BigHatLogan

This was a good read. It resonated with me because I've been noticing this happening with my mother and father as they get older. I hate to say it like this, but I used to think that my mother was sort of a "simple person" (I can't think of a better word) because she used to tell my brother and I to try to be happy with what we have, to try to enjoy the small things in life, and to try to be appreciative of the things around us. My father, on the other hand, had high ambitions and that mentality always resonated with me more. I used to think that my mother was complacent.

Now that my parents have gotten older, I've noticed that my father is becoming more and more bitter and resentful over how his life turned out, while my mother is becoming more and more at peace with how things have turned out. My father never quite hit his high ambitions, and I can tell that it eats away at him constantly throughout the day. My mother, on the other hand, seems very content with the life she is living.

The study in contrasts is interesting to me, and I think there is something to be learned from both schools of thought. As with most things in life, the optimal path seems to be the middle way. My mother has a very good job and part of that is due to my father encouraging her and pushing her to step outside of her comfort zone and go back to school in her late age. Similarly, my father seems to be (very slowly) mellowing out a little in his late age due to my mother helping him come to terms with how things turned out. Still, there is a lot of bitterness and envy and resentment within him, and it's hard to watch. My mother seems far more well-adjusted now, in comparison.

At the end of the day I think that is what matters most--your relationship to your life. When you strip away all the external things, everything eventually comes down to your thoughts and your mindset and how you think about things. That was the vibe I got from reading this essay, that ultimately things come down to how we reframe things, and that might be the most important "skill" / practice to cultivate.

I didn't even notice that, but I think you're right--the two points don't play well with each other.

I think what I meant to say is that what I tend to do is debate between doing multiple things, but then I end up doing none of them. I try to think things through--which thing would be best? which would help me the most?--but ultimately I sit there idly watching things go right past me. My goal in being more conscientious and deliberate is to cut through the decision paralysis and pick a decision and try to see it through to the end. What you mentioned resonates with me--getting stuck in thinking circles. I have been doing that for the past few years and maybe even the past decade if I'm being honest with myself. It hasn't been a pleasant place to be in, to say the least.

Be more conscientious about planning my days--and therefore my weeks, months, and years. I have been out of school for five years now and I noticed recently that time feels like it slipped through my fingers like water. I hardly know where it went. Of course I know logically where it went--I was living them, after all--but in some respect it feels like somebody else was living them because I lived without aim or purpose or direction, simply taking things day by day.

I deal with a lot of uncertainty and over-intellectualizing things and over-analyzing things, and I've realized that none of that has actually helped me move in my life, whether forwards or backwards. I've sort of stood in place, but you never really stand in place because things move whether you want them to or not, so in some way I've stagnated.

I want 2019 to be the year that I put an end to living like this, and instead give myself some direction to go in, whether I can see the end or not. I've been paralyzed by my inability to make decisions, and I want to put an end to that by forcing myself to make some decisions--things related to my career, side projects, health, etc.

Anyway, I'll quit rambling. I just don't want to keep living on autopilot as I am right now.

I love the example of fixing cars and building stuff. I never thought about it like that, but now that you mention it, I do think a lot of modern games are replacing the 20th century hobby of coming home and working on your car on weekends.

What you said is also what I'm suggesting: that gaming satisfies that drive in its own way. It's a simulation that can provide most of those same feelings.

You could, but then how do you explain the activity? For example, I agree it would be a lazy decision if the culprit passively consumed some sort of content. What if they are active? What if they actively collaborate with friends and strangers alike, set their own goals, and then work to meet them? Isn't that what people do in reality?

In Western society, a traditionally good life has a few components to it: friends, family, community, a sense of place, achievement. What if a video game provides this? Why would 100 hours spent towards building a building in Minecraft or learning new strategies in Starcraft be any different from spending 100 hours learning to chop wood and create a garden in your backyard? (By the way, there are popular garden simulator games too, like Stardew Valley).

Something in me tells me the two are different, but I'm grasping as to why, without placing my own sense of morality on the thing.

I think I saw the same post a few years ago. I was fascinated by it. The feat was hardly lazy by any stretch of the word.

