I am a big fan of this. As a 25 year old, I feel that I was truly the last general to experience what true boredom was like as a kid. Hanging out at the school during the weekend wondering what to do - those days are over now. Technology has definitely taken over our lives, and now there's always something to do.
I believe that leisure time is something that most people don't have nor know that they want. As the article states, it lets you think outside of the box and come back with fresh ideas. In a work-centered society though, it's really hard to justify spending that time. Even knowing all this, I still fall into the trap of always being busy with something.
> I was truly the last general to experience what true boredom was like as a kid
Old guy chiming in. Every generation feels like this. Socrates lamented that becoming literate would "create forgetfulness in the learners’ souls, because they will not use their memories." In the 16th century, Swiss scientist, Conrad Gessner, warned that the overabundance of information caused by the printing press was "confusing and harmful". In 1940s, radio had caused children to develop "the habit of dividing attention between the humdrum preparation of their school assignments and the compelling excitement of the loudspeaker." In my time, similar concerns were raised about cable TV and the walkman.
Pretty much all of the critics you mentioned were right in some small way. Relying on printed material does have downsides compared to memorization - for a modern example, consider the disadvantages of googling for information vs. actually learning it.
There’s a difference between Googling and comprehension. Google is a great substitute for remembering facts and details. It means there’s more room in my brain for concepts and things that can’t just be Googled for.
Treat Google as an augmentation of your brain. You both do what you’re good at (facts vs. concepts) and you end up better overall.
I don't know if I completely believe the more room for your memory part. That's my excuse for not memorizing things that take a few minutes to look up. I don't necessarily believe it as a truth. I've heard the memory of people in countries where paper is scarce tends to be amazing. This was before the everyone had a phone. I think we would have to measure how much memory is achievable for certain tasks before we can calculate room saved for concepts and where the threshold becomes an advantage. Anyway I'm a skeptic either way.
I feel I don't really understand the last line, in that I cannot find any disadvantages-
Google being so widely available means that people stop caring about memorizing things that are easily googleable, but that is pretty orthoganal to "actually learning". Google being available makes this distinction clear. If it can be easily googled for, it's a fact and remembering facts is for paper and bits. Most things aren't on google. Use your brain for the hard stuff.
I disagree. It's more about how often or how deeply you need to leverage information. Having facts in one's brain for immediate integration and synthesis matters to the translator or chemist, for instance.
By having information in your brain, your subconscious self will have worked out how to apply it in clever and novel ways as an extension of your problem solving capacity.
You can see it in your daily life too - for instance, you might occasionally find yourself programming with a new container or data structure library. The interface is hopefully simple enough to figure out at a glance, and you can look up things you don't know. But you'll likely move slower than if you had known the tool like the back of your hand. And more importantly, the lack of familiarity prevents your brain from being able to fully work at the level of the problem, since it's now forced to juggle with all the new information about the shape and behavior of the API.
Googling something once to figure out how to do something is an advantage. But, if you constantly google the same task over and over again you should probably put in the effort into learning it.
Mindlessly cutting and pasting from the search results such as from stackoverflow can be anywhere from a waste of your time to extremely dangerous. But, on the other hand when it works it makes you much faster than if you tried to solve the problem yourself.
Consider the advantages to googling: I can get expert advice on areas I know nothing about and use that advice to complete tasks that I would otherwise need specialist help with.
Example 1: I only cook occasionally, yet I made great Kimchi the other day by watching a YouTube video.
Example 2: I replaced the big end bearings on a small petrol 2 stroke by using a YouTube video.
We learn how to choose good instructional material and we learn how to apply it.
Learning is expensive in terms of your own time and the time of an expert teaching you. Imagine spending years to learn a foreign language to understand a single article on the internet vs just using google translate and accepting the low quality. It's best to have as many substitutes to learning as possible.
They can't, or choose not to, remain unoccupied with their own thought. This has disadvantages. It's all about the things they spend their seconds on.
