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There’s an explosion of new movements and techniques to fight procrastination, from Pomodoro (which gives you timed breaks when your tomato-shaped kitchen timer

There’s an explosion of new movements and techniques to fight procrastination, from Pomodoro (which gives you timed breaks when your tomato-shaped kitchen timer runs out) to self-help books and subreddits... The highlight of my early 20s was embracing the hedonism treadmill as a rejection of "imposed morals", only to spend countless hours trying tons of self help books and listening to podcasts about discipline and grit and motivation and positive thinking, etc. At some point, no matter which path you take, you'll find good secular justification for limiting your exposure to toxic people in life and limiting your swearing to improve your vocabulary and avoiding processed food, short term hookups, sleeping well, helping others, meditating, saying affirmations, thinking positively(using faith to counteract "rational evidence" that something will fail or wont work) and so on. You're following so many rules (self developed through experience and knowledge) that it gives you more appreciation for how the different religions were themselves using heuristics developed over thousands of years of trial and error to give you an optimal set of rules that would more than likely produce the best outcome for your life, given the environmental constraints and lack of scientific knowledge at the time. It was not simply "sky daddy made rulebook"

alexvoda 4y ago
However, the environmental constraints change and the amount of scientific knowledge also changes(and hopefully improves) over time. Therefore the heuristics turned into rule book will inevitably become harmful eventually. Also keep in mind that the rulebooks did not produce anything close to any ideal personal outcome. They always produced the ideal societal outcome that would preserve the existing structure of society. If said structure meant you were inherently harmed, your personal ideal was subordinated to that.
steveBK123 4y ago
Your response reminds me of the quote: “Tradition is a set of solutions for which we have forgotten the problems. Throw away the solution and you get the problem back. Sometimes the problem has mutated or disappeared. Often it is still there as strong as it ever was.” ― Donald Kingsbury Watching our politics speed-run the 60s-80s again reminds me of this every day. Hopefully we hit the 90s soon, those were pretty rad.
- darkteflon 4y ago
  Indeed, reminded me of this article from a few years back, which left quite the impression: https://scholars-stage.org/tradition-is-smarter-than-you-are/ https://scholars-stage.org/tradition-is-smarter-than-you-are...
  - rakejake 4y ago
    Fantastic article. Thanks for sharing.
  - steveBK123 4y ago
    Another interesting read with some ideological bends I can't completely buy into is Rob Henderson & his writing on "Luxury Beliefs". Basically the concept you may notice if you are in HCOL blue urban elite circles.. Well to do left of center people who espouse discouragement of / being against many traditional concepts (monogamy, two parent households, kids after marriage, strict discipline, follow the law, being drug-free, going to college for a career, etc) .. but largely actually follow it and is how they / their parents got where they are. And either way they have the means to not be effected by the negative effects of this non-traditionalism. However if you are middle/lower class and follow the same non-traditional path, the personal costs to you & your offspring of frequent drug use, being a single parent, etc are almost insurmountable and are some of the leading causes of generational poverty. That is - it is easy to say "hard work doesn't pay off, do drugs, break the law, and free love" when you are going from an elite (fully paid for by parents) university campus to start your career & live in NYC/SF/LA/Boston (with college & parents helping you with job connections, and parents helping underwrite your housing until you get on your feet). For them the worst cost of failure is moving back with mom&dad to their comfortable leafy suburb.
    - SamBam 4y ago
      > discouragement of / being against... I know lots of liberal elites, and don't know any who are actually against two parent households, kids after marriage, following the law, being drug-free, going to college for a career, etc This is a ridiculous assertion. But I know many of these same people who believe in not judging those who do not follow all of these ideals, and want systems in place that support, say, single mothers or whatever. This is very different.
BigHatLogan 4y ago
Beautifully said. It strikes me as incredibly arrogant and condescending that so-called rational, educated people today will gleefully throw out centuries (if not millennia) of knowledge because they (justifiably) take issues with some of it. Throwing the baby out with the bathwater comes to mind. I'm not particularly religious, but there have always been aspects of religion that I've admired and aspects that I've disliked. Your local Crossfit gym and book club, I promise you, are not adequate replacements for traditional recurring weekly gatherings, where it's normal (and expected!) to share what's on your mind, what's troubling you, what you are grieving over, what you are celebrating, etc. I've found that the quality of discourse here is much higher than the standard, "Did you watch Succession last week?", surface-level discourse at many of these alleged replacements. And then, like you mentioned, they embark on a decades-long quest, only to end up at more or less the place they would've ended up otherwise. Or they find themselves completely lost and wayward. I don't have a prescription here, but complete rejection of something seems almost as dull and narrow-minded as total dogmatic acceptance of it.
