To Become Wise, Do Less
leveragethoughts.substack.com
To Become Wise, Do Less
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Re: To Become Wise, Do Less
#2I gotta say, articles(to use that term loosely) like this are really starting to grind my gears.
There are so many of them. Every person and their dog is trying to become some sort of popular culture icon by sharing with us their incredibly profound inner dialogue. They all have advice for how to live our lives, and none of them can agree. If you take the sum of their advice, you have to do everything at once.
Gotta grind for that success. But don't grind too much. Also, remember to meditate. Disconnect from the internet. But don't become too disconnected, because you have to stay up to date on current events, because otherwise you can't keep up with the twittersphere. Which you should avoid, because it's toxic, by the way. But not too much, because important people say important things there!
This article is particularly bad. It's only a few paragraphs, and it still manages to be so self-contradictory that if you actually read it through, you're literally no wiser in the end, because the advice boils down to "Sometimes you need to relax, but you can't relax all the time." Gee, thanks. Pretty ironic, considering the subject of this article.
Re: To Become Wise, Do Less
#3I gotta say, articles(to use that term loosely) like this are really starting to grind my gears. There are so many of them. Every person and their dog is trying to become some sort of popular culture icon by sharing with us their incredibly profound inner dialogue. They all have advice for how to live our lives, and none of them can agree. If you take the sum of their advice, you have to do everything at once. Gotta…
Agree, far too many of them here at HN.
Re: To Become Wise, Do Less
#4I gotta say, articles(to use that term loosely) like this are really starting to grind my gears. There are so many of them. Every person and their dog is trying to become some sort of popular culture icon by sharing with us their incredibly profound inner dialogue. They all have advice for how to live our lives, and none of them can agree. If you take the sum of their advice, you have to do everything at once. Gotta…
> They all have advice for how to live our lives, and none of them can agree. If you take the sum of their advice, you have to do everything at once
Well yeah, different people have different views of how to accomplish stuff. You should have to reason a bit about what you read to figure out your own approach
Re: To Become Wise, Do Less
#5I gotta say, articles(to use that term loosely) like this are really starting to grind my gears. There are so many of them. Every person and their dog is trying to become some sort of popular culture icon by sharing with us their incredibly profound inner dialogue. They all have advice for how to live our lives, and none of them can agree. If you take the sum of their advice, you have to do everything at once. Gotta…
> They all have advice for how to live our lives, and none of them can agree. If you take the sum of their advice, you have to do everything at once Well yeah, different people have different views of how to accomplish stuff. You should have to reason a bit about what you read to figure out your own approach
Agree, after years and years of being inundated with self-help messages, platitudes, and coming-of-age teachings, I find most of it comes from a good place — however the messages are so context specific that it probably doesn’t apply to you in your current juncture in life right now.
I find what is crucial when it comes to taking advice, is figuring out when advice makes sense to you — and try to synthesize it as food for thought within your world view (or not).
Re: To Become Wise, Do Less
#6I gotta say, articles(to use that term loosely) like this are really starting to grind my gears. There are so many of them. Every person and their dog is trying to become some sort of popular culture icon by sharing with us their incredibly profound inner dialogue. They all have advice for how to live our lives, and none of them can agree. If you take the sum of their advice, you have to do everything at once. Gotta…
And so much of it is rehashed ancient philosophy, such as "moderation in all things". So much of is basically the Tao Te Ching, or astrology.
That is to say, it's not true! but over millennia, humans have found it to be useful. Try not to get annoyed by writing that isn't meant for you (assuming you don't get any value out of it, it's a tautology that you are not the intended audience.)
Re: To Become Wise, Do Less
#7I gotta say, articles(to use that term loosely) like this are really starting to grind my gears. There are so many of them. Every person and their dog is trying to become some sort of popular culture icon by sharing with us their incredibly profound inner dialogue. They all have advice for how to live our lives, and none of them can agree. If you take the sum of their advice, you have to do everything at once. Gotta…
I mostly agree with you, but I did find some value in the quotation (paraphrased, because I’ve closed the article) “Focus on doing the right things rather than doing things right.”
Re: To Become Wise, Do Less
#8I gotta say, articles(to use that term loosely) like this are really starting to grind my gears. There are so many of them. Every person and their dog is trying to become some sort of popular culture icon by sharing with us their incredibly profound inner dialogue. They all have advice for how to live our lives, and none of them can agree. If you take the sum of their advice, you have to do everything at once. Gotta…
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Re: To Become Wise, Do Less
#9I gotta say, articles(to use that term loosely) like this are really starting to grind my gears. There are so many of them. Every person and their dog is trying to become some sort of popular culture icon by sharing with us their incredibly profound inner dialogue. They all have advice for how to live our lives, and none of them can agree. If you take the sum of their advice, you have to do everything at once. Gotta…
I think the gist of the article is: Sometimes (not always) the winning move is not to play. I have experienced this phenomenon before where my best ideas are had in the shower, or a software bug is resolved after going for a walk in nature. Another way of putting this is: avoid the target to hit it.
Re: To Become Wise, Do Less
#10To become wise, do everything, fuck up on most of it, and know what works and doesn't by direct experience.
I am a minimalist (Essentialist) by choice, but a maximalist regarding knowledge and experience. Try and do everything you can, that way you know what does and doesn't work. Done. Anything else is overly reductive. You can't know how to do anything if you do or experience close to nothing.
Leisure is good, I am a ferverent advocate of Veblen philosophy, but if you want to be wise use your leisure to do the maximum you can and want to do with that time. Leisure is different for everyone, reading, gaming, sitting on the beach, making art, but if you want to be /wise/ with your leisure you have to do everything you want to do! Focus a lot, or focus a little, you just have to do everything possible to fuck up as much as possible.