How to Stare at Your Phone Without Losing Your Soul

It's not just a public place, but a very specific type of public place: a shopping mall. Were it just a public square with people from your social circle, then it wouldn't be as dangerous.

As a shopping mall, it's full of advertisements, slot machines, games, fast food, sales clerks trying to lead you into the place they want you to be, etc. But it is also the place where almost all your friends are, and almost all the books and newspapers are.

It's hard to leave it because it has valuable things inside (even your office might be inside the mall), but it's also hard to stay in without having your agency taken away by everyone competing for your attention. You could get a book from the bookstore, read it and talk to your friends about it, but it's hard to do that in a mall where everything is designed to take you to their stores, entertainment centers, etc.

Unfortunately, it doesn't disable shorts from the subscriptions tab. Which is really annoying now that all my preferred creators are making shorts, and it tries to suck me into doomscrolling.

Great article. I myself am completely unable to limit my consumption of novel information input by “willpower” or whatever. I’m 18 yo, and the internet, programming, HN, reddit and all are too damn interesting, unnaturally, too much. My brain is completely wired to seek novel information input and surge dopamine. I was an addict of some other thing before too, and I know this is %100 dopamine addiction. The only solution that I found to work, that lets my brain “breathe” and brain fog to clear is restricting access.

I set the password of my iPhone to a 20-digit number which I surely won’t be able to memorize while setting it up. I put all my contacts to my Emergency Contacts so that I can call them without unlocking my phone. I’m logged in to WhatsApp Web on my iPad, I use it from there. My iPad has Screen Time on, its settings are controlled from my iPhone. All domains except some necessary government etc. domains are blocked, and new app installing is disabled on the iPad. After setting up Screen Time, I asked my brother to enter a random password for the Screen Time password and forget it.

I created an iOS Shortcut on my iPhone which dictates my password[2] only if I’m X meters away from banned locations (home & school), because every once in a while I need to unlock my phone to do something. I go on a walk/run and unlock my phone in that case. The shortcut is a widget, it works while my phone is locked.

I also time-locked[1] this password to 24 hours (you can only open it after a decryption process which takes 24 hours) and saved it to my DO server in its locked form, because Shortcuts very rarely doesn’t work. I use my server to decrypt if needed.

My computer’s (NixOS) password is time-locked too, as I’m currently still in school and shouldn’t be using it (Little time left to university exam). After the exam, I plan to lock it down to 6 hours a day and writing a browser extension which uses an LLM to close the current tab if I’m not working on my project X and instead say, doomscrolling HN.

1: I use this program I wrote, in case anyone is interested: https://github.com/aerbil313/timelock

2: It doesn’t dictate the password digits for security reasons. It plays a different notification tone for each digit while I’m entering the password. I memorized which sound is which.

Interesting. I almost never comment on HN, and if I do, it tends to be without a lot of substance, like this one.

The thought of feeling a compulsion to participate in a lot of HN comment threads is very hard for me to imagine. My general reflexive feeling towards commenting is “waste of my time”. Particularly if there’s the risk to end up in some heated argument. Those are the worst.

I found that I spent more time on Reddit and Twitter than I wanted to. Scrolling on those apps was becoming a coping mechanism for avoiding unpleasant tasks. So I decided that I could only use those apps on a certain day of the week. On that day, I am free to go crazy and scroll all I want but outside of those days, I don't allow myself to open them at all. The first 2 weeks were pretty hard but once I got over the hump, I've gotten used to the new normal. There are still some days where I struggle not to fall off the wagon.

This experience has taught me that you can reset your brain to whatever normal you want. It's hard but doable. I'm not someone that has a ton of willpower but have managed to keep to this for the last couple of months.