Nice book, but I can't stand this sort of presentation. One tiny morsel per page, with hundreds of clicks to get through it all. A lot of people who make online FAQs are also guilty of this.
It's an extremely old-fashioned style of web design, back when bandwidth was low and webmasters split content across multiple pages, so as to increase load times by placing a lot of text and images into a single page.
Completely unnecessary in this day and age, 3G is slowest wireless network still in use, and can easily serve text and images quickly.
Even in the 90s when connections were super slow, I've always disagreed with this mantra. Firstly, even if the whole page takes long to load, the browser will display the start of the page exactly as quickly as it would if the page ended there. (Give or take.) Secondly, splitting into multiple pages prevents me from loading it in a background tab and reading it later.
Fun little index of behaviors & situations. Often just straight good basic advice, sometimes cheeky.
Example:
> one day you’ll find yourself working for an incompetent boss. No doubt you’ll find this inconvenient, but be thankful you’re not among the unlucky men whose incompetent bosses were the sergeants, lieutenants, or generals who led them to war.
Yikes!
This kind of compilation is what I rather expect we should train AGI on. Being able to recognize identify & understand variance of human situations like this.
This kind of thing, and tvtropes, which is the most valuable index of human behavior we have, I think, with the bonus of endless citations.
One day you’ll find yourself opening a golf umbrella. If you’re not standing on a golf course or in your own backyard, you’re everything that’s wrong with the world.
ok grandpa, what if I'm an adult with a surly child, or if I'm sharing this umbrella with a big bag, a friend, and their big bag?
One day you’ll find yourself thinking about quitting a new job. By quitting, you’ll ensure the job won’t work out. By staying a bit longer, though, you’ll at least allow the possibility that it might. And most do.
Surely you'll never find yourself in a situation where the job is actively destroying other parts of your life. Surely you'll never find yourself in a situation where the boss is using their position to extract sexual favors from you. Surely you'll never find yourself in a situation where your job is actively detrimental to the world at large, and is making you enough money that you begin to want to shrug and say "everyone does it".
Wait, I'm pretty sure it sounds like Grandpa here has done exactly that last one.
one day you’ll find yourself dressing for a flight. Take a stand against casualness and wear a blazer. The pockets are handy for tickets and passports, and you may as well look good—the person sitting next to you could be single.
jesus grandpa, I am an adult woman who has taken many flights while single and lemme tell you, the last damn thing I want to think about while I'm flying is flirting with the dude crammed in the seat next to me, I just want to take a nap and get off this nightmare vibrating stress tube ASAP.
one day you’ll find yourself graduating college. Resist the temptation to move home, even temporarily. Force yourself to find a job, live on a budget, and become an adult.
ok grandpa, you do know that most college graduates are now saddled with horrendous college loans that are impossible to get away from, and that living anywhere even remotely desirable requires paying increasingly absurd rents, and yes, that includes that charming town you settled in after your grandparents paid the majority of a tuition that was a tiny fraction of what modern graduates are in hock for, even after adjusting for inflation? You also do know that "leaving your parents and living by yourself" has only been the norm for a brief period of time, and that, in fact, living in the ancestral manse is a great way to accumulate and consolidate pan-generational wealth, as well as to share the burdens of caring for the young, the old, and the infirm?
One day, when you are old and think of yourself as wise, you will feel an urge to put together a little book of your attempts at advice. You will be tempted to divide this book into sections, with quotes from various dead white men, all of which lack closing quotes to match their opening quotes. Except for one, which has closing quotes. None of these quotes will be multi-paragraph quotes, which is the only case in which any grammar guides suggest unbalanced closing and opening quotation marks.
Resist this temptation.
Bonus points: Also resist the temptation to decorate the chapter headers with a red swash, that makes them look a pack of Marlboros. Who the hell even smokes any more, grandpa?
> ...the last damn thing I want to think about while I'm flying is flirting with the dude crammed in the seat next to me...
