Don't Become the Machine
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armeet.bearblog.dev
Having such hobbies plus a couple of kids (now teenagers so they're somewhat less demanding of my time) means I just don't have the time to do extra hours if I'm going to get enough sleep.
And if I don't get enough sleep then the hours I do work are nowhere near as productive as those when I have had enough sleep.
Work fits around my personality. If that doesn't suit my employer, I find a new employer.
Caveats: I don't hunt the highest paying job. I'm never going to be enthusiastic enough to be chosen to lead - I've had minor management roles in the past, and they lead to, basically, being paid to either sleep less or spend less time as "not work me". Both of those options result in lower productivity.
I'm good enough at what I do to earn a living for the foreseeable future. That's good enough for me career-wise. For my physical and mental health, both of which are indicators of and contributory to happiness and longevity, I will continue to spend much of my non-working time playing tennis and inline skating and lifting weights so I can continue to do those things, that make me happy with life and the world, for as long as physically possible.
I tend not to the machine that consumes humanity, I tend to the machine that gives me my humanity.
Edited to add: I'll never be a rich man. But I will lead a rich life.
I used to live close enough to bike to work, but I had nowhere to wash off the sweat. We (work) recently moved to a new building with a fitness center with showers, but it's too far to ride a bike. FML
While I'm sure the cycling angle brings more tangible benefits, I suspect they (work and cycling) suffer from the same drawbacks of committing to an unending display of exertion and suffering.
There are inevitable road crossings, but at a certain basic level of competency that doesn't pose a problem (except if you slip and slightly tear an adductor, for those of us over-forties).
I'm fairly paranoid about putting my bodily integrity at the mercy of device-distracted operators of two-tonne missiles flying past a metre off my right shoulder with no curb or other barrier between.
I might be crazy, but I'm not suicidal.
(A lot of 'doing' is dual purpose, both doing and preparation for some future 'next time')
It's about a 12km skate from there to work / the city.
Would a compromise such as that be a possibility?
This is the way. I want to earn enough money to live on (and I'm extremely lucky that I get to earn a living doing something I love), but past that point I care much more about doing things I enjoy or spending time with people I care about. More money is fine, I wouldn't necessarily turn it down if someone gave me a raise out of nowhere... but it's not important either.
Wouldn't the best way to spend a life be to go all in on one thing?
It's not like a video game where we can just try again. If the main quest isn't right, better find a new one, not just add distracting side quests.
no
The world is too interesting for me to be happy to limit myself to one thing.
Additionally, I listen to a wide variety of music, read not a very wide variety of books (mainly hard sci-fi), consider myself a connoisseur of film and television, take an interest in at least two other sports (have season tickets to the local teams games), run a slightly more than simple homelab (in a room I built myself in the shed, complete with backup battery power and rudimentary climate control), including hosting my own email server, amongst other parental and husbandly duties.
One of the reasons I'm awake at 3am on Christmas Day.
Everything is interesting. Limiting oneself to one thing is exceedingly boring.
Disclaimer: personal opinion. I see and live off the benefits to the world provided by the single minded. But I'll never pretend I could live like that.
plus, dont forget about the substantial benefits from cross-training
if you find something thats really your thing, thats great, but the goal is to interest and engage yourself. why is it that important to demand the time to to eek out that last 5%
its also possible to actually blow through a field. the scope of coding projects I can just spit out as rote are well past what anyone is willing to adopt. what would be the point of training any further. there's really a lot more to learn about machining.
I recently was very sick and was thinking about the people whose employers put their work output over their health.
I do think there’s too much concern with “what” and not enough “why” or “how” in the world.
it's interesting how relative this statement is. For a lot of people, being able to lead a rich life means you're already rich; if you're not worrying about money every day (and i mean literally checking your bank account before going to the grocery store), you are rich.
> I'm good enough at what I do to earn a living for the foreseeable future.
You are rich, then. You may not be a billionaire, but the simple fact that you don’t have to worry about money and employment makes you a rich person by default.
Having the work/life balance you so proudly proclaim to have is a result of owning wealth. Good on you.
