I had a little epiphany: Before the internet, and before people lived in large cities, the circle of people we came into contact might be only a couple hundred people.
Out of two or three hundred people, it's not hard to be in the top tenth percentile at something.
When your circle of acquaintances is the whole internet, being in the top tenth percentile of anything takes years of determined effort.
Our brains still have expectations rooted in these smaller communities: That we should be able to create something exceptional and praiseworthy for our efforts.
Today, it's hard to get praise for anything we do, unless it's from our families, or unless we do something truly world class. (Case in point: The other week someone shared some generative artwork here, and it got promptly criticized for not being "gallery worthy".) In the face of that, we instinctively give up.
Getting into running sums it up for me on a personal level.
When I ran my first marathon, I was the only person in my close friends and family that had ever ran one. Just running one was exceptional. At that point, you feel proud to be the runner people know personally but there's not a lot to talk about in depth.
Then I got faster. I qualified for the Boston Marathon. My times put put me in the top 1-2% of anyone running them. This is a running goal that more "serious" runners associate with, at least. It's still bit broad, but it's relatable.
Then I went longer. I ended up outright winning an ultramarathon as well as some other top finishes. In the region of the US I lived, there wasn't too many people doing exceptionally better at those kind of events. The community was small and inclusive enough where I felt like I fit in somewhat.
Then I moved to Colorado. There are lots of professional and competitive runners. I realized I wasn't national class, but perhaps competitive locally. Again, I fit in with a small group of people.
Then finally, I found some popular running message boards that focus on all types of running, but with a large emphasis on the world class. Everything I have done is dime a dozen in this realm. There is a very large "community" - but it comes with lots of negativity, jealousy, and gawking at world class athletes.
There's a couple sweet spots in there where I feel a decent combination of achievement and community, but comparing myself to the whole world (and all of history) doesn't seem to do it for me.
In my experience Colorado has been a great place to practice mediocrity.
I hit a major plateau in climbing about four years ago after hitting 5.12d in the gym and 5.11 lead outside. No matter what I did, I could never seem to push past it and I quickly recognized that without a serious climbing-focused training program it just wasn't going to happen. Slowly but surely this lack of progress drained the fun out of the sport for me, and after a minor injury I stopped completely.
Fast forward a few years, I get into mountain biking. The same thing starts to happen. I become focused on speed, distance, difficulty, and anything else quantifiable. Thankfully after my experience with climbing I was able to put the breaks on that type of thinking.
Now when I go out I purposefully do not record my time, my distance, my heart rate, or anything else. No Strava. No Runkeeper. Nothing. The only measure of progress I allow myself is how much sustain I have over the course of a ride. And even that I will sometimes purposefully ruin by taking breaks I do not need.
And surprise -- I am having an absolute blast, my skills and endurance have skyrocketed, I'm riding trails I never imagined I would, and it's all because I go out with the intention of having fun and not setting a new PR.
I can relate to this very much - all gizmos measuring various attributes seem to effectively remove the most important aspect of these sports/activities - fun, and hence in long term much of the motivation.
Suddenly you have some metrics, you see that last week you improved, this week you perform like cr_p, and that guy is so much better than you. It's some sort of obscure facebook effect when sport becomes very competitive. Its all great if you're a pro and you have to improve, you have to track progress etc.
But for mere mortals, it's worse than useless. I just can't imagine the mindset I would have to have to really benefit anyhow from these devices. I use some old crappy Suunto watches that barely measure altitude (for hikes/aki alpinism), compass stopped working and I used them mainly for time only. If they die I definitely won't be buying any other. On my bike, simple computer died 2 years ago, so I have no clue about speed, distance etc. Again, its great, just road and me and the bike.
Being very competitive in my book is a quite negative personality trait - never happy, always comparing themselves to others. On the outside it might look great, but inside it's not. I have no need to support this behavior.
Yea I had to ask myself what is my actual goal. Why do I need to progress as quickly as possible? I mean it’s fun to do harder trails and be able to go longer, but if I’m having fun does it matter if that takes three years versus one? At 38 I have no delusions of competing so there isn’t really a strong motivation to be the best.
I’m naturally very competitive, but as you point out it is a very negative trait when applied to all aspects of one’s existence.
I like the "goals versus systems" philosophy that Scott Adams espouses: http://blog.dilbert.com/2013/11/18/goals-vs-systems/. I find it more enjoyable and less stressful to use systems rather than establish goals: exercise aerobically a few times a week rather than run 5k in MM:SS time.
I can relate to this, but I think that also if you go through it, and come out the other side, you gain some perspective and appreciation. It forces you to ask yourself why you're doing it, if you'll never be the best. You can learn to appreciate effort, dedication, and enjoyment for their own sake, and recognize this in others of all abilities. In running for example, comments on Letsrun notwithstanding, most very good runners seem to grok this after a while.
This is a important point to make. I’ve asked myself, “Even if you never achieved another PR again, or even raced again, would you still run?” The answer is “Yes.”
I’m lucky enough to have this happen to me in a couple other disciplines so I came into it with more perspective.
LetsRun also has thr NCAA Division I focus, and that is a pressure cooker environment I was never a part of, and I think shapes a certain worldview there.
Don't listen to the internet trolls, build connections with people who share common interests, and hopefully some of them will support you.
I have personally found the older generations (I'm 25) to be more approachable. It's this that scares me.
I'll bore you with a story from today. I'm building a coffee table for my new place. I got the top from Home Depot, and was looking for table legs. I was wondering around a vintage market and met this guy Jimmy, who has a studio down the street. He sold me 4 legs for $15 and gave me a bunch of great advise, telling me to text him when I was done with it. I assured him it wasn't going to be pretty, but he didn't care in the least.
This is why I hate online shopping, and these are the interactions I cherish most.
I can entirely agree on that experience. I got into machine tools, and in looking for pieces and accessories on craigslist, I ran into someone who's become quite a mentor to me. He rebuilds crashed CNC machines, serious ones worth hundreds of thousands of dollars. The skills he taught me for free, just because I was interested, are shared by maybe, maybe ten thousand people in the world. That kind of friendliness is hard to come by in anybody, but I definitely see it more in the older generations (I'm 27, he's in his very early 60's).
As a sibling comment points out, I think some of that is the maturity that comes with age -- someone over 50 just doesn't have any interest in competing with a 25 year old on a hobby, or at least they have a much lower average interest in that competition. But some of it is just that at 25 you don't have enough time invested in a hobby or a pastime to have a whole lot to contribute to someone just getting into it. You also haven't spent years looking for other members of your weird, niche community. For a good, easily accessible example of this, stop by your local HAM radio club and talk to the definitely-older-than-your-average-startup-employee guys there about what it takes to get licensed and how many young people are getting into the hobby...
> I have personally found the older generations (I'm 25) to be more approachable. It's this that scares me.
I think in general everyone gets more approachable with age. Somehow we all evolve bit-by-bit from asshole teenager to lovable old grandpa. Well, most of us at least. Ha! When you're young you care too much about things that don't really matter, and you eventually grow out of it. Sounds like maybe you're ahead of your peers. Maybe you just skipped the asshole teenager stage altogether? ;-)
Perhaps, though testosterone doesn't really start to fall off dramatically until after middle age. In my own experience most people seem to have mellowed out significantly by the time they get into their 40s. Not everyone, of course, e.g. my 70 year old next door neighbor didn't evolve into a lovable old grandpa, he became a grumpy old man.
I remember a kid in highschool in the 90's. He was the best in our entire highschool at math. Any math contest in our school, he would win it.
He go accepted into Aerospace engineering at an elite university. Suddenly, his math skills were only mediocre compared to his new peers. He became depressed after this. He was always the "math guy"... now what is he?
> I remember a kid in highschool in the 90's. He was the
> best in our entire highschool at math. Any math contest
> in our school, he would win it.
I think that's an awakening a lot of people on HN have probably experienced!
A lot of us were "the smart kids" until at some point when we found ourselves in an environment where we were surrounded by other people just like us when suddenly we were very average or even below average.
There's also the related phenomenon, where a smart kid NEVER moves on to an environment where they are intellectually challenged and they develop an ego problem.
We all know somebody like this, right? You know: smart kid slacks his way through high school. Doesn't do college or work his way into some kind of career. Winds up working some menial job where he's a super genius compared to his coworkers, so he winds up thinking he's a super genius.
My tutor at university understood this very well. In my first week he told my tutor group "At school you were all the best, now it is likely that half of you are below average".
Another thing I noticed at university was "improvers syndrome". When I took up some new sport or hobby, I always thought I wasn't progressing very well, because I was comparing myself to the people around me who were all improving too. It was only at the start of a new year when lots of newbies arrived that I realised how much I had progressed.
> My tutor at university understood this very well. In my first week he told my tutor group "At school you were all the best, now it is likely that half of you are below average".
This was told to us as well, with a reminder that some of us never had to do much work in high school -- this was about to change. There were multiple people who just didn't know how to study any more, and dropped out.
Personally, I almost gave up programming in university when I saw there are others who are so much better than me, thinking I'm missing some innate gift they had. I'm glad I soon realized that I'm actually one of the better ones anyway, just not the absolute top of the class I was used to being in my small home town.
I think it helps in such cases to remember that just being in such a position puts you in the top and being mediocre across very talented peers is an achievement. It always helped me when moving up ranks in activities, when I hit my ceiling.
Also reminds me of the idea of fixed vs growth mindsets.
> Suddenly, his math skills were only mediocre compared to his new peers. He became depressed after this.
With a fixed mindset, you think your ability is static and so it can get you down when you stop being at the top.
With the growth mindset you know that your ability is not static and can get better with effort. Think of the opportunity he had to learn from his new peers.
Getting a job at Google has done this to me in regards to programming. For the last 7 years I've felt like an impostor whereas before I grew irritated by the mediocrity around me.
After watching how Google engineers interact with engineers from other companies, this checks out. It's very easy to believe that everyone there is irritated by the mediocrity of the world outside of Google when they have to interact with it.
Great point. I'll add that even within communities that are narrower than the whole Internet, we probably have more context-specific relationships than we did in the past, and that we compare ourselves to others within those contexts.
I'm almost certainly not in the top 10% of coders on HN, or in, say, the top 10% of pianists on r/piano. There's a decent chance that I'm in the top 10% of pianists on HN and the top 10% of coders on r/piano, but I don't compare myself to others in those communities on those terms.
This is why software development is such a great space. Its quite easy to find a task that no existing software does or the existing software is bad. You don't have to be the worlds best developer but you can make stuff that people will use because you are the only one making it.
With a painting you are getting compared to every other painting, with a program you are compared to other programs for the same task.
> This is why software development is such a great space. Its quite easy to find a task that no existing software does or the existing software is bad.
Maybe I hail from an alternate universe, but on my planet, everything that's obviously worth doing in software is already being done by 5 different startups and 20 open source projects (I'll grant that it's often done badly, though). How do you find "tasks that no existing software does"?
On my planet, I'm learning to settle for "doing better", or "doing more fully", or "being more accessible in environment X".
The stuff that programmers are interested in usually have 10000 tools made already but if you look at other industries or hobbies there are a lot of people using crappy expensive tools. A few times I have found areas where no tool exists like a few months ago I needed a ruby library that could download a picture from stitched together OSM tiles and nothing did that.
You can pretty easily find an area where you can easily be the only/best open source tool for the job and there are a lot of people who will use your tool just because it's open source.
And to be honest, there are actually piles and piles of money just waiting to be made this way.
We (as an industry) are trying to invent flying cars and the world's 482,382nd social networking app with zero revenue model and other crap crap like that.
