I'm Giving Up Reading for a Year

http://curiousrat.com/home/2012/5/2/im-giving-up-reading-for-a-year.html

by easonchan42 • 14 years ago

293 104 14 years ago

curiousrat.com

lwat• 14 years ago

So brave

marknutter• 14 years ago

Hi Reddit, welcome to HN :)

switz• 14 years ago

Unfortunately, the person who this post is directed at won't see it for at least a year.

dkuntz2• 14 years ago

Someone could print it out for him to read...

ifewalter2• 14 years ago

He won't see it either. "No reading" remember?

mistercow• 14 years ago

Or at least six weeks.

bzloe• 14 years ago

He'll get cravings soon enough

joedev• 14 years ago

I give him 2 months.

zhoutong2• 14 years ago

Giving up reading is just "harder" than giving up the Internet.

throwaway0003• 14 years ago

Take a look at this: http://www.theverge.com/2012/4/30/2988798/paul-miller-year-w...

zhoutong2• 14 years ago

Yes, I'm exactly referring to this.

sparknlaunch12• 14 years ago

Why? Surely a balance can be made?

I'm giving up reading "giving up" blog posts.

bsphil2• 14 years ago

It's satire.

skeletonjelly• 14 years ago

Satire on what?

TheBiv3• 14 years ago

I understand the satire, I just would rather see this in the comments of the original article. This feels more like a slap rather a thoughtful critique.

semisight3• 14 years ago

Really? It feels fairly well directed to me. The 'no internet' guy (who's name I've made a point to forget) was really egotistical about it. He even started an IAmA thread on reddit about it (link: http://www.reddit.com/r/tabled/comments/t14p6/table_iama_tec...).

TheBiv3• 14 years ago

Yeah, that is a very good point. I guess I just wanted to see this conversation die along with the original article. Because the 'no internet' guy was no doubt just doing that as link bait. Now this will be the top post tomorrow and it will have added nothing of real value.

ralfd• 14 years ago

At least he is honest.

. > > If you had to guess what your one cracking point would be, what would it be?

> Porn.

psylence519• 14 years ago

Why does it merit thoughtful critique? Sometimes a slap is the correct response.

TheBiv3• 14 years ago

In real life, maybe...behind a computer, probably not...in my opinion!

rubashov• 14 years ago

I don't find this as quite a ridiculous idea as the satire presumably assumes.

Reading, after a certain age, diverts the mind too much from its creative pursuits. Any man who reads too much and uses his own brain too little falls into lazy habits of thinking. --Albert Einstein

callil• 14 years ago

A bit over the top. I have hope that his being away from the internet will force him to report of the personalities of tech by talking face to face or over the phone. I think in depth personal stories and interviews of tech founders/engineers/designers etc. are fascinating. It's a great opportunity for The Verge to set itself miles apart from the competition.

bdhe• 14 years ago

This is as good a place and thread as any to write out some questions that have been bothering me. Maybe HN can help out.

I've seen over the past several years several such posts (leaving facebook, leaving the internet, etc.) and they have a very raw emotional appeal to me. Some sort of a fast or a ritual quality to the entire idea.

Do others here constantly wonder about their internet habits? I may be generalizing, but being uncomfortable or suspicious of gradual habits we develop, does that show characteristics of "getting old" and "conservative"? The get-off-my-lawn type of mentality?

The same argument extends to smartphones, and "new fangled" tools such as twitter/foursquare/etc. Do others also perceive some tension in embracing a new lifestyle.

Or am I overthinking it, and it is just a general equilibrium-maintaining feedback mechanism we develop through life. Because, with the internet (especially reddit and HN) and ubiquitous access to email/information through the smartphone I find myself, for the first time, cautious about embracing new technologies in a way I never felt before (not even when I got my first computer, or the first time I had cable TV ... of course, I was a kid back then).

/end rant

wattjustin2• 14 years ago

Take this quote from the original article for instance, "I’m also interested in a sans-internet reality as a technology writer. There was a time when technological innovation didn’t seem intimately linked to the internet." There was a time when using roads wasn’t linked to driving in a car, but there’s not much point in going back to that time.

