HN represents a wellspring of deeper reading than is generally afforded by the current entertainment cruft portals of the web - reddit, FB, insta, USA today, financial times, etc etc down to the SEO hellholes of recipe sites, youtube product placement; you get the idea. Let's appreciate HN for the quality of reading material and its curb on our drift to the rest of the 'popular' web. And I don't think I'm alone in always keeping an eye out for the next serious hub of real reading material!
That said I don't read nearly as many books as I did in high school. Books are wonderful things and can be a portal to a novel frame of mind. But then again my life is much busier these days and there are more demands on my time which are not responsibly ignored... So I cherish HN as a flourishing intellectual community, in easily digestible chunks. A bit like the "periodical" era of newspapers a century or two ago.
I used to read books all the time. I spent most of my waking hours as a teenager reading books. I’m 35 now and can barely hold attention on anything, I read maybe 3 books a year if I’m lucky. Even on Hacker News I almost exclusively read and comment on the comments, not the actual article unless I see someone says “have you read the article?”
I don’t really know why. I have 8+ hours a day screentime on my iPhone, which isn’t even including my Mac and work laptop which I might browse HN on. I feel sort of lobotomized but most people I know are still way dumber, I’m muddling through my career and not getting negative attention. I’m not even busy. I’m just lost and exist mostly moment to moment, and am lucky enough to have developed enough skill to write code before all this happened to me.
However, I have mostly (60-80%?) retained my ability to focus on reading without distraction. But there has been something lost and sometimes it feels like an uphill battle to retain your ability to concentrate on one thing at a time. Would be curious what makes a difference here?
I did some conscious choices, not sure how they contribute but I have the impression that each of them helps a bit:
* Not using social media and treating messengers more like email. A real-time conversation may happen, but does not need to.
* I (mostly) avoid browsing news sites where there is endless scrolling / content. I try to mostly read and almost never comment (as this makes me curious on what the reactions on it are)
* I bought a Kindle to read without distractions. It's in airplane mode most of the time, too.
* I separate my work and private equipment
* Only play games casually and sometimes not at all for longer periods of time. I mention this, as games usually have "optimized" on (rather quick) reward feedback and I can imagine that this is very similar as social media in some sense.
Kindle also really ignited my love for reading again this year.
I think it tricks my brain a bit into thinking “oh, it’s an electronic device anyway” :D
Another thing that helped, was a bit of a challenge with my partner, reading books in bed together, and having reading dates, when we would just snug on the sofa reading each other their own book.
I really like the idea of a reading date but I also know that neither of us want to read or hear every detail of what the other is reading. Our book interests are quite divergent, although we do enjoy sharing an interesting passage or description of what we are reading every now and again.
Me and my partner have fallen into this pattern too, down to sharing interesting passages from whatever ebook we’re reading. I’ve read more books in the past month than I have the entire year!
It's funny you place games in the "bad" side of things, this hich need to be reduced. I group gaming with reading because the kind of games I play require a level of focus and engagement, and my brain rather spend hours scroll HN and Reddit. It really is an uphill battle.
Having said that, there are many games that are more respectful of the player, with quieter user interfaces without design dark patterns to keep you hooked.
Here are some suggestions:
*Microsoft Flight Simulator* - Fly around Earth, preferably at a low to medium altitude with a small airplane. It can teach you about real world flying procedures if you are interested, with things like Vatsim. You can play with others without worrying about griefing as there are no collisions between airplanes modelled. If you want to shoot, too, try DCS World or IL-2 Sturmovik. https://store.steampowered.com/app/1250410/Microsoft_Flight_...
I find that keeping a physical journal, writing with a real pencil on real paper, while playing games, is good for my eyes and my mind, as is taking regular breaks and going for walks in the real world, every day.
PS. A childhood friend of mine started this website dedicated to relaxing games: https://yinindie.com/
The creators have revealed that the script of "Disco Elysium" consisted of roughly 980 000 words, and the 2020 rework "The Final Cut" was apparently even more massive, roughly 1.2 million words [1].
Its lead designer Robert Kurvitz is an Estonian novelist, and the development team largely consisted of members of a "small but loud" alternative cultural association. Another member of the team is Kaur Kender, cult writer and literary enfant terrible of late 1990s Estonia. I think his books are a required reading for Estonian high school students. It's a game made by poets, basically.
I'm not a gamer, but I think the game (entitled "No Truce with the Furies" during early stages of development) was largely based on a sci-fi and "proper literature" mashup novel by Kurvitz that imo gained a somewhat cult following in Estonia. The book pays remarkable attention to detail, and it took him about 5-6 years to write.
Outer Wilds, Return of the Obra Dinn, for investigations and memory and "human puzzles".
Manifold Garden, Opus Magnum (+ other Zachtronics game) for puzzle solving.
I had given up the hope of ever being as amazed by a game as I used to be as a kid, until I played Outer Wilds. It's truly a magical experience. And the soundtrack is amazing, it still gives me chills sometimes.
Kentucky Route Zero has been the most intellectual of journeys I went through in 2020-2021.
This game almost requires that I put it down every now and then to ponder and think. It calls for a glass of wine in a quiet place at 3am. I wish my friends would play it so I would have someone to discuss with.
Get Winfrotz for Windows or Lectrote under Linux/OSX and download Anchorhead, Spider and Web, Make It Good, Vicious Cycles, All Things Devour, Enemies and Slouch Over Bedlam from IFDB, they should be in Z5 or Z8 format. "Heroines" and "Enemies" are good, too.
I would recommend The Long Dark and Sable. Heavily focused on exploration and immersion. But really any game with an open world that doesn't hold your hand too much and lets you make your own choices.
I picked up Sable on a lark (also because I saw the Moebius-inspired art style and immediately fell in love). It's a fine game that you can tell was a labour of love by only a handful of people, for better and for worse. It hit that same vein of open-ended exploration that Breath of The Wild has and the same feeling of constant discovery the latter game has in its early hours. I do wish that Sable was less utopic, with dangers in the wild dunes from creatures or weather hazards, but that wouldn't work with the art style and doesn't make sense with the narrative. It's a great game, even if you can get around the often-janky flight model of the hoverbikes and bugs like occasional clipping into the environment.
Too late to comment, but I wanted to add puzzle games like Portal or The Talos Principle. The world building is stimulant, and the mechanics can be really hard on your first play. Their downside is the rapidly diminishing replay value, unless you collect achievements, which defeats the purpose of a casual game.
When I replay one of those, I do it for the story, because the puzzles are child's play when you know the solutions.
adding on some recs that aren't necessarily 'good for the mind' but great from a gaming as art perspective and not designed for addiction -
co op: terraria, Deep Rock Galactic, and Magicka
various interesting games: Subnautica, Transistor, noita, hyperlight drifter, control
Based on the context, it would appear that he is referring to mobile games like CandyCrush and their ilk, "games usually have "optimized" on (rather quick) reward feedback and I can imagine that this is very similar as social media in some sense". I don't think that refers to the NYT Crossword puzzle.
Ok, yes I see your point - I should have be more differentiated here. I can see that there are games which could also force you to keep focus. What I had in mind were more of the "almost instant reward" game mechanics.
For a long time I thought that my constant internet use was a symptom of my disinterest in other things, but more recently I've come to realize that it is, in fact, the sole cause of said disinterest. The quick dopamine hits you get on the internet have subconsciously convinced your brain that the internet is what matters, and that everything else (i.e. your life) is simply a distraction.
Don't take my word for it. You can test this hypothesis in ~2 hours. Hide and/or turn off all of your electronics, and wait. You'll sit on the couch, you'll eat a snack, you'll find that your phone has magically appeared in your hand (how?!?), but just put it back down. As you try to go 2 hours without any passive entertainment, and I can almost guarantee that you'll discover that your mind will begin to show interest in things like hobbies/reading. If you can't get online, a book sounds pretty nice.
There's the rub--if getting online is an option, it's always the best option. The only way to do other stuff is to carve out time where getting online (or, for me, passive entertainment of any kind) is not an option.
Fun fact: If you can forego passive entertainment for the week, you will see all of that junk for what it really is, to your horror and eternal benefit.
Even though I can see the value in what you’re saying and agree completely, I can’t help but feel like my attention span has been ruined by my casual internet usage.
I’ve been reading again, before I go to bed, and after months of picking back up the habbit I still only feel half as able to concentrate on novels as I was as a teenager.
I'm the same way. As a teen I'd sit down with a several hundred page book and spend an entire day reading the whole thing. These days I spend my spare time on reddit/HN or gaming (which I did in my teen years as well). Much less reading, although I aspire to read more and have a long backlog on my Kindle.
Maybe I'll commit to reading an hour a day or something. I certainly have the free time. In fact, I'll start now. Wish me luck.
My experience matches those of others in this thread. I barely read anymore and find it difficul to focus. Largely, my tastes have calcified and narrowed quite a lot. I used to be an adventurous reader and always tried random books I saw on the library shelves, but these days I find it difficult to get into something new, and if I do read a book I've probably read it before.
I think if I just start reading it'll come back to me. Starting is the hard part. So like you I may as well start now instead of browsing HN. An hour a day is more than doable given how much time I waste here and elsewhere.
One thing that seems to have helped some of my friends who have experienced the same issue of not wanting to read anymore is to find one particular book or style they liked before and go deep into that author's backlog or similar styles. And to add to that, don't be afraid of reading pulpy fiction; you're not trying to impress anybody with what you're reading, you're doing it for yourself. Enjoy it. Read young adult fiction, read Stephen King and James Patterson, read Beverly Cleary, whatever. As long as you're reading, you're building that bit of your attention span back, and you can move on from there to other things.
I fear there is a big subconscious element to it in "smart people" circles where it almost feels bad to be reading without learning.
I strongly recommend this approach, it's exactly how I got myself back into reading. I started back by just picking up a super light read, then some fun novels from a couple authors I liked from back when I used to read a lot, and now I'm starting to branch out more again.
Like so many others in this thread I had completely stopped reading in favor of quick bites on the internet. One thing I've been surprised to notice with reading again is how deep the experience can be compared to an online article, even for a pretty light book.
So yeah, for anyone who misses books but is having trouble getting back to them, try picking up the first thing that looks fun, even of it's silly or easy compared to your favorite books in the past.
I started reading Brandon Sanderson with this mindset and I'm loving it. Before I would only really read nonfiction but I would easily get distracted and didn't read much in practice. Now I'm reading like 100 pages a day and hopefully it improves my concentration. Even if it doesn't I'm really enjoying the books
Stormlight Archives are his latest and greatest. I'd recommend those if you were a wheel of time fan, or you could start with Mistborn. They're set in the same universe but it's not really necessary to have that background.
May I suggest the Expanse series. It’s I think a good “split the difference” book series. Not too pulpy, not too intellectually straining that I’m struggling to hold my attention like a Neal Stephenson book either.
I wholeheartedly second this recommendation. After struggling to read last year, I picked up the Expanse series and managed to break my rut. And the final book was released last month so you won't have to go through the months of waiting like I did.
> I have an unreasonably large collection of 40k books, they’re ace.
Literally? That is, wasn't Ace the name of a "pulp" publishing house? Would be cool to have a collection of 40K of those... But I imagine even they never put out quite that many titles.
I had the same experience but my problem was from the sheer amount of games being released. I couldn’t pick one, became overwhelmed and then lost the drive to try something.
So I stopped worrying about the reviews, about length about all the details behind a game. I check out Steam 250 or SteamDB charts, pick one out and just try it. I have no expectations going in, and I’m happy to drop it if I don’t find it enjoyable, there is plenty more to try :) You also have to listen to your mind and don’t force it if you don’t feel like playing.
This has been a success with me trying out Timberborn, Dyson Sphere, Gunfire Reborn, Valheim as well trying out Minecraft again.
Nah, doesn't work for me. I know the games I like; they are all old and I know I love them. I don't follow the news on new games at all. I simply can't concentrate on the games I like for more than 15 minutes. I get distracted, I alt-tab out all the time, and eventually I close them. It's the same with movies or books. It takes a superhuman effort for me to sit still and watch a movie.
If anybody has any recommendations on how to proceed from here my fried brain and I would be eternally grateful :P
I feel related to this. I wish I had a way out to tell you but I can only provide comfort in the thought that someone else feels the same.
I think a big part is the constant dissatisfaction, that time is wasted, and I should be doing something more productive. I start a movie, I see where this is going, this is not even that great -> I should be doing something else... I play a game, I understand the mechanics, I see the grind ahead -> I should be doing something else...
It's a negative loop like doomscrolling a news site. Very few things are truly offline and I don't think about the time I'm wasting.
But computers, they give me the best, and they give me the worst of myself.
I find it helps a little to remember that learning and observation are skills and humans, like other animals, 'play' for a reason. Even if you didn't 'produce' anything, you practiced your skills of observation and deduction, which are survival skills.
I'm also someone who has to have a real 'reason' to do things. The best short-circuit I've found is finding the value in my own desires.
I'm 35, I'm an addict as well. I suffer from a grinding omnipresent feeling of wasting time.... I have a wife cery anti drugs. My cou try has legalized weed... Very rarely use it... Once a year maybe. But I have incredible rich experiences being stoned, being in the moment. Maybe to truly check out we need some form of drugs... Dopamime shots retain us, THC gives us temp relief?
(1) Try learning a highly complex game like Dota 2. You can't alt-tab (well, you can, but you'll likely die fairly quickly), and the sheer number of things going on at once will require your full attention... but there are still many small things that you can succeed at that will keep it fun while you're learning.
(2) Consider doing some "concentration training" where you engage in a non-media activity (that's still enjoyable) in order to improve your concentration. For instance, for me, this is programming - unlike a movie (which I also get bored while watching), I can dedicate my entire brain to programming and still not be bored - but it's still enjoyable for me, and doesn't feel like work.
Only for specific personalities. I'm somewhat prone to Dota addiction, but 14 out of the 15 people I play with are not, and in both my case and that 15th person we've managed it with some difficulty.
For most people it won't be an issue - you're far more likely to not enjoy the game at all.
Maybe the real question, why do you want to do thise things? Because games and movies don't matter that much, really. Nor do books, really.
You dont need to force it. Try something else. Try different hobbies to spend time with.
And also, old games are not as good as nostalgia has us remember. Maybe you are alt tabbing, because the books you ate picking, movies you watch were good for past you. And now your interests changed and they don't fit you, actually.
