My blog posts have been technical (or at least informational) so far, and I actually like it that way, but I feel a constant urge to talk about this publicly, hence this post. I never claimed that this is a technical blog anyway.
The thing is, I've been surfing the web heavily for the past 5-or-so years of my life, and I'm not feeling good about it. I've been bookmarking pretty much every page I read for about half a year, so I have some concrete numbers: normally ~150 pages per month, as low as ~40 when I focus on other things, and as high as ~400 when I'm under pressure (e.g. near the final exams). When I'm bored or stressed, I surf the web instead of actually doing interesting stuff or dealing with the stress: there're always people saying stuff on the Internet, I can find these that interest me, that I may agree or disagree with, or maybe learn from. The Internet has become an escape for me when I don't want to deal with the snafu that is my own life, and I'm growing increasingly dependent on it. I'm having less motivation to do anything else, and when I do do other stuff, I convince myslf that I need to search the web for whatever reason (say prior works), but end up only to overwhelm and bikeshed myself. And I keep dozens of browser tabs open at almost all times, and also a dedicated backlog from the start of March that now has 270 entries. This entire thing just sucks. People talk about social media or short form videos a lot, and I think the web is doing the exact same thing to me, and it has to stop.
It's not like I didn't benefit from heavy web surfing. I read IRC chats and mailing list archives. I read about the history of computers, operating systems, programming languages, compilers, and security. I read about ethics and integrity. I read about GNU and BSD and free software and the UNIX wars. I read about the systemd controversy, why XML sucks, why dynamic linking sucks, and why Markdown sucks. I read about microarchitectures, rendering, text layout, RPC protocols, cryptography, and practical security. The problem is that I only read about those, and didn't actually do any of these myself, so I always feel that I've learned nothing, because I've tried (not very hard) and failed to do some of these myself. (And doing all of these would obviously take multiple lifetimes.) I've learned about so many problems I never feel safe or secure or satisfied. And I'm unable to change any of that, because I'm a mortal human and I really just didn't learn that much. I wouldn't consider time on the web wasted hours, but I wouldn't consider it well spent either: there's so much I could've been doing instead of staring at a screen for hours a day for some half-baked ideas. I could've learned to draw, or learned to make music, or learned Japanese or Latin or French, or travelled around, or exercised more, learned enough about one specific thing to do actually useful work to clean up the messes my predecessors left me with (and create new ones for my own successors), or just be living my own fucking life.
Now, blaming all these on web surfing is probably unfair. I may have better attention spans if I didn't surf the web so much,[1] but I'd still be lazy and disorganized as I am now. Or would I — there's really no way to know. It is an objective fact that I spent a few precious years of my life surfing the web, and here I am. Stopping that would almost surely not cure all my problems, but my current state is definitely not sustainable, so I have to change, even though I currently heavily rely on the calming effect of web surfing.
Again, writing a blog about doing the thing is not doing the thing. I just finished blogging about it, and I have no idea how I'd stop myself from surfing the web more. A few years ago I tried imposing limits or only allowing whitelisted websites with software, but that failed utterly because I was always able to circumvent my own controls. A random note on the age verification thing is in the news again recently: from my own experience, parental control is a lost cause. Parents should just try and not make children have to find comfort online.
Uh, that's all I have to say.
When I was young, my home had a crappy Internet connection, so each page load takes long enough that I had to keep switching tabs while waiting for them to load. And pages randomly fail to load, in which case I retry a few times before giving up. I also spent lots of late nights surfing the web. I would expect these to be no good to my attention span.