Internet Addiction

I guess tho the compulsive behavior was there for me for a long time -- when I was supposed to be studying in college I'd spend like 2 hrs playing pinball or 4 hrs listening to records in the listening library.

The same here. I'm only half-joking when I say I quit school in my sophomore year to stay home and play Castle Wolfenstein.

So THAT'S what I did before the Internet.

I was also an early Prodigy/AOL adopter. You could probably say I've been an internet addict in some form for 20 years.

i identify with this a lot

i think setting a rule that i dont surf the web while my son is awake has been rly helpful. as he's gotten older, i'm not as rigid about it as i used to be, but i've def been able to curtail this a lot more.

I don't do it while I'm home with my daughter, that's sort of a rule. Ok, occasionally check fb on my phone while I'm with my daughter, but it's not the same kind of disappearing into the net behavior.

OTOH, I guess I could have been home for bedtime tonight. Fuck, this is sad. Not that I usually miss bedtime, but still.

i've been reading the internet more or less constantly since 2003, when my prep school issued me a laptop. the whole campus was hooked up to wifi. when i realized how much music was now available to me (mostly through closed filesharing networks on campus with other students) i was so happy i think i probably cried. besides music, music blogs and things like pitchfork the big problem for me at first was just reading news articles so it felt educational... in any case, i actually discovered ilx in 2007 or 2008 but didn't allow myself to really post because i knew that it would be an "issue" for me

i respond a lot to what hurting is saying about not knowing how much is the internet and how much is "me". i certainly engage in escapist behaviors of all sorts.. it's tough for me to really summon up the courage to begin a mounting task, even though once i start it's never as bad as i imagine it to be.

I started this thread a few years ago hoping it would create some discussion about controlling internet use (and other things):
The Information Diet

Lately I have a policy of not bringing my phone with me if I can get by without it. It seems to help and I've had some genuinely great experiences that would have been impossible (probably) if I had it with me.

i don't even use my phone for anything now and hardly talk to anyone on it and can't afford to use teh interweb on it anyway but when i leave the house without it, i still feel kinda, wahey, you're going out into the lonely depths of space! or a remote forest, etc.

all this totally resonates with me. my procrastination has gotten horrible, i'm noticing that i'm like resetting my standards super low. when i feel productive i get 1-2 substantial things and 3-4 insubstnatial things done in a day. now it's like if i get one big thing done a week i feel justified to blow off entire days. it sucks. totally identify with that feeling of leaving work too late because i did jack shit and then only get a little time with my son before bedtime.

like reading some really good new yorker article is fun and entertaining and informative but at the end of the day i don't feel like it improved my life more than being present and committing to my work & colleagues would have.

and a reading a whole new yorker article is like as good as it gets when i'm wasting time on the internet, at worst it's like some dumbass ilx threads and facebook and other random sites i compulsively check

feel like there's a strong tie-in here to modern american office jobs and poor allocation of time

I'm sure everyone's been in an office and had the thought or even had some they work with say "can you imagine what work would be like without the internet?" And then everyone laughs bc it sounds like some horrible dark age, like before there was running water or electricity.

But when I'm at work and just jam through it without internet (which is rare) I feel a lot better at the end of the day.

otm

since i got the internet as a middle-schooler, in the 90s, all the office jobs i've ever gotten were to work ON the internet, really. but back then the internet was kind of like a natural and appropriate counterpart to real work so checking usenet or whatever was actually kind of productive, kept the mind limber. look up coding advice, or whatever.

i think the encroachment of mind-numbing drudgery onto the internet - the use of web interfaces for office-data type work, administrative bullshit - has had something to do with the change of character of the other parts of it, or of people's non-actual-work-related uses of it. like having given up on the belief that it was primarily a good and useful counterpart to the actual world, people have also given in to the despair that is joyless dumbass social media click click clicks or whatever.

(have commenced first 'office space' rewatch in years, am feeling embittered about tps reportification of the internet)

yeah i think that's right. i'm also thinking about the concept of the 8-hour day and how during slow days i can use the internet to stretch out my work, which then becomes a bad habit on less-slow days.