...which is your prerogative and another data point to go with the data point in the original article. As a single guy I've personally been lucky enough to be on the receiving end of an in-flight flirtation; not everyone hates flying.
I've had a few romantic connections begin on planes and trains, too. I wonder how common it is. There is something to this advice, which is that most people in airports look confused and lost, so looking like you know how to travel and have your shit together, being relaxed, maybe helping people lift their carry-ons and whatnot, can make you seem like someone people find easy to talk to.
I do dress well when flying and when in Vegas, but I do it for my own sense of aesthetics and elegance. It reminds me to slow down and hold myself well, and it definitely doesn't hurt when going through customs.
Circumstances vary, but especially in our industry, I've seen way more examples of people staying too long when they should have moved on. Even absent abuse or mistreatment.
In my career, I've already done it twice, and I'm in my mid-thirties.
Haha, I did that one year in Vancouver. I was just tired of arriving to my destination with wet feet. The winter rain in the Pacific Northwest is something else. But you really take up a lot of the sidewalk. I’m tall at least, so I could usually just go over people by raising my arm if needed.
This is a neat idea, but I can't get past how self-important some of these sound. For example, the shaking a handful of nuts:
> You also might find yourself leaning back and lacing your fingers behind your head. Regardless, both are the self-satisfied poses of bros, so quit it.
Maybe this is the shtick, but it's a real turnoff for me personally.
Completely different from my expectations of the title.
A nice little book, reminds me of the popular series "Dad, How Do I?" on YouTube (and I'm sure other places) where the creator offers general advice like "How do I wear a suit" to other men who may not have had someone to give such advice to them.
He also stated that the term "shotgun" is a reference to the idea that if all the doors are opened, a shotgun blast fired into the house from the front doorway will fly cleanly to the other end and out at the back.
> One day you'll find yourself considering whether to bike to work or not, and the thought of arriving sweaty and tired may hold you back. But let me tell you, the benefits of biking far outweigh the temporary discomfort of sweat. The fresh air, exercise, and feeling of freedom that comes with riding a bike can set the tone for your entire day. Plus, you'll be doing your part to reduce traffic congestion and air pollution. So, don't let the fear of sweat hold you back from experiencing the joy of biking to work. Give it a try and see how it can transform your daily routine and overall wellbeing.
That’s all great, but it will also shorten your life span. People drive like shit and if you’re on the road with them every day you’re going to get hit sooner or later. The odds aren’t great.
I would only do this in a place with separate bike lanes.
Sitting in a car also shortens your life and exercise extends your life. You have to weigh the benefits against the risk. There is a lot you can do to avoid getting hit by cars.
Yeah, bonus points here should be to take a shower when you get to the office. Double bonus: skip the shower if you really dislike the person in the next cubicle.
one day you’ll find yourself drinking at an office party. Want to be an observer of the inevitable shit show rather than the star? Skip the liquor and drink only beer or wine.
extra points
Only amateurs call in sick the morning after an office party.
Hah don’t most people get the hint from their body by their 30s anyway? I don’t know anyone who still drinks heavily and I knew some very heavy drinkers in their 20s
Or you can just get a neat whiskey then spend an hour or two sipping it. It's neat, so there's no ice to melt nor carbon dioxide to separate, and nobody can tell how long you've had it.
The only downside is defending it from over-zealous waiters.
Apple juice in a whiskey glass is a good one too. People just sort of assume the alcohol content.
Or if you're in a place where they sell ginger beer that's a good one too. Looks like it probably ought to be alcoholic, has "beer" in the name, but is alcohol free.
>One day you’ll find yourself wearing shorts. Fair enough, it’s probably hot out. One day you’ll also find yourself wearing a t-shirt. Again, fair enough. Unless you’re playing a sport, however, you will not be wearing the two together because you’re also no longer a ten-year-old boy.
Fucking boomer hypocrite. btw I am wearing shorts as I type this.
The problem is that I can't tell if people who say/write this would unironically wear long-sleeve button-down shirts to shorts or if that thought would make their head explode.
