7 ms·

This is as good a place and thread as any to write out some questions that have been bothering me. Maybe HN can help out. I've seen over the past several years

by bdhe 14y ago

This is as good a place and thread as any to write out some questions that have been bothering me. Maybe HN can help out. I've seen over the past several years several such posts (leaving facebook, leaving the internet, etc.) and they have a very raw emotional appeal to me. Some sort of a fast or a ritual quality to the entire idea. Do others here constantly wonder about their internet habits? I may be generalizing, but being uncomfortable or suspicious of gradual habits we develop, does that show characteristics of "getting old" and "conservative"? The get-off-my-lawn type of mentality? The same argument extends to smartphones, and "new fangled" tools such as twitter/foursquare/etc. Do others also perceive some tension in embracing a new lifestyle. Or am I overthinking it, and it is just a general equilibrium-maintaining feedback mechanism we develop through life. Because, with the internet (especially reddit and HN) and ubiquitous access to email/information through the smartphone I find myself, for the first time, cautious about embracing new technologies in a way I never felt before (not even when I got my first computer, or the first time I had cable TV ... of course, I was a kid back then). /end rant

wattjustin 14y ago
Take this quote from the original article for instance, "I’m also interested in a sans-internet reality as a technology writer. There was a time when technological innovation didn’t seem intimately linked to the internet." There was a time when using roads wasn’t linked to driving in a car, but there’s not much point in going back to that time. While I only have an undergraduate degree in Psychology and there are others who can speak to this topic in a lot more detail, I feel it allows me to say with confidence that the main concern is that the potential threat of limited time in our hectic lives being seeped from us by the internet (and technology in general) comes with the responsibility to use self control more than ever. Walking away from the internet for a year doesn't solve issues with self control and in a world so tightly integrated to the "new fangled" technological tools we use each day to make our lives easier, it's our responsibility to manage that, not walk away from it. To each their own and in the end, this was broadcast partially for page views, but embracing changing lifestyles and new technologies comes with personal responsibility. We all assess and compare ourselves with others to make sure we don't get carried away, but that doesn't mean we should walk away from something. I really should formulate my thoughts and feelings on this better before replying, but it's how I view the situation.
- uncoder0 14y ago
  I believe what you are zeroing in on at the end is well encapsulated in PG's Essay: http://www.paulgraham.com/addiction.html http://www.paulgraham.com/addiction.html
  - wattjustin 14y ago
    Anecdote: A professor once told me he read that whole essay after I referenced it in a paper for an addictions Psych class and he loved it. But yes, I agree, I am leaning towards what PG is saying there for sure as I think it speaks to a lot of the mockery of the original article as many see the issues for what they really are.
    - oskarth 14y ago
      This is getting awfully off-topic, but I just re-read the essay and stumbled across this: It will actually become a reasonable strategy (or a more reasonable strategy) to [suspect everything new] (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paleolithic_diet http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paleolithic_diet ) I didn't notice this double-meaning the first time around. As a fellow reader of the essay, do you think pg is implying that the Paleo diet is new or that it's a reaction to new food? First time reading it I assumed it was the latter, now I'm leaning to it being the former.
      - StavrosK 14y ago
        As I see it, it's pretty clearly the latter.
      - jalanb 14y ago
        As I see it, it's obviously the former
      - freshhawk 14y ago
        The former. The latter interpretation didn't even occur to me, although now that you mention it I can see how if you were a fan of the paleo diet you would interpret it that way. That's interesting, it is certainly possible it was the latter but it seems unlikely. I'm still not sure I buy the double meaning interpretation either. pg probably meant to imply only one of the interpretations. He writes pretty clearly and directly. I think the former is much more likely, since that's the simplest interpretation of the sentence and it's accurate. The paleo diet is new (to avoid any argument from paleo fans it doesn't actually have much to do with what paleolithic humans actually ate, so it's not old in that way).
semisight 14y ago
