There's a brazillian song called Tédio (Boredom) that was popular in the 80's. It talks about not withstanding boredom inside home, while life goes on out there. It's curious how the depicted feeling is so unrelatable today.
I think boredom is a real force that pushes ourselves to the edge, to hopefully make a change in life, like going out to see real people.
Social media creates this cozy, safe place to keep your mind occupied, letting life pass without realizing it.
But why do people blame social media for that? Every entertainment is equally at fault, wherever it's fictions, movies, tv series, comics/webtoons, games etc
It’s a difference of degree not kind. The constant audiovisual stimulus running through the internet is much more powerful than any of those things, and more widely available. Cable TV was close. It was always on in the room, but you had to be in the room, and you had to negotiate with your cohabitants over what to have on, or else you could go somewhere and be bored. There are no constraints anymore, with exceptions for the most impoverished among us - there’s always something close at hand to tickle your particular reptile brain until you fall asleep.
Computers with social media are so extremely reactive. Literally within half a second I can react to my boredom and find new content. I've noticed myself beginning to read a sentence, get bored half-way through, switch tabs, look over the new recommendations, do it again 30 seconds later.
Never bored, and yet never really entertained or satisfied.
The best is when you're on reddit, think "this is boring", open a new tab and type in "reddit.com"...
On that topic, I've luckily managed to make reddit boring that I open it, scroll for a minute or so, and close it again: I unsubscribed from the "interesting" subreddits like politics or tifu or askreddit.
One trick I've found to help with this is to live-stream. I once streamed a game on Twitch, nobody really watched, but it forced me to sit down and actually play the game for a good 2 or 3 hours. It was draining, gloriously draining and satisfying. You can stream programming and other personal projects as well. It doesn't matter if you get many viewers or not, just forcing yourself to maintain a consistent course of action helps. If you do get some real viewers though, all the better, you can monetize your work and enjoy free advice and socializing with viewers.
Yes, normally I would play for 30 mins and then do something else. It was Outer Wilds though, a mystery / puzzle game similar to Myst and so the problem solving made it more tiring and more tempting to take breaks.
That's not what happens when people doom scroll. They are not perfectly entertained. They are profoundly bored on social media. But they still scroll for scraps of entertainment because more promising alternatives are not really accessible to them at that moment, because of physical limitations or their state of mind or their energy levels.
Agreed, and quite often there was nothing of interest. On the net I can almost always find something of interest or at least interesting enough for me to crap my time away
yeah, internet has near no constraint and this is the key problem
TV had time.. you may be able to store it but you'd need tapes .. still space and efforts constraints
today your hard drive and infinite connection create an infinite pit
I also believe our brains love, just like muscles love exercise, prioritizing, you feel better when you made a smart decision. the feeling of never having to choose, skip through many videos, pausing them, in any order tickle the gluttony in us but then you get stuck and rot
I don't think novelists have yet figured out how to completely occupy your cognitive apparatus or put you under pressure to stay engaged. When I'm sitting in my comfy chair reading a novel, I can close my eyes without worrying that I might miss something while I'm asleep.
How is this different than closing your phone, screen shotting a FB post, pausing your video? Really. Even live streams, for the most part, are able to be paused and watched at a later date albiet without chat interaction. I fail to see the difference.
If you fall asleep during a video, now you'll have no idea where you were. Similarly if I lose concentration watching a video, I now have to either go back or hope I didn't miss anything important. If I lose concentration while reading, the page is still there, I just have to skim it until I find where i went on a tangent.
You really don't see a difference between skimming a single page and scrubbing through a video that could be hours long? And scrubbing only works when the video is visually distinct enough between parts that you can tell without having to watch a few seconds at multiple different points.
Social media has feedback loops that can adjust themselves orders of magnitude faster than legacy media, to keep you addicted (er, "engaged") with near zero friction.