You make a good point, and I think there is fear in that the hobbies that we used to enjoy get replaced by something less substantive, even less “productive” - scrolling for endless content, engaging in short-term meaningless comment threads like this, consuming information that the brain forgets within hours.
Meditation. Unironically. I haven't kept up with it because I'm a lazy person who's been too busy having a mental breakdown, but I find I often end up pulling something up when my attention wavers or I have a stray thought that pulls me out of the moment. When I meditate, I'm more aware of my thought patterns and can notice stray thoughts as stray thoughts (as opposed to boredom or disinterest; they're surprisingly hard to differentiate sometimes, at least for me.)
>I know the games I like; they are all old and I know I love them.
>I simply can't concentrate on the games I like for more than 15 minutes.
Maybe you should try playing something different. A new challenge might encourage you to concentrate more and/or build neuroplasticity, and you could find some satisfaction there.
go visit an arcade. crazy enough there are still companies out there making new arcade hardware and the benefit of being out of your home, in a place dedicated to gaming, will help you concentrate.
> I had the same experience but my problem was from the sheer amount of games being released. I couldn’t pick one, became overwhelmed and then lost the drive to try something.
Yeah, I don't even pay attention to what is coming out anymore. If something is worth playing, it'll reach me through the grapevine.
Altough, I only really play very few games atm. Dead cells, payday 2 and warframe in this case.
Maybe it is not such a bad thing. We spend 8+ hours a day doing concentrated work. Then we drive cars some more time and spend some more time learning. Not doing concentrated work afterwards makes sense. It makes sense to do less concentrated hobbies after - sport or crafts or whatever.
If your work is boring and unchallenging or if you have as much free time as students or kids, concentrated hobbies makes massive sense.
I kinda feel like we were trained to be maximally receptive in an era when information was just recently proven to be the most valuable thing, but also was still kinda rare. And then they just fucking dropped the information hose into our livingrooms and... now I'm blinded.
I think information is no longer the most valuable thing. Attention is. That said, I too am struggling. The dopamine response to new content is addictive, and I rarely keep the promise to myself to go back and extract the substance from the resources I discover.
YouTube and Instagram search (each of which make a concerted effort to derail your search with dozens of shiny examples of viral content) is a good example of how difficult it is to maintain focus against tools optimized for their own benefit (engagement).
Yeah. As somebody who's always had a strong interest in archiving, information organizing, and information persistence, this is certainly... an era. It's so hard to stop, and it's a lot harder when my personal life is so intertwined with the things I'm professionally/intellectually interested in.
For example, I'm fascinated by how people on TikTok conceive of the algorithm and the mutual push-pull of category definition. How the hell do I explore that without spending 2 hours derailed by fun history facts? Answer: I do not.
> How the hell do I explore that without spending 2 hours derailed by fun history facts? Answer: I do not.
Actually, the answer is "train your brain". Nobody's forcing you to get distracted and start clicking/tapping on other things - you're taking the actions yourself.
Now, of course, TikTok is designed to pull you in as much as possible, but ultimately it's still completely manageable. The maximum addictiveness of the internet (and adjacent things) is still not even comparable to that of hard drugs, and people can quit those.
It can be hard (depending on brain chemistry and how deep you're in), but it's doable, just like starting an exercise habit, quitting smoking, or learning to control video game use or eating habits.
I was being facetious, but yes, this is the actual answer.
Meditation helps me a lot, but the key to cutting out addictive habits for me has always been replacing them with something else, and nothing so far has quite scratched my intellectual itch like studying people online except grad school, and that doesn't count because that's part of what I was studying anyway. Usually, people are encouraged to do other things, but I think for those of us who are genuinely fascinated by the Web, it can be difficult. Imagine if you were genuinely really interested in the medical effects of hard drugs but the only way to study them was to do them.
Your approach of "replacement over removal" (of bad habits) is a solid one that I've had some success with myself! Better to distract yourself from the bad thing than just leave a void there...
And, you make a really good point about people who are actually interested in the Web, as opposed to just consuming a lot of content there. I'll have to give that some thought...
It might be interesting to see how humans solve this. Maybe it will prople some denser / easier way to explain things. Or maybe we'll just stop the flood and go back to calm learning with the good old material.
I also agree #1 is big, BUT a lot of sites are platforms now so ideally you'd have something that just throws out the particular parts of the platform that train you for dullness, etc. My method is rss/atom feeds whenever possible, basically use alternative channels to get to the same information.
As for #4, I have a place where I charge my phone out of sight. I normally have mobile data turned off, so I can switch off internet access by disabling WiFi without having to worry that I can't be contacted in case of a real emergency. This perhaps works better because I also implemented #3.
#1 is a big thing - delete your links to FB, reddit, whatever it may be. Diminish your portals to the engineered attention sucks out there.
I aspire to a separate personal phone vs work phone. Have a lightphone but have not set up separate numbers for work & personal so I can't yet fully unplug from work when desired.
I would give you more credit and say the landscape of how content and news is delivered has changed. Many articles are written in a way to generate engagement first and then inform. I don't feel bad about not wasting time on clickbait or sensationalized articles. The comments section is a good litmus test to see if something is worth spending my time on. I imagine you've learned the same habit.
When you were younger, I imagine books were the primary way in which you learned new things. Now there's fantastic blog posts, articles, video summaries, and discourse about basically everything. Multiple people don't have to independently spend energy distilling the same article over and over in order to have a meaningful conversation about it. With a place where I trust the people discussing something, I don't have to spend energy verifying their conclusions myself. That frees up time to do other things.
This was the exact realization that I had. At one point I noticed that when I was 16 I could sit down with a 500 page book and read it in one sitting while as an adult I can't concentrate even for 30 minutes.
Feeling stupider than my teenage hormonal self was honestly so embarrassing I just forced myself to read an hour per day without distraction and only work with everything else turned off except for music. It's better now but I still feel like years of constant internet multitasking and browser tab-switching have fried my brain somewhat
> I used to read books all the time. I spent most of my waking hours as a teenager reading books. I’m 35 now and can barely hold attention on anything, I read maybe 3 books a year if I’m lucky. Even on Hacker News I almost exclusively read and comment on the comments, not the actual article unless I see someone says “have you read the article?”
I used to be this way too. Then I just started reading again and now I can't stop. The trick for me -- which might be circumstantial and not related at all -- is an e-reader I always carry on my person, and an unlimited free books policy from my employer.
Sometimes I only get a few minutes of reading here and there. Sometimes there's a few hours at a time. But it's on the level of when I was a child and teenager again.
I mean, I still don't, generally read the article because the comments on HN are often higher quality. But the books I read are even higher quality.
And the things I've learned from mathematical, financial, systems theoretical, organisational, political, anthropological, and technical literature has really taken me places.
> Sometimes I only get a few minutes of reading here and there. Sometimes there's a few hours at a time. But it's on the level of when I was a child and teenager again.
So I dunno about everyone else, but thinking back on my teenage reading habits (which, like plenty others here, I could sit and read for hours and never find time nowadays), I didn't only read for hours at a time. I always had a large book in my backpack I could read a few pages of between classes, a smaller book that would fit in a pocket outside of school for similar short waiting times, and a third book sitting next to my bed where I'd read one full chapter each night. Then the full-day reading times would usually be if I found a fourth book where I couldn't help myself.
I brought back the one-chapter-per-night thing several years ago and I've been getting through books fast enough I no longer feel like I'm missing out. It's still rare that I sit for hours reading, but so many times I've had to make myself stop and go to sleep I no longer feel like it's out of my reach.
> I used to be this way too. Then I just started reading again and now I can't stop. The trick for me -- which might be circumstantial and not related at all -- is an e-reader I always carry on my person, and an unlimited free books policy from my employer.
I was facing similar challenges and I'm doing something similar and I can see my interest in reading gradually going back up (I bought an Onyx Note 3 e-reader and the fact that I can checkout books from the local library is doing wonders for me and my daughter). I'm hoping this sticks and would recommend trying out this approach.
Usually this kind of literature are however more similar to university textbooks for which I prefer to read them as PDFs on the iPad as my Kindle tends to mess up the formulas and figures if you get them in an Amazon Ebook format.
Sometimes you get a PDF from Amazon to begin with, for which I find the the Kindle a subpar experience.
I've come to dislike the pdf format more and more with time. It's great for printing, it's great to show documents really as they are, and it's bad when it comes to... Well, about anything else?
I feel it has become an standard of document viewing when it should have never gone beyond document sharing.
I totally see what you mean. For the most part, I have no trouble deciphering the garbled equations on the Kindle based on context and general understanding and subsequent description. When I do struggle, I tend to fall back to the PDF to clear the confusion up.
PDF is my favorite book format. I like the idea of reflowable text, but my experience is any book with pictures, tables, or math looks pretty terrible as an epub or kindle book. Books that would be suitable for Kindle (usually fiction), I find listening to as an audiobook much more convenient .
I have started to dislike pdfs a lot more since I bought an e-reader. A lot of them are basically scans of pages and basically there is no reflow; I just have to constantly zoom and scroll which is a major put-down.
It's not really my choice. My employer threw a Kindle at me on my first day, and then I e-mail my Amazon receipts to an administrative person at work who makes sure I'm reimbursed as part of my next salary payment.
Kobo Libra 2 is nice. Easy to hold, has a warm toned backlight (I switched from kindle to kobo for that reason alone) and with Overdrive it’s really easy to check out library books.
I used to read voraciously as well. It's very time consuming. Looking back, I spent at least one university summer simply reading every day, rather than doing a boring internship to get me a high paid job out of university. Reading is ultimately a leisure activity, like watching movie or listening to music. It may occasionally cause you to think, but it is another form of consumption. Reading HN has done more for my career than any books I read.
Not saying that is bad though - honestly I miss those carefree days of my youth terribly. I hate the rat race I live in now and the modern TC driven tech culture.
Lots of what you describe sounds to me like symptoms of depression and burn out, which is something I'm familiar with. Could be you need to change jobs or change something else to get yourself out of the rut.
As a similar-yet-different anecdote: I used to read all the time as a kid and I still read a lot as a 34 year old. I never stopped the habit.
I usually spend 8+ hours a day in front of my PC and I still read 50+ books a year (mostly fiction).
The internet didn't replace my reading habit though it did replace my TV time. I haven't spent more than a couple minutes in front of a TV in years.
Also don't sell yourself short. Whether you read books or not does not make you dumber. It's just another way to spend what time you have.
My friend, you just described a form of depression.
Not inferring anything from an online comment, but you may want to tackle the issue from a different perspective.
All the best. If you’re fine and happy, I’m sorry for my comment.
Try the Black Lotus app [0]. It has well-researched, applied framework called RARE to help you gain back your control on attention, build concentration and mindfulness. It's basically exercising of the brain/mind which we usually tend to ignore. The founder is an expert meditator and he has demonstrated voluntary activation of any region of the brain just by one-pointed concentration, under lab conditions [1].
I am similar age as you and I finished almost 25 books this year, and similar number for the past few years. It's had an amazing impact so far. Hopefully this can motivate you.
What you need is a habit change, which begins with an identity change (becoming a reader, or book club member). That will have long lasting effect, but identity change is not easy to begin with. So you setup systems and structures in place to encourage reading. The easiest way I think of is to download audio books that you would like and go for a walk. Other examples: You can uninstall distracting apps. You can publicly announce how much you want to read, or commit to writing some article that requires you to read something.
These ideas are outlined in Atomic Habits. So the solution to your problem of not reading lies in reading this book :)
I think much in the same way that heroin makes the ordinary pleasures life of life seem completely irrelevant by comparison, the supernormal stimulus of the web browser does the same thing for books.
Tbh, this sounds like a cry for help. Have you consulted a professional? If it's not a health issue, can I recommend changing your surroundings a bit and make it conducive to reading? FWIW, I keep my phone in 0 notifications mode and I don't have FB/Insta/TikTok etc. In addition, I keep some books and magazines lying around so it's easy to grab a quick read every now and then.
Finally, I have a goodreads reading challenge on and it's a nice kick to keep getting closer to the goal. This year's goal was 22 books and I did it recently :)
I’ve been through many addictions and nothing will happen until you look at yourself and the negative effects it’s having on your life and mental state and say “enough”.
1. Join a book club. Even with just two other friends. It holds you accountable and will force you to read most days. I often find myself aimlessly watching YouTube and reading Reddit comments at 8:30pm. It’s that bored stage of the daily social scroll where I’m not getting any novelty or pleasure. Then I realize I can read my book instead.
2. If you have a significant other, trying reading a short story out loud at night. My wife and I did this for a while and it’s awesome.
Hmm, I have both now. During the day, I build up around 4-5 hours of screentime on my phone, but at night, I have basically 3 options.
Read, Play games/program (e.g. boot up my PC) or Sleep.
If I start with any of them I won’t get to do the others any more (not because of any concious decision on my part, but because they all suck me in to such an extend it’s 2am by the time I’m done).
Can you get absorbed in a movie or binge watch a TV show? If so, I suspect your attention ability is still intact. You just need to re-practice consciously directing it again. I still struggle with it too, but was able to "get lost" in a book again. It was key though to move my phone way out of the room, and was hard to get started.
> Can you get absorbed in a movie or binge watch a TV show?
As a fellow 34 year old, no. Most movies these days are way too long and boring. Most shows it's tough to watch even a full episode in one sitting. Let alone binge a season.
I think, for me, it's because there's just too many things on my mind. And a lot of stuff just feels like it isn't worth my time. Why am I sitting here watching a dumb thing that kinda bores me when I could be working on any of the multiple dozens of tasks on my plate?
The only thing that works is getting a little high. Because you do need to give your brain a rest.
For reading books, audio and going on a long run is great. I read dozens of books per year that way. It's great and far less boring than shows.
Dont' watch modern media. Dive into old films that stand the test of time. Anything by Godard, Kurosawa, Fellini, etc.
I have awful attention spans, but I find that if I challenge myself by watching stuff out my comfort zone, I'm able to pay attention to it so well. If I know it's a great work of art, I find myself paying attention to just about every single shot, the composition of the frame, etc. It's incredibly rewarding, and it definitely makes watching most modern content impossible now
(That being said, I absolutely loved Pig and The Green Knight from this year)
I read at bedtime as well and I kind of wish I never started that. I've trained myself that reading means sleep. At any time of the day if I start reading something long, in ten minutes I'm starting to drift off. Any time I pick up my book to read, I have to step back a few pages and start there because I was in the process of falling asleep and don't really remember the last bit of what I read.
