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Comment by EliRivers | Hacker News Reader

In the absence of some driving good idea, enjoy not being driven by some single good idea.

Enjoy your free time and make yourself a better person. Here are some ways to do so.

Learn things. My last big learning project was mathematics (spent five structured years on that one). Now I'm learning Japanese. No purpose other than that I want to know more than I know now.

Read more. Read some history. Read some classics. Binge read Murakami.

Pick a couple of discrete technical aspects of some tool you never really understood, and hit them hard. I did this with C++ move semantics, and the shiny new template concepts. It's very satisfying to hit hard something you know you don't understand, and come away a few days later knowing it backwards.

Get more exercise.

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Hi. Yes that is exactly what I am doing at the moment.

I am learning German, also I am learning machine learning these days.

But haven't you felt at the end of the day doing all this spending time on something like that is worth it? What's the outcome in putting your time in to something like that?

Haven't you felt like that??

Because I feel like that at times :¡

Perhaps you spend too much time on HN and other such places, and been infected with the idea that if you're not hammering away on the next Uber all the time, you're not worth a damn and you're wasting your life.

It's not true. If you spend a few hours learning a foreign language, purely for the fun of it and because it's nice to learn, and at the end of it feel like you should have been using your free time to make an app instead, the problem is not that you should have been making an app instead.

What's your favorite Murakami ?

> My last big learning project was mathematics

May I ask for what purpose? required for professional purposes?

I don't know if I have a favourite, but I did enjoy "Sputnik Sweetheart" more than some others. "1Q84" was really good. I found Murakami easy to binge on, and reading too many at once easy to fall into. They were very moreish. David Mitchell, on the other hand and despite the similarities, is sufficiently different (and to my mind, better, but that's obviously personal preference) that I can read them more slowly.

Mathematics; about seven years ago, I was dissatisfied with my maths (or more to the point, I could feel my ability slipping away for lack of practice) so I decided to do a masters in maths. I wanted to be significantly more capable with mathematics than I was. Just that. No other reason.

I wrote about it a bit here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11267827

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