Good point. Someone could look at my computer/internet usage on a daily basis and say I’m addicted to computers, but probably 80% of that is what I do as my career.
I guarantee you I didn’t have a shopping addiction because I was in a store 8 hours a day every day when I worked in retail.
Being forced to be on social media for the purposes of making money off your art is opening the door to being distracted by all these things. It’s the difference between not keeping any sweets in your house so you’re never tempted and having to keep boxes of Oreos on your kitchen counter for work purposes or something. You can’t expect someone with an eating disorder to not eat the Oreos without some serious effort. Environmental overhaul, psychological restructuring, something.
I have a very active social life. Three or four nights a week I am out at live music where I will have any where from a few to lots of friends at the show (or performing) and two or three days a week I will get lunch or take a beach walk or spend an evening with a friend or two outside of a concert. I have occasional errands and house chores too and dealing with my family. I don’t watch much tv but a little. That leaves plenty of hours a day and most of those are spend fucking off online: here, Giraffe boards, reddit and live music forums. Addiction? Maybe by some definitions. Some people read novels, I interact.
Here is a scary story about real internet addiction. I know a married couple (man and woman) through some other friends. The husband has an addiction. He plays some sort of interactive on line game where he sits in front of the screen with headphones on and plays for hours and hours. He used to play all night and ignore his wife. She’d go over to our mutual friend’s house sometimes because she couldn’t deal with another second of looking at the back of his head and the computer.
Work from home destroyed him. He is some kind of programmer. He’d logon to work in the morning and work for an hour and then start of play his game for a little while and suddenly it was evening time. They warned him about how little he was getting done and not finishing things and put him on a PIP and finally fired him. He literally was unable to stay away. He finally got another job after a few months out of work and is apparently back to the same behavior. I have hung out with them a few times. His wife is intelligent, kind, engaging and beautiful. He will probably lose her.
I agree. But you can get help without going online to find it.
It ain’t gonna be easy. Just like not eating those Oreos wouldn’t be easy for a food addict.
Not as extreme an example, but my Aunt is routinely ignored by her ADHD husband who can’t stop gaming until 1 or 2am every night. It hasn’t been great for their marriage. I’ve seen no indication that he recognizes it as a problem, though.
I’m not that extreme. I attend to my personal relationships. Though I wish I spent more time with my son. That’s one of my motivators for re-assessing my habits and troubleshooting.
Maybe. I had a therapist once to work on internet addiction and he seemed underwhelmed by my problem and not really understanding it. I was pregnant anyway so I cut therapy short.
I truly do not understand how a person could game, twiddle around online, have a job, a house and a meaningful relationship and toddlers in the house, at the same time.
Something is going to suffer.
My young children demanded 80% of my direct attention. Everything else I did was probably for them in an indirect way.
Young children are extremely demanding of your attention. I think in a lot of scenarios where someone has a compulsive Internet use problem, all of the work is falling on the other parent. Which is a relationship killer to be sure.
I have seen improvements to my Internet use after childbirth, because like you said, you just have more demands on your time with a kid. I also work more hours now.
But I used to follow the new mother boards on Reddit and it was post after post about their partner doing nothing with the kid, just staring at their phone all night, and then when she asked him to spend time with the kid, he’d say he “deserved to relax after a long day of work.”
Trying to be charitable, falling down an Internet rabbit hole feels more relaxing because you’re fulfilling a craving, but it’s not ultimately going to be the most satisfying choice.
Hi, everyone - OP dropping in for a sec before I take off to tonight’s rehearsal.
One thing I feel I should briefly outline - the ‘legitimate’ use of a given online site/social media site versus the ‘undesirable’ use of an online/social media site.
Facebook - legitimate uses include staying in touch with directors, producers, presenters, colleagues, and fans. It all comes under the heading of ‘networking’, and the idea is to makes sure those people don’t forget about you.
Then, there’s the promotion, whether that’s of my album, my upcoming performances (in the hopes of getting people out to them), my past performances (to show people what they missed), or trying to enlarge my follower/fan base.
I’m trying not to post too much of my ‘official’ page content to my personal page, because the official page people tend to be fans rather than friends. People who’ve signed up follow me on my personal page tend to be friends first, fans second (if at all), and it causes bad feelings if you start to treat your friends like fans.
Unwanted Facebook use includes getting drawn in to political discussions, memes, following links to other sites - do I really have to elaborate on the FB rabbit holes that are out there?
Instagram - basically the same legitimate uses. Instagram has far greater potential for reaching people you’ve never met before, through the use of hashtags and mentions.
Unwanted uses of Instagram include the strange mix of ‘America’s Funniest Home Videos’ and soft-core porn that is reels. Again, I’m not sure I need to elaborate on the distraction factor of IG.
YouTube - Legitimate uses include the lifting of songs and monologues for auditions and performances. Musically, I prefer to have the actual sound file downloaded and run it through WavePad (really basic sound editing software) - with WavePad, I can slow the track down without changing the pitch, for example. YouTube is a distant second as a place to learn music, but you can still slow things down and learn them. And their library is extensive, and includes live performances where you can watch for the fingering.
Then, of course, there’s the management and promotion of my own videos, and the networking of liking/subscribing/commenting on colleagues videos.
On the downside, YouTube has an extensive library of everything distracting.
So that is my challenge - balancing the legitimate uses of these sites with the fact that these sites have been actively designed to suck me in and keep me ‘engaged’ on the site instead of getting work done. I’m getting better at it, but I have take it all one day at a time.
