Well, I think people have big aspirations, and these typically are achievable with lots of money, and people think you have to 'eat frogs' to make that money.
Ironically, eating frogs mostly helps making the frog industry a lot of money, not the frog eaters. Most of the people achieving things that require lots of money tend to be the ones who already started out with lots of money (even if it wasn't enough money to do those things right away).
That’s of course totally culture-specific, and the entire point of the article is that people should be thinking more about whether their aspirations are in fact their own or are they just having goals they think they’re supposed to have, and wondering why they feel sort of empty inside.
Except when "you are what you eat", and rather than the big aspirations you actually become really good at eating frogs and don't get the opportunity to do these great things.
Which is the big point about all these depressed kids with no direction.
I've started to believe that the aspirations that our culture promotes and pushes are the problem itself. Instead of creativeness Western culture promotes monetary success. Instead of happiness in a family we dream of making a billion dollars in a startup. Instead of dreaming about exploring the galaxy we dream about private space travel and mining. Instead of solving humanities greatest challenges via learning and science we push private businesses profiting from half fixes and pointless changes (carbon credits or slow introduction of electric vehicles without public infrastructure as examples). I'm not against people being rewarded for their work but the reward has become more important than the work itself. This is likely a result of the huge wealth inequality Western culture is dealing with, when someone has dramatically less they are always drawn to those that have more and are willing to do almost anything to get there.
It's funny because in Germany we have a similar phrase "swallowing the toad". I think the idea is to swallow them whole. I think French cuisine generally only serves frog legs, not whole frogs?
Also in some areas of Italy, there used to be restaurants where frog (only legs, usually fried) were the main dish, though I believe they are little by little becoming more rare.
Also they once were a very "poor" (please read as cheap) meal, while nowadays they tend to be "gourmet".
Frog legs are eaten in many parts of Europe (except Germany apparently)
So much that some indigenous frog species have become endangered, and frog legs are more often imported from South-East Asia these days.
BTW. I had also expected the article to be about actual frogs: about how endangered some species are, or how the flesh may contain pollutants or diseases.
"Frog eaters" (using the word for "eat" that is used for animals, not people) is a German slur against French people, so yeah, Germany seems to have a strong aversion.
Yeah me too! My first thought was, but frogs are... delicious? What is he even talking about?
That said, I was very surprised by the quality of the article, and the writing. I was expecting yet another bucket of self-help motivating bullshit and it's the opposite of that! And also quite funny.
BTW, as a 44 year old French that has never seen frogs on a restaurant menu, and never had any, I wonder how common eating frogs is nowadays. Escargots seem much more common, to cite something else we're known for.
They're common in Singapore because of the southern Chinese influence. You don't see them often in Malaysia or Indonesia tho (outside Chinese areas) because frog is not halal.
I think it's quite rare. I tried once because a friend was visiting from the US and wanted to try. With a bit of research, I found a restaurant specialised in frog, but yes, they aren't common.
Idk, I went to a lot of restaurant that had frog legs in their menu. On the other hand I had snails only once.
But I think "traditional" french restaurant are not that common anymore in anycase. My city is full of restaurant from all over the world or thematic restaurant, only an handful of "classic" french restaurant (and its not a bad thing, I love the variety).
Only place I've eaten frog was in Cambodia. First time, at a street vendor, it was delicious. Second time, at a hotel buffet, it made me sick as a dog.
Frogs are a protected specie in france: you can catch some for personal "use" but there are quotas. So all the frogs you eat in restaurants come from elsewhere in europe. Could explain the evolution. Also i'm not sure it's something "typically french", i'd definitely categorize it as region-dependent (eg from the Dombes near Lyon). Btw for frog fishing you need no hook but just a small piece of fabric, had some fun making a couple fly when a kid, see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yUDmb3ZMw5c
Now that I think of it, I remember that when I was a kid (40 years ago), occasionally my mother would cook snail/frogs. Snails more than frogs actually. Maybe it's one of these traditions that we're losing.
I’ve had them several times along the Gulf Coast of Texas. Like the alligator eaten here, it’s part of the joke of the long list of things that tastes sorta like chicken.
As 47 year old Dutch guy I can say I ate frogs in the Netherlands of all places... but never seen them in France (but I did not specifically search for them)
Our local supermarket in an Arizona small town sells frogs right next to the seafood in the meat department. Somebody must be buying them. Though I've never seen them on a local menu. Are they typical in a French grocery?
It's not uncommon. In the south they eat it, I personally have had frog and it tasted like chicken to me. I try all kinds of weird food because why not.
I've never eaten bread as delicious as the "boring" baguettes available from virtually every bakery in France. Maybe it's the yeast they use or something? So I'm genuinely curious as to where you're coming from with that.
Edit: Oh. Pat yourself on the back for a pun well played. Whooshed straight over my head! Take my angry upvote ;)
Baguettes "tradition" can only contain 3 ingredients (flour, water, yeast) so their quality matter, yes, but the preparation is what makes it all: how it's mixed, how long it rests, at what temperature, how the flour/water ratio changes through the process, etc. that dictate what the end result will be. It can take 10 years for a baker to master the process.
Two peasants find a frog and take a bet. One says he can eat the frog raw and the other bets $5 that he cannot. So the first peasant starts to eat the frog; halfway through he starts to feel nauseous. The second one starts to regret the $5 that he's about to lose. So he offers to reverse the bet - $5 back for eating the remaining half of the frog. The first one agrees and the second one eats the remaining half of the frog.
They walk for a bit and one asks the other "Hey, why exactly did we eat that frog?".
Interestingly, there is a similar French expression: "avaler des couleuvres" ("swallowing snakes").
It also means "doing things against your will", although it has the additional sense of doing them because you're gullible (not sure if this sense is also present in the English expression).
It comes from a line often attributed to the 19th-century humorist Mark Twain: Eat a live frog first thing in the morning, and nothing worse will happen to you that day. ”Eat a frog” is intended as a metaphor for “do that shitty task you don’t want to do”.
Who cares about all this? The work or not work is not an end. It's a means to an objective. I want to move the world closer to what I want it to be. I have a theory for what I need to do for that and it's going to take work.
Out there I'm sure is my antipode, someone who is taking a different path to the same objective. I'll let them do that way and I'll do this way and let whatever works work.
But for me it's hard work and if I don't finish it, power up my kids so that if this is what they want to do they'll have a head start.
I care. I am sure other people who read such articles care. And there might be yet another category of people who find it inspiring to such an extent that they are moved to act or change something about the way they do things.
Good for you. But you’re definitely generalizing from a single datapoint if you think people in general have very well-defined long-term goals beyond "what my society tells me I’m supposed to be doing". Why work towards goals that aren’t worth the pain of getting there?
I wanted to listen to the voiceover, but there's an error in the first 40 seconds (morning/evening) and it has really put me off from listening to the rest.
Thank you for sharing! This paper is absolutely amazing -- AND it came out in 1977!
Telling More Than We Can Know: Verbal Reports on Mental Processes by Richard E. Nisbett and Timothy D. Wilson
Both researchers have had amazing careers since then. Timothy Wilson's book Strangers to Ourselves is one I recommend to everyone. It is a continuation of the work in the paper you link to. Nisbett's books are excellent too; my favorite (a must-read!) is Culture of Honor: The Psychology of Violence in the South. Any student of psychology should know these works.
Kind of makes you think what's more important: the ability to do things you want to do, or the ability to not do the things you don't want to do... people do seem to give up on the latter one quite a lot in order to get the first one and then realize the trade-off they've made may have been somewhat non-optimal way too late to be able change it.
That's one of the best things that HN has ever sent me. I especially liked this penultimate paragraph:
"I no longer think there’s something wrong with me; there's something wrong with Reviewer 2. I intend to have so much fun that Reviewer 2 will simply have to join in."
I love the last bit: "..so much fun that Reviewer 2 will simply have to join in."
> "Stop confusing productivity with laziness. While no one likes admitting it, sheer laziness is the No. 1 contributor to lost productivity."
I was taught growing up that if it's something you must do anyhow, then true laziness is finding the simplest and most effective way to do a given task quickly and correctly the first time so that you don't have to waste time and effort doing it again or fixing your screw-up. Sounds pretty "productive" to me…
I heard a quote once that a general or some leader said he preferred “highly intelligent and slightly lazy” people because they found the most efficient and reliable ways to get things done, and quickly as a bonus!
> General Freiherr von Hammerstein-Equord, the present chief of the German Army, has a method of selecting officers which strikes us as being highly original and peculiarly un-Prussian. According to Exchange, a Berlin newspaper has printed the following as his answer to a query as to how he judged his officers:
> “I divide my officers into four classes as follows: The clever, the industrious, the lazy, and the stupid. Each officer always possesses two of these qualities.
> Those who are clever and industrious I appoint to the General Staff. Use can under certain circumstances be made of those who are stupid and lazy. The man who is clever and lazy qualifies for the highest leadership posts. He has the requisite nerves and the mental clarity for difficult decisions. But whoever is stupid and industrious must be got rid of, for he is too dangerous.”
Or
> I do not know whether your Lordships are familiar with the saying of a German General that there are four types of officer but I think that it is relevant to what we are discussing. He said that there are four types of officer: the clever and lazy, the clever and industrious, the stupid and lazy, and the stupid and industrious.
> The clever and lazy you make Chief of Staff, because he will not try to do everybody else’s work, and will always have time to think. The clever and industrious you make his deputy. The stupid and lazy you put into a line battalion, and kick him into doing a job of work. The stupid and industrious you must get rid of at once, because he is a national danger.
My father runs a business, one day many years ago in his shop he needed help moving a bunch of material. I explained it would be a lot faster to do it a different way, and he commented that would be the lazy way to do it. It wasn’t the first time I’d run into this thinking, though it has stuck with me ever since.
I explained this isn’t about exerting less effort, but that for the same effort we get a heck of a lot more done. I guess that’s when I first realized that management consulting can be a good thing.
Of course, 30 years later, I know management consultants are often frauds that have no idea what they are talking about or doing. They make business benefits by slowing wage growth and by essentially forcing smaller groups of people to do more work by laying off their coworkers. Not the efficiency I had in mind.
The protestant work ethic is a powerful tool, but people need to know that it is a religious value now woven into society. Not to avoid doing productive things, because I think it can provide the most amazing successes and a wonderful life, but to be aware that it is horribly abused in America by business management. “Idle hands are the devil’s hands.” And it drives all sorts of compulsion.
None of this is new, but if I could go back in time, I would find Chuck Palahniuk, and explain to him that the problem in our society isn’t the banks, but the big consulting firms. Oh that would be a much more satisfying ending to Fight Club.
> My father runs a business, one day many years ago in his shop he needed help moving a bunch of material. I explained it would be a lot faster to do it a different way, and he commented that would be the lazy way to do it. It wasn’t the first time I’d run into this thinking, though it has stuck with me ever since.
Bojack Horseman: “Are you gonna sail around the cape like a real man, or are you gonna cut through the Panama Canal like a Democrat?”
The matrix for effort vs. impact is something I find myself drawing in meetings a lot.
Effort
Low High
┌───────────┬───────────┐
I │ │ │
m Low │ Ok │ Bad │
p │ │ │
a ├───────────┼───────────┤
c │ │ │
t High │ Perfect │ Ok │
│ │ │
└───────────┴───────────┘
The best simple way to prioritize a backlog. Engineering team is responsible for assigning "effort" dimension; product/stakeholder team is responsible for assigning "impact" dimension. Then we see what's in high impact/low effort, and that's what we're gonna work on.
I came up with almost the same activity but didn't think of having different groups decide the dimensions. Some random stuff:
Use stack ranking. Avoids "everything is a priority" and related mistakes.
Effort and impact both have a long tail distribution, something like power law. It's probably power law because it's easy to be off by an order of magnitude. "Impact" is easier to get wrong because it's going to the high end. Don't think most impactful and second most impactful have a similar impact because they're close in rank. It's easy for #1 to be 10-100x #2.
This is a definition difference. You're defining "laziness" as "effectiveness"/"efficiency", broadly - which is a valid definition that I've heard many times, but not the only one. The article, instead, uses a definition of "laziness" that is "doing the things that you want to, instead of the things that you should do".
Your version of "laziness" is quite admirable, honestly.
Lovely concept and execution! Definitely going to share as it shows the diversity in humanity is real and just natural. There is no ‘ideal’ because other than genetic duplicates, everybody has variables it’s so much fun.
Reminds me of being a snippy teenager at “inspirational coaching” sessions or listening to some invited speaker…
This is a great article but the best part is an off hand link to a book review of A Square Meal: A Culinary History of the Great Depression [1] which includes choice quotes like
> The writer George Jean Nathan claimed that before the 1920s, there existed only eight basic sandwich types: Swiss cheese, ham, sardine, liverwurst, egg, corned beef, roast beef, and tongue (yes). But by 1926, he “claimed that he had counted 946 different sandwich varieties stuffed with fillings such as watermelon and pimento, peanut butter, fried oyster, Bermuda onion and parsley, fruit salad, aspic of foie gras, spaghetti, red snapper roe, salmi of duck, bacon and fried egg, lettuce and tomato, spiced beef, chow-chow, pickled herring, asparagus tips, deep sea scallops, and so on ad infinitum.”
I ordered it off Amazon right away only to immediately realize, to my horror, that the hardcover version I had chosen would not arrive until Saturday, a full fortnite after my aspic of foie gras, salmi of duck, and the $5 esp32-wroom dev kits that were part of the same order.
What is this, the 1930s? Civilization is seriously going down the drain.
Or, a generation earlier in 1884, the book "Salads and Sauces" by Thomas Jefferson Murrey (New York) has a chapter on sandwiches. https://archive.org/details/saladsandsauces00murrgoog/page/n... including "Apple Sandwich", "Anchovy Sandwich", "Beef, Raw, Sandwich", "Brie Sandwich", "Caviare Sandwich", "Clam Sandwich", "Curry Sandwich", "Dandelion Sandwich", "Duck Sandwich", and so on for several more pages, ending with "Welsh Sandwich". Look under "Goose Liver" for the foie gras entry.
