—- Core Question: Is what I‘m currently doing helpful to my goals?
Get Bored. Get Calm. Enjoy boredness.
Whatever happens on the front page, I’m never involved. It seems like the whole thing would work just as well even if nobody ever read the Times or watched the cable chat shows. It’s a closed system.
Breaking News is most often wrong and later corrected by more breaking news.
But if that’s true on a scale of minutes, why longer? Instead of watching hourly updates, why not read a daily paper? Instead of reading the back and forth of a daily, why not read a weekly review? Instead of a weekly review, why not read a monthly magazine? Instead of a monthly magazine, why not read an annual book?
Following the news isn’t just a waste of time, it’s actively unhealthy. Edward Tufte notes that when he used to read the New York Times in the morning, it scrambled his brain with so many different topics that he couldn’t get any real intellectual work done the rest of the day.
Its obsession with the criminal and the deviant makes us less trusting people. Its obsession with the hurry of the day-to-day makes us less reflective thinkers. Its obsession with surfaces makes us shallow.
I have not followed the news for a long time. My life does not seem to be impoverished for it; indeed, I think it has been greatly enhanced. But I haven’t found many other people who are willing to take the plunge.
News makes our inner opinion volcano boil and that is toxic!
Uncontrolled input prevents rest, relaxation and output. All this massive time that is lost is ultimately YOURS! I am good to myself. I am worth it to myself not to stuff myself with poison!
Bad news is toxic for your body:
By consuming all of this news (which is nearly all bad news), you’re stressing your body out, weakening its ability to fight off infection, and potentially causing digestive and growth problems.
The really bad news is that news consumption is a vicious cycle that’s hard to get out of. Stress weakens your willpower. Without the willpower to put your phone down or turn off your computer, you’re likely to consume more and more news. And so the pattern continues.
“We are training our brains to pay attention to crap.”
The more a person consumes multiple types of media, the fewer brain cells there were in the anterior cingulate cortex. This is the part of the brain responsible for attention span and moral deliberation. You can no longer concentrate on books and longer articles. Your mind gives up after just a few paragraphs without absorbing any of the content. And you begin to suffer from anxiety.
After all, it is also part of freedom of opinion not to have an opinion.
Reading the news doesn’t help you change the world for the better. Ignore it or do something.
You need to make a complete break. The best way to do this is to push through 30 days of no news at all. By the end of those 30 days, you’ll hopefully reach the point where you don’t feel the urge to peek at the headlines.
What do you REALLY want in life?
To be really successful at something, you need to dedicate yourself to it fully. Albert Einstein, Frida Kahlo, and Beethoven didn’t become greats in their respective fields by scrolling through news feeds every few moments. They simply couldn’t have done, wasting all of that time. —-
But really what does it matter? Anything really important will reach me anyway. And there's nothing I can do about most of it. I also can't care about every single person in the world. Even if I know about bad stuff happening I can't help it.
I just read the local paper website once a day now, and that's enough. Anything important like this in Turkey will show up there too. And most of the local news is about stuff that actually affects me.
I also don't have a TV subscription anymore. I don't watch anything live, and have zero interest in watching sports so I just had no need for it anymore. Same with social media, if I could still just follow my friends like they used to offer I would, but they don't. They try to make me engage with low quality nonsense which pushes me away.
The only interruptions I get now is from instant messaging, but most of the people I know and all group chats I have muted and I just check in on their chats when I feel like it. So no notifications there. Only the most important people get through.
Love this take. Thanks for saying it, has enriched my day today.
"All of humanity's problems stem from man's inability to sit quietly in a room alone"
...but maybe that better sums up OP's issue rather than a solution.
Either way you'll need to take steps to make it harder to do the things you're currently doing (e.g. get a dumb phone, set up a firewall rule to block these sites, set a timer) but there might be a deeper underlying issue of having nothing better to do.
Perhaps making other aspects of your life more difficult will eat up this idle time while also providing more fulfillment. I've personally found that riding a bike to get food at some place farther away (as opposed to eating at home, ordering food, or just driving somewhere) is an excellent way to detach digitally, get some exercise, and force yourself to see new parts of your town/city. Obviously this doesn't work for everyone but the gist of this is to force yourself to take time to do something unexpected and difficult and find your reward in that instead of reading every HN thread, checking every email, and responding to all the memes your friends send.
I have that one in my quotes file but it's just a big text file and not easily searched by subject. I need to add tags.