Endless bejeweled games are likely as bad as idle, empty thoughts. Reading, learning, even solving puzzles is a good use of the small shards of time like being in a line.
They are likely as wrong / right as simple games with which they are replaced.
Can be a good thing to help you wind down, if applied in moderation. Can waste your time otherwise. All non-trivial activities take some learning to do efficiently; thinking is no exception.
I think you’ll have to define the measure of correctness here as I don’t think I understand what right/wrong means at all in this context.
If we are talking about leisure time as understood by the subject, then it’s difficult to see how a non-harmful activity is a ‘waste’ of leisure time. You can’t waste leisure except by trying to get some sort of work done during leisure, I think.
Other than that, idle thoughts are a wellspring of creative ideas, leaps of deduction and what not. Games like bejewelled are not similar at all; in me, they quickly lead to obsessive hyper focus and a Tetris effect, which is why I don’t play them. But idle thoughts are quite the opposite experience.
Do you really think that sitting down watching the grass grow, clouds, bunnies playing... whatever, is actually a bad activity if done for an extended period?
If you have no responsibility that is being compromised, how can this be a bad thing or is time wasting?
You seem to be saying that everything you do needs to have some purpose or needs to be productive?
I suspect that the problem that society has is that we have decided that everybody needs to be productive and working towards something, even in recreation. Time to spin your wheels in an unstructured way is one of the great things about modern life. We don't have to be spending every minute of the day just trying to get our next meal.
All the people looking at their phones in grocery line, while riding the train, waiting for anything, while paused at a stop light in their car, it's everywhere.
Is reading on your phone on the train fundamentally different than reading a book? Is chatting with your friends while in line at the grocery store bad?
Your point about the stop-light is true, though, because it's unsafe.
Those are all specific complaints that don’t appear to be wrong if they are not proxies for more general complaints. These examples are only instructive to someone who thinks that a recent generation was perfect and perceived so by the people who lived through it, which is not the case here.
>I am a big fan of this. As a 25 year old, I feel that I was truly the last general to experience what true boredom was like as a kid.
I am aware what I am going to say will sound condescending, although I do not mean it in a negative manner; but this is a really cute and naive perspective.
Ask your grandparents. They will certainly claim _they_ were the last generation to experience true boredom as a kid. After all, those danged radios started to pop up around that time, much less black-and-white TVs.
>As a 25 year old, I feel that I was truly the last general to experience what true boredom was like as a kid. Hanging out at the school during the weekend wondering what to do - those days are over now. Technology has definitely taken over our lives, and now there's always something to do.
While growing up, I pretty much always had a computer, but did not have live Internet till I was 19. We had only one TV station to watch. The computer would be on for only a few hours - it could overheat, and it was routine to turn it off when not in use.
For the last 6 months my mind has been preoccupied by this. I can't stop memories coming in on how I would just laze in the afternoon, enjoying the breeze. Even recalling the boredom is a "good" memory. I would read a lot more books. I would sometimes play with toys. I would attempt solving puzzles. I would doodle with the calculator and learn interesting properties of numbers. And fun stuff on the computer - be it games, or programming, or playing with Fractint and POV-Ray.
These days: While I still have constructive hobbies, I'm realizing they exist mostly to make me feel constructive. If I examine my time at home, a lot of it is on the computer. And most of that is on the browser or email. I use a desktop which is on 24/7. The browser window is always open, with tabs open. And if I were to randomly ask myself what I gained in browsing the web in, say, the last month, I can't come up with enough to justify it. Intellectual debates on HN are cool, but I'm way past the point where it is meaningfully useful. Yes, I may have learned a few things while browsing the net, but the gain vs time spent ratio is not that good.
I'm not an addict. I spend time outside the house, and don't miss the computer when I'm, say, hiking. But it troubles me that this is my life at home. And fortunately, I find smartphones to be a real pain to use, so it can't be an attention sink.
In the last few months I've been musing on how I can capture some of my pre-Internet lifestyle back. It's complicated - I don't want to go cold turkey. There are scripts I run on a cronjob on my PC that are very useful to me (and are not tied heavily to my Internet/PC habits) - so I don't want to simply switch it off. Instead, I want to cripple some aspects of my Internet usage.
