Wow, I am a hacker on my computer 60-80 hours per week and my lifestyle is 179 degrees from yours.
I have no land line and a cell phone, but it's not a smart phone. I carry it to work or out of town, but nowhere else. If I visit someone else, run an errand, or go out to eat, you'll have to leave me a voicemail. Sorry about that, but I devote my full attention to the people I'm with.
I have a laptop, but it leaves my desk once or twice a year. If I'm on the road, I probably have a file folder full of papers and a thumb drive, but no electronics.
I check email many times per day and I visit hn many times per day, but only when I'm already at a computer. I never IM, Facebook, Twitter, or text. If you want to communicate with me: if it's important, call me, if not, email me. Either way, I'll get to it when it's convenient for me, and I'll respond fairly quickly.
I went out to dinner with a group including my 22 year old niece. She texted the entire time (under the table, but we all noticed). How sad, I thought. What was so important that she ignored the rest of us for an hour?
I almost feel sorry for you, Aaron, but then again, I know better. I'm curious to see how the next month will affect your lifestyle afterwards. Hopefully, I'll be able to welcome you back to the real human race (by email, of course.)
you don't have to be on the computer when you're not working. you don't even have to be on the computer for work -- you can find another job outside the industry if you really want to. you don't have to take your cell phone with you everywhere.
its obviously not always quite as simple as that, but often times, it is. if you're tired of something and don't want to do it anymore, find a way to stop doing it.
I can only suspect they are texting about popularity. Makes me thing is there is a market in there - relieve them from having to text all the time by showing them their popularity in some other way.
Or at least give them a popularity meter according to their text frequency ;-)
It comes down to tact, an I don't think there are any "rules" to applying it. It requires a unique and appropriate response to the current environment, and having been in that age group once myself, I can say it's not, generalizations aside, an uncommon deficiency.
...anyway I'm sure all of us here are stellar examples of tactfulness...
Every now and then I run across a story like this where someone is overburdened with communication and technology and wants to give it all up for a fixed time to cleanse themselves from the toxicity of modern life. Then they come back renewed, with new energy to conquer it all, and tell everyone how great it is and that everyone should give solitary confinement or meditation a serious attempt. Then a few months later, they get back into their old overloaded lifestyle of stress and constant work.
No, you don't need to give it all up for a month or year to find yourself. This is reaching out to the other extreme because you hope to end up in the center eventually. How about just slowly moving to the center from where you are? Get rid of the email+text features from you cellphone. Billions of people live perfectly fine without it. Keep GPS/web on your phone but only use when needed. Feel free to check your email whenever you have a few minutes but don't reply to it immediately. Shape your routine so you get to do what's important and not just what's urgent.
When not doing something productive or relaxing on the computer, step away. Go kayaking, hiking, camping, or jogging. Go to the movies, mall, museum, theater, art show, or a theme park. Get a backyard project, build something in real life, get your hands dirty. And while you do all of this, make adequate use of the technology available to you without feeling crushed under it. The purpose of technology is to solve real-life problems. It is not to replace real-life with a 24/7 stream of stress. People are good in general. Don't ignore them for a month because they contact you too much using different mediums. Spend more time with them in person, even if they annoy you. And use your knowledge of technology to enrich your and their lives. What good is 15 years of computer knowledge if you renounce it instead of sharing it with others?
Connectivity is not bad. What is bad is not knowing what form of communication to give more value to. Figure out your communication medium hierarchy and live by it. Mine goes:
Face-2-Face > Video chat > Phone > Email > Message boards > Social Networks
My social goal is to take people from the lower end and move them towards higher end. So I may get a friend message me through Facebook, then we'll email, then phone, with the final goal to hang out next time one of us is in town. Without technology, none of this would be possible. I love technology, but only enough to enable me to improve my real-life social activities.
You're onto something, and crash diets/extremes are no good, but there is a lot of value in giving it all up for periods of time. I wish I had opportunities to do this more frequently, once a year for a month would be very nice. I don't mean vacation - I mean disconnect.
There is so much going on, so much information coming in, so many interactions in our lives that many of our perspectives are on autopilot and if we get too buried, outside influences have too much influence on our perspectives.
I have taken time out a number of times in life, ranging from a month to two months. No friends, no family, no things to do, no internet, picked up a newspaper a few times (if you added up all of them I'd say 3 or 4) - spent most of my time outdoors, occasionally with music, and interaction with people I came across, and with no intention of keeping in touch. Works best out of country; first time was in the Himalayas, but one year I was poor and so I just went to a city a few hundred miles from anyone who knew me. The results are simple: various things that have been jumping around in your head settle, things that would have taken a year to figure out become crystal clear by week two, your life in so many ways becomes very clear, and you come out of all this with an incredible focus, energy, and just freshness.