But I feel it though, the urge to grind. When I have free time I think, shouldn't I be doing/achieving something. If you quantify value by money then yeah there are dumb ways to make money like me driving Uber Eats and donating plasma (an extra 17 hrs of my life per week). I can instead spend less money and enjoy life more.
I almost think social media is the worst thing that I ran into, the points/likes aspect. Going back to sharing things that aren't real yet for the kudos. Anyway ranting. I'm thankful I became self-aware as when Facebook was new I was posting like everything about my life like "omg look at me...". Which is a double-edged sword you know, something like Instagram is how women scope you out and if you don't have a good one...
Tangent, there is also this fetishizing of productivity where you see this clean desk and a little notepad. Or some kind of setup like a minimalist laptop. The whole video is about that but not actually working ha.
It is funny, I bought an old phone of mine from the 2010s, I had a different mindset back then (try to make a shit ton of money through ads on a website). That did not happen but I had this ambition/tried to make a lot of dumb apps. I'm trying to get back to that mental state as now I can make like anything, back then I didn't even know how to generate a CSR like come on you amateur!
I use the phone as a grounding tool for meditation/try to go back in time what I was thinking back then. I also loaded it with old cloud photos from that time. It doesn't have internet.
Oh yeah, what does work for grounding you to reality is when you lose internet. Then you're grounded in reality, bored. What do I do with myself now.
after a while it should feel like a refreshing nap. during the meditation itself, you're just doing a simple task and going along with it without resistance, like when sleeping. eventually the idea of "non-doing" will make more sense.
another way to look at it: upon waking each morning, you start with an empty glass. from this point, everything that enters your realm of awareness accumulates in this glass and at some point it will start overflowing if you don't manage what you're accumulating. meaning you can only effectively work with a certain amount of "stuff on your mind". So you shouldn't make a habit of carrying stress from the morning commute all day into affecting your afternoon meetings, for example.
take a few deep breaths and let the morning commute pass, and your glass is empty again. allow the glass to fill up with morning work, noticing and managing points of friction so they don't linger more than necessary. if you notice yourself getting overwhelmed or stressed about everything that comes up, you're overflowing and would likely benefit from some meditation. as you meditate more, it becomes more effortless so you won't be reliant on "doing meditation" as much.
the Plum Village app has a meditation bell that rings on a schedule (default is every 15 minutes). they recommend you take a few deep breaths to re-center and state your intention(s) for the moment. I started using it earlier this year and it has a noticeable effect over time, would highly recommend trying it out all day if possible. or at least during times where you're trying to do focused work but have a tendency to get distracted.
It's crazy how our lives just run on autopilot (following some schedule, scheduled to pay bills, if I do this and that I'm good). The meditation/mindfulness will be good to get grounded/be in the moment. Worries too trying to stop that.
No, but I am considering getting a working Amiga, a CRT and just writing some games for it.
All I had growing up was a C64, and I remember how peaceful I felt when I was designing and writing my (simple) games for it. I hankered all through my childhood for an Amiga; any Amiga.
TBH, I might even settle for a C128; just the thrill of writing software with some paper manuals next to me, no internet and no distractions.
Not directed towards you, but this brings up a thought I often ponder. I have friends and people around me who are plugged in 24/7. I don't really think they spend any time, what so ever, on internal thought or introspection / reflection. I think it really affects them. The "default mode network" as its neuroscience has coined it. No time to analyze the past or correlate cause with effect. Lives surrendered to notifications and scrolling the same 3 feeds, day in and day out. I don't even know what to say to them sometimes.
On the flip side, I do accept people for who they are. If this is what they want, and they enjoy it, then whatever. But it can be frustrating trying to communicate or interact with them.
I'm not on a high horse either, I do succumb to modern temptations. I have a YouTube addiction, but its all educational / a topic I'm learning / a hobby / etc. I just got my Recap and somehow I have watched 4500 different channels this year, that's saying nothing of # of videos or watchtime. I was pretty shocked.
