Maybe you should learn something
marginalia.nu
marginalia.nu
- energy: learning requires much more than the other "bad" activities like phone
- correct psychological state: procrastination is typically triggered as a response to anxiety for me, so any learning I do instead of the phone will also have this poisonous quality of guilt and fear.
- uninterrupted time
I have a problem that I take any learning way too seriously, such that it would require deliberate focused practice. Sometimes it kills all the fun, and sometimes I give up just because it takes too much energy.
Still, it's extremely rewarding for me to learn stuff, even at this age when intelligence is becoming less useful, or at least harder to monetize.
If you can replace five hours of doom scrolling with an hour of doing nothing in particular, an hour more of sleep, some time staring at a book page or soduku, some more work on chorse, you'll most likely gain an hour or so to use on something that takes mental energy.
It's never been the phone for me, particularly. I just don't pick mine up very often.
To have much more time to learn things I had to learn one key skill: systematically lose interest in syndicated American television. Other people can watch Lost, Game of Thrones, How I Met Your Mother etc.; I will use my time elsewhere.
(OK so I picked three that are widely recognised as having a major letdown as an ending, but you see my point I guess.)
Once I stopped sharing an interest in watching every episode of some show that a friend or the general zeitgeist was obsessed with, that is hundreds of hours (per show!) for a hobby.
And these days it's hobby-enabling money, because in many cases these shows are the only reason to pick up an extra streaming subscription. You can buy a good 3D printer and some filament, or an electric guitar and a little amp or headphone effects unit for less than a year's premium plan for an American streaming service, and a fully playable guitar alone costs about as much as a year's standard Netflix.
I learned this long enough ago that I have gone without a television for decades now. I had to re-learn it in the era of streaming TV. If you think you want to see one of these shows, they will be around forever so you can watch them from a hospital bed one day.
But phone is still the worst offender, of course. It doesn't just steal time and energy, it also reinforces its usage by producing more anxiety
(aside from this, fascinating math ;))
But doomscrolling seems to teach your brain to never pay attention to anything for more than a few seconds, while at the same time being more exhausting than watching TV.
So I'd say the TV is healthier.
If you're alone, it's probably a wash.
I do notice however, in myself as well as in others, that given an amount of uninterrupted time, we quickly get bored and pick up our phones to break it.
I recall that when Covid hit, I suddenly had a lot of interrupted time on my hands. It quite felt like the times from when we were kids, when he had these vast swathes of time in the afternoon and before bedtime.
I think for a lot of adults, besides the chores and errands that keep life busy, it's become a habit for us to fill up what little uninterrupted time we get with distractions.
I mostly put aside music and any physical artform that required getting out and putting stuff away each session. Instead, I did a lot more writing, programming, and making stuff on my laptop since pausing and resuming was only a Ctrl-S away.
It also required learning the meta-skill of being able to break a large project into tiny pieces. I got a lot better at leaving notes to myself, not having too many projects going on in parallel, and thinking about problems when I was otherwise idle.
Basically, I have windows of 5 minutes when I can do almost anything, then she calls me to do something for her that takes 15 minutes, then I have another 5 minutes of work. Instead of coding, my writing efforts have transitioned to writing fiction.
For energy, it both requires and pays dividends. It's a bit like working out in that sense.
I think my intended takeaway was that you really don't need to have make the thing you're studying take a lot of time, that daily consistency matters more than pouring hours into practice and obsessing about it.
Though in general, I do still think it's the phones and media diet that is the problem with the sense of lacking time.
Few years ago I had a full time job I felt like I had no time. Then I had a part time job, and I still had no time. Now I'm self employed, with nobody to answer to, and I still often feel like I have no time. Like damn, to get more time than I actually already have I'd need to move in next door to a black hole. Though when I unplug, then holy crap do I suddenly end up with a lot of time.
Being mentally worn out just kinda makes you feel like shit. It's a terrible state to be in, you don't want to do anything, but doing nothing also feels bad.
A lot of our entertainments and hobbies, especially in urban areas, are mental to begin with. The most evident example would be scrolling on your phone, which evidently is 100% a mental thing, but there's a lot in this box, videogames, music, reading can all really demand a lot from you mentally.
Explicitly physical things are not so common. Gym. Dancing. Climbing. Running. All of these are things that people who work with their brains often talk about as "relaxing" or "great against stress", even if they can put the body until great physical strain.
