It's all a fitness landscape. Once you have a good signal of a steep, yet tractable curve, it's time to hone in and focus. Otherwise you need to keep exploring.
Within your exploration you need to know when to search and when to labor.
You also need to know when you've sunk too much into a fruitless endeavor.
I definitely perceive partial truth to what you're saying but I wouldn't want people to confuse 'being disciplined' with what you're talking about. 'Being disciplined' just leads to burnout eventually, it's a way of the cortical (planning, future goals, losing weight) lying (foregoing good tasting food) to the thalamus ("give me good tasting food, feeling full, with the least amount of energy expenditure, NOW!") which will not succeed in the long run.
The trick is to research how to make healthy food taste better than junk food, and take less energy to make. Since you will always go for the best ratio of cost-benefit, you will lose weight without struggle.
I would rewrite the article as "If it's not a hard yes (in terms of BOTH immediate and long-term pleasure), it's a hard no"
This was actually accounted for by the system of thought the parent comment is discussing.
Since virtue is the median between two vices, there is a middle ground between focusing on nothing and focusing on something to the point of exhaustion. The virtue of eutrapelia. Thomas Aquinas argues that just as the body needs rest when it is weary, so too does the soul when it becomes overburdened. And, like the body, the soul takes rest in a kind of pleasure we call 'play'.
What I'm talking about is a synthesis of play and work, where work becomes play, as opposed to playing, resting, or relaxing, after or as a 'reward for' work (which would not qualify as immediate reward. Immediate reward = in a fraction of a second.)
The 'work itself is the reward' if one carefully chooses what the work entails.
The virtue ethicist would say that one should inculcate the virtue of caritas (love) which will enable them to approach any task with a positive attitude, such that something that would otherwise be annoying to do becomes meaningful or at least tolerable with a long-term goal of increasing the love of the other for whom you do the task for.
Catholic virtue ethicists (I can't speak for the others) do see one aspect of life as a combination of work and play: religious service. For example, the Sunday mass is both a liturgy (lit: "a work of the people") but also play: it is something to be done precisely because it need not be done. An omnipotent God doesn't need anything, including worship. It has no other outside purpose in theory than to be a celebration and is thus something meant to refresh in the way other forms of play refresh. In the Catholic tradition at least, this highest work is itself the highest form of play.
Can you name some examples of who you're talking about?
[0] https://aquinas.cc/la/en/~ST.II-II.Q166
[1] https://aquinas.cc/la/en/~ST.II-II.Q167
[2] https://maritain.nd.edu/ama/McInerny/McInerny11.pdf
[3] https://www.primematters.com/foundations/search-truth/studio...
If you want to get into classical philosophy you're going to run into that left, right, front, and center. Many words and concepts they take for granted either correspond to old English words (and I mean old as in time, not as in formaly Old English, though they may be that too), or simply no longer exist in English. Thus, reading translations of them may be quite challenging.
Personally I don't think it's because those concepts are necessarily inapplicable or that we're so much better, nor do I necessarily think we're so much worse either. If anything I see it as a very valuable way to get a very different perspective on philosophical issues. However, it will take substantial effort put in to understand what they're really saying; to use very modern terminology, the representational bias of modern English is almost incapable of expressing what they are actually saying. While I won't blindly endorse everything they say, I will say it is also not as stupid as it may sound at first when read in modern English, nor vacuous, nor any other quick dismissal than may come to mind.
It is possible to find well-done introductions that attempt to bring a philosopher 'forward' but even those often find it easier to define what the philosopher means by 'caritas' and then use the Latin instead of translating it as "love" or "charitable love" each time.
> St. Thomas defines wonder (admiratio) as “a kind of desire (desiderium) for knowledge; a desire which comes to man when he sees an effect of which the cause either is unknown to him, or surpasses his knowledge or faculty of understanding.” Wonder leads people to inquire and seek answers in a deliberate and purposeful manner in order to gain knowledge. St. Thomas identifies that we associate the desired person, event or object with what is “pleasing” and “scarce.” Simply, the wonderer glimpses an elusive knowledge to pursue.
https://aquinas.cc/la/en/~ST.I-II.Q32.A8 from https://www.nashvilledominican.org/desire-wonder-essential-e...
It kinda made me wonder why I felt so uncomfortable reading it, and I think it's the very deep religious philosophy that shines from it.
Curiosity is fundamentally a desire to discover things by one-self and uncover hidden things. It goes against authoritative advice ("kills the cat") and is self motivated. It is basically the opposite of blindless trust, faith. A vice.
Studiousness was the core virtue of monks, and they were the spearhead of shuting down distractions to focus on a single goal.
This is basically the advice we'd give to people to stop looking at the birds, to focus on plowing the field in front of them.
For instance during the “dark ages” we saw construction technique leap forward (think cathedrals like Paris’ one), accounting techniques saw the shift to double entry book-keeping, and so many deeply impacting innovations that didn’t cone from monks while they were supposed to have such knowledge and education.
You mention classical books reproduction which was a important occupation for monks, yet the printing revolution came from a completely different direction. Not rocking the boat was a principle they adhered to that basically tied their hand.