And I should also mention - it isn’t just a distraction from work, it’s a distraction from other things I enjoy doing, whether that’s reading, listening to music, physical exercise, practising (sometimes practising is work, and sometimes, it’s just idly noodling on the instrument or your voice while you daydream. Some of my best riffs and compositions come from the latter kind of ‘practice’.) and the list goes on.
And on a day when I’m procrastinating, it’s sooooo much worse! I may need a minute or two to think ‘what’s the best way to say this?’, but it’s totally different with the computer on and running! As I think I said somewhere upthread, if I’m going through a list of tasks for the day, I’m far better off to close the lappy when I finish something - that way, it’s far more likely that I will choose the next task, think about what it needs, and embark upon it. If I have the browser open while I think about ‘Should I write that e-mail to Maestro X, or should I edit that sound file? Or maybe this is when I should write out the ideas for the lyrics to that song I thought of yesterday? Oh, don’t forget you need to warm up and practice that passage - you need to leave the place fed and showered by 5pm’, that’s the kind of situation where I’m most susceptible to ‘I’ll just look at this thing that David sent me…’, and where I find myself unable to recount my train of thought for the last several minutes…
Thank you for all of your input - I’m fascinated to read other people’s stories on the question.
This is what I’ve encountered in the past as well. My vulnerable points are when I’m stuck in my writing, even for a few moments, I automatically open a web page or click on something without being consciously aware of it until it’s already happened.
And any time I finish a task, I’m at risk of getting distracted. I really struggle with transitions.
I do have ADHD, and I think such folks are extra vulnerable to these kinds of systems that are designed to distract and addict.
I’ve decided the human species is prone to highly addictive activity.
We’re just wired that way, I guess.
I have precisely the same pattern.
I would absolutely agree with this
NEWS FEED:
In an ironic twist a Florida man asked the Internet for help on how to not use the Internet so much. Podcast at 11:00.
I’ve never been diagnosed, but from my conversations with my oldest son on how his ADHD treatment/therapy is going, I’m pretty sure I’m somewhere in the ADHD range. I may get it checked one of these days, or I may not - I’m not sure it’s an aspect of my personality that I want to have ‘cured’.
And at present, while I wait for my US green card interview, I don’t want to draw any attention to any mental or physical conditions that might hinder my application.
ADHD can’t be cured, it’s who we are. Stimulants did change my life, but they haven’t changed my personality. It’s just easier for me to do things. I wasn’t diagnosed until age 34. I am not without my struggles, even medicated.
But yeah honestly if you’re getting by, I wouldn’t take any chances with the green card.
It’s a small step, but I was excited when I found out I can program my new laptop to turn off at a set time. Midnight’s a good round number… and an hour or two before i’d actually stop on my own.
(Next, I’ll set an alarm to warn me at 11:45pm…)
I somewhat struggle to understand how people accept/act acording to authority of some software that blocks the phone/computer from excess use…
… but do not have the mental strenght to impose a “I’ll turn that thing off and call it a day” on their own…
To quote Frankl, “Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.”
The space between stimulus and response in someone who has compulsive internet problems is a fraction of a second. Often I’m not even consciously aware before I’m already doing it. Those site-blocking apps, can, for many people, create a longer space between stimulus and response, one in which a conscious choice can be made. It’s much harder to put down your phone after you’ve already picked it up, because you’re in slot-machine mode, just one more click seems like a fairly small investment, but the cumulative impact of all those little clicks is damaging.
I started that Break Up With Your Phone thing. This week was about establishing a baseline. I spent an average of five hours (longest day seven hours) on my phone each day last week, which is a marked improvement over my past behavior. Still working on getting that number even lower (a good portion of that was listening to Spotify, though, or using a navigation app, so it can overinflate the real time spent browsing.)
ok, I do (somewhat) get it …
related: I once had a smoking GF and anytime somebody called x phone (pre-smartphone days) - she would of course answer, put a cigarette in her mouth and light it …
she wasn’t even really aware she smoked - when asked
I guess that is somewhat akin to the case you are arguing, barbwiring the access so you need to involve your other (logical) hemisphere as well, which might throw a wrench into the “automatic” gears
With any addiction, the addict has lost their ability to say ‘No’ to the thing they are addicted to. Often, in order to quit, they need some sort of help, whether that’s the server cutting them off, their friends having an intervention, going to an addiction clinic, and the list goes on. There is a certain irony to being hooked on the phone and simultaneously using an app on the phone to control your addiction, I grant you, but - internet use and cell phone use are now so absolutely ingrained into our society, it’s all but impossible to just give them up completely. Increasingly, restaurants don’t use a menu, they use a QR code. (Drives me nuts, because my cell phone won’t read a QR code.) Your tickets for a show are on your phone, you’re supposed to buy everything through an app - it’s quite sobering to think of how much we have all come to depend on these devices that didn’t exist 30 years ago.
And another thing to keep in mind - internet technology is designed to be addictive, using the latest research into behavioural psychology to keep you clicking and scrolling. The algorithm is constantly measuring your preferences and changing the content to match what it can tell you spend the most time on. The level of ‘direct marketing’ that actually goes on with social media sites is astonishing.
There is some government and consumer regulation to mitigate that, so it’s not quite like the heroin pusher who really doesn’t care if the addict lives or dies, but it is very much like when the tobacco companies fought back against the research showing that cigarettes were addictive.
So unlike heroin, tobacco, or alcohol, it becomes about the addict controlling their use rather than quitting altogether. And that’s more challenging…