Just speaking for myself, I've noticed that my habit is to eat what is in front of me, and clean my plate. I mean this both literally and figuratively.
If I have dessert in the house, like a bag of chocolate, then I eat one after dinner. If I don't have it in the house, then I just don't eat dessert.
If I have a social media feed full of content, then I'll scroll through all of it until there's nothing else that's new.
So what I've been doing is not entirely quitting Internet stuff, but instead I just massively unsubscribing, unfollowing, and filtering all the feeds. Sort of a Marie Kondo thing. I go through every subreddit I'm in, every RSS feed, every account I follow on Twitter, and i strongly consider "is this really providing lots of joy and/or value?" If not, it gets the chop.
I've cut out at least 2/3s of the stuff I was following since the peak, and it's only going down. Now when I doomscroll it's only for a few minutes. I hit the end of new content very very quickly. When that happens I start to look elsewhere. I've been reading a lot more actual books, done more chores, and been more productive overall.
As for the things I unfollowed? They clearly had no value because not only do I not miss them, I can barely even remember what they were.
Thought this was just me and it’s so refreshing to hear. I can never eat just part of a bag of chips. Or save the really good sandwhich for later. Or not drink another coffee because I already had one. Etc. etc
Do lots of other folks experience this? I seem to only have self control when it hurts my job or income, and even then, barely.
It may be a common trait in programmers, since we're rewarded by getting to the bottom of things: "why is this function failing? who calls it? in which possible states?"
Most programmers have experienced being so immersed in code that we don't notice time is passing, forgetting to eat or sleep.
It's similar with immersion in social media / food / whatever. We become lost in the activity and lose our sense of self.
I've recently heard of the concept of conscientiousness as a personality trait. People with low conscientiousness tend to procrastinate more, and it's tied to ADHD. Apparently it can be trained. I'm trying (though not really succeeding) to make pauses, take a deep breath and think about "what am I doing right now? What should I be doing instead?". Seems so basic, like I've regressed to being a child who has no self control...
> to make pauses, take a deep breath and think about "what am I doing right now? What should I be doing instead?".
this too can have its pitfalls. In my case, I always feel like I have BOTH too many things that I WANT to do and too many things HAVE to do and whenever I step back and try to look at the bigger picture, I realize that I don't feel like I'm making tangible progress on any of them. And then the anxiety sets in and I feel like, "well, if I'm working this hard and not even keeping up, why am I working at all?" And so I sort of "give up" for a few days or a week and feel even MORE guilty because literally nothing is getting done and I'm getting even further behind.
A lot of the comments I write here may sound like I really have my shit together, but that's just because I have a lot of generalized experience that just basically comes from lots of introspection and time being alive. But I have yet to figure out the one weird trick to being both productive (making progress toward future life goals) and happy (enjoying what I have in the present).
I joke about my procrastination with my team: "I looked at my TODO list for the day and there's no way I can get to 90% of it, so I might as well just not get to 100% of it". Sometimes there's a lot of truth to the joke, however.
As much as I know I should prioritize it based on urgency, highest impact, what I could delegate etc., if the willpower required to do that is more than the ramifications or not doing it, it can be a losing battle.
On days when I push through a ton of work, I'm energized at the end of the day. Compared to the feeling of guilt that I just wasted a day when there's so much to do and I achieved little. Yet knowing that still just doesn't provide the necessary motivation some days. I've yet to figure out a reliable solution for it.
It's worth mentioning that conscientiousness is a personality trait that's part of the "big five" personalities traits. It's a personality trait brouping that is supported by evidence [1] unlike Myers Briggs [2].
We tend to keep doing what we are already doing (an inertia of sorts). If we are eating, we keep on eating (even if we are not hungry anymore) until an external factor stops us (e.g. the food is over).
Changing states (starting/stopping) is the hardest part, but if you trick yourself somehow to stop it's easy to just put the food aside. The question that remain is how do you stop yourself from doing what you are currently doing? Some people use an "1,2,3 technique", where you just count to yourself and once you reach three you start doing what's needed. Mindfulness also helps, where you take a breath and think exactly what you are doing and why (I am eating, I am putting my hand in the bag of chips, I am bringing the chip to my mouth even if I am not hungry and don't even enjoy it that much, this would just make me feel fat afterwards).
