I play tennis twice a week and I inline skate twice a week (weather pending) and yesterday I commuted to and from work on inlines (first time I've done it, won't be the last, but won't be often).
Having such hobbies plus a couple of kids (now teenagers so they're somewhat less demanding of my time) means I just don't have the time to do extra hours if I'm going to get enough sleep.
And if I don't get enough sleep then the hours I do work are nowhere near as productive as those when I have had enough sleep.
Work fits around my personality. If that doesn't suit my employer, I find a new employer.
Caveats: I don't hunt the highest paying job. I'm never going to be enthusiastic enough to be chosen to lead - I've had minor management roles in the past, and they lead to, basically, being paid to either sleep less or spend less time as "not work me". Both of those options result in lower productivity.
I'm good enough at what I do to earn a living for the foreseeable future. That's good enough for me career-wise. For my physical and mental health, both of which are indicators of and contributory to happiness and longevity, I will continue to spend much of my non-working time playing tennis and inline skating and lifting weights so I can continue to do those things, that make me happy with life and the world, for as long as physically possible.
I tend not to the machine that consumes humanity, I tend to the machine that gives me my humanity.
Edited to add: I'll never be a rich man. But I will lead a rich life.
Here's the other thing: people who spend their time playing tennis, raising kids, hanging out with their dog by the grill, etc. aren't constantly marketing their lifestyles to social media.
It seems so silly to say but I too have a dream of not wanting to work. Then I can just exist. I came across this YT video about enjoying boredom. It slows down time and you do things you really want to do. I'm currently the type of person that is always plugged into noise (music, podcast, YT). It is rare that I sit in silence. But yeah I'm hoping I can save, exit working, I'll still be making stuff that I enjoy at a good pace. I have this problem where I want to share things that aren't done yet, it's early ego reward. That's the problem with YT too and attention span, things take time to do and it's about the immediate reward. I get it too, attention is a currency and people spend it where they want/deem important.
But I feel it though, the urge to grind. When I have free time I think, shouldn't I be doing/achieving something. If you quantify value by money then yeah there are dumb ways to make money like me driving Uber Eats and donating plasma (an extra 17 hrs of my life per week). I can instead spend less money and enjoy life more.
I almost think social media is the worst thing that I ran into, the points/likes aspect. Going back to sharing things that aren't real yet for the kudos. Anyway ranting. I'm thankful I became self-aware as when Facebook was new I was posting like everything about my life like "omg look at me...". Which is a double-edged sword you know, something like Instagram is how women scope you out and if you don't have a good one...
Tangent, there is also this fetishizing of productivity where you see this clean desk and a little notepad. Or some kind of setup like a minimalist laptop. The whole video is about that but not actually working ha.
> I'm currently the type of person that is always plugged into noise (music, podcast, YT). It is rare that I sit in silence.
Not directed towards you, but this brings up a thought I often ponder. I have friends and people around me who are plugged in 24/7. I don't really think they spend any time, what so ever, on internal thought or introspection / reflection. I think it really affects them. The "default mode network" as its neuroscience has coined it. No time to analyze the past or correlate cause with effect. Lives surrendered to notifications and scrolling the same 3 feeds, day in and day out. I don't even know what to say to them sometimes.
On the flip side, I do accept people for who they are. If this is what they want, and they enjoy it, then whatever. But it can be frustrating trying to communicate or interact with them.
There's an orthogonal aspect to it: control. I know I need some amount of noise to stay grounded and look outwards instead of collapsing into infinite reflection regression - but I also need control over that noise. That is, it needs to be my noise. Living in noise introduced by people around me is not reinvigorating, it's draining and depressing.
I couldn't agree more. Especially noise introduced by people around me. Drains me.
I'm not on a high horse either, I do succumb to modern temptations. I have a YouTube addiction, but its all educational / a topic I'm learning / a hobby / etc. I just got my Recap and somehow I have watched 4500 different channels this year, that's saying nothing of # of videos or watchtime. I was pretty shocked.
