Vanity activities | Hacker News Reader

Vanity activities

quarter--mile.com

74 pointssurprisetalk72 comments

Some good points in here, but with respect to networking, the author misses the forest for the trees.

Sure, when you go to networking events, you aren't certain you are going to get a job from the folks you meet.

What you are doing is increasing your luck surface area. Hiring is not an entirely rational process, but if someone doesn't know you exist, they won't hire you (how could they?).

From there, it follows that meeting someone and letting them know you exist increases the chances (however small) that they can and will assist you on your career path. And a networking opportunity, where you meet someone face to face (and can meet them repeatedly) is a far better way to let someone know you exist than sending them your resume.

There are other ways to raise your profile that don't involve networking events and you can argue that they are better, but that's a cost-benefit analysis you should consider.

> Hiring is not an entirely rational process

Agreed! I'd go so far as to say hiring is irrational in the aggregate.

The usual "rational" artifacts, if we can call them that (coding challenges, resumés, etc.) serve almost exclusively to eliminate candidates rather than boost good candidates. Firms are generally ok with false negatives from these artifacts as simply the cost of doing business.

> From there, it follows that meeting someone and letting them know you exist increases the chances (however small) that they can and will assist you on your career path.

I've seen this described as "people hire who they vibe with", and I've yet to see it play otherwise in my career. I'm not saying this is good, or fair, or desirable. It just is.

The folks who get offers are the ones who can meet people, tell stories (even true ones!), listen, and demonstrate that they can empathize with and contribute to messy, flawed organizations.

Humans have yet to invent a technology more powerful than social relationships, and I think technologists downplay this at their own peril.

Networking involves more than just letting people know you exist. I'd say that's borderline useless. Actually networking requires building real relationships with people. For me, that means continually meeting new people who do the same kind of thing that I do, having pleasant or exciting conversations with them, learning as much as I can about them (showing a real interest! asking serious questions! listening to their answers!), and demonstrating to them that I'm hungry and I want to do Big Things. It's hard to do this effectively. I'm sure it depends on your field and it certainly requires continual practice.

In general, going to a single networking event with the purpose of networking is kind of silly, but going to the same conference year after year to see the same people and have deep discussions opens a lot of doors. I imagine the point of "networking events" in general is to be a modern take on a country club: You go to see like-minded people who want to meet people like them, and you keep going over and over again to develop relationships.

> Actually networking requires building real relationships with people.

Yes! I'm sorry, I didn't mean to imply that letting folks know you exist was sufficient; it is only necessary.

I find a cheat code to building relationships with people is to give first. I love to ask "how can I help" when I meet someone at a conference or networking event. This does a few things:

* separates you from so many other people who go to these events looking to be transactional

* shows you can follow through (when you actually do help them) which, somewhat shockingly, distinguishes you from many other folks

* filters folks that might not be a fit for a deep relationship because you move in different worlds; if someone asks "well, I am looking for a major piece of real estate to buy", I as a software developer am unlikely to be able to help them

This is a long play though, to be sure.

I feel like networking at events is valuable, but networking events are less so with some exceptions. You ideally want to bump into someone with a high value network, but most of the people going to networking events are going to the events because they don't have a high value network.

An exception would be mixers for interns and juniors; few people have a developed network at that point, so even those with a couple good contacts are interested in expanding, and there's a lot of potential.

"Networking", in the abstract, can be good for finding a job. As they say, it's who you know not what you know.

That being said, industry networking events, like conferences and such, are almost not at all useful for that purpose. In my experience they're mostly used for B2B sales (which is a kind of networking, I guess).

That’s still networking. Companies often have referral bonuses for open positions so if a lot of salespeople know you, when there’s a referral bonus available they might just put your name in. It’s something.

Why not just cold-message people from a potential employer when you’re applying there? Works way better than it should, and is more targeted than talking to people 99% of who you‘ll never see again, at an event.

What is your go-to text for such a cold message? I haven't seen that work but am always interested in new techniques.

Hey XY, Sorry for the cheeky reach-out. I‘ve already applied to the XZY role and just wanted to say I‘m really interested because it seems like it could be very good fit for both sides. I see you‘ve been using [tech] a lot, which I‘m personally a fan of, because it has [upside]. Btw, are you also using [tangential other tech]?

Or alternatively, ask some questions around team structure and roadmap - good leads like it when people are interested in what is likely their field of work.

