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It’s like a constant stream of depression. A day without it made me feel like I was human again. I had the opposite reaction to a weekend without internet a fe

It’s like a constant stream of depression. A day without it made me feel like I was human again. I had the opposite reaction to a weekend without internet a few months ago: I felt lost and bored and didn't know what to do. After a while, when I got used to this feeling, it dawned on me that this was what I used to feel like all the time before the internet. In that light, it's no wonder I was unhappy and bored with only limited exceptions from the early 80s through the middle 90s (when I got a dialup connection).

jlees 18y ago
You didn't have books?
- randallsquared 18y ago
  I did, and read voraciously, at a pace and with a scope that now seems incredible to me. However, even while reading, there's more than one thread of thought going on in your head, wondering about whether this historical figure in the book really did that thing, or whether you need to have that report in Tuesday morning or Thursday morning, or what this typeface is called and what its history is, and so on. Before the internet, I had to ignore most of these to get anything done, since I would have ended up spending a very large percentage of my time writing them down and researching them, and most of those thoughts just weren't worth it. Now, though, I can put the book down for a moment and look up most of these instantly, and then go back to the book. Or not, because often the new questions that arise from the answers to these, and their answers, are more interesting than the fiction novel I was reading -- and this is part of my point: that the internet has both vastly increased the number of things I can find out about and my total consumption of information, and has greatly increased my average interest in what I'm doing, since I can stop and do something more interesting (in my own time) at any time. Usually whatever novel or textbook I was reading in the 80s was so boring that I wouldn't bother with it at all now, but at the time it was just the most interesting thing I had, and all the immediate alternatives to "read this book" were even more boring. I didn't have a great childhood, in retrospect, but at the time it seemed that my major problem was boredom. I guess that's enough self-examination for one post. :)
  - jlees 18y ago
    The ability to look stuff up while absorbed in another task, and even get distracted in this side-road ("the Wikipedia effect") is what has caused my current horrendous attention span. I miss the ability I had to sit and lose myself in one thing for a long period of time, frankly.
    - dkarl 18y ago
      You haven't changed. It's just that now you're distracted by all the new possibilities the internet provides. Going off the grid is a matter of getting rid of those possibilities. Resisting them is stressful; giving in to them is trivializing. The problem is that subconsciously, we don't see clearly. Consciously, we know that staying immersed in a book is more rewarding and is what we want to do right now, but subconsciously, every trivial impulse we don't follow up feels like a valuable opportunity lost. Truly believing, at all layers of consciousness, that those temptations have nothing to offer is the right solution, but it's hard to achieve. In Buddhism this is called the elimination of doubt or uncertainty. It means bringing your subconscious or emotional mind into accordance with your conscious convictions.
dmpayton 18y ago
I recently had to endure a weekend without internet, and I felt the same way. I ended up mostly watching TV, and in the end felt like I had accomplished nothing. It's painful to think about, but I have no idea how I would have survived if I had lived outside the age of digital technology.
sp332 18y ago
Wow, just reading that brought back a lot of painful memories. I used to hone my skill at carefully tearing seeds out of seed-pods while leaving the pods intact, out of sheer boredom.
- randallsquared 18y ago
  Me, too. :( Or carefully arranging things that didn't need arrangement.
potatolicious 18y ago
I enjoy disconnection - it's the reason reddit, digg, and slashdot are still banned from my /etc/hosts file. When I was a kid, before the internet, I put all that "boredom" time into books - and I have to say I was a better person for it. Now there's the omnipresent temptation to read that little blurb about some random guy on the internet. There's hours upon hours of interesting, yet totally pointless anecdotes that can easily consume your waking hours, yet contribute nothing to the richness and quality of your life. I suffered from this greatly - I was spending hours a day on reddit, for example, and reading what? Yet another article about yet another stupid subject that didn't really teach me anything I didn't already know, or anything worthwhile. I enjoy being connected on my terms - my iPhone is indispensable, and I love having maps, restaurant reviews, and all of that at my disposal - but my appreciation of connectedness is pretty old-school, I prefer to fetch my information than to have it come to me (e.g. twitter). There are too many unimportant things happening on the internet that will endlessly distract you if you let it "push" info to you.

