I had a notification pop down while looking at it and the timer did reset, stopped, and said „that was definitely something. Let‘s try nothing.“. A neat little site, that‘s for sure. Also worrying that websites can see when I receive a notification.
Breathing is something you can either do or not do, yet it's also something that happens automatically, such as during sleep or when you're not paying attention to it.
When done perfectly correctly, consciously breathing nets the same benefits to the body as unconscious or automatic breathing. You don't really have to spend any mental energy on it to get the oxygen you need (your body will even yawn for you if it needs more).
I think there is a way to find the ease and harmony in most things, or, the "automatic modes". You can design your life in such a way that you're essentially doing nothing, but to others you appear to be involved in everything.
I can only imagine what it would be like to stop paddling and see that I am still in motion, to be able to exhale and do nothing.
> When done perfectly correctly, consciously breathing nets the same benefits to the body as unconscious or automatic breathing. You don't really have to spend any mental energy on it to get the oxygen you need (your body will even yawn for you if it needs more).
I was taught that this is not entirely true : your automatic breathing is influenced by your morphology, your posture, your current levels of energy, and your current emotions. And it sounds like the feedback loop can go reverse : intentionally breathing have an impact on your posture, your level of energy and your emotion.
I have no source to support my claims so don’t take my words as any truth, that’s just a belief multiple people shared to me including my doctor.
But I do feel like intentional breathing have a direct impact on my levels of anxiety. Not magic, but useful.
People often wonder what advice they would give their younger self. This would be it for me.
It something seems too difficult, it is likely because you are still struggling with a pre-requisite. Go back to working on the previous foundation until your mastery is complete.
This is true for work, mental & fitness progress.
I.e. if you find losing weight hard, you probably need to improve your diet (not to lose weight, but to find healthy food you enjoy enough to become a self-reinforcing habit).
Don’t try to improve your diet in order to lose weight. That is trying to solve two big things, on two different levels, at once.
This may take a while, but eventually you can find your way to an exceptionally healthy diet you like too much to require any discipline to stay on.
That is a health foundation of lasting value. And with that foundatiin, when you try to lose weight again, it is much easier.
Likewise, if you find it is hard to improve your diet, even in increments, perhaps you are fatigued? You may need to improve your sleep routine until you are habitually not tired.
For some of us, that might take a lot of work. But focusing on it, instead of downstream efforts will pay off.
Etc.
Foundations should be iterated on until they are self-perpetuatingly solid. Then the next thing will be much easier.
Math and physics are mental versions.
The result for any path: Go slow (iterate & explore to complete fluency & habit) to go fast (compounding instead of linear gains in understanding & progress).
So critiquing me as suggesting anything that is not a healthy diet seems odd.
A healthy diet can be created many ways, all involve a lot of variety.
But it can be convenient too. If you find the right mix (for your own tastes) of “superfoods” as a foundation. I.e. hummus, mixed greens, mixed berries, a mix of nuts, a mix of seeds, sardines, salmon & tuna (but not too much), eggs, etc.
If your fridge, pantry, and eating habits cover all your basic nutrition multiple ways by default, then adding a variety of other healthy foods can be done very spontaneously without any need for planning.
I know, it took me a few years, and a lot of iteration, but it would be hard to beat my diet.
Even my snacks are up there, like edamame, chocolate in moderation, fresh veggies, high protein low sugar ice cream, etc.
In formal theory, it would be called a proof by contradiction when extended to an extreme.
Even with the "right mix", if you eat 5x the amount your lifestyle and body and mind need, you ain't ever going to lose weight or get to a healthy state. Obese people are (usually) obese because they eat too much, not just because of the type of food they eat. Heck, today both keto and vegan are considered "healthy" and they are on the opposite end of the spectrum when it comes to diet choices.
I am basically arguing that, to an extent, it's more important how much you eat, vs what you eat. Again, this is all comparative (eg. eating McDonalds burgers for the rest of your life is "healthy" compared to not eating anything at all, but that's a useless distinction).
Plenty of people in the past have eaten "unhealthy" (white bread, fried meat and vegetables) yet didn't have an obesity or health problem, because they countered that with a balanced activity (physical work) and mental load (shared responsibilities).
