7 ms·

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 p

by 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
I sometimes pause shows or YT videos I'm watching just to daydream for a little bit about something that just crossed my mind. Additionally I go outside at least once a day to walk or ride my bicycle, which also helps with this.
plastic-enjoyer 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. Sometimes I just turn my phone off and stare at a white wall for 15 minutes. People made fun of me when I told them how relaxing I find white walls, but it seems it turns out, that I'm not the only one doing this?
- ssl-3 2mo ago
  I found that people would make fun of me for that, too, if they were made aware of it. Back when I was still stuck to a desk in school (up hill both ways and without a pocket computer), I learned that folks would tend to leave me alone if I had a book open. It didn't really matter what book it was. I could just gaze at it with my eyes relaxed and unfocused, with the printing appearing as some kind of indistinct phoric blur. And as long as I turned the page occasionally, that was good enough to keep the would-be tyrants at bay. (And then I'd ace the test on Friday, repeat for dozens of weeks, and do it again next year.)
  - ryandrake 2mo ago
    When my wife and I started dating, she constantly was asking me what I’m thinking about (as people who care about you sometimes do). She was amazed that I could just sit down in a sofa and zone out, thinking about absolutely nothing. At first she would ask “come on, you meat be thinking about something” and later admitted she couldn’t do that and didn’t think people actually could!
- lanstin 2mo ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bodhidharma#Wall-gazing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bodhidharma#Wall-gazing
noir_lord 2mo ago
> I can't even think of the last time I daydreamed About 5 minutes ago for me, my missus says that I live with my head in the clouds (which is a nicer way of saying if I'm not actively doing something I just zone out and retreat into my own head), I've always been that way all the way back to school (with the inevitable consequences from teachers). I've mentioned on here before though that I never got addicted to my phone, I don't even know where it is ~80% of the time. My relationship with technology is (nearly) always intentional, I still access the internet 95% of the time on a desktop PC (which reduces doom scrolling since that just feels wrong on a desktop) so when I walk out my office I'm just "offline" in a very distinct way, if I go for a walk my phone stays at home, everyone who knows me knows I'll answer a text at some point but it could be a day or two. To sum it up, I resent the passive intrusion of technology into my life.
- kuerbel 2mo ago
  I'm not sure I have the willpower to follow your example but at least I managed to turn of notifications on my watch after reading your post.
  - noir_lord 2mo ago
    I honestly don't think it is willpower, it is simply that I never had to break the "addiction" because I never had it in the first place. I always found the form factor extremely limiting compared to a desktop (it's the same reason my laptop ended up running a TV upstairs, the idea of programming on the sofa sounded great but in practice I'd get frustrated and immediately retreat to my quiet downstairs office with multiple screens when I had to do something tricky/requiring concentration). Where I do use something that optimises for distractions, I look for how to minimize the distractions (e.g YouTube - I use the excellent Unhook (with Ublock Origin) which turns the YT home page into a search box and little else, hides mixes, shorts and other distractions) and make it work for me.
  - safety1st 2mo ago
    Willpower's not the solution. When we isolated cocaine from the coca leaf for the first time, the world pretty much went insane. In those first years people were injecting it into their eyeballs and spines. The most popular beverage on earth in 2026 STILL contains extract of the coca leaf as a holdover from the days when it was laced with its namesake, Coke. People were smoking cocaine, ingesting cocaine, giving it to their kids for a toothache, pretty much anything you could stick it in, they did. The solution to this wasn't willpower, it was to get rid of all that fucking cocaine. There's a reason you don't have the stuff lying around your house today, if you did you'd probably get hooked. In 2026 we're basically speedrunning the coke boom with infotech. So once again the solution is: get rid of it. Any time you're in a low stimulus environment, remove the tech so that you don't HAVE to exercise willpower. That means turning off the phone and the watch and maybe stuffing them in a drawer in another room or something. That's all it takes. I can't say how society will look back at this moment in history 150 years from now. But I do know I'm way happier and more relaxed when I just shut off the devices and put them away. When I'm at home or in the office, my phone's on mute, in a drawer/bag/other room, and I don't think about it unless I take it out for a few minutes to order a delivery or do a 2fa or something. At night it's simply turned off. I'll never own a smart watch. I still keep the phone on me when I go out and haven't found that to be a huge concern because if I'm at a bar or something it's competing with a lot of other stimuli for attention. We were never 100% available to anyone for all of human history until the last 10-20 years. I am not opting into this current Cocaine Moment.
AaronAPU 2mo ago
I think its unfortunate people wear headphones while walking/running/biking. If you don’t, that’s however many minutes or hours of nothing but daydreaming (and hearing nature).
- ABoltzmannMush 2mo ago
  Sadly around here it takes quite a lot of driving to get to anywhere that nature sounds predominate. Between the highways/airports/lawncare it is mostly noise pollution, and I generally find that doesn't work as well for daydreaming.
- jorisw 2mo ago
  I often just wear noise cancelling headphones without any music on
- radlad 2mo ago
  I find it impossible to daydream while focused on traffic.
  - lanstin 2mo ago
    I read my black on white eink reader on walks and occasionally run into poles and things in the sidewalk. Mostly I look up when crossing a street. When I was a kid I would walk slowly around with a Sci Fi book and read it. Never been hit by a car but every now and then get scared by one I didn’t notice. But I can’t read intense books too much - I alternate hard books and pulpy fun reads.
- duskdozer 2mo ago
  I've needed to take anc earbuds with me while out now, not to listen to music but just to tone down the noise pollution a bit. You can barely hear nature anyway over all the cars, trucks, lawnmowers, leafblowers, airplanes, and what I think are warehouses. It's been getting worse in recent years and the only way to have a chance at daydreaming is to lower it a bit.
roysting 2mo ago
How would one daydream, i.e., imagine, when you have everything presented to you in 4k and you can even interact with it through games? You have to imagine to daydream. When you’ve been raised on YouTube since birth (referring to U.S. primarily “GenZ”) or you’ve formed your identity around things on TV (like most Americans) you didn’t have to imagine, daydream you just took it in, like everyone else that took on the same thing. That’s another aspect that’s not really being called out, TV also has contributed to the homogenization and destruction of distinct and unique cultures, i.e., actual, real diversity; because everyone is programmed and trained by TV on the same material, as the famous water cooler discussion about a TV show episode everyone was watching tells us. Now imagine you’re “Gen Alpha” or maybe even “GenZ” where you have not even had anyone read you books that required you to imagine, i.e., daydream, what was being told to you? These are all compounding factors that are going to even cause massive problems for this sham, fake facade, con job American society. Talk to teachers in elementary schools and middle schools, even universities now; they’ll tell you things that should make and discerning person be alarmed. And that’s without even talking about the impending impacts of AI.
- JumpinJack_Cash 2mo ago
  > > How would one daydream, i.e., imagine, when you have everything presented to you in 4k and you can even interact with it through games? You can daydream about being the protagonist of such actions which is not the same as watching other people doing it
  - lanstin 2mo ago
    I used to spend a lot of time imagining myself as the captain of a Federation starship :) but I did also read a lot of books. But also, the availability of YouTube changes the utility of descriptive writing. Moby Dick can have pages of text about whales or whatever, but now I can spend hours watching whale videos on YouTube. The importance of the interior life of the characters is more, or of diffusive world building stories with too much intricacy for a movie or video presentation.
    - 2mo ago

