Being-Doing Balance over Work-Life Balance | Hacker News Reader

Being-Doing Balance over Work-Life Balance

jeanhsu.substack.com

155 pointskiyanwang30 comments

I would argue that people have a very intrinsic need for the "doing" mode (setting goals, spending effort achieving them, slowly observing the progress). If we don't get enough of that, we start inventing goals. If we don't manage to find/invent anything worth spending effort, we get depressed and step out of the game, freeing up resources for those who have goals. Brutal efficiency of nature in action.

If you focus on "being" too much, you still end up subconsciously setting goals, but those goals will be very tribal and emotional: get more people to give you attention or acknowledge your feelings, bash those who express opposing views.

I think, what works the best is reserving the "being" to your friends and close circle (that you can pick according to your preferences), and devoting work time to a 100% professional-driven "doing" mode where you focus on common goals and leave everything else outside the office. Sadly, companies don't want people to have lives outside of work anymore, so they are trying to substitute it for "being" at work, creating division out of the blue, and making the work culture toxic.

> I would argue that people have a very intrinsic need for the "doing" mode (setting goals, spending effort achieving them, slowly observing the progress). If we don't get enough of that, we start inventing goals. If we don't manage to find/invent anything worth spending effort, we get depressed and step out of the game, freeing up resources for those who have goals. Brutal efficiency of nature in action.

I agree. I also think people tend to set goals in very binary fashion (Success/Fail) and it puts people on path to be depressed all the time. You either succeed (and get a temporary high from success) only to set new goals and be depressed about hitting another goal for yourself or fail outright and be depressed about that.

I've experienced that myself (social and professional) and it just sucks...

Humans have been on this earth for 300 millennia

Most of that time, we were nomadic hunter gathers.

No one really knows what is "intrinsic" to human nature.

We only have records for the most recent 1-2% of our time on this planet. And that 1-2% of "recorded time" is by far one of the most abnormal periods not in human history (300,000 years), but probably one of the most abnormal periods in the history of life on our planet (4,500,000,000 years).

Your perceived "intrinsic" need may be true to our nature, but it's more likely a result of the strange environment we find ourselves in.

If you could talk to 100 people from all of human history, the majority of them would be hunter gatherers. You'd be lucky if you got a single person who even understand the concept of "history".

On the last point I feel obligated to point out that 120 bn people are estimated to have ever lived on the planet, of those a 100 bn lived before 1750, 60 bn before 1 CE, 10 bn before 8000 BCE.

That means that if you took 100 people from human history, 15 of them would have heard of press, 50 of writing, 90 of agriculture. Not so many humans in a state of nature there.

That's a great correction. I was absolutely not taking into account the population sizes at each part of human history.

Are your numbers assuming that everyone in the world knew about each "invention", for example writing, at the same time?

If writing existed in a society at a particular time, I'm not sure how to estimate if or how well an average person (likely without much education unless part of a privileged class) would know about it.

I think the point I'm trying to make is that a random human experience today is very abnormal compared to the average human experience at any time previously in history. So I guess the more accurate way to demonstrate that would be to choose 100 random years from the last 300 millennia, and then grab a random person from each of those years.

The concept of "being mode" laid out here bears a resemblance to the Jewish Sabbath ("shabbat" in Hebrew) observance from dusk on Friday to dusk on Saturday night.

As I understand it, one tradition of exegesis holds that most of the restrictions on activities during the Sabbath can be understood as restrictions on acting purposively to modify the natural world, engage in commerce, etc. (later rabbinical elaboration proscribed even thinking of such activities to maintain a restive frame of mind). The paradigm of such work activities in the Hebrew bible was the construction of the Tabernacle in the wilderness.

https://www.myjewishlearning.com/article/shabbats-work-prohi...

As a Jew, I'm a fan of Shabbat, but it bothers me when some Jews take this to absurdity. I read an article about elevators in certain buildings running all day without button presses because pressing the button is considered labor, or leaving their stove on all day to avoid turning the knob. These violate the spirit of the law by following the letter of the law.