It doesn't have to be one or the other. Both ethical consumption and going vegetarian reduce one's environmental impact, and they're independent of one another. So, while someone "truly" optimizing for environmental impact would better spend their time avoiding meat, someone who enjoys meat can still reduce their environmental impact without becoming miserable. Variables like "income" and "environment" are just parts of the equation for the more important heuristic of happiness.

A lot of the activities on that list are like this. Reading the news has a non-zero impact (hey, I'm on HN, and it definitely helps me keep up to date), and it's "easy" in that it fits into my heuristic for happiness. Same with using a metal straw, and same with picking between credit cards.

In a sense, these activities are "free" in terms of their perceived difficulty, but have a positive, if small, impact. If they're "free", why not do them?

> going vegetarian reduce one's environmental impact

Mmm, yes and no.

It depends where your meat comes from. If you buy meat the way it's produced in the US where you have great big sheds full of cattle in the desert with everything trucked in, then yes.

If you want permaculture, you absolutely must have livestock.

If you want arable farming of any sort, you absolutely must have livestock.

The whole thing breaks down very quickly if you don't have grass and clovers growing in fields, and ruminants eating them, breaking down the tough cellulose, and then shitting it out and trampling it in.

The amount of livestock that we actually would need in that case is probably around 5% of what we actually have (in the US). So it’s still valid if half of all people became vegetarian, and the remaining amount cut their meat consumption to “special occasions only”.

Keep in mind that a lot of our current agriculture is growing feed for livestock as well, so we could cut back on plant farming by a huge amount as well, if we greatly reduced livestock.

> Keep in mind that a lot of our current agriculture is growing feed for livestock as well, so we could cut back on plant farming by a huge amount as well, if we greatly reduced livestock.

Yes and no.

We'd also cut down massively on the amount of food we have available for humans.

What would be better is if people stopped eating soya.

The amount of cattle required to maintain pasture is way fewer than we have right now. From a CO2 perspective factory farmed cattle tends to look a little better than "free-range" mostly due to reduced land use changes (but it is obviously worse from a cruelty perspective). Finally, we can still have farm animals without eating them!!

You might be right, but I was taking that as a given since the article made that claim. I think the general point (of taking smaller actions in lieu of more effective but costly ones) matters more so than the individual "vanity activity".

Won’t that work better without killing & eating them young?

They're not free because they consume your time, which is valuable.

Yes, but only if you would spend that time on something that is more valuable (according to your happiness+ heuristic).

Right, but I think that was the author's point: many of these activities are seen by their participants as "productive", rather than just "this makes me happy". That was a specific point of the post.

On a related note: I've run businesses for close to 20 years, most of those spent selling to other businesses, and I still fail to understand what the entirety of LinkedIn is for and if there is any of it that wouldn't fall under the author's definition of "Vanity activities".

If anyone has a clue, please enlighten me.

I have a friend who calls LinkedIn "a rolodex that other people keep up to date".

There is some value in posting on LinkedIn, but the real value is that you can go back and find people who are weak connections when you are looking to hire, purchase services, or ask favors.

I think everyone should join LinkedIn and connect to every one of their colleagues that they would work with again. Then, once in a while, keep that connection alive by sending a message or commenting on a post.

It's a long game, but will pay dividends should you ever need to chat with them.

Definitely all the posting and activity on there seems very strange and is not something I’m remotely interested in participating in. But recruiters have often found me through LinkedIn and connected me with jobs, so it’s still useful overall and I keep my profile up to date.

I use it as a write only medium. I post about what I am doing and leave. It keeps my audience and people in my industry aware of what I am working on, and that makes my work more impactful. I have met many people that way, including my current partner.

It’s part of my strategy of working in public. It’s good for business and for my morale.

>what the entirety of LinkedIn is for

Signalling allegiance.

To?

I have this debate with people about news and podcasts sometimes (news was one of the examples in TFA). People say they are doing it to remain informed, and it’s a high-value activity, but I argue it’s mostly entertainment since it rarely affects any decision-making.

This is not a hardline position, but I’m surprised at how vehemently people insist that their news habit has benefits beyond entertainment.

(To be clear, I have nothing against entertainment.)

I agree, but also the context matters. Reading news about sports is basically always entertainment, with an exception of maybe betting, to make better bets. Reading news about housing market can get me in a better position to buy my next home for cheaper, or strenghten my negotiation position.

News consumption impacts political decision making, like who I want to support or oppose in local, state, and national elections.

That seems a pretty high impact decision we want all the members of our society to be making on a regular basis.

