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Comment by pianoben | Hacker News Reader

This headline is like a bad r/nosleep title. Someday, somehow, I hope we move past this dumb clickbait style.

I kind of like this title, it in my view throws shade to all the regurgitated desire to reach the monk/quiet mind status.

And I intuitively guessed it to be about something like that, so didn't consider it to be clickbait per se, and the story was great.

You think it's an article on the downsides of excessive patience or zen meditation, but no, TBI.

As a tangent: I learned how to enter a waking ideation / guided daydreaming state associated with sensory deprivation without extreme stimuli removal. It is good for startup ideas (not that they're any good but for generating them), fiction novel outlines, and letting your subconscious out.

Edit since I can't comment below right now:

I'm so sorry, I learned it intuitively by spending days / weeks by myself without human contact or interruptions in a low stimuli environment. Instead of going "crazy," it's possible the mind can entertain and amuse itself. I think this also explains why kids (and adults) in very poor countries have such wild imaginations and are so happy when they have almost nothing. And, where else would magical realism arise if not Colombia?

> As a tangent: I learned how to enter a waking ideation / guided daydreaming state associated with sensory deprivation without extreme stimuli removal.

Awesome. How? Any books/articles/resources that could help?

the attention economy demands it, as long as it reigns supreme we'll never be free from this dumb shit

I think we need more obsessive and honest curation of titles.

Perhaps a "launch a title change vote" feature so the community can fix it.

It's not really new. https://www.google.com/search?q=yellow+journalism+headlines&...

Exactly! While most click bait has interesting titles, not all interesting titles are clickbait. So many people seem to want headlines to be merely an 80 character summary of the article. That’s fine on articles of news - “so and so has died”, “Country declares war on Country Y”. Or in tutorials. But in pieces of writing we are reading mostly for leisure there’s no reason for it to have such a matter-of-fact title.

For me clickbait is hyper-sensationalised, usually misleading, and typically the article doesn’t deliver what the title says it will. None of those three attributes are true of this title or article.

Also misleading...usually when people talk about "quiet mind" they're talking about meditation, not TBIs

Thought it was obvious that it was meant to be a cheeky type of title.

Or we should just get past the FOMO and let some stuff unclicked and focus on things interesting for us.

Personally I got over that long ago; the style itself just irks me to see. I left Facebook to get away from attention-economy junk and am sad to see it show up here.

Yeah, I couldn't get very far in to it. Something about the author's tone and writing style was awkward and offputting.

On the contrary, I enjoyed it and read the whole thing with interest.

I felt like after reading the first paragraph, everything afterwards was just the same, written differently over and over again.

To me it felt very self-centered. Like that bit about having the worst injury. Was it really worth pointing out?

Worst injury out of the family, and I'd definitely agree with her. I definitely throughout the story was able to imagine myself being in her position and how dreadful it would be. I think self centered is totally fine, since it's her shitty circumstances that could really happen to anyone.

Losing your intelligence could very well be one of the scariest things.

Many people I have known remarked on how an older person they know has a failing body and an active mind. The mind being the most important.

Perhaps due to her head injury - I was surprised at how readable it was and just presumed she had significant help editing it (although that is unclear, perhaps not).

This is the best article I have read that was posted to HN this year. Most other articles that try to be insightful just reveal the writers own stupidity and desire to follow trends.

I did not see the same tricks in this article.

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