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? Go for a walk. Walking is what our ancestors did, to go into "finding" modus. Find a route to water, find prey, find adversaries to find you and find out. Or at least find the way home.
All senses get stimulated, a moving mind in a moving body. The great outdoors, fresh air, i shite being Scottish.
If you have a problem you need to solve, but don't know how, just walk up to a overview point and look down on the problem every day.
Maybe walking will work for me when I am older but it is not intense enough now. Cycling seems to be perfect as the scenery changes much faster and there is more opportunity to challenge myself (;
I don't know, it let's your mind wander - especially if you can walk near water or better, the sea.
Try walking while carrying a heavy load.
That's just regular walking. Life is hard!
I walk quickly in ellipses when I'm power-thinking.
Ah the infamous farmer's walk!
I think the intention is to not even try to identify solutions, or even identify problems. If you're opening this page on your computer or phone, presumably, you have nothing 100% critical pressing right now. Now take it to the extreme, and see if you can quiet your brain for a minute or so. Walking is not as "pure nothing" as sitting and letting your brain wander anywhere as long as it's not reminding you of obligation stress. You might even start to daydream a pleasant setting.
I like to go for a run or a bike ride.
On a walk, you can still carry and even use a phone, listen to a podcast or music, or have a conversation. When you're doing a workout, you might wear a watch, but otherwise it's a time when you can't really get distracted or interrupted by anything, you just move, observe, and think.
This is excellent advice. Spending 5 hours on a weekend cycling is extremely relaxing, not only because you are intensely using your body, but because you are completely and utterly distracted.
When I cycle, the first twenty kilometers are usually fairly painful: I am tired, I feel my knees, back, and muscles hurt, and am generally uncomfortable. After those twenty kilometers I enter a meditative, gelatinous phase, were I no longer really feel my body. I just ride. This is when I _think_; the same style of thinking I experience when lying, comfortably, in bed.
After maybe 60–90 kilometers (depending on my current fitness level), I enter the pain stage. This is when I start feeling my body again. Believe it or not, this is definitely the most therapeutic stage. This is when I cannot think. My mind stays blank, and I do — in a manner of speaking — nothing.
This lack of thought, meaning lack of stress, of worry, of hectic, etc., is what motivates me to go on 150 or 200 kilometer bike rides. You feel physically refreshed and exhausted. You feel that you were able to think in peace and purely, as well as having been void of all negative, stressful thoughts.
To anyone who has never tried an endurance sport like cycling: I highly recommend it. I started when I was 14, and it was one of the greatest decisions I ever made. It spared me hours of depression, fear, and stress. It also encouraged me to think and meditate in peace. I would not be the person I am today, if it were not for my dear high-school friend who showed me the world of cycling (as well as the world of communism; I owe much to this friend). Thank you.
I really identify with the phases and experience you describe above. The act of being engaged as your body moves through them is powerful.
Writer Haruki Murakami, a distance runner, was asked by an interviewer what we thinks about when he runs. Murakami responded that he basically doesn't think of anything. He runs not to think, but to _not_ think. That He runs specifically to create a void. (from his book "What I Talk About When I Talk About Running")
I would also encourage anyone who hasn't experienced this before: find an activity that demands this from you. You will learn a lot about yourself.
This sounds like the cycling version of runners high. I’ve never felt it.
I love both cycling and walking. But cycling is what gave me the best of all.
Riding for 7-8 hours even once a week just gave me a boost that would let me cope with everything that I had to face in daily life, and now after I've diagnosed with ADHD, I realize it was also helped me a lot to keep myself somewhat sorted. It's kinda therapy for me.
It's relaxing, and clams the racing mind so much.
Now I don't get a chance to ride anymore, but I miss it so much. And I feel ADHD affects me more now
I can't really use a phone outside on a sunny day. Even at max brightness the screen is unreadable.
Interesting you mention walking as what our ancestors did. Until about 100 years ago, food and energy scarcity was the norm. Our ancestors would have been lean and would not have typically expended energy for just pure leisure. In other words, everyone was busy trying to not starve. There was plenty of physical activity in the day, lots of chores and things to do.
I say this to demonstrate how un-adapted we are now for what is relatively recently a radically different lifestyle.
This is not supported by anthropological facts in the slightest.
First of all, the argument conflates hunter gatherers, nomadic tribes, and farming societies. The mean and variance in food supply in all three across the world and time varied quite a bit. Were the numbers so bad uniformly that people had no time for leisure activity!?!
Across history, there is evidence of people having huge celebratory festivals, involving excess food, dancing, and other rituals. People have been building for thousands of years humongous temples and pyramids and other structures requiring decades of continuous work, most of them without slave labor but voluntarily. Spending significant part of the day praying to the gods has also been the hallmark of humans. Do any of these strike you as low energy activities?
Or take a look at biology. Most animals with some intelligence spends a non-trivial amount of its time in play. Why would humans not?
Do what humans usually did - hunt some dinner, hang around, maybe go aggravate the neighboring tribe a bit, if you’re feeling feisty.