OK - I wish you the very best and hope you find your way through it soon. A difficult road it may be but it shows a lot of strength that you're walking it.
There are various reasons to not seek or avoid eye contact, and somehow I'd bet that "not knowing/never having heard about eye contact" is not the most probable one on average.
In fact, for many of the top reasons, "you should make eye contact" is probably completely useless advice at best.
I have two autistic sons. Obviously we moderate our expectations and responses based on their particular capabilities and preferences. But it's quite a lot of work to override inbuilt social/emotional reactions - more than you can expect from casual acquaintances.
As an autistic person, trust me when I say you don't want me to attempt forced eye contact. It's many many many levels more unnerving to have "bad" eye contact than a lack of eye contact.
Yes, I identify with this. My adaptation/compensation for it is to be specific with the thanks — never just “thank you” but “thank you for …” and mean it, kindly.
It’s probably not literally about making eye contact. It’s more about paying full attention to the person you’re taking to, even if you don’t make eye contact.
It doesn't to the receiver though. The point is conveying meaning to the other person, not how you internally feel (which obviously nobody but you gets access to)
Instead, become actively deranged. Send unlabeled vials of your hair to state senators. Stockpile canned beetroots. Wear a reflective helmet everywhere you go. Fall in love with a pigeon. Shave the left side of your body. Dig a gigantic hole on publicly owned land. Leave clues. Nothing matters.
The problem is most people read "The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom" (line 3) and neglect line 46: "You never know what is enough unless you know what is more than enough."
One day you'll find yourself spending several weeks making a "PWA book framework". When you do this, keep in mind that text is small and the network is slow, so store the whole book on one webpage and do pagination by switching which parts are visible. This way, the PWA book will be much more responsive and it will also work offline.
> One day you’ll find yourself saying “like” a lot. Please stop. If this generation can’t quit the habit, we’ll eventually have an American president who speaks that way too.
People who think this way really grind my gears. I especially enjoy that, like, there's no explanation for why this would be a problem.
Isn't that bit the same as when people use the word literally but not meaning literally? It grinds your gears but who am I to tell people how to speak?
people hold the phone vertically when shooting video because that’s the way the video looks when they watch it on their phone. This is the most correct way to prepare a video for casual viewing.
People hold the phone vertically when they shoot videos of other people, and other people happen to be vertical. They can see each other (aspect ratio)^2 times larger: more pixel, and bigger on screen.
People like who like think like this like way like really like grind like my like gears. Like I like especially like enjoy like that, like, there's like no like explanation like for like why like this like would like be like a like problem.
> In linguistics, a filler, filled pause, hesitation marker or planner is a sound or word that participants in a conversation use to signal that they are pausing to think but are not finished speaking.
[snip]
> Every conversation involves turn-taking, which means that whenever someone wants to speak and hears a pause, they do so. Pauses are commonly used to indicate that someone's turn has ended, which can create confusion when someone has not finished a thought but has paused to form a thought; in order to prevent this confusion, they will use a filler word such as um, er, or uh.[1][3] The use of a filler word indicates that the other person should continue listening instead of speaking.[4]
More to the point: Every language has them. Every language has always had them. Journalists are trained to edit them out of "verbatim" conversational speech unless they want the person they're quoting to come off like an imbecile, but longstanding journalistic convention doesn't mean filler is in any way recent.
We don't always speak without filler any more than we always speak in iambic pentameter.
For people in the age group that commonly does this, they know which part of the sentence the interjection is likely to appear in, and their brain can automatically filter it out, so it doesn't bother them and they don't even see it as a problem.
This applies to all verbal interjection. You use some form of verbal interjection too, but of course you don't even notice that you are doing it, and you would also get angry if some other people told you that your speech pattern is stupid and that you should change how you naturally speak.
> Please stop. If this generation can’t quit the habit, we’ll eventually have an American president who speaks that way too.
