I found it interesting to learn about the etymology of the word "character". It comes to us from Latin which took it from the Greek (χᾰρᾰκτήρ) which comes from kharasso (χαράσσω) - I scratch or engrave.
Our character can be thought of as the result of a long process of engraving or scratching. I tend to see it as a solid metal shield full of scratches from long battles. The resulting grooves tend towards virtue or vice. A sustained habit of wise choices makes it easier to do the right thing - even when it is hard - when the time comes and it will come. A marriage, a deathbed, a career. Life has its fair share of hard choices and having grooves in your soul that guide your choices towards the virtuous helps immensely.
That's also useful to know for when you have unimportant tasks to complete. For some people this may comprise the majority of their career and/or life. However, those "unimportant" tasks still scratch your soul and those scratches ultimately matter. Even seemingly mundane things like taking out the garbage can be done with virtue in mind.
I'll just toss this in, since I haven't seen someone else put it out out there yet:
Excellence is an art won by training and habituation: we do not act
rightly because we have virtue or excellence, but we rather have these
because we have acted rightly;
'these virtues are formed in man by his doing the actions';
we are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act but a habit:
'the good of man is a working of the soul in the way of excellence in
a complete life... for as it is not one swallow or one fine day that
makes a spring, so it is not one day or a short time that makes a man
blessed and happy'
-- Will Durant, "The Story of Philosophy: The Lives and Opinions of
the World's Greatest Philosophers" (1926), Ch. II: Aristotle and
Greek Science; part VII: Ethics and the Nature of Happiness
For a similar idea from another culture, see the ancient definitions of karma:
Now as a man is like this or like that,
according as he acts and according as he behaves, so will he be;
a man of good acts will become good, a man of bad acts, bad;
he becomes pure by pure deeds, bad by bad deeds;
And here they say that a person consists of desires,
and as is his desire, so is his will;
and as is his will, so is his deed;
and whatever deed he does, that he will reap.
The only thing I would change here is “watch your thoughts, thoughts become words” and reverse it.
Your words are so often careless attempts at thought. First approximations of ideas. All too often, however, they are spoken to oneself and heard by oneself as truth. Be very careful about your words, they will go on to constrain oh so much.
Now, strictly speaking thought may come first. But, it’s that thinking about words which becomes so trapping, not the initial conditions that give rise to the words. Interrogate your language, distrust it, scrutinise it.
That's a nice way to phrase it! Google tells me this quote is from Ralph Waldo Emerson, who himself was deeply influenced by ancient Indian thought (see [1], e.g.).
That’s a common misunderstanding. Karma is not a “restoring force”. Karma is habit. Act with kindness and your life will become one of kindness. Act with rage and your life will become one of rage.
Karma is not there to get you. Is the law of cause and effect. If you seed rage, you will get rage. No other result can become from rage than rage.
I doubt this is a novel thought, but as a non-believer in the Christian afterlife I’ve always considered Hell to be the place that one ends up in (while still alive) after a lifetime of bad choices.
It is the terrible reality that you find yourself in, full of demonic people and meager circumstance, as a consequence of your bad choices. Not a literal dimension of pain and suffering, but a manifestation of all the rejection and shunning by others that your terrible behavior warrants.
Unworthy of love, or forgiveness, or pity. Untrusted and unhelped by others because of your untrustworthy reputation.
I consider the independence of self to be an illusion. Instead, our self is composed by our influences. In that sense, “reincarnation” happens all the time as we influence each other and upload our selves. From this view, karmic influences are even more pronounced, as we create heaven and hell for our extended selves.
This is a common Western misunderstanding of karma.
Karma isn't about guaranteeing consequences/rewards. It's about actions increasing the odds of one or the other.
While it certainly has been used as a part of cosmological frameworks involving reincarnation, it can also be used in a secular framework within the context of a single life without relying on notions of a metaphysical force.
No. Reincarnation leads to a paradox: How would the last life before the universe’s end’s deeds and sins be karma’ed?
It actually only works in a religion with a proper afterlife. Not one in which everyone is saved regardless and go to heaven no matter what. One in which punishment is one-to-one to the sins in this life, like Islam.
Why “no”? I was literally describing the framework in which the spiritual idea of karma is commonly found: religion with the belief of cyclical rebirth.
What you go on to describe does not match up to “karma” as found- using that term- in religions.
I agree. But the message here is not an external occurring but rather internal. One's acts determine one's internal state. If you act virtuously by your definition, your judgement of yourself will be good/not corrupt, which is good. The key point here is that it's your own personal defination.
I'm not praising the oligarchs, of course. I'm saying that the "karma" bullshit just doesn't work. Yeah, I don't want to be like these bad guys, but I have no illusions that some magical "karma" will reward me or punish them - that's naive.
I don’t believe in karma or in the words of Johnny Cash “god almighty is gonna cut em down” but the world does work in funny ways.
Such behaviour is not sustainable and even if your network of nasties shields you from consequences, you’re making a giant gamble relying on that forever without some meaner network coming along and pop! with no moral issue.
I agree. The quote I shared above has nothing to do with external systems that dole out rewards and punishments. Ancient definitions of karma are very different from the mainstream definition in vogue today (edit: with the usual caveat that ancient concepts have multiple interpretations, and I'm sure there are contemporaries of the view I shared that are more in line with what you imagine).
A somewhat modernized version is to say: it's not nature, nor nurture, it's stigmergy [1]. Or another way: the organism is larger than the collection of the cells [2] [3].
[1] "mechanism of indirect coordination, through the environment, between agents or actions. The principle is that the trace left in the environment by an individual action stimulates the performance of a succeeding action by the same or different agent", https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stigmergy
[3] Michael Levin and Wayne Frasch (2023) From molecular physiology to anatomical form, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3l8I4gJ6D0w, at 27:32 the hybrid agent frog cells + scientists + AI exploring morphospace.
Webster [1] traces the source of the word “character” to theater where it was used as an emblem of the reputation of someone or a group of people, similar to how you would recognize the brand name engraved into a thing. The interpretation that character is a result of “engraving” through repeated behavior (at the individual level) is fascinating, but doesn’t seems as supported from original usage for centuries.
The article itself says that there are multiple meanings of "character". One of which refers to a persons reputation and can be traced back to "the Greek charassein, meaning “to sharpen, cut in furrows, or engrave.”
So perhaps this is convergent evolution? "Character" can also mean symbol, like a key on a typewriter. That would make more sense as a descendant from "engraving".
I'd hazard a guess it's that multiple words which sounded vaguely similar were merged into the most dominant form as a result of people being too lazy to differentiate them by minor nuances of pronunciation.
I don’t think Webster is always right or writes complete etymology. Perhaps there is a more charitable way to interpret the PC. But PC should provide sources, that would be nice.
Socrates was famous for his loose etymologies. He describes the etymology of techne (design, craft, basis of technology) as coming from “echo” and “nous” (mind). I love the idea of the echos of mind in technology!
His interlocutor said something like: “your etymology is like pulling a heavy boat up a steep ramp.” Ha! Yay for the playful side of Plato.
> The resulting grooves tend towards virtue or vice.
Virtue & vice are kind of an arbitrary way to device up those "grooves", and what constitutes virtue or vice varies by context/perspective.
I would argue there are a LOT more dimensions to character, and some are arguably more important than that one, but I otherwise agree with your metaphor.
I wear a platinum wedding ring for much the same reason. While it's really hard to break a platinum ring, they accumulate scratches quite easily. A ring that endures but carries with it scratches and grooves from the life you've lived seems like a pretty good metaphor for marriage.
My ring is just a little bit loose on my finger. It could slip off and be lost if it's not paid some attention. I initially found this supremely annoying, but realized that the metaphor is so good that I wouldn't have it any other way.
> I know of no more encouraging fact than the ability of a man to elevate his life by conscious endeavor. It is something to paint a particular picture, or to carve a statue, and so make a few objects beautiful. It is far more glorious to carve and paint the very atmosphere and medium through which we look. This morally we can do.
Funny that you bring this up. Just the other day I looked uo the etymology of “character” vs “caricature”. Surprisingly, considering the close similarity both in meaning and sound, they are completely unrelated. You already described “character”; “caricature” apparently comes from Italian for “load” or “exaggerate”, and is related to English “charge”.
A surprising number of words trace back to some form or other having to do with carving, cutting, boring into. See also analuein and krinein. It makes for some fantastic one-liners, like Foucault's C'est que le savoir n'est pas fait pour comprendre, il est fait pour trancher: Knowledge isn't made for understanding, it's made for cutting.
> Even seemingly mundane things like taking out the garbage can be done with virtue in mind.
Poet Jane Hirshfield, reflecting on her time at a monastery that ritualized waking up at ~0300 by splashing freezing water on one's face, said that her training was reducible to being more mindful when doing the dishes.
