"Beyond the sources of biologically based ADHD, there are a lot of people who act as if they have ADHD but on close inspection turn out not to have the diagnosable condition. These are the people who have ADHD-like symptoms caused by the conditions of modern life. Their “ADHD” is a response to the massive increase in stimuli that now bombard our brains and our world....
"Modern life has trained our brains to go faster and faster, to do more and more, to receive and transmit 24/7, and to require constant stimulation—be it from movies, TV, conversation, even news, as well as the minute-to-minute living of our lives. Most of us can go no more than a few seconds without looking for a screen."
It is likely to me that different people have different breaking points, and so one person may recognize the introduction of the smartphone or debut of TikTok as the point where they lost the ability to focus, and another may date it to the rise of LLMs.
Hallowell, E. M., & Ratey, J. J. (2021). ADHD 2.0: New science and essential strategies for thriving with distraction—from childhood through adulthood.
So if you feel like you are getting more ADHD-like issues, do consider a sleep study. Early tells are easy: you often feel like shit in the morning.
> In 2021, society is driven by a virtual Internet, which has created a degenerative effect called "nerve attenuation syndrome" or NAS.
Even more hilariously given the purveyors of the distractions we're discussing in this thread:
> Megacorporations control much of the world, intensifying the class hostility already created by NAS.
Bread and circuses, etc. I believe that given our cultural trajectory one's ability to lint their cognitive intake (that is keep TikTok/Insta/YouTube/podcast garbage viewership to a minimum) will be a large predictor of success. The next generation of doctors and Nobel Prize winners probably won't be watching boobies videos and Minecraft play-throughs.
During the weekends when I am not occupied with a task I often fall asleep. This happens on the first day or two of vacation also. After a few days my brain acclimates to the pace.
Definitely feels like that, with the exception of task initiation. I am capable of deep focus work, but I can't control when (or where). I can block out time on my calendar all I want, if my brain says "Nope, we're not doing work today" then I'm not doing work, interruptions or not.
It becomes a real disability in the workplace when everything is defined by more or less rigid schedules and your mode of operating is not a schedule but "whenever my brain says so." Some days that might be 7am, other days its 1am, and sometimes it's an entire week or two of not being able to get jack done and then staying up all night and getting 15 business hours worth of work done at once because you physically can't pull yourself away.
I always tell people, its not a deficit of attention, I have plenty of that. Its an inability to direct where and what that attention is on.
Point is I think MOST mental illness is the modern world. If you dumped people with severe depression into their ancestors supposedly worse lives 6,0000 years ago, hunting with tribe and sleeping under starry sky, they’d be fine.
This is an interesting way to try to put a label on someone’s behavioral conditioning. One of the common, and growing, problems with Internet discussions of ADHD is that they’ve expanded so much that most young people growing up in a connected world can identity with some influencer’s description of ADHD. Working with young, tech-interested students is worrying right now because across every group you will find most of them saying some variation of believing that they have ADHD. Their basis is usually a combination of Reddit posts and something from a streamer or content creator they follow.
Yet most of them don’t have anything resembling focus or executive function problems. I think those with ADHD diagnoses from youth just don’t talk about it much. It’s the people who discovered it on social media who are bringing it up the most in this context. The basis for their belief that they have ADHD is more about feeling that self-discipline is easy and enjoyable for “normies” and the fact that they have to put in some effort to study and keep their room clean instead of watching YouTube and playing video games is indicative of a condition.
The old way of trying to draw a line between people who are neurodivergent and neurotypical doesn’t really work on those who came up reading those terms on the internet. For various reasons, the majority of them have come to view themselves as neurodivergent in some way, even when they clearly don’t meet any intended definition of that word. In the teenage years it has almost become an extension of the youthful belief that nobody understands you because you’re different and you see the world uniquely. Along come all of the TikTok creators to explain that these feelings are abnormal and come with all these labels you should apply to yourself. Now they believe that they are neurodivergent and start collecting self-diagnoses.
Having a different set of labels could be an interesting way to try to change this dynamic. Instead of one label that’s supposed to represent the entire spectrum from people who cannot function in normal life to the guy who is getting As in all of his classes but feels like studying isn’t as easy as it should be, it might be time to offer some labels for the lighter end of the spectrum so we can get back to using the heavy medical diagnoses to mean something significant.
There’s an entire other conversation about how the dilution of diagnoses like ADHD is causing harm to those with serious ADHD because the term doesn’t mean as much any more. Extra labels for mimic conditions or behavioral/personality variants could be a good way to relieve some of that pressure.
[deleted]
Something I do when I struggle to focus is to add different stripped down user accounts to my computer.
I wanted to dabble in rust so I added a user called ~rs that literally only has access to two application hotkeys (via niri). super+enter opens a terminal, F1 opens the offline rust documentation. Yeah I can just log out and scroll HN, but there's a enough friction to that, that it doesn't really happen very often.
Within a year, my hyper-focus abilities I remember having as a teen starting flowing back. In the last 5 years I have done the best work of my career, including creating the first fully deterministic Linux distribution, building a community around it, helping start 3 companies, learned endless new skills.
I am not reachable or able to reach the internet every second of every day, and in the modern world that sounds scary. Yet I have a family, an active social life, frequently travel, meet new people every week, co-running two companies while actively developing new tech with daily progress, etc.
All of those things were -accelerated- by me being intentionally offline whenever I am not at a desk.
I gave up on facebook in 2010 and twitter in 2020ish. I never developed the habit for other social media. I turn off slack and email for the first 45 minutes of each hour. If the server is on fire, call me. That's why I have a phone. Oh, and I have an old-school non-smart phone for phone calls and it often lives in a different room from where I work. I run a TOTP authenticator on a tablet that's not configured to receive any messages.
HN and an occasional YouTube video are my only online distractions. In my advanced age I've lost the desire to tell everyone how wrong they are, which seems to be the national sport of online comments sections. (Though, HN, you're much better than most places.) I've been getting into GMRS lately and it's hard to turn off the radio during work days, but I have been able to do it. Maybe I should write a similar article saying "the net doesn't distract me, but dang if I can't go 10 minutes without thinking about people I know via GMRS."
The author of this piece makes an observation about bullshit vs. attention that is probably worth looking into. My last several jobs have included less bullshit, but a lot more documentation. Which is to say, the docs I write seem to have actual applicability to a real business problem and it's solution. There's little busy work that only serves to prove that a remote VP has more people working for him.
I think what I'm trying to say is a) it is possible to strengthen your attention gland. I'm happy to see the author at least trying. And... b) maybe there's a correlation between perceived bullshit and ability to focus. This needs more research.
It's difficult for me to separate whether this is a result of other changes in my life over time or simply a reflex of ageing in general, though I do think it's a wider societal shift. In the same way that older people find it difficult to watch newer movies (and vice-versa), there is a certain pace associated with culture as well. We have, on average, shifted from books to TikTok in the span of a generation.
I don't know if anyone has a solution that's not straight up quitting the internet cold turkey. My attempt so far has been meditating 50 minutes a day following "The Mind Illuminated" by Culadasa as a progress guide for increasing my mindfulness.
The most recent lesson I've learned is that allowing mind wandering and daydreaming can be a good thing. As a kid I read The Power of Now by Eckhart Tolle, and took away a misconstrued toolkit for dealing with an active mind. The whole book was about emphasizing the importance of being present in the moment, and I tried to carry that out by trying to silence my internal monologue and being frustrated whenever I found my mind thinking about something random and not processing direct conscious experience. That felt horrible and was completely counterproductive to being able to live normally, and now I'm trying to re-establish a relationship with my mind where I can welcome random thoughts while still being able to get things done.
Buy an Amazfit 6 watch, has alarms, clock, health stats, memos, weather, maps, and GPS workout.
Turn off nearly all phone notifications. Do not allow any phone to AmaZfit notifications. Don't have your phone physically attached to you.
You need your phone with you? Backpack. Never in pockets.
All sudden it is incredibly easy to focus.
We all understand this for physical exercise, I think we need to understand the same principles apply to skills.
We should be careful where we spend our limited attention on.
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.
- blocking social media everyday til 2pm(i like working from 5-1 everyday), i use freedom app for that
- having a "distraction" tablet with 2fa on the social media I use, so I can only use distracting things there and not on my computer and iphone.
