Extremely unpopular opinion from a software engineer on a tech forum but: mental health is as far away from the Internet as possible.
The more you can integrate the slower pace of nature and natural life, the better your mental health. Your physical presence is optimised for long days of doing fuck all, sitting in the grass, waiting for a deer to pass by.
Still struggling with this, but my long term life goal is living in a cabin in the middle of nowhere with easy access to the unnatural and constantly accelerating flow of information that is the Internet.
We don't know everything about the era that shaped our bodies, there are a few contradicting narratives:
One being that we were mainly scavengers during the time that our brains grew to this size, especially savoring the marrow of the large bones of the large animals that used to roam the earth before we finished them off and had to look for other sources of highly nutritious foodstuffs. [1]
Another (albeit questioned) is that we hunted prey by running them to exhaustion, so called persistence hunting - a far cry from "waiting for deer to pass by" [2].
Some do argue that the preagricultural societies seemed to have plenty of leisure however [3], so you might be right :-).
But the larger point is if we would be mentally more healthy if we stuck to the old ways of hunting mammoths - or if we are first and foremost adaptable ... I guess my penny is on the latter, within reason.
> the larger point is if we would be mentally more healthy if we stuck to the old ways of hunting mammoths
Certainly, if me and my buddies could hunt a whole mammoth our entire tribe could afford to do nothing for a month, as meat lasts a while in cold latitudes.
Sadly, nowadays one can't work very hard for a week and ask the boss to take the rest of the month off.
> The more you can integrate the slower pace of nature and natural life, the better your mental health. Your physical presence is optimised for long days of doing fuck all, sitting in the grass, waiting for a deer to pass by.
I am 1000% on board with this perspective, yet find your prescriptive solution to be a tad askew.
To me, the early internet - especially the pre-broadband days - was very similar to "doing fuck all," waiting for something to come by my screen to engage my focus & attention. In fact, the keyboard-driven computing world was a very pure invocation of the hunter-gatherer mindset. I wrote an article on Medium about this back in 2017, called "Tyrannical Illiteracy." [0]
I have yet to conceive of a more fitting description of today's internet than that.
> mental health is as far away from the Internet as possible.
I don't think it's the internet, exactly. But anywhere on the internet where your attention has been commoditized.
Basically - if you aren't paying to use the app (and it's not decent open source software), get that fucking cancer out of your device.
Just the basics: messages, calls, GPS, maps, shared connection, photos/videos
those make one awesome, compelling device. Don't ruin it by letting fucking scum companies siphon all your energy and attention away for their own profit (and they are actively trying - complete with statistics and graphs, OKRs & key performance indicators... all painting a picture about how much they can fuck you by stealing all your attention and time)
Turning off notifications - all notifications - helps quite a bit. It's a lot easier to ignore attention-grabbing apps when they can't put their attention grabbing alerts in front of you.
I have an iPad explicitly configured this way, and it's incredibly relaxing to use it.
That does sound pleasant. I wish I could push notifications into a todo list with 1 button / click. I am usually not bothered or distracted by seeing a notification, but having to choose to delete it or act on it immediately is what gets me. I tend to delete everything and keep the interesting ones in the back of my mind for later ("I should check out my gf's new IG post")
I like notifications, and I try to respond to them intentionally. I open apps intentionally (this was easy enough to learn) and close apps intentionally (this was hard to learn). So I am pretty good about actually going into the app to do what I intended to do in response to the notification, and then closing the app. I can reassess afterwards if I want to spend more time in the app and open it back up, but again I create an intention before opening it that has a stopping point.
Intention is the difference between enjoying some funny short videos while sitting in a waiting room, and losing 1-2 hours of your life a day to doomscrolling. And if I could have a filtered list of notifications in a todo somewhere, I can set aside time to update myself on whats new that I care about but arent super important
Reading this from a cabin in the middle of nowhere — However I combine it with regular work and news consumption but it's definitely beneficial to be able to easily step outside for ideation and decision making, or some push-ups in the grass.
> Your physical presence is optimised for long days of doing fuck all, sitting in the grass, waiting for a deer to pass by.
No, your physical presence is optimized for being active most of the time. If you do "long days of doing fuck all", you'll lose bone density, muscle mass and probably gain weight and a mass of health issues. You'll probably experience cognitive decline.
The older you get, the more rapid these issues manifest themselves and the more important constant activity becomes.
i still find games to be great for my mental health, even more so now as an adult than as a kid. they are a place where i can make uninformed decisions based on my gut, and experience no negative consequences to my life. i treat every game like a sandbox. dont get sucked into the idea that anything you build or create, or skills you develop, in the game is meant to last.
For example, in an RPG game when I find a powerful 1-time use item - I use it as soon as I can.
There are many factors to optimal decision making, and optimized results are just 1 factor. Games help me explore trade-offs with quick vs long decisions, side effects of over planning, stress and panic effects on decisions, etc.
It carries over into the rest of my life, even work, where I am better able to manage things, like diminishing returns on my efforts, in ways that are very personal to me and my natural tendencies.
No, the Internet is fun, in moderation, and it pays the bills. But then I want to switch off, step outside my front door and sit in the grass, soothed by the sound of insects, birds and wind.
I too did a double take on that, I thought you’d left out “without”. It’s a hard balance huh?
Perhaps the ideal way would be to have your main cabin with no real internet, and a 100 yard path to your tiny work cabin with internet. A physical friction to prevent needless interruption.
The more you can integrate the slower pace of nature and natural life, the better your mental health. Your physical presence is optimised for long days of doing fuck all, sitting in the grass, waiting for a deer to pass by.
Still struggling with this, but my long term life goal is living in a cabin in the middle of nowhere with easy access to the unnatural and constantly accelerating flow of information that is the Internet.