Hallowell and Ratey, who write about ADHD, suggested a new entity for the current world: VAST, the variable attention stimulus trait. It is like ADHD but it is culturally induced and not presumed to be due to an innate deficiency in executive function.
"Beyond the sources of biologically based ADHD, there are a lot of people who act as if they have ADHD but on close inspection turn out not to have the diagnosable condition. These are the people who have ADHD-like symptoms caused by the conditions of modern life. Their “ADHD” is a response to the massive increase in stimuli that now bombard our brains and our world....
"Modern life has trained our brains to go faster and faster, to do more and more, to receive and transmit 24/7, and to require constant stimulation—be it from movies, TV, conversation, even news, as well as the minute-to-minute living of our lives. Most of us can go no more than a few seconds without looking for a screen."
It is likely to me that different people have different breaking points, and so one person may recognize the introduction of the smartphone or debut of TikTok as the point where they lost the ability to focus, and another may date it to the rise of LLMs.
Hallowell, E. M., & Ratey, J. J. (2021). ADHD 2.0: New science and essential strategies for thriving with distraction—from childhood through adulthood.
This was a central plot point of the film adaptation of "Johnny Mnemonic". From Wikipedia:
> In 2021, society is driven by a virtual Internet, which has created a degenerative effect called "nerve attenuation syndrome" or NAS.
Even more hilariously given the purveyors of the distractions we're discussing in this thread:
> Megacorporations control much of the world, intensifying the class hostility already created by NAS.
Bread and circuses, etc. I believe that given our cultural trajectory one's ability to lint their cognitive intake (that is keep TikTok/Insta/YouTube/podcast garbage viewership to a minimum) will be a large predictor of success. The next generation of doctors and Nobel Prize winners probably won't be watching boobies videos and Minecraft play-throughs.
Please also note that ADHD-like symptoms can present from sleep Apnea/UARS-induced sleep deprivation and the probability of having Apnea/UARS rises with age. Smoothly for men and a with a sudden jump after menopause for women.
So if you feel like you are getting more ADHD-like issues, do consider a sleep study. Early tells are easy: you often feel like shit in the morning.
I recently went through this. I was diagnosed with ADHD 15 years ago and have been managing it, but over the last 2-3 years I had been experiencing increased levels of brain fog, fatigue, and by ability to focus had deteriorated to the point I wasn't sure if I would be able to continue working. I had a sleep study done 10 years ago that only found Night Terror Disorder, but no signs of sleep apnea. I did another sleep study about 6 months ago and it turns out while I wasn't having apnea events I had constant and persistent hypopnea. Started using a CPAP and it feels like I've been given a second lease on life. FWIW, I am a very active and in shape individual within a healthy weight range. Don't wait to get tested if you have even the slightest worry you may have it.
What machine and mask do you have? I had a bad CPAP experience 2017ish and navigating sleep apnea treatment with ADHD kinda sucks. I got a recent sleep study done, but the doctor's office seems like a sales farm for a specific CPAP brand/model and they aggressively steered me away from an oral appliance.
I was prescribed modafinil earlier this year and it worked well when I took it but it was intense at the useful dose so the doctor put in for a sleep study. It was a 3 month wait but I am finally getting it done next week an I'm hopeful it leads to a conclusive diagnosis.
I also noticed my issues were worse after my 3rd bout of covid :-/ I had very high sensitivity to alcohol and caffeine after the 2nd bout and have largely cut both out of my life (I never drank more than 20 drinks / year in my life anyway).
Doesn't even need to be a CPAP. I had a sleep study done and it said I basically only had sleep apnea when lying on my back, and my doctor suggested a dental appliance to pull my lower jaw forward.
I got one from my dentist for way too much money, it broke, so instead I got a "snore reducing mouthpiece" from ZQuiet or SnoreRX which is basically the exact same thing but they haven't done a clinical study to show it reduces sleep apnea. I wear one every night along with a nose strip (like Breathe Right, but a different brand that I like better) and my mornings feel like I was hung over are long gone.
The satiation effect that GLP-1s cause also affects motivational drive. I've noticed my ability to get work done is hampered when I am at higher doses of my ozempic.
Please, no. GLP1s leave you worse off than when you started if you stop taking them. Weight is also not necessarily the factor that leads to sleep apnea; I got diagnosed while having a healthy weight in my 30s.
The VAST thing speaks to me. I am capable of deep focus work but often am subject to constant interruption and multiple concurrent urgent demands. During a work week I get a lot done but often feel pulled in a lot of directions like I imagine ADHD might feel like.
During the weekends when I am not occupied with a task I often fall asleep. This happens on the first day or two of vacation also. After a few days my brain acclimates to the pace.
Definitely feels like that, with the exception of task initiation. I am capable of deep focus work, but I can't control when (or where). I can block out time on my calendar all I want, if my brain says "Nope, we're not doing work today" then I'm not doing work, interruptions or not.
It becomes a real disability in the workplace when everything is defined by more or less rigid schedules and your mode of operating is not a schedule but "whenever my brain says so." Some days that might be 7am, other days its 1am, and sometimes it's an entire week or two of not being able to get jack done and then staying up all night and getting 15 business hours worth of work done at once because you physically can't pull yourself away.
I always tell people, its not a deficit of attention, I have plenty of that. Its an inability to direct where and what that attention is on.
Yes, I've found it to be completely incompatible with managers and the corporate world.
I had some success in small startups where I was left to my own devices and built cool stuff whenever I felt the urge to do so.
In corporate jobs I just have to lie and describe smooth and steady daily progress while actually working in sudden fits and starts, but it's hard to maintain the lie.
I always joke that what I am interested in doing and when it is accomplished (if ever) comes down to when the Holy Spirit deigns to work through me lol
I’ve got a few dozen quarter finished projects still waiting in line…
> During a work week I get a lot done but often feel pulled in a lot of directions
This is normal for any "knowledge" employee or professional, or basically any job that is not strictly defined as doing one or a small number of fixed tasks such as on an assembly line.
> The VAST thing speaks to me. I am capable of deep focus work but often am subject to constant interruption and multiple concurrent urgent demands
This is actually something that is pretty misunderstood about ADHD.
People with ADHD don't actually struggle with attention. They struggle with executive function, because their brains don't produce/consume/manage dopamine correctly
Somewhat ironically, Hyperfocus is also a symptom of ADHD. When ADHD people are doing something that is rewarding (producing dopamine) to their brains they might be really hard to pull away from it. It's really common for ADHD people to be able to sit and play videogames for hours on end, because it is giving them dopamine. Ask them to sit and do spreadsheets and they can't sit still and they look "attention deficit". But attention isn't a problem when they're engaged with the work!
I have ADHD, and I really enjoy coding and building stuff. I can't sit still for more than two seconds when I try to use LLMs to build software though. I need to be more hands on than that. Same goal, same process, different execution, completely different experience for me. I don't feel accomplished or rewarded when the LLM writes a function for me compared to writing it myself.
I was formally diagnosed with ADHD and it continued into adulthood. The only way to suppress it is a diet of raw veggies fruits and meats, combined with like 3 hours of exercise a day and time in nature with silence which my evolutionary ancestors presumably did to survive. The way to make it worse is the combination of sugars, processed foods and flashing stimulus.
Point is I think MOST mental illness is the modern world. If you dumped people with severe depression into their ancestors supposedly worse lives 6,0000 years ago, hunting with tribe and sleeping under starry sky, they’d be fine.
If somebody told me 25 years ago that in the future we all would have a TV on our office desk with 100 channels I would not have believed them. Yet ... the current situation is worse! Thinking of it in terms of mental disorders, I don't think that is going to help much.
I’d argue Idiocracy is actually quite the opposite of what the OP was talking about. It has a mildly eugenics-y vibe where the world is bad because poor, stupid people have poor, stupid kids that outnumber the smart ones.
OP is talking about something environmental that can affect anyone.
Yeah, Idiocracy isn't wrong on the facts about our current day scenario. The issue is where it takes that: poor, lower educated people will inevitably have poor, lowered educated children who will in fact get less and less educated as time goes on, and they will take over, leading to... idiocracy.
There's a whole conversation to have about the assumptions in that. Is the implication it's genetic? The children of lower educated people aren't capable of moving to greater things? Or is it societal, that our education system fails the poor and doesn't give them the tools they need to thrive?
The movie isn't really interested in interrogating any of that and I don't think it needs to. Like I said, I see it as a fun movie that isn't that deep. But there's a common thread of opinion on the movie that holds it up as a biting satire ("Idiocracy is a documentary!" is essentially a meme at this point) and those folks don't seem to engage with the topic either. A worrying number of people seem to have a takeaway of "poor people shouldn't procreate as much".
Anyway, to bring it back to the actual topic at hand (and why I originally replied): I think something like VAST goes directly against what Idiocracy implies. We're all potential victims to distractions that reduce our capacity for executive function. A more accurate movie might show people of all financial and educational achievement glued to endless social media feeds.
Why wouldn't self defense be number one, in many cases/times?
Why wouldn't we simply stop spending on education at break even ROI? (to be clear that's not the same as the education creates a salary bump equal to the tuition ... there are Nth order effects of education that should be priced into my point)
Idiocracy's mechanism isn't as solid as it seems though even if high educated people do tend to have have less kid. The movie basically suggests "smart people have smart kids, dumb people have dumb kids, repeat forever." But you'd expect kids of very high or very low IQ parents to land closer to average in general. The "compounding" thing the movie relies on isn't really how it works in life.
And even if the premise of Idiocracy were true, less intelligent people aren't worth less than more intelligent people. That's the "eugenics-y vibe" problem mentioned earlier that makes the movie uncomfortable for some people.
Education is not a proxy for intelligence. There are plenty of smart people who don’t have formal education (including many in this forum).
Yes, higher education rates lead to lower birth rates. The movie still has eugenics vibes, by implying that the “wrong kind of people” are reproducing.
I agree that the overall premise is somewhat eugenics-y, but I overlook that on the basis that it's a comedy movie from 2005 and it's easier to swallow than something like "aliens abducted all the world's smart people"[0] or something. There are still some good themes on over-reliance on automation without understanding it.
The Idiocracy line that I think about the most these days is "Brawndo stock dropped to zero and the computer did that auto-layoff thing to everybody."
Satire pokes fun at what is happening right now; it's not predicting anything. Just like 1984 warned of the dangers of totalitarianism that was already happening, Idiocracy was about current U.S. culture at the time. It wouldn't have been funny if our culture weren't already like that 20 years ago.
The premise is just a silly one so that there's a plot-based reason to show an exaggerated version of what was already happening culturally. It's not intended to be the point of the movie.
Yeah I don't hate the movie by any means I just think it isn't as deep as people often credit it as being.
…and if you do credit it with incisive societal commentary you kind of have to engage with the weird implications of what it's saying rather than just come away feeling superior about not being one of the dumb underclass.
The point of the commentary isn't cryofreezing or the eugenics/handwaved-backstory. Those are a few minute intro just creating the setting and don't make sense nor do they have anything to do with the rest of the plot.
The fun in idiocy is the "isnt this dumb!" take on a bunch of society that is one big dumb step worse than current life but certainly recognizable.
Everything turned into advertising. Costco expanding into everything. Brainless tv and the related celebrities (that people love for the gimmick but don't give a shit about as people). Health care that only supports a diagnosis by matching to a few kid-friendly tiles. Politics as professional wrestling, nepotism, incompetence, and overpromising. For a related laugh, go look at one of the online quizzes from 2016 about "which of these ten quotes are from a real presidential candidate and which are from president comacho".
Idiocracy is a fun, silly satire that is nearly a cartoon, from a bunch of folks who made a bunch of successful social commentary cartoons. It very much isn't a eugenics story - if Mike judge were actually writing that as the intent I think it would be dark and with a vicious ruling class.
It would be interesting to remake it, replacing the premise that people are genetically stupid with just the idea that they're habitually stupid from generations of reliance on AI and social media.
An with proper view on the management. You see, Idiocracy is too optimistic, because their leader genuinely tried to solve a global problem, which is already unbelievable today. Moreover, when their plan didn't work, they really listened to their experts and changed their mind. It's too good.
I would add that Brazil (1985) foretold this 41 years ago.
The civil servants are addicted to their personal TV and only pause watching it compulsively when the boss comes around. As soon as the boss is out of sight they resume their fixation.
From memory it is a loop of a cowboy galloping on a horse.
Idiocracy is downright optimistic compared to our current society.
Citizens have one single piece of identification, and it's not even electronic. Their location is only tracked when discrete scanners manage to see that identification. Medical care is provided promptly. Joe Bowers's court case wasn't decided by political meddling, and the two minute hates were only focused on him after he was found guilty. There are security holes in the implementation of the prison that allow intelligent individuals to escape the machine. The president has leadership, speaking ability, policy planning, honesty, work ethic, intelligence, humility, and outright patriotism. Starbucks seems like respectable open employment for adults rather than children being trafficked to some island in secret. Joe Bower's aptitude was eventually recognized and appreciated - the society wants to get better.
Like all sci-fi, Idiocracy was largely a reflection of the society it was written in. A society that had values we've long since given up on.
Their leader tried to solve a global problem, not calling it a hoax. When their plan didn't work, they really listened to experts, whatever they had, and changed approach. Too optimistic even for modern times I would say.
Sure, my last sentence was a bit of a broad brush. But anything more substantive that focuses on direct sources of rot usually attracts partisans who don't like the messages.
In the introduction to Amusing Ourselves to Death, Postman said that the contemporary world was better reflected by Aldous Huxley's Brave New World, whose public was oppressed by their addiction to amusement, rather than by Orwell's work, where they were oppressed by state violence.
Yes, VAST is specifically not ADHD, although a disorder is really defined by how it affects you. For example, some people worry too much, other people have generalized anxiety disorder, and the effect it has on your life is what separates normal from disordered.
"The person finds it difficult to control the worry.... The anxiety, worry, or physical symptoms cause clinically significant distress or impairment in social, occupational, or other important areas of functioning." DSM-IV/V
Some of the strategies used to help people with ADHD are used to help with VAST-related loss of focus and procrastination, but medication is probably not recommended for those diagnosed as not having ADHD but likely having VAST.
It's funny, I googled VAST and the AI search insisting that it's the same as ADHD, it's just a reframing of it
It sounds similar but almost coming at it from the opposite angle. ADHD is when your brain's baseline is not producing or using dopamine properly. VAST almost sounds like a sort of burnout, where your brain is overwhelmed and cannot process stuff anymore. The symptoms are the same, the effects are the same, but the cause is different.
ADHD root cause is internal lack of stimulation, VAST root cause is external overwhelming stimulation. That's how I understand things anyways
I would have believed them, my tv at home had more than 100 channels at the time, and I think we all knew back then that usable video streaming was coming sooner or later.
> there are a lot of people who act as if they have ADHD but on close inspection turn out not to have the diagnosable condition
This is an interesting way to try to put a label on someone’s behavioral conditioning. One of the common, and growing, problems with Internet discussions of ADHD is that they’ve expanded so much that most young people growing up in a connected world can identity with some influencer’s description of ADHD. Working with young, tech-interested students is worrying right now because across every group you will find most of them saying some variation of believing that they have ADHD. Their basis is usually a combination of Reddit posts and something from a streamer or content creator they follow.
Yet most of them don’t have anything resembling focus or executive function problems. I think those with ADHD diagnoses from youth just don’t talk about it much. It’s the people who discovered it on social media who are bringing it up the most in this context. The basis for their belief that they have ADHD is more about feeling that self-discipline is easy and enjoyable for “normies” and the fact that they have to put in some effort to study and keep their room clean instead of watching YouTube and playing video games is indicative of a condition.
The old way of trying to draw a line between people who are neurodivergent and neurotypical doesn’t really work on those who came up reading those terms on the internet. For various reasons, the majority of them have come to view themselves as neurodivergent in some way, even when they clearly don’t meet any intended definition of that word. In the teenage years it has almost become an extension of the youthful belief that nobody understands you because you’re different and you see the world uniquely. Along come all of the TikTok creators to explain that these feelings are abnormal and come with all these labels you should apply to yourself. Now they believe that they are neurodivergent and start collecting self-diagnoses.
Having a different set of labels could be an interesting way to try to change this dynamic. Instead of one label that’s supposed to represent the entire spectrum from people who cannot function in normal life to the guy who is getting As in all of his classes but feels like studying isn’t as easy as it should be, it might be time to offer some labels for the lighter end of the spectrum so we can get back to using the heavy medical diagnoses to mean something significant.
There’s an entire other conversation about how the dilution of diagnoses like ADHD is causing harm to those with serious ADHD because the term doesn’t mean as much any more. Extra labels for mimic conditions or behavioral/personality variants could be a good way to relieve some of that pressure.
Can you elaborate on what symptoms do people with ADHD have that the ADHD “sympathizers” don’t? How can one analyze themselves “on close inspection” to know if they truly have ADHD?
ADHD usually runs in families. There will likely be a direct relative who went undiagnosed, but who fits the ADHD criteria. Also symptoms from early childhood onwards - it's not something that just happens one day. It's a lifelong pattern of behaviour.
If you're concerned I strongly recommend you speak with a professional. Everyone's ADHD manifest in slightly different ways and nobody on the internet can diagnose you.
Not OP, but I would say that people's self analysis should focus around examining/describing their own internal existence, not external-view terms from the medical industry. If you suspect you have a problem that can be diagnosed and helped by the medical industry, go right ahead and seek out that help. But regardless you've also got to do the work internally, and externalizing your locus of control onto the medical industry undermines that.
That could be me, I don't think I have ADHD but I might have some tendencies that were developed after I moved to the US in my teens. The culture was different, fast moving, and very hectic. My 20s were hell because I couldn't figure it all out. Not much changed since then.
OP is definitely not alone in this. It feels like I'm constantly trying to avoid "attention capture" when trying to do a task that involves browsing the internet - even going on LinkedIn or StackExchange for a specific purpose can get sidetracked by my eyes wandering to the sidebar or being drawn by updates in the feed. It's scary to realize how little in control I am of my own stream of thought.
I don't know if anyone has a solution that's not straight up quitting the internet cold turkey. My attempt so far has been meditating 50 minutes a day following "The Mind Illuminated" by Culadasa as a progress guide for increasing my mindfulness.
The most recent lesson I've learned is that allowing mind wandering and daydreaming can be a good thing. As a kid I read The Power of Now by Eckhart Tolle, and took away a misconstrued toolkit for dealing with an active mind. The whole book was about emphasizing the importance of being present in the moment, and I tried to carry that out by trying to silence my internal monologue and being frustrated whenever I found my mind thinking about something random and not processing direct conscious experience. That felt horrible and was completely counterproductive to being able to live normally, and now I'm trying to re-establish a relationship with my mind where I can welcome random thoughts while still being able to get things done.
People often question me how I manage to focus for more than a few minutes and I'm always confused because back in the day I was constantly informed I didn't have any focus and needed to be treated (adhd).
I'm not convinced attention spans themselves have changed; I think it has more to do with the fact that people's brains aren't defaulting to daydreaming anymore when bored.
I think it's still an issue with people being addicted to phones because I'm sure the lack of daydreaming -- which studies have proven as beneficial and arguibly even a form of microsleep -- is likely causing a lot of the fatigue and inattention people feel; as in their brains are literally being deprived of a natural thing and so are exhausted because of it.
(as an aside: whew what a run-on sentence i have no intention of fixing)
My personal supposition with 0 proof is that the "gen-z stare" is the end-stage of this phenomenon where after being deprived of daydreaming for so long they are essentially "sleeping while standing up" as it were.
There's only one important thing that I miss about smoking: A smoke break was an excuse that was tolerated by others, wherein I could go outside and just let my mind wander (daydream) with no particular goal for a short period of time.
Daydreaming should be perfectly acceptable either way, but people seem to think it's weird (concerning, even) when someone spends a bit of time to stand (or sit) around while appearing to be doing nothing at all.
But having a smoke is an activity, and the smoker's participation in this very passive activity assuages the concerns of others.
I don’t smoke but when I would consult in large companies especially I’d always find the smokers and pop by on my way back from a walk.
They are always a good group of people, with a roguish edge as smoking became less acceptable. Usually they are really kind people who represented every part of the the org, and loved some juicy gossip, and I’d learn alot about the informal networks in the company, who the admins were, etc. They would be entertained by my tales of idiocy from a dozen companies. I miss those days!
Not just smokers. The little groups who would go and leave for a walk and coffee. The people who ate lunch together either going out, or together in the kitchen.
These were opportunities to cross the boundaries of your department and role, it was a great excuse to make friends in other groups, and gain insights.
For me the first ones I tried to align with were always in CS and Accounting. The former often had great insight into emerging issues (next weeks "bug", next months "project"). The latter had insight into how the business was really doing, hearing from the people who looked at your "raw" numbers could tell you more than any company meeting where "everything is great".
Working from home killed these, and "zoom" or "slack" are not the same - people are far more guarded when they understand that the company owns that communication channel, that it is recorded/monitored.
I got caught in a big layoff last year that caught me off guard, in part because I was fully remote when I had been in person before. All the random hallway and kitchen conversations where you catch the vibe of what's really happening were gone from what I could see.
I noticed other co-workers going to the gym during the day and realized I could take a break as well. That's when I started to take walking breaks. No one ever said anything.
I see a lot of concern about whether or not people will tolerate some behavior of mine that isn't harmful to anyone. I'm Gen X, so maybe it's how I grew up, but I just dgaf about whether or not my coworkers are okay with my taking a break and going for a walk. I'm not doing it to be mean to them or anything and I don't do it when I'm in the middle of something big and it's definitely nothing personal (I like my coworkers), it just helps me clear my head which is a win when someone works in a job where they need to keep lots of details in their head and switch contexts a lot.
This attitude does lead to some people being miffed because I wasn't available on Teams for 10 minutes, but anything I can do to push back against the idea of my being available to everyone at any time is a win in my book.
Funny enough. I never smoked, but I often went and hung out in smoking sections outside our work office. I really enjoyed how open smokers were to just random conversations, and the quick 10 minutes of not looking at the screen were typically energizing. Almost like a natural pomodoro work schedule that forced up out of our desks, and then out of our offices.
Socially adroit undergraduates suiting up to exchange dead tree resumes at job fairs in exchange for the URL to online portals can definitely benefit from taking air breaks when/where recruiters do. No need to engage them to unless prompted, it's corporate Switzerland, but there is comfort in recognition on both sides of the booth.
I also appreciate the social break my brain seems to need in order to keep socializing. I'm an introvert but also social, so I love to talk to friends and hang out - but I still need that 5 minutes to just stare off into space and recharge before I jump back into the fray.
I quit smoking about 15 years ago, but still vape - and I remain a huge fan of the easy excuse to step away for 3-5 minutes and just zone out, or change from a large group to a smaller 2-person conversation outside.
Even back when we could smoke in bars, I would still sneak outside from time to time to settle and recharge.
Some of my deepest architectural work honestly happened... in a hammock on the balcony, while alternating between staring at a cloud, the sun, and two magpies building a nest in the birch tree while yelling at me occasionally.
Then I came back to my desk, saw that I had missed a call or two from my boss and he had a concerned message of where I was. I ignored that and sent him an architecture document an hour later. After years, it is still the backbone of our hosting infrastructure and will go into certification audits later this year.
One of my earlier startups, I was a junior/mid level software engineer. I took a skive day to WFH, but was actually travelling to a gig on the train. I sketched out something to pretend I was working that day, and sent him a photo of it. We ended up shipping that design and I only really made one major mistake that we fixed in v2.
It’s an option, but it’s worth noting that you’re not always idling your brain in quite the same way unless you happen to work somewhere were there are no roads to cross, cars and cyclists to dodge, nor other pedestrians to navigate around.
I sometimes find toilet breaks or coffee breaks (waiting for kettle to boil) fill the “daydream debugging” requirement. But that depends on having a clean bathroom with enough stalls, or an empty kitchen without other people making drinks.
Working from home definitely helps here. Though significantly less so during the holidays when kids are off.
Edit: just in case there’s any misunderstanding, I’m not suggesting having the kids around is a bad thing. I love my kids. Just that they have an obvious impact to my concentration.
I think they’re saying that you could say “I’m going for a smoke break” at work and it was at least tolerated. I don’t think you can say “I’m going for a walk” the same way.
We had 3pm coffee club at a previous job. It was great. Had our own slack channel(public). As the minutes counted down people would post gifs counting down (/giphy 4, /giphy 3). Most of the dev team would go. We’d go a heavy coffee shop. The talks there and back were great.
It has varied a bit depending on the timeline, but: Going out for a walk (or to just change environments and very passively stare at nothing) has been less socially-acceptable than going out for a smoke, in my experience.
One of these things is weird, or perhaps inducing of ire ("How dare he just go outside when he feels like it! What is he even doing?").
The other is, at worst, both understandable and disgusting ("Of course he's out there again with that filthy habit!").
I've worked a number of places where smoking on site wasn't allowed, and it was well accepted that if you wanted to just disappear for 30 minutes once or twice a day no one would care.
I have been doing this new practice I heard on some podcast or something - taking a short brisk walk like every thirty minutes. It was promoted for cardiovascular health, trying to compensate for sitting too much, but I also find it is incredibly good at letting me concentrate hard through more hours of work than without. I sometimes check the news or whatever but often just walk and listen to music or chat. I walk strictly five minutes, almost to the end of my block and back, and continue on. The timing ties in with my meditation training, Maezumi lineage, where we sit for 25 minutes then walk (first slowly and then quickly) for five minutes. In meditation it really allows one to sit with energy and focus all day long; also for software development, it turns out.
I also take a longer, 5 km, walk most days, as a way to control type 2 diabetes. This short regular walk is quite different.
Honestly the biggest issue is that the increased focus means I can get into a zone and two hours go by without pause, so every thirty minutes is not always met.
I've started to go stand in my front yard and just watch the world go by for 15 minutes or so and if I do it around dinner time then I can get away without looking weird as it's perfectly normal to wait uber eats this way.
> I'm not convinced attention spans themselves have changed; I think it has more to do with the fact that people's brains aren't defaulting to daydreaming anymore when bored.
Yea sometimes stuff has to sink in or marinate. If you don't give that to yourself then you'll never realize it's gone.
I realized I was missing this because I sometimes sit in my chair and tell myself "this is your life now, you sit in this chair" and I do that for as long as possible. I do this in part because a part of me just doesn't want to do anything: I don't want to work, I don't want to do fun things, I just want to do nothing. So I have an inclination towards being lazy.
But when I'm on that chair and give myself full freedom to do so, then I get agitated and want to do something. I plead with myself really hard. But my lazy part is like "fuck no... we're finally on this chair, I'll die this way, we're never getting off this chair."
And then at some point my mind says something like "FINE, I'LL EVEN DO THE TAX FORM THINGY I HAVE BEEN PUTTING OFF. I'LL DO ANYTHING!"
When I judge the activity to be productive enough, I get off the chair.
The real challenge is that I forget that I have this exercise because it actually works for me and it makes me realize that when you're doing "nothing" your brain is doing a whole lot.
If you haven’t read it, Cal Newport’s book Digital Minimalism is mostly about this topic. The value of giving your brain time to simply exist without any outside input, with many examples from history of people who carved out time explicitly for this, especially when needing to make big decisions or figure out answers to problems.
