Old guy chiming in. Every generation feels like this. Socrates lamented that becoming literate would "create forgetfulness in the learners’ souls, because they will not use their memories." In the 16th century, Swiss scientist, Conrad Gessner, warned that the overabundance of information caused by the printing press was "confusing and harmful". In 1940s, radio had caused children to develop "the habit of dividing attention between the humdrum preparation of their school assignments and the compelling excitement of the loudspeaker." In my time, similar concerns were raised about cable TV and the walkman.
Treat Google as an augmentation of your brain. You both do what you’re good at (facts vs. concepts) and you end up better overall.
Depth is good but it limits breadth. Before internet, and then before printed books, being narrow-minded was easier.
With that, the easy accessibility of information also helps depth in those who care.
Google being so widely available means that people stop caring about memorizing things that are easily googleable, but that is pretty orthoganal to "actually learning". Google being available makes this distinction clear. If it can be easily googled for, it's a fact and remembering facts is for paper and bits. Most things aren't on google. Use your brain for the hard stuff.
By having information in your brain, your subconscious self will have worked out how to apply it in clever and novel ways as an extension of your problem solving capacity.
You can see it in your daily life too - for instance, you might occasionally find yourself programming with a new container or data structure library. The interface is hopefully simple enough to figure out at a glance, and you can look up things you don't know. But you'll likely move slower than if you had known the tool like the back of your hand. And more importantly, the lack of familiarity prevents your brain from being able to fully work at the level of the problem, since it's now forced to juggle with all the new information about the shape and behavior of the API.
[1] https://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2011/03/110302-sola...
Mindlessly cutting and pasting from the search results such as from stackoverflow can be anywhere from a waste of your time to extremely dangerous. But, on the other hand when it works it makes you much faster than if you tried to solve the problem yourself.
Example 1: I only cook occasionally, yet I made great Kimchi the other day by watching a YouTube video.
Example 2: I replaced the big end bearings on a small petrol 2 stroke by using a YouTube video.
We learn how to choose good instructional material and we learn how to apply it.
Endless bejeweled games are likely as bad as idle, empty thoughts. Reading, learning, even solving puzzles is a good use of the small shards of time like being in a line.
Can be a good thing to help you wind down, if applied in moderation. Can waste your time otherwise. All non-trivial activities take some learning to do efficiently; thinking is no exception.
If we are talking about leisure time as understood by the subject, then it’s difficult to see how a non-harmful activity is a ‘waste’ of leisure time. You can’t waste leisure except by trying to get some sort of work done during leisure, I think.
Other than that, idle thoughts are a wellspring of creative ideas, leaps of deduction and what not. Games like bejewelled are not similar at all; in me, they quickly lead to obsessive hyper focus and a Tetris effect, which is why I don’t play them. But idle thoughts are quite the opposite experience.
If you have no responsibility that is being compromised, how can this be a bad thing or is time wasting?
You seem to be saying that everything you do needs to have some purpose or needs to be productive?
I suspect that the problem that society has is that we have decided that everybody needs to be productive and working towards something, even in recreation. Time to spin your wheels in an unstructured way is one of the great things about modern life. We don't have to be spending every minute of the day just trying to get our next meal.
Is reading on your phone on the train fundamentally different than reading a book? Is chatting with your friends while in line at the grocery store bad?
Your point about the stop-light is true, though, because it's unsafe.
I am aware what I am going to say will sound condescending, although I do not mean it in a negative manner; but this is a really cute and naive perspective.
Ask your grandparents. They will certainly claim _they_ were the last generation to experience true boredom as a kid. After all, those danged radios started to pop up around that time, much less black-and-white TVs.
While growing up, I pretty much always had a computer, but did not have live Internet till I was 19. We had only one TV station to watch. The computer would be on for only a few hours - it could overheat, and it was routine to turn it off when not in use.
For the last 6 months my mind has been preoccupied by this. I can't stop memories coming in on how I would just laze in the afternoon, enjoying the breeze. Even recalling the boredom is a "good" memory. I would read a lot more books. I would sometimes play with toys. I would attempt solving puzzles. I would doodle with the calculator and learn interesting properties of numbers. And fun stuff on the computer - be it games, or programming, or playing with Fractint and POV-Ray.
These days: While I still have constructive hobbies, I'm realizing they exist mostly to make me feel constructive. If I examine my time at home, a lot of it is on the computer. And most of that is on the browser or email. I use a desktop which is on 24/7. The browser window is always open, with tabs open. And if I were to randomly ask myself what I gained in browsing the web in, say, the last month, I can't come up with enough to justify it. Intellectual debates on HN are cool, but I'm way past the point where it is meaningfully useful. Yes, I may have learned a few things while browsing the net, but the gain vs time spent ratio is not that good.
I'm not an addict. I spend time outside the house, and don't miss the computer when I'm, say, hiking. But it troubles me that this is my life at home. And fortunately, I find smartphones to be a real pain to use, so it can't be an attention sink.
