The problem is that I can not pace myself.

I can go cold turkey without any withdrawals. Not using no phone or computer on holidays? Not a problem. It would not be a great sacrifice for me to never touch a computing device ever again in my life.

But that using the internet only at certain times thing? Absolutely not. There will always be an exception because I need to look up something really badly and once the exception is done it is over. Restricting certain sites? But then there is that search result or that person linked me something I need to see. Away with the filter!

It sucks because as a software engineer I need to keep up with things so there isn't really a way to quit.

I just had a text file "stuff to Google" and I Googled it later. There was always more work to do so I could either work around it or just do something else for a few hours and come back to it when I went back online.

Though most of the stuff was just documentation, so I just downloaded offline docs and reduced the need to Google stuff by an order of magnitude.

Of course, it's going to depend on what you're doing (I assume it works better for solo work) and what kind of resources are available.

By do you ruminate negative thoughts? That’s my excuse for keeping my phone playing at night: I’m single, and despite being a successful professional and trying hard at dating when I was younger, my private life is full of bad experiences. I think about it and get angry. Youtube masks it.

Yes I’ve seen psychologists but no, really, they try to où the blame on me but every time it’s the others who bullied me. Anyway — without a smartphone keeping your mind busy, how do you mask negative thoughts?

I’m sorry to hear that your past life experiences haunt you, but I’m also glad to hear that you’ve done well professionally for yourself despite that.

I can’t pretend to truly know your situation and realize you may have received similar advice already, but in case you haven’t or someone else reads this who feels similarly, here is some anyway.

Firstly, keep in mind this advice also applies inside the work place, for example think of having lost a client as someone who was largely responsible for preventing that from happening.

When something bad happens, we can have one of two mindsets about it, a victim mindset or alternatively a mindset of “how can I improve myself from this experience?”.

The key thing to understand is that the victim mindset is disempowering, that you’re resigning yourself to be helpless to stop it happening again, while the other mindset allows you to potentially be stronger and more capable for the future.

So when something bad happens, it’s necessary to reflect on what happened, and it’s okay to acknowledge that the circumstances were largely beyond your control, but you must be sure to focus on what _you_ can change or control to try be in a better position for the future.

And because the past can’t be changed (although not easily forgotten either), what you can change is what you choose to do about it going forward.

This change in mindset is often something that takes time to acquire, so don’t expect it to just happen, but the important thing is to constantly reflect with the goal of continuously moving towards achieving it and one day you may find you have.

I wish you the best of luck for the future.

I have correct answers to all of your questions. How do I know they are correct? Well first of all science: They’re repeatable and produce reliably the same result. Second: Attitude: People go all ways when I spell them out, deny them, be bad-faithed, attack me, or nag me on superficial properties; but one thing they don’t do is provide an argument against it.

It’s maybe usual to see people victimizing themselves in that society and that they’re so systematically wrong that “Take responsibility” is good advice.

However, I’m a white male who dwelled into work and got good results, and literal hate does exist against me.

Of course, some people who were talented early enough did succeed to build a balanced life. I didn’t learned to date early enough, and when 25 years old came, girls went systematically batshit crazy when they saw that I didn’t know how to handle sex, so that I reached 40 without a single positive experience.

It’s possible to recover with women when you get accepted in groups, but I’m a white male and I refuse to apologize for being white, because it’s been harassment all my life, and yes people are cunts, so no I won’t recover.

What worked for me is getting in really good physical shape and good physical conditioning.

I can remember constantly thinking how much life sucked, no matter how good it actually was. Slowly, the negative thoughts just went away as my physical conditioning improved.

Meditation helped me a lot. You can train yourself to notice when your mind is doing something unpleasant or unproductive. When you notice that, it typically just stops, and you wonder why you were even doing it in the first place.

I'd recommend (ironically) an app for that, but the important part is that you practice every day, even if only for a few minutes.

Alternatively, being too busy and/or social to spend any time thinking — I joked the other day that I had "backdoored" my way into enlightenment by simply having no time/energy to think.