You could do studies I suppose that figure out if this increases your overall efficiency, if it leads to better ideas, but such a study would only feed my curiosities because the value in this is more than just increasing efficiency, or improving products -- its about increasing the quality of life.
Reflection, pausing, meta-cognition, wandering into an alternate mindset are good to integrate into ones overall lifestyle, but sky diving for a weekend, or chilling out for 30 minutes a day - it seems with a busy life, as I'm guessing yours is as well - it's often like swimming against the current. It's nice to pause the current, enjoy your thoughts, paddle around some without worrying about it. It's very nice. I don't think it's going to happen this year for me, and that's unfortunate.
This is similar to crash dieting or excercise binges - people don't bother to fit eating or excercising into their regular habits so they do "crashes" to try and feel better.
It’s like a constant stream of depression. A day without it made me feel like I was human again.
I had the opposite reaction to a weekend without internet a few months ago: I felt lost and bored and didn't know what to do. After a while, when I got used to this feeling, it dawned on me that this was what I used to feel like all the time before the internet. In that light, it's no wonder I was unhappy and bored with only limited exceptions from the early 80s through the middle 90s (when I got a dialup connection).
I enjoy disconnection - it's the reason reddit, digg, and slashdot are still banned from my /etc/hosts file. When I was a kid, before the internet, I put all that "boredom" time into books - and I have to say I was a better person for it.
Now there's the omnipresent temptation to read that little blurb about some random guy on the internet. There's hours upon hours of interesting, yet totally pointless anecdotes that can easily consume your waking hours, yet contribute nothing to the richness and quality of your life.
I suffered from this greatly - I was spending hours a day on reddit, for example, and reading what? Yet another article about yet another stupid subject that didn't really teach me anything I didn't already know, or anything worthwhile.
I enjoy being connected on my terms - my iPhone is indispensable, and I love having maps, restaurant reviews, and all of that at my disposal - but my appreciation of connectedness is pretty old-school, I prefer to fetch my information than to have it come to me (e.g. twitter). There are too many unimportant things happening on the internet that will endlessly distract you if you let it "push" info to you.
Wow, just reading that brought back a lot of painful memories. I used to hone my skill at carefully tearing seeds out of seed-pods while leaving the pods intact, out of sheer boredom.
I recently had to endure a weekend without internet, and I felt the same way. I ended up mostly watching TV, and in the end felt like I had accomplished nothing.
It's painful to think about, but I have no idea how I would have survived if I had lived outside the age of digital technology.
Yes. My wife and I went camping in the Mojave desert a couple of years ago, where we were isolated enough that we actually had to worry about having enough petrol to get to the next gas station some times. I can thoroughly recommend it. Although I do love startup life, I'm very much looking forward to having the freedom to do this again one day.
For shorter getaways, bike riding is great. I went out for 5 hours yesterday, and rode around the 'Colli Berici', enjoying myself thoroughly (Italy in the spring is that gorgeous). It's a nice way to get away from other people for a bit, too, without having to actually go deep into the woods, although you can do that too with a mountain bike.
I agree. Personally my most rewarding wilderness adventures were Torres Del Paine, Chile and Denali National Park, Alaska. I think part of this is that even when I'm disconnecting and taking a break, I like to push myself. Make it interesting... It doesn't have to be just a relaxing week or weekend camping. After accomplishing a big goal (hiking, backpacking, climbing etc) it's rewarding and I promise you'll get your mind off your job. You'll come out of it reinvigorated.
To all of you that haven't camped or backpacked before, there is only one way to learn. Start doing it.
"I want to be human again. Even if that means isolating myself from the rest of you humans."
That's a contradiction, humans are social animal and the rise of telecommunications and the internet is just the current technological advancement in that direction.
Isolation is about as non-human as it gets. What this person sounds like is that they need some major therapy, not isolation from the real world.
There's nothing wrong with paper and books, but they should be understood as the exact same concepts, in their time as email and the internet today.
> That's a contradiction, humans are social animal and the rise of telecommunications and the internet is just the current technological advancement in that direction.
The whole notion of humans being "social animals" is a recent invention. (Even the notion of humans being just "animals" is about as young.) For most of human history, there has been an underlying impulse for humans to distance themselves from each other for periods of time. (Monasticism, colonization, and rural farming were the majority lifestyles until recently.) The only reason the contemplative lifestyle is being looked down upon nowadays is that we've simply run out of enough land to give everyone enough room to be so at the same time. Until we develop some means of overcoming the space distance barrier, we're stuck with each other.