We also use the word curiosity slightly differently - the older form is found in "curiosity killed the cat". The ancient philosophy term that would be closer to what we may mean by curiosity now is wonder.
I think you leaped to a conclusion here. Parent post is about immoderate distraction, not having horse blinders on 24/7. There is plenty of room to “look at the birds” while also knowing how to say “no” to distraction.
> prudent allocation of attention to what you should
How do we even define "what" outside of a basic moral context? "What" is a constant moving target throughout life, something extremely personal that's based on our experiences and knowledge.
I say stay curious.
Consider Bob, the virtuous, studious person, who is opposed to that vicious "curiosity" that would distract him from his goal, spends all his time studying and practicing and focusing on his very narrow subject. Think about building a building as tall as you possibly can -- that's their knowledge tower. Taller! Taller! More focused, more specialized! But once he's read all the books and journal articles on the subject, how can he keep getting better? Where do new ideas come from? Just more practice, the same thing over and over? That works well for running a marathon, but not for creative work.
Now consider Alice, the vicious, curious person, also wanting to get as good as possible in a focused field, but often distracted by her general intellectual curiosity. She doesn't read every book and journal article in the field, but she's read a lot of them (most of the way through) and is aware of the general ideas presented in most of the others. Think of the 80/20 power-law rules; this person, devoting half her time to the focused subject, is probably about 80% to 90% as knowledgeable about the deep, focused field as the person who devoted all his time to it. Meanwhile, she has a wellspring of fresh ideas from a wide range of related disciplines (and everything is all related, one way or another).
The thing about world-leading experts in creative fields is that they're constantly facing problems that nobody has ever solved before. When Bob The Studious faces such a problem, he needs to invent the solution wholesale by a mutation on his existing body of knowledge. He has no raw memetic material to cross-breed with to explore the solution space. But Alice does! She doesn't need to rely on the slow and random process of mutation; she has a wealth of other memetic material to cross-breed with her (somewhat more limited) specialist knowledge. Nobody in RAID Firmware design has solved that particular problem before, but it looks a little bit like a hobby project she read about a few months ago involving a Raspberry PI, and didn't they have to deal with something like this on the space shuttle? Hold on, I think I bookmarked that ...
Virtuoso musicians know that practicing 4 to 6 hours per day is better than practicing 10 hours per day. Instead, go listen genre of music you don't like, read about the between Baroque and Classical music, play around with an instrument you've never touched before, or even just space out and go on a walk.
I would also add that it can depend what your goals are.
In the parent's other metaphor (the grape vine) useless grapes are a vicious curiosity that must be stamped out. Propagation of species has no purpose in the fastidious pursuit of the longest strongest grape vine and so surely must be pruned.
The studious man marries the first person they date and commits to life-long faithfulness regardless of any potential misalignment.
The curious man dates lots of people trying to learn both if they want to get married and what they want out of such a life-long faithful commitment.
All people are a combination of both curious and studious. It reminds me of a question I've had quite often and had lots of good conversation about: Does learning make you less able to learn?
When you "learn" something and accept it as a de-facto truth, you can be very studious from that base. However, doing so limits your ability to be curious and explore contractions to that baseline. Most modern discoveries are built on curious, by questioning the status quo. THEN, committing to that curiosity in a studious fashion.
> For all of Michael’s amazing moves and unforgettable moments, he knew none of that could happen without the fundamentals. Those basic moves he had practiced over and over and over since he was a kid made everything else possible. He didn’t work on being flashy, he worked on being consistent, and he worked on it relentlessly. Cleaners don’t care about instant gratification; they invest in the long-term payoff.
I also recognize something Bruce Lee said about martial arts techniques, that the techniques that are pleasing to the eye are not very good, that the best stuff that works is boring and simple, and one has to develop that taste, not unlike developing a taste for wines.
I found the quote:
> “Some martial arts are very popular, real crowd pleasers, because they look good, have smooth techniques. but beware.They are like a wine that has been watered. A diluted wine is not a real wine, nto a good wine, hardly the genuine article. Some martial arts don’t look so good, but you know that they have a kick, a tang, a genuine taste. They are like olives. The taste may be strong and bittersweet. The flavour lasts. You cultivate a taste for them. NO one ever developed a taste for diluted wine”
In response to;
> The former shows restraint in relation to his appetites and is able to build a relationship and raise a family, while the latter is a mess who never achieves anything of value, slavishly indulging his appetites that lead nowhere but his own misery and mediocrity
I don't agree with your example by the way. There are many variables. For example, the former may be lazy and undisciplined with his life in general, but is still faithful out of a principle, or maybe he has a low sex drive, or maybe it's not that easy for him to seduce another woman (but he secretly wishes to - it's not like men get hit on by women and every married man has the discipline of a monk by staying faithful). The latter may just consider polygamy as a lifestyle choice for a certain period of time and be very disciplined in other areas. You could make many examples and counter-examples and it's just not correct to generalize like that.
In life, we must make decisions. The word "decision" comes from the Latin "to cut off", as in to cut off options or paths. The grapevine must be pruned to strengthen it and produce more fruit. Of course, we must decide wisely, there is no question about that, but FOMO is the opposite of that. It is an intemperate and immoderate desire for everything, never committing to anything and therefore never attaining anything and never becoming anything.