Leisure Is Our Killer App
sloanreview.mit.edu
sloanreview.mit.edu
I believe that leisure time is something that most people don't have nor know that they want. As the article states, it lets you think outside of the box and come back with fresh ideas. In a work-centered society though, it's really hard to justify spending that time. Even knowing all this, I still fall into the trap of always being busy with something.
“take the path to Nothing, and go Nowhere until you reach it.” - Benjamin Hoff
There is something about sitting back with a nice warm drink in your hands, your feet resting on a log near a crackling campfire gazing up as the embers from the fire spiral up amongst the stars that just helps put everything in perspective.
Your focus boils down to the necessaries of what am I going to eat and am I going to be warm and dry if it rains tonight. Depending on where you are camping you could add the excitement of, is something going to try to eat me during the night.
Old guy chiming in. Every generation feels like this. Socrates lamented that becoming literate would "create forgetfulness in the learners’ souls, because they will not use their memories." In the 16th century, Swiss scientist, Conrad Gessner, warned that the overabundance of information caused by the printing press was "confusing and harmful". In 1940s, radio had caused children to develop "the habit of dividing attention between the humdrum preparation of their school assignments and the compelling excitement of the loudspeaker." In my time, similar concerns were raised about cable TV and the walkman.
Is reading on your phone on the train fundamentally different than reading a book? Is chatting with your friends while in line at the grocery store bad?
Your point about the stop-light is true, though, because it's unsafe.
Endless bejeweled games are likely as bad as idle, empty thoughts. Reading, learning, even solving puzzles is a good use of the small shards of time like being in a line.
Can be a good thing to help you wind down, if applied in moderation. Can waste your time otherwise. All non-trivial activities take some learning to do efficiently; thinking is no exception.
If we are talking about leisure time as understood by the subject, then it’s difficult to see how a non-harmful activity is a ‘waste’ of leisure time. You can’t waste leisure except by trying to get some sort of work done during leisure, I think.
Other than that, idle thoughts are a wellspring of creative ideas, leaps of deduction and what not. Games like bejewelled are not similar at all; in me, they quickly lead to obsessive hyper focus and a Tetris effect, which is why I don’t play them. But idle thoughts are quite the opposite experience.
If you have no responsibility that is being compromised, how can this be a bad thing or is time wasting?
You seem to be saying that everything you do needs to have some purpose or needs to be productive?
I suspect that the problem that society has is that we have decided that everybody needs to be productive and working towards something, even in recreation. Time to spin your wheels in an unstructured way is one of the great things about modern life. We don't have to be spending every minute of the day just trying to get our next meal.
Treat Google as an augmentation of your brain. You both do what you’re good at (facts vs. concepts) and you end up better overall.
Depth is good but it limits breadth. Before internet, and then before printed books, being narrow-minded was easier.
With that, the easy accessibility of information also helps depth in those who care.
Google being so widely available means that people stop caring about memorizing things that are easily googleable, but that is pretty orthoganal to "actually learning". Google being available makes this distinction clear. If it can be easily googled for, it's a fact and remembering facts is for paper and bits. Most things aren't on google. Use your brain for the hard stuff.
[1] https://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2011/03/110302-sola...
By having information in your brain, your subconscious self will have worked out how to apply it in clever and novel ways as an extension of your problem solving capacity.
You can see it in your daily life too - for instance, you might occasionally find yourself programming with a new container or data structure library. The interface is hopefully simple enough to figure out at a glance, and you can look up things you don't know. But you'll likely move slower than if you had known the tool like the back of your hand. And more importantly, the lack of familiarity prevents your brain from being able to fully work at the level of the problem, since it's now forced to juggle with all the new information about the shape and behavior of the API.
Mindlessly cutting and pasting from the search results such as from stackoverflow can be anywhere from a waste of your time to extremely dangerous. But, on the other hand when it works it makes you much faster than if you tried to solve the problem yourself.
Example 1: I only cook occasionally, yet I made great Kimchi the other day by watching a YouTube video.
Example 2: I replaced the big end bearings on a small petrol 2 stroke by using a YouTube video.
We learn how to choose good instructional material and we learn how to apply it.
