- I play tennis twice a week and I inline skate twice a week (weather pending) and yesterday I commuted to and from work on inlines (first time I've done it, won't be the last, but won't be often).
Having such hobbies plus a couple of kids (now teenagers so they're somewhat less demanding of my time) means I just don't have the time to do extra hours if I'm going to get enough sleep.
And if I don't get enough sleep then the hours I do work are nowhere near as productive as those when I have had enough sleep.
Work fits around my personality. If that doesn't suit my employer, I find a new employer.
Caveats: I don't hunt the highest paying job. I'm never going to be enthusiastic enough to be chosen to lead - I've had minor management roles in the past, and they lead to, basically, being paid to either sleep less or spend less time as "not work me". Both of those options result in lower productivity.
I'm good enough at what I do to earn a living for the foreseeable future. That's good enough for me career-wise. For my physical and mental health, both of which are indicators of and contributory to happiness and longevity, I will continue to spend much of my non-working time playing tennis and inline skating and lifting weights so I can continue to do those things, that make me happy with life and the world, for as long as physically possible.
I tend not to the machine that consumes humanity, I tend to the machine that gives me my humanity.
Edited to add: I'll never be a rich man. But I will lead a rich life.
- It seems so silly to say but I too have a dream of not wanting to work. Then I can just exist. I came across this YT video about enjoying boredom. It slows down time and you do things you really want to do. I'm currently the type of person that is always plugged into noise (music, podcast, YT). It is rare that I sit in silence. But yeah I'm hoping I can save, exit working, I'll still be making stuff that I enjoy at a good pace. I have this problem where I want to share things that aren't done yet, it's early ego reward. That's the problem with YT too and attention span, things take time to do and it's about the immediate reward. I get it too, attention is a currency and people spend it where they want/deem important.
But I feel it though, the urge to grind. When I have free time I think, shouldn't I be doing/achieving something. If you quantify value by money then yeah there are dumb ways to make money like me driving Uber Eats and donating plasma (an extra 17 hrs of my life per week). I can instead spend less money and enjoy life more.
I almost think social media is the worst thing that I ran into, the points/likes aspect. Going back to sharing things that aren't real yet for the kudos. Anyway ranting. I'm thankful I became self-aware as when Facebook was new I was posting like everything about my life like "omg look at me...". Which is a double-edged sword you know, something like Instagram is how women scope you out and if you don't have a good one...
Tangent, there is also this fetishizing of productivity where you see this clean desk and a little notepad. Or some kind of setup like a minimalist laptop. The whole video is about that but not actually working ha.
- Just do the work at your body's natural pace. Your body will tell you when it's tired, when it's ready to focus, and when it's excited to work.
As with everything, the problem is hubris and impatience. So eager to prove god-like status, you stumble and fall, posting ephemeral think pieces about your "journey" on social media. Reading LinkedIn is the closest I've ever got to thinking "maybe asylums would be okay with a few reforms..."
My favorite (which I think/hope was a joke) was the guy cooking chicken breast in his hotel coffee maker to "show his commitment to the company" and how hard he was willing to grind.
- > I think hustle-culture and the vision being pushed on my timeline is a corrupted one.
A satirical video which I think captures some of the frustration: "The Hustle" by Krazam - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_o7qjN3KF8U
> Machine Head - Derek Hobbs 1995
For anyone else a little nerd-sniped, the ASCII art head is 54,505 bytes, <=300 chars wide, 182 lines tall, using 20 distinct characters... But then I get hung up on what an equivalent picture could be, since the characters aren't just levels of greyscale intensity, but also contain internal detail that would then take more pixels to describe.
My original motive was something like: "If this were a PNG it would have only taken a much smaller X bytes."
- This is something that hit me during my master thesis the first time: I was entirely free to choose my work time, work mode. Since the prof was very hands-off too, only the result after 6 months mattered. That was quite the weird time. But it taught me some pieces about work-life balance and choosing what is 'enough work', as well as giving your brain time off, or time on something else to work through more complex topics and to recharge.