I think it's pretty common. I personally call it "Goldfish syndrome", although apparently that's caught on with another informal meaning according to the internet.
Eating and drinking delicious high calorie things rewards your brain. On an evolutionary time scale, delicious things were relatively rare and often required expending a lot of energy to acquire. In the last 100 years or so, modern technology has shifted the typical diet to be primarily cheap, processed high calorie foods.
If you want to change your behavior, I would suggest calorie counting with a phone app. Do it every meal or snack, before you eat it. Even if you don't restrict yourself, it will make you consciously aware of your intake. You'll naturally start thinking in terms of energy intake rather than sensory intake. You'll also start to be able to correlate your emotional state to your current level of hunger rather than the other way around. "I am so hungry I could eat 300 calories of potato chips!" I did that for a few months recently and lost 8 pounds. I stopped doing it more recently, and have gained 3 back.
If you're a hipster at heart and have free time, you could also start doing more of your own food processing at home. Rather than order a pizza ever again, learn how to make a really good hand stretched pizza dough from scratch. If you really like good coffee, buy a hand grinder and whole beans, or figure out how to roast your own beans.
If you think you're eating unhealthy and having external pressure would help with your self control, maybe just go see a primary care physician and request a cholesterol check and to be screened for non-alcoholic fatty liver disease. If you have indeed been too indulgent and lethargic over an extended period of time, your cholesterol will probably read high, and you probably have fat in your liver that may be causing slightly elevated enzyme levels. A Dr. telling you to try to eat healthy may not be motivating, but quantitative data may be.
If you want an altogether nerdier name maybe call it Wittgenstein syndrome?
Drury reports a conversation with the famed philosopher:
> So the next day when we were alone I asked Wittgenstein to tell me more about Kierkegaard. Wittgenstein: “Kierkegaard was by far the most profound thinker of the last century. Kierkegaard was a saint.” He then went on to speak of the three categories of life-style that play such a large part in Kierkegaard’s writing: the asethetic, where the objective is to get the maximum enjoyment out of this life; the ethical, where the concept of duty demands renunciation; and the religious, where this very renunciation itself becomes a source of joy. Wittgenstein: “Concerning this last category I don’t pretend to understand how it is possible. I have never been able to deny myself anything, not even a cup of coffee if I wanted it. Mind you I don’t believe what Kierkegaard believed, but of this I am certain, that we are not here in order to have a good time.”
> Rather than order a pizza ever again, learn how to make a really good hand stretched pizza dough from scratch
This is good for different reasons, such as less additives in your food which might be healthier in the long term, taste, and the pleasure in the activity itself, but is unlikely to help with weight loss. There is little difference in calorie content between two similar pizzas, home made and from a restaurant (assuming you’re not eating Domino’s cheese-stuffed crust style pizzas).
My point is it's good to make lifestyle changes that lead to healthier choices on average. Pizza is inherently calorie dense, and easy to eat too much of. You might as well make it a relaxing hobby that requires some effort and forethought, rather than something you order out for several times a week because you're stressed out and exhausted. Good dough takes 24 hours to optimally ferment, and requires at least a few minutes of kneading by hand. Stretching the dough, topping it, and then baking it require some focused attention. It's not a big time commitment, though. The activity, mindfulness and the delayed gratification are the healthy part.
Neapolitan style pizza in particular is very thin crust, and the emphasis is on carefully chosen high quality ingredients rather than quantity. It is significantly less calorie dense than typical American pizza. Eating a whole pizza with toppings might be 1000 calories, while a single slice of cheese pizza from Costco is around 800 calories.
It's also very informative to see for yourself the ingredients going into what you're eating. Buying a can of cake frosting at the store gets you roughly the same outcome as making it from scratch using a whole stick of butter and several cups of sugar, but the latter seems more likely to influence the size of the piece you take, or at least make it obvious why you feel bleh after eating it.
If you compare the same pizzas restaurant vs. homemade then sure, but learning to do it well allows you to modify everything to suit your needs. A really nice thin crust can be made with quite a bit less dough, which may then need a lot less cheese to saturate the dish. Just like that you've knocked down two of the most calorically heavy parts of a pizza!
