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People often question me how I manage to focus for more than a few minutes and I'm always confused because back in the day I was constantly informed I didn't ha

People often question me how I manage to focus for more than a few minutes and I'm always confused because back in the day I was constantly informed I didn't have any focus and needed to be treated (adhd). I'm not convinced attention spans themselves have changed; I think it has more to do with the fact that people's brains aren't defaulting to daydreaming anymore when bored. I think it's still an issue with people being addicted to phones because I'm sure the lack of daydreaming -- which studies have proven as beneficial and arguibly even a form of microsleep -- is likely causing a lot of the fatigue and inattention people feel; as in their brains are literally being deprived of a natural thing and so are exhausted because of it. (as an aside: whew what a run-on sentence i have no intention of fixing) My personal supposition with 0 proof is that the "gen-z stare" is the end-stage of this phenomenon where after being deprived of daydreaming for so long they are essentially "sleeping while standing up" as it were.

oggreen 2mo ago
That's a very interesting perspective but now that you mention it, I can't even think of the last time I daydreamed, even when I'm not on a device. Curious if phone usage or whatever doom-scrolling we do exhausts the same part of the brain that we use to daydream.
- embedding-shape 2mo ago
  That's interesting. What happens if you just sit there doing nothing, looking around and what not? Does your brain start to wander by itself? Personally I struggle to remember any day I haven't had at least 10-15 minutes of idle time doing nothing, just thinking idly, but I still have similar struggles as the author. Although I barely use my phone for things neither.
  - cindyllm 2mo ago
    [dead]
  - lesostep 2mo ago
    >> What happens if you just sit there doing nothing, looking around and what not? Does your brain start to wander by itself? For me it's one of the three layers. First layer, it starts to wonder to the direction offered by real world. Wonder about song lyrics I'm listening too, or the colors of buildings, or something like that. Second layer happens if you purposefully stray your thoughts away from a real world. Brain starts trying to remember whatever you wanted it to remember. For example, if I tell myself three times "don't forget to call mom", if I just sit idly, chances are my brain would surface "call mom". Sometimes it surfaces "remember you wanted to try arch 2 years ago". Also this is the layer that works badly if you tried or depressed, because it can start surfacing bad thoughts. Third layer I call time skipper because it's just a basic time fast forwarding. I have no idea whether it's true meditation or controlled dissociation or something else, but thoughts slide of your brain, so there's nothing to remember afterwards. My friend said that maybe meditation is a controlled dissociation. I prefer to say that I'm so dumb, I can just switch my brain off.
- TheLML 2mo ago
  I sometimes pause shows or YT videos I'm watching just to daydream for a little bit about something that just crossed my mind. Additionally I go outside at least once a day to walk or ride my bicycle, which also helps with this.
- plastic-enjoyer 2mo ago
  > That's a very interesting perspective but now that you mention it, I can't even think of the last time I daydreamed, even when I'm not on a device. Sometimes I just turn my phone off and stare at a white wall for 15 minutes. People made fun of me when I told them how relaxing I find white walls, but it seems it turns out, that I'm not the only one doing this?
  - ssl-3 2mo ago
    I found that people would make fun of me for that, too, if they were made aware of it. Back when I was still stuck to a desk in school (up hill both ways and without a pocket computer), I learned that folks would tend to leave me alone if I had a book open. It didn't really matter what book it was. I could just gaze at it with my eyes relaxed and unfocused, with the printing appearing as some kind of indistinct phoric blur. And as long as I turned the page occasionally, that was good enough to keep the would-be tyrants at bay. (And then I'd ace the test on Friday, repeat for dozens of weeks, and do it again next year.)
    - ryandrake 2mo ago
      When my wife and I started dating, she constantly was asking me what I’m thinking about (as people who care about you sometimes do). She was amazed that I could just sit down in a sofa and zone out, thinking about absolutely nothing. At first she would ask “come on, you meat be thinking about something” and later admitted she couldn’t do that and didn’t think people actually could!
  - lanstin 2mo ago
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bodhidharma#Wall-gazing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bodhidharma#Wall-gazing
- noir_lord 2mo ago
  > I can't even think of the last time I daydreamed About 5 minutes ago for me, my missus says that I live with my head in the clouds (which is a nicer way of saying if I'm not actively doing something I just zone out and retreat into my own head), I've always been that way all the way back to school (with the inevitable consequences from teachers). I've mentioned on here before though that I never got addicted to my phone, I don't even know where it is ~80% of the time. My relationship with technology is (nearly) always intentional, I still access the internet 95% of the time on a desktop PC (which reduces doom scrolling since that just feels wrong on a desktop) so when I walk out my office I'm just "offline" in a very distinct way, if I go for a walk my phone stays at home, everyone who knows me knows I'll answer a text at some point but it could be a day or two. To sum it up, I resent the passive intrusion of technology into my life.
  - kuerbel 2mo ago
    I'm not sure I have the willpower to follow your example but at least I managed to turn of notifications on my watch after reading your post.
    - noir_lord 2mo ago
      I honestly don't think it is willpower, it is simply that I never had to break the "addiction" because I never had it in the first place. I always found the form factor extremely limiting compared to a desktop (it's the same reason my laptop ended up running a TV upstairs, the idea of programming on the sofa sounded great but in practice I'd get frustrated and immediately retreat to my quiet downstairs office with multiple screens when I had to do something tricky/requiring concentration). Where I do use something that optimises for distractions, I look for how to minimize the distractions (e.g YouTube - I use the excellent Unhook (with Ublock Origin) which turns the YT home page into a search box and little else, hides mixes, shorts and other distractions) and make it work for me.
    - safety1st 2mo ago
