Being basic as a virtue | Hacker News Reader

Being basic as a virtue

nadiaeghbal.com

159 pointsskellertor121 comments

This seems as good an opportunity as any to bring up another part of the "basic" concept which feels really unhealthy: the idea that "basic" is consuming commodity, mass-market goods, and that high status is distinguishing yourself through sophisticated taste in what you consume.

This mindset is problematic for at least a few reasons: - Every choice of consumption becomes an opportunity to over-examine - Devaluing goods because they're common lures us into a needless chain of "upgrades" as productivity improves. We can never have a post-scarcity economy if we're taught to shun whatever isn't scarce. - All of this plays into the framing that we're first and foremost workers and consumers.

Would we not all be happier and healthier consuming decent but not spectacular mass-produced and inexpensive food, drink, clothing, housing, cars, etc, instead of coveting a rare beer, or looking down our noses at people buying starbucks?

I felt very cool bringing a 7-Eleven Slurpee(R) into a Starbucks to hang out yesterday.

> This seems as good an opportunity as any to bring up another part of the "basic" concept which feels really unhealthy: the idea that "basic" is consuming commodity, mass-market goods, and that high status is distinguishing yourself through sophisticated taste in what you consume.

It's also a marketing tactic to be exotic and to add a strange element to the center of your product that no one has, because if you're incomparable, you'll never have to compete on quality.

Commodity products actually have to be better to command loyalty, not just something you can mention in conversation to make your tastes seem more exotic and you seem more knowledgeable and experienced.

I don't think conspicuous consumption is a thing that can be prevented, though, as long as there is a middle class (or any other form of aspiring courtier.)

Kids, like the rich, distinguish themselves by their tastes because their creations are not yet up to prevailing standards. But what really matters is not what you like, but what you create—whether that's a house, a web site, or a feeling of comfort for a friend who's sad.

Gourmets are tremendous bores; gourmet chefs are heroes.

Mass market goods have a strong financial incentive to slowly decrease quality to capitalize on brand goodwill for short term profit.

I completely agree, but I can't help but note this only sounds like a radical concept in the context of West coast liberals pretending their snobbiness is erudition.

I don't think this is specifically a West Coast thing. My supermarket has dozens or perhaps hundreds of cheeses, and so do large supermarkets all over the US. Surely that's because someone's buying the niche varieties, and going to a party and saying "oh you're still buying brie? you have to try reblochon."

Or maybe they just like brie?

Or they just like to try new cheeses?

> ...consuming decent but not spectacular mass-produced and inexpensive...

Sadly, in a crowded city, the economics don't incentivize retailers to hold middle-tier goods. High ticket items have better margins for the same shelf space. Low ticket items ensure some sale. But that decent mustard you can find in any suburban supermarket? Never in a city corner store.

Which is to say, you've a nice dream that, often, unintentionally our society conspires against allowing.

https://workaway.info

A site that lets you find hosts who will trade room and board in exchange for two to five hours of labor per weekday. Mostly located in beautiful/wild locations around the world.

I'm currently doing three months in Europe hopping from place to place using Workaway. For instance, right now I'm at a hobby farm on top of a mountain in central italy. Super laid back. And gorgeous. Imagine the most picturesque idyllic farm you can... I'm finding that the rewards in mental health are more than sufficient to justify the astronomical opportunity cost.

My browser is complaining about an expired or invalid cert

It's fine for https://www.workaway.info

Mine too. Just gotta stick a www. in front of the URL. The cert's apparently only valid for specific subdomains and not the root domain.

Is this your first foray into something like this?

Yes, and loving it!

>I'm finding that the rewards in mental health are more than sufficient to justify the astronomical opportunity cost.

If it helps you get by, there's no opportunity cost lost...

Burnt out/broken/dead people have no opportunities!

>I'm finding that the rewards in mental health are more than sufficient to justify the astronomical opportunity cost.

The opportunity cost is that obiefernandez is not working to earn money? Or not studying to improve their income? Earning money to be able to spend it later on things like overseas travel.

Reminiscent of Heinrich Böll's parable of the fisherman: https://www.becomingminimalist.com/recognizing-happiness/ (this version doesn't presume the fisherman is Mexican - is the original story in German?).

I just meant the opportunity cost of less billable hours in the day. My paid work is as a consultant with an hourly rate, so as I get a sense of how many hours less per day I'm spending earning money in order to live this new lifestyle, there's also a price tag attached.

Yes, but you should also ask "if I instead kept working all these extra hours as a consultant, would I be OK, or would I hate my life, be stressed, perhaps burnout and lose customers, or even have health implications"?

With these questions in mind it's not as straightforward to say "if I didn't live this new lifestyle I'd make billable hours consulting".

You also need to think the reverse "opportunity cost" playing into your consulting gig life in the mid/long run.

One not doing what they like to let off steam, could in the end lose gigs or family (e.g. due to drinking, substance abuse), or even hurt their health/life (depression for one).

How's the legality of this? Do you need a work visa or somesuch?

Don't mention on your way through customs that you're there to work, if that's what you're asking.

In a situation like this, a little discretion goes a long way.

Lovely! Where in Italy? Umbria, by chance? (that's where I am from originally)

Wow I had no idea something like this existed. I think this is something I should do, I've been flirting with the idea of escaping the city life and doing something physical, I don't think office work fulfills some of the necessary functions humans require. This will allow me to test out that theory without huge cost.

Is it common for knowledge workers to fantasize about more labor intensive work from time to time? Because I definitely found myself relating to that sentiment. Usually my mind goes to construction or carpentry in those moments.

