[Zarath]

While I understand why you'd write something like this, I think that this sort of thinking is the reason people get poor sleep nowadays anyway. This obsession with "efficiency" and "productivity". Even if it is more productive to get sleep, I believe that thinking about it in terms of hygiene or in terms of quality of life is much healthier.

Maybe you disagree but not every minute of life should be devoted to doing the most productive thing you can. Sleeping for sleep's sake or because it makes you feel good should be enough reason. I'd rather turn my attention away from all these life-hack, min-maxing ways of thinking and just listen to my body telling me what it wants.

[neuronic]

It's a truly mind-boggling feeling when you escape the busy city life and somehow manage to be truly in sync with yourself.

I was hiking in Scotland and Iceland over the last two years and either times there was a breaking point when we were in the middle of nowhere. In Iceland some weather forced us to camp near a volcano off-site from the camping zones. In the morning, I got out of our tent and looked across a vast space of grass, rocks and ashes. A creek flowing nearby made the only perceivable noise aside from wind.

You take a look left and right. Breathe. A breeze goes over your face and you hear the deafening silence emanating from nature itself.

It was then when the usual life all felt like a massive distraction from life itself. It was a nice, calming and deep feeling that it's completely enough to just be... hard to convey.

[mettamage]

I know how that feels, with camping as well. But I cannot shake the thought that most of our life is simply about survival.

And society is a better alternative than hunting/farming on your own.

[leadingthenet]

Sure, but is it a better alternative than hunting/farming in groups? I'm not convinced.

[Filligree]

Farming is not a good life. Hunter/gatherers famously had it much better.

Doesn't matter. The sustainable population of farmers is orders is magnitudes higher, to the point that they can push out any hunter-gatherers almost without noticing. I hope that modern life is at least closing on that quality of life, but I don't think it is yet, for most people.

[blunte]

What most people know as farming is not the only nor most effective way to grow food in trade of time and resources.

Permaculture practices, "food forests", etc. are a better alternative and take most of their effort in the several year setup process. Once in balance, they are generally self sufficient and can produce significant amounts of edible food.

That's not to say everyone should become a "farmer", but for people in the HN community, it should warrant some study (it's all about systems design and design patterns).

[thrownblown]

the !kung bushmen spend about 15-20 hours a week "working", some as little as 12

[RcouF1uZ4gsC]

What about the !Kung bush women?

Probably most of the labor of hunter gatherer societies was done by women. The men hunted some, but a bigger responsibility was raiding their neighboring tribes (often for women) and protecting themselves from being raided by their neighbors.

If you look at hunter gatherer societies, many times women are treated as property and there is horrific violence against women.

https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.nytimes.com/2018/11/15/worl...

Also a lot of these societies are polygynous with men having multiple wives. So yeah, men work less - but that is because the women do the work for them under threat of violence.

[hnick]

I've thought about this and come to the conclusion that the ambitious man/town/society down the road is the problem. You can hunt and gather all you want, but societies build technology and excess manpower and one day they will come along and ruin your day.

You see this to a lesser degree within society itself or even within a single workplace, where those few who are eager to over-extend with unpaid overtime ruin it for the rest of us!

[mettamage]

I don't know about that.

We live longer though. Could we sustain that if we'd be hunters, or as farmers? (in the long-term)

[sunpar]

And you don’t need to go far for this effect. I still to this day remember a beautiful calming moment I had when on a walk in the backyard near a house outside of Portland Maine.

[brootstrap]

Very true. and although i'm in the midwest you can still find forest preserves, hiking trails, lakes, rivers etc. Get out, find some big wide open space, no other people around. You get to zone in, decompress a little bit. personally i like fishing so i can stand around in silence for hours casting a little bait around trying to bag a fish.

[nindalf]

Completely agree. I think GP put it this way because it’s easier to convince a “productivity ninja” that sleep is good for productivity than to convince them that productivity shouldn’t be their sole focus. If the goal is for them to get more sleep, this is how to reason with them.

[soulofmischief]

I understand your point of view, but honestly I have a hard time consolidating the notion of being stress-free with the notion of making as much of an impact as I can.

I want to be as productive as possible (when I'm not allotting necessary time for recreational activity, but my social activity is generally at a minimum) because of a driving fear over the future of earth and humanity. I have a deep urge to do as much good as I can in my life for society, because anything else just seems so selfish.

