
You don't want quality time, you want garbage time - avoidboringppl
https://avoidboringpeople.substack.com/p/you-dont-want-quality-time-you-want
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awb
It's this just a quote? The rest of the content on the page doesn't seem
related.

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jvagner
There are 3 topics covered in the newsletter. It's number 3, scroll down.

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avoidboringppl
Yep thanks for pointing that out! It's the last of 3 main topics in the post

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Balanceinfinity
I became familiar with the term "quality time" as a contrast to "quantity
time," regarding child rearing. As both parents began working outside of the
home, and less time was spent with the kids, parents tried to ease their guilt
by ramping up the quality time. This really doesn't work, and I agree with Al
Franken: "“Parenting is the hardest job you’ll ever love. First and foremost,
being a good parent means spending lots of time with your children. I
personally hate the phrase ‘quality time.’ Kids don’t want quality time. They
want quantity time, big, stinking, lazy, nonproductive quantity time.”

[https://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/04/upshot/upshot-letter-
our-...](https://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/04/upshot/upshot-letter-our-anti-
parenting-bias.html)

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aidenn0
I think people just have different ideas of what "quality time" is.

The definition I've always used is roughly:

If I'm sitting right next to my kid and ignoring them, that's not QT. If I'm
sitting right next to my kid and interacting with them, that's QT.

Even if I'm doing household chores, if my kid is watching and I answer
questions they have about what I'm doing, that's QT. If I let them help out,
that's QT. If I say "go in the other room and watch TV so I can get this chore
done" that's not QT.

Some people seem to think if it's not a planned-out highly-structured
nutritious, fun and educational activity, it's not QT which is not how I ever
interpreted it.

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com2kid
Some of my best memories of my dad are of us sitting together every week
watching Kevin Sorbo run around as Hercules.

Don't completely dismiss "garbage" time!

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aidenn0
Absolutely. I spent time reading a book next to my dad who was reading a
different book and enjoyed that. It doesn't count under my definition of QT
though.

Watching TV _might_ though, particularly when we talked during the
commercials.

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kstenerud
It's unfortunate that "quality time" has come to have similar meaning to
"Kodak moments". Quality time is just time spent being comfortable. It's when
your soul gets some rest, and you look up at the end of the day and think
"Wow! Night time already!". Whether you spent that time collecting
butterflies, blasting aliens, or looking at clouds, is irrelevant.

It's nice to spend quality time with people you care about, because those
times together are a slow bonding process.

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agumonkey
I feel this whole era has been trying to game the metrics and forgot about the
real thing.

Good times => photos. So more photos => more good times. QED

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floren
I wonder if children being born over the last decade will come to despise
taking photos, because from their first memory they have been constantly
interrupted at play by mom or dad trying to get their attention for a picture.
My niece's every trip to the playground is documented in photo and video; she
looks down from the playset not at her mother's face but at the back of her
mother's iPhone.

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nkrisc
I had the same thought. Sure, I take photos of my kid, but sometimes I might
go weeks without taking a picture of him (Oh my, the horror!). Then people bug
me that I haven't taken any recent photos of him for a while and I can't help
but think, "yeah, because I was too busy having fun to take a picture." And if
I do decide to take one, I usually try to snap it discretely when he's not
looking so I'm not interrupting his play. I also show them to him later and he
likes looking at them, or a video of him going down the slide.

It's the same when I go on trips. I go on vacation then come back and realize
I only took maybe three photos on the first day and that was it.

I think people take photos when they're not having fun so they can look back
later and pretend they were.

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floren
It's funny that the old point-and-shoot film cameras everyone used in the 80s
and 90s were perhaps the best way to actually capture what's going on rather
than turning a photo into a big production.

You'd hold the camera in your right hand and prepare for the picture by
cranking the film with your thumb. When you wanted the picture, you'd quickly
raise it to your eye and take the shot. There was no waiting for focus,
because they were all set to infinity focus. They used simple analog light
sensors to set the exposure the instant you pointed the camera.

With a phone, you might raise it to your face so FaceID will unlock it, then
you look for and open the camera app, then you're using both hands to hold the
phone out in front of you and wait while it focuses and figures out exposure;
if you're using a cheaper phone, this could be several seconds. Then you take
the picture and, again, if you're not using the freshest iPhone it might take
1-2 seconds between tapping the shutter button and actually being sure the
picture has been taken. It's intrusive and slow.

Photos from my childhood often feature me either looking at something else or
having _just_ turned my head to look at the camera because my mom called to
me. Photos today often seem to have a more posed and unnatural feel to them,
because it's difficult to take a good picture stealthily; "hang on, I'm going
to take a picture" is the common refrain.

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jfengel
I know that a good photographer can take a good photograph with anything, and
a bad photographer myself won't be improved by better equipment. Still... I
took exclusively dreadful photos with those cameras.

Part of it was that film was a barrier to practice. Results took days to
produce, and the sum cost of film and processing quickly became higher than
the camera itself. So I'd use up a roll of film, send it off, get depressed at
the results, and quit. I was "in the moment" at those events because a camera
would not have made happy memories.

With practice I might have eventually learned something about composition, but
I don't have fond memories of those cameras. It's only now that I have a
camera with me at all times, and a computer struggling to adjust my shots to
some kind of artistic merit, that I have become the sort of person who takes
photos at all.

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floren
I'd say there was a difference between taking pictures so you had a visual
memory of the time you visited Hoover Dam with Grandma, vs. taking pictures
because you want an artistically meretricious result. I would say almost none
of the photos in our family albums are worth sharing on account of
composition, but the contents are valuable to me because they show my
grandfather (dead 25 years), they show my dad at 25 standing in front of the
horse trailer in which he briefly lived while herding sheep, they show me
playing on the steps of a home I only vaguely remember from the LORAN towers I
could see blinking from my bedroom window.

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nkrisc
In my experience, anyway, you're absolutely correct. The family photos from my
childhood that I've enjoyed the most are almost all either blurry, out of a
focus, or just too dark/light. It's not the quality of the photo that anyone
cares about.

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fxtentacle
For me, the concept of "quality time" only really applies to work. You can be
"in the flow" and get a lot of stuff done in 2 hours that might otherwise take
weeks to build. And in the context of work, there are factors (organized,
bright, distraction-free room) that you can optimize to make it more likely
for you to have a short, but high-quality work session.

But for free time, I don't get it. The whole point of relaxing is that you
stop worrying about getting things done, so there should be nothing left for
you to measure to determine the quality level.

If you can measure the "relaxingness-level" of your free time, you're playing
make believe for other people.

The quality of your instagram photos is probably inversely related to how
relaxing the vacation was. When you're asleep at the beach all the time, there
won't be any photos to show for it.

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jakearmitage
That's a very confusing page layout with not so good news design. I'm sure the
content must be nice, but I couldn't focus at all.

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chadthenderson
This reads like it was written by someone on a coke binge.

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ackshually
Imagine putting a paywall up on your personal blog.

I can't imagine people reliably get invested in your content if you're
blocking them from reading the top three posts.

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avoidboringppl
If you're interested in reading them I can forward any of the paywalled ones
to you :)

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julienreszka
Random never made me happy.