It is my experience that when mentally worn out, the "don't want to do anything" really translates to "don't want to do anything mentally", problem being, thinking about doing the physical thing instead is actually a little bit of mental, albeit more emotional, work, but once you ACTUALLY do that, then after spending the whole day focused on deep, complex stuff, being the caveman bench pressing is actually absolute bliss.
Also there are all these feedback loops. Staying active gives motivation to do mentally challenging things, and some of this mental energy can also be invested in learning new ways of staying active!
I have a feeling you are a young person :)
But, some things like doomscrolling and procrastination are both huge energy sinks as well as timesinks. However, targeting them is very hard (again, for me), as it is usually not the root problem but a symptom of anxiety and uncertainty, which I often cannot deal with. If the root of the problem is boredom, it should be much easier to unplug and occupy the brain with something more wholesome.
Another thing is obsessive optimization, "am I studying/practicing the best way possible?". "Is it worth it with so little progress?". I keep falling to such traps. Writing this, I found that I feel that I lack an example of people doing stuff in a suboptimal, slacky, yolo way, deriving fun and still achieving some results in the end.
Though I think that insight is also probably the first step toward working on the issue. The phone habit masks the problem, but when you take the phone away it can also reveal the truth of how bad it's gotten. Like why are you having these anxiety issues? Is it a lack of sleep, too much caffeine, something to see a therapist about, maybe go on meds? Questions worth asking at least. Self-medicating with doom scrolling isn't going to make things better that's for damn sure.
The more you safely do something that scares you, the more your brain learns that it's safe.
The key is to break it down into small steps. Each step feels less intimidating and the brain learns bit by bit not to feel anxiety anymore.
It most definitely worked for me.
When I work, my brain is fried from work. On the weekends I need a long period of idleness to recover before I can read a chapter of a novel.
An hour of study every day is unrealistic for me right now.
2 months later I was finished and the sleep deprivation hit me like a brick.
the breakthrough was a trip to a relative's remote house with no screens / internet. Kid found violin better than other things to do. More Hours led to improvement. That fed on itself and kid spent more time with the violin and improved much faster.
The busier our lifestyle, the more cheap, meaningless pursuits we engage ourselves in, it all chips away at out natural ability to focus on one thing for long term and we're left with a recursive livelock of infinite choices laden with hidden opportunity costs.
how can humans from 1500 with everything stacked against them have better art sense and science insight than humans in 2026 ?
It appears you definitely have received some benefit, but if you do not mind me asking, at what cost?
> But it turns out neurotypical people can be productive without being driven by stress.
As some that is neurodivergent, I cannot even fathom this. I cannot function without stress.
Some people choose what, if any pill to take each day according to what they intend to do that day.
Jung has a great quote to the effect of, "we don't solve our problems, but rather outgrow them." Life is going to feel like mostly-imperfect circumstances for any venture, and your brain can be too good at rationalizing any [lack of] behavior.
Some people feel good about making mistakes. Though necessary for long-term success, this is a completely foreign mindset to me. I have no idea how a person can do such a thing. I tend to overreact instead.
It's not any wonder I would turn to doomscrolling in response, it seems the stakes in my mind are too high and effort invariably leads to depression (speaking from experience). It's too important to me to fail at. Maladaptive phone usage is for escaping that anxiety. I'm most likely burnt out from other attempts in the past. I don't get this feeling at all with work since I'm only doing it for money.
I would feel bad if I couldn't learn the things I really wanted to in life because the emotional toll is too high to pay, after putting in all the work to have a stable income. I still have to manage the rest of my life on top of optional things.
Still occasionally get interrupted because of life, of course, but marking off an hour and a half and closing a door and putting all chores/calls on silent during that time is very helpful. And I understand that for many it is simply not possible. Private space is a luxury in much of the world.
A sense of play and no obligation also helps. For more on this I recommend Rubin’s The Creative Act.
It is very true that it is becoming hard to monetize knowledge. The depth a lot of people seek is often the depth of about at most five or six websearch queries, or maybe three or four AI-enabled queries.
It blows my mind that people want things like neural interfaces and human/computer physical integration, in part because, okay, let's say you have all that information there in your head, 24/7. What would it even be useful for, especially if others had it. You could not really make pay in any career involving a thought economy, and at the same time, you would destroy curiosity and actual learning, and you would almost certainly be (ugh) Bored (and Boring to anyone else). One reason Elon rubs me the wrong way.