But when I'm at work and just jam through it without internet (which is rare) I feel a lot better at the end of the day.

Jesus, so otm. It feels good to just stay on my tasks with my headphones on. It feels bad to poke at my tasks in between hopping over to the internet every 5 minutes. And yet I do the thing that feels bad so much more often. It's like I'm the rat who keeps nudging the pain button instead of the treat button, solely because the pain button makes me feel connected to other ppl and the treat button makes me feel alone.

tips for achieving that?

i try to remember that i've never earned an invitation to the private 77 board, and i don't deserve to be on the internet

But when I'm at work and just jam through it without internet (which is rare) I feel a lot better at the end of the day.

Did this today. Nothing like coming home to a stack of bookmarks on top of ILX.

You know how every once in awhile, some tenured regular here will disappear and someone will ask where s/he is and the answer is "Oh, they said they've got a project to get done this week. They'll be back after the first." ... ?

My first thought after hearing that is always, "And?"

yeah it's not like they're designing the space shuttle ok

How do you complete some important project without checking back every 15 minutes to see if the Eagles thread has been updated?

Whatever Microsoft guy might say about waiting and hoping, you have to go ask to get on 77 xp

been hearing this thread title all day to the tune of Amphetamine Addiction by the Zero Boys

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MmRA7f_EBPc

http://www.theguardian.com/science/2014/oct/14/google-glass-user-treated-addiction-withdrawal-symptoms

The man had been using the technology for around 18 hours a day – removing it only to sleep and wash – and complained of feeling irritable and argumentative without the device. In the two months since he bought the device, he had also begun experiencing his dreams as if viewed through the device’s small grey window.

i've been dealing with my own internet addiction pretty well at work (helps to finally be in a job where i feel competent and comfortable with what i'm doing)

what bothers me is the amount of time i spend on the internet outside of work ... i don't watch tv but i can see my weekend / nighttime Internet use is basically just listless channel flipping born of inertia and depression

How do you complete some important project without checking back every 15 minutes to see if the Eagles thread has been updated?

― pplains, Friday, October 10, 2014 8:54 PM Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

A pressing deadline doesn't mean I don't NEEEEED to know if my paragraph-long analysis of hip-hop's role in white teenagerhood has been thoroughly gutted by ILM yet

fwiw, appointment with new psych this week, gonna give it another go. Posting ITT helped me reach the conclusion at least. See, the internet is good for something!

fuck, i thought i was the only one with these problems

(helps to finally be in a job where i feel competent and comfortable with what i'm doing)

Ugh... yes. This would solve all of my problems. I tend to procrastinate when I'm not confident that the task I'm supposed to be doing can be done well (by me or by anyone). I want to defer shitty, useless outputs as long as possible.

i've had intermittent problems along these lines. Not too bad right now (that i have bigger problems). Good luck Hurting.

man today has been tough because I actually got a lot of sleep, came into work rested and motivated, and WAS pretty productive for the first couple hours, felt like I could get this shit done, but then gradually fell off during the day. Still intermittently productive, better than average day overall, but here I am at the office again, still trying to finish this assignment I've been agonizing over. Guess I'm just posting this to help remind myself of my patterns, and that no, adequate sleep and motivation alone doesn't completely do the trick.

focus me is the best and most customizable internet blocker i've found. lots of specification and thorough scheduling (block ilx except for 12-1 etc) and you can make it unbreakable. ofc it costs money.

i think the scheduling is the more expensive option. was the main reason it stuck out to me. wanted to block all social stuff except for like an hour a day.

obv i haven't built up the will to start using it and never will lolololol

work computer won't let me install stuff like that. I was able to make a blocker plugin for chrome work, but it only works for chrome.

You people are (mostly) great, but I really think the Internet has been a cognitively and emotionally corrosive force for me. I tried to stop altigether and then just started going on benders, sucking up tons of content and entering into debates. I don't want to be traversing this much information per day but I crave it for some reason... also all of my work is on the computer too. How fucked is that? It's like being an alcoholic but the only jobs that exist are jobs at bars.

