Paradoxically, when I had all the time in the world I frittered it away on video games and the internet.
Now that I have multiple kids and my time is extremely constrained, I am very efficient with my time usage. I listen to audiobooks while doing the dishes. I plan in my mind exactly which programming tasks I want to accomplish as soon as the kids are in bed so that I can do them quickly and still have time to spend with my wife.
Alternately: When you have a wife and kids and job you like, a lot of your most important needs are well met -- if you can keep juggling everything.
Someone with hours and hours to do nothing likely isn't getting laid, isn't making much money, isn't intellectually gratified, etc. So you play games to occupy yourself to keep from going bonkers.
People underestimate how incredibly hard it is to pull yourself out of habits born from socioeconomic factors. Video games give you an alternate reality, likely much better than your own.
It wasn't a criticism of video games and if you are suggesting I am underestimating something, I got myself off the street a few years ago of my own efforts.
I still play plenty of videogames. It's something I can drop at will as I get my act together, make the connections I need to make, etc. I like games and my kids always joked "Video games are our only education."
But the reality is I would rather have a life and if I had more of a life, that fact would drive a lot of my activities and there simply wouldn't be time -- or need -- to play games for hours.
You're so right - video games shouldn't even have been mentioned. As human ingenuity goes, there's infinite ways to "waste time".
I've spent many hours with the family playing MineCraft, and it's an amazing way to teach things like not being selfish, being cooperative, etc. to children because they experience the effects or lack of in compacted real time without permanent real-world impact.
I homeschooled my sons. After seeing how vastly superior Gungan Frontier and a similar Sim game were to my "pen and paper" style simulation in my college class on environmental biology, I went through their games and decided which games I would count as educational and for which subject.
Their joke grew out if conversations that went something like this:
Son blurts obscure historical factoid.
Me: "Where the hell did you learn that?!"
Son names video game he learned it from. Punchline: "Video games are our only education." (Vin Diesel movie line, so another excellent reason to say it to me.)
They now have a blog where that's the descriptor, basically.
Personally, I owe my English skills to videogames. While I later continued with proper education, the basics of grammar and vocabulary (as well as many incredibly subject-specific words) I've learned from, in order: Star Trek: Generations, Fallout, and StarCraft. I fondly remember me sitting in front of the first of these games with English/Polish dictionary and translating things on the screen word for word.
Based on the sound of his typing -- which sounds like his dad typing and I know his typing speed because I met him in typing class in high school -- my oldest son probably types at about 80wpm. This is thanks to online games with chat functions. You need to "talk" fast to coordinate with your teammates and stay on top of your duties in the game.
That's very true. Another related phenomenon that improved my typing speed is games that require execution of a lot of complex actions very quickly. Playing them competitively essentially forces you to master random access to your keyboard. In StarCraft, after grokking the core mechanics, your next primary improvement would be raising your APM (actions per minute). In terms of an OODA loop[0], most players are constrained by the Act part. So if you wanted to win, you had to master the art of issuing keyboard+mouse commands at a rate of 3 per second (= ~180 APM, which isn't even progamer level).
I was Director of Community Life for the oldest set of gifted support email lists on the internet while I was a homeschooling parent. It was common knowledge in those circles that the best way to improve typing speed for kids was to encourage them to get involved in things like online games.
My son was already a gamer. He hated his typing program. I told him he could quit doing practice typing as one of his assignments if he exceeded 35wpm -- which is my typical typing speed and I had a typing class in high school and can type about 60wpm when I am focused and yadda.
I also told him online gaming was a known way to hit a better speed and that's likely a factor in him going that route. He was gleefully happy to give up typing practice as one of his formal lessons.
I've always hoped this was a common knowledge, but unfortunately it somehow never reached my parents or my teachers.
> He hated his typing program.
I remember those typing practice programs. I always hated them. Super boring, couldn't stand them for more than 2 minutes.
Much later on (and well after I've achieved high typing speeds) I've discovered The Typing of The Dead - a House of The Dead clone where you shoot zombies by correctly typing words. For me, that was the ultimate typing program: it gave the same exercises, but in the context where I could spend hours in front of it. I suppose that was an early form of what we know today as "gamification".
I don't remember what typing program he had. Each of my sons had their own typing program because they had different learning styles.
I was very goal oriented. If they could meet the standard, they could move on to do something else instead. Where they exceeded grade level expectations across the board for some subject, I let them do whatever they felt like doing as "gifted enrichment."
For science, I got my oldest anything he was interested in -- books to read, magazine subscriptions, whatever he wanted -- because at age 13 he was talking slow and repeating himself a lot to explain the Theory of Relativity to me. This was enormously helpful in getting me through some of my later upper class college classes.
I honestly don't know if that's true. Everyone I have ever known who was supposedly being "lazy" turned out to have some serious personal issues, often issues that were not being identified.
In my experience, if you want to cure "laziness," the best thing to do is identify the underlying cause of the failure to get anything done and address that.
I homeschooled two special-needs sons who had a lot of issues that did not resolve for being lectured or something. They resolved by figuring why X was happening and addressing that.
Sometimes other people find it empowering to get that point of view put out there. It's an epiphany for some people that they aren't actually lazy like everyone has always told them. They just don't have the energy for some reason and addressing that can help make their life finally work after decades of frustration.
I’m very nostalgic about the countless hours I frittered away on video games and the internet as an adolescent. Part of me thinks it made me the person I am today, who I am proud of. I recently joined a Counter Strike team with work and had some of the most fun times I can think of recently. I compare that with the time I put aside to learn 3D modelling, which was fun in its own way but required more self motivation and the satisfaction took a lot more time to achieve. It made me question what society accepts as a valid way to spend spare time, as well as the purpose of how we spend our spare time.
> It made me question what society accepts as a valid way to spend spare time
Well, to be brutally honest with you, it's one thing for you to be proud of yourself for playing video games, but why would anyone else see that as something pride-worthy?
Typically, one takes justifiable pride for accomplishments that stand up to external scrutiny. That usually comes in the form of the accomplishment having an element of sacrifice, of pain and difficulty, of opportunity costs paid, and of a result that stands on its own as something not everyone can do. I am proud of some of my adventures; proud of some of my work; proud of some of the artistic things I have created. None of them are extremely amazing in the grand scheme of things, and I don't let any of it get to my head, but they do give me stories to tell at the bar that aren't dismissed with a wave of the hand as being frittered-away time.
Video games, on the other hand, are not exactly grand sacrificial effort. I can't imagine telling someone I was proud of myself for spending a few hours killing orcs on a screen while eating processed snack food alone in my underwear.
> as well as the purpose of how we spend our spare time.
It's only "spare" if you've really satisfied yourself in your best judgement of what you could otherwise be doing.
I like to put Slack and Laziness on a continuum. Laziness is putting things off, avoiding important tasks, pawning them off on others, rationalizing why you shouldn't bother, finding easier ways out even if the end result isn't as good, cutting corners. From the article:
> I was supposed to renew my car registration today. I haven’t opened the Web site.
That's classic laziness. Sure, the consequences can be dealt with later, a day or two without driving won't be the end of the world, but it also took about as much effort to write this self-effacing article as it would have to just renew the insurance and move on.
Slack, on the opposite side of the spectrum (and before the word was co-opted by a program that ironically takes up all possible Slack), is free time that you carve out of the world with your actions. Slack is arranging things so that you have time to relax, time to "surf down the luck plane" that you have created for yourself, so that you can allow things to proceed knowing that at the end of the slope, you're not actually in a worse off position than when you started. Slack is paid vacation time, where laziness is unemployment. Slack is a glass of wine at the end of the day, laziness is beer for breakfast. Slack is sitting in the hot tub after you work out, laziness is sitting in the bathtub after you eat a microwaved dinner. Slack is posting on HN on a cloudy Saturday morning while the kids (with breakfast in their tummies) watch a bit of TV, laziness is posting on HN when you're supposed to be writing a program at 3:00 on a Thursday afternoon.
Video games are something you can do in your slack time, or they're something you can do because you're lazy. That's the difference between a healthy hobby and a damaging addiction.
> Well, to be brutally honest with you, it's one thing for you to be proud of yourself for playing video games, but why would anyone else see that as something pride-worthy?
Putting aside the fact that many people have made highly successful careers out of playing video games, why should I care at all what other people think about it? Life is too short to only do the things that other people think are "pride-worthy". Do the things that make you happy.
> Well, to be brutally honest with you, it's one thing for you to be proud of yourself for playing video games, but why would anyone else see that as something pride-worthy?
For exactly the same reasons anyone thinks that reading novels is pride-worthy. People who plays some of the more complicated niche games have some respect from me at least.
Similarly getting good at a game requires dedication and work, so people with good ranks in games also has some respect from me.
My sons always said "Video games are our only education" because of the many times I was astonished they knew some obscure historical detail and they had learned it from a video game.
My oldest, who is math challenged, was livid when I finally successfully explained to him what Algebra was and he went "I've been doing that for years while playing video games!!!" He's still mad about it and it's probably at least two decades later.
Well, to be brutally honest with you
I read somewhere that "people who value brutal honesty value brutality more than honesty." As someone fond of the saying "I'm too truthful to be good," I took that to heart.
I’m pretty convinced that some games have made me smarter. It sounds daft, but I remember completing The Witness and felt like I had transcended somehow. Still haven’t found the right way to put it on my CV
I should clarify that I’m not proud of myself for playing video games, but that they were an important part of my life which no doubt shaped the person I am today. I do think people can be proud of playing video games though. The amount of hard work required to get into the top rank of competitive games such as Counter Strike is no different from any other sport. It’s a deep game with, I would argue, more to learn than most traditional sports.
