> “A restlessness has seized hold of many of us,” wrote the American author Rebecca Solnit, “a sense that we should be doing something else, no matter what we are doing”
However, as the article testifies, there is still pleasure (including a calmer intellectual pleasure) to be found in isolation with a book.
A useful hypothesis: Loss of attention span (due to an internet focus) can be reversed, and it is worth doing so.
this is what i was thinking, i think it depends on the demographic but overall i heard that reading rates are way higher now due to the internet’s text content. granted reading books are great but i mostly read those online as well or audiobooks in the car
If I'm blunt, I rarely read long form things. I've found that most long form things are filler. If you make a movie, people expect 2 hours. If you make a book, people expect 200 pages. Both are generally full of a big amount of filler to meet said metrics.
I definitely agree with this. One thing I've come to find out as I age is how much does -not- exist on the internet. We like to think all the information in the world is here, but a ton only exists in spoken word(folklore?) and in older books few will ever read.
For me, it was my school's enforced reading and book reports that taught me to skim and just pick up enough info to write a report, and the internet was ultimately what restored my capability to read and attention span, as I could find things that genuinely interested me.
Obviously, the internet has changed a lot since I was a kid, but I'm not entirely sure that there's just nobody being exposed to larger amounts of text and that few people online have interests greater than TikTok.
I think this is pretty natural given we live in an information-abundant world now. Taking the time to read everything you could get your hands on makes a lot of sense when you don't have constant access to everything.
For me, there are some writings that are really great and some that are a drag. I typically skim to figure out if something is really great. If it looks good after a skim, I'll dig deep. I suspect many others are the same, though there probably are some junkies who never dig deep.
I'm the opposite, if I'm staring at my phone for hours on end I'm probably reading a book. I have a respectable library right here in my hands right now.
But I do get what you're saying, I've had a problem with dicking around on Reddit before, for a couple of years I spent beyond productive amounts of time on that site.
I find that there’s something about reading a book that is more ‘calm’ than reading online. I think it’s the knowledge that switching away from it is a ‘chore’. If I get distracted, I’m likely to look into space and think for a moment, then return to the page, because I can’t just reach for the address bar and start typing.
I agree with you somewhat, but there's something unique about the internet I think is dangerous: there's no clear boundaries of when to stop. Radio stations would stop broadcasting, you reach the end of a book, and tv shows end. But, the internet just keeps going. You can just keep scrolling and clicking through website after website until you die, with very little prompt that it's time to stop.
Or even more obviously, keep clicking and scrolling to the next channel on TV. Not that much these days, because everyone switched away from cable onto the streaming services, but it should still be an easy comparison that is understood by most here.
Broadcast TV stations used to stop broadcasting every night. By midnight or 1:00 or so, none of the three or four channels you could receive was showing anything at all.
Yes but with substantially more friction. I have to stand up, walk over to my bookshelf, go through my books, grab one, sit back down, and start reading vs click
have to stand up, walk over to my bookshelf, go through my books, grab one, sit back dow
You can treat that as a chore, or as something exciting. Pick the latter and it's not really friction anymore, in that it's enjoyable friction: there's a certain expectation I get from picking the next book, encountering something I haven't read for ages and remembering how good it was.
None of those things have the addictive and distraction power of the Internet. Along with the Internet has come ubiquitous things like laptops, tablets, and cellphones. It is an actual problem, not one for people to merely "worry and kvetch about".
Well most of the population seems to drink coffee and is somehow proud of not being able to quit, so yeah. Addiction is a part of our life, we just have to be careful to not form harmful ones.
They are radically evolved means of consumption, too. If you go back far enough, even back to single cells, it's all been consumption this whole time. The more modern means help us select for specific types and amounts of energy via stimulation. Which is pretty amazing really.
That helps put it into perspective for me. I can watch the stimulation and consumption from the outside, so to speak, and get a helpful picture of what's going on in my life.
Not really. Moral panics are like their names suggests panic, on baseless fear. Even if it is a problem to be concerned about like kidnapping they will focus on the wrong aspect that incites the most fear instead of what is actually germane. See "stranger danger" and fears of pedophiles looking for some lurking creeper when they should be looking at their divorced ex or a trusted part of their kid's life.
It is a common problem, they always look for some sort of cartoonish villain to blame things on.
Actual data points at millenials and zoomers actually reading more books than other generations [1].
This seemed weird to me until I figured out how few books my parents actually read.
This thread is full of social media as a generation-destroying boogieman, but nobody seems to consider how much more common youth alcoholism was 20+ years ago or how much of our parents' lives was spent in front of the TV.
When you think about it, the internet is very interactive and most of it is reading (youtube aside), compared to TV which is 100% preset video content.
Exactly, because of the Internet we (as a collective) are probably reading and writing the most amount of text in history.
The difference between the past and the present is not that we're on the direction of illiteracy, but that the structure of text is becoming much more non-linear than before (distributed, discretized, highly referential, algorithmically sorted and processed text rather than continual, serial, and isolated text) which has consequences (both positively and negatively) in shaping our way of thinking about reality.
And to some extent, all of the nightmare scenarios from those technologies happened. Over time, those scenarios just became the new normal way of life and we adapted to it. Of course, many have made the case that a lot of our psychological and societal problems have their roots in those technologies just as their opponents originally thought they would have, but, again, this is the new norm now so people mostly don't think about it.
I strongly suspect that video as a medium (especially video social media, but also including TV) has been eating literacy (including text forums) for a while and will continue until we can program our video social media apps by talking and gesturing.
An aside, I find it a bit interesting that at some point we stopped talking about internet and game addiction. It used to be a hot topic, but I guess now that we are all completely addicted after decade of intense behavioral experimentation, none of us are interested in reading about it anymore.
It's like saying we have a driving addiction or a going to work addiction. Not everything can or should be couched in that kind of language. I've always found articles about internet and game addiction to be incredibly myopic, assuming that the "normal" of the 60's or 70's or 80's is somehow universal or worthy of being preserved, and that any deviation from it is an illness.
I understand what you're saying. Still though, you drive to get places or for fun sometimes, some people do it for sport for a living, but you don't find yourself just compulsively driving 8 hours a day. There are people that do find themselves staring at a phone 8 hours a day. The word addiction might be thrown around a little too loosely than it should be, but there's definitely widespread addiction to social media. I find it comparable to couch potatoes that sit down and watch TV all day.
Staring at a phone doing what? Swiping to refresh on social media for hours and hours at a time?
Using a phone is like going to the library, what you do there is what actually matters. Checking social media can be thought of as asking a librarian what new books are in. If you're asking every minute of every hour for 8 hours, then I can see that being a problem. But that's not really how people use the phone. You check email, you read news articles, you look at posts from friends on fb or instagram, you interact with people in a comments section, you take or share pictures, you have music or video essays playing to help you focus on work, you message coworkers, coordinate a meetup in a group chat, among other things.
I don't find it comparable to being a couch potato and watching TV all day. That analogy falls apart because watching TV isn't an interactive exercise.
>Staring at a phone doing what? Swiping to refresh on social media for hours and hours at a time?
Yes, for the technologically-not-literate people that I know, Internet = social media, and they totally spend every waking hour refresh the page to see "what's new". I used to do that on reddit.
>check email, you read news articles, you look at posts from friends on fb or instagram, you interact with people in a comments section, you take or share pictures, you have music or video essays playing to help you focus on work, you message coworkers, coordinate a meetup in a group chat, among other things.
Half of this thing are mental garbage, the other half are FOMO and outrage economy, so not doing them may result in a positive outcome.
I agree with you that escapism with tech can be more than a bad habit and it can take your attention away from things that would be more productive in the long term. However I don't know if I agree that it's a compulsion the way you'd think it with traditional addiction. If a friend you haven't talked to in a while suddenly came over to hang out, would you sit there and continue doom scrolling?
I also should clarify that I don't categorize reddit as social media because it's generally not people I know. I would consider fb, insta, snapchat as social media but not YouTube, reddit, or even here.
This reminds more of somewhere in between. Like stumbleupon but with a comment section where you can discuss things.
I am only differentiating because I believe the motivation for refreshing news aggregation sites vs social media is different. There's a much higher sense of urgency and importance when it's news. What you find interesting is also different between social media and news.
I think having a catch all term of being on the phone is not productive in helping people understand when the use of technology becomes unhealthy. Calling technology use unhealthy or even an addiction based on the perception of how long you spend is meaningless.
I agree that for some people using technology less would be positive, most often because they stop using technology to escape and ignore their responsibilities.
I don't know how fair it is to say it's garbage, some people like watching terrible films, some watch reality tv, some like video games, some like learning baseball stats, some like collecting NFTs, some like following twitter drama, I personally enjoy this kind of discourse on HN. How people choose to spend their time and what they enjoy is up to them.
I don't personally believe in the idea that constant stimulation is a bad thing as long as my responsibilities are taken care of. But I also have adhd so I don't know if everyone would share that sentiment.
Addiction exists, though. I often browse Twitter for no particular reason. Six months ago I changed my year of birth for something like 2017 because I was annoyed it was compulsory. That resulted in an immediate suspension, as Twitter forbids minors to use it (rightfully so); the suspension would only be lifted if I submitted an ID.
At first I thought "who cares?" But then I found myself in want of browsing the (few) people I follow, and eventually did submit an ID to have my account restored.
I get nothing out of Twitter. Absolutely zero value. Still, apparently, I can't live without it. That's a problem.
The addiction isn't to twitter. You feel like you will miss out on some important information if your access to twitter is blocked. You aren't browsing for no reason, while browsing a part of you has decided this is the best use of that time. Whatever else is going on isn't important enough to care about more than you care about seeing if there's new tweets.
If the people you follow stopped posting on twitter at the same time you changed your birthday, would you have cared about getting it restored? Valuing and caring about tweets people have sent isn't the same as being addicted to twitter. Maybe the problem is how much you value seeing those tweets the moment they are tweeted.
> I get nothing out of Twitter. Absolutely zero value. Still, apparently, I can't live without it. That's a problem.
Knowing nothing about you, the way this sentence is put is the most disturbing part. If you can’t live without it, at least it fills a hole in your life and that’s as much value as you could expect from anything.
How many things do you do in a day where you can put a crystal clear value on it? I mean, I’m writing this and I’d be hard press to come with a valuation, and I also don’t think it matters much if I don’t find any.
If looking at Twitter reduced your life expectancy by 25% we’d look at it differently, but from your description it doesn’t feels so.
Life expectancy isn’t the only metric we should care about. Life satisfaction is arguably more important.
…as I sit here on my phone at 1 am, responding to comments on HN for no particular reason other than worthless internet points, I guess, moderately depressed and anxious, despite having an objectively pretty great life.
I browse directly to the accounts of the few people I still want to follow, and refuse to log in or use the general feed. There’s a nagging pop-up demanding that you log in if you try to click away into a retweeted thread these days, so that helps keep me from getting sucked into the rabbit hole. Maybe that can help for you.
If I wanted to quit a drug addiction, I could probably find a sober community to try to bond with, and you can do stuff that doesn't involve drugs.
But it doesn't feel like there is a real-life world left for me to return to. If I turned off the Internet, I'd be even more alone than I am being on the Internet talking to people all day.
I can't imagine what withdrawal would be cause I can barely conceive of not immediately lighting up again every couple minutes
I’ve taken breaks before, and it’s really not that bad and you do adapt. But you’re absolutely right, there’s less and less of a “real-life” world left out there. I lived in a cabin and carried around firewood for 6 months. It wasn’t exactly modernity.
I wish there were a community that people could move to where everyone agreed they wouldn't be on their smartphone. Maybe we could fix up some shacks in the hills and ensure we are out of 4G range.
I think we stopped talking about it because most people realized that it's not a proper application of the word addiction. Adapting to the changing times doesn't make people ignorant. I dislike how when certain groundbreaking changes in the way people consume content is introduced, people who don't understand it call it an addiction. It's insulting to people who suffer clinical addiction. A perceived bad habit isn't an addiction.
We aren't addicted to having to use cars in suburban towns. But some can argue that people's legs aren't used like they were used to and we should all embrace biking or running everywhere. Not to mention traffic, pollution, road accidents. There's articles written in the last five years that use the term car addiction to describe modern population's necessity of cars for travel. https://www.credit-suisse.com/about-us-news/en/articles/news...
I think most people realized that the term internet and game addiction is most often used by people who simply don't understand the culture surrounding the internet or gaming.
Frankly, I’m still shocked at the shift from how it was during my childhood to the extent where we’re on desktop computers for over eight hours a day. Though I suppose sedentary office work has long predates PCs.
> I think we stopped talking about it because most people realized that it's not a proper application of the word addiction. Adapting to the changing times doesn't make people ignorant.
Isn't that a bit like saying if everyone takes drugs, nobody is a drug addict? "Adapting to the changing times where everybody is on heroin doesn't make people junkies" -- but yes, that's exactly what it makes them.
I remember about 10 years ago or so, smartphone addiction was something we talked about as well. People looking at their phones during dinner out was something we consciously called out. Now, it's such a normal thing that in commercials you see families depicted as all staring at their own devices like it's no big deal. Streaming services and internet providers promote bingeing of TV shows as well.
During the pandemic, my internet usage has been through the roof. At all hours of the day I'm online. It's really my only regular social outlet. It's weird how quickly norms change around you.
These two could have made sense if at the time we had a very solid grasp about the two topics, their place in society and their real impact. But the “addiction” label was thrown around at a time of uncertainty as they were too new, with a huge scoop of “back in the days” rhetoric.
