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Excuse me but why are you eating so many frogs

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Re: Excuse me but why are you eating so many frogs

#171

Post by istinetz »

jrochkind1 wrote: post #156
istinetz wrote: post #37

I strongly disagree with the author. What brings me pleasure is playing strategic computer games. I was addicted to playing dota. I was playing 12-16 hours a day, which left no place for socializing, career, family, even basic self-maintenance suffered. Anything meaningful, art, self-improvement was cut. It's a disgraceful, shameful life. The meaning of life is not the blind pursuit of pleasure. We are humans precise…

I think addiction is it's own thing -- which is not about a lack of pleasure either. The main thing I think is missing from the OP (which I liked very much) is discussion of the concept of meaning . (and perhaps social connection). I think what most "frog-eaters" are missing is meaning, not pleasure. People will gladly do hard things that seem meaningful. I think addiction is primarily about a lack of meaning (and so…

>I think OP is really talking about a lack of meaning, control, and social connection in our lives.

That is indeed a much more defensible thesis. But to do anything meaningful, you need to eat a bunch of frogs - to build a rocket, you need to call and compare suppliers, manage accounting, etc. If you avoided all of that annoying stuff, you would find yourself, years later, with very pretty blueprints and no rocket.

Re: Excuse me but why are you eating so many frogs

#172

Post by vanderZwan »

istinetz wrote: post #76
vanderZwan wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except that you're talking about a game hyper-optimized to be addictive, and while I can't speak for your specific case, in general having an addiction usually involves said addiction being a coping mechanism to fill some kind of hole in someone's life, or avoiding the pain of some unresolved trauma. Which is not at all the same thing as being proof of humans inherently being lazy and needing self-help gurus to fix t…

>Except that you're talking about a game hyper-optimized to be addictive When I stopped playing dota, civ took it's place, then reddit, then tiktok, etc. I've resorted to hard blocking a long list of apps and websites. I've seen other people on hackernews having the exact same problem and stumbling upon the exact same stack of solutions. My point is, it's not the one game, it's the entire internet. >said addiction be…

> When I stopped playing dota, civ took it's place, then reddit, then tiktok, etc

These are all still examples of things hyper-optimized to have addictive feedback loops.

> My point is, it's not the one game, it's the entire internet.

Fair point, but the author is most strongly disagreeing with the "human nature" claim of laziness, and everything you've described so far strikes me as an external influence coopting human instinct. Kind of like how cheesecake and other hyperprocessed foods coopt our instinct to really like eating fat and sugar, which from an evolutionary standpoint was a very good instinct actually for the sake of survival until extremely recently. Should morbidly obese people lose weight for the sake of their own health? Yes. Should we shame them for being obese when healthy food is hard to come by and extremely bad food is cheap and easy to find? No.

I understand how that might feel like arguing semantics when the end-result is still that you feel like it's hard to get control over your life and addictions, but the difference between blaming oneself and seeing that this is an external influence that one shouldn't hate oneself for is a very significant one.

Re: Excuse me but why are you eating so many frogs

#173

Post by forbiddenvoid »

phkahler wrote: post #138
Dig1t wrote: post #125

Counterpoint: sometimes eating frogs is an opportunity, and if you don’t eat them, someone else will and they will be better off because of it. Eating more frogs now can mean that you have to eat fewer frogs in the future, or in total, ALSO that your children and family will have to eat fewer frogs. I still believe that working hard is a virtue and the people who do will usually end up becoming the people who (and wh…

>> Eating more frogs now can mean that you have to eat fewer frogs in the future Key word there is "can". We need to be very careful when deciding about temporal shifts in frog eating (more now, fewer later). If it's not a very tight loop, you are likely eating someone else's frogs so they don't have to. Be sure you're actually reducing the number of frogs coming your way.

This is the con. If you convince a whole generation of people of this, you have a lot of people eating frogs. Some small percentage of those people will have the extraordinary fortune of not eating frogs later, and then attribute their success to all the frogs they ate, and recommend frog-eating to everyone.

Re: Excuse me but why are you eating so many frogs

#174

Post by anonymoushn »

ttyprintk wrote: post #164
anonymoushn wrote: post #59

Related reading: https://hotelconcierge.tumblr.com/post/113360634364/the-stan... http://benjaminrosshoffman.com/approval-extraction-advertise...

Taking tests is an important frog. It’s been quite a few years for me, but lately the movement to dethrone tests like SAT made me wonder how disadvantaged kids can distinguish themselves without a quantifier for potential. If it’s essays instead of a math score, then maybe an essay is like this article says, improved messaging makes bad startups look like good ones.