I haven’t read the book but I like this idea and intend to check out the book. I’m not on social media but I find Hacker News – and even Wikipedia – to be addictive enough. When I was younger, I found it very hard to just sit there without some form of external stimulation, e.g. I couldn’t sit down to eat by or have a coffee by myself without reading a magazine or newspaper at the same time – or listening to the radio. I still find it hard to do this.
Hacker News has been useful in that I’ve come across a few inspirational ideas on consuming less input (and producing more output):
I’ve made some changes to my life in that listening to music is more intentional – not just a distraction to have in the background. It probably helps that I’ve also started to learn a musical instrument. I can also go for a walk without needing to have music or a podcast to listen to.
Consume less, create more: “These are not the only two options. There's a third activity most of us seem to have forgotten - to simply be.
For me, the very act of everyday living has become very enjoyable and fulfilling in recent years. Doing the dishes, cooking, gardening, sweeping the floor, putting out the trash. Those are not "chores", that's what life's made of. Some of it creative, some not, but the difference is you're simply present in the moment and in the world.”
Next time I do the dishes, I will appreciate being alive, and be thankful to be doing something healthy for my brain. Thanks!
So true! I still think of these things as being chores and don’t look forward to doing them. Worse still, I sometimes procrastinate and let them build up into being much bigger jobs than they need to be.
Every now and again, I try to re-frame the way I view these tasks and try to be more positive about them. I remind myself how fortunate I am to be a (reasonably) fit and healthy adult who can physically do them. And I always feel good when I complete them.
That's probably a great read based on what I've heard from Cal, but I don't think you need an entire book to know how to scale back on your social media use. Just hand your phone to your friend and have them put a lock on the addictive features.
It’s not just social media. Most people have their thing… the news, podcasts, music, books, games, etc. In the modern era we can always have something that allows us to distract our brain or provides external ideas to direct it. Being alone with our own thoughts, devoid of outside influence, is something that seems to take an intentional choice these days.
I find that just setting it to grayscale is enough. Its not that colors are actually an important part of my mostly text based social media experience, but when I use them without colors I get distracted with:
> What am I doing? This dumb.
And then I remember that it is dumb and I go back to leaving it alone.
I agree. I am not sure it is as similar to sleep as you claim, but its definitely good for your brain.
I say something similar in the context of parenting, that a reasonable amount of boredom is good. I think it likely that being constantly entertained makes people more prone to seek constant stimulation.
This did not start with phones either. I am Gen X and it happened in my childhood with kids being dumped in front of TVs. One difference was a lot of adults resisted this and limited hours in front of a TV, whereas now a lot of adults are addicted to phones too.
I remember when cable TV used to be "addictive". Now I can't watch even 10 minutes of it without getting bored and pulling out my phone. Also something I learned recently: checking your phone at the movies is no longer the faux pas that it used to be.
There's definitely some hedonic treadmill type thing going on with attention and stimuli.
Think the difference is between "using your phone", meaning calling someone and audibly talking to someone, thus disrupting the movie for others, and "checking your phone", which is just looking at it, though inaudibly, though there might be some amount of light pollution depending on the screen brightness. First one has and will continue to be taboo, second one however, in my experience, used to be viewed with distaste, but is pretty common nowadays.
I’ve asked people sitting nearby to stop checking their phone as the glare can be very distracting. I might be immersed in the film but keep getting pulled out of the story by the distractingly bright light.
I also try to patronise cinemas that remind viewers at the start of the screening not to use their phone at all. I stopped going to the Cineworld near me because there was too much phone use (both calls and checking alerts) – and Cineworld had stopped the reminders at the start of the film for people to switch off their phone.
As someone who miraculously doesn’t feel this urge to constantly “check” his phone, I have to ask: what are you people “checking” for, exactly? It’s still there—it hasn’t gone anywhere. Is it the notifications? Why not just turn them off? I can assure you that there’s nothing on your phone that can’t wait an hour or so until the movie is done.
Out of 10,000 people “checking” their phones, probably around 1 of them is actually waiting for something urgent and important. The rest are doing it out of pure addiction.
Everything wants to hijack your attention via your phone now, whether it's apps spamming notifications or companies spamming SMS. And arguably every once in a while there is something you would like to know quickly, but any channel that comes on just gets abused by cruft.
If it's addiction, it's addiction through exploitation.
The guy next to me at the last movie I went to was scrolling TikTok. Seriously what the hell, you can do that anytime and you actually paid to be in that seat.
I have no idea at all what lost Xanadu theater you found where people don't check their phones. They weren't saying they like it or that it's actually ok. The word "apparently" tells you that this is something they have observed happening and were surprised to observe.
Solid Xanadu reference. I wonder what percentage of the current generation of young people would have any idea what this is from. I'm not a film buff, but took a film course in college, and learned all about Orson Welles and Citizen Kane.
I highly recommend road-tripping to those that can. At least once a year I end up driving out from the Mid-Waste to the Bay Area or SoCal. A few years ago the wife and I traded duties to drive to various parts of Alaska and back.
We've spent a week or so exploring just one state at a time…
There's nothing so mentally refreshing as a long, boring drive.
Well I made no claim of it being related to sleep; just that I've read a lot of claims that it's related to microsleep and used "sleeping while standing up" for the last bit as an analogy.
I am not a sleep doctor/therapist nor am I any sort of expert on the subject.
That's a very interesting perspective but now that you mention it, I can't even think of the last time I daydreamed, even when I'm not on a device. Curious if phone usage or whatever doom-scrolling we do exhausts the same part of the brain that we use to daydream.
> I can't even think of the last time I daydreamed
About 5 minutes ago for me, my missus says that I live with my head in the clouds (which is a nicer way of saying if I'm not actively doing something I just zone out and retreat into my own head), I've always been that way all the way back to school (with the inevitable consequences from teachers).
I've mentioned on here before though that I never got addicted to my phone, I don't even know where it is ~80% of the time.
My relationship with technology is (nearly) always intentional, I still access the internet 95% of the time on a desktop PC (which reduces doom scrolling since that just feels wrong on a desktop) so when I walk out my office I'm just "offline" in a very distinct way, if I go for a walk my phone stays at home, everyone who knows me knows I'll answer a text at some point but it could be a day or two.
To sum it up, I resent the passive intrusion of technology into my life.
I hope to find the strength to be more like that. Also to give a better example to others.
I notice making the screen go grayscale (can configure volume up+down to do this in android) already makes doom-anything much less long-lived. The next step, since apparently I can't go cold turkey, is to try one of these alternative minimalist launchers to see if it helps. And to teach people that if they want something from me urgently, they need to call.
On the topic of watches, I used a smartwatch the company gifted me for a while. Went back to an analog watch. Much better.
> And to teach people that if they want something from me urgently, they need to call.
There is a half way step (on Android at least, I assume Apple has similar) you can set "Do Not Disturb" and then white list the people who can message/call through the "Do Not Disturb" so you are reachable but only by people you trust/want to be able to reach you.
> On the topic of watches, I used a smartwatch the company gifted me for a while.
I just didn't use one, I have a rough rule that introducing new technology into my life has to be a complete and obvious unalloyed win or I just don't, it's a very high bar for a new technology to clear but it also means I don't spend money on things that end up in drawers because they either turned out not to meet the hype or just annoyed the living hell out of me after the initial "oooh shiny" wore off.
I’ve been 24/7 do-not-disturb mode with all notifications disabled, for the past 10 years. It’s been wonderful for “intentionality” and agency over my time. I use my phone when I want to do something on it, not when the phone beeps and buzzes telling me to use it.
I don’t even whitelist anyone anymore. If it’s important they will leave a message and I’ll get back to them.
You have to remember that not that long ago it was simply impossible to reach most people who were not at home or at work. Because it was impossible, nobody felt slighted that you were unable to read their message or take their call immediately. And nobody felt any anxiety about leaving the house for a few hours to shop or go to a movie or a ball game and being unreachable. Loved ones managed and life went on.
If you have an iPhone, you can put the greyscale as only a percentage greyscale if desired. I got an iPhone to get rid of the constant bothering from the apple devotees and quickly found myself spending an unhealthy amount of time on it. I started with a small percent greyscale so I didn't notice and would forget that the colors were dulled. Before I even got to 50% greyscale, my habit had died and I only use it when I need to (literally only for communicating with the folks who can't tolerate green bubbles)
My daily driver is GrapheneOS. I don't know if android has a similar feature, but I assume not because my GrapheneOS phone only supports fully greyscale, and the difference is so stark that I can't keep it on. The most addictive apps I have on it are my Hacker News client and NewPipe (the nonaddictive YouTube), so I am not too concerned though
This cracked me up. I have the same malady. The worst thing used to be a few close friends who recognized the pattern after being with me long enough and called me out in it when they knew I was zoning out while they were talking. Ive desperately tried to keep this daydreaming trait lately despite trying to get rid of it when I was younger when I used to think it was a disadvantage.
Willpower's not the solution. When we isolated cocaine from the coca leaf for the first time, the world pretty much went insane. In those first years people were injecting it into their eyeballs and spines. The most popular beverage on earth in 2026 STILL contains extract of the coca leaf as a holdover from the days when it was laced with its namesake, Coke. People were smoking cocaine, ingesting cocaine, giving it to their kids for a toothache, pretty much anything you could stick it in, they did.
The solution to this wasn't willpower, it was to get rid of all that fucking cocaine. There's a reason you don't have the stuff lying around your house today, if you did you'd probably get hooked. In 2026 we're basically speedrunning the coke boom with infotech.
So once again the solution is: get rid of it. Any time you're in a low stimulus environment, remove the tech so that you don't HAVE to exercise willpower. That means turning off the phone and the watch and maybe stuffing them in a drawer in another room or something. That's all it takes.
I can't say how society will look back at this moment in history 150 years from now. But I do know I'm way happier and more relaxed when I just shut off the devices and put them away. When I'm at home or in the office, my phone's on mute, in a drawer/bag/other room, and I don't think about it unless I take it out for a few minutes to order a delivery or do a 2fa or something. At night it's simply turned off. I'll never own a smart watch. I still keep the phone on me when I go out and haven't found that to be a huge concern because if I'm at a bar or something it's competing with a lot of other stimuli for attention. We were never 100% available to anyone for all of human history until the last 10-20 years. I am not opting into this current Cocaine Moment.
I think it depends on how you use it. All things in moderation and all. I've had one for years but when I set it up it only allowed it a few notifications. When meetings start during my work day, getting e-mail to my personal account, and when I get messages from my wife, that's it.
So when I'm not working the watch is... just a watch.
I was a fan of the Apple Watch initially because I felt like it kept me from having to take out my increasingly large iPhone to check things like the time and if I was going to get rained on, but they've managed to make WatchOS some weird nightmare of distractions and things I need to actively shut off on my phone, and I've grown very tired of it.
My big discovery a few years ago was uninstalling apps, especially social media apps. I don't mind the platforms, but removing their ability to ping notifications up was massive. I watch some people just get their phone out to dismiss a load of notifications for 20-30 seconds. It's a chore now. I think limiting notifications is the best thing you can do, on your phone and your watch.
I honestly don't think it is willpower, it is simply that I never had to break the "addiction" because I never had it in the first place.
I always found the form factor extremely limiting compared to a desktop (it's the same reason my laptop ended up running a TV upstairs, the idea of programming on the sofa sounded great but in practice I'd get frustrated and immediately retreat to my quiet downstairs office with multiple screens when I had to do something tricky/requiring concentration).
Where I do use something that optimises for distractions, I look for how to minimize the distractions (e.g YouTube - I use the excellent Unhook (with Ublock Origin) which turns the YT home page into a search box and little else, hides mixes, shorts and other distractions) and make it work for me.
I sometimes pause shows or YT videos I'm watching just to daydream for a little bit about something that just crossed my mind. Additionally I go outside at least once a day to walk or ride my bicycle, which also helps with this.
That's interesting. What happens if you just sit there doing nothing, looking around and what not? Does your brain start to wander by itself?
Personally I struggle to remember any day I haven't had at least 10-15 minutes of idle time doing nothing, just thinking idly, but I still have similar struggles as the author. Although I barely use my phone for things neither.
>> What happens if you just sit there doing nothing, looking around and what not? Does your brain start to wander by itself?
For me it's one of the three layers.
First layer, it starts to wonder to the direction offered by real world. Wonder about song lyrics I'm listening too, or the colors of buildings, or something like that.
Second layer happens if you purposefully stray your thoughts away from a real world. Brain starts trying to remember whatever you wanted it to remember. For example, if I tell myself three times "don't forget to call mom", if I just sit idly, chances are my brain would surface "call mom". Sometimes it surfaces "remember you wanted to try arch 2 years ago".
Also this is the layer that works badly if you tried or depressed, because it can start surfacing bad thoughts.
Third layer I call time skipper because it's just a basic time fast forwarding. I have no idea whether it's true meditation or controlled dissociation or something else, but thoughts slide of your brain, so there's nothing to remember afterwards. My friend said that maybe meditation is a controlled dissociation.
I prefer to say that I'm so dumb, I can just switch my brain off.
I think its unfortunate people wear headphones while walking/running/biking. If you don’t, that’s however many minutes or hours of nothing but daydreaming (and hearing nature).
I've needed to take anc earbuds with me while out now, not to listen to music but just to tone down the noise pollution a bit. You can barely hear nature anyway over all the cars, trucks, lawnmowers, leafblowers, airplanes, and what I think are warehouses. It's been getting worse in recent years and the only way to have a chance at daydreaming is to lower it a bit.
Sadly around here it takes quite a lot of driving to get to anywhere that nature sounds predominate. Between the highways/airports/lawncare it is mostly noise pollution, and I generally find that doesn't work as well for daydreaming.
I read my black on white eink reader on walks and occasionally run into poles and things in the sidewalk. Mostly I look up when crossing a street. When I was a kid I would walk slowly around with a Sci Fi book and read it. Never been hit by a car but every now and then get scared by one I didn’t notice. But I can’t read intense books too much - I alternate hard books and pulpy fun reads.
> That's a very interesting perspective but now that you mention it, I can't even think of the last time I daydreamed, even when I'm not on a device.
Sometimes I just turn my phone off and stare at a white wall for 15 minutes. People made fun of me when I told them how relaxing I find white walls, but it seems it turns out, that I'm not the only one doing this?
I found that people would make fun of me for that, too, if they were made aware of it.
Back when I was still stuck to a desk in school (up hill both ways and without a pocket computer), I learned that folks would tend to leave me alone if I had a book open. It didn't really matter what book it was.
I could just gaze at it with my eyes relaxed and unfocused, with the printing appearing as some kind of indistinct phoric blur. And as long as I turned the page occasionally, that was good enough to keep the would-be tyrants at bay.
(And then I'd ace the test on Friday, repeat for dozens of weeks, and do it again next year.)
When my wife and I started dating, she constantly was asking me what I’m thinking about (as people who care about you sometimes do). She was amazed that I could just sit down in a sofa and zone out, thinking about absolutely nothing. At first she would ask “come on, you meat be thinking about something” and later admitted she couldn’t do that and didn’t think people actually could!
How would one daydream, i.e., imagine, when you have everything presented to you in 4k and you can even interact with it through games?
You have to imagine to daydream. When you’ve been raised on YouTube since birth (referring to U.S. primarily “GenZ”) or you’ve formed your identity around things on TV (like most Americans) you didn’t have to imagine, daydream you just took it in, like everyone else that took on the same thing. That’s another aspect that’s not really being called out, TV also has contributed to the homogenization and destruction of distinct and unique cultures, i.e., actual, real diversity; because everyone is programmed and trained by TV on the same material, as the famous water cooler discussion about a TV show episode everyone was watching tells us.
Now imagine you’re “Gen Alpha” or maybe even “GenZ” where you have not even had anyone read you books that required you to imagine, i.e., daydream, what was being told to you?
These are all compounding factors that are going to even cause massive problems for this sham, fake facade, con job American society.
Talk to teachers in elementary schools and middle schools, even universities now; they’ll tell you things that should make and discerning person be alarmed. And that’s without even talking about the impending impacts of AI.
I used to spend a lot of time imagining myself as the captain of a Federation starship :) but I did also read a lot of books.
But also, the availability of YouTube changes the utility of descriptive writing. Moby Dick can have pages of text about whales or whatever, but now I can spend hours watching whale videos on YouTube. The importance of the interior life of the characters is more, or of diffusive world building stories with too much intricacy for a movie or video presentation.
Interesting that you bring daydreaming to the conversation. I've got an issue with it, and it's that I get interesting ideas then. But nothing comes out unless I sit in front of a computer to do anything with them. And computers have all the distractions.
I believe you are on to something. I like to run, which is common enough, but I never do it with a watch or phone. I always leave them at home. That is my hour of zen. Afterwards I may be exhausted but I am always full of ideas. After the first ten kilometres or so the body does all the running and the mind is set free. That's a lot like daydreaming.
Every other person I meet along the trail have headphones and some watch to measure their training. I get it, they want to get better at running. Maybe they train for some competition. I don't. I will never be an elite marathon runner and I know that, so I couldn't care less about getting better as long as I come back with a tired body and busy mind.
Everybody is different, but I have never understood why not more people are like me.
As much as I’d like to leave my phone in another room while working, 2FA has made that impossible. I’m now required to keep my phone nearby and pick it up periodically throughout the day, all in the same of security.
My phone is already like that. There are still emails, texts, the browser still exists, the weather, etc.
And even ignoring all of that, taking hands off the keyboard/mouse, picking up a different device, waiting for the notification, opening it up, typing in the code, putting the phone back down, moving back to the keyboard/mouse/monitor… it’s very disruptive to any flow I might hope to have.
Sometimes I worry that this whole gen-z stare thing is just millennial avocado toast under new management. I work with a ton of gen-z'ers, I think they're great and have never once experienced this gen-z stare thing you hear about so much online. They're hard workers, attentive, and less phone addicted than my latchkey parents.
It goes beyond my job but that is my fault for narrowing it down. Even day to day shopping at random stores, I have never seen this gen-z stare or any of the other terms we assign to them. If they are bimodal, which they very well could be, the competent mode is clearly dominant where I have lived
We went through twenty years of millennials being this or that, how none of them work, how they are moochers. Every generation gets called lazy and dumped on by the previous generations; as far as I can tell, it is mostly bull shit. I have yet to experience anything extraordinary about gen-z that I don't see in gen-y, gen-x, latchkey, boomers, greatest generation, etc.
Maybe younger gen-z or gen-alpha like you say are truly messed up, I think we have data coming out of schools that support that, but I have yet to interact with them as I don't have kids myself. Everything I have said is inherently anecdotal and no more important than what you've seen
at my first office job my coworkers quickly informed me i had a bizarre habit of staring at the ceiling before performing a burst of effort. i find loosening my visual focus helps me visualize concepts and idea, no idea when or how i picked up that habit
sometimes when i "space out" i am fully daydreaming, other times i am (in generous terms) "composing my thoughts". when its a daydream after snapping back to it ill think along the lines of, "guess i needed to process that"
The gen z stare is being unable or unwilling to give a verbal response when one is expected mostly as a result of social anxiety and lack of communication skills IMO.
> I'm not convinced attention spans themselves have changed; I think it has more to do with the fact that people's brains aren't defaulting to daydreaming anymore when bored.
If my mind is not defaulting to daydreaming and rather asking me to find a distraction, doesn't this mean my attention span is worse?
You don’t necessarily want to daydream. If you’re not careful, it becomes Negative rumination and mind wandering and that wouldn’t be as useful as an actual nap or a workout or meditation.
If meditation and workout look like a protection against ruminating, they might be functioning as avoidance. If a nap helps, maybe fix your sleep first (good sleep is super important for mental health). Daydreaming is healthy.
I would say that if the mind stays away from negative ruminations when set free, that is a sign of a balanced and healthy life. Many people lack balance and health, and for them changing the conditions a bit might be helpful. Knowing and practicing that one can focus the attention where it is useful can increase mental health or ability to cope with problems. One doesn’t want to run away from reality but one need not feel trapped by intrusive mental phenomena.
I often do this on flights under 3 hours. The hardest part is finding a place to land your gaze where it doesn’t look like you’re staring it someone, as that could become awkward.
I would also blame the Western commercialization of meditation. I have recently learned that in Buddhism meditation is just one side of the coin, and it’s usually diametrically paired with the opposite technique of contemplation: instead of concentrating into one infinitesimal point, you expand your awareness to encompass the whole of reality. Which is a bit like daydreaming. It’s through these two exercises that one finds the middle path of equanimity.
With technology, we spend our time with narrowed focus, we are told that to stay sane we need to cultivate our focus, and never find the time to release the grip on it, to just let the brain be and expand and relax a bit.
The Taoists had figured it out all along: to find focus, stop focusing so damn much.
As an avid consumer of Western Buddhism, this is pretty standard understanding. Concentration and insight, another complementary aspect of practice, like the dichotomy between sitting alone and sitting in a group, or between a steady daily practice and a deep intense retreat.
The linear story is that increased awareness of focus teaches the sitter that there are no real borders in reality, it is a seamless whole, and as the sitting continues, awareness naturally opens up to include the full current moment - seeing thoughts as thoughts, emotions as emotions, sore knees as sore knees, twitchy neighbor as a twitchy neighbor, etc thru the myriad things all showing the way, bright and clear.
But they are mutually reinforcing partners that appear as distinct.
I gave up my smartphone 6 years ago because I concluded the conveniences it offered came at cost of too much of my attention, freedom, and privacy. My ability to focus was just gone, and this magic device was not making me happy or productive anymore.
Within a year, my hyper-focus abilities I remember having as a teen starting flowing back. In the last 5 years I have done the best work of my career, including creating the first fully deterministic Linux distribution, building a community around it, helping start 3 companies, learned endless new skills.
I am not reachable or able to reach the internet every second of every day, and in the modern world that sounds scary. Yet I have a family, an active social life, frequently travel, meet new people every week, co-running two companies while actively developing new tech with daily progress, etc.
All of those things were -accelerated- by me being intentionally offline whenever I am not at a desk.
> Within a year, my hyper-focus abilities I remember having as a teen starting flowing back.
Mine are gone for good. But I no longer want to be able to hyperfocus, because it is invariably a sign I am losing control. For me, hyperfocus is dysregulation that benefits others and not me.
I just want to be able to think straight, keep my house tidy, and not spend a couple of hours every day wishing it would turn out to be my last day.
I have at various points of my life been diagnosed with downs syndrome, chronic depression, anxiety, ADD, tourettes. Almost certainly undiagnosed PTSD and tests indicate maybe mild autism. I do not think anyone actually knows, and I stopped letting such fuzzy labels define me. I can say for me the drugs never fixed the root causes. They just made me care less about having control. A passenger in my own life.
Once I recognized constant connectivity and internet media as mild poisons like alcohol, and regulated those, I found myself a lot happier without drug dependence. (YMMV, every brain is different)
I can focus on whatever I want now. A mechanical puzzle, work, an open source project, a video game, my family, my friends, or typing this comment to a stranger on the internet I empathize with. My motivation is seemingly endless now too.
Get rid of the doom scrolling poison and give your brain time to reset and recalibrate. Spend several hours a day away from the internet. I cannot promise it is the only change needed for you but I promise strategic life change experiments will provide a better chance of a positive outcome than waiting to die.
I am not a doom scroller. Like I say, I try to regulate my news intake to things that are valuable and I have for years. I use social media only for creative-interest-based groups — I have no "friend feed" at all and I haven't in more than a decade. I have some places where my limited focus is enough to share expertise, and that is more or less it.
Unfortunately my ability to focus declined precipitously three years ago and despite all sorts of long walks, breaks from the internet, breathing exercises, diet changes and ultimately stopping work entirely for months at a time, I have never got it back. I can no longer really do my job.
I don't want "hyperfocus" back at all. It's a disorder trait: it allows other people to expect more sustained over-exerted effort from me than I can possibly deliver without making myself ill.
I would like to be capable of managing my life on a day-to-day basis, but I am now so burned out that this is a struggle. I don't have any confidence that will return. I am what is left over from who I used to be.
But I am also now over fifty, single, childless, and I don't expect to return to my old job because everything I did has been changed so much by AI anyway.
As much as I try to learn about that AI future I will need to return to, and try to prepare to return to work, there is no returning to who I was, and I don't have the energy or focus to direct into some new version of me, so I will likely just potter around for a couple more years until I no longer want to.
I think it's just information overload. There's so much information everywhere now clamoring at you for attention. Our brains aren't made for processing this much information. Going on a media diet helps. Going completely offline helps even more.
Something I do when I struggle to focus is to add different stripped down user accounts to my computer.
I wanted to dabble in rust so I added a user called ~rs that literally only has access to two application hotkeys (via niri). super+enter opens a terminal, F1 opens the offline rust documentation. Yeah I can just log out and scroll HN, but there's a enough friction to that, that it doesn't really happen very often.
Yep, i do the same thing. The trick is to increase the barrier to entry.
For the same reason, i don't install ANY apps on my smartphone and tablet, like social apps and news apps. If you have to grab your laptop to check them, it takes way more effort.
And, if you really need to access something "urgently", you can always use the web browser (which is annoying) where i always use Private Mode (no easy logging in.)
> Yeah I can just log out and scroll HN, but there's a enough friction to that, that it doesn't really happen very often.
You can make sure the friction is high by having your password be something difficult to remember, written down on a note, and keeping that note somewhere "out of reach".
I don't think it's helpful to increase the friction more than it already is, then it just becomes annoying, which makes it more likely you'll stop working like this. You don't have to become a desert father to fix your attention.
My hypothesis is that what's hurting focus and attention is context and task switching. It too easy to open a bunch of tabs and get stuck in the xkcd loop[1] whenever you get stuck or something gets a bit boring, so that becomes a thing you do without thinking about it.
Having mise-en-place workspaces where things that aren't necessary for what you are doing are out of reach, and reaching for them means you have to log off and lose your state, is generally more than sufficient to fix the problem.
It's not that you can't ever check your socials or scroll HN (that wouldn't work for me as part of running a business is a digital presence), you just can't do it while working on something. Makes everything just a little bit more deliberate.
(Also on a practical note, chrome/chromium in app mode is great for this, if you do need to be able to go online, but in a limited sense)
It was a choice to make technology that absolutely hammers you with information. It was not the right choice.
I want to build and use stuff that promotes focus. I only have a vague inkling of what this means, but it's quieter, less instantaneous. And it's going to be an uphill battle because everyone else is doing the opposite.
A lot of the choices were to be fair quite accidental. Computers didn't use to be like this, but a lot of the reasons they weren't were properties of how the technology worked. A low-DPI 15" CRT monitor simply can't display very much information at any given moment. A slow single core CPU just doesn't permit browsing the web while your code is compiling. As that changed, we simply piled on multitasking capabilities without asking if we should.
But yeah, it's an interesting space to experiment in. I feel we could be doing much of this a lot better than we are now. My mise-en-place work accounts is very much a hack, and considerable work to set up.
On their own, browser tabs, notifications, and IM at work all make sense on their own and are not evil at all.
Taken together, there are now 8 people trying to talk to me all day every day, constant alerts unless you go out of your way to severely restrict what and who can message you, and you find yourself with 60 tabs across 3 windows doing 7 things at once but also doing nothing because... your brain was not built for this computer.
Before 1992, we browsed newsgroups, watched TV, or played with swords while compiling. That is, if you weren't using Turbo Pascal, with its near-instantaneous turnaround.
When I travel to EU, I completely ignore my phone. I'm doing things, driving, seeing things, and hiking. When I wake up I feel rested. I feel happy.