Meanwhile, your dentist's office is using software that sucks, probably costs $20K a year, and looks like Microsoft Office 2K3 threw up all over their computer screen. But we ignore that, in favor of creating yet another new Javascript framework-of-the-week or something else the world doesn't even remotely need.
I'm currently working at a privately-owned company that makes software for one of these unsexy niches and they're making very solid money. They're literally the only one making software in this space. It will never be a billion dollar space, and probably never a $100mil space, but there is a need and a market of companies willing to pay well for this software.
Yes developers are quite narrow sighted, we nag about how silly interviews in our area are, we don't even know what is it like to be interviewed as chemical engineer for example.
Follow up with that we get bunch of startups and tools from developers for developers because that is what we focus on. Where making small tool for some other profession could be even more interesting than trying to write better left pad or another package manager for javascript.
But also people in different fields have to use some stuff from 10 years ago or god forbid from previous century like 90's and you don't want to get dirty.
I think it's still "easy" to find something if you are looking in terms of bespoke software for one very specific use case. Like in our company, I'm building business and pipeline tools that reflect specifically our workflow, so it is very useful for us - but utterly irrelevant for 99.9% of other people or companies, probably. Meaning, it's hard to find ideas that apply to lots of people AND possibly make money of, but it's relatively easy to find things to do that are bespoke. If you are just looking for ways to make your own life easier, not everyone else's.
It's even better. Start a project for fun in existing field and people will question why did you even start it. Projects X, Y and Z already exist and have features A, B and C which you haven't implemented yet, how dare you?
> With a painting you are getting compared to every other painting, with a program you are compared to other programs for the same task.
Usually you are compared to other paintings done with the same technique and/or style. No one is going to compare your impressionist watercolors with abstract geometric acrylic painting. So in a way it's the same. There are categories both in painting and in software development.
I disagree. There are gradients to the type of engineer you are and the type of employer you have (or are, in the case of the HN crowd), how much you make/raise, etc.
Really? Because I see these things all the time. Of course, there's usually market forces keeping things that way.
In case you need examples:
I can't find a good surface subdivision modeler for Android tablets.
The desktop clients for Upwork are a bloated mess.
The Field Nation mobile client crashes twice a day for me, and both the mobile client and desktop website present a massive amount of information in a cluttered, completely disorganized fashion.
The inventory/shipping tracking systems for ecommerce are either clunky, or priced out of reach for Mom and Pop eBay sellers. I can't think of any CMSs that are particularly helpful for that vertical, either.
You could make a bunch of people happy by fixing any of those (okay, I may be the only person chafing for a good surface subdivision tool for Android). Unfortunately, you're going to have a hard time making real money from any of those niches.
I think this is exactly what happened with physical attractiveness in the TV era. Suddenly we are bombarded with images of the most beautiful people in the world, and everyone had become much more insecure about their looks ever since.
"When your circle of acquaintances is the whole internet, being in the top tenth percentile of anything takes years of determined effort."
I like that a lot and I'm going to add it to my bag of quotes. You're definitely not wrong and it can often feel like any hobby is pointless when you're surrounded by hundreds, if not thousands of people (in online communities) who are striving for the same things.
I feel like people's identity is being lost in a sea of brilliance. As soon as you pick up a guitar you are comparing yourself to the best in the world on youtube.
I sometimes yearn my schooldays, safe in the knowledge that I was the best at math and that it didn't matter that I couldn't play football.
Have you considered that this belief system is unlivable? Or maybe deep, down inside, you don't actually believe it?
If you believed it, and you were consistent, why did you post what you did? If you don't matter (I think you do matter tremendously), and if nobody who reads it matters, then your post doesn't matter.
But you do matter. And so do we. And you know it because you spoke up. Why do you matter? That's the question. Because you were created in the image of God.
It is indeed livable, you just may not be able to conceive how it is so. Contrary to what many think, nihilism is not just the assertion that reality lacks meaning, but a philosophy based around the implications of such a reality. To paraphrase, we are the ones, on an individual and collective level, who assign meaning to our experiences and encounters. Put simply, everything matters because nothing matters.
There's another solution to this question (or maybe the same one in different words). I believe something similar, but I still do things - why do I do things? Why write this message?
The question seems like a show-stopper.
Then again, the trees I can see outside my window don't believe pointing their leaves at the sun matters or bears meaning, nor do the planets consider turning in their orbits. Nevertheless, they continue to do these things!
What is the difference between me, and these other systems? Why do I need to Ultimately Matter to live?
I think we're thinking of "unlivable" in two different senses. When I said "belief system is unlivable" I didn't mean you can't agree with it and live. I meant you can't live as though it's actually true. You can't be consistent with it and live.
Why take care of yourself if you don't matter? Why help other people if they are as irrelevant as your help? Why participate in thoughtful discussion if nobody matters, and neither do the conclusions? Folks who think they have no ultimate value do these (good) things all the time -- but they can't and be consistent with their worldview.
> What is the difference between me, and these other systems?
Simply put, you're human, not a plant or a planet. Humans are volitional, trees and rocks are not. "How can trees live without beliefs?" is analogous to "how can humans live without photosynthesis?" -- because we're fundamentally different.
Human actions are the products of our beliefs. We think and long for significance. Why? If you're a just mass of chemicals, atoms clashing with atoms, why do you long to matter? And if you aren't more significant than the tree, why can't I cut you down if it suits me? The typical responses ("it's beneficial for survival", "society says so", etc.) don't make it wrong inherently, yet we know murder et al. are wrong. Actually wrong. And, if we don't matter, why is survival good? Why is society's opinion good? They wouldn't be, they would just be other possible, equally meaningless, states in the vast, purposeless, eternal state machine.
But you do matter. And it's a divine gift. You matter because you were created to matter.
> Human actions are the products of our beliefs. We think and long for significance. Why? If you're a just mass of chemicals, atoms clashing with atoms, why do you long to matter?
Because it’s built-in for your survival. You are optimizing a fitness function. Nature is ultimate. The meme that man has dominion over Earth has led to us raping and pillaging her. We have done horrible things to our mother.
Life has whatever value you give it. I'm an atheist and I love being alive. Being remembered is an arbitrary goalpost. Being sentient is a gift, and being dead one day is a gift too.
> Today, it's hard to get praise for anything we do
Interestingly, since I started working in the US, I found that it is actually hard to get critisicm for anything: « honest feedback » is definitely not something that is culturally ingrained: most people will never talk to your face about the things you do wrong at work.
And at the same time I found that my family and my friends are the harshest ones about what I do too.
Did you mean top ten rather than “top tenth percentile”?
Being the best 10% at something among all people on the Internet probably takes on average the same amount of talent & practice as among those in your tribe. Being the absolute top 10 is way harder as you said.
Unless you were talking about being the top 10% among aficionados who have the most exposure in the relevant Internet community.
You know, I meant the top tenth percentile, but you have a point. It's easy on the internet to see how many people are performing better than you, and not just how many people are worse than you.
I guess I was thinking in terms of being in the top tenth percentile of people showing off in that area. Someone else in the thread put it in terms of being in the top tenth percentile of piano players in r/piano.
But yeah, being in the absolute top ten probably is closer to capturing what our monkey brains are expecting.
The internet isn't interested in directing you to the top 10% of anything, in the event you're in the market. That's too many people, nearly all of the time.
It is, however, very interested in directing you to literally the top ten (whatever thing) to save you the trouble of messing around with inferior, market-failing solutions.
So you do have to be literally the top ten in the world (or on the internet). Because if you aren't, someone else is prepared to be (if only for a brief shining moment?)
That's true. I spent a few years trying to make it as a dance music producer, and I was constantly working my butt off writing music and doing sound design. My work was never even close to being good enough because you really do have to be the best or among the best in the world at what you do. how could I hope to compete with people who had years more experience and resources than I did from across the globe?
I'm still a little bitter that I couldn't make it work but at least I have a healthier relationship with my music now.
A bit late to the party, but this quote is striking in light of your comment:
“Don't think about making art, just get it done. Let everyone else decide if it's good or bad, whether they love it or hate it. While they are deciding, make even more art.”
The solution is niches. Super Mario speedrunning, Demoscene, extreme knitting, and so on. Once you found a niche (of a niche, of a etc) that fits your interests, you're golden.
It's interesting to me how your language implies everyone has a niche out there that's best for them, and they just need to find it. A lot of people have a similar mentality about relationships, that you have to find the right one. I think it can be harmful to use this lens, as it's easy to excuse a failure as a "bad fit", a losing gamble in the lottery, something unavoidable and absolute, rather than the result of personal actions and circumstances together. Attributing outcomes to your own actions is the way to self improvement and greater success, because it puts the focus on things you control.
I disagree. Our brains have expectations, evolutionary speaking. They don't care about the size of our communities, I think. Our brains still expect you to climb the dominance hierarchy; it will give you a dopamine boost when you do so, and a shot of cortisol when you degenerate.
I think that mediocrity is a bad thing and that the internet promotes progress. Yes, you have to be better now to be noticed, and yes, chances are that, now, most people give up, but isn't this a kind of social natural selection? If you give up because of, say, HN critics, you should improve.
Fair point. You tore the first sentence of my argument to shreds, thank you for that article! However, "Dunbar's number is a suggested cognitive limit to the number of people with whom one can maintain stable social relationships," and I am not talking (neither is OP) about maintaining relationships.
That's a very good insight. To make matters worse, once you're on a global level (or internet level) you find that practically everybody so driven to be that top performer is a monster… or at the very least, has a bunch of toxicity relating to the pressure they impose upon themselves to attain that top performance.
Those who aren't prepared to have the toxicity… drop out, before becoming the very top performer.
The larger the pool of competitors, the more obvious this effect. By now, with globalized commerce and global internet, it's pretty obvious.
I went to a top competitive field (at the time) in a top university in my country. A place where every student was the best in his former school. Resuming: a competitive field in a competitive school. You can imagine the rest, I feel even embarassed to tell extra details.
I have to admit, high competion feels good at times and is addictive but in the end it was just an illusion: the field lost importance (Architecture) and people slowly
- nobody wanted to be the first to abandon ship and assume a defeat - acknowledged how patetic was to compete 24/7 for nothing. Nowadays I can see how toxic that environment were.
Percentiles are already normalized to group size. So no: it's just as hard to be among the top 10% in your field in Billings, Montana, as it is in all of the world.
Of course your mechanism works in absolute terms, but then it rests on the dubious case that for any chosen activity, only one person in the world can be the best. That would relegate almost all people to helpless inadequacy, which I find not only a rather depressing prospect, but also not quite supported by actual lived experience.
That is an interesting perspective. I think makes the ability to distinguish between intrinsic and extrinsic motivation/validation a must have existencial-survival skill.
Goes the other way, lots of people reported that their oddity finally found other similar people to share it to.
I don't think internet really made a difference about group size. Even a large town (-pole) would make your life minuscule, and I have to live in a small place to see how much it affects life (peacefulness or not, efficiency, calmness)
Even a small town is far, far larger than the tribes in which we evolved. The amount of our history which involves sich large communities only encompasses something like 1% of our evolutionary history and should be considered in that context.
Come to Europe, we're all super mediocre here and it's great.
Less snarky, I find that attaching your identity to what you do is a profoundly American thing. "I'm a Rubyist", "I'm a runner", "I'm a Republican". The moment you are what you do, everything becomes so.. important.
I'm not sure if this is just my filter bubble, but most people I know "like to make demos" (as in Demoscene[0]), "enjoy speed cycling on Sunday mornings", "run a business" and "voted for the social democrats last election". It's not just a semantic difference.
