It's Okay to Abandon Things | Hacker News Reader

It's Okay to Abandon Things

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I've been reading Oliver Burkeman's latest book[1], which starts with a message a previous book of his [2] dug into quite deeply:

You can't do it all.

Just reflect on it for a moment before you continue: you can't and won't get to do it all.

You won't be all the things you dream about being, you won't get to visit all the places, read all those books, eat all those meals, have all those experiences, there just isn't enough time. And that's OK.

When I see a book or blog article called something like "500 films to watch before you die", I think: first, that's a todo list, no thanks; secondly, assuming an average run time of 2 hours, I perhaps have time in my life for 5 a week max, so this is now 2 years of my life, or if I just do one a week this is now a 10-year project. I might not even live that long, and then if I know I'm about to die I'm going to feel anxiety at an incomplete list.

Give up with the big lists and goals for this stuff. Just go do things.

And I heartily recommend Burkeman's books.

[1] https://app.thestorygraph.com/books/ab57bc2b-afcf-405a-a57b-... [2] https://app.thestorygraph.com/books/f7c8a521-f921-432a-b48a-...

I’m not sure if Bukerman has the worst job or the best job. His work¹ consists of being anxious about life, actively researching coping mechanisms, then writing a summary (with a dash of personal interpretation) to an audience suffering from the same maladies.

His curse is that he may never be able to attain nirvana: Doing so would destroy his source of income, which would bring back the stress. I do get the feeling he might (perhaps paradoxically) be at peace with the thought, that he accepted his neuroticism as an integral part of who he is and is learning to manage those feelings instead of trying to change all at once. Life, after all, is a journey and not a destination.

¹ Which I’ve been following from “This Column Will Change Your Life”, in The Guardian: https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/series/thiscolumnwi...

+1 for Burkerman. The first thing I read from him was "it's worse than you think" [1]

I was trying to finish my to-do lists to rest when he pointed out... I'll never finish. I'll always put new things on my to-do list. Once you dig down, you realize the issue is even worse and that gives the opportunity for a paradigm shift.

https://ckarchive.com/b/75u7h8hkk9g9e

here's how i shifted that paradigm:

have 1 item per list and no more, with only 3 priority levels: on deadline, life, wonderland.

make sure to stack whats finished.

'reorganize' lists you didn't get around to yet, regularly; just to know what's on them in case you ever stumble upon something that might extend one of the puzzles around those wondrous subject and objects on your many lists.

I loved Four Thousand Weeks. The new one sounds intriguing, but wasn't the point of the first book that "you don't even need to Finally Make Time for What Counts", because that is a rather new concept considering the history of civilization? You just did what you had to do. You don't have to make it count and min-max your life. Do you see this as a contradiction?

On the other hand, there is no time for mediocre experiences. I am still young, but I feel keenly aware of how few sunny weekends there are in a lifetime. These cannot be wasted on bad movies in bad company. I hope to be a far better curator of my time, just because there isn’t so much of it.

Paradoxically, that line of thinking is what leads to worse experiences. It is impossible to optimise everything, and if you never give a chance to a bad movie or bad company, you will never be surprised. You cannot know if a movie is bad until you see it, you can only know what other people thought of it. Even the worst movie can mean something to someone at the right time. A bad movie in good company can even be more valuable than a good movie in good company: The moments after a bad movie when you both get to riff on what was wrong with it can lead to moments of laughter, joy, creativity, and human connection that are more lasting than watching a good movie.

Is laying down in the grass staring at the sky a mediocre experience? Maybe some days. In others it will be exactly what you needed and didn’t know.

Give too much emphasis on curating and spontaneous gems will pass you by.

I’m writing this to my younger self as much as I’m writing it to you. I have no doubt my words won’t change your outlook in one go and that you have to learn this experience for yourself, but the sooner you do the fewer time you’ll feel to have wasted.

And remember it doesn’t matter anyway. If you’re an atheist, dying means you won’t feel or remember anything. If you’re religious, dying means an eternal existence. Either way, “wasted” time makes no difference.

