22 ms·

Consume less, create more

668 points by tomjcleveland 7y ago

tjr 7y ago
I do feel that I get more out of spending 30 minutes reading a book than I do out of 30 minutes browsing Twitter. Despite how addictive it is (and thus how much some part of me apparently enjoys it), I think I prefer pretty much any activity on my list of possible activities over puttering around with my phone: taking photographs, cleaning dishes, composing music, putting away laundry, writing software, pulling weeds, sleeping... Seriously, I get more value out of effectively anything else over browsing trivial stuff on my phone. Why then is it so easy to keep doing it?
- modo_ 7y ago
  It's hard for me to quit twitter because no matter how low quality the average tweet is, there are always diamonds in the rough -- perfectly composed little knowledge bombs. If you happen to open the app at the right time Twitter can be very high signal/noise. I keep coming back because of the thought that maybe I'll open it and be introduced to a compelling thought that would have otherwise been buried in 20 pages of cruft
  - moab 7y ago
    I find it hard to believe that something deeply insightful can be compressed into 140 characters, or even a collection of tweets. I've read tweet-chains from twitter pundits, and though these longer form tweets do have insight, it's still more like getting an elevator pitch from a smart person than actually getting a deep understanding of the reasoning that leads to said opinions. Basically, my feeling from using twitter is that it is a venue for expressing opinions in clever/snarky ways, and reading other people's clever/snarky opinions and feeling amused. But I might be very wrong, or following the wrong people. Do you have any examples of tweets that are highly information-dense and making insightful points?
    - modo_ 7y ago
      All fair points. I've found that radically limiting the people I follow has had a huge impact on the quality of my feed (and it's still not great). More often than not a tweet provides me with an introduction to a new topic / idea that I can then further explore off the site. I struggled to come up with good tweets on the spot -- here's my best shot: https://twitter.com/steveschoger/status/997125312411570176 https://twitter.com/steveschoger/status/997125312411570176 https://twitter.com/tobyshorin/status/1155965565963399173 https://twitter.com/tobyshorin/status/1155965565963399173 https://twitter.com/naval/status/1002103360646823936 https://twitter.com/naval/status/1002103360646823936 https://twitter.com/jmj/status/1114598412375035905 https://twitter.com/jmj/status/1114598412375035905 Naval's does feel particularly like an elevator pitch though
      - moab 7y ago
        Thanks for sharing these. It's funny, I had exactly that series by Naval in mind earlier. I think the database tweet is really useful (reminds me of a lecture slide).
- messo 7y ago
  Fear of missing out, I think. And the fact that social media generally speaking is engineered to grab our attention and keep it for as long as possible – because personalized ads. When I identified my own FOMO a few years back I deleted most of my social media apps on my phone (except Fediverse-apps which have no algorithms, only good old chronological feeds). I'm reading more books now :)
  - strikelaserclaw 7y ago
    I don't think it's FOMO as much as those products are designed to release temporary happy chemicals with the least amount of effort. Let's be honest, it is much easier to get drunk, eat junk food all the time, browse reddit than it is to eat ur veggies, moderate alcohol, exercise, study etc... For most people, their mind always gravitates towards immediate hedonistic pleasures, this is just the way most people are built (myself included).
    - messo 7y ago
      I guess the algorithms and the UX design is just tailored to tap into the very human fear of missing out. And the fact that we are creatures of habit.
- caconym_ 7y ago
  I think it's hard to bump your brain up out of the ground state of doing nothing into the state of doing something. You have to decide what to do, marshal your focus, get up off the couch, and do it. Browsing the web on your phone takes zero effort and it also effectively distracts you from the question of whether you should be doing something more worthwhile. It's a cognitive trap. It gives you the just five more minutes excuse, forever and ever.
- hombre_fatal 7y ago
  People love to repeat "time you enjoy wasting is not time wasted," but I'd change it to "time that's fulfilling to waste is not time wasted" because fulfillment looks at things on the long time scale. It better captures why wasting so much time on, say, Twitter actually is time wasted: it's not likely to be as fulfilling as just about any other way you could've spent that time. Only narrowly beating out spending that time in a drug-induced euphoric stupor.
- ekr 7y ago
  > Why then is it so easy to keep doing it? Because there's a strong dopamine rush triggered by the thought of seeing those twitter feeds, and your brain is particularly starved for dopamine at the time (maybe you're tired, bored etc). That triggering is the result of the same activity reinforced hundreds of time, so a strong neuronal association has been made between twitter and the reward. Stop using twitter (or whatever maladaptive addictive behavior you'd want to eliminate) for a few months, and those associations will fade. If you are engaged in a meaningful conversation for instance, you won't feel such a strong urge to check twitter.
t0mbstone 7y ago
Creating stuff will definitely give you more of a sense of self-worth and satisfaction than just consuming things will. On the flip side, I create stuff all day at work, and sometimes when I come home I just want to relax. There is room for both. If all people did was consume, then the world would be a boring place with nothing new. If all people did was create, then you would have a massive glut of stuff that nobody actually appreciated. I feel like video games are kind of in that space right now. There are just so many video games coming out every day/week/month, and they all rehash the same tropes. It's rare to find something really unique and "new". Sometimes I like to go back to an old game that I haven't played in a long time and just get caught up in it. Consumption doesn't always have to be of the latest and greatest thing.
- defterGoose 7y ago
  Yeah, I've have the same feeling about games lately. I took a break for a couple years in college and then junior year came back and started playing a lot of Halo 3 and Reach multiplayer. That was fun and got me back into video games as a 'serious' hobby: one that I was invested in exploring on a broad level. But ten years later I find myself getting bored with new games so easily. Maybe it's just getting more involved with adult stuff, but I have friends who are also avid gamers and I like having that as a shared interest/jumping off point. Still, I find myself craving truly novel narratives and mechanics and they're in thin supply. I'm reminded of Sturgeon's Law and the burgeoning market of Indy/low effort game-making. This was all a prelude to tell you that a couple months ago I picked up "Outer Wilds" and it sparked my imagination in a real way. It really felt like I had finally found a game that did space exploration 'right' and it ended up taking a place in my top-5 games of all time. It was truly a beautiful, crafted experience that kept me coming back for more. It was also not too long, not too short. Probably about 30-40 hours provided a comprehensive playthrough and I didn't feel like the game let you 'miss things', which I personally dislike. I wouldn't want to read a choose-your-own-adventure novel for the same reason.
  - FreezerburnV 7y ago
    If you haven’t heard of it yet, Subnautica is the last game I’ve played that truly felt wondrous to play and hooked into my brain in a major way. Highly recommend, one of my favorite games of all time I’d say. (Up there with Undertale and Super Metroid)
0x8BADF00D 7y ago
Some people are perfectly happy consuming and producing nothing. And the inverse. Not everyone can be a producer; it is hard work. Anyone can be a consumer.
moab 7y ago
To the author's point, yes I remember the main themes/movements in the Steinbeck books I have read. I remember them for the Dostoevsky and Tolstoy I have read. I remember them for most good books I have read, even if the reading happened in high school, or 10+ years ago. Good books are almost like a lived-experience. Yes, they are not as "creative" as sketching, or writing an essay, but reading can also require creativity on the part of the reader.
- jvagner 7y ago
  That part of the essay could be turned back on the essay itself.
caconym_ 7y ago
I don't think most people are capable of being creative all the time, but the key is to find some creative pursuit you enjoy and make sure you make time to pursue it. If that means doing it on a schedule, so be it. (that's what it means for me) I write fiction "for fun", and sometimes it feels like work, but if I gave it up I'd drink every night and binge every weekend because my job is totally devoid of meaning. Hanging out with my partner is the only other thing I really care about, and frankly we like drinking together a little bit too much. By the way, any late career change suggestions for a software engineer who's got some money saved up and is sick of tech? Because, fuck.
- ggm 7y ago
  By the way, any late career change suggestions for a software engineer who's got some money saved up and is sick of tech? Because, fuck. The person I seek advice from said radical departures without plans are high risk. Your fan interest in korean baking techniques of the 1750s era are unlikely to scale to a dayjob. But, If you have a passion which gives evidence of up-scaling potential, its still worth exploring. He also said if you treat a long working life as an oil tanker of momentum, the easiest course changes are the small slow ones: reversing course on a a full speed tanker takes kilometers. Reversing course on a career takes years. Moving it marginally, by some small but achievable amount, is both simpler and safer. So, how about exploring a move from the engineering side to some other side, but still exploiting software? or, ceasing software, but staying inside the discipline of engineering? Or applying your software engineering praxis, to some other field which you have less skill in, but strong interest? Those Korean 1760 bakers need some AWESOME code, to make the yeast work in a modern hot oven...
  - caconym_ 7y ago
    Yeah, the risks inherent in a radical departure without a plan are more or less why I'm hanging around. Thanks for your thoughtful reply. I really do love programming, and I have to imagine there are ways to exploit that skill that are a bit less soul crushing even if the money isn't quite as good. E.g. Korean baking. I should get off my ass and go looking.
- 7y ago
jannyfer 7y ago
Kudos to the author on getting a blog post out! It’s something I haven’t done in years. I also used to believe I need to “consume less, create more”... Since then, it’s become more like “if you want to, then consume meaningfully, take time to digest it, sleep on it, get your mind off it for a while, go consume more, take a break, create something, be bad at it, and create again, and maybe eventually you’ll be good at it”. Some books that shaped my thought process were: Where Good Ideas Come From - Steven Johnson Why We Sleep - Matthew Walker Also, blog posts about meditation, interviews with prolific movie writer/directors, and that Ira Glass video.
dredmorbius 7y ago
Yes, producing is hard. No, quantity is not the same as quality. Some people write 5,000 books in a lifetime. Wittgenstein wrote two. The second refuted most of the first. Much modern consumer technology is aggressively anti-generative. I'm wrestling with a crap tablet and OS and a browser that's crashed a half-dozen times today, taking down the 50 or so items I'd had lined up to read (I've yet to embrace the "consome less" element). I spend a lot of time fighting to create and acquire the time and space and materials and tools I require to create, often battling with uncomprehending others in this. "Why do you need books / computer / light / space / food / housing / clothing." I only wish I were kidding. Facile works can be created with relatively low barriers surmounted. More substantive ... takes a bit more. I'm not remotely pretending to be another Ludwig, but reading him and others like him, I've formed a pretty strong view of the quality-quantity curve and how that works out. If even just a 1,600 word blog essay takes a month to compose, a more ambitious project might just require a bit beyond that. And yes, getting into the creative habit, and seeing what works and doesn't (cold starts on blank pages have their place, but so doe boxes and stacks of index cards and books), and not being afraid to start over or take time.
- The_rationalist 7y ago
