We have become so detached from nature so much we have forgotten seasons exist, we can naturally divide the year in four (or two) by being attentive to the season, and you can add a little flair by being poetic about it (say saving during the fall, frugality in the winter, sexuality in the spring, enjoying the fullness of life in the summer. Life is not academia, it is poetry!
Hmm, you're gonna need to explain that again. How will this help me increase my LTV and ensure I'm optimizing every minute of the day for maximal productivity?
For anyone who has been to Darwin and also to Melbourne, you totally get why. Melbourne says "what a chilly winter" while Darwin says, what winter? Melbournites look forward to it drying out near Jan, and Darwin prepares for monsoon season. Perhaps an equivalent is being to Whistler and to Miami. Same continent, different seasons.
All that is just really to say, it's fun to be in tune with your local climate, and for most people, the 4 seasons are kind of a convenience but not that accurate.
Well said. It's especially easy to forget about simple, natural, and poetic cadences when you live an environment whose purpose is to crush those very things, i.e. cities.
And yet most will not even get close of being an ecosystem. "Green" and "parks" are mostly consisting of 2-10 species of plants, not more, and none of the species having a fully life cycle (seed to humus), also taking the space dozens of other species would otherwise fill (insects, funghi etc).
Im regents park london, they let some cut trees rot on purpose, years later there are still no funghi visible growing on them, while in a forest that happens. Ive also not met a single mosquito there in years.
Most city parks are mere deserts to me.
It sure still is healing to be outiside, but calling that "nature" is a blunt lie in my ears.
Luckily, those urban green spaces have a similar positive effect on our systems as a full forest would.
Separately, I would like to point to a place like Prospect Park in NYC, where one can find themselves in the equivalent of a new growth forest complete with the majority of applicable local flora. There are also botanic gardens, where one can experience a number of different groups of blooms throughout the year. We're capable of having this be part of our urban experience.
If that is your focus, over here (Hamburg, Germany) there also are real (mostly untouched) forests, which also include life. They are not extremely huge but at least many centuries old.
One is like 8min from my door, could even take a bus since there are stops on the edges.
Naive question: Are there any such cities in the US that have all that and all the other perks you'd want from a city (active dating scene; diversity of food, people, culture, museums, restaurants; good public transit; good schools; etc)?
I've been trapped in the concrete-jungle part of SF for a while, and — while I do really want to escape to a better, greener city — it's oddly difficult to find an alternative. I wonder if NYC may be the only viable candidate.
Even though not asked for, maybe consider european cities, too, especially the bigger older ones.
They are not skyscraper-level breathtaking like many US cities and not as dense - but have lots of advantages (walkable, good public transport, rich cuisine, higher food quality in general, less homelessness or other social issues, … not even talking about working here with much more vacation/free healthcare/…).
Ultimately you mentioned museums - well Europe has stuff that is thousands of years old. Lots of stuff to see and discover. I personally like to go to authentic medieval festivals or viking meetups for example.
I believe it is one of the greenest cities in the US, I used to know a few people from there that I'd connect with over the years at business conferences, and they absolutely loved it there.
I don't know where you're living or maybe my reading of the weather is just bad, but here in Central Europe according to your definition winter usually starts around Christmas, spring either starts in March or May, summer lasts from June through October, and fall is between "to cold for a t-shirt" and "it's snowing". Very useful indeed.
I think that is good advice, though I am not sure what you mean by saying life is poetry. I will also add that one should be aware of what is happening during the different seasons, such as particular flowers blooming, animal migrations, etc. Only after 30+ years have I begun to notice the changes of the season and wanting to bask in them.
Not OP but I was struck by the sentiment. I'm sure many of us on HN approach our lives through the lens of an academic/engineering mindset. Of course that kind of approach is valid and useful. We can also approach life as artists (poets) and lean into spontaneity, playfulness and creativity. There is a kind of freedom that is unique to the latter approach. You don't have to be a professional artist to make art out of living.
I'm not sure why people assume art or poetry is an anything-goes, free-for-all, opposed to the supposed rigor or rigidity of engineering.
Look at the art of the great masters. These were not acts of pure spontaneity. Music, even when improvised, leans into an acquired musical language from which the piece of composed.
And in engineering, there's experimentation, doodling, thought experiment, and a fair amount of hackery in many cases. Improvisation, too, can occur.
Poetry is a history of meter. Many poets consider free form lazy and the lowest form of poetry, as it is in keeping within the bounds of meter and maximizing within that structure that introduces a challenge and produces beautiful results.
