11 ms·

As a geek and a fan of 80s-90s PC games (not just Sierra but also LucasArts adventure games and so on), this was a super entertaining read on its own; but I als

by godot 7y ago

As a geek and a fan of 80s-90s PC games (not just Sierra but also LucasArts adventure games and so on), this was a super entertaining read on its own; but I also enjoyed some of these insights about life in general from it: > Living is mostly a series of repetitive and unrelated tasks. It makes sense that the most tedious things to code are the tedious things that just have to be done. There are no life lessons or gymnastic skills involved in doing dishes, there’s no underlying theory of housework that will reveal itself after a thousand vacuum cleanings. Making coffee is a boring sequence of steps people feel stupid for getting wrong, even though they’re statistically doomed to screw it up now and then. The hard parts of of life are driving to work, eating properly, flossing, .... Perhaps I found it particular insightful because I just became a parent a year ago. Prior to this, I thought I had optimized my life so well that most tedious work were gone from my life; with the peak being having switched to remote work and not having to even commute anymore. Then I became a parent, and had to come to terms again with having to do a long series of repetitive and routine work every day -- washing bottles, dishes, changing diapers, etc. It was a bit of a cultural shock to my system since over the past 10 years I had slowly gotten used to / gradually removed or optimized aspects that are frictions / repetitiveness / tedious routines from my life; and suddenly it's 10x of it all coming back. Over the past year, I've come to realize this is what life is, which is exactly as the author said.

