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Yeah ... you bet we're like that.

I'd bet that, back in the days of Oog, there were gals & guys who were always chipping away at rocks trying to make better spear-points. Even though the people around them were fat from feasting. For the edge cases.

And then there were people always trying to make better pictures of the universe, even though all that ever led to was better understanding of the Big Mystery. (Isaac Roberts famously imaging Andromeda in 1888.) (Who could ever care about that?) Or Prof. Goddard and his stupid rockets.

And it's too bad that people who started exploring solid-state electronics back in the mid-1800s (like Karl Ferdinand Braun in 1874, or H. J. Round in 1907) didn't get 'addicted' to playing with them. We might have skipped vacuum tubes completely if they had. Everyone's loss.

Some of us are cut out to obsessively explore the unknown, some aren't. Karl Jansky, for example, stumbled onto radio astronomy, but showed little interest in the topic afterward. Just not cut out. Grote Reber WAS cut out, but his efforts were largely ignored until decades later. Everyone's loss.

'Should' you feel better about learning about computers, or would you get more social approval by obsessing about the private lives of dozens of celebrities?

Most people seem to do what they like with their free time, and don't worry about whether it has any value. So, who's a fit judge of what 'addictive behavior' is? ( And why are they so obsessed with other people's behavior anyway?)

Do you often wish that you had spent your time in another way? For example you want to start working out or spend more time with your friends but instead you just end up in front of the computer.

Does the rest of your life suffer by you sitting in front of the computer a lot? Your job, your relationships, your house/apartment, your plans for your future?

No, what you experience is not addiction. You are able to get your work done on time. You don't fail to handle basic life responsibilities due to internet use. You are enjoying yourself. As an internet addict, I get little joy out of most of my computer use.

How do you distinguish between addicted, and depressed and coping? Because nobody seems to be trying too hard to distinguish the two, and a lot of the time classify the latter as a subset of the former, which might be reasonable except that the two cases surely require different interventions.

One criterium for a psychological disorder is that it "must also lead to serious impairment in functioning that limits or interferes with one or more major life activities."

If you think about it, even obsession is very different to addiction. The key tenant of addiction is that it interferes with your life.

Doesn't "obsession" usually carry the connotation of "unhealthy obsession?" It's only in already begning contexts like work environments that it carries a more neutral tone. The first thing that popped into my mind was Ahab and his whale.

You'd be hard pushed to find any activity that doesn't interfere with your life occasionally.

You might find a lot of people like this on HN. In fact I thought I was reading my own biography when you started mentioning the years.

The way I think of it, it's a slightly productive addiction. I keep a track of things that interest me, but are work related. So finance and coding topics mainly. And the inevitable economics/society stuff that's very broad.

But it helps a lot with my work. No one particular thing is super useful, but it's useful to know what kinds of things are floating around. If you're a tech person, you probably have a specific focus, but you need to know what else is out there. So that might be machine learning, serverless computing, or some language you never use at work.

The worst things with regards to potential for unhealthy use, IMO, are passive feeds which require no effort on the user’s part. These simply become a timedraining habit. Reddit, HN, YouTube, any social media.

How does the word 'unhealthy' apply here? How many people spend several hours a day watching TV shows? Or pinning 'new' butterflies to a board. Or 'obsessively' drawing cartoons?

Many people have limited options in life. I grew up in a small northern town with very limited options. I collected stamps all winter. Was that 'unhealthy'? Because I learned some world history, did that 'redeem' it from 'unhealthiness'?

As soon as I got to college, the stamp-collecting ended. HOWEVER... I also learned -organization of large amounts of random information-. Guess where that led (hint: it wasn't 'unhealthy')

I was using the word in a metaphorical sense. Also, you mentioned positive activities. I was referring to passive activities which can become “unhealthy” in the sense that the formed habits, which can in the extreme interfere with life, outweigh the information gleaned.

>Fast forward twenty years and I spend an inordinate amount of time on the internet...reading. Mostly I read science articles, CS/ML papers, wikipedia articles and watch videos from PBS, nerdwriter, 3blue1brown and the like, but I also comment here and on twitter, and surf memes on reddit.

Here's an exercise that's likely only useful once you are older than a certain age:

Look at all the time you spent in these activities in your life. Then ask: What have you achieved by it? Was it worth all that time? If you had spent only 60% of the time on it, what could you have done with the remaining 40%? Beyond a certain point, you run into diminishing returns.

I'm an information junkie too, and I occasionally use this to keep me grounded. I love learning new technologies, but how often do I apply them? How often is my goal to apply them, but I never start (or complete) because I go off and learn other things?

When you hit 35 (or 40, or 45) you may start thinking that there's no end to the knowledge you want to gain, and if you continue as you've always have, then your rate of progress will be the same till you die. That's quite OK if there is nothing else in life you want to achieve, but you really should ask yourself:

Are there things in life (unrelated to learning/reading) I want to do that I keep neglecting? Am I OK if I never get around to it?

