Sometimes I'll go for a long walk, maybe six miles. I don't walk fast or listen to music, I just look around, maybe at people's yards. I like to see who has a bird feeder or interesting landscaping. When I first start, my mind is full of thoughts and my muscles and legs are full of bounce, even tight, but after four miles, my mind is nearly empty, except for the kind of slow easy thoughts that someone who works the land all day, someone who sees the sun rise and set, might have, and my legs are heavier, yet loose, and ready for many more miles. After five miles, my gut feels lean and empty, my body feels purged of something.
"... Sometimes I'll go for a long walk, maybe six miles. ..."
I don't think it's just a function of the distance but the frequency and the empty mind you report is pretty close to describing meditation - empty mind observing - great stuff.
> If you need to listen to music while walking, don’t walk; and don’t listen to music.
I tend to never listen to music unless I'm taking a walk. I have no anxiety about idleness, but I do have an acute anxiety about others' opinions of my taste in music—it is such that I can only stand to enjoy music when there is no one close enough to me to hear it. Seeing as I live in an apartment with thin walls, this means going for a walk.
The last sentence of this comment makes no sense. Do his neighbors have such acute auditory ability that they can hear the music from his headphones -- the ones he takes on those walks -- through their walls?
There are few things more relaxing than coming home on a Friday afternoon, mixing a nice cocktail, and cranking some truly embarrassing music from your youth on the stereo, at full volume through big speakers.
To pull that off, you need thick skin or thick walls.
That was the entire point of my comment. No matter how loud you crank music on headphones, nothing will fall off the shelves, and you won't feel any bowel-loosening vibration coursing through your body.
That's an essential part of the experience. And if it's happening because of cheezy butt rock from the 80's, you'd best have thick stone walls or live well out in the country.
I like taking walks and listening to pod casts, the problem is the opposite; I'm laughing and muttering to myself as I walk along, unnerving all those elderly immigrants.
However it is a good idea to walk without ipods/mp3 players as much as you can bear, walking helps your mind wander or meditate without having to 'learn how to breathe'.
I enjoy taking good podcasts along with me on my walks because then, streets get associated with topics. The corner next to the ugly second-hand store is now all about planning the European high-voltage power grid, and the flower shop at the hospital is about self-made bicycle computers and OpenStreetMap.
summary for the lazy hackers / if you don't have the time to read it all
Had to laugh when I read this though, since this article is in so many ways talking about the same ones that will read that summary and click on to some other article on here.
Walking as the author describes is one of those simple pleasures that we have been gifted, but so few of us ever slow down to realize it and to receive it.
I've made a habit of taking a walk around 2 pm every Sunday. No matter how busy things get between school and business, an hour or so walk helps keep me grounded.
In much the same way that starting the day with breakfast gives my days a sense of rhythm, walking once a week gives my weeks a good demarcation.
I liked the article; it expressed something that had been lingering on the edges of my subconscious, but that I had never brought to light - like most good articles do.
What I don't see is why it had to have an anti-American bias. It doesn't help make your point, and all it does is antagonize your American readers. I am an American, I also take walks.
As a fellow American who takes walks,I disagree with the perceived antagonism.
I think part of the point is that there is something deep-seeded in our culture that punishes idleness. That is the social anxiety he describes. I do have a little anxiety when I'm going for a walk, alone, not particularly doing or thinking anything. Will people think I'm some sort of weirdo? The observation that this worry is itself worrisome is an observation I can identify with.
> I think part of the point is that there is something deep-seeded in our culture that punishes idleness.
I observed the same thing. I have lived half my life here, half in Eastern Europe. I remember we used to take walks with my family after dinner growing up. Here in US it is harder because it is so unusual. I guess life is faster paced, but I think at some point it becomes counter-productive.
Being fast-paced works very well for manual labor, not for problem solving. Hard problems can only be solved on a clear, rested mind, sometime a walk does just that.
I'm not sure I'd attribute it to a fast-paced lifestyle. My guess is that most people plunk down and just watch TV (or surf the web these days) after supper. After dinner walks would be a step towards a faster-pasted lifestyle :P
It seems more like it's tied to the importance placed on property ownership and lack of public common spaces. (Well, there's probably a feedback loop going on) We convince ourselves that owning a home in the suburb is so important and so wonderful that naturally we stay at home and enjoy our house.
An acquaintance of mine (Irish like me) visited the US some time in the mid 90s. He took a walk in a suburban area, and was surprised to find himself being followed by a police car before long. When they stopped and asked him what he was doing, it dawned on him that because he wasn't jogging, or walking a dog etc., someone had actually called the police when they saw a stranger walking aimlessly down their road.
Needless to say, all of us back home were appalled by this apparently fearful and paranoid US cultural trait.
Reminds me of Bob Dylan being questioned by the police due to walking around in New Jersey.
The incident began at 5 p.m. when a resident reported a man wandering around a low-income, predominantly minority neighbourhood several blocks from the oceanfront, looking at houses.
Something similar happened to me in the US, but then again I've been stopped by the police in the UK too while out for a walk. In the latter case it was about 4 a.m. and I must have looked suspiciously sober.
I find the UK oddly authoritarian / rigid in many of these ways. My GF and myself decided to go to a lake (actually some kind of reservoir) near London on a hot day a month or two ago, and were rather surprised to find out that the lake closed at 6pm.
The very concept of a lake closing, never mind at 6pm on a summer evening (easily light out until 10:30), was alien to my Irish mind.
Meanwhile, there was an article in the Guardian, about whether or not it's OK to go wild camping:
Similarly, the notion that going to a campsite could be described as camping was weird. I view campsites as more like unpleasant cheap muddy hotels - I grew up understanding one of the appeals of camping is being in the middle of nowhere, with nobody around. The idea of having other people, music, barbequeues, people drinking etc. all around sounds horrible to me.
