13 ms·

Excuse me but why are you eating so many frogs

742 points by irajdeep 4y ago

d--b 4y ago
Jesus, this guy knows how to write.
- danuker 4y ago
  Also how to read (if the same Adam recorded the voiceover).
  - ragazzina 4y ago
    I wanted to listen to the voiceover, but there's an error in the first 40 seconds (morning/evening) and it has really put me off from listening to the rest.
tdullien 4y ago
FWIW, I think this is among the better pieces that I have found on HN recently.
- dcminter 4y ago
  Same and I was skeptical at the outset. I particularly liked the analogy of the conscious/unconscious to the director and his intern!
more_corn 4y ago
I hate the author’s snarky arrogant voice. Like nails on a chalkboard.
d--b 4y ago
I truly loathe romanticism. If that's the kind of crap that's bursting out of you, don't do it.
irajdeep 4y ago
We've got the wrong theory about how minds work and it's ruining our lives
superchroma 4y ago
Well, I think people have big aspirations, and these typically are achievable with lots of money, and people think you have to 'eat frogs' to make that money.
- happymellon 4y ago
  Except when "you are what you eat", and rather than the big aspirations you actually become really good at eating frogs and don't get the opportunity to do these great things. Which is the big point about all these depressed kids with no direction.
- hnbad 4y ago
  Ironically, eating frogs mostly helps making the frog industry a lot of money, not the frog eaters. Most of the people achieving things that require lots of money tend to be the ones who already started out with lots of money (even if it wasn't enough money to do those things right away).
- Sharlin 4y ago
  That’s of course totally culture-specific, and the entire point of the article is that people should be thinking more about whether their aspirations are in fact their own or are they just having goals they think they’re supposed to have, and wondering why they feel sort of empty inside.
- jaegerpicker 4y ago
  I've started to believe that the aspirations that our culture promotes and pushes are the problem itself. Instead of creativeness Western culture promotes monetary success. Instead of happiness in a family we dream of making a billion dollars in a startup. Instead of dreaming about exploring the galaxy we dream about private space travel and mining. Instead of solving humanities greatest challenges via learning and science we push private businesses profiting from half fixes and pointless changes (carbon credits or slow introduction of electric vehicles without public infrastructure as examples). I'm not against people being rewarded for their work but the reward has become more important than the work itself. This is likely a result of the huge wealth inequality Western culture is dealing with, when someone has dramatically less they are always drawn to those that have more and are willing to do almost anything to get there.
renewiltord 4y ago
Who cares about all this? The work or not work is not an end. It's a means to an objective. I want to move the world closer to what I want it to be. I have a theory for what I need to do for that and it's going to take work. Out there I'm sure is my antipode, someone who is taking a different path to the same objective. I'll let them do that way and I'll do this way and let whatever works work. But for me it's hard work and if I don't finish it, power up my kids so that if this is what they want to do they'll have a head start.
- dabedee 4y ago
  I care. I am sure other people who read such articles care. And there might be yet another category of people who find it inspiring to such an extent that they are moved to act or change something about the way they do things.
- Sharlin 4y ago
  Good for you. But you’re definitely generalizing from a single datapoint if you think people in general have very well-defined long-term goals beyond "what my society tells me I’m supposed to be doing". Why work towards goals that aren’t worth the pain of getting there?
mlok 4y ago
As a Frenchman, it took me a while to realize it was supposed to mean "a painful thing to do"
- hnbad 4y ago
  It's funny because in Germany we have a similar phrase "swallowing the toad". I think the idea is to swallow them whole. I think French cuisine generally only serves frog legs, not whole frogs?
  - mlok 4y ago
    Yes, we only eat the legs :)
  - somenameforme 4y ago
    Not just French. They're popular in many parts of the South US as well, particularly in areas with Cajun/French influence. And delicious. And yeah, just the legs.
    - jaclaz 4y ago
      Also in some areas of Italy, there used to be restaurants where frog (only legs, usually fried) were the main dish, though I believe they are little by little becoming more rare. Also they once were a very "poor" (please read as cheap) meal, while nowadays they tend to be "gourmet".
      - _0ffh 4y ago
        Same thing as with oysters, then.
  - Findecanor 4y ago
    Frog legs are eaten in many parts of Europe (except Germany apparently) So much that some indigenous frog species have become endangered, and frog legs are more often imported from South-East Asia these days. BTW. I had also expected the article to be about actual frogs: about how endangered some species are, or how the flesh may contain pollutants or diseases.
danuker 4y ago
The author's favorite paper of all time, said in the article voiceover: https://home.csulb.edu/~cwallis/382/readings/482/nisbett%20saying%20more.pdf https://home.csulb.edu/~cwallis/382/readings/482/nisbett%20s...
- yboris 4y ago
  Thank you for sharing! This paper is absolutely amazing -- AND it came out in 1977! Telling More Than We Can Know: Verbal Reports on Mental Processes by Richard E. Nisbett and Timothy D. Wilson Both researchers have had amazing careers since then. Timothy Wilson's book Strangers to Ourselves is one I recommend to everyone. It is a continuation of the work in the paper you link to. Nisbett's books are excellent too; my favorite (a must-read!) is Culture of Honor: The Psychology of Violence in the South. Any student of psychology should know these works.
Joker_vD 4y ago
Kind of makes you think what's more important: the ability to do things you want to do, or the ability to not do the things you don't want to do... people do seem to give up on the latter one quite a lot in order to get the first one and then realize the trade-off they've made may have been somewhat non-optimal way too late to be able change it.
kwhitefoot 4y ago
That's one of the best things that HN has ever sent me. I especially liked this penultimate paragraph: "I no longer think there’s something wrong with me; there's something wrong with Reviewer 2. I intend to have so much fun that Reviewer 2 will simply have to join in." I love the last bit: "..so much fun that Reviewer 2 will simply have to join in."
blooalien 4y ago
Re; This particular quote from the article… > "Stop confusing productivity with laziness. While no one likes admitting it, sheer laziness is the No. 1 contributor to lost productivity." I was taught growing up that if it's something you must do anyhow, then true laziness is finding the simplest and most effective way to do a given task quickly and correctly the first time so that you don't have to waste time and effort doing it again or fixing your screw-up. Sounds pretty "productive" to me…
- 6stringmerc 4y ago
  I heard a quote once that a general or some leader said he preferred “highly intelligent and slightly lazy” people because they found the most efficient and reliable ways to get things done, and quickly as a bonus!
  - danuker 4y ago
    Bill Gates — 'I choose a lazy person to do a hard job. Because a lazy person will find an easy way to do it.'
    - bluedino 4y ago
      A true lazy person would never do it.
  - SideburnsOfDoom 4y ago
    > General Freiherr von Hammerstein-Equord, the present chief of the German Army, has a method of selecting officers which strikes us as being highly original and peculiarly un-Prussian. According to Exchange, a Berlin newspaper has printed the following as his answer to a query as to how he judged his officers: > “I divide my officers into four classes as follows: The clever, the industrious, the lazy, and the stupid. Each officer always possesses two of these qualities. > Those who are clever and industrious I appoint to the General Staff. Use can under certain circumstances be made of those who are stupid and lazy. The man who is clever and lazy qualifies for the highest leadership posts. He has the requisite nerves and the mental clarity for difficult decisions. But whoever is stupid and industrious must be got rid of, for he is too dangerous.” Or > I do not know whether your Lordships are familiar with the saying of a German General that there are four types of officer but I think that it is relevant to what we are discussing. He said that there are four types of officer: the clever and lazy, the clever and industrious, the stupid and lazy, and the stupid and industrious. > The clever and lazy you make Chief of Staff, because he will not try to do everybody else’s work, and will always have time to think. The clever and industrious you make his deputy. The stupid and lazy you put into a line battalion, and kick him into doing a job of work. The stupid and industrious you must get rid of at once, because he is a national danger.
6stringmerc 4y ago
Lovely concept and execution! Definitely going to share as it shows the diversity in humanity is real and just natural. There is no ‘ideal’ because other than genetic duplicates, everybody has variables it’s so much fun. Reminds me of being a snippy teenager at “inspirational coaching” sessions or listening to some invited speaker… Speaker: Think outside the box! Me: What box?
akiselev 4y ago
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 946 different sandwich varieties stuffed with fillings such as watermelon and pimento, peanut butter, fried oyster, Bermuda onion and parsley, fruit salad, aspic of foie gras, spaghetti, red snapper roe, salmi of duck, bacon and fried egg, lettuce and tomato, spiced beef, chow-chow, pickled herring, asparagus tips, deep sea scallops, and so on ad infinitum.” I ordered it off Amazon right away only to immediately realize, to my horror, that the hardcover version I had chosen would not arrive until Saturday, a full fortnite after my aspic of foie gras, salmi of duck, and the $5 esp32-wroom dev kits that were part of the same order. What is this, the 1930s? Civilization is seriously going down the drain. [1] https://slimemoldtimemold.com/2022/04/04/book-review-a-square-meal-part-i-foods-of-the-20s-and-30s/ https://slimemoldtimemold.com/2022/04/04/book-review-a-squar...
- eesmith 4y ago
