I don't look back on it that fondly nowadays, but it would probably be Mr Money Mustache's classic "The Simple Math of Early Retirement". I am not on a path to FIRE really, but in my early twenties it was really incredibly eye-opening.
At that age, I had very much assumed that the world had to work according to "work hard for 45 years, get the biggest house you can, buy as much stuff as you can, on your 65th birthday your company hands you a final salary pension that will last the rest of you life". Something had always felt a bit wrong about consumerism and the hedonic treadmill, but it took the brusque and entertaining prose of MMM to really stop and make me think.
Funnily enough, I now find him very grating, but he absolutely set me on a path of rethinking my life in my early 20s to truly think about what matters to me.
Basically he talks about how when you retire depends on one number, percentage of money you can save from your pay. If you save 50% of your pay and invest it, you can retire in 16 years. Pretty eye openning
The problem I've always had with that story is that most people are struggling just to live on what they make. Saving 50% of your income when you are trying to make rent is a pipe dream. Even making decent money, if you have a family, saving is tough. The idea that we are poor because we buy lattes is over-simplified, and borderline insulting.
Life is more complicated than a blog post with some arithmetic.
I could list more than 10 people I personally know who have probably permanently stunted their lives via credit card debt from door dash and uber eats.
The the world doesn't owe you a standard of living. If you want to have more money, spend less money. Or don't. It's your choice. Nothing insulting about it.
> The problem I've always had with that story is that most people are struggling just to live on what they make.
FIRE obviously isn’t meant for someone trying to live in an expensive city on a $15/hr wage. However, there really are many career paths that readily allow the math. You’re obviously going to struggle to make it work if your goal is to work for a non-profit in Seattle or San Francisco, but it’s entirely within reach if you choose to work for an average tech company in an average city. It’s also trivial to make the math work out if you’re able to get a FAANG job anywhere and keep your lifestyle in check.
> Saving 50% of your income when you are trying to make rent is a pipe dream.
Depends entirely on your lifestyle and relationship situation. Many of us easily achieved FIRE savings rates by simply getting married to another professional, choosing to keep expenses within the limits of one person’s income, and putting 100% of the other person’s income into savings. Instant 50% savings rate, and it’s not even difficult to be honest. As a bonus, it was easy to transition to having kids and a stay-at-home spouse because we already lived on one income.
Obviously doesn’t work for everyone in every situation, but it’s not correct to say it’s a pipe dream or that it can’t work. It’s a choice that requires choosing lifestyle and career directions to match, but everything is a tradeoff.
If you make $125k a year why cant you live like those making 55k? That’s the pickle at upper middle class incomes your spending is a choice. Most people refuse to see that.
> The most important thing to note is that cutting your spending rate is much more powerful than increasing your income.
I believe that part isn't exactly right, because you can increase your income way more than you can reduce what it takes for you to live. If you're a software engineer making let's say 70k, you can find a job where you make 150k, 200k or even more. If you currently spend 50k every year, it's way more effective than trying to spend less. You also have to take into account that once you retire you can live somewhere where the cost of living is lower.
Agree. I think that advice panders to people who want advice they can act on today. You can choose to save $3 at your next grocery store visit right away and it won’t even hurt.
However, telling people to work on earning more feels like an impossibly difficult ask for many. You’ll get instant pushback when you suggest it, so bloggers avoid it.
FIRE blogging is more about pandering to what people want to hear. It is, after all, a big money blogging niche these days. Alienating the reader is to be avoided if you want to keep readership up, so career and earnings are to be approached delicately if at all in their writings.
That's a good point. I wonder why we consider that people telling people to spend less is okay, while telling people to earn more is not. Maybe because we consider that they have total control over what they spend, but not over what they earn? While this may be true, most people still could probably find a better job.
Yes, doubling your income and maintaining your lifestyle would make a huge difference. In many cases such an extreme bump isn't reasonably available.
I believe GP was more referring to the rough rule of thumb is to have 25x your annual expenses by the time you retire. +5k income versus -5k expenses, you're better off cutting your expenses. By cutting expenses, the target drops by 25xExpensesCut, and you're throwing an extra ExpensesCut towards savings, helping on both sides of the equation. Going from spending 95% of savings to 90% makes a huge difference on the timeline, but 50% to 45% is much more modest since the timeline for compounding growth is so much shorter.
Using 70k income, 50k expenses, and a 5% return, this would take about 30 years. [0]
75k income, 50k expenses goes to 25.2 years [1]
70k income, 45k expenses goes to 24 years [2]
150k income, 50k expenses goes to 10.6 years [3]
Another detail often forgotten about, salary is stated before taxes, spending is almost always after taxes.
That further increases the power of decreasing expenses.
All good points. The original article has a few things that are oversimplified I think, which is why I criticize it a bit. For example, if you go from a country in the EU to San Francisco, you're going to earn way more but spend way more too. But if you plan on going back to the EU when you retire, this won't matter much because your living expenses will drop.
I don't know how hard is doubling your income in general, but I don't know if it's always harder than dividing by two your expenses. The thing is that by focusing on earning more, you will end up with more money, and at that point you can always cut back expenses. While if you focus on cutting back expenses, you will end up with less money.
But isn't this just the financial equivalent of "lose weight by consuming fewer calories than what you use"? It's far easier said than done.
If you lose your job, or spend a chunk of your savings in a family emergency of some kind, then what? Do you have to save 80% of your take home to make up for the lost savings?
The other half of it is how much you spend. You also have to keep your retirement spending at the same level. i.e. if you make 100k/yr and save 90% of it, you can retire in 3 years... however, you have to keep your spending at 10k/yr. So if you can handle living that frugally, great! Otherwise you have to save a lot more before you can retire at your "current" lifestyle.
Honestly I find the whole movement quite dreary if taken too seriously.
Of course, don't spend on frivolous things. Do you really need the designer bag, instead of just a bag? Do you need that road-trip with your friends in your 20s? Do you really need to impress that boy/girl by taking them to a michelin restaurant for a date?
OTOH what is the opportunity, and life cost of being frugal or too frugal? Perhaps the designer bag caught the attention of the boss, and 'earned' their respect, which ultimately translated to a promotion. Perhaps you ended up finding your life parrter in one of your road-trip friends. Perhaps you didn't get the boy/girl because you cheaped out on the date. Etc.
Life is to be lived. Some moderation is required. Not too much though.
> Honestly I find the whole movement quite dreary if taken too seriously.
FIRE content is best consumed in tiny doses. You can get 95% of what you need to know from a few blog posts, the Bogleheads Wiki, and creating a simple spreadsheet of your financial planning. That’s it.
The problem is that FIRE has become a magnet for people who are miserable and think retirement will solve all of their problems. This subset of FIRE people see their job as the source of all of their misery and have glorified the idea of FIRE as the only escape hatch. They think they’ll be finally be happy just as soon as they can save enough money (from the job they hate) and reduce their expenses (by ruthlessly cutting spending, even on things they enjoy) until the lines intercept on their FIRE projections.
There are many people following a FIRE path who don’t fit this stereotype, but those people aren’t the ones hanging out on FIRE forums discussing FIRE all day. The people who obsess over FIRE and want to create threads to trash talk their neighbors who had the audacity to go on an expensive vacation or write about how little they spent on food last year by eating lentils every day are predominantly the ones talking about it all the time. There just isn’t much to talk about once you’ve identified a retirement equilibrium target and established a plan, so most of the reasonable participants don’t bother hanging out in the FIRE communities.
There are exceptions to everything, of course, but I found that most real-world FIRE people I know don’t want anything to do with internet FIRE communities or MMM.
Finances are something that should enable the life you want, not something that should become the primary focus of your discussions, readings, and online discourse all of the time.
> The problem is that FIRE has become a magnet for people who are miserable. This subset of FIRE people see their job as the source of all of their misery and have glorified the idea of FIRE as the only escape hatch.
Frankly I'm amazed that there are people who don't see their job as their primary source of misery. I mean, I can understand it on a logical level, I just can't empathize. When I take time off I get up every day and actually get to decide for myself what I want to do with it and that's amazing. Work doesn't permit me that. Instead I have to prioritize away most of the things I want to do and squeeze the rest in between the 8+ hour chunks of my time I'm forced to sell. I derive no meaning from my work, it simply exists to sustain me. I'd get a job with fewer hours, even with the significantly lower pay, but because I live in the US that's impossible if I also want to have decent healthcare.
> Frankly I'm amazed that there are people who don't see their job as their primary source of misery.
Wow, what a gloomy outlook. Have you really never, ever enjoyed your work or workplace? Your coworkers?
I certainly haven’t enjoyed every job or workplace, but I have a lot of fond memories of many workplaces and teams. I’ve had a lot of fun throughout my career and made some lasting friendships.
I suppose I’m in the opposite mindset: I’m amazed that there are people (in tech) who haven’t ever been able to find enjoyment in their work. We literally grew up to get paid to play on computers all day. There are plenty of opportunities out there to have a good time in this field, but they won’t necessarily fall into your lap.
> Wow, what a gloomy outlook. Have you really never, ever enjoyed your work or workplace? Your coworkers?
I enjoyed my part-time lab tutor job in college. I was paid $17/hr for <20hrs of work a week and largely just helped people understand their networking assignments when needed and otherwise did pretty much whatever the hell I wanted to do. The instructors who were my bosses were a lot of fun. I also got to help write curriculum and teach it to instructors at other schools, which is more fun than it sounds like.
Sadly, that job is not at all viable when one is no longer living with their parents and mooching off their healthcare.
I also liked the people I worked with at the school district enough to hang out with them after work, although we all did drink way way too much. The environment was terrible despite the people.
> I suppose I’m in the opposite mindset: I’m amazed that there are people (in tech) who haven’t ever been able to find enjoyment in their work. We literally grew up to get paid to play on computers all day.
Yeah, I have to wonder about people like you whenever I see a horrifically slow website laden with megs of javascript that is broken half the time. I don't get paid to "play" with computers at work, I get paid to keep infrastructure running and write programs that actually fulfill a business goal that isn't "farm users for ad revenue".
> There are plenty of opportunities out there to have a good time in this field
You wouldn't know it from reading the job ads. IT job ads make me want to kill myself.
I wish I could find an archive of Jason Pargin's old writings back from when he ran PointlessWasteOfTime.com under the David Wong handle. The Monkeysphere was a brilliant essay.
You might want to rethink aligning your life to a Cracked listicle, in particular this one. For example:
> For instance, some people want to respond to that speech with Tyler Durden's line from Fight Club: "You are not your job." But, well, actually, you totally are.
Well, actually, you totally aren't. The next part is even worse and downright dehumanizing:
> you are nothing more than the sum total of your useful skills [...] Your "job" -- the useful thing you do for other people -- is all you are.
It's not a good idea to view yourself as purely a means to an end for other people. I'm strongly in favor of being a useful and productive part of society, but not to the point where nothing remains of your person except for an exploitable resource for others.
I generally agree and don't know how well this holds up, but reading this article when I was around 20 really broke me out of some entitlement and helped me start working on myself. I think it made me view things less selfishly and think about other people's perspectives more. So I do think it works for the question asked here
Having just read it for the first time, I'd characterize that article as the metaphorical slap to bring someone to their senses. It is not enough on its own to build a philosophy on, and it isn't necessarily representative of all of life, but that article is a slap a good number of people need.
But then there's also people for whom it will be the worst thing ever, who have already completely organized their lives around pleasing others and satisfying the needs of others while not thinking about the fact they have their own needs, and need in some sense the complete opposite slap.
But I'm not surprised there's some people who found the article to be food for some fairly big thoughts.
Thanks, that's an insightful take on it. You bring up a good point, which is that reading this article can be healthy for some people, and unhealthy for others.
I don't think there's a solution for this, because any kind of disclaimer would dilute its message for those that need to hear it, and do nothing for those that shouldn't hear it. And what would such a disclaimer even look like? "Disregard this article if you're not an entitled, selfish man-child"?
>Feel free to stop reading this if your career is going great, you're thrilled with your life, and you're happy with your relationships. Enjoy the rest of your day friend, this article is not for you.
The disclaimer is woven neatly in the opening paragraph, above the delightful picture of Lenny and his large scarf.
The article is absolutely perfect for its audience, which is the smirking, early-20s Internet user of 10 years ago that read Cracked, or Maddox and spent their time on Digg and Reddit. You know the type.
I remember the impact it had when it came out. It was the reality check that a lot of people in that age range needed, especially new college graduates. This was the era of the "jobless recovery" of post-2008, when S&P500 was going up but underemployment was very high. You have to learn to drop a lot of ego when your fancy degree has you working at the same Starbucks as a kid straight out of high school.
Maybe the Glengarry Glen Ross "closing" scene would have a positive impact on me and get me fired up if the profession was something in tech, at a company whose mission I cared about. Otherwise, as the article mentions, I do indeed just think Alec Baldwin's character is a borderline sociopathic asshole.
I just rewatched that scene - he isn't saying anything meaningful. He's being rude, telling people how much money he makes and telling them to "just close".
He’s telling them the harsh truths of how the world works. He’s flaunting what they want in front of them and then showing them what they have to do in order to have it.
It’s as controversial as the cracked piece in itself. And for some people in my circle - it’s a wake up call.
You can’t expect to just get what he has by drifting through life aimlessly. You have to do what it takes. It’s a message to the kids who were told as children that they were perfect just the way they are and that they could do anything they wanted (but never put in any effort towards it). It’s a message to the children raised by shitty parents who didn’t instill grit and perseverance and tenacity into their kids that they need to get it together if they want what others have. That it takes work and that you don’t get things handed to you like your parents handed things to you all the time as a kid.
I don't think that he's showing them what they have to do. Unless acting like he does in the scene is what they're supposed to be doing as salesmen? I don't know too much about sales so if the lesson was the all that the other salesmen need to be douchebags with their clients just like Baldwin's character was with them, then that lesson has gone completely over my head.
To me it looked like he's shaking them up a little. But the motivation from being shaken up doesn't last long especially if it isn't supplemented by actual skills. Let's say that one of these salesmen is really pumped up after this meeting - what happens the next time they're on a call with a client who isn't interested? What does that salesman know now that they didn't know pre-Baldwin-speech? What can they do differenty? Nothing as far as I can tell. And if the argument is that they all have the skills and it's all about the motivation, then that sounds very much like something from the soft generation that you're describing in your comment.