- when work requires just thinking, I bring my remarkable tablet to a coffeeshop or coworking and work just off of it.
- for avoiding staying behind on social media trends, etc, i built Analog Reader to read newsletters, best tweets from specific people and articles i save for later. It becomes a printed newspaper I can bring anywhere. I have a hacker news edition that runs everyday that showed this article for today and thats why im here lol.
I hope the ‘free internet all the time’ era that airlines have been threatening us with for a decade now never arrives.
My focus is as strong as ever, maybe stronger, but as time goes on I notice that it is harder and harder for me to gracefully respond to interruptions.
It's pretty damaging to my relationships. Everyone expects you to drop everything and give people attention and empathy and be the perfect active listener. But I need a cooldown or a change of scenery to leave a task behind.
Until the real problem is identified...which IMO is that programming itself is just harder to concentrate on in 2026 than it was in 1989. There are way too many possibilities of how to do things, and way too much difference between a good choice (say getting Claude to do it) and a bad one (say, writing a linked-list traverser yourself). Humans work well with the few variables involved in creating things like that linked-list traverser. But they require tons more energy if everything is on the table. Right library? Right platform? Right coding agent? Right way to keep myself from getting distracted?
In contrast, doing almost anything else seems like a relief for your brain.
- Learn about basic neuropsychology, to at least have a working understand of the triad Default-Mode-Network, Salience-Network, Executive-Network.
- Watch your ambient CO2, also at night.
- Sleep so that you always wake up with no alarm.
I couldn't give a single shit what friends or acquaintances (much less strangers) are doing in their free time day to day. They can tell me next time I see them. I have Instagram installed, but only because certain people message me there. I never scroll even a pixel.
My biggest distraction? Hacker News.
https://www.paulgraham.com/makersschedule.html
Many individual contributors (ICs) are getting introduced to multi-tasking for the first time. When I was an IC, I was really good at getting into flow state and getting solid work done. When I first started managing, I found it really to adjust to constantly multi-tasking.
After several years of managing, I found the opposite - I became really bad at getting into flow state, my brain had been rewired to constantly context switch every 30 seconds.
Now with AI, we're seeing many managers get back into coding again: "Hey! This fits exactly into my mental model! Delegate 5 agents at once and then keep juggling between their responses!". We're also seeing many ICs feel the opposite - much stress from needing to multi-task and constantly context switch.
I don't know if everyone's brain can be rewired for multi-tasking, but I can tell you that for me it took a couple years to adjust. Everyone is on manager schedule now.
Aristotle was on to something when he adopted a peripatetic approach to thinking.
The author talks about it; when facing a difficult problem, they go get a glass of water, and get distracted. That's what this is. Anything but doing the actual task. If you're going to take a break, take an honest break and rest, but then go back to work. That's the real solution, and boy is it hard to do these days.
The withdrawal-symptoms of going cold-turkey are intense but you get over them eventually and then once you've powered through a few weeks, and you try and go back and look at any type of "content" you see how much trash it all is. Even the "good ones" or things you tell yourself is "educational". Another important note is to have some replacements in place so that when you start seeing that new void of so much time on your hands, you don't feel empty/hollow but as a reminder to yourself that you had so many cool things to do.
It’s turned out to be the best thing I’ve done for myself in a long, long time.
Why? I never used any kind of mobile phone or tablet and I use LLM's to automate away the things I don't want to do.
I use a laptop(VOIP for texts and calls), desktop PC, a b6 physical notebook and a sony voice recorder-
B6 notebook(graph) https://www.amazon.com/STALOGY-Editors-notebook-Black-S4104/...
B6 cover with pocket https://www.amazon.com/Raymay-Fujii-CN162B-Notebook-Multi-Co...
Sony voice recorder https://www.amazon.com/Sony-ICDPX370-Digital-Recorder-Built/...
*these pens are zen for drawing and writing https://www.amazon.com/uni-ball-Vision-Needle-Rollerball-Poi...
I take notes/draw constantly as I take the b6 case with me everywhere- I keep the voice recorder in the pocket of the case when I need to dictate an idea, an article, record a song idea or a comedy bit, dictate a blog entry etc-
But all the actual "work" which these days is really just ideas is done on physical paper and a pen or with my speaking voice- no tapping, swiping etc- no notifications or any of that nonsense- so I work outside mostly- in various places- on planes- standing in line- all the places everyone is tapping/swiping onto a screen around me-
It's 10x easier to focus when you are outside and/or in public with a pen and pad in hand and no screens/tech to destroy your attention-
Most important — do NOT check any of those the rest of the day.
Getting diagnosed with ADHD and taking meds did the trick for me.
Not sure how relevant this is, since inability to focus was always an issue for me.
I also got the diagnosis of ADHD (inattentive type) a few months ago, in the interviews they asked whether I also had these symptoms as a child. Not easy to figure out because as a child things like finishing things on time are not so important yet, and my high IQ compensated for a lack of focus. Only in secondary school it became a problem, and my grades dropped.
Also, I do a lot of things offline. Read physical books, run after work, and tend to stay out of the internet mob altogether. Oh, having no Instagram or Twitter helps a lot.
The faster you realize that we have a limited time on this planet the more ruthless you become with your time. My time is expensive and my employer buys it at a premium. So I am extremely judicious about what I am reading, watching and who I am interacting with.
Building the muscle takes time but it's not that hard afterwards.
Some things to try:
- noise cancelling headphones with white noise background (Iceland White or Naturespace apps provide really good quality natural recordings)
- clean desk
- clear split between work and non-work environments
1. I notice the movement of my attention. I used to default to something like: sit down at my computer to look something up. But before I do that, just check the email. Then I am down some sort of rabbit hole. I did this sort of thing with no awareness or conscious choice. The change is that I notice what I'm doing. Then I can rein it back. I make a choice. (I think scrolling videos gets us into a habit of not choosing what to pay attention to.)
2. Be aware of my curiosity. Try to stay in touch with it. If I get into the space of curiosity I have a lot more juice for sustained attention. Something that helps with this is long form reading, especially fiction (!). I find myself replenished for all my work. The next thing I will try is some group support: silent reading groups where you read together.
3. I have an app on my devices that limits my access to twitter and reddit etc to small windows in the day.
4. Turn off ALL notifications except text messages.
I’m off anything with an algorithmic feed. My brain can’t handle these. I turn off shorts and YouTube auto play using iOS safari extensions. I block the linked in feed. I read a handful of blogs via rss. The most regular feed I check is HN a few times a day. I’m reading books again for the first time in a decade or so.
It feels good and certainly not worse than before.
That’s shifted now after a few weeks. I’m no longer filling those moments.
The wins are subtle but nice:
- when I watch a movie, I don’t feel the need to start scrolling
- I’m reading at night again. This is far more relaxing and gets me to bed at 9 - 10
- less doom / gloom
- consumption is more intentional. I consider what I am interested in then find, rather than be sucked down the algorithmic vortex of what’s proven to engage me
2. How you start your day after sleep creates framing of the brain and you can start iterating on frames and how you drive them depending on your needs. Maybe set a schedule of things to at need done the night before (a continuity thread) maybe boxing the activities to different types at different times. It’s all sciencing the self but the brain is definitely conditioning to things and you have to mind it.
3. ADHD meds from what i’ve read are caffeine on steroids (blocking adenosine receptors, but not really adding to executive function). From personal observation ADHD also feels like a mode one can be put into by wrong brain framing (at least for people not diagnosed).
based on my estimate it might be 60%. that's 60% of white collar gdp gone.
I have noticed, the more teams use slack/teams - the teams are usually bigger more than necessary. there's more meetings & less work gets done. more 'quick chats' vs teams who are email first (async) - no immediate response required.
I created this for me https://rainbreak.franzai.com/ to force myself into a break. Into breaking out of the agent loop.
7 minutes for short, 21 for a long break.One of the things that happens to me, is I get "in the zone," usually, when coding. Sometimes, an hour can pass, and I barely notice.
But I am also aware that this is not the way most people are.
This is a great life hack, I highly recommend it if you need accountability or motivation.
You don't even need an audience, and if your work is the kind that somehow benefits from one, all the better.
