No internet use is inherently intentional. Old-style internet made you choose where to go, but that doesn't make the use intentional. We make choices all the time on auto-pilot. Choosing isn't the same as being intentional.
It's true that it's harder to stay present on addictively designed feeds. But I find it difficult to stay present even visiting traditional websites / classic style forums. We also constantly get distracted reading books. Our minds are estimated to be wandering between 30 and 50% of the time during pretty much any task, even without phones or social media [1].
Presence and intention are skills–they can be trained. Don't expect significant benefits if you switch out addictive internet for classic without also training your attention. This applies for anything of this nature. A few weeks ago I took a weekend without any devices as well as a lot of awareness practicing just during everyday tasks, and one interesting benefit was how it allowed me to take enjoyment from mundane tasks–I stopped thinking of them as things to get done as soon as possible to get back to the computer and started just being.
If you meditate just a few minutes each day, you will start actually noticing yourself getting distracted and then shift to awareness. It feels annoying that you got distracted, but that just means it's working.
The reason to do this is we are much happier when we are present–a wandering mind is an unhappy mind.
I highly recommend Born to Flourish [2] for an introduction to meditation and the science behind it (it's still easy to read).
[1] https://neurosciencenews.com/mind-wandering-focus-25745/
[2] https://annas-archive.gd/md5/0e405c329f33fcb63b4647e386f0ad7...
> Presence and intention are skills–they can be trained
Please tell me how. I need to really really improve myself here. I used to be very good at being disciplined and focused, but being a parent and manager made me an ad-hoc reactive monkey that is always lagging behind with everything and not delivering on type, which I always did some time ago.
Try meditation.
If you're completely new to the idea I suggest the book With Each & Every Breath by Thanassiro Bikkhu. It's a Therevada Buddhist book but the breathing meditation instructions in it can be applied even if you want to ignore the other parts of the book.
If you're the sort of person who ignores parts of a book you're reading, try Mindfulness in Plain English by Bhante G.
Either the book I recommended in the post or "The Healthy Minds Program" app. The Healthy Minds Program is completely free—only donations are accepted.
The book explains their system and includes meditations. I can send you the audiobook and you can download the epub ebook from that Anna's archive link. Obviously also you can buy a hard copy.
I like the Healthy Minds program app more than other meditation apps because:
It's a curriculum so you aren't just handed a library to randomly choose, there's a set path.
It's completely free with no option to pay other than to donate.
There's a lot of speaker options and I like the speaker.
Someone else liked it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47710358
I'm working on a privacy-focused frontend for the Healthy Minds program because their app is very outdated and has a ton of tracking. You can use it on the web at https://getflourish.org. Completely vibe coded, very much not done, but it has the functionality to at least demo it. The Android app is a lot better but I haven't released it yet. The web version needs a ton of work it was just done in an hour based off the Android app and doesn't even format on desktop.