Related to reducing media exposure and the attendant increase in the sense of wellbeing, this is a lovely article by the Serbian / American poet Charles Simic, about discovering how his dad had attained "Olympian calm":
"Like others growing old, I had expected that after everything I had lived through and learned in my life, I would attain a state of Olympian calm and would regard the news of the day with amusement, like a clip from a bad old movie I had seen far too many times. It hasn’t happened to me yet. My late father, in the final year of his life, claimed that he finally found that long-sought serenity by no longer reading the papers and watching television. Even then, and I was thirty years younger than he, I knew what he meant. What devotees of sadomasochism do to their bodies is nothing compared to the torments that those addicted to the news and political commentary inflict on their minds almost every hour of the day.
My own inordinate interest in what the lunatics are up to in every corner of our planet has to do with my childhood. When I was three years old in Belgrade, German bombs started falling on my head. By the time I was seven, I was accustomed to seeing dead people lying in the street, or hung from telephone poles, or thrown into ditches with their throats cut. Like any child growing up in an occupied city during wartime, I didn’t think much about it. I was as serene then as I will ever be, sitting among the ruins smoking my first cigarette, riding on a Russian tank with a friend, or watching our school janitor hang the portraits of Marx, Stalin and Marshal Tito in our classroom after the liberation."
Detachment has its place in mental health but that is more when realizing "this is bullshit and doesn't matter". Like keeping up with the Joneses. If you don't actually enjoy any of that or find it useful just saying "fuck that and fuck you" to the social pressures is being anomalously sane.
To be honest all of the 1950s Zeitgeist reeks of suppressed trauma addressed in an unhealthy way. The whole lawn obsession reached a zenith from homesickness in Europe and POW camps - and that is just one of the milder examples. Kids ended up taking this state as a deeply unhealthy norm.
I totally quit television about a year ago, and it had a very noticeable positive impact on me.
I also mostly quit Facebook with the end of last year. I say mostly, because I still use its event calendar, and occasionally check my stream. But I significantly reduced the amount of comments I leave on that platform.
I feel like, while the criticism of FaceBook, Twitter, Reddit and co is pretty much warranted, we managed to push aside the biggest time sink we already have since the 60s.
TV, and Netflix, for that matter, is wasting our time since many many years.
I stopped watching regular TV around 2005 due to the influx of "reality-tv" and other crappy formats. What I used to watch before was real documentaries on discovery and it's family of channels.
Now I just watch Festival of Science or Royal Institution lectures on YouTube and some anime on wakanim :)
There are also a lot of real in-class lectures filmed on various topic on YouTube that I find very nice.
I don't miss regular TV at all.
I quit facebook around 2012 (deleted and purged the accont by waiting 6 months) and I don't miss that either. I still have contact with the friends that I care about via phone, I just don't look at their fake lives on facebook anymore.
I vaguely think I stopped watching TV, modulo Netflix, around the same time as you. Now when I see it in a trucker's break room or similar, it strikes me as shockingly vacuous, and so filled with commercials.
And now I'm living the irony, driving a truck and hauling all that stuff that the TV is waving in front of us. Just as some of you are living the irony, spending your hard earned educations building the infrastructure that implements the waving.
"Now:" I'm pulling a trailer from Illinois to Ohio, filled with "cereal, dry," from a maker to a big box chain's distribution center. Eat up! Eat!
* Deleted Reddit. I open the app every once in a while, scan what's popular. But not a lot.
* Pruned twitter. I don't follow anyone on Twitter anymore, save my partner. I deleted all my posts, going back to the beginning. I don't read it anymore, but I've preserved my username.
* Kept Instagram. I like following certain people in places around the world I have a travel connection too. And certain athletes in sports I follow.
And so...
If there's no benefit to posting -- there's very little inclination to consume. No arguing, no triggering, no pavlov-ian itch.
I post to Instagram, I post a little bit here on YC. This leveling keeps the "push for pellet", or "pull down for more content" habits very minimal.
