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> Only do the things you ultimately enjoy. Why put yourself through tedious things in your adulthood. The world is a big place, I'm sure there is something you like doing.

It’s too easy to interpret that advice as doing things that are easy. Easy things don’t require effort, and people who are not inherently driven to explore or be creative point to advice like this as ways to justify spending all day watching Netflix or posting on Instagram. Those things are easy and give some level of enjoyment, but they are ultimately empty and eventually result in deeper sadness.

Hardship is not the right word but struggle is. Struggle is not pleasant but leads to deeper satisfaction, and that’s what people mean when they talk about “hardship” as a virtue.

Ultimately this whole issue of "what action to perform for deepest satisfaction" comes down to the brain's reward system. Actually tangentially related to ML.

I am in the process of withdrawing from opiates that were prescribed for an injury. Over time I realized that my wear-withall to do hard and long term rewarding tasks was being degraded by the opiates. I still have pain but narcotics training my brains' reward system are so much worse than pain can be.

We all have seen movies and have that visceral image of the executive or city slicker who does hard drugs but still has drive to take care of their family, pay the bills, and do the hard things -- as if they lived in two worlds and were somehow hardened against mixing the pleasure rewards of drugs and the real rewards of life. Well it is pure bullshit. For only one reason if any: the brain physically changes..no matter how tough mentally a person is.

Ultimately, if one doesn't reinforce medium length promises of rewards and doesn't de-emphasize short term rewards like Netflix, drugs, and other consumables..then the brain has much larger of a reward gradient to scale..a steep cliff that is likely to require mental reserves that are likely to be exhausted, failing to push through. The only way to do long and hard tasks that have worthwhile rewards is to...train for them..by consistently going against the empty vapid consumption culture. It is just dopaminergic biology. Don't get used to easy and hollow pleasures. Because though day to day pleasure might be dictated by simple chemical concentrations of catecholamines, happiness is a complex thought..a function of memory and past effort... nothing easy gives real happiness. Only pleasure. And cheap pleasure is something we end up becoming stale and miserable over, wishing we hadn't reinforced our weakness to fleeting and short term, short sighted, moments of incredulity.

Happiness comes from knowing we did the hard things that went against our feeble reptilian neurological reward system. That we truly defeated easy and thoughtless inclination.

https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/best-life-advice

Agreed. I was not trying to imply watching Netflix or doing heroin is the correct way to go about this. But I sorta implied the context of learning a new skill. Like the sibling-post to this indicated: it's about the reward mechanism. But all too often I see people struggling to do something and not really get any satisfaction out of it. The key to learning anything, for me at least, is that it has to be self-rewarding or at least be self-motivating. Just today I did some SMD soldering to try and fix my SO's old discarded Macbook Air, will it fail: probably. Is it hard? you bet ya. At least for me right now. But, I thought it was fun to learn and fiddle with it. I could just as well have decided to learn to play the Cello, or some other thing. Which would probably have been equally "hard", but not as enjoyable for me. And that's the thing I guess: find some heuristic or compass for things that make you go "hey, that would be fun to be able to do" and then push through it. The reward will be greater, and ultimately the energy spend will feel less. For me personally, I know I have very little energy in me. I get 2-3 hours of good concentration per day. Tops. Then it's back to solid sleep. I don't know how people can do hard things for 8 hours straight, but I know it's not for me. (tangentially I think most people can't, they just lie or goof off, and sleep deprivation/burn-out/depression is I think the biggest culprit in our modern society). So I've become very aware of the things I'd like to put my energy in. Like fiddling with electronics, machine learning, philosophy, or astrophotography. But I bet most people would find those things tedious and annoying. So it's up to you :-)

I am definitely on the side of “do the things you ultimately enjoy.”

If you don’t enjoy something, ask yourself if you really have to do it, and if you do, ask yourself how you can enjoy it more. And I say this as a dad who has changed hundreds of poopy diapers and resolved thousands of toddler requests and minor conflicts. Learning French is not “better” than watching TV. There are lots of pointless, impoverishing hard tasks and meaningful, enriching easy tasks. Any value judgments on struggle will make this harder to see.

