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Comment by mevile | Hacker News Reader

There's a whole slew of content being created in all forms, from newsletters, blog posts, books, podcasts, music, video games, video on demand and live video. A lot of it is actually really high-quality content. We're being inundated with too much good stuff. I see all these newsletters in my inbox I don't have time to read that I want to. Tv shows, youtube videos I want to watch but don't have time for. I'm listening to a podcast when I cook while I have a game on and a book in my bag.

It's like a really good problem to have tbh, but there's a problem with managing this. This week there was a post about how to pick a good non-fiction book. Figuring out what the best content for me for the time I have is the problem. It's a problem we all have right now.

Also that was a really well written post, a love letter to newsletters. I really enjoyed it.

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This is a major factor of the "Ratings Problem" where only 4- and 5-star ratings signify quality which people commonly overlook. [0] I'm only interested in critically acclaimed non-fiction books because anything less and I'm down to the quality I might find in a blog post... Which might still great, but there's the time I allocate for blogs, and the time I allocate for books.

There's a part of me which harbors great sadness over the amount of historical art such as music and games which get completely ignored by the public with its ephemeral tastes. So as a natural reaction I've become an amateur art historian, spending lots of time going back and playing old games (not hard because I grew up on retro), listening to old music, watching old films... then spending time to learn about the people and effort behind these works of art. I even took a film history class.

I have books from the 1600's on my reading list. Some of them require learning another language which at some point I will have to set aside the time to do.

So how the hell am I going to have time to appreciate the cornucopia of art being thrust at me today from all directions?

It seems today you have to make the choice of appreciating the here and now vs appreciating the past. If you aren't an archivist or historian chances are you simply won't have the time to go back and explore.

And that's worrisome, because whereas the pace of masterpieces being released throughout history has been quite slow and manageable, presently I feel like I consume several masterpieces a year across several mediums.

All of this amazing content will be lost forever inside the noosphere, and the fantasy of living forever through your art and contributions to society is becoming more and more unattainable.

[0] https://xkcd.com/1098/

About 300 hours of content are uploaded to YouTube per minute. That’s 1800 minutes per minute.

You can look at just the best 0.06% of YouTube, and never touch the back catalog.

The sad thing about this is all of the "less than perfect" artists whose content gets swept up in the storm. Hopefully the rise of the Long Tail will combat this to some degree, but we will have to redefine our concepts of fame and eternal life through art. We have entered the age of globalized niche culture.

[0] https://longtail.typepad.com/about.html

Give up. There’s too much content, you obviously can’t handle it all.

Just acknowledge this and just enjoy what you can.

A few years ago I thought I could get through my to-read list, then I realized I couldn’t and stopped worrying about it.

I'm not worried about it, and I don't plan to give up.

Becoming an amateur art historian has greatly enriched my day-to-day life and given me much inspiration in my own creative output.

As a multi-disciplinary artist I feel called to recognize and hold important people and their creations in my memory, in order to help them live forever like they wanted.

While it may seem new, this has been a problem for a very long time. It’s the same thing Seneca was complaining about when he popularized the phrase “ars longa, vita brevis” back in 1st century Rome. And that wasn’t original either, but a translation of Hippocrates.

It's undeniable that the pace of creation of masterpieces has quickened dramatically at an unprecedented level. It's an entirely new age of creativity that is unlike anything before it and that will continue for millennia. We've crossed some kind of threshold.

"Ars longa, vita brevis" is an amazing quote however, and thank you for sharing that with me.

> It's undeniable that the pace of creation of masterpieces has quickened dramatically at an unprecedented level.

Yes and no. As far as I can tell, the pace of content creation and distribution has been exponentially increasing since at least the Renaissance. So, while it is undeniably true that the current pace is unprecedented, it has also been true at any point in the past you care to examine. This means that the feeling of being overwhelmed by a deluge of new information is something of a constant throughout history.

> It has also been true at any point in the past you care to exam

I figured you would say this, which is why I stressed that we have crossed some kind of threshold. The effect of the internet, cheap electronics, free online resources as well as the fact that we now have 8 billion people in this world all culminate to set the stage for an entirely new era of creativity.