This is only true if you define journey as basically doing anything interesting. But then you are just saying that the only story type is “someone does something”.
There's only one story type. Somebody runs into a problem and tries to solve it, but fails at the halfway mark because they didn't understand the problem well enough. They rethink the problem and try to solve it again, but fail at the 3/4 mark because they don't understand themselves. Then they defeat the problem by gaining understanding of themselves (or fail to defeat the problem because of a willful refusal to change, or have a partial/late revelation and a partial/late success.) Problem > failure of vision > failure of character > solution.
Stories are attached to particular protagonists, but you can do things like overlap the stories of multiple protagonists or give a single protagonist multiple overlapping stories in order to develop narratives of arbitrary complexity.
> Caviare is the roe of the sturgeon prepared under many formulas, the Russian being the best. Take a teaspoonful of caviare, put it in a soup-plate ; add to it a saltspoonful of chopped onion, a walnut of butter, and the juice of half a lemon ; work well together, spread on thin slices of rye-bread, press them together, cut the sandwich in two, and serve. Americans as a class do not like caviare.
According to Wikipedia, 1 salt spoon (ssp) = 0.25 teaspoon.
> In Scandinavia, a type of sandwich spread is available, made from smoked cod roe and other ingredients, which is referred to as smörgåskaviar (meaning "sandwich caviar"). Outside Scandinavia, the product is referred to as creamed smoked roe or in French as Caviar de Lysekil.
Perhaps the Swedish term "kaviar" doesn't overlap fully with the English term "caviar"?
1. Roe of the sturgeon or of certain other large fish, considered a delicacy.
2. (figuratively) Something whose flavour is too fine for the vulgar taste.
Before the internet existed you could just say things confidently and nobody could check if you were right. Nowadays you check the internet and there's 100 blog posts backing up the lie. What a time to be alive.
I was reading "Ramona Quimby, Age 8" to my kid and saw a reference to the Quimby family eating tongue as a cheap meat, due to budget cutbacks from Mr. Quimby going back to school to become a teacher.
Ramona did not care for tongue if I recall correctly.
My father made a wonderful tongue & beans soup; must have been 45 years ago. Little brother and friend come home, I tell them, "You've got to try Dad's soup!" They both raved about it, until I mentioned the meat was cow tongue. Years later I was still catching flack about that little incident. But he'd grown up on a farm and meat was meat; I thought it tasted great.
Right until the 90s in the UK you could get ox tongue in the deli of nearly all major supermarkets here (nicely sliced) - I loved it long before I realised what it was.
I grew up on a very small farm, but I'm sure many non farm folk were eating it back then too.
I don't balk at tongue (last ate it grilled at table) but you won't catch me eating brain. I have a deep horror of prion disease that precludes developing an appetite for nerve tissue.
Lengua tacos are delicious! But I once tried pig's ear at a korean street food cart. It felt like chewing on an ear. I still wish I had never tried it.
Tongue (with vinegar and garlic) is one of the traditional dishes for Christmas here in Argentina (or at least in my family). I never ate it in a sandwich, anyway.
> your previous love was just a make-believe love, a childish imitation that you mistook for the real thing––an honest mistake, because you had never felt the real thing before?
I'll share a personal story: I was burned by a "stuck in your head" "love". It was unrequited and I suffered a lot.
I have since then read about infatuation, and am averse towards it.
I'd much rather have a stable partner I can have fun with but also communicate, rather than the intense stomach-churning variant.
The most important criterion I've found is that both partners in a relationship see the other as greater or equal to themselves.
Satisfy that, and you get a long-lasting relationship, and you can stop chasing for the impossible ideal.
What brings me pleasure is playing strategic computer games. I was addicted to playing dota. I was playing 12-16 hours a day, which left no place for socializing, career, family, even basic self-maintenance suffered. Anything meaningful, art, self-improvement was cut. It's a disgraceful, shameful life.
The meaning of life is not the blind pursuit of pleasure. We are humans precisely because we follow higher purposes.
Except that you're talking about a game hyper-optimized to be addictive, and while I can't speak for your specific case, in general having an addiction usually involves said addiction being a coping mechanism to fill some kind of hole in someone's life, or avoiding the pain of some unresolved trauma. Which is not at all the same thing as being proof of humans inherently being lazy and needing self-help gurus to fix that.
>Except that you're talking about a game hyper-optimized to be addictive
When I stopped playing dota, civ took it's place, then reddit, then tiktok, etc.
I've resorted to hard blocking a long list of apps and websites. I've seen other people on hackernews having the exact same problem and stumbling upon the exact same stack of solutions.
My point is, it's not the one game, it's the entire internet.
>said addiction being a coping mechanism to fill some kind of hole in someone's life
I've been to several therapists, which have proven useless. I don't think there is a hole in my life, besides the fact that I'm wasting my entire life on stupid shit because I procrastinate.
If you told a king from 500 years past that in the future there is a magical "other" world inside a crystal crafted by the finest of mages where conquest, diplomacy, and economics can be practiced to perfection without risking no lives nor resources but that of time, and that this endeavor is both stupid and a complete waste of time, he'd think you're not only mad, but foolish to squander such an opportunity to learn how to govern a kingdom, and by extension, yourself.
Your mistake is not one of playing games, but of thinking there's nothing to be learned from doing so. Sid Meier's Civilization is not some slot machination to drain you of everything. It is the design of one of our era's greatest minds, in the pursuit of understanding the systems underlying our Earthly existence, and the democratization of that research to the fingertips of all.
For someone who enjoys balancing the needs of a kingdom, you've yet to learn to balance the needs of your own body.
I know and agree that there are lessons to be learned from civ and dota. I never said it was a complete waste of time, but it is an addiction that takes over your life.
Tiktok, reddit, binging netflix, in contrast are probably directly harmful.
> conquest, diplomacy, and economics can be practiced to perfection
This is a ridiculous analogy. The vast majority of video games have so little application to the real world as to be effectively useless. This is relevant in the particular case of Dota 2, which, while an incredibly interesting game, has virtually no relevance to the real world.
"Virtually" because if I say "no relevance" then pedants will quickly point out that you can learn some basic economics by looking at the skin marketplace, or something. Yeah, sure, and you can learn more about human anatomy by having sex. The ratios of learning for those things compared to doing dedicated learning (textbooks, classes, internet research, practice) are at least in the ratio of 100 to 1, if not more, for all but the tiny minority of games explicitly designed to have a significantly amount of learning potential (e.g. Kerbal Space Program).
Using your own analogy, if you told said king that using this crystal took you 100 to 1000 times longer to learn about things than the magical libraries that we also have available to us, which also only cost your own personal time, and then advocated for their use, he'd definitely think that you were crazy - and you would be.
> It is the design of one of our era's greatest minds, in the pursuit of understanding the systems underlying our Earthly existence, and the democratization of that research to the fingertips of all.
Sid Meyer is not "one of our era's greatest minds" even in the particularly narrow field of video game development.
> For someone who enjoys balancing the needs of a kingdom, you've yet to learn to balance the needs of your own body.
There is no "balancing the needs of a kingdom" going on. The Civilization games are optimized for entertainment first, and if educational value is optimized for at all, it's definitely not in the top 5. If you take someone who has put thousands of hours of Civilization into any position of authority (and no other relevant training), they'll a pathetic, miserable mess, and not able to keep up with someone who's read a just few dozen hours' worth of well-chosen history, economics, and military strategy books.
If you could learn to rule merely by playing Civ, then American anime enthusiasts would be able to learn Japanese merely by watching anime, which virtually never happens, and it's pretty well known that it's not a feasible learning strategy.
Sid Meier's Civilization is considered one of the most influential computer games in history, in addition to being a critical and commercial success, and a pedagogical boon to humanity.
The statements you make only reveal your utter ignorance to the subject at hand, as even the most cursory of web searches will squarely establish these facts.
> particularly narrow field of video game development
Video games are almost bigger than TV, movies, and radio combined. I hate to ad hominem but you're talking out of your ass.
You completely failed to respond to any of my points about anything substantive except quarreling about how great a video game Civilization is using subjective opinions.
> Sid Meier's Civilization is considered one of the most influential computer games in history
An extremely subjective list with hundreds of viable candidates for it. What does "one of" even mean here?
> a critical and commercial success
Which, alongside "one of the most influential computer games in history", are all literally completely irrelevant to the topic at hand, which is "does it have educational value".
> a pedagogical boon to humanity
Citation needed. I've never heard anyone call Civ anything like this, let alone anyone who is a professional educator.
> The statements you make only reveal your utter ignorance to the subject at hand, as even the most cursory of web searches will squarely establish these facts
Incredible arrogance, the old trope "look it up for yourself", and blatantly false. You know what my very first result is for searching "most inflential video games of all time" on Google is? A list of ten games[1] that doesn't have Civ at all. My next result[2] puts it at position 73. Then another list of five games[3] without it.
The very fact that you consider these subjective opinions, which are literally the opposite of facts to be "facts" proves that you have no idea what you're talking about, nor the most basic understanding of logic. (the fact that you don't know what search engine bubbling is doesn't help either)
> Video games are almost bigger than TV, movies, and radio combined.
Which is, again, completely irrelevant, because (1) you're ranking those by some consumer metric, not educational value, and (2) every one of those are entertainment fields. Which is more important: video games, or the study of physics or history itself? (this is a rhetorical question, and again, regardless of the truth of these claims, they simply do not matter to the discussion)
If you seriously think that video games are at all comparable in educational value to actual education, then you better provide some extremely convincing evidence, because it's pretty clearly false at first glance.
To sum up: aside from the small part of your comment that is objectively false, this entire thing is purely subjective opinion with absolutely no substantiation whatsoever, in addition to being utterly irrelevant to the rest of the thread. Please make points that are actually related to the subject at hand.
I will add learning teamwork, and learning incentivisation, and learning how to bend or manipulate rules. It is a great time to be alive if you have any sociopathic tendencies.
> When I stopped playing dota, civ took it's place, then reddit, then tiktok, etc
These are all still examples of things hyper-optimized to have addictive feedback loops.
> My point is, it's not the one game, it's the entire internet.
Fair point, but the author is most strongly disagreeing with the "human nature" claim of laziness, and everything you've described so far strikes me as an external influence coopting human instinct. Kind of like how cheesecake and other hyperprocessed foods coopt our instinct to really like eating fat and sugar, which from an evolutionary standpoint was a very good instinct actually for the sake of survival until extremely recently. Should morbidly obese people lose weight for the sake of their own health? Yes. Should we shame them for being obese when healthy food is hard to come by and extremely bad food is cheap and easy to find? No.
I understand how that might feel like arguing semantics when the end-result is still that you feel like it's hard to get control over your life and addictions, but the difference between blaming oneself and seeing that this is an external influence that one shouldn't hate oneself for is a very significant one.
> When I stopped playing dota, civ took it's place, then reddit, then tiktok, etc.
All of which are also hyper-optimized to be addictive.
Perhaps part of the problem is that you live in a world surrounded by things that are hyper-optimized to feed your addiction rather than bring you joy?
Not the person you asked, but I would guess the fact that "oh shit I forgot to sleep it's six o'clock in the morning" is a universal funny-because-it's-true joke made about all Civ games since forever? "One more turn syndrome"?
Honestly, on what grounds would you deny that Civ games are addictive given this common knowledge?
This is absurd. Neither of your memes provide a shred of evidence that Civ is optimized to be addictive, which is literally the point that I was contesting in my comment.
> Honestly, on what grounds would you deny that Civ games are addictive given this common knowledge?
This also clearly indicates that you didn't read my comment before replying. I was exclusively referring to the claim that Civ games were optimized to be addictive - not that they "were addictive".
You know what other things are addictive, despite having no intentional design put towards that end? Scrolling Hacker News, the New page on Reddit (yes, I know that Reddit has a surfacing algorithm, and it's irrelevant to the New page), many other video games that don't have free-to-play models or any other optimization, reading comics, and many other things.
The fact that something is addictive for some set of the population does not imply that it was designed that way.
"One more turn syndrome" was a thing for turn-based strategy games since basically forever; it's definitely not just Civ. I remember a semi-legendary story of a couple of teens living for 3 days on bread and kefir and no sleep because they couldn't stop playing X-COM (the original one, back in 1990s).
Thing is, good games are by definition interesting. If they are more interesting than anything else you can do at that moment, that's sufficient.
Can you please link to evidence that Dota 2 has been "hyper-optimized to be addictive"? Because I've never seen any indication that that's what Value is doing to it, and that is highly inconsistent with my personal experience playing the game and interacting with its community.
I suppose it's all relative. Sure, it's not slot machine or [any recent lootbox game] levels of vile tricks, but come one, it's free-to-play. Of course it's trying to keep people hooked. I also know multiple people who had to cope with Dota addictions ruining their relationships and lives (although I do happen to know quite a few game devs, being a programmer living in Malmö, so that's a skewed demographic of gamer-oriented people). At the very least there is a vulnerable segment of society that should avoid these types of games.
No, it's not relative. "This game has been optimized for the explicit purpose of "engagement"/addiction"" is a statement that can be factually known to be true or false.
> but come one, it's free-to-play. Of course it's trying to keep people hooked.
That's an appeal to emotion without a logical argument behind it. The logical argument is that the survival of free-to-play games depends on the microtransaction revenue being higher than the cost to run the game. You know what directly contributes to the cost of running the game? People using the servers. Unlike social media platforms that monetize through time spent = ad impressions, free-to-play games do not want to maximize the amount of time spent playing the game, they want to maximize the amount of cosmetics that people buy, which is very different, and is not obviously connected with playtime in any research I'm aware of.
> I also know multiple people who had to cope with Dota addictions ruining their relationships and lives
...which happened to me! But, as someone who is struggling with an HN addicition: something can be addicting without being purposefully designed to be that way - addictive traits do not imply that something was designed to be addictive.
Maybe you've lost access to a confortable middle ground, and I'm very sorry for you, but hopefully the vast majority of humans still can find balance between exclusive pursuit of pleasure and doing things things you hate every single minute of the day.