My favorite part of this is the acknowledgement of the enjoyment to be found embracing the 'degenerate' as the author calls it. I can strongly relate to needing a good, stupid, socially-unacceptable laugh sometimes.

I think it's pretty common. It can sometimes be solved by talking to some 45 year old carpet layers about their knees, carpenters/framers about their backs & wrists, etc.

It is nice to be able to put your hands on something you've done though.

Hmm, just a thought, but maybe that is an argument against the hyper-specialization of modern society. It would be nice to choose different things throughout a day/week/year, all productive, and all requiring some skill, but each one being a bit different providing physical or mental exercise of different types. Bending over all day to build something might not be great for humans, but sitting in a chair all day focusing probably isn't either. It would be nice to arrange a productive society that gave people the opportunity to move between the different types of productivity.

I don't think this is a new phenomena at all. Anthropologists can tell a lot about old civilizations by characteristic injuries, after all. I suspect that people have been screwing up their bodies with repetitive motions/positions since at least the dawn of agriculture. I suppose it is telling that this was the better alternative.

I've known people who have constructed working lives for themselves that try and achieve this balance, but it is a difficult thing to do. I expect that it usually has an economic penalty of some sort, but if at least some of the work pays well it's not crazy.

One way to manage it would be to find lucrative work roughly 1/2 time (i.e. "knowledge work" contracts) and then very intentionally spend the rest of your time outside and doing something active. If you've ever tried to negotiate a short week for less pay you'll probably realize this is difficult to arrange.

> I suppose it is telling that this was the better alternative.

Presumably you mean "better for the individual", but I don't believe this is an assumption we can make. It seems clear that agriculture was better in a competitive sense than other ways of life at the time, though likely worse for many of the individuals involved.

That was sloppy, sorry. I should have added "perceived" as there, or scare quotes on 'better'; I meant it in the sense that this was the path that was collectively chosen, i.e. the one that "won".

Actually I think it was clearly better at the group survival/displacement of other groups level.

There’s no evidence it was necessarily better for any particular insividual’s quality of life.

hell, you can tell smokers by the I dentation in their bones, or so I was told by one forensic anthropologist.

“For as soon as the distribution of labour comes into being, each man has a particular, exclusive sphere of activity, which is forced upon him and from which he cannot escape. He is a hunter, a fisherman, a herdsman, or a critical critic, and must remain so if he does not want to lose his means of livelihood; while in a society, where nobody has one exclusive sphere of activity but each can become accomplished in any branch he wishes, society regulates the general production and thus makes it possible for me to do one thing today and another tomorrow, to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticise after dinner, just as I have a mind, without ever becoming hunter, fisherman, herdsman or critic.”

That made some faint sense when he said it, though even that is easy to overestimate as many tasks of the day required more skill than Marx probably appreciated, but is gibbering lunacy if you want a 21st century technological society.

Only a few people are honest enough to say they want socialism and would be perfectly happy to live an 18th century life to have it.

Example: You could just pick up and be a farmer tomorrow, right? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ywBV6M7VOFU Certainly not at a 21st century farmer level. (Consider your criticisms of that idea carefully, for instance "yeah but those practices aren't sustainable" will just get you "sustainable practices are going to be just as challenging or even more so" in reply, along with the fact it's not really a relevant point; M(r/s). I Decided To Be A Farmer This Week isn't going to come up with breakthrough solutions in sustainability, either, as they will be far too busy.)

...the quotation isn't a factual claim about skills necessary and no one who isn't a gibbering lunatic reads it that way.

i was responding to someone who is very skilled (presumably) wishing they didn't need to be so specialized.

edit: lots of people willfully misconstrue things. the same goes for Marx. if you've read any of the volumes of capital you'd understand that marxist positions aren't as asinine as "everyone needs to be a farmer in order for socialism to be viable".

I'm saying that even what he said then was a bit of a stretch; even in his day you couldn't just decide to be a lawyer one day with any effectiveness.

Today it's just silly. You can't decide to review medical papers today, write them tomorrow, farm the next day, then be a lawyer, then go commercial crab fishing, then be a surveyer, then design an interstate highway bridge, then perhaps a concert pianist performance, and then perhaps start it all over again in a cycle. Or, to the extent you can, you can't generate any value that way.

Of course you can still "recreate" with hunting, fishing, and "criticizing after dinner" (note how, coincidentally, all his cited examples tend to gracefully fail; I can "go hunting" and come back with nothing and I have accomplished "going hunting"). Observing that recreation in the form of unevaluated, low-barrier-of-entry tasks that nobody cares if you produce no value with are available is a pointless statement, so I assume that's not the point of the quote. But there's a whackload of magic in that "society will regulate production" if everybody operates like this. "Society regulating production" is why we end up specialized. You end up specialized because it takes years of training and experience in any field to be worth a darn, which means that's by necessity the cost of switching too. You can certainly get to a hobbyist level in a couple of fields beyond your profession, too, but even then you're unlikely to just switch that to your profession one day in the general case.

