12 ms·

Being basic as a virtue

159 points by skellertor 7y ago

hockeybias 7y ago
Fly fishing.
whatshisface 7y ago
The desire to avoid the "tan back stigma" of having to think to make money has already been satisfied by snooty literature. Snooty thinking is thinking that requires a smart brain but has no economic value. If you want to show that you're smart, and you also want to show that you don't need to make money, you can produce opinions on 13th century literature or whatever else you like. So, in a sense the author's prophecy has already come to pass.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- ska 7y ago
  I suspect this take is as snooty as the caricature you are drawing.
  - pessimizer 7y ago
    Accusations of elitism from people who think they're better than everyone else are a weird feature of modern culture. I think it's somehow historically related to Calvinism (the best at being of service are the saved, not the best at being smart, or the best at asking questions.) It's virtuous not to think too much, it means you aren't wasting time on things other than salvation (or making money.) Just do the obvious thing. Whatever everybody else is doing. Do it harder, though.
    - whatshisface 7y ago
      The worst existential accusation that anyone could levy against the intellectual elite would be that they're engaging in the conspicuous consumption of brain time, especially so given all the fun that's made of "McMansions" and other forms of conspicuous consumption. It's probably not true of everybody, but I wonder how many people would care about whether or not they were philistines if you took away any chance of getting recognized for having good culture.
stcredzero 7y ago
Remember, your capacity for innovation can be optimized, but will always be finite. Apply your capacity to where the cost/benefit is optimized.
Notorious_BLT 7y ago
Is it common for knowledge workers to fantasize about more labor intensive work from time to time? Because I definitely found myself relating to that sentiment. Usually my mind goes to construction or carpentry in those moments. My favorite part of this is the acknowledgement of the enjoyment to be found embracing the 'degenerate' as the author calls it. I can strongly relate to needing a good, stupid, socially-unacceptable laugh sometimes.
- ska 7y ago
  I think it's pretty common. It can sometimes be solved by talking to some 45 year old carpet layers about their knees, carpenters/framers about their backs & wrists, etc. It is nice to be able to put your hands on something you've done though.
  - mgreenleaf 7y ago
    Hmm, just a thought, but maybe that is an argument against the hyper-specialization of modern society. It would be nice to choose different things throughout a day/week/year, all productive, and all requiring some skill, but each one being a bit different providing physical or mental exercise of different types. Bending over all day to build something might not be great for humans, but sitting in a chair all day focusing probably isn't either. It would be nice to arrange a productive society that gave people the opportunity to move between the different types of productivity.
    - ska 7y ago
      I don't think this is a new phenomena at all. Anthropologists can tell a lot about old civilizations by characteristic injuries, after all. I suspect that people have been screwing up their bodies with repetitive motions/positions since at least the dawn of agriculture. I suppose it is telling that this was the better alternative. I've known people who have constructed working lives for themselves that try and achieve this balance, but it is a difficult thing to do. I expect that it usually has an economic penalty of some sort, but if at least some of the work pays well it's not crazy. One way to manage it would be to find lucrative work roughly 1/2 time (i.e. "knowledge work" contracts) and then very intentionally spend the rest of your time outside and doing something active. If you've ever tried to negotiate a short week for less pay you'll probably realize this is difficult to arrange.
DarwinMailApp 7y ago
I loved this part: Being mediocre is turning down the combat difficulty on Red Dead so you can play through the game. It’s a resistance to hyper-optimization; the “courage to be ordinary”. I wholeheartedly agreed with this point as soon as I read it. I adapted this approach while building DarwinMail [1]. There have been countless email & Twitter suggestions for DarwinMail. I've always listened and asked questions until I understood what what the users core message was. However, I do not always implement what has been asked. I believe in some 'truths' when it comes to building your product while following a basic approach; 1. Users are the core of any business. 2. The feedback you receive from users is the most valuable feedback you will receive on your product as they are the ones actually using your product. 3. You do not have to implement everything your users ask for. Even though you may not do everything your users ask for, that does not mean you are not listening. I believe you need to keep your features simple and easy to understand. Being basic reminds me of the saying 'Slow is smooth and smooth is fast'. To me that is one of the most important truths when it comes to life and business. [1] https://www.DarwinMail.app https://www.DarwinMail.app
malvosenior 7y ago
It seems as if this person is just discovering old fashioned American anti-intellectualism (unintentionally ironically presented in an intellectual wrapper). There's a reason beyond laziness that many American's look down on typical urban, liberal arts thought and discussion, and it's close to what this post posits: tribalism and in/out group signalling. The difference is that the author sees being "basic" as a signal that one is wealthy enough not to have to work creatively for a living, and the historical practitioners of anti-intellectualism are signalling a disdain for productionless thought.
- blfr 7y ago
  The other reason is that a typical urban, liberat arts thought and discussion seems to have deteriorated greatly in the age of Internet. Or maybe lack of filtering through time and publishers just allowed for the usual quality to surface. Either way, anti-intellectualism is looking a little better every time an intellectual tweets.
- kickscondor 7y ago