I've read all the posts here and I can't seem to get away from the feeling that it's all a bit "overly complicated?"
I just don't see the point of categorising myself as a person who has, for example, a hierarchy for ranking social interactions or as a person who checks mail many times a day and doesn't go to the store with a mobile.
Why is this important? Is it? I just can't see the importance.
But maybe that's just me... When I was growing up I realised that I didn't know, or even care, for "how I wanted my eggs." It just didn't seem to matter in the grand scheme of things.
I'm addicted to tech too, and I'm planning to going to Germany by bike (1400km) in a few weeks, I think the bowl of real life will be good.
And I'm seriously thinking in abandoning the development too. Actually I'm unemployed and I already refused interesting offers in development, the next step is finding another career, away from office and computer.
I personally can't fathom giving up all the technological advances that we as a race are using to better ourselves and our lives. Isolating yourself can only help so much, but permanently shifting your lifestyle so that it's more comfortable will work better in the long run.
I don't understand the more critical comments here. He's obviously doing what he feels he needs to do to stay sane. Why so many judgmental statements? I think some of this may come from folks feeling a little guilty about their own technology addiction. Or maybe they're just feeling a little superior now that they've 'outlasted' Aaron Swartz. I donno. It's just weird that people would suddenly become so concerned with someone else's techno-fast, as if he's mentally off because he wants a break from it all.
Not all of us can be moderate about everything all the time. Some of us need to take extreme and immediate action to break out of a downward spiral or perform some other life-affirming action. Sometimes we need friends to push us to do this. Seems perfectly healthy to me. And I don't understand the comparison people are making to crash diets here, as if living off the grid is somehow equivalent to cutting off the flow of essential nutrients. Come on.
I have wondered lately if living in the weird information landscape of modern communication isn't sucking the joy out of my life to some degree. I think next time I am unemployed, I'm going to take a few months and similarly pull the plug, just to see what it feels like.
I often wonder about whether the constant connectivity with ubiquitous Twitter use and all is really a good thing, and whether we should just go out and play soccer and breathe the fresh air all day. I definitely find myself caught up in the craze at times, reading/commenting on HN included, and feel as if I'm missing out on a whole world of more rewarding experiences outside. Not to say I'm an antisocial person, I consider myself somewhat the opposite, but a lot of my life has definitely been used up in computer/internet time.
Let's do an experiment and take HN offline for one month. It'd be interesting to see what happens.
>I want to be human again. Even if that means isolating myself from the rest of you humans.
Communication technology exists to help satisfy the innate human desire and <em>need</em> to communicate. So it isn't reasonable to become anti-social to be human "again". Moderation and maybe a more sophisticated approach (letters maybe, I liked that in the article) is what we need.
heresy! All life outside of coding may be found in WoW... lol plus a few side trips up to haight... seriously though, I feel as a human I am an intellectual, emotional, physical being and it is essential to maintain development of all those aspects. Only a balanced life can lead to highly productive working hours.
I recently experienced something similar after losing my smartphone I switched to a dumb one. I found myself not living just fine with my regular phone and not really needing any of the fancy features. It feels strange for a techie to go low-tech, but it's also liberating.
I got the point where I was checking Reddit every 5 minutes. I changed my ways: Now I'm reading a book a week, and Hacker News supplies all my news. As for email, I hardly get replies to anything these days, so screw 'em.
How does this guy make his living? Just wondering...
I would simply call this a holiday, so why is this so ground breaking? I'm not trying to stir anything up by saying this..I just don't get why this is such a revelation.
[+] [-] edw519|17 years ago|reply
I have no land line and a cell phone, but it's not a smart phone. I carry it to work or out of town, but nowhere else. If I visit someone else, run an errand, or go out to eat, you'll have to leave me a voicemail. Sorry about that, but I devote my full attention to the people I'm with.
I have a laptop, but it leaves my desk once or twice a year. If I'm on the road, I probably have a file folder full of papers and a thumb drive, but no electronics.
I check email many times per day and I visit hn many times per day, but only when I'm already at a computer. I never IM, Facebook, Twitter, or text. If you want to communicate with me: if it's important, call me, if not, email me. Either way, I'll get to it when it's convenient for me, and I'll respond fairly quickly.
I went out to dinner with a group including my 22 year old niece. She texted the entire time (under the table, but we all noticed). How sad, I thought. What was so important that she ignored the rest of us for an hour?
I almost feel sorry for you, Aaron, but then again, I know better. I'm curious to see how the next month will affect your lifestyle afterwards. Hopefully, I'll be able to welcome you back to the real human race (by email, of course.)