You can put mathematical flesh on this concept by reading up on the statistics behind the "multiarmed bandit". You get suboptimal performance if you never take any risks. Since you can't 100% quantify all "risks" involved in watching a bad movie or the joys, you can't just plug numbers in and crank the crank to determine exactly how often you should explore for optimal results, but you can still get the general gist that if you don't roll the dice every so often you won't get the best outcome.

It isn't even necessarily about watching "bad movies" on purpose. Even in the space of movies, one dice roll I've made is to watch the best movie of some genre I'm not particularly into. Even if it doesn't "convert" me to a fan of the genre this has often paid off for me. Another example is a lot of people get into musical ruts very early in life, often I think not even having a clue what the diversity that is out there is like. It doesn't take much to just make a random leap across the landscape to somewhere you've never been to check a new space out.

This is a more accurate take. I don’t mean to say "optimise every waking minute“, but "roll the dice more". This might just mean ordering something different, but also saying yes to more things when the other option is staying home and watching Netflix.

Wouldn't you think that to be able to appreciate good movies, you should at least have seen a bad one too?

You definitely shouldn't waste your time on bad experiences deliberately, but with only positive and rewarding experiences you miss out on growing your own frame of reference and risk becoming blasé or completely risk-averse.

And good experiences can't always be planned or divined by browsing reviews.

These neat brain hacks are basically self-therapy so kudos to the author for discovering one such technique and applying it successfully. Very likely saved money on an indifferent therapist, too.

The following is NOT a knock on the author, I am simply sharing observations of some other types of people I knew a while ago:

Some people just want to feel intelligent and that gives them validation so they basically sprint through 200+ books as some sort of a badge of honor. They then proceeded to claim they are "well read" and couldn't answer 3 questions about the plot about 5 of the books I've also read from their catalog. They hated my guts afterwards of course -- I dispelled the street cred they have "suffered" through -- and then they never called again but I was just left wondering why would you be forcing yourself to read books you don't enjoy and then you are only kind of moving your eyes through the pages without remembering or learning anything at all.

Seemed, and still seems, counter-productive.

Again, not a knock on the article author, just sharing something that came to me during the reading of the article.

That sounds like the kind of people that gamify their life; reading X books per year, running Y miles, doing Z steps on their step counter, counting calories, quantifying sleep, working in 25 minute timed increments and counting how many you've achieved in a day, number of lines written, commits done, github contribution graph colour / activity streaks, etc.

It's like. Maybe you should find a hobby if you need to gamify things to keep doing them.

I count calories because I don't want to be fat again, having found fatness limiting. It has absolute nothing to do with meeting an arbitrary number and is not particularly gamified either. I need to track calories because otherwise I'll overeat.

This is a bizarre take on goal-setting in general. Would you complain about people who negotiate a raise of X dollars? No, you understand that money has value. Losing weight has value too, as do cardiovascular fitness and getting enough sleep. "Maybe you should find a hobby" is not an answer to me not wanting to be fat. It's a ridiculous non-sequitur. How on earth do you expect finding a hobby to stop me having a heart attack or losing a foot to diabetes?

1. They are not complaining;

2. They are talking about people who take the "data-driven decisions" to the extreme, where some of the data either doesn't make sense or doesn't help at all.

You kind of projected IMO. Their comment was absolutely not aimed at people like you who have a concrete goal in mind. They address people who constantly journal a ton of data about their lives (and not using most of it, but they wield the stress it gives them as a badge of honor).

"It's like; maybe you should find a hobby" sounds like complaining, or at least criticism, to me.

I read the reply as a straw man or weak man argument against tracking stats. I don't think there are many calorie counters, or frankly many book journallers or any of the other groups, who are doing it primarily for bragging rights. I reckon almost all of them are doing these things because they see real value in them, and some are incidentally bragging as well. The comment wasn't aimed at me, but it was aimed at a caricature or a handful of extreme examples often used to misrepresent people like me.

Their hobby is gamification.

Or they just dont have as good memory or simply did not found those parts to be worth effort of remembering.

I feel like there's a distinction between _learning something_ from reading a book and remembering plot details.

