It is like Pavlov’s bell—the important part being the randomness, of course.
I always find it funny to see, on any social media site, “I’ve quit almost all social media sites, except this one.” Well, we have successfully identified which one was most addictive I guess.
Noticeable on pubic transit particularly
I'm sure it happens, but it seemed rare to me. People read books or magazines, or were just too cramped and crowded to bother trying to interact
For college students they likely almost always find themselves surrounded by familiar faces, even classmates, because they are all going to class at the same time on the same transit
So yeah, it would be easier to strike up a random conversation with people you recognize from campus or just people who are all part of your similar demographic
I never saw anything like that happen.
While, yes, social media gives us a more pronounced dopamine hit-and-crave cycle, we've always had means of escape at our fingertips.
ON Saturday was waiting to meet people on a road that had just been reopened after a May Day (traditional British style with May Queen etc.) parade. Other people were doing the same.
I looked around and noticed people (some still in costume etc. so interesting crowd) and looked at buildings (its a pretty street, even though I know it well) and was quite happy.
One thing I noticed was the everyone else who was waiting for people was on their phones, almost all the time they were there.
Obsessive business is the opposite of mindfulness.
It also kills casual social interaction. Talking to someone who is standing next to you.
Put another way, think of it as an opportunity for more conscious reflection and exploration. Like sleep, but not just 'run the garbage collector and predictive simulation pre-cache' routines, instead time to consciously consider and critically cultivate new perspectives on issues that might have been vexing the individual.
The two ways I get to strategic reflection are really:
- Doing lego. I find thhat doing lego is actually really good at helping me consolidate thoughts and ideas. It takes up just enough mental energy to not get bored, but it lets me think about things with an unstressed mind.
- Walks. The other way to generate new perspectives is to take a walk at lunch though non-interesting territory. I really do not find walks in a busy downtown to be relaxing, too much activity intruding on me to actually be low stress, but if it is in a forest or even just a long parkway that works for me.
The absolute worst way to come up with new ideas is in front of my computer trying to work. Good for doing the next obvious thing, but really hard to think outside of the box.
You really do need a mix of the two, otherwise you are either doing the obvious or never actually doing anything.
Also showers are very good for the right state of mind.
Same thing happens for me, and that’s my working theory.
The theory of evolution was conceived way after the middle ages, so that seems beside the point.
- Best: walks, running, walking in circles, walking in circles talking over the phone (1:1 planning), walking in circles talking out loud to myself
- Good: showers, daydreaming in place, daydreaming on trips where I'm not driving, "pair program" white boarding with one other (exceptional) person
- Okay: white boarding by myself, trying to put ideas to pen and paper by myself, meetings with the right people in a physical space
- Bad: at the computer, on the phone, walking or running to podcasts, walking or running to the wrong type of music, video conference meetings, and generally all other meetings
- What are you even doing: YouTube, Netflix, or podcasts on in the background at any level
Walking in some easy nature is great too, somehow relaxes subconsciousness so I end up with few todos marked in my phone after each such walk. When I occasionally smoke weed at such walks somehow this feed becomes a firehose and sometimes struggle to note it all. Nature is amazing in any form, recharging, healing and somehow at lowest level that connection just feels right.
https://jaisenmathai.com/articles/latent-product-development...
This is a really good observation.
Lately, knitting has been scratching this itch for me.
those bricks helped me out of burnout towards the end of my studies (14 exams in 3 months…yes, you can do that in Italy)
now I keep new unopened boxes (+ my childhood stash) ready for future dark days
I do highly recommend getting the kids involved in the various Lego competitions, it forces problem solving and creativity.
I can second that long walks work great for daydreaming but they too feel painfully boring before the daydreaming kicks in.
Lego still sells products which are just big boxes of parts, as well as things between (the 3-in-1 sets that have several different models). I’m not sure why kids are missing out on this—some kids do enjoy it, and some kids don’t. But Lego caters actively to both.
And sure, I booked like 6 hours that day with no concrete immediate result, but 2-3 days like that a year or two ago shaped how applications function in the company today and it does so effectively.
Another thought the article provokes is the idea of mindfullnes and living in the moment. Sometimes it is easy to open up the phone and just escape. But in those situations, it can be quite interesting to just be in the moment, meet people and see where it goes. If you're in a shitty situation -- like a train stopping in the middle of nothing and dropping all passengers at a train station too short for the train -- it can be interesting to interact with and observe people. It can teach how all of us have very similar basic problems, no matter how we look or who we are. And I'm saying that as an introvert -- sometimes the anonymity of never meeting people again is a good thing.