Because it's too easy now. You need a creative endeavor to seem like an easy way to replace boredom with novelty. For a lot of folks especially younger ones, there is already infinite novelty just waiting to be scrolled all the time in their pocket. No need to do anything except wave your thumb around.
lower friction makes it even easier to consume. We didn't use to turn on a tv every time you took a dump but we are on our phones scrolling through brain garbage every idle second we have in our day. that's not good, our brain is not equipped to either deal with all this stimulus or resist it.
I intentionally avoid things like TikTok because I've experienced how incessantly and constantly addictive it is. But then again, I'll also avoid particularly long TV series, games without definitive ends, etc. I think TikTok et al are unique because you're "doing something" but the effort expended to get that next hit is extremely minimal. Even though I can sink hours into Factorio, it's challenging and exhausting. I might be able to binge a TV series, but eventually I'll want to do something. TikTok hits a perfect blend of "doing" and "experiencing" that makes it endlessly addictive.
If you're suggesting they're equally at fault, you better have some numbers to back it up. Otherwise it just looks like you say they're equal because that's what you want to believe.
Clearly not. That would be like dismissing Siberian tigers as just cats, and pretending they're no more dangerous than the average housecat. The taxonomy is the same, but the similarities end there.
In that sense everything is at fault, not just all forms of media.
But social media has no downtime and is engineered to be addictive. A casino will lose it's appeal once you've run out of liquidity. Social media has next to no prohibiting qualities.
I'm so grateful for having abandoned social networks. My main motivator were the fights over political weaponization of COVID-19, but then I went on and abandoned youtube and news as well. Now, I'm halfway with my first book, found a new hobby and developed my previous ones, rediscovered programming for fun, am learning a new foreign language, found a new job with very good compensation, lost 10 kg and became a better husband. My life is so fundamentally better.
I am bugged by this question too. I've stopped reading newspapers 8 years ago. Closed FB account 7 years ago. Never been on IG or Tiktok. Never watched more than 2 YouTube Videos in a month. Twitter? 10 minutes in every three days and I only read tweets about STEM topics. Heck, I don't even join WhatsApp groups. Reddit and HN is what I browse. I very rarely post on Reddit and stay away from all political posts. The amount of time I spend on Reddit is gradually decreasing.
So that leaves me with HN. I like HN because topics I encounter here are not nonsensical or political. There are no memes, gifs or cheap jokes here. I find myself in awe of the knowledge people have here. I am forced to read stuff here rather than fast paced casual browsing. As a meme reads, "On Internet, typing is fun and reading is hard" but HN is exact opposite of that for me.
But deep inside my heart, I know HN is also a social media in many ways and I need to cut down the time I spend on this. I am addicted to this. I realized browsing HN is essentially a coping mechanism for my depression and lifelong failures. HN gives me a false sense of "look I am not wasting my time in frivolous stuff". HH helps me escape from harsh realities of my life in much the same ways drinking helps people cope with their life. In subtle ways, HN has polluted my mind and corrupted my ability to think in realistic ways.
HN is a social media site if you visit multiple times a day and post comments and spend your mental energy on the site, and allow yourself to into rabbit holes for hours.
If you want to cut down on time spent on HN, on F-Droid there is an app called Glider. Its a typical HN client. It has a feature/button called Catch Up, where it gives you top posts by week/month, similar to how you can filter things on reddit and typically reddit clients.
I highly recommend experimenting with batching time spent on certain sites to once a week and once a month, that is, 5 or 6 visits a month, and get a high level overview of what happened (instead of multiple visits daily, which interrupts your flow). Then limit yourself to only look at the top 5 top-level comments (and not go into comment rabbit holes). Same for reddit, or skip reddit if you can, its mostly noise. Skip other social media sites too.
I concur very much. HN is the only social media I use these days, after cutting reddit and others nearly a decade ago. I have had to set up blockers for the comments section, to limit my time, as I end up spending far too much time here. Even so, did I really need to spend the last few hours learning about corner-locked land, southwest's canceled flights, new rust features, wifi DFS, anecdotes about electric vehicles in winter, etc?