Och that Guardian article is getting all in a fluster about "wild camping" being banned in a single location (Loch Lomond) that is near to a major city and is seeing some problems.
Just about everywhere else in the Highlands I've never had any problems wild camping or staying in bothies (http://www.mountainbothies.org.uk/).
It links to a different article discussing a camping ban near a large city, but the article itself says "It is currently banned across the vast majority of England and Wales".
"Needless to say, all of us back home were appalled by this apparently fearful and paranoid US cultural trait."
The US is a big place, about 100 times the size of Ireland. Neighborhoods differ. Please don't judge an entire population because of what happened in one suburb. In other places in the US you'd have people waving hello to you.
I'm sure I could walk through parts of Derry and have a dismal experience, but that shouldn't be used to judge all of the Irish.
Can't you? People throw off subtle cues all the time, and whether they're native born or not is something that isn't hard to pick up from that.
Conversely, take a native born person of Japanese or Indian descent, and send them to Japan or India. The natives there will be able to tell he isn't native born.
Very true; even with the same clothes, body language often varies substantially from culture to culture. With a bit of travel and observation, it's quite apparent.
A friend of mine who traveled to Central Asia was struck by how balanced people appeared; he found Westerners take up "too much space" in their movements, and East Asian people tended to do the opposite. But at least during his stay in Central Asia, he noticed the people there repeatedly showed an unconscious balance in their body language: neither too loud and aggressive, nor too quiet and subdued.
You can see culture, not birthplace. Those are different things.
If you see me on the street, I believe you will see my family culture (Chinese) and where I was brought up (American Midwest). You will not see where I was born (East Coast).
I bet if I saw you on the street, you would register as American to me. (East Coast and Midwest register the same to me.) I would be able to tell you apart from someone who was actually born and raised in China. Conversely, if you went to China, the people there would be able to identify you as foreign-born. Your culture is similar and related to, but very different from, the culture of people still living in China. I might be able to tell you apart from more assimilated Americans of East Asian descent, though.
Me specifically, yes. But I was born and grew up in the same country. I still think it's presumptuous to say that you can at a glance determine a person's place of birth. I have friends- people I've known for some time- that surprise me both because they were born overseas when I thought they were born in the states and vice versa.
And I'm talking about a relatively easy case of Chinese vs American. Are you going to tell me you can tell a Canadian-born person from an American-born at a glance?
Yes, many times you can tell where someone is from because of stereotypical cultural things that are difficult to hide. But to assume you can go for a walk and identify with certainty who is American born and who is not is ridiculous.
Yes, technically if you're born in Azerbaijan but whisked away at age 2 and grow up in America you'll read as American. And technically if you were raised in a culture almost identical to American culture (like Canada) you'll also read as American. That's a quibble, not the main point.
ah, I stand corrected. this is a hazy memory from a Reader's Digest condensed book I read 20 years ago titled "I captured Adolf Eichmann" ... can't seem to find a ref to it anywhere online now.
So you used people's walking pace to determine that most native-born people do not take leisurely walks? ;)
I am not offended, that sentence rubbed me the wrong way. I agree that most certainly culture affects our activities, even to the point of how we do seemingly simple things. But the culture you have and the place where you are born are very different things. Ask anyone who is born into a displaced family that preserves their original culture.
I am an American-born Chinese person that takes walks. When you see me and my wife strolling, at that moment, you are seeing my culture (that enjoys "san-bu") not my birth place.
"The gesticulations and facial expressions with which
an American will supplement his English are as distinctively American as those of a Frenchman are distinctively French. One can tell the nationality of a stranger by his gestures as readily as by his language. In a vague, general way I had become aware of this before, probably from contact with some American-born Jews whose gesticulations, when they spoke Yiddish, impressed me as utterly un-Yiddish. And so I studied Bender's gestures almost as closely as I did his words."
Abraham Cahan, _The Rise of David Delinsky_, published 1920s, set in the New York of the late 1800s & early 1900s.
I'm American and I take walks all the time. I rather enjoy walking quite a bit. My favorite was when I used to live in Chicago. The never ending expanse of sidewalk and streets meant I could leave my apartment, and just walk ... for hours. I used to walk home from work at the Field Museum, just because I enjoyed it. Although I guess that doesn't fit his definition of "just taking a walk", as about 3 hours later I'd arrive at a destination, my apartment.
One of the biggest things I missed when I loved form NYC to the Phoenix area was the option to walk places.
In New York I would take the A train from Washington Heights to Columbus Circle, and either walk up to the Metropolitan Museum, or down to the Village. It was endlessly entertaining, with sights and sounds to fill the mind.
It's a hack because it is an unusual or counter-intuitive way of solving a problem. Or meta-solve a problem -- recharge your mental batteries so when you get back you solve your real problem better, if you wish.
This is just as much a hack as articles about exercise or nutrition are a hack. They hack the hackers, who ... hack.
Yes, and that's why it's dumb to call articles about exercise and nutrition "hacks". When all of human endeavor falls under the rubric of the "hack" the word ceases to mean anything.
Hack your commute, take public transit! Hack your next dinner party with parlour games. Delightfully clever key hack keeps all your keys on the same ring. Hack Mexican food with a "burrito" sized tortilla! Hack your brain with REM sleep. Hack the sun with a straw hat. Hack hygiene with silver oxide "deodorant". Hack girls with compliments. Hack your windowsill with a pot of wheatgrass, and hack the sky with the goddamn moon.