I have defined for myself what are the higher purposes I want to follow. It's not an issue of them existing or not, for me the issue is that I am naturally lazy and I do naturally gravitate towards random bullshit, contrary to what the OP blogpost described.
It's just about personal aesthetics. You no longer like yourself, so you went and started to change yourself to better fit your new aesthetic sense.
Obviously the sense is informed by what you perceive.
You higher could be pretty low for someone else. Like yourself in a couple of years.
It's the biggest lie of them all that some behaviors are higher than other. That's how they sell you church, work week and other frogs.
Why? Because most of us converge on the same basic idea that with cooperation, we can have generally more fun. So we invent ways to get others involved in our shit. Some of it manipulative, because ends justify the means. Well, except when you like to play on hard and limit the set of your means, because it's more fun that way.
Hey OP, do you have issues with time management/procrastination, organization and planning too? If so a) read up about executive disfunction, and b) ask your doctor to test you for AD(H)D. I had a very similar story and struggled with motivation for years, until I realized its a fundamental symptom of AD(H)D that isn't really well discussed.
That is a pity. I have heard prescription meds can be game-changing for some people.
If legal, I would think it's probably worth getting a doctor (ie keep going to different doctors until you find a sympathetic one) to prescribe it. Even non stimulant medications like atomoxetin can be helpful.
I think addiction is it's own thing -- which is not about a lack of pleasure either.
The main thing I think is missing from the OP (which I liked very much) is discussion of the concept of meaning. (and perhaps social connection).
I think what most "frog-eaters" are missing is meaning, not pleasure. People will gladly do hard things that seem meaningful.
I think addiction is primarily about a lack of meaning (and social connection) as well -- rather than being about a surfeit of "pleasure" or lack of "discipline". It's an attempt to deal with a lack of meaning. (It is noteable to me that you point out that your 12-16 hours a day of playing, while (you claim) was "pleasurable", was not in fact "anything meaningful").
I think OP is really talking about a lack of meaning, control, and social connection in our lives. It's this same lack that is part of what leads to addiction. And in fact the solution is not "just try harder to do the things that seem meaningless and without joy, you need more discipline" -- that's the message I get from OP, and I think in fact it applies to addiction too. "Trying harder to be more disciplined" is not a great strategy for escaping addiction.
> But it takes a lot of work to be satisfied with their relationship and their pond, because they don’t get enough love to fill their hearts or enough fish to fill their bellies. So they end up reading articles about how to love things they don’t love that much and how to feel full without eating enough.
>I think OP is really talking about a lack of meaning, control, and social connection in our lives.
That is indeed a much more defensible thesis. But to do anything meaningful, you need to eat a bunch of frogs - to build a rocket, you need to call and compare suppliers, manage accounting, etc. If you avoided all of that annoying stuff, you would find yourself, years later, with very pretty blueprints and no rocket.
I'm not sure about that. Or at least I'm not sure it requires any one person to spend more than a small portion of their time doing anything that feels like eating frogs.
But mainly, I think the basic thesis is about how we diagnose our dissatisfaction. The very common way is what you seem to be suggesting: You need to get better at doing hard things, it's your fault for being lazy. How do you expect to be able to do anything worthwhile if you are so bad at doing hard things? That is the common perspective.
The OP's suggestion (tweaked a bit by me to have meaning) is that this is all wrong: If your life is mostly composed of things that are unpleasant, lacking meaning, control, and social connection, of COURSE they will be hard to get done and burn you out, and it's not your fault. The solution, if you can find a way to do it, is to increase the meaning, control, and social connection in your life -- tasks will not feel as unpleasant if in a framework of meaning, control, and social connection.
The problem is not your lack of discipline, it's that you are not getting enough meaning, control, and social connection in your life. (Granted, it's not necessarily simple what to do about this, especially when it's how our society is set up).
But I'm curious, if you feel like sharing (or if not these are just rhetorical for other readers, no problem), as to your personal anecdotal experience with the problem with computer games. (which I'd call an "addiction" from my experience, but you may or may not). How did you get out of it? Or are you out of it or still struggling? In what ways has it been about discipline and trying harder? In what ways has it been connected to meaning, control, and social connection in other parts of your life? Has the theory that your problem is with discipline and procrastination and just not trying enough been useful to solving the problem? If not, are you willing to consider a different theory/framework? What things in your life give you meaning, control, and social connection, do you feel your life is full of those? (I do not, personally, I'm having problems with the lack of those and am not sure what to do about it).
> That is indeed a much more defensible thesis. But to do anything meaningful, you need to eat a bunch of frogs - to build a rocket, you need to call and compare suppliers, manage accounting, etc. If you avoided all of that annoying stuff, you would find yourself, years later, with very pretty blueprints and no rocket.
I do think there's a certain audience that needs to hear that, specifically the do-nothing crowd or someone (like your former self perhaps) whose life is dominated by bad habits. I think the article is addressing the other side of the pendulum. There are plenty of people who are not addicted to some sort of obvious time waste, but they are addicted to self-flagellation.
You know what's funny? DotA involves a lot of frog-eating. A lot of it is a slog, and a lot of it is really frustrating. You hadn't decreased your frog consumption. You were just eating the wrong frogs.
It seems that now you're eating different frogs, and you're feeling happier and more fulfilled. You might even be eating less of them now, and that might be part of what's rewarding.
Yeah, it's tricky. Some places will just mix frogs into their burgers, so you've just gotta stop eating at the Chum Bucket and pay attention to what's in your mental diet.
I don't think the author is arguing that you should seek only pleasure or always avoid discomfort. The author is saying that you should notice what is pleasurable and what is causing discomfort.
Frustration is a kind of pain and pain is a signal that we should avoid a stimulus. It is frustrating to 'eat frogs'. You can force yourself to go through frustration, or you can use tools help manage those feelings. Or you can try to address the source of those feelings. Or you can choose to not engage in activities that bring up those feelings. We have words for some of these things like 'procrastination'
The point is that those feelings are real and they are not your fault. It is not a failure to feel frustrated. It is a signal. Forcing yourself to go through frustration repeatedly may strengthen that signal, laying down cognitive and emotional scar tissue.
Noticing a stimulus does not mean being fixated on it. It does not mean that you give that stimulus more power. It can feel that way at first, like noticing a tiger in the room; but the tiger has always been there.
---
On another level, the article hints at the real purpose of mental/cognitive/emotional therapy. "Therapy doesn't fix anything, you have to fix yourself" is a common way to say this, but I would say "Therapy is a way to see your situation more clearly, help you develop tools to deal with your personal situation, and help you decide what to change about your personal situation". Therapy can make you feel worse in the short term, and sometimes life does just suck; but it can also help quite a lot.
I can empathize with you, having been in your exact position almost to the T. The one thing I'd caution against is being overly critical of your bad habits.
Life is this amazing playground. We can choose our own values and work towards achieving those values, often to great success if we work hard. But, at the end of the day, what's most important is that we enjoy the moments along the way, and that's hard when you have a loud inner critic shouting at you.
> For legal reasons, I’m not saying the people who write this stuff are literally Lucifer in human skin. It’s just that, if I wanted to maximize human misery, I would 100% try to convince people to spend more time doing things they hate
When Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett wrote Good Omens thirty years ago they already hit upon this idea when Crowley, a demon and one of the main characters, tries to explain to his fellow demons that nowadays it's all about optimizing micro-evils for the biggest net amount of evil. Sure, things like corrupting a church leader sounds more impressive, but if you cause the phone network to be down for an entire morning in London that ruins so many more people's day ever so slightly, leading to more sinful thoughts in total and pushing them to take it out on others, who then take that out on others, and so on.
(my money is on that joke being written by Pratchett, it fits his kind of satire so perfectly)
Not a joke; the Screwtape Letters is a seminal piece of literature, forget the written story, the story is the context of the novel, it's intention, it's composition, and it's ultimate weakness as a intellectual milepost. It practically destroys itself. It's a masterpiece of self deception.
It doesn't destroy anything lol, it's just bog-standard, annoying, heavy-handed, Western Christian cringe thinly describing itself as apologetics. It's annoying as fuck when people pretend it's literature or something.
I need to check, are you sarcastic? I have so far avoided Lewis due to an impression (way too old impression to remember where I got it, may be unfounded or not) of the texts being close to christian/religious zealotry?
I mean he was a Christian and he did believe strongly in it and tried to share his beliefs with others. I'm not sure if I would call that zealotry though.
I'm not trying to guess why you would say that (and by that, I mean the fact that you would avoid writing because it's trying to preach to you), and I do want to say that Lewis is, overall, very close to proselytizing in his writings (generally it's pretty explicitly stated that's what he wants to do). But.
Avoiding something because it disagrees with your worldview, or because it is 'too close to [insert literally anything here]' is not a great way to expand your understanding of the world. Being exposed to things you disagree with is step 1 in understanding how or why they exist, with few exceptions (CP, explicit hate speech, most calls to violence, those sorts of things).
Read the screwtape letters. Yes, they're intended to make you consider your immortal soul and embrace Christianity. But also yes, it's an amazing piece of literature.
Well, I consider myself being relatively open to all kinds of new ideas. But at some point you need to realize that certain genre is not going to give you any new insights and it's better to move on. For example, I have read total of three books published by CATO Institute, and and by standard Bayesian rules, it is going to take a lot of convincing to give them one more chance.
That said,"Letters From the Earth" by Mark Twain is an excellent companion volume to the Screwtape Letters, taking an opposite position (and from the perspective of a somewhat more exalted demon).
> But also yes, it's an amazing piece of literature.
I think you are overselling. It's worth a read, but the writing is often stilted and repetitive, the central conceit interesting but tired by the end. It's not a long book, but probably would have been better as a shorter form.
Yes, that draining of energy towards the end is the anti-theist critism of the novel and philosophy. Quite a few essays have been written about how even this great intellectual peters out his reasoning and just repeats.
I haven’t read everything he ever wrote, but I think that most of his books are just fantasies, or perhaps early science fiction (Out of the Dark Planet). Many of them are allegorical; you might see parallels between them and concepts or elements from the Bible, or you might ignore that and just enjoy the story. I think you could enjoy The Screwtape Letters in the same way you would enjoy Good Omens, as a fantasy that has demons in it.
the whole point of the screwtape letters is defending christianity. I know it's wikipedia, but wikipedia says it's christian apologetics in the first sentence, and goodreads says it's religious satire in the first sentence.
Not sarcastic. The Screwtape Letters is important literature because it was praised at publication, became lauded, and is an complete intellectual failure. The Screwtape Letters stands as a milestone of logrolling: the practice of approval due to who authored something rather than what the writing actually contains. The Screwtape Letters is a debate exposing one of the several weak intellectual foundations of Christian philosophy - but none of that critism was socially allowed for many decades. Such critism still causes many a panty to bunch. The Screwtape Letters is important because it is weak intellectualism, wrapped up in pretty good writing, but not good enough to disguise its intellectual bankruptcy, yet it still lauded.
I also seem to remember that the story went on to say that Crowley at one point had been praised for his work in the Spanish Inquisition. That was the first he'd actually heard of it--humans had come up with it on their own--so he went and had a look, and then went and got blind drunk, because there are some things even demons would rather not think about.
That kind of abrupt tonal slam, from comedy to horror, leaving the reader feeling something like they just had a bucket of cold water unexpectedly poured over them, is classic Sir Pterry too. I read the Discworld series start-to-finish earlier this year as a minor bucket-list project, and I wish he was still around. He had a commendable simmering rage against the powerful and callous that boiled over often, and that's something we could use more of today.
I also did not expect to write a comment today using the word "bucket" in two unrelated idioms, but here we are.
> I also seem to remember that the story went on to say that Crowley at one point had been praised for his work in the Spanish Inquisition. That was the first he'd actually heard of it--humans had come up with it on their own--so he went and had a look, and then went and got blind drunk, because there are some things even demons would rather not think about.
Well, it makes sense that demons wouldn't want to think about strict judicial procedure and rules of evidence.
>That was the first he'd actually heard of it--humans had come up with it on their own--so he went and had a look, and then went and got blind drunk, because there are some things even demons would rather not think about.
This seems like one of the things you might say to diss humans, but which doesn't actually make sense when you think about it. I don't believe for one moment that an actual demon, who does the kind of evil things we normally think of demons as doing, would find human evils shocking, let alone unthinkable. The whole point of being a demon is being and doing evil. If the demon can't comprehend some human evil, he's a failure as a demon.
It can at most make sense as a joke. It makes too little sense taken seriously to actually be horror.
It does make more sense in context. Crowley isn't a stereotypical evil demon and could reasonably be considered a failure as a demon.
I think the horror comes from the thought that a being whose entire job is to come up with new and clever ways to bring about human misery and suffering is so thoroughly out-classed. The idea that humanity doesn't need an outside influence to inflict such evil is horrific. The joke is just there as window dressing to contrast the real horrors of our collective history.
Well yeah, the point is not to make _literal_ sense, this whole book is fiction, not technical writing. It's OK in that context to use devices like hyperbole and irony. A previous author, can't remember who and don't feel like googling, wrote a line in a similar spirit: "Hell is empty and the devils are here". He didn't mean that there were actual demons walking around on earth, who had left a physical place named Hell, which was at the moment unpopulated.
It's not that the demons found it appalling per se, but rather that they lacked imagination to come up with the more creative stuff that humans did to each other.
"Oh, he did his best to make their short lives miserable, because that was his job, but nothing he could think up was half as bad as the stuff they thought up themselves. They seemed to have a talent for it. It was built into the design, somehow. They were born into a world that was against them in a thousand little ways, and then devoted most of their energies to making it worse. Over the years Crowley had found it increasingly difficult to find anything demonic to do which showed up against the natural background of generalized nastiness. There had been times, over the past millennium, when he’d felt like sending a message back Below saying, Look, we may as well give up right now, we might as well shut down Dis and Pandemonium and everywhere and move up here, there’s nothing we can do to them that they don’t do themselves and they do things we’ve never even thought of, often involving electrodes. They’ve got what we lack. They’ve got imagination. And electricity, of course.