While I only have an undergraduate degree in Psychology and there are others who can speak to this topic in a lot more detail, I feel it allows me to say with confidence that the main concern is that the potential threat of limited time in our hectic lives being seeped from us by the internet (and technology in general) comes with the responsibility to use self control more than ever. Walking away from the internet for a year doesn't solve issues with self control and in a world so tightly integrated to the "new fangled" technological tools we use each day to make our lives easier, it's our responsibility to manage that, not walk away from it. To each their own and in the end, this was broadcast partially for page views, but embracing changing lifestyles and new technologies comes with personal responsibility. We all assess and compare ourselves with others to make sure we don't get carried away, but that doesn't mean we should walk away from something. I really should formulate my thoughts and feelings on this better before replying, but it's how I view the situation.

uncoder0• 14 years ago

I believe what you are zeroing in on at the end is well encapsulated in PG's Essay: http://www.paulgraham.com/addiction.html

semisight3• 14 years ago

As a college student, I can identify. I don't use foursquare or twitter even though my generation tends to, because I feel as though they're not necessary.

I think maybe part of this is the community (HN/the startup world) you're a part of. Speaking for myself, I love the ideas that people present here, but often it feels like each website is just another toy. I see no reason to commit to them.

I've always been something of a minimalist though, so maybe it is just me.

possibilistic• 14 years ago

I'm your age, I agree, and I'll take it a step further. I think these toys are causing an irrational exuberance.

I'm upset at all the polish, all the ten thousand variations on the same silly theme. They do nothing to advance our civilization. It's disheartening.

It's 2012, so why doesn't my OS know what I'm trying to do and solve problems for me? I wish this money and effort had gone into making a desktop environment that automatically tiled windows for whatever mental intent I have, removing any need for me to mentally do that. Why doesn't the environment know the type of task each process represents? Why can't it learn how I like to set windows up in response to any given input sequence and do that?

Another problem I have--Why do we need 'blogs' and 'websites'? We just share text, images, and video. Let's make a baseline platform for authoring, reading, commenting, sharing, upvoting, editing. Let's make it a hybrid of federated and p2p; articles get a real URI/URN and can be pulled from any server. No need for readability since it would be 'built-in': read everything in your favorite theme / font. Build an interest graph of users on top of this and you have an extensible solution ten times better than Prismatic; a testbed for every ML algorithm and recommendation algorithm we can think of. And it's software everyone can run/extend! Why the hell didn't we build that instead?

Maybe it's just my biology side getting through, but websites suck. Centralization sucks. We got it right with the PC, with the OS, with the internet, with web protocols, but seriously--websites were a step backwards. We stopped making general solutions and began reimplementing the same damn things over and again. Why? Progress just stopped.

I'm not smart enough to solve these problems / I don't research in these areas. I just hope to contribute meaningfully to metabolomics research. If this is something that irks you too, I dunno. Maybe we should get in touch. I'm just so fed up with the status quo / present paradigm.

unalone2• 14 years ago

> I don't use foursquare or twitter even though my generation tends to, because I feel as though they're not necessary.

> often it feels like each website is just another toy. I see no reason to commit to them.

In between these two sentences you highlight something important. At a certain point, it stops mattering what exists. All that matters is what you need.

Technophiles love trying out tools and imagining ways they can put them to use. It's fun, but it's also entirely unnecessary. (The unnecessariness is part of the fun!) If you're not a geek about this sort of thing, though, then all you need are the things which somehow extend your life in meaningful ways.

What worries me more than anything about startup culture is that by emphasizing the creation itself rather than the motive behind the creation, it often leaves people with the impression that the point of making a startup is to make a startup. And while many people do find success with that route, its opposite approach – live your life until you find something out of place, then build what you need to fix it – is much more commonplace, and often much more effective.