  Eh, there's more to it than this. 'Basic' is also the perspective that we're really just animals working to survive. That we're all just dipshits cluttering up the world while we attempt to assemble some kind of respectable way of living. No cynicism here - I feel a real kinship to others when I'm in this mood, rather than caught up in high-mindedness - which can be fun, too, of course. I think the fact that she terms it 'basic' rather than 'anti-intellectual' makes it less reactionary - a baseline humanity that joins all of us. I think even the term 'American anti-intellectualism' is a misnomer, considering that ancient figures such as Jesus or Buddha were in this vein - preferring terse wisdom to chains of detailed jargon. They spoke in 'basic', in a way.
- coldtea 7y ago
  >There's a reason beyond laziness that many American's look down on typical urban, liberal arts thought and discussion Yes, its dismal historical lows...
- golemotron 7y ago
  It's the "X-Class" from Paul Fussell's classic book _Class: A Guide Through the American Status System_ retooled for the present day. https://www.amazon.com/Class-Through-American-Status-System/dp/0671792253 https://www.amazon.com/Class-Through-American-Status-System/...
hliyan 7y ago
Whenever I feel this way (and I do feel this way more than I care to admit), it's usually due to mental fatigue from extended periods of mental exertion. I've found that stepping away from high intensity thinking for a few weeks every six months or so helps me reset. A complete "information lobotomy" as the author suggests, may be overcompensation...
obiefernandez 7y ago
https://workaway.info https://workaway.info A site that lets you find hosts who will trade room and board in exchange for two to five hours of labor per weekday. Mostly located in beautiful/wild locations around the world. I'm currently doing three months in Europe hopping from place to place using Workaway. For instance, right now I'm at a hobby farm on top of a mountain in central italy. Super laid back. And gorgeous. Imagine the most picturesque idyllic farm you can... I'm finding that the rewards in mental health are more than sufficient to justify the astronomical opportunity cost.
- opportune 7y ago
  My browser is complaining about an expired or invalid cert
  - johnchristopher 7y ago
    It's fine for https://www.workaway.info https://www.workaway.info
  - yellowapple 7y ago
    Mine too. Just gotta stick a www. in front of the URL. The cert's apparently only valid for specific subdomains and not the root domain.
- tictoc 7y ago
  Is this your first foray into something like this?
  - obiefernandez 7y ago
    Yes, and loving it!
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- coldtea 7y ago
  >I'm finding that the rewards in mental health are more than sufficient to justify the astronomical opportunity cost. If it helps you get by, there's no opportunity cost lost... Burnt out/broken/dead people have no opportunities!
draw_down 7y ago
Ironically (or perhaps expectedly), the author has reproduced the mindset they seek to distance themselves from in their analysis of the "counter-counterculture". You see, counter-counterculture is comprised of 3 pillars, and here is how they transmogrify into status symbols...
munificent 7y ago
If this article resonated with me any more strongly, I'd shatter like a wine glass. I love living on the West Coast and working in tech, and I fully appreciate the many levels of privilege it affords me. Likewise, I've learned a ton and gained countless hours of recreation from Reddit and the other social aggregators. At the same time, there is something unhealthy and unbalanced about it all. Reddit's never-ending stream of upvoted videos is a machine for showing me the best and worst of humanity. That's enriching and often hilarious. But those best videos often leave me feeling like I can't compete. Why should I practice a little guitar if I'm never going to be as good as that guy playing "While My Guitar Gently Weeps" on a ukelele? The videos of mishaps aren't any better. Anytime a video of someone doing something foolish gets a million views, I get a little more self-conscious. It reminds me of that traumatic transition in middle school when I first became really aware of social pressure and fitting in. Because I wasn't used to this signal, the gain was really high and I was constantly paralyzed by self-consciousness. The Internet is that times a million, forever. I used to feel good about my even mediocre accomplishments because I lived in a world where I wasn't constantly surrounded by the world's best X for all possible X. I'd like to get back to that state, but it's really hard to turn off that level of self awareness. Deliberately choosing to be unaware is not the same as actually being unaware. It's another layer on top when the goal is to strip off the inteceding layer. I can't go back to before ironic-detachment post-modernism. The best I can hope for is a "New Sincerity" post-post-modernism, which isn't the same. The part about degeneracy touches a nerve too. I don't know if I've ever tried to articulate this properly, but today's progressive liberal culture is possibly the most confining culture I've ever lived in. In many ways it feels like a neo-Victorian society where the expectation to follow the norms is high and the price for the slightest transgression is even higher. The values it adopts are strictly better than Victorian times and many of the places I grew up in the South. Equality for people of all genders, races, ability, orientations, etc. Care for the environment. Intolerance of sexual harrassment or violence of any kind. These are good values. But the way progressive culture enforces those values socially is pretty intense. There seems to be little room for human error, personal growth, or misinterpretation. A slip of the tongue can easily summon a career-ending mob on Twitter. (Or, at least, it seems that way.) If I tell a joke, is that a micro-aggression? If I don't tell a joke, is my seriousness itself another micro-aggression? While the laws are just, the penalties associated with breaking them are Draconian. Maybe it's supposed to feel this way for me now. I'm straight, male, white, able, and middle class. Perhaps I felt freer in my youth because I was in a position of implicit power where there were fewer consequences if I did or said some dumb shit that hurt someone else. And maybe I have to be more careful now because that power imbalance is being restored. But as someone who has always strived to not be racist, sexist, homophobic, etc., someone who has always had been sensitive to the discomfort of others and tried to not hurt people, it's kind of a bummer being in a culture that makes me feel even more cautious than I already naturally did. Meanwhile, there's still apparently no shortage of actual fascist, racist, sexual predator asshats out there who clearly couldn't care less about liberal culture. It feels like we're policing ourselves to the point of madness when we weren't the problem in the first place.