I haven't actually taken some concrete action, but ideas:
1. Disallow certain programs/processes (e.g. my browsers) from having access to the Internet. Unfortunately, there's no easy way to do this in Linux.
2. Use extensions like Leechblock. I don't have much hope for this working - I tried some years ago and kept finding ways around it. And I often just fired up another browser that did not have Leechblock installed.
3. Make accessing the web via browser painful. In the old days, when I wanted to use the computer, I had to boot it up (took a bit of time), then dial up to the Internet, then launch a browser. If I could simulate it so that when I launch the browser it takes that much time, it may significantly reduce how often I browse the Internet. Bonus points if the whole computer becomes unusable in that time period (it's not really effective if while I'm waiting for the browser to load I start doing other stuff).
4. Whatever crippling methods I have should be appropriately difficult to disable. If it's too easy, then I'll disable it all the time. If it's too hard I won't use the system.
5. Maybe have a cronjob that kills all open browsers every, say, 45 minutes. When I'm busy browsing and the browser crashes, will I really want to restart the browser? More effective if I couple it with 3 above. And maybe I shouldn't allow the browser to reload the crashed session, so I'd have to rebuild the tabs?
6. Disable multitasking while in the browser. I think the fact that we can browse the web, and run other programs at the same time, makes it more difficult to control. In the old DOS days, I ran only one program at a time. Even with the early Windows, I effectively ran one program at a time - multitasking ate up resources.
7. I just realized that I used to program in the days I did not have the Internet. It's a bit sad that the norm is to find solutions in Google or Stack Overflow, or even in the online docs. See if I can somehow download the docs for offline use. But then I wouldn't want a 5 minute delay in loading up the browser if all I want to do is browse local files. Conundrum...
8. Every so many minutes, somehow autoclose all tabs except the active one. While tabs are awesome, they also lead to more time in the browser. This will force me to be more discriminating in picking the tabs I want to read.
9. Somehow suspend accounts on sites like HN for, say, 6 months. I won't be able to post. Maybe block it altogether.
10. Netflix via Roku on my TV does not count. To me that's "TV time", and in any case, I don't spend much time on it. Thankfully, Youtube has always been a poor experience.
11. The goal isn't to get off the computer. It's to do more constructive things with it. So I'll likely program, do image editing (I have a few years of backlog), write, etc.
12. I haven't figured out where email fits into all this. Should I cripple it or keep it as is? I don't use webmail - it's the old style of IMAP + MUA + MDA
I hope I find some way to achieve a healthy amount of the above. In the back of my mind I'd been planning on posting this as an Ask HN to see what other people have come up with.
(As an aside, I think part of my current obsession is that in the last year I've met with a number of my high school friends - most of whom I hadn't seen since getting live Internet - scattered across the globe. That's actively reminding me of life in earlier days).
>For the last 6 months my mind has been preoccupied by this. I can't stop memories coming in on how I would just laze in the afternoon, enjoying the breeze. Even recalling the boredom is a "good" memory. I would read a lot more books. I would sometimes play with toys. I would attempt solving puzzles. I would doodle with the calculator and learn interesting properties of numbers. And fun stuff on the computer - be it games, or programming, or playing with Fractint and POV-Ray.
I can really relate to the feeling. The famous Okkusenman[0] really puts it into words better than I ever could really: that feeling of being chased by something as you get older, that being bored isn't allowed and that you must be doing something at all times; just sitting back and enjoying the scenery isn't allowed. I'm not sure where it comes from, and it's ironic how useless it is at actually making you a better, smarter, more well-rounded person. The only consolation is that it's clearly felt by so many others.
>that feeling of being chased by something as you get older, that being bored isn't allowed and that you must be doing something at all times; just sitting back and enjoying the scenery isn't allowed.