When I am home, I am exhausted every single day. Sometimes I don't even do anything, still exhausted.
Idk, if it is information overload, monotony, depression, work, brain get fried by constantly having to manage everything.
I also have kid....and let me tell you....to get him anywhere on time is mission impossible. Doesn't want to brush teeth, doesn't listen AT ALL, doesn't care about losing privileges. I guess this stress doesn't exist when we travel because we can spend 2 hours getting out the door.
I really need to stop using the phone as much and try to figure out what is causing it.
It's more than information overload. It's an overabundance of distractions specifically designed to steal your attention. I block dark pattern sites during working hours. It helps immensely.
> I think it's just information overload. There's so much information everywhere now clamoring at you for attention. Our brains aren't made for processing this much information. Going on a media diet helps. Going completely offline helps even more.
I wonder how much is real information, i.e. information that truly is related to your life, interests and within your sphere of influence; and how much is just noise that camouflages as information.
I've tried multiple things to regain focus, the only ones that worked:
- blocking social media everyday til 2pm(i like working from 5-1 everyday), i use freedom app for that
- having a "distraction" tablet with 2fa on the social media I use, so I can only use distracting things there and not on my computer and iphone.
- when work requires just thinking, I bring my remarkable tablet to a coffeeshop or coworking and work just off of it.
- for avoiding staying behind on social media trends, etc, i built Analog Reader to read newsletters, best tweets from specific people and articles i save for later. It becomes a printed newspaper I can bring anywhere. I have a hacker news edition that runs everyday that showed this article for today and thats why im here lol.
Living in Seattle saved me. In the winter months I started waking up and sitting in front of a SAD light for half an hour. I almost immediately got bored so I started reading long-form books (with the occasional short story) in front of the light for an hour each morning.
I gave up on facebook in 2010 and twitter in 2020ish. I never developed the habit for other social media. I turn off slack and email for the first 45 minutes of each hour. If the server is on fire, call me. That's why I have a phone. Oh, and I have an old-school non-smart phone for phone calls and it often lives in a different room from where I work. I run a TOTP authenticator on a tablet that's not configured to receive any messages.
HN and an occasional YouTube video are my only online distractions. In my advanced age I've lost the desire to tell everyone how wrong they are, which seems to be the national sport of online comments sections. (Though, HN, you're much better than most places.) I've been getting into GMRS lately and it's hard to turn off the radio during work days, but I have been able to do it. Maybe I should write a similar article saying "the net doesn't distract me, but dang if I can't go 10 minutes without thinking about people I know via GMRS."
The author of this piece makes an observation about bullshit vs. attention that is probably worth looking into. My last several jobs have included less bullshit, but a lot more documentation. Which is to say, the docs I write seem to have actual applicability to a real business problem and it's solution. There's little busy work that only serves to prove that a remote VP has more people working for him.
I think what I'm trying to say is a) it is possible to strengthen your attention gland. I'm happy to see the author at least trying. And... b) maybe there's a correlation between perceived bullshit and ability to focus. This needs more research.
A lot of people here are focusing on ADHD, but I think the author is commenting on a different phenomenon, because they were able to concentrate before and now it's just much harder. I feel it and many people I talk to feel it as well.
It's difficult for me to separate whether this is a result of other changes in my life over time or simply a reflex of ageing in general, though I do think it's a wider societal shift. In the same way that older people find it difficult to watch newer movies (and vice-versa), there is a certain pace associated with culture as well. We have, on average, shifted from books to TikTok in the span of a generation.
I think it is becoming clear that we now have type-1 and type-2 ADHD prevalent in the population. Dopamine deficiency or insensibility are indistinguishable in terms of symptoms.
We are all exposed to so much adversarial noise trying to steer us that people are loosing the ability to focus and to filter.
Dieting and exercising helps. Cut down on exposure to noise from apps, streaming services, devices, etc. And exercise your brain, use it. Read long form text, take notes, write intentional arguments, use these arguments to steer yourself and those around you to create things of value.
I've heard it's habit. You can have a habit of thinking long and hard or you can have a habit of jumping back and forth. You can always reach for the other, but you also have a default for most of the time. I think these days, companies want jumping back and forth because it means it's much easier to grab your attention and get something out of you, without giving you time to fully think through the consequences.
I don't know that this starts with LLMs, though LLMs are certainly--at least for some people--a way to take their ADHD tendencies further.
It's been obvious to me even since I was a computer-addled kid, in the 90s, that the way computer interfaces and multi-modal notifications affect the nervous system, the capacity for sustained attention and patient reading, and so on is pernicious. The impact has both cognitive and moral valences that reinforce each other, because the instincts reinforced by computer use turn into technocratic, anti-humanistic worldviews, and even cosmologies.
I regained my focus after many years and it had nothing to do with distractions for me, distractions were only a way of fighting stress that constantly appeared. The stress was the underlying issue. I worked on that in therapy (breaking away from my parents) and I can now work on what I want for hours at a time. It's because now I feel I can become my own person and do what I want while not being chained to the past anymore.
It seems that so many minor parts of the day don't work as expected and my attention is destroyed by a thousand annoyances. My watch only unlocks my computer 1/3 of the time. My car only recognizes my phone 1/2 of the time. 3/4 of the time I go to press/click on a song I want to hear, the data in the UI updates between the time I start to move to the song and I press/click and I end up hearing something I don't want. Annoying feature that I've disabled n times was re-enabled, and I have to disabled it again. Fighting autocorrect on my phone. I was signed out a service unexpectedly and have to re-authenticate. Programs X, Y, and Z are unresponsive. My VM says my network connection is unstable. My new car beeps because it thinks I'm distracted and then I get more annoyed and distracted.
I like to use my iPhone to read text articles. It's amazing to me how bad it's become at this task.
I get various emails with curated links to various stories, and I will click a link to go read that story. First, it often takes me to a browser re-direct that sometimes successfully redirects, sometimes doesn't. Then sometimes the redirect is to an app that I've subscribed to. Which would be great. Except for the times it opens the app but fails to redirect to the specific article. Then if the article is on a web page, it commonly fills the page with more and more ads slowing down my phone and giving me a tiny keyhole opening to read the text through.
Then I often want to go back to the email and pick up where I left off. Which works >50% of the time, but fairly often will skip to a different email.
I truly believe that for reading news and articles the state of software was much better 10 years ago than today.
my car has an AI assistant. I don't know what the wake word is, but it will wake up and be useless with no obvious way to turn it off. I'm sure I could search for it, but it happens while I'm driving and I forget about it. It happens just infrequently enough to not remember, but often enough to be really annoying.
My wife turned on a meditation feature on our very old Alexa. I guess the app was deleted or something, but every morning Alexa turns on and says "Starting your meditation times ... Sorry, this is no longer available". If I tell Alexa to turn this off, it has no idea what I'm talking about and it shows up nowhere in the iOS app. Instead of meditation, I got a nice dose of minor annoyance every morning.
You should do this regardless, no watch needed. The only phone notifications that should be turned on are ones that could be urgent. Phone calls, maybe text messages, alarms, and calendar reminders. No email, no social media, no stupid random apps telling you about some discount.
Phone in the backpack is a crazy simple hack. Every time you want to reach for it you get a slight punishment (anti-reward), this is operant conditioning.
This does work, especially at the library where you feel like you're drawing a little attention for going in your bag.
I also put my phone in a kSafe by Kitchen Safe for 20-30 minutes to break out of doomscrolling with no takebacks. I keep a wireless charger in the safe so it can charge while it's in there.
Another thing I realized by working at a job where I couldn't take my phone is that you can just go to the library and leave your phone at home.
* Monitor your health and track your time to help stay focused.
* Disable as many spurious notification types on your phone as you can afford to do. My recommendation: All notifications that aren't live messages from individuals.
* Keep your phone out of immediate reach so that you break the habit one likely has of instinctively reaching for it to fill in moments of boredom.
It seems to me that lots of people consider the ability to focus as some kind of innate ability which we are all born with, it's not. It's a learned skill which requires practice. Stop practising and it atrophies.
We all understand this for physical exercise, I think we need to understand the same principles apply to skills.
Working at a gig where I couldn't have my phone really put me on a painful dopamine fast, but helped me remember that I actually can focus. So I started working at the library and leaving my phone at home.
I don't buy this. I think people find it easier to make excuses about lacking some magical, unobtainable, abstract property like "the drive" than to actually put in the effort to improve themselves.
People over diagnose themselves so it seems more common than it is, but adhd is definitely real. Its not merely attention, its a set of traits like reduced working memory (and ability to utilize it) that manifest as difficulty in sustained attention / distraction. People who have it do a lot of other funny things than simply "get distracted easily", just ask the spouse of any person with add what _their_ coping strategies are and you'll get many humorous and perhaps unexpected stories.
You’re doing the engineering thing and focusing on the trees instead of the forest. It sounds to me like you have other things going on in your life that you aren’t acknowledging. Often stress and anxiety are primary sources of attention deficit. As we get older more and more stress is piled on us and it becomes even more important to manage it in a healthy way. I encourage you to reflect on your mental health because it might have some clues.
Yes, I feel like my brain is fried by dopamine dispensers, it's very bad and I have no clue how to get control back. At least I have some healthy routines in my days but it really does feel like being addicted to a hard drug.
To me, it is the same as a "hard drug". I struggle on and off. For me, it's HN and just general fear of AI / career trajectory. I'm constantly reading articles about it. To a lesser degree, videogames and other scrolling take mgood chunks of my time away.
I've been making a concerted effort of waking up in the morning, sitting out in my garage gym for an hour with coffee and a book. I'll do 1 workout per day, 6 times a week, and read a few pages of "Meditations" (The stoicism book). It really centers me and feels refreshing to break away from everything and just focus on my body and mind ad the real physical world. I'm not religious, so I consider that my "church" or something.
Obviously, carrying that mindset throughout the day is difficult - but having a set "no-screens" time is useful, especially when my previous schedule was this:
- Wake up + look at phone
- Sit on toilet and look at phone
- Drive to work and look at computer for 4 hours
- Have lunch and look at phone
- Look at computer for 4 more hours
- Come home, make dinner, eat food
- Look at computer or tv for 3 hours
- Go to bed and look at phone for another hour
Writing it down like this makes it very clear that this cannot be a healthy lifestyle - so for me, where work is ALL done in front of a screen, I'm increasingly trying to remove screens from the rest of my life. There's no reason for us to be on the internet all day long, there's other cool shit to do that feels way better than burning my eyes and brain receptors all day long.
There exist problems which cause years of suffering which can be solved in hours (sometimes minutes). Not every problem is like that, of course, but some are. Procrastination is like that, sometimes posture is like that, and mental effects of social media are like that. At least for now - this may get worse with time. But the solution is not to consume more content - books seem to be a common suggestion. It is to consume no content. Humans evolved to grind most of the time with a little excitement and entertainment now and again, but tech has inverted this. Its "what we want" in the same way a child wants sugar all the time, and its at once addictive and unhealthy. The screen is an insidious habit former and I'm not sure yet if there is any healthy level or use for some people.
>There exist problems which cause years of suffering which can be solved in hours (sometimes minutes). Not every problem is like that, of course, but some are. Procrastination is like that, sometimes posture is like that, and mental effects of social media are like that.
So simple to solve all those things in mere minutes, yet you can't even say how? Do I have to buy your book or subscribe to your website to find out the solution for poor posture and procrastination!
How long has it been since you've gone a single day without a screen? I don't have a miracle cure, just a suggestion to try going without for a day and see how you feel. Similar to how a pile of work in the corner can make you feel bad until you finally do it. The ratio of suffering time to cure time in both cases is very high.
That won't help. I can get engrossed in a book/film/videogame I like. Most day-to-day task are not as interesting though. The problem is being able to concentrate on an activity that doesn't get you instant gratification.
Nothing will help if you don't put in the effort. You need to regain dopamine sensitivity and the way to do that is going on a dopamine diet. If you keep gorging on easy dopamine, it can only get worse.
Strangely I think it's why I like roadtrips so much. Sitting doing absolutely nothing for even 15 minutes is difficult for me, but I can drive for hours doing nothing but watching the world go by, even without music or podcasts on, and it's fine. And that feels good.
Many individual contributors (ICs) are getting introduced to multi-tasking for the first time. When I was an IC, I was really good at getting into flow state and getting solid work done. When I first started managing, I found it really to adjust to constantly multi-tasking.
After several years of managing, I found the opposite - I became really bad at getting into flow state, my brain had been rewired to constantly context switch every 30 seconds.
Now with AI, we're seeing many managers get back into coding again: "Hey! This fits exactly into my mental model! Delegate 5 agents at once and then keep juggling between their responses!". We're also seeing many ICs feel the opposite - much stress from needing to multi-task and constantly context switch.
I don't know if everyone's brain can be rewired for multi-tasking, but I can tell you that for me it took a couple years to adjust. Everyone is on manager schedule now.
I think everyone is shifting between maker schedule and manager schedule constantly depending on what is going on, and that's so much more exhausting than just being in maker schedule or manager schedule full time
My focus is as strong as ever, maybe stronger, but as time goes on I notice that it is harder and harder for me to gracefully respond to interruptions.
It's pretty damaging to my relationships. Everyone expects you to drop everything and give people attention and empathy and be the perfect active listener. But I need a cooldown or a change of scenery to leave a task behind.
I take notes/draw constantly as I take the b6 case with me everywhere- I keep the voice recorder in the pocket of the case when I need to dictate an idea, an article, record a song idea or a comedy bit, dictate a blog entry etc-
But all the actual "work" which these days is really just ideas is done on physical paper and a pen or with my speaking voice- no tapping, swiping etc- no notifications or any of that nonsense- so I work outside mostly- in various places- on planes- standing in line- all the places everyone is tapping/swiping onto a screen around me-
It's 10x easier to focus when you are outside and/or in public with a pen and pad in hand and no screens/tech to destroy your attention-
I am interested in your phone setup. I need for for 2FA push notifications, public transit passes, and other random shit that I would love to be able to get rid of if it seemed sensible. Shed some light, I am here for it!
Unsolicited endorsement, but I bought a “Brick” device recently, and I can’t recommend it enough for cutting back on social media. Infinite scroll really destroys your ability to concentrate.
I wish people could just admit to themselves how irrelevant all this social media content is, lose interest, and keep the apps shut (or uninstall in case there's no DM feature that keeps it installed). I can't imagine needing to switch devices for this.
I couldn't give a single shit what friends or acquaintances (much less strangers) are doing in their free time day to day. They can tell me next time I see them. I have Instagram installed, but only because certain people message me there. I never scroll even a pixel.
An uncertain reward is a strong motivator in psychology. You give a rat a lever that drops a food pellet, he'll push it when he's hungry. You give a rat a lever that drops a food pellet 5% of the time, he'll keep pulling it, build up a little stockpile and then gorge himself.
You give a rat a lever that does nothing and drop pellets at random times, he'll practically pull it until his arms fall off.
Don't you see it's the same thing? Why can't you just admit to yourself how irrelevant it is and lose interest? I suppose you could use it just to read an article or two, but you're in the comments as well. The apps are just their Hacker News.
I like this line, but respectfully disagree that they're a 1:1. The difference being relevance and some of the dynamics of use.
Hacker News pertains to my profession. It's high relevance tech news with comments from peers.
I'm not following anyone just because I know them personally (or worse, because they're famous). I'm not posting photos or videos of activities that I want friends to know about.
There's no infinite doomscrolling either (I view the front page a couple of times a day) nor are there notifications interrupting me.
And very important: there's no dark algorithm that shows a different view each time you go back to HN. It is sometimes boring but the good kind of boring.
Can't speak to the previous comment's intent, but I find that all of Sapolsky's lectures and interviews are fantastic to listen to, as well as his podcast with his daughter called Father-Offspring interviews where she poses a submitted question to him and he answers in brief (or not so brief) about the biological/psychological/sociological implications of the question. Fascinating stuff.
In terms of solutions on an individual-level: after a lot of trial and error I feel like what works for me is an absolutist cold-turkey-approach. I've pretty much banned all consumptive screen-time except some things like Hacker News, LinkedIn, YouTube (only existing subscriptions, no recommendations or shorts etc). Things I know I won't spend more than 15-20 minutes on and are not highly stimulating and made to high-jack your brain. Initially, I used to allow myself some leeway as in screen-time i.e. should be less than X duration, but it never worked.
The withdrawal-symptoms of going cold-turkey are intense but you get over them eventually and then once you've powered through a few weeks, and you try and go back and look at any type of "content" you see how much trash it all is. Even the "good ones" or things you tell yourself is "educational". Another important note is to have some replacements in place so that when you start seeing that new void of so much time on your hands, you don't feel empty/hollow but as a reminder to yourself that you had so many cool things to do.
There is clear irony in the statement "... an absolutist cold-turkey-approach." ... "except some things like Hacker News, LinkedIn, YouTube." That sounds closer to the opposite end of the extreme.
I knew someone would nitpick on that. Could've worded it better. But like I expanded later in the para, an absolute for platforms where I feel my brain hijacked. To make clearer, 0 minutes for those things (example-Reddit, IG, etc.). Instead of something like X minutes of screen time where I'm allowed anything. Because for the things I allow, like LinkedIn, I don't find myself using them much at all even though I have full freedom, but the utility at that point crosses whatever time is spent on cringe posts.
And allow me to return the nitpickiness as well. "That sounds closer to the opposite end of the extreme." - I don't see how that's closer to the opposite end of the extreme? Are you saying only watching YouTube channels which you've subscribe to (despite being subscribed to dozens I only see maybe one new video pop up every few days) and spending some time on TWO work-related social-media is the opposite end of the EXTREME? How?
No offense intended by my initial reply, I understand how I may have came off in that way however.
On the 'extreme' bit, this might certainly be along the lines of personal experience- but I find LinkedIn, HN, and Reddit to be among the worst offenders in the basket of attention hogs / dopamine sinks.
My reasoning there is mainly rooted in the fact that these platforms all present a couple dozen or so items that are one click away from soaking your brain (whether that be comment sections, or the parent item itself.)
Social media being work related doesn't necessarily mean that the platform lies on either end of the spectrum here, to me. I work on AI things, and work related social media is certainly an avenue thats detrimental to me- in the fact that the aforementioned platforms produce more content that I can reasonably say I have the ability to consume in a healthy manner.
Again, your experience may be different; but I wouldnt put those platforms anywhere near what cold turkey might mean for me. For me, still consuming relevant work stuff while dialing down away from the extreme would probably be sticking to one or two newsletters, which post ~monthly or so.
I think if the platform is designed in such a way that the goal of the average post is aligned with whats detrimental to attention/focus/dopamine-response, then it can't possibly be used in a straightforwardly healthy manner.
Thanks for the perspective. Yea you're right, I think different platforms have different effects on people. As an example quitting TV shows was difficult for me, whereas most people I've talked to don't even think of TV shows as a necessary bad thing.
On HN/LI, at least for me I really don't find them disruptive or time sinks. LinkedIn seems boring, HN doesn't have infinite scroll, and again most articles don't really interest me that much.
I don't use Reddit exactly because I feel the posts evoke an emotional response from me and I tend to stay there. Haven't used it in a long time, same with other infinite popular scrollers.
Anyway, my core point being for the platforms that do trouble me in my experience going all-out helped. If I set a time limit or time window or use grayscale or all those hacks it doesn't work. All those are more like gateway drugs. So if HN/LI does truly provide more noise than signal I would personally cut it out but that's not the case for me at the moment.
Yeah I’ve gone through varying degrees of cold turkey too. These social media / infinite scroll platforms are not all ‘bad’, but some are ‘worse’ than others.
Unfortunately heavy platform usage is so widespread + people staying at home as a result, such that it’s harder to obtain ‘proper’ interaction and stimulation when stepping out IRL, so I think some controlled platform usage can be beneficial for filling the void.
My ultimate conclusion / main point is that balance is key, as per usual. I maintain limited Reddit, hacker news, LinkedIn, YouTube usage, and have Facebook because my distant family uses that a lot. That’s all though.
And I’ve tried all sorts of methodologies…making devices grayscale, timer locking my phone in a box, putting devices in faraday bag when not using as like a mental block, etc.
I remain out of the loop on some shared cultural fabric that comes with being chronically online and tapped into the global town square, and that manifests in IRL experiences / feeling excluded at times, but in exchange I get more peace and a greater focus on the present, which has felt ‘better’ and more ‘natural’ anecdotally speaking.
I managed to give up Reddit (still have other attention consuming vices) and temporarily checked in to see the reactions to Arsenal finally winning the Premier League...and was repulsed by just how MEAN that site is. Discussing something as innocuous as sporting events instantly devolves into cruel, personal attacks and pulls in every topic under the sun.
It's not just Reddit that's like that, but it was especially striking after having been away for a while.
But LinkedIn has become one of the worst kinds of social media. I mean, it's full of AI grifters, people starting posts with 'I wasn't going to post this but [continues with a dumb post]' and lately even a lot of obituaries. Everybody on LinekdIn is either "very successful" or has learned a lesson by some fck up that didn't even happen. I just saw a post of a guy who pretends to be successful, rents a Porsche and then post a photo of sitting inside the rental with the caption 'Fck the haters'. Yeah, all that on the professional networking internet website called LinkedIn. LinkedIn is a shitshow.
Yea exactly. That's why I allow it. Because apart from the obvious networking benefit and a few sane people I follow who post good stuff every now and then, I basically don't doom-scroll it. So the utility at that point crosses whatever 5-10 minutes of cringe AI slop I quickly scroll past.
I've found that the only way I can reliably create focus of late is to put music on. It's as though the music prevents my mind from wandering and/or wondering because it is already being consumed
Here's something that worked for me: put your phone in your pocket and go on a design walk. While walking, design the next step in whatever you're working on. Design walks work great with more than one person, too.
Aristotle was on to something when he adopted a peripatetic approach to thinking.
I don't think this is a solution. I do this often naturally, I walk around and "plan", and it feels like I'm just avoiding sitting down and doing the actual task.
The author talks about it; when facing a difficult problem, they go get a glass of water, and get distracted. That's what this is. Anything but doing the actual task. If you're going to take a break, take an honest break and rest, but then go back to work. That's the real solution, and boy is it hard to do these days.
My wireless router runs OpenWRT, one day after a particularly embarrassing YouTube binge, I turned on the adblock plugin on my router and configured it to block YouTube as an ad.
It’s turned out to be the best thing I’ve done for myself in a long, long time.
I really noticed this a few years ago to the point that I changed a few things and they have helped.
1. I notice the movement of my attention. I used to default to something like: sit down at my computer to look something up. But before I do that, just check the email. Then I am down some sort of rabbit hole. I did this sort of thing with no awareness or conscious choice. The change is that I notice what I'm doing. Then I can rein it back. I make a choice. (I think scrolling videos gets us into a habit of not choosing what to pay attention to.)
2. Be aware of my curiosity. Try to stay in touch with it. If I get into the space of curiosity I have a lot more juice for sustained attention. Something that helps with this is long form reading, especially fiction (!). I find myself replenished for all my work. The next thing I will try is some group support: silent reading groups where you read together.
3. I have an app on my devices that limits my access to twitter and reddit etc to small windows in the day.
4. Turn off ALL notifications except text messages.
It feels pretty obvious at this point that overstimulating ourselves with a multitude of different apps, social media, short form video, and so on, is hollowing out our capacity to focus. Cal Newport had a great opinion article in the NYT recently that spoke to this, and how reading might help us "train" our minds when so many media are adversely affecting our attention.'
The author doesn’t mention it, so it seems appropriate to suggest asking a doctor for attention deficit disorder screening. The cultural forces in play encouraging us to flit and switch constantly are a perfect distraction from the possibility one’s own brain is complicit.
I would caution a little against the prevailing wisdom of diagnosis-as-panacea. I've had a diagnosis for most of my life, but never seen stimulants as worth it (admittedly I've not tried them long term, but that's because after reading a whole lot about it I don't want it in my body). I don't think the diagnosis changes anything for me other than that. It's very much a case of "now what". I suppose some people find a great weight lifted from their shoulders at the idea others struggle with the same thing, or that their struggles aren't due to a personal failing. But I can't escape the next step which is that you still have to do go out and do all the same stuff anyway...
I feel similarly. I have a lot of tendencies characteristic of ADHD, but I'm undiagnosed, and I don't think I'll seek out the diagnosis either. I don't intend to take any stimulants, and the particular identity of having ADHD means little to me, so the diagnosis wouldn't change much. As you say, I'd still need to figure out how to live this life in these conditions anyway.
ADHD is something you can rapidly develop an inability to manage at that age, though — after trauma or burnout. Or maybe following RTO after a couple of years of a more peaceful WFH environment.
You can get through school without failing, you can get through university and early jobs with hyperfocus, you can be known for being the person who gets bored easily but can do incredible things. Maybe you are late paying bills, never get round to doing certain big tasks, rent when you should be looking to buy a house, all that. Maybe you have friendships that never quite develop into romantic relationships, maybe you are untidy, maybe you stay in a lot because you fear you tire people out socially. But you bimble on and you convince yourself it's OK.
My ADHD burnout started in my late forties. Before that I had any number of explanations for the unusual, eccentric aspects of my life, for why I was a freelancer rather than in a steady job, all of that. I still managed to get big jobs done with relentless bursts of focus. I had already quit social media, I had already learned to manage some distractions, and it still happened.
But it's clearly ADHD. Having read about it, "inattentive" (hilarious name for it) ADHD explains me to a shocking degree; I don't need a diagnosis.
I just never failed badly enough that the issue was forced, until now.
I burned out to the point that it feels like cognitive decline. I am broken and I struggle with everything. What the writer is talking about is so reminiscent of the early stages of my burnout that I worry for him.
> What the writer is talking about is so reminiscent of the early stages of my burnout that I worry for him.
Except it's everyone everywhere. Hands up in the thread anyone who doesn't recognise some of these symptoms. Our jobs, tech and societies are making us ill.
It is but some people cope better than others, right? Even now, some people thrive on social media and make the best of it.
One prosaic explanation is that in many people there is a predisposition to a mixture of hyperfocus and being distracted that society used to place at least some value on ("jack of all trades, master of none", researchers, multi-instrumentalists, artists, librarians, scientists).
The stereotypical image of ADHD is hyperactive ADHD — people who can't hold down a job, get caught up in stupid outcomes or violent outbursts, have accidents, get addicted to drugs, can't settle, distract and annoy everyone.
But it's increasingly clear to me that hidden "inattentive" ADHD is a normal human attention type, and yet those who have it, apart from being chatterboxes, tend to experience the downsides less visibly.
Another question is: is it really "everywhere" evenly, or do we see it more in "knowledge work" careers like IT and research where ADHD people (who are easily bored but highly attentive to interesting subjects) used to thrive?
That is, are we seeing it over and over in the tech industry because inattentive ADHD and the aptitudes (multiple talents, micro-expertise) it tends to foster drove us to this in the first place?
It would be good if society went back to a lower-distraction model, but it is not going to. Some of us are going to need to understand how to keep our brains under control, and some of us are going to need medication or stimulants. GLP-1 is normalised for another societally-driven illness, after all.
And again, it's not that he is distracted like everyone is, that I'm pointing out — it is that it is deteriorating in a way that worries him and he now needs external monitoring (buddy/honour systems) to cope at all. He is, I fear, heading towards burnout that can be life-changing.