Staying informed of current events being a vanity activity is an idea very heavily pushed by people who are radically opposed to broad democracy in favor of some variety of elite rule, a distressingly common position in general, and particularly in tech spaces.

True, I don’t have the right to vote in the place where I live, so that definitely reduces my incentive to engage in news.

But out of friends who engage in news it’s disproportionately at the global and nation level, so I don’t think they are really optimizing for civil engagement.

Voting is just one way people engage in the political process.

I live in a country that tends to deport noncitizens who “engage in the political process”, unless it’s in support of the incumbent government.

To call reading the news “vanity” exposes the true vanity of this kind of post. What is the logic of assigning the word “vanity” to my interest to know what’s going on in the world? It’s vanity because I have no important decisions to make about the war in Ukraine, or the perfidy of my government?

It’s not vanity, it’s a desire to understand my world and my place within it.

What IS vanity is imagining that one’s own tastes are the only tastes that matter in the world.

The given definition of vain is "if they don’t lead to something more important (e.g. profit)". I don't directly profit from reading the news, it's true. I'd have to make quite hand-wavy arguments about why it's beneficial. We can also list activities such as friendship, dreams, appreciating beauty, and feeling excited as non-profitable. Then there's having aspirations: what do we gain from that? Without goals, we could save a great deal of time and effort. Striving for profit, then, is a vain and non-profitable activity because of the unnecessariness of everything.

I like your comment.

I'm confused by how differently some otherwise smart people view the world than I do. My wife and family, by some definitions, are worthless. They have no economic value. But I look at them and feel that we lead lives of meaning and purpose every day. We know why we are alive and we are living up to it. If that's unproductive, then productivity itself is, I declare, vanity.

yeah that's just a bad definition. nobody would describe painting for fun as "vanity". vanity metrics make sense because in business the goal is to make money. in life that is not the goal.

Yeah, I think "vanity" is not totally the right term here, but I do think they have a point that there are diminishing returns with staying up on the news cycle.

For instance, I think there is a difference between reading some news daily and consuming only news. My father was in the latter category growing up -- I never really saw him read a book, but he was always reading a paper or listening to/watching a news program. Personally I find that I get more from reading books as they're afforded the space to go into depth on a topic. I think the author is trying to point out that that surface level news consumption is fine but probably not as beneficial as we might want to tell ourselves.

The one thing I've found most helpful news-wise, though, is that I find that it's one of the better ways to learn a foreign language to an upper-intermediate or advanced level. I relied heavily on RFI and other news outlets when learning French, with the added benefit that you're often getting international news the media doesn't report on here in the US.

> Yeah, I think "vanity" is not totally the right term here

“Recreation” is perhaps a good word.

But I also use “vanity” for doing serious things, for a non-serious purpose in a similar way. I.e. one day I would like to be able to afford to have some “vanity businesses”, regardless of profitability, like bar I have designed, a winery, etc.

Pretty common hobbies for the wealthy.

Those are not things that drive me, and not for appearance sake (I.e. not that kind of vanity). But if I had enough to throw in this direction without any risk to myself, I would enjoy that.

You are reading too much into choice of term. The author explains their rationale for using "vanity" quite clearly:

> In business, a “vanity metric” is a statistic that sounds good but is not very useful.

It's not about you being "vain" for reading the newspaper, it's just a parallel to another widely used term the author co-opted.

He literally says: "Our definition for vanity activity can be similar: something you do that seems more useful or virtuous than it really is."

And then he suggests that reading the news is a vanity activity.

My comment is perfectly on point. I think he is engaging in a vanity activity, by his own definition, when he suggests that reading the news is a vanity activity.

It's fine to have an opinion and a way of looking at the world. My objection is when a person claims that opinion is something more rational than it is-- while pissing on the choices other people make.

It is not hard to convincingly argue that reading the news is less useful than many participants believe it to be.

You in particular getting as much value out of the activity as you think you do doesn't negate the point of the article. Exceptions make rules, and the author said "most people".

More like a desire for dopamine.

surprisingly not listed: writing blog posts

The thing about writing is that there are dozens of reasons to do it, "it's fun" being one of them.

