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You are what you love

gspanos.tech

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Re: You are what you love

#41

Post by MattPalmer1086 »

mettamage wrote: post #11

> Firstly, let’s make clear that it’s unlikely that you’re good at something you don’t love. If you managed to do that, you’ve probably dedicated the hours to something that does not fulfill you. The goal is not happiness. It’s about fulfillment. After all, you have to do what you love. You are that, how can you be doing anything else? The author is not considering loving meta-skills. I don't love programming, I do l…

That's a great way to think about it, love the meta skill concept.

I had the same realisation but never expressed it as well. I used to want to be an artist for my living. Eveventually I realised that what I really wanted was to be creative in some way. Didn't have to be art or music to earn money.

Re: You are what you love

#42

Post by SamoyedFurFluff »

bambax wrote: post #21

> If you don’t know what you love, try playing with a couple of things. I have a theory that what you love is what you can experience bad versions of. If you're picky about something, you don't really like it. Connoisseurs and fanatics aren't picky, they're voracious. If you can only drink the very best wines, you don't like wine. I can eat very very bad, even stinky Chinese food, because I love all versions of it. I…

> I can eat very very bad, even stinky Chinese food

Hi, I’m a Chinese person. WTF do you mean by this? Are you seriously saying you love Chinese food (also what do you mean, Chinese food? What provinces? What regions?) when it’s shit? You’ll happily eat stale bao, rotten meat dumplings, moldy rice? What is “stinky”: durian? Something else?

Re: You are what you love

#43

Post by elteto »

mettamage wrote: post #16
Dachande663 wrote: post #8

I used to be the same. Until I started a family. You suddenly realise how… unimportant coding is when you have people who depend on you and you them. I’m a different developer now than I was back then, but I think better for it.

How are you better for it?

Me, personally, I’m better on the soft skills. Things like better organizing my work and strongly separating work and personal life.

My work day is 8-5 and that’s the time I have to get everything done. That’s it. I don’t take work home so I better make the best of the day.

Re: You are what you love

#44

Post by nonrandomstring »

bambax wrote: post #21

> If you don’t know what you love, try playing with a couple of things. I have a theory that what you love is what you can experience bad versions of. If you're picky about something, you don't really like it. Connoisseurs and fanatics aren't picky, they're voracious. If you can only drink the very best wines, you don't like wine. I can eat very very bad, even stinky Chinese food, because I love all versions of it. I…

Definitely "love" in its casual usage, is very fickle. You can turn something you love into something you hate by over-doing it.

Maybe the best way to kill something you love is to make it into work in the first place. There's a good argument for keeping the things you really savour a little at arms-length.

One psychological idea I found immensely helpful but hard to digest is the relation between love and hate; Love and hate are not opposites, but proximate. Love can easily flip to hate and vice versa. They're from a vector of two circuits, arousal and pleasure/displeasure. The opposite of love (and hate) is indifference. Socially, we worry about "hate speech" when a much more dangerous state of mind is blank faced indifference. ( Most of what I'm saying is just Erich Fromm [0]).

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Art_of_Loving

Re: You are what you love

#46

Post by bambax »

lordgrenville wrote: post #25
bambax wrote: post #21

> If you don’t know what you love, try playing with a couple of things. I have a theory that what you love is what you can experience bad versions of. If you're picky about something, you don't really like it. Connoisseurs and fanatics aren't picky, they're voracious. If you can only drink the very best wines, you don't like wine. I can eat very very bad, even stinky Chinese food, because I love all versions of it. I…

I would qualify this. If you like movies, you like all sorts of movies. You can enjoy well-done schlock horror as much as experimental Thai drama. But you still have a sense of good and bad, and you don't want to sit through something done badly in terms of what it's trying to achieve . Same with food: if you like Chinese food you maybe like all sorts of tastes, and high-end to low-end, but you don't need to like it…

I'm not saying to love something is to be devoid of taste or incapable of sorting the bad from the good. I'm saying it means being able to suffer the bad, to sit through a bad movie until the end, in the hunt for any passable scene.

Re: You are what you love

#47

Post by bambax »

SamoyedFurFluff wrote: post #42
bambax wrote: post #21

> If you don’t know what you love, try playing with a couple of things. I have a theory that what you love is what you can experience bad versions of. If you're picky about something, you don't really like it. Connoisseurs and fanatics aren't picky, they're voracious. If you can only drink the very best wines, you don't like wine. I can eat very very bad, even stinky Chinese food, because I love all versions of it. I…

> I can eat very very bad, even stinky Chinese food Hi, I’m a Chinese person. WTF do you mean by this? Are you seriously saying you love Chinese food (also what do you mean, Chinese food? What provinces? What regions?) when it’s shit? You’ll happily eat stale bao, rotten meat dumplings, moldy rice? What is “stinky”: durian? Something else?

Sorry if this came out as insensitive. I've never been to China. By Chinese food I mean food that is available in Chinese restaurants in Europe where I live. By bad Chinese food I mean food that isn't fresh, that's dry, that has obviously been reheated more than once. I don't mean rotten exactly (although it can happen).

Re: You are what you love

#48

Post by coldtea »

kubb wrote: post #9
inertiatic wrote: post #2

>I find it really challenging to talk with people who have completely separated their work from their emotional being. For me, work is part of life and it should be a meaningful one. I like my work too but when I hear things like this it's so hard not to cringe because of how much of a place of privilege this comes from. Most jobs are things no one would want to do if they didn't need to survive, and that's fundament…

As an empathetic person, this really makes me feel that we should fight for an economic system that gives people more leisure. Rewarding life doesn't need to be expensive, but it does require us to have the time to do something that we love. This is also why I dream about financial independence. I'm not lazy, I just want to do something else than what I have to.

>we should fight for an economic system that gives people more leisure

We don't even have an economic system that pays well or treats people humanely...

Re: You are what you love

#49

Post by dudul »

bambax wrote: post #21

> If you don’t know what you love, try playing with a couple of things. I have a theory that what you love is what you can experience bad versions of. If you're picky about something, you don't really like it. Connoisseurs and fanatics aren't picky, they're voracious. If you can only drink the very best wines, you don't like wine. I can eat very very bad, even stinky Chinese food, because I love all versions of it. I…

Makes no sense to me. It seems totally possible to me to love movies without enjoying wasting 2h watching a poorly made film.

Re: You are what you love

#50

Post by baggy_trough »

coldtea wrote: post #48
kubb wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As an empathetic person, this really makes me feel that we should fight for an economic system that gives people more leisure. Rewarding life doesn't need to be expensive, but it does require us to have the time to do something that we love. This is also why I dream about financial independence. I'm not lazy, I just want to do something else than what I have to.

> we should fight for an economic system that gives people more leisure We don't even have an economic system that pays well or treats people humanely...

Compared to what?
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