It looks like you got downvoted, but I agree with you actually.

that first one on the list kinda requires it though... and the 2nd one kinda requires the first one haha

not that easy is it

Maybe not. I put a ridiculous amount of effort into that last project last year. I saved it from disaster, which saved a bunch of people's asses that had fucked it up over and over.

Nobody really noticed. My raise this year didn't keep up with inflation. I could have let the project fail like it should have, rather than burning myself out. Maybe I would have received some of the blame, but chances are I'd still just be making the same amount of money if I had just cared less.

That's a classic story in a corporate world but I fail to see how is it relevant in the context :) We were talking about 'thinking' being required but nobody said it was sufficient.

I was mostly approaching it from the angle of how overworking and overthinking isn't really necessary to make money. And how doing so can actually lead to burnout.

Please give us your secret to making easy money.

Now what I was saying. Being the person on a team that kills themselves to get a project across the finish line isn't the secret to making money. It doesn't even get you recognition for your efforts most of the time.

> It doesn't even get you recognition for your efforts most of the time.

You've gotta toot your own horn. Relying on others to do it for you is a surefire recipe for disappointment and disillusionment. Think of it like a business. If the business does no marketing, what's going to be the result? Bankruptcy.

I've known many bitter people who did something great, and nobody knew about it because they thought it was unseemly to write papers about it, present about it at conferences, etc.

It doesn't have to be easy, it can just be the correct amount of work, or effort, for you.

What if correct is more than you can actually give?

Correct for you.

> Nobody really noticed.

It's often necessary to make sure they notice, by telling them. A good method is to email your manager a weekly summary of what you accomplished, including extra hours you spent on it. This is especially worth while if you're working remote.

A few weeks ago I'd have disagreed, but this weekend I did nothing close to dev and I feel a lot better.

There's a reason r/woodworking is full of software engineers

Great idea. I always wanted to get into this sort of stuff, esp blacksmithing.

Now, if only I had the space for it…

Woodworking using only hand tools can be a remarkably space-efficient and neighbour-friendly pastime. I started out that hobby making little projects, mainly using a few unpowered tools (plus a cordless drill) in an area the size of a small writing desk.

Is it possible to do that indoors? I live in an apartment.

Definitely possible. The nosiest thing would be banging on chisels, I've seen a hollow chisel mortiser recommended as a power tool well suited to apartments if you're not going all in on hand tools: https://www.finewoodworking.com/project-guides/shop-machines...

And here's an example of an apartment woodshop, you can get started with many less tools than this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ybvuuVRlSWc

r/handtools is another good place for questions/information on that.

> money, sex, and exercise.

Cringe

Came to post this. Life gets much better when you stop thinking of your body functions as bugs. They're features.

Your body learned that 'working really really hard for this resulted in very little tangible reward' and then probably concluded 'i will not work very hard for long periods of time without seeing reward'

Probably the hardest part is understanding that 'i made a number in a database increase' is not actually a reward.

> Life gets much better when you stop thinking of your body functions as bugs. They're features.

Counterpoint: this is like considering various peculiarities of software from 1980s to be features in 2020s. Yes, our bodies are well tuned. To an environment we've lived in until our ancestors, thousands of years ago, boarded a metaphorical rocket ship, and left it flying under constant acceleration.

In certain aspects, we're quite far from the environment we evolved in, and evolution has lost the ability to keep pace some time around when it granted us with ability to develop a language more complex than a few grunts.

tbh i don't think this feature is outdated. it's just your body telling you that doing someone else's bidding intensely and unendingly isn't healthy. it's good to recognize that.

But this is exactly where our environment differs profoundly from the ancestral one: most of us live in a society closed over resource production. We still need food and other means to survive, but now there are no freely accessible sources of them - we're all gating access to resources for each other. Which means I always have to do someone's bidding if I want to live. I have some choice of whose bidding I'll do, but this means that I'll eventually reach a point where changing the person whose bidding I do is less effective than just doing more for the current one.

I am a socialist, so I think that this is your body telling you that you have a political problem that you are sensing individually.

It's true this kind of thing can crop up even under the best labor conditions, but much much less frequently. Startup founders do run into it and they own their work product.

Still if workers get a significant share of the total value they produce and have good control of their working conditions (and can change projects easily), I suspect this will get a lot better.

fair call, if you're body-primary you'll see the environment as broken and in need of fixing. but if you see the current environment as the source of truth or what you'll need to adapt to survive long term, then yeah you'll need to fix your body.

this reminds me of the men in black scene [1] where Will Smith moves the table. you get to decide what kind of person you are

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dijVbM9DpxU&ab_channel=Creep...

I tend to see it as a dance - humans have unique ability to transform the environment to better suit their needs, but sometimes it's still easier to just adapt the body[0]. Both these things are unique to humans anyway[1] - all other life on Earth is "environment-primary", i.e. environment is the source of truth and living things adapt to thrive, except they adapt by breeding imperfectly and dying unevenly. Thus, arguably, neither is more or less "natural" than the other - we're the only ones to have the option to fix things - be it our bodies, our environment, or both.

--

[0] - Related concept: "society is fixed, biology is mutable". The flip side of the well-known (if annoyingly overused) adage, "you can't fix social problems with technology" is that if your problem is a social one, you've already lost. Social problems are unsolvable by direct approach; literally anything else is easier than getting people to coordinate at scale, when it means enduring a short-term personal loss for a long-term distributed gain. If you have that kind of problem, pray there's a way to medicate, industrialize, capitalize, code, or CRISPR your way out of it.

[1] - Unique at the scale we're talking about. There's a huge gap between us and the next animals best skilled at adapting themselves or the environment.

