My completely unprofessional opinion is that almost everyone that uses the internet throughout the day has developed some form of undiagnosed ADD/ADHD.
The modern internet has broken our slowly evolved brains. We are not built to cope with these types of attention destroying activities and media. At least 20 years ago you had to sit down at a specific place and use a chunky computer. Smartphones have made it 1000x worse.
There's no easy solution. I don't think becoming a digital luddite is the answer...but we all need to be more intentional with our time.
It's not the only answer, but Cal Newport's book Digital Minimalism^1 is a good read for anyone that finds themself feeling this way.
I remember years ago being a teenager and having limited access to computers and the internet so when I did have them I used my time to learn as much as I could.
When I didn’t, I got bored, and I picked up books. I remember reading books on history, biology, psychology, electronics, programming, etc. and learning from them, often just by flipping pages and reading passages that looked interesting. In fairness, even nowadays, it’s not uncommon for me to have a dozen Wikipedia tabs opened about random stuff that piqued my interest.
Nowadays I can’t get bored anymore. My phone is rarely out of arms reach and I own every steam game I ever wanted and a computer that can handle them.
Recently, I recall trying to work on a side project when I got stuck on a design aspect. My power went out later and with all my devices dead and I remember being bored to death, pacing around the apartment when the solution came to me.
Someone introduced me to the same idea a few years ago and it really stuck with me, "the only time people in the modern world experience boredom is in the 15 seconds before they pull out their smartphone".
It's in moments of boredom that you start having deep thoughts about the world, start thinking through solutions to problems you have, start thinking about changes you can make in your life.
I got rid of my smartphone and now the 20 minutes each day on the train where I'm "bored" are one of the most valuable parts of my day. And my mind feels much fresher after it, rather than being crammed with 20 minutes worth of mental junk food from the internet.
>> I got rid of my smartphone and now the 20 minutes each day on the train where I'm "bored" are one of the most valuable parts of my day. And my mind feels much fresher after it,
Thats interesting - I think I lost ability to be bored even if I do not reach for phone immediately. My mind somehow switches to a strange mode where I reply random events from my life and try to come out with different plays for each interaction.
And I cannot do this if I feel discomfort - its too hot or too cold etc. And I used to think that this was boredom but now I think this was because I was distracted by environment. The real boredom is something that I vaguely remember from my early childho hit`od and I cannot get there now - my mind is to full of past interactions. The smartphone age can be somehow at fault here - maybe my brain thirsts for dompamine hit so much that it creates its own mental junk.
Teach me! How do you keep in touch with people on the go? This is the only thing that has stopped me from dumping my iPhone altogether. I sometimes leave home without it but I end up relying on others for coordination, etc -- which means I haven't liberated myself so much as fobbed off the responsibility to others.
I don't have social media (besides HN), so my main contact with people who aren't in my immediate vicinity is through sharing photos directly on iMessage and the odd article-inspired rant.
I just use a £15 nokia phone (they still make them). It calls, texts, and plays snake.
Texting on a T9 keyboard is slow but I've come to consider that a feature. Before I had a smartphone I would just text everyone, now that texting takes actual effort I find myself calling people more, or asking to meet up in person. And I find myself forming much deeper personal connections with people as a result.
I recently uninstalled the social media apps on my phone and I have been noticing the number of times I reach for my phone are quite many. These are times I am just seeking stimulation of some sort, not trying to communicate or research something. Since I no longer have the apps, I just head over to settings or photos and then get so bored I just end up reading a book instead.
- I forgot how time could pass outside of internet. Days were flying in-house.. yet everytime I walked to anything 5mi away.. suddenly I felt like I lived a whole life yet only 1 hour had passed.
- It reached a point where when my ISP was failing, seeing the internet box being solidly offline dilated time in the blink of an eye. I had a giant "oh god yes." screamed by my brain because I felt free.. no more F5/refresh of stuff that only satisfied me shallowly and forbid mind wandering or in-depth activities. Stunning effect an electronic pipe..
The article kind of says this, but I suspect the process of editing films and composing shots has gotten easier over the years as the industry has refined tooling and techniques. Not just CGI, but the ability to arrange and view scenes is probably much more fluid today than it used to be. This also seems like something where incremental editing improvements lead to incremental changes in shot duration.
I think it's much shorter now, that article is almost 8 years old. With the ubiquity of digital cinema, I suspect the average shot length is 1.x seconds.
I'd expect that some films, at least, have an uneven distribution of cuts. Action scenes will have more cuts than non-action scenes etc. Still, it's interesting to watch these films with the shot length in mind, it can definitely be unnecessarily frenetic.
I have diagnosed ADHD and I can waste just as much time on my amateur radio as the Internet. I guess we get a pass due to the technical neediness, but I spent 3 hours yesterday listening to static trying to hear a specific station…
As someone with actual ADHD, before I had internet, I could waste hours reading the TV guide or pacing my room bouncing a ping-pong ball.
