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'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

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.'

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.

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.

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’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.

You're not alone. You will find some answers "Stolen Focus" by Johann Hari

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 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.

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