- energy: learning requires much more than the other "bad" activities like phone
- correct psychological state: procrastination is typically triggered as a response to anxiety for me, so any learning I do instead of the phone will also have this poisonous quality of guilt and fear.
- uninterrupted time
I have a problem that I take any learning way too seriously, such that it would require deliberate focused practice. Sometimes it kills all the fun, and sometimes I give up just because it takes too much energy.
Still, it's extremely rewarding for me to learn stuff, even at this age when intelligence is becoming less useful, or at least harder to monetize.
If you can replace five hours of doom scrolling with an hour of doing nothing in particular, an hour more of sleep, some time staring at a book page or soduku, some more work on chorse, you'll most likely gain an hour or so to use on something that takes mental energy.
It's never been the phone for me, particularly. I just don't pick mine up very often.
To have much more time to learn things I had to learn one key skill: systematically lose interest in syndicated American television. Other people can watch Lost, Game of Thrones, How I Met Your Mother etc.; I will use my time elsewhere.
(OK so I picked three that are widely recognised as having a major letdown as an ending, but you see my point I guess.)
Once I stopped sharing an interest in watching every episode of some show that a friend or the general zeitgeist was obsessed with, that is hundreds of hours (per show!) for a hobby.
And these days it's hobby-enabling money, because in many cases these shows are the only reason to pick up an extra streaming subscription. You can buy a good 3D printer and some filament, or an electric guitar and a little amp or headphone effects unit for less than a year's premium plan for an American streaming service, and a fully playable guitar alone costs about as much as a year's standard Netflix.
I learned this long enough ago that I have gone without a television for decades now. I had to re-learn it in the era of streaming TV. If you think you want to see one of these shows, they will be around forever so you can watch them from a hospital bed one day.
- T.H. White, The Once and Future King
Right.
If you think of the world as everything it is possible to see and experience, learning about the world won't bring torture, it will bring freedom from it.
People are less frustrated with the actually meme if it's insightful and not some pedantry.
I ended up thinking of it extremely fondly - way more fondly than I would’ve expected when halfway through. It’s one of my favorite books in spite of itself. I’d recommend it.
It takes about 2-3 years of mild practice to get good enough that you’ll routinely impress yourself, about 5 years to get good enough that you could do paid commissions.
Seems like a long time, but unless you start in your seventies you’ll have decades left of enjoying being an artist afterwards.
Language learning, for example is a huge category. You can get completely mired trying to sort out "grammar translation" versus "direct method" or "comprehensible input" approaches, the pros and cons of spaced repetition vs extensive/intensive reading, phonology & minimal pairs, picking a textbook/grammar/dictionary -- it's a lot. I imagine there are some people who are broadly interested in language learning, and don't actually use that information to actually learn a language. It might be more fun to prepare to learn a language than to get into the challenging and less fun work of actually doing it. I see the parallels with "Gear Acquisition Syndrome".
Why walk or jog of the car can do it for you?
I've even realised a few things about my own language.
It's easy to think, reading HN, that we're in some "post-knowledge" apocalypse, but that's just not the reality. It is, however, tragic that the irrationality of capitalism can be sustained so long, perhaps longer than some of us can stay solvent.
> You can learn new things. Pixel art, touch typing, 3d modelling, music, calligraphy, wood working, knitting, a language. Whatever is practical and calls to you, you can learn.
shameless plug: if you are interested in learning touch typing, i built a data driven touch typing application:
it started as a side project (combined wanting to learn typing with my desire to build a side business while working at amazon. working on this (almost) full time now
I like to learn new stuff, every day. I have found LLMs to be a godsend, here. Makes it much easier to just barge into unfamiliar territory.
Whenever I come across essays like this, I like to post The Gap, by Ira Glass[0]; one of the more encouraging short essays out there.
They do, but the shape of the way LLMs will confidently mislead you is quite different to the way misinformed humans, or even the malevolent and mendacious humans, will mislead you.
Kids are conditioned to associate learning with a formal course with a tutor culminating in exams.
It's also intentional to segregate skills, if schools taught every child basic plumbing or car mechanics for example instead of spending a month teaching something that won't get used in life, there would be less job in those fields.
It was probably written by a relatively young person.
Nice intent and advice, but in practice, mostly harder and harder to do as time passes by.
Learning for the sake of learning is one of my favorite things in life.
https://www.paulgraham.com/procrastination.html
(Except, his essay insinuates that there is some kind of brilliance at work here. In my own case, that remains to be seen.)
Never have I ever managed to accomplish anything of merit by just heading straight for it in the plainspoken sense. Some people will say that provides the basic architecture of some kind of "diagnosis", but I think it's just a normal human variance.
I'd say most of the learning is done by actually doing.
Even older kids... my 6 year old is jumping on the couch as I type this..