Yes, I completely agree video games can be an unhealthy pursuit to the detriment of one’s life. If I’d put some of those hours I spent playing video games at uni into my course work I would’ve got better grades. I actually stopped playing games for the better part of my twenties to pursue more valid hobbies, such as photography, which I’m glad of. It made me a more interesting person. I came back to playing games a few years ago and realised I had given up something in my life that gave me so much joy. I think it’s hard to develop that deep connection to anything that we don’t do when we’re adolescents.
Really liked the separation between slack and laziness!
> Typically, one takes justifiable pride for accomplishments that stand up to external scrutiny. That usually comes in the form of the accomplishment having an element of sacrifice, of pain and difficulty
I think this is where a lot of people might lose themselves, and I might be misinterpreting you here, but: I think an important distinction is that people should take pride in providing value for their community, not having it be approved by them. Otherwise we might end up acting contrary to our beliefs, and feeling a hollow sense of achievement in the end.
Also, by your definition of hard work being pride-worthy, many gamers might meet that criteria, especially the professionals (?). Games can often be more competitive and demanding than anything I've experienced in real life. I've only teetered on the edge of competitive levels, so in a sense I wasted a lot of my time, since it all wasn't deliberate, but parts of it were definitely hard work, filled with passion.
I feel this deeply. I was extremely lazy in high school and college and then got my act together gradually throughout my 20s to the point where I feel like I no longer waste much time. I've experienced some success and accomplished goals as a result, but when I look back on my life, I remember those hours wasted playing video games most fondly.
There's a motivational saying that when you die you get to meet the person you could have become, and that's your individual heaven/hell. I've got a nagging fear that maybe if I learn to speak French or sell a business or whatever, raise a family, grow old and die, I'll come face to face with the guy who played 10,000 hours of Civ.
You can't play 10,000 hours of Civ. At some point, the game become repetitive because the possibilities space is very limited. EU4, on the other hand, has pretty much unlimited possibilities. You can negotiate deals with neighboring countries, there are way more countries (whole world actually) than in Civ, you have a complicated Trade system that can make you money, a more sophisticated religion structure that you can use for your advantage...
Me too. I remember my countless hours playing (arguably wasted) diablo 2 very fondly. I still recall a lot of the detailed stats of specific characters I had built. Also helps I had sunk the hours playing with my partner at the time, so it was also a bit of a bonding moment. Didn’t help my grades any though.
You don't have to remember something perpetually for it to be worthwhile. I've got a young dog, and I've spent 1-2 hours (shared with partner) every single day for the last 18 months outside walking. I don't remember all of those walks, even some of the ones that were very enjoyable at the time. But I enjoyed them at the time, (or maybe I didn't, it was pouring rain etc).
Video games are an easy target, but you can make the same argument about any lesiure activity. Something doesn't have to have an output to be worth spending time on.
This describes me very well. What the hell was I doing with all that time during my 20s? I wasn't out hiking up a storm, I wasn't making a lot of music, I wasn't out drinking with friends at every chance. I was inside doing nothing, shitposting online, watching trash TV that I can barely remember the plots of now. Work was productive, but when I went home, I left it at work... Relationship was stable, but I didn't max out every minute of it when I could...
Now, as soon as the kids are in bed, virtually every scrap of time is used for something productive. Except, obviously, for lazy Saturday mornings posting on HN ;-)
I've had a similar experience. There is something about scarcity of time that breeds discipline. Whenever I go through a period of life where I have to spend a huge amount of time on some particular task project I always think "man, when this is over I'm going to be able to use all this time to do X,Y,Z. It's gonna be great!" And then the project ends and I essentially waste all of my newly found free time. I end up accomplishing less, even on my side projects somehow.
Yea there seems to be some thing of a positive feedback loop that one can get into. I’ve experienced this multiple times too. When I had a boring and easy job I had all sorts of aspirations of doing a side business or learning some new stuff etc. I ended up doing none of that and mostly playing games instead. When I had a busy (but interesting) job I ended up doing side projects, socializing a lot more and generally being more productive outside of work. Something like momentum from one activity carrying through to others.
Let me guess: liberal arts degree with tens of thousands (hundreds of thousands?) in loans. Living in an extremely expensive city. Dating other unserious romantic people with no plans for a family, who could afford one anyway?
I wish we (and people in similar situations) were more honest about these bad decisions. We need to warn our young people against falling into similar traps. It’s not victim blaming, it’s just honesty about what’s happening.
I had a friend in college who had a way with words and was an activist. But her dream was as a fiction writer, and last I checked in on her she has gotten nowhere with that.
The things she could have accomplished writing nonfiction...
You know how we sometimes don’t talk to childhood friends because they saw a better or more hopeful version of us and it’s too painful to think what the person we were would think of the person we’ve become? Turns out that goes both ways sometimes, and the reason you haven’t heard from them might be that they don’t want to remind you either. It would be cruel, maybe even dishonor the time we had together.
I don't think this really is limited to liberal arts and big city urban life. I know this group might be highly represented but you have many other types of people who struggle with the exact same problems.
Not everyone who gets lung cancer smokes but it's a hell of a risk factor.
A lot of debt without a clear "shovel ready" career path to pay it off combined with a high cost of living sure isn't a recipe for a fulfilling life outside of work and if your work doesn't do it for you you're SOL at that point.
Liberal arts degrees aren’t for everyone, but I sure wish more people understood the teachings of history, sociology, philosophy, and the arts. It’s also telling that in this economy the jobs available to young people are increasingly condensed into unlivable metropolises.
I don’t have any answers to all my questions, but I know something’s not balanced in this equation.
> We need to warn our young people against falling into similar traps. It’s not victim blaming, it’s just honesty about what’s happening.
It is victim blaming.
Rather than warning young people about the dangers of a solid education, we should make getting that education not dangerous. We fucked up universities with layers of bureaucracy, bizarre funding and compensation schemes, and vocational focus. Admitting and fixing that is being honest about what's happening. Telling people not to get degrees in the fields that might fix this just makes it worse.
Liberal arts aren't a solid education for survival. I'd rather the major/minor system to allow people to study these things while getting a useful qualification alongside.
It's possible to reject the notion that one has to justify one's existence in a capitalist society by getting The Right Degree and spending Forty Hours A Week Making Money For Someone Else.
In this case it seems like the author has only halfway rejected that notion. If you're gonna do it, you gotta do it all the way lol.
The great thing about a capitalist society is that you get to decide for yourself what you want to do and how you want to live. And fortunately you don’t get to decide for other people.
That's not true - you HAVE to do what society has decided is productive. We're under a person mocking liberal arts degrees.
This in spite of the fact that we throw away enough food to feed the world.
Capitalism isn't inherently evil but it isn't by default the best methodology just because America claims it is. A great example of rampantly shitty capitalism is in the phillipines, for example, where we don't even have to mention wage slavery to point out the issues with capitalism.
It seems really bad that I relate to parts of this even though I am still not 25.
I mean things are good with me, I am grateful for everything I have. But once in a while I just feel really empty and that I could be doing way more that I am doing right now rather than lazing around. We are a weird generation for sure ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
I definitely am in the same boat as you. My day to day life is great - good job, financially stable, good relationship, even play in a couple bands (when there's not a pandemic inhibiting us from peforming).
But there constantly feels like something is missing. Most days I have 4-6 hours of time that is spent doing near nothing. In the back of my mind is always "I should be doing x project" or "I should be practicing y skill" and then I end up feeling guilty just for relaxing.
I always go back and forth between "It's totally okay to be lazy. You have a life that affords it." and "If you want to be truly great at something, you need to work for it." The challenging part seems to be finding the healthy medium between the two, which is about where the author feels too, I think.
I know that this is a genre of American millennial/Gen X mid-life crisis clickbait, but it reminds me a lot of journal entries I wrote when I was not very invested in the present moment. I'd either look forward into the future or backwards into the past. But eventually I got tired of doing that, of measuring accomplishments, of basically robbing myself of the joy of experiencing life. Some of this can be attributed to time and life experience. Some of it maybe can be attributed to me not handling American cities so well.
The most important change started when I began to travel. Just spending a bit of time in Europe showed this neurotic American with overachiever tendencies so much about how to relax and live a little. It was a complete shock to the system, and in a very good way. It forced me to address -- at that moment -- how would I live life and enjoy it if I didn't have my career and "accomplishments" and lived in a society where most people derive fulfillment outside of that? I began to realize that my life was full of many proverbial Michelin-star rated meals that I was wolfing down like a burger -- that's no way to go about things!
Being back stateside, I guess I appreciate that even more because I once again recognize how very much abnormal that is in much of the country. I have to catch myself because it's so easy to slip back into keeping up with Jones who live inside my head.
This essay expresses the futility of ambition against distraction as well as the unproductive cycle of comparing yourself to others as a means of understanding your potential. I have certainly felt this way, and I imagine many do.
I take comfort in the idea that the world (and our lives) are constantly rocked by random circumstance and opportunity, and while there is a lot one can do to maximize our realized potential, we can't be completely responsible for our fulfillment.
Succinctly put! I can't count the number of times I've considered starting a project or something and thought "Nah, those guys did it better, I'll never be that good, what's the point..."
Or: why we spend too much time focused on goals and accomplishments instead of effort, perseverance, and the joy of the journey.
Actually for me it’s mainly the fear of doing something trite, that’s already been done a million times. I always think “oh what’s the point, this has been done before”.
But I’m starting to think that everybody hits that stage. People great at what they do hit it, keep pushing out of either strong will or just curiosity, and end up making it (or a facet of it) their own.
Funny piece. It can be so easy to waste time when we have the internet. I think the most dangerous distractions are the ones that feel productive but don’t actually work toward your goals. For example, browsing hacker news. Such an activity is useful every now and then, but at least for myself I often scroll around only to realize later that it was a massive waste of time I could’ve spent working on something I care about. I think the brain justifies it since hey, at least I’m “learning” something (not really).