  Hahahaha if you were in my brain you would understand easily why you made me laugh a lot. I'll still try to explain it to you. I mostly agree with most of your paragraphs. Wittgenstein wrote two. If I understand correctly, you imply that Wittgenstein books (including the tractactus) are of great quality (meaning ≈ of great intellectual value) Actually very few persons understand the tractactus philosophicus. Let me contextualize: Much of "modern" philosophy is totally bullshitesque, no empirism, no intellectual rigor / epistemology, add to this complex subjects studied by people with no knowledge about them and bullshit artists (which is a real skill for selling your books). In parralel of the unification of science happening in the 20th century, a few philosophers actually remembered that philosophy is the love(Phil) of truth (soph) (which indeed is antithetic to BS and to multiple incompatible theories). Those philosophers founded analytical philosophy that had intellectual rigor and even made advance in epistemology, study of paradoxes, of logics, and tools like truth tables (used for e.g hardware logic gates nowadays). They had big results in the foundation of mathematics (especially set theory, e.g the Foundational axiom from zFc) and so they got authority in philosophy in general, even getting recognized by fake philosophers aka bullshit artists. Wittgenstein was an analytical philosopher along with Russell. I've read most of the tractactus, at first I espected to learn many things from a book from such an intellectually rigorous man. And what a book! The tractactus "aims" to answer all philosophical problems... I was quickly disappointed at the beginning, descovering that tractactus pages were full of nonsense, of words equivocations, of sophisms/fallacies, of BS art. But by reading more and more I discovered that the tractactus was not an absurd nonsense, it is an hilarious satire of bullshit artists. It is not even questionable, all the book is full of memes, of trolling. E.g invalid, ridiculously filled truth tables (and he was an expert at truth tables) The end of the book is totally clear once you understand that and end beautifully saying that what you do not understand, you must not talk about. What's even funnier is that most of the philosophical community did not and even today do not understand this is an obvious satire, and think this is one of the greatest books ever. (btw this really fascinate me this kind of people that have this fascinating and horrifying cognitive ability: They read totally nonsensical texts (that use figure of speech melted with sophisms), they do not understand that they do not understand, and then call the author a genius, an "intellectual"(post modernism would perfectly fit such a category)) Wittgenstein wrote two. The second refuted most of the first. You are aware that it is refuted by himself, then how can you call it a high quality book? This make no sense ^^ Btw Wittgenstein had no added value in the philosophical world he has been totally useless and if he never had existed, state of the art philosophy would be unchanged.
apo 7y ago
Worth noting that this is the blog's first post. I like the tone, the humor, and the sheer nerve of writing something like this. It's inspirational without being preachy. It's also highly actionable. Here's how to apply it right now. Close your browser and all other applications. Open a text editor (or a can of paint or whatever). Reflect on something, anything. Then give yourself permission to make the worst possible version of something you like consuming. Write one sentence (or make one stroke), then another, and another. Eventually, rework the mess you've created. Having forced myself to do this on several occasions, I can say it becomes addictive after a few days. And tiring. Which is why I also know it's easy to relapse on an off day. Finding a way to keep motivated independent of external praise is critical.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- shartshooter 7y ago
  I’ve been thinking a lot about how I can enforce discipline in myself to accomplish specific tasks similar to OPs. I agree that that external praise can be a game changer but man of the habits you want to develop are trivial and not worth bringing up but can have a huge impact. For example, instead of being creative, maybe you want to floss consistently or walk 10k steps. Both of those habits are just as important as creating but writing a blog post about it isn’t as sexy, nor is bringing it up in conversation. I’ve been thinking about creating systems that help keep me going in the right direction even though I know I’m going to have an off day because discipline is so fleeting.
  - astockwell 7y ago
    Discipline equals Freedom, no doubt
  - tertius 7y ago
    Tiny habits (free course for a week) + never skip 2 days.
unnouinceput 7y ago
Consume less, create more (or produce more)...and if everyone would adhere to this we'd have another 1929 crisis. Remember those pictures of milk thrown out in the field in order to keep its price up? Yeah, that is what happened back then. Too much production and not enough consumption. Neither "consume lee, create more" nor "consume more, create less" are good. One leads to economic crisis, the other leads to famine. The sweet spot is 50/50, create exactly as much as is consumed. Currently we have achieved this, but with the caveat of West being the consumer and East the producer, hence the current trade war.
- jodrellblank 7y ago
  The sweet spot is 50/50, create exactly as much as is consumed. How do you apply that to something which is not used up as it is consumed, like a book, film, blog post, song, etc.?
  - unnouinceput 7y ago
    books, movies, music and blog posts are information. Information is consumed when assimilated. That's why you have every decade more profit from movies, people are hungry for more information/entertainment. That's why you have relative bad songs that break into billions views vs old songs that are very good and barely have millions view - people are hungry for more information/entertainment. That's why relative bad books like Twilight get screen time and make billions vs Alexandre Dumas who is public IP and yet no new movies based on his books are made - people are hungry for more information/entertainment. And blog posts, ohh, I read several (The old new thing, Schneier, etc) and you know what I always say about those? They post too few - I am hungry for more.
    - jodrellblank 7y ago
      Information is consumed when assimilated. It isn't; everyone could watch the same film on the internet, it's not limited in supply, it's not dependent on printing or shipping or factory production line. Once there's enough film for everyone to watch for a lifetime - say 1M hours to cover 24/7 watching for 100 years, what need is there for more film? What you describe is that people are hungry for novelty. Not more, or better, just newer. Yet there's enough books and films and songs already in existence that we could spend a lifetime exploring and not run out. How do you balance the claimed 50/50 production/consumption when there's already enough media for everyone's consumption for a lifetime, in libraries, today?
nonbirithm 7y ago
I've been thinking about this too much recently. Only a month ago did I realize that all the reading on HN I've done over the years hasn't given me much to think about or remember beyond the span of a day. None of it has made me any smarter, because I wasn't approaching it with that goal. All I really desired when I instinctively typed the "n" in the omnibar and pressed Enter was wanting to be amused and nothing more. Yet I wouldn't be honest if I said I didn't enjoy the time I spent, at least in the moment. It's just that "enjoyment" shuts down personal growth for me. I've since realized I was using the "time enjoyed is not wasted" adage as an excuse to not think critically and make honest attempts at internalizing new knowledge. As someone else mentioned the better word to use instead of "enjoyed" would be "fulfilled" because it takes into account the long term. I've found that I've become too good at subverting ways of not stressing out about figuring out one's lifestyle and using them to get complacent, when if I chose to think just the slightest bit more carefully I would realize I wasn't actually working towards what I wanted. For that matter I didn't even know what I wanted for a long time, because I never bothered to ask. If you search hard enough there will always be someone who will tell you you're doing just fine. In addition to a lack of creativity I can't remember much of what I've consumed. I don't use Facebook or Twitter so my usual assumption was that by consuming things that take continuous effort and resources to make, like television shows, I was spending my time more wisely. That wasn't really true if I made no effort to remember or understand what I had seen. To me it might as well be that I had never seen any of it in the first place and the time was lost. I've decided that some things are worth remembering and the only way I can remember anything for sure is by writing it down, so any time I consume I try to reflect on it and write a few paragraphs about the general plot, themes or personal takeaways. Even when I forget it later I can look back on my notes and know I made an effort to understand something. I know now that if I don't bother to do this I won't have anything interesting to talk about if it comes up in conversation except "I liked it," which has become one of the most painful responses for me to give. And this is just about consumption, not creative output. Suddenly I want to try to understand more things I consume but I also want to make room for trying to explore my own ideas. It's overwhelming and with a traditional day job it becomes soul-crushingly stressful.
- truth_be_told 7y ago
  You have nailed it! A lot of us are suffering from the above same mindset but because we don't even put forth the time to step back and reflect, we don't realize that we are simply running in place without advancing towards our goal (if we are even aware of our goal). Bertrand Russell in his book "The Conquest of Happiness" says; My purpose is to suggest a cure for the ordinary day-to-day unhappiness from which most people in civilized countries suffer, and which is all the more unbearable because, having no obvious external cause, it appears inescapable. Our current Society and Technology have made matters exponentially worse. "Consumption/Distraction" have become the norm and we have to fight the Environment mighty hard to focus and sustain "Creativity/Concentration". Technology might mask our mental degeneration for a while but sooner or later Society will have to pay the price.
platz 7y ago
It may be counter-intuitive, but I feel that without some level of consumption, what you create will be highly derivative—drawing of things you have internalized long ago, but have forgotten whereabouts they were acquired. (you can see this in philosophical/moral discussions with people who have never questioned the source of their values) Some consumption is probably necessary for creativity. You need to bring some things outside the world into yourself, or your ideas will feel made-up and phony. Also, many a artist will admit a lot of what some would call "copying" in the art world is common - but it's more akin to reacting to something from a peer and then putting a unique twisted outlook on it; and this almost creates a 'conversation' even if the author isn't intending that.
- rossdavidh 7y ago
  True that, but, really, wouldn't 1:1 ratio of consuming to creating be sufficient consumption?
- cannonedhamster 7y ago
  All art is a conversation between the artist and the viewer. I'm fairly certain that's a phrase I've heard before. If your goal is to just spew your ideas out a megaphone without any thought as to how it would be received then quality doesn't matter as your need for expression is fulfilled in the act. When you're trying to convey an idea that you think matters, that you feel is important, then you spend a lot more time in getting it as close to right as you can. This is because you're looking for a response, whether that's in words, action, or reaction. I think your comment is spot on.
- Fricken 7y ago
  I was never an avid a reader as I was during the years when I fancied myself a writer. I went straight for the densest tomes and scrutinized them carefully. I can say as much about any creative pursuit I've taken on, it enriches the experience of consuming similar things. I'm not actively engaged with writing now, and am ashamed to admit that I have a hard time getting through books. I end up blorping around on HN instead.
- Broken_Hippo 7y ago
person_of_color 7y ago
If you have high standards, it's difficult to create something.
- Existenceblinks 7y ago
  This comment is at the bottom while I find this is actually a valid point. I've often experienced this.
  - Existenceblinks 7y ago
    I can't believe someone just downvoted me, WOW! This is why I barely login to comment on HN.
- syncopatience 7y ago
  This brings to mind something Ira Glass said about "the gap": > Nobody tells this to people who are beginners, I wish someone told me. All of us who do creative work, we get into it because we have good taste. But there is this gap. For the first couple years you make stuff, it’s just not that good. It’s trying to be good, it has potential, but it’s not. But your taste, the thing that got you into the game, is still killer. And your taste is why your work disappoints you. A lot of people never get past this phase, they quit. Most people I know who do interesting, creative work went through years of this. We know our work doesn’t have this special thing that we want it to have. We all go through this. And if you are just starting out or you are still in this phase, you gotta know its normal and the most important thing you can do is do a lot of work. Put yourself on a deadline so that every week you will finish one story. It is only by going through a volume of work that you will close that gap, and your work will be as good as your ambitions. And I took longer to figure out how to do this than anyone I’ve ever met. It’s gonna take awhile. It’s normal to take awhile. You’ve just gotta fight your way through. https://www.thisamericanlife.org/extras/the-gap https://www.thisamericanlife.org/extras/the-gap
- tedmiston 7y ago
  It's always easier to critique than create.
riantogo 7y ago
Why? As in why is creating at a higher level than consuming? Couldn’t we just “create” at our day jobs and consume at leisure time? Isn’t consuming transferring some of the value we captured elsewhere to some creators? I give everyone here the permission to consume guilt free (if that make it better).
- phkahler 7y ago
  One is actually more satisfying than the other. If you have personal experience to the contrary I'd like to hear it.
  - riantogo 7y ago
    That is just shit we keep telling ourselves. You might even point to me studies, but those are just reflection of what we have conditioned ourselves to believe. Frankly this is how we end up with 70 hr work week or pressured into trying to build that app that no one needs or wants. Because reading a book or running around with your kid being silly is not “productive”.