I don't think there's any particular need to cold-turkey quit watching TV, just to be a little strict with yourself about what you watch.
Similarly with Facebook; I use it but I don't follow friends particularly - I follow pages, mainly a useful local neighbourhood page that mainly seems to concentrate on who has lost a cat and who can recomnend a plumbe. Similarly with Reddit, just select a few decent subs that you are interested in.
I look at Fscebook every couple of weeks. Reddit - too frequently.
I personally don’t find TV a time waster. If you enjoy it, as I do, then do it, guilt-free.
However if you find yourself addicted ie you want to do other things but you keep getting “sucked in” then by all means stop - it will have a noticeably positive impact.
I wasn't feeling like TV directly prevented me from doing anything else, but it still felt like a big relief when I finally sold my TV.
It didn't feel like it was stealing any of my time, still, my daily activities at home changed to something that feels much more productive and healthy.
I read more, and spend more time with my personal projects.
TV is sneaky, you don't realize how much time of your life it consumes.
I don’t agree. Watching tv and browsing social media just temporarily heightens the mood, but then tampers of very quickly. That time could be spend doing something useful like following a hobby, because that increases overall happiness.
Same here! I haven't had a TV in many years and since quitting the news (on every medium) I'm much happier and have much more time and energy to devote to fun and productive things.
I ended up finding youtube even more addicting than regular TV or netflix. This shouldn't be surprising, but I had to take steps to mitigate my Youtube intake all the same.
time spent in a way that made you feel good isn't wasted. maybe it had no economic output but that isn't a waste.
But the long term benefit of TV/Video isn't a diet that's good for you. Consider all the things you could do (not "achieve") if you'd use it for reading books, travel, learning a language or art. What this medium robs you of is boredom, which maybe feels great in the short run, but is hugely damaging to your creativity, focus and (probably even) mental health.
When I deleted facebook I noticed a huge improvement, but also I shifted my attention to other things which are equally addictive (HN, and my "personal information pipeline"). So like when I stopped smoking and moved to caffeine and sugar I substituted my FB addiction with other forms of unhealthy consumption. Getting rid of FB is therefore easy but getting rid of the underlying addiction is _really_ hard.
Sitting alone in a room with your thoughts is almost impossible (for most). Try it for a couple of days! Do nothing - not even reading a book you'll feel like you're going insane!
What works though is taking really long walks, or going out to nature for a few weeks (or months) and being on your own. You won't feel bored for long I'll promise! The most awesome memories I personally have are from things that made zero sense (and often in the most terrible circumstances).
Well, first of all, most TV programs I know are catering to an audience that is clearly not fitting my expectations of quality information or even entertainment. The mother from "requiem for a dream" comes to mind when I think about average TV entertainment.
What adds to that, is that I really can't stand the style of action movies produced since about 2010. They are heavily overloaded and lack a story that is worth following.
Maybe I am getting old, but I constantly feel like being wound up by TV programs these days.
There is a great plugin for browsers called 'news feed eradicator'. It's great because it turns facebook into messenger with notification center when somebody mentions you or there is event coming up.
Just a little note on using Facebook for the calendar. That was also an excuse for me to not deleting Facebook, but I imported the calendar to Google.
It's been a year and I don't miss any of it.
The only reason why I have a Google account is that Google bought YouTube.
Establishing a Google calendar to get rid of Facebook doesn't seem like a win for me...
Besides, how does that work? Much of the Facebook Calendar feature works for me by friends inviting me to events. So in a sense, I will still need to maintain an FB account.
The big corporate channels like "Analog Devices Inc" have too many premade for facebook 90 second snaps, and not enough relax in the living room recliner long format content.
The more niche the content the better the odds of "big corporate" producing quality content. "Analog Devices Inc" is mostly 90 second commercials, but "Arm Mbed" and its office hours series, despite also being "big corporate", has lots of enjoyable long format content, assuming you're into embedded FOSS RTOS for ARM or STM32.
