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Comment by orev | Hacker News Reader

> 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.

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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.

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 :-)

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

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