[HN Gopher] Excellence is a habit, but so is failure
___________________________________________________________________
Excellence is a habit, but so is failure
Author : dvrp
Score : 713 points
Date : 2023-07-07 07:24 UTC (15 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (awesomekling.github.io)
(TXT) w3m dump (awesomekling.github.io)
| slashdev wrote:
| Jocko Willink has a great quote on this subject:
| Rome wasn't built in a day. Everyone knows that. It
| took hundreds of years for Rome to reach its peak. But Rome
| also didn't fall in a day. It also took time, hundreds of
| years, for Rome to decay and fall apart.
|
| He goes on to say that each day we're either improving or
| decaying, either getting a little better or getting a little
| worse. Those little things add up over time to make a big
| difference in our lives.
| musebox35 wrote:
| This seems like a specific application of the "inverted
| thinking/inversion" mentality. I once came across a post on this
| but can not find it now. I think it was about this article:
| https://fs.blog/inversion/
|
| Edit - Or this one: https://jamesclear.com/inversion
| mylons wrote:
| the author is describing self medication as incremental failure.
| i think this is a mindset that can lead to more.
|
| in those moments you're seeking relief, and viewing it as failure
| can just perpetuate shame and creates a vicious cycle.
| totetsu wrote:
| The discussion on a similar article last month was interesting
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36195105
| alexmolas wrote:
| This is the classical 1.01**365=37 but 0.99**365=0.02. I guess
| the difficult part is to detect where is this missing 1%.
| myth_drannon wrote:
| Yes, when the change is small it is hard to realize is it
| really 1.01 or 0.99? That demands a lot of constant reflection
| which causes self-doubt and the easiest path out of this
| tension is too let it go and just don't care.
| anon35 wrote:
| Great observation. I found myself thinking it reflected the
| famous quote: ""Watch your thoughts, they become words; watch
| your words, they become actions; watch your actions, they
| become habits; watch your habits, they become character; watch
| your character, for it becomes your destiny." The post author
| is traversing the actions-habit-character territory.
| 23B1 wrote:
| 'Failure' is when the whole system crashes. Andreas is really
| talking about small setbacks that lead to failure.
|
| And I think its better to embrace Samuel Beckett's mantra: "Try
| Again. Fail Again. Fail Better."
|
| It's arguably the core tenet of agile/lean anyway. Measure,
| learn, _improve_. If you 're taking those single steps backwards
| and using them to make two steps forward, that's the opposite of
| failure.
| SanderNL wrote:
| I found it interesting to learn about the etymology of the word
| "character". It comes to us from Latin which took it from the
| Greek (kharakter) which comes from kharasso (kharasso) - I
| _scratch_ or _engrave_.
|
| Our character can be thought of as the result of a long process
| of engraving or scratching. I tend to see it as a solid metal
| shield full of scratches from long battles. The resulting grooves
| tend towards virtue or vice. A sustained habit of wise choices
| makes it easier to do the right thing - even when it is hard -
| when the time comes and it will come. A marriage, a deathbed, a
| career. Life has its fair share of hard choices and having
| grooves in your soul that guide your choices towards the virtuous
| helps immensely.
|
| That's also useful to know for when you have unimportant tasks to
| complete. For some people this may comprise the majority of their
| career and/or life. However, those "unimportant" tasks still
| scratch your soul and those scratches ultimately matter. Even
| seemingly mundane things like taking out the garbage can be done
| with virtue in mind.
|
| I'm fun at parties by the way.
| FreakLegion wrote:
| A surprising number of words trace back to some form or other
| having to do with carving, cutting, boring into. See also
| _analuein_ and _krinein_. It makes for some fantastic one-
| liners, like Foucault 's _C 'est que le savoir n'est pas fait
| pour comprendre, il est fait pour trancher_: _Knowledge isn 't
| made for understanding, it's made for cutting_.
| cbsmith wrote:
| > The resulting grooves tend towards virtue or vice.
|
| Virtue & vice are kind of an arbitrary way to device up those
| "grooves", and what constitutes virtue or vice varies by
| context/perspective.
|
| I would argue there are a LOT more dimensions to character, and
| some are arguably more important than that one, but I otherwise
| agree with your metaphor.
|
| I wear a platinum wedding ring for much the same reason. While
| it's really hard to break a platinum ring, they accumulate
| scratches quite easily. A ring that endures but carries with it
| scratches and grooves from the life you've lived seems like a
| pretty good metaphor for marriage.
| epiccoleman wrote:
| My ring is just a little bit loose on my finger. It could
| slip off and be lost if it's not paid some attention. I
| initially found this supremely annoying, but realized that
| the metaphor is so good that I wouldn't have it any other
| way.
| runeks wrote:
| > Virtue & vice are kind of an arbitrary way to device up
| those "grooves", and what constitutes virtue or vice varies
| by context/perspective.
|
| Would you care to provide a few examples?
| cbsmith wrote:
| Sorry for the typeoh in the above.
|
| Examples: compassion, loyalty, endurance/perseverance,
| social/independence, love/hate, trusting,
| cynicism/optimism, etc.
| akprasad wrote:
| For a similar idea from another culture, see the ancient
| definitions of _karma_ : Now as a man is like
| this or like that, according as he acts and according as
| he behaves, so will he be; a man of good acts will become
| good, a man of bad acts, bad; he becomes pure by pure
| deeds, bad by bad deeds; And here they say that a
| person consists of desires, and as is his desire, so is
| his will; and as is his will, so is his deed; and
| whatever deed he does, that he will reap.
|
| -- _Brihadaranyaka Upanishad_
| dr_dshiv wrote:
| At my summer camp, we used to hear:
|
| "Sow an act, reap a habit
|
| Sow a habit, reap a character
|
| Sow a character, reap a destiny"
| andorov wrote:
| Similar quote from Lao Tzu. I like the inclusion of
| thoughts -> words -> actions.
|
| "Watch your thoughts, they become your words;
|
| watch your words, they become your actions;
|
| watch your actions, they become your habits;
|
| watch your habits, they become your character;
|
| watch your character, it becomes your destiny."
| akprasad wrote:
| That's a nice way to phrase it! Google tells me this quote
| is from Ralph Waldo Emerson, who himself was deeply
| influenced by ancient Indian thought (see [1], e.g.).
|
| [1]: https://www.jstor.org/stable/2709649
|
| _(edit: replaced [1] with a better link.)_
| barrenko wrote:
| Another way to think about this and the parent comment is
| that karma is instant.
| ineedasername wrote:
| Rarely do people get what they deserve.
|
| The idea of Karma only "works" when embedded in a spiritual
| belief system that adheres to some form of iterative life
| cycle, e.g., reincarnation.
| SeanAnderson wrote:
| Reminds me of, "Luck is just when preparation meets
| opportunity."
| EugeneOZ wrote:
| oligarchs who were killing, stealing, raping and betraying
| their whole lives, now are laughing on this joke so hard, on
| their super-yachts.
| [deleted]
| mikrl wrote:
| I try to live virtuously in a way Russian oligarchs might
| laugh at.
|
| No yacht, but no enemies either.
|
| Never have to worry about novichok or a drone hitting me.
|
| It's not bad at all.
| berniedurfee wrote:
| And a mostly clean conscience! Not something everyone has
| to deal with, but some of us do.
| EugeneOZ wrote:
| Doesn't matter. their experience disproves that bullshit
| about "karma", that's all.
| lennxa wrote:
| I agree. But the message here is not an external
| occurring but rather internal. One's acts determine one's
| internal state. If you act virtuously by your definition,
| your judgement of yourself will be good/not corrupt,
| which is good. The key point here is that it's your own
| personal defination.
| EugeneOZ wrote:
| I'm not praising the oligarchs, of course. I'm saying
| that the "karma" bullshit just doesn't work. Yeah, I
| don't want to be like these bad guys, but I have no
| illusions that some magical "karma" will reward me or
| punish them - that's naive.
| akprasad wrote:
| I agree. The quote I shared above has nothing to do with
| external systems that dole out rewards and punishments.
| Ancient definitions of karma are very different from the
| mainstream definition in vogue today (edit: with the
| usual caveat that ancient concepts have multiple
| interpretations, and I'm sure there are contemporaries of
| the view I shared that are more in line with what you
| imagine).
| mikrl wrote:
| I don't believe in karma or in the words of Johnny Cash
| "god almighty is gonna cut em down" but the world does
| work in funny ways.
|
| Such behaviour is not sustainable and even if your
| network of nasties shields you from consequences, you're
| making a giant gamble relying on that forever without
| some meaner network coming along and _pop_! with no moral
| issue.
| pseg134 wrote:
| You are lacking the perspective to make that
| determination but I will pray that on your deathbed you
| will achieve total enlightenment so you can see.
| ly3xqhl8g9 wrote:
| A somewhat modernized version is to say: it's not nature, nor
| nurture, it's stigmergy [1]. Or another way: the organism is
| larger than the collection of the cells [2] [3].
|
| [1] "mechanism of indirect coordination, through the
| environment, between agents or actions. The principle is that
| the trace left in the environment by an individual action
| stimulates the performance of a succeeding action by the same
| or different agent", https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stigmergy
|
| [2] 2023, Michael Levin, _Bioelectric networks. The cognitive
| glue enabling evolutionary scaling from physiology to mind_ ,
| https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10071-023-01780-3
|
| [3] Michael Levin and Wayne Frasch (2023) _From molecular
| physiology to anatomical form_ ,
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3l8I4gJ6D0w, at 27:32 the
| hybrid agent frog cells + scientists + AI exploring
| morphospace.
| npsimons wrote:
| I'll just toss this in, since I haven't seen someone else put
| it out out there yet: Excellence is an art
| won by training and habituation: we do not act rightly
| because we have virtue or excellence, but we rather have these
| because we have acted rightly; 'these
| virtues are formed in man by his doing the actions';
| we are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act
| but a habit: 'the good of man is a working
| of the soul in the way of excellence in a complete
| life... for as it is not one swallow or one fine day that
| makes a spring, so it is not one day or a short time that makes
| a man blessed and happy' --
| Will Durant, "The Story of Philosophy: The Lives and Opinions
| of the World's Greatest Philosophers" (1926),
| Ch. II: Aristotle and Greek Science; part VII:
| Ethics and the Nature of Happiness
| e1g wrote:
| Webster [1] traces the source of the word "character" to
| theater where it was used as an emblem of the reputation of
| someone or a group of people, similar to how you would
| recognize the brand name engraved into a thing. The
| interpretation that character is a result of "engraving"
| through repeated behavior (at the individual level) is
| fascinating, but doesn't seems as supported from original usage
| for centuries.
|
| [1] https://www.merriam-webster.com/words-at-play/word-
| history-o...).
| birdyrooster wrote:
| I don't think Webster is always right or writes complete
| etymology. Perhaps there is a more charitable way to
| interpret the PC. But PC should provide sources, that would
| be nice.
| renewiltord wrote:
| It's more a poetic association than etymology. That's an
| all right way to link the two.
| dr_dshiv wrote:
| Socrates was famous for his loose etymologies. He
| describes the etymology of _techne_ (design, craft, basis
| of technology) as coming from "echo" and "nous" (mind). I
| love the idea of the echos of mind in technology!