  > The writer George Jean Nathan claimed that before the 1920s, there existed only eight basic sandwich types This is 2022 - you can get old cookbooks from archive.org and check if Nathan was right. He wasn't. For example, "The up-to-date sandwich book : 400 ways to make a sandwich", by Eva Greene Fuller. Published in Chicago in 1909. https://archive.org/details/uptodatesandwich00full/page/n7/mode/2up https://archive.org/details/uptodatesandwich00full/page/n7/m... Or, a generation earlier in 1884, the book "Salads and Sauces" by Thomas Jefferson Murrey (New York) has a chapter on sandwiches. https://archive.org/details/saladsandsauces00murrgoog/page/n281/mode/2up?q=sandwich https://archive.org/details/saladsandsauces00murrgoog/page/n... including "Apple Sandwich", "Anchovy Sandwich", "Beef, Raw, Sandwich", "Brie Sandwich", "Caviare Sandwich", "Clam Sandwich", "Curry Sandwich", "Dandelion Sandwich", "Duck Sandwich", and so on for several more pages, ending with "Welsh Sandwich". Look under "Goose Liver" for the foie gras entry. I hope I helped save your meal!
  - b112 4y ago
danuker 4y ago
> your previous love was just a make-believe love, a childish imitation that you mistook for the real thing––an honest mistake, because you had never felt the real thing before? I'll share a personal story: I was burned by a "stuck in your head" "love". It was unrequited and I suffered a lot. I have since then read about infatuation, and am averse towards it. I'd much rather have a stable partner I can have fun with but also communicate, rather than the intense stomach-churning variant. The most important criterion I've found is that both partners in a relationship see the other as greater or equal to themselves. Satisfy that, and you get a long-lasting relationship, and you can stop chasing for the impossible ideal.
istinetz 4y ago
I strongly disagree with the author. What brings me pleasure is playing strategic computer games. I was addicted to playing dota. I was playing 12-16 hours a day, which left no place for socializing, career, family, even basic self-maintenance suffered. Anything meaningful, art, self-improvement was cut. It's a disgraceful, shameful life. The meaning of life is not the blind pursuit of pleasure. We are humans precisely because we follow higher purposes.
- mordae 4y ago
  > higher purposes I chuckled. I have yet to see one.
  - istinetz 4y ago
    I have defined for myself what are the higher purposes I want to follow. It's not an issue of them existing or not, for me the issue is that I am naturally lazy and I do naturally gravitate towards random bullshit, contrary to what the OP blogpost described.
    - mordae 4y ago
      It's just about personal aesthetics. You no longer like yourself, so you went and started to change yourself to better fit your new aesthetic sense. Obviously the sense is informed by what you perceive. You higher could be pretty low for someone else. Like yourself in a couple of years. It's the biggest lie of them all that some behaviors are higher than other. That's how they sell you church, work week and other frogs. Why? Because most of us converge on the same basic idea that with cooperation, we can have generally more fun. So we invent ways to get others involved in our shit. Some of it manipulative, because ends justify the means. Well, except when you like to play on hard and limit the set of your means, because it's more fun that way.
      - istinetz 4y ago
        >It's the biggest lie of them all that some behaviors are higher than other. Disagree. >You higher could be pretty low for someone else. Like yourself in a couple of years. Possible, but I can console my future self with the fact that at least I'm not a filthy nihilist.
vanderZwan 4y ago
> For legal reasons, I’m not saying the people who write this stuff are literally Lucifer in human skin. It’s just that, if I wanted to maximize human misery, I would 100% try to convince people to spend more time doing things they hate When Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett wrote Good Omens thirty years ago they already hit upon this idea when Crowley, a demon and one of the main characters, tries to explain to his fellow demons that nowadays it's all about optimizing micro-evils for the biggest net amount of evil. Sure, things like corrupting a church leader sounds more impressive, but if you cause the phone network to be down for an entire morning in London that ruins so many more people's day ever so slightly, leading to more sinful thoughts in total and pushing them to take it out on others, who then take that out on others, and so on. (my money is on that joke being written by Pratchett, it fits his kind of satire so perfectly)
- mijoharas 4y ago
  I also seem to remember that Crowley had a hand in the shape of the M25 to help maximise misery.
  - WoahNoun 4y ago
    Found this on the wiki page for the M25. >The M25 plays a role in the comedy-fantasy novel Good Omens, as "evidence for the hidden hand of Satan in the affairs of Man".[14] The demon character, Crowley, had manipulated the design of the M25 to resemble a Satanic sigil, and tried to ensure it would anger as many people as possible to drive them off the path of good.[122][123] The lengthy series of public inquiries for motorways throughout the 1970s, particularly the M25, influenced the opening of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, where the Earth is destroyed to make way for a hyperspace bypass.[124]
- staticassertion 4y ago
  Reminds me of Supernatural's Crowley optimizing hell to just be one big line where everyone just has to stand and wait. The simpler solution.
  - 4y ago
frodetb 4y ago
> > 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 changed. But those faults are in fact undeniably persistent to us as a species. It is not without reason that many of our religions, since antiquity, have framed this issue, man's struggle against his impulses, against his baser self, as the struggle against evil. If you're of the opinion that religion is bad for the same reasons that those motivational coaches are bad, then I think you still have to admit that this fight against our selves is far from novel.
- presentation 4y ago
  That’s only if you consider them faults. Preserving energy by not doing things you don’t find rewarding isn’t necessarily a bad thing.
  - frodetb 4y ago
    I'm making no judgement call here, with respect to the "cardinal sins". I'm only highlighting that we've worried about committing them since forever, unlike what the author is suggesting.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- everforward 4y ago
  I don't even think they're persistent to us as a species. There's a clear evolutionary purpose to species not expending energy when they don't have to that applies near globally. I would say the change is more societal than cultural. Humans in a modern, wealthy country can survive and procreate without doing a whole lot. People can coast in their jobs, or live cheaply and work very little and still not worry about whether they'll starve in the winter (for the most part). There's no longer a biological necessity to get stuff done. If people of the past could have done very little and still survive, they probably would have. To my sensibilities, some of them did. The nobility seem like they did a lot of their version of "watching Netflix and eating potato chips".
ryzvonusef 4y ago
Isn't life just a menu of frogs?
- Pigalowda 4y ago
  “A life, Jimmy, you know what that is? It’s the shit that happens when you’re waiting for the things that never come.” -Detective Freamon (The Wire) >Life is what happens in between all the frog eating. As we all wait for “the big break” and dine on these frogs and prepare ourselves for bigger frogs we end up mischaracterizing the in-between. It’s unfortunate I squander this in-between time by preparing myself for the next frog rather than living in the present froglessness.
jiggywiggy 4y ago
I like some points of the article, but stating we are not naturally anything, and then in the next paragraph claiming: '"your base instincts" deserve more credit.', is very illogical.
- orzig 4y ago
  Exactly. And, while it's true we're in a different environment than we evolved for, our instincts are obviously still relevant. We still get hungry, crave connection, etc. They're just filtered through different specific objects
- vanderZwan 4y ago
  It's not illogical at all, although I suppose the author could have been more clear in separating the two points they're arguing against: 1) Humans are naturally lazy 2) Human instinct drives us to do things that are bad for us While connected by an implicit "being lazy is bad" value judgement, these are not the same things. Stating we are "naturally something" implies that there is an fixed equilibrium point that our behavior naturally converges to. The second claim about basic instincts is talking about the dynamic processes going on in your body that you are not consciously aware of. It's not saying anything about how those processes work. They can be perfectly valid, important processes that only act in response to contextual information (that is, it is entirely possible for them to not have a "natural, default" behavior).
  - jiggywiggy 4y ago
    Basic instincts is an other way of saying that we are "naturally" inclined to do certain things in certain situations. I understand that reading natural as a "fixed equilibrim" might mean that to you, but for me, and also others it doesn't mean that. So would be good to better explain that in the article.
    - vanderZwan 4y ago
      My interpretation of "fixed equilibrium" comes from the context of the "naturally lazy" claim, which is alleged to be touted as a universal truth by the gurus. A claim of an external, universal truth is that applies to all instincts. So then I take "not naturally anything" to mean "humans are extremely variable and contextual". I have to admit that my interpretation is biased by reading some post-phenomenological philosophy as part of my design master - I remember one paper that claimed that there is no "natural" endpoint because humans are always reacting to a dynamic context, one that is then changing in response to human interaction, meaning we're more like a chaotic pendulum swinging back and forth over ever-changing equilibrium points. And yeah, I do agree that the article is a bit ambiguous here and could be clearer.
Tade0 4y ago
Regarding pomodoro: I've found that 5 minutes of rest is not enough. Through trial and error I've settled on 30min work and 20min(!) of rest. I have to force myself to stop working when my timer is up, otherwise my productivity that day goes down. On one hand it's just a somewhat smarter way to eat frogs, on the other it doesn't feel so. I suppose half of the problem is not knowing what amount of frog is too much for you.
- presentation 4y ago
  I find it really depends on how motivated I am for the task. If I’m really motivated I can focus for hours and not feel bad at all.
  - danuker 4y ago
    Then there's this (the complete opposite of OP's link): https://www.wisdomination.com/screw-motivation-what-you-need-is-discipline/ https://www.wisdomination.com/screw-motivation-what-you-need...
    - presentation 4y ago
