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Comment by cortesoft | Hacker News Reader

This makes sense for some things, but the examples the author uses don't make sense to me.

Take the Moby Dick example... the author says you don't get the return on it until you have paid the 16 hour price of reading it... but isn't those sixteen hours the actual reward? You don't read a book to be finished with it, you read it because you like the reading process. The reward starts the first minute you start reading the book.

Not only that, but you don't have to finish the book to get something out of reading it. If you enjoyed the time you spent reading, that is enough.

This attitude seems very "completionist", where you only get value after you finish something. That isn't how I view things.

Also, why does he think mindless apps and games are the same as doing nothing? The idea is you enjoy the time spent playing the game. Sure, you don't end up with anything after, but you enjoyed the time.

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The author doesn't say that you don't get the return on reading Moby Dick until you have paid the 16-hour price of reading it. What he actually says is subtly but importantly different:

"Only once the second price is being paid do you see any return on the first one."

So he agrees with you: you start getting the benefits as soon as the "second price" is being paid.

And I don't think it's quite right to say that the sixteen hours are the actual reward. They're the space in which some of the actual reward occurs, so to speak. You pay the price of using 16 hours of your time to read Moby-Dick. You get the reward of 16 enjoyably-spent hours, and also the reward of having your brain reshaped in whatever way reading Moby-Dick does for you -- deepening your ideas about friendship or obsession or sailing or whales, etc.

The 16 hours you have to spend are still a price, even though you enjoy spending those hours. (Some people enjoy spending money. They're still paying when they do.) The 16 hours you spend reading Moby-Dick are 16 hours you aren't spending reading The Brothers Karamazov or sleeping or doing lucrative consultancy or talking with your friends.

You are paying the price in the sense of 'time is limited, and you are using some of this limited budget on this endeavor. The point is not that 'paying the price' is unpleasant. The point is that 'paying the price' reduces your budget of available hours.

I think, in addition, there is an 'unpleasant' quality about needing concentration for reading that the author feels more than you do. But that unpleasantness is not the core of the piece. The limited budget is.

Consider someone who reads 10 hours a week and buys 5 books a week. They will be buying books they will probably never read. They are paying the first price but never the second.

It’s not necessarily unpleasant but it does necessarily cost energy, I think. I love figuring out how a new piece of tech works but at the end of a long week when I’m worn out, I just can’t do it any more. If it didn’t have a cost then this wouldn’t be the case.

But that's not a price, I enjoy reading, that what I paid for.

It is not something that costs me anything other than time, however that's not the "price" he's talking about. Otherwise "low price pleasures" wouldn't be a category, if you enjoy that time it's not marginally better than nothing.

The author is framing consumption as having two pools of currency:

1) money

2) time

It costs money to get access to the good you are consuming, and hours to unlock the value. Whether or not you enjoyed reading Moby Dick, you have 16 less hours in the time bank.

If you do enjoy it (I did not), you have paid 16 hours out of the time bank and reaped the reward of 16 hours of pleasurable reading.

There are “cheaper” thrills. I am told you can spend 5 minutes on TickTock and receive some quick gratification. The up front cost is low. The cumulative payoff of spending 16 hours watching cat videos may not be as ultimately rewarding to you as plowing through some classic literature.

Tiltok is surprisingly good. I get: really beautiful girls (bordering on softporn), advice on home DIY, cooking howtos, HIGH end cooking howtos, bartending recipes, vegan recipes, meat BBQ recipes, life motivational videos, really funny short sketches from funny regular people (in several languages), relationship advice, psychologists

All original content. It has its own twist to it. All in 5 to 10 minutes. Everything just flows, I never use any browsing. Just swipe.

EDIT: I also need to mention that TikTok is host to many, not just one, many emergent properties. Trends take off, people from around the world do the weirdest things which become super popular. Such as ASMR videos, example: whispering secretary

I remember that some years ago, people treated AI who tries to fulfill your deepest desires as some sort of dystopia. Yet, here we are, with the TikTok algorithm trying to guess what you want to see and advanced AIs doing facial reshaping and skin smoothing to make that girl look inhumanely attractive. Let's hope we humans don't end up overly distracted like bees and brown beer bottles ;)

That analogy is desperately tortured. It just ... does not map at all to how I ever perceived reading or fun videos. I never even heard anyone talk about it is those terms.