|
| His interlocutor said something like: "your etymology is
| like pulling a heavy boat up a steep ramp." Ha! Yay for
| the playful side of Plato.
| ry4nolson wrote:
| this could be a nuance/difference of "a character" of a story
| and a real person's "character"
| [deleted]
| tinkrr wrote:
| The article itself says that there are multiple meanings of
| "character". One of which refers to a persons reputation and
| can be traced back to "the Greek charassein, meaning "to
| sharpen, cut in furrows, or engrave."
| fsckboy wrote:
| multiple meanings, ok; multiple etymologies, unlikely.
| algas wrote:
| So perhaps this is convergent evolution? "Character" can
| also mean symbol, like a key on a typewriter. That would
| make more sense as a descendant from "engraving".
| [deleted]
| tobr wrote:
| Funny that you bring this up. Just the other day I looked uo
| the etymology of "character" vs "caricature". Surprisingly,
| considering the close similarity both in meaning and sound,
| they are completely unrelated. You already described
| "character"; "caricature" apparently comes from Italian for
| "load" or "exaggerate", and is related to English "charge".
| tracerbulletx wrote:
| That's pretty interesting, also makes the direct connection to
| the other use of the word character.
| johnnyworker wrote:
| > I know of no more encouraging fact than the ability of a man
| to elevate his life by conscious endeavor. It is something to
| paint a particular picture, or to carve a statue, and so make a
| few objects beautiful. It is far more glorious to carve and
| paint the very atmosphere and medium through which we look.
| This morally we can do.
|
| -- Henry David Thoreau
| florg wrote:
| The article also reminded me of this Charlie Munger quote:
| "It is remarkable how much long-term advantage people like
| us have gotten by trying to be consistently not stupid,
| instead of trying to be very intelligent."
|
| Sometimes not doing something stupid is at once easier and harder
| than trying to get into a good habit.
| Arisaka1 wrote:
| Ever since I quit my first job I've been tinkering with languages
| and frameworks. And every time I would complete a book or course
| I'd face the decision of building something on my own.
|
| That building never happens. 1 month later my portfolio is
| nonexistent, there are no projects, and my blog is a figment of
| my imagination. And right now I'm in the process of learning yet
| another framework.
|
| So I've been thinking: This must be something worse than what I
| imagine. I read about perfectionism, fear of shame and
| judgment... bingo. I can tell that the root of the problem isn't
| that I can't work on a personal project, because I do have them.
| But the moment it's a portfolio project the question isn't "what
| would help me learn?" but "what would help me demonstrate to my
| future employer that I deserve a chance?"
|
| This is a behavioral habit, a disastrous one and potentially
| career-ending or at least progression-ending. And it may have
| started with me trying my best not meet external expectations or
| minimize my footprint to avoid being exposed to bullying,
| trolling, nickname calling, ever since I was a little kid. And
| that seed didn't happen overnight, it took a lot of daily
| conditioning to turn a child from risk-taker to risk-avoider.
|
| That's why I'm wary of giving the advice to beginners "just start
| building projects". It's not that the advice is bad, but there's
| just too many factors at play and failure to do so is not always
| about one's intelligence.
| withinboredom wrote:
| > And right now I'm in the process of learning yet another
| framework.
|
| Why not build a framework? At this point, you might be a
| subject-matter expert of frameworks!
|
| You know what you like and how you want to use it.
| ajkjk wrote:
| A framework that I have found helpful for situations like this:
|
| When you feel this way, that you "want to" do something but it
| keeps not happening, then there's evidently something
| inconsistent in your mental state: you seem to think you want
| to do one thing, but (it would be fair to say) since you're not
| doing it, maybe you don't 'actually want' to do it. The idea
| being that 'true wanting' compels actions. So when you
| fantasize about doing one thing, which you think you want,
| you're actually in the process of fulfilling a different want
| about something else (such as: "to feel like you are making
| progress on demonstrating value").
|
| To disentangle this you have to figure out what you "actually
| want", resolving the inconsistency, usually by asking yourself:
| "what do my actual behaviors reveal of my actual desires?"
| Recognizing the revealed desire seems, empirically, to help
| move past it, while not recognizing it leaves you/me/whoever in
| this seemingly infinite loop of feeling incapable of action.
|
| Sometimes just revealing the loop you're in unkinks it
| immediately and leaves you free to do something new. Sometimes,
| strangely, it makes you instantly uninterested in the whole
| topic, and then, in the space left by the now-uninteresting
| topic, new interests float in --- real interests, which come
| packaged with 'real' wanting that you can actually act on.
| spondylosaurus wrote:
| This is a nice little self-interrogation framework--thanks
| for sharing!
|
| It reminds me of a common refrain/warning among aspiring
| writers: it's not enough to want to _be a writer_ , you have
| to actually want to _write._ Both for a host of psychological
| reasons and for the simple fact that you 'll never be A
| Writer unless you're putting pen to paper on a regular basis.
| mezi wrote:
| I feel the same. For me the learning is the enjoyable part, and
| building a 1000th TODO app or a mediocre blog does not appeal
| to me. Although I'd like to have a blog and it would be great
| if I had some examples of the frameworks I've learnt, it's not
| something that I'll spend my time on.
| keyle wrote:
| I wrote a post about this that may help you. Please take a read
| and let me know https://noben.org "how to finish"
| POiNTx wrote:
| Your blog is beautiful, thanks for sharing.
| sanderjd wrote:
| I would give you different advice than "just start building
| projects": The language and framework that the first iteration
| of something is built in does not matter. You already know
| enough tools to build anything you want. If you want to build
| stuff, stop learning new tools. Maybe you'll replace the time
| you've been spending learning new tools with video games or TV
| shows, but maybe you'll replace it with building stuff,
| instead.
|
| This is a classic trap that young programmers fall into, to
| fetishize tools and condition doing useful work on learning a
| bunch of tools. Just say no!
|
| (This isn't anti-intellectualism - you'll eventually learn a
| bunch more tools as you go.)
| PartiallyTyped wrote:
| The advice should be, build stuff that you find interesting. I
| don't think prospects and motivational words are sufficient to
| get you to do things, but curiosity - or even better, child-
| like curiosity- is a far better lever to help you get things
| done.
| TheHumanist wrote:
| Man you just hit me hard with this... Also add one insanely
| overbearing mother that expects straight As and a perfect
| child, on top of some bullying and such... Really leads you to
| just want to curl up and not take risks anymore. I've just been
| discovering, through the aid of therapy, just how much my
| mother has affected my whole life up to this point. I love her
| and she was doing her best. I really believe she was, based on
| her mother (oof, even more insane lol). Man has it done a
| number on me in every way you can imagine. I only mention this
| because your piece of essentially having the fear to move any
| personal projects to portfolio projects is very real with me,as
| well.
|
| Side-note... How old are you? What frameworks? What personal
| projects? I'm 40 and just REALLY beginning this journey into
| coding and as much as I love it it is also insanely
| overwhelming because of reasons you started and also my
| terrible ADHD. So hard to stay focused on learning a piece at a
| time. My brain wants to open all the links, check out all the
| courses and YouTube videos... And it becomes too much.
| dgb23 wrote:
| Not GP but I share similar experiences as you. Started coding
| as a teenager, but after I got my first job I did similar
| things as you for a very long time on and off until only a
| few years ago.
|
| In part, it's good that you're trying out new things. That
| part should always be something we do. But the issue is when
| you don't have developed taste and principles to discriminate
| between things that just sound interesting and things you
| actually want to explore.
|
| For me the solution has been to develop a small set of
| important values by asking fundamental questions. Why do I
| program? What does emotionally satisfy me
| (fun/pride/learning)? What is valuable for my users? What are
| computers for? What makes a good program?
|
| Ask questions like that and you get a list of important
| things that you focus on.
|
| Whenever I see something new, it first has to get through my
| value filter.
|
| My reading, learning and tinkering list is still growing
| slightly faster than it shrinks. But I'm much more content
| and happy with what I actually end up doing or reading.
| mason55 wrote:
| > _and also my terrible ADHD_
|
| FWIW, programming and ADHD tend to go well together once you
| can get past the basics. Especially when you're in the flow
| of things, it's just a constant loop of small change ->
| visible progress -> dopamine hit. Combine that with
| hyperfocus on the occasional deep bug and it can feel like a
| superpower.
|
| Don't get me wrong, there are lots of other times where it
| doesn't work like that, and this assumes you can actually get
| started, but when you do it can be magical.
| actionfromafar wrote:
| Hear, hear
| bluedino wrote:
| I always seemed to switch languages, frameworks, projects,
| operating systems...seldom making something.
|
| From an interviewers perspective, it can be nice to see someone
| with varied experience across an array of tech. But just one or
| two demonstratable projects can seal the deal.
|
| At this point I'd be happy with three person listing one
| language/framework and one good project.
| maerF0x0 wrote:
| A smart person's fallacy is that more learning will yield a
| better outcome. (Note they've largely been rewarded for
| learning across their school career because that was something
| they excelled at). I've come to believe that in fact action
| should precede learning. That is first take action-- fire,
| ready/recover, aim (repeat).
|
| We think we can just learn to succeed, but in fact we need to
| learn in the right direction, which requires to first attempt
| it and gather feedback of where to learn.
| boredumb wrote:
| I tell people to build a small crud application that you can
| use to manage some data you have some interest in. I've build a
| similar non-marketable applications, usually a todo/project
| management application or something that imports a bunch of
| stock market data probably 30 times now, I actually use the
| project itself to learn new languages and frameworks because it
| hits most of the areas I will have to learn to be productive
| and I can pickup the language semantics along the way. When
| you're done you have code that is going to be doing things you
| will actually encounter in the wild instead of contrived and
| isolated examples from text books.
|
| My favorite part is once I'm done I feel comfortable enough
| with reading through repos and some books over how to be more
| efficient/idiomatic and then going back through my little
| project and refactoring it.
|
| With all that said I have a graveyard of projects in languages
| and technology that is probably not used anywhere commercially
| and the project itself is languishing if it was completed at
| all - but for example, I have a half working todo app in racket
| and despite being a junk app in a non-commercial language, I
| had to learn lisp and it at least subtly has influenced how I
| approach problems. Same thing with Rust which I actually use
| quite a bit personally and commercially, but when I originally
| learned it I was 100% golang professionally and I noticed my
| golang functions would resemble rust functions if I squinted
| and I think the complexity in my golang went way down.
|
| I guess my advice is Just Start Building Projects (that you may
| never even show anyone or post on github, much less go
| marketing it.) and you will benefit from it massively. If you
| are able to learn and benefit from it _and_ it becomes popular
| or a commercial success than great! But who cares, on the
| internet no one knows you aren't a dog.
| tuyiown wrote:
| > This is a behavioral habit, a disastrous one and potentially
| career-ending or at least progression-ending.
|
| Or it's just that reality lurks somewhere and that hidden
| complexity will arise making the effort unsatisfying with
| roadblock happening too early.
|
| Most people that achieve their pet project scope it into a
| narrow solution that don't address general problems. If your
| interest is the general problem, your solution is likely to be
| hard and complex, and narrowing it make it uninteresting.