To me, hack is a word for a modification you could make that 1) takes only a short time to master/implement, and 2) shows immediate desired results
Thus, learning to play guitar is not a hack, since it satisfies neither criteria, but learning to put some TP into the toilet first when you do #2 in order to prevent splashback is a hack.
You could make the exact same argument for art. Certainly a lot of supposed 'hacks' aren't. But someone creating a clever way of doing something in almost any field that makes me think "cool hack" still counts as a hack in my book.
Yes but that sort of means something, abstraction.
When new things come out or new ideas emerge people just 'hack' them and viscerally create. Hey I need this form, bust it out. Hey I need this renderer, bust it out.
But later as things are more known you might abstract away and say let's take a step back and look at the architecture of this whole thing rather than bust it out in a prototypical fashion (usually because the problem is complex or stuff is broken and a maintenance nightmare with steep technical debt). You might even architect the plan for what prototypes you would make to help solve the problems.
So true things being architected are happening more frequently as a buzz but as systems mature that is usually what happens via abstraction to see the full picture.
Maybe the difference is a 'hack' is something I am doing right now until it works, almost a prototype. Then something 'architected' is what you would do when you think about it for a week or two before starting. Lots of software development for instance starts with hacks/prototypes then architects how to use those to go to production.
Both sides are representations of the poles of creating, of course you can go way beyond either side and eat some spaghetti hacks or go to space with some architecture astronauts.
to be fair, programmers overuse the word too. nobody writes code or programs, everyone says "I'm an XYZ hacker" or "I hack on XYZ". the word means nothing, it's just trendy in an odd sort of way.
not sure what you're referring to, but if you're suggesting my programmer friends all say "I hack this/that" I should clarify that I'm mostly referring to bloggers and other web presences, which admittedly isn't really a representative sample. but, putting that aside, I could use some new friends anyway.
This is very important for programmers. You need to take a walk to recharge your batteries. To clear you mind. Well, it works for me anyway.
Do it during lunch, after work, after dinner. On the weekend , for a longer walk. Parks and trails work best. Less crowded streets in the city work as well.
Don't rush, just walk slowly.
Observe things.
If you end up thinking about the problem your are working on, that's fine, if you notice a bird's nest, that's fine too.
Walk like you have no place to be, look around. You will feel weird at first, but that's fine. Try not to care about that.
Think of it as something between meditation, relaxation and exercise. Sort of a all-in-one.
It's easy. There is nothing you have to do to plan for it, no special gear to buy, all you need to do is to say "I want to take a walk" and then ... take a walk.
When someone provides a plan, for some reason I am compelled to follow it meticulously or reject it entirely. I could use an Ask HN on how to loosen up.
No one ever looks up. No really. No one ever looks up.
I used to have a balcony over a very crowded alley with constant foot traffic. I would stand there quietly and watch people think they were alone in this alley all the time.
Drunk people were the best. One corner of the alley was constantly getting pee'd in so they installed a metal skirt that bounced the pee back on the pee'r. You could watch drunk people pee in that corner then walk away with a wet pant leg without ever noticing. Hilarious. And not once in the 3 years I lived there did someone look up.
1) It doesn't solve the problem at all as the drunks don't even notice the deterrent
2) If the drunks were aware enough to notice, they could simply pee at an angle to avoid backsplash - but I imagine they'd be too drunk to think of that simple solution
Oddly enough if you play through Portal with commentary on they talk about this constantly. Test players never looked up and they had to do elaborate things with the level design to simply get people to look up.
In older cities it's amazing how much great architecture goes unnoticed. New York city has buildings from turn of the century with most intricate decorations and reliefs and only recently I started noticing it (in a "they don't make 'em like they used to" way).
1.) 99% of the time, the people looking up are tourists.
2.) It is really funny to look straight up at the sky in a busy street and then watch twenty other people start looking up, wondering what could possibly be going on up there.
I went for a walk today. The fact that my car was in the shop being repaired had absolutely nothing to do with this. Nothing. I swear. I should go check out my new tires.
Two weeks ago I was hacking away in my apartment. It was a normal Arizona summer day, clear skies and 106 degrees F. All of the sudden my window started rattling and I had no idea what was going on. Peering behind my blinds I observed sheets of water falling from the sky. We get rain like that maybe once every year. I promptly undressed, donned my bathing suit, and went for a walk in the rain.
I'm with you. In college - being in Seattle - it would frequently pour down rain while I was walking between classes. At first, I would run and find cover like everyone else, but after awhile I gave up and started walking, head uncovered, treating the falling raindrops as thousands of gentle reminders that I'm alive. Once or twice, I couldn't help but just bursting out laughing.
Immersing yourself in a problem for a long time often establishes a number of assumptions in your brain about how said problem should be solved. When stuck, withdrawal from the direct effort of work can free up some of these assumptions, letting your mind entertain other possible approaches.
This sense of needing a purpose, a direction, a reason for doing something is certainly not unique to taking a walk. In a diner I frequent I was recently asked if I were a student by one of the servers who has often waited on me while I was reading. I'm not. And his reaction to my answer conveyed a sort of disbelief or at least a hint that I am wasting something, that I am throwing away a chance to convert this time into something tangible, beneficial.
i often take walks, especially in SF. as strange as it may sound i can't think of another activity that gives me as much of a sense of pure freedom as purposeless walking (and thinking) in a city
The author has clearly never lived in Texas during the summer. (A decent-length leisurely walk around Austin at midnight during this time of the year will inevitably result in more than enough sweat.)
While I've taken many, many walks in the heat of the Texas summer without sweating, it is freaking hot. Though, it's no reason to skip a nice walk -- just bring water.