>I'm saying that even what he said then was a bit of a stretch; even in his day you couldn't just decide to be a lawyer one day with any effectiveness.

you're repeating yourself. here is the quotation in context

"Further, the division of labour implies the contradiction between the interest of the separate individual or the individual family and the communal interest of all individuals who have intercourse with one another. And indeed, this communal interest does not exist merely in the imagination, as the "general interest", but first of all in reality, as the mutual interdependence of the individuals among whom the labour is divided. And finally, the division of labour offers us the first example of how, as long as man remains in natural society, that is, as long as a cleavage exists between the particular and the common interest, as long, therefore, as activity is not voluntarily, but naturally, divided, man's own deed becomes an alien power opposed to him, which enslaves him instead of being controlled by him. For as soon as the distribution of labour comes into being, each man has a particular, exclusive sphere of activity, which is forced upon him and from which he cannot escape. He is a hunter, a fisherman, a herdsman, or a critical critic, and must remain so if he does not want to lose his means of livelihood; while in communist society, where nobody has one exclusive sphere of activity but each can become accomplished in any branch he wishes, society regulates the general production and thus makes it possible for me to do one thing today and another tomorrow, to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticise after dinner, just as I have a mind, without ever becoming hunter, fisherman, herdsman or critic. This fixation of social activity, this consolidation of what we ourselves produce into an objective power above us, growing out of our control, thwarting our expectations, bringing to naught our calculations, is one of the chief factors in historical development up till now."

https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/download/Marx_Th...

> even in his day you couldn't just decide to be a lawyer one day with any effectiveness.

In his day (and in the modern world) people pretty freely move between roles within the intelligentsia but for legal constraints (which while notionally justified by consumer/public protection are often in no small part protectionist measures to maximize income of incumbents and restrict competing supply) and often hack around the legal constraints, too, (hanging out shingles in various “wellness” or un-/less-regulated alternative fields to evade regulation of health/medical work, for instance.)

Contrary to your descriptions of the requirements for a 21st century economy vs. earlier ones, in think mobility between career fields is probably greater in 21st century mixed economies than the 19th century capitalist ones that Marx was writing about, and that that is in no small part due to the ways in which modern mixed economies adopt elements of socialism and depart from the 19th Century system for which the term “capitalism” was coined.

That is, I think experience has shown that Marx’s description was correct at least as to the direction of effect of the politico-economic system, though probably hyperbolic about the degree of practical freedom from path-dependent career constraints attainable in even the ideal situation.

Yeah, let's entrust the communal cattle to whatever amateurs feel like being herdsmen today. And let's entrust the food supply to amateur hunters and fishermen. What could go wrong?

That is a spectacularly impractical idea.

>Yeah, let's entrust the communal cattle to whatever amateurs feel like being herdsmen today. And let's entrust the food supply to amateur hunters and fishermen. What could go wrong?

Compared to modern mass-scale industrial stock-farming killing the planet? Nothing really...

Industrial farming is the reason why you’ve never gone hungry before. In the good old days there would be a bad harvest every so many years and a substantial fraction of the population would starve to death in the ensuing famine.

>Industrial farming is the reason why you’ve never gone hungry before.

Depends on where you live (and most of current living where one can't make food and wouldn't survive a shortage has been enabled by "industrial farming" and other developments - e.g. enabling deserts cities in Nevada).

In my case, we have had hens, pigs, turkeys, olives, grapes, tomatoes, cucumbers, watermelons, oranges, figs, corn, berries, potatoes, and several other fruits and vegetables besides at the house at home. And this wasn't uncommon in my between ~150K strong place of birth (now I live in a much larger city), almost every family had such.

>In the good old days there would be a bad harvest every so many years and a substantial fraction of the population would starve to death in the ensuing famine.

We've had techniques to survive bad harvests, including long term storage, canned goods, saline storage, dried goods (from nuts to figs and salami), and so on, for millennia, and I don't remember any famines in my here parts (much less a "substantial fraction of the population starving to death"). Then there's always trade, which we also have had for quite a while.

The worst famines are not caused by bad harvests, they are either due to political reasons (from the Irish potato famine, to the 80s Ethiopian one, both caused by bad policies) or poor distribution/inequality (while food exists).

While you are correct on your own scale I don't think you truly appreciate the scale whole planet depends on industrial farming.

> e.g. enabling deserts cities in Nevada

That's more about water than food per se, though they go hand in hand.

It indeed does help that nearly all major Nevadan cities (and the vast majority of Nevadans, in turn) happen to be near the border between Nevada and one of the world's primary agricultural powerhouses, though.

>Yeah, let's entrust the communal cattle to whatever amateurs feel like being herdsmen today. And let's entrust the food supply to amateur hunters and fishermen. What could go wrong?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Leap_Forward#Consequence...

In fairness, the Great Leap Forward (reportedly, at least per that article) happened less because of the lack of food available nationally and more because it got stockpiled and harshly rationed to benefit the Communist Party elite and punish political dissidents.

>It can sometimes be solved by talking to some 45 year old carpet layers about their knees, carpenters/framers about their backs & wrists, etc.

I know many manual laborers who have far better physique, strength, and health than the average sedentary programmer, so there's that...

The key is to be an independent craftsman, and not e.g. lay carpets as an employee (at the businesses pace and mercy), or stand all day, etc...

Yes, that wasn't a general condemnation of trades, just noting that many of them have typical occupational injuries also. In some trades it really hits you at 50+, when your options for retraining are limited.

The ratio of independents to employees suggest a lot of people aren't in the situation you describe

To add to that, who are tired at the end of the day in a healthy physical way and most don't have problems with their sleep.

The key is to be an independent craftsman, and not e.g. lay carpets as an employee (at the businesses pace and mercy), or stand all day, etc...

I think most work is -- at the very least -- bearable given enough independence/autonomy. Programming can certainly be pretty joyful given a reasonably open-ended project and a quiet spot to sit. It's getting the autonomy that's the tricky bit.

Exoskeletons might help with that soon.