The human mind is always passively working on problems. We are not necessarily aware of how much working memory is "tied up" on background computations, but when it's a lot, we will feel a natural aversion to new learning, it will be exhausting, and we will lack for curiosity. This is fine, working as intended.
When in this state, what one usually needs to do is a different part of the learning process: not absorbing new information or abstractions, but making sense of what one already knows, working out contradictions, assembling larger-scale theories--synthesis, basically. "Learning" is only one part of the arc of "thinking".
Usually this is best done by writing, and usually comes easiest when trying to convince someone else or what we believe. If you can't find the energy to learn, try writing instead.
Re: "taking things way too serious" - a general life advice is to be after the journey, not the result. Goes for career, sports achievements and anything along the lines. Worry about getting to some place/rank/etc in particular and it's an endless stream of despair. Worry about just enjoying the practice and not being afraid to rock the boat (i.e. try something outside _your_ beaten path) and you're set.
Actual intelligence is as useful as it gets nowadays, given that it's at a premium.
This is a common trait of perfectionists. I have long forgotten the source, but someone once wrote that “Perfectionists have a special ability to turn the voluntary into the obligatory.” I, too, find this in voluntary pursuits.
> It's a very common thing to blame the lack of time and "finding" the extra time by suggesting to give up phone or some other form of procrastination. But in my experience, time is almost never a problem. It's usually (...) uninterrupted time (...)
Let's ignore the semantics nitpicking of trying to make believe that "time" does not reflect "energy" or "correct psychological state". Trying to frame "I don't have uninterrupted time" as something distinct from "I don't have time" is a choice that cannot be explained, let alone justified. I mean, do you honestly believe that setting 10minutes aside each day for a task has the same impact as being able to set aside an hour a week to invest in the same task?
Perhaps it's more productive to focus on the actual problem: not having time.
- T.H. White, The Once and Future King
I ended up thinking of it extremely fondly - way more fondly than I would’ve expected when halfway through. It’s one of my favorite books in spite of itself. I’d recommend it.
Right.
If you think of the world as everything it is possible to see and experience, learning about the world won't bring torture, it will bring freedom from it.
I'm still angry and upset that there are so many entities which prey upon this natural human tendency and twist it toward fruitless, bizarre ends.
People are less frustrated with the actually meme if it's insightful and not some pedantry.
Language learning, for example is a huge category. You can get completely mired trying to sort out "grammar translation" versus "direct method" or "comprehensible input" approaches, the pros and cons of spaced repetition vs extensive/intensive reading, phonology & minimal pairs, picking a textbook/grammar/dictionary -- it's a lot. I imagine there are some people who are broadly interested in language learning, and don't actually use that information to actually learn a language. It might be more fun to prepare to learn a language than to get into the challenging and less fun work of actually doing it. I see the parallels with "Gear Acquisition Syndrome".
True, and even more insidious than that can be consuming the actual learning material (e.g. textbooks), but not doing the required work to integrate it. I find that I need to do projects to properly learn something. Once I actually start doing things, I quickly identify the parts I knew in theory from reading about them but had never put to the test by solving real problems.
It takes about 2-3 years of mild practice to get good enough that you’ll routinely impress yourself, about 5 years to get good enough that you could do paid commissions.
Seems like a long time, but unless you start in your seventies you’ll have decades left of enjoying being an artist afterwards.
I've even realised a few things about my own language.
Why walk or jog of the car can do it for you?
There are. Unless your work requires almost constant creative reiteration over your mistakes on new topics, learning new things even when exhausted is still healthy for your brain.
It's easy to think, reading HN, that we're in some "post-knowledge" apocalypse, but that's just not the reality. It is, however, tragic that the irrationality of capitalism can be sustained so long, perhaps longer than some of us can stay solvent.
Imagine your perception as a VR headset, and any gadgets and apps are inserting a layer between you and your VR headset, making it worse.
The same goes with any augmenting technology you perceive not the real thing.
