My dad was a busy construction contractor. One summer he tore himself away from work and took the family to a week long boat camp out next to a big beautiful lake. It turned out that our campsite was actually in the lake by a few inches at high water, but dad saw a way to dam it off and keep it dry, so he grabs the shovel and starts digging trenches and building walls and ordering us around.
About an hour into that, pouring sweat, he stops cold and says "what the hell am I doing?" The flooded camp was actually nice on a hot day and all we really had to do was move a couple of tents. He dropped the shovel and spent the rest of the week sunbathing, fishing, snorkeling and water skiing as God intended. He flipped a switch and went from Hyde to Jekyll on vacation. I've had to emulate that a few times.
My spouse and I dealt with this on our honeymoon. We were both working 50-80 hour weeks for months leading up to our trip. The first day we got to this all-inclusive resort we spent the whole time trying to min/max and be as efficient and calculated as possible. It was a stressful, miserable day.
Day two we looked at each other, had an adult beverage with breakfast, and relaxed for the rest of the trip.
Growing up in a quaint rural town where high-powered people from NYC liked to "get away", this is very common situation, and the inability to disconnect and adopt a slower attitude was, IMO, the primary cause of friction between the weekenders and the locals. They would physically get away from the city, but were unable to mentally release the blend of Type-A competitive neuroses that helped them get ahead in the city but just made them come off as obnoxious in this slower, quieter place.
I've found myself in this mode before, too. A couple of years ago I was preparing for weeklong wilderness backpacking trip with some friends. I'd recently quit my high-stress job to take some time off, and I had a few new pieces of gear I wanted to test before relying on them on a longer trip. When I looked at the calendar, though, every weekend before we were to leave was already spoken for.
I was worrying about it to my wife, trying to decide whether I'd just have to use the old worn out gear or risk it with the new stuff, when she stopped me: "why don't you just... go on Monday?" It took me a second to even get what she was saying—I was still so much in work-all-the-time-mode that my brain didn't even consider whatsoever the possibility that I could just... go off and go camping on a weekday. I was really baffled for a moment, and I've reflected on that a bit since, it's funny how you can be trapped in your own default operating mode and not even realize it.
I'm not really a resort person. But I do subscribe to some travel feeds mostly in the vein of maybe finding some places/attractions/restaurants/etc. that I'm not familiar with. The number of hyper-scheduled spreadsheets I see is amazing. Doesn't mean I don't often have some itinerary and even book some particular, popular attractions/venues. But the 30-minute block scheduling is something I do for work (if that).
ADDED: I'll just add that I created a loose spreadsheet for a ~week-long NYC trip with (I think) just one timed admission for a recently reopened museum and no times otherwise. I think I ended up dynamically scrawling over the printout with changes for most of the trip.
I was like this but maybe not as stressful as you described. Still, I wanted to do stuff and see stuff during vacation.
After having kids, my habit changed. Now we enjoy going to local parks and walking around with no goals during vacation. This wonderful attraction? Nah we don't need to see it. If we can walk there, then maybe.
Arizona, Lake Havasu, triple digit temperatures. We spent more time in the water than out of it. Us kids loved the flooded camp because of the tiny fish that would swim up and nibble on our toes. It tickled. The camp was boat access only, and there were a few million acres of desert wilderness higher ground to move up to. The water rose gradually and the tents never got wet.
The bigger problem with that camp was the rattlesnakes. I killed one with the shovel and felt grown up.
Many years ago, I had a technical manager who never felt any pressure to be the first to come up with the answer to a question or the solution to some problem. If I was having a technical conversation with him, and we arrived at a particularly subtle or complex issue, he could go completely silent, just staring straight ahead with his fingers to his lips. I would find it very uncomfortable, and I would start blurting out half-baked ideas to fill the silence, but he would either raise his finger or (usually) just ignore me. This could go on for 30-60 seconds, at which point he might shrug and say "I don't know" or, more likely, have a pretty well formed idea of how to move ahead.
I used to joke to my co-workers that during those silent interludes, he was swapping in the solution from a remote disk.
This manager also typed with one or two fingers, and pretty slowly too. But he wrote a lot of good code.
I often do this in meetings and have gotten into the habit of saying "I'm thinking". It's not much but it gives both of us time to think and explicitly makes it clear I don't expect the person to say something. I think that helps.