I often find myself romanticizing the hunter-gatherer lifestyle. I'm certainly not suggesting modern society be dismantled, but there's something intriguing, attractive even, about the simplicity of that life.

I think this is why I enjoy backpacking once in a while. Sure, it’s nowhere close to actually “living off the land” but it’s still a challenge to survive out in the woods in the middle of winter with just what you can carry on your back. It also makes me more aware and appreciative of all the comforts and conveniences I have when I get home.

I've always thought I tasted a bit of this lifestyle when I went on a week long backpacking trip in Rocky Mountain National. Only brought enough food for half the trip and planned on eating fist to supplement. By the time we caught any fish we barely brazed them over a fire before eating them raw, and then decided to pack out the next day because this sucked.

is it simple? maybe only in our imaginations.

Rule 1: Always have a plan for the day.

Theorem 1: If you accomplish half of your plan for the day, you had a very unusual day.

Rule 2: Be ready, at a moment's notice, to drop your plan for the day to pursue an unusual opportunity.

Theorem 2: You might not always be rewarded for your enthusiasm, however. And, at first, you will see many "opportunities" that are actually distractions from the task you are avoiding. Time and seasoning will give you discernment.

Rule 3: Be aware, at a moment's notice, that you will have to drop your plans and focus on an unexpected emergency. Re-build what broke so that it won't break the same again next time.

Rule 4: You can start practicing now by skipping meals, or even skipping a day of eating on occasion. Also, sleep on the floor with a light blanket sometimes. Don't wear a coat to work sometimes. Take cold showers. Practice being uncomfortable. Practicing makes it easier to absorb being uncomfortable when you don't have a choice in the matter.

Rule 5: While you will be met by frequent surprises and challenges, you will also be bored at times. Practice being comfortable with being bored by walking more, with no headphones, no podcasts, no music. Just you and your thoughts.

Rule 6: You will always be building and re-building a plan for the day, but that plan should always be fitting into a context of the season that is coming next. What you do today makes the next season more comfortable, or at least, survivable.

Theorem 3: You can judge how well you are surviving and adapting to the challenges of your environment by how long out into the future your planning reaches.

Theorem 4: To romanticize this as "simplicity" is to grossly underestimate the mental fortitude and resilience required to focus on the matter at hand while continuing to rebuild a plan for the near future, all without losing your shit and giving up. Not to mention, grossly underestimating the creativity with which Nature can surprise you.

(The numbering doesn't really matter, but theorem 1 is related to rule 1, and theorem 2 is related to rule 2. Mostly, it was just a way of separating my thoughts.)

This is definitely not a response I was expecting, but it's a really good, thought-provoking one. Thanks for that.

I have no doubt I'm grossly underestimating things, but I do think your ideas fit the definition of "simplicity" as I intended--simple being the opposite of complex, rather than easy or effortless.

I find all of the ancillary functions we're forced to perform as part of modern life to be very complex and highly distracting. On any given day I might have to file a tax return, pay a phone bill, argue with a doctor's office over a bill I paid 18 months ago, have my car break down, deal with credit card fraud, receive a dozen spam calls, research and select a new insurance plan, find a new dentist, etc, etc.

I actively take steps to reduce these distractions, but many are pervasive and effectively required. I long for the opportunity to be bored. As another comment said, this is part of what I love about backpacking: it affords the change to be bored with my own thoughts.

And I'm back to romanticizing the ability to focus on a single, simple goal: survive to the next season, with all the uncertainty that brings and mental fortitude it demands.

I am a knowledgeworker. I defenitely find myself more and more doing things by hand. I own a tractor, mulcher, chain saw by now (just to name the more massive machinerey besides the ton of small machines)

I like doing things by hand. But I am generally a hard working man, by hand or when using my head.

Two observations:either work can become obsessive. When you start working with your hands for leasure, this can become a burden on it's own. But even more so: I do not need to make living out of carrying for my land. And: the grass looks always greener on the other side of the river!

I'm pretty sure, left to my own devices, my life would be a series of weeks largely focusing on one or two things each. Some of these might last as long as a month or two, for bigger projects. Focused programming for a couple weeks, then a week of working on my house, then a week of garden building & set-up, then a week of working on music, a three-week run of research and writing, and so on.

What sucks is spending 50ish weeks a year doing 40 hours/wk of the same damn thing. I don't hate hard work—I love it—I hate lack of autonomy to choose what to work on, in a very broad sense. Work is nice, jobs are fucking awful.

This x1000. You've basically described my dream lifestyle. It does seem indeed very hard to achieve without being retired, but I feel like for those making good money in tech it should be at least partially achievable, through a combination of proper money management, relocation to low cost of living area, and transitioning to freelance/consulting. Easier said than done but certainly not impossible .

I worked outdoors for ten years of summers and now I have worked ten years indoors as a programmer. I often fantasize about going back outdoors again. What I miss most is how easy it is to start and stop working. Starting your workday is as easy as pulling on your boots and stepping out of the truck. You don't need to mentally reorient yourself and focus as you do when working with source code. A thirty minute break is meaningful. It means sitting in the shade, having a friendly chat, maybe taking a quick nap. Getting back in the truck at the end of the day feels great and feels conclusive. After programming, it takes me an hour or more to leave the mental state of work and to feel normal again. I work from home, but the mental commute still adds to my workday.

I don't disagree exactly, but cannot help but think focus and all that is requisite to successfully avoiding sawing off your thumb, and so forth.

My dad was a carpenter, and I always went out of my way to not distract or surprise him when he was working with power tools.