How do you hunt for dinner in a cold winter? I appreciate your glibness, I was equally glib when I wrote "everyone"
Well, you put on your furs and go hunting. Tracking is easier in the snow. Or you stay in your shelter and eat some jerky. And, I'm not being glib - life was simple and you did what I said.
Okay, and when your feisty neighbors take all your jerky and have hunted all the animals that are not in hibernating - then what?
While "simple", that does not equate to abundant nor easy. Or, would you agree that there was plenty of abundance even during northern winters?
If there was such abundance, and things were as simple as hunting every now and then- why so many famines in history [1]? Surely any cause of famine could be remediated by going out and doing a little more hunting?
Simple doesn’t mean it’s easy or without risk
Indeed. I really would want my questions answered.
I believe noting that simple is not easy was my point already: "While "simple", that does not equate to abundant nor easy"
Which goes to my other point - getting food on your own is hard. Doing so in the winter is even more difficult. Hence, calorie deficits was a serious problem for many.
No argument - simple doesn’t mean easy. When the food runs out, only the the most fit (or ruthless) survive.
Not in the very slightest? Didn't most early american colonies die of starvation and disease?
I feel you completely discounted this: "Our ancestors would have been lean and would not have typically expended energy for just pure leisure." And instead responded to only the following simplification as if it were an absolute point: "In other words, everyone was busy trying to not starve"
Though, let us both stop nitpicking. It is hard to convey the full nuance, particularly when tapping this out on a phone.
In fairness, I did conflate a few concepts and did not convey some nuance. Though my point that humans are not adapted for our current lifestyle remains.
(1) serfs were not voluntarily lifting weights for leisure.
(2) humans were not historically jacked. They were lean. They looked like thru-hikers, or marathon runners. It is the reason why having fat was a beauty standard. Onky the rich could have that many excess calories and not be M tan from working. The body does not choose to put on unnecessary levels of muscle without training and constant nutrition
I did not mean to convey as was read into my statements that humans did zero leisure. It is an absurd claim. Though, running a marathon for the hell of it is likely well out of the cards for most people, particularly in a winter climate. To which my point, the need to go for intentional walks was less than what it is today. Not zero, but less.
As for the conflation, the lack of nutrition was particularly salient in WWII when most Americans were not getting enough calories.
"LeBlanc argues that the U.S. military’s interest in nutrition research exploded in the 1940s, after it began seeking healthy recruits to deploy in World War II and found a male population physically weakened by years of malnutrition during the Great Depression." [1]
Celebrating during a harvest makes sense. A lot of that food is liable to go bad. It is a time of plenty,in contrast to long winters before canning was invented.
My point is the need for recreational leisure amongst adults was less than compared to present day in "post industrial countries" for two reasons: (1) substance living intrinsically involves physical activity. (2) food scarcity. Yeah, it is easy to strawman my argument as if there was no excess expenditure of energy. I'll re-iterate my point is that subsistance living is not conducive to a lot of excess calorie expenditure. Second to that, the number of people who were at a subsistence level was historically far higher. Third, a lifestyle where time is measured more in months and seasons, where one needs to do "everything" manually - is fundamentally different then the lifestyles of today (where with $100, today you can eat as well as did the King of France)
[1] https://news.stanford.edu/stories/2019/01/historian-traces-m...
Petrarch climbed a mountain for fun in 1336.
My summary statement saying "everyone" should be taken into context rather than strawmanned. Fwiw, and also across most of europe in a similar time period: "The Great Famine of 1315–1317 (occasionally dated 1315–1322) was the first of a series of large-scale crises that struck parts of Europe early in the 14th century. Most of Europe (extending east to Poland and south to the Alps) was affected." [1]
Wasn't he effectively some version of upper middle class though? With enough money for servants and safely patronised, his time was protected from basic human needs.
Totally agree. Even in my childhood, if anyone was seen walking without work or running without being chased by dogs or thieves, they would be seen as lunatic. Why would anyone spend their precious energy except for some absolutely needed work? People perfected minimalistic energy spending and question any unnecessary walking. They ride on buffalos while coming back from farm, use farm animals and tools for harder work, have 24-hour servants, have more children, and have large family, get everyone, including women and children out to farm work.
I think the leisure walking, jogging, gym are all products of availability of too much food in return for less work. We are simulating work by cheating the body to think that these leisure activities are actually work.
The peripatetic school of Aristotle. ~335BC
Take walks to stimulate the mind
“We’re here on this Earth to fart around, don’t let anybody tell you different.”
~ Kurt Vonnegut
Thoreau, Humboldt, Goethe, Descartes. da Vinci, St. Francis of Assisi, Hildegard of Bingen, Li Bai, Seneca, Socrates
Yes, it wasn't as affordable in earlier times, but thinking and walking have been closely associated for millenia.
Most of those names strike me as particularly affluent or benefitting from a rich sponsor. Which does not really contradict the original point that majority of the population were focused on survival.
