Digital consumption keeps me from getting better at my job

What a fantastic essay. Long ago I had the same hunch and likened having the internet around me to running with a parachute.

These days I am little better at avoiding consumption, if not worse. I think it's inevitable. And I think on net it may be a good thing. Yes you lose time and focus by dipping your toes into the zeitgeist, but you also make sure you work on things that are relevant. The open vs closed door from Hamming's You and Your Research.

The closed-door researcher produces more work, but the open-door researcher produces impactful work. Who was ultimately more productive?

The key, I find, is to do a bit of both. Work on hard things with deep focus and validate against the zeitgeist regularly.

edit: Found it. Almost the exact same post (in gist) from 2011 when I was 24, similar age as OP. https://swizec.com/blog/my-ideas-are-shitty-so-im-going-on-a...

This comment kind of nails it. I don’t have any social media at all and often my friends tell me I live under a rock for not knowing the latest meme. The decision is trivial, I just don’t have social media (except Hackernews which does waste a disgusting amount of time).

Anyways - people gravitate toward the simple and assume the difficult is impossible. I’m training for a marathon with some friends and some are already making excuses to do as much as possible that _does not_ involve running (weight lifting, biking). I think humans just do the easy thing and complain about their situation because it’s.. well easy.

It’s actually one of the best arguments for pairing/mobbing that people don’t like to talk about.

When you are sitting at a keyboard with other people, there’s no chance you’re going to browse. You and everyone else involved will be 100% focused on the task.

They actually tested this with brainwave scans and found that concentration levels were significantly higher than working independently.

This post makes a few detours, but the section about their own work is always interesting to me. I've always been a "pull on the threads and then pattern match"-kinda worker, rather than a "productivity-chaser" or "advice-seeker". I just pull on the threads that interest me, and over time these threads always have a way of coming back together. It's the difference between being goal oriented and process oriented. This is a much slower, much longer arc to building your taste, skills, and reaching some semblance of your abstract goals, but the other way just wasn't fun to me.

When I was in undergrad I remember reading a lot of blogs and hoping to live up to their idealistic views (shoutout pg), because I hadn't quite yet identified what career I wanted to lead. I dropped out, and then around 24/25 the desire for those goals really shattered. I pursued a very self-directed path that has thankfully worked out (so far-still ample time for it to falter). As this post points out, the only advice that is universal on the internet is that there is no universal advice. Find what rings true to you and lean into it.