I was worried about that, but I find it doesn't happen to me unless I'm lying in bed, or I'm already tired. As long as I'm reasonably awake and sitting up, I can read for as long as I like.
One comment about only reading the HN comments and not the article. I usually do the same. I think that's the nice thing about HN. The commentary can be more interesting than the article. Also some articles are way too long to read when you're browsing HN and not really in "read mode".
> ...spent most of my waking hours as a teenager reading books. I’m 35 now and can barely hold attention on anything, I read maybe 3 books a year if I’m lucky.
Additional anecdata: 57, maybe 8-10 books a year nowadays (if that?). Which was a (low-end) monthly ration up through my twenties, into my thirties.
You’re comment resonates a lot with me. I used to read many books and now just mindlessly browse the internet. I feel like a zombie at times.
At the same time, I’ve never read as much as today. I get inspire by people like you living at the other side of the world. This new world we live in has definitely pros and cons.
This sounds a lot like my experience as well. Like I'm just waiting for the rest of my life to go away so I can look at my phone. It's terribly unsatisfying, like a diet of only Doritos, but moment to moment that's what I want.
Try listening to books and articles. Worked great for my I’ve past 370 trash novels this year. I listen to everything at 2x and slow things down when I hit a new concept.
Anna Lembke, Dopamine Nation: Finding Balance in the Age of Indulgence (August 2021)
The book «explores how to moderate compulsive overconsumption in a dopamine-overloaded world».
> Anna Lembke is professor of psychiatry at Stanford University School of Medicine and chief of the Stanford Addiction Medicine Dual Diagnosis Clinic. ... She sits on the board of several state and national addiction-focused organizations
> In Dopamine Nation, Dr. Anna Lembke ... explores the exciting new scientific discoveries that explain why the relentless pursuit of pleasure leads to pain... and what to do about it. Condensing complex neuroscience into easy-to-understand metaphors, Lembke illustrates how finding contentment and connectedness means keeping dopamine in check
--
I am curious about how and how much discipline overrides the practical need for this theoretical field.
> HN represents a wellspring of deeper reading than is generally afforded by the current entertainment cruft portals of the web - reddit, FB, insta, USA today, financial times, etc etc down to the SEO hellholes of recipe sites, youtube product placement; you get the idea.
HN _thinks_ it represents a wellspring of deeper reading just like every other site mentioned also thinks. Same as the others it is a shallow echo chamber, and reading through TFA it's pretty easy to see the behaviors described being here too. We should not fall into the hubris of assuming we are 'better' than others.
Agree. I purposely spend less time on HN now because it's a lot of the same thing over and over that I realize I get sucked into. A site like https://techurls.com/ lets me see what's trending without getting sucked into the comments.
As far as books go, I read every night and usually bounce between entertainment and usefulness.
I like the irony that most people probably didn’t read the article (or hardly ever read the articles) and yet agree that the content they find on HN must be so deep and that we’re special.
I agree - HN is still an echo chamber rage machine, and people engage in the outrage and negativity on HN as much as reddit or twitter or facebook or whatever. Yes there's also articles mixed in about some niche technology topic sometimes too.
If you search with the term "book" here and sort by date it's pretty impressive how often books come up. But also, Wikipedia.org is reading too, and I personally find that search term way more interesting.
Broad and shallow knowledge can be really helpful for building connections, creating new knowledge with overlaid metaphor, and priming the intuition.
Plus a lot of people here are very deep workers during hours 9-5, and break time is just going to have to be the opposite in most cases...
Okay I do like HN—I'm here for a reason after all—but it is flawed like any other curation. For one, I find that it veers extremely literal and nerdy. For some topics such as programming and math, this is wonderful, as programming and math are both topics where literalism and nerdiness are required.
But in some cases this blend is not great. I wouldn't put HN as a great place to get your knowledge of more social, cultural content. There are good articles on occasion and of course great users/comments, but there are times when I am confronted with the fact that there is a remarkable homogeneity which is reflected in the discourse on race, gender, politics, etc. This is a site populated by primarily tech workers and we have to face facts that tech workers are predominantly white and Asian and male, indeed predominantly cis-hetereosexual male. I don't mean any of this in an accusatory fashion; this is simply the reality of tech. But it does mean that the discourse is not capturing the entire spectrum of experiences and the few voices who do not fit these paradigms can, on occasion, be overwhelmed by the majority.
Not to mention, as a tech worker forum, I'd hazard that the average commenter is far more well versed in tech than in say, US politics or third wave feminism. Much as we'd find the discourse on technology in a politics forum rather naive and uninformed, I'd have to imagine that a politics expert would find the political discussions on HN similarly so.
TL;DR: Use HN as part of a balanced information diet. Read books and try to get out of the tech worker bubble.
I'm not a huge fan of the "make it about race/gender/politics" rhetoric, and frankly this demonstrates the issues I mentioned in the post. The entire framing of "making XYZ about race/gender/politics" implies that XYZ was not about race/gender/politics and that the addition was simply unnecessary. However these issue of race/gender/politics permeate our society and do have an effect on a lot of issues. If I'm being honest, it's usually the demographics who have the least discrimination and the most power who think that these issues do not permeate. It's quite easy to think racism has no relevance to your daily existence when you don't get stopped by the police; when people don't commit hate crimes on people who look like you; when your existence is validated by media, government and society as a whole. Racism doesn't operate on a neat time clock. It shows up everywhere.
Of course there are exceptions. Some people of color truly do believe this "not bringing race" rhetoric. The very existence of Black and Asian republicans demonstrates this. But they're pretty rare. And there are people of color who use race as a cudgel to attack others. But they're also pretty rare. I'd advocate that if you see someone bring up race/gender/politics, try to not see it as someone "bringing in race", but someone sharing their experiences, experiences that may not be yours, but are still valid experiences.
I'm not sure where parent argued that we should not be concerned about police brutality, hate crimes, or the ongoing fraying of the social fabric which gets commonly internalized as a sense that "society is not validating my existence". Framing those issues are purely matters of race/gender/factional politics is just as harmful.
I'm also not sure where I argued that we should frame it as purely matters of race/gender/politics. Certainly there are other aspects and other lenses. But these are intersectional issues and race/gender/politics happen to be crucial lenses.
I don't mean btw to straw man the comment by mentioning hate crimes/police brutality/etc. First of all, race shows up in much more mundane stuff like awkward conversations about where you're really from, or people making implicit assumptions about my parental background based on my being in tech. It's my bad for not mentioning those as well.
However it's also that these dramatic things, as thankfully rare as they are, have a pervasive effect on one's life. I've never gotten hate crimed, nor do I know anyone who has (knock on wood). But I have thought about whether to buy my parents pepper spray. I have wondered each time a mentally ill person steps on the subway and looks in my direction if I'm about to get hate crimed. My Asian friends and I joke about it because it's something we think about in our day to day life. I can't speak for white people but I don't think most white people have that concern. And if this isn't part of your daily fabric, your daily existence, you might not understand that nobody is "bringing race" into stuff as much as they are sharing their racialized daily existence.
> I'm also not sure where I argued that we should frame it as purely matters of race/gender/politics.
That's what people are doing when they "bring it up", effectively, whether they realize this or not. It's a populist, lazy, anti-intellectual framing which rejects deep engagement with object-level concerns as somehow being less meaningful than "acknowledging/validating my identity/daily experience". It's a rejection of real, actual politics as the domain of creative adaptation and compromise-- as if "sharing [one's] racialized daily existence" obviates the need for this kind of consistent, active, pro-social engagement. And it's bad regardless of who's doing it. It doesn't matter if the people involved wear MAGA hats or not, the underlying dynamics are pretty much equivalent.
You're both right. (I'm half in the in-group and half-out.)
It's nice that there's no political litmus test to post here. My gay butt would rather have to read some eyeroll inducing things but receive a greater variety of opinions because I favor variety in topics and opinions. This is because I think opinion and topic variety is important to synthesizing new ideas, to discovery, and to serendipity, which is what I like about tech.
On the other hand, it means if you point out that these demographics impact the tech world or its discussion centers, you get poo-poo'ed.
As somebody who would love to discuss things like the benefits, unexpected consequences, and drawbacks of more women in STEM or how, if all developers on a project share traits, they're more likely to miss needed features or key bugs depending on their audience (something I've also seen on all 'marginalized' teams), there's not anywhere to have those discussions that don't turn into shit-flinging contests that would make chimpanzees proud.
Very much agree. Computer related stuff in general, like anecdotes about buying brands to high level programming, and a wide spectrum of STEM discourse is great on HN, but I often find myself scratching my head like “lol really?” at comments which fall outside that. A lot of people here have a bit of a chip on their shoulder in topics outside their expertise just because, I guess, they have a false sense of confidence in all topics, art to philosophy to psychology to parenting etc etc, due to having high level ability in one hard one.
But to be fair, reddit and every other social platform is mostly terrible with both STEM and humanities.
> tech workers and we have to face facts that tech workers are predominantly white and Asian and male
In the US at least many tech companies have way more Indians that white. It's funny to me how Indians in the US are usually not in the white/asian conversation, and even often put in the "people of color" group. Just shows most people think race is about skin color.
I view it as Indian ⊆ Asian ⊆ people of color. I agree that Indians are often neglected in the Asian discourse, although I think there's been more work to include non-East Asians in the conversation lately.
The term people of color is bad and shouldn't be used. We shouldn't classify people into group of colors. When people see an African American person they are likely to have different bias about the person than when they see an Indian person. The bias is not about the skin color, it's about the group the person belongs to. Another example, Indians and African American have completely different issues in the US. Indians have great representation in academia, all top professions (tech, medical, law, etc), live in rich suburbs, etc. Racism against Indian people is usually from anti-immigrants people. African Americans have bad representation in everything I just listed and racism against them have nothing to do with immigration. In the US at least, the Indians and white groups are much closer to each other than Indians and African Americans (obv I'm generalizing here, even white is way too broad as a group).
"People of color" was invented as a way to help black people in the US by forming a coalition of them and every other minority/immigrant group. It's unclear if this worked, but it's probably effective at stopping the old system where immigrants (Italians, Irish) would "become white" by being even more anti-black than the WASP class they were trying to enter.
Reminds me of one bit of a conversation I heard post-graduation ceremony from an Indian fellow grad insistent upon Indians not being asian on the grounds of it being its own distinct subcontinent with its own ocean. I'm not entirely quite sure what to make of that personal perspective and what it qualifies as.
I struggle with this too. Books and newspapers are a good resource of course. It's also quite good to read some academic humanities and social science writing. HN and other fora make a big point of free speech, open minded discussion, but I find that there aren't always articles from intellectuals in the academic sphere on HN. Of course these sources have biases of their own, but isn't the point of open minded free speech to read those with whom you disagree?
I "read" much more books than when I was a teenager. The difference is that they're all audiobooks that I listen to while I cook or do other housework or during commutes.
> Let's appreciate HN for the quality of reading material and its curb on our drift to the rest of the 'popular' web.
Yes, but incentives are not there. Where incentives are is throwing flack at anything and anyone that is popular(including HN) since they also get clicks by association. So it simply does not matter how far and wide you shout stuff like that will always get created and will on occasion rise to the top.
Whilst I agree with your sentiment, I do think that including
The Financial Times (ft.com) with Reddit, FB, and Insta.
FT is one of the few newspapers that I feel still doing serious journalism
that I can sit down with, read and feel better informed at the end of it.
A good newspaper and I do prefer paper if at all possible, is a stimulating source of reading. Most newspaper has given 90% of their space to
gossip, sports, "lifestyle" WTF does that even mean? I still have not figured that out, lifestyle of the rich and famous, random paid for content.
I have for a long time wanted a service that curates today's real news and
presents it in an easy-to-read format.
I would prefer an epub, could take a pdf.
Nothing that exists today that I as a regular person could afford.
I do think it would be fun to see what the presidential write-up is every day.
Hmm maybe I can find it declassified from years in the past??
(I have no love for USA Today so I dont try to argue that one. )
But how much of that busier life is real and how much of it is a feeling from being online so much? I usually have a couple hours to myself at night and still wind up doing “Just one more crossword” or checking up on some sports team rather than shutting down.
The way to cure this is to develop a habit that severely limits undirected online browsing and socializing. Part of it is just an education of your own aesthetic sentiments. I read James Clear's "Atomic Habits" (not that this is a special book, I was just on another kick in which I really needed to improve my productivity and picked up a suggestion to use a physical counter of some kind to make a habit stick.
I bought a bunch of marbles, and for every bloc of time that I avoid undirected browsing or social media use, I move a marble from one container to the other. My goal every day is to get through an arbitrary number of marbles (160 right now), after which I can do whatever. If I slip up and open a social media page, HN, or start browsing newspapers, I dump all the marbles out of the container, which generally makes it impossible to meet the day's goal unless the slipup is very early in the day.
This has been nothing short of amazing for my life. One issue that I had is I had a physical twitch that would start developing after a couple minutes doing one thing, like a work project, at which I would feel the urge to check the news or social media. This twinge would show up and I would type into a browser window to relieve the sensation. Instead I more or less replaced that twinge with moving the marble from one container to the other. It's made it a lot easier to focus. Over time, I stopped caring as much about the news and became more easily satisfied by very briefly reading summaries every few days.
I think a lot of web addiction is less driven by thoughts or brain issues and more by physical habits akin to nail-biting or cuticle-picking. Most of the attempts that I've made to stop addictive behavior have not worked: they were based on schedules, timers, articulated goals, and other things like that rather than recognizing the physical trigger for the habit, the result of that trigger, and just redirecting the stimulus with another physical action rather than trying to suppress it.
Atomic Habits is an excellent book, highly recommend it to anyone struggling to fix patterns of behavior.
I’ve started to curate any environment I use to avoid unintentional triggers. For example, when you reach for your iPhone to open up Medium or Kindle, you are forced to see all the different notifications and home screen icons. If there is a social media app or Safari icon happen to be there, your craving to open it and check the feed will get triggered unconsciously. There will be no “decision to check news” — you’ll just find yourself scrolling through the feed. So what I have now is a clean setup which makes sure screen pages with valuable apps are not arranged together with distractions. I also try to keep my phone away on the other end of the room, so that reaching for it would require more efforts, breaking down old habits of mindless browsing.