As a college student, I can identify. I don't use foursquare or twitter even though my generation tends to, because I feel as though they're not necessary. I think maybe part of this is the community (HN/the startup world) you're a part of. Speaking for myself, I love the ideas that people present here, but often it feels like each website is just another toy. I see no reason to commit to them. I've always been something of a minimalist though, so maybe it is just me.
- possibilistic 14y ago
  I'm your age, I agree, and I'll take it a step further. I think these toys are causing an irrational exuberance. I'm upset at all the polish, all the ten thousand variations on the same silly theme. They do nothing to advance our civilization. It's disheartening. It's 2012, so why doesn't my OS know what I'm trying to do and solve problems for me? I wish this money and effort had gone into making a desktop environment that automatically tiled windows for whatever mental intent I have, removing any need for me to mentally do that. Why doesn't the environment know the type of task each process represents? Why can't it learn how I like to set windows up in response to any given input sequence and do that? Another problem I have--Why do we need 'blogs' and 'websites'? We just share text, images, and video. Let's make a baseline platform for authoring, reading, commenting, sharing, upvoting, editing. Let's make it a hybrid of federated and p2p; articles get a real URI/URN and can be pulled from any server. No need for readability since it would be 'built-in': read everything in your favorite theme / font. Build an interest graph of users on top of this and you have an extensible solution ten times better than Prismatic; a testbed for every ML algorithm and recommendation algorithm we can think of. And it's software everyone can run/extend! Why the hell didn't we build that instead? Maybe it's just my biology side getting through, but websites suck. Centralization sucks. We got it right with the PC, with the OS, with the internet, with web protocols, but seriously--websites were a step backwards. We stopped making general solutions and began reimplementing the same damn things over and again. Why? Progress just stopped. I'm not smart enough to solve these problems / I don't research in these areas. I just hope to contribute meaningfully to metabolomics research. If this is something that irks you too, I dunno. Maybe we should get in touch. I'm just so fed up with the status quo / present paradigm.
johnchristopher 14y ago
At some point in life (I really should write "At some points in every year") I/We feel the need to weed things out. There is a mental weight associated to all these things surrounding us and there is the whole "identity-through-activities-and-possessions" question that pops up every now and then. As a matter of fact I decided this morning to stop having so much arch/debian/ubuntu/xp/7 installations on all of my computers. It was a mental weight to drag along (that and the loss of two extended partitions holding all of this sutff because I decided to create an new ntfs partition in an empty space, I disgress). I believe this equilibrium you speak of is personnal. I sometimes ask myself if I am getting old because I don't want to buy "apps" and rather rely on the old paradigm "everything is a file and applications are juste file managing other files" and dislike the facebook timeline and twitter noise but then I remind myself that I am one of the few among my friends who don't think the new crop of teenagers and child cartoons are as doomed and rotten as they think they are (though I really don't like the current european teenage fashion guidelines). I believe you are spot-on with the notion of "ritualistic fast". Most religions I know put some accents on fasting for the mind at regular intervals. There are differences between technologies and adopting each of them without considering them for what they are isn't being old, it's being curious (or something like that). Let's be curious, not trendy. /back to setting-up VM's instead of real hdd OS installations.
PakG1 14y ago
I get the impression that you'd find Nick Carr a fairly insightful writer. http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2008/07/is-google-making-us-stupid/6868/ http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2008/07/is-googl... Maybe worth a look, at least I find his insights striking.
- dan-k 14y ago
