5 ms·

There is something so depressingly robotic about the obsession with being the best at everything all the time. Career, income, diet, exercise, lifestyle, hobbie

by 5cott0 7y ago

There is something so depressingly robotic about the obsession with being the best at everything all the time. Career, income, diet, exercise, lifestyle, hobbies; can't even have fun anymore without spending days holed-up researching esoteric hyper-optimizations. Some of you need to relax and stop sucking the fun out of everything.

ksdale 7y ago
I think some people get their enjoyment out of hyper-optimization rather than the hobby itself, which is also fine.
mo1ok 7y ago
I think it's important to be passionate about your life's work. However, maintaining "good enough" across all dimensions of particular lifestyle or role is actually incredibly challenging. Even for a standard engineer, think how many you know can code well, be leaders, AND can write good documentation. For most things, it's always a "pick 2 out of 3" situation.
- olau 7y ago
  There's a difference between being passionate about your own work, and being passionate about being better than everyone else. I fact, I don't think the two have anything in common?
  - SomeGuy789 7y ago
    It seems to me like there's two different things being discussed in this thread. The first one being passion about being better than everyone else as you mentioned and the second one is a desire to work on yourself on different aspects of life, a.k.a. try to be as well-rounded person as possible. When put in action these things are deceptively similar yet the underlying reasons for doing them are very different.
libria 7y ago
He leaves room for that. > And for games like Overwatch, I don't think improving is a moral imperative; there's nothing wrong with having fun at 50%-ile or 10%-ile or any rank.
- blackearl 7y ago
  I've gravitated to more random modes in multiplayer games. OW has mystery heroes where hero selection is random. Hostility is almost always met with "dude it's mystery heroes".
- mandelbrotwurst 7y ago
  Leaving room for being less competitive in games is not the same as doing so for non-games.
crispyambulance 7y ago
> relax and stop sucking the fun out of everything. Yep. It's important to try new things and put yourself "out there". That means you're going to fumble on a regular basis. The best way to master something, in the absence of a god-like mentor, is through endless repetitions of effort, failure, reflection and exploration. The concept is as old, tried, and true as the story of Odysseus.
- sireat 7y ago
  That is good advice. Only problem is that we do not have Bill Murray's 10,000 years to endlessly master everything in Punxsutawney. We have to pick our fights carefully.
zodiac 7y ago
I personally find it fun to become better or trying to see how close I can get to being the best at my hobbies.
flr03 7y ago
There is some sort of rat race being this obsession, that kind of put me off sometimes. It's like, yes, I'm guilty of it somehow, I want to be better, to be more productive, to do less mistakes etc. I'll do my work better, I can get hired by a company that would choose me over another candidate, nice. But the cost is that it's dragging the all profession into this mindset. The 10x thingy, the hyper productivity competition. This has also a cost for yourself, you can optimise everything, work on several IDEs, write your documentation as your code compiles, listen to a podcast as you have lunch, a book on the tube as you go back home... But boy oh that's exhausting.
- leoh 7y ago
  Agreed. My hypothesis is that it's largely due to constrained markets in the Bay Area (housing, dating pool especially) that lead to individuals feeling impoverished despite having enough cash. Like kids in poorer areas wanting to be professional athletes and putting immense energy into street basketball games — they do get better, it's a way to distract yourself from the mess, and it may be good for you, but it doesn't necessarily fundamentally address problems without or within (though it can!). If you look at the Bay Area before the 2000s, it wasn't like this at all. It was relaxed. For a while, it was said to be one of the best places in the world for dating. Housing was cheap. People had time. You could be a part time dishwasher and a poet in San Francisco. A lot of greatness grew out of that fecund environment — artists like Diebenkorn or luminaries like Alice Waters. Things are changing.

by 5cott0 7y ago

ksdale 7y ago

I think some people get their enjoyment out of hyper-optimization rather than the hobby itself, which is also fine.

mo1ok 7y ago

I think it's important to be passionate about your life's work. However, maintaining "good enough" across all dimensions of particular lifestyle or role is actually incredibly challenging. Even for a standard engineer, think how many you know can code well, be leaders, AND can write good documentation. For most things, it's always a "pick 2 out of 3" situation.

olau 7y ago
There's a difference between being passionate about your own work, and being passionate about being better than everyone else. I fact, I don't think the two have anything in common?
- SomeGuy789 7y ago
  It seems to me like there's two different things being discussed in this thread. The first one being passion about being better than everyone else as you mentioned and the second one is a desire to work on yourself on different aspects of life, a.k.a. try to be as well-rounded person as possible. When put in action these things are deceptively similar yet the underlying reasons for doing them are very different.

libria 7y ago

He leaves room for that. > And for games like Overwatch, I don't think improving is a moral imperative; there's nothing wrong with having fun at 50%-ile or 10%-ile or any rank.

blackearl 7y ago
I've gravitated to more random modes in multiplayer games. OW has mystery heroes where hero selection is random. Hostility is almost always met with "dude it's mystery heroes".
mandelbrotwurst 7y ago
Leaving room for being less competitive in games is not the same as doing so for non-games.

crispyambulance 7y ago

> relax and stop sucking the fun out of everything. Yep. It's important to try new things and put yourself "out there". That means you're going to fumble on a regular basis. The best way to master something, in the absence of a god-like mentor, is through endless repetitions of effort, failure, reflection and exploration. The concept is as old, tried, and true as the story of Odysseus.

sireat 7y ago
That is good advice. Only problem is that we do not have Bill Murray's 10,000 years to endlessly master everything in Punxsutawney. We have to pick our fights carefully.

zodiac 7y ago

I personally find it fun to become better or trying to see how close I can get to being the best at my hobbies.

flr03 7y ago

There is some sort of rat race being this obsession, that kind of put me off sometimes. It's like, yes, I'm guilty of it somehow, I want to be better, to be more productive, to do less mistakes etc. I'll do my work better, I can get hired by a company that would choose me over another candidate, nice. But the cost is that it's dragging the all profession into this mindset. The 10x thingy, the hyper productivity competition. This has also a cost for yourself, you can optimise everything, work on several IDEs, write your documentation as your code compiles, listen to a podcast as you have lunch, a book on the tube as you go back home... But boy oh that's exhausting.

leoh 7y ago
Agreed. My hypothesis is that it's largely due to constrained markets in the Bay Area (housing, dating pool especially) that lead to individuals feeling impoverished despite having enough cash. Like kids in poorer areas wanting to be professional athletes and putting immense energy into street basketball games — they do get better, it's a way to distract yourself from the mess, and it may be good for you, but it doesn't necessarily fundamentally address problems without or within (though it can!). If you look at the Bay Area before the 2000s, it wasn't like this at all. It was relaxed. For a while, it was said to be one of the best places in the world for dating. Housing was cheap. People had time. You could be a part time dishwasher and a poet in San Francisco. A lot of greatness grew out of that fecund environment — artists like Diebenkorn or luminaries like Alice Waters. Things are changing.