This idea really resonates with me. I started out life pretty poor, and am fortunate enough now to be able to purchase most anything I want. What I no longer have however, is time. I found myself purchasing things I want to have time for, but in all reality don't. Thinking about the second cost before hitting that buy button may be a good way for me to stop cluttering my life up with stuff I don't need, and the associated stress of knowing it's sitting there waiting to eat up time I don't have.
As someone with a similar story: I've found that there's a third cost and that's real estate.
As in: things take up space and if you consider the cost of that suddenly everything becomes expensive.
I while ago I wanted to buy a threadmill - I think I could get a decent one for €1000. BUT it would occupy two square metres in my apartment, so the space for that item is worth €5000 in my area.
€6000 for a threadmill? I think I'd rather use one of the two gyms available within a five minute walk.
I don't think this analogy quite makes sense. You didn't use that space before buying a treadmill anyway.
If anything you actually paid 5000€ to not use it at all. Money wasted.
But if you buy a treadmill you're finally putting it to use and starting to generate a ROI.
Unless you're thinking about large homes, these empty square meters are absolutely needed and healthy. You need space to walk in your home, it's much more pleasing psychologically than clutter (or even slabs of "organized" stuff), and reduces claustrophobia. So yeah, the space constraints can absolutely make some hobbies, or owning too many physical books and media etc., too costly.
It probably isn't quite that expensive since you don't buy the floor space with cash but a low-interest, high-leverage loan. And the resale value of that space is probably over 100%.
A better calculation would be annual costs. So say 2% mortgage × €5000 = €100/year. While the treadmill is €1000 / 5 years = €200 / year.
Along the same lines as realising that you'll eventually want to get rid of things is realising—at the time of purchase—that there'll be a cost (time, money, emotional) to getting rid of it is a healthier way of thinking.
That depends on climate and weather quite a bit. I'll walk five minutes in heavy rain / sub-freezing / muggy weather to spend an hour indoors, but not want to walk around for an hour in those conditions.
I can't tolerate the drudgery of any cardio machine that isn't a rower, but that's basically irrelevant.
I don't know how rich you are, but minimalism is possibility.
Contrary to what a lot people believe, minimalism is not a thing for the poor or a way to get rich. It's a lifestyle for the people who can buy/rent anything whenever they want and those people usually have a lot of money. You'll end up with a lot of less things, physically and mentally.
About time, you have to think about time x money. Is there any way that you can pay for some thing or service that free up your time? For example, you can drive to your work or you can pay a taxi and have that time to do something else. When on vacation, you cay pay more for a hotel that is near the place you're interested. You can pay for a personal assistant to handle smaller things, etc.
Thanks for giving a snappy way to call how I now feel about the lack of original-version American movies and TV series on streaming services in Germany. They’re all dubbed into German, and there is no legal source where I can hear the actors reciting their own dialogue. I understand and like German movies and even some TV, but can’t stand dubbed ones that I can almost lip-read in my native language.
Instead of taking the trouble to pirate or talk someone in the US through configuring a RaspberryPi on their home network, I just miss out. Previously, resentfully; now, joyfully.
Having a lot of disposable income and very little free time is the biggest driver of consumerism. People try to make up for the little free time with expensive vacations and activities and compulsive shopping.
It also disengages people from society, local communities, public matters and advocacy.
Time is not ways just for yourself. Time is also for the others in your life - partner, kids etc. Same for money.
Sure you can pay for others to do things for you (cleaning, cooking, laundry, gardening etc) but there is still only 24 hours in a day and you need to chose wisely on what you spend that time on. Likewise for money, I am not just working for my own personal benefit but I am also paying for my family's needs too. You can't just nope out of a job because you want more time to ready moby dick when you need to buy food to feed your kids.
Of course if you had limitless funds things would be different. I don't know where that point is, but I at least certainly still need to work the 40 hour week.
Maids and cloth-folding services are great, but a lot of people who have a whole lot of money but no time are working 60-80 hours a week (many work even more of course.) But you’re giving up more than money if you quit and take a 40 hour a week job. Jobs with fewer weekly hours often aren’t as glamorous and probably don’t have that feeling of “velocity”. Trying to take less than 40 hours a week and you’re probably not going to be a first class member of the company. If Bob takes off every Friday, how can he manage his full time team? And if a company tries to employ people at 30 hours a week as policy, how can they possibly compete?
When you're in a culture it's hard to spot the things that are not "normal".
From an external point of view working 60-80 hours a week is not "normal"[1] It's a very US centric thing. In, dare I say, most countries a 40 hour week (or less in places) is normal and working past that is not expected, and often frowned upon.[2]
If you are in the SV rat race, where you do 80 hours a week, then you can't imagine a world where people do less than that. But (spoiler alert) it works out just fine.
On the other hand if you have successfully indoctrinated employees to work for you for 100 hours a week growing your business for you, selling you their lives for nothing more than money, then by all means get rich off their sweat.
[1] I'm referring to regular salary work here, not minimum wage service jobs.
[2] there are also countries, often the same ones, that _require_ you to take 4 weeks of paid vacation every year.
>On the other hand if you have successfully indoctrinated employees to work for you for 100 hours a week growing your business for you, selling you their lives for nothing more than money, then by all means get rich off their sweat.
One of the great errors your comment exposes is that making your employees suffer enormously is going to make your company run well.
One of the first laws the Romans and Egiptians discovered is how unproductive slaves were compared to free men. It is a universal rule that applies to modern days as well.
The South pole was conquered (Amundsen expedition)making the men go SLOWER than what they wanted to go because that way the effort could be sustained over time.
I do that all the time in my company because I don't want heroes that do not sleep one day just to be zombies the next day making expensive mistakes.
The myth that many people work 60-80 hr weeks needs to die. Very few people do this and the ones that do choose to. C levels, company owners etc. Anyone else working that much straight up chooses to.
I don't know about SV but in academia it is extremely common and often expected that people work 60+ hours.
Sometimes it's just peer pressure. Sometimes it's an explicit requirement.
Few years ago I spoke with an American professor who just started his tenure in Switzerland. He told me he was shocked and outraged when he was the only one to show to work on national holiday!
Great anecdote. Academia is, what, like 0.1% of the workforce? Browsing some polls, it looks like less than 10% of salaries people work more than 60 hours. I don't know what the ratio is for salary vs hourly in the US, but that probably puts it less than 5% for all workers.
I think these people are just the loudest and like writing articles about how much they work. No one writes about how they work 40 hours and life is fine.
There is also the other case where someone may go to the office 10 hours a day, punch some time on the weekends, claim they "worked" 60 hours, but in reality only got 4-5 hours worth of work done per day.
> There is also the other case where someone may go to the office 10 hours a day, punch some time on the weekends, claim they "worked" 60 hours, but in reality only got 4-5 hours worth of work done per day.
They spend the other 5-6 hours writing about their 10 hour days.
If he's salaried in Switzerland, it's actually illegal to work on national holiday (similarly at night/on Sundays). (Unless he has an exemption, but that would be very unlikely, exemptions are for emergency workers and similar, not university professors.)
It might me. But in academia there is a lot pressure and many people decide to work on weekends, some have to work on weekends (e.g. long running experiments that require human input every 6 hours), and some are forced to work and only if there is an abundance of other forms of abuse it might get exposed.
Consider famous case of https://www.swissinfo.ch/eng/technology-institute_prestigiou...
If you read the detailed postmortem it is clear people were working way beyond normal working week. And it's not even mentioned as one of problems about the work with this professor.
> The myth that many people work 60-80 hr weeks needs to die.
996 and Japanese salarymen entered chat...
You might not consider much of what they do "work". You might consider their choice freely-given. Others reasonably have a difference of opinion. I'd advise caution when baking in assumptions on what you see in an asymmetric power differential context.
For W-2 exempt (salaried), if your definition of "work" is the equivalent of being in the zone for that much, of course not.