Besides, a lot of carpentry requires planning and precision, and there is no undo button...

You ( and many people, including me ) are attracted to the romanticized version of what you think such job is.

There are valid reasons for this, anyone who works with software for a while feels that he works so much but never made something you could actually touch and always has to explain to people the real value of his work because it's not obvious for the "common folk" ( even your boss ). So, making a deck is a physical, obvious and long lasting thing you can be proud of and easily pointed out when you seek for approval/praise ( everyone wants/needs that, some more than others )

I know all jobs are jobs, and all work is work, and I have no plans to bail on my software job for another field. But like you mention, the tangible, physical, lasting product of your efforts is an attractive concept.

That's probably the reason I like to make stuff in my spare time, and why I prefer to show that stuff off rather than talk about my work most of the time. I don't have to explain why my work is interesting or important. Even if the stuff I make isn't 'important', people can appreciate a finished physical thing and the work that went into it, and I can dive into details about how I made it and the choices I made.

I heard once, people who have intellectual jobs tend to have physical hobbies. People who have physical jobs tend to have intellectual hobbies. It seems to be pretty accurate.

I think it’s only common for male knowledge workers. American culture brainwashes men into believing that they are less manly if they don’t do physical work, and men who internalize that message feel emasculated by their desk jobs. They don’t realize that their dissatisfaction is not an intrinsic facet of the human condition but an artifact of very specific cultural prejudices.

Women often complain about their office jobs too, but you rarely see them fantasizing about being able to swing a hammer for a living because they weren’t subject to the same cultural programming.

I'm not sure about that, Fred Flintstone made a big deal about wanting an office job.

How much of that was because in that context "office job" meant "management" which in turn implies being in a position of leadership as opposed to under someone else?

Men and women both have a biological need to move and use their bodies. How we express our needs (eg swinging a hammer) is decided by culture, but the need is not.

I got to experience some unexpected culture shock earlier this year taking a vacation to SF from a medium-sized city in the midwest (to probably no surprise to you reading this comment). Having forgot my clothes on the trip I got to tour all of SF for a week in cheap business casual clothing I kept on after work, which was an experience. Lovely city but damn, I had a target on my back looking like a basic tourist so I bought some more appropriate clothing and tried my best to fit in. Got home after the trip made me want to take an extra vacation day just to drink cheap beer, stare at the cows, and listen to sports on the radio.

Sorry for the mostly irrelevant story, but what I'm trying to say is I think this is probably a pretty common thing even outside of white collar big city folk culture.

I loved this part: Being mediocre is turning down the combat difficulty on Red Dead so you can play through the game. It’s a resistance to hyper-optimization; the “courage to be ordinary”.

I wholeheartedly agreed with this point as soon as I read it. I adapted this approach while building DarwinMail [1].

There have been countless email & Twitter suggestions for DarwinMail. I've always listened and asked questions until I understood what what the users core message was. However, I do not always implement what has been asked.

I believe in some 'truths' when it comes to building your product while following a basic approach;

1. Users are the core of any business.

2. The feedback you receive from users is the most valuable feedback you will receive on your product as they are the ones actually using your product.

3. You do not have to implement everything your users ask for.

Even though you may not do everything your users ask for, that does not mean you are not listening.

I believe you need to keep your features simple and easy to understand.

Being basic reminds me of the saying 'Slow is smooth and smooth is fast'.

To me that is one of the most important truths when it comes to life and business.

[1] https://www.DarwinMail.app

“A person who thinks all the time has nothing to think about except thoughts. So he loses touch with Reality, and lives in a world of illusion.” -Alan Watts

Whenever I feel this way (and I do feel this way more than I care to admit), it's usually due to mental fatigue from extended periods of mental exertion. I've found that stepping away from high intensity thinking for a few weeks every six months or so helps me reset. A complete "information lobotomy" as the author suggests, may be overcompensation...

This is so personal it's beyond reproach, for decency’s sake. On the other hand, it could be overwrought romanticism that speaks to nothing but existential crisis.

Who doesn’t want to be a farmer, rising at 3am to be alone with your thoughts and hot coffee, tending the fields that feed a nation, while the sun rises, signalling: this is creation; I’m driving the world! The answer is probably: farmers, who would happily say “fuck right off” to 3am starts day after day sucking dust and hoping you can keep your margins, the equipment doesn’t break, and the weather holds.

I think the angst of the writing wants to push through to something more than analyzing the pedestrian, but have the ultimate enlightenment being cool with coming back to embrace the pedestrian. Ish.

I’m reminded of a couple story closings:

[1] Siddhartha listened. He was now nothing but a listener, completely concentrated on listening, completely empty, he felt, that he had now finished learning to listen. Often before, he had heard all this, these many voices in the river, today it sounded new. Already, he could no longer tell the many voices apart, not the happy ones from the weeping ones, not the ones of children from those of men, they all belonged together, the lamentation of yearning and the laughter of the knowledgeable one, the scream of rage and the moaning of the dying ones, everything was one, everything was intertwined and connected, entangled a thousand times. And everything together, all voices, all goals, all yearning, all suffering, all pleasure, all that was good and evil, all of this together was the world. All of it together was the flow of events, was the music of life. And when Siddhartha was listening attentively to this river, this song of a thousand voices, when he neither listened to the suffering nor the laughter, when he did not tie his soul to any particular voice and submerged his self into it, but when he heard them all, perceived the whole, the oneness, then the great song of the thousand voices consisted of a single word, which was Om: the perfection.