  Nicholas Carr is a good introduction, but he just touches the surface of this sort of thinking. A lot of his thought is like a popular version of stuff by Neil Postman and Albert Borgmann, though I'm not actually sure how much he's been directly influenced by them. To be fair, most of their work was done before the internet became widespread, so Carr's exploration of the online aspect of the impact of technology is quite welcome, but I think it also may lead some people to think that it's a problem unique to the internet, which is unfortunate. The internet is just a specific case where the issues are more pronounced, but all of these sorts of criticisms are really getting at the sort of thing warned against by Brave New World. There are those of us who think that we're rushing headlong towards the scenario that Huxley depicted because we're so freaked out by 1984 and the like that we're blinded to other, more insidious threats. Incidentally, a lot of these sorts of criticisms all trace back to Heidegger's thought. If you've got a solid foundation in philosophy, "The Question Concerning Technology" is a fascinating read. P.S. I apologize if anyone finds this post a little too esoteric or off-topic. I just have strong feelings about the way technology is used; I think that those who work to advance technology need to have a good understanding of the ethical considerations related to their work, and that most of the time this is lacking.
  - charliepark 14y ago
    For another, post-internet Postman/Borgmann lens, check out Douglas Rushkoff. He's a great thinker and writer, and one of his main areas of focus is on the internet and its role in culture. He's done at least one piece for Frontline on the internet's influence in shaping how we think and how we interact with each other, with companies, and with the world around us.
knowtheory 14y ago
Here are two things worth mentioning. First, the "OMG EVERYTHING IS TERRIBLE I WILL QUIT [insert the forum i am currently posting to/this social clique/the internet]" phenomenon is certainly not new, or unique to social networking sites. People used to say shit like this on slashdot all the time, and in many of the pre-social networking site communities i've participated in certainly. Second, this isn't an old person thing. Most of the internet forums i grew up in were populated by 15-30 year olds. This is a general expression of frustration or displeasure with the circumstances around their social interactions. And with that, it's never a terribly genuine one. The ones who are genuinely fed up just silently leave the communities they're actually fed up with. And i'd argue that the loud ones are filling out an archetype we see in western culture all around us.
- hartez 14y ago
  "People used to say shit like this on slashdot all the time" I think that to myself about at least one HN article/comment every day :)
fusiongyro 14y ago
I think it's important to examine your life and decide which things you're doing are positive and which are detrimental to your well-being. As you grow older, you have more constraints on your time and you also know yourself better. Those are going to encourage you to think twice. But there are lots of truly old people on Facebook and whatnot now, so clearly the cost/benefit calculation is different for different people. It's being conservative in the sense that you're trying to conserve your resources and not waste them. If these fasts sound appealing, I'd say try it. Quitting Facebook, Twitter and Reddit are some of the best decisions I've ever made. On the other hand, I get a lot of value out of leaving feedback on blogs and Slashdot and here. So it's case-by-case for me. Any experiment that helps you know yourself better is at least worth considering and probably worth doing.
nsomaru 14y ago
There's an interesting book called Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance which deals with the divide (in thinking) between those who 'get' technology, and those who don't. Quite a philosophical gem, that one.
bad_user 14y ago
I do not think we are "getting old" and "conservative". I am 29 years old, certainly not a teenager anymore, but I am also without doubt not old. That we even have to ask ourselves this question goes to show there's something really fucked up about our world, probably because we are losing respect for the elderly. I love technology and I think it's the answer to most of our problems, but its perseverance also scares me. That teenagers embrace it more than I do, that's only because teenagers are by definition raw and stupid, lacking the experience to foresee long-term problems ahead. When I was in highschool I used to spend hours playing games such as Starcraft, Age of Empires, Quake 2 and Counter Strike. I was doing that instead of going out to play soccer or to have barbecues with friends. I was logging frequently to local IRC channels, instead of going to the beach. Now I regret waisting my time in highschool. It's also easy for me to see how intense Facebook usage is actually removing friends from my life. That's because I don't have the curiosity necessary to see how friends are doing, since I find out from their Facebook stream, so one big incentive for asking them out simply disappears. And it is great that with Facebook I got connected to many primary school colleagues, but once past the thrill of seeing how they look like, I simply don't care anymore, as those people are actually strangers to me. You're definitely over-thinking it ... as we grow older, we start realizing that the important things in life are the same as ever: sex, good food, family, friends, building stuff, earning money, living comfortably, going out, relaxing on a beach somewhere with a tequila, etc... anything that distracts us from doing those and we start seeing it as dangerous to our mental health. E.g. I love my smartphone, I love how I receive my emails on it, but at night when I'm home with my son or on weekends when I'm taking walks in the park, I turn it off with no regrets.
