PieFedthe paradox is sitting by a screen to look for- and pull together some help with screen-addiction.
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your resident screen-addict advocate
edited
tonight i wrote a post in a drug-help forum in my country. then i shared it with a few near and dear to gauge their reaction to me writing in such severe honesty - i have told them alot but never gotten much recognition. this time it was wellwishes. som initial response i got i wanna share: "so you're a junkie now?" to which i lauded "sure, e-junkie."
social norms are weird and i'm sure i'd exhaust by writing, as interested as i am, just how much i wanna have added to the topic.
so i'll just wrap up with another response i got: "ironic that you look online for help against onlineaddiction." fucking ironic yea.
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It is kind of ironic that I feel that the most accepted place to talk about this is, again, behind a screen.
Thanks for making this community, I'm on a digital minimalism journey, and I feel like not many people I know IRL really understand.
I've made a lot of progress over the last 2 or 3 years, but here I am browsing aimlessly... I will say that Piefed/Lemmy has been a lot better for me than Reddit, which was my previous addiction that I finally freed myself from (partially) a couple weeks back. I say partially because even though I no longer have an account, I still find myself sometimes going back to aimlessly browse r/all when there haven't been any interesting new posts here, like window shopping for things I can't buy.
I struggle the most with online communities, because I don't have many IRL friends (though this is changing!), and I yearn for social interaction. I also really struggle with being incorrect. Everyone makes mistakes, sometimes I'll say something wrong or stupid, and in real life, I can kind of laugh it off, because people forget, it's not like that one random comment I said was the only thing my friend remembers about the whole day... I'll still feel bad about it, but then after a time, even I forget. Online, though, those posts stick around and constantly remind me of their presence. Hiding post scores here has been a huge improvement for me, because even a single -1 karma on Reddit would usually ruin my day (which is stupid, I know it shouldn't). I can still know that I was wrong, but not seeing the anonymous dissatisfaction is better.
i've read what you've written <3 (i got so glad from seeing a comment before the day ended)
writing notes as my thoughts come while reading:
+ i also don't know many (understatement) people IRL that get it, not now and not before. it's an added weight to not be believed.
+ glad to read your IRL friend-situation is changing in the very same sentence that you bring it up!
+ it really is like the whole humanity goes out the window as soon as there's a score to it. i didn't know PieFed has a "hide score" feature, neat of you to mention it.
+ there's certainly alot to be said about being in person but i too come to the conclusion that people just shrug alot more often. as you say being wrong sure sucks but it's inevitable. it's not an issue when life is divergent - full of facts which come together. online human communication is reduced because we have so few senses touching eachother... our expression is reduced, we maybe read some with our eyes, but don't hear smell touch or feel there's another human in the room, so we're treated so convergent - everything is either agreeable or disagreeable. "remember the human" was the first rule of the internet, now that i think about it.
If you're interested in hiding scores, see here: https://piefed.social/post/853795, simply copy and paste that code into the "additional CSS" box on the settings page.
I've taken to simply just not talking about it in real life. I made friends with an Android phone app developer recently, and he was actually very interested in my phone situation (smart phone with all the smart intentionally disabled), and we had a very nice long conversation about it last weekend, but that's far from the norm.
What's your next personal goal for reducing the screentime in your life?
okay. the more we talk about it online we'll manifest a normalcy, if not in others then in ourselves.
thanks for the brief instruction on disabling scores
and that's funny, talking about a "smart" phone with an android app dev. glad you got along with someone and didn't have to self-regulate to fit in when the topic came up =)
reminds me of Tom Nicholson's episode on 'limbic capitalism' - great public educator - for all the reasons he puts forth interface designers (like himself) feel guilty for the addiction happening.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XuTQbOo3Y30
appreciate the question!
i hope to enforce the "2h screentime per day, no screen the 1st hour of the day" guidelines set by research papers. in short the 2h cap to reduce neurogenesis and neuroinflammation (scary words, right? i wanna be scared into taking it seriously too so i don't sugarcoat it to myself) and the [1st hour of the day] thumb-rule is because introducing an object such as a screen before we've gotten out of bed and truly woken up puts our nerve system in literal fight-or-flight mode. not to be alarmist or anything.
