Posted by peykar 13 hours ago
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.
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.
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-
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.
It's not just Reddit that's like that, but it was especially striking after having been away for a while.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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 imagine it's easy to read something Ludditic into this critique, but I mean it quite a bit more matter-of-factly, and from the vantage point of a tech professional who is as passionate about coding and computers as anyone else on HN. Still, it's sobering to consider the ways in which being so computer-bound since age 9 or 10 has altered the development of my habits of mind, my nervous system and my cognition, and speculate about might have been gained and lost.
Aristotle was on to something when he adopted a peripatetic approach to thinking.
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.
It’s turned out to be the best thing I’ve done for myself in a long, long time.
> 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
That's exactly what I was afraid of, but it turns out that actually getting dopamine for completing tasks goes a long way to blunting the existential dread of there being yet more tasks. Consistently now whenever I feel crappy it correlates back to either (a) crap sleep or (b) forgot to take my meds.
Just my 2c, YMMV, everyone's different, etc. I had a hard time really understanding the anecdotes I got from medicated friends myself, but I'd encourage others who suspect they have ADHD to try even a very low dose of something for ~3 weeks and see how they feel after. I'm at the lowest "clinically effective" dose of my prescription and the effect is still significant.
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.
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.
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.
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):
or if you excelled at some topics which you found interesting but did middlingly or poorly at others...
I watched the skepticism form then evaporate in my psychiatrist as I explained that I did relatively well in school overall... except for the three or four classes I thought were boring, and how I consistently procrastinated but managed to pull off decent work right before hand.
(I got diagnosed after 30, though apparently my elementary school wanted to screen me.)
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.
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
> 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?