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Comment by everdev | Hacker News Reader

What's almost more amazing is that the developer spent 1.5 years planning and 3 years developing.

I find it absurd but also inspiring that someone can devote that much time and energy to a hobby or unfunded personal research project.

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How many hours in 4.5 years does an average Netflix users spend? Seems absurd to spend that time consuming than creating your own content.

it's much easier to consume content, and it produces endorphines just the same.

Creating content (or any creative endeavour) is hard, and most people don't like hard work.

I don't watch TV (or more correctly I very rarely watch TV).

The amount of time that free's up for activities is insane, I go to Chess twice a week, cycle, spend time keeping up to date on programming stuff and still have time to read.

3hrs a day over a year is the same as 6mths of working a 40hr week.

And even though it will reach to the top in HN and other sites we'll probably forget about it in a couple of weeks as any other meme.

But then again I spend my time daily in other meaningless activities that won't even be noticed by a single person. So good for him. I hope I'll reach that level of determination in the future.

Life feels more fulfilling when a person focus on increasing the happiness of people immediately around her instead of international fame,

No worries, I'll post it again in six to twelve months to farm karma.

speaking of "other meaningless activities"

Don't worry. People will complain when they find out he's karma farming and it will bounce right back.

Having just finished a PhD and working full time in industry, I still find myself having the appetite for some unfunded personal research projects. Clearly didn't want to continue in academia, but there seems to be no middle ground yet, apart from landing a job at Google or the like.

You can become an independent researcher. I've discussed this approach on Hacker News before:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16726033

Reading your other posts makes me realize I might be headed in this direction. I'm going to be making silly amounts of money soon enough (at least what I consider to be silly), meaning I could retire in 10 years if I wanted to. I do enjoy the work I am doing, but this means I could go in whatever direction I want. One challenge would be to establish proper collaborations, because working with other people feels very pleasant and rewarding to me.

You're right, collaboration could be difficult. I'm hoping to identify some other likeminded people in my field who I could collaborate with online at the very least.

The losses to the human species caused by the relentless drive to work longer and longer hours, destroying all leisure time, are utterly incalculable. Almost all great advances in art, science, and culture occurred as either a direct or indirect consequence of people working towards things which interested them during their leisure time. Bertrand Russel's "In Praise of Idleness" is more relevant now than ever before.

It's certainly more admirable than the amount of hours I have logged playing video games.

This is also what a lot of Simcity 4 players did. Some of them have spent years building highly realistic cities, taking care of all details the game would allow them, while some devoted their effort to the making of high quality models, MODs, and various plugins that helped the 2003 game to be still full of new contents a decade after its release.

Few games offer the same level of openness and depth as the (old) Simcity games does.

An inspired artist in other mediums would spend comparable time.

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