In the last few months I've been musing on how I can capture some of my pre-Internet lifestyle back. It's complicated - I don't want to go cold turkey. There are scripts I run on a cronjob on my PC that are very useful to me (and are not tied heavily to my Internet/PC habits) - so I don't want to simply switch it off. Instead, I want to cripple some aspects of my Internet usage.
I haven't actually taken some concrete action, but ideas:
1. Disallow certain programs/processes (e.g. my browsers) from having access to the Internet. Unfortunately, there's no easy way to do this in Linux.
2. Use extensions like Leechblock. I don't have much hope for this working - I tried some years ago and kept finding ways around it. And I often just fired up another browser that did not have Leechblock installed.
3. Make accessing the web via browser painful. In the old days, when I wanted to use the computer, I had to boot it up (took a bit of time), then dial up to the Internet, then launch a browser. If I could simulate it so that when I launch the browser it takes that much time, it may significantly reduce how often I browse the Internet. Bonus points if the whole computer becomes unusable in that time period (it's not really effective if while I'm waiting for the browser to load I start doing other stuff).
4. Whatever crippling methods I have should be appropriately difficult to disable. If it's too easy, then I'll disable it all the time. If it's too hard I won't use the system.
5. Maybe have a cronjob that kills all open browsers every, say, 45 minutes. When I'm busy browsing and the browser crashes, will I really want to restart the browser? More effective if I couple it with 3 above. And maybe I shouldn't allow the browser to reload the crashed session, so I'd have to rebuild the tabs?
6. Disable multitasking while in the browser. I think the fact that we can browse the web, and run other programs at the same time, makes it more difficult to control. In the old DOS days, I ran only one program at a time. Even with the early Windows, I effectively ran one program at a time - multitasking ate up resources.
7. I just realized that I used to program in the days I did not have the Internet. It's a bit sad that the norm is to find solutions in Google or Stack Overflow, or even in the online docs. See if I can somehow download the docs for offline use. But then I wouldn't want a 5 minute delay in loading up the browser if all I want to do is browse local files. Conundrum...
8. Every so many minutes, somehow autoclose all tabs except the active one. While tabs are awesome, they also lead to more time in the browser. This will force me to be more discriminating in picking the tabs I want to read.
9. Somehow suspend accounts on sites like HN for, say, 6 months. I won't be able to post. Maybe block it altogether.
10. Netflix via Roku on my TV does not count. To me that's "TV time", and in any case, I don't spend much time on it. Thankfully, Youtube has always been a poor experience.
11. The goal isn't to get off the computer. It's to do more constructive things with it. So I'll likely program, do image editing (I have a few years of backlog), write, etc.
12. I haven't figured out where email fits into all this. Should I cripple it or keep it as is? I don't use webmail - it's the old style of IMAP + MUA + MDA
I hope I find some way to achieve a healthy amount of the above. In the back of my mind I'd been planning on posting this as an Ask HN to see what other people have come up with.
(As an aside, I think part of my current obsession is that in the last year I've met with a number of my high school friends - most of whom I hadn't seen since getting live Internet - scattered across the globe. That's actively reminding me of life in earlier days).
I can really relate to the feeling. The famous Okkusenman[0] really puts it into words better than I ever could really: that feeling of being chased by something as you get older, that being bored isn't allowed and that you must be doing something at all times; just sitting back and enjoying the scenery isn't allowed. I'm not sure where it comes from, and it's ironic how useless it is at actually making you a better, smarter, more well-rounded person. The only consolation is that it's clearly felt by so many others.
In my case the feeling that I shouldn't be bored or should be productive all the time isn't the problem. It's the ability to keep doing stuff (in my case, stuff on the Internet) that is the problem. In point of fact, one of my hopes/wishes of getting off the web is to both laze around and be more productive. If I cut out an hour of web browsing per day, and spend 30 more minutes just sitting and relaxing, and 30 more minutes being productive, it's still a net gain in productivity.
I'm in my early 50's and it seems that everybody I talk to is spending their entire waking life working at something, be it a side business, fitness, training, learning or hobby. We've always had these things, but it seems that in the last 10 to 20 years the feeling of these activities has moved from a relaxed, something done for enjoyment to an almost desperate must excel race.
I don't know why this is, but I for one don't like it or the toll it's taking on peoples mood and health.
PSA: try installing DayWise on your phone. It batches up your notifications, letting you see them only at noon, and at 5 p.m.
“take the path to Nothing, and go Nowhere until you reach it.” - Benjamin Hoff
There is something about sitting back with a nice warm drink in your hands, your feet resting on a log near a crackling campfire gazing up as the embers from the fire spiral up amongst the stars that just helps put everything in perspective.
Your focus boils down to the necessaries of what am I going to eat and am I going to be warm and dry if it rains tonight. Depending on where you are camping you could add the excitement of, is something going to try to eat me during the night.
I believe that leisure time is something that most people don't have nor know that they want. As the article states, it lets you think outside of the box and come back with fresh ideas. In a work-centered society though, it's really hard to justify spending that time. Even knowing all this, I still fall into the trap of always being busy with something.