Comment by colmvp | Hacker News Reader

Comment by colmvp | Hacker News Reader

I think it's telling that those in tech, including billionaire execs like Jobs, were/are very sensitive to the usage of tech devices by their kids. Addiction to games, news, apps, entertainment is real, but that's only half the issue. It fosters this itch where we can't linger on uncomfortable thoughts without instinctively grabbing our phone to be distracted. This include when we're trying to really go deep on a subject matter that could take a long time to grok.

I credit a lot of changes I made over the last few years to courses like Learning How to Learn (Oakley, Sejnowski) and books like Deep Work (Newport) and Mastery (Greene) in helping to bring me back to realize the importance of uninterrupted blocks of hard, focused work. That coupled with moments of quiet time away from devices so that I can let my mind kind of just wander and process life has made life actually more fulfilling.

I quit Facebook, Twitter, and only check Instagram once every few days. I'm not totally 'clean' since I'll still spend time on YouTube and Reddit during moments of frustration, but I think it's important not to beat oneself up when one 'cheats.' After all, it's not completely a new phenomenon. There's always been things like books, newspapers, TV, radio to distract our attention.

But maybe it just feels a bit different since some of the smartest people in the world are working everyday to make sure we're looking at the thing they're working on in a very calculated fashion. That plus the fact that sometimes it feels like you're supposed to know so much of what's going on in the world and environment around you. But really, so many topics are so much more complicated than a simple cursory look that it feels kind of fruitless to jump into it when it realistically takes hundreds of hours to truly understand it.

Remember too that many billionaires are control freaks. Them policing their children's screen time may just be part of larger control regime. Lots of rich people, going back to most every king/queen in history, have been what we would today call overprotective parents. Tech royalty isn't any different.

> Remember too that many billionaires are control freaks. Them policing their children's screen time may just be part of larger control regime. Lots of rich people, going back to most every king/queen in history, have been what we would today call overprotective parents. Tech royalty isn't any different.

Whether this is the cause or not, children of the rich do very well in life, regardless of the level of control freak

They are doing well, because they have resources that 99.99% of humans never will have. It's very hard to draw any conclusions here.

> They are doing well, because...

you just drew a big one

Still, what's more likely? Rich children doing better because of overcontrolling parents, or doing better because they have access to enough resources to resolve almost any difficulty they face in their lives?

I grew up with some very wealthy people, and the richer the parents the more absentee/oblivious the parenting in my experiences.

We're not being distracted. We're just wise enough now to figure out that most of the subjects we're forced to focus on aren't that important.

That rings a bell. I can be laser-focused when something important is actually on the line - like, doing a high-visibility task at work, or studying for an important interview. Other than that, my mind seems to simply not care about the made-up human goals such "attaining mastery of a subject" etc. - it only focuses when survival is at stake. My subcionciousness may be smarter than I am.

Same for me, if something is on the line i have a clear mind and i can concentrate uninterrupted even in noisy Environments. Also if i am really passionate about something.

A good Horse only jumps as high as it must i guess

I wonder what do you do during the downtime? Nothing?

Sure. I think meditation has become popular specifically because we no longer just do "nothing" anymore, so people need to now dedicate time to doing nothing, just like we devote time to fitness. Evolutionarily speaking, I imagine humans spent vasts amount of time doing nothing over the past few million years - so one would think that it could be somehow vital to our physiology. I wouldn't be surprised if we find out in the near future that it's just as an important process as sleep for our mental health.

I suspect people in the past were mostly doing nothing in the company of other people (family, tribe), which is a social activity in itself, and thus very different than laying in bed and staring at the ceiling all alone (this is how I imagine doing nothing looks like for people without a family).

Breathe, think, observe the world around you. Pretty much what humans have always been doing during the downtime until about 10 years ago.

Was Jobs really, though? I thought he was a nearly completely absent father?

Round 1 yeah, round 2 was “normal”

I thought he was a nearly completely absent father?

Not according to his neighbour [1].

[1] https://patch.com/california/paloalto/my-neighbor-steve-jobs

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