I recall, pre-iPhone, sitting in a pub waiting for a friend to arrive, staring into the middle-distance. I noticed a young man sitting at the bar with a phone. He'd pick it up, check for messages, put it down, take a sip of beer then his leg would start to judder (he was on a bar stool), then repeat the whole thing. A cadence of around 45s. "What a weirdo" I thought to myself. Turns out I was the weirdo, heh.
Yep. When I worked at Apple and took the (Apple) bus to work, I would arrive early at the bus stop and wait with the other employees. Lined up, everyone had their phones out, staring down. Me, I was looking at the old out-of-comnmision payphone, at the cars going by, at the copies of "Avisador" in the busted newspaper stand.
Boredom is a good thing for the brain.
And, honestly, I must be of the older generation because I find nothing very interesting on my phone. It takes pictures and gives me directions. I'm a lap-topper.
The internet is not really organised in a way for you to do anything useful if you are bored. There’s no “learn about the world” course you take when you have nothing else to do.
In fact, all the stuff we’ve designed to capture attention is almost the exact opposite of a good use of the internet.
I find it very difficult to queue up good content to read or listen to on a daily basis. And I try. Imagine all the people without the time to discover enough good content.
> The internet is not really organised in a way for you to do anything useful if you are bored. There’s no “learn about the world” course you take when you have nothing else to do.
I'd argue you're holding it wrong. The repository of all human knowledge absolutely does contain numerous "learn about the world" courses in all shapes and forms. HN, arXiv, Wikipedia, parts of YouTube, and dedicated learning platforms abound and each probably has enough content for a lifetime of learning. I agree it's not designed to make this easy, but it's also not particularly hard. Hit "random article" a few times on Wikipedia and you're off to the races.
Well, it's not all knowledge. It doesn't know the inner thoughts of everyone. And human explicit knowledge is limited, it can't tell me whether I'll enjoy a certain bookstore if I go there.
And it's only explicit knowledge, not tacit knowledge. Nobody learns skills from browsing the Internet.
> There’s no “learn about the world” course you take
There's practically an undoable number of hours of free courses on Coursera, Udemy, Khan Academy, and others. Thousands of hours of interesting material on youtube.
I used to think so, but with more experience a lot of dark patterns and perverse incentives are becoming obvious. These people are not there to explain something interesting in a useful way, they are there to get your eyeballs to extract money from advertising or a Patreon. They are not teaching you, they are making you think they teach you to make you feel satisfied and give them money. Of course some of them are actually good, but a lot are not really.
I would agree that most people don't use the internet for that when they're bored (including me more often than I'd like to admit), and the big tech websites are all about capturing attention and not providing good uses of the internet, for the most part, but that doesn't mean it's not available for people if they want it.
Last night I was working through some shader tutorials, for instance, albeit on my laptop (I prefer laptop to phone when possible).
I also playtest one of my games (current one has a mobile version), or brainstorm and take notes for my game designs, or read up on something I want to do with one of my games, or go through my github issues list and sometimes even look at my code repos while I'm killing time while out and about (I mostly don't use my phone when I'm not out, I'll just use my laptop).
I try to remember I have a Kindle app with lots of informative books to read but I do forget about a little too often.
When I was younger, I would program text-based games all the time on my TI graphing calculator. I would even bring that instead of my Game Boy to my grandparents sometimes, because I just wanted to code more of my games.
I do think that capability is lacking on phones. It's technically possible, but the environment (at least on iPhone) is so sandboxed it's difficult to do effectively, or at least it was the last time I tried. Anything you're making on the device directly does not have access to the same capabilities as what you make from a laptop or desktop, and that's a shame.
I have a massive folder of ebooks, pdfs, YouTube videos, etc that I've downloaded on my phone. I also have a list in Google keep of about twenty of these things in order of preference, so I always have something to read/watch/listen to based on my level of energy.