In my case the feeling that I shouldn't be bored or should be productive all the time isn't the problem. It's the ability to keep doing stuff (in my case, stuff on the Internet) that is the problem. In point of fact, one of my hopes/wishes of getting off the web is to both laze around and be more productive. If I cut out an hour of web browsing per day, and spend 30 more minutes just sitting and relaxing, and 30 more minutes being productive, it's still a net gain in productivity.
You know I actually think that society has changed.
I'm in my early 50's and it seems that everybody I talk to is spending their entire waking life working at something, be it a side business, fitness, training, learning or hobby. We've always had these things, but it seems that in the last 10 to 20 years the feeling of these activities has moved from a relaxed, something done for enjoyment to an almost desperate must excel race.
I don't know why this is, but I for one don't like it or the toll it's taking on peoples mood and health.
I know you're already doing well as far as the phone aspect is concerned, but I wanted to add a phone-related suggestion here anyway, because your post is very much in that vein.
PSA: try installing DayWise on your phone. It batches up your notifications, letting you see them only at noon, and at 5 p.m.
Fellow 25 year old chiming in. It can be incredibly hard to relax and do nothing. And setting the expectation that letting your mind wander will lead to fresh ideas is somewhat anxiety inducing. You have to be truly comfortable with quiet and stillness. I'm finding Sam Harris to be a good teacher in making progress on this.
Best advice I can give - go away camping for a weekend, leave the phone or be in a no service area. Do that a few times, get used to it. Then for a week.
“take the path to Nothing, and go Nowhere until you reach it.” - Benjamin Hoff
Camping and spending time in the bush (wilderness) away from services may be one of the best ways of learning how to simplify your thinking and reduce your need to be always occupied.
There is something about sitting back with a nice warm drink in your hands, your feet resting on a log near a crackling campfire gazing up as the embers from the fire spiral up amongst the stars that just helps put everything in perspective.
Your focus boils down to the necessaries of what am I going to eat and am I going to be warm and dry if it rains tonight. Depending on where you are camping you could add the excitement of, is something going to try to eat me during the night.
I'm 30, and was never really bored as a kid, thanks to my Sega Mega Drive, followed by my N64, followed by my Playstation 2 and the internet, etc. I think you need to go back a lot further to find that generation.
One tiny issue with leisure in general is unpredictability. An uncontrolled mind can wander anywhere and come back (may not come back at all) in whatever state, not necessarily charged and refreshed.
I wonder if there's anything like disciplined leisure, where you concentrate on one thing intensively for a while, and you intentionally force yourself to let go of those thoughts, divert your attention to something else and let sub-consciousness deal with the topic. But the point is to come back to the same thing at the end with new ideas and a refreshed mind.
"The word school derives from Greek σχολή (scholē), originally meaning "leisure" and also "that in which leisure is employed", but later "a group to whom lectures were given, school"."
I remember I had Philosophy professor tell me this, back in the day. I think part of his point was that up until very recently, getting an education was a privilege that only the elite got to enjoy. Also, I imagine he was trying to say that compared to the back breaking manual labor almost everyone was expected to participate in back then, learning must've actually been leisurely.
More specific to your comment, I feel like what you're describing is sort of the idea behind things like the pomodoro technique. Take a timed break, let your mind wander, and come back (sometimes) with a solution. To digress one final time, this idea also reminds me a of practicing a musical instrument. I can't tell you how many times I've struggled with a piece of music, only to stop for a few hours or maybe a day, just to come back and "magically" be able to play it.
Taking that philosophy to be true, maybe the word 'leisure' has taken on the role of 'diversion' in the modern day. Is there an ancient Greek/Roman/Eastern take on 'diversionary' activities?
Not that I'm familiar with. I know various sports were big in Ancient Greece, but I couldn't say if they were seen as a 'diversion' from a cultural standpoint.
The topic you touch on is addressed quite poignantly by the inimitable Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (or Prof. C), in his book, Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience. (I've mentioned this book here before, but it's always worth mentioning again.)
