"Procrastination Monkey" series from waitbutwhy is the best treatise on this that I know.
Why do you waste so much time on the internet?
121–130 of 685 posts
Re: Why do you waste so much time on the internet?
#122Earlier quoted context omitted.
Doing the same, but this does not really apply for algorithmic feeds. When you open YouTube the recommendations are always the first thing you see, same for TikTok and Twitter (although at least you can configure it there). Sure you can say “just don’t use recommendation systems” just as you can say “just don’t go on YouTube”.
I use the following user stylesheet to hide YouTube recommendations for exactly the reason you mention: /* hide main page */ ytd-browse[page-subtype="home"] { display: none; }
Nice. I'll have to incorporate this little gem for the Linux laptop. Thank you. When I'm home, I primarily watch YouTube on my TV, but I don't use YouTube. Rather, I use SmartTubeNext, which grabs the same videos as YouTube, but has no ads, tracking, kills sponsored content in the video, as well as no YouTube recommendations. I'm very happy with it. I run it off my Amazon Firestick. If you're interested, here is the how-to: https://troypoint.com/smarttubenext/
Re: Why do you waste so much time on the internet?
#123Just speaking for myself, I've noticed that my habit is to eat what is in front of me, and clean my plate. I mean this both literally and figuratively. If I have dessert in the house, like a bag of chocolate, then I eat one after dinner. If I don't have it in the house, then I just don't eat dessert. If I have a social media feed full of content, then I'll scroll through all of it until there's nothing else that's ne…
Thought this was just me and it’s so refreshing to hear. I can never eat just part of a bag of chips. Or save the really good sandwhich for later. Or not drink another coffee because I already had one. Etc. etc Do lots of other folks experience this? I seem to only have self control when it hurts my job or income, and even then, barely.
For me it depends on how my day is going.
When I first read about willpower being an exhaustible resource, it totally aligned with my experience. A few years later I read that those ego depletion studies had been invalidated and that surprised me. Running out of willpower seems like something I experience.
Re: Why do you waste so much time on the internet?
#124Because we humans have a lot of idle time.
We feel like we're wasting it, and we feel we should instead spend time archiving goals, to better ourselves, to do something more meaningful. But that is not how life works. You are just unnecessarily burden yourself with guilt. Thinking you should be doing something else. There are so many things to learn about, so many things to experience, right? We fear on missing out on life, chasing something, but what exactly we don't really know.
But maybe you just don't need to? Most of us are exactly fine with where we are. Of course you should always strive to improve, but truth is "killing time" is a big part of life. Especially for top of the food chain animals like humans. Watch some livestreams of lions on youtube, what do they do? 99% of the time they just sit under a tree doing absolutely nothing, and I bet they don't feel guilty about it. People used to walk labyrinths for hours and hours, just to kill time.
This whole notion that you need to make the most out of every moment, live life to the fullest, see all the places, chase the uncomfortable! - I don't think it's necessarily the best advice, the happiest people I've met tend to have very simple boring routines.
Re: Why do you waste so much time on the internet?
#125Just speaking for myself, I've noticed that my habit is to eat what is in front of me, and clean my plate. I mean this both literally and figuratively. If I have dessert in the house, like a bag of chocolate, then I eat one after dinner. If I don't have it in the house, then I just don't eat dessert. If I have a social media feed full of content, then I'll scroll through all of it until there's nothing else that's ne…
Thought this was just me and it’s so refreshing to hear. I can never eat just part of a bag of chips. Or save the really good sandwhich for later. Or not drink another coffee because I already had one. Etc. etc Do lots of other folks experience this? I seem to only have self control when it hurts my job or income, and even then, barely.
It may be a common trait in programmers, since we're rewarded by getting to the bottom of things: "why is this function failing? who calls it? in which possible states?"
Most programmers have experienced being so immersed in code that we don't notice time is passing, forgetting to eat or sleep.
It's similar with immersion in social media / food / whatever. We become lost in the activity and lose our sense of self.