> I don't think that he's showing them what they have to do. Unless acting like he does in the scene is what they're supposed to be doing as salesmen?
Limitation of the format of the media and that it's for entertainment. Do you really expect a dry presentation about sales tactics in a play/movie???
It's a wake up call speech. It's a speech that you need to either shape up or get out - and to stop expecting handouts and to stop acting entitled. And the thing about his speech is that he's actually empathetic to people - he isn't saying you're worthless as a human being, he's saying you're not fit for the job and you need to be fit for the job if you want to keep it. "Good father? Fuck you - go home and play with your kids." It's a retaliation against the "but I'm a good/nice/whatever person" mentality of entitlement. If you want to work here - you need to close. That's the whole point - that our environment needs people with skills and people who can actually use those skills in a useful matter. You can't do it? Fine - you're not a worthless person but you don't deserve the job just out of birthright.
I'd watch the full thing to the end - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GrhSLf0I-HM In no way is he entrapping them or anything - he says over and over again... "Don't like it? Leave." He's tell them over and over - do the job or leave. Stop expecting a handout - stop being entitled - do the job we hired you for.
Those salesmen never stood a chance -- that's the point. All the grit and perseverance in the world can't make a silk purse out of a sow's ear. They were selling shitty real estate, hoping to find someone clueless or out to lunch enough to buy swampland in Florida or whatever it was. Alec Baldwin's character was there as much to prevent the salespeople from catching on to the scam as to motivate them by making sure they felt that it was their own fault if they couldn't move the bad product. "The fuckin' leads are weak? YOU'RE weak."
I've noticed that multi-level marketing companies use "love bombing" tactics with new members, showering them with praise and good vibes and assuring them that it is easy to make money using their system. Once you're in, however, the "sales experts" quickly turn into the Alec Baldwin character, pressuring, mocking, and grilling you to sell more in an environment where it's near impossible to sell anything.
I know the article is intentionally provocative and over the top to provoke a reaction... whether it's a healthy reflection on your attitude to success or crippling self-loathing probably depends on the reader.
Also, there are undeniably some hard truths hidden in there. However, my experience in almost 20 years in the tech/software/product industry often paints a different picture. Yes, our brains keep us from changing and evolving and yes, obviously you need skills to be successful in life and your career. But in my industry in particular, hard and soft skills are not the dominant factor that keeps individuals from succeeding or progressing. I'm lucky enough to work with an abundance of talent and skill, and yet, one of the major factors of dissatisfaction is lack of "progression". One of the main factors is self-confidence and in the more severe cases even mental health issues. Some of the most skilled and knowledgeable engineers I worked with struggled to realise their potential because of it. If the leaders in your organisation think they can just shout at them to "learn self-confidence as a skill" and get over it you're going to have a bad time. It will attract a certain type and employee that thrives in that environment and disengage everyone else. Wasting talent, wasting skills and ultimately a lot of money.
Creating an environment and learning how to tease the potential out of skilled and talented individuals is not a "hippie/hipster" thing to do, it is good for business.
Out of every post here so far, this is by far the best. It also aged like fine wine. Probably more poignant now than ever. I totally see this as a good occasional slap in the face every few months to re-analysis yourself.
It wasn't a blog post, but CGP Grey's "This Video Will Make You Angry" has been a tremendously helpful tool in understanding the behavior of people online and in controlling my own behavior.
Not life changing, but my favourite is "The 100% correct way to do CSS breakpoints" by David Gilbertson, because it clearly and convincingly restores common sense in an industry quick to follow well established nonsense.
I have only 1 break point now. 960px. This is based primarily on content, not the screen/window size. After 20+ years doing web design and multi-media, I just got tired of fighting changes to trends without any value for those changes.
If you see cooking primarily as a means of getting nutrients rather than a hobby, I very strongly recommend getting an electric pressure cooker. It greatly simplifies cooking because it's automated. Just add the ingredients, close the lid, press a button, and wait. You will get a perfectly cooked one-pot meal with minimum effort. You can even mix fresh and frozen ingredients and the timer won't start until the frozen ingredients are thawed. If you don't overfill it the only thing the food touches is the inner stainless steel pot, so it's very easy to clean. I get the majority of my nutrition from food cooked this way. I can't imagine going back to slow traditional methods.
It also makes dried legumes far more practical, because you can skip the pre-soak phase. If you eat a lot of legumes, and you switch from canned to dried, the savings will most likely pay for the cost of the machine within a few years. In addition, energy costs are reduced because cooking at increased pressure is faster, and good electric pressure cookers are insulated. I am happy with an Instant Pot brand one, although I don't guarantee they are the best. If somebody has strong opinions on which is best then please post them.
The one major downside is the texture of the food can become boring, because everything is mixed together and you can't make crispy foods with it, but you can always add things like pickles after you've cooked it.
Isn’t one of the benefits of presoaking is that it releases certain gases that can wreck havoc on your gastrointestinal system? Does the same thing happen if you use a pressure cooker?
If you're susceptible to that effect then presoaking will help, but susceptibility depends on your individual microbiome. Some vegans use the liquid that chickpeas were cooked in as an egg substitute ("aquafaba"). I personally drain the liquid off after cooking, and don't notice any problems.
Oligosaccharides rather than gases [1] - but your gut bacteria digest those to produce gases. Personally, i can eat unsoaked beans, but i think that varies from person to person.
Take care with dried legumes, many contain poisonous lectins and they should be soaked overnight first, with the soaking water disposed of and thoroughly rinsed before cooking
Phytohaemagglutinin is destroyed by sufficient heating. It is a serious danger with slow cookers, but not with pressure cookers. The FDA publishes a book on food safety:
"PHA is destroyed by adequate cooking. Some variation in toxin stability has been found at different temperatures. However, Bender and Readi found that boiling the beans for 10 minutes (100°C) completely destroyed the toxin. Consumers should boil the beans for at least 30 minutes to ensure that the product reaches sufficient temperature, for a sufficient amount of time, to completely destroy the toxin."
First time I see this post (thanks for sharing!). I bought one of these 2 years ago and it was life changing indeed. Stuffing it with vegetables and meat before going to the gym; come back and everything is done.
About boring food; it might not be crispy, but you can make amazing meats in it. Try slow cooking pork collar boneless[0] with honey and mustard.
> If you see cooking primarily as a means of getting nutrients rather than a hobby, I very strongly recommend getting an electric pressure cooker.
Oh hi there!
Do you have any recipes that you recommend? I actually bought an Instant Pot a couple months ago, and so far have found one great one pot meal that I cook in bulk on the weekend - basically tomatoes + sweet potatoes + peppers + beans + quinoa. Toss it all in and press a button, magic.
I like to eat as healthily as possible, so I'm interested to hear if you have any go-to staple recipes for the instant pot that you'd suggest :)
Not sure of your dietary preferences, but one of the big advantages of the Instant Pot is being able to cook cheaper, less palatable cuts of meat. It can also cook an entire frozen chicken in under an hour...
I do eat chicken a few times a week, so this is good to know, especially the ability to cook from frozen. Could I just throw some frozen chicken breasts in there with whatever else I want to eat it with, and pressure cook it for say 30 mins?
I've been using my instant pot and your meal sounds great but I am unfortunately hopeless at cooking. Can you let me know what you do with those ingredients? Do you dice the potatoes/peppers? Do you have to cook the beans/quinoa first? How long?
You'll want to cut up the potatoes and peppers, but when you're cooking them like this, the size doesn't matter much, it's just what you prefer. I'd go a bit chunkier -- smaller will have all the flavors blend more, chunkier and you'll be able to taste the separate ingredients a bit better.
Quinoa definitely does not need to be pre-cooked -- it cooks very quickly. If you're putting in dry beans, you'll want to use the "multigrain" setting for... 60 minutes I think? And add plenty of water for the beans and quinoa to absorb.
If you're using canned beans or pre-cooked beans, you can drop that time down to 15 minutes or so, that should be plenty for the quinoa to cook.
I'd also probably add some spices. You just gotta experiment and see what you like. Make sure you add enough -- when making a big pot of food, don't just add a little spice. I think cumin and/or coriander would go nicely with this. Cinnamon is another that might be good here. Can't go wrong with black pepper.
But really, this is a dish that could go nicely with lots of different spice blends. So don't be afraid to experiment! Try stuff, fail, it's ok, and it's how you get a feel for cooking. If it doesn't come out great, spread some hot sauce on there and it might make it good enough to eat :)
Great comment, thank you! Feels like cooking is a skill a lot like programming where you can be stuck in tutorial hell without ever actually learning anything. I'd like to get out of that and your about just trying things out and seeing how they taste helped me shift my mindset about it
The basic idea is:
- Chop up the sweet potatoes, peppers, and onions. This takes me a while lol.
- Start with saute mode, heat the oil, fry the onions, then add the garlic, spices, peppers. The saute part overall just takes me around 5-6 mins
- Add broth, quinoa, chopped tomatoes, and cook on high pressure for 8 mins (the actual cooking time is longer because it takes some time to reach high pressure, and then to depressurise when done)
- I use canned beans, so I just stir them in right here at the end and let them mix for 5-10 mins
(But this is all described in that recipe)
I can basically make 8 good sized portions of this if I fill my Instant Pot, and it's cheap and very healthy. So it's become almost my go-to meal. Oh, and it freezes well too!
When i'm cooking in this mode, i use a rice cooker to cook lentils, the Puy / French / lentilles vertes / speckled type. I like those because they retain a lot of texture when cooked, and have a decent flavour. Dry lentils, olive oil (apply to the dry lentils and stir to coat), water, fraction of a stock cube or some miso paste, garlic, herbs, spices, whatever else you like; cook on the white rice programme. Extremely easy, pretty tasty, and with loads of scope for variation.
As an addition, sliced chorizo is great, the spicy pork fat melts out and improves everything. Lardons are almost as good. You can float a chicken thigh on top, and it will cook nicely, but won't get crispy, but you can finish it up under the grill. Sliced onion is remarkably good, soaks up the stock and comes out juicy. I often add leafy brassicas like cabbage or kale, not very exciting but it's healthy.
I've used the same rice cooker on a slow cooking setting to cook beef ragout, something like cassoulet, and pork knuckle.
A pressure cooker can do all this, but can do the high-temperature bits faster!
Wow, thanks. That sounds very tasty. I've cooked lentils, but only indian-curry-style and on a stove, never in a rice cooker. Can I ask how long you cook them for in the rice cooker? I imagine dried lentils to be like beans in that they require pre-soaking and/or a long cooking time - is that right? Also, do you add the kale in near the end, or let it cook the whole way through?
Sous vide for all the hype has had similar benefits for me. Some recipes can take a long time, but same as on an electric pressure cooker things are completely automated and hands off. There's no need to monitor or stir, and the results are always great and always repeatable. Chicken breasts are always perfect, salmon, steak, etc... (also works on some veggie recipes)
Pressure cooking is very common in some countries, but I'm only familiar with the simple mechanical pressure cookers (that work on gas or induction stoves). Can electric pressure cookers do things that a regular one can't?
Many electric pressure cookers double or triple as other similar devices, e.g. rice cookers. Also, you can fry stuff in them before you start the pressure cooking phase (maybe you can do that in other devices, too, I don't know).
In general I would say that the temperature control in an electric pressure cooker is going to be more precise, so you see functions like yogurt making in them, too.
It's not a matter of what it can do, but of safety/ease of use. I used a traditional pressure cooker for many years, but nowadays I see no reason to go back to babysitting the cooking process. Waiting for pressure to build? Deciding when it's done and lowering the stove to maintenance pressure? Setting an alarm, and then making the pot stop cooking? Nah, just set the timer at the very beginning and go for a walk.
You don't need to "babysit" them. They'll get to pressure and adjust the heat automatically. And then they'll stop at the appropriate time.
Being able to dump ingredients in and set the pressure for 20 minutes, and then go out for 2 hours and come back and eat warm food that hasn't gone bad is really, really nice.
Apart from that - as others pointed out, they're multifunctional. I make yogurt in mine. Also acts as a slow cooker but in my experience not very well.
> It also makes dried legumes far more practical, because you can skip the pre-soak phase.
What do you do about the indigestible sugars found in many beans? Traditionally, pre-soaking reduces the amount of sugars and the corresponding flatulence.
Hey what do you mean you can skip the soaking time of beans?
If I buy dried beans (black beans let's day) don't I still need soak them overnight to avoid being super gassy?
If you get a Ninja Foodi, it has an air dryer mode that does make crispy things (like crispy chicken) in addition to the pressure cooking. There's even a model with Sous Vide.
12 functions: Pressure Cook, Air Fry/Air Crisp, Steam, Slow Cook, Yogurt, Sear/Sauté, Bake/Roast, Broil, Dehydrate, Sous Vide, Reheat, Keep Warm
I second both of these. Even though they write a lot about tech, you can replace the specific technologies with the modern day equivalent and it's still relevant. For a lot of the topics, I haven't come across anything else that better articulates it.
The next level is getting into the mind of Kathy Sierra. The idea that helping people become passionate -- or badass, as she later rewords -- is an end in itself. This isn't just about tech.
Before reading this post I had no idea I had aphantasia and thought everyone else was the same as me, unable to see anything when they closed their eyes. This helped me understand myself and my relationships so much better than ever before. Thanks Blake!
Yes, this. I honestly don't know if I see things vividly or not well at all because there is no baseline for comparison, such as a traditional vision and color test.
Yeah, I have asked people “ can you visualize Obama’s face on this piece of paper?” They say “oh, yes-perfectly! -it’s like I’m looking at a photograph”
“Could you trace it and come away with a drawing that would compare well with a traced photo?”
They can’t, and I think they are over-reporting the fidelity of their visualizations.
I agree that some people might under/over-estimate their abilities.
However, I am not sure if drawing is the right way to test it. I can visualise a straight line or a perfect circle, but I wouldn't be able to draw them perfectly.
Well, the image moves when you try to trace it, because your eyes are jumping around. Then, when you've got a wrong line, your brain tries to fit the imagined image to the wrong line by skewing it, which it does in several different ways once you've got enough wrong lines, so the wrong lines multiply.
A skilled artist can work around this, by drawing the right lines (and erasing / ignoring the wrong lines).