    - fredsir 7y ago
      Ideally you wouldn't have to be creating something you don't care about at your day job at 40-60/h/w, but instead could spend all your creative time on something you really care about, and doing it to benefit you and your peers instead of primarily just shareholders, and the rest of your time reading a good book, and being silly with your kid. However in the modern world, those things are mostly pushed aside, and instead most people in the modern world spend most of their waking hours as hamsters in a wheel. Then there's the middleground where you try to do both. That's where most people burn out.
    - maniflames 7y ago
      To be fair creating something that has to resemble someone else's vision feels very different from creating something that you envision yourself. Finding balance is important and apart from that I guess not everyone likes creating stuff equally. (Edit: grammar lol)
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
in_hindsight 7y ago
Serious question - would you consider exercise consumption or creation?
- jvagner 7y ago
  Being and transforming
- TeMPOraL 7y ago
  Not OP. It depends. If you're trying to get to a particular shape, it could be seen as creation - getting creative with your body. But if it's just maintenance exercise, than this IMO belongs to the third category of things - it's a chore. A maintenance task. The work you have to do to stand still. Something that I personally strive to minimize.
- tedmiston 7y ago
  Creation of health. Unless you're actively consuming something like watching tv or reading a book while you do it. When it comes to more passive consumption like listening to music while you exercise for background noise, I would still argue it's at least neutral. But if you're listening to an audiobook or podcast (something new to you), then it feels consumption again.
yakubin 7y ago
Offtopic, but assuming the poster is the author of the article: 1. I love the font you chose for your blog and the fancy styling of the first letter of each section. For the first 1 minute I was just staring at the L at the beginning appreciating it. I'm a huge fan of serif fonts in general and regret that sans-serif is used so much more widely. Generally a very clean, good-looking theme. 2. You might want to link to your rss feed in a <link> tag in the html head. I discovered it by knowing where Hugo usually puts it, but others may not have as much luck.
- tomjcleveland 7y ago
  1. Thanks! The font is actually just Times New Roman! I like serif fonts but wanted to use a common system font. 2. Great tip! Just added it.
  - cosmojg 7y ago
    What Hugo theme are you using, if any? Would you mind letting us see the source code?
  - contingencies 7y ago
    I made some art from an idea I had this morning that would have remained unimplemented if I hadn't read your writing. Send me your address (email in profile) and I'll snail-mail it to you.
sjustns 7y ago
Having spent the last few months away from technology to take care of my head, I find myself pacing around the living room waiting for a spark to return. This does not bother me in the least bit. I am someone who craves alone time. That means no music, no podcasts, no computer, no noise, no people. I am quite happy with a book and a writing pad. I want to be left alone to have a certain kind of inward experience. As a side note, I have always felt that the point of reading is not to remember everything you have read, it is more to shape the way you think. And we might remember more of what we read if we would stop reading about other people's reading and productivity habits, and just keep to ourselves. But I digress. Sometimes people ask what it is I am working on, or what it is I do by myself all of the time. The answer, of course, is not a whole lot. Ours is a society that celebrates participation and creativity, yet I feel no pressure to create for the sake of creating, or to share for the sake of sharing. And I do not feel guilty or lazy for not "producing" anything of note. If there is a hell, it is full of groups of people doing group activities, and I am required to participate and create and talk about whatever it is we are doing for eternity. What a nightmare. To be sure, I have written plenty. But what I am driving at is that a lot of the writing or "creative work" I do is for my eyes only. Sometimes I think about sharing an essay, but I have to pause to ask myself if I want to share because I have something to say, or if I want to share because I am seeking validation. Most of the time, the desire to create comes not from some quiet space inside of me, but from the side of me that wants to be seen and heard. I find that the quality of my writing, or any creative work, is far better when it comes from the right mental state, rather than from an abstract sense of urgency that I should be creating something, anything. On another note, having thought about this for awhile now, the deep need for solitude is part of who I am, but also a compensatory reaction to being connected all of the time. Whether we realize it or not, we spend the better half of our days in a sympathetic state. This has consequences, I think, that are different for everyone. Eventually, you have to deal with the residue of living and working at a pace that is often not of your own making. Sometimes you have to get your bearings before the creative spark comes back. That can take longer than expected. In closing, it is worth paying attention to the kind of creativity that comes from helping a friend or lover make something better. Even though the project is not of your own making, being able to add a touch of your creative insight is intellectually rewarding in a unique way.
- 7y ago
DoreenMichele 7y ago
This is a delight for so many reasons. Most of my online time is via a cheap smartphone. There are limits to what I can do on it, but a lot of my blog writing happens on that phone. A lot of what passes for a social life for me happens on that phone via the twitter app or other online platforms. A lot of research happens on that phone. The Palm Pilot was so named because it was the computer power of an airplane in the palm of your hand. I bet most smartphones today outclass it by a wide margin, yet we think they are good for shitposting on Facebook, not for Real Work. But they are good for real work. There's an insane amount of actually productive stuff you can do on a smartphone today from almost anywhere. I also enjoyed the style of the article -- the self-deprecating humor, the somewhat biting wit. It's a thing I used to do a lot more of and I guess I long to move back more in that direction so as to give more life to my writing.
8ytecoder 7y ago
This has been my thought for a while now. I have reasonably pared down on news and social media. However, I have tried to create regularly at least 4 or 5 times now but it hasn’t stuck. Well written essay and good motivation.
TaylorAlexander 7y ago
I love it! I am a super creative person and I spend a lot of time doing what the article suggests. I quit facebook and all other social media two years ago, though I still spend a lot of time scrolling through reddit. At any rate I also write, maintain a few websites, design and build 3D printed robots, and make youtube videos. The author really nails it that you can be creating every day. Today I installed a GPU in my desktop and set up tensorflow to train an image segmentation algorithm I got from github. A couple months ago I ordered a 64x64 LED panel on aliexpress for $26 (search for "hub75") and the appropriate adafruit raspberry pi shield, then took all that stuff on vacation so when I was in a cabin in vermont I could configure the raspberry pi with the appropriate libraries to drive the thing. That was super fun! Earlier this year I took time off between jobs and built a massive four post bed out of redwood. The corner posts are 6" square and 7 feet tall and its all sanded and oiled and it looks phenomenal. The author discovered something really valuable - even when you've got nothing but your phone you can create. And personally I find creating things way more rewarding. If you've ever thought about logging off of Netflix and social media, I definitely recommend it! And humbly, if you want to see what I've been working on, see here: http://tlalexander.com/missing/ http://tlalexander.com/missing/ https://reboot.love/ https://reboot.love/ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ToGT3KokPZA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ToGT3KokPZA
- Hasz 7y ago
  looked thru your site, seems pretty neat. I think accumulating and designing tools is one of the hardest parts to creating physically, as opposed to cranking out thoughts. Flutter seems like a cool platform!
  - TaylorAlexander 7y ago
    Thank you! Flutter is cool in theory, but in practice many backers never got their hardware. I still use Flutter almost every day for remote control of my robots, but it never got to be what I had hoped it would become.
Hasz 7y ago
A couple of thoughts, in the spirit of this essay: There's different levels of consumption. If it's a decent book, someone, usually a few someones, have revised and rewritten parts of a thought, in an attempt to refine the thought, boil it down, expand on it, etc. Your average Kanye tweet probably is, at best, a shot from the hip, blindfolded. Creation doesn't have to be a linear process. I spend a lot of commute time thinking about my projects. Sometimes this ends up in furious sketches and overly verbose notes, but more often than not, it consists of me awkwardly staring at the floor and missing my stop. I put in earbuds w/o noise to drown out the din and discourage the scourge of public transportation, conversation with strangers. Creative output does not need to be public. I'm sure there's the next great american novel locked up in a Microsoft word doc somewhere, and that's sad, but OK. Realistically, I only get to see what others put out, so if you want to be noticed, keep flinging shit at the wall like it's never going out of style. Even if it's a single blogpost on a personal site, someone will see it, and that makes it all totally worth it.
travislane 7y ago
Nice first post for a new blog. I like the blog theme as well. How can I create my own blog with such a clean and minimal theme?
- acangiano 7y ago
  Although I recommend WordPress to most people in my Technical Blogging book, I also discuss Hugo which is what OP used here. Technically you could get any blogging engine to produce a blog that looks like that, but if you're after the minimalistic look, Hugo is really not a bad way to go.
  - travislane 7y ago
    Thanks for the reply. I have tried Hugo earlier but found it confusing due to so many locations for template files (_default/? baseof.html? single.html? list.html? hard to remember all this stuff). What would be a good alternative tool where I can just place a few template files in a single location and it would be sufficient? I have also looked at Jekyll but it is Ruby-based. I know Python. If the tool is Python-based then it would help me because it would allow me to customize its functionality or make it do some niche things that the tool does not support by writing some Python code. I have looked at Pelican too but customizing it seemed daunting to a beginner like me. So I guess I am looking for a something simple, written in Python and easily customizable. Any suggestions?
    - acangiano 7y ago
      You might want to look into Hyde: http://hyde.github.io http://hyde.github.io. It's essentially a Jekyll for Python (though it evolved to something more than just a clone).
      - travislane 7y ago
        Awesome. Thank you for the suggestion. I will take a look at it.
    - 7y ago
ciconia 7y ago
These are not the only two options. There's a third activity most of us seem to have forgotten - to simply be. For me, the very act of everyday living has become very enjoyable and fulfilling in recent years. Doing the dishes, cooking, gardening, sweeping the floor, putting out the trash. Those are not "chores", that's what life's made of. Some of it creative, some not, but the difference is you're simply present in the moment and in the world.
- trevyn 7y ago
  I 100% agree, and I think that most people today need more guidance to achieve this than a snapshot of the target state. Always interested in hearing unusual answers as to how we might approach this challenge.
- thrav 7y ago
  Maintenance is either the one thing everyone forgets in these conversations, or it’s the one thing everyone says no one will want to do. If there were a return to pride in and appreciation of a job well done, there would be no shortage of people willing to do the work, in my mind. The reason most people are so unwilling to do these things is because they feel like it is beneath them, and that doing them is a demonstration of their low status.
  - tkbtkbtkb 7y ago
    I assume many people view menial tasks as below them, and it also seems to differ in degree culturally. I'm from the US, and on a recent trip to Japan I noticed a stark difference in the pride and responsibility the average citizen showed in taking good care of even small spaces. It appeared to be an appreciation for the aesthetics of life, no matter the scale. This isn't valued in the same way in America, where anything that isn't the top feels like it's not worth one's time.
    - thrav 7y ago
      Yep. I felt the same way in Japan. There appeared to be dignity in certain kinds of work in a way that there is not in the United States, and in most cases this yielded superior results of that work. They do so many foods better than the people who invented them.
hyperpallium 7y ago
Be a producer, not "a consumer".
Jakob 7y ago