The time spend by purely relaxing activities like reading or watching is on itself a reward. You do it instead of doing something less pleasant- staring bored at the wall.

And the idea that you could have spent all that time doing something super useful is wrong if it is about opportunity cost. I tried multiple times to cut off all "time wasters" like reading fiction or videos. It ended in low productivity and depression each time.

Imagine you could spend 16 hours enjoying reading without any time having passed in the real world. Then you would still have those 16 to enjoy something else as well. But instead you are actually 16 hours closer to your death. That's the cost. Not the time you experienced, but the time you no longer have.

If I would not be reading, that time would still pass. I would move closer to death by the exact same amount. Literally regardless of what I would do for 16 hours, my life would move exactly 16 hours closer to death.

The assumption is that if you wouldn't be reading, you could do something else that you would want to do. But if you are reading you can't. If you have more time than you know what to do with, then the argument doesn't hold.

I think we only say things about the cost of time for leisure activities when it's not worth it. Example, I heard many times people saying about a bad movie: wow, I wasted 2 hours watching that

Rather than two separate pools, I see it more as that every good's value is a complex number. The "real" part is the sticker price and the "imaginary" part is the time spent to consume or enjoy the good. So while we usually just assume the sticker price is the value of the good, in reality you have to calculate the length of the complex vector.

When you're young and poor, the sticker price seems very close to the actual value, but as you get older and richer, you come to see the time spent as by far the most significant scalar quantity.

“Time” only makes sense as a currency in the opportunity cost sense. Those 16 hours will pass whether you’re reading Moby Dick or not.

I don’t think it’s just time but also, as you allude to a bit, the extra effort, mental or physical.

I think the “time is money” metaphor is very useful to thinking about time as a limited resource. The average person has about 630,000 hours in their life. Take out 210,000 for sleeping, a largely involuntary time sink. The time cost is truly the more expensive portion. This limited resource consideration is even more important to consider there are strict upper-limits to how much time someone will have, and no one has lived 1,000,000 hours.

On the other hand, quality of time spent also matters. 10 hours reading a book can be more valuable than 1000 hours staring at a wall.

I appreciate you say this with humour. But if you voluntary or due to circumstances out of your control cannot distract you brain... At least nine starts thinking. The energy cost is high, but I always end up with a very profound experience and some great outcomes.

So I wouldn't cross out "staring at a wall" as inarguably invaluable. It's what's going on in your head when you do it. Same as when reading that book.

Reading still costs energy, although the amount varies from person to person and time to time.

there is no such thing as a time bank. you cannot save time.

The "time bank" is the opportunity cost of doing something else instead. By not doing something you have thus "saved" that time and can use it elsewhere.

Unless of course, you cant. For example, if you are tired and you are for entertainment, relax or to make you sleep. Or, if you are overworked from those other things and really really need to chill with a book or tictoc right now.

This is all theoretical. Think about it like the movie “In Time”

Maybe “opportunity cost” then? Though that still may be a kind of “price”.

This makes sense to me, and I think you explain it better than the author.

However, this is basically just the idea of opportunity costs, and pointing out that they apply to more than just the money spent, but also the time.

There are 2 costs: 1. Cost in money to purchase, 2. Cost in time to use and manage. By paying these costs you gain a benefit (of any kind, monetary, pure enjoyment, etc). These are given. So far this is pretty easy to agree on, and could be stated in several ways including probably in terms of opportunity costs.

The article's point is that there's a particular relationship between these costs and benefits. Namely, that the first cost only enables you to gain the benefit, but that you can't actually receive the benefit until you pay into the second, time cost. This is interesting because it's easy to forget or miscalculate that second cost, and because the second cost gates the benefit that means you may not be getting the full benefit from paying the first cost.

The author defines "price" as using your time on something instead of using it on something else. Not sure it's a good definition of price.

But yeah, many things require time and once you paid for something, often using isn't instant.

Exactly! The first commenter didn't catch that article at all...

Sixteen hours to read Moby Dick? That recalls the old Woody Allen joke about speed-reading: "I read War and Peace in two hours. It's about Russia."

Speaking of War and Peace.