So, your friend was just expressing the general zeitgeist. But something to be aware of, is that “having that knowledge in one’s own head” might be unrewarding in time. Namely, once high-quality AI translation in near-real-time becomes the social norm, Chinese people (and most other people on earth) will become much less tolerant of a foreigner trying to speak their language imperfectly. You can already see something similar if you go to countries like Netherlands or Sweden and try to speak the local language at anything short of a high B2-level: people will complain you’re wasting their time compared to just using English.
I like to learn new stuff, every day. I have found LLMs to be a godsend, here. Makes it much easier to just barge into unfamiliar territory.
Whenever I come across essays like this, I like to post The Gap, by Ira Glass[0]; one of the more encouraging short essays out there.
They do, but the shape of the way LLMs will confidently mislead you is quite different to the way misinformed humans, or even the malevolent and mendacious humans, will mislead you.
I look for citations and footnotes. In many cases, accuracy isn't something that I worry about, as bad info becomes apparent, almost immediately. In cases where it matters, though, I may try a couple of verifications.
One problem with humans, is that we can be quite insecure, and will fight to the death to defend a provably wrong position, because we can't bear to be seen as in error.
Can you elaborate on this? I suspect that you’re thinking mostly of cases in which you already have a fair bit of domain expertise. But in the general case, this seems to be very untrue. Which is why it’s so pernicious that LLMs can generate such quantities of syntactically-plausible-but-factually-untrue text.
Can’t really put it into precise terminology, but I get a “gut feeling,” that something is/is not plausible, and it happens pretty quickly; usually when I start some implementation. I tend to learn by do[0] (note the “sample playground,” in each essay), so the “reality filter” gets applied fairly rapidly.
In any case, I have been dealing with misinformation (sometimes, deliberate), for a long time, and I’m still working fairly effectively, so I guess it works.
Can’t argue with results.
But (not speaking about your use specifically here) many people (most, I'd wager) use LLMs for many things beyond their own expertise. And it's there that they're most likely to be ensnared without even knowing it.
I definitely agree with your notion that learning-by-doing is a helpful salve for LLM falsehoods. It's no panacea (working != correct (an incorrect solution can appear correct over a given interval)), but it's a good way of working in general that helps keep LLMs in check. And it's very natural to code or other things that can be immediately applied.
But learning-by-doing of course doesn't work with topics that aren't immediately applied. Which includes lots of topics that people use LLMs for (Wikipedia too, for that matter).
The set of unfamiliar-or-unapplied is practically a lot larger than the set of familiar-or-applied.
I don't think it would be a good idea for me to suddenly decide that I want to get rich, selling antivenin.
On the contrary, I believe most people use them precisely to find out more about topics of which they know vanishingly little, much as they'd have used Google before LLMs.
It’s not like we’ve created a new abstraction layer with coding agents. It’s a leaky factory where every part up and down can break and/or be improved.
The best factories thrive in a learning culture. Where humans grow their knowledge to improve the operation of the factory. From nuts and bolts up to larger systems.
How do you do that without reading code? Without writing code?
I started even replacing my use of specs with exploratory coding to grow my own knowledge and context
https://softwaredoug.com/blog/2026/07/04/write-code-not-spec...
I'm in my 40's so learning a new language has activated the brain muscles that were last active when I was... 4?
They were so rusty, slow and amost physically refused to cooperate at first. This was tough. Now looking back it was absolutely worth it, best brain workout ever. Best.
Even older kids... my 6 year old is jumping on the couch as I type this..
I like remote work but when I had to commute it was really nice to have that downtime built in to the day. I learned a lot of Dutch vocabulary on the train.
One day you will pick them up and, and most likely neither of you will know it, but it will be the last time you ever do.
Treasure everything, even the insanity.
If you are rich, you can get around this by hiring people to take care of the children, so then it could be possible, but it will still be a huge financial burden.
I’ve honestly never been able to understand this kind of thinking (uniformly ruling children as a negative because of the downsides), but I’d be curious to understand more about your perspective.
How do you weigh the joy and meaning many people find in having a family against the economic and time freedom costs?
Or the fact that societies do need to continue having children in order to: sustain economic growth, service their elderly population (that will be us in a few years to decades), maintain their armed forces, perpetuate their culture and values into the future, invest in scientific research, etc.
Are these not things you value? Or do you just see the tradeoff as not worth it?
That's a very presumptuous question.
I don't know if the original commenter has kids or a family, but I can assure you that not everyone finds as much joy in it as you may. You can easily end up with a kid that just hates your guts, and is problematic in many other ways to boot.