On the flip side, without HN, my life would be totally different. I likely would not have pursued the much higher paying job I have now. My enthusiasm for technology and software would not be as high, seeing the many ways tech is used here. I would not be aware of meditation, notion, chatgpt, ml, postgres, cloud, rust go, wait but why, the inner platform effect, and so much else. For better or worse, HN shapes my outlook on the world. Is knowing all this worth the time spent, or is seeking knowledge simply addictive? I don't know.
It might be social media, but it isn't a social network.
HN has no friending or a way to link yourself to any other user, no actual customizable profiles (a tiny "about me" textbox aside), no images anywhere, no way to DM users, and most people don't use their real names either.
There are only two "social" parts of HN. First is that the links to the articles are posted (and voted on) by users. And the second part is just the fancy comment section around those posts. Most big news websites have a comment section on their articles too, and those might even be more full-featured than HN (e.g., I am pretty sure quite a few of those allow setting a profile picture).
To put it simply, I believe social network and social media are two different things. You can have them both together (e.g., twitter), or separately. I would consider the initial Snapchat app to be a social network, but they added a dash of social media later on (with the "around me" feature, stories, etc). And HN would fall under the opposite of the original Snapchat app - social media, but without much social netowork.
Sidenote: I am not an expert on this and didn't spend time researching it. What I wrote above is a purely subjective take on how I personally understand those terms, and how they apply to the topic at hand.
> Is browsing and commenting on Hacker News not considered social media use though?
Somewhat and it is quite addictive too but the quality is way better and there is even an option to turn limit your time spent on HN (no procastination flag/option).
HN is not employing dirty techniques to keep user enganged with dumbed down content, people are just commenting out on articles, it’s more like a community
> to hopefully make a change in life, like going out to see real people.
I’m fascinated by this narrative on the “real” people outside. I wonder how having more people working remote could change that cultural landscape, and how much time it will take for people to go over the dichotomy of “real” vs “online”.
There are wonderful people with tons of insight and many things to share in the “outside” world. But thing is, they are also online and will share their life philosophy or their new hiking gears in reddit threads as well.
Went to a cafe last week and after a bunch of talk with the owner, he went to ask for my Twitter account and who I was following in the same cultural sphere. And it’s not like we stopped being real the moment we moved our focus to what happens online.
It’s very difficult when you have to make a conscious decision to.. be bored. I do think most people still get stimuli like loneliness that hopefully drives them out sometimes.
Interesting. We should not forget that social media creates this cozy safe place for everyone, so even if you personally realize that, your friends and acquaintances may not.
In my own experience, since around 2010 and with the rise of social media and streaming services -especially after covid- people are more inclined to spend time at home instead of hanging out or doing stuff "in real life"
I think it also has to do with the wider socioeconomic situation. (Most) people make less disposable money on the whole than they did before. Sure, the minimum wage might increase but rent and food and insurance is going up faster! And the restaurants and mall stores (when they exist at all) and theme parks certainly aren't cheap. You could go walk a park every day but that's just tiring. There are people working themselves to the bone without enough extra energy to fulfill their children's lives let alone their own. People are being squeezed from all sides.
In contrast, I'd say social media is not the cause but the reaction to such things. I mean, we all saw particular people get genuinely addicted to scrolling Facebook in the early years of the service, but that rarely totally ostracized them from their previous social circles, it might have even grown them! But now with things like twitch streamers on a schedule, ready to be your friend Friday night, and customized YouTube feeds of endless hours of documentaries and Twitter and even HN. The opportunity is there. Someone who's already staying in can get that fix, anyone who's avoiding anything can do it perfectly. It's a cycle of control. It's soooooo much easier to sit and stare and laugh and maybe even engage than it is to text a group, see if anyone else is in the perfect intersection of bored and not tired and enough income to go to dinner.