An interesting exercise. OP is still creating something for consumption, though. This is an old argument: SOCRATES: You know, Phaedrus, writing shares a strange feature with painting. The offsprings of painting stand there as if they are alive, but if anyone asks them anything, they remain most solemnly silent. The same is true of written words. You’d think they were speaking as if they had some understanding, but if you question anything that has been said because you want to learn more, it continues to signify just that very same thing forever. When it has once been written down, every discourse roams about everywhere, reaching indiscriminately those with understanding no less than those who have no business with it, and it doesn’t know to whom it should speak and to whom it should not. And when it is faulted and attacked unfairly, it always needs its father’s support; alone, it can neither defend itself nor come to its own support. -- Plato. c.399-347 BCE. “Phaedrus.” Pp. 551-552 in Complete Works tldr: Debate, discourse.
- thrav 7y ago
  Interesting to see reference to Phaedrus when so much of what’s being discussed in this thread takes me right back to thinking about Robert Pirsig.
cryptozeus 7y ago
I was thinking about this exact same thing. I consume so much like read, watching etc but don’t spend same amount on creating. Even in office I create but spend more time in meetings and other stuff than actually coddling. I find that creating anything random gives me more satisfaction so I have taken up on more creative activities like cooking, coding at home, design etc. I am driving this from the point of view of creation vs consumption and not so much as hobbies.
dynamite-ready 7y ago
I like to think it's less about patterns of consumption, and more about what we consume. One of my favourite quotes: “I cannot remember the books I've read any more than the meals I have eaten; even so, they have made me.” To me, that suggests a number of things. For one, consuming information is undervalued by the author of the blog. It's fundamental to us. Secondly, while you like broccoli and drink milk, I might well be allergic to milk and hate broccoli (I don't, just musing)... So one should be slow to judge. That said, I've never used Netflix. I could be missing out. And finally, you wouldn't eat a 4 course meal on you commute, and you would definitely have some trouble making one on a bus or train ride too.
- TeMPOraL 7y ago
  I like the "you are what you eat" sentiment and agree about judging (I used to hate broccoli, now I tolerate it) but analogies being what they are: > And finally, you wouldn't eat a 4 course meal on you commute, and you would definitely have some trouble making one on a bus or train ride too. You wouldn't eat a 4 course meal on a bus, but it's not 4 courses and flavor and textures that "make you", it's the calories and nutrients. I can absolutely eat a 2/3 of a day's worth of food on a bus no problem, and I can absolutely make this food on a bus too. Think Soylent-like shakes. (The equivalent of making Soylent shakes on a longer commute is a netbook with SSH connection to my home desktop, running terminal Emacs frame. Don't do that always, though - I learned to use travel time to rest and think.)
- toxicFork 7y ago
  Thank you for this quote. I am going through a book (The Nicomachean Ethics) trying to really understand every sentence in it, and its meaning. Going back and forth, taking notes. More like studying it than reading it, I guess. It's taking me a long time, almost a year. I was wondering if I remember the previous chapters, and I sort of do so. But I worry that by the time I have finished it, I will not be able to summarize the chapters well. I guess it's not necessary. There are many things I have picked up from it; it has lead to many interesting discussions with my friends, and so on. That should be enough.
  - 7y ago
randomsearch 7y ago
Massively disagree that reading a book and reddit are comparable. I guess if you only read trash novels you can close the gap, but there is great value to reading a quality book or a periodical like the Economist. Something I’ve been thinking about recently is how very educated people who would never read a tabloid paper or watch a stupid reality TV show will happily retweet lowest common denominator memes or outrage twitter. Because it’s so new, and because everything is intermingled, those people sleepwalk into consuming trash culture. It’s like a well trained athlete has been tricked into living off fast food.
Kecelij 7y ago
"This psychopath was sketching" Hahaha
vivekv 7y ago
I had a similar thought process a few days ago and wrote a post on the same. I was looking to see where the balance lied, ie between producing and consuming as there needs to be consumers for every product. A bit of self promotion - my article is here https://medium.com/@criticalmind/creation-vs-consumption-8e72023f5ef4?source=friends_link&sk=35b31fcaf673e15c3d67f4aa0fc5c533 https://medium.com/@criticalmind/creation-vs-consumption-8e7...
Ayesh 7y ago
I've been blogging low-key for 7 years now, and there are many pieces I feel embarrassed about today, and sometimes that are even downright wrong. But a habit of writing reduces the friction and helps in the thought process. Some of the tech talks I have given, open source packages, and even one side income source bringing about $2,000/mo are all branched out blog post ideas. For me, what is worth most is to identify an idea worth writing about, and I couldn't agree more with the author. Their site is also super fast and minimal, I love it.
rvn1045 7y ago
Creating things and publicaly sharing what I create is the single greatest way to reduce my anxiety. There is literally a step function decrease in anxiety every time I do it.
- tedmiston 7y ago
  I think it makes sense if you consider anxiety (simplistically) as "unpleasant disproportionate worry about the future", and then creating something as reducing uncertainty about the future.
valgor 7y ago
This really hits home with some thoughts I've had lately. But I'm caught in a trap. Do I go after my dreams (numerical computing), do something useful (continue working with the non-profit I help out with), or continue being a sellout by working and learning things relevant to my employer? Splitting my time does not seem efficient, but consuming less and creating more would mean I'm at least working towards several goals slowly than not at all.
pgcj_poster 7y ago
> Smartphones, I’ve decided, are not evil. This entire essay was composed on an iPhone. Maybe it wouldn't have taken a whole month if you had written it on a laptop.
- PeterStuer 7y ago
  Or used a pencil and notebook
maximedb 7y ago
Thank you for this. It is so simple, yet so true.
Barrin92 7y ago
Very strongly disagree with the idea that consuming art is not in itself a generative process. Reading (or many other forms of consumption), if done attentively require practise. There is a world of difference between anxious, distracted twitter scrolling and a good reader. All a book gives you is letters on a page, the rest of the exercise is left to the brain of the reader. Reading is a difficult and enormously complex process, and by no means less of an active or creative activity than writing. Becoming a skilled and mindful reader takes a lot of time. Learning how to engage with the creations of others also means widening ones own personality. I think this post falls into the trap of 'productiveness', which thinks of creative activity only in terms of to what degree something can be exposed to others, ironically for consumption.
- skadamou 7y ago
  I am inclined to agree with the sentiment of your post as I also enjoy reading. At the same time however, I'm not sure I could provide a summary of the themes from The Grapes of Wrath as the author suggests even though I've read that book in the last 10 years. What exactly do you mean by being an attentive reader and how do you go about training this skill? I read a lot and feel like I understand most of what I'm reading but it doesn't seem like most of it sticks for more than a year or two (if that).
  - Barrin92 7y ago
    I think I'd go with Nabokov's advice who said: "Curiously enough, one cannot read a book; one can only reread it. A good reader, a major reader, and active and creative reader is a rereader." Exploring many different books is fine, but I think what really pays of is sticking with the books that are particularly meaningful to you and exploring them over and over again, taking notes, finding people to discuss them with, mulling them over, and so on. I also do read quite a lot but on occassion I will always go back to the 5-7 books that are special to me, as a result I know a lot of them by heart even if I haven't picked them up in years.
PeterStuer 7y ago
The problem isn't so much consumption vs creation in itself. It is the overabundance and the complete lack of quality of both the created and the consumed. Put a high bar on both what you consume and what you create.
- gbjw 7y ago
  Strongly disagree with this sentiment. Which 'dimension' are you exactly putting a 'high bar' on? How does one measure 'quality'? How do you know the 'quality' of what you consume until you consume it (reviews? how do you trust the reviewer? also a 'high bar'?)? I strongly believe that you need to consume and produce a wide variety of content before you can even form a consistent notion of what you consider 'quality'.
Nec28 7y ago
I like the Homepage of his website.
lazyjones 7y ago
Isn't that essentially what the Instagram etc. generation is deliberately doing? It goes to such extremes that their whole lives are planned around creating content for other people to consume. It's not a life I'd like to live. My thoughts and activities aren't worth less because I don't finish, polish and publish them. The best feelings cannot even be expressed using the simple audiovisual channels we have...
- buboard 7y ago
  Digital content makers produce, they don't create. Mobile media are inherently limiting and limited media. There used to be a digital art which operates at the borders of what is technically possible and is thus inherently creative. It has increasingly become crowded out by the digital equivalents of ikea posters
buboard 7y ago
> Modern technology Modern technology isn't just phones. Get a PC, a desk and a proper chair. Instantly you ve become more creative because there is more to do than swiping up.
blisterpeanuts 7y ago
There’s also raising children. I’m surprised no one’s mentioned this notion yet. In my experience, there’s nothing more creative and productive and totally satisfying than bringing a child into the world and nurturing them to adulthood :)
edem 7y ago
I like your style. If you haven't written before you should keep doing it as I can see that this is your first post. I agree with the overall sentiment as well. Although I'm driving to work I spend a lot of time with creative activities and they greatly enhance my life.
nuclx 7y ago
Bookmarked the blog post so I can consume it tomorrow.
jdsampayo 7y ago
I Loved your article, I translated it to spanish for some friends that can not read english at all. I don't know if translating something counts as "creating", sometimes you need to change stuff in order to make sense in the new language but most of the time you don't need to think on new ideas, just different ways to express something. Nevertheless, I do it because it helps me to relax, forget about the day-day problems, practice english and as result to make it accesible for my friends / family. It also helps me (or obligates) to understand the article deeper which makes those more memorable. That (on my mind) helps me to consume / create at certain point in a more balanced way, as I need to spend more time on an article which makes it more valuable for me to pick responsibly the right one and not just live on the scroll-scroll-scroll-like-scroll cicle of most of social media.
benornk 7y ago
> How much can you really remember from all of those New York Times op-eds you’ve read? Could you summarize the major themes of Grapes of Wrath? There’s consuming for the sake of entertainment and consuming for the sake of learning. Before you can create anything worth creating, you first need to learn. You need to master your domain, understand its rules (which ones to obey, which ones to ignore), and develop pattern recognition that will make your creation authentic and meaningful. You don’t consume Grapes of Wrath in order to recite its themes. You consume it (and many other good works) to master storytelling and to gain the language and techniques that will enable you to communicate the human condition cogently. Without deep exposure to great works your creation potential is limited, no matter how much you create. Historically, people spent years in apprenticeships and other forms of learning before they could venture out on their own. If you consume the right stuff, then you’ll shorten the amount of time you need to wait before you are able to produce something worth producing.
JVIDEL 7y ago
Many who used to have a PC now have just a smartphone but the problem is that phones are modeled to be consumption devices, not for production. Even pro/highend mobile devices lack the ability to compete head-to-head with an actual laptop/macbook because the underlying OS is limited in scope by design. TL;DR: you were never meant to do work on a phone, just watch stuff
Kaius 7y ago
>>"Corín Tellado was a Spanish author who wrote over 5,000 books in her 81-year lifespan. That’s over sixty books a year, assuming she came out of the womb fully literate. She claimed she could write a book in two days, and I’m inclined to believe her." Crazy. I was going to mention that her time would have been better spent writing 1 good book rather than 5000 that (I assume because I have never heard of her name before) were mediocre. Quality over Quantity. Then I thought, perhaps writing brought her joy regardless of how well received the final book is, so she spent her time well by making herself happy doing what she loved. Be happy in your work. Then I though, jesus 60 books a year, that sounds like she was manically driven to write almost non-stop for her entire life, which is awful. Work will set you free.