by oggreen 2mo ago

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

I sometimes pause shows or YT videos I'm watching just to daydream for a little bit about something that just crossed my mind. Additionally I go outside at least once a day to walk or ride my bicycle, which also helps with this.

plastic-enjoyer 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. Sometimes I just turn my phone off and stare at a white wall for 15 minutes. People made fun of me when I told them how relaxing I find white walls, but it seems it turns out, that I'm not the only one doing this?

ssl-3 2mo ago
I found that people would make fun of me for that, too, if they were made aware of it. Back when I was still stuck to a desk in school (up hill both ways and without a pocket computer), I learned that folks would tend to leave me alone if I had a book open. It didn't really matter what book it was. I could just gaze at it with my eyes relaxed and unfocused, with the printing appearing as some kind of indistinct phoric blur. And as long as I turned the page occasionally, that was good enough to keep the would-be tyrants at bay. (And then I'd ace the test on Friday, repeat for dozens of weeks, and do it again next year.)
- ryandrake 2mo ago
  When my wife and I started dating, she constantly was asking me what I’m thinking about (as people who care about you sometimes do). She was amazed that I could just sit down in a sofa and zone out, thinking about absolutely nothing. At first she would ask “come on, you meat be thinking about something” and later admitted she couldn’t do that and didn’t think people actually could!
lanstin 2mo ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bodhidharma#Wall-gazing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bodhidharma#Wall-gazing

noir_lord 2mo ago

> I can't even think of the last time I daydreamed About 5 minutes ago for me, my missus says that I live with my head in the clouds (which is a nicer way of saying if I'm not actively doing something I just zone out and retreat into my own head), I've always been that way all the way back to school (with the inevitable consequences from teachers). I've mentioned on here before though that I never got addicted to my phone, I don't even know where it is ~80% of the time. My relationship with technology is (nearly) always intentional, I still access the internet 95% of the time on a desktop PC (which reduces doom scrolling since that just feels wrong on a desktop) so when I walk out my office I'm just "offline" in a very distinct way, if I go for a walk my phone stays at home, everyone who knows me knows I'll answer a text at some point but it could be a day or two. To sum it up, I resent the passive intrusion of technology into my life.