Mark Zuckerberg, he of Facebook fame, built a music player in high school because he wanted music recommendations. Released it for free rather than sell it to Microsoft, because it was about fixing a problem, not making money. Now read his letter to investors [http://www.wired.com/epicenter/2012/02/zuck-letter/]. He emphasizes again and again that Facebook was built to solve a problem: "We hope to strengthen how people relate to each other." Whether you think he's going about this the right way, it's clear that he built Facebook with this intent in mind. Its innovations have all been on this front. He didn't see MySpace and think, "how can I tweak this and steal their marketshare?", like many many other social networks did. He saw a social value in networking and sought to make a service that would fundamentally revolve around that value.

I use a number of services; my friends (mostly college-aged) and I overlap and diverge in a number of ways. What matters to us is our friendship. We use the software that'll let us interact in ways that we care about. Some of us even turn off our phones when we see each other in person. It's crazy!

johnchristopher• 14 years ago

At some point in life (I really should write "At some points in every year") I/We feel the need to weed things out. There is a mental weight associated to all these things surrounding us and there is the whole "identity-through-activities-and-possessions" question that pops up every now and then.

As a matter of fact I decided this morning to stop having so much arch/debian/ubuntu/xp/7 installations on all of my computers. It was a mental weight to drag along (that and the loss of two extended partitions holding all of this sutff because I decided to create an new ntfs partition in an empty space, I disgress).

I believe this equilibrium you speak of is personnal. I sometimes ask myself if I am getting old because I don't want to buy "apps" and rather rely on the old paradigm "everything is a file and applications are juste file managing other files" and dislike the facebook timeline and twitter noise but then I remind myself that I am one of the few among my friends who don't think the new crop of teenagers and child cartoons are as doomed and rotten as they think they are (though I really don't like the current european teenage fashion guidelines).

I believe you are spot-on with the notion of "ritualistic fast". Most religions I know put some accents on fasting for the mind at regular intervals.

There are differences between technologies and adopting each of them without considering them for what they are isn't being old, it's being curious (or something like that). Let's be curious, not trendy.

/back to setting-up VM's instead of real hdd OS installations.

PakG1• 14 years ago

I get the impression that you'd find Nick Carr a fairly insightful writer.

http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2008/07/is-googl...

Maybe worth a look, at least I find his insights striking.

dan-k• 14 years ago

Nicholas Carr is a good introduction, but he just touches the surface of this sort of thinking. A lot of his thought is like a popular version of stuff by Neil Postman and Albert Borgmann, though I'm not actually sure how much he's been directly influenced by them. To be fair, most of their work was done before the internet became widespread, so Carr's exploration of the online aspect of the impact of technology is quite welcome, but I think it also may lead some people to think that it's a problem unique to the internet, which is unfortunate. The internet is just a specific case where the issues are more pronounced, but all of these sorts of criticisms are really getting at the sort of thing warned against by Brave New World. There are those of us who think that we're rushing headlong towards the scenario that Huxley depicted because we're so freaked out by 1984 and the like that we're blinded to other, more insidious threats. Incidentally, a lot of these sorts of criticisms all trace back to Heidegger's thought. If you've got a solid foundation in philosophy, "The Question Concerning Technology" is a fascinating read.

P.S. I apologize if anyone finds this post a little too esoteric or off-topic. I just have strong feelings about the way technology is used; I think that those who work to advance technology need to have a good understanding of the ethical considerations related to their work, and that most of the time this is lacking.

knowtheory• 14 years ago

Here are two things worth mentioning.

First, the "OMG EVERYTHING IS TERRIBLE I WILL QUIT [insert the forum i am currently posting to/this social clique/the internet]" phenomenon is certainly not new, or unique to social networking sites. People used to say shit like this on slashdot all the time, and in many of the pre-social networking site communities i've participated in certainly.

Second, this isn't an old person thing. Most of the internet forums i grew up in were populated by 15-30 year olds. This is a general expression of frustration or displeasure with the circumstances around their social interactions. And with that, it's never a terribly genuine one. The ones who are genuinely fed up just silently leave the communities they're actually fed up with. And i'd argue that the loud ones are filling out an archetype we see in western culture all around us.

hartez• 14 years ago

"People used to say shit like this on slashdot all the time"

I think that to myself about at least one HN article/comment every day :)

fusiongyro• 14 years ago

I think it's important to examine your life and decide which things you're doing are positive and which are detrimental to your well-being. As you grow older, you have more constraints on your time and you also know yourself better. Those are going to encourage you to think twice. But there are lots of truly old people on Facebook and whatnot now, so clearly the cost/benefit calculation is different for different people. It's being conservative in the sense that you're trying to conserve your resources and not waste them.