Even something like an addictive videogame is designed to make you feel productive by giving you levels to progress through etc—fundamentally I think we all have a desire to produce, it’s just easy to spend time putting that energy into the wrong forms of productive activity, since these are usually easier and less isolating than actually producing crafts or products.
I find browsing hackernews to be one of the more beneficial activities I can do for 5-20 minutes as a break between more mentally taxing activities. Meditation, going for a walk, getting a snack or a drink, and a quick chat with a friend are other activities I consider both beneficial and short duration.
But I had, and I can tell from experience, it's the one Internet activity where I find it hard to determine its net value.
With anything else - TV shows, Reddit, Facebook, browsing memes - I can tell the marginal value becomes negative very quickly (after satiating the basic need to relax/unwind). So it makes sense to spend some, but only a little time on this.
But with HN... it feels like the above, except every other week I'll find some thought that will improve my understanding of the world. Every other month I'll find a tool that solves a problem or improves something in the projects I'm working on. Every couple years I hit something that essentially alters the course of my career. And around people I work with, I'm known to be the guy that, when told a problem, half of the time will point out a solution mentioned in some HN comment a year earlier (thank $deity for Algolia making finding it again easier).
So bottomline, I suspect the total net value of HN for me, after accounting for opportunity costs, is actually slightly positive. At least the procrastinator in me keeps saying that, conveniently omitting the confidence interval, which is absurdly wide.
I would advise you to fight any addiction your kids might have, especially gaming/other internet points addictions. Gamification is a fix that people addicted to dopamine rushes need, but children shouldn't require it. Instead I would work on framing work in a positive way.
The gamification of Duolingo is something that has really worked for me (as an adult). It has all the parts of an addictive mobile game that keep you coming back: a streak that notifies you if you're in danger of losing it (this is the one that really works for me), social rankings, fun graphics, in game currency. I have a 410 day Spanish streak as of this morning!
I took French in middle/high school with the standard lecture/hw school structure and was a lot less successful than I've been with Duolingo. Duolingo alone probably isn't enough to really learn a language but combined with other resources it provides a great structure to keep you committed and provides a great foundation to build from.
I believe his point is not that gamification doesn't work for learning, but rather that it has a nasty side effect of training your brain to be more susceptible to addiction/gamification everywhere, even where you don't want it.
I understand that and definitely a valid point especially for kids. I'm just making the point that in some situations there can be real benefits of using gamification. Like most things balance is important.
Duolingo is great as a beginning to language study but that’s all there is to it. If you have a 410 day Spanish streak it’s time to start reading Spanish children’s books or watching telenovelas or Narcos, anything but continuing with Duolingo.
Duolingo takes you 10 minutes a day. If it's the only thing you're doing, I agree it's not sufficient, but I disagree with stopping doing it - it has mechanisms to reinforce what you learned.
But what you’ve learned isn’t all that valuable from a language perspective. It doesn’t matter how well is reinforcing lessons of those lessons weren’t very valuable in the first place.
Yeah I agree (sorry I edited the original post to essentially say this while you wrote the comment). I also took a semester of Spanish in college and Duolingo let me (barely) place into the second level class. I've also been watching Spanish media (Telemundo, Casa de Papel, Pasion de Gavilanes) and just started a Spanish meetup group to practice speaking.
What Duolingo has been best for is getting a baseline vocab and familiarity with the language. It also lets you stay fresh/keep making progress when you don't have time or mental effort to spend more than a few minutes a day.
I have been on a streak for weeks, usually in the top 10 of that week's tournament, yet I am actually making no real progress in actually learning the language. Nothing is really going to beat rote memorization and full immersion I feel.
This isn't as big of a problem for latin based languages (English native) however.
Perfect illustration of GP point: you played for 410 days, yet you only learned the content of what is probably only a few hours of focused learning.
I’ve tested Duolinguo for languages I want to learn, for some I already know and a language BA/MA holder I can guarantee that Duolingo is total crap. This is just a feel good app. Just like another post was mentioning hiw note taking can do more harm than good because it feels like work, Duolingo is given the user the feeling of work and progression while very very little knowledge is gained. Let’s take Japanese as an example. Hiragana and katakana are each divided in 4 parts: a user can easily spend weeks on that and feel he’s making progress. University student on the other side learn that in a week... (for slow learners)
As a language learner (working on my 8th right now), I dabble in Duolingo from time to time and agree that it provides contact time with the language, and any contact time helps reinforce memory.
Language learning in general though, I have found, is not that amenable to gamification. Some learning methods may be more efficient than others, but even with the most efficient methods, real language learning is still inherently and unavoidably a slog. So if you come across a method that makes it "easy", chances are it's not actually working. It's too easy to trick oneself to think that one is making progress, and then find oneself unable to communicate when called upon to do so.
In the polyglot (ie actual practitioners of extreme language learning) community, there are many super talented language learners but a common pattern among them is the use of surprising traditional learning methods. Most do not use Duolingo but instead elect to do things the hard way, by actually going through workbooks, talking to tutors on iTalki, making mistakes, exposing themselves to media, translating, etc. Space repetition tools are sometimes used. Pimsleur is good for speaking, but not reading/writing so it doesn't get used that much.
There are clips of YouTubers where creators show you how to learned a language to a conversational level in 24 hours etc. but if you look more closely, the experiments are highly edited and the actual outcome is not that great.
I've resigned myself to the fact that the way to actually to learn a language is to jump in and do it the hard way, rather than through easier shortcuts. Language learning is about creating new reflexes and creating new pathways int he brain and there's no easy way to do that (the brain itself resists) without discomfort.
That said, tools like Duolingo do create fun and interest in a language -- and fun is needed to sustain oneself through the journey.
Interesting, I think I largely agree. However, I think the polyglot community is probably not a great representation of what would work for most people. For a lot of people, myself included, I think the choice is realistically between lower commitment (and lower quality/speed of learning) options and nothing at all. At least for myself it would take a lot of motivation to consistently do workbooks for years, major props to the people who can though.
> Language learning in general though, I have found, is not that amenable to gamification. Some learning methods may be more efficient than others, but even with the most efficient methods, real language learning is still inherently and unavoidably a slog. So if you come across a method that makes it "easy", chances are it's not actually working
Go to a foreign country and try to get laid. Genuine intrinsic motivation, and the difficulty increases with age. If nothing else, this education is good preparation for a career in business
Heh, that's the usual advice. However if you ask certain polyglots, they will tell you that as a general rule (exceptions exist), being in a foreign country or having a romantic partner aren't necessary or sufficient conditions, and in fact can work against language learning.
How so?
Using a romantic partner as a language-learning partner gets old for said person after a while, especially if you're not actively making progress on the language on the side. Unless said romantic partner is a language teacher, it can be annoying for them to constantly be correcting your mistakes. Over time, this annoyance can actually harm the relationship. Also most native speakers of a language aren't always good teachers -- they may know how to use the language but usually can't explain how things work. It's better to get a tutor whose job is to instruct, bear with your mistakes, and go home after. It's easier to for someone to bear with your mistakes if they don't have to spend all their free time with you.
As for language immersion by living in a country, you'd be surprised how that doesn't really work unless you're actively learning on your own or taking classes. Case in point: I lived in a French-speaking province for 4 years but can barely speak French -- I just never bothered learning. You'd think necessity would force one to learn but there are so many ways to get around actually doing it (e.g. hanging out with expats, using gestures/hand signs, Google Translate, etc.) On the other hand, there are folks who've never been in a Francophone country who can speak French at a high level, often through active learning. In fact, many polyglots often become fluent in a language without ever setting foot in the language's country of origin.
The key really is putting in the work. Getting laid in a foreign country may help kickstart the process, but to achieve working fluency, there are no real shortcuts.
(well, there is one, which is that you already know a related language. This is the only major accelerant. You can learn Afrikaans very quickly if you speak Dutch. Similarly for Malay -> Indonesian, Portuguese -> Spanish ... interestingly, this pair is asymmetric: Spanish -> Portuguese is harder than vice-versa)
Beware of gamification. There is a great talk[1] discussing intrinsic versus extrinsic motivation as it applies to video games, with the key insight being that extrinsic rewards decrease intrinsic motivation.
The speaker references a lot of research that seems worth digging into too.
> I think the most dangerous distractions are the ones that feel productive but don’t actually work toward your goals. For example, browsing hacker news.
This is why I question curiosity as the prescribed value from HN leadership. In its place one could've easily said learning or mastery.
> I think the most dangerous distractions are the ones that feel productive but don’t actually work toward your goals. For example, browsing hacker news.
Time to set up my emacs config to manage my life and stop wasting time.
When you increase the signal to noise ratio, it makes it even harder to stop reading. For all practical purposes, the internet is infinite; no matter how high you set your standards, gradually you will find enough sources to fill all your free time.
During the last few years, I switched from reading low quality content to reading high quality content. I am better informed about various things. But the problem of spending too much time reading remains unchanged.
Even among people trying to be productive you sometimes see vortexes of distraction, for instance around note-taking. I like note taking (apps and paper) but I think there is such thing as an over-reliance on them. They promote collecting over being. Perhaps also they stop people from completing their own ideas. One becomes Penelope, weaving the burial shroud of a thought forever.
Note taking can be pernicious because it feels like doing something but it also gives an excuse to not put forth your own thoughts until you have all the pieces. Then they become so large they are unweildy. The more notes, the less supple.
