It is interesting how manufactured distraction-free sessions like yoga, meditation, paid retreats, have emerged to fill the demand for idle time. We’re forgetting how to unplug unless it’s a product or service that we can buy.<p>The distraction issue is the number one issue holding back most of the young people in the mentorship group I’m part of. They’re so glued to their phones to check minute-by-minute updates about COVID death tolls, how big their stimulus checks are going to be, the value of their crypto portfolio, GameStop, and every other popular topic under the sun that they don’t have any attention left for their own lives.<p>Bitcoin is especially distracting right now, as they’re all nervously watching the real-time changes of their $1000 portfolios to see if they need to be sad about losing money because it’s crashing or sad about not investing more money because it’s going up.<p>These are all smart students. I always wonder how much more they could accomplish if they’d simply pick four hours each day to turn off their phones. That’s a tough sell, though.
Sorry to say this, but HN is a problem as well.<p>I’m looking for that 1% of the posts that interest me, and when I find them it’s fantastic, since it’s info I would not be able to find anywhere else. But going through the other 99% is a waste of time.<p>These two combined have a harmful effect on me. I don’t know if there’s a name for it, but it’s the same as the one causing addiction in gambling/bets/games. Gathering energy/motivation to do something productive instead takes effort.<p>Just a few days ago I was thinking of adding a dns block for it. But that 1% of the links is sweet...
I wonder if we see a rise in ADHD in kids nowadays because it is an increasingly useful adaptation to our environment.<p>"Hyperfocus is the experience of deep and intense concentration in some people with ADHD. ADHD is not necessarily a deficit of attention, but rather a problem with regulating one’s attention span to desired tasks."<p>I don't know, but "hyperfocus" on a hobby you love sounds exactly like what most people need nowadays to get off their phone and stop wasting their life staring on ads and ad-financed content. Also, I remember that most things we covered in school were completely irrelevant for the real world. So a difficulty to concentrate on school stuff may actually be better than doing the homework.<p>In short, ignoring what society considers normal and instead being super focused on your own things ... sounds more healthy to me than the average "normal" person.
Glad I found this useful post while refreshing HN for some mental stimulus.<p>A book I found silly when I read it was Future shock. It said that change and information would be so rapid in the future that people would be in permanent state of shock. Seemed like a ridiculous notion at the time but not anymore.<p>22 year old me read about the Jewish tradition of Sabbath day and found it so silly. A day where you’re not supposed to use any technology or do any productive work ? How silly !<p>I totally get it now. They were onto something. We’ve now reinvented it as “digital detox” and “dopamine fasting”.<p>Got my hit by writing this comment now off to the the next post I go.
I've spent the last year or so trying to control my smartphone usage, by removing apps and trying to set rules for myself like "your phone stays in the kitchen for most of the day". I recently took the plunge and got rid of it entirely, and it was truly surprising to realise how much of my time and attention it had still taken, despite my best efforts.<p>If you think you're ready for that step, I highly recommend it. Just as mindless browsing, refreshing, and scrolling is self-perpetuating, so is the obverse. Once you start removing apps and accounts, and habits are broken, you will start asking yourself "Why am I on my (phone/computer/laptop)? What else could I be doing?"
I love how you summarize the dilemma of a digital native.
May I add some juicy polarization by referencing the quote "I don't know how to live, but I got a lot of toys" from the song 21st Century Digital Boy?
Your article gives great reason to rethink. How to use the time we have been given in a meaningful way, to be labelled as a sentient being rather than a robot. It is definitely a daily test to one's choice: Rather to be a creator than consumer.
Creating things is usually a sequential process, without a secret passage, lots of effort, making own (in-)abilities public and taking real risks - consumption can be found the exact opposite.
So it's a path that needs decent courage.
In the end it makes life brighter - and as you point out: it doesn't matter if you write about thoughts, read a book in length or build a trustful relationship with a person you love. It will be a lasting and enriching experience.
Every time I see a post like this, I like to remind myself of a quote from Blaise Pascal in the 1600s,<p>"All of humanity's problems stem from man's inability to sit quietly in a room alone,"<p>This has been an internal battles for most, for much longer than smartphones have been around.
The fallout of a decade of senseless pushing, growing and disrupting in the attention economy.<p>We'll get the smartphone zombie outbreak under control, but not before it becomes worse. And if not.. not sure we'll even care or notice anymore.
