When you stop being able to participate, know anything about, learn about, or do anything else in a community without the internet, what other choice do you have?
I'm an addict
11–20 of 602 posts
Re: I'm an addict
#12We're all being sucked in the internet. It's so easy to become addict to video, podcasts, games, etc. nowadays that I would not be surprised if that becomes a major society issue.
I always thought in 20 years, Facebook (or its equivalent) will have warning labels similar to how cigarettes do now. People should be free to do as they please, but I would hope that as a society, we would at least inform people as to what the actual product is designed to do. You could think of it like the nutrition labels on food. Imagine a pop up when you log onto reddit saying "this site on average engages users…
Great. Another popup to dismiss!
Re: I'm an addict
#13> I'm simply incapable of doing things I've set out to do. Simple things. Everything is difficult.
“Independent discharges of dopamine neurons (tonic or pacemaker firing) determine the motivation to respond to such cues. As a result of habitual intake of addictive drugs, dopamine receptors expressed in the brain are decreased, thereby reducing interest in activities not already stamped in by habitual rewards.”
From: Dopamine and Addiction | Annual Review of Psychology — https://www.annualreviews.org/doi/abs/10.1146/annurev-psych-...
----
Edit:
I'd like to add a couple more ideas, because what you're describing in your article is spot on, and I believe can be generalized past your own experience.
> Another angle that makes this ever more distressing is that my memory is very, very fallible ... I can confidently say that I've done nothing I said I would do there.”
Herbert Simon says: “In an information-rich world, the wealth of information means a dearth of something else: a scarcity of whatever it is that information consumes. What information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence, a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention”.
As an information-addict myself, I've been meditating a lot about this topic. During the past two years I've been researching it from a psychological perspective (And for that, I'm grateful to @ericd for this HN comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24581016). I'll throw in some resources that I've came across during this journey, in case anyone finds them useful:
- Dr Gabor Mate: Addiction: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_-APGWvYupU
- Dr. Anna Lembke: Understanding & Treating Addiction | Huberman Lab Podcast: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p3JLaF_4Tz8
- The book “The Molecule of More” by by Daniel Z. Lieberman and Michael E. Long.
- The book “The Shallows” by Nicholas Carr.
Re: I'm an addict
#14It scares me how much this reminds me of myself. I don't know how I was able to keep my job (and keep the roof over my family's heads) with my habit of not being able to concentrate on work at all because the minute I need to think a bit harder I immediately switch to reading news, HN or watching YouTube, only to finish my work late in the evening to save my ass (on good days).
Re: I'm an addict
#15This hits hard. I recently counted hours watched on YT (via history export) and OH MY GD, it averaged around 3 hours daily throught the year, for several years. I just imagined WHAT IF I have spent this amount of effort and time on ANYTHING else: playing an instrument, learning a new language, coding a side-project. The thought scared me so much, aka the difference between current me and "potential" me that I have ab…
Did you estimate the hours by summing total video lenghts in history?
As I recall there was no time spent stat, just video history eothout watchtime indication.
Re: I'm an addict
#16I used to be like this. I solved it by making my default activity reading (anything, stop if you don't enjoy it, novels are great) and working out. Just getting a week or month break is sometimes enough to break the habit (but best to do it in a way doesn't feel like an endurance challenge - that replaces it with something else fun or stimulating).
Re: I'm an addict
#17This hits hard. I recently counted hours watched on YT (via history export) and OH MY GD, it averaged around 3 hours daily throught the year, for several years. I just imagined WHAT IF I have spent this amount of effort and time on ANYTHING else: playing an instrument, learning a new language, coding a side-project. The thought scared me so much, aka the difference between current me and "potential" me that I have ab…
Did you estimate the hours by summing total video lenghts in history? As I recall there was no time spent stat, just video history eothout watchtime indication.
There is no "official" way of doing this (as I imagine it will scare people away). You have to export your watch history as JSON that contains watch date and video ID. Then you obtain API key from google and iterate over all video IDs and add up video lengths. Yes, this is inaccurate for cases when you scroll thorugh a video and not watch it completely.
For all of this there were multiple projects on github that do all of this + with plots.
Re: I'm an addict
#18Hello fellow addict!
Other than just blanket banning stuff (which never works for me), I've tried to make reducing my technical consumption into something interesting. Listening to podcasts on an iPod adds friction, as does writing on an old Psion device. I bullet journal too, it's a maintainable balance right now. Even reading books, any book, nothing technical or what I "should be learning" if I'm not up for it. They're all a nice experience, with (for me) just enough tech involved for it to be sustainable and fun. I've failed too many times to just ban stuff or "not look at a screen".
I love the outdoors when I'm out there, but when someone suggests to just go outside instead of watching a video or playing a game, I just feel guilt and resent the outdoors a little more. Old tech has been a nice, interesting bridge.
Re: I'm an addict
#19I still get stuff done, but also lose so much time to mindless online consumption.
I read about resetting dopamine receptors, but it's quite hard. A bit like losing weight.
Re: I'm an addict
#20We're all being sucked in the internet. It's so easy to become addict to video, podcasts, games, etc. nowadays that I would not be surprised if that becomes a major society issue.
We may just as well call it the InterCage at this point.
Nets are for trapping prey, that part has been completed a long time ago.