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Comment by droopyEyelids | Hacker News Reader

your two analogies are interesting, because it shows your exercise regimen has kind of the same 'goal' as capitalism- always more! If you get faster and stronger, run further. If you become more productive at your job, increase the expectations. If you exceeded profitability this quarter, set that as a baseline and exceed it by more next quarter!

Notably, it doesn't _have_ to be that way. If you were running with a set destination, the hill would become easier over time. If we were paid based on our productivity, we could work less and enjoy the same lifestyle.

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The word that I think is missing from your analysis is "better." I don't "run further" because of some random need to do more, but because this is an input into my health, and more health is always better.

Then you say:

//If we were paid based on our productivity

We are paid for our productivity in the grand scheme of things. To make this obvious, many things that would have taken hours/days for a worker to do 200 years ago may be done in seconds with today's tooling. So if you want to live like people did 200 years ago, you can do that with minimum work (in fact, in the west you have a much better life unemployed today than a worker would have 200 years ago). But the reality is, you want the improvements of safety, quality of life, etc that have occurred in that time too. Because you want your life to be "better."

> I don't "run further" because of some random need to do more, but because this is an input into my health, and more health is always better.

Pretty dubious claim. You really think that running and health are related in an even remotely linear fashion? It's likely doing it at all puts you way, way up the effort/benefit curve. Constantly pushing yourself for "better" eventually just becomes a waste of time you could put into something else.

Yeah, and the stress of telling your body that it always needs to do better to survive probably makes you age faster.

There’s diminishing marginal returns from exercise. So there’s probably a sweet spot of how much you want to do it. Same with work. And for many people, same with spending time with friends and family.

There’s an implicit belief in a lot of this thread that more is better and that happiness is down the road of doing more things. That’s stupid and wrong for almost all of us. And ironically, your career, health and relationships all suffer if you push too hard and don’t let them breathe. The real joys are found sitting watching the sunset, with a good meal with the people we love. It doesn’t get better than that.

I mean if you want to split hairs and miss the larger points sure. Yes you can be at diminishing returns so you are right there's a limit to more is better. Not the situation I am talking about here, both fitness wise and economically because frankly 99.999% of people are nowhere near diminishing returns on either of those.

Except an exercise regime that eventually gets "easy" eventually gets harder again too. The value is being able to put in the work, not the outcome (the outcome you get elsewhere: if I can lift more weight, gardening will be that much easier - but that's not the point of my exercise regime).

My two examples are intended to show the difficulty of optimizing for ease or joy in the force of a system with more influence.

Capitalism is one such system, but it’s not the only system. What you’re describing is possible, and people do it, but to do it they have to have systems that support it.

It’s not quite as easy as as it is in War Games to “not play the game”.

If you want more people opting into ease and joy you first identify the barriers (which I’m attempting to do) then you find ways around them or replacements. I don’t have answers, but at minimum I wish that “faster”, “easier”, or “more convienent” would stop being used as proxies for “more joy” or “more ease”.

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