Life is about taking risk. We make daily decisions that involve big and small risk constantly.
Choosing to enjoy life today instead of waiting for tomorrow for that enjoyment isn't a failure, it's a choice. It comes with risk and tradeoffs.
Everyone thinks there's a magical line that everyone else should take that straddles that line between enjoyment today and tomorrow. That lines doesn't exist, and isn't even the same from day to day.
Looking back and regretting a lifetime of decisions is caused that the consequences from those earlier decisions. Once that weight becomes too heavy, the regret sets in.
IMO, the way to combat that is two-fold.
First, in the moment, be conscious of what the risks are, and if they are worth it. If they aren't, take pride in settling for less at the moment so you can safeguard your future. You're doing something hard and good, and it should feel good in itself to do it.
Second, when you look back, remember the joy you had at the time. It was judged, to the best of your ability, to be worth it at the time, and you should continue to feel warm and fuzzy from that joy today, even if bad things have come about as consequence for it.
For instance, like the author, I gained rather a lot of weight. Then I lost most of the excess. Then I gained half of it back. Every day is now a struggle to try to get my weight back down, and my blood pressure is back up so high I couldn't have dental surgery safely the other day, and I'm back on medication.
According to the author that's a failure, but I had a lot of really, really enjoyable meals. I ate the vast majority of them with friends and family. Many of them were either cooked by family, or were special occasions. Calling those meals "failures" now would be saying that it was a mistake to enjoy that time with my family and friends, and it absolutely wasn't.
> Choosing to enjoy life today instead of waiting for tomorrow for that enjoyment isn't a failure, it's a choice.
This conveniently papers over a critical mechanism of how biological brains operate: we do not choose 99% of our actions. It would be extremely inefficient and energy-consuming.
99% of our life we are on autopilot, driven by our habits engaged as response to sensory and internal stimuli.
Habits explain neatly concepts like addiction, while the choice story applied to concepts like addiction or self-destructive acts is reductive at best, and catastrophic on a societal level. Yet the majority of people, those that have been lucky not to have yet felt the grip of addiction, tend to have this opinion that addicts are just weak-willed idiots. This is not referred to you in particular, I am generalising based on common and frustrating opinions about addiction and recovery by well-meaning, but ignorant people.
Functionally and neurologically, there is no difference between a heroin addict and someone that has been going on a run every day for a decade. It's just that their autopilots have been trained to prefer a different action in response to similar stimuli, and brains respond and adapt much more readily to super-stimuli found in drugs and other destructive habits, than with natural and healthy "highs".
I recommend the book "The Biology of Desire" by Marc Lewis, an ex cocaine addict turned neuroscientist.
Hmm.. I’m torn because on the one hand, you’re definitely correct that a non-trivial amount of our lives is subconscious, which is different from auto-pilot in my pedantic opinion.
However, anecdotally I’ve found that whether you think you can do something or whether you think you cannot—you are correct. That is to say, I feel like admitting to the biological truth actually becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy which causes me to fall to my biological default.
However, if I reject that biological “truth”, I will more often find myself empowered by the notion that I can do anything I set my mind to, whether it be drugs or going for a run.
It’s the classic “mind over matter” phenomenon. Your fundamental beliefs can override your biological defaults, so I think it’s very important to regulate and review your beliefs.
I think you're totally missing the point. The point is that most of your actual lived life is simply stimulus and response. We actually have an extremely limited capacity for making reasoned choices - we just don't have the mental energy. So instead we learn to respond in a certain way to a certain stimulus (habit).
Here's an example from my life: I used to go the gym every Wednesday night after work. Several times over the course of this habit, I realized at the end of a long day that I would be better off going home and getting some rest, and decided to go home instead. In nearly every single instance I still drove to the gym, even though I had decided to go home. Because I was on auto-pilot. If we're talking about willpower, I would have say that it was my lack of willpower that led me to going to the gym and working out that day.
What you're talking about is a kind of willpower, which funnily enough has a biological basis also. Genetics seems to play a role, as do many medications. The marshmallow test seems to show willpower largely stays the same over 4 decades. Ozempic also seems to show you can artificially induce it. It's not mind over matter, it's having a mind primed to do it in the first place. It won't be as easily taught to someone who grabs the marshmallow instantly as a preschooler. We also seem to be able to induce it these days with ozempic, which is fascinating.
I don't think Ozempic operates on willpower... it slows your digestion process, which makes you feel fuller longer and can make you incredibly ill if you overeat.
> 99% of our life we are on autopilot, driven by our habits engaged as response to sensory and internal stimuli.
This is such a critical insight, and over the years it was eye opening to realize gradually how much I judged myself for factors that I clearly cannot control. Which is not to say that I’m helpless, but more interested now in focusing on systemic factors that directly influence automatic behaviors.
Judgement is such a major cultural response to addiction, and also happens to be one of the primary impulses that feeds it. Addicts often turn to their drug of choice to feel relief from the shame…of their addiction to their drug of choice.
> I recommend the book "The Biology of Desire" by Marc Lewis, an ex cocaine addict turned neuroscientist.
Adding this to my reading list. In a similar category, Anna Lembke is a psychiatrist and addiction specialist who wrote a book titled “Dopamine Nation” that I found worth reading.
You say we do not choose 99% of our actions, but then you say that we are on autopilot. This is gonna blow your mind now: we are our brain, so if we're on autopilot we're making those decisions.
Your point flies in the face of decades of evidence in the field of cognitive psychology.
Our brain is not defined as "that which makes decisions". Brains do many things, in many different ways, and the vast majority does not involve anything that could be meaningfully described as "deciding".
For the particular distinction here, the book "Thinking, Fast and Slow" by Daniel Khaneman gives a pretty detailed exposition.
Explicit decision making is slow, energy intensive, and unnecessary the vast majority of the time. And including all the implicit decision making in your definition would be like saying a leaf decides every way it tilts as it falls through the air off a tree.
> This conveniently papers over a critical mechanism of how biological brains operate: we do not choose 99% of our actions. It would be extremely inefficient and energy-consuming.
If we’re talking about the small, unimportant decisions then sure, I agree. But I don’t think the bigger decisions happen on autopilot — precisely because it would be very dangerous.
Speaking of addiction, relapses are never important decisions. Relapses are taking the wrong path (subconsciously because of habits and very strong neural pathways) at one of the thousands of different crossroads you come across in your daily life. This is why addiction is so terrible.
The first few days, the hardest ones, every single thing that happens to you (had a bad day, stranger frowned at me, stubbed my toe) is weighed and a decision is made. For a seasoned addict, many of these events have the automated response of ingesting your drug of choice.
Anecdote: I've quit smoking and any form of nicotine 3.5 years ago. I don't miss it. I have not relapsed once. Yet to this day, there are moments where I catch myself feeling that something is missing. That I have forgotten something important I had to do. A little soul searching later, and it's apparent I am just feeling that a cigarette right now be really nice. It completely sneaks up on me, but the first few months this happened dozens of times a day, the first few days even more. If your autopilot makes the wrong choice just once, you're back to square zero.
One thing I've personally found is, if I look closely, my small decisions often have big ramifications due to the chain of events or habits they kick off.
For example, the choice to open that one app leads to 30 minutes of scrolling leads to poor night's sleep leads leads to being on a later sleep schedule that week leads to not cognitively showing up to an important meeting that Saturday and missing an opportunity.
What we perceive of as 'big decisions' exist only within the conditions visible to our consciousness. Behind the scenes though those conditions are continuously shaped by small decisions amplified by the lever of the subconscious and our environment.
In other words, we're good at assessing the gravity of immediate conditions available to us, but we're bad at assessing internal and external processes and their effects. One reason why "know thyself" is such important advice.
Thus we'd be wise to make shaping conditions part of what we consider a 'big decision', perhaps even the big decision. This is another way of saying "we make our own luck".
I learned a lot about this kind of predictive modeling function of our brains from _The Experience Machine_ by Andy Clark. He was on Sean Carroll's podcast not too long ago and they had a great conversation on this topic.
> Calling those meals "failures" now would be saying that it was a mistake to enjoy that time with my family and friends, and it absolutely wasn't.
If gaining weight is the failure in this context, the mistake would likely be the excessive intake of food.
Time spent with friends and family would not be the mistake.
This might have come off a bit harsh.
Temperance, as you suggest, is a beautiful thing. It's hard (for me, especially), but sometimes we just have to put down the fork and politely decline that second, third, or fourth pancake.
I wasn't particularly overweight before but I attribute about ~10lbs of weight loss this year to realizing that:
- When at a dinner with family or friends, I never _have_ to finish something. Most of the time the host will be happy to package my leftovers to take back home when asked. That last part makes it clear that I like and appreciate the food even through I didn't finish it in the moment.
