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Comment by oilkillsbirds | Hacker News Reader

This is pure escapism. Numbing yourself to the burden of being. Likely from a stress tolerance so shallow and under-developed that the slightest inconvenience or expectation feels like a crisis.

The truth is that after the brief initial relief of excusing yourself from being anything at all, you'll end up in a deep depression. It's a naive and immature fantasy.

Remove all electronics from your life, they are a constant nervous system stimulator that has prevented you from truly relaxing into a state of repair. Then introduce responsibilities into your life, start small. We are wired to be needed, wanted, useful, accountable, social. You're just stressed out.

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Not sure at all you actually read the piece. Your responses about having a job or inconvenience or expectation seem entirely unrelated.

The text does not, for instance, encourage not having a job. It also does not encourage being nothing at all. Being nothing special is quite different.

Recommended movie: perfect days https://youtu.be/wqUT9hQd1XM?is=v1x85FdKOK_zfu60

Perfect Days is an amazing film which I recommend everyone reading to check out, I am not sure it's on streaming but available for rent / purchase on whatever platform you use (I bought it on Apple TV). I was amused to recently learn that it was an ad for Tokyo Toilet[0]

0 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Tokyo_Toilet#Film

The link i posted is actually the full movie. yt-dlp?

Thanks for the movie suggestion, looks very interesting, will check it out. Also, the Pixar movie Soul has a similar message.

Another cultural reference to this idea is the song Heaven by Talking Heads. Nothing ever happens.

Annoyed that npc is not defined in the post. Non-playing character.

I feel it necessary to make a slight pedantic correction here, since we're officially defining it. It's Non-Player Character.

No problem I had no idea what an NPC is.

Just a second recommendation for this movie. It is very good. It encapsulates part of my favorite danish psalm which translated is something like “An average happy and productive life on earth”. There is some ambiguity in the message in the movie, and I do not think it recommend his life, but it a very interesting contrast to most peoples life

I often ask myself if i can go to a small town and live an anonymous life. Its my scoring system for personal pride/ego. Does such an anonymous life stop me from inventing things or think about stuff deeply. I don't think so,..

If you want to live anonymously you wouldn't want to be in a small town.

> If you want to live anonymously you wouldn't want to be in a small town.

Having grown up in a small town, I can confirm this. The smaller the town, the more it becomes true that almost everyone in town has either heard of you from a friend or relative, or knows you directly. :)

>Being nothing special is quite different.

Related, I would also recommend the book "The courage to be disliked"

> do nothing after work. why do you have to do something after work? do something because you feel like doing it, not because you feel like you have to.

Escapism. You SHOULD feel like you have to do some stuff. Our bodies are always aiming to relax, because conserving calories is an extremely effective survival method. We are hardwired to do nothing, in order to escape the burden of instead doing something.

> Escapism. You SHOULD feel like you have to do some stuff.

This word keeps coming up, coupled with things unrelated.

The OP isn't saying "do nothing". He's saying "do what you want to do". If he wants to study mathematics, that's neither escapism nor "doing nothing".

The extreme majority of people don’t have some secret massive project they want to do and are weirdly choosing not to. There’s only one way to interpret this.

Nope, they might just want to clock out from work at 5pm and go ride their bike until sunset without giving a single shit about anything but the fresh air. Or go home and walk their kid to the park. Or throw a ball around the yard with the dog.

Except you've got to cut the grass, weed the flowerbeds, wash the car, do the laundy, cook dinner, do the dishes, etc.

There’s a difference between things that literally everyone has to do as part of being human, and things that only “strivers” seem to enjoy- climbing the corporate ladder, “obsessing over customers”, polishing Powerpoint decks, working overtime to win that big account, picking that perfect background song to kick off the Zoom all-hands meeting, posting on LinkedIn about what having a kid taught them about B2B SaaS, etc.

No one here is saying they’re going to stop clipping their nails or feeding themselves. If that’s how you interpreted the article, you’re being uncharitable.

Or not tonight.

