Tristram Harris [1][2] is worth listening to on these points, I'm sure many on HN are already aware.
Without rambling too much, I'm one of those over-sensitive, slightly aspie types that reads SSC and gets carried away with over-analysing the zeitgeist. Uncharitably, you might say 'smart but weak-minded'. The longer I spend in front of social media, the more and more in tatters I feel. I spent a week entirely disconnected from the 'net a month ago and I can't stress how restorative it was for me. Though, alarmingly, I was back in full swing soon after I returned.
For those of you who have problems with self-control and sustaining your attention, and think it has something to do with your browsing habits, I highly recommend you - I urge you - to disconnect in a significant way. Of course it's up to you what that means.
In September I gave up smoking, and the physical and psychological changes I underwent were pretty surprising. I felt more present and in-the-moment (and other barely-describable-but-definitely-nice feelings) than I had done in years. Despite smoking 25 a day, I have found quitting Reddit much, much harder; despite being convinced it's as bad for my mental health as smoking was for my physical.
I think there's something to be said about identifying addiction patterns in your life and exorcising them. The small amounts of progress I've made recently have certainly felt as though they've increased my net level of agency and free will. I wish that flowery metaphors about demons were more readily acceptable, because software is a lot like wizardy - and it really does feel like dark sorcery has been cast to possess the West.
Can you elaborate on how you felt after you took your week off? In particular I'm interested in differences in sleep requirements & quality, difficulty handling eye contact (the 'slightly aspie' stuff), and general cognition. "In tatters": can I get a description of that also?
Only reason I ask is because I've had a similar experience...twice. Once when moving into an apartment (no power, close proximity to roommates) and again when on a trip (golfing all day, close proximity again). My "symptoms" include pretty serious social anxiety and an inability to think during conversations, inability to focus on non-interesting work, and just a general feeling of being dumber.
I felt more socially confident (perhaps not confident exactly, though that was an aspect -- more strident). My sleep was at healthy times, for slightly longer, but the difference between being 'asleep' and 'awake' was, well, night and day. Rather than the slow, drawn-out waking, for which there's a gateway to very negative appraisal of the world. When I came back, I binged, heavily.
'In tatters', hmm... My self-regulation is poor but I'm desperately trying to claw upwards, so I have erected a lot of barriers between me and my lovely but drug-addicted friends, which gives me a lot of free time. I spend a lot of time purposefully and sanely researching things I want to learn, where I should learn them from, then feeling pooped out and gawping in front of YouTube or Reddit, then blaming myself for wasting time etc etc. It's hard to summarise, to be honest. Feeling 'locked-up' and 'scattered', maybe? I'm often exhausted by reading Reddit, it really feels like work. Honestly, I feel like I spend most days working intensely and not sleeping enough to manage it. Despite spending most of my time gaining weight on a desk chair, and not actually working.
I'm very gullible. I tend to remember a lot of what I read, and I'm naturally full of doubt, and over-analytical. So reading a thousand conflicting opinions on subjects makes me... A little loopy and conflicted. Like I'm always in last place, trying to catch up with the 'right' opinion on everything. There was a Reddit thread for the OP's link just today, where someone mentioned arguing with their girlfriend like an anonymous Redditor - I also definitely empathise with that one.
I have problems with eye contact, for sure, I tend to 'fall into' it if I look too long, as it seems to me to be a remarkably intense thing to hold eye contact for longer than an instant.
I was diagnosed with ADHD-PI in September, and haven't gotten on medication for it just yet (I've been disorganised...). I think reddit-like media is particularly bad for people like us. They say ADHD is more of a working memory disorder than anything, and I think we need our cache clearing regularly, let's say. A Reddit addiction tops it up at every opportunity.
> My "symptoms" include pretty serious social anxiety and an inability to think during conversations, inability to focus on non-interesting work, and just a general feeling of being dumber.
That hit really close to home. I've attributed my symptoms to lack of exercise and perhaps not reading enough long-form but this all conjecture at this point.
> My "symptoms" include pretty serious social anxiety and an inability to think during conversations, inability to focus on non-interesting work, and just a general feeling of being dumber.
Well, I guess I'm not alone. I feel like I've struggled with that for many years.
I can relate with the fact that taking a longer break from connectivity is very healthy.
