Comment by christiansakai | Hacker News Reader

Comment by christiansakai | Hacker News Reader

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For myself. This is what I've been doing and working for me.

From the outside, generally, stay away or just observe from far away:

- People who post political/religious/racial comments every 5 mins or so on social media, whether their view aligns with yours or not

- People who are too passionate about one thing

- People who don't keep their identity small in public, be it digital or real life

- People who have black and white thinking

- Social media

From the inside:

- Exercise (I do Karate)

- Have other creativity outlet (I do Aquascape, play electric guitar, bass, and sing, aside from programming)

- Read a lot various subjects, anything that spike your curiosity (I read programming books, theological books, finance, aquascaping, music, philosophy, economy)

- Have some other non thinking hobbies occasionally (I play games, go out with my spouse, watch movies)

- Help your communities (I am quite active to my church)

I still need to work on these:

- Eat healthier food

- Have more consistent sleep cycle

Generally if I have to sum it. Keep your public identity small, but keep your private identity large. You can definitely tell I grew up in Asia.

> - People who are too passionate about one thing

People who are passionate about something are generally interesting people. They know the obscure ins and outs of the thing they are passionate about. You can learn a lot from such people. At least, that's what I always felt.

I’m not sure if you add a point or misunderstood but OP said: “people who are -Too- passionate about one thing”.

OP is only talking about people who are too involved in what they are doing, and not people with a lot of passion, and so this having bad effects on their life with neglecting the other important part of their life.

If it’s to be work by being workalcolic, video games, music... and being so involved that kids, family, and friends are neglected. To education when they are in high school or college and playing video games which I did myself, and their future is neglected.

I also saw first hand parents loving so much their job and their career that they were neglecting their children to the point where their kids were starting to show warnings and sometimes alarming behaviors.

Also as a side note we can be strongly passionate because of something outside being really negative in our lives so our hobby or anything is our way to escape that and do something for ourselves. Now that can be good. But. We should remind ourselves in this case that the long term solution will be to address the problem first hand and not to escape it even more, if it’s to hobbies, work, or anything.

Thanks for clarifying. Indeed this is what I meant. I probably should use the word “overly” instead of “too” here to make it clearer.

I guess you should be a little selective about what the thing is. I've got friends into vintage sports cars and cartooning who are cool. Anything along the lines of extreme politics I'd avoid.

Amen. I’ll take a conversation with a head over heels weirdo over anyone considered normal any day of the week.

There seem to be stark contrasts in this regard, depending on your personality (for obvious reasons, depending on how the person comports with your ideals): I find Alex Honnold to be one of the most fascinating humans ever and, say, the pope to be one of the least. Obviously many would disagree with me. Both are very singularly focussed individuals.

Can you explain more about keeping your public identity small but your private identity large?

Does that just mean not trying to do your own personal branding so people can find you on the internet? Or is it more about "everyone that I care about, aka local people, should know about me - that's my private identity".

I'm curious, as an American born and someone who's continually trying to learn about other cultures.

If this is about personal branding related to your business, yes you can keep your public identity large, but strictly only about that. Let's say you are a musician, then yeah just promote yourself as a musician, music you write, instruments that you play, but stop there. Don't tell people anything about your private life, your politics, your religion, etc. Not to say that people shouldn't do that per se, but this comment is more about how to keep your sanity and your inner peace.

For everyone that you care about and if your care is reciprocated, I think no matter how small you try to keep your identity, they'll just still be enamored by it.

I myself try to generally keep my identity small, both in public/digital space and within my friends, but yeah my friend can't help but still know who I really am, what food that I like, what music that I like, just as I can't help but to know who they really are. It is the result of close proximity in relationship. But this results in more organic and more understanding. My friends don't judge me purely black and white, and I don't judge them purely black and white either.

This reads as "erase the parts of yourself that might make the mainstream uncomfortable." What you're writing seems very much to distill down to not discomfiting a default-white, default-male, default-affluent worldview, because it might make you feel bad when people get mad at you for existing.

Care to refine your position?

I don't see how you concluded that. I don't see why you would bring white males into this, though it seems like a sensitive topic for you.

