Many people are easily distracted and prone to procrastination. They can't easily switch from one task to the next, and they struggle to stay focused. I'm like that: it's why I'm commenting on Hacker News instead of writing the article I've been paid to. It's enormously frustrating to have goals and obligations you fail to achieve because your brain refuses to cooperate. A rigid framework that forces people like that to marshal their time and attention more effectively can be a big help.
It's nice that the OP has a life where they are only answerable to themselves and where they can carve out time as they see fit and the only challenge is their own self-control. Noticeably absent from the article is the mention of any spouse or kids.
So what we're talking about with the OP is a single, self-employed, well-to-do knowledge worker who has found a way to exercise self-control. That's fine, more power to them, and it's great that this advice may apply to one segment of the long tail demographics of the internet, but the range of people for whom the OP advice "doesn't apply" is huge and includes far more than just people who struggle with procrastination and distraction.
It either works for you or it doesn’t. If it does - great. If it doesn’t - I hope you find something that does.
The only way we’ll know is if we share our experiences. I don’t see any value in critique here.
He has the first/top comment on the article. Seems to me he's binging HN, hitting that refresh button. Check his IP, he probably visits several times daily.
Others have commented on how it is pompous (I agree) but I'd like to talk about the "limiting and sad life" bit.
I used to browse the net constantly in any room of spare time, I'd do it while waiting for anything, while relaxing at home, commuting, in my lunch break, you name it, while doing other mindless, yet active tasks such as cleaning or walking I'd listen to music.
Some two months ago I just decided to stop. I realized that all those things weren't really adding much to my life at all, I might try to stay up to date about this or that event, and I definitely still listen to music, but I do so with intent. I intentionally do certain things with a certain objective in mind instead of allowing myself to waste time out of habit.
In doing so, I'm more focused when it comes to achieving those objectives, I don't scroll through news because that's what was at the top of Reddit. I check news sources because I want to learn about the state of something. I don't grab a random album and press play, I think about what I want to listen. I also feel I'm way more aware of what my life is because my mind has way more spare time. I get bored sometimes, yes, and being bored brings very interesting thoughts that I've really come to appreciate.
I feel that a constant usage of internet is actually limiting and creates a sad life while the opposite is liberating and brings a feeling of fulfillment.
"What if we told you that there is a game: (...)" "Let’s call this the ultimate game: your real life."
Thanks for this golden nugget of knowledge, buddy.
I have experienced downvoting like that before, but usually it is about properly reading what the comment actually says and some do not do that. Some go ahead and start interpreting things into it. However, do you really think you wrapping the comment with that pre-addressing is going to help it? I doubt it.
In my own life, I have one (niche hobby) site I probably spend too much time on and watch a lot of YouTube when I’m bored (almost exclusively on the TV so displacing sports/other TV). I’ve noticed that if I let mindless consumption drift into too many areas, it takes over like weeds, but just a little bit of consciousness helps me keep/regain the balance I want in my life.
I see the structure as the author keeping the balance they want and sharing some details about it.
I could write a similar article about "How to use a social life in a healthy way", which for me would be to minimize it.
My life might be "limiting", but that's when I'm having the best time: I work and work out (a lot) and adventure on weekends and that's about it.. Mostly with my son, sometimes with my partner, frequently alone, and almost never with other people. When I do it with other people, I never have the deep dive experience that I want in those endeavors. They detract from it, for me.
For other people, it's the exact opposite. My partner doesn't like to do any of those things alone, and often seeks out others for them.
Different strokes for different folks, but my buttoned down, limited life is exactly what makes me happy. That said, I don't push it on others, but I do like reading material about living the solitary life, or the goodness of being alone, or quiet.
> I have no interest in a social life
Then got to
> Mostly with my son, sometimes with my partner
Your social life is your partner and son.
Unless you are indifferent to them, I think your assessment of your need of a social life is contradictory.
No offence intended, but I find this trope really exhausting. Web products - like any other product in the world - are designed to be enjoyable, and a side effect of that is that you will want to use them more. That's not what addiction is. I don't wake up in cold sweats needing to scroll through Instagram.
My tolerance doesn't increase, I don't experience withdrawal, I wouldn't suffer if you removed it from me. It's a horrendous mutilation of the meaning of the word, using it to mean 'an enjoyable habit'. I've been addicted to heroin, and I could talk at you for days about the difference.