So my point is that you should reach that "autopilot" on the amount of the food you get, and then you can be pretty liberal in how you achieve it (obviously, don't have chocolate for breakfast, lunch and dinner). I do agree getting to the autopilot is where you should put your effort to.
If you need to eat more, you need to eat more. You need a different mix
There isn’t a diet that works for everyone in both health & physical & psychological diet needs
The point is always making progress. Accumulating foods that work better. So learn and continually try things.
Anyone can make progress, that is beneficial.
I am still making progress, in food quality & convenience, which blows my mind.
And I don’t doubt there are medical and mental issues that need more than a healthy diet intervention
But that doesn’t eliminate the benefits from being healthier, easier.
You don’t know how much eating healthier automatically will impact seemingly independent or counter issues until trying. A sustained changed diet changes our responses to food physically & mentally in significant & positive ways.
I don't doubt that, and good for you! In a sense, that should be obvious to anyone who's ever been a bit more edgy because they lacked the carbohydrates for the moment ("eat some sugar"), but larger changes will certainly trigger a larger change in body response (hormones, energy levels, mood...).
From the get go, I only challenged the notion that the main issue for people who want to lose weight is the type of the food they eat, but instead, the amount of the food they eat.
It seems like we are arguing past each other though :)
I listened to a "Science Vs" podcast on it (or perhaps it was "unexplainable"), yawning is not yo increase oxygen levels. Study participants sat in an oxygen enriched room and also a depleted room without a change in yawn rates.
What did affect yawn rates was brain temperature. Yawning lowers brain temperature. Importantly, when ambient temperature is higher than body temperature, yawn rate dramatically goes down.
These resource [1] [2] goes into some of the details if you want to skip listening to the podcast
> taking a step back from the relentless grind, and reconnecting with the world around you
The world does not want to connect with me. The world is in many subtle ways actively trying to kill me, harm me, and reduce me. If I'm taking time off it's for myself.
> rebellion against the incessant noise of modern life, which demands constant action.
So does my own body. Eventually I'm going to get hungry no matter how much nothing I do. Having stillness of mind allows purpose of action. You've got it all backwards.
Neat! I've been reading How to Do Nothing by Jenny Odell and enjoying it. It's a bit political for my liking but overall a good reminder to pause and set aside time to just "be" and shelve the programmed drive to constantly be productive as in economically productive. My therapist recently helped me reframe my drive for being productive as being generative, which I have taken a liking to since it encompasses being creative for the sake of enjoying the process with no other end - economic or otherwise.
Really cool to remind people to do this but I also get a little sense of irony that to really do this, just walk away from the screen. Don't need an app to allow you to do nothing.
Not a put down at all, just that our strange little world has come to this.
I was also quite surprised, and I took a bit of challenge to make it a single file that faithfully reproduces the exact behavior and embeds all dependencies including the web font, besides from Inter which is only used for toasts and barely distinguishable from Arial in this context. It weighs 3,123 bytes without the specifically subsetted font which takes additional 10,433 bytes.
I know almost nothing about web dev, but that looked like a nice quick challenge. So I spent maybe 20 minutes to get it 90% there. It's missing a portion of text below the timer and a toast. 1948 bytes
Implementing absolutely everything, because I wasn't sure which part was intentional or not. My version even replicates some bugs and subtle behaviors: for example the toast animation lasts 5 seconds, which is measured from the beginning of fade-in animation to the beginning of fade-out animation.
That reminds me of a specific (de)motivational video of one of my favorite comedians Masood Boomgaard, which specifically covers the rat race that prevails in todays workplace culture. While it's meant to be funny, it actually touches some deeper philosophical truths.
I've known people that 'do nothing'. The modern day equivalent of that is the pot head. It's a lot easier to do nothing when you're stoned. The other alternative is the basement dweller kid of a well to do couple that just spends his day playing video games. Due to his parent's hard work (or luck), he can probably afford to do so for the rest of his life. But still seems depressing to me to think about.
But that kid in your example isn't doing _nothing_, they are playing video games. That is entirely different from consciously pausing and doing nothing.