BTW, if you really want to experience what I'm talking about, visit a demoparty. Some people making demos are really absurdly good at what they do, it's daunting (and still totally worthless btw). Nevertheless you'll see lots of other people make demos, and really do their best at it. They know they're going to lose the compo if at least one of the big shots have an entry, but they don't care. It's an absolutely wonderful experience. (and very encouraging) (and it sometimes makes you put out horrible crap that you're ashamed of later but hey it was fun at the time)
>Less snarky, I find that attaching your identity to what you do is a profoundly American thing. "I'm a Rubyist", "I'm a runner", "I'm a Republican". The moment you are what you do, everything becomes so.. important.
For the better part of a millennium people in Europe changed professions so little from generation to generation that it became baked into their last names in some places.
I dont think that s the way it goes. Its just that if there was 1 smith in a village he was identified as such. The occupation had to be rare and important ( eg they wouldn t call you farmer. His children would keep the name regardless of their job (given that ppl had a lot of kids and the job had to be rare it s impossible that they d all do the same job)
> Less snarky, I find that attaching your identity to what you do is a profoundly American thing. "I'm a Rubyist", "I'm a runner", "I'm a Republican". The moment you are what you do, everything becomes so.. important.
This is also a very German thing, especially due to the German apprenticeship system.
Many Germans, that don't go into higher education, do an apprenticeship in their teens and often end up working in that line of work for the rest of their lives. As doing another apprenticeship when you are older, and living on your own, is often not feasible due to the low income.
If somebody doesn't have either of the two, higher education or an apprenticeship they are usually considered a "nobody" as ones educational background is one of the main defining factors in German social hierarchy, in which "unlearned" occupations are generally looked down upon.
It's a very shortsighted view on society and in parts responsible for the current shortage of nurses and other jobs with difficult working circumstances and low social standing.
Yup, many Germans just love their honorifics, even if they are only for show, it shows their "standing/accomplishments" and thus is an extremely important part of their social identity, that's why many insist on using their full honorifics when referring to them: "I'm not just a professor in XY, I'm also a doctor in XYZ and ZYX!".
That's why bought honorific titles, usually by foreign universities/academies are a somewhat popular business in Germany. [0]
It's the same deal with "siezen" and "duzen", some Germans take a lot of offense if you simply "du" them. To them, that's a sign of lacking respect towards them.
Imho Germans are very similar to Japanese in a lot of these things. The form is often way more important than function, at least in a lot of social matters.
+1 for your vision. I also love demoscene and am a former scener.
The idea is not to be the best. The philosophy is to experiement, try, and have fun while discovering what we, or others, can achieve.
My hobby is electronics. I'm learning every time I practice and the fun and rewarding part is that there is still a lot to learn and improve. That's what a hobby should be.
Well I think he accidentally debunked me. Most people in the demoscene indeed refer to themselves as (demo)sceners. Hmm. I wonder how wrong this makes me about Republicans and Rubyists.
I've made demos, but I don't like attaching my whole identity to a group of people, it's close to cultish. On the other hand it makes you feel good about yourself and allows one to attach one's status to other people's status. For this reason it is inevitable that people would do it.
I have to say, I'm an American and I think we're definitely that way about our professions ("I'm a __________") but I don't really recognize the "hobbyists" described in the article.
> BTW, if you really want to experience what I'm
> talking about, visit a demoparty.
We have lots of that here in America!
Well, not demoscene meets (sadly!) but all the people I know who have passionate hobbies don't really "identify" with them.
I looooooooove playing tennis (2-3x per week) and I'm always trying to improve along with my wife but I don't have a goal to compete in tournaments or anything. I don't typically say "I'm a tennis player."
I'm also passionate about being an audio hobbyist but I'm happy wading in the shallow end of the pool; I don't even design my own speakers, I'm happy using the designs others have made and putting my own finishes on them. There are a few competitions in this hobby, but they are friendly and collegial and collaborative sort of like the demo parties... well, except all the guys are 55+ years old.
I have friends that are very very passionate about art, running, etc but I don't see them really shaping their identity around those things.
MORE IMPORTANTLY THOUGH: thank you for making my morning brighter by mentioning the demo scene =)
While Americans would say "I'm a _insert_hobby_or_job_or_responsibility_here_," they don't necessarily limit themselves to just one item.
Like in my case, at this point in time I would say I'm a software engineer, a video and board game designer, a writer, and a hiker (well maybe just one or two depending on the context, but if I was writing a Twitter bio or something it'd include these things).
If I was a mother or a father, I'd probably say that (most parents do), and if I cared enough about religion or politics, I'd probably include that also, but I don't really identify with anything too strongly there (or what to highlight or emphasize it), or if I cared about a specific identity label (gay, sapiosexual, polyamorous, genderfluid, whatever), that tends to get included also nowadays, especially with younger people.
As the parent points out, there's no reason this must be the case. I'd encourage you to open your mind to the possibility of separating your core identity from being a programmer. It's totally up to you of course! But believe me when I say there's way more to life than this.
This is a phenomenon I think a lot about -- how globalization and the sheer amount of information we have available requires you to either drastically increase your expectations of yourself or drop them all together.
Think about what being an alpha among a primitive group of humans (or apes) entails. It's part something that is internalized and demonstrated by that individual, and part reinforced socially by the rest of a small group of people who, within the context of the group, plainly recognize that individual as "best". This same dynamic exists for craftsmen among the group, for instance.
Being at the top is always a function of where everyone else on your radar is at. It's just now you have to be your own cheerleader, because it's a much bigger pond.
You have to make calculated decisions about how different things validate you (recreation vs greatness); being great at something in the 21st century really means putting your head down and having an unwavering faith in yourself. You have to keep lifting yourself back up, as the reward is always 10 steps out and always fleeting. At the same time, you now have an infinite amount of resources and inspiration for what you could become. You aren't limited by the nearest available expert, and you aren't limited by your imagination. It's all there for you to pick off the shelf.
If you have kids, this kinda changes for a lot of people. You'll still have these feelings, but the little monsters change your view points a fair bit. Being on top, or really comparing yourself to others that are far far away, kinda drops away. I'm talking from a male perspective here, as I know the mommy-bloggers are demon spawn in the comparisons regard. But when something that REALLY is super important comes along and keeps bugging you to play monster trucks, that hierarchy urge transforms from 'me me me' to 'them them them'. Sure, parenthood is hectic as all get out, and providing for the puke machines is NOT easy. But there is a personal existential calmness that smooths out the ambitions of self towards an ambition of family (and 8 hours of sleep!).
Not the OP, but I think what he means is that mommy-bloggers provide a very visible, high-bar point of comparison. Many of these mommy-blogs (though certainly not all) show perfect lives, perfect activities, perfectly photogenic children, perfect this and perfect that.
The reality is that (especially early) parenthood is very harsh, and very hard to do alone -- doing it while achieving this "perfect life" as displayed on these blogs is basically impossible for working parents, but it's portrayed as being easy.
Naturally, many mothers feel that their own efforts fall far short in comparison, and feel like they're failing their children as a result. As a new dad, I can tell you this is one of the biggest fears and one of the most painful feelings I have ever experienced.
Could there be similar daddy-bloggers with daddy-blogs showing perfect daddy lives? Absolutely. But somehow it's not very prevalent.
I suspect that part of the reason why insecurity inducing daddy blogs are comparatively rare is that the bar for fathers is traditionally very low compared to what is expected of mothers in regard to caring for children.
The standard for being a great mother is high verging on impossible. Be available to your children 24/7, be patient, kind, and caring 24/7, be interested in every detail of your children's lives, prepare fresh nutritious meals and snacks, keep the house clean, oh, and get a part time job.
The traditional standard for being a great father is relatively modest. Earn enough to pay the bills, spend a non-zero amount of time with your children, show some modest level of interest in your children's lives, don't get drunk and hit your wife and kids. Simply being physically present and not being abusive gets you points as a dad.
Mothers can pretty much never do enough. Meanwhile fathers like myself get praised for doing relatively trivial things like going to a playground on the weekend or making the effort to NOT work late so as to be home before the kids go to bed.
> The traditional standard for being a great father is relatively modest. Earn enough to pay the bills, spend a non-zero amount of time with your children, show some modest level of interest in your children's lives, don't get drunk and hit your wife and kids. Simply being physically present and not being abusive gets you points as a dad.
Sort of. I definitely feel guilty about not spending enough time with my kids doing hobbies, imparting knowledge and skills, etc. I feel very selfish because I want my own time.
Then again, I feel that quite a lot of current children are coddled and over parented.
But how much of that is me rationalizing my own guilt, and how much is justified? I definitely don't do a lot of research on what parenting is best (partially because I'm not sure how trustworthy any of that is, but again, confirmation bias...).
Such an appropriate post for this article. It seems that we could expand the argument supporting mediocrity beyond the scope of hobbies and include parenthood as well.
Exactly! I'm certain daddy-bloggers exist out there, but the mommy-bloggers are on a whole other level. Early childhood is just ... fluids ... everywhere. Having time for perfect makeup and lighting design is hysterically funny in it's unreality, but nonetheless, make MANY women feel terrible all the same. I can't count the number of ladies I know that deal with PPD.
What I tell my younger friends and colleagues is: "You don't want to see what people my age post on Facebook." The endless bragging on top of bragging, about their wonderful luxury vacations, home cooked meals, and brilliant children.
Yeah, sure. Mommy bloggers is just a group prone to coplmparing, oneupmanship, and being “perfect”. Not all of them of course, but it is a thing. Just call them hyper-perfectionist parent bloggers
As a counterpoint, most US Presidents and also most billionaires have children. I don't see much historical evidence for children being a damper on ambition.
Outside of the privileged few, having children is about having family. For those privileged few who trade money for someone else to handle any and all steps that come along with child rearing it is largely about bloodlines and passing on the family name, typically to children whose mother had world class genetic makeup.
A personal example for me is computer games. I used to play for a good amount of time during high school (my parents would argue too much), and I really did enjoy it. Losses would be annoying and sting a little, but it was easy to brush them off and play another round of the original DotA. Getting into university, I had a whole lot less time, but the people I came across were much better, and wins spread farther and farther apart. Still I had hope that after I graduated, I'd have more time to get back into it. I ended up switching to World of Warcraft after I graduated because there were things to do outside of competing all the time. A few years after I graduated, Twitch arrived on the radar, and the having all that knowledge of that many people that were better than me became obviously apparent. I still had a feeling of hope, but now it was coupled with the beginnings of what I would say is a realization that I'm not at all that good to the point that I avoid playing certain games to avoid being reminded of that within a game.
It's not simply enough to avoid multiplayer for me: I try to look for things that I can both grok, but is more of a niche game / less popular to avoid being exposed to a constant source to compare myself against.
Twitch is what made you realize you weren't good enough? VODs in the 90s for Starcraft or CS were more than enough to convince me that being competitive was nigh impossible.
Another option is to specialize to a very large degree. It's possible for almost anyone (assuming sufficient motivation) to become a leading expert in a field or the one of the best at some activity, as long as it's sufficiently niche. You may have to go in a subfield of a subfield of a subfield in many cases, but it's much more realistic to be in the top 10 of something with just a few hundred practitioners than something with a few million.
Take music, becoming one of the top 100 pop musicians on the planet in terms of popularity is incredibly unlikely, but top 100 of some more obscure genre (such as synthwave) is more achievable. You can add more qualifiers - (e.g. Italo-disco inspired synthwave) until you feel comfortable with the pool of competitors, and you'll be far less at risk of feeling insignificant and overshadowed.