If these fasts sound appealing, I'd say try it. Quitting Facebook, Twitter and Reddit are some of the best decisions I've ever made. On the other hand, I get a lot of value out of leaving feedback on blogs and Slashdot and here. So it's case-by-case for me. Any experiment that helps you know yourself better is at least worth considering and probably worth doing.

nsomaru• 14 years ago

There's an interesting book called Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance which deals with the divide (in thinking) between those who 'get' technology, and those who don't. Quite a philosophical gem, that one.

bad_user• 14 years ago

I do not think we are "getting old" and "conservative".

I am 29 years old, certainly not a teenager anymore, but I am also without doubt not old. That we even have to ask ourselves this question goes to show there's something really fucked up about our world, probably because we are losing respect for the elderly.

I love technology and I think it's the answer to most of our problems, but its perseverance also scares me. That teenagers embrace it more than I do, that's only because teenagers are by definition raw and stupid, lacking the experience to foresee long-term problems ahead.

When I was in highschool I used to spend hours playing games such as Starcraft, Age of Empires, Quake 2 and Counter Strike. I was doing that instead of going out to play soccer or to have barbecues with friends. I was logging frequently to local IRC channels, instead of going to the beach. Now I regret waisting my time in highschool.

It's also easy for me to see how intense Facebook usage is actually removing friends from my life. That's because I don't have the curiosity necessary to see how friends are doing, since I find out from their Facebook stream, so one big incentive for asking them out simply disappears. And it is great that with Facebook I got connected to many primary school colleagues, but once past the thrill of seeing how they look like, I simply don't care anymore, as those people are actually strangers to me.

You're definitely over-thinking it ... as we grow older, we start realizing that the important things in life are the same as ever: sex, good food, family, friends, building stuff, earning money, living comfortably, going out, relaxing on a beach somewhere with a tequila, etc... anything that distracts us from doing those and we start seeing it as dangerous to our mental health.

E.g. I love my smartphone, I love how I receive my emails on it, but at night when I'm home with my son or on weekends when I'm taking walks in the park, I turn it off with no regrets.

s8qnze982y• 14 years ago

> I love technology and I think it's the answer to most of our problems

I'd be curious to know which are the problems that technology solves, because I'm actually of the opposite opinion - technology is the answer to all the wrong problems.

Johngibb• 14 years ago

> goes to show there's something really fucked up about our world, probably because we are losing respect for the elderly.

I (totally open-mindedly) wonder if that's partially because our elderly are getting older? We're getting better at keeping people alive after their minds have lost their edge.

mbrock3• 14 years ago

I think this question is deeply rooted in the zeitgeist!

For me, investigation into it over the years has led me to Zen Buddhism, which though ancient seems to me almost incredibly relevant to our age.

It's a question of attention, awareness, reality & virtuality, mental health beyond the crude categories of psychiatry, desire, comfort, sacrifice, renunciation, virtue...

As someone steeped in internets and technology, this question is like a lens through which I view my whole life purpose and aspiration. And it seems increasingly relevant for everyone I know.

All this stuff is reality. It's affecting our lives, second by second. Our relationships, our selves, our life worlds. Not bad, not good, but profound and worth paying close attention to.

Here's a nice quote by Dogen Zenji:

"Even when you are uncertain, do not use this one day wastefully. It is a rare treasure to value. Do not compare it with an enormous jewel. Do not compare it with a dragon's bright pearl. Old sages valued this one day more than their own living bodies. Reflect on this quietly. A dragon's pearl may be found. An enormous jewel may be acquired. But this one day out of a hundred years cannot be retrieved once it is lost. What skillful means can retrieve a day that is passed? No historical documents have recorded such means. Not to waste time is to contain the passage of days and months within your skin bag, without leaking. Thus sages and wise ones in olden times valued each moment, day, and month more than their own eyeballs or the nation's land. To waste the passage of time is to be confused and stained in the floating world of name and gain. Not to miss the passage of time is to be in alignment with the way.