There must be people studying actual internet and game addiction, but it won’t make headlines as much as it will be for actual pathological behaviors, affecting the few people that need actual treatment.
The same way we’ll probably have a flurry of “VR addiction” panic articles in the next years, that dies down when we get to better understand the topic.
It was a hot topic because we make hot topics out of the "doom" of [insert new/cool thing here]. We've villified reading, chess, video games, television, dungeon and dragons, driving, dancing, and so on - and vilifying it all goes out of fashion.
We didn't stop, it just stopped being a hot media topic. I still see threads about it on reddit (and sometimes HN) at least once a month, and probably more like once a week.
It is because people lacked interest in it and ran out of things to say. The conversation was more or less saturated such that it occurs only mostly organically like an author's book coming out or an actual story related to the far dysfunctional outliers who let their kid starve to play more Everquest. Except with smartphones you can always half-ass most functions.
The media itself has an attention span of a small child in its pursuit of ratings so they move onto the next emotional source.
It seems to be a recurring thing with new technologies. Something new arrives and some people instantly see how it can ruin some aspects of our lives and warn about it. It gets taken semi-seriously, but in the end not seriously enough and the thing that those people warned us about ends up happening. After the fact no-one cares, because the new normal is now the thing that used to be unthinkably horrible before.
I remember someone here on HN once commented something about how the Amish instead of just categorically opposing all new technologies decide collectively which technologies to use and take into consideration how the technology might affect their culture and communities and this has lead them to reject things like the television and cars. I can't find any more realiable sources on this, but it sure seems like a much better way to build the society than ours is.
The "free" Western cultures are increasingly vulnerable to hacking of either human psychology or collective customs and laws. It's like a code base where every new commit automatically gets accepted and only occasionally some commits get reverted because someone managed to prove without doubt that it was a bad idea. To continue the metaphor, this sort of project management might make sense when the code base (or the civilization) is new and the focus is on just getting something running as quickly as possible, but makes the code base (or the cultural heritage of a society) bloated, unmanageable and vulnerable to attacks over longer time periods.
Same for coffee. It’s now a socially accepted drug and I’m wondering if there’ll be a future where it’s badly seen to work without drinking coffee (“how can you even be productive?”)
I have definitely replaced my book reading with the web. But I did that at least a decade ago. I still "read" a lot of books and novels, I'm just listening to the audio version now. Not as good for recall, I will readily admit, but on the other hand it does let you re-listen again with almost equal enjoyment. I've replaced all television watching - except for live sports and news - with YouTube. All movies are now watched at home.
Information consumption habits change as the media does. "Reader's Digest", among other magazines, used to be required reading for any well-read person and now it basically doesn't exist.
HN represents a wellspring of deeper reading than is generally afforded by the current entertainment cruft portals of the web - reddit, FB, insta, USA today, financial times, etc etc down to the SEO hellholes of recipe sites, youtube product placement; you get the idea. Let's appreciate HN for the quality of reading material and its curb on our drift to the rest of the 'popular' web. And I don't think I'm alone in always keeping an eye out for the next serious hub of real reading material!
That said I don't read nearly as many books as I did in high school. Books are wonderful things and can be a portal to a novel frame of mind. But then again my life is much busier these days and there are more demands on my time which are not responsibly ignored... So I cherish HN as a flourishing intellectual community, in easily digestible chunks. A bit like the "periodical" era of newspapers a century or two ago.
I used to read books all the time. I spent most of my waking hours as a teenager reading books. I’m 35 now and can barely hold attention on anything, I read maybe 3 books a year if I’m lucky. Even on Hacker News I almost exclusively read and comment on the comments, not the actual article unless I see someone says “have you read the article?”
I don’t really know why. I have 8+ hours a day screentime on my iPhone, which isn’t even including my Mac and work laptop which I might browse HN on. I feel sort of lobotomized but most people I know are still way dumber, I’m muddling through my career and not getting negative attention. I’m not even busy. I’m just lost and exist mostly moment to moment, and am lucky enough to have developed enough skill to write code before all this happened to me.
I'm the same way. As a teen I'd sit down with a several hundred page book and spend an entire day reading the whole thing. These days I spend my spare time on reddit/HN or gaming (which I did in my teen years as well). Much less reading, although I aspire to read more and have a long backlog on my Kindle.
Maybe I'll commit to reading an hour a day or something. I certainly have the free time. In fact, I'll start now. Wish me luck.
My experience matches those of others in this thread. I barely read anymore and find it difficul to focus. Largely, my tastes have calcified and narrowed quite a lot. I used to be an adventurous reader and always tried random books I saw on the library shelves, but these days I find it difficult to get into something new, and if I do read a book I've probably read it before.
I think if I just start reading it'll come back to me. Starting is the hard part. So like you I may as well start now instead of browsing HN. An hour a day is more than doable given how much time I waste here and elsewhere.
One thing that seems to have helped some of my friends who have experienced the same issue of not wanting to read anymore is to find one particular book or style they liked before and go deep into that author's backlog or similar styles. And to add to that, don't be afraid of reading pulpy fiction; you're not trying to impress anybody with what you're reading, you're doing it for yourself. Enjoy it. Read young adult fiction, read Stephen King and James Patterson, read Beverly Cleary, whatever. As long as you're reading, you're building that bit of your attention span back, and you can move on from there to other things.
I fear there is a big subconscious element to it in "smart people" circles where it almost feels bad to be reading without learning.
I started reading Brandon Sanderson with this mindset and I'm loving it. Before I would only really read nonfiction but I would easily get distracted and didn't read much in practice. Now I'm reading like 100 pages a day and hopefully it improves my concentration. Even if it doesn't I'm really enjoying the books
Stormlight Archives are his latest and greatest. I'd recommend those if you were a wheel of time fan, or you could start with Mistborn. They're set in the same universe but it's not really necessary to have that background.
May I suggest the Expanse series. It’s I think a good “split the difference” book series. Not too pulpy, not too intellectually straining that I’m struggling to hold my attention like a Neal Stephenson book either.
I wholeheartedly second this recommendation. After struggling to read last year, I picked up the Expanse series and managed to break my rut. And the final book was released last month so you won't have to go through the months of waiting like I did.
> I have an unreasonably large collection of 40k books, they’re ace.
Literally? That is, wasn't Ace the name of a "pulp" publishing house? Would be cool to have a collection of 40K of those... But I imagine even they never put out quite that many titles.
I strongly recommend this approach, it's exactly how I got myself back into reading. I started back by just picking up a super light read, then some fun novels from a couple authors I liked from back when I used to read a lot, and now I'm starting to branch out more again.
Like so many others in this thread I had completely stopped reading in favor of quick bites on the internet. One thing I've been surprised to notice with reading again is how deep the experience can be compared to an online article, even for a pretty light book.
So yeah, for anyone who misses books but is having trouble getting back to them, try picking up the first thing that looks fun, even of it's silly or easy compared to your favorite books in the past.
I had the same experience but my problem was from the sheer amount of games being released. I couldn’t pick one, became overwhelmed and then lost the drive to try something.
So I stopped worrying about the reviews, about length about all the details behind a game. I check out Steam 250 or SteamDB charts, pick one out and just try it. I have no expectations going in, and I’m happy to drop it if I don’t find it enjoyable, there is plenty more to try :) You also have to listen to your mind and don’t force it if you don’t feel like playing.
This has been a success with me trying out Timberborn, Dyson Sphere, Gunfire Reborn, Valheim as well trying out Minecraft again.
Nah, doesn't work for me. I know the games I like; they are all old and I know I love them. I don't follow the news on new games at all. I simply can't concentrate on the games I like for more than 15 minutes. I get distracted, I alt-tab out all the time, and eventually I close them. It's the same with movies or books. It takes a superhuman effort for me to sit still and watch a movie.
If anybody has any recommendations on how to proceed from here my fried brain and I would be eternally grateful :P
I feel related to this. I wish I had a way out to tell you but I can only provide comfort in the thought that someone else feels the same.
I think a big part is the constant dissatisfaction, that time is wasted, and I should be doing something more productive. I start a movie, I see where this is going, this is not even that great -> I should be doing something else... I play a game, I understand the mechanics, I see the grind ahead -> I should be doing something else...
It's a negative loop like doomscrolling a news site. Very few things are truly offline and I don't think about the time I'm wasting.
But computers, they give me the best, and they give me the worst of myself.
I'm 35, I'm an addict as well. I suffer from a grinding omnipresent feeling of wasting time.... I have a wife cery anti drugs. My cou try has legalized weed... Very rarely use it... Once a year maybe. But I have incredible rich experiences being stoned, being in the moment. Maybe to truly check out we need some form of drugs... Dopamime shots retain us, THC gives us temp relief?
I find it helps a little to remember that learning and observation are skills and humans, like other animals, 'play' for a reason. Even if you didn't 'produce' anything, you practiced your skills of observation and deduction, which are survival skills.
I'm also someone who has to have a real 'reason' to do things. The best short-circuit I've found is finding the value in my own desires.
>I know the games I like; they are all old and I know I love them.
>I simply can't concentrate on the games I like for more than 15 minutes.
Maybe you should try playing something different. A new challenge might encourage you to concentrate more and/or build neuroplasticity, and you could find some satisfaction there.
go visit an arcade. crazy enough there are still companies out there making new arcade hardware and the benefit of being out of your home, in a place dedicated to gaming, will help you concentrate.
Meditation. Unironically. I haven't kept up with it because I'm a lazy person who's been too busy having a mental breakdown, but I find I often end up pulling something up when my attention wavers or I have a stray thought that pulls me out of the moment. When I meditate, I'm more aware of my thought patterns and can notice stray thoughts as stray thoughts (as opposed to boredom or disinterest; they're surprisingly hard to differentiate sometimes, at least for me.)
Maybe the real question, why do you want to do thise things? Because games and movies don't matter that much, really. Nor do books, really.
You dont need to force it. Try something else. Try different hobbies to spend time with.
And also, old games are not as good as nostalgia has us remember. Maybe you are alt tabbing, because the books you ate picking, movies you watch were good for past you. And now your interests changed and they don't fit you, actually.
You make a good point, and I think there is fear in that the hobbies that we used to enjoy get replaced by something less substantive, even less “productive” - scrolling for endless content, engaging in short-term meaningless comment threads like this, consuming information that the brain forgets within hours.
(1) Try learning a highly complex game like Dota 2. You can't alt-tab (well, you can, but you'll likely die fairly quickly), and the sheer number of things going on at once will require your full attention... but there are still many small things that you can succeed at that will keep it fun while you're learning.
(2) Consider doing some "concentration training" where you engage in a non-media activity (that's still enjoyable) in order to improve your concentration. For instance, for me, this is programming - unlike a movie (which I also get bored while watching), I can dedicate my entire brain to programming and still not be bored - but it's still enjoyable for me, and doesn't feel like work.
Only for specific personalities. I'm somewhat prone to Dota addiction, but 14 out of the 15 people I play with are not, and in both my case and that 15th person we've managed it with some difficulty.
For most people it won't be an issue - you're far more likely to not enjoy the game at all.
> I had the same experience but my problem was from the sheer amount of games being released. I couldn’t pick one, became overwhelmed and then lost the drive to try something.
Yeah, I don't even pay attention to what is coming out anymore. If something is worth playing, it'll reach me through the grapevine.
Altough, I only really play very few games atm. Dead cells, payday 2 and warframe in this case.
Maybe it is not such a bad thing. We spend 8+ hours a day doing concentrated work. Then we drive cars some more time and spend some more time learning. Not doing concentrated work afterwards makes sense. It makes sense to do less concentrated hobbies after - sport or crafts or whatever.
If your work is boring and unchallenging or if you have as much free time as students or kids, concentrated hobbies makes massive sense.
I would give you more credit and say the landscape of how content and news is delivered has changed. Many articles are written in a way to generate engagement first and then inform. I don't feel bad about not wasting time on clickbait or sensationalized articles. The comments section is a good litmus test to see if something is worth spending my time on. I imagine you've learned the same habit.
When you were younger, I imagine books were the primary way in which you learned new things. Now there's fantastic blog posts, articles, video summaries, and discourse about basically everything. Multiple people don't have to independently spend energy distilling the same article over and over in order to have a meaningful conversation about it. With a place where I trust the people discussing something, I don't have to spend energy verifying their conclusions myself. That frees up time to do other things.
#1 is a big thing - delete your links to FB, reddit, whatever it may be. Diminish your portals to the engineered attention sucks out there.
I aspire to a separate personal phone vs work phone. Have a lightphone but have not set up separate numbers for work & personal so I can't yet fully unplug from work when desired.
I also agree #1 is big, BUT a lot of sites are platforms now so ideally you'd have something that just throws out the particular parts of the platform that train you for dullness, etc. My method is rss/atom feeds whenever possible, basically use alternative channels to get to the same information.
As for #4, I have a place where I charge my phone out of sight. I normally have mobile data turned off, so I can switch off internet access by disabling WiFi without having to worry that I can't be contacted in case of a real emergency. This perhaps works better because I also implemented #3.
This was the exact realization that I had. At one point I noticed that when I was 16 I could sit down with a 500 page book and read it in one sitting while as an adult I can't concentrate even for 30 minutes.