Alongside the siblings, the types of challenges you face as a kid and as an adult are different. You might be able to manage schoolwork on natural ability alone while your parents and other adults are your "life personal assistants" that take care of a lot of things for you, but fail when it comes to managing adult responsibilities yourself, or maybe being the "life personal assistant" to a child of your own.
Symptoms become more obvious as you age, which can feel like it came on later. As part of an assessment they do go through your childhood - if you had trouble in school for example that's a classic ADHD symptom, but there's a lot more to consider. It's not always obvious and I've met plenty of people in their 30s, 40s, 50s who only just realized they had it this year and got assessed.
Glyphack's experience definitely mirrors my own and I just got diagnosed with ADHD this year and medication absolutely helps my focus.
If you're wondering if you have ADHD this is basically the pre-assessment GPs use in the UK (which then continues to triage and then a full assessment):
Except ADHD was there long before the machines, and stimulants have been scientifically proven time and time again to be helpful in treating ADHD at a very minimal sides effects cost.
TFA links attention on one hand, and social media and LLM use on the other. I'm not making any points about the scientific validity of those conclusions, but that's the context in which this discussion is taking place.
Personally, I find a very strong link between my devices and my ability to focus, as they're the space in which I spaff my time. I do not believe myself to have ADHD, I believe that the machines I use offer limitless ways for me to lose track when I'm tired.
I'm deeply skeptical of pharmacological solutionism, particularly in the domain of mental health. A variety of drugs can be a boon, life-saving to many, but are over-prescribed and treat symptoms not causes.
With regard to amphetamines in particularly (we called it 'whizz' where I'm from, back in the day), we're talking about a class of drug that can cause dependency, problems with sleep and sex, anxiety and plenty more. I would not say they're not without side effects in the slightest.
Sure, great if this sort of stuff helps, but I find the "just get a diagnosis" line utterly inadequate and borderline disturbing.
I agree that screens contribute to the issues of attention and executive dysfunction. But the thing with ADHD is that there is no "treating the cause", because the cause is genetic and there is no cure, there is only management of the symptoms. As for dependency, people with ADHD report to chronically forget to take their stimulants, so there's that. For me personally, I find things like weed way more addictive, and I didn't notice any issues with sleep or sex (and I think you might be confusing stimulants with SSRIs here in regards to sex).
I agree that not everyone having issues today would be qualifying for ADHD. There are way too many things about the zeitgeist that are overloading everyone. But still:
1. you can't prescribe someone a fixed society
2. what constitutes "over prescription" is subjective, and some increase in prescriptions is to be expected in line with better knowledge and so ability to diagnose people who were previously missed
3. contrary to several other psychiatric medications, stimulants have a known MoA and consistently beat placebo
4. amphetamine taken recreationally is often in different forms and much higher doses than would be taken on prescription, by people who aren't in need. Things like sleep and anxiety can actually be improved by such prescriptions
You don't believe in them, for yourself or others, and you've been trained well enough to couch your disbelief (eg "great if this sort of stuff helps") so as to avoid someone directly addressing your disbelief in them. Yeah there are side effects, but it's a personal choice. No one's going to force you to take them if you don't want them, but for people that find them useful, going around telling everybody that they're over prescribed and have side effects doesn't help people who would benefit from them get access to them.
> just get a diagnosis" line utterly inadequate
There's an entire industry with licensing boards and factories and regulations. How much more money do you want spent on the problem in order to form an adequate response, and what would that look like to you?
Regarding the urge to “check what’s out there”, one simple rule I follow is: spend around an hour in the morning catching up with HN, a few reddits, a couple newsletters,
and Bluesky. I completely avoid Twitter/X and LinkedIn, trusting that anything significant enough bubbles up to those other places.
Most important — do NOT check any of those the rest of the day.
So you start your day passively scrolling and dopamine front-loading which basically sets the tone for the whole day… I think the “right” way is the exact opposite which is to start the day dopamine-starved and context-free and only scroll at the end of the day
Agree with this one and can vouch for it, for a while while living closer to nature I would start my day by drinking water and taking a walk in the forest, actively avoiding screens for my first hour awake. I need to find something similar to do now, maybe water the plants...
It will continue to be a mystery only solvable by the dwindling number of people clever enough to combat the problem with strategies like the many offered here.
Until the real problem is identified...which IMO is that programming itself is just harder to concentrate on in 2026 than it was in 1989. There are way too many possibilities of how to do things, and way too much difference between a good choice (say getting Claude to do it) and a bad one (say, writing a linked-list traverser yourself). Humans work well with the few variables involved in creating things like that linked-list traverser. But they require tons more energy if everything is on the table. Right library? Right platform? Right coding agent? Right way to keep myself from getting distracted?
In contrast, doing almost anything else seems like a relief for your brain.
Not relatable. "Internet is not real, and strangers' opinions don't mean anything" is an ethos that I have been religiously following for as long as I can remember.
Also, I do a lot of things offline. Read physical books, run after work, and tend to stay out of the internet mob altogether. Oh, having no Instagram or Twitter helps a lot.
The faster you realize that we have a limited time on this planet the more ruthless you become with your time. My time is expensive and my employer buys it at a premium. So I am extremely judicious about what I am reading, watching and who I am interacting with.
Building the muscle takes time but it's not that hard afterwards.
I had the same exact issue. Turns out I have depression. Currently I'm on meds, therapy and functioning on 80% my ability but it's still better than near 0
I’m guess “all you need is attention” is a good reflection of ourselves as well AI.
I’m off anything with an algorithmic feed. My brain can’t handle these. I turn off shorts and YouTube auto play using iOS safari extensions. I block the linked in feed. I read a handful of blogs via rss. The most regular feed I check is HN a few times a day. I’m reading books again for the first time in a decade or so.
It feels good and certainly not worse than before.
Something I really grew to hate over my time at various software firms were complex and flaky stacks with big test loops, and it's exactly this kind of reason why. Ideally, I have a problem, I want to put my head in the problem space and stay focused there until it's done. Every time a test suite takes five minutes to run, or I have to look up some obscure docs in my web browser, or I have to go somewhere else to rebuild a failing service, is an off-ramp to that flow state, and that's where I lose a whole hour to procrastination.
Traction between intention and result is the most powerful tool in the brain's kit. We are made to spin our wheels often, it's adversarial.
Gain and keep traction. Attention is our most valuable resource. If you chose what you attend to, you can achieve at the limit of your physical and mental potential. If you attend to what others wish you attend to, you will be ceding the difference to parasitic systems.
This sounds a little bit like ADHD, but the common advice of getting medication isn't always applicable. Yes, it is definitely worth finding out if you have ADHD and diagnosing it, because if you do, it will help you understand yourself much better and might prevent problems further down the road like anxiety and depression. But medication isn't always the answer. ADHD might be entirely manageable for some people if their work is interesting enough.
Some things to try:
- noise cancelling headphones with white noise background (Iceland White or Naturespace apps provide really good quality natural recordings)
- clean desk
- clear split between work and non-work environments
I recently deleted social media from my phone. With nothing left, I found myself compulsively checking HN anytime I had a free moment.
That’s shifted now after a few weeks. I’m no longer filling those moments.
The wins are subtle but nice:
- when I watch a movie, I don’t feel the need to start scrolling
- I’m reading at night again. This is far more relaxing and gets me to bed at 9 - 10
- less doom / gloom
- consumption is more intentional. I consider what I am interested in then find, rather than be sucked down the algorithmic vortex of what’s proven to engage me
You're just getting older and realizing something about yourself. The only way to preserve your attention is to guard it like a jewel. It is a learned behavior once you enter the real world.
I’ve started evaluating what seem like brain “modes”. 1. Constant flow of information with disjointed context (social media, brain fracking, moving in a crowd) triggers hunter-gatherer instinct that is hard to stop. The dopamine seek in a way. Even if you stop your brain seeks it, so unless you really need this mode for work, it helps to postpone or time box these to the end of the day (kind of like some would do with drinking alcohol).
2. How you start your day after sleep creates framing of the brain and you can start iterating on frames and how you drive them depending on your needs. Maybe set a schedule of things to at need done the night before (a continuity thread) maybe boxing the activities to different types at different times. It’s all sciencing the self but the brain is definitely conditioning to things and you have to mind it.
3. ADHD meds from what i’ve read are caffeine on steroids (blocking adenosine receptors, but not really adding to executive function). From personal observation ADHD also feels like a mode one can be put into by wrong brain framing (at least for people not diagnosed).
one day maybe in 30 years - research is gonna come out - on how much a hit on productivity Slack/teams was.
based on my estimate it might be 60%. that's 60% of white collar gdp gone.
I have noticed, the more teams use slack/teams - the teams are usually bigger more than necessary. there's more meetings & less work gets done. more 'quick chats' vs teams who are email first (async) - no immediate response required.
I don't think that the author has ADHD, because they used to be more attentive in the past. In the case of ADHD, it was also the case as a child.
I also got the diagnosis of ADHD (inattentive type) a few months ago, in the interviews they asked whether I also had these symptoms as a child. Not easy to figure out because as a child things like finishing things on time are not so important yet, and my high IQ compensated for a lack of focus. Only in secondary school it became a problem, and my grades dropped.
I can attest to experiencing virtually everything the author describes here. I admire the ability to articulate these mundane-sounding challenges that greatly impact your quality of life.
One of the best ways I have found not to get distracted while in a task, with other more interesting or something that you do not want to forget, is NOT to use your device to do it or even add to your TODO, or note it down but to use an actual notebook (may be a small memo note) to quickly write out and continue with your current task/more.
When you are done, visit and parse your sidenotes.
Of course, the are the usual No Notifications, timers, etc.
This week I've got all the feeds: slack, email, ticketing system, dev story board, prod system health, prod user activity, prod job queues -- all coming to one dashboard. They are distilled by a local LLM, when I get bursts it offloads to Google's low cost Flash lite so I only read the essential text, no threads, no scrolling and scanning to get to the content.
It's freaking amazing, I know everything going on. I can look at it every half hour and be caught up in three minutes. I double click about one in ten messages to reply and it takes me right to the source app to reply.
Consider turning off the internet before you go to bed and not turning it on for at least 1 hour after you wake up. I think I got this idea from Craig Mod (who I believe does no internet until after lunch). I've been doing this for a few months. The initial hour is really good (very easy to e.g. read or work calmly on some software projects without distraction) but I also find it puts me in the right mindset for the rest of the day.
Yes the night before you look at your calendar and figure out what time you need to be online at.
In general if you want a no-internet 1 hour in the morning, organize yourself to wake up 1 hour earlier (maybe going to sleep 1 hour earlier). You sleeping until 8am, and you sleeping until 7am and having no internet for 1 hour, is equivalent to the outside world.
Rather ironic: I was in the process of moving all Android apps to a second user to be able to stop all apps (and just not DnD, because I'll know I may have some messages waiting for me after disabling DnD) when I got distracted by HN (just one tiny minute).
Another thing I'm testing is having VPN OFF with its kill-switch ON.
Sounds like the answer may be simpler than it seems. You could just be tired. You said you’ve been balancing a lot for years and years. Take some time to just focus on yourself.
Meditate, go on walks, wake up earlier, always have breakfast, and for the love of all that is good, get enough sleep.
I'm using an app called Focusmate (no affiliation) on a daily basis - scheduling 5-6 hour sessions per day.
You talk to a stranger for a few seconds, say what you're working on, and after 50 minutes you say goodbye. They stay on the video throughout the session, but muted.
It helps me focus because I always think "it's only 50 minutes".
Also, I recently deleted Instagram and it made a huge impact.
Not sure why you got downvoted. This works for a lot of people. Doesn’t work for me because I find the video aspect to be awkward, but the concept of ‘body doubling’ as a way of enabling focus is well established.
[Editing to note that perhaps you were downvoted because OP lives in a place with internet issues and couldn’t use Discord to cowork with friends, so the video and bandwidth heavy approach of Focusmate isn’t a viable recommendation]
This is a real problem, a long time in the making. Over fifty years ago advertising started to affect the way people thought: I argue that they trained people to not be content with a classic simple life. Fast forward to the best tech focused on messing with people's attention. I like Center for Humane Technology for discussions of tech that is designed to help people, not control them.
It seems like I have challenges with both extremes, I can get pulled into my work and not look up again for 10 hours. But with virtually everything else, I have no energy to see it through. It is rare for me to watch a movie from start to finish. I used to be able to shut off my brain.
Is the goal of the "dopamine fracking" metaphor is to represent a "pure concentrated dopamine hit", I would argue it is a more apt representation of what hard stimulants do to your brain (i.e. a shortcut to massive amount of dopamine release).
The perverse effect of social media addiction is more akin to a slow I.V. drip where you are always in a slightly aroused state, which then becomes your baseline and any cut from it is a net negative in your life.
I read the metaphor differently. Doesn't invalidate your view, and I see that your view better captures the day to day experience.
I read the author as saying that his mind is being fracked, with all the implicit destruction that operation can cause, so that others can extract something from him. Yeah, I see that the analogy breaks down, because the extractors are after attention not dopamine (we're the ones who get the dopamine).
This is me. I hate it.
I'm working though (ever so slowly) The Global Village by Marshall McLuhan and I really like the metaphor technology going from Visual to Acoustic. Put another way the past had a serial enforcement we don't have today with always-on connections and easy access to distractions.
I've been trying to introduce more friction into my life to make doing harder things the right thing.
1. I have a rooted Orchid F1 flip phone with Telegram and Firefox focus. Telegram lets me TTS to an openclaw instance if I need to get something "out" but long interactions are awful with the small screen and latency. Firefox focus is also terrible in all the right ways. If I'm out and HAVE to search for something this is enough of a break glass solution but for the most part it's just calls and texts.
2. I carry an xteink x3 for books. I'm trying to read more so this being the only thing available has me reaching for it more than I'd normally do.
I don't have a good solution for things at work yet. Maybe I'll start blocking all websites or doing strict pomodoros.
I do have this problem. Its not caused by my age or mental decline. Its simply too many things happening too fast, to many people asking questions and too many topics to pursue without any pause.
Work, family, life, world around you, all scream „me now, my problem, do this, do that, watch this, listen to that”.
Its exhausting. Humans are not built to be constantly in overdrive. I just want to sit and have peace of mind.
Issue is the moment you hit the breaks - „you lose” sign pops up and well.. you fade away. Maybe its a good thing?
As it happens I'm currently working on an app to help with this problem, effectively a soft habit tracker designed for daily reflection and mindful progression. It touches on some of the themes in this HN thread - helping create quiet space, time away from stimulation.
It's an early stage, fully functional but I'm looking for beta users. If you're interested in helping out or simply trying the app, please complete the form on https://coghance.com !
I can focus at home. I have a terrible time focusing in the open office floor plan at work. I have to wear noise-canceling headphones just to cut down on some of the noise. Even then, people are constantly stopping by to chit-chat or make small talk. I hate it.
This feels so familiar. Since more than a year or so Im witnessing more and more content being produced. One year ago or so it was enough to visit HN main page once a day and be up to day. These day, it needs a visit every few hours, the main page changes constantly.
Not only that but also the amount of content received via newsletters.
Worst is with LLMs and coding agents, I give it a task to work on then go browsing the web, the LLM finishes in 2 minutes but I come back after 10…
At the end of the day, my mind feels super tired even though its the LLM that did the heavy lifting. I also barely remember what I was browsing 15 minutes ago. At this point I can honestly say - Im in trouble.
I don’t know if this helps, as kids don’t make it easier BUT they do make you much more aware of how valuable your time is. One free hour as a parent feels like a full free day to someone without kids.
YouTube is really the thing that got me - the thing is it's not bad content, I don't watch slop, I watch quality stuff from interested, passionate individual creators and I could listen to them talk about their interests all day.
It doesn't wreck my day or make me feel anxious or anything, no doom scrolling involved, but it sure can turn into a huge time sink very fast.
> I am waiting for something then I go browse the web and I get distracted.
I firmly believe that we've gotten so used to always-at-hand phones/apps that we can no longer handle spending a few minutes doing "nothing". I see this in my teenager.
The OP may or may not struggle with ADHD, but this is something that IMO isn't ADHD but rather a new pervasive trait across our modern society. Everything must be instant now. Emails and now chats must be replied to instantly. Service/delivery must be as instant as possible. No more waiting, no more "doing nothing". We're all operating at high speed, even during our "down time". And for no good reason -- we're just inflicting this on ourselves.
A habit that I've taken up which makes me quite happy and I think solidly helps my focus is working offline.
Some days, I'll set a timer for two hours, and then just work offline for those two hours.
I have most of the documentation for tools I use available offline, I'm a bit math enjoyer so I have like 5GB of maths textbooks/papers to study, and programming offline, especially when you've got docs for everything you use, is not only still doable in the LLM age, but also quite enjoyable :)
Reading the article, basically all of the distractions the author mentions are internet-based (HN, LLMs), so perhaps adopting an offline work habit might help them too :)
The standards we set are off: I recently discovered 75 hard, and it's mind-boggling to me that the mental equivalent of "do two separate workouts, 45 minutes each" is "read 10 pages of a non-fiction book."
If it's a physics textbook, sure, that balance makes sense. If it's Atomic Habits (no offense to that book) then 10 pages is just not equivalent.
I agree with this article, but I found the easiest ways to work on my focus are the following:
- Don't use social media. It's all garbage and counterproductive for your attention. Once you stop using it, you start to forget it exists.
- Always carry a Kindle, and when you're bored, read instead of reaching for other apps or games.
- Try to read 15 minutes before work, 30 minutes during lunch, and 15 minutes after work. That's an hour of reading a day — enough to get through a lot of books and papers.
- If you use an elliptical, read while on it. It takes practice, but it can be done.
You will see the biggest gains by saying bye to social media.
Not the zennial definition of listen to a podcast – actual books.
Here's how to reboot your reading.
Do this during a break, when you have a couple weeks. Or schedule a couple hours in the evenings. But make the time be a "habit" block that you require yourself to do. (Something else has to give – consider letting your streaming queue get longer for a bit. And replace your HN bookmark with https://www.daemonology.net/hn-daily/ … seriously!)
1. Start with trash, an "airport novel" type with giant print double spaced lines so the short story looks like a proper book. Pure story dopamine.
2. Then one with normal print and single spaced lines with enough substance to engage meta or systems thought as you read, maybe a Len Deighton or Eric Ambler if you're feeling able. Your brain relearns getting to think doesn't actually hurt.
3. Next shift into non-fiction. Something about Norway's heavy water sabotage against Nazi Germany, for instance; or preferably something field-adjacent to your field, with both narrative and knowledge. Re-priming your dopamine to hit from knowledge too.
4. Finally move into your own field, now knowledge you haven't been able to stick with to learn but wanted to. For this read something from a genuine practitioner, not the LinkedIn-fluencer TED talk transcripts in book form that top charts these days. Leveling up is its own reward.
Once you've made it through that, you should (a) be able to read again, (b) be able to focus on semantic processing, (c) regain your ideas to words to ideas mapping necessary for product/platform systems analysis or software engineering.
Importantly, prefer physical books or (“try this one cool trick!”) a full A4 or 8.5"x11" page e-paper tablet turned landscape, set up to read 2 pages side by side. When this is configured right (smallest margins, right font and line size) ending up same size as a paperback. The retention of two pages at a time, and the fewer page turns (fewer, larger, memory chunks) per book, is better for regaining focus and better for improving working memory. The smaller the font you can still read quickly and easily, the better, for the same reason.
Set your black mirror devices out of reach during the time block, don't have the TV on, ideally no music, or (“try this one cool trick too…”) while reading the first book on your list: play music in a language you don't understand but that sounds reasonably close to your own. For English speakers, germanic or romance languages are good. This makes your language centers busy wanting to comprehend the audio channel along with your visual channel, so your brain eats up the book without your mind wandering.
Using the method above, you can work to being able to sit with and absorb hardbound textbooks in just a series of 4 or 5 escalating challenges.
Hallowell and Ratey, who write about ADHD, suggested a new entity for the current world: VAST, the variable attention stimulus trait. It is like ADHD but it is culturally induced and not presumed to be due to an innate deficiency in executive function.
"Beyond the sources of biologically based ADHD, there are a lot of people who act as if they have ADHD but on close inspection turn out not to have the diagnosable condition. These are the people who have ADHD-like symptoms caused by the conditions of modern life. Their “ADHD” is a response to the massive increase in stimuli that now bombard our brains and our world....
"Modern life has trained our brains to go faster and faster, to do more and more, to receive and transmit 24/7, and to require constant stimulation—be it from movies, TV, conversation, even news, as well as the minute-to-minute living of our lives. Most of us can go no more than a few seconds without looking for a screen."
It is likely to me that different people have different breaking points, and so one person may recognize the introduction of the smartphone or debut of TikTok as the point where they lost the ability to focus, and another may date it to the rise of LLMs.
Hallowell, E. M., & Ratey, J. J. (2021). ADHD 2.0: New science and essential strategies for thriving with distraction—from childhood through adulthood.
This was a central plot point of the film adaptation of "Johnny Mnemonic". From Wikipedia:
> In 2021, society is driven by a virtual Internet, which has created a degenerative effect called "nerve attenuation syndrome" or NAS.
Even more hilariously given the purveyors of the distractions we're discussing in this thread:
> Megacorporations control much of the world, intensifying the class hostility already created by NAS.
Bread and circuses, etc. I believe that given our cultural trajectory one's ability to lint their cognitive intake (that is keep TikTok/Insta/YouTube/podcast garbage viewership to a minimum) will be a large predictor of success. The next generation of doctors and Nobel Prize winners probably won't be watching boobies videos and Minecraft play-throughs.
Please also note that ADHD-like symptoms can present from sleep Apnea/UARS-induced sleep deprivation and the probability of having Apnea/UARS rises with age. Smoothly for men and a with a sudden jump after menopause for women.
So if you feel like you are getting more ADHD-like issues, do consider a sleep study. Early tells are easy: you often feel like shit in the morning.
I recently went through this. I was diagnosed with ADHD 15 years ago and have been managing it, but over the last 2-3 years I had been experiencing increased levels of brain fog, fatigue, and by ability to focus had deteriorated to the point I wasn't sure if I would be able to continue working. I had a sleep study done 10 years ago that only found Night Terror Disorder, but no signs of sleep apnea. I did another sleep study about 6 months ago and it turns out while I wasn't having apnea events I had constant and persistent hypopnea. Started using a CPAP and it feels like I've been given a second lease on life. FWIW, I am a very active and in shape individual within a healthy weight range. Don't wait to get tested if you have even the slightest worry you may have it.
What machine and mask do you have? I had a bad CPAP experience 2017ish and navigating sleep apnea treatment with ADHD kinda sucks. I got a recent sleep study done, but the doctor's office seems like a sales farm for a specific CPAP brand/model and they aggressively steered me away from an oral appliance.
I was prescribed modafinil earlier this year and it worked well when I took it but it was intense at the useful dose so the doctor put in for a sleep study. It was a 3 month wait but I am finally getting it done next week an I'm hopeful it leads to a conclusive diagnosis.
I also noticed my issues were worse after my 3rd bout of covid :-/ I had very high sensitivity to alcohol and caffeine after the 2nd bout and have largely cut both out of my life (I never drank more than 20 drinks / year in my life anyway).
Doesn't even need to be a CPAP. I had a sleep study done and it said I basically only had sleep apnea when lying on my back, and my doctor suggested a dental appliance to pull my lower jaw forward.
I got one from my dentist for way too much money, it broke, so instead I got a "snore reducing mouthpiece" from ZQuiet or SnoreRX which is basically the exact same thing but they haven't done a clinical study to show it reduces sleep apnea. I wear one every night along with a nose strip (like Breathe Right, but a different brand that I like better) and my mornings feel like I was hung over are long gone.
One of the many reasons why we should air drop GLP-1 over the entire country, like condoms in Bangladesh!
The satiation effect that GLP-1s cause also affects motivational drive. I've noticed my ability to get work done is hampered when I am at higher doses of my ozempic.
> I've noticed my ability to get work done is hampered when I am at higher doses of my ozempic.
You should be using LLM agents anyway. It's the solution to every problem.
Can I have LLMs replace my GLP-1?
Yes. LLMs are the new zombo.com. You can do anything with LLMs. Anything at all.
The only limit is yourself.
Please, no. GLP1s leave you worse off than when you started if you stop taking them. Weight is also not necessarily the factor that leads to sleep apnea; I got diagnosed while having a healthy weight in my 30s.
>Please, no. GLP1s leave you worse off than when you started if you stop taking them.
This doesn't seem factual, or at the very least, not that simple?
https://www.epicresearch.org/articles/two-years-after-stoppi...
Not the OP, but there was a lot of talk that glp1 had a negative effect on bone density and in older people it was especially problematic.
There is evidence that is not the case though https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8878541/
The VAST thing speaks to me. I am capable of deep focus work but often am subject to constant interruption and multiple concurrent urgent demands. During a work week I get a lot done but often feel pulled in a lot of directions like I imagine ADHD might feel like.
During the weekends when I am not occupied with a task I often fall asleep. This happens on the first day or two of vacation also. After a few days my brain acclimates to the pace.
> like I imagine ADHD might feel like.
Definitely feels like that, with the exception of task initiation. I am capable of deep focus work, but I can't control when (or where). I can block out time on my calendar all I want, if my brain says "Nope, we're not doing work today" then I'm not doing work, interruptions or not.
It becomes a real disability in the workplace when everything is defined by more or less rigid schedules and your mode of operating is not a schedule but "whenever my brain says so." Some days that might be 7am, other days its 1am, and sometimes it's an entire week or two of not being able to get jack done and then staying up all night and getting 15 business hours worth of work done at once because you physically can't pull yourself away.
I always tell people, its not a deficit of attention, I have plenty of that. Its an inability to direct where and what that attention is on.
Yes, I've found it to be completely incompatible with managers and the corporate world.
I had some success in small startups where I was left to my own devices and built cool stuff whenever I felt the urge to do so.
In corporate jobs I just have to lie and describe smooth and steady daily progress while actually working in sudden fits and starts, but it's hard to maintain the lie.
> I always tell people, its not a deficit of attention, I have plenty of that. Its an inability to direct where and what that attention is on
Yeah, ADHD is very poorly named unfortunately. It really is not an attention disorder, it's an executive function disorder
I always joke that what I am interested in doing and when it is accomplished (if ever) comes down to when the Holy Spirit deigns to work through me lol
I’ve got a few dozen quarter finished projects still waiting in line…
> During a work week I get a lot done but often feel pulled in a lot of directions
This is normal for any "knowledge" employee or professional, or basically any job that is not strictly defined as doing one or a small number of fixed tasks such as on an assembly line.
> The VAST thing speaks to me. I am capable of deep focus work but often am subject to constant interruption and multiple concurrent urgent demands
This is actually something that is pretty misunderstood about ADHD.
People with ADHD don't actually struggle with attention. They struggle with executive function, because their brains don't produce/consume/manage dopamine correctly
Somewhat ironically, Hyperfocus is also a symptom of ADHD. When ADHD people are doing something that is rewarding (producing dopamine) to their brains they might be really hard to pull away from it. It's really common for ADHD people to be able to sit and play videogames for hours on end, because it is giving them dopamine. Ask them to sit and do spreadsheets and they can't sit still and they look "attention deficit". But attention isn't a problem when they're engaged with the work!
