Is it just me? why is “news” so addictive?

Seems an appropriate time to post my favourite piece on news addiction by Charles Simic in the NYRB.

"I’m having trouble deciding whether I understand the world better now that I’m in my seventies than I did when I was younger, or whether I’m becoming more and more clueless every day. The truth is somewhere in between, I suspect, but that doesn’t make me rest any easier at night. 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."

https://www.nybooks.com/daily/2011/12/05/goodbye-serenity/

Edit: Charles Simic is a Serbian-American poet who lived through WWII and saw some really grisly things, some described briefly in the article, hence "after everything I had lived through and learned in my life..."

My understanding is it’s the little thrill your brain gets from the possibility of finding something super interesting. That’s the addicting piece. The gambling piece of it.

I read (or more likely heard on a podcast) about an experiment with mice and a food dispensing button. In one case, the button reliably dispensed food every time it was pressed. In the other case, sometimes the button wouldn’t work. The mice with the reliable button didn’t do anything odd. Whenever they were hungry, they would hit the button for some food. The mice with the unreliable button however would repeatedly hit the button, and they ended up being overweight.

My feeling is that if EVERYTHING on something like HN was super interesting, we’d only be here when we were up for some interesting reads. But the fact is, not everything is. But the possibility that something EXTRA interesting might pop up keeps us coming back in an addictive type of way.

The premise is wrong. It’s less about news than your phone.

Before, news was timeboxed. You might have a daily paper habit, or listened to the radio in the car on a commute, or a nightly broadcast, and a handful of longer term magazines, but that was it. It may capture your attention for a bit but there wasn’t any more of it to obsess compulsively.

24/7 cable broke this contract, but let’s be honest, that’s really not something normal people stare at all day.

What’s really new is the constantly updating infinite feed, be it HN or Facebook. (Refreshing the front page of NYT or the BBC doesn’t have enough churn to creative this effect.) Oh, and we took that and we put it in your pocket.

So that’s not great, and it definitely doesn’t need to be in your pocket.

I’m still experimenting with this, but the best change has been to unfollow every news site on social media (the algorithm is a terrible editor) and sign up for a few email newsletters instead. They’re finite, and the good ones are curated by real people.

It's a pure dice-rolling addiction.

Let me share a personal story:

For the last 3.5 years, every night before bed, I would browse https://www.gitlogs.com, a site that had it's own algorithm for ranking top-trending Github repos for the day (it is much better than Github Trends, don't ask how).

It was my nightly ritual, and my favorite part of the day. Sometimes I would find 3-5 REALLY fucking awesome projects, or one that was so useful it changed my life as a developer, in one night.

I never missed a night.

For the last month or two it's been flaky (the API has been hosted as a free Glitch project this whole time LOL) and finally, the backend died. So it's gone forever. RIP friend, I have a void in my soul now.

But while it was alive, it was a daily dice roll that was incredibly exhilarating. And that's the addiction, and why I sink so much time into HN too.

It may be the case that we just crave variety.

If I am scrolling hacker news, and someone opened a portal to the Australian outback, I’d probably put down HN (sorry, folks) and crawl through the portal to hang out for a bit.

I lived on a beach for years and in a big city for several, and in each place I craved the other.

Part of it is surely fear of missing out, in this case fear that everyone else will know something you don't. Exactly what we fear of missing out on probably varies a lot from person to person. I don't care all all about the football results, but many people do, as it's a staple of their conversation in their social sphere.

For the HN crowd, we survive and thrive on what we know. We're in an industry that moves rapidly, and we perceive that successful people thrive on knowing more, or knowing first. Of course that's only partly true. Successful people know just enough, and then actually get the job done. Knowing where to draw the line between reading about what others have done and doing stuff ourselves is really hard. It's always easier to read about what others have done, and it feels productive, but past a certain point it really isn't.