I am in decent shape and I've always sweated when I go outside in the summer, particularly at midday. I have to plan my walks around this so that I don't stink up the office when I'm done.
Actually, I did spend a year (and parts of 2 summers) in Austin. I used to go for late night walks near my apartment, which was just off 183, well north, in strip-mall land.
If you walk slowly enough, you won't sweat. Or maybe that's just Austin.
I found the article interesting, but I thought it was somewhat overly argumentative. In particular, the claim that immigrants take walks and Americans don't struck me as an implausible over-generalization. I liked his points about the right attire for walking, but the "your walk doesn't count if..." part bothered me.
not a touch on Ed Stafford: 859 days & 4,000 miles of walking the entire Amazon ~ http://www.walkingtheamazon.com/ but looking at the shots, beautiful scenery. Envious.
I took a stand-up comedy course a couple of years ago. I found out that it takes a long time to come up with material. You can't just sit down and start writing jokes. They come when they are ready and you'd better be ready to write them down.
When I had some time in the evenings to come up with material I would sit at home without much inspiration. However, I found that when I walked to the convenience store to get a snack, I would inevitably return with at least one new joke idea, maybe more.
Walking was such a predictably good way to loosen up my creativity that when I got stuck I would head for the door and tell my wife, "I'm going to the convenience store to buy a joke."
My favorite is juggling. I learned how recently after someone on HN posted a link to a Youtube video. At first I found it required a lot of concentration, but now it just takes my mind off coding for a few minutes during a break and it gives my wrists a little stretch away from the keyboard.
I grew up in a SW Portland neighborhood with no sidewalks. The road shoulders were narrow, unsafe, and often muddy. I never saw people out for leisure walks. It just wasn't enjoyable.
Now I live in the outskirts of Portland, in a place with modern suburbs grown up around a quaint old town. Sidewalks are everywhere. I take walks all the time, and I see other people out for walks daily.
It's seems like common sense that urban and neighborhood design can have a huge impact on the livability of an area, but a lot of the suburbs created in the US abandoned the sidewalk to save a few bucks and cram more houses per acre. I don't know if the tide has turned, but I'd never live in a neighborhood without sidewalks again.
Home buying tip: Look for a neighborhood with a strip of grass between the sidewalk and the street. It's a small detail that has a big impact on "neighborhood" feel.
Woah, we've had some 'pack 'em in' zoning here in New Zealand but I've never seen anything where they left out footpaths entirely. Has anyone got a representative Google street view link for SW Portland or something similar? (And is this really quite common across the US?)
There are two separate issues at play - urban planning and neighborhood development. Portland prides itself on being at the forefront of urban planning, but when many of the roads were created in the perimeter of the city, there wasn't much thought put into it. The city has looked at retrofitting sidewalks into some of these areas, but it's prohibitively expensive.
Oddly enough, a lot of the neighborhoods weren't tightly packed. The lot sizes were decent and the house-to-house spacing was ample. I'm guessing it was more of an issue where, if the builders didn't have to spend money on sidewalks, they didn't.
Wow. I've travelled to many countries and lived in a few, but I've never been somewhere without sidewalks. I looked at that street view and thought: "that's weird, grassy sidewalks". I had to pan 360 degrees a few times to realise it was people's front gardens, not public space. It feels very alien to me.
Around here, there are laws now that prevent someone from building without providing a sidewalk. Old lots are grandfathered in, I think, but any new development has to also provide a sidewalk.
I suspect it's that way most places, and that's why you find so few without sidewalks. They do exist, though.
In the suburbs you can walk in the street or through people's yards ("gardens") along the edges and no one really minds. Everyone tends drive instead, though, since there aren't any well-connected walkways that lead to any place you'd really like to get to.
In general, people do not walk down the street at all. I used to live in a place that looked a bit like this (except spread out a bit more) in Alabama, and while you'd once in a while see someone walking down the street, it was pretty rare except for kids too young to have cars (under 16, basically).
> Portland is not a good example of American urban planning gone awry. As it's probably one of the most sensible cities in the US.
Mostly, but there's really 2 Portlands. Downtown & the eastside are dense, mostly flat, walkable and with excellent public transit. The west side is hilly, mostly suburban, and generally neither walking nor transit friendly.
Fairly large stretches of the Washington, DC, suburbs have no or few sidewalks once you are off main streets. I have read the explanation that the developers wanted to give the original buyers, 55 or 60 years ago, the feeling that they were out in the country. (Given that some of these streets had little bungalows wedged tightly together, the buyers must have been oddly susceptible.) A number of neighborhoods within the city lack sidewalks, too, and in them one can start a listserve war and bring out yard signs by proposing to lay sidewalks. There can be good reasons--big old oaks in the way--and ridiculous ones--fear of attracting riff-raff.
It should be said that when some of these neighborhoods were laid out, most families had at most one car, and that car commonly smaller than some of the sports utes and minivans one sees today, leaving more space on the pavement for pedestrians.
It's rare to have connected walkways in the US. They often stop suddenly on their trail off to nowhere, have big gaps between disconnected sections, lead up to bridges that are meant for driving on, etc.
My mother-in-law lives in a neighborhood with no sidewalk. However, it's got very little traffic, and it's a 20mph zone. When we go for a walk, we just walk on the street. A good number of people in the neighborhood do the same.
A sidewalk is not always needed to have a good walk.
Yes, good point. And some of these street views (thanks everyone - most interesting!) actually look okay for walking as long as the traffic was light and slow.
It's not even all that rare to lack sidewalks within traditional city limits. The street where I grew up had sidewalks, but here is Street View of the street a block away, which does not: http://maps.google.com/maps?f=q&source=s_q&hl=en&...