      Willpower's not the solution. When we isolated cocaine from the coca leaf for the first time, the world pretty much went insane. In those first years people were injecting it into their eyeballs and spines. The most popular beverage on earth in 2026 STILL contains extract of the coca leaf as a holdover from the days when it was laced with its namesake, Coke. People were smoking cocaine, ingesting cocaine, giving it to their kids for a toothache, pretty much anything you could stick it in, they did. The solution to this wasn't willpower, it was to get rid of all that fucking cocaine. There's a reason you don't have the stuff lying around your house today, if you did you'd probably get hooked. In 2026 we're basically speedrunning the coke boom with infotech. So once again the solution is: get rid of it. Any time you're in a low stimulus environment, remove the tech so that you don't HAVE to exercise willpower. That means turning off the phone and the watch and maybe stuffing them in a drawer in another room or something. That's all it takes. I can't say how society will look back at this moment in history 150 years from now. But I do know I'm way happier and more relaxed when I just shut off the devices and put them away. When I'm at home or in the office, my phone's on mute, in a drawer/bag/other room, and I don't think about it unless I take it out for a few minutes to order a delivery or do a 2fa or something. At night it's simply turned off. I'll never own a smart watch. I still keep the phone on me when I go out and haven't found that to be a huge concern because if I'm at a bar or something it's competing with a lot of other stimuli for attention. We were never 100% available to anyone for all of human history until the last 10-20 years. I am not opting into this current Cocaine Moment.
- AaronAPU 2mo ago
  I think its unfortunate people wear headphones while walking/running/biking. If you don’t, that’s however many minutes or hours of nothing but daydreaming (and hearing nature).
  - ABoltzmannMush 2mo ago
    Sadly around here it takes quite a lot of driving to get to anywhere that nature sounds predominate. Between the highways/airports/lawncare it is mostly noise pollution, and I generally find that doesn't work as well for daydreaming.
  - jorisw 2mo ago
    I often just wear noise cancelling headphones without any music on
  - radlad 2mo ago
    I find it impossible to daydream while focused on traffic.
    - lanstin 2mo ago
      I read my black on white eink reader on walks and occasionally run into poles and things in the sidewalk. Mostly I look up when crossing a street. When I was a kid I would walk slowly around with a Sci Fi book and read it. Never been hit by a car but every now and then get scared by one I didn’t notice. But I can’t read intense books too much - I alternate hard books and pulpy fun reads.
  - duskdozer 2mo ago
    I've needed to take anc earbuds with me while out now, not to listen to music but just to tone down the noise pollution a bit. You can barely hear nature anyway over all the cars, trucks, lawnmowers, leafblowers, airplanes, and what I think are warehouses. It's been getting worse in recent years and the only way to have a chance at daydreaming is to lower it a bit.
- roysting 2mo ago
  How would one daydream, i.e., imagine, when you have everything presented to you in 4k and you can even interact with it through games? You have to imagine to daydream. When you’ve been raised on YouTube since birth (referring to U.S. primarily “GenZ”) or you’ve formed your identity around things on TV (like most Americans) you didn’t have to imagine, daydream you just took it in, like everyone else that took on the same thing. That’s another aspect that’s not really being called out, TV also has contributed to the homogenization and destruction of distinct and unique cultures, i.e., actual, real diversity; because everyone is programmed and trained by TV on the same material, as the famous water cooler discussion about a TV show episode everyone was watching tells us. Now imagine you’re “Gen Alpha” or maybe even “GenZ” where you have not even had anyone read you books that required you to imagine, i.e., daydream, what was being told to you? These are all compounding factors that are going to even cause massive problems for this sham, fake facade, con job American society. Talk to teachers in elementary schools and middle schools, even universities now; they’ll tell you things that should make and discerning person be alarmed. And that’s without even talking about the impending impacts of AI.
  - JumpinJack_Cash 2mo ago
    > > How would one daydream, i.e., imagine, when you have everything presented to you in 4k and you can even interact with it through games? You can daydream about being the protagonist of such actions which is not the same as watching other people doing it
    - lanstin 2mo ago
      I used to spend a lot of time imagining myself as the captain of a Federation starship :) but I did also read a lot of books. But also, the availability of YouTube changes the utility of descriptive writing. Moby Dick can have pages of text about whales or whatever, but now I can spend hours watching whale videos on YouTube. The importance of the interior life of the characters is more, or of diffusive world building stories with too much intricacy for a movie or video presentation.
      - 2mo ago
graemep 2mo ago
I agree. I am not sure it is as similar to sleep as you claim, but its definitely good for your brain. I say something similar in the context of parenting, that a reasonable amount of boredom is good. I think it likely that being constantly entertained makes people more prone to seek constant stimulation. This did not start with phones either. I am Gen X and it happened in my childhood with kids being dumped in front of TVs. One difference was a lot of adults resisted this and limited hours in front of a TV, whereas now a lot of adults are addicted to phones too.
- lardosaurusrex 2mo ago
  Well I made no claim of it being related to sleep; just that I've read a lot of claims that it's related to microsleep and used "sleeping while standing up" for the last bit as an analogy. I am not a sleep doctor/therapist nor am I any sort of expert on the subject.
  - graemep 2mo ago
    I may have read your statement as being stronger than you intended. its a reasonably analogy then.
- roncesvalles 2mo ago
  I remember when cable TV used to be "addictive". Now I can't watch even 10 minutes of it without getting bored and pulling out my phone. Also something I learned recently: checking your phone at the movies is no longer the faux pas that it used to be. There's definitely some hedonic treadmill type thing going on with attention and stimuli.
  - 6031769 2mo ago
    Using your phone in a cinema was, is and ever will be a massive faux pas. I have no idea at all why you think it might be otherwise.
    - Melonai 2mo ago
larodi 2mo ago
Sleeping while standing up is the state one finds oneself endlessly scrolling somebody else's dreams. Avoid at all costs.
sph 2mo ago