Feeling stupider than my teenage hormonal self was honestly so embarrassing I just forced myself to read an hour per day without distraction and only work with everything else turned off except for music. It's better now but I still feel like years of constant internet multitasking and browser tab-switching have fried my brain somewhat
However, I have mostly (60-80%?) retained my ability to focus on reading without distraction. But there has been something lost and sometimes it feels like an uphill battle to retain your ability to concentrate on one thing at a time. Would be curious what makes a difference here?
I did some conscious choices, not sure how they contribute but I have the impression that each of them helps a bit:
* Not using social media and treating messengers more like email. A real-time conversation may happen, but does not need to.
* I (mostly) avoid browsing news sites where there is endless scrolling / content. I try to mostly read and almost never comment (as this makes me curious on what the reactions on it are)
* I bought a Kindle to read without distractions. It's in airplane mode most of the time, too.
* I separate my work and private equipment
* Only play games casually and sometimes not at all for longer periods of time. I mention this, as games usually have "optimized" on (rather quick) reward feedback and I can imagine that this is very similar as social media in some sense.
Kindle also really ignited my love for reading again this year.
I think it tricks my brain a bit into thinking “oh, it’s an electronic device anyway” :D
Another thing that helped, was a bit of a challenge with my partner, reading books in bed together, and having reading dates, when we would just snug on the sofa reading each other their own book.
I really like the idea of a reading date but I also know that neither of us want to read or hear every detail of what the other is reading. Our book interests are quite divergent, although we do enjoy sharing an interesting passage or description of what we are reading every now and again.
Me and my partner have fallen into this pattern too, down to sharing interesting passages from whatever ebook we’re reading. I’ve read more books in the past month than I have the entire year!
It's funny you place games in the "bad" side of things, this hich need to be reduced. I group gaming with reading because the kind of games I play require a level of focus and engagement, and my brain rather spend hours scroll HN and Reddit. It really is an uphill battle.
I would recommend The Long Dark and Sable. Heavily focused on exploration and immersion. But really any game with an open world that doesn't hold your hand too much and lets you make your own choices.
I picked up Sable on a lark (also because I saw the Moebius-inspired art style and immediately fell in love). It's a fine game that you can tell was a labour of love by only a handful of people, for better and for worse. It hit that same vein of open-ended exploration that Breath of The Wild has and the same feeling of constant discovery the latter game has in its early hours. I do wish that Sable was less utopic, with dangers in the wild dunes from creatures or weather hazards, but that wouldn't work with the art style and doesn't make sense with the narrative. It's a great game, even if you can get around the often-janky flight model of the hoverbikes and bugs like occasional clipping into the environment.
Having said that, there are many games that are more respectful of the player, with quieter user interfaces without design dark patterns to keep you hooked.
Here are some suggestions:
*Microsoft Flight Simulator* - Fly around Earth, preferably at a low to medium altitude with a small airplane. It can teach you about real world flying procedures if you are interested, with things like Vatsim. You can play with others without worrying about griefing as there are no collisions between airplanes modelled. If you want to shoot, too, try DCS World or IL-2 Sturmovik. https://store.steampowered.com/app/1250410/Microsoft_Flight_...
I find that keeping a physical journal, writing with a real pencil on real paper, while playing games, is good for my eyes and my mind, as is taking regular breaks and going for walks in the real world, every day.
PS. A childhood friend of mine started this website dedicated to relaxing games: https://yinindie.com/
Outer Wilds, Return of the Obra Dinn, for investigations and memory and "human puzzles".
Manifold Garden, Opus Magnum (+ other Zachtronics game) for puzzle solving.
I had given up the hope of ever being as amazed by a game as I used to be as a kid, until I played Outer Wilds. It's truly a magical experience. And the soundtrack is amazing, it still gives me chills sometimes.
Kentucky Route Zero has been the most intellectual of journeys I went through in 2020-2021.
This game almost requires that I put it down every now and then to ponder and think. It calls for a glass of wine in a quiet place at 3am. I wish my friends would play it so I would have someone to discuss with.
The creators have revealed that the script of "Disco Elysium" consisted of roughly 980 000 words, and the 2020 rework "The Final Cut" was apparently even more massive, roughly 1.2 million words [1].
Its lead designer Robert Kurvitz is an Estonian novelist, and the development team largely consisted of members of a "small but loud" alternative cultural association. Another member of the team is Kaur Kender, cult writer and literary enfant terrible of late 1990s Estonia. I think his books are a required reading for Estonian high school students. It's a game made by poets, basically.
I'm not a gamer, but I think the game (entitled "No Truce with the Furies" during early stages of development) was largely based on a sci-fi and "proper literature" mashup novel by Kurvitz that imo gained a somewhat cult following in Estonia. The book pays remarkable attention to detail, and it took him about 5-6 years to write.
Get Winfrotz for Windows or Lectrote under Linux/OSX and download Anchorhead, Spider and Web, Make It Good, Vicious Cycles, All Things Devour, Enemies and Slouch Over Bedlam from IFDB, they should be in Z5 or Z8 format. "Heroines" and "Enemies" are good, too.
adding on some recs that aren't necessarily 'good for the mind' but great from a gaming as art perspective and not designed for addiction -
co op: terraria, Deep Rock Galactic, and Magicka
various interesting games: Subnautica, Transistor, noita, hyperlight drifter, control
Too late to comment, but I wanted to add puzzle games like Portal or The Talos Principle. The world building is stimulant, and the mechanics can be really hard on your first play. Their downside is the rapidly diminishing replay value, unless you collect achievements, which defeats the purpose of a casual game.
When I replay one of those, I do it for the story, because the puzzles are child's play when you know the solutions.
Ok, yes I see your point - I should have be more differentiated here. I can see that there are games which could also force you to keep focus. What I had in mind were more of the "almost instant reward" game mechanics.
Based on the context, it would appear that he is referring to mobile games like CandyCrush and their ilk, "games usually have "optimized" on (rather quick) reward feedback and I can imagine that this is very similar as social media in some sense". I don't think that refers to the NYT Crossword puzzle.
> I used to read books all the time. I spent most of my waking hours as a teenager reading books. I’m 35 now and can barely hold attention on anything, I read maybe 3 books a year if I’m lucky. Even on Hacker News I almost exclusively read and comment on the comments, not the actual article unless I see someone says “have you read the article?”
I used to be this way too. Then I just started reading again and now I can't stop. The trick for me -- which might be circumstantial and not related at all -- is an e-reader I always carry on my person, and an unlimited free books policy from my employer.
Sometimes I only get a few minutes of reading here and there. Sometimes there's a few hours at a time. But it's on the level of when I was a child and teenager again.
I mean, I still don't, generally read the article because the comments on HN are often higher quality. But the books I read are even higher quality.
And the things I've learned from mathematical, financial, systems theoretical, organisational, political, anthropological, and technical literature has really taken me places.
Usually this kind of literature are however more similar to university textbooks for which I prefer to read them as PDFs on the iPad as my Kindle tends to mess up the formulas and figures if you get them in an Amazon Ebook format.
Sometimes you get a PDF from Amazon to begin with, for which I find the the Kindle a subpar experience.
I've come to dislike the pdf format more and more with time. It's great for printing, it's great to show documents really as they are, and it's bad when it comes to... Well, about anything else?
I feel it has become an standard of document viewing when it should have never gone beyond document sharing.
I have started to dislike pdfs a lot more since I bought an e-reader. A lot of them are basically scans of pages and basically there is no reflow; I just have to constantly zoom and scroll which is a major put-down.
PDF is my favorite book format. I like the idea of reflowable text, but my experience is any book with pictures, tables, or math looks pretty terrible as an epub or kindle book. Books that would be suitable for Kindle (usually fiction), I find listening to as an audiobook much more convenient .
I totally see what you mean. For the most part, I have no trouble deciphering the garbled equations on the Kindle based on context and general understanding and subsequent description. When I do struggle, I tend to fall back to the PDF to clear the confusion up.
> I used to be this way too. Then I just started reading again and now I can't stop. The trick for me -- which might be circumstantial and not related at all -- is an e-reader I always carry on my person, and an unlimited free books policy from my employer.
I was facing similar challenges and I'm doing something similar and I can see my interest in reading gradually going back up (I bought an Onyx Note 3 e-reader and the fact that I can checkout books from the local library is doing wonders for me and my daughter). I'm hoping this sticks and would recommend trying out this approach.
It's not really my choice. My employer threw a Kindle at me on my first day, and then I e-mail my Amazon receipts to an administrative person at work who makes sure I'm reimbursed as part of my next salary payment.
Kobo Libra 2 is nice. Easy to hold, has a warm toned backlight (I switched from kindle to kobo for that reason alone) and with Overdrive it’s really easy to check out library books.
> Sometimes I only get a few minutes of reading here and there. Sometimes there's a few hours at a time. But it's on the level of when I was a child and teenager again.
So I dunno about everyone else, but thinking back on my teenage reading habits (which, like plenty others here, I could sit and read for hours and never find time nowadays), I didn't only read for hours at a time. I always had a large book in my backpack I could read a few pages of between classes, a smaller book that would fit in a pocket outside of school for similar short waiting times, and a third book sitting next to my bed where I'd read one full chapter each night. Then the full-day reading times would usually be if I found a fourth book where I couldn't help myself.
I brought back the one-chapter-per-night thing several years ago and I've been getting through books fast enough I no longer feel like I'm missing out. It's still rare that I sit for hours reading, but so many times I've had to make myself stop and go to sleep I no longer feel like it's out of my reach.
You’re comment resonates a lot with me. I used to read many books and now just mindlessly browse the internet. I feel like a zombie at times.
At the same time, I’ve never read as much as today. I get inspire by people like you living at the other side of the world. This new world we live in has definitely pros and cons.
I’ve been through many addictions and nothing will happen until you look at yourself and the negative effects it’s having on your life and mental state and say “enough”.
One comment about only reading the HN comments and not the article. I usually do the same. I think that's the nice thing about HN. The commentary can be more interesting than the article. Also some articles are way too long to read when you're browsing HN and not really in "read mode".
My friend, you just described a form of depression.
Not inferring anything from an online comment, but you may want to tackle the issue from a different perspective.
All the best. If you’re fine and happy, I’m sorry for my comment.
I kinda feel like we were trained to be maximally receptive in an era when information was just recently proven to be the most valuable thing, but also was still kinda rare. And then they just fucking dropped the information hose into our livingrooms and... now I'm blinded.
It might be interesting to see how humans solve this. Maybe it will prople some denser / easier way to explain things. Or maybe we'll just stop the flood and go back to calm learning with the good old material.
I think information is no longer the most valuable thing. Attention is. That said, I too am struggling. The dopamine response to new content is addictive, and I rarely keep the promise to myself to go back and extract the substance from the resources I discover.
YouTube and Instagram search (each of which make a concerted effort to derail your search with dozens of shiny examples of viral content) is a good example of how difficult it is to maintain focus against tools optimized for their own benefit (engagement).
Yeah. As somebody who's always had a strong interest in archiving, information organizing, and information persistence, this is certainly... an era. It's so hard to stop, and it's a lot harder when my personal life is so intertwined with the things I'm professionally/intellectually interested in.
For example, I'm fascinated by how people on TikTok conceive of the algorithm and the mutual push-pull of category definition. How the hell do I explore that without spending 2 hours derailed by fun history facts? Answer: I do not.
> How the hell do I explore that without spending 2 hours derailed by fun history facts? Answer: I do not.
Actually, the answer is "train your brain". Nobody's forcing you to get distracted and start clicking/tapping on other things - you're taking the actions yourself.
Now, of course, TikTok is designed to pull you in as much as possible, but ultimately it's still completely manageable. The maximum addictiveness of the internet (and adjacent things) is still not even comparable to that of hard drugs, and people can quit those.
It can be hard (depending on brain chemistry and how deep you're in), but it's doable, just like starting an exercise habit, quitting smoking, or learning to control video game use or eating habits.
I was being facetious, but yes, this is the actual answer.
Meditation helps me a lot, but the key to cutting out addictive habits for me has always been replacing them with something else, and nothing so far has quite scratched my intellectual itch like studying people online except grad school, and that doesn't count because that's part of what I was studying anyway. Usually, people are encouraged to do other things, but I think for those of us who are genuinely fascinated by the Web, it can be difficult. Imagine if you were genuinely really interested in the medical effects of hard drugs but the only way to study them was to do them.
Your approach of "replacement over removal" (of bad habits) is a solid one that I've had some success with myself! Better to distract yourself from the bad thing than just leave a void there...
And, you make a really good point about people who are actually interested in the Web, as opposed to just consuming a lot of content there. I'll have to give that some thought...
Anna Lembke, Dopamine Nation: Finding Balance in the Age of Indulgence (August 2021)
The book «explores how to moderate compulsive overconsumption in a dopamine-overloaded world».
> Anna Lembke is professor of psychiatry at Stanford University School of Medicine and chief of the Stanford Addiction Medicine Dual Diagnosis Clinic. ... She sits on the board of several state and national addiction-focused organizations
> In Dopamine Nation, Dr. Anna Lembke ... explores the exciting new scientific discoveries that explain why the relentless pursuit of pleasure leads to pain... and what to do about it. Condensing complex neuroscience into easy-to-understand metaphors, Lembke illustrates how finding contentment and connectedness means keeping dopamine in check
--
I am curious about how and how much discipline overrides the practical need for this theoretical field.
I read at bedtime as well and I kind of wish I never started that. I've trained myself that reading means sleep. At any time of the day if I start reading something long, in ten minutes I'm starting to drift off. Any time I pick up my book to read, I have to step back a few pages and start there because I was in the process of falling asleep and don't really remember the last bit of what I read.