I found that as I sat on a bus my first instinct was to call a friend. That is not a problem per se, but this I did for every ride. With enough friends I was be able to keep that up all the time. The same pattern was present in everything I did, sitting home alone was not an option.
In the end I lost my phone and felt that I shouldn't get a new one, at the same time my computer was at a friends place. All of a sudden my appartment was without mobile and computer connectivity (not a even a clock!). All of a sudden I could here myself again and I felt stronger and more filled with energy than in a long time.
Later on I have seen talks on precisely the same thing where they talk about how we end up skipping those small breaks we need to take during the day.
It was just a couple of days ago I heard about people who build dark rooms in their home where they can retract and replenish. Munks being the extremes.
I think it's great to find the things you can't handle, IRC, Reddit or Facebook, it's all the same if it steals those small breaks from your schedule. A compact schedule without those will eventually make you break.
Oddly enough I find that Hacker News is totally fine since it's easy to surf in on the most upvoted , read through the headlines, read comments for the interesting parts and be done with it. In the end that's basically the only site I read now a day since my life is busy enough with family and work.
I too have problems with controlling how much I do stuff, obviously. But taking note that it is actually an issue and doing it in controlled doses are really empowering. Choose platforms wisely :) Meditation helps.
Also, quitting IRC was about the hardest thing I've done (but I got my life back), but taking away part by part, channel by channel, i.e. stop gaming since that was why I used chats, made it so much easier to just walk away. Did the same with facebook recently and it was awesome.
Despite smoking 25 a day, I have found quitting Reddit much, much harder
I started using BBS systems in 1985 and reddit in 2006. Left reddit several times, deleting my account(s) each time. Finally left it for good about a year and a half ago and am so glad it's gone. I've replaced it with some similar things like HN but reddit is such a particularly addictive and destructive site it's worth singling out for avoidance.
You mention that you replaced Reddit with some similar things like HN. If you don't mind me asking, what are they? I've failed to find content with the quality of discussion that can be found here.
I recently put some money on bitcoin, I don't think there's much difference to the neverending stream web of today and gambling money. It's true you're rushing for something exciting. A new info, a new tweet, new joke, it's zapping web scale. I gradually tried to disconnect but I think I should just go full stop for a week.
I would always worry that if I permanently deleted (not deactivated -- deleted) my Facebook account something would be lost, but this just wasn't the case in practice. Once it was gone it felt like nothing was ever there to begin with, and I feel _so much better_. I highly recommend that others take a leap of faith and do the same.
My issue with replacing something like reddit is... what exactly to replace it with?
Reddit is entertaining and free. Every time I quit, I end up still seeking out entertainment, but it's no longer free. Movies, gambling, restaurants, bars. TV is free but even less entertaining, imo. Books feel like mental masturbation and very few change my worldviews at this point.
My overall conclusion has been that reddit is not that bad of a habit, comparatively.
The whole problem of the main thread is that people seek entertainment (dopamine.)
This is mindless and not constructive.
If the alternative was watching TV, yeah, Reddit isn't that bad. But if the alternative is exercise, or serving homeless, or inventing a new way of cleaning air, or having deep conversations with your family, or creating art, then that Reddit habit deprived your life of meaning and impact.
I mean, I already work 10-12 hours per day and have a gym routine.
My life has plenty of meaning (as far as I'm concerned) but yeah, I see your point. Reddit replaces other entertainment for me, it wouldn't be productive time anyway, which I've learned from experimenting.
What your life is missing is meaning. Meaning is action. If a word means anything at all it is because it is in reference to some kind of actual experience.
Blogs, books, and media of all kind are basically meaningless. Vanity of vanities and all that jazz.
You need to experience life. You need to find meaning through action. You need to become a poet by becoming the poem.
Help your neighbor with his hobbies. Cook dinner for your family. Sing a song for a friend. Do something, anything, for someone else.
Realize the inaction and the meaningless nature of sitting in one place and searching for answers on screen or in print.
If you must read, read all text as a poem, or at least read poetry itself!
The darkness that you see is just a fiction. How could it be anything else? The magic spells are just words on a page. Belief is what makes them seem real.
Go outside. Go for a walk. There is no darkness. It is boring and peaceful and that should put your mind to rest.
