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Comment by hnthrow90348765 | Hacker News Reader

The time pressures of every day life, which has gotten more complicated, are probably why we gravitate towards instant gratification more often. You don't have the time or energy to go to the library for books on a work day, especially with a commute. Same with any other activity. Working hard to finish your work ahead of time results in more work. Innovation's reward is not more free time, it's more work of a different kind.

Blaming phones is a distraction. If it weren't phones, we'd still be couch potatoes lazily scrolling through channels to find something to watch. The core issue is we only have time/energy these days for our job's work and the lazy resting which seeks instant gratification.

Next time someone's unemployed, try doing nothing but social media for 8 hours a day, 7 days a week on a couch and see you'll eventually get bored.

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> You don't have the time or energy to go to the library for books on a work day, especially with a commute. Same with any other activity.

I hear this repeated a lot on the Internet, but in real life I do things during the week and meet up with a lot of other adults with jobs and commutes for them.

This came up a lot when I was mentoring younger engineers. Every time we did a deep dive into their daily routine, they had a lot of unaccounted for time. They’d list their work day and commute, obviously, then add things like getting ready in the morning and eating dinner at night. Then one of two things happened: Either they’d start to exaggerate their daily routine chores (getting ready in the morning, making dinner at night) until they took 6 hours every day, or they’d be confused about how they couldn’t get the numbers to add up.

Upon further gentle pushing, they almost always realize that they’re spending hours and hours watching TV and on their phones every time. Some times they’d pull out a phone with screen time tracking, be stunned by the number of hours, and tell me it must be broken.

There are some job and commute combinations that won’t leave time for anything during the week, but most people don’t have those. They just have poor time management and their revealed priorities differ from their stated priorities. People will tell you that reading books and going to the gym is a priority for them, but then they’ll spend 3 hours watching Netflix every night and scroll social media for 90 minutes every morning.

8 hour work days could probably be 6 or less with the same pay for plenty of jobs (or 5 day weeks could be 4 days). Some of these jobs could be remote. If your job is draining, it's not taking the same energy as a job you like and fulfills you; it's probably taking multiples more energy and willpower away from you.

Let's not even throw childcare into consideration here. Childcare blows your energy and time out of the water all by itself, yet we still ask 8 hours a day from parents.

People miscount calories like you're saying with time, so I'd say that's accurate, but no one is really forcing you to eat the overportioned, oversalted and oversugar'd foods from restaurants these days (USA perspective). Work is definitely forcing you to spend the time you do otherwise you quickly go homeless.

I think the amount of different activities you can do in a day is a personality thing.

I work 9-10 hours a day. Could I physically squeeze in an Another hour and half of chores or socializing than I do now? Sure. Is that going to make my life better and more fulfilling? No.

But for many people I know, the answer would be yes. They want to do PTA or whatever.

Why do you work so much?

Not the OP, but have been in an identical situation for a while.

Unfortunately the answer I've come to is "I don't know how to stop, and I have nothing else valuable to replace it with."

I have made great strides in the last 12 months on the second part, but the first part is still hard to move past.

> when I was mentoring younger engineers

In what context? At work? If a more established coworker was "mentoring" me about how much work I was getting done and wanting detailed info about how I spend my time outside of work, I'd lie and act confused about it too.

For reasons (work is paying for it, sets me up for several positions I'm interested in) I'm knocking out a masters degree. I've had this same discussion with other students who are, like me, juggling a full-time job, house, and family with school. They don't understand how I fit in everything and take more classes than them every semester (still part time, 2 this semester and TA'ing a 3rd).

The time is there, if you're willing to use it. You have 16-18 hours every week day (depending on how much you sleep).

I wake at 6am, work out until 6:30 or 7 (depending on the day) then cleanup and head to work, where I arrive around 8am. I leave around 4:30pm and get home no later than 5:30pm (if there's an accident on the route home). So this is the largest portion of my day and eats up 11.5 hours on a bad day, but 11 normally.

That leaves me with 4.5-6.5 more hours in the evening for everything else. That's actually a lot of time if you're not wasting it. 2-3 hours with my family every night and 1-2 hours doing school work or TA'ing. And since I go to bed at midnight, that leaves me with 1.5-3.5 hours to do whatever else (more time with the family or wife most likely, or housework).

And weekends there's a glut of time. In 18 hours of waking time, I can do a 2 hour ride, 2 hours of yard and house work, and say 4 hours (max) of school work. I still have 10 hours for family, friends, or myself.

Or as if people use to work 12 hours in a coal mine and have all this energy for dancing and piano practice after.

Modern people are just spoiled and largely delusional.

I had a bad work day yesterday but compared to anything else I would have been doing 50 years ago it was absolutely nothing in terms of stress or energy.

A 12 hour work day is probably not at all the historical norm, and only existed broadly after the industrial revolution.

"Next time someone's unemployed, try doing nothing but social media for 8 hours a day, 7 days a week on a couch and see you'll eventually get bored."

I think this can be true while also further enforcing the point. I was a child in the 80's and would ride my bike all over town just doing stuff. Sometimes alone, sometimes with friends. Yes, I know that sounds like older guy nostalgia.

But the idea that a full work day is the only reason that adults aren't "bored" seems absurd to me. The world is full of low-cost wonder. We have allowed ourselves to be captured by low agency tasks like watching TV and scrolling through phones.

The classic consumption vs creative use of computation.

I think people underestimate how much consumption there was in the past. For example, TV viewership peaked in 2009[0] before iPhones were widespread. Average viewership in America was almost 9 hours a day.

[0] https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2018/05/when-...