One of them had written it, hadn’t he … “Hell is empty, and all the devils are here.”
Crowley had got a commendation for the Spanish Inquisition. He had been in Spain then, mainly hanging around cantinas in the nicer parts, and hadn’t even known about it until the commendation arrived. He’d gone to have a look, and had come back and got drunk for a week.
That Hieronymus Bosch. What a weirdo.
And just when you’d think they were more malignant than ever Hell could be, they could occasionally show more grace than Heaven ever dreamed of. Often the same individual was involved. It was this free-will thing, of course. It was a bugger."
> my money is on that joke being written by Pratchett, it fits his kind of satire so perfectly
Pretty sure it was written by Gaiman. I’m not finding the interview where he said this, but (if memory serves) Gaiman wrote that part of the story and had shelved it when Pratchett contacted him:
— Do you have plans for that thing you sent me?
— Not really, why?
— Because I know what happens next. So either sell me the rights to it or write it with me.
And then continued the interview with something like “and because I’m not an idiot, I didn’t pass up the opportunity to write something with him”.
Unless I misunderstand you I think you're talking about the story (or perhaps that chapter) as a whole, and I'm talking about one particular passage in that story
> I'm talking about one particular passage in that story
Gaiman’s initial draft may have included more by the time they had the conversation, but the moment I remember from the interview was specifically about that conversation amongst the demons. It stuck with me because I found the idea funny and it’s what made me want to take a look at Good Omens.
Now that you mention it, I do remember one author--pretty sure it was Gaiman re Good Omens--say that the parts you'd think were him were mostly the other author, and vice versa.
>The M25 plays a role in the comedy-fantasy novel Good Omens, as "evidence for the hidden hand of Satan in the affairs of Man".[14] The demon character, Crowley, had manipulated the design of the M25 to resemble a Satanic sigil, and tried to ensure it would anger as many people as possible to drive them off the path of good.[122][123] The lengthy series of public inquiries for motorways throughout the 1970s, particularly the M25, influenced the opening of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, where the Earth is destroyed to make way for a hyperspace bypass.[124]
> > We humans are, deep down, lazy and gluttonous creatures. If left to our own devices, we will do nothing but eat Pringles and watch Netflix. The only way we can escape our indolent nature is to exert our higher faculties over our base instincts.
> First, humans are not “naturally” lazy, because humans are not “naturally” anything. ... We’re different today not because our genes changed, but because our culture changed.
But those faults are in fact undeniably persistent to us as a species. It is not without reason that many of our religions, since antiquity, have framed this issue, man's struggle against his impulses, against his baser self, as the struggle against evil.
If you're of the opinion that religion is bad for the same reasons that those motivational coaches are bad, then I think you still have to admit that this fight against our selves is far from novel.
I'm making no judgement call here, with respect to the "cardinal sins". I'm only highlighting that we've worried about committing them since forever, unlike what the author is suggesting.
I don't even think they're persistent to us as a species. There's a clear evolutionary purpose to species not expending energy when they don't have to that applies near globally.
I would say the change is more societal than cultural. Humans in a modern, wealthy country can survive and procreate without doing a whole lot. People can coast in their jobs, or live cheaply and work very little and still not worry about whether they'll starve in the winter (for the most part).
There's no longer a biological necessity to get stuff done. If people of the past could have done very little and still survive, they probably would have. To my sensibilities, some of them did. The nobility seem like they did a lot of their version of "watching Netflix and eating potato chips".
“A life, Jimmy, you know what that is? It’s the shit that happens when you’re waiting for the things that never come.”
-Detective Freamon (The Wire)
>Life is what happens in between all the frog eating. As we all wait for “the big break” and dine on these frogs and prepare ourselves for bigger frogs we end up mischaracterizing the in-between. It’s unfortunate I squander this in-between time by preparing myself for the next frog rather than living in the present froglessness.
I like some points of the article, but stating we are not naturally anything, and then in the next paragraph claiming: '"your base instincts" deserve more credit.', is very illogical.
Exactly. And, while it's true we're in a different environment than we evolved for, our instincts are obviously still relevant. We still get hungry, crave connection, etc. They're just filtered through different specific objects
It's not illogical at all, although I suppose the author could have been more clear in separating the two points they're arguing against:
1) Humans are naturally lazy
2) Human instinct drives us to do things that are bad for us
While connected by an implicit "being lazy is bad" value judgement, these are not the same things.
Stating we are "naturally something" implies that there is an fixed equilibrium point that our behavior naturally converges to.
The second claim about basic instincts is talking about the dynamic processes going on in your body that you are not consciously aware of. It's not saying anything about how those processes work. They can be perfectly valid, important processes that only act in response to contextual information (that is, it is entirely possible for them to not have a "natural, default" behavior).
Basic instincts is an other way of saying that we are "naturally" inclined to do certain things in certain situations.
I understand that reading natural as a "fixed equilibrim" might mean that to you, but for me, and also others it doesn't mean that. So would be good to better explain that in the article.
My interpretation of "fixed equilibrium" comes from the context of the "naturally lazy" claim, which is alleged to be touted as a universal truth by the gurus. A claim of an external, universal truth is that applies to all instincts. So then I take "not naturally anything" to mean "humans are extremely variable and contextual".
I have to admit that my interpretation is biased by reading some post-phenomenological philosophy as part of my design master - I remember one paper that claimed that there is no "natural" endpoint because humans are always reacting to a dynamic context, one that is then changing in response to human interaction, meaning we're more like a chaotic pendulum swinging back and forth over ever-changing equilibrium points.
And yeah, I do agree that the article is a bit ambiguous here and could be clearer.
Yeah although that claim by gurus "naturally lazy" can also be read less absolute, as "many people are inclined to be lazy in a and b kind of circumstances". Which is not far from the truth.
Even the assertion that humans aren't naturally anything is absurd. We're naturally many things: social, food-motivated, curious, horny. Those traits are not cultural, and are common to humans as far back as we can trace (many shared with our ape ancestors as well).
It's an argument against the claim that there's virtue in doing things and that those who don't are lazy.
There's a huge gap between any "natural" instincts (needing to eat, needing to sleep, breathe, keep warm, social connections) and the sort of tasks you need to do in your modern life, like writing a boring report. The idea of laziness - and that there's virtue in doing such things - is a cultural trueism, not a "natural" state of humans.
> Why are we so hard on ourselves? I think it’s because we have a bad theory about how our minds work, one so dastardly that it could have only been devised by the devil himself. It goes like this:
>> We humans are, deep down, lazy and gluttonous creatures. If left to our own devices, we will do nothing but eat Pringles and watch Netflix. The only way we can escape our indolent nature is to exert our higher faculties over our base instincts.
What works for me is in between. I use both motivation and determination to achieve my goals, trying to use as little determination as is feasible. When I feel unmotivated, I don't try to fight it at first. If there's something else that's equally urgent but I am more motivated to do, I'll do that. If I'm just feeling sluggish overall, I'll go eat lunch or do a workout or drink a coffee or something. And once I don't have a choice but to will myself to do that thing, then I'll do that. Much of the time I don't need to because "resetting" myself will get me to that state of mind.
My observation is that even when I'm highly motivated I shouldn't go over the scheduled time, otherwise my energy to work will drop and with it, motivation.
It's counter-intuitive to say the least.
Perhaps there's something about sitting down for extended periods of time that causes this effect.
This seems to be a major epidemic nowadays. I suspect that mechanistic, meaningless, purely mimetic pursuit of success has some pretty negative consequences on society. I suspect it might explain why so many people are interested in engaging in politics (or company politics) and zero-sum value extraction schemes instead of just adding value... They're not interested in the process at all, only in the outcome; financial success and social approval from authority figures.
Many people are spending most of their lives doing stuff that they don't want to do, so of course they tend to look for shortcuts instead of trying to do things the right way. They have no intrinsic pride in the work they do; it's all about status, money and power. As people have become more free in their personal lives, on the career-side, we've never been so constrained.
A friend recently got what he thought was a great gig with an engineering firm - turned out it was more of a cult - rah rah sessions, after work bowling, softball - and they weren’t shy about shunning anybody who didn’t want all in right away.
He got bullied and saw others bullied too - we figure it’s why they prefer to intern pipeline and hire and retain - a lot easier to brainwash when young.
I mean it’s not a bad company, they do strong and good work - but acting like it’s the best place ever? Well, most of them have only worked there. We were like, offhand we’ve each had two better jobs than that one.[0] They used culture as a bait for lower pay too.
There’s something really disturbing about a company in 2022 wanting to act like a cult rather than accept the job market is turning more mercenary by the day. Oh well, their choice to fail.
[0] - Daniel Tosh “America #1” stand up bit for reference
I wish I could say this is not normal, but I see this everywhere: employers want cult-like fiefdoms, and many are successful creating them. These companies are filled with young developers who completely drink the kool-aid and become no less than fan-boys for their oppressor, as anyone that has had more than 1 job would look at the environment as darkly Orwellian.
Alternatively, some may prefer a basic safe haven from all the chaos out there, because their temperaments make too much rapid change intolerable.
Past a certain point, this sort of neurodivergence can be severely detrimental for no good reason, but I do understand why sometimes people accept a non-optimal situation for a while just to have some stability and simplify their lives.
Having worked for many different tech companies, the concept of 'cult companies' seems like a trend. Though I can't say for sure if this is only affecting the tech industry or all industries.
One of my ex-colleagues was hired straight out of university by a company and he did not take a single holiday in 4 years because his boss would always try to make him feel guilty or would imply that there would likely be negative consequences for him as an employee.
After he eventually quit and changed companies, he had very low expectations and he couldn't believe how much better that second company was... It was a startup so it wasn't exactly low-stress by my standards; it goes to show how extreme the differences can be between companies that even a job which I considered challenging seemed like a walk in the park to him given what he had experienced before.
Years ago, I had a very local Hongkong Chinese boss. My holidays were constantly being challenged as "Hey, can you move that holiday?" By dumb luck, I was listening to him one day talk to his boss about an upcoming wedding. "It is so important. I cannot miss that wedding." After that, every single holiday of mine was a wedding or funeral. And I heard him several times "defend" my holiday plans: "Oh, he cannot move that holiday -- wedding/funeral". Ri-don-kulous!
That's a great example of how people tend to build complex ethical models in their minds to maintain the illusion that they are just and consistent with others.
Negative - as mentioned in a couple other comments here, a different industry. Not a really large company either, like 1700 people, which is a good place as a private firm with a 60% margin on professional services and low overhead…
I worked at Best Buy so I recognized the signs immediately. The expression was “man he/she really bleeds blue” and if you hung out with the managers after work - because they all hung out together (and drove the same Scions lol) - you’d be in line for the next promotion. For some people that was a good path. Store Manager life and pay is legit.
It’s definitely a “high school hero” type thing where there’s not of lot of experience with leadership outside of sports like football. If it’s all they know, yeah, it’s their playbook. Fortunately here in Texas I know that playbook and I’m helping him go Mike Leach on them and they’re really surprised and not taking it well. Which is good for him.
Note: The blue-shirt Best Buy experience is certainly cultish. The software developer side of Best Buy is not (unless you count wokeness and scrum-agile cultish).
I was speaking about my Best Buy Retail experience but they do have other large operations that are different.
I’m not sure what drugs the Shipping people are on though - we routinely shuffled 40+ unsold copies of The Benchwarmers into a bye bye crate and they’d show back up a month later but 50+. They were inventory gaming and probably doing some book cooking now when I look back on it.
Not until the payout is in the bank, but yes there will be a reckoning for their unethical wickedness toward innocent well-meaning employees who just didn’t want to drink the kool-aid.
This was exactly my experience at Goldman Sachs. Sorry, I should be posting under a throw-away, but let's be real for a moment. That place was nothing but a cult. Yes, they make lots of money, but you need to sell your soul. I never worked in a place with so many sheep (non-believers but scared to speak-up) and assholes (believers, only because they profit / climb the corporate ladder) _at the same time_. Fortunately, I escaped after two years of that prison sentence. (The whole experience feels like Shawshank Redemption when I write about it now!) All the global investment banks where I have worked, Goldman had the fewest number of mid-career/senior hires. The intern/fresher pipeline was so deep. Now I understand why! They are so much easier to brain-wash.
Two stories stand out in my new hire training:
We had multiple "partners" (super senior, old-school MDs) tell us: "At Goldman, there is not publically available org chart." Fucking dead wrong. I raised my hand at each of those bullshit meetings and said, "I'm sorry, but this is incorrect. There is a website where you can view and search the org chart." (It was amazing -- no lie/joke.) Each PMD was so "surprised" to learn this. Not sure if real, or encouraging people to do face-to-face networking.
Second, they showed all these weird propaganda videos about how Goldman is closely tied with the US gov't, especially during World War 2. So weird, creepy, and out of date! Many senior partners leave Goldman and enter US politics. In American English, they call it "the revolving door" (between private industry and politics). Many democracies have this problem. But why celebrate it? Fuct! The whole thing felt so sleazy. Why is this important to non-US citizens? Many people looked bored and only read their mobile phones during these 90 minute(!) videos.
Nice post, and I upvoted, but it might say something about your personality that you seem to consider 'throwaway2037' a part of your identity and not a throw-away. It makes me wonder if some of what you consider to be a 'cult' might just be what others think of as 'community'.
I don't doubt that you need to sell your soul to work for Goldman, but those two examples don't seem particularly striking to me.
> We had multiple "partners" (super senior, old-school MDs) tell us: "At Goldman, there is not publically available org chart." Fucking dead wrong. I raised my hand at each of those bullshit meetings and said, "I'm sorry, but this is incorrect. There is a website where you can view and search the org chart." (It was amazing -- no lie/joke.) Each PMD was so "surprised" to learn this. Not sure if real, or encouraging people to do face-to-face networking.
It's a big company - it seems entirely plausible to me that it could have been an honest mistake and he just didn't know that it existed. And the goal of having an organization where people are free to collaborate with others outside of their org, and employees at all levels are able to voice their opinions, seems like a valid aspiration to fight for... even if in reality it doesn't work that way.
