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The Importance of Being Idle

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Re: The Importance of Being Idle

#191

Post by alsetmusic »

mzelling wrote: post #171

Intermittent idleness is appealing and even productive, as it often surfaces valuable ideas from your subconscious. That said, today's society is badly equipped for idleness. With phone notifications going off every few minutes, it's difficult not to be constantly interrupted with the "task" of looking at a text. Let's throw out our phones first, then we can experience true mental repose.

> That said, today's society is badly equipped for idleness. With phone notifications going off every few minutes, it's difficult not to be constantly interrupted with the "task" of looking at a text.

I have to leave home to read a book. Sitting on a park bench is the only way for me to focus and not get distracted. It’s great, though. We have a beautiful rose garden nearby. Lots of critters scurrying about.

Re: The Importance of Being Idle

#192

Post by PinkSheep »

perhonen wrote: post #162
artirdx wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Europe is not behind because Europeans are working less and taking more vacations. This message that is being loudly broadcasted hides the real problem. Europe is behind because we do not have good leadership. The decisions taken by leadership, no matter what level you look at - local, company, national, supranational - are rarely in the best interest of Europeans. Our markets - housing, rental, labor, capital, pensi…

European societies are the most truly democratic states there have ever been. You have educated populaces making decisions with full information (comparatively more than anywhere else in the world, ever) to choose your leaders. All your policy decisions - generous state pensions and benefits, redistributive taxes, extreme bureaucracy around hiring and firing, stifling operational and capital markets regulations - are…

> Macron tried to do pension reform > they're your countries, but i do not think it's your leaders letting you down.

What fanfic am I reading here? The protests had no impact on the course of the pension reform.

Re: The Importance of Being Idle

#193

Post by butlike »

mzelling wrote: post #187
butlike wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Perpetual Do Not Disturb is a better stopgap

I agree for the most part. DND isn't perfect, though. When you're bored, your mind naturally searches for things to do, and you'll be tempted to proactively check your lock screen, which unhelpfully informs you about "3 messages received while in Do Not Disturb." Now you really want to know what those messages are. This is why I tend to keep my phone physically far away from me, and out of sight.

Less phone usage makes for less phone usage. It gets easier. Now I don't particularly care what the messages are if they come outside of my designated "message checking time."

Anecdotally, I'd give it 3 months of "reduced phone usage mindfulness." For further reading, check out the wikipedia article on ∆FosB expression, which is a gene expression which essentially tells your body to keep doing things that release dopamine. It takes about 3 months for the ∆FosB expression to decay.

Re: The Importance of Being Idle

#194

Post by PinkSheep »

artirdx wrote: post #178
perhonen wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

European societies are the most truly democratic states there have ever been. You have educated populaces making decisions with full information (comparatively more than anywhere else in the world, ever) to choose your leaders. All your policy decisions - generous state pensions and benefits, redistributive taxes, extreme bureaucracy around hiring and firing, stifling operational and capital markets regulations - are…

For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong. - H. L. Mencken The sad thing about democratic societies it is difficult to form a consensus on anything. So elections are won on either emotions or the minimally contentious manifesto. Each successive win on such a manifesto further lowers what will achieve consensus. People will mesmerizing oratory skills are extremely rare. That such in…

> about democratic societies

You imply representative democracy, where political parties are forced to be formed not to solve issues, but to win a popular vote. To win the vote, you have to dilute your policy enough to encompass the masses by providing many common denominators. There, consensus is impossible by design, we no longer live in a Greek metropolis, where the dimensionality of problems is low. Todays societies are complex and have many dimensions, yet the representative democracies group all of the similar and dissimilar issues under 2-3-4-5 different parties.

I see exactly two (one) solutions:

- people go beyond party boundaries and cooperate on issues they feel important (doesn't work, it's already possible on paper, but in the best case this ability is traded for negotiational power)

- direct voting on issues, parties only serve a directional and educational role

Re: The Importance of Being Idle

#195

Post by perhonen »

PinkSheep wrote: post #192
perhonen wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

European societies are the most truly democratic states there have ever been. You have educated populaces making decisions with full information (comparatively more than anywhere else in the world, ever) to choose your leaders. All your policy decisions - generous state pensions and benefits, redistributive taxes, extreme bureaucracy around hiring and firing, stifling operational and capital markets regulations - are…

> Macron tried to do pension reform > they're your countries, but i do not think it's your leaders letting you down. What fanfic am I reading here? The protests had no impact on the course of the pension reform.

they did not manage to stop the law. what i am saying is that the leaders were trying to pass a necessary law and the population was against it, so you can't pass off blame for the dysfunction on them

Re: The Importance of Being Idle

#199

Post by camillomiller »

gilbetron wrote: post #189
camillomiller wrote: post #21

I hope that people realize still that LLMs will never ever be able to produce a piece like this. This is extraordinarily written. It is etymologically out of the average. It’s complex. Concepts intertwine and build on each other. The linguistic choices are unusual but perfectly placed. >>“But even idlers, try as they might, cannot ignore the passage of time. In 1911, a dozen years before Capek published his essay, Pa…

This easily could be AI generated, there is little character to it, and if you told me it was AI generated, I would believe you.

You clearly don’t understand shit about good writing.

Re: The Importance of Being Idle

#200

Post by nullhole »

syphia wrote: post #34
dripdry45 wrote: post #3

I started with “How to Be Idle” by Hodgkinson about 20 years ago. Found “The importance of living “ by Lin yutang. I now have a small collection of books about idleness… yet here i am working and then throwing myself into working on a century house in my spare time… feeling starved for idleness. Yet my most creative ideas for it come when I’m idle. Idleness led to Taoism, the pursuit of being useless. Led to Buddhism…

"All of humanity's problems stem from man's inability to sit quietly in a room alone." - Blaise Pascal Translations vary slightly.

It's hard to escape the tick-tock of time slipping away, even if there's no clock in the room
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