Forcing a short delay is such a powerful technique.

I use this when I'm at risk of binging a show. If I'm tempted to let Netflix continue into the next episode, I say "ok maybe, but let's get up and do something else for a few minutes first and see if I still want to" and before I know it I'm building a robot instead.

Not bad, but leaves out crucial steps? "I chose to do this" puts the blame at your own feet without telling you how to deal with it constructively. That can lead to learned helplessness.

Contemplation has the goal of a reassessment of evaluation. The choice needs to be re-evaluated as inferior to better alternatives.

Those need to be explicitly identified. In order to do this, you need to know what led to your choice emotionally.

The other side of the coin is the intentional design of many internet sites to exploit human psychology. News for example are "infotainment", "fear-porn" and "rage-bait", etc. by design and override many "self-discipline" mechanisms.

The internet isolates people while feeding them a simulacra of social interaction without actual social functionality. Objective truth in particular isn't reliably established by "watching the news", that's merely top-down conditioning by whoever owns your "news". Finding objective truth is an active process, not a passive event.

Thanks - useful to think about as I try and wean myself off the novel information highs. I’ve been consciously aware of the problematic aspect of my behavior since about the pandemic - but struggle to make much change.

Super hard agree with this

It's all about balance. Learning about various stuff from well written articles and Wikipedia for one hour is good. Doing the same thing for the whole weekend isn't.

Even reading books all the time to the detriment of other activities isn't good.

What's good is doing a bit of everything. Reading a book an hour before sleep, doing a hour of exercise two to three times a week. Reading a few blog articles, wikipedia, long and well researched magazine articles. Making time for in person social interactions. Playing games, video games, board games, card games from time to time. Engaging in a few online discussions every week. Etc

It's all about balance or at least that's the way I see it.

I've recently spent a night or two with near insomnia going down a performance / security rabbit hole in open source .NET libraries.

It feels useful, it feels important. But it's not, it's just addictive behaviour, because "you found a way to make <library> 5% faster / 5% fewer allocations" is a dopamine hit that feeds back into wanting to prod some more.

It feels like I'm learning an absolute ton about high performance .NET and the kinds of crazy things that maintainers need to consider when taking in untrusted input.

But it's the equivalent of empty calories. The maintainers don't really want to know, and I'm not really learning anything actually useful. It's not actually enlightening work, it's just keeping myself busy while helping feed maintainers a maintenance headache.

The security angle is also horrifying in a different way, it puts me off wanting to put anything near the internet. I used to think the concept of "net crash" and an internet abandoned to "rogue AIs" in cyberpunk was entertaining fiction.

While I don't think the network itself will host those rogue AIs, I do worry that there'll simply be a critical mass of bad actors armed with AI that will render the net effectively inoperable.

> The most dangerous part of this addiction is that it doesn't feel like addiction.

I've started framing addiction as something that we feel compelled to do even when we know it has a detrimental effect on more important aspects of our life. In that respect, yes, it does feel like an addiction.

> Unlike alcohol or drugs, this is knowledge addiction - afterall, we learned about a bunch of things in those 4 hours, didn't we?

Did we learn anything? If we aren't using that knowledge, even in casual conversation, chances are that retention is very low. I'm not even talking about useful learning here, since it is pleasurable to learn something for its own sake. I'm talking about the stickiness.

Another way to think of it is: are we even interested in learning? I have downloaded the entire Wikipedia to my computer, along with Project Gutenberg, as well as various technical documentation. (Kiwix is wonderful.) On top of that I have enough books (digital and physical) to last a lifetime. I have a multitude of resources that I can tap into without touching the Internet, and accessing it is all very low resistance (e.g. I don't have to get off my ass to go to the library). So why do I even have home Internet access? Communicating with people certainly doesn't require a high speed connection.

Well, it depends. If it's not at the cost of relationship, sports and other important things, is it really an addiction? It can often be just a hobby like everything else.

Piggybacking onto your post to sort of expand this. I feel like there are a few views of what those 4 hours can encompass on the internet. My view is that reels/shorts << rage gaming <<< background noise-tier youtube << social/healthy gaming <= information binging. My problem is most reddit or twitter-esque sites make it easy to fall on the side of rage consumption, without constant self enforcement.

Now I don't think that most knowledge is really that useful in general, maybe 1% of 4 hour binges have any real consequences. But occasionally it really does turn out to be very useful. I spent maybe 4-5 hours reading and watching videos about window air conditioners, having known basically nothing but the terrible shaky units from my childhood. After that period of research time, I bought two new replacements, saved $80 with National Grid rebates, and reduced my summer monthly kwh consumption by 200-250. It also led me to information about heat pump systems which I will consider in a future house purchase, and additionally more information which led me to avoid purchasing cheap peltier dehumidifiers for one with a compressor.

I guess my point is, it can definitely be worse. You can at least point to an Ortega hypothesis-like effect of learning a bunch of random stuff. But I agree that even just going on a walk and doing literally nothing feels way, way better than spending that time online. The balance is so heavily tilted towards internet addiction that I expect that having multiple "real" offline hobbies will increasingly be seen as green flags. In my experience, "bookworm" has not been a pejorative in a long time. stackbutterflow's comment about balance seems like the most sensible way to approach timespend in this sense, though. /rant

It's not learning unless you put it into practice. 4 hours of woodworking videos is nothing for you unless you get to work.

I've been watching framing videos for weeks feeling like I'm being less unproductive than if I were playing video games. But at a certain point it's just as bad. Not a single nail driven.