"Yes, it wasn't as affordable in earlier times,"
Thinking in peace and quiet was indeed a luxury in past times.
That doesn't mean there isn't a long tradition of walking if you needed to think. And that was the core point of OP - not that the majority was focused on survival, but that supposedly thinking and walking are a new relationship, previously impossible. And they really aren't. (Even as a subsistence farmer, you occasionally have to think, and doing that during a walk is a pretty common approach)
> supposedly thinking and walking are a new relationship, previously impossible
Not quite, the relationship between walking and thinking is more salient now. Not previously impossible.
Note OP cites examples of walking that are all practical. Poetically OP states this as a way to "find" answers. That element of finding is no longer a necessity like it used, but arguably taking the time and the method are still important.
Quoting OP: " Walking is what our ancestors did, to go into "finding" modus. Find a route to water, find prey, find adversaries to find you and find out. Or at least find the way home."
My points are nuanced and being strawmanned.
(1) energy scarcity makes walking for leisure less attractive. Can't just pound a bag of chips.
(2) because of the necessity to be active, the time to think and be still was more baked into human lifestyle. Further making explicit intention to do nothing, quietly walk less needed.
(3) our current lifestyle tends to be the opposite of (1) & (2). We can readily get cookies (high calorie foods) and don't have movement baked in.
(4) humans are evolved for (1) & (2). That we are at (3), and are not adapted for that lifestyle, underscores why leisure walks would be more important now than ever before.
They're still somebody's ancestors!
Yeah, Thoreau in particular didn't really "live off the land" when writing Walden; his mother came to do his laundry for him.
Showers also tend to be effective.
I find that cold showers are magic for clearing my mind.
I agree but I need to find an alternative. I live in texas unfortunately and walking is miserable for 4 months out of the year. I should just move but can't currently.
The weather is perfect right now, take advantage!
Also it's perfect most of our "winter", unlike many places where it snows / gets too cold.
No place other than California will have perfect weather all year, but then you live in California...
During the summer my wife and I run inside, or very early in the morning outside.
Why do nothing?
Because it gives you a chance to think about what you _really_ must be doing instead of what you were doing that led to wanting to calm the mind by doing nothing.
And what were you doing that made the mind "empty calorie"-style busy?
Usually getting lost in youtube videos or social media doomscrolling.
Love it!
One minor improvement idea: get rid of the timer during the nothing phase. I looked at it all the time.
You could show the timer once someone starts scrolling again.
Yeah this was me too, I found myself fixated on the timer, then I started computing factors of the numbers in my head, then I realised I just failed at doing nothing :<
You didn't fail. You succeeded...Doing nothing mostly means letting your mind go wherever it wants to. Counting the time (seconds on a clock) is a good way to start doing nothing
in other words, DMN got activated.
That reminds me of a specific (de)motivational video of one of my favorite comedians Masood Boomgaard, which specifically covers the rat race that prevails in todays workplace culture. While it's meant to be funny, it actually touches some deeper philosophical truths.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8An2SxNFvmU [Do Nothing - a message of motivation from Self-help Singh- (un) motivational speaker and life coach]
Thanks for the link! When it is well done comedy often covers something more profound and summarizes it in an accessible and more memorable manner just like the video you are talking about.
"The world is fucked, and you cannot un-fuck it."
"You will die one day just as confused as you are now."
"Everything you think you need to do was done before you and will be done after you."
"Whether you are fat or thin haters will hate."
"Nothing really matters."
There are some really deep insights in all of those thoughts, thanks for sharing.
PS: this remembers me of a sketch about giraffes being an animal created by a gay friend of the comedian, after the sketch I learned that giraffes engage in male-male acts more often than male-female acts and got mindblown. They have been called "especially gay" for this fact.
This is amazing, thanks for sharing. Looking at his other videos, the unbearable pain of working on friday is also great.
Something I'd have never been introduced to without your comment, thank you.
What philosophical truths?
I've known people that 'do nothing'. The modern day equivalent of that is the pot head. It's a lot easier to do nothing when you're stoned. The other alternative is the basement dweller kid of a well to do couple that just spends his day playing video games. Due to his parent's hard work (or luck), he can probably afford to do so for the rest of his life. But still seems depressing to me to think about.
If you're playing video games you're literally not doing nothing. The point is to give yourself time to reflect and breathe. If you're stoned and that makes it easy to meditate for ages, you could probably count that as doing nothing. Although you should probably worry if you simply cannot sit still for any significant amount of time without being stoned. But yeah if you're getting stoned and like watching movies and stuffing your face then you're not doing nothing.
But that kid in your example isn't doing _nothing_, they are playing video games. That is entirely different from consciously pausing and doing nothing.
That kid is doing nothing with their life, there’s a difference between that and a nornal persob’s downtime that makes sure we don’t task out with some goal that feels like doing nothing but it’s got some agenda: no planned activity!
Humor can often make such profound messages more accessible and memorable...
I hear the voice of the stoics in there …
I relate so much to his recent video on Friday meetings.