If I didn’t enjoy yard care, I wouldn’t have a yard or I’d xeriscape or gravel + trees, or something. Laundry’s kind of a drag, mostly the folding part. Most of the time I enjoy cooking and tidying up afterwards; when I’m not in the mood I’ll do takeout or throw something from the freezer in.

I’m not sure what you’re saying overall? Is it that those things you’ve listed are what stops people from having enjoyable lives where they do what they want?

They are just examples. Adults with responsibilities, especially with familes, have really moved beyond living "without giving a single shit about anything." The only adults I know who live like that are homeless. I guess they are the ultimate real-life NPCs

> Adults with responsibilities, especially with families

I’ll rephrase a little bit because “not give a shit” is maybe too flippant and what you’re saying is important context: if you have a family and responsibilities, framing it in terms of the article, that is one version of the NPC life and you’re going to be way better at it if you actually like it. If you feel like your constant responsibilities to your family are a burden and are getting in the way of doing what you want to be doing, that’s going to show up everywhere.

I was definitely raised with a “happy wife, happy life” mentality and a few years ago I smashed that whole notion to pieces for myself, not because it’s wrong but because the implementation I was taught was wrong. I understood it as “she’s going to want you to do a bunch of stuff that you don’t want to do, and the key to a happy life is to do it anyway.” As it turns out, in my experience, genuinely enthusiastic yesses and clear “no, not interested” is a way better approach. She trusts your yes way more if she trusts your ability to say no. Turns out that knowing she’s with someone who knows what he wants and doesn’t want, and has enough of a spine to say and act accordingly, is a key component to both “happy wife” and “happy life”.

If you’ve got family responsibilities and they feel like a heavy burden, it’s probably worth spending some time really reflecting on that and figuring out what needs to change.

None of this is a burdain if you don't let it

- cut the grass -> robot

- weed the flowerbeds -> once every week, or no flowerbeds if you feel it's not necessary

- wash the car -> idk I wash mine every 6 months or something. Go to the thingy, put coin, wait

- cook dinner -> or not. You could choose not to have dinner at all, or one of those fine premade gazpachos with a bit of bred and an egg

- do the dishes -> mostly putting things in a dishwasher and removing them every few days

The thing is, having a mind mostly empty of this kind of thing is its own reward. Maybe your car is less shiny, but your inner experience more so.

It's telling that you include totally unnecessary things like yard and car stuff.

I mean, sure, I wash the car every so many months because I take a road trip and can't get stuff off my windshield.

Washing cars is one of those absolutely pointless things people do that the article is alluding to. It is not supposed to be clean.

Those things were really just meant to be examples of the sorts of routine, daily things that have to get done if you have any responsibilities above and beyond your own immediate gratification. You might generically call them "chores." Just the routine, boring, regular responsibilites that are part of being an adult who is taking care of his life and family.

The guy who takes a bike ride after work until sunset has either done some planning and dealt with the chores to free up that time, or he's a selfish inconsiderate who's letting the other people in his life shoulder the externalities of his self-indulgence. Sure most chores can wait a bit, so some amount of spontaneity is OK, but it can't be a regular way of living.

Again, your comment only highlights the original post.

Cleaning the (exterior) of the car is something so many people do primarily because of judgmental folks like yourself. They don't care about a lot of dust on their cars, but they feel they have to because of what others think. The point of the post is to stop caring what such folks think. They definitely are not your friends.

His sentiment is a common one amongst much older folks. "Don't care too much what others think" is a fairly common advice they give. You'll put in a lot of effort and get very little in return.

Same goes for yard stuff. One of the things I looked at when I bought my house was how the neighborhood's yards were. Some were very "well kept". Others were clearly not. I bought the house because of the latter - it told me the neighborhood doesn't care that much, which is a good thing. Maintaining yards is one of the more wasteful acts in life (unless it happens to be your hobby).

https://blog.nwf.org/2024/04/why-we-shouldnt-have-lawns/

(My yard is actually well maintained, because I pay a guy to do it - if I can't afford him, though, it's going downhill).