I see very little love from parents, but I generally see an enormous amount of selfishness. True betrayal, overt and subtle abuse, and kids seem more to push through that to really thrive… occasionally.
This idea that someone has never felt to love this powerful before? Incredibly selfish. It feels almost disgusting to write about let alone really think about. Who the hell are these people saying these things? Do they even hear themselves?
Every metric and every explanation I ever hear or read about when it comes to kids seems… ultimately selfish. The future for civilization looks awfully bleak, and bringing children to this world? Now?! Their future is a dodgy proposition at best.
Having children consistently seems to be for people with little creativity, little prospect in their lives, and very little thought or consideration for a wide and colorful world which could actually use some help instead of holding up in a house for 20 years.
Society uses our biology against us. It uses it to create enormous anxiety, depression, and poverty through having children. I wish to live the second half of my life in a meaningful way rather than shackling some unsuspecting little-me to the insane whims of hyper consumerist and capitalist culture designed only to extract everything from them and create as much anxiety and hurt as possible, that it might produce as much from them as possible.
For someone to not see that this is what most societies have become? The height of blindness; i’m not sure I’ve ever seen a parent in America who didn’t have their kids as part of this culture of spectacle , of blindly shambling without critical thinking. It’s as if most people want to collect all the check boxes in life, like little Pokémon, little experiences that they simply must have and show off to people to fluff their ego.
Sure, the process produces all kinds of crazy chemicals but so do hallucinogenic drugs. They’re basically both the same thing, but one of them really makes people unhealthy, intense, and emotionally unbalanced while the other just makes them see weird stuff that isn’t there.
The more you look at it, just the less it makes sense. All the uncritical, thoughtless people that I’ve ever met in my life are the ones having kids, while all the people I’ve respected, who are generally considerate, intelligent, kind, intentional, mindful, and honestly quite accomplished and as helpful as possible toward their fellow people? None of them have kids. Not a single one. Not my entire life. Well one. One, and it’s such a bad experience, and is so painful and difficult for he, his wife, and the child that he says he would never wish it on his worst enemy, despite absolutely loving his child and doing his best to demonstrate that every day.
I know it’s a bit rambling, but there you go.
Of course there are kind and loving parents, but you are right in that many (most?) just follow their biological program on autopilot, never thinking about the consequences.
But I do think, at some level, the species is starting to realize how unsustainable this is, and we see this in dropping fertility and child birth levels.
These levels I think, will only start to increase again, once society has adapted to man, instead of like today, when authoritarian politicians try to adapt man, pushing him like a cog wheel into the machinery of the state. Man is now tired, and refuses, and as a result, more and more people just stop procreating, which I see as a sign of health.
I don't understand what the point of hiring people to take care of mine would be. That's the fun part. Makes about as much sense as going to an amusement park and paying someone to take the rides for you.
We did buy a more expensive home to live near better peers, but that's not really a consumption issue; it's a cultural one.
Kids are conditioned to associate learning with a formal course with a tutor culminating in exams.
It's also intentional to segregate skills, if schools taught every child basic plumbing or car mechanics for example instead of spending a month teaching something that won't get used in life, there would be less job in those fields.
We used to have "shop" (or similarly named) classes for this in junior high/middle school. They have mostly been cut, but more for budgetary reasons. A lot of high schools still have a vocational department for the kids who are not college-bound and not complete wasteoids.
Learning for the sake of learning is one of my favorite things in life.
I started playing pool in college around 2017 and, without really intending to, it became something I did at least once a week. I never had a structured practice routine or any goal of getting really good. I just enjoyed playing, and after enough years I realized I'd become a decent player.
I never gambled, but we usually played loser-pays, so every session still cost a bit. I'm unemployed right now, so I've stopped going because it just doesn't fit my budget anymore.
But another side effect of this process is if people stop believing in the accrual of the knowledge which will lead them to nowhere (use cases for those information becoming irrelevant by the time you start using it), justifying this mentally exhausting practice becomes really hard. And I don't mean this on learning static information but also on how to define and build a meta-cognitive framework to systemically learn things.
I don't quite get the "lifelong learning" approach, since lifelong learning must usually be accompanied with organic evolution of the information space. Employers wont pay you because you are a lifelong learner, they'll pay you to actually fix a problem you provide a solution for. And that solution isn't guaranteed by the knowledge you possess and doesn't usually qualify the marginal cost of being a lifelong learner.