[+] [-] tlrobinson|17 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ciupicri|17 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|17 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] noodle|17 years ago|reply
you don't have to be on the computer when you're not working. you don't even have to be on the computer for work -- you can find another job outside the industry if you really want to. you don't have to take your cell phone with you everywhere.
its obviously not always quite as simple as that, but often times, it is. if you're tired of something and don't want to do it anymore, find a way to stop doing it.
[+] [-] Tichy|17 years ago|reply
Or at least give them a popularity meter according to their text frequency ;-)
[+] [-] rms|17 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jasongullickson|17 years ago|reply
...anyway I'm sure all of us here are stellar examples of tactfulness...
[+] [-] zackattack|17 years ago|reply
[+] [-] chime|17 years ago|reply
Every now and then I run across a story like this where someone is overburdened with communication and technology and wants to give it all up for a fixed time to cleanse themselves from the toxicity of modern life. Then they come back renewed, with new energy to conquer it all, and tell everyone how great it is and that everyone should give solitary confinement or meditation a serious attempt. Then a few months later, they get back into their old overloaded lifestyle of stress and constant work.
No, you don't need to give it all up for a month or year to find yourself. This is reaching out to the other extreme because you hope to end up in the center eventually. How about just slowly moving to the center from where you are? Get rid of the email+text features from you cellphone. Billions of people live perfectly fine without it. Keep GPS/web on your phone but only use when needed. Feel free to check your email whenever you have a few minutes but don't reply to it immediately. Shape your routine so you get to do what's important and not just what's urgent.
When not doing something productive or relaxing on the computer, step away. Go kayaking, hiking, camping, or jogging. Go to the movies, mall, museum, theater, art show, or a theme park. Get a backyard project, build something in real life, get your hands dirty. And while you do all of this, make adequate use of the technology available to you without feeling crushed under it. The purpose of technology is to solve real-life problems. It is not to replace real-life with a 24/7 stream of stress. People are good in general. Don't ignore them for a month because they contact you too much using different mediums. Spend more time with them in person, even if they annoy you. And use your knowledge of technology to enrich your and their lives. What good is 15 years of computer knowledge if you renounce it instead of sharing it with others?
Connectivity is not bad. What is bad is not knowing what form of communication to give more value to. Figure out your communication medium hierarchy and live by it. Mine goes:
My social goal is to take people from the lower end and move them towards higher end. So I may get a friend message me through Facebook, then we'll email, then phone, with the final goal to hang out next time one of us is in town. Without technology, none of this would be possible. I love technology, but only enough to enable me to improve my real-life social activities.[+] [-] sachmanb|17 years ago|reply
There is so much going on, so much information coming in, so many interactions in our lives that many of our perspectives are on autopilot and if we get too buried, outside influences have too much influence on our perspectives.
I have taken time out a number of times in life, ranging from a month to two months. No friends, no family, no things to do, no internet, picked up a newspaper a few times (if you added up all of them I'd say 3 or 4) - spent most of my time outdoors, occasionally with music, and interaction with people I came across, and with no intention of keeping in touch. Works best out of country; first time was in the Himalayas, but one year I was poor and so I just went to a city a few hundred miles from anyone who knew me. The results are simple: various things that have been jumping around in your head settle, things that would have taken a year to figure out become crystal clear by week two, your life in so many ways becomes very clear, and you come out of all this with an incredible focus, energy, and just freshness.
You could do studies I suppose that figure out if this increases your overall efficiency, if it leads to better ideas, but such a study would only feed my curiosities because the value in this is more than just increasing efficiency, or improving products -- its about increasing the quality of life.
Reflection, pausing, meta-cognition, wandering into an alternate mindset are good to integrate into ones overall lifestyle, but sky diving for a weekend, or chilling out for 30 minutes a day - it seems with a busy life, as I'm guessing yours is as well - it's often like swimming against the current. It's nice to pause the current, enjoy your thoughts, paddle around some without worrying about it. It's very nice. I don't think it's going to happen this year for me, and that's unfortunate.
[+] [-] michaelneale|17 years ago|reply
But everything he said resonated with me.
[+] [-] randallsquared|17 years ago|reply
I had the opposite reaction to a weekend without internet a few months ago: I felt lost and bored and didn't know what to do. After a while, when I got used to this feeling, it dawned on me that this was what I used to feel like all the time before the internet. In that light, it's no wonder I was unhappy and bored with only limited exceptions from the early 80s through the middle 90s (when I got a dialup connection).
[+] [-] potatolicious|17 years ago|reply
Now there's the omnipresent temptation to read that little blurb about some random guy on the internet. There's hours upon hours of interesting, yet totally pointless anecdotes that can easily consume your waking hours, yet contribute nothing to the richness and quality of your life.
