Ask HN: How can we care more about fewer things? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: How can we care more about fewer things?

4 pointsrobalni5 comments

There is a lot of stuff available on the internet. Just look at HN; link after link, every day more links. Other social medias are probably even worse.

I feel like this has a disabling effect. I mean, when there is always more stuff on the internet to find, why should I focus on the things I already have? Things feel less important when there are so many of them. It feels like everyone just keeps looking for more all the time. But do we really need more? I don't think so.

How can we pick some half-bad thing and just stick to it and make it better, as if there were no other things in the world?

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"The things you own end up owning you" is a quote on my whiteboard. It reflects the reality of tradeoff between possessions and investment in maintaining them.

If you have lots of interests that you decide to get into, you buy lots of things. But them you need to use the things, find the things, maintain the things. For me this extends to books, I buy used books like they're getting banned. That's the old school version of reading blog posts.

Reading something just because doesn't hit the same as reading something because I'm curious about the subject and started thinking about it. Once you have a topic of interest to dig into it becomes obvious what to focus on; it becomes obvious what is the noise.

If you want to be distracted, find a distraction that builds on itself. I have a guitar sitting next to my desk. Get bored, work on a lick.

An older distraction I did was to to https://en.cppreference.com/cpp/algorithm, pick an algorithm and try to write it myself without looking at the impl. It takes 5mins, but I might spend the day going back to it. Opens the door to building on stuff. The counter opposite of this are "shorts", which are not sticky.

I wasn't thinking about distractions or being able to concentrate when I asked this. I meant something that exists over longer time, like years. Like, the knowledge that there are so many other things makes it harder to appreciate and care about each of them. There seems to be a similar effect when living in a place where there is a high density of people. They start looking like background noise. But if there are not many people around, you might talk to almost everyone you see.

Trying to answer my own question, one thing that I think has helped me to more appreciate some things, is to have rules and try to enforce them. It could be to use an unusual operating system, or disconnect my computer from the internet, or deciding that there are some types of things or features that may not be used. That has the effect that most things I find online don't pass the rules or don't work for me and therefore I have to care more about the things that do.

So I was wondering how we can achieve this at a bigger scale, unless everyone else want to limit themselves as I do. It's quite fun actually but I don't think people care enough to do this.

I created a couple of agentic workflows to scan tech news, filter and create short digests. 5 top news is enough per day. 5 minutes reading. The rest of the time I can concentrate on things which matter for me the most. The next step is to automate all the boring stuff like accounting, taxes, funds management etc. Now I have time for family, sport and new agentic software development. The last one is just for fun, because nobody uses it but me :)

I've recently adopted the mindset that I will wait until things actually impact me before I will give them my finite attention.

This seems to get easier as I get older. Death is the only certainty in life and reflecting on that makes it easier to let go of things that are well beyond my control.

I posted this a while back: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48990399

Maybe it helps you as well.

Additionally I highly recommend the book "Indistractable" by Nir Eyal. Best book on living a distraction free life.

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