668 points by tomjcleveland 7y ago

tjr 7y ago

I do feel that I get more out of spending 30 minutes reading a book than I do out of 30 minutes browsing Twitter. Despite how addictive it is (and thus how much some part of me apparently enjoys it), I think I prefer pretty much any activity on my list of possible activities over puttering around with my phone: taking photographs, cleaning dishes, composing music, putting away laundry, writing software, pulling weeds, sleeping... Seriously, I get more value out of effectively anything else over browsing trivial stuff on my phone. Why then is it so easy to keep doing it?

modo_ 7y ago
It's hard for me to quit twitter because no matter how low quality the average tweet is, there are always diamonds in the rough -- perfectly composed little knowledge bombs. If you happen to open the app at the right time Twitter can be very high signal/noise. I keep coming back because of the thought that maybe I'll open it and be introduced to a compelling thought that would have otherwise been buried in 20 pages of cruft
- moab 7y ago
  I find it hard to believe that something deeply insightful can be compressed into 140 characters, or even a collection of tweets. I've read tweet-chains from twitter pundits, and though these longer form tweets do have insight, it's still more like getting an elevator pitch from a smart person than actually getting a deep understanding of the reasoning that leads to said opinions. Basically, my feeling from using twitter is that it is a venue for expressing opinions in clever/snarky ways, and reading other people's clever/snarky opinions and feeling amused. But I might be very wrong, or following the wrong people. Do you have any examples of tweets that are highly information-dense and making insightful points?
  - modo_ 7y ago
    All fair points. I've found that radically limiting the people I follow has had a huge impact on the quality of my feed (and it's still not great). More often than not a tweet provides me with an introduction to a new topic / idea that I can then further explore off the site. I struggled to come up with good tweets on the spot -- here's my best shot: https://twitter.com/steveschoger/status/997125312411570176 https://twitter.com/steveschoger/status/997125312411570176 https://twitter.com/tobyshorin/status/1155965565963399173 https://twitter.com/tobyshorin/status/1155965565963399173 https://twitter.com/naval/status/1002103360646823936 https://twitter.com/naval/status/1002103360646823936 https://twitter.com/jmj/status/1114598412375035905 https://twitter.com/jmj/status/1114598412375035905 Naval's does feel particularly like an elevator pitch though
    - moab 7y ago
      Thanks for sharing these. It's funny, I had exactly that series by Naval in mind earlier. I think the database tweet is really useful (reminds me of a lecture slide).
messo 7y ago
Fear of missing out, I think. And the fact that social media generally speaking is engineered to grab our attention and keep it for as long as possible – because personalized ads. When I identified my own FOMO a few years back I deleted most of my social media apps on my phone (except Fediverse-apps which have no algorithms, only good old chronological feeds). I'm reading more books now :)
- strikelaserclaw 7y ago
  I don't think it's FOMO as much as those products are designed to release temporary happy chemicals with the least amount of effort. Let's be honest, it is much easier to get drunk, eat junk food all the time, browse reddit than it is to eat ur veggies, moderate alcohol, exercise, study etc... For most people, their mind always gravitates towards immediate hedonistic pleasures, this is just the way most people are built (myself included).
  - messo 7y ago
    I guess the algorithms and the UX design is just tailored to tap into the very human fear of missing out. And the fact that we are creatures of habit.
caconym_ 7y ago
I think it's hard to bump your brain up out of the ground state of doing nothing into the state of doing something. You have to decide what to do, marshal your focus, get up off the couch, and do it. Browsing the web on your phone takes zero effort and it also effectively distracts you from the question of whether you should be doing something more worthwhile. It's a cognitive trap. It gives you the just five more minutes excuse, forever and ever.
hombre_fatal 7y ago
People love to repeat "time you enjoy wasting is not time wasted," but I'd change it to "time that's fulfilling to waste is not time wasted" because fulfillment looks at things on the long time scale. It better captures why wasting so much time on, say, Twitter actually is time wasted: it's not likely to be as fulfilling as just about any other way you could've spent that time. Only narrowly beating out spending that time in a drug-induced euphoric stupor.
ekr 7y ago
> Why then is it so easy to keep doing it? Because there's a strong dopamine rush triggered by the thought of seeing those twitter feeds, and your brain is particularly starved for dopamine at the time (maybe you're tired, bored etc). That triggering is the result of the same activity reinforced hundreds of time, so a strong neuronal association has been made between twitter and the reward. Stop using twitter (or whatever maladaptive addictive behavior you'd want to eliminate) for a few months, and those associations will fade. If you are engaged in a meaningful conversation for instance, you won't feel such a strong urge to check twitter.

t0mbstone 7y ago

Creating stuff will definitely give you more of a sense of self-worth and satisfaction than just consuming things will. On the flip side, I create stuff all day at work, and sometimes when I come home I just want to relax. There is room for both. If all people did was consume, then the world would be a boring place with nothing new. If all people did was create, then you would have a massive glut of stuff that nobody actually appreciated. I feel like video games are kind of in that space right now. There are just so many video games coming out every day/week/month, and they all rehash the same tropes. It's rare to find something really unique and "new". Sometimes I like to go back to an old game that I haven't played in a long time and just get caught up in it. Consumption doesn't always have to be of the latest and greatest thing.

defterGoose 7y ago
Yeah, I've have the same feeling about games lately. I took a break for a couple years in college and then junior year came back and started playing a lot of Halo 3 and Reach multiplayer. That was fun and got me back into video games as a 'serious' hobby: one that I was invested in exploring on a broad level. But ten years later I find myself getting bored with new games so easily. Maybe it's just getting more involved with adult stuff, but I have friends who are also avid gamers and I like having that as a shared interest/jumping off point. Still, I find myself craving truly novel narratives and mechanics and they're in thin supply. I'm reminded of Sturgeon's Law and the burgeoning market of Indy/low effort game-making. This was all a prelude to tell you that a couple months ago I picked up "Outer Wilds" and it sparked my imagination in a real way. It really felt like I had finally found a game that did space exploration 'right' and it ended up taking a place in my top-5 games of all time. It was truly a beautiful, crafted experience that kept me coming back for more. It was also not too long, not too short. Probably about 30-40 hours provided a comprehensive playthrough and I didn't feel like the game let you 'miss things', which I personally dislike. I wouldn't want to read a choose-your-own-adventure novel for the same reason.
- FreezerburnV 7y ago
  If you haven’t heard of it yet, Subnautica is the last game I’ve played that truly felt wondrous to play and hooked into my brain in a major way. Highly recommend, one of my favorite games of all time I’d say. (Up there with Undertale and Super Metroid)

0x8BADF00D 7y ago

Some people are perfectly happy consuming and producing nothing. And the inverse. Not everyone can be a producer; it is hard work. Anyone can be a consumer.

moab 7y ago

To the author's point, yes I remember the main themes/movements in the Steinbeck books I have read. I remember them for the Dostoevsky and Tolstoy I have read. I remember them for most good books I have read, even if the reading happened in high school, or 10+ years ago. Good books are almost like a lived-experience. Yes, they are not as "creative" as sketching, or writing an essay, but reading can also require creativity on the part of the reader.

jvagner 7y ago
That part of the essay could be turned back on the essay itself.

caconym_ 7y ago

I don't think most people are capable of being creative all the time, but the key is to find some creative pursuit you enjoy and make sure you make time to pursue it. If that means doing it on a schedule, so be it. (that's what it means for me) I write fiction "for fun", and sometimes it feels like work, but if I gave it up I'd drink every night and binge every weekend because my job is totally devoid of meaning. Hanging out with my partner is the only other thing I really care about, and frankly we like drinking together a little bit too much. By the way, any late career change suggestions for a software engineer who's got some money saved up and is sick of tech? Because, fuck.

ggm 7y ago
By the way, any late career change suggestions for a software engineer who's got some money saved up and is sick of tech? Because, fuck. The person I seek advice from said radical departures without plans are high risk. Your fan interest in korean baking techniques of the 1750s era are unlikely to scale to a dayjob. But, If you have a passion which gives evidence of up-scaling potential, its still worth exploring. He also said if you treat a long working life as an oil tanker of momentum, the easiest course changes are the small slow ones: reversing course on a a full speed tanker takes kilometers. Reversing course on a career takes years. Moving it marginally, by some small but achievable amount, is both simpler and safer. So, how about exploring a move from the engineering side to some other side, but still exploiting software? or, ceasing software, but staying inside the discipline of engineering? Or applying your software engineering praxis, to some other field which you have less skill in, but strong interest? Those Korean 1760 bakers need some AWESOME code, to make the yeast work in a modern hot oven...
- caconym_ 7y ago
  Yeah, the risks inherent in a radical departure without a plan are more or less why I'm hanging around. Thanks for your thoughtful reply. I really do love programming, and I have to imagine there are ways to exploit that skill that are a bit less soul crushing even if the money isn't quite as good. E.g. Korean baking. I should get off my ass and go looking.
7y ago

jannyfer 7y ago

Kudos to the author on getting a blog post out! It’s something I haven’t done in years. I also used to believe I need to “consume less, create more”... Since then, it’s become more like “if you want to, then consume meaningfully, take time to digest it, sleep on it, get your mind off it for a while, go consume more, take a break, create something, be bad at it, and create again, and maybe eventually you’ll be good at it”. Some books that shaped my thought process were: Where Good Ideas Come From - Steven Johnson Why We Sleep - Matthew Walker Also, blog posts about meditation, interviews with prolific movie writer/directors, and that Ira Glass video.

dredmorbius 7y ago

Yes, producing is hard. No, quantity is not the same as quality. Some people write 5,000 books in a lifetime. Wittgenstein wrote two. The second refuted most of the first. Much modern consumer technology is aggressively anti-generative. I'm wrestling with a crap tablet and OS and a browser that's crashed a half-dozen times today, taking down the 50 or so items I'd had lined up to read (I've yet to embrace the "consome less" element). I spend a lot of time fighting to create and acquire the time and space and materials and tools I require to create, often battling with uncomprehending others in this. "Why do you need books / computer / light / space / food / housing / clothing." I only wish I were kidding. Facile works can be created with relatively low barriers surmounted. More substantive ... takes a bit more. I'm not remotely pretending to be another Ludwig, but reading him and others like him, I've formed a pretty strong view of the quality-quantity curve and how that works out. If even just a 1,600 word blog essay takes a month to compose, a more ambitious project might just require a bit beyond that. And yes, getting into the creative habit, and seeing what works and doesn't (cold starts on blank pages have their place, but so doe boxes and stacks of index cards and books), and not being afraid to start over or take time.