adammish 7y ago
“A person who thinks all the time has nothing to think about except thoughts. So he loses touch with Reality, and lives in a world of illusion.” -Alan Watts
- draw_down 7y ago
  Illusions aren't so bad, and reality ain't so great (and is an inherently ideological concept to boot). So, there are probably worse consequences than this one.
invalidOrTaken 7y ago
I really liked this piece. I especially enjoyed the thinking<--->tan analogy. "Intellectualism as signal for (possibly (likely!) contagious) unluck" is an unfortunate, but I think real, phenomenon.
_bxg1 7y ago
Instead of chasing the latest one-dimensional solution (or anti-solution) to The Good Life, just seek balance. Everyone needs creative space, and everyone needs something in their life that feels truly challenging. But everyone also needs meditative breaks from mental activity, and time spent in nature, and time building relationships, and time doing things that are dumb and fun and useless. This seems to be a common theme in California (at least, SF and LA): take something good - creativity, progress, art - and fetishize it until it becomes a pathology. The problem is not with any of these things - they're good; great, even! - the problem is with seeing one single dimension of life as The End-All. That is always going to end up being unhealthy, no matter what it is.
- lanstin 7y ago
  So you advocate a middle path?
  - _bxg1 7y ago
    I'm not sure what you mean by that; but I think people like this author fantasize about extreme life changes when one of their core needs as a human isn't being met. It's generally better to identify and satisfy that need, instead of taking a huge leap in the opposite of your current direction.
    - Retra 7y ago
      It's easy to give vague advice though, and the more vague it is the less actionable it tends to be. These "huge leaps" can be seen as a counterpoint to that, where people are trying to do something, and anything less extreme won't really feel like something -- it won't feel like a life-changing event.
- nostrademons 7y ago
  An ironic trend among some of the Bay Area upper-middle class is taking balance itself and fetishizing it. So instead of meditating for 20 minutes at home, we have 10-day silent Vipassana meditation retreats where you can't talk or touch anything. Instead of walking to the store once in a while to get some exercise, people bike 50 miles in and 50 miles back to work. Instead of having a pet, people raise a menagerie. Sometimes I think Californians should just own it and admit that this is an extreme place. Even when we do balance, we do it by switching up the obsession weekly.
skim_milk 7y ago
I got to experience some unexpected culture shock earlier this year taking a vacation to SF from a medium-sized city in the midwest (to probably no surprise to you reading this comment). Having forgot my clothes on the trip I got to tour all of SF for a week in cheap business casual clothing I kept on after work, which was an experience. Lovely city but damn, I had a target on my back looking like a basic tourist so I bought some more appropriate clothing and tried my best to fit in. Got home after the trip made me want to take an extra vacation day just to drink cheap beer, stare at the cows, and listen to sports on the radio. Sorry for the mostly irrelevant story, but what I'm trying to say is I think this is probably a pretty common thing even outside of white collar big city folk culture.
rhacker 7y ago
In before there's a picture of a girl with one arm in the air with short pants on butt-facing-camera and a rake in the other arm.
- dang 7y ago
  Please don't do this here.
scelerat 7y ago
To me, saying someone is “basic” is another way of saying they’re living the unexamined life. It’s an epithet that probably doesn’t apply to anyone 100% and probably everyone at least a little bit
fragsworth 7y ago
Listen to yourselves. Look at what you're upvoting. Is this community reaching peak arrogance? It can be rephrased as "We're so fucking smart we need to take steps to dumb ourselves down". I'm prepared for the downvotes. But come on. Really?
- tjoff 7y ago
  That's not what it is about, at all. It is, perhaps, quite telling that you would reach that conclusion to a post that ponders whether striving to perform your very best every inch of your life really is the utopia. Being "smart" wasn't even part of the equation yet you somehow ended up there.
  - fragsworth 7y ago
    My point is that the original post and this entire thread is mental masturbation for a bunch of people who think so highly of themselves that they should take steps to actively have to reduce their [insert word for superiority]. You've got issue with me using the word "smart". What word would you like to use? The lack of self-awareness in this community is sometimes baffling.
  - akhilcacharya 7y ago
    I'll be honest, I interpreted it the same way. >a post that ponders whether striving to perform your very best every inch of your life really is the utopia. I can't read it that way because it's not how I operate. I don't identify as a member of the "front row"[0] even though I am middle to upper middle class. All of the things identified as "mediocre" and implicitly compared against are normal to me. There's an entire caste of Americans that went to HYPSM+ and got 2300's on their SATs and feel stifled by Bay culture. I think they are supremely out of touch. [0] https://www.firstthings.com/article/2019/06/back-row-america https://www.firstthings.com/article/2019/06/back-row-america
abeppu 7y ago
This seems as good an opportunity as any to bring up another part of the "basic" concept which feels really unhealthy: the idea that "basic" is consuming commodity, mass-market goods, and that high status is distinguishing yourself through sophisticated taste in what you consume. This mindset is problematic for at least a few reasons: - Every choice of consumption becomes an opportunity to over-examine - Devaluing goods because they're common lures us into a needless chain of "upgrades" as productivity improves. We can never have a post-scarcity economy if we're taught to shun whatever isn't scarce. - All of this plays into the framing that we're first and foremost workers and consumers. Would we not all be happier and healthier consuming decent but not spectacular mass-produced and inexpensive food, drink, clothing, housing, cars, etc, instead of coveting a rare beer, or looking down our noses at people buying starbucks?
- cwkoss 7y ago
  Mass market goods have a strong financial incentive to slowly decrease quality to capitalize on brand goodwill for short term profit.