The area was built up in the 1920s, and apparently at the time it was left to the homeowners on each block whether they wanted to pay for sidewalk construction. Most blocks paid for it but the homeowners on this street did not.
In my neighborhood (Washington, DC area) some residents recently objected to plans to install a sidewalk along the main drag because "the drivers don't need any more distractions than they already have". We're moving in two weeks, hallelujah!
I met a woman from New York who was visiting SF. We both had been to Burning Man. She expressed her distaste at how much time San Franciscans spend on their art projects. According to her, New Yorkers "have a life".
So, that bar conversation ended pretty quickly. But later on I got to thinking about it. There might be positive senses of "having a life", but I think she meant it in the more common way -- a horror of getting too enthusiastic about anything.
Oh yeah, we could plant a rose garden in our backyard, but you know, we have lives.
I get really infuriated by the phrase "too much time on their hands", when used to dismiss acts of creativity (like building a model of the Eiffel tower out of match sticks). At least they weren't watching TV.
I am not sure if you are being sarcastic, but I will say I very much doubt it. There are many TV shows I enjoy watching, and a few that are either inspirational or infomrative. But never have I accomplished something by watching TV.
Building something, even an Eiffel tower out of match sticks, is accomplishing something. How valuable or useful that something is is debatable, and there are probably better things to build then a match-stick tower, but it is still an accomplishment it adds to the world in a way that watching TV never will.
I will admit to watching TV and enjoying it, but I consider it an indulgence. I always have something better to do, and I think that is true of nearly everyone.
Seriously? I watch almost no television, and most of it is utter mind-rot.
But of course watching something can "accomplish something" -- it can broaden your experience of reality by showing you something that took place on the other side of the world, or ten years ago.
The best television shows you moments of life that otherwise only the people who were actually present might have had a chance to see.
This is where the advantage to a place like Silicon Valley helps a startup; being surrounded by your fellow enthusiasts. It doesn't matter so much what they're enthusiastic about, so much as they are that type. Being surrounded by people who make less of your and yo work is demoralizing.
Compound their consternation by having fun with math. Just yesterday I got several expressions of horror from passers-by when I explained I was working out a problem for fun.
I got this reaction from a few people after the Tau Manifesto came out (http://tauday.com/). The thing is, I don't have too much time on my hands; taking a week off to write and launch the Tau Manifesto was expensive. And yet, it's clearly the awesomest thing I've ever done, and I haven't regretted it for a nanosecond.
P.S. I also, from time to time, enjoy watching TV. Don't judge. ;-)
I've thought about this, then decided I probably couldn't live a fulfilling life conforming to the standard of this idea of having a life most people have.
Cory Doctorow has a very thoughtful blog post that expands on this theme and really picks out what's wrong with accusations of "too much time on your hands": http://boingboing.net/2002/02/03/too-much-time-on-his.html It's good enough that I periodically reread it, and recommend it to others.
I agree with the sentiment, but the source is suspect. Being an editor at Boing Boing gives him a vested interest in people building art projects that make you go "oooh, shiny!" for thirty seconds.
"Having a life" is how people explain why they don't do anything fun with their friends except eat and have drinks. "Want to ...?" "Well, yeah, that sounds great, but unlike you I have a frickin' life."
For most of my friends these days, "a life" is a wife and kids, but for some of them, it's just a house, or pets, or even a job.
Strangely, "a life" never stops them from having dinner with you or meeting for beers after work. It just stops them from doing anything that requires energy or planning. It's got to the point where I'm trying to figure out how to make new friends at an age where it doesn't happen by accident. But you find a guy whose Facebook page says "I love backpacking" and then you find out he hasn't done it once since he got married. I'm going out with women I'm not into just so I have somebody to do something with. I'd be too scared to get seriously involved with them, though, because then they would have a "life."
> Strangely, "a life" never stops them from having dinner with you or meeting for beers after work. It just stops them from doing anything that requires energy or planning.
Excellent insight. I was trying to articulate what having-a-life really means. So in this sense, having-a-life means that your duties are supposed to be active, but your entertainments are passive.
If your entertainments are active, perhaps the implication is that you must be a loser in the other areas -- not accruing enough status, money, friends, etc., since you have energy left over. And that isn't completely untrue; sacrifices are necessary for any project. (Although, for me, it has always been the stuff that I did for no good reason which brought me the best jobs and the strongest relationships).
But if someone has no dreams apart from passive entertainments... I don't know how they even get through the day.
I think that nails it. There is an urge to demonstrate your success in everything you do, and some activities just aren't good mediums for showcasing how awesome you are.
"Having a life" is how people explain why they don't do anything fun with their friends except eat and have drinks.
It's funny, I always think the opposite. Whenever I'm working hard at my job during the week and then just eating and drinking with friends on the weekends, I feel like don't "have a life." I do these things most often for lack of other opportunities, and then I start to feel don't have anything more interesting to do than eat and drink and talk. At these junctures, I start thinking more about potential activities, projects and travel opportunities in order to get my "life" going again.
There can be something akin to meditation in walking, or "taking a walk". An approach I've taken in the past is attempt to hear all the sounds. Not to listen to, just hear. Wherever you are, there are likely enough sounds for this. If you catch yourself focusing on one sound, gently let it go back to the level of the rest. If you find yourself not hearing sounds, gently let yourself hear them again.
I believe this is quite similar to bringing your mind back to the breath in sitting meditation in Vipassana and similar practices, though others may correct me. The difference here is that it's perhaps somehow more obvious when your mind has strayed from its object. In fact, there are forms of walking meditation in Vipassana and other practices. These focus -- again, I believe -- much more on the walking: the walking and its sensations are the object. Generally you would walk up and down a short stretch; this avoid the worry of a route, or how to return to the starting point.