For me the greatest improvement came from stopping using Twitter and Reddit rather than Facebook or Instagram (I quit using all four within the last year, Youtube is the only social media service that I'm still regularly consuming, I'd like to quit that too), of course this is based on my personal situation and the way I personally use all of those media. In my specific case I have the impression that Twitter and Reddit are somehow more addictive and they used to have the largest detrimental impact on my mental health. With Facebook, that impact is moderate and with Instagram I would say almost non existent.
Same here. At least in Facebook you mostly communicate with people you've chosen to accept as friends, and know who they really are.
Reddit and Twitter on the other hand show all the bad sides of anonymity to the fullest. Way too much blind tribalism and conflict seeking, few adults actually capable of real discussion. So it's not only a waste of time, but one that gives you a bad mood as well.
People on Hacker News, by and large, don't seem to grasp the concept of using Twitter for things other than having debates/arguments. The criticisms of it here typically boil down to it not being a good platform for discussion, when in reality, that's just not the point of Twitter!
Most people are using Twitter for the memes, the (often educational) content, the news, and direct messaging. The average person is probably not there to look for people to have a long form discussion with, especially if that person is a stranger who is trying to argue with them.
The echo chamber is real. I went cold turkey on Twitter after using it for 10 years and gaining about 6k followers.
Twitter was the #1 source of left-wing extremist noise in my life. I'm sure there were/are right-wing extremists on that platform too, but one seemed to appear in my algorithmic feed more than the other. Or perhaps it was confirmation bias. Who knows!
I never understood the value of Twitter. It looked to me like a few people machine gun blasting personal details to the world. Why anybody would do that or even read it was bizarre to me. I guess some people just crave attention.
I wonder if people will ever quit Facebook.. I mean after all the stuff that's happened and they still haven't.
We had a discussion about this recently in my Spanish class. Someone asked me for my facebook and when I said I closed it long ago they were all like "eeewww privacy freak".
So I explained my reasons, the abuse of personal data, the manipulation of the masses (Cambridge Analytica) and the others immediately sprang to life saying how horrible it all is. And turned out to have good knowledge of the facts. But yeah, it's so easy to stay in touch with friends.. Well yes I know, as an expat it's not easy without it.
Still, their initial "ewww" reaction really surprises me considering their apprehension at Facebook's practices.
Facebook, like many other things in our society, is a Clan-thing. "My clan vs your clan" is a game that humans play very very well.
Their initial reaction is just "oh, you are not one of us". If you talk about the details, they might agree with you, but they still fall for the "not one of my clan"-thing initially.
Same happens with many things.
Linux vs Windows vs Mac OS
Android vs iOS
Left vs Right
Vegetarian vs meat-eater
vaxxination vs anti-vaxx
choose your poison.
HN contains many obvious example of clan behavior. New Urbanism, bicycling, cooking for yourself instead of eating restaurant food every meal, Trump derangement syndrome, Brexit is going to cause the collapse of civilization, all strictly enforced groupthink on HN.
It never fails to amaze me how we (as a group) can have a free and open discussion of microcontroller RTOS options, but god help someone who has the wrong opinion about bicycling the groupthink will incinerate them.
Free to have any opinion here about tech things, but the counter reaction to that is no freedom at all about non-tech related opinions.
It is awful that staying in contact with messages from friends and loved ones forces one to be exposed to Facebook's addictive advertising, propaganda and surveillance machine - especially as Facebook is a monopoly.
Legislation enshrining adversarial interoperability would allow competition to improve user experience.
But now Facebook is a kingmaker akin to the Murdoch press legislators are not incentivised to corral Facebook.
Imagine a message client that interacts with facebookosphere and allows the use of a single detoxified client for messages and feeds from all protocols, services and ospheres.