> Second, they showed all these weird propaganda videos about how Goldman is closely tied with the US gov't, especially during World War 2. So weird, creepy, and out of date! Many senior partners leave Goldman and enter US politics. In American English, they call it "the revolving door" (between private industry and politics). Many democracies have this problem. But why celebrate it? Fuct! The whole thing felt so sleazy. Why is this important to non-US citizens? Many people looked bored and only read their mobile phones during these 90 minute(!) videos.
It's not uncommon to show "propaganda" videos to new hires when they join a company - to try to motivate them by showing them the impact that their work can have on the world. And yes they do often come across as a bit creepy. It's also not uncommon for companies that have been around for a while to be proud of their history - which probably explains the WW2 references. I also don't think there's anything inherently wrong about working closely with the government - the US government provides a lot of useful services for its citizens after all. Corruption of course is another matter entirely... but I can only assume the video was not promoting corruption.
Surely you must have seen worse things than this in your time at Goldman Sachs?
> It's not uncommon to show "propaganda" videos to new hires when they join a company
And as a new hire it's interesting to get to know something where the company comes from. Often it makes it easier to endure some of the company's idiosyncrasies if you know their origins.
In most of my big league Fortune level gigs you’ll watch plenty of videos eventually about compliance, sexual harassment, phishing, quarterly results, and internal training videos.
You will eventually learn what Peter in “Office Space” refers to it as ‘zoning out’ - you look like you’re watching the video, but you’re only doing just enough to get through the quiz at the end.
>They have no intrinsic pride in the work they do; it's all about status, money and power
the guy with status,money and power is obviously more attractive than the guy who, although he loves his work, is more or less unsuccessful on those parameters.
it's intraspecific selection at play. One of the only remaining factor influencing human evolution today. People understandably value what increases their SMV.
Konrad Lorenz has written an interesting part about it in his book "Civilized Man's Eight Deadly Sins" (4. Man's race against himself)
As bad as it sounds, I think this does seem to describe the situation correctly.
This is the kind of attitude which helps the individual at the expense of the group. When the group is too dumb to see through bullshit, the people who produce bullshit have a huge advantage within that group.
I've seen this dynamic at play first hand in groups and communities of various sizes. It's just incredible how sometimes individually smart people can form a group but somehow, as a group, they act really dumb and they fall for obvious BS over and over... And the people selling BS within the group keep screwing the group over and over again and group members just ignore all the evidence that they are being screwed. Meanwhile those who are working in the interest of the group are shunned because the group ignores the tangible evidence and believes the BS narratives which paints those people as harmful.
> They have no intrinsic pride in the work they do; it's all about status, money and power.
Damn these modern people, why would they look after things so irrelevant as “status, money and power” instead of taking pride in completing Jira tickets?
Not sure whether it would help, but if someone finds themselves in this kind of situation maybe try to find a way to discreetly suss out whether they are doing it because they've drunk the kool aid or as a "work to rule" strategy. It seems to me that many of the Agile methodologies, and Scrum in particular, are susceptible to that kind of approach.
I agree with your basic diagnosis, "Many people are spending most of their lives doing stuff that they don't want to do". But I want to add: most of their lives doing things they find meaningless and pointless. (See Graeber on "Bullshit Jobs" for just an instance, not exhaustive).
So I don't agree with your next conclusion, I don't think that's leading to "shortcuts instead of trying to do things the right way." To do things they don't want to do the right way? To do things that are meaningless and pointless, but do them the "right way"?
I agree with, I think, the OP, in that what you are suggesting is metaphorical "get better at eating frogs, why are you so lazy about it?"
But I agree with your basic explanation. My interpretation of why people might engage in office/politics is: to try and find some meaning in life. The politics seem meaningful because politics (of both varieties) are actually core to what humans as humans do.
The problem is not "How do we figure out how to force ourselves to do the meaningless boring stuff we don't want to do the right way?" The problem is: How do we find meaning in our lives that have been structured so we spend most of them doing meaningless things we don't want to do, and are not sure how to live otherwise. And, with regard to harmful or unhealthy forms of "politics" or "drama": In what ways do our attempts to find meaning backfire?
I hated college. I never finished for the frogs. But I'm a lifelong reader. I don't regret failing to get a degree, but I regret that I wasn't in the right mindset and that I could have used the time to create meaning.
>This article highlights that alternative theories grounded in empirical research are required to understand the social suffering caused by the feelings of useless work that Graeber observes. Therefore, our third major contribution is to demonstrate the value of Marx’s writings on alienation. We take inspiration from Marx’s understanding of alienation to investigate whether the social relations of work can explain why millions of workers do not feel that their work is useful. In particular, we focus on the ways in which the development of workers’ human capacities may be fettered by social relations at work.
Reminds me of that delayed gratification experiment with the kids and chocolates, except instead of eating the 2x reward the kid will then hold off for even more (for their whole life)!
Yes, this is one of those ideas that keeps me up at night. When I'm looking at this system in aggregate, I become aware that we're racing toward asceticism. Me and the person next to me are competing in what we can do without. Even more disconcerting is that as soon as we reach a new equilibrium of austerity someone will find a new way to jump ahead with another form of self-denial. Or in other words, those who live in excess are meant to be punished. It's completely absurd. I'm lucky I fall asleep before continuing too far down this path of thoughts
I agree about the negative consequences, but I'm not so sure about "nowadays". Haven't most people, throughout history, basically copied what other people did, followed the standard paths, etc., when it comes to trying to make a living? Haven't almost all of them been constrained by needing to do so, or fearing the unknown of not doing so?
Taking tests is an important frog. It’s been quite a few years for me, but lately the movement to dethrone tests like SAT made me wonder how disadvantaged kids can distinguish themselves without a quantifier for potential. If it’s essays instead of a math score, then maybe an essay is like this article says, improved messaging makes bad startups look like good ones.
I agree, but taking a single test that's mostly about merit rather than compliance is not really what's being talked about.
For what it's worth, my family is not wealthy or educated and I was able to go to a high-quality-but-not-prestigious magnet school in significant part because of my SAT score :)
But the linked article (GP to yours) is about Y-Combinator and yes it is a bit of a different topic than the (better written) posted one about frogs.
It’s been quite a few years, but without the SAT, the only test that would distinguish me from a socio-economically disadvantaged background was a military assessment test.
So when the SAT came under fire after a high-profile cheating scandal in Hollywood, I heard a lot about replacing the test with an essay.
The article about Y-Combinator is about IQ and things that are not IQ. It also has this interesting quote about messaging —- message coaching can obscure the bad candidates among the good ones. I feel replacing the frog of SAT preparation with the possibility of an essay-as-a-service feels punitive to kids from difficult backgrounds.
If you have goals beyond feeling good in the moment then sometimes it’s worth feeling bad for some time to achieve them. Most people definitely spend a lot of time doing things that will never lead them to that deeper satisfaction but that shouldn’t stop one from trying. And to enjoy the struggle along the way.
The topic is nice, but above all I thoroughly enjoy the writing.
I feel like I get a lot more done precisely because I don't like to eat frogs. I sleep until I'm rested. I don't touch my computer until I've had tea on the balcony. I work on what feels right, when it feels right, for as long as it feels right. If the weather is nice, I'll hop on my bicycle and forget about work.
But when something sparks my interest, I have stores of energy to throw at it. My appetite for work is unrestrained by the frogs I've had for breakfast.
I embraced the fact that I am not a machine, and that my output is neither constant nor predictable. I'd rather respect the tides of my energy than fight against them.
Sounds nice to either have no real outside demands upon your time, or to sufficiently lack emotional attachment to anything you do such that it can’t exert pressure on you.
That said, I don’t know if I’d actually want to live that dispassionately.
That's a very uncharitable take. What part of my comment makes you think that I live dispassionately?
The whole point is that my work is almost single-handedly defined by passion. When that runs dry, I take a break and do other things. It's easier to do good work with a well-rested mind full of ideas.
I think what people envy is that not everyone get to achieve your set of options. This article is by an academic advisor for students at an elite university. I have a feeling that GP was a post that didn’t need to be made, but to achieve your set of options, a lot of things have to go right. You can’t have kids too young, you can’t take on disabled family members, you can’t make certain career choices because you have to pay for aging parents. Some people have to pick up and move everything because of politics. And drug and gambling addiction add at least a frog a day.
I'm admittedly sitting on a winning lottery ticket, no doubt.
But it came out of the many impulses I followed when I should have been eating frogs. Other impulses got me all sorts of connections, career boosts and other perks.
Some frogs you just have to eat, but I don't think that anyone's denying that. The original article is questioning competitive frog-eating. In my experience, refusing to eat those frogs is how you end up finding other ways.
When I interviewed for my current job, I had to take psychology test and I'm very skeptical to those kind of tests. The guy that ran the test explained that this wasn't about putting me into a colored box but trying to figure out what I naturally preferred to do in a work situation with the idea being that things that I enjoy are probably things that I'm good at because it takes less energy to perform. I don't know if it works but it's an interesting idea, things that takes less energy, you do more and you're probably more proficient at it.
I had a similar experience which, when combined with my academic background, pointed toward a particular corporate need that (to my surprise) was mostly received as unpleasant. It’s a decision support role starting with a risk-based statistical model of products, then devising for hypothetical competing devices the best selling points. The test was useful to decide which frog, reminded me of the movie Brazil.
No, people had assumed it was hard and non-redeeming. Part of me thought that the personality quiz worked surreptitiously to identify me as someone just boring enough to put up with it.
> work on what feels right, when it feels right, for as long as it feels right
How have you achieved this?
I once had a setup like this, but eventually the work which permitted that freedom got boring, and I was so void of responsibility that I felt a pain of meaninglessness. Climbing out of this hole was via a feast of frogs.
I find that this comes with kids. Once the kids come, many are compelled to play the game since many feel responsible for their kids’ health and future opportunities (education).
This turns into competing for best schools districts, which turns into paying as much as you can for land, to surround yourself with others who can pay at least as much as you can.
In the US, healthcare costs also keep people on their toes. Between health insurance premiums and annual out of pocket maximums, you need somewhere around $24k per year plus ~$34k emergency funds for 2 years worth of out of pocket maximum healthcare expenses for a family of 4.
If I was single or without kids, I would not necessarily care enough about any of that.
What is your occupation where you get paid to work only on what feels right, only when it feels right, for only as long as it feels right, with leeway to hop on your bicycle and forget about work whenever you want?
Cause I am interested in this line of work. At least if it pays enough to live comfortably.
Intersting. I am also a remote software engineer, but either working "feels right" a lot less for me than for you, and I feel like spending time outside riding my bike a lot less than you, or my employer is a lot less tolerant of taking the day off to ride my bike because work just didn't feel right.
I am curious how many hours a day/week you work, and if you are open about this with your employer...
I wouldn't say that I'm taking my day off to go ride my bike without telling anybody, but I would say that working from home affords me flexibility to, say, take a few hours to get a massage, go work out, or take my time making lunch.
I make sure I'm aligning my personal technical interests with the kinds of projects I work on for the company, so work feels more like a fun puzzle to solve rather than slogging through tedium. Generally I don't work late into the evenings, but sometimes a problem is really just that fun to solve, and I enjoy spending time on it. Other times, projects may be less interesting, so I work fewer hours, letting myself rest. Burnout is real, and it sucks, and I avoid it at all costs.
My employer really just cares that I get my work done, not how many hours it takes to do it. If I'm getting "meets all" or "exceeds" in my yearly ratings, then I'm meeting or exceeding their standard, and we're both happy.
I have a similar schedule, although a slightly more organized. I try to be available from 9 to 4, atleast through emails if I'm not in my office, because that's when other people also work and might need me. I often leave mid-day to go running or come in late because I went bouldering in the morning. If I don't feel inspired to write or work, I often instead go for a walk and read books tangentially to my research topics. Then some days I'll work 12 hours straight.
I mostly work when it feels right, yes, and do something else when it doesn't. But I am doing my PhD and (in Canada) it absolutely does not pay enough to live comfortably.
allaboutberlin.com. I'm self-employed, and I have no direct customers. So long as my bills are paid, everything else is extra. I can invest time into more, better content, but I can also mess around with things that don't make money. More often than not, they turn out to do just that. "If you build it, they will come."
Mind you, I still have to work, but there's rarely anything that needs to be done right now, unless I goofed up while fiddling with nginx.
Before that I was a contractor for a year or two. After seeing contracting colleagues disappear for months-long vacations, I wanted in on that.
Before that I was a regular employee in Europe, where work culture is far more relaxed. I had more vacation days as an intern than my parents in the home country ever had. I also became really good at aggressively cutting meetings for me and my team, which gave us more time to experiment without affecting output.
In Germany, you also have the right to reduce your work hours. Coincidentally, that's the article I'm currently working on.
There's a minimum number of frogs that you have to eat. Mine is very low out of sheer luck. However there are different ways to bring most people's number down, starting with don't glorify eating frogs.
Affiliate links on things an immigrant needs during their journey. There's enough genuine demand to skip the sales pitch entirely. The quality of the advice gives the rare product recommendations a lot of weight.
That is a great website. Very well thought out and actionable. That model can surely be replicated for other arenas. You have actually thought about what people need and given an easy way to find it. Big props for that!
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[ 6.6 ms ] story [ 358 ms ] threadWhich is the big point about all these depressed kids with no direction.
And yeah, just the legs.
Also they once were a very "poor" (please read as cheap) meal, while nowadays they tend to be "gourmet".
BTW. I had also expected the article to be about actual frogs: about how endangered some species are, or how the flesh may contain pollutants or diseases.
"If your job requires you to eat a toad, do it first. If it requires you to eat two, eat the bigger one first."
The book itself is probably a wink to that Mark Twain quote.
That said, I was very surprised by the quality of the article, and the writing. I was expecting yet another bucket of self-help motivating bullshit and it's the opposite of that! And also quite funny.
Frog leg porridge is really easy to find in Singapore, for example.