"Give me a second" is something I say when someone just has to break the silence with some unproductive comment. Having 20-30 seconds to think silently should be a completely normal thing.
I that once in a technical interview and got the job (just paused for 30 seconds until the answer came to me). I think they expected a 15 minute process of problem solving.
If I recall correctly the question was something like:
You are sitting recording cars by their license plate as they drive down a road. You only have N spots on your worksheet. You can overwrite spots as many times as you need to. By the end of the day you must have an unbiased sampling of cars that have driven by you. How do you record the cars?
Nice statistical problem! I only thought of a solution that is valid for many cars and few worksheet spots. Were you able to fully solve it on the spot?
I have far more trust for people willing to say this.
> I would start blurting out half-baked ideas to fill the silence
I find that I'm more likely to do this but try to make an effort to stop. There's times to spitball but we should also spend time thinking. And let's be real 30-60s is not that long
> This manager also typed with one or two fingers, and pretty slowly too. But he wrote a lot of good code.
I'll be honest, this is the big reason I don't get all the hype around coding agents. I do find them useful but typing isn't the bottleneck. Not even close. Plus, while typing is when I'm doing my best debugging and best simplifying.
I find it absolutely is much of the time - I'll determine the architecture/overall solution, know exactly what needs to go in a multitude of files, and now actualizing all that isn't really thinking anymore, just donkey work. Getting AI to do this has been incredible now that it's finally good enough. I've had Copilot make flawless 500+LOC C++ classes in the first pass, and when I introduced bugs by changing it by hand, it found them instantly from stack traces without even having symbols, saving me hours. I see a future where writing a large codebase all by hand is seen like raising a barn the Amish way with no powertools - impressive and maybe there's something to be said for it philosophically, but just not practical otherwise.
If shrug-guy is anything like me, he sat there blurting out half-baked ideas and then shooting them down all in his internal monologue, instead of out loud.
For me, I sometimes feel like I'm an old school chess engine, exploring as many possible moves/ideas as I can - as many steps into the future as time allows. Constantly evaluating them based on some known-simplified fitness function usually involving pattern recognition from past experience in similar problems. Eventually I arrive at a place where I'm either confident I know a reasonable way forward (and why some of the obvious ways forward are unlikely to be ideal) - or I've scatter-gun searched all of the quickly available ideas and discovered I have no idea if some of them are good or bad, and I need to do much deeper research and investigation of the problem.
From the outside, that'd look identical to "he could go completely silent, just staring straight ahead with his fingers to his lips"
> I'll be honest, this is the big reason I don't get all the hype around coding agents. I do find them useful but typing isn't the bottleneck. Not even close. Plus, while typing is when I'm doing my best debugging and best simplifying.
As you sort of point out between the lines, it depends on what you work on. I had an AI agent rewrite some ancient (and terrible code) which had stopped working because the v1 of an api on v3 was sunset. It took around 5 minutes out of my day, and most of those were having two people explaining to me where the code was and what they thought had happened to make it break. It would've like taken me a full day to fix without AI because I would have needed to understand things first, and because it was quite a lot of code.
The result wasn't very good, but it was better than what was before, and since that had run for years without anyone tuching it, well... good enough. Heck, it might've taken me more than a day because I doubt I would have left it at "wasn't very good".
Aside from this anecdote I think AI writes a good 80% of my code these days. I'm not sure I buy the whole "bottleneck or not" discussion around typing. I think for a lot of people, myself included, AI does 10x part of the process of writing software. Where it doesn't help is when you need to do computer science, and as you point out, those parts AI don't speed up. I sometimes still use AI for computer science parts, but in those situations the AI will be a rubber duck because I tend to think by talking out my own ideas, and at least the AI duck pretends to answer. Even if the answer is more useless than what the actual rubber duck comes up with, which it usually is, it's more immersive for me.
> I'll be honest, this is the big reason I don't get all the hype around coding agents. I do find them useful but typing isn't the bottleneck. Not even close.
It's always possible to go slower for practically no cost. -- So, any benefit from going slower is obtainable for everyone.
Whereas, typing faster takes discipline and effort. There are diminishing benefits to putting in more effort to type faster.
The main benefit isn't so much "more output" so much as "reduced latency". e.g. It takes less time to type out queries that help you gather information.