> or he's a selfish inconsiderate who's letting the other people in his life shoulder the externalities of his self-indulgence.

Hey, if my dusty car bothers you - by all means come over and clean it.

Again, they were examples. Stuff has to get done. It doesn't specifically have to be washing the car or cutting the grass. Maybe it's helping kids with homework, or cleaning the toilets, or shopping for groceries, or taking your wife out to a nice dinner, or watching the kids while she goes to a movie with her friends.

I don't care about your dusty car. By all means don't wash it for me. But if your wife cares, and she's driving a dirty car because you go bike riding after work every day, then you might want to reconsider. Again, that's just an example.

I'm reminded of a quote, something along the lines of "if we all did the little things we know we are supposed to do, most of our big problems would take care of themselves"

As several people have pointed out, the original submission is not saying what you think it is. It is implicit that there are some things he has to do. He says:

> have a boring job. do nothing after work. why do you have to do something after work? do something because you feel like doing it, not because you feel like you have to.

Are you suggesting he has a boring job because he wants to have a boring job?

> I'm reminded of a quote, something along the lines of "if we all did the little things we know we are supposed to do, most of our big problems would take care of themselves"

The reason old people give the advice I mentioned is because they tried this approach and it backfired.

One of the major markers of my maturity was switching away from: "Well, if everyone does X, things would be better" to "What is the Y that will improve things the most, given that we know not everyone is going to do it?"

Having a system that only works well when (almost) everyone plays nice usually fails. Search instead for robustness: What system works well when a decent percentage don't adhere to it?

There's a reason communism lost.

Most of these obligations are self-imposed

Most people's "secret massive project they want to work on" is their family

Yeah, that's not living an NPC life. Nobody is talking about that when they call someone an NPC.

>There’s only one way to interpret this.

obviously not.

If everyone would be ready to jump in and help you with some revolutionary project you should really bother to figure out what that project is going to be.

They are not ready to help because normal life is designed to be absurdly complicated, time consuming, constraining and draining.

The irony is that the solution is for people to take up massive projects that address the many angles of needless complexity [again]

> There’s only one way to interpret this.

In any context, this is about as trivially false as any non-tautological statement can be.

> You SHOULD feel like you have to do some stuff.

Gregor: It would be nice to do something.

Sam: We are doing something. We're sitting here, waiting.

"Ronin", 1998

Sitting sometimes is good, sitting always is not.

Not the OP, nor the quote from Ronin state that one should always sit

I do not mean literally sitting. The article encourages complacency (metaphorically sitting around all day) which I disagree with.

"All day" and "always" are your words, not mine, and not those of the article's author.

I'm not quoting the author's words but their mentality, which is clear to see in their post.

You can't quote a mentality, and you're not a mind-reader. You're putting words in the author's mouth, and then arguing against them. Saying it's "clear to see" is just asking others to find your evidence for you.

It's just someone drawing conclusions based on what the author chose to write, which is common and fine.

Drawing conclusions is fine, if they're traceable to something on the page. This one started with "always" and "all day," which aren't in the post, and when that was pointed out it moved to the author's mentality. I can assign anyone any mentality I want, and it's impossible to prove me wrong.

No, they are my conclusions of what they said, which I have assumed is clear to see for others too. You are the one taking this simple interaction way too literally.

Reading someone's words as written isn't being "too literal". With a blog post, as with this thread, it's actually the only thing there is to go on.

You're not understanding metaphor and I'm not sure at this point in the comment thread I could explain it to you either.

Or maybe people like to stare at the clouds while herding sheep. This is just bro-science half-baked evolutionary psychology bullshit.

Personally I enjoy listening to the birds with a book in my hands.

Your body is, maybe, but we're not all the same. Making my body sit still and do nothing requires sustained, focused attention; action is the comfort state, and idleness the burden.

Meanwhile, my idleness is so ingrained that sometimes I can't even make myself do the things I WANT to do, like load up a game that I've been wanting to play.

And I'm just tired...all the time. I do nothing and still I'm exhausted.

