thick

"Social Media" seems to be a scapegoat for the underlying causes: children are in particular affected by this because they haven't had years/decades to build up mental disorders yet where they justify it to themselves that it's "okay", and the unfairness in the world through the lens of social media, taking the emotional toll head on. Children are very sensitive to their status in society, but we forget this because we grew out of that. Those of us on the successful side of things anyway.

Social Media isn't the boogeyman. It's that no matter how hard you try, your life will never be as good as what is usually portrayed through these channels. You are swarmed with people who lead far better lives than you do, have way more fun than you do, and so on and so forth. Your only escapism at home, in a pandemic, is to go on the internet where you're spammed with these successful people (posers or not, doesn't matter) selling you things by showing off what they have.

So no, it's not social media that damages teenagers mental health. It's worse than that. Ignorance is bliss? There's an argument to be made for that.

It starts before they even hit teens. That YouTube channel of the kid unpacking toys and other things is the kind of early stage precursor to things to come. The kids watching this viscerally live through him for some years, until it dawns on them that hey, wait a minute, he has all those toys and I don't have anything.

It's no wonder exercise makes things better - it's a great distraction from the illnesses of the world. Assuming that children are somehow not aware of it, or are not susceptible to it, is being naive at best.

Excellent summary. Thank you for this.

One thing I forgot to mention is that when I started, I didn’t even have actual blurriness for the most part (unless it’s really far away). I had double vision along the vertical axis, and I did what Becker recommended to do which is to try to focus on the actual object (in my case mostly text), and ignore the ghosted copy so that two of them can converge. I would then intentionally defocus by looking in front or behind the text, and then try to refocus again. It keeps it slightly interesting/amusing.

There’s way more stuff out there on this topic today then there was when I first started practicing it, but it doesn’t seem to have changed all that much. People are still very skeptical about it and I guess optometrists still don’t talk about it.

I’m talking about nearsightedness. But in all honesty I don’t know what the underlying causes are as I haven’t been to an optometrist about it. I think my last check up was when I was in grade 6. Horrible, I know. I noticed it a few years ago and it bothered me enough to do some late night googling to see what snake oil I come across, but I decided to give it a try as a “I doubt I’ll permanently injure my eye trying to get it to focus”. I’ve been staring at a computer screen for well over 25 years, almost every day. I think that at this point it’s more of a genetic lottery that I’m not wearing glasses for severe myopia more than anything.

It’s not perfect like it was when I was younger, I don’t know if it’ll ever be to that level of clarity but I did develop the ability to rapidly focus which for me is “good enough.” I don’t always have to force the focusing - relaxing the eye and not blinking also does the trick, but I combine both of them since I think of it as stretching the muscle out slightly, making it more elastic by ping ponging between focal planes a little bit. Either way, as long as I can impress the plebs by being able to read road signs at a distance that they can’t, I’ll be alright.

I wanted to make the original post because, HN being inquisitive into longevity and health research, I’m very surprised that over the years very few people discussed active focus or other “alternative” vision correction methods. I’m sure there must be lots of people who wear vision correction here. I’d rather not, so I decided to try the weird stuff first and see how things go.

Maybe some of you will find this beneficial if you have slight vision issues. It’s anecdotal, I don’t have scientific backing here. It worked for me, and I think it’s harmless to try. What I’m about to describe is what I think is the Active Focus method.

I’ve always had perfect vision but my dominant eye degraded slightly over the years so I looked into how to bring it back to full. No one in family wears glasses or anything like that, although the elderly use reading glasses of course.

Practicing reading on both monitor and in front of a book with the good eye palmed and trying to shift the focus back and forth while gunning for more clarity for a longer period of time, it took me very little to get rid of the issue - I must have practiced probably 30 times of a few minutes each over the span of a few months, so maybe once every 2nd or 3rd day as I felt like it. I went from having a hard time reading the numbers and letters to very carefully observing the edges of fonts rendered by ClearType antialiasing on Windows.

At first the eye muscles got strained from me forcing it to focus, but then it got better. Minor soreness and redness at first is nothing to be concerned about IMHO. I still practice but not as often, since I’ve trained the ability to focus at will which is really what active focus is about from my understanding - intentional focusing with enough speed.