Taking walks is an essential part of how I program. They're like garbage collection pauses to clear out irrelevant details that were clogging my thinking. You know how a lot of people say that they do their best thinking in the shower? Walks work the same way.
This reminds me strongly of a John Muir quote I've recently been finding to be very true.
"Thousands of tired, nerve-shaken, over-civilized people are beginning to find out that going to the mountain is going home; that wildness is necessity; that mountain parks and reservations are useful not only as fountains of timber and irrigating rivers, but as fountains of life."
I find more enjoyment in a simple hike through a forest than I've had at work for a very long time. Also, I find that when I go back to work after a trip to the forest or even just a walk outside the city, I feel better and am less crabby about going back to work. I think this is something that is sorely lacking in many people's lives. Not recreation but just being out in whatever wild we have left. Aaand now I sound like a crazy hippie.
190 comments
[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 331 ms ] threadI don't think it's just a function of the distance but the frequency and the empty mind you report is pretty close to describing meditation - empty mind observing - great stuff.
> If you need to listen to music while walking, don’t walk; and don’t listen to music.
I tend to never listen to music unless I'm taking a walk. I have no anxiety about idleness, but I do have an acute anxiety about others' opinions of my taste in music—it is such that I can only stand to enjoy music when there is no one close enough to me to hear it. Seeing as I live in an apartment with thin walls, this means going for a walk.
To pull that off, you need thick skin or thick walls.
That was the entire point of my comment. No matter how loud you crank music on headphones, nothing will fall off the shelves, and you won't feel any bowel-loosening vibration coursing through your body.
That's an essential part of the experience. And if it's happening because of cheezy butt rock from the 80's, you'd best have thick stone walls or live well out in the country.
However it is a good idea to walk without ipods/mp3 players as much as you can bear, walking helps your mind wander or meditate without having to 'learn how to breathe'.
The last few paragraphs were the most interesting in my opinion if you don't have the time to read it all.
summary for the lazy hackers / if you don't have the time to read it all
Had to laugh when I read this though, since this article is in so many ways talking about the same ones that will read that summary and click on to some other article on here.
Walking as the author describes is one of those simple pleasures that we have been gifted, but so few of us ever slow down to realize it and to receive it.
In much the same way that starting the day with breakfast gives my days a sense of rhythm, walking once a week gives my weeks a good demarcation.
What I don't see is why it had to have an anti-American bias. It doesn't help make your point, and all it does is antagonize your American readers. I am an American, I also take walks.
I think part of the point is that there is something deep-seeded in our culture that punishes idleness. That is the social anxiety he describes. I do have a little anxiety when I'm going for a walk, alone, not particularly doing or thinking anything. Will people think I'm some sort of weirdo? The observation that this worry is itself worrisome is an observation I can identify with.
I observed the same thing. I have lived half my life here, half in Eastern Europe. I remember we used to take walks with my family after dinner growing up. Here in US it is harder because it is so unusual. I guess life is faster paced, but I think at some point it becomes counter-productive.
Being fast-paced works very well for manual labor, not for problem solving. Hard problems can only be solved on a clear, rested mind, sometime a walk does just that.
It seems more like it's tied to the importance placed on property ownership and lack of public common spaces. (Well, there's probably a feedback loop going on) We convince ourselves that owning a home in the suburb is so important and so wonderful that naturally we stay at home and enjoy our house.
Needless to say, all of us back home were appalled by this apparently fearful and paranoid US cultural trait.
The incident began at 5 p.m. when a resident reported a man wandering around a low-income, predominantly minority neighbourhood several blocks from the oceanfront, looking at houses.
(...)
"What is your name, sir?" the officer asked.
"Bob Dylan," Dylan said.
"OK, what are you doing here?" the officer asked.
"I'm on tour," the singer replied.
http://www.cbc.ca/arts/music/story/2009/08/15/dylan-police.h...
The very concept of a lake closing, never mind at 6pm on a summer evening (easily light out until 10:30), was alien to my Irish mind.
Meanwhile, there was an article in the Guardian, about whether or not it's OK to go wild camping:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2010/aug/09/holidays-w...
Similarly, the notion that going to a campsite could be described as camping was weird. I view campsites as more like unpleasant cheap muddy hotels - I grew up understanding one of the appeals of camping is being in the middle of nowhere, with nobody around. The idea of having other people, music, barbequeues, people drinking etc. all around sounds horrible to me.
Just about everywhere else in the Highlands I've never had any problems wild camping or staying in bothies (http://www.mountainbothies.org.uk/).
The US is a big place, about 100 times the size of Ireland. Neighborhoods differ. Please don't judge an entire population because of what happened in one suburb. In other places in the US you'd have people waving hello to you.
I'm sure I could walk through parts of Derry and have a dismal experience, but that shouldn't be used to judge all of the Irish.
I have no idea what it's like in Derry, FWIW, as I've never been up north.
I wonder if he thinks he looks like a native-born or an immigrant?
Conversely, take a native born person of Japanese or Indian descent, and send them to Japan or India. The natives there will be able to tell he isn't native born.
A friend of mine who traveled to Central Asia was struck by how balanced people appeared; he found Westerners take up "too much space" in their movements, and East Asian people tended to do the opposite. But at least during his stay in Central Asia, he noticed the people there repeatedly showed an unconscious balance in their body language: neither too loud and aggressive, nor too quiet and subdued.
If you see me on the street, I believe you will see my family culture (Chinese) and where I was brought up (American Midwest). You will not see where I was born (East Coast).