Consuming media without further participation in life may be meaningless, but to assert that they're inherently meaningless is nonsense. Many people are perfectly capable to grasping ideas in the abstract and then implementing them in reality.
You could argue that symbols are all 'inherently meaningless' without breathing some life in them from your own needs and experiences. 'Fingerspitzengefuhl' [1] is one of my favourite words in German and I think gaining that kind of understanding is impossible if one spends all their time in letters and doing nothing of the stuff that necessitates writing them. I took the author to mean that endlessly reading without doing any living is somewhat of a dead existence. As the person they're replying to, that's what I got from it anyways.
I tend to intellectualise this way of looking at depression (and how to get out of it - how to just get out the damn house!) as related to the Symbol Grounding Problem [2], in a semi-serious, semi-metaphorical way.
- I think everyone understands this, but it bears repeating: dopamine isn't the problem here, as it will be involved in any rewarding behavior. The real claim being made is that we have created technologies that give us too much and/or the wrong kind of pleasure.
- We should consider that "junk food" pleasure (the internet, TV, drugs, actual junk food, etc.) can be useful as a coping mechanism for individuals facing trauma, stress, depression, or other psychological issues. We should consider the possibility that healthier coping mechanisms might be insufficient or unavailable in certain situations. It might actually be a good thing that we've come up with a portable technology (the smartphone) that can be used on the go for short bursts of dopamine. In terms of addictions, you could do worse.
All that being said, I agree that people can develop unhealthy relationships with technology, and we should be working (as always) in the direction of harm reduction.
Every new massively successful technology requires a new kind of social education. When cars became popular people had to be educated to respect pedestrian signals and not jaywalk. With the mass adoption of credit cards and ATMs people had to be educated to keep their PINs secret and not write them right on credit cards.
Social networks require new social education that should start with realizing their potentials downsides which I believe is still the most difficult part.
The problem is when necessary human coping mechanisms combine with capitalism.
That's when you get children's advertising for junkfood. Facebook pushing controversial shock stories to stir up users. And the War on Drugs leading to environments like the Opioid crisis.
I wonder if this is even avoidable - exercise for example is a huge industry and whether you're paying for a gym membership, exercise classes, or a new bike, you're paying...
He stated what I have felt for years, in words much better than I could.
If you struggle to disconnect from social media because you feel like you’ll miss out on friends, remember this: If social media is the only thing connecting you to a friend, they aren’t that good of a friend anyway. Your true friends will not disappear if you delete Facebook.
What's true for you is not necessarily true for others. Are you still in touch with the people you knew in kindergarten? How many years ago was that? Consider that some people might have two or three times that many adult years of changing cities, changing jobs, changing life circumstances, each change resulting in more people with whom staying in touch is not automatic as it is with current classmates or coworkers. Some of them might have less free time because of family and other obligations. Some of them might have disabilities. Some might be more introverted than you are, which does not mean that they need human contact less but that it might take more effort to sustain it. Many people who are not exactly the same as you might find great value in having a lightweight way to maintain those tenuous contacts. Deriding them as not "true friends" or assuming that only "true friends" matter is very egocentric and privileged.
Your potential true friends will. Also, it’s not just about your true friends anyways, is it? There’s more to why we like social media than just that (although granted you qualified your statement). Anyways I don’t want to make it harder for you to quit but I don’t think misleading yourself (intentionally or not) and others is the right way to do it.
That’s the usual objection whenever I advocate getting off of Facebook: “But I will lose contact with all my friends!” So, how did you contact them before Facebook?
The fear is unjustified. Your actual friends will keep in contact, just like they did before Facebook. I left FB 5+ years ago and by some great miracle I still have a robust social life, and as a bonus am not wasting hours a day scrolling through useless information about the lives of remote acquaintances.
If social media is the only thing connecting you to a friend, they aren’t that good of a friend anyway.
Sure, I have friends like that. I also have friendships that began on social media and endured for years, including both people I've never met in real life due to geographic separation/difficulty of travel and people that I have met and got on with equally well in person. Perhaps you haven't experienced that yet, but I've been hearing this clicheed dismissal of virtual relationships for ~25 years now and it's getting pretty old.
Even people without true friends need acquitances and social contact. The consequence for many is not knowing about social activities at all and thus not being able to participate at all because they tend to get organized over facebook. Moreover, there is such a thing as being special snowflake that refuses to use same practical tool as everyone and demand that others do out of way especially for him.
