Ask HN: Anyone else using Hacker News as a `dopamine hit`?

I basically have two modes, hunt and eat. When I'm at my computer, I pull in the list of HN titles via RSS. I go through the list (just titles, no upvote numbers, rankings, or other brain hackery) and select the ones I'm actually interested in. I pop those open as tabs.

Once I have the articles I want, I quickly go through them in a sorting cycle. Weird games or apps I might take a quick look at. Paywalls get busted down, bypassed, or ignored. The articles I'm interested in reading go into Pocket using the browser extension.

When I'm out and about or lying around, I read articles using the Pocket app. I have the articles I want in front of me and so my brain isn't looking for more quick hits. Completing articles is the hit in that context. Actually, I pump most of the articles into my head as audio, so I can do laundry or walk around or cook. That's when I get most of them read, plus books and such.

Might be overengineered but it works for me. According to Pocket, I read over 8 million words last year. I'm actually thinking of pulling back a bit as there are dcreasing returns. Not sure how it counts words, as that seems like a lot, but there's also a ton I read that isn't in Pocket.

If you don't read the whole article, it's probably because it's not so interesting.

It's hand-wavey, unverifiable magic that fits in broadly with anyone's self image, without contaminating the circumstances by laying blame or guilt at the feet of the individual.

The truth is that many of us have a lot of down time, and we don't know what to do with ourselves. We don't know what to do with ourselves, because so many other optional behaviors have been rationalized away from us, and removed from any normal equation.

If you were reading a book or knitting a sweater or mowing the lawn, your behavior would similarly directed into yet another pointless passtime, gifted with a deceptive sense of seeming purpose. But the cause-and-effect relationship interacting with electronic media, while intellectually occupying, suffers from effects that evaporate as soon as you pull the plug or as soon as the battery dies. This leaves a gaping feeling of wasted time, as soon as the power goes out, when there's no more electricity.

So, what if we turn our attention to activities where we can cause some sort of effect, which has no basis in electronic systems demonstrating evidence of the effect we have? Surpise! 99% of what you're legally permitted to do is essentially pointless time wasting, where you spin your wheels until you die unfulfilled, only to pass a world of questions to the next generation, with no answers to match.

One might say that our society, our culture is hollow, empty and meaningless, but with enough of a deconstructivist outlook, everything starts to look like that. When you take things apart (a bicycle for example), disassembling recognizable objects or concepts to their fundamental building blocks (handle bars, pedals, chain, wheels), often this destroys something beyond recognition, only to leave one with a feeling of regret at the loss of the thing they once knew.

With advanced technology, we've disassembled fundamental aspects of human civilization, at a pace where the people who have lived through previous decades, now must cope with a near total reorganization of typical modes of behavior, while also raising the next generation, without having many answers for what comes next.

On both sides of this equation, this feels like a near total loss of control. And for some, it actually is.

Gee, what to do with all this spare time you have on your hands, now that communication is near effortless, crosses the globe in an instant, discounting inflated prices built to accomodate a previously well-understood overhead cost, of staying organized in a world where staying on the same page with someone hundreds of miles away used to require carefully concerted planning?

Beats me, partner. Just don't hurt anybody. The times, they are a'changin'. Maybe knit a sweater?