One could brain storm on these issues by critiquing the premise of this book: https://www.amazon.com/100-Year-Life-Living-Working-Longevit...
Examples: under a sink, there were two 2m-long supply hoses, where 40cm would be enough, convoluted in a double loop together, to spare a visit to a DIY store. Or dowels made to be driven by hammer, for plastic baseboards, used to hang a cupboard (almost fell out). Or a too long corrugated plastic tube making a virage and another, unnecessary, water seal, and impeding outflux -- also to spare a visit to a store.
I'd say most of the learning is done by actually doing.
https://www.paulgraham.com/procrastination.html
(Except, his essay insinuates that there is some kind of brilliance at work here. In my own case, that remains to be seen.)
Never have I ever managed to accomplish anything of merit by just heading straight for it in the plainspoken sense. Some people will say that provides the basic architecture of some kind of "diagnosis", but I think it's just a normal human variance.
This shift is such a game changer for me personally. It reduces how many times I ask myself “am I actually making any progress or just wasting time?” by putting all the pressure on “sleep’s REM phase” instead of me and my ability to learn.
I don’t like cooking mostly because of how many dishes you have to wash afterwards. Saying “your sleep will handle the learning part” is like someone saying “feel free to cook the craziest dishes, I will do all the washing afterwards”.
> Learning something completely new from scratch is really awful, and at this point most people are very disheartened and want to give up, which is unfortunate, because if they got back to it the next day, they’d find it’s actually gotten tangibly easier.
This certainly applies to some people, but not all people, and I suspect that the people who actually take the time to "learn new things" are those who enjoy the process. People tend to avoid things they don't enjoy, especially when those things are discretionary, so telling the people who don't enjoy the process of learning new things to do so anyway is preaching to the wrong audience.
1) learning how to learn; and
2) using projects to learn
Writing about your experience in learning is also a powerful tool. If you can describe it to your journal (or someone else), you really know it.
Did you do a teaching degree or equivalent, or something a bit more theoretical/philosophical?
And who do you now teach?
> You can learn new things. Pixel art, touch typing, 3d modelling, music, calligraphy, wood working, knitting, a language. Whatever is practical and calls to you, you can learn.
shameless plug: if you are interested in learning touch typing, i built a data driven touch typing application:
it started as a side project (combined wanting to learn typing with my desire to build a side business while working at amazon. working on this (almost) full time now
An attention span of 30mins seems too little to me. Any ways to incrementally work on this? Anyone with similar experience?
I look up to people who are well-read and try to follow their example. Maybe one day I can inspire somebody else.
How learning and doing aren't exactly the same and that you need to get back to it many times rather than doing a lot at once.
It's ofc nothing new and the same principle as for example spaced repetition.
Slightly off topic, but as a parent I found this hilarious and will now be closely watching to see if any of my own screaming logos ever perfectly hit the corner of a room.
It was probably written by a relatively young person.
Nice intent and advice, but in practice, mostly harder and harder to do as time passes by.
I had a student come to me with essentially the same problem over two years and each time I helped her she was in refusal to listen as she stressed herself to just make it work now. Her problem was that she never took the time to do the basics and rejected any learning opportunity as it stared her in the face.
You get results over time if you dedicate yourself to just doing the thing. For many subjects there is no shortcut, no way to walk the path without actually walking it. Every time you encounter an issue there is a learning opportunity. Use it.
You follow a tutorial to do something, feel happy about it. Then you start a new project to put your new skills to good use and... Blank. No idea where to start, no idea how to proceed.
It's so important to build stuff, using references is fine, but following tutorials is not the way forward! You have to work on your own without the training wheels.
For me it is. Even in my domain where I’m an expert and it’s fun, it only is if I’m working on something interesting.
Sometimes distraction is the main issue when it comes to having ideas.
I get stuck into this mentality of "I need to learn and master X, Y and Z before I can even start building my dream"
Would be much better served by just building whatever and learning the skill
Once you're a little more confident (you know a bit, but not much) I suggest to modify the tutorial as you follow along, that makes the tutorial harder and gives you small challenges to overcome while still giving you general guard rails.
Then as soon as you're dangerous enough to be let loose you should pick your own projects that are slightly above your skill level. Maybe try different approaches if you're unhappy with the first result.