- If I buy food at a restaurant, I don't have an obligation to finish it to get my moneys worth. And again, I can just save it for another meal if I want.
- I don't have to eat snacks just because the host put them on a table at a party.
For some reason our brains think that just because food is _there_ we need to eat it, but that's generally not true.
I don’t actually think temperance and logic like this moves the needle significantly for obese people. When you’re obese you need to lose 50, 70, 100+ lbs, not 10. You’re looking at fundamentally changing relationship with food at multiple levels to the point where it’s unrecognizable. I don’t think small changes in habit like this are in the same ballpark as what obese people need to become a normal weight, in the same way that I don’t think taking the stairs instead of the elevator is in the same ballpark as someone who wants to become a professional athlete.
> When you’re obese you need to lose 50, 70, 100+ lbs, not 10.
You have to lose 10 at some point. The way you're putting it, it looks like losing weight would be some kind of drastic sprint with a finish line. I don't think it can happen that way. You have to lose weight and continuing changing your habit to lose 10 more, and the others 10 after, until it stabilises at healthy weight, then you start your healthy life, but it's not a finish line, the effort continues by fighting unhealthy habit for the rest of your life.
I don't think anyone is suggesting that the same tricks will work for everyone. I've never been chronically obese so I wouldn't know what goes on in someone's mind at that point.
However I do know that it moved the needle significantly in _my_ life by changing my relationship with food so it's valuable to me. Losing the extra ~10 to 20 lbs of weight people gain in adulthood is something that people do struggle with even if it's not as dramatic as someone fighting obesity.
I've seen a handful people close to me go from 100lb+ overweight to a more comfortable 10 to 20 (or 50). And I think what GP described is a fundamental change to the relationship with food: You're (consciously at first) changing the definition of what needs to be consumed vs what is being consumed without need. They've all from what I've observed gone through this change.
They said that when you're really big, the first 10 lbs is the easiest to lose, and can come from taking stairs and changing snack habits. It's the last 10 lbs that requires the diligent workouts and very strict diets.
Indeed, walking punches way over expectations for keeping weight off. You have to do a good hour of a walk, but an hour walking is probably better than a rushed workout of similar time.
Good on you! Something I preach to my children is that success comes from showing up every day to do a little and not from a sudden burst of a lot. Well done.
I turn 50 this year and have committed to doing 50,000 pushups before 2024. It sounds like a lot, but after the first month, doing 200-300 a day isn't really that difficult (when broken up into smaller sets). Honestly, it's a LOT more of a mental challenge than a physical challenge.
Sunk cost fallacy. You aren't getting that $7.50 back. The question should actually be "do I want to, for no reason at all, feel like shit for the rest of the evening?"
(This assumes you aren't deriving any pleasure or utility from eating that last 25%. If you are, then that's one side of the cost/benefit analysis. But the initial cost of the food is irrelevant not matter what.)
Yeah. I suppose sunk cost fallacy here would be "I should eat it all to avoid wasting money." I guess you're sort of actually psychologizing OUT of that. It's still a bit fallacious, since the correct cost of the decision to not eat is actually $0, not $7.50, but I guess lying to yourself about that could be a useful mental trick.
Indeed. I doubt anyone ever got fat by eating food they didn't like.
The issue becomes all the worse when food is designed to make you want to keep on eating. Bonus points for it giving you that sort of hunger-like feeling 2 hours after your meal.
I realize everyone has different dietary needs, so I'm not saying this is for everyone, but it's very, very rare for me to finish a meal at a restaurant in one sitting. I used to, but leaving and feeling stuffed got old.
I've found if I stop early, it turns out it was only my brain that wanted more food. Physically, I've had enough and am satisfied. I just need to give my brain time to catch up to my body.
Additionally, I drink a lot of water with my meals. This helps prevent overeating.
Lastly, it's always great to get two meals (dinner and tomorrow's lunch) from one restaurant dinner.
And in general it's easier to have the snacks simply not be there, than to try to resist eating them. The habit of having random food and snacks lying around the house for 'just in case' is not a good one if you care about your health or weight. Unless of course you are actually required to eat frequently due to medical conditions.
There's a hack that solves "the problem" in general: "non-judgment".
We get so inculcated with comparing, contrasting, thinking about "better", "not as good as", "worse" ... it's THE recipe for all manner of negative psychological states, emotions, etc. There are basic biological drives, of course, but both implicitly and explicitly we are taught minute-by-minute, starting from not long after birth, to JUDGE EVERYTHING. Parents - "good/bad boy / girl", school - grades / social status / toys, work - "star employee / slacker" ... It's a set up for every imaginary "treadmill" that exists - consumer, achievement, etc.
All illusory.
It takes some conscious work / effort, to undo. But, I found, ultimately, that I was able to undo a hell of a lot of that crap in a shorter time than I expected. Several weeks worth of work with Jon Kabat-Zinn's 7 pillars of mindfulness, etc... can make a big difference, in my experience.
Getting out of the habit of having to have "an opinion" / "judgment" about every single F'ing thing that IS ... That just IS, until we have to categorize, compare, pick apart, judge, ... let the moronic inner critic - amalgamated, in part, through years of inculcation via others, intentional and not - dissect every molecule of existence until the minutest shred of simple BEING, JOY, etc. in any MOMENT is reduced to ash ... getting out of that habit is the greatest gift I've ever been given.
I still judge, I still fall into traps / stupidity ... I'm still human - hell, this comment has enough judging in it itself, even more simply implied / denotational ... but, I'm so much further out of the mire of crap our heads tend to get filled up with than so many people. It's both tremendously more comfortable, and yet also saddening to see so many still so trapped - by the same kinds of shitty thinking I was trapped by for years.
Everything you wrote here resonates pretty deeply. And as a child of fundamental religion, these judgements were not just social, but existential.
My path to something better has been Sam Harris’ Waking Up app, as well as exploring the Dzogchen analytical framework for exploring the ways we constantly engage in this labeling/judging was mind bending and eye opening (a guy named James Low does a talk titled “Everything as it is” that unlocked some things in my brain).
I feel the same way about this - it’s a gift. Nearing 40 and experiencing relief from lifelong struggles with painful patterns of thought for the first time. These are ideas worth exploring, and are all solidly grounded in rational thought, which was something I mistakenly thought I’d have to leave behind to explore this kind of contemplative path.
It’s interesting to me to see this comment, because “today” is very much the focus in recovery circles. If you’ve ever been to AA or any of the other 12-step programs you’ve probably heard someone say something akin to “one day at a time”. In general, though, it is important to note that part of what makes an addiction an addiction is the lack of willpower to overcome it. So if you tell an addict “it is a choice” they’ll ultimately agree with you, knowing that in the moment of their failure it very much did not feel like one.
For those of us who have had to make drastic life changes in order to make “making the wrong choice” difficult or impossible, there’s definitely an amount of life planning (and before that, honesty with self and others) that has to happen in order to balance the scale and turn those forks in the road into ones we can look at and say, “Today, I’ll make a good choice.” For some there are ways to reset and never look back, and I’ve seen it happen. One good choice can be the difference. For others, as you mention, there are daily choices, and it continues to take effort to make the right one every single time.
There's the saying that "we are free to do what we want, but not to want what we want". I'd guess that at the moment of a lapse, the drug/alcohol is all an addict wants. Changing that want into something else is the hard part and also depends strongly on the environment.
It's a good saying, but something leaving in exposition. Each addict is different, but frequently the drug/alcohol is not what the addict wants.
Think of the addict in relapse more as saying “yeahhhh gonna let loose and party hard and have a lot of fun and go wild and crazy.” The overindulgence is the point, the feeling of freedom and abandon.
I liked the way Craig Ferguson put it in American on Purpose, he said that if he could drink alcohol “socially” the limited way other people do, it wouldn't be interesting to him in the first place.
This is also why people get addicted to casinos, it's a similar “woooo, party!!” desire. People who are addicted to junk food also have this, they call it a “cheat day,” the idea is not that I slipped myself an extra Oreo, but that I decided to slip myself the extra Oreo and then declared it a cheat day and then ate puddings and cakes and pizza and guzzled soft drinks and “wooo, party day, calories don't count”...
One typically doesn't “change that want,” one buries it. It still keeps coming up as an “I am overwhelmed with the boring tedium of adulthood can't I go back to being a reckless kid and partying all night?” and you say “Look, having fun is why we have playing that guitar in the backyard or lifting or jamming out to music or planning a week off in Colorado, we have to do the less intense adulty fun things that build us up now, because we know what happens when we do the reckless childish fun things that tear down (and have torn us down, over and over and over and over again)... and we have to grow up so that we don't lose everything and die alone in a ditch.” So you bury the want, not allowed to want “woooo party time!!”, because you have hit rock bottom several times now and you know that you don't have an ability to have a healthy relationship with that internal party-fiend, because he will react to the stress of money being tight by wanting to gamble more, will react to the weight gain by having more cheat days, will react to the hangover by looking for a cider in the fridge. Can't give him a foothold in your life again.