It's ironic because the same tools can be used to empower your thinking[0]. Instead of collecting notes, note taking utilities can be used as a sort of L2 cache when you're trying to think something through. E.g. most of my problem solving involves repeated sessions with a text file, in which I dump my stream of thought and refine it. Sometimes it means literally talking with myself via a text file, sometimes it's constructing an artifact (like a prioritized list of things to do). Same tool, slightly different approach.
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[0] - Or damage your brain. The fact that I can't think things through unless I'm writing thoughts down or drawing diagrams may be a sign of improved quality of thoughts, or a sign of me no longer being able to think without a crutch.
I think your [0] note points to a hard truth of life. You have to be aware of how you're used to thinking so you can challenge yourself to make your brain work in new ways. I don't think this is by any means essential but I think it can be immensely useful to not always default to the same habit. 80% of the time, it's ok to exploit what you know, but maybe that remaining 20% of the time try thinking in a new way. The hard part is finding those new ways and not being too lazy or rushed to skip it.
HN, Facebook, Reddit, Messenger, YouTube, news websites and dozens of other sites are on a block list from 0900-1800 M-F via a super useful plugin for Firefox (on mobile now and I can't remember it!)
what sort of gamification is there on HN, upvotes not much else? Maybe it's plausible to strike a deal with oneself not to look at upvotes or downvotes, I think that would make comments more sincere. It would be great to have a setting not to display upvotes and down-votes on your own comments but to still be able to respond on threads tab
Generally I'm glad that HN has minimal gamification, at least compared to the worst offenders reddit, fb, twitter etc.
Watching sports and memorizing athletes’ stats is another waste of time a lot of people partake in. Here’s to hoping people are more productive during this hiatus.
People are now terrified of putting down a screen and being left alone with their own thoughts for more than 30 seconds. It's horrifying what's bouncing around up in that dome, and having to process it.
But this is exactly what we did before. We got bored, we were wasting time, we were experimenting, and that's how great ideas came around.
Idk if it's just terrified, but I think we're addicted. This probably sounds ridiculous but I recently blocked some apps and sites on my phone and actually felt a little off for a day, like my sleep was weird. I think there was a slight withdrawal from the constant bombardment of stuff. It is helping kill my Facebook habit. I don't even really like the site, I just check it impulsively. It's weird.
Reddit is another one, the infinite scroll I think is addictive. Trying to kill that habit. But there is useful information on there so it's hard to disable it completely.
I have taken 3 photography related courses that all have private groups on FB. I don't use FB in any other capacity but the value of those groups is probably among the highest ROIs on the internet for me (hobby wise at least).
Yes-ish. Not that facebook is providing anything from their side but the adoption rate of the non-technical participants is sky-high. much higher than what i have seen with private forums.
I can only speculate but my guess is that all the participants are already actively using facebook and hence don't have any reasons not to join and use the private groups. Notifications are dealt with quickly because of the already implemented workflow from their side.
No need for infernal advocacy here. Reddit is to some extent the unfortunate heir of newsgroups, as well as many independent forums, so of course there is going to be a lot of interesting and useful information on it.
The thing I imagine that gives some people such a negative view is coming in contact through the brand "reddit" and being dumped into large controversial sub-reddits straight away.
A lot of people bump into a particular sub-reddit through a search result and have no idea of the dumpster fires elsewhere on the larger "reddit" site.
Pick a programming language or piece of popular tech, chances are good it has a subReddit of discussions and links to blog posts and announcements, sometimes with some of the creator/maintainer people posting.
Its helpful to get kind of organic opinions on things. See what people are saying if your shopping for something new. Its comes up in google searches a lot. At least there's no seo gaming on a reddit link.
Ive had some ok experiences on reddit too, meet ups, bought stuff, got free concert tickets once too. its hard to write the whole thing off. That might be a different era of reddit though. Its been a few years since I had something like that happen now that i think about it
Yep. I deactivated Facebook and it took a week or so to get used to not having it. I feel a lot better without it that I will probably delete it. I do want to keep messenger so that’s one of the only reasons to keep it.
True, but AFAIK, you can't keep your contacts (friends?) list when you delete the account and create a new one just on Messenger. An alternative is to deactivate the account [1] – this effectively removes your account from Facebook, but allows you to keep Messenger with all the contacts. (It probably also keeps other associated accounts, such as Instagram.) Although, it means that the moment you log into Facebook, your account comes back up, with all the relationships that were left off, tags, photos, etc.
Yes, definitely. I feel this way as well. It's not ridiculous at all. Forced withdrawal is the only way to begin recovery and get back sensitivity.
People are extremely scared of the word "addiction" though. I feel the same way about sugar and basically all carbohydrates at all and it's very challenging to talk about.
Congratulations! I’ve been fruit free and almost vegetable free for 3 years and it’s been the best time of my life. I’ve lost over 200 pounds and kept it off for longer than I ever have in 3+ decades of weight loss attempts.
Not sure about how different the effectiveness is, but I use the Freedom app to block sites at schedules times on my desktop. I also have it on my phone, but it’s not as reliable on iPhone as it sometimes randomly deactivates.
Delete the mobile apps. I scrolled reddit to infinity on my phone going through news that would make me depressed. I deleted the app and have been happy ever since. I come here twice a day for 10 minutes instead and my screen time reduced by 40minutes at least. I don’t feel gloomy all the time because of news too
FWIW I did something similar. Deleted my reddit account and now just occasionally visit specific subreddits that I used to subscribe to. I find that actually going to a subreddit to find specific content I want to look at helps break the loop of endless scrolling but I still get just as informed/entertained.
Looking at certain sites just becomes a muscle reflex. The second I'm bored, I feel the urge to look at my phone.
If you have a large enough rotation of websites, you never feel properly bored, so you can spend the entire day mindlessly browsing.
I think it's easy to tell whether you're browsing with intent or just killing time. It's just hard to close the lid and go do something else, especially if you've been doing it for so long that you forgot what "something else" is.
You can use extensions to either delete or remove the infinite scroll.
In my opinion, the infinite scroll is both addictive and fruitless. I rarely find something fun when it's buried deep in the feed. That's pretty obvious. If it was a fun post, it would've been at the top, right?
If you don't trust any extension with site-reading capability, here's a simple solution: scroll down as much as you are comfortable, and then work upwards!
It feels like how I treat junk food and snacks: I’m welcome to have as much as I want, but I have to go out of my way to get it every time. Never stock up, which in this analogy would mean never install the native app or subscribe to newsletters or notifications.
For reddit et al, I only view it on the browser. Sure, I get bombarded by popovers and alerts telling me to install the app, but I have to work my way to get to the content if I really wanted to view it.
Generating endless ideas is how my brain fights off boredom. Bringing those ideas to life is a different story. The brain is too busy generating new ideas.
I can't lay hands on a link, but there was an article about the psychological phenomenon of time passing too quickly. It was a measurable state you could detect a brain as either being in or not in.
One of the most reliable ways to reset internal time perception? Experiencing nature.
Yes. The gist was that your brain gets caught in a loop in which your perception of time was continuously skewed, leading to a constant feeling of hurrying / lacking enough time.
Spending time in nature essentially jumped your brain out of the loop, even after you returned from nature.
Think it might have been a summary of this: "Awe Expands People’s Perception of Time, Alters Decision Making, and Enhances Well-Being" (2012)
I’m afraid of boredom because I’m not loved. When we had no phone addiction, other people were talking more too. If I get my dose of speech/interaction during the day, I could quit twitter anytime. But since I regularly don’t get it, especially as a programmer where written chat is the norm as an ersatz of human interaction, then I compulsively need to read and write information and watch (*gobble) videos, and generally fall asleep to the sound of a video talking to me.
With enough human interaction and love, I come back to being an avid reader, consume little addictive networks, and don’t mind boredom.
This happened to me as I got older. Now I MUST have something like Seinfeld on to fall asleep. I cannot fall asleep in silence and darkness alone - the angst takes over. Also the accupressure mat is a life saver.
> But this is exactly what we did before. We got bored, we were wasting time, we were experimenting, and that's how great ideas came around.
Yep! I firmly believe that boredom is not just healthy, but a necessary part of life. Your mind needs downtime and your creativity and imagination need mind-numbing boredom.
Meditation is also a great way to force yourself to be alone with your thoughts. However, speaking from experience, that can lead to some uncomfortable truths -- so it's good to be prepared.
Once all of your friends are hooked on their phone, it becomes very lonely to be the only one that doesn't stare at a screen. But what people naturally yearn for is not to get bored alone, but to get bored as a group. So the "quality of bored-ness" goes down as screen usage expands.
"All of humanity's problems stem from man's inability to sit quietly in a room alone.” - Blaise Pascal, 1654 AD.
This is not a new problem, we are just experiencing a hyper version of it. Social media, the world's knowledge at your finger tips, is distraction on steroids.
I have the complete opposite feeling. As long as you filter yourself fairly well on which topics you read, HN can be immensely useful. You can learn about new things that can help you a lot in your career, that you otherwise may have missed.
There is a lot that I know which was relevant but is not anymore. A large percentage of knowledge needs constant replacing and often I do not know with what until I‘m exposed. HN gives me exposure. It is part of my solution to staying on top of developments. It does not provide answers to questions I have but to questions I should have had.
Excellent way to phrase it. For lock of a better way of saying it, you don't know what you don't know. You can become comfortable with certain things, but the pace at which stuff moves in this industry makes you stale if you don't at least look at the trends every few months or so. you could always be in the camp that says you should look at new trends, but I'm of the complete opposite viewpoint. Some of these new trends which people love to hate ended up working really well in production for me, and being on HN gave me the exposure I needed to them. It also gives you people that have used these technologies in production, and have opinions on them that might be helpful.
Of course I researched the decision outside of HN. But just the superficial exposure you have to so many different things that you wouldn't have by just browsing around is invaluable. And just by hearing something like a name can take you on a tangent that can be very fruitful.