And I'm talking about a relatively easy case of Chinese vs American. Are you going to tell me you can tell a Canadian-born person from an American-born at a glance?
Yes, many times you can tell where someone is from because of stereotypical cultural things that are difficult to hide. But to assume you can go for a walk and identify with certainty who is American born and who is not is ridiculous.
There are studies (see Robert Levine, "Geography of Time") that use normal walking pace as a very characteristic indicator of geographic origin.
The FBI caught Adolf Eichmann in Argentina partly because they noticed his dissonant walking pace :)
Venkat
I am not offended, that sentence rubbed me the wrong way. I agree that most certainly culture affects our activities, even to the point of how we do seemingly simple things. But the culture you have and the place where you are born are very different things. Ask anyone who is born into a displaced family that preserves their original culture.
I am an American-born Chinese person that takes walks. When you see me and my wife strolling, at that moment, you are seeing my culture (that enjoys "san-bu") not my birth place.
Abraham Cahan, _The Rise of David Delinsky_, published 1920s, set in the New York of the late 1800s & early 1900s.
In New York I would take the A train from Washington Heights to Columbus Circle, and either walk up to the Metropolitan Museum, or down to the Village. It was endlessly entertaining, with sights and sounds to fill the mind.
What a joy.
This isn't a hack. It's an activity. I can't think of any conceivable definition of "hack" that this article would also fit.
This is just as much a hack as articles about exercise or nutrition are a hack. They hack the hackers, who ... hack.
Hack your commute, take public transit! Hack your next dinner party with parlour games. Delightfully clever key hack keeps all your keys on the same ring. Hack Mexican food with a "burrito" sized tortilla! Hack your brain with REM sleep. Hack the sun with a straw hat. Hack hygiene with silver oxide "deodorant". Hack girls with compliments. Hack your windowsill with a pot of wheatgrass, and hack the sky with the goddamn moon.
It's stupid. Take a walk.
Good idea ;-)
Thus, learning to play guitar is not a hack, since it satisfies neither criteria, but learning to put some TP into the toilet first when you do #2 in order to prevent splashback is a hack.
When new things come out or new ideas emerge people just 'hack' them and viscerally create. Hey I need this form, bust it out. Hey I need this renderer, bust it out.
But later as things are more known you might abstract away and say let's take a step back and look at the architecture of this whole thing rather than bust it out in a prototypical fashion (usually because the problem is complex or stuff is broken and a maintenance nightmare with steep technical debt). You might even architect the plan for what prototypes you would make to help solve the problems.
So true things being architected are happening more frequently as a buzz but as systems mature that is usually what happens via abstraction to see the full picture.
Maybe the difference is a 'hack' is something I am doing right now until it works, almost a prototype. Then something 'architected' is what you would do when you think about it for a week or two before starting. Lots of software development for instance starts with hacks/prototypes then architects how to use those to go to production.
Both sides are representations of the poles of creating, of course you can go way beyond either side and eat some spaghetti hacks or go to space with some architecture astronauts.
I hacked my feet with shoes so I can walk for longer on rougher terrains.
Do it during lunch, after work, after dinner. On the weekend , for a longer walk. Parks and trails work best. Less crowded streets in the city work as well.
Don't rush, just walk slowly.
Observe things.
If you end up thinking about the problem your are working on, that's fine, if you notice a bird's nest, that's fine too.
Walk like you have no place to be, look around. You will feel weird at first, but that's fine. Try not to care about that.
Think of it as something between meditation, relaxation and exercise. Sort of a all-in-one.
It's easy. There is nothing you have to do to plan for it, no special gear to buy, all you need to do is to say "I want to take a walk" and then ... take a walk.
When someone provides a plan, for some reason I am compelled to follow it meticulously or reject it entirely. I could use an Ask HN on how to loosen up.
Also look up. In city streets there are things to see above the horizontal plane we strongly tend to confine our view to.
I used to have a balcony over a very crowded alley with constant foot traffic. I would stand there quietly and watch people think they were alone in this alley all the time.
Drunk people were the best. One corner of the alley was constantly getting pee'd in so they installed a metal skirt that bounced the pee back on the pee'r. You could watch drunk people pee in that corner then walk away with a wet pant leg without ever noticing. Hilarious. And not once in the 3 years I lived there did someone look up.
1) It doesn't solve the problem at all as the drunks don't even notice the deterrent 2) If the drunks were aware enough to notice, they could simply pee at an angle to avoid backsplash - but I imagine they'd be too drunk to think of that simple solution
2.) It is really funny to look straight up at the sky in a busy street and then watch twenty other people start looking up, wondering what could possibly be going on up there.
"Some people walk in the rain, and some people just get wet."
Be someone who walks in the rain.
The author has clearly never lived in Texas during the summer. (A decent-length leisurely walk around Austin at midnight during this time of the year will inevitably result in more than enough sweat.)
Edit: I live in Tennessee.
If you walk slowly enough, you won't sweat. Or maybe that's just Austin.
not a touch on Ed Stafford: 859 days & 4,000 miles of walking the entire Amazon ~ http://www.walkingtheamazon.com/ but looking at the shots, beautiful scenery. Envious.
When I had some time in the evenings to come up with material I would sit at home without much inspiration. However, I found that when I walked to the convenience store to get a snack, I would inevitably return with at least one new joke idea, maybe more.
Walking was such a predictably good way to loosen up my creativity that when I got stuck I would head for the door and tell my wife, "I'm going to the convenience store to buy a joke."
What a great meta-punchline. :)
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/29/science/29tier.html
Now I live in the outskirts of Portland, in a place with modern suburbs grown up around a quaint old town. Sidewalks are everywhere. I take walks all the time, and I see other people out for walks daily.