That’s a good point. Internet addiction didn’t have a name, or a stigma, in the way alcohol or other drugs did so in a sense I had no idea that the slide I was on was harmful. It also felt a lot like what I did a lot of at university - library research.

What if you consume those things but still have time for relationships and health etc?

This is a big part of it for me. The old Internet was full of individuals sharing deep passion--whether on a personal website or on a forum. There was a sense of connecting to another human being.

This is the only forum-style site I regularly interact with, and I must admit that I rarely try to remember another username here. The effect is that I interact with ideas, not people. And there is some deep connection between behaviors I might label as addiction and a felt sense of isolation.

Even 25 years ago being “too online” - back then it was icq, livejournal, and forums - was already destructive as hell and always led to some pretty cringe outcomes. At least these days some people make a career out of it, back then it was purely negative

> Internet addiction in the early millennium wasn't so destructive, because so much internet content was somehow related to quality interaction with other people. You could meet cool new people (even occasionally IRL friends) from forums and blogs

My experience has been the opposite. The people I knew who got seriously addicted to the internet a couple decades ago were mostly not thriving online among cool other people. They were getting dragged down into swirling cesspools of the time.

4chan has been around for over 20 years. A lot of the gaming communities and forums were toxic and brutal back then. There were social news sites, content mills, and personality cults back then too.

I think there’s some glorification of the past that happens in these threads. The old internet was full of toxic and addictive things, too. It was just less common to be immerse in it because you had to go to a physical computer and, if you go back far enough, dial up and occupy the house phone line. There were natural limits to how exposed most people would get.

Sorry, but teenage me, growing up late 90s, wildly disagrees with this statement.

It's always been addictive and destructive. I was staying up past 3am to talk to my American friends, knowing I'd have to get up at 7am to get to school.

Painting the past with such a rose brush does not help anyone.

> so much internet content was somehow related to quality interaction with other people

That still exists. Except now it's not in IRC or BBSes but in Discord "servers" instead.

> You could meet cool new people

My first date was a guy with fake photos. Ten dates later I settled for a married guy cheating on his wife. He eventually divorced but then I left him.

Yep... back then, the internet was a way people would discuss and organize their real world interests and activities, like clubs and usergroups would organize their next meeting... and then meet, off the internet.

Now, it's all just online drivel that never turns into anything else.

It's so weird. I used to consider myself a fringe internet addict in the 2000s but now everyone is like me.

Like many of you, I deal with stuff like depression, anxiety, ADHD. Back in the 2000s it felt like I was the only weirdo out there. Now I cringe writing that out because it feels like everyone is like that now.

I made the same observation recently.

I think people under 25 probably don't even know how absolutely uncool it was to tell people you stayed at home in front of a computer on weekends or after school.

Absolute pariah behavior on the scale of coolness. But now ? Totally normal.

I started to notice a shift in how the recommendation algorithms worked probably around 2018-2019 and then the pandemic just took it to nuclear levels against the entire population

Okay but what should people be doing instead?

The complaint that everyone is on their phone (or in front of screens) is less informative then the interlocutors ideas of what should be instead.

> and you kinda have to keep learning in software dev

It's less the constant need to keep learning that bothers me (my formal credentials involve a requirement to undertake a minimum of 30 hours of continuing education annually) than it is that the industry has focused on vendor-specific implementations of various concepts.

I've built a lot of control planes like Kubernetes and Cloud Foundry (and its accompanying BOSH) over my career as a system administrator, but hiring managers and staff engineers these days specifically want Kubernetes experience.

Likewise, I've built a lot of control planes like what backs AWS's EC2 (including multi-tenant accounting and quotas and MAC/RBAC!), but hiring managers and staff engineers specifically want production experience with EC2 (and, seemingly, the broader AWS ecosystem, which is nonetheless approachable for someone who has production distributed systems experience).

At my most tinfoil hat, I want to say that this is blatantly in the interest of setting up a consulting industry around these vendor solutions, and it creates something of a monopsony situation for someone with my skillset.

My formal credentials are as an actuary, so I can at least go back to pursuing claim severity modeling and pricing out when something has a hiccup as a primary responsibility, but this focus is almost certainly a deskilling move otherwise.

And it's exactly as addictive as Twitter.

Fair enough.

I don’t think I’m necessarily caught in a doom loop news cycle. My reading habits are around philosophy, sociology, anthropology, technology.

That’s not to say I’m immune to clickbait!

>Just focus on putting your phone in a draw for as long as you can,

I've had a smartphone since the iPhone 4, I think. And while I find it useful, I honestly don't understand how anyone can be addicted to it. Mostly stays in my pocket. If I need navigation, it's out in the car while I find the address. I use it for instant messaging for my wife and kids (rarely the phone call anymore... don't know the last time I answered a call, it's all robot scammers and telemarketers).

The screen's not big enough to read anything, not large enough to watch anything. The sorts of games I enjoyed as a kid just aren't available. Sometimes I'll have an ebook on it, that's ok (it's nearly as big as a paperback used to be), but remembering to load one onto my phone before I got somewhere I'll be waiting doesn't always work out.

I can spend hours online, if I'm not careful. At home, in front of the big monitor. How does anyone get addicted on a tiny little phone screen, with dumbed down apps? I can't even look at pages on Firefox on the phone, without adblock it's just abysmal.

Corporate law.

If my history reading is any indication the answer is ‘getting drunk at the pub’

Opium