Case in point: I'm very familiar with Kafka, and the discussions on here usually lead to hinting about new technologies that you may not hear of just by reading a Kafka threat. Things like NATS, Jetstream, liftbridge, pulsar, and the list goes on. Having that kind of exposure just knowing that alternatives are out there, and people having real-world experience with them is really useful.
I don't think we should think in terms like that. We don't always have to be working toward a goal. There's nothing won't with reading, taking a nap, it sound other unproductive activities. Also, not everyone has big lofty goals of self accomplishment. For some, constant goal seeking can be both stressful and emotionally difficult when goals aren't met.
We should be careful to paint with such a broad brush.
On the other hand, why do so many highly skilled people push themselves so hard? I do not have any stats, it's just an observation looking at all the people in my environment, and then some public exponents.
I've grown up in a family where there was always enough, yet not much in excess. Most grown up people I knew in my childhood would probably complain that they would want more, yet they mostly just did their job, had enough and enjoyed their family life.
That is also true for some of the people I later met at university and then in business, but I get the impression that quite a lot of them, even though they have much better jobs than the people from my childhood, invest a lot of their free time trying to pursue their goal. And it is extremely rare that I see someone actually reaching it. It is far more often that their life becomes a lot more miserable, think divorce or similar.
Now don't ge me wrong, I think pursuing ones goals can be extremely valuable. But for a lot of people, pursuing a goal and trying to be productive with it while at the same time being married, raising kids, earning money, staying healthy and doing chores is most likely not going to lead anywhere good. So why is it so hard for smart people to accept that fact, and enjoy one or two hours of lazyness every day? Why do people take Elon Musk as an example, if even he himself decribes his life as not too nice?
> I think the most dangerous distractions are the ones that feel productive but don’t actually work toward your goals. For example, browsing hacker news.
Browsing HN has never felt productive to me. At times useful, entertaining, informative, thought-provoking, and at others less so, when it can seem annoying, repetitive, pointless and so on. But never "productive".
> It can be so easy to waste time when we have the internet.
I'm just really glad I did college when the only thing distracting on the internet was Slashdot and you could only access it with a computer attached to an ethernet cable.
I'm almost certain I would not have made it past Freshman year if I had a smartphone.
I have the opposite experience. I can recall discussions I've read months or years ago. In aggregate, it added a bit of depth to my perception of the world. They gave me a lot more vocabulary to process the world around me, as do good books.
Life recently told the meaning of 'know-how' and real life has no competitor.
I spent countless hours fiddling with git tutorials, the best branching, workflow.. Nothing was even close to when I had to actual work with it on a tight rope.
Curiosity intellect is mostly dead baggage in ones head, knowing how to apply ideas as tools, to actually do something, and even have it in mind when you work so that you know you wrote enough, commit will be long, or merge will be ugly. It all balances out on itself and you actually feel light and capable.
Reddit was a huge time waste for me. I'd spend entire mornings and nearly all night browsing the site and arguing with other users. I wish I could get all of it back.
I don't know if internet is really the culprit to how easy it is to waste time. We have long created enough distraction to fill a entire lifespan.
Before I've encountered any digital computing device, I used to just play Sudoku during class. Or read novels; I had a textbook that carved, inside which hid a small novel. Or, just day-dream and think about stuff.
On the other hand, I enjoyed Sudoku and novels. I don't consider them to be a complete waste of time. In retrospect, they made my childhood better.
Its funny because its hard to gauge – the things you think are the most productive feed strongly into your confirmation bias, so maybe they aren't really that productive after all. But that's fine.
In general though, I prefer the idea of going "all in" in whatever I'm doing. If I'm going to play video games, I'm making sure I have a damn good time doing it. If I'm going to put in work, I'm gonna make sure it gets done. Distractions will do you in in both cases. Ruin your fun time and mess up your productivity.
I worked for a big multinational bank and was reasonably comfortable but sometimes not very busy and most of the usual online distractions was blocked except for hacker news. I spent so much time reading hacker news that it was probably a big influence in me deciding to quit my job to join a bootstrapped startup as a CTO. Also probably the biggest mistake of my life. In the aftermath I ended up working as a contractor in a remote office for a tech company to recover my finances. During that time I used to spend my afternoon coffee break reading a newsletter from Matt Levine and I think that's probably one of the primary influences that made me end up working in finance again.
I completely agree with you. Some other distractions are the many intelectual hobbies overpraised out there, two of them which I know very closely: learning languages and reading lots of books (novels).
These activities by itself don’t yell any value by themselves and still free like a super productive to the extent of feeling incredibly productive. One should not forget that intelectual hobbies are in fact still hobbies.
I'm in my 50's and I read less now, it's because writers are now younger than me and they tell stories I've already lived. I suspect all older folk might feel the same? Writing is for the young? Being published is for the young?
I've been thinking a lot lately about a line from the movie Master and Commander, a euology (though perhaps not much 'eu' about it) for a dead character.
"The simple truth is, not all of us become the men we once hoped we might be"
Spoken by a character who very much has. I don't really have much comment beyond that.
Funny and all too familiar, especially during Covid. For a 700+ page take on this theme, check out The Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann. If you finish it, you'll at least feel like you accomplished something worthwhile.
"Abundance is harder for us to handle than scarcity.If tired after an intercontinental flight, go to the gym for some exertion instead of resting. Also, it is a well known trick that if you need something urgently done, give the task to the busiest (or second busiest) person in the office. Most humans manage to squander their free time, as free time makes them dysfunctional, lazy, and unmotivated - the busier they get, the more active they are at other tasks."
> the busier they get, the more active they are at other tasks.
Wow does that ever ring true for me right now...
Over the last couple of months I've had some major work items at about 80% complete but just couldn't find the motivation to push them over the line. I'd have free time but I'd always waste it.
A couple weeks ago, an exec came to me and a couple of colleagues and asked us for a major assignment to be complete in two weeks. At first I balked but after thinking it through I saw an obvious path and bore down.
The work was fast and furious and with the deadline looming I put in late nights and used all my free time to get the work done.
It was incredibly satisfying!
But a weird thing happened: I suddenly got motivated to finish those other assignments and knocked off a number of them in short order.
Somehow I've gotten back into the mental headspace of just knocking tasks off my to-do list and I find the momentum keeps me going. I always knew that about myself--my productivity has always been very spikey--but this experience was truly eye opening.
> the busier they get, the more active they are at other tasks.
Not at all my experience. I hate not feeling unproductive and so spend almost 100% of my free time programming open source projects. But I seem to be unable to care about anything else, and there are long periods of time where I cabnot bring myself to do anything else besides keep working on these projects until 2 in the morning - so-called hyperfocus. As a result I keep feeling exhausted when it comes to anything besides working on said projects, and the first thing I do when not thinking of anything is to gravitate back to them at the expense of everything else. The most trivial things like cleaning my room or even eating a proper lunch become an unbearable slog if I'm in the middle of something important, and sometimes I just skip over them entirely.
I believe this is making me a shallow person because I have no understanding of literally anything else, and is also keeping me in this bubble where there's so much more to life which would be fulfilling that I will never see, but at the same time I just can't bring myself to care about much else that isn't a productive activity. I can't have it both ways, even though I constantly say I should be doing things that aren't productive like playing video games or watching television, and then shoot them down immediately because I feel like I'm not creating anything. I will tell myself that those are the kind of things that humanity usually squanders its free time on, and that I'm not about to fall into that trap.
In the example, if someone gave me that paper to fill out while I was busy and I don't care about filling out the paper, I wouldn't fill out the paper. Not unless my paycheck and continued survival depend on it.
It does not feel like I chose my hobbies, it feels like they chose me.
> the busier they get, the more active they are at other tasks
In my experience, there's a limit to that. If being busy doing tasks gives you regular rewards (and I mean daily, not a monthly paycheck), and you trust yourself to keep the rhythm, then it seems to work. But if you lose the momentum, get swamped in tasks you hate with no clear way out - that's a fast track to complete burnout. Been there, done that, and I like to feel I've finally recovered after many years, but sometimes I'm not so sure.
I recently read an article on HN where someone mentioned that they saw a guy sitting on a bicycle just talking to a friend, he then lost his footing and hit his head on the ground and died.The commenter then wrote "We're just farts in the wind". Now I understand the reference!
One key to a good life is low expectations. Most of the people I know who are unhappy thought they were going to be more than they are now, and some of them carried the naive arrogance around with them all their lives until reality smacked them upside the head.
There is a difference between arrogance and dissatisfaction.
I will attribute _most_ of my successes to the latter and all of my failures to the former.
This is key. I would recommend anyone to go to a poorer area in the world and meet the locals... they value things you take for granted so much more.
It made me value things I take for granted much more... like running water... or streets that don't stink like trash... family... I took them for granted.
Advocating for low expectations is usually criticized as laziness when targeted at oneself or pessimism when targeted at others. But I think that criticism happens when we conflate expectations and aspirations, when we set our target as our baseline.
On that note, exercising gratitude (counting your blessings) is a wonderful tool for teasing apart expectations and aspirations. Acknowledging that something you have is good enough to make you happy implicitly informs you that expectations have already been exceeded even if you aspire for more.
This is so true. I have a difficult love/hate relationship with technology, and the internet in particular. Life is so much more social and in some ways enjoyable when the power is out. And yet I wouldn’t have my career or so much of my life without the internet.
It’s difficult for me to imagine what it was like for people who grew up and worked their whole career without it, but I imagine that a much larger percentage of their working relationships and friendships were (by necessity) face to face, and by comparison richer and deeper than the mostly online connections I’ve grown up with.
What kinds of stuff did you accomplish? I do most work on the computer, with the internet, so just wondering what I could do if I had neither that was still productive for that type of work, like for example programming.
