21–30 of 82 posts
Glad I left a trace.
In contrast: A few years ago I was hiking on the Pacific Crest Trail (PCT). One of the few rules to follow there is to explicitly leave no trace , in respect to nature and others.
Go to your professor's office hours, learn the names of your neighbors, become a regular at the local sandwich shop and shoot the breeze with staff, ask the people you're waiting in line alongside if they have any good jokes.
Don't be fooled that social media and conspicuous consumption are the best paths to community.
> As a writer, receiving feedback on my work is welcome and rare. This blog gets thousands of readers a month, and yet the amount of direct feedback I’ve received over all the years is a small fraction of that. If you don’t have any comment box it’s hard to give you any feedback.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48508069
Similar idea: don't go through life anonymously. Go to your professor's office hours, learn the names of your neighbors, become a regular at the local sandwich shop and shoot the breeze with staff, ask the people you're waiting in line alongside if they have any good jokes. Don't be fooled that social media and conspicuous consumption are the best paths to community.
The last thing I want to do when out in public is be stuck talking with strangers.
Leaving a trace is something I've been grappling with which seemed incredibly straight forward initially as an open source developer. These days, I find myself questioning for whom am I leaving a trace for? What kinds of humans or entities? Do I care about the kinds of entities who will inhabit the future? Or will their value system be so different to my own that I'd prefer not to have anything to do with them. Beyon…
How's your reasoning there? You only want to be nice to people who have earned it? This sounds a bit too close to the "you have to EARN my respect", which is a hallmark of somebody nobody wants to be around.
You can only control your own actions. If your "good deeds" are conditional or transactional, then that very much diminishes their goodness.
But what really makes a trace valuable? Internet growth has proven that scaling traces does not really grow value to the same extent.
> Leaving something adds a little humanity to the internet. > It helped you, so it’s likely a useful idea > You now have a profile you can access that collects the things you found noteworthySimilar idea: don't go through life anonymously. Go to your professor's office hours, learn the names of your neighbors, become a regular at the local sandwich shop and shoot the breeze with staff, ask the people you're waiting in line alongside if they have any good jokes. Don't be fooled that social media and conspicuous consumption are the best paths to community.
That all sounds exhausting (introvert here). The last thing I want to do when out in public is be stuck talking with strangers.
Leaving a trace is something I've been grappling with which seemed incredibly straight forward initially as an open source developer. These days, I find myself questioning for whom am I leaving a trace for? What kinds of humans or entities? Do I care about the kinds of entities who will inhabit the future? Or will their value system be so different to my own that I'd prefer not to have anything to do with them. Beyon…