Does the average person think the Internet has added to the stress in their life? Am I the only one who feels this sense of pervasive unease? My rhetoric might sound over the top but really, I've been fantasizing a lot recently about moving to Walden Pond or doing something like that. Maybe this summer.

If your brain is asking for Walden Pond, then give it a break and let it have as much of Walden Pond as you can offer it. At the very least spend time in a park or outdoors every day. Even in crap weather. Walk around. Look at the sky. Stare at trees. Poke mud with a stick.

you should get a paper copy of sherry turkle to read, treezy (it's not great but you may find it somewhat reassuring to know you're not alone at all)

Treesh I feel you. And my habit has been way worse since I got the new phone. Constant microescaping.

treeship you are not alone. it certainly adds stress to my life. there are so much fewer things on it that i need than i realize. i've been painting my room this week and the hours away from electronics have been so good.

i wonder if certain personality types (maybe "type b" or introverts or those inclined to thinking/over-thinking or whatever) suffer a greater negative effect from the internet. or maybe different personality types respond to *limitless information* differently than others. like, my pre-smartphone life felt richer precisely because i was constantly starved for information which led to a deeper engagement with whatever particular book i had with me, etc.

A therapist I started seeing had a good description I thought of how things that have beginnings and ends tend to produce less anxiety (e.g., I start cleaning the kitchen, I finish cleaning the kitchen), whereas something like posting to ILX has no end, and this produces a kind of anxiety. I thought that was a good insight -- there's actually an anxiety to my need to post, to keep checking to see if anyone responded to me, is there another thread I should now respond to, did I get any OTMs, were my posts made fun of, etc.

xp i think that's likely ryan. i remember going to a panel discussion on david foster wallace -- an author i recently criticized on another thread -- where his biographer, dt max, said that dfw never used the internet because he was afraid that, for him, the internet might be a labyrinth from which he'd never emerge.

personally, i don't really have a point of comparison for a "pre-internet" life because i have had almost 24 hour access to a laptop with a wifi connection since i was 14. i remember "taking notes" in high school classes reading wikipedia and the times. i think this lack of a benchmark is part of what causes me to fantasize so often about what life would be like for me if i were born in, say, 1949 instead of 1989 and the internet came along late enough that it never became second nature for me.

also, i know, at some level, that my issues have to do with avoidance and escapism and that the internet is just the "crutch" i reach for when i feel too bored or anxious to do what i am supposed to be doing. in a different context, maybe i would reach for something more sinister like alcohol. still, i do feel that my resilience has been eroded by constant access to unlimited information. i've lost the ability to just sit with myself, evaluate my surroundings, and plan the next step without a constant, gnawing sense that i am missing something. a serious round of cognitive behavior therapy might help me reverse this.

also, hurting, that therapist sounds very otm. it reminds me of the advice to "take one thing at a time," which i've heard often from various sources, but which has always seemed unreasonably difficult to follow.

Sounds a lot like me, I'm older I think but we had stuff like Prodigy and AOL in the house by the time I was 13 or 14 -- no laptops in class yet but I was already message board posting, which is still the activity that I spend the most time doing on the internet today. Relate to the whole question of "is it really the escapism that's the problem and the internet is just the thing that fills the need?" but there is something I think that is more addictive about the internet than other escapes, maybe the combination of unpredictability, quick dopamine rewards, variety, the physical aspect of clicking/typing, the availability of it everywhere now etc. I did blow a lot of time in college on pinball and arcade games but at least there you had to spend money so it felt like there was a constraint (also you couldn't just like hang out in an arcade for eight hours pretending to do your work and eating your meals there).

yeah, the way the computer is the tool i use for both my work and avoiding my work seems dysfunctional and also unavoidable. i grade my students' papers on google docs, often a tab away from ilx and facebook and there would just be no way for me rearrange my life in a way that i wasn't spending hours in front of the screen anyway. so physically separating myself is not an option; i need to avoid doing distracting things while using the computer.