> the lack of daydreaming I would also blame the Western commercialization of meditation. I have recently learned that in Buddhism meditation is just one side of the coin, and it’s usually diametrically paired with the opposite technique of contemplation: instead of concentrating into one infinitesimal point, you expand your awareness to encompass the whole of reality. Which is a bit like daydreaming. It’s through these two exercises that one finds the middle path of equanimity. With technology, we spend our time with narrowed focus, we are told that to stay sane we need to cultivate our focus, and never find the time to release the grip on it, to just let the brain be and expand and relax a bit. The Taoists had figured it out all along: to find focus, stop focusing so damn much.
- lanstin 2mo ago
  As an avid consumer of Western Buddhism, this is pretty standard understanding. Concentration and insight, another complementary aspect of practice, like the dichotomy between sitting alone and sitting in a group, or between a steady daily practice and a deep intense retreat. The linear story is that increased awareness of focus teaches the sitter that there are no real borders in reality, it is a seamless whole, and as the sitting continues, awareness naturally opens up to include the full current moment - seeing thoughts as thoughts, emotions as emotions, sore knees as sore knees, twitchy neighbor as a twitchy neighbor, etc thru the myriad things all showing the way, bright and clear. But they are mutually reinforcing partners that appear as distinct.
ssl-3 2mo ago
There's only one important thing that I miss about smoking: A smoke break was an excuse that was tolerated by others, wherein I could go outside and just let my mind wander (daydream) with no particular goal for a short period of time. Daydreaming should be perfectly acceptable either way, but people seem to think it's weird (concerning, even) when someone spends a bit of time to stand (or sit) around while appearing to be doing nothing at all. But having a smoke is an activity, and the smoker's participation in this very passive activity assuages the concerns of others.
- hgomersall 2mo ago
  You can get the same effect by going for a walk.
  - mysterydip 2mo ago
    I think they’re saying that you could say “I’m going for a smoke break” at work and it was at least tolerated. I don’t think you can say “I’m going for a walk” the same way.
    - ssl-3 2mo ago
      Indeed. It has varied a bit depending on the timeline, but: Going out for a walk (or to just change environments and very passively stare at nothing) has been less socially-acceptable than going out for a smoke, in my experience. One of these things is weird, or perhaps inducing of ire ("How dare he just go outside when he feels like it! What is he even doing?"). The other is, at worst, both understandable and disgusting ("Of course he's out there again with that filthy habit!").
      - SoftTalker 2mo ago
        Smoke breaks used to be acceptable because your boss probably took them also. Now that few people smoke, I don't think they are seen as a valid excuse to duck out for a few minutes. "I need to stretch my legs" is probably better these days.
gib444 2mo ago
The gen z stare is being unable or unwilling to give a verbal response when one is expected mostly as a result of social anxiety and lack of communication skills IMO.
cpt_sobel 2mo ago
> I'm not convinced attention spans themselves have changed; I think it has more to do with the fact that people's brains aren't defaulting to daydreaming anymore when bored. If my mind is not defaulting to daydreaming and rather asking me to find a distraction, doesn't this mean my attention span is worse?
shafyy 2mo ago
Reminds me of this scene from Curb where Jeff just sits in the plane: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zONvxznbUJA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zONvxznbUJA
- al_borland 2mo ago
  I often do this on flights under 3 hours. The hardest part is finding a place to land your gaze where it doesn’t look like you’re staring it someone, as that could become awkward.
  - instakill 2mo ago
    try "the Polish stare"
- snovymgodym 2mo ago
  I wonder if they forgot they already used this bit in Seinfeld or if it's an intentional homage. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JBBQdFSvvTE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JBBQdFSvvTE
  - shafyy 2mo ago
    100% homage. Larry David plays with recurring jokes all the time (e.g. see his new series on HBO now) which makes it even funnier.
Dumblydorr 2mo ago
You don’t necessarily want to daydream. If you’re not careful, it becomes Negative rumination and mind wandering and that wouldn’t be as useful as an actual nap or a workout or meditation.
- abyssin 2mo ago
  If meditation and workout look like a protection against ruminating, they might be functioning as avoidance. If a nap helps, maybe fix your sleep first (good sleep is super important for mental health). Daydreaming is healthy.
  - lanstin 2mo ago
    I would say that if the mind stays away from negative ruminations when set free, that is a sign of a balanced and healthy life. Many people lack balance and health, and for them changing the conditions a bit might be helpful. Knowing and practicing that one can focus the attention where it is useful can increase mental health or ability to cope with problems. One doesn’t want to run away from reality but one need not feel trapped by intrusive mental phenomena.
mettamage 2mo ago
> I'm not convinced attention spans themselves have changed; I think it has more to do with the fact that people's brains aren't defaulting to daydreaming anymore when bored. Yea sometimes stuff has to sink in or marinate. If you don't give that to yourself then you'll never realize it's gone. I realized I was missing this because I sometimes sit in my chair and tell myself "this is your life now, you sit in this chair" and I do that for as long as possible. I do this in part because a part of me just doesn't want to do anything: I don't want to work, I don't want to do fun things, I just want to do nothing. So I have an inclination towards being lazy. But when I'm on that chair and give myself full freedom to do so, then I get agitated and want to do something. I plead with myself really hard. But my lazy part is like "fuck no... we're finally on this chair, I'll die this way, we're never getting off this chair." And then at some point my mind says something like "FINE, I'LL EVEN DO THE TAX FORM THINGY I HAVE BEEN PUTTING OFF. I'LL DO ANYTHING!" When I judge the activity to be productive enough, I get off the chair. The real challenge is that I forget that I have this exercise because it actually works for me and it makes me realize that when you're doing "nothing" your brain is doing a whole lot.
al_borland 2mo ago
As much as I’d like to leave my phone in another room while working, 2FA has made that impossible. I’m now required to keep my phone nearby and pick it up periodically throughout the day, all in the same of security.
- dwedge 2mo ago
  I worked around this by just storing the 2FA in Bitwarden. Yeah, same place as the passwords but I don't care I don't want the forced context switch.
  - gexla 2mo ago
    KeePassXC also has one.
  - al_borland 2mo ago
    A coworker tried to use Authy a couple years ago and it wouldn't work. It seemed like we were forced to use Microsoft Authenticator. I just tried setting it up with Apple Passwords and it wouldn’t accept the QR code. It seems to be specifically made for Microsoft.