And even when intentionally doing nothing, there is some obscure desire to measure how much nothing we are actually doing. Hence the idle counter.
There's an idea that modern lives demand value in material terms. Usually it's monetary value. It's based on materialism and economics and can be seen most clearly in consumerism.
Even not spending time or money has to be worth something. Why do nothing if I can't measure the benefits.
Another example of this could be in the adoption of "Mindfulness" vs meditation. Mindfulness is a useful thing it can be measured and it has an industry behind it.
It's a philosophy that we see more and more in every part of our lives.
Consider art or poetry. Did people make art to be measured or to be useful?
> Did people make art to be measured or to be useful?
Quite often to put food on the table, or for clout. There’s an intrinsic desire to create, sure, but there’s also a cultural context in which art is valued and certain kinds of art are valued more at different times or in different places.
I suppose it’s splitting hairs to say that art has some use both for the creator and the consumer, because it’s not the same kind of use you mean.
It’s just that when I dig in to “useful” vs “useless” endevours there’s often no clear line between them.
> There's an idea that modern lives demand value in material terms. All lives demand value in caloric or reproductive terms. Economics teaches us that most commodities are fungible. If you receive material value, this can be exchanged for caloric or reproductive value. Thus, modern (and non-modern) lives demand value in material terms. This isn't a philosophy, it's just a fact.
It may tasteless to you, but most people are just trying to achieve those material terms as efficiently as possible.
What happens when I already have all the calorific or reproductive value I need? Endlessly seeking more isn't a fact.
> What happens when I already have all the calorific or reproductive value I need?
How would you even determine how much you need? You labor under the illusion that you're an intelligent being. Evolution does not care about "enough"... because there is no way to determine what "enough" is. What is enough today will not help you survive tomorrow's famine. Best stock up now. If you were so smart, you'd get that. What others call greed is subconscious anticipation of calamity.
Evolution has not solved the principal-agent problem.
> What is enough today will not help you survive tomorrow's famine.
Tomorrow's famine will be caused by you (read: those behaving as you describe) not knowing when enough is enough. Best preserve what we have, rather than waste it all in a frantic bid for number-goes-up.
> Tomorrow's famine will be caused by you
Possibly. Or maybe it will happen anyway.
> (read: those behaving as you describe)
That's mostly leftist moralizing on your part.
Maybe it's moralizing, but I don't think it's wrong. I'm using the same model as you, after all, only I'm applying Kantian ethics instead of unconsidered egoism.
• If you wish yourself maximal reproductive fitness, then all humanity will be your descendants, and the next few centuries of all human interest is your interest.
• The iterated prisoner's dilemma is a classic economic argument, by which Tragedy of the Commons-type behaviours can be averted. (Garrett Hardin's 1968 paper is a load of nonsense.)
I'm not sure what would contrast my earlier "leftist moralizing", because I have absolutely no idea what a leftist is.
> Maybe it's moralizing, but I don't think it's wrong.
Religionists never think their religion is wrong. But I don't belong to your cult.
> because I have absolutely no idea what a leftist is.
Leftists never have any idea what a leftist is. But I don't belong to your cult.
Utilitarianism definitely has a lot of well established shortcomings, like quantifying utility and doing so objectively which sort of, IMO, makes most of it nonsensical as quantified utility is ultimately subjective unless you want utility to be defined by a consensus, which is what we do in practice. So it’s really what the masses decide is valuable and how valuable, even though we know from practice that mass assessment isn’t inherently accurate, good, or often even desirable. Yet we do it because it looks objectively analytic.
What is your definition of utilitarianism? Utilitarianism is not a form of democracy. Good is not subject to a vote and is not decided by the masses.
Fwiw: "Utilitarianism is a theory of morality that advocates actions that foster happiness or pleasure and oppose actions that cause unhappiness or harm. When directed toward making social, economic, or political decisions, a utilitarian philosophy would aim for the betterment of society as a whole."
There's a long history of visual art being created in the service of god worship. Musical art too. Much of Bach's oeuvre is in service to the god of the Protestant church.
Numbers go brrrt. It's the gamification of everything; lines of code written, number of tasks ticked off, number of words written in a day (often in the context of fanfictino, doesn't matter if the story is good), shades of green on github, hours slept, minutes meditated, seconds spent doing nothing according to a website promoting the virtues of doing nothing.
I mean I get it, idle / factory games are one of my vices. But I won't let it control my existence.
After a tragedy it's customary to call for a 'minute of silence' even this purposeful exercise of nothing but thoughts is measured in minutes too. I don't think it takes from the desired outcome.
When you did nothing you must know how much of nothing you did
Yeah, but number go up.
I have had a page for just that for years now:
Wait, did you make that? I remember going to that site around 2003-2004!
No no - I wish I was that person though. By "had" I meant I'm a longtime user.
Were you on the mailing list that it tells you about after running it long enough? :P
The only limit is yourself.
Someone needs to update it for mobile and dark mode though.