I was worried about that, but I find it doesn't happen to me unless I'm lying in bed, or I'm already tired. As long as I'm reasonably awake and sitting up, I can read for as long as I like.
I used to read voraciously as well. It's very time consuming. Looking back, I spent at least one university summer simply reading every day, rather than doing a boring internship to get me a high paid job out of university. Reading is ultimately a leisure activity, like watching movie or listening to music. It may occasionally cause you to think, but it is another form of consumption. Reading HN has done more for my career than any books I read.
Not saying that is bad though - honestly I miss those carefree days of my youth terribly. I hate the rat race I live in now and the modern TC driven tech culture.
Lots of what you describe sounds to me like symptoms of depression and burn out, which is something I'm familiar with. Could be you need to change jobs or change something else to get yourself out of the rut.
As a similar-yet-different anecdote: I used to read all the time as a kid and I still read a lot as a 34 year old. I never stopped the habit.
I usually spend 8+ hours a day in front of my PC and I still read 50+ books a year (mostly fiction).
The internet didn't replace my reading habit though it did replace my TV time. I haven't spent more than a couple minutes in front of a TV in years.
Also don't sell yourself short. Whether you read books or not does not make you dumber. It's just another way to spend what time you have.
Hmm, I have both now. During the day, I build up around 4-5 hours of screentime on my phone, but at night, I have basically 3 options.
Read, Play games/program (e.g. boot up my PC) or Sleep.
If I start with any of them I won’t get to do the others any more (not because of any concious decision on my part, but because they all suck me in to such an extend it’s 2am by the time I’m done).
Tbh, this sounds like a cry for help. Have you consulted a professional? If it's not a health issue, can I recommend changing your surroundings a bit and make it conducive to reading? FWIW, I keep my phone in 0 notifications mode and I don't have FB/Insta/TikTok etc. In addition, I keep some books and magazines lying around so it's easy to grab a quick read every now and then.
Finally, I have a goodreads reading challenge on and it's a nice kick to keep getting closer to the goal. This year's goal was 22 books and I did it recently :)
1. Join a book club. Even with just two other friends. It holds you accountable and will force you to read most days. I often find myself aimlessly watching YouTube and reading Reddit comments at 8:30pm. It’s that bored stage of the daily social scroll where I’m not getting any novelty or pleasure. Then I realize I can read my book instead.
2. If you have a significant other, trying reading a short story out loud at night. My wife and I did this for a while and it’s awesome.
Can you get absorbed in a movie or binge watch a TV show? If so, I suspect your attention ability is still intact. You just need to re-practice consciously directing it again. I still struggle with it too, but was able to "get lost" in a book again. It was key though to move my phone way out of the room, and was hard to get started.
> Can you get absorbed in a movie or binge watch a TV show?
As a fellow 34 year old, no. Most movies these days are way too long and boring. Most shows it's tough to watch even a full episode in one sitting. Let alone binge a season.
I think, for me, it's because there's just too many things on my mind. And a lot of stuff just feels like it isn't worth my time. Why am I sitting here watching a dumb thing that kinda bores me when I could be working on any of the multiple dozens of tasks on my plate?
The only thing that works is getting a little high. Because you do need to give your brain a rest.
For reading books, audio and going on a long run is great. I read dozens of books per year that way. It's great and far less boring than shows.
Dont' watch modern media. Dive into old films that stand the test of time. Anything by Godard, Kurosawa, Fellini, etc.
I have awful attention spans, but I find that if I challenge myself by watching stuff out my comfort zone, I'm able to pay attention to it so well. If I know it's a great work of art, I find myself paying attention to just about every single shot, the composition of the frame, etc. It's incredibly rewarding, and it definitely makes watching most modern content impossible now
(That being said, I absolutely loved Pig and The Green Knight from this year)
Try the Black Lotus app [0]. It has well-researched, applied framework called RARE to help you gain back your control on attention, build concentration and mindfulness. It's basically exercising of the brain/mind which we usually tend to ignore. The founder is an expert meditator and he has demonstrated voluntary activation of any region of the brain just by one-pointed concentration, under lab conditions [1].
I think much in the same way that heroin makes the ordinary pleasures life of life seem completely irrelevant by comparison, the supernormal stimulus of the web browser does the same thing for books.
Try listening to books and articles. Worked great for my I’ve past 370 trash novels this year. I listen to everything at 2x and slow things down when I hit a new concept.
I am similar age as you and I finished almost 25 books this year, and similar number for the past few years. It's had an amazing impact so far. Hopefully this can motivate you.
What you need is a habit change, which begins with an identity change (becoming a reader, or book club member). That will have long lasting effect, but identity change is not easy to begin with. So you setup systems and structures in place to encourage reading. The easiest way I think of is to download audio books that you would like and go for a walk. Other examples: You can uninstall distracting apps. You can publicly announce how much you want to read, or commit to writing some article that requires you to read something.
These ideas are outlined in Atomic Habits. So the solution to your problem of not reading lies in reading this book :)
For a long time I thought that my constant internet use was a symptom of my disinterest in other things, but more recently I've come to realize that it is, in fact, the sole cause of said disinterest. The quick dopamine hits you get on the internet have subconsciously convinced your brain that the internet is what matters, and that everything else (i.e. your life) is simply a distraction.
Don't take my word for it. You can test this hypothesis in ~2 hours. Hide and/or turn off all of your electronics, and wait. You'll sit on the couch, you'll eat a snack, you'll find that your phone has magically appeared in your hand (how?!?), but just put it back down. As you try to go 2 hours without any passive entertainment, and I can almost guarantee that you'll discover that your mind will begin to show interest in things like hobbies/reading. If you can't get online, a book sounds pretty nice.
There's the rub--if getting online is an option, it's always the best option. The only way to do other stuff is to carve out time where getting online (or, for me, passive entertainment of any kind) is not an option.
Fun fact: If you can forego passive entertainment for the week, you will see all of that junk for what it really is, to your horror and eternal benefit.
Even though I can see the value in what you’re saying and agree completely, I can’t help but feel like my attention span has been ruined by my casual internet usage.
I’ve been reading again, before I go to bed, and after months of picking back up the habbit I still only feel half as able to concentrate on novels as I was as a teenager.
This sounds a lot like my experience as well. Like I'm just waiting for the rest of my life to go away so I can look at my phone. It's terribly unsatisfying, like a diet of only Doritos, but moment to moment that's what I want.
> ...spent most of my waking hours as a teenager reading books. I’m 35 now and can barely hold attention on anything, I read maybe 3 books a year if I’m lucky.
Additional anecdata: 57, maybe 8-10 books a year nowadays (if that?). Which was a (low-end) monthly ration up through my twenties, into my thirties.
If you search with the term "book" here and sort by date it's pretty impressive how often books come up. But also, Wikipedia.org is reading too, and I personally find that search term way more interesting.
Broad and shallow knowledge can be really helpful for building connections, creating new knowledge with overlaid metaphor, and priming the intuition.
Plus a lot of people here are very deep workers during hours 9-5, and break time is just going to have to be the opposite in most cases...
Okay I do like HN—I'm here for a reason after all—but it is flawed like any other curation. For one, I find that it veers extremely literal and nerdy. For some topics such as programming and math, this is wonderful, as programming and math are both topics where literalism and nerdiness are required.
But in some cases this blend is not great. I wouldn't put HN as a great place to get your knowledge of more social, cultural content. There are good articles on occasion and of course great users/comments, but there are times when I am confronted with the fact that there is a remarkable homogeneity which is reflected in the discourse on race, gender, politics, etc. This is a site populated by primarily tech workers and we have to face facts that tech workers are predominantly white and Asian and male, indeed predominantly cis-hetereosexual male. I don't mean any of this in an accusatory fashion; this is simply the reality of tech. But it does mean that the discourse is not capturing the entire spectrum of experiences and the few voices who do not fit these paradigms can, on occasion, be overwhelmed by the majority.
Not to mention, as a tech worker forum, I'd hazard that the average commenter is far more well versed in tech than in say, US politics or third wave feminism. Much as we'd find the discourse on technology in a politics forum rather naive and uninformed, I'd have to imagine that a politics expert would find the political discussions on HN similarly so.
TL;DR: Use HN as part of a balanced information diet. Read books and try to get out of the tech worker bubble.
> tech workers and we have to face facts that tech workers are predominantly white and Asian and male
In the US at least many tech companies have way more Indians that white. It's funny to me how Indians in the US are usually not in the white/asian conversation, and even often put in the "people of color" group. Just shows most people think race is about skin color.
I view it as Indian ⊆ Asian ⊆ people of color. I agree that Indians are often neglected in the Asian discourse, although I think there's been more work to include non-East Asians in the conversation lately.
The term people of color is bad and shouldn't be used. We shouldn't classify people into group of colors. When people see an African American person they are likely to have different bias about the person than when they see an Indian person. The bias is not about the skin color, it's about the group the person belongs to. Another example, Indians and African American have completely different issues in the US. Indians have great representation in academia, all top professions (tech, medical, law, etc), live in rich suburbs, etc. Racism against Indian people is usually from anti-immigrants people. African Americans have bad representation in everything I just listed and racism against them have nothing to do with immigration. In the US at least, the Indians and white groups are much closer to each other than Indians and African Americans (obv I'm generalizing here, even white is way too broad as a group).
"People of color" was invented as a way to help black people in the US by forming a coalition of them and every other minority/immigrant group. It's unclear if this worked, but it's probably effective at stopping the old system where immigrants (Italians, Irish) would "become white" by being even more anti-black than the WASP class they were trying to enter.
Reminds me of one bit of a conversation I heard post-graduation ceremony from an Indian fellow grad insistent upon Indians not being asian on the grounds of it being its own distinct subcontinent with its own ocean. I'm not entirely quite sure what to make of that personal perspective and what it qualifies as.
You're both right. (I'm half in the in-group and half-out.)
It's nice that there's no political litmus test to post here. My gay butt would rather have to read some eyeroll inducing things but receive a greater variety of opinions because I favor variety in topics and opinions. This is because I think opinion and topic variety is important to synthesizing new ideas, to discovery, and to serendipity, which is what I like about tech.
On the other hand, it means if you point out that these demographics impact the tech world or its discussion centers, you get poo-poo'ed.
As somebody who would love to discuss things like the benefits, unexpected consequences, and drawbacks of more women in STEM or how, if all developers on a project share traits, they're more likely to miss needed features or key bugs depending on their audience (something I've also seen on all 'marginalized' teams), there's not anywhere to have those discussions that don't turn into shit-flinging contests that would make chimpanzees proud.
I'm not a huge fan of the "make it about race/gender/politics" rhetoric, and frankly this demonstrates the issues I mentioned in the post. The entire framing of "making XYZ about race/gender/politics" implies that XYZ was not about race/gender/politics and that the addition was simply unnecessary. However these issue of race/gender/politics permeate our society and do have an effect on a lot of issues. If I'm being honest, it's usually the demographics who have the least discrimination and the most power who think that these issues do not permeate. It's quite easy to think racism has no relevance to your daily existence when you don't get stopped by the police; when people don't commit hate crimes on people who look like you; when your existence is validated by media, government and society as a whole. Racism doesn't operate on a neat time clock. It shows up everywhere.
Of course there are exceptions. Some people of color truly do believe this "not bringing race" rhetoric. The very existence of Black and Asian republicans demonstrates this. But they're pretty rare. And there are people of color who use race as a cudgel to attack others. But they're also pretty rare. I'd advocate that if you see someone bring up race/gender/politics, try to not see it as someone "bringing in race", but someone sharing their experiences, experiences that may not be yours, but are still valid experiences.
I'm not sure where parent argued that we should not be concerned about police brutality, hate crimes, or the ongoing fraying of the social fabric which gets commonly internalized as a sense that "society is not validating my existence". Framing those issues are purely matters of race/gender/factional politics is just as harmful.
I'm also not sure where I argued that we should frame it as purely matters of race/gender/politics. Certainly there are other aspects and other lenses. But these are intersectional issues and race/gender/politics happen to be crucial lenses.
I don't mean btw to straw man the comment by mentioning hate crimes/police brutality/etc. First of all, race shows up in much more mundane stuff like awkward conversations about where you're really from, or people making implicit assumptions about my parental background based on my being in tech. It's my bad for not mentioning those as well.
However it's also that these dramatic things, as thankfully rare as they are, have a pervasive effect on one's life. I've never gotten hate crimed, nor do I know anyone who has (knock on wood). But I have thought about whether to buy my parents pepper spray. I have wondered each time a mentally ill person steps on the subway and looks in my direction if I'm about to get hate crimed. My Asian friends and I joke about it because it's something we think about in our day to day life. I can't speak for white people but I don't think most white people have that concern. And if this isn't part of your daily fabric, your daily existence, you might not understand that nobody is "bringing race" into stuff as much as they are sharing their racialized daily existence.
> I'm also not sure where I argued that we should frame it as purely matters of race/gender/politics.
That's what people are doing when they "bring it up", effectively, whether they realize this or not. It's a populist, lazy, anti-intellectual framing which rejects deep engagement with object-level concerns as somehow being less meaningful than "acknowledging/validating my identity/daily experience". It's a rejection of real, actual politics as the domain of creative adaptation and compromise-- as if "sharing [one's] racialized daily existence" obviates the need for this kind of consistent, active, pro-social engagement. And it's bad regardless of who's doing it. It doesn't matter if the people involved wear MAGA hats or not, the underlying dynamics are pretty much equivalent.
