Comment by alfalfasprout | Hacker News Reader

Comment by alfalfasprout | Hacker News Reader

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I have to echo this. I know HN is full of people obsessed with a very different lifestyle but frankly... I think this piece misses the mark entirely.

PG I suspect and many others derive intrinsic happiness from the grind. From achievement. Yet this is a very myopic way to live that for the vast majority of people will result in a fair amount of unhappiness.

A far healthier and happier way to live is to live a balanced life. Work efficiently when you need to work, and be focused on your objectives. Don't waste time on stuff that doesn't matter. You can still be successful, grow yourself, etc. but without killing yourself in the process.

And for the love of god... take time for yourself to enjoy the finer things in life. Take a walk and try to find the beauty in things. Go travel somewhere new! Enjoy some you time and treat yourself.

I cannot disagree more with PG here, sadly. But that's all it is... a disagreement. Everyone gets to choose what life they want to live.

I think on some level, barring the "stuck-in-bed depression" cases, we all work hard, but the work is nothing like a startup or a coding challenge.

It's more often things like going on a walk and identifying the birds, going to the bar and getting better at telling stories or playing pool, seeing patterns in watching daily traffic or weather. Things you absolutely could go deep on, but just can't justify as "character building exercise" because they won't directly lead to you acquiring property or power.

And that's where the alarm bells start to come in; if you get anxious about that, you can get stuck on the idea of work and cut yourself off from a balanced set of interests, and this hits young people especially hard because they don't know what the balance could look like, or they observe media(including HN) where the balance is clearly defined towards one extreme, think "I will become that" and treat it as a masochistic exercise. I believe this to be a deep affliction of the online world particularly since, without trying you can stumble into media containing the "best" of everything.

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