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by lordkrandel 188 days ago
Aaahahaha I've never seen a more toxic advice. Go faster! The world will be more alive! It's like putting yourself on cocaine. Grow expectations from you into people, that you'll never be able to sustain! Burn yourself on the altar of productivity! People will like you more at work! When you will die you will be remembered as the fastest guy in the office! The one who made a lot of mistakes but kept the company afloat by doing so much unpaid overwork that capital could flow free to the owner of the business! For no gain than self validation!
3 comments

I used to share a similar sentiment about speed, especially after having burned out hard around 30. But after recovering, I think I may have overcorrected. Momentum is very powerful, and it's hard to gain momentum at low speed.

Speed is important but going fast doesn't mean going as fast as possible. It's about going fast sustainably. Work speed isn't binary. You can be fast without being the fastest.

The speed that's between "slow" and "fast" is called normal, and far too many companies, people and leaders deeply believe normal counts as slow.
This one's almost as good as "why don't we try paying software engineers by the line?"
Yes. It's a brillant [1] idea to apply metrics like that to people with university level training in optimization!

[1] https://thedailywtf.com/articles/The_Brillant_Paula_Bean

If your alternative meaning of life is harnessing as many feel good chemicals in your brain as possible, that’s an objectively pointless existence

If we’re all just particles and fields, we might as well be as thermodynamically productive as possible

Who says that burning more fuel is a good goal? Productivity is a tool for people in charge to make you feel like you lack something and you have to burn to be valued. Get some therapy instead: all that stuff is toxic and unneeded. Feel free to burn your lives to capitalism and big tech, for no gain
You have to look a level deeper. Life has always been productive, it’s the only way you maintain negative entropy and thus life itself. If you found a species that stopped being biologically productive, you would recognize that as a maladaptive deviation from the norm (and that species would quickly go extinct).

You should work hard to be productive for humanity, not owners, who themselves are also subject to their own biological drives and pressures that channel them just like these same drives channel others.

If you feel exploited, then be productive in ways that circumvent your exploitation. Working hard and being productive is far older and more fundamental that capitalism though, and for your own sake and humanity’s sake you should embrace it.

Your definition of good doesn't apply to me. The more "productive ways" are to me, actually non-factive. Like, contemplation, art for art sake, playing, meditating. And this comes from reduced time spent on producing material things. So going faster and doing more to me is a dis-value. Life is not measured with negative entropy. Life is not measured, not quantitative.