However, meeting Japanese-style salaryman-type management expectations of butts-in-seat-appearing-busy, or in a poorly-led consulting company that underbids and expects hapless employees to still deliver with uncompensated overtime while timesheets read exactly 40 hours per week, or overbook in a subscription-based business and throw the overage onto the heads of the employees, or any number of numerous scams I've seen?
Yeah, that happens plenty. Any area of human activity that is so structurally secular that it not only has a formal label ("overtime abuse"), but has law firms specializing in litigating it [1], makes it a real stretch to assert it is a "myth". I'd like to see where your assertion is coming from, because this is a concern I have to address with job candidates, and I'd really love to have persuasive evidence that it really is a myth in general, and with my organization in particular.
48 hours a week is the maximum in the UK and the EU.
You (the worker) may opt out (this is a domestic add-on, not all countries have this I think) and work more hours, but you can't be required to, and may not be fired or discriminated against if you do not.
60 hours in any _individual_ week, but cannot exceed 48 hr/week on average (normally over 17 weeks to be exact, but this isn't fixed).
So your 60 hour week needs to be offset by, for example, a 36 hour week at some point. Unless you opted yourself out, or you work in one of industries where it doesn't apply.
However, it doesn't appear Austria has the opt-out at all.
I work over 40 hours a week or less and it is already tough, because the intensity of my work is very high, like an air controller work I just can't work more hours at that intensity or I will burn out.
No human being can run a marathon for 8 hours a day, every day. They will tell you they do but it is not true, the people that know the best are those that are used to run marathons.
The people that work 80 hours have an intensity of work that is extremely weak, or else they will not be able to work in a sustained way. Most people I know delude themselves and can do as much in way less time increasing their intensity of work and using delegation and automation.
By the way I am competitive doing that and lots of my friends also are doing the same.
> The people that work 80 hours have an intensity of work that is extremely weak, or else they will not be able to work in a sustained way
I don't think this is necessarily a fair way to frame this side. I was very close to burnout in a previous job, and it's taken me probably two years to realise that one of the root causes of my problems was that I just never, ever ever got a chance to switch off. I would be doing "light" work on the weekends (responding to people, messages, build issues), and in the evenings people would be messaging me with questions because I was in a different time zone where my evening overlapped with their afternoon. I turned off notifications outside of work hours and started getting feedback that my work was suffering so I turned them back on. What started as one message a week from a stressed coworker was now 4-5 messages every evening. I was starting work at 9am, finishing at 6pm, and then connected and pretty much unofficially on call until midnight, and then basically on call from 3pm until midnight on weekends. It was probably 90 hours a week all in, and I was definitely doing probably 50% more work than another engineer doing a 40h week, but I was doing it because I was working 2x the hours.
I actually tend to see anything I buy as a black hole that will suck more money into it.
A good example is when you get a bicycle, you do the equation and realize that within two years you will have saved in on the cost of public transportation. But it's when you start using it you realize that suddenly you always end up sweaty arriving to work so you need to buy good ventilated outdoor clothes and then a little bit later the winter arrives and you realize you need the same type of winter clothes, and then your first tier brakes and you realize you don't have any tools, so not only do you need to buy a new tier but also the tools. And here the initial smart calculation has fallen apart long time ago.
Don't get me wrong. There's a lot of benefits riding a bike to work so it may still be very much worth it. But once you have this realization you can apply the same logic to anything you buy or thinking of buying which may helps prioritizing because there's just so many black holes you can have in your life.
What funny is that if you rent a car once a month for $150, people will say something like "WOW, THAT'S SO EXPENSIVE, YOU SHOULD BUY A CAR INSTEAD". Except that insurances alone on a car would cost me $150 per month.
People prefer owning and bleeding money where the cost gets spread over time than to pay a smaller amount in lump sums when they need the service.
I lived the no car/short-term rental car life for eight years when I lived in Seattle. I would use bike & public transit to get around the city, but if I wanted to go out to the mountains I would need to rent a car (or carpool with a friend who owned a car).
The truth is it's different psychologically to spend $150 on going out to the mountains instead of the marginal cost of driving out to the mountains in a car you already own. Yeah you can be like but that's not rational with X Y Z reasons all you want but the actual decision experience becomes "do I want to spend $150 today on going to the mountains", which is matched up against any other thing I could do that day for much cheaper, and still have a fair bit of fun. $150 would buy you & someone else dinner at a very nice restaurant! Hell, it would nearly buy a round-trip plane ticket from Seattle to Palm Springs to visit Joshua Tree NP.
Also relevant is that the fun of using the car is offset against the pain of the rental experience. Buying a car means having that experience once. Renting means having it every time you want to rent.
That's the thing though. Recurring payments hide the cost from you and it hides the fact are making a choice by owning a car instead of going to a nice restaurant every month.
Paying for stuff only when you use it puts the costs in your face and puts you in control of your spendings.
My point is orthogonal to "utility vs happiness". Let's say someone spends $5 on starbucks per day, I just want them to realize that's $1800 per year and so they're really making the choice between a coffee per day and an RTX 3090 every year. Or a $150 bottle of wine per month. Once you accept you are indeed making a choice, then you have the power to consciously choose what you want to splurge on.
But it's ignoring the human psychology involved. "Ignorance is bliss" is true. Yes ok, I could have invested in $GOOG and earned a bunch of money that would be worth more to me today, but that just isn't how we process information. What happens instead is that I buy the coffee because I want it and now I can't even enjoy it because I know it's "stupid."
I'm in the process of fixing up a house and while I have a station wagon, it doesn't have the capacity of a pickup truck.
Friend after friend jokes about how their truck is more useful, but the one time I really needed one (to purchase a refrigerator) it cost $19 + fuel from Lowes and that was that.
I offer this only because I'm a native English speaker and found the typo confusing: "first tier brakes" are very good brakes, "first tire/tyre breaks" is when your first set of tyres fails. I'm quite sure you meant the latter, there's a lot of ESL on HN so I thought I'd offer a translation.
The magical way to alleviate this is to be okay with most things being kinda shitty. While it's very hard and expensive to optimize at above 80%, it is relatively easy and cheap to keep alright stuff working at an okayish condition.
This is surprisingly hard for some people (including myself) to do.
I make my work high quality, and I want to spend the time I have using things that are well designed and well thought out. In some small way I hope that seeing those things will inspire me to keep my quality up. It’s extra work, but I think that allowing things in one area of my life to be “kinda shitty” will creep into other areas of my life.
How I’ve dealt with this is just doing less. I live in a smaller, more maintainable house. I drive nice, but not luxury, cars that I can afford to keep maintained (both in the sense of time and money), and while I have hobbies (wife says too many), I go for nice gear that is a good value and easily maintainable, that I can resell if I need to.
That’s not to say the most expensive is the best, but I find Kinda shitty comes with the cost of our initial research, purchase, downtime after it breaks or just a less safe/enjoyable experience, trying to get out of the first thing by selling it with a low resale value, then re-purchasing a nicer thing.
I guess my metric is: if I can’t afford to pay for it in cash and don’t have the time or money to maintain it, I probably shouldn’t be buying it - or I should be getting rid of something if I do.
> In microeconomic theory, the opportunity cost of a particular activity option is the loss of value or benefit that would be incurred (the cost) by engaging in that activity, relative to engaging in an alternative activity offering a higher return in value or benefit.
No, I'd say the gp is talking more about "hidden TCO" (Total Cost of Ownership).
Opportunity Cost is about finite time which forces the choice of one action to come at the expense of other alternative actions.
Hidden TCO is being ignorant of auxiliary costs of the base products (accessories, maintenance, etc.) An extreme example of that is a "free puppy" can become one of the most expensive items to own especially when you're uneducated about the true TCO of dogs. I.e. In addition to obvious vet bills, going on a vacation now means you have to pay for a dog sitter which you didn't initially account for. Owning recreational boats is another example of hidden TCO.
> A good example is when you get a bicycle, you do the equation and realize that within two years you will have saved in on the cost of public transportation.