> I think people underestimate how much consumption there was in the past

Sure, but as a child I was limited to initial one TV station, later two. They started broadcasting at 16 - 17 and stopped around midnight. The subtract dinner time, programming after bed time and the stuff I had no interest in watching, That didn't leave many hours for TV.

I don't think it's the hours that's the point, because is it really better to read a book, a magazine or the newspaper? It really depends on the content you consume and the quality of the content has gone rapidly downhill since the invention of reality TV.

Listen , take my words with a grain of salt because I admittedly waste a LOT of time .

But from what I've heard from great people / self help books in general is that

Getting bored isn't bad. I think you need to get bored sometimes to fetch back to your default.

Are we humans to not get bored or are we not bored / constantly stimulated / this drive towards higher and higher satisfaction that makes us human?

My brother used to joke that we should have some device that just injects the maximum amount of pleasure possible (like drugs) , I was like uhh that makes them unproductive and he was like : what is productivity to individual if he isn't happy?

Though I wonder if happiness and satisfaction are same. Satisfaction feels chemical , happiness feels spiritual.

Blaming phones isn't a distraction. I use a dumb phone and it didn't even had songs till yesterday (had no sd card , read my other comment)

And I had to constantly spend 3 - 4 hours 3 days per week in car travel. Guess what? I like to look at visuals and maybe reading book (though it gets vomit-y , I am going to now listen to AUDIOBOOKs , it's so fun!) , and maybe interacting with other human beings. I love dumb phones. I am seriously thinking of never buying a smartphone

I remember reading about the importance of getting bored/stuck in "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance", from 1974. Long before the phone.

Regarding stuck.

I am not sure if this is just me

But I don't know , like if I get stuck on a study question or on a programming question. I actually feel like my breaths get short and I get anxious and it feels clumsy (like the world is falling bit by bit)

The best way to describe it would be the box getting shorter and you are trapped in it ("stuck")

So I personally really hate getting stuck but I am okay with getting bored since then I can play with my own (thoughts?)

Maybe its just me. If then I am sorry.

I think the advice for that situation would be to "sit with it"; through exposure gradually reduce your automatic response to that situation and become calmer about it. Easier said than done of course.

The most unpleasant "stuck" feelings I get tend to be associated with learning something that's new (could be a musical technique, a new codebase, etc.). At age 42, I now try to treat that feeling as a positive - it means I'm stretching my brain / body in ways I haven't done before.

Is that really true? I think life has become infinitely more convenient over the last few decades.

One can now order everything over the internet and not even leave the house. SO many errands that cost tons of time involved leaving the house and getting this or that. This is now all reduced to minutes on the phone or computer and the items will magically appear in front of your door.

Same with information search. Having the internet, google maps, etc. has made everything so much easier than it used to be in the 80s or 90s.

I never understood this either. I sleep well, work 8 hours, meal prep my meals, work out a few days a week, have outdoor and indoor hobbies, meet up with friends at least weekly, and still have more time than I know what to do with.

This didn't "just happen". I made choices all life long, and continue to make choices to change my circumstances to build and to have the life and lifestyle I want.

Do you have kids?

No and that was a deliberate choice I made.

I think both things can be (and are) true.

Life IS infinitely more convenient and A biproduct of that is missing out on things that are (or used to be) authentic experiences.

Is it a guarantee that going to the grocery store is certain to be a thrilling adventure whereas Instacart is ceratain not to be? Of course not. There is a non-zero chance you meet the love of your life at the Grocery store just as there is a non-zero chance you meet the love of your life dropping off your Instacart order. (We can argue about the relative percentages of each but that's not the point)

The point is not that convenience is bad but rather that the ubiquity of phones (on-demand apps, social media) in daily life removes a wide range of potential emotional outcomes from daily life as a result of the fact that nothing is rare anymore. Nothing.

That part is hard to argue.

New complexity is a factor, but I would also point to a reduced standard of living (possibly related). Times are hard. Individuals are worked harder than past decades by their employers, and the goods and services available to them are reduced in quality. So, for example, to get the same quality of food, you have to spend more time discerning its quality or sourcing it from different or more high quality places. Whereas you might have been able to afford a trustworthy handyman to fix certain things in years past, the cost of this is higher and the average individual is less trustworthy, in terms of somebody you want to let into your home.

All of that is 100% self-imposed.

Work and live closer together. Find a job that allows sane hours. Find a hobby so you don't have to spend what little extra time you have doom-scrolling (or watching TV).

I get up a 5:30, go to the gym or pool, and still have time to walk my dog and eat a sensible breakfast before walking to the office and arriving around 8am. I leave at 5:30ish, walk the dog again, and then cycle or run before dinner. That puts me somewhere around 7:30 or 8, so I still have an hour or two to chat with wife and read a book. No doom-scrolling or couch-potato-ing required.

If I'm physically tired, swap "run" for "fiddle with home lab" or "read more books" or "take dog for 3 mile hike".

Quitting Fecesbook and Twatter were two of the best decisions I've made in the past 5 years.

I'm not taking extra effort to change my life when companies want to do RTO when it's unnecessary. Sure, you can be a survivor and adapt to any situation and just go with it, but that stops you from fighting back against these pressures. You'll get taken advantage of if you always live like that.

The time pressures of every day life, which has gotten more complicated, are probably why we gravitate towards instant gratification more often.

You said people don't have time, so they resort to scrolling or whatever. All I'm saying is that time limitations and excess complexities are largely self-imposed. If you (general you) want to continue commuting and working long hours and not having the bandwidth to do anything else, you do you. But admit that that's on you.

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