> The internet is not really organised in a way for you to do anything useful if you are bored. There’s no “learn about the world” course you take when you have nothing else to do.
I have a list of links to read for when I have time to do so. But yeah, if I don’t have anything to do, I prefer just doing nothing than seeking engagement. Social media are a mind killer.
> I find it very difficult to queue up good content to read or listen to on a daily basis.
When I come across something that looks interesting, I add it to the list and stuff accumulates until I go through each link and read the page, usually during my 30 minutes commute. (or not, sometimes it is not as interesting as I thought it would be). For me it works quite well.
Sure there is. I used to read Wikipedia's Article of the Day every day at lunch. I only stopped because I found even more interesting (to me) things to read about.
> There’s no “learn about the world” course you take when you have nothing else to do.
I've been testing https://brilliant.org/ and like it so far. Its scope is limited to STEM topics, but the thing I like about it is you can set courses to bite sized daily chunks as small as 5 minutes.
What are you talking about? Find any topic you're vaguely interested in, say history. Type "history" in YouTube, and you'll very quickly find enough videos to fill hundreds of lifetimes, to suit exactly what you want. Prefer high-production high-graphics videos? Check. Prefer a person speaking into a microphone? Check. Prefer a university lecture? Check.
Rinse and repeat for anything you're vaguely interested in.
The problem is way too many interesting things to see, not too few.
I think the point is that mindfulness in your present moment, if done intentionally, can be a beneficial practice. There is value in not constantly seeking dopamine hits and allowing your brain to feel discomfort in doing nothing. It's really up to the individual when they choose to do this, though. I don't personally enjoy doing this in public and when having to do stuff like commute or try to get through a work day. But I can respect that others do.
I'm the same. I spend somewhere between 1 and 5 hours on the phone daily, but 80 % of that is writing articles and reading books I don't have on my Kindle.
Indeed. I spent surely a few thousand hours in books as a teenager. Now I spend majority of time on my phone reading short- and long-form non-fiction. “Time on phone” is irrelevant without specifying the activity. Perhaps not if it automatically implies “time on social networks”.
They very obviously weren't claiming that, they were responding to a specific comment about there being nothing interesting on smartphones. Try to interpret what people say with good faith.
the subtext of their comment, the unspoken implication, the between the lines meaning was that it's fine people are on their phone all the time, because some of them are reading books
Actually, you phrased your previous post as though it were a fact, not an opinion, so it's more like "A didn't happen for me, so A does not happen for everyone."
I was challenging your assertion, not making a counter-assertion.
I think the implication was that it didn't have to be on tiktok. it's a choice that people make. the phone doesn't force them. rejecting the phone entirely isn't some form of virtue or moral purity.
There's nothing intrinsically wrong with hedonistic activities, so long as they don't harm other people and so long as you avoid things like addiction. Even something like using heroin isn't immoral in and of itself (except according to some religions), it's just that it's so unlikely you'll be able to use it once without going down the path of addiction that most of us sensibly treat it as something to never do.
Social media can cause mental health issues, qnd can lead to addiction to it, but that doesn't mean that using it is a moral failing. And frankly, neither is becoming addicted to heroin a moral failing (though most people would consider it a personal failing since we would dislike being addicted to it), it's a healthcare issue not a morality issue. The only moral failing would be committing offences against other people because of the addiction, eg stealing from somebody to pay for the drugs.
that doesn't negate what I said at all, not striving to keep a healthy body and healthy mind, not working on developing yourself, on elevating yourself, not wanting to become better, IS a moral failing
and certain hedonistic activities, like the social media dopamine dispensers, although they do not hurt other people, do hurt the moral imperative of growing yourself as a person
>>not striving to keep a healthy body and healthy mind, not working on developing yourself, on elevating yourself, not wanting to become better, IS a moral failing
Whoa. How is it any of your business how I live my life so long as I am not impacting you or society in any way? I'm 72 years old and I spend my time the way I want to spend my time. I don't exercise any longer. And that will almost certainly shorten how much longer I live. How is that any of your business?