I do this a lot as well. I have a bad habit of just freezing physically when I start to think. Since my work is conducted over video, my colleagues will often think I dropped off the call XD
Personally I find it a bad habit of mine, I have no idea how people gracefully take time to think. Whenever I do say something like “hold on, let me just think for a moment” my brain completely freezes and I get no thinking done.
I worked with a guy that operated like this, a technical expert in a very specialized domain. You'd ask him a question - he'd just stare at you in silence for 60s or more, and then give a very well-considered answer that you couldn't get from anyone else in the world.
His manager was used to this and sort of enjoyed the mystique of this monk-like expert that he was responsible for.
I once was in a meeting where we had to talk to the great expert on the phone. Let's just say his name was Otto. Of course, he worked remote quite often, in the days before Zoom. His manager calls him and puts the phone on speakerphone for the room to hear.
Manager: Otto, we need your input on <long technical problem>.
<60 seconds of silence>
Otto: Yes, I think that might work, but you'll run into <other problems>.
Manager: Well, yes, we've considered that, but <explanation>
A few minutes of reasonably normal conversation ensues between the assembled group and Otto. Then:
Manager: Well, I think then that this is a pretty good solution, as long as Otto agrees.
Manager looks around the table, clearly waiting for Otto's concurrence
<60 seconds of silence>
<90 seconds of silence>
<120 seconds of silence>
People are starting to get uncomfortable. The manager makes a reassuring face. This is normal for those of us that work closely with the great expert, do not lose faith.
<240 seconds of silence>
Manager briefly lets slip a concerned look, then quickly hides it
By coincidence I also finished The Fellowship of the Ring about two weeks ago.
I have always had the intuition about reading speed that it is very easy to be a speed reader if you skim over things. I've always questioned how much of speed reading is just skipping stuff and filtering for the most important word tokens.
You could skip all of Tolkien's scenery descriptions, you could skip Tom Bombadil and Lothlorien and still know basically what happened to Frodo and where he's going. But that's not really the point. When I read a book of that much importance, I've always read every word and understood every sentence. I get easily distracted and often have to reread passages. I am not a fast reader. Tolkien's descriptions are not always that easy. But this is what I find so rewarding about reading in the first place.
However, when I'm reading an article online, the difference is stark. When I read articles, I usually start from the bottom and read backwards. That's my way of finding out the results, and then piecing together how much context I actually need to understand it. Maybe I should slow that down sometimes.
Although people think LoTR as a novel meant for younger people, it certainly is not an Tolkien never meant it that way and it certainly is not an easy text. It is far more complex than any fantasy I have ever come across. Tolkien was a top language scholar who spoke several even dead languages, so there’s a lot more going on than just the surface plot of Frodo “returning” Bilbo’s ring. One would be mad to simply skim it through.
> Tolkien was a top language scholar who spoke several even dead languages, so there’s a lot more going on than just the surface plot of Frodo “returning” Bilbo’s ring.
If you want to see it then way Tolkien saw it, probably the best way is to get through all that unimportant stuff involving rings and battles as quickly as possible to get to the appendices where Tolkein spent his time thinking about the history and etymology and even neat little details like how the calendar worked in the Shire...
Reminds me of an ah-ha! moment I had as a kid playing a text adventure game on my C64. I was stuck for a while and tried to find alternative ways forwards. I typed in "cheat" and it replied "OK, you win!" and ended the game.
One might also argue that The Little Prince is "far more complex" and deeper than anything written at a typical adult reading level. That lower linguistic surface complexity allows more space for the reader to explore ideas and themes.
I'm skeptical. Is there no more value to series like Gormenghast, Book of the New Sun, and The Second Apocalypse, beyond mere literary masochism, compared to LotR? Like them or not, LotR, as elaborate as its mythology is (if you include Silmarillion and some or all of the History of Middle Earth), is not at the same level.
I've read that Tolkien wrote There and Back Again / The Hobbit as a book for his children. Then he started writing what would become The Fellowship of The Ring for his kids, but he quickly realized that the story was taking many dark turns and that he was best served by moving away from writing it as a book for his kids.
