Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Why do you waste so much time on the internet?

zan.bearblog.dev

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

311–320 of 685 posts

Re: Why do you waste so much time on the internet?

#311

Post by Braini »

fma wrote: post #31
Apreche wrote: post #17

Just speaking for myself, I've noticed that my habit is to eat what is in front of me, and clean my plate. I mean this both literally and figuratively. If I have dessert in the house, like a bag of chocolate, then I eat one after dinner. If I don't have it in the house, then I just don't eat dessert. If I have a social media feed full of content, then I'll scroll through all of it until there's nothing else that's ne…

Switching Twitter to timeline mode rather than their poor excuse of an algorithm helps. Learned that from HN....but I have a browser plug-in that also removes all their recommended and "Joe also owed this tweet" junk.

Funny enough I have the opposite opinion regarding twitter: If I use it in timeline mode I have the urge to read through all of it until where I stopped last time as the OP described (same with my Feedly RSS feed) In algorithm mode its more like a "don't care, its garbled anyway, just a sea of stuff". That being said I am still mostly using timeline mode.

Re: Why do you waste so much time on the internet?

#312

Post by ricardobeat »

sgtnoodle wrote: post #118
haliskerbas wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thought this was just me and it’s so refreshing to hear. I can never eat just part of a bag of chips. Or save the really good sandwhich for later. Or not drink another coffee because I already had one. Etc. etc Do lots of other folks experience this? I seem to only have self control when it hurts my job or income, and even then, barely.

I think it's pretty common. I personally call it "Goldfish syndrome", although apparently that's caught on with another informal meaning according to the internet. Eating and drinking delicious high calorie things rewards your brain. On an evolutionary time scale, delicious things were relatively rare and often required expending a lot of energy to acquire. In the last 100 years or so, modern technology has shifted t…

> Rather than order a pizza ever again, learn how to make a really good hand stretched pizza dough from scratch

This is good for different reasons, such as less additives in your food which might be healthier in the long term, taste, and the pleasure in the activity itself, but is unlikely to help with weight loss. There is little difference in calorie content between two similar pizzas, home made and from a restaurant (assuming you’re not eating Domino’s cheese-stuffed crust style pizzas).

Re: Why do you waste so much time on the internet?

#313

Post by drivers99 »

reggieband wrote: post #253
aantix wrote: post #42

I wonder if this is because we're lonely..? Just wondering out loud here. E.g. Twitter - feels like many of the "thought leaders" I follow, their "friends" are also on Twitter. And they tweet/respond so much I often wonder if they're really ever "building a business". And are they ever interacting with their real-world friends or family? Or if their lives just consist of a constant refresh of their feed. Even at dinn…

People often say they will keep old TV shows like Friends, How I Met Your Mother or The Office on in the background. I think it simulates the feeling of having familiar social connections in ones life. In Fahrenheit 451, the protagonist's wife Mildred "finds herself more involved in the "parlor wall" entertainment in the living room – large televisions filling the walls" [1]. She frequently calls the entertainers tha…

I got really into watching Twitch for a while in 2020 (especially IRL content such as a mechanical watch repair guy (relevant to yesterday's top post about watches), musicians, and other small streamers I could get to know and they'd recognize my name) and that scene often came to mind.

Re: Why do you waste so much time on the internet?

#314

Post by windowsrookie »

twobitshifter wrote: post #81

Has anyone tried?: * Using an apple cellular watch and leaving your phone at home * Using a smaller phone like an iphone mini * Using a lower tech feature phone * Using screentime And found success that way?

I tried an Apple Watch. It had a couple of issues that prevented it from working for me. When it's on LTE the battery only lasted me about 5-6 hours. It's just not designed to be used away from an iPhone for more than a couple hours. So you have to carry an Apple Watch charger with you, and it can only charge if you take it off your wrist. Also while iMessages would come thru, text messages would not reliably get sent to the watch while it was on LTE only. Another issue is you can't send/receive messages from social media apps like instagram/snapchat. 80% of my communications with friends is through Snapchat. Maybe there's a Facebook messenger or telegram app for the watch but I don't use those apps. Also, there's no way (that I know of) to stream music to your car radio from the watch, streaming music over LTE to your headphones drops the battery life to 2-3 hours.

