This article was written in mostly* one continuous chain of thought and I can be wrong, I usually am. I think that the goal of this blog isn't to be right/wrong, its just to explain what I am feeling in the moment to the community that I love. perhaps, its a form of personal growth or maybe even personal regression haha, I am not sure. Also, I think that there is still some nuance with ambition that I haven't detailed in this blog but I think that you can still be ambitious, but be ambitious for the sake of being ambitious (treating it as the end goal rather than the means) and ambition is much less valor and can itself be done if not mostly done in the mundane things of life just as much as well and there's some nuance in that.
This blog was itself created as a means of procastination as I have an exam of professional communication in 4-5 hours. Wish me luck and I would like/prefer it if when reading the blog, you treat me as your little brother because I have learnt all so much from the community and it's not as if I am leaving HN but rather definitely talking on it on a more fixed time. I am also not sure if I am being loud with this opinion, I don't intend on being loud as much as I wish to help someone else who might perhaps have similar thoughts, also this isn't just strictly related to HN itself as well as you might see and if this blog post can genuinely help one person out there (Hi!), I would consider this blog post as a success and even if not, then well it has helped me in both its writing and I might re-read this blog post myself in the future or make some edits, so I consider this a bit already in success.
Anyways, wish me luck for the exam and enjoy the blog! (it starts from here)
I think that, many of us are addicted to HN and believe that this form of addiction is better than other forms of addictions towards say instagram reels/shorts etc. And I constantly check the website for "news" as a form of break, I mean, I certainly do that and I think that this is what my blog is about. The thing though is that either you will find something rewarding on the homepage or not If not, then you will keep looking until you find one, and if you do find one, then you will read the comments, form opinions, make your own thoughts and sometimes write your own comments.
Although its a form of good stuff and I really really admire all the people who are on HN and whom I had the pleasure and will have the pleasure to talk to, but nonetheless, this whole process takes more than 5 minutes and my breaks inevitably go quite large or I would have less focus on the task that I was doing as more thoughts about XYZ project come into my mind and focus/compartmentalization becomes harder and inevitably the process streches further which requires taking more breaks.
I think the process as being in motion but not going anywhere.
Anyways, this made me wonder a lot more on what does it mean to take breaks then. I think that for people like us on HN, we have optimized our brain for constantly seeking new information novelty, in the hopes of becoming smarter or finding thoughts which make us smarter or ideas which work or are quite innovative etc.
I had this thought that:
"wait I dont have to be an information gathering and processing machine!??"
Yes, the information can be well... more informative than the thing on the instagram but nonetheless this sort of thing is still a bit like hustle culture where you aren't really resting in a meaningful way as you are still having quite large expectations within your rest period.
Let your rest period be rest period, Give it that ability and permission to be so. Read HN on a more allocated period of time or when you are actually in the process of a more prolonged break or recreation (say 1-2 hour or 30 minutes rather than 5-10 minutes constantly opening up the website)
One of the reasons that I started hackernews was because I thought that it was a smart thing to do and I thought that I was smarter than thee (my peers) for using HN when they were using insta reels or whatever, it was a source of genuine pride for me, maybe still is, but I wish to be a more humble man while being proud of HN nonetheless and using it in my leisure time, life is not a comparison really.I like HN quite a lot, thus writing this story to open up about its addiction.
So, that left me wondering, what does it mean to take a rest?
For people like us, I think its a form of allowing yourself to not be obedient to curiosity or being at the whims of it, what I mean by that, is we don't have to treat every curious or interesting idea and build it or run along it (even more so now with the advent of AI)
Let yourself have the ability to lose ideas as well, if you think its genuinely good, then maybe write it in a piece of paper or write it somewhere but you have to stop making yourself at the same time a machine [for me, being a meat proxy of Ai where I am the machine, the world is input, the output is ideas, which are pasted into AI, to get the output]
I don't know where I am going with this thought but just give yourself the ability to do the mundane things in life.
The mundane things in life really matters too in my opinion, in the spirit of curiosity and the fast paced life that we live in, we quickly gloss over them [I certainly did and perhaps still do :-(] but for people like us suffering from the HN addiction, its a form of superpower to just sit through the mundane thing of life and enjoy that as well.
I have also found that ironically, I have found my attention span [in some sense] to also decrease as my thoughts are scattered all throughout the past, the present, the future and there is just this continuos pursuit in my mind to discover more, learn more. Although I admire this form of curiosity within myself and I am proud of who I am, everything has a time and place at the same time I think and this might be doing some harm that I gloss over, my overthinking also spirals into it and makes me sometimes forget what the original thought even was and there goes my mind trying to decipher it whole again haha.
While writing this, I found out that HN has a noprocast feature as well.[0][1]
But basically when taking a break or short breaks, instead of being addicted to HN or whatever source, just do something mundane with your life.
Being excited when given intellectual stimulus is alright but being excited about life when there isn't intellectual stimulus or even the pursuit of it in that moment, just living the life in it of itself, is in my opinion something beautiful and can only be captured in the moment.
Though, a lot of my role-models don't fall into this category, perhaps to achieve exceptionalism you might require dedicating your life to the craft but this pursuit of exceptionalism is a pitfall in it of itself. There can only be some people who are extraordinary or exceptionalist [by definition], but what is wrong is that we are trying to force everyone to be exceptionalist, the math doesn't work out!
It is okay to be ordinary in life. Why has society decided that it isn't okay for us to be so or that we are failing behind if that's the case?
And for the ordinary people in world, well they are enjoying their life and I might not know them because they might not be famous and thus they might not be my role models but perhaps ignorance is a form of bliss in that regards.
What I mean by that is the pursuit of relentless knowledge can sometimes be a form of hedonistic treadmill. You cannot ever encapsulate the whole information and nuance and everything of the world and that's completely okay!
There have been a lot of communication nowadays on HN about what does it mean to be a human if AI can do some things better than us or just a lot of philosophical questions.
I wish to argue that humanity or humans live not for accomplishing some achievements but rather for the experience of it combined with the community that they were inspired from and help foster. Chess is a good example of that. No AI can replace that.
HN is the community that I passionately love even with all of its flaws yet at the same time, I think that even then, its important to be mindful about the whole situation and this blog piece has been one attempt at capturing some of the nuance.
I hope that you take some mundane breaks and just relax without any anticipation of accomplishing or doing anything in it, just relax for the sake of relaxing and do the mundane tasks and I hope that you find that they can bring joy in life.
Just live your life and as always, have a nice day.
[0]https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16354131 [1]https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html