- Bootvis 2mo ago
  Excellent reason to stand up and take a short walk.
- timacles 2mo ago
  Just make your phone boring. Delete instagram, log out and don’t go on YouTube. Delete games. It’s really not that hard to make your phone a device for communication and not entertainment
  - al_borland 2mo ago
    My phone is already like that. There are still emails, texts, the browser still exists, the weather, etc. And even ignoring all of that, taking hands off the keyboard/mouse, picking up a different device, waiting for the notification, opening it up, typing in the code, putting the phone back down, moving back to the keyboard/mouse/monitor… it’s very disruptive to any flow I might hope to have.
al_borland 2mo ago
If you haven’t read it, Cal Newport’s book Digital Minimalism is mostly about this topic. The value of giving your brain time to simply exist without any outside input, with many examples from history of people who carved out time explicitly for this, especially when needing to make big decisions or figure out answers to problems.
- austy69 2mo ago
  That's probably a great read based on what I've heard from Cal, but I don't think you need an entire book to know how to scale back on your social media use. Just hand your phone to your friend and have them put a lock on the addictive features.
  - __MatrixMan__ 2mo ago
    I find that just setting it to grayscale is enough. Its not that colors are actually an important part of my mostly text based social media experience, but when I use them without colors I get distracted with: > What am I doing? This dumb. And then I remember that it is dumb and I go back to leaving it alone.
  - al_borland 2mo ago
    It’s not just social media. Most people have their thing… the news, podcasts, music, books, games, etc. In the modern era we can always have something that allows us to distract our brain or provides external ideas to direct it. Being alone with our own thoughts, devoid of outside influence, is something that seems to take an intentional choice these days.
- Anthony-G 2mo ago
  I haven’t read the book but I like this idea and intend to check out the book. I’m not on social media but I find Hacker News – and even Wikipedia – to be addictive enough. When I was younger, I found it very hard to just sit there without some form of external stimulation, e.g. I couldn’t sit down to eat by or have a coffee by myself without reading a magazine or newspaper at the same time – or listening to the radio. I still find it hard to do this. Hacker News has been useful in that I’ve come across a few inspirational ideas on consuming less input (and producing more output): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44702212 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44702212 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39674619 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39674619 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20781463 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20781463 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24582837 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24582837 I’ve made some changes to my life in that listening to music is more intentional – not just a distraction to have in the background. It probably helps that I’ve also started to learn a musical instrument. I can also go for a walk without needing to have music or a podcast to listen to.
IdiotSavage 2mo ago
Meanwhile in Japan: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z9FsQXYVgUE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z9FsQXYVgUE
duplessitous 2mo ago
Sometimes I worry that this whole gen-z stare thing is just millennial avocado toast under new management. I work with a ton of gen-z'ers, I think they're great and have never once experienced this gen-z stare thing you hear about so much online. They're hard workers, attentive, and less phone addicted than my latchkey parents.
- anthonypasq 2mo ago
  gen z and even more so gen alpha is a complete bimodal distribution. The top kids are genuinely incredible.
  - duplessitous 2mo ago
    It goes beyond my job but that is my fault for narrowing it down. Even day to day shopping at random stores, I have never seen this gen-z stare or any of the other terms we assign to them. If they are bimodal, which they very well could be, the competent mode is clearly dominant where I have lived We went through twenty years of millennials being this or that, how none of them work, how they are moochers. Every generation gets called lazy and dumped on by the previous generations; as far as I can tell, it is mostly bull shit. I have yet to experience anything extraordinary about gen-z that I don't see in gen-y, gen-x, latchkey, boomers, greatest generation, etc. Maybe younger gen-z or gen-alpha like you say are truly messed up, I think we have data coming out of schools that support that, but I have yet to interact with them as I don't have kids myself. Everything I have said is inherently anecdotal and no more important than what you've seen
boogieknite 2mo ago
at my first office job my coworkers quickly informed me i had a bizarre habit of staring at the ceiling before performing a burst of effort. i find loosening my visual focus helps me visualize concepts and idea, no idea when or how i picked up that habit sometimes when i "space out" i am fully daydreaming, other times i am (in generous terms) "composing my thoughts". when its a daydream after snapping back to it ill think along the lines of, "guess i needed to process that"
xorcist 2mo ago
I believe you are on to something. I like to run, which is common enough, but I never do it with a watch or phone. I always leave them at home. That is my hour of zen. Afterwards I may be exhausted but I am always full of ideas. After the first ten kilometres or so the body does all the running and the mind is set free. That's a lot like daydreaming. Every other person I meet along the trail have headphones and some watch to measure their training. I get it, they want to get better at running. Maybe they train for some competition. I don't. I will never be an elite marathon runner and I know that, so I couldn't care less about getting better as long as I come back with a tired body and busy mind. Everybody is different, but I have never understood why not more people are like me.
- deleted 2mo ago
  [deleted]
scary-size 2mo ago
There’s this great post about „The Death Of Day Dreaming“: https://www.afterbabel.com/p/on-the-death-of-daydreaming https://www.afterbabel.com/p/on-the-death-of-daydreaming
dsign 2mo ago
Interesting that you bring daydreaming to the conversation. I've got an issue with it, and it's that I get interesting ideas then. But nothing comes out unless I sit in front of a computer to do anything with them. And computers have all the distractions.
- phainopepla2 2mo ago
  Pen and paper nearby might help.
m463 2mo ago
I get a lot figured out in the time between waking and getting out of bed. I do have my phone around, but just to jot things down. Also in the shower, but then my phone isn't handy and I lose a few thoughts.

