It's like getting stress-relief from eating junk food and stress from resisting cravings.

revolution of some kind

Quite often it's really a question of gut flora and lack of knowledge regarding good eating habits.

Also fat cells are endocrinologically active, so they try to compel the person to, well, get fatter.

I've been doing this the hard way lately and there's still much that I don't know, because food and lifestyles used to be different, so my parents only told me what they knew from theirs.

To illustrate just how different, my great-grandmother reportedly disliked food that she described as "rich" - too calorie dense for her taste. By this definition cottage cheese was "rich".

I doubt it. I've never been overweight in my lifetime. I have never had to put any effort into that. I simply cannot relate at all to the food-related struggles I sometimes read about overweight people having. It would be silly and condescending of me to claim that I simply have more strength of will here than they do. On the other hand, I struggle heavily with some things many/most people do not, and this is often blamed as a personal failure and weakness of mine. So I wonder if it's just that people who don't have any similar struggles think they are just superior beings with superior willpower.

While we're on the subject of gripes with the modern internet, the fact that most social media sites that publish to a single feed flatten reality into a single format. People then apply uniform judgement to content with wildly different purposes (and subconsciously people ascribe more purpose to posts that happen to rise up the frontpage, even when the blog in question was just some thought somebody threw out in ten minutes)

Random link from google, normally costs less than that: https://trakke.co.uk/collections/all-products-in-stock/produ...

That targets a different thing IMO. You can aim for privacy or you can aim for the thing being slow and irritating to use to disrupt the habit. If tech companies spend money to make their apps smooth to use, you can aim for the opposite and inject friction and reduce the amount of high you get from it and making it slower to reach so you can have a chance to take back the executive control over the task.

Well, that's the point. The actual money-controlling phone could be sitting in the drawer power off until you need to do something.

This also prevents spending too much money on impulsive purchases and take-away thai food when you should know better.

missing link to MiSTer https://retrorgb.com/mister.html

It's interesting about MiSTer. It was wedged into the article so awkwardly and suddenly that it felt like a definite advert, but it mostly said it was shit and only get it if you like frustratingly broken systems. I still think it was a reverse psychology form of an ad

why make a point when the robot can spew out 1500 words of cliches and other nonsense

I have lived in a tech-rich life since I bought my first single board home system in around 1975.

I think it is as easy as setting boundaries: practice meditation. Learn to enjoy sitting and doing nothing, both in the living room and sitting outside.

Then when the time is right, work hard for several hours to get important stuff done.

Food tastes best when we are very hungry, so we must go long periods of time doing mini-fasting a few times a day in order to enjoy food. Similarly, earning a living or experimenting with tech should be something that you sit down and do for a while, then do something else.

This is why we sail the salty seas. right here. if someone needs an explanation.

I tuned out when it switched, also. How to move on when job is in front of screen?

Tech/phone addiction is real. But it will be years before anyone admits it.

If you use those apps it is probably worth it, otherwise just delete them.

I recently switched to a used Minimal Phone (no longer being made sadly) and its been great for this. The best thing for me is to just make the phone completely unappealing to use, but still capable of essentials. A slow refresh rate eink screen helps a lot with that.

For the authors complaints about ads, I recommend paying for ad free versions of things you truly enjoy. Budgeting will mean you consume less and have fewer choices, but enjoy it more. And if something doesn't offer an ad free experience you can pay for, that's a great reason not to use it.

I’ve read so many posts like these on hn, but I just don’t relate to them. I have loved internet access since my first dial in to a BBS in the 90s. I’ve been cruising the information superhighway at top speed every day since. There is always something new to discover.

My solution to this is carrying two devices. One turned off iphone and a TCL flip 2. The flip phone runs android 11 so I can use signal to stay connected with international family, but for anything else it is useless other than calling, texting, and basic email

I long for the days of driving through the night with AM radio, where at least the ads were interesting.

AM radio sucked.

The author loved technology when it worked for him, now he toils in its service. Previously, it was additive, only giving and not taking; now it narrows options to only one: the app.

Obviously, we shouldn't let this happen. Keep paper tickets, physical menus, cash, etc. These things are human, made by and for humans. They make sense across the intelligence spectrum as they connect to us in the physicality of the real (which everyone understands).

Of course, the individual doesn't get to decide if all his government and city services app-ify themselves. What to do in that case? I guess this guy's chosen the path of minimal leashing: wearing the digital yoke as little as possible. That's just harm minimization though.

Perhaps it'll help someone to say this: It is possible to live without a smartphone. I do it. There's times when you can't use a service. QR codes are meaningless. You might occasionally be bored. I've always found an alternative or workaround to these issues. Yes, that's inconvenient sometimes (usually not though, surprisingly), but is that worse than being a slave to glass slab?

it was much easier when shitty nokias had functional google maps and wifi hotspots. still it is currently doable to rock a sub 100 dollar nokia day to day, with an equally shitty android at home for necessities. honestly its not even that hard ...

One can be against something and still make use of it. Don’t be ”Mister Gotcha”: <https://thenib.com/mister-gotcha/>

Total tangent, but I really like the way this article is written; you can effectively read the first sentence of each paragraph, and it still conveys the same story in a coherent, summarized way.

Absolutely audacious to complain about being "forced" to install apps and in the next sentence complain about the Aliexpress app. Nobody forced you to install the aliexpress app. Nobody needs the aliexpress app.

Also people need to hate ads more. A single unwarranted notification will get me to disable all notifications or uninstall your app. If you don't hate ads enough, you'll find yourself being shown ads.

The emotions are relatable, but the examples are strange and don't back up his argument. It is true that there are many situations in modern life where a smartphone has become effectively mandatory.

But Ali Express is not one of those. It's very feasible to delete the app, or at least turn off the notifications. The quality of TV writing may have taken a nosedive but nobody is forcing you to watch TikTok Empire. If you long for the golden age of television, you can find disc versions of The Wire, Mad Men, The Sopranos etc. Often they're free to borrow at your local library. The App Store is indeed garbage, but I open it a handful of times per year and probably spend less than a minute to search for the app I want and install it.

The argument about losing control to devices would be much more effective if the examples weren't mainly cases where the user clearly has control.