We are living in the New Renaissance. People will be discussing this era in history books for a very long time, like we do the Renaissance now. Why do we focus on the Renaissance and not the period of creation between then and now? Because it marked an unprecedentedly different era of creativity. And here we are again. So your mention of the Renaissance really only strengthens my argument.

We talk plenty about 18th and 19th century creators. That's Dickens, Dumas, Beethoven, Mozart, Wagner, Brahms, Chopin, Paganini, Mahler, Tchaikovsky, Swift, Defoe, Washington Irving, Wordsworth, Rousseau, Louisa May Alcott, Hans Christian Anderson, Lewis Carrol, the Bronte sisters, Jane Austen, Emily Dickinson, Doyle, Elliott, Emerson, the Brothers Grimm, Charles Darwin, Victor Hugo, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Kipling, Melville, Nietzsche, Proust, Shelley, R.L.Stevenson, Thoreau, Twain, H.G. Wells, and many more.

Their works are all over 100 years old and regularly read (or performed) today, long predating the internet and most predating the telephone. The internet is still way too new to say how history will remember it, and I don't see any evidence that the creativity explosion that started in the Renaissance ever stopped.

You completely ignored everything I said. Listing a large amount of historical artists does nothing to refute that we have more today than ever before.

It's amazing you can point to the Renaissance as an obvious point in history where things transitioned but you aren't able to see it happening right now around us.

> Listing a large amount of historical artists does nothing to refute that we have more today than ever before.

Of course it doesn’t, I agree with this statement wholeheartedly. However, the changes brought by the internet don’t feel categorically different than the ones that came from steamships, telegraphs, radio, film, telephone, railroads, or airplanes. Each of these innovations changed the world as we know it by making it easier for new ideas to spread, and a corresponding increase in the quantity of available content. You may be right that the internet has ushered in a new Renaissance, but history may also decide that the old one never really stopped, or that the seminal invention of this era was one of these earlier ones, or even one that doesn’t get invented for another decade — predicting how history will judge the present is always difficult, and never certain.

It doesn’t increase exponentially all the time. It’s tied in to changes with how information is dispersed.

The printing press, the telegraph, radio, tv, the internet, and most recently the mobile internet are some of the reasons for increases in the firehose of information being thrown in our faces.

Here’s an excellent book on the subject https://www.amazon.com/Amazing-Ourselves-Death-Introduction-...

I don't understand why it's so hard to understand this. The internet and mobile communication have undoubtedly ushered in an entirely new era.

And King Solomon, ~950 BC :)

"But beyond this, my son, be warned: the writing of many books is endless, and excessive devotion to books is wearying to the body."

Eccl 12:12

This reminds me of the Sand Mandalas (1) made by Buddhists, intricate detailed pieces of art that take weeks to make intentionally destroyed to represents their belief of the natural cycle. I can imagine someone having an instagram catalogue of their own work trying to leave their mark through their digital footprint. Even if the data stored to preserve individuals works on these platforms persisted beyond ones life there's no guarantee the service that hosts it will be around that long.

In an age where we have a growing abundance of material to go through and discover, it shows the futility to hold attachment to our own personal marks on this world during this life. There will come a point where even just the relevant amount of material to our own interests will exceed the time one can consume in a single lifetime, perhaps we have already passed that point.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sand_mandala

Part of the problem is this industrialist idea of using time efficiently. Where we originally quantified our use of time at work in order to make our managers more money, we now apply this ideology to our entire lives. We don't want to waste our time consuming anything but the highest-rated, most-upvoted, best-liked content. We end up having to manage not just our working life, but our free time too.

Worse - I've noticed that most of HN likes to read productivity and self help books. Nothing wrong with that, but it means people are spending a majority of their leisure time learning how to work better!

Honest question - if not work, then do what?

Read for pleasure, explore nature, travel, paint, go to concerts, knit, etc.

Anything that helps you feel relaxed and at ease.

I'm always super busy with work and side projects, but last December I went to Maui for 2 weeks and it was the best thing I did for myself: when I returned, all the things I had to do ("work") crept back in and I realized what it actually meant to be relaxed (because in this condition, I'm definitely anything but that).