You could (or at least I could with little musical training) fumble around finding the right notes, and with enough time, eventually transcribe the song to sheet music though. mostly accurately.
just because you have no skill in shading and drawing lines doesnt mean that you shouldn't be able to replicate the correct proportions and details in the features of someones face.
Visualization is a bit confusing in the sense that I can perfectly "see" someone's image in my mind or on the piece of paper, but I cannot draw it that well. It is like a "floating image"? that gives me the person's face in my head, but I if I sit down and try to describe it with minor details or draw it, I cannot.
I do think variances in reporting are some of it. I have some visualization skills and wouldn't claim to be "aphantasic", but on the flip side, there is an enormous dividing line between real-world images and these imagined images. While awake I would never confuse the two.
I also suspect a lot of people are massively overreporting the quality of their images. It's very easy to imagine something and think you understand it, until asked to produce something based on it. This isn't just limited to mental images, it's the source of the "why don't you 'just'..." questions, and comes up all the time in building, engineering, artistic endeavors, etc. Your brain is easily convinced it has a thought with more detail than it actually has. I really only trust people who have taken a lot of time to train the relevant system if they claim they have these things. For instance, I really can design some somewhat non-trivial programs in my head... but I've been doing this for ~25 years, and only recently would I say I'm getting to the point where these designs are sometimes good enough that they're not taking serious body blows betwixt conceptualization and realization.
What's more convincing to me than self report of image quality is self report of imagery use. Whether it should be described as aphantasia I don't know, but I never think in a visuospatial way unless I consciously stop and try because the problem really requires it (and even then I feel I'm pretty bad). On the other hand I have friends that describe their ideas in such a visual way almost instantly, and report having imagery pop into their heads naturally.
To me it seems really obvious that relative to my internal monologue, my imagery is much weaker and quantifiably less frequent. So I think at least people that report having imagery much stronger than internal monologue likely have something different going on for real, not just with reporting.
I'm pretty sure it's just in how people report it. I was always quite good at geometry puzzles because I could picture the shapes moving in my head. Does that mean I can see images in my mind or not? It's nothing like seeing with my eyes, but I can definitely "see" it in my mind.
I'm aphantasic, and I'd say one advantage is that I'm not bothered by invasive vivid memories or anxiety inducing imagery. Just on a hunch, I think aphantasics are probably less likely to develop PTSD after trauma, as a big component of PTSD appears to be just this kind of pervasive, invasive and hyper-vivid memories. I sometimes feel that I'm missing out on something, but from experiences on psychedelics, which give me closed-eye visuals of geometric shapes and colors which don't go away until the effects pass, I think I prefer the still black void and relative mental silence (apart from the soundless inner monologue) of aphantasia to a 'richer' inner world that I'm not able to shut off. Would be happy to get other aphantasics' (as well as hyperphantasics at the other end of the spectrum) perspective on this
I'm curious what you mean by "soundless inner monologue"? I don't really experience much imagery at all but my inner monologue feels very close to how talking to myself aloud feels, so I wouldn't describe it as soundless. The verbal vividness of my internal monologue is actually how I imagined people with good imagery skills "see".
On the note of advantages, I know I have something weird going on with the back right of my brain specifically (focal slowing on EEG among other things), which I am pretty certain connects to my favoring of verbal over visual thinking. So I guess it depends on the cause of a case of aphantasia, but to me it feels a little like how blind people end up with heightened hearing. I think I've really developed strong verbal skills because of it, and there are definitely advantages to having strong verbal skills.
I recall a professor showing us a study once where students performed better on an exam when they were allowed/encouraged to talk out loud to themselves while they were taking it. He was encouraging us to talk through stuff with ourselves, but at first I found the result weird because I assumed everybody was always talking to themselves in their head. That was the first time it really dawned on me there may be large individual differences in how we experience thoughts.
Late response here, but hoping you might catch it!
I'm also very verbal, as that is the form most of my thinking takes. I do have some very limited visual imagination, but it takes the form of very vague and transparent 'flash' visions, and otherwise it's mostly a kind of spatial sense (I have pretty good spatial orientation, and it often surprises me how some people with vivid visual imaginations can be very easily spatially disoriented).
My inner monologue is running most of the time, and I tend to think in complete sentences, even stopping to rephrase when it doesn't make sense. But it's soundless, as in not being perceived as a sound. I'm a musician and songwriter, so I often sing and make melodies in my head, but these too aren't perceived as sound in any way resembling what I hear with my ears. Hearing your own voice all the time also sounds like an invasive and disturbing experience to me, but I guess everyone is used to their inner world. It seems aphantasia can be uni- or multimodal. I also can't imagine smells or tastes, beyond having a vague idea of whether a combination of flavours will be good. I have heard others describe tasting chocolate in their mouth when imagining it, and that's just not something I've experienced.
So yes, I'm also fascinated by the huge range of inner experiences people have, and how it affects their personality and relationship with the world
I participated in the Prosopagnosia study at Imperial a few years ago. I also don't hear any internal monologue; When I think, I think in words, and it is very similar to reading.
I think I can imagine sounds in my head, but it is a little like singing, or humming a tune without making noise. I believe I have the cadence and rhythm of sounds, but it's not really easy to get words that way.
I can also recognise some specific images I have seen previously, but I definitely do not see them and cannot conjure up any imagery of any kind.
You might be amused to know that until I joined that study I had no idea that you were thinking any differently than I was, and since learning you-all are freaks, I have wondered if the reason you guys get distracted so easily is that you're watching a movie out of the corner of your eye, or maybe the reason you think code is unreadable is that you need to sound out your program in order to read it.
>I participated in the Prosopagnosia study at Imperial a few years ago. I also don't hear any internal monologue; When I think, I think in words, and it is very similar to reading.
Isn't this exactly what an internal monologue is? Lack of internal monologue would be someone who thinks only abstractly or visually, without any words.
>I think I can imagine sounds in my head, but it is a little like singing, or humming a tune without making noise. I believe I have the cadence and rhythm of sounds, but it's not really easy to get words that way.
Yes, isn't this what pretty much everyone experiences, unless they have one of these listed disorders? If you can think in words, watch a TV show and later picture what the characters look like, and listen to a song and have it get "stuck in your head", then I think you have an internal monologue and don't have aphantasia.
> Isn't this exactly what an internal monologue is? Lack of internal monologue would be someone who thinks only abstractly or visually, without any words.
I don't know. It's like reading though. I definitely don't hear a voice (mine or anyone else's).
> If you can think in words, watch a TV show and later picture what the characters look like, and listen to a song and have it get "stuck in your head", then I think you have an internal monologue and don't have aphantasia.
Nope. I can't picture what the characters look like. I can't get a song stuck in my head either.
>I think I can imagine sounds in my head, but it is a little like singing, or humming a tune without making noise.
This seems like how I and I assume most people experience the phenomenon of recalling or thinking about sound. It's just more or less vivid and detailed for different people.
Do you listen to music often? If so, you've never listened to a song and later had some sort of experience where something about that song stayed remnant in your mind?
If you try to imagine the loud alarm of an alarm clock, do you feel like you're experiencing something? By "experiencing", I mean you aren't just like "I can't even say any part of what I'm doing is imagining the sound of an alarm", but are in some way perceiving some kind of representation of some recollection of hearing an alarm clock's alarm.
Also, what happens in your mind when you hum something? To me, humming is the process of transforming that rough, vague, general "phantasic" representation of pitch/amplitude/time into rough, vague, general vocal cord movements. I could be very wrong, but I suspect that if someone is capable of humming anything with even the tiniest minuscule of correlation with the original song, then they don't have aphantasia (with respect to sound).
My speculative, uninformed hypothesis is that actual aphantasia is very rare and that sometimes there's misunderstanding of what it means, combined with the fact that some people have less vivid imaginations and mental representations than others.
Many people may have "weak phantasia", e.g. they may not internally imagine a 1-to-1 visual representation of what they saw on a walk on the previous day, or may not recreate every texture and pitch in a song they heard, but they can imagine some rough approximation of them. I think almost no one can construct these perfect mental recreations; maybe von Neumann and a tiny number of others.
For most people, I'd guess it's probably like 0.1 - 10%. But I think 0% is rare. And during dreaming, I imagine for most people it may increase to like 10 - 40%.
The weaker it is, I think the less one may feel attached to a term like "seeing" or "hearing". But I think no one is ever actually "seeing" or "hearing". It's just a mental representation which no term can fully describe. Kind of like how you can't exactly put a scientific, objective perceptual term to the experience of feeling love. It's just an internal, subjective experience within your mind. Something a little bit more like "reading" rather than "hearing", as you say.
And for internal monologue: if I ask you to "think" the phrase "I am going to go to the store", were you able to "think it"? If so, then I think you probably have internal monologue, or at least the capacity for internal monologue. It may not manifest very often, and you may "experience" it less "potently" than some other people, but I think you have it.
The suspected misunderstanding with internal monologue is that I think some people "spend more time with" their internal monologue than others. Like, a catastrophizer might regularly think the words "oh fuck oh fuck oh fuck what do I do", while for someone else their mind may be fairly "blank" most of the time, especially if they're distracted with something.
For people who experience it more frequently, some percentage of it may manifest and "bleed over" into spoken utterances, like the catastrophizer may sometimes mumble "oh fuck", perhaps without even realizing it. In my opinion, humming is often this same sort of "bleeding over" of the internal into the external, but with music instead of monologue.
Based on what you've said so far, I think you potentially might have visual aphantasia, but I think you likely don't have aural a...
> If so, you've never listened to a song and later had some sort of experience where something about that song stayed remnant in your mind?
With listening? Never. I can remember the lyrics of songs, and I can remember (sometimes) the progression of notes, but no: nothing I would refer to as an “experience”. They might as well be written down.
> you try to imagine the loud alarm of an alarm clock, do you feel like you're experiencing something?
No. I know what an alarm clock is and I know they can go “ding ding ding ding ding” - but these things are just the same words I give to you. Again: I certainly can’t experience an alarm clock in my head (or experience being in the same room as an alarm clock or anything like that)
> Also, what happens in your mind when you hum something?
If I hum and then stop, I have a sensation of the vibration and of the way my breathing changes. I can then recall (in some way) those vibrations and then reintroduce heavier breath so we hear sound again.
Is this not like how it is for you? Do you remember “the sound” of your own hum and try to reproduce it?
> Based on what you've said so far, I think you potentially might have visual aphantasia
If you are a researcher working in this space, you can send me an email from an edu address and I’ll connect you with the people who ran tests on me in London.
If not, could you explain why you’re giving your opinion?
>If not, could you explain why you’re giving your opinion?
I'm not a researcher or a scientist of any kind. I know very little about aphantasia, and don't experience it myself or know anyone who does (besides one podcaster I listen to). I simply suspect that some percentage of people who report aphantasia may not actually have it, based on dozens of peoples' self-reports that I've read before. Subjective experiences are complicated. I could certainly be completely wrong both in general and in this case, though.
I based most of my reply on the fact that you said:
>I think I can imagine sounds in my head, but it is a little like singing, or humming a tune without making noise.
To me, this is the experience of aural "phantasia". This is what happens when I imagine sounds in my head. That's why I read your post with a sense of dissonance. It made me want to try to understand how you can have this kind of "humming a tune without making noise" sound in your head yet also have aural aphantasia.
Are you able to hum a song you've heard before? If so, I think that could potentially require a kind of ability to represent the song in your mind, though I could be wrong about that.
Are you able to think about a note with some pitch frequency and then about a note with a higher pitch frequency right afterwards? If not, what is the experience of humming like for you? If so, then what's happening when you're thinking about these pitches?
The fact that you've never had anything like a song getting stuck in your head (e.g. hearing a song you like and humming or thinking about it a later time) would make me think there likely is something atypical about your experience, at the least, though.
Additionally, you said:
>I don't know. It's like reading though. I definitely don't hear a voice (mine or anyone else's).
This is also my own perception of what internal monologue is like for me. Although this is potentially a separate phenomenon from aphantasia, to me it seemed like you were saying you didn't have an internal monologue when I thought maybe you did, which, if true, made me think there was possibly an increased chance you don't have aphantasia if you think you do.
Obviously you know your own experience better than anyone else does or could, but there's a lot of ambiguity and ineffability around the meanings of all of these terms; a little bit like (though not as extreme as) trying to describe the experience of perceiving a particular color.
I'm also doing all this in part so I can better understand the phenomenon and educate myself.
I initially was considering adding the "I think you likely don't have aural aphantasia" part but decided to leave it out, since it's extremely presumptive, but the imagining sounds/humming thing and the capability of humming something you've heard before (if I understand correctly) seemed so contradictory with what I personally understand aphantasia to be that I later went back and edited it in. If not for that part I probably wouldn't have replied and would've just silently acknowledged your aphantasia.
> Are you able to hum a song you've heard before? If so, I think that could potentially require a kind of ability to represent the song in your mind
If I pay attention I can tell that a sound is higher or lower than another. I can also count. It often requires a lot of concentration (and many repeats) to hum a song I have heard.
> Are you able to think about a note with some pitch frequency and then about a note with a higher pitch frequency right afterwards?
Yes. I can also tell the names of tones (as in keys on a piano) in some cases, but it requires a lot of focus to do this quickly, and the tones usually have to be pretty simplistic or extremely rhythmic.
> If so, then what's happening when you're thinking about these pitches?
What do you mean? If you have ever played SIMON you have to memorise a sequence of red blue yellow and green lights. The repetition starts slowly and gets faster. Then it can become so fast it is overwhelming. Do you memorize the colours or the names of the colours? If you haven’t played it maybe you could look at a YouTube video and get the idea.
> it seemed like you were saying you didn't have an internal monologue
I said I can’t hear one.
> I simply suspect that some percentage of people who report aphantasia may not actually have it, based on dozens of peoples' self-reports that I've read before.
That’s not what I asked. I asked you why you gave your opinion, not why you have an opinion.
I have noticed people do this quite often, and I do not really know why. I wonder if you can sufficiently self-reflect to explain your thinking to me.
I think their argument may stem from the fact that they can’t remove themselves from their own frame of reference enough to understand yours. In their head, to have this abnormal diagnosis, you must either be exactly like their perspective of someone with aphantasia, or be someone who just doesn’t understand that your experience is just like theirs.