That kid is doing nothing with their life, there’s a difference between that and a nornal persob’s downtime that makes sure we don’t task out with some goal that feels like doing nothing but it’s got some agenda: no planned activity!
If you're playing video games you're literally not doing nothing. The point is to give yourself time to reflect and breathe. If you're stoned and that makes it easy to meditate for ages, you could probably count that as doing nothing. Although you should probably worry if you simply cannot sit still for any significant amount of time without being stoned. But yeah if you're getting stoned and like watching movies and stuffing your face then you're not doing nothing.
Thanks for the link! When it is well done comedy often covers something more profound and summarizes it in an accessible and more memorable manner just like the video you are talking about.
"The world is fucked, and you cannot un-fuck it."
"You will die one day just as confused as you are now."
"Everything you think you need to do was done before you and will be done after you."
"Whether you are fat or thin haters will hate."
"Nothing really matters."
There are some really deep insights in all of those thoughts, thanks for sharing.
PS: this remembers me of a sketch about giraffes being an animal created by a gay friend of the comedian, after the sketch I learned that giraffes engage in male-male acts more often than male-female acts and got mindblown. They have been called "especially gay" for this fact.
This page is a great example how we got of rails with a webpage. Its a very simple page, with a counter and some text. The files and js needed to make it run is insane.
There's an idea that modern lives demand value in material terms. Usually it's monetary value. It's based on materialism and economics and can be seen most clearly in consumerism.
Even not spending time or money has to be worth something. Why do nothing if I can't measure the benefits.
Another example of this could be in the adoption of "Mindfulness" vs meditation. Mindfulness is a useful thing it can be measured and it has an industry behind it.
It's a philosophy that we see more and more in every part of our lives.
Consider art or poetry. Did people make art to be measured or to be useful?
Utilitarianism definitely has a lot of well established shortcomings, like quantifying utility and doing so objectively which sort of, IMO, makes most of it nonsensical as quantified utility is ultimately subjective unless you want utility to be defined by a consensus, which is what we do in practice. So it’s really what the masses decide is valuable and how valuable, even though we know from practice that mass assessment isn’t inherently accurate, good, or often even desirable. Yet we do it because it looks objectively analytic.
What is your definition of utilitarianism? Utilitarianism is not a form of democracy. Good is not subject to a vote and is not decided by the masses.
Fwiw: "Utilitarianism is a theory of morality that advocates actions that foster happiness or pleasure and oppose actions that cause unhappiness or harm. When directed toward making social, economic, or political decisions, a utilitarian philosophy would aim for the betterment of society as a whole."
> Did people make art to be measured or to be useful?
Quite often to put food on the table, or for clout. There’s an intrinsic desire to create, sure, but there’s also a cultural context in which art is valued and certain kinds of art are valued more at different times or in different places.
I suppose it’s splitting hairs to say that art has some use both for the creator and the consumer, because it’s not the same kind of use you mean.
It’s just that when I dig in to “useful” vs “useless” endevours there’s often no clear line between them.
There's a long history of visual art being created in the service of god worship. Musical art too. Much of Bach's oeuvre is in service to the god of the Protestant church.
> There's an idea that modern lives demand value in material terms.
All lives demand value in caloric or reproductive terms. Economics teaches us that most commodities are fungible. If you receive material value, this can be exchanged for caloric or reproductive value. Thus, modern (and non-modern) lives demand value in material terms. This isn't a philosophy, it's just a fact.
It may tasteless to you, but most people are just trying to achieve those material terms as efficiently as possible.
> What happens when I already have all the calorific or reproductive value I need?
How would you even determine how much you need? You labor under the illusion that you're an intelligent being. Evolution does not care about "enough"... because there is no way to determine what "enough" is. What is enough today will not help you survive tomorrow's famine. Best stock up now. If you were so smart, you'd get that. What others call greed is subconscious anticipation of calamity.
Evolution has not solved the principal-agent problem.
> What is enough today will not help you survive tomorrow's famine.
Tomorrow's famine will be caused by you (read: those behaving as you describe) not knowing when enough is enough. Best preserve what we have, rather than waste it all in a frantic bid for number-goes-up.