Or, instead of narrowing your niche, you can hone a combination of skills. Think of any of the multisport competitions (biathlon, triathlon, winter quadrathlon). The more exotic the combination, the more likely you are the best in the world.
> ow globalization and the sheer amount of information we have available requires you to either drastically increase your expectations of yourself or drop them all together.
As someone who grew up and studies in a third world country, seeing kids younger than me doing impressive things in Stanford for example is depressing as hell but compared to my peers, I am doing extremely well.
As someone who grew up in Northern California an hour from San Francisco and works in the tech industry in that area, besides that difference I could have written your comment myself.
If it makes you feel any better 90% of those achievements are crap and the other 10% depend heavily on older mentors who've spent their lives studying the topic.
I completely agree. I would even go on to add that what is held at high regard in culture is often, may I say always, not that great. What makes something great, regardless of what it is, is the state of your inner self - which might sound like hogwash but to which I firmly hold to be true. And anyways, your life is so inexpressibly your own that to be mournful because someone has something you don't have, is on a path you would like to be, etc, is to render your life and your path not true and not fruitful to the greatest extent possible. As naive as all the above may sound.
Related: my university started supporting students in doing all the things I dreamed of (drones, rocketry, rovers) a few years after I graduated. Trying hard not to be, but I'm really jealous.
If you’re a jogger, it is no longer enough to cruise around the block; you’re training for the next marathon. If you’re a painter, you are no longer passing a pleasant afternoon, just you, your watercolors and your water lilies; you are trying to land a gallery show or at least garner a respectable social media following. When your identity is linked to your hobby — you’re a yogi, a surfer, a rock climber — you’d better be good at it, or else who are you?
Similar thoughts cross my mind every time I'm passed by a cyclist with a $2,500 bike wearing technicolor corporate spandex.
As someone riding an ancient bike in a grubby, flapping getup, I sometimes wonder who's having more fun.
Ask them. Just because someone is riding a nice bike and wearing athletic clothing doesn't mean they don't enjoy their hobby (on the contrary, my instinct would be to say they do enjoy it since they obviously spend so much money on it).
I’m not a distance athlete and can’t comment on their gear or thought process.
However, for strength training, I’ve made two small purchases (a belt and deadlift straps). They’ve been both fun and a way to help me in the process. I spent a total of around 40 dollars, so it isn’t quite comparable, but my point is that I can provide one anecdatum that exercise equipment for a hobby can be fun.
Getting a nice pair of lifting shoes made the whole process a lot more fun for me. I was surprised at how much more comfortable they made lifts like the squat. They're pretty cheap, too. Worth checking out if you haven't yet got a pair.
FWIW, riding in jeans gave me folliculitis, and a well maintained & fit bike is more pleasant to ride. Don't let the desire to separate yourself from the spandex crowd drive you to torture yourself.
You don't have to have spandex for the legs, for me synthetic hiking pants have done fine, and also courds in the winter. The problem was basically two things- jeans were abrasive, wearing away hair follicles, and they didn't breathe, trapping a lot of sweat/humidity.
If you're riding for very long, though, you will probably want padded shorts. I used to think they were silly, but after a couple of rides where my butt was seriously sore afterwards and one where my junk went numb, I swapped out my old saddle for one with a split down the middle and started wearing padded shorts and now I can bike for 40+ miles without getting sore.
I like my cycling tunic/jersey thing because it gets really good airflow, but I've gone on long rides in just a plain old t-shirt, too.
IMHO a lot of this is the need for adaptation to increased stress.
I've heard a lot of stories of people going through quite a few different saddles until they finally find one that "works", but in the meantime they've also been spending a lot of time riding and have toughened up their posterior. So was it the saddle or the adaptation that solved the issue?
I'll wear padded shorts and lycra for a looong ride (2-6 hours) as it's just more comfortable, but plain tights under short and a cotton tshirt is fine for the 30min commute.
I think there is a movement toward sincerity and realistic expectations in a lot of these things. For example, the most popular mountain biking youtube channels are all people who are kindof okay at riding but do it because they love having fun. Whilst those youtubers themselves are trying to garner success, it shows that a lot of people don't really care about racing mountain bikes. That's true for a lot of mountain bikers I know in real life too. Even those on the 8k engineering masterpiece still don't aspire to enter any races or have any delusions of grandeur.
I myself ride some pretty wierd, definitely not race spec bikes and I love every minute of it. I never considered racing or "winning at bikes" to be important to me.
To be fair (as a hobbyist cyclist myself), there are multiple sub-hobbies. The act of riding is one. The act of assembling, repairing, maintaining, and upgrading a bike is another. Some people really enjoy geeking out over the latter.
"There are two ways you can get exercise out of a bicycle: you can “overhaul” it, or you can ride it. On the whole, I am not sure that a man who takes his pleasure overhauling does not have the best of the bargain. He is independent of the weather and the wind; the state of the roads troubles him not. Give him a screw-hammer, a bundle of rags, an oil-can, and something to sit down upon, and he is happy for the day. He has to put up with certain disadvantages, of course; there is no joy without alloy. He himself always looks like a tinker, and his machine always suggests the idea that, having stolen it, he has tried to disguise it; but as he rarely gets beyond the first milestone with it, this, perhaps, does not much matter.
The mistake some people make is in thinking they can get both forms of sport out of the same machine. This is impossible; no machine will stand the double strain. "
Jerome K. Jerome, Three Men On A Bummel, 1914[1]
(The very-much underrated sequel to Three Men in a Boat -- probably because of the title! -- in which the three men take a trip across Germany on 1 bike and 1 tandem).
True. I enjoy both. A couple of my bikes are assembled from old frames and parts. Hiding under the shabby exterior of each bike is a finely tailored machine. But these bikes are also work horses.
Having been both riders in this situation - I'd speculate that you're the one having more fun. I went through phases of recreational cyclist -> competitive cyclist and racer -> back to recreational cyclist.
Training and racing was immensely satisfying for the few moments when I would beat a personal best or place well, but it wasn't necessarily fun. The time, suffering and monetary cost of bike racing even on at the amateur-with-no-hope-of-going-pro level is crazy. The most fun I've had cycling was doing leisurely rides with friends or even just around the neighborhood with my partner.
I see a lot of MAMILs (middle-aged men in lycra) on my regular rides. What I genuinely never see is them smiling- the person may change, but various levels of grimace is the universal expression. If they truly are enjoying themselves, they hide it pretty well.
I say this without judgment. I ride a custom recumbent, so it's not like I have anything against spending money on the hobby. But I do wonder what the drive is that seems to affect so many people the same way.
YMMV but the reason I bike to work (and have been biking to work for the past 7 years) is because I enjoy the experience of going as hard as I can, heart pumping, asphalt rolling fast under my wheel while taking turns fast, feeling wind in my hair. You won't see me smiling (while passing you at 25mph) just like you won't see someone at the gym smiling when pushing heavy weights, but I prefer my commute to the alternative of driving stuck in traffic. Because for me the alternative isn't "bike relaxed, take in the nature", that's just too boring and slow and it doesn't hold any interest to me.
So you people need to stop being judgy. I won't judge someone because they ride a crappy looking bike in crappy clothes so don't judge someone for riding a fancy looking bike in lycra (which btw is very comfortable athletic wear, you should try it). Everyone is having fun in their own way, they have their own motivations for doing some of the same things. Just because I put a lot of effort (and money) into my biking it doesn't mean I don't enjoy it, it's my favorite part of going to work.
Did you mean to reply to me? I think I was clear that what I said was without judgement. I genuinely don't understand the perspective of the people who grimace all the time while riding. If you get off on passing people, ok. And it really is ok, there's nothing wrong with feeling competitive. That's not what it is about for me, and I both bike and lift, and push myself hard. I just enjoy the process and the camaraderie.
I race motorcycles. I don't get joy out of it, I get satisfaction and a feeling of achievement. I get a feeling of ultimate focus for 15 minutes. Nothing compares to it. I can't imagine processing the experience as an emotion, that would require taking focus away from the knife edge of going fast but not fast enough to crash. My good friend races with me and he says it's the most fun thing ever, he's grinning in his helmet. We are doing the same thing, we are getting something positive from it, but we have completely different ways we experience it.
I think you and the person you're replying to may just be defining "enjoy" differently. To me, enjoying something just means you like doing it for some reason or another, not necessarily that you're on cloud nine throughout.
I wouldn't say I'm on cloud nine. But if I'm out for a ride, and things are working like the should, no leg stiffness, balance isn't off... It really does make me happy enough to smile. And that in turn makes my effort feel lightened. It is so much more enjoyable than the approach I took when I was in my 20's, which was more of the no pain/no gain variety.
I can absolutely get euphoria while pushing myself to the limit (I don't bike or wear Lycra, though.) I don't know if I have the free energy to smile in those moments...
I mean.. nobody smiles in the middle of exercise. I thoroughly enjoy working hard and pushing myself on my bike, but it definitely doesn't make me smile. I might smile 3 hours later when I see I broke a few personal records though.
I do? I mean, I don't consider myself an unusual athlete or anything. But if I'm biking or lifting, I almost always have a smile on my face, even while pushing myself. So do other people I know, so I really don't think it's unusual.
Yes, you are basically an 'unusual athlete', at least in this regard. Going along at top speed or riding up a steep hill takes effort and the last thing on most people's minds is their facial expression - so they might assume an expression that allows easy breathing or possibly tense all their facial muscles.
I have to say, I'm kind of surprised at the negative reaction saying smiling while exercising has gotten in this subthread. It really is something a lot of folks do. It's even something that top-tier athletes do on purpose: https://www.cnn.com/2018/02/12/health/smile-running-energy-p...
Even if it isn't something one does without being prompted, frame of mind is such an important part of performance. Anything that can lower perceived effort is worth taking seriously.
I'm not riding in lycra, but yes I use padded bike shorts under my montainbike shorts, but I don't do roadbikes (yet).
I don't think I ever smile when riding a bike, either my mind wanders if it's "easy" or I am concentrated because I don't want to hurt myself.
On my commute (by bike) I even sometimes actively think about hard problems at work, apparently I look very grim because only a month ago a ~10 year old was shouting "come on, smile" at me when I was passing him. Or maybe I was just imagining it because it's so funny :P
What I'm saying is.. I know a ton of people who don't smile while riding a bike. Or doing anything except when talking to other people or reading something funny.
They might be fighting for their future sustainable health as some issues probably already manifested themselves and reduced their quality of life. Such a training after a lifetime of not caring is no fun...
I'm 44. Oddly enough, it was only after the spectre of long-term health issues raised its head that I was able to let go of some of the stress and just enjoy exercising for what it is, even beyond the health benefits. I'm almost (almost) thankful, in a way.
Is there a name for the feeling you get when you discover something you thought only you noticed or knew about has a name (and essays written about it, and a documentary)?
Counterpoint: I never smile while doing something physically intensive. I am almost always focusing on breathing technique (especially for cardio) or general form.
Can I ask about your breathing techniques for cardio? It’s something I’ve thought about some, but tend to waffle between being important and worthy of focus, or just letting my body do its thing.
> Similar thoughts cross my mind every time I'm passed by a cyclist with a $2,500 bike wearing technicolor corporate spandex.
To each his own, but I can't imagine getting much enjoyment out of road cycling.
Now mountain biking seems to me much more interesting.
And my friends and I don't compete to go the fastest, we try to 'clean' difficult trails. To clean a section means to ride it without putting a foot down or stopping.
