Ask HN: How do you deal with information and internet addiction?
I have noticed that I am getting more and more addicted to consuming information so I am listening to podcasts while working and I watch Youtube videos in my free time. This is all fun and interesting but I feel this makes me want to do things less and less. Instead of working on my own problems I distract myself by listening to ever more information. I get a lot of benefit from this information but somehow it feels shallow.
I think part of it is that my work is quite uninteresting and doesn't really keep my mind engaged. But the work is tedious enough that I am too tried in the evening to do something interesting. After a few years everything feels like it's a repeat.
Does anybody else feel that way? Have you been able to detach yourself from the constant flow of information and focus on your own stuff?
213 comments
[ 3.9 ms ] story [ 234 ms ] threadIt's a search for stimulation, and underdeveloped skill of dealing with a lack of stimulation.
For me I've started to focus on just acting. Got the idea to do something? Try your best to do it without googling, youtubing, listening to pod casts. Just take the next action that seems like it might work, and pivot if it doesn't. It adds some adventure back into life too.
[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NuHEY7CjjTI
If it's the former, block the addictive content and replace it with other things you find fun (hobbies, books, movies, etc), paying attention to how it's more worthwhile to do so.
If it's the latter, find out how to overcome such fear / anxiety and to stop using addictive content as a crutch.
Earlier in my life, I was addicted because I was fearful/anxious/traumatized. It was a (shitty, yet effective) escape.
Now that my life has been stable for a few years the addiction came back up. I wondered why, and I realized it was because I was bored. It made things more challenging (which was a motivation to quit I thought), but it turns out the challenges introduced by this addiction actually make my mundane day-to-day more stimulating.
Sure is hard to code stoned huh?
Also as an experiment I deleted Twitter which I used to mindlessly scroll, put HN on no procrastination mode and stopped reading digital news except for two sites that I trust and read sporadically about two years ago. It might sound strange but I ended up feeling a lot happier on the regular as a result.
Spending some time curating what you consume or limiting the amount of time a day could also be a good idea.
How long does it take to plan like this?
[1] https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/improvedtube/bnomi...
Think of this addiction as a mood regulator. You can replace it by other type of mood regulation (sport, games, family or friends...).
The crux of the addiction is that doing is hard and consuming is easy. I can watch a YT video on homotopy type theory (I'm not a mathematician) and feel good about myself and how much I'm learning and how I'm going to use this newly found knowledge. The reality of the situation is I'm probably not learning very much and just procrastinating.
The moment you sit down and try to create, you are almost immediately slapped in the face by your own limitations and this is an unsettling feeling. You then have a reflex to escape this discomfort by opening a new tab and navigating to YouTube and sedate yourself with that sweet, sweet content - where anything is possible.
If you're an engineer or product person, I would recommend perhaps turning this problem into an opportunity. Can you solve this problem for yourself as a product or service? If you do I'd love to buy it.
—- Core Question: Is what I‘m currently doing helpful to my goals?
Get Bored. Get Calm. Enjoy boredness.
Whatever happens on the front page, I’m never involved. It seems like the whole thing would work just as well even if nobody ever read the Times or watched the cable chat shows. It’s a closed system.
Breaking News is most often wrong and later corrected by more breaking news.
But if that’s true on a scale of minutes, why longer? Instead of watching hourly updates, why not read a daily paper? Instead of reading the back and forth of a daily, why not read a weekly review? Instead of a weekly review, why not read a monthly magazine? Instead of a monthly magazine, why not read an annual book?
Following the news isn’t just a waste of time, it’s actively unhealthy. Edward Tufte notes that when he used to read the New York Times in the morning, it scrambled his brain with so many different topics that he couldn’t get any real intellectual work done the rest of the day.
Its obsession with the criminal and the deviant makes us less trusting people. Its obsession with the hurry of the day-to-day makes us less reflective thinkers. Its obsession with surfaces makes us shallow.
I have not followed the news for a long time. My life does not seem to be impoverished for it; indeed, I think it has been greatly enhanced. But I haven’t found many other people who are willing to take the plunge.
News makes our inner opinion volcano boil and that is toxic!
Uncontrolled input prevents rest, relaxation and output. All this massive time that is lost is ultimately YOURS! I am good to myself. I am worth it to myself not to stuff myself with poison!
Bad news is toxic for your body:
By consuming all of this news (which is nearly all bad news), you’re stressing your body out, weakening its ability to fight off infection, and potentially causing digestive and growth problems.
The really bad news is that news consumption is a vicious cycle that’s hard to get out of. Stress weakens your willpower. Without the willpower to put your phone down or turn off your computer, you’re likely to consume more and more news. And so the pattern continues.
“We are training our brains to pay attention to crap.”