So, the distinction isn't perhaps one between art and engineering (engineering is, technically, art), but temperaments or habit.
("Spontaneously" vomiting paint on canvas is not art. It's fraud or some act of superstition.)
I'm not sure why people assume that either. These are interesting points. I know very little about formal poetry, but I consider art to be expression. So what I meant is that there is an art to the way we live our lives. Many people of the modern era are very rational and technical and lean hard into a "command and control" style way of living that's very focused on future results. I think its in a way limiting, and to our detriment. So like the great masters, I try to find a balance between pure spontaneity and pure formality.
> We have become so detached from nature so much we have forgotten seasons exist,
True for me as I enjoy reading and programming, but I'm not sure if it's true in general, at least not in the metro area where I live. It looks outdoor activity is a big deal in American life. Hiking, camping, fishing and etc are so popular that one has to book a camping site in a state park months ahead of time. The trails are always full of people. Stores like REI either have heavy traffic or run out of stock.
My high level time organization has been ski season (Nov-Jun) and other (May/Jun-Oct) for many years. My partner is a swimmer though so now there is lake swimming season as well.
Last year I introduced her to a native berry and it turned out she actually like berries after a lifetime thinking she didn't. This year I've shown her more than 10 species that can be found nearby and we have moved our targets based on the season and which species are fading as others come into ripeness. It has been interesting to see someone learn how elevation can delay stages of the season, or how going to the dry side of the mountains moves the season forward.
Now we are in a stage where the blackberries are a gamble. Many are still ripe and ripening but some are fermented on the vine, some have lingered because they are just bland, and unpicked clumps are overwhelmed by drosophila that have been able to go a couple generations uninterrupted. When it finally rains the season will be over for good. But the less prolific Rubus laciniatus is about to ripen for one last batch of berries as summer fades.
Since joining Netflix two years ago, I’ve posted on Slack on every equinox and solstice. What time it is, what it means literally, what you could take it to mean. People seem to like it.
As an interesting side-note, 365 has two prime factors: 5 and 73. That means you can cleanly divide the year in five 'seasons' (or 'pentamesters', I suppose) of 73 days each, which somehow seemed... beautiful to me from a mathematical perspective.
In case anyone else is curious and wants to segment their year in 20% chunks, the start dates are:
Damn, thanks for letting me know! I suspect then that I was prompted to re-discover this by some fnording guy in a submarine, using mind control satellites or something.
- January 1st: depression and solitude
- March 15th: spring, yay
- May 27th: summer
- August 8th: late summer + bit of autumn
- October 20th: autumn and christmas
Guess again. I'm old enough to realize that tying your self-worth to objectified life goals and measurable achievements is a fool's errand sold to us by a self-help industrial complex designed to make us feel as bad as possible all the time so we'll constantly strive for the next cure for the sense of emptiness they create and then purport to fix; a feeling only exacerbated by social media, which constantly presents us with people who seem to be smarter, more driven, more successful, more wealthy, so that we're constantly asking ourselves "shit, what have I done with my life?"
I think there’s a middle ground here. There is value and meaning in finding meaningful ways to spend your time in life and for that time to be spent working towards something. I don’t think most humans would be happy being completely idle and stale in their life. Which is also not to say most people should chase goals like making millions of dollars.
I agree social media and materialism are negative impacts on society. Social media in particular is destructive in ways I don't have time to try to type out, being old enough to remember college before social media existed.
But I think "dividing time into semesters" is a way to be more aware of the passage of time. To help us be more aware, not less. I didn't see it as anything but a handy tool.
Those two things are independent. You are conflating being very aware of our limited time on earth, with all the negative stuff you've mentioned. You can be very good with time, and follow the exact opposite of what you've mentioned. For example, being cognizant of time can help us prioritize stuff like - health, relationships, helping others, etc.
We have ways of counting that are similar without additional overhead.
Hours, days, weeks, months, quarters, years, decades, mid-life, before death.
Time dilation is powerful, while life division is also undervalued.
I think in terms of accomplishments with deadlines and progress. My son had to dress himself by 3. That was the goal starting at 2.5. And 1 year later, it's accomplished.
The goal pushes progress. I require effort, not the result. The discipline gets easier as the effort is measured.
Finding good time bases to observe ones life from is a huge task. I'm hoping to get a better weekly view of myself & what's happening about, that I can hopefully use to reflect better on a bigger time-basis with.
Yearly is too long for most objectives & hopes. Months probably too short for many things. Quarters or semesters could be great.