I find ideas from Atomic Habits interesting as they suggest improving your life through pre-defined policies and good habit design, not through conscious decisions made in the moment. Made me look at many other things (e.g. management, teamwork environment) in a different way.
Interesting idea! Most productivity apps have some kind of a nudge built-in (for example, DayOne sends periodic reminders and even writing prompts to keep you journaling). It rarely works for me, though, as they pop up at times when I’m focused on something else.
What usually works is a physical reminder that something I have planned to do is not complete. Two examples:
- For a couple of years I had that large sticky note posted on my fridge on which each day I would draw a stick every time I drank a glass of water. Simply seeing this note with no sticks drawn for particular day was enough of a motivation to drink my recommended daily number of glasses. I made sure an empty glass was always strategically positioned nearby. I had many attempts to track that electronically, with reminders and such, but only after reading Atomic Habits I was able to design this simple ‘off-the-grid’ solution, and it just worked.
(I have since stopped tracking exact number of glasses, but I still set an empty glass on my kitchen counter, which is enough to trigger my habit and drink more every time I see it)
— Similar thing with vitamin D which I take during the winter. At my kitchen table I have this pill case with seven transparent cells per each day of the week, so any time I go to the kitchen and notice the case, and it’s not empty, it motivates me to take this day’s pill. Just keeping a bottle full of pills on the table was not enough to build a habit, but as soon as I made “lack of progress” visible, it worked.
I am able to achieve this by supplementing with the amino acid precursor N-acetyl cysteine. I've done the container goal with paper clips, have used pomodoros, full-time accounting, to-do lists, commitment devices, aversion stimulus, and on and on. I don't use any hacks or techniques any more.
I take 2000mg. That's about 12-14mg/lb. I think I'm on the high end of dosaging. I've recently encountered reports of people getting unwanted effects like dulled emotions. That's part of what helps me be more productive. Procrastination is largely an emotional problem.
One factor that fits into my situation is that I think I have glutamine-glutamate dysregulation due to chronic stomach problems. NAC, GABA, L-Glutamine, lithium orotate all have drastic effects on me. That is a signal that serotonin and GABA production are screwed up in me.
I've been using NAC for about three months now, at the same dose. The effects are consistent, although not "noticeable" like a drug. It's more like the target lock mechanism in my brain starts looking for productive activities instead of hedonistic activities.
I second "Atomic Habits". It's not my inspiration for building a habit (it' too dry and too methodological for me) but it explains some core ideas why habit is important. One of the main benefit is once you commit your habit, you do it without thinking and even arguing. For example, I commit to read several pages of book before bed time. I try to keep it everyday, even the holiday. Just one page is okay. The amount it accumulates is amazing. Now I already read 40 books per year and still counting.
* PS: my inspiration for building habit is Haruki Murakami.
"When I’m in writing mode for a novel, I get up at four a.m. and work for five to six hours. In the afternoon, I run for ten kilometers or swim for fifteen hundred meters (or do both), then I read a bit and listen to some music. I go to bed at nine p.m. I keep to this routine every day without variation. The repetition itself becomes the important thing; it’s a form of mesmerism. I mesmerize myself to reach a deeper state of mind. But to hold to such repetition for so long — six months to a year — requires a good amount of mental and physical strength. In that sense, writing a long novel is like survival training. Physical strength is as necessary as artistic sensitivity."
I have also settled on using an antique coffee tin to toss them in, so it starts the day with some satisfying 'ding' sounds. Not sure if I could get away with it if I didn't have a private office.
Socrates famously hated the written form, not because it was technologically advanced for its time, but because it was "dead": you can't have a conversation with a piece of writing, or ask the author to explain something that's on the page.
I disagree (and agree, indirectly, with the OP): deadness is a feature, not a bug. The problem with Internet writing is not just its addictive nature, it's groupthink. It is too much alive. You have to either follow popular opinion, or oppose it vehemently; tangential or orthogonal thinking is almost impossible.
Books, because they are not part of an immediate, global conversation where people share opinions and judgements and signal their virtue to one another, are something very different and allow for a very different experience than any written text found online.
Maybe books will slowly fade; but I think it's unlikely they would ever completely disappear, as they offer something unique not found anywhere else.
Incidentally, this morning I finished reading the Socratic dialogue, 'Phaedrus'[1]. At the end of the dialogue (and also in a couple of other dialogues), Socrates makes his famous rebuttal against writing:
You know, Phaedrus, writing shares a strange feature with painting. The offsprings of painting stand there as if they are alive, but if anyone asks them anything, they remain most solemnly silent. The same is true of written words. You'd think they were speaking as if they had some understanding, but if you question anything that has been said because you want to learn more, it continues to signify just that very same thing forever.
When it has once been written down, every discourse roams about everywhere, reaching indiscriminately those with understanding no less than those who have no business with it, and it [writing] doesn't know whom it should speak and to whom it should not. And when it is faulted and attacked unfairly, it always needs its father's [the writer's] support; alone, it can neither defend itself nor come to its own support.
- - -
What is Socrates' proposed solution, then? A combination of two things: (1) of course, the so-called Socratic method (elenchus in Greek) of refutation, that teases out better hypotheses by "identifying and eliminating contradictions", and (2) the "art of dialectic", i.e. the art of investigating the truth, which Plato makes Socrates use in his later dialogues such as the Republic. I'm sure we don't miss the irony here—we gain many of Socrates' insights, regardless of what we think of them, thanks to Plato's writing.
PS: I agree with you on books, modulo this: it's more likely to see pigs flying than to see "books starting to slowly fade away" :-)
After reading a few of the dialogues, love reading these BTW, I highly suspect that Plato often misrepresented Socrates- would often put words in his mouth. With that said..
I think it’s very OK for Socrates to be wrong or to disagree with him. He’s the kind of guy who would change his opinions in light of conflicting evidence or an iron clad logical argument. Just because he said that about writing doesn’t mean he’s right nor does it mean he’s done with the tangent.
I forgot to add: Socrates actually does sort of say that even writing is okay—as long as you're doing it in the right spirit (seeking truth) and are not deceiving your audience.
In the Phaedrus, Socrates rails against the "speechmakers" who don't truly know what they're talking about, but instead write based on "what is likely" to persuade the audience.
And yes, in the later dialogues (e.g. the Republic), many scholars agree that Plato used Socrates as his "mouthpiece". I don't care either way, they're insanely fun to read.
I think a parallel argument to Socrates's could be made for the internet -- it is "alive", but in a much lower-dimensional way than real conversation with people in the world who have bodies and families. Online, everyone is a disembodied psyche -- so much is abstracted ideas, universalized groups and events, unbounded emotion/impulse. Talking with someone in real life almost requires confronting the shared humility and complexity of being a person. Avatars and text do not.
It reminds me of this short essay [0] I came across in Harper's a while back, which, at the time of publishing, was in a section devoted to the defense of books. I believe it's from 1999.
"[...] a treasured book is more important than a dance card, or the photo that freezes you in mid-teeter at the edge of the Grand Canyon, because such a book can be a significant event in the history of your reading, and your reading should be an essential segment of your character and your life. Unlike the love we’ve made or meals we’ve eaten, books congregate to form a record around us of what they’ve fed our stomachs or our brains. These are not a hunter’s trophies but the living animals themselves."
Well, the Internet conversation mediated by the concept of engagement wasn’t what Socrates had in mind opposing writing.
The value of well constructed and structured dialogue is enormous. If it’s between two people, it’s already quite powerful, then you add complexity by adding an additional voice. We’ve been doing this for millennia, and it works, it’s just not what the internet translated.
An aside, I find it a bit interesting that at some point we stopped talking about internet and game addiction. It used to be a hot topic, but I guess now that we are all completely addicted after decade of intense behavioral experimentation, none of us are interested in reading about it anymore.
It's like saying we have a driving addiction or a going to work addiction. Not everything can or should be couched in that kind of language. I've always found articles about internet and game addiction to be incredibly myopic, assuming that the "normal" of the 60's or 70's or 80's is somehow universal or worthy of being preserved, and that any deviation from it is an illness.
I understand what you're saying. Still though, you drive to get places or for fun sometimes, some people do it for sport for a living, but you don't find yourself just compulsively driving 8 hours a day. There are people that do find themselves staring at a phone 8 hours a day. The word addiction might be thrown around a little too loosely than it should be, but there's definitely widespread addiction to social media. I find it comparable to couch potatoes that sit down and watch TV all day.
Staring at a phone doing what? Swiping to refresh on social media for hours and hours at a time?
Using a phone is like going to the library, what you do there is what actually matters. Checking social media can be thought of as asking a librarian what new books are in. If you're asking every minute of every hour for 8 hours, then I can see that being a problem. But that's not really how people use the phone. You check email, you read news articles, you look at posts from friends on fb or instagram, you interact with people in a comments section, you take or share pictures, you have music or video essays playing to help you focus on work, you message coworkers, coordinate a meetup in a group chat, among other things.
I don't find it comparable to being a couch potato and watching TV all day. That analogy falls apart because watching TV isn't an interactive exercise.
>Staring at a phone doing what? Swiping to refresh on social media for hours and hours at a time?
Yes, for the technologically-not-literate people that I know, Internet = social media, and they totally spend every waking hour refresh the page to see "what's new". I used to do that on reddit.
>check email, you read news articles, you look at posts from friends on fb or instagram, you interact with people in a comments section, you take or share pictures, you have music or video essays playing to help you focus on work, you message coworkers, coordinate a meetup in a group chat, among other things.
Half of this thing are mental garbage, the other half are FOMO and outrage economy, so not doing them may result in a positive outcome.
I agree with you that escapism with tech can be more than a bad habit and it can take your attention away from things that would be more productive in the long term. However I don't know if I agree that it's a compulsion the way you'd think it with traditional addiction. If a friend you haven't talked to in a while suddenly came over to hang out, would you sit there and continue doom scrolling?
I also should clarify that I don't categorize reddit as social media because it's generally not people I know. I would consider fb, insta, snapchat as social media but not YouTube, reddit, or even here.
This reminds more of somewhere in between. Like stumbleupon but with a comment section where you can discuss things.
I am only differentiating because I believe the motivation for refreshing news aggregation sites vs social media is different. There's a much higher sense of urgency and importance when it's news. What you find interesting is also different between social media and news.
I think having a catch all term of being on the phone is not productive in helping people understand when the use of technology becomes unhealthy. Calling technology use unhealthy or even an addiction based on the perception of how long you spend is meaningless.
I agree that for some people using technology less would be positive, most often because they stop using technology to escape and ignore their responsibilities.
I don't know how fair it is to say it's garbage, some people like watching terrible films, some watch reality tv, some like video games, some like learning baseball stats, some like collecting NFTs, some like following twitter drama, I personally enjoy this kind of discourse on HN. How people choose to spend their time and what they enjoy is up to them.
I don't personally believe in the idea that constant stimulation is a bad thing as long as my responsibilities are taken care of. But I also have adhd so I don't know if everyone would share that sentiment.
Addiction exists, though. I often browse Twitter for no particular reason. Six months ago I changed my year of birth for something like 2017 because I was annoyed it was compulsory. That resulted in an immediate suspension, as Twitter forbids minors to use it (rightfully so); the suspension would only be lifted if I submitted an ID.
At first I thought "who cares?" But then I found myself in want of browsing the (few) people I follow, and eventually did submit an ID to have my account restored.
I get nothing out of Twitter. Absolutely zero value. Still, apparently, I can't live without it. That's a problem.
> I get nothing out of Twitter. Absolutely zero value. Still, apparently, I can't live without it. That's a problem.
Knowing nothing about you, the way this sentence is put is the most disturbing part. If you can’t live without it, at least it fills a hole in your life and that’s as much value as you could expect from anything.
How many things do you do in a day where you can put a crystal clear value on it? I mean, I’m writing this and I’d be hard press to come with a valuation, and I also don’t think it matters much if I don’t find any.
If looking at Twitter reduced your life expectancy by 25% we’d look at it differently, but from your description it doesn’t feels so.
Life expectancy isn’t the only metric we should care about. Life satisfaction is arguably more important.
…as I sit here on my phone at 1 am, responding to comments on HN for no particular reason other than worthless internet points, I guess, moderately depressed and anxious, despite having an objectively pretty great life.
The addiction isn't to twitter. You feel like you will miss out on some important information if your access to twitter is blocked. You aren't browsing for no reason, while browsing a part of you has decided this is the best use of that time. Whatever else is going on isn't important enough to care about more than you care about seeing if there's new tweets.
If the people you follow stopped posting on twitter at the same time you changed your birthday, would you have cared about getting it restored? Valuing and caring about tweets people have sent isn't the same as being addicted to twitter. Maybe the problem is how much you value seeing those tweets the moment they are tweeted.
I browse directly to the accounts of the few people I still want to follow, and refuse to log in or use the general feed. There’s a nagging pop-up demanding that you log in if you try to click away into a retweeted thread these days, so that helps keep me from getting sucked into the rabbit hole. Maybe that can help for you.
I remember about 10 years ago or so, smartphone addiction was something we talked about as well. People looking at their phones during dinner out was something we consciously called out. Now, it's such a normal thing that in commercials you see families depicted as all staring at their own devices like it's no big deal. Streaming services and internet providers promote bingeing of TV shows as well.
During the pandemic, my internet usage has been through the roof. At all hours of the day I'm online. It's really my only regular social outlet. It's weird how quickly norms change around you.
It seems to be a recurring thing with new technologies. Something new arrives and some people instantly see how it can ruin some aspects of our lives and warn about it. It gets taken semi-seriously, but in the end not seriously enough and the thing that those people warned us about ends up happening. After the fact no-one cares, because the new normal is now the thing that used to be unthinkably horrible before.
I remember someone here on HN once commented something about how the Amish instead of just categorically opposing all new technologies decide collectively which technologies to use and take into consideration how the technology might affect their culture and communities and this has lead them to reject things like the television and cars. I can't find any more realiable sources on this, but it sure seems like a much better way to build the society than ours is.