We all got dripfed this stuff by force and sheer survival for the last couple years, and I understand it's hard to rip the tubes out of your arm.
Perhaps this is due to my insufficient understanding of English, but "an abundance of uninterrupted time spent in relative solitude" doesn't sound like boredom to me, especially if the time is spent on active thinking.
If you are deeply engaged in musing, despite the solitary situation, you are not really bored, are you? At least I wouldn't call it being bored. You've got something to do, and you're well occupied by it. It's just thinking time to me. Such a situation I'd never characterize as boring (unless it lasts a ridiculous time, which reminds me of _Chess Story_).
What I think of as "boredom" is more like being in a sporadic lecture, doing assignments that are lengthy and thoughtless, being locked in a traffic jam, etc. Something that takes time, repulses attention, but has sufficient consequence that compels your concentration. And I don't think those are helpful in the profoundness of anything.
So, if the premise is "social media may prevent users from reaping creative rewards of time to profoundly think", I'd agree. But "profound boredom"? I just couldn't get behind this terminology.
I think it’s an attempt to refer to the mind idling, without active engagement, left to itself to wonder, improvise, manifest spontaneous connections… create.
I find the differentiation to be rather circular in its logic. The authors chose to call it "profound boredom", grouped it with "normal boredom" (which is, in fact, just "boredom"), called the union of them "boredom", and thus boredom can be great for your creativity.
All this mental gymnastic to produce the attention grabbing headline that something bad can be good for you, when that something bad is actually something good, but rehashed into the category of something bad. Of course, that thing which is good for you has not changed; we always knew that if you spend time thinking deeply, you might gain some insights or ideas. It's just a shuffling of terminologies, which conveniently helps market their findings.
By the same thought process, a human being can have 8 limbs, because here are the "normal humans", and there we have Billy the Octopus, who we re-categorize as a "Octopusian human". So, it's safe to say that some human can have 8 limbs.
Quit Twitter about 6 years ago because of related issues. Checked out Mastodon, but apart from the distributed aspect it just seems like more of the same, as in an evolution upon the experience of watching TV, in the internet era. I've been quite happy without it since.
We followed a similar path and my experience was mostly the same. I wanted the fediverse to be a positive social thing in my life, I gave it a few years but in practice it felt sadly similar. Reading Amusing Ourselves to Death over the holiday helped me understand my relationship to infotainment a little better. (And I'm conflicted about this site too honestly...)
This book should be required reading in school. I read it when I was around 18 and it vaccinated me profoundly for all things entertainment industry, be it video games, TV or social media. I partake, but there always comes a point where I get that Clockwork Orange gag reaction at some point and am driven away.
And yes, this site is of quality content, but it is still the same opiate.
Very true, but HN has a hard limit on how much time I will spend here. A few stories on the main page plus sometimes comments, and that's it for the day. Social media is designed to eliminate that limit, I used to be able to spend an entire day scrolling Twitter.
I'm fine with HN personally because there is no infinite scrolling, plus a significant number of the posts/comments here teach me something new every day.
Everytime there's some article about Netflix, Facebook, or the like there's a bunch of people telling everyone they quit and how their life is better, etc.
Many times the article isn't even about quitting social media, just some controversy. I wonder if some percentage of those people are right-wing and wait for a chance to jump in so they can harm companies they disagree with.
I love how it has become a right-wing thing to hate corporations. Those poor left-wing global megacorps, constantly attacked by the evil anti-corporate right.
The whole problem with social media is the feed. Remove that feed and replace it with something that is not the mechanism to keep users captive and most of the issues with social media are solved.
One of the ways to achieve that is to make people at the center of app. The user chooses avatar from multiple avatars on main screen and view their updates. Once they have viewed someone's update they can go back do it for other, it becomes boring very fast and discourages app usage. No social media company is going to do this but something of this sort needs to happen.
