Why do you waste so much time on the internet?

> I may have been on psychedelic mushrooms at the time, but something I took away from the trip was an acknowledgement of a feeling of 'shedding' in life, in terms of hobbies and interests.

I had a very similar feeling in a similar setting, like a large part of the process of life is scrubbing crusty exteriors off so that new capacities can emerge. Like continuous molting.

Thanks for the reminder.

When I was a child, my father decided to convert from Catholicism to Evangelical Protestantism. For reference, both sides of my family have been Catholic going all the way back for at least 300 years. So a schism occurred. My dad dragged me to his church services and wasted my entire Sunday mornings, and my sisters remained in the Catholic faith. My mom told me on the day that I was to first go to his church service that if I went with him, that she was not my mother anymore. So I went with my dad, because even at that age, I didn't do emotional terrorism.

Because this was in the 80s and we only had one television, books were my refuge. I was a voracious reader. In standardized testing, I went from having a 1st grade reading ability in 1st grade to college level by 3rd grade. That tapered off because I wasn't a huge fan of reading fiction and I had basically read all the interesting non-fiction in the local library by 5th grade. Being an 80s kid, I had a lot more personal autonomy than kids since and started spending a ton of time outdoors, riding my bike to go fishing and playing sports outdoors. When it got really cold, I'd write code in GW-Basic, but that was mostly to enter competitions to miss school (state science fair for the win).

So then I got to college, and was able to browse the web on NCSA Mosaic. And there was just TONS of new things to read. My ADHD went full blast reading article after article and my grades suffered a bit. Every new day is an attempt to avoid falling down the rabbit hole.

I identify with all of this, but this:

> to make pauses, take a deep breath and think about "what am I doing right now? What should I be doing instead?".

this too can have its pitfalls. In my case, I always feel like I have BOTH too many things that I WANT to do and too many things HAVE to do and whenever I step back and try to look at the bigger picture, I realize that I don't feel like I'm making tangible progress on any of them. And then the anxiety sets in and I feel like, "well, if I'm working this hard and not even keeping up, why am I working at all?" And so I sort of "give up" for a few days or a week and feel even MORE guilty because literally nothing is getting done and I'm getting even further behind.

A lot of the comments I write here may sound like I really have my shit together, but that's just because I have a lot of generalized experience that just basically comes from lots of introspection and time being alive. But I have yet to figure out the one weird trick to being both productive (making progress toward future life goals) and happy (enjoying what I have in the present).

The cure does not come from discipline but from finding things that are more fun to do.

I'd rather read a book or tinker with a program instead of wasting time on the internet, but somehow my phone alone still recorded at least more than three hours of use and usually sometimes more than four. Reflecting upon this, I identified two reasons for such irrational behavior. First, I was afraid of getting carried away from reading a book, while checking timeline of twitter seems non-committing. Second, this little dose of dopamine from reading a short update from the internet seems really addictive.

Luckily, I find a treatment that seems working:

1. I realize that reading a book or a long article is not as addictive as before, for whatever reason. In addition, I use a timer to remind myself just in case.

2. I surround myself with many types of books, videos, articles, magazines, and some exercise routines and equipment. Whenever I have an urge to take a break, I first ask myself if I really need to get distracted. It's amazing how awareness itself can reduce the urge to check updates from the internet. If I do want to take a break, I pick the book/video/article/exercise that's most appealing at the moment. This little trick works quite well. My phone usage has been consistently below 2 hours, with nearly half of them coming from reading Kindle and Apple Books. I finished multiple books in the past few months, including tombs like Programming Rust, and Isaacson's Leonardo Da Vinci.

I wish I could spend even less time on social media, but at least I can see concrete improvement now.

Glitch will let you fork ("remix") and modify -- I don't know if the Twitter APIs are real friendly anymore for that open-ended of use, but it'd be worth trying :)