- xabotage 4y ago
  You're looking at weekly religious gatherings through rose-colored lenses. A crossfit gym membership and book club could very well produce a far healthier local community than a church. Religion does not have a monopoly on the variables that attract healthy, thoughtful, intelligent people (in fact, trends in the US suggest quite the opposite).
thih9 4y ago
> heuristics developed over thousands of years of trial and error to give you an optimal set of rules that would more than likely produce the best outcome for your life Unless you're cherry picking rules from the set, the outcome would be far from best. My point is that thousands of years of trial and error may include some valuable insight but also some pretty outdated approaches.
- lolinder 4y ago
  The question isn't if we've reached a global maximum (we obviously haven't) it's if we can do better than thousands of years of trial and error? I can see the rationale for taking tradition as a baseline and tweaking it to better fit modern times. That's what every generation has done. The direction many of us are heading, however, is to assume that tradition is all bogus and we can do better today with just the scientific method. I hope if the replication crisis in psychology has taught us anything it's that science applied to people is still in its infancy and we are not yet at a place where we can entirely discard the wisdom of our ancestors.
  - thih9 4y ago
    > The question isn't if we've reached a global maximum On the contrary; top level comment said "rules that would more than likely produce the best outcome for your life". I disagreed.
    - lolinder 4y ago
      "The best outcome" doesn't mean the best life theoretically possible, it means the best life you can achieve for yourself in the life that you have. You do not have access to infinite information about how to live a good life. You have access to a limited amount of knowledge gained scientifically, an even more limited amount of your personal lived experience, and a vast trove of traditional wisdom. Given that limited knowledge, OP asserts that the best outcomes are achieved by paying heed to traditional wisdom. There are certainly better ways to live than the ones handed down to us over millennia, and I think we ought to fine-tune what we've been given and learn from other cultures' traditions. But discarding everything our ancestors have given us because we think we know better is sheer arrogance.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
astrange 4y ago
People should not say “processed food” when they mean “a specific kind of bad for you processed foods”. Running society off “unprocessed food” would mean returning to the hunter-gatherer state where having twins means killing one of them so your family doesn’t starve. (Kind of like “plant-based diet”, which actually means “plants but not, like, unhealthy plants”) Encouraging people to try meditation with no other qualifications is a bit dangerous too - the original purpose of meditation is to become a monk, which is the opposite of having a family.
- Eleison23 4y ago
  The original purpose of meditation is to become a monk? That's a bizarre hot take; how did you come to that conclusion? Monks become monks first and then they perfect their meditations. Monks become monks because the community recognizes someone who can be formed and taught, not because a man has perfected his meditative chops and now the monks all want him. Meditation, for as long as I can trace back, is for everyone: who speaks in Psalms 63, a monk? Only King David? Every faithful and observant Jew ponders the works and laws of the LORD while he lies in bed, so thus do Christians. The Church often encourages devotions for the laity which facilitate meditation. The Rosary and Eucharistic Adoration are 100% meditative, contemplative activities; no monks are required. In fact the Rosary is a "poor man's Breviary" where meditation upon a few fixed concepts replace active recitation of many, many words and disparate prayers. The next time you see someone praying a Rosary with their family, are you going to tell them to stop, because they're not a monk? That's the height of weird - it's every Catholic father's duty to lead their family in a daily Rosary, and everybody meditates.
  - astrange 4y ago
    > The original purpose of meditation is to become a monk? That's a bizarre hot take; how did you come to that conclusion? https://vividness.live/theravada-reinvents-meditation https://vividness.live/theravada-reinvents-meditation It was invented to disconnect you from your desires and sense pleasures - not just in a therapy way but so you won't accidentally enjoy food or sex or any of those non-monk things. Milder forms and "mindfulness" are modern inventions and it's actually rather surprising they turned out to be beneficial. If you just sit there and do vipassana cold for days it can easily make you depressed or in some people leads to psychotic breaks.