This is also why I honestly enjoy being a salaried employee. My employer buys 40 hours a week from me. Right, some weeks it's 50 and the next week only 30. Some weeks need a machine just executing, some weeks need more careful thought.
I could optimize it for more monetary output, but at the moment it is a predictable, usually not-painful thing with decent monetary output for personally more interesting subjects. I've found appreciation of this.
- I recommend reading the Happiness Files, by Arthur Brooks.
It contain great advice, including on how to handle your professional life. But even more importantly, I feel the world would be a better place if more people followed its advice. A world full of happy people would be a world that runs far better.
- I have trouble figuring what this is about. You could read it as „don’t fall for hustle culture“ or „don’t work hard, work smart“ which is just a different version of hustle culture. May also be a warning on AI and the cost of trying to stay afloat.
- If you are only useful, you will be used until you not useful anymore. Make relationships that care about you even after you’ve become worn out. Make things that pay off even after you’re done making.
- I am lucky that most of my career happened before linkedin/X, so I never developed the urge or the instinct to broadcast my supposed successes to my network's timelines.
In my 20s, I wasn't immune to the need to promote myself: everyone in our team was supposed to write up his/her achievements each week and we would discuss these write-ups at our weekly meeting. I would use that opportunity to blow my own horn. I hope, however, I never crossed over into cringe-land like you see now.
Now I just program for fun: I don't do it on anyone else's schedule or to promote myself, because I don't expect to be paid.
- Genius does what it must.
Talent does what it can.
You do what you're told.
Now get back to work.
- A quote shared by a close friend and mentor -
Apparently an elderly Irish musician said this as he was tuni g his instrument - "I've learnt that the secret to being happy is to not get personally involved in your own life."
- > "Hustle-culture optimizes for work input because it's sexy. It's easy to post the inputs. It's hard to face the output"
Amazing
- > Don't become the machine.
> ...our company just graduated from the YC Fall 2025 batch.
- Often there is a bell shaped curve where productivity peeks at a point and bigger efforts after that make you actually less productive overall. In my personal experience most projects are a marathon not a sprint. Always sleep the 8-9 hours necessary to feel full-rested. I'm most productive in the morning so I try to work every day during mornings but since in the afternoon I'm a lot less productive I've decided I can allocate that time to entertainment and social activities. My entertainment and social activity tend also to be along learning new things.
- > Hustle-culture optimizes for work input because it's sexy. It's easy to post the inputs. It's hard to face the output.
Hustling is sexy insofar as the output is sexy imo. What hustlers miss is that working hard is only cool if the work you do makes sense - work for its own sake is one of the most uncool things there is. And I also think that willingness to work hard comes on its own if you find something meaningful; reading on how to work hard is like treating symptoms (you don't work hard) rather than actual cause (you don't have anything to work hard on). Getting up at 5am to go to the gym then manage.your 500 dollars of crypto portfolio you don't understand anything about is the epitome of finance bro that everyone cringes about.
- Around 2019 it became clear to me how much I was underestimating how quickly AI would "take over" and "take credit" for the parts of my identity I wanted to keep (engineering, design taste, invention for example).
But it also made me realize that because I was always at the tip of my chosen curve of tech adoption, I was also the first to be feeling the existential dread that would soon permeate the lives of everyone living a life even tangentially touched by tech.
(I think the author is ahead of the curve too).
But I feel this post identifies the problem and then compounds it with this line:
> This messaging works. Look at me. I feel the need to write a post about it. But it is completely wrong.
I would counter that (intentional) "ignorance is bliss". If you want to play the VC grind hustle game, do it, but be intentional about checking in and checking out, and don't let it into your identity. And don't write posts like this.
It might "feel" dishonest to operate like this, but the alternative is doom, because you are fighting against demons that don't actually exist. I think more and more people will realize this over the coming years -- we are only now starting to react to the personal problems caused by immersion in social media.