|
| Each experience is different, but since I stopped caring about
| half baked solution to general hard problems (New Web UI
| Framework ! Implementation automation !) and stopped
| daydreaming about building a solution, but merely thinking of
| the problem itself, I stopped plateauing and resumed a steady
| progress in my relationship with tech.
| A4ET8a8uTh0 wrote:
| That hits close to home. I was cleaning my drive recently and I
| have a folder of completed projects ( which has few items ) and
| various random stuff that I briefly found interesting over the
| course of the years ( and then just gave up as soon as
| something else caught my attention or got bored.. you know the
| drill ).
|
| Some of it helped me a little ( that is partially how I learned
| basics of R ), but I fear that it also held me back as I never
| really finished any of the more amusing projects and did not
| experience that feeling of finishing something.
|
| And as you get older, it is harder to expose yourself to that
| scrutiny.
| m3kw9 wrote:
| Creating a project is tough because there are so name variables
| to contend with: better ideas, "this won't pan out", small
| burnouts, no accountability on time wasted on procrastinating,
| self doubts, money, opportunity cost analysis making you switch
| etc.
|
| So you do need to just build once or twice to experience the
| hardship of it to see if this is for you
| phoe-krk wrote:
| The original title is "Excellence is a habit, but so is failure"
| and I think it reflects the contents of the post somewhat better.
| A short but insightful piece, thank you for posting.
| lo_zamoyski wrote:
| Indeed. And I think a good term here is "moral failure", which is
| exactly what the traditional meaning of "sin" is, i.e., doing
| something you shouldn't, that you _know_ , to some degree, that
| you shouldn't (culpability is determined by the degree to which
| you understand you are doing something wrong, since understanding
| is a prerequisite for consent). And small sins are gateways to
| still greater sins. Indulge them enough, rationalize your
| indulgence, and you will slowly habituate indulgence and corrupt
| yourself and shift your moral Overton window. You become what you
| repeatedly do.
|
| Sinning, in fact, corrupts the _intellect_ and so it quite
| literally dulls your mind to reality over time. Why? Because in
| order to choose against what you _know_ is the good decision, you
| have to turn your mind _away_ from reality, from the truth. Do
| this often enough and it becomes a _habit_ of blinding the mind
| to enable doing what you shouldn 't. A blinded mind is degraded,
| worse at grasping reality, and this makes it even easier to
| commit still greater evil as it has become worse at determining
| what is objectively good. A downward spiral.
|
| This is why a habit of self-discipline is important. What we call
| "self-denial" is really the practice of depriving yourself of
| what you desire that you know you should not desire
| inappropriately. The obvious example here is food, but it applies
| generally. Food, _as such_ , is good. However, if I _know_ that I
| 've eaten enough, but an unruly desire for food surfaces, perhaps
| for food I know is bad for me, denying or repressing that desire
| is good. One of the purposes of fasting is actually the
| disciplining of the appetite for food. Consistent practice of
| self-denial has the effect of regulating the appetite and
| strengthening the dominion of reason over it, which develops
| one's integrity. Over time, that unruly desire, ruled over and
| purified by reasoned discipline, will better conform to the
| rational order, i.e., what is objectively good. Note how people
| who indulge their hunger against their own good only become more
| voracious eaters. They may even become _disordered_ eaters (e.g.,
| bulimia). Rewarding an inordinate (or disordered) desire only
| reinforces it.
|
| Now consider how vicious, destructive, and irrational our
| consumerist culture is. It thrives on mindless and degrading
| indulgence of any and all desires. This is not the way.
| lionkor wrote:
| I've been watching Andreas' YouTube channel since very early on,
| and had some short interactions with him in his comment section,
| and I really believe that every one of the videos where he sits
| in his car and talks made a difference for me. They taught me a
| lot - and of course, after tens or hundreds of hours of watching
| him write code, my C++ looks quite similar to his.
| jpeeler wrote:
| I've never found the motivation or the desire to watch
| livestream coding. I had assumed that the value gained versus
| time investment wouldn't pay off. But then it was in Andreas'
| Igalia chat[1] that he said that showing the failures and
| getting stuck was important to portray. And now you're saying
| that you've (presumably) improved and can even identify similar
| coding patterns due to your investment. I guess I'm now finally
| convinced it's a good investment.
|
| [1] https://www.igalia.com/chats/ladybird
| smcin wrote:
| Andreas Kling's YouTube channel:
| https://www.youtube.com/andreaskling
| [deleted]
| croes wrote:
| hindsight is 20/20
| sph wrote:
| Timely post. I was planning on spending the day researching
| gamification applied to healthy habits and/or abandoning
| unhealthy ones.
|
| Anyone has any pointer? Bonus if it's RuneScape-style
| gamification (exponential XP curve, rewarding yourself every
| level up, build on the assumption that growth in life is a _very_
| long grind like maxing a RS character, made of small steps)
| Wurlitzer wrote:
| Habitica
| skapadia wrote:
| I love listening to Guy Raz's "How I Built This" podcast - a
| common element in almost every success story is the number of
| failures it took to reach success. Failure, the ability to keep
| working / pivot through failures, and being okay with failure
| seem to be requirements to succeeding.
|
| Failure is literally a key ingredient to success.
| stillbourne wrote:
| Can't have excellence without a shit ton of failure
| arnejenssen wrote:
| Excellent!
|
| Via negativa is a useful tool. Instead of thinking about what to
| add, via negativa is about what to remove.
| m3kw9 wrote:
| This is the basis of ignorance or no self awareness, you go on
| autopilot on what feels great at the moment
| wonderwonder wrote:
| Andrew Tate (I am in no way condoning his character) has an
| interesting video where he talks about discipline vs motivation.
| If you need to be motivated to do something then its probably not
| going to last, discipline is what makes things last. Combined
| with patience is how we see real change and results. If we wake
| up at 5am to go to the gym, many of us are motivated when we set
| the alarm but that motivation is gone when the alarm rings, only
| discipline can make you get up day after day instead of hitting
| the snooze button.
|
| This applies to all aspects of life. Its the reason so many new
| years resolutions die after a few weeks. Why diets fail. Why the
| gym is packed in January and back to normal in March. If you need
| to be motivated to succeed, you will likely fail, only discipline
| will get you through both the good and bad times.
|
| Discipline is what separates the great from the average or even
| good.
| jschveibinz wrote:
| Potentially interesting to some readers:
|
| "The Handbook of Self-Regulation", Baumeister and Vohs
|
| http://ndl.ethernet.edu.et/bitstream/123456789/28342/1/162.p...
| trollerator23 wrote:
| Baumeister has a lot of great research.
| goatkey wrote:
| This looks really great. Thank you for sharing
| vkolencik wrote:
| The same point expressed beautifully by Jocko Willink:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TyMEQMt6yAw
| euix wrote:
| It's very honest of him to breakdown how he makes his living on
| SerenityOS - really enjoyed that blog post, helps give people an
| idea of how a very technically saavy person can make it in
| today's world as a "nomad".
| hotdogscout wrote:
| I think failure is a better groomer for success than success.
| Every truly great achievement of my life came from prior
| humiliation from failure.
| zh3 wrote:
| > We often hear that making small incremental improvements every
| day can lead to great things. This popular piece of advice rings
| true...
|
| A journey of 10,000 miles starts with a single step.
|
| You can only cross a chasm with a mighty leap.
|
| YMMV.
| zackmorris wrote:
| IMHO there's a level of understanding beyond this, which might be
| called grace. I identify as a lifelong failure, but I no longer
| place blame on specifics like addiction or body weight or
| relationship issues. The truth of my existence is that the world
| is really messed up, but also beautiful despite the dysfunction.
| And I'm grateful for the adversity which woke me out of the
| fantasies which distracted me throughout so much of my life and
| added to the suffering of others.
|
| Loosely that means that every time I took a drink, there was a
| reason, like maybe I was lonely because I was rejected by
| someone. Maybe I was fat because I was too broke to take care of
| myself. Maybe I was mean to my partners because I was projecting
| my own frustrations.
|
| Now I look at life more like a game. I'm drawn to fringe ideas
| and projects with an overwhelming likelihood of failure. I've
| been through the ringer so many times that I'm more of a loosely
| held together hodgepodge of components than a coherent identity.
| But I keep showing up. I'm hardened from adversity but I've
| alchemized that into softness and an infinite well of empathy for
| others struggling with the human condition. I cheer inside when
| the meekest among us speak truth to power. I live in service to
| others now, who are an aspect of myself.
| norir wrote:
| You may be interested in Gravity and Grace by Simone Weil which
| takes a more mystical approach to these ideas.
| Zetice wrote:
| This ideology takes a good idea and pushes it too far. There
| isn't a lot of value in seriously considering oneself as a
| "failure", and rarely is it actually true.
|
| Perspective to recognize the lack of any such way to measure
| outcomes so booleanly is probably more valuable than choosing
| to adopt failure as your default state.
| pseudostem wrote:
| Since a lot of people are talking about themselves so openly, I
| feel a compulsion too.
|
| I hide behind perfection. Learning maths, programming, sports,
| health.
|
| Of course I need a perfect OS, perfect programming paradigm,
| perfect book, the best music learning method, greatest body
| improvement program.
|
| Perfect is the enemy of good. It's something I grapple with on a
| daily basis.
| xorvoid wrote:
| I'm continually struck by how brave Andreas is for talking about
| his addiction problems out in public. In most every interview he
| leads with it when he could just easily say a vague: "I found
| myself with a lot of free time".
|
| Addiction can come with a LOT of shame baggage. To embrace
| vulnerability over it is quite substantial. Thank you Andreas for
| being a positive example for the world! Keep up the great work!
| ilrwbwrkhv wrote:
| I think if more people were vulnerable, the world would be a
| kinder place. I also wish more CEOs were vulnerable. They are
| forced to "show strength" and "not complain" especially if they
| are a billionaire. But it would really show how much their
| lives are a mixed bag and we all face challenges and try to
| figure it out.
| MicropenisMike wrote:
| Unfortunately vulnerability is among the first things to be
| exploited, just take a look at any advertisement.
| blastro wrote:
| human CVE
| erikpukinskis wrote:
| > They are forced to "show strength" and "not complain"
|
| I wonder about this. Sometimes I think that _is_ the job of a
| CEO: to put on a good face and keep and maintain "The Plan Is
| Gonna Work" vibes.
|
| Every CEO I've worked under--no matter how compassionate they
| were on a personal level--has had a policy of absolutely
| crushing voices of dissent. Maybe not immediately, but within
| a couple quarters. At least when the dissent was regarding
| things that the CEO felt were not something they could
| address on the current roadmap.
|
| I've come to appreciate that this attitude may be
| necessary... that companies (with headcounts in the 50-500
| range at least) cannot afford to have some of their people
| pulling in a different direction than their roadmap. And that
| people who will do that must be excised.
|
| But your comment makes me wonder... is that the only way? I
| think maybe a company like Valve lets their employees pull in
| different directions, and also then just allows them to be
| starved of resources. Which maybe is effectively the same? Or
| maybe is an innovation on the standard CEO model?
| Findecanor wrote:
| > I've come to appreciate that this attitude may be
| necessary... that companies (with headcounts in the 50-500
| range at least) cannot afford to have some of their people
| pulling in a different direction than their roadmap. And
| that people who will do that must be excised.