Still though, I purposefully make time to be alone and just daydream or relax and ponder. I don't use my phone while driving (besides maps etc). I try to put my phone away when others are around (unless we're sharing memes or photos or you know, actively using our phones together). I'm not a snob, go ahead and reply to your significant other while we're eating dinner - that's understandable. When I watch movies or TV (that I care about, I do keep old scifi on in the background while on the PC or doing stuff around the house) I am actively watching and do not touch my phone, and if I do need to I pause first.
The worst part? When you know someone is on their phone 24/7, phone in hand at all times, and you can't get them to respond to your calls or texts.
I feel like I'm bragging or showing off or something but I'm really not, just interested in how people interact with their devices, and their life.
haha this is so true about ppl not able to respond to calls while they are literally on the phone ALL the time
Wrote about this - https://www.unsungnovelty.org/posts/04/2025/you-dont-need-ai...
> I do accept people for who they are. If this is what they want, and they enjoy it, then whatever.
You do you, but you're not obliged to accept someone for who they are if who they are is a brainless wastoid. I recommend minimizing the time wasted on zombies in favor of seeking out people who still value their brains.
The terminally online don't seem to like being reminded that they're the terminally online.
Unfortunately the infestation only seems to grow.
> I too have a dream of not wanting to work.
The OP isn't about not wanting to work. To labor in pursuit of your own personal purpose is a virtue and a privilege. But labor for the sake of labor is not a virtue, nor is labor for the sake of watching that bank account go up, and least of all labor for the sake of watching your billionaire CEO's bank account go up.
Have you ever tried meditation? Does a great job scratching that ‘boredom’ itch…
> Have you ever tried meditation? Does a great job scratching that ‘boredom’ itch…
No, but I am considering getting a working Amiga, a CRT and just writing some games for it.
All I had growing up was a C64, and I remember how peaceful I felt when I was designing and writing my (simple) games for it. I hankered all through my childhood for an Amiga; any Amiga.
TBH, I might even settle for a C128; just the thrill of writing software with some paper manuals next to me, no internet and no distractions.
Ironically Amiga means "female friend" in portuguese.
I'm trying to. I don't know how you know it's working. Maybe, sometimes I do feel present like I am in this building, this town right now.
It is funny, I bought an old phone of mine from the 2010s, I had a different mindset back then (try to make a shit ton of money through ads on a website). That did not happen but I had this ambition/tried to make a lot of dumb apps. I'm trying to get back to that mental state as now I can make like anything, back then I didn't even know how to generate a CSR like come on you amateur!
I use the phone as a grounding tool for meditation/try to go back in time what I was thinking back then. I also loaded it with old cloud photos from that time. It doesn't have internet.
Oh yeah, what does work for grounding you to reality is when you lose internet. Then you're grounded in reality, bored. What do I do with myself now.
> I don't know how you know it's working.
after a while it should feel like a refreshing nap. during the meditation itself, you're just doing a simple task and going along with it without resistance, like when sleeping. eventually the idea of "non-doing" will make more sense.
another way to look at it: upon waking each morning, you start with an empty glass. from this point, everything that enters your realm of awareness accumulates in this glass and at some point it will start overflowing if you don't manage what you're accumulating. meaning you can only effectively work with a certain amount of "stuff on your mind". So you shouldn't make a habit of carrying stress from the morning commute all day into affecting your afternoon meetings, for example.
take a few deep breaths and let the morning commute pass, and your glass is empty again. allow the glass to fill up with morning work, noticing and managing points of friction so they don't linger more than necessary. if you notice yourself getting overwhelmed or stressed about everything that comes up, you're overflowing and would likely benefit from some meditation. as you meditate more, it becomes more effortless so you won't be reliant on "doing meditation" as much.
the Plum Village app has a meditation bell that rings on a schedule (default is every 15 minutes). they recommend you take a few deep breaths to re-center and state your intention(s) for the moment. I started using it earlier this year and it has a noticeable effect over time, would highly recommend trying it out all day if possible. or at least during times where you're trying to do focused work but have a tendency to get distracted.
Honest to God, the best meditation for me is Focus 1 from The Gateway Tapes. I'm not sure the woo of astral projection and energy control are for me at all. But when it comes to blanking my mind and existing purely in the exact right now, that does it for me.
