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The Death of Daydreaming

(www.afterbabel.com)
707 points isolli | 1 comments | | HN request time: 0.207s | source
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susam ◴[] No.43896261[source]
Lucky for me, I could never get used to the small screens of mobile phones as a serious computing or web browsing device. While I still rely on my mobile phone for basic tasks like making calls, sending messages, and on the rare occasion, reluctantly typing emails when I don't have a laptop handy, my primary computing and web browsing device remains my laptop, with Emacs and Firefox as my main tools.

Surprisingly, the one thing that occasionally manages to distract me is this very forum - Hacker News! :) If I observe myself spending too much time on Hacker News, I block it at the /etc/hosts level. I have a little shell script to point news.ycombinator.com to 127.0.0.1 when I don't want to be browsing HN. HN provides a nifty solution of its own too in the form of the "noprocrast" setting in your HN profile page. If you haven't checked it out yet, it is definitely worth considering.

Apart from that, I think I've been able to escape the traps of modern social media. Also, I still depend quite a bit on physical textbooks, a rollerball pen, and a stack of plain A4 paper for most of my learning, thinking, and exploration activities. This routine has helped me to stay away from modern social media too. So, fortunately, I still have the luxury of boredom in my life which I find to be an essential ingredient for digesting new knowledge as well as finding creative solutions to difficult problems. I've found that letting my mind wander aimlessly sometimes leads to new insights when I least expect them. I think it also helps with creativity and reflection, in general, which is likely a nice bonus too.

replies(2): >>43896296 #>>43902631 #
1. chubot ◴[] No.43902631[source]
Ha yeah, when people talk about "smartphone addiction", I don't relate

I can relate to INTERNET addiction, but not phone addiction

Because I always found that phone UI is a frustrating bottleneck. The rate of information flow is not very high, with the small screens and the limited keyboards (although I can type long chats just fine on phones now)

I was a slightly late adopter of smartphones, and I also don't use social media apps. I use them on the web on my desktop, not on my phone

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Though a caveat is that HN does look reasonable on a phone's web browser, and it loads quickly, so it's an exception!