|
| There's a big difference between differing opinions and
| outright insubordination though, and one should not mistake
| one for the other.
|
| IMHO, a good leader should encourage his underlings to
| express their opinions and giving him feedback and advice,
| but when the boss has made a decision then that decision
| should be followed. A leader who does not allow the former
| is a weak leader.
|
| But it is difficult sometimes, because being able to give
| and take criticism in a constructive way is a _skill_ that
| not everyone has, but it can be learned.
| feoren wrote:
| > Every CEO I've worked under--no matter how compassionate
| they were on a personal level--has had a policy of
| absolutely crushing voices of dissent.
|
| I think there's a really interesting confluence of factors
| here.
|
| (A) CEOs tend to be psychopaths and/or narcissists --
| people who care about others, or who don't have a
| bottomless need to prove their own self-importance simply
| don't become CEOs (or don't succeed at it). So of course
| they crush dissent: it is antithetical to their whole
| psyche. That comes from their weak, fragile egos, not any
| real "leadership" traits. That being said ...
|
| (B) Luckily, having a singular, narrow-minded focus is
| _sometimes_ good for a company. And the times when it 's
| really needed, this narcissistic ego-fragility of the CEO
| happens to be beneficial ("wartime CEO"), at least for
| those companies that survive.
|
| (C) Survivorship bias eliminates the cases where the
| singular, narrow-minded focus driven by the CEO's
| narcissism actually completely destroys the company. You
| haven't worked under them because they destroyed the
| company before you applied. Darwinism does the rest: good
| companies survive long enough for you to work for them
| because the narrow-minded idea the narcissistic CEO focused
| on happened to be the right one at that time. The company
| looks strong, the CEO looks smart, and then they exit to
| another CEO job and completely fuck it up, because they've
| never actually been smart, never been a good leader, never
| had all the answers -- they just got lucky, and the lucky
| ones are the ones who are around to be seen and worked for.
|
| (D) When it's "peacetime", not "wartime", the narcissism of
| CEOs is slowly eating away at the company, corrupting it
| from the inside out, but it doesn't matter so much, because
| the company is generally doing well. They can hire and fire
| whoever they want; their "singular focus" is just ignored
| by the people who are actually doing the work, and the
| company plods along, being productive despite the cancer
| slowly growing inside of it.
|
| We forget the bad CEOs, misattribute random success to good
| leadership, and ignore their parasitism when the company is
| doing well. We praise them when they save a struggling
| company, even if the company is only struggling due to
| their past ineptitude. And so we perpetuate the cycle of
| CEOs generally looking like strong, visionary leaders, when
| they are nothing more than narcissistic parasites who
| occasionally force a struggling company to randomly do
| exactly what it needed to survive.
|
| Of _course_ letting your employees pull in different
| directions is a better strategy for the long-term health of
| the company. But long-term health of the company is not
| what CEOs, nor shareholders, nor board members, nor anyone
| pulling any strings actually cares about. Of course this
| entire treatment mostly applies to publicly traded
| companies, or companies with an "exit strategy".
|
| > Valve lets their employees pull in different directions
|
| Valve is not a publicly traded company, and therefore its
| CEO is actually invested in its long-term health.
| coffeebeqn wrote:
| Especially since most CEOs are at a minimum work addicts. Most
| probably use various chemical "enhancers"
| rco8786 wrote:
| Seems like a pretty broad brush there
| jliptzin wrote:
| They are also addicts. They're addicted to the dopamine rush
| of their stock prices ticking higher and moving up the wealth
| ladder.
| aeyes wrote:
| It can be a psychological trick you are playing on yourself by
| just putting it out there in public. Lots of people now know
| about it so you don't want to let them down by misstepping
| again.
|
| In a way it's a form of holding yourself accountable.
|
| I'm not sure how rehab works but I guess the first thing you
| need to do is to admit that you have a problem. And then you
| need to find ways to prevent yourself from giving in.
| onemoresoop wrote:
| It still requires some courage to do so.
| germandiago wrote:
| 100% agree.
| tgv wrote:
| That title: how is excellence a habit? You can't excel without
| consistent practice (unless it's a completely new field,
| possibly), but that doesn't make it a habit. The reverse doesn't
| hold. While failure may also be lack of habit.
|
| Clickbait is a habit, I suppose.
| PaulHoule wrote:
| I think it's going to come out eventually that obesity is not a
| failure of willpower but a derangement of your metabolism caused
| by some environmental chemical such as PFAS, glyphosate, etc.
| adamsmith143 wrote:
| Weird then that Semaglutide is so effective for weight loss
| when it's mechanism of action is to reduce the amount you eat.
| Almost like that was the answer all along.
| sph wrote:
| I wouldn't even know where to start deconstructing your
| argument.
|
| If you remove the sense of taste from someone, I assure you
| they won't enjoy food and will lose weight very quickly.
| Almost like that was the answer all along.
|
| Your comment has to be made in bad faith and it's not even
| worth engaging with.
| adamsmith143 wrote:
| "No one becomes obese eating natural foods" That is the
| most hippy BS I have ever heard. Eat 10,000 calories of raw
| sugarcane a day for 1 year and get back to me on the
| results.
|
| >If you remove the sense of taste from someone, I assure
| you they won't enjoy food and will lose weight very
| quickly. Almost like that was the answer all along.
|
| Yes, reducing the number of calories you eat is how you
| lose weight.
| BitwiseFool wrote:
| I don't think anyone is disputing that? The challenge has
| always been _getting_ people to eat less, not making them
| realize that is what they need to do.
| inconceivable wrote:
| it's getting them to eat less while not crashing the
| metabolism so that their "calories out" is constantly
| shifting downwards too.
|
| and forcing people to exercise just gives them ravenous
| insatiable hunger. if they're not aware of this they'll
| reach for the carbs, ruining all their work.
| npsimons wrote:
| > I don't think anyone is disputing that?
|
| Oh, but they do, even right here in this very thread!
|
| I admit it's hard losing weight - I've been there. But
| there are some people who will compound the difficulty of
| following through by denying the reality of the
| conservation of mass.
| sph wrote:
| No, the challenge is recognising that food is not equal,
| and we have chemical and physical reasons why we overeat
| some and not others.
|
| "Eat less food" is technically true, but as useful
| dietary advice as "become less obese".
| sph wrote:
| Show me someone that has become obese eating 10,000
| calories of sugar cane for a year. Certainly not for the
| lack of trying, sugar cane is delicious.
|
| We are not calorimeters, nor furnaces. There is a reason
| people get obese on 10,000 kcal of junk food and
| virtually no one ever on 10,000 kcal of sugar cane.
| Focusing only on the caloric figure is completely missing
| the point.
|
| Yet the immensely reductive CICO bullshit is perpetuated,
| because "laws of thermodynamics." Simplify a model too
| much and you get nonsense.
| CyberDildonics wrote:
| What evidence makes you think that instead of the idea that
| sugar and sugar addiction is a major cause of obesity?
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dBnniua6-oM
| PaulHoule wrote:
| Obesity rates rise sharply circa 1980, when the deregulatory
| climate became entrenched in the US and UK and there is a
| proliferation of new chemicals. You might say corn syrup
| became popular then but cane sugar was around long before
| obesity became epidemic.
|
| Dietary and lifestyle interventions notoriously don't work,
| or rather they work temporarily. There seems to be a set-
| point for weight and you just won't eat enough to go over it
| and have a very hard time to go under it. That set point
| seems to have gone up.
|
| Here are some reviews
|
| https://www.annualreviews.org/doi/10.1146/annurev-
| pharmtox-0...
|
| https://academic.oup.com/endo/article/161/3/bqaa024/5739626
|
| https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3076189/
| CyberDildonics wrote:
| _Obesity rates rise sharply circa 1980_
|
| This is explained directly in the video I linked. Cane
| sugar is more expensive and less consistent commodity while
| corn syrup is cheap and consistent. Fat became demonized
| from bad science and sugar was added to almost everything.
|
| _Dietary and lifestyle interventions notoriously don't
| work_
|
| They absolutely work individually. If someone changes their
| diet to cut out sugar they lose weight very consistently.
| Expecting that of people is not a systemic solution
| however. Watch the video I linked instead of trying to
| explain everything with looser correlations.
| sph wrote:
| It's not black and white. It's both overeating, tendency to
| prefer unhealthy foods, and unhealthy processed food are just
| terrible for you for the reasons you've mentioned.
|
| No one becomes obese eating natural food. But no one resorts to
| natural food if they use food as a coping mechanism either.
| Then when your body is out of whack, it is really hard to get
| back to a healthy metabolism, if not healthy weight. The idea
| that your gut flora triggers particular food cravings, for
| example, is still not common knowledge, so we hear dietary and
| nutritional nonsense spread by misinformed GPs and online
| articles.
| scns wrote:
| > From these experiences, I've realized that avoiding bad habits
| is just as important as cultivating good habits.
|
| Avoidance rarely works i think. I'd say replacing negative habits
| with positive ones is a better long term strategy.
|
| Can recommend the App Habitica for this, free and open source.
| There are Android and iOS clients for it. Makes habits dailies
| and todos more fun.
|
| Not affiliated, only fixed an accessibility issue once.
|
| https://habitica.com
| jstimpfle wrote:
| > I'd say replacing negative habits with positive ones is a
| better long term strategy.
|
| If the reason for forming the bad habit was that what you're
| susposed to do is dreadful i.e. not positive, yes, a positive
| one must be found.
|
| But a positive activity doesn't feel good from the start,
| that's why you need avoidance. You need to get over the hump.
| When you're forming a new habit, the natural tendency is to
| cheat when you're susposed to do the new to-be habit, and do
| the old thing instead. Instead of working, browsing HN or
| youtube. Instead of going out for a run, eating cookies. Tell
| yourself to not do that -- avoid it -- and force yourself to do
| the new activity until it becomes self-sustaining.
| horsawlarway wrote:
| And my experience is that the idea you can just "tell
| yourself to avoid it" is basically baloney.
|
| Replacement on the other hand... That seems to genuinely
| work. You just have to pick a replacement that isn't
| dreadful.
|
| ---
|
| My experience: I gained ~90lbs over 12 years. I didn't over
| eat horribly, but I also didn't exercise much, and my job
| keeps me stationary.
|
| Instead of trying to not eat (dieting - which I have tried
| several times over those 12 years, never with long term
| success) this last time I took a different approach: I picked
| the easiest, most enjoyable, exercise I could think of and
| added that.
|
| That exercise turned out to be biking - but not even just
| biking, because biking is still pretty hard when you're 90lbs
| overweight and I'd had other exercise attempts fail because
| they were unpleasant (ex: jogging). E-biking, though...
| that's pretty easy and nice.
|
| So an e-bike it was. It's totally cheating with a bike: it
| makes biking feel relaxing, tackles the hills with ease,
| always gives you a cooling breeze - basically: it's just
| enjoyable and refreshing.
|
| 12.5 months later and I'm down 50 lbs. It turns out that I
| didn't need some dreadful, healthy, righteous activity to
| replace the bad ones. I just needed something small and
| enjoyable I could do as an alternative. Something that
| wouldn't dig the hole deeper.
