alt Hacker NewsDoomscrolling ourselves to death
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Scrolling through the comments here, let's be honest about having actually read the entire article. Have you? Be honest.
At first I had not, only the first 3-4 paragraphs. And it just read like another one of those articles where somebody is sad about their own and their kids' habits. I then found that most comments here are about that too.
But I realized that not actually reading a lengthy article like this one is part of the problem, so I went back.
I have read it fully now and noticed two things. First, it's a very lengthy way to say few things. The author could surely have made the point much more crisp. But second, it's not just about the personal situation and some abstract form of person in society. It's also about those "in charge". And that's frightening.
I don't read less, but I do read fewer books. It is hard to find a book that is the best source for what I want know about, and that changes too frequently now to outlive the time it takes to read a book. This is what you'd expect in a world where the sheer volume of things that are important to know about has grown beyond a sustainable capacity.
What has taken their place, for better or for worse, are various information feeds with blog posts, news articles, and projects relevant to my interests and the moment. I've come to prefer a more raw exposition of other people's thoughts. It seems partly in the interest of credibility; more spontaneous writing offers a richer surface area to judge the quality of thought. And finding it in a place where other people are free to critique and engage with those thoughts means that I'm not locked into just one voice. I also have the opportunity to engage myself which fundamentally changes how actively I think about it.
I'm open to the idea that the shift has come at a cost. There is value to reading something that someone has put a lot of work into and in large quantities. But the days when I felt it was enough to just passively let information flow over me seem to be over; it is a luxury I can't afford.
I can tell, usually within a few minutes of meeting them, who’s really into social media.
There’s a little bit of frenetic emotional dysregulation, and then they say the weirdest stuff to me.
I don’t think you could have made a similar argument about heavy trash tv watchers. They may have had less to talk about, you may have found them less interesting, but it didn’t literally alter their personalities.
We have a big problem.
Hm, comparing developments spanning from the 12th century up to now with stuff that is happening in the last decade. Just give social media about 5 or 6 centuries to develop, and then check back to see if the arguments of this article are sound.
Edit: sorry for being so dismissive, but I just can't stand rhetoric that says something about "us" and "we". There were seriously stupid people back when we supposedly had larger attention spans. There are still stupid people now.
Killer line: "Having written extensively about how no one reads books anymore, he decided to turn the subject into a book"
Here's my n of 2 story, but my young kids read all the time and it's likely for two reasons. My wife and I read, and still read to them every night, and second, they both have Kobo Clara Colour e-readers. They love graphic novels and the colour screen keeps them engaged (we had black and white e-readers before and it just wasn't the same). We get 100% of our books from the public library and they probably read 5-20 graphic novels a week. Best $120 investment we've made.
Why do we scroll and not swipe? Scrolling is not a god-given mechanism to read web pages. Swiping/page-turning would be easier on the eyes (text lines don't move) and would probably be less addictive.
I think its deeper than "reading books" vs "doomscrolling social media's". Books can be fast food too. And, probably, in our time more and more books will become fast food.
There are a lot of good staff in format of short essay or in blog posts and even in videos. So, its a bit incorrect to say that reading is better than watching. Or that people was more intelligent due to reading.
Question here is not how, but what to consume.
But I think even consuming high quality/professional content, with deep research and etc etc, can be addictive and lead to problems described in this post.
I don't really know how to classify this problem, but maybe - "producing ideas by yourself" vs "consuming someone other ideas"?
With reading we consume ideas. But because reading is boring (rating by speed of receiving information), we also have lot of time to think, to produce new ideas.
And what with watching videos? especially short - you have almost no time to think about 15sec video content, because it already gone up and you need to forget it and see next...
So, reading and watching, doomscrolling is all about one, but on different stage.
And all this about competing two's: create it by yourself or listen it from someone other.
P.S. this is even make sense.. look: the more you do something, the more you skilled in this. And vice versa. So, when you stop thinking by yourself and start listening, your intelligence go down just because intelligence is about thinking, about analyzing and about your own sight, not someone other.
Reposting something I put in another doom scrolling thread
quite a while now. And have had periods where I've done it almost religiously. It is addictive. And the effects linger a lot longer than the period of scrolling. There is a thing I generally believe about neural pathways. That the road we most travel is the one we'll keep going back too. And doom scrolling makes me walk down those paths. To the point that it impairs and guides my thinking even after I stop.
And I have stopped. I have had periods where I have blocked Reddit, HN, LinkedIn. I will find myself walking those paths regardless. And then, after a time, I start seeking out the doom again because it's comforting in it's discomfort.