Very much agree. Computer related stuff in general, like anecdotes about buying brands to high level programming, and a wide spectrum of STEM discourse is great on HN, but I often find myself scratching my head like “lol really?” at comments which fall outside that. A lot of people here have a bit of a chip on their shoulder in topics outside their expertise just because, I guess, they have a false sense of confidence in all topics, art to philosophy to psychology to parenting etc etc, due to having high level ability in one hard one.
But to be fair, reddit and every other social platform is mostly terrible with both STEM and humanities.
I struggle with this too. Books and newspapers are a good resource of course. It's also quite good to read some academic humanities and social science writing. HN and other fora make a big point of free speech, open minded discussion, but I find that there aren't always articles from intellectuals in the academic sphere on HN. Of course these sources have biases of their own, but isn't the point of open minded free speech to read those with whom you disagree?
> HN represents a wellspring of deeper reading than is generally afforded by the current entertainment cruft portals of the web - reddit, FB, insta, USA today, financial times, etc etc down to the SEO hellholes of recipe sites, youtube product placement; you get the idea.
HN _thinks_ it represents a wellspring of deeper reading just like every other site mentioned also thinks. Same as the others it is a shallow echo chamber, and reading through TFA it's pretty easy to see the behaviors described being here too. We should not fall into the hubris of assuming we are 'better' than others.
I agree - HN is still an echo chamber rage machine, and people engage in the outrage and negativity on HN as much as reddit or twitter or facebook or whatever. Yes there's also articles mixed in about some niche technology topic sometimes too.
Agree. I purposely spend less time on HN now because it's a lot of the same thing over and over that I realize I get sucked into. A site like https://techurls.com/ lets me see what's trending without getting sucked into the comments.
As far as books go, I read every night and usually bounce between entertainment and usefulness.
I like the irony that most people probably didn’t read the article (or hardly ever read the articles) and yet agree that the content they find on HN must be so deep and that we’re special.
> Let's appreciate HN for the quality of reading material and its curb on our drift to the rest of the 'popular' web.
Yes, but incentives are not there. Where incentives are is throwing flack at anything and anyone that is popular(including HN) since they also get clicks by association. So it simply does not matter how far and wide you shout stuff like that will always get created and will on occasion rise to the top.
I "read" much more books than when I was a teenager. The difference is that they're all audiobooks that I listen to while I cook or do other housework or during commutes.
But how much of that busier life is real and how much of it is a feeling from being online so much? I usually have a couple hours to myself at night and still wind up doing “Just one more crossword” or checking up on some sports team rather than shutting down.
Whilst I agree with your sentiment, I do think that including
The Financial Times (ft.com) with Reddit, FB, and Insta.
FT is one of the few newspapers that I feel still doing serious journalism
that I can sit down with, read and feel better informed at the end of it.
A good newspaper and I do prefer paper if at all possible, is a stimulating source of reading. Most newspaper has given 90% of their space to
gossip, sports, "lifestyle" WTF does that even mean? I still have not figured that out, lifestyle of the rich and famous, random paid for content.
I have for a long time wanted a service that curates today's real news and
presents it in an easy-to-read format.
I would prefer an epub, could take a pdf.
Nothing that exists today that I as a regular person could afford.
I do think it would be fun to see what the presidential write-up is every day.
Hmm maybe I can find it declassified from years in the past??
(I have no love for USA Today so I dont try to argue that one. )
I think how many stars a github repo that you created or are a major contributor of is an interesting tech flair these days. Being a early/top adopter/contributor on places like stack exchange and reddit is good too. It's probably easier to tell in hindsight.
I actually read more books now. I download them and load them up on my phone and read them like crazy.
Also discussions on sites like this have expanded my articulation and understanding of many concepts and topics. I spent a lot of time, years, dedicating a significant potion of my life to reading educational material of all sorts.
I don't know if I use the internet differently, maybe, I don't use Facebook or twitter or tiktok or any of that. We forget the access to information we have, it would be unimaginable 30 years ago. I can delve into literally any topic I want as deep as I want to go, I can read any book I want right now, for free if I were so inclined.
I bought a Kindle and that was nice, but I'm terrible at remembering to bring it with me when I leave the house, and the (admittedly small) effort of having to connect it to my computer to load epubs onto it is enough friction to stop me from doing it in the first place a lot of the time. I usually obtain them from less than legal sources and buy a hardcopy if I like it.
For awhile I was buying ebooks straight from the Kindle store on the device itself but something about paying the same price for a file as a hardcopy left a bad taste in my mouth. I'd rather have something to put on my shelf and I can loan to friends. Plus paying for the book up front is a bit of a risk if it sucks, because I can't return it or resell it or even give it away to someone else.
The past few months I've just been loading the books straight to my phone and I've read more new books in the last 3 months than I have in the last 3 years. Definitely a game changer.
Last time I used a Kindle, you could just email a book to your Kindle email address and then the book would appear in the library.
Much easier than physically connecting to copy books.
I consume most of my content within the browser itself, For long reads, however, I regularly send the content over to my Kindle via. 'push to kindle' [0]; sometimes makes for a good bed time read.
So Kindles don't support epubs, and for whatever inane, absurd reason Amazon does not let you use their send to Kindle function with their own ebook format azw3. You have to convert them to mobi if you wanna email them, which is missing some QOL features last time I checked, which was admittedly a looong time ago so maybe that's changed.
I broke my Kindle by dropping it a few years back and the number of books I've read really took a nosedive from then. Maybe it's time to buy another one.
I once left mine under the bed, but the cats pushed it out during the night and I stood on it. The screen is very fragile. Back then I could find no way at all to repair it.
I did just buy the latest model on Amazon for $30 during Black Friday. I find reading on the Kindle is way better than on the phone because it removes all the distractions.
I do own a kindle but reading from it is so unattractive over reading from the Hard copy. Has anyone here tried audible? Are audiobooks good? I've read a few audiobooks, but it still can't match reading from the hard copy.
With the right perspective the internet is the ultimate medium for books (ebooks and audiobooks) and it's easier to read hundreds or thousands of books than it has ever been in history.
In terms of accessibility and ease of finding your next read,yes I would agree with that. But, the culture of Goodreads et al. would make you do you reading like people do everything else nowadays to "show off" (i.e. share it) with your "friends" so they too know how many book you can handle per year. That's why I hate Goodreads for instance.
The author argues that focused, deep, and uninterrupted reading is harder to achieve when our brains become addicted to the effects of rewarding stimuli, such as those offered on the internet. My personal experience has been just that. When I want to truly understand & reflect on what I read, I need to actually remove all the distractions (phone, laptop) and force myself to not use those for a while. If I don't pick up a book for a month, the effort required to avoid the temptations becomes higher.
I strongly dislike the continued push to categorize bad habits using technology as an addiction. Addiction is not a description of a behavior that you think is bad and wish to change. Addiction is life damaging compulsive action that you wish you could control but can't due to psychological and sometimes physical dependence. If you are using technology as a means of escapism and it becomes a detriment to your health, for example you start struggling with person hygiene, you delay or miss appointments or meetings, you forgo or isolate yourself from your social support, and you see the negative effects of choosing technology and yet don't change your actions, then it can be considered an addiction.
Getting distracted while reading the paper edition of a book and googling something isn't an addiction or "withdrawal effects", it means you find that book boring.
The reason I, and I imagine many others enjoy, reading digitally is because of two main reasons. One is the sheer abundance of new reading materials I will find interesting. I no longer feel an urge to spend my time and energy on writing that's obtuse as a way of considering myself enlightened for having finished reading it. I value my time differently because of choices technology presents me with. The second reason I prefer reading digitally is the accessibility of the discussion and conversations around whatever I'm reading. It's easier to create and engage with others regarding a piece of writing thanks to technology.
Sometimes I wonder if people, like the author, who decide to forgo the use of internet during reading use it positively, the way I do. Any word or phrase I don't understand can be instantly looked up. I can learn the context about the setting an author uses, like looking up pictures of certain types of geography.
The biggest thing that I think the people who decide to go paper only miss out on is the novel ways in which writing is evolving. Fanfiction and independent publishing is a lot easier when it is digital only. Textbooks are becoming better at incorporating web technologies, for example I'm learning a new programming language and the ability to test and run exercises at the end of each section is so helpful in keeping me engaged. There are digital choose your own adventure stories and visual novel games that immerse me in a way no book ever will. The simple ability to copy and paste is groundbreaking when I want to interact with the text.
Many of the downsides the author lists as negatives of digital reading seems to actually be regarding people skimming instead of intentional reading. I would argue that this has more to do with people being conditioned to no longer waste time and poorly written articles that are 90% fluff and 10% content. The biggest problem for me has been the current state of local news articles. A single story reworded and posted multiple times by different news agencies in order to generate content and keep people engaged on their site. I'm not sure if clickbait news articles are gone or if I just have gotten better at filtering them out.
But it's necessary to try to read because the old mediums of news delivery are dying. Why wait for the familiar well spoken news anchor to tell you the most important events of the day over the radio or tv when you can look up the details yourself online? Twitter is one of the most current ways to stay updated on a story because people report live.
The world has become a place where using the internet to stay up to date and read is necessary. People have adapted to having a constant stream of information that can keep them occupied. Most people aren't clinically addicted to the internet, people just don't want to miss information that feels important at the time it's released.
I love my ereader. Books aren't going anywhere. The romantic experience of what past generations defined as reading is disappearing. Some people have a harder time adapting to that truth. Reading to me has never been ...
Socrates famously hated the written form, not because it was technologically advanced for its time, but because it was "dead": you can't have a conversation with a piece of writing, or ask the author to explain something that's on the page.
I disagree (and agree, indirectly, with the OP): deadness is a feature, not a bug. The problem with Internet writing is not just its addictive nature, it's groupthink. It is too much alive. You have to either follow popular opinion, or oppose it vehemently; tangential or orthogonal thinking is almost impossible.
Books, because they are not part of an immediate, global conversation where people share opinions and judgements and signal their virtue to one another, are something very different and allow for a very different experience than any written text found online.
Maybe books will slowly fade; but I think it's unlikely they would ever completely disappear, as they offer something unique not found anywhere else.
I think a parallel argument to Socrates's could be made for the internet -- it is "alive", but in a much lower-dimensional way than real conversation with people in the world who have bodies and families. Online, everyone is a disembodied psyche -- so much is abstracted ideas, universalized groups and events, unbounded emotion/impulse. Talking with someone in real life almost requires confronting the shared humility and complexity of being a person. Avatars and text do not.
Well, the Internet conversation mediated by the concept of engagement wasn’t what Socrates had in mind opposing writing.
The value of well constructed and structured dialogue is enormous. If it’s between two people, it’s already quite powerful, then you add complexity by adding an additional voice. We’ve been doing this for millennia, and it works, it’s just not what the internet translated.
Incidentally, this morning I finished reading the Socratic dialogue, 'Phaedrus'[1]. At the end of the dialogue (and also in a couple of other dialogues), Socrates makes his famous rebuttal against writing:
You know, Phaedrus, writing shares a strange feature with painting. The offsprings of painting stand there as if they are alive, but if anyone asks them anything, they remain most solemnly silent. The same is true of written words. You'd think they were speaking as if they had some understanding, but if you question anything that has been said because you want to learn more, it continues to signify just that very same thing forever.
When it has once been written down, every discourse roams about everywhere, reaching indiscriminately those with understanding no less than those who have no business with it, and it [writing] doesn't know whom it should speak and to whom it should not. And when it is faulted and attacked unfairly, it always needs its father's [the writer's] support; alone, it can neither defend itself nor come to its own support.
- - -
What is Socrates' proposed solution, then? A combination of two things: (1) of course, the so-called Socratic method (elenchus in Greek) of refutation, that teases out better hypotheses by "identifying and eliminating contradictions", and (2) the "art of dialectic", i.e. the art of investigating the truth, which Plato makes Socrates use in his later dialogues such as the Republic. I'm sure we don't miss the irony here—we gain many of Socrates' insights, regardless of what we think of them, thanks to Plato's writing.
PS: I agree with you on books, modulo this: it's more likely to see pigs flying than to see "books starting to slowly fade away" :-)
After reading a few of the dialogues, love reading these BTW, I highly suspect that Plato often misrepresented Socrates- would often put words in his mouth. With that said..
I think it’s very OK for Socrates to be wrong or to disagree with him. He’s the kind of guy who would change his opinions in light of conflicting evidence or an iron clad logical argument. Just because he said that about writing doesn’t mean he’s right nor does it mean he’s done with the tangent.
I forgot to add: Socrates actually does sort of say that even writing is okay—as long as you're doing it in the right spirit (seeking truth) and are not deceiving your audience.
In the Phaedrus, Socrates rails against the "speechmakers" who don't truly know what they're talking about, but instead write based on "what is likely" to persuade the audience.
And yes, in the later dialogues (e.g. the Republic), many scholars agree that Plato used Socrates as his "mouthpiece". I don't care either way, they're insanely fun to read.
It reminds me of this short essay [0] I came across in Harper's a while back, which, at the time of publishing, was in a section devoted to the defense of books. I believe it's from 1999.
