Life is Short

Life seems really short as soon as kids enter the picture. The best line I ever heard about kids and life was this:

With children, the days are long but the years are short.

These days, I find myself trying to find the "work/life balance", which is really just me managing the ebb-and-flow of time between work and family. What I've learned in that process is that while work provides some satisfaction that meets an internal need, it will never ever hug me back.

Take time, hug your kids, leave your work every now and then. The years won't seem so short that way.

Sure. What is productive or nonproductive is your opinion and I can partly agree with your opinion. However, I'm not on HN to be productive (who is?). I'm just here to introduce my thoughts in a way that I perceive logical.

Also please note that although I was obviously disagreeing with paul on economic inequality I was not explicitly debating the topic. I was simply pointing out potential bias of a post made by a biased source and the possible validity that this recent essay was in response to the backlash caused by pg's economic article.

Additionally, I spent deliberate effort to craft my post in a way to avoid aggression as much as possible. I specifically stated that jl's statement can be classified as supporting evidence but it's still biased evidence and that it needs to be taken into account.

>I am no fan of pg's worldview but I think there are less conspiratorial and more good-faith ways to attack it

Your OP was a conspiratorial attack. I am just defending your original opinion.

I resonated with the article as well, for similar reasons. I think trimming the fat from you life, so to speak, frees up so much time for meaningful endeavors.

> The next step was to kill a lot of tv/movies, and most of my free time internet usage.

So I actually figured out that TV was the devil in early high school and stopped watching it almost entirely. There are very particular shows that I will follow and if that show isn't playing, the TV is off.

I also don't watch movies to kill time. I pretty much only watch movies with friends or if it's a movie that I suspect will be thought provoking.

I'm still working on the internet distraction piece. I'd love to hear strategies for wasting less time on the internet.

> Finally, I started steadily filling in the new time gainings with things I really care about

I was very fortunate that I've had this mentality from the start. I pursue what interests me. Whatever that is. Don't care if it's weird, or if I'm the oddball. I just go for it. That has led me to have the most random diverse group of hobbies/skills/life pursuits. I'm a programmer. All-American football player (and national champion). Football coach. Gamer. I'm darn good at drawing/illustration. Pretty good cook as well. I like to sew. Now I'm in med school.

I look back at everything I've accomplished, the skills I've developed, the friends I've made along the way, and the future ahead of me, and I feel like I've had a full 25 years. Like I could die tomorrow and not be too upset about how I spent my time.

I often look at other people's lives and wonder who they would be if they simply went after the things they enjoyed.

> [pg is] not going to wake up tomorrow, admit that nobody is asking for 100% income equality and that he was a dishonest sack of shit for pretending otherwise

pg did not make the claim that anyone is arguing for "100% income equality"; he did not posture as if that was the position he was arguing against. You're making things up and are being appropriately downvoted for it.

The topic of this essay was:

"[E]conomic inequality is not just one thing. It consists of some things that are very bad, like kids with no chance of reaching their potential, and others that are good, like Larry Page and Sergey Brin starting the company you use to find things online. If you want to understand economic inequality—and more importantly, if you actually want to fix the bad aspects of it—you have to tease apart the components. And yet the trend in nearly everything written about the subject is to do the opposite: to squash together all the aspects of economic inequality as if it were a single phenomenon."

If he oversimplifies his opposition at all, it's to characterize their position as "economic inequality is bad and should be decreased". He positions that argument as the one in opposition to his. It sounds like you've misunderstood what he's written and are attributing positions to him that he did not write.