[2] https://youtu.be/OsDnrFBpsBk

—-

[1] Siddhartha, Hermann Hesse

[2] A River Runs Through It. Robert Redford/Norman Maclean

I definitely see this. There's a brand of clothing for workers that has become fashionable among trendy young people. I see people walking around with a hammer loop who I doubt have ever used a hammer.

I really liked this piece. I especially enjoyed the thinking<--->tan analogy.

"Intellectualism as signal for (possibly (likely!) contagious) unluck" is an unfortunate, but I think real, phenomenon.

If this article resonated with me any more strongly, I'd shatter like a wine glass.

I love living on the West Coast and working in tech, and I fully appreciate the many levels of privilege it affords me. Likewise, I've learned a ton and gained countless hours of recreation from Reddit and the other social aggregators. At the same time, there is something unhealthy and unbalanced about it all.

Reddit's never-ending stream of upvoted videos is a machine for showing me the best and worst of humanity. That's enriching and often hilarious. But those best videos often leave me feeling like I can't compete. Why should I practice a little guitar if I'm never going to be as good as that guy playing "While My Guitar Gently Weeps" on a ukelele? The videos of mishaps aren't any better. Anytime a video of someone doing something foolish gets a million views, I get a little more self-conscious.

It reminds me of that traumatic transition in middle school when I first became really aware of social pressure and fitting in. Because I wasn't used to this signal, the gain was really high and I was constantly paralyzed by self-consciousness. The Internet is that times a million, forever.

I used to feel good about my even mediocre accomplishments because I lived in a world where I wasn't constantly surrounded by the world's best X for all possible X. I'd like to get back to that state, but it's really hard to turn off that level of self awareness. Deliberately choosing to be unaware is not the same as actually being unaware. It's another layer on top when the goal is to strip off the inteceding layer. I can't go back to before ironic-detachment post-modernism. The best I can hope for is a "New Sincerity" post-post-modernism, which isn't the same.

The part about degeneracy touches a nerve too. I don't know if I've ever tried to articulate this properly, but today's progressive liberal culture is possibly the most confining culture I've ever lived in. In many ways it feels like a neo-Victorian society where the expectation to follow the norms is high and the price for the slightest transgression is even higher.

The values it adopts are strictly better than Victorian times and many of the places I grew up in the South. Equality for people of all genders, races, ability, orientations, etc. Care for the environment. Intolerance of sexual harrassment or violence of any kind. These are good values.

But the way progressive culture enforces those values socially is pretty intense. There seems to be little room for human error, personal growth, or misinterpretation. A slip of the tongue can easily summon a career-ending mob on Twitter. (Or, at least, it seems that way.) If I tell a joke, is that a micro-aggression? If I don't tell a joke, is my seriousness itself another micro-aggression? While the laws are just, the penalties associated with breaking them are Draconian.

Maybe it's supposed to feel this way for me now. I'm straight, male, white, able, and middle class. Perhaps I felt freer in my youth because I was in a position of implicit power where there were fewer consequences if I did or said some dumb shit that hurt someone else. And maybe I have to be more careful now because that power imbalance is being restored.

But as someone who has always strived to not be racist, sexist, homophobic, etc., someone who has always had been sensitive to the discomfort of others and tried to not hurt people, it's kind of a bummer being in a culture that makes me feel even more cautious than I already naturally did. Meanwhile, there's still apparently no shortage of actual fascist, racist, sexual predator asshats out there who clearly couldn't care less about liberal culture.

It feels like we're policing ourselves to the point of madness when we weren't the problem in the first place.

> These are good values. But the way progressive culture enforces those values socially is pretty intense.

I hadn't drawn this delineation before, but I find it apt. I grew up Asian in the Midwest and while I like progressive values here, I do miss how people there tried to be _neighborly_, even if they held opposing values. I was a kid in the suburbs, so maybe I only saw the softer side, but that doesn't stop me from admiring it and hoping to emulate that particular virtue.

> I do miss how people there tried to be _neighborly_

Yes, there's a certain presumption of goodwill that seems to be lacking. I think of it as "tolerance" in the engineering sense — the idea that we each need to give a little more than 50% in an interaction to account for some slippage and human error.

I do believe that micro-aggressions are a real thing, that small-magnitude interactions that are consistently in a negative direction can add up to a large negative effect. But focusing on those makes it hard to gracefully accommodate the normal noise and random error in humanity. If we aren't also tracking the "micro-benefiencies", then it paints everyone who ever makes a mistake (which is all of us) as deliberately malicious.

"Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience." -C. S. Lewis

> Maybe it's supposed to feel this way for me now.

No, it's not supposed to feel this way. It's not ok to go oppressing people without cause just because one can invent a justification describing them as powerful.

I think it's meaningful to draw another line between the kind of casual value enforcement you see in day to day life (which, in my experience, is generally reasonable and mild) and the enforcement you see by zealot communities online (which is then amplified by 24/7 digital publishers and social media aggregators responding to evident market demand for divisive content). This model certainly applies to the left, but there are pretty obvious parallels on the right as well.

Anyway, the "policing to madness" phenomenon can be more clearly understood as highly reactive online behavior by true believers who tie their entire identity to promoting their belief system. For the most part, I haven't seen this kind of behavior permeate daily life. The exceptions to that rule are generally violent and depressing, but they aren't the norm.

Which is to say, I live right in the center of lefty-values America and see behavior every day that would get people cancelled on Twitter. But in the real world people have their feelings, talk it out, and try to move on. People get to screw up, get to be hurt, get to have really different opinions about heavy topics, and get to work through it together. And it more or less just works. Most people don't want to fight with the people around them so they figure out how to get along.

