Hacker News Reader

Comment by qwerty456127 | Hacker News Reader

Because working days don't count as living (days spent worrying also don't so being jobless hardly helps). Only secure spare time is life time. After all the chores you have to do besides your job, an average adult doesn't have much time to live. A day per week max. Even if you have full 2-day weekend for yourself you still need a day to recover a bit from the burnout before you can really live. This said, count how many days of life do kids get per annum and how much do adults get. Many don't get any.

View on HN

Exactly this. Plus, when I was a kid, there were also other kids that had just as much time as me, and so I would hang out and actually do stuff all the time. Now, whenever I have some time off, chances are that no-one else has any time because everyone's busy with their own lives. So I'll just putter around instead of doing something that would possibly create a future memory worth keeping.

As a kid you have friends and no money. As an adult you have money and no friends.

This is tongue in cheek, it's just it's been on my mind a lot as all my close friends have families now. We have all the resources we wanted growing up but no time and no friends to play. =/

Having kids somewhat remedies that. I'm playing Super Mario World on an original SNES with my kids now.

This depends. As an adult your don't necessary "have money". You can only say you "have money" in a useful sense when you have spare money after paying for all the essentials. And this is far from being the case for every adult.

I really hate this aspect of adult living.

Being tired or exhausted from daily/weekly chores is definitely a thing people deal with, but let’s not start calling that “burnout”. Burnout is a much different thing that’s a profound sense of exhaustion that can take years to recover from, and it would be better if we don’t start diluting its meaning.

This depends. Some people just are tired, but some live burtn out, I mean like this[1]. In some cases even having much less real work to do, just because being much more sensitive to some specific stressors they have in their lives. Some burnt out, also some genuinely depressed people still manage being (even without proper medication) reasonably functional and live this way for decades. A 15-hour sleep followed by a day of doing nothing can be a relief even though you can't really recover any close to fully this quick.

I get your point and upvote though.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41461499

That very much resonates with my thoughts on the matter.

I think the rigid, repetitive structure is what makes days fly by. I remember one time, while I younger and time still felt slow, I was in a sort of youth camp and I spent two weeks in their spaces with many other students. Our days were scheduled from morning to night with various activities, and most of time was either participating in activities or taking a break inbetween them. At the end, I was surprised how fast two weeks went by.

Maybe boredom is needed for time to go slowly, and we just don't have time to be bored.

I believe having time to be bored (not by doing boring work but by doing nothing) is extremely important for mental health.

I’m a bit surprised how insightful this is. It’s reframed the way I think about this topic.

uh what?

kids go to school. that's hardly better than working. on the contrary, it's worse. i had a lot less freedom to do things the way i liked in school. i "lived" during holidays when i went traveling. once i started working, i was able to incorporate work into my life. i picked jobs that i actually wanted to do, where i would learn something interesting. where i had the freedom to structure my work as i wanted. where i had colleagues that i enjoyed working with. especially as a freelancer i have a lot of freedom. i also picked jobs in other countries, so every day i was learning about new cultures and ways of doing things not only in my free time but also at work. so while i had a full time job, i was also a full time traveler.

so for me the full day is part of life. balancing the priorities, and making the best out of every situation. even chores go into that. i enjoy cooking. i enjoy seeing a clean kitchen. chores are a part of making my home livable. and for most chores i can pick an audiobook or something else to listen to, making the time even more worthwhile.

if you think work and chores are not part of life then they will probably cause you more stress and you'll be in a situation that you can't get out of because you can't stop working and doing chores. on the other hand by incorporating those into living, i can detect things that really cause me stress and avoid them. i can fire bad customers and quit bad jobs. if work is not part of living then changing jobs won't help. if a chore is causing me stress, i find a different way of doing it, or for things like cleaning, maybe try to avoid that needing to be cleaned in the first place.

on the topic of the article: how fast i perceive time depends on how much of that time is spent experiencing something new.

i write a diary that is a reflection of that. days where nothing happens go by fast, and my diary is one paragraph. days that are filled with novel activities cause me to write more, sometimes a lot more.

children spend more time experiencing something new

Reply on news.ycombinator.com