I then tried the light phone 2. https://www.thelightphone.com

Similar to the Watch it has short battery life. Maybe ~8 hours with sending some texts and listening to an hour long podcast or music. It uses Micro-USB so you have to carry one of those around because everything is USB-C now. It can receive texts but no images. So anytime someone sends you a picture in a text you have to ask them what it is. Again no way to send messages in social media apps. Also there is no way to stream music from any streaming service.

I then tried an iPhone SE. It can do everything you need, but not very well. It's screen was often too small, and too dim outside. Compared to high end phones the camera sucks, and again it has bad battery life. I eventually came to the conclusion that if I'm going to carry a full smartphone It may as well be a good one.

So after all that I'm back on an iPhone 13 Pro Max. Not using a smartphone for a few months did seem to "reset" my brain tho. I don't really use any Apps on the iPhone aside from safari, camera, YouTube music, and Snapchat for messaging. Having a good camera on you at all times is really hard to give up.

Re: Why do you waste so much time on the internet?

#315

Post by v-erne »

Crabber wrote: post #191
the_only_law wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I remember years ago being a teenager and having limited access to computers and the internet so when I did have them I used my time to learn as much as I could. When I didn’t, I got bored, and I picked up books. I remember reading books on history, biology, psychology, electronics, programming, etc. and learning from them, often just by flipping pages and reading passages that looked interesting. In fairness, even n…

Someone introduced me to the same idea a few years ago and it really stuck with me, "the only time people in the modern world experience boredom is in the 15 seconds before they pull out their smartphone". It's in moments of boredom that you start having deep thoughts about the world, start thinking through solutions to problems you have, start thinking about changes you can make in your life. I got rid of my smartph…

>> I got rid of my smartphone and now the 20 minutes each day on the train where I'm "bored" are one of the most valuable parts of my day. And my mind feels much fresher after it,

Thats interesting - I think I lost ability to be bored even if I do not reach for phone immediately. My mind somehow switches to a strange mode where I reply random events from my life and try to come out with different plays for each interaction. And I cannot do this if I feel discomfort - its too hot or too cold etc. And I used to think that this was boredom but now I think this was because I was distracted by environment. The real boredom is something that I vaguely remember from my early childho hit`od and I cannot get there now - my mind is to full of past interactions. The smartphone age can be somehow at fault here - maybe my brain thirsts for dompamine hit so much that it creates its own mental junk.

Re: Why do you waste so much time on the internet?

#316

Post by tobylane »

331c8c71 wrote: post #296
dcchambers wrote: post #21

My completely unprofessional opinion is that almost everyone that uses the internet throughout the day has developed some form of undiagnosed ADD/ADHD. The modern internet has broken our slowly evolved brains. We are not built to cope with these types of attention destroying activities and media. At least 20 years ago you had to sit down at a specific place and use a chunky computer. Smartphones have made it 1000x wo…

Not exactly. It's definitely not ADHD if there's no prolonged and debilitating impact. Being distracted an hour there and a couple there is not like ADHD. ADHD would be like more like falling in a pit where one basically cannot do anything meaningful for days and days despite willing to do so (if the motivation is lost, in turn, we are talking about depression-like states). I doubt that many of normal smartphone user…

Agreed. We may have a lack of practise/comfort with the slower pace, but I think it call it ADHD is to understate the disorder.

Re: Why do you waste so much time on the internet?

#320

Post by laurex »

I think an underappreciated aspect of this phenomenon is loneliness.

Many of the things that suck us in (including HN) have this aspect of being with other people, though they don't actually lead to us feeling actually known or cared about in the same way as our bodies/minds evolved for.

Thus, it's very easy to feel an ambient loneliness, go online where there are other people saying things, sharing things, sending us emails (even if they are not actually "to us" like newsletters) and getting sucked in, then feeling like "where did that time go" because it was not really an investment in any of those top-of-pyramid needs, but instead 'empty calories' of socializing.

Post reply on HN