Coffee Is Hard

Not to sound too much like a hippie, either, but I learned (actually after having a kid as well) that when people talked about enjoying the ride, that's what they were talking about - the tedious stuff.

I always assumed it meant travel more and look for adventure, but I have come to understand that 'enjoying the ride' in your life, not always just pursuing some next thing is about enjoying the tedium.

Some of my favorite memories of my young children is the time we spent washing dishes together or watching them vacuum up the rugs and chase the cat with the broom.

It's all about enjoying the ride, man.

"But most days, if you’re aware enough to give yourself a choice, you can choose to look differently at this fat, dead-eyed, over-made-up lady who just screamed at her kid in the checkout line. Maybe she’s not usually like this. Maybe she’s been up three straight nights holding the hand of a husband who is dying of bone cancer. Or maybe this very lady is the low-wage clerk at the motor vehicle department, who just yesterday helped your spouse resolve a horrific, infuriating, red-tape problem through some small act of bureaucratic kindness. Of course, none of this is likely, but it’s also not impossible. It just depends what you want to consider. If you’re automatically sure that you know what reality is, and you are operating on your default setting, then you, like me, probably won’t consider possibilities that aren’t annoying and miserable. But if you really learn how to pay attention, then you will know there are other options. It will actually be within your power to experience a crowded, hot, slow, consumer-hell type situation as not only meaningful, but sacred, on fire with the same force that made the stars: love, fellowship, the mystical oneness of all things deep down." -- David Foster Wallace, This is Water

https://fs.blog/2012/04/david-foster-wallace-this-is-water/

I'm a fan of meditation and mind body awareness. I think that digging a ditch can a quite interesting because, while somewhat repetitive, it also involves variation and the challenge putting your entire body into the activity. Even dish washing or sweeping involves quite a bit of integrating intention and the use of the body.

All that said, I don't think you can say this is just a question of attitude. Some activities just inherently suck - 19th factory jobs, manual data entry and things of this sort can't be redeemed by attitude. Indeed, it's probably better to hate jobs like that than to think of them as a reasonable place for a human being to end up.

When I feel myself lapsing into grumpiness at the mundane nature of everyday life I sometimes manage to help myself by attempting to picture the theoretical ideal life I am not living, and then reflecting on the absurdity of wishing things were different. Should it involve: not having to do boring tasks? Being a bit taller, funnier and better looking? Being super rich? Being the most powerful person on earth? Being an omniscient, transcendental super-being, free of time and space, able to manipulate entire galaxies on a whim?

Everyone is missing out on something; everyone is a prisoner of circumstance.

I agree with your point that it's all about perspective, but you can easily spin it negatively.

"Life is suffering" -Buddha

"Tedium is the worst pain" -Grendel

I realize that first quote is meant to be encouraging, but you can take it at face value to mean what it is: most of life sucks.

Pessimism and optimism are choices we make on how to interpret reality based on our experiences. This might sound like some feel-good comment that you can easily just see things better if you try to frame it differently but it's not. I am profoundly cynical and genuinely believe the world would be a better place if more people would replace their unfounded optimism with skepticism. Sometimes there really isn't a reason to be optimistic other than a desire to feel better about the situation.

As a sidenote, I find that being overly tired or stressed makes it far more difficult for me to appreciate/enjoy the miracle of the everyday quotidian.

Part of not being bored is to ensure you are "present", which is a whole lot easier when you're well rested.

Yes! There's a quote that resonated with me:

"Some people do the dishes to make them clean. Some people do the dishes to do the dishes."

Valuing the experience that is happening, whatever it may be, has power.

That's a totally backwards take. Most of these things are modern labor-saving devices that replaced even worse drudgery. Sweeping takes longer than vacuuming. Washing dishes by hand takes longer than a dishwasher -- especially if you don't have unlimited running water, or dish detergent, or if you need to start a fire to get hot water. Ancient Romans didn't have to deal with rush hour traffic, but research says their commutes were just as long as ours.

To put it another way: we used to required half of all human beings to attend to household tasks. That setup wasn't put into place because of malice, it was there by necessity. Managing a household used to take as much effort and thought as running a small business does today. Modernity has saved us from that.