So basically hobbies and travel... My problem - my hobbies is what my friends see as a "work" (and I identify it as a work as well). Traveling is alright (although it is plenty of work with whole family, which includes two kiddos) - but it gets old rather quickly (again, perhaps part of it the fact that it is family traveling, so entertaiment options are rather limited)... Perhaps kiddos get old enough I might re-discover traveling as a way to relax, but until then doing nothing makes me more anxious than just keep working. And these self-help/productivity book are just tools, just like "c# for dummies" books.

Hobbies and travel are what are "relaxing" for me :). That may be different for you!

I was not brought up in America so I didn't grow up with the Protestant Work Ethic as part of my culture, so this question is hard for me to answer. Honestly, anything else?

Nothing wrong with focusing on work, especially if you're an entrepreneur or very ambitious. I respect that.

But I think most of us are just putting our eight hours in and then doing other stuff, and that's okay too. The problem I see in the US is that the latter group of people is subconsciously guilty about this and thus spends their free time reading about how to be better at work. It's yet another manifestation if the "temporarily embarrassed millionaire" culture.

How about reading or learning about something that has nothing to do with your day to day job that you find interesting?

Everything I find interesting is somehow ends up related to what friends call "work" =)

EDIT: I was brought up in ex-USSR country, place not quite known for work ethic.

Is there something wrong with having work as your hobby? Or should I say, having work and your hobby be the same thing. I don't think most people are "subconsciously guilty" about anything. They just enjoy their work.

There is a word in applied behavior analysis: enrichment. An animal kept in a plain concrete cage develops stereotyping behaviors (pacing back and forth endlessly, rubbing so much on the same corner that fur falls out). The solution is enrichment, adding things to the environment that engage attention and are reinforcing at a healthy level when engaged with. What qualifies as the right amount of enrichment varies. A box turtle needs a few interesting objects to turn over, drag around, break, crawl over. A cockatoo...a cockatoo will engage to destruction with everything you have the mental space to give it and then start on your house. They're like toddlers with high intelligence and beaks that can bite through wood. (We do not have a cockatoo.)

When you accept all this stuff into your world, it is for enrichment. So is playing sports with friends who having a cup of tea and catching up with someone.

I have found that my guilt over not keeping up went away entirely when I switched to this. I don't have an obligation to this stuff. It has an obligation to me for giving it rent-free space in my head.

I wish there was a higher level being to recognize my stereotyping behavior and put appropriate enrichment into my environment. Because from where I sit I do not see it as repetitive, nor it does not make me feel guilty, but perhaps sad if something does not work out. But maybe from outside this is exactly what that caged animal was doing..

> I wish there was a higher level being to recognize my stereotyping behavior and put appropriate enrichment into my environment.

You're not alone. This is why therapy and coaching are a thing. It's not quite the same thing, but having someone to reflect with you and help you lay things out is useful.

I have so many queues of stuff I want to get to. I feel guilty how little of it I consume. Sometimes just looking at my backlog is somewhat anxiety inducing.

I have 245 videos in my YouTube "Watch Later" queue. (Turns out some parts of the Android YT UI has a max of 199 videos.) And a lot of those are 30min+ lectures. I probably have at least 50hrs of content queued on YT alone. And that's what I haven't watched.

Sometimes I can't choose when I do have the time. I'll have the time to consume 1-3 hours of content and I'll freeze, unable to choose. And half the time I choose something new that's not on my list yet.

Do what I do: just clear out your backlogs once in a while. Be heavy-handed and learn to ignore your Fear Of Missing Out.

They're not like your Jira backlog that someone requires and expects you to work through in its entirety.

They're just lists of things that are "interesting, but not interesting enough to watch/listen to/read right now". So clear them out, I bet you've had some stuff on there for over a year. I know you probably feel some attachment to them, but try clearing out one of the backlogs and see how you feel about it.

I learned this when I accidentally nuked my backlog of open tabs in Firefox, which had lots of things I wanted to get around to checking out in depth. I discovered that I didn't really miss most of them, and the few I did miss, I could find again from memory.

Yes, for sure. I have done this before, but I'm long overdue for another. I have to make it a conscious dedicated effort, otherwise I'm too lenient and I don't trim nearly as much as I ought.

I've done the same thing with tab backlogs. Once I accidentally closed a window and went to re-open it. I couldn't remember any specific thing in that window. I left it closed and moved on.