|
| I set absolutely zero rules around dieting/eating. I didn't
| actively avoid anything at all. I just added a small
| enjoyable activity with very low activation cost.
|
| Essentially: It's hard to avoid a bad (but pleasurable)
| activity if the alternative is boredom or chores (ex:
| jogging). It's easy to avoid it by giving yourself a
| different pleasurable activity to pick.
| fyuhuji wrote:
| [flagged]
| desireco42 wrote:
| This went dark quickly... I hope author is in good shape and drug
| free now.
| 999900000999 wrote:
| The biggest source of drama in my life has been other people.
|
| Particularly other people who aren't living right. Past 25 and
| doesn't have or trying to get a stable job. Carefully evaluate if
| you want that person in your life.
|
| Misery loves company, the wrong type of people will bring you
| down and laugh when they do so.
|
| Likewise, people with stable lives can and often will lift you
| up.
| tristor wrote:
| Agreed, I have a history of being a bit of a shopaholic (and
| being overweight). I've vacillated between periods of being debt-
| free and periods of indebtedness, I've vacillated between periods
| of being in relatively good shape and periods of weight gain.
| None of these circumstances, good or bad, happened overnight,
| they were the accumulation of many small daily decisions, often
| over years.
|
| When I was in the peak shape of my life (178 and stacked), it was
| following being in the worst condition in my life (315), after
| more than 7 years of constant careful attention to my calorie
| intake, every other day exercise, and meticulously recording it
| all so I could keep myself honest. It didn't evaporate overnight
| either, I was able to maintain a good state of health without
| being so controlled while I was traveling, but once the pandemic
| happened and I became sedentary my loss of control over my eating
| caught up to me over the next 14 months and I gained nearly 40
| pounds back prior to getting myself back under control. Now I'm
| on that journey again back to a healthier weight.
|
| The things we do every day, the small choices we consistently
| make, these form the habits of our lives. I have good habits and
| I have bad habits, and it's a consistent struggle for me (and
| likely everyone) to overcome our bad habits and turn them into
| good habits. Some of these habits, including my relationship with
| food, came from my environment as a child, so the work of a
| lifetime forming them is often difficult to overcome, but it's
| never impossible.
| basq wrote:
| I am similar wrt to bodyfat fluctuations, but interestingly
| enough, it did happen to me overnight. During the pandemic I
| reached my lowest bf% ever, single digits, despite gyms being
| closed.
|
| It was after things began to open back up in summer/fall '21
| that, as I started to get back into the gym, I allowed myself
| to "eat instinctively" and went from 160-190 in a month. The
| weight managed to stabilize but still slowly go up, eventually
| reaching in the 200's. I was hitting the weight racks but
| struggling to keep my weekly caloric intake in a deficit.
|
| There's a lot more to the story in terms of what I did and
| learned, but in short, calorie estimates online were often
| over-prescribing my TDI which was a lot closer to my BMR. I now
| eat 600 less than my BMR every week and that's about 1.5
| lbs/week lost. I'm still hitting the gym and getting 1g protein
| /lb of lean body mass so I am still managing to put on muscle
| despite being in a deficit.
|
| But ultimately, it will have taken me 2 years of meticulous,
| dedicated calorie and macro tracking and diet modulation to
| undo that single month of damage, and return to my previous
| bf%. Although I have dealt with the frustration of impatience,
| I am finally on track and expect to hit my goals in
| October/November.
| nektro wrote:
| "The master has failed more times than the beginner has even
| tried."
| blueyes wrote:
| I find Andreas's short non-technical posts to be fairly
| unenlightening, and am consistently surprised to see them attract
| so much attention on HN. The information value here is low.
| passion__desire wrote:
| Sometimes it's just that you need to be reminded of what you
| already know. Taking your own advice and all that.
| specialist wrote:
| They're descriptive, not prescriptive. Like journaling. Like
| "writing to understand" (oneself). Andreas benefits from the
| process itself. If other's appreciate it, woot. If not, just
| move on.
|
| I personally find Andreas's efforts comforting.
|
| Whereas I eschew the majority of our culture's prescriptive
| self-help BS. Just one sincere, yet still excretable, example
| is Mark Manson's middle brow rehash of philosophy; I get more
| from reading the OCs like Zeno and Epicurus.
| OldManRyan wrote:
| I enjoy them. It's a paragraph or so of easily digestible
| information. Not everyone has read something like Atomic Habits
| so the value is relative. Worst case scenario it acts as an
| excuse to kick off discussion.
| drefinel wrote:
| the message is self-evident, but seeing obvious advice
| rephrased by someone they respect can help many people stop
| ignoring and internalize it.
|
| I'm reminded of people who ignored "clean your room" every time
| their parents told them until Jordan Peterson said it.
| idlewords wrote:
| I share your surprise at how simplistic self-help bromides
| consistently bubble to the top of this site.
| m3kw9 wrote:
| I find the opposite, I find myself saying "I like this format",
| because he boiled it down and I can extrapolate and understand
| just by reflecting on the simple ideas he put out.
| JHer wrote:
| It irritates me a bit that many comments on HN are like a Yelp
| review of the linked article instead of adding to the
| discussion of their comments. Maybe you see HN primarily as a
| community-curated list of links while I see it as a place of
| discussions?
|
| In this thread, for example, wccrawford gave an interesting
| perspective on choices in life. While they used the linked
| article as a reference point, the contents of their comment
| stand entirely on their own. The information value in the
| linked article is not that important, the value of the
| discussion is much more important. To me, that is.
| fsociety wrote:
| Perhaps it's not meant for you. Does not mean it's not meant
| for others.
| dpbriggs wrote:
| Not everyone has heard this advice or is in the audience for
| which it's important.
|
| Andreas' audience includes a lot of young people for which this
| is valuable.
| strikelaserclaw wrote:
| maybe its good to have a reminder of obvious information which
| is vital once in a while
| stefncb wrote:
| Besides what the others said, they're also good conversation
| starters.
| jrvarela56 wrote:
| This is good writing. Highlights a very important concept in
| very few words. I am thankful for the reminder.
| markusstrasser wrote:
| +1
| positive_loop wrote:
| [dead]
| 767664386 wrote:
| [dead]
| bsuvc wrote:
| Pertaining to habits, this stuck with me from James Clear's
| Atomic Habits [1]:
|
| > Every action you take is a vote for the type of person you wish
| to become. No single instance will transform your beliefs, but as
| the votes build up, so does the evidence of your identity. This
| is why habits are crucial.
|
| [1] https://jamesclear.com/atomic-habits
| stanislavb wrote:
| Such a good quote. Worth remembering.
| croes wrote:
| The problem is you don't know the result of your actions.
|
| Many bad things happened because of good intentions and vice
| versa
|
| I remember a story about a neo nazi who travelled to Africa to
| buy weapons and felt in live with a black woman.
| [deleted]
| vorpalhex wrote:
| But usually you do.
|
| Like obviously there are edge cases, but for the most part
| consequences aren't a surprise. Eat too much, you get fat.
| Fail to work out, your body goes to hell. Fail to sleep and
| your mind goes.
| croes wrote:
| It not that simple.
|
| Eat healthy and you become obsessed with it and get a
| eating disorder.
|
| Work out, get injured, need pain killers, get addicted.
|
| In hindsight it's easy to spot your mistakes. Should have
| turned left instead of right.
| npsimons wrote:
| > Eat healthy and you become obsessed with it and get a
| eating disorder.
|
| Except that's the exception, not the rule - the vast
| majority of people who eat healthy are not disordered
| eaters.
|
| > Work out, get injured, need pain killers, get addicted.
|
| Again, this is the exception, not the rule. The majority
| of people exercise without sustaining an injury.
| croes wrote:
| But you don't know if you are the exception or the rule.
|
| And often it's not as simple as counting calories.
|
| Do you work too hard or not hard enough? Should you learn
| something or let it be?
| npsimons wrote:
| Chances are, you are not the exception, and neither am I.
|
| Also, it's not _easy_ , but is as simple as counting
| calories. Conservation of mass and all that.
| sebmellen wrote:
| I wrote something similar a while back before reading _Atomic
| Habits_. Not as eloquent, but the gist is the same :)
|
| https://www.sebastianmellen.com/post/2020/how-are-you-really...
| wccrawford wrote:
| Life is about taking risk. We make daily decisions that involve
| big and small risk constantly.
|
| Choosing to enjoy life today instead of waiting for tomorrow for
| that enjoyment isn't a _failure_ , it's a choice. It comes with
| risk and tradeoffs.
|
| Everyone thinks there's a magical line that everyone else should
| take that straddles that line between enjoyment today and
| tomorrow. That lines doesn't exist, and isn't even the same from
| day to day.
|
| Looking back and regretting a lifetime of decisions is caused
| that the consequences from those earlier decisions. Once that
| weight becomes too heavy, the regret sets in.
|
| IMO, the way to combat that is two-fold.
|
| First, in the moment, be conscious of what the risks are, and if
| they are worth it. If they aren't, take _pride_ in settling for
| less at the moment so you can safeguard your future. You 're
| doing something hard and good, and it should feel good in itself
| to do it.
|
| Second, when you look back, _remember_ the joy you had at the
| time. It was judged, to the best of your ability, to be worth it
| _at the time_ , and you should continue to feel warm and fuzzy
| from that joy today, even if bad things have come about as
| consequence for it.
|
| For instance, like the author, I gained rather a lot of weight.
| Then I lost most of the excess. Then I gained half of it back.
| Every day is now a struggle to try to get my weight back down,
| and my blood pressure is back up so high I couldn't have dental
| surgery safely the other day, and I'm back on medication.
|
| According to the author that's a failure, but I had a _lot_ of
| really, really enjoyable meals. I ate the vast majority of them
| with friends and family. Many of them were either cooked by
| family, or were special occasions. Calling those meals
| "failures" now would be saying that it was a mistake to enjoy
| that time with my family and friends, and it absolutely wasn't.
| blfr wrote:
| "Choosing to enjoy life" is not how most people get fat. It's
| not meals with friends and family but rather scrolling tiktok
| and eating potato chips.
| 331c8c71 wrote:
| Not really I think. I think people eat more than they need
| because 1) it's a form of self soothing 2) habits and choice
| of food.
|
| I for one gain weight pretty easily when I start eating carbs
| such as pasta and bread without restraint - even on holidays
| when I am pretty physical.
| whstl wrote:
| Well, you're not wrong.
|
| But on the other hand, even the most minor enjoyment
| (especially the kind that will make you guilty later) is
| still somehow a form of enjoyment.
|
| Perhaps the bigger lessons is that small pleasures can be
| expensive in the long term. More than we think.
| marginalia_nu wrote:
| There's enjoying things, and being a servant of pleasure.
|
| Plato puts it well in Gorgias; where he makes an analogy of
| two men tasked with keeping jars filled with wine, honey
| and milk.
|
| The first man has jars of good quality, and is able to fill
| them up and they stay full and then he can go on about his
| life and be happy, the task of keeping them full causes him
| no grief. The second man has cracks and holes in his jars,
| so the pleasure always leaks out and he needs to spend
| every day topping them up in order to avoid misery. He's
| completely enslaved by the task and it's causing him daily
| grief to keep them full.