Let me make a choice quote (from the chapter: "Enjoying Solitude And Other People"):
“The ultimate test for the ability to control the quality of experience is what a person does in solitude, with no external demands to give structure to attention. [...]”
You can put the above text in books.google.com and read the surrounding text (I recommend to slow-read the whole book, of course); he makes some time-tested suggestions, without imposing them on the reader.
PS: If you want pronounce Prof C's full name, here is a memorable mnemonic by the man himself: "Me-High Chick-Sent-Me-High".
Josh Waitzkin talks about this. Unfortunately he doesn't seem to produce much public work anymore. This is from a Tim Ferriss Interview [1]:
And a lot of what I work on with guys is creating rhythms in their life that really
are based on feeding the unconscious mind, which is the wellspring of creativity
information and then tapping it. So for example, ending the workday with high
quality focus on a certain area of complexity where you can use an insight and
then waking up first thing in the morning creating input and applying your mind
to it, journaling on it.
Not so much to do a big brainstorm, but to tap what you've been working on
unconsciously overnight. Which of course, is a principle that Hemingway wrote
about when he spoke about the two core principles in his creative writing
process, number one ending the workday with something left to write and --
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, often in mid-sentence even.
Josh Waitzkin: Right. So not doing everything he had to do. Which most people do, but they
feel this sense of guilt if they're not working. You and I have discussed this at
length, but leaving something left to write and then the second principle, release
your mind from it. Don't think about it all night. Really let go. Have a glass of
wine. Then wake up first thing in the morning and reapply your mind to it.
And it's amazing because you're basically feeding the mind complexity and then
tapping that complexity or tapping what you've done with it. This rhythm, the
large variation of it is overnight, and then you can have microbursts of it
throughout the day. Before workouts pose a question, do a workout, release
your mind after workout, return to it, and do creative bursts.
Before you go to the bathroom, before you go to lunch, before anything. And in
that way you're systematically training yourself to generate the crystallization
experience, that ah-ha moment that can happen once a month or once a year. A
lot of what I do is work on systems to help it happen once a day or four times a
day, and when we're talking about guys who run financial groups of $20 to $30
billion, for example, if they have a huge insight that can have unbelievable
value.
If you can really train people to get systematic about nurturing their creative
process, it's unbelievable what can happen and most of that work relates to
getting out of your own way. It's unloading. It's the constant practice of
subtraction, reducing friction.
I recommend the book "Hare Brain, Tortoise Mind" by Guy Claxton for a well-researched and approachable overview of cognitive science and different modes of thinking.
I think the point of the article was that coming back to the same thing is best left to the robots; humans should take advantage of their capacity to wander off and find new territory.
>I wonder if there's anything like disciplined leisure, where you concentrate on one thing intensively for a while, and you intentionally force yourself to let go of those thoughts, divert your attention to something else and let sub-consciousness deal with the topic. But the point is to come back to the same thing at the end with new ideas and a refreshed mind.
it's called meditation. as soon as your workplace mandates that you do it, it becomes impossible to perform successfully, thankfully.
Yes, meditation could be called disciplined leisure. I'm not sure if the post you are responding to is getting at that. Meditation and minding wandering are very different things, even opposites. But I think both are very useful for that creative process. It would be interesting to examine the effects of these two things in the context of this article.
There are broadly speaking two kinds of meditations: focussed meditation and awareness meditation.
I heard a useful analogy of the mind being like an elephant that wants to wander around on its own.
In focussed meditation, we try to focus your attention on our breath, or some point inside our body or an idea. We tie the elephant with a rope to a pole. If it wanders too far, we tug it and bring it back to the pole.
In awareness meditation, we just observe where the elephant roams wherever it wants. That is more like leisurely mind wandering.
I'd like to recommend "The Mind Illuminated" by Culadasa John Yates. Besides the elephant analogy, there is much actionable advice on meditation to be found in that book.
Open research. The most academic of labs or research groups used to be places where professors could follow their interests - it's hard to imagine that nearly as many scientists today would have freedoms to pursue interesting math or phenomena like Feynman or Shannon had in their day. It feels like accountism (or maybe some would say neoliberalism) has infected everything.
