Internet Addiction

flopson, you mean you step away a lot

I'm really enjoying not having the internet for a chunk of the week. I still haven't quite figured out how to cram everything into two or three days but I'm working on it.

It's really sad looking at people you admire on twitter acting like they're in highschool trying to say cool things and all the stupid clique behavior.

Some really intelligent people now seem incapable of realizing when their attempts at ingratiation are appallingly gooey.

i remember when I used to care about the internet; for years really. now I fucking hate it and am only on here when I'm at work.

I'm always trying to find the right mix of sites to block and keep. I don't want to block ILX, but I think Youtube has to go. Being on the computer too much has been messing up my sleep lately.

Quite horrifying to think back to how much time I spent checking for updates and looking at things that felt important at the time but weren't at all.

I like ILX a lot and really enjoy posting here and reading everyone's posts, but I hate how much time I spend on the internet and I wish it were possible for me to find some balance. This weekend I'm anxious and feel like crap about an observation at work that didn't go well, and I have to wait until Monday to find out how badly I screwed up, so I'm unable to concentrate on anything and I just keep refreshing the same sites. I know I'm doing this as a way to numb my brain and fast-forward through the weekend, but knowing I'm doing that doesn't help me not do it.

I used to live in a cabin with no internet, where I had to drive into town to check emails, and that was great because I had internet time but it was automatically limited and my home was an internet-free space. I wish I could go back to that.

There are some ADD-centric tools that can help with that. Like apps that will shut off your internet access after a prescribed amount of time.

Cold Turkey is a good one.

I've been using one, but unfortunately I've figured out how to get around it by opening an incognito window.

Try Cold Turkey, it's wise to your schemes, including incognito mode or changing the date/time to circumvent the lock.

Oh good! That sounds great, thank you!

yeah I use cold turkey a fair bit, it does the job!

I've been thinking about this very thing today, before I saw this thread. (Irony right there, I guess.) I really do have to figure out some way to lessen my time online. Cold turkey is inconceivable. I wish I were the kind of person who could say "Your house is filled with unread books and unwatched movies and unheard music--why don't you spend most of your retirement attending to that?" and follow through, but I just don't have the mindset or discipline or whatever is needed to do that. So much of my occasional moodiness is attributable to the internet in one way or another.

It's brutal, isn't it? I'm sitting in this room filled with books, and it's like I can't even see them.

Lately I've been reading books about the attention economy and I still get distracted mid-sentence by the very mechanisms being deconstructed therein.

Disconnecting myself altogether from social media has helped immensely, both with the extent to which the internet gets its hooks in me and the extent to which the internet contributes to my feeling like shit.

Like on the extremely rare occasion that I open Facebook, I start feeling like shit within minutes and know it's time to step away again.

Trump being in power for four years made it possible for me to surgically seek content, both on his re-electability, and his approval ratings, desperate to see signs of an end.

when he left, that still left things like daily COVID statistics, news on vaccines, stimulus, etc.

when this is over....might finally be at the point where like, the internet is just 'there' again, like pre-2016.

i go on FB to say happy birthday, to msg my best friends who chat w/ me daily, and a new friend from years back that I have been chatting with. maybe see if any new friends got vaccinated.

then PM my brother to tell me the hit he thinks he got in Little League Baseball 24 years ago was actually a fielder's choice.

then I'm done for the day

At least for me, there's an underlying problem here which is that my moods/sense of self are too dependent on how I do at my job from day to day, and there's something soothing and numbing (though also inherently depressing) about the internet which makes me turn to it in a time of low self-esteem and then creates a feedback loop that makes me ultimately feel worse.

I get very little out of Facebook but can't disconnect entirely because my brother and I started a Facebook group back in college which has somehow grown to have more than 6,000 members, many of whom are lonely old people who rely on it as a major part of their day, and I'm the main moderator so I have to check it fairly routinely to make sure they haven't all started screaming at each other about politics.

Just to add to the Cold Turkey recs, I recently shelled out for a lifetime subscription to Freedom and it's been the best purchase in years.

When I've been particularly scattered I've sometimes gone and looked at a painting for fifteen minutes — it seems to effectively settle the mind, though it can yield a certain melancholy. I took up the practice after reading about a medical instructor who took his students to a gallery when they couldn't distinguish between skin lesions in this NYRB article. For me it doesn't particularly matter if the painting is by a professional or not, just so long as there's something I can dig into with my eyes.