The_rationalist 7y ago
Hahahaha if you were in my brain you would understand easily why you made me laugh a lot. I'll still try to explain it to you. I mostly agree with most of your paragraphs. Wittgenstein wrote two. If I understand correctly, you imply that Wittgenstein books (including the tractactus) are of great quality (meaning ≈ of great intellectual value) Actually very few persons understand the tractactus philosophicus. Let me contextualize: Much of "modern" philosophy is totally bullshitesque, no empirism, no intellectual rigor / epistemology, add to this complex subjects studied by people with no knowledge about them and bullshit artists (which is a real skill for selling your books). In parralel of the unification of science happening in the 20th century, a few philosophers actually remembered that philosophy is the love(Phil) of truth (soph) (which indeed is antithetic to BS and to multiple incompatible theories). Those philosophers founded analytical philosophy that had intellectual rigor and even made advance in epistemology, study of paradoxes, of logics, and tools like truth tables (used for e.g hardware logic gates nowadays). They had big results in the foundation of mathematics (especially set theory, e.g the Foundational axiom from zFc) and so they got authority in philosophy in general, even getting recognized by fake philosophers aka bullshit artists. Wittgenstein was an analytical philosopher along with Russell. I've read most of the tractactus, at first I espected to learn many things from a book from such an intellectually rigorous man. And what a book! The tractactus "aims" to answer all philosophical problems... I was quickly disappointed at the beginning, descovering that tractactus pages were full of nonsense, of words equivocations, of sophisms/fallacies, of BS art. But by reading more and more I discovered that the tractactus was not an absurd nonsense, it is an hilarious satire of bullshit artists. It is not even questionable, all the book is full of memes, of trolling. E.g invalid, ridiculously filled truth tables (and he was an expert at truth tables) The end of the book is totally clear once you understand that and end beautifully saying that what you do not understand, you must not talk about. What's even funnier is that most of the philosophical community did not and even today do not understand this is an obvious satire, and think this is one of the greatest books ever. (btw this really fascinate me this kind of people that have this fascinating and horrifying cognitive ability: They read totally nonsensical texts (that use figure of speech melted with sophisms), they do not understand that they do not understand, and then call the author a genius, an "intellectual"(post modernism would perfectly fit such a category)) Wittgenstein wrote two. The second refuted most of the first. You are aware that it is refuted by himself, then how can you call it a high quality book? This make no sense ^^ Btw Wittgenstein had no added value in the philosophical world he has been totally useless and if he never had existed, state of the art philosophy would be unchanged.

apo 7y ago

Worth noting that this is the blog's first post. I like the tone, the humor, and the sheer nerve of writing something like this. It's inspirational without being preachy. It's also highly actionable. Here's how to apply it right now. Close your browser and all other applications. Open a text editor (or a can of paint or whatever). Reflect on something, anything. Then give yourself permission to make the worst possible version of something you like consuming. Write one sentence (or make one stroke), then another, and another. Eventually, rework the mess you've created. Having forced myself to do this on several occasions, I can say it becomes addictive after a few days. And tiring. Which is why I also know it's easy to relapse on an off day. Finding a way to keep motivated independent of external praise is critical.

deleted 7y ago
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shartshooter 7y ago
I’ve been thinking a lot about how I can enforce discipline in myself to accomplish specific tasks similar to OPs. I agree that that external praise can be a game changer but man of the habits you want to develop are trivial and not worth bringing up but can have a huge impact. For example, instead of being creative, maybe you want to floss consistently or walk 10k steps. Both of those habits are just as important as creating but writing a blog post about it isn’t as sexy, nor is bringing it up in conversation. I’ve been thinking about creating systems that help keep me going in the right direction even though I know I’m going to have an off day because discipline is so fleeting.
- astockwell 7y ago
  Discipline equals Freedom, no doubt
- tertius 7y ago
  Tiny habits (free course for a week) + never skip 2 days.

unnouinceput 7y ago

Consume less, create more (or produce more)...and if everyone would adhere to this we'd have another 1929 crisis. Remember those pictures of milk thrown out in the field in order to keep its price up? Yeah, that is what happened back then. Too much production and not enough consumption. Neither "consume lee, create more" nor "consume more, create less" are good. One leads to economic crisis, the other leads to famine. The sweet spot is 50/50, create exactly as much as is consumed. Currently we have achieved this, but with the caveat of West being the consumer and East the producer, hence the current trade war.

jodrellblank 7y ago
The sweet spot is 50/50, create exactly as much as is consumed. How do you apply that to something which is not used up as it is consumed, like a book, film, blog post, song, etc.?
- unnouinceput 7y ago
  books, movies, music and blog posts are information. Information is consumed when assimilated. That's why you have every decade more profit from movies, people are hungry for more information/entertainment. That's why you have relative bad songs that break into billions views vs old songs that are very good and barely have millions view - people are hungry for more information/entertainment. That's why relative bad books like Twilight get screen time and make billions vs Alexandre Dumas who is public IP and yet no new movies based on his books are made - people are hungry for more information/entertainment. And blog posts, ohh, I read several (The old new thing, Schneier, etc) and you know what I always say about those? They post too few - I am hungry for more.
  - jodrellblank 7y ago
    Information is consumed when assimilated. It isn't; everyone could watch the same film on the internet, it's not limited in supply, it's not dependent on printing or shipping or factory production line. Once there's enough film for everyone to watch for a lifetime - say 1M hours to cover 24/7 watching for 100 years, what need is there for more film? What you describe is that people are hungry for novelty. Not more, or better, just newer. Yet there's enough books and films and songs already in existence that we could spend a lifetime exploring and not run out. How do you balance the claimed 50/50 production/consumption when there's already enough media for everyone's consumption for a lifetime, in libraries, today?

nonbirithm 7y ago

I've been thinking about this too much recently. Only a month ago did I realize that all the reading on HN I've done over the years hasn't given me much to think about or remember beyond the span of a day. None of it has made me any smarter, because I wasn't approaching it with that goal. All I really desired when I instinctively typed the "n" in the omnibar and pressed Enter was wanting to be amused and nothing more. Yet I wouldn't be honest if I said I didn't enjoy the time I spent, at least in the moment. It's just that "enjoyment" shuts down personal growth for me. I've since realized I was using the "time enjoyed is not wasted" adage as an excuse to not think critically and make honest attempts at internalizing new knowledge. As someone else mentioned the better word to use instead of "enjoyed" would be "fulfilled" because it takes into account the long term. I've found that I've become too good at subverting ways of not stressing out about figuring out one's lifestyle and using them to get complacent, when if I chose to think just the slightest bit more carefully I would realize I wasn't actually working towards what I wanted. For that matter I didn't even know what I wanted for a long time, because I never bothered to ask. If you search hard enough there will always be someone who will tell you you're doing just fine. In addition to a lack of creativity I can't remember much of what I've consumed. I don't use Facebook or Twitter so my usual assumption was that by consuming things that take continuous effort and resources to make, like television shows, I was spending my time more wisely. That wasn't really true if I made no effort to remember or understand what I had seen. To me it might as well be that I had never seen any of it in the first place and the time was lost. I've decided that some things are worth remembering and the only way I can remember anything for sure is by writing it down, so any time I consume I try to reflect on it and write a few paragraphs about the general plot, themes or personal takeaways. Even when I forget it later I can look back on my notes and know I made an effort to understand something. I know now that if I don't bother to do this I won't have anything interesting to talk about if it comes up in conversation except "I liked it," which has become one of the most painful responses for me to give. And this is just about consumption, not creative output. Suddenly I want to try to understand more things I consume but I also want to make room for trying to explore my own ideas. It's overwhelming and with a traditional day job it becomes soul-crushingly stressful.

truth_be_told 7y ago
You have nailed it! A lot of us are suffering from the above same mindset but because we don't even put forth the time to step back and reflect, we don't realize that we are simply running in place without advancing towards our goal (if we are even aware of our goal). Bertrand Russell in his book "The Conquest of Happiness" says; My purpose is to suggest a cure for the ordinary day-to-day unhappiness from which most people in civilized countries suffer, and which is all the more unbearable because, having no obvious external cause, it appears inescapable. Our current Society and Technology have made matters exponentially worse. "Consumption/Distraction" have become the norm and we have to fight the Environment mighty hard to focus and sustain "Creativity/Concentration". Technology might mask our mental degeneration for a while but sooner or later Society will have to pay the price.

platz 7y ago

It may be counter-intuitive, but I feel that without some level of consumption, what you create will be highly derivative—drawing of things you have internalized long ago, but have forgotten whereabouts they were acquired. (you can see this in philosophical/moral discussions with people who have never questioned the source of their values) Some consumption is probably necessary for creativity. You need to bring some things outside the world into yourself, or your ideas will feel made-up and phony. Also, many a artist will admit a lot of what some would call "copying" in the art world is common - but it's more akin to reacting to something from a peer and then putting a unique twisted outlook on it; and this almost creates a 'conversation' even if the author isn't intending that.

rossdavidh 7y ago
True that, but, really, wouldn't 1:1 ratio of consuming to creating be sufficient consumption?
cannonedhamster 7y ago
All art is a conversation between the artist and the viewer. I'm fairly certain that's a phrase I've heard before. If your goal is to just spew your ideas out a megaphone without any thought as to how it would be received then quality doesn't matter as your need for expression is fulfilled in the act. When you're trying to convey an idea that you think matters, that you feel is important, then you spend a lot more time in getting it as close to right as you can. This is because you're looking for a response, whether that's in words, action, or reaction. I think your comment is spot on.
Fricken 7y ago
I was never an avid a reader as I was during the years when I fancied myself a writer. I went straight for the densest tomes and scrutinized them carefully. I can say as much about any creative pursuit I've taken on, it enriches the experience of consuming similar things. I'm not actively engaged with writing now, and am ashamed to admit that I have a hard time getting through books. I end up blorping around on HN instead.
Broken_Hippo 7y ago

person_of_color 7y ago

If you have high standards, it's difficult to create something.

Existenceblinks 7y ago
This comment is at the bottom while I find this is actually a valid point. I've often experienced this.
- Existenceblinks 7y ago
  I can't believe someone just downvoted me, WOW! This is why I barely login to comment on HN.
syncopatience 7y ago
This brings to mind something Ira Glass said about "the gap": > Nobody tells this to people who are beginners, I wish someone told me. All of us who do creative work, we get into it because we have good taste. But there is this gap. For the first couple years you make stuff, it’s just not that good. It’s trying to be good, it has potential, but it’s not. But your taste, the thing that got you into the game, is still killer. And your taste is why your work disappoints you. A lot of people never get past this phase, they quit. Most people I know who do interesting, creative work went through years of this. We know our work doesn’t have this special thing that we want it to have. We all go through this. And if you are just starting out or you are still in this phase, you gotta know its normal and the most important thing you can do is do a lot of work. Put yourself on a deadline so that every week you will finish one story. It is only by going through a volume of work that you will close that gap, and your work will be as good as your ambitions. And I took longer to figure out how to do this than anyone I’ve ever met. It’s gonna take awhile. It’s normal to take awhile. You’ve just gotta fight your way through. https://www.thisamericanlife.org/extras/the-gap https://www.thisamericanlife.org/extras/the-gap
tedmiston 7y ago
It's always easier to critique than create.

riantogo 7y ago

Why? As in why is creating at a higher level than consuming? Couldn’t we just “create” at our day jobs and consume at leisure time? Isn’t consuming transferring some of the value we captured elsewhere to some creators? I give everyone here the permission to consume guilt free (if that make it better).