It's freaking amazing, I know everything going on. I can look at it every half hour and be caught up in three minutes. I double click about one in ten messages to reply and it takes me right to the source app to reply.
When you are done, visit and parse your sidenotes.
Of course, the are the usual No Notifications, timers, etc.
Another thing I'm testing is having VPN OFF with its kill-switch ON.
[deleted]
You talk to a stranger for a few seconds, say what you're working on, and after 50 minutes you say goodbye. They stay on the video throughout the session, but muted.
It helps me focus because I always think "it's only 50 minutes".
Also, I recently deleted Instagram and it made a huge impact.
Meditate, go on walks, wake up earlier, always have breakfast, and for the love of all that is good, get enough sleep.
My “stack” is self-control for blocking social and Gmail access.
And now I built QuiteCode to focus on deep coding and learning on a more mindful way.
Is the goal of the "dopamine fracking" metaphor is to represent a "pure concentrated dopamine hit", I would argue it is a more apt representation of what hard stimulants do to your brain (i.e. a shortcut to massive amount of dopamine release).
The perverse effect of social media addiction is more akin to a slow I.V. drip where you are always in a slightly aroused state, which then becomes your baseline and any cut from it is a net negative in your life.
On HN eventually there isn't much interesting stuff on the front page, on X it pulls you in with great effectiveness
Even the fellas in Iran are struggling with staying focused..
It's been obvious to me even since I was a computer-addled kid, in the 90s, that the way computer interfaces and multi-modal notifications affect the nervous system, the capacity for sustained attention and patient reading, and so on is pernicious. The impact has both cognitive and moral valences that reinforce each other, because the instincts reinforced by computer use turn into technocratic, anti-humanistic worldviews, and even cosmologies.
I imagine it's easy to read something Ludditic into this critique, but I mean it quite a bit more matter-of-factly, and from the vantage point of a tech professional who is as passionate about coding and computers as anyone else on HN. Still, it's sobering to consider the ways in which being so computer-bound since age 9 or 10 has altered the development of my habits of mind, my nervous system and my cognition, and speculate about might have been gained and lost.
It's an early stage, fully functional but I'm looking for beta users. If you're interested in helping out or simply trying the app, please complete the form on https://coghance.com !
I've been trying to introduce more friction into my life to make doing harder things the right thing. 1. I have a rooted Orchid F1 flip phone with Telegram and Firefox focus. Telegram lets me TTS to an openclaw instance if I need to get something "out" but long interactions are awful with the small screen and latency. Firefox focus is also terrible in all the right ways. If I'm out and HAVE to search for something this is enough of a break glass solution but for the most part it's just calls and texts. 2. I carry an xteink x3 for books. I'm trying to read more so this being the only thing available has me reaching for it more than I'd normally do.
I don't have a good solution for things at work yet. Maybe I'll start blocking all websites or doing strict pomodoros.
Worst is with LLMs and coding agents, I give it a task to work on then go browsing the web, the LLM finishes in 2 minutes but I come back after 10…
At the end of the day, my mind feels super tired even though its the LLM that did the heavy lifting. I also barely remember what I was browsing 15 minutes ago. At this point I can honestly say - Im in trouble.
I’ve deleted TikTok and now get blocks of focused work done and I haven’t been this effective or happy in years.
I genuinely believe the next generation will be defined by people who can and who cannot focus their attention and get stuff done.
[1] https://open.spotify.com/show/2YCIVADHhUbpTtuCIvV7dG?si=lOiV...
You just described ADHD.
I've learned to realize how many times it's boredom or stress triggering the distraction.
I see also other people struggle as much or worse than I do.
It doesn't wreck my day or make me feel anxious or anything, no doom scrolling involved, but it sure can turn into a huge time sink very fast.
If it's a physics textbook, sure, that balance makes sense. If it's Atomic Habits (no offense to that book) then 10 pages is just not equivalent.
TL;DR get kids.
Work, family, life, world around you, all scream „me now, my problem, do this, do that, watch this, listen to that”.
Its exhausting. Humans are not built to be constantly in overdrive. I just want to sit and have peace of mind.
Issue is the moment you hit the breaks - „you lose” sign pops up and well.. you fade away. Maybe its a good thing?
I firmly believe that we've gotten so used to always-at-hand phones/apps that we can no longer handle spending a few minutes doing "nothing". I see this in my teenager.
The OP may or may not struggle with ADHD, but this is something that IMO isn't ADHD but rather a new pervasive trait across our modern society. Everything must be instant now. Emails and now chats must be replied to instantly. Service/delivery must be as instant as possible. No more waiting, no more "doing nothing". We're all operating at high speed, even during our "down time". And for no good reason -- we're just inflicting this on ourselves.
Some days, I'll set a timer for two hours, and then just work offline for those two hours.
I have most of the documentation for tools I use available offline, I'm a bit math enjoyer so I have like 5GB of maths textbooks/papers to study, and programming offline, especially when you've got docs for everything you use, is not only still doable in the LLM age, but also quite enjoyable :)
Reading the article, basically all of the distractions the author mentions are internet-based (HN, LLMs), so perhaps adopting an offline work habit might help them too :)
- Don't use social media. It's all garbage and counterproductive for your attention. Once you stop using it, you start to forget it exists.
- Always carry a Kindle, and when you're bored, read instead of reaching for other apps or games.
- Try to read 15 minutes before work, 30 minutes during lunch, and 15 minutes after work. That's an hour of reading a day — enough to get through a lot of books and papers.
- If you use an elliptical, read while on it. It takes practice, but it can be done.
You will see the biggest gains by saying bye to social media.
Oh wait, I am one and I can't resist it since day 1 on this world.
Read.
Not the zennial definition of listen to a podcast – actual books.
Here's how to reboot your reading.
Do this during a break, when you have a couple weeks. Or schedule a couple hours in the evenings. But make the time be a "habit" block that you require yourself to do. (Something else has to give – consider letting your streaming queue get longer for a bit. And replace your HN bookmark with https://www.daemonology.net/hn-daily/ … seriously!)
1. Start with trash, an "airport novel" type with giant print double spaced lines so the short story looks like a proper book. Pure story dopamine.
2. Then one with normal print and single spaced lines with enough substance to engage meta or systems thought as you read, maybe a Len Deighton or Eric Ambler if you're feeling able. Your brain relearns getting to think doesn't actually hurt.
3. Next shift into non-fiction. Something about Norway's heavy water sabotage against Nazi Germany, for instance; or preferably something field-adjacent to your field, with both narrative and knowledge. Re-priming your dopamine to hit from knowledge too.
4. Finally move into your own field, now knowledge you haven't been able to stick with to learn but wanted to. For this read something from a genuine practitioner, not the LinkedIn-fluencer TED talk transcripts in book form that top charts these days. Leveling up is its own reward.
Once you've made it through that, you should (a) be able to read again, (b) be able to focus on semantic processing, (c) regain your ideas to words to ideas mapping necessary for product/platform systems analysis or software engineering.
Importantly, prefer physical books or (“try this one cool trick!”) a full A4 or 8.5"x11" page e-paper tablet turned landscape, set up to read 2 pages side by side. When this is configured right (smallest margins, right font and line size) ending up same size as a paperback. The retention of two pages at a time, and the fewer page turns (fewer, larger, memory chunks) per book, is better for regaining focus and better for improving working memory. The smaller the font you can still read quickly and easily, the better, for the same reason.
Set your black mirror devices out of reach during the time block, don't have the TV on, ideally no music, or (“try this one cool trick too…”) while reading the first book on your list: play music in a language you don't understand but that sounds reasonably close to your own. For English speakers, germanic or romance languages are good. This makes your language centers busy wanting to comprehend the audio channel along with your visual channel, so your brain eats up the book without your mind wandering.
Using the method above, you can work to being able to sit with and absorb hardbound textbooks in just a series of 4 or 5 escalating challenges.
You'll find you regained intraday focus as well.
• • •
PS. Did you update that bookmark? Yesterday's HN Daily happens to be relevant as is so often the case: https://resobscura.substack.com/p/quality-non-fiction-books-...
I'm not convinced attention spans themselves have changed; I think it has more to do with the fact that people's brains aren't defaulting to daydreaming anymore when bored.