- 1000units 7y ago
  I felt very cool bringing a 7-Eleven Slurpee(R) into a Starbucks to hang out yesterday.
- pessimizer 7y ago
  > This seems as good an opportunity as any to bring up another part of the "basic" concept which feels really unhealthy: the idea that "basic" is consuming commodity, mass-market goods, and that high status is distinguishing yourself through sophisticated taste in what you consume. It's also a marketing tactic to be exotic and to add a strange element to the center of your product that no one has, because if you're incomparable, you'll never have to compete on quality. Commodity products actually have to be better to command loyalty, not just something you can mention in conversation to make your tastes seem more exotic and you seem more knowledgeable and experienced. I don't think conspicuous consumption is a thing that can be prevented, though, as long as there is a middle class (or any other form of aspiring courtier.)
- 7y ago
ken 7y ago
I definitely see this. There's a brand of clothing for workers that has become fashionable among trendy young people. I see people walking around with a hammer loop who I doubt have ever used a hammer.
ggg3 7y ago
thankfully the shift he points out with tan/work/leisure is happening and everyone now "works" as influencer on social media being the most basic as possible. By the time the author archives his desired basicnes as a status symbol, basicnes will already be repurpose to mean that you toil all day with basic social media influencing.
your-nanny 7y ago
It's this new fangled meaning of basic. I have to accept it as given, but I sort of find it aggravating, maybe because I think of basic as a synonym of foundational or elementary. In the context of mathematics, calling something basic, foundational, or elementary needn't mean simplistic, stupid, or something for young children. People can add and subtract without grasping number theory. But again, just me complaining about you people's neologisms, and how basic is that?
algaeontoast 7y ago
I equate “basic” as a label to someone I simply find so in-interesting or dull in their personal persists or interests that I’m uncomfortable being around them. Moreso, I’m acknowledging I’m incompatible with them, to me they are “basic” in that I don’t seem to stretch my thought process around them. To others they might be interesting, but I’m not going to lie to myself or others.
bch 7y ago
This is so personal it's beyond reproach, for decency’s sake. On the other hand, it could be overwrought romanticism that speaks to nothing but existential crisis. Who doesn’t want to be a farmer, rising at 3am to be alone with your thoughts and hot coffee, tending the fields that feed a nation, while the sun rises, signalling: this is creation; I’m driving the world! The answer is probably: farmers, who would happily say “fuck right off” to 3am starts day after day sucking dust and hoping you can keep your margins, the equipment doesn’t break, and the weather holds. I think the angst of the writing wants to push through to something more than analyzing the pedestrian, but have the ultimate enlightenment being cool with coming back to embrace the pedestrian. Ish. I’m reminded of a couple story closings: [1] Siddhartha listened. He was now nothing but a listener, completely concentrated on listening, completely empty, he felt, that he had now finished learning to listen. Often before, he had heard all this, these many voices in the river, today it sounded new. Already, he could no longer tell the many voices apart, not the happy ones from the weeping ones, not the ones of children from those of men, they all belonged together, the lamentation of yearning and the laughter of the knowledgeable one, the scream of rage and the moaning of the dying ones, everything was one, everything was intertwined and connected, entangled a thousand times. And everything together, all voices, all goals, all yearning, all suffering, all pleasure, all that was good and evil, all of this together was the world. All of it together was the flow of events, was the music of life. And when Siddhartha was listening attentively to this river, this song of a thousand voices, when he neither listened to the suffering nor the laughter, when he did not tie his soul to any particular voice and submerged his self into it, but when he heard them all, perceived the whole, the oneness, then the great song of the thousand voices consisted of a single word, which was Om: the perfection. [2] https://youtu.be/OsDnrFBpsBk https://youtu.be/OsDnrFBpsBk —- [1] Siddhartha, Hermann Hesse [2] A River Runs Through It. Robert Redford/Norman Maclean
obiefernandez 7y ago
I mentioned this article to my friend Michael who is currently hosting me at his farm in Umbria, and this was his reply: "Interesting yes, too much of anything dulls the mind, even the best things can jade and wane if overindulged in. One hour outside tying up tomato vines, weeding or watering balances out 10 trading memes on FB or watching YouTube tutorials, reading about myriad things as long as they are well written. We need and crave variety, novelty and balance, while the culture nudges us towards monomania, tunnel thinking and hyper-specialisation, narrow casting in the data stream, all trees, no forest. To zoom back out you need to let go of forward motion (or better, our notion of it) and be willing to stop using our will power for a few moments and see what's behind our ego's prideful play for perfection or power. Basic thinking is a cool concept. Unwinding complexity, seeking simpler, more elegantly energetic solutions to life's challenges, first to survive then to transform quantity into quality."
- fbi-director 7y ago
  Standing at a crossroad in my life right now, your friend Michael has some really insightful quotes. Thank you.
sharadov 7y ago
I think what we as programmers or more largely knowledge workers miss is doing something which is physical and involves direct contact. Typing away on a computer in a room with dozens of others with the him of white noise is far off from that kind of experience. I like to cook, the experience of touching produce, cutting and cooking is a uniquely human experience. So, yeah get a hobby which allows you to do that. Disconnect and recharge.
strikelaserclaw 7y ago
It is not the thinking that is the problem, it is the constant need to be productive and for thoughts to have value somehow. There are plenty of people who can think about stuff just for the pleasure of it. I guess living in a hyper competitive place like San Francisco would kill some of that "doing something purely for the joy of it" mentality.