You need to watch your line, and traction becomes your most precious resource on climbs. Apply too much power when your back tire is over a root and you'll blow the climb. You have to keep a constant awareness of where the contact patch of your back wheel is at all times. You can't just mash up the climb and 'win.'
It's like the difference between saying: "I'll ride this trail faster than you" and "I'll ride this trail 'better' than you."
I myself ride a pair of $2500 mountain bikes, but they are a mix of ghetto old components (one frame is 20yrs old with gripshift!) and high end parts (Chris King rear hubs).
I put the money where it makes the most difference.
Also, re lycra, I've been known to ride wearing a mechanic's jumpsuit when the stinging nettles are bad, but I do sometimes wear the lycra stuff too.
Similar thoughts cross my mind every time I'm passed by a cyclist with a $2,500 bike wearing technicolor corporate spandex.
When I was very young, and about a third my current weight, I rode my bike from Montreal to Vancouver with a bunch of friends.
They all had the latest $500+ touring cycles. I had a brown $99 generic bike from Toys R Us.
We all got there at the same time. And since my bike was far less engineered and precise than theirs, mine broke less often and could be repaired much easier.
YMMV when it comes to bikes. About 3 years ago I bought a cheap bike from Canadian Tire, and on the first day riding it to work, both pedals broke off.
It's like most things, buy the literal cheapest item you can and it'll probably be shit. Buy something in the lower middle of the price range and it'll probably serve you well for most uses. With bikes, that's probably $300-600.
One pedal broke off, then I tried riding with one foot on the crank arm, and the other on the pedal. A couple seconds later, the other pedal broke off.
Apparently it was a pretty common issue with the series of bikes.
Having had mostly cheap bikes before, I finally ponied up the cash for a decent bike. Not a racer or anything, a not too expensive ordinary 8-speed flat bar city bike, with a good aluminum frame, fenders, luggage rack, good ergonomics and quality Shimano components.
Compared to the cheaper bikes I used to ride, the difference is night and day.
You don't have to go crazy, but you should spend enough to get good quality.
When I used to commute 10 miles on bike every day I started out with fairly cheap bike. It worked fine but then I got an opportunity to get a better bike for very good price. Having better brakes and smoother gear shifts and a lot of other details made my commute much better. there is certainly a point where spending more doesn't make things better though.
Nothing wrong with riding on a cheap bike of course, but your latter statement doesn't really ring true to me.
The "extra" money into more expensive bikes may partially be marketing/name brand but most of it either goes into making things lighter or stronger (and sometimes both). A real touring spec bike will tend to be on the heavier side (at least, compared to race bikes) but be much stronger than a typical bike. They really are pretty robust. I don't know if your friends were just unlucky and you were lucky, but it might just be sample size, as you'd really want to measure this over much longer times/distances.
I have friends who pretty much always ride cheap bikes due to losing them semi-regularly in the city. The main differences between them and more medium-price bikes seem to be: poor brakes and clunky shifters, and occasional catastrophic failure of components (i.e. not repairable without replacement). Oh, and they tend to be heavy.
Instinctively, that seems like a rather long way to bike at an age where one gets a bike from Toys R Us. I admit, though, that I've never particularly looked into the bikes on offer there -- as far as I was aware, they were limited to toy plastic tricycles and the like -- so perhaps they simply had a larger selection than I would have expected.
Hobbies can be just for enjoyment. If you're not growing in some area of your life though (relationships, family, career, hobby, knowledge) you're stagnating.
I think one of the best possible desiderata for society is to reconfigure work so that we do a lot less of it, and so that less of our self-identity and self-respect depends upon it.
By the way, for those that didn't realise, this article is clearly riffing off Bertrand Russell's well-known essay, 'In Praise of Idleness'.
When I bring that up to many people, they gawk. That’s just abhorrent. But, at some point, that must be the end goal, right?
For at least five generations, my ancestors have been working hard to “give their kids a better life.” But, at what point will the goal be to give one’s kids the time and resources to be idle? If I was president of the world, I’d make that Humanity’s moonshot project.
Of course, it may not ever be possible. But, hey, there are 100 million people out there smarter than me. Surely, someone can figure it out.
Your comment reminded me of this quote even though it might not entirely fit the topic at hand:
"I must study Politicks and War that my sons may have liberty to study Mathematicks and Philosophy. My sons ought to study mathematicks and philosophy, geography, natural history, naval architecture, navigation, commerce, and agriculture, in order to give their children a right to study painting, poetry, musick, architecture, statuary, tapestry, and porcelaine.” John Adams, Letter to Abigail Adams, May 12, 1780.
As I said, it might not apply to this overall discussion but I've always found it quite poignant. Sadly society is more apt to ridicule those who still pursue liberal arts due to it's economic opportunity costs. While technically correct I believe that should come from the viewpoint that this could be considered a sad failure in humanity's progress.
Hard times create strong men,
Strong men create good times,
Good times create weak men,
Weak men create hard times.
Progress is something desirable only when you are in the bad part of that cycle. When you are in the good part of that cycle, progress takes you around to the bad part.
I dont think that poem describes real world and real history. Hard times often generated men who did not created good times, but create even worst way more violent oppressive times. Think world wars, French revolution, communists in Russia etc.
Hard times create hard people and that that can have very unfortunate consequences.
And good times did not necessary created men who create hard times, they often created men wanted to keep things good.
> And good times did not necessary created men who create hard times, they often created men wanted to keep things good.
But did they? Looking at the world today, I feel that good times create men who take good times for granted, not understanding what made those good times possible in the first place, and who through inaction or cluelessness work to undo those things. See e.g. our generation working hard to undo all the improvements for the workers, ones which our great-^n-grandparents paid in blood for.
Given that I don't know which generation and country you are from, it is hard to counteract. I don't know who or what causes your great-^n-grandparents were fighting for. I have no idea about link between past wars and whatever your generation is undoing.
If anything else it sounds a bit like caricature. Past generation fought against others of the past generation. Members of past generations have different interests and some have good life others bad. So maybe it is more about which sub-group of whatever generation is winning and able to effectively push for own interests.
For the sake of context, I would be an early millennial from Poland.
But my point is applicable to pretty much the entire western world; the struggle of our great-^n-grandparents is the one against insanely bad working conditions in the XIX and early XX century. The one that gave us modern employment laws, which both my fellow millennials and gen-X'ers are trying hard to revert.
This is backwards. It is a good economy that made those employment laws possible. The good times came first.
Overdoing those employment laws will strangle the economy, pushing us around the cycle to hard times. It is the "weak men" who push for this, trying to avoid even the modest amount of suffering that is required to be competitive.
Backing off on those laws will delay collapse.
You really don't want to see the collapse. At that point, employment laws count for nothing. You work illegally or you starve.
This isn't backwards, unless somehow not touching employment laws is strangling the economy. Nobody is trying to overdo those laws; they're mostly fine, but businesses these days increasingly try to skirt them and make such practices the new default.
I am not an expert on Polish history, but afaik, Polish became to have current employment laws not because employer/employee clashes (which happened more on west - GB and USA). Polish tended to emigrate.
The Polish history and current laws have a lot to do with legacy of Communism and how it came to be. Early XX century was more about moving toward war and then being in war and Russian threat.
I agree completely! I remember having a conversation with my parents about one of those "robots taking all the jobs" articles and I brought up universal basic income as a solution to mass technological unemployment and they seemed very unconvinced that it would be a good world where nobody had to "work."
I think a lot of people equate not working with not doing anything and they imagine massive slums full of unemployed people sitting around being miserable.
I've always felt nearly the opposite. Even doing work like estate planning felt kind of silly in the big picture compared to just spending time with my family, reading, writing, exercising, learning new things.
A person can spend just a couple thousand dollars on a car that works. Or somewhere between ten and twenty thousand dollars on a car that's really reliable. But you can also spend as much as many people earn in a lifetime on a car. Clothes are similar. You can buy decent clothes at Target for cheap, or you can buy similar clothing for hundreds of times as much from designer brands. I'm not saying those goods are all the same quality, but the prices of lots of things can be arbitrarily high based on their social importance.
I think work loses a ton of meaning when so much of the product of your work can be devoured by status goods like these. There will always be another status good to buy.
The end goal can't possibly be for everyone to have a yacht... Even if it were, everyone would just want a bigger yacht. If we don't need more stuff forever, eventually we'll be able to make all the stuff we need with almost no work, and all that will be left is to figure out how to lead fulfilling lives that don't revolve around acquiring yachts.
> all that will be left is to figure out how to lead fulfilling lives that don't revolve around acquiring yachts.
Well, there is the huge problem. Finding meaning is not only a difficult problem on a personal level, but the entire inertia of the existing system is moving precisely to prevent finding that meaning.
This is cause to be skeptical of any technological solution.
Imho, it is easier to approach from a cultural level. To that end, we seem to be moving backwards: we already had huge cultural apparatuses which (mostly) eschewed material things for a meaning based (somewhat, depending on who you ask...) on humanistic connection. We have been doing our best to dismantle it in the past few generations.
That point is definitely now! Not only for kids but also for ourselves (as some of us don't have kids). If we can give ourselves more idleness to fill up with things that we enjoy, we should be pursuing that. Some people simply cannot see beyond work as you say and can't even fathom the idea. They don't matter. Let them work sixteen hour days while we do four or six or even less, play soccer, write, paint, travel, or even passively watch tv. Why not? To each his own. The great thing is that some of us have this freedom and we should indeed take advantage of it. We should provide it to our kids if we can. And the masses who want to work 80 hour weeks? They are free to do that too. It's the people that don't but are forced to work like that that we should try to help and lift up.
Totally agree, with one caveat - don't then turn around and complain when these hard workers, or especially their hardworking children and grandchildren, have more resources than you and yours.
I would not as in my case, and most people's I would bet, working harder does not produce more money or resources. Whether I work four hours or sixteen a day, I still get paid the same. As a programmer, there really is no place to get promoted and bonuses/raises seem to be non-existent. The less I, and other salaried employees, manage to spend working each day, the higher our hourly rate. If I was working for myself or paid hourly, things would be different. If my employer cared enough to give me bonuses/raises/more vacation instead of taking benefits away, things would also be different. As it stands, the only thing I get from working more is poorer health, stress, and the extreme costs that come with that.
I don't think it has to be the end goal. In fact I think idleness should not be foisted on anyone. It's awful.
There are demonstrably many people who don't need to work (e.g. anyone with over a few millions dollars), who choose to work anyway.
It gives a sense of purpose, a reason to get up in the morning. Human beings are not well adapted to being idle. It's like a muscle - you don't want to overload it, but it needs some load to thrive. Hormesis.
Humans need stress to grow and thrive.
Even animals need work. Zookeepers don't just feed animals, they put food inside metal boxes with holes in the corners, or hidden in nooks, so the animal has to work to get at it. They understand that it's good for the animal.
Bring on FALC! Fully automated luxury communism. This, or simply the push for more free time for everybody, is one of my life goals. Kinda my main goal actually.
Strange how we, in the UK, have an eight hour day, weekends, public holidays, sick pay, and maternity and paternity leave, then. Or that France has a legally mandated 35-hour working week.
What exactly do you think would happen if we had a four day working week? Labour would be more evenly distributed. Productivity would go up. We'd all live better and more fulfilling lives. What is good for humans, and for societies, is not to amass as much wealth as possible.
I think UBI (or even better, universal basic services) would be a colossal act of social liberation.
Hmm, well you all did spend a few centuries looting treasure from the rest of the world, you know.