Exactly! It's the digital equivalent of placing the milk at the back of the grocery store. It's meant to distract you from why you're there in the first place.
This is actually almost exactly what Snapchat stories - now also on Instagram and Facebook - achieve. You can click through your friend’s updates, reply as you want, and when you’ve seen everyone you’re out of content until someone posts again. I kinda like using these apps in this way, because it’s still cool to see what people are up to, usually more genuine, and harder to get sucked down the scroll.
Except this setting reverts back to the default if you haven't visted Twitter for some time (48h or so IIRC), which works as another gravity to let you habitize it.
I think it would have similar effect of reddit or youtube. 99% of the time I use reddit or youtube, it's started with search to jump straight to a topic.
And that is better because the demand side is an active, the knowledge side is the sort of passive. So mediocre knowledge wouldn't have the money backed ads power to outperform the better knowledge or solution.
This looked interesting and then I read the following in the press release: “Dr Hill said the research sampled 15 participants of varying age, occupational and education backgrounds in England and the Republic of Ireland, who had been put on furlough or asked to work from home.”
So the hypothesis is based on 15 people, in one region of the world, in a very specific circumstance. The authors admit the research is limited, but if you don’t read deeply into the press release you might come away thinking this finding—if you can call it that—is much more solid than the actual survey methodology would support.
> Dr Hill said the research sampled 15 participants of varying age, occupational and education backgrounds in England and the Republic of Ireland, who had been put on furlough or asked to work from home. He said the survey was relatively limited and that it also would be valuable to examine, for example, the role that material conditions and social class played in people’s experience of boredom.
> “We think these initial findings will resonate with so many people’s experiences of the pandemic and their use of social media to alleviate boredom, and we would like to see this research taken further,” he said.
You don’t publish because basically anything can be proven at n=15. I could probably go perform another study right now at n=15 and if I chose my variables right I could determine that social media has no effect whatsoever. And as much as you or I know not to read too much into this one study, there are plenty more people who won’t read too closely or carefully.
I'll put it bluntly. I don't care about people who read a single study and take it as gospel. Science would be nothing without all the studies that are published about every single topic. Even the most important findings are built on studies done before them.
> basically anything can be proven at n=15
Nothing was proven. The paper is literally a philosophical discussion about Heidegger leaning on a survey. If you think that proves anything, I have a bridge to sell you. It's a data point, nothing more and nothing less. It's an interesting perspective worth thinking about and investigating further.
You may not care, but science as a whole has a responsibility to do more help than harm. Anyways I feel like we’re kind of arguing past each other. I agree studies should be done; I just don’t think people should be getting news articles written up at n=15; that seems deceptive.
I'm ambivalent about the news article. It can be misleading, but I also wouldn't have found the paper and read through the whole thing without it, which I felt was a really interesting and valuable read.
Funny to read this today. Last night I got sick of TV, sick of all the interwebs' distractions, and just sat there with eyes closed, letting my mind wander.
Finally I remembered I wanted to read Fathers and Sons (Turgenev). Here's a great question: why am I here and not reading that? BRB.
> “Profound boredom may sound like an overwhelmingly negative concept but, in fact, it can be intensely positive if people are given the chance for undistracted thinking and development.”
Is there historical evidence, from before social media or computers existed, that boredom made people productive or creative? I am worried about my kids never ever being bored, and the points in the article are tempting to believe, but when I think about history, I’m sure people were more lots more bored but not sure they were creatively doing any better than what we see today.
Boredom is what led to pretty much every project I've ever done. I usually have a list in my head of things that could be made better, but they never come to anything until I have a lengthy period of nothing to do.
Latest example: I had to take all my vacation time this year or else I'd lose it. I got so bored that I built this over the past weeks: https://github.com/kstenerud/kbnf
That's an interesting question... I'm not sure how one would quantify which is more creative, and I certainly wouldn't stay long at a job that has no creative outlet. It's also confounded by the fact that I got my current job because they're using one of my open source projects as part of their core business.