(if i had spoons i'd pre-emptively fine-read and post sources to these two very specific claims. right now it's very much a notion i got from glossing over conclusions. anyone asks and i'll feel obligated to take responsibility for the claims.)
how long have you gone without the need to look at a screen before?
I've gone multiple days before when I am out camping (unless you count an e-ink e-reader, but I don't). Being out in the wilderness is really something that calms me and grounds me. I live and work in a medium sized city in a very densely populated area, so I am constantly surrounded by stimuli. There are a few places near my work where if I am having a bad day, I will head there after work and bring one of the hammocks I always keep in my trunk, and the e-reader I always keep on me, and read in the woods for a few hours.
De-smarting my phone made an IMMEDIATE improvement on my morning routine. No longer can I lay and scroll... I silence my alarm, check the weather for the day, see if any of the emails I got look important, then get up.
The home screen launcher I use on my phone (Olauncher) includes a screen-time counter prominently on the home-screen, so you can immediately see how long you've been on your phone that day. I've gotten down to less than 45 minutes a day, for the most part. Most days is less than 15 minutes, especially after I broke up with my girlfriend recently, she texted SO much...
The Piefed web interface also has a time counter. If you scroll to the bottom of any page, there is a time listed. That's the amount of time you've spent on Piefed on that specific device (It doesn't count between devices. Like I'm on my work laptop, which is where I have the hardest time avoiding scrolling). I've spent a hair under 14 hours this month... Which feels like a lot, but then looking at the date, it's only a little over an hour a day, which is WAY less than I used to browse Reddit at work. My laptop at home is under 2 hours, I don't have trouble keeping offline at home, I have so many hobbies and things to do.
I think I am down around the 2-hour screen-time for personal things every day, maybe closer to 3... but to me it still feels like too much, I think because I do a lot of WORK on a screen. Between 4 to 8 hours of my day (sometimes less depending on which machines broke) is spent behind a computer, and that's something that I can't control.
i don't count an e-reader either, no.
nature & animals are truly what keeps being my font of wellbeing likewise. i adore that you keep a hammock and an e-reader around. those aren't big nor heavy to carry around either. would you fancy sharing some recommended reading from what you keep on your e-reader in a forumpost? i have had trouble deciding
apologies on the broken up relationship, i do feel that screen issue with texting alot: right now i'm flirting with someone and this is a big reason why i stay online literally all day. 45 minutes is an amazing screentime you've reached, that it's 15 minutes sometimes per day is mindbogglingly impressive to me. in liason with the article i disseminated here your anecdote on awareness then seems like a prominent take-away: a screen timer for each screen. didn't know Piefed has a timer- immensely helpful.
yes with your work hours being put behind a screen then that's quite some screentime in total. do you turn off the colours on your work screen? apparently a colourless screen (atleast accessibility settings -> high contrast mode) would decrease blue light. i turnt that on today, but it didn't remove all colours and my screen is quite bright at it's lowest, so i've yet to feel much difference.
Today has been wrecking my Piefed timer lol, it's a slow Friday.
Reading suggestions really depends on what you like reading. I love "hard" sci-fi. Recently I have been voraciously consuming Greg Egan's body of work. I just finished Permutation City yesterday, started Distress today. I originally found this author after finding his book Diaspora on a reading list, and I really REALLY liked it. His more recent "Orthogonal" trilogy is fascinating, the characters are somewhat more flat, but the physics of the universe the series is set in is so thoroughly fleshed out. That universe consists of 4 identical dimensions instead of the 3 spatial and 1 time of our own universe. Many of the characters are scientists and explorers trying to make sense of their world, and there are sometimes just pages of equations to explain one small thing, which... I just love it so much.
Before tackling Egan's work, I read Ra by Qntm. They did some writing for the SCP foundation, and that same vibe really comes through in their work. Ra has such an interesting premise, and there were many twists in the fundamental understanding of what was really going on, I couldn't put that book down. Qntm wrote some other short stories, which are on my list to read next once I finish Distress.