Or comments on blog post aggregators

This reminds me of something slightly different but of "not reinventing the wheel"

It feels like there should be emerging "optimized solutions" to certain problems that are widely accepted, but rather instead it seems like people just keep re-doing things that I thought we would have already "solved" and moved on past

For example, if you simply want to consume the cheapest caffeine source, I thought someone figured out it was powdered caffeine... versus paying maybe like 100x more for a coffee from a "coffee chain store". Now, granted the experience and maybe the same antioxidants or chemical makeup may not be the same in caffeine powder versus coffee, but the point is I feel like a lot of problems aren't "solved for optimization" which would enable us to make progress on some other unoptimized problem in society

I guess this "reinvention of the wheel" feels like a "vanity activity" to me?

Author really should have figured out a better word than "vanity."

Feels like a pretty tidy parallel to luxury beliefs. Luxury activities would fit, especially since some of these are the activity equivalent to the belief.

Why?

I enjoyed the article. Many comments here on HN seem to be missing the point.

The author isn't bashing on "hobbies" and is not even bashing on "vanity activities". S/he is merely challenging us to acknowledge them for what they are. Stop kidding yourself.

If you churn credit cards (for example) and are one of the 10% that can make it truly profitable, then good for you. The other 90% are probably kidding themselves. Same for the other examples. The author is encouraging a self-sanity check. Are you in the 10% or the 90%, and wherever you land, are you okay with that? If not, you may want to reevaluate, pick something else, or make peace with it. It's better than kidding yourself.

IMHO, churning is clearly profitable if you pay off your card every month, will hit the spend requirements organically and are organized enough to cancel to avoid annual fees in the second year. Some people dive into manufactured spending to hit the required spending, but then you really need to consider the time invested.

The question is more about if the rewards are meaningful. I think it's actually worth doing a bit of churning to get exposure to different banks and figure out which one you like... might as well get paid for that. But after a certain point, I value stability and routine more than $300 to jump through hoops... and I'm not going back to Chase no matter what they want to pay me.

What's wrong with Chase?

Bonkers fraud checks that flagged my ISP charges every month for several months in a row. And some other stuff I don't remember, but I'll continue to hold the grudge anyway because there's 9 other top 10 national banks. Or at least 8, cause I'm not using Wells Fargo either (they dinged me a phone teller fee when I called in to let them know I was fixing an overdraft) ... Wells Fargo doesn't do a lot of attractive credit card offers though, so that's less of a hardship than ignoring Chase.

I feel like it's hobbies with an element of virtue-signalling.

This article digs on atomic habits... honestly that book changed my life. Stopped doing drugs, started eating healthy, started working out. Direct result of that book along with some philosophical reading.

Interesting thought. However, the author starts with “In business…”, then immediately goes on to shoehorn the idea to people. The logic tracks if your underlying assumption is that the core purpose of a human life is to “be productive” (sic generate profit).

Is ethical consumption really a vanity activity? For the most part it just means not buying things. I don’t think that a Christian would consider “not sinning” a vanity activity. It’s just how people act about behaviour they consider harmful.

“The number of pageviews on your website and the number of likes on your tweets are fun to look at and sound impressive, but optimizing for them completely misses the point if they don’t lead to something more important (e.g. profit).”

Profit is fun to look at and sounds impressive, but optimizing for it completely misses the point if it doesn't lead to something more important (e.g. human flourishing, or net societal gain)

Profit is useful. Views, likes and comments have zero value. That's why e-celebs with millions and millions of "followers" can't sell more than a dozen coffee mugs when they try to make money from it.

> paying $49 per month for productivity software

I wonder what software is this that cost this much.

Vanity is contextual. Everything is vanity from some ultimate perspective.

Are we really shaming having hobbies now?

No, the author actually says: Acknowledge that they are hobbies.

What does that even mean?

Why does the author care that much anyway? Seems like a person I would not enjoy talking with.

The article explained it fairly well. Re-iterating the credit card churning example: people will spend a lot of time optimizing their credit card spend, to end up with maybe a few hundred dollars in savings per year. Working 10 hours of overtime a year nets more and takes less time/mental capacity, for example. But it is fine to do this anyway if you let go of the "I'm saving money" schtick and just embrace that you like maximizing points on spend.

yeah this was a weird article and largely a waste of my time

I too have hobbies.

There's something horribly broken about the styling on this site. Attempting to scale the page (Ctrl-+) doesn't change the font size. I have no idea how the page managed that, but whatever mechanism allowed that, browsers should kill it with fire.

This page - a bit of barely styled text on a plain background - also doesn't work without JS at all. Even though this is not a SPA, the essay text is just there in HTML response. I know I'm yelling at the clouds here, but I find this slightly annoying (why do I need to run code to read this?).

Yeah sorry, those are vanity features \s

Reply on news.ycombinator.com