I speed read War and Peace for the first time in ~4 hours for the school test (I refused to read assigned literature). It went into one ear and into another.

I then re-read it while recovering from the surgery over a leisurely week and enjoyed it tremendously as I think would anyone who gives it time.

My mother told me she read just the Peace parts, while my father admitted to reading only the War parts (they are pretty much alternate chapters).

Assigned reading has a bad habit of pushing us into such patterns. Human's seem to treat anything they are asked to do as a cost to be minimized in favor of the things they choose to do. Given options, they will do the things least similar to those that they are asked to do.

It's too bad we can't structure assigned reading and coursework in terms of choice, I distinctly remember choosing to work on harder assignments when given choices back in the grade school era.

I’ve heard people say they’d done similar things (about skipping the battle scenes) and I don’t get it. Some really important things happen to some of the characters in those bits! Surely it’d be super confusing…

To be honest, the whole book is confusing even if you read it as written. It's probably me reading it over months, but forgetting names and relations does not help. So, probably skipping some chapters wouldn't matter to me that much. In general, I love the book. I definitely need to finish it!

There was a time I wanted to learn Russian to read Tolstoy and Dostoevsky.

The unabridged audiobook is just under 24 hours. 16 hours seems short, but not terribly so.

https://www.audible.ca/pd/Moby-Dick-Audiobook/B071NYW4Q1

I believe you could consume all the words in Moby Dick in 16 hours. But it’s one of those “crammed full of metaphors” books that could easily take a seminar to unpack. I don’t pretend to get it, but smarter people than me write articles on its layers of complexity and interpretation[1].

You can read those masterworks at a superficial level and they’re usually somewhat rewarding. Or you can read Dostoyevsky while deep diving on Russian history and get a notably different experience. But it takes a lot longer.

1: https://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2013/08/th...

You can read Dostoyevsky just normally - immersing yourself in story, characters, atmosphere and depression of it.

Overanalysing it kills that pleasure and atmosphere. That is not reading, that is doing seminar.

I generally read audiobooks at 1.5x because 1.0 seems terribly slow to me. This more or less matches my reading pace for printed books, so 16 hours seems right.

1.0 is so slow that I wonder if they record the narrator, then slow them down by a third. It's much slower than people talk.

Not everyone is native English speaker, and slow pace allows you to get immersed. That people want 1,5 speed or do two things at same time is a sign of our time (appropriate content is cheap snd widely available but we don't have more available leisure time). Society doesn't want people have abundant leisure time, hence 'Bullshit Jobs'.

I'm not a native English speaker either. The thing here is that audiobooks are quite a bit slower than normal speech, which is what we've been trained on all our lives.

People want 1.5 speed because that's what gets the narrator back to a normal speaking speed.

I slow down some narrators and speed up others because I like content delivered at a specific speed. Leisure time is a reason, but not the only reason.

If I am doing something else while listening, it helps to have it slow down a bit. Maybe that's why audiobooks slow it down from the get go.

this is how nomal people read book, maybe it is not best, but still most common way to contact literature

What are "normal people"?

This quote lead me down this rabbit hole:

https://quoteinvestigator.com/2015/12/08/speed-reading/

To be fair, with "War and Peace", this is quite possibly the only way to read it and enjoy the process. ~

You might be splitting hairs.

I think the broader point the author is making is that we are over-consuming — because we can. But without the fulfillment that comes from the time spent with the purchased thing we are finding our lives paradoxically empty.

The problem the author elucidates really resonated with me, but perhaps it was framed a little awkwardly.

We are living in an age when consuming is easy, while time has become so much more precious. Contrast that with days past when the opposite was true: purchases were precious while time was more plentiful.

> Contrast that with days past when the opposite was true: purchases were precious while time was more plentiful.

When exactly was supposed that be?

Pre-modern society was precisely like that. Agriculture on the level of, say, the 17th century, demands a lot of time, but only in specific periods dictated by natural processes. In the meantime, as a male peasant you are "almost free", with scattered duties here and there. Also, no commute and very little artificial light. Most people's workplace was within walking distance from their bed, if not in the same house. And a majority of work was stopped after sunset, given that artificial light was scarce (perhaps just one lamp for the entire household).

People like pastoralists who watch over grazing flocks are relatively free too, it is not a constant work comparable to a factory floor.

