You may think that's a long list...but it isn't. If you had all the free time in the world, you'd get bored of it within a few years. Most of the things you mention, are things you do in the background as you live your life. You might as well say "Go to the grocery store", yeah its an activity, but that's not really the point.
The thing I see from your post is that you like to explore...which can be summed up as one thing. You might enjoy doing this for 1-2 hours in your spare time, but you'll get tired of it, if you had nothing but the free time. It's like eating ice cream, if you eat nothing but ice cream, you'd grow to hate it eventually.
So far I still find grocery stores incredibly exciting. I find it slightly bewildering that people get bored of a store with hundreds of thousands of products.
You may think that's a long list...but it isn't.
Remember when I said hundreds of thousands of things? That still stands. I'm not going to spend the rest of my life cycling through what I just posted; that's just a sampling of the last month of my life. There are hundreds of thousands of things, but it's ridiculous of you to think I'll write all hundreds thousand down in front of you. Sorry. Not a priority.
Or, put another way: So far in my life I've never gotten bored, my parents have never gotten bored, and my grandparents are still traveling the world every week and getting excited, so I'm not worrying too much.
Well what I was looking for was for you to say something like: jump out of an airplane, go scuba diving, drive an F1 car. You know a list of different things. You pretty much just said "Go exploring" a dozen times.
Again: I listed the things I did this month, from my house, with a handful of friends. I won't even try to make a list of super-exciting experiences because there are so many things. When the possibilities range from "learn to sumo wrestle" to "take a silent 10-day meditation retreat in the mountains" to "fire machine guns at things", it's stupid to name everything within that range. The point I was trying to make was that I could be satisfied even with the little exciting things for a long, long time.
Isn't jumping out of an aeroplane exploring? It is exploring a different experience and so are all the things you mentioned and I think that was the point of his post, go find out what is our there so that you may experience different things.
I used to read some developers' personal blogs and every time they posted a photo, I'd feel some weird envy, even when it was stupid photos. "Oh, man, he and a friend went to buy some milk! I hate that I'm inside living a boring life!"
There's a difference between being bored and thinking, erroneously, that your life is boring. It's much easier to complain about being bored than it is to actually be bored.
You seem to be saying that if you're bored, it doesn't mean your life is boring. But if you say your life is boring, does it mean you're bored, or only that your life is boring, or omg neither and can you even be bored if your life is not boring ooohh..
Or maybe you're saying that when someone complains about being bored, he's not actually bored but just thinks he is?
"Twist" this? I'm trying to answer your question. It's not worth cheating in an online dick-waving contest.
I'm saying, very clearly, that complaining about being bored doesn't automatically make your life boring, not when you have the choice of being bored or not. When I spent all day reading other people's blogs, I was missing the fact that they were probably spending just as much time online as I was. The instant I started walking out the door in the morning, I realized the only thing keeping my life boring was me.
Let's end this line of conversation here, as neither of us benefits from it.
> Let's end this line of conversation here, as neither of us benefits from it.
Good idea.
> I realized the only thing keeping my life boring was me.
All along, I wanted to point out that you contradicted yourself, which was most likely quite apparent to you too.
Claiming that you (and your parents etc) have never been bored in your lives when it's just not true (by your admission too) is, well, disingenuous at best, especially when you do it to embellish how magical your life supposedly is. Your chronicling of all the QuirkyMagical things you've supposedly done felt a bit off too.
We're pretty much all computer nerds here, and we've all wasted quite a bit of our lives feeling bored and sorry for ourselves.
If you've managed to turn your life around and stop wasting time, that's great for you, but to the rest of us, what you've been saying here feels too pretentious, dishonest, or like "rubbing it in", or highlighting your own awesomeness, and none of these things is very classy.
It could be that I'm all alone in thinking this, or it could be that no one else just wanted to say anything, because this is HN and we're all serious and business-like, and you're an intelligent and eloquent fellow.
I wasn't participating in a dick-waving contest though. I just couldn't help but think that you knew exactly what I meant to point out a couple of messages earlier, hence the "twist".
The thing I see from your post is that you like to explore...which can be summed up as one thing. You might enjoy doing this for 1-2 hours in your spare time, but you'll get tired of it, if you had nothing but the free time. It's like eating ice cream, if you eat nothing but ice cream, you'd grow to hate it eventually.