When I think these things, I have a few guidelines:

1. I don't count knowledge I've gained as progress. I think of how that knowledge has meaningfully helped me, to the point that it is externally noticeable. The amount I've learned is no longer a metric for me. It's just that monkey that's trying to make me feel good. Don't give that monkey a chance!

2. When I read a nonfiction book, over 80% is forgotten within months. I promised myself a few years ago that I'll take notes, and put them on a blog, so I can review the book later on. This really slowed things down - I probably read only a fifth of the books I normally would. It is depressing at times, but so is realising that I've spent a lot of my life reading books that ultimately were of no use to me, even though they contained a ton of useful material. In retrospect, it was more entertainment than utility, and fiction is a much better way to entertain myself. If I just want to chill and relax, I'll read fiction.

3. At the beginning of 2018, I made a "Do-not-do" list. I wanted to focus on a few things, and did not want to get distracted. Most of the "do-not-do" list was technology related. I picked 1 or 2 that I hoped to do, and promised myself everything else on the list will be verboten until I accomplish the ones in the TODO. Sadly, I didn't consult that list throughout the year. I don't even know how well I did. I did keep the principle in my head, though, and actively forced myself to stop when tempted often during the year, so I'm sure I didn't do too poorly.

4. Keith Ferrazzi has a nice exercise that I never tried, but should. It's called the Personal Success Wheel. The basic idea is to separate your life into a bunch of categories. Examples: Professional growth, relationships, intellectual stimulation, physical health, spirituality, etc.

Then figure out how much time you want to spend on each. Assuming disjoint sets, the fractions should add up to 100%. For each category, split it up into concrete activities. Now comes the challenging part: Say you put 30% for intellectual stimulation. In a given month, that's 9 days. If you look at all the concrete activities you've listed for intellectual stimulation (e.g. learn Haskell, read tech blog, etc), how many have you listed? Say you've listed 9. So that means you can spend on average one day a month on that activity. That probably won't sound like much to you. Using his "wheel" keeps you honest about how much time you can spend on an activity, and how thin you'll end up being spread out. Likely then you'll prioritise and simply cut out lower value time gobblers. It's probably better to spend 3 or 4 days a month on something than one day.

I wrote the above from my memory, but here's a link from his site (I did not reread to see how well it matches my memory):

http://blog.mygreenlight.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/12/6-St...

Yea I'm 35 and I'm basically trying to figure this out.

It's hard because I end up using a lot of my casual reading in life and at work, so in that sense it has meaningfully helped.

So I think it comes down to deciding to make some some kind of life optimization around a bigger goal. I'm not sure I want to make that right now because I enjoy the information binging for it's own sake. I just did a startup where I was definitely not doing any info binging, and am in a cool down phase so I'm doing it more.

It's a good thought and an interesting approach though so thanks for writing that all out.

>It's hard because I end up using a lot of my casual reading in life and at work, so in that sense it has meaningfully helped.

So do I. However, ask yourself the following:

1. (For work) Do your peers who perform as well or better than you do spend as much as time as you do learning?

2. If you were to randomly throw away 30% of the knowledge you've read (keeping in mind you probably didn't retain it anyway) how much would it hurt your work/life?

3. (For work) Do people in other disciplines (or even ones not too far removed from yours) do fine/well at work without putting in all the effort you have?

I'm a SW developer, and mostly self-taught. I studied engineering in school and took only two programming courses, and mostly non-computer related courses. I do well because I have strong interests in computers. So I can certainly relate. Yet, all that time and knowledge has not given me a particularly great advantage. The idea isn't to stop doing it all together. It is that you're likely well beyond the peak benefit of learning - and the limiting factor in career/life are things you may be neglecting. You can probably afford to cut back some percentage on the knowledge and focus on other things.

And of course: If you value learning that much, there's nothing wrong with dedicating your life to it. I love it a lot, but I also do have other interests and goals that tend to get sabotaged. I know that if I wake up tomorrow at 55 with only my knowledge to show for it, I'll be very unhappy.

> the Personal Success Wheel. The basic idea is to separate your life into a bunch of categories. Examples: Professional growth, relationships, intellectual stimulation, physical health, spirituality, etc

I tried a variant of this combined with journalling; the idea was simply to write down each week what I'd done to advance my goals in each category. It's quite an effective tool for avoiding over-focus and unbalanced life.

> Am I OK if I never get around to it?

This is definitely an important and difficult one to wrestle with as we age. After a while you're probably never going to get around to everything - and that's OK.

OK, knowledge isn't progress. Why is anything else progress? Nothing lasts forever, is nothing progress?

Progress is whatever you want it to be.

For me, I delist it as progress because I feel I'm at the "diminishing returns" point. Extra knowledge isn't really doing anything for me beyond feeding an addiction.

If I had $10B, I wouldn't consider getting another $10M as progress. There are many who would, but not me. I would ask myself "I'm putting the effort to get $10M. What is that $10M going to do for me?"