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Comment by silisili | Hacker News Reader

If you mean just 'thinking on things', pretty much all the time. I realized when I was younger I never felt 'bored' like everyone else seems to. I'm perfectly content to just sit and stare at the sky thinking of god knows what. Even my wife sometimes comes in and asks what I'm doing when I'm seemingly just sitting on the couch staring at the wall at times. The downsides are that I have trouble sleeping unassisted, as I'll just lay in bed thinking til the sun comes up, and also have trouble staying focused on movies or even conversation, as my mind will be elsewhere.

If you mean work/product/big picture specific... probably a few hours a week.

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Same here. Even the wife part. The hardest/funniest thing is trying to elaborate the source of my thoughts.

Me: brings out birthday cake, we sing happy birthday to my son

Wife: What are you thinking about?

Me: That doorknobs probably got invented before door handles.

Wife: ...

Then I have to explain that I was thinking about the kitchen door and the dining room, and how we removed it when we first moved in, and how I was holding the cake with both hands and then thought about the door because it would have been annoying to deal with a door knob while holding a cake, that lead me to think how our house uses doorknobs only, and it's part of the problem of opening doors...and yeah.

...as a side note, I was wrong, door handles were invented first. It's because the mechanism is easer and relies on gravity, instead of a mechanism doing it for you.

> ...as a side note, I was wrong, door handles were invented first. It's because the mechanism is easer and relies on gravity, instead of a mechanism doing it for you.

I was about to comment on this, having grown up in a house with latches that relied upon gravity to do their work. I currently live in a home which has handles on most of the doors, including the exterior doors. It's actually problematic for us because activating the handle also unlocks the deadbolt from the inside. Our dog has figured out how to open the handles, but he can't work a door knob. We rely upon a baby gate to keep him upstairs and away from the exterior door he can operate. He could easily jump the gate if he so desired (he's done it a few times without thinking while chasing one of our cats).

I also have contemplated doorknobs. I hate that the choice is between slippery round ones and hook-like ones. I'd like a slightly rounded dodecahedron, icosahedron, or 5 to 12 sided prism.

I remember growing up in the UK having a few similar to this: https://www.wayfair.ca/Nostalgic-Warehouse--Clear-Crystal-Wa... if thats what you mean?

My grandparents house had those. They would loosen if turned the wrong way - and half the family is left handed! The right handers were always complaining that the doorknob was loose.

Have you tried crystal door knobs (or glass ones made to look like crystal)? They may have the shape you're looking for

What would drive you to the conclusion that a complex, specialized mechanism was developed before literally the simplest solution anyone could imagine (a stick you pull on)?

Holding a cake.

> The downsides are that I have trouble sleeping unassisted, as I'll just lay in bed thinking til the sun comes up, and also have trouble staying focused on movies or even conversation, as my mind will be elsewhere.

I daydream a lot. But I (mostly) don't suffer from those side effects. Instead, a couple of years ago, I got myself trapped in a spiral of recurring daydreams which slowly removed me from active life - to the point where I found myself on the verge of financial ruin (because: lost interest in finding work). I managed to pull out of the spiral with the help of a psychotherapist, but it was a close-run thing. The scary thing was that I didn't notice I was spiralling until one day I found myself in tears because my bank account was empty and I genuinely had no idea about how to fix it. Those daydreams (personal historical what-if scenarios, mostly) were highly addictive!

>The downsides are that I have trouble sleeping unassisted, as I'll just lay in bed thinking til the sun comes up, and also have trouble staying focused on movies or even conversation, as my mind will be elsewhere.

I'm the exact same way. Podcasts are a godsend. The trick is finding one that's just interesting enough to keep your attention, while simultaneously being just boring enough to fall asleep to. I find that really dry, technical historical lectures work great.

Oh, man. I do this, too, but mostly with youtube. I have discovered that Jim Al-Khalili, Brian Greene and Hannah Fry are too interesting to fall asleep to but that there are plenty of Royal Institute lectures that serve really well and have no, or very few, commercial insertions.

This is crazy. I never thought that anyone else would use those lectures to sleep. I like them when I'm awake also!

The exception is RI's Andrew Szydlo. His lectures are… well, kind'a nuts. Too entertaining to be soporific.

I fall asleep to Melvyn Bragg's In Our Time Discussions

https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b006qykl/episodes/player

Curiously, I have found that my own ability to lecture monotonously on some obstruse topic has (at one point or another) put every member of my family to sleep.

I've though about doing a podcast or something where I just read boring, impenetrable books to help people fall asleep.

I agree completely. Commercials and flashy endings are to be avoided.

I'm exactly like you. I can just think for hours. Sometimes at the end of the day I wonder what I did and I can't find an answer, I spent almost all day wondering in my mind. It can be a problem sometimes as you said, since I can't really pay attention in class, when someone is talking to me, reading a book, etc.

My solution to that aspect of time wasting is to write it down. I don't think I am unique in this aspect but sometimes my contemplations are circular, the deeper I go the more I have to rehash my thoughts, which wastes time.

I find it writing it down eliminates that problem significantly. Depending on the thought I follow two different approaches.

1. Write down what comes in mind, each thought a separate point. If it's causal, like A -> B -> C, I will re-arrange my typed up thoughts to match the pattern. So it works like a sorting queue for thoughts.

2. Mindmap. Usually when I am trying to think of all the likely scenarios, which ends up having multiple causal trees, and sometimes thinking about a 3rd dependency will make me think of a similar dependency on a different tree...that's when a lot of the cyclical thinking happens, so writing it down like a mindmap is like a weird breadth first approach.