I didnt create that situation on purpose, both aspects are due to poverty (working two jobs and living in shared accomodations) but they've both had powerful unexpected benefits, to the point where I'm not much looking forward to getting my own place and going back to being alone all the time again.

Sometimes have the same issue (rumination).

I listen to podcasts and youtube science, tech ans history videos (with non exiting voices and without music or other sounds) to block out thoughts. It works. I guess audiobooks should work too.

Mind you I keep thinking that I should try meditation to build up my capacity at directing my thoughts, but with everything going on I can't seem to find the time.

Using my phone for anything else though (reading, watching videos) have the inverse effect and keep me awake.

Eh, I'm a handholdless wizard who's been down in the dumps for years now, so trust me when I say I know what you're feeling (kind of). The trick is that yes, we need distraction from our shitty lives and it's very comfortable sinking into a zoomer routine to numb yourself BUT you can get the same level of distraction from saner occupations, as long as you still have some fire inside you (often in the form of spite and bitterness, which are much healthier than simple decay).

Lift heavy objects and acquire mass, lose yourself in classic nerd crap (old school fantasy/SF novels, obscure music, do the Advent of Code in Lisp/ML/Forth/Prolog), solo hiking, drive fast, etc... embrace the loneliness and become someone better than the rabble, choose the path of the "Wanderer above the Sea of Fog", not that of the brainrotten goblin!

I'm not saying that existential pain will cease, especially when being around people with a normal life full of joy that seems so unattainable, but it certainly makes you feel better in the long term.

Thank you, it’s true that hate and the idea of revenge kept me from committing suicide and were the path out from my darkest times. Maybe I’ve recovered more than I admit, because your vocabulary is what I used 3 years ago and I’m far from that now, just the addiction to Youtube remains, to covers the negative thoughts.

There is still advice that I’ll use from your comment, and once again I love the vocabulary “Lift heavy objects and acquire mass”, which is typical from the meme world. You basically remind me of Jordan Peterson’s advice to stand up and do something, as soon as a lighter period of depression strucks.

embrace them, just refuse to act on them. let the thoughts come in, let them stay, and eventually they go back out. you're left with boredom, which can then be filled with whatever productive things that you enjoy.

That’s the thing with mental health, sometimes you forget one of the methods to get rid of unhealthy habits, and they might be so simple. Let’s give it a try.

It's possible that the discipline of psychology has something to offer you and you've simply seen a few bad psychologists. (There are plenty of them.)

If you ruminate a lot I would look into cognitive behavioral therapy and its variants and think about how their principles can be incorporated into your ruminations. The TLDR of CBT is it involves analyzing your negative thoughts critically, rationally and systematically in writing. Often when we do that the thoughts lose their emotional hold on us, even if some of them are true.

Avoiding may be better than ruminating, but processing is better than both. I spent way too much of my life thinking that ruminating was worthwhile on its own and eventually realized it is not unless you structure it narrowly and productively.

> books read, games played,

So that is positive, but reading and playing games on a phone is negative?

Yes, I think so. For one thing, reading on a phone is harder and leads to worse retention. The content you consume is likely to be shorter and less intellectually valuable. Maybe more importantly, doing anything on a phone seems to encourage a shorter attention span and switching over to other activities, such as tapping useless notifications and doomscrolling your way into anger, unhappiness, depression, anxiety etc. all generated by content that was designed for mobile users. Books don't do this.

I had a feeling someone might pick on the gaming reference here, but what I am saying is that hours of doomscrolling have been replaced by a mix of a half dozen activities, all of which I enjoy more than doomscrolling, and many of which are more useful.

Why would reading on a phone be any less intellectually valuable? A book is a book regardless.

Just uninstall the social apps and/or turn off notifications if you are easily distracted. It's not rocket science (which incidentally you can learn on a phone if you wanted)

I am actually surprised that this is not self-evident, I figured everyone knew it, but upon reflection I suppose not.

