Maybe the default settings are too high
raptitude.com
raptitude.com
About an hour into that, pouring sweat, he stops cold and says "what the hell am I doing?" The flooded camp was actually nice on a hot day and all we really had to do was move a couple of tents. He dropped the shovel and spent the rest of the week sunbathing, fishing, snorkeling and water skiing as God intended. He flipped a switch and went from Hyde to Jekyll on vacation. I've had to emulate that a few times.
Day two we looked at each other, had an adult beverage with breakfast, and relaxed for the rest of the trip.
ADDED: I'll just add that I created a loose spreadsheet for a ~week-long NYC trip with (I think) just one timed admission for a recently reopened museum and no times otherwise. I think I ended up dynamically scrawling over the printout with changes for most of the trip.
My firm rule is - have a loose plan, aim for one activity per day, an emergency option, or two, if the weather plays up, and that's it.
It's the type of plan that has worked for every holiday that I have taken that involves a different city to the one I live in.
One or two core activities for the day.
If it works out for more that's great but it's not expected or necessary.
I've traveled with some people who seem focused on just getting pictures in front of as many things as possible which seems a poor way to really take in a place.
there are parks everywhere!
I've found myself in this mode before, too. A couple of years ago I was preparing for weeklong wilderness backpacking trip with some friends. I'd recently quit my high-stress job to take some time off, and I had a few new pieces of gear I wanted to test before relying on them on a longer trip. When I looked at the calendar, though, every weekend before we were to leave was already spoken for.
I was worrying about it to my wife, trying to decide whether I'd just have to use the old worn out gear or risk it with the new stuff, when she stopped me: "why don't you just... go on Monday?" It took me a second to even get what she was saying—I was still so much in work-all-the-time-mode that my brain didn't even consider whatsoever the possibility that I could just... go off and go camping on a weekday. I was really baffled for a moment, and I've reflected on that a bit since, it's funny how you can be trapped in your own default operating mode and not even realize it.
After having kids, my habit changed. Now we enjoy going to local parks and walking around with no goals during vacation. This wonderful attraction? Nah we don't need to see it. If we can walk there, then maybe.
Some of the most enjoyable parts of those trips were hanging out with my family in a local park.
For me the story was also a bit weird. “Just take the tents out of the water”. Ok…
These are alternative ways to keep the tents dry ... which entails that they were never soaked in the first place.
> A tent that’s been in a lake
The tents were never in the lake. A few inches of the campsite was in the lake at high water.
> sounds like a throwaway to me
Do you have any experience with this? I've been on trips where tents and even sleeping bags ended up in a river. They don't dissolve ...they can be dried in the sun. And a tent with a wet floor can be wiped down.
> “Just take the tents out of the water”.
Those words don't appear anywhere. Try looking at the actual words and not just your mental images.
But I guess a synthetic ultra light tent will do better.
I also assumed the tents were already there when he arrived (complete assumption, but the term campsite conjures up a place with tents already there), and so must be of the more heavy more stationary kind.
Anyway, the point is, I also had this question: Where do you go when you mess up your tent like that? How can a dam in a layer of water make it dry? Don't you need a dam and then pump it dry.
This is going too far, I just wanted to defend the question. Maybe it's a cultural difference.
[0] https://duckduckgo.com/?t=ffab&q=de+waard+tent&ia=images&iax...
You've never been camping. Ok.
In England, we can’t just pitch up a tent in the woods, we need to pay for a campsite where there’s other tents.
I suspect, from their description, this person is from a different country again, where camping may happen in large open steppe with lots of other yurts.
Also, this is about a campsite a few inches of which is in a lake, and people moving their tents. But apparently paying attention to the actual context is optional for some people.
I also feel it was unnecessary to dismiss their experience as “not camping,” just because it was different to yours. It turns a learning opportunity for us all into a needlessly toxic argument.
> I think you’re viewing this through your own cultural lens where camping can be totally solo (in the woods?)
Again, your notion of my experience of camping does not come from anything I actually wrote ... that's quite toxic.
And recognizing the mere possibility of camping solo in the woods (which has nothing to do with anything in this thread--the OP was in a group on a lakeshore) has nothing to do with a "cultural lens".
That's the last I will say about this trivial matter.
Allow me to correct myself: I meant to say I believed you were referring wild camping, away from a commercial site (either alone or part of a group).
> None of this is responsive to my comment that you are responding to ... I find that quite toxic.
You find it toxic that I won’t join you in an argument that only you want to have?
> Again, your notion of my experience of camping does not come from anything I actually wrote ... that's quite toxic.
I just woke up an hour ago. Did you find that toxic, too?
Tents are generally made of a very wuick-drying, thin synthetic.
And like the other person said, this does make it seem like you’ve potentially never been camping but i don’t want to gatekeep the definition of “camping”. My version is carrying everything I need on my back for two weeks and walking 10-15 miles each day to the next campsite (read: “patch of dirt”, preferably near fresh water). Other people “camp” in RV’s though, so.
"A campsite is a designated area where individuals can set up bedding, sleeping bags, or cooking equipment, such as stoves or fires. This definition encompasses any location that allows for sleeping or cooking, regardless of whether it includes a tent, lean-to, shack, or other structures."
I would note that camping also involves sitting in campchairs talking, reading, singing, etc.
And
> I’d call your version hiking/walking/backpacking depending where I am.