> Whoa. How is it any of your business how I live my life so long as I am not impacting you or society in any way? I'm 72 years old and I spend my time the way I want to spend my time. I don't exercise any longer. And that will almost certainly shorten how much longer I live. How is that any of your business?
Because your actions will impact society. You might get healthcare, paid for by the rest of society, which may or may not be caused by you not exercising. Or it might be caused by you exercising.
The way people raise their kids affects society, or even simply their decision to have or not have a certain number of kids impacts society. Some personal actions can collectively impact society.
Just because your choices might not affect me, and they don't, at all, doesn't mean they're moral, doesn't mean they're good.
I would rank self-actualization, personal growth, as the second rule behind the golden rule, and there are many schools of philosophy where that's the case: aristotelian ethics, kantian ethics, existentialism, etc.
Why should I (or anyone) care where you (or anyone) rank anything?
I'm pretty comfortable with my ranking of things. What someone else thinks about how I decide to live my life is pretty much at the bottom of my ranking board.
> I think the implication was that it didn't have to be on tiktok. it's a choice that people make. the phone doesn't force them. rejecting the phone entirely isn't some form of virtue or moral purity.
I don't think staring at a bus stop is a meaningful step towards changing the American nightmare. We have a lot of problems due to poor leadership in this country and in the world, and people understandably struggle to take meaningful action to replace that leadership (i.e. vote in their best interest, and vote based on meaningful things that most people don't consider at all when voting). Instead we bicker about DEI and what genitals someone has under their clothes when they use certain restrooms instead of, you know, a voting and election process that is more representative and accountable. Until there is greater class consciousness and people have more emotional bandwidth to consider things outside what is immediately placed in front of them with instagram/tiktok/corporate news/advertising, I don't think it's going to change much. This is a weird tangent.
> I don't think staring at a bus stop is a meaningful step towards changing the American nightmare.
That is not even close to what I was speaking to. It is just part of the process of waking up and becoming unattached and less dependent and more aware of your surroundings and feeling the suffering so you create the will to change things.
> Instead we bicker about DEI and what genitals someone has under their clothes when they use certain restrooms instead of, you know, a voting and election process that is more representative and accountable.
All of this was brought to you by the internet by the people you complain about below.
> Until there is greater class consciousness and people have more emotional bandwidth to consider things outside what is immediately placed in front of them with instagram/tiktok/corporate news/advertising, I don't think it's going to change much.
Class consciousness starts off line, by helping the poor in your local area. Take a look at what the Black Panthers did and you will get an idea. If people are staring at TikTok it is highly unlikely that are running into this information.
Though commonly associated with the sensational, the Black Panthers conceived of and implemented a wide array of meaningful social programs. The Panthers started free breakfast for school children, with party members cooking every morning for the poor and undernourished kids in their communities. They established the Oakland Community School, which offered adult education and childcare, as well as free medical clinics staffed by well-regarded academic physicians who volunteered a portion of their time. Mary Bassett, former commissioner of health of the city of New York, writes that the Panthers initiated medical research into sickle cell anemia, which was largely ignored prior to their work. They provided plumbing, home maintenance, and even pest control services.
> It is just part of the process of waking up and becoming unattached and less dependent and more aware of your surroundings and feeling the suffering so you create the will to change things.
Unless there is already the seed of making change and recognizing what change needs to be made, the idle time isn't really going to help. I suffer plenty in life, I don't need to artificially increase that as some sort of motivation to vote differently or interact with my community differently.
> All of this was brought to you by the internet by the people you complain about below.
Disagreement on social issues has always existed and would also exist even without the internet. I'm not sure what your point is with this comment.
I agree local efforts are great and meaningful. But for large systemic change we need different voting habits.