I have ADHD, and I really enjoy coding and building stuff. I can't sit still for more than two seconds when I try to use LLMs to build software though. I need to be more hands on than that. Same goal, same process, different execution, completely different experience for me. I don't feel accomplished or rewarded when the LLM writes a function for me compared to writing it myself.
I was formally diagnosed with ADHD and it continued into adulthood. The only way to suppress it is a diet of raw veggies fruits and meats, combined with like 3 hours of exercise a day and time in nature with silence which my evolutionary ancestors presumably did to survive. The way to make it worse is the combination of sugars, processed foods and flashing stimulus.
Point is I think MOST mental illness is the modern world. If you dumped people with severe depression into their ancestors supposedly worse lives 6,0000 years ago, hunting with tribe and sleeping under starry sky, they’d be fine.
I think placebo is a very strong effect most people underestimate.
If somebody told me 25 years ago that in the future we all would have a TV on our office desk with 100 channels I would not have believed them. Yet ... the current situation is worse! Thinking of it in terms of mental disorders, I don't think that is going to help much.
The current situation was foretold 20 years ago in the prescient documentary named Idiocracy.
I’d argue Idiocracy is actually quite the opposite of what the OP was talking about. It has a mildly eugenics-y vibe where the world is bad because poor, stupid people have poor, stupid kids that outnumber the smart ones.
OP is talking about something environmental that can affect anyone.
Isn't is well-known that higher education correlates with lower birthrates? At the very least college years are prime child-rearing years.
> Educated women delay the onset of childbearing and have fewer children overall compared with less-educated women
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3449224/
Yeah, Idiocracy isn't wrong on the facts about our current day scenario. The issue is where it takes that: poor, lower educated people will inevitably have poor, lowered educated children who will in fact get less and less educated as time goes on, and they will take over, leading to... idiocracy.
There's a whole conversation to have about the assumptions in that. Is the implication it's genetic? The children of lower educated people aren't capable of moving to greater things? Or is it societal, that our education system fails the poor and doesn't give them the tools they need to thrive?
The movie isn't really interested in interrogating any of that and I don't think it needs to. Like I said, I see it as a fun movie that isn't that deep. But there's a common thread of opinion on the movie that holds it up as a biting satire ("Idiocracy is a documentary!" is essentially a meme at this point) and those folks don't seem to engage with the topic either. A worrying number of people seem to have a takeaway of "poor people shouldn't procreate as much".
Anyway, to bring it back to the actual topic at hand (and why I originally replied): I think something like VAST goes directly against what Idiocracy implies. We're all potential victims to distractions that reduce our capacity for executive function. A more accurate movie might show people of all financial and educational achievement glued to endless social media feeds.
You could also look at it as a metaphor for the continued debasement of american public life and mass media. Or an excuse to make lots of dick jokes.
I always saw the mechanism being that Clevon created more offspring without instilling good memes.
If it's even a little bit genetic, the idiocracy effect still holds up
The number one goal in a functioning democracy should be to have the highest possible education rate.
Number one? Highest?
I disagree with the extremes.
Why wouldn't self defense be number one, in many cases/times?
Why wouldn't we simply stop spending on education at break even ROI? (to be clear that's not the same as the education creates a salary bump equal to the tuition ... there are Nth order effects of education that should be priced into my point)
Idiocracy's mechanism isn't as solid as it seems though even if high educated people do tend to have have less kid. The movie basically suggests "smart people have smart kids, dumb people have dumb kids, repeat forever." But you'd expect kids of very high or very low IQ parents to land closer to average in general. The "compounding" thing the movie relies on isn't really how it works in life.
And even if the premise of Idiocracy were true, less intelligent people aren't worth less than more intelligent people. That's the "eugenics-y vibe" problem mentioned earlier that makes the movie uncomfortable for some people.
Education is not a proxy for intelligence. There are plenty of smart people who don’t have formal education (including many in this forum).
Yes, higher education rates lead to lower birth rates. The movie still has eugenics vibes, by implying that the “wrong kind of people” are reproducing.
I agree that the overall premise is somewhat eugenics-y, but I overlook that on the basis that it's a comedy movie from 2005 and it's easier to swallow than something like "aliens abducted all the world's smart people"[0] or something. There are still some good themes on over-reliance on automation without understanding it.
The Idiocracy line that I think about the most these days is "Brawndo stock dropped to zero and the computer did that auto-layoff thing to everybody."
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lllrpcd8vbk
Satire pokes fun at what is happening right now; it's not predicting anything. Just like 1984 warned of the dangers of totalitarianism that was already happening, Idiocracy was about current U.S. culture at the time. It wouldn't have been funny if our culture weren't already like that 20 years ago.
The premise is just a silly one so that there's a plot-based reason to show an exaggerated version of what was already happening culturally. It's not intended to be the point of the movie.
Honestly, as fun as the film is I’ve noticed people very rarely mention that disturbing premise.
Yeah I don't hate the movie by any means I just think it isn't as deep as people often credit it as being.
…and if you do credit it with incisive societal commentary you kind of have to engage with the weird implications of what it's saying rather than just come away feeling superior about not being one of the dumb underclass.
The point of the commentary isn't cryofreezing or the eugenics/handwaved-backstory. Those are a few minute intro just creating the setting and don't make sense nor do they have anything to do with the rest of the plot.
The fun in idiocy is the "isnt this dumb!" take on a bunch of society that is one big dumb step worse than current life but certainly recognizable.
Everything turned into advertising. Costco expanding into everything. Brainless tv and the related celebrities (that people love for the gimmick but don't give a shit about as people). Health care that only supports a diagnosis by matching to a few kid-friendly tiles. Politics as professional wrestling, nepotism, incompetence, and overpromising. For a related laugh, go look at one of the online quizzes from 2016 about "which of these ten quotes are from a real presidential candidate and which are from president comacho".
Idiocracy is a fun, silly satire that is nearly a cartoon, from a bunch of folks who made a bunch of successful social commentary cartoons. It very much isn't a eugenics story - if Mike judge were actually writing that as the intent I think it would be dark and with a vicious ruling class.
It would be interesting to remake it, replacing the premise that people are genetically stupid with just the idea that they're habitually stupid from generations of reliance on AI and social media.
An with proper view on the management. You see, Idiocracy is too optimistic, because their leader genuinely tried to solve a global problem, which is already unbelievable today. Moreover, when their plan didn't work, they really listened to their experts and changed their mind. It's too good.
Wall-e!
There is an even darker, older story with a similar premise. And it also has undertones of today with the billionaires' promise of space colonization.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Marching_Morons
I would add that Brazil (1985) foretold this 41 years ago.
The civil servants are addicted to their personal TV and only pause watching it compulsively when the boss comes around. As soon as the boss is out of sight they resume their fixation.
From memory it is a loop of a cowboy galloping on a horse.
Idiocracy is downright optimistic compared to our current society.
Citizens have one single piece of identification, and it's not even electronic. Their location is only tracked when discrete scanners manage to see that identification. Medical care is provided promptly. Joe Bowers's court case wasn't decided by political meddling, and the two minute hates were only focused on him after he was found guilty. There are security holes in the implementation of the prison that allow intelligent individuals to escape the machine. The president has leadership, speaking ability, policy planning, honesty, work ethic, intelligence, humility, and outright patriotism. Starbucks seems like respectable open employment for adults rather than children being trafficked to some island in secret. Joe Bower's aptitude was eventually recognized and appreciated - the society wants to get better.
Like all sci-fi, Idiocracy was largely a reflection of the society it was written in. A society that had values we've long since given up on.
Their leader tried to solve a global problem, not calling it a hoax. When their plan didn't work, they really listened to experts, whatever they had, and changed approach. Too optimistic even for modern times I would say.
https://xkcd.com/603/
Sure, my last sentence was a bit of a broad brush. But anything more substantive that focuses on direct sources of rot usually attracts partisans who don't like the messages.
We are “Amusing Ourselves to Death”.
Thanks for the reminder to read this.
¿Por qué no los dos?
Removed that line just before commenting :)
It's incidentally one of the explanations for the Fermi paradox.
"Alien species may isolate themselves in virtual worlds"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fermi_paradox#Hypothetical_exp...
Yes, VAST is specifically not ADHD, although a disorder is really defined by how it affects you. For example, some people worry too much, other people have generalized anxiety disorder, and the effect it has on your life is what separates normal from disordered.
"The person finds it difficult to control the worry.... The anxiety, worry, or physical symptoms cause clinically significant distress or impairment in social, occupational, or other important areas of functioning." DSM-IV/V
Some of the strategies used to help people with ADHD are used to help with VAST-related loss of focus and procrastination, but medication is probably not recommended for those diagnosed as not having ADHD but likely having VAST.
It's funny, I googled VAST and the AI search insisting that it's the same as ADHD, it's just a reframing of it
It sounds similar but almost coming at it from the opposite angle. ADHD is when your brain's baseline is not producing or using dopamine properly. VAST almost sounds like a sort of burnout, where your brain is overwhelmed and cannot process stuff anymore. The symptoms are the same, the effects are the same, but the cause is different.
ADHD root cause is internal lack of stimulation, VAST root cause is external overwhelming stimulation. That's how I understand things anyways
I would have believed them, my tv at home had more than 100 channels at the time, and I think we all knew back then that usable video streaming was coming sooner or later.
> there are a lot of people who act as if they have ADHD but on close inspection turn out not to have the diagnosable condition
This is an interesting way to try to put a label on someone’s behavioral conditioning. One of the common, and growing, problems with Internet discussions of ADHD is that they’ve expanded so much that most young people growing up in a connected world can identity with some influencer’s description of ADHD. Working with young, tech-interested students is worrying right now because across every group you will find most of them saying some variation of believing that they have ADHD. Their basis is usually a combination of Reddit posts and something from a streamer or content creator they follow.
Yet most of them don’t have anything resembling focus or executive function problems. I think those with ADHD diagnoses from youth just don’t talk about it much. It’s the people who discovered it on social media who are bringing it up the most in this context. The basis for their belief that they have ADHD is more about feeling that self-discipline is easy and enjoyable for “normies” and the fact that they have to put in some effort to study and keep their room clean instead of watching YouTube and playing video games is indicative of a condition.
The old way of trying to draw a line between people who are neurodivergent and neurotypical doesn’t really work on those who came up reading those terms on the internet. For various reasons, the majority of them have come to view themselves as neurodivergent in some way, even when they clearly don’t meet any intended definition of that word. In the teenage years it has almost become an extension of the youthful belief that nobody understands you because you’re different and you see the world uniquely. Along come all of the TikTok creators to explain that these feelings are abnormal and come with all these labels you should apply to yourself. Now they believe that they are neurodivergent and start collecting self-diagnoses.
Having a different set of labels could be an interesting way to try to change this dynamic. Instead of one label that’s supposed to represent the entire spectrum from people who cannot function in normal life to the guy who is getting As in all of his classes but feels like studying isn’t as easy as it should be, it might be time to offer some labels for the lighter end of the spectrum so we can get back to using the heavy medical diagnoses to mean something significant.
There’s an entire other conversation about how the dilution of diagnoses like ADHD is causing harm to those with serious ADHD because the term doesn’t mean as much any more. Extra labels for mimic conditions or behavioral/personality variants could be a good way to relieve some of that pressure.
Informative comment, thank you.
Can you elaborate on what symptoms do people with ADHD have that the ADHD “sympathizers” don’t? How can one analyze themselves “on close inspection” to know if they truly have ADHD?
ADHD has a clinical definition that needs to be diagnosed by a clinical professional.
ADHD usually runs in families. There will likely be a direct relative who went undiagnosed, but who fits the ADHD criteria. Also symptoms from early childhood onwards - it's not something that just happens one day. It's a lifelong pattern of behaviour.
If you're concerned I strongly recommend you speak with a professional. Everyone's ADHD manifest in slightly different ways and nobody on the internet can diagnose you.
Not OP, but I would say that people's self analysis should focus around examining/describing their own internal existence, not external-view terms from the medical industry. If you suspect you have a problem that can be diagnosed and helped by the medical industry, go right ahead and seek out that help. But regardless you've also got to do the work internally, and externalizing your locus of control onto the medical industry undermines that.
Amazingly well said. I have nothing substantive to add but thank you for writing that
That could be me, I don't think I have ADHD but I might have some tendencies that were developed after I moved to the US in my teens. The culture was different, fast moving, and very hectic. My 20s were hell because I couldn't figure it all out. Not much changed since then.
...as I sit here reading the experienced/insightful/funny posts on hacker news instead of working on more pressing matters.
OP is definitely not alone in this. It feels like I'm constantly trying to avoid "attention capture" when trying to do a task that involves browsing the internet - even going on LinkedIn or StackExchange for a specific purpose can get sidetracked by my eyes wandering to the sidebar or being drawn by updates in the feed. It's scary to realize how little in control I am of my own stream of thought.
I don't know if anyone has a solution that's not straight up quitting the internet cold turkey. My attempt so far has been meditating 50 minutes a day following "The Mind Illuminated" by Culadasa as a progress guide for increasing my mindfulness.
The most recent lesson I've learned is that allowing mind wandering and daydreaming can be a good thing. As a kid I read The Power of Now by Eckhart Tolle, and took away a misconstrued toolkit for dealing with an active mind. The whole book was about emphasizing the importance of being present in the moment, and I tried to carry that out by trying to silence my internal monologue and being frustrated whenever I found my mind thinking about something random and not processing direct conscious experience. That felt horrible and was completely counterproductive to being able to live normally, and now I'm trying to re-establish a relationship with my mind where I can welcome random thoughts while still being able to get things done.
People often question me how I manage to focus for more than a few minutes and I'm always confused because back in the day I was constantly informed I didn't have any focus and needed to be treated (adhd).
I'm not convinced attention spans themselves have changed; I think it has more to do with the fact that people's brains aren't defaulting to daydreaming anymore when bored.
I think it's still an issue with people being addicted to phones because I'm sure the lack of daydreaming -- which studies have proven as beneficial and arguibly even a form of microsleep -- is likely causing a lot of the fatigue and inattention people feel; as in their brains are literally being deprived of a natural thing and so are exhausted because of it.
(as an aside: whew what a run-on sentence i have no intention of fixing)
My personal supposition with 0 proof is that the "gen-z stare" is the end-stage of this phenomenon where after being deprived of daydreaming for so long they are essentially "sleeping while standing up" as it were.
There's only one important thing that I miss about smoking: A smoke break was an excuse that was tolerated by others, wherein I could go outside and just let my mind wander (daydream) with no particular goal for a short period of time.
Daydreaming should be perfectly acceptable either way, but people seem to think it's weird (concerning, even) when someone spends a bit of time to stand (or sit) around while appearing to be doing nothing at all.
But having a smoke is an activity, and the smoker's participation in this very passive activity assuages the concerns of others.
I don’t smoke but when I would consult in large companies especially I’d always find the smokers and pop by on my way back from a walk.
They are always a good group of people, with a roguish edge as smoking became less acceptable. Usually they are really kind people who represented every part of the the org, and loved some juicy gossip, and I’d learn alot about the informal networks in the company, who the admins were, etc. They would be entertained by my tales of idiocy from a dozen companies. I miss those days!
> informal networks in the company
Not just smokers. The little groups who would go and leave for a walk and coffee. The people who ate lunch together either going out, or together in the kitchen.
These were opportunities to cross the boundaries of your department and role, it was a great excuse to make friends in other groups, and gain insights.
For me the first ones I tried to align with were always in CS and Accounting. The former often had great insight into emerging issues (next weeks "bug", next months "project"). The latter had insight into how the business was really doing, hearing from the people who looked at your "raw" numbers could tell you more than any company meeting where "everything is great".
Working from home killed these, and "zoom" or "slack" are not the same - people are far more guarded when they understand that the company owns that communication channel, that it is recorded/monitored.
I got caught in a big layoff last year that caught me off guard, in part because I was fully remote when I had been in person before. All the random hallway and kitchen conversations where you catch the vibe of what's really happening were gone from what I could see.
People will tolerate a "daily run" (or walk).
I noticed other co-workers going to the gym during the day and realized I could take a break as well. That's when I started to take walking breaks. No one ever said anything.
(I quit smoking when my first daughter was born.)
I see a lot of concern about whether or not people will tolerate some behavior of mine that isn't harmful to anyone. I'm Gen X, so maybe it's how I grew up, but I just dgaf about whether or not my coworkers are okay with my taking a break and going for a walk. I'm not doing it to be mean to them or anything and I don't do it when I'm in the middle of something big and it's definitely nothing personal (I like my coworkers), it just helps me clear my head which is a win when someone works in a job where they need to keep lots of details in their head and switch contexts a lot.
This attitude does lead to some people being miffed because I wasn't available on Teams for 10 minutes, but anything I can do to push back against the idea of my being available to everyone at any time is a win in my book.
I’m aspiring to the gen-X level of DGAF (elder millennial - prone to giving many Fs).
Funny enough. I never smoked, but I often went and hung out in smoking sections outside our work office. I really enjoyed how open smokers were to just random conversations, and the quick 10 minutes of not looking at the screen were typically energizing. Almost like a natural pomodoro work schedule that forced up out of our desks, and then out of our offices.
Socially adroit undergraduates suiting up to exchange dead tree resumes at job fairs in exchange for the URL to online portals can definitely benefit from taking air breaks when/where recruiters do. No need to engage them to unless prompted, it's corporate Switzerland, but there is comfort in recognition on both sides of the booth.
I also appreciate the social break my brain seems to need in order to keep socializing. I'm an introvert but also social, so I love to talk to friends and hang out - but I still need that 5 minutes to just stare off into space and recharge before I jump back into the fray.
I quit smoking about 15 years ago, but still vape - and I remain a huge fan of the easy excuse to step away for 3-5 minutes and just zone out, or change from a large group to a smaller 2-person conversation outside.
Even back when we could smoke in bars, I would still sneak outside from time to time to settle and recharge.
Some of my deepest architectural work honestly happened... in a hammock on the balcony, while alternating between staring at a cloud, the sun, and two magpies building a nest in the birch tree while yelling at me occasionally.
Then I came back to my desk, saw that I had missed a call or two from my boss and he had a concerned message of where I was. I ignored that and sent him an architecture document an hour later. After years, it is still the backbone of our hosting infrastructure and will go into certification audits later this year.
One of my earlier startups, I was a junior/mid level software engineer. I took a skive day to WFH, but was actually travelling to a gig on the train. I sketched out something to pretend I was working that day, and sent him a photo of it. We ended up shipping that design and I only really made one major mistake that we fixed in v2.
It’s amazing how much value there is in idleness.
Rich Hickey, creator of clojure, literally calls this "Hammock driven development" and has a great talk on the matter (multiple actually):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f84n5oFoZBc
(oops, cross-posted with a similar comment.. well, shows the vid is watchworthy)
Update: this person has been fired for "slacking off". The manager only saw the absence, not the work output.
Rich Hickey gave a great talk on Hammock Driven Development
You can get the same effect by going for a walk.
It’s an option, but it’s worth noting that you’re not always idling your brain in quite the same way unless you happen to work somewhere were there are no roads to cross, cars and cyclists to dodge, nor other pedestrians to navigate around.
I sometimes find toilet breaks or coffee breaks (waiting for kettle to boil) fill the “daydream debugging” requirement. But that depends on having a clean bathroom with enough stalls, or an empty kitchen without other people making drinks.
Working from home definitely helps here. Though significantly less so during the holidays when kids are off.
Edit: just in case there’s any misunderstanding, I’m not suggesting having the kids around is a bad thing. I love my kids. Just that they have an obvious impact to my concentration.
Kids are like management that way. Tough to get work done efficiently when they’re around.
But unlike management, you get to tuck them in and “I love you” for no reason is a standard bonus with a free hug.
I think they’re saying that you could say “I’m going for a smoke break” at work and it was at least tolerated. I don’t think you can say “I’m going for a walk” the same way.
We still use the same phrase today "Smoke break?" "Yep" though none of us smoke any more, and some never did.
Why not? Ive been doing it for years, when I worked in office. Get someone to go with you. Or walk to get food/coffee/whatever.
We had 3pm coffee club at a previous job. It was great. Had our own slack channel(public). As the minutes counted down people would post gifs counting down (/giphy 4, /giphy 3). Most of the dev team would go. We’d go a heavy coffee shop. The talks there and back were great.
The perfect work ritual: fresh air, banter, coffee.
That doesn't sound so bad. I like chatting with people I know. I like coffee. Food is nice.
Except: My involvement in these activities doesn't leave much, if any, room for the kind of detachment that daydreaming requires.
The group needs to be big enough (6+ people) that you’re not just chatting with someone; you’re part of a group and can drift in and out .
Indeed.
It has varied a bit depending on the timeline, but: Going out for a walk (or to just change environments and very passively stare at nothing) has been less socially-acceptable than going out for a smoke, in my experience.
One of these things is weird, or perhaps inducing of ire ("How dare he just go outside when he feels like it! What is he even doing?").
The other is, at worst, both understandable and disgusting ("Of course he's out there again with that filthy habit!").
Smoke breaks used to be acceptable because your boss probably took them also.
Now that few people smoke, I don't think they are seen as a valid excuse to duck out for a few minutes.
"I need to stretch my legs" is probably better these days.
I've worked a number of places where smoking on site wasn't allowed, and it was well accepted that if you wanted to just disappear for 30 minutes once or twice a day no one would care.
"i'm going to go get a coffee" works fine in my experience
I have been doing this new practice I heard on some podcast or something - taking a short brisk walk like every thirty minutes. It was promoted for cardiovascular health, trying to compensate for sitting too much, but I also find it is incredibly good at letting me concentrate hard through more hours of work than without. I sometimes check the news or whatever but often just walk and listen to music or chat. I walk strictly five minutes, almost to the end of my block and back, and continue on. The timing ties in with my meditation training, Maezumi lineage, where we sit for 25 minutes then walk (first slowly and then quickly) for five minutes. In meditation it really allows one to sit with energy and focus all day long; also for software development, it turns out.
I also take a longer, 5 km, walk most days, as a way to control type 2 diabetes. This short regular walk is quite different.
Honestly the biggest issue is that the increased focus means I can get into a zone and two hours go by without pause, so every thirty minutes is not always met.
Almost. Nicotine does a lot of work in a short smoke break. Gotta walk for a lot longer to get close.
A cigarette to doing nothing, is like a dog to walking pointlessly.
I've started to go stand in my front yard and just watch the world go by for 15 minutes or so and if I do it around dinner time then I can get away without looking weird as it's perfectly normal to wait uber eats this way.
It's your yard though, you can stand in it whenever you want.
That's where I solve most of the problems which have been nagging me
I've never had a 10 minute walk around the building not be tolerated, and that takes longer than my 5 minute smoke breaks used to.
That said, nicotine could get more done in my brain in those 5 minutes, but the toll on my body wasn't worth it.
I quit smoking years ago but I still go for walks with the same regularity I would smoke.
RIP smoke breaks
> I'm not convinced attention spans themselves have changed; I think it has more to do with the fact that people's brains aren't defaulting to daydreaming anymore when bored.
Yea sometimes stuff has to sink in or marinate. If you don't give that to yourself then you'll never realize it's gone.
I realized I was missing this because I sometimes sit in my chair and tell myself "this is your life now, you sit in this chair" and I do that for as long as possible. I do this in part because a part of me just doesn't want to do anything: I don't want to work, I don't want to do fun things, I just want to do nothing. So I have an inclination towards being lazy.
But when I'm on that chair and give myself full freedom to do so, then I get agitated and want to do something. I plead with myself really hard. But my lazy part is like "fuck no... we're finally on this chair, I'll die this way, we're never getting off this chair."
And then at some point my mind says something like "FINE, I'LL EVEN DO THE TAX FORM THINGY I HAVE BEEN PUTTING OFF. I'LL DO ANYTHING!"
When I judge the activity to be productive enough, I get off the chair.
The real challenge is that I forget that I have this exercise because it actually works for me and it makes me realize that when you're doing "nothing" your brain is doing a whole lot.
If you haven’t read it, Cal Newport’s book Digital Minimalism is mostly about this topic. The value of giving your brain time to simply exist without any outside input, with many examples from history of people who carved out time explicitly for this, especially when needing to make big decisions or figure out answers to problems.
I haven’t read the book but I like this idea and intend to check out the book. I’m not on social media but I find Hacker News – and even Wikipedia – to be addictive enough. When I was younger, I found it very hard to just sit there without some form of external stimulation, e.g. I couldn’t sit down to eat by or have a coffee by myself without reading a magazine or newspaper at the same time – or listening to the radio. I still find it hard to do this.
Hacker News has been useful in that I’ve come across a few inspirational ideas on consuming less input (and producing more output):
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44702212
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39674619
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20781463
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24582837
I’ve made some changes to my life in that listening to music is more intentional – not just a distraction to have in the background. It probably helps that I’ve also started to learn a musical instrument. I can also go for a walk without needing to have music or a podcast to listen to.
Consume less, create more: “These are not the only two options. There's a third activity most of us seem to have forgotten - to simply be.
For me, the very act of everyday living has become very enjoyable and fulfilling in recent years. Doing the dishes, cooking, gardening, sweeping the floor, putting out the trash. Those are not "chores", that's what life's made of. Some of it creative, some not, but the difference is you're simply present in the moment and in the world.”
Next time I do the dishes, I will appreciate being alive, and be thankful to be doing something healthy for my brain. Thanks!
So true! I still think of these things as being chores and don’t look forward to doing them. Worse still, I sometimes procrastinate and let them build up into being much bigger jobs than they need to be.
Every now and again, I try to re-frame the way I view these tasks and try to be more positive about them. I remind myself how fortunate I am to be a (reasonably) fit and healthy adult who can physically do them. And I always feel good when I complete them.
That's probably a great read based on what I've heard from Cal, but I don't think you need an entire book to know how to scale back on your social media use. Just hand your phone to your friend and have them put a lock on the addictive features.
It’s not just social media. Most people have their thing… the news, podcasts, music, books, games, etc. In the modern era we can always have something that allows us to distract our brain or provides external ideas to direct it. Being alone with our own thoughts, devoid of outside influence, is something that seems to take an intentional choice these days.
I find that just setting it to grayscale is enough. Its not that colors are actually an important part of my mostly text based social media experience, but when I use them without colors I get distracted with:
> What am I doing? This dumb.
And then I remember that it is dumb and I go back to leaving it alone.
I get a lot figured out in the time between waking and getting out of bed. I do have my phone around, but just to jot things down.
Also in the shower, but then my phone isn't handy and I lose a few thoughts.
I agree. I am not sure it is as similar to sleep as you claim, but its definitely good for your brain.
I say something similar in the context of parenting, that a reasonable amount of boredom is good. I think it likely that being constantly entertained makes people more prone to seek constant stimulation.
This did not start with phones either. I am Gen X and it happened in my childhood with kids being dumped in front of TVs. One difference was a lot of adults resisted this and limited hours in front of a TV, whereas now a lot of adults are addicted to phones too.
I remember when cable TV used to be "addictive". Now I can't watch even 10 minutes of it without getting bored and pulling out my phone. Also something I learned recently: checking your phone at the movies is no longer the faux pas that it used to be.
There's definitely some hedonic treadmill type thing going on with attention and stimuli.
Using your phone in a cinema was, is and ever will be a massive faux pas. I have no idea at all why you think it might be otherwise.
