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It's getting harder to focus every day
191–200 of 440 posts
Re: It's getting harder to focus every day
#192Consider turning off the internet before you go to bed and not turning it on for at least 1 hour after you wake up. I think I got this idea from Craig Mod (who I believe does no internet until after lunch). I've been doing this for a few months. The initial hour is really good (very easy to e.g. read or work calmly on some software projects without distraction) but I also find it puts me in the right mindset for the…
Kind of hard if you work 9-5 need to know what's gonna happen before you pull up to the office. Do I have a meeting at 9 AM kind of thing.
Re: It's getting harder to focus every day
#193Yes, I feel like my brain is fried by dopamine dispensers, it's very bad and I have no clue how to get control back. At least I have some healthy routines in my days but it really does feel like being addicted to a hard drug.
To me, it is the same as a "hard drug". I struggle on and off. For me, it's HN and just general fear of AI / career trajectory. I'm constantly reading articles about it. To a lesser degree, videogames and other scrolling take mgood chunks of my time away.
I've been making a concerted effort of waking up in the morning, sitting out in my garage gym for an hour with coffee and a book. I'll do 1 workout per day, 6 times a week, and read a few pages of "Meditations" (The stoicism book). It really centers me and feels refreshing to break away from everything and just focus on my body and mind ad the real physical world. I'm not religious, so I consider that my "church" or something.
Obviously, carrying that mindset throughout the day is difficult - but having a set "no-screens" time is useful, especially when my previous schedule was this:
- Wake up + look at phone
- Sit on toilet and look at phone
- Drive to work and look at computer for 4 hours
- Have lunch and look at phone
- Look at computer for 4 more hours
- Come home, make dinner, eat food
- Look at computer or tv for 3 hours
- Go to bed and look at phone for another hour
Writing it down like this makes it very clear that this cannot be a healthy lifestyle - so for me, where work is ALL done in front of a screen, I'm increasingly trying to remove screens from the rest of my life. There's no reason for us to be on the internet all day long, there's other cool shit to do that feels way better than burning my eyes and brain receptors all day long.
Re: It's getting harder to focus every day
#194Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's a very interesting perspective but now that you mention it, I can't even think of the last time I daydreamed, even when I'm not on a device. Curious if phone usage or whatever doom-scrolling we do exhausts the same part of the brain that we use to daydream.
> That's a very interesting perspective but now that you mention it, I can't even think of the last time I daydreamed, even when I'm not on a device. Sometimes I just turn my phone off and stare at a white wall for 15 minutes. People made fun of me when I told them how relaxing I find white walls, but it seems it turns out, that I'm not the only one doing this?
Re: It's getting harder to focus every day
#195The author doesn’t mention it, so it seems appropriate to suggest asking a doctor for attention deficit disorder screening. The cultural forces in play encouraging us to flit and switch constantly are a perfect distraction from the possibility one’s own brain is complicit.
ADHD isn't something you suddenly develop at 30 or 40. You can get diagnosed later, but the signs are meant to have been there since childhood.
ADHD is something you can rapidly develop an inability to manage at that age, though — after trauma or burnout. Or maybe following RTO after a couple of years of a more peaceful WFH environment.
You can get through school without failing, you can get through university and early jobs with hyperfocus, you can be known for being the person who gets bored easily but can do incredible things. Maybe you are late paying bills, never get round to doing certain big tasks, rent when you should be looking to buy a house, all that. Maybe you have friendships that never quite develop into romantic relationships, maybe you are untidy, maybe you stay in a lot because you fear you tire people out socially. But you bimble on and you convince yourself it's OK.
My ADHD burnout started in my late forties. Before that I had any number of explanations for the unusual, eccentric aspects of my life, for why I was a freelancer rather than in a steady job, all of that. I still managed to get big jobs done with relentless bursts of focus. I had already quit social media, I had already learned to manage some distractions, and it still happened.
But it's clearly ADHD. Having read about it, "inattentive" (hilarious name for it) ADHD explains me to a shocking degree; I don't need a diagnosis.
I just never failed badly enough that the issue was forced, until now.
I burned out to the point that it feels like cognitive decline. I am broken and I struggle with everything. What the writer is talking about is so reminiscent of the early stages of my burnout that I worry for him.
Re: It's getting harder to focus every day
#196Earlier quoted context omitted.
If you haven’t read it, Cal Newport’s book Digital Minimalism is mostly about this topic. The value of giving your brain time to simply exist without any outside input, with many examples from history of people who carved out time explicitly for this, especially when needing to make big decisions or figure out answers to problems.
That's probably a great read based on what I've heard from Cal, but I don't think you need an entire book to know how to scale back on your social media use. Just hand your phone to your friend and have them put a lock on the addictive features.
It’s not just social media. Most people have their thing… the news, podcasts, music, books, games, etc. In the modern era we can always have something that allows us to distract our brain or provides external ideas to direct it. Being alone with our own thoughts, devoid of outside influence, is something that seems to take an intentional choice these days.
Re: It's getting harder to focus every day
#197Earlier quoted context omitted.
How would one daydream, i.e., imagine, when you have everything presented to you in 4k and you can even interact with it through games? You have to imagine to daydream. When you’ve been raised on YouTube since birth (referring to U.S. primarily “GenZ”) or you’ve formed your identity around things on TV (like most Americans) you didn’t have to imagine, daydream you just took it in, like everyone else that took on the…
> > How would one daydream, i.e., imagine, when you have everything presented to you in 4k and you can even interact with it through games? You can daydream about being the protagonist of such actions which is not the same as watching other people doing it
I used to spend a lot of time imagining myself as the captain of a Federation starship :) but I did also read a lot of books.
But also, the availability of YouTube changes the utility of descriptive writing. Moby Dick can have pages of text about whales or whatever, but now I can spend hours watching whale videos on YouTube. The importance of the interior life of the characters is more, or of diffusive world building stories with too much intricacy for a movie or video presentation.
Re: It's getting harder to focus every day
#198Earlier quoted context omitted.
As much as I’d like to leave my phone in another room while working, 2FA has made that impossible. I’m now required to keep my phone nearby and pick it up periodically throughout the day, all in the same of security.
Just make your phone boring. Delete instagram, log out and don’t go on YouTube. Delete games. It’s really not that hard to make your phone a device for communication and not entertainment
My phone is already like that. There are still emails, texts, the browser still exists, the weather, etc.
And even ignoring all of that, taking hands off the keyboard/mouse, picking up a different device, waiting for the notification, opening it up, typing in the code, putting the phone back down, moving back to the keyboard/mouse/monitor… it’s very disruptive to any flow I might hope to have.
Re: It's getting harder to focus every day
#199Earlier quoted context omitted.
The current situation was foretold 20 years ago in the prescient documentary named Idiocracy.
I’d argue Idiocracy is actually quite the opposite of what the OP was talking about. It has a mildly eugenics-y vibe where the world is bad because poor, stupid people have poor, stupid kids that outnumber the smart ones. OP is talking about something environmental that can affect anyone.
Honestly, as fun as the film is I’ve noticed people very rarely mention that disturbing premise.
Re: It's getting harder to focus every day
#200It seems to me that lots of people consider the ability to focus as some kind of innate ability which we are all born with, it's not. It's a learned skill which requires practice. Stop practising and it atrophies.
We all understand this for physical exercise, I think we need to understand the same principles apply to skills.