This is exactly why my dream is to save enough money so that I can retire and fuck off and just smoke weed and play vidya until I die. People speak of "hedonistic treadmill" but there's also "achievement treadmill" where you want to achieve more and more and more and it never ends. The biggest perk of my current job is that the company is completely dysfunctional, so it's normal for me to spend entire day doing nothing and I don't even need to be at the office. At first my body reacted with panic because I was used to being a slave, but I'm slowly adapting to think "wait, I'm actually winning"
Just do the work at your body's natural pace. Your body will tell you when it's tired, when it's ready to focus, and when it's excited to work.
As with everything, the problem is hubris and impatience. So eager to prove god-like status, you stumble and fall, posting ephemeral think pieces about your "journey" on social media. Reading LinkedIn is the closest I've ever got to thinking "maybe asylums would be okay with a few reforms..."
My favorite (which I think/hope was a joke) was the guy cooking chicken breast in his hotel coffee maker to "show his commitment to the company" and how hard he was willing to grind.
> I think hustle-culture and the vision being pushed on my timeline is a corrupted one.
A satirical video which I think captures some of the frustration: "The Hustle" by Krazam - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_o7qjN3KF8U
> Machine Head - Derek Hobbs 1995
For anyone else a little nerd-sniped, the ASCII art head is 54,505 bytes, <=300 chars wide, 182 lines tall, using 20 distinct characters... But then I get hung up on what an equivalent picture could be, since the characters aren't just levels of greyscale intensity, but also contain internal detail that would then take more pixels to describe.
My original motive was something like: "If this were a PNG it would have only taken a much smaller X bytes."
A very un-scientific screen grab and saving as a GIF gives me 604kB at 990×1000 pixels, but this does include color fringing at the edges of each letter and I'd be inclined to treat this as a 1 BPP image.
I recommend reading the Happiness Files, by Arthur Brooks.
It contain great advice, including on how to handle your professional life. But even more importantly, I feel the world would be a better place if more people followed its advice. A world full of happy people would be a world that runs far better.
> Hustle-culture optimizes for work input because it's sexy. It's easy to post the inputs. It's hard to face the output.
Hustling is sexy insofar as the output is sexy imo. What hustlers miss is that working hard is only cool if the work you do makes sense - work for its own sake is one of the most uncool things there is. And I also think that willingness to work hard comes on its own if you find something meaningful; reading on how to work hard is like treating symptoms (you don't work hard) rather than actual cause (you don't have anything to work hard on). Getting up at 5am to go to the gym then manage.your 500 dollars of crypto portfolio you don't understand anything about is the epitome of finance bro that everyone cringes about.
This is something that hit me during my master thesis the first time: I was entirely free to choose my work time, work mode. Since the prof was very hands-off too, only the result after 6 months mattered. That was quite the weird time. But it taught me some pieces about work-life balance and choosing what is 'enough work', as well as giving your brain time off, or time on something else to work through more complex topics and to recharge.
This is also why I honestly enjoy being a salaried employee. My employer buys 40 hours a week from me. Right, some weeks it's 50 and the next week only 30. Some weeks need a machine just executing, some weeks need more careful thought.
I could optimize it for more monetary output, but at the moment it is a predictable, usually not-painful thing with decent monetary output for personally more interesting subjects. I've found appreciation of this.
The constant anti work agenda that is thrown in your face if you use almost any social media is so annoying.
Have these anti work people ever considered that maybe some people actually like work and labelling them as slaves is insulting?
Thats interesting because my social media is filled with constant hustle culture content. Wonder how the algorithm classifies us.
The algorithm is just amplifying what gets the kick out of you. For some it's more of things they like or they are like; for others, it's more of things they hate or disagree with. Social media is approximating an infinite hall of mirrors.
> almost any social media is so annoying.
Never a truer word spoken. And yet you go back?
I think it's a lot more complicated than anti-work vs. pro-work. The author is cautioning people against defining themselves by their level of productivity.
The majority of people don't have that luxury, and very few have it throughout their whole career. The lucky ones should be grateful this label does not apply to them and not feel insulted by the less fortunate.