If what you really want is for work to be more evenly distributed on a global basis, this is probably going to mean an increase in the amount of work for places like England and France.
And I think that if these were the optimal way for society to operate, we would already been doing it. Capitalism and Communism, in the form of bartering and tribes exist since the first societies.
> Strange how we, in the UK, have an eight hour day, weekends, public holidays, sick pay, and maternity and paternity leave, then. Or that France has a legally mandated 35-hour working week.
To make it clear, if France started to decline compared to other countries economically where their competitors have a labor force doing better work and spending more time, something would have to change. Wannabe "productivity" would go up don't show in numbers.
"And I think that if these were the optimal way for society to operate, we would already been doing it."
Why? That seems like an extraordinarily implausible claim to me. Presumably you don't think human societies at all times and places are 'optimal', so why would the Western world at the present moment be? And in any case, what is understood to be optimal is historically variable, which is, in part, my point: maybe we should realign our culture.
"Capitalism and Communism, in the form of bartering and tribes exist since the first societies."
Again, I profoundly disagree. Capitalism is a historically specific configuration of social, economic and legal arrangements. It requires that the economy be elevated into an independent sphere of production and exchange, free of direct political control (contrary to feudalism). It requires the creation of a large surplus population, driven out of subsistence agriculture (the historical norm for the last six-thousand years), who come to depend for the means of life on renting themselves out to a small elite with a monopoly on the means of production. It requires this to be at a sufficient scale that large profits can be ploughed back into investment in a cumulative process of self-expansion. This has generally required a certain amount of stability, a powerful military base, and sophisticated trade networks, among much else (as in Northern Italy in the middle of the last millennium, or the Dutch imperial network after that, or the British Empire after that). Similar things can be said about communism - though it's more complicated.
"If France started to decline compared to other countries economically where their competitors have a labor force doing better work and spending more time, something would have to change".
Why would they do 'better work'? Generally, if people do less hours of work, their productivity in the hours they do work goes up. Part of the point of reducing working hours is to redistribute those hours more evenly. So it is not simply a reduction; it is also an addition. But I would assume net working hours would decline, and thus net GDP. I don't see why that's a problem.
"Wannabe "productivity" would go up don't show in numbers".
> Again, I profoundly disagree. Capitalism is a historically specific configuration of social, economic and legal arrangements.
You are just talking about scales here. What I mean is that we basically have two different ways of subsisting: by working individually and trading or by working collectively and be part of a social welfare system. There is no proven third option were a huge chunk of a population's society didn't need to work for it to work. Might happen in the future, but I don't think so.
(1) It is an act of stupefying reduction to claim that every human society, across space and time, can be fitted into one of two models. That is just not very insightful or helpful. I am not talking about 'scales', I am talking about qualitative historical transformations.
(2) I am not suggesting that people do no work, I am suggesting they do less work.
The American time use statistics make it pretty clear. Our hobby is watching television and using our phones. Anyone who says they have "no hobby" almost certainly spends hours of entertainment time each day at a screen. People just mean they have no other hobby aside from the default hobby.
The same goes for anyone claiming they have no free time. No free time after sleep, work, kids and screen entertainment.
It's not at all clear to me that people WANT a different hobby than the one they've got.
Yeah, I'm not entirely clear what counts as a hobby and what doesn't.
I went to a comedy show tonight. Does that count as a hobby? I don't think so, but it's also clearly a leisure activity.
Does reading count as a hobby? It's still fairly passive, but less so than just watching. What about video games? Definitely not just passive, but how much do you have to play for it to be a hobby?
I also have no idea where this claim that we're all to competitive to have hobbies comes from. I, like the tech bro stereotype, enjoy rock climbing, the only thing that gets in the way is my laziness, not comparing myself to those far better than myself. No-one I have climbed with has expressed status anxiety about what they can and cannot climb, though I admit to being a tad competitive with those who I am close in ability to.
This author is in some super weird bubble that I have never really seen, but that's probably because I don't have kids, and that probably has a bigger impact than anything this article is talking about.
"... there’s a deeper reason, I’ve come to think, that so many people don’t have hobbies: We’re afraid of being bad at them. Or rather, we are intimidated by the expectation — itself a hallmark of our intensely public, performative age — that we must actually be skilled at what we do in our free time."
That seems weird. I haven’t taken skiing lessons in years but I certainly took them, as many friends did, long after the time there would have been any chance of pro.
And I find it hard to believe tennis is much different. Lots of people take lessons who don’t have personal coaches in many sports.
I think people give skiing lessons a pass because you can break your neck if you make a mistake on the hill. You're a lot less likely to die while playing tennis.
Downhill skiing isn't really dangerous although you may fall a lot. We're not talking skydiving which you probably want some instruction with. I've taken lessons for skiing but to improve technique and enjoy the sport more, never because I was concerned about safety.
Country Clubs and other places where people play sports like tennis and golf have regular lessons. It's not at all unusual for casual players.
I'd add that I'm an instructor/leader for hiking courses with a local club that gets a few hundred people in programs in a typical year.
Heh. I don't disagree with that. I go full fledged hobby mode in most of the stuff I do, but I like competition. Unfortunately, I'll never be the best at anything I do.
I have the 10% theory. That is, you can be top 10% in anything with deliberate practice and a really solid effort. After that, it gets exponentially harder, and natural ability plays a larger and larger effect.
I'm really into cycling. I've been doing it all my life, but I broke into the top 10% with relative ease (judging by Strava). It took me a lot more consistent effort to break into the 5%, and a whole lot more effort (and some luck) to break into the 1-3%. Beyond that, there are some serious outliers who are just so much faster than even the 1%ers. Who knows though, maybe they're car KOMs or on e-bikes. In any case, I enjoy the competitive aspects of Strava, but some people think it ruins cycling.
I have the same theory, except that hard work can get about anyone into the top 1-2% instead of top 10% (well, except maybe for income. I’m talking strictly about hobbies).
>> I broke into the top 10% with relative ease (judging by Strava)
> except that hard work can get about anyone into the top 1-2% instead of top 10%
Keep in mind that people on Strava are already self-selecting out of the general population, it is instead that 10% who are interested in measuring their performance compared to other cyclists/runners.
So these claims are equivalent. Top 10% of the 10% = 1%.
I have a lot of hobbies, some are team competitive and some are only competitive with myself. If I enjoy doing something, I don't care how bad I am at it when I start. I do like to see improvement though.
I've been playing squash for like 4 years and I still very much suck at it. The reason I stuck with it soo long is that we don't count points when we play. It's just for the fun of it, for the running, the goofy plays etc.
Recently though I'm not enjoying it as much as I used to. What I realised is that, because of the way we've been playing it, I also have the mental comfort of just walking away from it the second it stops being enjoyable without the feeling of "wasting" a couple of years.
Hah! Surprised to see squash mentioned here - such a great game. Similar to you, I love it, but am fairly bad at it (compared to the “average” person I see on the courts). That said, I’ve recently got a resurgence of excitement out of it by:
(1) paying for lessons once a week (I committed an pre-paid for 20 lessons)
(2) Attending the weekly/bi-weekly round-robins; playing/meeting people there. Anyone who I have fun, spirited rallies with, I get their contact info
(3) once a week (I put a calendar reminder), I look at my next two weeks, and I email blast my list of squash contacts and get games scheduled in
(4) my gym uses ClubLocker, which has a ranking system. Sometimes I try to “gamify” the sport by looking up people just above me in ranking, and seeing if I can beat them.
(5) once in awhile, I’ll try to turn some of the squash buddies into “real” friends - suggesting a post-squash beer, etc. It’s been really fun, and made a few real friends this way!
Nothing groundbreaking, but it’s been fun lately. Happy squashing!
Keith Johnstone has a nice passage in his book Impro where he likens adults to atrophied children (which applies to hobbies of a more artistic bent):
"If he believed he was a transmitter, rather than a creator, then we'd be able to see what his talents really were."
"We have an idea that art is self-expression - which historically is weird... Once we believe that art is self-expression, then the individual can be criticized not only for his lack of skill, but for simply being what he is."
I used to brew beer...
Man, I sucked... A lot...
Mainly due to high expectations set by my family, my friends, my co-workers, and so on.
I ended up selling everything and going for bike riding - no one expects nothing from me now...
The two sports I love, rugby and open water swimming, share a common trait: I do them badly. Don't get me wrong -- I wish I did them well -- but I don't.
When I was younger I fenced, but I was ambitious, and wanted to be a better fencer, so I worked out in a gym, had regular lessons from my coach, went to competitions. And somewhere along the line it transformed from being fun to being work. And then I stopped fencing.
These days I try my best to accept not being very good.
I think this a sidee effect of the _goal driven_ mentality so common in the US. You're never just doing something for your enjoyment; you're doing it for a goal. It's never, ever, about the journey; it's absolutely always about the destination. Of course someone in that position won't enjoy a hobby: unless they can be the best at it, and do it for a reason (money, social status), they won't do it.
Yesterday I was in the train and I overheard two young girls talking. One of them said she hoped she'd be made captain of her sports team at school, "because it would look good for college". That's it. That's the whole reason. Fill a role not because you want to contribute, or because you think you'd be good at it, but because it will be one more bullet point in a few years.
This is part of a trend where I see kids growing being instructed to use 100% of their time with goal achievements. Leisure time is a reason for shame. Hobbies would just be a waste your time. You can't _find out who you are_; instead you just need to check the imaginary boxes set by someone else that will guarantee a superficially successful life.
Would these guys be casted today? I can't imagine, we see mostly perfect faces on television.
Movies and television are not even the worst, advertising is insane. If you count the number of 'perfects' in some commercials you easily hear it 4 to 5 times in just a couple of seconds. You need perfect skin, a perfect dream kitchen, a perfect ride in a perfect car, etc.
Why do people want this? Can't blame it all to hollywood...
In addition to "worried about not being good at them", I think the competition for hobbies has greatly increased, too. My grandpa used to sit around on his porch in Indiana whittling because there was nothing else to do at night besides read and drink Budweiser (his other two favorite hobbies). Now, I can think of ten fun places to go at any hour and a million things I can do online and, all of a sudden, whittling doesn't seem so entertaining. That being said, I think that the author doesn't fully acknowledge modern hobbies (gaming comes to mind) which are part of staring at screens. In general, I believe we should always pursue hobbies we find enjoyable, no matter the difficulty, for their own sake, so maybe we just need to reset expectations a bit.
I've taken up woodworking as a hobby after not doing much in that vein since 7th grade. Using hand tools, not power tools, and taking time. One of the leaders in this movement is Paul Sellers [1], who couldn't be kindler and more inspirational. One of his key points that he stresses is that "It's not what you make, but how you make it."
I know I'll never come close to the skill level he exhibits, but I hope to approach his level of sang froid and equanimity.
Man, this list deserves to be a post in its own right.
Incidentally, the Woodwright’s Workshop show on PBS is part of the reason I donate to keep the “passport” access. Reruns of that show are pretty much the definition of my happy place.
Mr. Sellers is exceptional in his "good enough" attitude. Sometimes there are more or less precise measurements, slight differences and imperfections, etc, then he says "it's still going to last a hundred years". Also his "poor mans's" tools and ideas that demonstrate you don't have to get top of the line gear to make progress and create. I think the only areas where he aims for perfection are: tools as sharp as possible, and perfect right angles where it's important to be square.