There's enjoying things, and being a servant of pleasure.
Plato puts it well in Gorgias; where he makes an analogy of two men tasked with keeping jars filled with wine, honey and milk.
The first man has jars of good quality, and is able to fill them up and they stay full and then he can go on about his life and be happy, the task of keeping them full causes him no grief. The second man has cracks and holes in his jars, so the pleasure always leaks out and he needs to spend every day topping them up in order to avoid misery. He's completely enslaved by the task and it's causing him daily grief to keep them full.
I think the moral of the story is that if you find yourself in that situation, you should repair or replace the jar instead of spending every day in a futile struggle to keep it full.
It's more useful to view resolve, moral continence, self-control as things that you do rather than things you have been granted.
I think you can enjoy some potato chips and some short videos, but I have my doubts about how many you can consume in a row while maintaining enjoyment.
My experience is that the enjoyment one feels with the first few bites quickly transforms from seeking the pleasure of continuing, into avoiding the pain of stopping.
If you could wave a magic wand and give someone a day to do whatever they want to do no one would be choosing chips and TikTok.
I don't think many people really enjoy it. It's just less painful than other things, or they don't have the resources to do what they actually want to do, or their choice requires something that's not possible right now... Chips and TikTok is the fallback, not the first choice.
What’s the issue with "chips and TikTok"? It’s virtually free, requires no new equipement and can be done anywhere. Depending on how your feed is curated, you can learn more things in five minutes on TikTok than the same duration on HN or any other website.
OP's take on this resonated with me deeply. Throughout my life I've held the belief that, "I generally choose the right path." That's helped me in five decades of life to never be overweight, never smoke cigarettes, never do an illicit drug, etc. Your take on this topic does not come across as helpful or beneficial to me:
First, in the moment, be conscious of what the risks are, and if they are worth it. If they aren't, take pride in settling for less at the moment so you can safeguard your future.
I think it's important to forgive ourselves when we don't choose the right path. Shame isn't good for anyone. But to take pride in it? I don't believe that's helpful at all.
Calling those meals "failures" now would be saying that it was a mistake to enjoy that time with my family and friends
This really sounds like a rationalization. You could enjoy a healthful meal with family and friends. But you're likely addicted to sugar, fat and salt like most people are. So you need a bunch of sugar, fat and salt to be satisfied by a meal.
A decade ago I had slightly high triglycerides. I stopped all obvious sugar cold turkey for a year. It was brutal for two weeks - craving soda and all kinds of other sugar. Then an amazing thing happened... I stopped craving sugar. Fruit and other food started to taste amazing! Imagine getting as excited about eating a clementine as you used to get eating chocolate cheesecake.
I reframed the topic in my mind to, "I just don't eat those things." which was successful. Thoughts of, "I won't eat those things for the next two weeks and then I'll do what I want" just exhausts your will power and leads to a roller coaster of weight gain and loss.
I don't really know anything about physiology or nutrition, but when you learn physics you do have to learn about the difference between simple linear systems and complex feedback networks, and then you see the Metabolic Pathways chart[1] and that proves that we are the latter, a complex feedback network.
One lesson about complex systems is that you don't change them by finding something “wrong” and “fixing it”, in the traditional sense. The problem is that there was a feedback loop keeping it that way and whatever you did just enabled that feedback loop to work harder at fighting your change. The weight-loss interpretation of this would be the failure of fad diets, I guess?
What you do instead is that you find a way to pin the output out of its range and then work backwards, or disconnect an input or so. “I need to live a life without sweets,” sounds like it was your disconnected input.
A second lesson about the complex system is that for the one thing to change, everything must change. All of the feedback loops that kept the system in state 1 need to reconfigure and reorganize themselves to accept state 2. Which means there's a period of breakage, one could even call “mourning,” where the system has not yet managed to reconfigure itself and limps along trying to get the new thing going. You just wanted a cleaner house, but in order to get it done it turned out to not require haphazard two hours cleaning sessions, no. Instead you needed to start waking up at 7 AM to have the time to empty the dishwasher before you go to work so that your spouse, who will forget about the dishwasher if it is not left open and inviting, can put the kids’ dishes in it, this causes a chain reaction where the kitchen countertops are not covered with dirty dishes so that becomes the natural room for the kids to draw in when they come home from school, which leads to them choosing to do their own homework, which leads to them having time at the end of the day to clean up, which allows everybody to go to bed early in a clean house... which is the ONLY reason you can, night owl though you are, get up at 7AM to empty the damn dishwasher. Everything had to reorganize to accomplish the goal and that took chaos and difficulty.
Obviously, you cannot be omniscient. The idea is that you have to accept that you made the best decision with the information you had at the time. If that information changes, make new decisions.
Well, this is why "it boils down to" this. You can't control what other people do; you may have influence, sometimes, but never control. You can't blame people for what they do, if you live with the assumption that 'most' people are making the 'best' decisions with the information they have available at the time of making it; where 'best' means something that could be an entire book.
Every decision boils down to one of four types of decisions (philosophy 101):
1. inconsequential and routine (what color shirt to wear)
2. inconsequential and once-in-a-lifetime (what color shirt to wear _today_)
3. consequential and routine (which route to take to work)
4. consequential and once-in-a-lifetime (who to marry)
The thing is, 1 & 2 can be and usually are consequential; it's just that you lack the ability to detect the consequences. Usually. I met my wife, on the beach, with some friends. The decision that led there, I thought, was inconsequential at the time.
But yes, your information will always be imperfect. I have scars all over my body from doing things that should have been fine. I've nearly died and somehow escaped (or been rescued from) the situation too many times to count. You have to live with consequences and not all consequences are knowable in advance; and for that matter, not all consequences are bad.
Genuinely asking, how so? I've had my bouts of depression and burn-out in my life, but even then, I just assumed it was an unforeseen consequence of some action(s) and got treatment.
This is also the boiled down version though, so I'm kinda curious what you see in it and how it could influence the bigger picture.
> Choosing to enjoy life today instead of waiting for tomorrow for that enjoyment isn't a failure, it's a choice. It comes with risk and tradeoffs.
That dichotomy is not always true. There is a percentage of people that can enjoy their youth (travel, parties, ...) and still get a plentiful future. Other people needs to renounce to everything now just to survive to tomorrow. So, not always a choice there.
> Choosing to enjoy life today instead of waiting for tomorrow for that enjoyment isn't a failure, it's a choice. It comes with risk and tradeoffs.
100% this. It's not as black or white as people make it.
That being said, there is some level of diminishing returns for how much enjoyment you can get from something (e.g. eating), and how much of a tradeoff (e.g. gaining weight). You can maximize it (be selective in which foods you really like - and the people you want to be around) and minimize the tradeoffs (eating in a day 2 meals instead of 3). That's if you want to take a sabbatical and maximize the enjoyment out of life. If you want to grind, focus on yourself, etc and push yourself to the limits - you need to be outside that comfort zone. You spend more time putting yourself in uncomfortable situations at the cost of spending less time with friends and family.
Life is all about balance.
Sometimes you take high risks and push yourself further
Sometimes you take low risks and enjoy the benefits from the work you put in
With every high comes lows
All good things come to an end
But you won't get anywhere in life without taking risks
> First, in the moment, be conscious of what the risks are, and if they are worth it.
Is that a happy life? For every decision you take, every thought that crosses your mind, making a concious cost-benefit analysis?
> According to the author that's a failure, but I had a lot of really, really enjoyable meals. I ate the vast majority of them with friends and family. Many of them were either cooked by family, or were special occasions. Calling those meals "failures" now would be saying that it was a mistake to enjoy that time with my family and friends, and it absolutely wasn't.
Perhaps it wasn't the meals that were the failure, but the lack of compensating physical activity? Discussions of body weight issues seem over-emphasize blame of too much on food and diet and neglect sedentary lifestyle and lack of physical activity. In other words, barring serious medical conditions (many of which are treatable once diagnosed properly), you can have it both, enjoy good times with friends that includes eating really tasty food as well as not into health-affecting weight issues.
This rationalization is not meaningfully different than those given by the obese (or drug addicted) to maintain their habits. For instance, "This milkshake sparks joy", or "everything in moderation including moderation" (only, no two people agree on what 'moderate' is).
