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People often question me how I manage to focus for more than a few minutes and I'm always confused because back in the day I was constantly informed I didn't ha

• Dumblydorr 2mo ago
  You don’t necessarily want to daydream. If you’re not careful, it becomes Negative rumination and mind wandering and that wouldn’t be as useful as an actual nap or a workout or meditation.
  • abyssin 2mo ago
    If meditation and workout look like a protection against ruminating, they might be functioning as avoidance. If a nap helps, maybe fix your sleep first (good sleep is super important for mental health). Daydreaming is healthy.
    • lanstin 2mo ago
      I would say that if the mind stays away from negative ruminations when set free, that is a sign of a balanced and healthy life. Many people lack balance and health, and for them changing the conditions a bit might be helpful. Knowing and practicing that one can focus the attention where it is useful can increase mental health or ability to cope with problems. One doesn’t want to run away from reality but one need not feel trapped by intrusive mental phenomena.
• oggreen 2mo ago
  That's a very interesting perspective but now that you mention it, I can't even think of the last time I daydreamed, even when I'm not on a device. Curious if phone usage or whatever doom-scrolling we do exhausts the same part of the brain that we use to daydream.
  • embedding-shape 2mo ago
    That's interesting. What happens if you just sit there doing nothing, looking around and what not? Does your brain start to wander by itself? Personally I struggle to remember any day I haven't had at least 10-15 minutes of idle time doing nothing, just thinking idly, but I still have similar struggles as the author. Although I barely use my phone for things neither.
    • cindyllm 2mo ago
      [dead]
    • lesostep 2mo ago
      >> What happens if you just sit there doing nothing, looking around and what not? Does your brain start to wander by itself? For me it's one of the three layers. First layer, it starts to wonder to the direction offered by real world. Wonder about song lyrics I'm listening too, or the colors of buildings, or something like that. Second layer happens if you purposefully stray your thoughts away from a real world. Brain starts trying to remember whatever you wanted it to remember. For example, if I tell myself three times "don't forget to call mom", if I just sit idly, chances are my brain would surface "call mom". Sometimes it surfaces "remember you wanted to try arch 2 years ago". Also this is the layer that works badly if you tried or depressed, because it can start surfacing bad thoughts. Third layer I call time skipper because it's just a basic time fast forwarding. I have no idea whether it's true meditation or controlled dissociation or something else, but thoughts slide of your brain, so there's nothing to remember afterwards. My friend said that maybe meditation is a controlled dissociation. I prefer to say that I'm so dumb, I can just switch my brain off.
  • TheLML 2mo ago
• graemep 2mo ago
  I agree. I am not sure it is as similar to sleep as you claim, but its definitely good for your brain. I say something similar in the context of parenting, that a reasonable amount of boredom is good. I think it likely that being constantly entertained makes people more prone to seek constant stimulation. This did not start with phones either. I am Gen X and it happened in my childhood with kids being dumped in front of TVs. One difference was a lot of adults resisted this and limited hours in front of a TV, whereas now a lot of adults are addicted to phones too.
  • lardosaurusrex 2mo ago
    Well I made no claim of it being related to sleep; just that I've read a lot of claims that it's related to microsleep and used "sleeping while standing up" for the last bit as an analogy. I am not a sleep doctor/therapist nor am I any sort of expert on the subject.
    • graemep 2mo ago
      I may have read your statement as being stronger than you intended. its a reasonably analogy then.
  • roncesvalles 2mo ago
    I remember when cable TV used to be "addictive". Now I can't watch even 10 minutes of it without getting bored and pulling out my phone. Also something I learned recently: checking your phone at the movies is no longer the faux pas that it used to be. There's definitely some hedonic treadmill type thing going on with attention and stimuli.
    • 6031769 2mo ago
      Using your phone in a cinema was, is and ever will be a massive faux pas. I have no idea at all why you think it might be otherwise.
      • Melonai 2mo ago
• sph 2mo ago
  > the lack of daydreaming I would also blame the Western commercialization of meditation. I have recently learned that in Buddhism meditation is just one side of the coin, and it’s usually diametrically paired with the opposite technique of contemplation: instead of concentrating into one infinitesimal point, you expand your awareness to encompass the whole of reality. Which is a bit like daydreaming. It’s through these two exercises that one finds the middle path of equanimity. With technology, we spend our time with narrowed focus, we are told that to stay sane we need to cultivate our focus, and never find the time to release the grip on it, to just let the brain be and expand and relax a bit. The Taoists had figured it out all along: to find focus, stop focusing so damn much.
  • lanstin 2mo ago
    As an avid consumer of Western Buddhism, this is pretty standard understanding. Concentration and insight, another complementary aspect of practice, like the dichotomy between sitting alone and sitting in a group, or between a steady daily practice and a deep intense retreat. The linear story is that increased awareness of focus teaches the sitter that there are no real borders in reality, it is a seamless whole, and as the sitting continues, awareness naturally opens up to include the full current moment - seeing thoughts as thoughts, emotions as emotions, sore knees as sore knees, twitchy neighbor as a twitchy neighbor, etc thru the myriad things all showing the way, bright and clear. But they are mutually reinforcing partners that appear as distinct.