Think the difference is between "using your phone", meaning calling someone and audibly talking to someone, thus disrupting the movie for others, and "checking your phone", which is just looking at it, though inaudibly, though there might be some amount of light pollution depending on the screen brightness. First one has and will continue to be taboo, second one however, in my experience, used to be viewed with distaste, but is pretty common nowadays.
I’ve asked people sitting nearby to stop checking their phone as the glare can be very distracting. I might be immersed in the film but keep getting pulled out of the story by the distractingly bright light.
I also try to patronise cinemas that remind viewers at the start of the screening not to use their phone at all. I stopped going to the Cineworld near me because there was too much phone use (both calls and checking alerts) – and Cineworld had stopped the reminders at the start of the film for people to switch off their phone.
As someone who miraculously doesn’t feel this urge to constantly “check” his phone, I have to ask: what are you people “checking” for, exactly? It’s still there—it hasn’t gone anywhere. Is it the notifications? Why not just turn them off? I can assure you that there’s nothing on your phone that can’t wait an hour or so until the movie is done.
Out of 10,000 people “checking” their phones, probably around 1 of them is actually waiting for something urgent and important. The rest are doing it out of pure addiction.
Everything wants to hijack your attention via your phone now, whether it's apps spamming notifications or companies spamming SMS. And arguably every once in a while there is something you would like to know quickly, but any channel that comes on just gets abused by cruft.
If it's addiction, it's addiction through exploitation.
I think checking your phone unless you are actually expecting an important notification is a symptom of the problem we are discussing here.
Faux pas or not, it now happens much more than it used to.
The guy next to me at the last movie I went to was scrolling TikTok. Seriously what the hell, you can do that anytime and you actually paid to be in that seat.
He should go to TikTok headquarters and watch a movie on his phone next to complete the circle.
Using your phone used to mean talking. Now it means silently browsing and that's not so bad.
I have no idea at all what lost Xanadu theater you found where people don't check their phones. They weren't saying they like it or that it's actually ok. The word "apparently" tells you that this is something they have observed happening and were surprised to observe.
Solid Xanadu reference. I wonder what percentage of the current generation of young people would have any idea what this is from. I'm not a film buff, but took a film course in college, and learned all about Orson Welles and Citizen Kane.
Please never check your phone while the film is playing. Major faux pas.
I highly recommend road-tripping to those that can. At least once a year I end up driving out from the Mid-Waste to the Bay Area or SoCal. A few years ago the wife and I traded duties to drive to various parts of Alaska and back.
We've spent a week or so exploring just one state at a time…
There's nothing so mentally refreshing as a long, boring drive.
Well I made no claim of it being related to sleep; just that I've read a lot of claims that it's related to microsleep and used "sleeping while standing up" for the last bit as an analogy.
I am not a sleep doctor/therapist nor am I any sort of expert on the subject.
I may have read your statement as being stronger than you intended. its a reasonably analogy then.
Sleeping while standing up is the state one finds oneself endlessly scrolling somebody else's dreams. Avoid at all costs.
That's a very interesting perspective but now that you mention it, I can't even think of the last time I daydreamed, even when I'm not on a device. Curious if phone usage or whatever doom-scrolling we do exhausts the same part of the brain that we use to daydream.
> I can't even think of the last time I daydreamed
About 5 minutes ago for me, my missus says that I live with my head in the clouds (which is a nicer way of saying if I'm not actively doing something I just zone out and retreat into my own head), I've always been that way all the way back to school (with the inevitable consequences from teachers).
I've mentioned on here before though that I never got addicted to my phone, I don't even know where it is ~80% of the time.
My relationship with technology is (nearly) always intentional, I still access the internet 95% of the time on a desktop PC (which reduces doom scrolling since that just feels wrong on a desktop) so when I walk out my office I'm just "offline" in a very distinct way, if I go for a walk my phone stays at home, everyone who knows me knows I'll answer a text at some point but it could be a day or two.
To sum it up, I resent the passive intrusion of technology into my life.
Respect.
I hope to find the strength to be more like that. Also to give a better example to others.
I notice making the screen go grayscale (can configure volume up+down to do this in android) already makes doom-anything much less long-lived. The next step, since apparently I can't go cold turkey, is to try one of these alternative minimalist launchers to see if it helps. And to teach people that if they want something from me urgently, they need to call.
On the topic of watches, I used a smartwatch the company gifted me for a while. Went back to an analog watch. Much better.
> And to teach people that if they want something from me urgently, they need to call.
There is a half way step (on Android at least, I assume Apple has similar) you can set "Do Not Disturb" and then white list the people who can message/call through the "Do Not Disturb" so you are reachable but only by people you trust/want to be able to reach you.
> On the topic of watches, I used a smartwatch the company gifted me for a while.
I just didn't use one, I have a rough rule that introducing new technology into my life has to be a complete and obvious unalloyed win or I just don't, it's a very high bar for a new technology to clear but it also means I don't spend money on things that end up in drawers because they either turned out not to meet the hype or just annoyed the living hell out of me after the initial "oooh shiny" wore off.
I do the Do Not Disturb + whitelist thing on my iPhone.
I also disable any and all notifications of apps other than direct messaging apps. No group message notifications.
I’ve been 24/7 do-not-disturb mode with all notifications disabled, for the past 10 years. It’s been wonderful for “intentionality” and agency over my time. I use my phone when I want to do something on it, not when the phone beeps and buzzes telling me to use it.
I don’t even whitelist anyone anymore. If it’s important they will leave a message and I’ll get back to them.
> If it’s important they will leave a message and I’ll get back to them.
I can't really do that. For some things (urgent and important), loved ones need to be able to reach me.
But yes, a lot of this advice would work.
You have to remember that not that long ago it was simply impossible to reach most people who were not at home or at work. Because it was impossible, nobody felt slighted that you were unable to read their message or take their call immediately. And nobody felt any anxiety about leaving the house for a few hours to shop or go to a movie or a ball game and being unreachable. Loved ones managed and life went on.
Grey scale is amazingly less compelling experience. I have it on for a while but then give in an turn color back on just for the thrill.
If you have an iPhone, you can put the greyscale as only a percentage greyscale if desired. I got an iPhone to get rid of the constant bothering from the apple devotees and quickly found myself spending an unhealthy amount of time on it. I started with a small percent greyscale so I didn't notice and would forget that the colors were dulled. Before I even got to 50% greyscale, my habit had died and I only use it when I need to (literally only for communicating with the folks who can't tolerate green bubbles)
My daily driver is GrapheneOS. I don't know if android has a similar feature, but I assume not because my GrapheneOS phone only supports fully greyscale, and the difference is so stark that I can't keep it on. The most addictive apps I have on it are my Hacker News client and NewPipe (the nonaddictive YouTube), so I am not too concerned though
This cracked me up. I have the same malady. The worst thing used to be a few close friends who recognized the pattern after being with me long enough and called me out in it when they knew I was zoning out while they were talking. Ive desperately tried to keep this daydreaming trait lately despite trying to get rid of it when I was younger when I used to think it was a disadvantage.
I'm not sure I have the willpower to follow your example but at least I managed to turn of notifications on my watch after reading your post.
Willpower's not the solution. When we isolated cocaine from the coca leaf for the first time, the world pretty much went insane. In those first years people were injecting it into their eyeballs and spines. The most popular beverage on earth in 2026 STILL contains extract of the coca leaf as a holdover from the days when it was laced with its namesake, Coke. People were smoking cocaine, ingesting cocaine, giving it to their kids for a toothache, pretty much anything you could stick it in, they did.
The solution to this wasn't willpower, it was to get rid of all that fucking cocaine. There's a reason you don't have the stuff lying around your house today, if you did you'd probably get hooked. In 2026 we're basically speedrunning the coke boom with infotech.
So once again the solution is: get rid of it. Any time you're in a low stimulus environment, remove the tech so that you don't HAVE to exercise willpower. That means turning off the phone and the watch and maybe stuffing them in a drawer in another room or something. That's all it takes.
I can't say how society will look back at this moment in history 150 years from now. But I do know I'm way happier and more relaxed when I just shut off the devices and put them away. When I'm at home or in the office, my phone's on mute, in a drawer/bag/other room, and I don't think about it unless I take it out for a few minutes to order a delivery or do a 2fa or something. At night it's simply turned off. I'll never own a smart watch. I still keep the phone on me when I go out and haven't found that to be a huge concern because if I'm at a bar or something it's competing with a lot of other stimuli for attention. We were never 100% available to anyone for all of human history until the last 10-20 years. I am not opting into this current Cocaine Moment.
Willpower is a great solution if the problem is to let the companies off the hook, though.
Not even a smartwatch? What's your opinion on fitness trackers (the passive ones, without display)?
I think it depends on how you use it. All things in moderation and all. I've had one for years but when I set it up it only allowed it a few notifications. When meetings start during my work day, getting e-mail to my personal account, and when I get messages from my wife, that's it.
So when I'm not working the watch is... just a watch.
I was a fan of the Apple Watch initially because I felt like it kept me from having to take out my increasingly large iPhone to check things like the time and if I was going to get rained on, but they've managed to make WatchOS some weird nightmare of distractions and things I need to actively shut off on my phone, and I've grown very tired of it.
> fitness trackers (the passive ones, without display
Do you mean my belly when I look down? That and the answer to "can I keep up with my kids?" has always been enough fitness tracking for me.
I wear a self winding watch. I suppose if it stops going while I'm wearing it, I've been very still and might be dead.
To stick with the analogy: to me, your question reads as "What's your opinion on Speed?".
More like "Not even weed? What's your opinion on psychedelics (the mushrooms, they aren't addictive)?"
My big discovery a few years ago was uninstalling apps, especially social media apps. I don't mind the platforms, but removing their ability to ping notifications up was massive. I watch some people just get their phone out to dismiss a load of notifications for 20-30 seconds. It's a chore now. I think limiting notifications is the best thing you can do, on your phone and your watch.
I honestly don't think it is willpower, it is simply that I never had to break the "addiction" because I never had it in the first place.
I always found the form factor extremely limiting compared to a desktop (it's the same reason my laptop ended up running a TV upstairs, the idea of programming on the sofa sounded great but in practice I'd get frustrated and immediately retreat to my quiet downstairs office with multiple screens when I had to do something tricky/requiring concentration).
Where I do use something that optimises for distractions, I look for how to minimize the distractions (e.g YouTube - I use the excellent Unhook (with Ublock Origin) which turns the YT home page into a search box and little else, hides mixes, shorts and other distractions) and make it work for me.
I sometimes pause shows or YT videos I'm watching just to daydream for a little bit about something that just crossed my mind. Additionally I go outside at least once a day to walk or ride my bicycle, which also helps with this.
That's interesting. What happens if you just sit there doing nothing, looking around and what not? Does your brain start to wander by itself?
Personally I struggle to remember any day I haven't had at least 10-15 minutes of idle time doing nothing, just thinking idly, but I still have similar struggles as the author. Although I barely use my phone for things neither.
>> What happens if you just sit there doing nothing, looking around and what not? Does your brain start to wander by itself?
For me it's one of the three layers.
First layer, it starts to wonder to the direction offered by real world. Wonder about song lyrics I'm listening too, or the colors of buildings, or something like that.
Second layer happens if you purposefully stray your thoughts away from a real world. Brain starts trying to remember whatever you wanted it to remember. For example, if I tell myself three times "don't forget to call mom", if I just sit idly, chances are my brain would surface "call mom". Sometimes it surfaces "remember you wanted to try arch 2 years ago". Also this is the layer that works badly if you tried or depressed, because it can start surfacing bad thoughts.
Third layer I call time skipper because it's just a basic time fast forwarding. I have no idea whether it's true meditation or controlled dissociation or something else, but thoughts slide of your brain, so there's nothing to remember afterwards. My friend said that maybe meditation is a controlled dissociation.
I prefer to say that I'm so dumb, I can just switch my brain off.
I think its unfortunate people wear headphones while walking/running/biking. If you don’t, that’s however many minutes or hours of nothing but daydreaming (and hearing nature).
I've needed to take anc earbuds with me while out now, not to listen to music but just to tone down the noise pollution a bit. You can barely hear nature anyway over all the cars, trucks, lawnmowers, leafblowers, airplanes, and what I think are warehouses. It's been getting worse in recent years and the only way to have a chance at daydreaming is to lower it a bit.
Sadly around here it takes quite a lot of driving to get to anywhere that nature sounds predominate. Between the highways/airports/lawncare it is mostly noise pollution, and I generally find that doesn't work as well for daydreaming.
I often just wear noise cancelling headphones without any music on
I find it impossible to daydream while focused on traffic.
I read my black on white eink reader on walks and occasionally run into poles and things in the sidewalk. Mostly I look up when crossing a street. When I was a kid I would walk slowly around with a Sci Fi book and read it. Never been hit by a car but every now and then get scared by one I didn’t notice. But I can’t read intense books too much - I alternate hard books and pulpy fun reads.
> That's a very interesting perspective but now that you mention it, I can't even think of the last time I daydreamed, even when I'm not on a device.
Sometimes I just turn my phone off and stare at a white wall for 15 minutes. People made fun of me when I told them how relaxing I find white walls, but it seems it turns out, that I'm not the only one doing this?
I found that people would make fun of me for that, too, if they were made aware of it.
Back when I was still stuck to a desk in school (up hill both ways and without a pocket computer), I learned that folks would tend to leave me alone if I had a book open. It didn't really matter what book it was.
I could just gaze at it with my eyes relaxed and unfocused, with the printing appearing as some kind of indistinct phoric blur. And as long as I turned the page occasionally, that was good enough to keep the would-be tyrants at bay.
(And then I'd ace the test on Friday, repeat for dozens of weeks, and do it again next year.)
When my wife and I started dating, she constantly was asking me what I’m thinking about (as people who care about you sometimes do). She was amazed that I could just sit down in a sofa and zone out, thinking about absolutely nothing. At first she would ask “come on, you meat be thinking about something” and later admitted she couldn’t do that and didn’t think people actually could!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bodhidharma#Wall-gazing
How would one daydream, i.e., imagine, when you have everything presented to you in 4k and you can even interact with it through games?
You have to imagine to daydream. When you’ve been raised on YouTube since birth (referring to U.S. primarily “GenZ”) or you’ve formed your identity around things on TV (like most Americans) you didn’t have to imagine, daydream you just took it in, like everyone else that took on the same thing. That’s another aspect that’s not really being called out, TV also has contributed to the homogenization and destruction of distinct and unique cultures, i.e., actual, real diversity; because everyone is programmed and trained by TV on the same material, as the famous water cooler discussion about a TV show episode everyone was watching tells us.
Now imagine you’re “Gen Alpha” or maybe even “GenZ” where you have not even had anyone read you books that required you to imagine, i.e., daydream, what was being told to you?
These are all compounding factors that are going to even cause massive problems for this sham, fake facade, con job American society.
Talk to teachers in elementary schools and middle schools, even universities now; they’ll tell you things that should make and discerning person be alarmed. And that’s without even talking about the impending impacts of AI.
> > How would one daydream, i.e., imagine, when you have everything presented to you in 4k and you can even interact with it through games?
You can daydream about being the protagonist of such actions which is not the same as watching other people doing it
I used to spend a lot of time imagining myself as the captain of a Federation starship :) but I did also read a lot of books.
But also, the availability of YouTube changes the utility of descriptive writing. Moby Dick can have pages of text about whales or whatever, but now I can spend hours watching whale videos on YouTube. The importance of the interior life of the characters is more, or of diffusive world building stories with too much intricacy for a movie or video presentation.
Interesting that you bring daydreaming to the conversation. I've got an issue with it, and it's that I get interesting ideas then. But nothing comes out unless I sit in front of a computer to do anything with them. And computers have all the distractions.
I believe you are on to something. I like to run, which is common enough, but I never do it with a watch or phone. I always leave them at home. That is my hour of zen. Afterwards I may be exhausted but I am always full of ideas. After the first ten kilometres or so the body does all the running and the mind is set free. That's a lot like daydreaming.
Every other person I meet along the trail have headphones and some watch to measure their training. I get it, they want to get better at running. Maybe they train for some competition. I don't. I will never be an elite marathon runner and I know that, so I couldn't care less about getting better as long as I come back with a tired body and busy mind.
Everybody is different, but I have never understood why not more people are like me.
There’s this great post about „The Death Of Day Dreaming“: https://www.afterbabel.com/p/on-the-death-of-daydreaming
As much as I’d like to leave my phone in another room while working, 2FA has made that impossible. I’m now required to keep my phone nearby and pick it up periodically throughout the day, all in the same of security.
Excellent reason to stand up and take a short walk.
Just make your phone boring.
Delete instagram, log out and don’t go on YouTube. Delete games.
It’s really not that hard to make your phone a device for communication and not entertainment
My phone is already like that. There are still emails, texts, the browser still exists, the weather, etc.
And even ignoring all of that, taking hands off the keyboard/mouse, picking up a different device, waiting for the notification, opening it up, typing in the code, putting the phone back down, moving back to the keyboard/mouse/monitor… it’s very disruptive to any flow I might hope to have.
I worked around this by just storing the 2FA in Bitwarden. Yeah, same place as the passwords but I don't care I don't want the forced context switch.
A coworker tried to use Authy a couple years ago and it wouldn't work. It seemed like we were forced to use Microsoft Authenticator.
I just tried setting it up with Apple Passwords and it wouldn’t accept the QR code. It seems to be specifically made for Microsoft.
KeePassXC also has one.
Consider getting a hardware key (typical example: YubiKey)
Sometimes I worry that this whole gen-z stare thing is just millennial avocado toast under new management. I work with a ton of gen-z'ers, I think they're great and have never once experienced this gen-z stare thing you hear about so much online. They're hard workers, attentive, and less phone addicted than my latchkey parents.
gen z and even more so gen alpha is a complete bimodal distribution. The top kids are genuinely incredible.
It goes beyond my job but that is my fault for narrowing it down. Even day to day shopping at random stores, I have never seen this gen-z stare or any of the other terms we assign to them. If they are bimodal, which they very well could be, the competent mode is clearly dominant where I have lived
We went through twenty years of millennials being this or that, how none of them work, how they are moochers. Every generation gets called lazy and dumped on by the previous generations; as far as I can tell, it is mostly bull shit. I have yet to experience anything extraordinary about gen-z that I don't see in gen-y, gen-x, latchkey, boomers, greatest generation, etc.
Maybe younger gen-z or gen-alpha like you say are truly messed up, I think we have data coming out of schools that support that, but I have yet to interact with them as I don't have kids myself. Everything I have said is inherently anecdotal and no more important than what you've seen
at my first office job my coworkers quickly informed me i had a bizarre habit of staring at the ceiling before performing a burst of effort. i find loosening my visual focus helps me visualize concepts and idea, no idea when or how i picked up that habit
sometimes when i "space out" i am fully daydreaming, other times i am (in generous terms) "composing my thoughts". when its a daydream after snapping back to it ill think along the lines of, "guess i needed to process that"
The gen z stare is being unable or unwilling to give a verbal response when one is expected mostly as a result of social anxiety and lack of communication skills IMO.
> I'm not convinced attention spans themselves have changed; I think it has more to do with the fact that people's brains aren't defaulting to daydreaming anymore when bored.
If my mind is not defaulting to daydreaming and rather asking me to find a distraction, doesn't this mean my attention span is worse?
Meanwhile in Japan:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z9FsQXYVgUE
You don’t necessarily want to daydream. If you’re not careful, it becomes Negative rumination and mind wandering and that wouldn’t be as useful as an actual nap or a workout or meditation.
If meditation and workout look like a protection against ruminating, they might be functioning as avoidance. If a nap helps, maybe fix your sleep first (good sleep is super important for mental health). Daydreaming is healthy.
I would say that if the mind stays away from negative ruminations when set free, that is a sign of a balanced and healthy life. Many people lack balance and health, and for them changing the conditions a bit might be helpful. Knowing and practicing that one can focus the attention where it is useful can increase mental health or ability to cope with problems. One doesn’t want to run away from reality but one need not feel trapped by intrusive mental phenomena.
Reminds me of this scene from Curb where Jeff just sits in the plane: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zONvxznbUJA
I wonder if they forgot they already used this bit in Seinfeld or if it's an intentional homage.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JBBQdFSvvTE
I often do this on flights under 3 hours. The hardest part is finding a place to land your gaze where it doesn’t look like you’re staring it someone, as that could become awkward.
try "the Polish stare"
> the lack of daydreaming
I would also blame the Western commercialization of meditation. I have recently learned that in Buddhism meditation is just one side of the coin, and it’s usually diametrically paired with the opposite technique of contemplation: instead of concentrating into one infinitesimal point, you expand your awareness to encompass the whole of reality. Which is a bit like daydreaming. It’s through these two exercises that one finds the middle path of equanimity.
With technology, we spend our time with narrowed focus, we are told that to stay sane we need to cultivate our focus, and never find the time to release the grip on it, to just let the brain be and expand and relax a bit.
The Taoists had figured it out all along: to find focus, stop focusing so damn much.
As an avid consumer of Western Buddhism, this is pretty standard understanding. Concentration and insight, another complementary aspect of practice, like the dichotomy between sitting alone and sitting in a group, or between a steady daily practice and a deep intense retreat.
The linear story is that increased awareness of focus teaches the sitter that there are no real borders in reality, it is a seamless whole, and as the sitting continues, awareness naturally opens up to include the full current moment - seeing thoughts as thoughts, emotions as emotions, sore knees as sore knees, twitchy neighbor as a twitchy neighbor, etc thru the myriad things all showing the way, bright and clear.
But they are mutually reinforcing partners that appear as distinct.
I gave up my smartphone 6 years ago because I concluded the conveniences it offered came at cost of too much of my attention, freedom, and privacy. My ability to focus was just gone, and this magic device was not making me happy or productive anymore.
Within a year, my hyper-focus abilities I remember having as a teen starting flowing back. In the last 5 years I have done the best work of my career, including creating the first fully deterministic Linux distribution, building a community around it, helping start 3 companies, learned endless new skills.
I am not reachable or able to reach the internet every second of every day, and in the modern world that sounds scary. Yet I have a family, an active social life, frequently travel, meet new people every week, co-running two companies while actively developing new tech with daily progress, etc.
All of those things were -accelerated- by me being intentionally offline whenever I am not at a desk.
> Within a year, my hyper-focus abilities I remember having as a teen starting flowing back.
Mine are gone for good. But I no longer want to be able to hyperfocus, because it is invariably a sign I am losing control. For me, hyperfocus is dysregulation that benefits others and not me.
I just want to be able to think straight, keep my house tidy, and not spend a couple of hours every day wishing it would turn out to be my last day.
I have at various points of my life been diagnosed with downs syndrome, chronic depression, anxiety, ADD, tourettes. Almost certainly undiagnosed PTSD and tests indicate maybe mild autism. I do not think anyone actually knows, and I stopped letting such fuzzy labels define me. I can say for me the drugs never fixed the root causes. They just made me care less about having control. A passenger in my own life.
Once I recognized constant connectivity and internet media as mild poisons like alcohol, and regulated those, I found myself a lot happier without drug dependence. (YMMV, every brain is different)
I can focus on whatever I want now. A mechanical puzzle, work, an open source project, a video game, my family, my friends, or typing this comment to a stranger on the internet I empathize with. My motivation is seemingly endless now too.
Get rid of the doom scrolling poison and give your brain time to reset and recalibrate. Spend several hours a day away from the internet. I cannot promise it is the only change needed for you but I promise strategic life change experiments will provide a better chance of a positive outcome than waiting to die.
I am not a doom scroller. Like I say, I try to regulate my news intake to things that are valuable and I have for years. I use social media only for creative-interest-based groups — I have no "friend feed" at all and I haven't in more than a decade. I have some places where my limited focus is enough to share expertise, and that is more or less it.
Unfortunately my ability to focus declined precipitously three years ago and despite all sorts of long walks, breaks from the internet, breathing exercises, diet changes and ultimately stopping work entirely for months at a time, I have never got it back. I can no longer really do my job.
I don't want "hyperfocus" back at all. It's a disorder trait: it allows other people to expect more sustained over-exerted effort from me than I can possibly deliver without making myself ill.
I would like to be capable of managing my life on a day-to-day basis, but I am now so burned out that this is a struggle. I don't have any confidence that will return. I am what is left over from who I used to be.
But I am also now over fifty, single, childless, and I don't expect to return to my old job because everything I did has been changed so much by AI anyway.
As much as I try to learn about that AI future I will need to return to, and try to prepare to return to work, there is no returning to who I was, and I don't have the energy or focus to direct into some new version of me, so I will likely just potter around for a couple more years until I no longer want to.
I think it's just information overload. There's so much information everywhere now clamoring at you for attention. Our brains aren't made for processing this much information. Going on a media diet helps. Going completely offline helps even more.
Something I do when I struggle to focus is to add different stripped down user accounts to my computer.
I wanted to dabble in rust so I added a user called ~rs that literally only has access to two application hotkeys (via niri). super+enter opens a terminal, F1 opens the offline rust documentation. Yeah I can just log out and scroll HN, but there's a enough friction to that, that it doesn't really happen very often.
Yep, i do the same thing. The trick is to increase the barrier to entry.
For the same reason, i don't install ANY apps on my smartphone and tablet, like social apps and news apps. If you have to grab your laptop to check them, it takes way more effort.
And, if you really need to access something "urgently", you can always use the web browser (which is annoying) where i always use Private Mode (no easy logging in.)
That's a really cool technique.
> Yeah I can just log out and scroll HN, but there's a enough friction to that, that it doesn't really happen very often.
You can make sure the friction is high by having your password be something difficult to remember, written down on a note, and keeping that note somewhere "out of reach".
I don't think it's helpful to increase the friction more than it already is, then it just becomes annoying, which makes it more likely you'll stop working like this. You don't have to become a desert father to fix your attention.
My hypothesis is that what's hurting focus and attention is context and task switching. It too easy to open a bunch of tabs and get stuck in the xkcd loop[1] whenever you get stuck or something gets a bit boring, so that becomes a thing you do without thinking about it.
Having mise-en-place workspaces where things that aren't necessary for what you are doing are out of reach, and reaching for them means you have to log off and lose your state, is generally more than sufficient to fix the problem.
It's not that you can't ever check your socials or scroll HN (that wouldn't work for me as part of running a business is a digital presence), you just can't do it while working on something. Makes everything just a little bit more deliberate.
(Also on a practical note, chrome/chromium in app mode is great for this, if you do need to be able to go online, but in a limited sense)
[1] https://xkcd.com/1411/
That's smart. It's also revealing.
It was a choice to make technology that absolutely hammers you with information. It was not the right choice.
I want to build and use stuff that promotes focus. I only have a vague inkling of what this means, but it's quieter, less instantaneous. And it's going to be an uphill battle because everyone else is doing the opposite.
A lot of the choices were to be fair quite accidental. Computers didn't use to be like this, but a lot of the reasons they weren't were properties of how the technology worked. A low-DPI 15" CRT monitor simply can't display very much information at any given moment. A slow single core CPU just doesn't permit browsing the web while your code is compiling. As that changed, we simply piled on multitasking capabilities without asking if we should.
But yeah, it's an interesting space to experiment in. I feel we could be doing much of this a lot better than we are now. My mise-en-place work accounts is very much a hack, and considerable work to set up.
Oh 100%.
On their own, browser tabs, notifications, and IM at work all make sense on their own and are not evil at all.
Taken together, there are now 8 people trying to talk to me all day every day, constant alerts unless you go out of your way to severely restrict what and who can message you, and you find yourself with 60 tabs across 3 windows doing 7 things at once but also doing nothing because... your brain was not built for this computer.
