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Comment by marginalia_nu | Hacker News Reader

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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.

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Overall, I agree, especially the unplugging part. It's just optimizing for time doesn't really apply in my case. I can carve some time in the evening, but if I spent energy at work, I can hardly learn much.

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.

Yeah I think reaching for the phone can very easily be a soothing mechanism. Like I've noticed sometimes when something a bit socially uncomfortable has happened, like half the people in the room immediately grab their phones. If you pay attention to when people grab their phones, you start to see it a lot.

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.

I understand exactly what you are talking about because I had both realizations myself: thinking that I have no time because of work and chores, and realizing that the phone is addictive because it gives an exit for my anxiety. I'm still trying to solve both problems, though.

So probably the thing you need to start practicing and learning is how to deal with anxiety. Conveniently those sessions can fit right into the time slots you're currently spending procrastinating because of selfsame anxiety. See how long you can sit with it and reassure yourself, before reaching for the phone. Once that's been tamed a bit, I think the ability to enjoy doing something poorly will start to appear naturally as a by-product. Or, you can force the issue a bit by adopting a "punk" ethos: "I suck at this, but fuck you, I'm doing it anyway." And there's your example of doing things in a slacky YOLO way too: listen to early punk rock. They did a pretty good job of channeling their anxiety outward into creativity and energy. And there's a "punk" version of almost anything you can think of. Keep it simple, be a beginner, maybe even mock the experts - some of them need it. Good luck.

Agree. In my experience, the only way to overcome anxiety is to push yourself to do the thing anyway.

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.

recently read a post on a moms' forum about her having a hard time getting her kid to practice violin and the skill plateauing.

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 ?

I think what the parent post was saying is that there is a finite amount of useful mental function time in any one day, and once you’ve exhausted this any attempted learning will be pretty inefficient. Also some jobs will have a faster burn rate. Doing a workout is separate as it doesn’t draw on the mental energy pool.

is true that if you've done some amount of mental effort in the day, learning becomes "pretty inefficient"? I could see that being true if you're exhausted, but then doing a workout would also be a problem.

I would say that learning draws from the pool of "mental energy", but working out draws from the pool of "physical energy". Just because your brain is tired, it doesn't mean that your biceps are.

Yeah exactly. After a hard day when my brain is frazzled, a workout will actually make me feel better.

Probably good to align mental and physical tiredness. Being physically tired makes rest feel very good.

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.

I'm almost certain people are different on this point, but I just want to put this out there in case it applies.

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.

Yeah this is largely my experience as well, and few things will raise your quality of life if you do have a mentally taxing life as having one or more hobbies that are physical and ideally requires you to get out of your head (gym kinda does that and if nothing else is a good sort of stress degauss, but dance is arguably even more fantastic as it literally will not work if you're in your head; not that one excludes the other).

From my experience, workout draws exactly from the same pool as mental effort, so after a tough day at work/school, there is little left for a workout and vice versa. Instead of brain spending its energy on thinking, it spends it on muscle/movement coordination.

I find it easier to work out when being mentally exhausted than doing something mentally challenging when physically exhausted. My main sport is climbing and it is perfect for a Friday evening when I am exhausted from my research and teaching job.

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 find it slightly easier to do mental work after a hard workout, especially when it's cardio, but not by much.

Yeah, I have a similar experience when I put the phone down for prolonged periods. Though I need to be mindful to not do the same stuff on the computer i.e. open Hacker News or other attention grabbing websites. For that stuff I find it useful to use any feature I can either in the browser or the desktop environment to separate work from leisure.

Idk if this is universal but as soon as I’m on vacation I start learning new things, reading, and getting creative.

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.

Just want to "me too" this. I have two weeks a year where I unplug completely from my daily work and it often results in a new project or skill that I wouldn't have thought of otherwise

When chatgpt dropped I found time to start making stuff with it. All the brainpower that typically went towards checking my favorite creators or reading HN links went into making my first LLM powered game.

2 months later I was finished and the sleep deprivation hit me like a brick.

working out in my 40s just makes me tired. used to energize me when i was younger.

I have a feeling you are a young person :)

I'm funnily enough 40. You can definitely overdo exercise, but going from zero to some is generally very good for energy in my experience. It generally lets you turn that sort of tiredness you can't rest yourself out of into the sort of tiredness you can.

If you haven't tried a creatine supplement, I'd suggest trying it. 5g/day makes a huge difference for me in workout recovery.

yea it just gave me tummy ache and poor sleep. i tried to get used to it but no longer how long i tried tummy ache never went away.

Just wait till you're in your late 70s...

I think it's a useful distinction between learning about something and learning to do something. They have very different paths and methods of satisfaction.

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