Lastly, not everyone has super rich social life that would make it easy to make and keep friends. Many people work a lot of hours in companies that change every 2 year, limiting opportunities for friends time. Others have children they already feel they spend too little time with. The loose connection when you react to each others posts is much better then comelet cut off.
This is not entirely true. Your link leads to a 56 minutes video while my linked video is just 4 minutes and providing the relevant discussion point.
Moreover, I couldn't find any larger discussion: I searched HN with the link you gave and found only two postings, one with 1 point and another one with 7 points and only 2 comments.
I hadn’t seen this yet, I think we can all agree using machine learning to brainwash people is bad and probably more effective that you might think given Cambridge Analytica’s and Russia’s recent successes.
This is what a lot of us have figured out and stopped using facebook. I briefly checked in last year and was overwhelmed by the number of engagements, marriages, newborns, relationships. The eerie thing is everybody's life looked very similar from one another, happy, smiling instagramed filters where they momentarily pose for selfies.
Then it hit me. I know what makes me disappointed about society today. It's that we consider the image of success more important than reality. For example, the mainstream collectively considers steve jobs as the ideal entrepreneur, when when we knew he made billions off the backs of children and women in horrible working conditions in an authoritarian government. How about Bill Cosby, Mel Gibson, Lance Armstrong, Trump, Weinstein? How great did you think those people were before revealing themselves to be a complete hoax? Especially when society has been reduced to spamming a running commentary of bullshit masquerading as insight, our social media faking as intimacy. Or is it that we voted for this? Not with our rigged elections, but with our things, our property, our money. I'm not saying anything new. We all know why we do this, not because Hunger Games books make us happy but because we wanna be sedated. Because it's painful not to pretend, because we're cowards.
Wait, you mean people 'keep up with the Joneses' online as well as in real life? Social media ia new venue for an old behavior. People who are shallow online are shallow in real life, it's just more 3d. Likewise, people who are thoughtful and interesting online tend to be similarly so in person.
I also have a jaundiced view of society, but it's naive to think it was great and than got completely wrecked by social media (or TV, or jazz music, or dancing, or...). Going down that path will just lead to being a bitter reactionary. Instead, examine your prior premise of what you thought society was or should be, and consider whether that was a historical actuality or a frustrated desire. A good deal depends on whether you conceive of people to 'naturally' be good or bad and whether/how they are shaped by society or vice versa, so your consideration should include some philosophical reading since this is a fundamental question philosophers struggle with.
Read some history too. If you're American, I suggest 'American Nations' by Colin Woodard, which offers a sweeping overview of the competing forces that have shaped US society and makes for an interesting contrast to the increasingly dysfunctional idealogical monomyth.
He's just another rich asshole working a new angle now that he made his billion. At no point in time during his time at FB did he have a conscience? He could have done more earlier.
Just seems like he's working a new angle now to grow his billion into two.
Comments like this—bilious and informationless—are destructive. You can't post like this here, not necessarily because you owe better to people you hate, but because you owe better to this community if you want to keep participating in it.
Great for the individual in the very short term but any longer than that, the society in which the individual exists is degraded enough to impact them too.
Brexit and Trump are two examples of a nation state actor using the... tool... for their purposes and succeeding. It's like vaccination: if you don't use it, you're still feeling the effects of others using it even if you're living far away and never knew them.
We do regulate many tools because not all members of society can be trusted to operate them properly (the young, elderly, those temporarily vulnerable due to mental issues, etc.).
It does not preclude it but it certainly does not make it easier.
I think you suffer from the delusion that the human mind is rational and logical. It can be, under certain limited conditions. But under most circumstances it is a complete mess.
> I think you suffer from the delusion that the human mind is rational and logical.
I don't suffer from it, not more or less than the countless text of law that base their logic on citizens from being trustful agent in the society, but thank you for your concern.
Edit: it looks like you've been posting a lot of unsubstantive comments to Hacker News. We eventually ban such accounts. If you have a substantive point to make, please make it thoughtfully; if you don't, please don't comment until you do.
And they weren't necessarily wrong IMHO, with the exception of maybe the original landline telephone (I would give this an asterisk though, and confine it to the first ~20 years of landline telephony; ie, farmers running homebrew line using barbed wire fencing in the depression-era dust bowl to keep current on grain prices, etc.).