Neapolitan style pizza baked at high temperature is actually extremely sensitive to excessive topping. Too much sauce or fresh mozzarella, and there will be too much liquid for the center of the crust to cook properly. I'll typically only use maybe 3 tbsp of tomato sauce, and aim for 50% of cheese coverage by area if using hand cut mozzarella cubes, or 80% coverage if shredded.
My typical dough recipe has 150g of flour and 5g sugar per pizza, which is about 550 calories. Let's say 250 calories of cheese. Raw tomato sauce isn't even worth counting. So 800 as a baseline for one pizza. Fully loading it with pepperoni might bump it up to 1000.
A few months ago I was trying to restrict myself to 1800 calories per day. We had friends over for pizza one night, and I decided to just not worry about it and gorge myself. I counted it all up before going to bed, though, and my daily intake worked out to be about 1900.
To me, part of it is being mindful. Don't open the bag of chips and then watch a movie or surf the net while munching on them. You will eat the whole bag.
If I mode change from sitting in front of the computer to standing in the kitchen eating the chips and then mode change to back in front of the computer, I don't mindlessly consume the whole bag. But I will still sometimes consume the whole bag.
One thing I have also tried to do is differentiate between "I want chips because I'm hungry" vs "I want chips because I'm craving salt". It's not easy for me to tell the difference. I coat some baby carrots in salt or Old Bay seasoning and munch a few--if that keeps the munchies away, my body wanted salt. If I'm hungry again 15 minutes later, well, my body wants calories.
Nevertheless, I'm mostly in the camp of "Just don't have chips/cookies in the house". It also helps that I learned to bake as a child. I like tasty desserts, and most of what now exists is mostly sugar overload with no flavor. So, a dessert easily sets off my "Is this dessert tasty enough to merit skipping two entire steaks <or insert whatever main course you like> to compensate?" And, if my that activates, the answer is almost always a resounding "No." and I skip dessert.
Unfortunately for me, I found a middle eastern place that does homemade Baklava with a cream filling. It's right next to a Mexican restaurant that I also find quite nice. This is a bad thing for my waistline.
When I first read about willpower being an exhaustible resource, it totally aligned with my experience. A few years later I read that those ego depletion studies had been invalidated and that surprised me. Running out of willpower seems like something I experience.
But it might be something that is subjectively felt, and people then attributed it to be something that depletes.
Even if the depletion is invalidated, the subjective feeling might however still be valid.
---
If I should suggest another possibility on the spot, I would suggest mental fatigue.
You get tired of denying yourself things the same way you get tired of denying your kid pestering you for a treat.
It's not directly depletion, but I could subjectively describe it as a resource getting depleted.
It might be worth thinking about what it is that is being depleted, exactly. When I "run out of willpower" it doesn't really feel the same as when I "simply cannot do it anymore". If I lift a weight enough times, eventually I simply can't anymore, no matter how much I will it. It's not a decision, like a decision to stop working on a problem. That would be a lack of willpower to continue...?
Is there really a mental equivalent to physical exhaustion that leaves us beyond the ability to make a decision? Is that what running out of willpower would be?
Believe it or not, even something like physical exertion has hard-to-define limitations. The amount of reps that you can do of an exercise is more based on how forcefully your brain drives your nerves to activate your muscles and keep going. If you have a habit of sticking to sets of 10 reps, odds are you will feel exhausted at 10 reps, and this is because once you hit your magic goal, you're no longer applying the same concentrated mental energy, and you suddenly feel tired and stop there. But if you did that set like as if it were the last set of your life, or like you were at the olympics trying to break records, you'd be able to push 15 or 20 reps, rather than just the 10 that you do as your comfortable limit. You have the physical ability to keep doing something until the moment that your muscles lock up from lactic acid buildup and you just drop. But people rarely ever reach that state. They stop much sooner because pushing further requires more concentrated brain input which they don't want to dedicate. Maintaining your current routine is effortless, and we tend to favor the easy, comfortable. Pushing your limits is uncomfortable, and in a world where we have become so accustomed to prioritizing indulgence and comfort it becomes hard to break out of our safe zones.
Reading your comment made me realize that you're right, there really isn't such a hard rule even with physical exertion. Even putting some motivating music on might make you push for an extra rep or two. If a gun was to your head maybe you'd do even more. The extreme end might be phenomena like "dead man's grip" where inhuman strength is shown while on death's door.
