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Ask HN: What's the most life-changing blog post you've ever read?

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Re: Ask HN: What's the most life-changing blog post you've ever read?

#371

Post by no_time »

beltsazar wrote: post #98
shaneos wrote: post #20

Aphantasia: How it feels to be blind in your mind By Blake Ross https://m.facebook.com/nt/screen/?params=%7B%22note_id%22%3A... Before reading this post I had no idea I had aphantasia and thought everyone else was the same as me, unable to see anything when they closed their eyes. This helped me understand myself and my relationships so much better than ever before. Thanks Blake!

What's even crazier is that not everyone has an internal monologue: https://www.insidemymind.me/blog/brain-stuff/today-i-learned... If aphantasia is "internally blind", this one is "internally mute and deaf". I wonder if anyone in the world has both conditions. That would be interesting to understand how they think.

I wonder if there is a correlation between having an internal monologue and higher levels of social inhibition.

Re: Ask HN: What's the most life-changing blog post you've ever read?

#372

Post by komlenic »

28903jf90wedf wrote: post #250
ripitrust wrote: post #46

https://blog.tjcx.me/p/consume-less-create-more This article inspired me on two things : 1) Lots of the things I do in everyday life is just to consume: buying, watching, following, etc. These things either consume my money, or my time. These things make me feel good, but it does not generate real value. In order to get rich, I need to create things. I also start to realize that great people are great because they st…

I don't understand this worldview. I guess appreciating art or music, or bullshitting with friends, or just enjoying some time off with a beer and a movie is lumped into the evils of consumption? And by replacing all of this filthy filthy idleness with endless creation just to be creating, we... achieve enlightenment? I guess it seems like this author is driving himself to write and write not so much because he loves…

You're looking at it way too absolutely. The author's point wasn't to say you need to spend every waking minute creating and all other time is wasted. They/we should consider the ratio of time spent creating(and doing -- not all doing is creating), vs passively consuming. In the modern technological world, there are more ways to fill your entire existence with consumption than ever before. The point was to be conscious of that and achieve a balance, because creation/doing tends to have more lasting personal value.

The title is literally "Consume less, create more," not "Consume none, create always".

Re: Ask HN: What's the most life-changing blog post you've ever read?

#374

Post by CRConrad »

BeetleB wrote: post #300
2OEH8eoCRo0 wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>I realized that reading a book was really just like reading Reddit—both were consumptive activitives. I disagree on this but I love and agree with the premise of the blog post. Comparing reddit to Moby Dick could not be further off. reddit (or any similar site) is a shill/bad actor/agitator/troll cesspool full of memes and clickbait. It is important to learn to tell good shit from bad shit. Consume things produced b…

Comparing Reddit to one book is not a proper comparison. Instead, compare Reddit as a whole to books as a whole. Most books are not worth reading. > It is important to learn to tell good shit from bad shit That would apply within Reddit, as well. Find the good subreddits and the good comments.

> That would apply within Reddit, as well.

And HN.

Re: Ask HN: What's the most life-changing blog post you've ever read?

#375

Post by jonaustin »

codemonkey-zeta wrote: post #256
certeoun wrote: post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Reminds me of stoicism. If it's outside your control, don't bother too much. Face your challenges and do the best you can, being a better you.

Great wisdom presents itself with different faces to different people throughout time, but maintains the same essence. That's what makes it wisdom. It is eternal and unchanging, it just takes perspective to see. I had exactly the same epiphany while reading Meditations. I thought, "wow, this sounds an awful lot like the Buddhism I've read/heard about". Again, after reading Ralph Waldo Emerson I saw the same wisdom wi…

This idea is called the Perennial Philosophy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perennial_philosophy

Aldous Huxley wrote a book about it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Perennial_Philosophy

Re: Ask HN: What's the most life-changing blog post you've ever read?

#376

Post by anm89 »

honkdaddy wrote: post #56
anm89 wrote: post #6

Not really life changing but still my favorite blog post of all time https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/09/30/i-can-tolerate-anythin...

Scott's writing definitely absolutely life changing for me.

Yeah I guess I agree. It's in a pretty intangible way but he has definitely influenced my thinking.

Re: Ask HN: What's the most life-changing blog post you've ever read?

#377

Post by skr5 »

ema wrote: post #128

7 years ago I had just aborted an internship, my foray into being an employed adult, because I found myself unable to deal with disagreements. Contrary to my naive hope that the confidence boost from being a Professional Software Developer(tm) would solve all my emotional problems I now knew that my limitations would follow me around anywhere I would go. But I had no idea how to change and was too stuck in my own anx…

Inspiring. Thanks for sharing.

Re: Ask HN: What's the most life-changing blog post you've ever read?

#378

Post by codemonkey-zeta »

jonaustin wrote: post #375
codemonkey-zeta wrote: post #256

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Great wisdom presents itself with different faces to different people throughout time, but maintains the same essence. That's what makes it wisdom. It is eternal and unchanging, it just takes perspective to see. I had exactly the same epiphany while reading Meditations. I thought, "wow, this sounds an awful lot like the Buddhism I've read/heard about". Again, after reading Ralph Waldo Emerson I saw the same wisdom wi…

This idea is called the Perennial Philosophy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perennial_philosophy Aldous Huxley wrote a book about it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Perennial_Philosophy

Brilliant! Thank you for pointing this out, I was unaware of this notion. From the first link,

> "In the early 19th century the Transcendentalists propagated the idea of a metaphysical Truth and universalism"

So it seems it was not a coincidence Emerson stuck out to me when I first read him (Emerson was a foundational Transcendentalist).

Re: Ask HN: What's the most life-changing blog post you've ever read?

#379

Post by filipsch »

Not necessarily the most life-changing blog post, but one I'll always remember:

https://waitbutwhy.com/2014/06/taming-mammoth-let-peoples-op...

The light tone and funny images make it stick, up to the point that it became part of my vocabulary; when my SO is worrying too much about what other people think, I mimick a mammoth trunk and she immediately gets it, and vice versa.

Re: Ask HN: What's the most life-changing blog post you've ever read?

#380

Post by trilinearnz »

brundolf wrote: post #232

https://kotaku.com/we-are-explorers-in-search-of-mystery-in-... This one crystallized for me a feeling that I'd always felt deep inside but never known how to express. I'd found it in virtual worlds, sure, but it goes far beyond that. Even beyond fiction. This longing for something beyond the fold, something that can never be reduced or pinned down or fully understood, a wormhole in understanding that always begs you…

Very interesting ideas here. A similar one that has stuck with me is my notion of "personalisation" in a game. The idea is that your experience with the game is a combination of two things: a) the game itself and what it chooses to show to you, and b) the imagination that you unconciously employ in order to fill in the blanks of the experience.

This is more obvious when you think of older games with very coarse-grained levels of detail, that essentially require you to imagine what is actually going on. Conversely, it is destroyed in modern AAA games which are over-designed and developed by a team of hundreds to the N-th degree.

How well the game surfs this edge between "just enough detail" is more an art than a science, and you often find it games that had some kind of developmental problem that prevented a coherent vision from being thoroughly implemented.

Take Quake, for example, in comparison to Quake II. For this reason, the former will forever hold a special place in my heart. I can vividly imaging myself sitting beside the watery bridge in E1M1, or leaning up against the bricks in the START map. It's truly that ingrained on my psyche, partly because I spent so much time in that world due to the modding scene, and partly because the game never tried to "tell" me anything about the environment, or try to instruct me as to how I should and should not interpret it. It was left up to me, and that made it more special than any designer could have imagined, because ultimately I became that designer.

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