The hiking/walking/backpacking is what nerdsniper does between campsites:
> My version is carrying everything I need on my back for two weeks and walking 10-15 miles each day ==> to the next campsite <==
Despite his phrasing, he of course is not saying that hiking == camping.
It appears that you are confused with West European camping, which is where you drive two days to the south of France (most of which stuck in traffic), pay large amounts of money for a patch of perfectly flat grass where you are allowed to park your car and set up your tent. In a grid pattern with hundreds of other tents. Where there is a building nearby for toilets and showers. And a swimming pool plus live entertainment for the children.
OP appears to be talking about camping in nature.
I think some people are interpreting “campsite” as the literal space occupied by the tent’s ground sheet while you are interpreting it as the broader area - which in an organised institutional arrangement might be called the “campground”
To use an analogy, think of being in a partly flooded parking space vs parking lot
It makes sense that someone with the former interpretation - the tent ground sheet submerged by a few inches of water - would understand that the tent got soaked.
"A campsite is a designated area where individuals can set up bedding, sleeping bags, or cooking equipment, such as stoves or fires. This definition encompasses any location that allows for sleeping or cooking, regardless of whether it includes a tent, lean-to, shack, or other structures."
And here's the Wikipedia description, which notes that the English "campsite" is equivalent to the American "campground", but that is broader and neither is so absurdly narrow as your words:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Campsite
> would understand that the tent got soaked
I already refuted this nonsense ... there is no reason to think from the OP's description that the tent got soaked.
> To use an analogy, think of ...
I don't need any help with thinking, especially from bad analogies that are flatly contradicted by the OP's description. What's the parking lot analogy to building dams?
The bigger problem with that camp was the rattlesnakes. I killed one with the shovel and felt grown up.
Many years ago, I had a technical manager who never felt any pressure to be the first to come up with the answer to a question or the solution to some problem. If I was having a technical conversation with him, and we arrived at a particularly subtle or complex issue, he could go completely silent, just staring straight ahead with his fingers to his lips. I would find it very uncomfortable, and I would start blurting out half-baked ideas to fill the silence, but he would either raise his finger or (usually) just ignore me. This could go on for 30-60 seconds, at which point he might shrug and say "I don't know" or, more likely, have a pretty well formed idea of how to move ahead.
I used to joke to my co-workers that during those silent interludes, he was swapping in the solution from a remote disk.
This manager also typed with one or two fingers, and pretty slowly too. But he wrote a lot of good code.
> he might shrug and say "I don't know"
> I would start blurting out half-baked ideas to fill the silence
> This manager also typed with one or two fingers, and pretty slowly too. But he wrote a lot of good code.
For me, I sometimes feel like I'm an old school chess engine, exploring as many possible moves/ideas as I can - as many steps into the future as time allows. Constantly evaluating them based on some known-simplified fitness function usually involving pattern recognition from past experience in similar problems. Eventually I arrive at a place where I'm either confident I know a reasonable way forward (and why some of the obvious ways forward are unlikely to be ideal) - or I've scatter-gun searched all of the quickly available ideas and discovered I have no idea if some of them are good or bad, and I need to do much deeper research and investigation of the problem.
From the outside, that'd look identical to "he could go completely silent, just staring straight ahead with his fingers to his lips"
Instead if you're blurting out your thinking more in unison. Naturally you'll stray less, exploring less.
Of course you want collaboration but I find the magic is going back and forth between alone and together. I even find this helpful when just working by myself, stepping away from the problem or context switching, allowing the problem to distill.
But everyone has their own personal preferences. Which is perfectly fine too. But I think it's worth mentioning that, as illustrated by the comment, it's typically more acceptable to blurt than think silently. And there's the bias that blurting makes it harder to think silently by thinking silently doesn't make blurting harder (the uncomfortable with some silence part is not healthy imo. Of course long silence is a different issue but we're talking 30-60s)
It's always possible to go slower for practically no cost. -- So, any benefit from going slower is obtainable for everyone.
Whereas, typing faster takes discipline and effort. There are diminishing benefits to putting in more effort to type faster.
The main benefit isn't so much "more output" so much as "reduced latency". e.g. It takes less time to type out queries that help you gather information.
> typing faster takes discipline and effort.
>> ***typing isn't the bottleneck***
> The main benefit isn't so much "more output" so much as "reduced latency". e.g. It takes less time to type out queries that help you gather information.
While typing I'm doing other things in parallel.
Those other things are things that require you to scrutinize and look at each character. I think the vacuum analogy from the OP is quite apt here. It's much harder to debug other people's code and more so an LLMs.
I find it absolutely is much of the time - I'll determine the architecture/overall solution, know exactly what needs to go in a multitude of files, and now actualizing all that isn't really thinking anymore, just donkey work. Getting AI to do this has been incredible now that it's finally good enough. I've had Copilot make flawless 500+LOC C++ classes in the first pass, and when I introduced bugs by changing it by hand, it found them instantly from stack traces without even having symbols, saving me hours. I see a future where writing a large codebase all by hand is seen like raising a barn the Amish way with no powertools - impressive and maybe there's something to be said for it philosophically, but just not practical otherwise.
Lmao, please tell me what products you're working on so I can avoid them
Actually, I found that this is exactly where they shine (I wouldn't trust them with greenfield implementation myself). Exploring existing code is so much easier when you can ask them how something works. You can even ask them to find problems - you can't trust them to be correct, of course, but at least you get some good brainstorming going. And, incredibly, they often do find actual problems in the code. Pretty impressive for language models.