Maybe it's moralizing, but I don't think it's wrong. I'm using the same model as you, after all, only I'm applying Kantian ethics instead of unconsidered egoism.
• If you wish yourself maximal reproductive fitness, then all humanity will be your descendants, and the next few centuries of all human interest is your interest.
• The iterated prisoner's dilemma is a classic economic argument, by which Tragedy of the Commons-type behaviours can be averted. (Garrett Hardin's 1968 paper is a load of nonsense.)
I'm not sure what would contrast my earlier "leftist moralizing", because I have absolutely no idea what a leftist is.
Numbers go brrrt. It's the gamification of everything; lines of code written, number of tasks ticked off, number of words written in a day (often in the context of fanfictino, doesn't matter if the story is good), shades of green on github, hours slept, minutes meditated, seconds spent doing nothing according to a website promoting the virtues of doing nothing.
I mean I get it, idle / factory games are one of my vices. But I won't let it control my existence.
After a tragedy it's customary to call for a 'minute of silence' even this purposeful exercise of nothing but thoughts is measured in minutes too. I don't think it takes from the desired outcome.
For more brain explosion, compound that with a "memento mori" timer that converts the time spend in "nothingness" into "how much closer you are to eternal nothingness."
No wonder people watch TV, fight wars, or build startups to forget that.
Generally when I ride the MRT I unwind and just stare and chill. It helps that in a crowded train it's hard to fetch your phone from your pocket, even though everyone else does it. I think just by disposition I cannot physically stayed plugged in, otherwise I lose myself.
There's a whole trend at the moment called 'raw dogging' (sigh) that means to do something like take a flight with no entertainment, books, phone turned off, etc. etc.
Dysphemism isn't an innovation, it's been around a long time. It simply means the opposite of a euphemism. Where a euphemism is a nicer way of saying something, a dysphemism is a worse or derogatory way of saying something. E.g. Referring to your car as a "banger"
To me it sounds like coded speech I need to put in some effort to understand. It’s a lot of effort to catch up with these, though I admit that sometimes they’re funny. But only sometimes, most times it feels forced and senseless.
199 comments
[ 1.9 ms ] story [ 229 ms ] threadEdit : nope, you just scrolled the page :) [0]
[0] : https://github.com/remvze/nothing/blob/5402ae06169c67bdfa8b6...
Big respect to the dedication.
When done perfectly correctly, consciously breathing nets the same benefits to the body as unconscious or automatic breathing. You don't really have to spend any mental energy on it to get the oxygen you need (your body will even yawn for you if it needs more).
I think there is a way to find the ease and harmony in most things, or, the "automatic modes". You can design your life in such a way that you're essentially doing nothing, but to others you appear to be involved in everything.
I can only imagine what it would be like to stop paddling and see that I am still in motion, to be able to exhale and do nothing.
I was taught that this is not entirely true : your automatic breathing is influenced by your morphology, your posture, your current levels of energy, and your current emotions. And it sounds like the feedback loop can go reverse : intentionally breathing have an impact on your posture, your level of energy and your emotion.
I have no source to support my claims so don’t take my words as any truth, that’s just a belief multiple people shared to me including my doctor.
But I do feel like intentional breathing have a direct impact on my levels of anxiety. Not magic, but useful.
People often wonder what advice they would give their younger self. This would be it for me.
It something seems too difficult, it is likely because you are still struggling with a pre-requisite. Go back to working on the previous foundation until your mastery is complete.
This is true for work, mental & fitness progress.
I.e. if you find losing weight hard, you probably need to improve your diet (not to lose weight, but to find healthy food you enjoy enough to become a self-reinforcing habit).
Don’t try to improve your diet in order to lose weight. That is trying to solve two big things, on two different levels, at once.
This may take a while, but eventually you can find your way to an exceptionally healthy diet you like too much to require any discipline to stay on.
That is a health foundation of lasting value. And with that foundatiin, when you try to lose weight again, it is much easier.
Likewise, if you find it is hard to improve your diet, even in increments, perhaps you are fatigued? You may need to improve your sleep routine until you are habitually not tired.