This line never hits right to me. I used to religiously carry around the New Yorker and / or NYRB and / or London Review of Books etc, often with a book too, so that I could read while waiting for friends, appointments, public transport etc, so I was never bored or daydreaming when I didn't want to be. I think this needs to be rephrased to account for the difference in quality between printed material and the infinite, deliberately-addictive makeup of the modern internet, which is the real issue.
edit: even a steam deck is somehow less distracting than a phone, despite distraction being one of its main purposes
Surprisingly, the one thing that occasionally manages to distract me is this very forum - Hacker News! :) If I observe myself spending too much time on Hacker News, I block it at the /etc/hosts level. I have a little shell script to point news.ycombinator.com to 127.0.0.1 when I don't want to be browsing HN. HN provides a nifty solution of its own too in the form of the "noprocrast" setting in your HN profile page. If you haven't checked it out yet, it is definitely worth considering.
Apart from that, I think I've been able to escape the traps of modern social media. Also, I still depend quite a bit on physical textbooks, a rollerball pen, and a stack of plain A4 paper for most of my learning, thinking, and exploration activities. This routine has helped me to stay away from modern social media too. So, fortunately, I still have the luxury of boredom in my life which I find to be an essential ingredient for digesting new knowledge as well as finding creative solutions to difficult problems. I've found that letting my mind wander aimlessly sometimes leads to new insights when I least expect them. I think it also helps with creativity and reflection, in general, which is likely a nice bonus too.
Obviously, that is the extreme on the opposite side of the spectrum. But from what I recall reading, daydreaming, evenly moderately, can be somewhat unproductive. I mean that in the sense that daydreaming can provide the brain with a shortcut to a feeling that would be better served if an action provided it.
For example, one can daydream about going to the gym and becoming more healthy. One can follow the daydream all the way through. However, at least in my case, I have caught myself enjoying the pleasurable feelings and the "one day, I will..." too much to the point that I never go to the gym.
I think my brain has learned that I can quell whatever feeling I am having in the moment by daydreaming. It's my brain's shortcut. It's as if my mind say, "Why spend the effort to do something when we can just imagine how it feels and enjoy the reward now?"
Like anything in life, the key is balance. However, creating that balance is not easy in my experience.
But I'd wager that, deep down, you know that the feeling you get thinking about it is far different from the actual feelings (both physical and mental) you'd get if you'd actually done it, no? I know that's been the case in the past for myself with regards to some thoughts - I know what I'm doing and I know that nothing will improve until I do it, and then I'm thrilled in ways beyond just what the thought provided when I actually execute.
This also kinda misses the forest for the trees. Not acting on a desire you think of is separate from the idea that people don't give their brains a break.
I suppose there is probably some ratio for any given task that is amount of effort:reward. So, for some tasks, I would gladly take a quarter of the reward to avoid spending ten times the effort to acquire it.
> Not acting on a desire you think of is separate from the idea that people don't give their brains a break.
I agree and disagree. While there are obvious differences, I do believe not giving one's brain a break is partly causative in depleting one's desire/ability to act.
We all have different experiences, but I do not think daydreaming is really giving my mind a break. I find my mind to be quite active while daydreaming. But everyone is different, I suppose.
The response I am flippantly tempted to argue is that it's good for people to not be acting/doing all the time and that downtime is essential, but, as we've both acknowledged, there's nuance there, and it all boils down to what the desire is and what the consequence(s) is/are should we not act.
>I find my mind to be quite active while daydreaming. But everyone is different, I suppose.
Totally! I mentioned elsewhere in this thread that I love backpacking in silence and without using my phone. These are 3-4 day trips deep in the wilderness, completely disconnected from the rest of the world and entirely in my own headspace. I love those moments, but I know plenty of people in meatspace who've expressed to me that they don't know how I can do that because of the way their own trains of thought run/work.
Of course, when I looked up citations on this I found some links on maladaptive daydreaming as well ._.”
When I go hiking/backpacking, I don't listen to music at all, as I enjoy the peacefulness of the forest and the break that my mind gets from the noise of life. I also typically default to paper maps after having done a lot of research via guidebooks, old and new, about where I'm heading. I'll reach for my phone if I really need it, but usually I don't, and I don't roll with a GPS track I downloaded from someone's past trip. I'm there to enjoy the environment around me, and that means hearing it, too.
Same for driving. Maybe I'll use Waze if it's somewhere I've never really been before, but typically I'll just look it up beforehand and find my way there on my own.
When it comes to those navigation choices, wrt both driving and hiking, it gives me a better understanding of the area, and a stronger sense of route options, and therefore a stronger sense of myself being able to find my own way, than if I were to rely on a screen (or Google Maps/Waze audio telling me where/when to turn and me following blindly).
if you are listening to a podcast or music, your mind is following those rhythms and thoughts. Not clear this is better when running that listening to the rhythms of your own body; breath, heart, footfall, and the sounds of the world around you.
