- Build something. A new workbench for your office. Fix up an old car. Build a pull-up bar in your garage. Use your hands, cut some wood and metal, and treat yourself to a new tool or two. Do this with every project and you will have a nice tool collection before you know it.
- Learn to take pictures on a manual camera. You can do this with a modern automatic camera if it has a manual mode. Learn about ISO, f-stop, and shutter speed and the interplay of those three variables. There's a fantastic multi-part tutorial on Reddit that can help you learn these things. I don't have the link handy but you can Google for it.
- Set a goal of cooking for yourself at least two nights a week and eating leftovers two nights a week. Buy a binder and some clear inserts and start to put together your own book of favorite recipes.
- Take a nightly walk.
- Listen to classical music. This one didn't come to me until my 40s but I finally realized: there's a reason that this music has been popular for 300 years. Opera is great, too. Listen to Mozart's "The Marriage of Figaro". Download the KUSC app and listen to the amazing Metropolitan Opera broadcast every Saturday morning at 10 AM Pacific.
What blows my mind is how much I took my ability to cook for granted. So many people my age (millennial) can barely cook anything. I have friends who eat out every single meal of every single day. People give me weird looks when every single workday I have the same answer to “you wanna go out and get some lunch?” “Nope. I have leftovers!”
I used to eat out almost every meal as well. It wasn't because I didn't know how to cook, and I even like cooking. The economics (monetary and time) just didn't work out for one person. I can't buy in bulk (at least not fresh produce) because there is only one of me, so the cost is about the same as eating out. It also takes me a while to cook, clean etc, which takes more time than just eating out some where or getting takeout.
However, when I'm in a relationship, we tend to cook a lot more. The economics works out better, lower incremental cost of 2 vs 1 at home but double the cost (nearly) eating out. Also with 2 people cooking / cleaning, the time it takes for 1 person reduces quite a bit.
I love cooking and have recently become obsessed with it, but doing it well is extremely time consuming. The best equipment is all meant to be washed by hand (knives, aluminum baking sheets, cast iron and stainless steel skillets, etc.) and cleaning all this easily takes over an hour per meal, never mind the time to actually cook the meal (which, depending on what I’m cooking takes 1-4 hours of active prep time). Also, finding high quality ingredients requires planning and trips to farmers markets. I could save a bunch of time and money by buying from the local grocery store and using cheap dishwasher safe products, but I’ll be dissatisfied with the end result, so I might as well eat out somewhere inexpensive then.
A few tips I learned from a professional chef that changed everything:
— Mise en place (Get everything you need prepped)
— Clean as you cook
Get a bunch of small glass dishes and get all the ingredients you need measured, chopped and placed into those dishes. This will make combining them effortless when cooking.
If you've done prep, you'll have some down time while cooking. As you finish using pans and utensils wash them and put them away. By the time you're done cooking you'll also be almost done cleaning—save the pan that needs to soak a bit in the sink.
It took a short culinary program to really drill those into my head, but they are game changers for sure. Now I get a bit anxious when my “station” isn’t tidy, like I’m disappointing the chef. The other habit drilled out of me was watching food cook...very few things require constant attention and that’s all time that should be spent on prep and cleaning.
I use stainless steel mixing bowls, lighter and cheaper than glass and they stack really well. A large cutting board (24x18) helps you work clean.
I've found that listening to stovetop food sizzle will usually tell you what's going on. I imagine I'm generally hearing the amount of water left in the food?
But curious about any other approaches to "No look" you have!
Xcelerate says >"The best equipment is all meant to be washed by hand (knives, aluminum baking sheets, cast iron and stainless steel skillets"<
Toss the cast iron and stainless steel skillets and buy nonstick skillets, cheap or expensive. When they wear out, replace them.
I've gone through more than two sets of cast iron cookware trying to "season" them properly. "Seasoning cast iron" never works, either consistently or well. It is little more than marketing horseshit the iron cookware industry feeds to foodies who cannot resist the perfect skillet they imagine exists on the far side of the hill.
I ditched my (expensive) non-stick pans two years ago and bought a decent stainless steel pan and a cast iron pan (since then I've also upgraded to SS stockpots and sauce pans).
This was the best thing I've done in the kitchen. My cast iron pan is the best pan I've ever used and is as non-stick as any "non-stick" pan I have used. I cook pancakes, omelets, and fried eggs without any sticking and minimal oil. It is may daily cooker.
My stainless is okay for things like omelets and fried eggs but it takes more skill and understanding of the pan and I still sometimes end up with lots of sticking. But for things like meats, pan sauces, or grilled cheeses I love it.
My advice to any home-cook is to ditch the non-stick pans, buy a cheap 12" cast-iron pan, and a decent SS pan and watch a few videos about using them (e.g., SS pans needs to be heated to the point where the Leidenfrost effect occurs). These two things can transform your cooking and open a world of high-temp searing, pan sauces, and stainless steel tools (I can't stand using plastic spatulas any more, like when I use my teflon coated griddle).
Also, keep Barkeepers Friend on hand for cleaning SS pans (otherwise life is hard)
I completely agree that a proper nonstick pans is easier to clean and sticks less, but cast iron has an incredibly high specific heat (and thermal mass) that makes searing food a breeze, and till recent years consumer grade nonstick pans couldn't even take the heat needed to do so.
Tangential anecdote: For a few years in college I had a single cast iron skillet as my only pot or pan. It's all you need to make tacos, soup, noodles, bread, shepherds pie, or a host of other things. Being deep enough to hold a few servings of food for a couple people and being able to go in the oven go a long ways toward its versatility.
The main problem with restaurants is the shitty vegetable oils they use. It's horrible for you. Unless they're a REALLY high end restaurant, they're using junk industrial seed oils for all of their cooking. That stuff is what causes obesity and heart disease. At home you can cook with butter, olive oil, etc. But I guarantee, most restaurants do not cook with high quality fats.
Agree 100%, the #1 reason I should cook at home more where I always use butter, coconut oil etc. Either need to do big cook ups of extra tasty food and pack lots of meals, or find more real simple meals to whip up quickly.
A restaurant benefits from the economy of scale --- preparing food for a lot of people amortizes the effort spent on upkeep and $ on equipment. Also there's a team, vs. just yourself when you cook yourself, and specialization increases efficiency too. As for ingredients, well, YMMV; personally I frequent quite a few 'somewhere inexpensive' restaurants that minimally process quality ingredients.
Yeah, besides chain restaurants (which probably use a bunch of prepackaged, microwaved stuff), most places stock their kitchen with pretty fresh ingredients. Probably from a big restaurant retailer like Sysco or Restaurant Depot, but I doubt it's worse than what you can get at a grocery store.
Cooking for myself became easier when I started using rice/quinoa/beans + meat with vegetables. The first part is a single pot, and can usually be made in large enough quantity to last most of the week (via reheating or reuse, like old rice into fried rice). The second part can also be done in a single pot. And I have found that vegetables last far enough into the week that usually one trip covers me. To handle running out, make stews and other freezable things for the end of the week (or to mix things up earlier in the week) and store in single-serving portions.
I had periods of doing something similar too. Make a pot of stew / curry / jambalaya with rice, eat with some salad.
Advantage of stew / curry is they can be frozen and later thawed and reheated. Over time though it got really monotonous for me. I like good food, and importantly variety.
Feels like there is some opportunity here. A way to scale home cooking for a bunch of individuals. Like if a few people in close proximity, say in the same apartment complex, rotated responsibilities for cooking. You can get bulk savings, time savings and variety.
The real thing would be to have a freezer. Cook enough for now and freeze a cache for later. Do this quick enough and you’ll be able to stock up multiple recipes in the freezer with omit needing to cook once a week (for me, preferably). My trouble is my apartment won’t allow a freezer.
Not everything is freezer friendly though. Many seafood tastes pretty bad after being frozen and reheated. Ditto for anything that is supposed to be crispy / crunchy etc or any texture that’s not soft.
Once you know how to cook, you don't really need the training wheels any more, and the cost of their overhead is just that: extra cost.
I have a hard time imagining them beating grocery stores / delivery long-term.
Maybe if they get enough customers to get economies of scale so large they can offer meals cheaper than grocery stores, despite their extra overhead (meal planning, recipe development, and software maintenance come to mind immediately).
I could tell this "mail order meal kit" industry was doomed when local groceries tried to hop on to the trend (selling the boxes in their stores, with very little overhead: no need to ship an insulated box across the country), and it didn't take off.
Yes but then you loose the bulk discounts. Getting 2 days (for one person) worth of veggies, meat etc isn't much cheaper than eating out. Plus the time spent doing the grocery shopping 3 times a week, with the time to cook the individual portion, then cleaning up for me just wasn't worth it. Individual preference obviously, but just didn't make sense for me most of the time.
You can definitely argue on the time aspect, it is definitely much longer, but if you actually start adding tax and tip and really look at transactions, there's no way that eating out is anywhere close than food cost.
> I have friends who eat out every single meal of every single day.
I have friends who do too but it's not because they don't know how to cook, it's because they don't like to and don't wanna bother and can afford the luxury of having someone else to do it for them.
I have a suspicion this kind of living, in part, explains why so many people are miserable. I feel like removing every inconvenient thing from your life, and "having someone else do it for you" must make your ability to handle discomfort atrophy to the point where the tiniest unpleasantness feels like a catastrophe. Like muscles, your brain, your immune system, etc., we need a little discomfort / struggle once in a while to grow. Systematically removing all discomfort from our lives seems both expensive and self-destructive.
Or freeing up time spent on minor inconveniences (buying ingredients, cooking, cleaning) gives me more opportunity to deal with more major inconveniences and challenges, or anything else I want to do.
I used to cook but stopped years ago. I like having a huge variety of food options on-demand. I like being able to order delivery, do something fun and/or productive while waiting for the food, and then continue as soon as I finish eating. Or I can walk to a restaurant and get some exercise in before and after eating.
I have a small kitchen and a short attention span. I could stockpile it with dozens of fresh ingredients every day and cook from 7 different cuisines every day of the week, but it's much easier if I don't have to do that. Time is the most valuable resource in the universe, and I don't get much enjoyment from cooking, so having the privilege to eat out for every meal has made me a lot happier on average.
I don't buy the argument that removing those sorts of obstacles and inconveniences makes you depressed. Maybe in cases where physical activity is greatly reduced, but that's just a correlation and not a given. If you're self-sustaining and not mooching off of others, I think you should do whatever makes you happy, and if that includes never cooking, cleaning, or driving again, odds are you'll be happier and better-off for it. If you enjoy cooking, go for it, but if you don't and don't have to, why do something that doesn't make you happy and erases a not-insignificant proportion of your entire existence? Life has more than enough hardships and inconveniences to throw at you in other ways.
I agree. Before my burnout I used to order food every day of the week, eating while coding, etc. Taking the time to cook a simple meal is a piece of mindfulness. It helped a lot in my burnout recovery. I can highly recommend the YouTube videos of Gennaro Contaldo. Quick, easy and healthy meals. Few but high-quality ingredients is key. Parmigiano Reggiano saved my life.
I agree with your general sentiment. However, in my anecdotal sampling of people who frequently cook vs frequently eat out, tolerance for discomfort is greater in those that frequently eat out. Especially in relation to food, where those who frequently cook almost can't tolerate food cooked by others. Further on the food front, people who cook seem to be more heavily affected by fasting, or less willing to tolerate it. (For my sampling, eating food supplement such as huel or soylent goes under the frequently eat out category)
With respect to the ancestral comment about getting confused looks when refusing to eat with someone, they likely aren't confused because you would eat food you cooked, they are confused because you don't want to spend time with them. Personally, eating out for lunch with my labmates, coworkers, friends, family, etc. is the highlight of my day.
>Especially in relation to food, where those who frequently cook almost can't tolerate food cooked by others.
OMG, this was definitely SO true of my grandma when she was alive. She would frequently go gambling and the casino gave her free food and she wouldn't eat it. She'd claim she didn't like it, all of it, couldn't stomach it, not even a bite. So she'd pack a lunch.
It kinda bothered me because as far as I'm concerned if food is free as long as it's not rotten/unsanitary or meat (I'm a vegetarian) and I'm hungry, I'll happily eat it, even if it doesn't taste good.
Food biz is a low margins cut throat affair, quality is not something that is easy to get.
"Just fine" is very low bar, my mom is an excellent chef, to get the same tastiness and attention to detail you have to pay quite a lot of money. Even eating her sandwiches on the go can be better than a high end fast food stall.
> where those who frequently cook almost can't tolerate food cooked by others.
I suspect this is because people have a small repertoire of food which is largely designed specifically for their palette. I know that I have a very strong preference for the way I cook foods. But I also can't handle certain foods, notably olives, mushrooms, and raw tomatoes.
> Further on the food front, people who cook seem to be more heavily affected by fasting, or less willing to tolerate it.
This has not been my experience, but N=1 because I'm the only person I know who regularly fasts. I'm fine cooking for others while fasting too.
You just described pretty much every day of my life for the past 8 years.
I think there's nothing wrong with this. (Though of course I'm biased.) The intermittent fasting seems to benefit my concentration and energy, even if the fasting happens to be unintentional and due to distraction or laziness. The only externality is if you end up eating a lot right before sleeping, which tends to impact my sleep and digestion. As long as you avoid that and are getting enough calories and nutrition, I don't see the issue.
Yes, there are reasons people cook. My point was more to provide a defense on specific issues related to not cooking, particularly the idea that it makes one weak willed.
I would assert that most people who eat out regularly have spent some time amount of cooking for themselves (once again anecdotal) and are not just ignorant of the concept of cooking. Their cost calculus weights time, socializing, and mental load greater than their refined taste preferences and the cost saving. I really doubt anyone who is over the age of 20 hasn't cooked a cycle of meals for themselves.
We are becoming one trick ponies, only defined by the work that we do. There is something about cooking, doing things with your hands that is fundamental to the human experience. I cook, but I also like to order in, sometimes I just microwave stuff. It depends on your mood.
"A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects."
This, so much. Saying this in earnest, I've stopped tying my identity with my work and it feels liberating. I'm not bothered by people who think I "can do so much more". May be but I'm happier.
I have thought about this a lot while cooking, and I also think it comes down to the fact that cooking is both very creative but also very destructive (fire, oil, cutting, smashing, boiling, melting! such fun).
It satisfies those two core urges we all have to some degree.
> There is something about cooking, doing things with your hands that is fundamental to the human experience.
I agree that doing more has plenty of avantage, but is there something specifically about cooking?
Have you ever sew piece of clothes that you regularly wear? Most people never did... yet for something that will be used for hundreds of hours, we pay 20$+ for it instead of taking a few hours to do it. Why are we arguing about cooking ourself but not sewing our own clothes?
Cooking our own food is simply a tradition that stayed with us, nothing else. It doesn't make more sense to do it ourself, than making our own clothes.
I mean sustenance and cooking is one of the fundamental activities required to continue living. Defintely ranks higher than any other skill i.e. sewing etc. Although, still quite important to do that as well.
I am also skeptical of "optimizing" every part of our lives. Cell phones allow us to do so many things more efficiently than in the past. But what are people actually doing with that freed up time?
I had to wait in line at a bank a few months ago (how quaint). It made me realise how little 'off' time we have compared to my parents' generation. It was peaceful.
Sure, websites and phones save us so much time but there's always another thing to do. If we're not doing something we are wasting time aren't we? The opportunity cost gets higher every time technology becomes more efficient. Some of us aren't even safe from the constant feed in the toilet.
I believe that your comment is spot-on. As one part of the population goes further and further towards living in a world where we get everything we need from a smartphone, another part of the population has figured out that this is the road to misery and is running quickly in the other direction, embracing stoicism, cold showers, and Crossfit workouts.
A podcast I listen to calls this "ordinary misery" and stresses the need to bring as much of it into our lives as we can stand.
Sounds like you're projecting the habits of your personal circle onto the masses: most people are nowhere remotely near the point of removing every inconvenience from their lives. I don't know a lot of miserable rich people either.
Yeah, seems very weird to judge someone so harshly for simply not wanting to cook and then go on to accuse them of being miserable. I mean, does someone who's spouse does the shopping and cooking get the same judgement? Absolutely not! Neither do people who hire a landscaper instead of doing their own yardwork. Nor do people who drive a mile to the store instead of walking or biking there. Nor do couples who have multiple cars when one of them doesn't work (or they both work in the same direction)
Anyways, these people I'm talking about upthread still go to work everyday, do their own laundry, clean their houses, scrub their toilets, do their yardwork, do their taxes, work out regularly, run errands, and probably hundreds of other things that cause minor inconvenience. It's not like they are doing nothing but sitting on the couch poking at their phones.
It's not my kinda thing, personally. Mostly because food in general just isn't at all important to me.
To me it's just ascribing all these benefits to your little hobby horse that other people surely lack since they don't share your interests, even going so far as to hint that it's evidence of some sort of decline in society. I've seen HNers say the same thing about people who don't care how computers work to people who can't take a walk without headphones on.
The atrophy of personal cooking in the United States is a broad and pretty well documented phenomenon: "The percentage of daily energy consumed from home food sources and time spent in food preparation decreased significantly for all socioeconomic groups between 1965–1966 and 2007–2008" [1]
It is not about discomfort..I don’t want to waste my time on things that take up a lot of my time for very little return. Hired help for cooking, cleaning, child care, outdoor and home maintainance is pretty common. If I had spare change, I would even hire someone to drive me around. My time is important.
If I can make double or triple what a maid service charges per hour, it makes no sense to do the lower wage jobs by myself. It’s the same thing with hiring delivery services. Take amazon prime for example..When you can get caught Bay Area traffic for 40-60 mts at a time, it makes no sense to do a milk and bread run. I spend less, waste nothing, save time and eat better because I know exactly what to order and how much.
It reminds me of my childhood back in India when the corner store would deliver provisions and vegetables every weekend even without us ordering because they knew our eating habits. Same with milk man, vegetable vendor, flower girl and even the plumber/electrician who came once in 3 months for a check. There was no contract, no insurance and no order forms. It was small communities making sure there were jobs and income for all within small neighborhoods. They operated as clusters even with one billion people. Compared to that, it’s pure chaos here wrt domestic time management. I really appreciate all the services available these days. I have been american for a few decades and it wasn’t like so earlier.
