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Comment by allendoerfer | Hacker News Reader

I am a victim of the religion of self-optimization and productivity for the sake of productivity myself, but in the end you do not have to optimize yourself at all. If you and your family have enough to eat, you are fine. If you are procrastinating something, you can also just decide to not do it. Just live, you are fine.

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>and productivity for the sake of productivity

For some reason, the word "productive" causes some readers to get the wrong message. (I.e. some readers see a blog text mentioning "productivity" and thus it must be some veiled guilt-shaming article.)

People don't try to be productive just for the sake of being productive. People want to improve their lives and productivity is a natural focus of optimization to bring about a quality-of-life improvement.

Your pushback is similar to previous commenters that rejected the idea of "productivity" and I replied in previous comments

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19592404

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22255557

To recap one of my comments, even the prehistoric hunter "having enough to eat" is not fine because the hunter still wants to improve the productivity of hunting. Over the last 10000 years, people have continuously improved the productivity of hunting (and farming) so much that today's people like you and I have enough free time to type HN comments -- instead of spending all day chasing after animals to eat.

People naturally want to improve their lives. Some people also want to share ideas on how to improve their lives. It seems the word "productivity" has tainted that discussion. However, it doesn't change the fact that people still want to reduce the ratio of effort-to-benefit.

I agree to your general point, but

"instead of spending all day chasing after animals to eat."

Actual working hours in small hunter gatherer tribes like the Lakota were more likely around 3-4 hours.

Medieval peasants had to work all day long.

But both experienced starving in winter and spring, in a bad year.

Those tribes have been optimizing their hunter-gatherer lifestyle for thousands of years. Like the rest of modernity, they have innovated (increased their productivity) on their practices and their culture and society has evolved.

So I see this point as being evidence to GPs perspective, rather than your own, respectfully.

If you are procrastinating you are probably fine and will not starve. You do not have to hustle. Of course you can, but if it‘s not your thing, just don’t do it. Most of us are not hunter/gatherers.

That's divorced from whether that optimization actually increases QoL vs not doing it.

Doing something that makes you unhappy even more because you do it more efficiently doesn't make you happier, only more efficient

I read your comment and then skimmed the article. This is how it reads: “ALERT! YOU HAVE PROBLEMS! STEPS 123455789 ARE NEEDED!” And so on. Talk about piling it on. Thanks for your perspective.

I find once I remove addiction (YouTube, twitter) I will naturally get things done

For me it’s twitter and… porn

I find myself with an idea "oh that's right, I need to do X" and go to find the tab X in my browser with 100+ tabs open, and quite often forget what I was searching for before I find it.

I really ought to remember to write a list. Oh wait I have one, where is that tab again?

I installed an extension to close idle tabs older than 30 minutes. Keeps my tabs tidy because turns out searching for the page is faster than finding the tab among the hundreds.

> If you are procrastinating something, you can also just decide to not do it. Just live, you are fine.

Procrastination can be the thin end of the wedge though and, in extreme cases, deciding not to do things develops into doing nothing, like not going to work, not paying paying bills, not opening letters or answering the phone, and so on...

Thanks. This is a good reminder for some of us.

Not everyone can or should embrace this mindset, not because it’s a bad one per se…. But some people are driven by ambition—ambition to make money, make art, explore, create, etc. We have a lot to be thankful for in todays world and it’s partly due to people who challenged themselves to do more than simply sit back and chill. I look at it this way… some people want to star in the show, not just watch it.

Those are all great motivators. While the article mentions "working on something exciting" it doesn't suggest, well, finding something that motivates you at a fundamental level.

I think we can assume that the author of this post sees these things as equivalents.

Everybody always was the star in their show. That's almost certainly true for non-human creatures too.

To a degree, mass media undermined that foundation.

If you're able to just decide not to do the thing, then you're in a much better place. Some of us can get stuck in a loop where we can't decide not to do the thing, but also can't get started on it.

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