Some of the “workarounds” strike me as “okay, so you just don’t want to do it; why not just admit that?”

https://www.npr.org/2019/05/13/721551785/a-fishing-line-enci...

Not Jewish myself but married to an Israeli; it was explained to me like this:

- There are rules, passed on to humanity from God.

- God is perfect.

- Therefore if you find a loophole in the rules you are not outsmarting God or anything like that, God is Perfect and cannot be outsmarted by mere mortals.

- Therefore if you find such a loophole, you are not committing some form of heresy as most Christians would see it. Rather, you are extra virtuous because you found the loopholes that God put there as "easter eggs" for those of His followers that were attentive and clever enough to spot them.

- Repeat this for several millennia and you get the New York fishing line shenanigans.

I'm not sure I agree with some of the axioms, but I must admit that if you accept the first few points then "New York fishing line" follows pretty much linearly from those. I also quite like the idea that mortals cannot "outsmart" a deity by finding loopholes, because the idea a human could outsmart God always seemed like the very height of hubris to me. Then again, I am a (drunk) atheist so my opinions about gods are probably not too reliable. :)

Why not just go with "God is perfect, but humans aren't, so maybe we just misunderstood the laws?"

He knew what we'd understand and how we'd interpret these laws when he wrote it that way and left the wording exactly like this anyway. If he really didn't want people having Eruvs in their cities, he'd have defined walls and houses better.

All knowing by necessity means knowing about the loopholes we'd exploit, or he's not all knowing.

Yes well, by that argument anything we choose to do at all must be part of God's plan and hence Good™.

It’s more like a tie-breaker for religious rules disputes favoring personal and societal freedom: something like

“if you don’t have a clear example indicating how something’s bad, it’s probably Good Enough™ “

The fishing line is one of my favorite things in the world.

I know that most people (including me) generally view it as silly loopholes, but I recently read a perspective on this that sorta makes sense in my head.

Basically, if you believe that god is omnipotent and omnipresent, then surely he is aware of those loopholes. Which might indicate that he left them in purposefully, so that people could use them.

While it seems shaky, it follows certain logic there that makes some sense to me as a non-religious person.

Before I was born, my mother was a nanny. A big part of her job for one of the families she worked for was stuff like this. If you ask her about it she'll talk about it briefly before going on to describe how good the bread was in epic detail.

As a Gentile, I always find these things really funny.

Just reading through the Judaism Stack Exchange and coming across fiery, genuinely intelligent debates about whether or not you need to install a microfilter in your tap for the (apparently not kosher) micro-crustaceans that live in metropolitan water supplies is always a bit of fun.

The oven at my house has a sabbath mode where you can preschedule it to turn on to a certain temperature and turn off after several hours. I hadn’t ever heard of the elevators or other sabbath devices before that.

(Without commenting on religion in the modern day,) this was a very common theme throughout early Christianity. Much of Jesus’ ministry involved condemning the religious leaders of the time for focusing on minutiae of the law, particularly Sabbath law.

Matthew 23:1–7 — “Then Jesus spoke to the crowds and to His disciples: ‘The scribes and Pharisees sit in Moses’ seat. So practice and observe everything they tell you. But do not do what they do, for they do not practice what they preach. They tie up heavy, burdensome loads and lay them on men’s shoulders, but they themselves are not willing to lift a finger to move them.’”

Matthew 23:23–24 — “Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, you hypocrites! You pay tithes of mint, dill, and cumin. But you have disregarded the weightier matters of the law: justice, mercy, and faithfulness. You should have practiced the latter, without neglecting the former. You blind guides! You strain out a gnat but swallow a camel.” [Referring to a practice of the time: pious Jews would strain their drinks to avoid accidentally swallowing bugs, which are unclean. In focusing on such small things, and serving as the “ideal” example for others to follow, Jesus accuses them of violating the law in a much more significant way, figuratively swallowing a much bigger unclean animal.]