Sure, I could write it all by hand; but even as a decent typer, I'll never match a tenth speed of claude code or opencode just GOING. Maybe there's a better way to learn, but whatever it is, it's not obvious to me.
I actually felt like I learned the most when I stopped going to Google and StackOverflow for solutions and instead moved to docs. It's far less direct but the information is much more rich. All that auxiliary information compounds. I want to skip it, feeling rushed to get an answer, but I've always been the better for taking the "scenic route". I'd then play around and learn how to push functions and abuse them. Boy there's no learning like learning how to abuse code.
Fwiw, I do use LLMs, but they don't write code for me. They are fantastic rubber ducky machines. Far better than my cat, which is better than an actual rubber duck. They aid in docs too, helping fill in that space when you don't exactly understand them. But don't let them do the hard work nor the boring work. The boring work is where you usually learn the most. It's also the time you don't recognize that's happening
> The boring work is where you usually learn the most. It's also the time you don't recognize that's happening
That was always how I did it before mid-2025. And I do still do boring work when I truly want to master something, but doing that too much just means (for me) not finishing anything.
Not finishing things can be okay but also not. An important skill to learn is what's good enough. And to write good enough to be easily upgradable. It's important to write code to be flexible for this reason. It's also important to realize it's okay to completely throw away code. But also this is the reason comments are so important. Don't just write what functions do but also write how you envision the design. Even if you can't get to it now. Then when you or anyone else comes back (after lunch, next week, next year, whenever) there's good hints about all that. Knowing how to get up to speed and be effective fast. If anything this helps agents even more. Commenting is a vastly under appreciated skill and only becoming more valuable
Here's an alternative take: if typing isn't a bottleneck for you, and you don't experience coding as being donkey work, you are thinking too slow, and/or in too small increments.
Granted, sometimes it's really not that interesting to type the stuff. It depends what one is working on.
And truth be told, if I'm writing the same thing many times it's time to create a library. Maybe just for myself or for the company I work for. But the same thing happens. I always learn more while doing it and it always gets better.
I fear the programmer whose bottleneck is typing. They already know the answer. But the problem is that there is none
As you sort of point out between the lines, it depends on what you work on. I had an AI agent rewrite some ancient (and terrible code) which had stopped working because the v1 of an api on v3 was sunset. It took around 5 minutes out of my day, and most of those were having two people explaining to me where the code was and what they thought had happened to make it break. It would've like taken me a full day to fix without AI because I would have needed to understand things first, and because it was quite a lot of code.
The result wasn't very good, but it was better than what was before, and since that had run for years without anyone tuching it, well... good enough. Heck, it might've taken me more than a day because I doubt I would have left it at "wasn't very good".
Aside from this anecdote I think AI writes a good 80% of my code these days. I'm not sure I buy the whole "bottleneck or not" discussion around typing. I think for a lot of people, myself included, AI does 10x part of the process of writing software. Where it doesn't help is when you need to do computer science, and as you point out, those parts AI don't speed up. I sometimes still use AI for computer science parts, but in those situations the AI will be a rubber duck because I tend to think by talking out my own ideas, and at least the AI duck pretends to answer. Even if the answer is more useless than what the actual rubber duck comes up with, which it usually is, it's more immersive for me.
> because I doubt I would have left it at "wasn't very good".
Don't get me wrong, we all write sloppy code and often not our best. It's one of the difficulties of being an engineer, deciding what exactly is good enough.
If I recall correctly the question was something like:
You are sitting recording cars by their license plate as they drive down a road. You only have N spots on your worksheet. You can overwrite spots as many times as you need to. By the end of the day you must have an unbiased sampling of cars that have driven by you. How do you record the cars?
I checked for which situations it is valid, and it surprisingly was when there are many more cars than the list size. But it is not valid when there are just a few more cars than the list size.
Personally I find it a bad habit of mine, I have no idea how people gracefully take time to think. Whenever I do say something like “hold on, let me just think for a moment” my brain completely freezes and I get no thinking done.
His manager was used to this and sort of enjoyed the mystique of this monk-like expert that he was responsible for.
I once was in a meeting where we had to talk to the great expert on the phone. Let's just say his name was Otto. Of course, he worked remote quite often, in the days before Zoom. His manager calls him and puts the phone on speakerphone for the room to hear.
Manager: Otto, we need your input on <long technical problem>.
<60 seconds of silence>
Otto: Yes, I think that might work, but you'll run into <other problems>.
Manager: Well, yes, we've considered that, but <explanation>
A few minutes of reasonably normal conversation ensues between the assembled group and Otto. Then:
Manager: Well, I think then that this is a pretty good solution, as long as Otto agrees.
Manager looks around the table, clearly waiting for Otto's concurrence
<60 seconds of silence>
<90 seconds of silence>
<120 seconds of silence>
People are starting to get uncomfortable. The manager makes a reassuring face. This is normal for those of us that work closely with the great expert, do not lose faith.
<240 seconds of silence>
Manager briefly lets slip a concerned look, then quickly hides it
<360 seconds of silence>
Manager: Um, Otto?
Otto: Oh, I thought I was waiting for you.
I have always had the intuition about reading speed that it is very easy to be a speed reader if you skim over things. I've always questioned how much of speed reading is just skipping stuff and filtering for the most important word tokens.
You could skip all of Tolkien's scenery descriptions, you could skip Tom Bombadil and Lothlorien and still know basically what happened to Frodo and where he's going. But that's not really the point. When I read a book of that much importance, I've always read every word and understood every sentence. I get easily distracted and often have to reread passages. I am not a fast reader. Tolkien's descriptions are not always that easy. But this is what I find so rewarding about reading in the first place.