LunaSea 7y ago
Interesting! What kind of life optimizations did you use before?
- shantly 7y ago
  Having money and spending it to make other people do your boring stuff is a pretty effective life optimization. Cleaning, laundry, cooking, lawn care, car maintenance—even driving—can all be bought, so you barely have to do any of it again, if you've got money. You can—and most with means do, I think—just make almost any of this "this is what life mostly is" boring crap go away, unless you actually enjoy it more than what you might be doing instead. Making the tedious parts of raising a kid go away is a lot more expensive than making the normal adult boring stuff go away, though. Also if you're not fairly damn rich (i.e. rich enough not to need a real job) the boring parts will be most of the time you spend with your kids by a large margin, so you'll be reluctant to outsource that even if you can afford to. That's even more true if you're not paying to have the rest of your boring stuff done by someone else ("sorry honey, maybe we can play blocks later, I'm cooking dinner because if I don't we won't, you know, have any" but then later it's bath time then story and bed and maybe you squeeze in 10min of blocks if you're lucky)
monktastic1 7y ago
At the risk of sounding hippie, "tedious" and "boring" are emotional reactions to the chores, and not attributable to the chores themselves. We don't have to do that. "Everything in life is miraculous. It rests within the power of each of us to awaken from a dragging nightmare of life made up of unimportant tasks and tedious useless little habits to see life as it really is, and to rejoice in its exquisite wonderfulness." ― James Branch Cabell, The Cream of the Jest Not that I've remotely mastered it, but I think there's a lot of wisdom in there.
- Loughla 7y ago
  Not to sound too much like a hippie, either, but I learned (actually after having a kid as well) that when people talked about enjoying the ride, that's what they were talking about - the tedious stuff. I always assumed it meant travel more and look for adventure, but I have come to understand that 'enjoying the ride' in your life, not always just pursuing some next thing is about enjoying the tedium. Some of my favorite memories of my young children is the time we spent washing dishes together or watching them vacuum up the rugs and chase the cat with the broom. It's all about enjoying the ride, man.
  - throw0101a 7y ago
    Sisyphus may disagree. :) * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sisyphus https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sisyphus
    - matwood 7y ago
      If I was Sisyphus and got the boulder to the top, I would push it back down myself. I'm going to die eventually, so is it futile to exercise everyday, to learn, to try and be a better person? I don't think so, but all of those things are journeys that never end and require many mundane tasks.
      - psalminen 7y ago
        > If I was Sisyphus and got the boulder to the top, I would push it back down myself. I'm really loving this quote, definitely using it at some point.
ckcheng 7y ago
> a long series of repetitive and routine work every day...aspects that are frictions / repetitiveness / tedious routines...this is what life is Thanks. Just reminded me of this: "One always finds one's burden again... He too concludes that all is well... Each atom of that stone, each mineral flake of that night filled mountain, in itself forms a world. The struggle itself toward the heights is enough to fill a man's heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy." (Camus, http://dbanach.com/sisyphus.htm http://dbanach.com/sisyphus.htm )
- gbear605 7y ago
  Alternatively, Camus thought too much and pushed boulders too little. :) http://existentialcomics.com/comic/301 http://existentialcomics.com/comic/301
iClaudiusX 7y ago
That's interesting because otherwise tedious chores like washing dishes or cleaning can feel meditative and therapeutic after I've had my coffee.
danharaj 7y ago
The way is the dust of the way.
yodsanklai 7y ago
> The hard parts of of life are driving to work, eating properly, flossing, .... I disagree. Those are simple rituals that makes life enjoyable too. For instance, I know that after flossing, I'm good to go to bed. Or I know when I'm driving my car that I won't get interrupted and I can wander with my thoughts.
- organsnyder 7y ago
  I've been working from home for the past year, after previously taking the bus to work downtown. It's mostly an improvement, but I do miss the commute—especially when I'd go early in the morning and get off the "wrong" stop to walk across the river, through a riverside park, back across the river, and still be the first one in the office. I really miss that. The afternoon commute with the traffic jams, buses packed with students, noise... nope, never missed that.
- TeMPOraL 7y ago
  You say "makes life enjoyable", but I read "Stockholm syndrome". To me, it's a kind of mind hacking that I'm both unable to do and, deep inside, feel is somehow "wrong". > I know that after flossing, I'm good to go to bed. I know that when I'm tired and done for the day, I'm good to go to bed. Flossing is a maintenance chore that's needed only because our teeth aren't good enough (and can't be made good enough, yet) to not need it. > I know when I'm driving my car that I won't get interrupted and I can wander with my thoughts. If I were in that situation, I'd prefer to stop driving to work (by e.g. going remote, or relocating), but I'd also want to have an uninterrupted time for being with my thoughts anyway, perhaps explicitly scheduled and negotiated with my S.O. Etc. Now, I'm not really criticizing you as much as I envy you - my life would be happier if I could hack my brain to see the tedium as something worthwhile, instead of doing my best to minimize its amount and impact on my life.
  - flossmaster 7y ago
    A dental technician once asked me what I did for my job, and upon hearing my reply said, "Well, as an engineer, you really should have a better concept of how to floss than you apparently do."
DantesKite 7y ago
It's interesting how all the tedious tasks listed are a product of modernity. Vacuuming, driving to work, flossing, doing dishes, etc. I wonder how repetitive life feels for humans who still have to hunt for their food. Not to say that we should shift back to a hunter-gatherer society, but I wonder how much of the mundaneness of life is something we brought on ourselves and not actually an implicit part of existence.
- maxwindiff 7y ago
  They have their version of mundane tasks.
- knzhou 7y ago
  That's a totally backwards take. Most of these things are modern labor-saving devices that replaced even worse drudgery. Sweeping takes longer than vacuuming. Washing dishes by hand takes longer than a dishwasher -- especially if you don't have unlimited running water, or dish detergent, or if you need to start a fire to get hot water. Ancient Romans didn't have to deal with rush hour traffic, but research says their commutes were just as long as ours. To put it another way: we used to required half of all human beings to attend to household tasks. That setup wasn't put into place because of malice, it was there by necessity. Managing a household used to take as much effort and thought as running a small business does today. Modernity has saved us from that.
  - chrisco255 7y ago
    The most stressful thing about modern commutes is that you can easily die if you take your eyes off the road for one second. Romans on horseback certainly didn't have that problem.
    - pshc 7y ago
      Driving to work doesn't fit with the others--it can be replaced with riding the subway to work. The automotive status quo is tragedy and farce.
pmarreck 7y ago
Life is mostly moving bits of physical material from one location to another in an endless series of queues, and programming is mostly transforming data from one form into another. It's the bits in between those things that are the juicy fun part, though, I guess
ip26 7y ago
Think of it this way- the years you spent optimizing your life and removing tedious unnecessary work was preparation for becoming a parent, freeing up time you can now invest in your kid.
bbojan 7y ago
The French have a term for this - vie quotidienne. Literal translation would be "everyday life", but the French term has an aspect of positivity in it that I don't think carries over to the English version.
- girzel 7y ago
  There's a nice phrase in Chinese: 过日子, literally "passing the days". It also has that connotation of being content with a regular life, wanting nothing special. The phrase is also extended into several other usages (thriftiness, etc), but that's the heart of it.
jv22222 7y ago
At the risk of sounding pretentious, I gameify all those chores and try to do them more perfectly each time I do them. I find this especially effective filling up the dishwasher more perfectly optimizing the layout each time. I guess I approach these chores like Zen gardens. Anyway that’s how I tricked my brain into turning the chores into quality time. ;)
- jamiek88 7y ago
  Me too! If I'm going to clean, I might as well work towards being amazing at it. Same tetris with the dishwasher too as well as trying to find the correct amount of detergent to use per load over a period of time with different loads and soil levels. Sad I know!
  - jv22222 7y ago
    Check out this guy! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qx-aak2zK_Y https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qx-aak2zK_Y
    - jamiek88 7y ago
      Now that is what I'm talking about!
- keyle 7y ago
  I do a sort of thing like that but it's more in the speed running genre. How fast can I do a reasonably good job at this, time starts now.
- nivenhuh 7y ago
  Lol — I always joke with my partner (an artist) about how much chaos he brings when he loads the dishwasher. There’s a proper way!! I swear it!
  - journalctl 7y ago
    You jest, but it’s totally possible to screw up loading a dish washer. In the best case, you just wind up with dirty dishes. In the worst case, you end up with damage.
k2xl 7y ago
this is a wonderful comment. as a new parent i'm in the same boat.
anonu 7y ago
Kids do really throw a massive wrench into the system. There's a beauty in dealing with that. I usually get solace in the fact that there have been a few billion people before me who have had to deal with the situation! On washing dishes: of course nobody loves doing dishes. But honestly it is zen for me. I have a method and a particular way to stack the dishwasher or dish rack. I don't really let anyone come between me and my process. Bluetooth headphones are a boon to the whole process as you can just plug in, listen to your favorite podcast, and putter around the kitchen getting dishes done!
- Cd00d 7y ago
  Hi doppelganger! In my house the chore division has me doing the kitchen after the kids are in bed. I love optimizing and getting everything in, but in the right configuration so it also all gets clean. I get annoyed when my wife starts loading the dishes early, because the space isn't managed perfectly, and I don't get my little zen-zing of 'I had a lot, and I wasn't sure it would work out, but it all fit'. Plus, with Bluetooth, I no longer get my headphone cord caught on the dishwasher's rack! I listen to podcasts at 3x, and learn so much while getting a feeling of satisfaction for a job well done.
bitwize 7y ago
"Before enlightenment, chop wood, carry water. After enlightenment, chop wood, carry water." There will always be wood that won't chop itself and water that won't carry itself, m8. Enlightenment can only put things in perspective.
ssss11 7y ago
I’ve gone through pretty much exactly the same thing! I’ve found that I can tolerate and sometimes enjoy the mundane tasks if I focus on completion. That is, like completing milestones of a project - completing the dishes for the day, the washing, the kids naps etc... who would think having kids would have this effect...
Procrastes 7y ago
Sometimes, the only thing that gets me through a week of stressful, complicated, brainy crap, is washing the dishes, washing, folding and putting away clothes. I learned a long time ago that, for me, this is life. The rest is just shots across my bow and terrors in the night.