- s8qnze982y 14y ago
  > I love technology and I think it's the answer to most of our problems I'd be curious to know which are the problems that technology solves, because I'm actually of the opposite opinion - technology is the answer to all the wrong problems.
  - NickPollard 14y ago
    A few problems Technology solves: Starvation (better agriculture, distribution, storage) Pathogens and illness (medicine) Environmental hazards (heating, shelter) Lack of human contact (transportation + communication) Censorship (distributed networks) Entertainment (media creation, reproduction, storage) Now, if you define technology as 'The internet-focused startup world of social media and marketing that the buzzword "technology" often refers to', of which Instagram is the current poster-child, then you might have a point. Might. Slamming all technology because of that is to be willfully ignorant of what modern life relies on. I'll take a world full of pop-up adds, viral marketing videos and spam email over a world in which my parents both died of Malaria in their 30's and I can barely get enough clean water to live on in my dirt-brick house.
mbrock 14y ago
I think this question is deeply rooted in the zeitgeist! For me, investigation into it over the years has led me to Zen Buddhism, which though ancient seems to me almost incredibly relevant to our age. It's a question of attention, awareness, reality & virtuality, mental health beyond the crude categories of psychiatry, desire, comfort, sacrifice, renunciation, virtue... As someone steeped in internets and technology, this question is like a lens through which I view my whole life purpose and aspiration. And it seems increasingly relevant for everyone I know. All this stuff is reality. It's affecting our lives, second by second. Our relationships, our selves, our life worlds. Not bad, not good, but profound and worth paying close attention to. Here's a nice quote by Dogen Zenji: "Even when you are uncertain, do not use this one day wastefully. It is a rare treasure to value. Do not compare it with an enormous jewel. Do not compare it with a dragon's bright pearl. Old sages valued this one day more than their own living bodies. Reflect on this quietly. A dragon's pearl may be found. An enormous jewel may be acquired. But this one day out of a hundred years cannot be retrieved once it is lost. What skillful means can retrieve a day that is passed? No historical documents have recorded such means. Not to waste time is to contain the passage of days and months within your skin bag, without leaking. Thus sages and wise ones in olden times valued each moment, day, and month more than their own eyeballs or the nation's land. To waste the passage of time is to be confused and stained in the floating world of name and gain. Not to miss the passage of time is to be in alignment with the way. "Once you have clarity, do not neglect a single day. Wholeheartedly practice for the sake of the way and speak for the sake of the way. We know that buddha ancestors of old did not neglect each day's endeavor. You should reflect on this every day. Sit near a bright window and reflect on this, on mellow and flower-filled days. Sit in a plain building and remember it on a solitary rainy evening. Why does the passage of time steal your endeavor? What kind of enemy is the passage of time? How regrettable to waste your time because of distractions. If you do not know yourself, you will not be able to be your own ally in this great undertaking."
- taofu 14y ago
  Is Zen Buddhism more of a philosophy than a religion? Or is it a way of living?
  - 14y ago
deleted 14y ago
[deleted]
k-mcgrady 14y ago
I think a lot of people are addicted to the internet. The internet provides a lot of benefit and is very useful but there is also a lot of entertainment available through it. And most of that entertainment is free or extremely low cost. I think that is why a lot of people feel relieved to get away from it from time to time. With other addictions (smoking, drinking, drugs) there is a very clear cost. Your health, and your money. As the addictive parts of the internet are free you don't really notice the negative effects until you stop. It all comes down to controlling your use and as I've said, when everything addictive is free it's hard to stop yourself.
Havoc 14y ago
I feel the same way...but only from a privacy implications point of view. Internet addiction, new fangled tools etc doesn't phase me in the least as long as I can maintain control over it. One of the reasons why this whole "app" movement unnerves me a bit. There is no way of really knowing what these apps are doing with my info & when it will come back to haunt me.
phene 14y ago
Not really, I think these authors are just idiots trying to gain readership.