It's probably the worst moment in recent history for this. The constant barrage of information whether it comes from AI, climate disasters, politics or any of the other myriad things that are occurring right now. It feels impossible to break from that cycle. I'm trying.
I want to be present and live in the moment. But it's hard to feel powerless. And Doomscrolling, while it absolutely doesn't bring power, brings a comforting illusion of it. I am aware of it, so I am at least a little in control.
"It is notable that the era of peak democracy in the Anglophone world, the mid-20th century when the working class had the most political power, was also the peak of literacy."
That's the most significant line in the article. That was the peak of union power, and unions routinely had meetings and votes which mattered. What organization do you belong to today where the members can fire the leadership by a vote? When did you last go to a meeting run under Roberts Rules of Order, as almost all union meetings are?
This is why I still browse 4chan and of course HN - because the feed is entirely time based with zero recommendations and no infinite content.
I've also added userscripts to remove shorts and recs from YouTube as well as uninstalling absolutely all social apps and only using web
Ironically 4chan /pol/ now has higher quality debates and more diverse opinions than Reddit, and a faster website that doesn't constantly push nag screens or hang rendering.
What I'm getting at is the internet is too common and we need to retreat to extremely niche and selective platforms with limited content that you can't just binge for 2 hours.
The idea that society was always going to be literate—as in a book-reading people—is sort of absurd, especially when the practice is treated like a means to an end and the medium of the book itself is rivaled by digital media that affects its audience quicker, requiring less effort from them in return.
Now force all of culture and the most basic forms of social interactions through this digitally mediated funnel. You get the worst aspects of pre-literate and literate civilizations.
It’s not just kids at risk, I also struggle with it as a millennial. I love skimming HN, comments, blogs but I almost never read a full article. I wanted to read the Bible recently, and it was such a challenge that instead I generated an app to doomscroll it called ScrollMyBible.com (plugging because it’s 100% free/ad free and has actually been helping me read more) - maybe this idea could be used for other applications where we redirect this tendency that is weaponized against us towards something constructive
I switched to a Minimal Phone...it's terrible, and that's the point. The friction of everything being so clunky keeps me from picking it up and staring at it, it's unpleasant to look at and scroll through anything but text. It functions enough to let me acknlowedge a page, pay for parking, or disable the alarm system - but anything other than that is just not appealing.
I'm trying to read more, but it is definitely a struggle when I used to consume books voraciously. I'm definitely getting better though - for instance, I finished this article, at least. Beats scrolling thru /r/funny or something. I'm trying my best to reclaim my brain.
If you have ADHD, it's particularly damaging to doomscroll. It worsens my ADHD I've found; hence, except Youtube, I am off all social media of the Tiktok/X type.
I use Youtube for long-form video and only select videos, and XCancel/Nitter for specific feeds by certain people, which I read according to a predetermined schedule.
Often time I just found myself unconsciously take out my phone and start scrolling for no reason. Was not a conscious decision just muscle memory. Stop scrolling isn't really an option for me because a lot of info are genuinely useful, but I do fall into rabbithole of some of the most random stuff. Feel like that's how most people start doom scrolling
I just started reading Infinite Jest and unsurprisingly it seems shockingly relevant to the doomscrolling problem. I’m aware of its flaws, but I’ve heard it recommended a number of times related to our modern problem of amusing ourselves to death. So far it’s surprisingly enjoyable, eerily relatable, and not nearly as difficult to follow as I was warned.
One thing that recently clicked for me was making podcasts for my girlfriend / friends / parents on the subject, highlights of books I’ve read. It’s like a virtual book club.
Somehow even though this adds a gigantic amount of burden to reading, it taps into a “productivity” seeking part of my brain that can then create a sense of focus and accomplishment after each book.
Since then reading has been a lot easier and I can usually get to 1 hour per day. Still really underwhelming but it’s way more than I managed to accomplish through sheer force of will in the past
I encourage those who want to read more to start a book club with their friends. My club has read 6 books now and it gets at two things the article mentions, isolation and illiteracy.
I’ve recently also subscribed to a few in print magazines to address the desire for up to date recent information we get from social media.
HN is still hard to quit, the amount of useful information here is still high. digg.com summarizes X which I’ve found to be useful for not feeling like I am missing out on discussions there.
Could this post been equally effective without the history literacy since the early middle age? I recognize the irony of complaining about this post's length.
After a long period of reading very little fiction (and even less on deadtree), I’ve been rereading some SF in my bookshelf (the Culture series in particular) and I’ve been positively surprised how easy it has been to reach the "zone" where you aren’t constantly losing your focus or trying to fight the instinct to reach for an electronic device. Starting is the hardest part. It helps, of course, when the author’s prose is as compelling as Banks’s (RIP).