I think both ways of reading are fine. Sometimes you just want to get on with the plot, other times you want to immerse yourself. Or maybe you always just want to get on with the plot, which is fine, just don't complain about the book being boring, it just wasn't for you. Which is how I feel about Lotr. But at the same time, rushing over the songs, boring parts with Tom etc is also how I managed to make it work for me.
I've been reading "Terminal Alliance", a light, humorous s.f. novel. After reading tfa I've slowed down and after all it's Christmas holidays, what's the rush? Even reading this inconsequential novel more slowly has allowed me to enjoy the details more. The metric in online discussions is always how many books you read, but this is a reminder that that's not the point.
The title, about "default settings" being "too high" makes me want an example from a technical domain, though.
Imagine if Tolkien was writing Fellowship last decade, and the book landed on your hands today. No decades of cult growing, no adaptations or explosive marketing, some word of mouth. Would you think it "much important" before reading it? What makes the importance?
In my opinion it's the prose. It's always the prose. Always gotta be on the lookout for good writers, new and old.
I thought I was crazy for reading articles backwards, but it really does help to build a better picture of what's being shared or reported.
I find that a lot of journalists like to pack their writing with fluff before they even reach the subject of the headline, a lot like recipe blogs sharing their life stories before finally reaching the instructions, as if the recipe is only secondary or tertiary to the background given.
This is why I appreciate articles that include bullet points or a TL;DR right at the beginning to summarize. For anything really long that I'm just not interested in reading fully and only want the main points, I use an LLM with the URL to summarize briefly.
While there's so much value in slowing down as the OP wrote, I feel as if journalists want you to lend the same pace to them for all the time of ours they waste. It's like they forget how much information is available to us and how unimportant it all is.
I find walking can be a similar experience. It really crystalized for me this summer while walking the Camino de Santiago because of the effect of exploring another country. When you walk, you see everything. The world is huge. Everything is slower, higher fidelity, and for me, richer. You can spend an entire day walking from one town to another. Think of everything you will see! Compare this to driving. Driving is like compression. You could drive between the same two towns in less than an hour. You may see many beautiful things while driving, but the experience is fleeting and momentary. You will miss so many details along the way.
As always, there are tradeoffs, and you can't walk everywhere or always have these types of mindful experiences. On the other hand, life is short and perhaps paradoxically, slower experiences can yield richer days.
For the same reason I have decided I don't like fast travel in games. The whole thing becomes this strange distorted reality where the travel nodes and their immediate surroundings are over represented in your mental model but most of the rest of the map is blank. Now I don't think games should get rid of their fast travel systems But I find that enjoy the game world a lot more without them and think every one should try.
The first time I did this was the breath of the wild zelda game, I got to the point in the tutorial where they teach you to fast travel and said, "no I don't want to" so I spent the whole game slow traveling around, planing my trips enjoying the scenery finding new routes , Just bumming back and forth across the map enjoying the game and all it's corners in small slices each night, it took me a couple months to get complete and it was great.
My current phase of this madness is Valheim with no portals and no map. and wow it is an experience. With no map you get this hyper distorted view of the landscape the other way around, it is still based on what you can navigate easily but stuff like shorelines and terrain features are over represented and forests are these scary black boxes. Fog is very very scary, more than once fog has rolled in and I got so lost that I have had to say "well I guess I am living here now." I am currently having fun trying to figure out how to use the in game tools as surveying instruments to make my own hand drawn maps.
> For the same reason I have decided I don't like fast travel in games.
I was playing Wing Commander, Privateer way back when (mid-1990's) and didn't realize that there were ways to travel faster. So I did the obvious: I pretended I was a trader on a long haul route, dug out some books and notebooks, and just did whatever until I arrived at my destination or was attacked by pirates. I loved the passive game play in the moment, but I didn't realize how much until about a decade later. That kinda ruined gaming for me in general since games tend to keep the player busy (even if they aren't action games).
In some respects, I think that slow travel offers a sense of authenticity to the game. Well, I should say to some games. Many games set out goals for players. It's obvious why. If there is nothing to accomplish, there is little sense of accomplishment. Yet goals also ruin things in my mind since there is an urgency to get things done to see what the outcome is. Of course, games also reward following up on that urgency. That's contrary to real life where you may be rewarded or you may have to wait upon the rewards.
