I doubt you are addicted to information. I highly suspect like many users of digital technology who are able to consume near infinite streams of said, that you are like a wasteful software program "polling" these data sources hoping that something really important will surface or that some underlying truth will be revealed through identifying patterns in the information.

I dont think you would need someone to publish that your hair was on fire on the web before you would believe it.

The wasteful part is that repeating the behavior (addiction or not) can become self-repeating even in the absence of the fix. Also one has to realize that at least in the case of news there is very little every day and most of what is distributed is rehash, or ancillary, or bloated and repeated to sell ads. You can go without watching or consuming news on the internet and not miss much for a pretty long time.

As far as tech goes, it moves very slow you can take a couple years off a software eng job and come back and not much has changed with very few exceptions. (Yes LLMs were one)

When you are done staring at your phone/computer at the end of the day reflect on whether or not you got anything really worthwhile out of it and put it in perspective. The signal vs noise ratio is not in your favor and getting less so every day.

I personally stare at my phone alot for the same reason as many people do. Im bored. But I dont do it at the expense of anything else Id rather do.

There’s so much more information to consume than news — or worse, tech news. Every day I find new things to learn about physics, history, geology, paleontology, biology… and not just things we discovered today, but decades and centuries worth of findings.

There is so much more to learn than any one person could even skim in their lifetime, even if you ignore absolutely all news. And heck yeah, it’s addictive.

>like a wasteful software program "polling" these data sources hoping that something really important will surface

This is me on eBay :)