I am aware what I am going to say will sound condescending, although I do not mean it in a negative manner; but this is a really cute and naive perspective.
Ask your grandparents. They will certainly claim _they_ were the last generation to experience true boredom as a kid. After all, those danged radios started to pop up around that time, much less black-and-white TVs.
While growing up, I pretty much always had a computer, but did not have live Internet till I was 19. We had only one TV station to watch. The computer would be on for only a few hours - it could overheat, and it was routine to turn it off when not in use.
For the last 6 months my mind has been preoccupied by this. I can't stop memories coming in on how I would just laze in the afternoon, enjoying the breeze. Even recalling the boredom is a "good" memory. I would read a lot more books. I would sometimes play with toys. I would attempt solving puzzles. I would doodle with the calculator and learn interesting properties of numbers. And fun stuff on the computer - be it games, or programming, or playing with Fractint and POV-Ray.
These days: While I still have constructive hobbies, I'm realizing they exist mostly to make me feel constructive. If I examine my time at home, a lot of it is on the computer. And most of that is on the browser or email. I use a desktop which is on 24/7. The browser window is always open, with tabs open. And if I were to randomly ask myself what I gained in browsing the web in, say, the last month, I can't come up with enough to justify it. Intellectual debates on HN are cool, but I'm way past the point where it is meaningfully useful. Yes, I may have learned a few things while browsing the net, but the gain vs time spent ratio is not that good.
I'm not an addict. I spend time outside the house, and don't miss the computer when I'm, say, hiking. But it troubles me that this is my life at home. And fortunately, I find smartphones to be a real pain to use, so it can't be an attention sink.
In the last few months I've been musing on how I can capture some of my pre-Internet lifestyle back. It's complicated - I don't want to go cold turkey. There are scripts I run on a cronjob on my PC that are very useful to me (and are not tied heavily to my Internet/PC habits) - so I don't want to simply switch it off. Instead, I want to cripple some aspects of my Internet usage.
I haven't actually taken some concrete action, but ideas:
1. Disallow certain programs/processes (e.g. my browsers) from having access to the Internet. Unfortunately, there's no easy way to do this in Linux.
2. Use extensions like Leechblock. I don't have much hope for this working - I tried some years ago and kept finding ways around it. And I often just fired up another browser that did not have Leechblock installed.
3. Make accessing the web via browser painful. In the old days, when I wanted to use the computer, I had to boot it up (took a bit of time), then dial up to the Internet, then launch a browser. If I could simulate it so that when I launch the browser it takes that much time, it may significantly reduce how often I browse the Internet. Bonus points if the whole computer becomes unusable in that time period (it's not really effective if while I'm waiting for the browser to load I start doing other stuff).
4. Whatever crippling methods I have should be appropriately difficult to disable. If it's too easy, then I'll disable it all the time. If it's too hard I won't use the system.
5. Maybe have a cronjob that kills all open browsers every, say, 45 minutes. When I'm busy browsing and the browser crashes, will I really want to restart the browser? More effective if I couple it with 3 above. And maybe I shouldn't allow the browser to reload the crashed session, so I'd have to rebuild the tabs?
6. Disable multitasking while in the browser. I think the fact that we can browse the web, and run other programs at the same time, makes it more difficult to control. In the old DOS days, I ran only one program at a time. Even with the early Windows, I effectively ran one program at a time - multitasking ate up resources.
7. I just realized that I used to program in the days I did not have the Internet. It's a bit sad that the norm is to find solutions in Google or Stack Overflow, or even in the online docs. See if I can somehow download the docs for offline use. But then I wouldn't want a 5 minute delay in loading up the browser if all I want to do is browse local files. Conundrum...
8. Every so many minutes, somehow autoclose all tabs except the active one. While tabs are awesome, they also lead to more time in the browser. This will force me to be more discriminating in picking the tabs I want to read.
9. Somehow suspend accounts on sites like HN for, say, 6 months. I won't be able to post. Maybe block it altogether.
10. Netflix via Roku on my TV does not count. To me that's "TV time", and in any case, I don't spend much time on it. Thankfully, Youtube has always been a poor experience.