However, when I'm reading an article online, the difference is stark. When I read articles, I usually start from the bottom and read backwards. That's my way of finding out the results, and then piecing together how much context I actually need to understand it. Maybe I should slow that down sometimes.
If you want to see it then way Tolkien saw it, probably the best way is to get through all that unimportant stuff involving rings and battles as quickly as possible to get to the appendices where Tolkein spent his time thinking about the history and etymology and even neat little details like how the calendar worked in the Shire...
(I'm only half joking)
Reminds me of an ah-ha! moment I had as a kid playing a text adventure game on my C64. I was stuck for a while and tried to find alternative ways forwards. I typed in "cheat" and it replied "OK, you win!" and ended the game.
The cheat code will immediately end your game while informing you that you scored 800 of 800 points (presumably a Sierra reference; this is the only way to score any number - including zero - of points).
There's no particular reason you'd discover this while playing either game, but if you play the third one, a mandatory plot point will show the message "You lose. You scored 0 of 800 points," referring back to the obscure joke in the earlier games.
I'm skeptical. Is there no more value to series like Gormenghast, Book of the New Sun, and The Second Apocalypse, beyond mere literary masochism, compared to LotR? Like them or not, LotR, as elaborate as its mythology is (if you include Silmarillion and some or all of the History of Middle Earth), is not at the same level.
I think what I tried to say is that the language Tolkien uses is as much or more part of the middle earth as are the characters, maps and whatnot. The obvious point is that he created whole new languages and writing systems for the book, basing the two Elvish languages on Finnish and Welsh etc. Other is that he changes his vocabulary depending on what he is describing. I am not a linguistic scholar, but I’m fairly vertain that at least in Two Towers the parts describing nature, forrests and whatnot use solely words that are celtic in origin, ie. no Latin influence and very old. There’s also structural techniques of interwoven plots that I can’t even start to unwind.
Point being, you can very much read the book on surface level as Frodo and the Ring and Swords and lah-di-daa and that is all fine. That’s how I read it when I was 12-13. But there is so much more, mastery of English language comparable only to Cormac McCarthy and Joyce… Here Tolkien is very much a singular writer, escaping the limits of genre he very much was essential in creating.
So no wonder it is perhaps the most influential book of the 20th century.
There is no value in doing it for modern clickbait or AI slop though.
I find that a lot of journalists like to pack their writing with fluff before they even reach the subject of the headline, a lot like recipe blogs sharing their life stories before finally reaching the instructions, as if the recipe is only secondary or tertiary to the background given.
This is why I appreciate articles that include bullet points or a TL;DR right at the beginning to summarize. For anything really long that I'm just not interested in reading fully and only want the main points, I use an LLM with the URL to summarize briefly.
While there's so much value in slowing down as the OP wrote, I feel as if journalists want you to lend the same pace to them for all the time of ours they waste. It's like they forget how much information is available to us and how unimportant it all is.
Imagine if Tolkien was writing Fellowship last decade, and the book landed on your hands today. No decades of cult growing, no adaptations or explosive marketing, some word of mouth. Would you think it "much important" before reading it? What makes the importance?
In my opinion it's the prose. It's always the prose. Always gotta be on the lookout for good writers, new and old.
> "I took a speed-reading course and read War and Peace in twenty minutes. It involves Russia."
The title, about "default settings" being "too high" makes me want an example from a technical domain, though.
As always, there are tradeoffs, and you can't walk everywhere or always have these types of mindful experiences. On the other hand, life is short and perhaps paradoxically, slower experiences can yield richer days.
No to doing books via audiobook because I see the words in my head and it’s massively distracting. Cool if it works for others I guess but like the mechanic excerpt above… not for me.
The first time I did this was the breath of the wild zelda game, I got to the point in the tutorial where they teach you to fast travel and said, "no I don't want to" so I spent the whole game slow traveling around, planing my trips enjoying the scenery finding new routes , Just bumming back and forth across the map enjoying the game and all it's corners in small slices each night, it took me a couple months to get complete and it was great.
My current phase of this madness is Valheim with no portals and no map. and wow it is an experience. With no map you get this hyper distorted view of the landscape the other way around, it is still based on what you can navigate easily but stuff like shorelines and terrain features are over represented and forests are these scary black boxes. Fog is very very scary, more than once fog has rolled in and I got so lost that I have had to say "well I guess I am living here now." I am currently having fun trying to figure out how to use the in game tools as surveying instruments to make my own hand drawn maps.
I was playing Wing Commander, Privateer way back when (mid-1990's) and didn't realize that there were ways to travel faster. So I did the obvious: I pretended I was a trader on a long haul route, dug out some books and notebooks, and just did whatever until I arrived at my destination or was attacked by pirates. I loved the passive game play in the moment, but I didn't realize how much until about a decade later. That kinda ruined gaming for me in general since games tend to keep the player busy (even if they aren't action games).
In some respects, I think that slow travel offers a sense of authenticity to the game. Well, I should say to some games. Many games set out goals for players. It's obvious why. If there is nothing to accomplish, there is little sense of accomplishment. Yet goals also ruin things in my mind since there is an urgency to get things done to see what the outcome is. Of course, games also reward following up on that urgency. That's contrary to real life where you may be rewarded or you may have to wait upon the rewards.
