You don't want quality time, you want garbage time | Hacker News Reader

You don't want quality time, you want garbage time

avoidboringpeople.substack.com

It's this just a quote? The rest of the content on the page doesn't seem related.

There are 3 topics covered in the newsletter. It's number 3, scroll down.

Yep thanks for pointing that out! It's the last of 3 main topics in the post

I became familiar with the term "quality time" as a contrast to "quantity time," regarding child rearing. As both parents began working outside of the home, and less time was spent with the kids, parents tried to ease their guilt by ramping up the quality time. This really doesn't work, and I agree with Al Franken: "“Parenting is the hardest job you’ll ever love. First and foremost, being a good parent means spending lots of time with your children. I personally hate the phrase ‘quality time.’ Kids don’t want quality time. They want quantity time, big, stinking, lazy, nonproductive quantity time.”

https://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/04/upshot/upshot-letter-our-...

I think people just have different ideas of what "quality time" is.

The definition I've always used is roughly:

If I'm sitting right next to my kid and ignoring them, that's not QT. If I'm sitting right next to my kid and interacting with them, that's QT.

Even if I'm doing household chores, if my kid is watching and I answer questions they have about what I'm doing, that's QT. If I let them help out, that's QT. If I say "go in the other room and watch TV so I can get this chore done" that's not QT.

Some people seem to think if it's not a planned-out highly-structured nutritious, fun and educational activity, it's not QT which is not how I ever interpreted it.

Oh I love this definition! As a parent of a just-started-crawling infant, I can already see how they thrive on attention.

Oh yeah, #1 piece of advice for toddlers is roughly:

1. They crave attention

2. If they do something wrong they reliably get lots of attention (sure they'd rather have more positive attention, but...)

3. If you don't reliably give them loads of attention for doing something right, see #2

Some of my best memories of my dad are of us sitting together every week watching Kevin Sorbo run around as Hercules.

Don't completely dismiss "garbage" time!

Absolutely. I spent time reading a book next to my dad who was reading a different book and enjoyed that. It doesn't count under my definition of QT though.

Watching TV might though, particularly when we talked during the commercials.

I agree - family trips (even long car rides) can be quality time if everyone is listening to the same songs and singing along together, or listening to a book together and discussing what's going to happen (ok, we're strange) or wasted time as everyone escapes into their own devices.

We go to a lot of sporting events and our rule is that when a ball or puck is in play, no devices - these have been the best way to share quality time with our teens.

It's unfortunate that "quality time" has come to have similar meaning to "Kodak moments". Quality time is just time spent being comfortable. It's when your soul gets some rest, and you look up at the end of the day and think "Wow! Night time already!". Whether you spent that time collecting butterflies, blasting aliens, or looking at clouds, is irrelevant.

It's nice to spend quality time with people you care about, because those times together are a slow bonding process.

Agreed - it can really be the little things and moments that matter. When we've become focused on creating camera worthy moments at the expense of having an enjoyable, satisfying moment, that's a problem.

I don't think there's a default "oh just don't use instagram/cameras/phones" reaction that we should jump to; as with everything there's a certain amount of usage that's good and bad.

I feel this whole era has been trying to game the metrics and forgot about the real thing.

Good times => photos. So more photos => more good times. QED

I wonder if children being born over the last decade will come to despise taking photos, because from their first memory they have been constantly interrupted at play by mom or dad trying to get their attention for a picture. My niece's every trip to the playground is documented in photo and video; she looks down from the playset not at her mother's face but at the back of her mother's iPhone.

I had the same thought. Sure, I take photos of my kid, but sometimes I might go weeks without taking a picture of him (Oh my, the horror!). Then people bug me that I haven't taken any recent photos of him for a while and I can't help but think, "yeah, because I was too busy having fun to take a picture." And if I do decide to take one, I usually try to snap it discretely when he's not looking so I'm not interrupting his play. I also show them to him later and he likes looking at them, or a video of him going down the slide.

It's the same when I go on trips. I go on vacation then come back and realize I only took maybe three photos on the first day and that was it.

I think people take photos when they're not having fun so they can look back later and pretend they were.

It's funny that the old point-and-shoot film cameras everyone used in the 80s and 90s were perhaps the best way to actually capture what's going on rather than turning a photo into a big production.

You'd hold the camera in your right hand and prepare for the picture by cranking the film with your thumb. When you wanted the picture, you'd quickly raise it to your eye and take the shot. There was no waiting for focus, because they were all set to infinity focus. They used simple analog light sensors to set the exposure the instant you pointed the camera.

With a phone, you might raise it to your face so FaceID will unlock it, then you look for and open the camera app, then you're using both hands to hold the phone out in front of you and wait while it focuses and figures out exposure; if you're using a cheaper phone, this could be several seconds. Then you take the picture and, again, if you're not using the freshest iPhone it might take 1-2 seconds between tapping the shutter button and actually being sure the picture has been taken. It's intrusive and slow.

Photos from my childhood often feature me either looking at something else or having just turned my head to look at the camera because my mom called to me. Photos today often seem to have a more posed and unnatural feel to them, because it's difficult to take a good picture stealthily; "hang on, I'm going to take a picture" is the common refrain.

I know that a good photographer can take a good photograph with anything, and a bad photographer myself won't be improved by better equipment. Still... I took exclusively dreadful photos with those cameras.

Part of it was that film was a barrier to practice. Results took days to produce, and the sum cost of film and processing quickly became higher than the camera itself. So I'd use up a roll of film, send it off, get depressed at the results, and quit. I was "in the moment" at those events because a camera would not have made happy memories.

With practice I might have eventually learned something about composition, but I don't have fond memories of those cameras. It's only now that I have a camera with me at all times, and a computer struggling to adjust my shots to some kind of artistic merit, that I have become the sort of person who takes photos at all.