      What works for me is in between. I use both motivation and determination to achieve my goals, trying to use as little determination as is feasible. When I feel unmotivated, I don't try to fight it at first. If there's something else that's equally urgent but I am more motivated to do, I'll do that. If I'm just feeling sluggish overall, I'll go eat lunch or do a workout or drink a coffee or something. And once I don't have a choice but to will myself to do that thing, then I'll do that. Much of the time I don't need to because "resetting" myself will get me to that state of mind.
  - Tade0 4y ago
    My observation is that even when I'm highly motivated I shouldn't go over the scheduled time, otherwise my energy to work will drop and with it, motivation. It's counter-intuitive to say the least. Perhaps there's something about sitting down for extended periods of time that causes this effect.
jongjong 4y ago
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; financial success and social approval from authority figures. Many people are spending most of their lives doing stuff that they don't want to do, so of course they tend to look for shortcuts instead of trying to do things the right way. They have no intrinsic pride in the work they do; it's all about status, money and power. As people have become more free in their personal lives, on the career-side, we've never been so constrained.
- 6stringmerc 4y ago
  A friend recently got what he thought was a great gig with an engineering firm - turned out it was more of a cult - rah rah sessions, after work bowling, softball - and they weren’t shy about shunning anybody who didn’t want all in right away. He got bullied and saw others bullied too - we figure it’s why they prefer to intern pipeline and hire and retain - a lot easier to brainwash when young. I mean it’s not a bad company, they do strong and good work - but acting like it’s the best place ever? Well, most of them have only worked there. We were like, offhand we’ve each had two better jobs than that one.[0] They used culture as a bait for lower pay too. There’s something really disturbing about a company in 2022 wanting to act like a cult rather than accept the job market is turning more mercenary by the day. Oh well, their choice to fail. [0] - Daniel Tosh “America #1” stand up bit for reference
  - Invictus0 4y ago
    Name and shame please.
    - 6stringmerc 4y ago
      Not until the payout is in the bank, but yes there will be a reckoning for their unethical wickedness toward innocent well-meaning employees who just didn’t want to drink the kool-aid.
NiceWayToDoIT 4y ago
So good article, I felt recently the same like a torture with all, make money, do this or that, travel more, enjoy more, do more ...
rfgrffr 4y ago
anonymoushn 4y ago
Related reading: https://hotelconcierge.tumblr.com/post/113360634364/the-stanford-marshmallow-prison-experiment https://hotelconcierge.tumblr.com/post/113360634364/the-stan... http://benjaminrosshoffman.com/approval-extraction-advertised-as-production/ http://benjaminrosshoffman.com/approval-extraction-advertise...
- ttyprintk 4y ago
  Taking tests is an important frog. It’s been quite a few years for me, but lately the movement to dethrone tests like SAT made me wonder how disadvantaged kids can distinguish themselves without a quantifier for potential. If it’s essays instead of a math score, then maybe an essay is like this article says, improved messaging makes bad startups look like good ones.
  - anonymoushn 4y ago
    I agree, but taking a single test that's mostly about merit rather than compliance is not really what's being talked about. For what it's worth, my family is not wealthy or educated and I was able to go to a high-quality-but-not-prestigious magnet school in significant part because of my SAT score :)
    - ttyprintk 4y ago
      But the linked article (GP to yours) is about Y-Combinator and yes it is a bit of a different topic than the (better written) posted one about frogs. It’s been quite a few years, but without the SAT, the only test that would distinguish me from a socio-economically disadvantaged background was a military assessment test. So when the SAT came under fire after a high-profile cheating scandal in Hollywood, I heard a lot about replacing the test with an essay. The article about Y-Combinator is about IQ and things that are not IQ. It also has this interesting quote about messaging —- message coaching can obscure the bad candidates among the good ones. I feel replacing the frog of SAT preparation with the possibility of an essay-as-a-service feels punitive to kids from difficult backgrounds.
presentation 4y ago
If you have goals beyond feeling good in the moment then sometimes it’s worth feeling bad for some time to achieve them. Most people definitely spend a lot of time doing things that will never lead them to that deeper satisfaction but that shouldn’t stop one from trying. And to enjoy the struggle along the way.
nicbou 4y ago
The topic is nice, but above all I thoroughly enjoy the writing. I feel like I get a lot more done precisely because I don't like to eat frogs. I sleep until I'm rested. I don't touch my computer until I've had tea on the balcony. I work on what feels right, when it feels right, for as long as it feels right. If the weather is nice, I'll hop on my bicycle and forget about work. But when something sparks my interest, I have stores of energy to throw at it. My appetite for work is unrestrained by the frogs I've had for breakfast. I embraced the fact that I am not a machine, and that my output is neither constant nor predictable. I'd rather respect the tides of my energy than fight against them.
- taneq 4y ago
  Sounds nice to either have no real outside demands upon your time, or to sufficiently lack emotional attachment to anything you do such that it can’t exert pressure on you. That said, I don’t know if I’d actually want to live that dispassionately.
  - nicbou 4y ago
    That's a very uncharitable take. What part of my comment makes you think that I live dispassionately? The whole point is that my work is almost single-handedly defined by passion. When that runs dry, I take a break and do other things. It's easier to do good work with a well-rested mind full of ideas.
    - timmahoney 4y ago
      Not to mention, the work you perform while in that rested, ready state is of better quality than it would be otherwise.
    - ttyprintk 4y ago
      I think what people envy is that not everyone get to achieve your set of options. This article is by an academic advisor for students at an elite university. I have a feeling that GP was a post that didn’t need to be made, but to achieve your set of options, a lot of things have to go right. You can’t have kids too young, you can’t take on disabled family members, you can’t make certain career choices because you have to pay for aging parents. Some people have to pick up and move everything because of politics. And drug and gambling addiction add at least a frog a day.
manholio 4y ago
> we have a bad theory about how our minds work, one so dastardly that it could have only been devised by the devil himself. It goes like this: 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. I believe that allegedly wrong theory applies perfectly to me, since I have watched myself descend into the junk food - junk flix routine. It started with a mild depression which was a perfect excuse at the time, and then continued down into the pits of procrastination where the lazy part of me was feeling fabulous. Thankfully, the devilish side went completely crazy with guilt and frustration, never mind their Satan worshiping sidekick - the wife - and eventually delivered me back into productivity heaven/hell.
ekianjo 4y ago
Thats a very epicurian piece. Yeah dont do things you hate, love yourself the way you are and dont have big dreams that you hope to achieve, you are already perfect. No thanks.
- bruce343434 4y ago
  I disagree with your take. The article is exactly about finding what you ACTUALLY WANT to achieve and then not getting distracted with eating frogs.
  - ekianjo 4y ago
    > finding what you ACTUALLY WANT to achieve and then not getting distracted with eating frogs. That's precisely the bad piece of advice. Nobody knows what they really want, most of the time, because people change, you change, and the environment changes. It's better to have a system that makes you do something to progress in your skills or your ongoing projects every single day, than coming up with a goal since you have no idea how to get there or that is even worth pursuing. If you are not seeing any progress, the problem is not with the idea that you need to progress every day, rather a bad technique you are applying.
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
    - twoquestions 4y ago
      So people are generally incapable of governing themselves, and require goals to be imposed on them to make meaningful progress? I sure as hell hope I'm reading you wrong, because yikes that is a frightening ideology.
      - ekianjo 4y ago
        where do you see goals imposed on them? i am precisely saying having goals does not work.
kaon123 4y ago
Great article. It is necessary to be reminded of this some time. I always like to remind myself of Steve Jobs' famous speech where he says something like: "As with all matters of the heart, you know when things are right". Which implies you damn well know when things are not right too. (source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UF8uR6Z6KLc&ab_channel=Stanford https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UF8uR6Z6KLc&ab_channel=Stanf...) Not sure if Steve Jobs is a devil according to this guy.
veltas 4y ago
In the doctor and sweet shop owner story the article's author is the sweet shop owner. Sometimes I think the sweet shop owner is helpful to some people, but not to me! I need that disgusting medicine. To each their own.
NDizzle 4y ago
I had this exact conversation with my 3 month old puppy just the other day. Toads, though.
noduerme 4y ago
yeah, man's natural state is better than this bitter dystopia. >> using your “higher faculties” doesn't always leave you better off. As I wrote recently, smart people aren’t happier glad we've come full circle, all the way through self help gurus back to self-referencing barbarians masquerading as intellectual saviors. no, the notion of work is not the devil. idle hands are. if you need evidence, check out all the people who apparently don't have to work and spend all their time on tiktok.
VoodooJuJu 4y ago
>I am not-at-leisure in order to be-at-leisure - Aristotle If you're never at-leisure, you're missing something important. Leisure is the very basis of culture [1]. [1] https://www.worldcat.org/title/leisure-the-basis-of-culture/oclc/38853869 https://www.worldcat.org/title/leisure-the-basis-of-culture/...
Dig1t 4y ago
Counterpoint: sometimes eating frogs is an opportunity, and if you don’t eat them, someone else will and they will be better off because of it. Eating more frogs now can mean that you have to eat fewer frogs in the future, or in total, ALSO that your children and family will have to eat fewer frogs. I still believe that working hard is a virtue and the people who do will usually end up becoming the people who (and who’s children also) are privileged. I agree though that the culture around it is a bit much, and it’s not for everyone. Those type of people should not be forced to participate in that kind of culture if they don’t want to.