> Make people mad at you for existing.

You brought this up, not the commenter.

Commenter: > Don't tell people anything about your private life, your politics, your religion, etc

Does not say to keep a specific belief private, but in general practice. This helps avoid conflict with people who disagree, as well as deter people looking for a point to drag you down for.

And the above quote is when it comes to personal branding in a business - I believe I don't need to elaborate on why you shouldn't talk politics with a client, as well as keep your personal life separate from business.

The latter half of the comment reveals that that they simply prefer to keep their personal details to themself. To do so digitally makes sense, considering how often it is for people's data to be sold. In-person, the commenter does not practice this extremely because their friends inevitably get to know them better, and the commenter gets to know said friends.

If anything, why don't you elaborate on your interpretation?

I was born in Asia and grew up there, so sorry I am not fully qualified to answer this, nor do I understand. I did grew up as a racial minority and experienced racial and religious persecution. I can comment on those, but regarding default-white, default-male, default-affluent, I have no comments. Maybe my fellow countrymen/women can vouch.

So, go back to the original topic. The topic is about you wanting to keep your mental health/wealth, sanity, inner peace. In this case, you want to avoid trouble as much as possible. People will bother you for everything, anything. You want to minimize this. In Asia, we prefer to keep the harmony, so to speak. Not saying it is perfect, no system or worldview in this world is perfect. Trade-offs everywhere. When you want to keep the harmony, then individual and group rights already take the second place compared to the majority.

In case you want to challenge the default status quo, the mainstream, then you can no longer keep your mental health healthy. It is already a warfare in your mind. It is a trade off. No war can be won without price. By going against the default status quo, you already signed yourself up to the battlefield, starting from your mind, and then, your body. For people who are oppressed, they never had peace from the start anywhere anytime, so asking this question for them is already a privilege, because they are already at war.

But the topic here is not about that, but about keeping your mental health/wealth. Mental health and wealth is like peace, it is a luxury. Those who have the chance to read the article above and relate to it, are living in luxury already. Peace after all, is the privilege of the victors.

Just want to say that I really appreciated this thoughtful response about tradeoffs. I had a common knee-jerk reaction to your initial post: "Well how convenient, someone who's not in an oppressed group is advising keeping out of politics, which is essentially encouraging the status quo".

It is indeed true, that when you choose to fight the status quo (which there are many valid reasons to do), it makes it much more difficult to keep constant mental peace.

No problem. I appreciate the response.

He just means be a private person jeez.

Don't tweet about your hemorroids.

When I read that, I immediately thought of this article from earlier this year by Tim Ferriss.

https://tim.blog/2020/02/02/reasons-to-not-become-famous/

Having a large and visible private identity has a cost, and I think that post does a great job at illustrating it.

Not OP, but his post reminded me of a Paul Graham article [0] about keeping your identity small.

[0]http://paulgraham.com/identity.html

This is an interesting idea, but I wonder to what extent this view is only possible for people who aren't explicitly persecuted for their identity. How can you keep your "identity" small if it's written on your skin or on your marriage documents? Should these people simply disassociate from their identities?

I think as a general principle it's probably good to minimize your public-facing identity, however, the reductionism and broad generalization make this argument much weaker and misses the point about why people get so upset about identity.

In this age of social media I think this can't be stressed enough.

Apart from the "People who are too passionate about one thing" part, I can 100% agree with you. Over the past few years I've changed from a rather sad person obsessed over topics others would find barely relevant (kids, don't do /g/) to a person that's rather satisfied with his own life. I still care about these previously mentioned topics, but it's not something that'd make me throw insults at someone if they didn't agree with me.

"Throwing insults to anyone who disagrees" and being too passionate about one thing are not necessarily correlated. I can imagine someone being extremely passionate and still respectful.

By being obsessed over a topic I meant that back then I'd take any kind of criticism as a personal attack or just presume that everyone's not educated enough on it, instantly resorting to using "ad hominem" arguments myself. Thankfully, today I'm a completely different person. Being passionate about something is something completely else that I personally consider beautiful in its own way.

I couldn’t tell you grew up in Asia based on that

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