I’m not a big fan of EndMyopia but the subreddit has people claiming they fixed far worse problems than I have (if slight blurryness is even worthy being called a problem).

I highly recommend Todd Becker’s presentation on Active Focus for anyone wanting a breakdown of the approach. Some people seem to have a hard time with being able to finely control where their focal plane is. It gets easier with practice is about all I can say.

The full “method” that Todd Becker and EM recommend is to try to keep distance to whatever that you’re reading so that it’s just slightly out of focus, but I haven’t had that severe of a myopia. From time to time I read sites like HN from slightly further away than usual just to provide a bit of a challenge to the focus practice, but I think long term it probably isn’t healthy to try to read HN at normal font size from across the room.

Can’t upvote this enough. HN has turned to shambles over the years as people here are way more concerned with “getting out” than they are with building companies. It’s not surprising the place is a cesspool of jealousy whenever someone succeeds.

I’ve called them out on this shit years ago. It still hasn’t changed.

This kind of attitude comes up on HN a lot. They have lots of internal tooling and jobs that have to be done, especially at their scale.

WhatsApp with 50 employees is an anomaly. In reality, companies need lots more employees just to get by. Not all industries are equal when it comes to responsibilities and programmers are the most ignorant but arrogant class, thinking that all you need is software. Spolsky covered this 2 decades ago in his “Developer Abstraction Layer” article.

There are very few overweight people past the age of 80. Anyone telling you otherwise is trying to sell you a bridge. Agenda pushers and idiots who parrot for free what others are selling them are responsible for the “body shaming” nonsense.

Cut back on the ice cream and hit the rack. Your body will thank you, even if your politically minded “friends” don’t.

Refreshing to see that the top Ars comments are supporting this. I’m looking forward to the tables turning around when “they” take control of the situation again, and remember all of this, and the events that have yet to happen.

I remember a few months ago one of the YC alumni building a website to document anyone who supports the RNC for the quoted intention of shaming them and making their lives/livelihood harder. They were so proud of it and advertised it on Twitter. I’ll see if I can dig up the name of one of the authors. They took the tweet down when they realized the audience found them no better than the Nazi supporters of the 30s putting together lists of the Jews.

This doesn’t end well, and people won’t forget this.

Eye for an eye, and then some.

Press release by the author of Lifespan.

These sort of articles need a gigantic preface: you’re talking about a minute portion of the population who gives a damn enough about things to legitimately push themselves hard enough to suffer consequences from doing so.

For rest of the population, they aren’t pushing themselves anywhere near close to their limit. They don’t even know where their limits lie.

People can stress and get ulcers from whatever. But to be wired in a way where you are stressed because you’re not at the top of your game and you think you’re losing it, is a certain kind of personality.

I would sincerely like to get a breakdown of all the factors that contribute to the Japanese living to such an old age, rather than the usual "this one weird trick" bullshit that Economist and others try to swindle on the Western readership. It's quite frankly annoying, although I've lost the last ounce of respect I've had for the Economist years ago so I'm the idiot for expecting them to be any better.

I've gone through pop diet literature like How Not To Die, Blue Zone, and others, but it's mostly just people trying to push an agenda in one way or another. I just want the facts, in somewhat of plain as English as possible but I don't mind some technical fluff if it will help clarify things. I tend to find in a lot of this sort of literature that the technical fluff is useless to majority of the readership and yet takes up 80%+ of the content, as the authors try to use as many half-baked analogies and metaphors as they can to explain technical concepts that nobody cares about. At the same time, something more substantial than "Eat food, not too much, mostly plants" would be welcome. You know, how does exercise play a part in it. How does ancestry that has also lived to an old age play a part in it. Is it kind of a big deal, or nice to have? How many consecutive generations of people living to 100 does it take before it happens at a regular basis. These sorts of things. Holistic analysis that compares more than just "Wim Hof has slightly more brown fat than most people and that's the reason why he is superhuman" level of nonsense.

The latest bit seems to be from longevity research where cold showers and fasting are in vogue again, for the Nth time. Oh, but our company is the only one that provides this one unique test that checks your age biomarkers. We didn't just name drop the company in there for the sake of baiting you into it or anything.

Why is it so bloody hard?