"[...] a treasured book is more important than a dance card, or the photo that freezes you in mid-teeter at the edge of the Grand Canyon, because such a book can be a significant event in the history of your reading, and your reading should be an essential segment of your character and your life. Unlike the love we’ve made or meals we’ve eaten, books congregate to form a record around us of what they’ve fed our stomachs or our brains. These are not a hunter’s trophies but the living animals themselves."
Without facial expressions, it's a problem that its hard to tell how serious someone is being on the internet. So every comment is treated like the persons solemn sworn testimony for which they should be judged not just in the current moment, but forever into the future, and everything they every said in the past is relevant, if need be, to show how bad of a person they've been.
I had the advantage of becoming an adult before the Internet even though I was on it earlier than most people. So I can clearly remember both before and after. While its overwhelmingly beneficial not all of it was good.
I've observed that some of my richer friends are limiting their kids screen time. In fact it's becoming almost universal among those who work in tech. Clearly some of them want their kids to become more balanced. It's hilarious to see these kids to be told to leave the house and play with your friends. They don't know what to do! Boomers never had that problem or had to be asked twice.
I've got an extremely talented friend who is paying each of his kids to read the classics and write book reports which he reviews. The kids in the beginning did it for the money but there is a sense of pride on what they're learning that their peers are not. Certain books became classics for a reason!
My late Mother took us to the library every single week and often checked out and read more books than we did. I naively thought that everyone's parents did the same but I learned that wasn't the case. I think fostering a love of books is one of the greatest gift she gave us.
The present state of reading and the internet is another example of the familiar tension that a healthy diet and processed foods demonstrate. Those that still read and write are like those that jogged, abstained from smoking, and ate balanced meals in the seventies. There is an intrinsic good to reading, one that readers have an intuition for, and that good merely needs to be discovered again by the culture and made explicit. No few of us are lost to the negative effects of internet, just like no few people simply will not overcome their reliance on sweets. We do go on, but leave the kind of material in our wake that the likes of the Johns Stewart and Oliver can use to make their living.
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[ 3.7 ms ] story [ 293 ms ] threadHowever, as the article testifies, there is still pleasure (including a calmer intellectual pleasure) to be found in isolation with a book.
A useful hypothesis: Loss of attention span (due to an internet focus) can be reversed, and it is worth doing so.
And you can skip parts while reading a book.
Obviously, the internet has changed a lot since I was a kid, but I'm not entirely sure that there's just nobody being exposed to larger amounts of text and that few people online have interests greater than TikTok.
For me, there are some writings that are really great and some that are a drag. I typically skim to figure out if something is really great. If it looks good after a skim, I'll dig deep. I suspect many others are the same, though there probably are some junkies who never dig deep.
(All: please respond to the substance of an article and not technicalities or provocative bits.)
But I do get what you're saying, I've had a problem with dicking around on Reddit before, for a couple of years I spent beyond productive amounts of time on that site.
But are we _thinking_?
I find that there’s something about reading a book that is more ‘calm’ than reading online. I think it’s the knowledge that switching away from it is a ‘chore’. If I get distracted, I’m likely to look into space and think for a moment, then return to the page, because I can’t just reach for the address bar and start typing.
The one thing they all have in common is being new behavior patterns that people can worry and kvetch about.
Not that I've ever done such things. Carrying around 4 books would have been absurd. Not me.
You can treat that as a chore, or as something exciting. Pick the latter and it's not really friction anymore, in that it's enjoyable friction: there's a certain expectation I get from picking the next book, encountering something I haven't read for ages and remembering how good it was.
I imagine a large segment of humanity has always looked for addictions.
That helps put it into perspective for me. I can watch the stimulation and consumption from the outside, so to speak, and get a helpful picture of what's going on in my life.
It is a common problem, they always look for some sort of cartoonish villain to blame things on.
This seemed weird to me until I figured out how few books my parents actually read.
This thread is full of social media as a generation-destroying boogieman, but nobody seems to consider how much more common youth alcoholism was 20+ years ago or how much of our parents' lives was spent in front of the TV.
[1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/neilhowe/2017/01/16/millennials...
The difference between the past and the present is not that we're on the direction of illiteracy, but that the structure of text is becoming much more non-linear than before (distributed, discretized, highly referential, algorithmically sorted and processed text rather than continual, serial, and isolated text) which has consequences (both positively and negatively) in shaping our way of thinking about reality.
Using a phone is like going to the library, what you do there is what actually matters. Checking social media can be thought of as asking a librarian what new books are in. If you're asking every minute of every hour for 8 hours, then I can see that being a problem. But that's not really how people use the phone. You check email, you read news articles, you look at posts from friends on fb or instagram, you interact with people in a comments section, you take or share pictures, you have music or video essays playing to help you focus on work, you message coworkers, coordinate a meetup in a group chat, among other things.
I don't find it comparable to being a couch potato and watching TV all day. That analogy falls apart because watching TV isn't an interactive exercise.
Yes, for the technologically-not-literate people that I know, Internet = social media, and they totally spend every waking hour refresh the page to see "what's new". I used to do that on reddit.
>check email, you read news articles, you look at posts from friends on fb or instagram, you interact with people in a comments section, you take or share pictures, you have music or video essays playing to help you focus on work, you message coworkers, coordinate a meetup in a group chat, among other things.
Half of this thing are mental garbage, the other half are FOMO and outrage economy, so not doing them may result in a positive outcome.
I also should clarify that I don't categorize reddit as social media because it's generally not people I know. I would consider fb, insta, snapchat as social media but not YouTube, reddit, or even here.
This reminds more of somewhere in between. Like stumbleupon but with a comment section where you can discuss things.
I am only differentiating because I believe the motivation for refreshing news aggregation sites vs social media is different. There's a much higher sense of urgency and importance when it's news. What you find interesting is also different between social media and news.
I think having a catch all term of being on the phone is not productive in helping people understand when the use of technology becomes unhealthy. Calling technology use unhealthy or even an addiction based on the perception of how long you spend is meaningless.
I agree that for some people using technology less would be positive, most often because they stop using technology to escape and ignore their responsibilities.
I don't know how fair it is to say it's garbage, some people like watching terrible films, some watch reality tv, some like video games, some like learning baseball stats, some like collecting NFTs, some like following twitter drama, I personally enjoy this kind of discourse on HN. How people choose to spend their time and what they enjoy is up to them.
I don't personally believe in the idea that constant stimulation is a bad thing as long as my responsibilities are taken care of. But I also have adhd so I don't know if everyone would share that sentiment.
At first I thought "who cares?" But then I found myself in want of browsing the (few) people I follow, and eventually did submit an ID to have my account restored.
I get nothing out of Twitter. Absolutely zero value. Still, apparently, I can't live without it. That's a problem.
If the people you follow stopped posting on twitter at the same time you changed your birthday, would you have cared about getting it restored? Valuing and caring about tweets people have sent isn't the same as being addicted to twitter. Maybe the problem is how much you value seeing those tweets the moment they are tweeted.
Knowing nothing about you, the way this sentence is put is the most disturbing part. If you can’t live without it, at least it fills a hole in your life and that’s as much value as you could expect from anything.
How many things do you do in a day where you can put a crystal clear value on it? I mean, I’m writing this and I’d be hard press to come with a valuation, and I also don’t think it matters much if I don’t find any.
If looking at Twitter reduced your life expectancy by 25% we’d look at it differently, but from your description it doesn’t feels so.
…as I sit here on my phone at 1 am, responding to comments on HN for no particular reason other than worthless internet points, I guess, moderately depressed and anxious, despite having an objectively pretty great life.
That’s what made me quit Facebook. Best decision ever. I do miss the random international friend update from time to time, but nothing vital.
Still working on Twitter.
If I wanted to quit a drug addiction, I could probably find a sober community to try to bond with, and you can do stuff that doesn't involve drugs.
But it doesn't feel like there is a real-life world left for me to return to. If I turned off the Internet, I'd be even more alone than I am being on the Internet talking to people all day.
I can't imagine what withdrawal would be cause I can barely conceive of not immediately lighting up again every couple minutes
We aren't addicted to having to use cars in suburban towns. But some can argue that people's legs aren't used like they were used to and we should all embrace biking or running everywhere. Not to mention traffic, pollution, road accidents. There's articles written in the last five years that use the term car addiction to describe modern population's necessity of cars for travel. https://www.credit-suisse.com/about-us-news/en/articles/news...
I think most people realized that the term internet and game addiction is most often used by people who simply don't understand the culture surrounding the internet or gaming.
Isn't that a bit like saying if everyone takes drugs, nobody is a drug addict? "Adapting to the changing times where everybody is on heroin doesn't make people junkies" -- but yes, that's exactly what it makes them.
During the pandemic, my internet usage has been through the roof. At all hours of the day I'm online. It's really my only regular social outlet. It's weird how quickly norms change around you.
https://youtu.be/l9evyGr57hs
There must be people studying actual internet and game addiction, but it won’t make headlines as much as it will be for actual pathological behaviors, affecting the few people that need actual treatment.
The same way we’ll probably have a flurry of “VR addiction” panic articles in the next years, that dies down when we get to better understand the topic.
The media itself has an attention span of a small child in its pursuit of ratings so they move onto the next emotional source.
I remember someone here on HN once commented something about how the Amish instead of just categorically opposing all new technologies decide collectively which technologies to use and take into consideration how the technology might affect their culture and communities and this has lead them to reject things like the television and cars. I can't find any more realiable sources on this, but it sure seems like a much better way to build the society than ours is.
The "free" Western cultures are increasingly vulnerable to hacking of either human psychology or collective customs and laws. It's like a code base where every new commit automatically gets accepted and only occasionally some commits get reverted because someone managed to prove without doubt that it was a bad idea. To continue the metaphor, this sort of project management might make sense when the code base (or the civilization) is new and the focus is on just getting something running as quickly as possible, but makes the code base (or the cultural heritage of a society) bloated, unmanageable and vulnerable to attacks over longer time periods.
Information consumption habits change as the media does. "Reader's Digest", among other magazines, used to be required reading for any well-read person and now it basically doesn't exist.
I assume this trend will continue apace.
That said I don't read nearly as many books as I did in high school. Books are wonderful things and can be a portal to a novel frame of mind. But then again my life is much busier these days and there are more demands on my time which are not responsibly ignored... So I cherish HN as a flourishing intellectual community, in easily digestible chunks. A bit like the "periodical" era of newspapers a century or two ago.
I don’t really know why. I have 8+ hours a day screentime on my iPhone, which isn’t even including my Mac and work laptop which I might browse HN on. I feel sort of lobotomized but most people I know are still way dumber, I’m muddling through my career and not getting negative attention. I’m not even busy. I’m just lost and exist mostly moment to moment, and am lucky enough to have developed enough skill to write code before all this happened to me.
Maybe I'll commit to reading an hour a day or something. I certainly have the free time. In fact, I'll start now. Wish me luck.
I think if I just start reading it'll come back to me. Starting is the hard part. So like you I may as well start now instead of browsing HN. An hour a day is more than doable given how much time I waste here and elsewhere.
Good luck!
I fear there is a big subconscious element to it in "smart people" circles where it almost feels bad to be reading without learning.
Amen. I have an unreasonably large collection of 40k books, they’re ace.
Literally? That is, wasn't Ace the name of a "pulp" publishing house? Would be cool to have a collection of 40K of those... But I imagine even they never put out quite that many titles.
Like so many others in this thread I had completely stopped reading in favor of quick bites on the internet. One thing I've been surprised to notice with reading again is how deep the experience can be compared to an online article, even for a pretty light book.
So yeah, for anyone who misses books but is having trouble getting back to them, try picking up the first thing that looks fun, even of it's silly or easy compared to your favorite books in the past.
So I stopped worrying about the reviews, about length about all the details behind a game. I check out Steam 250 or SteamDB charts, pick one out and just try it. I have no expectations going in, and I’m happy to drop it if I don’t find it enjoyable, there is plenty more to try :) You also have to listen to your mind and don’t force it if you don’t feel like playing.
This has been a success with me trying out Timberborn, Dyson Sphere, Gunfire Reborn, Valheim as well trying out Minecraft again.
If anybody has any recommendations on how to proceed from here my fried brain and I would be eternally grateful :P
I think a big part is the constant dissatisfaction, that time is wasted, and I should be doing something more productive. I start a movie, I see where this is going, this is not even that great -> I should be doing something else... I play a game, I understand the mechanics, I see the grind ahead -> I should be doing something else...
It's a negative loop like doomscrolling a news site. Very few things are truly offline and I don't think about the time I'm wasting.
But computers, they give me the best, and they give me the worst of myself.
I'm also someone who has to have a real 'reason' to do things. The best short-circuit I've found is finding the value in my own desires.
>I simply can't concentrate on the games I like for more than 15 minutes.
Maybe you should try playing something different. A new challenge might encourage you to concentrate more and/or build neuroplasticity, and you could find some satisfaction there.
You dont need to force it. Try something else. Try different hobbies to spend time with.
And also, old games are not as good as nostalgia has us remember. Maybe you are alt tabbing, because the books you ate picking, movies you watch were good for past you. And now your interests changed and they don't fit you, actually.
You may just need to change genre.
Games and movies, sure. But books?!? Oh yes they do!
Yeah, I know, weird. Dunno why I think that way. But I do.
For the same reasons as TFA, I guess.
(1) Try learning a highly complex game like Dota 2. You can't alt-tab (well, you can, but you'll likely die fairly quickly), and the sheer number of things going on at once will require your full attention... but there are still many small things that you can succeed at that will keep it fun while you're learning.