Neat! I've been reading How to Do Nothing by Jenny Odell and enjoying it. It's a bit political for my liking but overall a good reminder to pause and set aside time to just "be" and shelve the programmed drive to constantly be productive as in economically productive. My therapist recently helped me reframe my drive for being productive as being generative, which I have taken a liking to since it encompasses being creative for the sake of enjoying the process with no other end - economic or otherwise.
Was it hard to switch perspective?
Yes, it’s definitely an ongoing process for me!
Keep going!
I am torn about the page having a scrollbar. It would be nice to be able to read the entire page without having to scroll. But you can not guarantee that anyway as the browser window might be arbitrarily small. It punishes you for not doing nothing and wanting to read the text which is the point. So maybe the page should actually ensure that there is always a scroll bar, place the statistics always below the fold.
The fact that you describe the act of missing a site's self-described "pointless statistics" as "punishment" screams volumes about our current state. The point is to do what it says, which may involve not even looking at the screen whatsoever
"There is no reward for lingering. Just the pleasure of simple being."
If you're looking for something that rewards you for doing nothing on the other hand, your favorite IRC server probably has an #idleRPG channel to join
Fwiw, you can cheat on mobile Safari by scrolling in reader mode, which doesn't reset the timer.
Looking at the source code, I have never seen so many files for such a simple HTML page.
I was also quite surprised, and I took a bit of challenge to make it a single file that faithfully reproduces the exact behavior and embeds all dependencies including the web font, besides from Inter which is only used for toasts and barely distinguishable from Arial in this context. It weighs 3,123 bytes without the specifically subsetted font which takes additional 10,433 bytes.
https://gist.github.com/lifthrasiir/f46725d3e9e9d055da40b3de...
Really cool.
I know almost nothing about web dev, but that looked like a nice quick challenge. So I spent maybe 20 minutes to get it 90% there. It's missing a portion of text below the timer and a toast. 1948 bytes
https://gist.github.com/Archargelod/d121ae5377a0d09b0133b7b0...
Comment was deleted :(
What were the main difficulties?
Implementing absolutely everything, because I wasn't sure which part was intentional or not. My version even replicates some bugs and subtle behaviors: for example the toast animation lasts 5 seconds, which is measured from the beginning of fade-in animation to the beginning of fade-out animation.
You have improved nothing.
Joke obviously lost on some…
I'd advise a complete rewrite of Astro to Rust+WASM, then add most of what Angular does inside the framework, then usenothing will benefit from it.
Surely a html web page and maybe 5 lines of JS could have accomplished the same thing?
Or am I missing something?
No. See lifthrasiir‘s answer above.
Astro[0]: wrong tool for this job.
I assume the author is good at quickly whipping stuff up with Astro, which makes it an excellent tool for the job.
Wtf, there's a great irony in this right here.
> taking a step back from the relentless grind, and reconnecting with the world around you
The world does not want to connect with me. The world is in many subtle ways actively trying to kill me, harm me, and reduce me. If I'm taking time off it's for myself.
> rebellion against the incessant noise of modern life, which demands constant action.
So does my own body. Eventually I'm going to get hungry no matter how much nothing I do. Having stillness of mind allows purpose of action. You've got it all backwards.
This reminds me of "Don't Shoot the Puppy". https://www.addictinggames.com/funny/dont-shoot-the-puppy
There's a whole trend at the moment called 'raw dogging' (sigh) that means to do something like take a flight with no entertainment, books, phone turned off, etc. etc.
Raw dogging can mean quite different things. Apparently :D
Ah yes, raw dogging.
This kind of linguistic innovation is called a “dysphemism”, apparently. The Wikipedia entry for “dysphemism” was quite enlightening.
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/07/17/style/rawdog-flights-term...
Dysphemism isn't an innovation, it's been around a long time. It simply means the opposite of a euphemism. Where a euphemism is a nicer way of saying something, a dysphemism is a worse or derogatory way of saying something. E.g. Referring to your car as a "banger"
"Banger" is a good thing, I think it comes from "head banging" at concerts.
No its not. It means its banged up. Broken. In the case of cars. In the case of a "banger of a tune", you are probably right.
I meant the novel use of “raw dogging”
To me it sounds like coded speech I need to put in some effort to understand. It’s a lot of effort to catch up with these, though I admit that sometimes they’re funny. But only sometimes, most times it feels forced and senseless.
> There's no reward for lingering, just the peculiar pleasure of simply being.
Reward: the numbers go up. Almost like idle clicker games, but without clicking.
Breathing is something you can either do or not do, yet it's also something that happens automatically, such as during sleep or when you're not paying attention to it.
When done perfectly correctly, consciously breathing nets the same benefits to the body as unconscious or automatic breathing. You don't really have to spend any mental energy on it to get the oxygen you need (your body will even yawn for you if it needs more).
I think there is a way to find the ease and harmony in most things, or, the "automatic modes". You can design your life in such a way that you're essentially doing nothing, but to others you appear to be involved in everything.