However, when I actually have something to do, when I'm with friends or on a vacation, I barely remember my smartphone exists. But again, at the end of a 2-week vacation, I catch myself doing the same things routinely and mindlessly, without enjoying them as much.
Basically, when I'm tired or something, my brain goes for a quick dopamine fix which requires the less effort and, very importantly, the less deciding. The "beauty" of social media, is that they free you from the decision. On Wikipedia, you have to decide what to read, but social media give you a nice platter of content: "here's a tip for straining pasta, here's a nine-year-old who died."
If there's a started jigsaw puzzle on the coffee table, I'll go for that. A Duolingo lesson pending, a book laying around, sweets in the pantry, a small enough cleaning task...
> but we all need to be more intentional with our time.
Yes. Think how you want your time to be spent. Then make the hard easy, and make the easy hard. Make a "dopamenu" of fun/relaxing/satisfying stuff to do when you need a break.
ADHD is a developmental condition which is highly genetic and relates to neurotransmitter brain chemistry (Dopamine / Norepinephrine). People with ADHD have it their whole life, it's not something you can develop in adulthood. However, people can be (commonly are) diagnosed in adulthood, especially for the inattentive subtype which has less outward symptoms.
What can change or develop over time is the life circumstances that a person with ADHD finds themselves in. Circumstance can make the difference between ADHD being a disorder with significant impairments vs a joyful and creative existence.
Situations which demand executive function, like putting down that mobile phone or closing youtube in favor of doing something more productive are much harder for people with ADHD. The market built by the tech industry to transact human attention for profit certainly hasn't helped here.
According to the CDC/DSM-5, people with ADHD simply have enough of the described ADHD symptoms, and most importantly "interferes with functioning or development."
We don't yet know enough about the brain besides that people have different brain makeups and respond to different stimuli differently. We don't quite know what causes ADHD but we can group the overall symptoms together to try and treat them.
That said, plenty of the criteria in the DSM-5 can be as a result of our modern lifestyles. I talked to multiple psychiatrists/therapists who had consensus that I had ADHD. I tried all the different meds, none of them really helped. The only thing that did was changing my lifestyle. Completely eliminating some addictive habits that wrecked my response/reward circuits (porn and addictive video games) (still a work in progress but it helps). Structuring my life for more consistency and setting up a system that would prevent me from dropping into the negative ADHD habits.
I recommend reading ADHD 2.0 by Dr Halowell. Everyone's journey is different and I don't want to take away from people who get serious improvements from traditional ADHD treatments. But ADHD is a spectrum, and it's unfortunate that many of the traits that come with ADHD cause negative outcomes for our modern society, but it's really just a different functioning of the brain. Some activities exacerbate the negative outcomes, and some can reel them in. Like most other things, I believe ADHD is partly genetic and partly behavioral. The weight differs from person to person. One of those you can't control, and one you (sort of) can
As it's a developmental issue, you can't get it once your brain is fully developed.
However, your circumstances change as you become an adult and once well managed symptoms can start showing. You don't see impaired decision making when you can ask your parents about everything. You're not late when mom makes sure you get out one time. You manage all 2-3 household chores you have, but crack when you get 20-30. You manage your pocket money well enough, but not so much a full adult budget. You're fine when you know what you're supposed to be doing (the homework for tomorrow), but adult life gets you overwhelmed. Etc. Etc.
I'm not sure we're disagreeing here? As I understand it, some people have a certain kind of distractable brain and there's an underlying brain chemistry implicated here which isn't something you develop in adulthood.
However, having this brain chemistry doesn't necessarily mean a person suffers impairments in daily life: impairments are highly situational.
I suppose - to the extent that the DSM-5 requires a fair level of impariment for someone to be diagnosed with ADHD - that it's technically correct to say people can develop this in adulthood: there it passes from a syndrome to an disorder. (Personally I feel it's kind of absurd not to have a name for the syndrome if it occurs in the absence of impariment due to life circumstances! Perhaps this will be "fixed" one day as psychology slowly becomes more quantitative.)
I found Newport's book to be so surface level for anyone with even a passing familiarity with the problem that it wasn't worth my time.
What really helped me was these two books:
(1) The Attention Merchants by Tim Wu
(2) The Age of Surveillance Capitalism by Shoshanna Zuboff
and the nextdns.io installed on all my devices. I literally blocked Reddit, et al to break the cycle of "I just woke up so I'mm scroll until I'm fully awake" and then oops -- an hour went by.
The thing that ended up motivating me to change was reinforcing for myself the fact that I'm in this mess because very smart people have designed systems to exploit me. Fuck that. I'm in control of my attention.
The first thing I did is move my phone out of the bedroom. This helped break the habit of picking it up right away in the morning, and created some friction. I keep it on my desk on a charger.