If you are driving using a GPS for navigating, how much of your mind are you using to track where you are, spotting landmarks, etc. This is a FUNDAMENTAL aspect of almost all motive forms of live, the circuitry is deep in the brain, and if you are not activating it, you don't even know what you are missing.
I do active thinking about projects I have, I recapitulate human interactions and reweight my decisions, I decide stuff that is going to happen. Someimes I do nothing, its not like I plan this stuff. I just plan not using any devices. (I also dont listen to music).
A friend and me worked for like a year back to back on a project and I like forced him to split work-time and come with me with the dogs. He absolutely loved it and said recently that he still forces himself to take a longer break for walks because that just makes him more productive.
On the computer monitor(s), I could lose the entire day here on HN or (less often now days) reddit. I still can't understand the appeal of gluing my eyeballs to a phone screen.
I also wonder if the aging brain is particularly vulnerable to some of the darker patterns these platforms employ? It certainly seems like it from the small number of data points I've seen.
This forces me to get up and walk into the other room every time I have to do 2FA at work which has a ton of benefits. I'll bring dishes or cups to the kitchen on the way, very frequently have useful thoughts about whatever I'm working on, get up out of my chair more frequently, and look at things farther away than my screen which relaxes the eyes.
In general, I advocate for avoiding any product with an infinite scroll as I find them detrimental to my own health, extremely addictive, barely rewarding, and frequently enriching to people I barely have any good impressions of.
There are 4.5 weeks a month, which is 9 MegaMillions tickets. At $5 a pop, that's $45 a month.
I suggest the MegaMillions tickets get you better daydreaming than the phone does ...
As a parent I highly value boredom. At ages 6 and 8 electronics limited to 30 mins per day.
Our phones stay in my wife's home office during the day, since we want to model not staring at them.
They come to my work sometimes, and I've had a few people express how they're impressed when they watch them entertain themselves, and my response is always, "They have to learn how to be bored".
I am often surprised when we are out at restuarants and cafes, and other kids that age are staring into tablets with their headphones on. How are these kids going to develop adult social skills when they are oblivious to them going on around them?
Also car journeys. We enjoy things like playing I-spy, and singing along to songs together. I would hate it so much if my kid was glued to a tablet watching stuff.
Boredom is very very important for a childs development. I feel that the reduction in kids boredom time is a big reason we are experiencing epidemics of mental health revolving around concepts such as FOMO and personal image.
The whole point of this discussion is that daydreaming is not a worthless activity, therefore time spent daydreaming is not "squandered."
I don't think anyone is forcing this on you, I think it's your choice on how you spend your time. Allowing for periods of boredom is just more choice available to you. If you're already saturated, I understand that you wouldn't want to embrace that.
For instance for people reading around a hundred books a year, would they want to spend more time daydreaming instead of reading ? Probably no.
In reality, one does not simply sit down on a whim and go into Book Reading mode. Maybe others are built for it, but I have to set aside time in advance, drive to a cafe, and really hunker down. And I don't always have the bandwidth or gas to do that.
If you frame daydreaming as a mentally expensive activity with variable return (5% eureka moments, 95% tedium), and I'm starved for time already, you'll be much more tempted to reach for the mental junk-food. Low-mental expense, immediate, guaranteed reward.
I'm learning I can't have my cake and eat it to. I can't fill my schedule yet also try to pursue these activities that ask me for sustained, long term attention. Something has to give.
I noticed a huge number of benefits, but one of the most surprising was that it forced me to confront a number of difficult decisions.
There were a few times in which I was bored (waiting at the passport office, sitting on a plane) in which I started to think about decisions I had to make that were very difficult in ways that caused me anxiety: firing a person I'm good friends with, shutting down a company, stuff like that.
I realized that ordinarily I would simply refuse to engage with the decision: I'd get on my phone or "get busy" somehow and so simply postpone thinking about the issue indefinitely.
But when you're stuck at the passport office for 2 hours with nothing to do, you can't but help think about the thing that is top of mind, anxiety be damned.
For someone that is prone to anxiety around certain topics (conflict avoidance, "disappointing" people, etc) having times in which I was forced to engage with the topic had truly enormous benefits.
What I ended up with is literally a time of day where I "sit with myself" and just think about things. I just sit down for some minutes and try to get my bearings on where I am in life right now. Also, I eliminated a lot of background noise and music - I often do menial things without any other distractions for example. Good opportunities to think about something deep.
I did a screen time detox a few years back. After hearing a similar idea about needing to get to boredom sometimes and not just escaping to a device. Only used a computer for work and exclusively worked on it, then no screen time whatsoever. Maybe lasted 3 weeks or so and made me more interested in stuff like reading, drawing, etc.
