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The Death of Daydreaming

(www.afterbabel.com)
707 points isolli | 3 comments | 05 May 25 12:22 UTC | HN request time: 0.467s | source
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elbasti ◴[05 May 25 16:26 UTC] No.43896780[source]▶
Last year I took a smartphone holiday for 4 months (switched to a dumbphone). It was a fantastic time and I regret "falling off the wagon" and getting a smartphone again.

I noticed a huge number of benefits, but one of the most surprising was that it forced me to confront a number of difficult decisions.

There were a few times in which I was bored (waiting at the passport office, sitting on a plane) in which I started to think about decisions I had to make that were very difficult in ways that caused me anxiety: firing a person I'm good friends with, shutting down a company, stuff like that.

I realized that ordinarily I would simply refuse to engage with the decision: I'd get on my phone or "get busy" somehow and so simply postpone thinking about the issue indefinitely.

But when you're stuck at the passport office for 2 hours with nothing to do, you can't but help think about the thing that is top of mind, anxiety be damned.

For someone that is prone to anxiety around certain topics (conflict avoidance, "disappointing" people, etc) having times in which I was forced to engage with the topic had truly enormous benefits.

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1. timeinput ◴[05 May 25 21:26 UTC] No.43899611[source]▶
Do you ever have trouble falling into past decisions, and over analyzing them, and doubling down on your anxiety?

I would love to get rid of my smart phone, but the problems I dwell on are very rarely present or future decisions, and realistically what is top of my mind anxiety be damned is useless energy, it's like running a wind turbine off the grid, and forcing it to spin as if it were a big fan instead of running the grid off wind turbines. The thoughts are more like did I disappoint that friend last weekend, or did I dissapoint that coworker at the Christmas party 6 months ago, or did I do <x> that definitely didn't create <y>, but did I do <x> that made <y> happen?

I use chess apps on my phone to at least put my brain off those thoughts entirely because I have a different problem to solve, and that is magnificent, and if If I didn't have that I don't know what I would do. I know there's something probably not quite right, but I'm wondering how much time you end up spending on problems that "can't be solved," and how much is time spent actually solving problems in your life. If that makes any sense.

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2. bix6 ◴[06 May 25 00:09 UTC] No.43900661[source]▶
Don’t worry about the past, what’s done is done. Learn from it to do better next time and move on. Most people won’t remember the thing you’re freaking out about because it was something minor in their lives.
3. glic3rinu ◴[06 May 25 07:19 UTC] No.43902547[source]▶
What you are describing sounds precisely like your brain trying to do some emotional processing and you are shutting it down because you think it's not useful. If you are looking for the productive spin, then I would suggest trying some metathinking. Try to discover why your brain decides to bring this up to your attention. The specific story might seem banal, but uncovering the underlying pattern will teach you things about yourself that you might not be aware of yet, like what you are afraid in life.