After much experimentation and many years of failure, I've surfaced two rules of thumb for myself that seem to be working lately:
(1) Write a monthly plan that's broken down by weeks, and then review/iterate on it weekly.
The weekly review alone risks having too small of a focus, so blending it with a monthly planning horizon has felt like a nice balance.
(2) Yearly planning is surprisingly useful, but it's best done as a solitary thing.
Most people view the whole "new year's resolution" thing as a cliché, and — separately — most people don't respond well to seeing someone else's ambition. Silicon Valley promises to be some sort of magical land where everyone's working on big things, but — same as everywhere else in the world — people largely respond negatively to seeing someone succeed (or even want to succeed) on a long timescale.
Talking about borrowing from academia, another idea I like is sabbatical. For example a year-long time off every seven years [0]. I did it once and it was great. Planning to keep doing that.
That's a bit harsh. Also you seem to assume American (or western?) spending habit that has no saving. If one would really plan for a sabbatical, I'm sure they would have planned financially from the six years leading to that too.
You must be kidding me, I was a graduate student in one of those "public Ivy" with such a low salary at 50% contract, with a spouse that holds a VISA not allowed to work, and for the duration of our VISA she never worked illegally to make money (which I heard is the norm that we didn't conform to). So I have a 25% of household income with a base that's low to begin with. Yet we can save up.
Hint: we are Hong Kong people. Don't assume people don't save up because they don't earn enough. I'm not saying the system isn't problematic, but I hope I prove your statement wrong.
Then for a harder challenge divide your life into 10 week quarters that cover 30 weeks of material in 9 weeks and have a brutally hard competitively curved final on week 10. That'll light some fires under some butts.
I’ve recently started taking some online courses (Coursera) and the ability to see how far along have I gone, in both percent and time, together with how much I have left is tremendously encouraging!
Reading this article makes me think that I could also apply a similar systematic approach to other goals.
I always wonder why we lose the efficiency and intensity over time that we enjoyed in college. When in college, we took five pretty intense courses a semester. We didn't have to wait for "a big chunk of time" to work on our homework. Instead, we got tons done in library or in the computer lab in between classes. And we still managed to find time to date, to party, and to read volumes of fictions. Years having flashed by, and yet somehow I always find half an hour is too short for me to read something interesting, and it always takes more than I can admit to focus on what I want to learn. Yes, we have family and kids and etc so we have less time, but if I check my screen time, oh s%*t! I certainly have time for intense study, but somehow I manage to squander them on social media and what not.
I can still do it when I hunker down and legitimately try, but you need to drown out distractions. I don't know how old you are, but graduating high school in the 90s, the Internet existed when I was in college, but no social networks, no targeted advertising, no attention economy, no smart phones. I didn't have a dumb mobile phone or even a television. If I want to learn as much as I learned back then, I need to remove those things from my life as much as possible. Leave the phone in my bedroom. Read physical textbooks and take notes by hand on paper, not on an electronic device connected to the web. If I'm reading papers/articles, print them out.
This is effectively isomorphic to the obesity epidemic. You can try to white knuckle it with sheer discipline or run 80 miles a week, and some people manage to do that, but mostly it's a matter of food environment. If you have a genetic predisposition to frequent snacking, typically the only way to avoid it in the long run is to not have shitty snack foods available to you at all. Expecting to just control yourself when the option is there not to usually doesn't work at some point. You can't binge on screen time if you have no screens around.
Even in the 1990s, I saw the phrase "academic suicide by Usenet". Some people got so pulled into keeping up with newsgroups that they'd neglect their homework, thesis, or studies. A stream of anything engaging is addictive.
I have a very different perspective of college than you. Some semesters I only had ~6 hours of classes on Tuesday and Thursday, so the majority of my time was spent not learning, but rather reinforcing through rote memorization (so-called "studying") and busywork (homework).
I don't think college is a good model for how to schedule and manage your life, because I don't think college is a good model for anything
Different styles of college? My college shaped me and what I learned carried me until today. Case in point, I don't think I would learn how to write a database engine, albeit a single-threaded one, from scratch with progressive difficulties, if my professors didn't design the course properly. I wouldn't be equipped with intuitive understanding of maths and stats that I can express using the proper language such as linear algebra, if it were not for the rigorous training given by college. I wouldn't be able to use queuing theory to analyze systems fresh out of college if it were not for tons of fun of studying queuing systems in college. I wouldn't have no difficulty picking up any programming language if it were not for the courses on programming language theories. I wouldn't even know the advanced mathematical logic and formal verifications and computability and a long list of other things if it were not for excellent teaching and unwavering demand from my professors. Heck, I wouldn't even be able to deeply appreciate English classics like The Great Gatsby and Mobi Dick, given that I could barely pass TOFLE when I went to my college, if it were not for the excellent and rigorous writing course given by a demanding lecturer.