The more a person consumes multiple types of media, the fewer brain cells there were in the anterior cingulate cortex. This is the part of the brain responsible for attention span and moral deliberation. You can no longer concentrate on books and longer articles. Your mind gives up after just a few paragraphs without absorbing any of the content. And you begin to suffer from anxiety.
After all, it is also part of freedom of opinion not to have an opinion.
Reading the news doesn’t help you change the world for the better. Ignore it or do something.
You need to make a complete break. The best way to do this is to push through 30 days of no news at all. By the end of those 30 days, you’ll hopefully reach the point where you don’t feel the urge to peek at the headlines.
What do you REALLY want in life?
To be really successful at something, you need to dedicate yourself to it fully. Albert Einstein, Frida Kahlo, and Beethoven didn’t become greats in their respective fields by scrolling through news feeds every few moments. They simply couldn’t have done, wasting all of that time. —-
But really what does it matter? Anything really important will reach me anyway. And there's nothing I can do about most of it. I also can't care about every single person in the world. Even if I know about bad stuff happening I can't help it.
I just read the local paper website once a day now, and that's enough. Anything important like this in Turkey will show up there too. And most of the local news is about stuff that actually affects me.
I also don't have a TV subscription anymore. I don't watch anything live, and have zero interest in watching sports so I just had no need for it anymore. Same with social media, if I could still just follow my friends like they used to offer I would, but they don't. They try to make me engage with low quality nonsense which pushes me away.
The only interruptions I get now is from instant messaging, but most of the people I know and all group chats I have muted and I just check in on their chats when I feel like it. So no notifications there. Only the most important people get through.
Love this take. Thanks for saying it, has enriched my day today.
"All of humanity's problems stem from man's inability to sit quietly in a room alone"
...but maybe that better sums up OP's issue rather than a solution.
Either way you'll need to take steps to make it harder to do the things you're currently doing (e.g. get a dumb phone, set up a firewall rule to block these sites, set a timer) but there might be a deeper underlying issue of having nothing better to do.
Perhaps making other aspects of your life more difficult will eat up this idle time while also providing more fulfillment. I've personally found that riding a bike to get food at some place farther away (as opposed to eating at home, ordering food, or just driving somewhere) is an excellent way to detach digitally, get some exercise, and force yourself to see new parts of your town/city. Obviously this doesn't work for everyone but the gist of this is to force yourself to take time to do something unexpected and difficult and find your reward in that instead of reading every HN thread, checking every email, and responding to all the memes your friends send.
I have that one in my quotes file but it's just a big text file and not easily searched by subject. I need to add tags.
There's wishing the town returns to being affordable because high costs only rids places of their proper energy. Despite being in my mid-twenties, these days I, maybe foolishly/naively, dream of living in Bonny Doon.
1. https://www.badanimalbooks.com/
I've found a simple "productivity apps only" policy to be enough. Instant messengers, browser, email, banking app, bus ticket.
I would also add to these the TS Elliot quote from his work, the Rock:
> “Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge? Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?”
“A preoccupation with the means is a lack of commitment to the end.”
In this context, the means is knowledge. And for me, the end is building things. So, I try always to be building something (in my work or avocationally), and the high I get from that helps to resist the craving to know more about how to build things.
What they mean to me is to focus on the questions important to me. An easier way to put it is the example of writing a book. For a long time you do a lot of research and collect information. At some point you have to start writing the book which means turning your collection into a story. Once I got in this mode, I stopped "fear of missing out" about things I was never going to learn. There's just too much. My mind is limited. I'm hopeful that AI will help me with this focus.
I'm actually not sure whether I fully agree, I think that knowledge can also be a goal in and of itself sometimes.
If you are miserable reading academic research papers in your basement everyday for no reason, I would recommend you reconsider.
If you are reading them because you want to cure cancer or get a job, then that's really a different scenario.
Sounds about right.
I write much, sci-fi and always draft some articles (but never publish), so that keeping up with HN is a sort of reference material building activity, other than it I don't go on twitter, IG, reddit, slack, mastodon or whatever IRC channel, so I try to make the most of my constrained addiction, but it's always tough work to clean up a browser tab accumulation, as the Feynman quote quips, it's costly, you have to pay attention:
The method involves a paper notebook, which I use whenever I can in lieu of a PC for drafting, taking notes, planning etc. On a two-page spread I start sth like an index by arbitrary useful topics of my current researches. Each line is a one or two word topic, after the word I simply list the HN IDs separated by comma. It's nice to save individual comment threads or whole posts using the same interface. When useful I write a little two word note on top of the number. In this fashion I close dozens or hundreds of tabs and postpone/defer reading the interesting conversations to when I will take action upon it e.g. by writing a short story or poetry or articles. I also use the GTD golden 2-min rule: if I can read and/or take action on a useful discussion or link posted in a few minutes, I do it on the spot and close the HN post forever. Done.