I think it's still an issue with people being addicted to phones because I'm sure the lack of daydreaming -- which studies have proven as beneficial and arguibly even a form of microsleep -- is likely causing a lot of the fatigue and inattention people feel; as in their brains are literally being deprived of a natural thing and so are exhausted because of it.
(as an aside: whew what a run-on sentence i have no intention of fixing)
My personal supposition with 0 proof is that the "gen-z stare" is the end-stage of this phenomenon where after being deprived of daydreaming for so long they are essentially "sleeping while standing up" as it were.
[dead]
[dead]
[dead]
[dead]
[dead]
[dead]
[dead]
[dead]
[dead]
I also noticed my issues were worse after my 3rd bout of covid :-/ I had very high sensitivity to alcohol and caffeine after the 2nd bout and have largely cut both out of my life (I never drank more than 20 drinks / year in my life anyway).
I got one from my dentist for way too much money, it broke, so instead I got a "snore reducing mouthpiece" from ZQuiet or SnoreRX which is basically the exact same thing but they haven't done a clinical study to show it reduces sleep apnea. I wear one every night along with a nose strip (like Breathe Right, but a different brand that I like better) and my mornings feel like I was hung over are long gone.
You should be using LLM agents anyway. It's the solution to every problem.
This doesn't seem factual, or at the very least, not that simple?
https://www.epicresearch.org/articles/two-years-after-stoppi...
Or they will be, and we will have an even bigger problem..
I had some success in small startups where I was left to my own devices and built cool stuff whenever I felt the urge to do so.
In corporate jobs I just have to lie and describe smooth and steady daily progress while actually working in sudden fits and starts, but it's hard to maintain the lie.
I’ve got a few dozen quarter finished projects still waiting in line…
Yeah, ADHD is very poorly named unfortunately. It really is not an attention disorder, it's an executive function disorder
This is normal for any "knowledge" employee or professional, or basically any job that is not strictly defined as doing one or a small number of fixed tasks such as on an assembly line.
This is actually something that is pretty misunderstood about ADHD.
People with ADHD don't actually struggle with attention. They struggle with executive function, because their brains don't produce/consume/manage dopamine correctly
Somewhat ironically, Hyperfocus is also a symptom of ADHD. When ADHD people are doing something that is rewarding (producing dopamine) to their brains they might be really hard to pull away from it. It's really common for ADHD people to be able to sit and play videogames for hours on end, because it is giving them dopamine. Ask them to sit and do spreadsheets and they can't sit still and they look "attention deficit". But attention isn't a problem when they're engaged with the work!
I have ADHD, and I really enjoy coding and building stuff. I can't sit still for more than two seconds when I try to use LLMs to build software though. I need to be more hands on than that. Same goal, same process, different execution, completely different experience for me. I don't feel accomplished or rewarded when the LLM writes a function for me compared to writing it myself.
I'll give it a try though. Thanks
OP is talking about something environmental that can affect anyone.
> Educated women delay the onset of childbearing and have fewer children overall compared with less-educated women
There's a whole conversation to have about the assumptions in that. Is the implication it's genetic? The children of lower educated people aren't capable of moving to greater things? Or is it societal, that our education system fails the poor and doesn't give them the tools they need to thrive?
The movie isn't really interested in interrogating any of that and I don't think it needs to. Like I said, I see it as a fun movie that isn't that deep. But there's a common thread of opinion on the movie that holds it up as a biting satire ("Idiocracy is a documentary!" is essentially a meme at this point) and those folks don't seem to engage with the topic either. A worrying number of people seem to have a takeaway of "poor people shouldn't procreate as much".
Anyway, to bring it back to the actual topic at hand (and why I originally replied): I think something like VAST goes directly against what Idiocracy implies. We're all potential victims to distractions that reduce our capacity for executive function. A more accurate movie might show people of all financial and educational achievement glued to endless social media feeds.
The Idiocracy line that I think about the most these days is "Brawndo stock dropped to zero and the computer did that auto-layoff thing to everybody."
The premise is just a silly one so that there's a plot-based reason to show an exaggerated version of what was already happening culturally. It's not intended to be the point of the movie.
…and if you do credit it with incisive societal commentary you kind of have to engage with the weird implications of what it's saying rather than just come away feeling superior about not being one of the dumb underclass.
The civil servants are addicted to their personal TV and only pause watching it compulsively when the boss comes around. As soon as the boss is out of sight they resume their fixation.
From memory it is a loop of a cowboy galloping on a horse.
Citizens have one single piece of identification, and it's not even electronic. Their location is only tracked when discrete scanners manage to see that identification. Medical care is provided promptly. Joe Bowers's court case wasn't decided by political meddling, and the two minute hates were only focused on him after he was found guilty. There are security holes in the implementation of the prison that allow intelligent individuals to escape the machine. The president has leadership, speaking ability, policy planning, honesty, work ethic, intelligence, humility, and outright patriotism. Starbucks seems like respectable open employment for adults rather than children being trafficked to some island in secret. Joe Bower's aptitude was eventually recognized and appreciated - the society wants to get better.
Like all sci-fi, Idiocracy was largely a reflection of the society it was written in. A society that had values we've long since given up on.
In the introduction to Amusing Ourselves to Death, Postman said that the contemporary world was better reflected by Aldous Huxley's Brave New World, whose public was oppressed by their addiction to amusement, rather than by Orwell's work, where they were oppressed by state violence.
Thanks for the reminder to read this.
"Alien species may isolate themselves in virtual worlds"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fermi_paradox#Hypothetical_exp...
"The person finds it difficult to control the worry.... The anxiety, worry, or physical symptoms cause clinically significant distress or impairment in social, occupational, or other important areas of functioning." DSM-IV/V
Some of the strategies used to help people with ADHD are used to help with VAST-related loss of focus and procrastination, but medication is probably not recommended for those diagnosed as not having ADHD but likely having VAST.
It sounds similar but almost coming at it from the opposite angle. ADHD is when your brain's baseline is not producing or using dopamine properly. VAST almost sounds like a sort of burnout, where your brain is overwhelmed and cannot process stuff anymore. The symptoms are the same, the effects are the same, but the cause is different.
ADHD root cause is internal lack of stimulation, VAST root cause is external overwhelming stimulation. That's how I understand things anyways
Can you elaborate on what symptoms do people with ADHD have that the ADHD “sympathizers” don’t? How can one analyze themselves “on close inspection” to know if they truly have ADHD?
If you're concerned I strongly recommend you speak with a professional. Everyone's ADHD manifest in slightly different ways and nobody on the internet can diagnose you.
> Yeah I can just log out and scroll HN, but there's a enough friction to that, that it doesn't really happen very often.
You can make sure the friction is high by having your password be something difficult to remember, written down on a note, and keeping that note somewhere "out of reach".
My hypothesis is that what's hurting focus and attention is context and task switching. It too easy to open a bunch of tabs and get stuck in the xkcd loop[1] whenever you get stuck or something gets a bit boring, so that becomes a thing you do without thinking about it.
Having mise-en-place workspaces where things that aren't necessary for what you are doing are out of reach, and reaching for them means you have to log off and lose your state, is generally more than sufficient to fix the problem.
It's not that you can't ever check your socials or scroll HN (that wouldn't work for me as part of running a business is a digital presence), you just can't do it while working on something. Makes everything just a little bit more deliberate.
(Also on a practical note, chrome/chromium in app mode is great for this, if you do need to be able to go online, but in a limited sense)
It was a choice to make technology that absolutely hammers you with information. It was not the right choice.
I want to build and use stuff that promotes focus. I only have a vague inkling of what this means, but it's quieter, less instantaneous. And it's going to be an uphill battle because everyone else is doing the opposite.
But yeah, it's an interesting space to experiment in. I feel we could be doing much of this a lot better than we are now. My mise-en-place work accounts is very much a hack, and considerable work to set up.
On their own, browser tabs, notifications, and IM at work all make sense on their own and are not evil at all.
Taken together, there are now 8 people trying to talk to me all day every day, constant alerts unless you go out of your way to severely restrict what and who can message you, and you find yourself with 60 tabs across 3 windows doing 7 things at once but also doing nothing because... your brain was not built for this computer.