‘… many tech titans, Steve Jobs in particular, limit the amount of technology their children access…‘
Is he not aware that Mr. Jobs has been dead for over a decade?
I've abandoned all forms of media outside of HN, GitHub, Steam, Spotify and the occasional visit to a pirate streaming site.
This is an article about declining literacy in the West. But this is notably a Western decline problem. In some other parts of the world, literacy is improving.
One of the first things I noticed when I moved to Ukraine in 2020 was that even the political jokes that you see on television have real highbrow wit and humor, which assume a high degree of literacy to understand. Even talking to some kids who were 14 years old, I was surprised at how they had memorized poetry in multiple languages and could write beautifully in cursive. You don't find that anymore in the West.
Sure, kids over here doomscroll themselves on TikTok as well, but they are not illiterate.
Trying to get off the internet for me feels like a messy divorce. It's difficult because it was essentially my world growing up, shaped my value system and defined the type of things I should strive towards. Being involved in game dev, electronic music, and CTF communities exposed me to people doing all sorts of cool things and made me aspire to be at their level.
There were really two components to it I valued - the inherent interest in the topic itself of course, but also the sense of community and recognition you got as you dove deeper and created cooler things to share with people. At some point the second overtook the first, and I internally started to value the outcome or reaction to something I would create more than the satisfying pursuit of making itself. Doing a thing wasn't valuable unless it would be acknowledged by some group of people. It's been a long process trying to get rid of that mindset and I'm still not done, and has caused a lot of anxiety and questioning my interest in the hobbies I love.
A lot of the questioning has been driven by the absolute saturation of my online feeds. The algorithm can so quickly figure out the type of stuff I like and show me so much of it that it begins to start feeling meaningless in 10 minutes of scrolling - deconstructing that value system in real time (and I guess technically helping? hooray for accelerationism). If there is so much out there, what am I supposed to create that could add to the pile in a meaningful way? It really takes a lot of effort to sever yourself from the algorithmic mindset and remind yourself that you got into it because you like doing the thing.
Not to mention the second order effects, like the ancillary feelings of guilt that show up because I start questioning why I want to avoid seeing things about topics I supposedly enjoy. Part of it is personal flaw - I find it difficult to see something cool without feeling some imperative to figure out how I could do it myself. When I don't want to feel bothered, I'm driven towards more mindless consumption that doesn't run the risk of reminding me that I should be doing something. I feel I would be much happier engaging in the hobbies I have if I was a bit less aware of everything related to them going on in every part of the world, and the algorithm is a big culprit in that. Detaching from it is not just hard because "phone feels good", but also because it means completely giving up on the value system I grew up on, where you could know if you were doing something meaningful if it got attention from other people in the communities you wanted to be a part of. "Attention" has been too commoditized at this point to use it as a fulfilling indicator of return (but unfortunately, some people have to play this game if they want to support a living off a creative endeavor - at least I can ignore that part because I just make music or do creative coding as a hobby).
Wondering if hn ever considered doomscrolling and why they did not do it
I'd honestly be interested to know what kind of argument HN would accept to acknowledge there IS a problem.
Currently reprogramming myself on this. I’ve started doing more stuff on paper and using single-use devices as there’s not an immediate attention demand from something else then.
I suspect the author is reacting less to the decline of literature and cultural elitism specifically and more to the general decline of those critical thinking skills that you gain by engaging in difficult works. I actually don't think anyone needs to read all of "the classics" and there's no point gatekeeping "intelligence" behind Shakespeare. If you feel like you had your brain expanded through, I don't know, Marvel movies, then the more power to you, but the key is that you are able to actually reflect on the work instead of just saying "well that was fun."
What is happening, however, is that people are getting increasingly acclimated to consuming easily-digestible content because our lives are ruled by a couple of companies who make money off of your attention and the human brain struggles to sustain focus through friction, even though the way we actually learn and question our lives is through that difficulty. Unfortunately, social media isn't the only culprit because almost all media that gets sold suffers from forced participation in the attention economy, although social media is probably one of the worst culprits just because the form factor makes it so easy to consume brain-rotting content.
I guess all that to say, I think the problem is fundamentally structural and thus essentially bound to happen because of the way our society and economy is organized, so I'm not sure what there is to do about this. Maybe we can all collectively decide to power through the lack of dopamine and actively choose content that is more difficult but also more edifying to force the algorithms to optimize for something more substantive.
"Huxley was right" coin jar is pretty full these days!