Facebook is moderately useful for keeping in touch with people you want to hear from and who just won't use email/Mastadon or whatever, and for interest-based groups and events. That is all. And as long as you strictly restrict yourself to using only the website through a browser and eschew their apps and carefully go over the privacy settings and tune them to your needs you should be okay. As for endlessly scrolling the newsfeed all day, well that is not so much Facebook's fault as that people who do that are probably having too much idle time and not knowing how to do some productive or more creative activity. If Facebook did not exist those people would trawl through Twitter or Youtube or something else.
> As for endlessly scrolling the newsfeed all day, well that is not so much Facebook's fault as that people who do that are probably having too much idle time and not knowing how to do some productive or more creative activity. If Facebook did not exist those people would trawl through Twitter or Youtube or something else.
ehh... yes and no.
On the one hand, there is something to the idea that folks should take responsibility for figuring out how to not waste their time like this (if they consider it a problem; if you want to spend all day on goofing around on the internet, have fun I guess). There's some internal motivation required to make that happen that's a skill worth learning.
...but on the other hand, companies spend a ton of money researching how to keep people "engaged." This includes hiring psychologists to help them fine-tune the crap out of their platforms to make them addictive. Given that level of manipulative behavior, I don't think it's entirely fair to blame the users. And yes, without Facebook they might just do the same on Twitter or YouTube, but those platforms are doing the same thing. It doesn't make it ok just because everyone else is doing it.
I just want status updates and photos from my friends. If I could literally mute all shared content (memes, twitter dunk screenshots and "shares") it would be a much nicer platform to use, but from Facebook's perspective this would be awful because I would be on and off the site in a few minutes.
It turns out I really just wanted MySpace with photo albums.
The internally-inconsistent premise FB is based on, keeping in touch with friends, ultimately leaves nothing new and no mystery to talk about.. and no point to ever meet, effectively creating distance from and losing friends. Isn't that an awesome technology?
My attempts to not use Facebook and social media typically ended with substantial social isolation. The range of media I consumed became significantly smaller, because apparently got variety from other peoples suggestions. Maybe these articles are about people who have great IRL communities they fit perfectly in, but some of us are mostly lonely unless we keep at least those weak ties via network.
So ironically, I am not in period of starting to use Facebook again, so that I have more contact with people again.
Why not go do social hobbies? Photography or creative clubs, walking groups, dance classes, book reading clubs, volunteer work. There is lots to choose from.
I have job and kids. And I am already using my allocated "for me" time for sport. It gives some social contact, but not enough. Social hobbies require significant time spent hanging out, but are not child friendly so they are out.
Besides that, walking groups or book reading clubs don't exist here. Photography or creative clubs exist only in form of structured classes, where you pay for two lessons a week. Adults/older people, they mostly come and hurry back home - which is what I would do too I guess anyway. They are not really social places where you come for idle chat and build relationships that survive end of semester.
So it does not even matter that none of these activities appeals to me in any way - I could not belong to creative group, because I completely sux at art and find it frustrating.
Instagram has so many low-quality ads that show up so frequently when scrolling through the feed/stories that it's like they don't even WANT me to get addicted
Personally, giving up facebook saves about 10-15 minutes a day. I feel better, not because my friends' stories were making me feel inadequate, but because it is one less stream of mostly useless information that I need to filter and process. I miss seeing pictures of my friends. I do not miss people regurgitating political memes. I don't think quitting FB dramatically improved my life satisfaction or happiness.
Readit News
"Like others growing old, I had expected that after everything I had lived through and learned in my life, I would attain a state of Olympian calm and would regard the news of the day with amusement, like a clip from a bad old movie I had seen far too many times. It hasn’t happened to me yet. My late father, in the final year of his life, claimed that he finally found that long-sought serenity by no longer reading the papers and watching television. Even then, and I was thirty years younger than he, I knew what he meant. What devotees of sadomasochism do to their bodies is nothing compared to the torments that those addicted to the news and political commentary inflict on their minds almost every hour of the day.