• ssl-3 2mo ago
  There's only one important thing that I miss about smoking: A smoke break was an excuse that was tolerated by others, wherein I could go outside and just let my mind wander (daydream) with no particular goal for a short period of time. Daydreaming should be perfectly acceptable either way, but people seem to think it's weird (concerning, even) when someone spends a bit of time to stand (or sit) around while appearing to be doing nothing at all. But having a smoke is an activity, and the smoker's participation in this very passive activity assuages the concerns of others.
  • hgomersall 2mo ago
    You can get the same effect by going for a walk.
    • mysterydip 2mo ago
      I think they’re saying that you could say “I’m going for a smoke break” at work and it was at least tolerated. I don’t think you can say “I’m going for a walk” the same way.
      • fireflash38 2mo ago
        Why not? Ive been doing it for years, when I worked in office. Get someone to go with you. Or walk to get food/coffee/whatever.
        • ssl-3 2mo ago
          That doesn't sound so bad. I like chatting with people I know. I like coffee. Food is nice. Except: My involvement in these activities doesn't leave much, if any, room for the kind of detachment that daydreaming requires.
          • maccard 2mo ago
            The group needs to be big enough (6+ people) that you’re not just chatting with someone; you’re part of a group and can drift in and out .
• larodi 2mo ago
  Sleeping while standing up is the state one finds oneself endlessly scrolling somebody else's dreams. Avoid at all costs.
• gib444 2mo ago
  The gen z stare is being unable or unwilling to give a verbal response when one is expected mostly as a result of social anxiety and lack of communication skills IMO.
• cpt_sobel 2mo ago
  > I'm not convinced attention spans themselves have changed; I think it has more to do with the fact that people's brains aren't defaulting to daydreaming anymore when bored. If my mind is not defaulting to daydreaming and rather asking me to find a distraction, doesn't this mean my attention span is worse?
• shafyy 2mo ago
  Reminds me of this scene from Curb where Jeff just sits in the plane: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zONvxznbUJA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zONvxznbUJA
  • al_borland 2mo ago
    I often do this on flights under 3 hours. The hardest part is finding a place to land your gaze where it doesn’t look like you’re staring it someone, as that could become awkward.
    • instakill 2mo ago
      try "the Polish stare"
  • snovymgodym 2mo ago
    I wonder if they forgot they already used this bit in Seinfeld or if it's an intentional homage. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JBBQdFSvvTE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JBBQdFSvvTE
    • shafyy 2mo ago
      100% homage. Larry David plays with recurring jokes all the time (e.g. see his new series on HBO now) which makes it even funnier.
• mettamage 2mo ago
  > I'm not convinced attention spans themselves have changed; I think it has more to do with the fact that people's brains aren't defaulting to daydreaming anymore when bored. Yea sometimes stuff has to sink in or marinate. If you don't give that to yourself then you'll never realize it's gone. I realized I was missing this because I sometimes sit in my chair and tell myself "this is your life now, you sit in this chair" and I do that for as long as possible. I do this in part because a part of me just doesn't want to do anything: I don't want to work, I don't want to do fun things, I just want to do nothing. So I have an inclination towards being lazy. But when I'm on that chair and give myself full freedom to do so, then I get agitated and want to do something. I plead with myself really hard. But my lazy part is like "fuck no... we're finally on this chair, I'll die this way, we're never getting off this chair." And then at some point my mind says something like "FINE, I'LL EVEN DO THE TAX FORM THINGY I HAVE BEEN PUTTING OFF. I'LL DO ANYTHING!" When I judge the activity to be productive enough, I get off the chair. The real challenge is that I forget that I have this exercise because it actually works for me and it makes me realize that when you're doing "nothing" your brain is doing a whole lot.
• al_borland 2mo ago
  As much as I’d like to leave my phone in another room while working, 2FA has made that impossible. I’m now required to keep my phone nearby and pick it up periodically throughout the day, all in the same of security.
  • dwedge 2mo ago
    I worked around this by just storing the 2FA in Bitwarden. Yeah, same place as the passwords but I don't care I don't want the forced context switch.
    • al_borland 2mo ago
      A coworker tried to use Authy a couple years ago and it wouldn't work. It seemed like we were forced to use Microsoft Authenticator. I just tried setting it up with Apple Passwords and it wouldn’t accept the QR code. It seems to be specifically made for Microsoft.
    • gexla 2mo ago
      KeePassXC also has one.
  • Bootvis 2mo ago
    Excellent reason to stand up and take a short walk.
  • timacles 2mo ago
    Just make your phone boring. Delete instagram, log out and don’t go on YouTube. Delete games. It’s really not that hard to make your phone a device for communication and not entertainment
    • al_borland 2mo ago
      My phone is already like that. There are still emails, texts, the browser still exists, the weather, etc. And even ignoring all of that, taking hands off the keyboard/mouse, picking up a different device, waiting for the notification, opening it up, typing in the code, putting the phone back down, moving back to the keyboard/mouse/monitor… it’s very disruptive to any flow I might hope to have.