I am awful at remembering names and characters from books. I'm all good while I'm reading them, but if you asked me "What did you think of John's situation in $BookX" I would find it hard to answer. That said, it all goes into the gestalt jumble of ideas that is me.

I'll say that I mostly read comparitively low-effort fiction that people rarely "test me" on, so it possibly matters less.

Ah, but I am not talking about memorizing stuff, I am really talking about things like "Hey, I forgot what was the backstory of the villain of the book #2 in series X, what was he about?" and then the person proceeded to award me with an empty stare, followed by a hostile one.

If that backstory was not interesting to that person it is likely they will forget immediately after reading. I mean, your own premise is that you forgot too, the stare is hostile because they know the exercise is dishonest.

Nope, it was a very nice positive meet of 8-9 people and I had no goals or agendas, I simply asked because it was long time ago for me. The person projected very hard and I realized I struck a nerve post factum. It was a classic case of being misinterpreted due to the other person's own insecurities.

I think it's worth mentioning some people have differing ability to memorize passively. I can thoroughly comprehend, interact with, and enjoy a book but I won't really remember details after the fact.

I can put in extra, additional effort to commit it to memory, but this is much slower, and generally removes the fun, so I've reserved this for assessed reading.

I think it is an adequate heuristic for many people that if you don't remember details about a book on your bookshelf, you haven't properly engaged with it. But I think it is not universally true.

As another data point, I also never remember the lyrics to my favourite songs unless I study them line by line.

I am very similar to you by the way, and I was mostly talking about just having a recollection of the plot and the main characters / villains, not minutiae.

I don’t know you or the people you talked to, so it’s entirely plausible that you’re 100% correct in your evaluation. Or that you’re projecting feelings into other people.

If someone “hated [your] guts” and “never called again”, I invite you to reflect if they truly got mad because you “dispelled [their] street cred” or because of the way you approached the subject. Especially if that happened multiple times.

A conversation requires more than one person and the “3 questions about 5 books” sounds awfully like “oh, you like Nirvana? Name three of their songs right now”. You could ask what they thought about the book, which ideas resonated with them or didn’t, instead of making them answer a pop quiz of shame. Maybe you’d find out they give importance to different things than you do. Or maybe they didn’t pay that much attention to those books because in a sea of 200 others, they didn’t shine bright enough. Perhaps they have a different set of 5 books where they could tell you every detail.

Again, I don’t know you or the other people so it is entirely possible they were the assholes, I just want to make sure that you’re sure.

>You could ask what they thought about the book, which ideas resonated with them or didn’t, instead of making them answer a pop quiz of shame.

“I cannot remember the books I've read any more than the meals I have eaten; even so, they have made me.” ― Ralph Waldo Emerson

I have a coworker that describes exactly this behavior. Most of the (young) people I know who engage in dialog with him immediately regret it and find ways to end it without feeding into his superiority complex but I think it is his way of validating himself which I most often find entertaining and comically pretentious.

I have an aunt like this. Additionally, she'll argue that you've misunderstood the book when she can't remember plot points :P

one-uppers battling one-uppers

I’m guessing it’s perverse outcome of our species being a trophy species, that being educated is now considered pro-social, and that people have to compete against the world instead of just the few dozen in the tribe.

Yeah, if you literally quizzed me on books I read and then acted I am liar just because I dont remember plot point I would dislike you too. I forget plot points of things. It does not mean I did not read those books or did not watched the movie. I hated this test via memory of uninteresting or unimportant plot point in school too.

Almost no one is able to remember whole books after first reading. That proves exactly nothing. You experience them as you read them.

That's fine because I did none of the things you said. I legitimately asked them about stuff I forgot because I read those books like 15 years ago. And it wasn't details, it was major plot points or character backgrounds.