This is more a counterexample.
I bought a bike eighteen months ago, it's my only transportation, it sits outside in the rain, and so far I have spent €0 on it. It's a good bike, but by no means an expensive bike.
> But it's when you start using it you realize that suddenly you always end up sweaty arriving to work so you need to buy good ventilated outdoor clothes
I don't get sweaty walking somewhere. Why should I get sweaty biking?
If you treat biking as transportation and not a race, you won't get sweaty.
> then your first tier brakes
I'm not quite sure what you mean, but I assume you mean you need maintenance. Well, don't buy tools, go to a bike shop. They can do it quicker and better than you can, and it will cost very little - certainly a tiny fraction of what car maintenance is.
I got a bike to _simplify_ my life and it has worked.
> If you treat biking as transportation and not a race, you won't get sweaty.
That’s only true if you live in a flat region, are never in a hurry, never wear rain clothing, and never dress even slightly too warm. My bike commute has some very minor hills, and it’s virtually impossible for me to not get at least somewhat sweaty. And I view bikes purely as a pragmatic transportation vehicle — not a bike enthusiast.
This makes sense for some things, but the examples the author uses don't make sense to me.
Take the Moby Dick example... the author says you don't get the return on it until you have paid the 16 hour price of reading it... but isn't those sixteen hours the actual reward? You don't read a book to be finished with it, you read it because you like the reading process. The reward starts the first minute you start reading the book.
Not only that, but you don't have to finish the book to get something out of reading it. If you enjoyed the time you spent reading, that is enough.
This attitude seems very "completionist", where you only get value after you finish something. That isn't how I view things.
Also, why does he think mindless apps and games are the same as doing nothing? The idea is you enjoy the time spent playing the game. Sure, you don't end up with anything after, but you enjoyed the time.
The author doesn't say that you don't get the return on reading Moby Dick until you have paid the 16-hour price of reading it. What he actually says is subtly but importantly different:
"Only once the second price is being paid do you see any return on the first one."
So he agrees with you: you start getting the benefits as soon as the "second price" is being paid.
And I don't think it's quite right to say that the sixteen hours are the actual reward. They're the space in which some of the actual reward occurs, so to speak. You pay the price of using 16 hours of your time to read Moby-Dick. You get the reward of 16 enjoyably-spent hours, and also the reward of having your brain reshaped in whatever way reading Moby-Dick does for you -- deepening your ideas about friendship or obsession or sailing or whales, etc.
The 16 hours you have to spend are still a price, even though you enjoy spending those hours. (Some people enjoy spending money. They're still paying when they do.) The 16 hours you spend reading Moby-Dick are 16 hours you aren't spending reading The Brothers Karamazov or sleeping or doing lucrative consultancy or talking with your friends.
You are paying the price in the sense of 'time is limited, and you are using some of this limited budget on this endeavor. The point is not that 'paying the price' is unpleasant. The point is that 'paying the price' reduces your budget of available hours.
I think, in addition, there is an 'unpleasant' quality about needing concentration for reading that the author feels more than you do. But that unpleasantness is not the core of the piece. The limited budget is.
Consider someone who reads 10 hours a week and buys 5 books a week. They will be buying books they will probably never read. They are paying the first price but never the second.
It’s not necessarily unpleasant but it does necessarily cost energy, I think. I love figuring out how a new piece of tech works but at the end of a long week when I’m worn out, I just can’t do it any more. If it didn’t have a cost then this wouldn’t be the case.
But that's not a price, I enjoy reading, that what I paid for.
It is not something that costs me anything other than time, however that's not the "price" he's talking about. Otherwise "low price pleasures" wouldn't be a category, if you enjoy that time it's not marginally better than nothing.
The author is framing consumption as having two pools of currency:
1) money
2) time
It costs money to get access to the good you are consuming, and hours to unlock the value. Whether or not you enjoyed reading Moby Dick, you have 16 less hours in the time bank.
If you do enjoy it (I did not), you have paid 16 hours out of the time bank and reaped the reward of 16 hours of pleasurable reading.
There are “cheaper” thrills. I am told you can spend 5 minutes on TickTock and receive some quick gratification. The up front cost is low. The cumulative payoff of spending 16 hours watching cat videos may not be as ultimately rewarding to you as plowing through some classic literature.
Tiltok is surprisingly good. I get: really beautiful girls (bordering on softporn), advice on home DIY, cooking howtos, HIGH end cooking howtos, bartending recipes, vegan recipes, meat BBQ recipes, life motivational videos, really funny short sketches from funny regular people (in several languages), relationship advice, psychologists
All original content. It has its own twist to it. All in 5 to 10 minutes. Everything just flows, I never use any browsing. Just swipe.
EDIT:
I also need to mention that TikTok is host to many, not just one, many emergent properties. Trends take off, people from around the world do the weirdest things which become super popular. Such as ASMR videos, example: whispering secretary
I remember that some years ago, people treated AI who tries to fulfill your deepest desires as some sort of dystopia. Yet, here we are, with the TikTok algorithm trying to guess what you want to see and advanced AIs doing facial reshaping and skin smoothing to make that girl look inhumanely attractive. Let's hope we humans don't end up overly distracted like bees and brown beer bottles ;)
That analogy is desperately tortured. It just ... does not map at all to how I ever perceived reading or fun videos. I never even heard anyone talk about it is those terms.
The time spend by purely relaxing activities like reading or watching is on itself a reward. You do it instead of doing something less pleasant- staring bored at the wall.
And the idea that you could have spent all that time doing something super useful is wrong if it is about opportunity cost. I tried multiple times to cut off all "time wasters" like reading fiction or videos. It ended in low productivity and depression each time.
Imagine you could spend 16 hours enjoying reading without any time having passed in the real world. Then you would still have those 16 to enjoy something else as well. But instead you are actually 16 hours closer to your death. That's the cost. Not the time you experienced, but the time you no longer have.
If I would not be reading, that time would still pass. I would move closer to death by the exact same amount. Literally regardless of what I would do for 16 hours, my life would move exactly 16 hours closer to death.
The assumption is that if you wouldn't be reading, you could do something else that you would want to do. But if you are reading you can't. If you have more time than you know what to do with, then the argument doesn't hold.
I think we only say things about the cost of time for leisure activities when it's not worth it. Example, I heard many times people saying about a bad movie: wow, I wasted 2 hours watching that
Rather than two separate pools, I see it more as that every good's value is a complex number. The "real" part is the sticker price and the "imaginary" part is the time spent to consume or enjoy the good. So while we usually just assume the sticker price is the value of the good, in reality you have to calculate the length of the complex vector.
When you're young and poor, the sticker price seems very close to the actual value, but as you get older and richer, you come to see the time spent as by far the most significant scalar quantity.
I think the “time is money” metaphor is very useful to thinking about time as a limited resource. The average person has about 630,000 hours in their life. Take out 210,000 for sleeping, a largely involuntary time sink. The time cost is truly the more expensive portion. This limited resource consideration is even more important to consider there are strict upper-limits to how much time someone will have, and no one has lived 1,000,000 hours.
I appreciate you say this with humour. But if you voluntary or due to circumstances out of your control cannot distract you brain... At least nine starts thinking. The energy cost is high, but I always end up with a very profound experience and some great outcomes.
So I wouldn't cross out "staring at a wall" as inarguably invaluable. It's what's going on in your head when you do it. Same as when reading that book.
The "time bank" is the opportunity cost of doing something else instead. By not doing something you have thus "saved" that time and can use it elsewhere.
Unless of course, you cant. For example, if you are tired and you are for entertainment, relax or to make you sleep. Or, if you are overworked from those other things and really really need to chill with a book or tictoc right now.
There are 2 costs:
1. Cost in money to purchase,
2. Cost in time to use and manage.
By paying these costs you gain a benefit (of any kind, monetary, pure enjoyment, etc).
These are given.
So far this is pretty easy to agree on, and could be stated in several ways including probably in terms of opportunity costs.