I suffered from this greatly - I was spending hours a day on reddit, for example, and reading what? Yet another article about yet another stupid subject that didn't really teach me anything I didn't already know, or anything worthwhile.
I enjoy being connected on my terms - my iPhone is indispensable, and I love having maps, restaurant reviews, and all of that at my disposal - but my appreciation of connectedness is pretty old-school, I prefer to fetch my information than to have it come to me (e.g. twitter). There are too many unimportant things happening on the internet that will endlessly distract you if you let it "push" info to you.
[+] [-] sp332|17 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jlees|17 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dmpayton|17 years ago|reply
It's painful to think about, but I have no idea how I would have survived if I had lived outside the age of digital technology.
[+] [-] staunch|17 years ago|reply
[+] [-] abstractbill|17 years ago|reply
[+] [-] davidw|17 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jmatt|17 years ago|reply
To all of you that haven't camped or backpacked before, there is only one way to learn. Start doing it.
[+] [-] yan|17 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sfphotoarts|17 years ago|reply
That's a contradiction, humans are social animal and the rise of telecommunications and the internet is just the current technological advancement in that direction.
Isolation is about as non-human as it gets. What this person sounds like is that they need some major therapy, not isolation from the real world.
There's nothing wrong with paper and books, but they should be understood as the exact same concepts, in their time as email and the internet today.
[+] [-] absconditus|17 years ago|reply
This is intended as tangential to your argument and not a dispute of your argument about isolation.
[+] [-] DLWormwood|17 years ago|reply
The whole notion of humans being "social animals" is a recent invention. (Even the notion of humans being just "animals" is about as young.) For most of human history, there has been an underlying impulse for humans to distance themselves from each other for periods of time. (Monasticism, colonization, and rural farming were the majority lifestyles until recently.) The only reason the contemplative lifestyle is being looked down upon nowadays is that we've simply run out of enough land to give everyone enough room to be so at the same time. Until we develop some means of overcoming the space distance barrier, we're stuck with each other.
[+] [-] pistoriusp|17 years ago|reply
I just don't see the point of categorising myself as a person who has, for example, a hierarchy for ranking social interactions or as a person who checks mail many times a day and doesn't go to the store with a mobile.
Why is this important? Is it? I just can't see the importance.
But maybe that's just me... When I was growing up I realised that I didn't know, or even care, for "how I wanted my eggs." It just didn't seem to matter in the grand scheme of things.
[+] [-] mhp|17 years ago|reply
[+] [-] swolchok|17 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nraynaud|17 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mmc|17 years ago|reply
If pressure and constant stimulation has you down, how exactly is ignoring your friends and the outside world going to help, I wonder?
[+] [-] Mintz|17 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ruby_roo|17 years ago|reply
I don't understand the more critical comments here. He's obviously doing what he feels he needs to do to stay sane. Why so many judgmental statements? I think some of this may come from folks feeling a little guilty about their own technology addiction. Or maybe they're just feeling a little superior now that they've 'outlasted' Aaron Swartz. I donno. It's just weird that people would suddenly become so concerned with someone else's techno-fast, as if he's mentally off because he wants a break from it all.
Not all of us can be moderate about everything all the time. Some of us need to take extreme and immediate action to break out of a downward spiral or perform some other life-affirming action. Sometimes we need friends to push us to do this. Seems perfectly healthy to me. And I don't understand the comparison people are making to crash diets here, as if living off the grid is somehow equivalent to cutting off the flow of essential nutrients. Come on.
[+] [-] Tichy|17 years ago|reply
[+] [-] frodwith|17 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kyro|17 years ago|reply
Let's do an experiment and take HN offline for one month. It'd be interesting to see what happens.
[+] [-] sfphotoarts|17 years ago|reply
[+] [-] adamsmith|17 years ago|reply
In my mind social is the opposite of computers and isolation, so trying to remove both is going to push in the wrong direction.
[+] [-] dimitar|17 years ago|reply
Communication technology exists to help satisfy the innate human desire and <em>need</em> to communicate. So it isn't reasonable to become anti-social to be human "again". Moderation and maybe a more sophisticated approach (letters maybe, I liked that in the article) is what we need.
[+] [-] keefe|17 years ago|reply
[+] [-] andresmh|17 years ago|reply
[+] [-] zandorg|17 years ago|reply
[+] [-] metatronscube|17 years ago|reply
I would simply call this a holiday, so why is this so ground breaking? I'm not trying to stir anything up by saying this..I just don't get why this is such a revelation.