Maybe you could automate pasting the url by copying it beforehand and having the new entry draw it from the clipboard.
I do look at mine extensively. Though I invested a significant amount of time organizing them. Having a way of quickly searching notes and previewing their contents does help. I use fzfx, which is basically opinionated shell functions on top of fzf to do the search. In the future I want to autosync the public notes to my site and implement an improved search system there.
> Maybe you could automate pasting the url by copying it beforehand and having the new entry draw it from the clipboard.
C-C + C-V isn't a huge hassle at least for me. I have a bind on Neovim to format the link in Markdown format so I don't have to type []() and carefully paste the link in the right place but honestly I always forget to use and lately I'm just pasting the raw link and not caring about formatting. I think formatting should be done automatically in the background. In the future I may adapt or write a formatter for those niche cases. It can be triggered by a save or pre-commit hook (everything is in a repo inside a single monorepo). Might even hook up a LLM to it. Developing my own Notion lol.
[1] as a matter of fact today I "launched" (on a barren desert let's say) a substack newsletter to feature code reviews by the chatG man (and soon feature open source AI projects too), and at first I'm having it review the old Vim plugins I once authored, including vim-seek on next issue, if you want to be my first subscriber, lol: https://generativereview.substack.com/p/the-generative-revie...
"Human" technology focuses on adapting the natural world to one's needs, the ultimate result being the whole natural world removed / replaced by said technology.
"Elven" technology focuses on adapting oneself, to remove the need to rely on, or change the natural world. The ultimate end being the complete removal of oneself from the natural world (while continuing to exist, of course). However that process still requires you to take "human" steps to ensure survival and progress.
https://vm.tiktok.com/ZMY6dDMx7/
> ― Aristotle
If the quote works for you, that's all good.
But for the other people adding it to their quote list, it's unlikely to be a real Aristotle quote. In the Nicomachean Ethics Aristotle concludes that the highest activity of human life is contemplation or speculative thinking.
I've found that substantial efforts to get off of platforms that distract me can work, but it's very difficult and should very much be thought of as a hybrid problem of both your personal self, and your technological environment around you. If you're surrounded by distractions, you will find yourself distracted; however, if you simply crave distraction, blocking things will only lead to you getting distracted by the next best source of entertainment.
But long stretches of silence are the human norm. Even in social situations. I've found when I'm literally spending all day with someone, with no media to distract, that the conversation will have long lulls in it. I think I first noticed it when I went fishing with my boyfriend. Stretches of quiet that will go on for ten minutes until one of us thought of something worth saying, then some lively talk, then quiet again. And that was okay!
Does the thought of such stretches of emptiness fill you with dread? It usually does for me. I think that's where my own information addiction comes from. It relieves that discomforting sensation. But I have come to believe such experiences are essential to mental health, from time to time. I'm ill at ease with my own thoughts.
If this sounds familiar in some way, I suggest prayer and/or meditation. Though if you want a more practical prescription, take a long walk daily without your phone, in a quiet area.
Go for a walk. Did you see an interesting bird, insect, or plant? Take a picture or commit to memory and try to identify it when you get home.
Got any broken stuff? Look up information on how to fix it. Then fix it.
Has it been over a year since your last physical? Make an appointment with your doctor. Look up any new terminology from your visit or test results.
Seek experiences, then supplement them with related information. Emphasize quality over quantity.
This is what worked for me:
- Every week I unsubbed a subreddit until eventually there was only one left. It was so boring I stopped visiting Reddit.
- I installed an extension for Facebook and slowly unfollowed every one.
- I stopped posting to Instagram. Eventually stopped posting stories.
- Uninstalled Facebook and Instagram from my phone.
- Don't have TikTok, Snapchat, Reddit or any apps on my phone.
- Started using https://www.beeper.com so I can still chat with people on Facebook or Instagram.
- I turned off all notifications except vital ones (mentions on slack emails)
- I turned on screentime for news, financial stuff, everything really. Put it all for only 5 minutes a day.
This all has dramatically helped.
Another thing: Spend time outside, sans phone (off or on mute is fine). Humans have survived for millennia without the glut of information we have now, and they did it by getting outside and spending some time with the planet. Try it. It helps.
I do still work on my projects though. I listen to the same music/stuff I've heard before while working.
In the end, it’s the poster’s responsibility to comb through responses to find useful snippets. The cliche of “admitting the problem is the first step towards recovery” could also apply to asking this question.
Rather than comparing HN to patrons at a bar, I’d counter that HN is more like a large courtyard on a tech campus. Sure, there’s bars, foam pits and foosball tables, but there’s also chess matches, spirited debate, and plenty of like-minded people around too.
Is there a smaller number like 10 that might make me feel less guilty?