Valheim does that so well. The feeling of walking through an unfamiliar forest and stumbling across a faint trail that you made weeks ago, knowing that it will eventually lead you back to your old base and thus back to where you were trying to get to before you got lost…
Reading the Reddit for the game, filled with people complaining that the portal system is too restrictive and forces them to make upwards of three long boat trips over the course of the game is a bit sad. It’s as though they expect the fun to happen when they finish everything, but the fun all happens while you’re actually playing the game.
The hardcore mode of Kingdom Come: Deliverance really made me appreciate the game (although that's the only way I played it). It became a very immersive experience.
Valheim without a map would be a bit too much for me. No way to quickly escape to some safe green pastures sounds too stressful :).
I do agree, playing open world games without fast travel can be a bit of a slog though. I considered playing Skyrim without fast travel but many of the quests make you run half way across the map and back multiple times.
Without fast travel you’d be forced to plan your trips more and bundle all the tasks in an area which would be cool. But it’s probably too much to ask for the general public who will see it as annoying.
There is a great meditation in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance about the differences between riding and driving. Being open to the elements, in and a part of nature, is visceral. Bubbled in a car, our surroundings are observed more than experienced. That's always resonated for me.
That’s a book I’ve been taking my time with. Read a bit every few weeks. Found the part about visual memory mechanics resonated: I have to spread everything out and see it when doing mechanic work.
No to doing books via audiobook because I see the words in my head and it’s massively distracting. Cool if it works for others I guess but like the mechanic excerpt above… not for me.
I like thinking about the scales of speed and the impact it has on one's experience.
I used to fly fairly regularly between Germany and Italy. I'd get on a plane in Munich and get off in Florence, going from a very "German" place to a very "Italian" place. A few years ago I started driving the route, and I was surprised just how much gradation there is between the cultures.
As an American, I always thought of "Italians" and "Germans" as very distinct cultures, but then you drive through Südtirol (or Alto Adige, if you're feeling Italian, the northern most province of Italy) and it feels quite Germanic. Then gradually, as you continue south, you hear more Italian, see more Italianate architecture and place names. Similar story for Alsace between France and Germany.
Of course none of this is all that surprising knowing the history of these areas, but it is very interesting to experience in-person.
I'm sure most places and cultures are like this, even when we think of of them as quite distinct. When you only fly between major cities, you lose so much of the wonderful overlap.
Had the same feeling a while ago, I called it the teleportation effect. From the moment you reduce the time needed to go somewhere, you alter the experience to a point that it's not recognizable. Not to say that it's not nice to see the mountain from the sky for one hour but it is an other thing to go through them.
Something to break the teleportation is obviously to make breaks and enjoy where you are (a lake not too far on the road, any viewpoint...). Plan in advance, have a tent, be ready to not reach your target in one day and you will enjoy a much better a road trip than a train, a plane or even the highway.
Completely agree. I don’t have a car anymore so I walk a lot, and my mental image of the streets is so much more in depth now to the point I could visualise streets down to the stickers on poles.
I love walking and couple of years ago I moved to LA. I fucking hate how hard to walk in this city. I always knew I liked walking but I didn’t realize how crucial it was for mental health (I grew up around Europe, purely on walkable cities and didn’t get my driving license until 30,years old or something)
There was a man who was afraid of his shadow and disliked his footprints. So he tried to get away from them.
He ran, but the faster he ran, the more numerous his footprints became, and his shadow kept up with him without lagging behind.
Thinking he was going too slowly, he ran faster and faster, until he collapsed and died of exhaustion.
He did not realize that if he had simply stayed in the shade, his shadow would have disappeared, and if he had sat still, there would have been no footprints.
And another one [0]:
My hut lies in the middle of a dense forest;
Every year the green ivy grows longer.
No news of the affairs of men,
Only the occasional song of a woodcutter.
The sun shines and I mend my robe;
When the moon comes out I read Buddhist poems.
I have nothing to report, my friends.
If you want to find the meaning, stop chasing after so many things.
If you’re a fan of LOTR but don’t fancy reading it aloud yourself, I’d really recommend the new audio versions read by Andy Serkis. While I don’t vibe with every facet of his performance, overall it’s a tour-de-force, and really makes the prose come to life. Especially in those descriptive sections that it’s possible to glaze over when reading the text. Having an actor of the calibre of Serkis reading them to you brings out the poetry and beauty of Tolkien’s language.