159 points by skellertor 7y ago

Fly fishing.

The desire to avoid the "tan back stigma" of having to think to make money has already been satisfied by snooty literature. Snooty thinking is thinking that requires a smart brain but has no economic value. If you want to show that you're smart, and you also want to show that you don't need to make money, you can produce opinions on 13th century literature or whatever else you like. So, in a sense the author's prophecy has already come to pass.

deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
ska 7y ago
I suspect this take is as snooty as the caricature you are drawing.
- pessimizer 7y ago
  Accusations of elitism from people who think they're better than everyone else are a weird feature of modern culture. I think it's somehow historically related to Calvinism (the best at being of service are the saved, not the best at being smart, or the best at asking questions.) It's virtuous not to think too much, it means you aren't wasting time on things other than salvation (or making money.) Just do the obvious thing. Whatever everybody else is doing. Do it harder, though.
  - whatshisface 7y ago
    The worst existential accusation that anyone could levy against the intellectual elite would be that they're engaging in the conspicuous consumption of brain time, especially so given all the fun that's made of "McMansions" and other forms of conspicuous consumption. It's probably not true of everybody, but I wonder how many people would care about whether or not they were philistines if you took away any chance of getting recognized for having good culture.

stcredzero 7y ago

Remember, your capacity for innovation can be optimized, but will always be finite. Apply your capacity to where the cost/benefit is optimized.

Notorious_BLT 7y ago

Is it common for knowledge workers to fantasize about more labor intensive work from time to time? Because I definitely found myself relating to that sentiment. Usually my mind goes to construction or carpentry in those moments. My favorite part of this is the acknowledgement of the enjoyment to be found embracing the 'degenerate' as the author calls it. I can strongly relate to needing a good, stupid, socially-unacceptable laugh sometimes.

ska 7y ago
I think it's pretty common. It can sometimes be solved by talking to some 45 year old carpet layers about their knees, carpenters/framers about their backs & wrists, etc. It is nice to be able to put your hands on something you've done though.
- mgreenleaf 7y ago
  Hmm, just a thought, but maybe that is an argument against the hyper-specialization of modern society. It would be nice to choose different things throughout a day/week/year, all productive, and all requiring some skill, but each one being a bit different providing physical or mental exercise of different types. Bending over all day to build something might not be great for humans, but sitting in a chair all day focusing probably isn't either. It would be nice to arrange a productive society that gave people the opportunity to move between the different types of productivity.
  - ska 7y ago
    I don't think this is a new phenomena at all. Anthropologists can tell a lot about old civilizations by characteristic injuries, after all. I suspect that people have been screwing up their bodies with repetitive motions/positions since at least the dawn of agriculture. I suppose it is telling that this was the better alternative. I've known people who have constructed working lives for themselves that try and achieve this balance, but it is a difficult thing to do. I expect that it usually has an economic penalty of some sort, but if at least some of the work pays well it's not crazy. One way to manage it would be to find lucrative work roughly 1/2 time (i.e. "knowledge work" contracts) and then very intentionally spend the rest of your time outside and doing something active. If you've ever tried to negotiate a short week for less pay you'll probably realize this is difficult to arrange.

DarwinMailApp 7y ago

I loved this part: Being mediocre is turning down the combat difficulty on Red Dead so you can play through the game. It’s a resistance to hyper-optimization; the “courage to be ordinary”. I wholeheartedly agreed with this point as soon as I read it. I adapted this approach while building DarwinMail [1]. There have been countless email & Twitter suggestions for DarwinMail. I've always listened and asked questions until I understood what what the users core message was. However, I do not always implement what has been asked. I believe in some 'truths' when it comes to building your product while following a basic approach; 1. Users are the core of any business. 2. The feedback you receive from users is the most valuable feedback you will receive on your product as they are the ones actually using your product. 3. You do not have to implement everything your users ask for. Even though you may not do everything your users ask for, that does not mean you are not listening. I believe you need to keep your features simple and easy to understand. Being basic reminds me of the saying 'Slow is smooth and smooth is fast'. To me that is one of the most important truths when it comes to life and business. [1] https://www.DarwinMail.app https://www.DarwinMail.app

malvosenior 7y ago

It seems as if this person is just discovering old fashioned American anti-intellectualism (unintentionally ironically presented in an intellectual wrapper). There's a reason beyond laziness that many American's look down on typical urban, liberal arts thought and discussion, and it's close to what this post posits: tribalism and in/out group signalling. The difference is that the author sees being "basic" as a signal that one is wealthy enough not to have to work creatively for a living, and the historical practitioners of anti-intellectualism are signalling a disdain for productionless thought.

blfr 7y ago
The other reason is that a typical urban, liberat arts thought and discussion seems to have deteriorated greatly in the age of Internet. Or maybe lack of filtering through time and publishers just allowed for the usual quality to surface. Either way, anti-intellectualism is looking a little better every time an intellectual tweets.
kickscondor 7y ago
Eh, there's more to it than this. 'Basic' is also the perspective that we're really just animals working to survive. That we're all just dipshits cluttering up the world while we attempt to assemble some kind of respectable way of living. No cynicism here - I feel a real kinship to others when I'm in this mood, rather than caught up in high-mindedness - which can be fun, too, of course. I think the fact that she terms it 'basic' rather than 'anti-intellectual' makes it less reactionary - a baseline humanity that joins all of us. I think even the term 'American anti-intellectualism' is a misnomer, considering that ancient figures such as Jesus or Buddha were in this vein - preferring terse wisdom to chains of detailed jargon. They spoke in 'basic', in a way.
coldtea 7y ago
>There's a reason beyond laziness that many American's look down on typical urban, liberal arts thought and discussion Yes, its dismal historical lows...
golemotron 7y ago
It's the "X-Class" from Paul Fussell's classic book _Class: A Guide Through the American Status System_ retooled for the present day. https://www.amazon.com/Class-Through-American-Status-System/dp/0671792253 https://www.amazon.com/Class-Through-American-Status-System/...