I remember many years ago I read an article on studies about addiction, and turns out Pornography and Drugs totally lost out to News, being the number one worldwide addiction without being widely known.

Unfortunately my Google Fu hasn't turn up anything. I will Edit the post if I find the link.

My personal opinion is that

1. All Human has an urge to want to know more, Curiosity. It doesn't necessarily means knowledge, as information without "thinking" is pretty much meaningless. One reason why the world we are in right now are a complete mess, because thanks to the Internet we all thought we "know".

2. All Human has an urge to want something better, Innovation. Why hasn't something been done? Why hasn't this problem be solved? Is this not a problem for enough people to recognise changes? Has Science improved? Medical improved? Technology Improved? Food Safety or Nutrition Improved? etc.

Seems like a good time to revisit this blog post by the late-Aaron Schwartz about removing news from your information diet: http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/hatethenews

Perhaps we need to view 'news' through the lens of 'is this information' before reading and therefore allowing it to impact how we feel about our lives. News being an event that may or may not impact your life, vs. information that can be assimilated to improve your life. Or perhaps, did you seek out the information because you need to learn something, or, are you reading what is being presented to you unprompted by a service that profits from you viewing it?

There is some news that matters, in terms of how you or those that matter to you can be impacted. For example, the state of the economy as pertains to your employment can help you forecast interruptions in work. Or in other economic cases, enable you to forecast where good investments will be. Or someone you admire passing away.

In political terms, changes in direction of leadership can forecast changes in lifestyle. Many nations could be given as an example, Iran, Syria, Turkey.

What does not matter, ever, as far as I can tell, is the type of 'rare incident' such as a shark attack killing a surfer, or a wildfire in another country that killed some unfortunate people, or locust swarms in Asia when you've never left South America. It matters to people directly affected, of course, but if you're half a world away, every day some bad event is going to transpire somewhere that could literally never affect your life. Does it benefit you to be aware of this?

So thank you for your many thoughtful responses to the post. My battery is about to die which means I am over and out (until I drive somewhere tomorrow and re-juice the phone). But to be honest, you've all done a pretty good job of answering why HN sits high in the list of nervous tics. I genuinely look forward to returning to read everything posted in the interim. In the meantime here's a picture of the sky from where I'm sat ~ https://ibb.co/cwDD7GG

How does one decide what information to consume? If I shun news altogether, then how will I come to know of some events that might have a direct effect on my life?

Even with what we consider useful knowledge, how much of it is really useful? Yes, it is fun learning new stuff, making connections between seemingly disjointed topics etc, but how much of it has direct influence on our daily lives? I've learned a lot from HN, but I often wonder if I should have spent all that time elsewhere, carefully picking up only those knowledge and skills that benefit me in my life and that I can use to help others.

This isn't an answer to your question, because I don't know the answer. I've the same question as you. My one guess is that everything that is made today is made with the explicit intention of getting users hooked - from fast food to social media, including news.

Coincidentally neuroscientist Andrew D. Huberman was on the JRE podcast yesterday and among the many topics/studies he discussed was one where electrodes were hooked up to brains and the subjects were given complete control over the areas they stimulated.

Contrary to what one might think (or at least the scientists) that the subjects would stimulate areas of sexual response or pleasure, it turns out they elected to stimulate areas of anger and frustration.

Without knowing exactly what "news" you found yourself reading, I think its a fair guess the majority of news now-a-days (or maybe always) triggers this area of the brain and so you are probably just elected to trigger anger and frustration over stimulating your brain with the natural beauty of the world around you (so don't feel bad apparently this is the norm).

I recommend book "Stop reading the news" by Rolf Dobelli.

To put it short, daily news are bad for you. Especially and including your understanding of the world. (Yes, I am still addicted, but trying to work myself out.)

As somebody who likes nature, please don't make fire on a cliff. It leads to the rock cracking and degrading faster. The next one coming along wants to enjoy the place as much as you do.

