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The kind of consuming he's talking about here, the continuous soaking up of information, news, current events, on subjects that interest you, is something I'm p
by drinian 18y ago
The kind of consuming he's talking about here, the continuous soaking up of information, news, current events, on subjects that interest you, is something I'm pretty familiar with personally, and I can tell you that it can be a cognitive drain that actually reduces your desire to produce. And news is addictive; it's easier than producing something new, and, at least to me, seems to hit the reward receptors in the brain pretty hard.
This is one of the reasons I try to route all the streams of news I keep up with through a single RSS reader; this helps enforce limits on how often I can go back for another hit.
- time_management 18y agoYou've hit on one of the major reasons why the Internet is worse than TV, as far as time-wasters go. TV gets old after a while and is unfulfilling. The Internet devises new ways of hitting new reward receptors every second, and the possibilities are infinite. Sick of reading? You can write. (Comments, blogs, Wikipedia). I've often thought of Internet addiction as being more like an overeating problem than a drug problem. You can give up cigarettes or opiates cold turkey, but no one can stop eating. In order to be productive as a programmer, you must daily engage your vice.