- b112 4y ago
  Eating frogs means more earwigs. We need maximum viable frogs.
- temple_os 4y ago
  Obviously you have the right mindset but the point is that the majority of surface-level work addicts don't even have the intention of getting less work in the future as a result. Work for more work for more work -- no end in sight!
- UncleMeat 4y ago
  This is certainly true. The article speaks about how sometimes you must eat frogs. The point is that we often do not ask ourselves whether eating so many frogs is actually necessary and instead take it for granted that we must do this thing that we hate and seek advice for how to do that.
- phkahler 4y ago
  >> Eating more frogs now can mean that you have to eat fewer frogs in the future Key word there is "can". We need to be very careful when deciding about temporal shifts in frog eating (more now, fewer later). If it's not a very tight loop, you are likely eating someone else's frogs so they don't have to. Be sure you're actually reducing the number of frogs coming your way.
  - forbiddenvoid 4y ago
daniel-cussen 4y ago
spaceman_2020 4y ago
The 40 point spreadsheet from the Harvard Business Review article sounds like pure parody.
jaqalopes 4y ago
I love and agree with this article, but I do want to defend the Pomodoro method. In brief, if you already don't enjoy what you are doing for work, applying a new time management strategy to that work will not increase your enjoyment. However, I have personally thrived using the Pomodoro method to help keep myself on track and hitting goals for the work I do enjoy. In this light, moreover, I don't think the analogy to a diet makes much sense. Still, overall an insightful and much-needed statement on one problem with the times we live in. I especially loved this line: > These students inevitably end up as consultants or bankers or managers at tech companies, industries that richly reward people who are willing to work very hard for no particular reason.
- travisjungroth 4y ago
  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 that schedule would work for something I disliked. On the other hand, I have actually found one minute on, one minute off, 30 times with an automated repeating timer to work on tasks that seem downright unbearable. The minute off you just do nothing. Do not do this daily! This is like a once-a-year thing.
  - drivers99 4y ago
    > Do not do this daily! This is like a once-a-year thing. Why's that? (I'm intrigued by this idea.)
    - travisjungroth 4y ago
      I mean, first off, do whatever you want. I'm not a cop. 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.
jrochkind1 4y ago
This essay is really hitting home for me (sorry for leaving a few comments in the thread, they are hopefully each contributing), and I think has some resonance with this essay I also just saw today: > I’m a psychologist – and I believe we’ve been told devastating lies about mental health / by Sanah Ahsan > To return to the plant analogy – we must look at our conditions. The water might be a universal basic income, the sun safe, affordable housing and easy access to nature and creativity. Food could be loving relationships, community or social support services. The most effective therapy would be transforming the oppressive aspects of society causing our pain. We all need to take whatever support is available to help us survive another day. Life is hard. But if we could transform the soil, access sunlight, nurture our interconnected roots and have room for our leaves to unfurl, wouldn’t life be a little more livable? — https://amp.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/sep/06/psychologist-devastating-lies-mental-health-problems-politics https://amp.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/sep/06/psycho... Compare to from OP: > I think lots of people are stuck in that first relationship, stuck next to their tiny little pond, skeptical that anything greater exists. But it takes a lot of work to be satisfied with their relationship and their pond, because they don’t get enough love to fill their hearts or enough fish to fill their bellies. So they end up reading articles about how to love things they don’t love that much and how to feel full without eating enough. > …When they get home at the end of the day and they’re so tired that all they can do is sit motionless and watch TV, they blame themselves, as if it’s their fault that they feel exhausted after racing to meet a deadline so they can avoid being publicly shamed. And that breaks my heart.
metacritic12 4y ago
Summary: The author argues that the popular productivity advice to "eat frogs" (i.e. do the things you don't want to do first) is based on a false premise, that humans are naturally lazy and gluttonous. This false premise leads to a lot of unnecessary suffering, as people try to force themselves to do things they don't actually enjoy.
giantg2 4y ago
Frogs are actually pretty tasty. Contrary to the article, I am a human piece of trash. The problem with those questions of what will make you successful that you hate doing, is that you can't say with certainty that the behavior will make you successful since there are multiple variables at play (most of the time).
csours 4y ago
Don't be angry at your frustration, it already feels bad enough. Don't be angry at your shame, it already feels bad enough. Don't be angry at your fear, it already feels bad enough. Don't be angry at your anger, it already feels bad enough. All of your "bad" emotions can feed other "bad" emotions. The "bad" emotions are a way for your mind to tell you to avoid or change something. They aren't bad in the same way that hunger isn't bad. Hunger feels bad, but it's a signal that tells you to change something or do something. --- This is not a comprehensive comment. There are very important things I didn't say here.
tikkun 4y ago
I made a summary of this article, because I found it a bit hard to read. I used GPT-3! Here's the summary: The author is saying that people who write about productivity are, in a way, the devil, because they convince people to do things they hate. The author is also saying that these people are not literally the devil, but are just as bad. The article argues that humans are not "naturally" lazy, and that the feeling of being a "lazy piece of trash" is actually a result of the unconscious mind doing its job. The unconscious mind is only able to communicate with the conscious mind when there is a problem that needs attention, which can make it seem like the unconscious is lazy. However, the unconscious mind is actually responsible for solving a lot of problems without the conscious mind even realizing it. The author is talking about how people who are successful often have to eat a lot of frogs (do a lot of things they don't want to do), but that doing too many things you don't want to do can lead to burnout. The author suggests that people should stop and think about what they really want to do, and not just do things because they think they should or because other people are doing them. The author also talks about how some people never get to experience true love because they're stuck in bad relationships, and how this can be just as bad as eating too many frogs.
- colemannugent 4y ago
  This is a shockingly coherent summary. The accuracy leaves a bit to be desired, but this is perfectly usable for distilling things you don't have time to fully evaluate.
  - throwaway2037 4y ago
    I felt the same. I read the full article. Then, I returned to HN. I was surprised to see the top post was talking about GPT-3(!). Then, I read the GPT-3 summary. I think: "Hey, not bad! This could be a real tool for everyday use!"
- Infernal 4y ago
  As someone who has not "used GPT-3" what does it mean to say that you used it to make a summary? Just dump the full text of the article into a tool and request a summary output? I have only seen GPT-3 used when it takes a prompt and then generates more related text, I didn't realize you could run that process in reverse.
yboris 4y ago
A classic article on this: In Praise of Idleness by Bertrand Russell https://harpers.org/archive/1932/10/in-praise-of-idleness/ https://harpers.org/archive/1932/10/in-praise-of-idleness/
kika 4y ago
Amazing piece. I always read such types of fiction with some white, but slightly darkening, sense of envy. Especially parts like "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." I left my job in February with enough take to not work for another 10 years keeping my gluttonous lifestyle and 20 or more without it. I kept myself busy with moving across the country (and then pushed a little further) for a couple months but 6 months later I ended up with a side project that I have an itch to productize, another project that I want to do for money, a consulting company and I talk to prospective employers at least once in 2-3 weeks. I don't remember when I was watching Netflix online, not downloaded while on the plane. These are the people from another universe. Somehow I believe their existence is a figure of speech for brilliant writers like Adam.
techno_king 4y ago
causality0 4y ago
I wish he'd used a different metaphor. Fried frog legs are delicious.
wbharding 4y ago
I wonder if past generations have cared as much as we do about helping people feel better about their perceived failings? This essay fits snugly into a 2020s canon of NYT Best Sellers around "work less, enjoy more." My impression had been that previous generations principally aspired to get more done to advance their lot in life. If that's true, it will be interesting to assess later how long-term happiness compares between the "try harder do more" past generations and the "you're amazing why are you working so hard?" current one. Cal Newport is the only contemporary personality I know of that advocates for getting more done, but his method still conforms to the zeitgeist, in that his "get more done" is more precisely "get more important stuff done by doing less overall." Perhaps this is the natural evolution that occurs when a country has reached sufficient wealth where contributing gains to per capita GDP just ain't inspiring to a comfortable generation? It's interesting to try to contextualize the current popularity of anti-productivity literature vs what has come before it.
unknownsky 4y ago
As developers, don't we usually automate the frog?
hermitcrab 4y ago
I think a lot of the motivation to keep shoving those frogs down comes from religion, particularly christianity. Christianity teaches that we are born flawed (original sin) and must work for our redemption. The protestant wing of christianity seems the worst for this (I'm not sure why). Just look what happened when the puritans took over England after the English civil war. What a joyless bunch they were. It is a great article. Insightful and funny.
frozencell 4y ago
"The French eat the frogs", very discriminatory to all insects and small animals that represent the many diasporas of France all over the world.