Cars are great for transportation and have enabled humankind to travel further and more often then ever before, but they are also 2000+ lb. death traps and combined with alcohol they are an absolute threat to everyone's safety.
Television is pretty much ALL evil these days (everyone's trying to sell you SOMETHING or worse yet manipulate your natural thought process -- but it's all about money of course), so that's out.
Computers are probably a double-edged sword. Incredibly powerful and have given humanity new capabilities, but we've probably become too reliant on them. They are too ingrained into daily society now. On a somewhat narrower scope: social media is absolutely 100% all evil, designed intentionally with the explicit intention of manipulating their own users.
I wouldn't by any stretch call social media "all evil". It has its problems, a lot of them. But, for me personally, it's just an extension of the rest of the internet, where I encounter people and ideas that I wouldn't otherwise stumble into. I grew up in a fairly poor, extremely white setting and social media (and its precursors, IRC and the like) was, no joke, pretty much the first exposure I had to people who were not white Americans. Meeting those people, having to get along with them, was a pretty big formative thing that wouldn't have happened without these tools. Or, in the reverse, watching the GamerGate thing happen clued me in early that the trolls and harassers that now do the alt-right thing had a certain kind of power that needed to (and, it turns out, wasn't) defended against, that they were not just "internet whiners" but were creating their own extremist political factions whether they knew they were (I think they did) or not. And, today, through idly browsing Twitter when I have a little downtime, I often see drift through my timeline the kinds of thought-provoking links and threads that make me aware of valuable and viewpoint-broadening ideas I wouldn't see otherwise.
I wouldn't say a word in defense of television, though. Being at my parents' for Christmas has made me uncomfortably aware of just how loud and penetrating those commercials-every-six-minutes are. And it's very, very one-way.
I too grew up during the dawn of the Internet and "information age" in general. It was a wonderful time to be living, and an even better time to be a teenager -- we had such a leg up on the previous generation because we KNEW the 'net was going to be huge, and most of them thought of it as just another passing fad. I have fond memories of even pre-Internet, dialing into local BBS' on 28.8 baud modems -- which of course led to discovering "phreaking" to get free long-distance calls to dial into the non-local BBS' (hey, I was a teenager remember). Such great memories.
IRC was, and still is, incredible. But I can't bring myself to lump the current day 'social media' (ie; Twitter, Facebook, etc.) into the same category as IRC. Yes technically I guess it's in the same vein, but there are no "likes"/hearts/thumbs-up-or-down on IRC -- it's just a vast open public forum for almost instantaneous text-based chat, for better or worse (better, IMO). That whole likes vs. dislikes thing which is far too central and too much of a core part of current social media platforms. It's way, way, way too easy to use as a tool for manipulation -- and if anyone thinks they are NOT doing this, they are sorely mistaken.
There's a case to be made that advertising is really the central issue with Twitter/FB/etc. They have to keep people's eyes glued to the platform in order to show them more ads in order to make more money. That business model isn't going to end well for anyone except the advertisers.
But I can't bring myself to lump the current day 'social media' (ie; Twitter, Facebook, etc.) into the same category as IRC.
There was no magician behind the curtain of IRC statistically evaluating every line of text before deciding whether or not showing it to you would or would not make you spend more time on IRC, and interjecting an ad every few lines. And you saw it in order too, there was no monkeying with that...
> Cars are great for transportation and have enabled humankind to travel further and more often then ever before, but they are also 2000+ lb. death traps and combined with alcohol they are an absolute threat to everyone's safety.
The time savings provided by cars, once you factor in time spent to pay for them, pump gas, perform (or wait on) maintenance, plus actual travel time, is dubious for anyone earning average income. I've run the numbers, and even for me earning way over, it's practically a wash versus a bicycle.
Then consider its effects also on distances between things and how many people are now dependent on cars (=less free), and it's not hard to see widespread ownership of automobiles as overall a very negative force in society.
The time savings provided by cars, once you factor in time spent to pay for them, pump gas, perform (or wait on) maintenance, plus actual travel time, is dubious
I call shenanigans on this. How much time do you spend pumping gas? I doubt I spend more than 5 minutes a week, maybe even every two weeks.