What an utterly superficial way of looking at the presidency. GW Bush and Trump didn't talk like valley girls, but still said plenty of nonsensical garbage that lost them respect at home and abroad.
As someone who gets deeply irritated by filler words, I will try to tell you why it makes me feel like that.
People who abuse filler words do so to keep the line busy because they fear being interrupted. Their speech is a continuous and anxious stream of poorly formed sentences without regard for the listener. Trying to listen to them feels like taking a ride with a brake-happy, inexperienced driver.
I have thanked AI in the past, not Siri or Alexa, but when it’s smart enough for me to wonder whether there is a bit of consciousness hiding in there. Just in case.
I think there’s a significant difference between the user in being an adult that knows that Siri etc isn’t ‘real’ and is considerate enough of others to treat them with respect to say please and thank you, and a child. What do we teach a young boy if he learns that he doesn’t have to say please and thank you to a device that (almost universally up until now) speaks with a woman’s voice?
The problem I’ve always found with etiquette advice is that it can usually be summed up with “be kind to your fellow human” or it’s just “I have this pet peeve, stop doing this”.
I didn't believe the conceit -- that the narrator is your wise uncle. It sounded like advice written by a much younger person pretending to be the wise uncle.
Definitely, I got the same vibe reading this as I do with Economist articles where you can tell the unnamed author waxing poetic inefficiencies in state allocation of capital just graduated 2 years ago.
I can. We all know a person like this: well-read but highly sanctimonious, overly concerned with keeping up appearances, frequently complains about 'societal degeneration'.
Bonus points if they're also a tech bro who's into Seneca and Marcus Aurelius.
Some of these are very silly. There's nothing wrong with golf umbrellas unless you're in a crowded place; pointing is fine, so long as you're not pointing at something with feelings; the advice on accepting compliments doesn't mention why you should accept and move on (it's because deflecting makes the other person compliment you even more, which is narcissistic); at least half my female friends laugh at or are offended by faux-gallantry like going through a door first, even though they appreciate actually important things like waiting with them until their ride home arrives; urinal etiquette is contextual, and at a music festival after 12am it's probably rude not to talk; ordering everything medium-rare fails to take into account the unique qualities of the cut of meat; you can eat oysters however you want, and there's nothing wrong with mingonette nor other vinegar-based garnishes; and so on for all the rest.
This is sublime. The transition to modern is just beautiful. I actually knew people who wrote etiquette columns back when it was still an actual newspaper job, I even wrote a few myself, and the design and simplicity of these statements are like koans. It's probably too late for most of you, but if you have kids, someone who knows this stuff is welcome everywhere in the world.
I don't. It would mess up my algorithm for weeks. Stuff like this, while itself harmless, is just a stone's throw away from manosphere sigma male garbage targeted at 20 year olds who don't know any better.
If you want to make a static site that loads quickly (unlike this one), I recommend GitHub Pages! Free, SSL, custom domain, easy deploy, super fast, CDN, etc.
People have to internalize that for a site like this, 99% of your traffic will arrive in 0.1% of the time your site is up. Unless you want to lose the vast majority of people who would otherwise read your content, you need to pick a server that can handle many orders of magnitude higher than baseline load!
That’s survivorship bias though: only true for sites that make it big. 99% of them won’t get much traffic at any point, and for them any form of hosting will do.
Indeed but those sites failed. So if you are planning for failure, sure, use any hosting. If you hope for success, use a reasonable host — it’s not that difficult, and if luck favors you, you’ll be able to capitalize on it.
This is a Progressive Web App [1]? Terrible reading experience. The home page is just the book "cover", with no way to scroll down to the table of contents because it's convinced it has to behave as a real "book".
Each page is a tiny snippet of text. This entire website would be better served as
a table of contents at the top and use anchor links to jump to specific headers (and back). Performs 1000% faster too.
And to top it off these are incredibly opinionated thoughts of a single person masquerading as life advice.
