Live data from Hacker News

How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy

nytimes.com

51–60 of 141 posts

Re: How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy

#51
post #20

An office building nearby renovated their ground floor with a new food court. Great idea but they also added a semi-circle of TVs all tuned on CBC News that pretty much looks over most of the seating and the food stalls. It’s hard to avoid. Easy enough to modify the environment on our phones and desktops but it’s more inconvenient to avoid IRL distractions.

It really should be made illegal to put TVs and other noise making devices into the public space. I don’t understand why it’s acceptable to put that stuff everywhere. It’s basically visual and auditory littering, not much different from throwing away trash.

Re: How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy

#52
post #20

An office building nearby renovated their ground floor with a new food court. Great idea but they also added a semi-circle of TVs all tuned on CBC News that pretty much looks over most of the seating and the food stalls. It’s hard to avoid. Easy enough to modify the environment on our phones and desktops but it’s more inconvenient to avoid IRL distractions.

Gyms that have wall mounted TVs always on is a peeve of mine, especially when it's nonsense political commentators. I actively have to avoid glancing at the TV screens.

But that takes an active effort to look away so it’s still stress.

Re: How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy

#53
Obligatory quotation from Pascal:

"When I have occasionally set myself to consider the different distractions of men, the pains and perils to which they expose themselves at court or in war, whence arise so many quarrels, passions, bold and often bad ventures, etc., I have discovered that all the unhappiness of men arises from one single fact, that they cannot stay quietly in their own chamber."

(http://www.gutenberg.org/files/18269/18269-0.txt)

Re: How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy

#54
post #20

An office building nearby renovated their ground floor with a new food court. Great idea but they also added a semi-circle of TVs all tuned on CBC News that pretty much looks over most of the seating and the food stalls. It’s hard to avoid. Easy enough to modify the environment on our phones and desktops but it’s more inconvenient to avoid IRL distractions.

It makes me crazy that the gas station has installed news shows on the pumps.

Re: How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy

#55
post #29
post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would appreciate if you could share that Youtube download script.

https://gist.github.com/dikeert/ce43bfe607e46c9c04e47ab5a0e6...

Thanks for that. For a while I had been meaning to create a script that would archive favorites/likes/etc across multiple websites (eg. soundcloud also) using cron + youtube-dl.

Nothing sucks like saving a video, forgetting about it, seeing a [Video removed] in your favorites and Youtube not even telling you what it was. That's just bad UX imo..

Re: How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy

#56
post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which is what paperbacks, newspapers, radio, tv, movies, etc were/are called at one time or another. I bet in 20 years, smartphone and social media companies and everyone else will be ranting about VR being a distraction.

I think this dismissal really ignores a very crucial difference. Unlike magazines or even TV for that matter, the new social media has personalized and detailed information on individuals and can tailor their content and design to target every person individually. IMO, that is a substantial and qualitative difference that makes the new “distraction” mediums far more effective and dangerous.

One other problem is, magazines end. They have X articles, of which you find Y interesting enough to read, and then that's that. You read it. It's done. You go do something else.

Digital feeds never end. There's always something new, always something interesting. There's always something. You can keep staring at the screen endlessly. And if one app doesn't give new stuff anymore, there's 10 other apps within a tap away to give you more.

Re: How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy

#57

I feel like the hardest part of learning to do nothing is getting over an initial period where your body and mind is trying to remember how to fill an hour of idle time without Instagram or Twitter or Facebook. I think after long periods of relying on these services to fill pockets of time that are otherwise hard to capitalize on, we unlearn how to simply sit and be bored. Like any form of rehabilitation, it takes ti…

> we unlearn how to simply sit and be bored Yup.. personally I somehow feel it's "wrong" that I sit there and do nothing on the rare occasion I get the opportunity.

This is often how I feel. There have definitely been days when I just sat around doing nothing, but even on those days I find myself reading a book, practicing a language, writing down ideas, practicing music, and thinking about things that matter to me. I feel like not doing 'something' is a waste of time and brings me no value. Even in times when I am 'doing nothing' that I think of right now, I am generally at least walking or doing some exercise.

I strongly recall going with my parents to the laundromat as a child and sitting there for 3 hrs straight on a chair. I had no phone, no book, no other kids in the building, and the arcade machines and other things all costed quarters that I didn't have. I would just sit there bored out of my skull, and I hated it more than anything else in the world. It wasn't like playing outside with friends where we could invent our own games, it was cold sterile nothing in a smelly building. When people complain about contemporary kids on their tablets or phones 24/7 and how this is bad I always think back to these times when I literally didn't even have a crayon to scribble with. The times I remember fondly of exploring/playing/running around the neighborhood/drawing/ fighting/ etc are more memorable, but in terms of objective measurement, were vastly outweighed by sitting doing literally nothing. I feel like people often view the world with rose-coloured glasses when they write these anti-screen messages.

Re: How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy

#58

I feel like the hardest part of learning to do nothing is getting over an initial period where your body and mind is trying to remember how to fill an hour of idle time without Instagram or Twitter or Facebook. I think after long periods of relying on these services to fill pockets of time that are otherwise hard to capitalize on, we unlearn how to simply sit and be bored. Like any form of rehabilitation, it takes ti…

> I’d take an hour of staring at a wall over an hour of Hacker News any day, if I was trying specifically to drum up ideas for something to hack on.

I feel like this misses the point because you're still looking at it through the lens of productivity, albeit a step removed from "writing code" kind of productivity.

In your example you're still doing something -- "trying specifically to drum up ideas for something to hack on".

It seems like, if anything, this is an example of what the author is talking about: the need to turn everything into productivity.

Re: How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy

#59

I feel like the hardest part of learning to do nothing is getting over an initial period where your body and mind is trying to remember how to fill an hour of idle time without Instagram or Twitter or Facebook. I think after long periods of relying on these services to fill pockets of time that are otherwise hard to capitalize on, we unlearn how to simply sit and be bored. Like any form of rehabilitation, it takes ti…

Mindfulness is slow, frustrating, inconvenient, impractical, irritating, and that's the whole point.

Re: How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy

#60
Doing nothing is how I often stayed productive. I used to be able to stay and think about something for hours. If I encountered something difficult I would go for a walk or take a nap. Now that I've been forced, at work, to use Slack day in and out -- I feel like I can't spend 5 minutes without flipping to another window, checking this, checking that. It's counter productive and feels like torture.

I get a hangover from the weekend... because I do nothing. I go for walks, read a book, ask my kids whether they think there are more cats than animals... I work on old recreational maths puzzles. I wander over to my friend's house for tea to catch up on how he's doing. We check for caterpillars in his garden on the way out. I plant wildflowers in my own.

The hardest part of doing nothing is learning to live with all the people who can't.

Post reply on HN