291–300 of 361 posts
> > 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. > First, humans are not “naturally” lazy, because humans are not “naturally” anything. ... We’re different today not because our genes changed, but because our culture cha…
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> They have no intrinsic pride in the work they do; it's all about status, money and power. Damn these modern people, why would they look after things so irrelevant as “status, money and power” instead of taking pride in completing Jira tickets?
Agile with a pedantic scrum master is a particular kind of hell.
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Like 15 years ago, before pomodoro was popular (or at least I didn't know about it) my sister asked if I knew a good time schedule for studying. She was in senior year of high school, I was in flight school. My answer of "about 15 seconds reading then a 10 second break" was not what she expected. It's what I was using and worked pretty well. I enjoyed that work very much. I was basically memorizing the book. No way t…
> Do not do this daily! This is like a once-a-year thing. Why's that? (I'm intrigued by this idea.)
I found I could make myself do things I had a lot of resistance to with this technique. It wouldn't necessarily be great, but it would get done. One could call this activity... eating frogs. I'll defer to the article on the issues with that in general.
The problem with this technique is that it's so strong (god it sounds like I'm selling the thing) that you don't even exactly notice the will power you're using up. But you're still using it! My experience with doing this kind of thing too many days in a row is that every individual day feels okay, but they build up until some type of subconscious rebellion goes off.
Maybe if you were more chill about it, didn't use it super frequently or only on things you absolutely despise it would actually be fine.
This is a great article but the best part is an off hand link to a book review of A Square Meal: A Culinary History of the Great Depression [1] which includes choice quotes like > The writer George Jean Nathan claimed that before the 1920s, there existed only eight basic sandwich types: Swiss cheese, ham, sardine, liverwurst, egg, corned beef, roast beef, and tongue (yes). But by 1926, he “claimed that he had counted…
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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.
allaboutberlin.com. I'm self-employed, and I have no direct customers. So long as my bills are paid, everything else is extra. I can invest time into more, better content, but I can also mess around with things that don't make money. More often than not, they turn out to do just that. "If you build it, they will come." Mind you, I still have to work, but there's rarely anything that needs to be done right now , unles…
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…
I agree with your basic diagnosis, "Many people are spending most of their lives doing stuff that they don't want to do". But I want to add: most of their lives doing things they find meaningless and pointless . (See Graeber on "Bullshit Jobs" for just an instance, not exhaustive). So I don't agree with your next conclusion, I don't think that's leading to "shortcuts instead of trying to do things the right way." To…
Alienation Is Not ‘Bullshit’: An Empirical Critique of Graeber’s Theory of BS Jobs https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/09500170211015...
from the conclusion:
>This article highlights that alternative theories grounded in empirical research are required to understand the social suffering caused by the feelings of useless work that Graeber observes. Therefore, our third major contribution is to demonstrate the value of Marx’s writings on alienation. We take inspiration from Marx’s understanding of alienation to investigate whether the social relations of work can explain why millions of workers do not feel that their work is useful. In particular, we focus on the ways in which the development of workers’ human capacities may be fettered by social relations at work.
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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.
allaboutberlin.com. I'm self-employed, and I have no direct customers. So long as my bills are paid, everything else is extra. I can invest time into more, better content, but I can also mess around with things that don't make money. More often than not, they turn out to do just that. "If you build it, they will come." Mind you, I still have to work, but there's rarely anything that needs to be done right now , unles…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I also seem to remember that the story went on to say that Crowley at one point had been praised for his work in the Spanish Inquisition. That was the first he'd actually heard of it--humans had come up with it on their own--so he went and had a look, and then went and got blind drunk, because there are some things even demons would rather not think about. That kind of abrupt tonal slam, from comedy to horror, leavin…
>That was the first he'd actually heard of it--humans had come up with it on their own--so he went and had a look, and then went and got blind drunk, because there are some things even demons would rather not think about. This seems like one of the things you might say to diss humans, but which doesn't actually make sense when you think about it. I don't believe for one moment that an actual demon, who does the kind…
I think the horror comes from the thought that a being whose entire job is to come up with new and clever ways to bring about human misery and suffering is so thoroughly out-classed. The idea that humanity doesn't need an outside influence to inflict such evil is horrific. The joke is just there as window dressing to contrast the real horrors of our collective history.