The problem with having a diagnosis like this is that a lot of people won’t understand what it’s like to not have the characteristics we take for granted to the point that it seems unreal. To avoid accepting that the scale of people who have experiences that they’ll never be able to understand is bigger than they imagine (and avoid cognitive dissonance), they must invalidate your experience.
> I wonder if anyone in the world has both conditions. That would be interesting to understand how they think.
I think maybe I do? I’ve know about the aphantasia and it wasn’t surprising to me because I always felt like I was missing something when people used phrases like “picture $thing in your mind” but now you’re telling me everyone is talking to themselves in their heads, too? It’s actually so hard for me to wrap my head around I think I must be misunderstanding...
I think you and some others probably are misunderstanding. It's the idea that sometimes when you think, you "think with words". It's the presence or employment of words or language anywhere in your thinking.
Not "hearing" the words or necessarily "talking to yourself" or hearing someone talk to you. I think many people do mentally talk to themselves, but I think that's a sufficient condition to have an internal monologue rather than a necessary condition.
People who don't have it would 100% of the time only ever think about things in terms of visual imagery, symbols, or something else abstract. I believe it's quite rare.
This one I’ve always been extremely skeptical of. I suspect it’s more likely they’re lacking introspection to such an extent that they’re not even aware of it.
It just seems highly unlikely that a non brain damaged human sharing the same evolutionary history and ability to use language would not have one, yet be able to speak and converse normally. Their arguments in support of it always seemed weak to me.
It’s in those class of things where people like to be the person that has it (and it’s hard to test or verify)
When I read, I hear my voice. That’s the only time I ever hear a voice in my head. When I think of problems and solutions, I build structures in my mind and navigate those structures, examine them, and solve them. Rubik’s cubes are ridiculously easy.
There’s plenty of introspection, but if anything, it’s hardest to translate some solutions to English. Often, I can’t tell you why “it’s the right answer” other than “the whole structure would collapse” which makes no sense to other people. I used to get points docked on math papers because I couldn’t show my work.
I find software engineering fantastic, because everyone can agree they see the same structure, rendered as code on a screen. We can agree why something is right or wrong or YAGNI. I love working remote because I have more time to compose thoughtful answers to describe/translate what I mean.
Sometimes I need to talk through a problem out loud because the problem and solution exist in the English language (people problems) which is another boon to remote work. So, I talk out loud to myself, quite a bit more than other people do. I have hours of recordings because people look at you weird walking down the street if you’re not holding a phone but speaking out loud.
I can spot a bug a mile away in code, because the code literally becomes a structure in my mind. Bugs stick out as weak points or unstable parts of the structure.
I’m just rambling a bit as I fall asleep, but maybe you won’t be so skeptical now.
It's possible I'm brain damaged, though I've never been diagnosed as such. And of course it's possible I'm lacking introspection. I've spent years honing introspective skills via meditation, but of course if I have blind spots, I wouldn't know about them.
My conscious lived is experience has always been one in which I have no inner voice. No words, in fact. It's totally silent in my head. (It's not still. I have racing thoughts. But they're non-verbal. They seem to be in some sort of "mentalese.") I neither see words nor hear them. And it's impossible for me to imagine what my voice sounds like unless I actually hear myself speak.
I also can't imagine what my wife or friends sound like. My father died a few years ago, and I now can't imagine his voice. I never could unless I heard it. And now that's impossible.
While I know the ideas I want to express, I have no clue what words I'll use to express them until I hear them come out of my mouth or see them on a page or screen. When I type, it seems like my fingers are making up the words. Obviously, that's not what's happening, but I have no sense at all that my mind chose the words.
I also have never felt authorship of anything I've written, even though I'm a published author. I have no sense at all that I've written this paragraph. It's my ideas--it's what I wanted to say--but it's as if someone else chose the words.
I suspect that for everyone, there's a process that goes something like this: mentalese --> coming up with words --> expressing words via speech or writing.
Some folks have no conscious access to the first step. For them, it's entirely unconscious. (mentalese) --> coming up with words --> speaking or writing.
In my case, for some reason I seem to have no conscious access to the choosing-words part. It must happen, of course, but it seems to be hidden from my conscious mind: mentalese --> (coming up with words) --> speaking or writing.
Until fairly recently I thought everyone was like me. When people talked about seeing or hearing words in their heads (or their "inner voice"), I thought they meant it metaphorically. It's still amazing to me that people can imagine or "hear" voices in their heads. So I have the same impulse as you, except in reverse: Come on! An inner voice? I'm skeptical. (Intellectually, I'm not, anymore. But I still feel the pang of skepticism, because it's so alien to me.)
I think I have close to opposite of not having an internal monologue, it is hard for me to turn my internal monologue into an external one. Talking takes a lot of effort and I get tired of doing it after a short while. I've conditioned myself to be able to do it well now, and I can be very articulate, but my wife and son, for instance, can just keep talking and talking and talking. I find it so bizarre.
But I can talk with myself internally for hours on end.
I have no internal monologue. No voice in my head and also no words. I can't even imagine what my voice sounds like (or my wife's voice) unless I hear it. And I also have aphantasia. It's totally silent and totally dark in my head. (And when I'm typing this, I know the ideas I want to communicate, but I have no idea what words I'll use until I see them on the screen.)
I wonder if those with aphantasia tend to hate reading novels. For me, once I get into a book I basically "see" it playing out in my head and I won't even notice that I'm reading words.
I could totally understand how it would be bland if you were just reading a description and nothing was coming to you.
I guess I have this thing, I had never heard of it before but I have it based on Wikipedia's description, I also have very few memories of my life, which can be disturbing, maybe this is why.
For the record I love novels, inc fantasy fiction and descriptive sci-fi without having a minds eye to bring it into.
e.g. Big fan of starship troopers (the book) which is completely set in an invented universe none of which I have visualized. I saw the film and I can't remember its visual interpretation. (I do remember it being lame compared to the book)
Even without a minds eye I sometimes find some directors visual interpretation jarring.
How do you visualizers get on with the colour of magic? Do you have to see everything?
On the plus side I support two concurrent internal monologues or one that goes double speed & I can go full-duplex.
Let's say somebody shows you a picture of a house for a couple of minutes and then takes it away, is there no way for you to recollect and reproduce anything that was on that picture (visually)?
not the OP but similar to him. I can fleetingly see details individually in my mind, i struggle to really see the whole house. i can see (fleetingly) in my mind how the shutters are built, their material, what color they are, how they fold over the window. and so on for each feature of the house.
reading fiction and fantasy books are also sort of boring for me because i have no mental image of the characters or their settings or faces or anything like that. like if it's describing a blacksmith's forge, sure i know that has a forge and anvil and tools and quenching bucket. but there's not really a cohesive setting in my head of what it looks like for the story.
i also cant really mentally image the faces of people i know. i can see their features but their face in my mind doesn't really look human. i can't imagine someone's whole body including their face. i have no issue recognizing faces and putting them to names in person though.
i have a notoriously bad memory. i still made good grades in school and can study and retain knowledge and skills. but i forget the vast majority of conversations i've had with people after a couple weeks, and my fiance is constantly telling me things i said where i have no memory of saying it.
I have it and I love reading novels. Like I can't "see" your comment or any other comment but I understand what you are saying. Likewise I can't "see" novels but that doesn't mean I can't understand and find them interesting.
To be clear, I don't "see" comments like this. It's pretty specific to engaging content that is apt to be visualized. i.e. I don't tend to visualize books or passages that aren't as engaging to me.
For sure, I understand. Was more trying to say that it is not necessary to visualize comments to enjoy them. Likewise it is not necessary to visualize a book to enjoy it. "For sale, baby shoes, never worn." I don't see the shoes, and I don't see the advertisement but damn if it doesn't make me feel sad.
I can't quite describe how it works, but I still get something out of a visual description. If the author mentions a small red leather book and then later a large wooden book with a blue ribbon across it I get a different "sense" for lack of a better word. I have seen both things and know what they look like even if I can't form a visual picture in my mind while reading it. To be more precise I haven't actually seen a wooden book with a blue ribbon across it, but I have seen both of those items individually and know how it would look if they were combined. But I don't actually have a picture of it in my mind.
I remember reading this first time in early twenties - it was mindblowing. After several years I can say that many things I’ve expierenced, noticed and learned are mentioned somewhere along these lines.
‚One must permit his people the freedom to seek added work and greater responsibility. In my organization, there are no formal job descriptions or organizational charts. Responsibilities are defined in a general way, so that people are not circumscribed. All are permitted to do as they think best and to go to anyone and anywhere for help. Each person then is limited only by his own ability.’
> Unless the individual truly responsible can be identified when something goes wrong, no one has really been responsible. With the advent of modern management theories it is becoming common for organizations to deal with problems in a collective manner, by dividing programs into subprograms, with no one left responsible for the entire effort.
I was quite literally thinking about this exact problem at my organization last week. This quote is older than I am.
This is my absolute favorite essay of all time. I actually have it set to my default tab whenever I open a web browser, because I try to make sure I read it as often as I can.
> To complaints of a job poorly done, one often hears the excuse, “I am not responsible.” I believe that is literally correct. The man who takes such a stand in fact is not responsible; he is irresponsible. While he may not be legally liable, or the work may not have been specifically assigned to him, no one involved in a job can divest himself of responsibility for its successful completion.
I know that it is tempting to paste a link to your favorite blog post, but I would like to encourage you to post really life-changing posts. If you post "maybe not" or "not really" maybe refrain from posting? Otherwise it will be just another popularity contest of random blog posts, we have more of them than those from the title I believe. It's okay for the thread to be short.
Every time I see something like this I have two answers: none and all. On one hand, "life changing" is a big word and I have never read anything that I could possibly say had as big an impact on me as, say, having children. It's hard to imagine articles and books are life changing, only that they can contribute to life changing actions.
On the other, nearly everything I've read has changed me and how I saw the world, even ever so slightly. Different perspectives, bits of knowledge, connections made that I'm not even aware of. So I guess I just have to assume that everyone's definition of "life changing" is going to be quite wide depending on their own life experience and attitudes.
> If you post "maybe not" or "not really" maybe refrain from posting?
Sometimes people use hedging language like this because they’re being vulnerable beyond their comfort level. So even though a post might truly have been life changing for them they brace for someone responding with a dismissive or snarky comment by hedging with “maybe not really” type words. It’s a form of self-protection, in a way.
So I fear your comment could very likely discourage people who were already on the fence about sharing, perhaps even sharing something interesting. So I say, the more the merrier! Who knows what might be life changing for someone. I definitely didn’t expect to open this thread and read a blog post about bone trumpets but I’m really glad I did.
It's a short blog post that I've probably read a thousand times at this point. He wrote about how websites give Google a big advantage when it comes to web crawling and how that big advantage probably makes it harder for other search engines to compete with Google. This was a pretty striking idea to me and there was a lot of talk at the time about antitrust and Big Tech. Dan's post had been written in 2015, so I was sure that a ton of other people, especially DC policy people, already knew about this and were talking about it. Right?
Turns out, basically nobody in DC knew anything about this. A ton of website operators complain about it on their own forums like HN and SEO, it's not hard to find people griping about the cost of Bing's crawlers, but those people never saw fit to tell anybody in DC about this and how it impacts the market for general purpose search engines and gives Google such an advantage. So I started writing down everything that I was finding about Google's web crawling advantage and writing it in a way that policy people could understand these things called web crawlers they had probably never heard much about before.
And, long story short, the policy people were very grateful that I had gotten in touch and explained all this, and I got cited in the Big Tech Antitrust report published by Congress last summer and then featured in The New York Times:
So, Dan's blog post has had a pretty big impact on my life so far and it's not quite done yet. The pandemic has slowed me down this year much more than it did last year, but I'm working on preparing to submit a paper to an economics journal for peer review that lays out the dynamics of web crawling, why Google accrues this advantage and why it matters. I'm very grateful to Dan for writing that post and, as far as career advice goes, I heartily recommend going back every once in a while and rereading everything he has ever written. Who knows what else he's hiding in there?
The difference between Bing and Google's crawlers causes me physical pain.
As part of a team that runs several large sites, the performance difference between them is stunning, but not any any way complimentary to Bing. We want Bing to do better. We want them to challenges Google pole position.
Bingbot will crawl the exact same set pages 10 times in a week, and will make hundreds of requests per minute doing so. Googlebot will crawl them once, at a much more reasonable pace.
The bandwidth and power costs we incur from Bing crawlers are a hundredfold (at least) what we incur from Googlebot.
Please, Microsoft, make Bingbots not suck so badly.
Wallace says it himself in the speech:
"
Twenty years after my own graduation, I have come gradually to understand that the liberal arts cliché about teaching you how to think is actually shorthand for a much deeper, more serious idea: learning how to think really means learning how to exercise some control over how and what you think. It means being conscious and aware enough to choose what you pay attention to and to choose how you construct meaning from experience. Because if you cannot exercise this kind of choice in adult life, you will be totally hosed. Think of the old cliché about “the mind being an excellent servant but a terrible master.”
I second this nomination. This is one of the most insightful essays I've ever read. Wallace's central points of consciously choosing A) what you give your attention to and B) how you construct meaning from experience REALLY DO lie at the heart of learning how to think and live a meaningful life.
("Water" is the noise in life that surrounds us every day which we've learned to ignore. But it's still the lens through which an untrained eye sees everything, that shapes who we are and how we live, since most of us don't act deliberately so much as react to life. Being oblivious to water is about remaining clueless to this noise, just going with the flow, unquestioningly and passively allowing your view of the world and your role in life to be shaped by mostly meaningless turbulence.)
I once had an entire podcast dedicated to sharing blog posts that had influenced my life. I recorded almost 50 episodes, it was a really rewarding experience. You can see the whole list at https://aaronfrancis.com/musicmakers
Joel Spolsky's The Perils of JavaSchools really popped my bubble when I first read it. It was part of a suggested reading list from the Software Engineering MA program I was taking (hidden away on a dark corner of a syllabus). Reading it felt like a refutation of almost everything I knew about software at that point. He introduced to me new topics I had never heard about from my compsci classes like Lisp and SICP.
Reading the post, it became clear to me that it was not about how quick or deep you can learn a language, but rather what are all the ideas and abstractions that enable such a language to exist. Computer science really was more than just computers. After reading that post I looked around and discovered the youtube videos of SICP, which have done more for my love and knowledge of programming than the entire MA program I took.
