Comment by jasode | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jasode | Hacker News Reader

The article is ~1700 words. It takes the author ~950 words to get past her autobiographical background and finally start the meat of the message:

>, and, glued to our devices, playing video games, or checking theDaily Mail, we waste enormous amounts of time — even while pretending otherwise.

>, they’re busy with text messages and Snapchat, with Tumblr and Vine.

>If my son spends his afternoons watching FIFA videos on YouTube, or my daughter studying nail-painting tutorials, these are no worse ways to spend time than watching Get Smart or Diff’rent Strokes — arguably, they are better. Their world, however, is more monolithic.

Lastly, it closes with:

>It’s all here, inside and in the room — not on the screen — before us.

In essence, it's another "stop and smell the roses" essay. Similar templates for essays would be the "slow living"[1], or "be in the present moment"[2], and "power of now" type of messages.

If you're not already familiar with those themes, you may find something new in the essay. Otherwise, it's just another author's take on the same material.

[1]https://www.google.com/search?q=slow+living

[2]https://www.google.com/search?q=be+present+zen

Ironic how your comment kind of epitomizes the whole gist of the article.

It was well written, and the take away for me was not the closing sentence you quoted. As a father, it echoed a similar sentiment I've been thinking and have read about recently, namely:

> They’d have to learn to lie on the lawn watching ants scale the grass blades; they’d have to linger, digits pruning, in the bathtub; they’d have to stop, to be still, and then to wait, and wait, and wait, allowing time to fatten around them, like a dewdrop on the tip of a leaf. And then, only then, who knows what they might imagine or invent?

If you like that, you might also like Thoreau's 1854 book "Walden"[1]

It is over 100,000 words about ignoring the silly distractions in town and making close observations of nature that help one to "discover oneself".

For example, he writes about how he closely watches ant colonies fighting and compares them to the armies in The Iliad, etc, etc.

But I do understand that ~1700 words in a magazine article is more digestible than 100k words from a 160 year old book if the themes are unfamiliar to the reader.

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walden

My favorite line from that book:

"I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived. I did not wish to live what was not life, living is so dear; nor did I wish to practise resignation, unless it was quite necessary. I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and Spartan-like as to put to rout all that was not life, to cut a broad swath and shave close, to drive life into a corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms, and, if it proved to be mean, why then to get the whole and genuine meanness of it, and publish its meanness to the world; or if it were sublime, to know it by experience, and be able to give a true account of it in my next excursion."

That is an incredibly deep soliloquy. Statements like that scared me as a child, they force you to confront the ultimate worth of existence.

Thanks for that ... I stuck on that sentence too. What you should really do after reading this article is just stop doing anything for a few minutes. Seriously. Nothing. Don't check your phone, don't flip through the mail. Don't sort dishes in the sink. Don't grab a glass of water. Just sit and don't do anything. I dare you :)

My wife can't stand taking a bath with the kids because they always want to be in there for about 20 minutes longer than her sanity allows. I've discovered just sitting there with them, hanging out, watching them play and I love it.

Man, if we can't stop and watch the things move around us ...

The meta-irony is that an article lambasting the "TL;DR culture" needed a TL;DR to be palatable. I always appreciate when someone takes the time to summarize these "wall of text" articles, since I tend to not have 30 whole minutes spend while the author tries to get to the point. I need things to be boiled down (I'm looking at you, New Yorker!) and I personally find more utility in skimming 10 articles than fully investing in a single one.

> I need things to be boiled down (I'm looking at you, New Yorker!)

Then perhaps New Yorker is not the sort of thing you should be reading?

As other comments noted below, the whole point of the article seems to have been lost to you (as they say these days: woosh!)

It's also wonderful that you have taken the time to count the words instead of reading them; the number of words, the length of sentences, the frequency of certain words, the number of results in a Google search: you may feel safer with numbers, but not all measurements mean something.

>It's also wonderful that you have taken the time to count the words instead of reading them; the number of words,

I read the article in a viewer that automatically shows a running word count down the margin.

I have a limited time budget for reading so I always have to know in advance if the article is 1000 words (less than 5 minutes) or 20,000 words (over 1 hour of reading which means I print it out and take it on the train).

I feel like you missed the point of my comment. The author's essay has already been done thousands of times by thousands of authors using different variations of words. (Indeed... see another poster commenting on Russell's "On Idleness"). They're not bad essays. It's just that there are so many of them.

Since many HN readers are well-read, they have already read dozens of these type of essays. My comment is to give them a heads up and save them time. On the other hand, if you found the essay filled a hole for you, that's great.

I disagree with you on the "whole point" of the article. She goes to great pains to talk about observing things like ants and coffee with friends instead of staring at screens. I don't see her emphasizing that one must read redundant articles on the same topic repeatedly. On the contrary, more time spent reading her essay is less time to spend observing ants.

> I have a limited time budget for reading (...) My comment is to give them a heads up and save them time. (...) I disagree with you on the "whole point" of the article (...) more time spent reading her essay is less time to spend observing ants

The point of the article is not that everyone should become an entomologist.

It's that time should be wasted, not saved, that there is value in doing nothing, or, well, reading something several times, or, well, different variations on one theme.

>everyone should become an entomologist.

You really think my reading skills are so deficient that I thought she was lecturing everyone on becoming an entymologist? Really? Or are you not engaging with the meaning of what I actually said?

>that there is value in doing nothing, or, well, reading something several times,

No, you misunderstood her. She wrote:

>It’s all here, inside and in the room — not on the screen — before us.

In other words, how about not spending "screen time" on harpers.org reading her essay (especially if you've already been exposed to it like many HN'rs already have).

Instead, she advises to appreciate doing "nothing", savoring "boredom", and experiencing "empty" time -- such as watching ants, sharing coffee, listening to rain, whatever.

(And no, I don't think she's lecturing us on becoming meteorologists to study precipitation -- so you don't need to go there.)

> You really think my reading skills are so deficient...

I don't know you; I don't know anything about your reading skills. What you've shown so far isn't promising, though, IMHO.

Let's agree to disagree and go do something else. It's midnight in Paris, I'm going to bed.

I love that you posted a TL;DR: on an article whose sole focus is on taking more time. (Full disclosure, I also skimmed the beginning of the article and then jumped here to the comments.)

You're commenting on an article within America's oldest literary journal. A literary journal pontificates, deviates, muses on subjects. Taking time to frame a subject - partly for enjoyment of the process - is par for the course.

I'm afraid we have lost our sense of irony.

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