How do you measure return? Not doubting your approach - just curious how you measure the return of various unrelated tasks (e.g. cooking vs. spending that time working)
Example: I grew up in a large joint family. In the family kitchen, everyone had a chore. Often around 20-40 mts time investment each benefited 12 people’s meals. Cooking for myself or even two people is at least one hour. My time is better spent doing other things. I would rather hire a cook.
Otoh, it’s also a timesaver and money saver if we could have a hired a cook to feed 12 people, but the family had seniors, kids, teens and working adults and stay at home moms. It was also a way for our grandmother to teach us family recipes and chores. That was invaluable. We also learnt time management, budgeting and cooking informally. Those are life lessons. Priceless. Now this..As an adult in a nuclear family, it’s a drain on my time. And time is money too. Ditto with driving.
Example: it costs $6.99 for A2 milk from Whole Foods delivered free. $5 tip for $40 worth of deliveries. The cheapest A2 milk in a store is 9.99/three cartons at Costco. That’s one hour shopping+driving plus gas. And I can’t buy in small quantities. I can’t manage groceries on a week to week basis. Net net, the seemingly more expensive option is the cheapest one.
Not including the carbon footprint benefit. One person delivering to ten homes on a route is better than 10 people driving to different stores to pick up milk. Time. The arrow of time goes in only one direction. Can’t reverse time and hence it has become more valuable. Take communal time and communal value for money too.
If I were a mom dropping off my kids at two different schools, that time shopping and driving for milk runs is better spent as quality time with my kids. Even if it’s pure comfort factor. Kicking back and watching a movie is totally worth the money. It’s hedonism at a very small price. Discomfort is not a virtue nor is it a teachable moment.
There is a quality I’d like to call ‘slack’. It’s the stress adjustment factor. If your inner space is taut and always stretched end to end, it would snap. Makes you inflexible. Frayed. No ‘give’ to personality. That has a huge impact..esp with relationships even if it’s with yourself. Slack makes it better. Let’s you live longer and better without snapping. Avoiding discomfort is a survival skill.
Having said that, discomfort is essential to children. It is an experience and a teachable skill. Interestingly, I have been observing that we pad our younger generation’s life and make them soft by catering to their every need while parents fray and become brittle. When the kids grow up, they are never going to understand ‘discomfort’ and when it becomes unavoidable (as it goes in life) and unable to adjust, they are going to break down.
Adults need to embrace slack and pass on discomfort to the next generation. They have rightly been dubbed entitled. And we are no longer children and our time in discomfort training camp is over.
Cooking plus cleaning is usually a 2 hour experience. So you really need to enjoy cooking to do it or if you have no choice. Yes I see most cookers here omit cleaning which is part of the deal
But one day I was watching Gordon Ramsey work with a home cook and the home cook was trying to keep up with Ramsey.
It was amazing because Ramsey kept his whole cooking area so clean and organized, and the home cook's area looked like a tornado passed through. At that point I had an epiphany and started trying to keep organized like Ramsey.
Pretty quickly I became very efficient and clean in the kitchen. This is a skill that takes practice and experience and is as integral to cooking as the actual cooking.
Now I think about the order I do things, the order I use my tools, tool placement, tool cleanup, and surface cleanup as I cook. The result is that very rarely do I have more than a single pan (or two) to wash after cooking, and the kitchen is usually cleaner when the meal is done than when I started.
I put this to the test, last Thanksgiving when I cooked a large meal for 5 people over the course of several hours and when I was done I did not have a single dirty dish (other than those being used for serving/eating) and my dishwasher was empty. It felt good because just a year prior I would have had a destroyed kitchen with a sink full of pots and pans and dirty counters.
I call it "kitchen craft" (like field craft) and if you work to practice it, it gets better every time you cook. And it makes cooking so much easier. For instance, making something like tortillas from scratch used to be a huge endeavor because I'd have such a big mess to cleanup afterword. It seemed daunting. Now I will make tortillas on a whim because I wan't a breakfast burrito and my kitchen will be clean before the pan is even hot enough to cook the tortillas.
Theres two approaches to solving this. If there is more than one of you, or you have kids, then the person who cooks doesn't clean. The other (more sensible approach) is once you enter the kitchen, you don't leave it until the meal is done. If a meal takes 30 minutes from prep to plate, chances are a lot of that time is waiting. Cleaning during that time is how you minimise that cost. I cook every other night (and we have leftovers in between) and we have food on the table, with everything but serving dishes within an hour from when I get home most evenings.
I find it pretty hard to get cooking down to 30 minutes of actual clock time spent working, not counting cleanup (I do a decent job of cleaning as I go anyway). Most recipes with short nominal "hands-on time" achieve it by not accounting for the prep to have all the ingredients ready, as specified in the ingredients list (dicing vegetables, grinding & mixing spices, cutting up meat, that sort of thing) and usually the shorter the nominal time the more important it is to have all that stuff ready from the start, as there's little slack to do that as you're cooking.
Yeah true but a lot of time it ain’t happening, kids too young, wife too tired, or you cooking for yourself etc. So there is always a situational thing going on unless you have a military style home rules. The best is still to enjoy it. Even when cleaning I find a way infuse joy, like having a system and always find ways to improve speed, then marvel how fast and good it was done
My struggle is that I look at it as a time/cost relationship. I'd rather use my time more wisely because the cost of me maintaining a pantry, cooking, and cleaning for one outweighs the cost of getting takeout. It's probably an excuse more than anything but my work schedule can be irregular and makes it more difficult to plan.
I don't understand it, but I can eat the same thing at home for breakfast every day of every week for years and not get bored of it. If I ate at the same restaurant every morning, I'd be sick of it before the end of the week.
Who says you would have to eat at the same restaurant? When I was always eating out I was going to multiple restaurants. I avoided going to the same place too often so I wouldn't get bored with it.
Yes, but if we are talking strictly numbers, we have to consider opportunity cost. I do love cooking, but I can make way more than $10 in 1 or 2 hours.
I love cooking sometimes, but then again, other-times I would rather spend my time working on a client project. When you add up the time spent:
1. planning meals (may be minimal if you can ad-hoc quickly)
2. walking/driving to the grocery store
3. cooking
4. cleaning
It can easily be more expensive for an individual person (or even a couple) to cook than it is to eat out. (I think this makes intuitive sense too, since there are economies of scale and efficiencies with how restaurants are run.) If you love cooking, then you are doing it for fun---thats great! But I think for people who don't like cooking, it can be rational to eat out for most meals.
Many people are not paid at an hourly rate, so this analysis may not make sense for them.
(Also, where I live, there are plenty of healthy and cheap places to eat out at.)
If you care about it, it's easy to save money by cooking yourself with this one crazy trick: leftovers. It takes very little extra effort to make a much larger batch of whatever you're cooking. It's pretty simple to cook ~10 servings of a solid meal that costs ~$0.25 (e.g., Chana Masala w/ brown rice) each with about ~2 hours of time all in with grocery shopping + cooking + cleaning. Sure, if you're making $200+/hour and would do none of these things, it might be slightly cheaper to get delivery. But... I suspect that scenario is very uncommon.
Sure, but now you're eating the same thing for a week. I lived that way in college, it was great for saving money. Now i can afford to do a combination of delivery and blueapron style box'o'ingredients and enjoy the increased variety with less mental overhead (buying, prepping, and storing multiple servings for one has its own issues).
The trade off here is that now you're eating the same meal for 10 meals straight. Most people would rather not do that if they could afford not to.
It doesn't particularly bother me to eat the same thing everyday, but some people absolutely hate it. I am good friends with someone who absolutely refuses to eat leftovers, ever.
I think this is why the usual advice is usually 'learn a few dishes you like', not 'cook something new every day'. Once you have a few recipes nailed, you don't need to spend time planning etc, and you can work out a pattern whereby you know exactly what to buy each time you go to the store (which you'd be doing anyway) without needing to think. And for washing/cleaning up, there are dishwashers.
It's not about affording it dude, I got a cook who comes and cooks for me, have a meal delivery service as well, but I also like to cook.Period. Nothing to do with luxury BS.
Funny thing about those people is they constantly complain about how expensive everything is, yet they spend frivolous amounts of money on what's probably the highest marked up item: food. Meal prep for a week for ~$75 and you're set. It would cost probably 4 times that (at least, depending on where you eat) to eat out, not to mention you don't know how it was prepared, and it's probably wildly unhealthy compared to if you just cooked it at home.
Take 2-3 hours on Sundays and cook some food. It's not hard.
Totally agree. It's so easy to overthink cooking. Take off the exec-chef-in-restaurant apron and focus on the simple stuff:
- Add salt/pepper/spices by hand if you can. Shakers/larger-volume canisters lead to over-application, but it's so easy to grab a little bit of salt, apply, taste, and do it over again until you hit the right mark
- Learn how to cook in a single pot - stews/soups/etc. Saves on cleaning, and broths packed full of nutrients
- Use a crock-pot/slow-cooker. Dead simple, very low risk, produces significant quantities of food
- Learn about portion sizing. So much of over or under cooking is applying the same technique and timing to two different quantities of food. 16 oz of steak cooks differently than 8, same for veggies. Buying the right portions consistently solves so many problems
- Given the point above, learn about an oven -- convection vs. radiant heat. Convection cooking is fast, easy, and awesome.
- Learn how to store stuff properly. You'll spend a fortune if you regularly trap your veggies in air-tight containers. Many of them don't need and are worse-off in those containers. Learn what stuff should be near or away from other vegetables. Good example: if you put your avocados and tomatoes next to your cucumbers, kiss the latter good-bye -- they'll go bad way faster due to the gas emitted by the two others
- Finally, it goes without saying -- not everyone likes what you do, so it's ok if your most exquisite dish doesn't go over perfectly with everyone.
Funny, I was just thinking how helpful these tips are compared to a lot of the advice on cooking which is repetitive.
Was not aware of the differences in veggie storage.
You do have a lot more seasoning control not in a shaker and that's how it is done in a professor kitchen.
Thanks!
A lot of this stuff can get pretty nuanced especially seasoning, and to me that makes or breaks any dish even if you're just using salt and pepper. I usually just go with what's recommended for a particular recipe... After trying a recipe a few times, I MIGHT tweak the seasoning based my or the wife's preferences. When I'm not sure what seasonings to use outside of salt/pepper, I usually just use seasoned salt.
And lentils with bread -most people look down on them for some reason, unless it's a side of some sort, but I find them just beautiful as proper dinner!
I'd love to cook and eat more lentils. They taste pretty good to me, are cheap and fairly easy to cook. My problem is, they tend (for me at least) produce a lot of undesired gas.
I have found two things improve this: the first is ensuring they are well cooked to the point of full softness. The second is freezing and rethawing seems to eliminate a lot of this issue. I've no idea why, chemically that works, but it does.
Sorry it just occurred to me that I was using a more specific word to refer to the family of edibles that I meant, the correct one would be "legumes" -I'd never leave things like beans or chickpeas out on purpose!
People with glucose issues will probably want to avoid the bread and go for something like brown rice (a slower carb) or a veg, but it's a good suggestions nonetheless!
It depends what you eat. Most of my home cooked meals are just seasoned vegetables with the occasional chicken on the side, or pasta. They don't have to be bottom of the barrel ingredients, just a higher ratio of vegetables to meats.
One of the reasons people get so flustered over food is that they don't organize correctly and end up getting frustrated over the lack of ability to follow recipes easily.
Restaurant chefs have known about 'mise en place' for years. Cutting and measuring most of your ingredients before cooking makes cooking simple and easy. Yeah, there are more dishes to wash, but it makes up for the eventual headaches.
I guess I understand how many people dislike cooking, I guess. For me, it's a very creative, relaxing, rewarding, (and necessary) process in my life. For me, it's like coding, but with ingredients. Take a bunch of relatively trivial components, and combine them creatively into something complex, useful, even beautiful--inspiring. You generally follow "industry best practices", but there's plenty of room for interpretation or establishing your own patterns.
It’s like coding but with none of the frustrations. You can’t get stuck midway because you have an incompatible version of carrots. All you need is ingredients and a good repertoire of recipes to draw from.
Huh, I feel the exact opposite- it's like coding with a bunch of extra frustrations like shopping and cleaning, and the possibility of messing up in an irreversible way (burning something, for example).
Software production involves planning, gathering requirements, estimating, testing, refactoring, evaluating acceptance criteria.... not just writing code. Personally, yes, the coding is one of the more fun parts. The others are like cleaning dishes, which I hate to do above all else. But I love to cook (and I love a clean kitchen) so I put up with the rest.
But I hear you on the burning. I've burnt plenty of things in my time. I think any cook worth their salt has. Story time: an executive chef I once worked for had a keychain that looked like a pewter ingot. She said one evening as they were finishing their shift, they thought they could leave a 30 gallon pot over very low heat to make a reduction over night. When they arrived in the morning, the pot had mostly melted and the stove was on fire. Her keychain was part of the melted pot, her reminder to never do that again. Live and learn (and hopefully don't burn the house down)!
That's all part of the fun of learning to cook. I've burned so many things over the years it's almost like a game. I've made hundreds of ommlettes for breakfast and burned at least 30. Each time it was a learning experience, and it taught me to pay attention to what I'm doing and not get sidetracked trying to pack for the day or take garbage out or clean the refrigerator.
Cleaning isn't so bad if you handle it immediately and treat it as a meditative experience. I just think about whatever while washing dishes or throw on a relaxing podcast occasionally.
I cook or eat left overs 6 nights a week at this point. Beyond saving a massive amount of money it's shocking how much better the steak I make myself is than one I can get out. Most cities have kitchen equipment stores (not just Bed Bath) that actually have cooking courses you can take.
Saving massive amount of money? Judging just from demographic that uses hackernews (mostly tech workers), I think it's actually cheaper to eat out if you measure price of your time by how much money would you earn in that time while working compared to shopping for the ingredients, cooking and doing dishes.
That's an optimization that looks good in theory but is poor in practice. Evidence has proven that we consume more calories at restaurants than we do when we cook at home. There's a lot more to get out of cooking at home than nutrition, though. As others have alluded to, the experience of cooking and working with your hands is excellent (and cheap) therapy.
As for economy, you will find it once you've built up a good stock of spices and non-perishables and begin to optimize things by--for example--making chicken stock from the bones of that bird you roasted for dinner, or freezing the extra tomato paste from the can that you used 1/3 of.
This is coming from a guy who spent the first 15 years of his tech career eating out every single meal before meeting a girl, getting married, and then eating 6 of 7 weekly dinners at home.
My doctor tells me the secret to long life includes not eating out too often. Which is short for restaurants tend to cook in ways you wouldn't at home: deep fried food is much more common. They tend to use more salt than I would. Sugar is added to things that don't need it. Cheap oils instead of the better quality ones...
I'm a salaried employee, I don't get paid extra if I stay an hour later and get a takeaway on my way home, and I still have to pay for the takeaway. I get the idea, but you can't work 24/7
I've been there, done that. It's not worth the extra $20-30k/year to do nothing but code. Even if I had clients to fill 80 hours a week I would still only work 40. Life is too short to do nothing but earn money.
If I go to H-E-B and buy a rib eye steak for $15.99 a pound and cook it. I'm out less than $15.99, because I don't want a pound of steak. If I go to a mid range steak restaurant I'm going to get a rib-eye for $29.99 for 12 oz of steak. And it's going to be of lower grade and less seasoned. Why would I do that?
Also, I'm not working all the time. Cooking is a way of relaxing.
Even if I charge $250/hour I'll still save both money and time when doing grocery shopping and meal prepping every sunday night. It's not like I'd been working on a sunday night anyway so I can't count those 5-6 hours/month spent on grocery shopping and cooking as a "loss of income".
I've been trying to learn to cook off and on for years now and I get so discouraged all the time because I'm still either overcooking or undercooking something, still not getting the flavors right, not using the right amount of oil despite the recipe's prescription. I can't be alone in feeling that way.
It took me years of cooking every day to get to a level where I'm confident in my cooking skills. It's a lot of trial and error. Look up a recipe that looks good, and try to follow it exactly. There's no eyeballing when you are learning. There's a reason those ingredients are added in that particular order and quantity.
I've come to a point where I can whip up a recipe and improvise some, but that's after years of following recipes, experimenting and eating a fair share of disappointing meals.
Learn the fundamentals. Binging With Babish on YouTube is an excellent show to learn with its Basics With Babish series.
Want to re-emphasize, cooking is a skill that's learned by repetition.
There are methods to help. Over cooking vs undercooking is because of guesswork. Remove that by buying an Instant Read thermometer. Over and under season? Taste as you go, add more seasoning if it needs it.
Also, make sure you find a consistently good recipe. Allrecipes is a crapshoot even though it's consistently a top Google search. Another poster mentioned Kenji Lopez who tests the crap out of his recipes. I'd also recommend Alton Brown having solid but accessible recipes. America's Test Kitchen/Cook's Illustrated and Bon Apetit for when you're getting more advanced. More beginner friendly stuff like Budget Bytes tends to be less flavorful, but typically simple enough and cheap enough you don't feel bad screwing up.
Basics with Babish is decent, at least the early episodes, for helping explain and visualize some of the basic skills.
But again, it's a skill that requires practice. I've been cooking consistently for years and I still can't spin up a recipe from memory or by feel. I mostly rely on trusted recipes and maybe do my own riff if I've done something similar before.
My experience was the complete opposite. Just relax and do whatever you want, the pan is your own little canvas. If something doesn't work out, oh well, you tried and learned from it.
I know you're getting a ton of responses, but if you do see this, look up Food Wishes on youtube. Would not be an exaggeration to say it has changed my life. 5-10m videos focused on one dish, usually including quite a bit of context and instruction aimed at beginners.
Cook with stuff you like! That way even if you screw it up you're left with stuff you mostly don't mind. Can't count the number of times I've screwed up meat sauce, and ended up eating a pound of meaty-tomato slop that tasted just fine albeit wasn't recognizable as any type of dish.
Also go easy on yourself. Recognize that this is a whole skill set that people spend their whole lives cultivating (just like software). You'll start to develop an intuition.
Make sure you have the right equipment you need too. I probably spent two years thinking I couldn't make eggs, turns out my pan was warped.
+1 to foodwishes. Most of my cooking knowledge comes from those videos. One thing that's hard to get from recipes is the actual cooking techniques, e.g. how loud onions should sizzle when you saute them. Foodwishes is great for learning and entertaining as well.