For some of us, that might take a lot of work. But focusing on it, instead of downstream efforts will pay off.
Etc.
Foundations should be iterated on until they are self-perpetuatingly solid. Then the next thing will be much easier.
Math and physics are mental versions.
The result for any path: Go slow (iterate & explore to complete fluency & habit) to go fast (compounding instead of linear gains in understanding & progress).
There's no such thing. Eating only 50 avocados a day (so called "superfood") won't get you healthy or make you lose weight.
Too much of anything is not healthy.
A "healthy diet" is matched up with your body, short- and long-term needs, activities, mental state, etc.
I do agree with the suggested approach for achieving anything significant, just nitpicking on some of the language in your dieting example.
You have lost me. I said a healthy diet you love.
So critiquing me as suggesting anything that is not a healthy diet seems odd.
A healthy diet can be created many ways, all involve a lot of variety.
But it can be convenient too. If you find the right mix (for your own tastes) of “superfoods” as a foundation. I.e. hummus, mixed greens, mixed berries, a mix of nuts, a mix of seeds, sardines, salmon & tuna (but not too much), eggs, etc.
If your fridge, pantry, and eating habits cover all your basic nutrition multiple ways by default, then adding a variety of other healthy foods can be done very spontaneously without any need for planning.
I know, it took me a few years, and a lot of iteration, but it would be hard to beat my diet.
Even my snacks are up there, like edamame, chocolate in moderation, fresh veggies, high protein low sugar ice cream, etc.
Achieving healthy autopilot is the point.
Even with the "right mix", if you eat 5x the amount your lifestyle and body and mind need, you ain't ever going to lose weight or get to a healthy state. Obese people are (usually) obese because they eat too much, not just because of the type of food they eat. Heck, today both keto and vegan are considered "healthy" and they are on the opposite end of the spectrum when it comes to diet choices.
I am basically arguing that, to an extent, it's more important how much you eat, vs what you eat. Again, this is all comparative (eg. eating McDonalds burgers for the rest of your life is "healthy" compared to not eating anything at all, but that's a useless distinction).
Plenty of people in the past have eaten "unhealthy" (white bread, fried meat and vegetables) yet didn't have an obesity or health problem, because they countered that with a balanced activity (physical work) and mental load (shared responsibilities).
So my point is that you should reach that "autopilot" on the amount of the food you get, and then you can be pretty liberal in how you achieve it (obviously, don't have chocolate for breakfast, lunch and dinner). I do agree getting to the autopilot is where you should put your effort to.
There isn’t a diet that works for everyone in both health & physical & psychological diet needs
The point is always making progress. Accumulating foods that work better. So learn and continually try things.
Anyone can make progress, that is beneficial.
I am still making progress, in food quality & convenience, which blows my mind.
And I don’t doubt there are medical and mental issues that need more than a healthy diet intervention
But that doesn’t eliminate the benefits from being healthier, easier.
You don’t know how much eating healthier automatically will impact seemingly independent or counter issues until trying. A sustained changed diet changes our responses to food physically & mentally in significant & positive ways.
My diet has changed me.
From the get go, I only challenged the notion that the main issue for people who want to lose weight is the type of the food they eat, but instead, the amount of the food they eat.
It seems like we are arguing past each other though :)
We still don't know why people (or various mammals) yawn.
I listened to a "Science Vs" podcast on it (or perhaps it was "unexplainable"), yawning is not yo increase oxygen levels. Study participants sat in an oxygen enriched room and also a depleted room without a change in yawn rates.
What did affect yawn rates was brain temperature. Yawning lowers brain temperature. Importantly, when ambient temperature is higher than body temperature, yawn rate dramatically goes down.
These resource [1] [2] goes into some of the details if you want to skip listening to the podcast
[1] https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.pbs.org/newshour/amp/scienc...
[2] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/24721675/
https://sonnet.io/posts/sit/
The world does not want to connect with me. The world is in many subtle ways actively trying to kill me, harm me, and reduce me. If I'm taking time off it's for myself.
> rebellion against the incessant noise of modern life, which demands constant action.
So does my own body. Eventually I'm going to get hungry no matter how much nothing I do. Having stillness of mind allows purpose of action. You've got it all backwards.
