My computer feels aversive

(Not sure if this note will/can be evergreen… so consider this some initial thinking as of 2022-06-06)

It’s funny… when I was a kid, my computer was my place, the happy place, a place I’d escape to. Now I find myself not wanting to look at a computer at all outside of my morning working block. Which is sort of bad, since I want to e.g. read in the afternoon on it.

• It feels like it’s buzzing with distracting energy, like trying to do something hard on a noisy, crowded train.
  • Disabling WiFi helps, but it’s not enough… there’s still plenty on my computer to fiddle with!
  • Twitter is always just a few keystrokes away.
  • Worse, I notice myself needing validation on it. There’s this impulse to get social approval, particularly after I’ve just written something. I want to care less what other people—particularly random Twitter people—think.
  • Plan for contending with this: log out of Twitter in Safari; habituate myself to using TweetDeck and de-metricator’d Twitter in FireFox.
  • Mail is always just a few keystrokes away
  • Calm it down by only showing unread
  • Use Focus to make it unavailable most of the day
• It’s a place I associate with obligation…
  • …in part because I’ve centralized so much activity onto it in the name of efficiency:
  • Text messages and emails waiting to be answered
  • Tabs to be processed
  • Notes to be written
  • And so when I sit down to do thing X, I feel distracted by the possibility of handling all these other obligations.
  • Also because it’s where I do my work! So at any time, when I’m using it, I could be doing work! There’s always more work to do.
  • And because I’ve been really locking down my computer habits while I do work, I’ve trained myself that using the computer without some productive intention is bad.
    • This isn’t necessarily bad—I don’t want to sit down at it thoughtlessly—but it does create a certain burden.
• It’s a place I associate with struggle
  • The work I do is hard!
  • Writing good notes and prompts about books is hard! So much easier to just read on the reMarkable without any extra work.
• It’s a place I associate with danger
  • Because distraction and senselessness are so easy, I’ve trained myself that the computer is a dangerous place to be!
  • Like I always have to be on my guard!
  • Which… is sort of true. But it’s costly. Ideally I could arrange the computer so that I didn’t always have to be on my guard.

Q. Andrew Sutherland’s structural diagnosis?
A. Zero-friction context switching