The successor game added an in-game compass/radar which detracted from the immersion, made the world feel small and boring.
Without fast travel you’d be forced to plan your trips more and bundle all the tasks in an area which would be cool. But it’s probably too much to ask for the general public who will see it as annoying.
Valheim without a map would be a bit too much for me. No way to quickly escape to some safe green pastures sounds too stressful :).
Reading the Reddit for the game, filled with people complaining that the portal system is too restrictive and forces them to make upwards of three long boat trips over the course of the game is a bit sad. It’s as though they expect the fun to happen when they finish everything, but the fun all happens while you’re actually playing the game.
Something to break the teleportation is obviously to make breaks and enjoy where you are (a lake not too far on the road, any viewpoint...). Plan in advance, have a tent, be ready to not reach your target in one day and you will enjoy a much better a road trip than a train, a plane or even the highway.
I used to fly fairly regularly between Germany and Italy. I'd get on a plane in Munich and get off in Florence, going from a very "German" place to a very "Italian" place. A few years ago I started driving the route, and I was surprised just how much gradation there is between the cultures.
As an American, I always thought of "Italians" and "Germans" as very distinct cultures, but then you drive through Südtirol (or Alto Adige, if you're feeling Italian, the northern most province of Italy) and it feels quite Germanic. Then gradually, as you continue south, you hear more Italian, see more Italianate architecture and place names. Similar story for Alsace between France and Germany.
Of course none of this is all that surprising knowing the history of these areas, but it is very interesting to experience in-person.
I'm sure most places and cultures are like this, even when we think of of them as quite distinct. When you only fly between major cities, you lose so much of the wonderful overlap.
There was a man who was afraid of his shadow and disliked his footprints. So he tried to get away from them. He ran, but the faster he ran, the more numerous his footprints became, and his shadow kept up with him without lagging behind. Thinking he was going too slowly, he ran faster and faster, until he collapsed and died of exhaustion. He did not realize that if he had simply stayed in the shade, his shadow would have disappeared, and if he had sat still, there would have been no footprints.
And another one [0]:
My hut lies in the middle of a dense forest; Every year the green ivy grows longer. No news of the affairs of men, Only the occasional song of a woodcutter. The sun shines and I mend my robe; When the moon comes out I read Buddhist poems. I have nothing to report, my friends. If you want to find the meaning, stop chasing after so many things.
[0] https://firstknownwhenlost.blogspot.com/2011/06/stop-chasing...
The article advocates not rushing. In general, that's a good fit for audiobooks.
Second of all, I took TFA advice and read that article with the slowness and deliberate attention it recommended and found it to be trite and difficult to distinguish from AI slop… but if that’s what brings this person joy, good for them.
Who cares if the GP eats their cookies in one bite and listens to their audiobooks at 2.25x speed? Because one self help guru turned blogger said it’s a bad idea?
> limiting myself to mouth-speed
Audiobooks are mouth-speed.
The article suggests this is the right slow speed, at least for the author.
Maybe you yourself want even slower, but that's not what the article is suggesting.
>So I tried slowing down even more, and discovered something. I slowed to a pace that felt almost absurd, treating each sentence as though it might be a particularly important one. I gave each one maybe triple the usual time and attention, ignoring the fact that there are hundreds of pages to go.
You can’t pause your audiobooks?
And I too, often watch youtube at 1.5x or 2x speed, and dislike audiobooks because I read so much faster that I can possibly listen to them, and there's always an ever growing list/pile of books I want to read after this one. I wonder if that's why a certain type of movie works so well for me - I think of them as "movies made from short stories, not novels", and now I'm wondering if it's something similar to the OP's idea - and that spending 2 hours watching a short story I'd expect to read in 15/20mins is what I'm enjoying, in a different way to, say, the new Dune movies - which so far have been 4-5 hours watching a couple of big novel's worth of story that'd take me a week or so to read? Just writing that out now, I realised theres a two orders of magnitude difference in speed there going from 1/10th of reading speed to 10x reading speed - from a 15 minute read to 2 hour watch, to a week long read to 4-5 hour watch. Hardly surprising they hit my brain differently.
I think this often sounds unsettling (like the reader is drunk or otherwise impaired), and anyway the listener doesn't need more time to recognise each individual word -- they want time to take in sentences and paragraphs.
To borrow the same analogy from the article, image trying to savor a meal where someone else was deciding when you take each bite. Even at a slow pace, the rigidness of the pace and your lack of fine control would still pose a problem with giving each bite it's rightful consideration.
That being said I love audio books and think I would struggle to apply this article's advice in my own life. Slowing down your audiobook is still a step in that direction, though I sometimes find that slowing it down can cause my mind to wander and my comprehension goes down and not up.
and audiobooks with really good narrators? the miles will melt away.
(I like Wil Wheaton)
(don't know about lotr oudiobooks)
(currently part way through we are legion read by ray porter)
Though now that everybody has a device, we have to intentionally opt for a shared experience, rather than 1:1 devices.
State of nature isn't inherently good. It's bloody, smelly, dirty, and only incidentally nice, by virtue of evolutionary path dependence.
Having said that yes I do indeed pause if I need to take a moment to think, and I roll back 15 seconds if I want to hear it again. Not a big deal, just part of the experience. -signed ex-hater of audiobooks
[0] https://old.reddit.com/r/tolkienfans/comments/100n0y/maybe_t...
And similar to the point OP made, you get more out of it when you attend more closely. And similarly, most music does not withstand this level of scrutiny.