phkahler 7y ago
One is actually more satisfying than the other. If you have personal experience to the contrary I'd like to hear it.
- riantogo 7y ago
  That is just shit we keep telling ourselves. You might even point to me studies, but those are just reflection of what we have conditioned ourselves to believe. Frankly this is how we end up with 70 hr work week or pressured into trying to build that app that no one needs or wants. Because reading a book or running around with your kid being silly is not “productive”.
  - fredsir 7y ago
    Ideally you wouldn't have to be creating something you don't care about at your day job at 40-60/h/w, but instead could spend all your creative time on something you really care about, and doing it to benefit you and your peers instead of primarily just shareholders, and the rest of your time reading a good book, and being silly with your kid. However in the modern world, those things are mostly pushed aside, and instead most people in the modern world spend most of their waking hours as hamsters in a wheel. Then there's the middleground where you try to do both. That's where most people burn out.
  - maniflames 7y ago
    To be fair creating something that has to resemble someone else's vision feels very different from creating something that you envision yourself. Finding balance is important and apart from that I guess not everyone likes creating stuff equally. (Edit: grammar lol)

deleted 7y ago

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in_hindsight 7y ago

Serious question - would you consider exercise consumption or creation?

jvagner 7y ago
Being and transforming
TeMPOraL 7y ago
Not OP. It depends. If you're trying to get to a particular shape, it could be seen as creation - getting creative with your body. But if it's just maintenance exercise, than this IMO belongs to the third category of things - it's a chore. A maintenance task. The work you have to do to stand still. Something that I personally strive to minimize.
tedmiston 7y ago
Creation of health. Unless you're actively consuming something like watching tv or reading a book while you do it. When it comes to more passive consumption like listening to music while you exercise for background noise, I would still argue it's at least neutral. But if you're listening to an audiobook or podcast (something new to you), then it feels consumption again.

yakubin 7y ago

Offtopic, but assuming the poster is the author of the article: 1. I love the font you chose for your blog and the fancy styling of the first letter of each section. For the first 1 minute I was just staring at the L at the beginning appreciating it. I'm a huge fan of serif fonts in general and regret that sans-serif is used so much more widely. Generally a very clean, good-looking theme. 2. You might want to link to your rss feed in a <link> tag in the html head. I discovered it by knowing where Hugo usually puts it, but others may not have as much luck.

tomjcleveland 7y ago
1. Thanks! The font is actually just Times New Roman! I like serif fonts but wanted to use a common system font. 2. Great tip! Just added it.
- cosmojg 7y ago
  What Hugo theme are you using, if any? Would you mind letting us see the source code?
- contingencies 7y ago
  I made some art from an idea I had this morning that would have remained unimplemented if I hadn't read your writing. Send me your address (email in profile) and I'll snail-mail it to you.

sjustns 7y ago

Having spent the last few months away from technology to take care of my head, I find myself pacing around the living room waiting for a spark to return. This does not bother me in the least bit. I am someone who craves alone time. That means no music, no podcasts, no computer, no noise, no people. I am quite happy with a book and a writing pad. I want to be left alone to have a certain kind of inward experience. As a side note, I have always felt that the point of reading is not to remember everything you have read, it is more to shape the way you think. And we might remember more of what we read if we would stop reading about other people's reading and productivity habits, and just keep to ourselves. But I digress. Sometimes people ask what it is I am working on, or what it is I do by myself all of the time. The answer, of course, is not a whole lot. Ours is a society that celebrates participation and creativity, yet I feel no pressure to create for the sake of creating, or to share for the sake of sharing. And I do not feel guilty or lazy for not "producing" anything of note. If there is a hell, it is full of groups of people doing group activities, and I am required to participate and create and talk about whatever it is we are doing for eternity. What a nightmare. To be sure, I have written plenty. But what I am driving at is that a lot of the writing or "creative work" I do is for my eyes only. Sometimes I think about sharing an essay, but I have to pause to ask myself if I want to share because I have something to say, or if I want to share because I am seeking validation. Most of the time, the desire to create comes not from some quiet space inside of me, but from the side of me that wants to be seen and heard. I find that the quality of my writing, or any creative work, is far better when it comes from the right mental state, rather than from an abstract sense of urgency that I should be creating something, anything. On another note, having thought about this for awhile now, the deep need for solitude is part of who I am, but also a compensatory reaction to being connected all of the time. Whether we realize it or not, we spend the better half of our days in a sympathetic state. This has consequences, I think, that are different for everyone. Eventually, you have to deal with the residue of living and working at a pace that is often not of your own making. Sometimes you have to get your bearings before the creative spark comes back. That can take longer than expected. In closing, it is worth paying attention to the kind of creativity that comes from helping a friend or lover make something better. Even though the project is not of your own making, being able to add a touch of your creative insight is intellectually rewarding in a unique way.

7y ago

DoreenMichele 7y ago

This is a delight for so many reasons. Most of my online time is via a cheap smartphone. There are limits to what I can do on it, but a lot of my blog writing happens on that phone. A lot of what passes for a social life for me happens on that phone via the twitter app or other online platforms. A lot of research happens on that phone. The Palm Pilot was so named because it was the computer power of an airplane in the palm of your hand. I bet most smartphones today outclass it by a wide margin, yet we think they are good for shitposting on Facebook, not for Real Work. But they are good for real work. There's an insane amount of actually productive stuff you can do on a smartphone today from almost anywhere. I also enjoyed the style of the article -- the self-deprecating humor, the somewhat biting wit. It's a thing I used to do a lot more of and I guess I long to move back more in that direction so as to give more life to my writing.

8ytecoder 7y ago

This has been my thought for a while now. I have reasonably pared down on news and social media. However, I have tried to create regularly at least 4 or 5 times now but it hasn’t stuck. Well written essay and good motivation.

TaylorAlexander 7y ago

I love it! I am a super creative person and I spend a lot of time doing what the article suggests. I quit facebook and all other social media two years ago, though I still spend a lot of time scrolling through reddit. At any rate I also write, maintain a few websites, design and build 3D printed robots, and make youtube videos. The author really nails it that you can be creating every day. Today I installed a GPU in my desktop and set up tensorflow to train an image segmentation algorithm I got from github. A couple months ago I ordered a 64x64 LED panel on aliexpress for $26 (search for "hub75") and the appropriate adafruit raspberry pi shield, then took all that stuff on vacation so when I was in a cabin in vermont I could configure the raspberry pi with the appropriate libraries to drive the thing. That was super fun! Earlier this year I took time off between jobs and built a massive four post bed out of redwood. The corner posts are 6" square and 7 feet tall and its all sanded and oiled and it looks phenomenal. The author discovered something really valuable - even when you've got nothing but your phone you can create. And personally I find creating things way more rewarding. If you've ever thought about logging off of Netflix and social media, I definitely recommend it! And humbly, if you want to see what I've been working on, see here: http://tlalexander.com/missing/ http://tlalexander.com/missing/ https://reboot.love/ https://reboot.love/ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ToGT3KokPZA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ToGT3KokPZA

Hasz 7y ago
looked thru your site, seems pretty neat. I think accumulating and designing tools is one of the hardest parts to creating physically, as opposed to cranking out thoughts. Flutter seems like a cool platform!
- TaylorAlexander 7y ago
  Thank you! Flutter is cool in theory, but in practice many backers never got their hardware. I still use Flutter almost every day for remote control of my robots, but it never got to be what I had hoped it would become.

Hasz 7y ago

A couple of thoughts, in the spirit of this essay: There's different levels of consumption. If it's a decent book, someone, usually a few someones, have revised and rewritten parts of a thought, in an attempt to refine the thought, boil it down, expand on it, etc. Your average Kanye tweet probably is, at best, a shot from the hip, blindfolded. Creation doesn't have to be a linear process. I spend a lot of commute time thinking about my projects. Sometimes this ends up in furious sketches and overly verbose notes, but more often than not, it consists of me awkwardly staring at the floor and missing my stop. I put in earbuds w/o noise to drown out the din and discourage the scourge of public transportation, conversation with strangers. Creative output does not need to be public. I'm sure there's the next great american novel locked up in a Microsoft word doc somewhere, and that's sad, but OK. Realistically, I only get to see what others put out, so if you want to be noticed, keep flinging shit at the wall like it's never going out of style. Even if it's a single blogpost on a personal site, someone will see it, and that makes it all totally worth it.

travislane 7y ago

Nice first post for a new blog. I like the blog theme as well. How can I create my own blog with such a clean and minimal theme?

acangiano 7y ago
Although I recommend WordPress to most people in my Technical Blogging book, I also discuss Hugo which is what OP used here. Technically you could get any blogging engine to produce a blog that looks like that, but if you're after the minimalistic look, Hugo is really not a bad way to go.
- travislane 7y ago
  Thanks for the reply. I have tried Hugo earlier but found it confusing due to so many locations for template files (_default/? baseof.html? single.html? list.html? hard to remember all this stuff). What would be a good alternative tool where I can just place a few template files in a single location and it would be sufficient? I have also looked at Jekyll but it is Ruby-based. I know Python. If the tool is Python-based then it would help me because it would allow me to customize its functionality or make it do some niche things that the tool does not support by writing some Python code. I have looked at Pelican too but customizing it seemed daunting to a beginner like me. So I guess I am looking for a something simple, written in Python and easily customizable. Any suggestions?
  - acangiano 7y ago
    You might want to look into Hyde: http://hyde.github.io http://hyde.github.io. It's essentially a Jekyll for Python (though it evolved to something more than just a clone).
    - travislane 7y ago
      Awesome. Thank you for the suggestion. I will take a look at it.
  - 7y ago

ciconia 7y ago

These are not the only two options. There's a third activity most of us seem to have forgotten - to simply be. For me, the very act of everyday living has become very enjoyable and fulfilling in recent years. Doing the dishes, cooking, gardening, sweeping the floor, putting out the trash. Those are not "chores", that's what life's made of. Some of it creative, some not, but the difference is you're simply present in the moment and in the world.

trevyn 7y ago
I 100% agree, and I think that most people today need more guidance to achieve this than a snapshot of the target state. Always interested in hearing unusual answers as to how we might approach this challenge.
thrav 7y ago
Maintenance is either the one thing everyone forgets in these conversations, or it’s the one thing everyone says no one will want to do. If there were a return to pride in and appreciation of a job well done, there would be no shortage of people willing to do the work, in my mind. The reason most people are so unwilling to do these things is because they feel like it is beneath them, and that doing them is a demonstration of their low status.
- tkbtkbtkb 7y ago
  I assume many people view menial tasks as below them, and it also seems to differ in degree culturally. I'm from the US, and on a recent trip to Japan I noticed a stark difference in the pride and responsibility the average citizen showed in taking good care of even small spaces. It appeared to be an appreciation for the aesthetics of life, no matter the scale. This isn't valued in the same way in America, where anything that isn't the top feels like it's not worth one's time.
  - thrav 7y ago
    Yep. I felt the same way in Japan. There appeared to be dignity in certain kinds of work in a way that there is not in the United States, and in most cases this yielded superior results of that work. They do so many foods better than the people who invented them.

hyperpallium 7y ago

Be a producer, not "a consumer".

