The Slackification of the American Home • Hacker News Board

Re: The Slackification of the American Home

#51

Post by Gene_Parmesan » Thu, Jul 25, 2019, 5:42 AM UTC

garmaine wrote: post #44

coderintherye wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tools are helpful for being intentional, but so is instruction. Regular meditation and listening to buddhist instructors can help you along this path. If your intention is to get better at being more intentional, then you are already halfway there!

We shouldn’t need religion for this.

Meditation isn't religious. Zen-style mindfulness is proven to be beneficial for stress, anxiety, and even some indicators of physical health. It just so happens that most of the best meditation instructors are Buddhist (to some degree).

Re: The Slackification of the American Home

#52

Post by jacobolus » Thu, Jul 25, 2019, 5:42 AM UTC

celim307 wrote: post #42

rusteh1 wrote: post #34

What does it say about us as a society in which a pre-high school child needs to use a productivity suite to manage their lives? The answer here is not to provide more software to allow 11 year olds to eek out a few extra percentage points of productivity. The answer is to expect less of 11 year olds.

My cousin is raising 2 kids in a major urban center. Discussions of what pre-K they needed to prepare for starts around the time they are able to independently walk. Social calanders are decided weeks in advance. Play dates are heavily documented on social media and 'bucket-lists' of rites of passage such as photo session at a historical landmark, baseball stadium, etc are turned into holiday cards. My cousin might b…

This is more a “certain type of rich people” thing than an “urban center” thing, I think. Picture-perfect boring sheltered childhoods are common in the suburbs, and there are plenty of city kids who control their own time.

Re: The Slackification of the American Home

#53

Post by avip » Thu, Jul 25, 2019, 5:43 AM UTC

stackzero wrote: post #28

The next step is to open source your family as a project on Github

### Call for maintainers

This family could use some help. If you're an experienced parent, and have some extra time, please contact us.

Re: The Slackification of the American Home

#54

Post by dependsontheq » Thu, Jul 25, 2019, 5:43 AM UTC

fwip wrote: post #41

paxys wrote: post #25

Every family in the world uses IM, and Slack isn't very different from any of the hundred other options out there for group messaging. So not too surprising that families are using it. Similarly all the other software mentioned can be used for simple calendaring, TODO lists, reminders etc., all of which most people here undoubtedly use in some form to manage their life. It's just the association of these brands with…

A lot of families don't even have texting, let alone IM each other regularly on their personal computing devices. Please don't generalize your experiences so recklessly.

That’s not realistic, messengers are much more ubiquitous than any other kind of software and are mostly used in a family/friends network. We had our local digital festival last week an we had school classes teaching seniors WhatsApp.

Re: The Slackification of the American Home

#55

Post by TheSpiceIsLife » Thu, Jul 25, 2019, 5:44 AM UTC

avip wrote: post #37

rusteh1 wrote: post #34

What does it say about us as a society in which a pre-high school child needs to use a productivity suite to manage their lives? The answer here is not to provide more software to allow 11 year olds to eek out a few extra percentage points of productivity. The answer is to expect less of 11 year olds.

Expect different, not necessarily less. The context is obvious: Parents get less house time, do more house-irrelevant things during said time, and most importantly - the outside is more hostile, so more and more kids life is organized and initiated by parents.

Where is the evidence that suggests outside is more hostile?

Aren't our cities, generally speaking, safer now than they were at most times in the past?

Re: The Slackification of the American Home

#56

Post by m_mueller » Thu, Jul 25, 2019, 5:47 AM UTC

_pmf_ wrote: post #50

m_mueller wrote: post #36

People, please, think about what you want your children to become. Do you want easily employed drones that just as easily can get outsourced or replaced by AI, or do you want independent and creative thinkers? Creativity needs space and time. Extend both increasingly, with age. It's sad to me that American life requires you to manage their time - elsewhere they can just independently go to school, first on foot then…

> do you want independent and creative thinkers That's probably the worst you can do to a child. It's setting them up for unhappiness.

Just give em space and see what happens, don't create a damn curriculum from school out to sleep.

Re: The Slackification of the American Home

#57

Post by avip » Thu, Jul 25, 2019, 5:47 AM UTC

komali2 wrote: post #49

avip wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think that's a very subjective observation. It's really challenging to let urban kids be unsupervised (and, in some places - it's borderline illegal)

I mean, maybe? Walk around Brooklyn and you'll see tons of unsupervised kids. Seem to be doing fine to me.

YMMV. How old are said kids?

Re: The Slackification of the American Home

#58

Post by [deleted] » Thu, Jul 25, 2019, 5:50 AM UTC

celim307 wrote: post #42

rusteh1 wrote: post #34

What does it say about us as a society in which a pre-high school child needs to use a productivity suite to manage their lives? The answer here is not to provide more software to allow 11 year olds to eek out a few extra percentage points of productivity. The answer is to expect less of 11 year olds.

My cousin is raising 2 kids in a major urban center. Discussions of what pre-K they needed to prepare for starts around the time they are able to independently walk. Social calanders are decided weeks in advance. Play dates are heavily documented on social media and 'bucket-lists' of rites of passage such as photo session at a historical landmark, baseball stadium, etc are turned into holiday cards. My cousin might b…

[deleted]

Re: The Slackification of the American Home

#59

Post by ubercow » Thu, Jul 25, 2019, 5:55 AM UTC

mistermann wrote: post #13

ubercow wrote: post #4

Trello along with Airtable are invaluable to keeping my life organized.

How do you use airtable? I keep coming across it in comments but would like to hear some personal use cases.

A couple of big ones I have are:

Video games, movies, books, tv shows I've watched/played or want to watch/play, what platform they are on, if I've bought them already

Brands and blends of tea I've tried, want to try, tasting notes, preferences for brewing amounts and times

Some are just super fancy spreadsheets like serial numbers for expensive electronics I own and when I purchased them.

Re: The Slackification of the American Home

#60

Post by seszett » Thu, Jul 25, 2019, 5:58 AM UTC

megabl8 wrote: post #48

djaychela wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My kids' school has just been taken over (in the UK) by an academy group whose other local schools were telling 8 and 9 year old that they needed to know what career they were going to have so they could study the right subjects... I'm 47 and I still don't really know what I want to do with my life. How the hell does an 8 year old?

Is it a bad thing to get kids thinking about this? I mean, this is what they have to do when they select what subjects they want to do. This has happened all over the world for at least 30 years.

Kids at 9 are absolutely not able to choose what career they will actually want to do when they are old enough to work. They just don't know enough of the world to make this choice.

What they have to do at this age is discover as much of the world as possible in order to be able to make a better choice later on.