alexvoda 4y ago

However, the environmental constraints change and the amount of scientific knowledge also changes(and hopefully improves) over time. Therefore the heuristics turned into rule book will inevitably become harmful eventually. Also keep in mind that the rulebooks did not produce anything close to any ideal personal outcome. They always produced the ideal societal outcome that would preserve the existing structure of society. If said structure meant you were inherently harmed, your personal ideal was subordinated to that.

steveBK123 4y ago

Your response reminds me of the quote: “Tradition is a set of solutions for which we have forgotten the problems. Throw away the solution and you get the problem back. Sometimes the problem has mutated or disappeared. Often it is still there as strong as it ever was.” ― Donald Kingsbury Watching our politics speed-run the 60s-80s again reminds me of this every day. Hopefully we hit the 90s soon, those were pretty rad.

darkteflon 4y ago
Indeed, reminded me of this article from a few years back, which left quite the impression: https://scholars-stage.org/tradition-is-smarter-than-you-are/ https://scholars-stage.org/tradition-is-smarter-than-you-are...
- rakejake 4y ago
  Fantastic article. Thanks for sharing.
- steveBK123 4y ago
  Another interesting read with some ideological bends I can't completely buy into is Rob Henderson & his writing on "Luxury Beliefs". Basically the concept you may notice if you are in HCOL blue urban elite circles.. Well to do left of center people who espouse discouragement of / being against many traditional concepts (monogamy, two parent households, kids after marriage, strict discipline, follow the law, being drug-free, going to college for a career, etc) .. but largely actually follow it and is how they / their parents got where they are. And either way they have the means to not be effected by the negative effects of this non-traditionalism. However if you are middle/lower class and follow the same non-traditional path, the personal costs to you & your offspring of frequent drug use, being a single parent, etc are almost insurmountable and are some of the leading causes of generational poverty. That is - it is easy to say "hard work doesn't pay off, do drugs, break the law, and free love" when you are going from an elite (fully paid for by parents) university campus to start your career & live in NYC/SF/LA/Boston (with college & parents helping you with job connections, and parents helping underwrite your housing until you get on your feet). For them the worst cost of failure is moving back with mom&dad to their comfortable leafy suburb.
  - SamBam 4y ago
    > discouragement of / being against... I know lots of liberal elites, and don't know any who are actually against two parent households, kids after marriage, following the law, being drug-free, going to college for a career, etc This is a ridiculous assertion. But I know many of these same people who believe in not judging those who do not follow all of these ideals, and want systems in place that support, say, single mothers or whatever. This is very different.

BigHatLogan 4y ago

Beautifully said. It strikes me as incredibly arrogant and condescending that so-called rational, educated people today will gleefully throw out centuries (if not millennia) of knowledge because they (justifiably) take issues with some of it. Throwing the baby out with the bathwater comes to mind. I'm not particularly religious, but there have always been aspects of religion that I've admired and aspects that I've disliked. Your local Crossfit gym and book club, I promise you, are not adequate replacements for traditional recurring weekly gatherings, where it's normal (and expected!) to share what's on your mind, what's troubling you, what you are grieving over, what you are celebrating, etc. I've found that the quality of discourse here is much higher than the standard, "Did you watch Succession last week?", surface-level discourse at many of these alleged replacements. And then, like you mentioned, they embark on a decades-long quest, only to end up at more or less the place they would've ended up otherwise. Or they find themselves completely lost and wayward. I don't have a prescription here, but complete rejection of something seems almost as dull and narrow-minded as total dogmatic acceptance of it.