Thanks for the heads-up, LBI. If you've experimented with Cold Turkey as well, how does it compare to Freedom? I've never tried the latter.

It's been rough for me lately as well. I try to use the Hosts file to block websites like ILX and Youtube, but somehow I’ve gotten accustomed to just mechanically opening the file and unblocking them every time I turn on my computer – all it does is add a few more steps. I should try Cold Turkey.

I think it helps to not regard internet addiction as an individual failing. Huge numbers of people are internet addicts. Our brains are not evolved to use this technology in a balanced way, especially when social media and streaming are engineered to suck up as much of our attention as possible.

I really do hope new websites come along that steal the best parts of twitter and tumblr (pillowfort and mastodon are pretty much ripoffs of tumblr and I'm curious to see if they build). Still never joined twitter but I've been looking at it a lot and it definitely makes me unhappy. Something about twitter and tumblr makes the word "doomscrolling" seem a perfect description of the feeling of using them, regardless of subject matter. There needs to be somewhere that gets content to people more efficiently, shares & spreads (retweet, reblog) well and gets rid of the trivial and shitty stuff. But I kinda would like to go back to the blogger and forum days and just accept the tradeoff that they aren't as good for sharing & spreading content.

Since my last posts above, I've moved to my father's permanently, so I don't weekend binge anymore, I try to keep it to just a couple of hours a day (I'm failing badly at that recently).

xp Yeah, it's horribly addictive, and like all addictive things it targets whatever you're already feeling bad about, briefly gives you the illusion of making it better, and ultimately makes it worse. So it's hard not to feel like it's an individual failing because the way you experience it is so personal, but it's definitely a widespread problem.

I actually got rid of my smartphone a couple years ago and it was great, about three days of feeling like a part of me had been amputated, and then this wonderful freedom, where I could leave the house, get on a bus, go to a cafe or whatever, and not have to think about the internet until I came home again. But now, with lockdown, I'm almost always in my house surrounded by computers, so not having the phone doesn't make much difference.

Internet Addiction is a thing, but refreshing the same websites during a time of stress is the new version of re-reading the same newspaper article/book and not taking any of it in.

I uninstalled all social media on my phone, it helped me more than you'd think even in lockdown - no computer in the living room. Periodically reinstall twitter to check for CenturiesOfSound's takes after watching totp.

I think the chillness of current era ILX makes it less damaging to my psyche, I still fall into the "argue angrily and then refresh the page compulsively waiting for an answer" trap every now and then but much less than I used to. Its slowness, though obviously a sign of its dwindling membership, is good for me too - no endless timeline to scroll through.

Twitter seems to serve me up angry politics stuff no matter how much I try to nudge it into other directions. Funny thing is the aggravation I feel from it isn't even about getting into yelling matches myself anymore, it's all vicarious stress from other ppl's shouting matches. That and the consciousness of just how many awful people exist out there. And the ppl I find who never post about politics are just terminally bland - endless tweets wishing dead actors a happy birthday, who cares.

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2021/aug/07/on-earth-4000-weeks-so-why-lose-time-online-distraction-oliver-burkeman

Check out this film on MUBI: Sweat https://mubi.com/films/sweat-2020

(x post)

This is a very silly article/book extract - it's thought deserving of a tweet or two turned into a book.

I found it useful. It's no less silly than most of the self-help pap that nonetheless hits the occasional bullseye depending on how much you need to hear it.

I read it prepared to be sceptical but ended up appreciating it, though I do usually get something out of his columns. Re: tweet v book, if you read a tweet you might think "oh yeah, bingo" then forget all about it, a book is likely to sink in deeper.

I'd prefer to see an article along the lines of if you think you have online addiction/issues that you are worried about, where are some practical things you can do....Dressing it in the context of 'omg do you guys realise you only have 4000 weeks' as if that has some great ontological significance is some sales bullshit imho..

Next week's Oliver Burkeman column: "Is the fact that the sun will one day burn out and extinguish all life on Earth preventing you from clinching that important job interview...?"

Lol

I have no idea who the author is, so I approached the piece without bias. For what it's worth, he does provide practical advice via the long anecdote about Steve Young.

