[lrvick]

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.

[dofm]

> 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.

[lrvick]

I have at various points of my life been diagnosed with downs syndrome, chronic depression, anxiety, ADD, tourettes. Almost certainly undiagnosed PTSD and tests indicate maybe mild autism. I do not think anyone actually knows, and I stopped letting such fuzzy labels define me. I can say for me the drugs never fixed the root causes. They just made me care less about having control. A passenger in my own life.

Once I recognized constant connectivity and internet media as mild poisons like alcohol, and regulated those, I found myself a lot happier without drug dependence. (YMMV, every brain is different)

I can focus on whatever I want now. A mechanical puzzle, work, an open source project, a video game, my family, my friends, or typing this comment to a stranger on the internet I empathize with. My motivation is seemingly endless now too.

Get rid of the doom scrolling poison and give your brain time to reset and recalibrate. Spend several hours a day away from the internet. I cannot promise it is the only change needed for you but I promise strategic life change experiments will provide a better chance of a positive outcome than waiting to die.

[dofm]

I am not a doom scroller. Like I say, I try to regulate my news intake to things that are valuable and I have for years. I use social media only for creative-interest-based groups — I have no "friend feed" at all and I haven't in more than a decade. I have some places where my limited focus is enough to share expertise, and that is more or less it.

Unfortunately my ability to focus declined precipitously three years ago and despite all sorts of long walks, breaks from the internet, breathing exercises, diet changes and ultimately stopping work entirely for months at a time, I have never got it back. I can no longer really do my job.

I don't want "hyperfocus" back at all. It's a disorder trait: it allows other people to expect more sustained over-exerted effort from me than I can possibly deliver without making myself ill.

I would like to be capable of managing my life on a day-to-day basis, but I am now so burned out that this is a struggle. I don't have any confidence that will return. I am what is left over from who I used to be.

But I am also now over fifty, single, childless, and I don't expect to return to my old job because everything I did has been changed so much by AI anyway.

As much as I try to learn about that AI future I will need to return to, and try to prepare to return to work, there is no returning to who I was, and I don't have the energy or focus to direct into some new version of me, so I will likely just potter around for a couple more years until I no longer want to.

[lrvick]

> As much as I try to learn about that AI future I will need to return to, and try to prepare to return to work, there is no returning to who I was

Changing the way I have worked for decades in a fundamental way has been hard, depressing even, but then exciting. My way of taking control of the AI story is racking GPUs at home and doing all my work from those. I have found those with experience programming before AI actually have a major advantage to steer things into exactly the right shape.

> I will likely just potter around for a couple more years until I no longer want to.

Community tends to help. #!:matrix.org welcomes anyone not spamming :)

No replacement for IRL hanging out with other humans. Board game nights and forcing myself to do weekly social events really helped with my overall motivation for reasons I cannot fully articulate. Just made me feel like I existed as more than a handle on a screen, you know?

Traveling also really helped. Maybe give yourself the chance to try the things you have never tried before and ramp up that novelty part of your brain again.

I know depression and desperation. At one point in my career all I could find for work was minimum wage telemarketing and day labor while fishing leftovers out of garbage cans, taking sponge baths in gas station bathrooms, and spending nights sleeping in the trunk of a scrap car in a snowy winter trying not to freeze to death.

Really really glad I kept going, and kept taking risks, moving, and changing things until something worked. I have good and days like anyone, but am on average happy now, and trying to enjoy every hour of my life I have left.

It can absolutely get better if you decide you want it to be.

[dofm]

I would not say I am depressed. Despairing at what the world is, sometimes (with much more detachment than before). Not at what I have become; that just is what it is.

I am burned out rather than sad. I can’t get across that I will struggle to travel because that requires planning and initiative that I cannot functionally sustain, or that my previously quite busy social life is gone because I fail to manage an ordinary day, let alone one that will need me to meet people. These are things I am unable to do.

It ultimately doesn’t matter what I would like to do or could fleetingly imagine doing: within an hour I will have lost focus on it or on the drive to do it. I certainly don’t have sustained aspirations because I can’t focus on them. Most days I definitely have an hour or so where I feel like it would be better if it was my last day, but I get distracted from that too.

Everything I achieve happens in these very short windows of time; sometimes maybe I can spend a couple of hours in any day on one thing if I am lucky, but I may not feel the impetus to return to it the next day.

I am lucky if I complete tasks for others that have purely external impetus or a deadline.

It is not about cutting out more compelling or distracting stimuli; my house is quiet and I can also lose focus by falling asleep if I am too comfortable.

I still don’t want hyperfocus back because hyperfocus did this to me! But it’s difficult to envisage things getting better when I can see they are getting worse.

[lrvick]

It really sounds like you should seek out professional help if you have not alread. Everyone deserves to be happy, and in most cases that is possible with the willingness to pursue it.

What you are describing is an imbalance that it not making you happy.

If hyperfocus does not make you happy, then aggressively pursue a balance that does with whatever mix of drugs or therapy or travel or new social activities or new hobbies works for you. Changing nothing only makes sense if you are happy.