Easier said than done. The most important prerequisites to getting successful treatment for ADHD are the abilities to:
- Stay focused while shopping for a psychiatrist for a problem that fills you with a sense of despair.
- Make appointments and consistently attend them.
- Clearly and persuasively explain to your loved ones how important it is to you for them to fill in a description of their memories of your childhood symptoms... and hope you weren't inattentive subtype. Spending hours reading history books isn't memorably annoying to parents like hyperactivity.
- Keep an organised record of the impacts of medication as you go through titration.
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[ 17.2 ms ] story [ 678 ms ] threadNow that I have multiple kids and my time is extremely constrained, I am very efficient with my time usage. I listen to audiobooks while doing the dishes. I plan in my mind exactly which programming tasks I want to accomplish as soon as the kids are in bed so that I can do them quickly and still have time to spend with my wife.
nothing is impossible for the man who doesn't have to do it himself.
For me it just pushes the point that every situation is a negotiation.
When you have hours and hours available for the rest of the week, why fret about it? You have so many other opportunities ahead.
Someone with hours and hours to do nothing likely isn't getting laid, isn't making much money, isn't intellectually gratified, etc. So you play games to occupy yourself to keep from going bonkers.
I still play plenty of videogames. It's something I can drop at will as I get my act together, make the connections I need to make, etc. I like games and my kids always joked "Video games are our only education."
But the reality is I would rather have a life and if I had more of a life, that fact would drive a lot of my activities and there simply wouldn't be time -- or need -- to play games for hours.
I've spent many hours with the family playing MineCraft, and it's an amazing way to teach things like not being selfish, being cooperative, etc. to children because they experience the effects or lack of in compacted real time without permanent real-world impact.
Their joke grew out if conversations that went something like this:
Son blurts obscure historical factoid.
Me: "Where the hell did you learn that?!"
Son names video game he learned it from. Punchline: "Video games are our only education." (Vin Diesel movie line, so another excellent reason to say it to me.)
They now have a blog where that's the descriptor, basically.
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[0] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OODA_loop
My son was already a gamer. He hated his typing program. I told him he could quit doing practice typing as one of his assignments if he exceeded 35wpm -- which is my typical typing speed and I had a typing class in high school and can type about 60wpm when I am focused and yadda.
I also told him online gaming was a known way to hit a better speed and that's likely a factor in him going that route. He was gleefully happy to give up typing practice as one of his formal lessons.
> He hated his typing program.
I remember those typing practice programs. I always hated them. Super boring, couldn't stand them for more than 2 minutes.
Much later on (and well after I've achieved high typing speeds) I've discovered The Typing of The Dead - a House of The Dead clone where you shoot zombies by correctly typing words. For me, that was the ultimate typing program: it gave the same exercises, but in the context where I could spend hours in front of it. I suppose that was an early form of what we know today as "gamification".
I was very goal oriented. If they could meet the standard, they could move on to do something else instead. Where they exceeded grade level expectations across the board for some subject, I let them do whatever they felt like doing as "gifted enrichment."
For science, I got my oldest anything he was interested in -- books to read, magazine subscriptions, whatever he wanted -- because at age 13 he was talking slow and repeating himself a lot to explain the Theory of Relativity to me. This was enormously helpful in getting me through some of my later upper class college classes.
What gets labeled laziness all too often seems to be exhaustion, invisible disability or other hidden problems.
Agreed.
A good, old essay on this and related questions wrt. character and mental diseases, by Scott Alexander back before he had his own blog: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/895quRDaK6gR2rM82/diseased-t....
In my experience, if you want to cure "laziness," the best thing to do is identify the underlying cause of the failure to get anything done and address that.
I homeschooled two special-needs sons who had a lot of issues that did not resolve for being lectured or something. They resolved by figuring why X was happening and addressing that.
Sometimes other people find it empowering to get that point of view put out there. It's an epiphany for some people that they aren't actually lazy like everyone has always told them. They just don't have the energy for some reason and addressing that can help make their life finally work after decades of frustration.
Well, to be brutally honest with you, it's one thing for you to be proud of yourself for playing video games, but why would anyone else see that as something pride-worthy?
Typically, one takes justifiable pride for accomplishments that stand up to external scrutiny. That usually comes in the form of the accomplishment having an element of sacrifice, of pain and difficulty, of opportunity costs paid, and of a result that stands on its own as something not everyone can do. I am proud of some of my adventures; proud of some of my work; proud of some of the artistic things I have created. None of them are extremely amazing in the grand scheme of things, and I don't let any of it get to my head, but they do give me stories to tell at the bar that aren't dismissed with a wave of the hand as being frittered-away time.
Video games, on the other hand, are not exactly grand sacrificial effort. I can't imagine telling someone I was proud of myself for spending a few hours killing orcs on a screen while eating processed snack food alone in my underwear.
> as well as the purpose of how we spend our spare time.
It's only "spare" if you've really satisfied yourself in your best judgement of what you could otherwise be doing.
I like to put Slack and Laziness on a continuum. Laziness is putting things off, avoiding important tasks, pawning them off on others, rationalizing why you shouldn't bother, finding easier ways out even if the end result isn't as good, cutting corners. From the article:
> I was supposed to renew my car registration today. I haven’t opened the Web site.
That's classic laziness. Sure, the consequences can be dealt with later, a day or two without driving won't be the end of the world, but it also took about as much effort to write this self-effacing article as it would have to just renew the insurance and move on.
Slack, on the opposite side of the spectrum (and before the word was co-opted by a program that ironically takes up all possible Slack), is free time that you carve out of the world with your actions. Slack is arranging things so that you have time to relax, time to "surf down the luck plane" that you have created for yourself, so that you can allow things to proceed knowing that at the end of the slope, you're not actually in a worse off position than when you started. Slack is paid vacation time, where laziness is unemployment. Slack is a glass of wine at the end of the day, laziness is beer for breakfast. Slack is sitting in the hot tub after you work out, laziness is sitting in the bathtub after you eat a microwaved dinner. Slack is posting on HN on a cloudy Saturday morning while the kids (with breakfast in their tummies) watch a bit of TV, laziness is posting on HN when you're supposed to be writing a program at 3:00 on a Thursday afternoon.
Video games are something you can do in your slack time, or they're something you can do because you're lazy. That's the difference between a healthy hobby and a damaging addiction.
Putting aside the fact that many people have made highly successful careers out of playing video games, why should I care at all what other people think about it? Life is too short to only do the things that other people think are "pride-worthy". Do the things that make you happy.
For exactly the same reasons anyone thinks that reading novels is pride-worthy. People who plays some of the more complicated niche games have some respect from me at least.
Similarly getting good at a game requires dedication and work, so people with good ranks in games also has some respect from me.
My oldest, who is math challenged, was livid when I finally successfully explained to him what Algebra was and he went "I've been doing that for years while playing video games!!!" He's still mad about it and it's probably at least two decades later.
Well, to be brutally honest with you
I read somewhere that "people who value brutal honesty value brutality more than honesty." As someone fond of the saying "I'm too truthful to be good," I took that to heart.
Yes, I completely agree video games can be an unhealthy pursuit to the detriment of one’s life. If I’d put some of those hours I spent playing video games at uni into my course work I would’ve got better grades. I actually stopped playing games for the better part of my twenties to pursue more valid hobbies, such as photography, which I’m glad of. It made me a more interesting person. I came back to playing games a few years ago and realised I had given up something in my life that gave me so much joy. I think it’s hard to develop that deep connection to anything that we don’t do when we’re adolescents.
> Typically, one takes justifiable pride for accomplishments that stand up to external scrutiny. That usually comes in the form of the accomplishment having an element of sacrifice, of pain and difficulty
I think this is where a lot of people might lose themselves, and I might be misinterpreting you here, but: I think an important distinction is that people should take pride in providing value for their community, not having it be approved by them. Otherwise we might end up acting contrary to our beliefs, and feeling a hollow sense of achievement in the end.
Also, by your definition of hard work being pride-worthy, many gamers might meet that criteria, especially the professionals (?). Games can often be more competitive and demanding than anything I've experienced in real life. I've only teetered on the edge of competitive levels, so in a sense I wasted a lot of my time, since it all wasn't deliberate, but parts of it were definitely hard work, filled with passion.
There's a motivational saying that when you die you get to meet the person you could have become, and that's your individual heaven/hell. I've got a nagging fear that maybe if I learn to speak French or sell a business or whatever, raise a family, grow old and die, I'll come face to face with the guy who played 10,000 hours of Civ.
Wait, I should stop playing these games.
pours some Monster energy drink on the floor
Video games are an easy target, but you can make the same argument about any lesiure activity. Something doesn't have to have an output to be worth spending time on.
Now, as soon as the kids are in bed, virtually every scrap of time is used for something productive. Except, obviously, for lazy Saturday mornings posting on HN ;-)
When you are young, you trade time for money.
When you are middle aged, you trade money for convenience.
When you are old, you trade money for time.
Someday you'll find an idea you like that hasn't been done before and you'll kill it.
At least that's what I tell myself :-)
I wish we (and people in similar situations) were more honest about these bad decisions. We need to warn our young people against falling into similar traps. It’s not victim blaming, it’s just honesty about what’s happening.
I had a friend in college who had a way with words and was an activist. But her dream was as a fiction writer, and last I checked in on her she has gotten nowhere with that.
The things she could have accomplished writing nonfiction...
You know how we sometimes don’t talk to childhood friends because they saw a better or more hopeful version of us and it’s too painful to think what the person we were would think of the person we’ve become? Turns out that goes both ways sometimes, and the reason you haven’t heard from them might be that they don’t want to remind you either. It would be cruel, maybe even dishonor the time we had together.