I believe you had enjoyable meals with friends, but to be honest, are those by themselves happening often enough to gain a problematic amount of weight? What if you would find the habit to balance these events with some counter measure (be it going to gym, eating more fruits and vegetables at the rest of those days or weeks). I think the point of OP still holds, the "failures" are habits. What failure is, is subjective, but if you are mindful of what you do when -- your habits, you know what to label a failure and what not, and when to steer/change an intention. Easier said then done though.
Yup, tradeoffs, all the way down. Sure, you can exercise afterwards, but then you give up something else. It might be de-stressing time in front of the TV, or chat time with friends and family. Or it might make you tired and achy for the rest of the day, lessening the fun there.
It's easy to say "just balance it", but all of it has been attempting to balance things, and some people, including myself, repeatedly chose the side that had risks and consequences later so that they could enjoy the moment.
A lot of enjoyable meals with friends and overweight is not necessaraly correlated.
There are a lot of social gourmets that have normal weight. Usually overweight comes from cheap garbage fastfood, sweet drinks and low physical movement.
Excellent food has often low calories and small portions.
I lost you in the first line. Why is life about taking risk? Like is about eating, playing , having fun, etc. Why emphasize risk? Some silicon valley mantra?
Ever since I quit my first job I've been tinkering with languages and frameworks. And every time I would complete a book or course I'd face the decision of building something on my own.
That building never happens. 1 month later my portfolio is nonexistent, there are no projects, and my blog is a figment of my imagination. And right now I'm in the process of learning yet another framework.
So I've been thinking: This must be something worse than what I imagine. I read about perfectionism, fear of shame and judgment... bingo. I can tell that the root of the problem isn't that I can't work on a personal project, because I do have them. But the moment it's a portfolio project the question isn't "what would help me learn?" but "what would help me demonstrate to my future employer that I deserve a chance?"
This is a behavioral habit, a disastrous one and potentially career-ending or at least progression-ending. And it may have started with me trying my best not meet external expectations or minimize my footprint to avoid being exposed to bullying, trolling, nickname calling, ever since I was a little kid. And that seed didn't happen overnight, it took a lot of daily conditioning to turn a child from risk-taker to risk-avoider.
That's why I'm wary of giving the advice to beginners "just start building projects". It's not that the advice is bad, but there's just too many factors at play and failure to do so is not always about one's intelligence.
Man you just hit me hard with this... Also add one insanely overbearing mother that expects straight As and a perfect child, on top of some bullying and such... Really leads you to just want to curl up and not take risks anymore. I've just been discovering, through the aid of therapy, just how much my mother has affected my whole life up to this point. I love her and she was doing her best. I really believe she was, based on her mother (oof, even more insane lol). Man has it done a number on me in every way you can imagine.
I only mention this because your piece of essentially having the fear to move any personal projects to portfolio projects is very real with me,as well.
Side-note... How old are you? What frameworks? What personal projects?
I'm 40 and just REALLY beginning this journey into coding and as much as I love it it is also insanely overwhelming because of reasons you started and also my terrible ADHD. So hard to stay focused on learning a piece at a time. My brain wants to open all the links, check out all the courses and YouTube videos... And it becomes too much.
FWIW, programming and ADHD tend to go well together once you can get past the basics. Especially when you're in the flow of things, it's just a constant loop of small change -> visible progress -> dopamine hit. Combine that with hyperfocus on the occasional deep bug and it can feel like a superpower.
Don't get me wrong, there are lots of other times where it doesn't work like that, and this assumes you can actually get started, but when you do it can be magical.
Not GP but I share similar experiences as you. Started coding as a teenager, but after I got my first job I did similar things as you for a very long time on and off until only a few years ago.
In part, it's good that you're trying out new things. That part should always be something we do. But the issue is when you don't have developed taste and principles to discriminate between things that just sound interesting and things you actually want to explore.
For me the solution has been to develop a small set of important values by asking fundamental questions. Why do I program? What does emotionally satisfy me (fun/pride/learning)? What is valuable for my users? What are computers for? What makes a good program?
Ask questions like that and you get a list of important things that you focus on.
Whenever I see something new, it first has to get through my value filter.
My reading, learning and tinkering list is still growing slightly faster than it shrinks. But I'm much more content and happy with what I actually end up doing or reading.
A framework that I have found helpful for situations like this:
When you feel this way, that you "want to" do something but it keeps not happening, then there's evidently something inconsistent in your mental state: you seem to think you want to do one thing, but (it would be fair to say) since you're not doing it, maybe you don't 'actually want' to do it. The idea being that 'true wanting' compels actions. So when you fantasize about doing one thing, which you think you want, you're actually in the process of fulfilling a different want about something else (such as: "to feel like you are making progress on demonstrating value").
To disentangle this you have to figure out what you "actually want", resolving the inconsistency, usually by asking yourself: "what do my actual behaviors reveal of my actual desires?" Recognizing the revealed desire seems, empirically, to help move past it, while not recognizing it leaves you/me/whoever in this seemingly infinite loop of feeling incapable of action.
Sometimes just revealing the loop you're in unkinks it immediately and leaves you free to do something new. Sometimes, strangely, it makes you instantly uninterested in the whole topic, and then, in the space left by the now-uninteresting topic, new interests float in --- real interests, which come packaged with 'real' wanting that you can actually act on.
This is a nice little self-interrogation framework—thanks for sharing!
It reminds me of a common refrain/warning among aspiring writers: it's not enough to want to be a writer, you have to actually want to write. Both for a host of psychological reasons and for the simple fact that you'll never be A Writer unless you're putting pen to paper on a regular basis.
I tell people to build a small crud application that you can use to manage some data you have some interest in. I've build a similar non-marketable applications, usually a todo/project management application or something that imports a bunch of stock market data probably 30 times now, I actually use the project itself to learn new languages and frameworks because it hits most of the areas I will have to learn to be productive and I can pickup the language semantics along the way. When you're done you have code that is going to be doing things you will actually encounter in the wild instead of contrived and isolated examples from text books.
My favorite part is once I'm done I feel comfortable enough with reading through repos and some books over how to be more efficient/idiomatic and then going back through my little project and refactoring it.
With all that said I have a graveyard of projects in languages and technology that is probably not used anywhere commercially and the project itself is languishing if it was completed at all - but for example, I have a half working todo app in racket and despite being a junk app in a non-commercial language, I had to learn lisp and it at least subtly has influenced how I approach problems. Same thing with Rust which I actually use quite a bit personally and commercially, but when I originally learned it I was 100% golang professionally and I noticed my golang functions would resemble rust functions if I squinted and I think the complexity in my golang went way down.
I guess my advice is Just Start Building Projects (that you may never even show anyone or post on github, much less go marketing it.) and you will benefit from it massively. If you are able to learn and benefit from it _and_ it becomes popular or a commercial success than great! But who cares, on the internet no one knows you aren't a dog.
That hits close to home. I was cleaning my drive recently and I have a folder of completed projects ( which has few items ) and various random stuff that I briefly found interesting over the course of the years ( and then just gave up as soon as something else caught my attention or got bored.. you know the drill ).
Some of it helped me a little ( that is partially how I learned basics of R ), but I fear that it also held me back as I never really finished any of the more amusing projects and did not experience that feeling of finishing something.
And as you get older, it is harder to expose yourself to that scrutiny.
I would give you different advice than "just start building projects": The language and framework that the first iteration of something is built in does not matter. You already know enough tools to build anything you want. If you want to build stuff, stop learning new tools. Maybe you'll replace the time you've been spending learning new tools with video games or TV shows, but maybe you'll replace it with building stuff, instead.
This is a classic trap that young programmers fall into, to fetishize tools and condition doing useful work on learning a bunch of tools. Just say no!
(This isn't anti-intellectualism - you'll eventually learn a bunch more tools as you go.)
The advice should be, build stuff that you find interesting. I don’t think prospects and motivational words are sufficient to get you to do things, but curiosity - or even better, child-like curiosity- is a far better lever to help you get things done.
My advice is not to focus on a portfolio or a "project". Find things that annoy you in life that code can fix, write that code. Some of these things will become more complex then others. I would advise against anything larger than 3 days of work (as in distinct days spent working on the project ,not total hours) in scale, as you'll just feel bad when you don't finish the latest grandiose dream.
Don't worry about how pretty or impressive the code is. The point is the function. Save everything in a projects folder, no matter how shit.
At some point you'll hit a point where a project hits the right intersection of elegance/function/polish, and then you can throw that on a portfolio page. Then another one, and another one.
The important thing is the end goal. As long as that goal is to impress other people you will be paralyzed by fear of rejection. If the goal is to fix a problem for yourself that's much more achievable, as the only bar you need to meet is "did it fix my problem?".
