Internet Addiction

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.

addendum... i have carried out this same procedure to fight compulsions in the past. heh. this was nice to read.

So, I'm not quitting ILX yet, but I yesterday decided to quit another message board that I felt had become a very bad habit. I made a scrambled password and C&P'd it into the new password fields so that I wouldn't be able to log in anymore.

Interestingly, I have probably already a dozen times since yesterday gone to the site and tried to poast, forgetting, momentarily, that I had quit. I think this is pretty good evidence of how compulsive the behavior is for me.

― space phwoar (Hurting 2), Wednesday, 13 March 2013 14:52 (eight years ago) bookmarkflaglink

Again, what I said about Discord above but the problem is finding the groups to join, they're often hidden away or linked to on someone's social media bio

the semi-hidden nature of a lot of discord groups is probably what's keeping them healthy

Starting to dislike things about Discord. The notices at the bottom that other people are typing is likely to keep you on longer and when it's super busy with other people writing posts, it's quite unnerving and starts to feel really claustrophobic. I prefer more thought out posts and Discord sort of hurries people.

But to be honest even on a regular forum I find it unpleasant when a thread is incredibly busy

I like the idea of Discord and I know it's becoming increasingly popular, but I just can't get into it. I never think to look at it when I'm on a computer, it doesn't look appealing or feel good, and I don't want another time & attention sucking app on my phone, idk.

Since it uses invites, I feel like there's more open bitching about people who might come after you on twitter

discord is a bloated, chaotic mess of an interface and retains almost nothing fun about old chatrooms... it's also pretty spooky/awful how it retains so much in chat history.

I love Discord. Big servers can be tough to follow, though. Mute is essential.

It's good for really niche things and since it's like a cluster of different forums you can just bounce between them. Some servers I've given up trying to follow properly and accept I'll miss a lot of the conversation.

Not addiction exactly but I got the worst lump of stress in my throat I've ever felt from Pinterest, which seems like such an innocuous site but I guess it's because it's so jumbled and feels even more neverending than other sites somehow