As an Indian I loved my afternoon sleep during the holidays. During school days I would come home and sleep for an hour while reading something. I really loved my sleep. When I started work I hated that my sleep was reduced drastically. Sleeping late working on personal projects played havoc on my sleep. Now in WFH I sleep for an hour or more in the evening which would have been wasted commuting.

I have seen my cognitive skills decrease because of lack of sleep. Now I am just chilling and catching up with rest and chilling and don't give a crap about work or projects.

Once you realize you only work for (aka being bribed by) BigCo to snuff out their competition it pretty much removes the guilt of not working. I used to have gray hair coming in, and after I stopped being a try-hard the color came back. I was looking so old and tired always, now I am looking and feeling spry! Enjoy life and donate all of the bribes you don’t need to people who need it through direct action so they can have a chance to nap too.

>Once you realize you only work for (aka being bribed by) BigCo to snuff out their competition it pretty much removes the guilt of not working.

Yes. Exactly. There is no real innovation. All that I see nowadays is corporate drama of passing the blame around, climbing the ladder with politics and all the wrong people put in interesting and important positions. There are a lot of cult like people who take pride in this fake drama and I am definitely not one.

All I want now is to retire with a good enough corpus by coasting so that I have enough to work on my personal projects, eat healthy, sleep well coupled with some sports and exercise.

Sometimes, bugs can even be helpful to humanity? Imagine a World of Warcraft bug that broke the game for a week, forcing the WoW addicts to go out and see the sunshine

Definitely I wouldn't feel much pressure, as a WoW dev (had I been one).

> All that I see nowadays is corporate drama

Wow! How large is the organization?

(At what levels of management does such behavior become annoyingly prevalent?)

I can resonate; I also love napping. Naturally, my body does not require much sleep, but napping is like having one of those 5 hours energy drink, without actually having it. Sometimes, I'm up from it in just 20 mins w\o an alarm and there are times when I don't wake up with an alarm even after 1 hour - it goes for 2ish hours.

Yes, I'm gifted - https://www.cnn.com/2021/06/22/health/short-sleep-gene-welln...

How many cultures are there that have a midday/afternoon sleep? I only knew of the siësta in Spain..

I think it is pretty common in places where the mid day sun makes working difficult and dangerous.

There was a famous line about it for when the British started colonizing Africa, "only mad dogs and English men go out in the midday sun"

Then one can infer that the Brits' recklessness allowed them to build a globe spanning empire to whom the sun never sets.

smirk

From my experience, Italians and in the south of France. The French also shut everything down on Sundays.

In the middle east I’ve also seen people napping in mosques. The large ones remain nice and cool during the hot summer day. Mind you, it was Ramadan, so that might have changed things.

Overall, I expect people in hot climates to sleep through the mid day heat and go back to work later. I for one envy them.

I mean, it makes sense. It's fairly well encoded into the genetics that determine our circadian rhythms. There is a dip in energy levels, corresponding to changed brain waves, that occurs at approximately midday. That 1pm drowsiness is your body just trying to do mammal things.

> Most people want to be productive because they want to feel valued by others. But if you have to look to your own value from others, you've already lost, and will continue to lose forever.

I think for me its about fear of death.

There’s a book about this called “4000 weeks” (thanks for the correction). Basically, all the popular productivity hacks are nonsense, and just make you busier. You do this because of a fear of death. Accept that you will die soon, so just stick to the important stuff.

Nothing like a strong dose of existential dread to get me through the work day.

Reminds me of The Hustle[0], which I actually found here

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_o7qjN3KF8U

4000 weeks

Death will come for you regardless of your productivity.

I know, but if I get twice as much done, its like living twice as long ;)

I know its nonsense, but it makes an intuitive sense in the absence of a better way to deal with existential anxiety.

For some, productivity equals virtue.

A virtuous life is always better than a lazy or vicious life. So you die having lived a better life. And (at least for us catholics AFAIK), a virtuous life leads to heavens.

As a US Catholic, I find much greater value in family time, volunteering, and jus the regular things I do to help people in my community. Work productivity is not on my list of "virtues".

