Hacker News Reader

Comment by yojo | Hacker News Reader

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.

View on HN

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”

Reply on news.ycombinator.com