I think news gives the illusion that you are doing something important when you really aren't, and that has appeal.

Sometimes I feel like I am endlessly scrolling for a "solution" or bit of news that I "like". Then I have to take a step back and do something else, because nothing good really comes of that.

A therapist or coach recommended this book called the Power of Habit. https://www.amazon.com/Power-Habit-What-Life-Business/dp/081....

The central theme of that book is that people attribute dumb behaviors to things like chemical dependence, when in fact it's a behavioral habit. The classic example from the book is people trying to quit smoking. You kick the physical dependency in a few days - the headaches and irritability go away, but smokers still relapse months or years afterwards. Why? It's because the smoking formed a habit to their brain, and their brain associated good feelings with smoking.

Read the book. But if you don't: Your brain has trained you to feel good when you read the news. You break this habit by replacing the good feeling of reading the news with a good feeling from some other, positive, healthy activity. Example: every time you get a desire to pull out your phone, do 10 pushups instead. You get a little physical exercise, and your brain starts associating positive feelings with positive activities.

Also, why the hell do you have notifications turned on if you're worried about the phone or the news being addictive? It's like asking to have cravings amplified. Turn off badges, notifications, etc. Check it on your own time and terms.

This article enabled me to see and take care of my news addiction:

https://www.theguardian.com/media/2013/apr/12/news-is-bad-ro...

They're designed to be. The more emotional outrage they provoke in you, the more you spend engaging with them by reading more news, writing online comments, or even if the outrage happens once you've already closed the given webpage, giving you a need to read even more of them.

That's how they get views, ad revenue, and user-generated comments - out of an army of addicted people.

Matt Taibbi has a pretty good take on it I think. (https://www.amazon.com/Hate-Inc-Todays-Despise-Another/dp/19...)

I just built an app to control my own addiction (addictionlocker.com) and have thought a lot about this recently.

My two cents: the media has gotten good at giving us what we want, and what we want is conflict. If bad news and fighting weren't what we wanted they wouldn't publish it. By engaging with it, we tell it what we want, and they just deliver more of it. Extrapolated ad absurdum; YouTube and Facebook's algorithms serve you what you're interested in, otherwise you'd get bored and go somewhere else. The rest of the media just got good at doing this too...

Your brain gives you dopamine reward hits when you find a new article or topic, then you form a habit of looking for those dopamine hits. This habit is physically manifest in neural circuitry which your brain uses like a function to simplify its decision making, it uses that process to fill time and release dopamine.

So, you have to retrain your brain not to even start the process, you must be mindful and interrupt the process as it starts. Also, make the barrier to entry into the process very high, make it annoying and inconvenient to do the bad habit.

One of the best things I've done in my life is to start actively avoiding news. That doesn't mean I try to stay ignorant of what happens outside my home's walls. News is not information. Information you can find on your own, news is somebody deciding for you what you should know and how you should feel about it.

I've had nothing but an improvement in quality of life since starting this, and think people should try it at least once in their life, just to see how unhealthy news can be

Attention hijacking, turns into subtle micro-habits, then turns into routines, backed by the most powerful computers in the world and most likely AI.

Internet + Smartphones + Apps

Mentioned this a while ago but I try to skip all the CNNs and just subscribe to a couple of newsletters for Zeitgeistish stuff. the hustle, briefingday.com, etc.

It has always been. That’s why it’s called “News” not “Olds”. Getting access to the most up to date information about the world has always been compelling. Whether it’s where the best hunting or foraging grounds were, who is in a relationship to who, or which person/people are attacking our tribe. It’s all the same now.

Aggregators like people who are gossips, newspapers and now social media are all attention based. Even the structure of writing of news stories to give you the main story in the headline, then start with the conclusion and fill in the details has been making this type of information bite sized from the dawn of time.

And now of course our “news” is global, often the stories about people are not people actually in our lives (Royals? Celebrities, who cares?), and politics have cranked us vs them to 11. No wonder it’s addictive.