This may sound old-fashioned, but parents can say no. Deciding what our children may do and what they have access to is part of being a parent. We don’t have to let them do whatever they want and then lament the results.
I recognise that it’s easier to establish these habits early. Our children are still toddlers, so we haven’t yet faced the challenges of parenting teenagers, but they rarely have access to screens because we deliberately restrict it. Even Steve Jobs limited his children’s use of technology at home. Recognising the problem ought to lead to setting and enforcing limits, not treating our children’s access to these devices as inevitable.
off-topic but anyone knows why these medium.com-like website have so many trackers in them? 100+ blocked by ublock origin
What he found was that as cable marched across Norway intelligence fell in its wake: “for each year that their hometown had full coverage, IQ dropped by 0.08 points”. “Higher exposure to commercial television”, Hernæs’s study bluntly concludes, “reduces cognitive ability”
No doubt that effect is real. But I think of it as this: some activities excercise your brain in ways that improve it, make new connections between neurons etc. While other activivities don't. Or worse: degrade your brain. Aaand: which is which, also depends on what you've done before. Or how often you do it. Or in what environment.
People who read books all day, every day, may become walking libraries who know all their classics. Are they smarter? Have more 'agile' brains? I doubt it. Perhaps the brain specializes on that activity & becomes veeery good at it. Potentially becoming worse at other activities. Granted: there's probably a lot of 'unused' capacity in most people's brains such that improving one area doesn't come at the cost of other abilities.
But I do suspect there's the rub: a healthy brain must be excercised regularly. Not just by doing again & again something it's already good at (however challenging). But also by trying new stuff. Activities not done before. Explore new subjects in entirely different fields. Especially stuff that promotes imagination / creativity as opposed to more passive consumption like movies or music. Couch potato? Move your muscles!
I'm not sure whether there's a way to max out that brain excercise part (if healty, and assuming it's possible in the 1st place). But chances are reading would be part of it. Longreads & a broad range of fiction in particular. Some puzzle or exploration / building type games could be. Mechanical construction stuff a la Lego surely is. As well as a variety of sports (doing, that is! Not watching or discussing). Socializing in various ways: in moderation.
As for people choosing (?) to spend a big chunk of their lives on passive consumption (great Dutch wording: "je leven wegflixen"): let 'em. If post-scarcity, information-overloaded society moves the masses' lives there, so be it.
Personally I prefer a hike up a mountain, improving a hands-on creative skill, a thoughful discussion, or a deep dive into an interesting new subject.
People love to say that this is the end of X, where X is something that humans have been doing for less than 100 years.
I think people still read, but the problem is largely that people read older literature, meaning anything older than 5-10 years at the very least. People are very hesitant to read something recent because it may very well be AI slop.
It's a crisis in literature. How do we fix this?
In the olden days we read because there was nothing better to do, with no TV until evening. If all you have is books, you read. It is as simple as that.
Some people came from houses that had books in them and others did not. Accessibility to books was important, you would just pick things off the parent's shelves out of curiosity, and learn what you liked.
Not everyone was culturally rich even if they were financially well-off, you could come from a poor background where the house had books, and reading whilst bored was a form of education not everyone had.
If you lived in the countryside and needed to walk miles to see a friend then you tended to read more than those that had friends next door. They had sports and general shenanigans to get up to, and would not be reading as much.
I don't see those moaning about kids today downloading The Complete Works of Shakespeare from the Gutenberg library to read it on open source recycled e-screen tablets, whilst eating their quinoa and jackfruit.
Leave those kids alone means protecting them from online nonsense but there is no going back to the 1970s or earlier when kids would spend hours immersed in a book purely for the pleasure of it.
> YouTube, which for any adult briefly glancing at the screen seems to feature an array of thumbnailed gawping imbeciles
I've basically given up on humanity. YouTube is a cesspit of stupidity - a race to the bottom and right through the other side of how utterly devoid of dignity human beings can be. I feel a physical rage at the mere sight of all the thumbnails of people pulling the stupidest face they can to try to get the stupidest people on the planet to click on their stupid video.
> Having written extensively about how no one reads books anymore, he decided to turn the subject into a book, The New Dark Ages, published this week.
That’ll teach them.
Jokes aside, reading something doesn’t mean it’s valuable. I think people read more than ever. Subtitles, captions, social media posts, source code. Most of it is jank.
> people in positions of power and influence are now notably ignorant about history and the classics, comfortable only with referencing pop culture
Reads like unsourced depressionwave slop. First source that comes to mind: https://www.ranker.com/list/us-presidents-by-iq/lauren-slocu...