This also reminds me of a good piece by PG: https://paulgraham.com/identity.html
- The most important thing is not to have a purpose. Machines will always outdo you in optimizing for a goal function.
Don't follow rules and if you really need to, make your own and never tell them to anyone. Keep people guessing and change your mind often. Never ask opinions. They are useless and if you never ask people think you know better.
What you know you think and feel are not what you think and feel but dead remnants of your past thoughts and hunches. You have no personality but an ever evolving process that changes instantly to fill the areas you think are not you or your interest.
- Very relevant talk by Osho: https://youtu.be/OGM7VFeLRyQ?si=ecB_6L8IRgIT4LD1 Efficiency is a quality of machines.
- > Try to find the most rewarding solution.
This sentence gave me pause and I’ll be chewing it over in my mind for awhile, I think.
- This post is essentially the premise of the Adam Curtis series “All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace.”
- echoing this sentiment. I really do believe at some level there is strength/wisdom in being able to step away from a problem and return to it from a new perspective despite of what narratives are being pushed online by hustle
- > Only a slave quantifies its existence through productivity
> If I can turn myself into a mechanism that takes input and consistently works towards some goal...
This is, in fact, a quasi-religion, if you think about it. Its central dogma is that humans are no different from machines, so we can be reduced to automatas with well-defined inputs, outputs, productivity and other measurable metrics.
would be its motto.*Productivity is your heart, Corporation is your body and GDP is your god* - The constant anti work agenda that is thrown in your face if you use almost any social media is so annoying.
Have these anti work people ever considered that maybe some people actually like work and labelling them as slaves is insulting?
- > I was recently recommended a YouTube video with the following title:
> "Ligma balls"
I don't know what I've expected from the article, this is your typical run of the mill tech/linked-in bro fart in the wind. How to write a page and not say anything at all.
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- This feels like a good second draft. There's definitely a message in here, but it shifts through the piece. To me, the most poignant sentence was " If I can just keep chugging forward, I will end up somewhere that is not here." I think the message is "Why are you working this hard? What do you hope to get out of participating in hustle culture; to what end?
- Anthony Jackson interview from 1992:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IS-xDsic84Q
Please listen to it.
> The machines are here.
> We have to live with that. Things are different.
> Hopefully, if one has done his homework, one can continue to pick and choose what to do.
> If you keep your skills up, there is a place for you. If you don't, then there isn't. Very simple equation.
> I will not permit myself to be outplayed by someone using the machine.
---
Anthony Jackson is regarded as one of the most talented bassists that ever lived. He did, in fact, outplayed the machine, re-invented his own tone and technique, and proved over and over again that synthesizers could not do what he did. Synthetisers could replace thousands of pop musicians (they still do), but not him.
So yeah, do the grind. Don't break the machines, don't bow to them. Instead, outplay them. Keep your skills up, so you are free to pick and choose.
- The very basic (but incorrect) assumption that the “grind never stops” people rely on is
more hours == more productivity
It’s not. If you’re sleep deprived you’ll produce shit, which you’ll probably have to redo later. Sleep properly, produce more in less hours.
But hey, at least your colleagues think you’re busy because you’re last to leave redoing your shitty work!
Edit: read The Brain at Rest by Jebelli, don’t work yourself to death
- "Quite an experience to live in fear, isn't it? That's what it is to be a slave."
- Remember that on the Internet the majority of people are telling you:
- dating is hard
- loneliness is an epidemic
- they’ve got untreated trauma
- society is the cause of all this
Do you want to select your advice from a population the majority of whose life sucks? Getting self-help advice out of a population which can’t help itself is a prima-facie idiotic idea.
- I know many people who are full on into hustle culture and they don't care to optimize their productivity.
the hustle is being strategic, work smart not hard, fake till you make it, lie and be ruthless and amoral
It's kind of disgusting...
Edit: Actually, I don't know many such people. Just 2-3 maybe. But it feels like many