cross-posted from: https://lemmygrad.ml/post/3190048

I’ve been languishing in my comfort zone. Continuing to do so will have terrible effects for me. To quote Marx, I “[have] become a monster, a huge mass of flesh and fat, and [am] barely capable of walking any more.” Ever since the pandemic started I’ve become a terminally online antisocial weirdo who barely ever leaves my room, let alone the house.

Of course, in addition to the damage this does to my personal life, it also makes me non - potentially even counter - revolutionary. As someone who wants to be a communist instead of just some internet poisoned middle class dilettante, I don’t know how I can be expected to jeopardize the comfort of my parasitic labor aristocratic class position when I can’t even get out of my comfort zone enough to go outside, eat real food, and do even the barest minimum of light exercise.

  • macerated_baby_presidents [he/him]@hexbear.netEnglish
    9·
    9 months ago

    Also last year, I realized that I was spending like 8h a day on my phone and it was affecting my life. I sat down and took some notes and wrote up my theory of why I thought I was doing that, which I will reproduce:

    original notes doc

    goal: reduce compulsive phone use dopamine hit -> compulsive phone use long term, reduce need for dopamine hit

    phone use triggers:

    • boredom
      • do something else dumbass
    • escape from difficult task
      • willpower/discipline

    strategies:

    • make phone use inconvenient.
      • leave it off except for scheduled hours
        • replace some functions with other things
          • bathroom / smart home spotify?
          • wear watches more often
          • paper to-do lists
      • delete social media apps
      • greyscale
    • replace with some other dopamine hit
      • seems bad?
      • replace with good “mode shift” activity?
        • every pomodoro, go put something away / play with cat / walk around block

    Said I was either going to fix this myself, really try, or pay for therapy. After I identified the problem I took a long weekend where my phone was completely off and I tried to “detox” a little and push through it. The specific actions I ended up taking were

    actions
    • Got smart home speakers for kitchen and bathroom. Now I can select and listen to music with my phone in the other room. Temptation much reduced. This has been helpful, but I do have to take my phone into the kitchen to look at recipes sometimes.
    • Keep my phone charging in the bedroom when I’m in my office, and in the office when I’m out of the office.
    • Wear watches more, leave the house without my phone sometimes. I can only do this for short trips though since I want google maps if I’m going far.
    • Use paper to-do lists instead of the notes app on my phone
    • Limit social media apps to 20/30 minutes each with the built-in controls
    • Install an app to lock down my phone outside of certain hours, or more than an hour a day. This also helps me stick to my daily schedule, because if don’t stick to it I miss the scheduled “fix” of screen time.

    I’m down to 1-2h phone daily. It hasn’t been a monotonic improvement, and some of that has been shifted to bullshit internet time on the computer* like I’m doing now, but even though I feel pretty online I think I’ve improved a bit overall. If you want to lose weight or get offline I think you need to analyze how you have gained weight and gotten online and why, and then use that info to come up with some actionable strategies. If you’re ordering takeout too often the strategy will be different than if you’re eating too many snacks or genuinely just really sedentary. I have found that I cannot implement goals like “check my phone less” or “eat healthier”. They HAVE to be discrete actions or they won’t get done, no matter how much I beat myself up.

    Good luck comrade.

    *like you i’m a programmer. being extremely online is a genuine workplace hazard for us