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Comment by dkhenry | Hacker News Reader

I am not happy doing nothing. I don't understand how you can be do content just "chilling". Now don't get me wrong there is nothing wrong with recreation and spending time with your family, there isn't even anything wrong with doing nothing, if its for a purpose, but just wasting time because you can is a waste of time. You should be optimizing your time to get the most value out of it.

Maybe I am just odd, but I would much rather be hacking on my side projects then playing games and watching movies. I guess that the difference between your vocation being your passion and it just being something to pay the bills. Perhaps the author needs to find a different career that provides some fulfillment to him so he doesn't feel the need to waste his life decompressing from his job.

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No. I can't speak for the author, but I can empathize. I'm VERY satisfied with my career. I honestly couldn't imagine doing anything else...but I couldn't do it anymore either. The late nights, always being in front of the computer, always working on something. People burn out, even doing things they love to do. I still do what I love, I just have more of an appropriate balance.

I think you're just odd, like you said.

Talk about taking every single word I wrote literally :) Thats ok.

I do regularly work on side projects. But being 100% productive 100% of the time, in my mind, is not healty. This is my personal opinion.

The assumption you make about your vocation being your passion and for me it being just to pay the bills could not be more wrong. I have been a coder all my life. It is my job now and will continue to be as well as my passion. I will continue improving and working on all kinds of things.

The difference is that I allow myself some breathing room to be a person, not just a machine, on a regular basis.

Here is how I see it. If your going on a drive and you have three choices, one of them is the most direct route its on the freeway and you will make it there is the shortest amount of time, the second is a winding country road it takes twice as long, but you get to enjoy the country road maybe listen to the radio maybe roll your windows down and enjoy the fresh spring air, and you have a separate freeway that is underground and always has a traffic jam. Doing nothing as your described is to me the third option, your just wasting time for no reason whatsoever and your telling yourself this is nice because I am not stressing out about whatever, but your still wasting you time. Relaxation doesn't have to be fruitless, for instance I relax by gardening. It is both calming and productive. After watching that movie or playing that game _most_ of the time all you have is three less hours to do something productive. You have just sat in that underground freeway when you could have been enjoying a spring drive or getting to your destination faster.

In the scope of my article, when will you be at your destination? Will you be driving at full speed on the freeway for the rest of your life until your car breaks down from wear and tear? Or would you not rather arrive there a bit later with your car still running and still in good health.

"You should be optimizing your time to get the most value out of it."

Why? What makes that lifestyle any better than the lifestyle where you sit back and chill?

> I guess that the difference between your vocation being your passion and it just being something to pay the bills.

Or maybe it's a passion, but not to the degree of being able to sustain that passion for much more than 40 hours a week. That's a whole lot of time doing one thing (let's not get into the details of how many of those hours are really programming, technical work, etc.). Maybe you won't call it passion since yours seems to be more "intense", but it's still much more than just-being-something-to-pay-the-bills.

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