Anecdotally, I do a lot less personal projects and wild exploration since spending much more time on the net every day. This resonates to other people’s comments I think.
On the other hand, when looking back at what I was doing a decade or two ago, they were dumber, clunkier and just less interesting things overall. My personal take is that the barrier to invest time into something is now a lot higher, but the results are to me much more fulfilling and impacting.
Doing stuff out of pure boredom wasn’t as efficient and engaging as doing stuff that I long thought about and actively create time to execute on.
My four step kids have no idea what boredom is. I, however, do, and found most of my creative endeavours and hobbies arose when I was bored. I'm pretty sure if boredom wasn't the alternative, I wouldn't have learned the guitar, or spent many hours daydreaming science fiction fantasies.
I think it's hard to judge, because we have so many more tools and resources today which amplify creative output.
It might true that we are have more creative output today than we did 100 years ago, while also being true that social media stifles us from reaching our full creative potential.
I did not read the study, but the finding seems trivial and limited at the same time:
Anything you do to alleviate or prevent boredom that is not creative can be said to 'prevent reaping creative rewards' of boredom. Not just social media (or any media consumption, really) but also sports or calling a friend or helping in a soup kitchen. If you didn't do it, you'd feel boredom, and might pick up something creative instead.
This is no doubt true but smart phones basically give you the option to never be bored, and get instant gratification whenever you feel like it. I don’t think it is limited to social media but I imagine there are pretty profound consequences to that.
TV and video games are also an option but as you implied you may not always have access to them.
However in what situation prior to the internet would a person be forced to be bored. Waiting at the DMV? I guess what I'm saying is it's pretty rare that someone wouldn't have an escape from bordem, even before phones.
Even sitting at home you could get bored. Yes, you would have TV but "nothing is on" and you might have books but nothing "seems right". None of those activities were as carefully tailored to bring you in and actively work to keep you engaged as social media does today.
road trips, standing in line anywhere (toll booth, amusement park, gas station, grocery store etc), riding the subway, waiting room at a doctor’s office, riding in a cab, waiting between customers at your retail job, power outages, camping trips, I am sure I could think of many more.
For the above you could
-listen to music
-talk to someone
-read a book, magazine, or newspaper
-text people (I assume we mean no social media, not no phones)
Now my nitpicks
- How long do you wait for gas? It's also an activity (assuming you aren't using full service)
-Camping is an activity
Sure you can come up with a scenarios where people are forced to be bored. Like waiting in a doctors office that you went to by yourself and they don't offer any reading material. Seems rare.
Let me offer another one: solitary confinement, what happens to people left alone with their own thoughts? They often go crazy.
> However in what situation prior to the internet would a person be forced to be bored.
What? People used to wait all the time. Meeting friends? “See you at 8 at the mall, east corner” and your friend would arrive at 8:13 while you were there since 7:46pm, unable to walk away for fear of missing the evening completely. So people smoked! A LOT!
And sometimes you would miss the appointment, have no way to reach the person, and spend the whole evening by yourself in the city, having also missed the movie time.
It is a self regulating problem, bored people create entertainment until there are no other bored people left. Modern tech makes that process more efficient so you have less bored people, I don't see why that is a problem.
It's a problem if the things that people used to do while bored were useful and now that social media is handling the boredom problem those things are not happening anymore.
TV being a problem was talked to death for years. Now the attention is on streaming binges on Netflix. Not everyone likes or plays video games it doesn't have the same mass appeal
Social media is distinct in that it's not one thing, one experience.
It's many different experiences, that users are cut between, exposed to. Where-as calling a friend every hour doesnt make sense & would get repetitive, one can just drop into the feed of experiences whenever they want.
Your point remains, certainly. But I do think there's a kind of unbridled access to novelty & other-peoples-creativeness that is indeed remarkably blunting when compared to most personal lives & options we'd have.