I can only imagine what it would be like to stop paddling and see that I am still in motion, to be able to exhale and do nothing.
I have had a similar insight.
People often wonder what advice they would give their younger self. This would be it for me.
It something seems too difficult, it is likely because you are still struggling with a pre-requisite. Go back to working on the previous foundation until your mastery is complete.
This is true for work, mental & fitness progress.
I.e. if you find losing weight hard, you probably need to improve your diet (not to lose weight, but to find healthy food you enjoy enough to become a self-reinforcing habit).
Don’t try to improve your diet in order to lose weight. That is trying to solve two big things, on two different levels, at once.
This may take a while, but eventually you can find your way to an exceptionally healthy diet you like too much to require any discipline to stay on.
That is a health foundation of lasting value. And with that foundatiin, when you try to lose weight again, it is much easier.
Likewise, if you find it is hard to improve your diet, even in increments, perhaps you are fatigued? You may need to improve your sleep routine until you are habitually not tired.
For some of us, that might take a lot of work. But focusing on it, instead of downstream efforts will pay off.
Etc.
Foundations should be iterated on until they are self-perpetuatingly solid. Then the next thing will be much easier.
Math and physics are mental versions.
The result for any path: Go slow (iterate & explore to complete fluency & habit) to go fast (compounding instead of linear gains in understanding & progress).
> ...exceptionally healthy diet you like too much to require any discipline to stay on.
There's no such thing. Eating only 50 avocados a day (so called "superfood") won't get you healthy or make you lose weight.
Too much of anything is not healthy.
A "healthy diet" is matched up with your body, short- and long-term needs, activities, mental state, etc.
I do agree with the suggested approach for achieving anything significant, just nitpicking on some of the language in your dieting example.
> Too much of anything is not healthy.
You have lost me. I said a healthy diet you love.
So critiquing me as suggesting anything that is not a healthy diet seems odd.
A healthy diet can be created many ways, all involve a lot of variety.
But it can be convenient too. If you find the right mix (for your own tastes) of “superfoods” as a foundation. I.e. hummus, mixed greens, mixed berries, a mix of nuts, a mix of seeds, sardines, salmon & tuna (but not too much), eggs, etc.
If your fridge, pantry, and eating habits cover all your basic nutrition multiple ways by default, then adding a variety of other healthy foods can be done very spontaneously without any need for planning.
I know, it took me a few years, and a lot of iteration, but it would be hard to beat my diet.
Even my snacks are up there, like edamame, chocolate in moderation, fresh veggies, high protein low sugar ice cream, etc.
Achieving healthy autopilot is the point.
In formal theory, it would be called a proof by contradiction when extended to an extreme.
Even with the "right mix", if you eat 5x the amount your lifestyle and body and mind need, you ain't ever going to lose weight or get to a healthy state. Obese people are (usually) obese because they eat too much, not just because of the type of food they eat. Heck, today both keto and vegan are considered "healthy" and they are on the opposite end of the spectrum when it comes to diet choices.
I am basically arguing that, to an extent, it's more important how much you eat, vs what you eat. Again, this is all comparative (eg. eating McDonalds burgers for the rest of your life is "healthy" compared to not eating anything at all, but that's a useless distinction).
Plenty of people in the past have eaten "unhealthy" (white bread, fried meat and vegetables) yet didn't have an obesity or health problem, because they countered that with a balanced activity (physical work) and mental load (shared responsibilities).
So my point is that you should reach that "autopilot" on the amount of the food you get, and then you can be pretty liberal in how you achieve it (obviously, don't have chocolate for breakfast, lunch and dinner). I do agree getting to the autopilot is where you should put your effort to.
If you need to eat more, you need to eat more. You need a different mix
There isn’t a diet that works for everyone in both health & physical & psychological diet needs
The point is always making progress. Accumulating foods that work better. So learn and continually try things.
Anyone can make progress, that is beneficial.
I am still making progress, in food quality & convenience, which blows my mind.
And I don’t doubt there are medical and mental issues that need more than a healthy diet intervention
But that doesn’t eliminate the benefits from being healthier, easier.
You don’t know how much eating healthier automatically will impact seemingly independent or counter issues until trying. A sustained changed diet changes our responses to food physically & mentally in significant & positive ways.
My diet has changed me.
I don't doubt that, and good for you! In a sense, that should be obvious to anyone who's ever been a bit more edgy because they lacked the carbohydrates for the moment ("eat some sugar"), but larger changes will certainly trigger a larger change in body response (hormones, energy levels, mood...).
From the get go, I only challenged the notion that the main issue for people who want to lose weight is the type of the food they eat, but instead, the amount of the food they eat.
It seems like we are arguing past each other though :)
> When done perfectly correctly, consciously breathing nets the same benefits to the body as unconscious or automatic breathing. You don't really have to spend any mental energy on it to get the oxygen you need (your body will even yawn for you if it needs more).
I was taught that this is not entirely true : your automatic breathing is influenced by your morphology, your posture, your current levels of energy, and your current emotions. And it sounds like the feedback loop can go reverse : intentionally breathing have an impact on your posture, your level of energy and your emotion.
