all the social media is for instant gratification, nothing more, people then get addicted to it. Im glad i never even used those apps.
this post was submitted on 20 Aug 2025
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Yes but I would rethink the crt. Those use crazy amounts of energy vs led. Its like having old fashioned lightbulbs instead of led.
Its worth every penny for gaming and watching old VHS and DVDs.
I mean its great ok with the monetary cost but I was thinking more on the energy usage in terms of reduce, reuse, recycle. Curiously energy efficiency is the main reason to not reuse.
NGL, kinda feels like trying to have a picnic with The Eye of Sauron towering above. 🤷🏼♂️
Haha that is such a good fucking description!
I used to go out into the woods for about 3 hours on weekends. Just being there, being quiet, walking slowly, maybe taking a few pictures of wildlife and beautiful nature.
Should do this again. Winter is over now, isn't it? ;-) I always feel wonderfully slowed down afterwards.
Cool to hear, and that's one of the things I have been starting doing myself. I have always been taking walks in the forest and mountains in and around my town (living in Norway so evening walks on a little mountain is quite common). The thing is that I all my life have been doing these walks with music in my ears and phone in my pocket. In the recent times I have just gone out by my self just like you describe, even without a phone, which really makes the experience something else.
Microdose shrooms. The moment will come to you.
Went to a Linkin Park concert last week. Everyone had their phones out the entire time. I snapped a few 15 second videos myself but then I just stood there and enjoyed myself.
One dude next to me was on Instagram. Why the fuck are you here?!
Legitimate question: are you ever going to watch those videos again, ever?
I don't go to concerts as often as I'd like, but when I do I'd far prefer to take in the moment myself vs. trying to capture it on my phone. I'm there for an experience; not a recording.
If that action makes your night better, so be it. I won't get in your way. I do, however, get annoyed when I'm trying to watch an act and some idiot's phone is held above their head, blocking my view.
Each to their own, but personally I don't "get" it.
Insane.
You might enjoy Moose2 on YouTube. Another video producer made a Windows 98 computer for him, and he invented this game show he puts on called Bingo98 (then BingoXP, PingoS2, and more in the future with N64 and PSX).
Pulls a bingo number which corresponds to a random windows 98 game, installs it, starts a timer, plays for 15 minutes, and then everyone watching votes to play another 15 minutes or pass to another game. It’s a hoot if you like retro/vintage games!
I'm a little older than you and years ago I took similar steps. Getting rid of "distractions" for me did help but it left with me emptiness as scrolling or whatever had become second nature. I moved to the slow Internet, gopher, Gemini, much later lemmy but in my case the distractions gave shape to my problem not the problem was my distractibility.
Being in the moment for me took practice and the cultivation of calm. As cliche the e as it sounds meditation helped me find what calm felt like and that allowed me to cultivate it. I had stopped doing social media in my late 20s, stopped going to bars everyday and then moved across the country.
The reset of moving allowed me to attempt all new habits but I had not yet changed enough to appreciate what I had. I would have probably gotten the same benefit just being open to change where I was. Wherever you go, there you are is legit. Video games, alcohol, cocaine, social media or whatever were not keeping me from happiness. I was using them to replace the work of finding contentment.
I was a poor craftsman and I blamed my tools. I probably set my "personal development" (whatever that is supposed to mean) back years by making drastic changes to my circumstances and still being miffed I wasn't "fulfilled."
I can't say that any of that is applicable to you but I tried a lot of things and the "problem" if it can be called that was between the keyboard and chair for me. I should have started by asking myself what do I want and then Iinterrogating that answer until it confessed.
Did the same things (my iPhone is the dumbest one can imagine, no social, no apps, no games, there is not even email configured on it). Including reading print newspapers and printed books... not just for the peace of mind but also for privacy and ownership reasons.
Also got rid of all subscription streaming and services and never looked back. If I can't buy/rent a DVD I won't watch whatever it is I'm interested in, simple as that. The same with music.
Because it's much more pleasant, so much quieter and simpler (no update, no Notifications, no menus, no nothing) and relaxing I also went back to writing longhand (I don't need to be constantly fast, but I need to enjoy writing) , using fountain pens/pencils and paper.
My agenda is a paper one too which can sometimes be an excuse way to trigger unexpected conversations with people that are surprised to see you using such a strange tool ;)
I'm a 50+ years old dude.