This is the trap they have you in. Of course there is always something "more interesting" on the internet. The interesting creates the adrenaline rush, the adrenaline rush gets you addicted by changing adrenaline receptor density which leads you looking for something even more exciting.
Even when you are just looking around IRL, one view will be more interesting than the other, right? But now that got you all doped up on "super interesting" through this teleportation device to all things interesting, everything around you look extremely boring in comparison.
As your adrenaline receptors come back to life you will find that everything around you is really actually quite interesting.
I don't know where you're from, but in the US, the average spot I'd be killing time in is surrounded by acres of parking lots and a busy stroad or two. A Tamagotchi or 1980s pocket calculator is more engaging.
Nothing to do with adrenaline, addiction, doom-scrolling, dopamine or chemical receptors. Millions of people are surrounded by a wasteland of asphalt and machines going 60mph with nothing interesting within sight.
I’m sorry you had such difficult things to overcome in your life and I applaud you for your skilled eye as a photographer, but you’re coming on pretty strong and I think you could do with being a little less aggressive when trying to make your points. For the record, I am a cinematographer. I’m not sure why that’s relevant but apparently it is.
You also know nothing about our relationship with phones and such. You just sound like somebody who has an ax to grind.
My friend it doesn’t have to be my phone. If I’ve got something to read nearby I’ll pick that up if I think to grab it before leaving.
I am as much of a dopamine junkie as anyone here, but I am perfectly comfortable leaving my phone behind for long stretches and sometimes I’m just sitting at a public transit stop around ads and concrete. Unfortunately people watching, while romanticized as the ultimate fun activity by interesting indie folks in movies, does get old eventually.
I doubt you spend every second of your non-work time staring into space though. I like to read, for example; just because I do it on my phone in public sometimes doesn't mean I'm not finding other times for quiet contemplation.
> I doubt you spend every second of your non-work time staring into space though.
Do you really think that's what was being suggested? I assumed they were merely suggesting to not reflexively reach for your phone any time you have a moment of downtime.
The example used doesn't seem like a good indication of reflexively reaching for a phone, as doing things while waiting at a bus stop is pretty reasonable and has been around long before smartphones.
You're right though, that's likely what was meant, which I agree with. The hyperbole was unnecessary.
I hear this adage repeated a lot, but is it true? A quick kagi finds me lots of news articles quoting neuro-scientists, but no actual studies I can see.
If it is, I assume like sleep or vegetables there's a certain amount you should have per day and a point of diminishing returns.
Exact same experience at Google in 2015. I remember being super weirded out that seemingly everyone was buried in phones and laptops while walking around the campus. Hated it.
Wikipedia’s random link is great for learning something new. It is described here as I can’t copy the real link on my phone without it resolving to a new page.
Pre palm tro I'd have a book or laptop or newspaper with me everywhere cause it was either that, doing highlights, or reading o magazine at the doctor. Though I learned some great recipes from o magazine.
Pre Kindle I'd take around 15 lbs of books with me on trips.
There's a joke in knpins about reading the shampoo bottle on the John. I've done that
I would always have a copy of The Economist, New Yorker, NYRB, LRB or similar when I was travelling around London, so avoiding boredom was a priority for me even then. Much more restful to read a physical magazine though, and the only thing to distract me from an article was other articles in the magazine or my surroundings rather than "maybe that comment on Hacker News has a few more upvotes now".
A few years back I arrived at a venue sans phone* waiting for a date to arrive. I was early and she was late.
It was actually incredible to get the visceral reminder of just how ingrained having my phone for distraction was to me. I didn't take any action but sometimes wonder if I should have.
*I had lent my phone to a friend, who was using it to communicate with the person who had found their phone and making recovery/transfer easier... classic?
No, he was the weirdo. The fact that something is common does not make it normal. If you walked around Hong Kong in the 1880s you'd think you are a weirdo for not smoking opium all day. There will be a similar rude awakening after the current one.