I used to be deep into photography, and these communities were strongly focused on gear. In the hand tool woodworking circles I get the feeling that gear is so much less important - of course you need a basic set of tools, but you can buy them vintage, 100 years old still in working condition and often cheap, and these will last you a lifetime, as they did for the previous owners. There are also brand new options, some more pricy than others, but I am yet to witness a heated discussion on why my brand of hand saws is better than yours, or why a single specific detail of a hand plane design makes it basically unusable on a pro level - which is the very kind of unproductive discussion that makes up a huge volume of photographer's forums.
Also, I went back to photography with the attitude I have learned in wood working. Got a good enough mirrorless camera (still better specs than my last DSLR which was a semi-pro level equipment when I got it years ago). Dusted off my manual focus, USSR-made lenses and M42 adapter. It's a lot of fun again, these lenses are older than me and will last me a lifetime, just as my pre-WWII hand planes, saws and chisels. Since none of it is about the tools, it's how you use them and how much fun you have along the way.
I'm drawn to this hobby because it seems that with few exceptions, the craft is about skill, not tools. The tools are often the same ones used hundreds of years ago; even the newer ones are only slight variations. It's made me appreciate the craftsmanship of stuff made in the last century.
Also, the Internet is both blessing and a curse here. On the one hand, you have
free access to all the information and educational material you need to quickly get up to speed with pretty much any hobby imaginable. On the other hand, you also get to see so many people doing so much better than you. I find it subtly intimidating.
It's easy not to care how good you are at your hobbies when you're already really good at something else. It takes a tremendous amount of time and energy to really master something. There just isn't time in the day left over to master multiple things.
I'd like to think I'm pretty good at programming. I spend many hours a day doing it, have studied it for decades and pretty much have been completely obsessed with computers my whole life.
From that standpoint it's really nice for me to have a few hobbies that are much less intense and where I can be "not good" but just enjoy myself. The position this article takes.
That being said, if I wasn't an expert in my field, I may not be able to find that comfort in being middling at best in other areas. This I think is a lot of people's problem. The fear of failure (and in the west, anti-intellectual culture) stop people from even attempting to be great. Not at hobbies but at everything.
So I think the article is correct, but missing hobbies are a second order effect after missing primary passion.
> It's easy not to care how good you are at your hobbies when you're already really good at something else.
I've seen that at play, and it can be a very significant effect. The clearest instance from my personal experience was in self-studying mathematics. I began my regimen of study literally the day after finishing my CS degree. I'd had a 'repetitive strain injury' related to computer usage for years at that point, and had figured I would never be able to work as a programmer again (did a brief stint as a teenager). I needed to find something else and had been searching for a long time without luck—but now I had something: I'd just earn money doing mathematics somehow!
It was grueling to work on at that time because it seemed like my last option for being able to do something that used my creative/technical abilities as a career (I was working at a grocery store then to put things in perspective)—and I just had no idea if I was going to be good enough with math for it to be a realistic possibility. So it was nerve-wracking anytime I attempted something that would test my ability.
Several years later, after figuring out the computer use issues—I didn't need mathematics anymore. But I'd spent a lot of time learning, gaining proficiency, and developing interests in various areas; so at some point I got back into studying again. The difference is night and day—I'm far more productive, and it's just, by comparison to before, no big deal.
Highly recommended if you can settle it with yourself that you're okay with things however they turn out in relation to some hobby/skill/whatever.
I could never get a doctor to give a precise answer to that, just, "some kind of repetitive strain injury." It seems to have had psychological components to it also: I was so worried about it that I created additional tension there and never let it relax, and I was always super stiff/tense while using the computer. So whatever new ergonomics or exercises I tried, I continued clenching/worrying whenever using a computer. And then I could see that the tension was making things worse so I'd get worried and more tense because of that which created a bad feedback effect.
Getting better was partly just learning to not freak out about it—the situation was manageable and I wasn't going to have to give up my favorite activity that I'd spent so much of my life training for etc.
More exercise, better ergonomics, and taking breaks also helped. I've been practicing meditation for a couple years now too, and it's finally been getting to the point where I can use what I've learned to see and modify the bad mental patterns I established during 10 years of unpleasant computer use (including getting out of the feedback effect mentioned above).
I really like the spirit of the article, and I sympathize with it.
One visible example of this phenomenon is wrt fitness. We often hear gym goers doing "training" rather than "exercising". That usage in itself shows a sense of vanity, may be a result of general identity crisis, because most of these don't compete in anything sports-y, leave alone "strength games"; they train to train more it seems. I am not saying they ought to compete, that would be against the spirit of the article which I like, but I am just saying that even when they don't commit to such achievement oriented pursuit in action, they do it with words. Most are into fitness to improve their aesthetics but here too they set unreasonable goals. The level of obsession is unbelievable. They do the most difficult lifts with the heaviest weights and constantly monitor the "gains", because anything less is for the sissies. They are the real world Dom Mazzettis.
>We often hear gym goers doing "training" rather than "exercising". That usage in itself shows a sense of vanity, may be a result of general identity crisis
You're reading way too much into a domain-specific term. "Training" is just when you have a regimented exercise schedule and routine to improve your body. Of course there do exist gym rats with motivations and goals a more reasonable person would consider obsessive. That's because there are for any pursuit. But your post is a long just-so story about a kind of person that the HN audience is predisposition to dislike.
> You're reading way too much into a domain-specific term. "Training" is just when you have a regimented exercise schedule and routine to improve your body.
On the same lines, one can rationalize the empty words such as "synergy" that corporate marketers use routinely that are taken apart brutally routinely.
This is making me really want to either get back into dancing (burlesque and pole, so far, who knows what next) or finally pick up that cheap electric guitar I've wanted most of my life. Because one of the things I really liked about dancing was the room to be an amateur who is not constantly pushing to take her craft further, worrying about publicity and networking, etc - I was just some lady who was learning to dance.
A lot of why I quit pole dance was feeling like I had gotten to the point where I was not going to see any more slow improvement unless I started seriously focusing on it like it was a major part of by life, and I don't have time for that.
In the United States at least, there's a very popular hobby which many people won't admit to practicing:
Consumerism.
And thanks to the internet/smartphones/social media etc. It's practiced 24x7, while driving, from bed, from the toilet, it's always going on and it displaces time for and interest in creative pursuits for most.
I agree that there are a lot of people practicing that.
I also think that there are so many distractions, things designed to catch our attention, be addicting, and take our time, that it takes a concerted effort to allow ourselves to be bored.
Boredom in itself isn't useful, but it gives us the opportunity to motivate ourselves into trying new things that aren't necessarily "fun" immediately.
It's quite liberating to be totally shit at everything and fail everybody's expectations. For some reason we all hit rock bottom at some point. I'm reminded of this talk from Simon Sinek when somebody at Google asked him what his worst moments in life were - a rather weird question, but the answer was great - his life was falling apart and that somehow led him to do more: https://sahilparikh.com/simon-sinek-the-finite-and-infinite-... I see adults around me all the time - not doing things. We all have something that holds us back, and it would seem the more successful we are, the more we are held back. Like it was pretty weird when Michael Jordan started playing baseball https://www.bleachernation.com/2017/02/07/michael-jordans-ba... but then the question sort of becomes - wait, what does everybody do instead? Why don't every great athlete go try some other random sport instead? And likewise - why don't we all just go and do it, whatever the "it" may be for ourselves.
I recently completed the Presidential Leadership Scholars program, and we
had an question and answer session with former President George W Bush.
One of my classmates asked him about his painting hobby and if he was afraid of being bad or of critics.
His reply will always stick with me. He said, “you can’t be afraid to try new things. If id expected perfection from the start, I would never have started. To learn requires making mistakes. I paint because I love it - and I don’t care what anybody else thinks.”
I think a different way to express this problem is comparative measurement vs absolute measurement.
If you can make a good chair, you can make a good chair. It shouldn't be too relevant that someone else somewhere can make a good chair.
The same is much harder to see, but is true for more sports-style activities. Someone who's decent at a sport is still worth respecting, in my view.
But somewhere down the line we removed the "decent", "pretty good", and "respectable", and replaced it with "sucks", and removed all motivation to get to those levels. Now you're either the best or you don't count.
Part of the drive to be the best may be due to conditional love.
Some of us may have been raised in households where love was given out as a reward for marks at school or success in sports. And the converse was true as well, with love being withheld when these goals were not met.
Anyone whose family have treated them this way can tell you that this pattern is toxic.
Sadly, many of us then go on to internalise this and to treat ourselves this way,
Does this article match other people's experience? The whole opening premise, that few people have hobbies now seems entirely wrong to me. I can't think of anyone I know who doesn't have at least a few hobbies. Many people I know are significantly into several hobbies, and most people are at least casually invested in some.
Not really, I have hobby's just as my friends have them, but I feel rare. I don't use social media, and I don't have Netflix or hbo. As a software engineer I have a lot of screen time. At home sometimes I watch a movie or do some gaming, but I don't hit the 5hr average. https://www.nytimes.com/2016/07/01/business/media/nielsen-su...
Doing a lot non digital things in my free time is a conscious decision. The fun thing is you meet a lot of people who are active I as well.
I know people whose only hobbies seem to be watching TV and going to concerts, but then I have always known people like that, so perhaps it is not indicative of a trend either way.
It’s partly the fault of high street retail. Go into a shop to buy running shoes, and you’re greeted by this barrage of technical nonsense about “pronation” and details of your running gait and what sort of support you “need”. of course, it’s just an obvious ruse to get normal people to buy expensive products, but it contributes to the atmosphere described in the article. I do blame US retail culture, but the UK is so culturally coupled to the US in retail that it’s long been the way in the UK also. I’ve even been videod running on a treadmill to perform gait analysis as if I were a pro athlete! It’s embarrassing that people suck this all up. But it’s not just running, try buying a tent or sleeping bag from an outdoor store like REI in the US. “So what sort of camping do you usually do? What altitude do you normally camp at?” “Dude I just want a fucking sleeping bag.”
Why are we so fixated on ranking people, and strictly on a linear scale? As soon as you're measuring performance on more than one dimension, it becomes very hard to rank people. Multivariate competitions, for that matter, are more interesting to me. I get bored by Olympic disciplines with a one-dimensional metric (fastest time or longest distance, for the most part), but am far more interested in team sports where players show a lot of variation among multiple measurement categories. Participants in team sports can also show a lot more finesse, creativity, or even craziness than many an Olympian who is just trying to maximize a single physical quantity in a simple sport.
Competition is often interesting and appealing, but I'd prefer if we didn't let it distract us in every single activity. In the athletic realm, it's refreshing for to read about many of parkour's expositors, who seem to deemphasize competition and focus on personal satisfaction. I don't know how prevalent this attitude is among its practitioners, but I know that if I ever took it up, I'd do for my personal enjoyment... and maybe to entertain some of my friends and family members. For parkour in particular, I'd probably enjoy it less if it was structured as a competition, rather than as free form activity where one gets to see where each participant decides to travel and how they decide to go about it, free from any expectation (other than moving and avoiding major injury).
Moving away from athletic pursuits, why does it even matter who the top musician is in a given musical genre? What does that even mean? I don't care about who the "best" jazz instrumentalist is, but am instead glad that there a lot of great jazz musicians out there, whose music I can enjoy, whether they happen to be the best regarded or the most obscure. I only hope that everyone from the most popular artists "down" to local bands and street musicians can make a living doing what they love, which also happens to be something I enjoy to witness, regardless of whatever rank they may have on a given scale.
Other than respect for others, we should not expect anything out of people that pursue a hobby or recreational interest for their own personal pleasure. For those creating or doing something for others to enjoy, maybe we just settle for a certain, subjectively satisfactory level of proficiency with a given discipline's skills, instead of insisting that everyone seeks to becomes the "best" at whichever activity they happen to be pursuing.