When I was 13 I read ESR’s how to become a hacker and it changed my life.. I followed the instructions starting with c++ then linux and that’s basically how I got into coding!
1) Lots of the things I do in everyday life is just to consume: buying, watching, following, etc. These things either consume my money, or my time. These things make me feel good, but it does not generate real value. In order to get rich, I need to create things. I also start to realize that great people are great because they started to create things at a very early stage of their life (but not consuming things as they advocate, think about celebrities, entrepreneurs etc), so they are able to practice and perfect the value creating skills to the extreme.
2) I start to realize that the world is binary in nature : I create to sell, I buy to consume. I either at the buyer side, or at the seller side. And in this current society, there is a huge buyer side trap, the whole idea of consumerism and social media is to trap you inside the buyer side, so you keep buying, you keep consuming. I really need to break free from this trap.
This blog post was written before COVID-19, but the idea feels even fresher during this pandemic era
If you keep reading murakami and Dan brown, sure you’re just juggling words for no real benefit. But if you’re gonna read the making of the atomic bomb, or team of teams, then maybe it’s not a wasteful exercise. Definitely better than writing if you ask me.
I agree on that, I would like to add that for some of the time, consuming helps us create better. Different kind of consuming activities actually have different leverage on creating value
If you want to be a writer, you must do two things above all others: read a lot and write a lot. There's no way around these two things that I'm aware of, no shortcut.
Disagree on this. I used to only read non-fiction, but these days, I feel like reading fiction (especially literary fiction) and having different experiences and empathizing with characters is more beneficial and relevant to my life in _general_ (obviously not always the case). Plus there are no limits to the realities that can be created in fiction, so there are some creative (and escapist) benefits there as well.
I'm not saying fiction is objectively more "beneficial" than non-fiction, I'm just saying the opposite isn't necessarily true either.
It’s as beneficial as listening to music or watching tv is. It’s not inherently more beneficial just because it involves books. No one said tv or music is bad for you and neither is fiction. Just remember it’s entertainment for the most part. Im yet to see someone become wiser because they consume a ton of fiction.
I think I've been adjusting my life style to that idea for a couple months now. Being alone without friends for a few years makes working much more fun then I remember. Great article.
I think those of us with leisure time or "bullshit" work struggle with these questions, but I find that the consumption/creation dichotomy is the wrong approach. Arguably almost everything is consumptive in some capacity, from creating art (which is indulgent and pleasurable) to unnecessary programs (they're all unnecessary) or any other passtime. I would further reduce the problem to one of stimulus and desire. Execution and completion of tasks is in itself cognitively satisfying, that's in part why smartphone games can be so addictive, you can "fake" the experience in rapid fashion. The mechanism behind the dopamine release etc doesn't care about the context behind it, that is an existential problem. We like the flow experience. That can be "deep" work, or not.
The question of meaning behind our actions is one divorced from this, and obviously not so easily determined as whether or not an action is creative. Some of the most effective altruistic actions are boring. I'm of the type that has short bouts of investigative interest in certain topics, and that wanes, so I can't count on merely my "mood" to finish projects. I had read anecdotally that authors in particular seem to derive satisfaction from having completed a work, and find that driving themselves to finish it can be torturous. I feel that way about my projects.
Personally, it's a good day if I've "executed" and completed a lot at work. There is no objective reason why this ought to be better than those days where I struggle to finish a single assignment, but that is human nature. You can satisfy such a creature with social validation and the feedback of completing tasks, until maybe you broach the problem of meaning. I wonder how many of us in the future will spend most of our time dwelling in virtual worlds where nothing is real. If we do, then meaning is cheap.
>I realized that reading a book was really just like reading Reddit—both were consumptive activitives.
I disagree on this but I love and agree with the premise of the blog post. Comparing reddit to Moby Dick could not be further off. reddit (or any similar site) is a shill/bad actor/agitator/troll cesspool full of memes and clickbait.
It is important to learn to tell good shit from bad shit. Consume things produced by masters of their craft. Try not to settle for less, you have limited time here. Use this to create more.
The quality of consumption is different for sure, but I would argue that certain areas of reddit are of high value to my job, hobbies, etc. and Moby Dick is of little value those areas and quality of life in general. You could perhaps make arguments about historical value, context, or benefits to reading comprehension, but at the end of the day, reading anything is about only as good as the information you're taking in.
I would argue that reading Moby Dick is of value to your quality of life in general. Good fiction speaks to the human condition and can help us live our lives more fully.
I will respectfully disagree that it leads to a more 'full life' for everyone. People have different perspectives, values, etc. and that type of experience is purely subjective. I personally think it's of some value, but not as much as some other content.
And it makes things richer just in your daily life to have some familiarity with history and the literary canon instead of being deaf to its influence all around you.
> And in this current society, there is a huge buyer side trap, the whole idea of consumerism and social media is to trap you inside the buyer side, so you keep buying, you keep consuming.
Aside from bankruptcy, buying and selling are actually completely balanced in a modern market economy. Even “saving” money is actually best considered as selling it. Earning money is obviously selling your time and bodily energy (those are the only finite things you have that are inputs into the system).
Borrowing is selling your future money to someone who wants to take on the risk.
While I do agree with your first point, I think it's a bit .. obvious. Of course you need to create value in order to be great (or get rich).
Regarding the article, it doesn't match my experience. All the prolific creators I know (about) are prolific consumers as well. Writers are known to read a lot. The girl the author saw sketching on the bus probably loves looking at and reading about art and does it often as well as actually creating art.
The other issue is the amount of creative effort you can spend. For example, software engineering is a very creative job and often at the end of the day I just have no energy left to create more.
Wow, really great article. I think there is nuance to consumption as others have pointed out. Regardless, this article really resonated with me and I appreciate you bringing it into my perspective.
I don't agree with the overall take that the world is binary in that way at all..
You create to sell? No, I think a fundamental part, for example of art, is that it can be created for no reason whatsoever. To give a personal example, I really enjoy music production and playing piano.. but I do it only for myself and have fun doing so.. i don't even share it with anyone. Does that mean I am creating but not selling? And does that mean it is wrong and a waste of my time and I should stop doing it? No, I'm just creating for the sake of creating.
Another thing I don't understand, is your end goal in life to get rich? And do you equal being rich with being happy?
That's not my worldview at all. I mainly care about three things, curiosity, ethics and empathy. But definitely curiosity, being able to learn everyday is what makes me happy. But that doesn't fit into what your explaining, I don't have to create and sell anything with what I've learned because the act of learning already gives me happiness.
Maybe I'm the weird one but I truly find that a life with the sole goal of selling and accruing wealth seems boring.
Yeah, I agree with all of this. A lot of these types of posts and responses give me strange vibes, like people going through life trying to minmax everything and 'win' it as if it was a game.
It's an attitude I encounter frequently in tech circles, but it never stops feeling very weird to me.
One can argue that you are buying an experience with your time and services in this framework rather than money. Kinda just shortcutting the wealth transfer bit. Not that I agree with the framework at all. (It narrows down to Objectivism really and makes no real sense in long-form concepts. In what part of this framework does a mother jumping in front of a bus to save her child does this fit?)
> Another thing I don't understand, is your end goal in life to get rich? And do you equal being rich with being happy?
Here's the deal: in a capitalist system, being rich may not equal being happy, but it certainly does equal being secure. The average worker is a lot less secure now that the days of "a job for life" are gone, and prices for housing, education, and health care have gone through the roof.
So your real goal is not to become rich but to become secure. Being rich doesn’t make you secure. You still have to worry about loosing your wealth, people trying to take advantage of you, raising your kids to be mentally happy/stable without just living off your wealth, not knowing if people are truly your friends etc. etc.
Okay, I get that. But in that case, wouldn't you say that the system itself is flawed/unjust and that you should rather put your efforts into changing that system?
Because if you focus on you making money to make your situation more secure, you're only solving the problem for yourself... which seems selfish and a bit unethical to me.
But I understand, we all have to live in a system and under circumstances we didn't choose and I guess we have to make the best of it.
You are not weird at all. I feel the same. Being rich is not a goal in itself. It is just a tool that you might use to solve your real goal. However if you don’t think deeply enough to realise what your real goal is then you might not realise that most goals can be achieved without becoming rich.
I don't understand this worldview. I guess appreciating art or music, or bullshitting with friends, or just enjoying some time off with a beer and a movie is lumped into the evils of consumption?
And by replacing all of this filthy filthy idleness with endless creation just to be creating, we... achieve enlightenment?
I guess it seems like this author is driving himself to write and write not so much because he loves it or loves books or anything, but more out of a drive to discipline himself into working constantly
You're looking at it way too absolutely. The author's point wasn't to say you need to spend every waking minute creating and all other time is wasted. They/we should consider the ratio of time spent creating(and doing -- not all doing is creating), vs passively consuming. In the modern technological world, there are more ways to fill your entire existence with consumption than ever before. The point was to be conscious of that and achieve a balance, because creation/doing tends to have more lasting personal value.
The title is literally "Consume less, create more," not "Consume none, create always".
Something I think about is the desire to share especially when it's not done yet (ego satisfaction). I got into that cycle, sharing things that were like dreams before they even existed/noteworthy. "wouldn't it be cool if..."
This is a fantastic article. While I agree with the author for the most part, its a fine line between not reading anything at all and only creating. After all the author has a signup page to receive more of his content. I don't think the author meant that you should not read anything at all. The takeaway for me is:-
1. Be conscious of what you are reading.
2. Realize the opportunity cost of what you are reading/watching.
3. Always be creating something.
Why do you want to become rich? Honest question. What problems are you trying to solve by becoming rich? And are there other ways to solve those problems?
392 comments
[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 161 ms ] threadAt that age, I had very much assumed that the world had to work according to "work hard for 45 years, get the biggest house you can, buy as much stuff as you can, on your 65th birthday your company hands you a final salary pension that will last the rest of you life". Something had always felt a bit wrong about consumerism and the hedonic treadmill, but it took the brusque and entertaining prose of MMM to really stop and make me think.
Funnily enough, I now find him very grating, but he absolutely set me on a path of rethinking my life in my early 20s to truly think about what matters to me.
Basically he talks about how when you retire depends on one number, percentage of money you can save from your pay. If you save 50% of your pay and invest it, you can retire in 16 years. Pretty eye openning
<1>https://www.mrmoneymustache.com/2012/01/13/the-shockingly-si...
Life is more complicated than a blog post with some arithmetic.
The the world doesn't owe you a standard of living. If you want to have more money, spend less money. Or don't. It's your choice. Nothing insulting about it.
FIRE obviously isn’t meant for someone trying to live in an expensive city on a $15/hr wage. However, there really are many career paths that readily allow the math. You’re obviously going to struggle to make it work if your goal is to work for a non-profit in Seattle or San Francisco, but it’s entirely within reach if you choose to work for an average tech company in an average city. It’s also trivial to make the math work out if you’re able to get a FAANG job anywhere and keep your lifestyle in check.
> Saving 50% of your income when you are trying to make rent is a pipe dream.
Depends entirely on your lifestyle and relationship situation. Many of us easily achieved FIRE savings rates by simply getting married to another professional, choosing to keep expenses within the limits of one person’s income, and putting 100% of the other person’s income into savings. Instant 50% savings rate, and it’s not even difficult to be honest. As a bonus, it was easy to transition to having kids and a stay-at-home spouse because we already lived on one income.
Obviously doesn’t work for everyone in every situation, but it’s not correct to say it’s a pipe dream or that it can’t work. It’s a choice that requires choosing lifestyle and career directions to match, but everything is a tradeoff.
If you make $125k a year why cant you live like those making 55k? That’s the pickle at upper middle class incomes your spending is a choice. Most people refuse to see that.
I believe that part isn't exactly right, because you can increase your income way more than you can reduce what it takes for you to live. If you're a software engineer making let's say 70k, you can find a job where you make 150k, 200k or even more. If you currently spend 50k every year, it's way more effective than trying to spend less. You also have to take into account that once you retire you can live somewhere where the cost of living is lower.
However, telling people to work on earning more feels like an impossibly difficult ask for many. You’ll get instant pushback when you suggest it, so bloggers avoid it.
FIRE blogging is more about pandering to what people want to hear. It is, after all, a big money blogging niche these days. Alienating the reader is to be avoided if you want to keep readership up, so career and earnings are to be approached delicately if at all in their writings.
I believe GP was more referring to the rough rule of thumb is to have 25x your annual expenses by the time you retire. +5k income versus -5k expenses, you're better off cutting your expenses. By cutting expenses, the target drops by 25xExpensesCut, and you're throwing an extra ExpensesCut towards savings, helping on both sides of the equation. Going from spending 95% of savings to 90% makes a huge difference on the timeline, but 50% to 45% is much more modest since the timeline for compounding growth is so much shorter.
Using 70k income, 50k expenses, and a 5% return, this would take about 30 years. [0]
75k income, 50k expenses goes to 25.2 years [1]
70k income, 45k expenses goes to 24 years [2]
150k income, 50k expenses goes to 10.6 years [3]
Another detail often forgotten about, salary is stated before taxes, spending is almost always after taxes. That further increases the power of decreasing expenses.
[0] https://networthify.com/calculator/earlyretirement?income=70...
[1] https://networthify.com/calculator/earlyretirement?income=75...
[2] https://networthify.com/calculator/earlyretirement?income=70...
[3] https://networthify.com/calculator/earlyretirement?income=15...*
I don't know how hard is doubling your income in general, but I don't know if it's always harder than dividing by two your expenses. The thing is that by focusing on earning more, you will end up with more money, and at that point you can always cut back expenses. While if you focus on cutting back expenses, you will end up with less money.
If you lose your job, or spend a chunk of your savings in a family emergency of some kind, then what? Do you have to save 80% of your take home to make up for the lost savings?
Of course, don't spend on frivolous things. Do you really need the designer bag, instead of just a bag? Do you need that road-trip with your friends in your 20s? Do you really need to impress that boy/girl by taking them to a michelin restaurant for a date?
OTOH what is the opportunity, and life cost of being frugal or too frugal? Perhaps the designer bag caught the attention of the boss, and 'earned' their respect, which ultimately translated to a promotion. Perhaps you ended up finding your life parrter in one of your road-trip friends. Perhaps you didn't get the boy/girl because you cheaped out on the date. Etc.