I agree, but taking a single test that's mostly about merit rather than compliance is not really what's being talked about.

For what it's worth, my family is not wealthy or educated and I was able to go to a high-quality-but-not-prestigious magnet school in significant part because of my SAT score :)

Re: Excuse me but why are you eating so many frogs

#175

Post by mytailorisrich »

glandium wrote: post #22
mlok wrote: post #4

As a Frenchman, it took me a while to realize it was supposed to mean "a painful thing to do"

BTW, as a 44 year old French that has never seen frogs on a restaurant menu, and never had any, I wonder how common eating frogs is nowadays. Escargots seem much more common, to cite something else we're known for.

I ate frog legs in a restaurant in France no later than this summer, but it was a Vietnamese restaurant...

Snails, on the other hand, are not too difficult to find in supermarkets.

Re: Excuse me but why are you eating so many frogs

#176

Post by Invictus0 »

6stringmerc wrote: post #62
jongjong wrote: post #56

This seems to be a major epidemic nowadays. I suspect that mechanistic, meaningless, purely mimetic pursuit of success has some pretty negative consequences on society. I suspect it might explain why so many people are interested in engaging in politics (or company politics) and zero-sum value extraction schemes instead of just adding value... They're not interested in the process at all, only in the outcome; financi…

A friend recently got what he thought was a great gig with an engineering firm - turned out it was more of a cult - rah rah sessions, after work bowling, softball - and they weren’t shy about shunning anybody who didn’t want all in right away. He got bullied and saw others bullied too - we figure it’s why they prefer to intern pipeline and hire and retain - a lot easier to brainwash when young. I mean it’s not a bad…

Name and shame please.

Re: Excuse me but why are you eating so many frogs

#177

Post by bruce343434 »

ekianjo wrote: post #75

Thats a very epicurian piece. Yeah dont do things you hate, love yourself the way you are and dont have big dreams that you hope to achieve, you are already perfect. No thanks.

I disagree with your take. The article is exactly about finding what you ACTUALLY WANT to achieve and then not getting distracted with eating frogs.

Re: Excuse me but why are you eating so many frogs

#178

Post by db48x »

beefield wrote: post #132
bsenftner wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Any claimed author who's not read The Screwtape Letters has no business writing modern literature.

I need to check, are you sarcastic? I have so far avoided Lewis due to an impression (way too old impression to remember where I got it, may be unfounded or not) of the texts being close to christian/religious zealotry?

I haven’t read everything he ever wrote, but I think that most of his books are just fantasies, or perhaps early science fiction (Out of the Dark Planet). Many of them are allegorical; you might see parallels between them and concepts or elements from the Bible, or you might ignore that and just enjoy the story. I think you could enjoy The Screwtape Letters in the same way you would enjoy Good Omens, as a fantasy that has demons in it.

Re: Excuse me but why are you eating so many frogs

#179

Post by dymk »

jrochkind1 wrote: post #148
nicbou wrote: post #63

The topic is nice, but above all I thoroughly enjoy the writing. I feel like I get a lot more done precisely because I don't like to eat frogs. I sleep until I'm rested. I don't touch my computer until I've had tea on the balcony. I work on what feels right, when it feels right, for as long as it feels right. If the weather is nice, I'll hop on my bicycle and forget about work. But when something sparks my interest,…

What is your occupation where you get paid to work only on what feels right, only when it feels right, for only as long as it feels right, with leeway to hop on your bicycle and forget about work whenever you want? Cause I am interested in this line of work. At least if it pays enough to live comfortably.

Remote software engineer at a company with good WLB

Re: Excuse me but why are you eating so many frogs

#180

Post by teamonkey »

jiggywiggy wrote: post #43

I like some points of the article, but stating we are not naturally anything, and then in the next paragraph claiming: '"your base instincts" deserve more credit.', is very illogical.

It's an argument against the claim that there's virtue in doing things and that those who don't are lazy.

There's a huge gap between any "natural" instincts (needing to eat, needing to sleep, breathe, keep warm, social connections) and the sort of tasks you need to do in your modern life, like writing a boring report. The idea of laziness - and that there's virtue in doing such things - is a cultural trueism, not a "natural" state of humans.

> Why are we so hard on ourselves? I think it’s because we have a bad theory about how our minds work, one so dastardly that it could have only been devised by the devil himself. It goes like this:

>> We humans are, deep down, lazy and gluttonous creatures. If left to our own devices, we will do nothing but eat Pringles and watch Netflix. The only way we can escape our indolent nature is to exert our higher faculties over our base instincts.

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