That's actually bad advise. Nothing worth learning will be finished learning before you run out of joy for it.

The best example from my experience is learning songs in a foreign language I'm studying. First you listen to a song you really enjoy and partly understand. Then you sit down and translate it. For most songs this will not just be tedious work, but also take out some of the joy of this song, because if you understand it you realize some of the text is outright stupid. That's normal.

Then you go and learn the song. That's not hollywood romantic stuff, with exciting background music and action heavy cutscenes. That is sitting down and repeating line 1 until you hate it. Then repeat it a few times more. Then do the same with line 2. Then do the same with the combination of lines 1 and 2. Then line 3. Then line 1+2+3. Then line 4. Then line 1+2+3+4, [...] then repeating line 1+2+3+4+5+6+7+8 but sadly by doing that you completely forgot line 2 and you always reorder line 5 according to your mother language's grammar instead of the one used in the lyrics.

In the end, you really hate the song. And you sing it quite badly if you just spend time learning the lyrics and no time on the melody and composition of the whole thing. When you can really sing it for other people to enjoy listening, even the slightest bit of magic for it will be gone for you.

And only after you done this multiple times and you start to have a collection of songs, ready to apply to different circumenstances, able to apply the feelings of the moment for a unique interpretation of your own, then you will find joy in it again.

And I can promise you, if you can get to that point it doesn't really matter anymore if in the beginning it was something you enjoyed or not. You made it your own, and that is what is much more enjoyable.

I'm sorry you had such a bad experience learning things. Really, that's probably the worst way to learn a language. Ideally language is acquired, not learned. It's a passive process governed by exposure, rather than repetition. http://www.utesinternationallounge.com/language-acquisition-...

But even with skills that do require solid spaced-repetition (like factoids, and probably only factoids) if you run out of joy: what even is the point. Maximize misery in life?

Please stop talking. It really hurts.

I'm sorry I hurt your feelings. I do feel "Nothing worth learning will be finished learning before you run out of joy for it." is terrible advice and reinforces a believe that's non-congruent with my life experience. But that's my life, and your life is yours. I am trying to let your knee-jerk offensiveness slide, because you obviously feel strongly about the topic; but out of context it almost reads like a threat which I do not appreciate.

If you watch a dog happily run in front of a car it's empathy that hurts not your emotions.

Again with the offensiveness. I'm not sure why you're like this because you have not given any argument to your strong reactions, and are apparently judging me on a myriad of things (even equating me to a dog ffs) without even a shred of explanation. Fyi I live a happy life and am successful at what I do. I'm seriously beginning to doubt that for you; if so I do really hope you'll find happier times. That's what empathy is.

Personal attacks will get you banned on Hacker News. Please do not do this again, regardless of how annoyed you are by another comment.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

I agree in principle that learning things can be tedious at times, but... learning, memory retention and reward system are very tightly integrated. It's almost laughably ineffective to learn despite pain, relative to learning with joy. You know there are people who could complete your song-memorizing ordeal in 1/10th of the time, not feeling any major frustration? Because most of the work is happening effortlessly, the song being sung in their heads on autopilot, reconstructing and optimizing?

I won't claim that toughing it out isn't worthy or that there always is a better way, however it seems clear that top performers in every field tend not to have to tough it out very much. This is unfair but not smart to ignore.

For an expert in the language I would agree with your statement. But language is a complex task, like juggling. And you don't start with throwing three balls up. You start with one, and then when you can handle it you add the second, etc. It's way more boring that way, but it greatly reduces the time needed to get to the more complex topics.

I would argue that someone around A2 level in a language (where most hobby learners are) will take 10x longer in learning a song, when applying the method proposed by you. And many people won't ever finish learning one song, because before they finish other topics, songs, activities become more interesting.

Exactly! I think the OP read a comment that was really just encouragement in the form of, “You may not understand any of this now, but any time and energy you put into learning more will be rewarded with greater understanding; good luck!” which was not meant to be pressury or judgmental or moralistic, and read his own meaning of “no pain no gain” into it.