Is there somewhere I can learn more about the evolution of expectations on professors? This seems like an interesting phenomenon to learn more about, but I'm not quite sure where to start in finding material on this change.
Far from naive, I think you worry too much. How is it that leisure is can be somehow threatening. Is it that unless told, you don't know what to do next?
In a world where no one is compelled to work more than four hours a day, every person possessed of scientific curiosity will be able to indulge it, and every painter will be able to paint without starving, however excellent his pictures may be. Young writers will not be obliged to draw attention to themselves by sensational pot-boilers, with a view to acquiring the economic independence needed for monumental works, for which, when the time at last comes, they will have lost the taste and capacity. Men who, in their professional work, have become interested in some phase of economics or government, will be able to develop their ideas without the academic detachment that makes the work of university economists often seem lacking in reality. Medical men will have the time to learn about the progress of medicine, teachers will not be exasperatedly struggling to teach by routine methods things which they learnt in their youth, which may, in the interval, have been proved to be untrue.
I've always felt that "In Praise of Idleness" would be the basis of the fictional post-scarcity economy of Star Trek (and it's likely that this essay influenced the screenwriters).
IMHO the first step to build an economic system where people work in a project because they want to, and not because they need to, is to defuse the protestant ethics that measure the worth of people based on how much they earn.
Russell's ideas could underline a new ethics that optimized the economy around what people likes to do the most, in special if the most unpleasant jobs can be automated away by robots.
> The protestant ethics that measure the worth of people based on how much they earn.
Curious how you got this idea lodged in your head. There are so many examples that refute it that it's hard to know where to start. There are other prominent cultures which are much more concerned with displays of wealth than protestants (Chinese, for example). And then there are sub-cultures within the U.S. that are also more concerned with displays of wealth (watch some rap videos). And, generally speaking, my life experience is that more devout -> less concerned with material wealth. Then there's the protestant sect (Calvinists) who split from the Catholics because they believed in predestination, which would rule out how much you earn as a path to moral worth (in addition to good works).
I think I haven't explained myself well. I was not referring to exhibition of wealth, but to the effort required to earn a living. Mesuring personal worth in terms of wealth would be a by-product of this, as a signal that you are being righteous and disciplined.
I.e. I was talking about the Lutheran work ethic, which considers hard work and frugality virtuous, and leisure and munificence as moral failures. Other cultures think of free time, and expending on oneself and loved ones, as esencial to enjoy life.
> I've always felt that "In Praise of Idleness" would be the basis of the fictional post-scarcity economy of Star Trek (and it's likely that this essay influenced the screenwriters).
The "problem" is that Star Trek has always been about the adventure at the frontier, with a quasi-military (and precisely how quasi varying based on series) organization exploring new worlds, meeting new civilizations, and fighting with well-known civilizations the Federation is currently struggling against. Very little time is devoted to the people at home actually living that post-scarcity existence.
(And, no, I don't see that as a problem. I like adventure-oriented Star Trek. It just means that these ideas have little relevance to that show.)
Unfortunately in practice it seems that people have actually responded to increased leisure time by dramatically increasing the amount of time they spend watching TV. That's certainly not true for everyone, but I think most people need some external impetus or accountability to make progress and stay on track towards their goals.
The pleasures of urban populations have become mainly passive: seeing cinemas, watching football matches, listening to the radio, and so on. This results from the fact that their active energies are fully taken up with work; if they had more leisure, they would again enjoy pleasures in which they took an active part.
I suspect that may be true for ephemeral leisure time or the little leisure time most people have. Give the average person a 20/hr work week and I’d assume they won’t fill the time with more tv.
Maybe watching tv is their goal, for the time being.
If they were given an opportunity to travel the world, most would gladly take it.
Having free time isn't of much use if it isn't coupled with resources to do interesting things. Since most people have very limited resources - tv is the best bang for your buck way of spending the time.