Catholics have far better news than that you get to heaven on the basis of personal productivity. Consider these questions: When and why was toil introduced? Did the prodigal son have riches when he returned to the father to justify himself? Did the Pharisees need to have bread with them? Did the crowd have enough bread? Who provided sufficient bread: the vine or the lost sheep? If virtue is productivity, then why does God say that there is a rest for his people? Did he rest on the seventh day because he was not as virtuous as Pharaoh's taskmasters?

Industriousness is wise, but all is vanity and the fool when he dies goes to the same place as the wise.

All correct, though there is also the part about burying a lent talent and returning it without "interest".

Just to give some context: a single talent was worth about 6,000 denarii. A denarius was the usual payment for a day's labour. That single talent was a sum of money worth roughly twenty years of labor. In the parable the person doesn't earn that twenty years of labor. They have twenty years of labor handed to them with no effort on their part. The rebuke wasn't: you should have woken up at 4 AM. You should have exercised. You should have taken a cold shower. You should have eaten with one hand while handling emails with another. Ten hour days or you are a loser. It was practically milquetoast; you could have at least put the money in the bank.

> Now as they were traveling along, He entered a village; and a woman named Martha welcomed Him into her home. She had a sister called Mary, who was seated at the Lord’s feet, listening to His word. But Martha was distracted with all her preparations; and she came up to Him and said, “Lord, do You not care that my sister has left me to do all the serving alone? Then tell her to help me.” But the Lord answered and said to her, “Martha, Martha, you are worried and bothered about so many things; but only one thing is necessary, for Mary has chosen the good part, which shall not be taken away from her.”

"vicious" Think you meant to say "vacuous"

"Vicious" also means "full of vice", which is probably the more apt context here (since it's being contrasted with virtue).

But what if we hack death??

Joking, obviously. But it is amusing how many people (Kurzweil, Harari) seriously have faith in this (and believe there is something novel in this pursuit).

I see no harm in pursuing the impossible, in moderation of course.

After all if we didn't, we wouldn't have tried landing on the moon, among myriad other things.

I know that submissions with no substance are frowned upon here, but I just wanted to tell you that for some reason your comment is the funniest one I read in quite some time.

Maybe because of my lifelong struggle with productivity and procrastination... Cheers!

Yes, but you can either die having achieved your goals, or die with them unmet.

You won't know either way. Few people die knowing they will.

You’re dead though. What does it matter?

But then again, nothing makes you feel more empty than achieving a goal...

Achieving something evokes a feeling of loss that you have to bear until you've found whatever is next. It's not unlike experiencing a death or break-up. This happens when you finish a book, video game, or TV show you've invested a fair bit of time in. We are driven to cope with this feeling by seeking what's next.

That's not my experience. I need to be making progress to be sane. Achieving something small everyday makes me have confidence in life and a sense of control. This is crucial to keep existential dread at bay. I have a calendar where I track life events (good and bad). It's wonderful to look back and remember that, tlin the last two years, even though I feel like I haven't changed, actually a lot has.

Achieving something is hence a source of joy. But so is eating food.

Kind of orthogonal to this conversation, but... with increasing temperatures, I find myself wondering at what point more parts of the US might switch to a formal siesta or even nighttime hours. Last summer my area had a month+ of 100+ degree days, and this year it looks like we will have at least several weeks of it. People, especially outdoor workers, simply can't be expected to work in that for a full on day - people would die. So it makes me wonder if we will start to see interesting shifts in the work day as happens in other parts of the country.

This is more possible with WFH now. I sleep for about an hour a day on work hours and I don't work later to make it back up. Still only get positive feedback about the work I get done.

This you can only do when they don't set meetings just after lunch time, which is very common in my company unfortunately. But yeah I agree with you.

Alain De Botton has a fantastic book about this called "Status Anxiety"[1]. The book gave me a fresh perspective on how to avoid being trapped in the race to prove yourself to others.

[1]https://www.amazon.com/Status-Anxiety-Alain-Botton/dp/037572...