• al_borland 2mo ago
  If you haven’t read it, Cal Newport’s book Digital Minimalism is mostly about this topic. The value of giving your brain time to simply exist without any outside input, with many examples from history of people who carved out time explicitly for this, especially when needing to make big decisions or figure out answers to problems.
  • austy69 2mo ago
    That's probably a great read based on what I've heard from Cal, but I don't think you need an entire book to know how to scale back on your social media use. Just hand your phone to your friend and have them put a lock on the addictive features.
    • __MatrixMan__ 2mo ago
      I find that just setting it to grayscale is enough. Its not that colors are actually an important part of my mostly text based social media experience, but when I use them without colors I get distracted with: > What am I doing? This dumb. And then I remember that it is dumb and I go back to leaving it alone.
    • al_borland 2mo ago
      It’s not just social media. Most people have their thing… the news, podcasts, music, books, games, etc. In the modern era we can always have something that allows us to distract our brain or provides external ideas to direct it. Being alone with our own thoughts, devoid of outside influence, is something that seems to take an intentional choice these days.
  • Anthony-G 2mo ago
    I haven’t read the book but I like this idea and intend to check out the book. I’m not on social media but I find Hacker News – and even Wikipedia – to be addictive enough. When I was younger, I found it very hard to just sit there without some form of external stimulation, e.g. I couldn’t sit down to eat by or have a coffee by myself without reading a magazine or newspaper at the same time – or listening to the radio. I still find it hard to do this. Hacker News has been useful in that I’ve come across a few inspirational ideas on consuming less input (and producing more output): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44702212 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44702212 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39674619 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39674619 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20781463 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20781463 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24582837 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24582837 I’ve made some changes to my life in that listening to music is more intentional – not just a distraction to have in the background. It probably helps that I’ve also started to learn a musical instrument. I can also go for a walk without needing to have music or a podcast to listen to.
• IdiotSavage 2mo ago
  Meanwhile in Japan: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z9FsQXYVgUE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z9FsQXYVgUE
• duplessitous 2mo ago
  Sometimes I worry that this whole gen-z stare thing is just millennial avocado toast under new management. I work with a ton of gen-z'ers, I think they're great and have never once experienced this gen-z stare thing you hear about so much online. They're hard workers, attentive, and less phone addicted than my latchkey parents.
  • anthonypasq 2mo ago
    gen z and even more so gen alpha is a complete bimodal distribution. The top kids are genuinely incredible.
    • duplessitous 2mo ago
      It goes beyond my job but that is my fault for narrowing it down. Even day to day shopping at random stores, I have never seen this gen-z stare or any of the other terms we assign to them. If they are bimodal, which they very well could be, the competent mode is clearly dominant where I have lived We went through twenty years of millennials being this or that, how none of them work, how they are moochers. Every generation gets called lazy and dumped on by the previous generations; as far as I can tell, it is mostly bull shit. I have yet to experience anything extraordinary about gen-z that I don't see in gen-y, gen-x, latchkey, boomers, greatest generation, etc. Maybe younger gen-z or gen-alpha like you say are truly messed up, I think we have data coming out of schools that support that, but I have yet to interact with them as I don't have kids myself. Everything I have said is inherently anecdotal and no more important than what you've seen
• boogieknite 2mo ago
  at my first office job my coworkers quickly informed me i had a bizarre habit of staring at the ceiling before performing a burst of effort. i find loosening my visual focus helps me visualize concepts and idea, no idea when or how i picked up that habit sometimes when i "space out" i am fully daydreaming, other times i am (in generous terms) "composing my thoughts". when its a daydream after snapping back to it ill think along the lines of, "guess i needed to process that"
• xorcist 2mo ago
  I believe you are on to something. I like to run, which is common enough, but I never do it with a watch or phone. I always leave them at home. That is my hour of zen. Afterwards I may be exhausted but I am always full of ideas. After the first ten kilometres or so the body does all the running and the mind is set free. That's a lot like daydreaming. Every other person I meet along the trail have headphones and some watch to measure their training. I get it, they want to get better at running. Maybe they train for some competition. I don't. I will never be an elite marathon runner and I know that, so I couldn't care less about getting better as long as I come back with a tired body and busy mind. Everybody is different, but I have never understood why not more people are like me.
  • deleted 2mo ago
    [deleted]
• scary-size 2mo ago
  There’s this great post about „The Death Of Day Dreaming“: https://www.afterbabel.com/p/on-the-death-of-daydreaming https://www.afterbabel.com/p/on-the-death-of-daydreaming
• dsign 2mo ago
  Interesting that you bring daydreaming to the conversation. I've got an issue with it, and it's that I get interesting ideas then. But nothing comes out unless I sit in front of a computer to do anything with them. And computers have all the distractions.
  • phainopepla2 2mo ago
    Pen and paper nearby might help.
• m463 2mo ago
  I get a lot figured out in the time between waking and getting out of bed. I do have my phone around, but just to jot things down. Also in the shower, but then my phone isn't handy and I lose a few thoughts.