There's wishing the town returns to being affordable because high costs only rids places of their proper energy. Despite being in my mid-twenties, these days I, maybe foolishly, dream of living in Bonny Doon.
I've found a simple "productivity apps only" policy to be enough. Instant messengers, browser, email, banking app, bus ticket.
I would also add to these the TS Elliot quote from his work, the Rock:
> “Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge? Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?”
“A preoccupation with the means is a lack of commitment to the end.”
In this context, the means is knowledge. And for me, the end is building things. So, I try always to be building something (in my work or avocationally), and the high I get from that helps to resist the craving to know more about how to build things.
What they mean to me is to focus on the questions important to me. An easier way to put it is the example of writing a book. For a long time you do a lot of research and collect information. At some point you have to start writing the book which means turning your collection into a story. Once I got in this mode, I stopped "fear of missing out" about things I was never going to learn. There's just too much. My mind is limited. I'm hopeful that AI will help me with this focus.
If you are miserable reading academic research papers in your basement everyday for no reason, I would recommend you reconsider.
If you are reading them because you want to cure cancer or get a job, then that's really a different scenario.
I'm actually not sure whether I fully agree, I think that knowledge can also be a goal in and of itself sometimes.
Addiction is giving up everything for one thing,
sobriety is giving up one thing for everything
If I delete Reddit I'll just end up on another platform, if I stop gaming I'll start watching more movies, if I start reading physical books instead of watching movies I'll just read all the time. If I don't have substance Y at home I'll just not consume it, but if I have it I'll do, and if I have substance Z at home instead I'll just consume that one.
Sounds about right.
I write much, sci-fi and always draft some articles (but never publish), so that keeping up with HN is a sort of reference material building activity, other than it I don't go on twitter, IG, reddit, slack, mastodon or whatever IRC channel, so I try to make the most of my constrained addiction, but it's always tough work to clean up a browser tab accumulation, as the Feynman quote quips, it's costly, you have to pay attention:
The method involves a paper notebook, which I use whenever I can in lieu of a PC for drafting, taking notes, planning etc. On a two-page spread I start sth like an index by arbitrary useful topics of my current researches. Each line is a one or two word topic, after the word I simply list the HN IDs separated by comma. It's nice to save individual comment threads or whole posts using the same interface. When useful I write a little two word note on top of the number. In this fashion I close dozens or hundreds of tabs and postpone/defer reading the interesting conversations to when I will take action upon it e.g. by writing a short story or poetry or articles. I also use the GTD golden 2-min rule: if I can read and/or take action on a useful discussion or link posted in a few minutes, I do it on the spot and close the HN post forever. Done.
Maybe you could automate pasting the url by copying it beforehand and having the new entry draw it from the clipboard.
I do look at mine extensively. Though I invested a significant amount of time organizing them. Having a way of quickly searching notes and previewing their contents does help. I use fzfx, which is basically opinionated shell functions on top of fzf to do the search. In the future I want to autosync the public notes to my site and implement an improved search system there.
> Maybe you could automate pasting the url by copying it beforehand and having the new entry draw it from the clipboard.
C-C + C-V isn't a huge hassle at least for me. I have a bind on Neovim to format the link in Markdown format so I don't have to type []() and carefully paste the link in the right place but honestly I always forget to use and lately I'm just pasting the raw link and not caring about formatting. I think formatting should be done automatically in the background. In the future I may adapt or write a formatter for those niche cases. It can be triggered by a save or pre-commit hook (everything is in a repo inside a single monorepo). Might even hook up a LLM to it. Developing my own Notion lol.
[1] as a matter of fact today I "launched" (on a barren desert let's say) a substack newsletter to feature code reviews by the chatG man (and soon feature open source AI projects too), and at first I'm having it review the old Vim plugins I once authored, including vim-seek on next issue, if you want to be my first subscriber, lol: https://generativereview.substack.com/p/the-generative-revie...
"Human" technology focuses on adapting the natural world to one's needs, the ultimate result being the whole natural world removed / replaced by said technology.
"Elven" technology focuses on adapting oneself, to remove the need to rely on, or change the natural world. The ultimate end being the complete removal of oneself from the natural world (while continuing to exist, of course). However that process still requires you to take "human" steps to ensure survival and progress.
> ― Aristotle
If the quote works for you, that's all good.
But for the other people adding it to their quote list, it's unlikely to be a real Aristotle quote. In the Nicomachean Ethics Aristotle concludes that the highest activity of human life is contemplation or speculative thinking.