I like remote work but when I had to commute it was really nice to have that downtime built in to the day. I learned a lot of Dutch vocabulary on the train.
One day you will pick them up and, and most likely neither of you will know it, but it will be the last time you ever do.
Treasure everything, even the insanity.
If you are rich, you can get around this by hiring people to take care of the children, so then it could be possible, but it will still be a huge financial burden.
I’ve honestly never been able to understand this kind of thinking (uniformly ruling children as a negative because of the downsides), but I’d be curious to understand more about your perspective.
How do you weigh the joy and meaning many people find in having a family against the economic and time freedom costs?
Or the fact that societies do need to continue having children in order to: sustain economic growth, service their elderly population (that will be us in a few years to decades), maintain their armed forces, perpetuate their culture and values into the future, invest in scientific research, etc.
Are these not things you value? Or do you just see the tradeoff as not worth it?
I don't understand what the point of hiring people to take care of mine would be. That's the fun part. Makes about as much sense as going to an amusement park and paying someone to take the rides for you.
> Learning something completely new from scratch is really awful, and at this point most people are very disheartened and want to give up, which is unfortunate, because if they got back to it the next day, they’d find it’s actually gotten tangibly easier.
This certainly applies to some people, but not all people, and I suspect that the people who actually take the time to "learn new things" are those who enjoy the process. People tend to avoid things they don't enjoy, especially when those things are discretionary, so telling the people who don't enjoy the process of learning new things to do so anyway is preaching to the wrong audience.
How learning and doing aren't exactly the same and that you need to get back to it many times rather than doing a lot at once.
It's ofc nothing new and the same principle as for example spaced repetition.
I had a student come to me with essentially the same problem over two years and each time I helped her she was in refusal to listen as she stressed herself to just make it work now. Her problem was that she never took the time to do the basics and rejected any learning opportunity as it stared her in the face.
You get results over time if you dedicate yourself to just doing the thing. For many subjects there is no shortcut, no way to walk the path without actually walking it. Every time you encounter an issue there is a learning opportunity. Use it.
You follow a tutorial to do something, feel happy about it. Then you start a new project to put your new skills to good use and... Blank. No idea where to start, no idea how to proceed.
It's so important to build stuff, using references is fine, but following tutorials is not the way forward! You have to work on your own without the training wheels.
In my experience most people can do this, if they think about it a bit — identify the thing they want to learn and find a tutorial for it. Which is amazing, really; this sort of meta-knowledge is a remarkable human concept.
For me it is. Even in my domain where I’m an expert and it’s fun, it only is if I’m working on something interesting.
Sometimes distraction is the main issue when it comes to having ideas.
Once you're a little more confident (you know a bit, but not much) I suggest to modify the tutorial as you follow along, that makes the tutorial harder and gives you small challenges to overcome while still giving you general guard rails.
Then as soon as you're dangerous enough to be let loose you should pick your own projects that are slightly above your skill level. Maybe try different approaches if you're unhappy with the first result.
When I wanted to improve my comic drawing skills ca. 2009 I started drawing and publishing a daily webcomic strip for a year. That really helped.
But tutorials remain useful even if you're advanced or a pro. E.g. if you use blender a lot and a new feature comes around watching a tutorial on it is a very efficient way of getting up to speed. Of course you will watch tutorials differently from a beginner, you will pick up on different things etc.
The best way to learn is a serious project with a deadline, but if you have that deadline it will make you wish you had watched some tutorials when you had the time. Source: I teach this kind of stuff at the university level for 6 years now.
You absulutely CAN meaningfully pickup things in a day or two, especially with modern AI agents. 3D modeling is a good example, it is not that difficult! It takes some preparation not to be blocked, and good hardware, but when you actually start it goes fast.
You need a concrete goals, not some nebulous plan to learm one hour a day for years.
Do you people have to mention AI in every single subject.
In the case of 3d modeling, it did initial research, prepared software, prepared a few prototypes to kick start, prepared validation checklist, and found some tutorial videos for me.
I am learning a bit of 3D modeling in Blender so I can mod games that I like (just for private use), I do get stuck sometimes on the silliest things and Blender docs don’t help, but neither did LLMs tbf when I tried to troubleshoot issues with them. I wonder how I can make it a bit less tedious.
As well as not particularly being innate or "god-given", talents tend to emerge only when supported by learned ability. And not even just your own learned ability. Talented violinists exist only in a world that had talented violin makers: you perhaps cannot fully know how society could benefit from things you could learn.
Two of my mini-talents are things I used to think were not just difficult but actually things I would be specifically bad at, like, worse than most people. (Which may for complex reasons be a sign I would not be)
I believe it also misapprehends where the boundary between practice and consumption can sit, too, but that's a longer comment.
No matter which side of the equation you sit, try to unlearn this belief you have, and help others unlearn it.
Like, in a just having a life kind of way.
But what do I know?