Life is to be lived. Some moderation is required. Not too much though.
FIRE content is best consumed in tiny doses. You can get 95% of what you need to know from a few blog posts, the Bogleheads Wiki, and creating a simple spreadsheet of your financial planning. That’s it.
The problem is that FIRE has become a magnet for people who are miserable and think retirement will solve all of their problems. This subset of FIRE people see their job as the source of all of their misery and have glorified the idea of FIRE as the only escape hatch. They think they’ll be finally be happy just as soon as they can save enough money (from the job they hate) and reduce their expenses (by ruthlessly cutting spending, even on things they enjoy) until the lines intercept on their FIRE projections.
There are many people following a FIRE path who don’t fit this stereotype, but those people aren’t the ones hanging out on FIRE forums discussing FIRE all day. The people who obsess over FIRE and want to create threads to trash talk their neighbors who had the audacity to go on an expensive vacation or write about how little they spent on food last year by eating lentils every day are predominantly the ones talking about it all the time. There just isn’t much to talk about once you’ve identified a retirement equilibrium target and established a plan, so most of the reasonable participants don’t bother hanging out in the FIRE communities.
There are exceptions to everything, of course, but I found that most real-world FIRE people I know don’t want anything to do with internet FIRE communities or MMM.
Finances are something that should enable the life you want, not something that should become the primary focus of your discussions, readings, and online discourse all of the time.
Frankly I'm amazed that there are people who don't see their job as their primary source of misery. I mean, I can understand it on a logical level, I just can't empathize. When I take time off I get up every day and actually get to decide for myself what I want to do with it and that's amazing. Work doesn't permit me that. Instead I have to prioritize away most of the things I want to do and squeeze the rest in between the 8+ hour chunks of my time I'm forced to sell. I derive no meaning from my work, it simply exists to sustain me. I'd get a job with fewer hours, even with the significantly lower pay, but because I live in the US that's impossible if I also want to have decent healthcare.
Wow, what a gloomy outlook. Have you really never, ever enjoyed your work or workplace? Your coworkers?
I certainly haven’t enjoyed every job or workplace, but I have a lot of fond memories of many workplaces and teams. I’ve had a lot of fun throughout my career and made some lasting friendships.
I suppose I’m in the opposite mindset: I’m amazed that there are people (in tech) who haven’t ever been able to find enjoyment in their work. We literally grew up to get paid to play on computers all day. There are plenty of opportunities out there to have a good time in this field, but they won’t necessarily fall into your lap.
Yeah that's the thing, I don't get paid to play on computers. I'd take such a role in minute, but there's a line of much smarter people than me there.
I enjoyed my part-time lab tutor job in college. I was paid $17/hr for <20hrs of work a week and largely just helped people understand their networking assignments when needed and otherwise did pretty much whatever the hell I wanted to do. The instructors who were my bosses were a lot of fun. I also got to help write curriculum and teach it to instructors at other schools, which is more fun than it sounds like.
Sadly, that job is not at all viable when one is no longer living with their parents and mooching off their healthcare.
I also liked the people I worked with at the school district enough to hang out with them after work, although we all did drink way way too much. The environment was terrible despite the people.
> I suppose I’m in the opposite mindset: I’m amazed that there are people (in tech) who haven’t ever been able to find enjoyment in their work. We literally grew up to get paid to play on computers all day.
Yeah, I have to wonder about people like you whenever I see a horrifically slow website laden with megs of javascript that is broken half the time. I don't get paid to "play" with computers at work, I get paid to keep infrastructure running and write programs that actually fulfill a business goal that isn't "farm users for ad revenue".
> There are plenty of opportunities out there to have a good time in this field
You wouldn't know it from reading the job ads. IT job ads make me want to kill myself.
https://www.cracked.com/blog/6-harsh-truths-that-will-make-y...
https://www.cracked.com/article_14990_what-monkeysphere.html
> For instance, some people want to respond to that speech with Tyler Durden's line from Fight Club: "You are not your job." But, well, actually, you totally are.
Well, actually, you totally aren't. The next part is even worse and downright dehumanizing:
> you are nothing more than the sum total of your useful skills [...] Your "job" -- the useful thing you do for other people -- is all you are.
It's not a good idea to view yourself as purely a means to an end for other people. I'm strongly in favor of being a useful and productive part of society, but not to the point where nothing remains of your person except for an exploitable resource for others.
But then there's also people for whom it will be the worst thing ever, who have already completely organized their lives around pleasing others and satisfying the needs of others while not thinking about the fact they have their own needs, and need in some sense the complete opposite slap.
But I'm not surprised there's some people who found the article to be food for some fairly big thoughts.
I don't think there's a solution for this, because any kind of disclaimer would dilute its message for those that need to hear it, and do nothing for those that shouldn't hear it. And what would such a disclaimer even look like? "Disregard this article if you're not an entitled, selfish man-child"?
The disclaimer is woven neatly in the opening paragraph, above the delightful picture of Lenny and his large scarf.
I remember the impact it had when it came out. It was the reality check that a lot of people in that age range needed, especially new college graduates. This was the era of the "jobless recovery" of post-2008, when S&P500 was going up but underemployment was very high. You have to learn to drop a lot of ego when your fancy degree has you working at the same Starbucks as a kid straight out of high school.
It’s as controversial as the cracked piece in itself. And for some people in my circle - it’s a wake up call.
You can’t expect to just get what he has by drifting through life aimlessly. You have to do what it takes. It’s a message to the kids who were told as children that they were perfect just the way they are and that they could do anything they wanted (but never put in any effort towards it). It’s a message to the children raised by shitty parents who didn’t instill grit and perseverance and tenacity into their kids that they need to get it together if they want what others have. That it takes work and that you don’t get things handed to you like your parents handed things to you all the time as a kid.
To me it looked like he's shaking them up a little. But the motivation from being shaken up doesn't last long especially if it isn't supplemented by actual skills. Let's say that one of these salesmen is really pumped up after this meeting - what happens the next time they're on a call with a client who isn't interested? What does that salesman know now that they didn't know pre-Baldwin-speech? What can they do differenty? Nothing as far as I can tell. And if the argument is that they all have the skills and it's all about the motivation, then that sounds very much like something from the soft generation that you're describing in your comment.
Limitation of the format of the media and that it's for entertainment. Do you really expect a dry presentation about sales tactics in a play/movie???
It's a wake up call speech. It's a speech that you need to either shape up or get out - and to stop expecting handouts and to stop acting entitled. And the thing about his speech is that he's actually empathetic to people - he isn't saying you're worthless as a human being, he's saying you're not fit for the job and you need to be fit for the job if you want to keep it. "Good father? Fuck you - go home and play with your kids." It's a retaliation against the "but I'm a good/nice/whatever person" mentality of entitlement. If you want to work here - you need to close. That's the whole point - that our environment needs people with skills and people who can actually use those skills in a useful matter. You can't do it? Fine - you're not a worthless person but you don't deserve the job just out of birthright.
I'd watch the full thing to the end - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GrhSLf0I-HM In no way is he entrapping them or anything - he says over and over again... "Don't like it? Leave." He's tell them over and over - do the job or leave. Stop expecting a handout - stop being entitled - do the job we hired you for.
I've noticed that multi-level marketing companies use "love bombing" tactics with new members, showering them with praise and good vibes and assuring them that it is easy to make money using their system. Once you're in, however, the "sales experts" quickly turn into the Alec Baldwin character, pressuring, mocking, and grilling you to sell more in an environment where it's near impossible to sell anything.
Also, there are undeniably some hard truths hidden in there. However, my experience in almost 20 years in the tech/software/product industry often paints a different picture. Yes, our brains keep us from changing and evolving and yes, obviously you need skills to be successful in life and your career. But in my industry in particular, hard and soft skills are not the dominant factor that keeps individuals from succeeding or progressing. I'm lucky enough to work with an abundance of talent and skill, and yet, one of the major factors of dissatisfaction is lack of "progression". One of the main factors is self-confidence and in the more severe cases even mental health issues. Some of the most skilled and knowledgeable engineers I worked with struggled to realise their potential because of it. If the leaders in your organisation think they can just shout at them to "learn self-confidence as a skill" and get over it you're going to have a bad time. It will attract a certain type and employee that thrives in that environment and disengage everyone else. Wasting talent, wasting skills and ultimately a lot of money. Creating an environment and learning how to tease the potential out of skilled and talented individuals is not a "hippie/hipster" thing to do, it is good for business.
https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/09/30/i-can-tolerate-anythin...
https://www.epsilontheory.com/things-fall-apart-pt-1/
HN discussion about it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25513713
https://medium.com/free-code-camp/the-100-correct-way-to-do-...
* https://neilonsoftware.com/soft-skills-every-dev-should-know...
This next one isn't life-changing. But, it has intriguing ideas in it, summarized from Fooled by Randomness:
* https://jamesclear.com/book-summaries/fooled-by-randomness
The last link has a trove of top-tier content if you go to the articles section. Smart lad!
https://iheartintelligence.com/discipline-beats-motivation/
If you see cooking primarily as a means of getting nutrients rather than a hobby, I very strongly recommend getting an electric pressure cooker. It greatly simplifies cooking because it's automated. Just add the ingredients, close the lid, press a button, and wait. You will get a perfectly cooked one-pot meal with minimum effort. You can even mix fresh and frozen ingredients and the timer won't start until the frozen ingredients are thawed. If you don't overfill it the only thing the food touches is the inner stainless steel pot, so it's very easy to clean. I get the majority of my nutrition from food cooked this way. I can't imagine going back to slow traditional methods.
It also makes dried legumes far more practical, because you can skip the pre-soak phase. If you eat a lot of legumes, and you switch from canned to dried, the savings will most likely pay for the cost of the machine within a few years. In addition, energy costs are reduced because cooking at increased pressure is faster, and good electric pressure cookers are insulated. I am happy with an Instant Pot brand one, although I don't guarantee they are the best. If somebody has strong opinions on which is best then please post them.
The one major downside is the texture of the food can become boring, because everything is mixed together and you can't make crispy foods with it, but you can always add things like pickles after you've cooked it.
"cooking primarily as a means of getting nutrients rather than a hobby" is such a strange opposition to me.
[1] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/12489819/
Probably for the better, since baking/frying to crispiness is usually tied to "advanced glycation endproducts".
https://nutritionfacts.org/topics/advanced-glycation-end-pro...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lectin#Dietary_lectin
https://www.fda.gov/downloads/Food/FoodborneIllnessContamina...
"PHA is destroyed by adequate cooking. Some variation in toxin stability has been found at different temperatures. However, Bender and Readi found that boiling the beans for 10 minutes (100°C) completely destroyed the toxin. Consumers should boil the beans for at least 30 minutes to ensure that the product reaches sufficient temperature, for a sufficient amount of time, to completely destroy the toxin."
About boring food; it might not be crispy, but you can make amazing meats in it. Try slow cooking pork collar boneless[0] with honey and mustard.
Oh hi there!
Do you have any recipes that you recommend? I actually bought an Instant Pot a couple months ago, and so far have found one great one pot meal that I cook in bulk on the weekend - basically tomatoes + sweet potatoes + peppers + beans + quinoa. Toss it all in and press a button, magic.
I like to eat as healthily as possible, so I'm interested to hear if you have any go-to staple recipes for the instant pot that you'd suggest :)
Not sure of your dietary preferences, but one of the big advantages of the Instant Pot is being able to cook cheaper, less palatable cuts of meat. It can also cook an entire frozen chicken in under an hour...
You'll want to cut up the potatoes and peppers, but when you're cooking them like this, the size doesn't matter much, it's just what you prefer. I'd go a bit chunkier -- smaller will have all the flavors blend more, chunkier and you'll be able to taste the separate ingredients a bit better.
Quinoa definitely does not need to be pre-cooked -- it cooks very quickly. If you're putting in dry beans, you'll want to use the "multigrain" setting for... 60 minutes I think? And add plenty of water for the beans and quinoa to absorb.
If you're using canned beans or pre-cooked beans, you can drop that time down to 15 minutes or so, that should be plenty for the quinoa to cook.
I'd also probably add some spices. You just gotta experiment and see what you like. Make sure you add enough -- when making a big pot of food, don't just add a little spice. I think cumin and/or coriander would go nicely with this. Cinnamon is another that might be good here. Can't go wrong with black pepper.
But really, this is a dish that could go nicely with lots of different spice blends. So don't be afraid to experiment! Try stuff, fail, it's ok, and it's how you get a feel for cooking. If it doesn't come out great, spread some hot sauce on there and it might make it good enough to eat :)
The basic idea is: - Chop up the sweet potatoes, peppers, and onions. This takes me a while lol. - Start with saute mode, heat the oil, fry the onions, then add the garlic, spices, peppers. The saute part overall just takes me around 5-6 mins - Add broth, quinoa, chopped tomatoes, and cook on high pressure for 8 mins (the actual cooking time is longer because it takes some time to reach high pressure, and then to depressurise when done) - I use canned beans, so I just stir them in right here at the end and let them mix for 5-10 mins
(But this is all described in that recipe)
I can basically make 8 good sized portions of this if I fill my Instant Pot, and it's cheap and very healthy. So it's become almost my go-to meal. Oh, and it freezes well too!
As an addition, sliced chorizo is great, the spicy pork fat melts out and improves everything. Lardons are almost as good. You can float a chicken thigh on top, and it will cook nicely, but won't get crispy, but you can finish it up under the grill. Sliced onion is remarkably good, soaks up the stock and comes out juicy. I often add leafy brassicas like cabbage or kale, not very exciting but it's healthy.
I've used the same rice cooker on a slow cooking setting to cook beef ragout, something like cassoulet, and pork knuckle.
A pressure cooker can do all this, but can do the high-temperature bits faster!
In general I would say that the temperature control in an electric pressure cooker is going to be more precise, so you see functions like yogurt making in them, too.
Being able to dump ingredients in and set the pressure for 20 minutes, and then go out for 2 hours and come back and eat warm food that hasn't gone bad is really, really nice.
Apart from that - as others pointed out, they're multifunctional. I make yogurt in mine. Also acts as a slow cooker but in my experience not very well.
What do you do about the indigestible sugars found in many beans? Traditionally, pre-soaking reduces the amount of sugars and the corresponding flatulence.