Now that I live inside the biggest library in the world I feel alive, any and all knowledge I want is an instant away (so many times I liken it to the Matrix scene where Neo downloads new learnings and exclaims that he "knows Kung Fu")
I still look at "useless" information, but my interests in Politics, Computer Science, and to a lessor extent Economics are properly satiated.
It might be an addiction, but it's a hang of a lot better than drinking/drugs.
I take a longer view to this. For example, a few years ago I read about an algorithm to calculate percentiles in real time. [0]
It literally just came up at work today. I haven't used that information but maybe two times since I read it, but it was super relevant today and saved my team potential weeks of development.
So maybe it's not so shallow.
But to your actual question, I have a similar problem. The best I can say is that deadlines help. I usually put down the HN and Youtube when I have a deadline coming up. And not just at work. I make sure my hobbies have deadlines too.
I tell people when I think something will be done, so they start bugging me about it when it doesn't get done, so that I have a "deadline". Also one of my hobbies is pixel light shows for holidays, which come with excellent natural deadlines -- it has to be done by the holiday or it's useless.
So either find an "accountability buddy" who will hold you to your self imposed deadlines, or find a hobby that has natural deadlines, like certain calendar dates, or annual conventions or contests that you need to be done by.
[0] https://github.com/tdunning/t-digest
1) Cut internet to your house, or get someone to change the WiFi password if you can't do that.
2) Remove your SIM card and glue it into a dumb phone
3) Delete social media and things you find distracting (steam, instagram, etc.)
4) Organise your work tasks by priority if you haven't already. I use Kanboard for this. Otherwise the former steps will leave a void you'll fill by procrastinating.
That is essentially the only thing that worked after trying many other solutions over three years. Some people don't have to go to that extreme but... different strokes for different folks. One year later and I'm still going strong! I now rent in a co-working space, but a library was perfectly adequate before that.
It's not a matter of you choosing to use the internet for hours a day, it's a matter of society's efficiencies removing any need to do things such as:
- Build a house
- Grow crops
- Talk to your neighbors
- Etc.
and therefore your are forced to use the internet.
Can you still do the things listed? Sure. Is society set up in such a way that those things are easy and done by the vast majority of people? No.
It's like online dating. A modern person is, in a way, forced to using online dating because the alternatives are out of fashion.
Software is eating the world, which means it's eating your life.
This leaves a lot of time for you to figure out what to do with your time. The internet has a large presence in life because everyone is online. You then, in a way, are forced online because everyone else is there.
The communities I have found for my various hobbies (woodworking, music) are all online. To find other people to talk to about the hobby, I need to go online, because that's where everyone is.
This isn't going to hard and fast apply to every possible scenario in life, but I have found internet networks to be a heavy force in my online usage. And because of network effects, it creates a feedback loop where you spend more time online because everyone else is online.
I'm sure there's a way to break free from the loop, but it's not as easy as you mention. Ok, I built a chair in my garage. What am I gonna do? Sit in it and call it a day? Build another chair? A major part of having hobbies is sharing your creation, which ends up being online because that's where everyone is. Otherwise building chairs all day long for no one isn't very fulfilling.
* Use the CLI for everything - reduce the amount of time you have a browser open
* An egg timer - use this every time a tedious task needs completing
* A dumb phone - small and minimal functionality, easy to forget about
* A watch - stop using your phone for checking the time
* Cook your own food - excellent use of time
* Exercise - no headphones, a gym provides background music and enough human contact to keep boredom at bay
* Long-form media - books, films, music
* Return to things you know you like - 'it is better to know one book intimately than to have read one hundred'
Interesting, can you explain what this looks like in practice?
Seriously though, I do this a lot too. All my instant messaging comes though a text interface, most of my note taking and other work. I use the browser a lot still because it's sadly unavoidable.
If I really need to focus I even use my old VT520 CRT terminal. The soft amber glow really helps to focus <3
PRESS RETURN TO HACK THE PENTAGON
I wrapped the GPT-3 API in a stupid little CLI the other day, just to poke a davinci w/o having to go the browser. I like it.
This requires more diligence, but can't you create the experience you want on a smart phone (no social media, disable all notifications, etc.) without giving up utilities that provide actual value, such as GPS / navigation?
> Exercise - no headphones, a gym provides background music and enough human contact to keep boredom at bay
Interesting. I feel like I am more distracted and unfocused when I listen to the gym's music (sometimes their music just doesn't match the intensity of the workout) or when I socialize between workouts.
A - I travel across the city to visit friends/family/work or go somewhere far but familiar.
B - I travel across the country or for an extended period of time.
A dumb phone will cover A and a smart phone will cover B. The switching of sims is a non-issue as situation A covers almost all of the time.
For exercise, I just found that eliminating the concern of what to listen to was the real gain