Add in complicated feelings that we want to avoid (how bout that pandemic?) and looking at new information also serves as a distraction from the things we can or cannot change in our lives.

Be well weary news consumer. Get off your phone and enjoy nature.

Almost all news and social media site structure is derived from research using the Skinner box[1, scroll down to A Man, a Plan, and a Rat in a Box]. Researching operant conditioning, they found that introducing randomness to some sort of dopamine release would cause habitual behavior of the action that caused dopamine release. This reaction to novelty was then successfully transferred to humans. This is most obvious on Reddit IMO, with "gems" interspersed between vapid, uninteresting posts.

I'm actually making an alternative to Facebook that shows posts chronologically in the feed instead of using machine learning algorithms to make them addictive. I also plan to not include a share button on posts. I think these two changes would make it far less addictive and better for users.

[1] https://www.skyword.com/contentstandard/conditioned-social-m...

It may be a feedback loop that makes people read news.

When I was a kid or teenager I used to live in some mountains where even newspapers were rare. Being disconnected for months or years had no negative impact. Working in IT, being disconnected for a couple of years can catastrophic for you because changes are often, not of substance but there are legion of minor things that add up and catching up is possible, but difficult. Therefore I read IT news to keep up and ignore regular news, I don't watch TV and just read the titles of online news for something that I really need to know (like a virus lockdown in my city or country).

In a way I am concerned about the many "show HN: I did that I am proud of "; it gives the impression important things happen, when they don't. This feeds the loop to continue reading for some stuff for the fear of missing something important or useful.

I'm in the same boat. News is addicting. I've done a lot to rid myself of various addictions but news has been the last and hardest one to crack. It seems like it would be beneficial to know what's going on, and sometimes it is. Socially you look like a weirdo if you don't know the latest scare.

But that's not why I check it. I am addicted, and people a hundred years back recognized this as well.

Why I don't spend the time reading Tolstoy or Neitzsche or something more substantial I don't know. What I do know is that I burn more time than is healthy consuming it and it doesn't give back nearly as much as I give in. I have no suggestions, but maybe this will be what I try to expunge for the rest of this quarantine phase. I think at the end of it, the only thing in control of any addiction is one's self, site blockers and timers help, but what I really need are bulletproof arguments against consuming it, and from there I believe the motivation will follow.

It's difficult that in this covid pandemic you'll come off as esoteric or uninformed because you don't stay immediately up to date with the hyperbolized and polarizing news.

For example, just tonight, I wasn't sure exactly the status of bars: whether they are allowed to be open (legally), which ones might choose to be open (socially), which ones have favorable conditions (physically; outdoor seating, mask regulation, that sort of thing). When I asked my friends about the general status, they were somewhat incredulous.

Regardless, I had a nice time socializing, until my girlfriend and I went back to the car, and she immediately started a very uncomfortable diatribe on which of our friends she suspected were Republican based on innocuous comments of recent events.

I guess my point is that even if you try to abstain from the toxicity of current events and of the news, your friends and families can drag you back down, and I don't know how to improve the situation.

> Study finds information acquisition shares the same dopamine producing reward system pathway as food, financial rewards and drugs.

https://neurosciencenews.com/information-addiction-brain-142...

Raptitude has a good article about why you should read less news: https://www.raptitude.com/2016/12/five-things-you-notice-whe...

Reading news is procrastination. It's easier to rationalize than other forms, however. Not as obviously useless as watching TV. It's addictive because you don't have to go do work or something novel, but don't feel like you are wasting time.

A lot of things going on. My amateur take on _just one_ of the factors is that we are evolutionarily inclined to be aware of events, especially negative events.

Bad news is so addictive because knowing about the bad things in our tribe’s region helps us survive.