Still though, I purposefully make time to be alone and just daydream or relax and ponder. I don't use my phone while driving (besides maps etc). I try to put my phone away when others are around (unless we're sharing memes or photos or you know, actively using our phones together). I'm not a snob, go ahead and reply to your significant other while we're eating dinner - that's understandable. When I watch movies or TV (that I care about, I do keep old scifi on in the background while on the PC or doing stuff around the house) I am actively watching and do not touch my phone, and if I do need to I pause first.
The worst part? When you know someone is on their phone 24/7, phone in hand at all times, and you can't get them to respond to your calls or texts.
I feel like I'm bragging or showing off or something but I'm really not, just interested in how people interact with their devices, and their life.
You do you, but you're not obliged to accept someone for who they are if who they are is a brainless wastoid. I recommend minimizing the time wasted on zombies in favor of seeking out people who still value their brains.
Unfortunately the infestation only seems to grow.
I see this type of sentiment reflected all over the internet as well, avoiding people because they don't fit whatever type of mold, I think this type of mentality is terrible. Not saying you gotta go out and find someone who has 14 hours of screen on time a day and hang out with them, but even just lumping people into the category of "brainless wastoid" feels to me very much like bordering on dehumanization.
You are the average of the people you spend your time with. To spend time with thoughtless people is to drag yourself down.
> bordering on dehumanization
No, this isn't dehumanization at all. I'm well aware of the self-destruction that humans are capable of.
> You are the average of the people you spend your time with. To spend time with thoughtless people is to drag yourself down.
this is a popular thing to say, that PROBABLY shouldn't be taken THIS literally, if i spend time with an idiot relative on a holiday, am i suddenly a dumber person? Is it suddenly your obligation to avoid certain gatherings because you know some of the people there aren't gonna meet your minimum standards of intelligence? If your child ends up not really being all that smart.. just hard abandon them? How literal should this statement be taken?
Insulting a human doesn't deny their humanity. I encourage you to take humans off a pedestal. Humans are just animals with a superiority complex.
I feel you are just attempting to avoid defending your actual stances tbh.
I actually AGREE that humans are not that special... however, that applies to literally every single human. what you are doing is isolating groups of humans, which is something drastically different.
We can be not special on a grand scale, but we still must all live together.
As long as you get it done.
The OP isn't about not wanting to work. To labor in pursuit of your own personal purpose is a virtue and a privilege. But labor for the sake of labor is not a virtue, nor is labor for the sake of watching that bank account go up, and least of all labor for the sake of watching your billionaire CEO's bank account go up.
But not working at all? sounds so boring, and not boring in the way that frees you up that others in this thread has mentioned as a good thing.
For example, I had two project ideas i kinda wanna pursue and was picking which to do first, one was very much almost no path to revenue, but way more fun and would be usable daily for me personally, the other? market aggregation stuff that i've done already and i know the exact structure, there is no mystery to it, its nothing special, just a helpful tool that might make me some money, and sadly THAT is the project i chose to pursue, over the personal project with no clear path to revenue.
I'll still enjoy making it, but I am positive if money wasn't a factor, i am deep into the other project instead.
As with everything, the problem is hubris and impatience. So eager to prove god-like status, you stumble and fall, posting ephemeral think pieces about your "journey" on social media. Reading LinkedIn is the closest I've ever got to thinking "maybe asylums would be okay with a few reforms..."
My favorite (which I think/hope was a joke) was the guy cooking chicken breast in his hotel coffee maker to "show his commitment to the company" and how hard he was willing to grind.
For better or worse, this is becoming more difficult as the standard coffee maker in rooms these days is a one-cup-at-a-time model. So you need your own container, or you'll have to use the ice bucket (if they have one).
A chicken breast is a bit far fetched, but I could see it happening with someone who was craving chicken at an odd hour.
A satirical video which I think captures some of the frustration: "The Hustle" by Krazam - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_o7qjN3KF8U
> Machine Head - Derek Hobbs 1995
For anyone else a little nerd-sniped, the ASCII art head is 54,505 bytes, <=300 chars wide, 182 lines tall, using 20 distinct characters... But then I get hung up on what an equivalent picture could be, since the characters aren't just levels of greyscale intensity, but also contain internal detail that would then take more pixels to describe.