by bdhe 14y ago

wattjustin 14y ago

Take this quote from the original article for instance, "I’m also interested in a sans-internet reality as a technology writer. There was a time when technological innovation didn’t seem intimately linked to the internet." There was a time when using roads wasn’t linked to driving in a car, but there’s not much point in going back to that time. While I only have an undergraduate degree in Psychology and there are others who can speak to this topic in a lot more detail, I feel it allows me to say with confidence that the main concern is that the potential threat of limited time in our hectic lives being seeped from us by the internet (and technology in general) comes with the responsibility to use self control more than ever. Walking away from the internet for a year doesn't solve issues with self control and in a world so tightly integrated to the "new fangled" technological tools we use each day to make our lives easier, it's our responsibility to manage that, not walk away from it. To each their own and in the end, this was broadcast partially for page views, but embracing changing lifestyles and new technologies comes with personal responsibility. We all assess and compare ourselves with others to make sure we don't get carried away, but that doesn't mean we should walk away from something. I really should formulate my thoughts and feelings on this better before replying, but it's how I view the situation.

uncoder0 14y ago
I believe what you are zeroing in on at the end is well encapsulated in PG's Essay: http://www.paulgraham.com/addiction.html http://www.paulgraham.com/addiction.html
- wattjustin 14y ago
  Anecdote: A professor once told me he read that whole essay after I referenced it in a paper for an addictions Psych class and he loved it. But yes, I agree, I am leaning towards what PG is saying there for sure as I think it speaks to a lot of the mockery of the original article as many see the issues for what they really are.
  - oskarth 14y ago
    This is getting awfully off-topic, but I just re-read the essay and stumbled across this: It will actually become a reasonable strategy (or a more reasonable strategy) to [suspect everything new] (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paleolithic_diet http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paleolithic_diet ) I didn't notice this double-meaning the first time around. As a fellow reader of the essay, do you think pg is implying that the Paleo diet is new or that it's a reaction to new food? First time reading it I assumed it was the latter, now I'm leaning to it being the former.
    - StavrosK 14y ago
      As I see it, it's pretty clearly the latter.
    - jalanb 14y ago
      As I see it, it's obviously the former
    - freshhawk 14y ago
      The former. The latter interpretation didn't even occur to me, although now that you mention it I can see how if you were a fan of the paleo diet you would interpret it that way. That's interesting, it is certainly possible it was the latter but it seems unlikely. I'm still not sure I buy the double meaning interpretation either. pg probably meant to imply only one of the interpretations. He writes pretty clearly and directly. I think the former is much more likely, since that's the simplest interpretation of the sentence and it's accurate. The paleo diet is new (to avoid any argument from paleo fans it doesn't actually have much to do with what paleolithic humans actually ate, so it's not old in that way).

semisight 14y ago

As a college student, I can identify. I don't use foursquare or twitter even though my generation tends to, because I feel as though they're not necessary. I think maybe part of this is the community (HN/the startup world) you're a part of. Speaking for myself, I love the ideas that people present here, but often it feels like each website is just another toy. I see no reason to commit to them. I've always been something of a minimalist though, so maybe it is just me.

possibilistic 14y ago
I'm your age, I agree, and I'll take it a step further. I think these toys are causing an irrational exuberance. I'm upset at all the polish, all the ten thousand variations on the same silly theme. They do nothing to advance our civilization. It's disheartening. It's 2012, so why doesn't my OS know what I'm trying to do and solve problems for me? I wish this money and effort had gone into making a desktop environment that automatically tiled windows for whatever mental intent I have, removing any need for me to mentally do that. Why doesn't the environment know the type of task each process represents? Why can't it learn how I like to set windows up in response to any given input sequence and do that? Another problem I have--Why do we need 'blogs' and 'websites'? We just share text, images, and video. Let's make a baseline platform for authoring, reading, commenting, sharing, upvoting, editing. Let's make it a hybrid of federated and p2p; articles get a real URI/URN and can be pulled from any server. No need for readability since it would be 'built-in': read everything in your favorite theme / font. Build an interest graph of users on top of this and you have an extensible solution ten times better than Prismatic; a testbed for every ML algorithm and recommendation algorithm we can think of. And it's software everyone can run/extend! Why the hell didn't we build that instead? Maybe it's just my biology side getting through, but websites suck. Centralization sucks. We got it right with the PC, with the OS, with the internet, with web protocols, but seriously--websites were a step backwards. We stopped making general solutions and began reimplementing the same damn things over and again. Why? Progress just stopped. I'm not smart enough to solve these problems / I don't research in these areas. I just hope to contribute meaningfully to metabolomics research. If this is something that irks you too, I dunno. Maybe we should get in touch. I'm just so fed up with the status quo / present paradigm.

johnchristopher 14y ago

At some point in life (I really should write "At some points in every year") I/We feel the need to weed things out. There is a mental weight associated to all these things surrounding us and there is the whole "identity-through-activities-and-possessions" question that pops up every now and then. As a matter of fact I decided this morning to stop having so much arch/debian/ubuntu/xp/7 installations on all of my computers. It was a mental weight to drag along (that and the loss of two extended partitions holding all of this sutff because I decided to create an new ntfs partition in an empty space, I disgress). I believe this equilibrium you speak of is personnal. I sometimes ask myself if I am getting old because I don't want to buy "apps" and rather rely on the old paradigm "everything is a file and applications are juste file managing other files" and dislike the facebook timeline and twitter noise but then I remind myself that I am one of the few among my friends who don't think the new crop of teenagers and child cartoons are as doomed and rotten as they think they are (though I really don't like the current european teenage fashion guidelines). I believe you are spot-on with the notion of "ritualistic fast". Most religions I know put some accents on fasting for the mind at regular intervals. There are differences between technologies and adopting each of them without considering them for what they are isn't being old, it's being curious (or something like that). Let's be curious, not trendy. /back to setting-up VM's instead of real hdd OS installations.