I think I've read several studies that indicate hunter gatherers worked less than agrarian societies. However, agrarian societies are better at producing predictable abundance of food, so they outpace hunters by far. I will admit that hunting is incredibly fun. I do think we lost something as a trade-off when we moved to agrarian/industrial societies.

I'd imagine, if it was really early hunter gatherers, it would go more like "hungry, caught prey, ate, happy!". Way more impulsive responses. Throw in some "starving, I wish food was more stable, even if tedious". Anything after agriculture would include tedious tasks like tending to the crops and cleaning.

I’ve been doing woodworking with just hand tools and wow, some tasks just take waaaaaay longer

They have their version of mundane tasks.

Me too!

If I'm going to clean, I might as well work towards being amazing at it.

Same tetris with the dishwasher too as well as trying to find the correct amount of detergent to use per load over a period of time with different loads and soil levels.

Sad I know!

I think the trick here is that by trying to be ever better at a chore you stop filing it mentally as "obstacle in the way of a target I'm trying to reach" and instead as a target in its own right.

The distinction is fairly small but at least for me personally it makes a gigantic difference in how much I like doing a task. If I'm woodworking I generally loathe sanding, it's repetitive, tiring, and dusty. But if I see the sanding as its own mini project I can spend hours getting it perfect.

Lol — I always joke with my partner (an artist) about how much chaos he brings when he loads the dishwasher.

There’s a proper way!! I swear it!

I do a sort of thing like that but it's more in the speed running genre.

How fast can I do a reasonably good job at this, time starts now.

Alternatively, Camus thought too much and pushed boulders too little. :)

http://existentialcomics.com/comic/301

There's a nice phrase in Chinese: 过日子, literally "passing the days". It also has that connotation of being content with a regular life, wanting nothing special. The phrase is also extended into several other usages (thriftiness, etc), but that's the heart of it.

You say "makes life enjoyable", but I read "Stockholm syndrome". To me, it's a kind of mind hacking that I'm both unable to do and, deep inside, feel is somehow "wrong".

> I know that after flossing, I'm good to go to bed.

I know that when I'm tired and done for the day, I'm good to go to bed. Flossing is a maintenance chore that's needed only because our teeth aren't good enough (and can't be made good enough, yet) to not need it.

> I know when I'm driving my car that I won't get interrupted and I can wander with my thoughts.

If I were in that situation, I'd prefer to stop driving to work (by e.g. going remote, or relocating), but I'd also want to have an uninterrupted time for being with my thoughts anyway, perhaps explicitly scheduled and negotiated with my S.O.

Etc. Now, I'm not really criticizing you as much as I envy you - my life would be happier if I could hack my brain to see the tedium as something worthwhile, instead of doing my best to minimize its amount and impact on my life.

I've been working from home for the past year, after previously taking the bus to work downtown. It's mostly an improvement, but I do miss the commute—especially when I'd go early in the morning and get off the "wrong" stop to walk across the river, through a riverside park, back across the river, and still be the first one in the office. I really miss that.

The afternoon commute with the traffic jams, buses packed with students, noise... nope, never missed that.

Hi doppelganger!

In my house the chore division has me doing the kitchen after the kids are in bed. I love optimizing and getting everything in, but in the right configuration so it also all gets clean. I get annoyed when my wife starts loading the dishes early, because the space isn't managed perfectly, and I don't get my little zen-zing of 'I had a lot, and I wasn't sure it would work out, but it all fit'.

Plus, with Bluetooth, I no longer get my headphone cord caught on the dishwasher's rack! I listen to podcasts at 3x, and learn so much while getting a feeling of satisfaction for a job well done.

Having money and spending it to make other people do your boring stuff is a pretty effective life optimization. Cleaning, laundry, cooking, lawn care, car maintenance—even driving—can all be bought, so you barely have to do any of it again, if you've got money. You can—and most with means do, I think—just make almost any of this "this is what life mostly is" boring crap go away, unless you actually enjoy it more than what you might be doing instead.