Or you should realize that it's called work because it's not fun and you can still enjoy and appreciate it. You think only people with rare amazing unicorn jobs enjoy work? Go drive a cab. Bartend. Work long hours for a startup you care about. Yes you can complain it sucks, but that's why it's called work. Learning how to enjoy it is the same as learning how to be good at it - and better at life.
This luxury you speak of as if it exists in some jobs is completely in your own mind.
Put another way, the only thing preventing you from enjoying that luxury right now, whatever you do, is a shitty attitude.
I think it's called work because it _accomplishes something_, in a way that play or idleness doesn't.
Something can be a work of love, your life work, et cetera and it doesn't imply anything about it being fun or for money or not.
I want to learn more skills so I can do more types of work.
I would like to see you working in construction.
Those things you describe are jobs
Work is a term of physics; breathing is work. Eating is work.
Jobs exist because people are too lazy to do work for themselves.
What I want is no job and to work on my house, work in my food prep, work on interesting projects. Work on making the last mile stuff I need.
Work is great. Jobs are dumb.
You want to work on your house and prep your food? I am the complete opposite. I would rather work on building a website, and eat in a canteen, than work on my house or my food.
Sometimes jobs are great streams of interesting work to do that also switch off at five.
Some work is exploited, in fact in this economy most work is exploited. If most people could work without being forced to work unreasonable hours, under stressful conditions, with ample free time, and without their bosses, or worse, their shareholder talking almost all of the profit they generate, most people would probably choose to work.
Most people like working, hardly anybody likes being exploited.
If you read the article that’s not at all what they’re saying.
> The constant anti work agenda that is thrown in your face if you use almost any social media is so annoying.
I've got several friends who are doctors. They did study a shitload. And one of them, once his day is over, loves to read about investments, how to manage his finance, etc. Another one has a passion for Ferrari cars and owns one (but it's already its fourth one). He'll tell you all about the life of Enzo Ferrari and he'll never miss the Monaco F1 grand prix.
I won't write here what I think of people hating on these persons because they're successful. I especially won't write what I think of them when they go to visit the doctor. I know HN won't ban people easily but if I really wrote what I thought of these people it'd get me close to being banned.
12 years of studies. A very hard work: though on the mental and usually with incredibly long hours.
I don't consider them slaves. But I'd rather be remembered as a slave than as a parasite.
Very relevant talk by Osho: https://youtu.be/OGM7VFeLRyQ?si=ecB_6L8IRgIT4LD1 Efficiency is a quality of machines.
If you are only useful, you will be used until you not useful anymore. Make relationships that care about you even after you’ve become worn out. Make things that pay off even after you’re done making.
Often there is a bell shaped curve where productivity peeks at a point and bigger efforts after that make you actually less productive overall. In my personal experience most projects are a marathon not a sprint. Always sleep the 8-9 hours necessary to feel full-rested. I'm most productive in the morning so I try to work every day during mornings but since in the afternoon I'm a lot less productive I've decided I can allocate that time to entertainment and social activities. My entertainment and social activity tend also to be along learning new things.
Regular morning stand-ups really fuck my morning momentum.
I'm getting my shit done, then I gotta stop and listen to a whole bunch of crap that I either already know or doesn't affect me at all.
Sometimes, in fact often, the level of momentum I had before the meeting is never reached again the rest of day.
All meetings should be post lunch. All meetings I organize are post lunch.
Around 2019 it became clear to me how much I was underestimating how quickly AI would "take over" and "take credit" for the parts of my identity I wanted to keep (engineering, design taste, invention for example).
But it also made me realize that because I was always at the tip of my chosen curve of tech adoption, I was also the first to be feeling the existential dread that would soon permeate the lives of everyone living a life even tangentially touched by tech.
(I think the author is ahead of the curve too).
But I feel this post identifies the problem and then compounds it with this line:
> This messaging works. Look at me. I feel the need to write a post about it. But it is completely wrong.
I would counter that (intentional) "ignorance is bliss". If you want to play the VC grind hustle game, do it, but be intentional about checking in and checking out, and don't let it into your identity. And don't write posts like this.
It might "feel" dishonest to operate like this, but the alternative is doom, because you are fighting against demons that don't actually exist. I think more and more people will realize this over the coming years -- we are only now starting to react to the personal problems caused by immersion in social media.