I was a huge news junkie in college. And at one point, I don't know where maybe at a doctor's office, I saw the cover of Newsweek magazine with a shocking statement of impending doom. I grabbed it and read the article and was worried. Then I saw the cover date was about a year old.

That moment was hugely influential to me. I still follow the news but at an arm's length. I learned that in news, as in everything, there are a few overarching stories and a lot of minutiae. A little signal, lots of noise. The signal takes a long time to build, it's not daily news. But when it comes, all the daily news changes to reflect it.

Novelty is rewarding in itself, all kinds of novelty (Why did you ride out to the outback? because you wanted novelty of visual and other sensory stimulus as well as novelty in perception of place). Same way why simply driving somewhere new is rewarding. "News" is constant information novelty , it's not like the "olds". Rewarding things have the potential to be addictive. If they are easily obtainable they tend to become so.

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/24911320/

You reminded me of this quote “Most neuroses and some psychoses can be traced to the unnecessary and unhealthy habit of daily wallowing in the troubles and sins of five billion strangers.” -- Stranger in Strange Land.

That sounds awesome!

If you're going to spend time on the Internet, you could make it a better place by telling us more about what sounds like an awesome trip so we have something to read that's not the stupid news.

I think it’s related to a human bias towards novel stimuli. Evolutionarily, it’s unsafe to disregard new and unfamiliar signals. That sound could be nothing, or it could be predator outside the cave.

I would guess it's the same mechanism as used in gambling , gaming and social media to addict the user: variable reward.

For some reason if you are given a reward with unpredictable interval in some specific context, this will create a dopamin kick in your brain.

So I would say you are not addicted to the news as such, you are addicted to the dopamine kick that picking up an occasional interesting news-article from the endless queue creates.

Slot machines, games with surprise reward loot-boxes, doom-scrolling social media - they all utilize this simple neurological hack.

I am in the same boat, floating the same ocean full of news.

New stuff, head lines, news flashes, breaking news, current events, notifications etc. all trigger some dopamine release and make me feel satisfied.

The media tries to induce fear and rage so they get the maximum number of eyeballs to see their ads. Couple that with high access to information and low transformative power on the part of the individual and you're set: almost everyone seems to be expecting some kind of "happening" to turn the tide towards their own ideology, since they cannot participate themselves. The media abides, but only gives them some breadcrumbs here and there to keep them glued to the screens.

One of the reason is because we like “new” things. Human tend to be attracted towards new vs old. I notice myself often less wanting to click on a news in HN that is not new.

News is mostly gossip. It tells you about unusual and sensational things. Not about how to understand the world.

To understand the world, spend that daily time reading books instead.

It is designed to be. If it wasn't addictive they'd change it to make it so. Otherwise you'd be thinking about the other 10^12 things in the world.

If you're on the autism spectrum.. your brain is hardwired to be 'obsessed' w/ certain topics it seems (just learning I'm on spectrum at 40).

you hate to talk, but get you going on a subject you read about yesterday and nobody can shut you up...

For those of us lower on the spectrum we're not super focused on one area but multiples, for me that's tech/programming/politics/science and lately viruses for obvious reasons.

I've gone so far as to forceably reduce the temptation of other websites by reducing my feed to a static set of links which is updated once a day.

Live website: www.danielwasserlaufquicklinks.com

github if you want to manage your own: https://github.com/twosdai/contentGrabber

I don't come to hackernews that often so just open an issue on git if you have a question.

You ask that on site that is as minimalistic as possible and still has buildin 'noprocrast' option. Clearly people can't stop checking the news.

I think it might be the "new" in "news". I think our brain has an impulsivity towards novelty.

Perhaps it's hitting the reward centers of our brain that is designed to validate productive behaviour. Although as we know there's a fine line when it comes to consumption of so-called news as to wheter it is actually productive.

I guess like any addictive "substance" it can be difficult to regulate and control.