Traditional female works were a bit different. A lot of spinning, for example, that was a major time eater, and independent of season.

> Agriculture on the level of, say, the 17th century, demands a lot of time, but only in specific periods dictated by natural processes. In the meantime, as a male peasant you are "almost free", with scattered duties here and there

Yeah no. That meme came from estimation of some economist that completely ignored what actually male (or female) peasants done. And conditions they actually lived in.

And they already knew how to make candles.

So I am a rather late child and a late grandchild; my grandparents grew up in rural Slovakia and Bulgaria between 1900-1940, at which point those places were rather underdeveloped. None of them had electricity before 22 years of age and my oldest grandfather, a rural blacksmith, only had it in his 40ies.

I have some first-hand knowledge from them, which I consider quite reliable. They are all dead now, but their conditions were quite alike.

The work in the height of the agricultural season was very hard and arduous. A huge problem was the weather: if it rained too much, or not at all, food would become very expensive.

But I stand by my claim that they had a lot of free or semi-free time. Their entire rhythm of living was different.

For example, every Sunday, there was a market in a town 20 kms away. My grandma walked there and back to sell some eggs and cheese and buy whatever the village did not produce (e.g. kerosene for the kerosene lamp). It was 4 hours each way, but the time spent walking there wasn't work. The villagers went in a group, talked, told stories, flirted, sung etc. on the way. So the journey was a mix of leisure, exercise and bonding.

Or another example. Girls would often knit or decorate clothing together. It was an important activity, but under no hard deadline or quality pressure (unlike in a factory), and they usually gathered together and had a good time talking, sewing, relaxing for a bit. Someone could actually read stories aloud to pass time etc.

These days, we have rather hard divisions between "work", "hobby" and "leisure". Only a few moments in the day (the watercooler chit-chat) are somewhere in between.

That wasn't the case in premodern rural society and my grandparents yet lived in such a world.

Yeah I had grandparents too. Going to market for 4 hours is a work. I have good time working fairly often too and it is still work. I went to business trips, we chatted and had good time and it was work.

Decorating cloth is work. It just is and was. Nor something you can avoid and something you are judged on. I listen to music when coding and to podcast when doing repetitive work. Does not make it not work.

You know why we girls don't don't anymore? Because it is boring repetitive chore to large majority of us. And I actually did some embroidery - it is cool in small amounts. Emphasis on small.

And it was not all relaxing either. You are talking about period with huge pressures, periods of lack of food due to wars.

In generation in between, there are people who cant relax. They feel guilty and will badge you if you dare to sit and rest.

When going out for dinner was only for special occasions.

Its more of a spectrum but pre-internet, if you wanted to watch a movie you had to rent the VHS or order it somehow. You had to buy a book in a bookstore. Each limiting your range of exposure (you had magazines, papers, and peers which each were very important). On top of that, piracy took little amount of time and effort, and legal distribution eventually went to compete.

An extreme example these days are the people who buy games for $5 on Steam sales and never even download them because they can't afford the 200 hours or so to enjoy the game.

The 200 hours isn't quite the reward. A jog isn't rewarding. Reading a paragraph isn't rewarding. You need to read perhaps a chapter at least to get some reward.

I bought Dune. I read until the legendary "fear is the mind killer" scene. And then I put it down and haven't picked it up yet. I got some reward from it, probably not the full amount, but I just couldn't afford the hours to finish the book.

Are you otherwise familiar with the story? There's a good reason it is recommended to read the book before you watch the movie/series. A book allows you to completely apply your own imagination. My path was: Dune II (game), Dune (David Lynch movie), Dune (game, did not finish), Dune 2000 (game), Dune (remake from 2001), Children of Dune and in 2016 I finally finished reading the book (I started in ~2012). Obviously I knew the story quite well as I played Dune II and watched the movies a lot (though I did not like Children of Dune much). The book felt like a choir, but it was good. Really good. Its just that the movies were good enough. Its why I don't bother reading Fire and Ice, Lord of the Rings, or The Witcher. I've seen the series/movies. We also need to put a book in the age or context it was written. Or, well, 'need to'? It'd be fair. I do the same with older content of movies and series.

