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Your Lifestyle Has Already Been Designed (2010)

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Re: Your Lifestyle Has Already Been Designed (2010)

#221

Post by nate_meurer »

nautilius wrote: post #213
postoak wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is a funny quote, but I don't think it's the same as questioning the idea that everyone needs to have kids. Going to the dumpster is a bad idea if you value your health for everyone, but not having kids isn't clearly bad unless you only think of having kids in economic/religious terms (need to produce more workers/believers, or having support in old age).

I think you’re missing the point of the funny quote: both decisions don’t work if everyone acts like that, both rely on everyone else (or a vast majority) to do the ‘right thing’. If no one buys in the grocery store, there will soon be no grocery store to dumpster dive behind. If no one has kids, there will be no one to pay into health insurance, social security or take care of you when you’re old. Would you be willi…

I missed it too, thanks for coming back to explain.

Re: Your Lifestyle Has Already Been Designed (2010)

#222

Post by sneak »

wallacoloo wrote: post #195
sneak wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In-person shopping for food (including travel to/from the place of purchase), food prep, cooking, and the associated cleanup is an enormous time sink. Perhaps you have free time or are already used to spending a lot of it on these tasks, but let's not pretend that it's "not that much". It's huge.

Like anything, it’s a skill that you develop over time. Certainly at the start, you might find that cooking respectable meals takes more out of you than just ordering them. But at some point, with enough practice, this flips for most people. Of course, there might also be some survivorship bias here. And food delivery changes things (but, so too does grocery delivery).

I'm a good cook and have been cooking my whole life. Cleaning easily takes as much time as the cooking, sometimes more.

Re: Your Lifestyle Has Already Been Designed (2010)

#223

Post by sneak »

kwhitefoot wrote: post #108
sneak wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In-person shopping for food (including travel to/from the place of purchase), food prep, cooking, and the associated cleanup is an enormous time sink. Perhaps you have free time or are already used to spending a lot of it on these tasks, but let's not pretend that it's "not that much". It's huge.

Shopping for the four of us in this house takes about three man hours a week. Cooking about 15. That is much less than an hour a day per person. If we felt like it we could optimise the shopping even further by only shopping when we were already passing the supermarket on the way to or from work. If we felt like it we could do the shopping online and cut it down to a few minutes a week. Cooking Sunday dinner for four…

18 hours per week, and a lot of that is spent whether you are cooking for 1 or for 4, so those that live alone are talking about 15-16 hours per week. A whole waking day.

Re: Your Lifestyle Has Already Been Designed (2010)

#224

Post by wallacoloo »

sneak wrote: post #222
wallacoloo wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Like anything, it’s a skill that you develop over time. Certainly at the start, you might find that cooking respectable meals takes more out of you than just ordering them. But at some point, with enough practice, this flips for most people. Of course, there might also be some survivorship bias here. And food delivery changes things (but, so too does grocery delivery).

I'm a good cook and have been cooking my whole life. Cleaning easily takes as much time as the cooking, sometimes more.

Well if it is just an equation of time for you, is there any sort of multitasking you can do to get more out of it? I find that I’m able to pay full attention to audio-based media when cooking meals I’ve made before, and especially when cleaning up. So if any of your day is otherwise spent with audiobooks, news, etc, maybe you could do your cooking with the time you usually spend listening to those, and sort of get it for free?

Re: Your Lifestyle Has Already Been Designed (2010)

#225

Post by JamesAdir »

The "travel mentality" that has been circulating in the last ten years portraits travel as the ultimate goal for many tech workers. It sells the ultimate concept of freedom and zero responsibility. Social media extended this with the van life blogs, pictures and clips. This of course a big fallacy. When you're traveling you have zero planning ahead. You don't need to think about major decisions in your life, you usually don't invest in hobbies (how could you go to your gym if you're not in the same place every month) and of course it usually correlates with no spouse or kids, that require major decisions of their own. When you live on your backpack you avoid many major decisions and that's ok. but you can't compare the two situations.

Re: Your Lifestyle Has Already Been Designed (2010)

#226

Post by TeMPOraL »

stjohnswarts wrote: post #97
WalterBright wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been wearing the exact same jeans cut for 30 years now. When they get holes, I just push a button on Amazon for more. My dress shirts are 20-30 years old. They're not out of style. Of course, I've never been cool, so there's that.

I'm kind of in the same boat. I never cared about fashion much. It always seemed hollow and vapid to me. Even as a kid/teen-ager/20s when it's supposed to matter the most.

Perhaps your circle of friends didn't care either.