For the same reason, i don't install ANY apps on my smartphone and tablet, like social apps and news apps. If you have to grab your laptop to check them, it takes way more effort.
And, if you really need to access something "urgently", you can always use the web browser (which is annoying) where i always use Private Mode (no easy logging in.)
When I am home, I am exhausted every single day. Sometimes I don't even do anything, still exhausted.
Idk, if it is information overload, monotony, depression, work, brain get fried by constantly having to manage everything.
I also have kid....and let me tell you....to get him anywhere on time is mission impossible. Doesn't want to brush teeth, doesn't listen AT ALL, doesn't care about losing privileges. I guess this stress doesn't exist when we travel because we can spend 2 hours getting out the door.
I really need to stop using the phone as much and try to figure out what is causing it.
What an awesome tip!
I wonder how much is real information, i.e. information that truly is related to your life, interests and within your sphere of influence; and how much is just noise that camouflages as information.
Mine are gone for good. But I no longer want to be able to hyperfocus, because it is invariably a sign I am losing control. For me, hyperfocus is dysregulation that benefits others and not me.
I just want to be able to think straight, keep my house tidy, and not spend a couple of hours every day wishing it would turn out to be my last day.
Once I recognized constant connectivity and internet media as mild poisons like alcohol, and regulated those, I found myself a lot happier without drug dependence. (YMMV, every brain is different)
I can focus on whatever I want now. A mechanical puzzle, work, an open source project, a video game, my family, my friends, or typing this comment to a stranger on the internet I empathize with. My motivation is seemingly endless now too.
Get rid of the doom scrolling poison and give your brain time to reset and recalibrate. Spend several hours a day away from the internet. I cannot promise it is the only change needed for you but I promise strategic life change experiments will provide a better chance of a positive outcome than waiting to die.
Unfortunately my ability to focus declined precipitously three years ago and despite all sorts of long walks, breaks from the internet, breathing exercises, diet changes and ultimately stopping work entirely for months at a time, I have never got it back. I can no longer really do my job.
I don't want "hyperfocus" back at all. It's a disorder trait: it allows other people to expect more sustained over-exerted effort from me than I can possibly deliver without making myself ill.
I would like to be capable of managing my life on a day-to-day basis, but I am now so burned out that this is a struggle. I don't have any confidence that will return. I am what is left over from who I used to be.
But I am also now over fifty, single, childless, and I don't expect to return to my old job because everything I did has been changed so much by AI anyway.
As much as I try to learn about that AI future I will need to return to, and try to prepare to return to work, there is no returning to who I was, and I don't have the energy or focus to direct into some new version of me, so I will likely just potter around for a couple more years until I no longer want to.
Changing the way I have worked for decades in a fundamental way has been hard, depressing even, but then exciting. My way of taking control of the AI story is racking GPUs at home and doing all my work from those. I have found those with experience programming before AI actually have a major advantage to steer things into exactly the right shape.
> I will likely just potter around for a couple more years until I no longer want to.
Community tends to help. #!:matrix.org welcomes anyone not spamming :)
No replacement for IRL hanging out with other humans. Board game nights and forcing myself to do weekly social events really helped with my overall motivation for reasons I cannot fully articulate. Just made me feel like I existed as more than a handle on a screen, you know?
Traveling also really helped. Maybe give yourself the chance to try the things you have never tried before and ramp up that novelty part of your brain again.
I know depression and desperation. At one point in my career all I could find for work was minimum wage telemarketing and day labor while fishing leftovers out of garbage cans, taking sponge baths in gas station bathrooms, and spending nights sleeping in the trunk of a scrap car in a snowy winter trying not to freeze to death.
Really really glad I kept going, and kept taking risks, moving, and changing things until something worked. I have good and days like anyone, but am on average happy now, and trying to enjoy every hour of my life I have left.
It can absolutely get better if you decide you want it to be.
[dead]
We are all exposed to so much adversarial noise trying to steer us that people are loosing the ability to focus and to filter.
Dieting and exercising helps. Cut down on exposure to noise from apps, streaming services, devices, etc. And exercise your brain, use it. Read long form text, take notes, write intentional arguments, use these arguments to steer yourself and those around you to create things of value.
I get various emails with curated links to various stories, and I will click a link to go read that story. First, it often takes me to a browser re-direct that sometimes successfully redirects, sometimes doesn't. Then sometimes the redirect is to an app that I've subscribed to. Which would be great. Except for the times it opens the app but fails to redirect to the specific article. Then if the article is on a web page, it commonly fills the page with more and more ads slowing down my phone and giving me a tiny keyhole opening to read the text through.
Then I often want to go back to the email and pick up where I left off. Which works >50% of the time, but fairly often will skip to a different email.
I truly believe that for reading news and articles the state of software was much better 10 years ago than today.
My wife turned on a meditation feature on our very old Alexa. I guess the app was deleted or something, but every morning Alexa turns on and says "Starting your meditation times ... Sorry, this is no longer available". If I tell Alexa to turn this off, it has no idea what I'm talking about and it shows up nowhere in the iOS app. Instead of meditation, I got a nice dose of minor annoyance every morning.
To say nothing of ads themselves or CTAs or cookie consent banners or...
I'd frequently gripe about how much I felt my attention was fractured as an adult to my grandfather, between taxes or coordinating with service providers or whatever, and his response would frequently be "I'm retired and I can't keep up!"
It does feel that there's pressure in many avenues of life to capture and fracture people's attention.
I also put my phone in a kSafe by Kitchen Safe for 20-30 minutes to break out of doomscrolling with no takebacks. I keep a wireless charger in the safe so it can charge while it's in there.
Another thing I realized by working at a job where I couldn't take my phone is that you can just go to the library and leave your phone at home.
[dead]
I just bought [product placeholder] and it has [features placeholder].
I am no longer distract by phon.
* Monitor your health and track your time to help stay focused.
* Disable as many spurious notification types on your phone as you can afford to do. My recommendation: All notifications that aren't live messages from individuals.
* Keep your phone out of immediate reach so that you break the habit one likely has of instinctively reaching for it to fill in moments of boredom.
[dead]
You should do this regardless, no watch needed. The only phone notifications that should be turned on are ones that could be urgent. Phone calls, maybe text messages, alarms, and calendar reminders. No email, no social media, no stupid random apps telling you about some discount.
Notifications are absolutely abused by everything. Phone calls from known numbers, texts from known numbers on my device and then meeting start reminders on my laptop are the only notifications enabled.
For some things its just the truth that some people have "the drive" and some people don't.
So simple to solve all those things in mere minutes, yet you can't even say how? Do I have to buy your book or subscribe to your website to find out the solution for poor posture and procrastination!
An uncertain reward is a strong motivator in psychology. You give a rat a lever that drops a food pellet, he'll push it when he's hungry. You give a rat a lever that drops a food pellet 5% of the time, he'll keep pulling it, build up a little stockpile and then gorge himself.
You give a rat a lever that does nothing and drop pellets at random times, he'll practically pull it until his arms fall off.
Don't you see it's the same thing? Why can't you just admit to yourself how irrelevant it is and lose interest? I suppose you could use it just to read an article or two, but you're in the comments as well. The apps are just their Hacker News.
I like this line, but respectfully disagree that they're a 1:1. The difference being relevance and some of the dynamics of use.
Hacker News pertains to my profession. It's high relevance tech news with comments from peers.
I'm not following anyone just because I know them personally (or worse, because they're famous). I'm not posting photos or videos of activities that I want friends to know about.
There's no infinite doomscrolling either (I view the front page a couple of times a day) nor are there notifications interrupting me.
I think everyone is shifting between maker schedule and manager schedule constantly depending on what is going on, and that's so much more exhausting than just being in maker schedule or manager schedule full time
It's not just Reddit that's like that, but it was especially striking after having been away for a while.
And allow me to return the nitpickiness as well. "That sounds closer to the opposite end of the extreme." - I don't see how that's closer to the opposite end of the extreme? Are you saying only watching YouTube channels which you've subscribe to (despite being subscribed to dozens I only see maybe one new video pop up every few days) and spending some time on TWO work-related social-media is the opposite end of the EXTREME? How?