Jakob 7y ago

An interesting exercise. OP is still creating something for consumption, though. This is an old argument: SOCRATES: You know, Phaedrus, writing shares a strange feature with painting. The offsprings of painting stand there as if they are alive, but if anyone asks them anything, they remain most solemnly silent. The same is true of written words. You’d think they were speaking as if they had some understanding, but if you question anything that has been said because you want to learn more, it continues to signify just that very same thing forever. When it has once been written down, every discourse roams about everywhere, reaching indiscriminately those with understanding no less than those who have no business with it, and it doesn’t know to whom it should speak and to whom it should not. And when it is faulted and attacked unfairly, it always needs its father’s support; alone, it can neither defend itself nor come to its own support. -- Plato. c.399-347 BCE. “Phaedrus.” Pp. 551-552 in Complete Works tldr: Debate, discourse.

thrav 7y ago
Interesting to see reference to Phaedrus when so much of what’s being discussed in this thread takes me right back to thinking about Robert Pirsig.

cryptozeus 7y ago

I was thinking about this exact same thing. I consume so much like read, watching etc but don’t spend same amount on creating. Even in office I create but spend more time in meetings and other stuff than actually coddling. I find that creating anything random gives me more satisfaction so I have taken up on more creative activities like cooking, coding at home, design etc. I am driving this from the point of view of creation vs consumption and not so much as hobbies.

dynamite-ready 7y ago

I like to think it's less about patterns of consumption, and more about what we consume. One of my favourite quotes: “I cannot remember the books I've read any more than the meals I have eaten; even so, they have made me.” To me, that suggests a number of things. For one, consuming information is undervalued by the author of the blog. It's fundamental to us. Secondly, while you like broccoli and drink milk, I might well be allergic to milk and hate broccoli (I don't, just musing)... So one should be slow to judge. That said, I've never used Netflix. I could be missing out. And finally, you wouldn't eat a 4 course meal on you commute, and you would definitely have some trouble making one on a bus or train ride too.

TeMPOraL 7y ago
I like the "you are what you eat" sentiment and agree about judging (I used to hate broccoli, now I tolerate it) but analogies being what they are: > And finally, you wouldn't eat a 4 course meal on you commute, and you would definitely have some trouble making one on a bus or train ride too. You wouldn't eat a 4 course meal on a bus, but it's not 4 courses and flavor and textures that "make you", it's the calories and nutrients. I can absolutely eat a 2/3 of a day's worth of food on a bus no problem, and I can absolutely make this food on a bus too. Think Soylent-like shakes. (The equivalent of making Soylent shakes on a longer commute is a netbook with SSH connection to my home desktop, running terminal Emacs frame. Don't do that always, though - I learned to use travel time to rest and think.)
toxicFork 7y ago
Thank you for this quote. I am going through a book (The Nicomachean Ethics) trying to really understand every sentence in it, and its meaning. Going back and forth, taking notes. More like studying it than reading it, I guess. It's taking me a long time, almost a year. I was wondering if I remember the previous chapters, and I sort of do so. But I worry that by the time I have finished it, I will not be able to summarize the chapters well. I guess it's not necessary. There are many things I have picked up from it; it has lead to many interesting discussions with my friends, and so on. That should be enough.
- 7y ago

randomsearch 7y ago

Massively disagree that reading a book and reddit are comparable. I guess if you only read trash novels you can close the gap, but there is great value to reading a quality book or a periodical like the Economist. Something I’ve been thinking about recently is how very educated people who would never read a tabloid paper or watch a stupid reality TV show will happily retweet lowest common denominator memes or outrage twitter. Because it’s so new, and because everything is intermingled, those people sleepwalk into consuming trash culture. It’s like a well trained athlete has been tricked into living off fast food.

Kecelij 7y ago

"This psychopath was sketching" Hahaha

vivekv 7y ago

I had a similar thought process a few days ago and wrote a post on the same. I was looking to see where the balance lied, ie between producing and consuming as there needs to be consumers for every product. A bit of self promotion - my article is here https://medium.com/@criticalmind/creation-vs-consumption-8e72023f5ef4?source=friends_link&sk=35b31fcaf673e15c3d67f4aa0fc5c533 https://medium.com/@criticalmind/creation-vs-consumption-8e7...

Ayesh 7y ago

I've been blogging low-key for 7 years now, and there are many pieces I feel embarrassed about today, and sometimes that are even downright wrong. But a habit of writing reduces the friction and helps in the thought process. Some of the tech talks I have given, open source packages, and even one side income source bringing about $2,000/mo are all branched out blog post ideas. For me, what is worth most is to identify an idea worth writing about, and I couldn't agree more with the author. Their site is also super fast and minimal, I love it.

rvn1045 7y ago

Creating things and publicaly sharing what I create is the single greatest way to reduce my anxiety. There is literally a step function decrease in anxiety every time I do it.

tedmiston 7y ago
I think it makes sense if you consider anxiety (simplistically) as "unpleasant disproportionate worry about the future", and then creating something as reducing uncertainty about the future.

valgor 7y ago

This really hits home with some thoughts I've had lately. But I'm caught in a trap. Do I go after my dreams (numerical computing), do something useful (continue working with the non-profit I help out with), or continue being a sellout by working and learning things relevant to my employer? Splitting my time does not seem efficient, but consuming less and creating more would mean I'm at least working towards several goals slowly than not at all.

pgcj_poster 7y ago

> Smartphones, I’ve decided, are not evil. This entire essay was composed on an iPhone. Maybe it wouldn't have taken a whole month if you had written it on a laptop.

PeterStuer 7y ago
Or used a pencil and notebook

maximedb 7y ago

Thank you for this. It is so simple, yet so true.

Barrin92 7y ago

Very strongly disagree with the idea that consuming art is not in itself a generative process. Reading (or many other forms of consumption), if done attentively require practise. There is a world of difference between anxious, distracted twitter scrolling and a good reader. All a book gives you is letters on a page, the rest of the exercise is left to the brain of the reader. Reading is a difficult and enormously complex process, and by no means less of an active or creative activity than writing. Becoming a skilled and mindful reader takes a lot of time. Learning how to engage with the creations of others also means widening ones own personality. I think this post falls into the trap of 'productiveness', which thinks of creative activity only in terms of to what degree something can be exposed to others, ironically for consumption.

skadamou 7y ago
I am inclined to agree with the sentiment of your post as I also enjoy reading. At the same time however, I'm not sure I could provide a summary of the themes from The Grapes of Wrath as the author suggests even though I've read that book in the last 10 years. What exactly do you mean by being an attentive reader and how do you go about training this skill? I read a lot and feel like I understand most of what I'm reading but it doesn't seem like most of it sticks for more than a year or two (if that).
- Barrin92 7y ago
  I think I'd go with Nabokov's advice who said: "Curiously enough, one cannot read a book; one can only reread it. A good reader, a major reader, and active and creative reader is a rereader." Exploring many different books is fine, but I think what really pays of is sticking with the books that are particularly meaningful to you and exploring them over and over again, taking notes, finding people to discuss them with, mulling them over, and so on. I also do read quite a lot but on occassion I will always go back to the 5-7 books that are special to me, as a result I know a lot of them by heart even if I haven't picked them up in years.

PeterStuer 7y ago

The problem isn't so much consumption vs creation in itself. It is the overabundance and the complete lack of quality of both the created and the consumed. Put a high bar on both what you consume and what you create.

gbjw 7y ago
Strongly disagree with this sentiment. Which 'dimension' are you exactly putting a 'high bar' on? How does one measure 'quality'? How do you know the 'quality' of what you consume until you consume it (reviews? how do you trust the reviewer? also a 'high bar'?)? I strongly believe that you need to consume and produce a wide variety of content before you can even form a consistent notion of what you consider 'quality'.

Nec28 7y ago

I like the Homepage of his website.

lazyjones 7y ago

Isn't that essentially what the Instagram etc. generation is deliberately doing? It goes to such extremes that their whole lives are planned around creating content for other people to consume. It's not a life I'd like to live. My thoughts and activities aren't worth less because I don't finish, polish and publish them. The best feelings cannot even be expressed using the simple audiovisual channels we have...

buboard 7y ago
Digital content makers produce, they don't create. Mobile media are inherently limiting and limited media. There used to be a digital art which operates at the borders of what is technically possible and is thus inherently creative. It has increasingly become crowded out by the digital equivalents of ikea posters

buboard 7y ago

> Modern technology Modern technology isn't just phones. Get a PC, a desk and a proper chair. Instantly you ve become more creative because there is more to do than swiping up.

blisterpeanuts 7y ago

There’s also raising children. I’m surprised no one’s mentioned this notion yet. In my experience, there’s nothing more creative and productive and totally satisfying than bringing a child into the world and nurturing them to adulthood :)

edem 7y ago

I like your style. If you haven't written before you should keep doing it as I can see that this is your first post. I agree with the overall sentiment as well. Although I'm driving to work I spend a lot of time with creative activities and they greatly enhance my life.

nuclx 7y ago

Bookmarked the blog post so I can consume it tomorrow.

jdsampayo 7y ago

I Loved your article, I translated it to spanish for some friends that can not read english at all. I don't know if translating something counts as "creating", sometimes you need to change stuff in order to make sense in the new language but most of the time you don't need to think on new ideas, just different ways to express something. Nevertheless, I do it because it helps me to relax, forget about the day-day problems, practice english and as result to make it accesible for my friends / family. It also helps me (or obligates) to understand the article deeper which makes those more memorable. That (on my mind) helps me to consume / create at certain point in a more balanced way, as I need to spend more time on an article which makes it more valuable for me to pick responsibly the right one and not just live on the scroll-scroll-scroll-like-scroll cicle of most of social media.

benornk 7y ago

> How much can you really remember from all of those New York Times op-eds you’ve read? Could you summarize the major themes of Grapes of Wrath? There’s consuming for the sake of entertainment and consuming for the sake of learning. Before you can create anything worth creating, you first need to learn. You need to master your domain, understand its rules (which ones to obey, which ones to ignore), and develop pattern recognition that will make your creation authentic and meaningful. You don’t consume Grapes of Wrath in order to recite its themes. You consume it (and many other good works) to master storytelling and to gain the language and techniques that will enable you to communicate the human condition cogently. Without deep exposure to great works your creation potential is limited, no matter how much you create. Historically, people spent years in apprenticeships and other forms of learning before they could venture out on their own. If you consume the right stuff, then you’ll shorten the amount of time you need to wait before you are able to produce something worth producing.

JVIDEL 7y ago

Many who used to have a PC now have just a smartphone but the problem is that phones are modeled to be consumption devices, not for production. Even pro/highend mobile devices lack the ability to compete head-to-head with an actual laptop/macbook because the underlying OS is limited in scope by design. TL;DR: you were never meant to do work on a phone, just watch stuff

Kaius 7y ago

>>"Corín Tellado was a Spanish author who wrote over 5,000 books in her 81-year lifespan. That’s over sixty books a year, assuming she came out of the womb fully literate. She claimed she could write a book in two days, and I’m inclined to believe her." Crazy. I was going to mention that her time would have been better spent writing 1 good book rather than 5000 that (I assume because I have never heard of her name before) were mediocre. Quality over Quantity. Then I thought, perhaps writing brought her joy regardless of how well received the final book is, so she spent her time well by making herself happy doing what she loved. Be happy in your work. Then I though, jesus 60 books a year, that sounds like she was manically driven to write almost non-stop for her entire life, which is awful. Work will set you free.