So we have a bunch of data that points to these conclusions, since I'm not sure precisely what I'm trying to prove here, I'll start with what I consider some key insights

- We know that attention spans are just massively shorter on phones than any other medium, the evidence from this comes from multiple disciplines and subjects - like pretty much any task you might do, when you do it on the phone you do it for a smaller period of time, on the web for example you always see higher bounce rates and shorter session times. Same with game/media engagement

- When it comes to reading we have a fair amount of research showing that memory and retention seem to suffer on screens in general, especially smaller screens; the gold standard is still reading from paper, and then handwriting notes about what you read

- It follows from the various above points that you're going to struggle to read and digest long, complex texts on a phone more than you would on a larger screen or in a paper book. And sure enough the type of behavior we see on phones is the consumption of bite-size content where it's difficult to express much in the way of complexity.

Recently, the writing-by-hand vs typing debate has been getting some more press, with people saying that pen and paper leads to better retention while note taking. Could reading have similar differences between methods?

Theoretically yes. In practice it is extremely difficult to say no to the short dopamine shots that a smart phone can deliver. Perhaps, comparable how alcoholics struggle to drink moderately.

Why would food at McDonalds be any nutritionally less valuable than food at home?! After all, food is food, and there is nothing stopping someone from having home cooked food at a McDonalds.

Because many people will read different content than in physical book form.

Doing challenging intellectual activity on a phone is possible, but it's a very small portion of what people actually do when they pick up said phone.

Phones are wonderful objects full of possibility, but in this context they're objects of mass distractions. That's 99.9% of their reality. Nothing wrong with normalising them as such.

Cocaine might be wonderfully productive for certain people, but that's not how it should be broadly discussed when we talk about its usage.

I’m not a specialist but I think someone having in its hand the same device they do other activities on, may trigger some habits they have/had on that same device. That doesn’t refrain someone to be productive but not the easiest way.

Yeah, in my case the benefits were dramatic because I'm easily distracted and lose track of time. So I was like, I'm just going to eliminate all possible distractions. I found that very helpful.

Another effect was that I started to become somewhat more productive during times when I did have access to my phone, or rather, more reluctant to start wasting time even if the option was easily available to me.

Damn, I should get my smartphone out of the bag and start using it, and develop a TikTok habit. Then I can put it away again, and my productivity will double!

Which is to say that I find this claim highly unlikely. You're very lucky to have such immense latent productivity that was just waiting for the smartphone dam to burst.

You can choose not to believe me if you want. Yes, turning the phone off doubled my productivity.

I can't imagine why you wouldn't believe this, if you've ever had coworkers, and observed them spending half their time on their phone at work.

It's a distraction which hampers sustained attention and deeper thinking - as well as eats up actual minutes of time, some raw percentage of your work hours inevitably goes into garbage content on the phone instead.

I find the people who are skeptical about the idea that the phone frustrates doing deeper thinking, are often the ones who have never done it. This is why they don't see the value in it.

Being interrupted by people at your desk is a known productivity issue. Why would phones be different ?

When I work at home or during evenings when I can focus for long duration my productivity explodes.

I have no issue believing the level of impact.

I don’t get this comment. Double is common hyperbole, but like do you think tiktok habits don’t degrade other productivity? It’s a known phenomenon that smartphones kill boredom and boredom promotes things like sleeping and productivity.

Smartphones kill boredom by replacing it with their own productivity killer.

I noticed something similar. Productivity does go up if you don’t replace social media with other forms of entertainment. After a while one gets bored and starts doing more stuff, either work or hobbies

You can waste time without a phone and you can do programming fairly productively on a phone (I lived without a laptop for 6 months, did everything in Termux!). But there's a right tool for every job, and the phone is designed to steal your soul (attention), designed to encourage mindless consumption, and interrupt you as often as possible.

This is part of a bigger principle I've noticed where I can rely on sheer willpower, or I can simply make a small change to my environment (e.g. move the phone to another room) and that's a much more efficient way to achieve the same result.

It's partly about reducing the Temptation, and partly about setting a strong intention / setting a strong message to yourself. If you're serious about getting some real work done, then why are you even looking at your phone?

Eventually you can get to the point where wasting time in any way starts to feel gross and you catch yourself more and more, but for most people it takes a bit of recalibration to get there.