The article's point is that there's a particular relationship between these costs and benefits. Namely, that the first cost only enables you to gain the benefit, but that you can't actually receive the benefit until you pay into the second, time cost. This is interesting because it's easy to forget or miscalculate that second cost, and because the second cost gates the benefit that means you may not be getting the full benefit from paying the first cost.
I speed read War and Peace for the first time in ~4 hours for the school test (I refused to read assigned literature). It went into one ear and into another.
I then re-read it while recovering from the surgery over a leisurely week and enjoyed it tremendously as I think would anyone who gives it time.
My mother told me she read just the Peace parts, while my father admitted to reading only the War parts (they are pretty much alternate chapters).
Assigned reading has a bad habit of pushing us into such patterns. Human's seem to treat anything they are asked to do as a cost to be minimized in favor of the things they choose to do. Given options, they will do the things least similar to those that they are asked to do.
It's too bad we can't structure assigned reading and coursework in terms of choice, I distinctly remember choosing to work on harder assignments when given choices back in the grade school era.
I’ve heard people say they’d done similar things (about skipping the battle scenes) and I don’t get it. Some really important things happen to some of the characters in those bits! Surely it’d be super confusing…
To be honest, the whole book is confusing even if you read it as written. It's probably me reading it over months, but forgetting names and relations does not help. So, probably skipping some chapters wouldn't matter to me that much. In general, I love the book. I definitely need to finish it!
There was a time I wanted to learn Russian to read Tolstoy and Dostoevsky.
I believe you could consume all the words in Moby Dick in 16 hours. But it’s one of those “crammed full of metaphors” books that could easily take a seminar to unpack. I don’t pretend to get it, but smarter people than me write articles on its layers of complexity and interpretation[1].
You can read those masterworks at a superficial level and they’re usually somewhat rewarding. Or you can read Dostoyevsky while deep diving on Russian history and get a notably different experience. But it takes a lot longer.
I generally read audiobooks at 1.5x because 1.0 seems terribly slow to me. This more or less matches my reading pace for printed books, so 16 hours seems right.
Not everyone is native English speaker, and slow pace allows you to get immersed. That people want 1,5 speed or do two things at same time is a sign of our time (appropriate content is cheap snd widely available but we don't have more available leisure time). Society doesn't want people have abundant leisure time, hence 'Bullshit Jobs'.
I'm not a native English speaker either. The thing here is that audiobooks are quite a bit slower than normal speech, which is what we've been trained on all our lives.
People want 1.5 speed because that's what gets the narrator back to a normal speaking speed.
I slow down some narrators and speed up others because I like content delivered at a specific speed. Leisure time is a reason, but not the only reason.
I think the broader point the author is making is that we are over-consuming — because we can. But without the fulfillment that comes from the time spent with the purchased thing we are finding our lives paradoxically empty.
The problem the author elucidates really resonated with me, but perhaps it was framed a little awkwardly.
We are living in an age when consuming is easy, while time has become so much more precious. Contrast that with days past when the opposite was true: purchases were precious while time was more plentiful.
Pre-modern society was precisely like that. Agriculture on the level of, say, the 17th century, demands a lot of time, but only in specific periods dictated by natural processes. In the meantime, as a male peasant you are "almost free", with scattered duties here and there. Also, no commute and very little artificial light. Most people's workplace was within walking distance from their bed, if not in the same house. And a majority of work was stopped after sunset, given that artificial light was scarce (perhaps just one lamp for the entire household).
People like pastoralists who watch over grazing flocks are relatively free too, it is not a constant work comparable to a factory floor.
Traditional female works were a bit different. A lot of spinning, for example, that was a major time eater, and independent of season.
> Agriculture on the level of, say, the 17th century, demands a lot of time, but only in specific periods dictated by natural processes. In the meantime, as a male peasant you are "almost free", with scattered duties here and there
Yeah no. That meme came from estimation of some economist that completely ignored what actually male (or female) peasants done. And conditions they actually lived in.
So I am a rather late child and a late grandchild; my grandparents grew up in rural Slovakia and Bulgaria between 1900-1940, at which point those places were rather underdeveloped. None of them had electricity before 22 years of age and my oldest grandfather, a rural blacksmith, only had it in his 40ies.
I have some first-hand knowledge from them, which I consider quite reliable. They are all dead now, but their conditions were quite alike.
The work in the height of the agricultural season was very hard and arduous. A huge problem was the weather: if it rained too much, or not at all, food would become very expensive.
But I stand by my claim that they had a lot of free or semi-free time. Their entire rhythm of living was different.
For example, every Sunday, there was a market in a town 20 kms away. My grandma walked there and back to sell some eggs and cheese and buy whatever the village did not produce (e.g. kerosene for the kerosene lamp). It was 4 hours each way, but the time spent walking there wasn't work. The villagers went in a group, talked, told stories, flirted, sung etc. on the way. So the journey was a mix of leisure, exercise and bonding.
Or another example. Girls would often knit or decorate clothing together. It was an important activity, but under no hard deadline or quality pressure (unlike in a factory), and they usually gathered together and had a good time talking, sewing, relaxing for a bit. Someone could actually read stories aloud to pass time etc.
These days, we have rather hard divisions between "work", "hobby" and "leisure". Only a few moments in the day (the watercooler chit-chat) are somewhere in between.
That wasn't the case in premodern rural society and my grandparents yet lived in such a world.
Yeah I had grandparents too. Going to market for 4 hours is a work. I have good time working fairly often too and it is still work. I went to business trips, we chatted and had good time and it was work.
Decorating cloth is work. It just is and was. Nor something you can avoid and something you are judged on. I listen to music when coding and to podcast when doing repetitive work. Does not make it not work.
You know why we girls don't don't anymore? Because it is boring repetitive chore to large majority of us. And I actually did some embroidery - it is cool in small amounts. Emphasis on small.
And it was not all relaxing either. You are talking about period with huge pressures, periods of lack of food due to wars.
In generation in between, there are people who cant relax. They feel guilty and will badge you if you dare to sit and rest.
Its more of a spectrum but pre-internet, if you wanted to watch a movie you had to rent the VHS or order it somehow. You had to buy a book in a bookstore. Each limiting your range of exposure (you had magazines, papers, and peers which each were very important). On top of that, piracy took little amount of time and effort, and legal distribution eventually went to compete.
An extreme example these days are the people who buy games for $5 on Steam sales and never even download them because they can't afford the 200 hours or so to enjoy the game.
The 200 hours isn't quite the reward. A jog isn't rewarding. Reading a paragraph isn't rewarding. You need to read perhaps a chapter at least to get some reward.
I bought Dune. I read until the legendary "fear is the mind killer" scene. And then I put it down and haven't picked it up yet. I got some reward from it, probably not the full amount, but I just couldn't afford the hours to finish the book.
Are you otherwise familiar with the story? There's a good reason it is recommended to read the book before you watch the movie/series. A book allows you to completely apply your own imagination. My path was: Dune II (game), Dune (David Lynch movie), Dune (game, did not finish), Dune 2000 (game), Dune (remake from 2001), Children of Dune and in 2016 I finally finished reading the book (I started in ~2012). Obviously I knew the story quite well as I played Dune II and watched the movies a lot (though I did not like Children of Dune much). The book felt like a choir, but it was good. Really good. Its just that the movies were good enough. Its why I don't bother reading Fire and Ice, Lord of the Rings, or The Witcher. I've seen the series/movies. We also need to put a book in the age or context it was written. Or, well, 'need to'? It'd be fair. I do the same with older content of movies and series.
I'm not. It does sound like the kind of thing I would like (I'm a fan of the Dark Sun setting). I normally prefer movies over books, again, because it's less time commitment. But Dune tops Amazon's list week after week, so there has to be a good reason for that.
It is a fantastic book, still reads well nowadays (I finished reading it in 2016). Just like a book like Snow Crash. However, the movies/series are great, too. The games are dated. Haven't seen the 2021 series as of yet.