Like everyone else, I'm worried about the jungle rules of online engagement becoming part of meatspace culture, but I don't believe we're going that direction. And while I have serious problems with the "public sacrifice" model of social good the digital jungle has embraced, I don't believe that's Coming To An HR Department Near You™️ either.

"A slip of the tongue can easily summon a career-ending mob on Twitter. (Or, at least, it seems that way.)"

I understand this concern and I ask you instead- how common is this realistically? How much are we potentially following how things feel rather than how they really are? Can we justify how we feel with genuine data about our environment?

For example, worrying about a microaggressive joke. Do we have evidence that justifies this worry (ie. this specific joke or a joke similar to this has offended someone)?

"But the way progressive culture enforces those values socially is pretty intense. There seems to be little room for human error, personal growth, or misinterpretation."

I feel this way about 'normal' culture a lot of the time, honestly, it's just so normalized that no one really notices it without coming off as 'too sensitive', which is itself a cultural enforcement of allowing cultural enforcement. "Progressive culture" seems too harsh because it hasn't been internalized the way "normal" culture has, and so adaptation to a new paradigm requires peer correction. For peer correction in "normal" culture look at schoolyard bullying and children taking on the bigotry of their parents.

> how common is this realistically?

I don't know, hence the parenthetical. It's an interesting question about how many doors the police need to actually pound on before sufficient self-policing kicks in that they don't have to anymore.

I know for me personally, because I am very sensitive to hurting people's feelings, I am hyper-vigilant about this. Whether the odds of it happening are rare or not, my subjective emotional experience is that I worry about it, which in turn leads me to be a little less of myself.

> "Progressive culture" seems too harsh because it hasn't been internalized the way "normal" culture has, and so adaptation to a new paradigm requires peer correction.

I agree with this, strongly. If you want to move a culture from X to Y, you have to sort of aim for some point past Y and do a bunch of awkward deliberate calling out when people aren't moving in the right direction. There are so many inertial forces against change that it takes something like that to make any progress.

So, in general, I try not to get too worried about how progressive culture makes me uncomfortable. It's supposed to. Growth and progress is always uncomfortable, both at the individual and collective levels.

Hey, I like your writing.

You are the world's best X, for X equal to you.

Thank you! :D

To me, saying someone is “basic” is another way of saying they’re living the unexamined life. It’s an epithet that probably doesn’t apply to anyone 100% and probably everyone at least a little bit

It is not the thinking that is the problem, it is the constant need to be productive and for thoughts to have value somehow. There are plenty of people who can think about stuff just for the pleasure of it. I guess living in a hyper competitive place like San Francisco would kill some of that "doing something purely for the joy of it" mentality.

Remember, your capacity for innovation can be optimized, but will always be finite. Apply your capacity to where the cost/benefit is optimized.

I mentioned this article to my friend Michael who is currently hosting me at his farm in Umbria, and this was his reply:

"Interesting yes, too much of anything dulls the mind, even the best things can jade and wane if overindulged in.

One hour outside tying up tomato vines, weeding or watering balances out 10 trading memes on FB or watching YouTube tutorials, reading about myriad things as long as they are well written.

We need and crave variety, novelty and balance, while the culture nudges us towards monomania, tunnel thinking and hyper-specialisation, narrow casting in the data stream, all trees, no forest. To zoom back out you need to let go of forward motion (or better, our notion of it) and be willing to stop using our will power for a few moments and see what's behind our ego's prideful play for perfection or power.

Basic thinking is a cool concept.

Unwinding complexity, seeking simpler, more elegantly energetic solutions to life's challenges, first to survive then to transform quantity into quality."

Standing at a crossroad in my life right now, your friend Michael has some really insightful quotes. Thank you.

It's this new fangled meaning of basic. I have to accept it as given, but I sort of find it aggravating, maybe because I think of basic as a synonym of foundational or elementary. In the context of mathematics, calling something basic, foundational, or elementary needn't mean simplistic, stupid, or something for young children. People can add and subtract without grasping number theory. But again, just me complaining about you people's neologisms, and how basic is that?

I think what we as programmers or more largely knowledge workers miss is doing something which is physical and involves direct contact. Typing away on a computer in a room with dozens of others with the him of white noise is far off from that kind of experience. I like to cook, the experience of touching produce, cutting and cooking is a uniquely human experience. So, yeah get a hobby which allows you to do that. Disconnect and recharge.

I equate “basic” as a label to someone I simply find so in-interesting or dull in their personal persists or interests that I’m uncomfortable being around them. Moreso, I’m acknowledging I’m incompatible with them, to me they are “basic” in that I don’t seem to stretch my thought process around them. To others they might be interesting, but I’m not going to lie to myself or others.

thankfully the shift he points out with tan/work/leisure is happening and everyone now "works" as influencer on social media being the most basic as possible. By the time the author archives his desired basicnes as a status symbol, basicnes will already be repurpose to mean that you toil all day with basic social media influencing.

Listen to yourselves. Look at what you're upvoting. Is this community reaching peak arrogance?

It can be rephrased as "We're so fucking smart we need to take steps to dumb ourselves down".

I'm prepared for the downvotes. But come on. Really?

That's not what it is about, at all.

It is, perhaps, quite telling that you would reach that conclusion to a post that ponders whether striving to perform your very best every inch of your life really is the utopia.

Being "smart" wasn't even part of the equation yet you somehow ended up there.