12 functions: Pressure Cook, Air Fry/Air Crisp, Steam, Slow Cook, Yogurt, Sear/Sauté, Bake/Roast, Broil, Dehydrate, Sous Vide, Reheat, Keep Warm
https://m.ninjakitchen.com/exclusive-offer/FD402WBKT/ninja-f...
This was my favourite one on avoiding mediocrity. It crosses my mind at least weekly over a decade later!
https://headrush.typepad.com/creating_passionate_users/2006/...
The next level is getting into the mind of Kathy Sierra. The idea that helping people become passionate -- or badass, as she later rewords -- is an end in itself. This isn't just about tech.
By Blake Ross
https://m.facebook.com/nt/screen/?params=%7B%22note_id%22%3A...
Before reading this post I had no idea I had aphantasia and thought everyone else was the same as me, unable to see anything when they closed their eyes. This helped me understand myself and my relationships so much better than ever before. Thanks Blake!
I’m very conscious of how poor my mental images are, but maybe with a little less introspection I would also say I have great mental imagery.
However, I am not sure if drawing is the right way to test it. I can visualise a straight line or a perfect circle, but I wouldn't be able to draw them perfectly.
A skilled artist can work around this, by drawing the right lines (and erasing / ignoring the wrong lines).
just because you have no skill in shading and drawing lines doesnt mean that you shouldn't be able to replicate the correct proportions and details in the features of someones face.
I also suspect a lot of people are massively overreporting the quality of their images. It's very easy to imagine something and think you understand it, until asked to produce something based on it. This isn't just limited to mental images, it's the source of the "why don't you 'just'..." questions, and comes up all the time in building, engineering, artistic endeavors, etc. Your brain is easily convinced it has a thought with more detail than it actually has. I really only trust people who have taken a lot of time to train the relevant system if they claim they have these things. For instance, I really can design some somewhat non-trivial programs in my head... but I've been doing this for ~25 years, and only recently would I say I'm getting to the point where these designs are sometimes good enough that they're not taking serious body blows betwixt conceptualization and realization.
To me it seems really obvious that relative to my internal monologue, my imagery is much weaker and quantifiably less frequent. So I think at least people that report having imagery much stronger than internal monologue likely have something different going on for real, not just with reporting.
Do you think that there are some advantages to being this way? For example, being able to live more "in the moment"?
On the note of advantages, I know I have something weird going on with the back right of my brain specifically (focal slowing on EEG among other things), which I am pretty certain connects to my favoring of verbal over visual thinking. So I guess it depends on the cause of a case of aphantasia, but to me it feels a little like how blind people end up with heightened hearing. I think I've really developed strong verbal skills because of it, and there are definitely advantages to having strong verbal skills.
I recall a professor showing us a study once where students performed better on an exam when they were allowed/encouraged to talk out loud to themselves while they were taking it. He was encouraging us to talk through stuff with ourselves, but at first I found the result weird because I assumed everybody was always talking to themselves in their head. That was the first time it really dawned on me there may be large individual differences in how we experience thoughts.
I'm also very verbal, as that is the form most of my thinking takes. I do have some very limited visual imagination, but it takes the form of very vague and transparent 'flash' visions, and otherwise it's mostly a kind of spatial sense (I have pretty good spatial orientation, and it often surprises me how some people with vivid visual imaginations can be very easily spatially disoriented).
My inner monologue is running most of the time, and I tend to think in complete sentences, even stopping to rephrase when it doesn't make sense. But it's soundless, as in not being perceived as a sound. I'm a musician and songwriter, so I often sing and make melodies in my head, but these too aren't perceived as sound in any way resembling what I hear with my ears. Hearing your own voice all the time also sounds like an invasive and disturbing experience to me, but I guess everyone is used to their inner world. It seems aphantasia can be uni- or multimodal. I also can't imagine smells or tastes, beyond having a vague idea of whether a combination of flavours will be good. I have heard others describe tasting chocolate in their mouth when imagining it, and that's just not something I've experienced.
So yes, I'm also fascinated by the huge range of inner experiences people have, and how it affects their personality and relationship with the world
If aphantasia is "internally blind", this one is "internally mute and deaf".
I wonder if anyone in the world has both conditions. That would be interesting to understand how they think.
I think I can imagine sounds in my head, but it is a little like singing, or humming a tune without making noise. I believe I have the cadence and rhythm of sounds, but it's not really easy to get words that way.
I can also recognise some specific images I have seen previously, but I definitely do not see them and cannot conjure up any imagery of any kind.
You might be amused to know that until I joined that study I had no idea that you were thinking any differently than I was, and since learning you-all are freaks, I have wondered if the reason you guys get distracted so easily is that you're watching a movie out of the corner of your eye, or maybe the reason you think code is unreadable is that you need to sound out your program in order to read it.
>I participated in the Prosopagnosia study at Imperial a few years ago. I also don't hear any internal monologue; When I think, I think in words, and it is very similar to reading.
Isn't this exactly what an internal monologue is? Lack of internal monologue would be someone who thinks only abstractly or visually, without any words.
>I think I can imagine sounds in my head, but it is a little like singing, or humming a tune without making noise. I believe I have the cadence and rhythm of sounds, but it's not really easy to get words that way.
Yes, isn't this what pretty much everyone experiences, unless they have one of these listed disorders? If you can think in words, watch a TV show and later picture what the characters look like, and listen to a song and have it get "stuck in your head", then I think you have an internal monologue and don't have aphantasia.
I don't know. It's like reading though. I definitely don't hear a voice (mine or anyone else's).
> If you can think in words, watch a TV show and later picture what the characters look like, and listen to a song and have it get "stuck in your head", then I think you have an internal monologue and don't have aphantasia.
Nope. I can't picture what the characters look like. I can't get a song stuck in my head either.
>I think I can imagine sounds in my head, but it is a little like singing, or humming a tune without making noise.
This seems like how I and I assume most people experience the phenomenon of recalling or thinking about sound. It's just more or less vivid and detailed for different people.
Do you listen to music often? If so, you've never listened to a song and later had some sort of experience where something about that song stayed remnant in your mind?
If you try to imagine the loud alarm of an alarm clock, do you feel like you're experiencing something? By "experiencing", I mean you aren't just like "I can't even say any part of what I'm doing is imagining the sound of an alarm", but are in some way perceiving some kind of representation of some recollection of hearing an alarm clock's alarm.
Also, what happens in your mind when you hum something? To me, humming is the process of transforming that rough, vague, general "phantasic" representation of pitch/amplitude/time into rough, vague, general vocal cord movements. I could be very wrong, but I suspect that if someone is capable of humming anything with even the tiniest minuscule of correlation with the original song, then they don't have aphantasia (with respect to sound).
My speculative, uninformed hypothesis is that actual aphantasia is very rare and that sometimes there's misunderstanding of what it means, combined with the fact that some people have less vivid imaginations and mental representations than others.
Many people may have "weak phantasia", e.g. they may not internally imagine a 1-to-1 visual representation of what they saw on a walk on the previous day, or may not recreate every texture and pitch in a song they heard, but they can imagine some rough approximation of them. I think almost no one can construct these perfect mental recreations; maybe von Neumann and a tiny number of others.
For most people, I'd guess it's probably like 0.1 - 10%. But I think 0% is rare. And during dreaming, I imagine for most people it may increase to like 10 - 40%.
The weaker it is, I think the less one may feel attached to a term like "seeing" or "hearing". But I think no one is ever actually "seeing" or "hearing". It's just a mental representation which no term can fully describe. Kind of like how you can't exactly put a scientific, objective perceptual term to the experience of feeling love. It's just an internal, subjective experience within your mind. Something a little bit more like "reading" rather than "hearing", as you say.
And for internal monologue: if I ask you to "think" the phrase "I am going to go to the store", were you able to "think it"? If so, then I think you probably have internal monologue, or at least the capacity for internal monologue. It may not manifest very often, and you may "experience" it less "potently" than some other people, but I think you have it.
The suspected misunderstanding with internal monologue is that I think some people "spend more time with" their internal monologue than others. Like, a catastrophizer might regularly think the words "oh fuck oh fuck oh fuck what do I do", while for someone else their mind may be fairly "blank" most of the time, especially if they're distracted with something.
For people who experience it more frequently, some percentage of it may manifest and "bleed over" into spoken utterances, like the catastrophizer may sometimes mumble "oh fuck", perhaps without even realizing it. In my opinion, humming is often this same sort of "bleeding over" of the internal into the external, but with music instead of monologue.
Based on what you've said so far, I think you potentially might have visual aphantasia, but I think you likely don't have aural a...
With listening? Never. I can remember the lyrics of songs, and I can remember (sometimes) the progression of notes, but no: nothing I would refer to as an “experience”. They might as well be written down.
> you try to imagine the loud alarm of an alarm clock, do you feel like you're experiencing something?
No. I know what an alarm clock is and I know they can go “ding ding ding ding ding” - but these things are just the same words I give to you. Again: I certainly can’t experience an alarm clock in my head (or experience being in the same room as an alarm clock or anything like that)
> Also, what happens in your mind when you hum something?
If I hum and then stop, I have a sensation of the vibration and of the way my breathing changes. I can then recall (in some way) those vibrations and then reintroduce heavier breath so we hear sound again.
Is this not like how it is for you? Do you remember “the sound” of your own hum and try to reproduce it?
> Based on what you've said so far, I think you potentially might have visual aphantasia
If you are a researcher working in this space, you can send me an email from an edu address and I’ll connect you with the people who ran tests on me in London.
If not, could you explain why you’re giving your opinion?
I'm not a researcher or a scientist of any kind. I know very little about aphantasia, and don't experience it myself or know anyone who does (besides one podcaster I listen to). I simply suspect that some percentage of people who report aphantasia may not actually have it, based on dozens of peoples' self-reports that I've read before. Subjective experiences are complicated. I could certainly be completely wrong both in general and in this case, though.
I based most of my reply on the fact that you said:
>I think I can imagine sounds in my head, but it is a little like singing, or humming a tune without making noise.
To me, this is the experience of aural "phantasia". This is what happens when I imagine sounds in my head. That's why I read your post with a sense of dissonance. It made me want to try to understand how you can have this kind of "humming a tune without making noise" sound in your head yet also have aural aphantasia.
Are you able to hum a song you've heard before? If so, I think that could potentially require a kind of ability to represent the song in your mind, though I could be wrong about that.
Are you able to think about a note with some pitch frequency and then about a note with a higher pitch frequency right afterwards? If not, what is the experience of humming like for you? If so, then what's happening when you're thinking about these pitches?
The fact that you've never had anything like a song getting stuck in your head (e.g. hearing a song you like and humming or thinking about it a later time) would make me think there likely is something atypical about your experience, at the least, though.
Additionally, you said:
>I don't know. It's like reading though. I definitely don't hear a voice (mine or anyone else's).
This is also my own perception of what internal monologue is like for me. Although this is potentially a separate phenomenon from aphantasia, to me it seemed like you were saying you didn't have an internal monologue when I thought maybe you did, which, if true, made me think there was possibly an increased chance you don't have aphantasia if you think you do.
Obviously you know your own experience better than anyone else does or could, but there's a lot of ambiguity and ineffability around the meanings of all of these terms; a little bit like (though not as extreme as) trying to describe the experience of perceiving a particular color.
I'm also doing all this in part so I can better understand the phenomenon and educate myself.
I initially was considering adding the "I think you likely don't have aural aphantasia" part but decided to leave it out, since it's extremely presumptive, but the imagining sounds/humming thing and the capability of humming something you've heard before (if I understand correctly) seemed so contradictory with what I personally understand aphantasia to be that I later went back and edited it in. If not for that part I probably wouldn't have replied and would've just silently acknowledged your aphantasia.
If I pay attention I can tell that a sound is higher or lower than another. I can also count. It often requires a lot of concentration (and many repeats) to hum a song I have heard.
> Are you able to think about a note with some pitch frequency and then about a note with a higher pitch frequency right afterwards?
Yes. I can also tell the names of tones (as in keys on a piano) in some cases, but it requires a lot of focus to do this quickly, and the tones usually have to be pretty simplistic or extremely rhythmic.
> If so, then what's happening when you're thinking about these pitches?
What do you mean? If you have ever played SIMON you have to memorise a sequence of red blue yellow and green lights. The repetition starts slowly and gets faster. Then it can become so fast it is overwhelming. Do you memorize the colours or the names of the colours? If you haven’t played it maybe you could look at a YouTube video and get the idea.
> it seemed like you were saying you didn't have an internal monologue
I said I can’t hear one.
> I simply suspect that some percentage of people who report aphantasia may not actually have it, based on dozens of peoples' self-reports that I've read before.
That’s not what I asked. I asked you why you gave your opinion, not why you have an opinion.
I have noticed people do this quite often, and I do not really know why. I wonder if you can sufficiently self-reflect to explain your thinking to me.
The problem with having a diagnosis like this is that a lot of people won’t understand what it’s like to not have the characteristics we take for granted to the point that it seems unreal. To avoid accepting that the scale of people who have experiences that they’ll never be able to understand is bigger than they imagine (and avoid cognitive dissonance), they must invalidate your experience.
I think maybe I do? I’ve know about the aphantasia and it wasn’t surprising to me because I always felt like I was missing something when people used phrases like “picture $thing in your mind” but now you’re telling me everyone is talking to themselves in their heads, too? It’s actually so hard for me to wrap my head around I think I must be misunderstanding...
Not "hearing" the words or necessarily "talking to yourself" or hearing someone talk to you. I think many people do mentally talk to themselves, but I think that's a sufficient condition to have an internal monologue rather than a necessary condition.
People who don't have it would 100% of the time only ever think about things in terms of visual imagery, symbols, or something else abstract. I believe it's quite rare.
It just seems highly unlikely that a non brain damaged human sharing the same evolutionary history and ability to use language would not have one, yet be able to speak and converse normally. Their arguments in support of it always seemed weak to me.
It’s in those class of things where people like to be the person that has it (and it’s hard to test or verify)
There’s plenty of introspection, but if anything, it’s hardest to translate some solutions to English. Often, I can’t tell you why “it’s the right answer” other than “the whole structure would collapse” which makes no sense to other people. I used to get points docked on math papers because I couldn’t show my work.