| BOOSTERHIDROGEN wrote:
| Isn't that unfair the others have solid jars while you
| have leaked jars ?
| marginalia_nu wrote:
| I think the moral of the story is that if you find
| yourself in that situation, you should repair or replace
| the jar instead of spending every day in a futile
| struggle to keep it full.
|
| It's more useful to view resolve, moral continence, self-
| control as things that you do rather than things you have
| been granted.
| quickthrower2 wrote:
| Eating shit and scrolling is enjoyable though, right? It just
| doesn't sound as socially acceptable to admit it.
| gooseus wrote:
| I think you can enjoy some potato chips and some short
| videos, but I have my doubts about how many you can consume
| in a row while maintaining enjoyment.
|
| My experience is that the enjoyment one feels with the
| first few bites quickly transforms from seeking the
| pleasure of continuing, into avoiding the pain of stopping.
| onion2k wrote:
| If you could wave a magic wand and give someone a day to do
| whatever they want to do no one would be choosing chips and
| TikTok.
|
| I don't think many people _really_ enjoy it. It 's just
| less painful than other things, or they don't have the
| resources to do what they actually want to do, or their
| choice requires something that's not possible right now...
| Chips and TikTok is the fallback, not the first choice.
| nickpp wrote:
| I wonder why we find life so painful that we find "chips
| and TikTok" as an acceptable default.
| hk__2 wrote:
| What's the issue with "chips and TikTok"? It's virtually
| free, requires no new equipement and can be done
| anywhere. Depending on how your feed is curated, you can
| learn more things in five minutes on TikTok than the same
| duration on HN or any other website.
| _Algernon_ wrote:
| Being manipulated by greedy corporations into spending the
| bulk of your life in a human Skinner Box is _enjoyable_?
| Stop deluding yourself.
| JanSt wrote:
| enjoying something != life fullfilment
|
| Our biology enjoys those dopamine hits
| maxfurman wrote:
| Enjoyable in the chemical sense. It triggers your brain's
| reward pathways via dopamine just like anything else you
| enjoy.
| [deleted]
| mrcode007 wrote:
| https://www.hsph.harvard.edu/news/hsph-in-the-
| news/friends-a...
|
| Food for thought.
| slothtrop wrote:
| This rationalization is not meaningfully different than those
| given by the obese (or drug addicted) to maintain their habits.
| For instance, "This milkshake sparks joy", or "everything in
| moderation including moderation" (only, no two people agree on
| what 'moderate' is).
| 300bps wrote:
| OP's take on this resonated with me deeply. Throughout my life
| I've held the belief that, "I generally choose the right path."
| That's helped me in five decades of life to never be
| overweight, never smoke cigarettes, never do an illicit drug,
| etc. Your take on this topic does not come across as helpful or
| beneficial to me:
|
| _First, in the moment, be conscious of what the risks are, and
| if they are worth it. If they aren 't, take pride in settling
| for less at the moment so you can safeguard your future._
|
| I think it's important to forgive ourselves when we don't
| choose the right path. Shame isn't good for anyone. But to take
| pride in it? I don't believe that's helpful at all.
|
| _Calling those meals "failures" now would be saying that it
| was a mistake to enjoy that time with my family and friends_
|
| This really sounds like a rationalization. You could enjoy a
| healthful meal with family and friends. But you're likely
| addicted to sugar, fat and salt like most people are. So you
| need a bunch of sugar, fat and salt to be satisfied by a meal.
|
| A decade ago I had slightly high triglycerides. I stopped all
| obvious sugar cold turkey for a year. It was brutal for two
| weeks - craving soda and all kinds of other sugar. Then an
| amazing thing happened... I stopped craving sugar. Fruit and
| other food started to taste amazing! Imagine getting as excited
| about eating a clementine as you used to get eating chocolate
| cheesecake.
|
| I reframed the topic in my mind to, "I just don't eat those
| things." which was successful. Thoughts of, "I won't eat those
| things for the next two weeks and then I'll do what I want"
| just exhausts your will power and leads to a roller coaster of
| weight gain and loss.
| crdrost wrote:
| That's awesome!
|
| I don't really know anything about physiology or nutrition,
| but when you learn physics you do have to learn about the
| difference between simple linear systems and complex feedback
| networks, and then you see the Metabolic Pathways chart[1]
| and _that_ proves that we are the latter, a complex feedback
| network.
|
| One lesson about complex systems is that you don't change
| them by finding something "wrong" and "fixing it", in the
| traditional sense. The problem is that there was a feedback
| loop keeping it that way and whatever you did just enabled
| that feedback loop to work harder at fighting your change.
| The weight-loss interpretation of this would be the failure
| of fad diets, I guess?
|
| What you do instead is that you find a way to pin the output
| out of its range and then work backwards, or disconnect an
| input or so. "I need to live a life without sweets," sounds
| like it was your disconnected input.
|
| A second lesson about the complex system is that for the one
| thing to change, everything must change. All of the feedback
| loops that kept the system in state 1 need to reconfigure and
| reorganize themselves to accept state 2. Which means there's
| a period of breakage, one could even call "mourning," where
| the system has not yet managed to reconfigure itself and
| limps along trying to get the new thing going. You just
| wanted a cleaner house, but in order to get it done it turned
| out to not require haphazard two hours cleaning sessions, no.
| Instead you needed to start waking up at 7 AM to have the
| time to empty the dishwasher before you go to work so that
| your spouse, who will forget about the dishwasher if it is
| not left open and inviting, can put the kids' dishes in it,
| this causes a chain reaction where the kitchen countertops
| are not covered with dirty dishes so that becomes the natural
| room for the kids to draw in when they come home from school,
| which leads to them choosing to do their own homework, which
| leads to them having time at the end of the day to clean up,
| which allows everybody to go to bed early in a clean house...
| which is the ONLY reason you can, night owl though you are,
| get up at 7AM to empty the damn dishwasher. Everything had to
| reorganize to accomplish the goal and that took chaos and
| difficulty.
|
| 1. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Human_Metabolism_-
| _P...
| sph wrote:
| > Choosing to enjoy life today instead of waiting for tomorrow
| for that enjoyment isn't a failure, it's a choice.
|
| This conveniently papers over a critical mechanism of how
| biological brains operate: we do not choose 99% of our actions.
| It would be extremely inefficient and energy-consuming.
|
| 99% of our life we are on autopilot, driven by our habits
| engaged as response to sensory and internal stimuli.
|
| Habits explain neatly concepts like addiction, while the choice
| story applied to concepts like addiction or self-destructive
| acts is reductive at best, and catastrophic on a societal
| level. Yet the majority of people, those that have been _lucky_
| not to have yet felt the grip of addiction, tend to have this
| opinion that addicts are just weak-willed idiots. This is not
| referred to you in particular, I am generalising based on
| common and frustrating opinions about addiction and recovery by
| well-meaning, but ignorant people.
|
| Functionally and neurologically, there is no difference between
| a heroin addict and someone that has been going on a run every
| day for a decade. It's just that their autopilots have been
| trained to prefer a different action in response to similar
| stimuli, and brains respond and adapt much more readily to
| super-stimuli found in drugs and other destructive habits, than
| with natural and healthy "highs".
|
| I recommend the book _" The Biology of Desire"_ by Marc Lewis,
| an ex cocaine addict turned neuroscientist.
| runeks wrote:
| > This conveniently papers over a critical mechanism of how
| biological brains operate: we do not choose 99% of our
| actions. It would be extremely inefficient and energy-
| consuming.
|
| If we're talking about the small, unimportant decisions then
| sure, I agree. But I don't think the bigger decisions happen
| on autopilot -- precisely because it would be very dangerous.
| npunt wrote:
| One thing I've personally found is, if I look closely, my
| small decisions often have big ramifications due to the
| chain of events or habits they kick off.
|
| For example, the choice to open that one app leads to 30
| minutes of scrolling leads to poor night's sleep leads
| leads to being on a later sleep schedule that week leads to
| not cognitively showing up to an important meeting that
| Saturday and missing an opportunity.
|
| What we perceive of as 'big decisions' exist only within
| the conditions visible to our consciousness. Behind the
| scenes though those conditions are continuously shaped by
| small decisions amplified by the lever of the subconscious
| and our environment.
|
| In other words, we're good at assessing the gravity of
| immediate conditions available to us, but we're bad at
| assessing internal and external processes and their
| effects. One reason why "know thyself" is such important
| advice.
|
| Thus we'd be wise to make _shaping conditions_ part of what
| we consider a 'big decision', perhaps even _the_ big
| decision. This is another way of saying "we make our own
| luck".
| sph wrote:
| Speaking of addiction, relapses are never important
| decisions. Relapses are taking the wrong path
| (subconsciously because of habits and very strong neural
| pathways) at one of the thousands of different crossroads
| you come across in your daily life. This is why addiction
| is so terrible.
|
| The first few days, the hardest ones, every single thing
| that happens to you (had a bad day, stranger frowned at me,
| stubbed my toe) is weighed and a decision is made. For a
| seasoned addict, many of these events have the automated
| response of ingesting your drug of choice.
|
| Anecdote: I've quit smoking and any form of nicotine 3.5
| years ago. I don't miss it. I have not relapsed once. Yet
| to this day, there are moments where I catch myself feeling
| that something is missing. That I have forgotten something
| important I had to do. A little soul searching later, and
| it's apparent I am just feeling that a cigarette right now
| be _really nice_. It completely sneaks up on me, but the
| first few months this happened dozens of times a day, the
| first few days even more. If your autopilot makes the wrong
| choice just once, you 're back to square zero.
|
| Most of our life, we're in the passenger seat.
| blitz_skull wrote:
| Hmm.. I'm torn because on the one hand, you're definitely
| correct that a non-trivial amount of our lives is
| subconscious, which is different from auto-pilot in my
| pedantic opinion.
|
| However, anecdotally I've found that whether you think you
| can do something or whether you think you cannot--you are
| correct. That is to say, I feel like admitting to the
| biological truth actually becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy
| which causes me to fall to my biological default.
|
| However, if I reject that biological "truth", I will more
| often find myself empowered by the notion that I can do
| anything I set my mind to, whether it be drugs or going for a
| run.
|
| It's the classic "mind over matter" phenomenon. Your
| fundamental beliefs can override your biological defaults, so
| I think it's very important to regulate and review your
| beliefs.
| jewayne wrote:
| I think you're totally missing the point. The point is that
| most of your actual lived life is simply stimulus and
| response. We actually have an extremely limited capacity
| for making reasoned choices - we just don't have the mental
| energy. So instead we learn to respond in a certain way to
| a certain stimulus (habit).
|
| Here's an example from my life: I used to go the gym every
| Wednesday night after work. Several times over the course
| of this habit, I realized at the end of a long day that I
| would be better off going home and getting some rest, and
| decided to go home instead. In nearly every single instance
| _I still drove to the gym_ , even though I had decided to
| go home. Because I was on auto-pilot. If we're talking
| about willpower, I would have say that it was my _lack_ of
| willpower that led me to going to the gym and working out
| that day.