The second thing I did was decide on a few things I had to do before picking up my phone for the first time in the morning. This like a game, where I started with one thing and then built up more, to see how many things I could get done before checking my messages. I started with taking a shower. Then I added walking the dog, then coffee, then breakfast... now I'm up to the point where my entire morning routine has to happen before I pick up my phone.
It's not easy. I'm not perfect at this, and there are days when I go back to bad habits. (In this context, I use "bad habits" to mean "habits that prevent me achieving the goals I set for myself). That's why I block certain websites still, for myself, to help from getting back into those habits.
I spoke to a fairly well respected psychologist about exactly the issue OP was describing. He felt that the issue was really poor impulse control and suggested introducing delays between action -> reward.
He thought it wasn't ADHD because I don't otherwise get distracted if I'm engaged (watching a movie in a theater, cooking etc) and can generally see the task through to the end.
Note: watching a movie in a theater is, for me, a totally different experience to watching it at home. At home there's always an option to pick up the phone in the middle or walk away and do something else whereas at the theater I don't have that option. I can very easily watch a full movie at the theater but it's been a fairly long time since I was able to watch a full movie at home in one go.
I’d also recommend Nicholas Carr’s 2011 book “The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains”. I read it a long time ago and was impressed with its insights on attention (or the lack of it) and the usage of the Internet.
Not exactly. It's definitely not ADHD if there's no prolonged and debilitating impact. Being distracted an hour there and a couple there is not like ADHD.
ADHD would be like more like falling in a pit where one basically cannot do anything meaningful for days and days despite willing to do so (if the motivation is lost, in turn, we are talking about depression-like states).
I doubt that many of normal smartphone users get into such pits despite they appear distracted and might have an urge to get into one's smartphone.
ADD/ADHD are very much a spectrum. If someone is having trouble focusing for a few hours a day, even if it’s not literal days on end, I don’t think it’s crazy to investigate ADD/ADHD as the cause/name of the problem.
Agreed. Especially if slacking for days would quickly lead to negative consequences. ADHDs are often distracted until the very last moment when the failure becomes imminent -- and then work to avoid it.
Some times I go through periods where I do that repeatedly. Distracted and unproductive, to the point where it physically hurts, until there's no possible alternative but to work hard or fail.
I think the last couple years have been especially bad. We've had a pandemic that isn't 100% over that removed a lot of the non-Internet interactions from most people's lives, we have a major land war in Europe now that could turn into a civilization-ending nuclear war at the drop of a hat, we had a contentious election in the U.S. about a year and a half ago that culminated in the Capital being ransacked, we've had ongoing droughts, wildfires, and heat waves that will probably just keep getting worse, we have supply chain disruptions, and so on.
It's really no wonder people are paying attention to the Internet, because at any moment some new calamity will be upon us. (It was kind of also true for me during the Trump presidency: I felt compelled to check the political news multiple times a day as if somehow my personal supervision and online comments would keep Trump from doing anything too crazy.) I've started to wonder if I'm exhibiting ADD-like symptoms, and I'm also wondering if it's not just me, that it's happening to most people at the same time.
Maybe things will go a little bit back to normal as in-person social interaction ramps back up. (I'm in the Portland area. Here, Covid restrictions are basically over but a lot of people are still operating in a pandemic mode. We've just now been allowed to work from our cubicles again, and only a couple of my coworkers actually do it on kind of a once-a-week cadence.) I don't think things are going back to anything like what I'd like to think of as normal, though. The world's just a really turbulent place right now.
I'm reminded of Scott Alexanders musing re: whether someone "has ADD" if they have trouble focusing on things that are simply boring as fuck, like looking at spreadsheets (or code...) all day every day, week, after week, after week.
But then if all their peers are in fact outperforming them, because they're already all self-medicating for ADD symptoms, or have a prescription for ADD meds, so they can focus on something that most ordinary people would have trouble focusing on... what then?
What's normal in a work environment that's fundamentally and extremely not normal?
Given enough time abnormal becomes normal and everyone who couldn't fit in is selected out. Several thousand years ago agricultural societies were abnormal, but they allowed high population densities and were better at war so they dominated (except on the steppe).
When Henry Ford popularized the assembly line he had extremely high employee turnover. People didn't like working that way.
It's not, but it will lead to some (obesity, diabetes, heart disease, etc).
In the same way, consuming infinite amounts of quick-hitting and dopamine-inducing social media is not a disease, but it can damage our brains and lead to "disease" in the same way that sugar damages the rest of our body.
Again, I'm not a doctor and I have no facts/evidence to share. Just my own thoughts on how things are going.
The modern internet has broken our slowly evolved brains. We are not built to cope with these types of attention destroying activities and media. At least 20 years ago you had to sit down at a specific place and use a chunky computer. Smartphones have made it 1000x worse.
There's no easy solution. I don't think becoming a digital luddite is the answer...but we all need to be more intentional with our time.
It's not the only answer, but Cal Newport's book Digital Minimalism^1 is a good read for anyone that finds themself feeling this way.
[1]: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/40672036-digital-minimal...