hliyan 7y ago

Whenever I feel this way (and I do feel this way more than I care to admit), it's usually due to mental fatigue from extended periods of mental exertion. I've found that stepping away from high intensity thinking for a few weeks every six months or so helps me reset. A complete "information lobotomy" as the author suggests, may be overcompensation...

obiefernandez 7y ago

https://workaway.info https://workaway.info A site that lets you find hosts who will trade room and board in exchange for two to five hours of labor per weekday. Mostly located in beautiful/wild locations around the world. I'm currently doing three months in Europe hopping from place to place using Workaway. For instance, right now I'm at a hobby farm on top of a mountain in central italy. Super laid back. And gorgeous. Imagine the most picturesque idyllic farm you can... I'm finding that the rewards in mental health are more than sufficient to justify the astronomical opportunity cost.

opportune 7y ago
My browser is complaining about an expired or invalid cert
- johnchristopher 7y ago
  It's fine for https://www.workaway.info https://www.workaway.info
- yellowapple 7y ago
  Mine too. Just gotta stick a www. in front of the URL. The cert's apparently only valid for specific subdomains and not the root domain.
tictoc 7y ago
Is this your first foray into something like this?
- obiefernandez 7y ago
  Yes, and loving it!
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
coldtea 7y ago
>I'm finding that the rewards in mental health are more than sufficient to justify the astronomical opportunity cost. If it helps you get by, there's no opportunity cost lost... Burnt out/broken/dead people have no opportunities!

draw_down 7y ago

Ironically (or perhaps expectedly), the author has reproduced the mindset they seek to distance themselves from in their analysis of the "counter-counterculture". You see, counter-counterculture is comprised of 3 pillars, and here is how they transmogrify into status symbols...

munificent 7y ago

If this article resonated with me any more strongly, I'd shatter like a wine glass. I love living on the West Coast and working in tech, and I fully appreciate the many levels of privilege it affords me. Likewise, I've learned a ton and gained countless hours of recreation from Reddit and the other social aggregators. At the same time, there is something unhealthy and unbalanced about it all. Reddit's never-ending stream of upvoted videos is a machine for showing me the best and worst of humanity. That's enriching and often hilarious. But those best videos often leave me feeling like I can't compete. Why should I practice a little guitar if I'm never going to be as good as that guy playing "While My Guitar Gently Weeps" on a ukelele? The videos of mishaps aren't any better. Anytime a video of someone doing something foolish gets a million views, I get a little more self-conscious. It reminds me of that traumatic transition in middle school when I first became really aware of social pressure and fitting in. Because I wasn't used to this signal, the gain was really high and I was constantly paralyzed by self-consciousness. The Internet is that times a million, forever. I used to feel good about my even mediocre accomplishments because I lived in a world where I wasn't constantly surrounded by the world's best X for all possible X. I'd like to get back to that state, but it's really hard to turn off that level of self awareness. Deliberately choosing to be unaware is not the same as actually being unaware. It's another layer on top when the goal is to strip off the inteceding layer. I can't go back to before ironic-detachment post-modernism. The best I can hope for is a "New Sincerity" post-post-modernism, which isn't the same. The part about degeneracy touches a nerve too. I don't know if I've ever tried to articulate this properly, but today's progressive liberal culture is possibly the most confining culture I've ever lived in. In many ways it feels like a neo-Victorian society where the expectation to follow the norms is high and the price for the slightest transgression is even higher. The values it adopts are strictly better than Victorian times and many of the places I grew up in the South. Equality for people of all genders, races, ability, orientations, etc. Care for the environment. Intolerance of sexual harrassment or violence of any kind. These are good values. But the way progressive culture enforces those values socially is pretty intense. There seems to be little room for human error, personal growth, or misinterpretation. A slip of the tongue can easily summon a career-ending mob on Twitter. (Or, at least, it seems that way.) If I tell a joke, is that a micro-aggression? If I don't tell a joke, is my seriousness itself another micro-aggression? While the laws are just, the penalties associated with breaking them are Draconian. Maybe it's supposed to feel this way for me now. I'm straight, male, white, able, and middle class. Perhaps I felt freer in my youth because I was in a position of implicit power where there were fewer consequences if I did or said some dumb shit that hurt someone else. And maybe I have to be more careful now because that power imbalance is being restored. But as someone who has always strived to not be racist, sexist, homophobic, etc., someone who has always had been sensitive to the discomfort of others and tried to not hurt people, it's kind of a bummer being in a culture that makes me feel even more cautious than I already naturally did. Meanwhile, there's still apparently no shortage of actual fascist, racist, sexual predator asshats out there who clearly couldn't care less about liberal culture. It feels like we're policing ourselves to the point of madness when we weren't the problem in the first place.

adammish 7y ago

“A person who thinks all the time has nothing to think about except thoughts. So he loses touch with Reality, and lives in a world of illusion.” -Alan Watts

draw_down 7y ago
Illusions aren't so bad, and reality ain't so great (and is an inherently ideological concept to boot). So, there are probably worse consequences than this one.

invalidOrTaken 7y ago

I really liked this piece. I especially enjoyed the thinking<--->tan analogy. "Intellectualism as signal for (possibly (likely!) contagious) unluck" is an unfortunate, but I think real, phenomenon.