This also reminds me of a good piece by PG: https://paulgraham.com/identity.html
I think AI is completely optional for software development.
There seems to be a new kind of anxiety wherein devs feel that they aren't leveraging AI to the fullest in order to make them more productive at developing software, and that since they aren't doing so, they should just give up writing software completely.
This anxiety is unfounded. The difference between using AI vs not using AI is not like using a physical spreadsheet vs Microsoft Excel. It's more like using a text editor versus an IDE. If you're happy producing software the way that you always were sans AI, you should just keep doing it that way and don't even pay mind to AI tooling.
Those guys who have super sophisticated MCP/tool use setups, and a roster of agents, and testdrive all the latest tools and plugins, and curate a personal library of carefully tuned prompts that make them the "LLM Whisperer" — they're not actually doing that much better than you at producing software. Or at least not to the extent that you are totally obsolete.
I think it’s exactly like going from paper spreadsheet to Excel in some very important aspects of engineering (but not all).
I really encourage you to update your priors since capabilities are very different than even 6 months ago.
I like to think I'm very much abreast of the bleeding edge because I feel this anxiety myself. At this point I can't code without LLMs because I just notice things that I could hand off to LLMs and they will do it faster and there's no reason for me to do it myself (although I still could).
But the overall gain in efficiency is still a low single digit speedup. It's not a multi-OOM speedup as if e.g. doing 1000 long divisions by hand over many days versus letting a computer program do them in a split second. The "wall" that is irreducible complexity was never OOMs away from how modern pre-AI software development was done.
For me the speed-up has not been in doing things I was already an expert at doing quickly with high quality. It has been in skipping the learning curve for adjacent things.
Does it make the curve easier or do you skip learning it entirely and just trust the LLM? I wouldn't do the latter.
So far I've skipped learning it entirely. For things I want to learn, I learn the old school way--maybe with an LLM as an unreliable thesaurus and/or second search engine (where I distrust its output, but read its links). For things I want to just get done, I use an LLM. It's something close to blind trust, but not completely.
For example, I've used LLMs to write ~20KLOC of Rust in the past few days. I'm having it make Ratatui bindings for Ruby. I haven't ever learned Rust, but I can read C-like languages so I kinda understand what's happening. I could tell when it needed to be modularized. I have a sneaking suspicion most of the Rust tests it's written are testing Ratatui, rather than testing its own bindings. But I've had the LLM cover the functionality in Ruby tests, a language I do know. So I've felt comfortable enough to ship it.
Will you remember it if you don't "break your teeth" on it though? At the same level as the things you're already an expert on?
I'm a big believer in desirable difficulty for learning. But I'm a big believer in reduced difficulty for non-learning-oriented getting-things-done.
The 6 months ago is a meme at this point.
Don‘t worry, these „LLM Whisperers“ are too busy on social media to get anything done.
The most important thing is not to have a purpose. Machines will always outdo you in optimizing for a goal function.
Don't follow rules and if you really need to, make your own and never tell them to anyone. Keep people guessing and change your mind often. Never ask opinions. They are useless and if you never ask people think you know better.
What you know you think and feel are not what you think and feel but dead remnants of your past thoughts and hunches. You have no personality but an ever evolving process that changes instantly to fill the areas you think are not you or your interest.
> make your own and never tell them to anyone. Keep people guessing and change your mind often. Never ask opinions. They are useless and if you never ask people think you know better.
What an incredibly lonely and antagonist life philosophy.
Not only lonely, this feels downright anxiety-driven.
A secure person who has their shit together knows that some people do in fact have valuable opinions and they won't be afraid to ask in public. And they know that too: two thirds of their HN submissions are questions for advice after all.
So this isn't about actual value of opinions, this is about a certain fright of how you appear to others and strategies to control that.
It's an attempt to escape the control of the system but it's a reactionary approach, which at the end of the day, is just letting the system dictate how your life unfolds in a different way.
To live well and accomplish OP's goal in the modern era you have to understand that the attention economy has won, completely and totally. You can choose to live your life in a proactive manner: motivating force arises internally, through contemplation, meditation, deliberate study, and intention.
