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- Hacker News
- LLM: Attention is all you need. Human: Attention is all we have.
We should be careful where we spend our limited attention on.
by fredliu - Strangely I think it's why I like roadtrips so much. Sitting doing absolutely nothing for even 15 minutes is difficult for me, but I can drive for hours doing nothing but watching the world go by, even without music or podcasts on, and it's fine. And that feels good.by maguay
- Plane flights.
I hope the ‘free internet all the time’ era that airlines have been threatening us with for a decade now never arrives.
by jrmg - Yes, I feel like my brain is fried by dopamine dispensers, it's very bad and I have no clue how to get control back. At least I have some healthy routines in my days but it really does feel like being addicted to a hard drug.by Zealotux
- Get a kindle and buy some really gripping books.by ricardobayes
- There exist problems which cause years of suffering which can be solved in hours (sometimes minutes). Not every problem is like that, of course, but some are. Procrastination is like that, sometimes posture is like that, and mental effects of social media are like that. At least for now - this may get worse with time. But the solution is not to consume more content - books seem to be a common suggestion. It is to consume no content. Humans evolved to grind most of the time with a little excitement and entertainment now and again, but tech has inverted this. Its "what we want" in the same way a child wants sugar all the time, and its at once addictive and unhealthy. The screen is an insidious habit former and I'm not sure yet if there is any healthy level or use for some people.by simpaticoder
- To me, it is the same as a "hard drug". I struggle on and off. For me, it's HN and just general fear of AI / career trajectory. I'm constantly reading articles about it. To a lesser degree, videogames and other scrolling take mgood chunks of my time away.
I've been making a concerted effort of waking up in the morning, sitting out in my garage gym for an hour with coffee and a book. I'll do 1 workout per day, 6 times a week, and read a few pages of "Meditations" (The stoicism book). It really centers me and feels refreshing to break away from everything and just focus on my body and mind ad the real physical world. I'm not religious, so I consider that my "church" or something.
Obviously, carrying that mindset throughout the day is difficult - but having a set "no-screens" time is useful, especially when my previous schedule was this:
- Wake up + look at phone
- Sit on toilet and look at phone
- Drive to work and look at computer for 4 hours
- Have lunch and look at phone
- Look at computer for 4 more hours
- Come home, make dinner, eat food
- Look at computer or tv for 3 hours
- Go to bed and look at phone for another hour
Writing it down like this makes it very clear that this cannot be a healthy lifestyle - so for me, where work is ALL done in front of a screen, I'm increasingly trying to remove screens from the rest of my life. There's no reason for us to be on the internet all day long, there's other cool shit to do that feels way better than burning my eyes and brain receptors all day long.
- It seems to me that lots of people consider the ability to focus as some kind of innate ability which we are all born with, it's not. It's a learned skill which requires practice. Stop practising and it atrophies.
We all understand this for physical exercise, I think we need to understand the same principles apply to skills.
by moebrowne - Well, some people are innately physically stronger than others.
For some things its just the truth that some people have "the drive" and some people don't.
by Jtarii - Working at a gig where I couldn't have my phone really put me on a painful dopamine fast, but helped me remember that I actually can focus. So I started working at the library and leaving my phone at home.by Noumenon72
- OP is definitely not alone in this. It feels like I'm constantly trying to avoid "attention capture" when trying to do a task that involves browsing the internet - even going on LinkedIn or StackExchange for a specific purpose can get sidetracked by my eyes wandering to the sidebar or being drawn by updates in the feed. It's scary to realize how little in control I am of my own stream of thought.
I don't know if anyone has a solution that's not straight up quitting the internet cold turkey. My attempt so far has been meditating 50 minutes a day following "The Mind Illuminated" by Culadasa as a progress guide for increasing my mindfulness.
The most recent lesson I've learned is that allowing mind wandering and daydreaming can be a good thing. As a kid I read The Power of Now by Eckhart Tolle, and took away a misconstrued toolkit for dealing with an active mind. The whole book was about emphasizing the importance of being present in the moment, and I tried to carry that out by trying to silence my internal monologue and being frustrated whenever I found my mind thinking about something random and not processing direct conscious experience. That felt horrible and was completely counterproductive to being able to live normally, and now I'm trying to re-establish a relationship with my mind where I can welcome random thoughts while still being able to get things done.
by udbhavs - The number of news articles I start reading that interrupt the flow of the article with 'ads' for other articles I could read is driving me bananas.
