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Comment by _bxg1 | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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.

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