I find software engineering fantastic, because everyone can agree they see the same structure, rendered as code on a screen. We can agree why something is right or wrong or YAGNI. I love working remote because I have more time to compose thoughtful answers to describe/translate what I mean.
Sometimes I need to talk through a problem out loud because the problem and solution exist in the English language (people problems) which is another boon to remote work. So, I talk out loud to myself, quite a bit more than other people do. I have hours of recordings because people look at you weird walking down the street if you’re not holding a phone but speaking out loud.
I can spot a bug a mile away in code, because the code literally becomes a structure in my mind. Bugs stick out as weak points or unstable parts of the structure.
I’m just rambling a bit as I fall asleep, but maybe you won’t be so skeptical now.
My conscious lived is experience has always been one in which I have no inner voice. No words, in fact. It's totally silent in my head. (It's not still. I have racing thoughts. But they're non-verbal. They seem to be in some sort of "mentalese.") I neither see words nor hear them. And it's impossible for me to imagine what my voice sounds like unless I actually hear myself speak.
I also can't imagine what my wife or friends sound like. My father died a few years ago, and I now can't imagine his voice. I never could unless I heard it. And now that's impossible.
While I know the ideas I want to express, I have no clue what words I'll use to express them until I hear them come out of my mouth or see them on a page or screen. When I type, it seems like my fingers are making up the words. Obviously, that's not what's happening, but I have no sense at all that my mind chose the words.
I also have never felt authorship of anything I've written, even though I'm a published author. I have no sense at all that I've written this paragraph. It's my ideas--it's what I wanted to say--but it's as if someone else chose the words.
I suspect that for everyone, there's a process that goes something like this: mentalese --> coming up with words --> expressing words via speech or writing.
Some folks have no conscious access to the first step. For them, it's entirely unconscious. (mentalese) --> coming up with words --> speaking or writing.
In my case, for some reason I seem to have no conscious access to the choosing-words part. It must happen, of course, but it seems to be hidden from my conscious mind: mentalese --> (coming up with words) --> speaking or writing.
Until fairly recently I thought everyone was like me. When people talked about seeing or hearing words in their heads (or their "inner voice"), I thought they meant it metaphorically. It's still amazing to me that people can imagine or "hear" voices in their heads. So I have the same impulse as you, except in reverse: Come on! An inner voice? I'm skeptical. (Intellectually, I'm not, anymore. But I still feel the pang of skepticism, because it's so alien to me.)
But I can talk with myself internally for hours on end.
As far as I can tell, I think in abstract ideas.
I could totally understand how it would be bland if you were just reading a description and nothing was coming to you.
For the record I love novels, inc fantasy fiction and descriptive sci-fi without having a minds eye to bring it into.
e.g. Big fan of starship troopers (the book) which is completely set in an invented universe none of which I have visualized. I saw the film and I can't remember its visual interpretation. (I do remember it being lame compared to the book)
Even without a minds eye I sometimes find some directors visual interpretation jarring.
How do you visualizers get on with the colour of magic? Do you have to see everything?
On the plus side I support two concurrent internal monologues or one that goes double speed & I can go full-duplex.
Wow, really? I'd love to hear more about how that works.
reading fiction and fantasy books are also sort of boring for me because i have no mental image of the characters or their settings or faces or anything like that. like if it's describing a blacksmith's forge, sure i know that has a forge and anvil and tools and quenching bucket. but there's not really a cohesive setting in my head of what it looks like for the story.
i also cant really mentally image the faces of people i know. i can see their features but their face in my mind doesn't really look human. i can't imagine someone's whole body including their face. i have no issue recognizing faces and putting them to names in person though.
i have a notoriously bad memory. i still made good grades in school and can study and retain knowledge and skills. but i forget the vast majority of conversations i've had with people after a couple weeks, and my fiance is constantly telling me things i said where i have no memory of saying it.
I can't quite describe how it works, but I still get something out of a visual description. If the author mentions a small red leather book and then later a large wooden book with a blue ribbon across it I get a different "sense" for lack of a better word. I have seen both things and know what they look like even if I can't form a visual picture in my mind while reading it. To be more precise I haven't actually seen a wooden book with a blue ribbon across it, but I have seen both of those items individually and know how it would look if they were combined. But I don't actually have a picture of it in my mind.
I remember reading this first time in early twenties - it was mindblowing. After several years I can say that many things I’ve expierenced, noticed and learned are mentioned somewhere along these lines.
‚One must permit his people the freedom to seek added work and greater responsibility. In my organization, there are no formal job descriptions or organizational charts. Responsibilities are defined in a general way, so that people are not circumscribed. All are permitted to do as they think best and to go to anyone and anywhere for help. Each person then is limited only by his own ability.’
I was quite literally thinking about this exact problem at my organization last week. This quote is older than I am.
> To complaints of a job poorly done, one often hears the excuse, “I am not responsible.” I believe that is literally correct. The man who takes such a stand in fact is not responsible; he is irresponsible. While he may not be legally liable, or the work may not have been specifically assigned to him, no one involved in a job can divest himself of responsibility for its successful completion.
https://tedgioia.substack.com/p/how-i-became-the-honest-brok...
Not a GP. The opinion is my own.
On the other, nearly everything I've read has changed me and how I saw the world, even ever so slightly. Different perspectives, bits of knowledge, connections made that I'm not even aware of. So I guess I just have to assume that everyone's definition of "life changing" is going to be quite wide depending on their own life experience and attitudes.
Same here. The discrete life-changing stuff in my life have been things that happened to me or someone close to me.
Not stuff I've read. But the stuff I've read stay with me and have definitely changed my perspective, affected how I approach things etc.
So rather than reading a particular blog post, I'd say: read lots!
Sometimes people use hedging language like this because they’re being vulnerable beyond their comfort level. So even though a post might truly have been life changing for them they brace for someone responding with a dismissive or snarky comment by hedging with “maybe not really” type words. It’s a form of self-protection, in a way.
So I fear your comment could very likely discourage people who were already on the fence about sharing, perhaps even sharing something interesting. So I say, the more the merrier! Who knows what might be life changing for someone. I definitely didn’t expect to open this thread and read a blog post about bone trumpets but I’m really glad I did.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j7zzQpvoYcQ [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memento_mori
https://danluu.com/googlebot-monopoly/
It's a short blog post that I've probably read a thousand times at this point. He wrote about how websites give Google a big advantage when it comes to web crawling and how that big advantage probably makes it harder for other search engines to compete with Google. This was a pretty striking idea to me and there was a lot of talk at the time about antitrust and Big Tech. Dan's post had been written in 2015, so I was sure that a ton of other people, especially DC policy people, already knew about this and were talking about it. Right?
Turns out, basically nobody in DC knew anything about this. A ton of website operators complain about it on their own forums like HN and SEO, it's not hard to find people griping about the cost of Bing's crawlers, but those people never saw fit to tell anybody in DC about this and how it impacts the market for general purpose search engines and gives Google such an advantage. So I started writing down everything that I was finding about Google's web crawling advantage and writing it in a way that policy people could understand these things called web crawlers they had probably never heard much about before.
And, long story short, the policy people were very grateful that I had gotten in touch and explained all this, and I got cited in the Big Tech Antitrust report published by Congress last summer and then featured in The New York Times:
https://knuckleheads.club/we-crawled-our-way-into-the-big-te...
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/14/technology/how-google-dom...
So, Dan's blog post has had a pretty big impact on my life so far and it's not quite done yet. The pandemic has slowed me down this year much more than it did last year, but I'm working on preparing to submit a paper to an economics journal for peer review that lays out the dynamics of web crawling, why Google accrues this advantage and why it matters. I'm very grateful to Dan for writing that post and, as far as career advice goes, I heartily recommend going back every once in a while and rereading everything he has ever written. Who knows what else he's hiding in there?
As part of a team that runs several large sites, the performance difference between them is stunning, but not any any way complimentary to Bing. We want Bing to do better. We want them to challenges Google pole position.
Bingbot will crawl the exact same set pages 10 times in a week, and will make hundreds of requests per minute doing so. Googlebot will crawl them once, at a much more reasonable pace.
The bandwidth and power costs we incur from Bing crawlers are a hundredfold (at least) what we incur from Googlebot.
Please, Microsoft, make Bingbots not suck so badly.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=8CrOL-ydFMI
Wallace says it himself in the speech: " Twenty years after my own graduation, I have come gradually to understand that the liberal arts cliché about teaching you how to think is actually shorthand for a much deeper, more serious idea: learning how to think really means learning how to exercise some control over how and what you think. It means being conscious and aware enough to choose what you pay attention to and to choose how you construct meaning from experience. Because if you cannot exercise this kind of choice in adult life, you will be totally hosed. Think of the old cliché about “the mind being an excellent servant but a terrible master.”
I second this nomination. This is one of the most insightful essays I've ever read. Wallace's central points of consciously choosing A) what you give your attention to and B) how you construct meaning from experience REALLY DO lie at the heart of learning how to think and live a meaningful life.
("Water" is the noise in life that surrounds us every day which we've learned to ignore. But it's still the lens through which an untrained eye sees everything, that shapes who we are and how we live, since most of us don't act deliberately so much as react to life. Being oblivious to water is about remaining clueless to this noise, just going with the flow, unquestioningly and passively allowing your view of the world and your role in life to be shaped by mostly meaningless turbulence.)
Reading the post, it became clear to me that it was not about how quick or deep you can learn a language, but rather what are all the ideas and abstractions that enable such a language to exist. Computer science really was more than just computers. After reading that post I looked around and discovered the youtube videos of SICP, which have done more for my love and knowledge of programming than the entire MA program I took.
Link: https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2005/12/29/the-perils-of-java...
http://www.catb.org/~esr/faqs/hacker-howto.html
This article inspired me on two things :
1) Lots of the things I do in everyday life is just to consume: buying, watching, following, etc. These things either consume my money, or my time. These things make me feel good, but it does not generate real value. In order to get rich, I need to create things. I also start to realize that great people are great because they started to create things at a very early stage of their life (but not consuming things as they advocate, think about celebrities, entrepreneurs etc), so they are able to practice and perfect the value creating skills to the extreme.
2) I start to realize that the world is binary in nature : I create to sell, I buy to consume. I either at the buyer side, or at the seller side. And in this current society, there is a huge buyer side trap, the whole idea of consumerism and social media is to trap you inside the buyer side, so you keep buying, you keep consuming. I really need to break free from this trap.
This blog post was written before COVID-19, but the idea feels even fresher during this pandemic era
-Stephen King
I'm not saying fiction is objectively more "beneficial" than non-fiction, I'm just saying the opposite isn't necessarily true either.
The question of meaning behind our actions is one divorced from this, and obviously not so easily determined as whether or not an action is creative. Some of the most effective altruistic actions are boring. I'm of the type that has short bouts of investigative interest in certain topics, and that wanes, so I can't count on merely my "mood" to finish projects. I had read anecdotally that authors in particular seem to derive satisfaction from having completed a work, and find that driving themselves to finish it can be torturous. I feel that way about my projects.
Personally, it's a good day if I've "executed" and completed a lot at work. There is no objective reason why this ought to be better than those days where I struggle to finish a single assignment, but that is human nature. You can satisfy such a creature with social validation and the feedback of completing tasks, until maybe you broach the problem of meaning. I wonder how many of us in the future will spend most of our time dwelling in virtual worlds where nothing is real. If we do, then meaning is cheap.
I disagree on this but I love and agree with the premise of the blog post. Comparing reddit to Moby Dick could not be further off. reddit (or any similar site) is a shill/bad actor/agitator/troll cesspool full of memes and clickbait.
It is important to learn to tell good shit from bad shit. Consume things produced by masters of their craft. Try not to settle for less, you have limited time here. Use this to create more.
What 'other content' are you referring to that is exempt from this?
You make my point for me.
> It is important to learn to tell good shit from bad shit
That would apply within Reddit, as well. Find the good subreddits and the good comments.
And HN.
Aside from bankruptcy, buying and selling are actually completely balanced in a modern market economy. Even “saving” money is actually best considered as selling it. Earning money is obviously selling your time and bodily energy (those are the only finite things you have that are inputs into the system).
Borrowing is selling your future money to someone who wants to take on the risk.
Regarding the article, it doesn't match my experience. All the prolific creators I know (about) are prolific consumers as well. Writers are known to read a lot. The girl the author saw sketching on the bus probably loves looking at and reading about art and does it often as well as actually creating art.
The other issue is the amount of creative effort you can spend. For example, software engineering is a very creative job and often at the end of the day I just have no energy left to create more.
You create to sell? No, I think a fundamental part, for example of art, is that it can be created for no reason whatsoever. To give a personal example, I really enjoy music production and playing piano.. but I do it only for myself and have fun doing so.. i don't even share it with anyone. Does that mean I am creating but not selling? And does that mean it is wrong and a waste of my time and I should stop doing it? No, I'm just creating for the sake of creating.
Another thing I don't understand, is your end goal in life to get rich? And do you equal being rich with being happy?
That's not my worldview at all. I mainly care about three things, curiosity, ethics and empathy. But definitely curiosity, being able to learn everyday is what makes me happy. But that doesn't fit into what your explaining, I don't have to create and sell anything with what I've learned because the act of learning already gives me happiness.
Maybe I'm the weird one but I truly find that a life with the sole goal of selling and accruing wealth seems boring.
It's an attitude I encounter frequently in tech circles, but it never stops feeling very weird to me.
Here's the deal: in a capitalist system, being rich may not equal being happy, but it certainly does equal being secure. The average worker is a lot less secure now that the days of "a job for life" are gone, and prices for housing, education, and health care have gone through the roof.
Because if you focus on you making money to make your situation more secure, you're only solving the problem for yourself... which seems selfish and a bit unethical to me.
But I understand, we all have to live in a system and under circumstances we didn't choose and I guess we have to make the best of it.
And by replacing all of this filthy filthy idleness with endless creation just to be creating, we... achieve enlightenment?
I guess it seems like this author is driving himself to write and write not so much because he loves it or loves books or anything, but more out of a drive to discipline himself into working constantly
The title is literally "Consume less, create more," not "Consume none, create always".
Why do you want to get rich?
I've been thrilled to have a life of consuming and not creating.
I find value in this in both creating and doing nothing.
Coincidentally, here's a fitting answer to the GP and your comment: https://www.robinsloan.com/notes/home-cooked-app/