On the 'extreme' bit, this might certainly be along the lines of personal experience- but I find LinkedIn, HN, and Reddit to be among the worst offenders in the basket of attention hogs / dopamine sinks.
My reasoning there is mainly rooted in the fact that these platforms all present a couple dozen or so items that are one click away from soaking your brain (whether that be comment sections, or the parent item itself.)
Social media being work related doesn't necessarily mean that the platform lies on either end of the spectrum here, to me. I work on AI things, and work related social media is certainly an avenue thats detrimental to me- in the fact that the aforementioned platforms produce more content that I can reasonably say I have the ability to consume in a healthy manner.
Again, your experience may be different; but I wouldnt put those platforms anywhere near what cold turkey might mean for me. For me, still consuming relevant work stuff while dialing down away from the extreme would probably be sticking to one or two newsletters, which post ~monthly or so.
I think if the platform is designed in such a way that the goal of the average post is aligned with whats detrimental to attention/focus/dopamine-response, then it can't possibly be used in a straightforwardly healthy manner.
> But I can't escape the next step which is that you still have to do go out and do all the same stuff anyway
That's exactly what I was afraid of, but it turns out that actually getting dopamine for completing tasks goes a long way to blunting the existential dread of there being yet more tasks. Consistently now whenever I feel crappy it correlates back to either (a) crap sleep or (b) forgot to take my meds.
Just my 2c, YMMV, everyone's different, etc. I had a hard time really understanding the anecdotes I got from medicated friends myself, but I'd encourage others who suspect they have ADHD to try even a very low dose of something for ~3 weeks and see how they feel after. I'm at the lowest "clinically effective" dose of my prescription and the effect is still significant.
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.
Except it's everyone everywhere. Hands up in the thread anyone who doesn't recognise some of these symptoms. Our jobs, tech and societies are making us ill.
One prosaic explanation is that in many people there is a predisposition to a mixture of hyperfocus and being distracted that society used to place at least some value on ("jack of all trades, master of none", researchers, multi-instrumentalists, artists, librarians, scientists).
The stereotypical image of ADHD is hyperactive ADHD — people who can't hold down a job, get caught up in stupid outcomes or violent outbursts, have accidents, get addicted to drugs, can't settle, distract and annoy everyone.
But it's increasingly clear to me that hidden "inattentive" ADHD is a normal human attention type, and yet those who have it, apart from being chatterboxes, tend to experience the downsides less visibly.
Another question is: is it really "everywhere" evenly, or do we see it more in "knowledge work" careers like IT and research where ADHD people (who are easily bored but highly attentive to interesting subjects) used to thrive?
That is, are we seeing it over and over in the tech industry because inattentive ADHD and the aptitudes (multiple talents, micro-expertise) it tends to foster drove us to this in the first place?
It would be good if society went back to a lower-distraction model, but it is not going to. Some of us are going to need to understand how to keep our brains under control, and some of us are going to need medication or stimulants. GLP-1 is normalised for another societally-driven illness, after all.
And again, it's not that he is distracted like everyone is, that I'm pointing out — it is that it is deteriorating in a way that worries him and he now needs external monitoring (buddy/honour systems) to cope at all. He is, I fear, heading towards burnout that can be life-changing.
Glyphack's experience definitely mirrors my own and I just got diagnosed with ADHD this year and medication absolutely helps my focus.
If you're wondering if you have ADHD this is basically the pre-assessment GPs use in the UK (which then continues to triage and then a full assessment):
Personally, I find a very strong link between my devices and my ability to focus, as they're the space in which I spaff my time. I do not believe myself to have ADHD, I believe that the machines I use offer limitless ways for me to lose track when I'm tired.
I'm deeply skeptical of pharmacological solutionism, particularly in the domain of mental health. A variety of drugs can be a boon, life-saving to many, but are over-prescribed and treat symptoms not causes.
With regard to amphetamines in particularly (we called it 'whizz' where I'm from, back in the day), we're talking about a class of drug that can cause dependency, problems with sleep and sex, anxiety and plenty more. I would not say they're not without side effects in the slightest.
Sure, great if this sort of stuff helps, but I find the "just get a diagnosis" line utterly inadequate and borderline disturbing.
Gain and keep traction. Attention is our most valuable resource. If you chose what you attend to, you can achieve at the limit of your physical and mental potential. If you attend to what others wish you attend to, you will be ceding the difference to parasitic systems.
In general if you want a no-internet 1 hour in the morning, organize yourself to wake up 1 hour earlier (maybe going to sleep 1 hour earlier). You sleeping until 8am, and you sleeping until 7am and having no internet for 1 hour, is equivalent to the outside world.
[Editing to note that perhaps you were downvoted because OP lives in a place with internet issues and couldn’t use Discord to cowork with friends, so the video and bandwidth heavy approach of Focusmate isn’t a viable recommendation]
I read the author as saying that his mind is being fracked, with all the implicit destruction that operation can cause, so that others can extract something from him. Yeah, I see that the analogy breaks down, because the extractors are after attention not dopamine (we're the ones who get the dopamine).
Daydreaming should be perfectly acceptable either way, but people seem to think it's weird (concerning, even) when someone spends a bit of time to stand (or sit) around while appearing to be doing nothing at all.
But having a smoke is an activity, and the smoker's participation in this very passive activity assuages the concerns of others.
They are always a good group of people, with a roguish edge as smoking became less acceptable. Usually they are really kind people who represented every part of the the org, and loved some juicy gossip, and I’d learn alot about the informal networks in the company, who the admins were, etc. They would be entertained by my tales of idiocy from a dozen companies. I miss those days!
Not just smokers. The little groups who would go and leave for a walk and coffee. The people who ate lunch together either going out, or together in the kitchen.
These were opportunities to cross the boundaries of your department and role, it was a great excuse to make friends in other groups, and gain insights.
For me the first ones I tried to align with were always in CS and Accounting. The former often had great insight into emerging issues (next weeks "bug", next months "project"). The latter had insight into how the business was really doing, hearing from the people who looked at your "raw" numbers could tell you more than any company meeting where "everything is great".
Working from home killed these, and "zoom" or "slack" are not the same - people are far more guarded when they understand that the company owns that communication channel, that it is recorded/monitored.
I noticed other co-workers going to the gym during the day and realized I could take a break as well. That's when I started to take walking breaks. No one ever said anything.
(I quit smoking when my first daughter was born.)
This attitude does lead to some people being miffed because I wasn't available on Teams for 10 minutes, but anything I can do to push back against the idea of my being available to everyone at any time is a win in my book.
I quit smoking about 15 years ago, but still vape - and I remain a huge fan of the easy excuse to step away for 3-5 minutes and just zone out, or change from a large group to a smaller 2-person conversation outside.
Even back when we could smoke in bars, I would still sneak outside from time to time to settle and recharge.
I sometimes find toilet breaks or coffee breaks (waiting for kettle to boil) fill the “daydream debugging” requirement. But that depends on having a clean bathroom with enough stalls, or an empty kitchen without other people making drinks.
Working from home definitely helps here. Though significantly less so during the holidays when kids are off.
Edit: just in case there’s any misunderstanding, I’m not suggesting having the kids around is a bad thing. I love my kids. Just that they have an obvious impact to my concentration.
Then I came back to my desk, saw that I had missed a call or two from my boss and he had a concerned message of where I was. I ignored that and sent him an architecture document an hour later. After years, it is still the backbone of our hosting infrastructure and will go into certification audits later this year.
That said, nicotine could get more done in my brain in those 5 minutes, but the toll on my body wasn't worth it.
[deleted]
Yea sometimes stuff has to sink in or marinate. If you don't give that to yourself then you'll never realize it's gone.
I realized I was missing this because I sometimes sit in my chair and tell myself "this is your life now, you sit in this chair" and I do that for as long as possible. I do this in part because a part of me just doesn't want to do anything: I don't want to work, I don't want to do fun things, I just want to do nothing. So I have an inclination towards being lazy.
But when I'm on that chair and give myself full freedom to do so, then I get agitated and want to do something. I plead with myself really hard. But my lazy part is like "fuck no... we're finally on this chair, I'll die this way, we're never getting off this chair."
And then at some point my mind says something like "FINE, I'LL EVEN DO THE TAX FORM THINGY I HAVE BEEN PUTTING OFF. I'LL DO ANYTHING!"
