Posted by tartoran 2 hours ago
Excessive scrolling is like excessive eating, smoking, or snorting coke.
It is not healthy and not indicative of a full filling life.
My primary computing and web browsing device remains my laptop, with Emacs and Firefox being my main tools. One thing that does manage to distract me sometimes is YouTube recommendations. As a result I have written a little userscript for myself to disable shorts and recommendations: https://github.com/susam/userscripts/blob/main/js/ytx.user.j...
So far the userscript has been successful. As a side effect of disabling the recommendations sidebar, the video panel expands to occupy a larger part of the screen which I quite like. Here is a screenshot: https://susam.github.io/blob/img/userscripts/ytx.png
Also, I still depend heavily on physical textbooks, a rollerball pen and a stack of plain A4 paper for most of my learning and exploration activities. This routine has helped me to stay away from modern attention media too.
I'm not exactly curing cancer, but my media consumption is more moderate and mindful now.
Or if you want to get fancy use tubearchivist with the Jellyfin plug-in.
Fine-motor skills connected to memory, etc.
Doesn't take much to find the science.
Also, avoiding interruption is good for your train of thought.
If a train of thought doesn't matter, then stay online and leave your phone able to interrupt you.
It's your "choice" (tm)
Seriously, try everything including the things you don't think will work for your sense of peace, so you know, IOWA (I over-worry always)
Peace to you all.
Anyway, the oldest over 80-something man was given some older Samsung phone by his great-grandson with instruction to launch tiktok whenever he feels bored. And bloody hell, that thing looped so much content with every launch but this man still tried hard to find something remotely interesting. I wouldn't say he was glued but that's a random guy who liked to attend his orchard and bees, going fishing etc. - he had something to do in the real world.
I'm witnessing more elderly people around me actually struggling using touch-capable devices - it's like they're smacking fingers in frustration that there's no tactile sensation. They were told that there are buttons to press/tap but there's no feedback they'd expect. For them smartphone screen is no different than tv.
When I was in high school, flip phones could let you text friends, as long as you didn't mind your parents later using your soul to pay the phone bill.
When I was in college, the most addictive thing the internet could offer was foul bachelor frogs and rage comics.
Along the way, I learned how dangerous even those unrefined sugars were. It was like chewing coca leaves or sugarcane. Enough t get you a buzz, but not enough to ruin your life. So I know not to touch the algorithmic fentanyl feeds of TikTok and the like.
But good god, nobody younger or older had any protection from this. My parents and spouses parents, and my zoomer cousins both basically got handed giant bags of refined gigasugar without even the vaguest warnings. I'll refrain from likening it to opiates against because they are on a whole different level, but good god it does seem more dangerous than even refined sugar.
It’s strange to hear a 60-something rant about how evil Facebook is and then go on to regurgitate countless conspiracy theories they picked up from whatever websites they’re reading this month.
The parents who scroll Instagram and Facebook feel downright tame in comparison.
There's fueling political and social rage with "news", casting doubts on family relations with "true life stories" (daughter-in-law threw me out of my house), religious "coaching" (dead since end of 60s Padre Pio gives you life lessons and "secret" prophecies), worthless tips and tricks (don't eat this nut if you're 50yo woman or your hair will fell off), lewd promotion with twist on history (sexual violence in every thumbnail) or tourism (women in country of x are "ready" all the time). So on and so on.
So I'd say it's not that much strange if you look closely what kind of the content older people can walk onto. And this is just youtube.
Of course, I also wonder if non-digital natives also just have less of a thick skin for this sort of thing.
https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/2025/12/do-your-paren...
The decline is accelerated by muscle weakness which is accelerated by sitting around all day looking at screens.