I've encountered this often. Bookshelves are a red flag, change my mind

This is a common reaction to a pervasive phenomenon

Reading is one way people encounter ideas and learn, and so some people who read have a broad worldview and have absorbed the insights from books

People start to notice this, or perhaps those people attribute some other success to reading books. Enough association of this kind makes reading books high-status

Many people want to short-circuit this process to get status, so they optimize for reading a lot of books, or sometimes fake reading books

People who fake reading books for status are shown ridiculous when exposed

People who are allergic to and resent status nonsense conclude that bookshelves mean someone's a poser

This is obviously ridiculous. Many people have bookshelves because they simply need to store some books

The error committed here is, to me, a common one, overfocusing on the most salient case. I agree that it's icky when people do shit like fill shelves with books they've never and will never read as a status symbol. But are we really to assume that this is the most common reason to have a bookshelf? Or is it just the reason to which you have the strongest reaction, and thus stands out the most to you as a hypothesis?

With some additional information about a person, one might be able to conclude this given the bookshelf, but it hardly seems like enough evidence to come to this conclusion by itself

Thank you for taking the time to analyze! You nailed me here:

    People who are allergic to and resent status nonsense conclude that bookshelves mean someone's a poser

That describes me to a fault. Very 'sensitive' to status. Anyone trying to convince is easily removed. I think of it as a credulity compulsion

I don't mean to imply I rule people out solely based on this. Someone with a full bookshelf and little practical experience does get a different path towards judgement, though.

I did say red flag, not checkered...

That's a poor way to look at the world. Also have no interest to change your mind.

I don't disagree. It is a dim view. Yet, I have it for a reason. Thank you for participating

I'm not actually calling for my mind to be changed. I want the readers I encounter to not be as they are.

Yea, yea. Common demoninator. There are plenty I enjoy. I can afford this position.

"It is foolish to think that you have to read all the books you buy, as it is foolish to criticize those who buy more books than they will ever be able to read. It would be like saying that you should use all the cutlery or glasses or screwdrivers or drill bits you bought before buying new ones.

...we understand that it is good to have many at home rather than a few: when you want to feel better, then you go to the ‘medicine closet’ and choose a book. Not a random one, but the right book for that moment. That’s why you should always have a nutrition choice!"

-- Umberto Eco (https://fs.blog/the-antilibrary/)

It is foolish to think disguises don't exist. Or assume 'red flag' means 'finish line'

Do you mean bookshelves as in the place where you put books before, during, and after reading them, or bookshelves as in the online habit of sharing what you've read?

I agree that the latter is self-congratulatory but I don't see why you'd object to the former.

Either in a certain use. I'm fine with them as a place to put things or even highlight values. Less as an ambiguous prop.

One data point among many. I like to see some tools or wear on the hands too

I very much agree with the base premise here, but I do think with art (music, movies, books, etc) there can also be value in working to appreciate that which does not immediately reveal itself. Sometimes good art doesn't catch you in the first 10 mins and you need to spend more time with it to fully appreciate it.

That said, there are plenty of times when this advice is absolutely on point. You should never feel guilty or bad for abandoning something you aren't enjoying.

Agree. This is where doing a little research can pay off handsomely. The first time I listened to Stravinsky's "The Rite of Spring", I didn't 'get it'. But people in the know held it in very high esteem, so I gave it a few more listens, and eventually it opened up for me. It's now one of my favorite pieces of classical music. If I'd given up after 10 minutes I would've missed out.

> I’ve never been diagnosed with ADHD and don’t feel that I have it, but there’s a little sparkle at starting a new project and a certain amount of slog in following certain ones through to their logical end.

Every now and then (usually after reading something on here that brings it up) I wonder about this for myself as well.

I don't think it's ADHD, it's just... normal life, surely? New projects are always more exciting than the last, boring, grindy bits of a side project.

I like the way Jordi Brun approaches scoping/deciding when to continue or abandon personal projects:

- 2 hours for a PoC

- 2 days for a prototype you can share

- 2 weeks for something actually useful

I put together some notes on the subject here: https://untested.sonnet.io/notes/2-2-2-project-scoping-techn...

Those deadlines are way to short except for really small projects little like a single static web page. Or the guy is a x100 developer.

100% agree. This is fine if you're experimenting with product discovery or small projects.

> Or the guy is a x100 developer.

Haha, I've had 0.1x developer* as my bio on the cringe blue site™ for the past decade or so. I just want to make toys.

