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The Death of Daydreaming

(www.afterbabel.com)
707 points isolli | 5 comments | 05 May 25 12:22 UTC | HN request time: 0.295s | source
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gaoshan ◴[05 May 25 15:53 UTC] No.43896416[source]▶
Only recently, like in the last year, have I found my phone just sucking me in. I am mindlessly browsing whatever (TikTok, Xiao Hong Shu, Reddit) and then suddenly my time has slipped away. The thing is, I'm not young by any means. I figured I was aged out of the risk that the phone could devour my time but I was so mistaken in thinking that way. Compared to how I felt my time went and was spent when I was younger (pre-internet days) this feels awful and draining and so damn easy to slip into. Feels like life is on pause yet time is still slipping away as fast as ever.
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1. bityard ◴[05 May 25 16:06 UTC] No.43896528[source]▶
Doom-scrolling and short-form videos seem to not discriminate by age. I know lots of middle-aged to elderly people who can sit on their phones and scroll for hours on end every day.
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2. switchbak ◴[05 May 25 16:48 UTC] No.43897015[source]▶
My boomer relatives seem especially susceptible to this. As our local community ties atrophy, I find many old folks with less social contact tend to turn to social media to compensate.

I also wonder if the aging brain is particularly vulnerable to some of the darker patterns these platforms employ? It certainly seems like it from the small number of data points I've seen.

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3. unfitted2545 ◴[05 May 25 17:43 UTC] No.43897534[source]▶
yep. in my parents case, it might be that they've always thought I was the young, addicted zoomer, and it could never happen to them. it happened to them and now there's no self awareness.
4. smileysteve ◴[05 May 25 20:59 UTC] No.43899398[source]▶
Distractions aren't new; but they are more 24/7

24 hour "news" is a great example; we leave it on in the background, as Radio or TV, but we're not listening to gain information, we're listening to be entertained - amygdala activated.

With AM radio and broadcast TV, low efforts were mostly limited to 2 hour segments from the 80s-90s; then in the late 90s, cable tv became standard, then in the 2000s the internet (chats, reddit, hacker news), and then the smartphone...

5. gaoshan ◴[06 May 25 14:15 UTC] No.43905398[source]▶
I can tell you that for me (early Gen X) it got bad when my wife was out of town for an extended period of weeks for work. Ours kids have moved out, we have no family in the region, all of my oldest friends live across the country and I'm 20 years older than most of my coworkers. I found myself getting home from work, making dinner and then having absolutely nothing to do for several hours. That's when I got sucked in. Next thing you know I would wake up on a rainy Saturday and just reach for the phone and then it was lunch time and suddenly dinner time. It feels pretty shitty, too.

Recently I've had to find things for myself to do in order to make sure my time is better filled otherwise I will "fill" it with doom scrolling. I don't know that my brain is more susceptible (hard to self determine something like that) but my time is certainly more open than it ever was in my life previously.