To say nothing of ads themselves or CTAs or cookie consent banners or...
I'd frequently gripe about how much I felt my attention was fractured as an adult to my grandfather, between taxes or coordinating with service providers or whatever, and his response would frequently be "I'm retired and I can't keep up!"
It does feel that there's pressure in many avenues of life to capture and fracture people's attention.
- I am in the same boat as you and OP. For me, its partly age related, partly a (normal) boredom with my profession. I find my mind intentionally trying to switch tracks/find a distraction even while working on a task without external interruptions. For now, I'm just trying to observe and note that this is happening.
Recommendation for Linkedin/web distractions: use an ad blocker, add the central feed/sidebar with news and games as an element to your ad blocker. That way you can use certain parts of LI with less distractions.
I keep thinking of how certain religions deal with this challenge: going through intentional fasting and periods of retreat in order to reset your "dopamine floor" by reducing stimuli.
by jfil - I regained my focus after many years and it had nothing to do with distractions for me, distractions were only a way of fighting stress that constantly appeared. The stress was the underlying issue. I worked on that in therapy (breaking away from my parents) and I can now work on what I want for hours at a time. It's because now I feel I can become my own person and do what I want while not being chained to the past anymore.by doright
- Hard to break that family trauma cycle so congrats on that
- It seems that so many minor parts of the day don't work as expected and my attention is destroyed by a thousand annoyances. My watch only unlocks my computer 1/3 of the time. My car only recognizes my phone 1/2 of the time. 3/4 of the time I go to press/click on a song I want to hear, the data in the UI updates between the time I start to move to the song and I press/click and I end up hearing something I don't want. Annoying feature that I've disabled n times was re-enabled, and I have to disabled it again. Fighting autocorrect on my phone. I was signed out a service unexpectedly and have to re-authenticate. Programs X, Y, and Z are unresponsive. My VM says my network connection is unstable. My new car beeps because it thinks I'm distracted and then I get more annoyed and distracted.by gullywhumper
- my car has an AI assistant. I don't know what the wake word is, but it will wake up and be useless with no obvious way to turn it off. I'm sure I could search for it, but it happens while I'm driving and I forget about it. It happens just infrequently enough to not remember, but often enough to be really annoying.
My wife turned on a meditation feature on our very old Alexa. I guess the app was deleted or something, but every morning Alexa turns on and says "Starting your meditation times ... Sorry, this is no longer available". If I tell Alexa to turn this off, it has no idea what I'm talking about and it shows up nowhere in the iOS app. Instead of meditation, I got a nice dose of minor annoyance every morning.
by mritchie712 - also when I remember to put by phone away not to get distracted, then the 2FA requires me to go fetch it...by cellu
- I like to use my iPhone to read text articles. It's amazing to me how bad it's become at this task.
I get various emails with curated links to various stories, and I will click a link to go read that story. First, it often takes me to a browser re-direct that sometimes successfully redirects, sometimes doesn't. Then sometimes the redirect is to an app that I've subscribed to. Which would be great. Except for the times it opens the app but fails to redirect to the specific article. Then if the article is on a web page, it commonly fills the page with more and more ads slowing down my phone and giving me a tiny keyhole opening to read the text through.
Then I often want to go back to the email and pick up where I left off. Which works >50% of the time, but fairly often will skip to a different email.
I truly believe that for reading news and articles the state of software was much better 10 years ago than today.
by jimbokun - A lot of people here are focusing on ADHD, but I think the author is commenting on a different phenomenon, because they were able to concentrate before and now it's just much harder. I feel it and many people I talk to feel it as well.
It's difficult for me to separate whether this is a result of other changes in my life over time or simply a reflex of ageing in general, though I do think it's a wider societal shift. In the same way that older people find it difficult to watch newer movies (and vice-versa), there is a certain pace associated with culture as well. We have, on average, shifted from books to TikTok in the span of a generation.
by pu_pe - I've heard it's habit. You can have a habit of thinking long and hard or you can have a habit of jumping back and forth. You can always reach for the other, but you also have a default for most of the time. I think these days, companies want jumping back and forth because it means it's much easier to grab your attention and get something out of you, without giving you time to fully think through the consequences.by LoganDark
- I think it is becoming clear that we now have type-1 and type-2 ADHD prevalent in the population. Dopamine deficiency or insensibility are indistinguishable in terms of symptoms.