194 comments
[ 4.2 ms ] story [ 257 ms ] threadLike a rat, in cage, in some professor's deranged behavioral experiment.
Though usually this sort of time-wasting is driven by advertisement impressions.
Completely unnecessary in this day and age, 3G is slowest wireless network still in use, and can easily serve text and images quickly.
Example:
> one day you’ll find yourself working for an incompetent boss. No doubt you’ll find this inconvenient, but be thankful you’re not among the unlucky men whose incompetent bosses were the sergeants, lieutenants, or generals who led them to war.
Yikes!
This kind of compilation is what I rather expect we should train AGI on. Being able to recognize identify & understand variance of human situations like this.
This kind of thing, and tvtropes, which is the most valuable index of human behavior we have, I think, with the bonus of endless citations.
ok grandpa, what if I'm an adult with a surly child, or if I'm sharing this umbrella with a big bag, a friend, and their big bag?
Surely you'll never find yourself in a situation where the job is actively destroying other parts of your life. Surely you'll never find yourself in a situation where the boss is using their position to extract sexual favors from you. Surely you'll never find yourself in a situation where your job is actively detrimental to the world at large, and is making you enough money that you begin to want to shrug and say "everyone does it".
Wait, I'm pretty sure it sounds like Grandpa here has done exactly that last one.
Can confirm.
jesus grandpa, I am an adult woman who has taken many flights while single and lemme tell you, the last damn thing I want to think about while I'm flying is flirting with the dude crammed in the seat next to me, I just want to take a nap and get off this nightmare vibrating stress tube ASAP.
ok grandpa, you do know that most college graduates are now saddled with horrendous college loans that are impossible to get away from, and that living anywhere even remotely desirable requires paying increasingly absurd rents, and yes, that includes that charming town you settled in after your grandparents paid the majority of a tuition that was a tiny fraction of what modern graduates are in hock for, even after adjusting for inflation? You also do know that "leaving your parents and living by yourself" has only been the norm for a brief period of time, and that, in fact, living in the ancestral manse is a great way to accumulate and consolidate pan-generational wealth, as well as to share the burdens of caring for the young, the old, and the infirm?
Resist this temptation.
Bonus points: Also resist the temptation to decorate the chapter headers with a red swash, that makes them look a pack of Marlboros. Who the hell even smokes any more, grandpa?
...which is your prerogative and another data point to go with the data point in the original article. As a single guy I've personally been lucky enough to be on the receiving end of an in-flight flirtation; not everyone hates flying.
I wasn't wearing a blazer though.
I do dress well when flying and when in Vegas, but I do it for my own sense of aesthetics and elegance. It reminds me to slow down and hold myself well, and it definitely doesn't hurt when going through customs.
In my career, I've already done it twice, and I'm in my mid-thirties.
> You also might find yourself leaning back and lacing your fingers behind your head. Regardless, both are the self-satisfied poses of bros, so quit it.
Maybe this is the shtick, but it's a real turnoff for me personally.
ellsworth toohey
A nice little book, reminds me of the popular series "Dad, How Do I?" on YouTube (and I'm sure other places) where the creator offers general advice like "How do I wear a suit" to other men who may not have had someone to give such advice to them.
I did scan the list and was disappointed to not find 'living in a shotgun shack'.
Admittedly, it isn’t a very crowded field.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shotgun_house
He also stated that the term "shotgun" is a reference to the idea that if all the doors are opened, a shotgun blast fired into the house from the front doorway will fly cleanly to the other end and out at the back.
I would only do this in a place with separate bike lanes.
Some accidents happen even when the bicyclist or car driver made no obvious mistakes.
Drinking at an Office Party
one day you’ll find yourself drinking at an office party. Want to be an observer of the inevitable shit show rather than the star? Skip the liquor and drink only beer or wine.
extra points
Only amateurs call in sick the morning after an office party.
The only downside is defending it from over-zealous waiters.
Or if you're in a place where they sell ginger beer that's a good one too. Looks like it probably ought to be alcoholic, has "beer" in the name, but is alcohol free.
