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.
> 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.
Respect.
I hope to find the strength to be more like that. Also to give a better example to others.
I notice making the screen go grayscale (can configure volume up+down to do this in android) already makes doom-anything much less long-lived. The next step, since apparently I can't go cold turkey, is to try one of these alternative minimalist launchers to see if it helps. And to teach people that if they want something from me urgently, they need to call.
On the topic of watches, I used a smartwatch the company gifted me for a while. Went back to an analog watch. Much better.
> And to teach people that if they want something from me urgently, they need to call.
There is a half way step (on Android at least, I assume Apple has similar) you can set "Do Not Disturb" and then white list the people who can message/call through the "Do Not Disturb" so you are reachable but only by people you trust/want to be able to reach you.
> On the topic of watches, I used a smartwatch the company gifted me for a while.
I just didn't use one, I have a rough rule that introducing new technology into my life has to be a complete and obvious unalloyed win or I just don't, it's a very high bar for a new technology to clear but it also means I don't spend money on things that end up in drawers because they either turned out not to meet the hype or just annoyed the living hell out of me after the initial "oooh shiny" wore off.
I do the Do Not Disturb + whitelist thing on my iPhone.
I also disable any and all notifications of apps other than direct messaging apps. No group message notifications.
I’ve been 24/7 do-not-disturb mode with all notifications disabled, for the past 10 years. It’s been wonderful for “intentionality” and agency over my time. I use my phone when I want to do something on it, not when the phone beeps and buzzes telling me to use it.
I don’t even whitelist anyone anymore. If it’s important they will leave a message and I’ll get back to them.
> If it’s important they will leave a message and I’ll get back to them.
I can't really do that. For some things (urgent and important), loved ones need to be able to reach me.
But yes, a lot of this advice would work.
You have to remember that not that long ago it was simply impossible to reach most people who were not at home or at work. Because it was impossible, nobody felt slighted that you were unable to read their message or take their call immediately. And nobody felt any anxiety about leaving the house for a few hours to shop or go to a movie or a ball game and being unreachable. Loved ones managed and life went on.
Grey scale is amazingly less compelling experience. I have it on for a while but then give in an turn color back on just for the thrill.
If you have an iPhone, you can put the greyscale as only a percentage greyscale if desired. I got an iPhone to get rid of the constant bothering from the apple devotees and quickly found myself spending an unhealthy amount of time on it. I started with a small percent greyscale so I didn't notice and would forget that the colors were dulled. Before I even got to 50% greyscale, my habit had died and I only use it when I need to (literally only for communicating with the folks who can't tolerate green bubbles)
My daily driver is GrapheneOS. I don't know if android has a similar feature, but I assume not because my GrapheneOS phone only supports fully greyscale, and the difference is so stark that I can't keep it on. The most addictive apps I have on it are my Hacker News client and NewPipe (the nonaddictive YouTube), so I am not too concerned though
This cracked me up. I have the same malady. The worst thing used to be a few close friends who recognized the pattern after being with me long enough and called me out in it when they knew I was zoning out while they were talking. Ive desperately tried to keep this daydreaming trait lately despite trying to get rid of it when I was younger when I used to think it was a disadvantage.
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.
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.
Willpower is a great solution if the problem is to let the companies off the hook, though.
Not even a smartwatch? What's your opinion on fitness trackers (the passive ones, without display)?
I think it depends on how you use it. All things in moderation and all. I've had one for years but when I set it up it only allowed it a few notifications. When meetings start during my work day, getting e-mail to my personal account, and when I get messages from my wife, that's it.
So when I'm not working the watch is... just a watch.
I was a fan of the Apple Watch initially because I felt like it kept me from having to take out my increasingly large iPhone to check things like the time and if I was going to get rained on, but they've managed to make WatchOS some weird nightmare of distractions and things I need to actively shut off on my phone, and I've grown very tired of it.
> fitness trackers (the passive ones, without display
Do you mean my belly when I look down? That and the answer to "can I keep up with my kids?" has always been enough fitness tracking for me.
I wear a self winding watch. I suppose if it stops going while I'm wearing it, I've been very still and might be dead.
To stick with the analogy: to me, your question reads as "What's your opinion on Speed?".
More like "Not even weed? What's your opinion on psychedelics (the mushrooms, they aren't addictive)?"
My big discovery a few years ago was uninstalling apps, especially social media apps. I don't mind the platforms, but removing their ability to ping notifications up was massive. I watch some people just get their phone out to dismiss a load of notifications for 20-30 seconds. It's a chore now. I think limiting notifications is the best thing you can do, on your phone and your watch.
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.
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.
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.
>> 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.
[dead]
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).
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.
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.
I often just wear noise cancelling headphones without any music on
I find it impossible to daydream while focused on traffic.
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.
> 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?
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.)
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!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bodhidharma#Wall-gazing
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.
> > 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
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.