I'd go even further to suggest that idleness itself has value and doesn't need be justified by the belief that a mind with fewer external stressors is more productive. It's only worth clarification because the idea of "wanting, but not needing" to work is incredibly foreign and through our current lens can only be interpreted as "needing to work, but enjoying it more."
This is a lovely idea, but completely incompatible with biology (like other utopian ideals). The evolutionarily stable outcome is for everybody to use all of their available time to compete with each other for access to resources. It doesn't matter if we could all subsist (even at what is, by all measures, a historically opulent level) on 4 hours/day of work. To start, some people will work more to get more. Eventually all people will work more just to get enough.
And that's just the logic of existing in an environment of abundance. The larger issue is that abundance doesn't last. Resources quickly become scarce because populations grow to the environment's carrying capacity.
Working week of 40 hours once also seemed utopian and yet here we have it. And it didn't lead to economic ruin. I don't see why we can't reduce it even further.
"Most countries in the developed world have seen average hours worked decrease significantly.[14][15] For example, in the U.S in the late 19th century it was estimated that the average work week was over 60 hours per week.[16] Today the average hours worked in the U.S. is around 33,[17] with the average man employed full-time for 8.4 hours per work day, and the average woman employed full-time for 7.9 hours per work day.[18] The front runners for lowest average weekly work hours are the Netherlands with 27 hours,[19] and France with 30 hours.[20] At current rates the Netherlands is set to become the first country to reach an average work week under 21 hours"
We’ve also had three entire continents to take population pressure off of Europe for the last several hundred years. We’ll see what happens now that the Americas and Australia are pretty well settled.
I'm halfway through the book, and it has already influenced my behavior. I began setting "to bed" alarm, just like I set "wake up" alarm.
If you don't have the time (?) to read the book, then at least listen to Walker's presentation at "Talk at Google". (Not to mention, he's an outstanding public speaker, too.) He has a segment where he talks about how sleep hits the "save button" to preserve your memory (after learning) to "persistent storage in your brain", as it were.
Human mind is most creative when it's idle. That's where unplugging and turning down your cellphone would help. With the advent of smart phones and being constantly plugged in, I feel like we've lost our ability to be creative. Instead now we always reach for the phone when we are bored.
> nobody is safe from being replaced by software, algorithms, and machines.
That’s a big leap. We yet have to prove we can make machines smarter than human. It might be possible but it might be not. Like flying - as without huge fans - cars.
Which at least in tech doesn't seem to have lost anyone a job. With all the tooling and advancements in modern programming what would have taken years to build 10 years ago could be done in a week now. Broadcasting a message to computers around the world would have once been a very difficult task that took a lot of time and skill. Now its just a chapter in the python beginners book.
The world responded by building more complicated applications.
It's very far from the vision people had in 50-60s. We haven't found yet the gravity fighting mechanism that will allow them.
We might find a novel way to fight gravity tomorrow, in another 50 years, or never. Like AI. We might find a way to build truly intelligent computers tomorrow, in 50 years, or never. However in both cases, it's ridiculous to try to come up with rules for a non existing technology. It will be like people in the 50-60s trying to make rules from the Internet.
It's possible to make airplanes which kinda look like cars and which can perhaps fold their wings away and drive on roads. It isn't possible to make airplanes which the average person can get in and safely fly with no more than a current driver's license. The true division between flying car and roadable airplane is that kind of extremely advanced autopilot we don't currently possess.
True, but the article isn't trying to say that everyone _can_ have time for leisure, but rather everyone _should_ have time for leisure. An optimist may say that with the advent of automation people should have more time for leisure, where a pessimist may say that the poor will grow poorer.
Sure the poor will grow more poor, and also have a lot more free time due to not having employment. That's not necessarily a good thing, but it does agitate for both the optimistic and pessimistic views being likely at once in the future.
> have a lot more free time due to not having employment
I assume you're advocating their support through some social safety net that provides them with basic necessities.