jlees 18y ago

You didn't have books?

randallsquared 18y ago
I did, and read voraciously, at a pace and with a scope that now seems incredible to me. However, even while reading, there's more than one thread of thought going on in your head, wondering about whether this historical figure in the book really did that thing, or whether you need to have that report in Tuesday morning or Thursday morning, or what this typeface is called and what its history is, and so on. Before the internet, I had to ignore most of these to get anything done, since I would have ended up spending a very large percentage of my time writing them down and researching them, and most of those thoughts just weren't worth it. Now, though, I can put the book down for a moment and look up most of these instantly, and then go back to the book. Or not, because often the new questions that arise from the answers to these, and their answers, are more interesting than the fiction novel I was reading -- and this is part of my point: that the internet has both vastly increased the number of things I can find out about and my total consumption of information, and has greatly increased my average interest in what I'm doing, since I can stop and do something more interesting (in my own time) at any time. Usually whatever novel or textbook I was reading in the 80s was so boring that I wouldn't bother with it at all now, but at the time it was just the most interesting thing I had, and all the immediate alternatives to "read this book" were even more boring. I didn't have a great childhood, in retrospect, but at the time it seemed that my major problem was boredom. I guess that's enough self-examination for one post. :)
- jlees 18y ago
  The ability to look stuff up while absorbed in another task, and even get distracted in this side-road ("the Wikipedia effect") is what has caused my current horrendous attention span. I miss the ability I had to sit and lose myself in one thing for a long period of time, frankly.
  - dkarl 18y ago
    You haven't changed. It's just that now you're distracted by all the new possibilities the internet provides. Going off the grid is a matter of getting rid of those possibilities. Resisting them is stressful; giving in to them is trivializing. The problem is that subconsciously, we don't see clearly. Consciously, we know that staying immersed in a book is more rewarding and is what we want to do right now, but subconsciously, every trivial impulse we don't follow up feels like a valuable opportunity lost. Truly believing, at all layers of consciousness, that those temptations have nothing to offer is the right solution, but it's hard to achieve. In Buddhism this is called the elimination of doubt or uncertainty. It means bringing your subconscious or emotional mind into accordance with your conscious convictions.

dmpayton 18y ago

I recently had to endure a weekend without internet, and I felt the same way. I ended up mostly watching TV, and in the end felt like I had accomplished nothing. It's painful to think about, but I have no idea how I would have survived if I had lived outside the age of digital technology.

sp332 18y ago

Wow, just reading that brought back a lot of painful memories. I used to hone my skill at carefully tearing seeds out of seed-pods while leaving the pods intact, out of sheer boredom.

randallsquared 18y ago
Me, too. :( Or carefully arranging things that didn't need arrangement.

potatolicious 18y ago

I enjoy disconnection - it's the reason reddit, digg, and slashdot are still banned from my /etc/hosts file. When I was a kid, before the internet, I put all that "boredom" time into books - and I have to say I was a better person for it. Now there's the omnipresent temptation to read that little blurb about some random guy on the internet. There's hours upon hours of interesting, yet totally pointless anecdotes that can easily consume your waking hours, yet contribute nothing to the richness and quality of your life. I suffered from this greatly - I was spending hours a day on reddit, for example, and reading what? Yet another article about yet another stupid subject that didn't really teach me anything I didn't already know, or anything worthwhile. I enjoy being connected on my terms - my iPhone is indispensable, and I love having maps, restaurant reviews, and all of that at my disposal - but my appreciation of connectedness is pretty old-school, I prefer to fetch my information than to have it come to me (e.g. twitter). There are too many unimportant things happening on the internet that will endlessly distract you if you let it "push" info to you.