I feel like you are a couple of steps ahead of me and I love hearing that you have never looked back! All the things you have mentioned are things I either have done or is considering. Especially the ownership vs streaming thing!
I'm a bit older too. I started older than you are ;)
There is a lot of things I decided to move away from digital/online, including actually meeting people. The only social I still use is here.
Also got rid of all subscription streaming and services and never looked back. If I can’t buy/rent a DVD I won’t watch whatever it is I’m interested in, simple as that. The same with music.
I get that, but I will say that I think it's sad that you are missing out on art you are interested in just because of capitalism. Using a VPN and sailing the high seas isn't very complicated and they are not losing out on any money since you wouldn't have bought it in the first place, so morally I think it's fine. Actually you consuming the art, liking it, and suggesting it to other people who might buy it could be considered leaving the artist with more money than had you never consumed the piece of art.
We do miss a few things but not that much as my spouse and I are much more into works that will challenge us, not make us feel right/validated or whatever along those lines that seem to be so trendy.
Plus, there are so many great things to watch on DVD and books to read, more than enough to occupy every second of whatever time we have left on this planet would we ever want to do just that ;)
A bit like there are many paintings I will never have the opportunity to see IRL, that's fine. I can appreciate so many already.
That's a fair enough take as well :)
Has anyone else felt this way about not being in the moment when doing things?
I kind of have the opposite. Sometimes I have to fight myself from losing myself to the moment, exploring all the permutations of thought of what is happening in the moment, what its implications are, what else would compliment it or sour it, how others around me are experiencing it (or ignorant of it), the visceral experience, the light/texture/smell/temperature, the infinite possibilities of the circumstances of the moment and every branch the next second could follow. Then I realize I've been daydreaming again, and have to drag myself back to the toned-down reality of what life chore I have to do next.
You mention several things in your live that distract you (doomscrolling, steamdeck, etc). Those offer someone else's prepackaged experiences for you to consume, which is their purpose. Distraction. There's nothing wrong with those, as long as they aren't consuming you all the time.
Can I ask if you allow yourself to daydream?
I can relate to what you are saying and I am certainly daydreaming. My problem is that when I am in “such” moments, I get a strange feeling that I schould be doing something else. Something important or something that I am missing out on. That be work, beer with friends or just a simple task then and there.
Ah okay, thats a different problem, with different a solution.
On its surface you're expressing you don't have permissions to just enjoy the moment, that there is some other pressing issue that you should be putting your attention to instead.
Instead what you have is a budgeting problem. Except our scarce resource isn't money, but time. There are only so many hours in a day, and if you let it, an infinite number of tasks to complete. Knowing that you can only do so much in a day, and only a fraction of that time can be spent on "productive" activities. You have to give time to yourself or you'll go nuts. So first, decide how much time of the day (outside of work and sleep) you are going to put to "productive" activities. That number can't simply be all the waking hours that aren't sleeping, working, or eating. Be realistic. Then along with that budget time to slack off where your only responsibility is no responsibility. If you are daydreaming during that slack off time, you know there's nothing else you should be doing. The thing you should be doing is slacking off.
More pragmatically, instead of having a daily time budget, have a weekly one. You can work yourself hard one day if it means allowing yourself a longer continuous slack off time later in the week.
Not really, but I make a point of being offline when doing certain activities like evening walks or long distance runs. Also, if I have some free time at home (which is rare), I put my phone in another room and just do offline stuff.
No, because I actively separate the things I'm doing.
Smart phone gets put away if I'm focused on something else. I block off time to do things to minimize interruptions and distractions. Often this requires working around the schedules of the wife and kiddo, but it is doable for the most part. I play modern games on a modern PC with friends, but again the time is (mostly) blocked off for that and I am fully engaged. I can't do the scrolling and videos at the same time because I'm not able to read and listen to something else at the same time.
While I do tend to scroll my phone with a show or movie I'm not focused on in the background, that is mainly because I want to scroll and the TV is there to drown out background noises.
It really comes down to choosing what to be focused on, and it may take practice. I have ADHD and it takes a lot of intentional work to stay focused on things, but it is doable without needing to revert to retro tech, which I found more distracting at the time before working on intentionally avoiding distractions!
Anhedonia?