xabotage 4y ago
You're looking at weekly religious gatherings through rose-colored lenses. A crossfit gym membership and book club could very well produce a far healthier local community than a church. Religion does not have a monopoly on the variables that attract healthy, thoughtful, intelligent people (in fact, trends in the US suggest quite the opposite).

thih9 4y ago

> heuristics developed over thousands of years of trial and error to give you an optimal set of rules that would more than likely produce the best outcome for your life Unless you're cherry picking rules from the set, the outcome would be far from best. My point is that thousands of years of trial and error may include some valuable insight but also some pretty outdated approaches.

lolinder 4y ago
The question isn't if we've reached a global maximum (we obviously haven't) it's if we can do better than thousands of years of trial and error? I can see the rationale for taking tradition as a baseline and tweaking it to better fit modern times. That's what every generation has done. The direction many of us are heading, however, is to assume that tradition is all bogus and we can do better today with just the scientific method. I hope if the replication crisis in psychology has taught us anything it's that science applied to people is still in its infancy and we are not yet at a place where we can entirely discard the wisdom of our ancestors.
- thih9 4y ago
  > The question isn't if we've reached a global maximum On the contrary; top level comment said "rules that would more than likely produce the best outcome for your life". I disagreed.
  - lolinder 4y ago
    "The best outcome" doesn't mean the best life theoretically possible, it means the best life you can achieve for yourself in the life that you have. You do not have access to infinite information about how to live a good life. You have access to a limited amount of knowledge gained scientifically, an even more limited amount of your personal lived experience, and a vast trove of traditional wisdom. Given that limited knowledge, OP asserts that the best outcomes are achieved by paying heed to traditional wisdom. There are certainly better ways to live than the ones handed down to us over millennia, and I think we ought to fine-tune what we've been given and learn from other cultures' traditions. But discarding everything our ancestors have given us because we think we know better is sheer arrogance.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

astrange 4y ago

People should not say “processed food” when they mean “a specific kind of bad for you processed foods”. Running society off “unprocessed food” would mean returning to the hunter-gatherer state where having twins means killing one of them so your family doesn’t starve. (Kind of like “plant-based diet”, which actually means “plants but not, like, unhealthy plants”) Encouraging people to try meditation with no other qualifications is a bit dangerous too - the original purpose of meditation is to become a monk, which is the opposite of having a family.

Eleison23 4y ago
The original purpose of meditation is to become a monk? That's a bizarre hot take; how did you come to that conclusion? Monks become monks first and then they perfect their meditations. Monks become monks because the community recognizes someone who can be formed and taught, not because a man has perfected his meditative chops and now the monks all want him. Meditation, for as long as I can trace back, is for everyone: who speaks in Psalms 63, a monk? Only King David? Every faithful and observant Jew ponders the works and laws of the LORD while he lies in bed, so thus do Christians. The Church often encourages devotions for the laity which facilitate meditation. The Rosary and Eucharistic Adoration are 100% meditative, contemplative activities; no monks are required. In fact the Rosary is a "poor man's Breviary" where meditation upon a few fixed concepts replace active recitation of many, many words and disparate prayers. The next time you see someone praying a Rosary with their family, are you going to tell them to stop, because they're not a monk? That's the height of weird - it's every Catholic father's duty to lead their family in a daily Rosary, and everybody meditates.
- astrange 4y ago
  > The original purpose of meditation is to become a monk? That's a bizarre hot take; how did you come to that conclusion? https://vividness.live/theravada-reinvents-meditation https://vividness.live/theravada-reinvents-meditation It was invented to disconnect you from your desires and sense pleasures - not just in a therapy way but so you won't accidentally enjoy food or sex or any of those non-monk things. Milder forms and "mindfulness" are modern inventions and it's actually rather surprising they turned out to be beneficial. If you just sit there and do vipassana cold for days it can easily make you depressed or in some people leads to psychotic breaks.