_bxg1 7y ago

Instead of chasing the latest one-dimensional solution (or anti-solution) to The Good Life, just seek balance. Everyone needs creative space, and everyone needs something in their life that feels truly challenging. But everyone also needs meditative breaks from mental activity, and time spent in nature, and time building relationships, and time doing things that are dumb and fun and useless. This seems to be a common theme in California (at least, SF and LA): take something good - creativity, progress, art - and fetishize it until it becomes a pathology. The problem is not with any of these things - they're good; great, even! - the problem is with seeing one single dimension of life as The End-All. That is always going to end up being unhealthy, no matter what it is.

lanstin 7y ago
So you advocate a middle path?
- _bxg1 7y ago
  I'm not sure what you mean by that; but I think people like this author fantasize about extreme life changes when one of their core needs as a human isn't being met. It's generally better to identify and satisfy that need, instead of taking a huge leap in the opposite of your current direction.
  - Retra 7y ago
    It's easy to give vague advice though, and the more vague it is the less actionable it tends to be. These "huge leaps" can be seen as a counterpoint to that, where people are trying to do something, and anything less extreme won't really feel like something -- it won't feel like a life-changing event.
nostrademons 7y ago
An ironic trend among some of the Bay Area upper-middle class is taking balance itself and fetishizing it. So instead of meditating for 20 minutes at home, we have 10-day silent Vipassana meditation retreats where you can't talk or touch anything. Instead of walking to the store once in a while to get some exercise, people bike 50 miles in and 50 miles back to work. Instead of having a pet, people raise a menagerie. Sometimes I think Californians should just own it and admit that this is an extreme place. Even when we do balance, we do it by switching up the obsession weekly.

skim_milk 7y ago

I got to experience some unexpected culture shock earlier this year taking a vacation to SF from a medium-sized city in the midwest (to probably no surprise to you reading this comment). Having forgot my clothes on the trip I got to tour all of SF for a week in cheap business casual clothing I kept on after work, which was an experience. Lovely city but damn, I had a target on my back looking like a basic tourist so I bought some more appropriate clothing and tried my best to fit in. Got home after the trip made me want to take an extra vacation day just to drink cheap beer, stare at the cows, and listen to sports on the radio. Sorry for the mostly irrelevant story, but what I'm trying to say is I think this is probably a pretty common thing even outside of white collar big city folk culture.

rhacker 7y ago

In before there's a picture of a girl with one arm in the air with short pants on butt-facing-camera and a rake in the other arm.

dang 7y ago
Please don't do this here.

scelerat 7y ago

To me, saying someone is “basic” is another way of saying they’re living the unexamined life. It’s an epithet that probably doesn’t apply to anyone 100% and probably everyone at least a little bit

fragsworth 7y ago

Listen to yourselves. Look at what you're upvoting. Is this community reaching peak arrogance? It can be rephrased as "We're so fucking smart we need to take steps to dumb ourselves down". I'm prepared for the downvotes. But come on. Really?

tjoff 7y ago
That's not what it is about, at all. It is, perhaps, quite telling that you would reach that conclusion to a post that ponders whether striving to perform your very best every inch of your life really is the utopia. Being "smart" wasn't even part of the equation yet you somehow ended up there.
- fragsworth 7y ago
  My point is that the original post and this entire thread is mental masturbation for a bunch of people who think so highly of themselves that they should take steps to actively have to reduce their [insert word for superiority]. You've got issue with me using the word "smart". What word would you like to use? The lack of self-awareness in this community is sometimes baffling.
- akhilcacharya 7y ago
  I'll be honest, I interpreted it the same way. >a post that ponders whether striving to perform your very best every inch of your life really is the utopia. I can't read it that way because it's not how I operate. I don't identify as a member of the "front row"[0] even though I am middle to upper middle class. All of the things identified as "mediocre" and implicitly compared against are normal to me. There's an entire caste of Americans that went to HYPSM+ and got 2300's on their SATs and feel stifled by Bay culture. I think they are supremely out of touch. [0] https://www.firstthings.com/article/2019/06/back-row-america https://www.firstthings.com/article/2019/06/back-row-america

abeppu 7y ago

This seems as good an opportunity as any to bring up another part of the "basic" concept which feels really unhealthy: the idea that "basic" is consuming commodity, mass-market goods, and that high status is distinguishing yourself through sophisticated taste in what you consume. This mindset is problematic for at least a few reasons: - Every choice of consumption becomes an opportunity to over-examine - Devaluing goods because they're common lures us into a needless chain of "upgrades" as productivity improves. We can never have a post-scarcity economy if we're taught to shun whatever isn't scarce. - All of this plays into the framing that we're first and foremost workers and consumers. Would we not all be happier and healthier consuming decent but not spectacular mass-produced and inexpensive food, drink, clothing, housing, cars, etc, instead of coveting a rare beer, or looking down our noses at people buying starbucks?