Before 1992, we browsed newsgroups, watched TV, or played with swords while compiling. That is, if you weren't using Turbo Pascal, with its near-instantaneous turnaround.
https://xkcd.com/303/
I like my remarkable eink tablet for this. It's boring.
When I travel to EU, I completely ignore my phone. I'm doing things, driving, seeing things, and hiking. When I wake up I feel rested. I feel happy.
When I am home, I am exhausted every single day. Sometimes I don't even do anything, still exhausted.
Idk, if it is information overload, monotony, depression, work, brain get fried by constantly having to manage everything.
I also have kid....and let me tell you....to get him anywhere on time is mission impossible. Doesn't want to brush teeth, doesn't listen AT ALL, doesn't care about losing privileges. I guess this stress doesn't exist when we travel because we can spend 2 hours getting out the door.
I really need to stop using the phone as much and try to figure out what is causing it.
> Yeah I can just log out and scroll HN, but there's a enough friction to that, that it doesn't really happen very often.
What an awesome tip!
Absolutely. There is no more boredom in today's world. Not a second. But boredom is important for the mind to rest.
It's more than information overload. It's an overabundance of distractions specifically designed to steal your attention. I block dark pattern sites during working hours. It helps immensely.
> I think it's just information overload. There's so much information everywhere now clamoring at you for attention. Our brains aren't made for processing this much information. Going on a media diet helps. Going completely offline helps even more.
I wonder how much is real information, i.e. information that truly is related to your life, interests and within your sphere of influence; and how much is just noise that camouflages as information.
I've tried multiple things to regain focus, the only ones that worked:
- blocking social media everyday til 2pm(i like working from 5-1 everyday), i use freedom app for that
- having a "distraction" tablet with 2fa on the social media I use, so I can only use distracting things there and not on my computer and iphone.
- when work requires just thinking, I bring my remarkable tablet to a coffeeshop or coworking and work just off of it.
- for avoiding staying behind on social media trends, etc, i built Analog Reader to read newsletters, best tweets from specific people and articles i save for later. It becomes a printed newspaper I can bring anywhere. I have a hacker news edition that runs everyday that showed this article for today and thats why im here lol.
You're not alone. You will find some answers "Stolen Focus" by Johann Hari
Living in Seattle saved me. In the winter months I started waking up and sitting in front of a SAD light for half an hour. I almost immediately got bored so I started reading long-form books (with the occasional short story) in front of the light for an hour each morning.
I gave up on facebook in 2010 and twitter in 2020ish. I never developed the habit for other social media. I turn off slack and email for the first 45 minutes of each hour. If the server is on fire, call me. That's why I have a phone. Oh, and I have an old-school non-smart phone for phone calls and it often lives in a different room from where I work. I run a TOTP authenticator on a tablet that's not configured to receive any messages.
HN and an occasional YouTube video are my only online distractions. In my advanced age I've lost the desire to tell everyone how wrong they are, which seems to be the national sport of online comments sections. (Though, HN, you're much better than most places.) I've been getting into GMRS lately and it's hard to turn off the radio during work days, but I have been able to do it. Maybe I should write a similar article saying "the net doesn't distract me, but dang if I can't go 10 minutes without thinking about people I know via GMRS."
The author of this piece makes an observation about bullshit vs. attention that is probably worth looking into. My last several jobs have included less bullshit, but a lot more documentation. Which is to say, the docs I write seem to have actual applicability to a real business problem and it's solution. There's little busy work that only serves to prove that a remote VP has more people working for him.
I think what I'm trying to say is a) it is possible to strengthen your attention gland. I'm happy to see the author at least trying. And... b) maybe there's a correlation between perceived bullshit and ability to focus. This needs more research.
Do you have an automated way of turning off Slack and email for the first 45 minutes of each hour?
A lot of people here are focusing on ADHD, but I think the author is commenting on a different phenomenon, because they were able to concentrate before and now it's just much harder. I feel it and many people I talk to feel it as well.
It's difficult for me to separate whether this is a result of other changes in my life over time or simply a reflex of ageing in general, though I do think it's a wider societal shift. In the same way that older people find it difficult to watch newer movies (and vice-versa), there is a certain pace associated with culture as well. We have, on average, shifted from books to TikTok in the span of a generation.
I think it is becoming clear that we now have type-1 and type-2 ADHD prevalent in the population. Dopamine deficiency or insensibility are indistinguishable in terms of symptoms.
We are all exposed to so much adversarial noise trying to steer us that people are loosing the ability to focus and to filter.
Dieting and exercising helps. Cut down on exposure to noise from apps, streaming services, devices, etc. And exercise your brain, use it. Read long form text, take notes, write intentional arguments, use these arguments to steer yourself and those around you to create things of value.
I've heard it's habit. You can have a habit of thinking long and hard or you can have a habit of jumping back and forth. You can always reach for the other, but you also have a default for most of the time. I think these days, companies want jumping back and forth because it means it's much easier to grab your attention and get something out of you, without giving you time to fully think through the consequences.
I don't know that this starts with LLMs, though LLMs are certainly--at least for some people--a way to take their ADHD tendencies further.
It's been obvious to me even since I was a computer-addled kid, in the 90s, that the way computer interfaces and multi-modal notifications affect the nervous system, the capacity for sustained attention and patient reading, and so on is pernicious. The impact has both cognitive and moral valences that reinforce each other, because the instincts reinforced by computer use turn into technocratic, anti-humanistic worldviews, and even cosmologies.
> Sometimes I live stream what I’m doing just because with a camera I cannot escape from hard challenges by grabbing my phone.
This is a great life hack, I highly recommend it if you need accountability or motivation.
You don't even need an audience, and if your work is the kind that somehow benefits from one, all the better.
I regained my focus after many years and it had nothing to do with distractions for me, distractions were only a way of fighting stress that constantly appeared. The stress was the underlying issue. I worked on that in therapy (breaking away from my parents) and I can now work on what I want for hours at a time. It's because now I feel I can become my own person and do what I want while not being chained to the past anymore.
Hard to break that family trauma cycle so congrats on that
This article is SO long.
It seems that so many minor parts of the day don't work as expected and my attention is destroyed by a thousand annoyances. My watch only unlocks my computer 1/3 of the time. My car only recognizes my phone 1/2 of the time. 3/4 of the time I go to press/click on a song I want to hear, the data in the UI updates between the time I start to move to the song and I press/click and I end up hearing something I don't want. Annoying feature that I've disabled n times was re-enabled, and I have to disabled it again. Fighting autocorrect on my phone. I was signed out a service unexpectedly and have to re-authenticate. Programs X, Y, and Z are unresponsive. My VM says my network connection is unstable. My new car beeps because it thinks I'm distracted and then I get more annoyed and distracted.
I like to use my iPhone to read text articles. It's amazing to me how bad it's become at this task.
I get various emails with curated links to various stories, and I will click a link to go read that story. First, it often takes me to a browser re-direct that sometimes successfully redirects, sometimes doesn't. Then sometimes the redirect is to an app that I've subscribed to. Which would be great. Except for the times it opens the app but fails to redirect to the specific article. Then if the article is on a web page, it commonly fills the page with more and more ads slowing down my phone and giving me a tiny keyhole opening to read the text through.
Then I often want to go back to the email and pick up where I left off. Which works >50% of the time, but fairly often will skip to a different email.
I truly believe that for reading news and articles the state of software was much better 10 years ago than today.
also when I remember to put by phone away not to get distracted, then the 2FA requires me to go fetch it...
my car has an AI assistant. I don't know what the wake word is, but it will wake up and be useless with no obvious way to turn it off. I'm sure I could search for it, but it happens while I'm driving and I forget about it. It happens just infrequently enough to not remember, but often enough to be really annoying.
My wife turned on a meditation feature on our very old Alexa. I guess the app was deleted or something, but every morning Alexa turns on and says "Starting your meditation times ... Sorry, this is no longer available". If I tell Alexa to turn this off, it has no idea what I'm talking about and it shows up nowhere in the iOS app. Instead of meditation, I got a nice dose of minor annoyance every morning.
It's really not that hard but people are addicted and don't want to admit it.
Buy an Amazfit 6 watch, has alarms, clock, health stats, memos, weather, maps, and GPS workout.
Turn off nearly all phone notifications. Do not allow any phone to AmaZfit notifications. Don't have your phone physically attached to you.
You need your phone with you? Backpack. Never in pockets.
All sudden it is incredibly easy to focus.
> Turn off nearly all phone notifications.
You should do this regardless, no watch needed. The only phone notifications that should be turned on are ones that could be urgent. Phone calls, maybe text messages, alarms, and calendar reminders. No email, no social media, no stupid random apps telling you about some discount.
Phone in the backpack is a crazy simple hack. Every time you want to reach for it you get a slight punishment (anti-reward), this is operant conditioning.
This does work, especially at the library where you feel like you're drawing a little attention for going in your bag.
I also put my phone in a kSafe by Kitchen Safe for 20-30 minutes to break out of doomscrolling with no takebacks. I keep a wireless charger in the safe so it can charge while it's in there.
Another thing I realized by working at a job where I couldn't take my phone is that you can just go to the library and leave your phone at home.
very true.
I just bought [product placeholder] and it has [features placeholder].
I am no longer distract by phon.
Take a step back and realize what they're saying.
* Monitor your health and track your time to help stay focused.
* Disable as many spurious notification types on your phone as you can afford to do. My recommendation: All notifications that aren't live messages from individuals.
* Keep your phone out of immediate reach so that you break the habit one likely has of instinctively reaching for it to fill in moments of boredom.
Is this an ad plug lol
It seems to me that lots of people consider the ability to focus as some kind of innate ability which we are all born with, it's not. It's a learned skill which requires practice. Stop practising and it atrophies.
We all understand this for physical exercise, I think we need to understand the same principles apply to skills.
Working at a gig where I couldn't have my phone really put me on a painful dopamine fast, but helped me remember that I actually can focus. So I started working at the library and leaving my phone at home.
Well, some people are innately physically stronger than others.
For some things its just the truth that some people have "the drive" and some people don't.
I don't buy this. I think people find it easier to make excuses about lacking some magical, unobtainable, abstract property like "the drive" than to actually put in the effort to improve themselves.
People over diagnose themselves so it seems more common than it is, but adhd is definitely real. Its not merely attention, its a set of traits like reduced working memory (and ability to utilize it) that manifest as difficulty in sustained attention / distraction. People who have it do a lot of other funny things than simply "get distracted easily", just ask the spouse of any person with add what _their_ coping strategies are and you'll get many humorous and perhaps unexpected stories.
You’re doing the engineering thing and focusing on the trees instead of the forest. It sounds to me like you have other things going on in your life that you aren’t acknowledging. Often stress and anxiety are primary sources of attention deficit. As we get older more and more stress is piled on us and it becomes even more important to manage it in a healthy way. I encourage you to reflect on your mental health because it might have some clues.
focusing is indeed so hard, couldn't even finish reading this post
LLM: Attention is all you need. Human: Attention is all we have.
We should be careful where we spend our limited attention on.
Yes, I feel like my brain is fried by dopamine dispensers, it's very bad and I have no clue how to get control back. At least I have some healthy routines in my days but it really does feel like being addicted to a hard drug.
To me, it is the same as a "hard drug". I struggle on and off. For me, it's HN and just general fear of AI / career trajectory. I'm constantly reading articles about it. To a lesser degree, videogames and other scrolling take mgood chunks of my time away.
I've been making a concerted effort of waking up in the morning, sitting out in my garage gym for an hour with coffee and a book. I'll do 1 workout per day, 6 times a week, and read a few pages of "Meditations" (The stoicism book). It really centers me and feels refreshing to break away from everything and just focus on my body and mind ad the real physical world. I'm not religious, so I consider that my "church" or something.
Obviously, carrying that mindset throughout the day is difficult - but having a set "no-screens" time is useful, especially when my previous schedule was this:
- Wake up + look at phone
- Sit on toilet and look at phone
- Drive to work and look at computer for 4 hours
- Have lunch and look at phone
- Look at computer for 4 more hours
- Come home, make dinner, eat food
- Look at computer or tv for 3 hours
- Go to bed and look at phone for another hour
Writing it down like this makes it very clear that this cannot be a healthy lifestyle - so for me, where work is ALL done in front of a screen, I'm increasingly trying to remove screens from the rest of my life. There's no reason for us to be on the internet all day long, there's other cool shit to do that feels way better than burning my eyes and brain receptors all day long.
There exist problems which cause years of suffering which can be solved in hours (sometimes minutes). Not every problem is like that, of course, but some are. Procrastination is like that, sometimes posture is like that, and mental effects of social media are like that. At least for now - this may get worse with time. But the solution is not to consume more content - books seem to be a common suggestion. It is to consume no content. Humans evolved to grind most of the time with a little excitement and entertainment now and again, but tech has inverted this. Its "what we want" in the same way a child wants sugar all the time, and its at once addictive and unhealthy. The screen is an insidious habit former and I'm not sure yet if there is any healthy level or use for some people.
>There exist problems which cause years of suffering which can be solved in hours (sometimes minutes). Not every problem is like that, of course, but some are. Procrastination is like that, sometimes posture is like that, and mental effects of social media are like that.
So simple to solve all those things in mere minutes, yet you can't even say how? Do I have to buy your book or subscribe to your website to find out the solution for poor posture and procrastination!
How long has it been since you've gone a single day without a screen? I don't have a miracle cure, just a suggestion to try going without for a day and see how you feel. Similar to how a pile of work in the corner can make you feel bad until you finally do it. The ratio of suffering time to cure time in both cases is very high.
Get a kindle and buy some really gripping books.
That won't help. I can get engrossed in a book/film/videogame I like. Most day-to-day task are not as interesting though. The problem is being able to concentrate on an activity that doesn't get you instant gratification.
Nothing will help if you don't put in the effort. You need to regain dopamine sensitivity and the way to do that is going on a dopamine diet. If you keep gorging on easy dopamine, it can only get worse.
Strangely I think it's why I like roadtrips so much. Sitting doing absolutely nothing for even 15 minutes is difficult for me, but I can drive for hours doing nothing but watching the world go by, even without music or podcasts on, and it's fine. And that feels good.
Plane flights.
I hope the ‘free internet all the time’ era that airlines have been threatening us with for a decade now never arrives.
Unfortunately it's nearly here thanks to Starlink
For me, AI is a classic tale of maker schedule vs manager schedule, just at massive scale:
https://www.paulgraham.com/makersschedule.html
Many individual contributors (ICs) are getting introduced to multi-tasking for the first time. When I was an IC, I was really good at getting into flow state and getting solid work done. When I first started managing, I found it really to adjust to constantly multi-tasking.
After several years of managing, I found the opposite - I became really bad at getting into flow state, my brain had been rewired to constantly context switch every 30 seconds.
Now with AI, we're seeing many managers get back into coding again: "Hey! This fits exactly into my mental model! Delegate 5 agents at once and then keep juggling between their responses!". We're also seeing many ICs feel the opposite - much stress from needing to multi-task and constantly context switch.
I don't know if everyone's brain can be rewired for multi-tasking, but I can tell you that for me it took a couple years to adjust. Everyone is on manager schedule now.
> Everyone is on manager schedule now
I think everyone is shifting between maker schedule and manager schedule constantly depending on what is going on, and that's so much more exhausting than just being in maker schedule or manager schedule full time
I have almost the exact opposite problem.
My focus is as strong as ever, maybe stronger, but as time goes on I notice that it is harder and harder for me to gracefully respond to interruptions.
It's pretty damaging to my relationships. Everyone expects you to drop everything and give people attention and empathy and be the perfect active listener. But I need a cooldown or a change of scenery to leave a task behind.
Literally turn off your internet, within 30 seconds you will understand why you cannot focus and that you developed a severe psychological addiction
It's getting easier to focus every day for me-
Why? I never used any kind of mobile phone or tablet and I use LLM's to automate away the things I don't want to do.
I use a laptop(VOIP for texts and calls), desktop PC, a b6 physical notebook and a sony voice recorder-
B6 notebook(graph) https://www.amazon.com/STALOGY-Editors-notebook-Black-S4104/...
B6 cover with pocket https://www.amazon.com/Raymay-Fujii-CN162B-Notebook-Multi-Co...
Sony voice recorder https://www.amazon.com/Sony-ICDPX370-Digital-Recorder-Built/...
*these pens are zen for drawing and writing https://www.amazon.com/uni-ball-Vision-Needle-Rollerball-Poi...
I take notes/draw constantly as I take the b6 case with me everywhere- I keep the voice recorder in the pocket of the case when I need to dictate an idea, an article, record a song idea or a comedy bit, dictate a blog entry etc-
But all the actual "work" which these days is really just ideas is done on physical paper and a pen or with my speaking voice- no tapping, swiping etc- no notifications or any of that nonsense- so I work outside mostly- in various places- on planes- standing in line- all the places everyone is tapping/swiping onto a screen around me-
It's 10x easier to focus when you are outside and/or in public with a pen and pad in hand and no screens/tech to destroy your attention-
I am interested in your phone setup. I need for for 2FA push notifications, public transit passes, and other random shit that I would love to be able to get rid of if it seemed sensible. Shed some light, I am here for it!
Unsolicited endorsement, but I bought a “Brick” device recently, and I can’t recommend it enough for cutting back on social media. Infinite scroll really destroys your ability to concentrate.
I wish people could just admit to themselves how irrelevant all this social media content is, lose interest, and keep the apps shut (or uninstall in case there's no DM feature that keeps it installed). I can't imagine needing to switch devices for this.
I couldn't give a single shit what friends or acquaintances (much less strangers) are doing in their free time day to day. They can tell me next time I see them. I have Instagram installed, but only because certain people message me there. I never scroll even a pixel.
My biggest distraction? Hacker News.
But what if it becomes relevant?
An uncertain reward is a strong motivator in psychology. You give a rat a lever that drops a food pellet, he'll push it when he's hungry. You give a rat a lever that drops a food pellet 5% of the time, he'll keep pulling it, build up a little stockpile and then gorge himself.
You give a rat a lever that does nothing and drop pellets at random times, he'll practically pull it until his arms fall off.
>My biggest distraction? Hacker News.
Don't you see it's the same thing? Why can't you just admit to yourself how irrelevant it is and lose interest? I suppose you could use it just to read an article or two, but you're in the comments as well. The apps are just their Hacker News.
> The apps are just their Hacker News.
I like this line, but respectfully disagree that they're a 1:1. The difference being relevance and some of the dynamics of use.
Hacker News pertains to my profession. It's high relevance tech news with comments from peers.
I'm not following anyone just because I know them personally (or worse, because they're famous). I'm not posting photos or videos of activities that I want friends to know about.
There's no infinite doomscrolling either (I view the front page a couple of times a day) nor are there notifications interrupting me.
And very important: there's no dark algorithm that shows a different view each time you go back to HN. It is sometimes boring but the good kind of boring.
Advice that works: - Watch the Robert Sapolsky human behavior lectures.
- Learn about basic neuropsychology, to at least have a working understand of the triad Default-Mode-Network, Salience-Network, Executive-Network.
- Watch your ambient CO2, also at night.
- Sleep so that you always wake up with no alarm.
Hey, about the lectures, do you mean these ones https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL848F2368C90DDC3D ?
Can't speak to the previous comment's intent, but I find that all of Sapolsky's lectures and interviews are fantastic to listen to, as well as his podcast with his daughter called Father-Offspring interviews where she poses a submitted question to him and he answers in brief (or not so brief) about the biological/psychological/sociological implications of the question. Fascinating stuff.
In terms of solutions on an individual-level: after a lot of trial and error I feel like what works for me is an absolutist cold-turkey-approach. I've pretty much banned all consumptive screen-time except some things like Hacker News, LinkedIn, YouTube (only existing subscriptions, no recommendations or shorts etc). Things I know I won't spend more than 15-20 minutes on and are not highly stimulating and made to high-jack your brain. Initially, I used to allow myself some leeway as in screen-time i.e. should be less than X duration, but it never worked.
The withdrawal-symptoms of going cold-turkey are intense but you get over them eventually and then once you've powered through a few weeks, and you try and go back and look at any type of "content" you see how much trash it all is. Even the "good ones" or things you tell yourself is "educational". Another important note is to have some replacements in place so that when you start seeing that new void of so much time on your hands, you don't feel empty/hollow but as a reminder to yourself that you had so many cool things to do.
There is clear irony in the statement "... an absolutist cold-turkey-approach." ... "except some things like Hacker News, LinkedIn, YouTube." That sounds closer to the opposite end of the extreme.
I knew someone would nitpick on that. Could've worded it better. But like I expanded later in the para, an absolute for platforms where I feel my brain hijacked. To make clearer, 0 minutes for those things (example-Reddit, IG, etc.). Instead of something like X minutes of screen time where I'm allowed anything. Because for the things I allow, like LinkedIn, I don't find myself using them much at all even though I have full freedom, but the utility at that point crosses whatever time is spent on cringe posts.
And allow me to return the nitpickiness as well. "That sounds closer to the opposite end of the extreme." - I don't see how that's closer to the opposite end of the extreme? Are you saying only watching YouTube channels which you've subscribe to (despite being subscribed to dozens I only see maybe one new video pop up every few days) and spending some time on TWO work-related social-media is the opposite end of the EXTREME? How?
No offense intended by my initial reply, I understand how I may have came off in that way however.
On the 'extreme' bit, this might certainly be along the lines of personal experience- but I find LinkedIn, HN, and Reddit to be among the worst offenders in the basket of attention hogs / dopamine sinks.
My reasoning there is mainly rooted in the fact that these platforms all present a couple dozen or so items that are one click away from soaking your brain (whether that be comment sections, or the parent item itself.)
Social media being work related doesn't necessarily mean that the platform lies on either end of the spectrum here, to me. I work on AI things, and work related social media is certainly an avenue thats detrimental to me- in the fact that the aforementioned platforms produce more content that I can reasonably say I have the ability to consume in a healthy manner.
Again, your experience may be different; but I wouldnt put those platforms anywhere near what cold turkey might mean for me. For me, still consuming relevant work stuff while dialing down away from the extreme would probably be sticking to one or two newsletters, which post ~monthly or so.
I think if the platform is designed in such a way that the goal of the average post is aligned with whats detrimental to attention/focus/dopamine-response, then it can't possibly be used in a straightforwardly healthy manner.
Thanks for the perspective. Yea you're right, I think different platforms have different effects on people. As an example quitting TV shows was difficult for me, whereas most people I've talked to don't even think of TV shows as a necessary bad thing.
On HN/LI, at least for me I really don't find them disruptive or time sinks. LinkedIn seems boring, HN doesn't have infinite scroll, and again most articles don't really interest me that much.
I don't use Reddit exactly because I feel the posts evoke an emotional response from me and I tend to stay there. Haven't used it in a long time, same with other infinite popular scrollers.
Anyway, my core point being for the platforms that do trouble me in my experience going all-out helped. If I set a time limit or time window or use grayscale or all those hacks it doesn't work. All those are more like gateway drugs. So if HN/LI does truly provide more noise than signal I would personally cut it out but that's not the case for me at the moment.
Yeah I’ve gone through varying degrees of cold turkey too. These social media / infinite scroll platforms are not all ‘bad’, but some are ‘worse’ than others. Unfortunately heavy platform usage is so widespread + people staying at home as a result, such that it’s harder to obtain ‘proper’ interaction and stimulation when stepping out IRL, so I think some controlled platform usage can be beneficial for filling the void. My ultimate conclusion / main point is that balance is key, as per usual. I maintain limited Reddit, hacker news, LinkedIn, YouTube usage, and have Facebook because my distant family uses that a lot. That’s all though. And I’ve tried all sorts of methodologies…making devices grayscale, timer locking my phone in a box, putting devices in faraday bag when not using as like a mental block, etc. I remain out of the loop on some shared cultural fabric that comes with being chronically online and tapped into the global town square, and that manifests in IRL experiences / feeling excluded at times, but in exchange I get more peace and a greater focus on the present, which has felt ‘better’ and more ‘natural’ anecdotally speaking.
I managed to give up Reddit (still have other attention consuming vices) and temporarily checked in to see the reactions to Arsenal finally winning the Premier League...and was repulsed by just how MEAN that site is. Discussing something as innocuous as sporting events instantly devolves into cruel, personal attacks and pulls in every topic under the sun.
It's not just Reddit that's like that, but it was especially striking after having been away for a while.
But LinkedIn has become one of the worst kinds of social media. I mean, it's full of AI grifters, people starting posts with 'I wasn't going to post this but [continues with a dumb post]' and lately even a lot of obituaries. Everybody on LinekdIn is either "very successful" or has learned a lesson by some fck up that didn't even happen. I just saw a post of a guy who pretends to be successful, rents a Porsche and then post a photo of sitting inside the rental with the caption 'Fck the haters'. Yeah, all that on the professional networking internet website called LinkedIn. LinkedIn is a shitshow.
Yea exactly. That's why I allow it. Because apart from the obvious networking benefit and a few sane people I follow who post good stuff every now and then, I basically don't doom-scroll it. So the utility at that point crosses whatever 5-10 minutes of cringe AI slop I quickly scroll past.
I've found that the only way I can reliably create focus of late is to put music on. It's as though the music prevents my mind from wandering and/or wondering because it is already being consumed
Here's something that worked for me: put your phone in your pocket and go on a design walk. While walking, design the next step in whatever you're working on. Design walks work great with more than one person, too.
Aristotle was on to something when he adopted a peripatetic approach to thinking.
I don't think this is a solution. I do this often naturally, I walk around and "plan", and it feels like I'm just avoiding sitting down and doing the actual task.
The author talks about it; when facing a difficult problem, they go get a glass of water, and get distracted. That's what this is. Anything but doing the actual task. If you're going to take a break, take an honest break and rest, but then go back to work. That's the real solution, and boy is it hard to do these days.
My wireless router runs OpenWRT, one day after a particularly embarrassing YouTube binge, I turned on the adblock plugin on my router and configured it to block YouTube as an ad.
It’s turned out to be the best thing I’ve done for myself in a long, long time.
I really noticed this a few years ago to the point that I changed a few things and they have helped.
1. I notice the movement of my attention. I used to default to something like: sit down at my computer to look something up. But before I do that, just check the email. Then I am down some sort of rabbit hole. I did this sort of thing with no awareness or conscious choice. The change is that I notice what I'm doing. Then I can rein it back. I make a choice. (I think scrolling videos gets us into a habit of not choosing what to pay attention to.)
2. Be aware of my curiosity. Try to stay in touch with it. If I get into the space of curiosity I have a lot more juice for sustained attention. Something that helps with this is long form reading, especially fiction (!). I find myself replenished for all my work. The next thing I will try is some group support: silent reading groups where you read together.
3. I have an app on my devices that limits my access to twitter and reddit etc to small windows in the day.
4. Turn off ALL notifications except text messages.
It feels pretty obvious at this point that overstimulating ourselves with a multitude of different apps, social media, short form video, and so on, is hollowing out our capacity to focus. Cal Newport had a great opinion article in the NYT recently that spoke to this, and how reading might help us "train" our minds when so many media are adversely affecting our attention.'
The author doesn’t mention it, so it seems appropriate to suggest asking a doctor for attention deficit disorder screening. The cultural forces in play encouraging us to flit and switch constantly are a perfect distraction from the possibility one’s own brain is complicit.