My own inordinate interest in what the lunatics are up to in every corner of our planet has to do with my childhood. When I was three years old in Belgrade, German bombs started falling on my head. By the time I was seven, I was accustomed to seeing dead people lying in the street, or hung from telephone poles, or thrown into ditches with their throats cut. Like any child growing up in an occupied city during wartime, I didn’t think much about it. I was as serene then as I will ever be, sitting among the ruins smoking my first cigarette, riding on a Russian tank with a friend, or watching our school janitor hang the portraits of Marx, Stalin and Marshal Tito in our classroom after the liberation."
https://www.nybooks.com/daily/2011/12/05/goodbye-serenity/
To be honest all of the 1950s Zeitgeist reeks of suppressed trauma addressed in an unhealthy way. The whole lawn obsession reached a zenith from homesickness in Europe and POW camps - and that is just one of the milder examples. Kids ended up taking this state as a deeply unhealthy norm.
I feel like, while the criticism of FaceBook, Twitter, Reddit and co is pretty much warranted, we managed to push aside the biggest time sink we already have since the 60s. TV, and Netflix, for that matter, is wasting our time since many many years.
Now I just watch Festival of Science or Royal Institution lectures on YouTube and some anime on wakanim :)
There are also a lot of real in-class lectures filmed on various topic on YouTube that I find very nice.
I don't miss regular TV at all.
I quit facebook around 2012 (deleted and purged the accont by waiting 6 months) and I don't miss that either. I still have contact with the friends that I care about via phone, I just don't look at their fake lives on facebook anymore.
And now I'm living the irony, driving a truck and hauling all that stuff that the TV is waving in front of us. Just as some of you are living the irony, spending your hard earned educations building the infrastructure that implements the waving.
"Now:" I'm pulling a trailer from Illinois to Ohio, filled with "cereal, dry," from a maker to a big box chain's distribution center. Eat up! Eat!
* Deleted Facebook. Don't miss it one bit.
* Deleted Reddit. I open the app every once in a while, scan what's popular. But not a lot.
* Pruned twitter. I don't follow anyone on Twitter anymore, save my partner. I deleted all my posts, going back to the beginning. I don't read it anymore, but I've preserved my username.
* Kept Instagram. I like following certain people in places around the world I have a travel connection too. And certain athletes in sports I follow.
And so... If there's no benefit to posting -- there's very little inclination to consume. No arguing, no triggering, no pavlov-ian itch.
I post to Instagram, I post a little bit here on YC. This leveling keeps the "push for pellet", or "pull down for more content" habits very minimal.
Similarly with Facebook; I use it but I don't follow friends particularly - I follow pages, mainly a useful local neighbourhood page that mainly seems to concentrate on who has lost a cat and who can recomnend a plumbe. Similarly with Reddit, just select a few decent subs that you are interested in.
I look at Fscebook every couple of weeks. Reddit - too frequently.
However if you find yourself addicted ie you want to do other things but you keep getting “sucked in” then by all means stop - it will have a noticeably positive impact.
But the long term benefit of TV/Video isn't a diet that's good for you. Consider all the things you could do (not "achieve") if you'd use it for reading books, travel, learning a language or art. What this medium robs you of is boredom, which maybe feels great in the short run, but is hugely damaging to your creativity, focus and (probably even) mental health.
When I deleted facebook I noticed a huge improvement, but also I shifted my attention to other things which are equally addictive (HN, and my "personal information pipeline"). So like when I stopped smoking and moved to caffeine and sugar I substituted my FB addiction with other forms of unhealthy consumption. Getting rid of FB is therefore easy but getting rid of the underlying addiction is _really_ hard.
Sitting alone in a room with your thoughts is almost impossible (for most). Try it for a couple of days! Do nothing - not even reading a book you'll feel like you're going insane!
What works though is taking really long walks, or going out to nature for a few weeks (or months) and being on your own. You won't feel bored for long I'll promise! The most awesome memories I personally have are from things that made zero sense (and often in the most terrible circumstances).