Re: Steve Young - to me that was some sub-standard Malcom Gladwell approach, as someone observed here on ilx:

So basically his formula is (1) take commonsense thing that everyone already knows (2) make it sound like it actually goes against the "conventional wisdom," (3) extrapolate overbroadly from the phenomenon (4) assign pseudoscientific terms to thing (5) audience now feels both that it is smart and that it has learned something

Faced with physical distress – even of a much milder variety – most people’s instinctive reaction is to try not to pay attention to it, to attempt to focus on anything else at all. For example, if you’re mildly phobic about hypodermic syringes, like I am, you’ve probably found yourself staring very hard at the mediocre artwork in doctors’ clinics in an effort to take your mind off the jab you’re about to receive. At first, this had been Young’s instinct, too: to recoil internally from the experience of the freezing water hitting his skin by thinking about something different – or else just trying, through an act of sheer will, not to feel the cold. Common sense would seem to suggest that mentally absenting yourself from the situation would moderate the pain.

When we succumb to distraction, we’re motivated by the desire to flee something painful about our experience of the present
And yet as icy deluge followed icy deluge, Young began to understand that this was the wrong strategy. In fact, the more he concentrated on the sensations of intense cold, giving his attention over to them as completely as he could, the less agonising he found them – whereas once his “attention wandered, the suffering became unbearable”. After a few days, he began preparing for each drenching by first becoming as focused on his present experience as he possibly could so that, when the water hit, he would avoid spiralling from mere discomfort into agony. Slowly it dawned on him that this was the whole point of the ceremony. As he put it – though traditional Buddhist monks certainly would not have done so – it was a “giant biofeedback device”, designed to train him to concentrate by rewarding him (with a reduction in suffering) for as long as he could remain undistracted, and punishing him (with an increase in suffering) whenever he failed.

Th offending passage.

Cant wait until Steve Young gets a toothache.

1) 'Common sense would seem to suggest that mentally absenting yourself from the situation would moderate the pain.'

2) 'the more he concentrated on the sensations of intense cold, giving his attention over to them as completely as he could, the less agonising he found them'

Right off the bat, it doesn't quite fit the model. Unless your argument is that #2 is also 'common sense'? But that's not really true, is it? In my experience, at least, #1 is by far the most widespread approach to this problem.

Well, it's a slight Gladwellian variation:
(1) take some 'common-sense' view
2) show the opposite is 'true'

3,4,5 - apply as usual.

Oliver Burkeman is still building up his 10,000 hours (omg do you guys realise that's like 60 weeks?) to master his Gladwell abilities.

That article is better than I expected, despite the clickbait start.

It's the kind of clickbait that works on me precisely because I'm an Internet Addict.

Heh

Buzzcocks to thread!

Anyway, as far as I can tell the conclusion is not much different from what the majority of meditation instructors would tell you.

I did try meditation for once, found it alright for kicks, but I did not find out that it's a habit that sticks.

You're an ooohhhmmm-gasm addict

Whoever mentioned Discord above is right, it's really good. People keep saying it feels nice and feels like the good old days of internet but it is quite addicting (seeing that people are typing doesn't help). Thought about giving it up but I actually do find the place quite rewarding.

i really feel like the internet is dying. i grew up with web 2.0, and even six, seven years ago community felt vibrant and things were a little more free. it's like i don't even know what to do when i open a browser window now.

i have been 'addicted' to a particular 'erotic fiction' text-based chatroom since i was sixteen. it was somewhere to freely explore identity and exist anonymously. no social network. no photos - the place is trapped in 1997. that's pretty rare these days. i still keep checking in now and then for this 'old net' feeling, and i guess i get the same feeling from ILX. i'm twenty-nine now, and pretty sick of the sight of that chatroom. i wish there was a community worthwhile visiting with a similar infrastructure that isn't centred on sexuality.

sometimes i feel like reddit is almost the last bastion of a free and open net, and even there, it's narrowing, and demographic has shifted. all i see everywhere are ads/captchas/useless shit i don't need. it makes me wonder where people are hanging out these days... even the early days of FB had a community feeling... IG has no real network to it. i suppose there are particular forums given your interest but i wouldn't know where to start. it just doesn't feel 'fun' anymore...

i read a fair bit about cyberpsychology and addiction & the net a few years ago in order to figure out my feelings and complex trauma with the WWW. i've been to hell and back with long-distance relationships and online encounters and shit like that. while i believe you can be addicted to certain behaviours and compulsions within the net itself (e.g. gambling, gaming, cybersex, other virtual activities), addiction to the internet *itself* doesn't really make sense; it's simply a portal, a mirror, another mode of existing.

i want to stay online - i love the possibility and engagement with a decentralized internet... but i already feel so restricted, and tired of bureaucracy. maybe we can decentralize our way out of the noise of social media in time... i'm not sure what is next.