Noooo. Audio books feed you the content at someone else’s pace, not at your (slow) pace, which is exactly what TFA advocates. Or, what are you going to do? Hit Pause after each sentence so you can fully digest and savor it?
Listening to someone talking is how humanity transmitted culture and stories for tens of thousands of years. The fact that "we" cannot tolerate it anymore, is a sign of how badly our brains are being reshaped (or maybe damaged) by screens.
Not the OP, but to me audio generally x2 slower than I read, so I’m content with the speed, anything slower than that would be weird pace for many stuff.
Having said that yes I do indeed pause if I need to take a moment to think, and I roll back 15 seconds if I want to hear it again. Not a big deal, just part of the experience. -signed ex-hater of audiobooks
First of all, I don’t recommend going through life yucking someone else’s yum.
Second of all, I took TFA advice and read that article with the slowness and deliberate attention it recommended and found it to be trite and difficult to distinguish from AI slop… but if that’s what brings this person joy, good for them.
Who cares if the GP eats their cookies in one bite and listens to their audiobooks at 2.25x speed? Because one self help guru turned blogger said it’s a bad idea?
I hate audiobooks because they're way too slow and full of moods/tones that often contradict how I would have read it. I can't be the only one who thinks they're overindulgent and annoying.
for lotr in particular my last reread was slower paced because I kept this map[0] open and paused frequently to refer to it and see where everyone was. it was super enjoyable, I have literally read the book dozens of times before that and have never gotten so good a sense of the world's geography and the difficulty of various journeys.
Music is an interesting case. You can't slow down the consumption of music (you have to let it play at the speed the performer intended), but you can dial up the attention you give it. Listening with headphones, eyes closed, and phone+doorbell etc. switched off would be close to max. Sitting at a live concert (I am thinking classical) is up there too, because you've given yourself permission to not think of/work on anything else in that time. For music, we can say that the default settings are too LOW.
And similar to the point OP made, you get more out of it when you attend more closely. And similarly, most music does not withstand this level of scrutiny.
I've taken the time to rebuild a large music collection locally. I've adopted every CD collection my friends and family have set aside to rust. It's immensely satisfying to scroll a gigantic list of 40,000 tracks and just pick whatever feels good, knowing I'm not contributing to a profile on my listening habits and that the file will instantly play flawlessly.
I have some excellent garage band CDs that probably have two or three copies still in the wild at most. Unfortunately sometimes the 25 year old burned CDs are missing the TOC data, but even the recovery process is satisfying.
You certainly do not need to play music at the speed the performer intended! There are whole genres (and subgenres) based on this. :) Personally, I have found that slowing a familiar piece down by ~5% tricks my brain into perceiving it as novel again, which helps me attend to it more closely and appreciate it more.
I listen to a lot of music on the side, but Chris Boltendahl of Grave Digger said something that stuck with me. Btw, Grave Digger are not making Heavy Metal inspired by Heavy Metal, they were there making Heavy Metal in the 80s :)
Paraphrasing: With all of the streaming, and easy access to music, music has turned into a fast food. Eaten on the side, but rarely really fully appreciated this day.
And for new albums of bands I follow (or if I want to have a good time), I do exactly that: If the weather permits, get a hammock, a good drink, the good headphones (yes, I have several levels of quality of headphones), and just look at the sun, the trees and the magpies while listening to the music. Improving my own guitar skills has only deepened this appreciation.
> Sitting at a live concert (I am thinking classical) is up there too, because you've given yourself permission to not think of/work on anything else in that time
At least in Metal and to me, concerts are a different beast than the record. The record is usually the best and most perfect take of a song, often with additional effects, better mix. If you want to hear to the best version of a song, it's usually from the record.
Concerts are a party. It's always amusing how different concert cultures are there -- I know of some people who complain that they "can't hear the singer over someone next to them shouting". That's kind of the point of a live celebration of the band at the music in my world.
You actually can slow down music. A novel experience in itself.
When you try to learn the song — once you get a grip – everything slows.
That's why people play so much with metronome – once your brain "slows down", you will speed up naturally.
Spent a few months learning how to get around it as a novice drummer. The only way around I found? It's to notice the slowing speed of time and slow the rhythm into it.
Probably related: most drummers play with a click in their ears.
I noticed similar effects when "locking in" in games or sports. Time gets slower.