by godot 7y ago

LunaSea 7y ago

Interesting! What kind of life optimizations did you use before?

shantly 7y ago
Having money and spending it to make other people do your boring stuff is a pretty effective life optimization. Cleaning, laundry, cooking, lawn care, car maintenance—even driving—can all be bought, so you barely have to do any of it again, if you've got money. You can—and most with means do, I think—just make almost any of this "this is what life mostly is" boring crap go away, unless you actually enjoy it more than what you might be doing instead. Making the tedious parts of raising a kid go away is a lot more expensive than making the normal adult boring stuff go away, though. Also if you're not fairly damn rich (i.e. rich enough not to need a real job) the boring parts will be most of the time you spend with your kids by a large margin, so you'll be reluctant to outsource that even if you can afford to. That's even more true if you're not paying to have the rest of your boring stuff done by someone else ("sorry honey, maybe we can play blocks later, I'm cooking dinner because if I don't we won't, you know, have any" but then later it's bath time then story and bed and maybe you squeeze in 10min of blocks if you're lucky)

monktastic1 7y ago

At the risk of sounding hippie, "tedious" and "boring" are emotional reactions to the chores, and not attributable to the chores themselves. We don't have to do that. "Everything in life is miraculous. It rests within the power of each of us to awaken from a dragging nightmare of life made up of unimportant tasks and tedious useless little habits to see life as it really is, and to rejoice in its exquisite wonderfulness." ― James Branch Cabell, The Cream of the Jest Not that I've remotely mastered it, but I think there's a lot of wisdom in there.