My original motive was something like: "If this were a PNG it would have only taken a much smaller X bytes."
> 1 BPP
Yeah, the different ASCII characters might be best modeled/analogized as local dithering.
This is also why I honestly enjoy being a salaried employee. My employer buys 40 hours a week from me. Right, some weeks it's 50 and the next week only 30. Some weeks need a machine just executing, some weeks need more careful thought.
I could optimize it for more monetary output, but at the moment it is a predictable, usually not-painful thing with decent monetary output for personally more interesting subjects. I've found appreciation of this.
Which means you need to have some kind of ownership of the means of production (equity, in this world of capitalism), else you're just a wage slave.
In China we call this kind of person a Tool Man. Don't be a Tool Man.
It contain great advice, including on how to handle your professional life. But even more importantly, I feel the world would be a better place if more people followed its advice. A world full of happy people would be a world that runs far better.
Ok, but is that really the worst thing? People are already constantly afloat in near endless foreign propaganda at this point; pawns in the latest cold war, all being slowly convinced to destroy their own countries from within. Culture / traditions / historic ways of life and governing being overthrown and replaced.
But really, promoting hard work is the top of the list of what this guy complains about and doesn't want to see in his feed? That'd be at the bottom of my list of propaganda campaigns to complain about.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IS-xDsic84Q
Please listen to it.
> The machines are here.
> We have to live with that. Things are different.
> Hopefully, if one has done his homework, one can continue to pick and choose what to do.
> If you keep your skills up, there is a place for you. If you don't, then there isn't. Very simple equation.
> I will not permit myself to be outplayed by someone using the machine.
---
Anthony Jackson is regarded as one of the most talented bassists that ever lived. He did, in fact, outplayed the machine, re-invented his own tone and technique, and proved over and over again that synthesizers could not do what he did. Synthetisers could replace thousands of pop musicians (they still do), but not him.
So yeah, do the grind. Don't break the machines, don't bow to them. Instead, outplay them. Keep your skills up, so you are free to pick and choose.
Talent does what it can.
You do what you're told.
Now get back to work.
Don't follow rules and if you really need to, make your own and never tell them to anyone. Keep people guessing and change your mind often. Never ask opinions. They are useless and if you never ask people think you know better.
What you know you think and feel are not what you think and feel but dead remnants of your past thoughts and hunches. You have no personality but an ever evolving process that changes instantly to fill the areas you think are not you or your interest.
What an incredibly lonely and antagonist life philosophy.
A secure person who has their shit together knows that some people do in fact have valuable opinions and they won't be afraid to ask in public. And they know that too: two thirds of their HN submissions are questions for advice after all.
So this isn't about actual value of opinions, this is about a certain fright of how you appear to others and strategies to control that.
To live well and accomplish OP's goal in the modern era you have to understand that the attention economy has won, completely and totally. You can choose to live your life in a proactive manner: motivating force arises internally, through contemplation, meditation, deliberate study, and intention.
Or you can choose to live it reactively: you look at what just popped up in your feed and you write a blog post about it.
We're living more reactively than ever now. It's stifling creativity and individuality, it's creating depression and anxiety. The answer is to unplug and let the motive force for your actions start coming from your internal world again. It's okay to be influenced by the outside but we're more possessed now by derivative slop (see how all brand logos have essentially become the same) than we probably ever have been. It's time to unplug from the hive mind and wait in the resulting stillness for the next step.
A way to offload the challenging search for purpose, to a shallow controllable process, consistent with the described disillusionment.
But people are idiosyncratic. Maybe for someone, a life of inscrutable eccentric rebellion against the Gods of practical reality, might actually be deeply meaningful to them - even if they don't admit it.
There are people who are genuinely happy doing the same thing every day. Every day. That is just as strange to me!
> If I can turn myself into a mechanism that takes input and consistently works towards some goal...
This is, in fact, a quasi-religion, if you think about it. Its central dogma is that humans are no different from machines, so we can be reduced to automatas with well-defined inputs, outputs, productivity and other measurable metrics.