ADHD here. Kids are ADHD. My Malinois has to be ADHD. Being ADHD like I am with almost two decades of IT under my belt has felt weird. I crave my YouTube channels and certain news sites since the content creators I watch/read put out daily content. Ditto my insane amount of caffeine and nicotine consumption, which I learned from having my kids diagnosed, is me self medicating in lieu of something pharmaceutical. I'm also OCD, so that doesn't help. People with ADHD/OCD need closure something fierce, so when I feel like I'm not getting it, I feel the world is not right.
On the professional side, my ADHD/OCD makes for some clean code and pedantically-set up servers. Nothing says ADHD/OCD like taking two days to crank out code which some of my colleagues can crank out in half the time. I'm told I'm too pedantic sometimes. Too much of a perfectionist. ADHD can do that to you. I'm happy with my lot in life.
I don't know why this comment feels like a punch in the face... I have severe ADHD, it's been getting worse and only medication helps, and I cannot get it.
I have failed my whole life, I cannot start shit, I cannot finish anything, I'm just an impulsive monkey who is unfortunately aware of their own situation, stuck inside a body, forced to watch a deadly trainwreck in slow motion.
The little I've achieved has taken me 10x as much time as it would've a normal person. And I'm pissing it all away anyway.
This is hell.
And then I see "everyone in my life is ADHD lolkek" "I'm happy".
Hey, I feel your pain. It’s important to consider though that you can only do your best with what you’ve got. So long as you’re doing your best, your honest best, what else can you do?
I know the urge to beat yourself to for it is pretty strong. But the only thing you can do is regroup and try to make the rest of today better. Then start again tomorrow.
You’ve achieved something, right? Maybe it took ten times as long. That’s fine. Just keep at it. Don’t compare yourself to other people, just yourself yesterday. That’s all that can count.
It’s easier said than done. Don’t hate yourself though. Life isn’t easy, you just make the most of it. Take care.
Wouldn't you say that ADHD affects the person, and therefore the type of personality would change the outcome?
(In contrast to ADHD defining the person)
An easy way to have self control is to switch to a keto-like diet. You don't even have to count calories and carbs in most cases. There's a variant called lazy keto, where you just stick to approved foods and don't need to count. It's surprisingly hard to overeat on things like cauliflower and pork chops.
Be wary however of the more "extreme" advice on keto-like diets. You don't have to stuff yourself with fats, or put a stick of butter in your coffee.
This is terrible advice. Any fads are. Ketogenic diets are not good for you in any way.
Bad behaviour starts with acknowledgement and the best way to do that is to track what you eat and learn to adapt slowly and develop self discipline. Use a tracker app and set a reasonable daily break even nutritional target and start thinking about what you eat. Slowly substitute better choices in. Eventually you will develop self control.
People want quick fixes but keto just breaks other things.
The key thing you do in a keto diet, entering a state of ketogenesis, can cause massive complications for diabetic people due to ketoacidosis.
Unfortunately a lot of people who would be interested in dieting and trying out a keto diet are diabetic. It's not always dangerous, but it's generally not a good diet for diabetic people because of this.
This is incorrect. I'm a Type 1 Diabetic and in my opinion keto diet is probably the healthiest diet a diabetic can be on.
Ketoacidosis is a result of extremely high blood sugar for a prolonged period of time combined with ketosis. The reason this happens is that without insulin your body cannot use the sugar in your blood so your blood sugar keeps going up and your body doesn't get any energy out of it.
What happens when your body is out of fuel for a couple of days? It enters ketosis and starts to burn fat. Ketons mixed with sugar in your blood will acidify blood, this is ketoacidosis. It's an extremely dangerous condition.
However, if a diabetic is on keto diet they will have low blood sugar and their body will enter regular ketosis almost eliminating the need for insulin and ensuring a stable healthy blood sugar.
In other words, a diabetic will end up in ketoacidosis if they're bad at controlling their blood sugar, regardless of their diet. However, if they are on keto diet the chance that their blood sugar will be very high is extremely small. High blood sugar is the killer, not ketosis.
I've been doing a keto diet on and off for a number of years. When I'm in ketosis my blood sugar is steady in 80-100 range and I don't need almost any insulin.
This is a very low effort, unsourced listicle, that is probably wrong on several points. Disregarding that, I was more curious about how this particular person managed to get hospitalized.