>Take the Moby Dick example... the author says you don't get the return on it until you have paid the 16 hour price of reading it... but isn't those sixteen hours the actual reward? You don't read a book to be finished with it, you read it because you like the reading process. The reward starts the first minute you start reading the book.
Honestly, I'm not sure if you can say that the money spent is truly a "cost" either.
Consumers love buying books (spending money) as much as they love reading books (spending time).
There is definitely a sense of reward in simply buying a book - even one you never read - just as there is for buying clothes you'll never wear or gadgets you'll never use.
> There is definitely a sense of reward in simply buying a book - even one you never read
Is there? Doesn't that just make you feel like an idiot for wasting your money? The only feeling I ever get after spending money is "this better not suck".
Feeling a sense of reward simply for spending money sounds unhealthy.
> > There is definitely a sense of reward in simply buying a book - even one you never read
> Is there?
W-w-what? Of course there is reward in simply buy a book. Or, perhaps, one could say there is reward in the possessing of the book, and maybe not the purchasing. Or maybe that's a distinction with no distinction. In any case, it's certainly true that one can get reward from buying books without the necessity of reading them.
> Doesn't that just make you feel like an idiot for wasting your money?
Sorry, I'm not seeing where any "wasting" enters into it. If I buy a book I want, the reward is having it. There is no waste. I got what I wanted. What you're saying only makes sense if you make the rather odd assumption that the value of a book is exclusively in the reading of the book...
I mean... do you, or have you ever, collected anything simply for the sake of having that something? Stamps? Vinyl records? Magazines? Bicycles? Video game consoles? Something?? I mean, it's quite a common activity. I would think most anybody would be able to relate to this.
I have bought books that I thought I wanted to read, but then left on the shelf without reading for almost 20 years.
Then when I did read them, they greatly affected me, and were as worthwhile as I had originally hoped.
I could've died without ever reading them, but I still bought them to read at some undefined future date.
If I wanted to have books on a shelf for visual decoration, I believe that there are fake books available. But I have enough real ones.
Getting a signed first edition or something for the collector value seems reasonable to me, but I don't know why I would want it if I hadn't read some version of it.
> I mean... do you, or have you ever, collected anything simply for the sake of having that something? Stamps? Vinyl records? Magazines? Bicycles? Video game consoles? Something??
I do. But only digitally nowadays. I hardly own any physical goods. Maybe $10-$15k taken together at most. I realize this puts me close to an extreme end.
As a kid I used to 'play' trading card games - but I hardly played them and mostly just spent a large portion of my meager allowance on buying painted cardboard. With the benefit of hindsight I could've spend that money on things that would have brought me considerably more joy, but I consider that a valuable lesson in itself.
I don't begrudge people their collections. There's still purpose in that. However buying something for your collection is different from buying for the sake of buying.
Kickstarters? Pateron? Boy Scout popcorn? That water bottle that an NGO was supposed to ship you for anything over a $20 donation?
There are some uses of money which are primarily philanthropic or social messaging. In these cases, the utility of the good or service is ancillary to the purchase. As overall economic welfare continues to improve, the niche for these things increases. The split between purpose and utility varies, maybe 5/95 for that chocolate bar that says it is protecting the rainforest (doubtful) but 40/60 for Girl Scout cookies. It's hard to straddle anywhere near that 50/50 line, but again, as the niche expands, the markets will eventually figure out more products for the space.
> That water bottle that an NGO was supposed to ship you for anything over a $20 donation?
"This NGO better be honest". It's not about the water bottle.
When I spend money, I expect something (to happen) in return. It doesn't have to benefit myself.
If you enjoy wasting money on books you are not going to read, I suggest you just set the money on fire instead. Or bury it and take the location to your grave. You'll do everyone else a favor by driving down the cost of goods, and nobody had to labor or waste resources on something you weren't planning to use. The economy will instead find something useful to do it with that labor and those resources.
Alternatively donate it as in your example - if you want to benefit someone specific. Maybe to the author whose book you weren't going to read?
>nobody had to labor or waste resources on something you weren't planning to use
If someone buys a collectible book with no intention of reading it, is it really a waste of resources?
Stuff is collectible because it's not being made any more and can't be. A signed first edition of something can't be sending an economic signal to produce more.
The money paid represents labor and resources forgone, and the more that the collectible costs, the more labor and resources is reserved for better purposes.
It is depriving someone else who would like to own it and possibly read it, but is that honestly a loss to society?
Here you are describing an edge case with collecting things because :
- You still need to manage / expose / dedicate space / maintain your collectibles to enjoy them
- It can be an investment so it’s really different than buying something to use it. It’s buying something hoping to resell it. Still, we could say you also pay with incertitude, maybe stress and responsibility if it’s something expensive.
>You still need to manage / expose / dedicate space / maintain your collectibles to enjoy them
This is true. A sense of proportion is always useful. Wouldn't you expect maintenance to be orders of magnitude smaller than creating things in the first place, very generally?
>It can be an investment so it’s really different than buying something to use it
I don't know what you are trying to say. Investment is inherently deferred consumption, and the higher the value, the more consumption is deferred. That leaves more resources for people who need them.
Imagine a stylized society with one rich person who has a billion dollars, and everybody else is poor.
If that person spends their billion dollars on a rare book, then the only thing that has been taken away from society is that book. And usually there is more than one copy of a book, so other people can still read the story, they just don't have the specific physical object.
But if they spend their billion dollars on, say, constructing a palace, then the resources could have been used to build thousands of homes for ordinary people.
>You should think about the kind of behavior either of these feelings encourage, or discourage.
If I was going to drive myself to destitution chasing good feeling like a rat in an experiment, there are far more effective hits I could get than just "the feeling of spending money on something I like, but may not actually use."
I already have to have the skills to not let good feelings completely drive my decision making, so what benefit is there to making an unavoidable process into a source of negative feelings? Would it be healthy to feel nausea every time I eat so that I don't overindulge?
If it makes you happy, is it really wasting money?
Personally, I only think money is wasted when you don't get what you were trying to get when you spent the money. So if you decide to spend your money buying a delicious burrito, but it turns out to taste bad, then it was wasted money.
If you are trying to buy a book to bring you the joy you feel when buying a book, and you get that joy, then it isn't money wasted. If you buy it and then regret it after and don't feel the joy, then it was wasted.
> If you are trying to buy a book to bring you the joy you feel when buying a book, and you get that joy, then it isn't money wasted.
It's still wasted. That person would just be an egocentric idiot. Even if they are a happy idiot.
A capitalist society cannot work properly if the experience of buying is valued at the cost of whatever is bought.
Neither can this world or society sustain widespread wastefulness. It hurts everyone (else).
Wasting money on things that are unused causes labor and resources to be diverted from more worthy endeavors. More directly it causes the price of those goods to increase, or even become unavailable.
Defining waste is almost impossible when you see things in these terms. Is culture a waste? Are things not needed to survive waste? Are activities only valid if they generate enough new knowledge or happiness - who judges that?
Ultimately you need to trust that if someone spends, there's utility to the spend, otherwise they wouldn't have - even if the act of spending is the benefit itself.
It's not for 3rd parties to judge the usefulness of the spend. To illustrate this, think about the typical teenager who's mom says wastes all their time on "insert hobby mom doesn't like" and extrapolate that to the world's consumption habits. Everyone thinks others are wasteful.
Owning a library is not so that you’ve read every book In collection, but it’s a research area where you can spend time to read new books. Some of the books in your library may never get read, and that’s ok because they’re always close at hand if you need it.
I'd go even further: I get a lot more enjoyment in going deep in things. Reading a book or watching a movie multiple times, discussing it with friends, family, people online, showing it/gifting it to people, learning about how it was made, who made it, in what context. I can't do this with everything, but I'd rather go deep on a few things than shallow on lots.
A friend once recommended a video game and when I asked if it was worth the price he said it was "a solid 100 hours of gameplay".