Leaning into the metaness of having this conversation on social media in social media and on the subject of it's shallowness, then detaching the headline takeaways from the study's detail as done here by GP is a useful case in point. Can a reasonable argument be made even against straw men ? Do the details matter when the sound byte talking head line is the lone subject of interest ?
Note to downvoters : no opinion is offered here, for or against.
Like it or not the memeification of a study like this compressed in to a couple of headlines which float off into the field of engagement on their own - that phenomenanon is a thing and would not happen if the bullet points didn't tap into a confirmation bias of pre existing wider interest in the topic being advanced in some small way through surfacing the conversation and I question if this holds true whatever the originating details might be. I certainly don't have a clear answer.
Sports use more muscles and cardio than social media scrolling. Phonecalls at least rely on speech instead of an algorithm deciding what to show you. Helping in a Soup Kitchen is obviously more productive than doom-scrolling.
All of those examples are better uses of time than passively consuming "Social Media"
"Phonecalls at least rely on speech instead of an algorithm deciding what to show you"
People participate in social media. Think of all the creative content that exists. In your example you compared a two way phone call with only one part of social media.
"Helping in a Soup Kitchen is obviously more productive than doom-scrolling."
Though subjective, I agree with you. However without social media how many 14 year olds were helping at soup kitchens instead of watching TV, playing video games, or outside playing. You implied that social media was impacting selfless benevolent acts.
This could even get complicated where I show that young people use social media in a positive way to call out social issues or make people aware of volunteer events.
"All of those examples are better uses of time than passively consuming "Social Media"
Again, social media doesn't have to be passive, your comment that I'm replying to and this reply show that.
I believe you are letting your cynicism impact your view of social media
however there's some pretty stark differences. Sport is inherently physically healthy, and working in a soup kitchen or doing some other charitable work has positive social effects. Much social media usage, despite the name, isn't very social at all.
After a game of soccer with your friends you probably feel better both physically and mentally than after scrolling through twitter. The latter is more like reality tv combined with the worst news channel available.
I am reading Antifragile by Nassim Taleb, and one of his points is that much of invention happens either out of necessity or outside of structure vs traditional R&D / Academia.
I was wondering how much social media filling in all spare time keeps people from tinkering and inventing and making progress.
Though, I suspect the tinkers are still spending a lot of time tinkering - and only the people who have nothing better to do are spending most of their time on social media.
There is a line of research according to which social media create addiction [0]. When we are addicted to social media, we have less and less time for tinkering and pushing the envelope, because a sizeable part of our time is claimed by such media.
[0] Griffiths, M. D. (2012). Facebook addiction: Concerns, criticism, and recommendations: A response to Andreassen and colleagues. Psychological Reports, 110, 518–520. https://doi.org/10.2466/01.07.18.PR0.110.2.518-520
I thought this was a well known observable fact. There are certain creative thought processes that only occur to me when I really have absolutely nothing else to think about, but that basically never happens anymore thanks to the internet. The only reason I'm even aware that I'm missing out on this is because it still happens when I take long showers, so basically the only time I don't have a phone or computer with me.
A powerful, constant, extremely low-effort distraction.
It's blinding to all of your senses and thoughts because as long as your attention is consumed by this fascinating object everything else is invisible.
Walls of blindness surround you. A kind of invisible prison.
I live in a different country, continent because of the boredom of buses in late 90’s.
I would look around and just see how little was happening in my town. I hated it, it spurned me on to escape.
If the monotony of bus journeys was eased by social media I am sure I may still be there.
I don't mean to be glib, but I often see people discuss this as though it's a smartphone only thing. It's just as possible to doom scroll on the big screen.
Maybe I'm jealous that some people can restrict time wasting to just the phone.