742 points by irajdeep 4y ago

d--b 4y ago

Jesus, this guy knows how to write.

danuker 4y ago
Also how to read (if the same Adam recorded the voiceover).
- ragazzina 4y ago
  I wanted to listen to the voiceover, but there's an error in the first 40 seconds (morning/evening) and it has really put me off from listening to the rest.

tdullien 4y ago

FWIW, I think this is among the better pieces that I have found on HN recently.

dcminter 4y ago
Same and I was skeptical at the outset. I particularly liked the analogy of the conscious/unconscious to the director and his intern!

more_corn 4y ago

I hate the author’s snarky arrogant voice. Like nails on a chalkboard.

d--b 4y ago

I truly loathe romanticism. If that's the kind of crap that's bursting out of you, don't do it.

irajdeep 4y ago

We've got the wrong theory about how minds work and it's ruining our lives

superchroma 4y ago

Well, I think people have big aspirations, and these typically are achievable with lots of money, and people think you have to 'eat frogs' to make that money.

happymellon 4y ago
Except when "you are what you eat", and rather than the big aspirations you actually become really good at eating frogs and don't get the opportunity to do these great things. Which is the big point about all these depressed kids with no direction.
hnbad 4y ago
Ironically, eating frogs mostly helps making the frog industry a lot of money, not the frog eaters. Most of the people achieving things that require lots of money tend to be the ones who already started out with lots of money (even if it wasn't enough money to do those things right away).
Sharlin 4y ago
That’s of course totally culture-specific, and the entire point of the article is that people should be thinking more about whether their aspirations are in fact their own or are they just having goals they think they’re supposed to have, and wondering why they feel sort of empty inside.
jaegerpicker 4y ago
I've started to believe that the aspirations that our culture promotes and pushes are the problem itself. Instead of creativeness Western culture promotes monetary success. Instead of happiness in a family we dream of making a billion dollars in a startup. Instead of dreaming about exploring the galaxy we dream about private space travel and mining. Instead of solving humanities greatest challenges via learning and science we push private businesses profiting from half fixes and pointless changes (carbon credits or slow introduction of electric vehicles without public infrastructure as examples). I'm not against people being rewarded for their work but the reward has become more important than the work itself. This is likely a result of the huge wealth inequality Western culture is dealing with, when someone has dramatically less they are always drawn to those that have more and are willing to do almost anything to get there.

renewiltord 4y ago

Who cares about all this? The work or not work is not an end. It's a means to an objective. I want to move the world closer to what I want it to be. I have a theory for what I need to do for that and it's going to take work. Out there I'm sure is my antipode, someone who is taking a different path to the same objective. I'll let them do that way and I'll do this way and let whatever works work. But for me it's hard work and if I don't finish it, power up my kids so that if this is what they want to do they'll have a head start.

dabedee 4y ago
I care. I am sure other people who read such articles care. And there might be yet another category of people who find it inspiring to such an extent that they are moved to act or change something about the way they do things.
Sharlin 4y ago
Good for you. But you’re definitely generalizing from a single datapoint if you think people in general have very well-defined long-term goals beyond "what my society tells me I’m supposed to be doing". Why work towards goals that aren’t worth the pain of getting there?

mlok 4y ago

As a Frenchman, it took me a while to realize it was supposed to mean "a painful thing to do"

hnbad 4y ago
It's funny because in Germany we have a similar phrase "swallowing the toad". I think the idea is to swallow them whole. I think French cuisine generally only serves frog legs, not whole frogs?
- mlok 4y ago
  Yes, we only eat the legs :)
- somenameforme 4y ago
  Not just French. They're popular in many parts of the South US as well, particularly in areas with Cajun/French influence. And delicious. And yeah, just the legs.
  - jaclaz 4y ago
    Also in some areas of Italy, there used to be restaurants where frog (only legs, usually fried) were the main dish, though I believe they are little by little becoming more rare. Also they once were a very "poor" (please read as cheap) meal, while nowadays they tend to be "gourmet".
    - _0ffh 4y ago
      Same thing as with oysters, then.
- Findecanor 4y ago
  Frog legs are eaten in many parts of Europe (except Germany apparently) So much that some indigenous frog species have become endangered, and frog legs are more often imported from South-East Asia these days. BTW. I had also expected the article to be about actual frogs: about how endangered some species are, or how the flesh may contain pollutants or diseases.

danuker 4y ago

The author's favorite paper of all time, said in the article voiceover: https://home.csulb.edu/~cwallis/382/readings/482/nisbett%20saying%20more.pdf https://home.csulb.edu/~cwallis/382/readings/482/nisbett%20s...

yboris 4y ago
Thank you for sharing! This paper is absolutely amazing -- AND it came out in 1977! Telling More Than We Can Know: Verbal Reports on Mental Processes by Richard E. Nisbett and Timothy D. Wilson Both researchers have had amazing careers since then. Timothy Wilson's book Strangers to Ourselves is one I recommend to everyone. It is a continuation of the work in the paper you link to. Nisbett's books are excellent too; my favorite (a must-read!) is Culture of Honor: The Psychology of Violence in the South. Any student of psychology should know these works.

Joker_vD 4y ago

Kind of makes you think what's more important: the ability to do things you want to do, or the ability to not do the things you don't want to do... people do seem to give up on the latter one quite a lot in order to get the first one and then realize the trade-off they've made may have been somewhat non-optimal way too late to be able change it.

kwhitefoot 4y ago

That's one of the best things that HN has ever sent me. I especially liked this penultimate paragraph: "I no longer think there’s something wrong with me; there's something wrong with Reviewer 2. I intend to have so much fun that Reviewer 2 will simply have to join in." I love the last bit: "..so much fun that Reviewer 2 will simply have to join in."

blooalien 4y ago

Re; This particular quote from the article… > "Stop confusing productivity with laziness. While no one likes admitting it, sheer laziness is the No. 1 contributor to lost productivity." I was taught growing up that if it's something you must do anyhow, then true laziness is finding the simplest and most effective way to do a given task quickly and correctly the first time so that you don't have to waste time and effort doing it again or fixing your screw-up. Sounds pretty "productive" to me…

6stringmerc 4y ago
I heard a quote once that a general or some leader said he preferred “highly intelligent and slightly lazy” people because they found the most efficient and reliable ways to get things done, and quickly as a bonus!
- danuker 4y ago
  Bill Gates — 'I choose a lazy person to do a hard job. Because a lazy person will find an easy way to do it.'
  - bluedino 4y ago
    A true lazy person would never do it.
- SideburnsOfDoom 4y ago
  > General Freiherr von Hammerstein-Equord, the present chief of the German Army, has a method of selecting officers which strikes us as being highly original and peculiarly un-Prussian. According to Exchange, a Berlin newspaper has printed the following as his answer to a query as to how he judged his officers: > “I divide my officers into four classes as follows: The clever, the industrious, the lazy, and the stupid. Each officer always possesses two of these qualities. > Those who are clever and industrious I appoint to the General Staff. Use can under certain circumstances be made of those who are stupid and lazy. The man who is clever and lazy qualifies for the highest leadership posts. He has the requisite nerves and the mental clarity for difficult decisions. But whoever is stupid and industrious must be got rid of, for he is too dangerous.” Or > I do not know whether your Lordships are familiar with the saying of a German General that there are four types of officer but I think that it is relevant to what we are discussing. He said that there are four types of officer: the clever and lazy, the clever and industrious, the stupid and lazy, and the stupid and industrious. > The clever and lazy you make Chief of Staff, because he will not try to do everybody else’s work, and will always have time to think. The clever and industrious you make his deputy. The stupid and lazy you put into a line battalion, and kick him into doing a job of work. The stupid and industrious you must get rid of at once, because he is a national danger.