Because currently, not having employment is a major loss in free time: you spend all your time trying to meet core needs like food, shelter, and clothing. Where an employed person can simply order take-out, hire a contractor to fix their house, and buy new clothes as required, an impoverished person will be scraping together safe food and trying to cook it to be palatable, sheltering in uncomfortable or unsafe places, and repairing clothes that are long since worn out. And if they do go to work, they earn a pittance that's insufficient to pay rent, much less afford luxuries like prepared food, home ownership, or durable clothing.
Unless you're extremely optimistic about social services improving, the poor being poorer puts heavier burdens on their time, not lighter.
The problem is many jobs with high socialiability and variability as mentioned in the article are often very time demanding jobs that require constant coverage. There are also financial realities in that people are often expensive to add, train, and retain in order to enable enough leisure.
Automation if anything makes this worse since people will often decrease to fill the need instead of hire more.
The article builds up to this:
"By encouraging our minds to wander, leisure activities pull us out of our present reality, which in turn can improve our ability to generate novel ideas or ways of thinking."
This is why I moved my family to Patagonia. The concept of Time is different here. I've finally managed to do really deep work from my 'garage office'.
My best ideas come while either driving my son to school or taking a fishing break on the lake just meters near our home. Back to Basics.
Weekends are 99% Tech-free now, and it's been amazing so far.
> By encouraging our minds to wander, leisure activities pull us out of our present reality, which in turn can improve our ability to generate novel ideas or ways of thinking.
You can have great ideas but the hard part is the intersection between being lucky to be able to apply them at work, those ideas to be relevant and execute them properly.
If anyone likes this sort of idea, they should check out the book: A Whack on the Side of the Head: How You Can Be More Creative[0]
There's a section where he talks about thinking about other businesses or activities that are outside of your main focus, and after you go through that process you may come up with different ideas for your own business. It's pretty easy too. Just look around your room or where ever you are for objects and then think about how they are manufactured -- stuff like that.
I remember seeing a piece of lumber (I was reading outside) and it got me to think about how efficient some lumber manufacturers are. They might make 2x4s and other processed wood which they sell to retailers, but there's so much waste produced during the process in the form of sawdust and those manufacturers figured out how to sell their sawdust waste.
I never would have ever thought about something like that on my own, but it got me to think about how I can reduce waste and cross pollinate some of the things I create (code, blog posts, videos, etc.).
[0]: http://amzn.to/2CqmvqH (yes it's an Amazon affiliate link and no I don't care if you Google it instead. I just happened to have the link handy since I wrote about the book on my site in the past.)
I don't see the point of rest. We are biologically bound to need a resting period which is not the case for robots thereby making them superior species. A robot would rather crawl more webpages and learn more than shutting down, even we would like to finish those couple of side projects than sleeping off but are unable to.
A robot doesn't have a preference. It wouldn't "rather" do anything because it's not sentient.
Machines don't need rest because they aren't capable of regeneration. They run and damage accumulates until they break. Then they're done. You can run them less and have the damage accumulate slower so they last longer, but they don't heal themselves without somebody else to perform maintenance.
Living things on the other hand, do repair themselves while they rest. In fact, they even grow stronger to better endure the stresses they experience. So, that's the point of rest.
Perhaps this is because you don’t, as you say, see the point of rest. It may be that the time is used for other, very important things. Perhaps someday a robot could do those things without stopping, but for all we know it’s a form of Mark-sweep GC.
Your position is similar to the view of so-called “Junk DNA” which was initially thought to be literal junk but some of which does in fact appear to modulate gene expression at runtime.
I think if we all never slept, assuming that was just what had always happened, without something else happening to change the nature of society as it is, we'd just end up using those extra hours for work - not nice, fully voluntary side project work, either. I mean work of economic necessity as we do today. We might have flashier phones as a result but we'd only have the same amount of time in which to use them.
I believe that leisure time is something that most people don't have nor know that they want. As the article states, it lets you think outside of the box and come back with fresh ideas. In a work-centered society though, it's really hard to justify spending that time. Even knowing all this, I still fall into the trap of always being busy with something.