"Once you have clarity, do not neglect a single day. Wholeheartedly practice for the sake of the way and speak for the sake of the way. We know that buddha ancestors of old did not neglect each day's endeavor. You should reflect on this every day. Sit near a bright window and reflect on this, on mellow and flower-filled days. Sit in a plain building and remember it on a solitary rainy evening. Why does the passage of time steal your endeavor? What kind of enemy is the passage of time? How regrettable to waste your time because of distractions. If you do not know yourself, you will not be able to be your own ally in this great undertaking."

taofu• 14 years ago

Is Zen Buddhism more of a philosophy than a religion? Or is it a way of living?

cgoddard• 14 years ago

I'm sorry. A lot of this post just reads like a bunch of nonsense, especially this line: "It's a question of attention, awareness, reality & virtuality, mental health beyond the crude categories of psychiatry, desire, comfort, sacrifice, renunciation, virtue..."

I'm sorry, what exactly is "crude" about the concepts of desire, comfort, sacrifice, renunciation, and virtue? Also why is psychiatry slipped in there. That is a discipline, rather than an abstract concept.

As far as Zen and any type of Buddhism goes, if you're worried and anxious all of the time, or flying off the handle at simple things, you could probably benefit some from meditation. But as far as a way of life, it makes a lot more sense to me to try and fix the bullshit that makes modern life unpleasant and alienating, rather than checking out of the whole process.

The human mind is an amazing thing. It can adapt to many different ways of life and find happiness in them. Though i'd much rather spend my life having experiences, connecting with people, and trying to change the world for the better, than spend most of my time doing absolutely nothing.

k-mcgrady• 14 years ago

I think a lot of people are addicted to the internet. The internet provides a lot of benefit and is very useful but there is also a lot of entertainment available through it. And most of that entertainment is free or extremely low cost. I think that is why a lot of people feel relieved to get away from it from time to time. With other addictions (smoking, drinking, drugs) there is a very clear cost. Your health, and your money. As the addictive parts of the internet are free you don't really notice the negative effects until you stop. It all comes down to controlling your use and as I've said, when everything addictive is free it's hard to stop yourself.

Havoc• 14 years ago

I feel the same way...but only from a privacy implications point of view. Internet addiction, new fangled tools etc doesn't phase me in the least as long as I can maintain control over it.

One of the reasons why this whole "app" movement unnerves me a bit. There is no way of really knowing what these apps are doing with my info & when it will come back to haunt me.

phene• 14 years ago

Not really, I think these authors are just idiots trying to gain readership.

tdfx• 14 years ago

Most of the "general public" that I encounter have already made this commitment, but for a much longer duration.

drivebyacct2• 14 years ago

I'm honestly surprised it took this long.

ifewalter2• 14 years ago

RANT ALERT!!! "No reading"? What do you do to SMS, email, parking tickets, expiry dates on foods, music details, your watch, video games........ Except you're gonna lock yourself in a room and have a maid do everything, quit kidding yourself. And please reply all our questions and comments, 'cos I'm sure you came back to read them.

NZ_Matt• 14 years ago

The article is satire in response to this: http://www.theverge.com/2012/4/30/2988798/paul-miller-year-w...

Perhaps a mod could add Satire to the thread title to avoid the confusion.

zobzu• 14 years ago

I'm giving up on giving a fuck for a year!

Stay trendy my friends.

(I actually started this one quite a few years ago and it's still going strong. Allow oneself to think on it's own a little more easily!)

QuarkSpark• 14 years ago

hilarious stuff! you should also consider logging your last 3 hours of reading and post it online, like how your targeted audience for this post of yours just recently did! :D

willurd• 14 years ago

I was giving up before it was cool.

dasil003• 14 years ago

Yeah, it used to just be "loser-talk"

winkerVSbecks• 14 years ago

Ah yes the I'm giving up_______ trend. I said the same thing in the post Paul Miller made. If you want to give up aspects of your life or stop using certain services – can you even call the Internet a service anymore – good for you. I will not to judge you but FFS stop making public announcements. If you're really doing it for yourself. Keep it to your self.