A lot of debt without a clear "shovel ready" career path to pay it off combined with a high cost of living sure isn't a recipe for a fulfilling life outside of work and if your work doesn't do it for you you're SOL at that point.
I don’t have any answers to all my questions, but I know something’s not balanced in this equation.
It is victim blaming.
Rather than warning young people about the dangers of a solid education, we should make getting that education not dangerous. We fucked up universities with layers of bureaucracy, bizarre funding and compensation schemes, and vocational focus. Admitting and fixing that is being honest about what's happening. Telling people not to get degrees in the fields that might fix this just makes it worse.
In this case it seems like the author has only halfway rejected that notion. If you're gonna do it, you gotta do it all the way lol.
This in spite of the fact that we throw away enough food to feed the world.
Capitalism isn't inherently evil but it isn't by default the best methodology just because America claims it is. A great example of rampantly shitty capitalism is in the phillipines, for example, where we don't even have to mention wage slavery to point out the issues with capitalism.
But there constantly feels like something is missing. Most days I have 4-6 hours of time that is spent doing near nothing. In the back of my mind is always "I should be doing x project" or "I should be practicing y skill" and then I end up feeling guilty just for relaxing.
I always go back and forth between "It's totally okay to be lazy. You have a life that affords it." and "If you want to be truly great at something, you need to work for it." The challenging part seems to be finding the healthy medium between the two, which is about where the author feels too, I think.
The most important change started when I began to travel. Just spending a bit of time in Europe showed this neurotic American with overachiever tendencies so much about how to relax and live a little. It was a complete shock to the system, and in a very good way. It forced me to address -- at that moment -- how would I live life and enjoy it if I didn't have my career and "accomplishments" and lived in a society where most people derive fulfillment outside of that? I began to realize that my life was full of many proverbial Michelin-star rated meals that I was wolfing down like a burger -- that's no way to go about things!
Being back stateside, I guess I appreciate that even more because I once again recognize how very much abnormal that is in much of the country. I have to catch myself because it's so easy to slip back into keeping up with Jones who live inside my head.
I take comfort in the idea that the world (and our lives) are constantly rocked by random circumstance and opportunity, and while there is a lot one can do to maximize our realized potential, we can't be completely responsible for our fulfillment.
Or: why we spend too much time focused on goals and accomplishments instead of effort, perseverance, and the joy of the journey.
Actually for me it’s mainly the fear of doing something trite, that’s already been done a million times. I always think “oh what’s the point, this has been done before”.
But I’m starting to think that everybody hits that stage. People great at what they do hit it, keep pushing out of either strong will or just curiosity, and end up making it (or a facet of it) their own.
Even something like an addictive videogame is designed to make you feel productive by giving you levels to progress through etc—fundamentally I think we all have a desire to produce, it’s just easy to spend time putting that energy into the wrong forms of productive activity, since these are usually easier and less isolating than actually producing crafts or products.
With anything else - TV shows, Reddit, Facebook, browsing memes - I can tell the marginal value becomes negative very quickly (after satiating the basic need to relax/unwind). So it makes sense to spend some, but only a little time on this.
But with HN... it feels like the above, except every other week I'll find some thought that will improve my understanding of the world. Every other month I'll find a tool that solves a problem or improves something in the projects I'm working on. Every couple years I hit something that essentially alters the course of my career. And around people I work with, I'm known to be the guy that, when told a problem, half of the time will point out a solution mentioned in some HN comment a year earlier (thank $deity for Algolia making finding it again easier).
So bottomline, I suspect the total net value of HN for me, after accounting for opportunity costs, is actually slightly positive. At least the procrastinator in me keeps saying that, conveniently omitting the confidence interval, which is absurdly wide.
I worry it is just teaching them to get gamified...
But the idea is nice - banks that enforce aging and budgets, shops that put fresh produce at the checkouts and never sell chocolate bars...
I took French in middle/high school with the standard lecture/hw school structure and was a lot less successful than I've been with Duolingo. Duolingo alone probably isn't enough to really learn a language but combined with other resources it provides a great structure to keep you committed and provides a great foundation to build from.
What Duolingo has been best for is getting a baseline vocab and familiarity with the language. It also lets you stay fresh/keep making progress when you don't have time or mental effort to spend more than a few minutes a day.
This isn't as big of a problem for latin based languages (English native) however.
I’ve tested Duolinguo for languages I want to learn, for some I already know and a language BA/MA holder I can guarantee that Duolingo is total crap. This is just a feel good app. Just like another post was mentioning hiw note taking can do more harm than good because it feels like work, Duolingo is given the user the feeling of work and progression while very very little knowledge is gained. Let’s take Japanese as an example. Hiragana and katakana are each divided in 4 parts: a user can easily spend weeks on that and feel he’s making progress. University student on the other side learn that in a week... (for slow learners)
Language learning in general though, I have found, is not that amenable to gamification. Some learning methods may be more efficient than others, but even with the most efficient methods, real language learning is still inherently and unavoidably a slog. So if you come across a method that makes it "easy", chances are it's not actually working. It's too easy to trick oneself to think that one is making progress, and then find oneself unable to communicate when called upon to do so.
In the polyglot (ie actual practitioners of extreme language learning) community, there are many super talented language learners but a common pattern among them is the use of surprising traditional learning methods. Most do not use Duolingo but instead elect to do things the hard way, by actually going through workbooks, talking to tutors on iTalki, making mistakes, exposing themselves to media, translating, etc. Space repetition tools are sometimes used. Pimsleur is good for speaking, but not reading/writing so it doesn't get used that much.
There are clips of YouTubers where creators show you how to learned a language to a conversational level in 24 hours etc. but if you look more closely, the experiments are highly edited and the actual outcome is not that great.
I've resigned myself to the fact that the way to actually to learn a language is to jump in and do it the hard way, rather than through easier shortcuts. Language learning is about creating new reflexes and creating new pathways int he brain and there's no easy way to do that (the brain itself resists) without discomfort.
That said, tools like Duolingo do create fun and interest in a language -- and fun is needed to sustain oneself through the journey.
Go to a foreign country and try to get laid. Genuine intrinsic motivation, and the difficulty increases with age. If nothing else, this education is good preparation for a career in business
How so?
Using a romantic partner as a language-learning partner gets old for said person after a while, especially if you're not actively making progress on the language on the side. Unless said romantic partner is a language teacher, it can be annoying for them to constantly be correcting your mistakes. Over time, this annoyance can actually harm the relationship. Also most native speakers of a language aren't always good teachers -- they may know how to use the language but usually can't explain how things work. It's better to get a tutor whose job is to instruct, bear with your mistakes, and go home after. It's easier to for someone to bear with your mistakes if they don't have to spend all their free time with you.
As for language immersion by living in a country, you'd be surprised how that doesn't really work unless you're actively learning on your own or taking classes. Case in point: I lived in a French-speaking province for 4 years but can barely speak French -- I just never bothered learning. You'd think necessity would force one to learn but there are so many ways to get around actually doing it (e.g. hanging out with expats, using gestures/hand signs, Google Translate, etc.) On the other hand, there are folks who've never been in a Francophone country who can speak French at a high level, often through active learning. In fact, many polyglots often become fluent in a language without ever setting foot in the language's country of origin.
The key really is putting in the work. Getting laid in a foreign country may help kickstart the process, but to achieve working fluency, there are no real shortcuts.
(well, there is one, which is that you already know a related language. This is the only major accelerant. You can learn Afrikaans very quickly if you speak Dutch. Similarly for Malay -> Indonesian, Portuguese -> Spanish ... interestingly, this pair is asymmetric: Spanish -> Portuguese is harder than vice-versa)
If we approached every challenge with “how do we design experience that builds on and supplements user motivation?” We’d leap forward as a species.
[1] https://www.gdcvault.com/play/1012290/Achievements-Considere...
This is why I question curiosity as the prescribed value from HN leadership. In its place one could've easily said learning or mastery.
Time to set up my emacs config to manage my life and stop wasting time.
Increasing the signal to noise ratio would help reduce time spent scrolling. A “filter” by keyword feature would be massively helpful.
During the last few years, I switched from reading low quality content to reading high quality content. I am better informed about various things. But the problem of spending too much time reading remains unchanged.
Note taking can be pernicious because it feels like doing something but it also gives an excuse to not put forth your own thoughts until you have all the pieces. Then they become so large they are unweildy. The more notes, the less supple.
--
[0] - Or damage your brain. The fact that I can't think things through unless I'm writing thoughts down or drawing diagrams may be a sign of improved quality of thoughts, or a sign of me no longer being able to think without a crutch.
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/leechblock-ng...
Generally I'm glad that HN has minimal gamification, at least compared to the worst offenders reddit, fb, twitter etc.
But this is exactly what we did before. We got bored, we were wasting time, we were experimenting, and that's how great ideas came around.
Reddit is another one, the infinite scroll I think is addictive. Trying to kill that habit. But there is useful information on there so it's hard to disable it completely.
I used to often see niche, really interesting stuff on there, although I haven't used it much lately. The Frontpage is pure garbage though.
The thing I imagine that gives some people such a negative view is coming in contact through the brand "reddit" and being dumped into large controversial sub-reddits straight away.
A lot of people bump into a particular sub-reddit through a search result and have no idea of the dumpster fires elsewhere on the larger "reddit" site.
Pick a programming language or piece of popular tech, chances are good it has a subReddit of discussions and links to blog posts and announcements, sometimes with some of the creator/maintainer people posting.
Ive had some ok experiences on reddit too, meet ups, bought stuff, got free concert tickets once too. its hard to write the whole thing off. That might be a different era of reddit though. Its been a few years since I had something like that happen now that i think about it
[1]: https://www.facebook.com/help/214376678584711
People are extremely scared of the word "addiction" though. I feel the same way about sugar and basically all carbohydrates at all and it's very challenging to talk about.