I've learned the most and gotten the most bang for the buck from using Cook's Illustrated special edition magazines. For example, Skillet Dinners1[1], my copy of which is well worn. The writeups that go with the recipes really help train one's intuition about cooking. Over time, I've gotten much better at knowing when to adjust ingredients or cooking times for a given recipe.
The best part of ATK and related Cook's country is they also helpfully go in-depth about the why. This helps you understand why the steps are laid out how they are. Plus it helps they test the crap out of their recipes so even with minor variation you can get a stellar end result.
My only complaint is sometimes they are way more steps and more exspensive sets of ingredients than other recipes. But often it's worth it for vastly superior results.
That's why I liked Serious Eat's Food Lab where Kenji also breaks stuff down but in an accessible set of recipes. Similar to Alton Brown's Good Eats, also a great resource if you like understanding the chemistry going on in your cooking!
ATK is great for beginners because they test their recipes and their recipe amounts are literally the same as they used in the tests.
A lot of recipes you find online are really guestimates on the amounts, so you never get the same result as the author. People are very bad about guestimating volumes, like "about 2 tablespoons of oil" when they really used half a cup.
Heh, I run into a lot of recipes where they have you cook in a tiny amount of oil and dump the pan out a couple times but you're still supposed to be "sautéing" whatever's in the last batch. Yeah, OK. Double the initial oil, add it again after each dump since there's still none left after the first time. Or else we're not doing what you claim we're doing, recipe. Which may also be fine, but still.
Or high-heat nonstick cooking with like one teaspoon of oil in the pan, heating it to nigh-smoke before adding anything else. LOL. Or steel or cast-iron temp + fat combos that make no sense and are guaranteed to give you a bad time. Either lots and lots of recipes are nonsense on this front, requiring modification of one form or another to be reasonable, or these people have magical pans that I do not.
A lot of the time I'll see recipes call for heating non-stick on a medium- or medium-high flame with so little fat in ("one teaspoon of oil" or some similarly-way-under-enough quantity) them that it only covers like 1/4 or less of the pan surface, so most of the pan is heating dry, which AFAIK is a great way to turn the coating into a gas that's fairly bad for you. Though maybe that's folk-wisdom and it's actually fine to heat a nonstick pan empty? IDK.
Learn your five basic tastes, most people don't get balance right, they can balance sweet and salty but they don't know how to balance sweet with sour and bitter with savory. Once you learn how to balance you can turn any dish into a flavorful dish. Learn your savory ingredients such as Soy Sauce, Truffles, Mushrooms, MSG, etc. Then learn your bitters, they are the hardest. If you make something too sweet balance it with lemon juice or vinegar. Too sour brown sugar, molasses. Too bitter use soy sauce.
As for overcook / undercook as other have suggested, get a good stick thermometer and use it religiously. I have cooked since I was 8 years old in a family of excellent cooks and went to culinary school and to this day I still use a thermometer.
Invest in a Thermapen instant thermometer (or less expensive Javelin) and a kitchen scale, these will make your life much easier and recipes more reproducible.
Also, can’t more highly recommend reading anything by Kenji Alt Lopez. A google of nearly any food you want to cook plus “kenji” will lead you to accurate, well explained, scientific based approach to cooking it. Or just pick up a copy of the Food Lab.
You're learning after-all, and learning while hungry is not a good combination. If you burn the food and then have to eat it, you're going to have a bad time, negative reinforcement, etc. Order something else, like pizza, munch on that as you learn this new skill of cooking.
I might try this more often. I'm currently trying to make a food schedule for things I know how to make every day of every week, and some of the new recipes I try are just not coming out all that well discouraging me to venture out on new recipes.
Yes, this. They are basically like magic for cooking proteins and vegetables. And the 'done' to 'overdone' margin of error can be hours instead of mere minutes.
Equipment matters, too. I thought I was cooking until I got a place with a gas stove and a great pan to match. Electric equipment just oscillates on/off at different rates and produces (un)predictably different results than modulating a constant intensity with fine control.
You might want to actually take cooking classes. Since you will learn the basics of saute, grill, heat. The right order of ingredients. Some of much of cooking is science and so much is just feel.
I don't eat much when I cook for myself though. Not because I dislike the food, I don't have much of an appetite by the time it finishes cooking. I do love cooking for others and experimenting the hell out of weird cooking combos because why not. That's the most fun part, you pick a recipe and then you try to substitute ingredients but maintain the taste more or less the same. Eventually, you will understand flavors more and can create new recipes because you can learn about various ways in which you can cook the ingredient for using it as a different part in a dish.
Cooking edible food is easy for most people, they are either lazy or like me sometimes where their appetite is gone. Following recipes is more bothersome than you think for a lot of folks, programmers don't find it that bad given they are used to reading monotone instructions.
I was actually thinking about opening an online food service for people with diabetes/weight problems/specific goals where you can get good food delivered to your home. The recipes aren't that different for someone doing keto and suffering with diabetes type 2. They can generally be combined for example.
Finding ingredients for a keto low carb diet is hard if you are vegetarian/vegan and there is ton of problematic information out there. Recipes are not clear, it won't taste good and frankly speaking, it is expensive if you get the ingredients in low quantity due to the demand.
People need a dietician + food without jumping through many hoops. That way, More people can be healthy.
What sucks about people not being able to cook for themselves is that they stop cooking interesting things and thus the supermarket produce section keeps shrinking. Yeah, some places like Whole Foods have large varieties of items, but there isn't one anywhere near my neighborhood. The local grocery store doesn't even sell radishes.
I tried to save money once by making lunch and bringing it to work. My SO at the time who was much more frugal than me pointed out that eating lunch out (socializing) was much more important to them than the savings which over the course of a month was not that much, especially if you factor in the cost of time and that there were way more effective ways of saving money than giving up socializing time.
It was also boring (for me) in that in order to save time and money I'd end up having to make a larger portion of one thing and then eat the same thing all week.
In many cities in the us eating out is as cheap as cooking. I'm not 100% certain but someone told me it's because you have to consider economies of scale for an eatery and real estate prices and commodity level revenue streams for the supermarket.
Provided the workers scoop deep, a chipotle bowl is generally two meals for me, especially if I get a tortilla on the side to build a burrito with the remnants later. Lunch and dinner for ~$7, breakfast can be a cliff bar for another buck. So ~$56 a week to eat out every day, not too bad if a $50 weekly grocery bill is the rule of thumb.
You barely get two dinners for $50 here in Sweden unless you go for fast food which isn't an option if you're going to be eating out every day. A typical lunch is at least $10.
If I'd eat out every day both lunch and dinner I'm going to pay roughly $800/month compared to my usual $300/month for groceries.
For me it's quite similar, in the office they always tell me "Wow! That look amazing, I can't believe you do it everyday". Even when it's a salad with 3 ingredients
Same here. As Italian living in The Netherlands the difference with my everyday meal and the Dutch sandwiches always leaves some awe. Honestly, cooking and eating healthy is not hard, saves money and tastes better.
1. Cooking causes awe in Dutch people
2. Eating healthy is cheaper that eating out, and easier that many may think.
BTW, you Dutch guys should stop putting butter on everything, eating hagelslag by the ton, and drinking yogurt instead of water. It might be cheap, but terribly unhealthy :).
Eating left over for lunch at work is usually not a good experience as the only way to heat food is microwave, unless the food you bring is best reheated with one, or just have a cold salad or sandwich. As an aside, learn the best method to reheat food for each type of meal. Steak, spaghetti, fish, bread all have the best way to make it as enjoyable as possible.
Same. Started cooking out of frugality and anything I can order or comes packaged is unhealthy. Cooking feels like the default, what normal people do. I was so wrong. None of my friends can cook even a simple meal without step by step instructions. Some can grill, and that's it. They just order food or eat something from a box every single day.
It’s gotten to the point for me where I look at Seamless (hundreds of options here in NYC) and generally go to the kitchen and make something instead.
So much less packaging.
I spend less on more food and what I eat is largely organic, pasture raised, grass fed and often from local farms.
And I really enjoy cooking, so that probably helps. I love using my hands, and I usually don’t have any music on so I have a lot of nice time to think while I’m cooking.
Plus the people around me love eating delicious morsels I produce and I occasionally get a rain of compliments.
Sometimes I follow recipes, sometimes I do my own thing, and sometimes it’s a mix.
Keeps me on my feet, and dextrous, even going to the store is a bit of exercise since I walk there.
All in all, a wonderful part of my average day and week usually.
What made my post-college mental state so much better (as well as my friends' quality of life) was that I forced my flatmates to cook with me all the time and we would have people over for lunch/dinner like I used to do back home, in Greece. Our stomachs and wallets are still thanking us to this day.
For context, I studied in the US and moved to London for work right after graduation.
I rarely have time to cook which sucks, but I make the effort when I can and I've just bought fresh ingredients.
I get home around 6:30 and go to the gym in my apt until around 7:30, then after I've showered and had my protein shake it's now 8:00 and I'm tired. Prep to eating to cleaning up can take an hour or more for me, and I try to go to bed around 10 if I can to wake up for the next day at 6. If I have to go to the grocery store that can take another hour out of my free time after work. Morale is low, freetime for hobbies are low, and the only way to maximize this time without cutting into fitness or sleep is to go with a premade meal from trader joes and be done with it.
Homecooked meals made a lot of sense when you showed up at home at 5:30 with that pot roast your wife started at 2:30 steaming and plated for you on the table, but that's not the world we live in anymore.
I feel that's why food trucks became popular. Low barrier to entry (relative) and allows people that know how to cook quickly cook for those that don't.
Learn to enjoy poetry. There is so much of great poetry in English, but I think it is not being read and appreciated enough. It is a kind of mental challenge like doing a puzzle, to unlock the full vivid meaning.
Also reading fiction, though how exactly it helps one is beyond me, but it offers glimpses into other worlds. For example I read recently 'The French Lieutenant's Woman', I doubt its richness of detail, and evocation of place and time, etc can ever be captured in a film or even a miniseries, and on top of it is choc-full of tid-bits of information.
I've been trying the same and each time I failed miserably. I just don't get it and certainly can't enjoy it. Can someone recomend good poetry sutable for highly analytical mind or a book about apreciating poetry?
I would recommend 'Understanding Poetry' by Robert Penn Warren and Cleanth Brooks, as a good introduction, it also includes a reasonable collection of poems from various poets to appreciate.
I would also suggest getting an anthology like 'The Golden Treasury' or Anthony Quiller-Couch or Robert Penn Warren (Six Centuries of British Poetry) or G B Harrison. They are available often in small pocket editions, which one can carry around with one.
I've been reading "Sleeping on the Wing" on and off recently -- I think it's meant more as an intro for older school kids but I've never read poetry outside of school and it's been an interesting overview of different poets and styles.
I am not very fond of poetry (except some specific poems), but there is one book of english poetry which I think you may enjoy: the Spoon River Anthology[0].
It's a collection of epitaphs for the cemetery of a fictional town, and each one basically tells a story. Fiddler Jones[1] and Blind Jack[2] (coincidentally, both about fiddlers) contain a few of my favourite verses in all literature.
Maybe try reading poems by poets who write mostly in plain English. For example Charles Bukowski, Philip Larkin and Stephen Dunn. I don't generally like "flowery" poetry but I do enjoy many of the poems written by these writers.
I personally am pretty into William Carlos Willams for a few reasons:
- intense dedication to imagery
- his poem Danse Russe, which to me us just about the silly things we do in privacy where no one is around
- the fact he was a doctor and churning out an insane quantity of poetry
WCW inspired me to write my own poetry mainly because of that last point. I struggle to describe software engineering in that format, sadly!
Rather like music theory, having a highly analytical mind is a boon...eventually. It's so easy to dig into the mathematical structure of it all and not deal with the actual thing. So start with the rollicking and absurd, and read it aloud!. Lewis Carroll's Jabberwocky, for example. I have yet to meet someone that doesn't get a grin out of that. Isherwood, 'The Common Cormorant'. These are poems that beat you over the head with their structure and meter. Limericks, doggerel, songs from Shakespare plays...and pay attention to where it seems to stutter or skip, where it doesn't work. That is the beginning of training your ear, and recovering the ability to feel and enjoy the sound, making that part of the reading experience. Technical prose has trained that out of us as a matter of self defense because so much technical prose is only tolerable with your ear firmly swathed in cotton wool and stored carefully away.
When you get past the level of limericks and children's poems level, suddenly you have interpretive choices to make because the precise flow and timing of sounds can work different ways and some work better than others, and as a reader you have to bring an interpretive faculty to these works. When you get to something like John Donne's poetry, you're now deep in "every bit of timing and inflection matters."
For children's poetry to get started, Belloc's 'The Bad Child's Book of Beasts' or the Looking Glass Book of Verse are high quality collections. Then it's worth getting something like a Norton Anthology of Poetry as a way of reading very widely very quickly to find out what appeals to you right now, and explore that further.
Many people recommend the Oxford Book of English Verse. I don't, because I think Quiller-Couch had insipid taste and his editing ranges from the uninspired to the positively atrocious (what he did to John Donne's 'The Ecstasy' is horrid). I have found Garrison Keillor's 'Good Poems' to be particularly approachable, high quality collection of verse. I also suggest Ezra Pound's 'ABCs of Reading', though you shouldn't take what he writes about Chinese as anything other than a metaphor for his topic at hand.
Spend time with Shakespeare, of course. I recommend the Oxford complete works. I do not recommend the Yale complete works. Did my wife and I have a tiff about that? Yes, we did. Was I able to demonstrate by reference to passages that I was right? Yes. Do we only have the Oxford in the house now? Yes.
Robert Frost's complete works are cheaply had and a necessity for someone studying modern poetry. Two or three poems of his are butchered in every school class, and the full range of what he worked on is generally ignored, because it can require a very finely tuned ear to hear and interpret the force that his longer, narrative poems can produce.
But really, once your ear starts to come together, dig through the Norton anthology and use it as pointers to further things to read.
Some stuff that reads weird to me is quite beautiful when spoken appropriately, my internal voice/reading speed needs to be adjusted or is not good for this. Off the top of my head the best example might be cheating but it's when Ann Dowd recites a bit of Yeats in The Leftovers.
An easy way to get started is the YouTube channel Ours Poetica[1]. It's kinda like Audible but for poems (and free). Produced in collaboration with The Poetry Foundation.
Totally agree with you. Recently started moving from non-fiction to poetry and picked up "The Gift", Poems by Hafiz. It refreshing to see how much one can say with a few words.
Agreed. It's a magnificent translation of magnificent work. My family has adopted the Nowruz custom of opening Hafiz randomly and reading what we find as an annual ritual.
Is there any evidence that poems have meaning? I could easily imagine a world where poets fool themselves into thinking the words they wrote contained their intentions, while readers fooled themselves into thinking they had uncovered those intentions.
Poetry has no more and no less meaning than language itself. The popular HN definition of a "hacker" is someone who digs deep into a system, understanding it and pushing its capabilities beyond what is commonly understood. Poets hack language. Sometimes the product is buggy, but sometimes it's an elegant hack.
The meaning to the reader who believes this is, that poetry can fool and likely in interesting ways. I don't believe 'poetry is meaningless' as a interpretative structure, though the format has the capacity to convey that.
I prefer Tolkein's applicability of art over auteur theory and allegory. A work of Art applies in many different meanings. Allegory and auteur theory exist as a valid interpretation and are too limited to see the whole picture of what art can do. An artist can intend to write a meaningful poem that conveys love and sadness, an audience member can see that as a foolish endeavor. Both are right, when the poem is executed in a manner that provides fuel for both flames.
So why do people tend to shit on fine art of hacker news, but whenever they discuss writers there’s a certain love attached to it?
Especially concerning self-help books: aren’t most of these books written for those who simply don’t have enough courage to listen to their own common sense?
It takes a while to understand what fine art is about because it's almost completely removed from education and cultural relevance for most of the populace. Fine art is a great art form and you need to be in a mental space that's open to interpreting it. Movies and games have superseded fine art's ability to excite the self. Paintbrush technology doesn't have many real world applications and does not excite HN. The construction skills that go into fine art and what it means to build a great piece of art is now something you have to seek out, rather than be taught or find in popular culture. Movies and computer games in particular are on the bleeding edge of what we can do. They are more exciting and more able to keep the viewer up to date on the current culture, technology and stories.
There is room for a minor hypocrisy in your average criticism of high concept fine art that seeks to express an idea that pushes the field forward despite it not being a complete, popular or useful product. Programmers are doing the same all the time in hobby projects and sometimes they blow up to a massive scale, the same in fine art.
Self help books hit multiple marks, it depends how broadly you see common sense. They help keep a very self-focused individual up to date with the culture and provide extra insight into common problems people can have. They can be used by the reader to explore a thought that is related to what is being read. They can be used as a reference point in a relationship. They can be a starting for point for people with psychological issues to begin the climb back up to a healthy state. They provide a window into another person's perspective on the world and that can be entertaining in itself.
This board is highly focused towards a certain set of goals and a certain set of outcomes. There are a bunch of perspectives that get trimmed in the comments, which is inline with the stated objective of this place as a technology incubator. Any derision or negativity to fields that don't have an immediate application in the tech field are going to be given more leniency than other windows into negativity, like flat-earthers, religious comments and lazy criticism of tech from other fields. That's part of what makes HN what it is. Independence in commenting (and content) has become a limited phenomena online.
Even in that world, I would dare say that poems have meaning. Just one that is personal to the beholder. As a lover of the sciences and mathematics, it used to really bother me, the 'subjectiveness' of there being no "right" answer - but I think an important aspect of that subjectivity is that while there are not necessarily knowably correct answers, it is quite possible for an interpretation to fail to map. What makes many a poem beautiful is how many 'correct' (and often mutually exclusive) interpretations simultaneously contain, i.e. interpretations that are not contradicted by the poem itself. That aspect of containing multitudes is now one of the may things I have come to really appreciate about poetry, and the arts more generally.
"Is there any evidence that tweets have meaning? I could easily imagine a world where posters fool themselves into thinking the words they wrote contained their intentions, while readers fooled themselves into thinking they had uncovered those intentions."
As with all natural language, production and interpretation of poems is subjective. Poetry is just an attempt to use natural language without the constraints of prose, in order to accomplish things that are not possible with prose.