Not a put down at all, just that our strange little world has come to this.
https://astro.build/
https://gist.github.com/lifthrasiir/f46725d3e9e9d055da40b3de...
I know almost nothing about web dev, but that looked like a nice quick challenge. So I spent maybe 20 minutes to get it 90% there. It's missing a portion of text below the timer and a toast. 1948 bytes
https://gist.github.com/Archargelod/d121ae5377a0d09b0133b7b0...
Or am I missing something?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8An2SxNFvmU [Do Nothing - a message of motivation from Self-help Singh- (un) motivational speaker and life coach]
I've known people that 'do nothing'. The modern day equivalent of that is the pot head. It's a lot easier to do nothing when you're stoned. The other alternative is the basement dweller kid of a well to do couple that just spends his day playing video games. Due to his parent's hard work (or luck), he can probably afford to do so for the rest of his life. But still seems depressing to me to think about.
"The world is fucked, and you cannot un-fuck it."
"You will die one day just as confused as you are now."
"Everything you think you need to do was done before you and will be done after you."
"Whether you are fat or thin haters will hate."
"Nothing really matters."
There are some really deep insights in all of those thoughts, thanks for sharing.
PS: this remembers me of a sketch about giraffes being an animal created by a gay friend of the comedian, after the sketch I learned that giraffes engage in male-male acts more often than male-female acts and got mindblown. They have been called "especially gay" for this fact.
Something I'd have never been introduced to without your comment, thank you.
Reward: the numbers go up. Almost like idle clicker games, but without clicking.
Even not spending time or money has to be worth something. Why do nothing if I can't measure the benefits.
Another example of this could be in the adoption of "Mindfulness" vs meditation. Mindfulness is a useful thing it can be measured and it has an industry behind it.
It's a philosophy that we see more and more in every part of our lives.
Consider art or poetry. Did people make art to be measured or to be useful?
Fwiw: "Utilitarianism is a theory of morality that advocates actions that foster happiness or pleasure and oppose actions that cause unhappiness or harm. When directed toward making social, economic, or political decisions, a utilitarian philosophy would aim for the betterment of society as a whole."
https://www.investopedia.com/terms/u/utilitarianism.asp
Quite often to put food on the table, or for clout. There’s an intrinsic desire to create, sure, but there’s also a cultural context in which art is valued and certain kinds of art are valued more at different times or in different places.
I suppose it’s splitting hairs to say that art has some use both for the creator and the consumer, because it’s not the same kind of use you mean.
It’s just that when I dig in to “useful” vs “useless” endevours there’s often no clear line between them.
It may tasteless to you, but most people are just trying to achieve those material terms as efficiently as possible.
How would you even determine how much you need? You labor under the illusion that you're an intelligent being. Evolution does not care about "enough"... because there is no way to determine what "enough" is. What is enough today will not help you survive tomorrow's famine. Best stock up now. If you were so smart, you'd get that. What others call greed is subconscious anticipation of calamity.
> What is enough today will not help you survive tomorrow's famine.
Tomorrow's famine will be caused by you (read: those behaving as you describe) not knowing when enough is enough. Best preserve what we have, rather than waste it all in a frantic bid for number-goes-up.
Possibly. Or maybe it will happen anyway.
> (read: those behaving as you describe)
That's mostly leftist moralizing on your part.
• If you wish yourself maximal reproductive fitness, then all humanity will be your descendants, and the next few centuries of all human interest is your interest.
• The iterated prisoner's dilemma is a classic economic argument, by which Tragedy of the Commons-type behaviours can be averted. (Garrett Hardin's 1968 paper is a load of nonsense.)
I'm not sure what would contrast my earlier "leftist moralizing", because I have absolutely no idea what a leftist is.
Religionists never think their religion is wrong. But I don't belong to your cult.
> because I have absolutely no idea what a leftist is.
Leftists never have any idea what a leftist is. But I don't belong to your cult.
I mean I get it, idle / factory games are one of my vices. But I won't let it control my existence.
No wonder people watch TV, fight wars, or build startups to forget that.
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/07/17/style/rawdog-flights-term...