This, along with other popular tropes like the 'corporations are responsible for 95% of carbon emissions' one, seem to be designed to excuse the individual from straightforward behavioural issues, like not being able to control their procrastination. I'm not complaining because I feel corporations are attacked, but because this isn't a healthy way to face (or rather not face) your problems.
Well, is that factoid wrong though? Sometimes personal responsibility is just a smokescreen pushed by bigger fish to guilt the smaller ones, red herrings. Same situation as the California water shortage where personal use is massively dwarfed by agricultural use of water.
The S&P 100 aren’t sitting around a carbon campfire, passing a massive carbon joint, while they chat about how much they enjoy destroying the environment.
It seems like a false dichotomy, because one can affirm personal responsibility and place the blame on the main culprits of an activity. And to claim that businesses are forced into do that because of consumers- well when do individual consumers get a chance to express their feelings at how carbon is produced by the businesses they patronize? How transparent is the production process to consumers? There is information asymmetry at play.
Reducing such a complex issue into a simple moral judgment about personal responsibility (or the dodging thereof) would seem to be an oversimplification.
Yup, exactly. Calling businesses the 'main culprit' is absurd, like placing the blame on slaughterhouses for people eating meat.
https://www.visualcapitalist.com/companies-carbon-emissions/
There’s definitely a place for personal responsibility in terms of land or air travel, but it’s hard to blame individual consumers for things like America’s car culture, the product of decades of urban planning and lack of support for public transit.
The answer is that we need to coordinate, get serious, and fix these problems. But part of getting serious is not using obvious sophistry to trick dull-witted people into thinking that 'corporations' are just magically burning carbon for reasons that have nothing at all to do with their consumption, and therefore there's no point in their changing their own behaviour –– which is a very prevalent argument on social media, and is what I was alluding to initially.
By contrast, the result of any one person's vote in the 02020 election was nil. I don't think there's any person in the world whose vote in 02020, if you'd changed it to some other candidate, would have resulted in a different candidate winning. Whether this is valid consequentialist moral reasoning or not is related to, for example, whether participants in a firing squad are killers.
On the other hand, if you live in Los Angeles, your life is going to suck pretty hard without a car; you won't be able to go to college and you probably won't have a job. Good luck convincing anyone in LA to follow your example after that! Unilaterally opting out of car culture mostly hurts you, though it also has a first-order effect of helping the planet a little bit, in a way that giving your vote to a marginal candidate doesn't. Substantially reducing your carbon footprint requires not self-sacrifice but some kind of collective action, like the massive installation of solar panels across California over the past few years, which in turn was made profitable by the mostly Chinese research and development that has dropped the resources required for solar panels by over an order of magnitude over the last decade.
Or, for example, like the collective action in which NCL (owned by Firestone, General Motors, Standard Oil, and Mack Trucks) bought up the nearly-bankrupt Los Angeles public transportation system in 01944, an act for which they were convicted of antitrust violations in 01949, and converted it from electric to internal combustion engines over the following 19 years, completing the job in 01963.
Corporations are organs of collective action—"coordination", as you put it—so they can sometimes achieve things that individual efforts cannot; because all the people in a corporation can act together (for example, under the command of management) to do something that would be counterproductive if only a few of them were doing it.
Also, though, there are better uses of computers than congratulating yourself on seeing through "obvious sophistry" and not being so "dull-witted" as to think [insert obvious strawman argument].
My wider point is precisely that people have personal responsibility for carbon emissions, in exactly the way you described. In the car example you gave, the "corporations are responsible for most of climate change!" argument would attribute the emissions involved in manufacturing your car to the corporation instead of you. It's a compelling argument until you think about it, in concrete terms like that, for even thirty seconds.
I agree with that as far as it goes—certainly attributing the emissions to the car buyer is less foolish than attributing them to General Motors, US Steel, or Peabody Coal—but I think it's still an oversimplification, and that personal action isn't enough. And I would like you to stop using HN to congratulate yourself on how smart you are.
I’m glad it works for the author but when I’m making a cup of tea I think I’ll keep scrolling Instagram thanks.
I fully expect to downvoted into oblivion for this comment.