Random sampling of my own "frustration" projects:
- automatic version control in SQL Server for object/table definitions
- cron script that scrapes + downloads the latest driver from Nvidia from their website, installs it, then deletes the file
- command line tool that formats text in the clipboard various ways (mostly I use this for transforming csv/excel files into SQL lists or table inserts)
- a small utility for printing notes on a receipt thermal printer
- a Lemmy scraper that combines different communities into a single coherent image board (I hated their default media presentation)
A smart person's fallacy is that more learning will yield a better outcome. (Note they've largely been rewarded for learning across their school career because that was something they excelled at). I've come to believe that in fact action should precede learning. That is first take action-- fire, ready/recover, aim (repeat).
We think we can just learn to succeed, but in fact we need to learn in the right direction, which requires to first attempt it and gather feedback of where to learn.
I always seemed to switch languages, frameworks, projects, operating systems...seldom making something.
From an interviewers perspective, it can be nice to see someone with varied experience across an array of tech. But just one or two demonstratable projects can seal the deal.
At this point I'd be happy with three person listing one language/framework and one good project.
I feel the same. For me the learning is the enjoyable part, and building a 1000th TODO app or a mediocre blog does not appeal to me. Although I'd like to have a blog and it would be great if I had some examples of the frameworks I've learnt, it's not something that I'll spend my time on.
> This is a behavioral habit, a disastrous one and potentially career-ending or at least progression-ending.
Or it's just that reality lurks somewhere and that hidden complexity will arise making the effort unsatisfying with roadblock happening too early.
Most people that achieve their pet project scope it into a narrow solution that don't address general problems. If your interest is the general problem, your solution is likely to be hard and complex, and narrowing it make it uninteresting.
Each experience is different, but since I stopped caring about half baked solution to general hard problems (New Web UI Framework ! Implementation automation !) and stopped daydreaming about building a solution, but merely thinking of the problem itself, I stopped plateauing and resumed a steady progress in my relationship with tech.
Creating a project is tough because there are so name variables to contend with: better ideas, “this won’t pan out”, small burnouts, no accountability on time wasted on procrastinating, self doubts, money, opportunity cost analysis making you switch etc.
So you do need to just build once or twice to experience the hardship of it to see if this is for you
I’m continually struck by how brave Andreas is for talking about his addiction problems out in public. In most every interview he leads with it when he could just easily say a vague: “I found myself with a lot of free time”.
Addiction can come with a LOT of shame baggage. To embrace vulnerability over it is quite substantial. Thank you Andreas for being a positive example for the world! Keep up the great work!
It can be a psychological trick you are playing on yourself by just putting it out there in public. Lots of people now know about it so you don't want to let them down by misstepping again.
In a way it's a form of holding yourself accountable.
I'm not sure how rehab works but I guess the first thing you need to do is to admit that you have a problem. And then you need to find ways to prevent yourself from giving in.
I think if more people were vulnerable, the world would be a kinder place. I also wish more CEOs were vulnerable. They are forced to "show strength" and "not complain" especially if they are a billionaire. But it would really show how much their lives are a mixed bag and we all face challenges and try to figure it out.
> They are forced to "show strength" and "not complain"
I wonder about this. Sometimes I think that is the job of a CEO: to put on a good face and keep and maintain “The Plan Is Gonna Work” vibes.
Every CEO I’ve worked under—no matter how compassionate they were on a personal level—has had a policy of absolutely crushing voices of dissent. Maybe not immediately, but within a couple quarters. At least when the dissent was regarding things that the CEO felt were not something they could address on the current roadmap.
I’ve come to appreciate that this attitude may be necessary… that companies (with headcounts in the 50-500 range at least) cannot afford to have some of their people pulling in a different direction than their roadmap. And that people who will do that must be excised.
But your comment makes me wonder… is that the only way? I think maybe a company like Valve lets their employees pull in different directions, and also then just allows them to be starved of resources. Which maybe is effectively the same? Or maybe is an innovation on the standard CEO model?
> I’ve come to appreciate that this attitude may be necessary… that companies (with headcounts in the 50-500 range at least) cannot afford to have some of their people pulling in a different direction than their roadmap. And that people who will do that must be excised.
There's a big difference between differing opinions and outright insubordination though, and one should not mistake one for the other.
IMHO, a good leader should encourage his underlings to express their opinions and giving him feedback and advice, but when the boss has made a decision then that decision should be followed.
A leader who does not allow the former is a weak leader.
But it is difficult sometimes, because being able to give and take criticism in a constructive way is a skill that not everyone has, but it can be learned.
> Every CEO I’ve worked under—no matter how compassionate they were on a personal level—has had a policy of absolutely crushing voices of dissent.
I think there's a really interesting confluence of factors here.
(A) CEOs tend to be psychopaths and/or narcissists -- people who care about others, or who don't have a bottomless need to prove their own self-importance simply don't become CEOs (or don't succeed at it). So of course they crush dissent: it is antithetical to their whole psyche. That comes from their weak, fragile egos, not any real "leadership" traits. That being said ...
(B) Luckily, having a singular, narrow-minded focus is sometimes good for a company. And the times when it's really needed, this narcissistic ego-fragility of the CEO happens to be beneficial ("wartime CEO"), at least for those companies that survive.
(C) Survivorship bias eliminates the cases where the singular, narrow-minded focus driven by the CEO's narcissism actually completely destroys the company. You haven't worked under them because they destroyed the company before you applied. Darwinism does the rest: good companies survive long enough for you to work for them because the narrow-minded idea the narcissistic CEO focused on happened to be the right one at that time. The company looks strong, the CEO looks smart, and then they exit to another CEO job and completely fuck it up, because they've never actually been smart, never been a good leader, never had all the answers -- they just got lucky, and the lucky ones are the ones who are around to be seen and worked for.
(D) When it's "peacetime", not "wartime", the narcissism of CEOs is slowly eating away at the company, corrupting it from the inside out, but it doesn't matter so much, because the company is generally doing well. They can hire and fire whoever they want; their "singular focus" is just ignored by the people who are actually doing the work, and the company plods along, being productive despite the cancer slowly growing inside of it.
We forget the bad CEOs, misattribute random success to good leadership, and ignore their parasitism when the company is doing well. We praise them when they save a struggling company, even if the company is only struggling due to their past ineptitude. And so we perpetuate the cycle of CEOs generally looking like strong, visionary leaders, when they are nothing more than narcissistic parasites who occasionally force a struggling company to randomly do exactly what it needed to survive.
Of course letting your employees pull in different directions is a better strategy for the long-term health of the company. But long-term health of the company is not what CEOs, nor shareholders, nor board members, nor anyone pulling any strings actually cares about. Of course this entire treatment mostly applies to publicly traded companies, or companies with an "exit strategy".
> Valve lets their employees pull in different directions
Valve is not a publicly traded company, and therefore its CEO is actually invested in its long-term health.
Pertaining to habits, this stuck with me from James Clear's Atomic Habits [1]:
> Every action you take is a vote for the type of person you wish to become. No single instance will transform your beliefs, but as the votes build up, so does the evidence of your identity. This is why habits are crucial.
Like obviously there are edge cases, but for the most part consequences aren't a surprise. Eat too much, you get fat. Fail to work out, your body goes to hell. Fail to sleep and your mind goes.
Those are such hyperbolic statements. You're more likely to die of heart disease (at least in the US) from the standard diet and activity levels. Just get off the couch and move. Find something fun to do. It's not hard.
IMHO there's a level of understanding beyond this, which might be called grace. I identify as a lifelong failure, but I no longer place blame on specifics like addiction or body weight or relationship issues. The truth of my existence is that the world is really messed up, but also beautiful despite the dysfunction. And I'm grateful for the adversity which woke me out of the fantasies which distracted me throughout so much of my life and added to the suffering of others.
Loosely that means that every time I took a drink, there was a reason, like maybe I was lonely because I was rejected by someone. Maybe I was fat because I was too broke to take care of myself. Maybe I was mean to my partners because I was projecting my own frustrations.
Now I look at life more like a game. I'm drawn to fringe ideas and projects with an overwhelming likelihood of failure. I've been through the ringer so many times that I'm more of a loosely held together hodgepodge of components than a coherent identity. But I keep showing up. I'm hardened from adversity but I've alchemized that into softness and an infinite well of empathy for others struggling with the human condition. I cheer inside when the meekest among us speak truth to power. I live in service to others now, who are an aspect of myself.
This ideology takes a good idea and pushes it too far. There isn’t a lot of value in seriously considering oneself as a “failure”, and rarely is it actually true.
Perspective to recognize the lack of any such way to measure outcomes so booleanly is probably more valuable than choosing to adopt failure as your default state.
