Hacker News Reader

what do you do for fun? do you consider that time wasted?

(honest question. I did used to consider fun stuff to be time wasted, but as I've gotten older and am paying the price for a long-term high stress lifestyle, I'm starting to think differently about it)

View on HN

Feynman has a fantastic anecdote about getting over what we might today call burnout. He was not interested in work at all in his professorship, when he noticed a wobble in a plate being thrown, and wondered about it. He spent all day working on the physics of this toy problem, and claims discovering play as the key to his recovery.

If you haven't read them yet, "Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman", and "What Do You Care What Other People Think" were great reads in my 20s.

The punch line is that the equations he worked out ended up being useful for his Nobel Prize winning work. So it ended up being useful even if that wasn't the goal.

My favourite part of that story is when he shows the maths to one of the other professors they can't understand why he is "wasting time" on it.

And then he goes on to win the Nobel prize because of it..

I don't think GP is suggesting the time was wasted. Rather the opposite.

Agree that’s also how I interpreted the comment

Indeed, that does seem quite plausible! Thanks.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com