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I need to stop being boring

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Re: I need to stop being boring

#21

Post by chii »

nonrandomstring wrote: post #16

> So what went wrong? My gut feeling is that I am boring. A lot of pain seems to come from a poor vocabulary about feelings. What is boring? It's a weak and flattened word like the feelings it's used about. Do you mean avolition, acedia, irascibility, dissatisfaction, insensibility, repression, discouragement, ambivalence, anxiety? The Psychology of the Emotions by Neal Burton is a fair place to continue the introspe…

> All progress depends upon the unreasonable man. You need to stop being reasonable

and yet there's an unreasonable man invading another country right now.

I dont think progress depends on the unreasonable man. It depends on the reasonable man who would put in the sweat and blood, but might be inspired or paid by the unreasonable man.

Re: I need to stop being boring

#22

Post by buro9 »

> I lost my creativity and the sense of wonder I used to have in childhood. I am no longer curious because I am settled for the world as it is. I accept things the way they are instead of imagining how they could be.

I agree with this, or rather... I think we need to live life full of hope and wonder. That when we do, we deeply experience things, and we get excited by things. Excitement itself is infectious, it brings other people along.

Somewhere in there is an essence of an idea, that to build something that makes someone else excited such that they want to use it, we must be excited by it and full of hope for what it can be and wonder for what it is. To even present things to others, such as a thing we've been working on, we must feel that excitement and express it.

I don't agree with the "I'm boring" sentiment, no-one is boring. But having hope and wonder can fuel excitement and that is a very good way to get others excited too.

Re: I need to stop being boring

#23

Post by rhn_mk1 »

chii wrote: post #21
nonrandomstring wrote: post #16

> So what went wrong? My gut feeling is that I am boring. A lot of pain seems to come from a poor vocabulary about feelings. What is boring? It's a weak and flattened word like the feelings it's used about. Do you mean avolition, acedia, irascibility, dissatisfaction, insensibility, repression, discouragement, ambivalence, anxiety? The Psychology of the Emotions by Neal Burton is a fair place to continue the introspe…

> All progress depends upon the unreasonable man. You need to stop being reasonable and yet there's an unreasonable man invading another country right now. I dont think progress depends on the unreasonable man. It depends on the reasonable man who would put in the sweat and blood, but might be inspired or paid by the unreasonable man.

That's a mutual dependence then. It's still dependent on the unreasonable man.

I look at this in terms of variance: there are few ways to be reasonable, but many to be unreasonable. Many of the unreasonable ones lead nowhere, but a few lead to progress. That's similar to the concept of antifragility.

Re: I need to stop being boring

#24

Post by arvinsim »

chii wrote: post #21
nonrandomstring wrote: post #16

> So what went wrong? My gut feeling is that I am boring. A lot of pain seems to come from a poor vocabulary about feelings. What is boring? It's a weak and flattened word like the feelings it's used about. Do you mean avolition, acedia, irascibility, dissatisfaction, insensibility, repression, discouragement, ambivalence, anxiety? The Psychology of the Emotions by Neal Burton is a fair place to continue the introspe…

> All progress depends upon the unreasonable man. You need to stop being reasonable and yet there's an unreasonable man invading another country right now. I dont think progress depends on the unreasonable man. It depends on the reasonable man who would put in the sweat and blood, but might be inspired or paid by the unreasonable man.

>It depends on the reasonable man who would put in the sweat and blood, but might be inspired or paid by the unreasonable man.

It's just the same thing as parent poster said, just with extra steps.

Re: I need to stop being boring

#25

Post by XorNot »

superasn wrote: post #11

I don't think you're boring but I do think your brain is feeling cheated for putting in all this work over and over and not getting the dopamine rewards for it afterwards (which in most cases is often praise or money). I think you need some small wins to keep your motivation going. I read this quote here on hacker news which was very eye opening for me at the time(1). This idealogy of using small wins while you're ch…

Messing around with OpenID connect for a web service template has proven to be a mistake for me in this regard.

A template has no immediate utility, and OAuth2 and OpenID are nightmare protocols where dreams go to die.

Re: I need to stop being boring

#27

Post by codingdave »

I'm not making the connections in the article - business success isn't about whether or not you are boring. Neither is happiness. They even said they were happy. Just not motivated. But living a simple and happy life is not a bad thing. Being boring is different than being bored. Enjoying boring hobbies is still enjoying your world. I don't need to entertain others to live a fulfilling life.

So if the author has problems they want to fix with their work or life, by all means fix them. But "being boring" is not a problem in and of itself.

Re: I need to stop being boring

#28

Post by shisisms »

Broadly the core of western psychotherapy, the rediscovery of self; free of psychic oppression/external forces.

Two wonderfully relevant quotes from Adam Philips, that the author may gain from:

> “For the child's curiosity (''this child who can be deranged by hope and anticipation -- by ice cream,'' as Phillips puts it) is the grail for which the adult yearns. When all hope of recovering it, or at least glimpsing it glowing in the distance, vanishes, there is only a terrible emptiness. ''Ecstasy of opportunity'' gives way to a corrosive loss of interest in life.”

> "As always, Phillips prefers not to be too direct. (...) Phillips' own writings are prime examples of what we can achieve if we put aside, at least for a moment, the overly sensible -- and set out to discover what really moves us."

Re: I need to stop being boring

#29

Post by codingdave »

napolux wrote: post #26
shaftoe444 wrote: post #6

Archive for others getting a database error: https://web.archive.org/web/20220406064123/https://patzhong....

2022 and we still have to see WordPress Database Errors.

2022 and we have so many options for free/cheap tiers on so many platforms which provide so many ways for people to share content and express themselves to the world. With just one pain point that a spike in traffic can overwhelm your database limits. Seems like wonderful problem for us all to have.

Re: I need to stop being boring

#30

Post by yolo69420 »

Attention span and related topics are well studied in psychology, with new research appearing almost weekly - much more than becoming not boring, what would really help is if the author would spend their time on google scholar diving through the existing literature on the topic, then do a thorough examination of the existing state of the art in the market, and see if there is actually any way to meaningfully improve on the state of the art.

In other words, figuring out if a potential product could have actual value.

Instead they seemed to have reversed the process, already concluded that writing this app is a good idea, and relied instead of the nebulous and irrational guidance of purely artistic ideas and asking friends for new perspectives.

The same irrational thought process and overreliance on emotions probably combines with their superficial understanding of pop psychology to lead them to conclude that they fall in the 'boring' category of that (honestly) completely arbitrary dichotomy.

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