Hm. When I read about it, it does not seem like relevant to me, as I previously have not had any problems with enjoying things. I feel more like I am suffering from "things change and I miss something"
No, I have anhedonia and this doesn't sound like what I live with.
Kinda, I'm frustrated at how little time I have in general more than anything.
I already don't have kids, I barely socialize anymore except with my gf on the weekends and occasional texts with friends, I work from home, even when I skip chores it still feels like barely enough time.
At one point I was convinced it was distractions, little minutes here little minutes there, it adds up, so I cut them out, and yeah I was more productive, but I also felt like absolute shit, every day was the same, work, study, life admin, chores, sleep etc etc. even then, it was barely, barely enough, and I often had to isolate myself for a week straight and blitz through whatever I wanted to do.
For instance learning about return oriented programming, over the span of 2 weeks of practically ignoring everything else I went from not really understanding computer memory beyond the fact that pointers exist in C to finding basic stack based buffer overflow vulns, creating an appropriate payload for shellcode, and eventually creating ROPchains without hints on retired hackthebox machines.
There was about 200 pages of notes I wrote by hand in there somewhere, explaining it to my future self in case I'd forget some subtle details and observations that helped my understanding.
To even scratch the surface of such a subject, it took me 2 weeks of doing it almost to the complete exclusion of everything else, including work. Maybe I'm just dumb as a rock, but frankly - I was pretty fucking proud of myself, in as far as the sheer intellectual challenge of it, it was glorious. But not sustainable, sadly.
Even if the worry and stress of "omg I haven't even said anything to my coworkers in weeks imma be fired" didn't catch up to me, the pace and an internal demand for "progress" eventually caught up to me and I got so burned out I fell into a full blown months long depression I'm still crawling my way out of.
I knew that I probably overdid it with the pressure I put myself under, so I relaxed, I decided that I'm gonna build a gaming PC and play some vidya games I've had in my backlog for probably years - maybe I'd start making music again.
So I did, I got into some games I liked but even still, beating them and experiencing them fully took up a lot of time, so did creating music, and I just ended up burning out even further. Every second I do anything I would ever want to do, I'm falling behind on doing things I should be doing, which is never want to do unless I absolutely had to (work).
I want to read more into things, to think about them more, feel them more, ponder and understand, and to do so in a relaxed way free of time pressure.
Oh sure I could glance up a history topic on Wikipedia or listen to some talking head drone on in the background for 20 minutes, but to really understand much of anything, it takes time.
Oh sure I could slap together a song in frankly about an hour, and my friends and family say it's great, so surely it must be (/s) but at this stage even as an amateur I understand that to flesh things out I simply need more time and it's time I just never ever seem to have.
Oh sure I could get a basic grasp of how one would go about reverse engineering or what assembly is, but to read even basic assembly programs and find your misplaced NOPsled in that program and understand not just that things are wrong and fix it in a "monkey see, monkey do" fashion but understand the why of all of it - that takes a lot more time, at least for me.
I started playing some Paradox games recently because they were a thing I used to really enjoy but had to drop, and I'm just about to finish my first campaign in Vic3 1.9, which I haven't played since launch, with Morgenröte and E&F and BPM mods and I'm just over 200 hours into this campaign at 1909 and I still feel I'm skipping over so much nuance and detail, not to mention I never reload an older save and play around with anything and I have the game running pretty much constantly at 5 speed, I'm loving it so much, it's healing in every way, but I just don't really know where I'm meant to get those 200 hours from to enjoy it.
Maybe it's like that "HealthyGamerGG" grifter on YouTube said - "failing to coalesce", a sensationalist way of saying that one lacks a focus, coated in shame and guilt to hide the opinion validating this demand as reasonable underneath.
Frankly I don't want to have a focus of any kind. If I want to - I will.
It's very pretentious but I really feel like I relate to Nietzche's bit about "not being done" when he mocked the German education system in "Twilight of the Idols" for pumping out eager soldiers and servants rather than what he saw as people reaching their own potential, (at least in my interpretation when reading it).
It's like, samesies bestie, I'm a human being, not a fucking meal, I'll be done when I want to be, and not a minute sooner.
And when it comes to "doomscrolling" - I wrote this post and it took me about 30 minutes, more or less as a matter of principle, I wanted to express myself fully and clearly even if it is ultimately self-defeating in carrying the message across and only be done when I think the thought is concluded, not when some external command demands it of me. Which is about now.