When I judge the activity to be productive enough, I get off the chair.
The real challenge is that I forget that I have this exercise because it actually works for me and it makes me realize that when you're doing "nothing" your brain is doing a whole lot.
Hacker News has been useful in that I’ve come across a few inspirational ideas on consuming less input (and producing more output):
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44702212
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39674619
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20781463
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24582837
I’ve made some changes to my life in that listening to music is more intentional – not just a distraction to have in the background. It probably helps that I’ve also started to learn a musical instrument. I can also go for a walk without needing to have music or a podcast to listen to.
For me, the very act of everyday living has become very enjoyable and fulfilling in recent years. Doing the dishes, cooking, gardening, sweeping the floor, putting out the trash. Those are not "chores", that's what life's made of. Some of it creative, some not, but the difference is you're simply present in the moment and in the world.”
Next time I do the dishes, I will appreciate being alive, and be thankful to be doing something healthy for my brain. Thanks!
I say something similar in the context of parenting, that a reasonable amount of boredom is good. I think it likely that being constantly entertained makes people more prone to seek constant stimulation.
This did not start with phones either. I am Gen X and it happened in my childhood with kids being dumped in front of TVs. One difference was a lot of adults resisted this and limited hours in front of a TV, whereas now a lot of adults are addicted to phones too.
There's definitely some hedonic treadmill type thing going on with attention and stimuli.
We've spent a week or so exploring just one state at a time…
There's nothing so mentally refreshing as a long, boring drive.
I am not a sleep doctor/therapist nor am I any sort of expert on the subject.
About 5 minutes ago for me, my missus says that I live with my head in the clouds (which is a nicer way of saying if I'm not actively doing something I just zone out and retreat into my own head), I've always been that way all the way back to school (with the inevitable consequences from teachers).
I've mentioned on here before though that I never got addicted to my phone, I don't even know where it is ~80% of the time.
My relationship with technology is (nearly) always intentional, I still access the internet 95% of the time on a desktop PC (which reduces doom scrolling since that just feels wrong on a desktop) so when I walk out my office I'm just "offline" in a very distinct way, if I go for a walk my phone stays at home, everyone who knows me knows I'll answer a text at some point but it could be a day or two.
To sum it up, I resent the passive intrusion of technology into my life.
I hope to find the strength to be more like that. Also to give a better example to others.
I notice making the screen go grayscale (can configure volume up+down to do this in android) already makes doom-anything much less long-lived. The next step, since apparently I can't go cold turkey, is to try one of these alternative minimalist launchers to see if it helps. And to teach people that if they want something from me urgently, they need to call.
On the topic of watches, I used a smartwatch the company gifted me for a while. Went back to an analog watch. Much better.
Personally I struggle to remember any day I haven't had at least 10-15 minutes of idle time doing nothing, just thinking idly, but I still have similar struggles as the author. Although I barely use my phone for things neither.
For me it's one of the three layers.
First layer, it starts to wonder to the direction offered by real world. Wonder about song lyrics I'm listening too, or the colors of buildings, or something like that.
Second layer happens if you purposefully stray your thoughts away from a real world. Brain starts trying to remember whatever you wanted it to remember. For example, if I tell myself three times "don't forget to call mom", if I just sit idly, chances are my brain would surface "call mom". Sometimes it surfaces "remember you wanted to try arch 2 years ago". Also this is the layer that works badly if you tried or depressed, because it can start surfacing bad thoughts.
Third layer I call time skipper because it's just a basic time fast forwarding. I have no idea whether it's true meditation or controlled dissociation or something else, but thoughts slide of your brain, so there's nothing to remember afterwards. My friend said that maybe meditation is a controlled dissociation.
I prefer to say that I'm so dumb, I can just switch my brain off.
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?
Back when I was still stuck to a desk in school (up hill both ways and without a pocket computer), I learned that folks would tend to leave me alone if I had a book open. It didn't really matter what book it was.
I could just gaze at it with my eyes relaxed and unfocused, with the printing appearing as some kind of indistinct phoric blur. And as long as I turned the page occasionally, that was good enough to keep the would-be tyrants at bay.
(And then I'd ace the test on Friday, repeat for dozens of weeks, and do it again next year.)
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 same thing. That’s another aspect that’s not really being called out, TV also has contributed to the homogenization and destruction of distinct and unique cultures, i.e., actual, real diversity; because everyone is programmed and trained by TV on the same material, as the famous water cooler discussion about a TV show episode everyone was watching tells us.
Now imagine you’re “Gen Alpha” or maybe even “GenZ” where you have not even had anyone read you books that required you to imagine, i.e., daydream, what was being told to you?
These are all compounding factors that are going to even cause massive problems for this sham, fake facade, con job American society.
Talk to teachers in elementary schools and middle schools, even universities now; they’ll tell you things that should make and discerning person be alarmed. And that’s without even talking about the impending impacts of AI.
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
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.
I just tried setting it up with Apple Passwords and it wouldn’t accept the QR code. It seems to be specifically made for Microsoft.
We went through twenty years of millennials being this or that, how none of them work, how they are moochers. Every generation gets called lazy and dumped on by the previous generations; as far as I can tell, it is mostly bull shit. I have yet to experience anything extraordinary about gen-z that I don't see in gen-y, gen-x, latchkey, boomers, greatest generation, etc.
Maybe younger gen-z or gen-alpha like you say are truly messed up, I think we have data coming out of schools that support that, but I have yet to interact with them as I don't have kids myself. Everything I have said is inherently anecdotal and no more important than what you've seen
Every other person I meet along the trail have headphones and some watch to measure their training. I get it, they want to get better at running. Maybe they train for some competition. I don't. I will never be an elite marathon runner and I know that, so I couldn't care less about getting better as long as I come back with a tired body and busy mind.
Everybody is different, but I have never understood why not more people are like me.
[deleted]
Also in the shower, but then my phone isn't handy and I lose a few thoughts.
If my mind is not defaulting to daydreaming and rather asking me to find a distraction, doesn't this mean my attention span is worse?
sometimes when i "space out" i am fully daydreaming, other times i am (in generous terms) "composing my thoughts". when its a daydream after snapping back to it ill think along the lines of, "guess i needed to process that"
I would also blame the Western commercialization of meditation. I have recently learned that in Buddhism meditation is just one side of the coin, and it’s usually diametrically paired with the opposite technique of contemplation: instead of concentrating into one infinitesimal point, you expand your awareness to encompass the whole of reality. Which is a bit like daydreaming. It’s through these two exercises that one finds the middle path of equanimity.
With technology, we spend our time with narrowed focus, we are told that to stay sane we need to cultivate our focus, and never find the time to release the grip on it, to just let the brain be and expand and relax a bit.
The Taoists had figured it out all along: to find focus, stop focusing so damn much.
The linear story is that increased awareness of focus teaches the sitter that there are no real borders in reality, it is a seamless whole, and as the sitting continues, awareness naturally opens up to include the full current moment - seeing thoughts as thoughts, emotions as emotions, sore knees as sore knees, twitchy neighbor as a twitchy neighbor, etc thru the myriad things all showing the way, bright and clear.
But they are mutually reinforcing partners that appear as distinct.
The only limit is yourself.
There is evidence that is not the case though https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8878541/
I think they were referring to rebound weight though, something else I'd heard about these drugs that also doesn't affect everyone. A scarier one was one person whose weight got too low so they stopped taking it, but for some reason had a lot of trouble gaining any weight and getting up to a healthy level.
I disagree with the extremes.
Why wouldn't self defense be number one, in many cases/times?
Why wouldn't we simply stop spending on education at break even ROI? (to be clear that's not the same as the education creates a salary bump equal to the tuition ... there are Nth order effects of education that should be priced into my point)
And even if the premise of Idiocracy were true, less intelligent people aren't worth less than more intelligent people. That's the "eugenics-y vibe" problem mentioned earlier that makes the movie uncomfortable for some people.
[deleted]
Yes, they obviously are? Just an absurd thing to state.
Yes, higher education rates lead to lower birth rates. The movie still has eugenics vibes, by implying that the “wrong kind of people” are reproducing.