As for travel time, just other day I was thinking, my 30-minute journey would be a day's walk probably, starting and finishing in darkness. And carrying all my stuff on my back I would have been exhausted at the end, if I'd gone cross-country instead of on metalled roads, instead of arriving in no time feeling fresh as a daisy. If the weather was bad perhaps I couldn't have made the journey at all, on foot.
And as for maintenance, well, I have a Toyota, so that doesn't take much of my time either!
Cost of gas. Cost of maintenance. Cost of insurance. Cost of replacement car from time to time. Cost of parking, both at home (garage is part of the cost of your house, if you own/mortgage) and at work. Direct time lost to gas pumping, maintenance, replacing a tire, detours taken to reach gas or maintenance places, whatever. Time of actual commute. Find typical values for normal working people for these, find typical commute distances and times, find average hourly wage. Figure out how much of an average person's working day is spent paying for car-related expenses, how much non-driving time goes toward one's car averaged per day, and add those to actual commute time. Compare with time to travel average commute distance by bicycle.
That's without considering the effects of omnipresent automobiles on city layouts and how they force everything to spread out (enormous parking lots much larger than the destination they're for, incredibly wide roads, massive "green spaces" to provide buffers between ugly, noisy, smelly, dangerous highways and areas for humans, big front yards for similar reasons, and so on)
[EDIT] to save you some time, the average spent on car-related stuff in the US per year is about $9,000. Average hourly wage, 26.55 or so. Call it 50 working weeks a year, 5 days a week. Looking at about 1.35 hrs per day paying for car crap, on average. Plus actual commute time and other time lost to cars for various reasons. And I doubt they included cost of garage on house or whatever in those numbers.
[EDIT] to save you some time, the average spent on car-related stuff in the US per year is about $9,000. Average hourly wage, 26.55 or so. Call it 50 working weeks a year, 5 days a week. Looking at about 1.35 hrs per day paying for car crap
That "car crap" is also the ability to head into the mountains or to the coast or the lake at the weekend... while cyclists, so smug during the week, are left begging for a lift. Like children being taken to after-school activities.
Compare with time to travel average commute distance by bicycle.
But that's not a fair comparison, because bicycle commuters have completely externalized the cost of the infrastructure they rely on. You have to compare commuting by car against commuting by bike with no roads. That's why I compared it to travelling on foot across country in my comment.
Oh get over yourself, this video is disgustingly egotistical. "ripping apart the social fabric", I absolutely doubt that. This is getting way out of hand. Social media isn't ripping any core values apart, and nothing he has said in this video proves it.
Just curious if you’ve any anecdotes about behavior of nouveau generation. While not a parent myself I’ve heard many times from parent and youth peers that the new generations are entirely lacking IRL social skills, instead deferring their social lives entirely to their digital presence. As a result, basic conversational skills development is limited.
Maybe it's just another case of the new generation just isn't like the old generation. Jazz music, rock music, drugs, cars, fast women, violent video games, porn... You name it and every generation has something the previous generation thinks is destroying society.
Without rambling too much, I'm one of those over-sensitive, slightly aspie types that reads SSC and gets carried away with over-analysing the zeitgeist. Uncharitably, you might say 'smart but weak-minded'. The longer I spend in front of social media, the more and more in tatters I feel. I spent a week entirely disconnected from the 'net a month ago and I can't stress how restorative it was for me. Though, alarmingly, I was back in full swing soon after I returned.
For those of you who have problems with self-control and sustaining your attention, and think it has something to do with your browsing habits, I highly recommend you - I urge you - to disconnect in a significant way. Of course it's up to you what that means.
In September I gave up smoking, and the physical and psychological changes I underwent were pretty surprising. I felt more present and in-the-moment (and other barely-describable-but-definitely-nice feelings) than I had done in years. Despite smoking 25 a day, I have found quitting Reddit much, much harder; despite being convinced it's as bad for my mental health as smoking was for my physical.
I think there's something to be said about identifying addiction patterns in your life and exorcising them. The small amounts of progress I've made recently have certainly felt as though they've increased my net level of agency and free will. I wish that flowery metaphors about demons were more readily acceptable, because software is a lot like wizardy - and it really does feel like dark sorcery has been cast to possess the West.
[1] http://www.tristanharris.com/essays/ [2] https://www.samharris.org/podcast/item/what-is-technology-do...