Some poets may have a goal to convey a particular idea or emotion. Others may just want to create something moves the reader. Still others may not care about the reader at all. All of these things are okay.
Actually, that speculation about tweets sounds pretty realistic to me...
But seriously, I think we can all agree that among the literary arts, poetry is the most likely to be accidentally uninterpretable. Due to its cultural context it is also the area where uninterpretability is the most likely to be accepted. This creates an environment where you run a serious risk of developing a culture of meaninglessness.
Some poetry serves the "higher" meaning of discussing political ideas like Claudia Rankine's Citizen: An American Lyric.
Some poetry is made to make you laugh like Billy Collins' Another Reason Why I Don't Keep A Gun in the House.
Some poetry is purposefully inscrutable and difficult because the author wants you to work to understand them. A good example of this might be r-p-o-p-h-e-s-s-a-g-r by E.E. Cummings.
Each of these examples is meaningful in its own different way. I think trying to decide what has meaning is hard because you might automatically discard a work of art that is "just for fun". Isn't play meaningful?
as everybody else in Italy, I had to study the Divine Comedy (which is an incredible work, and I'm glad I had to), and part of doing that is learning multiple interpretations of a single line, variations of people who have read and re-read the work over centuries. It really easily convinces you that, if the art itself can have a given meaning, still many interpretations are bonkers and there might be no hidden meaning at all.
I am sure the same applies, to e.g. William Blake.
If you try reading poetry and get something out of so reading, does it matter whether they "have meaning"? It's the practice, and its effect on you, that matters. Like Zen. You've missed the point if you think there's anything valuable to be found, something concrete you can dig up and take hold of, that when you find it you have it and someone gave it to you.
"Meaning" may be present but is irrelevant if the experience is the same—what evidence do you want? Getting something out of poetry? Many people clearly do, if that's the test.
I'm faintly appalled by the glibness of this comment. I'm not sure what kind of poetry you have in mind, but spending even a little time with the classics will reveal that they "have meaning".
You might as well ask "does music have meaning?" Poetry is many things, but at the root it's about the beauty of words themselves, their sound and shape and feeling and even taste.
Read the 'right' poetry, you'll find the evidence for yourself.
For me the first piece that spoke to me is When the Frost is on the Punkin by James Whitcomb Riley, that we had to memorize in 7th grade (he's buried here in Indy).
The first line:
>When the frost is on the punkin and the fodder's in the shock,
This immediately triggers fall in my brain. The smell of damp hay and decaying leaves. The morning chill and moisture in the air as the frost begins to quickly melt as the sun comes up.
The second line:
>And you hear the kyouck and the gobble of the struttin' turkey-cock,
If you've ever seen a turkey in person, and heard it start making a fuss, it's a pretty unique sound. They can also be quite flamboyant and arrogant as they strut around a field. I immediately think of that sound, the herky-jerky movements, them posturing to challenge you before they charge.
Later:
>They's somethin kindo' harty-like about the atmusfere
>When the heat of summer's over and the coolin' fall is here
Those first few days when fall really sets in, when you start to get that frost and the leaves are falling and you have that wonderful musky aroma of their decay, there's something almost magical about it and you just stand there drinking it in. This takes me there.
A bit later:
>But the air's so appetizin'; and the landscape through the haze
>Of a crisp and sunny monring of the airly autumn days
>Is a pictur' that no painter has the colorin' to mock -
>When the frost is on the punkin and fodder's in the shock.
Again, the smells and chill of that crisp and often damp air with all of those aromas starting to rise as the sun comes up. The beautiful reds and oranges and browns and champagne yellows of the leaves of the changing trees
>The husky, rusty russel of the tossels of the corn,
There's something about wind blowing through standing corn that is almost ready to harvest, I read this and I hear that, 'rusty russel of the tossels' is a perfect description.
>And the raspin' of the tangled leaves, as golden as the morn;
As the laves have started to fall in great numbers and you traipse through them they do make a rasping sound mixed with this every so slightly wet sound as mositure trapped between them makes them peel and tangle.
>Then your apples all is gethered, and the ones a feller keeps
>Is poured around the celler-floor in red and yeller heaps;
>And your cider-makin's over, and your wimmern-folks is through
I can almost feel that fuzzy, sweet, crisp taste of warm cider lighting my mouth up and warming me.
>With their mince and apple-butter, and theyr souse and sausage, too!
Boom! Always makes me feel the cool air, catch a hint of memory of the smells of fall and want some warm biscuits slathered in apple butter and the wonderful porky-vinegar magic that is souse.
Definitely no argument there. It's not a competition between art and science to see who is more pointless, it's about humanity striving for point-fulness.
This book[1] compares poetry to music. There are many genres and styles of music, and it is likely that you don't like all genres. Enjoying poetry is about trying to find the "genre" of poetry that moves you.
[1] Don't Read Poetry: A Book About How to Read Poems - Stephanie Burt
> - Build something. A new workbench for your office. Fix up an old car. Build a pull-up bar in your garage. Use your hands, cut some wood and metal, and treat yourself to a new tool or two.
Be careful... my wife gave me a drill one year and I’ve since renovated two houses and now have a small fortune in tools.
If you don’t have a garage, basement or backyard for it, your local community college might have a “maker lab” with all sorts of high end woodworking, metal working, laser cutters and 3D printers...along with meetups and evening classes to boot.
Btw, not as satisfying as woodwork perhaps but you can do small electrical projects around your house and feel a sense of accomplishment. e.g. installing dimmer switches. Turn off mains and then easy to follow instructions that comes with the switch. Just screwdriver and pliers needed. Save energy and house looks warmer. :-)
I always found the "idea" of that kind of work enticing.
However, once I owned a house and had to do renovating/updating, I ultimately found it frustrating.
Some jobs are incredibly frustrating if you don't have the exact tool to make it easier.
The likelihood the angles and geometry of your home are square is, IME, near 0. Even measuring and re-measuring multiple times, I end up with a lot of wasted, mis-cut material.
YMMV, but I always found when you add up the time spent and material cost, it's nearly a wash to just pay someone else to do it.
> YMMV, but I always found when you add up the time spent and material cost, it's nearly a wash to just pay someone else to do it.
I dunno. For some tasks the time it takes to find somebody else to do it, be available to let the person in/out, and settle payment is much larger than doing it yourself; the lead time is orders of magnitude larger, and doing it yourself gets the bonus that you can do it whenever is best for you, instead of negotiating your agenda with a busy person.
This is why I've acquired most of the DIY home improvement skills I have.
By the time I message 3 electricians, coordinate to let them in the house, get a bid and have someone do the job, and finally get it done, I could've just youtubed and googled my way to doing it myself. Maybe I have to pick up a tool or two along the way but eventually you reach an inflection point where you have the tools you need for multiple jobs. I think the biggest tool purchases I've made in the last 18 months are a brad nailer, a finish nailer, and a 4 ft level.
>The likelihood the angles and geometry of your home are square
This is true...it might be square on one plane and off on the other. That's what the 6 foot long levels are for by the way. It's good to find someone who has the tools and expertise to apprentice from -- either at a local cc or just hire them and ask if you can do some of the work. I went through several contractors before I found the guy I like to work with...I guess its the same in everything...but once you figure stuff out like that blasted little semi-hidden copper pin that's between you and a replacement shower valve, a lot of cost savings can be realized. The first time I replaced that thing, the plumber charged me $270. The second time I replaced it, I paid $19 for a part at home depot and did the rest myself.
I would agree that often projects to fix up your home can be more frustrating than satisfying, unless, like you said, you have the right tools and some prior experience.
Building things that sit in your home (furniture) is likely a bit less frustrating & rewarding, even without the perfect tools and experience.
Agreed, carpentry and fine woodworking aren't the same thing, but a lot of the tools/practices/methods overlap.
Start small and work your way up. Make a cutting board, fast forward a couple of years and you'll be building cabinets. Fast forward from that and you'll be shaving backs on a Windsor chair.
I've started some woodworking projects. My first couple of attempts left a lot to be desired. It seems like a lot of it is just having the right tools. I mostly enjoy the sanding and staining part, or using a torch to weather proof it.
The other thing is I can't find good plans. If I have a plan to follow, it makes all the difference, I don't know enough to figure it out as I go. Like right now, I've been wanting to build a pool stick holder. Probably one that is on the ground, not attached to the wall. Even the sites I look at that have plans you pay for, they don't seem that helpful.
I agree that it does make the process go better if you have a reference. I found myself more and more looking at small details -- I cannot go into a room any more and not see the sheet rock screws underneath layers of tape and spackle designed to conceal them. I can't unsee poorly mitered joints.
It's like coding...in the beginning, yes, its useful to modify someone else's similar project as you learn, but after awhile, its much easier and more engaging to start with a blank sheet and just start typing.
> Be careful... my wife gave me a drill one year and I’ve since renovated two houses and now have a small fortune in tools.
Started with a 3D printer for me, then a membership to Techshop. Few years later I have a garage filled with woodworking / metalworking, diy cnc machines, laser cutter, welding, and automotive tools. It’s a slippery slope.
+1 on all of the above. I just want to add one thing
- Learn an instrument. Just for fun. You don't have to play in an orchestra or a band.
I came to this thread expecting it to be about tech skills, glad to see this comment at the top. Overall, I'm more grounded and happier for it (and less depressed).
I am a hobby (unplugged) woodworker with a quite large collection of vintage tools... it all started because I needed some basic temporary furniture for the new house and w were broke enough to not be able to afford it - the kitchen I built is still around after 7 years and I have developed a lot in this area.
I use manual cameras, or digital cameras in manual mode / with manual lenses because that's how I learned photography in 1990's
I like to cook, 95% of our meals are home made, I can prepare a whole week worth of meals in abut 3 hours, including cleaning. I usually just improvise, my wife says I can make a delicious meal out of an empty fridge...
Yet music somehow eludes me - and it is THE thing I have always wanted to be proficient at way more than any of the above. I just don't have any idea how to approach it. Let's say I get a musical instrument - be it a piano (keyboard), a guitar, saxophone or percussion. What's next? Practice the notes until I'm "touch-typing" them? Then try to mix and match? Try to play some sheet music or repeat what I've heard before by brute-forcing? I am actually able to re-create a simple melody by trying the keys on a toy keyboard, but in all the other areas (woodworking, cooking, photography) I went almost straight to improvisation - which I enjoy the most - and I have the feeling that in music there is some set of basic skills required to unlock this, yet I don't know what it entails. Woodworking is all about hiding the imperfections, photography is about selecting the best shots / being prepared for lucky timing, and an imperfect meal can be (usually) fixed with herbs/spices/salt. Music is either spot on, or too far off to be tolerable - am I missing some middle ground opportunity here?
I'm learning it with an electric guitar plugged into my xbox using the game/app Rocksmith. It's not the recommended approach for beginners. But I'm having so much fun with it that I'm going to see how far I can go before I signup for classes. That and JustinGuitar is how I'm approaching it. The whole investment was under $300 (not including the xbox). I'm assuming that music is going to take a while before I feel I have anything resembling mastery of it. My goal is different - I just want to blow off steam playing music instead of a video game or watching TV. It's a very modest goal at this point. YMMV depending on what you're trying to achieve.
learn to play songs you like. all you need to do this is a few chords. if you choose guitar, there's tonnes of tabs out there, and if you choose piano, just read the guitar tabs and translate the notes/chords.
but most importantly, play songs you like! sing along! play around with the lyrics! whatever!
Listen to classical music. This one didn't come to me until my 40s but I finally realized: there's a reason that this music has been popular for 300 years.
I agree. It's funny how when I was young I would only listen to one type of music, like it was some kind of tribal loyalty. Now I listen to all kinds of things, and I've learned to hear the difference between really good music and stuff that's just manufactured for corporations.
(Ironically, what got me to expand my musical horizons was Apple's corporate promotion, back when you used to get a free iTune each the week on the iTunes store, by picking up a card in Starbucks, or buying a bottle of Pepsi from the vending machine at work.)
Getting back to classical, I also recommend apps for KDFC/San Francisco, KING-FM/Seattle, RTBF Musiq'3/Brussels, RTHK4/Hong Kong, and RTÉ LyricFM (Dublin?). I used to be a WQXR/New York fan, but it lost its way after the New York Times sold it. I've heard good things about WRR/Dallas, but haven't tried it yet.
KING-FM-HD2 is awesome background brain lubricant when you're working on something hard and mathematical.
If anyone else has any favorite classical stations, please reply.
The cooking thing really hits home. I work in a high stress, banking environment at a fortune 500 company, and I eat out most days. I know theoretically how to cook, but between the time it takes to shop, cook, and clean, AND I'm doing well financially it's so hard to convince myself to cook. Living alone doesn't help either.
Get a slow cooker and have your groceries delivered. You can make delicious, nutritious 1 pot meals that last you 2 or 3 days a pop with minimal prep time and cleanup.
In a similar vain, I recommend getting a sous vide circulator. You'll make perfect steaks and pork chops every time, and it's extremely clean and convenient. You can cook all sorts of other things sous vide style as well.
I recently got one, and I've been cooking at home a lot more often as a result. I think more people would cook their own food if they knew how to make it taste really good.
I fully support the value system here in that we both want people cooking for themselves more, but I have to say that sous vide cooked steaks taste like boiled meat to me, aka terrible. People around me are swear by it until I slap a ribeye onto the pan for them, high heat, making sure to render the fat.
To each their own but imo a sous vide is a big, expensive, plastic waste of counter space.
If sous vide is tasting really bad to you, you’re doing it wrong. Almost certainly you’re not doing the final step, finish in a pan. You shouldn’t take something right from the sous vide to the plate, hit it in the pan at the highest heat you possible can to get the Maillard reaction and develop the crust.
So you're getting the pan out, oiled, and hot anyway. You're gonna have to clean it. And while on the pan a rare is slowly turning to well. Why not just do it all on the pan??
Because with a skillet on high heat, it really doesn't take long to sear a steak and still keep it pretty rare. It also depends on the kind of pan you're using. A cheap pan will have a different heat distribution than a cast iron skillet.
Yes, you have to clean the pan. This is precisely why I use a torch to sear my meat. Even with the few times I use a pan, I prefer it because the reduced time on the pan means less oils splattering around my stove top, and I do think that the pan is still an easier clean this way. But that can all be avoided by using a good torch.
Because not everyone can get the timing right and heat consistent enough to properly cook from start to finish in a pan. Especially as you get to thicker cuts.
Sous vide takes out the guesswork for getting the insides to the right temp. Then just get the pan as hot as possible for quick sear in a pan for the outside.
> Because not everyone can get the timing right and heat consistent enough to properly cook from start to finish in a pan.
I understand this point, the point of sous vide is consistency, but I disagree that not everyone can get the timing right. With practice, anybody absolutely can get it right. And if they have hundreds of dollars plus the counterspace to throw at a sous vide machine, they have the resources to cook a couple "bad" steaks before they start getting it right.
Right, but not everyone wants to. One of the reasons I gave up cooking steaks the normal way was because I can easily get distracted by checking something on my computer, a few minutes go by, and then the steak doesn't come out the way I wanted. This is a personal failing, but at the same time doing it sous vide helps avoid that problem. Hours can go by and a steak will still come out pretty good.
> And if they have hundreds of dollars plus the counterspace to throw at a sous vide machine
Exactly how much counter space do you think a sous vide machine takes up? Maybe there's some out there that are huge, IDK, but most of the consumer grade ones sold are like half the size of a wine bottle and can be attached to any container. You could probably even attach it to a kitchen sink if you wanted to.
Not disagreeing, and honestly it's much faster to do in a pan.
Still, I also understand the appeal. More precise, less issues if something interrupts you, and perhaps the best benefit is batch cooking steaks. Especially when starting, using sous vide can help you focus on getting the sear right and not ruining your steak.
Plus, with thicker steaks, you often need better pan temp control or the use of an oven to help get it to cook evenly. And that's just an extra layer of hassle that takes time to master as well.
But I concede it can also be a crutch for a relatively easy cooking skill.
Was going to reply with this, you need to brown a steak. That’s where the flavour comes from. Much easier to brown a steak that is already warm too. Would need to be careful of overcooking if you’re used to 90 secs each side on a seating hot pan.
It sounds like it's the people around you doing sous vide wrong and you're actually doing it correctly(by virtue of searing the steak). I've never heard anyone suggest eating a sous vide steak without searing it or using a torch to brown it, render the fat, etc. A sous vide steak should still taste at least halfway decent without searing because of the amount of salt and seasoning used in the process.
Your viewpoint is totally valid, though I still encourage people to give it a try for themselves. They don't even need a circulator the first time they do it, although I do think they're worth the money. A lot of restaurants actually sous vide their steaks before searing them, so if someone's sous vide steak is coming out terrible then I suspect something really went wrong in the process. Either not enough salt and seasoning was used(sous vide calls for a lot of salt), or they didn't properly sear the steak.
In culinary school we where taught that a steak does not touch the flame until it is room temperature. The reason for this is it shocks the steak and causes it to draw up, it takes longer to draw out the moisture in the surface and it allows some of the organic decay of the fat. Most restaurants use sous vide to short circuit this process as they can hold them in immersion below rare temp and then take them directly to the grill. Nothing wrong with this, it accomplishes the same end result and that is you don't seize the meat and cause it to draw up and you pull some of the moisture out of the surface while breaking down some of the fat.
I think most people mess up on doing it all in a pan due to the fact that they go from at least fridge cold to the pan. Put one on the counter, salt it, cover it and let it sit for an hour or two and most people will be surprised at how well of a steak they can produce in a pan. If one really wants a good crust, leave it salted and uncovered in the fridge to dry for 3 day. It takes a lot of energy to evaporate moisture and you need the moisture out of the surface to brown a steak rapidly.
That being said I use my sous vide machine to bring them to temp as it also does a better job of distributing the salt and garlic I like to use.
Yea I’ve found the same. Nothing like slapping a nice marbled ribeye on a hot grill.
I will say though the sous vide does work really well for some things. Batch cooking of chicken breast, venison in nearly any form, and various cuts of pork that you want rare but want to make sure it’s safe to eat.
1. You quickly chill the meat in the freezer (or ice bath) after taking it out of the sous vide. This will help prevent further cooking when searing it, because we only want the sear.