The "free" Western cultures are increasingly vulnerable to hacking of either human psychology or collective customs and laws. It's like a code base where every new commit automatically gets accepted and only occasionally some commits get reverted because someone managed to prove without doubt that it was a bad idea. To continue the metaphor, this sort of project management might make sense when the code base (or the civilization) is new and the focus is on just getting something running as quickly as possible, but makes the code base (or the cultural heritage of a society) bloated, unmanageable and vulnerable to attacks over longer time periods.
If I wanted to quit a drug addiction, I could probably find a sober community to try to bond with, and you can do stuff that doesn't involve drugs.
But it doesn't feel like there is a real-life world left for me to return to. If I turned off the Internet, I'd be even more alone than I am being on the Internet talking to people all day.
I can't imagine what withdrawal would be cause I can barely conceive of not immediately lighting up again every couple minutes
I’ve taken breaks before, and it’s really not that bad and you do adapt. But you’re absolutely right, there’s less and less of a “real-life” world left out there. I lived in a cabin and carried around firewood for 6 months. It wasn’t exactly modernity.
I wish there were a community that people could move to where everyone agreed they wouldn't be on their smartphone. Maybe we could fix up some shacks in the hills and ensure we are out of 4G range.
I think we stopped talking about it because most people realized that it's not a proper application of the word addiction. Adapting to the changing times doesn't make people ignorant. I dislike how when certain groundbreaking changes in the way people consume content is introduced, people who don't understand it call it an addiction. It's insulting to people who suffer clinical addiction. A perceived bad habit isn't an addiction.
We aren't addicted to having to use cars in suburban towns. But some can argue that people's legs aren't used like they were used to and we should all embrace biking or running everywhere. Not to mention traffic, pollution, road accidents. There's articles written in the last five years that use the term car addiction to describe modern population's necessity of cars for travel. https://www.credit-suisse.com/about-us-news/en/articles/news...
I think most people realized that the term internet and game addiction is most often used by people who simply don't understand the culture surrounding the internet or gaming.
> I think we stopped talking about it because most people realized that it's not a proper application of the word addiction. Adapting to the changing times doesn't make people ignorant.
Isn't that a bit like saying if everyone takes drugs, nobody is a drug addict? "Adapting to the changing times where everybody is on heroin doesn't make people junkies" -- but yes, that's exactly what it makes them.
Frankly, I’m still shocked at the shift from how it was during my childhood to the extent where we’re on desktop computers for over eight hours a day. Though I suppose sedentary office work has long predates PCs.
These two could have made sense if at the time we had a very solid grasp about the two topics, their place in society and their real impact. But the “addiction” label was thrown around at a time of uncertainty as they were too new, with a huge scoop of “back in the days” rhetoric.
There must be people studying actual internet and game addiction, but it won’t make headlines as much as it will be for actual pathological behaviors, affecting the few people that need actual treatment.
The same way we’ll probably have a flurry of “VR addiction” panic articles in the next years, that dies down when we get to better understand the topic.
It is because people lacked interest in it and ran out of things to say. The conversation was more or less saturated such that it occurs only mostly organically like an author's book coming out or an actual story related to the far dysfunctional outliers who let their kid starve to play more Everquest. Except with smartphones you can always half-ass most functions.
The media itself has an attention span of a small child in its pursuit of ratings so they move onto the next emotional source.
We didn't stop, it just stopped being a hot media topic. I still see threads about it on reddit (and sometimes HN) at least once a month, and probably more like once a week.
It was a hot topic because we make hot topics out of the "doom" of [insert new/cool thing here]. We've villified reading, chess, video games, television, dungeon and dragons, driving, dancing, and so on - and vilifying it all goes out of fashion.
Same for coffee. It’s now a socially accepted drug and I’m wondering if there’ll be a future where it’s badly seen to work without drinking coffee (“how can you even be productive?”)
> I sometimes wonder what will happen if the internet gets suddenly shut down worldwide? Will hundreds of millions of internet addicts go down the streets protesting, and possibly overthrowing their governments?
That is downright laughable. So much hinges on the internet these days that society would literally grind to a halt even without considering anything non-essential. Databases offline, communications down, supply chains gone in an instant. Most businesses would be bankrupt within a week not being able to access their CRM, or emails, or you know... bank accounts. People would be too busy dying to protest.
But sure some teenagers with a mild psychological addiction to browsing tiktok or whatever would be upset! Self centered writers with jobs that entail scribbling down fiction on a piece of paper seem to easily forget what are considered essential utilities in this world these days and how fragile is the house of cards we've built.
That sounds like a wild exaggeration. The internet is a fast communication tool but most critical communication tasks can still be performed by telephone, mail, courier etc. All of the physical production and transport infrastructure is still there, people are smart and resourceful and will quickly route around the failed part of the infrastructure, albeit with degraded performance.
You might not hear from your grandmother for a while, but the John Deere company will immediately cough up their root "internet only" master key when the army show up at their door demanding those tractors work for national security.
A company might go bankrupt by way of CRM crash today, when every competitor has a working CRM. If their activity becomes critical for keeping a large part of the population alive, then silly things like investor and management decisions, accounting law, employee freedom to not come into work etc. go out the window. Money is ultimately just a symbolic representation of work and value, in a crisis they can be completely ignored for a limited time.
If you can, give Tim Maughan’s Infinite Detail a try. It's SF on what would happen if the Internet disappears, and goes quite deeply into collapsing supply chains.
> In an essay he published in The Guardian (which is by now removed from their website, following a massive Twitter campaign against the novelist mainly because of his opinion on techno-consumerism), titled “What’s Wrong with the Modern World?”, American novelist Jonathan Franzen wrote:
This piece argues he was an early symbol/scapegoat in the conversation around equity in the literary world. I found it to be pretty sympathetic and enjoyable.
Hack /1/ was useful to get rid of the "new tab > enter distracting site url" urges that I get several times per hour. The error loading the page reminds me of my commitment to seek less superficial distractions and practicing better information hygiene. Disclaimer: it's not easy to stick to this (for god's sake I'm no HN right now!!), but I sometimes get good chunks of disconnected time (several weeks in a row).
Hack /2/ has allowed me to read A LOT more books then ever before in my life (like one book per week): I simply open the PDF, select a good chunk of text (like one chapter or something), then listen to the book while doing other things (e.g. exercise, cleanup, or computer tasks with low cognitive requirements).
Re: 2, I find that listening to something (that is not music) while doing something else makes me zone out for one of the two activities.
I tried listening to podcasts/conferences while coding, or listening to a zoom meeting while reading my email or doing work, and it doesn't work. I tend to zone out on the listening. If it was audio, I must rewind and listen to it again. If it was a zoom call... oh, well, "what were you saying again?".
True that — I can only combine the "speech input channel" in my brain with very low cognitive load tasks like data entry or doing the dishes.
Interestingly, I've noticed that "can you understand the article while doing the dishes" is a very good test of the quality of a piece of writing. Whenever I lose track on the narrative repeatedly (I must stop the computer and restart from the beginning) it's usually a sign that whatever I'm reading is too "fluffy" (convoluted sentence structure, no clear point, roundabout explanations, all-opinions, outrage narrative, etc.).
I feel like I actually get a bump in comprehension if I do a menial task like dishwashing while listening to an audiobook, versus sitting down with my eyes closed. I think the key is to occupy that little bit of your brain that would otherwise spin off on an internal tangent with every new idea you hear.
I have noticed I have the same issue, but I can play Minecraft while listening to something. So I spend a lot of time listening to podcasts while playing Minecraft.
I assume the same would be possible with audiobooks.
I’ve had the same experience, although it depends on the difficulty of the podcast and the difficulty of the task. I feel like I have an inner threshold.
Also, I’m convinced that multitasking obliterates your long term memory, in addition to stunting your short term memory.
There have been many studies on this, people much overestimate their ability to multitask. Of course if you listen to a book being read to you while doing other stuff, retention isn't going to be as high. You also won't be able to reflect as much on what's being read to you as you would if the book had your full attention.
What I'm curious about is if people actually read less or if people who read less tend to congregate on social media, which would make sense.
It used to be much cheaper, but it really helps to stop the surfing urges for a time. Well, not stop them so much as force me to realize when I have them.
FocusLite (https://focuslite.app) has interesting business model - you purchase a consumable ($7.99 I think) to start a streak. If you wanna cancel blocking, you have to delete the app. And once you've done that, you have to purchase the consumable again.
I actually read more books now. I download them and load them up on my phone and read them like crazy.
Also discussions on sites like this have expanded my articulation and understanding of many concepts and topics. I spent a lot of time, years, dedicating a significant potion of my life to reading educational material of all sorts.
I don't know if I use the internet differently, maybe, I don't use Facebook or twitter or tiktok or any of that. We forget the access to information we have, it would be unimaginable 30 years ago. I can delve into literally any topic I want as deep as I want to go, I can read any book I want right now, for free if I were so inclined.
I bought a Kindle and that was nice, but I'm terrible at remembering to bring it with me when I leave the house, and the (admittedly small) effort of having to connect it to my computer to load epubs onto it is enough friction to stop me from doing it in the first place a lot of the time. I usually obtain them from less than legal sources and buy a hardcopy if I like it.
For awhile I was buying ebooks straight from the Kindle store on the device itself but something about paying the same price for a file as a hardcopy left a bad taste in my mouth. I'd rather have something to put on my shelf and I can loan to friends. Plus paying for the book up front is a bit of a risk if it sucks, because I can't return it or resell it or even give it away to someone else.
The past few months I've just been loading the books straight to my phone and I've read more new books in the last 3 months than I have in the last 3 years. Definitely a game changer.
Last time I used a Kindle, you could just email a book to your Kindle email address and then the book would appear in the library.
Much easier than physically connecting to copy books.
I consume most of my content within the browser itself, For long reads, however, I regularly send the content over to my Kindle via. 'push to kindle' [0]; sometimes makes for a good bed time read.
So Kindles don't support epubs, and for whatever inane, absurd reason Amazon does not let you use their send to Kindle function with their own ebook format azw3. You have to convert them to mobi if you wanna email them, which is missing some QOL features last time I checked, which was admittedly a looong time ago so maybe that's changed.
I do own a kindle but reading from it is so unattractive over reading from the Hard copy. Has anyone here tried audible? Are audiobooks good? I've read a few audiobooks, but it still can't match reading from the hard copy.
I broke my Kindle by dropping it a few years back and the number of books I've read really took a nosedive from then. Maybe it's time to buy another one.
I once left mine under the bed, but the cats pushed it out during the night and I stood on it. The screen is very fragile. Back then I could find no way at all to repair it.
I did just buy the latest model on Amazon for $30 during Black Friday. I find reading on the Kindle is way better than on the phone because it removes all the distractions.
> “A restlessness has seized hold of many of us,” wrote the American author Rebecca Solnit, “a sense that we should be doing something else, no matter what we are doing”
However, as the article testifies, there is still pleasure (including a calmer intellectual pleasure) to be found in isolation with a book.
A useful hypothesis: Loss of attention span (due to an internet focus) can be reversed, and it is worth doing so.
Very productive discussion here with lots of tips shared here. I am grateful that HN is one of the places which still feel worth the time spent. I would like to share my own thoughts as well..
Personally, my weakness is video-games and I have lost the ability to stop playing once I start. Gaming sessions usually last for hours and hours until I feel satisfied (Doesn't matter whether I am winning or losing). I tried several strategies for self-control but none worked out, so I have taken extreme measures to completely stay away from gaming.
- I have deleted my steam and similar profiles (they don't make this easy)
- I do not own a mouse anymore (switched to a trackpad completely)
- If I really feel the need, I just watch a gaming-stream on twitch/highlights on youtube - I would like to phase this out as well, but have not found an effective strategy to do so yet, since blocking these websites is not a reasonable option.
Finally, about reading, I have been doing more of it lately, but I usually read research-papers related to my work and some popular self-improvement books. What really helped me is purchasing a kindle - it offers a free feature to convert PDFs to kindle format - which doesn't work so well with research papers with lots of images and charts but otherwise really helpful.
We haven't scrutinized video games enough after the "video games cause violence" myth was debunked.
Hands down the biggest addiction among my friends in their late 20s and early 30s.
The problem is that none of them see it that way.
They take breaks from "known" addictions (alcohol, cannabis) repeatedly, only to still fail to reach their goals, without ever acknowledging the gaming issue.
As an aside, I wonder if we’ve missed out on longer term repercussions of violence in video games, after the hysteria of video games causing violence turned out to be false. You’d think immersing people in unreality for extended amounts of time could have a desensitizing effect. Sure, there’s violent movies and other media, but the degree of immersion feels like it should make a difference. And I’m still weirded out how kids these days can get an elementary familiarity with real-life weapons not from gritty adult FPS like Doom, but the cartoony Fortnite.
Well I don't know what he was referring to, but at some point while I was at university I became totally addicted to the game "Football Manager". I would stay up entire nights playing that game. I had to completely quit playing it or I would have flunked out.
basically when you get addicted to video-games, you prioritise it over everything else in your life - eg. you start skipping meetings, both at work and hanging out with friends, skip spending time with your loved ones and even skip taking care of your own health (gym/sports/..)
Doesn't help that every product is trying to be as addictive as possible these days. All the psychological devastation of hard drugs and none of the euphoria.
I doubt what I say might be helpful here, but in the spirit of sharing…
I grew up severely addicted to video games. My parents didn’t buy me a PC until I was in college, and so I would befriend anyone in school who had a PC and was willing to let me play/ take turns in playing. It was pretty insane now that I think back… I didn’t even mind watching others play, I just loved video games so fucking much.
In college, the semester I did get my own machine, I got Cs in most of my courses (while I had been a mostly A and some B student in previous semesters). I returned my machine to my parents in the hopes of improving my grades, but I would just borrow a laptop from a friend and play anyways.
I didn’t get a console for the longest time as an adult.
However when I saw a pretty great game on a PlayStation at a friends place, I was hooked and bought it. The addiction was back: couldn’t stop playing until I completed the game; I barely got by with other things while I played.
However, I guess my life got more interesting so there were other things that I really liked doing too. But If there is a really cool game, I will get it, and the rest of my life takes a backseat while I complete it. During the pandemic, I went really hard for factorio and would spend hours upon hours in the game, to the point that I was dreaming in designs for solving problems in the game.
