In high school and the first bit of college, I had a cell phone. I spent far too much time reading nonsense on Reddit and Hacker News. I cannot specifically remember anything that I read, which is how I know that it must have been essentially worthless. I persisted like that for a long time, and it took a lot of my life away from me. For no reason. Eventually, I became a missionary for my church, during a time when missionaries had only flip phones. I believe that this was due to concerns that nicer phones would have lead to us getting mugged more often. In any case, I remember being able to actually do things. I learned Spanish. I learned the Cyrillic alphabet by studying maps in Russian and English. I did more fanciful things like designing imaginary elevated tramways for my home town, ennumerating the sounds of the English language and designing a phonetic writing system for it that I still sometimes use, and constructing languages. I really only had a few hours to my self each day, yet the things that I did during my free time were many millions of times more intellectually interesting than what I was able to do on my phone. Why did I spend so much time reading irrelevant nonsense on sites like Reddit and HN? Things that have had so little impact on me that I cannot even recall any of them specifically. What a waste of time. It was all nonsense.
Still, the time of my service as a missionary eventually ended. I went home and got a new smartphone, a Galaxy Note 8, which I had until a few months ago. I fell into my old habits. Instead of having interesting hobbies I read nonsense on the Internet again. I don't know why. Now I often feel like I can barely concentrate even at work. I have an interesting job, where I help integrate sensor packages onto aerial drones and manipulate the data that they return. I am mostly on the software side. Really, it is interesting stuff. Why am I so unable to concentrate?
Now I have a new phone, a Pixel 8. I installed Calux OS on it because the internet told me to. I mostly do what the cool internet people tell me to do.
But maybe I can return to that place. It took a few months of very restricted computer access to detoxify the last time. Instead of reading nonsense, maybe I can write nonsense. That sounds preferrable to me.