For kids/teenagers/early-20s, what matters is belonging - observable patterns of behavior that follow are whatever gets amplified when everyone looks at everyone else in their vicinity for signals of approval.

FWIW, I also didn't care about fashion, and neither did my friends. I expect this to be the case with quite a lot of HNers - this comes from being a nerd and having nerd friends. We amplified each other on different patterns of behavior.

Re: Your Lifestyle Has Already Been Designed (2010)

#227

Post by TeMPOraL »

crazygringo wrote: post #189
ABCLAW wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not really. All companies that make bags may be pulling consumers in different directions with respect to which style of bags they should purchase, but all will pull in the direction of "purchase bags". You can zoom out from bags to fashion, and the same idea repeats itself. Consumer consumption itself is the unified cultural zeitgeist. That's the issue - in some areas it'll spur innovation, but in others it is an ob…

I think you're having a different conversation? I was arguing that fashion trends are ultimately driven by consumers, not by companies (as GP was arguing). Consumers aren't blindly buying whatever's for sale. Whether people are purchasing more than they need, or whether that's wasteful, is a totally orthogonal conversation. But pretty sure most women need bags. And a lot of guys use backpacks too. They're not some ar…

> Consumers aren't blindly buying whatever's for sale.

But of course they are. This is the case not just in fashion, but pretty much everywhere (and particularly visible wrt. hardware and software). Consumers are given a bit of a choice to get completely confused by it, but ultimately they pick something from what's for sale. They can't just go and say, "I want these trousers, except cut like these other ones, and with the color from that dress" - much like they can't go and say "I want a phone like this new iPhone, but with my damn headphone jack back". Not without spending 1-2 orders of magnitude more money.

What this means for our discussion is, it's vendors who set the trends, because they choose what is available for purchase at scale.

Re: Your Lifestyle Has Already Been Designed (2010)

#228

Post by TeMPOraL »

grumblenum wrote: post #69
goodpoint wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> you're not forced to do anything You are forced to choose between working to pay rent and health insurance or go hungry, homeless and ill or in prison. In various developed societies there is free healthcare, social safety nets, or some forms of UBI or other help. > but you're seduced out of your mind, I guess it's fair Fair? Consumerism is threatening all ife on the planet. Humanity can do so much better.

A Malthusian crisis has been “imminent” since the 19th century. I think that you should try writing down what facts you think support the a priori assumption that our sinful ways are leading us to a future, sudden disaster. I don’t think you will find much evidence that isn’t traceable to popular opinion. Sorry, fam, it’s just Puritanism for the modern age.

It was, and it was postponed several times through technological means, at the cost of widespread environmental degradation. The underlying logic of the prediction is still sound.

It's like someone is warning you that, with your current spending patterns, you'll go broke in a year. You come to them five years later, showing off your fancy new car and talking about vacations, defying their "alarmist predictions", conveniently omitting the fact that in those five years, you've maxed out on all your credit cards and every possible loan anyone would give you.

No, the crisis is still ahead, and will hit us that much harder unless we work quickly to make our economy sustainable.

Re: Your Lifestyle Has Already Been Designed (2010)

#229

Post by TeMPOraL »

meiraleal wrote: post #107
goodpoint wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you saying that climate change, ocean depletion, soil depletion, desertification, plastic pollution and food shortage are not real?

The population growth trend proves OP point.

No, it doesn't. It still levels off way above what was the carrying capacity of Earth before the "Green Revolution" - and the systems maintaining our food production are unsustainable. We extract surplus food from the ground by destroying the ability to grow more food in the future.

Re: Your Lifestyle Has Already Been Designed (2010)

#230

Post by TeMPOraL »

namarie wrote: post #90
namdnay wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And hunter gatherers lived to what age, 40? And you’re skipping a few thousands of years of civilization between hunter gatherers and the industrial revolution. I can guarantee a Roman or medieval farmer worked pretty much every hour of sunlight

>I can guarantee a Roman or medieval farmer worked pretty much every hour of sunlight The work was seasonal, though. They built up their reserves for winter, when I imagine they didn't have to work nearly as hard.

There's plenty of work around the farm to be done over winter (basically, all kinds of work that isn't strictly necessary around harvest season will be pushed out to whatever other time there is in the year). You still have farm animals to handle. There are repairs to be made. Trenches to dig. And as the winter comes full force, given how low-density an energy source firewood is, you at least needed to regularly get out to haul and process fuel for heating.

Etc. My life experience is only slightly farm-adjacent. I'm sure someone who grew up on a farm can contribute more examples of winter work.

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