I'd say there was a difference between taking pictures so you had a visual memory of the time you visited Hoover Dam with Grandma, vs. taking pictures because you want an artistically meretricious result. I would say almost none of the photos in our family albums are worth sharing on account of composition, but the contents are valuable to me because they show my grandfather (dead 25 years), they show my dad at 25 standing in front of the horse trailer in which he briefly lived while herding sheep, they show me playing on the steps of a home I only vaguely remember from the LORAN towers I could see blinking from my bedroom window.

In my experience, anyway, you're absolutely correct. The family photos from my childhood that I've enjoyed the most are almost all either blurry, out of a focus, or just too dark/light. It's not the quality of the photo that anyone cares about.

"I know that a good photographer can take a good photograph with anything, and a bad photographer myself won't be improved by better equipment."

With high latency, a photographer may take a technically high-quality photograph of the moment half-a-second too late. Skill can't overcome latency.

I've become half-decent at accounting for the latency... pushing the button to take a picture, wait quarter second, then call out to the kid in question to look at you. But it's definitely one of those places where the old analog ways have an advantage over all of our digital ways and their interminable deciseconds extending into seconds of endlessly getting ready... gotta load the home screen, gotta load the camera, ok, now, wait a second, gotta initialize the camera hardware... whoops, gotta swap out some of your apps... ok... NO WAIT NOT OK oh crap they pushed the button... uh... load the button push handler... uhhh.... ok, CLICK.

Sigh.

My Galaxy Note 8 camera is nothing like you described. You don't have to unlock the phone, just double-press the power button even if the screen is locked and it goes directly into the camera app, ready to shoot.

You can even review and delete photos in this mode. If the phone was locked, it only shows the photos that you took in that session.

Latency is barely noticeable. I always take multiple photos anyway, either a burst or by tapping the shutter button repeatedly. I never dared do that with a film camera except for very important shots.

So I get a lot more interesting shots now and a lot more "keepers".

I just tried the same thing on my Nokia 6.1 and it worked! It still took 2-3 seconds before it was ready to shoot, but it's a major improvement. Thank you!

The volume rocker buttons are frequently mapped (or can be in settings) as a shutter release, too. Handy when you've got gloves on.

Great comment. Real life is HD as fuck!

I've got a teenager. This is very, very not the case.

do they make contest on who has the largest online pics collection ?

20 years ago before digital cameras were useful (they existed but where poor quality) all pictures were by film which was somewhat expensive if you took a lot of pictures. (figure $.75/picture) It made sense to take care to get each picture perfectly posed as if anything was wrong it cost money. Now when have digital cameras where the marginal cost of each photo is 0.

People have adjusted to free photos by taking more. However they have forgotten that they should also adjust by not spending as much time to pose perfection and instead just get the moment.

As I just replied to a sibling comment, I'm not sure this is entirely true. If I look at old pictures my parents took on film, a lot of them are frivolous and unposed--and enjoyable, because they're not a row of people standing with picture-smiles on. The pictures were expensive, but the attitude to taking pictures was also different. You'll find out if the picture was good in a couple weeks; no sense taking another.

Even when taking frivolous pictures more care was taken about when to take them. Most people didn't carry a camera with them like they do now, thus even then frivolous pictures of the past were more planned because somebody had to think ahead to break the camera. (Cell phone cameras have nothing on the lens of a SLR, but they are amazing within their limits)

Of course every family did have the photobuf who always had a camera in front of their face even back then. Most people in the family didn't though.

My wife does this to our kids and it breaks my heart - I try to be very sneaky on the somewhat rare (once every few weeks?) occasions I want to take a couple pics or vids of something spontaneous my kids are doing. My wife will interrupt, tell them to do something again or otherwise put them on the spot and then point the phone at them. I almost cringe whenever things are going well because I know she’ll want to interrupt. She feels it is harmless and doesn’t like how I “hate pictures”. Sigh.

I can relate. I hate taking pictures that you have to "fabricate" or redo because it didn't come out perfect. Especially around kids because they might infer these pictures are important somehow.

I'm from 1997 and that is precisely the case for me. It's bad enough that I have a hard time taking pictures even when I want to, because I internalized how annoying it is.

> I wonder if children being born over the last decade will come to despise taking photos...

I hope so. I've recently noticed that I spend a lot of time at concerts trying to take photos. Photos I'll probably never look at again. Meanwhile, I'm not paying attention to the music or the people around me.

Obama said he was shocked by how many people he met as president, and all they wanted to do was take a picture - even though there's a professional White House photographer recording everything and the pictures are made available. Heck - you're with the president: be in the moment.

https://www.today.com/news/barack-obama-explains-why-he-ll-n...

we're knee deep in the metamoment

For me, the concept of "quality time" only really applies to work. You can be "in the flow" and get a lot of stuff done in 2 hours that might otherwise take weeks to build. And in the context of work, there are factors (organized, bright, distraction-free room) that you can optimize to make it more likely for you to have a short, but high-quality work session.

But for free time, I don't get it. The whole point of relaxing is that you stop worrying about getting things done, so there should be nothing left for you to measure to determine the quality level.

If you can measure the "relaxingness-level" of your free time, you're playing make believe for other people.

The quality of your instagram photos is probably inversely related to how relaxing the vacation was. When you're asleep at the beach all the time, there won't be any photos to show for it.

That's a very confusing page layout with not so good news design. I'm sure the content must be nice, but I couldn't focus at all.

This reads like it was written by someone on a coke binge.

Imagine putting a paywall up on your personal blog.

I can't imagine people reliably get invested in your content if you're blocking them from reading the top three posts.

If you're interested in reading them I can forward any of the paywalled ones to you :)

Random never made me happy.

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