True enough, but it does outline the potential nutritional shortfalls of extreme food regimes, most of which I was aware of. It seemed to sum up most of the obvious shortfalls - I was only passingly interested and this was a low hanging answer. I have seen numerous extreme diets. Many of which are OK in the short term - but not in the longer term. Unless the OP replies - I have no idea in detail what befell him?
Keto can definitely cause constipation under some circumstances, but I'd be dubious about linking it to fibre. Fibre also doesn't count towards carbs, so it's not something that you can't have.
100% this. People often ask me "How do you stick with keto? It's such a strict diet." I always answer: "It's actually one of the easiest diets: the answer to most 'can I eat this?' question is 'no'."
There isn't a persistently high cognitive load on deciding what you can eat, once you master the foundational knowledge of eating low-carb.
That usually happens because people use stimulants to accelerate energy burn and it dries you out, and when your body, especially your mouth, get dry, you will get bad breath immediately. If you want to test this out for yourself, try brushing your teeth while you feel very dehydrated. Your breath will smell bad soon after.
Yeah, you absolutely don't need to overthink keto once you have a good idea of what foods provide the ideal set of nutrients that you need. You just have to keep those foods stocked, and eat whatever you have on hand when you're hungry, until you stop being hungry. As for avoiding junk food, just STAY OUT OF THE JUNK FOOD AISLE. Don't walk through there, don't daydream about chocolate, make a conscious effort to keep it out of sight, and it will be out of mind. That part takes some self-discipline, but once you make the conscious decision to keep it out of sight, your mind will go wander to some other distraction or stimulus and you will forget about it, and it will become a habit soon.
The truly hardest part of all of this in general is finding a suitable form of substitute stimulus that keeps you from being driven to seek your default vices. The unfortunate part is that there are not a lot of accessible/healthy things in life that provide the adequate stimulus that we seek/need in order to feel "okay". We're drawn towards drugs and junk food and etc because it's easy to acquire and satisfies our needs for stimulus in the short term.
This is me so bad. I have it in the good and bad ways.
In the good I will run couple marathons a month and in the bad I will eat whatever I can find.
I always felt like an outcast, good to hear I am not alone :)
For media consumption it is exactly the same. The good is that I get to the nitty gritty of technical problems. But I also read the unless crap till no end.
I have been able to ditch Twitter, reddit, Facebook and Instagram but I just substitute it with hackernews and YouTube.
Haha. Same here.
I have gotten back into reading though. That took a while because I lost the ability to concentrate on books as I grew more dependent on streaming and social media.
Its been about a year now, since I left all the major social media hubs, got incredibly selective on daily news (only one local media outlet and a couple of polar opposite international ones that I pay for) and cut down on watching streaming services, that I started to be able to concentrate on reading books again.
I grew up reading everything I could get my hands on.
I missed it terribly.
HN and youtube still stick. Mostly tutorials, workouts or info videos ( Andrew Huberman, justforfunc, 3blue1brown etc. ) on youtube though.
Same, but with books and audiobooks I just misuse them in the same way, feels like consumption addiction, even though, like you, it is all in the selfhelp / tutorial / learning space.
My default method of weight control is not to have unhealty food and alcohol in the house except for weekends. In the office I only have healthy food available. It works and I have gotten used to it - mainly because my anything goes weekends act as a great pressure release valve.
Yes indeed, many of us do. Nearly everyone I've ever dated gets mad at me at some point because I can't keep cookies in the house or I will eat them all. You are far from alone, and in fact I suspect the overwhelming majority of people are the same. Hence the obesity epidemic.
Personally I find that my self-control is limited to the same extent that my time and energy are limited. If I'm tired, it's harder for me to be disciplined, and the place that I most often tired is at home at the end of the day, when temptation to over eat is at the greatest. I believe there is a fairly substantial body of evidence that shows I am not unusual in this regard. This phenomenon is why groceries stores put candy in checkout lanes, when you are mentally tired from exercising discipline by not picking up the delicious-looking tray of cupcakes in the bakery aisle and thus are most susceptible to temptation.