11. The goal isn't to get off the computer. It's to do more constructive things with it. So I'll likely program, do image editing (I have a few years of backlog), write, etc.
12. I haven't figured out where email fits into all this. Should I cripple it or keep it as is? I don't use webmail - it's the old style of IMAP + MUA + MDA
I hope I find some way to achieve a healthy amount of the above. In the back of my mind I'd been planning on posting this as an Ask HN to see what other people have come up with.
(As an aside, I think part of my current obsession is that in the last year I've met with a number of my high school friends - most of whom I hadn't seen since getting live Internet - scattered across the globe. That's actively reminding me of life in earlier days).
I can really relate to the feeling. The famous Okkusenman[0] really puts it into words better than I ever could really: that feeling of being chased by something as you get older, that being bored isn't allowed and that you must be doing something at all times; just sitting back and enjoying the scenery isn't allowed. I'm not sure where it comes from, and it's ironic how useless it is at actually making you a better, smarter, more well-rounded person. The only consolation is that it's clearly felt by so many others.
In my case the feeling that I shouldn't be bored or should be productive all the time isn't the problem. It's the ability to keep doing stuff (in my case, stuff on the Internet) that is the problem. In point of fact, one of my hopes/wishes of getting off the web is to both laze around and be more productive. If I cut out an hour of web browsing per day, and spend 30 more minutes just sitting and relaxing, and 30 more minutes being productive, it's still a net gain in productivity.
I'm in my early 50's and it seems that everybody I talk to is spending their entire waking life working at something, be it a side business, fitness, training, learning or hobby. We've always had these things, but it seems that in the last 10 to 20 years the feeling of these activities has moved from a relaxed, something done for enjoyment to an almost desperate must excel race.
I don't know why this is, but I for one don't like it or the toll it's taking on peoples mood and health.
PSA: try installing DayWise on your phone. It batches up your notifications, letting you see them only at noon, and at 5 p.m.
I wonder if there's anything like disciplined leisure, where you concentrate on one thing intensively for a while, and you intentionally force yourself to let go of those thoughts, divert your attention to something else and let sub-consciousness deal with the topic. But the point is to come back to the same thing at the end with new ideas and a refreshed mind.
Am I too naive?
I heard a useful analogy of the mind being like an elephant that wants to wander around on its own.
In focussed meditation, we try to focus your attention on our breath, or some point inside our body or an idea. We tie the elephant with a rope to a pole. If it wanders too far, we tug it and bring it back to the pole.
In awareness meditation, we just observe where the elephant roams wherever it wants. That is more like leisurely mind wandering.
Not at all. Meditation is an excellent example, but also volunteering and learning.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/School
I remember I had Philosophy professor tell me this, back in the day. I think part of his point was that up until very recently, getting an education was a privilege that only the elite got to enjoy. Also, I imagine he was trying to say that compared to the back breaking manual labor almost everyone was expected to participate in back then, learning must've actually been leisurely.
More specific to your comment, I feel like what you're describing is sort of the idea behind things like the pomodoro technique. Take a timed break, let your mind wander, and come back (sometimes) with a solution. To digress one final time, this idea also reminds me a of practicing a musical instrument. I can't tell you how many times I've struggled with a piece of music, only to stop for a few hours or maybe a day, just to come back and "magically" be able to play it.
And a lot of what I work on with guys is creating rhythms in their life that really are based on feeding the unconscious mind, which is the wellspring of creativity information and then tapping it. So for example, ending the workday with high quality focus on a certain area of complexity where you can use an insight and then waking up first thing in the morning creating input and applying your mind to it, journaling on it. Not so much to do a big brainstorm, but to tap what you've been working on unconsciously overnight. Which of course, is a principle that Hemingway wrote about when he spoke about the two core principles in his creative writing process, number one ending the workday with something left to write and -- Tim Ferriss: Yeah, often in mid-sentence even. Josh Waitzkin: Right. So not doing everything he had to do. Which most people do, but they feel this sense of guilt if they're not working. You and I have discussed this at length, but leaving something left to write and then the second principle, release your mind from it. Don't think about it all night. Really let go. Have a glass of wine. Then wake up first thing in the morning and reapply your mind to it. And it's amazing because you're basically feeding the mind complexity and then tapping that complexity or tapping what you've done with it. This rhythm, the large variation of it is overnight, and then you can have microbursts of it throughout the day. Before workouts pose a question, do a workout, release your mind after workout, return to it, and do creative bursts. Before you go to the bathroom, before you go to lunch, before anything. And in that way you're systematically training yourself to generate the crystallization experience, that ah-ha moment that can happen once a month or once a year. A lot of what I do is work on systems to help it happen once a day or four times a day, and when we're talking about guys who run financial groups of $20 to $30 billion, for example, if they have a huge insight that can have unbelievable value. If you can really train people to get systematic about nurturing their creative process, it's unbelievable what can happen and most of that work relates to getting out of your own way. It's unloading. It's the constant practice of subtraction, reducing friction.