6stringmerc 4y ago

Lovely concept and execution! Definitely going to share as it shows the diversity in humanity is real and just natural. There is no ‘ideal’ because other than genetic duplicates, everybody has variables it’s so much fun. Reminds me of being a snippy teenager at “inspirational coaching” sessions or listening to some invited speaker… Speaker: Think outside the box! Me: What box?

akiselev 4y ago

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 946 different sandwich varieties stuffed with fillings such as watermelon and pimento, peanut butter, fried oyster, Bermuda onion and parsley, fruit salad, aspic of foie gras, spaghetti, red snapper roe, salmi of duck, bacon and fried egg, lettuce and tomato, spiced beef, chow-chow, pickled herring, asparagus tips, deep sea scallops, and so on ad infinitum.” I ordered it off Amazon right away only to immediately realize, to my horror, that the hardcover version I had chosen would not arrive until Saturday, a full fortnite after my aspic of foie gras, salmi of duck, and the $5 esp32-wroom dev kits that were part of the same order. What is this, the 1930s? Civilization is seriously going down the drain. [1] https://slimemoldtimemold.com/2022/04/04/book-review-a-square-meal-part-i-foods-of-the-20s-and-30s/ https://slimemoldtimemold.com/2022/04/04/book-review-a-squar...

eesmith 4y ago
> The writer George Jean Nathan claimed that before the 1920s, there existed only eight basic sandwich types This is 2022 - you can get old cookbooks from archive.org and check if Nathan was right. He wasn't. For example, "The up-to-date sandwich book : 400 ways to make a sandwich", by Eva Greene Fuller. Published in Chicago in 1909. https://archive.org/details/uptodatesandwich00full/page/n7/mode/2up https://archive.org/details/uptodatesandwich00full/page/n7/m... Or, a generation earlier in 1884, the book "Salads and Sauces" by Thomas Jefferson Murrey (New York) has a chapter on sandwiches. https://archive.org/details/saladsandsauces00murrgoog/page/n281/mode/2up?q=sandwich https://archive.org/details/saladsandsauces00murrgoog/page/n... including "Apple Sandwich", "Anchovy Sandwich", "Beef, Raw, Sandwich", "Brie Sandwich", "Caviare Sandwich", "Clam Sandwich", "Curry Sandwich", "Dandelion Sandwich", "Duck Sandwich", and so on for several more pages, ending with "Welsh Sandwich". Look under "Goose Liver" for the foie gras entry. I hope I helped save your meal!
- b112 4y ago

danuker 4y ago

> your previous love was just a make-believe love, a childish imitation that you mistook for the real thing––an honest mistake, because you had never felt the real thing before? I'll share a personal story: I was burned by a "stuck in your head" "love". It was unrequited and I suffered a lot. I have since then read about infatuation, and am averse towards it. I'd much rather have a stable partner I can have fun with but also communicate, rather than the intense stomach-churning variant. The most important criterion I've found is that both partners in a relationship see the other as greater or equal to themselves. Satisfy that, and you get a long-lasting relationship, and you can stop chasing for the impossible ideal.

istinetz 4y ago

I strongly disagree with the author. What brings me pleasure is playing strategic computer games. I was addicted to playing dota. I was playing 12-16 hours a day, which left no place for socializing, career, family, even basic self-maintenance suffered. Anything meaningful, art, self-improvement was cut. It's a disgraceful, shameful life. The meaning of life is not the blind pursuit of pleasure. We are humans precisely because we follow higher purposes.

mordae 4y ago
> higher purposes I chuckled. I have yet to see one.
- istinetz 4y ago
  I have defined for myself what are the higher purposes I want to follow. It's not an issue of them existing or not, for me the issue is that I am naturally lazy and I do naturally gravitate towards random bullshit, contrary to what the OP blogpost described.
  - mordae 4y ago
    It's just about personal aesthetics. You no longer like yourself, so you went and started to change yourself to better fit your new aesthetic sense. Obviously the sense is informed by what you perceive. You higher could be pretty low for someone else. Like yourself in a couple of years. It's the biggest lie of them all that some behaviors are higher than other. That's how they sell you church, work week and other frogs. Why? Because most of us converge on the same basic idea that with cooperation, we can have generally more fun. So we invent ways to get others involved in our shit. Some of it manipulative, because ends justify the means. Well, except when you like to play on hard and limit the set of your means, because it's more fun that way.
    - istinetz 4y ago
      >It's the biggest lie of them all that some behaviors are higher than other. Disagree. >You higher could be pretty low for someone else. Like yourself in a couple of years. Possible, but I can console my future self with the fact that at least I'm not a filthy nihilist.

vanderZwan 4y ago

> For legal reasons, I’m not saying the people who write this stuff are literally Lucifer in human skin. It’s just that, if I wanted to maximize human misery, I would 100% try to convince people to spend more time doing things they hate When Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett wrote Good Omens thirty years ago they already hit upon this idea when Crowley, a demon and one of the main characters, tries to explain to his fellow demons that nowadays it's all about optimizing micro-evils for the biggest net amount of evil. Sure, things like corrupting a church leader sounds more impressive, but if you cause the phone network to be down for an entire morning in London that ruins so many more people's day ever so slightly, leading to more sinful thoughts in total and pushing them to take it out on others, who then take that out on others, and so on. (my money is on that joke being written by Pratchett, it fits his kind of satire so perfectly)

mijoharas 4y ago
I also seem to remember that Crowley had a hand in the shape of the M25 to help maximise misery.
- WoahNoun 4y ago
  Found this on the wiki page for the M25. >The M25 plays a role in the comedy-fantasy novel Good Omens, as "evidence for the hidden hand of Satan in the affairs of Man".[14] The demon character, Crowley, had manipulated the design of the M25 to resemble a Satanic sigil, and tried to ensure it would anger as many people as possible to drive them off the path of good.[122][123] The lengthy series of public inquiries for motorways throughout the 1970s, particularly the M25, influenced the opening of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, where the Earth is destroyed to make way for a hyperspace bypass.[124]
staticassertion 4y ago
Reminds me of Supernatural's Crowley optimizing hell to just be one big line where everyone just has to stand and wait. The simpler solution.
- 4y ago

frodetb 4y ago

> > 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 changed. But those faults are in fact undeniably persistent to us as a species. It is not without reason that many of our religions, since antiquity, have framed this issue, man's struggle against his impulses, against his baser self, as the struggle against evil. If you're of the opinion that religion is bad for the same reasons that those motivational coaches are bad, then I think you still have to admit that this fight against our selves is far from novel.

presentation 4y ago
That’s only if you consider them faults. Preserving energy by not doing things you don’t find rewarding isn’t necessarily a bad thing.
- frodetb 4y ago
  I'm making no judgement call here, with respect to the "cardinal sins". I'm only highlighting that we've worried about committing them since forever, unlike what the author is suggesting.
deleted 4y ago
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everforward 4y ago
I don't even think they're persistent to us as a species. There's a clear evolutionary purpose to species not expending energy when they don't have to that applies near globally. I would say the change is more societal than cultural. Humans in a modern, wealthy country can survive and procreate without doing a whole lot. People can coast in their jobs, or live cheaply and work very little and still not worry about whether they'll starve in the winter (for the most part). There's no longer a biological necessity to get stuff done. If people of the past could have done very little and still survive, they probably would have. To my sensibilities, some of them did. The nobility seem like they did a lot of their version of "watching Netflix and eating potato chips".

ryzvonusef 4y ago

Isn't life just a menu of frogs?

Pigalowda 4y ago
“A life, Jimmy, you know what that is? It’s the shit that happens when you’re waiting for the things that never come.” -Detective Freamon (The Wire) >Life is what happens in between all the frog eating. As we all wait for “the big break” and dine on these frogs and prepare ourselves for bigger frogs we end up mischaracterizing the in-between. It’s unfortunate I squander this in-between time by preparing myself for the next frog rather than living in the present froglessness.

jiggywiggy 4y ago

I like some points of the article, but stating we are not naturally anything, and then in the next paragraph claiming: '"your base instincts" deserve more credit.', is very illogical.

orzig 4y ago
Exactly. And, while it's true we're in a different environment than we evolved for, our instincts are obviously still relevant. We still get hungry, crave connection, etc. They're just filtered through different specific objects
vanderZwan 4y ago
It's not illogical at all, although I suppose the author could have been more clear in separating the two points they're arguing against: 1) Humans are naturally lazy 2) Human instinct drives us to do things that are bad for us While connected by an implicit "being lazy is bad" value judgement, these are not the same things. Stating we are "naturally something" implies that there is an fixed equilibrium point that our behavior naturally converges to. The second claim about basic instincts is talking about the dynamic processes going on in your body that you are not consciously aware of. It's not saying anything about how those processes work. They can be perfectly valid, important processes that only act in response to contextual information (that is, it is entirely possible for them to not have a "natural, default" behavior).
- jiggywiggy 4y ago
  Basic instincts is an other way of saying that we are "naturally" inclined to do certain things in certain situations. I understand that reading natural as a "fixed equilibrim" might mean that to you, but for me, and also others it doesn't mean that. So would be good to better explain that in the article.
  - vanderZwan 4y ago
    My interpretation of "fixed equilibrium" comes from the context of the "naturally lazy" claim, which is alleged to be touted as a universal truth by the gurus. A claim of an external, universal truth is that applies to all instincts. So then I take "not naturally anything" to mean "humans are extremely variable and contextual". I have to admit that my interpretation is biased by reading some post-phenomenological philosophy as part of my design master - I remember one paper that claimed that there is no "natural" endpoint because humans are always reacting to a dynamic context, one that is then changing in response to human interaction, meaning we're more like a chaotic pendulum swinging back and forth over ever-changing equilibrium points. And yeah, I do agree that the article is a bit ambiguous here and could be clearer.