Cutting carbs though, esp. fruits, is way harder.
If you have a large enough rotation of websites, you never feel properly bored, so you can spend the entire day mindlessly browsing.
I think it's easy to tell whether you're browsing with intent or just killing time. It's just hard to close the lid and go do something else, especially if you've been doing it for so long that you forgot what "something else" is.
In my opinion, the infinite scroll is both addictive and fruitless. I rarely find something fun when it's buried deep in the feed. That's pretty obvious. If it was a fun post, it would've been at the top, right?
If you don't trust any extension with site-reading capability, here's a simple solution: scroll down as much as you are comfortable, and then work upwards!
For reddit et al, I only view it on the browser. Sure, I get bombarded by popovers and alerts telling me to install the app, but I have to work my way to get to the content if I really wanted to view it.
One of the most reliable ways to reset internal time perception? Experiencing nature.
I try and take more walks now.
Effect of Exercise-Related Factors on the Perception of Time (frontiersin.org) 65 points, 9 days ago | 9 comments
Because if not, while walks are nice, my goal isn't exactly to have twice as long of a subjective experience but 60% of it is parks.
Spending time in nature essentially jumped your brain out of the loop, even after you returned from nature.
Think it might have been a summary of this: "Awe Expands People’s Perception of Time, Alters Decision Making, and Enhances Well-Being" (2012)
https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2083257
Often my surfing feeds my ideas. My latest creation is derived from downloading Reddit to my brain on the regular.
Boredom is a great stimulus. It’s not a pre-requisite.
With enough human interaction and love, I come back to being an avid reader, consume little addictive networks, and don’t mind boredom.
Yep! I firmly believe that boredom is not just healthy, but a necessary part of life. Your mind needs downtime and your creativity and imagination need mind-numbing boredom.
Once all of your friends are hooked on their phone, it becomes very lonely to be the only one that doesn't stare at a screen. But what people naturally yearn for is not to get bored alone, but to get bored as a group. So the "quality of bored-ness" goes down as screen usage expands.
This is not a new problem, we are just experiencing a hyper version of it. Social media, the world's knowledge at your finger tips, is distraction on steroids.
... but I made a technical decision because of an idea on hacker news.
You should have researched that decision outside of hacker news. Less aggregate time spent.
Case in point: I'm very familiar with Kafka, and the discussions on here usually lead to hinting about new technologies that you may not hear of just by reading a Kafka threat. Things like NATS, Jetstream, liftbridge, pulsar, and the list goes on. Having that kind of exposure just knowing that alternatives are out there, and people having real-world experience with them is really useful.
We should be careful to paint with such a broad brush.
I've grown up in a family where there was always enough, yet not much in excess. Most grown up people I knew in my childhood would probably complain that they would want more, yet they mostly just did their job, had enough and enjoyed their family life. That is also true for some of the people I later met at university and then in business, but I get the impression that quite a lot of them, even though they have much better jobs than the people from my childhood, invest a lot of their free time trying to pursue their goal. And it is extremely rare that I see someone actually reaching it. It is far more often that their life becomes a lot more miserable, think divorce or similar.
Now don't ge me wrong, I think pursuing ones goals can be extremely valuable. But for a lot of people, pursuing a goal and trying to be productive with it while at the same time being married, raising kids, earning money, staying healthy and doing chores is most likely not going to lead anywhere good. So why is it so hard for smart people to accept that fact, and enjoy one or two hours of lazyness every day? Why do people take Elon Musk as an example, if even he himself decribes his life as not too nice?
In this day and age, being productive is considered a virtue.
Browsing HN has never felt productive to me. At times useful, entertaining, informative, thought-provoking, and at others less so, when it can seem annoying, repetitive, pointless and so on. But never "productive".
I'm just really glad I did college when the only thing distracting on the internet was Slashdot and you could only access it with a computer attached to an ethernet cable.
I'm almost certain I would not have made it past Freshman year if I had a smartphone.
I haven't taken full control of myself back yet, but that thought was a strong wake-up call to me.
I spent countless hours fiddling with git tutorials, the best branching, workflow.. Nothing was even close to when I had to actual work with it on a tight rope.
Curiosity intellect is mostly dead baggage in ones head, knowing how to apply ideas as tools, to actually do something, and even have it in mind when you work so that you know you wrote enough, commit will be long, or merge will be ugly. It all balances out on itself and you actually feel light and capable.
Before I've encountered any digital computing device, I used to just play Sudoku during class. Or read novels; I had a textbook that carved, inside which hid a small novel. Or, just day-dream and think about stuff.
On the other hand, I enjoyed Sudoku and novels. I don't consider them to be a complete waste of time. In retrospect, they made my childhood better.
In general though, I prefer the idea of going "all in" in whatever I'm doing. If I'm going to play video games, I'm making sure I have a damn good time doing it. If I'm going to put in work, I'm gonna make sure it gets done. Distractions will do you in in both cases. Ruin your fun time and mess up your productivity.
These activities by itself don’t yell any value by themselves and still free like a super productive to the extent of feeling incredibly productive. One should not forget that intelectual hobbies are in fact still hobbies.
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2020/08/24/cicadia
"The simple truth is, not all of us become the men we once hoped we might be"
Spoken by a character who very much has. I don't really have much comment beyond that.
"Abundance is harder for us to handle than scarcity.If tired after an intercontinental flight, go to the gym for some exertion instead of resting. Also, it is a well known trick that if you need something urgently done, give the task to the busiest (or second busiest) person in the office. Most humans manage to squander their free time, as free time makes them dysfunctional, lazy, and unmotivated - the busier they get, the more active they are at other tasks."
Wow does that ever ring true for me right now...
Over the last couple of months I've had some major work items at about 80% complete but just couldn't find the motivation to push them over the line. I'd have free time but I'd always waste it.
A couple weeks ago, an exec came to me and a couple of colleagues and asked us for a major assignment to be complete in two weeks. At first I balked but after thinking it through I saw an obvious path and bore down.
The work was fast and furious and with the deadline looming I put in late nights and used all my free time to get the work done.
It was incredibly satisfying!
But a weird thing happened: I suddenly got motivated to finish those other assignments and knocked off a number of them in short order.
Somehow I've gotten back into the mental headspace of just knocking tasks off my to-do list and I find the momentum keeps me going. I always knew that about myself--my productivity has always been very spikey--but this experience was truly eye opening.
Not at all my experience. I hate not feeling unproductive and so spend almost 100% of my free time programming open source projects. But I seem to be unable to care about anything else, and there are long periods of time where I cabnot bring myself to do anything else besides keep working on these projects until 2 in the morning - so-called hyperfocus. As a result I keep feeling exhausted when it comes to anything besides working on said projects, and the first thing I do when not thinking of anything is to gravitate back to them at the expense of everything else. The most trivial things like cleaning my room or even eating a proper lunch become an unbearable slog if I'm in the middle of something important, and sometimes I just skip over them entirely.
I believe this is making me a shallow person because I have no understanding of literally anything else, and is also keeping me in this bubble where there's so much more to life which would be fulfilling that I will never see, but at the same time I just can't bring myself to care about much else that isn't a productive activity. I can't have it both ways, even though I constantly say I should be doing things that aren't productive like playing video games or watching television, and then shoot them down immediately because I feel like I'm not creating anything. I will tell myself that those are the kind of things that humanity usually squanders its free time on, and that I'm not about to fall into that trap.
In the example, if someone gave me that paper to fill out while I was busy and I don't care about filling out the paper, I wouldn't fill out the paper. Not unless my paycheck and continued survival depend on it.
It does not feel like I chose my hobbies, it feels like they chose me.
In my experience, there's a limit to that. If being busy doing tasks gives you regular rewards (and I mean daily, not a monthly paycheck), and you trust yourself to keep the rhythm, then it seems to work. But if you lose the momentum, get swamped in tasks you hate with no clear way out - that's a fast track to complete burnout. Been there, done that, and I like to feel I've finally recovered after many years, but sometimes I'm not so sure.
Personally, I think I’d rather take a 20 minute nap and then go to the gym.
It made me value things I take for granted much more... like running water... or streets that don't stink like trash... family... I took them for granted.
Advocating for low expectations is usually criticized as laziness when targeted at oneself or pessimism when targeted at others. But I think that criticism happens when we conflate expectations and aspirations, when we set our target as our baseline.
On that note, exercising gratitude (counting your blessings) is a wonderful tool for teasing apart expectations and aspirations. Acknowledging that something you have is good enough to make you happy implicitly informs you that expectations have already been exceeded even if you aspire for more.
Also this person daily schedule reads like someone with mild depression.
Wasn't just the power, also Comcast. Fine, whatever, tether to my phone. Wait, no service. Cell tower was out too.
Had no internet at all for four days. I think I got more done in that time with a flashlight and pen and paper than I do in a typical month.
It’s difficult for me to imagine what it was like for people who grew up and worked their whole career without it, but I imagine that a much larger percentage of their working relationships and friendships were (by necessity) face to face, and by comparison richer and deeper than the mostly online connections I’ve grown up with.
- Stay focused while shopping for a psychiatrist for a problem that fills you with a sense of despair.
- Make appointments and consistently attend them.
- Clearly and persuasively explain to your loved ones how important it is to you for them to fill in a description of their memories of your childhood symptoms... and hope you weren't inattentive subtype. Spending hours reading history books isn't memorably annoying to parents like hyperactivity.
- Keep an organised record of the impacts of medication as you go through titration.
- Deal effectively with the administrative complexity of either health insurance or a new country's healthcare system. (See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aKUdadCsuRE)