I think some people can just use willpower to maintain their discipline in every situation, but those people are extreme outliers. Like Navy SEALs or Olympic athletes or other extreme high performers, and not even all of them. Those who can are experts at delayed gratification and are able to visualize what they want and then never deviate from their plan for how to achieve it, regardless of their current emotional state or energy levels. But that is vanishingly rare and often their behavior is a result of some deep trauma (eg someone who is super disciplined about their diet because their dad died early from an obesity-related illness) rather than a positive focus on a certain outcome. The truth is that the vast majority of people just follow their natural inclinations and do whatever is easiest for them. The path of least resistance.
As one such weak-willed person, my approach has been to structure my life to remove temptations, much as the GP comment above described their approach to curating their internet content. For example, I have lived almost exclusively in big cities for my entire life until the last year, when I moved to the middle of nowhere. Which means I can't get takeout food delivered and it's much harder to go out and get ice cream on a whim. Compared to living in a major city where I could get Michelin star restaurant food delivered in a matter of minutes, the temptation is just much, much less powerful. I order my groceries online too, which also dramatically reduces the tendency to impulse buy anything unhealthy (I get to skip the checkout lane with the candy, for one thing). On the other side of the caloric equation, I set up a home gym so that travel time to the gym doesn't become an excuse not to exercise. Basically I add barriers for bad choices and remove them for good ones. I am in the best shape of my life as a result.
I guess what I'm saying is that most people achieve good behaviors in part because of their intentional discipline and in part because their environment is conducive to those behaviors. The real trick is figuring out how to intentionally structure your environment to match whatever behaviors you want. It's effectively borrowing motivation from your peak-energy level periods to provide discipline during periods when you don't have the energy to generate it yourself. It can be incredibly hard to figure out, because you need to know how to change your environment and how you will actually react to that new environment, which isn't always predictable.
Which looks at the accounts you're following, looks at the links in their bios, sees if there's an RSS feed indicated at that link, and puts the whole thing together into an OPML feed (the standard XML-of-RSS-feeds format used for RSS reader import/export, among other things).
i would love if a tool like this were made based on interactions I've had with authors. generally, i like comment or retweet content that "sparks joy".
Glitch will let you fork ("remix") and modify -- I don't know if the Twitter APIs are real friendly anymore for that open-ended of use, but it'd be worth trying :)
I used to spend a lot of time on youtube, in part because I had the free time to spend on it, and had gaps in my schedule that were convenient for watching certain content creators.
Since moving into the workforce, my free time is no longer segmented into so many pieces. I don't get as much value as I used to from 10 to 15 minute chunks of entertainment, so I stop keeping up with the sources, and just lose touch.
It isn't that the content I'm leaving behind is bad or 'cheap', it's just that I don't have the time and attention to keep up with most of it. My entertainment time is better spent on stuff that takes longer to engage with/consume, since those bigger things are often more valuable as entertainment.
I'm coming to a realization across all facets of my life, where I am interested or engaged in many more things than I have time for. I am starting to prepare myself for the uncomfortable process of sacrificing a few (in fact, many) things I've previously mentally and emotionally invested in, but I know it's going to be a big shift and the dread causes my feet to drag. There's just not enough time... and I don't believe that the solution is "improve focus and productivity" because that's a fast track to burnout and disengagement for all but the most obsessive of minds.
Curiosity can be a curse, and has killed several cats.
I may have been on psychedelic mushrooms at the time, but something I took away from the trip was an acknowledgement of a feeling of 'shedding' in life, in terms of hobbies and interests.
Stuff will get boring and be forgotten, or fall to the side and be ignored while it collects dust. This is something that I should expect to happen, and be prepared for. So long as you derived some value from those once-great things, it hasn't been a waste, and is just a symptom of time passing.
Maybe you pick those things back up later, and maybe you don't. For myself, I think my 'best life' would be one where I had the space and tools to be able to pick up or put down whatever ideas come to me.
> I may have been on psychedelic mushrooms at the time, but something I took away from the trip was an acknowledgement of a feeling of 'shedding' in life, in terms of hobbies and interests.
I had a very similar feeling in a similar setting, like a large part of the process of life is scrubbing crusty exteriors off so that new capacities can emerge. Like continuous molting.
scrub-a-dub-dub the existential dirt from your soul, wanderer.
Somewhat related is a one-player game I'm looking at, called Thousand Year Old Vampire. Eventually, the character must choose what memories to leave behind. It's going to be a strange experience when I get to that stage.