cwkoss 7y ago
Mass market goods have a strong financial incentive to slowly decrease quality to capitalize on brand goodwill for short term profit.
1000units 7y ago
I felt very cool bringing a 7-Eleven Slurpee(R) into a Starbucks to hang out yesterday.
pessimizer 7y ago
> This seems as good an opportunity as any to bring up another part of the "basic" concept which feels really unhealthy: the idea that "basic" is consuming commodity, mass-market goods, and that high status is distinguishing yourself through sophisticated taste in what you consume. It's also a marketing tactic to be exotic and to add a strange element to the center of your product that no one has, because if you're incomparable, you'll never have to compete on quality. Commodity products actually have to be better to command loyalty, not just something you can mention in conversation to make your tastes seem more exotic and you seem more knowledgeable and experienced. I don't think conspicuous consumption is a thing that can be prevented, though, as long as there is a middle class (or any other form of aspiring courtier.)
7y ago

ken 7y ago

I definitely see this. There's a brand of clothing for workers that has become fashionable among trendy young people. I see people walking around with a hammer loop who I doubt have ever used a hammer.

ggg3 7y ago

thankfully the shift he points out with tan/work/leisure is happening and everyone now "works" as influencer on social media being the most basic as possible. By the time the author archives his desired basicnes as a status symbol, basicnes will already be repurpose to mean that you toil all day with basic social media influencing.

your-nanny 7y ago

It's this new fangled meaning of basic. I have to accept it as given, but I sort of find it aggravating, maybe because I think of basic as a synonym of foundational or elementary. In the context of mathematics, calling something basic, foundational, or elementary needn't mean simplistic, stupid, or something for young children. People can add and subtract without grasping number theory. But again, just me complaining about you people's neologisms, and how basic is that?

algaeontoast 7y ago

I equate “basic” as a label to someone I simply find so in-interesting or dull in their personal persists or interests that I’m uncomfortable being around them. Moreso, I’m acknowledging I’m incompatible with them, to me they are “basic” in that I don’t seem to stretch my thought process around them. To others they might be interesting, but I’m not going to lie to myself or others.

bch 7y ago

This is so personal it's beyond reproach, for decency’s sake. On the other hand, it could be overwrought romanticism that speaks to nothing but existential crisis. Who doesn’t want to be a farmer, rising at 3am to be alone with your thoughts and hot coffee, tending the fields that feed a nation, while the sun rises, signalling: this is creation; I’m driving the world! The answer is probably: farmers, who would happily say “fuck right off” to 3am starts day after day sucking dust and hoping you can keep your margins, the equipment doesn’t break, and the weather holds. I think the angst of the writing wants to push through to something more than analyzing the pedestrian, but have the ultimate enlightenment being cool with coming back to embrace the pedestrian. Ish. I’m reminded of a couple story closings: [1] Siddhartha listened. He was now nothing but a listener, completely concentrated on listening, completely empty, he felt, that he had now finished learning to listen. Often before, he had heard all this, these many voices in the river, today it sounded new. Already, he could no longer tell the many voices apart, not the happy ones from the weeping ones, not the ones of children from those of men, they all belonged together, the lamentation of yearning and the laughter of the knowledgeable one, the scream of rage and the moaning of the dying ones, everything was one, everything was intertwined and connected, entangled a thousand times. And everything together, all voices, all goals, all yearning, all suffering, all pleasure, all that was good and evil, all of this together was the world. All of it together was the flow of events, was the music of life. And when Siddhartha was listening attentively to this river, this song of a thousand voices, when he neither listened to the suffering nor the laughter, when he did not tie his soul to any particular voice and submerged his self into it, but when he heard them all, perceived the whole, the oneness, then the great song of the thousand voices consisted of a single word, which was Om: the perfection. [2] https://youtu.be/OsDnrFBpsBk https://youtu.be/OsDnrFBpsBk —- [1] Siddhartha, Hermann Hesse [2] A River Runs Through It. Robert Redford/Norman Maclean

obiefernandez 7y ago

I mentioned this article to my friend Michael who is currently hosting me at his farm in Umbria, and this was his reply: "Interesting yes, too much of anything dulls the mind, even the best things can jade and wane if overindulged in. One hour outside tying up tomato vines, weeding or watering balances out 10 trading memes on FB or watching YouTube tutorials, reading about myriad things as long as they are well written. We need and crave variety, novelty and balance, while the culture nudges us towards monomania, tunnel thinking and hyper-specialisation, narrow casting in the data stream, all trees, no forest. To zoom back out you need to let go of forward motion (or better, our notion of it) and be willing to stop using our will power for a few moments and see what's behind our ego's prideful play for perfection or power. Basic thinking is a cool concept. Unwinding complexity, seeking simpler, more elegantly energetic solutions to life's challenges, first to survive then to transform quantity into quality."

fbi-director 7y ago
Standing at a crossroad in my life right now, your friend Michael has some really insightful quotes. Thank you.

sharadov 7y ago

I think what we as programmers or more largely knowledge workers miss is doing something which is physical and involves direct contact. Typing away on a computer in a room with dozens of others with the him of white noise is far off from that kind of experience. I like to cook, the experience of touching produce, cutting and cooking is a uniquely human experience. So, yeah get a hobby which allows you to do that. Disconnect and recharge.

strikelaserclaw 7y ago

It is not the thinking that is the problem, it is the constant need to be productive and for thoughts to have value somehow. There are plenty of people who can think about stuff just for the pleasure of it. I guess living in a hyper competitive place like San Francisco would kill some of that "doing something purely for the joy of it" mentality.