We are all exposed to so much adversarial noise trying to steer us that people are loosing the ability to focus and to filter.
Dieting and exercising helps. Cut down on exposure to noise from apps, streaming services, devices, etc. And exercise your brain, use it. Read long form text, take notes, write intentional arguments, use these arguments to steer yourself and those around you to create things of value.
- I gave up my smartphone 6 years ago because I concluded the conveniences it offered came at cost of too much of my attention, freedom, and privacy. My ability to focus was just gone, and this magic device was not making me happy or productive anymore.
Within a year, my hyper-focus abilities I remember having as a teen starting flowing back. In the last 5 years I have done the best work of my career, including creating the first fully deterministic Linux distribution, building a community around it, helping start 3 companies, learned endless new skills.
I am not reachable or able to reach the internet every second of every day, and in the modern world that sounds scary. Yet I have a family, an active social life, frequently travel, meet new people every week, co-running two companies while actively developing new tech with daily progress, etc.
All of those things were -accelerated- by me being intentionally offline whenever I am not at a desk.
by lrvick - > Within a year, my hyper-focus abilities I remember having as a teen starting flowing back.
Mine are gone for good. But I no longer want to be able to hyperfocus, because it is invariably a sign I am losing control. For me, hyperfocus is dysregulation that benefits others and not me.
I just want to be able to think straight, keep my house tidy, and not spend a couple of hours every day wishing it would turn out to be my last day.
by dofm - Living in Seattle saved me. In the winter months I started waking up and sitting in front of a SAD light for half an hour. I almost immediately got bored so I started reading long-form books (with the occasional short story) in front of the light for an hour each morning.
I gave up on facebook in 2010 and twitter in 2020ish. I never developed the habit for other social media. I turn off slack and email for the first 45 minutes of each hour. If the server is on fire, call me. That's why I have a phone. Oh, and I have an old-school non-smart phone for phone calls and it often lives in a different room from where I work. I run a TOTP authenticator on a tablet that's not configured to receive any messages.
HN and an occasional YouTube video are my only online distractions. In my advanced age I've lost the desire to tell everyone how wrong they are, which seems to be the national sport of online comments sections. (Though, HN, you're much better than most places.) I've been getting into GMRS lately and it's hard to turn off the radio during work days, but I have been able to do it. Maybe I should write a similar article saying "the net doesn't distract me, but dang if I can't go 10 minutes without thinking about people I know via GMRS."
The author of this piece makes an observation about bullshit vs. attention that is probably worth looking into. My last several jobs have included less bullshit, but a lot more documentation. Which is to say, the docs I write seem to have actual applicability to a real business problem and it's solution. There's little busy work that only serves to prove that a remote VP has more people working for him.
I think what I'm trying to say is a) it is possible to strengthen your attention gland. I'm happy to see the author at least trying. And... b) maybe there's a correlation between perceived bullshit and ability to focus. This needs more research.
by OhMeadhbh - Do you have an automated way of turning off Slack and email for the first 45 minutes of each hour?by Noumenon72
- I think it's just information overload. There's so much information everywhere now clamoring at you for attention. Our brains aren't made for processing this much information. Going on a media diet helps. Going completely offline helps even more.
Something I do when I struggle to focus is to add different stripped down user accounts to my computer.
I wanted to dabble in rust so I added a user called ~rs that literally only has access to two application hotkeys (via niri). super+enter opens a terminal, F1 opens the offline rust documentation. Yeah I can just log out and scroll HN, but there's a enough friction to that, that it doesn't really happen very often.
- It's more than information overload. It's an overabundance of distractions specifically designed to steal your attention. I block dark pattern sites during working hours. It helps immensely.by willmadden
- > Yeah I can just log out and scroll HN, but there's a enough friction to that, that it doesn't really happen very often.
What an awesome tip!
by mettamage - When I travel to EU, I completely ignore my phone. I'm doing things, driving, seeing things, and hiking. When I wake up I feel rested. I feel happy.
When I am home, I am exhausted every single day. Sometimes I don't even do anything, still exhausted.
Idk, if it is information overload, monotony, depression, work, brain get fried by constantly having to manage everything.
I also have kid....and let me tell you....to get him anywhere on time is mission impossible. Doesn't want to brush teeth, doesn't listen AT ALL, doesn't care about losing privileges. I guess this stress doesn't exist when we travel because we can spend 2 hours getting out the door.
I really need to stop using the phone as much and try to figure out what is causing it.
by avgDev