When I wanted to improve my comic drawing skills ca. 2009 I started drawing and publishing a daily webcomic strip for a year. That really helped.
But tutorials remain useful even if you're advanced or a pro. E.g. if you use blender a lot and a new feature comes around watching a tutorial on it is a very efficient way of getting up to speed. Of course you will watch tutorials differently from a beginner, you will pick up on different things etc.
The best way to learn is a serious project with a deadline, but if you have that deadline it will make you wish you had watched some tutorials when you had the time. Source: I teach this kind of stuff at the university level for 6 years now.
In my experience most people can do this, if they think about it a bit — identify the thing they want to learn and find a tutorial for it. Which is amazing, really; this sort of meta-knowledge is a remarkable human concept.
Literally an hour ago my 7 and 9 year olds came to mom and I and said, “thank you for disabling YouTube. We are having so much fun.” I know this sounds like a fake Donald Trump kind of story but I swear to god it just happened.
// you == the reader of this comment
this adds to the difficulty in getting started; so many times you start down a path, don't make good progress and hit a paywall or realize the path you started on is just marketing for some (not even valuable) learning resource
this is super common with language learning stuff, especially because AI makes it seem so cheap to produce learning content
Struggling with what to learn?
Learn to write! It’s the ultimate meta-skill.
But I never tout this as some kind of way of being everyone needs to or should try to emulate. As I said at the outset, I can't think of any tangible benefit from doing this. I'm exactly the same upper middle-class, white-collar office worker earning a very good but nowhere near "fuck you" level of money exactly the same as all my peers who are mostly more ordinary people doing ordinary things like watching Love Island and whatever else ordinary people do.
This isn't the automatic golden ticket to a good life. I have no social media accounts. I don't even know where my phone is right now and often don't have it with me. I watch no video on it ever. Most of my entertainment comes from listening to music and even then it's active because I usually listen to songs I can sing and sing along while listening. Even then, I'm still practicing and I'm a very good singer. None of this makes me any happier or any better than anyone else. My mental health is not skyrocketing through the roof because I'm unplugged from the 24 hours news cycle and don't feel the scrutiny of my body and lifestyle not matching an Instagram ideal. In fact, I probably do match that. I've managed to lift at least an hour a day far more days in my adult life than not. I still run even in my mid-40s. I can't get a sub-16 minute 5k like I could as a teenager but I'm in shape. I still sometimes hit 80 miles in a week. My BMI hasn't been over 22 and I haven't had double-digit body fat since being bedridden with spine injuries a decade ago. I look like an underwear model for no reason at all because nobody ever sees it and nobody cares.
It doesn't matter. It's compulsion. I doubt myself and hate myself just as much as anyone else does. I can't sleep because I feel like nothing I ever do is enough and the slightest disturbance in sleep jolts me instantly awake with my mind racing anxious over all the things I believe I need to do, all the ways I'm not living up to my own potential. All those degrees? Shitty schools. No PhDs. Good job. Okay, but I've never made 7 figures in a year. Someday I will but that won't be enough, either. Even Michael Jordan was angry more often than happy, alienated every person he ever knew, and spent his hall of fame induction insulting people and being mad rather than celebrating his own accomplishments. The only real ticket is satisfaction, being able to say good enough is good enough. Spending too much time doomscrolling and not enough learning a second language? So what? Give yourself some grace. People who speak 19 languages are no happier or better than you are. Learning a 20th is every bit as compulsive and pointless as you watching TikTok.
I want more content on the Internet, or anywhere else, telling people all the ways and all the reasons they're already good enough, not constantly pointing out any and all shortcomings of the world and their own personal habits.
Like, in a just having a life kind of way.
But what do I know?
As well as not particularly being innate or "god-given", talents tend to emerge only when supported by learned ability. And not even just your own learned ability. Talented violinists exist only in a world that had talented violin makers: you perhaps cannot fully know how society could benefit from things you could learn.
Two of my mini-talents are things I used to think were not just difficult but actually things I would be specifically bad at, like, worse than most people. (Which may for complex reasons be a sign I would not be)
I believe it also misapprehends where the boundary between practice and consumption can sit, too, but that's a longer comment.
No matter which side of the equation you sit, try to unlearn this belief you have, and help others unlearn it.