Addictive Stuffs

This morning I have read an article about distraction by famous Paul Graham titled Disconnected Distraction. The article is something about distraction and addictive element of life. Well addictive element is a very vague term. At first glance it reminds everyone about narcotics, alcohol and other stuffs like that. Surely they are addictive but the question is how much. Well a lot, but not more than few stuffs that are considered as innocent like television, computer games, internet and so on. I never heard about anybody who takes drugs for whole day but I heard about lot of guys who watch television for whole day or surfing internet for whole day.

Surely there are some goods on it. Paul Graham used an appropriate analogy,

“If you drink too much, you can solve that problem by stopping entirely. But you can't solve the problem of overeating by stopping eating.”

Well I have few stories in my own.

I used to watch television at early stage of my life. Everyone knows how much addictive it is so I am not going to tell about that. Then one day I realize that I am just wasting my time, “Is this something I suppose to do?” No, obviously not. So I stopped watching television. This story sounds pretty good. But the real story is not that much innocent. Actually by this time I had got something more addictive, Computer Games!!! So start wasting my time on it. Sure I did few important things with my computer also. Then I got more addictive one, Internet!!! I spend most of my time in front of computer so internet. After few days I realize that it brings more bad than good for me. No doubt about that internet is immense source but the problem is I am not designed to deal with such immense source of information. I know hell of a lot about different things that I am not supposed to know. At least they do not bring any good for me.

Lastly I have identified few applications and sites and decided not to go there anymore. But you know it doesn’t work pretty well. Thousands of similar things are out there. I don’t know how get out of this abysmal pit. I have tried lot of technique but no luck. Surely it is more addictive than anything I have ever seen before. It is okay with idle but the problem arises when it distract me at my working time. I guess the problem lies in somewhere else.

This is a world of business everything from television to internet all are business tools. So there is no wonder that they will make addict to increase their revenue, this is certain. Why I will allow them to use me for their business? No reason for that. I have to be wolf not sheep. May be it will work.

Probably everybody will be agree with me that internet waste our valuable times. I am not going to tell that we should stay apart but I wanna tell we should care about our time more than that. However, I am still looking for a better technique; surely I will found one, one day.