Comment by PaulRobinson | Hacker News Reader

Comment by PaulRobinson | Hacker News Reader

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.

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.

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.

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