What this article is clearly missing is that "hobbies" is a very modern concept. Humans never evolved to engage in semi-serious idle pursuits. We have evolved to compete and seek progress.
What's happening is that the definition of competition and progress has been massively reconfigured due to social media. But even in pre-Industrial days, people worked hard to be better off, to accumulate wealth, to increase their social status. In fact, industrialization is a result of that ingrained work ethic.
Asking people to be OK with mediocrity is like asking warring nations not to go to war. It's a well-intentioned but ultimately stupid advice because it doesn't work. What could work however is reconfiguring social media and environment: the less an individual gets exposed to competence, the more s/he'll be able to enjoy whatever s/he is enjoying.
I don't think that is entirely true -- surely, "hobbies" is a relatively new word, but even in pre-industrial times people had plenty of spare time to waste on stuff like learning songs/poems/card games/etc. Not every second was crucial for survival.
I have a lifelong philosophy of getting to about the 80th percentile of proficiency of any given activity, craft, sport, etc.
A lot of the enjoyment I get from new things is in the rapid rate of improvement while learning and developing. After about the 80th percentile, diminishing returns kind of curse the activity, which is meant to provide leisure, pleasure, and well being. When it becomes a curse, those attributes are diminished.
Also, to be in the 80th percentile, you could probably 'hang' with any range of folks involved in the thing, and if I ever want to get back into it after a break, it'll come back.
I'd like to reinforce what an earlier commenter has already hinted at, with a story of a collapsing marathon runner. A lot of hobbies get much more dangerous with increased ambitions. Always ask yourself if that's worth it. As someone once said, "He who does not sore with the eagles does not get sucked into jet engines." And they didn't shoot Ringo, did they.
I think people just need to learn that the journey is the reward, not the mastery. We in the US are in many ways, over concerned with the perception of success and the outcome of an activity. Starts very early on -- "Winning isn't everything. Its the only thing"
There's also a large segment of the world in which people don't have time for hobbies because they are hustling to survive. As education, medical, housing, etc explode in costs while wages stagnate, we have to work harder just to get by.
There are also a lot of angles the author might be missing by condensing a long article into small blog post. In the case of the jogger posting to social media and training for marathons, is this person picking up a hobby or is this person joining a tribe? If the social experience is greater than the activity, then this example makes sense. It might even be better for people who need the social experience more than they need the hobby.
I stopped reading at that point. Maybe I missed something later in the article which addresses the above points.
A few scattered thoughts:
Much of this article seems to only apply under the assumption that people didn't have hobbies prior to being a working adult. Most people I know have hobbies, but those hobbies were developed prior to being working adults. The article states:
> most of us will be truly excellent only at whatever we started doing in our teens.
So what about all of us that have had our hobbies prior to even being a teenager? I've been playing piano now for almost 3 decades. I played nearly every day from age 4 to the day I graduated college. By the article's admission, I'm supposed to be excellent by now. But... I've steadily gotten worse since becoming a working professional. I have my 5000+ hours of practice, but only a few hundred in decade since graduating. My experience when it comes to these hobbies is that most people drift away from their interests due to self-comparison, not societal comparison.
The activities mentioned by the article seem to be of the everyday athletic variety. As adults, we're supposed to be conscious about our health. Nobody cares if you're a shitty runner when it's an expectation that you're health-conscious. The same can't be said for the arts and crafts variety of hobbies. The home brewer doesn't necessarily want you to try their shitty beer; The illustrator doesn't want to show their stick figures; The woodworker doesn't want you to sit in the chair that's probably going to break under your weight, regardless of whether or not they had fun making it. The office talk of "what did you do last night?" is a lot easier to answer with "went for a run"/"watched the same TV show as you" rather than having to follow up with the inevitable Q&A about your hobby. Let's say I mentioned that I was playing piano ("I've been playing since I was 4!"). The next time my team goes for drinks and there is a piano in the bar, people want to hear me play. Do I really want to publicly struggle to play a piece I was able to easily perform when I was 12? That doesn't sound like very much fun to me.
> you are trying to land a gallery show or at least garner a respectable social media following
People put their best foot forward, which also assumes they have a good foot to begin with. If you suck at something, you usually don't put it up on your Instagram. My point is really just that I don't talk about my hobby, and I assume that's also somewhat common for hobbies that aren't the typical everyday athletic variety. While I realize there are statistics that heavily back TV-as-a-hobby, I think the author has a bit of a selection bias and that there is under-appreciated amount of people that simply have no desire to discuss their hobbies. The discussion can detract from the enjoyment you get from the hobby itself.
great premise, well articulated. its fairly obvious to me that capitalism in our current environment generates insane winner take all scenarios, which are partially responsible for this mentality of only doing things you are good at. the joy of learning is highest when you move from novice to intermediate, the maximum external reward is when you move from master to the best in the world.
Finding the true strength hidden deep inside is the only way to not get lost in the chaos of achieving more than the other guy. Something Alexander Grothendieck said is so relevant:
In those critical years I learned how to be alone. [But even] this formulation doesn't really capture my meaning. I didn't, in any literal sense learn to be alone, for the simple reason that this knowledge had never been unlearned during my childhood. It is a basic capacity in all of us from the day of our birth. However these three years of work in isolation [1945–1948], when I was thrown onto my own resources, following guidelines which I myself had spontaneously invented, instilled in me a strong degree of confidence, unassuming yet enduring, in my ability to do mathematics, which owes nothing to any consensus or to the fashions which pass as law....By this I mean to say: to reach out in my own way to the things I wished to learn, rather than relying on the notions of the consensus, overt or tacit, coming from a more or less extended clan of which I found myself a member, or which for any other reason laid claim to be taken as an authority. This silent consensus had informed me, both at the lycée and at the university, that one shouldn't bother worrying about what was really meant when using a term like "volume," which was "obviously self-evident," "generally known," "unproblematic," etc....It is in this gesture of "going beyond," to be something in oneself rather than the pawn of a consensus, the refusal to stay within a rigid circle that others have drawn around one—it is in this solitary act that one finds true creativity. All others things follow as a matter of course.
Since then I've had the chance, in the world of mathematics that bid me welcome, to meet quite a number of people, both among my "elders" and among young people in my general age group, who were much more brilliant, much more "gifted" than I was. I admired the facility with which they picked up, as if at play, new ideas, juggling them as if familiar with them from the cradle—while for myself I felt clumsy, even oafish, wandering painfully up an arduous track, like a dumb ox faced with an amorphous mountain of things that I had to learn (so I was assured), things I felt incapable of understanding the essentials or following through to the end. Indeed, there was little about me that identified the kind of bright student who wins at prestigious competitions or assimilates, almost by sleight of hand, the most forbidding subjects.
In fact, most of these comrades who I gauged to be more brilliant than I have gone on to become distinguished mathematicians. Still, from the perspective of thirty or thirty-five years, I can state that their imprint upon the mathematics of our time has not been very profound. They've all done things, often beautiful things, in a context that was already set out before them, which they had no inclination to disturb. Without being aware of it, they've remained prisoners of those invisible and despotic circles which delimit the universe of a certain milieu in a given era. To have broken these bounds they would have had to rediscover in themselves that capability which was their birthright, as it was mine: the capacity to be alone.
Check out Victor Wooten's Ted Talk on thinking about music as a language. He compares learning music with learning to talk. The general premise: "Nobody waits until you're an expert in language before being allowed to speak, why are you expected to be a master before you can make music with other musicians?".
It's risky to tie up your ego, or sense of self, with being anything other than yourSelf. When I started out coding in my career I had a huge chip on my shoulder. I needed a popular project on github, I needed to be given that big new project, I needed the recognition and praise of others. I didn't realize I was setting myself up for a lot of angst. And I'm ashamed of some of the things I did or said trying to protect my ego, which was now bound up in being seen by others as a genius programmer. Took me 7 or 8 years to figure it out and let go.
Recently an elite marathon runner collapsed just before the finishing line - it turns out that "elite" athletes seem to simply ignore their bodies danger signals
I honestly don't want to push myself that far. 10 minutes a mile is fine
That's a bit of an oversimplification, but culturally I notice we prize success & effort & grit in the moment, and pay very little attention to training. This results in athletes who drive themselves over the brink trying to make up for their lack of training.
A favorite quote of mine:
The will to win is nothing without the will to prepare
It's how everyone arrives on Survivor without knowing how to make a fire - what did you think was going to happen? I understand that the Venn diagram between "people narcissistic enough to be on reality tv" and "people who like to plan ahead" is probably the number 8, but even still, c'mon!
I came to the conclusion years ago that the selection criteria for shows like that is nothing to do with skills and everything to do with entertainment. They want a mix of pretty-but-dumb people, good-honest-family people, and assholes.
I haven’t watched for years. But, yeah, in the Bizarro world I was going to end up on the show you can be sure I would be fanatically reviewing past seasons and seriously practicing any skills that seemed relevant.
> This results in athletes who drive themselves over the brink trying to make up for their lack of training.
Maybe some, but the best athletes are known for their almost super human training habits. Look up the training regimens of Michael Jordan, Tiger Woods, Lebron James, Kobe Bryant, Tom Brady, Michael Phelps in his hayday...the list goes on.
the simple pleasure of doing something you merely, but truly, enjoy.
I, for one, don't enjoy perpetually wallowing in mediocrity. The sense of fleeting time gone to waste weighs heavily on both the conscious and unconscious of my mind.
There's a difference between not having a life's chance at being a competitive athlete but still trying within the best of your means to progress within the sport, and "taking it easy" and treating physical activity solely as occasional recreation. But this article argues for the latter - why? If you're not training for the next marathon, then why are you running in the first place? If you ask me, running the same pace, the same distance, year after year, is a waste of time no matter how much you enjoy it.
And this viewpoint leads to slow decrepitude, because if you treat all of your hobbies so casually, you can never improve but only digress. Take physical activity, again, as an example: as you age, as natural hormonal production declines, as wear and tear builds up, that casual run around the block can only ever become more infrequent, more prone to injury, and thus slower and slower until one day you're not running at all. But striving to be the best runner you can be from the get-go, regardless if you have a chance at competitiveness, learning about health and longevity in the sport, will allow you to persevere far longer than the casual merely enjoying themselves on occasion.
There's also general consumerism, which this article brings up for me. "Enjoyment", "fun", is largely inherent. It's then easy to say "have fun, enjoy yourself", because that goes without saying. It's far harder to put time and effort into an activity and derive pleasure from it, and the chance for failure is not only higher but more devastating. Develop chronic injury years into your sport of choice? It's over. Don't enjoy the Netflix show you're watching? Turn on another one until you do. Of course most people wouldn't consider watching Netflix a hobby. But that's only because they're at the lowest possible level of mediocrity, because, perhaps, they value cheap ideals of entertainment over all else. In reality, film and television as a medium spans over a century of arts and culture, waiting for you to delve into and master. But if you take this article to heart, you'll instead be content wallowing in the "simple pleasure" of consumption.
Out of two or three hundred people, it's not hard to be in the top tenth percentile at something.
When your circle of acquaintances is the whole internet, being in the top tenth percentile of anything takes years of determined effort.
Our brains still have expectations rooted in these smaller communities: That we should be able to create something exceptional and praiseworthy for our efforts.
Today, it's hard to get praise for anything we do, unless it's from our families, or unless we do something truly world class. (Case in point: The other week someone shared some generative artwork here, and it got promptly criticized for not being "gallery worthy".) In the face of that, we instinctively give up.