Tade0 4y ago

Regarding pomodoro: I've found that 5 minutes of rest is not enough. Through trial and error I've settled on 30min work and 20min(!) of rest. I have to force myself to stop working when my timer is up, otherwise my productivity that day goes down. On one hand it's just a somewhat smarter way to eat frogs, on the other it doesn't feel so. I suppose half of the problem is not knowing what amount of frog is too much for you.

presentation 4y ago
I find it really depends on how motivated I am for the task. If I’m really motivated I can focus for hours and not feel bad at all.
- danuker 4y ago
  Then there's this (the complete opposite of OP's link): https://www.wisdomination.com/screw-motivation-what-you-need-is-discipline/ https://www.wisdomination.com/screw-motivation-what-you-need...
  - presentation 4y ago
    What works for me is in between. I use both motivation and determination to achieve my goals, trying to use as little determination as is feasible. When I feel unmotivated, I don't try to fight it at first. If there's something else that's equally urgent but I am more motivated to do, I'll do that. If I'm just feeling sluggish overall, I'll go eat lunch or do a workout or drink a coffee or something. And once I don't have a choice but to will myself to do that thing, then I'll do that. Much of the time I don't need to because "resetting" myself will get me to that state of mind.
- Tade0 4y ago
  My observation is that even when I'm highly motivated I shouldn't go over the scheduled time, otherwise my energy to work will drop and with it, motivation. It's counter-intuitive to say the least. Perhaps there's something about sitting down for extended periods of time that causes this effect.

jongjong 4y ago

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; financial success and social approval from authority figures. Many people are spending most of their lives doing stuff that they don't want to do, so of course they tend to look for shortcuts instead of trying to do things the right way. They have no intrinsic pride in the work they do; it's all about status, money and power. As people have become more free in their personal lives, on the career-side, we've never been so constrained.

6stringmerc 4y ago
A friend recently got what he thought was a great gig with an engineering firm - turned out it was more of a cult - rah rah sessions, after work bowling, softball - and they weren’t shy about shunning anybody who didn’t want all in right away. He got bullied and saw others bullied too - we figure it’s why they prefer to intern pipeline and hire and retain - a lot easier to brainwash when young. I mean it’s not a bad company, they do strong and good work - but acting like it’s the best place ever? Well, most of them have only worked there. We were like, offhand we’ve each had two better jobs than that one.[0] They used culture as a bait for lower pay too. There’s something really disturbing about a company in 2022 wanting to act like a cult rather than accept the job market is turning more mercenary by the day. Oh well, their choice to fail. [0] - Daniel Tosh “America #1” stand up bit for reference
- Invictus0 4y ago
  Name and shame please.
  - 6stringmerc 4y ago
    Not until the payout is in the bank, but yes there will be a reckoning for their unethical wickedness toward innocent well-meaning employees who just didn’t want to drink the kool-aid.

NiceWayToDoIT 4y ago

So good article, I felt recently the same like a torture with all, make money, do this or that, travel more, enjoy more, do more ...

rfgrffr 4y ago

anonymoushn 4y ago

Related reading: https://hotelconcierge.tumblr.com/post/113360634364/the-stanford-marshmallow-prison-experiment https://hotelconcierge.tumblr.com/post/113360634364/the-stan... http://benjaminrosshoffman.com/approval-extraction-advertised-as-production/ http://benjaminrosshoffman.com/approval-extraction-advertise...

ttyprintk 4y ago
Taking tests is an important frog. It’s been quite a few years for me, but lately the movement to dethrone tests like SAT made me wonder how disadvantaged kids can distinguish themselves without a quantifier for potential. If it’s essays instead of a math score, then maybe an essay is like this article says, improved messaging makes bad startups look like good ones.
- anonymoushn 4y ago
  I agree, but taking a single test that's mostly about merit rather than compliance is not really what's being talked about. For what it's worth, my family is not wealthy or educated and I was able to go to a high-quality-but-not-prestigious magnet school in significant part because of my SAT score :)
  - ttyprintk 4y ago
    But the linked article (GP to yours) is about Y-Combinator and yes it is a bit of a different topic than the (better written) posted one about frogs. It’s been quite a few years, but without the SAT, the only test that would distinguish me from a socio-economically disadvantaged background was a military assessment test. So when the SAT came under fire after a high-profile cheating scandal in Hollywood, I heard a lot about replacing the test with an essay. The article about Y-Combinator is about IQ and things that are not IQ. It also has this interesting quote about messaging —- message coaching can obscure the bad candidates among the good ones. I feel replacing the frog of SAT preparation with the possibility of an essay-as-a-service feels punitive to kids from difficult backgrounds.

presentation 4y ago

If you have goals beyond feeling good in the moment then sometimes it’s worth feeling bad for some time to achieve them. Most people definitely spend a lot of time doing things that will never lead them to that deeper satisfaction but that shouldn’t stop one from trying. And to enjoy the struggle along the way.

nicbou 4y ago

The topic is nice, but above all I thoroughly enjoy the writing. I feel like I get a lot more done precisely because I don't like to eat frogs. I sleep until I'm rested. I don't touch my computer until I've had tea on the balcony. I work on what feels right, when it feels right, for as long as it feels right. If the weather is nice, I'll hop on my bicycle and forget about work. But when something sparks my interest, I have stores of energy to throw at it. My appetite for work is unrestrained by the frogs I've had for breakfast. I embraced the fact that I am not a machine, and that my output is neither constant nor predictable. I'd rather respect the tides of my energy than fight against them.

taneq 4y ago
Sounds nice to either have no real outside demands upon your time, or to sufficiently lack emotional attachment to anything you do such that it can’t exert pressure on you. That said, I don’t know if I’d actually want to live that dispassionately.
- nicbou 4y ago
  That's a very uncharitable take. What part of my comment makes you think that I live dispassionately? The whole point is that my work is almost single-handedly defined by passion. When that runs dry, I take a break and do other things. It's easier to do good work with a well-rested mind full of ideas.
  - timmahoney 4y ago
    Not to mention, the work you perform while in that rested, ready state is of better quality than it would be otherwise.
  - ttyprintk 4y ago
    I think what people envy is that not everyone get to achieve your set of options. This article is by an academic advisor for students at an elite university. I have a feeling that GP was a post that didn’t need to be made, but to achieve your set of options, a lot of things have to go right. You can’t have kids too young, you can’t take on disabled family members, you can’t make certain career choices because you have to pay for aging parents. Some people have to pick up and move everything because of politics. And drug and gambling addiction add at least a frog a day.

manholio 4y ago

> we have a bad theory about how our minds work, one so dastardly that it could have only been devised by the devil himself. It goes like this: 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. I believe that allegedly wrong theory applies perfectly to me, since I have watched myself descend into the junk food - junk flix routine. It started with a mild depression which was a perfect excuse at the time, and then continued down into the pits of procrastination where the lazy part of me was feeling fabulous. Thankfully, the devilish side went completely crazy with guilt and frustration, never mind their Satan worshiping sidekick - the wife - and eventually delivered me back into productivity heaven/hell.

ekianjo 4y ago

Thats a very epicurian piece. Yeah dont do things you hate, love yourself the way you are and dont have big dreams that you hope to achieve, you are already perfect. No thanks.

bruce343434 4y ago
I disagree with your take. The article is exactly about finding what you ACTUALLY WANT to achieve and then not getting distracted with eating frogs.
- ekianjo 4y ago
  > finding what you ACTUALLY WANT to achieve and then not getting distracted with eating frogs. That's precisely the bad piece of advice. Nobody knows what they really want, most of the time, because people change, you change, and the environment changes. It's better to have a system that makes you do something to progress in your skills or your ongoing projects every single day, than coming up with a goal since you have no idea how to get there or that is even worth pursuing. If you are not seeing any progress, the problem is not with the idea that you need to progress every day, rather a bad technique you are applying.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - twoquestions 4y ago
    So people are generally incapable of governing themselves, and require goals to be imposed on them to make meaningful progress? I sure as hell hope I'm reading you wrong, because yikes that is a frightening ideology.
    - ekianjo 4y ago
      where do you see goals imposed on them? i am precisely saying having goals does not work.

kaon123 4y ago

Great article. It is necessary to be reminded of this some time. I always like to remind myself of Steve Jobs' famous speech where he says something like: "As with all matters of the heart, you know when things are right". Which implies you damn well know when things are not right too. (source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UF8uR6Z6KLc&ab_channel=Stanford https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UF8uR6Z6KLc&ab_channel=Stanf...) Not sure if Steve Jobs is a devil according to this guy.

veltas 4y ago

In the doctor and sweet shop owner story the article's author is the sweet shop owner. Sometimes I think the sweet shop owner is helpful to some people, but not to me! I need that disgusting medicine. To each their own.

NDizzle 4y ago

I had this exact conversation with my 3 month old puppy just the other day. Toads, though.

noduerme 4y ago

yeah, man's natural state is better than this bitter dystopia. >> using your “higher faculties” doesn't always leave you better off. As I wrote recently, smart people aren’t happier glad we've come full circle, all the way through self help gurus back to self-referencing barbarians masquerading as intellectual saviors. no, the notion of work is not the devil. idle hands are. if you need evidence, check out all the people who apparently don't have to work and spend all their time on tiktok.

VoodooJuJu 4y ago

>I am not-at-leisure in order to be-at-leisure - Aristotle If you're never at-leisure, you're missing something important. Leisure is the very basis of culture [1]. [1] https://www.worldcat.org/title/leisure-the-basis-of-culture/oclc/38853869 https://www.worldcat.org/title/leisure-the-basis-of-culture/...