Loughla 7y ago
Not to sound too much like a hippie, either, but I learned (actually after having a kid as well) that when people talked about enjoying the ride, that's what they were talking about - the tedious stuff. I always assumed it meant travel more and look for adventure, but I have come to understand that 'enjoying the ride' in your life, not always just pursuing some next thing is about enjoying the tedium. Some of my favorite memories of my young children is the time we spent washing dishes together or watching them vacuum up the rugs and chase the cat with the broom. It's all about enjoying the ride, man.
- throw0101a 7y ago
  Sisyphus may disagree. :) * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sisyphus https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sisyphus
  - matwood 7y ago
    If I was Sisyphus and got the boulder to the top, I would push it back down myself. I'm going to die eventually, so is it futile to exercise everyday, to learn, to try and be a better person? I don't think so, but all of those things are journeys that never end and require many mundane tasks.
    - psalminen 7y ago
      > If I was Sisyphus and got the boulder to the top, I would push it back down myself. I'm really loving this quote, definitely using it at some point.

ckcheng 7y ago

> a long series of repetitive and routine work every day...aspects that are frictions / repetitiveness / tedious routines...this is what life is Thanks. Just reminded me of this: "One always finds one's burden again... He too concludes that all is well... Each atom of that stone, each mineral flake of that night filled mountain, in itself forms a world. The struggle itself toward the heights is enough to fill a man's heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy." (Camus, http://dbanach.com/sisyphus.htm http://dbanach.com/sisyphus.htm )

gbear605 7y ago
Alternatively, Camus thought too much and pushed boulders too little. :) http://existentialcomics.com/comic/301 http://existentialcomics.com/comic/301

iClaudiusX 7y ago

That's interesting because otherwise tedious chores like washing dishes or cleaning can feel meditative and therapeutic after I've had my coffee.

danharaj 7y ago

The way is the dust of the way.

yodsanklai 7y ago

> The hard parts of of life are driving to work, eating properly, flossing, .... I disagree. Those are simple rituals that makes life enjoyable too. For instance, I know that after flossing, I'm good to go to bed. Or I know when I'm driving my car that I won't get interrupted and I can wander with my thoughts.

organsnyder 7y ago
I've been working from home for the past year, after previously taking the bus to work downtown. It's mostly an improvement, but I do miss the commute—especially when I'd go early in the morning and get off the "wrong" stop to walk across the river, through a riverside park, back across the river, and still be the first one in the office. I really miss that. The afternoon commute with the traffic jams, buses packed with students, noise... nope, never missed that.
TeMPOraL 7y ago
You say "makes life enjoyable", but I read "Stockholm syndrome". To me, it's a kind of mind hacking that I'm both unable to do and, deep inside, feel is somehow "wrong". > I know that after flossing, I'm good to go to bed. I know that when I'm tired and done for the day, I'm good to go to bed. Flossing is a maintenance chore that's needed only because our teeth aren't good enough (and can't be made good enough, yet) to not need it. > I know when I'm driving my car that I won't get interrupted and I can wander with my thoughts. If I were in that situation, I'd prefer to stop driving to work (by e.g. going remote, or relocating), but I'd also want to have an uninterrupted time for being with my thoughts anyway, perhaps explicitly scheduled and negotiated with my S.O. Etc. Now, I'm not really criticizing you as much as I envy you - my life would be happier if I could hack my brain to see the tedium as something worthwhile, instead of doing my best to minimize its amount and impact on my life.
- flossmaster 7y ago
  A dental technician once asked me what I did for my job, and upon hearing my reply said, "Well, as an engineer, you really should have a better concept of how to floss than you apparently do."

DantesKite 7y ago

It's interesting how all the tedious tasks listed are a product of modernity. Vacuuming, driving to work, flossing, doing dishes, etc. I wonder how repetitive life feels for humans who still have to hunt for their food. Not to say that we should shift back to a hunter-gatherer society, but I wonder how much of the mundaneness of life is something we brought on ourselves and not actually an implicit part of existence.