Today, I would say I have a good relationship with video games. When a new game is released that I find interesting, I am hyped. I’m very upfront about this to my coworkers and my manager, that I might be less productive because a game is coming out. Sometimes I take time off just to immerse in the game completely.
I’m happy that I have a somewhat healthy relationship with gaming today. I couldn’t have gone through the pandemic without video games… and some games are just so good, there are moments from these that are very memorable. I know not everyone may be able to get this balance, I guess I’m just happy I was able to because I really love gaming. As a socially awkward teen, it provided me an amazing escape and I latched on to it really hard. As an adult, I still love the feeling of escaping reality, of total immersion in a story, in a different universe.
Thanks for sharing, and congrats, you have made really good progress!
Having a healthy relationship with video-games, while not prioritising it over everything else in life (except on some occasions ;)) seems like a really good end state. As for myself, I will only start playing again when I get a trusty accountability partner who would make sure that my relationship with gaming stays healthy :)
While the article veers a bit all over the place at its core it's about a topic I have given a lot of thought to - relationship between information form and content and our expectations.
I still read books but I'm very against fetishising them. I don't understand the emotional connection with paper, typewriters and the general attitude that medium destroys the content. What I think happens a lot is the old correlation vs causation mistake.
Let me illustrate with an anecdote. When I was beginning woodworking I discovered a lot of educational youtube channels which I thought were great. At the same time I bought a lot of books. A couple of years later I realised that those youtube channels were mostly worthless but I still use those books to this day. The paradox is that it should be obvious that video is a much better medium to teach you woodworking. Unfortunately, due to factors outside of those dictated by form, it so happens that books are better, even though they are limited by their form.
Sometimes I think it's self reinforcing by people producing to the expectations of the platform - so the real limitation is not the form but the customer's expectation.
People quickly create mental shortcuts and hence the cargo cult of paper. I reject it. I often find that after reading a history book I learn and am entertained more by reading a few wikipedia articles on the subject. Paper is no guarantee of quality, and modern form is not the limit (modern form has in fact fewer limits than paper).
Interesting counter balance. I still think what makes books perceived as more valuable is based on a actual facts that comes out of this medium: barrier of entry.
It takes serious dedication to author a book. Writing over 100 pages on any subject takes dedication, ability to organise thoughts, multiple reviews and editing passes.
Most other media don't require this level of dedication and abilities to formulate valuable thoughts. Twitter is on the other extreme of the spectrum. Just a short phrase and tap "publish". Can do this on the toilet seat.
Even making a video now takes far less effort than writing a book given the productivity tools made available to anyone who has a mid range smartphone.
Edit: it doesn't imply all books are valuable, actually most aren't. But the barrier of entry leads to less noise than found on most other media.
People who make woodworking videos on youtube are putting in a lot of work though. It's very professionalized.
The amount of effort (money, space, equipment) that would be required to compete with these professional youtubers is a substantial barrier to entry, though of course it's easy enough to make a non-competitive video.
Ultimately I believe what books help is to create a shared perspective of the world. If everyone has read a book, you can quote a passage and everyone gets what you’re trying to communicate. You may use it in clever ways in your daily interactions. In premodern times, books literally shaped language by introducing new words, terms and phrases.
Today, the closest thing I can think of is popular TV shows and movies; but also, video games, social media etc. What was once the exclusive domain of books is now accessible via other media. Of course the book people are mad at this but I agree with you that it’s kinda antiquated to lament that books have lost that place in society.
> Unfortunately, due to factors outside of those dictated by form, it so happens that books are better, even though they are limited by their form.
I think you've got this backwards: it's the "form" that dictates youtube videos must always target the lowest common denominator, target absolute beginners, use clickbait approaches to topic selection, and spread content thin to increase number of videos.
(The "form" not being merely video, though, but the overall platform: the feed algorithm, the userbase, the thumbnail popups, etc.)
I didn't think of the form as "YouTube video", but you make a good argument. I divided it into the form "video" and expectations of the audience "youtube". Now I see it was arbitrary. Instead I should've thought of the distinction between technical limits of the form and non technical.
I agree with you somewhat, but there's something unique about the internet I think is dangerous: there's no clear boundaries of when to stop. Radio stations would stop broadcasting, you reach the end of a book, and tv shows end. But, the internet just keeps going. You can just keep scrolling and clicking through website after website until you die, with very little prompt that it's time to stop.
Or even more obviously, keep clicking and scrolling to the next channel on TV. Not that much these days, because everyone switched away from cable onto the streaming services, but it should still be an easy comparison that is understood by most here.
Broadcast TV stations used to stop broadcasting every night. By midnight or 1:00 or so, none of the three or four channels you could receive was showing anything at all.
Yes but with substantially more friction. I have to stand up, walk over to my bookshelf, go through my books, grab one, sit back down, and start reading vs click
have to stand up, walk over to my bookshelf, go through my books, grab one, sit back dow
You can treat that as a chore, or as something exciting. Pick the latter and it's not really friction anymore, in that it's enjoyable friction: there's a certain expectation I get from picking the next book, encountering something I haven't read for ages and remembering how good it was.
Actual data points at millenials and zoomers actually reading more books than other generations [1].
This seemed weird to me until I figured out how few books my parents actually read.
This thread is full of social media as a generation-destroying boogieman, but nobody seems to consider how much more common youth alcoholism was 20+ years ago or how much of our parents' lives was spent in front of the TV.
When you think about it, the internet is very interactive and most of it is reading (youtube aside), compared to TV which is 100% preset video content.
Exactly, because of the Internet we (as a collective) are probably reading and writing the most amount of text in history.
The difference between the past and the present is not that we're on the direction of illiteracy, but that the structure of text is becoming much more non-linear than before (distributed, discretized, highly referential, algorithmically sorted and processed text rather than continual, serial, and isolated text) which has consequences (both positively and negatively) in shaping our way of thinking about reality.
None of those things have the addictive and distraction power of the Internet. Along with the Internet has come ubiquitous things like laptops, tablets, and cellphones. It is an actual problem, not one for people to merely "worry and kvetch about".
Well most of the population seems to drink coffee and is somehow proud of not being able to quit, so yeah. Addiction is a part of our life, we just have to be careful to not form harmful ones.
And to some extent, all of the nightmare scenarios from those technologies happened. Over time, those scenarios just became the new normal way of life and we adapted to it. Of course, many have made the case that a lot of our psychological and societal problems have their roots in those technologies just as their opponents originally thought they would have, but, again, this is the new norm now so people mostly don't think about it.
They are radically evolved means of consumption, too. If you go back far enough, even back to single cells, it's all been consumption this whole time. The more modern means help us select for specific types and amounts of energy via stimulation. Which is pretty amazing really.
That helps put it into perspective for me. I can watch the stimulation and consumption from the outside, so to speak, and get a helpful picture of what's going on in my life.
Not really. Moral panics are like their names suggests panic, on baseless fear. Even if it is a problem to be concerned about like kidnapping they will focus on the wrong aspect that incites the most fear instead of what is actually germane. See "stranger danger" and fears of pedophiles looking for some lurking creeper when they should be looking at their divorced ex or a trusted part of their kid's life.
It is a common problem, they always look for some sort of cartoonish villain to blame things on.
I relate completely with the comments here. I have only recently even managed to finish reading a couple of books, but it took me months.
I would really like to blame how busy I am (new startup, 3 kids, other commitments), however I see my wife who is a physician who works in 2 departments and also teaches and runs a residency program and I know she is quantitatively much busier than I am and has far less control over her time.
However, she manages to read a couple of books a month at least.
I think that during the 2000s/2010s when I was sucking in a firehose of information and learning to consume exclusively in places like HN, she was still researching, studying and learning through long form papers, textbooks and experiments. Our brains are trained on very different cadences.
So when she sits down to read, there is almost no distraction, her comprehension is far better than mine, and she sort of shoots through a chapter with much better momentum than me.
I've recently resolved to stop trying to read anything popular/trendy that I might be attracted to just because it's there and instead only read history, which is my real interest. No more business books or novels I don't really enjoy. That has made a difference and it's already becoming much easier as I am more disciplined about it.
> Our brains are trained on very different cadences.
I think this is a very interesting concept. If you're used to quickly finding out which information is relevant or not for you (e.g. from technical docs, emails, etc.), going back to reading a book from cover to cover is a completely different approach from what you're used to. In this case, would it be easier to try to read books just like you usually read, possibly in a non-linear order, starting with what seems to be more important?
I know too many people who seem to struggle with reading, simply because they have this idea ingrained in them that they have to read the whole book, from the first page to the end. Even if you're a good reader, it's not clear you want to read a book like this when it's still of unknown quality to you.
See also: the levels of reading mentioned in How to Read a Book[0].
If one wants to read more and willing to try few ideas, here are few that works for me and our family.
- Have physical books always around — at your desk, bookshelf, bedside table, etc. My current ratio is roughly 1:4 of physical against Kindle.
- Read multiple books at a time.
- If you get bored, don’t feel like finishing a book; let it go. May be you can come back to it later.
- Always try to carry your Kindle or other readers with you on your Uber/Lift/Ola rides, Train/Metro/Planes, etc.
- Or buy at-least one copy at the start of your flight, and try books that you can finish off in that leg of the flight. Personally, I try to give it to a random stranger on the way out, “It was a good/awesome book. I have finished reading it, please go ahead and read it.”
- I don’t care who read my blog but I try to publish/write few lines about the books I read on my blog. Have been doing it for a few years now.
## Kids Rule;
- There is no limit to how much books (digital or physical) my daughter can ask me to buy as long as she finish reading the last one.
- If she can't or don’t want to finish the last book, wait for one week to pass.
- She gets ₹100 for every book she finishes regardless of genres but ₹500 for any non-fiction documentary-ish like a biography of a great person.
Of course, there is nothing entertaining/social on my phone.
> - She gets ₹100 for every book she finishes regardless of genres but ₹500 for any non-fiction documentary-ish like a biography of a great person.
Are you sure that's a good idea? At least at one point, pecuniary incentives for children for "good" behavior were considered harmful to their education, but maybe that has changed.
That was how it started (I think about 2-years ago) with that rule but now it has become normal, and are more lumpsum. She doesn't care much and she is more into reading something over and over again, and would usually point things out to me in extreme details. So, no longer a hard rule or a motivating factor.
Reading multiple books at a time has been a big one for me. When I was younger, this concept didn’t even enter my mind… I had one book I was reading right now, and I wouldn’t pick up another until that one was done.
But I feel like having multiple books “in flight” is crucial for comprehending denser topics. I might only be able to get through one chapter a night of a particularly dense book (right now, for me, Understanding Media by McLuhan), but I can still burn through a sci-fi novel or a light biography in a few days at most.
adding to this: if your issue is one of focus, try a pomodoro timer. it's a great way to shut off that voice nagging you about all the other things you need to remember to do, because you can forget about all of those and know that in 25 minutes you'll have an opportunity to reconsider them. if you're really strict with your time management, another approach is to use detailed calendars, but that's a lot more work than just a simple timer.
> “Isn’t the essence of the Apple product that you achieve coolness simply by virtue of owning it? It doesn’t even matter what you’re creating on your Mac Air. Simply using a Mac Air, experiencing the elegant design of its hardware and software, is a pleasure in itself, like walking down a street in Paris. Whereas, when you’re working on some clunky, utilitarian PC, the only thing to enjoy is the quality of your work itself.”
Whoever writes this lacks knowledge of the world, and yet decides to express an opinion on it. The fact that it’s a celebrated author like Franzen, makes it even worse.
A “Mac Air” is a wondrous machine. It’s so good that it makes you FORGET about the machine so much better than a clunky PC. So, if anything, the opposite of what Franzen write is actually true.
I have definitely replaced my book reading with the web. But I did that at least a decade ago. I still "read" a lot of books and novels, I'm just listening to the audio version now. Not as good for recall, I will readily admit, but on the other hand it does let you re-listen again with almost equal enjoyment. I've replaced all television watching - except for live sports and news - with YouTube. All movies are now watched at home.
Information consumption habits change as the media does. "Reader's Digest", among other magazines, used to be required reading for any well-read person and now it basically doesn't exist.
> In short, voracious readers ultimately become critical thinkers.
No relationship whatsoever. You develop critical thinking when you are in touch with reality, or when you do stuff, more than spending your time in books.
is it the generalization you take issue with (i.e. the implication that reading of any kind in enough volume can teach critical thinking)? or do you actually take issue with the voracious readers of epistemology/philosophy of science/etc who are explicitly trying to use books as an aid to become more critical thinkers?
If anything they got the logic completely wrong. You are more likely to become a voracious reader if you have a propensity for critical thinking and curiosity.
I was never a reader. I’ve played video games since I was a child, for over twenty years, and social media for almost as long.
I wonder how much harder it will be to develop mental patience and critical reasoning as someone who has never known what it’s like to slow down and enjoy the thought process of reading a book.
It will be hard but by no means impossible. Your brain is trainable in the same way, that your body is when you exercise. I'm by no means unaffected by all this, but being 40+, I experienced my entire pre-adult life without the Web or with a very different form of it at least.
I highly recommend making the effort to slow your mind. My brain works best when relaxed, not multitasking / not too many "tabs" open. I find that the best ideas come to me when I'm not even thinking and grinding the cogs of my conscious mind at least. I'm not sure what's going on but when the mind gets quiet, ideas and insights bubble to the surface. I guess the background processing (of which most of the brain is I guess) somehow has a chance to emerge.
Apart from this, I find it a much more satisfying state of mind to inhabit. It feels like relaxed contentment, not anxious and dissatisifed grasping at a million things underpinned by FOMO that I need the next bit of info / distraction. Don't get me wrong though, I get days when I fall down the hole of distraction too. I'm just really trying to hang on to what I developed many years ago. These days you have to actively cultivate this, whereas it came more naturally in the past.
Honestly reading is just a skill; like any others you get better at it with time.
My intro to reading for fun was via comic books: I got bored really easily reading regular books. The next step was reading Harry Potter series, which I found incredibly immersive and enjoyable.
I guess my advice would be to try things you might like rather than what are considered to be important or classics. If there’s something that piques your interest, reading is almost like an adventure, trying to get to the end to know the full story.