I have no source to support my claims so don’t take my words as any truth, that’s just a belief multiple people shared to me including my doctor.
But I do feel like intentional breathing have a direct impact on my levels of anxiety. Not magic, but useful.
Re: yawning
I listened to a "Science Vs" podcast on it (or perhaps it was "unexplainable"), yawning is not yo increase oxygen levels. Study participants sat in an oxygen enriched room and also a depleted room without a change in yawn rates.
What did affect yawn rates was brain temperature. Yawning lowers brain temperature. Importantly, when ambient temperature is higher than body temperature, yawn rate dramatically goes down.
These resource [1] [2] goes into some of the details if you want to skip listening to the podcast
[1] https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.pbs.org/newshour/amp/scienc...
Experimentally, increasing oxygen doesn't reduce how often people yawn.
We still don't know why people (or various mammals) yawn.
your body doesn't regulate its functions based on diminishing o2 levels, but raising co2 levels
That was tested too, according to the Wikipedia page about yawns. Still no.
Along similar lines, I built Sit (https://sit.sonnet.io) a couple of years ago, and so far we’ve generated months of blissful un-productivity (my main metric).
(I use it as a meditation timer.)
For sitting and doing nothing as a group activity, I made Sit Together: https://untested.sonnet.io/Sit.%2C+(together)+devlog+002+–+S...
Unfortunately for you, resting leads to increased productivity. Sucker!
Goddammit!
If you gamify doing nothing, is doing nothing actually the same as actively playing the game?
Exactly. It's the same as using one of those meditation apps with gamification elements.
The non-action of the wise man is not inaction.
It is not studied. It is not shaken by anything.
The sage is quiet because he is not moved,
Not because he wills to be quiet.
I thought it would just be a satirical post, except there's an actual app and github repo with 20 commits.
Big respect to the dedication.
That’s a lot of text for nothing.
Seriously. Some feedback to author: the page is awesome up to "You've been idle for X seconds." Delete every word after that.
But then you couldn't scroll and the punchline of even scrolling resetting your timer would be lost.
Loved this one.
Off Topic: Since it linked to GitHub. I clicked. Than my 1st thought was, "This must be a web learning project for the author." Otherwise this page could be made in 1 .html page instead of 50+ files present in the repository!
Missed the trick to detect lost window focus, which is easy to do when you are using multiple monitors and very much NOT doing nothing ;-)
And a list of people doing nothing together with you.
Okay, but I want to be able to compare how much "nothing" I'm doing with my friends and have "do nothing" influencer tools so I can monetize "doing nothing." I need to be able to sell flairs, let people pay for private one-on-one "do nothing" sessions, and promote products integral to my "do nothing" success like Mountain Dew and Taco Bell.
Interestingly, http://www.donothingfor2minutes.com/ eventually morphed into Calm
It’s an excellent detail that the nothing timer resets if you scroll down to read the copy.
Bug or feature? I couldn't resist scolling to read the rest of the message and my timer reset!
This page is a great example how we got of rails with a webpage. Its a very simple page, with a counter and some text. The files and js needed to make it run is insane.
Nice idea. We need a technology that doesn't just look at mouse movement to help you do nothing, but reads your brainwaves.
This exists! You can use the mediation measurements on a Neurosky Mindwave [1] to measure when you're thinking of nothing.
I wrote an app with a friend about 10 years ago where we used the headset and the python mindwave library [2]. The app displays a longer and longer spiral on screen when you aren't thinking about anything.
[1] The headset seems to still exist in some form: https://store.neurosky.com/pages/mindwave [2] https://github.com/faturita/python-mindwave
also covered by the great philosopher Bertrand Russell: https://harpers.org/archive/1932/10/in-praise-of-idleness/.
This is a great intro to meditation.
Meet people where they are, and make it as easy as possible to start doing something
I dont think "doing nothing" is enough - the mind, at least mine, will often wander into ugly places if left truly alone. What I think is needed is a conscious & repeated effort of sustaining attention away from past or future and back to here & now
Yep, happens to me the instant I get bored or - do nothing.
Generally when I ride the MRT I unwind and just stare and chill. It helps that in a crowded train it's hard to fetch your phone from your pocket, even though everyone else does it. I think just by disposition I cannot physically stayed plugged in, otherwise I lose myself.
Brilliant. Reminds me of https://github.com/kelseyhightower/nocode but for general public.
Sometimes to get an idea of something you should simply stop thinking.
Comment was deleted :(
Could we get a leaderboard feature
I made it to 2 minutes and 5 seconds.
Breathing, heart beats, and keeping the sphincter closed is allowed.
I've enjoyed using Sit, which is similar in spirit:
What is is about this site? The style or whatever it is, is seemingly calming. Love it.