(2) Consider doing some "concentration training" where you engage in a non-media activity (that's still enjoyable) in order to improve your concentration. For instance, for me, this is programming - unlike a movie (which I also get bored while watching), I can dedicate my entire brain to programming and still not be bored - but it's still enjoyable for me, and doesn't feel like work.
Don't do that, highly addictive.
For most people it won't be an issue - you're far more likely to not enjoy the game at all.
Yeah, I don't even pay attention to what is coming out anymore. If something is worth playing, it'll reach me through the grapevine.
Altough, I only really play very few games atm. Dead cells, payday 2 and warframe in this case.
If your work is boring and unchallenging or if you have as much free time as students or kids, concentrated hobbies makes massive sense.
When you were younger, I imagine books were the primary way in which you learned new things. Now there's fantastic blog posts, articles, video summaries, and discourse about basically everything. Multiple people don't have to independently spend energy distilling the same article over and over in order to have a meaningful conversation about it. With a place where I trust the people discussing something, I don't have to spend energy verifying their conclusions myself. That frees up time to do other things.
1. Delete frequently visited websites in chrome on Desktop and mobile and populate it with websites that you want to visit more frequently.
2. Create a new profile on YT and subscribe to channels you like that add value.
3. Keep a separate work phone.
4. Keep your personal phone away for certain times of the day
5. Read a book that you have been waiting to read on a dedicated Kindle or in a physical copy.
Ask yourself what the problem is and try to find a solution that works.
I aspire to a separate personal phone vs work phone. Have a lightphone but have not set up separate numbers for work & personal so I can't yet fully unplug from work when desired.
* Block time sucking websites in .hosts file, or in uBlock Origin custom filter. Latter works well for Android
* Delete mobile apps, or add strict usage timers (at least Android supports this)
* Never take phone to bed. Leave outside of bedroom or by the door where you have to get up to reach it
As for #4, I have a place where I charge my phone out of sight. I normally have mobile data turned off, so I can switch off internet access by disabling WiFi without having to worry that I can't be contacted in case of a real emergency. This perhaps works better because I also implemented #3.
Feeling stupider than my teenage hormonal self was honestly so embarrassing I just forced myself to read an hour per day without distraction and only work with everything else turned off except for music. It's better now but I still feel like years of constant internet multitasking and browser tab-switching have fried my brain somewhat
However, I have mostly (60-80%?) retained my ability to focus on reading without distraction. But there has been something lost and sometimes it feels like an uphill battle to retain your ability to concentrate on one thing at a time. Would be curious what makes a difference here?
I did some conscious choices, not sure how they contribute but I have the impression that each of them helps a bit:
* Not using social media and treating messengers more like email. A real-time conversation may happen, but does not need to.
* I (mostly) avoid browsing news sites where there is endless scrolling / content. I try to mostly read and almost never comment (as this makes me curious on what the reactions on it are)
* I bought a Kindle to read without distractions. It's in airplane mode most of the time, too.
* I separate my work and private equipment
* Only play games casually and sometimes not at all for longer periods of time. I mention this, as games usually have "optimized" on (rather quick) reward feedback and I can imagine that this is very similar as social media in some sense.
Kindle also really ignited my love for reading again this year. I think it tricks my brain a bit into thinking “oh, it’s an electronic device anyway” :D Another thing that helped, was a bit of a challenge with my partner, reading books in bed together, and having reading dates, when we would just snug on the sofa reading each other their own book.
Having said that, there are many games that are more respectful of the player, with quieter user interfaces without design dark patterns to keep you hooked.
Here are some suggestions:
*Microsoft Flight Simulator* - Fly around Earth, preferably at a low to medium altitude with a small airplane. It can teach you about real world flying procedures if you are interested, with things like Vatsim. You can play with others without worrying about griefing as there are no collisions between airplanes modelled. If you want to shoot, too, try DCS World or IL-2 Sturmovik. https://store.steampowered.com/app/1250410/Microsoft_Flight_...
*Everything* - Meditative game about life and the relationships between all things. https://store.steampowered.com/app/582270/Everything/
*Balsa Model Flight Simulator* - Build and fly radio controlled airplanes! By the creator of Kerbal Space Program. https://store.steampowered.com/app/977920/Balsa_Model_Flight...
I find that keeping a physical journal, writing with a real pencil on real paper, while playing games, is good for my eyes and my mind, as is taking regular breaks and going for walks in the real world, every day.
PS. A childhood friend of mine started this website dedicated to relaxing games: https://yinindie.com/
For a completely integrated puzzle solving Zen experience, The Witness is also excellent.
Its lead designer Robert Kurvitz is an Estonian novelist, and the development team largely consisted of members of a "small but loud" alternative cultural association. Another member of the team is Kaur Kender, cult writer and literary enfant terrible of late 1990s Estonia. I think his books are a required reading for Estonian high school students. It's a game made by poets, basically.
I'm not a gamer, but I think the game (entitled "No Truce with the Furies" during early stages of development) was largely based on a sci-fi and "proper literature" mashup novel by Kurvitz that imo gained a somewhat cult following in Estonia. The book pays remarkable attention to detail, and it took him about 5-6 years to write.
1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disco_Elysium
Get Winfrotz for Windows or Lectrote under Linux/OSX and download Anchorhead, Spider and Web, Make It Good, Vicious Cycles, All Things Devour, Enemies and Slouch Over Bedlam from IFDB, they should be in Z5 or Z8 format. "Heroines" and "Enemies" are good, too.
When I replay one of those, I do it for the story, because the puzzles are child's play when you know the solutions.
I used to be this way too. Then I just started reading again and now I can't stop. The trick for me -- which might be circumstantial and not related at all -- is an e-reader I always carry on my person, and an unlimited free books policy from my employer.
Sometimes I only get a few minutes of reading here and there. Sometimes there's a few hours at a time. But it's on the level of when I was a child and teenager again.
I mean, I still don't, generally read the article because the comments on HN are often higher quality. But the books I read are even higher quality.
And the things I've learned from mathematical, financial, systems theoretical, organisational, political, anthropological, and technical literature has really taken me places.
Sometimes you get a PDF from Amazon to begin with, for which I find the the Kindle a subpar experience.
I feel it has become an standard of document viewing when it should have never gone beyond document sharing.
I was facing similar challenges and I'm doing something similar and I can see my interest in reading gradually going back up (I bought an Onyx Note 3 e-reader and the fact that I can checkout books from the local library is doing wonders for me and my daughter). I'm hoping this sticks and would recommend trying out this approach.
So I dunno about everyone else, but thinking back on my teenage reading habits (which, like plenty others here, I could sit and read for hours and never find time nowadays), I didn't only read for hours at a time. I always had a large book in my backpack I could read a few pages of between classes, a smaller book that would fit in a pocket outside of school for similar short waiting times, and a third book sitting next to my bed where I'd read one full chapter each night. Then the full-day reading times would usually be if I found a fourth book where I couldn't help myself.
I brought back the one-chapter-per-night thing several years ago and I've been getting through books fast enough I no longer feel like I'm missing out. It's still rare that I sit for hours reading, but so many times I've had to make myself stop and go to sleep I no longer feel like it's out of my reach.
At the same time, I’ve never read as much as today. I get inspire by people like you living at the other side of the world. This new world we live in has definitely pros and cons.
I’ve been through many addictions and nothing will happen until you look at yourself and the negative effects it’s having on your life and mental state and say “enough”.
But some types of good information are very valuable too. Surely it's available somewhere today, but finding it can sometimes be very difficult.
For example, I'm fascinated by how people on TikTok conceive of the algorithm and the mutual push-pull of category definition. How the hell do I explore that without spending 2 hours derailed by fun history facts? Answer: I do not.
Actually, the answer is "train your brain". Nobody's forcing you to get distracted and start clicking/tapping on other things - you're taking the actions yourself.
Now, of course, TikTok is designed to pull you in as much as possible, but ultimately it's still completely manageable. The maximum addictiveness of the internet (and adjacent things) is still not even comparable to that of hard drugs, and people can quit those.
It can be hard (depending on brain chemistry and how deep you're in), but it's doable, just like starting an exercise habit, quitting smoking, or learning to control video game use or eating habits.
Meditation helps me a lot, but the key to cutting out addictive habits for me has always been replacing them with something else, and nothing so far has quite scratched my intellectual itch like studying people online except grad school, and that doesn't count because that's part of what I was studying anyway. Usually, people are encouraged to do other things, but I think for those of us who are genuinely fascinated by the Web, it can be difficult. Imagine if you were genuinely really interested in the medical effects of hard drugs but the only way to study them was to do them.
Your approach of "replacement over removal" (of bad habits) is a solid one that I've had some success with myself! Better to distract yourself from the bad thing than just leave a void there...
And, you make a really good point about people who are actually interested in the Web, as opposed to just consuming a lot of content there. I'll have to give that some thought...
The book «explores how to moderate compulsive overconsumption in a dopamine-overloaded world».
> Anna Lembke is professor of psychiatry at Stanford University School of Medicine and chief of the Stanford Addiction Medicine Dual Diagnosis Clinic. ... She sits on the board of several state and national addiction-focused organizations
> In Dopamine Nation, Dr. Anna Lembke ... explores the exciting new scientific discoveries that explain why the relentless pursuit of pleasure leads to pain... and what to do about it. Condensing complex neuroscience into easy-to-understand metaphors, Lembke illustrates how finding contentment and connectedness means keeping dopamine in check
--
I am curious about how and how much discipline overrides the practical need for this theoretical field.
And then I started reading at bedtime. Sometimes that's 10-15 minutes, and sometimes it's an hour. However long it takes to get sleepy.
Now I read about a dozen books a year, and if a book really grips me, I'll read it during the day at times, too.
Not saying that is bad though - honestly I miss those carefree days of my youth terribly. I hate the rat race I live in now and the modern TC driven tech culture.
Lots of what you describe sounds to me like symptoms of depression and burn out, which is something I'm familiar with. Could be you need to change jobs or change something else to get yourself out of the rut.
I usually spend 8+ hours a day in front of my PC and I still read 50+ books a year (mostly fiction). The internet didn't replace my reading habit though it did replace my TV time. I haven't spent more than a couple minutes in front of a TV in years.
Also don't sell yourself short. Whether you read books or not does not make you dumber. It's just another way to spend what time you have.
Read, Play games/program (e.g. boot up my PC) or Sleep.
If I start with any of them I won’t get to do the others any more (not because of any concious decision on my part, but because they all suck me in to such an extend it’s 2am by the time I’m done).
Tbh, this sounds like a cry for help. Have you consulted a professional? If it's not a health issue, can I recommend changing your surroundings a bit and make it conducive to reading? FWIW, I keep my phone in 0 notifications mode and I don't have FB/Insta/TikTok etc. In addition, I keep some books and magazines lying around so it's easy to grab a quick read every now and then.
Finally, I have a goodreads reading challenge on and it's a nice kick to keep getting closer to the goal. This year's goal was 22 books and I did it recently :)
2. If you have a significant other, trying reading a short story out loud at night. My wife and I did this for a while and it’s awesome.
As a fellow 34 year old, no. Most movies these days are way too long and boring. Most shows it's tough to watch even a full episode in one sitting. Let alone binge a season.
I think, for me, it's because there's just too many things on my mind. And a lot of stuff just feels like it isn't worth my time. Why am I sitting here watching a dumb thing that kinda bores me when I could be working on any of the multiple dozens of tasks on my plate?
The only thing that works is getting a little high. Because you do need to give your brain a rest.
For reading books, audio and going on a long run is great. I read dozens of books per year that way. It's great and far less boring than shows.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2894658
Have you tried it again since then?
I have awful attention spans, but I find that if I challenge myself by watching stuff out my comfort zone, I'm able to pay attention to it so well. If I know it's a great work of art, I find myself paying attention to just about every single shot, the composition of the frame, etc. It's incredibly rewarding, and it definitely makes watching most modern content impossible now
(That being said, I absolutely loved Pig and The Green Knight from this year)
0: https://blacklotus.app/ 1: https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/abstract/document/8717094./autho... (An EEG based Quantitative Analysis of Absorbed Meditative State, IEEE, 23 March 2019)
What you need is a habit change, which begins with an identity change (becoming a reader, or book club member). That will have long lasting effect, but identity change is not easy to begin with. So you setup systems and structures in place to encourage reading. The easiest way I think of is to download audio books that you would like and go for a walk. Other examples: You can uninstall distracting apps. You can publicly announce how much you want to read, or commit to writing some article that requires you to read something.
These ideas are outlined in Atomic Habits. So the solution to your problem of not reading lies in reading this book :)
For a long time I thought that my constant internet use was a symptom of my disinterest in other things, but more recently I've come to realize that it is, in fact, the sole cause of said disinterest. The quick dopamine hits you get on the internet have subconsciously convinced your brain that the internet is what matters, and that everything else (i.e. your life) is simply a distraction.
Don't take my word for it. You can test this hypothesis in ~2 hours. Hide and/or turn off all of your electronics, and wait. You'll sit on the couch, you'll eat a snack, you'll find that your phone has magically appeared in your hand (how?!?), but just put it back down. As you try to go 2 hours without any passive entertainment, and I can almost guarantee that you'll discover that your mind will begin to show interest in things like hobbies/reading. If you can't get online, a book sounds pretty nice.
There's the rub--if getting online is an option, it's always the best option. The only way to do other stuff is to carve out time where getting online (or, for me, passive entertainment of any kind) is not an option.