I have some excellent garage band CDs that probably have two or three copies still in the wild at most. Unfortunately sometimes the 25 year old burned CDs are missing the TOC data, but even the recovery process is satisfying.
(Same with the DVD collections.)
I listen to a lot of music on the side, but Chris Boltendahl of Grave Digger said something that stuck with me. Btw, Grave Digger are not making Heavy Metal inspired by Heavy Metal, they were there making Heavy Metal in the 80s :)
Paraphrasing: With all of the streaming, and easy access to music, music has turned into a fast food. Eaten on the side, but rarely really fully appreciated this day.
And for new albums of bands I follow (or if I want to have a good time), I do exactly that: If the weather permits, get a hammock, a good drink, the good headphones (yes, I have several levels of quality of headphones), and just look at the sun, the trees and the magpies while listening to the music. Improving my own guitar skills has only deepened this appreciation.
> Sitting at a live concert (I am thinking classical) is up there too, because you've given yourself permission to not think of/work on anything else in that time
At least in Metal and to me, concerts are a different beast than the record. The record is usually the best and most perfect take of a song, often with additional effects, better mix. If you want to hear to the best version of a song, it's usually from the record.
Concerts are a party. It's always amusing how different concert cultures are there -- I know of some people who complain that they "can't hear the singer over someone next to them shouting". That's kind of the point of a live celebration of the band at the music in my world.
I noticed similar effects when "locking in" in games or sports. Time gets slower.
So when you slow down, you start to pay more attention. But if you pay more attention, the world itself will slow down. And the music would be slowed
This post resonates strongly with me. I strongly believe the default settings _are_ too high, and it takes conscious effort to slow down while bound to the shackles of modern society, but it's so worth it.
In fact, I noticed that whenever a book becomes most exciting, I start reading especially fast (to the point of skipping words), because I want to know what happens next. So I spend the least time with the best parts of the best books.
Ever since I realized that, I have switched pretty much exclusively to audiobooks. I don't really know if it's faster or slower overall, but it's a predetermined pace, and that works better for me.
(There was one point during Riyria Revelations where a character was explaining how Elven succession works. After repeating the sequence a bunch of times, I finally had to get out my laptop and take notes.)
For me, moving my lips while reading is a surefire way to significantly slow down the pace. I do this all the time when giving a document a final proofread before publishing.
Like you, I do proofread this way, and for that it works well.
However now he has started to write stories about dragons and things, and that's a pretty interesting development.
I don't know how long they'll let me keep doing it for, but I don't see any reason to stop
The Wind in the Willows is good beginning around that age too.
Love both Pooh, and Wind in the Willows, and will enjoy seeing how they take him.
As promising as Fellowship was, the films just kept going down hill—one after the other.
As the girls were growing up we worked through all the Harry Potter books, a half-dozen of the "colored Fairy" books (edited by Andrew Lang), plenty of Uncle Remus tales, the "Little House" books and a number of Sid Fleischman books…
Those were magical years. Only when homework arrived did the reading hour finally come to a close. :-(
I've recently started the Letters too, and can thoroughly recommend it. It's fascinating and oddly cosy to get a direct tap into a mind you know so well at second hand, through its fiction.
Sadly, for some reason I now can't read slowly, which pisses me off. I and my partner read aloud together alternating chapters of a chosen book, and I love how get _much_ more out of the book than I would reading alone in a tenth of the time.
I've also found that some books seem written to be read aloud: the sentence structure and punctuation lends itself to easy reading aloud, whereas some books have really convoluted sentences with multiple parenthetical sub-clauses that are a real challenge to read aloud in an a way that's easy to follow. I've ended up so that normally try to write in a way that's easy to read aloud. I think if something's easy to read aloud it's going to be easy to comprehend when read normally. And Yes, I know that the sentence at the beginning of the paragraph probably doesn't match that.
0: (https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/festina%20lente)
The title failed to inspire but I heard it was worth the read and stepped through line by line.
It hit with a depth that I know with complete certainty I would not have gotten if I worked through at my usual pace or took it in as an audiobook.
Nassim Taleb’s books are also favorite slow reads of mine.
All this said, I collect books faster than I can read them so there’s always a feeling somewhere that I should be pushing through a little faster.
Ah well, in the end I think that really comprehending a handful of quality books is about as good as a shallow comprehension of many more.
There are words you don't know or know how to use them properly. It will help you learn the second language better, while also helping you to not gloss over whole passages.
I did this with Spanish and it was terrible for learning grammar because things tended to be transliterated from English however I found it good for learning vocab.
I chose really trashy romance novels translated from English e.g. Danielle Steel.
\* they tended to use more colloquialisms
\* simple plots, so easy to read
\* useful words
\* often transliterated directly from English so easiest forms of grammar
I also found it screwed up my Spanish pronunciation and had a queer side-effect that it permanently slowed down my English reading.
Personally, I think languages should be learnt by talking and mimicking (as much like a baby as possible). Reading is worthwhile for work but I expect to be more careful for the next language I learn.
This worked for me... for a time. And then what happened surprised me (but maybe shouldn't have): I started zoning out and thinking about other things, missing important details, while reading aloud. Wild that we can even do that.
So the main learning is to be aware of the speed settings, and then consider putting ourselves in situations where we can alter them. Faster or slower isn't better in a vacuum. Expermiment and find what's right for you, or, in communication, for your audience.