Joke's on you, I got depression and that counter only goes up to rookie numbers. /meme :)
Josef Pieper moment - good reminder to read "Leisure, the Basis of Culture" again.
you do nothing while I use your CPU to mine crypto. thanks
For more brain explosion, compound that with a "memento mori" timer that converts the time spend in "nothingness" into "how much closer you are to eternal nothingness."
No wonder people watch TV, fight wars, or build startups to forget that.
Before clicking, I thought this was going to be the next step in the evolution of "frameworks" like http://vanilla-js.com/
Really cool to remind people to do this but I also get a little sense of irony that to really do this, just walk away from the screen. Don't need an app to allow you to do nothing.
Not a put down at all, just that our strange little world has come to this.
I really do think it’s more a message / a sort or artistic expression, than an app :)
Sensory deprivation tanks are also great for this. No distractions or to-do's, just you and your thoughts for an hour.
Unless someone has a condition, I'd say that going out in nature and practicing doing nothing is more beneficial and low-tech.
This is good advice, actually. If you can't perform simple things, how can you do complex ones?
But this also borders on asceticism - the practice of letting go of worldly things, in pursuit of higher learning.
It is hard for me to pinpoint what actually happened, but I felt happy just looking at the page for about a minute.
But what about the ten-thousand invisible habits? You could be engaged in furious activity right now and not even know it.
This is amazing, it amazes me how some people are able to take the simplest idea and put it out. Amazing, kudos
I lasted about 10 seconds before I gave into the irresistible urge to read the comments about this on HN.
The essence of stepping away from the relentless pace of modern life. But sometimes it is so hard to do nothing
Pinch-to-zoom on a MacBook touchpad did not trigger a reset of the idle timer.
I don't get it. What is the difference between this website and the rest of the internet?
You're actively do nothing instead of passively doing nothing.
Witty, I like it. It also highlights the subtle irony of turning "doing nothing" into yet another thing you need to optimize.
It doesn't reset when I alt+tab
I was hoping that it would crash over the 900 seconds but it still worked.
What happens after 999?
I am a huge fan of meditation, I've been practicing it for over a decade. I would like to extend an invitation to those that are interested to pursue the concept of this applet further to find a proper teacher rooted in a tested tradition.
There's this movement to reintroduce millenial traditions of mindfulness into our lives under the guise of modern secularism. I am not convinced that removing its original context is as wise as it's purported. So many old traditions focus on lineage for a reason, and it is something we're too quick to do away with in society.
Most meditation practices come along with a warning, that doing this type of work can lead to results that you need proper preparation for. At the very least you need proper intentionality, and doing them incorrectly can lead to neuroticism and in some cases breakdowns and dissociation.
Good luck with all your nothings.
If you do, don't.
I can do that when I'm dead.
I was expecting an xyzzy reference.
Buddhism, son!
Intriguing. Perhaps adding focus gained detection with a timer reset would increase the motivation to do nothing.
I had a notification pop down while looking at it and the timer did reset, stopped, and said „that was definitely something. Let‘s try nothing.“. A neat little site, that‘s for sure. Also worrying that websites can see when I receive a notification.
That’s probably just a detection of the tab losing focus.
Edit : nope, you just scrolled the page :) [0]
[0] : https://github.com/remvze/nothing/blob/5402ae06169c67bdfa8b6...
"You don't need a million dollars to do nothin. Take a look at my cousin, he's broke don't do shit."
Meditation and "thinking about nothing" are glamorized self-centeredness. Try thinking about "nothing" and you'll come to realize that you are just thinking about yourself, your feelings, your anxiety (and attempts to alleviate it), your need to escape from others, etc.
What brought you to meditation in the first place? Stress, anxiety, resentment, insecurity. Instead of reconciliation, meditation brings more isolation and brooding.
Meditation is narcissistic.
I'll grant you this. Meditation in the modern secular context which is devoid of its philosophical undercurrent, done in absence of an experienced teacher that has achieved the goal can lead to the pitfalls you describe.
Meditation is a tool, and it can be pointed to many aims. Without the right aims, it can lead you to reinforce things you don't want to like you describe. It can also lead you to dissociate, or to exacerbate latent neurosis. However, it can also be a life affirming method for being more present and less hung up on the vicissitudes of the anxiety producing nature of an impermanent world. It takes wisdom to use it for the latter.
I agree. I am referring to "pop" meditation, "mindfulness", clinical meditation, what you get at workplaces -- i.e. the "thinking about nothing" meditation promoted by this webpage.
I'm calling attention to value, virtue, beauty, etc. Someone who is telling you that prayer is bad while meditation is good, or that religion is bad while secular mindfulness is good -- they are telling you to focus on yourself instead of something or someone else.
Frankly, I’d rather do Everything at zombo.com
I'm dissatisfied with "Nothing". I need "Noting+" for 5.99 eur per month. Or give me at least couple advertisements to look at.
Gamifying stillness.
- Share you highest score with friends.
- Set a reminder
- a “don’t break the chain” calendar in the background
;^D
Comment was deleted :(
Doing nothing gets nothing in return, forget about easing your mind.
Crafted by Rajat
Source Code