There's definitely an alternative framing for entertainment. My friend gladly traded $60 for something that promised to take 100 hours. If it only took 50 hours, he would have found it less valuable.
The submission isn't loading for me right now but based on your comment, I imagine I share some views with the author.
I have this problem with games; there are lots of games. I can only find out if I enjoy one by spending time on it (and unfortunately the industry seems to like drawing things out such that the first hour or three aren't necessarily representative). Unfortunately, very often it is the case I go in hoping I would enjoy it, but after a while have to cut it short because it's not enjoyable. Not only have I not gotten much out of it, I've lost all the time I could have spent on something more enjoyable (or productive). And it's still true that I've lost the time, even if I enjoyed the activity. One tricky part with games that start out as fun (and addictive) is that it can take a while to realize it's not fun anymore and hasn't been for a while. And I've definitely had regrets with games that don't feel fun but after consulting opinions, "trust me it gets better." Ugh.
That sort of plays in to the value calculus on games.. a common mindset I see in reviews is that if a game offers hundreds of hours of gameplay, it is a high value game. For me, it rarely works out that way; I'm not a bored teenager desperate for entertainment, and in practice long games rarely seem to respect my time. They're long because they drag on and push you into running around, dull repetitive grind and fighting, mass produced shallow quests, boring errands, copypaste scenery spread over a large map... Quantity over quality. From my perspective, a game can definitely have negative value.
What I'm looking for in games today is definitely the opposite. Maximum quality that lasts a weekend at most and then I can move on in life. And I still don't want to waste most of my weekends playing games, even if I could find good ones.. Similarly, I have a bunch of books about which I've been wondering whether it's really worth my time reading them.
I'm sure I'd feel differently if I could somehow make more time available to me (e.g. work only three days a week oslt).
In general open world games are ones to avoid. They contain the most bloat. My Friend Pedro, Ori, and other 2D games are actually more fun than 3D games.
In Ux, you often optimize systems to help make user error as close to impossible as you can, and to optimize to be able to complete tasks quickly. However, in many video games, user error is a core part of the experience and you often don’t want to shorten tasks because they are pleasant. Starcraft players fight on forums to defend the unnecessary tasks they have to do manually because they enjoy practicing their good mechanics, some even asking blizzard to worsen the games pathfinding (big, fascinating subject, won’t get into it here)
That said, I own several books and games that I haven’t put the effort into reading/playing yet. Reading and gaming aren’t effortless
Assuming this is true, you still need to pay for machines to dig the big holes, transportation to those big holes, infrastructure for transporting to those to those big desert holes.
That’s probably still less total effort than what’s embodied in the device as part of its making. Mining and refining bauxite or iron ore, mining and refining fossil fuels, doing all the processing and transporting to get it to you in good condition is likely to dominate the cost to throw it into a regionally compacted bundle to trundle it off across half a continent (but not the world’s largest ocean) for disposal.
I didn’t claim landfills don’t exist, nor that there is unlimited room in populated areas. I claim that there is essentially unlimited room if you’re willing to travel a few hundred miles, at least in the states.
Trucking trash is pretty cheap - think about how cheap it is to transport retail goods across the country. Now think about the cost savings from not caring about the condition of the “product” on arrival.
And anyway, it’s gotta be cheaper than sending waste to China, like we used to do.
I thought actually that this was going to be the second price from the article. What's so disappointing to me is how many companies get to treat the earth as a free or nearly resource to turn into profit.
It's free in the same way that stealing is a way to get things for free. When you pay for petrol for example, the money you pay goes to the oil extractors, refiners, distributors, etc. for the transfer of oil from the ground to your car. But you're not paying the earth for the taking of those resources (carbon budget I can be considered a "resource"). It's analogous to paying for someone to steal for you.
In an efficient market, the price you pay would include a carbon tax paid to the "Earth fund", and the fund would be used to replenish the planet's resources (eg. by carbon capture and storage).
But until then, the version of capitalism we operate is one where the largest participant (planet Earth) is only being stolen from; never being paid.
That's pretty much what carbon credits are. We have them, they just need to be expanded and developed. And ideally not subverted and transformed into just another tax.
The current system, as far as I understand it, is a market. One of the better ideas I've seen governments implement. You can purchase carbon credits only to the extent other carbon credits are on the market - like people planting trees.
So do you think all the people breathing air right now are stealing it unless they first ask Mother Earth whether they may have it? What should the payment be?
Sorry, but it's not at all common sense to me. Where is the line? Am I allowed to cut down a tree on the property I own? Or is that stealing? I brought up the extreme case of breathing because it is literally putting carbon directly in the air.
How about this: The CO2 that you're breathing out right now has been bound during your lifetime, and can certainly be expected to become bound once more during your lifetime. The same cannot be said for CO2 emitted from the burning of fossil fuels.
I am the worst for not taking care if things I own.
I've noticed an increased sense of joy and satisfaction by when I, for example, wash and wax my car. Instead of just using it when I need to go somewhere spending time taking care of it reminds me i own it, that it was a large purchase and keeping clean and in proper working order is beneficial and I should be proud.
It has definitely helped me be less materialistic this past year and really appreciate the things I have purchased.
By optimizing for initial purchase price, I often find that I don't take care of my stuff because it was never that good to begin with. When I had a car I loved, I took way better care of it than other vehicles simply because I found it to be a joy to drive. Alas, good care doesn't protect against hit & run accidents. We had a good eight years together. IMO, people often don't bother to care for their belongings because their belongings just aren't worthwhile or deprecate too rapidly: you bought that PC last week? Throw it out, it's an antique.
IMO, it seems that the problem became a self-reenforcing cycle when the middle classes learned that they could optimize on price on nonessentials in order to free up money for the things they truly cared about. That caused markets to bifurcate into cheap garbage that, in a just world, would not be worthwhile at any price and luxury products priced for the wealthy. Mid-price mid-quality repairable goods mostly no longer exist.
That's a little bit like the Ikea effect where people who assemble their furntiure themselves value it more than people who don't.
This also leads onto another problem which is a lot of things you own demand attention and money throughout their life. Cars are the obvious example which demand new tyres, servicing, fuel, cleaning, their own house to be stored in, etc. Even the bookshelf that Moby Dick sits on will need dusting from time to time.
It's funny how the author frames this post in a very economic way. Personally, I would never describe reading a book as something where I'm investing and/or extracting value.
It's extra ironic that the entire issue they're describing is caused exactly by such (IMHO) over-economic thinking.
A long time ago I started computing entertainment in terms of quality hours per dollar.
So for example a good book might cost $20 but last ten hours of high quality entertainment, which is very good value at $2 per hour.
Movie tickets are not-so-good at something like $20 per hour, $40+ if I have a date and we're buying snacks.
Some computer games are ludicrously efficient. I never paid a cent for some games and played them for thousands of hours. Even factoring in the cost of the PC and electricity, we're looking at cents per hour.
Holidays are the worst, at something like $1K+ per day or $60 per waking hour.
I had to explain to the missus that we're wasting money going to a so-so restaurant on an overseas holiday. Since we've already sunk thousands into just being present at that location, and every hour was costing us Real Money, we may as well go to restaurant that's just shy of 5 stars and costs triple digits. Do the sky dive. Then do a dive under the ocean. Snowboard. See something spectacular! Otherwise, what's the point? We're burning money for what... doing nothing... but in a different part of the planet!?
Doing “nothing” in a different part of the planet is my kind of vacation. Those “spectacular” things might be there occasionally, but I don’t optimize for them.
I optimize for having a good time with people I care in places where we get know how other people live, taste what other people eat, appreciate different landscapes. I also optimize for relaxing and thinking about life, without the regular worries I have at home. Walking around to see how different cities are.
I don’t optimize for “stories to tell”, “adrenaline”, or “instagrammable moments”.