I think a corollary to this is the relatively modern idea that life needs purpose in the form of measurable accomplishments.
Looking back at how most people lived their lives, it was sustenance, interspersed with things like family, religion, and friendship (if you were lucky). Nearly nobody owned much, nearly nobody 'did cool things,' nearly nobody was famous.
They all just had a part of life (surviving) that they knew was bad and hard work, then they tried as hard as they could to escape that briefly.
Now, we expect work to be fulfilling and non-work to be fulfilling. For the majority of people where that isn't true, it feels really depressing, which is compounded by the fact that society pushes you to spend more time on improving the work side of things (which again for most people will not be intrinsically fulfilling no matter how hard they try), so they end up feeling lonely and sad.
Switching Twitter to timeline mode rather than their poor excuse of an algorithm helps. Learned that from HN....but I have a browser plug-in that also removes all their recommended and "Joe also owed this tweet" junk.
Funny enough I have the opposite opinion regarding twitter:
If I use it in timeline mode I have the urge to read through all of it until where I stopped last time as the OP described (same with my Feedly RSS feed)
In algorithm mode its more like a "don't care, its garbled anyway, just a sea of stuff".
That being said I am still mostly using timeline mode.
This! I often let my phone run out of battery and avoid plugging it in so I can do other things.
From a similar thread, someone mentioned that phones are only good for content consumption. When I’m on the computer, I’m at least somewhat productive and the distractions aren’t quite as strong.
Doing the same, but this does not really apply for algorithmic feeds.
When you open YouTube the recommendations are always the first thing you see, same for TikTok and Twitter (although at least you can configure it there).
Sure you can say “just don’t use recommendation systems” just as you can say “just don’t go on YouTube”.
I find it relatively easy to use YouTube without exposing myself to their recommendations (not that they're ever particularly good, in my experience).
My bookmark for YouTube is directly to my subscriptions, and it's also possible to create a android shortcut link directly to subscriptions. Occasionally, a flow will direct me to the homepage, but that's rare and I usually organically bounce back to my subs without even thinking about it.
There's always recs below a video, but again, those are rarely very interesting to me or they're things I've subscribed to anyway.
I’ve been using a really nice extension the past couple months called unhook [0] that gives a lot of control over the YouTube UI. I’ve disabled shorts, the homepage, related videos, comments, etc. and now I only see videos I have subscribed to. Much more useful (I subscribed for a reason!) and much less time wasted. Just thought I’d share in case it helps anyone!
I block recommendation sections on some site with the ublock element picker (like the "recommendations" stackoverflow puts in the right column from their other sites, completely unrelated to the current page or search terms).
I never got round to trying that with Youtube, this seems a better solution.
Nice. I'll have to incorporate this little gem for the Linux laptop. Thank you. When I'm home, I primarily watch YouTube on my TV, but I don't use YouTube. Rather, I use SmartTubeNext, which grabs the same videos as YouTube, but has no ads, tracking, kills sponsored content in the video, as well as no YouTube recommendations. I'm very happy with it. I run it off my Amazon Firestick. If you're interested, here is the how-to: https://troypoint.com/smarttubenext/
> When you open YouTube the recommendations are always the first thing you see
There is a brilliant hack to YT's urge to show you some BS. Make a bookmark of YT submissions on HN. Clear cookies. Click on any few random vids. Voila! Now YT considers you enough smart person to be shown a decent recommendations!!! (But the magic quickly disappears if you will click any BS from main because my hack does not affects the main page).
The recommendation algos can be quite good but you need to give them good signal. I doubt many people do this, but clicking 'not interested' on the clickbaity vids and thumbs-up high-effort content can very quickly tune your recommendations to be very high quality.
In weight watchers (yes, weight watchers), we classified certain foods as "red flag foods"; these were foods that we _knew_ we could not control ourselves around. The kind of food where you have one, and then suddenly you've finished the bag/box.
I tend to agree with you: if it's there, you're going to go for it. We all have things like this. "Cleaning your plate" is a good metaphor, but I'm betting you don't "clean your plate" when it comes to exercise or other things that may be less enjoyable.
Identify the things in your life that are red flags, and consciously keep them out of your life. It's hard at first, but soon, you don't even miss them.
On the other hand I started following only “teaching chinese” accounts on instagram. Whenever I go on instagram I just watch stuff to learn chinese because it’s in my feed.