oggreen 2mo ago

That's a very interesting perspective but now that you mention it, I can't even think of the last time I daydreamed, even when I'm not on a device. Curious if phone usage or whatever doom-scrolling we do exhausts the same part of the brain that we use to daydream.

embedding-shape 2mo ago
That's interesting. What happens if you just sit there doing nothing, looking around and what not? Does your brain start to wander by itself? Personally I struggle to remember any day I haven't had at least 10-15 minutes of idle time doing nothing, just thinking idly, but I still have similar struggles as the author. Although I barely use my phone for things neither.
- cindyllm 2mo ago
  [dead]
- lesostep 2mo ago
  >> What happens if you just sit there doing nothing, looking around and what not? Does your brain start to wander by itself? For me it's one of the three layers. First layer, it starts to wonder to the direction offered by real world. Wonder about song lyrics I'm listening too, or the colors of buildings, or something like that. Second layer happens if you purposefully stray your thoughts away from a real world. Brain starts trying to remember whatever you wanted it to remember. For example, if I tell myself three times "don't forget to call mom", if I just sit idly, chances are my brain would surface "call mom". Sometimes it surfaces "remember you wanted to try arch 2 years ago". Also this is the layer that works badly if you tried or depressed, because it can start surfacing bad thoughts. Third layer I call time skipper because it's just a basic time fast forwarding. I have no idea whether it's true meditation or controlled dissociation or something else, but thoughts slide of your brain, so there's nothing to remember afterwards. My friend said that maybe meditation is a controlled dissociation. I prefer to say that I'm so dumb, I can just switch my brain off.
TheLML 2mo ago
I sometimes pause shows or YT videos I'm watching just to daydream for a little bit about something that just crossed my mind. Additionally I go outside at least once a day to walk or ride my bicycle, which also helps with this.
plastic-enjoyer 2mo ago
> That's a very interesting perspective but now that you mention it, I can't even think of the last time I daydreamed, even when I'm not on a device. Sometimes I just turn my phone off and stare at a white wall for 15 minutes. People made fun of me when I told them how relaxing I find white walls, but it seems it turns out, that I'm not the only one doing this?
- ssl-3 2mo ago
  I found that people would make fun of me for that, too, if they were made aware of it. Back when I was still stuck to a desk in school (up hill both ways and without a pocket computer), I learned that folks would tend to leave me alone if I had a book open. It didn't really matter what book it was. I could just gaze at it with my eyes relaxed and unfocused, with the printing appearing as some kind of indistinct phoric blur. And as long as I turned the page occasionally, that was good enough to keep the would-be tyrants at bay. (And then I'd ace the test on Friday, repeat for dozens of weeks, and do it again next year.)
  - ryandrake 2mo ago
    When my wife and I started dating, she constantly was asking me what I’m thinking about (as people who care about you sometimes do). She was amazed that I could just sit down in a sofa and zone out, thinking about absolutely nothing. At first she would ask “come on, you meat be thinking about something” and later admitted she couldn’t do that and didn’t think people actually could!
- lanstin 2mo ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bodhidharma#Wall-gazing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bodhidharma#Wall-gazing
noir_lord 2mo ago
> I can't even think of the last time I daydreamed About 5 minutes ago for me, my missus says that I live with my head in the clouds (which is a nicer way of saying if I'm not actively doing something I just zone out and retreat into my own head), I've always been that way all the way back to school (with the inevitable consequences from teachers). I've mentioned on here before though that I never got addicted to my phone, I don't even know where it is ~80% of the time. My relationship with technology is (nearly) always intentional, I still access the internet 95% of the time on a desktop PC (which reduces doom scrolling since that just feels wrong on a desktop) so when I walk out my office I'm just "offline" in a very distinct way, if I go for a walk my phone stays at home, everyone who knows me knows I'll answer a text at some point but it could be a day or two. To sum it up, I resent the passive intrusion of technology into my life.
- kuerbel 2mo ago
  I'm not sure I have the willpower to follow your example but at least I managed to turn of notifications on my watch after reading your post.
  - noir_lord 2mo ago
    I honestly don't think it is willpower, it is simply that I never had to break the "addiction" because I never had it in the first place. I always found the form factor extremely limiting compared to a desktop (it's the same reason my laptop ended up running a TV upstairs, the idea of programming on the sofa sounded great but in practice I'd get frustrated and immediately retreat to my quiet downstairs office with multiple screens when I had to do something tricky/requiring concentration). Where I do use something that optimises for distractions, I look for how to minimize the distractions (e.g YouTube - I use the excellent Unhook (with Ublock Origin) which turns the YT home page into a search box and little else, hides mixes, shorts and other distractions) and make it work for me.
  - safety1st 2mo ago
    Willpower's not the solution. When we isolated cocaine from the coca leaf for the first time, the world pretty much went insane. In those first years people were injecting it into their eyeballs and spines. The most popular beverage on earth in 2026 STILL contains extract of the coca leaf as a holdover from the days when it was laced with its namesake, Coke. People were smoking cocaine, ingesting cocaine, giving it to their kids for a toothache, pretty much anything you could stick it in, they did. The solution to this wasn't willpower, it was to get rid of all that fucking cocaine. There's a reason you don't have the stuff lying around your house today, if you did you'd probably get hooked. In 2026 we're basically speedrunning the coke boom with infotech. So once again the solution is: get rid of it. Any time you're in a low stimulus environment, remove the tech so that you don't HAVE to exercise willpower. That means turning off the phone and the watch and maybe stuffing them in a drawer in another room or something. That's all it takes. I can't say how society will look back at this moment in history 150 years from now. But I do know I'm way happier and more relaxed when I just shut off the devices and put them away. When I'm at home or in the office, my phone's on mute, in a drawer/bag/other room, and I don't think about it unless I take it out for a few minutes to order a delivery or do a 2fa or something. At night it's simply turned off. I'll never own a smart watch. I still keep the phone on me when I go out and haven't found that to be a huge concern because if I'm at a bar or something it's competing with a lot of other stimuli for attention. We were never 100% available to anyone for all of human history until the last 10-20 years. I am not opting into this current Cocaine Moment.
AaronAPU 2mo ago
I think its unfortunate people wear headphones while walking/running/biking. If you don’t, that’s however many minutes or hours of nothing but daydreaming (and hearing nature).
- ABoltzmannMush 2mo ago
  Sadly around here it takes quite a lot of driving to get to anywhere that nature sounds predominate. Between the highways/airports/lawncare it is mostly noise pollution, and I generally find that doesn't work as well for daydreaming.
- jorisw 2mo ago
  I often just wear noise cancelling headphones without any music on
- radlad 2mo ago
  I find it impossible to daydream while focused on traffic.
  - lanstin 2mo ago
    I read my black on white eink reader on walks and occasionally run into poles and things in the sidewalk. Mostly I look up when crossing a street. When I was a kid I would walk slowly around with a Sci Fi book and read it. Never been hit by a car but every now and then get scared by one I didn’t notice. But I can’t read intense books too much - I alternate hard books and pulpy fun reads.
- duskdozer 2mo ago
  I've needed to take anc earbuds with me while out now, not to listen to music but just to tone down the noise pollution a bit. You can barely hear nature anyway over all the cars, trucks, lawnmowers, leafblowers, airplanes, and what I think are warehouses. It's been getting worse in recent years and the only way to have a chance at daydreaming is to lower it a bit.
roysting 2mo ago
How would one daydream, i.e., imagine, when you have everything presented to you in 4k and you can even interact with it through games? You have to imagine to daydream. When you’ve been raised on YouTube since birth (referring to U.S. primarily “GenZ”) or you’ve formed your identity around things on TV (like most Americans) you didn’t have to imagine, daydream you just took it in, like everyone else that took on the same thing. That’s another aspect that’s not really being called out, TV also has contributed to the homogenization and destruction of distinct and unique cultures, i.e., actual, real diversity; because everyone is programmed and trained by TV on the same material, as the famous water cooler discussion about a TV show episode everyone was watching tells us. Now imagine you’re “Gen Alpha” or maybe even “GenZ” where you have not even had anyone read you books that required you to imagine, i.e., daydream, what was being told to you? These are all compounding factors that are going to even cause massive problems for this sham, fake facade, con job American society. Talk to teachers in elementary schools and middle schools, even universities now; they’ll tell you things that should make and discerning person be alarmed. And that’s without even talking about the impending impacts of AI.
- JumpinJack_Cash 2mo ago
  > > How would one daydream, i.e., imagine, when you have everything presented to you in 4k and you can even interact with it through games? You can daydream about being the protagonist of such actions which is not the same as watching other people doing it
  - lanstin 2mo ago
    I used to spend a lot of time imagining myself as the captain of a Federation starship :) but I did also read a lot of books. But also, the availability of YouTube changes the utility of descriptive writing. Moby Dick can have pages of text about whales or whatever, but now I can spend hours watching whale videos on YouTube. The importance of the interior life of the characters is more, or of diffusive world building stories with too much intricacy for a movie or video presentation.
    - 2mo ago