Sivart13• 14 years ago

whoosh

BasDirks• 14 years ago

> but being uncomfortable or suspicious of gradual habits we develop, does that show characteristics of "getting old" and "conservative"? The get-off-my-lawn type of mentality?

Sounds like the opposite.

I have over the past 3 years lived abroad for a total of ~4 months, in Italy and France. I helped build a house and a shed. I had my laptop with me, but internet was limited to an hour a day, 56k is still pricey. Once in a while I flip my world upside down, and it always makes me stronger. Sleeping in a 2x2m tower with spiders bigger than you've ever seen before is good for you, and breaks a lot of habits.

pinchyfingers• 14 years ago

Written in response to this article:

http://www.theverge.com/2012/4/30/2988798/paul-miller-year-w...

bashzor• 14 years ago

I think it's laughable what he does for pageviews. If you read all, you'll notice that's quite the only reason.

Also if you read all, you might have discovered the Readability link at the very bottom. So just when you're done reading, the site offers to make reading it more comfortable.

squiid• 14 years ago

I'm also an avid reader, bordering on obsessive. As you described, I read not only devour books, magazines, and blog posts, but signs, labels, billboards, and anything else where words are printed. I just spent four months in South/east Asia, mostly Thailand, and because I can't read Thai script, my eyes and my brain have had a much needed break. I've been able to focus on reading only what I've conciously chosen to read and have eliminated all the 'passive' reading I do by habit. I've also been able to focus much more intensely on my work without distraction. For anyone who has the ability to work virtually and needs to focus deeply onas project, I highly recommend such a trip!

jezclaremurugan• 14 years ago

You should do AMA in reddit.

corwinstephen• 14 years ago

The Internet is Y-Combinator for sarcastic satire.

SatvikBeri• 14 years ago

I actually got a lot of benefit out of seriously cutting back my reading a couple of years ago. I found that rather than coming up with my own arguments and using examples from what I'd read to support them, I was just citing arguments from various books I'd read. It wasn't that I'd lost the capacity for original thought, but my mental habits had changed from trying to come up with something on my own to purely synthesizing and citing material I'd read elsewhere.

Some more extreme but shorter versions of this that I've tried include putting myself in an environment with no words for a few days, and spending a day blindfolded.

padobson• 14 years ago

I love this piece. The Verge has become the philistine's Rolling Stone. It has all the pretentiousness, and none of the cultural value. Everytime I read something on the Verge, I can't help but feel like there's an air of timeless importance being attributed to things that will be forgotten a year from now.

This might also simply stem from frustration over a systemic failure of technology writers to do their material any justice, or the press in general failing to keep people properly informed over the last 25 years.

But maybe I'm curmudgeonyly. Maybe there is value in knowing about a bamboo phone[1] while SOPA and CISPA threaten to turn it into a weapon against us. There could be some good reason for me to know that Kanye is banging a Kardashian while our President is allowed to assassinate US citizens with a simple say-so.[2]

I guess if I get a nice piece of satire like this every now and again, I'm good with it.

[1] http://mobile.theverge.com/2012/2/2/2766670/adzero-bamboo-ph... [2] http://m.yahoo.com/w/legobpengine/news/obama-lawyers-citizen...

cafard• 14 years ago

I thought that Rolling Stone _was_ the philistine's Rolling Stone, but then nobody ever mistook me for Matthew Arnold.

swah• 14 years ago

This isn't doable... I'll try to stick with "start your day as a producer, not a consumer".

obtu• 14 years ago

http://youtu.be/EC0TDci9hqg — as mocked by Mitchell & Webb (That Mitchell & Webb Look series 2)

w1ntermute• 14 years ago

Ironically, Paul Miller probably won't see this parody because he's not using the internet anymore.

verminoth• 14 years ago

Ha ha ha ha, so great.

I'm Giving Up Reading for a Year

Related Stories