Luke 14:1–6 — “One Sabbath, when Jesus went to eat in the house of a prominent Pharisee, he was being carefully watched. There in front of him was a man suffering from abnormal swelling of his body. Jesus asked the Pharisees and experts in the law, ‘Is it lawful to heal on the Sabbath or not?’ But they remained silent. So taking hold of the man, he healed him and sent him on his way.

“Then he asked them, ‘If one of you has a child or an ox that falls into a well on the Sabbath day, will you not immediately pull it out?’ And they had nothing to say.”

Mark 2:23–28 — “One Sabbath Jesus was passing through the grainfields, and His disciples began to pick the heads of grain as they walked along. So the Pharisees said to Him, ‘Look, why are they doing what is unlawful on the Sabbath?’

“Jesus replied, ‘Have you never read what David did when he and his companions were hungry and in need? During the high priesthood of Abiathar, he entered the house of God and ate the consecrated bread, which was lawful only for the priests. And he gave some to his companions as well.’

“Then Jesus declared, ‘The Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath. Therefore, the Son of Man is Lord even of the Sabbath.’”

Mark 3:1–6 — “Another time Jesus went into the synagogue, and a man with a shriveled hand was there. Some of them were looking for a reason to accuse Jesus, so they watched him closely to see if he would heal him on the Sabbath. Jesus said to the man with the shriveled hand, ‘Stand up in front of everyone.’

“Then Jesus asked them, ‘Which is lawful on the Sabbath: to do good or to do evil, to save life or to kill?’ But they remained silent.

“He looked around at them in anger and, deeply distressed at their stubborn hearts, said to the man, ‘Stretch out your hand.’ He stretched it out, and his hand was completely restored. Then the Pharisees went out and began to plot with the Herodians how they might kill Jesus.”

This brings to mind Compass Rose's piece Shabbat Hard or Go Home.

http://benjaminrosshoffman.com/sabbath-hard-and-go-home/

Whoops, autocorrect substituted "restive" where I of course meant "restful"!

“When I was young, I had to choose between the life of being and the life of doing. And I leapt at the latter like a trout to a fly. But each deed you do, each act, binds you to itself and to its consequences, and makes you act again and yet again. Then very seldom do you come upon a space, a time like this, between act and act, when you may stop and simply be. Or wonder who, after all, you are.”

― Ursula K. Le Guin, The Farthest Shore

"I was in too much haste, and now have no time left."

- A Wizard of Earthsea

It's a nice distinction. I find most article with "deep stuff about life" are just fluff, this is genuinely an interesting observation.

Like with work-life balance, I think the doing-being balance is a bit of a luxury. I mean, quite an important one, like having a balanced diet, but i suppose there are many people who lack it because they can't afford it. Maybe they are working two jobs, or are saving for kids' education etc.

It's also likely true that within some limit, more doing has delayed benefits, eg learning new skill for work vs chilling on a weekend. I'm not saying "doing" is better, just that it's a tradeoff, like everything else.

Mental health is a currency for "desk workers" just as physical health is for physical workers.

Being mode sounds pretty much what Yoga or Buddhist practice is about, and I cannot recommend enough to explore it. Here is a starting point: http://t3x.org/rajayoga/

For 99% of people, I'd argue there are at least a couple of things they know they ought to be doing, that they aren't doing, and a couple of things they are doing, that they ought to lessen or cut out of their life.

For the remaining 1%, maybe it's worth contemplating being vs doing, reading Tao Te Ching and going hmmmm :)

I learned about this at Homestar Runner's totally not cult-like Life Cleanse seminar! https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=WFu-GaktLu8

I like this framework. I sometimes think about it as producing versus consuming although that's very different than this framework and I like this framework even better.

Sounds more like mindfulness. idk the juxtaposition here feels a little forced

Why the f*k can't i zoom on this page on mobile?! What's the benefit of that? :(

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