maxwindiff 7y ago
They have their version of mundane tasks.
knzhou 7y ago
That's a totally backwards take. Most of these things are modern labor-saving devices that replaced even worse drudgery. Sweeping takes longer than vacuuming. Washing dishes by hand takes longer than a dishwasher -- especially if you don't have unlimited running water, or dish detergent, or if you need to start a fire to get hot water. Ancient Romans didn't have to deal with rush hour traffic, but research says their commutes were just as long as ours. To put it another way: we used to required half of all human beings to attend to household tasks. That setup wasn't put into place because of malice, it was there by necessity. Managing a household used to take as much effort and thought as running a small business does today. Modernity has saved us from that.
- chrisco255 7y ago
  The most stressful thing about modern commutes is that you can easily die if you take your eyes off the road for one second. Romans on horseback certainly didn't have that problem.
  - pshc 7y ago
    Driving to work doesn't fit with the others--it can be replaced with riding the subway to work. The automotive status quo is tragedy and farce.

pmarreck 7y ago

Life is mostly moving bits of physical material from one location to another in an endless series of queues, and programming is mostly transforming data from one form into another. It's the bits in between those things that are the juicy fun part, though, I guess

ip26 7y ago

Think of it this way- the years you spent optimizing your life and removing tedious unnecessary work was preparation for becoming a parent, freeing up time you can now invest in your kid.

bbojan 7y ago

The French have a term for this - vie quotidienne. Literal translation would be "everyday life", but the French term has an aspect of positivity in it that I don't think carries over to the English version.

girzel 7y ago
There's a nice phrase in Chinese: 过日子, literally "passing the days". It also has that connotation of being content with a regular life, wanting nothing special. The phrase is also extended into several other usages (thriftiness, etc), but that's the heart of it.

jv22222 7y ago

At the risk of sounding pretentious, I gameify all those chores and try to do them more perfectly each time I do them. I find this especially effective filling up the dishwasher more perfectly optimizing the layout each time. I guess I approach these chores like Zen gardens. Anyway that’s how I tricked my brain into turning the chores into quality time. ;)

jamiek88 7y ago
Me too! If I'm going to clean, I might as well work towards being amazing at it. Same tetris with the dishwasher too as well as trying to find the correct amount of detergent to use per load over a period of time with different loads and soil levels. Sad I know!
- jv22222 7y ago
  Check out this guy! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qx-aak2zK_Y https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qx-aak2zK_Y
  - jamiek88 7y ago
    Now that is what I'm talking about!
keyle 7y ago
I do a sort of thing like that but it's more in the speed running genre. How fast can I do a reasonably good job at this, time starts now.
nivenhuh 7y ago
Lol — I always joke with my partner (an artist) about how much chaos he brings when he loads the dishwasher. There’s a proper way!! I swear it!
- journalctl 7y ago
  You jest, but it’s totally possible to screw up loading a dish washer. In the best case, you just wind up with dirty dishes. In the worst case, you end up with damage.

k2xl 7y ago

this is a wonderful comment. as a new parent i'm in the same boat.

anonu 7y ago

Kids do really throw a massive wrench into the system. There's a beauty in dealing with that. I usually get solace in the fact that there have been a few billion people before me who have had to deal with the situation! On washing dishes: of course nobody loves doing dishes. But honestly it is zen for me. I have a method and a particular way to stack the dishwasher or dish rack. I don't really let anyone come between me and my process. Bluetooth headphones are a boon to the whole process as you can just plug in, listen to your favorite podcast, and putter around the kitchen getting dishes done!

Cd00d 7y ago
Hi doppelganger! In my house the chore division has me doing the kitchen after the kids are in bed. I love optimizing and getting everything in, but in the right configuration so it also all gets clean. I get annoyed when my wife starts loading the dishes early, because the space isn't managed perfectly, and I don't get my little zen-zing of 'I had a lot, and I wasn't sure it would work out, but it all fit'. Plus, with Bluetooth, I no longer get my headphone cord caught on the dishwasher's rack! I listen to podcasts at 3x, and learn so much while getting a feeling of satisfaction for a job well done.

bitwize 7y ago

"Before enlightenment, chop wood, carry water. After enlightenment, chop wood, carry water." There will always be wood that won't chop itself and water that won't carry itself, m8. Enlightenment can only put things in perspective.

ssss11 7y ago

I’ve gone through pretty much exactly the same thing! I’ve found that I can tolerate and sometimes enjoy the mundane tasks if I focus on completion. That is, like completing milestones of a project - completing the dishes for the day, the washing, the kids naps etc... who would think having kids would have this effect...

Procrastes 7y ago

Sometimes, the only thing that gets me through a week of stressful, complicated, brainy crap, is washing the dishes, washing, folding and putting away clothes. I learned a long time ago that, for me, this is life. The rest is just shots across my bow and terrors in the night.