Anecdotally, they really work. It’s not just your food cravings that are mostly stopped in their tracks. But in some miraculous fashion it seems all your “bad” cravings are squashed, while your good ones (side projects, chores, work) stay intact. The only good one I can see slightly down is sex, but as well with that it does also feel like you have a lot more control in that area.
I think we’ll eventually see them as first line prescriptions for all types of addicts. It’s part of the reason I sort of want to throw some money into their stock, but then again it’s hard to know how that all turns out as multiple manufacturers have these drugs and there are many more analogues in the pipelines.
But I find it so interesting, as it really upsets my notion of morality. Yes, resisting your temptations without drugs seems like the obvious better world. But our modern world is simply overflowing with temptation. Fast food, advertisements, sugar in everything, caffeine in everything, drugs everywhere. It was far easier to be ascetic when there just wasn’t that much around. But suddenly on one of these drugs you feel… powerful, in a way. Like you’ve gained a superpower. It’s a really weird experience, and I don’t hate it.
This is fascinating. Do you know if these anti-addiction effects have only been studied with the weight-loss drugs? I'm too skinny (133 lbs) to take them, but am interested in the rest of it.
> I'd say replacing negative habits with positive ones is a better long term strategy.
If the reason for forming the bad habit was that what you're susposed to do is dreadful i.e. not positive, yes, a positive one must be found.
But a positive activity doesn't feel good from the start, that's why you need avoidance. You need to get over the hump. When you're forming a new habit, the natural tendency is to cheat when you're susposed to do the new to-be habit, and do the old thing instead. Instead of working, browsing HN or youtube. Instead of going out for a run, eating cookies. Tell yourself to not do that -- avoid it -- and force yourself to do the new activity until it becomes self-sustaining.
And my experience is that the idea you can just "tell yourself to avoid it" is basically baloney.
Replacement on the other hand... That seems to genuinely work. You just have to pick a replacement that isn't dreadful.
---
My experience: I gained ~90lbs over 12 years. I didn't over eat horribly, but I also didn't exercise much, and my job keeps me stationary.
Instead of trying to not eat (dieting - which I have tried several times over those 12 years, never with long term success) this last time I took a different approach: I picked the easiest, most enjoyable, exercise I could think of and added that.
That exercise turned out to be biking - but not even just biking, because biking is still pretty hard when you're 90lbs overweight and I'd had other exercise attempts fail because they were unpleasant (ex: jogging). E-biking, though... that's pretty easy and nice.
So an e-bike it was. It's totally cheating with a bike: it makes biking feel relaxing, tackles the hills with ease, always gives you a cooling breeze - basically: it's just enjoyable and refreshing.
12.5 months later and I'm down 50 lbs. It turns out that I didn't need some dreadful, healthy, righteous activity to replace the bad ones. I just needed something small and enjoyable I could do as an alternative. Something that wouldn't dig the hole deeper.
I set absolutely zero rules around dieting/eating. I didn't actively avoid anything at all. I just added a small enjoyable activity with very low activation cost.
Essentially: It's hard to avoid a bad (but pleasurable) activity if the alternative is boredom or chores (ex: jogging). It's easy to avoid it by giving yourself a different pleasurable activity to pick.
The original title is "Excellence is a habit, but so is failure" and I think it reflects the contents of the post somewhat better. A short but insightful piece, thank you for posting.
I find Andreas's short non-technical posts to be fairly unenlightening, and am consistently surprised to see them attract so much attention on HN. The information value here is low.
It irritates me a bit that many comments on HN are like a Yelp review of the linked article instead of adding to the discussion of their comments. Maybe you see HN primarily as a community-curated list of links while I see it as a place of discussions?
In this thread, for example, wccrawford gave an interesting perspective on choices in life. While they used the linked article as a reference point, the contents of their comment stand entirely on their own. The information value in the linked article is not that important, the value of the discussion is much more important. To me, that is.
I find the opposite, I find myself saying “I like this format”, because he boiled it down and I can extrapolate and understand just by reflecting on the simple ideas he put out.
They're descriptive, not prescriptive. Like journaling. Like "writing to understand" (oneself). Andreas benefits from the process itself. If other's appreciate it, woot. If not, just move on.
I personally find Andreas's efforts comforting.
Whereas I eschew the majority of our culture's prescriptive self-help BS. Just one sincere, yet still excretable, example is Mark Manson's middle brow rehash of philosophy; I get more from reading the OCs like Zeno and Epicurus.
I dunno that it's surprising. Every time the subject of books comes up here, everyone's like yeah I read non-fiction. And it's never anything interesting, it's all self-helpy fluff with titles like Business Warrior: Brain Mindset.
I enjoy them. It's a paragraph or so of easily digestible information. Not everyone has read something like Atomic Habits so the value is relative. Worst case scenario it acts as an excuse to kick off discussion.
Agreed, I have a history of being a bit of a shopaholic (and being overweight). I've vacillated between periods of being debt-free and periods of indebtedness, I've vacillated between periods of being in relatively good shape and periods of weight gain. None of these circumstances, good or bad, happened overnight, they were the accumulation of many small daily decisions, often over years.
When I was in the peak shape of my life (178 and stacked), it was following being in the worst condition in my life (315), after more than 7 years of constant careful attention to my calorie intake, every other day exercise, and meticulously recording it all so I could keep myself honest. It didn't evaporate overnight either, I was able to maintain a good state of health without being so controlled while I was traveling, but once the pandemic happened and I became sedentary my loss of control over my eating caught up to me over the next 14 months and I gained nearly 40 pounds back prior to getting myself back under control. Now I'm on that journey again back to a healthier weight.
The things we do every day, the small choices we consistently make, these form the habits of our lives. I have good habits and I have bad habits, and it's a consistent struggle for me (and likely everyone) to overcome our bad habits and turn them into good habits. Some of these habits, including my relationship with food, came from my environment as a child, so the work of a lifetime forming them is often difficult to overcome, but it's never impossible.
I am similar wrt to bodyfat fluctuations, but interestingly enough, it did happen to me overnight. During the pandemic I reached my lowest bf% ever, single digits, despite gyms being closed.
It was after things began to open back up in summer/fall '21 that, as I started to get back into the gym, I allowed myself to "eat instinctively" and went from 160-190 in a month. The weight managed to stabilize but still slowly go up, eventually reaching in the 200's. I was hitting the weight racks but struggling to keep my weekly caloric intake in a deficit.
There's a lot more to the story in terms of what I did and learned, but in short, calorie estimates online were often over-prescribing my TDI which was a lot closer to my BMR. I now eat 600 less than my BMR every week and that's about 1.5 lbs/week lost. I'm still hitting the gym and getting 1g protein /lb of lean body mass so I am still managing to put on muscle despite being in a deficit.
But ultimately, it will have taken me 2 years of meticulous, dedicated calorie and macro tracking and diet modulation to undo that single month of damage, and return to my previous bf%. Although I have dealt with the frustration of impatience, I am finally on track and expect to hit my goals in October/November.
The article also reminded me of this Charlie Munger quote:
“It is remarkable how much long-term advantage people
like us have gotten by trying to be consistently not
stupid, instead of trying to be very intelligent.”
Sometimes not doing something stupid is at once easier and harder than trying to get into a good habit.
Indeed. And I think a good term here is "moral failure", which is exactly what the traditional meaning of "sin" is, i.e., doing something you shouldn't, that you know, to some degree, that you shouldn't (culpability is determined by the degree to which you understand you are doing something wrong, since understanding is a prerequisite for consent). And small sins are gateways to still greater sins. Indulge them enough, rationalize your indulgence, and you will slowly habituate indulgence and corrupt yourself and shift your moral Overton window. You become what you repeatedly do.
Sinning, in fact, corrupts the intellect and so it quite literally dulls your mind to reality over time. Why? Because in order to choose against what you know is the good decision, you have to turn your mind away from reality, from the truth. Do this often enough and it becomes a habit of blinding the mind to enable doing what you shouldn't. A blinded mind is degraded, worse at grasping reality, and this makes it even easier to commit still greater evil as it has become worse at determining what is objectively good. A downward spiral.
This is why a habit of self-discipline is important. What we call "self-denial" is really the practice of depriving yourself of what you desire that you know you should not desire inappropriately. The obvious example here is food, but it applies generally. Food, as such, is good. However, if I know that I've eaten enough, but an unruly desire for food surfaces, perhaps for food I know is bad for me, denying or repressing that desire is good. One of the purposes of fasting is actually the disciplining of the appetite for food. Consistent practice of self-denial has the effect of regulating the appetite and strengthening the dominion of reason over it, which develops one's integrity. Over time, that unruly desire, ruled over and purified by reasoned discipline, will better conform to the rational order, i.e., what is objectively good. Note how people who indulge their hunger against their own good only become more voracious eaters. They may even become disordered eaters (e.g., bulimia). Rewarding an inordinate (or disordered) desire only reinforces it.