This really captures what I think is the main problem with our state of being constantly distracted: it feels at first like a relief from anxiety, but ultimately results in even small anxieties never properly being dealt with. The end result is a vicious cycle (or I guess virtuous if you sell online ads) of becoming more and more anxious causing us to rely more and more on the screen to distract us, which in turn only increases that backlog of anxiety.
I see this happen in a lot of younger people that are constantly on screens: they frequently mention their need to "chill for a bit" and yet spend most of their time doing nothing but staring at a screen. It's clear that they are living in a lukewarm vat of anxiety that they can't face while staring at a screen, but also one which causes them immediate stress when they do look away.
which sounds a whole lot like a word that starts with "a" and ends with "ddiction"
- Navigation (can be solved with a dedicated device, but it's a lot less convenient) - A good camera at all times (I used to not care about this, but it's become more important now I have kids) - Mobile payments (pretty essential in my country, not all places accept cards or cash)
In every other aspect, it was a net positive in my life to get rid of my phone.
(I'm not affiliated with minimal company in any way, nor have I actually tried the phone)
- Uber
- Banking
- Google Maps
For a camera, I suggest buying a real, standalone camera (I have a fuji x100). The photos it takes are VASTLY better than an iphone. For something smaller that fits in a pocket, people say great things about the Ricoh GR III.
Unfortunately, I found that being out without a smartphone did cause certain anxieties for me: What if I forgot about an appointment? What if I get an urgent email or whatsapp?
The answer would be having an actual assistant (ie, a secretary). Someone I could call to order me an uber or look up a restaurant, and someone who could call me to say "hey, X just sent you a whatsapp message that seems pretty urgent."
I that an AI powered assistant that communicates via phone or text could be a great use for AI and something I hope to code up whenever I have some spare time.
Other benefits:
- Vastly improved mood
- Renewed interest in creative endeavors, specifically writing
- A sense of well-being
- A "the scales have fallen from my eyes" realization/epiphany/gnosis around the nature of reality and the effect "weaponized language delivery mechanisms" (ie, social media) have on our perception of it.
Pretty fucking worth it, if you asked me. And yet I fell off the wagon and have a smartphone again.
The fact that we can each curate our own choice of media or news means we can also create our own echo chambers, so our chosen "realities" aren't as similar to our neighbors as they were when people all watched the same few channels on TV.
I agree though that it can also mean we're experiencing more of the world through other people, strangers, instead of experiencing it for ourselves. I think our exposure to so many different experiences (but not direct experiences) also has an effect on our perception of what's normal or ideal, i.e. sitting being idle feels even worse when you see other people online doing amazing things.
Different from when I'm on my smartphone, I do not feel any anxiety to check social networks using my computer. So I can focus more on learning some stuff, coding, organizing my personal data, checking my appointments, checking the tech news, or even playing some games (to have some fun).
I have been thinking about this lately. Not just in the context of smartphone use but being devoted to some mind consuming endeavour like building a startup.
I have been building and operating company for over 15 years now (I am 43 now). During those years I had amazing quality of life due to success of the business. However, at the same time I spent most of my daydreaming hours on thinking how to grow my business. Now when business is about to be sold and I don't think about the growth that much I am starting to realise I don't remember as many things from my childhood as most of people around me. I keep wondering whether this is common to other people who have been obsessed about something for many years and forgot to daydream about their earlier years.
Because the world is interesting, yes, but only in spurts, and only for some people.
It's been this way before and after the arrival of smartphones. Some of us have always felt the need to disconnect from what didn't interest us. But it's never been as easy and convenient as it is now. In a second, you can access all of human knowledge, record a memory, see where you are on a map, or simply entertain your brain with a game. Everything we used to carry in a bag now fits in the palm of your hand.
Maybe I'm just rude, but if someone snatched a book from my hands just because I wasn't enjoying a sunset, I'd be mad. If they then called me a slave or a zombie, I'd throw the book at their face. Or the puzzle. Or the iPad. Well, maybe not the iPad, because it's really heavy and expensive, but you get the idea. Why? Because I decide what to dedicate my mental resources to at any given moment.
I decide when to pay attention. There will be times when I want to share a look with the person I'm with, and others when I simply won't have anything to say or do. And still others when I'd prefer to be far, far away, somewhere else entirely. My mind is like that: it wanders and rebels. Perhaps others prefer to cling to the apparent certainties of what's in front of them; I don't dislike that, but I can't and don't want to do it constantly. Nobody can.
tines•2h ago
This week I ordered a SIM card compatible with my Nokia dumb phone. I have a smartphone for work, and I intend for it to be off and in a drawer when I get home in the evenings.
I’ve realized also that having a dedicated space to do computing activities, the kind encouraged by having an immobile desktop computer rather than a phone, tablet or laptop, is immensely important for my mental integrity. I’m bringing that back too.