* inspired by a post by this post by Benji Weber: https://benjiweber.co.uk/blog/2016/01/25/why-i-strive-to-be-...

That's written by an oddly highly motivated individual.

It often takes me 2 hours to focus and stop daydreaming.

Perhaps that's a good signal that I'm not a natural "builder" and I should take the hint.

> That's written by an oddly highly motivated individual.

On the contrary. Sometimes I struggle with attention or get hyperfocussed on a specific problem, so I use these to keep myself in check. I fail most of the time, still, just a little bit less often.

Nonsense, a lot of genius builders needed months to just begin one project. And some of them needed decades to even finish the thing.

Don't let yourself be chained by artificial frameworks that were arbitrarily formulated by someone who feels everything should be on schedule.

> Don't let yourself be chained by artificial frameworks that were arbitrarily formulated by someone who feels everything should be on schedule.

Can't agree more. Just please, please consider the context of this site when reading:

https://untested.sonnet.io/notes/this-is-not-writing-or-prod...

The only advice that really works for me is this: https://untested.sonnet.io/notes/share-your-unfinished-scrap...

- happy 0.1x developer

Or a visionary.

I can't edit, so will post here: please read the note before commenting (it's short), a lot of context is missing in this quick comment.

Apologies, I should've put this phrase in more context. I agree with most of the comments, even the snarky ones, but I didn't express what I meant well enough.

Lmao. HN people don't want to grind for years to solve tough problems. They want to find some 'hack' or side-trick to bypass everything. But the reality is some problems take a long time to solve. How long do you think Bitcoin took to write? It wasn't 2 weeks.

Ok, pal, before you continue gangbanging me, please read the note!

Sorry, it wasn't my intention to make you feel harassed. Your advice probably makes a lot of sense for people who like to release many smaller products. Scope creep and extreme complexity are problems I've struggled with myself, and I often find it hard to start with the most basic deliverable rather than a vision that is much further along. I still have a lot to learn and I think these things are important problems for HN-type people.

Thanks, I appreciate that. As much as many people here didn't seem to have read the article or the note I linked, I should've phrased it differently so the context was apparent.

I have something of the opposite problem with books. I'll get right around the hundred page mark, forget it existed, and start something new.

I have probably 40 or 50 books with this status, and I have been doing this going back to Elementary School when I tried to read both Dune and The Gunslinger. I picked them up recently, starting fresh, and got just about as far.

My stale projects can be categorized as being ahead or behind an event horizon:

I will rarely let go of an idea, but I can calculate the probability that I'll ever pick a project up again.

I don't feel sorry that some things I will never get back to:

It's only because more interesting projects will always pop up before I get to the end of the stack.

The same is true for browser tabs: My mind could literally go in a thousand directions, many of which lead elsewhere and not back.

I'm cautious of throwing things away, because there are projects I've got back to after 5 years.

Most often I'm going back to something after less than 6 months to understand what I did, so I can copy it in a similar project.

The best quality of a spurious project is that it stacks against other things: When (not if) I abandon the project, I've made reusable components.

And I'm cautious of making big initial investments if the project will fall behind.

That could be Google's new slogan.

Ultimately, I think this article is about having self-compassion. Yes, sometimes a little perseverance goes a long way. Yes, things are a handful of things we "have" to do. However, I appreciate that the author is practicing giving himself grace. We all start reading book that were excited about and sometimes "abandoning" the book is the right call. In that way, I like how the author of the blog post created a "stepped-away" book shelf on their goodread profile.

The Unfinished Project Release Form looks cool! Thanks for sharing.

Projects I haven't touched for a long, long time...

XRDPConfigurator : https://github.com/scarygliders/XRDPConfigurator

- This is a GUI application I wrote 10 years ago. It even has a full WYSIWYG emulation of the xrdp login screen, which you can use to customize the look of it! All written in Python and PySide. It was originally meant to be a commercial product that I'd sell. Turns out there was no market for it and no one seems interested in it. Oh well!