I was gifted with intelligence and determination, and to waste these skills overwhelmingly in personal pursuits when the world is in flames just seems so irresponsible. Anyone could do that. I want to make a difference, and that requires being as efficient and productive as I can.

[4b11b4]

What kinds of projects are you working on?

[soulofmischief]

A lot of my energy still goes into the projects that feed me, but as I build after I build a nest egg there are many things I would like to increase my focus on.

For one I would like to break into the educational gaming sector. [0]

I've drafted and prototyped a few programs but haven't released anything substantial yet. Productivity and privacy tools mostly. Persona management utilities, a log utility I hope to eventually have distributed with most Linux distros, a (in my opinion) revolutionary social media platform which I'm still keeping quiet about for now.

I've recently finished drafting initial plans for a software suite which would allow you to maintain a private distributed data store and generate hashes which contain unique revocable keys in order to access and/or modify portions of this store. Websites/entities can be given these unique hashes in order to share information like reputation and private information under their own unique namespace, and other entities can be given access to (optionally fuzzed) fields from other namespaces. A Reputation API would provide entities a common way to provide cumulative updates to a person's reputation.

This could power services such as anonymized chat platforms based on reputation, distributed trustless online transactions, and hopefully a viable alternative to Cloudflare and Google reCAPTCHA. I want to work with websites like Reddit to reduce bot spam by implementing it. To move forward I'm just looking for a partner to aid me in technical writing (RFCs and such) and community management so I can start an open source collective around this idea because it's a lot of work.

I spend a lot of time leisure coding as well just for practice, picking up new technologies and stuff.

What about you, working on anything cool?

[0] My first experiment in this vein last year: https://tinyurl.com/43softrains-v1-1

[koonsolo]

You have a valid point. But on the other hand, this is ycombinator news, and so entrepreneurs trying to get that last bit of productivity by doing an all nighter might think more long-term about this.

[Kiro]

Hacker News is the complete opposite nowadays. People who tries to maximize productivity are frowned upon. The norm is to put your family, friends, travelling and stuff like that before anything else.

[amptorn]

Productivity is just value you create for people who aren't you. Family, friends and travelling is value you create for yourself.

[olyjohn]

Having family and friends creates value for them too.

[blunte]

There's a visible shift in HN, but I certainly don't see HN so extreme on the end that you are stating as absolute.

[mft_]

It doesn't have to be about work productivity.

The most profound effect I noticed myself is learning passages of music on an instrument (note I'm an amateur, and not especially good!) After not too long trying to learn/practise one evening, I will be noticeably better the next day.

[copperx]

I found exactly the same thing and it weirded me out. How did I get better without practicing? Often I would hit a wall after practicing for hours and was not able to play a certain passage, but then the next day I magically could.

I've recently found that reading before going to sleep (while not staying up late reading) opens my mind the next day and I wake up knowing whether I have accepted or rejected a premise of a nonfiction book. It's like I read, don't think about it then, but then as I sleep I make up my mind or have more questions about the things that I read.

It's strange, and I wish I could learn more about this phenomenon.

[vidarh]

I won't dismiss that a lot of things can happen during sleep that will help you do better in the morning, but a lot of the time I think this kind of thing boils down to performance falling off as you get tired, to the point of eventually negating improvements you make. It doesn't help if you've figured out how to do something if you're tired to execute on it.

[scandinavegan]

That's an interesting thought!

The Dark Souls series of video games are known to be hard, especially the bosses. Many people, myself included, have experienced being stuck on a boss and after 20 attempts they give up for the night. Next time you start the game up you beat the boss on the first attempt!

It's hard to know if this is because your subconscious mind kept working on the problem, or if new neural pathways were formed to handle the eye-hand coordination, or, as you suggest, you just came back to the problem refreshed.

Being refreshed, and not frustrated and tired, seems like the simplest explanation for this.

[LeonB]

The music thing is definitely a real phenomenon. It’s well researched and covered in some detail in “Why We Sleep” by Matt Walker (which is mentioned in tfa, and is a fantastic book.)

The fiction thing is interesting.

[ck425]

I do theatre as a hobby and do the same thing with learning lines. I run lines before bed and before lunchtime naps and I absorb the info far easier.