I time waste with any computer, so I leave them all at home and make an effort to be out all day without any computer on me. I believe it was Jonathan Frazen who said "nothing of any worth was ever written in a room with an internet connection" and I agree. You lose the subtleties of human behaviour when you can just unplug from reality.
It's certainly a way to waste time, but social media is also where I've found a lot of creative partners to work on side projects with, and it's where I've found a lot of inspiration too when looking at people's art, microfiction, etc. So I feel like for me it's probably at least net neutral when I use it properly instead of just doomscrolling.
Actually being creative requires work, a lot of it, and the people who are very creative think the work is fun or have accepted it. Best to get into a regular groove of doing your creative work on a predictable schedule.
The opposite of being bored is cultivating your interests, treating them like a garden that takes work but grows over time into a variety of wonderful things.
I agree that many people think "being creative" is just swanning around being inspired, but all the high-level creative people I know are very hard-working. There's a great book called The Creative Habit by the choreographer Twyla Tharp which is an absolutely fantastic insight into what it takes to operate at a high level in the arts.
What exactly is the difference between idling, daydreaming, meditating, musing or sitting on sofa with eyes shut and profound boredom?
Aren't all these activities doing the same thing, giving the brain pause to calm down, to refocus. Perhaps our brains require idle times as our bodies need pause after exercise.
> Profound boredom stems from an abundance of uninterrupted time spent in relative solitude, which can lead to indifference, apathy, and people questioning their sense of self and their existence - but which Heidegger said could also pave the way to more creative thinking and activity.
I wonder if there is a record of what could help one break out of 'indeifference, apathy, ...' phase and into the 'creative thinking and activity' phase. It is just a matter of time? Is it possible only for some and not for others? Have you, dear reader, succesfully transitioned to the latter phase and as a result, change the course of your life towards a desirable goal?
Wrote a book covering this topic this year. You could live an entire life not being bored. There’s definitely different types of boredom and we are constantly distracted from the good kinds.
I could not even being to read the article. The title was enough.
Now we are trying to be productive even in boredom.
Let us suck the life out of everything.
While we are at, just invent something that let us work when we are asleep.
I know I'm being hard, but I can't help feeling nauseated by this mindset of "reaping" something out of everything and everywhere.
I think you may have missed the point of the article if that's your take on it. Its not about deliberately mining boredom, it's that being constantly "entertained" by social media means you will not enter the mind state where creativity can reach significant peaks.
From what I can tell from a brief googling, the term "social media" was coined (or at least an early documented use was) by an AOL executive in 1997. I think that refutes your assertion. AOL usernames tended to be pretty pseudonymous.
I disagree that this is a social media, I don't even look at the names of those who leave comments or those I reply to. It's like I'm reading and talking to the hivemind.
For me what puts Hacker News in the same bucket as Twitter, Reddit, or Facebook is that it’s a constantly refreshing feed of content that requires very little choice or initiative on my end to access. It’s always here, always novel, and I don’t have to think from a blank slate to figure out what I want to read, I just come and pick from the menu that’s been put in front of me.
I can contribute and participate actively by doing critical thinking and leaving comments but I can also read passively and barely even think my own thoughts. For me that passive version is the default.
I agree that social media is not the most accurate term. I wonder what a good alternative would be. “Mindless feed reading” could refer to the act of consuming it.
You are being pedantic. Yes, if you're in a group and exchange discussions which are low-effort(memes) and high-dopamine(outrageous views) you are in the cycle.
HN still serves as a source of distraction for time periods of arbitrary length. TikTok may also not be a social network, but it's distracting and addicting. The content on HN is just a bit more geared towards the intellectual (and The Algorithm is less powerful).
Or maybe posting all our creative output on large searchable databases actually amplifies creativity due to tools like AI whereas aimless boredom tends to result in local efforts such as scribbling?
I think boredom is a real force that pushes ourselves to the edge, to hopefully make a change in life, like going out to see real people.
Social media creates this cozy, safe place to keep your mind occupied, letting life pass without realizing it.