[1] https://fhww.files.wordpress.com/2018/07/02-josh-waitzkin.pd...
This is an interesting way to put it. Thanks for the quote!
Let me make a choice quote (from the chapter: "Enjoying Solitude And Other People"):
“The ultimate test for the ability to control the quality of experience is what a person does in solitude, with no external demands to give structure to attention. [...]”
You can put the above text in books.google.com and read the surrounding text (I recommend to slow-read the whole book, of course); he makes some time-tested suggestions, without imposing them on the reader.
PS: If you want pronounce Prof C's full name, here is a memorable mnemonic by the man himself: "Me-High Chick-Sent-Me-High".
it's called meditation. as soon as your workplace mandates that you do it, it becomes impossible to perform successfully, thankfully.
https://www.amazon.com/Mind-Play-Shannon-Invented-Informatio...
-- Bertrand Russell
IMHO the first step to build an economic system where people work in a project because they want to, and not because they need to, is to defuse the protestant ethics that measure the worth of people based on how much they earn.
Russell's ideas could underline a new ethics that optimized the economy around what people likes to do the most, in special if the most unpleasant jobs can be automated away by robots.
The "problem" is that Star Trek has always been about the adventure at the frontier, with a quasi-military (and precisely how quasi varying based on series) organization exploring new worlds, meeting new civilizations, and fighting with well-known civilizations the Federation is currently struggling against. Very little time is devoted to the people at home actually living that post-scarcity existence.
(And, no, I don't see that as a problem. I like adventure-oriented Star Trek. It just means that these ideas have little relevance to that show.)
Curious how you got this idea lodged in your head. There are so many examples that refute it that it's hard to know where to start. There are other prominent cultures which are much more concerned with displays of wealth than protestants (Chinese, for example). And then there are sub-cultures within the U.S. that are also more concerned with displays of wealth (watch some rap videos). And, generally speaking, my life experience is that more devout -> less concerned with material wealth. Then there's the protestant sect (Calvinists) who split from the Catholics because they believed in predestination, which would rule out how much you earn as a path to moral worth (in addition to good works).
I.e. I was talking about the Lutheran work ethic, which considers hard work and frugality virtuous, and leisure and munificence as moral failures. Other cultures think of free time, and expending on oneself and loved ones, as esencial to enjoy life.
- - - -
Cf. "What Are People For?" by Wendell Berry
I suspect that may be true for ephemeral leisure time or the little leisure time most people have. Give the average person a 20/hr work week and I’d assume they won’t fill the time with more tv.
-- Bertrand Russell
If they were given an opportunity to travel the world, most would gladly take it.
Having free time isn't of much use if it isn't coupled with resources to do interesting things. Since most people have very limited resources - tv is the best bang for your buck way of spending the time.
And that's just the logic of existing in an environment of abundance. The larger issue is that abundance doesn't last. Resources quickly become scarce because populations grow to the environment's carrying capacity.
"Most countries in the developed world have seen average hours worked decrease significantly.[14][15] For example, in the U.S in the late 19th century it was estimated that the average work week was over 60 hours per week.[16] Today the average hours worked in the U.S. is around 33,[17] with the average man employed full-time for 8.4 hours per work day, and the average woman employed full-time for 7.9 hours per work day.[18] The front runners for lowest average weekly work hours are the Netherlands with 27 hours,[19] and France with 30 hours.[20] At current rates the Netherlands is set to become the first country to reach an average work week under 21 hours"
> At current rates the Netherlands is set to become the first country to reach an average work week under 21 hours
Turns out the "reference" is just a broken link to an old random blog post with no data that doesn't even make this claim.
