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Being Bored Is Good

thewalrus.ca

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Re: Being Bored Is Good

#221

Post by antepodius »

brokenmachine wrote: post #167
brokenmachine wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>We demand constant growth in the economy which won't play well with a rapidly shrinking population. That ridiculous and frankly insane expectation of constant growth is the reason we're in this mess in the first place. Also, a "rapidly shrinking population" has never happened so who knows what the effects might be. >Personally, I am OK with waves of forced mass sterilization but I understand, because human nature, i…

Replying to myself because I found this interesting, so someone else might as well: >We demand constant growth in the economy which won't play well with a rapidly shrinking population. https://www.globalcitizen.org/en/content/world-population-ch... Especially interesting/scary is the "World population since 10,000 BCE" chart. I don't think a rapidly shrinking population is the problem that we are likely to experience…

Look at Japanese, Korean, and European birthrates. Look at the birthrates as a function of how 'developed' a country is. The trend is clear- as countries develop, they die. They stop having kids. Even the US, I'm pretty sure, is below replacement rate- without immigration, their population would be going down. If you want to stop population growth and kill off the human race, do whatever it is Japan, Europe, Korea did to themselves and people will stop having kids.

Re: Being Bored Is Good

#222

Post by collyw »

brokenmachine wrote: post #144
goutham2688 wrote: post #37

random thought: Can this be why colder countries are doing better than hotter countries, by being forced to stay at home/shelter during winter periods.

Please define what "doing better" means.

Economically.

Look at Europe, the north does significantly better than the south in most cases. The southern countries in my opinion, have far better quality of life.

Re: Being Bored Is Good

#224

Post by beat »

non-entity wrote: post #88
beat wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I carry a Kindle Paperwhite just for focused reading, but I also have a Kindle app on my phone, so I'll read books rather than obsessively checking email / social media / weather / omganything. I read different books on my phone thank on the Kindle, things that I can easily pick up and put down without having to shift the brain to a different gear. (Current phone read: Everything Is Fucked . Current Kindle read: War…

It's still crazy to me the paperwhites are more expensive than Amazon's Fire Tablets

I imagine most of the cost is in that wonderful screen. Reading on a paperwhite is a revelation - the next best thing to an actual book, and better than many books.

Re: Being Bored Is Good

#226

Post by stefanwlb »

ohduran wrote: post #178

Upcoming generations will think of us as the society who was afraid of being bored. The book Deep Work by Cal Newport is a good read on this topic, but I'm sure it isn't the only one. You can find my detailed notes on it here: https://alvaroduran.me/deep-work (any feedback is welcomed!)

Thank you! Really enjoyed reading this article and others on your website.

Re: Being Bored Is Good

#227

Post by cataphract »

antepodius wrote: post #220
cataphract wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does it even matter that one gets remembered by a few more centuries (if mankind's lucky) before we destroy ourselves (or ultimately by the Sun boiling the planet) rather than after one's grandchildren or so die?

Depends what the possible futures you're envisioning are. If some crazy hive-mind/brain-upload/matrioshka brain/turn the universe into computronium future happens, what you do now could influence part of the course of that. I don't get the 'either we destroy ourselves, or the sun explodes'. If we don't destroy ourselves now, there's no way humans just stick around in the solar system till the sun explodes- at one poi…

Either way, the universe will undergo heat death. So on very long timescales nothing will be left. Also, we don't have "billions" of years on the planet, more like 1 billion tops. Life on Earth is on its final stretch.

Re: Being Bored Is Good

#228

Post by rwnspace »

DJohnBenton wrote: post #187
ne01 wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I really like this: > However, silence was a big part of traditional music, in the past. A glass is useful because of its empty space. You need the emptiness to fill it up with something. For inventions/ideas/startups, you need some empty space in your mind. Think of a bored computer (one that is not used to its maximum capacity). It's like a computer that uses swap memory v.s. one that has a few GBs of free RAM. Whi…

Like the Tao Te Ching passage: Thirty spokes share the wheel's hub; It is the centre hole that makes it useful. Shape clay into a vessel; It is the space within that makes it useful. Cut doors and windows for a room; It is the holes which make it useful. Therefore profit comes from what is there; Usefulness from what is not there.

I find this passage resonates most when drawn against my living relationship with the rest of the text.

As for the thread, a very straightforward quote:

~

So the unwanting soul

sees what's hidden,

and the ever-wanting soul

sees only what it wants.

Re: Being Bored Is Good

#229

Post by Dunedan »

antepodius wrote: post #219
freeflight wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You reduce it uncharitably by claiming it's simply 'birthing.' Isn't that exactly what it has become? Right now we are struggling with a massive environmental catastrophe, which is largely caused by overconsumption. One of the best ways to fight that is to simply have fewer consumers [0], yet somehow that's something barely anybody even dares to talk about because we can't take from people the "freedom" to keep bir…

What are you talking about? Birthrates in developed countries are below replacement rates. If anything, in developed countries, more people should be having more kids. If you want to decrease the number of consumers, here's what you do: Go to every developing country in the world and speed up its movement aping the western development arc so that it gets more money, suburbia, feminism, etc. Until everyone's miserable…

> What are you talking about? Birthrates in developed countries are below replacement rates. If anything, in developed countries, more people should be having more kids.

I believe that you have to look at that from a global perspective as the climate change also doesn't stop at borders and globally birth rates are still way too high. The proper solution would be to stop trying to keep "foreigners" out of the rich, western countries, so that people from countries with high population growth can migrate to countries with shrinking population. That'd be a win-win situation for everybody.

Re: Being Bored Is Good

#230

Post by topologie »

“Few understand that procrastination is our natural defense, letting things take care of themselves and exercise their antifragility; it results from some ecological or naturalistic wisdom, and is not always bad -- at an existential level, it is my body rebelling against its entrapment. It is my soul fighting the Procrustean bed of modernity.”

― Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder

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