I'll be honest, I interpreted it the same way.

>a post that ponders whether striving to perform your very best every inch of your life really is the utopia.

I can't read it that way because it's not how I operate. I don't identify as a member of the "front row"[0] even though I am middle to upper middle class. All of the things identified as "mediocre" and implicitly compared against are normal to me.

There's an entire caste of Americans that went to HYPSM+ and got 2300's on their SATs and feel stifled by Bay culture. I think they are supremely out of touch.

[0] https://www.firstthings.com/article/2019/06/back-row-america

Instead of chasing the latest one-dimensional solution (or anti-solution) to The Good Life, just seek balance. Everyone needs creative space, and everyone needs something in their life that feels truly challenging. But everyone also needs meditative breaks from mental activity, and time spent in nature, and time building relationships, and time doing things that are dumb and fun and useless.

This seems to be a common theme in California (at least, SF and LA): take something good - creativity, progress, art - and fetishize it until it becomes a pathology. The problem is not with any of these things - they're good; great, even! - the problem is with seeing one single dimension of life as The End-All. That is always going to end up being unhealthy, no matter what it is.

So you advocate a middle path?

I'm not sure what you mean by that; but I think people like this author fantasize about extreme life changes when one of their core needs as a human isn't being met. It's generally better to identify and satisfy that need, instead of taking a huge leap in the opposite of your current direction.

It's easy to give vague advice though, and the more vague it is the less actionable it tends to be. These "huge leaps" can be seen as a counterpoint to that, where people are trying to do something, and anything less extreme won't really feel like something -- it won't feel like a life-changing event.

An ironic trend among some of the Bay Area upper-middle class is taking balance itself and fetishizing it. So instead of meditating for 20 minutes at home, we have 10-day silent Vipassana meditation retreats where you can't talk or touch anything. Instead of walking to the store once in a while to get some exercise, people bike 50 miles in and 50 miles back to work. Instead of having a pet, people raise a menagerie.

Sometimes I think Californians should just own it and admit that this is an extreme place. Even when we do balance, we do it by switching up the obsession weekly.

It's not just california man.

I live in Wisconsin, and a friend just got back from his 2 week trip to some kind of shaman in a forest in South America somewhere. Complete with the no talking, no touching, throw away worldly concerns, giant picnic pack family fun size BS package.

You keep using that word. I dunno think it means what you think it means.

Walking to the store “once in a while” is basically zero exercise. That’s an awful example of healthy moderation.

It's more than many many Americans get.

All you need is 30 minutes of getting your heart rate up, 5 days a week. If you walk to the store 2-3 times a week, take a hike on the weekends, and jog around the block a few times on the off days, you're there.

It seems as if this person is just discovering old fashioned American anti-intellectualism (unintentionally ironically presented in an intellectual wrapper).

There's a reason beyond laziness that many American's look down on typical urban, liberal arts thought and discussion, and it's close to what this post posits: tribalism and in/out group signalling. The difference is that the author sees being "basic" as a signal that one is wealthy enough not to have to work creatively for a living, and the historical practitioners of anti-intellectualism are signalling a disdain for productionless thought.

The other reason is that a typical urban, liberat arts thought and discussion seems to have deteriorated greatly in the age of Internet. Or maybe lack of filtering through time and publishers just allowed for the usual quality to surface.

Either way, anti-intellectualism is looking a little better every time an intellectual tweets.

Eh, there's more to it than this. 'Basic' is also the perspective that we're really just animals working to survive. That we're all just dipshits cluttering up the world while we attempt to assemble some kind of respectable way of living. No cynicism here - I feel a real kinship to others when I'm in this mood, rather than caught up in high-mindedness - which can be fun, too, of course.

I think the fact that she terms it 'basic' rather than 'anti-intellectual' makes it less reactionary - a baseline humanity that joins all of us. I think even the term 'American anti-intellectualism' is a misnomer, considering that ancient figures such as Jesus or Buddha were in this vein - preferring terse wisdom to chains of detailed jargon. They spoke in 'basic', in a way.

>There's a reason beyond laziness that many American's look down on typical urban, liberal arts thought and discussion

Yes, its dismal historical lows...

It's the "X-Class" from Paul Fussell's classic book _Class: A Guide Through the American Status System_ retooled for the present day.

https://www.amazon.com/Class-Through-American-Status-System/...

In before there's a picture of a girl with one arm in the air with short pants on butt-facing-camera and a rake in the other arm.

Please don't do this here.

The desire to avoid the "tan back stigma" of having to think to make money has already been satisfied by snooty literature. Snooty thinking is thinking that requires a smart brain but has no economic value. If you want to show that you're smart, and you also want to show that you don't need to make money, you can produce opinions on 13th century literature or whatever else you like. So, in a sense the author's prophecy has already come to pass.

I suspect this take is as snooty as the caricature you are drawing.

Accusations of elitism from people who think they're better than everyone else are a weird feature of modern culture. I think it's somehow historically related to Calvinism (the best at being of service are the saved, not the best at being smart, or the best at asking questions.)

It's virtuous not to think too much, it means you aren't wasting time on things other than salvation (or making money.) Just do the obvious thing. Whatever everybody else is doing. Do it harder, though.

The worst existential accusation that anyone could levy against the intellectual elite would be that they're engaging in the conspicuous consumption of brain time, especially so given all the fun that's made of "McMansions" and other forms of conspicuous consumption. It's probably not true of everybody, but I wonder how many people would care about whether or not they were philistines if you took away any chance of getting recognized for having good culture.

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