kuerbel 2mo ago
I'm not sure I have the willpower to follow your example but at least I managed to turn of notifications on my watch after reading your post.
- noir_lord 2mo ago
  I honestly don't think it is willpower, it is simply that I never had to break the "addiction" because I never had it in the first place. I always found the form factor extremely limiting compared to a desktop (it's the same reason my laptop ended up running a TV upstairs, the idea of programming on the sofa sounded great but in practice I'd get frustrated and immediately retreat to my quiet downstairs office with multiple screens when I had to do something tricky/requiring concentration). Where I do use something that optimises for distractions, I look for how to minimize the distractions (e.g YouTube - I use the excellent Unhook (with Ublock Origin) which turns the YT home page into a search box and little else, hides mixes, shorts and other distractions) and make it work for me.
- safety1st 2mo ago
  Willpower's not the solution. When we isolated cocaine from the coca leaf for the first time, the world pretty much went insane. In those first years people were injecting it into their eyeballs and spines. The most popular beverage on earth in 2026 STILL contains extract of the coca leaf as a holdover from the days when it was laced with its namesake, Coke. People were smoking cocaine, ingesting cocaine, giving it to their kids for a toothache, pretty much anything you could stick it in, they did. The solution to this wasn't willpower, it was to get rid of all that fucking cocaine. There's a reason you don't have the stuff lying around your house today, if you did you'd probably get hooked. In 2026 we're basically speedrunning the coke boom with infotech. So once again the solution is: get rid of it. Any time you're in a low stimulus environment, remove the tech so that you don't HAVE to exercise willpower. That means turning off the phone and the watch and maybe stuffing them in a drawer in another room or something. That's all it takes. I can't say how society will look back at this moment in history 150 years from now. But I do know I'm way happier and more relaxed when I just shut off the devices and put them away. When I'm at home or in the office, my phone's on mute, in a drawer/bag/other room, and I don't think about it unless I take it out for a few minutes to order a delivery or do a 2fa or something. At night it's simply turned off. I'll never own a smart watch. I still keep the phone on me when I go out and haven't found that to be a huge concern because if I'm at a bar or something it's competing with a lot of other stimuli for attention. We were never 100% available to anyone for all of human history until the last 10-20 years. I am not opting into this current Cocaine Moment.

AaronAPU 2mo ago

I think its unfortunate people wear headphones while walking/running/biking. If you don’t, that’s however many minutes or hours of nothing but daydreaming (and hearing nature).

ABoltzmannMush 2mo ago
Sadly around here it takes quite a lot of driving to get to anywhere that nature sounds predominate. Between the highways/airports/lawncare it is mostly noise pollution, and I generally find that doesn't work as well for daydreaming.
jorisw 2mo ago
I often just wear noise cancelling headphones without any music on
radlad 2mo ago
I find it impossible to daydream while focused on traffic.
- lanstin 2mo ago
  I read my black on white eink reader on walks and occasionally run into poles and things in the sidewalk. Mostly I look up when crossing a street. When I was a kid I would walk slowly around with a Sci Fi book and read it. Never been hit by a car but every now and then get scared by one I didn’t notice. But I can’t read intense books too much - I alternate hard books and pulpy fun reads.
duskdozer 2mo ago
I've needed to take anc earbuds with me while out now, not to listen to music but just to tone down the noise pollution a bit. You can barely hear nature anyway over all the cars, trucks, lawnmowers, leafblowers, airplanes, and what I think are warehouses. It's been getting worse in recent years and the only way to have a chance at daydreaming is to lower it a bit.

roysting 2mo ago

How would one daydream, i.e., imagine, when you have everything presented to you in 4k and you can even interact with it through games? You have to imagine to daydream. When you’ve been raised on YouTube since birth (referring to U.S. primarily “GenZ”) or you’ve formed your identity around things on TV (like most Americans) you didn’t have to imagine, daydream you just took it in, like everyone else that took on the same thing. That’s another aspect that’s not really being called out, TV also has contributed to the homogenization and destruction of distinct and unique cultures, i.e., actual, real diversity; because everyone is programmed and trained by TV on the same material, as the famous water cooler discussion about a TV show episode everyone was watching tells us. Now imagine you’re “Gen Alpha” or maybe even “GenZ” where you have not even had anyone read you books that required you to imagine, i.e., daydream, what was being told to you? These are all compounding factors that are going to even cause massive problems for this sham, fake facade, con job American society. Talk to teachers in elementary schools and middle schools, even universities now; they’ll tell you things that should make and discerning person be alarmed. And that’s without even talking about the impending impacts of AI.

JumpinJack_Cash 2mo ago
> > How would one daydream, i.e., imagine, when you have everything presented to you in 4k and you can even interact with it through games? You can daydream about being the protagonist of such actions which is not the same as watching other people doing it
- lanstin 2mo ago
  I used to spend a lot of time imagining myself as the captain of a Federation starship :) but I did also read a lot of books. But also, the availability of YouTube changes the utility of descriptive writing. Moby Dick can have pages of text about whales or whatever, but now I can spend hours watching whale videos on YouTube. The importance of the interior life of the characters is more, or of diffusive world building stories with too much intricacy for a movie or video presentation.
  - 2mo ago