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Comment by baddox | Hacker News Reader

I'm curious: why exactly is being a "consumer" such a bad thing? I'm not necessarily saying I disagree, but I'm having trouble coming up with an explanation, and it seems like everyone is simply assuming that consumption is a bad thing.

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Nice question; I'll take a stab at an answer.

Since consumers need producers and producers need consumers, you really can't argue that either one is inherently bad.

However, I would argue that our intent should be biased toward producing, since producing helps us grow. Consuming in this context has connotations of passivity, and while rest is important, too much rest will make us weak. Also, when you are consuming you can be mindless. When you are producing, you stretch your mind. Not only do you have to think about how to meet your goal, you have to think about what you are producing in context of value and other people. It's mind-expanding.

Also, it is natural for us to want to grow, so if we spend most of our time in passive consumption it will negatively affect our mood and sense of well-being in the world.

Good points. I think a lot of it depends on the definition of "consumption." Most people use it pejoratively to mean "mindless consumption," but personally I don't think I engage in that much "mindless consumption." Sure, I surf reddit and hn, but most of my time online is spent either having conversations like this one, laughing at funny stuff (surely entertainment and comedy can't be all bad), or actively educating myself (e.g. reading programming articles, current events). Actually, I think even "mindlessness" can have benefits: everyone knows the value of relaxation or even meditation.

Doesn't matter whether it's mindless or not. Consumption is consumption. Educating yourself by reading programming articles could be considered an investment, which is the distinction you want to make here, but if it's not an investment towards future production, then it's still just consumption and not much different from playing Farmville.

I still don't agree. I don't think knowledge for the sake of knowledge is such a bad thing. I feel happier when I learn things, even if the things are unlikely to help me be productive in any measurable capacity. I will go on Wikipedia binges on bizarre topics like fighter aircraft or quantum mechanics, and it makes me happy even though I certainly don't retain any real expertise of the subjects. I guess that makes it "entertainment" more than anything, but I think that's fine.

No one said consumption is "bad". All that's said is that consumption is dependent on "production", and "production" gets its value from "consumption" (even the producer ends up being the only consumer).

That wonderful book you read? It wasn't created by someone reading; it was created by someone writing. If everyone read Wikipedia and no one wrote Wikipedia, there wouldn't be anything to read.

I don't think he's implying that consumption is a bad thing inherently. I think an underlying assumption of the article is that the author has greater aspirations which he feels he is not be pursuing effectively.

It's about focus and goals which can only be achieved by concerted effort over a long period.

I don't think it's a bad thing, but the things that are easy to consume take time and don't provide much benefit. Nobody would say that spending a couple of hours reading a novel is a waste of time, but reading HN is probably not as good a use of time. (The difference, in my mind, is that reading edited long-form literature is going to help you write better, while reading a bunch of casual comments about the latest Internet Outrage isn't.)

Actually, pg says just this in his essay How to Do What You Love: "Except for some books in math and the hard sciences, there's no test of how well you've read a book, and that's why merely reading books doesn't quite feel like work. You have to do something with what you've read to feel productive."

http://www.paulgraham.com/love.html

I don't read books to "feel productive", I read them to take my mind somewhere else for a while. I don't get the whole "feeling productive" thing; if I'm being productive, I'm too focused on producing to feel anything.

I think the problem is consuming through addiction, gamification, procrastination, etc. If I spend a day or evening in the garden creating something, designing a new side project or similar, I never find myself regretting that expense of time later. But after any night of trawling crappy news sites, or flicking channels, I head to bed defeated and annoyed at myself for not being able to overcome those things.

For me, It isn't so much about being a consumer as it is resigning myself to a mentality of not putting work and important things first. I'll read one article on HN, then another, then check techcrunch, then mashable, some blogs, and before I know it I've wasted two hours and haven't accomplished anything productive.

Hi, aceex from Reddit here.

Instead of "producer" and "consumer" I could have said "force of nature" and "hopeless stimulation junkie".

Whether or not you make anything of value to exchange with other people is not really important. How much you're consuming is also pretty irrelevant. The important thing is that your brain is in "make things happen" mode, not "stimulate me" mode.

I wasn't writing about economics, I wrote about you getting what you really want out of today and not having your attention and focus stolen.

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