Oof this hits for me. Maybe not as much during the day - my mind is running 110% all the time but I'm a very active person so I usually need to be _doing_ something too.

When it comes to falling asleep at night, and trying to sleep to a reasonable hour though, I'm SOL. No matter what time I wake up in the morning, that's the time I'm getting out of bed, because the second I'm awake my mind start churning through thoughts and what I could be accomplishing that day. Case in point - I didn't have anything to do before work this morning, so I would have loved to sleep in until ~7:30 to catch up on some sleep from waking up at 6am every day this week. 6:32am, wide awake in bed, no chance of going back to sleep.

I like it in some ways - I know I'm driven and motivated. But man I'd love to be able to turn it off sometimes.

> The primary indication, to my thinking, of a well-ordered mind is a man’s ability to remain in one place and linger in his own company

Seneca, Moral Letters to Lucil

Likewise and I've always been like this. Wife is a very hardworking woman who gets the job done physically and she thinks I waste a lot of my time contemplating, she rarely does so, she's a doer. But this is my way of getting stuff done and moving the needle, a lot of time I look like I am doing nothing but my brain has a life of its own. Some years ago, like 10 years to be more exact, I found the prefect outlet for this: contemplating while painting. Brain is free to go wherever it wants while paintings get done and now I have a way to justify all my contemplation.

This is great. What would you recommend for someone who wanted to get started painting?

(Particular books/videos? Kit? Or better to sit in on a local class?)

Go watch Bob Ross videos.

I'm serious. He's not a great painter, his technique is not amazing -- but he shows you exactly what he is doing and talks about it continuously. For a beginner, that's pretty much perfect.

Note that there is nothing special about Bob Ross brand anything; if you've got a local art supply place, you really don't need to buy that brand.

There is a lot of helpful content on youtube but it does really depend on what you want to do. Sometimes it's good to start without any help. I personally wanted to explore and learn by myself and took my own approach to that. I'd been jamming guitars/keyboards/other instruments for some years before I took up painting and decided to take the same approach to painting: improvise and learn from the improvisation process, then look up a bit of theory and incorporate some of it, in small bits so. Sometimes the theory comes after you have learned something hands on and it fixates a concept, other times you truly get something later on. Here's the thing magic: At a painting session I fell into a chasm of peace where I felt completely free. I wasn't thinking of the painting itself, my hands were naturally doing what they were supposed to do but my mind was wondering in different places or was observing the whole thing without interfering. When the session was over, let's say the second day I was painting this whole thing didn't repeat and felt that what I was doing was frustrating, forced. I kept at it and in a couple days I fell into that again. Then I backtracked the steps and noted what it takes to get there: you need to warm up, be prepared in advance so you don't have to take main decisions, everything is at your fingertips for you to play with. You also have to not be interrupted. There is a feedback aspect in painting as well, and when you feel that what you do is uninspiring you should quickly move on and come back to it later. My solution for this was simple: work on many works at the same time. I start priming or applying the backgrounds (random colors make for different starting points) then go over with rough shapes switching from a painting to another while the previous ones are drying. Once in a while I spend more time on one that is moving forward but generally the cycling through them gets me quite far. But your experience may vary as this is your own journey so to speak and you are free to do whatever you wish to do.

Check out “paint by numbers”

This is how I'm able to out for a quick jog/run and come back two or three hours later. My brain just switches to engineering mode and I start thinking about circuits, op amps, code architecture, milling, 3d printing, stories, plots, arguments...

Once I get past the "why am I running?" phase and my brain clicks over (usually about the same time my body switches from anaerobic to aerobic energy production), I just disappear into thought and time vanishes...

I used to be like this until about roughly the same time as I got my first smartphone. Now I just have to fill my 'empty' time with watching, reading or scrolling of some sort, otherwise I'll start to get anxious and bored. I miss those days of daydreaming and contemplation, but I've found it very difficult to go back to not needing to look at screens.

I'm pretty much the same. Don't have much trouble sleeping though - if I just let the train of thought wander instead of concentrating on something specific, I find myself asleep pretty soon. I also have had an extraordinary luck of finding a wife that gets it, so when she finds me in one of those moments she knows what's going on.

>If you mean just 'thinking on things', pretty much all the time

I'm a very outgoing person, but I also crave alone time. I also require time before bed to let the thoughts in my brain run their course, and it does make it hard to actually fall asleep sometimes. I make sure to take time each day to simply sit and ponder.

If you get stuck on the infinite loop of actively trying to get to sleep, which does not work, try what I do: grab a book, forget about getting to sleep and assume you'll be reading it until morning. Usually I doze off in a couple of chapters. It helps to use an e-reader with low backlight.

That sounds nice, I just end up reading until far far too late and end up with only about 3hrs sleep, after I make an effort to stop at around 3ish and finally try and shut my eyes at 4.

Read until 4, then 6, then 9am. Sleep until 3pm, stay awake until noon the next day. And 3pm the day after that.

My day shifts forward by 3 hours per day.

I've always been this way as well. This isn't considered normal behavior/thinking?

I can say it's rare for me to think introspectively like that. If I have a moment to reflect I almost always distract myself with my phone. My mind is on the moment unless I force it otherwise or right before bed.

I can personally relate. Reading something simple, like fiction or an autobiography, is how I fall asleep at night. I let someone else (the author) do some thinking for me, so I can rest!

Introspection is our one true superpower.

I think that speech is also a pretty good superpower.

seems like you are like that guy from that movie life of Walter Mitty.

Based (loosely) on a short story of the same name. I really identified with the character.

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