There's only one important thing that I miss about smoking: A smoke break was an excuse that was tolerated by others, wherein I could go outside and just let my mind wander (daydream) with no particular goal for a short period of time.

Daydreaming should be perfectly acceptable either way, but people seem to think it's weird (concerning, even) when someone spends a bit of time to stand (or sit) around while appearing to be doing nothing at all.

But having a smoke is an activity, and the smoker's participation in this very passive activity assuages the concerns of others.

> I'm not convinced attention spans themselves have changed; I think it has more to do with the fact that people's brains aren't defaulting to daydreaming anymore when bored.

Yea sometimes stuff has to sink in or marinate. If you don't give that to yourself then you'll never realize it's gone.

I realized I was missing this because I sometimes sit in my chair and tell myself "this is your life now, you sit in this chair" and I do that for as long as possible. I do this in part because a part of me just doesn't want to do anything: I don't want to work, I don't want to do fun things, I just want to do nothing. So I have an inclination towards being lazy.

But when I'm on that chair and give myself full freedom to do so, then I get agitated and want to do something. I plead with myself really hard. But my lazy part is like "fuck no... we're finally on this chair, I'll die this way, we're never getting off this chair."

And then at some point my mind says something like "FINE, I'LL EVEN DO THE TAX FORM THINGY I HAVE BEEN PUTTING OFF. I'LL DO ANYTHING!"

When I judge the activity to be productive enough, I get off the chair.

The real challenge is that I forget that I have this exercise because it actually works for me and it makes me realize that when you're doing "nothing" your brain is doing a whole lot.

If you haven’t read it, Cal Newport’s book Digital Minimalism is mostly about this topic. The value of giving your brain time to simply exist without any outside input, with many examples from history of people who carved out time explicitly for this, especially when needing to make big decisions or figure out answers to problems.

Sleeping while standing up is the state one finds oneself endlessly scrolling somebody else's dreams. Avoid at all costs.

That's a very interesting perspective but now that you mention it, I can't even think of the last time I daydreamed, even when I'm not on a device. Curious if phone usage or whatever doom-scrolling we do exhausts the same part of the brain that we use to daydream.

I agree. I am not sure it is as similar to sleep as you claim, but its definitely good for your brain.

I say something similar in the context of parenting, that a reasonable amount of boredom is good. I think it likely that being constantly entertained makes people more prone to seek constant stimulation.

This did not start with phones either. I am Gen X and it happened in my childhood with kids being dumped in front of TVs. One difference was a lot of adults resisted this and limited hours in front of a TV, whereas now a lot of adults are addicted to phones too.

Sometimes I worry that this whole gen-z stare thing is just millennial avocado toast under new management. I work with a ton of gen-z'ers, I think they're great and have never once experienced this gen-z stare thing you hear about so much online. They're hard workers, attentive, and less phone addicted than my latchkey parents.

As much as I’d like to leave my phone in another room while working, 2FA has made that impossible. I’m now required to keep my phone nearby and pick it up periodically throughout the day, all in the same of security.

Meanwhile in Japan:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z9FsQXYVgUE

> I'm not convinced attention spans themselves have changed; I think it has more to do with the fact that people's brains aren't defaulting to daydreaming anymore when bored.

If my mind is not defaulting to daydreaming and rather asking me to find a distraction, doesn't this mean my attention span is worse?

You don’t necessarily want to daydream. If you’re not careful, it becomes Negative rumination and mind wandering and that wouldn’t be as useful as an actual nap or a workout or meditation.

The gen z stare is being unable or unwilling to give a verbal response when one is expected mostly as a result of social anxiety and lack of communication skills IMO.

Reminds me of this scene from Curb where Jeff just sits in the plane: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zONvxznbUJA

> the lack of daydreaming

I would also blame the Western commercialization of meditation. I have recently learned that in Buddhism meditation is just one side of the coin, and it’s usually diametrically paired with the opposite technique of contemplation: instead of concentrating into one infinitesimal point, you expand your awareness to encompass the whole of reality. Which is a bit like daydreaming. It’s through these two exercises that one finds the middle path of equanimity.

With technology, we spend our time with narrowed focus, we are told that to stay sane we need to cultivate our focus, and never find the time to release the grip on it, to just let the brain be and expand and relax a bit.

The Taoists had figured it out all along: to find focus, stop focusing so damn much.