I'm not. It does sound like the kind of thing I would like (I'm a fan of the Dark Sun setting). I normally prefer movies over books, again, because it's less time commitment. But Dune tops Amazon's list week after week, so there has to be a good reason for that.

It is a fantastic book, still reads well nowadays (I finished reading it in 2016). Just like a book like Snow Crash. However, the movies/series are great, too. The games are dated. Haven't seen the 2021 series as of yet.

I absolutely have not done this. No sir, not me. Never.

But only because I have plenty of disk space and install all of them just in case.

>Take the Moby Dick example... the author says you don't get the return on it until you have paid the 16 hour price of reading it... but isn't those sixteen hours the actual reward? You don't read a book to be finished with it, you read it because you like the reading process. The reward starts the first minute you start reading the book.

Honestly, I'm not sure if you can say that the money spent is truly a "cost" either.

Consumers love buying books (spending money) as much as they love reading books (spending time).

There is definitely a sense of reward in simply buying a book - even one you never read - just as there is for buying clothes you'll never wear or gadgets you'll never use.

> There is definitely a sense of reward in simply buying a book - even one you never read

Is there? Doesn't that just make you feel like an idiot for wasting your money? The only feeling I ever get after spending money is "this better not suck".

Feeling a sense of reward simply for spending money sounds unhealthy.

> > There is definitely a sense of reward in simply buying a book - even one you never read

> Is there?

W-w-what? Of course there is reward in simply buy a book. Or, perhaps, one could say there is reward in the possessing of the book, and maybe not the purchasing. Or maybe that's a distinction with no distinction. In any case, it's certainly true that one can get reward from buying books without the necessity of reading them.

> Doesn't that just make you feel like an idiot for wasting your money?

Sorry, I'm not seeing where any "wasting" enters into it. If I buy a book I want, the reward is having it. There is no waste. I got what I wanted. What you're saying only makes sense if you make the rather odd assumption that the value of a book is exclusively in the reading of the book...

I mean... do you, or have you ever, collected anything simply for the sake of having that something? Stamps? Vinyl records? Magazines? Bicycles? Video game consoles? Something?? I mean, it's quite a common activity. I would think most anybody would be able to relate to this.

I have bought books that I thought I wanted to read, but then left on the shelf without reading for almost 20 years.

Then when I did read them, they greatly affected me, and were as worthwhile as I had originally hoped.

I could've died without ever reading them, but I still bought them to read at some undefined future date.

If I wanted to have books on a shelf for visual decoration, I believe that there are fake books available. But I have enough real ones.

Getting a signed first edition or something for the collector value seems reasonable to me, but I don't know why I would want it if I hadn't read some version of it.

> I mean... do you, or have you ever, collected anything simply for the sake of having that something? Stamps? Vinyl records? Magazines? Bicycles? Video game consoles? Something??

I do. But only digitally nowadays. I hardly own any physical goods. Maybe $10-$15k taken together at most. I realize this puts me close to an extreme end.

As a kid I used to 'play' trading card games - but I hardly played them and mostly just spent a large portion of my meager allowance on buying painted cardboard. With the benefit of hindsight I could've spend that money on things that would have brought me considerably more joy, but I consider that a valuable lesson in itself.

I don't begrudge people their collections. There's still purpose in that. However buying something for your collection is different from buying for the sake of buying.

Kickstarters? Pateron? Boy Scout popcorn? That water bottle that an NGO was supposed to ship you for anything over a $20 donation?

There are some uses of money which are primarily philanthropic or social messaging. In these cases, the utility of the good or service is ancillary to the purchase. As overall economic welfare continues to improve, the niche for these things increases. The split between purpose and utility varies, maybe 5/95 for that chocolate bar that says it is protecting the rainforest (doubtful) but 40/60 for Girl Scout cookies. It's hard to straddle anywhere near that 50/50 line, but again, as the niche expands, the markets will eventually figure out more products for the space.

> That water bottle that an NGO was supposed to ship you for anything over a $20 donation?

"This NGO better be honest". It's not about the water bottle.

When I spend money, I expect something (to happen) in return. It doesn't have to benefit myself.

If you enjoy wasting money on books you are not going to read, I suggest you just set the money on fire instead. Or bury it and take the location to your grave. You'll do everyone else a favor by driving down the cost of goods, and nobody had to labor or waste resources on something you weren't planning to use. The economy will instead find something useful to do it with that labor and those resources.

