| I know it's almost become a trope here already, but I'm really becoming increasingly worried about the cultural impact of the kind of entertainment that optimizes for rapid action / reward cycles. Facebook is definitely in that class, even if to me personally it's never been that attractive. I used to say that it was impossible for me to understand how people could become hooked on activities as ridiculous as gambling on slot machines, and yet I have to shamefully admit that I've probably now spent one or two full years of my life just cycling through different news sites, even when I knew I had probably read almost all of the interesting articles already. The insidious thing about these things is that you do get something out of it, too. I've come to realize that it's not worth it ultimately. For me, the point where I started to understand that this really wasn't healthy was when I realized that the hours I spent on rapid-reward websites per day was pretty well (negatively) correlated with my mood. It can become an escapist activity, the go-to thing to do to avoid facing actual real-world issues. I think rapid-reward websites are particularly dangerous to people who are intrinsically very curious and thus drawn to novel information. It's sad to think how much genuinely interesting thoughts of genuinely worthwhile thinkers you could absorb instead, if these sites didn't exhert such a pull. The pessimist in me is really worried about all the 12-year-old John von Neumann's right now being intellectually poisoned by ubiquitous, rapid-reward entertainment. Anyway, I finally made the decision to change something and blocked almost all of the rapid-reward sites in my hosts file, via browser extension and Android apps... Defense in depth. ;) [1] Now, when I feel really compelled to check some news site, I go for a run. I can honestly say that this is one of the things that I have done in my life that has had the biggest positive impact on my well-being, relative to the effort needed. [1] Yes, I've made an exception for HN and for one super boring newspaper website. I feel those are actually worth it. |