graemep 2mo ago

I agree. I am not sure it is as similar to sleep as you claim, but its definitely good for your brain. I say something similar in the context of parenting, that a reasonable amount of boredom is good. I think it likely that being constantly entertained makes people more prone to seek constant stimulation. This did not start with phones either. I am Gen X and it happened in my childhood with kids being dumped in front of TVs. One difference was a lot of adults resisted this and limited hours in front of a TV, whereas now a lot of adults are addicted to phones too.

lardosaurusrex 2mo ago
Well I made no claim of it being related to sleep; just that I've read a lot of claims that it's related to microsleep and used "sleeping while standing up" for the last bit as an analogy. I am not a sleep doctor/therapist nor am I any sort of expert on the subject.
- graemep 2mo ago
  I may have read your statement as being stronger than you intended. its a reasonably analogy then.
roncesvalles 2mo ago
I remember when cable TV used to be "addictive". Now I can't watch even 10 minutes of it without getting bored and pulling out my phone. Also something I learned recently: checking your phone at the movies is no longer the faux pas that it used to be. There's definitely some hedonic treadmill type thing going on with attention and stimuli.
- 6031769 2mo ago
  Using your phone in a cinema was, is and ever will be a massive faux pas. I have no idea at all why you think it might be otherwise.
  - Melonai 2mo ago

larodi 2mo ago

Sleeping while standing up is the state one finds oneself endlessly scrolling somebody else's dreams. Avoid at all costs.

sph 2mo ago

> the lack of daydreaming I would also blame the Western commercialization of meditation. I have recently learned that in Buddhism meditation is just one side of the coin, and it’s usually diametrically paired with the opposite technique of contemplation: instead of concentrating into one infinitesimal point, you expand your awareness to encompass the whole of reality. Which is a bit like daydreaming. It’s through these two exercises that one finds the middle path of equanimity. With technology, we spend our time with narrowed focus, we are told that to stay sane we need to cultivate our focus, and never find the time to release the grip on it, to just let the brain be and expand and relax a bit. The Taoists had figured it out all along: to find focus, stop focusing so damn much.

