Ask HN: What do you care about? What is your joy and purpose?

Csikszentmihalyi did research around what gives people joy. From that, he introduced the concept of Flow in 1975, which is often misunderstood.

Flow is my definition of joy. You do something that needs intense focus. The focus makes you lose sense of self and time. You're too focused to be self-conscious. You don't overthink. You move fluidly.

I don't have fixed hobbies. I did boxing for half the year just because I love the feel of redirecting energy from my toes to my fists. But something like climbing or basketball works too.

Work can give flow too, it's just programming and writing the way we're usually taught is quite bad for it. One hack is to write at the speed of thought and then edit it afterwards, instead of doing block by block.

Meditation makes everything more pleasurable because you learn to silence all the internal voices and ambient thoughts. You learn to empty your mind and other emotions. You focus on the present. And once you can do this, you can apply the same to work or other less joyful activities.

As for purpose, it's the long term, the infinite game as described by Carse. Not just the afterlife, but what lies beyond death - family, community, country, humanity, ethics. Purpose has been solved many centuries ago, just RTFM.

Building things that'll still work in five years. fixing someone's annoying tuesday problem. cooking a meal without a screen involved.

most of my week is screens, the joy is whatever forces slowness.

I like helping others learn and grow. Having a child helped focus my sense of purpose, but I already cared to help others, as a classroom teacher and private tutor. Parenting gave me a second childhood, during which I read Complex PTSD by Pete Walker (2010) and significantly reduced passing on the ongoing trauma I experienced during my childhood. I find joy in being okay with simply pausing and breathing like a resting dog (inhale until full, then relax and let it out, not inhaling again until the need arises), observing how my body feels wherever I am. I find joy in moving around the world under my own power or augmented by an ebike (bakfiets, for carrying my child, groceries, etc). I do not find joy in sitting in a car and letting gasoline or electricity move me and more than a ton of metal and plastic along a lifeless strip of asphalt, but I do it to meet the medical needs of my family members (otherwise I seldom outsource my mobility needs beyond human-powered machines). I find joy in learning, which is part of why I keep returning to HN; I find many of your choices to be harmful to life on earth in the long run, and it's also where I learned of solar.lowtechmagazine.com, so here I am.

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