[prottog]

> if you're not improving, you're less of a human being

I mean, it's true. The version of you that was a couch potato for four hours on a Saturday is less good than the version that went for a run, lifted weights, home-brewed beer, met someone for coffee, or whatever self-improvement you might have done. (I don't agree that enjoying relationships is contrary to self-improvement.) Of course, opportunity cost is a thing, and we will never know what action or inaction you took was the "best" or "right" one.

The better way to approach it, in my view, is to accept the fact that if you're not improving and being productive, in some ways you are indeed a worse version of you than you could be; but in the Stoic tradition, to divorce that fact from how you feel about it emotionally -- as you said, it's OK. Perhaps you can trend towards being better without self-flagellating when you're not.

[lacy_tinpot]

Productivity making you better or worse makes a needless moral judgement. What's better is that being productive allows you to accomplish the things you want.

Then the real question becomes about your goals, rather than some vague ideas of "work". I think it's better to really consider what you want and don't want, and genuinely accept them. The productivity scale is not some inherent moral metric. This shrouds the intent of productivity, which is to accomplish goals.

So you're not worse if you're not being productive, but you are worse if you aren't accomplish whatever goals you have for yourself. Not because it's some moral failure but simply accomplishing goals feels good and not accomplishing them feels bad. Further the goals themselves aren't universal. They're merely reflections of your innate desires, which you have to accept. If you feel like you weren't "productive", it's probably closer to say that you feel bad for not achieving what you set out to do.

The simple problem here I think is goal setting. Not solely productivity itself.

[gausswho]

I think you have distilled this to an accurate origin. Those who are driven to improve wish to live an intentful life pursuing their explicit goals.

I would however challenge the corollary that that is an objectively more enjoyable life. I find many unhappy friends an colleagues grinding on a path of thejr choosing, to a pace of their own arbitrary selection.

In my experience, I am most happy when I am goal-less, but engaged. Open to happy accidents. Agile to respond to new inspirations. Free of burdens imposed either by others or myself. I pair this with a drive to bring my pursuits to a nice milestone if possible, ideally public like publishing a video. But I allow myself to move on if something doesn't bring joy anymore.

[lacy_tinpot]

I don’t see why goals need to be anything other than what makes you happy. That was kind of the point. Maybe “living with intent” is another way to think about it. But still I think actual goals should be explicit. If not for anything else but to be honest with yourself so that you can live sanely.

So even if things are more free flowing the fact that you accept the consequences and benefits of living that way is still goal oriented, and being productive. Being productive in that way can even be playing video games, so long as it, the act itself, doesn’t interfere with what you want.

Be shameless about what you want!

[xboxnolifes]

> The version of you that was a couch potato for four hours on a Saturday is less good than the version that went for a run, lifted weights, home-brewed beer, met someone for coffee, or whatever self-improvement you might have done.

How so? I see many people assert this, but I've yet to see someone be able to articulate why (that isn't trivially refutable).

Are we measuring by happiness? Contentment? External validation? Popularity? Legacy? Fitness? Total number of experiences? Something else? And, for any chosen metric, why is that metric important?

[yamtaddle]

> How so? I see many people assert this, but I've yet to see someone be able to articulate why (that isn't trivially refutable).

> Are we measuring by happiness? Contentment? External validation? Popularity? Legacy? Fitness? Total number of experiences? Something else? And, for any chosen metric, why is that metric important?

I think this is mostly a distraction.

I don't think most folks find it that hard to separate the best 1/3 of things they might reasonably do to fill a free hour, from the worst 1/3, for example, or to name on a Thursday things they probably ought to do more of in the next couple days, because they've not done much of it this week, and it's good to do. Absence of iron-clad proof of what "good" is doesn't seem to impede them a bit.

[ozim]

I think only proper metric is "future quality of life". Sitting on couch watching TV - you are sure it is not going to contribute to your well being in 10-20-40 years. To be able to do some pushups while you are 70y.o. - you have to do hundreds of pushups while you were 20y.o.