I would caution a little against the prevailing wisdom of diagnosis-as-panacea. I've had a diagnosis for most of my life, but never seen stimulants as worth it (admittedly I've not tried them long term, but that's because after reading a whole lot about it I don't want it in my body). I don't think the diagnosis changes anything for me other than that. It's very much a case of "now what". I suppose some people find a great weight lifted from their shoulders at the idea others struggle with the same thing, or that their struggles aren't due to a personal failing. But I can't escape the next step which is that you still have to do go out and do all the same stuff anyway...
I feel similarly. I have a lot of tendencies characteristic of ADHD, but I'm undiagnosed, and I don't think I'll seek out the diagnosis either. I don't intend to take any stimulants, and the particular identity of having ADHD means little to me, so the diagnosis wouldn't change much. As you say, I'd still need to figure out how to live this life in these conditions anyway.
ADHD isn't something you suddenly develop at 30 or 40. You can get diagnosed later, but the signs are meant to have been there since childhood.
ADHD is something you can rapidly develop an inability to manage at that age, though — after trauma or burnout. Or maybe following RTO after a couple of years of a more peaceful WFH environment.
You can get through school without failing, you can get through university and early jobs with hyperfocus, you can be known for being the person who gets bored easily but can do incredible things. Maybe you are late paying bills, never get round to doing certain big tasks, rent when you should be looking to buy a house, all that. Maybe you have friendships that never quite develop into romantic relationships, maybe you are untidy, maybe you stay in a lot because you fear you tire people out socially. But you bimble on and you convince yourself it's OK.
My ADHD burnout started in my late forties. Before that I had any number of explanations for the unusual, eccentric aspects of my life, for why I was a freelancer rather than in a steady job, all of that. I still managed to get big jobs done with relentless bursts of focus. I had already quit social media, I had already learned to manage some distractions, and it still happened.
But it's clearly ADHD. Having read about it, "inattentive" (hilarious name for it) ADHD explains me to a shocking degree; I don't need a diagnosis.
I just never failed badly enough that the issue was forced, until now.
I burned out to the point that it feels like cognitive decline. I am broken and I struggle with everything. What the writer is talking about is so reminiscent of the early stages of my burnout that I worry for him.
> What the writer is talking about is so reminiscent of the early stages of my burnout that I worry for him.
Except it's everyone everywhere. Hands up in the thread anyone who doesn't recognise some of these symptoms. Our jobs, tech and societies are making us ill.
It is but some people cope better than others, right? Even now, some people thrive on social media and make the best of it.
One prosaic explanation is that in many people there is a predisposition to a mixture of hyperfocus and being distracted that society used to place at least some value on ("jack of all trades, master of none", researchers, multi-instrumentalists, artists, librarians, scientists).
The stereotypical image of ADHD is hyperactive ADHD — people who can't hold down a job, get caught up in stupid outcomes or violent outbursts, have accidents, get addicted to drugs, can't settle, distract and annoy everyone.
But it's increasingly clear to me that hidden "inattentive" ADHD is a normal human attention type, and yet those who have it, apart from being chatterboxes, tend to experience the downsides less visibly.
Another question is: is it really "everywhere" evenly, or do we see it more in "knowledge work" careers like IT and research where ADHD people (who are easily bored but highly attentive to interesting subjects) used to thrive?
That is, are we seeing it over and over in the tech industry because inattentive ADHD and the aptitudes (multiple talents, micro-expertise) it tends to foster drove us to this in the first place?
It would be good if society went back to a lower-distraction model, but it is not going to. Some of us are going to need to understand how to keep our brains under control, and some of us are going to need medication or stimulants. GLP-1 is normalised for another societally-driven illness, after all.
And again, it's not that he is distracted like everyone is, that I'm pointing out — it is that it is deteriorating in a way that worries him and he now needs external monitoring (buddy/honour systems) to cope at all. He is, I fear, heading towards burnout that can be life-changing.
Alongside the siblings, the types of challenges you face as a kid and as an adult are different. You might be able to manage schoolwork on natural ability alone while your parents and other adults are your "life personal assistants" that take care of a lot of things for you, but fail when it comes to managing adult responsibilities yourself, or maybe being the "life personal assistant" to a child of your own.
Symptoms become more obvious as you age, which can feel like it came on later. As part of an assessment they do go through your childhood - if you had trouble in school for example that's a classic ADHD symptom, but there's a lot more to consider. It's not always obvious and I've met plenty of people in their 30s, 40s, 50s who only just realized they had it this year and got assessed.
Glyphack's experience definitely mirrors my own and I just got diagnosed with ADHD this year and medication absolutely helps my focus.
If you're wondering if you have ADHD this is basically the pre-assessment GPs use in the UK (which then continues to triage and then a full assessment):
https://adhduk.co.uk/adult-adhd-screening-survey/
FFS. The solution to our machines eating our brains should not be "just take amphetamine, bro".
Machines aren't going away. I need a solution that is available right now.
Except ADHD was there long before the machines, and stimulants have been scientifically proven time and time again to be helpful in treating ADHD at a very minimal sides effects cost.
TFA links attention on one hand, and social media and LLM use on the other. I'm not making any points about the scientific validity of those conclusions, but that's the context in which this discussion is taking place.
Personally, I find a very strong link between my devices and my ability to focus, as they're the space in which I spaff my time. I do not believe myself to have ADHD, I believe that the machines I use offer limitless ways for me to lose track when I'm tired.
I'm deeply skeptical of pharmacological solutionism, particularly in the domain of mental health. A variety of drugs can be a boon, life-saving to many, but are over-prescribed and treat symptoms not causes.
With regard to amphetamines in particularly (we called it 'whizz' where I'm from, back in the day), we're talking about a class of drug that can cause dependency, problems with sleep and sex, anxiety and plenty more. I would not say they're not without side effects in the slightest.
Sure, great if this sort of stuff helps, but I find the "just get a diagnosis" line utterly inadequate and borderline disturbing.
I agree that screens contribute to the issues of attention and executive dysfunction. But the thing with ADHD is that there is no "treating the cause", because the cause is genetic and there is no cure, there is only management of the symptoms. As for dependency, people with ADHD report to chronically forget to take their stimulants, so there's that. For me personally, I find things like weed way more addictive, and I didn't notice any issues with sleep or sex (and I think you might be confusing stimulants with SSRIs here in regards to sex).
I agree that not everyone having issues today would be qualifying for ADHD. There are way too many things about the zeitgeist that are overloading everyone. But still:
1. you can't prescribe someone a fixed society
2. what constitutes "over prescription" is subjective, and some increase in prescriptions is to be expected in line with better knowledge and so ability to diagnose people who were previously missed
3. contrary to several other psychiatric medications, stimulants have a known MoA and consistently beat placebo
4. amphetamine taken recreationally is often in different forms and much higher doses than would be taken on prescription, by people who aren't in need. Things like sleep and anxiety can actually be improved by such prescriptions
You don't believe in them, for yourself or others, and you've been trained well enough to couch your disbelief (eg "great if this sort of stuff helps") so as to avoid someone directly addressing your disbelief in them. Yeah there are side effects, but it's a personal choice. No one's going to force you to take them if you don't want them, but for people that find them useful, going around telling everybody that they're over prescribed and have side effects doesn't help people who would benefit from them get access to them.
> just get a diagnosis" line utterly inadequate
There's an entire industry with licensing boards and factories and regulations. How much more money do you want spent on the problem in order to form an adequate response, and what would that look like to you?
Regarding the urge to “check what’s out there”, one simple rule I follow is: spend around an hour in the morning catching up with HN, a few reddits, a couple newsletters, and Bluesky. I completely avoid Twitter/X and LinkedIn, trusting that anything significant enough bubbles up to those other places.
Most important — do NOT check any of those the rest of the day.
So you start your day passively scrolling and dopamine front-loading which basically sets the tone for the whole day… I think the “right” way is the exact opposite which is to start the day dopamine-starved and context-free and only scroll at the end of the day
Agree with this one and can vouch for it, for a while while living closer to nature I would start my day by drinking water and taking a walk in the forest, actively avoiding screens for my first hour awake. I need to find something similar to do now, maybe water the plants...
Interesting take. I should try that !
It will continue to be a mystery only solvable by the dwindling number of people clever enough to combat the problem with strategies like the many offered here.
Until the real problem is identified...which IMO is that programming itself is just harder to concentrate on in 2026 than it was in 1989. There are way too many possibilities of how to do things, and way too much difference between a good choice (say getting Claude to do it) and a bad one (say, writing a linked-list traverser yourself). Humans work well with the few variables involved in creating things like that linked-list traverser. But they require tons more energy if everything is on the table. Right library? Right platform? Right coding agent? Right way to keep myself from getting distracted?
In contrast, doing almost anything else seems like a relief for your brain.
Not relatable. "Internet is not real, and strangers' opinions don't mean anything" is an ethos that I have been religiously following for as long as I can remember.
Also, I do a lot of things offline. Read physical books, run after work, and tend to stay out of the internet mob altogether. Oh, having no Instagram or Twitter helps a lot.
The faster you realize that we have a limited time on this planet the more ruthless you become with your time. My time is expensive and my employer buys it at a premium. So I am extremely judicious about what I am reading, watching and who I am interacting with.
Building the muscle takes time but it's not that hard afterwards.
I had the same exact issue. Turns out I have depression. Currently I'm on meds, therapy and functioning on 80% my ability but it's still better than near 0
I’m guess “all you need is attention” is a good reflection of ourselves as well AI.
I’m off anything with an algorithmic feed. My brain can’t handle these. I turn off shorts and YouTube auto play using iOS safari extensions. I block the linked in feed. I read a handful of blogs via rss. The most regular feed I check is HN a few times a day. I’m reading books again for the first time in a decade or so.
It feels good and certainly not worse than before.
Something I really grew to hate over my time at various software firms were complex and flaky stacks with big test loops, and it's exactly this kind of reason why. Ideally, I have a problem, I want to put my head in the problem space and stay focused there until it's done. Every time a test suite takes five minutes to run, or I have to look up some obscure docs in my web browser, or I have to go somewhere else to rebuild a failing service, is an off-ramp to that flow state, and that's where I lose a whole hour to procrastination.
Traction between intention and result is the most powerful tool in the brain's kit. We are made to spin our wheels often, it's adversarial.
Gain and keep traction. Attention is our most valuable resource. If you chose what you attend to, you can achieve at the limit of your physical and mental potential. If you attend to what others wish you attend to, you will be ceding the difference to parasitic systems.
This sounds a little bit like ADHD, but the common advice of getting medication isn't always applicable. Yes, it is definitely worth finding out if you have ADHD and diagnosing it, because if you do, it will help you understand yourself much better and might prevent problems further down the road like anxiety and depression. But medication isn't always the answer. ADHD might be entirely manageable for some people if their work is interesting enough.
Some things to try:
- noise cancelling headphones with white noise background (Iceland White or Naturespace apps provide really good quality natural recordings)
- clean desk
- clear split between work and non-work environments
I recently deleted social media from my phone. With nothing left, I found myself compulsively checking HN anytime I had a free moment.
That’s shifted now after a few weeks. I’m no longer filling those moments.
The wins are subtle but nice:
- when I watch a movie, I don’t feel the need to start scrolling
- I’m reading at night again. This is far more relaxing and gets me to bed at 9 - 10
- less doom / gloom
- consumption is more intentional. I consider what I am interested in then find, rather than be sucked down the algorithmic vortex of what’s proven to engage me
You're just getting older and realizing something about yourself. The only way to preserve your attention is to guard it like a jewel. It is a learned behavior once you enter the real world.
I’ve started evaluating what seem like brain “modes”. 1. Constant flow of information with disjointed context (social media, brain fracking, moving in a crowd) triggers hunter-gatherer instinct that is hard to stop. The dopamine seek in a way. Even if you stop your brain seeks it, so unless you really need this mode for work, it helps to postpone or time box these to the end of the day (kind of like some would do with drinking alcohol).
2. How you start your day after sleep creates framing of the brain and you can start iterating on frames and how you drive them depending on your needs. Maybe set a schedule of things to at need done the night before (a continuity thread) maybe boxing the activities to different types at different times. It’s all sciencing the self but the brain is definitely conditioning to things and you have to mind it.
3. ADHD meds from what i’ve read are caffeine on steroids (blocking adenosine receptors, but not really adding to executive function). From personal observation ADHD also feels like a mode one can be put into by wrong brain framing (at least for people not diagnosed).
There are non-stimulant ADHD meds. Strattera being a big one.
one day maybe in 30 years - research is gonna come out - on how much a hit on productivity Slack/teams was.
based on my estimate it might be 60%. that's 60% of white collar gdp gone.
I have noticed, the more teams use slack/teams - the teams are usually bigger more than necessary. there's more meetings & less work gets done. more 'quick chats' vs teams who are email first (async) - no immediate response required.
I wonder how old the author is. Losing the ability to stay focused on tasks is a pretty common aging symptom. I have felt it now that I'm in my 40s
I disagree that it’s a common aging symptom, unless we are talking 70+. How do you know it’s your age instead of a sign of the times?
> So how can I regain my ability to focus?
Getting diagnosed with ADHD and taking meds did the trick for me.
Not sure how relevant this is, since inability to focus was always an issue for me.
I don't think that the author has ADHD, because they used to be more attentive in the past. In the case of ADHD, it was also the case as a child.
I also got the diagnosis of ADHD (inattentive type) a few months ago, in the interviews they asked whether I also had these symptoms as a child. Not easy to figure out because as a child things like finishing things on time are not so important yet, and my high IQ compensated for a lack of focus. Only in secondary school it became a problem, and my grades dropped.
I can attest to experiencing virtually everything the author describes here. I admire the ability to articulate these mundane-sounding challenges that greatly impact your quality of life.
One of the best ways I have found not to get distracted while in a task, with other more interesting or something that you do not want to forget, is NOT to use your device to do it or even add to your TODO, or note it down but to use an actual notebook (may be a small memo note) to quickly write out and continue with your current task/more.
When you are done, visit and parse your sidenotes.
Of course, the are the usual No Notifications, timers, etc.
This week I've got all the feeds: slack, email, ticketing system, dev story board, prod system health, prod user activity, prod job queues -- all coming to one dashboard. They are distilled by a local LLM, when I get bursts it offloads to Google's low cost Flash lite so I only read the essential text, no threads, no scrolling and scanning to get to the content.
It's freaking amazing, I know everything going on. I can look at it every half hour and be caught up in three minutes. I double click about one in ten messages to reply and it takes me right to the source app to reply.
In my case, I'm "on the spectrum," so focus isn't a problem. In fact, too much focus can be a problem.
One of the things that happens to me, is I get "in the zone," usually, when coding. Sometimes, an hour can pass, and I barely notice.
But I am also aware that this is not the way most people are.
Claude Code has made my computer as - or even more - addicting as social media.
I created this for me https://rainbreak.franzai.com/ to force myself into a break. Into breaking out of the agent loop.
This is really cute but also really funny.
Consider turning off the internet before you go to bed and not turning it on for at least 1 hour after you wake up. I think I got this idea from Craig Mod (who I believe does no internet until after lunch). I've been doing this for a few months. The initial hour is really good (very easy to e.g. read or work calmly on some software projects without distraction) but I also find it puts me in the right mindset for the rest of the day.
Kind of hard if you work 9-5 need to know what's gonna happen before you pull up to the office. Do I have a meeting at 9 AM kind of thing.
Yes the night before you look at your calendar and figure out what time you need to be online at.
In general if you want a no-internet 1 hour in the morning, organize yourself to wake up 1 hour earlier (maybe going to sleep 1 hour earlier). You sleeping until 8am, and you sleeping until 7am and having no internet for 1 hour, is equivalent to the outside world.
Rather ironic: I was in the process of moving all Android apps to a second user to be able to stop all apps (and just not DnD, because I'll know I may have some messages waiting for me after disabling DnD) when I got distracted by HN (just one tiny minute).
Another thing I'm testing is having VPN OFF with its kill-switch ON.
As much as I love and embrace LLMs, they are clearly eliminating all flow state that was previously inevitable when coding something
Sounds like the answer may be simpler than it seems. You could just be tired. You said you’ve been balancing a lot for years and years. Take some time to just focus on yourself.
Meditate, go on walks, wake up earlier, always have breakfast, and for the love of all that is good, get enough sleep.
> Unfortunately it’s not possible anymore because people in Iran cannot have a stable internet connection nowadays
Even the fellas in Iran are struggling with staying focused..
I'm using an app called Focusmate (no affiliation) on a daily basis - scheduling 5-6 hour sessions per day.
You talk to a stranger for a few seconds, say what you're working on, and after 50 minutes you say goodbye. They stay on the video throughout the session, but muted.
It helps me focus because I always think "it's only 50 minutes".
Also, I recently deleted Instagram and it made a huge impact.
Yeah I’ve done nearly 3000 sessions on there and it’s been a life saver.
Not sure why you got downvoted. This works for a lot of people. Doesn’t work for me because I find the video aspect to be awkward, but the concept of ‘body doubling’ as a way of enabling focus is well established.
[Editing to note that perhaps you were downvoted because OP lives in a place with internet issues and couldn’t use Discord to cowork with friends, so the video and bandwidth heavy approach of Focusmate isn’t a viable recommendation]
This is a real problem, a long time in the making. Over fifty years ago advertising started to affect the way people thought: I argue that they trained people to not be content with a classic simple life. Fast forward to the best tech focused on messing with people's attention. I like Center for Humane Technology for discussions of tech that is designed to help people, not control them.
Pretty much the reason why I reset my X password, sent that to a friend then used HN for my tech news fix instead.
On HN eventually there isn't much interesting stuff on the front page, on X it pulls you in with great effectiveness
I feel quite the same (struggle basically) as the OP.
My “stack” is self-control for blocking social and Gmail access.
And now I built QuiteCode to focus on deep coding and learning on a more mindful way.
https://gethopp.github.io/quite-code/
It seems like I have challenges with both extremes, I can get pulled into my work and not look up again for 10 hours. But with virtually everything else, I have no energy to see it through. It is rare for me to watch a movie from start to finish. I used to be able to shut off my brain.
dopamine fracking.
https://igerman.cc/blog/dopamine-fracking/
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48440792
I completely disagree with the author.
Is the goal of the "dopamine fracking" metaphor is to represent a "pure concentrated dopamine hit", I would argue it is a more apt representation of what hard stimulants do to your brain (i.e. a shortcut to massive amount of dopamine release).
The perverse effect of social media addiction is more akin to a slow I.V. drip where you are always in a slightly aroused state, which then becomes your baseline and any cut from it is a net negative in your life.
I read the metaphor differently. Doesn't invalidate your view, and I see that your view better captures the day to day experience.
I read the author as saying that his mind is being fracked, with all the implicit destruction that operation can cause, so that others can extract something from him. Yeah, I see that the analogy breaks down, because the extractors are after attention not dopamine (we're the ones who get the dopamine).
I think exposure (or multiple) to SARS-CoV-2 should be taken under consideration when talking about all of this..
This is me. I hate it. I'm working though (ever so slowly) The Global Village by Marshall McLuhan and I really like the metaphor technology going from Visual to Acoustic. Put another way the past had a serial enforcement we don't have today with always-on connections and easy access to distractions.
I've been trying to introduce more friction into my life to make doing harder things the right thing. 1. I have a rooted Orchid F1 flip phone with Telegram and Firefox focus. Telegram lets me TTS to an openclaw instance if I need to get something "out" but long interactions are awful with the small screen and latency. Firefox focus is also terrible in all the right ways. If I'm out and HAVE to search for something this is enough of a break glass solution but for the most part it's just calls and texts. 2. I carry an xteink x3 for books. I'm trying to read more so this being the only thing available has me reaching for it more than I'd normally do.
I don't have a good solution for things at work yet. Maybe I'll start blocking all websites or doing strict pomodoros.
Water, fish oil, vitamin d, and food. If i forget any of these I have the same symptoms.
My 10 cents lately, pink noise. Blocks out a lot of distraction and helps focus.
I do have this problem. Its not caused by my age or mental decline. Its simply too many things happening too fast, to many people asking questions and too many topics to pursue without any pause.
Work, family, life, world around you, all scream „me now, my problem, do this, do that, watch this, listen to that”.
Its exhausting. Humans are not built to be constantly in overdrive. I just want to sit and have peace of mind.
Issue is the moment you hit the breaks - „you lose” sign pops up and well.. you fade away. Maybe its a good thing?
Long walks with no phone help me come back with a lot of focus and less stress.
As it happens I'm currently working on an app to help with this problem, effectively a soft habit tracker designed for daily reflection and mindful progression. It touches on some of the themes in this HN thread - helping create quiet space, time away from stimulation.
It's an early stage, fully functional but I'm looking for beta users. If you're interested in helping out or simply trying the app, please complete the form on https://coghance.com !
I can focus at home. I have a terrible time focusing in the open office floor plan at work. I have to wear noise-canceling headphones just to cut down on some of the noise. Even then, people are constantly stopping by to chit-chat or make small talk. I hate it.
This feels so familiar. Since more than a year or so Im witnessing more and more content being produced. One year ago or so it was enough to visit HN main page once a day and be up to day. These day, it needs a visit every few hours, the main page changes constantly. Not only that but also the amount of content received via newsletters.
Worst is with LLMs and coding agents, I give it a task to work on then go browsing the web, the LLM finishes in 2 minutes but I come back after 10…
At the end of the day, my mind feels super tired even though its the LLM that did the heavy lifting. I also barely remember what I was browsing 15 minutes ago. At this point I can honestly say - Im in trouble.
I listened to the dose effect [1] and that has really helped me get my attention back.
I’ve deleted TikTok and now get blocks of focused work done and I haven’t been this effective or happy in years.
I genuinely believe the next generation will be defined by people who can and who cannot focus their attention and get stuff done.
[1] https://open.spotify.com/show/2YCIVADHhUbpTtuCIvV7dG?si=lOiV...
I don’t know if this helps, as kids don’t make it easier BUT they do make you much more aware of how valuable your time is. One free hour as a parent feels like a full free day to someone without kids.
TL;DR get kids.
"It feels like my brain finds a way to do something else and avoid painful situations like boredom or hard work."
You just described ADHD.
YouTube is really the thing that got me - the thing is it's not bad content, I don't watch slop, I watch quality stuff from interested, passionate individual creators and I could listen to them talk about their interests all day.
It doesn't wreck my day or make me feel anxious or anything, no doom scrolling involved, but it sure can turn into a huge time sink very fast.
I'm in the same boat as OP.
I've learned to realize how many times it's boredom or stress triggering the distraction.
I see also other people struggle as much or worse than I do.
> I am waiting for something then I go browse the web and I get distracted.
I firmly believe that we've gotten so used to always-at-hand phones/apps that we can no longer handle spending a few minutes doing "nothing". I see this in my teenager.
The OP may or may not struggle with ADHD, but this is something that IMO isn't ADHD but rather a new pervasive trait across our modern society. Everything must be instant now. Emails and now chats must be replied to instantly. Service/delivery must be as instant as possible. No more waiting, no more "doing nothing". We're all operating at high speed, even during our "down time". And for no good reason -- we're just inflicting this on ourselves.
A habit that I've taken up which makes me quite happy and I think solidly helps my focus is working offline.
Some days, I'll set a timer for two hours, and then just work offline for those two hours.
I have most of the documentation for tools I use available offline, I'm a bit math enjoyer so I have like 5GB of maths textbooks/papers to study, and programming offline, especially when you've got docs for everything you use, is not only still doable in the LLM age, but also quite enjoyable :)
Reading the article, basically all of the distractions the author mentions are internet-based (HN, LLMs), so perhaps adopting an offline work habit might help them too :)
The standards we set are off: I recently discovered 75 hard, and it's mind-boggling to me that the mental equivalent of "do two separate workouts, 45 minutes each" is "read 10 pages of a non-fiction book."
If it's a physics textbook, sure, that balance makes sense. If it's Atomic Habits (no offense to that book) then 10 pages is just not equivalent.
I agree with this article, but I found the easiest ways to work on my focus are the following:
- Don't use social media. It's all garbage and counterproductive for your attention. Once you stop using it, you start to forget it exists.
- Always carry a Kindle, and when you're bored, read instead of reaching for other apps or games.
- Try to read 15 minutes before work, 30 minutes during lunch, and 15 minutes after work. That's an hour of reading a day — enough to get through a lot of books and papers.
- If you use an elliptical, read while on it. It takes practice, but it can be done.
You will see the biggest gains by saying bye to social media.
I got a secure computer room professionally installed.
Check your diet. ADD/ADHD has been linked to histamine intolerance.
Perhaps we should learn from the ADHDs on how to resist the dopamine hacks.
Oh wait, I am one and I can't resist it since day 1 on this world.
And yet people are still happily driving 10 LLM sessions concurrently.
idk discipline? try retraining your brain on non-digital activities. Pick a long running non-digital activity and gitrdone.
Dude needs a vacation.
> So how can I regain my ability to focus?
Read.
Not the zennial definition of listen to a podcast – actual books.
Here's how to reboot your reading.
Do this during a break, when you have a couple weeks. Or schedule a couple hours in the evenings. But make the time be a "habit" block that you require yourself to do. (Something else has to give – consider letting your streaming queue get longer for a bit. And replace your HN bookmark with https://www.daemonology.net/hn-daily/ … seriously!)
1. Start with trash, an "airport novel" type with giant print double spaced lines so the short story looks like a proper book. Pure story dopamine.
2. Then one with normal print and single spaced lines with enough substance to engage meta or systems thought as you read, maybe a Len Deighton or Eric Ambler if you're feeling able. Your brain relearns getting to think doesn't actually hurt.
3. Next shift into non-fiction. Something about Norway's heavy water sabotage against Nazi Germany, for instance; or preferably something field-adjacent to your field, with both narrative and knowledge. Re-priming your dopamine to hit from knowledge too.
4. Finally move into your own field, now knowledge you haven't been able to stick with to learn but wanted to. For this read something from a genuine practitioner, not the LinkedIn-fluencer TED talk transcripts in book form that top charts these days. Leveling up is its own reward.
Once you've made it through that, you should (a) be able to read again, (b) be able to focus on semantic processing, (c) regain your ideas to words to ideas mapping necessary for product/platform systems analysis or software engineering.
Importantly, prefer physical books or (“try this one cool trick!”) a full A4 or 8.5"x11" page e-paper tablet turned landscape, set up to read 2 pages side by side. When this is configured right (smallest margins, right font and line size) ending up same size as a paperback. The retention of two pages at a time, and the fewer page turns (fewer, larger, memory chunks) per book, is better for regaining focus and better for improving working memory. The smaller the font you can still read quickly and easily, the better, for the same reason.
Set your black mirror devices out of reach during the time block, don't have the TV on, ideally no music, or (“try this one cool trick too…”) while reading the first book on your list: play music in a language you don't understand but that sounds reasonably close to your own. For English speakers, germanic or romance languages are good. This makes your language centers busy wanting to comprehend the audio channel along with your visual channel, so your brain eats up the book without your mind wandering.
Using the method above, you can work to being able to sit with and absorb hardbound textbooks in just a series of 4 or 5 escalating challenges.
You'll find you regained intraday focus as well.
• • •
PS. Did you update that bookmark? Yesterday's HN Daily happens to be relevant as is so often the case: https://resobscura.substack.com/p/quality-non-fiction-books-...