Do you know why? It might be worth figuring out. For me is is mild ME/CFS but for you maybe not (a good tell for CFS is if doing any exercise at all e.g. 1km walk makes you feel rough later. Not delayed muscle soreness or a stitch but more like a flu say).

So many other things are possible like iron, thyroid, sleep apnea, ADHD, depression or burnout, long COVID, tropical illness. Maybe more.

Finally it is totally morally OK not to be a 100% productive worker bee. A "cure" is not necessary but might be worth rabbit holing if you desire and have the energy.

FWIW, I've been there too. One thing to realize is that action precedes motivation. The idea is to train yourself to do things you _don't_ want to do.

You have authority over your body. You can tell it to do things it doesn't want to.

You can walk into your bathroom and take a cold shower right now, on purpose. Your body doesn't want to, but it will yield if your mind tells it to.

In fact, doing that will switch up your state into a different one, which is half of the work needed to feel better.

Energy begets energy. Sloth begets sloth. It's a simple calorie conservation thing. Why power up the body to 80% when it'll only need 10%?

This isn't the answer for everyone, but for 90% of people, it moves the needle in the right direction.

That is pretty typical of depression, especially if you can't make yourself do activities you normally would enjoy or you stop feeling as much enjoyment from them

Unfortunately I have no advice for it but I wish you good luck. We're all struggling lately

Call that conserving energy. Contrary to commonly-held belief, calories are a very ambiguous concept.

tell that to someone with an eating disorder.

> Not sure at all you actually read the piece.

On my HN!? Surprised pikachu

Don't be patronising. I am pretty sure he has read the article because I agree with him, and I have read the article as well.

Surprised pikachu :OOOO

You agree with him? Even the boomer coded armchair psychology? My comment isn’t even in the same realm of patronizing as that.

How is this coded to baby boomer? Honest question; I want to understand the post-war generational perspective.

Guessing, but i suppose he might be referring to the implied-as-given duty ethics tone of the parent post, that easily comes across as an obligation to be blindly guided externally by norms.

I don't interpret it to that extreme. I think it's more about shutting out noise and acting along a thread that keeps you pleased without interference from e.g. brainrot media or an over-demanding job.

Arguably a reason most everyone found the early internet/web so awesome: it wasn't as commoditized into feeds and platforms. You were an adventurer on an undiscovered planet, a secret life beside the boring real one and just did your thing. It's how most of us ended up here, anyhow.

I feel like we aren't reading the same thing.

You'd be a great CEO, preaching people to tie their worth to their output in life.

> you'll end up in a deep depression

That’s a stretch and in realm of pure speculation.

A blacksmith is useful for society and for himself. It’s a profession and it’s not anything. OP’s point is that profession compared to chasing dragons. I’m tired of chasing dragons and very happy focusing on my own life.

Who is this “we” you speak of? I see this word thrown around a lot here. Never use “we” in a sentence unless you’re referring to another individual directly. It’s beyond arrogant to assume you have the authority to speak for all others.

Parent commenter means “we” as in humans. Their comment is not meant to speak for others’ individual preferences.

Humans are a bunch of individuals though with an incredible amount of diversity. If their claim is biological, it would be helpful to pin down more precisely what they mean, because right now it's pretty vague. I'm dubious that there's a rigorous claim here though because pretty much every time I've seen a claim like this before it's essentially just protection of one's personal beliefs about psychology without more of a basis than assumption that their personal experience is universal, which is what the comment you're responding to is alluding to.

Great. I couldn’t care less. Was just clarifying the comment in case the commenter wasn’t a native English speaker. Reply to them not me.

They didn't explicitly say they were trying to speak for all of humanity. I'm responding to the specific interpretation of it directly because as the comment you were responding to pointed out, it was ambiguous.

We are wired to be

> needed

If I died today, I wouldn't even get a slack memo "we miss anal_reactor". Modern economy proved that humans are totally fungible.

> wanted

I have a dream that someone would take me on a date. But I understand it's just a silly fantasy.

