I was thinking of Three Body Problem

I think so, given that the first picture in the article is George Clooney in Men who stare at Goats

> Dopamine has a half life of 2 minutes in the body.

May be true.

But doing "rewarding" work encourages your body to emit more dopamine. Some people call it "the flow", others "hyperfocus", but it is a constant stream of dopamine that keeps you doing what you currently do. And you can interfere with the emittance and absorbtion by using caffeine.

> It’s just the caffeine

Fair enough if the use of “dopamine” is imprecise, but excessive screen time / doomscrolling / shitposting is definitely enough to wire you awake on its own, without caffeine.

> Dopamine has a half life of 2 minutes in the body.

That's for IV dopamine, used in extreme circumstances. Natural dopamine lasts shorter than that!

If that trend really wants to measure the quality of video etc. as well, it would definitely be way more. But that assumption seems very flawed to me, e.g. watching a full 4K movie would amount to way more data than scrolling through memes, even though the latter is way more of an attention-stealing activity.

More on the topic of the post, devices require a tight focus on details on a small object. That's the poison. Tight focus means stress for humans. You need time where you're not focusing on things (in all senses of the word, ideally) to recover and lower stress.

Totally agree with the absorption thing. I've always found myself at a great calm, ever since I was a kid, from sitting en transit and looking out the window. A train ride is great for this reason. I think about things. I actively think about things. These things are often not daydreams, hard problems, rumination. I know what those feel like, and they are definitely different from depressive rumination or furiously working through tasks.

Again, I want to emphasize, that in none of these are you explicitly practicing the act of leashing in your mind.

All in all, I think the popular conception of meditation, Youtube-ized since the 2010s, has more nuance. Maybe people see this distinction and think it's obvious. To me, as someone who unironically feel like I'm net negative from self-help content than net-positive, this matters to me, personally.

If you want to get mystical, there are plenty of stories of deep Eastern masters practicing their craft every day. They certainly are thinking about their act - they are not trying their best to "get rid of all their thoughts". These are different activities, each with their own merits, both much different states than the common state of the modern man today.

That being said, meditation and the surrounding ideas have helped me overall, if not just because the specific influencers that I do hold as valuable had a good attitude when approaching it. But nowadays I'd imagine it's been silently incorporated into the very underlying forces they were trying to avoid (I have to meditate because it makes me a more improved human being compared to my peers!)

> You can't just turn around and start working on some new idea if you are out on a path somewhere.

Eh? I'm retired now so I don't need to work but when I did I often went for a walk when a problem seemed insoluble. After a while I might feel that I have the solution to that and I'd start working on another problem as I continued my walk. You don't need to be in front of a screen with your fingers on a keyboard to do some work.