It's seems like common sense that urban and neighborhood design can have a huge impact on the livability of an area, but a lot of the suburbs created in the US abandoned the sidewalk to save a few bucks and cram more houses per acre. I don't know if the tide has turned, but I'd never live in a neighborhood without sidewalks again.
Home buying tip: Look for a neighborhood with a strip of grass between the sidewalk and the street. It's a small detail that has a big impact on "neighborhood" feel.
Oddly enough, a lot of the neighborhoods weren't tightly packed. The lot sizes were decent and the house-to-house spacing was ample. I'm guessing it was more of an issue where, if the builders didn't have to spend money on sidewalks, they didn't.
Portland is not a good example of American urban planning gone awry. As it's probably one of the most sensible cities in the US.
And yes, unfortunately neighborhoods without sidewalks are all too common in American suburbs.
I suspect it's that way most places, and that's why you find so few without sidewalks. They do exist, though.
http://maps.google.com/maps?f=q&source=s_q&hl=en&...
Mostly, but there's really 2 Portlands. Downtown & the eastside are dense, mostly flat, walkable and with excellent public transit. The west side is hilly, mostly suburban, and generally neither walking nor transit friendly.
It should be said that when some of these neighborhoods were laid out, most families had at most one car, and that car commonly smaller than some of the sports utes and minivans one sees today, leaving more space on the pavement for pedestrians.
A sidewalk is not always needed to have a good walk.
The area was built up in the 1920s, and apparently at the time it was left to the homeowners on each block whether they wanted to pay for sidewalk construction. Most blocks paid for it but the homeowners on this street did not.
I met a woman from New York who was visiting SF. We both had been to Burning Man. She expressed her distaste at how much time San Franciscans spend on their art projects. According to her, New Yorkers "have a life".
So, that bar conversation ended pretty quickly. But later on I got to thinking about it. There might be positive senses of "having a life", but I think she meant it in the more common way -- a horror of getting too enthusiastic about anything.
Oh yeah, we could plant a rose garden in our backyard, but you know, we have lives.
It makes me feel tired just contemplating it.
I also get terribly infuriated by this. It reminds me of being in high school when any display of creativity or intelligence was frowned upon.
It's too bad the guy did the illumination with LEDs, instead of using matches for that, too. (Although that would have worked only once.)
Building something, even an Eiffel tower out of match sticks, is accomplishing something. How valuable or useful that something is is debatable, and there are probably better things to build then a match-stick tower, but it is still an accomplishment it adds to the world in a way that watching TV never will.
I will admit to watching TV and enjoying it, but I consider it an indulgence. I always have something better to do, and I think that is true of nearly everyone.
But of course watching something can "accomplish something" -- it can broaden your experience of reality by showing you something that took place on the other side of the world, or ten years ago.
The best television shows you moments of life that otherwise only the people who were actually present might have had a chance to see.
Well, at least nobody beat me with a stick.
P.S. I also, from time to time, enjoy watching TV. Don't judge. ;-)
(Just submitted it as http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1591218 )
For most of my friends these days, "a life" is a wife and kids, but for some of them, it's just a house, or pets, or even a job.
Strangely, "a life" never stops them from having dinner with you or meeting for beers after work. It just stops them from doing anything that requires energy or planning. It's got to the point where I'm trying to figure out how to make new friends at an age where it doesn't happen by accident. But you find a guy whose Facebook page says "I love backpacking" and then you find out he hasn't done it once since he got married. I'm going out with women I'm not into just so I have somebody to do something with. I'd be too scared to get seriously involved with them, though, because then they would have a "life."
Excellent insight. I was trying to articulate what having-a-life really means. So in this sense, having-a-life means that your duties are supposed to be active, but your entertainments are passive.
If your entertainments are active, perhaps the implication is that you must be a loser in the other areas -- not accruing enough status, money, friends, etc., since you have energy left over. And that isn't completely untrue; sacrifices are necessary for any project. (Although, for me, it has always been the stuff that I did for no good reason which brought me the best jobs and the strongest relationships).
But if someone has no dreams apart from passive entertainments... I don't know how they even get through the day.
It's funny, I always think the opposite. Whenever I'm working hard at my job during the week and then just eating and drinking with friends on the weekends, I feel like don't "have a life." I do these things most often for lack of other opportunities, and then I start to feel don't have anything more interesting to do than eat and drink and talk. At these junctures, I start thinking more about potential activities, projects and travel opportunities in order to get my "life" going again.
Clubs (not the music type), Meetup.com, user groups.
I believe this is quite similar to bringing your mind back to the breath in sitting meditation in Vipassana and similar practices, though others may correct me. The difference here is that it's perhaps somehow more obvious when your mind has strayed from its object. In fact, there are forms of walking meditation in Vipassana and other practices. These focus -- again, I believe -- much more on the walking: the walking and its sensations are the object. Generally you would walk up and down a short stretch; this avoid the worry of a route, or how to return to the starting point.
I just have a lot to do, and when I do have downtime, I prefer to spend it on sites like Hacker News. That's all.
They're also good for just relaxing.
I suspect Smoking works the same way.
"Thousands of tired, nerve-shaken, over-civilized people are beginning to find out that going to the mountain is going home; that wildness is necessity; that mountain parks and reservations are useful not only as fountains of timber and irrigating rivers, but as fountains of life."
I find more enjoyment in a simple hike through a forest than I've had at work for a very long time. Also, I find that when I go back to work after a trip to the forest or even just a walk outside the city, I feel better and am less crabby about going back to work. I think this is something that is sorely lacking in many people's lives. Not recreation but just being out in whatever wild we have left. Aaand now I sound like a crazy hippie.