The present state of reading and the internet is another example of the familiar tension that a healthy diet and processed foods demonstrate. Those that still read and write are like those that jogged, abstained from smoking, and ate balanced meals in the seventies. There is an intrinsic good to reading, one that readers have an intuition for, and that good merely needs to be discovered again by the culture and made explicit. No few of us are lost to the negative effects of internet, just like no few people simply will not overcome their reliance on sweets. We do go on, but leave the kind of material in our wake that the likes of the Johns Stewart and Oliver can use to make their living.
I find I get my best reading done or can bang out an unusually amount code while I’m on a long flight or passenger rail (Amtrak) without fast, stable internet.
I would love if someone opens up a no-internet cafe. And you can pay an optional, arbitrary “deposit” where if you leave early you get charged whatever amount you deposited.
I've been in the same spot as lots of people here. I started doing some changes.
I started to practice meditation, with no guidance and no bs like headspace. Real meditation is exercise on how to focus on what makes you happy and avoid any thoughts in the process. Basically find a focus point to watch, or close eyes , count, if you have a thought - start counting again.
I deleted social media. All of them. the only one left is youtube. Even for youtube I have two profiles one for work, where I search only tech related stuff. I still had to curate and spend ~3-4 hours to delete, remove from recommendations everything.
I installed app called Lock. That literally block all the apps on the phone for defined amount of time.
Meditation + deleting everything makes you rethink of what is really important to you. Every of this new youtubers looking at you offering to watch a new review about Travel, Space, Tesla, Ecology, News , anything you think is interesting.
You start see social media producers and their real relationship with YOU in a different way. They eat a lot of your time. Don't Believe ? check screentime. They bring you very little real value. You just watch another stupid episode with mediocre value you barely even able to share with friends to make them interested.
They all fight for your attention , once they grab it, they will try to monetize this attention to sell you something.
Another side effect of this relationship is separation of interests. Since there are a lot of them, they tend to go into not very crowded topic. While it's good, it creates more and more bubbles you can get into. I like EV's my friend still own an ICE car? Our content will be different. We will be laughing different jokes. And that's happening in hundreds of dimensions.
Now ask yourself a question, do you really want to have a relationship, when the best person knows you is algorithms of TikTok/Youtube. Because that's what they created for... This also leads to disconnection from society offering you more and more curated content about your phone brand, car brand, space company, travel style , food, anything you wish.
Without a mental model to resist such trend you're done as a fully integrated to society individual.
With the right perspective the internet is the ultimate medium for books (ebooks and audiobooks) and it's easier to read hundreds or thousands of books than it has ever been in history.
In terms of accessibility and ease of finding your next read,yes I would agree with that. But, the culture of Goodreads et al. would make you do you reading like people do everything else nowadays to "show off" (i.e. share it) with your "friends" so they too know how many book you can handle per year. That's why I hate Goodreads for instance.
I am surprised nobody brought up
“Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World” by Cal Newport. The book explores the idea of the post in more detail and argues for concentrated work (“deep” work) lifestyle that’s devoid of shallow activities such as reading Twitter or Facebook feeds. It heavily affected my view on the harm of addictive and distracted habits. Decreasing shallow activities has improved my ability to focus both for work and for leisure reading.
All I have to offer is nothing more than personal anecdotes.
I think there is a "habitual framework of the mind" that we condition ourselves to operate, and that it's a side-effect of the ways we consume information on a daily basis.
Now we simply want to learn about what big event happened moments after it happened. We want to be entertained in our free time and there's a surplus of ways to achieve it, to the point where we can even desensitize ourselves by chasing more triggers than before. Another opinionated and not so scientific book about this subject is "the shallows what the internet is doing to our brains".
Last but not least, I don't believe that this is simply a matter of aging. Correlation does not imply causation. It takes time for the mind to get into this state but I don't think it's just the passing of time that causes it, but also what you're doing with. A sufficiently accurate metaphor would be that of the person who exercises daily to maintain a level of fitness that's deemed "very good" for their age. I'm ashamed to admit that my grandfather would easily fall in this category. My grandparents lived far away from town and they worked in the fields, biking etc. daily. As a result my grandfather could easily kick the lights out of me if he wanted to. That's how much of a chair slug I am.
And just like there can be a wide discrepancy of physical strength that correlates with habits and activities, so can it happen for mental strength or parts of which in our case is concentration, information recalling and memorizing new things.
I think how many stars a github repo that you created or are a major contributor of is an interesting tech flair these days. Being a early/top adopter/contributor on places like stack exchange and reddit is good too. It's probably easier to tell in hindsight.
this is what i was thinking, i think it depends on the demographic but overall i heard that reading rates are way higher now due to the internet’s text content. granted reading books are great but i mostly read those online as well or audiobooks in the car
If I'm blunt, I rarely read long form things. I've found that most long form things are filler. If you make a movie, people expect 2 hours. If you make a book, people expect 200 pages. Both are generally full of a big amount of filler to meet said metrics.
I definitely agree with this. One thing I've come to find out as I age is how much does -not- exist on the internet. We like to think all the information in the world is here, but a ton only exists in spoken word(folklore?) and in older books few will ever read.
>'In an essay he published in The Guardian (which is by now removed from their website, following a massive Twitter campaign against the novelist mainly because of his opinion on techno-consumerism), titled “What’s Wrong with the Modern World?”,...'
I'm having trouble believing The Guardian would remove an article by a well-known author because of a Twitter campaign. However it does in fact appear to no longer exist on their site at least as far as having google search guradian.com. It's here in case anyone is interested:
I was a voracious reader as a child all the way until I got to university where I had to consume incredibly dense tomes of the most boring subjects known to man. It took me a while to get into the habit of being able to consume 10-15 of those a year. I did it. But it forever killed my thirst to read anything afterward that wasn't consumable within 30 minutes. The great irony of this...I write for a living now.
Having failed to truly "disconnect" in the past, my recommendation in order not to be distracted by the internet is to first and foremost write down everything that you would have the urge to google. Instead of googling it, put it on paper, and continue your activity. Once you are done you can review the points that you have wrote down, and think whether they are really worth pursuing. And if they are: stop right there! Don't google it. Think about how you could get this information without the internet.
This process has helped me rediscover atlases, dictionaries, and many other forms of offline knowledge. I almost see it as a form of survivalism: asking yourself how would you learn without electricity?
Of course there will be failures, either due to loss of focus, or maybe because of perceived boredom. But if one sticks with it, it really does become a good habit.
The first part makes sense. Not to distract and interrupt a productive activity.
But the second part just seems pointless improductivity, doesn't it?
I mean, to counter lack of exercises due to excessive use of cars, you would at times avoid it. But not every time, when you really can benefit from its speed, safety and comfort.
I see the fact that searching for the information without the internet (or electricity in general) is more difficult as a filter to select what is relevant and discard the noise. In these cases I simply accept that I need to pick what I want to focus on.
But I am in no way advocating for a 100% electricity free lifestyle, nor am I saying that one should ditch all modern technology. Something that I do are offline days [1] during which I try to apply what I wrote about here. On other days it will depend on the urgency of the task itself.
You can of course also apply only the first part (noting down things to search later). Whatever works for you ultimately.
Dopamine exhaustion from over-stimulation may be a reason for the common “can’t focus” complaints. Dr. Huberman claims that he has treated this with dopamine budgeting, information diet, etc…: https://youtu.be/QmOF0crdyRU
Yes. Dopamine is the mediator of the brain's seeking system, SEEKING being one of the seven emotional drives, according to Jaak Panksepp and Mark Solms. The full list of instinctual emotion systems comprises SEEKING, LUST, PANIC, GRIEF, RAGE, CARING and PLAY.
Seeking makes a cat play with its prey before eating it. Presumably the exercise of skill and the risk of losing lunch make the overall process more satisfying.
What might be the reading equivalent? Something like having to track down one's target book in an elaborate and interesting library, complete with secret rooms and hidden shelves (this being an analogue of the internet). In the process one risks being tempted and distracted by other volumes and other authors...
I dont understand this anti-digital-books attitude honestly. The books themselves are just paper. What really matters is their content. And everyone can read the same content on their phone.
Having this in mind, how is reading an EPUB any worse than reading a hardcover (besides personal preference)?
It isn’t. And it’s pretty amazing: I can read a little bit on my phone when commuting, then continue reading on my iPad before bed (I use Apple Books).
My side project tries to address this! by replacing the habit with a real book. It's a little half baked but personally I've read 20 books this year, which is the most I've ever read as an adult. Won't self promote beyond that but the link is in my profile.
I strongly suspect that video as a medium (especially video social media, but also including TV) has been eating literacy (including text forums) for a while and will continue until we can program our video social media apps by talking and gesturing.
Only having read some of the comments - which btw. are often the best part of a HN submission. It is not like we are only getting the fluffy part, just because we are trained to go for the meat, when authors often had to literate a whole backstory before getting to the point. This ability is what makes a great information worker like a developer. So despite only having read some of the comments and finding it hard to start reading a book, I have no problem to keep my focus on difficult professional problems for very long hours (>10).
So I don’t think it is attention span in general. Might be just your mind being trained for things you value.
The author argues that focused, deep, and uninterrupted reading is harder to achieve when our brains become addicted to the effects of rewarding stimuli, such as those offered on the internet. My personal experience has been just that. When I want to truly understand & reflect on what I read, I need to actually remove all the distractions (phone, laptop) and force myself to not use those for a while. If I don't pick up a book for a month, the effort required to avoid the temptations becomes higher.
I read less books than when I was school age. I have a couple that are sitting in Books app that I read a few pages at a time.
I think the “problem” is twofold:
1) phones are too much
2) too many books
1: using a book used to be easier than computer. You had to turn it on, wait, sit in a chair. With book it’s just grab and start reading in any position. People were/are reading standing up in Moscow metro. Computer was also limited in what you can do with it: I had a few games, a few programms and if I wanted more, it’s either going to a store for CD or using a slow Dial-up (check if no one is talking on the phone or expecting a call). With smartphone now there is Youtube, games and a ton of text that talks back to you (like HN or Twitter).
2: I find that many books and movies just say too much. I went out of the movie theater from Hellboy reboot when they started explaining the lore right away. I don’t mind a bit of exposition, but a film is not the right medium imo. Similarly with books: I feel like at least some of them could be a series of Substack posts if not Twitter threads.
So I agree that books are dying out a bit, but I’m optimistic that they are being replaced with mediums more suitable for the message. Also I hope there will be more specialized gadgets like ReMarkable tabled that you can’t do everything with.
I find your point 2 very odd on both counts. First, I would find it pretty surreal to walk out of a movie theater because of 1-2 minutes of exposition. You literally spend more time walking from the booth to your seat or watch advertisements before the movie starts then the few noments of on boarding for those that don't know the universe.
Second, there are literally millions of books published each year. Yes many are bad fiction or bad nonfiction but there is an incredible wealth of books that use each page well. E.g. I read 'Sex, Power, Suicide' by Nick Lane a few weeks ago and there was not a single page that felt wasted - every page i learned something new. Similar with e.g. Hans Rosling's book. And there is much fiction where each page matters in driving the plot.
I thought Hellboy was a bad movie, because it’s more tell than show. I think voiceover is appropriate in special cases like Dexter’s inner monologue, because it shows separation of his public and private persona. I wouldn’t mind exposition scene at some point if it fits in the story, like for example someone telling a bedtime tale.
With regards to blocking sites to concentrate, adding a comment as to why it was blocked in the first place might help. It is something I try now to see how effective it is.
My etc/hosts:
# This should never be commented out unless my life depends on it. If
# We get an article or there is CRITICAL information there it is OK, but
# in 99% of cases you will just waste your time on these websites. GO OUTSIDE INSTEAD!
0.0.0.0 dn.no dinside.no nettavisen.no itavisen.no e24.no vg.no www.dn.no nrk.no dagbladet.no https://dn.nohttps://www.nettavisen.no/ www.nettavisen.no shifter.no www.shifter.no nettavisen.no nrk.no www.nrk.no
# FB might be relevant for work, but ONLY uncomment if you have something CONCRETE to do on the platform.
# Delegate to someone else if possible, which can be done in most cases.
# TRAIN or GO OUTSIDE instead of wasting time here
127.0.0.1 facebook.com login.facebook.com secure.facebook.com latest.facebook.com inyour.facebook.com beta.facebook.com static.facebook.com touch.facebook.com developers.facebook.com newsroom.fb.com pixel.facebook.com apps.facebook.com graph.facebook.com m.facebook.com upload.facebook.com www.facebook.com https://facebook.com
# LinkedIn should only be used for marketing, DO NOT COMMENT UNLESS YOU HAVE A CONCRETE THING TO DO.
# TRAIN or GO OUTSIDE instead of wasting time here.
127.0.0.1 linkedin.com www.linkedin.com https://linkedin.com
“ In an essay he published in The Guardian (which is by now removed from their website, following a massive Twitter campaign against the novelist mainly because of his opinion on techno-consumerism), titled “What’s Wrong with the Modern World?” ”
I'm the opposite, if I'm staring at my phone for hours on end I'm probably reading a book. I have a respectable library right here in my hands right now.
But I do get what you're saying, I've had a problem with dicking around on Reddit before, for a couple of years I spent beyond productive amounts of time on that site.
For me, it was my school's enforced reading and book reports that taught me to skim and just pick up enough info to write a report, and the internet was ultimately what restored my capability to read and attention span, as I could find things that genuinely interested me.
Obviously, the internet has changed a lot since I was a kid, but I'm not entirely sure that there's just nobody being exposed to larger amounts of text and that few people online have interests greater than TikTok.
I think this is pretty natural given we live in an information-abundant world now. Taking the time to read everything you could get your hands on makes a lot of sense when you don't have constant access to everything.
For me, there are some writings that are really great and some that are a drag. I typically skim to figure out if something is really great. If it looks good after a skim, I'll dig deep. I suspect many others are the same, though there probably are some junkies who never dig deep.
I find that there’s something about reading a book that is more ‘calm’ than reading online. I think it’s the knowledge that switching away from it is a ‘chore’. If I get distracted, I’m likely to look into space and think for a moment, then return to the page, because I can’t just reach for the address bar and start typing.
I'm not in the whole anti-Internet camp, indeed my viewpoint is far closer to Randall Munroe's[1]. But it is a little sad how few of my peers read books. I just finished three volumes of the Robert Caro series on Lyndon Johnson along with The Power Broker. Now, granted, these are big tomes. They also cover a topic that most people would not find interesting. Yet I still find it very depressing how almost all of my peers balk at the idea of reading them. Part of the reason they balk is, yes, the length and topic, but also because reading has become such a chore, such an unusual event, that the idea of reading a 800 page book is akin to running a marathon. If you struggle to read a 200 page book, an 800 page book appears impossible.