> useful

I spent last two years at work doing projects that went nowhere because my manager is deaf to feedback.

> accountable

What is that even supposed to mean? If I don't pay taxes I'll go to jail.

> social

I tried inviting a neighbor for a beer. Didn't work.

I'd have a beer with you

> Likely from a stress tolerance so shallow and under-developed that the slightest inconvenience or expectation feels like a crisis

Maybe, but that could also be because of autism, trauma or some other disability

And maybe the author just wants to feel heard, get others to comment on their experiences, be vulnerable in public (which btw can be pretty stressful too), and connect with their community

> We are wired to be needed, wanted, useful, accountable, social.

When AI eventually takes nearly ALL jobs, that will be a quite difficult thing.

Very tangentially related but I've seen the word escapism used a couple of times in this thread...

I can't tell what's happening here...

Did we all extract a different conclusion/meaning from the piece?

Did a bunch of people discover the same new word recently, and are learning to use it?

Did people not read the full post perhaps, and jumped to conclusions?

I don't think the author is advocating or engaging in escapism here... Did I misunderstand the post?

These are the cultural projections previous western generations were built upon. My reading is that that is what’s happening, that is why they are so predominant.

What does that even means in this context? Is "western" now synonym for "people exactly like me"?

It appears obvious to me that there is a hegemonic world order that is more culturally western oriented that has driven globalisation. Your mileage appears to vary.

> cultural projections previous western generations were built upon

By that you mean American? Or German? Or French? Or Nordic? They were very different a generation ago.

Or like the fascist subculture? The pro-Russian one? The liberal one?

none of them specifically, but something they share on a different level.

life is measured by individual achievement, self-actualization through work, being ordinary is failure as you're supposed to present and perform. none of those cultures differ much on that, though maybe on how much you're allowed to express preferences vs. that.

why does this thread read as escapism to so many? because it's a cultural norm people are not aware of, and it gets violated.

> life is measured by individual achievement, self-actualization through work, being ordinary is failure as you're supposed to present and perform.

That is very American, even specifically American right wing masculinity point of view. Not generalized western one.

> none of those cultures differ much on that, though maybe on how much you're allowed to express preferences vs. that.

Oh yeah, they do differ on that exact point by a lot.

As you’re not providing any quantifiable argument either, it seems to me this discussion doesn’t need to continue.

Feels more like they're discovering Taoism to me

That can happen with a high stress tolerance too, it just needs to be pushed past the breaking point. Some of us have gone through harrowing experiences and the NPC lifestyle is one coping mechanism among many others.

a low stress tolerance and a highly sensitized stress reaction can often look the same. If someone is hurt repeatedly in the same way, they will react when a stimuli that reminds them of it comes near. Similarly, people who are constantly stressed out often develop things like "learned helplessness", where they are incapable of solving their problems because they've failed, been rejected, or told no so many times that they stop trying.

i dont think it's that deep.

it's the age old advice of "dont give a fuck" dressed up in some modern terminology ("npc")

It even says “maybe this is just a retelling of stoicism.”

"Don't give a fuck" - Ignore your feelings. Ignore your thoughts. Ignore others. Exist in some detached unalive state divorced from the human condition. Because it's easier. Oh and the monks did it. It's also easier to die, that's the end of that path of thought.

It really isn't that though. If you're disparaging normal ass people with jobs and families and lives as "NPCs" you probably should try ignoring your thoughts and feelings a bit because they're probably part of a some low level grinding psychosis.

that is not really what is meant by that advice

I don't know if I fully agree with this analysis, but I really appreciate the argument for emphasizing these values.

(Singer) Paul Simon said he no longer plays "I Am a Rock" at shows.

Not all of us live for The Hustle...

wtf are you talking about. Being a blacksmith isn't pure escapism.

Yeah if you are a "non playing character" why play at all?

such a reddit reply

Bro, this ain’t LinkedIn you don’t have to signal your virtue as a worker so hard

> The truth is that after the brief initial relief of excusing yourself from being anything at all, you'll end up in a deep depression.

So status quo lol?

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