*Productivity is your heart,
Corporation is your body and
GDP is your god*
In my 20s, I wasn't immune to the need to promote myself: everyone in our team was supposed to write up his/her achievements each week and we would discuss these write-ups at our weekly meeting. I would use that opportunity to blow my own horn. I hope, however, I never crossed over into cringe-land like you see now.
Now I just program for fun: I don't do it on anyone else's schedule or to promote myself, because I don't expect to be paid.
I'm getting my shit done, then I gotta stop and listen to a whole bunch of crap that I either already know or doesn't affect me at all.
Sometimes, in fact often, the level of momentum I had before the meeting is never reached again the rest of day.
All meetings should be post lunch. All meetings I organize are post lunch.
- Guy who spends 20 of the 15 minutes being way too detailed about his work.
- Two guys who argue back and forth about technical minutiae that doesn't affect you.
- Your manager who lets two guys argue back and forth about technical minutiae that doesn't affect you.
- Your manager asking if you have any blockers.
- A PM asking you how many points you have left on a ticket.
(The boss battle is just this, but stretched over an entire hour.)
It expresses something that is true for many individuals.
But it also made me realize that because I was always at the tip of my chosen curve of tech adoption, I was also the first to be feeling the existential dread that would soon permeate the lives of everyone living a life even tangentially touched by tech.
(I think the author is ahead of the curve too).
But I feel this post identifies the problem and then compounds it with this line:
> This messaging works. Look at me. I feel the need to write a post about it. But it is completely wrong.
I would counter that (intentional) "ignorance is bliss". If you want to play the VC grind hustle game, do it, but be intentional about checking in and checking out, and don't let it into your identity. And don't write posts like this.
It might "feel" dishonest to operate like this, but the alternative is doom, because you are fighting against demons that don't actually exist. I think more and more people will realize this over the coming years -- we are only now starting to react to the personal problems caused by immersion in social media.
This also reminds me of a good piece by PG: https://paulgraham.com/identity.html
There seems to be a new kind of anxiety wherein devs feel that they aren't leveraging AI to the fullest in order to make them more productive at developing software, and that since they aren't doing so, they should just give up writing software completely.
This anxiety is unfounded. The difference between using AI vs not using AI is not like using a physical spreadsheet vs Microsoft Excel. It's more like using a text editor versus an IDE. If you're happy producing software the way that you always were sans AI, you should just keep doing it that way and don't even pay mind to AI tooling.
Those guys who have super sophisticated MCP/tool use setups, and a roster of agents, and testdrive all the latest tools and plugins, and curate a personal library of carefully tuned prompts that make them the "LLM Whisperer" — they're not actually doing that much better than you at producing software. Or at least not to the extent that you are totally obsolete.
I really encourage you to update your priors since capabilities are very different than even 6 months ago.
But the overall gain in efficiency is still a low single digit speedup. It's not a multi-OOM speedup as if e.g. doing 1000 long divisions by hand over many days versus letting a computer program do them in a split second. The "wall" that is irreducible complexity was never OOMs away from how modern pre-AI software development was done.
For example, I've used LLMs to write ~1600 lines of Rust in the past few days. I'm having it make Ratatui bindings for Ruby. I haven't ever learned Rust, but I can read C-like languages so I kinda understand what's happening. I could tell when it needed to be modularized. I have a sneaking suspicion most of the Rust tests it's written are testing Ratatui, rather than testing its own bindings. But I've had the LLM cover the functionality in Ruby tests, a language I do know. So I've felt comfortable enough to ship it.
Amazing
Hustling is sexy insofar as the output is sexy imo. What hustlers miss is that working hard is only cool if the work you do makes sense - work for its own sake is one of the most uncool things there is. And I also think that willingness to work hard comes on its own if you find something meaningful; reading on how to work hard is like treating symptoms (you don't work hard) rather than actual cause (you don't have anything to work hard on). Getting up at 5am to go to the gym then manage.your 500 dollars of crypto portfolio you don't understand anything about is the epitome of finance bro that everyone cringes about.
Apparently an elderly Irish musician said this as he was tuni g his instrument - "I've learnt that the secret to being happy is to not get personally involved in your own life."