Alternatively donate it as in your example - if you want to benefit someone specific. Maybe to the author whose book you weren't going to read?

>nobody had to labor or waste resources on something you weren't planning to use

If someone buys a collectible book with no intention of reading it, is it really a waste of resources?

Stuff is collectible because it's not being made any more and can't be. A signed first edition of something can't be sending an economic signal to produce more.

The money paid represents labor and resources forgone, and the more that the collectible costs, the more labor and resources is reserved for better purposes.

It is depriving someone else who would like to own it and possibly read it, but is that honestly a loss to society?

Here you are describing an edge case with collecting things because :

- You still need to manage / expose / dedicate space / maintain your collectibles to enjoy them

- It can be an investment so it’s really different than buying something to use it. It’s buying something hoping to resell it. Still, we could say you also pay with incertitude, maybe stress and responsibility if it’s something expensive.

>You still need to manage / expose / dedicate space / maintain your collectibles to enjoy them

This is true. A sense of proportion is always useful. Wouldn't you expect maintenance to be orders of magnitude smaller than creating things in the first place, very generally?

>It can be an investment so it’s really different than buying something to use it

I don't know what you are trying to say. Investment is inherently deferred consumption, and the higher the value, the more consumption is deferred. That leaves more resources for people who need them.

Imagine a stylized society with one rich person who has a billion dollars, and everybody else is poor.

If that person spends their billion dollars on a rare book, then the only thing that has been taken away from society is that book. And usually there is more than one copy of a book, so other people can still read the story, they just don't have the specific physical object.

But if they spend their billion dollars on, say, constructing a palace, then the resources could have been used to build thousands of homes for ordinary people.

Money is not a resource.

Afaik this is called Tsundoku in Japanese.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tsundoku

> Feeling a sense of reward simply for spending money sounds unhealthy.

It seems healthier than having a sense of anxiety. Living in a moneyed society requires spending money, so why attach a sense of dread to it?

You should think about the kind of behavior either of these feelings encourage, or discourage.

Also, if the experience of spending itself was valued at the amount being spent, this economy would break down in an instant.

>You should think about the kind of behavior either of these feelings encourage, or discourage.

If I was going to drive myself to destitution chasing good feeling like a rat in an experiment, there are far more effective hits I could get than just "the feeling of spending money on something I like, but may not actually use."

I already have to have the skills to not let good feelings completely drive my decision making, so what benefit is there to making an unavoidable process into a source of negative feelings? Would it be healthy to feel nausea every time I eat so that I don't overindulge?

>Would it be healthy to feel nausea every time I eat so that I don't overindulge?

It might be healthier than becoming obese which comes with it's own negative feelings.

And yet I have enjoyed food for nearly 32 years, and I am if anything underweight. Enjoyment is not synonymous with overindulgence.

That's nice anecdata, but there's still an obesity epidemic with at least ~70% of the US population being at least overweight and 40% being obese.

Despite obesity being a (if not the) leading cause of death, people are overindulging anyways.

It would appear that overwhelmingly people will act against their best interests if it just makes them feel good. At least when it comes to food.

I'm happy for you that you appear to be an exception.

If it makes you happy, is it really wasting money?

Personally, I only think money is wasted when you don't get what you were trying to get when you spent the money. So if you decide to spend your money buying a delicious burrito, but it turns out to taste bad, then it was wasted money.

If you are trying to buy a book to bring you the joy you feel when buying a book, and you get that joy, then it isn't money wasted. If you buy it and then regret it after and don't feel the joy, then it was wasted.

> If you are trying to buy a book to bring you the joy you feel when buying a book, and you get that joy, then it isn't money wasted.

It's still wasted. That person would just be an egocentric idiot. Even if they are a happy idiot.

A capitalist society cannot work properly if the experience of buying is valued at the cost of whatever is bought.

Neither can this world or society sustain widespread wastefulness. It hurts everyone (else).

Wasting money on things that are unused causes labor and resources to be diverted from more worthy endeavors. More directly it causes the price of those goods to increase, or even become unavailable.

Defining waste is almost impossible when you see things in these terms. Is culture a waste? Are things not needed to survive waste? Are activities only valid if they generate enough new knowledge or happiness - who judges that?