What makes it specifically better and why was that so easy to discover? Additionally, if it is obvious, as you say, then how do you reconcile that with the number of people who are checking out of society to disappear into video games, particularly in Japan?

I guess what I'm curious of is this: What do games offer these people that reality doesn't? I'm not talking about people who play casually here and there, but rather people who spend well over twenty hours per week playing games, sometimes longer.

This is very interesting to me. What made you adopt this habit? It does seem counterintuitive to everything I have read and heard throughout my entire life. What sort of improvements, if any, have you noticed from adopting this style of eating versus the standard 3-4 meals per day?

A tactical question: Do you load up all of your daily calories in that one meal e.g. if your usual intake is 2500 per day, do you have all of that at once or do you eat less?

I may be preaching to the choir here (because this is largely a tech audience) but I don't buy into the stereotype that gamers play videogames (video games?) because of laziness or sloth or some other unfairly negative characteristic misattributed to them.

I saw a post on Reddit where a group of gamers had recreated King's Landing, the main city from Game of Thrones, in Minecraft. The entire project looked like it took years to complete. It was something of an architectural marvel and a sight to behold.

The reason I bring that up specifically was because it was not the work of a lazy and apathetic group of people. I would imagine the entire project took more hours than I spent studying for much of my undergraduate degree. Not to mention the collaboration involved. The entire project was a collective team effort towards a goal that the group deemed meaningful. I have seen multiple projects of this scale on Minecraft. If the people involved were lazy and slothful, where would they muster up the energy to work on such an endeavor? A project like this involves a certain level of planning and discipline to see to completion.

I have felt the same way about competitive games like Starcraft in that I'm amazed at how much effort people put forth to obtain proficiency and competency. There are thousands of hours of YouTube videos online dissecting every aspect of that game, not unlike the way a football quarterback might analyze game film. Again, there is nothing particularly lazy about this. I see it no differently than I would see a chess player studying old chess matches and strategies to improve their skill.

My preliminary thoughts are that video games offer a fair simulation of perfect competition in a world that is otherwise devoid of fairness. Reality is messy. Much of it, maybe most of it, depends on where you started out economically, who your parents were, and what kind of people were around you while you grew up. It's easy to fall into patterns of thought that resemble a "Why Me?" view of the world. I suspect a lot of gamers fall under this umbrella. I'm not making a moral judgement here. Instead, the way I see it is: If the real world has been disappointing to you for whatever reason, why wouldn't you seek out a more "perfect" world in a simulation? Especially when the simulation offers you what you crave in the real world: status, competency, hierarchy, friendship, community, etc. All of those can be found in video games. To me, many of them resemble a sort of perfect and fair world where one lives and dies by their own merits. I see the appeal of disappearing into one of these.

I'd love to hear everyone's thoughts on this. I was thinking about this recently and I am still hashing out my thoughts.

Haha your comment made me laugh. Or rather: It evoked a sense of humor out of me! Kidding.

I haven't taken an Uber in quite some time, but I was in a taxi earlier this year. There was a small television, not unlike the one at the gas station, playing advertisements. It took every ounce of strength and fiber in my body not to jump out of the window. I know the feeling.

Not being allowed to pump your own gas has always fascinated me. I believe Vermont also has the same law in place. Or maybe it was New Hampshire?

Does the overall price increase as a result of not being allowed to pump your own gas? From the gas station standpoint, they would need to offset the wages given to the station attendant. Is this difference passed down to the customer?

Interesting! This is exactly what I was talking about. I do wish the Mute button was better labeled. The gas station I'm talking about has completely unlabelled buttons. No doubt this was a conscious design decision.

I'm conflicted about this whole thing because, on the one hand, it is within the right of the private organization to do this. They see empty space and decide that they can cut a deal with the local News station and make some extra revenue. I completely understand that and I can sympathize with it. On the other hand, at what point do things become "Too Much?" I'm foreseeing a Bladerunner world where advertisements dominate the landscape and all areas of our life.

The death knell will be when I go to a State Park or a National Park and see an advertisement for refinancing my home next to a century-old tree. I haven't been to a park in a few years so perhaps this has already happened...

