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My life after quitting social media

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Re: My life after quitting social media

#91

Post by valbaca »

100011_100001 wrote: post #72
valbaca wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The most insidious pattern of mindless engagement is when you're bored at the checkout line, waiting in-between meetings with nothing to do, sitting on the toilet. Just curious, why is this considered the "most insidious"? Isn't that time wasted anyway? Before cellphones you would just stare off into space (you're not getting any deep thinking or deep work done waiting in line) or would just browse the gum or trash…

You could think and self-reflect. There is a reason why shower thoughts are a thing, in a society dominated by things that illicit emotional reactions it's hard to have time to just be.

Shower thoughts are great b/c you know nearly exactly how long a shower takes, you're relaxed, doing something basically automatic, and can take longer if you need to. You can also talk to yourself.

I guess what I'm saying is I find other moments in my day (shower, sipping my coffee in the morning, the few moments I take after I close my work laptop but before I start my evening, journaling, jogging or walking) to be much more effective and rewarding for thinking and self-reflection. Those times give insight and clarity. Not out in public with the cacophony of other people.

Obviously one can do both and more power to them/you.

I personally find the worst mind-scrolling is when I could be doing anything else (opportunity cost) not when I'm literally just waiting around.

Re: My life after quitting social media

#92

Post by inglor_cz »

cortesoft wrote: post #21

I always find these "quitting social media" blog posts a bit ironic... "social media is addictive and encourages doing and posting things just for the attention and to make other people think I am interesting... so I wrote this blog post about quitting social media, and am posting it to hacker news and other sites... I hope lots of people read it and think I am insightful"

I write a blog too, but I do not want people to become addicted to it and spend hours on my site. I do not even want to track them, so Jetpack was uninstalled promptly.

Blogs are like books or newspapers. We can live with books and newspapers, they have been around for centuries. Social media are like fentanyl.

Re: My life after quitting social media

#93

Post by ceronman »

I don't use Facebook or Instagram. But I use Twitter, YouTube, Reddit and Hacker News.

I used to think that this is not that bad, after all, I'm consuming actually good content, not silly stuff like in those other networks. But then I was shocked to see how much time I'm actually spending on these networks. This is easy to see in the "Digital Wellbeing" section of modern phones. It was hours, several each day.

I was having trouble keeping up with my chores or exercising. I blamed work. I work the whole week and then in the weekend I want to rest, not to do chores. So I was falling behind. It took me a while to realize that the actual problem is that I'm spending so much time on social media. It's consuming all my free time. I don't watch TV anymore, I rarely watch movies or read books. Most of my free time is being devoured by social media.

The key word here is "addiction". It doesn't matter if you think that the content you consume is actually valuable. These are short doses of dopamine that make you feel good for a very short time and leave you wanting more. You start with a nice video of a guy building an 8 bit computer from scratch and you end up watching a girl watching dogs. And you keep scrolling because you want more dopamine. And if there is nothing more, you switch to Twitter or Reddit. And all these sites are being constantly optimized to keep you on the dopamine rush for as long as possible.

I used to think that the content I was consuming was actually good and valuable. And some of it is, but it was much less that I thought. One day I realized that I can barely remember anything that I have consumed on social media a week ago. Forget about a month ago or a year ago. It's because most of this content is so unimportant that it doesn't stick in my brain. Other slower sources of dopamine aren't like this. A good movie or book leave you with something to remember. Social media rarely does.

I now understood that I have an addiction to social media. I have yet to overcome it though (after all, I'm here on HN). But at least I know that I have a problem.

Re: My life after quitting social media

#94

Post by taylodl »

mr_cyborg wrote: post #75
taylodl wrote: post #61

Maybe I'm the outlier - but everybody I am "friends" with on social media I'm friends with IRL (save for Twitter, but that's more blogging than social media). We just post what we did this weekend and stuff like that. Post stuff that the kids are doing (and for some of my friends what the grandkids are doing). No one is trying to impress anyone else. People just staying in touch. Maybe we older folks have a better fe…

What generation do you fall into? I’ve noticed some groups of people are better than others. Most of my baby boomer relatives are really bad about social media, sharing tons of political things (often nasty and offputting) and seem to liken social media to spending time with people or catching up with them a bit inappropriately.

I'm a Gen Xer. The majority of my friends are Gen Xers and Millennials. I have a few friends who are Boomers, and a few who are Zoomers.

Re: My life after quitting social media

#95

Post by taylodl »

baron_harkonnen wrote: post #87
taylodl wrote: post #61

Maybe I'm the outlier - but everybody I am "friends" with on social media I'm friends with IRL (save for Twitter, but that's more blogging than social media). We just post what we did this weekend and stuff like that. Post stuff that the kids are doing (and for some of my friends what the grandkids are doing). No one is trying to impress anyone else. People just staying in touch. Maybe we older folks have a better fe…

> Maybe I'm the outlier A good sanity check of this is to use Dunbar's number (usually considered at ~150)[0] and see how many of your friends and friends of friends have a number of social media "friends" that reaches or exceeds that number. In case you are unfamiliar: Dunbar's number is a proposed cognitive limit to the number of real social relationships we can have based on brain size. The total number of real, s…

I have roughly 70-80 social media friends, discounting Twitter which I don't engage with my friends at all but instead engage with other computer science, mathematics, physics and beer enthusiasts. These are people having similar interests to me, but they're not my friends. Sort of like HN - you can think of HN as a professional community where we all have like interests, but we're not friends. Like this conversation, we're just strangers who've met and are talking for a brief moment.

Re: My life after quitting social media

#98

Post by xyzzy21 »

coding123 wrote: post #31
billfruit wrote: post #20

Sometimes I feel HN also is a similar attention sink, even Wikipedia as well. They also can draw you in for information snacking, and before you know hours have gone. Commenting and reading responses in HN is also another attention consuming loop.

And checking to see if your comment stays near the top, how many up votes, reading the replies to see if you're a smart person or not.

Hmm. I've never cared about that. For whatever reason. I generally don't care what other people think - especially after I read Feynman's book of the same name decades ago.

Re: My life after quitting social media

#99

Post by legrande »

I quit social media for a year and nothing magical happened to me. I think it's because I never really had a problem with it, since all my feeds were heavily curated and I didn't scroll through mountains of noise. The content I consume is always high quality, because I made social media work for me. I avoid Instagram since it's too visual and full of posers. Twitter is more real and authentic. Facebook is mostly for the family group chat which I enjoy more than the timeline. You have to make it work for you.

Re: My life after quitting social media

#100

Post by gear54rus »

legrande wrote: post #99

I quit social media for a year and nothing magical happened to me. I think it's because I never really had a problem with it, since all my feeds were heavily curated and I didn't scroll through mountains of noise. The content I consume is always high quality, because I made social media work for me. I avoid Instagram since it's too visual and full of posers. Twitter is more real and authentic. Facebook is mostly for…

How can you call twitter more authentic when it seems pretty clear (to me ofc) that their stupid length limit is ideally cut out to stir controversy and create confrontation out of nowhere (by virtue of people assuming the worst when there's not enough info presented to them).
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