> Now go focus on important things in life: money, sex, and exercise.

I read this list as: requires stable employment, requires stable employment, is torture. The first two items... are not something I can focus in lieu of my job, they're literally the point of it (I long ago gave up on the idea of Finding Fulfilling Work That Is Also Your Passion And That Is Net Good For The World).

As a comment on exercise: I also see exercise as torture when I'm doing it wrong.

For me, I needed(/need - this is not a solved problem) to find a way that works for me, and also take it in the tiniest of little bites.

I tried for years to get into running. Never worked. I hate running. I tried to go to the gym, but all the classes went way too hard for me and my local didn't do "just show up and lift", only classes. I tried riding a bike, but I could never find a way to do that where I wasn't dodging cars, rain, hills and heat.

Finally last year I bought a rowing machine and a heart rate monitor. I put my headphones on, listen to a podcast, and focus on keeping my heart rate in a specific zone for a certain amount of time. If it's hot, I turn on the AC. If I get sick of it, I stop. I dont have to dodge cars, so I can completely dissociate and listen to the podcast so long as the number is where I want it to be.

It's great and generally not torture, which is nice because apart from team sport it's literally the only way I've found that isn't.

Thank you. I'll consider getting a machine then. It seems like might just work. I did some serious amount of exercising in the past with VR glasses, but that was inconsistent because of space constraints, and became nearly impossible after our first kid became self-propelled.

For me, all common forms of exercise feel like torture when doing them, or when thinking about doing them, or both. Most of it isn't even for physical reasons, just a combination of anxiety, procrastination, and the kind of general sports aversion you develop when you get prescribed glasses when you're 7 y.o. and thus go through 10+ years of schools not being able to effectively participate in team sports during PE classes...

100% with you on the anxiety and procrastination. The anxiety for me was driven in part by "people can see me suck at this", so I put the machine in my home office - with a door.

As for buying a machine, I highly recommend going to a gym during a quiet period if you can find one that will let you do a trial or a day pass. Then you can try all the machines and find the one that you think sucks the least. Rowing is good because it does loads of muscle groups, but ultimately that doesn't mean anything if you hate it.

E: the thing that changed the game for me was a good hr monitor. Smart watch was full of crap, and just listening to my body made me go way too hard too fast.

I hate using exercise machines. Everything about them. Running outside I see the sun, feel the wind, splash through the puddles, say hello to others, check the Little Free Library, tell the ditch diggers that they're digging in the wrong spot as legend has it the gold is buried the next street over, it's all good.

To add detail onto my reply to your other comment then: these things are the things I hate about exercising outside!

The sun is too hot, the wind is too cold. The puddles are a twisted ankle just waiting to happen. I don't want people to see me running - it makes me self conscious of every part of my body and my running form. I don't want to check the little free library during my exercise - that's a break in my flow.

On a machine, I don't have to worry about any of that. I just go, and when I reach my time goal, or I don't feel like it anymore, I stop. I can close my eyes if I want to without worrying about falling over. I can make all the exertion noises I want to if it's hard. I don't have to walk all the way home if I go too hard too early by mistake and get a stitch.

And the best bit is that your way and my way are both totally valid ways of exercising. The important bit is not how we exercise, the important bit is that we exercise.

You're right, the point is doing the exercise in a way that works for you.

An exercise machine? jeez, I hate that stuff

Meanwhile, I go to kung-fu training and get pretty annoyed when I have to skip a class once. Sports can be wayy more fun and I wouldn't worry about the social aspect so much - adults can behave better than teenagers.

Running was torture for me and I hated it. But after a year of running 3 days a week, suddenly I noticed I was enjoying it and looking forward to it. Been running for nearly 40 years now. It's one of the best parts of my day.

Of course, I run in quiet areas where my mind can drone off and think about interesting things.

I've tried running around the park, I've tried running around the track, I've tried road running, I've tried cross country running, I've tried treadmills. Every time, I keep it up for a couple of weeks and then I get horrible shin splints. Or I bust my ankle, or I can't commit the time to do a good loop because it's winter and dark all the time. One way or another, I stop, and I don't go back to it for another year. I've learned to stop fighting it. I just don't like running that much, and I'm ok with it.

The point is, I mistook my dislike of running, cycling and HIIT for a dislike of exercise for basically my whole 20s, and it turns out that's not true at all. I just had to figure out the version that worked for me.

>I get horrible shin splints

One should avoid running on concrete pavements. Consider alternatives such as grass or tarmac.

I get shin splits on grass, artificial turf, unpaved tracks and treadmills. I've had it looked at by a podiatrist, and he recommended stretches for my tibialis anterior. I do them before I play sport and they generally work if I'm only playing once a week, but much past that and I'm in pain again.

Shin splints are horrid but can be avoided.

Increase your cadence to at least 170 strides per minute. More if you can. This forces you to lower stride length. Overstriding is a main cause for shin splints.

Also try to think about your hips when you run. An anterior hip tilt will put excess stress on shins and quads. Tense your glutes when running to keep hips level. Imagine you are carrying a bowl of water in your hips and try not to spill!

Also weak glute medius will cause knee pain and potentially shin splints. Try strengthening up the glutes and shortening stride length.

Good luck!

This. Use a metronome on your phone. And do high rep weight training (leg machines) and crosstrain on a bike.

(Late response, sorry)

These are great tips! I've had issues with weak / under-activated glute medius for years, but I didn't think about that causing the shin splints. I'll give the 170 stride a minute tip a try.

Thanks!

> important things in life: money, sex, and exercise

Sarcasm?

Absolutely not.

Sad.