2. You heat the pan as hot as possible, way hotter than normal, so that you can sear with only 10-20 seconds per side. Some use a torch instead.
Do both. Sous vide to your tastes, then in a hot pan on each side for 3-4 minutes. Best of both worlds, without having to worry about overcooking the outside to get the desired internal doneness.
IKR. I sear steaks for 6-7 minutes per side anyway for rare to mid-rare, so I don't see the point in sous viding for hours just to save 3 minutes in the pan.
I love sous vide for tougher cuts that need a long cook time, but using a sous vide for a ribeye is just pointless.
3-4 minutes per side is insufficient to raise a thick steak to 125 degrees (rare). Below 125 is "Blue", aka raw. Which can be fine as well, but I wouldn't call it a rare steak.
I've seen such steaks (I don't have sous vide myself), and they look like the perfect rare done steak. A nice pink shade throughout, with a beautiful crust.
Seconding immersion circulator as a purchase. Joule by chefsteps is nice, and small enough to fit in a drawer. Entirely app controlled though and has visual doneness guides and recipes. Helps you get the feel for it for sure. Best part is you can cook from frozen too so if you forget to pull something out to defrost you can just add a little time to the bath.
I wish. Minimum $$ and limited inventory available for delivery through my local grocers. Anyone who cooks beyond some veggies and out-of-the-box meal components knows quality of ingredients is the utmost. Like, going to multiple butchers for the best cut of meat kind of quality.
It's like anything else, you must invest the time and energy to get the quality. Restaurants simply abstract this away by increasing the cost.
I think you're over playing "quality." A great stew can be made from ribeye or from chuck; if I'm grilling I want the ribeye from my local butcher, if I'm making a stew I don't really care.
If I'm making a quick soup for the evening; I'll use store-bought stock, if I'm making it for a huge group of friends, I'll put in the time to make my own.
Home made spaetzle is a great, quick noodle (and since I've got Celiac, it's an easy noodle to make GF) that takes about 5 minutes to actually make, 3 minutes to boil, and 5 minutes to brown on the stove top. Using it for Mac-and-Cheese is almost faster than the Kraft stuff.
And with anything that is a learned skill, cooking is slow at first; but as you get better at the basics it speeds up the process. As an example, it used to take me almost 2 hours to change my oil on my car; now I can do it as fast as a shop (~20-30 minutes).
The biggest thing that it all comes down to is time/money tradeoff, if I can convince myself that something is more worth the time it takes to do than the cost of someone else doing it, I can usually make it happen.
I love my instant pot. My favorite recipe is red beans and rice. My mother-in-law is Cajun from down on the bayou and this was one that I adapted from hers. Happy to post it if anyone is interested. It makes enough for about 6-8 one-bowl meals and freezes wonderfully, so you can always have a quick meal ready in a pinch. Takes about 10 minutes of prep and an hour to cook.
I originally bought mine for pork butt, it makes doing pulled pork super easy as you have to use spoons to get it out because it falls apart that easily. Then I found it made chicken thighs incredibly easy to cook to fall-off-the-bone. I did a smaller beef roast in there too once and the meat was more tender and moist than in the oven and was done in 1/4 of the time.
Last year I transitioned to 95%~ whole food plant based eating and used it a ton for black beans (I've since switched to low sodium canned black beans just for convenience) and now every 3 days I cook a bunch of peeled potatoes and baby carrots in it for my lunches.
I put in some water, hit the broil button to pre-heat the water and peel my potatoes. By the time I'm done peeling the potatoes and have dumped the baby carrots in the water is boiling and I go ahead and set it to manual for 16 minutes and put the lid on. 20-25 minutes later it beeps and I manually vent the valve and get my meal prep containers out, fill them up, 30-40 seconds to clean the pot and I've got lunch for three days. It's great!
The IP is pretty overrated. I have one and use it really often, but it has serious limitations that fad blogs just kind of ignore. Like, it's not really a huge time saver because it's low pressure and takes so long to come to pressure anyway. Also, pressure cooked meat is very often gross and spongy, so you should use it as a slow cooker in those situations.
It's great for rice, beans, sauce & soup bases. Plus, it doesn't heat up the house in the summer. But I think it's limitations make it a poor suggestion for a novice cook.
> pressure cooked meat is very often gross and spongy
I haven't cooked much beef in it that hasn't become part of a stew, but my experience cooking chicken and turkey is that it comes out incredibly juicy and flavorful. Even better if you have the air fryer/convection add on. I've done turkey in it for the past several years for potlucks and family meals and it always gets rave reviews. For beef, part of the appeal was that I could brown it, saute aromatics, and then cook it in the same pot.
If you have the money (and it sounds like you have), there are quite a few recipe box companies which send you boxes of ingredients and recipes every few days. It's a nice stepping stone towards fully cooking for yourself as it cuts out the shopping/deciding part.
Blue Apron tends to focus on interesting recipes. Hello Fresh tends to be a bit more focused on fresh ingredients. But honestly I couldn't really tell them apart.
Alternatively, several super markets now sell kits you can buy with the ingredients and directions.
If you have never cooked before, start with one of the big companies mentioned by other posters. Once you build up recipes (HF and BA send you the recipes on notecards!), you can cancel and get everything at the local grocery. These days, most grocers have order-online options with quick pick-up or delivery.
I've used Gousto on and off for years, great variety of recipes and never disappointed -it actually works out not very expensive per meal if you order the 4-people package, though you need some organizing to cook/freeze the extra meals in time.
This is good way to start cooking and hit the kitchen. Eventually though you may feel like you want to mix and match and start buying your own grocery.
If you happen to enjoy it, cook. If you don't want to cook, you don't have to. It's also possible to eat healthily if you eat out, especially if you have enough money.
I have done all of the above except the classical music. I find spending time to do meditation is more useful.
All of the above, I find cooking is an incredible skill that many people underestimate greatly.
Here are the things that I do for my cooking for every week or every two weeks.
+ 30-45 minutes grocery shopping including driving.
+ 30-60 minutes per day to cook daily dinner and prepare breakfast.
+ 10-15 minutes to clean up.
And what I think it solves/helps/improve our family daily life:
+ Food quality is definitely way better than outside. We have good amount of vegetable, fruits, fresh meat/fish/poultry and other dairy products.
+ Lots of time saving for not going out, spending time waiting, driving, moving the whole family around.
+ The cost is very low, probably around 1/3 of eating out.
We do spend a day or two to eat out or eat carry-out food.
While this takes time (months/years) to get a good skill at cooking and minimizing the time, this is so far one of the best skills I have had and I do think people should invest in it.
That's awesome! I forgot to mention this in my top-level comment but if you're ever interested in cooking some Tex-Mex, I have a recipe book for you. My grandmother wrote this in the early 1970s and it was regionally famous in the part of Texas where I grew up. She died when I was young and my aunt inherited the ownership of the book. I asked her for permission to make it freely available and she said OK. I had plans to translate it to TeX but never got it finished. I did put up a PDF scan of the original that you can download:
Hope you enjoy it as much as I did. For newcomers to the book, I highly recommend the cheese enchiladas recipe and the anticuchos recipe. Anticuchos are not authentic Tex-Mex but they are very much tied to San Antonio and that recipe is probably the best in the book if you make it with good quality steak.
Agreed, no one in my friend circle cook any more. I learnt it out of necessity - I missed home cooking and then became vegan which made me realise the lack of creativity of the chefs when it comes to vegan food. Now I love cooking just for the sake of it.
For the "learn to take pictures on a manual camera" suggestion, this is probably the reddit multi-part tutorial: https://www.reddit.com/r/photoclass/ (scroll to the bottom for the first lesson)
Yes!! This is the one. This class taught me so much. I went from a photographer that ended up with garbage 90% of the time, to one that can usually get the shot. Glad to see that they now have a 2020 class, too.
>- Listen to classical music. This one didn't come to me until my 40s but I finally realized: there's a reason that this music has been popular for 300 years. Opera is great, too. Listen to Mozart's "The Marriage of Figaro". Download the KUSC app and listen to the amazing Metropolitan Opera broadcast every Saturday morning at 10 AM Pacific.
Agree with the sentiment, the answer is just soapboxing life advise, not really answering. But being able to focus on/appreciate classical music is a skill, hearing the different instruments and such.
Aaron Copland's "What to Listen For in Music" is a great primer!
I think most people fall into a Passive Listening model when getting into symphonic or chamber music. The book suggested above would certainly push an average listener closer to an 'active' model.
Appreciating anything that you aren’t already a fan of is a skill. You can also develop the skills of enjoying hip hop, metal, spaghetti westerns, rock climbing, etc.
Cooking is one of my favorite activities that I'm actually decent at. One "cooking sin" that I do is that I don't taste my food throughout cooking. The general feedback on my cooking has been positive.
When I try and cook new dishes, I do it by theme. The theme can be:
Einstein walked on the beach when he needed to work out complex problems. Steve Jobs preferred to conduct meetings while walking. Tchaikovsky took a walk every morning, before sitting down to work on his music. Charles Darwin walked twice a day to process ideas... turns out that walking boosts cognition and creative thinking.
Learn to make basic cocktails ( manhattan, old-fashioned).
Get good spirits, quality mixes ( cannot emphasize this enough), fresh herbs and you got yourself a great skill.
Definitely. Like a good set of tools in the workshop, I love to buy new spirits every time I have a cocktail night with friends. I have a liquor cabinet full of strange aperitifs and whiskeys. It's very fun to learn. I should find an app that lets me build a virtual liquor cabinet and gives me ideas for new drinks that I can make with what I have.
What are you guys eating if you're not already cooking/eating leftovers 4+ nights a week? This is absolutely mind boggling to me... I eat out maybe 1-3 times per month, I don't think I would even want to go out more than that.
Are people actually eating out 3 or more times a week? I'm convinced that you aren't actually saving that much time vs cooking.
I cook most nights and frankly am starting to see the appeal of frequent dining out.
I cook for three and that's generally in the 10 minutes prep, 20-45 minutes cooking, 15+ minutes cleaning. And that's dinner. It adds up. Eating truly fast food takes 5-15 minutes.
If fast food were reliably better for you I think it would be a wash. Financially I used to order out in NYC and get two+ days meals out of a single Indian seamless order for $30 and no cooking time.
The compromise, I think, is cooking a meal 2x quantity and freezing half for a week, but then you get into some very tiresome food routines.
I guess it depends on how much food you're making. My girlfriend and I typically alternate cooking and will make enough for ~3 days of food, so really we only cook 2-3 times a week, and when you alternate the task it's not much time at all. I also don't mind eating the same thing for days in a row, so that helps too.
I discovered at 22 (now 28) that most cities have young person and student programs for inexpensive tickets to the symphony. $20 for any ticket in the house is a great way to spend 10 or more nights a year.
Build something that the world actually needs. Something where you're using your unique skills and privilege to help improve the world a bit - help others who are a few rungs below you.
Have a plan for how you're going to do the most good you can with the time you have left. Helping others (humans and sentient non-humans) is the best path to long-term happiness in my opinion.
A reddit user (which I cannot remember) said it best imo. The way they put it was (loosely quoted) "Create something. It doesn't have to be anything physical, you can create experiences for people".
If woodworking or car repair isn't your jam, volunteer to help the needy. Or if you like the stage join a drama club or comedy club or whatever else you can do to enrich other people's lives.
Cooking: while in grad school we started a cooking club, which has since evolved into a cookbook club. One person chooses a cookbook, and then tells the group which main dish they will prepare. Others chime in with side dishes, desserts, etc. The group gets together to discuss the book, the challenges, the triumphs, etc. It is one of the things I look forward to!
Agreed. The skill I'm working on this year seems to be woodworking. I made my wife a little box to put her Christmas present in, and designed and built a storage system for the garage over the holidays. Now I'm working on building a new set of workbenches for the garage to replace the ones the previous owner built.
- I take commission based wood working projects
- Cannot use a manual camera
- Wife cooks most nights
- always take a nightly walk with my dog
- listen to classical music with my baby everyday
I’m not doing too badly by this list and I’m relatively happy.
I would say focus on building a solid, functional body vs. say focusing on goals like "how much can I lift?" or "how much do I weigh?" or "how fast can I go?". Those goals, while laudable, can also cause you to break down your body in your quest to achieve them.
An example from literally yesterday. Over the past few months, I struggled with medial knee pain that was limiting my ability to walk up stairs and do other activities (see other list of goals from above). I had a bunch of observations (pain only when going up stairs, pain goes away oddly enough when running up stairs, clicking noise in knee before onset of pain) but I hadn't spent time trying to root cause it.
I had done a bunch of Google searches but to no avail (with scary things like surgery showing up on the list). But then of all things the YouTube algorithm came to the rescue and recommended this: [1]. Turns out it was a weak Gluteus Medius that allowed my femur to rotate medially which in turn caused the kneecap to track in an unnatural way. Once I knew this, I "fixed" it in a day. But it won't stay "fixed" unless I focus on strengthening that muscle.
Figure out what you need to do to provide you with sufficient functional strength, focus on root causing pain and then addressing it. Don't ignore the foundations of your body.
There is beauty to the simple goal of "I want to lift x amount one day." Instead of worrying yourself to death over whether you are "functional" or not. I've seen so many regulars at my gym over the years still doing the same stuff, still looking the same, still lifting the same, still doing kettlebell goblet squats and farmers walks and step-ups and whatever else have you.
I realize what an elitist knob this makes me sound like but I decry all of this because I've been there before and made the same mistakes. I like your example because you mention a specific issue you had that you then went on to fix. I know of many who train this way when they have no ailments whatsoever.
"I want to lift x amount one day" is not for everyone, it's what lead me to destroy my spine. I went years without any problems and I was in the best shape of my life, but I never thought about the level of compression my spine was taking on.
I ended up having multiple bulging discs from C5-C7, a severe disc herniation in T8-T9 (which happened mid workout, very painful), L4-S1 herniations and L4-L5 breaking away chunks of my vertebrae. I eventually had to get emergency surgery on C5-C7 due to the narrowing of spinal cord.
I still "work out" with resistance bands, but I'm never allowed to properly lift weights again thanks to my foolishness. It's horribly depressing and I don't wish this on anybody.
Moral of the story is you might be just fine and have the skeletal structure to support lifting, or it could be a ticking time bomb like in my case. Lifting goals should carry disclaimers about the possible dangers.
Gradual. When my T8-T9 popped, I was doing pull-ups of all things, so there was no compression which means it could have been anything preceding that, but I suspect years of military/shoulder press or squats contributed.
I did dead-lifts several years prior to the injuries and stopped those when I had a funny "clammy skin" sensation in one of my arms; it freaked me out a little and I hated deadlifts anyway so I always thought it was just my excuse not to do them, but in retrospect I think that was probably a wise decision.
Thank you for sharing your experience. Lifting is great but it should always be done in moderation (as always with anything that one does with their body).
At the time I was about 180lbs/6' and just got done cutting. I was lifting in the 12-15 rep range so the load was relatively light-moderate enough to hit those reps without losing form. I am an ectomorph, so my skeletal structure is weak by design, really poor bone density.
Nothing wrong to be exercise regularly without progression. I wouldn't be surprised if this was even better than going ham on the gym because of how little exercise the human body actually needs to be considered healthy.
Not saying there is nothing wrong with having lifting goals either. But there are definitely diminishing returns to your health in regards to the amount/intensity of your exercise routine for sure.
I became much happier once I realized that I'm not an athlete and I don't need to have a goal of "I want to lift x amount one day". This has been freeing for me. I started focusing more and more on fixing certain parts of the body (like tightness of pecs, weak glutes, weak transverse abdominis etc - 99% of the people at the gym has it, but they are not aware of it).
So I really think if you are an athlete/ex-athlete and you really know how to train - go for it. My main goal was not to have a back pain ever again.
Nothing wrong with avoiding lifting heavy if you are satisfied with your size. At that point it's maintenance. Even professional body builders get devastating injuries, and if they get devastating injuries while doing a supervised squat with two spotters, then I don't trust myself to go for PR in the squat rack unless my form with the current weight is absolutely effortless. There isn't even a point for me to go for PR; I'm not getting a gold metal but I could end up with a hernia.
Funny. When I shipped to Marine boot camp I was frightful my minor knee pain would get worse. Turns out I was just a wimp. Pain disappeared with exercise. I also had acid reflux and stomach problems for years that disappeared.
Every single ailment that I've had that is not an injury disappeared when I got into shape (and read Sarnos book).
I've been feeling pain in my right elbow for a couple of years now. Doctor diagnosed as carpal tunnel syndrome.
You know the picture. Spent tons of time playing video game and works in an office since forever. I can't afford physical therapy, but working out + good posture makes the pain goes away "magically".
I say "magically" because I am not doing anything to target it, just go to the gym and literally do whatever for 30-40 minutes every other day.
assuming The Mindbody Prescription. Worth reading through some of the reviews on Amazon.
Sarno's argument is essentially that emotional distress (mainly, rage) manifests itself in the body through TMS (tension myositis syndrome), and that depending on the person this expresses itself as a number of different ailments (sciatica, back and neck pain, migraines) with the same underlying cause (stress that results in decreased blood flow and oxygen deprivation which cause pain in the related area).
I thought I was special in this philosophy but seems like others are catching on too. The tip that worked for me is "Do the activity to get that type of body." I've always admired the physique of basketball players like Steph Curry so I picked up basketball a few years back. It's done wonders for my posture and aesthetics and basketball is a fun kickass workout.
Swimming/soccer/tennis are other sports I'd put in the category of aesthetically pleasing.
While I agree supplementing with cycling or running is great, on the boulders if you’re too “top heavy” try focusing on “wobbly” problems more. Find a gym with a slab wall, and practice balance style climbing where you don’t need strength in the arms & shoulders. Doing that regularly will balance out the legs portion easily if biking or running isn’t your thing.
I'd add hiking or running to this. I've seen my coworkers get winded walking hilly sidewalks, any type of ambulatory work is at the heart of human function.
For others reading this - this is what good physiotherapists do. Changing the movement patterns and balancing the body instead of prescribing painkillers.
The reality I've seen is that most doctors can only help with small/very specific issues of this kind if it's something they happened to had encountered before. Otherwise they will send you on a trip for multiple exams and in the end tell you there's nothing particularly wrong and should just bear with it till it becomes worse. Doing our own research or reaching out to others -none of which is mutually exclusive to consulting doctors- often pays out. Remember the experience of Patrick Volkerding? http://www.ae.iitm.ac.in/pipermail/ilugc/2004-November/01390...
