In between studying, I default to scrolling through my Twitter Timeline to see what people are building and investing in. I am met with some dating app promotions, gambling site promotions, and my friends’ tweets with 800 impressions a pop. Occasionally, I’ll get some useful insight into how Anthropic’s new model is doing when put against the latest OpenAI model, or some new agent that I NEED to be using or else I will fall behind. This obviously isn’t productive, I just want to think that I’m not completely wasting my time while waiting to get into the mood to do my OCaml assignment.
On the flip side, my dad, his tech friends, and his colleagues read through Hacker News while sipping their morning coffee, or listen to TWiT while on the drive to work. I gave it a quick look, and this is a much more curated source of information consumption. Additionally, the way that generation consumes knowledge is much more intentional than the way me and my peers currently do. If they are going to take a break from their day job to check out what’s happening in SF, they are going to read real articles, instead of engagement-maxxing tweets that were written by AI.
I don’t think the generations above me don’t use Twitter, Instagram, or LinkedIn. I just think that they set aside their Twitter time as junk time, to let the brain deactivate for a little while to catch up on the latest Drake Maye deep ball touchdown, instead of trying to use it to keep up with what the next unicorn will be.
I’m going to keep this brief, because not many people will read this, and the people reading this are probably people my age taking a break from their studies right now anyway. I just think you should be (me included) more intentional with your consumption of information. I don’t think Linus Torvalds, my CS professor, or Elon (actually, maybe Elon) take breaks to put their feet up and scroll through their social media TLs with the intent to learn something new.
Keep Instagram, X, TikTok, and even LinkedIn in your “Doomscroll” folder.