This sentence gave me pause and I’ll be chewing it over in my mind for awhile, I think.
> ...our company just graduated from the YC Fall 2025 batch.
Have these anti work people ever considered that maybe some people actually like work and labelling them as slaves is insulting?
This luxury you speak of as if it exists in some jobs is completely in your own mind.
Put another way, the only thing preventing you from enjoying that luxury right now, whatever you do, is a shitty attitude.
Work is a term of physics; breathing is work. Eating is work.
Jobs exist because people are too lazy to do work for themselves.
What I want is no job and to work on my house, work in my food prep, work on interesting projects. Work on making the last mile stuff I need.
Work is great. Jobs are dumb.
> ...work on interesting projects.
Been building websites for 20 years, and writing code, studying math, building electronics since the 80s. Along with building homes from foundation up, rebuilding cars... Hedonic treadmill; individually, none of those things are enough anymore.
For me having to put so much time into riding a tightly focused job escalator is hell.
Don't tell me you don't have time to do your daily web job and also work on your house. That's a first world problem if I've ever heard one.
Something can be a work of love, your life work, et cetera and it doesn't imply anything about it being fun or for money or not.
I want to learn more skills so I can do more types of work.
You can have a life of the mind at work, or you can have a mindless job and have your life of mind in your off hours. It's almost impossible to have both.
We tech workers are spoiled, but we should have a little empathy for those who aren't as lucky as those of us who found a way to support their families by doing something they love.
I've got several friends who are doctors. They did study a shitload. And one of them, once his day is over, loves to read about investments, how to manage his finance, etc. Another one has a passion for Ferrari cars and owns one (but it's already its fourth one). He'll tell you all about the life of Enzo Ferrari and he'll never miss the Monaco F1 grand prix.
I won't write here what I think of people hating on these persons because they're successful. I especially won't write what I think of them when they go to visit the doctor. I know HN won't ban people easily but if I really wrote what I thought of these people it'd get me close to being banned.
12 years of studies. A very hard work: though on the mental and usually with incredibly long hours.
I don't consider them slaves. But I'd rather be remembered as a slave than as a parasite.
Most people like working, hardly anybody likes being exploited.
Never a truer word spoken. And yet you go back?
With all due respect, this reads like you had an axe to grind about social media’s anti work slant and this just reminded you of that.
I absolutely do just "switch off" at 5pm. I sometimes work on programming things in my free time if I feel like it regardless.
I feel like, if your job is demanding more of you than a nine to five, and you don't thrive in that environment, you certainly have a right to complain or look for different work. I'm just surprised that it seems to be so common when all the work I've stumbled into in this field has been very reasonable.
And yes, obviously there's a difference between software dev and blue collar, or even other types of white collar work. I'm not blind to the fact that this is a particularly comfortable career, even if it's not as extravagant as it seems to have be a decade or so ago.
I guess I'm just surprised that there are so many apparently ground-down people in a place like this which you would imagine would be primarily populated with people in the software industry.
the hustle is being strategic, work smart not hard, fake till you make it, lie and be ruthless and amoral
It's kind of disgusting...
Edit: Actually, I don't know many such people. Just 2-3 maybe. But it feels like many
A friend of mine recently pointed me to the song "Lie, Cheat, Steal" by Run The Jewels. Seems like the strategy of choice for a while yet.
> "Ligma balls"
I don't know what I've expected from the article, this is your typical run of the mill tech/linked-in bro fart in the wind. How to write a page and not say anything at all.
more hours == more productivity
It’s not. If you’re sleep deprived you’ll produce shit, which you’ll probably have to redo later. Sleep properly, produce more in less hours.
But hey, at least your colleagues think you’re busy because you’re last to leave redoing your shitty work!
Edit: read The Brain at Rest by Jebelli, don’t work yourself to death
- dating is hard
- loneliness is an epidemic
- they’ve got untreated trauma
- society is the cause of all this
Do you want to select your advice from a population the majority of whose life sucks? Getting self-help advice out of a population which can’t help itself is a prima-facie idiotic idea.