So when you slow down, you start to pay more attention. But if you pay more attention, the world itself will slow down. And the music would be slowed
I suffered a burnout fall last year and adapting to a slower lifestyle was my way out of it. I started reading long novels, and taking aimless, leisurely walks. It's hard to overstate the positive effect that had on my mind and well-being. I haven't felt this kind of mental clarity and motivation to do things for over a decade.
This post resonates strongly with me. I strongly believe the default settings _are_ too high, and it takes conscious effort to slow down while bound to the shackles of modern society, but it's so worth it.
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About an hour into that, pouring sweat, he stops cold and says "what the hell am I doing?" The flooded camp was actually nice on a hot day and all we really had to do was move a couple of tents. He dropped the shovel and spent the rest of the week sunbathing, fishing, snorkeling and water skiing as God intended. He flipped a switch and went from Hyde to Jekyll on vacation. I've had to emulate that a few times.
Day two we looked at each other, had an adult beverage with breakfast, and relaxed for the rest of the trip.
I've found myself in this mode before, too. A couple of years ago I was preparing for weeklong wilderness backpacking trip with some friends. I'd recently quit my high-stress job to take some time off, and I had a few new pieces of gear I wanted to test before relying on them on a longer trip. When I looked at the calendar, though, every weekend before we were to leave was already spoken for.
I was worrying about it to my wife, trying to decide whether I'd just have to use the old worn out gear or risk it with the new stuff, when she stopped me: "why don't you just... go on Monday?" It took me a second to even get what she was saying—I was still so much in work-all-the-time-mode that my brain didn't even consider whatsoever the possibility that I could just... go off and go camping on a weekday. I was really baffled for a moment, and I've reflected on that a bit since, it's funny how you can be trapped in your own default operating mode and not even realize it.
ADDED: I'll just add that I created a loose spreadsheet for a ~week-long NYC trip with (I think) just one timed admission for a recently reopened museum and no times otherwise. I think I ended up dynamically scrawling over the printout with changes for most of the trip.
After having kids, my habit changed. Now we enjoy going to local parks and walking around with no goals during vacation. This wonderful attraction? Nah we don't need to see it. If we can walk there, then maybe.
Dead Comment
The bigger problem with that camp was the rattlesnakes. I killed one with the shovel and felt grown up.
Many years ago, I had a technical manager who never felt any pressure to be the first to come up with the answer to a question or the solution to some problem. If I was having a technical conversation with him, and we arrived at a particularly subtle or complex issue, he could go completely silent, just staring straight ahead with his fingers to his lips. I would find it very uncomfortable, and I would start blurting out half-baked ideas to fill the silence, but he would either raise his finger or (usually) just ignore me. This could go on for 30-60 seconds, at which point he might shrug and say "I don't know" or, more likely, have a pretty well formed idea of how to move ahead.
I used to joke to my co-workers that during those silent interludes, he was swapping in the solution from a remote disk.
This manager also typed with one or two fingers, and pretty slowly too. But he wrote a lot of good code.
If I recall correctly the question was something like:
You are sitting recording cars by their license plate as they drive down a road. You only have N spots on your worksheet. You can overwrite spots as many times as you need to. By the end of the day you must have an unbiased sampling of cars that have driven by you. How do you record the cars?
I find it absolutely is much of the time - I'll determine the architecture/overall solution, know exactly what needs to go in a multitude of files, and now actualizing all that isn't really thinking anymore, just donkey work. Getting AI to do this has been incredible now that it's finally good enough. I've had Copilot make flawless 500+LOC C++ classes in the first pass, and when I introduced bugs by changing it by hand, it found them instantly from stack traces without even having symbols, saving me hours. I see a future where writing a large codebase all by hand is seen like raising a barn the Amish way with no powertools - impressive and maybe there's something to be said for it philosophically, but just not practical otherwise.
For me, I sometimes feel like I'm an old school chess engine, exploring as many possible moves/ideas as I can - as many steps into the future as time allows. Constantly evaluating them based on some known-simplified fitness function usually involving pattern recognition from past experience in similar problems. Eventually I arrive at a place where I'm either confident I know a reasonable way forward (and why some of the obvious ways forward are unlikely to be ideal) - or I've scatter-gun searched all of the quickly available ideas and discovered I have no idea if some of them are good or bad, and I need to do much deeper research and investigation of the problem.