The fun in idiocy is the "isnt this dumb!" take on a bunch of society that is one big dumb step worse than current life but certainly recognizable.
Everything turned into advertising. Costco expanding into everything. Brainless tv and the related celebrities (that people love for the gimmick but don't give a shit about as people). Health care that only supports a diagnosis by matching to a few kid-friendly tiles. Politics as professional wrestling, nepotism, incompetence, and overpromising. For a related laugh, go look at one of the online quizzes from 2016 about "which of these ten quotes are from a real presidential candidate and which are from president comacho".
Idiocracy is a fun, silly satire that is nearly a cartoon, from a bunch of folks who made a bunch of successful social commentary cartoons. It very much isn't a eugenics story - if Mike judge were actually writing that as the intent I think it would be dark and with a vicious ruling class.
I am burned out rather than sad. I can’t get across that I will struggle to travel because that requires planning and initiative that I cannot functionally sustain, or that my previously quite busy social life is gone because I fail to manage an ordinary day, let alone one that will need me to meet people. These are things I am unable to do.
It ultimately doesn’t matter what I would like to do or could fleetingly imagine doing: within an hour I will have lost focus on it or on the drive to do it. I certainly don’t have sustained aspirations because I can’t focus on them. Most days I definitely have an hour or so where I feel like it would be better if it was my last day, but I get distracted from that too.
Everything I achieve happens in these very short windows of time; sometimes maybe I can spend a couple of hours in any day on one thing if I am lucky, but I may not feel the impetus to return to it the next day.
I am lucky if I complete tasks for others that have purely external impetus or a deadline.
It is not about cutting out more compelling or distracting stimuli; my house is quiet and I can also lose focus by falling asleep if I am too comfortable.
I still don’t want hyperfocus back because hyperfocus did this to me! But it’s difficult to envisage things getting better when I can see they are getting worse.
On HN/LI, at least for me I really don't find them disruptive or time sinks. LinkedIn seems boring, HN doesn't have infinite scroll, and again most articles don't really interest me that much.
I don't use Reddit exactly because I feel the posts evoke an emotional response from me and I tend to stay there. Haven't used it in a long time, same with other infinite popular scrollers.
Anyway, my core point being for the platforms that do trouble me in my experience going all-out helped. If I set a time limit or time window or use grayscale or all those hacks it doesn't work. All those are more like gateway drugs. So if HN/LI does truly provide more noise than signal I would personally cut it out but that's not the case for me at the moment.
or if you excelled at some topics which you found interesting but did middlingly or poorly at others...
I watched the skepticism form then evaporate in my psychiatrist as I explained that I did relatively well in school overall... except for the three or four classes I thought were boring, and how I consistently procrastinated but managed to pull off decent work right before hand.
(I got diagnosed after 30, though apparently my elementary school wanted to screen me.)
1. you can't prescribe someone a fixed society
2. what constitutes "over prescription" is subjective, and some increase in prescriptions is to be expected in line with better knowledge and so ability to diagnose people who were previously missed
3. contrary to several other psychiatric medications, stimulants have a known MoA and consistently beat placebo
4. amphetamine taken recreationally is often in different forms and much higher doses than would be taken on prescription, by people who aren't in need. Things like sleep and anxiety can actually be improved by such prescriptions
> just get a diagnosis" line utterly inadequate
There's an entire industry with licensing boards and factories and regulations. How much more money do you want spent on the problem in order to form an adequate response, and what would that look like to you?
But unlike management, you get to tuck them in and “I love you” for no reason is a standard bonus with a free hug.
It has varied a bit depending on the timeline, but: Going out for a walk (or to just change environments and very passively stare at nothing) has been less socially-acceptable than going out for a smoke, in my experience.
One of these things is weird, or perhaps inducing of ire ("How dare he just go outside when he feels like it! What is he even doing?").
The other is, at worst, both understandable and disgusting ("Of course he's out there again with that filthy habit!").
I also take a longer, 5 km, walk most days, as a way to control type 2 diabetes. This short regular walk is quite different.
Honestly the biggest issue is that the increased focus means I can get into a zone and two hours go by without pause, so every thirty minutes is not always met.
It’s amazing how much value there is in idleness.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f84n5oFoZBc
(oops, cross-posted with a similar comment.. well, shows the vid is watchworthy)
Every now and again, I try to re-frame the way I view these tasks and try to be more positive about them. I remind myself how fortunate I am to be a (reasonably) fit and healthy adult who can physically do them. And I always feel good when I complete them.
> What am I doing? This dumb.
And then I remember that it is dumb and I go back to leaving it alone.
Out of 10,000 people “checking” their phones, probably around 1 of them is actually waiting for something urgent and important. The rest are doing it out of pure addiction.
If it's addiction, it's addiction through exploitation.
I also try to patronise cinemas that remind viewers at the start of the screening not to use their phone at all. I stopped going to the Cineworld near me because there was too much phone use (both calls and checking alerts) – and Cineworld had stopped the reminders at the start of the film for people to switch off their phone.
There is a half way step (on Android at least, I assume Apple has similar) you can set "Do Not Disturb" and then white list the people who can message/call through the "Do Not Disturb" so you are reachable but only by people you trust/want to be able to reach you.
> On the topic of watches, I used a smartwatch the company gifted me for a while.
I just didn't use one, I have a rough rule that introducing new technology into my life has to be a complete and obvious unalloyed win or I just don't, it's a very high bar for a new technology to clear but it also means I don't spend money on things that end up in drawers because they either turned out not to meet the hype or just annoyed the living hell out of me after the initial "oooh shiny" wore off.
I also disable any and all notifications of apps other than direct messaging apps. No group message notifications.
I don’t even whitelist anyone anymore. If it’s important they will leave a message and I’ll get back to them.
I can't really do that. For some things (urgent and important), loved ones need to be able to reach me.
But yes, a lot of this advice would work.
My daily driver is GrapheneOS. I don't know if android has a similar feature, but I assume not because my GrapheneOS phone only supports fully greyscale, and the difference is so stark that I can't keep it on. The most addictive apps I have on it are my Hacker News client and NewPipe (the nonaddictive YouTube), so I am not too concerned though
The solution to this wasn't willpower, it was to get rid of all that fucking cocaine. There's a reason you don't have the stuff lying around your house today, if you did you'd probably get hooked. In 2026 we're basically speedrunning the coke boom with infotech.
So once again the solution is: get rid of it. Any time you're in a low stimulus environment, remove the tech so that you don't HAVE to exercise willpower. That means turning off the phone and the watch and maybe stuffing them in a drawer in another room or something. That's all it takes.
I can't say how society will look back at this moment in history 150 years from now. But I do know I'm way happier and more relaxed when I just shut off the devices and put them away. When I'm at home or in the office, my phone's on mute, in a drawer/bag/other room, and I don't think about it unless I take it out for a few minutes to order a delivery or do a 2fa or something. At night it's simply turned off. I'll never own a smart watch. I still keep the phone on me when I go out and haven't found that to be a huge concern because if I'm at a bar or something it's competing with a lot of other stimuli for attention. We were never 100% available to anyone for all of human history until the last 10-20 years. I am not opting into this current Cocaine Moment.
I always found the form factor extremely limiting compared to a desktop (it's the same reason my laptop ended up running a TV upstairs, the idea of programming on the sofa sounded great but in practice I'd get frustrated and immediately retreat to my quiet downstairs office with multiple screens when I had to do something tricky/requiring concentration).
Where I do use something that optimises for distractions, I look for how to minimize the distractions (e.g YouTube - I use the excellent Unhook (with Ublock Origin) which turns the YT home page into a search box and little else, hides mixes, shorts and other distractions) and make it work for me.
[dead]
You can daydream about being the protagonist of such actions which is not the same as watching other people doing it
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.
Except: My involvement in these activities doesn't leave much, if any, room for the kind of detachment that daydreaming requires.
Now that few people smoke, I don't think they are seen as a valid excuse to duck out for a few minutes.
"I need to stretch my legs" is probably better these days.
So when I'm not working the watch is... just a watch.
Do you mean my belly when I look down? That and the answer to "can I keep up with my kids?" has always been enough fitness tracking for me.
I wear a self winding watch. I suppose if it stops going while I'm wearing it, I've been very still and might be dead.