PakG1 14y ago

I get the impression that you'd find Nick Carr a fairly insightful writer. http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2008/07/is-google-making-us-stupid/6868/ http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2008/07/is-googl... Maybe worth a look, at least I find his insights striking.

dan-k 14y ago
Nicholas Carr is a good introduction, but he just touches the surface of this sort of thinking. A lot of his thought is like a popular version of stuff by Neil Postman and Albert Borgmann, though I'm not actually sure how much he's been directly influenced by them. To be fair, most of their work was done before the internet became widespread, so Carr's exploration of the online aspect of the impact of technology is quite welcome, but I think it also may lead some people to think that it's a problem unique to the internet, which is unfortunate. The internet is just a specific case where the issues are more pronounced, but all of these sorts of criticisms are really getting at the sort of thing warned against by Brave New World. There are those of us who think that we're rushing headlong towards the scenario that Huxley depicted because we're so freaked out by 1984 and the like that we're blinded to other, more insidious threats. Incidentally, a lot of these sorts of criticisms all trace back to Heidegger's thought. If you've got a solid foundation in philosophy, "The Question Concerning Technology" is a fascinating read. P.S. I apologize if anyone finds this post a little too esoteric or off-topic. I just have strong feelings about the way technology is used; I think that those who work to advance technology need to have a good understanding of the ethical considerations related to their work, and that most of the time this is lacking.
- charliepark 14y ago
  For another, post-internet Postman/Borgmann lens, check out Douglas Rushkoff. He's a great thinker and writer, and one of his main areas of focus is on the internet and its role in culture. He's done at least one piece for Frontline on the internet's influence in shaping how we think and how we interact with each other, with companies, and with the world around us.

knowtheory 14y ago

Here are two things worth mentioning. First, the "OMG EVERYTHING IS TERRIBLE I WILL QUIT [insert the forum i am currently posting to/this social clique/the internet]" phenomenon is certainly not new, or unique to social networking sites. People used to say shit like this on slashdot all the time, and in many of the pre-social networking site communities i've participated in certainly. Second, this isn't an old person thing. Most of the internet forums i grew up in were populated by 15-30 year olds. This is a general expression of frustration or displeasure with the circumstances around their social interactions. And with that, it's never a terribly genuine one. The ones who are genuinely fed up just silently leave the communities they're actually fed up with. And i'd argue that the loud ones are filling out an archetype we see in western culture all around us.

hartez 14y ago
"People used to say shit like this on slashdot all the time" I think that to myself about at least one HN article/comment every day :)

fusiongyro 14y ago

I think it's important to examine your life and decide which things you're doing are positive and which are detrimental to your well-being. As you grow older, you have more constraints on your time and you also know yourself better. Those are going to encourage you to think twice. But there are lots of truly old people on Facebook and whatnot now, so clearly the cost/benefit calculation is different for different people. It's being conservative in the sense that you're trying to conserve your resources and not waste them. If these fasts sound appealing, I'd say try it. Quitting Facebook, Twitter and Reddit are some of the best decisions I've ever made. On the other hand, I get a lot of value out of leaving feedback on blogs and Slashdot and here. So it's case-by-case for me. Any experiment that helps you know yourself better is at least worth considering and probably worth doing.

nsomaru 14y ago

There's an interesting book called Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance which deals with the divide (in thinking) between those who 'get' technology, and those who don't. Quite a philosophical gem, that one.

bad_user 14y ago

I do not think we are "getting old" and "conservative". I am 29 years old, certainly not a teenager anymore, but I am also without doubt not old. That we even have to ask ourselves this question goes to show there's something really fucked up about our world, probably because we are losing respect for the elderly. I love technology and I think it's the answer to most of our problems, but its perseverance also scares me. That teenagers embrace it more than I do, that's only because teenagers are by definition raw and stupid, lacking the experience to foresee long-term problems ahead. When I was in highschool I used to spend hours playing games such as Starcraft, Age of Empires, Quake 2 and Counter Strike. I was doing that instead of going out to play soccer or to have barbecues with friends. I was logging frequently to local IRC channels, instead of going to the beach. Now I regret waisting my time in highschool. It's also easy for me to see how intense Facebook usage is actually removing friends from my life. That's because I don't have the curiosity necessary to see how friends are doing, since I find out from their Facebook stream, so one big incentive for asking them out simply disappears. And it is great that with Facebook I got connected to many primary school colleagues, but once past the thrill of seeing how they look like, I simply don't care anymore, as those people are actually strangers to me. You're definitely over-thinking it ... as we grow older, we start realizing that the important things in life are the same as ever: sex, good food, family, friends, building stuff, earning money, living comfortably, going out, relaxing on a beach somewhere with a tequila, etc... anything that distracts us from doing those and we start seeing it as dangerous to our mental health. E.g. I love my smartphone, I love how I receive my emails on it, but at night when I'm home with my son or on weekends when I'm taking walks in the park, I turn it off with no regrets.

