Rationalist Lent

+1 to this. I think porn is a good example of superstimuli that society is insufficiently worried about.

I'm specifically giving up games that encourage many short check-ins, e.g. most phone games and idle games. Binges aren't a big issue for me, they tend to give me joy and renewal. But frequent check-in games make me less happy and less productive.

I will try out not using YouTube for 7 days, and if it still seems like a good idea then, will not use it for a month. Exception are UC Berkeley course captures.

FYI, SelfControl looks like it should be a link due to being underlined, but I can't actually click on it.

I did this 6 years ago, also for a non-religious "lent". I was actually very strict about it:

• nothing with "sugar" (or an artificial sweetener as an ingredient)
• nothing that is more than 5% sugar by mass.

The latter one means that most fruit was out (except lemons, limes, and (surprisingly!) strawberries & raspberries).

Everyone had told me this would have an effect on my mood or something, or that I would notice things if/when I went back to eating sugar. It didn't. I have since concluded my body is uncommonly resiliant to eating different things.

Oh, except that that all 3 times I have tried a low-carb diet (2× "slow carb", 1× keto) I have gotten ill (usually ~flu) about a week in. Could be a coincidence but feels worth noting.

I like the term "obvious sugar", and hereby commit to the same.

EDIT: On second thought, I'd like to allow for one slice of birthday cake per birthday, for social reasons.

Youtube

I permanently blocked the website in all browsers I use. I use command line tool youtube-dl to download the videos I want/need to watch. This workflow gives me an option to watch videos (and also some friction to reevaluate the decision to watch a video); but prevents me from engaging with youtube, the risky game I might 'loss' otherwise.

Seems interesting but tricky to set TAPs that will reliably hit this. Maybe ask friends to help you monitor?

Going to do the same.

edit: Might still look at Reddit on my phone at work sometimes when taking a break, but not at home.

I will also spend the first week of Lent meditating for at least 10 minutes every day, which I may or may not continue.

I've stuck to no fiction. (I unthinkingly read a few paragraphs of a short story that came across my Twitter, but otherwise have been consistent.)

It's mostly been fairly easy. It's really obvious now that it's a social pica. I think some of the time I would have spent on it has been going to increased use of LessWrong and Facebook, which are also social picas, but those are both more genuinely social, and harder to lose 8 hours at a time to.

There was at least one night where I was pretty unhappy, and didn't have access to any actual friends to spend time with, and really wanted to lose myself in a book. I probably think that ordinarily it would have been an ok thing to do as a coping mechanism, but it was useful to observe how badly I needed the coping mechanism. That makes it obvious how much I need the real thing.

There are also a couple things I'm genuinely looking forward to reading when Lent is over. (Murphy's Quest, for one.) But I'd say those things are probably ~1/4 or less the amount of fiction I would have read this month without Lent.

This has been an especially exciting/productive/momentum-filled month for me. This probably makes it easier than normal to not read fiction. Though maybe there's some causality the other direction as well?

I've stuck to not using Youtube for three weeks (I only committed to not do it for a week), and found it a very enlightening experience. I now use it much more sporadically, and was quite surprised how much I really wanted to go to Youtube during the first week.

Not having Facebook or YouTube on my laptop has been net positive I think. Not having Netflix has been weakly negative, I’ll not keep that up.

Basically stuck to my commitment - early on I bent it a bit by taking 'notes' in the form of drawing abstract scribbles, but I now mostly don't do that. I have also once or twice looked up info relevant to the meeting, but both times felt pretty in the spirit. This has partially been achieved by attending fewer lectures and meetings, which is something I explicitly permitted myself to do.

I did in fact meditate 10 minutes a day for a week, then promptly stopped.

An interesting experiment would be to try giving up fiction in full generality. I think people are insufficiently worried about this.

Was this Android? I tried removing Safari from iPhone but couldn't in a way that robustly worked. (Although by now I have Freedom running much of the time)

Optimizing a schedule is cognitively demanding and constantly tests your willpower; giving up for 40 days is simple, if not easy. On the other hand, if there's no part of you that feels worried about music then I wouldn't give up music in your posiiton. You could try taking up a new habit / hobby instead.