Ultimately you need to trust that if someone spends, there's utility to the spend, otherwise they wouldn't have - even if the act of spending is the benefit itself.

It's not for 3rd parties to judge the usefulness of the spend. To illustrate this, think about the typical teenager who's mom says wastes all their time on "insert hobby mom doesn't like" and extrapolate that to the world's consumption habits. Everyone thinks others are wasteful.

Owning a library is not so that you’ve read every book In collection, but it’s a research area where you can spend time to read new books. Some of the books in your library may never get read, and that’s ok because they’re always close at hand if you need it.

Antilibrary?

https://fs.blog/the-antilibrary/

>Is there? Doesn't that just make you feel like an idiot for wasting your money?

Of course there is. Most books people buy can be borrowed from a library for free, but people still do it.

Then download Moby Dick from Guttenberg.

You pay literally for physical copy only in this case. You literally can get it for free.

Mark Twain: 'A classic is something that everybody wants to have read and nobody wants to read.'

I'd go even further: I get a lot more enjoyment in going deep in things. Reading a book or watching a movie multiple times, discussing it with friends, family, people online, showing it/gifting it to people, learning about how it was made, who made it, in what context. I can't do this with everything, but I'd rather go deep on a few things than shallow on lots.

A friend once recommended a video game and when I asked if it was worth the price he said it was "a solid 100 hours of gameplay".

There's definitely an alternative framing for entertainment. My friend gladly traded $60 for something that promised to take 100 hours. If it only took 50 hours, he would have found it less valuable.

It was a useful metric until it became a target.

Except perhaps 50 hours of it were boring filler content, like on certain series (Netflix). We don't have infinite leisure time.

They ought to try EU4, it's solid 4000 hours of gameplay

The submission isn't loading for me right now but based on your comment, I imagine I share some views with the author.

I have this problem with games; there are lots of games. I can only find out if I enjoy one by spending time on it (and unfortunately the industry seems to like drawing things out such that the first hour or three aren't necessarily representative). Unfortunately, very often it is the case I go in hoping I would enjoy it, but after a while have to cut it short because it's not enjoyable. Not only have I not gotten much out of it, I've lost all the time I could have spent on something more enjoyable (or productive). And it's still true that I've lost the time, even if I enjoyed the activity. One tricky part with games that start out as fun (and addictive) is that it can take a while to realize it's not fun anymore and hasn't been for a while. And I've definitely had regrets with games that don't feel fun but after consulting opinions, "trust me it gets better." Ugh.

That sort of plays in to the value calculus on games.. a common mindset I see in reviews is that if a game offers hundreds of hours of gameplay, it is a high value game. For me, it rarely works out that way; I'm not a bored teenager desperate for entertainment, and in practice long games rarely seem to respect my time. They're long because they drag on and push you into running around, dull repetitive grind and fighting, mass produced shallow quests, boring errands, copypaste scenery spread over a large map... Quantity over quality. From my perspective, a game can definitely have negative value.

What I'm looking for in games today is definitely the opposite. Maximum quality that lasts a weekend at most and then I can move on in life. And I still don't want to waste most of my weekends playing games, even if I could find good ones.. Similarly, I have a bunch of books about which I've been wondering whether it's really worth my time reading them.

I'm sure I'd feel differently if I could somehow make more time available to me (e.g. work only three days a week oslt).

> What I'm looking for in games today is definitely the opposite. Maximum quality that lasts a weekend at most and then I can move on in life.

Try a board game! Seems like a great fit for what you want.

In general open world games are ones to avoid. They contain the most bloat. My Friend Pedro, Ori, and other 2D games are actually more fun than 3D games.

In Ux, you often optimize systems to help make user error as close to impossible as you can, and to optimize to be able to complete tasks quickly. However, in many video games, user error is a core part of the experience and you often don’t want to shorten tasks because they are pleasant. Starcraft players fight on forums to defend the unnecessary tasks they have to do manually because they enjoy practicing their good mechanics, some even asking blizzard to worsen the games pathfinding (big, fascinating subject, won’t get into it here)

That said, I own several books and games that I haven’t put the effort into reading/playing yet. Reading and gaming aren’t effortless

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