And yet, inside these books, there is absolutely multitudes. There's more insight and political knowledge and facts than thousands of blog posts and news articles, aided by thorough, comprehensive decades-long research. There's also pure pleasure. The writing quality is so far and above the pedestrian prose that you see on the internet. It's like eating your first bite of top notch sushi after years of cold supermarket stuff. I can't tell you how emotional I got reading about the Civil Rights movement, about the trial of Emmett Till, about Coke Stevenson[2], about the Rural Electrification movement. There's no blog or article that compares.
[2]: Even if that portrayal is considered to be suspect. Although if you ask me, I think the rebuttal of "but Stevenson was a virulent racist" ignores the fact that everybody, LBJ included, was a virulent racist at the time and to tar Stevenson with that brush is to apply modern sensibilities to a different era.
the quality of any body of work is incredibly subjective. take a look at any best-sellers list and pick a random book off it: chances are (if you're like me) that you'll think it was a waste of time after having read it. so then how do you find good content? 1) have friends with common tastes, and consult them. this becomes difficult if you're a millennial surrounded by peers who don't read. 2) find short-form blogs for which the sunk cost in deciding if you like them and want to follow them is low; expand into adjacent blogs & writers. blogs don't link to each other quite like they did in the past (e.g. webrings), so this almost always puts you back into some form of social media for the aggregation (reddit), and those aggregators quite often degrade/drift over time. 3) follow the algorithm. the only platform i've found that's semi-decent at introducing me to new, quality, creators is YouTube (or TikTok, but that's a substantially different genre).
books are cool, but if any of the above tracks with you, the barrier to entry is actually a lot more substantial than the other forms of media we're accustomed to (tv shows, video games, etc). writers shoot themselves in the foot by writing massive tomes that take 800 pages to say what could have been better communicated in 200. introductions are the epitome of authors totally losing track of what the value they provide is -- and yet new authors still include them freakishly often.
Without facial expressions, it's a problem that its hard to tell how serious someone is being on the internet. So every comment is treated like the persons solemn sworn testimony for which they should be judged not just in the current moment, but forever into the future, and everything they every said in the past is relevant, if need be, to show how bad of a person they've been.
Millennials and especially Gen Z are thought to have higher rates of depression and anxiety than previous generations. I would be very surprised if social media weren’t a factor.
Despite making a career in tech I believe some of what we’re doing is very harmful to culture, mental and physical health, the environment, and democracy.
At some point I would like to focus on mitigating these problems.
Do they have higher rates, or better access to information, introspection, tools, awareness, and common understanding of these things? I am curious about that.
I disagree with tbe self-flagellation Zeitgeist. If we didn't have social media we would still have problems with all of those things. It isn't the well of all sorrows that the Zeitgeist is set on scapegoating it as.
It just displaced several of the other ills for more or less no difference. Remember obsessive tabloid celebrity culture and reality TV being big things? Things like news media unironically going "we interupt this story from Iraq for news about Britney Spears being released from jail?".(Ah yes, the same media claiming them going out of business would be terrible for democracy.) The Paris Hilton obsession?
Innane instagrammers and the pyramid scheme of posers selling guides to being posers are the same societal sickness more or less, manifesting its symptoms differently with the era. There will always be some innanity that is with us long before. From their obsessive focus from the dress at the court to the beads in Ugg's hair and bones spiked through his club!
Or, you know, any of the 50 billion other things that have changed in the past 20 years.
Plus it's questionable how much the issue is social media versus just that some things suck and we don't have the option to put our fingers in our ears and go 'la la la everything is fine' anymore. I used to be deeply depressed and angry over climate change; is social media to blame since that's part of what kept it in my head for so long, or maybe it's just a normal response to be depressed and mourn when you learn a bunch of things are dying?
Likewise, 20 years ago I would have been SURPRISED to wake up to news about a school shooting in my state, but now it was just 'yup, we were due.'
Tech and social media are definitely entwined with these changes, but I side eye the recent attempts to put all the responsibility on tech. It's shared responsibility in my opinion: Tech and its incentives are a problem, but there's also a lot of social rot that we can't ignore and that does tend to make people unhappy.
Decent comments and recommendations. I've started to purchase more physical books. But I have the same problem as when I purchase kindle books - they sit there. When I get the chance to read a book and get in, I find that I forget the content. In general I don't have a great memory, anyways. Even when I code, I generally can't tell you where a file is. I think through all the logical steps, from front to back to reach where I need to go.
Nowadays with a young daughter that I need to drive to extracurricular activities (2x a week) it gives me 1 hour to sit in the car by myself...half of which I am able to get some reading done (the other half, on social media of course :( ).
The funny thing is the last book I read, I was able to complete it because I thought it was longer than it actually is (it had a huge appendix). I have a tendency to finish things to 90%...
Oh I'll also say...one trick I've done sometimes is to read using the kindle app or if it's a PDF, xodo...where I can highlight. I treat it almost like I'm reading a website.
I jealously preserve my time and habit of reading lots of books because it's a main contrast to digital life. A welcome pause from the distractions of nonlinearity in online media and electronic devices (such as e reading devices). It's relaxing. Physical books are still a favorite pastime.
Games are completely out for me, except for Microsoft Solitaire on my phone for odd moments. I haven't found an immersive game since playing Harpoon in the early Aughts. They require too much time, too much hardware, and give me little return.
But I do read a lot, still, thanks to the Kindle. I re-read a lot of beloved books, so having the library on the device or easily available is important. But I also find as I grow older it can be harder to concentrate on things. The TV is on too often in my house, and there's really not a good place to escape from it, and it is much more a distraction than the Internet.
Still, I manage to get through between twenty and forty books a year, both new and old.
The worrying thing is that mainstream social medias are stopping reading as a form of the content consumption. Videos are becoming shorter and more condensed. It will end badly for brains of the generation raised on tiktok.
Why is it bad though . I don’t have hours to spend reading a book. Did they not say the same thing when TVs initially came out ? Seems like just another “back in the good old days” post .
What a great read! I am and author and I just emailed a link to three friends who write and my wife.
I guess the summary is just being mindful on how we spend our time, deep thinking rather than shallow reactive thinking, etc.
I use a service https://freedom.to to restrict access to much of the Internet except for specific times. I find this useful as well as the freedom.to podcasts and newsletters - really good material on using technology with purpose.
I have to get into the habit of reading books again, because of the internet I started to just read stuff online because it was just so much easier to keep up to date on things.
I find the long form linear book format puts me into a calming perceiving mood. It became a much needed method of taking a break at a time when multiple high pressure projects and private stress at the same time were pushing me towards collapse. Internet is fractured and many encounter either directly elicit an emotional response of ask of me some form of judgement. Not helpful when needing to calm down.
“When we track the hours, we become shocked—not at the numbers per see—at what could have been learned, grasped, or done during these wasted hours.“
This is the big thing for me. I easily waste an exercise habit, a social life, and a hobby most days. None of it spent on anything fulfilling. Then it often seems like I’m bored or there’s nothing else to do and I distract myself from the reason why with the reason why.
I consider myself to have an internet addiction, and it has definitely cut down on my previously extensive book-reading, and I don't like it.
> Personally I’d been deprived of access to computers and the internet for several straight months. It was a tough experience—not by choice, but by obligation.
Wait, what happened to the author that led to this obligation to not use computers for several months?
I spend way too much time on the internet, listening to a deluge of podcasts and videos at high speed, reading gobs of articles, but I still manage to read 30 books a year.
However this overconsumption of information indisputably harms my ability to create in general; I write less content, less code, less drawings, less music than I used to.
Similar story here. Yes I'm addicted to internet, but no that didn't have any effect on how much I read. Probably because of the habit (did this when I was a kid already): I read about an hour, in bed, right before going to sleep, about 8 out of 10 days. Convenient thing is that my SO does the same. Indeed what I spend on internet time is mostly time taken from creative hobbies. On the other hand I was also not super good at those and it bacame boring after a while.
I used to read non-stop. My kindle is now filled with hundreds of books I haven’t read.
I don’t generally do New Years resolutions but fixing that seems an excellent candidate.
Edit: I’ve just deleted all my standard newsy favourites and moved my Kindle app to where browser usually goes. Browser in same “distractions” folder as Tweetbot.
The answer is yes, we're reading much less and the trend will stay.
Our brain will adapt and evolve, eventually, our brain is more of a browser to search info quickly, it will offload the deep thinking or memorization gradually to the internet/searchc-engine/metaverse/whatever collectively.
FWIW, the Internet and modern electronic gadgets are the best thing that happened to me when it comes to reading more. My reading list is now long enough to last me a year (and keeps growing), and I can just whip my phone out and read whenever I'm waiting for something.
I had the advantage of becoming an adult before the Internet even though I was on it earlier than most people. So I can clearly remember both before and after. While its overwhelmingly beneficial not all of it was good.
I've observed that some of my richer friends are limiting their kids screen time. In fact it's becoming almost universal among those who work in tech. Clearly some of them want their kids to become more balanced. It's hilarious to see these kids to be told to leave the house and play with your friends. They don't know what to do! Boomers never had that problem or had to be asked twice.
I've got an extremely talented friend who is paying each of his kids to read the classics and write book reports which he reviews. The kids in the beginning did it for the money but there is a sense of pride on what they're learning that their peers are not. Certain books became classics for a reason!
My late Mother took us to the library every single week and often checked out and read more books than we did. I naively thought that everyone's parents did the same but I learned that wasn't the case. I think fostering a love of books is one of the greatest gift she gave us.
I used to read a lot of books but now it is hard. Sometimes I can get into something and the pages fly. Often though I space out, my eyes move but I don't read the words, it's not great.
It takes discipline to return to active reading, to re-acquire the proficiency in automated reading.
> my eyes move but I don't read the words
That's also an understandable consequence of having become information scavengers, used to spend time trying to retrieve the important signal in the mass of noise. The information available in the formation years of many was structured in the essays ("careful pace") and breathing in the narrative ("flow and occasionally pick") - today facing "informational landfills" is much more common (this included, e.g., newspaper titles, with few exceptions). One should probably consciously scavenge the more loose texts, and return to a punctual reading of the more structured and reliable texts, after evaluating what kind of text one has in front - to use the type of reading that is appropriate.
I just got out of jail after 8 years. I managed to read over 800 books during that time. Since I got out I've read zero books and 100,000 pages from HN.
I strongly dislike the continued push to categorize bad habits using technology as an addiction. Addiction is not a description of a behavior that you think is bad and wish to change. Addiction is life damaging compulsive action that you wish you could control but can't due to psychological and sometimes physical dependence. If you are using technology as a means of escapism and it becomes a detriment to your health, for example you start struggling with person hygiene, you delay or miss appointments or meetings, you forgo or isolate yourself from your social support, and you see the negative effects of choosing technology and yet don't change your actions, then it can be considered an addiction.
Getting distracted while reading the paper edition of a book and googling something isn't an addiction or "withdrawal effects", it means you find that book boring.
The reason I, and I imagine many others enjoy, reading digitally is because of two main reasons. One is the sheer abundance of new reading materials I will find interesting. I no longer feel an urge to spend my time and energy on writing that's obtuse as a way of considering myself enlightened for having finished reading it. I value my time differently because of choices technology presents me with. The second reason I prefer reading digitally is the accessibility of the discussion and conversations around whatever I'm reading. It's easier to create and engage with others regarding a piece of writing thanks to technology.
Sometimes I wonder if people, like the author, who decide to forgo the use of internet during reading use it positively, the way I do. Any word or phrase I don't understand can be instantly looked up. I can learn the context about the setting an author uses, like looking up pictures of certain types of geography.
The biggest thing that I think the people who decide to go paper only miss out on is the novel ways in which writing is evolving. Fanfiction and independent publishing is a lot easier when it is digital only. Textbooks are becoming better at incorporating web technologies, for example I'm learning a new programming language and the ability to test and run exercises at the end of each section is so helpful in keeping me engaged. There are digital choose your own adventure stories and visual novel games that immerse me in a way no book ever will. The simple ability to copy and paste is groundbreaking when I want to interact with the text.
Many of the downsides the author lists as negatives of digital reading seems to actually be regarding people skimming instead of intentional reading. I would argue that this has more to do with people being conditioned to no longer waste time and poorly written articles that are 90% fluff and 10% content. The biggest problem for me has been the current state of local news articles. A single story reworded and posted multiple times by different news agencies in order to generate content and keep people engaged on their site. I'm not sure if clickbait news articles are gone or if I just have gotten better at filtering them out.
But it's necessary to try to read because the old mediums of news delivery are dying. Why wait for the familiar well spoken news anchor to tell you the most important events of the day over the radio or tv when you can look up the details yourself online? Twitter is one of the most current ways to stay updated on a story because people report live.
The world has become a place where using the internet to stay up to date and read is necessary. People have adapted to having a constant stream of information that can keep them occupied. Most people aren't clinically addicted to the internet, people just don't want to miss information that feels important at the time it's released.
I love my ereader. Books aren't going anywhere. The romantic experience of what past generations defined as reading is disappearing. Some people have a harder time adapting to that truth. Reading to me has never been about the paper, the tangibility, or the fact that you don't need electricity. The most important thing about reading, to me, has been accessibility. I have read an entire harry potter books on an ipod touch, bored in class, while in high school. I do not consider myself a poor student and neither did my teachers. I enjoyed the story just as much as everyone else. I appreciate some people value the concept of physical books more than I do. The doesn't change the fact that the value of writing comes from the ability to convey ideas to another, the medium is an afterthought.
But I do know they [technological advances] won’t make writing twice as
good.
So wrong! There's no question Google has improved my writing, enabling
"google-fu" which dials in the precise historical reference or literary
turn-of-phrase I'm looking for.
That said I don't read nearly as many books as I did in high school. Books are wonderful things and can be a portal to a novel frame of mind. But then again my life is much busier these days and there are more demands on my time which are not responsibly ignored... So I cherish HN as a flourishing intellectual community, in easily digestible chunks. A bit like the "periodical" era of newspapers a century or two ago.