s8qnze982y 14y ago
> I love technology and I think it's the answer to most of our problems I'd be curious to know which are the problems that technology solves, because I'm actually of the opposite opinion - technology is the answer to all the wrong problems.
- NickPollard 14y ago
  A few problems Technology solves: Starvation (better agriculture, distribution, storage) Pathogens and illness (medicine) Environmental hazards (heating, shelter) Lack of human contact (transportation + communication) Censorship (distributed networks) Entertainment (media creation, reproduction, storage) Now, if you define technology as 'The internet-focused startup world of social media and marketing that the buzzword "technology" often refers to', of which Instagram is the current poster-child, then you might have a point. Might. Slamming all technology because of that is to be willfully ignorant of what modern life relies on. I'll take a world full of pop-up adds, viral marketing videos and spam email over a world in which my parents both died of Malaria in their 30's and I can barely get enough clean water to live on in my dirt-brick house.

mbrock 14y ago

I think this question is deeply rooted in the zeitgeist! For me, investigation into it over the years has led me to Zen Buddhism, which though ancient seems to me almost incredibly relevant to our age. It's a question of attention, awareness, reality & virtuality, mental health beyond the crude categories of psychiatry, desire, comfort, sacrifice, renunciation, virtue... As someone steeped in internets and technology, this question is like a lens through which I view my whole life purpose and aspiration. And it seems increasingly relevant for everyone I know. All this stuff is reality. It's affecting our lives, second by second. Our relationships, our selves, our life worlds. Not bad, not good, but profound and worth paying close attention to. Here's a nice quote by Dogen Zenji: "Even when you are uncertain, do not use this one day wastefully. It is a rare treasure to value. Do not compare it with an enormous jewel. Do not compare it with a dragon's bright pearl. Old sages valued this one day more than their own living bodies. Reflect on this quietly. A dragon's pearl may be found. An enormous jewel may be acquired. But this one day out of a hundred years cannot be retrieved once it is lost. What skillful means can retrieve a day that is passed? No historical documents have recorded such means. Not to waste time is to contain the passage of days and months within your skin bag, without leaking. Thus sages and wise ones in olden times valued each moment, day, and month more than their own eyeballs or the nation's land. To waste the passage of time is to be confused and stained in the floating world of name and gain. Not to miss the passage of time is to be in alignment with the way. "Once you have clarity, do not neglect a single day. Wholeheartedly practice for the sake of the way and speak for the sake of the way. We know that buddha ancestors of old did not neglect each day's endeavor. You should reflect on this every day. Sit near a bright window and reflect on this, on mellow and flower-filled days. Sit in a plain building and remember it on a solitary rainy evening. Why does the passage of time steal your endeavor? What kind of enemy is the passage of time? How regrettable to waste your time because of distractions. If you do not know yourself, you will not be able to be your own ally in this great undertaking."

taofu 14y ago
Is Zen Buddhism more of a philosophy than a religion? Or is it a way of living?
- 14y ago

deleted 14y ago

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k-mcgrady 14y ago

I think a lot of people are addicted to the internet. The internet provides a lot of benefit and is very useful but there is also a lot of entertainment available through it. And most of that entertainment is free or extremely low cost. I think that is why a lot of people feel relieved to get away from it from time to time. With other addictions (smoking, drinking, drugs) there is a very clear cost. Your health, and your money. As the addictive parts of the internet are free you don't really notice the negative effects until you stop. It all comes down to controlling your use and as I've said, when everything addictive is free it's hard to stop yourself.

Havoc 14y ago

I feel the same way...but only from a privacy implications point of view. Internet addiction, new fangled tools etc doesn't phase me in the least as long as I can maintain control over it. One of the reasons why this whole "app" movement unnerves me a bit. There is no way of really knowing what these apps are doing with my info & when it will come back to haunt me.

phene 14y ago

Not really, I think these authors are just idiots trying to gain readership.