Assuming memory capacity would yield the best decisions and best leadership ignores charisma, personal life experience, sociopathy, interdependence, society, uncertainty about the future and more.
You can’t be too literate and educated: it’s a rat race / status race like any other.
Even if the classics and history siphon into modern productions such as Hades.
> The cultural elite has abandoned cultural elitism.
Cultural accessibility is at an all time high. Next to oceans of entertaining things more optimized for consumption it’s hard to stay relevant.
Expertise and being able to rely on others with expertise is more valuable than requiring every leader to have read the classics or being part of some intellectual elite. Knowing things is awesome mainly because it’s fast and helps with survival.
Requiring everyone to be an expert on everything is a form of punishment to all.
Edit: wrong any/every
Interesting article right up until they introduce the right vs left debate. The left doesn’t want to appear “elite” because they are so smart and intelligent they don’t want to offend. Give me a break jagoff.
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> hiding my smartphone from myself. I have shoved my smartphone behind wardrobes and under beds. I have shut it up in cupboards.
> One particularly desperate ... strategy I developed was to kick my phone haphazardly across the room so it would lodge under some unknown piece of furniture
So over privileged people buy $1500 iphones, only to kick them across room, to hide? I do not think reading yet another master piece would help such person!
There's another perspective - everyone and his dog today is reading more than ever because of LLMs (which are really LCPs in 2026 considering the machinery embeds all kinds of concepts in tokens). We ingest more information, condensed or not, than the average PHD scholar did mere 20-30 years ago. That is... by all measures - a lot.
And while many ppls throughout the centuries would never enter a library (and thus many would never consciously talk to AI), we can assume one cannot use AI atm if they don't read through all (or at least some) of its response. Perhaps we'll reach the Lady's Illustrated Primer* at some point (amazing we're not there yet, but we are actually given all the visual artifacts produced by Gees), but right now - everyone on a computer with AI access reads more than they did back in the 90s. It is just not reading off a book.
And there is also a strong argument that reading off the endless (still, sadly) stream of generated text is more beneficial to the person than reading endless nonsense on everyday media. Because media is super biased, and local media even more so.
Ed West’s longstanding intellectual project is fairly conventional reactionary/retvrn/conservative pessimism, and he has no particular technology background of all to speak of.
The argument is basically here is what happened to civilisation X when it abandoned virtue/cohesion/tradition; therefore contemporary liberalism, immigration, feminism, secularism, etc. are leading us towards the same fate.
No interest really in people whose project it is to launder reactionary opinions through ancient history.
Sorry for being pedantic but content like “I took a bath full of Diet Coke and Mentos” is not doom scrolling. Is it low quality use of your time, sure, but it’s not doom scrolling
"I have given up newspapers in exchange for Tacitus & Thucydides, for Newton & Euclid; & I find myself much the happier."
- Jefferson letter to John Adams, 1812.
The not-reading part is seriously starting to sound like lamenting the death of the epos. Yeah, there is a real loss of an art form there but also most books are padded to death and should have been articles at most, maybe even tweets.
The reason we read less long form prose is because we have more information-dense, relevant, and personalized forms of communication and knowledge transfer available to us. If you take a book from world top 100 and compare it to average youtube feed, you will be horrified. But it's not like people in the recent past were primarily reading Conrad and contemplating physical isolation's impact on social norms.
On a personal level I have become more anxious and it has become more difficult to deal with my tendency to procrastinate the more screen time I have and the more I am exposed to social media. I have in essence deleted the vast majority of my social media accounts years ago, but stayed a passive and rather anonymous consumer on Reddit, X and YouTube. A few weeks ago I blocked them too. I would say in totality I read more than I read growing up, but it was usually in the form of short content. Same goes for watching things. Unlimited access to short form content of any form has made my monkey brain feel a resistance to longer form content and that annoys and scares me. It’s like having free hyper palatable but unhealthy food in front of you at all times while you know that there are fresh ingredients for a proper healthy meal in the fridge. And as absurd as it sounds as a 30 something year old, I am now actively working on getting into the habit of reading books again and watching movies in one go to work on that specific problem. And talking ti my friends and family it looks like many of them struggle with similar problems.
I am less worried about the classics or the depth of wisdom that I miss. I am worried about the addiction that is dangled in front of my face and normalised completely now. As for society, I think this is an uphill battle that I don’t see a real and lasting solution for it - and by “it” I mean us fellow humans in aggregate escaping this vortex of what I feel is ultimately self-harming behaviour. I hope for better regulation. I hope for better education. I hope for people realizing how harming it all is and turning around but my sense is that the shape of the world right now will make that so difficult in practice that it won’t happen.