Not so much in restaurants but I was invited to a friends house and that was part of the meal. Tasted kinda like chewy chicken wings, not bad.
Snails, on the other hand, are not too difficult to find in supermarkets.
I cross the line at eating spiders. Nope
(Sorry.)
Edit: Oh. Pat yourself on the back for a pun well played. Whooshed straight over my head! Take my angry upvote ;)
Edit: It's too early, thanks to the more awake commenters to point out the pun ;)
I hate this joke. There's a bakery I used to drive past called the "House of Pain".
Two peasants find a frog and take a bet. One says he can eat the frog raw and the other bets $5 that he cannot. So the first peasant starts to eat the frog; halfway through he starts to feel nauseous. The second one starts to regret the $5 that he's about to lose. So he offers to reverse the bet - $5 back for eating the remaining half of the frog. The first one agrees and the second one eats the remaining half of the frog.
They walk for a bit and one asks the other "Hey, why exactly did we eat that frog?".
It also means "doing things against your will", although it has the additional sense of doing them because you're gullible (not sure if this sense is also present in the English expression).
https://fr.wiktionary.org/wiki/avaler_des_couleuvres
It appears to have actually been coined by a late 18th century French humorist: https://quoteinvestigator.com/2013/04/03/eat-frog/
Out there I'm sure is my antipode, someone who is taking a different path to the same objective. I'll let them do that way and I'll do this way and let whatever works work.
But for me it's hard work and if I don't finish it, power up my kids so that if this is what they want to do they'll have a head start.
https://home.csulb.edu/~cwallis/382/readings/482/nisbett%20s...
Telling More Than We Can Know: Verbal Reports on Mental Processes by Richard E. Nisbett and Timothy D. Wilson
Both researchers have had amazing careers since then. Timothy Wilson's book Strangers to Ourselves is one I recommend to everyone. It is a continuation of the work in the paper you link to. Nisbett's books are excellent too; my favorite (a must-read!) is Culture of Honor: The Psychology of Violence in the South. Any student of psychology should know these works.
"I no longer think there’s something wrong with me; there's something wrong with Reviewer 2. I intend to have so much fun that Reviewer 2 will simply have to join in."
I love the last bit: "..so much fun that Reviewer 2 will simply have to join in."
> "Stop confusing productivity with laziness. While no one likes admitting it, sheer laziness is the No. 1 contributor to lost productivity."
I was taught growing up that if it's something you must do anyhow, then true laziness is finding the simplest and most effective way to do a given task quickly and correctly the first time so that you don't have to waste time and effort doing it again or fixing your screw-up. Sounds pretty "productive" to me…
> “I divide my officers into four classes as follows: The clever, the industrious, the lazy, and the stupid. Each officer always possesses two of these qualities.
> Those who are clever and industrious I appoint to the General Staff. Use can under certain circumstances be made of those who are stupid and lazy. The man who is clever and lazy qualifies for the highest leadership posts. He has the requisite nerves and the mental clarity for difficult decisions. But whoever is stupid and industrious must be got rid of, for he is too dangerous.”
Or
> I do not know whether your Lordships are familiar with the saying of a German General that there are four types of officer but I think that it is relevant to what we are discussing. He said that there are four types of officer: the clever and lazy, the clever and industrious, the stupid and lazy, and the stupid and industrious.
> The clever and lazy you make Chief of Staff, because he will not try to do everybody else’s work, and will always have time to think. The clever and industrious you make his deputy. The stupid and lazy you put into a line battalion, and kick him into doing a job of work. The stupid and industrious you must get rid of at once, because he is a national danger.
I explained this isn’t about exerting less effort, but that for the same effort we get a heck of a lot more done. I guess that’s when I first realized that management consulting can be a good thing.
Of course, 30 years later, I know management consultants are often frauds that have no idea what they are talking about or doing. They make business benefits by slowing wage growth and by essentially forcing smaller groups of people to do more work by laying off their coworkers. Not the efficiency I had in mind.
https://www.economist.com/business/2022/04/09/how-mba-wieldi...
The protestant work ethic is a powerful tool, but people need to know that it is a religious value now woven into society. Not to avoid doing productive things, because I think it can provide the most amazing successes and a wonderful life, but to be aware that it is horribly abused in America by business management. “Idle hands are the devil’s hands.” And it drives all sorts of compulsion.
None of this is new, but if I could go back in time, I would find Chuck Palahniuk, and explain to him that the problem in our society isn’t the banks, but the big consulting firms. Oh that would be a much more satisfying ending to Fight Club.
Bojack Horseman: “Are you gonna sail around the cape like a real man, or are you gonna cut through the Panama Canal like a Democrat?”
Use stack ranking. Avoids "everything is a priority" and related mistakes.
Effort and impact both have a long tail distribution, something like power law. It's probably power law because it's easy to be off by an order of magnitude. "Impact" is easier to get wrong because it's going to the high end. Don't think most impactful and second most impactful have a similar impact because they're close in rank. It's easy for #1 to be 10-100x #2.
Your version of "laziness" is quite admirable, honestly.
Reminds me of being a snippy teenager at “inspirational coaching” sessions or listening to some invited speaker…
Speaker: Think outside the box!
Me: What box?
> The writer George Jean Nathan claimed that before the 1920s, there existed only eight basic sandwich types: Swiss cheese, ham, sardine, liverwurst, egg, corned beef, roast beef, and tongue (yes). But by 1926, he “claimed that he had counted 946 different sandwich varieties stuffed with fillings such as watermelon and pimento, peanut butter, fried oyster, Bermuda onion and parsley, fruit salad, aspic of foie gras, spaghetti, red snapper roe, salmi of duck, bacon and fried egg, lettuce and tomato, spiced beef, chow-chow, pickled herring, asparagus tips, deep sea scallops, and so on ad infinitum.”
I ordered it off Amazon right away only to immediately realize, to my horror, that the hardcover version I had chosen would not arrive until Saturday, a full fortnite after my aspic of foie gras, salmi of duck, and the $5 esp32-wroom dev kits that were part of the same order.
What is this, the 1930s? Civilization is seriously going down the drain.
[1] https://slimemoldtimemold.com/2022/04/04/book-review-a-squar...
This is 2022 - you can get old cookbooks from archive.org and check if Nathan was right.
He wasn't.
For example, "The up-to-date sandwich book : 400 ways to make a sandwich", by Eva Greene Fuller. Published in Chicago in 1909. https://archive.org/details/uptodatesandwich00full/page/n7/m...
Or, a generation earlier in 1884, the book "Salads and Sauces" by Thomas Jefferson Murrey (New York) has a chapter on sandwiches. https://archive.org/details/saladsandsauces00murrgoog/page/n... including "Apple Sandwich", "Anchovy Sandwich", "Beef, Raw, Sandwich", "Brie Sandwich", "Caviare Sandwich", "Clam Sandwich", "Curry Sandwich", "Dandelion Sandwich", "Duck Sandwich", and so on for several more pages, ending with "Welsh Sandwich". Look under "Goose Liver" for the foie gras entry.
I hope I helped save your meal!
+ Someone goes on a journey.
+ A stranger comes to town.
Stories are attached to particular protagonists, but you can do things like overlap the stories of multiple protagonists or give a single protagonist multiple overlapping stories in order to develop narratives of arbitrary complexity.
One type, yes, and Kishōtenketsu as well. And now you know.
The aforementioned recipe from https://archive.org/details/saladsandsauces00murrgoog/page/n... says:
> Caviare is the roe of the sturgeon prepared under many formulas, the Russian being the best. Take a teaspoonful of caviare, put it in a soup-plate ; add to it a saltspoonful of chopped onion, a walnut of butter, and the juice of half a lemon ; work well together, spread on thin slices of rye-bread, press them together, cut the sandwich in two, and serve. Americans as a class do not like caviare.
According to Wikipedia, 1 salt spoon (ssp) = 0.25 teaspoon.
The other recipe book has caviare-lobster sandwich (species unspecified; I assume sturgeon), roe sandwich (salt herring), and two types of shad-roe sandwiches (shad). See https://archive.org/details/uptodatesandwich00full/page/12/m... .
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caviar mentions:
> In Scandinavia, a type of sandwich spread is available, made from smoked cod roe and other ingredients, which is referred to as smörgåskaviar (meaning "sandwich caviar"). Outside Scandinavia, the product is referred to as creamed smoked roe or in French as Caviar de Lysekil.
Perhaps the Swedish term "kaviar" doesn't overlap fully with the English term "caviar"?
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/kaviar#Swedish says:
while https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/caviar#Noun says:It was a comment written by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.
Is this a comment box which I see before me, the submit button toward my hand?
Never been a fan of chips in my sandwich, but each to their own I suppose.
Ramona did not care for tongue if I recall correctly.
I grew up on a very small farm, but I'm sure many non farm folk were eating it back then too.
That's an awesome price!
Can't help but think people wrote to tell him he was wrong.
I'll share a personal story: I was burned by a "stuck in your head" "love". It was unrequited and I suffered a lot.
I have since then read about infatuation, and am averse towards it.
I'd much rather have a stable partner I can have fun with but also communicate, rather than the intense stomach-churning variant.
The most important criterion I've found is that both partners in a relationship see the other as greater or equal to themselves.
Satisfy that, and you get a long-lasting relationship, and you can stop chasing for the impossible ideal.
What brings me pleasure is playing strategic computer games. I was addicted to playing dota. I was playing 12-16 hours a day, which left no place for socializing, career, family, even basic self-maintenance suffered. Anything meaningful, art, self-improvement was cut. It's a disgraceful, shameful life.
The meaning of life is not the blind pursuit of pleasure. We are humans precisely because we follow higher purposes.
When I stopped playing dota, civ took it's place, then reddit, then tiktok, etc.
I've resorted to hard blocking a long list of apps and websites. I've seen other people on hackernews having the exact same problem and stumbling upon the exact same stack of solutions.
My point is, it's not the one game, it's the entire internet.
>said addiction being a coping mechanism to fill some kind of hole in someone's life
I've been to several therapists, which have proven useless. I don't think there is a hole in my life, besides the fact that I'm wasting my entire life on stupid shit because I procrastinate.
Your mistake is not one of playing games, but of thinking there's nothing to be learned from doing so. Sid Meier's Civilization is not some slot machination to drain you of everything. It is the design of one of our era's greatest minds, in the pursuit of understanding the systems underlying our Earthly existence, and the democratization of that research to the fingertips of all.
For someone who enjoys balancing the needs of a kingdom, you've yet to learn to balance the needs of your own body.
Tiktok, reddit, binging netflix, in contrast are probably directly harmful.
This is a ridiculous analogy. The vast majority of video games have so little application to the real world as to be effectively useless. This is relevant in the particular case of Dota 2, which, while an incredibly interesting game, has virtually no relevance to the real world.
"Virtually" because if I say "no relevance" then pedants will quickly point out that you can learn some basic economics by looking at the skin marketplace, or something. Yeah, sure, and you can learn more about human anatomy by having sex. The ratios of learning for those things compared to doing dedicated learning (textbooks, classes, internet research, practice) are at least in the ratio of 100 to 1, if not more, for all but the tiny minority of games explicitly designed to have a significantly amount of learning potential (e.g. Kerbal Space Program).
Using your own analogy, if you told said king that using this crystal took you 100 to 1000 times longer to learn about things than the magical libraries that we also have available to us, which also only cost your own personal time, and then advocated for their use, he'd definitely think that you were crazy - and you would be.
> It is the design of one of our era's greatest minds, in the pursuit of understanding the systems underlying our Earthly existence, and the democratization of that research to the fingertips of all.
Sid Meyer is not "one of our era's greatest minds" even in the particularly narrow field of video game development.
> For someone who enjoys balancing the needs of a kingdom, you've yet to learn to balance the needs of your own body.
There is no "balancing the needs of a kingdom" going on. The Civilization games are optimized for entertainment first, and if educational value is optimized for at all, it's definitely not in the top 5. If you take someone who has put thousands of hours of Civilization into any position of authority (and no other relevant training), they'll a pathetic, miserable mess, and not able to keep up with someone who's read a just few dozen hours' worth of well-chosen history, economics, and military strategy books.
If you could learn to rule merely by playing Civ, then American anime enthusiasts would be able to learn Japanese merely by watching anime, which virtually never happens, and it's pretty well known that it's not a feasible learning strategy.
The statements you make only reveal your utter ignorance to the subject at hand, as even the most cursory of web searches will squarely establish these facts.
> particularly narrow field of video game development
Video games are almost bigger than TV, movies, and radio combined. I hate to ad hominem but you're talking out of your ass.
> Sid Meier's Civilization is considered one of the most influential computer games in history
An extremely subjective list with hundreds of viable candidates for it. What does "one of" even mean here?
> a critical and commercial success
Which, alongside "one of the most influential computer games in history", are all literally completely irrelevant to the topic at hand, which is "does it have educational value".
> a pedagogical boon to humanity
Citation needed. I've never heard anyone call Civ anything like this, let alone anyone who is a professional educator.
> The statements you make only reveal your utter ignorance to the subject at hand, as even the most cursory of web searches will squarely establish these facts
Incredible arrogance, the old trope "look it up for yourself", and blatantly false. You know what my very first result is for searching "most inflential video games of all time" on Google is? A list of ten games[1] that doesn't have Civ at all. My next result[2] puts it at position 73. Then another list of five games[3] without it.
The very fact that you consider these subjective opinions, which are literally the opposite of facts to be "facts" proves that you have no idea what you're talking about, nor the most basic understanding of logic. (the fact that you don't know what search engine bubbling is doesn't help either)
> Video games are almost bigger than TV, movies, and radio combined.
Which is, again, completely irrelevant, because (1) you're ranking those by some consumer metric, not educational value, and (2) every one of those are entertainment fields. Which is more important: video games, or the study of physics or history itself? (this is a rhetorical question, and again, regardless of the truth of these claims, they simply do not matter to the discussion)
If you seriously think that video games are at all comparable in educational value to actual education, then you better provide some extremely convincing evidence, because it's pretty clearly false at first glance.