Personally I've tuned out all news minus local news. All other is sensationalized garbage filled with fueling hate (stereotypes), outrage, and fear.

not sure if this resonates with anyone else, but from my own experience (especially back when I had really bad anxiety) I think a major draw of news is the perceived feeling of safety from being "in the know". I believed that the more I knew about what was going on in the world, the safer I would be without necessarily taking action based on the information. I think it was as if not reading the news was like being in a dark room where my mind was free to conjure up a multitude of awful things/situation lurking in the dark, but by reading what was gong on and grounding those fears in something "real", it gave me the sense that the world was not so scary or I could at least better react/protect myself by "knowing"/"illuminating" the darkness.

Of course all this mostly just fed into my fears and just exacerbated my anxiety-induced hyper vigilance and paranoia, but I really think that there was a part of me that saw benefit in being aware of the state of the world through news (both mainstream and alternative).

I think the whole package has been made in a such a way that it's addictive .. It's just another product being sold in the market ..

News is stimulus. All you're describing is a habit you've formed, and a stimulus you respond to.

When we're 'addicted' to anything, it's just us abusing our individual coping mechanisms.

The answer, like in all other aspects of life, is to take steps to form the habits you want, and steps to discard the habits you don't want.

I am an online media junkie but recently I've found so much of the news boring. Not because of what's going on, but because how it is reported is all the same. Hyperbole, listicles (never more than 10 items), predictions about the future that are simply opinions, etc.

Maybe there is hope that too much news just exhausts everyone.

I stopped reading news for a while as an experiment. It made me start to dwell on my personal life. Money issues, my love life, loneliness, my future in general, etc. This can either be a happy thing or not. I imagine the more bleak one's personal life is, the more we are drawn to news.

From a fellow Aussie: I'm in Melbourne atm in the midst of the latest C19 outbreak and I wish I was there

I think when it comes to news it just ends up being another skinner box for me. Reload the page/pull the lever whatever you want to call it. You almost always will find another story that's interesting. But, almost always it will just be another fluff-filled piece about some topic.

While reading the news you do not have to deal with yourself. Quite a relieve for most people I reckon.

On top of that, bad "news" sources are designed in such a way that you do get addicted (e.g. endless scrolling, getting notifications on new article while still reading one, clickbait and so on).

Here's one theory: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UPYiif7znZw&feature=youtu.be... (Scott Adams @ Commonwealth Club of California).

My solution whenever focusing on goals / deadlines: edit hosts file (as root/admin, when necessary)

127.0.0.1 reddit.com www.reddit.com

127.0.0.1 news.ycombinator.com

127.0.0.1 twitter.com

127.0.0.1 other social / news domains...

The little bit of friction required to undo this is enough to remind me to get back to being productive.

Also, Pomodoros for pacing.

https://readup.com/comments/the-guardian/-news-is-bad-for-yo...

One of the best things that I did for myself related to this addiction process is to use android focus/well-being to limit my interaction with social networks/news with a time budget. It allowed me to focus my efforts in doing other things.

I think it is an easy, highly rewarding version of learning. Learning new things from a physics book and a news paper is probably not that enormously different on a chemical level.

News papers give you dozens of new things to learn every time you refresh the page.

1. Because organizations which don't make their news rewarding to read will not be able to make a profit.

2. Because we humans evolved as storytelling creatures. We live and die by our ability to maintain a connection to our kinship group by telling stories.

Our species has survived through millions of years of evolution by being social, and depending on others for resources. It's baked into our DNA by now. News is the ultimate form of social information, ergo, it's hard to resist.

Reminds me of this thread from last year.

"Information is like snacks, money, and drugs to the brain"

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20241456

The twenty-four hour news cycle has had time to refine itself to be addicting. They must always produce news to be on continually, and news that keeps eyes on the screen, and therefore advertisers happy.