I would be careful about believing anything on that page.
Not really. Human sleep is much more than simply turning off and on. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sleep_and_memory
https://www.penguin.co.uk/books/295/295665/why-we-sleep/9780...
I'm halfway through the book, and it has already influenced my behavior. I began setting "to bed" alarm, just like I set "wake up" alarm.
If you don't have the time (?) to read the book, then at least listen to Walker's presentation at "Talk at Google". (Not to mention, he's an outstanding public speaker, too.) He has a segment where he talks about how sleep hits the "save button" to preserve your memory (after learning) to "persistent storage in your brain", as it were.
Walker's work is urgent and important.
That’s a big leap. We yet have to prove we can make machines smarter than human. It might be possible but it might be not. Like flying - as without huge fans - cars.
We might find a novel way to fight gravity tomorrow, in another 50 years, or never. Like AI. We might find a way to build truly intelligent computers tomorrow, in 50 years, or never. However in both cases, it's ridiculous to try to come up with rules for a non existing technology. It will be like people in the 50-60s trying to make rules from the Internet.
The world responded by building more complicated applications.
Sure the poor will grow more poor, and also have a lot more free time due to not having employment. That's not necessarily a good thing, but it does agitate for both the optimistic and pessimistic views being likely at once in the future.
I assume you're advocating their support through some social safety net that provides them with basic necessities.
Because currently, not having employment is a major loss in free time: you spend all your time trying to meet core needs like food, shelter, and clothing. Where an employed person can simply order take-out, hire a contractor to fix their house, and buy new clothes as required, an impoverished person will be scraping together safe food and trying to cook it to be palatable, sheltering in uncomfortable or unsafe places, and repairing clothes that are long since worn out. And if they do go to work, they earn a pittance that's insufficient to pay rent, much less afford luxuries like prepared food, home ownership, or durable clothing.
Unless you're extremely optimistic about social services improving, the poor being poorer puts heavier burdens on their time, not lighter.
Automation if anything makes this worse since people will often decrease to fill the need instead of hire more.
Work to live or live to work.
Then wraps up and ends.
We don't have a killer app.
My best ideas come while either driving my son to school or taking a fishing break on the lake just meters near our home. Back to Basics.
Weekends are 99% Tech-free now, and it's been amazing so far.
And then you get the post [Nobody Likes the “Idea Guy”](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19280907).
You can have great ideas but the hard part is the intersection between being lucky to be able to apply them at work, those ideas to be relevant and execute them properly.
There's a section where he talks about thinking about other businesses or activities that are outside of your main focus, and after you go through that process you may come up with different ideas for your own business. It's pretty easy too. Just look around your room or where ever you are for objects and then think about how they are manufactured -- stuff like that.
I remember seeing a piece of lumber (I was reading outside) and it got me to think about how efficient some lumber manufacturers are. They might make 2x4s and other processed wood which they sell to retailers, but there's so much waste produced during the process in the form of sawdust and those manufacturers figured out how to sell their sawdust waste.
I never would have ever thought about something like that on my own, but it got me to think about how I can reduce waste and cross pollinate some of the things I create (code, blog posts, videos, etc.).
[0]: http://amzn.to/2CqmvqH (yes it's an Amazon affiliate link and no I don't care if you Google it instead. I just happened to have the link handy since I wrote about the book on my site in the past.)
Your position is similar to the view of so-called “Junk DNA” which was initially thought to be literal junk but some of which does in fact appear to modulate gene expression at runtime.
Machines don't need rest because they aren't capable of regeneration. They run and damage accumulates until they break. Then they're done. You can run them less and have the damage accumulate slower so they last longer, but they don't heal themselves without somebody else to perform maintenance.
Living things on the other hand, do repair themselves while they rest. In fact, they even grow stronger to better endure the stresses they experience. So, that's the point of rest.