Dig1t 4y ago

Counterpoint: sometimes eating frogs is an opportunity, and if you don’t eat them, someone else will and they will be better off because of it. Eating more frogs now can mean that you have to eat fewer frogs in the future, or in total, ALSO that your children and family will have to eat fewer frogs. I still believe that working hard is a virtue and the people who do will usually end up becoming the people who (and who’s children also) are privileged. I agree though that the culture around it is a bit much, and it’s not for everyone. Those type of people should not be forced to participate in that kind of culture if they don’t want to.

b112 4y ago
Eating frogs means more earwigs. We need maximum viable frogs.
temple_os 4y ago
Obviously you have the right mindset but the point is that the majority of surface-level work addicts don't even have the intention of getting less work in the future as a result. Work for more work for more work -- no end in sight!
UncleMeat 4y ago
This is certainly true. The article speaks about how sometimes you must eat frogs. The point is that we often do not ask ourselves whether eating so many frogs is actually necessary and instead take it for granted that we must do this thing that we hate and seek advice for how to do that.
phkahler 4y ago
>> Eating more frogs now can mean that you have to eat fewer frogs in the future Key word there is "can". We need to be very careful when deciding about temporal shifts in frog eating (more now, fewer later). If it's not a very tight loop, you are likely eating someone else's frogs so they don't have to. Be sure you're actually reducing the number of frogs coming your way.
- forbiddenvoid 4y ago

daniel-cussen 4y ago

spaceman_2020 4y ago

The 40 point spreadsheet from the Harvard Business Review article sounds like pure parody.

jaqalopes 4y ago

I love and agree with this article, but I do want to defend the Pomodoro method. In brief, if you already don't enjoy what you are doing for work, applying a new time management strategy to that work will not increase your enjoyment. However, I have personally thrived using the Pomodoro method to help keep myself on track and hitting goals for the work I do enjoy. In this light, moreover, I don't think the analogy to a diet makes much sense. Still, overall an insightful and much-needed statement on one problem with the times we live in. I especially loved this line: > These students inevitably end up as consultants or bankers or managers at tech companies, industries that richly reward people who are willing to work very hard for no particular reason.

travisjungroth 4y ago
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 that schedule would work for something I disliked. On the other hand, I have actually found one minute on, one minute off, 30 times with an automated repeating timer to work on tasks that seem downright unbearable. The minute off you just do nothing. Do not do this daily! This is like a once-a-year thing.
- drivers99 4y ago
  > Do not do this daily! This is like a once-a-year thing. Why's that? (I'm intrigued by this idea.)
  - travisjungroth 4y ago
    I mean, first off, do whatever you want. I'm not a cop. 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.

jrochkind1 4y ago

This essay is really hitting home for me (sorry for leaving a few comments in the thread, they are hopefully each contributing), and I think has some resonance with this essay I also just saw today: > I’m a psychologist – and I believe we’ve been told devastating lies about mental health / by Sanah Ahsan > To return to the plant analogy – we must look at our conditions. The water might be a universal basic income, the sun safe, affordable housing and easy access to nature and creativity. Food could be loving relationships, community or social support services. The most effective therapy would be transforming the oppressive aspects of society causing our pain. We all need to take whatever support is available to help us survive another day. Life is hard. But if we could transform the soil, access sunlight, nurture our interconnected roots and have room for our leaves to unfurl, wouldn’t life be a little more livable? — https://amp.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/sep/06/psychologist-devastating-lies-mental-health-problems-politics https://amp.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/sep/06/psycho... Compare to from OP: > I think lots of people are stuck in that first relationship, stuck next to their tiny little pond, skeptical that anything greater exists. But it takes a lot of work to be satisfied with their relationship and their pond, because they don’t get enough love to fill their hearts or enough fish to fill their bellies. So they end up reading articles about how to love things they don’t love that much and how to feel full without eating enough. > …When they get home at the end of the day and they’re so tired that all they can do is sit motionless and watch TV, they blame themselves, as if it’s their fault that they feel exhausted after racing to meet a deadline so they can avoid being publicly shamed. And that breaks my heart.

metacritic12 4y ago

Summary: The author argues that the popular productivity advice to "eat frogs" (i.e. do the things you don't want to do first) is based on a false premise, that humans are naturally lazy and gluttonous. This false premise leads to a lot of unnecessary suffering, as people try to force themselves to do things they don't actually enjoy.

giantg2 4y ago

Frogs are actually pretty tasty. Contrary to the article, I am a human piece of trash. The problem with those questions of what will make you successful that you hate doing, is that you can't say with certainty that the behavior will make you successful since there are multiple variables at play (most of the time).

csours 4y ago

Don't be angry at your frustration, it already feels bad enough. Don't be angry at your shame, it already feels bad enough. Don't be angry at your fear, it already feels bad enough. Don't be angry at your anger, it already feels bad enough. All of your "bad" emotions can feed other "bad" emotions. The "bad" emotions are a way for your mind to tell you to avoid or change something. They aren't bad in the same way that hunger isn't bad. Hunger feels bad, but it's a signal that tells you to change something or do something. --- This is not a comprehensive comment. There are very important things I didn't say here.

tikkun 4y ago

I made a summary of this article, because I found it a bit hard to read. I used GPT-3! Here's the summary: The author is saying that people who write about productivity are, in a way, the devil, because they convince people to do things they hate. The author is also saying that these people are not literally the devil, but are just as bad. The article argues that humans are not "naturally" lazy, and that the feeling of being a "lazy piece of trash" is actually a result of the unconscious mind doing its job. The unconscious mind is only able to communicate with the conscious mind when there is a problem that needs attention, which can make it seem like the unconscious is lazy. However, the unconscious mind is actually responsible for solving a lot of problems without the conscious mind even realizing it. The author is talking about how people who are successful often have to eat a lot of frogs (do a lot of things they don't want to do), but that doing too many things you don't want to do can lead to burnout. The author suggests that people should stop and think about what they really want to do, and not just do things because they think they should or because other people are doing them. The author also talks about how some people never get to experience true love because they're stuck in bad relationships, and how this can be just as bad as eating too many frogs.

colemannugent 4y ago
This is a shockingly coherent summary. The accuracy leaves a bit to be desired, but this is perfectly usable for distilling things you don't have time to fully evaluate.
- throwaway2037 4y ago
  I felt the same. I read the full article. Then, I returned to HN. I was surprised to see the top post was talking about GPT-3(!). Then, I read the GPT-3 summary. I think: "Hey, not bad! This could be a real tool for everyday use!"
Infernal 4y ago
As someone who has not "used GPT-3" what does it mean to say that you used it to make a summary? Just dump the full text of the article into a tool and request a summary output? I have only seen GPT-3 used when it takes a prompt and then generates more related text, I didn't realize you could run that process in reverse.

yboris 4y ago

A classic article on this: In Praise of Idleness by Bertrand Russell https://harpers.org/archive/1932/10/in-praise-of-idleness/ https://harpers.org/archive/1932/10/in-praise-of-idleness/

kika 4y ago

Amazing piece. I always read such types of fiction with some white, but slightly darkening, sense of envy. Especially parts like "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." I left my job in February with enough take to not work for another 10 years keeping my gluttonous lifestyle and 20 or more without it. I kept myself busy with moving across the country (and then pushed a little further) for a couple months but 6 months later I ended up with a side project that I have an itch to productize, another project that I want to do for money, a consulting company and I talk to prospective employers at least once in 2-3 weeks. I don't remember when I was watching Netflix online, not downloaded while on the plane. These are the people from another universe. Somehow I believe their existence is a figure of speech for brilliant writers like Adam.

techno_king 4y ago

causality0 4y ago

I wish he'd used a different metaphor. Fried frog legs are delicious.

wbharding 4y ago

I wonder if past generations have cared as much as we do about helping people feel better about their perceived failings? This essay fits snugly into a 2020s canon of NYT Best Sellers around "work less, enjoy more." My impression had been that previous generations principally aspired to get more done to advance their lot in life. If that's true, it will be interesting to assess later how long-term happiness compares between the "try harder do more" past generations and the "you're amazing why are you working so hard?" current one. Cal Newport is the only contemporary personality I know of that advocates for getting more done, but his method still conforms to the zeitgeist, in that his "get more done" is more precisely "get more important stuff done by doing less overall." Perhaps this is the natural evolution that occurs when a country has reached sufficient wealth where contributing gains to per capita GDP just ain't inspiring to a comfortable generation? It's interesting to try to contextualize the current popularity of anti-productivity literature vs what has come before it.

unknownsky 4y ago

As developers, don't we usually automate the frog?

hermitcrab 4y ago

I think a lot of the motivation to keep shoving those frogs down comes from religion, particularly christianity. Christianity teaches that we are born flawed (original sin) and must work for our redemption. The protestant wing of christianity seems the worst for this (I'm not sure why). Just look what happened when the puritans took over England after the English civil war. What a joyless bunch they were. It is a great article. Insightful and funny.

frozencell 4y ago

"The French eat the frogs", very discriminatory to all insects and small animals that represent the many diasporas of France all over the world.