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

What you are drawing is in my opinion a false equivalency. It is not at all the same doing things in real life like reading a book, mowing the lawn or knitting a sweater and skimming a news feed or interacting with social media. The main reason for that imo is the amount of effort you have to put in to get a reward. When you take the offline work you (in the case of a book) at least have to go to the bookshelf, pick a book, take it in your hand and whilst reading have the rough content of the previous pages in your head or (in the case of mowing the lawn) actually physically move. This delays the gratification you get when having finished reading the book or mowing the lawn.

With social media or quickly skimming articles from a news feed the delay you get on your gratification when scrolling through is literally given by the speed with which you can scroll and read. This makes dopamine so cheap for your brain, that it will of course reward you when you engage in these activities. (Incidentally it also makes it more susceptible to future easy dopamine hits (too lazy to find online sources, will look a little later. Joachim Bauer: Selbststeuerung is a very good book on this)).

And no, it is nihilistic to think that 99% of what we are allowed to do is pointless. Having these discussion for example is a great source of meaning. Really: educating yourself, talking to other people and forming opinions on different topics is also very meaningful as it will influence your perspective on the world in a lot of (sometimes even positive ;) ) ways.

I must admit, that I don't quite get your point on the disassembly of fundamental aspects of human civilization (although it sounds very good :D). To me the equivalency would be a bicycle becoming an ebike, which drives nearly effortlessly. The difference between today and before is that before you had enough time to think where you want to go while riding the bike (as it was tedious and slow to ride) and today the bike is going so fast that some people just ride it for the rush of speed and don't actually know where they want to go.

So the lesson to me is: Get off the bike. Sit down, enjoy the view and figure out where you want to go first and then drive the hell out of it in that direction.

Try this: instead of merely skimming articles, make it mandatory to summarize everything you read in a few sentences. You'll very soon figure out that most what you read does not really interest you. Understanding requires work and deeper motivation to do so.