Oh, you don't want me to be a cynic? Weird, because this is the most cynical GQ piece of trash I've read in recent memory.
>One day you’ll find yourself wearing shorts. Fair enough, it’s probably hot out. One day you’ll also find yourself wearing a t-shirt. Again, fair enough. Unless you’re playing a sport, however, you will not be wearing the two together because you’re also no longer a ten-year-old boy.
Fucking boomer hypocrite. btw I am wearing shorts as I type this.
Fair enough, it's probably hot out.
Autistic person here, nope. It still means something even if you have trouble regulating eye contact.
In fact, for many of the top reasons, "you should make eye contact" is probably completely useless advice at best.
Social anxiety, autism, lying, not actually being present in a moment. Some good reasons, some bad.
Repeating social norms is not useless.
Instead, become actively deranged. Send unlabeled vials of your hair to state senators. Stockpile canned beetroots. Wear a reflective helmet everywhere you go. Fall in love with a pigeon. Shave the left side of your body. Dig a gigantic hole on publicly owned land. Leave clues. Nothing matters.
1: https://allpoetry.com/poem/10257717-Beasts-Bounding-Through-...
https://www.onedayyoullfindyourself.com/table-of-contents.ht...
Yeah. Go read a book, not this comment!
> One day you’ll find yourself saying “like” a lot. Please stop. If this generation can’t quit the habit, we’ll eventually have an American president who speaks that way too.
People who think this way really grind my gears. I especially enjoy that, like, there's no explanation for why this would be a problem.
You really see nothing wrong with this?
Weasel words and delaying terms are common regardless, and usually not desirable.
Many years ago I saw a study that ums and ahs helped listeners understand better because it indicated the next phrase was important.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Filler_(linguistics)
> In linguistics, a filler, filled pause, hesitation marker or planner is a sound or word that participants in a conversation use to signal that they are pausing to think but are not finished speaking.
[snip]
> Every conversation involves turn-taking, which means that whenever someone wants to speak and hears a pause, they do so. Pauses are commonly used to indicate that someone's turn has ended, which can create confusion when someone has not finished a thought but has paused to form a thought; in order to prevent this confusion, they will use a filler word such as um, er, or uh.[1][3] The use of a filler word indicates that the other person should continue listening instead of speaking.[4]
More to the point: Every language has them. Every language has always had them. Journalists are trained to edit them out of "verbatim" conversational speech unless they want the person they're quoting to come off like an imbecile, but longstanding journalistic convention doesn't mean filler is in any way recent.
We don't always speak without filler any more than we always speak in iambic pentameter.
This applies to all verbal interjection. You use some form of verbal interjection too, but of course you don't even notice that you are doing it, and you would also get angry if some other people told you that your speech pattern is stupid and that you should change how you naturally speak.
Also it's significantly less noticeable in spoken conversation. smh...
What an utterly superficial way of looking at the presidency. GW Bush and Trump didn't talk like valley girls, but still said plenty of nonsensical garbage that lost them respect at home and abroad.
People who abuse filler words do so to keep the line busy because they fear being interrupted. Their speech is a continuous and anxious stream of poorly formed sentences without regard for the listener. Trying to listen to them feels like taking a ride with a brake-happy, inexperienced driver.
I can relate to that. About this "You can’t make eye contact with Siri or Alexa, but it’s a good habit to thank them as well."
I understand the sentiment, still I think this has to be debated considering all the implications.
Plus, what you said. Might be something in that.
Bonus points if they're also a tech bro who's into Seneca and Marcus Aurelius.
Each page is a tiny snippet of text. This entire website would be better served as a table of contents at the top and use anchor links to jump to specific headers (and back). Performs 1000% faster too.
And to top it off these are incredibly opinionated thoughts of a single person masquerading as life advice.
[1] https://www.onedayyoullfindyourself.com/how-to-read-this-boo...
But the content is kind of annoying and preachy