Almost all of what I was presented with in college felt like a very slow motion way to learn the required material, most of which I had already taught myself via the internet. It felt as if reading the textbook and then creating a project at the end would have allowed me to finish the courses faster than having to survive through lectures for several hours a week.
Some classes were exactly like that: the professor taught straight from the book, so I stopped going to class and just read the textbook instead. I showed up for the finals and got an A (or turned in a project at the end of the semester and got an A)
But other than the CS classes, there was a ton of filler crap meant to line the pockets of the administrators. Various math and science, art, history and english classes wasted the vast majority of my first 2 years at college. If you were to cut out the filler and allow students more flexibility in how they learned, you could cut a bachelor's degree down from 4 years to 1 or 2.
However, I think that the excruciating length of college is a selling point: Americans who go to college are looking for an all-inclusive resort at which they can fuck each other's brains out while they defer the real world and adulthood for another 4 years, only becoming marginally useful to the world 6 months after graduating, when they've been fully de-programmed at their jobs of all the useless and incorrect information they were provided during their degree. I truly believe that most people go to college in an attempt to prolong their childhoods into their mid 20s.
College, to me, is just a bloated jobs program for middle management types to suck up tens of thousands of dollars per student in tuition while providing dubious value in return.
I remember when we were taking an algorithm course, the professor gave us a proof question on the CLR book. It's a property of universal hashing and it used to be a well known corollary. It took me multiple hours to crack the insight that led to the proof. That level of teaching - the ability to select the right problems to nail deep concepts and to push us to grow - is hard to come by if we teach ourselves. At least not for ordinary students like me.
My other issue with college, especially in CS, was the amount of theory classes we took. The vast majority of CS students just want to be software engineers; most CS theory is not useful for that goal
It means they are still courses instead of seminars, and they are not necessarily cutting-edge research materials. Many of the courses are taught to senior undergrads too.
Some of that is age: schools are generally mostly for the youth(ful). Some efficiency is lost with age, that's just the unfortunate entropic nature of it all.
Some of that is nostalgia and beer goggles: we remember the good times and the grades that were recorded in our transcripts, but we forget the weeks of intense stress and the feelings of barely managing to juggle it all or hold it all together. We remember the parties fondly but forget how much those parties were designed to help us forget some of our struggles and drama before and after those parties.
You had a curriculum that those short bursts tied into. Some one else already did the organizational work - I think if you enrolled in a class now you'd similarly find the time.
I've personally found immense use in tracking life according to the Moon's phases. 1/2/4 week intervals turn out to be a good timescale for tracking things like plant growth, project progress, etc.
I'm at the point where I'd like to replace all my clocks with some pictorial representation of Sol's position in the daily cycle and Luna's position in the (near-)monthly cycle. Working with the body's circadian rhythm, rather than ignoring/contradicting it, seems appropriate to me, especially since so much about our mood (hormones, etc.) is governed by our exposure to natural light and the rhythms of sleep -- see: "farmer time".
Among many other reasons, one of them is to eliminate the fabled and apparently widespread phenomenon of "plan to start a thing at 14:00; oops it's 14:03, guess I'll keep procrastinating and start that next thing at 14:30 instead". With no hard boundaries aside from sunrise/sunset, this would probably be a much more difficult excuse to lean on. Remains to be seen whether new excuses come to replace the old.
As someone that has never used a clock for alarms, it sadly doesn't help with procrastination at all. And where I live, sunrise/sunset varies heavily throughout the year. Such that it is easy to mess up your natural timing and inclinations in the months where you are effectively losing an hour of daylight.
The Lunar Society of Birmingham (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lunar_Society_of_Birmingham) met at the full moon, although this was actually practical - if your meetings end after dark and artificial light isn't a thing yet it's good to have some moonlight to make it easier for people to get home.
Attend festivals. And not the giant music festivals, either. They still exist virtually everywhere, and they occur at different times of the year. It will get you off your ass and around other people, and also let you experience the season.
As a bonus, you won't have to worry about what you're doing or eating, because all of that will be taken care of for you.
Go to giant music festivals as well. It’s a great way to be around a lot of people that are into the same thing as you where you can chat, make friends, and just experience shared life.