We are different people and there is nothing wrong with your view on vacations. The only issue that I see is when you try to convince your partner (I’m not sure if that’s what “missus” mean) that this a “waste of money”. “Waste” here is completely subjective. There is nothing objective about it as you seem to imply. So I would make sure that they spontaneously agree with your perspective, before trying to convince them of what is a waste of money and what’s not.
There is some merit into investing from an "hours of fulfilment resulting from the investment" perspective, but if you overdo things, it may actually spoil most of your vacations. If in every moment, you reflect what you could have done, and calculate the hourly opportunity cost instead of enjoying the moment, any money spent on being right under that clear summer sky with romantically sparkling stars on the French coast will degrade to a spreadsheet exercise.
My recommendation: use such considerations in the planning phase, but not _during_ a vacation or date! "Be here now."
I understand (and am prone to) this line of thinking, and found it most prevalent when I was doing a lot of consulting. The problem is you also start to see ALL time as money and thinking opportunity cost of everything: playing with your kids, going for a walk, doing absolutely nothing. I found it really stressful and unhealthy and it took years to break this habit.
If you watch shows like "No Reservations" a traveler who is competent in gastronomy will avoid near 5-star restaurants. They are largely copies of an international standard you could get anywhere, certainly much closer to home.
>It's funny how the author frames this post in a very economic way. [...] over-economic thinking.
He's not framing it in an economic way. It's just that the words "pay/paid" are very common conversational shorthand for "effort you have to expend". E.g. when parents often say "you have to _invest_ in your children" -- or -- "if you don't exercise consistent discipline when they're young, you will _pay_ the _price_ when they're older" ... the parents are not being clinical economists.
If you're still sidetracked by "pay/price", the alternative metaphor for the same concept is: Don't buy stuff for the "fantasy self" you're imagining. Instead, you have to be brutally honest in your self-assessment of what you will realistically use.
I.e. Don't buy a stack of cookbooks when you don't really have the motivation to cook. Thinking that the colorful photos of completed dishes will spur you to action is fantasy.
Yes, somebody might still complain that "fantasy self" is wrong because "I would never frame cooking food as a field of speculative fiction genre in literature" ... then I guess we're in a never-ending loop of focusing on the metaphor instead of the underlying message.
Thanks! I thought exactly the same. "A book costs 10 hours" ?? oh come on, no, 10 hours is the amount of time you can have the privilege of "wasting" while relaxing in a confy sofa with a cup of tea, while being entertained or learning, _thanks_ to that book. It't not a cost. It's a gift.
Some people need to learn how to relax, forget about maximizing value of everything, and just enjoy the act of doing nothing.
Framing it as paying a price to be paid might be a bit awkward, but surely the idea that we often make aspirational purchases without thinking through what it will take to actually get any enjoyment out of those items afterwards, resonates with many and has little to do with ultra-utilitarian thinking?
This is why I prefer open source software over commercial offerings. I spent years developing expertise in 3d Studio Max and Photoshop, (the second price) but from time to time have found myself in situations where I couldn't use them. These days I prefer Blender and Krita where they are almost always available. (And Linux vs Windows or Mac OS, and Kdenlive vs Premier, and the list goes on.)
I consider taking the time to learn these apps an investment.
I do the same -- that is what moved me from Matlab to Python and Windows to Linux about 15 years ago. I had no idea at the time what a blessing that move was going to be, but the principle of maximizing future freedom led me in the right direction.
I think music makers get lucky. Most of our software has reasonable copy protection. I've never had problems activating or opening something from Ableton or Native Instruments. Some people have trouble, but it's nothing like the horror stories I've heard out of other creative fields. My theory is the people at the top are mostly people who actually use the software or have at least had bad experiences with copy protection and don't want to contribute to the problem.
I don't think that's necessarily correct. Music production software isn't as dystopian partially because of the absolute market dominance of Logic Pro - anything else can't compete with it, so the last thing those companies want is more reasons for their customers to not use them.
The other reason is people making money - the vast, vast majority of people will never make money from music production or guitar plugins (not because it is inherently worse, but because a lot more people do it for fun, v/s photo or video editing). Photoshop and Premier know that a substantial amount of customers use their products to make a living.
OTOH, what you're saying is definitely true to some extent for Guitar Plugins et al. Native Instruments has a bunch of free guitar plugins, and Tonebridge is amazing, and neither have any reason to be free.
>> "I don't think that's necessarily correct. Music production software isn't as dystopian partially because of the absolute market dominance of Logic Pro - anything else can't compete with it, so the last thing those companies want is more reasons for their customers to not use them."
This is news to me. It seems like the major DAWs have each cornered a particular sub-market. Cubase for orchestral, Pro Tools for studios, Live for live electronic stuff and EDM in general. Then there are smaller ones that claim share on the weaknesses of the others: Studio One, BitWig, Reaper, FL Studio, etc. I've been in this for a long time and never got a sense that Logic Pro was more than a strong contender. And I mainly get that sense from Logic Pro users who describe it as an oft-ignored underdog.
Is your claim only an intuitive thing based on the limits of one person's perspective, or do you have some stats for it? I couldn't find anything. My view is based on accounts from people who use it. You're the first to describe it as dominant.
So time is money... Except it isn't. Instead money is a construct that is very useful for the effective exchange of goods, and not a measure of time. In fact it is just a saying, because wage slaves usually don't see much variance in how they're awarded for their time. As such money is instead an expression of supply and demand.
The time spent on making some good is merely an argument for some minimum pay, but if the thing you made is worthless to the other party, then there is no guarantee that you'll be rewarded for the effort you made over time. If all else is equal, then sure, you can save money by working faster. But there are a lot of ways to work around working faster, such as working smarter or making time into your friend, say by buying something that compounds over time.
Time, on the other hand, is a constant. Whether you "make use" of the time or not is irrelevant. Add to this that about eight hours a day is "wasted" to sleep! You only ever have a rough measuring stick as for how long you'll live, and beyond that point, time stops bearing any meaning what so ever for you, because you're dead. That is quite important, because you can't experience time when you're dead. And so, from your perspective, time stops existing until your next experience, however long that may take.
Now what does that tell you? Well, for one, it should probably tell you that time isn't nearly as valuable as folks make it out to be, though what you make out of this life is of course pretty important. And so you might value other things more than the hustle and bustle of making something faster or on time. Instead perhaps enjoy life more.
I learned this the hard way when trying to create iron nanoparticles.
I found a great deal on a fair amount of iron pentacarbonyl while I was working at LANL. It was a few dollars to buy. Later I learned that it would cost thousands of dollars to dispose of!
I wonder if you could give it to chemical plants or industrial forges that make use of it regularly. But the unknown sourcing, purity, and relatively tiny volume would probably be a total blocker - if not by company policy then by regulation. Maybe there's some kind of trial run or safety drill they can waste it on.
Well, even if you are totally oblivious to the cost to the environment (we all are at times) - there are real, immediate costs to getting read of many items.
Ask anyone how many hours they took to sell a car, house, or their art work and you can see 'ending' costs add up quickly - other items often have disposal costs like appliances and tires.
I think most of those costs for a house, car, or piece or art are only present because of an attempt to recover some of the first cost. If you just want to be rid of those things, the third cost can be quite low.
Only if you want to sell above market price, sell slightly below, and it’s gone in minutes/hours. Underprice car by 5% and put on FB marketplace, you’ll get first offer in 10 minutes and 20 offers in an hour.
This article reminds me of a book I'm reading now, "Four thousand weeks: time management for mortals"[1]. One of the repeated themes is that every choice you make to do something, you are choosing not to do any number of things at that given time. Obvious when hearing it, but it's really made me ponder about how I choose to spend my time.
Great to see this on here! Since I've started listening to it, I go around recommending the book to basically everyone. The truths in there are so simple in theory, but it's still eye opening to be confronted with them.
I really like some of the viewpoints and perspectives, but I found the material pretty thin and not worthy of an entire book. It's a dozen short blog entries stretched into several hundred pages of text. I recommend it as "skim in a few sittings" vs. read.