Or you can choose to live it reactively: you look at what just popped up in your feed and you write a blog post about it.
We're living more reactively than ever now. It's stifling creativity and individuality, it's creating depression and anxiety. The answer is to unplug and let the motive force for your actions start coming from your internal world again. It's okay to be influenced by the outside but we're more possessed now by derivative slop (see how all brand logos have essentially become the same) than we probably ever have been. It's time to unplug from the hive mind and wait in the resulting stillness for the next step.
You should understand what this is in response to, though. The commenter advocates opacity for the sake of not being treated like a machine. The ideal solution is for people to not treat you like a machine, but things aren’t always ideal.
But what's a better way to be seen as machine than to become an opaque black box? And unpredictable black box isn't seen as somehow not a machine; it's seen as a broken machine.
I would describe this as giving up on any serious agency, and retreating into a game of time killing tactics oriented around other people's confused reactions.
A way to offload the challenging search for purpose, to a shallow controllable process, consistent with the described disillusionment.
But people are idiosyncratic. Maybe for someone, a life of inscrutable eccentric rebellion against the Gods of practical reality, might actually be deeply meaningful to them - even if they don't admit it.
There are people who are genuinely happy doing the same thing every day. Every day. That is just as strange to me!
You don't seem to realize that you are undermining what you have written by sharing it with us here. That gives me hope for you. Of course, you can counter my objection by leaving it open in retrospect whether the text was meant seriously or not. Mind ninja! Always one step ahead! In any case, you won't be able to live a good life as a living gradient in a game-theoretical hell, denying your own goal orientation but strangely still interacting strategically with the world.
But why? What value does living like this add to your life?
Jesus Christ, was this written by LLM trained on 69 laws of power something or some other psychopath bullshit aimed at angsty coming of age?
Genius does what it must.
Talent does what it can.
You do what you're told.
Now get back to work.
Hotel does trivago.
Why cant Talent also do what it must?
> I was recently recommended a YouTube video with the following title:
> "Ligma balls"
I don't know what I've expected from the article, this is your typical run of the mill tech/linked-in bro fart in the wind. How to write a page and not say anything at all.
echoing this sentiment. I really do believe at some level there is strength/wisdom in being able to step away from a problem and return to it from a new perspective despite of what narratives are being pushed online by hustle
Anthony Jackson interview from 1992:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IS-xDsic84Q
Please listen to it.
> The machines are here.
> We have to live with that. Things are different.
> Hopefully, if one has done his homework, one can continue to pick and choose what to do.
> If you keep your skills up, there is a place for you. If you don't, then there isn't. Very simple equation.
> I will not permit myself to be outplayed by someone using the machine.
---
Anthony Jackson is regarded as one of the most talented bassists that ever lived. He did, in fact, outplayed the machine, re-invented his own tone and technique, and proved over and over again that synthesizers could not do what he did. Synthetisers could replace thousands of pop musicians (they still do), but not him.
So yeah, do the grind. Don't break the machines, don't bow to them. Instead, outplay them. Keep your skills up, so you are free to pick and choose.
The very basic (but incorrect) assumption that the “grind never stops” people rely on is
more hours == more productivity
It’s not. If you’re sleep deprived you’ll produce shit, which you’ll probably have to redo later. Sleep properly, produce more in less hours.
But hey, at least your colleagues think you’re busy because you’re last to leave redoing your shitty work!
Edit: read The Brain at Rest by Jebelli, don’t work yourself to death
"Quite an experience to live in fear, isn't it? That's what it is to be a slave."
I know many people who are full on into hustle culture and they don't care to optimize their productivity.
the hustle is being strategic, work smart not hard, fake till you make it, lie and be ruthless and amoral
It's kind of disgusting...
And unfortunately being demonstrated by a role model right now to a whole lot of impressionable US school children who will grow up lying through their teeth who will eventually occupy jobs they're woefully unqualified for, to the detriment of their entire sphere of influence.
A friend of mine recently pointed me to the song "Lie, Cheat, Steal" by Run The Jewels. Seems like the strategy of choice for a while yet.