One way to combat this (if you’re physically capable): long distance running without headphones.<p>It forces you to focus on one thing alone: finish your route. I’ve found that my mind wanders, but the pain exerted by running for an hour or so inevitably brings you back.
I love how, just 2 spots up from this post, is another post entitled "Debian Packages That Need Lovin' (debian.net)".<p>I do hope the Debian packages get the help they need (and this is a great place to ask for such help) but it's hilarious for my mind to ping-pong between "Hey, maybe that's a new hobby (that I probably don't have time for)" and "Huh. There are a lot of distractions out there" :)
I keep remembering that episode from The Outer Limits (the 90s series). I think the title was "The stream". It was set in the future, where everybody had an implant that they could use to access 'the stream' to get access to all the world's knowledge and information. (I.e. the internet, but back then even dialup internet was an uncommon thing for most people to have.)<p>The story was that there was a single guy who could not have the implant and he was, of course, and outcast. And then there was a virus that started to spread through the stream and people started to show strange symptoms. Well, maybe not that strange: they started to consume more and more information. First the infected just started to look up and quote seemingly irrelevant pieces of information. You know, like the things you'd see on Quora (or during a random trip to Wikipedia) and then they would spend more and more time fetching more knowledge and have more and more information hunger.<p>I'd say it's not unlike what we see around ourselves the past few years.
It seems though that people like this kind of thing, so it will get worse. Even in jobs that require focus like software development. Many people seem to like the bustle of constant chats in Slack instead of pre arranged meetings, face to face adhoc talks, open offices, living in a big city, notifications etc and then on a more technical level: setting up and configuring things that have nothing to do with the task at hand (which is writing code to answer to a business demand), spending strange amounts of time on 'automating their pipeline and processes' (which appears to be never finished and so is a perpetual distraction), checking out or even changing their stack/tools every week to adhere to the latest hype (which came from distractions like reddit and hn) etc etc.<p>Not saying good or bad but not sure if people will ever like a life without these things even though they feel it is far from optimal, productivity wise.
What information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence, a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention and a need to allocate that attention efficiently among the overabundance of information sources that might consume it.
--Herbert Simon, economist
Unpopular opinion but I've embraced it. I'm OK with doing everything in small chunks anyway. So yeah, in between three pages of a novel, I'll check my notifications. When my pomodoro counter hits during a coding session, I'll stand take a walk and stretch. Five minutes later, I'll check my phone. Then return to my desk. While relaxing and watching Netflix, when an episode finishes, I'll stop watching, close Netflix, check my phone. If it's bed time, bed. If it's something else, do it for a small amount of time with notable progress.
Small chunks, always. A hacker news post or a Reddit meme. Never hours of /g/. But my phone is my companion, not my enemy.
Good points. And it reminds me that this is neither a new problem nor solved:<p><i>I find myself in these kinds of situations often, checking email or Twitter, or Facebook, with nothing to gain except the stress of a work-related message that I can’t answer right now in any case.</i><p><i>It turns out that digital devices and software are finely tuned to train us to pay attention to them, no matter what else we should be doing. The mechanism, borne out by recent neuroscience studies, is something like this: [...]</i><p>Source: <a href="https://medium.com/@hughmcguire/why-can-t-we-read-anymore-503c38c131fe" rel="nofollow">https://medium.com/@hughmcguire/why-can-t-we-read-anymore-50...</a>
I think by now, the post title is a cliché. That makes me wonder what I'll gain by reading another lament about how we're Stuck In The Shallows. That in turn makes me wonder if the post isn't an example of what it complains about.
We live in distraction because we give attention to <i>what does not matter</i> which, if we let our hair down, is the external world. The imperative of dying to the external world is a process of rediscovery of <i>what does matter</i>.
Check out out Nir Eyal's book "Indistractable"[1].<p>It's about 5 hours long with plenty of useful tips for becoming indistractable.<p>1: <a href="https://www.nirandfar.com/indistractable/" rel="nofollow">https://www.nirandfar.com/indistractable/</a>
I use my camera very often now for functional purposes, like snapshots of documents, paper maps, door notices and hours, etc where it serves as a replacement for having to remember things or even having to jot down a note.