I wonder if this contributes to a good chunk of the experience of fine dining. When you get served expensive food in micro-portions that are accompanied by long explanations, you don't gobble it down but take as much time as possible to savour it.
Yet this quote has me thinking that maybe we fear slowing down because of the consciousness overload. That we get so overwhelmed by our senses. Maybe even that can lead to the tears of being so alive.
Another, less romantic option would be to recharge it somewhere faster ;-)
This is true for Tolkien, Turgenev, Hemingway or Pound. The amount of information per page—per word!—is incredibly high, which permits the conveyance of ideas which simply do not land when spoken more plainly.
You don’t need to go to high literature to find this density, by the way. Political speeches from Republican Rome and America’s Founders have a similar aspect to them.
Why?
Now in the UK all we get are monotonous robots or people who have clearly had intensive coaching in how to speak in a clear. Decisive. Direct. Way, to inspire confidence and project competence. The two qualities entirely absent in most of our politicians.
The less said about the other side of the pond the better.
My off the cuff observation is that there is a lot less mastery of language than there used to be in America. I'm not really sure why, but compare the grand language used by the early political leaders to, say, Obama, and it's striking. And that's not saying Obama is a bad speaker! He has a ton of charisma and makes you want to like his ideas by the way he presents them. But he's never given something on the level of Lincoln's Gettysburg address (in my opinion at least).
I’m arguing he couldn’t have. Until America regains a literary tradition, the complexity and imagery gained with heavy words is lost against the conciseness soundbites demand.
One thing that is thankfully unique to America is that rudeness as a debating tactic can win elections.
Look at the debates from 2015 where Trumps opponents are rendered speechless by his overbearing personality. He makes himself the centre of everything and is completely shameless about it. He's an American phenomenon. BUT, the reason it works is because he means what he says and does what he says he'll do. America has always appreciated straight talkers more then Europe.
IMO that's a direct consequence of becoming a real democracy: can't just target those rich enough to get a fancy education.
IIRC, the land ownership requirements had already gone by the time of Lincoln's Gettysburg address, but I expect them to have still been writing with such an audience in mind.
Uh, yes. This is press-release speak, optimised for a fourth grader’s reading comprehension.
If, on the other hand, you want to develop the motif of the Unseen—central to Tolkien’s work—the type of tired the characters are and how they’re detecting and addressing it is incredibly germane, interesting and totally lost in your summary.
You’re also describing the first scenes we see through familiar eyes of Mordor. The landscape is an extension of Sauron’s will. The contrast with the developed, organised, albeit crowded cities of men; the arrogance implied in the desolation; et cetera pack information lost in your summary.
Instead, I propose that the type of tied is informationally and qualitatively distinct. The exhaustion of the weight of the world, internal struggle, amidst a dismal hellscape is different than "really tired".
Great writing can build depth of quality and understanding with the authors intent.
LOTR could be summarized with a sentence. The content is in the detail.
Uh... Huh? So it's my argument, which I've refuted, and therefore it's a strawman? I think you should go get refreshed on informal fallacies. No, what's happening here is that there's a phenomenon that's being discussed -- namely, mood-setting in fictional writing -- and I'm proposing as its mechanism not additional information, but rather additional time. If you want to participate in the discussion you can't dismiss my argument my incorrectly calling it a strawman. You have to explain why it doesn't work as an explanation, like this:
>Instead, I propose that the type of tied is informationally and qualitatively distinct. The exhaustion of the weight of the world, internal struggle, amidst a dismal hellscape is different than "really tired".
Yet, if we were to replace the particular flavor of tiredness with a completely different, equally intense one, it would evoke the exact same empathic feeling on the reader, because the imagination is not precise enough to reproduce other people's feelings with such granularity. Someone can't precisely imagine the difference between the tiredness felt by Conan after 12 hours of turning a mill for the sixth day in a row, and that felt by Frodo. The reader is going to reach that passage and feel that the characters are really tired. That's why such long descriptions don't contain any more meaning; because they can be replaced with something completely different and put the same idea in the reader's mind: "Sam and Frodo are really tired".
>LOTR could be summarized with a sentence. The content is in the detail.
I've already addressed that. If the information is the words themselves and not their meaning, then any English text is equally information-dense. "It's raining" contains a third as much information as "it's raining, it's raining, it's raining", since it contains a third as many words.
You’ve set up a great question. Why is what you wrote shitty writing while what Tolkien wrote not?
The answer isn’t just variation. If you look at what’s been conveyed in his writing that wasn’t with your repetition, you’ll start unlocking what I suspect you know is there but are having trouble describing.
I guess we'll just have to agree to disagree.
This does not set a mood and thus does not convey the same information. This removes the information about mood and setting away while keeping only rough plot point in.
The outcome in terms of how reader interpret the situation is massively different. The thing you wrote implies that all they need is to go to sleep an hour sooner and rest, all will be fine.
Are you sure? Or is that just superfluous for the way you’re reading it?
In some cases, it’s overly verbose. But if you’re taking this away from acclaimed authors, consider picking up some literary criticism (fancy words for fan theories). Chances are, there is meaning embedded in what you’re dismissing as fluff.
It might sound like I’m just offering clichés – less is more, stop and smell the roses, take your time – and I guess I am. But clichés suffer the same issue: they are often profound insights, consumed and passed on too rapidly for their real meaning to register anymore. You really should stop and smell roses, as you know if you’re in the habit of doing that.
