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Just watch the intro to an old movie or sitcom that you can remember from back in the day.
Haha why?
Anyway, this brings to mind one good thing about Hacker News: while breaking stories make it to the front page, so does older content worthy of discussion. We need more people to care about curation of what might otherwise be forgotten.
I credit a lot of changes I made over the last few years to courses like Learning How to Learn (Oakley, Sejnowski) and books like Deep Work (Newport) and Mastery (Greene) in helping to bring me back to realize the importance of uninterrupted blocks of hard, focused work. That coupled with moments of quiet time away from devices so that I can let my mind kind of just wander and process life has made life actually more fulfilling.
I quit Facebook, Twitter, and only check Instagram once every few days. I'm not totally 'clean' since I'll still spend time on YouTube and Reddit during moments of frustration, but I think it's important not to beat oneself up when one 'cheats.' After all, it's not completely a new phenomenon. There's always been things like books, newspapers, TV, radio to distract our attention.
But maybe it just feels a bit different since some of the smartest people in the world are working everyday to make sure we're looking at the thing they're working on in a very calculated fashion. That plus the fact that sometimes it feels like you're supposed to know so much of what's going on in the world and environment around you. But really, so many topics are so much more complicated than a simple cursory look that it feels kind of fruitless to jump into it when it realistically takes hundreds of hours to truly understand it.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Haha why?
In case this is a serious question and not a joke (unclear which it is) then he may be saying that older movies and shows had these longer intros that seemed normal at the time, but if you watch them again now they seem long and boring now. So that is one to show how your attention span has become shorter
Just watch the intro to an old movie or sitcom that you can remember from back in the day.
Haha why?
The internet has been commercialized to the point where it’s no longer exciting to browse. I stay on HN and mostly read reactions to posts without opening the post link.
Just watch the intro to an old movie or sitcom that you can remember from back in the day.
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https://humanetech.com/ Attention economy unintentionally promotes "human downgrading" Great opportunity to innovate on apps and services that promotes reversal of human downgrading.
Else... The answer is less apps and device time. Even having an app to help with 'human downgrading' takes up brainspace and a lingering attachment to the screen and devices. Though I suppose since screentime/devices aren't going away any time soon might as well try to mitigate it a bit.
I think it's telling that those in tech, including billionaire execs like Jobs, were/are very sensitive to the usage of tech devices by their kids. Addiction to games, news, apps, entertainment is real, but that's only half the issue. It fosters this itch where we can't linger on uncomfortable thoughts without instinctively grabbing our phone to be distracted. This include when we're trying to really go deep on a sub…