| ragequitta wrote:
| What you're talking about is a kind of willpower, which
| funnily enough has a biological basis also. Genetics seems
| to play a role, as do many medications. The marshmallow
| test seems to show willpower largely stays the same over 4
| decades. Ozempic also seems to show you can artificially
| induce it. It's not mind over matter, it's having a mind
| primed to do it in the first place. It won't be as easily
| taught to someone who grabs the marshmallow instantly as a
| preschooler. We also seem to be able to induce it these
| days with ozempic, which is fascinating.
| spondylosaurus wrote:
| I don't think Ozempic operates on willpower... it slows
| your digestion process, which makes you feel fuller
| longer and can make you incredibly ill if you overeat.
| ultrasandwich wrote:
| I learned a lot about this kind of predictive modeling
| function of our brains from _The Experience Machine_ by Andy
| Clark. He was on Sean Carroll's podcast not too long ago and
| they had a great conversation on this topic.
| haswell wrote:
| > _99% of our life we are on autopilot, driven by our habits
| engaged as response to sensory and internal stimuli._
|
| This is such a critical insight, and over the years it was
| eye opening to realize gradually how much I judged myself for
| factors that I clearly cannot control. Which is not to say
| that I'm helpless, but more interested now in focusing on
| systemic factors that directly influence automatic behaviors.
|
| Judgement is such a major cultural response to addiction, and
| also happens to be one of the primary impulses that _feeds_
| it. Addicts often turn to their drug of choice to feel relief
| from the shame...of their addiction to their drug of choice.
|
| > _I recommend the book "The Biology of Desire" by Marc
| Lewis, an ex cocaine addict turned neuroscientist._
|
| Adding this to my reading list. In a similar category, Anna
| Lembke is a psychiatrist and addiction specialist who wrote a
| book titled "Dopamine Nation" that I found worth reading.
| nuancebydefault wrote:
| I believe you had enjoyable meals with friends, but to be
| honest, are those by themselves happening often enough to gain
| a problematic amount of weight? What if you would find the
| habit to balance these events with some counter measure (be it
| going to gym, eating more fruits and vegetables at the rest of
| those days or weeks). I think the point of OP still holds, the
| "failures" are habits. What failure is, is subjective, but if
| you are mindful of what you do when -- your habits, you know
| what to label a failure and what not, and when to steer/change
| an intention. Easier said then done though.
| Kagerjay wrote:
| > Choosing to enjoy life today instead of waiting for tomorrow
| for that enjoyment isn't a failure, it's a choice. It comes
| with risk and tradeoffs.
|
| 100% this. It's not as black or white as people make it.
|
| That being said, there is some level of diminishing returns for
| how much enjoyment you can get from something (e.g. eating),
| and how much of a tradeoff (e.g. gaining weight). You can
| maximize it (be selective in which foods you really like - and
| the people you want to be around) and minimize the tradeoffs
| (eating in a day 2 meals instead of 3). That's if you want to
| take a sabbatical and maximize the enjoyment out of life. If
| you want to grind, focus on yourself, etc and push yourself to
| the limits - you need to be outside that comfort zone. You
| spend more time putting yourself in uncomfortable situations at
| the cost of spending less time with friends and family.
|
| Life is all about balance.
|
| Sometimes you take high risks and push yourself further
|
| Sometimes you take low risks and enjoy the benefits from the
| work you put in
|
| With every high comes lows
|
| All good things come to an end
|
| But you won't get anywhere in life without taking risks
| the_common_man wrote:
| I lost you in the first line. Why is life about taking risk?
| Like is about eating, playing , having fun, etc. Why emphasize
| risk? Some silicon valley mantra?
| danderoo wrote:
| > First, in the moment, be conscious of what the risks are, and
| if they are worth it.
|
| Is that a happy life? For every decision you take, every
| thought that crosses your mind, making a concious cost-benefit
| analysis?
|
| > According to the author that's a failure, but I had a lot of
| really, really enjoyable meals. I ate the vast majority of them
| with friends and family. Many of them were either cooked by
| family, or were special occasions. Calling those meals
| "failures" now would be saying that it was a mistake to enjoy
| that time with my family and friends, and it absolutely wasn't.
|
| Perhaps it wasn't the meals that were the failure, but the lack
| of compensating physical activity? Discussions of body weight
| issues seem over-emphasize blame of too much on food and diet
| and neglect sedentary lifestyle and lack of physical activity.
| In other words, barring serious medical conditions (many of
| which are treatable once diagnosed properly), you can have it
| both, enjoy good times with friends that includes eating really
| tasty food as well as not into health-affecting weight issues.
| tiffanyg wrote:
| There's a hack that solves "the problem" in general: "non-
| judgment".
|
| We get so inculcated with comparing, contrasting, thinking
| about "better", "not as good as", "worse" ... it's THE recipe
| for all manner of negative psychological states, emotions, etc.
| There are basic biological drives, of course, but both
| implicitly and explicitly we are taught minute-by-minute,
| starting from not long after birth, to JUDGE EVERYTHING.
| Parents - "good/bad boy / girl", school - grades / social
| status / toys, work - "star employee / slacker" ... It's a set
| up for every imaginary "treadmill" that exists - consumer,
| achievement, etc.
|
| All illusory.
|
| It takes some conscious work / effort, to undo. But, I found,
| ultimately, that I was able to undo a hell of a lot of that
| crap in a shorter time than I expected. Several weeks worth of
| work with Jon Kabat-Zinn's 7 pillars of mindfulness, etc... can
| make a big difference, in my experience.
|
| Getting out of the habit of having to have "an opinion" /
| "judgment" about every single F'ing thing that _IS_ ... That
| just IS, until we have to categorize, compare, pick apart,
| judge, ... let the moronic inner critic - amalgamated, in part,
| through years of inculcation via others, intentional and not -
| dissect every molecule of existence until the minutest shred of
| simple BEING, JOY, etc. in any MOMENT is reduced to ash ...
| getting out of that habit is the greatest gift I 've ever been
| given.
|
| I still judge, I still fall into traps / stupidity ... I'm
| still human - hell, this comment has enough judging in it
| itself, even more simply implied / denotational ... but, I'm so
| much further out of the mire of crap our heads tend to get
| filled up with than so many people. It's both tremendously more
| comfortable, and yet also saddening to see so many still so
| trapped - by the same kinds of shitty thinking I was trapped by
| for years.
| haswell wrote:
| Everything you wrote here resonates pretty deeply. And as a
| child of fundamental religion, these judgements were not just
| social, but existential.
|
| My path to something better has been Sam Harris' Waking Up
| app, as well as exploring the Dzogchen analytical framework
| for exploring the ways we constantly engage in this
| labeling/judging was mind bending and eye opening (a guy
| named James Low does a talk titled "Everything as it is" that
| unlocked some things in my brain).
|
| I feel the same way about this - it's a gift. Nearing 40 and
| experiencing relief from lifelong struggles with painful
| patterns of thought for the first time. These are ideas worth
| exploring, and are all solidly grounded in rational thought,
| which was something I mistakenly thought I'd have to leave
| behind to explore this kind of contemplative path.
| blastro wrote:
| amen
| [deleted]
| vimsee wrote:
| > Calling those meals "failures" now would be saying that it
| was a mistake to enjoy that time with my family and friends,
| and it absolutely wasn't.
|
| If gaining weight is the failure in this context, the mistake
| would likely be the excessive intake of food. Time spent with
| friends and family would not be the mistake. This might have
| come off a bit harsh.
| thelastparadise wrote:
| Temperance, as you suggest, is a beautiful thing. It's hard
| (for me, especially), but sometimes we just have to put down
| the fork and politely decline that second, third, or fourth
| pancake.
| Aeolun wrote:
| Or just eat all those pancakes, as long as we don't make a
| habit of deciding to do so every day.
| frde wrote:
| I wasn't particularly overweight before but I attribute
| about ~10lbs of weight loss this year to realizing that:
|
| - When at a dinner with family or friends, I never _have_
| to finish something. Most of the time the host will be
| happy to package my leftovers to take back home when asked.
| That last part makes it clear that I like and appreciate
| the food even through I didn't finish it in the moment.
|
| - If I buy food at a restaurant, I don't have an obligation
| to finish it to get my moneys worth. And again, I can just
| save it for another meal if I want.
|
| - I don't have to eat snacks just because the host put them
| on a table at a party.
|
| For some reason our brains think that just because food is
| _there_ we need to eat it, but that's generally not true.
| imjonse wrote:
| And in general it's easier to have the snacks simply not
| be there, than to try to resist eating them. The habit of
| having random food and snacks lying around the house for
| 'just in case' is not a good one if you care about your
| health or weight. Unless of course you are actually
| required to eat frequently due to medical conditions.
| SamoyedFurFluff wrote:
| I don't actually think temperance and logic like this
| moves the needle significantly for obese people. When
| you're obese you need to lose 50, 70, 100+ lbs, not 10.
| You're looking at fundamentally changing relationship
| with food at multiple levels to the point where it's
| unrecognizable. I don't think small changes in habit like
| this are in the same ballpark as what obese people need
| to become a normal weight, in the same way that I don't
| think taking the stairs instead of the elevator is in the
| same ballpark as someone who wants to become a
| professional athlete.
| tuyiown wrote:
| > When you're obese you need to lose 50, 70, 100+ lbs,
| not 10.
|
| You have to lose 10 at some point. The way you're putting
| it, it looks like losing weight would be some kind of
| drastic sprint with a finish line. I don't think it can
| happen that way. You have to lose weight and continuing
| changing your habit to lose 10 more, and the others 10
| after, until it stabilises at healthy weight, then you
| start your healthy life, but it's not a finish line, the
| effort continues by fighting unhealthy habit for the rest
| of your life.
| jvanderbot wrote:
| I've seen a handful people close to me go from 100lb+
| overweight to a more comfortable 10 to 20 (or 50). And I
| think what GP described _is_ a fundamental change to the
| relationship with food: You 're (consciously at first)
| changing the definition of what needs to be consumed vs
| what is being consumed without need. They've _all_ from
| what I 've observed gone through this change.
|
| They said that when you're _really big_ , the first 10
| lbs is the easiest to lose, and can come from taking
| stairs and changing snack habits. It's the last 10 lbs
| that requires the diligent workouts and very strict
| diets.
| frde wrote:
| I don't think anyone is suggesting that the same tricks
| will work for everyone. I've never been chronically obese
| so I wouldn't know what goes on in someone's mind at that
| point.
|
| However I do know that it moved the needle significantly
| in _my_ life by changing my relationship with food so
| it's valuable to me. Losing the extra ~10 to 20 lbs of
| weight people gain in adulthood is something that people
| do struggle with even if it's not as dramatic as someone
| fighting obesity.
| Aeolun wrote:
| Taking the stairs is a lot more attainable though.
| unmole wrote:
| But is unlikely to make a difference.
| xupybd wrote:
| All the small things add up. You'd be surprised how
| effective they can be when combined
| unmole wrote:
| Climbing up a flight of stairs burns less than 2
| calories. An Oreo has 53 calories. You do the maths.
| taeric wrote:
| Indeed, walking punches way over expectations for keeping
| weight off. You have to do a good hour of a walk, but an
| hour walking is probably better than a rushed workout of
| similar time.
| p0d wrote:
| I lost 40kg walking one hour a day over the last 3 years.
| Some people don't recognise me.
