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Comment by godelski | Hacker News Reader

I wonder if these people just need to talk.

I wonder if these people are just avoiding thinking about the tough things in their lives.

I wonder if these people are just scared of being human, so reaching for any distraction they can get.

I've tried to stop taking my phone with me when I go to the bathroom. When I shower. When I go to bed. Because I think we all have these same addictions. There's things that suck in life. But maybe if we put our phones down we can work together to solve these things.

- Written on godelski's iPhone while pooping

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The author says he has two kids, which would likely constrain what he is able to accomplish in his free time.

Children are financially dependent on the parents to provide for them. There's not really much way around that. It makes sense that if you can do more things within the time that is left that people will try to figure out how to cram those things in. What we would have resigned to give up in the past now seems possible to attain with enough AI credits and tools.

I do know a lot of people who love to talk. I don't think it's a character flaw. It's certainly not what I want, and I would die if I had to talk all day, but it's just the way they prefer to communicate. Same way that some people are introverts and some are extroverts, some people like reading paper books and some people like audiobooks.

I like how in spite of the author explaining why (father of two small children that occupy his free time), you jumped to the most negative set of possibilities. Instead, it sounds like when he's with his children, he is focusing on them instead of on productivity, which is the opposite of what you're suggesting.

Also, if he instead chose to occupy his drive time with listening to a comedy podcast, or NPR, or even a technical podcast, I can't help but imagine you wouldn't give it a second thought, in spite of that being just as "productive" and "avoiding thinking about the tough things".

Excrementalist Philosophy

on your drive you could:

a) listen to a useless podcast of two people blathering on about nothing.

b) come up with an idea, and have a coding agent start implementing it; maybe go back and forth on how to improve it.

seems like b is a better use of time.

or c) just stare into the void and let your thoughts consume you; this is my favorite, I don't like listening to stuff when I drive.

or d) just drive.

Surprisingly difficult to do. The assumption is that there are some things we do in our life that act as a blank space that must be filled with something. Productivity, or deep thought, or whatever. People go through life always doing something so there's never a "wasted" moment, but I'd argue thats a recipe for burnout and unhappiness.

There's a buddhist concept of suchness, seeing things exactly as they are in the present without judging them or trying to change them. Doing anything else but "just driving" is trying to live somewhere other than where you actually are. Where ever you are, and whatever you are doing right now is what life is, your life isn't somewhere else in the future, and you don't need to escape from a mundane task and rush somewhere else to experience life. All of it is life, even the boring parts.

I have not very well treated AuADHD and being alone with my thoughts very long is generally not very productive, At least Coding LLMs have helped me get things I wouldn't of had the attention span to make in the past come to life. and a good bit of vibe coding is just yelling at the LLM that what its doing sounds good on paper so keep going, please do the needful, make no mistakes :V

> I wonder if these people just need to talk.

No. I need to create. That energizes me, and I have far too little time for it.

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