I've recently heard of the concept of conscientiousness as a personality trait. People with low conscientiousness tend to procrastinate more, and it's tied to ADHD. Apparently it can be trained. I'm trying (though not really succeeding) to make pauses, take a deep breath and think about "what am I doing right now? What should I be doing instead?". Seems so basic, like I've regressed to being a child who has no self control...
Re: Why do you waste so much time on the internet?
#126I wonder if this is because we're lonely..? Just wondering out loud here. E.g. Twitter - feels like many of the "thought leaders" I follow, their "friends" are also on Twitter. And they tweet/respond so much I often wonder if they're really ever "building a business". And are they ever interacting with their real-world friends or family? Or if their lives just consist of a constant refresh of their feed. Even at dinn…
I miss working with you, Jim!
You're the best Peter! :)
Re: Why do you waste so much time on the internet?
#127If it annoys you, then you're probably an extrovert. I am an introvert and I like being alone and being able to choose how much I self-express and communicate. In person, I do not have as much choice about my time and energy commitment in front of company if I want to be polite. It's just easier for me to manage my social bandwidth while being on the internet.
I am also an introvert and the computer is an easy escape after a day of what I can only describe as sensory overload. That said, the author's point was more about productivity than socialization. There, I can only agree.
To offer a couple of personal examples: I have to actively avoid certain types of games since it is far too easy to explore virtual worlds, gather virtual resources, and build virtual things when I would feel more productive doing something real. That something real may be as mundane as learning how to develop software more sophisticated than toy projects, simply because the product is reflects reality rather than fantasy.
The other example is my tendency to watch other people do real things, like embedded development or repairing electronics. I have the interest and I even have most of the tooling. Still, consuming is easier than creating. That is especially true after a mentally exhausting day.
I can only conclude that technology has made some things easier than others, and that it doesn't necessarily correlate with what people value. It doesn't even matter whether those values are social or asocial.
Re: Why do you waste so much time on the internet?
#128>sometimes i wonder why do i waste so much of time on internet
I enjoy my time on the internet and I treasure it as a tool for reaching new intellectual heights but not in a straightforward fashion. I speak two languages more than my own native one thanks to the time "wasted" on the internet shitposting on imageboards & forums, watching JP vtuber clips and anime, playing CRPGs or MMORPGs, etc... and that's just the one quantifiable metric I can offer, cause to me it's pretty clear I would be a worse, less polished version of myself if I hadn't spend so much time on the internet running in circles.
>not even doing productive work >back to that unproductive and mindless pithole
What a tragic and servile mentality to think we are always meant to be productive to deserve enjoying our time on this Earth; guilt-tripping yourself back into the cog in the machine mindset to force yourself to become something you don't really want to be seems a terrible choice. That path will only lead to wearing you down, eroding your actual capability to be productive in the process.
PS: Try to improve your experience on the internet by constantly filtering your information sources until you find you stay here useful.
Re: Why do you waste so much time on the internet?
#129I wonder if this is because we're lonely..? Just wondering out loud here. E.g. Twitter - feels like many of the "thought leaders" I follow, their "friends" are also on Twitter. And they tweet/respond so much I often wonder if they're really ever "building a business". And are they ever interacting with their real-world friends or family? Or if their lives just consist of a constant refresh of their feed. Even at dinn…
> I wonder if this is because people are lonely..? Just wondering out loud here. Discord has propped up my social life for years now. And I mean outside of the internet as well! I also engage in independent, more traditional social engagement and it usually ends in nothing more than a hangover. Not unexpectedly, the internet makes it easier to bring people with similar interests/believes/personalities together. There…
Discord is most likely the most
phallocentric large scale platform ever made. It is an abysmally terrible place to go to meet people, and particularly to go argue. Ever seen what the most popular politics server on discord looks like? 4chan is tame by comparison...
Re: Why do you waste so much time on the internet?
#130Because we humans have a lot of idle time. We feel like we're wasting it, and we feel we should instead spend time archiving goals, to better ourselves, to do something more meaningful. But that is not how life works. You are just unnecessarily burden yourself with guilt. Thinking you should be doing something else. There are so many things to learn about, so many things to experience, right? We fear on missing out o…
> People used to walk labyrinths for hours and hours, just to kill time.
I walk and ride bicycle just to kill time to this days