|
| Don't get yourself into a state where you need to lose
| 40kg. If you do, and lose the weight, you will have
| excess skin.
|
| I like my new healthy self but actions have consequences.
| krumpet wrote:
| Good on you! Something I preach to my children is that
| success comes from showing up every day to do a little
| and not from a sudden burst of a lot. Well done.
|
| I turn 50 this year and have committed to doing 50,000
| pushups before 2024. It sounds like a lot, but after the
| first month, doing 200-300 a day isn't really that
| difficult (when broken up into smaller sets). Honestly,
| it's a LOT more of a mental challenge than a physical
| challenge.
|
| It's all about showing up every day.
| taeric wrote:
| Kudos on the progress! Curious what got you to start
| walking for that long?
| randomname93857 wrote:
| I think one hour a day of walk is not even a bare minimum
| if you don't do any other exercises or physical work
| taeric wrote:
| I think you'd be surprised. A solid hour of walking goes
| a long way.
| unmole wrote:
| > but an hour walking is probably better than a rushed
| workout of similar time.
|
| How so?
| taeric wrote:
| I honestly don't know how/why.
| https://www.nbcnews.com/better/health/why-walking-most-
| under... is one of the first search results in "benefits
| of walking vs gym" and there is no shortage there.
|
| It could be as simple as you are less likely to indulge
| in a treat after a walk?
| krumpet wrote:
| I realize everyone has different dietary needs, so I'm
| not saying this is for everyone, but it's very, very rare
| for me to finish a meal at a restaurant in one sitting. I
| used to, but leaving and feeling stuffed got old.
|
| I've found if I stop early, it turns out it was only my
| brain that wanted more food. Physically, I've had enough
| and am satisfied. I just need to give my brain time to
| catch up to my body.
|
| Additionally, I drink a lot of water with my meals. This
| helps prevent overeating.
|
| Lastly, it's always great to get two meals (dinner and
| tomorrow's lunch) from one restaurant dinner.
| sbergot wrote:
| Other eating realizations:
|
| - counting calories for 2 weeks can help you understand
| how much food you really need.
|
| - sometimes you eat out of boredom
| Aeolun wrote:
| > If I buy food at a restaurant, I don't have an
| obligation to finish it to get my moneys worth.
|
| I could think about it as: "I spent $30 on this meal, I
| ate 75% of it, would I spend $7.5 to not feel like shit
| the rest of the evening?"
|
| In almost all cases I think yes, and it's fine to stop
| eating. It's much harder when the food is great though.
| vladvasiliu wrote:
| > It's much harder when the food is great though.
|
| Indeed. I doubt anyone ever got fat by eating food they
| didn't like.
|
| The issue becomes all the worse when food is designed to
| make you want to keep on eating. Bonus points for it
| giving you that sort of hunger-like feeling 2 hours after
| your meal.
| foobarbecue wrote:
| Sunk cost fallacy. You aren't getting that $7.50 back.
| The question should actually be "do I want to, for no
| reason at all, feel like shit for the rest of the
| evening?"
|
| (This assumes you aren't deriving any pleasure or utility
| from eating that last 25%. If you are, then that's one
| side of the cost/benefit analysis. But the initial cost
| of the food is irrelevant not matter what.)
| withinboredom wrote:
| My life philosophy boils down to: you can do whatever you want
| as long as you're willing to pay the price and deal with the
| consequences.
| twodave wrote:
| That's an okay attitude from an interpersonal standpoint, but
| horrible advice from a mental health perspective.
| withinboredom wrote:
| Genuinely asking, how so? I've had my bouts of depression
| and burn-out in my life, but even then, I just assumed it
| was an unforeseen consequence of some action(s) and got
| treatment.
|
| This is also the boiled down version though, so I'm kinda
| curious what you see in it and how it could influence the
| bigger picture.
| ozim wrote:
| So you have perfect knowledge of consequences for everything
| you do in your life?
|
| 50 years ago general public was not aware that smoking is
| that bad as we know today.
|
| For a lot of things we don't know the real consequences or
| full price.
| withinboredom wrote:
| Obviously, you cannot be omniscient. The idea is that you
| have to accept that you made the best decision with the
| information you had at the time. If that information
| changes, make new decisions.
| hourago wrote:
| > Choosing to enjoy life today instead of waiting for tomorrow
| for that enjoyment isn't a failure, it's a choice. It comes
| with risk and tradeoffs.
|
| That dichotomy is not always true. There is a percentage of
| people that can enjoy their youth (travel, parties, ...) and
| still get a plentiful future. Other people needs to renounce to
| everything now just to survive to tomorrow. So, not always a
| choice there.
| holri wrote:
| A lot of enjoyable meals with friends and overweight is not
| necessaraly correlated. There are a lot of social gourmets that
| have normal weight. Usually overweight comes from cheap garbage
| fastfood, sweet drinks and low physical movement. Excellent
| food has often low calories and small portions.
| twodave wrote:
| It's interesting to me to see this comment, because "today" is
| very much the focus in recovery circles. If you've ever been to
| AA or any of the other 12-step programs you've probably heard
| someone say something akin to "one day at a time". In general,
| though, it is important to note that part of what makes an
| addiction an addiction is the lack of willpower to overcome it.
| So if you tell an addict "it is a choice" they'll ultimately
| agree with you, knowing that in the moment of their failure it
| very much did not feel like one.
|
| For those of us who have had to make drastic life changes in
| order to make "making the wrong choice" difficult or
| impossible, there's definitely an amount of life planning (and
| before that, honesty with self and others) that has to happen
| in order to balance the scale and turn those forks in the road
| into ones we can look at and say, "Today, I'll make a good
| choice." For some there are ways to reset and never look back,
| and I've seen it happen. One good choice can be the difference.
| For others, as you mention, there are daily choices, and it
| continues to take effort to make the right one every single
| time.
| vjk800 wrote:
| There's the saying that "we are free to do what we want, but
| not to want what we want". I'd guess that at the moment of a
| lapse, the drug/alcohol is all an addict wants. Changing that
| want into something else is the hard part and also depends
| strongly on the environment.
| crdrost wrote:
| It's a good saying, but something leaving in exposition.
| Each addict is different, but frequently the drug/alcohol
| is _not_ what the addict wants.
|
| Think of the addict in relapse more as saying "yeahhhh
| gonna let loose and party hard and have a lot of fun and go
| wild and crazy." The overindulgence is the point, the
| feeling of freedom and abandon.
|
| I liked the way Craig Ferguson put it in _American on
| Purpose_ , he said that if he _could_ drink alcohol
| "socially" the limited way other people do, _it wouldn 't
| be interesting to him in the first place._
|
| This is also why people get addicted to casinos, it's a
| similar "woooo, party!!" desire. People who are addicted to
| junk food also have this, they call it a "cheat day," the
| idea is not that I slipped myself an extra Oreo, but that I
| decided to slip myself the extra Oreo and then declared it
| a cheat day and then ate puddings and cakes and pizza and
| guzzled soft drinks and "wooo, party day, calories don't
| count"...
|
| One typically doesn't "change that want," one buries it. It
| still keeps coming up as an "I am overwhelmed with the
| boring tedium of adulthood can't I go back to being a
| reckless kid and partying all night?" and you say "Look,
| having fun is why we have playing that guitar in the
| backyard or lifting or jamming out to music or planning a
| week off in Colorado, we have to do the less intense adulty
| fun things that build us up now, because we know what
| happens when we do the reckless childish fun things that
| tear down (and have torn us down, over and over and over
| and over again)... and we have to grow up so that we don't
| lose everything and die alone in a ditch." So you bury the
| want, not allowed to want "woooo party time!!", because you
| have hit rock bottom several times now and you know that
| you don't have an ability to have a healthy relationship
| with that internal party-fiend, because he will react to
| the stress of money being tight by wanting to gamble more,
| will react to the weight gain by having more cheat days,
| will react to the hangover by looking for a cider in the
| fridge. Can't give him a foothold in your life again.
| 767664386 wrote:
| [dead]
| ergonaught wrote:
| The habit to form is "making wise choices". We dramatize and
| complicate this mostly because it is stimulating to do so, which
| gets reinforced via confirmation bias, cognitive dissonance, etc.
| We also seem to enjoy moralizing what is "wise" for other people
| more than keeping our attention where it belongs.
|
| It can be as basic as forming the habit of asking whether you'll
| be thankful you did XYZ when you're at the end of your life.
| Sometimes that's going to be a "yes", even for "unwise" choices,
| but most people who actually engage with this will find that most
| of the honest answers are "no".
|
| It's not new or revolutionary or particularly insightful or
| easily productized so it keeps having to be rediscovered.
| nwienert wrote:
| I think the new generation of weight-loss drugs are going to be a
| revolution because they give you power over bad habits,
| wholesale.
|
| ICYMI:
| https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2023/05/ozempic-a...
|
| Anecdotally, they really work. It's not just your food cravings
| that are mostly stopped in their tracks. But in some miraculous
| fashion it seems all your "bad" cravings are squashed, while your
| good ones (side projects, chores, work) stay intact. The only
| good one I can see slightly down is sex, but as well with that it
| does also feel like you have a lot more control in that area.
|
| I think we'll eventually see them as first line prescriptions for
| all types of addicts. It's part of the reason I sort of want to
| throw some money into their stock, but then again it's hard to
| know how that all turns out as multiple manufacturers have these
| drugs and there are many more analogues in the pipelines.
|
| But I find it so interesting, as it really upsets my notion of
| morality. Yes, resisting your temptations without drugs seems
| like the obvious better world. But our modern world is simply
| overflowing with temptation. Fast food, advertisements, sugar in
| everything, caffeine in everything, drugs everywhere. It was far
| easier to be ascetic when there just wasn't that much around. But
| suddenly on one of these drugs you feel... powerful, in a way.
| Like you've gained a superpower. It's a really weird experience,
| and I don't hate it.
| vorpalhex wrote:
| unpaywalled link: https://archive.is/7mxOi
| abnercoimbre wrote:
| This is fascinating. Do you know if these anti-addiction
| effects have only been studied with the weight-loss drugs? I'm
| too skinny (133 lbs) to take them, but am interested in the
| rest of it.
| nwienert wrote:
| I think at the lowest dose you could still maintain weight
| while getting the effects.
| adamsmith143 wrote:
| Didn't Edison fail like >2000 times when creating the lightbulb?
| Seems like a "habit" of failure... /s
| pxeger1 wrote:
| I wouldn't say those are 2000 failures, because the point is
| that you learn from them each time. Also building a light bulb
| that doesn't work is really not an error, that's the whole idea
| of iteration.
| robinduckett wrote:
| Positive habit forming is incredibly hard to do. Negative habit
| forming is easy. Being "aware" of this fact is not enough to
| prevent bad habit forming.
| vrnvu wrote:
| Avoidance of something deprives us of the experience we might
| gain from it. I don't believe that avoiding everything we might
| consider "bad" is generally a good practice. However, I am not
| suggesting that we should try everything we consider as "bad"
| either.
|
| When people talk about excellence, productivity, and performance,
| they often draw conclusions based on the final outcomes. However,
| these conclusions cannot be reached without encountering mistakes
| along the way.
|
| As the Greeks said, the golden mean is the desirable point.
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