Reading books has been a good way for me personally to pull myself away from online pursuits that break up attention into 15-second spans such as browsing HN and news sites. That tends to be the real addiction for me (...wait, someone is wrong on the internet! must post! must read replies!).
I don't see coding as an addiction. Sure, it is a time sink and feels good, but after a focused coding session the results are (usually) constructive and I learn new things along the way.
This is different from addictions which are usually a way of instant easy satisfaction, a "high", after which you feel useless and down when it weans off. Programming is nothing like that at least for me.
> online pursuits that break up attention into 15-second spans such as browsing HN
I don't understand, how do you use HN then? I take a look at a front page and open interesting comments pages in background tabs. Then I close the front page and proceed to comments. There is frequently more than 100 comments on interesting topics and many of them long, involved and worth reading. I'm done with one page after some time, from 10 to 30 minutes. Then I sometimes read the article (if the comments convinced me to) or just go straight to the next tab with comments. A single comment may be worthless, but it's then short and easily identified as such, reading them hardly takes 15 seconds. On the other hand, long comments tend to form threads, which I then read as an essay, which takes much longer than 15 seconds.
So, how do you use HN to have your attention split into 15-seconds spans?
I'm not saying HN is bad specifically (otherwise I wouldn't be here). There are obviously links to excellent articles posted here, and interesting projects. So this is not an issue with the quality, but more the quantity. Call it "information overload" if you want.
"15 second spans" was exaggerated, this is not Twitter. However reading these kind of sites causes a lot of context switches between topics and articles that seem interesting, or make me want to argue, but a few hours later I cannot really remember anymore what they were about.
It's a very fragmented experience with no clear narrative (at least, that my brain bothers remembering), but it does wear me out.
In any case, it's not that I don't have it under control, but to me it feels more like a potential addiction than coding ever did.