I don't know anyone who wants to have a heart attack or spend his last 5-10 years of life in a hospital bed. So I am not writing about quality of life like getting a Porsche, because grabbing coffee with a friend or home brewing won't land you that. Having a habit of doing something, walking somewhere gets you going and if someone hits 70y.o. and they are couch potato, they will be in for a world of pain. Where if they would grab a coffee with their friends from time to time do some hobby they will have some lasting relations and stuff to do.

Well I suppose it is not trivially refutable - but happy to see what would be the refutation.

[copperx]

To be clear, when someone says "quality of life" they're referring to health, well-being, and happiness, whatever that is.

Buying a Porsche implies a certain standard of living, not quality of life. Completely orthogonal concepts. We Americans mix up these concepts frequently, which explains a lot about the culture.

[OkayPhysicist]

Individuals are free to choose their own evaluation metric for their lives, but it turns out that most fall into a relatively narrow band. Let's assume people have (at least some measure of) free will, because otherwise the question of "What should I do" is largely moot.

Let's define life as a path through a space of nonfungible states. Our utility metric U(s,t) gives a utility value to experiencing a certain state (s) at a certain time (t). Our goal is to maximize our utility over our lives (for the sake of the religious, include "and afterlives" wherever I say lives), aka the integral of U over the range 0 to infinity.

States are time and past state dependent. Two experiences are different states even holding everything else equal depending on what states you have previously experienced, and when you experience them.

What states you can experience at a given time is limited by your previous state. You may have an infinite number of possible next states, but there are also infinite states that you cannot experience next that you could have arrived at if you had a different previous state. e.g., you can't enjoy a night in with your wife, if your previous state didn't have you already married. The ultimate example of this is the secular "dead" state, where your only available next state is dead@t+epsilon.

With all that out of the way, we can start cutting away some easily analyzed sets of metrics. The easiest is the "heaven or hell" set. These assign some non-zero value to all dead states, dependent on a morality function applied to all states prior to death. As t->Inf, your average utility will be dominated by your death value, so your best choices in life are those that maximize your prescribed morality function. Given that most such religions assign a negative morality to sloth, and at the very least you'd be hard pressed to find someone who believes that sitting on your couch is the most moral possible action you could be taking at any point in time, couch potato is right out.

Morality-based reincarnation metrics follow a similar line of thought, so long as you assume that your reincarnation has positive or negative effects on your range of possible average utility. (E.g., the best possible bug life is worse than the best possible human life).

If you follow a belief system where everyone experiences the same afterlife regardless of their life, then you can just subtract the value of U(afterlife,t) from a finite life metric to arrive at identical choices.

We'll ignore immortality/non-static afterlives, because they're hard to reason about, and relatively niche held beliefs.

What's left is finite life metrics, where U(dead,t)=0. All the utility you can possibly accumulate is going to be obtained before your time of death. These can be categorized into four groups:

A) Different states have varying utilities, but tend positive.

B) All states have the same positive utility: U(s!=dead,t) = x > 0

C) Most or all experiences are somewhat negative

D) Most or all experiences are somewhat negative, but killing yourself is more negative than the expected value of living until your natural demise.

Type C is the radical anti-natalist block. They assert the best possible move is to kill yourself. You are unlikely to meet someone who earnestly believes this due to survivorship bias, but since every state you spend alive is reducing your utility, delaying a deliberate exit to sit on the couch is sub-optimal.

Type B is exact opposite: the only thing that matters is living as long as possible. The best choice is always the one that extends your lifespan, which precludes the life-reducing sedentary choice of couch-potato-dom.

Type A (most secular philosophical beliefs systems), and D (more mainstream anti-natalism) are largely interchangeable except when it comes to evaluating the expected value of prolonging your life. Thus, for the purposes of refuting the couch-potato lifestyle we can analyze them together, because there are better ways both to die young and to grow to a ripe old age than sitting on your couch.