lanstin 2mo ago
As an avid consumer of Western Buddhism, this is pretty standard understanding. Concentration and insight, another complementary aspect of practice, like the dichotomy between sitting alone and sitting in a group, or between a steady daily practice and a deep intense retreat. The linear story is that increased awareness of focus teaches the sitter that there are no real borders in reality, it is a seamless whole, and as the sitting continues, awareness naturally opens up to include the full current moment - seeing thoughts as thoughts, emotions as emotions, sore knees as sore knees, twitchy neighbor as a twitchy neighbor, etc thru the myriad things all showing the way, bright and clear. But they are mutually reinforcing partners that appear as distinct.

ssl-3 2mo ago

There's only one important thing that I miss about smoking: A smoke break was an excuse that was tolerated by others, wherein I could go outside and just let my mind wander (daydream) with no particular goal for a short period of time. Daydreaming should be perfectly acceptable either way, but people seem to think it's weird (concerning, even) when someone spends a bit of time to stand (or sit) around while appearing to be doing nothing at all. But having a smoke is an activity, and the smoker's participation in this very passive activity assuages the concerns of others.

hgomersall 2mo ago
You can get the same effect by going for a walk.
- mysterydip 2mo ago
  I think they’re saying that you could say “I’m going for a smoke break” at work and it was at least tolerated. I don’t think you can say “I’m going for a walk” the same way.
  - ssl-3 2mo ago
    Indeed. It has varied a bit depending on the timeline, but: Going out for a walk (or to just change environments and very passively stare at nothing) has been less socially-acceptable than going out for a smoke, in my experience. One of these things is weird, or perhaps inducing of ire ("How dare he just go outside when he feels like it! What is he even doing?"). The other is, at worst, both understandable and disgusting ("Of course he's out there again with that filthy habit!").
    - SoftTalker 2mo ago
      Smoke breaks used to be acceptable because your boss probably took them also. Now that few people smoke, I don't think they are seen as a valid excuse to duck out for a few minutes. "I need to stretch my legs" is probably better these days.

gib444 2mo ago

The gen z stare is being unable or unwilling to give a verbal response when one is expected mostly as a result of social anxiety and lack of communication skills IMO.

cpt_sobel 2mo ago

> I'm not convinced attention spans themselves have changed; I think it has more to do with the fact that people's brains aren't defaulting to daydreaming anymore when bored. If my mind is not defaulting to daydreaming and rather asking me to find a distraction, doesn't this mean my attention span is worse?

shafyy 2mo ago

Reminds me of this scene from Curb where Jeff just sits in the plane: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zONvxznbUJA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zONvxznbUJA

al_borland 2mo ago
I often do this on flights under 3 hours. The hardest part is finding a place to land your gaze where it doesn’t look like you’re staring it someone, as that could become awkward.
- instakill 2mo ago
  try "the Polish stare"
snovymgodym 2mo ago
I wonder if they forgot they already used this bit in Seinfeld or if it's an intentional homage. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JBBQdFSvvTE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JBBQdFSvvTE
- shafyy 2mo ago
  100% homage. Larry David plays with recurring jokes all the time (e.g. see his new series on HBO now) which makes it even funnier.

Dumblydorr 2mo ago

You don’t necessarily want to daydream. If you’re not careful, it becomes Negative rumination and mind wandering and that wouldn’t be as useful as an actual nap or a workout or meditation.

abyssin 2mo ago
If meditation and workout look like a protection against ruminating, they might be functioning as avoidance. If a nap helps, maybe fix your sleep first (good sleep is super important for mental health). Daydreaming is healthy.
- lanstin 2mo ago
  I would say that if the mind stays away from negative ruminations when set free, that is a sign of a balanced and healthy life. Many people lack balance and health, and for them changing the conditions a bit might be helpful. Knowing and practicing that one can focus the attention where it is useful can increase mental health or ability to cope with problems. One doesn’t want to run away from reality but one need not feel trapped by intrusive mental phenomena.

mettamage 2mo ago

> I'm not convinced attention spans themselves have changed; I think it has more to do with the fact that people's brains aren't defaulting to daydreaming anymore when bored. Yea sometimes stuff has to sink in or marinate. If you don't give that to yourself then you'll never realize it's gone. I realized I was missing this because I sometimes sit in my chair and tell myself "this is your life now, you sit in this chair" and I do that for as long as possible. I do this in part because a part of me just doesn't want to do anything: I don't want to work, I don't want to do fun things, I just want to do nothing. So I have an inclination towards being lazy. But when I'm on that chair and give myself full freedom to do so, then I get agitated and want to do something. I plead with myself really hard. But my lazy part is like "fuck no... we're finally on this chair, I'll die this way, we're never getting off this chair." And then at some point my mind says something like "FINE, I'LL EVEN DO THE TAX FORM THINGY I HAVE BEEN PUTTING OFF. I'LL DO ANYTHING!" When I judge the activity to be productive enough, I get off the chair. The real challenge is that I forget that I have this exercise because it actually works for me and it makes me realize that when you're doing "nothing" your brain is doing a whole lot.

al_borland 2mo ago

As much as I’d like to leave my phone in another room while working, 2FA has made that impossible. I’m now required to keep my phone nearby and pick it up periodically throughout the day, all in the same of security.