Making the tedious parts of raising a kid go away is a lot more expensive than making the normal adult boring stuff go away, though. Also if you're not fairly damn rich (i.e. rich enough not to need a real job) the boring parts will be most of the time you spend with your kids by a large margin, so you'll be reluctant to outsource that even if you can afford to. That's even more true if you're not paying to have the rest of your boring stuff done by someone else ("sorry honey, maybe we can play blocks later, I'm cooking dinner because if I don't we won't, you know, have any" but then later it's bath time then story and bed and maybe you squeeze in 10min of blocks if you're lucky)

Take a look for yourself:

https://gamasutra.com/view/news/300313/Scribblenauts_dev_sha...

I recall beating most of the levels with just a jetpack.

Wow, that was a ride. I could think of worse things to do in a Friday night than read that for the past three hours. Thanks for linking. I'm now much more interested in reading the book and the rest of his blog.

It's the same plot to “And Then I Thought I Was A Fish”

Sounds like it could make for a fun variation on the text adventure, where having stuff go wrong is at least as amusing as actually solving puzzles.

Nuclear Throne is the best example of a solid game made in Game Maker that comes to my mind.

Looks like Spelunky, Undertale, and Hyper Light Drifter were as well.

Construct is great for simple games like this and is pretty intuitive.

I lately got a buzz to play some detective adventures, which predictably had me combing through the lists of adventures on several sites. As a result, I now have a lament that there doesn't seem to be an engine for creating graphical adventures as easily as text ones: with lots of ready-made images that could be put in the proper order for the game. Not even with much interactivity, since something like HTML with hyperlink trees of choices would likely be more humane than point-and-click pixel hunting.

Though, maybe Adventure Game Studio and free images do the trick, dunno.

Specifically, I myself would play games that are set in the same city if the city was big and detailed enough. Just let the games be something more than the hyper-casual churn of ‘question the witnesses, look for evidence, name the perpetrator.’

SCUMM was used by Lucasfilm's adventures; its name is an abbreviation of Scripting Utility For Maniac Mansion.

Sierra's graphic adventure games used their own toolkit called AGI, which stood for Adventure Game Interpreter. http://www.agidev.com

Ron Gilbert who wrote SCUMM has a blog. It’s kinda fun

https://grumpygamer.com/about

He also wrote a new adventure game and blogged about its development

https://blog.thimbleweedpark.com/

For python, check out pygame. It's outdated and only works with 2.7, but I think it can be installed with apt on Ubuntu and will teach the basics like rendering loops, frames, etc.

I can’t speak for the author, but one reason not to use data for logic is that you’ll end up building a (difficult to use, buggy) programming language in your schema. And if you’re going to do that, why not just use a programming language, which is a lovely way to encode logic?

I would turn the question around on you: why would you put this in data? If you have too much boilerplate, just refactor your code.

LucasArts had a very strong bent towards not putting you in a fail state.

My understanding is that Sierra was intending to be more fair as time went on, but they had a bias against playtesting so there were still some big goofs that got through.

I think all of the first 5 KQ games had ways to lose items that would later be needed to win.

KQ VI had a branching path and if you picked the "easy" branch you were unlikely to end up in a very unwinnable state, but there was no indication at the time of the branch that you were doing so (IIRC you were about to be burned alive and you could either use some maid's clothes to put out the fire, destroying the clothes, or cast a spell that required boiling some water, using up some component). With a hint-book it took me several attempts to make it through the "hard" path.

Definitely by later (early Windows) games, this is true. Neverhood was a very fun one where it was advertised that there was only one way to die. And that was marked, "don't do this, you will die".

Wow, I totally skimmed over that.

If you download it from the wrong mirror..

> Life is not a competition for whose job is hardest

I think the author agrees, and wrote the article mostly as a response to people who think it is.

> no one on Hacker News would win it.

That might be true, but it doesn’t seem like a thing you could know.

trouble's coming!

I'm curious why people would have voted this person's comment down, simply for a mistake. Seems sort of harsh to do that to someone's reputation simply for a mistake.

Oo. Thx.