Comment by mattbrewsbytes | Hacker News Reader

Comment by mattbrewsbytes | Hacker News Reader

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Watching 3 hours of TV is perfectly fine. Lean into the binge watching. Do more of it. Find more shows you want to watch. Pile it on, watch so much you get bored and then turn it off. Then maybe just sit there. Maybe that takes a few weeks.

I think there's been some research that professional/thinking jobs can be as taxing on someone as hard labor like construction. Your brain needs time to relax, decompress, and wander. You have a stable job and free time after work to do whatever you want. This is part of being human - your hierarchy of needs is mostly complete, I assume.

Set all of those things aside for now (book, duolingo, web-dev, etc.) Just chill. Don't treat hobbies or recreational activities like work. The interest in them will come back to you naturally. If it doesn't then were you really that interested? Or was there some observation of others falsely creating a desire?

If one of your interests is career related (web-dev), seek out time during your work day to further your career. Sneak it in if your employer won't allow it.

Strongly disagree. Watching TV is easy and numbing - before you know you’ll have a habit. Habits are hard to break.

I think OP would far better advised spending 15 minutes a day on any of the hobbies he listed. If he doesn’t feel like doing it, do it anyways. Eventually he’ll have a positive habit.

Some people are going to make the argument that you work hard enough, don’t “work” outside your job. Doing anything new is inherently hard though - you need to get past the initial “suck”.

After some time you’ll be far better equipped to figure out if this something you actually want in your life.

Don’t feel like starting something? Do it anyways. Take tomorrow off, but not today.

It seems like OP has piled intellectually intense hobbies (learning a foreign language, reading "complex" books) on top of a intellectually challenging career. Thats not going to work for most people, just like most people cant spend 12 hours a day on their career.

So while maybe watching TV is a little too passive, there are lots of in between activities that might be useful: cooking, gardening, meditating, things that are reasonably mindful, but work different mental muscles than thinking about algorithms or data structures.

No offense, but doubling down on the binge watching is maybe the worst personal advice I've ever heard. Maybe somehow that worked for you, but far too many folks are multiple decades into a TV watching habit that has become unbreakable.

Honestly, I find the way that Netflix tries to cram the next episode down your throat to be borderline criminal behavior.

Take your queue from some of these shows. None of the people in them are watching 3 or 4 hours of TV a day. Well, unless they're on step 1 of the Hero's Journey...

I dunno, I see where they're coming from. Someone once asked me what it's like being me, and my off-the-cuff semi-joke response was "sometimes coding isn't fun and I have to play video games to have fun, and other times video games aren't fun and I have to code to have fun."

So there's definitely a tide-goes-in, tide-goes-out flow to this for some people. I've learned to embrace it. When coding makes the serotonin flow, I get a lot done. And when video games gets the job done, I experience a lot of new stories and ideas.

Right now we're in the video game part of the phase. Valheim. It got me good.

I am the same. I bought a PC and played video games for 1 month then I got bored. I just needed this to recharge. Now I am back on a company project and I have a very good flow. What worked for me is melatonin to get better sleep too.

This culture/attitude of constantly trying to level-up various skills in ones life like its a video game skill tree and always being "productive" is tiring and could be worse than my advice because it could very well lead to mental health issues of anxiety and depression.

A lot of the advice in this thread is your self-improvement cliches of become an early riser, focus a little at a time, set a timer, etc. that show up every time someone has a similar question. Sure some of that stuff might work, it also might not.

What I suggested just might get someone out of a funk. Try and force yourself to get to the burned out phase earlier of media consumption. I tend to get bored of things (usually after recognizing predictable patterns), but it takes a little while. I don't view it as "wasted" at all. Our minds need time to idle and recover. Just check with yourself if you are enjoying it and stop when you're not.

If you are working on switching careers or trying to learn something on a timeline (i.e. learn language before business trip) then that is different. It's work, not a hobby. You should set goals and probably follow a schedule of sorts. OP asked about hobbies though.

If someone works hard and spends their evenings watching movies or TV shows or YouTube for the majority of their career, so what? They are better off than 95% of the humans on the planet probably.

> Take your queue from some of these shows. None of the people in them are watching 3 or 4 hours of TV a day.

It's because 99% of commercial shows and cinema depict a fantasy. In reality, most people in developed countries watch TV/streaming for multiple hours a day. If you want to take cues from shows/movies, try watching the art ones instead, they are often closer to reality and are fine with showing the unpleasant truths.

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