Vanity activities
quarter--mile.com
Vanity activities
1–10 of 76 posts
Re: Vanity activities
#2I too have hobbies.
Re: Vanity activities
#3On a related note: I've run businesses for close to 20 years, most of those spent selling to other businesses, and I still fail to understand what the entirety of LinkedIn is for and if there is any of it that wouldn't fall under the author's definition of "Vanity activities".
If anyone has a clue, please enlighten me.
Re: Vanity activities
#4Some good points in here, but with respect to networking, the author misses the forest for the trees.
Sure, when you go to networking events, you aren't certain you are going to get a job from the folks you meet.
What you are doing is increasing your luck surface area. Hiring is not an entirely rational process, but if someone doesn't know you exist, they won't hire you (how could they?).
From there, it follows that meeting someone and letting them know you exist increases the chances (however small) that they can and will assist you on your career path. And a networking opportunity, where you meet someone face to face (and can meet them repeatedly) is a far better way to let someone know you exist than sending them your resume.
There are other ways to raise your profile that don't involve networking events and you can argue that they are better, but that's a cost-benefit analysis you should consider.
Re: Vanity activities
#5On a related note: I've run businesses for close to 20 years, most of those spent selling to other businesses, and I still fail to understand what the entirety of LinkedIn is for and if there is any of it that wouldn't fall under the author's definition of "Vanity activities". If anyone has a clue, please enlighten me.
Definitely all the posting and activity on there seems very strange and is not something I’m remotely interested in participating in. But recruiters have often found me through LinkedIn and connected me with jobs, so it’s still useful overall and I keep my profile up to date.
Re: Vanity activities
#6I have this debate with people about news and podcasts sometimes (news was one of the examples in TFA). People say they are doing it to remain informed, and it’s a high-value activity, but I argue it’s mostly entertainment since it rarely affects any decision-making.
This is not a hardline position, but I’m surprised at how vehemently people insist that their news habit has benefits beyond entertainment.
(To be clear, I have nothing against entertainment.)
Re: Vanity activities
#7This article digs on atomic habits... honestly that book changed my life. Stopped doing drugs, started eating healthy, started working out. Direct result of that book along with some philosophical reading.
Re: Vanity activities
#8Are we really shaming having hobbies now?
Re: Vanity activities
#9It doesn't have to be one or the other. Both ethical consumption and going vegetarian reduce one's environmental impact, and they're independent of one another. So, while someone "truly" optimizing for environmental impact would better spend their time avoiding meat, someone who enjoys meat can still reduce their environmental impact without becoming miserable. Variables like "income" and "environment" are just parts of the equation for the more important heuristic of happiness.
A lot of the activities on that list are like this. Reading the news has a non-zero impact (hey, I'm on HN, and it definitely helps me keep up to date), and it's "easy" in that it fits into my heuristic for happiness. Same with using a metal straw, and same with picking between credit cards.
In a sense, these activities are "free" in terms of their perceived difficulty, but have a positive, if small, impact. If they're "free", why not do them?
Re: Vanity activities
#10To call reading the news “vanity” exposes the true vanity of this kind of post. What is the logic of assigning the word “vanity” to my interest to know what’s going on in the world? It’s vanity because I have no important decisions to make about the war in Ukraine, or the perfidy of my government?
It’s not vanity, it’s a desire to understand my world and my place within it.
What IS vanity is imagining that one’s own tastes are the only tastes that matter in the world.