301–310 of 685 posts
Don't be afraid to admit that the moment you feel a touch of boredom you reflexively type 'reddit'. Tools like 'Freedom.to' block these time sinks and you don't even realize how frequently you visit these sites until you get the block notification.
After a week or two your cured.
These online communities are a net negative in my life, and I'm done.
I 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…
[1] https://www.google.com/search?q=books+about+difficult+conver...
Because 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…
Maybe that’s true, but it doesn’t provide me with any comfort. I’m only going to live once. When I’m old and bound to a chair (hopefully due to frailty and not because a psychiatrist strapped me to it), I want to feel like I achieved something more than a passive human existence. All these hours spent consuming forgettable garbage on Reddit, YouTube, Facebook, and in video games… these are hours not spent learning re…
I do all those things and I still waste a ton of time on Youtube.
And it's fine; your brain cannot dedicate all of its waking time to high-intensity intellectual endavours, you just end up burning out.
I worked full-time and studied for a few years. Remarkably, I still had a share of free time, but I couldn't do anything "productive" with it as I had no mental energy to do perform these tasks. You _have_ to just hang out and do nothing.
The most productive people I know waste a ton of time outside of their chosen specialty, and it's not a coincidence.
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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.
This is me so bad. I have it in the good and bad ways. In the good I will run couple marathons a month and in the bad I will eat whatever I can find. I always felt like an outcast, good to hear I am not alone :) For media consumption it is exactly the same. The good is that I get to the nitty gritty of technical problems. But I also read the unless crap till no end. I have been able to ditch Twitter, reddit, Facebook…
HN and youtube still stick. Mostly tutorials, workouts or info videos ( Andrew Huberman, justforfunc, 3blue1brown etc. ) on youtube though.
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I remember years ago being a teenager and having limited access to computers and the internet so when I did have them I used my time to learn as much as I could. When I didn’t, I got bored, and I picked up books. I remember reading books on history, biology, psychology, electronics, programming, etc. and learning from them, often just by flipping pages and reading passages that looked interesting. In fairness, even n…
Someone introduced me to the same idea a few years ago and it really stuck with me, "the only time people in the modern world experience boredom is in the 15 seconds before they pull out their smartphone". It's in moments of boredom that you start having deep thoughts about the world, start thinking through solutions to problems you have, start thinking about changes you can make in your life. I got rid of my smartph…
Teach me! How do you keep in touch with people on the go? This is the only thing that has stopped me from dumping my iPhone altogether. I sometimes leave home without it but I end up relying on others for coordination, etc -- which means I haven't liberated myself so much as fobbed off the responsibility to others.
I don't have social media (besides HN), so my main contact with people who aren't in my immediate vicinity is through sharing photos directly on iMessage and the odd article-inspired rant.
This sounds like a major depressive episode. A very experienced psychologist recently told me that even folks with no hint of mental health trouble started having a hard time with motivation and mood in the pandemic, but many with existing tendencies towards depressive states were plunged straight into oblivion. Talk therapy and medication can be a big help, but CBT exercises can also help if you're against using med…
For those who didn't get the memo: Be warned, folks! Depression is not about sadness, but about not being able to do things. If you are feeling incapable of doing things, like physically siting in front of the computer and not being able to do any work, you are probably depressed. Sometimes you'll sit in front of the computer, try to start some task but somehow end opening hackeer news, digg, youtube. Seek help as so…
I have to strongly disagree.
If that kind of behavior gets out of control it sounds like typical adhd. One still wants to do stuff but unable to get oneself into actually doing it.
Depression IMO is when one starts losing motivation and ability to derive pleasure from activities that were normally pleasant.
My completely unprofessional opinion is that almost everyone that uses the internet throughout the day has developed some form of undiagnosed ADD/ADHD. The modern internet has broken our slowly evolved brains. We are not built to cope with these types of attention destroying activities and media. At least 20 years ago you had to sit down at a specific place and use a chunky computer. Smartphones have made it 1000x wo…
> The average shot length of English language films has declined from about 12 seconds in 1930 to about 2.5 seconds today https://www.wired.com/2014/09/cinema-is-evolving/
Of course, this does beg the question, if we took steps to stop doing it, would it give us more time to do useful focussed work or would we instead just watch TV, read a book, go to the part or whatever.
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I always say to people that CrossFit is my church, and while I say it with mild sarcasm, internally it is true. Everyday I turn up, see the same people, build a community to the extent we do socials, help each other out with all manner of things, and honestly it gives me fulfilment more so than anything else I do.
I know next to nothing about crossfit and it definitely looks like religion to me. I'm not even sure where this impression comes from but it's probably first or second thing that comes into my mind when I hear "crossfit" (the other thing is that someone I vaguely know does it to keep in shape -- but we never discussed it in any detail).
To keep riffing on the religious theme, there was a fair bit of controversy around crossfit when it first arrived on the scene, to the point where even other fairly similar gym disciplines were pushing it out of their gyms. That kind of criticism tends to drive you back into your group (the same way door-knocking drives evangelists back to the warm embrace of the parish), and I almost never see crossfit happening in regular gyms, just crossfit gyms. As above that's partly practicality, but I think it's also fair to say it wasn't received well at first and that likely drove people to those specialized gyms instead of practicing it at their local.
I do powerlifting/strength training and powerlifters had the same issue in mainstream gyms, and there are powerlifting specific gyms around. But that's gotten better over time with mainstream gyms having powerlifing/olympic lifting gear more often than not now.