X11RDP-o-Matic : https://github.com/scarygliders/X11RDP-o-Matic

- This was a shell script which automatically built and installed the Xrdp server on Debian based systems. Was quite popular back in the day but became kinda obsolete, which was good.

Polkit Explorer : https://github.com/scarygliders/Polkit-Explorer

- reads in a Policykit .policy file, parses its XML contents, and presents the information it contains, on a more human-readable GUI window. This seems to be useful to folks and someone even created an Arch Linux AUR for it, which was nice. I perhaps should try to update it so that it works with more modern versions of Python and PySide.

That last one. Hmmm. It's been a hot minute since I even thought about it, but someone recently created an issue to do with getting it running with python 3.12, so maybe I should have a peek at it once again...

The author of the article, I agree with. It's OK to abandon things. XRDPConfigurator is what I used to learn Python and Qt (with a naive goal of making income from it). That application took a year and bit of my time. I'm particularly proud of the Xrdp emulation, and the WYSIWYG editing of the Xrdp login screen layout! But spending any more time on it was wasted time. I open-sourced it after taking out all the nasty - and self-designed - registration (DRM) stuff I'd also had (which spoke to a central registration server and was Very Clever[tm] With No Chance Of Being Bypassed! ( /s ), and promptly just left it stewing in stasis. And no one was really interested in it, either. I guess Xrdp just isn't sexy enough for folks ;)

I have this same problem with books. One thing that helps with nonfiction books: just skim it. Especially if it's a pop-sci, business type book that is a lot of unnecessary fluff to make word count. When it gets tedious, skim the rest. Read the headlines, a few paragraphs, skip all the anecdotes. You still get the idea. You don't have to force yourself to choke down every word.

I feel like I sympathise with books related section: https://www.owsiak.org/reading-books-you-are-doing-it-wrong/

If you find this idea interesting or new, you haven't really deeply thought about your own mortality and how your body is dying slowly. There is nothing for you to hold on to no matter the illusions created by your mind.

The most important thing is to function from a point of curiosity-driven creativity. Fear makes us define projects out of that, and the resulting project-driven life only kills creativity and makes us machines.

I think this is the last thing I need to hear

Here is my double-edge-sword one. (A recipe for interesting yet unsuccessful paths).

- Don't start something until you have set a finish line.

You have full freedom on how you set the finish line. If the finish line is too far away, split into subproject for which you can set a closer finish line. Sometimes you will fail to reach the finish line for some unforeseen reasons, that's OK, just reevaluate if this impact the feasibility of the upper projects.

- Don't start something you don't have the resources for. If some project are expected to be long-running, you should plan for the resources needed for their being interrupted. Because you can interrupt and restart projects, advancing is just picking some task for the day from your priority queue.

This one is tricky because if you start to define a subproject that you have the resources to do (like building a prototype), once it is done, people will tell you it's just a prototype, and you don't have the resources to build the full thing nor find investors or customers). So maybe you shouldn't have built the prototype knowing you wouldn't be able to scale it up later. And then you get sunk-cost fallacy put on a dead-end road.

- Don't share your projects. Uncouple task completion from external validation. External validation should be avoided. At anytime, you'll most likely be working on a subproject of a subproject. It's likely to be specific, boring, or some very valuable key brick that can be used for many other projects.

If you chase the high of sharing a successful project and rely on it for taking each step, and at the end external success doesn't come, you are killing your future motivation source (in a kind of learned helplessness fashion).

It often kills motivation, transforming the intrinsic reward of completing subprojects fully in your control into external rewards out of your control. Inversely it can lead you to delude yourself if you surround yourself with sycophants.

External validation will want to set arbitrary finish lines upon you without regards for feasibility or resources needed.

"Just turn it into money", "It's useless", "Don't give it for free" are things you don't like to hear when you run on an empty stomach after pouring your soul into making some great things.

I wish HN let us favourite comments, because I’d favourite this and then print it out and stick it on my wall. Really like this.

>I wish HN let us favourite comments

It does. The button says 'favorite'.

Aaaahh I'm dense. I forget you have to click through the comment to get the favourite button.

I mostly agree with

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