To sum up: aside from the small part of your comment that is objectively false, this entire thing is purely subjective opinion with absolutely no substantiation whatsoever, in addition to being utterly irrelevant to the rest of the thread. Please make points that are actually related to the subject at hand.
[1] https://www.hongkiat.com/blog/greatest-video-games/
[2] https://www.animationcareerreview.com/articles/top-100-most-...
[3] https://www.digitaltrends.com/gaming/most-influential-video-...
These are all still examples of things hyper-optimized to have addictive feedback loops.
> My point is, it's not the one game, it's the entire internet.
Fair point, but the author is most strongly disagreeing with the "human nature" claim of laziness, and everything you've described so far strikes me as an external influence coopting human instinct. Kind of like how cheesecake and other hyperprocessed foods coopt our instinct to really like eating fat and sugar, which from an evolutionary standpoint was a very good instinct actually for the sake of survival until extremely recently. Should morbidly obese people lose weight for the sake of their own health? Yes. Should we shame them for being obese when healthy food is hard to come by and extremely bad food is cheap and easy to find? No.
I understand how that might feel like arguing semantics when the end-result is still that you feel like it's hard to get control over your life and addictions, but the difference between blaming oneself and seeing that this is an external influence that one shouldn't hate oneself for is a very significant one.
All of which are also hyper-optimized to be addictive.
Perhaps part of the problem is that you live in a world surrounded by things that are hyper-optimized to feed your addiction rather than bring you joy?
Honestly, on what grounds would you deny that Civ games are addictive given this common knowledge?
> Honestly, on what grounds would you deny that Civ games are addictive given this common knowledge?
This also clearly indicates that you didn't read my comment before replying. I was exclusively referring to the claim that Civ games were optimized to be addictive - not that they "were addictive".
You know what other things are addictive, despite having no intentional design put towards that end? Scrolling Hacker News, the New page on Reddit (yes, I know that Reddit has a surfacing algorithm, and it's irrelevant to the New page), many other video games that don't have free-to-play models or any other optimization, reading comics, and many other things.
The fact that something is addictive for some set of the population does not imply that it was designed that way.
Thing is, good games are by definition interesting. If they are more interesting than anything else you can do at that moment, that's sufficient.
No, it's not relative. "This game has been optimized for the explicit purpose of "engagement"/addiction"" is a statement that can be factually known to be true or false.
> but come one, it's free-to-play. Of course it's trying to keep people hooked.
That's an appeal to emotion without a logical argument behind it. The logical argument is that the survival of free-to-play games depends on the microtransaction revenue being higher than the cost to run the game. You know what directly contributes to the cost of running the game? People using the servers. Unlike social media platforms that monetize through time spent = ad impressions, free-to-play games do not want to maximize the amount of time spent playing the game, they want to maximize the amount of cosmetics that people buy, which is very different, and is not obviously connected with playtime in any research I'm aware of.
> I also know multiple people who had to cope with Dota addictions ruining their relationships and lives
...which happened to me! But, as someone who is struggling with an HN addicition: something can be addicting without being purposefully designed to be that way - addictive traits do not imply that something was designed to be addictive.
I chuckled. I have yet to see one.
Obviously the sense is informed by what you perceive.
You higher could be pretty low for someone else. Like yourself in a couple of years.
It's the biggest lie of them all that some behaviors are higher than other. That's how they sell you church, work week and other frogs.
Why? Because most of us converge on the same basic idea that with cooperation, we can have generally more fun. So we invent ways to get others involved in our shit. Some of it manipulative, because ends justify the means. Well, except when you like to play on hard and limit the set of your means, because it's more fun that way.
Disagree.
>You higher could be pretty low for someone else. Like yourself in a couple of years.
Possible, but I can console my future self with the fact that at least I'm not a filthy nihilist.
If legal, I would think it's probably worth getting a doctor (ie keep going to different doctors until you find a sympathetic one) to prescribe it. Even non stimulant medications like atomoxetin can be helpful.
The main thing I think is missing from the OP (which I liked very much) is discussion of the concept of meaning. (and perhaps social connection).
I think what most "frog-eaters" are missing is meaning, not pleasure. People will gladly do hard things that seem meaningful.
I think addiction is primarily about a lack of meaning (and social connection) as well -- rather than being about a surfeit of "pleasure" or lack of "discipline". It's an attempt to deal with a lack of meaning. (It is noteable to me that you point out that your 12-16 hours a day of playing, while (you claim) was "pleasurable", was not in fact "anything meaningful").
I think OP is really talking about a lack of meaning, control, and social connection in our lives. It's this same lack that is part of what leads to addiction. And in fact the solution is not "just try harder to do the things that seem meaningless and without joy, you need more discipline" -- that's the message I get from OP, and I think in fact it applies to addiction too. "Trying harder to be more disciplined" is not a great strategy for escaping addiction.
> But it takes a lot of work to be satisfied with their relationship and their pond, because they don’t get enough love to fill their hearts or enough fish to fill their bellies. So they end up reading articles about how to love things they don’t love that much and how to feel full without eating enough.
This seems so relevant to addiction to me.
That is indeed a much more defensible thesis. But to do anything meaningful, you need to eat a bunch of frogs - to build a rocket, you need to call and compare suppliers, manage accounting, etc. If you avoided all of that annoying stuff, you would find yourself, years later, with very pretty blueprints and no rocket.
But mainly, I think the basic thesis is about how we diagnose our dissatisfaction. The very common way is what you seem to be suggesting: You need to get better at doing hard things, it's your fault for being lazy. How do you expect to be able to do anything worthwhile if you are so bad at doing hard things? That is the common perspective.
The OP's suggestion (tweaked a bit by me to have meaning) is that this is all wrong: If your life is mostly composed of things that are unpleasant, lacking meaning, control, and social connection, of COURSE they will be hard to get done and burn you out, and it's not your fault. The solution, if you can find a way to do it, is to increase the meaning, control, and social connection in your life -- tasks will not feel as unpleasant if in a framework of meaning, control, and social connection.
The problem is not your lack of discipline, it's that you are not getting enough meaning, control, and social connection in your life. (Granted, it's not necessarily simple what to do about this, especially when it's how our society is set up).
But I'm curious, if you feel like sharing (or if not these are just rhetorical for other readers, no problem), as to your personal anecdotal experience with the problem with computer games. (which I'd call an "addiction" from my experience, but you may or may not). How did you get out of it? Or are you out of it or still struggling? In what ways has it been about discipline and trying harder? In what ways has it been connected to meaning, control, and social connection in other parts of your life? Has the theory that your problem is with discipline and procrastination and just not trying enough been useful to solving the problem? If not, are you willing to consider a different theory/framework? What things in your life give you meaning, control, and social connection, do you feel your life is full of those? (I do not, personally, I'm having problems with the lack of those and am not sure what to do about it).
I do think there's a certain audience that needs to hear that, specifically the do-nothing crowd or someone (like your former self perhaps) whose life is dominated by bad habits. I think the article is addressing the other side of the pendulum. There are plenty of people who are not addicted to some sort of obvious time waste, but they are addicted to self-flagellation.
It seems that now you're eating different frogs, and you're feeling happier and more fulfilled. You might even be eating less of them now, and that might be part of what's rewarding.
Frustration is a kind of pain and pain is a signal that we should avoid a stimulus. It is frustrating to 'eat frogs'. You can force yourself to go through frustration, or you can use tools help manage those feelings. Or you can try to address the source of those feelings. Or you can choose to not engage in activities that bring up those feelings. We have words for some of these things like 'procrastination'
The point is that those feelings are real and they are not your fault. It is not a failure to feel frustrated. It is a signal. Forcing yourself to go through frustration repeatedly may strengthen that signal, laying down cognitive and emotional scar tissue.
Noticing a stimulus does not mean being fixated on it. It does not mean that you give that stimulus more power. It can feel that way at first, like noticing a tiger in the room; but the tiger has always been there.
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On another level, the article hints at the real purpose of mental/cognitive/emotional therapy. "Therapy doesn't fix anything, you have to fix yourself" is a common way to say this, but I would say "Therapy is a way to see your situation more clearly, help you develop tools to deal with your personal situation, and help you decide what to change about your personal situation". Therapy can make you feel worse in the short term, and sometimes life does just suck; but it can also help quite a lot.
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A tool that helped me -
Emotion Wheel - https://feelingswheel.com/
Life is this amazing playground. We can choose our own values and work towards achieving those values, often to great success if we work hard. But, at the end of the day, what's most important is that we enjoy the moments along the way, and that's hard when you have a loud inner critic shouting at you.
When Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett wrote Good Omens thirty years ago they already hit upon this idea when Crowley, a demon and one of the main characters, tries to explain to his fellow demons that nowadays it's all about optimizing micro-evils for the biggest net amount of evil. Sure, things like corrupting a church leader sounds more impressive, but if you cause the phone network to be down for an entire morning in London that ruins so many more people's day ever so slightly, leading to more sinful thoughts in total and pushing them to take it out on others, who then take that out on others, and so on.
(my money is on that joke being written by Pratchett, it fits his kind of satire so perfectly)
[shows self out]
Avoiding something because it disagrees with your worldview, or because it is 'too close to [insert literally anything here]' is not a great way to expand your understanding of the world. Being exposed to things you disagree with is step 1 in understanding how or why they exist, with few exceptions (CP, explicit hate speech, most calls to violence, those sorts of things).
Read the screwtape letters. Yes, they're intended to make you consider your immortal soul and embrace Christianity. But also yes, it's an amazing piece of literature.
I think you are overselling. It's worth a read, but the writing is often stilted and repetitive, the central conceit interesting but tired by the end. It's not a long book, but probably would have been better as a shorter form.
That kind of abrupt tonal slam, from comedy to horror, leaving the reader feeling something like they just had a bucket of cold water unexpectedly poured over them, is classic Sir Pterry too. I read the Discworld series start-to-finish earlier this year as a minor bucket-list project, and I wish he was still around. He had a commendable simmering rage against the powerful and callous that boiled over often, and that's something we could use more of today.
I also did not expect to write a comment today using the word "bucket" in two unrelated idioms, but here we are.
Well, it makes sense that demons wouldn't want to think about strict judicial procedure and rules of evidence.
This seems like one of the things you might say to diss humans, but which doesn't actually make sense when you think about it. I don't believe for one moment that an actual demon, who does the kind of evil things we normally think of demons as doing, would find human evils shocking, let alone unthinkable. The whole point of being a demon is being and doing evil. If the demon can't comprehend some human evil, he's a failure as a demon.
It can at most make sense as a joke. It makes too little sense taken seriously to actually be horror.
I think the horror comes from the thought that a being whose entire job is to come up with new and clever ways to bring about human misery and suffering is so thoroughly out-classed. The idea that humanity doesn't need an outside influence to inflict such evil is horrific. The joke is just there as window dressing to contrast the real horrors of our collective history.
"Oh, he did his best to make their short lives miserable, because that was his job, but nothing he could think up was half as bad as the stuff they thought up themselves. They seemed to have a talent for it. It was built into the design, somehow. They were born into a world that was against them in a thousand little ways, and then devoted most of their energies to making it worse. Over the years Crowley had found it increasingly difficult to find anything demonic to do which showed up against the natural background of generalized nastiness. There had been times, over the past millennium, when he’d felt like sending a message back Below saying, Look, we may as well give up right now, we might as well shut down Dis and Pandemonium and everywhere and move up here, there’s nothing we can do to them that they don’t do themselves and they do things we’ve never even thought of, often involving electrodes. They’ve got what we lack. They’ve got imagination. And electricity, of course.
One of them had written it, hadn’t he … “Hell is empty, and all the devils are here.”
Crowley had got a commendation for the Spanish Inquisition. He had been in Spain then, mainly hanging around cantinas in the nicer parts, and hadn’t even known about it until the commendation arrived. He’d gone to have a look, and had come back and got drunk for a week.
That Hieronymus Bosch. What a weirdo.
And just when you’d think they were more malignant than ever Hell could be, they could occasionally show more grace than Heaven ever dreamed of. Often the same individual was involved. It was this free-will thing, of course. It was a bugger."
...I'll show myself out.
Pretty sure it was written by Gaiman. I’m not finding the interview where he said this, but (if memory serves) Gaiman wrote that part of the story and had shelved it when Pratchett contacted him:
— Do you have plans for that thing you sent me?
— Not really, why?
— Because I know what happens next. So either sell me the rights to it or write it with me.
And then continued the interview with something like “and because I’m not an idiot, I didn’t pass up the opportunity to write something with him”.
Gaiman’s initial draft may have included more by the time they had the conversation, but the moment I remember from the interview was specifically about that conversation amongst the demons. It stuck with me because I found the idea funny and it’s what made me want to take a look at Good Omens.
>The M25 plays a role in the comedy-fantasy novel Good Omens, as "evidence for the hidden hand of Satan in the affairs of Man".[14] The demon character, Crowley, had manipulated the design of the M25 to resemble a Satanic sigil, and tried to ensure it would anger as many people as possible to drive them off the path of good.[122][123] The lengthy series of public inquiries for motorways throughout the 1970s, particularly the M25, influenced the opening of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, where the Earth is destroyed to make way for a hyperspace bypass.[124]
> First, humans are not “naturally” lazy, because humans are not “naturally” anything. ... We’re different today not because our genes changed, but because our culture changed.
But those faults are in fact undeniably persistent to us as a species. It is not without reason that many of our religions, since antiquity, have framed this issue, man's struggle against his impulses, against his baser self, as the struggle against evil.
If you're of the opinion that religion is bad for the same reasons that those motivational coaches are bad, then I think you still have to admit that this fight against our selves is far from novel.
I would say the change is more societal than cultural. Humans in a modern, wealthy country can survive and procreate without doing a whole lot. People can coast in their jobs, or live cheaply and work very little and still not worry about whether they'll starve in the winter (for the most part).
There's no longer a biological necessity to get stuff done. If people of the past could have done very little and still survive, they probably would have. To my sensibilities, some of them did. The nobility seem like they did a lot of their version of "watching Netflix and eating potato chips".