Marcus Aurelius' Stoic idea of winning the morning.
This means doing your best to make the most of the first part of the day: arise early and jump into doing the most important tasks of the day. Practice good habits. Then, as the day expands and becomes less in your control, you've 'won' the morning.
I use 'win the morning!' almost as a mantra, and just that single, simple idea been life-changing.
I like the sound of this but what does it look like in practice? By "arise early" are we talking like 4 or 5am, or just early enough to get to the office slightly before 9am and be the first one there by a few minutes? By "jump into the most important tasks of the day", would you consider working out to be one of those? It's important in the long run to do consistently, but on a given day it's not usually what I would list as my most important task.
I guess what I'm saying is, I feel like if you put the right spin on almost any series of morning activities you can call it winning the morning. So it's not very prescriptive advice that I can use to be more productive. It's almost a tautology - to be more productive, start your day by being productive.
For a lot of people, being 'productive' to them means burning the midnight oil which is hardly actually productive. If you do things when you are alert it makes them more effective. It also gives you the rest of the day to just breath and not be hard on yourself for getting tired and your performance faltering throughout the day; after all you got all that stuff done earlier. Ever have a weekend when you got everything you needed to do done by noon? The day becomes yours and you feel like a superhuman.
for me it depends on what I'm doing. if its something creative then i find I get better results late at night. if its more technical then early in the morning.
the quote from hemmingway "write drunk, edit sober" comes to mind, if you replace drunk with tired
You can nitpick any idea into oblivion but the gist is: figure out what is the most important thing for you to do in the morning to be productive and do it.
And if going to the gym in the morning makes the rest of your day productive by providing you with lots of energy and a clear head, then yes, going to the gym is the most important and productive for you to do in the AM.
"If it's your job to eat a frog, it's best to do it first thing in the morning. And If it's your job to eat two frogs, it's best to eat the biggest one first."
"Rise to Victory" is the way I teach my kids to wake up in the morning.
Setting a central focus for the morning, and working to accomplish it before noon is critical. If I cannot finish whatever it is, I usually become so incensed that that drive lasts me the rest of the afternoon.
...and I track every day in my Google Docs journal. I lay out the thing I want to accomplish that day, and then just break it out to the steps needed to accomplish it before the day gets filled with distractions.
It turns out, this simple journal is the one habit I've that's lasted more than a year - it's become invaluable. of all the GTD, Pomodoros, Google tasks, etc... ...all I ever needed was a list in a doc that was broken into dated sections.
I will add Kettlebell swings to Squat and deadlift. They are one of the best all round exercise for muscle development particularly around the lower back and for cardio as well. In fact, I haven't come across a full body muscle building and cardio exercise that can match Kettlebell swings.
Burpees are one of the best movements for all-around muscle development and the best thing is you don't need any weights.
If you can perform a full burpee (from standing to the floor) then the benefits are huge. You can also scale and go from standing to plank position or use a swimming pool (stand in the pool near the edge, jump onto the ledge and then back into the pool and go into squat position underwater).
Outside of the pool burpees are terrible on your joints - mainly your shoulders (subscapularis specifically). Even more so if you're carrying around extra weight.
I understand the need to keep adding resistance, though as my sibling commenter says, I think you're understating the potential of pure bodyweight progressions to increase strength. Exercises like one arm push ups, one arm chin ups, hand stand push ups, planches, pistol squats, nordic curls, etc. can be equivalent to seriously heavy weights and there are plenty of options for gradually progressing toward them. Lots of muscle bound guys who can lift a lot of weight still aren't strong enough do any of these advanced bodyweight moves.
But anyway, what does that have to do with comparing burpees to squats/push ups? :)
What's the progression for push-ups? I was doing 1½ sets of ten wide push-ups on Friday (to failure, thus the ½) and today thought maybe I'd try a one-arm set. Couldn't do a single one, even on knees. Then I tried a set of narrow push-ups with the hands moved a bit footward, and could manage, like, four. On my knees. Is there a good guide to push-up progressions and resistance ratios?
Yeah check out https://reddit.com/r/bodyweightfitness/ as mentioned. There are lots of good resources there and you can find advice on just about anything by searching within the sub.
One arm push ups are way harder than normal ones. It's not something I've tried working on yet myself, but I think you build up by doing things like archer push ups with the other arm assisting less and less until you don't need it anymore.
Not fully true, body weight can make you gain lots of muscle, but you do need to add resistance. However, resistance doesn’t need to be weight or bands, but do a more difficult version of the exercise. Push ups are easy for you? Do planche pushups or diamond pushups.
I drank a lot of the Reddit/HN koolaid that you can't get big/ripped on bodyweight fitness until I moved into a new place with an amazing back patio will full sunlight all day where I felt bad exercising anywhere else. Much less under the fluorescent lighting of my local gym.
For a year I've been exercising in my backyard with a podcast in my ears, maybe during a group phonecall for work, while thinking between programming sessions, etc.
Now I realize that 100% of these people are full of shit. I got jacked. Whenever I've mentioned this to someone, they'll say something like, yeah but you can't get as big as $bodyBuilder, like Ronnie Coleman.
The truth is I think very few people have actually tried a serious daily bodyweight regimen. Most people don't have a reason to try, they just go to the gym if they want a daily workout. And then we, including myself, have the human tendency to regurgitate ideas we've heard from others rather than from personal experience.
Well, I'm curious to hear out your experience, do you think the amount of time you spent bodyweight training was equal to the amount of time someone would need to do resistance training for similar results?
This is why I chose resistance training - the gym is on my way to work and I am willing to spare about an hour and a half daily to fitness. My research indicated I'll get better results with that time at the gym lifting weights than body weight training.
In my experience, bodyweight training is actually quite efficient in terms of time spent because you do a lot of compound movements that work multiple muscle groups at the same time. You can definitely get a good full-body workout done in an hour and a half.
It can also be less efficient though in the sense that it can sometimes require a pretty big jump in both strength and technique to go from one progression to the next, so you can get stuck for awhile. With weights you can of course just keep adding a little bit more. But the plus side of this for bodyweight training is that apart from just strength, you also get improvements in muscular coordination, balance, flexibility, and body awareness.
You don't really have to choose though--you can do both! They complement each other quite well.
What’s funny is I’ve drank the Reddit koolaid in favor of body weight fitness, as the routine I do is the r/bodyweightfitness routine, with bordering mixed in for fun
Can you expand on that? I've never gotten anything out of them. I could do them an 88# kettlebell. Never felt as effective as most everything else I was/am doing.
Yes, heavy two-handed swings were a game-changer for me. I am a climber and I don't think it's any coincidence that 5.13- and V8 became "easy" after incorporating these into my routine. I had a very weak posterior chain. It's funny, when you do an actual sport-specific strength assessment, it often seems your weaknesses are not what you thought they were.
Truthfully I dont think there is any reason for a regular person to deadlift. It's a pretty high risk exercise and you can hit those muscles groups with different exercises. If you are hard set on deadlifts though I recommend the hexbar deadlifts to reduce the chances for injury.
The deadlift is one of the most well-rounded, important lifts out there. I don't understand what you mean by "regular people"; are you saying that only eg powerlifters should do deadlifts and that casual lifters should avoid it?
IMO anyone interested in developing their strength (that is physically able to deadlift) should learn how to do them safely and then work on them.
I hear the argument that deadlifts are great if you have perfect form a lot. However, if you don't have perfect form they can be extremely dangerous. Very few other excercises have such high risks, and there are plenty that are just as good. A lot of people think they have great form but don't record themselves from the side so they don't notice how much their back is bending. On the other hand excercises like the pull up, push up, dumbbell press, row, dumbbell squat, etc are also very good with little potential for life threatening injuries even if you have bad form.
Of course form is very important. If your deadlifts are "extremely dangerous" and can potentially cause "life threatening injuries", then yes, take a good hard look at your form and work on improving it, staying away from heavy weights until you get there. But the idea that most people have form bad enough to seriously injure them isn't my experience at all. Deadlifts can be done safely, and having good form isn't some unattainable, Mt Olympus feat.
I'll leave these here as I think they're both relevant to your point, in different ways:
Form isn't just about the movement but strengthening your stabilizing muscle groups that keep your body aligned during that movement. By the time you start dead lifting serious weight, your core should be like a tree trunk and your muscles should be strong enough to support your body's alignment while flexed during the lift.
I do think too many people go overboard with the olympic lifts. You don't have to be red faced and shaking to get a good pump from a deadlift. Just because you can lift the weight in some way 5 times, doesn't mean you should. I bet most people who are boasting about their >400lb dead lift can't do that movement for 3x10 reps with good form. Lower the weight and it's as safe as the dumbbell squat.
I'm not saying that it's not a great lift, I'm just saying that most people can reach their fitness goals without it, and it's pretty easy to injure yourself doing a deadlift relative to other exercises.
[edit]: took a quick look at that video you posted though and that's an amazing resource! I look forward to checking out more of there videos.
I don't know about squat and deadlift. I'm in my mid 30s and 20-40% of my friends who squat and deadlift had to stop because they injured their back in the last couple of years. All of them looked like they had great form and half had gone to a trainer as some point to make sure their form was good.
Any athletic pursuit is going to injure you eventually.
Not pursuing any athletics is going to kill you and make the late years of your life frustrating a you lose capabilities. And you'll probably get injured as your body deteriorates.
I think a lot of people do these lifts with way too much weight, opting to play the stats game with the poundage while sometimes doing just two reps per set. More reps with less weight and it's a safer workout.
Anything physical pushed to the limits will result in injury. Most people never get an injury casually playing pickup basketball. Then watch one season in the NBA, you'd probably see half a dozen ligaments snap on live TV.
I don't think any NBA player has injured themselves from deadlift, because they know how to lift properly and are supervised by physical therapists during practice of course, but in the intensity of an NBA game this is no longer a controlled reaction taking place. Lifting heavy puts strain on a lot of variables at once, not unlike an all out NBA game.
Do you have stats to back that up? I'm having trouble finding it, but the only study I've ever seen on the subject showed lifting as being fairly on par with other athletic activities.
However, when it comes to results, squat and deadlift are way ahead in producing muscular and skeletal adaptation.
The good thing is that once you recognize it, it's fairly easily remediated. Get that ROM back and you're back in business. Rarely is surgery necessary.
Sounds link these folks were really pushing their bodies. I don't think these fall in the "get in shape" weight ranges, but I'd be willing to listen to why that's not the case. Id imagine there are a lot more factors than just form that go into your bodies safety when you're lifting that big regularly.
I have anxiety and it's really difficult to talk to strangers.
Edit:I would also like to mention. I talk very less reason being whenever I tell people honestly about my feelings. Later or sooner they use it against me.
Start at work if you aren't remote "Hey I'm mesaframe over in department, what department are you in?" in the break room or hall (NEVER the bathroom if you are male, NEVER, please watch Male Restroom Etiquette to learn the ramifications of talking in the bathroom https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IzO1mCAVyMw )
Or if you stop for coffee some place regularly, eat some place regularly, etc ask someone that serves you regularly how their day is. For years I used White Castle for my socialization. I'd go in every Saturday and Sunday morning and order the same thing and would chat to the employees once I'd established myself as a regular. Similarly some friends and I had a Denny's waitress that we eventually followed to another location and then even to another restaurant chain as we were there so much at night that we became friends with her.
It was super easy to for me to become friendly with a specific individual when I would see them over and over with small exposure doses.
I've talked to strangers about Boolean algebra, the weather, how long the bus is taking, the slogan on the bag they're carrying and how it relates to their calling in life, and so on. I dated a girl for about a year that I met on the train and started a conversation by joking with her about filler phrases she had used in a cellphone conversation. And of course evangelists are always willing to talk about theology.
I think most people are eager to be heard, eager to talk about their experiences and feelings (even trivial ones like being impatient for the bus to arrive), and lonely. But most people are preoccupied and in a hurry much of the time. You have to be paying attention at a moment when they are willing, and then be able to give them what they want.
It’s a skill and like any other skill it becomes less anxiety inducing the better you get at it. You could start with complete strangers at (say) a coffee shop, so that if you get embarrassed well it doesn’t matter, you’ll never see them again (this is how I improved). Also, learning how to be rejected and bail out is part of the skill. I still get into awkward situations sometimes, but it’s happened enough that I can cut the conversation off and the embarrassment doesn’t bother me all that much
Remember that one time that one random person struck up a conversation with you and it was awkward and you never saw each other again?
Me neither. People generally don’t remember these things.
Strike up a conversation and it doesn’t go well? It may feel like the world is falling apart at that moment, but you can rest assured it will be forgotten, and sooner rather than later. And you may get a sense of accomplishment just from going through the motions and doing it.
Strike up a conversation and maybe make a new friend? Awesome :)
I also have anxiety. The way you deal with it is to talk with strangers. Start by expressing yourself more with the people you are already comfortable with. Something you might normally not share. Then start with chit chat with people who are less familiar. You will be chatting comfortably with people you don't know in no time. Isolating yourself is the wrong way and will lead you to dark places. I know. I'm better. It's scary, uncomfortable and totally worth it.
Start living life head first. I hate speaking too, but I put myself out there and make myself do it, because you really have nothing to loose. Life is sporadic and impermenant. You try and strike up a conversation with a stranger, fail, move on, the next day you've both forgotten eachother's face, the next week you've both forgotten about the event entirely. Most conversations don't matter at all.
Start simple - ask people on the street what time it is. It’s a simple opener that should help you with your anxiety, and you’ll see nothing bad happens.
Here’s a neat trick. When you’re at a party, meetup or other social event, don’t approach people standing alone. Instead, approach people in groups of two, say hello (or give a quick little glass tink ‘cheers’) and introduce yourself. A large large amount of the time, one of those two people want OUT of the conversation and you’ll be that out.
That’s a great low risk drill to get started. It’s low risk because it works and you’re in an environment where respectful interruptions like that are acceptable. Good luck and if you get stuck, feel free to reach out.
This is a good tip. And something easy and safe to start a conversation with a group of 2+ is a question like "How do you guys know each other?" They'll likely mention a mutual friend, their workplace, or a hobby they share, which can all be good topics to help develop a conversation.
Also, if you're a guest of the host of a party, you can approach people and just ask "So, how do you know $host?" Perhaps these are both effective conversation starts or questions because they begin with "how" as opposed to a who/what/when sort of question.
I find the whole social scene like a weird challenge. Maybe I'm just out of muscle but it seems too many people are struggling and everybody is resorting to tips and tricks to live by. How come it's an easy process on average.
Find something the person may be very interested in, and get them talking about it.
"I can't help but notice that watch, can I ask you about it?" (Anybody asking about my watch is an instant friend. WHY WONT ANYBODY NOTICE MY WATCHES??)
"This might be weird but I need a new barber, where do you get your haircut?"
"Yooo where did you get that sweater?"
"You carrying golf clubs around the city? There a course I don't know about?"
"Is that a defcon sticker?"
Something unique about them. Find it, ask about it. Easy to practice. Just do the find it step to random people during your commute.
If some randomer approached me in public, especially on my commute, and dropped any of the above lines or any others about some material item I had on me, I’d write them off as a grifter looking for an angle to play.
Especially the “yoooo dawg lemme see that watch!” kind of vernacular.
As such I refuse to believe any of your recommendations come from personally successful experiences.
That’s quite an insecurity-laced kneejerk reaction you’ve posted there.
A tip from an adult who didn’t stumble into this industry from the recruitment sidelines: Keep your “yoooo dawg swaggy swag brooo!” stuff to your non-work friends. Women cite this immature brogrammer nonsense and the “culture” it creates as one of the reasons they’re put off from joining, or as a reason for leaving, the tech industry.
Where's these personal attacks coming from? Insecurity? You called me a liar. I feel my response was a perfectly acceptable way to defend myself against such an accusation.
> A tip from an adult who didn’t stumble into this industry from the recruitment sidelines:
What's the purpose of delving into my post history to find more material for personal insults?
Why have you rhetorically positioned yourself as an adult, and me as a child, in your message?
What emotion were you hoping I felt when you insinuated that my professional background makes me Less Than?
Why is it so important to you to impress upon me that You Are Smarter Than Me?
This only really should be used in parties or social events where there is a host, like a dinner party at someone's house. Or a work office lunch, or meet-and-greet.
You wouldn't use it out and about on the street or the bus, unless you were really personable.
"Hi , my name is .. <reach out hand for handshake>. What you've been up today?"
- Start conversion with something you notice about the other person, the event, the surroundings ("the color of your watch matches with your sweater - stylish!", "is this stuff boring or is it just me?", "you know why they put that thing over there?")
- Topics: Family, Occupation, Recreation, Dreams
- Repeat the last few words of the other person and look asking. The person will continue the subject s/he's talking about
- Connect and imagine the other guy. "I am a writer" - "A writer! I always wanted to be one but always stop after one page of writing. I imagine you must be very disciplined"
- You can always say nothing and just stay there. Often the other person picks up the conversation once you're past a few minutes.
- Try looking people into the eye while walking around, and force yourself to not look away. This is a nice training for looking strangers in to the eye in a cold approach. Once you got that, talking to strangers becomes much less intimidating.
- Eventually people will ask you what you do for work / or what you did today. Have something ready that sounds interesting.
> "Hi , my name is .. <reach out hand for handshake>. What you've been up today?"
...why is this guy randomly talking to me? Are they selling something?
> - Start conversion with something you notice about the other person, the event, the surroundings ("the color of your watch matches with your sweater - stylish!", "is this stuff boring or is it just me?", "you know why they put that thing over there?")
...this is wildly veering _super_ boring and way too personal.
> Repeat the last few words of the other person and look asking. The person will continue the subject s/he's talking about
...okay, they're not selling me anything, they're an axe murderer.
> Connect and imagine the other guy. "I am a writer" - "A writer! I always wanted to be one but always stop after one page of writing. I imagine you must be very disciplined"
...at least they seem sloppy, maybe if I leave the venue quietly they'll forget I was there.
1. Avoids topic that involve materialised ethics.
2. Uses _rape_ as a funny acronym.
More evidence of axe murdering tendencies.
> You can always say nothing and just stay there. Often the other person picks up the conversation once you're past a few minutes.