The article is interesting but I wish it went deeper into one of the theses: that people aren't craving silence as much as they are craving a lack of distraction. Noise has always existed in varying levels, but what I think may be different about the 21st century is how distracted our environments have become, which can feel like noise.

Here's something strange that happened to me last week. I went to my local gas station to fill up the tank on my car. As I was standing idly and staring off into the distance, I heard a voice talking to me. I spun around but nobody was around me. Afterwards I noticed that the voice was coming from a small, iPhone 8-sized screen embedded on the gas pump. It was showing advertisements as well as looping the "Hot News" of the day. Admittedly, I became irrationally angry about this. It felt like an invasion of my mental space. Here I was pumping gas, already paying money to the business, why are they continuing to invade my mental space, which is the last bastion of "freedom" an individual can have? I noticed the whole event put me in a heightened state of tension and anxiety. I wanted to leave as fast as I could. I wasn't bothered by the other cars driving on the road, I wasn't bothered by the local homeless population trading and bartering a few dozen feet from me, I wasn't bothered by any of this background noise. What bothered me, and what felt "noisy" to me, was this invasion of my mindshare.

It's an interesting question, one that has been bothering me as I get "older" (I'm a few years short of turning 30).

The short answer is I'm not sure. There was a set of paths ahead of me in life and I chose one, more or less arbitrarily. I'm not sure how cognizant of it I was. I think most people operate in this manner.

The long answer is that I'm not sure nor am I sure where to start. This is one of the areas where I think religion proves incredibly useful in that it gives followers a set framework and rules for existing in the world. Finding meaning in your own life is a messy and complicated task. I see the appeal of giving that power away to some sort of authority. In return you don't have to think about these challenging questions.

Some variant of this seems to happen to organizations after they reach a certain size of people. I used to work at a startup that raised a massive round of funding and began a hiring spree. I joined one of the satellite offices shortly afterwards, excited and eager to get to work. What I found was that the vast majority of our 50-person office was more or less spinning the hamster wheel, so to speak. The work that needed to be done was parsed and diluted across so many people that there was hardly any work to fill a full 8-hour workday. I recall missing a day of work once and forgetting to notify my boss (I had a midterm and was likely in some sort of panic mode). The next day as I walked in he greeted me by saying, "Hey! Nice job yesterday." He wasn't being sarcastic either. The amount of work to do was so minimal that my boss forgot (or didn't even notice) that I wasn't at the office.

I've read some articles recently stating that Netflix and Facebook experience increases in traffic during traditional work hours. It's an interesting data point. I think most jobs don't need to exist. They exist for a variety of reasons: signaling (the company must signal growth), incompetence, inefficiency, etc.

I may be overanalyzing this entire "phenomenon", but it serves to remind me that our own understanding of ourselves is incredibly limited. There seem to be a number of processes happening under the surface that are completely unbeknownst to us. It made me wonder what else I have missed or misinterpreted in other aspects of my life. How often have I been utterly convinced of something? How often am I so sure that what I'm feeling or thinking is the "correct" way to feel or think about a problem? It amazes me that something as simple as a good night's sleep (the phrase, "Sleep on it", comes to mind) can completely change my perception of an event in the course of a few hours. Whereas in the prior evening it felt as if my world was caving in on me, in the morning things became more manageable. The event itself did not change, only my perception. I liken the human mind to an iceberg. We're cognizant of such a small part of it while the rest remains under the surface and out of our sight.

Don't have a perfect answer for you here, but I would recommend you check out a book called "Deep Work" by Cal Newport. The book is primarily concerned with focus and how to get more out of it. It's backed by both anecdotes and research. I think you would find it interesting given your question.

With that said, I'm not sure it's "possible" to do cognitively demanding tasks for 6 hours in a row with a 5 minute break after the 4th hour. At work I notice that my coworkers and I have a difficult time focusing intensely after 2 or 3 hours. There comes a point when all you get are diminishing returns. At that point I find it useful to switch tasks completely for an hour or so, to something less cognitively demanding, like administrative things I have to do as an employee.