dwedge 2mo ago
I worked around this by just storing the 2FA in Bitwarden. Yeah, same place as the passwords but I don't care I don't want the forced context switch.
- gexla 2mo ago
  KeePassXC also has one.
- al_borland 2mo ago
  A coworker tried to use Authy a couple years ago and it wouldn't work. It seemed like we were forced to use Microsoft Authenticator. I just tried setting it up with Apple Passwords and it wouldn’t accept the QR code. It seems to be specifically made for Microsoft.
Bootvis 2mo ago
Excellent reason to stand up and take a short walk.
timacles 2mo ago
Just make your phone boring. Delete instagram, log out and don’t go on YouTube. Delete games. It’s really not that hard to make your phone a device for communication and not entertainment
- al_borland 2mo ago
  My phone is already like that. There are still emails, texts, the browser still exists, the weather, etc. And even ignoring all of that, taking hands off the keyboard/mouse, picking up a different device, waiting for the notification, opening it up, typing in the code, putting the phone back down, moving back to the keyboard/mouse/monitor… it’s very disruptive to any flow I might hope to have.

al_borland 2mo ago

If you haven’t read it, Cal Newport’s book Digital Minimalism is mostly about this topic. The value of giving your brain time to simply exist without any outside input, with many examples from history of people who carved out time explicitly for this, especially when needing to make big decisions or figure out answers to problems.

austy69 2mo ago
That's probably a great read based on what I've heard from Cal, but I don't think you need an entire book to know how to scale back on your social media use. Just hand your phone to your friend and have them put a lock on the addictive features.
- __MatrixMan__ 2mo ago
  I find that just setting it to grayscale is enough. Its not that colors are actually an important part of my mostly text based social media experience, but when I use them without colors I get distracted with: > What am I doing? This dumb. And then I remember that it is dumb and I go back to leaving it alone.
- al_borland 2mo ago
  It’s not just social media. Most people have their thing… the news, podcasts, music, books, games, etc. In the modern era we can always have something that allows us to distract our brain or provides external ideas to direct it. Being alone with our own thoughts, devoid of outside influence, is something that seems to take an intentional choice these days.
Anthony-G 2mo ago
I haven’t read the book but I like this idea and intend to check out the book. I’m not on social media but I find Hacker News – and even Wikipedia – to be addictive enough. When I was younger, I found it very hard to just sit there without some form of external stimulation, e.g. I couldn’t sit down to eat by or have a coffee by myself without reading a magazine or newspaper at the same time – or listening to the radio. I still find it hard to do this. Hacker News has been useful in that I’ve come across a few inspirational ideas on consuming less input (and producing more output): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44702212 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44702212 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39674619 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39674619 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20781463 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20781463 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24582837 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24582837 I’ve made some changes to my life in that listening to music is more intentional – not just a distraction to have in the background. It probably helps that I’ve also started to learn a musical instrument. I can also go for a walk without needing to have music or a podcast to listen to.

IdiotSavage 2mo ago

Meanwhile in Japan: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z9FsQXYVgUE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z9FsQXYVgUE

duplessitous 2mo ago

Sometimes I worry that this whole gen-z stare thing is just millennial avocado toast under new management. I work with a ton of gen-z'ers, I think they're great and have never once experienced this gen-z stare thing you hear about so much online. They're hard workers, attentive, and less phone addicted than my latchkey parents.

anthonypasq 2mo ago
gen z and even more so gen alpha is a complete bimodal distribution. The top kids are genuinely incredible.
- duplessitous 2mo ago
  It goes beyond my job but that is my fault for narrowing it down. Even day to day shopping at random stores, I have never seen this gen-z stare or any of the other terms we assign to them. If they are bimodal, which they very well could be, the competent mode is clearly dominant where I have lived We went through twenty years of millennials being this or that, how none of them work, how they are moochers. Every generation gets called lazy and dumped on by the previous generations; as far as I can tell, it is mostly bull shit. I have yet to experience anything extraordinary about gen-z that I don't see in gen-y, gen-x, latchkey, boomers, greatest generation, etc. Maybe younger gen-z or gen-alpha like you say are truly messed up, I think we have data coming out of schools that support that, but I have yet to interact with them as I don't have kids myself. Everything I have said is inherently anecdotal and no more important than what you've seen

boogieknite 2mo ago

at my first office job my coworkers quickly informed me i had a bizarre habit of staring at the ceiling before performing a burst of effort. i find loosening my visual focus helps me visualize concepts and idea, no idea when or how i picked up that habit sometimes when i "space out" i am fully daydreaming, other times i am (in generous terms) "composing my thoughts". when its a daydream after snapping back to it ill think along the lines of, "guess i needed to process that"

xorcist 2mo ago

I believe you are on to something. I like to run, which is common enough, but I never do it with a watch or phone. I always leave them at home. That is my hour of zen. Afterwards I may be exhausted but I am always full of ideas. After the first ten kilometres or so the body does all the running and the mind is set free. That's a lot like daydreaming. Every other person I meet along the trail have headphones and some watch to measure their training. I get it, they want to get better at running. Maybe they train for some competition. I don't. I will never be an elite marathon runner and I know that, so I couldn't care less about getting better as long as I come back with a tired body and busy mind. Everybody is different, but I have never understood why not more people are like me.

deleted 2mo ago
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scary-size 2mo ago

There’s this great post about „The Death Of Day Dreaming“: https://www.afterbabel.com/p/on-the-death-of-daydreaming https://www.afterbabel.com/p/on-the-death-of-daydreaming

dsign 2mo ago

Interesting that you bring daydreaming to the conversation. I've got an issue with it, and it's that I get interesting ideas then. But nothing comes out unless I sit in front of a computer to do anything with them. And computers have all the distractions.

phainopepla2 2mo ago
Pen and paper nearby might help.

m463 2mo ago

I get a lot figured out in the time between waking and getting out of bed. I do have my phone around, but just to jot things down. Also in the shower, but then my phone isn't handy and I lose a few thoughts.