Now consider how vicious, destructive, and irrational our consumerist culture is. It thrives on mindless and degrading indulgence of any and all desires. This is not the way.
Great observation. I found myself thinking it reflected the famous quote: "“Watch your thoughts, they become words; watch your words, they become actions; watch your actions, they become habits; watch your habits, they become character; watch your character, for it becomes your destiny.” The post author is traversing the actions-habit-character territory.
Yes, when the change is small it is hard to realize is it really 1.01 or 0.99? That demands a lot of constant reflection which causes self-doubt and the easiest path out of this tension is too let it go and just don't care.
Rome wasn't built in a day.
Everyone knows that.
It took hundreds of years for Rome to reach its peak.
But Rome also didn't fall in a day.
It also took time, hundreds of years, for Rome to decay and fall apart.
He goes on to say that each day we're either improving or decaying, either getting a little better or getting a little worse. Those little things add up over time to make a big difference in our lives.
This seems like a specific application of the "inverted thinking/inversion" mentality. I once came across a post on this but can not find it now. I think it was about this article: https://fs.blog/inversion/
I've been watching Andreas' YouTube channel since very early on, and had some short interactions with him in his comment section, and I really believe that every one of the videos where he sits in his car and talks made a difference for me. They taught me a lot - and of course, after tens or hundreds of hours of watching him write code, my C++ looks quite similar to his.
I've never found the motivation or the desire to watch livestream coding. I had assumed that the value gained versus time investment wouldn't pay off. But then it was in Andreas' Igalia chat[1] that he said that showing the failures and getting stuck was important to portray. And now you're saying that you've (presumably) improved and can even identify similar coding patterns due to your investment. I guess I'm now finally convinced it's a good investment.
The biggest source of drama in my life has been other people.
Particularly other people who aren't living right. Past 25 and doesn't have or trying to get a stable job. Carefully evaluate if you want that person in your life.
Misery loves company, the wrong type of people will bring you down and laugh when they do so.
Likewise, people with stable lives can and often will lift you up.
Avoidance of something deprives us of the experience we might gain from it. I don't believe that avoiding everything we might consider "bad" is generally a good practice. However, I am not suggesting that we should try everything we consider as "bad" either.
When people talk about excellence, productivity, and performance, they often draw conclusions based on the final outcomes. However, these conclusions cannot be reached without encountering mistakes along the way.
As the Greeks said, the golden mean is the desirable point.
That title: how is excellence a habit? You can't excel without consistent practice (unless it's a completely new field, possibly), but that doesn't make it a habit. The reverse doesn't hold. While failure may also be lack of habit.
The habit to form is “making wise choices”. We dramatize and complicate this mostly because it is stimulating to do so, which gets reinforced via confirmation bias, cognitive dissonance, etc. We also seem to enjoy moralizing what is “wise” for other people more than keeping our attention where it belongs.
It can be as basic as forming the habit of asking whether you’ll be thankful you did XYZ when you’re at the end of your life. Sometimes that’s going to be a “yes”, even for “unwise” choices, but most people who actually engage with this will find that most of the honest answers are “no”.
It’s not new or revolutionary or particularly insightful or easily productized so it keeps having to be rediscovered.
'Failure' is when the whole system crashes. Andreas is really talking about small setbacks that lead to failure.
And I think its better to embrace Samuel Beckett's mantra: "Try Again. Fail Again. Fail Better.”
It's arguably the core tenet of agile/lean anyway. Measure, learn, improve. If you're taking those single steps backwards and using them to make two steps forward, that's the opposite of failure.
Positive habit forming is incredibly hard to do. Negative habit forming is easy. Being “aware” of this fact is not enough to prevent bad habit forming.
Timely post. I was planning on spending the day researching gamification applied to healthy habits and/or abandoning unhealthy ones.
Anyone has any pointer? Bonus if it's RuneScape-style gamification (exponential XP curve, rewarding yourself every level up, build on the assumption that growth in life is a very long grind like maxing a RS character, made of small steps)
I love listening to Guy Raz's "How I Built This" podcast - a common element in almost every success story is the number of failures it took to reach success. Failure, the ability to keep working / pivot through failures, and being okay with failure seem to be requirements to succeeding.
It's very honest of him to breakdown how he makes his living on SerenityOS - really enjoyed that blog post, helps give people an idea of how a very technically saavy person can make it in today's world as a "nomad".
I wouldn't say those are 2000 failures, because the point is that you learn from them each time. Also building a light bulb that doesn't work is really not an error, that's the whole idea of iteration.
I think it’s going to come out eventually that obesity is not a failure of willpower but a derangement of your metabolism caused by some environmental chemical such as PFAS, glyphosate, etc.
It's not black and white. It's both overeating, tendency to prefer unhealthy foods, and unhealthy processed food are just terrible for you for the reasons you've mentioned.
No one becomes obese eating natural food. But no one resorts to natural food if they use food as a coping mechanism either. Then when your body is out of whack, it is really hard to get back to a healthy metabolism, if not healthy weight. The idea that your gut flora triggers particular food cravings, for example, is still not common knowledge, so we hear dietary and nutritional nonsense spread by misinformed GPs and online articles.
Obesity rates rise sharply circa 1980, when the deregulatory climate became entrenched in the US and UK and there is a proliferation of new chemicals. You might say corn syrup became popular then but cane sugar was around long before obesity became epidemic.
Dietary and lifestyle interventions notoriously don’t work, or rather they work temporarily. There seems to be a set-point for weight and you just won’t eat enough to go over it and have a very hard time to go under it. That set point seems to have gone up.
This is explained directly in the video I linked. Cane sugar is more expensive and less consistent commodity while corn syrup is cheap and consistent. Fat became demonized from bad science and sugar was added to almost everything.
Dietary and lifestyle interventions notoriously don’t work
They absolutely work individually. If someone changes their diet to cut out sugar they lose weight very consistently. Expecting that of people is not a systemic solution however. Watch the video I linked instead of trying to explain everything with looser correlations.
Weird then that Semaglutide is so effective for weight loss when it's mechanism of action is to reduce the amount you eat. Almost like that was the answer all along.
I wouldn't even know where to start deconstructing your argument.
If you remove the sense of taste from someone, I assure you they won't enjoy food and will lose weight very quickly. Almost like that was the answer all along.
Your comment has to be made in bad faith and it's not even worth engaging with.
"No one becomes obese eating natural foods" That is the most hippy BS I have ever heard. Eat 10,000 calories of raw sugarcane a day for 1 year and get back to me on the results.
>If you remove the sense of taste from someone, I assure you they won't enjoy food and will lose weight very quickly. Almost like that was the answer all along.
Yes, reducing the number of calories you eat is how you lose weight.
Show me someone that has become obese eating 10,000 calories of sugar cane for a year. Certainly not for the lack of trying, sugar cane is delicious.
We are not calorimeters, nor furnaces. There is a reason people get obese on 10,000 kcal of junk food and virtually no one ever on 10,000 kcal of sugar cane. Focusing only on the caloric figure is completely missing the point.
Yet the immensely reductive CICO bullshit is perpetuated, because "laws of thermodynamics." Simplify a model too much and you get nonsense.
I don't think anyone is disputing that? The challenge has always been getting people to eat less, not making them realize that is what they need to do.
Oh, but they do, even right here in this very thread!
I admit it's hard losing weight - I've been there. But there are some people who will compound the difficulty of following through by denying the reality of the conservation of mass.
> No, the challenge is recognising that food is not equal, and we have chemical and physical reasons why we overeat some and not others.
Those reasons still add up to Calories in - Calories Out. You need Out to be > than In or you will not lose weight. Eat all the kale and celery you want if you aren't burning more than you eat you won't lose weight.
it's getting them to eat less while not crashing the metabolism so that their "calories out" is constantly shifting downwards too.
and forcing people to exercise just gives them ravenous insatiable hunger. if they're not aware of this they'll reach for the carbs, ruining all their work.
Our character can be thought of as the result of a long process of engraving or scratching. I tend to see it as a solid metal shield full of scratches from long battles. The resulting grooves tend towards virtue or vice. A sustained habit of wise choices makes it easier to do the right thing - even when it is hard - when the time comes and it will come. A marriage, a deathbed, a career. Life has its fair share of hard choices and having grooves in your soul that guide your choices towards the virtuous helps immensely.
That's also useful to know for when you have unimportant tasks to complete. For some people this may comprise the majority of their career and/or life. However, those "unimportant" tasks still scratch your soul and those scratches ultimately matter. Even seemingly mundane things like taking out the garbage can be done with virtue in mind.
I'm fun at parties by the way.