For the most part, I find that most online social media just degrades human interaction. Twitter encourages short shallow quips, Facebook shows me my friends arguing angrily and pointlessly over random articles, dating apps encourage some of the behaviors described in the article. Heck, even HN encourages a certain kind of attitude that I don't find that great, all in all. I know that it's not black or white, and that you get out of these things what you put in them - but more often than not, those systems are designed in such a way to tap into primal human drives (the need for sex, validation, novelty, etc.) that makes it very hard to have constant good self discipline.

As I've realized this over the past few months (a big factor was reading the biographies of some of my heroes, e.g. Dirac, Feynman, etc., and realizing that they spent a lot of their time working alone in their offices uninterrupted, and communicating with people either in real life over meals, walks, etc. or by postal mail), I've been trying to pull out of most technological communications; using text only for coordinating/logistics ("want to grab dinner tomorrow night?") and email for longer form communication.

Then instead of dicking around on Reddit for an hour or chatting with people on Jabber, I go hang out in a local bookstore, read a book in a coffee shop, grab a beer (without my phone) alone at the local bar, go have a meal with a friend. I've had interesting encounters and great conversations with complete strangers; I was the first surprised, given that I'm not particularly gregarious and it's hard for me to strike up conversation with a stranger. But it turns out that there are plenty of people out there who will happily talk to you for a bit.

I just recently moved to a new place, and have been thinking about how I can structure my living space to encourage good habits (e.g. practicing music regularly, reading books, working on electronic projects) and discourage bad ones (e.g. spending too much time on social media, reading superficial online articles, etc.). One of the things I did was not connecting my iMac (which I still use for composing music in Ableton, programming, reading PDFs, etc.) to the internet; if I need to look up restaurant times or something, I'll use my phone. I do try to leave my phone in a drawer out of sight most of the time, and have removed most of the distracting apps on it. It's only been a week, but I like what it's doing so far.

I'm in the second half of my 20s, I work in tech, so I don't think I'm a case of a grumpy old luddite. I'm just starting to realize that technology makes things like hooking up easier, but certain things aren't meant to be made easier. People designing those social apps and sites have, for the vast majority, no regard for your time and your attention - so maybe you just shouldn't give it to them.

I remember reading an article a long time ago (http://kk.org/thetechnium/amish-hackers-a/) about the misconception we have about the Amish refusing to use technology. We think that the Amish refuse to use ALL technology; but really, it's that our society accepts technology unconditionally as soon as it's available, whereas Amish society accepts it only after it's proven a clear benefit, and that they understand how to use it in a way that won't disrupt their community. For instance, they found that phones are useful: if someone hurts themselves, it's good to be able to call the hospital. But if you put a phone in every home, then people start using it a lot, and local community ties suffer. Their solution to that is to have a single phone booth per village, a couple minutes' walk out. Another example is vehicles: it's very useful to have a tractor to work on the farm, but then people start using them as vehicles to go spend time outside of the village, again weakening community ties. Their solution to that is to have tractors with steel wheels so that they can only drive in the fields, not the open road.

Of course you can push that philosophy as strongly as you want to the point of the absurd, and there are many things you can criticize about it. But overall, I do find that mindset very refreshing and interesting, and that's what I'm trying to bring to my life.