(Would elaborate, but, y'know. Opportunity cost)
I pictured it spoken with a heavy Californian surfer accent. He wanted elaborate but a huge wave was breaking and he really didn’t want to miss the next one. Was in far too much of a rush to even leave punctuation behind.
So long, dude, I hope the waves keep coming for you.
There is so much to unpack, which requires very slow treatment.
One of the things is savour so much is the time I read Idiot, we were on a cruise completely disconnected from the rest of the world. No distractions and just the sound on waves.
Really enjoyed the part talking about Tolkien. It reminds me of my own LOTR experience: I finished the trilogy in three consecutive summers in the hilly countryside of Italy near Rome. The first summer I made it through the fellowship of the ring with a lot of patience and trying for the slower moving parts. The summer after that I started over and read book 1 and 2, and in year three I felt I was finally in sync with the pace of the book and enjoyed reading through book 1, 2, and 3 in a few weeks.
It is quite amazing how many people do not know that there is a multitude of reading techniques to be used with various kinds of texts. You need to use a right tool for the job. Tolkien’s passages describing the Middle Earths ecological landscape are particularly rich calling for careful reading and lingual analysis. I believe he uses almost sole old Celtic words in those passages, avoiding any newer latin-based words more familiar to a modern reader, which cannot be a coincidence.
[1] https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/46452/to-an-athlete-d... [2] https://poets.org/poem/having-coke-you
Most books are the other way. Zoom through and you can get most of the value. This is especially true of non-fiction, where most have a message that can be gleaned in 15 minutes. (The exceptions are the great ones)
Podcasts are similar. Most give you 80% of the value at 2X speed. Even my favorites - I’d rather speed listen to get 80% the value rather than get 100% of half the backlog. The best podcasts defy this too.
So in the end it’s a bit of a skill to both choose the right things to slow down on, and then a discipline to force the appropriate speed.
In fantasy / sci-fi, I'd unreservedly recommend:
- Ursula K LeGuin
- Steven Erickson
- Gene Wolfe
With reservations, I'd recommend:
- Patrick Rothfuss (unfinished)
- George RR Martin (unfinished; sometimes dodgy prose, but occasionally transcendent character and theme)
- Dune (just know it goes downhill fast after the first book)
Elsewhere, but still genre (ie: meant to be entertaining, not uber-serious, self-conscious "literature"):
- Patrick O'Brian
- Arthur Conan Doyle
- Dorothy Dunnet
I'd recommend Rudyard Kipling's short stories, but they're hit and miss, and sometimes out of step with modern mores. Maybe stick with the Jungle Book, and Just So Stories, and if you like those make sure you read Without Benefit of Clergy, They (short stories), and Kim (a masterpiece of a novel).
Once you've got through those, Hemingway is approachable, and the true modernist master. Fiesta / The Sun Also Rises (same book, known by different names in different parts of the world) is ironic and beautiful; A Farewell to Arms is beautiful and almost unbearably sad; his short stories are impeccable.
That's not always the case. With certain types of food, it's much more enjoyable to have your mouth full than to eat a small amount, for example. It's a trade-off.
It's the same with a story. Taking too long can make it boring, for example.
That doesn't mean we always choose the optimal balance, though.
For some books, faster is better. Neuromancer, for example, has a lot of sentences and paragraphs that if I go slowly, I can’t figure out what it is that Gibson is talking about. But if I go fast, I pick up the vibe and things start to make sense.
I find this approach rewarding across most forms of media. There plenty of movies and music I’ve revisited over and over again.
For some reason the first half of the first book appealed to me the most. I liked the leaving, the setting out on an adventure that you know not where it will lead you.
After Rivendell the hobbits no longer seemed to be driving.
It is also possible to walk at incredible low speeds. Some times, I try to force myself to walk as slowly as I dear. It is hard to walk slow in a city full of people. It feels silly. However, it feels great once you've actually slowed down.
Tolkien recorded some passages of LoTR on a friend's tape recorder while it was still unpublished, I'd highly recommend checking them outz particularly the Ride of the Rohirrim.
The title would make more sense as the default settings being "too low" since Low is the setting where when we trade off fidelity for speed, but "too high" has a nice ring to it.
At first, I found writing code with Claude Code to be enjoyable, while Codex seemed boring. But over time, I've discovered that I actually prefer Codex. Perhaps slowing down really is the key to writing high-quality code.
Reminds me of this speech by Leon Wieseltier.
The author just scratches the surface.
I've been reading the Wheel of Time (started by Robert Jordan, ended by Brandon Sanderson). I'm on book 11 currently. I've found something similar in that the Jordan's later books in the WOT are basically just incredible slogs if you read for completion (which, I myself did around 20 years ago at around book 10, where I stopped). Around book 6 or so I purposely slowed down and started really imagine the scenes in my minds eye. I also keep the map open on my phone and just kind of keep note of where they are at different points in the series.
Obvious, but it is really striking how much better his books are when you try to "live in the moment" of your imagination as you read, rather than reading to move the plot and action forward. I was kind of confused with myself when I reflected on it. That I somehow thought it made more sense to skim through an entire series and take reduced pleasure from something, when I could just take 50% longer and actually enjoy it.
Made me wonder about where else I am doing this in my life.
I still thinks these books are radically overpadded. He was clearly in love with his characters and his setting. He needed the guidance of a strong armed editor imho. With all that said, if you are going to commit to reading a massive series like this, you might as well appreciate it in the moment, you are going to be here a while.
I came here to say "I hope that you are recording yourself so that you create your OWN audiobook"