Facebook I left a decade ago, for its ethical issues. Instagram I left because I felt the performance aspect was unhealthy: even in my only-friends-and-family circle, I'd still care too much about picking out the perfect photo of my kid or wherever.
For Twitter I realized it was way too easy to get sucked down political/angry feeds. One day Twitter said my account has suspicious activity (maybe a bot tried to log in) and I needed to reply to an email to re-enable it. I never replied to the email. Somehow this meant that every time I followed a Twitter link, I'd get that alert, so I could never see content. I felt so much happier.
I noticed the same about myself and have been doing something similar. I haven't been as focused on cutting down things I follow (actually even increasing), instead just paying attention to what I find valuable and aggressively cutting out everything I either dislike or find superfluous and spammy (eg if I see the same post multiple times on my reddit feed, I'll quickly check the poster's profile, if they spam the same content on several subreddits regularly I'll block them even if the content is something I enjoy).
In the world of food it was a watershed moment for me in controlling my waistline when I stopped checking the unit price on items at the store.
The brain invents its own portion sizes that are more dependent on the size of the container than the total supply. I don't know how you introduce portion control to the Internet, but we definitely need it.
Some people have strategies for avoiding a shopping cart full of junk food. I wonder how far you can stretch that into media consumption before the analogy tears.
Haven't been using social media for more than five years and it doesn't feel like I'm halfway there.
Now I am using my smartphone pretty much in the same way I was using my PC when smartphones didn't exist (e.g. 20 years ago): quite a bit of browsing and few comments here and there.
It's not that I can't do without smartphone: on holidays I can totally avoid using it for browsing. But that inevitably comes back to "normal".
And I'm pretty sure I was distracting myself with literature in a similar way when I was even younger (e.g. 25 yrs ago). I read very fast and hardly retain anything:) Is it in any way healthier? Not so sure, it feels like binge reading is as addictive and unsatisfying -- I do that nowadays (rarely) too.
Yup, dashcam videos / crashes is a huge time sink which I have to ruthlessly unsubscribe from. It's one of those things where you can feel your blood pressure increase as you watch it.
>I just massively unsubscribing, unfollowing, and filtering all the feeds.
Nothing has been more effective for me than this, as well unfriending/following people or accounts that actively make me angry. Had to unfollow like 10 people tops and the quality of my feeds got noticeably better.
I'm the same way, keep me away from buffets, cupboards containing sweets, and any newsfeed.
One thing I've founds success with was getting a digital Economist subscription (confession, just a shared password). Having a steady stream of high quality content without paywall nonsense helped me replace my regular trolling around internet with something more useful and less addictive. Perhaps paying a bit for something high quality can help fill void for those dopamine seeking internet impulses.
I've always looked at paywall sites as obnoxious cash grabs that try to reel you in with small samples of quality content... But this makes me look at them differently now. Perhaps the fact that you gave them money allows them to forego excessive advertising and clickbait and provide you with quality content that is actually worth reading because they can focus on creating good content rather than pulling people in with free clickbait and just do anything possible to keep us scrolling and watching ads. The unfortunate part is that it doesn't really make sense to pay money to subscribe to every single website individually... Maybe if google had a quality version of google news... lol
"Out of sight, out of mind" works great for me too. It's staying occupied so that your thoughts don't meander back to that thing, that makes the trick.
If I have dessert in the house, like a bag of chocolate, then I eat one after dinner. If I don't have it in the house, then I just don't eat dessert.
If I have a social media feed full of content, then I'll scroll through all of it until there's nothing else that's new.
So what I've been doing is not entirely quitting Internet stuff, but instead I just massively unsubscribing, unfollowing, and filtering all the feeds. Sort of a Marie Kondo thing. I go through every subreddit I'm in, every RSS feed, every account I follow on Twitter, and i strongly consider "is this really providing lots of joy and/or value?" If not, it gets the chop.
I've cut out at least 2/3s of the stuff I was following since the peak, and it's only going down. Now when I doomscroll it's only for a few minutes. I hit the end of new content very very quickly. When that happens I start to look elsewhere. I've been reading a lot more actual books, done more chores, and been more productive overall.
As for the things I unfollowed? They clearly had no value because not only do I not miss them, I can barely even remember what they were.