...I don't think standing silently in the corner and staring is going to diminish the axe murderer impression you just made.
> Try looking people into the eye while walking around, and force yourself to not look away. This is a nice training for looking strangers in to the eye in a cold approach. Once you got that, talking to strangers becomes much less intimidating.
...what did I just say about staring? Because now you're _staring people right in the eye and not looking back_. Fun thing you learn early as you learn masking autism, people _way_ overrate looking others in the eyes.
> Eventually people will ask you what you do for work / or what you did today. Have something ready that sounds interesting.
"I kill people. With an axe and/or facial recognition."
> ...why is this guy randomly talking to me? Are they selling something?
People assume that even at networking, social gatherings, or speed dating events. Doesn't matter what their initial impression is as you can change their later impression.
> ...oh god, this is boring...
That can be said for anything. The point is to make them contribute and prevent a one-sided conversation.
> ...this is wildly veering _super_ boring and way too personal.
That's why progression matters. You can also refrain from asking them directly, like for example: "let me guess, you're an arts student/interior designer" Most people would correct your assumption, and now you're talking about occupation. Or you can segway that to recreation "I could've sworn that you're the (assumed occupation) type. You seem like you do plenty of (activity related to assumed occupation)" The person would again correct the assumption, or if not, you can change the subject or push through. Either ask directly "so what do you do instead?" or share a detail about yourself/the subject that'd bait the person into asking or sharing theirs.
> ...Axe murder...
Most people respond friendly. If they are part of the contrary, move on.
> People assume that even at networking, social gatherings, or speed dating events. Doesn't matter what their initial impression is as you can change their later impression.
They literally wrote "cold approach," so no, this does imply approaching strangers in random situations.
> That can be said for anything. The point is to make them contribute and prevent a one-sided conversation.
It implies tying people in an unwanted conversation and then trying to leverage inevitable anxiety to get them to say something personal.
> That's why progression matters. You can also refrain from asking them directly, like for example: "let me guess, you're an arts student/interior designer"
Jesus christ, who talks like that.
> Most people respond friendly. If they are part of the contrary, move on.
I too respond friendly to potential axe murderers. Angry axe murderers are more likely to axe murder you.
Seriously, though, there are _multiple_ red lights for abusive and exploitative behaviour in that advice. Yes, it _will_ work, abusive behaviour often works. But also, if you ever meet someone like that - or if you try it on someone with life experience that taught them _both_ what abuse and respect look like, they'll most likely smile, say something safe, and then leave to warn others about you.
> They literally wrote "cold approach," so no, this does imply approaching strangers in random situations.
You make conversations with strangers all the time. The taxi driver, while waiting at a long queue, a friend brings over a new face, someone on the street shows you interest (they smile first, greet, etc), you see a familiar face out there and you check out if they're showing interest such as a longer eye contact and then you go "Hey we go to the same gym, how's X? blah blah. Oh really? By the way I'm Brad"
> It implies tying people in an unwanted conversation and then trying to leverage inevitable anxiety to get them to say something personal.
Jeez, as long as you're not being a creep it's just friendly banter. There'll of course be people like you who think the world is after them so just have the decency to get out and leave them be.
> Jesus christ, who talks like that.
I'm sure you do it one way or another. Light-hearted teasing and joking: "is that code I see? i'm betting you're a CS student." Heck that's actually how I got my last job referral, sat next to a dude and noticed that he's reading notes that has a diagram of a (segment) tree. Turns out that he's got a position at a company's R&D lab and at that time was prepping for a competition at codeforces. He invited me to his company and we're friends to this day.
> I sure would.
You can't satisfy everyone. Just don't be a creep and pick up on social cues.
Okay, this is a narrative that is occurring in your head, but it's not occurring in everyone's head, and if you happen to talk to someone who has this narrative occurring in their head, who cares? You're not going to please everyone.
You're not going to befriend everyone you talk to, but you're not going to befriend anyone you don't talk to.
> Okay, this is a narrative that is occurring in your head, but it's not occurring in everyone's head,
Oh, for sure, I'm not saying this approach won't work for you. I'm saying that if you're using that approach you're being using strategies designed mostly by abusers, that are inherently abusive (now, whether you are an abuser depends on whether you realise that and whether you stick to it after realising that), and that you _shouldn't do that_.
> You're not going to befriend everyone you talk to, but you're not going to befriend anyone you don't talk to.
I don't have to try and befriend everyone I meet. There are social contexts specifically designed for making new friendships, and quite helpfully they usually also provide a framework for approaching new people. And between meetup.com, OkCupid, interest-specific subreddits, Discords and Twitter, it's easier than ever to find should spaces that are tailored to however specific your social needs are. There's zero excuse for cold approach.
It sounds like you have a history of abuse. I am so sorry and hope you're able to get the help you need. As I'm sure you know, not everyone trying to socialize is out to get you. Not everyone has the same social needs as you. But I can see how difficult that could be if you've been a victim of abuse. I think it's good to note that not everyone has the same hang ups as you do, and many people do actually enjoy meeting people and making acquaintances outside of specifically designated social events.
> As I'm sure you know, not everyone trying to socialize is out to get you
No, I mean, it might be hard to imagine to a person who believes into might makes right as strong as you apparently do, but a couple of tiny restrictions actually makes it _easier_ to make friends.
And, y'know, no, I don't have much of history of abusive. I knew a few abusive people, but they mostly focused on others. Another thing that might be hard to imagine for you, I suppose.
I'm not sure what you mean here, can you explain? What did I say that makes you think this?
I actually am a victim of abuse. It took me a long time to understand that strangers who talk to me aren't trying to hurt me. It really took a lot of work, and still takes a lot of work.
I enjoy making friends almost anywhere, unless I'm on a date. Life is boring and meaningless without human connection and community. I believe your mindset is in the minority, and I suggest you find a therapist to work on why you think all strangers are abusers.
Well, one thing is just a mindset thing: as long as you go in with kind intentions, there's almost no way anything can go wrong. Maybe the person you talk to will be bored or uninterested, but that is a good thing because a) you've chipped away at your social anxiety a little, and b) you can check them off your mental list of potential friends/contacts/whatever.
As for tactics: just ask questions. Everybody likes to talk about themselves. Eventually, you'll get good at finding out what interesting things people have going on in their lives (most people have something).
I like this answer because it starts with finding a setting that the other strangers chose likely to meet some strangers, instead of finding ways to lock some random person in a conversation. It's the first sign of basic respect that can, in my eye, excuse _a lot_ of awkwardness.
I'd actually encourage people to not use this crutch. It certainly helps with your own anxiety, but it also prevents you from reading social cues and learning from your mistakes.
The difference between confidence and arrogance is that confidence is rational belief in oneself, while arrogance is irrational belief in oneself. People think alcohol gives them confidence, but it might just be giving them arrogance.
Practice makes perfect. Have you tried going to things on meetup? It's sort of expected to meet strangers on there so it's a great environment to meet new people.
> deadlift's are quite dangerous for the untrained.
It's odd to me you picked deadlift to call out as dangerous.
The deadlift is certainly dangerous, but only in the sense that almost any large lift is dangerous for the untrained. But in my experience, the deadlift is a very natural motion for me and most people who I've seen get into lifting heavy. Fixing people's natural instincts is usually just pointing out a few cues--if you look up deadlift workshops most are are only an hour long. And if you are lifting too much weight, you just drop it.
The squat is a much more complicated motion: squat workshops are usaully full-day events, and the ways it breaks down tends to change as you add weight, so just getting the form is a long-term process. It's also a more dangerous lift if you have too much weight because you're under the bar.
I've seen people confuse clean and jerks with deadlifts. Maybe that's what's happening here? The biggest deadlift injury I've seen is scraped shins. It's hard to injure yourself without straps.
1. Hunching your back. This can cause slipped discs and some muscle issues.
2. Trying to controlled-lower the bar to the ground. Contrary to the policies of a lot of gyms, you should get to the top of your deadlift and basically drop: you might keep your hands on it to keep it from rolling away after it reaches the ground, but you definitely don't want to try to slow it down as you lower. If this is too loud for you, use bumper plates or a deadlift platform. This is pretty much guaranteed to cause you severe soreness and tightness as you go up in weight, which will likely clue you in that you are doing something wrong, but if you persist or jump right up to too high a weight, you can tear muscles or ligaments.
Both of these can cause pretty serious long-term injuries. But they're also both pretty easy to fix.
Agreed. I would also add that mobility issues are a short-cut to injury. You have to have great mobility in your hip flexors, IT bands, and ankles in order to perform deadlifts well (as well as any other lower body movement).
Sumo deadlifts are easy enough for a novice and are relatively lower impact. Form strictness is less of an issue for most people with these, and are a good starting point for deads.
Interesting, I looked it up, and apparently there is more disagreement on this than I was aware of.
If you read in depth on the subject, most people are saying it can fall pretty fast: controlling the bar seems to be mostly directed at making sure it takes a straight line down and doesn't hit your knees.
However, some people are saying that they lower it slower to get more work per rep.
All I will say is that my personal experience is that trying to over-control the lower has caused issues for me, and a few other people I've known who deadlifted, and these were always fixed by the cue, "Just keep your hands on it and otherwise let it drop."
And the flipside is definitely clear: if you watch any high-level deadlift competitions, tons of competitors will just completely let go of the bar, and I'm not aware of any injuries caused by doing this.
That said, I'd love to see actual data, as the only information I have found here (including my own) is just appeals to authority.
Even then not necessarily sufficient. Source: worked with a trainer on this for months after pulling my back at a crossfit years earlier and still having lingering effects. Sitting a ton creates, or can create, large hip inflexibility, tight hamstrings, etc. If budget and space isn't a material constraint, get a hexbar... it will lessen some of the impact on your back.
Deadlifting (and squatting) is arguably the most important full body exercise you can do, and the staple of every single marvel super hero body transformation, but the risk threshold is fairly high for a beginner.
If you want to stretch, try ROMWOD. A bit intense but likely the most impactful in terms of results.
Sitting tightens the calves too, especially if put your heels on the chair legs to prop them higher. Zero drop shoes, lowering every chair as much as possible, sitting on even lower things, and the "third world squat" all help. I saw my daughter squatting that way and it made me look it up. Adults should be able to do it too. Squatting desks are great. Also, dont do your introduction to CrossFit at a competitive box. Or don't do it at all and do something like starting strength or stronglifts.
There's a lot of back and forth in this thread about deadlifts "being the devil", so I'm glad you brought up flexibility. ROM gets more important the older you get. If you're a washed-up meathead (like myself) working on flexibility makes it easier to get out of the bed in the morning and some mornings it makes it _possible_ to get out of bed.
Doing yoga (yeah, I know) has fixed my hip flexor issues and got my lower body lifts to near PR levels again.
I train deadlifts by using the lightest possible weights and doing 2 sets of practice reps. Focus on keeping the spine stable, use legs to push the weight up. Don't add weight until you video record yourself and ensure your back and hips are on point. Back needs to not bend, and hips need to thrust forward, bar path vertical, close to the body as that's our center of mass. Ensure your sternum stays on the same plane as your stomach and neck, keep the upper back from rounding.
> deadlift's are quite dangerous for the untrained.
This is just false. Sure, the untrained should get some instruction on proper form, and start with manageable weights, as with any exercise. But deadlifting is the least dangerous of the power lifts, and far less dangerous than half the activities in the average WOD.
> Start with "Fix Rounded Shoulders" and "Fix Anterior Pelvic Tilt"
Definitely don't. These are non-scientific maladies invented by fitness personalities to convince you to pay for their specialized expertise to fix your particular biomechanical imperfections. You don't need perfect posture as a prerequisite to benefiting from deadlifting, or any kind of exercise. If you're physically capable of doing the movement, even if your version of the movement is imperfect and not adhering to the mechanical ideal, you're able to benefit from it.
Yeah, it seems weird to always couch squats/deadlifts in the disclaimer of "if trained / done correctly" and then get defensive when people point out that they are dangerous.
If you're starting out doing deadlifts then I'm almost certain you're at a gym where there's someone experienced enough to show you how to do a deadlift.
Alternatively, learn not to accept death and start that life goal of making it something that is a sad, rare event instead of part of the human nature.
This. A follow-up suggestion: try to truly understand the motivation and concerns behind the other person's arguments.
Useful tools are asking "Why?" multiple times to dig deeper. If the conversation seems to dead-end in a broad claim, ask "Can you give me a specific example of …? to continue your quest.
This is especially useful (and interesting!) when talking about politics.
I would never recommend deadlifts. Those are really dangerous and easy to do wrong. My friend shattered his spine doing deadlifts and needed surgery and months of recovery and he still can't bend down or sit in certain positions.
To be somewhat insensitive; it sounds like he was doing it wrong.
I'm recently on a kick to take my fitness more seriously; for me that means a three month stint with a personal trainer, bringing in a dietician soon, and planning on rounding out with a running coach.
As a note, all of this isn't that expensive - its just coming out of most peoples holiday and expensive treat budgets.
Doing it like this means you consult with real experts, who will tell you what you're doing wrong that you didn't think to ask about.
Exactly. If you're not focusing on form and don't have experience or guidance, almost any free weight lift can be dangerous. There are ways to mitigate the risk of deadlifts just like any other lift. Use a hexbar so the weight isn't entirely in front of you. Start learning incredibly light and focus on form. Wear a belt to help keep your core engaged. These plus so many other tips will mitigate the risks of one of the most effective full body lifts.
I don’t think this goes directly against the parent comment. They aren’t inherently dangerous, but they’re really easy to do wrong and cause a lot of damage.
The health risks of not doing deadlifts far outweigh the risk of doing them. It's the only thing that has resolved my back pain and improved my posture.
Disclaimer: hire a trainer to learn the correct form
It's not an absurd statement. Deadlifts improve so much musculature in your body which resolves/prevents injury. I had a 3+ year long knee injury from running and the only remedy was heavy squats. I was considering surgery and experimental stem cell injections since nothing was working. Thankfully I tried strength training before the alternatives.
It's important that people understand proper deadlift form though. It's a bit more complicated than just picking the barbell up off the ground.
Being weak and overweight is way more dangerous than deadlifts. Muscle mass helps build and maintain bone mass (depending on your age) which avoids broken bones, and osteoporosis later in life. Strong people get injured less and recover faster from injuries.
Yes, there are some ways deadlifts can go horribly wrong, but these are pretty avoidable.
I would totally recommend deadlifts because like anything if you don't learn how to do something properly you're going to do it wrong which could easily lead to disastrous results. Your friend is the exception, most people do deadlifts regularly no problem. If you've never done them before ask a trainer or someone who knows what they're doing for help, watch videos for form, take form videos of yourself, learn the movement, know when it's time to lower the weight or stop altogether and start slow with low weight. There are so many variations beyond the basic deadlift movement that if one doesn't feel right you have other options.
He was a regular in the gym for at least a few years, trying to loose weight. I don't know the weight he was lifting, but I suspect he moved to heavier weights before developing the proper technique.
The solution is to use a hex bar, which centres the weight under the hips and removes the health concerns related to poor technique. There is simply no exercise substitute for picking up really heavy things and everyone, particularly women, should do it regularly.
1. Trap bar deadlifts are not actually deadlifts. The defining characteristic of a deadlift is that the load is in front of your center of balance. Trap bar deadlifts are actually squats, because the load is centered on your center of balance. It's a fine exercise, I'm just trying to point out that it's far different from a standard deadlift than the naive impression many people form based on their appearance. I think many people try to swap in a trap bar because the starting position doesn't require as much hamstring mobility, but they are not interchangeable.
2. You can absolutely injure yourself doing trap bar deadlifts or any other type of squat with poor technique.
Not a squat and not interchangeable, that is true. They are their own thing and provide comparable benefits for non-powerlifters. Re safety, you are being pedantic. They are much safer than deadlifts.
Honesty is multi-layered and difficult. It is the art of conveying truth, or at least your truth.
But how can you convey truth if you don't really understand it? And how can you convey truth even if you understand it, if you don't understand what the listener understands when you speak of it?
It's not enough to use "correct" words, if they won't be understood. That's not honesty. That's how clever people take advantage; which is not honesty.
In these terms, I've never met anyone who seems like they could be entirely honest, even if they wanted to be.
But they can learn how to convey something closer to truth with practice and introspection and learning from others; so I'd say it's a skill.
I've met people who say they are honest, but a few minutes listening and from the inconsistent thinking it is apparent they are not even able to be honest within their own thoughts to themselves.
This is not a criticism because I think it applies to everyone, including myself. I think it's just part of the human condition.
To say a person is honest, then, is to say they desire to be honest; that their heart is in it, that they wish to convey truth and not to decieve, or even to risk misunderstandings, no matter who is listening. As noble as it is to desire this, it is quite something to master the art of doing so regularly and reliably.
Kinda. It's easy to just say whatever comes to your mind. Actual honesty requires introspection and self-criticism, learning honesty _to yourself_, if you will.
I see a lot of people shitting on deadlifts in this thread, but OHPs are way more risky. Great if you have great form and know your body, but still pretty damn risky.
I can see why you would think this. Lying successfully ultimately takes more work than being honest. Being honest is like swinging a golf club or tennis racket correctly. It feels awkward and unnatural at first, but eventually gets easier. Honesty definitely is a skill, though.
It's a habit. Personally, I think lying takes up way too much mental space. It's sort of like driving with the seat belt unbuckled; just makes me anxious.
It's a skill to be honest faster, and with less hesitation. The faster you can be honest, the more benefits you reap from it.
Kindness is similar. You want to be kinder faster, with less hesitation.
I think honesty is a skill by the dictionary definition as you can certainly do honesty badly, and learning to do it well is difficult and requires study and practice.
Nonsense. The skill of honesty is fighting your instinct to lie. If you actually try to always be honest, you'll discover that it's not as easy as you are claiming.
> Neither is kindness. (And forced kindness can be patronizing.)
Well, let me ask you, when you decided to leave a comment, did you make that decision with kindness in mind? :)
I will share one that has served me well for over 20 years: learn RDBMS and SQL. Learn normal forms, good schema design, and how to write complex queries. NoSQL adopters often avoided schemas like the plague and ended up with unmaintainable messes after a few years. I have seen more than a few NoSQL -> SQL conversions by now. Data is the most important thing in your app. Give it a great design.