Fun fact: If you can forego passive entertainment for the week, you will see all of that junk for what it really is, to your horror and eternal benefit.
Did anyone else try?
I’ve been reading again, before I go to bed, and after months of picking back up the habbit I still only feel half as able to concentrate on novels as I was as a teenager.
He wrote, on his phone, in bed, pursuing his HN addiction.
Additional anecdata: 57, maybe 8-10 books a year nowadays (if that?). Which was a (low-end) monthly ration up through my twenties, into my thirties.
:-(
Broad and shallow knowledge can be really helpful for building connections, creating new knowledge with overlaid metaphor, and priming the intuition.
Plus a lot of people here are very deep workers during hours 9-5, and break time is just going to have to be the opposite in most cases...
But in some cases this blend is not great. I wouldn't put HN as a great place to get your knowledge of more social, cultural content. There are good articles on occasion and of course great users/comments, but there are times when I am confronted with the fact that there is a remarkable homogeneity which is reflected in the discourse on race, gender, politics, etc. This is a site populated by primarily tech workers and we have to face facts that tech workers are predominantly white and Asian and male, indeed predominantly cis-hetereosexual male. I don't mean any of this in an accusatory fashion; this is simply the reality of tech. But it does mean that the discourse is not capturing the entire spectrum of experiences and the few voices who do not fit these paradigms can, on occasion, be overwhelmed by the majority.
Not to mention, as a tech worker forum, I'd hazard that the average commenter is far more well versed in tech than in say, US politics or third wave feminism. Much as we'd find the discourse on technology in a politics forum rather naive and uninformed, I'd have to imagine that a politics expert would find the political discussions on HN similarly so.
TL;DR: Use HN as part of a balanced information diet. Read books and try to get out of the tech worker bubble.
In the US at least many tech companies have way more Indians that white. It's funny to me how Indians in the US are usually not in the white/asian conversation, and even often put in the "people of color" group. Just shows most people think race is about skin color.
Sorry for digressing on the topic here...
What I appreciate about HN is that we don‘t make everything about race, gender, and politics, for no reason.
It's nice that there's no political litmus test to post here. My gay butt would rather have to read some eyeroll inducing things but receive a greater variety of opinions because I favor variety in topics and opinions. This is because I think opinion and topic variety is important to synthesizing new ideas, to discovery, and to serendipity, which is what I like about tech.
On the other hand, it means if you point out that these demographics impact the tech world or its discussion centers, you get poo-poo'ed.
As somebody who would love to discuss things like the benefits, unexpected consequences, and drawbacks of more women in STEM or how, if all developers on a project share traits, they're more likely to miss needed features or key bugs depending on their audience (something I've also seen on all 'marginalized' teams), there's not anywhere to have those discussions that don't turn into shit-flinging contests that would make chimpanzees proud.
Of course there are exceptions. Some people of color truly do believe this "not bringing race" rhetoric. The very existence of Black and Asian republicans demonstrates this. But they're pretty rare. And there are people of color who use race as a cudgel to attack others. But they're also pretty rare. I'd advocate that if you see someone bring up race/gender/politics, try to not see it as someone "bringing in race", but someone sharing their experiences, experiences that may not be yours, but are still valid experiences.
I don't mean btw to straw man the comment by mentioning hate crimes/police brutality/etc. First of all, race shows up in much more mundane stuff like awkward conversations about where you're really from, or people making implicit assumptions about my parental background based on my being in tech. It's my bad for not mentioning those as well.
However it's also that these dramatic things, as thankfully rare as they are, have a pervasive effect on one's life. I've never gotten hate crimed, nor do I know anyone who has (knock on wood). But I have thought about whether to buy my parents pepper spray. I have wondered each time a mentally ill person steps on the subway and looks in my direction if I'm about to get hate crimed. My Asian friends and I joke about it because it's something we think about in our day to day life. I can't speak for white people but I don't think most white people have that concern. And if this isn't part of your daily fabric, your daily existence, you might not understand that nobody is "bringing race" into stuff as much as they are sharing their racialized daily existence.
That's what people are doing when they "bring it up", effectively, whether they realize this or not. It's a populist, lazy, anti-intellectual framing which rejects deep engagement with object-level concerns as somehow being less meaningful than "acknowledging/validating my identity/daily experience". It's a rejection of real, actual politics as the domain of creative adaptation and compromise-- as if "sharing [one's] racialized daily existence" obviates the need for this kind of consistent, active, pro-social engagement. And it's bad regardless of who's doing it. It doesn't matter if the people involved wear MAGA hats or not, the underlying dynamics are pretty much equivalent.
But to be fair, reddit and every other social platform is mostly terrible with both STEM and humanities.
Books will always be supreme.
I don't think my info diet is very balanced. I'd love to be introduced to other places where people talk about different things
Which I've been engaging into a bit too much (yet again) in the past days.
So I guess that I can thank this article as I will now "log out" and do something more productive with my life.
HN _thinks_ it represents a wellspring of deeper reading just like every other site mentioned also thinks. Same as the others it is a shallow echo chamber, and reading through TFA it's pretty easy to see the behaviors described being here too. We should not fall into the hubris of assuming we are 'better' than others.
As far as books go, I read every night and usually bounce between entertainment and usefulness.
Yes, I realize I'm here too.
Yes, but incentives are not there. Where incentives are is throwing flack at anything and anyone that is popular(including HN) since they also get clicks by association. So it simply does not matter how far and wide you shout stuff like that will always get created and will on occasion rise to the top.
FT is one of the few newspapers that I feel still doing serious journalism that I can sit down with, read and feel better informed at the end of it.
A good newspaper and I do prefer paper if at all possible, is a stimulating source of reading. Most newspaper has given 90% of their space to gossip, sports, "lifestyle" WTF does that even mean? I still have not figured that out, lifestyle of the rich and famous, random paid for content.
I have for a long time wanted a service that curates today's real news and presents it in an easy-to-read format. I would prefer an epub, could take a pdf.
Nothing that exists today that I as a regular person could afford.
I do think it would be fun to see what the presidential write-up is every day.
Hmm maybe I can find it declassified from years in the past??
(I have no love for USA Today so I dont try to argue that one. )
What tech flair these days makes you look "Ahead of the game?".
For me it's either:
(a) using an MCU for a substantial project that isn't an Raspberry PI or Arduino (hello STM or NXP).
(b) a github repo that proves I know how to use Jest, Nuxt, ESLint, Grunt, Gradle, Gulp, or some combination of the latest CI/CD/UI frameworks.
(c) being followed on twitter by someone famous.
Also discussions on sites like this have expanded my articulation and understanding of many concepts and topics. I spent a lot of time, years, dedicating a significant potion of my life to reading educational material of all sorts.
I don't know if I use the internet differently, maybe, I don't use Facebook or twitter or tiktok or any of that. We forget the access to information we have, it would be unimaginable 30 years ago. I can delve into literally any topic I want as deep as I want to go, I can read any book I want right now, for free if I were so inclined.
For awhile I was buying ebooks straight from the Kindle store on the device itself but something about paying the same price for a file as a hardcopy left a bad taste in my mouth. I'd rather have something to put on my shelf and I can loan to friends. Plus paying for the book up front is a bit of a risk if it sucks, because I can't return it or resell it or even give it away to someone else.
The past few months I've just been loading the books straight to my phone and I've read more new books in the last 3 months than I have in the last 3 years. Definitely a game changer.
[0] https://www.fivefilters.org/push-to-kindle/
I did just buy the latest model on Amazon for $30 during Black Friday. I find reading on the Kindle is way better than on the phone because it removes all the distractions.
With the right perspective the internet is the ultimate medium for books (ebooks and audiobooks) and it's easier to read hundreds or thousands of books than it has ever been in history.
Getting distracted while reading the paper edition of a book and googling something isn't an addiction or "withdrawal effects", it means you find that book boring.
The reason I, and I imagine many others enjoy, reading digitally is because of two main reasons. One is the sheer abundance of new reading materials I will find interesting. I no longer feel an urge to spend my time and energy on writing that's obtuse as a way of considering myself enlightened for having finished reading it. I value my time differently because of choices technology presents me with. The second reason I prefer reading digitally is the accessibility of the discussion and conversations around whatever I'm reading. It's easier to create and engage with others regarding a piece of writing thanks to technology.
Sometimes I wonder if people, like the author, who decide to forgo the use of internet during reading use it positively, the way I do. Any word or phrase I don't understand can be instantly looked up. I can learn the context about the setting an author uses, like looking up pictures of certain types of geography.
The biggest thing that I think the people who decide to go paper only miss out on is the novel ways in which writing is evolving. Fanfiction and independent publishing is a lot easier when it is digital only. Textbooks are becoming better at incorporating web technologies, for example I'm learning a new programming language and the ability to test and run exercises at the end of each section is so helpful in keeping me engaged. There are digital choose your own adventure stories and visual novel games that immerse me in a way no book ever will. The simple ability to copy and paste is groundbreaking when I want to interact with the text.
Many of the downsides the author lists as negatives of digital reading seems to actually be regarding people skimming instead of intentional reading. I would argue that this has more to do with people being conditioned to no longer waste time and poorly written articles that are 90% fluff and 10% content. The biggest problem for me has been the current state of local news articles. A single story reworded and posted multiple times by different news agencies in order to generate content and keep people engaged on their site. I'm not sure if clickbait news articles are gone or if I just have gotten better at filtering them out.
But it's necessary to try to read because the old mediums of news delivery are dying. Why wait for the familiar well spoken news anchor to tell you the most important events of the day over the radio or tv when you can look up the details yourself online? Twitter is one of the most current ways to stay updated on a story because people report live.
The world has become a place where using the internet to stay up to date and read is necessary. People have adapted to having a constant stream of information that can keep them occupied. Most people aren't clinically addicted to the internet, people just don't want to miss information that feels important at the time it's released.
I love my ereader. Books aren't going anywhere. The romantic experience of what past generations defined as reading is disappearing. Some people have a harder time adapting to that truth. Reading to me has never been ...
I disagree (and agree, indirectly, with the OP): deadness is a feature, not a bug. The problem with Internet writing is not just its addictive nature, it's groupthink. It is too much alive. You have to either follow popular opinion, or oppose it vehemently; tangential or orthogonal thinking is almost impossible.
Books, because they are not part of an immediate, global conversation where people share opinions and judgements and signal their virtue to one another, are something very different and allow for a very different experience than any written text found online.
Maybe books will slowly fade; but I think it's unlikely they would ever completely disappear, as they offer something unique not found anywhere else.
You know, Phaedrus, writing shares a strange feature with painting. The offsprings of painting stand there as if they are alive, but if anyone asks them anything, they remain most solemnly silent. The same is true of written words. You'd think they were speaking as if they had some understanding, but if you question anything that has been said because you want to learn more, it continues to signify just that very same thing forever.
When it has once been written down, every discourse roams about everywhere, reaching indiscriminately those with understanding no less than those who have no business with it, and it [writing] doesn't know whom it should speak and to whom it should not. And when it is faulted and attacked unfairly, it always needs its father's [the writer's] support; alone, it can neither defend itself nor come to its own support.
What is Socrates' proposed solution, then? A combination of two things: (1) of course, the so-called Socratic method (elenchus in Greek) of refutation, that teases out better hypotheses by "identifying and eliminating contradictions", and (2) the "art of dialectic", i.e. the art of investigating the truth, which Plato makes Socrates use in his later dialogues such as the Republic. I'm sure we don't miss the irony here—we gain many of Socrates' insights, regardless of what we think of them, thanks to Plato's writing.PS: I agree with you on books, modulo this: it's more likely to see pigs flying than to see "books starting to slowly fade away" :-)
[1] This English translation (by Nehamas & Woodruff) is excellent: https://www.hackettpublishing.com/philosophy/phaedrus
I think it’s very OK for Socrates to be wrong or to disagree with him. He’s the kind of guy who would change his opinions in light of conflicting evidence or an iron clad logical argument. Just because he said that about writing doesn’t mean he’s right nor does it mean he’s done with the tangent.
In the Phaedrus, Socrates rails against the "speechmakers" who don't truly know what they're talking about, but instead write based on "what is likely" to persuade the audience.
And yes, in the later dialogues (e.g. the Republic), many scholars agree that Plato used Socrates as his "mouthpiece". I don't care either way, they're insanely fun to read.
"[...] a treasured book is more important than a dance card, or the photo that freezes you in mid-teeter at the edge of the Grand Canyon, because such a book can be a significant event in the history of your reading, and your reading should be an essential segment of your character and your life. Unlike the love we’ve made or meals we’ve eaten, books congregate to form a record around us of what they’ve fed our stomachs or our brains. These are not a hunter’s trophies but the living animals themselves."
0: https://harpers.org/archive/2018/10/living-animals/
I've observed that some of my richer friends are limiting their kids screen time. In fact it's becoming almost universal among those who work in tech. Clearly some of them want their kids to become more balanced. It's hilarious to see these kids to be told to leave the house and play with your friends. They don't know what to do! Boomers never had that problem or had to be asked twice.
I've got an extremely talented friend who is paying each of his kids to read the classics and write book reports which he reviews. The kids in the beginning did it for the money but there is a sense of pride on what they're learning that their peers are not. Certain books became classics for a reason!
My late Mother took us to the library every single week and often checked out and read more books than we did. I naively thought that everyone's parents did the same but I learned that wasn't the case. I think fostering a love of books is one of the greatest gift she gave us.