In this space it makes sense to evaluate states not just on their immediate utility, but on the utility of future states they make possible or exclude, and the states necessary to pass through to achieve them.

The latter is where couch-pototo-ness really shines: it has an incredibly low barrier to entry. There is minimal sacrifice that needs to be made to achieve sitting on the couch, watching TV, relative to the bare minimum of survival. You don't need to do anything unpleasant, or immoral, or antisocial, or really anything at all to get to sit there and watch TV. But we can exclude metrics that assign a higher utility to some other, as easy or even easier to achieve states, because the leisure wouldn't be an attraction to them.

Future states is where the couch potato states really flounder: compared to pretty much any use of your time, they have very little effect on your available future states. Their utility will probably be somewhat above average in most people's metric functions, because that's what mass entertainment was designed for: being appealing to most people. But the lack of expanding your availability of options means that for almost any metric, there will be something you could be doing that takes slightly more delayed gratification, but with a much higher pay off.

So there's my (hopefully) non-trivially refutable explanation for why choosing to be a couch potato kinda sucks. TL;DR: It's a very-low, very-local maxima for most utility metrics because it doesn't open any new doors.

[factsaresacred]

> it makes sense to evaluate states not just on their immediate utility, but on the utility of future states they make possible or exclude, and the states necessary to pass through to achieve them.

Great way to frame it. Somewhat similarly, I view it as path dependency: your current choices are constrained by previous choices, meaning the further you deviate from the person you wish to be the harder it is to turn things around if the future you so wishes to.

[boca_honey]

Is this satire? Surely you must know that many (most?) human beings don't conform into your presuppositions about value and the meaning of positive and negative, given that life isn't a spreadsheet.

[OkayPhysicist]

The mathiness of it is, admittedly, a touch tongue in cheek. But the underlying philosophy stands: Despite there being as many different views on "What do I value" as there are people, it's hard to construct a value system where sitting on the couch isn't paying a significant opportunity cost, unless you axiomatically take sitting on the couch as the greatest good there is.

[bheadmaster]

There is no objective "good", only "good for whom". Even widely accepted qualities like money, character, physical health - they are good to the person that has them, but only if they themselves desire such things.

If a person desires peace and quiet and a vacation, then getting up at 6am to go to gym and spending time grinding leetcode is not good for them, it's a burden.

[prottog]

> There is no objective "good", only "good for whom".

I think this is at the crux of your and the other commenters' points. There can be no final agreement on this topic between those who think that there is an objective "good" and those who don't.

[ilc]

Not true at all.

You forget the importance of rest itself in self improvement.

Understanding how to improve, is a lifelong journey. Understanding how much to work, how much to rest, how much to sharpen the sword, how much you can mix those things... and how all this interplays with your personal factors is essential to get the most from yourself.

Sometimes... Watching TV and not seeing your friends, or whatever is the RIGHT thing to do. And we should have 0 shame about it when it is. I'll admit video games are my vice over TV in general. But there's times when I've gone too hard... and even gaming may be too taxing for what I can take.

[prottog]

Like I said, opportunity cost is a thing, and we'll never know what the "best" choice was at any given time. The best choice may be getting rest or watching TV or whatever.

And, like I also said, it's important to not attach emotions to your judgment of whether your choice was the right one or not; you can reflect upon your choice to play a video game over doing some other "productive" thing without feeling shame about it. In fact, it's important to remain dispassionate in this process.

[RHSman2]

The 25-30 yr old version of myself who was super driven, deadly fit, focused and high achieving in chosen hobby was not a better version of me. It was a version that was a lot more free, less responsibility, way more selfish, self centered and egotistical.

The internal judge is à dangerous beast.

[davidthewatson]

No, this is just as bad as:

"who the world wants you to be" from the OP.

This is toxic positivity.

There's a place for feedback loops whether you label it tldr; GPT, sensemaking, or dislike.