This is just evolution in action. The quiet progressive evolution of A/B testing culminating in our current symbiotic relationship between our dopamine receptors and the news headline generators. :)

Evolution. Information == survival. There’s a good scientific overview of how our hunter-gatherer brains evolved to put a huge value on novel bits of information in the book, “The Distracted Mind”.

News is like heroin, also earns billions. Also addictive as porn, coffee, cigarettes etc.

One of the easiest way to leave that way - force yourself to create something, not consume everything.

"News" is about manipulating your emotions to keep you watching, which sells advertising revenue. As long as you are upset about something, the profiteering ensures.

It's all about gaining social status, about knowing more than that other bloke and potentially gaining some economic advantage so as to attract an attractive female etc.

Reposting a comment from another thread as it seems relevant, I was talking about Twitter but the same applies to news sites I think...

I definitely found myself wasting more time recently scrolling through Twitter e.g. in the evening or when compiling code. I actually quite like the site but I find there's more and more irrelevant stuff on my feed so I don't really like feel like I get as much value from it, yet the addictive nature of the feed still makes you refresh it.

I was aware I was doing this but didn't do anything about it until I was prompted by this article, which I think was posted on here recently: https://craigmod.com/essays/how_i_got_my_attention_back/. For me it really hit the nail on the head about wanting to reclaim your attention a bit, but that these companies have thousands of people working on systems to try and claim your attention for themselves, so it's no wonder it's hard.

I made a few small changes as a result of this:

- I used Screen Time on my iPhone to block all apps except essential ones (clock, calendar, notes, Philips Hue) for the first hour of my day

- I logged out of Twitter on my Firefox and instead logged into it in a container tab, which takes a few extra clicks to open

- I logged out of Twitter on my iPhone, so I have to log in to access it

- I didn't install Twitter on my new iPad

I've found these changes have made a big difference - I think particularly blocking apps in the morning. It feels like if you can "control" your attention a bit more in the first part of your day, that continues somewhat throughout the day, then adding in the slight hurdles to access the site throughout the day causes you to stop and think "do I really want to do this?" when your reflex to just open a new tab and type "tw" or to scroll while you're stood in a queue or whatever kicks in.

I still do browse Twitter and other time wasting sites a little bit, which I'm fine with, but I feel like I'm doing it more conciously - sometimes after a long day I'll think "I just fancy sitting on the sofa and reading the news and looking on Twitter" and I'm fine with that, as it's something I've chosen to do.

It's only been a few weeks so I don't want to speak too soon, but I'm feeling really happy with this approach so far, without having to go atomic and delete Twitter entirely as I do get some value from it.

New. We are triggered by new information. Probably a really useful trait if you wandering around a savanna. Bit of a burden now to be honest.

Saltwater crocodile: eating humans and their phones since prehistorical times...

My biggest issue with 'not reading the news/social media', as so many have suggested, is that:

1) It feels irresponsible as a US Citizen. Especially with Trump as president. The corruption committed by the FCC chairman alone, that he nominated, feels like I should keep ahead of as a citizen. I got into politics after Microsoft tried to lobby the California government to ban copyleft software licenses like the GNU GPL.

2) There is good information valuable to me as a person or to my profession. It is easy to ignore CNN-a lot of it is click bait. Phoronix and Slashdot is another story. This post on 'Hacker News' is another good example. Yet it triggers the same dopamine release that gambling does-a random chance of getting something that may benefit you. But you are spending your time, instead of money, and instead of getting a lot of money, you get information you need to spend more time to act on in the future.

I stopped reading Apple News and Google News. Life is much better now.

News is habit forming.

I think it's because you like to learn new things.

I prefer Not to follow COVID related news.

Marketing. And it's not just news or why fizzy water and clothing and everything else that's sold to make you feel special. It's why we like pickup trucks now. And why we think everyone should have a gun. And why drugs seem so dangerous. And even why our notions of "left wing" in American seem awfully far to the right if we step back out of our typical context. All the result of marketing.

cause you are drawn away from the hard reality of yourr shity life