While on the topic of save for later, I was going to clean my downloads folder by sorting the stuff I may need but then realized I had gigs of files and folders. I took the nuke approach and deleted everything. It was terrifying but I did it. What a relief now seeing how it’s been bugging me for over a year.

> Turns out some parts of the Android YT UI has a max of 199 videos.

It also turns out the YouTube service limit of videos in the "Watch Later" list is at 5000 videos :^)

Get someone on fiverr to watch it for you.

> I have so many queues of stuff I want to get to

I had this problem. Here is my solution:

1. Push stuff to physical. Newspapers? Paper delivery. Magazines? Mailed. When the new one comes in, the old one gets thrown out.

2. Set up a dedicated e-mail account for newsletters. Same rule as above. New one in, old one deleted. No exceptions.

News is an information feed. An opportunity to become educated. It should not become an obligation.

That sounds like an RSS reader.

>> 1. Push stuff to physical. Newspapers? Paper delivery. Magazines? Mailed. When the new one comes in, the old one gets thrown out.

I don't think pushing stuff to physical solves my problem of not consuming my desired content. It would solve my problem of having an increasingly longer queue, but at the cost of the environment. I think I would prefer to stay digital.

Watch later is useless, when you press it you know you will never watch it.

I have a To Read folder in my bookmarks bar. I'd argue that it's useful even though I almost never read anything placed in there: it helps me by giving me the opportunity to bookmark and close a single tab and edge a tiny bit closer to internal peace.

I have the same perspective.

Last night I had probably 20 tabs open on Reddit that I wanted to read. Didn’t have the time to look through them all so I bookmarked them in Pinboard, closed the tab, and moved on with my life.

Will I ever read them? Probably not, but it’s nice knowing they’re not lost in my internet history and that I could.

I solve this by just keep the tabs open.

I use tree-style tabs, so anything interesting gets stuck in a tree that I can collapse. It might stay there for a month, maybe more.

Eventually I'll either find the time to read/watch/whatever, or realize it doesn't interest me anymore.

Either way, after a while that tree gets closed and the cycle starts over.

Read Later saving to Instapaper is one of the few things of that type that I actually get around to reading much of the time. I use it judiciously for long reads that I genuinely want to do but can't give the 20 minutes or whatever it deserves right now. Then they're synced to my iPad and make good reads while I'm traveling.

It's wonderful for me. I use it to queue up everything I follow so I don't have to manually interact to keep it going. Mine currently has 1 item that I'm keeping there as a quasi-bookmark, but I churn through it pretty regularly.

I'd very much consider speeding up your videos.

I watch things like educational videos, interviews, news videos etc mostly on 2x.

Movies I often watch on 1.5x, not always but typically at least 1.3x.

Sometimes I go up to 2.5x or 3x when needed, e.g. speeding through a Let's Play video during a part which isn't particularly interesting any slower.

> Movies I often watch on 1.5x, not always but typically at least 1.3x.

For me, I would ask myself if these movie is worth watching, and if the teaching materials are worth ingesting.

Of course, I always do, too.

Funny thing is that some of this stuff wouldn't be worth watching at 1x, but are worth watching on 2.5x. For example I really enjoy watching replays of strategical games, but much of it is frankly quite boring in real time. Take a typical 2+1 hour game of chess, with minutes between moves, condensed into a 45 minute match with commentary, that's an excellent way for me to enjoy relaxing after a day of work while the washing machine is churning and I'm eating dinner. But I'd absolutely have no time (much less interest) to sit there for 3 hours watching people think.

You have to wonder, what are the odds that all of human content is paced at a perfect speed for all of human consumers?

What are the odds that every lecturer for example, speaks at the same pace, all with the same information density of the concepts they are talking about?

The answer obviously is virtually zero. And so if you have different paces of information density, then the norm should be for every individual that for some content, you adjust the speed of the video!

Some videos pack a ton of information in five sentences, others take ten sentences to convey the same idea. (a density of concepts per sentence) And some lecturers pack those say five sentences in one minute, while others do it in two. (speed of speech) If everyone enjoyed the same pace, and all content was at the same pace, then you'd never have to adjust content-speed. But both of those two statements aren't true. So again, the norm should be that any individual may want to speed up at least some of his content.