Plus databases like Postgres have key/value and JSON data types. Once you are sure that is what you need it’s still there.
Rob Pikes 5th rule of programming: Data dominates.
To expand on this, learn about some of the neat things you can do within a SELECT statement.
Learn how the JOIN syntax works[0], and how to use OUTER JOINs.
Learn about WINDOW[1] functions and what kind of problems they can solve. In particular, many reporting needs can probably be solved with WINDOW functions instead of tracking state as you loop through a result set in application code.
Learn about Common Table Expressions[2]. While these usually aren't necessary, they can make your queries a LOT more readable.
The thing about learning this type of stuff is that it doesn't matter what database you learn on, you can use it on virtually any SQL database (possibly requiring minor syntax changes).
This. Specially if you work with Node.js. The JavaScript community is susceptible to ignoring all previous knowledge, experience, wisdom and tries to reinvent everything. I appreciate the energy, but it is often misguided. Understand the difference between merit and marketing bullshit (stack names that include Mongodb?). Understand context. If you are using Node.js in green field project, you are probably better off using Postgres. Understand Lindy effect. Sql isn't going away, but the vendor specific query language that you are spending time with and hoping will replace sql is probably going to.
Do you have any recommendations on how to learn RDBMS/SQL? I'm currently using NoSQL at my day job (and agree with your points on it), but have struggled to find a good side project to really dig into RDBMS/SQL. I have used SQL briefly in the past (side projects/class projects) but I'm looking to really cement the skill in my mind.
Agreed, though interviews seem to focus on trendy framework of the month plus some random algorithm that I learned 20 years ago then forgot as I never needed it.
Any references in particular you recommend to learn schema design, particularly with an orientation towards performance (e.g. for high-volume sites)?
A couple years ago I got dinged on a take-home project that involved building a db schema, but didn't get any specific feedback on my work, and it's sort of haunted me to this day (especially since SQL is one of my primary languages)
Although it is 10 years old, not much has changed in the universe of SQL basics. If I were to capture the essence of good schema design it is mostly about keeping data normalized until you have a really good reason not to. Denormalization is almost always an optimization choice.
And before you optimize you should have basic things covered, like indexes, etc. I have fixed more than one "slow" query by simply adding indicies to everything people are joining on. So, check out a tool like pgAdmin that has a cool query planner optimization feature. What is happening under the hood doesn't matter a /lot/ when learning SQL, but it is really insightful to see how indicies of various types impact performance. I believe this book basically covers it all from a theoretical perspective. Optimization and indices aren't super well covered in SQL for smarties, which make sense, it isn't about optimization but is a little higher level.
There are /tons/ of data sets out there now a days. CSV files, etc. Find some interesting data and start challenging yourself with interesting ways to design that data into a database. I actually design most of my SQL databases using an ORM these days, but, my bedrock knowledge of SQL makes it very efficient and I can avoid committing "SQL sins" (denormalization) prematurely. You will be surprised at how much you can learn on simple data sets :)
Take a look at the "Relational Design Theory"[1] mini-course on Stanford/Lagunitas. Though I had used SQL for years, I took it as part of the early MOOC on databases that was offered in 2011. It is likely to match up with the intuition you already have about what works well in practice, but it can still be a challenge and rewarding to formalize your intuition and understanding.
The way the course is broken up now, you may need some of the other sections [2] like Intro to Relational Databases or Relational Algebra as prerequisites, since I do not remember if it used SQL syntax.
Reminder, Stanford is taking down this course on March 26th, 2020. They let you download courses that are setup for download (this course is not, unfortunately).
>NoSQL adopters often ... ended up with unmaintainable messes
learning SQL seems much more straightforward than learning NoSQL. personally I'd like to find a good resource that will help me use a non-relational database without creating a mess
> I'd like to find a good resource that will help me use a non-relational database without creating a mess
My plan for the day when someone requires me to use NoSQL is to say that postgres supports JSON/JSONB perfectly so I can use that as a NoSQL database and then use the relational part to keep me out of the mess...
Normalization is a thing in NoSQL and SQL. When you end up with data skip and tons of duplication it can get pretty crazy. Being able to normalize data fits with most data models so much better because data is mostly a collection of related bits of information.
Learn how to make more friends.
Communicate. Learn how to talk with people, how to be adaptive and contextual.
Learn about yourself as much as you can, either via introspection or from other people. Learn what your values are, and what makes them satisfied.
"You are your own ally, when you make yourself an enemy even though you should trust yourself, you become the victim hit the hardest".
Learn agency. Remember that you are a person, and you can take initiative.
Learn that another person's behavior toward you is just a reflection of their relationship with themselves rather than a statement about your value as a person.
Learn to genuinely tell people that you love them. People are precious.
Last of all, actually learn how to use knowledge of all of the above in your situation.
I've come to believe that introspection is the one true real superpower.
Here is an exercise for the reader. Every year on your birthday, write down what you "know" to be true about life, work, love, politics, money, meaning, happiness, environment, etc. and then seal it. Now read what you wrote last year and see how dumb you used to be.
Right now I’m completing an “In My 20’s” document tracking numbers of big things (is: how many countries visited, music festivals attended, pieces of furniture built, jobs had, dollars saved, etc), feelings, observations, lessons and questions.
It’s pretty powerful. I can track my progress, see the speedbumps, but I think the biggest thing is that despite having all this data, it is not predictive.
I have zero idea what my thirties will look like. Will my goals and priorities change? If so, in what direction and how much?
The biggest takeaway for me in this process is really wrapping my head around how I have no control over tomorrow, only the actions I take today, and that whatever happens, that too shall pass.
This comment, along with another on this thread and finally by a few statements from a friend made me want to pursue writing a server app to help with this endeavor. I always say Ok I'm going to start writing and introspecting on my life, but always quit shortly thereafter. My plan is to have a server run cron jobs to text / email me to help facilitate this writing and introspection
I don't think it's good to regard it as "how dumb you were". I used to do something similar to this but this screwed me up a bit mentally, leading to a big lack of confidence.
How can I be confident or feel good about my decision if I am currently "dumb"?
You're not dumb if you make the best choices you can with the information you have at the time.
Sorry, I mean "dumb" in jest. The point is that introspection allows you to see what you knew based on what was available and what was short sighted and biased. I think that taking the time to consider decisions or positions at all is a huge step forward.
Some less usual things people do that I think are very high value but boring (hence why they're not usually done):
- Understanding taxes, the importance of savings and baseline personal finance literacy.
- Reading the political programs of a few parties running for elections in you country
- Reading a few yearly report / financial statements for a public company, an NGO/non-profit/state agency/local government and trying to understand them
- Reading a few top research papers in a field you're interested in and work through them
Actually getting a proper handle on my finances has been the single thing I did last year which has contributed most to my general mental wellbeing. Historically I've been terrible at it, I'm paid incredibly well compared to most of the population, but because I wasn't consciously budgeting I'd end up running down to the last few pounds in my bank account every month.
Putting an effort into setting actual budgets at the start of the month means I'm shifted from impulse buying silly things on the basis that I have the money at the moment to holding off on those and saving some money. (And admittedly still making silly impulse purchases, but with solid data that I can afford to do so and still have enough money left over for food).
I can highly recommend the ridiculously named You Need A Budget (https://www.youneedabudget.com/) if you're not sure what you're doing, since they have a ton of content around how to go about budgeting. Even if you don't buy the software, give their educational material a read.
> Historically I've been terrible at it, I'm paid incredibly well compared to most of the population, but because I wasn't consciously budgeting I'd end up running down to the last few pounds in my bank account every month.
I'll pile on a recommendation for YNAB. This sounds exactly like me. Having a better handle on my money and where it's going has definitely improved my mental health this year.
> Reading the political programs of a few parties running for elections in you country
I too recommend reading more fiction in 2020! (Sorry, I was just a little bit struck with how little this would matter in some countries, mine included).
Political parties are highly skilled at telling people what they want to hear. Reading their programs will keep you current on what people want to hear.
If it doesn't matter in your country, you could look at the voting records of the people running for leadership positions, and thereby separate their words from their actions.
Any tips on the political reading piece? I've found it challenging or a waste of time because either it is hard to find concise info from a variety of candidates that is in an easy to compare format, or I distrust the candidate to actually stick to their platform (vs just saying whatever they need to get elected).
> Understanding taxes, the importance of savings and baseline personal finance literacy.
Ok, what could be a good resource for this? The problem with finances is alike eating: You get so much talk from shaddy "experts" that is hard to see where the good info is.
The Reddit r/personalfinance sub is a well moderated place (no shady experts shilling nonsense). Take a look at their wiki[1] for a good jumping off point.
There are also country specific pf reddits listed in their wiki if you're not in the US.
The basic jist of things is:
1. Create a budget, go through the last few months of bank statements and categorise your spending
2. Pay down your debt (starting with the highest rate first)
3. Save 3-6 months expenses (which you know from your budget) as an emergency fund. (This does not need to all be accessable immediately just available, say 80% in a savings account with 30 days notice)
4. 2 & 3 should be done at the same time, it might not be mathematically the best but paying all your debt off and then being fired/made redundant without a cushion is not good.
Then once you've got a handle on the pf stuff, think about r/financialindependence or r/fire
And I'm currently reading a book called "Ultralearning" by a guy called Scott H Young who I imagine is the type of person to be on hacker news and be like "Hey, thanks for recommending my book!"
The book so far is great, there are certainly some principles which may seem obvious but in reality they need to be acknowledged and used effectively. Overall it's a clear read and gives a pretty clear way to get started on learning a ton of things in a short amount of time.
No shortcuts though, still a ton of effort involved.
Highly recommend the "Learning How to Learn" Coursera course. I took it late last year and believe it is a must for anyone interested in continual learning. It can be cheesy at times and seem like common sense, but the material is highly applicable to your daily life.
- First-principles based reading. I fell into the easy trap of just reading business books that cover tactics. Read biographies of people who've accomplished a lot. Read how computers and electronics work at a more fundamental level, not just how to code. Basically, just apply some conscious thought to the kinds of books you read, and don't think of books as an instruction manual for right now. They're part of your general education.
- If you're a developer, become friends with the sales team at your work. Seeing things through a less technical lens will make you much more effective.
- Learn the mental skill of endurance. If you can walk 2 miles, try 20. Once you can cycle 20, you can do 100. The difference is mental more than physical.
I have a lot of trouble finding first principles resources. For instance, I'm trying to build up my expertise in business intelligence / analytics. I have found it basically impossible to find anything that isn't at the "for dummies" and / or temporarily dominant technology level. Do you have strategies for finding these kinds of books?
I once rowed a "half marathon" on an erg (~21km) on a whim (with a "slow and steady" strategy). It was amazing to me how much of finishing it was mental - especially the last third.
I'm trying to write more! I forget where I originally read it, but I think Ben Horowitz said something to the effect of "Clear thinking is best expressed in writing, so you can refer back to it later and see if your logic was correct." Been blowing up Confluence at work like a fuckin' fiend, and been blogging a lot more on my personal site.
I don't have any objective measures for this, but I think it's helped me a lot - it gets my head straight about the "why" of actions I've taken. That's valuable, if not terribly measureable!
Learn a another human language. You don’t have to be good at it or even able to converse. Languages are systems of thinking as much as they are systems of communication. Some thoughts only make sense in a given language! The process of learning a language builds cognitive skills and perhaps fights cognitive decline. If you have absolutely no “ear” for human language start with Esperanto and work your way to additional languages from there.
I was going to leave this comment. I am about ~2 months into study Japanese and I love it. I get up early before work, and make some coffee and study for about an hour and it is one of my favorite parts of the day.
I am still very much in the beginning stages but the satisfaction of being able to read or understand something that was previously so foreign, is incredible.
As a fellow language lover I second the suggestion, but not the reasoning. What's your evidence for "some thoughts only make sense in a given language"? From what I've read, this isn't agreed upon in the linguistic community. As for Esperanto, it's heavily biased towards Western speakers, so it wouldn't necessarily be easy to start with for someone whose native language is non-Western.
On the most superficial level:
It's easier to talk about snow or numbers in languages that have more words for these concepts than in languages that have less.
Languages with lots of words for snow tend to be used places where there is lots of snow to talk about. Languages with few words for snow tend to be used in places that don't get much snow and thus don't need to talk about it.
In short, if you need to talk about any subject learn the local language (whatever that is) so you can talk to the locals about the topic.
Having recently listened to John McWhorter's lectures on the history of human language, I was surprised to find out that there is no reliable evidence for the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis (that language affects thought). The Wikipedia article on linguistic relativism states:
> The strongest form of the theory is linguistic determinism, which holds that language entirely determines the range of cognitive processes. The hypothesis of linguistic determinism is now generally agreed to be false.
English includes a lot more words than most people use regularly. I imagine that's the same in any language. Just expanding one's working vocabulary in one's native language would probably be quite helpful for thinking and expressing oneself more fluently—not that learning another language isn't valuable.
I'm told that English will create words for where other language create grammar. (which can be anything, from a new tense to prefixes to other things I cannot imagine because I don't know the language)
> Languages are systems of thinking as much as they are systems of communication. Some thoughts only make sense in a given language!
This sounds like the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis [1], and it's been refuted, by and large. There's a good pop-sci book examining it [2], and it concludes that there is really only instance where language clearly influences world view, and that is that in the Guugu Yimithirr languages: people don't use left, right, front, back, but the cardinal directions north, south, east, west (as in, "there's an ant on your western leg"), and that does appear to give them a superior sense of direction.
youtube. Find out how to translate a term you are interested in to the target language and search that term. You will find a ton of videos of someone in your target language doing something of interest to you. For example "Weld" in Spanish is "Soldar" - throw that into the search box and I get plenty of interesting videos of people teaching how to weld, which is a topic I'm interested in so I enjoy watching them and I have some idea of what they must be talking about. (Of course some of them are giving bad advice, but I'm there to learn the language...) Don't forget to look at the related videos from the videos you watch to branch out topics.
You need to find your own topic of interest, but it is a great way to learn from native speakers as they would speak.
Assimil is the best program I've found so far for learning a foreign language. The way you learn the language feels very natural to me. I used their book but they've recently released an app which may be good.
I also recommend Pimsleur as a supplement to work on your accent and listening skills. Don't let the limited vocabulary misguide you...Pimsleur teaches and emphasizes a lot of very useful language patterns/structures. Great tool in the language learning toolbox
In my view, apps are ok to train vocabulary, but not really to learn the grammar and usage patterns. As such, some languages might lend themselves somewhat better to learn via apps (Malay), while others are less suitable (Russian, Japanese).
Find native speakers and talk to them. Write down words you don't rememberand put them in Anki (or Pleco flash cards if you're learning Mandarin) and drill yourself on them daily.
I only ever try reading latin. It does massage my brain.. the order of words, the way ideas combine slightly differently at many layers.. it does tickle the brain deeply.
Even knowing alphabet (cyrillic is "fun" one) does stimulate.
I'd second the idea of learning a non-Latin alphabet. Cyrillic is fun and many English speakers would only be a few hours' study away from recognising and sounding out every character. Korean is surprisingly easy to grasp and has the bonus of appearing to be quite complex. Even just plain old Greek is familiar-yet-not enough to be a challenge.
In terms of ones I personally don't know but would enjoy - Georgian script is beautiful, and Armenian looks cool too. I know enough to suggest steering clear of Arabic and Hebrew unless you're willing to commit to learning the languages themselves though. I'd be happy to be proven wrong on this though!
Knowing the alphabets themselves aren't really practical unless you're going to the country (and even then only if you can then match the sounds to some words) so it's only really a little party trick or for personal satisfaction.
I don't know the numbers but I would assume there is more literature in French and Spanish by now, and more diverse.
To learn a language effectively it's important to be able to immerse yourself in it. Youtube with auto transcripts, Netflix w/ subtitles, news in written form, chatting with native speakers in a language exchange by texting or skype, tutoring, etc. Once your reach A1-A2 level by any traditional mean, you will have a lot of options to get to fluency.
After trying a few different options I have ended up on the (seemingly very uncool) Pimsleur program (available for cash lump sum or monthly. I am paying monthly). For me, one of the biggest challenges in French is how a lot of words get blended together and are spoken very fast. It's easy to hear what seem like new words, but they're actually things I know, but spoken as native speakers do. This listening concept is extremely important for me with French in particular. To contrast, I speak Swahili too and learned it differently, where I wouldn't say there's as much of a demand for emphasis on listening to native speakers.
Some other alternatives I tried first include:
Chatterbug: Nice combination of tools/methods, but expensive and I'd need to pay a much higher price to get the kind of listening I need. A side note on these guys that's relevant for this site: they do a lot of ruby/rails stuff and have a nice graphql gem called cacheql.
French Uncovered: Interesting idea and fun method of learning, but the "book" material wasn't as long as I'd have liked and I would have liked to do a lot more listening. The self-study written materials are decent, but felt slow and like a forced way of trying to cram information into my head, where I personally do better getting that stuff naturally.
Language Transfer: Great free option, but doesn't have native French speakers and the French course doesn't good too far.
I've also done the apps like Duolingo, but the listening and speaking isn't what they do best. I basically get great at Duolingo, but not at being able to use the language.
Spanish language learner here (five years invested). Some generally applicable tools/programs I'd recommend are: Anki (or any other SRS flashcard app), Glossika (expensive but worth it), and Clozemaster (free). Glossika and Clozemaster work better af
- Build something. A new workbench for your office. Fix up an old car. Build a pull-up bar in your garage. Use your hands, cut some wood and metal, and treat yourself to a new tool or two. Do this with every project and you will have a nice tool collection before you know it.
- Learn to take pictures on a manual camera. You can do this with a modern automatic camera if it has a manual mode. Learn about ISO, f-stop, and shutter speed and the interplay of those three variables. There's a fantastic multi-part tutorial on Reddit that can help you learn these things. I don't have the link handy but you can Google for it.
- Set a goal of cooking for yourself at least two nights a week and eating leftovers two nights a week. Buy a binder and some clear inserts and start to put together your own book of favorite recipes.
- Take a nightly walk.
- Listen to classical music. This one didn't come to me until my 40s but I finally realized: there's a reason that this music has been popular for 300 years. Opera is great, too. Listen to Mozart's "The Marriage of Figaro". Download the KUSC app and listen to the amazing Metropolitan Opera broadcast every Saturday morning at 10 AM Pacific.