The big corporate channels like "Analog Devices Inc" have too many premade for facebook 90 second snaps, and not enough relax in the living room recliner long format content.
The more niche the content the better the odds of "big corporate" producing quality content. "Analog Devices Inc" is mostly 90 second commercials, but "Arm Mbed" and its office hours series, despite also being "big corporate", has lots of enjoyable long format content, assuming you're into embedded FOSS RTOS for ARM or STM32.
Reddit and Twitter on the other hand show all the bad sides of anonymity to the fullest. Way too much blind tribalism and conflict seeking, few adults actually capable of real discussion. So it's not only a waste of time, but one that gives you a bad mood as well.
Most people are using Twitter for the memes, the (often educational) content, the news, and direct messaging. The average person is probably not there to look for people to have a long form discussion with, especially if that person is a stranger who is trying to argue with them.
Of course it depends a lot which subreddits you use. Some are toxic. The more technically oriented ones are fine in my experience.
Twitter was the #1 source of left-wing extremist noise in my life. I'm sure there were/are right-wing extremists on that platform too, but one seemed to appear in my algorithmic feed more than the other. Or perhaps it was confirmation bias. Who knows!
Good riddance.
We had a discussion about this recently in my Spanish class. Someone asked me for my facebook and when I said I closed it long ago they were all like "eeewww privacy freak".
So I explained my reasons, the abuse of personal data, the manipulation of the masses (Cambridge Analytica) and the others immediately sprang to life saying how horrible it all is. And turned out to have good knowledge of the facts. But yeah, it's so easy to stay in touch with friends.. Well yes I know, as an expat it's not easy without it.
Still, their initial "ewww" reaction really surprises me considering their apprehension at Facebook's practices.
It never fails to amaze me how we (as a group) can have a free and open discussion of microcontroller RTOS options, but god help someone who has the wrong opinion about bicycling the groupthink will incinerate them.
Free to have any opinion here about tech things, but the counter reaction to that is no freedom at all about non-tech related opinions.
Legislation enshrining adversarial interoperability would allow competition to improve user experience.
But now Facebook is a kingmaker akin to the Murdoch press legislators are not incentivised to corral Facebook.
Imagine a message client that interacts with facebookosphere and allows the use of a single detoxified client for messages and feeds from all protocols, services and ospheres.
Dead Comment
Dead Comment
ehh... yes and no.
On the one hand, there is something to the idea that folks should take responsibility for figuring out how to not waste their time like this (if they consider it a problem; if you want to spend all day on goofing around on the internet, have fun I guess). There's some internal motivation required to make that happen that's a skill worth learning.
...but on the other hand, companies spend a ton of money researching how to keep people "engaged." This includes hiring psychologists to help them fine-tune the crap out of their platforms to make them addictive. Given that level of manipulative behavior, I don't think it's entirely fair to blame the users. And yes, without Facebook they might just do the same on Twitter or YouTube, but those platforms are doing the same thing. It doesn't make it ok just because everyone else is doing it.
I just want status updates and photos from my friends. If I could literally mute all shared content (memes, twitter dunk screenshots and "shares") it would be a much nicer platform to use, but from Facebook's perspective this would be awful because I would be on and off the site in a few minutes.
It turns out I really just wanted MySpace with photo albums.
So ironically, I am not in period of starting to use Facebook again, so that I have more contact with people again.
Besides that, walking groups or book reading clubs don't exist here. Photography or creative clubs exist only in form of structured classes, where you pay for two lessons a week. Adults/older people, they mostly come and hurry back home - which is what I would do too I guess anyway. They are not really social places where you come for idle chat and build relationships that survive end of semester.
So it does not even matter that none of these activities appeals to me in any way - I could not belong to creative group, because I completely sux at art and find it frustrating.
Maybe I was an extreme case, but it had a horrible effect on me and I would never consider using it regularly again.