In the end it really depends on the content. I don't speed up movies as much for example as news though because in the former, moments of quietness and facial expression are much more meaningful than in the latter and it loses its impact when sped up too much.

What are the odds that all information worth consuming is best consumed at the same speed?

What are the odds that every human cultural experience can be reduced to "consumption" of N bits of information per minute?

I say you will benefit more from eating your dinner and relaxing into the churning sounds of the washing machine than you will from another day of your hyperoptimized speed run through life, measured in bits of information per minute absorbed (like a sponge) from 'content' (a term invented by industries that profit by the mindless consumption of your time by their 'content').

Thanks for the refreshing answer! :)

+1.

This is a good Chrome extension for video speed control of all web video content: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/video-speed-contro...

Highly recommended!

Unless the film is animated, I could not see how you could enjoy watching it at 1.5x speed, particularly if it's a serious drama.

Humans moving at 1.5x speed just looks weird, and when I speed narrative (i.e. not documentaries) films, it feels like I am watching them just to feel like I watched it compared to enjoying it.

Videos/interviews I agree 2x is fine. I'd think that movies would have a sense of artistic timing/pacing which speeding up the movie would ruin.

It’s funny because I tried to hyper optimize my email so I would get less of it, but now I’m going in the opposite direction, largely because of email lists and how terrible websites have become.

I’d much rather get email newsletters than trying to stay on top of RSS, which feels like I’m always drowning. And emails are usually much simpler and no flashing ads, no auto playing video, no unlimited scroll, etc.

There is some irony here in how terrible and clunky the Gmail web UI has gotten, yet how standardized and seamless email has remained.

Hacker news has had a recurring discussion about disrupting email. Of course some startup would love to vacuum up all email in to their own walled ecosystem, wrap it in ads, and charge companies to reach their own customers. Please, no.

I use RSS to keep up with podcasts, with a couple webcomics and [so far] one comedian's tour-dates list. I'm hovering around 50 subscriptions, which I feel is "too much" but I'm not sure which great content I should cut; I have a few ideas, but it's in the small single digits against the 50.

For myself, I'm likely much better to start slashing at my email. What suggestions do you have on how to "hyper optimize" with that?

It gets frustrating to feel like every moment another decision needs to be made. Driving to the store: what will I listen to? Free time: video games, tv, reading or what? At work: music or podcasts or radio as background noise?

I am not sure if decision fatigue is real, but working from that assumption, too much of my energy is used up on ultimately inconsequential things like this...

>I am not sure if decision fatigue is real, but working from that assumption, too much of my energy is used up on ultimately inconsequential things like this...

I think it is and have largely given up on trying to plan entertainment for trivial things like driving to the store. I either just sit in silence and enjoy it or let someone else in the car pick radio if they want it.

Automate your decision making progress. The same music, the same food, the same routine. Problem solved.

>Figuring out what the best content for me for the time I have is the problem.

And, of course, sometimes the best choice is no content at all.

I do wonder how increasing quantity and quality of content will effect markets and create new opportunities. Maybe Ev Williams is right and it’s about curation. Maybe something deeper.

"The best response is no response."—Dr. Maxwell Maltz, "Psycho-Cybernetics"(1960)

Maybe we just need to dip into what we feel at each moment and forget there's all this torrent passing by, probably never seen again.

As for choosing non-fiction books, pick one that really ticks the fancy. Then follow into what falls naturally next. Unless a person develops some intuition and freedom in this matter it's always gonna be an anxiety-driven ride through the content river.

And someone will make money out of it promising an app to solve your management non-issues. I like to keep a simple big to-read list and another chnological list of things read, and try to have only one fiction and one non-fiction at at time, everything else is just a flow.

I think part of the problem is that nobody wants to admit what they really want to themselves.

>There's a whole slew of content being created in all forms, from newsletters, blog posts, books, podcasts, music, video games, video on demand and live video. A lot of it is actually really high-quality content. We're being inundated with too much good stuff. I see all these newsletters in my inbox I don't have time to read that I want to. Tv shows, youtube videos I want to watch but don't have time for.

Sounds like online dating.

For 10% of the user group.

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