I think this happens with most self-help books. Most of the time it's just lecturing about a single point for a number of pages that can be summed up into a paragraph or even a sentence at times. Personally for me, the value of the long form style is that it allows the author's message to brew slowly in my head.
> With all the wonderful toys on offer, almost nobody feels like they have quite enough money, enough acquisition power
I don't have anywhere near enough money (I'm literally under the poverty line) but I definitely feel like I have enough "acquisition power." I don't want to acquire more, I want to sort through all my junk and get rid of most of it.
Figuring out how much is "enough" has been incredibly valuable to me.
It turns out I'm already quite wealthy in the categories that are important to me.
I, too, am trying to get rid of a lot of things. Not to be a minimalist or anything, but to quit feeling like I owe time to those objects and the spaces they occupy, and instead focus even more time into the things I care more about.
The third price is the total cost required to own something, independent of any utilization.
Think rent on storage units filled with unused and forgotten items. Or simply the clutter and lost useful space in a room due to the simple presence of an object.
Oh yes. Don’t under estimate how upkeep on small items can quickly escalate to require even more stuff.
Book needs new bookshelf, bookshelf needs bigger room, room need bigger house, house need lawn, lawn need lawn mower, lawn mower need garage, garage need paint job, and so on. Think about all the items you own and if you really use them or if they are there “just in case” or to support some other useless single purpose item.
Not saying you shouldn’t buy the things you enjoy and your garage might be a joy for other reasons. Just be mindful that once you reach the limit of one space, practicing one-in one-out is a very good idea. People renting storage units (not temporarily) are frankly just sad. How are you ever going to use something if it’s stowed away so deep.
> we reflexively overindulge in entertainment and other low-second-price pleasures –- phone apps, streaming services, and processed food — even though their rewards are often only marginally better than doing nothing.
But without religion or other compelling organizations or meaningful jobs, it's the most natural way for people feel a part of an experience together. There is a significant return on investment: you get to compare opinions with your family about the latest Marvel movie, or chat with your friends about the newest Taco Bell offering. Otherwise what can you talk about?
The problem isn't the presence of a "consumer society" but the absence of meaning.
This is an interesting perspective but it only applies in cases where the use case doesn't already exist. For example, shoes are exempt. Another example I like is wood working tools. I need to cut wood in a certain way; buying a miter saw (while requiring a bit of setup and on boarding) has a net negative "second price" given I'm already committed to replacing every baseboard in my house.
But I like the author's perspective, so I agree that we should at least consider the second price and prioritize purchase of items for which it is negative.
Shoes aren't exempt though. You're just paying the price as soon as you start wearing them. If you have only one pair of shoes, that's every day. But there are a lot of people with more than one pair of shoe, for different occasions, and many unworn pairs of shoes around.
I sort of understand the example about the book, but what about a video game? Certainly playing a video game doesn't count as 'paying for it' again. But in that light, the book example doesn't really make sense, at least for books that are enjoyable to read. Some books you read to get the nuggets of knowledge, perhaps for business purposes. But many books are actually enjoyable to read, at least ostensibly!
From my perspective with a bit of economic background, the author is attempting to describe opportunity cost in the most roundabout and counterintuitive way possible.
Personally, I think reading the standard definition first would be much more helpful:
I honestly think the author made a pretty bad point. Time isn't money. Instead money is a construct that is very useful for the exchange of goods. Sure, part of the argument for a price is time, but the agreed upon price is not an expression of time alone, but mostly supply and demand. That's why you are more handsomely awarded for making things that are actually in demand, and thus valuable for the other party. But sure you can measure just about anything as a "cost" if you like. Personally I find a lot of work quite enjoyable, though. So is it then a "cost" for me to endure it?
Liked the article, but did anyone else find it odd they’re asking you to do a ‘Depth Year’ in a… Facebook group?
The concept sounds appealing, but a Facebook group is one of the last places I would associate with finding ‘depth’ (Slack or Discord being a close second and third).
I definitely has a consumer addiction on buying used books, discounted games, new electronics, etc. This article is enlightening to me as it helps me to analyze my behavior. I really should only buy an item like books when the Value is > than the Cost. What it looks like right now (using used book as example):
Cost = the amount of money I bought the book
Value = the rush feeling that I have about being a reader/phantom feeling of being a little better
But actually:
Cost = the amount of money I bought the book + keeping/transporting the book + not reading it + fueling to my addictive behavior spiral
Value = none, maybe when I sell the damn thing with a profit - the time and effort = negative value
Overall, the value is far less than the cost. This article value is ++ for me.
After about a year of online shopping spree heavily induced by lockdowns, I decided to record and analyze all the purchases I made online and not surprisingly, a lot of those are either left unused or broken. This made me realize how a lot of purchases I do are really just because of impulse.
Now, I try to be more conscious about what I buy through simple accounting. I always record everything I order with my ledger. Together with that, I also have a list of the items I currently own with an indication how much I paid for it initially and how long have I been using them. Regular tracking really helps to make sense of your financial decisions.
By default I don't buy things on Amazon, but just add it to the cart, and keep in cart for weeks. I sometimes go over the cart. If there's something I truly need, it would come up often enough in mind that the next time I check cart it will make me click 'buy'.
In my experience, I eventually pay for everything three times. Once to get, once to use (to get the return), and once to dispose. I'm continually surprised at the time cost of the last one.
This second price is obvious for anyone who has downloaded a Gb worth of classic eBooks and realised their life is not long enough to read through them all.
I’ve not managed to read the article since its site’s choked. However I wonder if like some of the comments here it touches on something that has only become more stark with increasing automation and mass surveillance. That labor tends to consumption and vice versa.
These two otherwise orthonormal concepts collapse into each other in a manner perhaps related to the swings between pleasure and jouissance.
Hah, I was expecting the "second price" to be some sort of rent or bribe that had to be paid to use something that was independently procured or invented. Like planning something innovative but not having the right social capital in your org to get it approved, or inventing something but not being allowed to use it without first buying the patent rights to related inventions.
Well advocates of an optimal systems of patents (not what we have) would say the returns to society as a result of granting exclusivity are far greater than the cost. So there wouldn't be an amortized net cost to society.
Another cost is what i call “maintenance cost”. The thinking about, cleaning, repairing, recharging, moving, etc. Even a pencil. I must store it, remember where it is, take it out, clean under it, sharpen it, move it out of the way to get another thing, and finally discard it. These costs compound with each new acquisition.
What I found helpful is: Think ahead. What if I could afford it? What does acquiring this actually mean to me? Will it make me happier (however you define it). Be careful what you wished for.
The author seems to have mostly stumbled upon the old “time is money” adage.
People today have much more money (or purchasing power) than pre industrial people. They have the same amount of time.
There’s a big consequence to your behaviors whether you have more time, or more money. When you have more time, you backpack, take long buses and sleep in hostels. When you have more money than time you fly, use guided tours to do things quickly etc (all within your preferences of course)
The author then goes through the problem with what another comment described as “completionist attitude”. That’s not necessarily a good way to live your life I reckon.
There‘s this scene in the movie „Walk the Line“ (about Johnny Cash“ where John fails to correctly operate a tractor that he bought (first price) alongside with the estate he was now living on. He hadn’t spent the second price to get familiar with his estate and the tractor, which resulted with him ending up in the river, falling off the tractor. His inability of paying the second price is what gets him almost killed, and is the reason his family rallies behind him to help him get his life in order.
I could never put the concept from the scene in words, but first and second price describes this problem perfectly.
There are other dimensions of cost. Storage space consumption and the payment for rights to the space, for example. Complexity of inventory management for a second. Eventually you pay the time and attention, it not also monetary, cost of disposal.
And here I was hoping for something non-vacuous, like that you should have to pay a price when you buy something and when you dispose of it. Is it insightful now that buying stuff you won't use is a waste of money?
This is why you should always have a cooldown period before buying anything, to help avoid letting marketing influence you as heavily versus your actual needs.