-Detective Freamon (The Wire)
>Life is what happens in between all the frog eating. As we all wait for “the big break” and dine on these frogs and prepare ourselves for bigger frogs we end up mischaracterizing the in-between. It’s unfortunate I squander this in-between time by preparing myself for the next frog rather than living in the present froglessness.
Stating we are "naturally something" implies that there is an fixed equilibrium point that our behavior naturally converges to.
The second claim about basic instincts is talking about the dynamic processes going on in your body that you are not consciously aware of. It's not saying anything about how those processes work. They can be perfectly valid, important processes that only act in response to contextual information (that is, it is entirely possible for them to not have a "natural, default" behavior).
I understand that reading natural as a "fixed equilibrim" might mean that to you, but for me, and also others it doesn't mean that. So would be good to better explain that in the article.
I have to admit that my interpretation is biased by reading some post-phenomenological philosophy as part of my design master - I remember one paper that claimed that there is no "natural" endpoint because humans are always reacting to a dynamic context, one that is then changing in response to human interaction, meaning we're more like a chaotic pendulum swinging back and forth over ever-changing equilibrium points.
And yeah, I do agree that the article is a bit ambiguous here and could be clearer.
There's a huge gap between any "natural" instincts (needing to eat, needing to sleep, breathe, keep warm, social connections) and the sort of tasks you need to do in your modern life, like writing a boring report. The idea of laziness - and that there's virtue in doing such things - is a cultural trueism, not a "natural" state of humans.
> Why are we so hard on ourselves? I think it’s because we have a bad theory about how our minds work, one so dastardly that it could have only been devised by the devil himself. It goes like this:
>> We humans are, deep down, lazy and gluttonous creatures. If left to our own devices, we will do nothing but eat Pringles and watch Netflix. The only way we can escape our indolent nature is to exert our higher faculties over our base instincts.
Through trial and error I've settled on 30min work and 20min(!) of rest.
I have to force myself to stop working when my timer is up, otherwise my productivity that day goes down.
On one hand it's just a somewhat smarter way to eat frogs, on the other it doesn't feel so.
I suppose half of the problem is not knowing what amount of frog is too much for you.
It's counter-intuitive to say the least.
Perhaps there's something about sitting down for extended periods of time that causes this effect.
Many people are spending most of their lives doing stuff that they don't want to do, so of course they tend to look for shortcuts instead of trying to do things the right way. They have no intrinsic pride in the work they do; it's all about status, money and power. As people have become more free in their personal lives, on the career-side, we've never been so constrained.
He got bullied and saw others bullied too - we figure it’s why they prefer to intern pipeline and hire and retain - a lot easier to brainwash when young.
I mean it’s not a bad company, they do strong and good work - but acting like it’s the best place ever? Well, most of them have only worked there. We were like, offhand we’ve each had two better jobs than that one.[0] They used culture as a bait for lower pay too.
There’s something really disturbing about a company in 2022 wanting to act like a cult rather than accept the job market is turning more mercenary by the day. Oh well, their choice to fail.
[0] - Daniel Tosh “America #1” stand up bit for reference
Past a certain point, this sort of neurodivergence can be severely detrimental for no good reason, but I do understand why sometimes people accept a non-optimal situation for a while just to have some stability and simplify their lives.
One of my ex-colleagues was hired straight out of university by a company and he did not take a single holiday in 4 years because his boss would always try to make him feel guilty or would imply that there would likely be negative consequences for him as an employee.
After he eventually quit and changed companies, he had very low expectations and he couldn't believe how much better that second company was... It was a startup so it wasn't exactly low-stress by my standards; it goes to show how extreme the differences can be between companies that even a job which I considered challenging seemed like a walk in the park to him given what he had experienced before.
I worked at Best Buy so I recognized the signs immediately. The expression was “man he/she really bleeds blue” and if you hung out with the managers after work - because they all hung out together (and drove the same Scions lol) - you’d be in line for the next promotion. For some people that was a good path. Store Manager life and pay is legit.
It’s definitely a “high school hero” type thing where there’s not of lot of experience with leadership outside of sports like football. If it’s all they know, yeah, it’s their playbook. Fortunately here in Texas I know that playbook and I’m helping him go Mike Leach on them and they’re really surprised and not taking it well. Which is good for him.
I did abuse the heck out of the BB IT at the time using flash drives and paint.exe admin tricks.
I’m not sure what drugs the Shipping people are on though - we routinely shuffled 40+ unsold copies of The Benchwarmers into a bye bye crate and they’d show back up a month later but 50+. They were inventory gaming and probably doing some book cooking now when I look back on it.
Two stories stand out in my new hire training:
We had multiple "partners" (super senior, old-school MDs) tell us: "At Goldman, there is not publically available org chart." Fucking dead wrong. I raised my hand at each of those bullshit meetings and said, "I'm sorry, but this is incorrect. There is a website where you can view and search the org chart." (It was amazing -- no lie/joke.) Each PMD was so "surprised" to learn this. Not sure if real, or encouraging people to do face-to-face networking.
Second, they showed all these weird propaganda videos about how Goldman is closely tied with the US gov't, especially during World War 2. So weird, creepy, and out of date! Many senior partners leave Goldman and enter US politics. In American English, they call it "the revolving door" (between private industry and politics). Many democracies have this problem. But why celebrate it? Fuct! The whole thing felt so sleazy. Why is this important to non-US citizens? Many people looked bored and only read their mobile phones during these 90 minute(!) videos.
Nice post, and I upvoted, but it might say something about your personality that you seem to consider 'throwaway2037' a part of your identity and not a throw-away. It makes me wonder if some of what you consider to be a 'cult' might just be what others think of as 'community'.
> We had multiple "partners" (super senior, old-school MDs) tell us: "At Goldman, there is not publically available org chart." Fucking dead wrong. I raised my hand at each of those bullshit meetings and said, "I'm sorry, but this is incorrect. There is a website where you can view and search the org chart." (It was amazing -- no lie/joke.) Each PMD was so "surprised" to learn this. Not sure if real, or encouraging people to do face-to-face networking.
It's a big company - it seems entirely plausible to me that it could have been an honest mistake and he just didn't know that it existed. And the goal of having an organization where people are free to collaborate with others outside of their org, and employees at all levels are able to voice their opinions, seems like a valid aspiration to fight for... even if in reality it doesn't work that way.
> Second, they showed all these weird propaganda videos about how Goldman is closely tied with the US gov't, especially during World War 2. So weird, creepy, and out of date! Many senior partners leave Goldman and enter US politics. In American English, they call it "the revolving door" (between private industry and politics). Many democracies have this problem. But why celebrate it? Fuct! The whole thing felt so sleazy. Why is this important to non-US citizens? Many people looked bored and only read their mobile phones during these 90 minute(!) videos.
It's not uncommon to show "propaganda" videos to new hires when they join a company - to try to motivate them by showing them the impact that their work can have on the world. And yes they do often come across as a bit creepy. It's also not uncommon for companies that have been around for a while to be proud of their history - which probably explains the WW2 references. I also don't think there's anything inherently wrong about working closely with the government - the US government provides a lot of useful services for its citizens after all. Corruption of course is another matter entirely... but I can only assume the video was not promoting corruption.
Surely you must have seen worse things than this in your time at Goldman Sachs?
And as a new hire it's interesting to get to know something where the company comes from. Often it makes it easier to endure some of the company's idiosyncrasies if you know their origins.
You will eventually learn what Peter in “Office Space” refers to it as ‘zoning out’ - you look like you’re watching the video, but you’re only doing just enough to get through the quiz at the end.
> I mean it’s not a bad company
These two statements cannot exist together when discussing the same organization.
the guy with status,money and power is obviously more attractive than the guy who, although he loves his work, is more or less unsuccessful on those parameters. it's intraspecific selection at play. One of the only remaining factor influencing human evolution today. People understandably value what increases their SMV.
Konrad Lorenz has written an interesting part about it in his book "Civilized Man's Eight Deadly Sins" (4. Man's race against himself)
This is the kind of attitude which helps the individual at the expense of the group. When the group is too dumb to see through bullshit, the people who produce bullshit have a huge advantage within that group.
I've seen this dynamic at play first hand in groups and communities of various sizes. It's just incredible how sometimes individually smart people can form a group but somehow, as a group, they act really dumb and they fall for obvious BS over and over... And the people selling BS within the group keep screwing the group over and over again and group members just ignore all the evidence that they are being screwed. Meanwhile those who are working in the interest of the group are shunned because the group ignores the tangible evidence and believes the BS narratives which paints those people as harmful.
Damn these modern people, why would they look after things so irrelevant as “status, money and power” instead of taking pride in completing Jira tickets?
So I don't agree with your next conclusion, I don't think that's leading to "shortcuts instead of trying to do things the right way." To do things they don't want to do the right way? To do things that are meaningless and pointless, but do them the "right way"?
I agree with, I think, the OP, in that what you are suggesting is metaphorical "get better at eating frogs, why are you so lazy about it?"
But I agree with your basic explanation. My interpretation of why people might engage in office/politics is: to try and find some meaning in life. The politics seem meaningful because politics (of both varieties) are actually core to what humans as humans do.
The problem is not "How do we figure out how to force ourselves to do the meaningless boring stuff we don't want to do the right way?" The problem is: How do we find meaning in our lives that have been structured so we spend most of them doing meaningless things we don't want to do, and are not sure how to live otherwise. And, with regard to harmful or unhealthy forms of "politics" or "drama": In what ways do our attempts to find meaning backfire?
Alienation Is Not ‘Bullshit’: An Empirical Critique of Graeber’s Theory of BS Jobs https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/09500170211015...
from the conclusion:
>This article highlights that alternative theories grounded in empirical research are required to understand the social suffering caused by the feelings of useless work that Graeber observes. Therefore, our third major contribution is to demonstrate the value of Marx’s writings on alienation. We take inspiration from Marx’s understanding of alienation to investigate whether the social relations of work can explain why millions of workers do not feel that their work is useful. In particular, we focus on the ways in which the development of workers’ human capacities may be fettered by social relations at work.
For what it's worth, my family is not wealthy or educated and I was able to go to a high-quality-but-not-prestigious magnet school in significant part because of my SAT score :)
It’s been quite a few years, but without the SAT, the only test that would distinguish me from a socio-economically disadvantaged background was a military assessment test.
So when the SAT came under fire after a high-profile cheating scandal in Hollywood, I heard a lot about replacing the test with an essay.
The article about Y-Combinator is about IQ and things that are not IQ. It also has this interesting quote about messaging —- message coaching can obscure the bad candidates among the good ones. I feel replacing the frog of SAT preparation with the possibility of an essay-as-a-service feels punitive to kids from difficult backgrounds.
I feel like I get a lot more done precisely because I don't like to eat frogs. I sleep until I'm rested. I don't touch my computer until I've had tea on the balcony. I work on what feels right, when it feels right, for as long as it feels right. If the weather is nice, I'll hop on my bicycle and forget about work.
But when something sparks my interest, I have stores of energy to throw at it. My appetite for work is unrestrained by the frogs I've had for breakfast.
I embraced the fact that I am not a machine, and that my output is neither constant nor predictable. I'd rather respect the tides of my energy than fight against them.
That said, I don’t know if I’d actually want to live that dispassionately.
The whole point is that my work is almost single-handedly defined by passion. When that runs dry, I take a break and do other things. It's easier to do good work with a well-rested mind full of ideas.
But it came out of the many impulses I followed when I should have been eating frogs. Other impulses got me all sorts of connections, career boosts and other perks.
Some frogs you just have to eat, but I don't think that anyone's denying that. The original article is questioning competitive frog-eating. In my experience, refusing to eat those frogs is how you end up finding other ways.
This guy who makes computers put it best: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kYfNvmF0Bqw
How have you achieved this?
I once had a setup like this, but eventually the work which permitted that freedom got boring, and I was so void of responsibility that I felt a pain of meaninglessness. Climbing out of this hole was via a feast of frogs.
Most people get indoctrinated into a 1:1 relationship with what they make and their lifestyle cost.
This turns into competing for best schools districts, which turns into paying as much as you can for land, to surround yourself with others who can pay at least as much as you can.
In the US, healthcare costs also keep people on their toes. Between health insurance premiums and annual out of pocket maximums, you need somewhere around $24k per year plus ~$34k emergency funds for 2 years worth of out of pocket maximum healthcare expenses for a family of 4.
If I was single or without kids, I would not necessarily care enough about any of that.
Cause I am interested in this line of work. At least if it pays enough to live comfortably.
I am curious how many hours a day/week you work, and if you are open about this with your employer...
I make sure I'm aligning my personal technical interests with the kinds of projects I work on for the company, so work feels more like a fun puzzle to solve rather than slogging through tedium. Generally I don't work late into the evenings, but sometimes a problem is really just that fun to solve, and I enjoy spending time on it. Other times, projects may be less interesting, so I work fewer hours, letting myself rest. Burnout is real, and it sucks, and I avoid it at all costs.
My employer really just cares that I get my work done, not how many hours it takes to do it. If I'm getting "meets all" or "exceeds" in my yearly ratings, then I'm meeting or exceeding their standard, and we're both happy.
I mostly work when it feels right, yes, and do something else when it doesn't. But I am doing my PhD and (in Canada) it absolutely does not pay enough to live comfortably.
Mind you, I still have to work, but there's rarely anything that needs to be done right now, unless I goofed up while fiddling with nginx.
Before that I was a contractor for a year or two. After seeing contracting colleagues disappear for months-long vacations, I wanted in on that.
Before that I was a regular employee in Europe, where work culture is far more relaxed. I had more vacation days as an intern than my parents in the home country ever had. I also became really good at aggressively cutting meetings for me and my team, which gave us more time to experiment without affecting output.
In Germany, you also have the right to reduce your work hours. Coincidentally, that's the article I'm currently working on.
There's a minimum number of frogs that you have to eat. Mine is very low out of sheer luck. However there are different ways to bring most people's number down, starting with don't glorify eating frogs.