From the outside, that'd look identical to "he could go completely silent, just staring straight ahead with his fingers to his lips"
As you sort of point out between the lines, it depends on what you work on. I had an AI agent rewrite some ancient (and terrible code) which had stopped working because the v1 of an api on v3 was sunset. It took around 5 minutes out of my day, and most of those were having two people explaining to me where the code was and what they thought had happened to make it break. It would've like taken me a full day to fix without AI because I would have needed to understand things first, and because it was quite a lot of code.
The result wasn't very good, but it was better than what was before, and since that had run for years without anyone tuching it, well... good enough. Heck, it might've taken me more than a day because I doubt I would have left it at "wasn't very good".
Aside from this anecdote I think AI writes a good 80% of my code these days. I'm not sure I buy the whole "bottleneck or not" discussion around typing. I think for a lot of people, myself included, AI does 10x part of the process of writing software. Where it doesn't help is when you need to do computer science, and as you point out, those parts AI don't speed up. I sometimes still use AI for computer science parts, but in those situations the AI will be a rubber duck because I tend to think by talking out my own ideas, and at least the AI duck pretends to answer. Even if the answer is more useless than what the actual rubber duck comes up with, which it usually is, it's more immersive for me.
It's always possible to go slower for practically no cost. -- So, any benefit from going slower is obtainable for everyone.
Whereas, typing faster takes discipline and effort. There are diminishing benefits to putting in more effort to type faster.
The main benefit isn't so much "more output" so much as "reduced latency". e.g. It takes less time to type out queries that help you gather information.
Personally I find it a bad habit of mine, I have no idea how people gracefully take time to think. Whenever I do say something like “hold on, let me just think for a moment” my brain completely freezes and I get no thinking done.
His manager was used to this and sort of enjoyed the mystique of this monk-like expert that he was responsible for.
I once was in a meeting where we had to talk to the great expert on the phone. Let's just say his name was Otto. Of course, he worked remote quite often, in the days before Zoom. His manager calls him and puts the phone on speakerphone for the room to hear.
Manager: Otto, we need your input on <long technical problem>.
<60 seconds of silence>
Otto: Yes, I think that might work, but you'll run into <other problems>.
Manager: Well, yes, we've considered that, but <explanation>
A few minutes of reasonably normal conversation ensues between the assembled group and Otto. Then:
Manager: Well, I think then that this is a pretty good solution, as long as Otto agrees.
Manager looks around the table, clearly waiting for Otto's concurrence
<60 seconds of silence>
<90 seconds of silence>
<120 seconds of silence>
People are starting to get uncomfortable. The manager makes a reassuring face. This is normal for those of us that work closely with the great expert, do not lose faith.
<240 seconds of silence>
Manager briefly lets slip a concerned look, then quickly hides it
<360 seconds of silence>
Manager: Um, Otto?
Otto: Oh, I thought I was waiting for you.
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I have always had the intuition about reading speed that it is very easy to be a speed reader if you skim over things. I've always questioned how much of speed reading is just skipping stuff and filtering for the most important word tokens.
You could skip all of Tolkien's scenery descriptions, you could skip Tom Bombadil and Lothlorien and still know basically what happened to Frodo and where he's going. But that's not really the point. When I read a book of that much importance, I've always read every word and understood every sentence. I get easily distracted and often have to reread passages. I am not a fast reader. Tolkien's descriptions are not always that easy. But this is what I find so rewarding about reading in the first place.
However, when I'm reading an article online, the difference is stark. When I read articles, I usually start from the bottom and read backwards. That's my way of finding out the results, and then piecing together how much context I actually need to understand it. Maybe I should slow that down sometimes.
If you want to see it then way Tolkien saw it, probably the best way is to get through all that unimportant stuff involving rings and battles as quickly as possible to get to the appendices where Tolkein spent his time thinking about the history and etymology and even neat little details like how the calendar worked in the Shire...
(I'm only half joking)
Reminds me of an ah-ha! moment I had as a kid playing a text adventure game on my C64. I was stuck for a while and tried to find alternative ways forwards. I typed in "cheat" and it replied "OK, you win!" and ended the game.
I'm skeptical. Is there no more value to series like Gormenghast, Book of the New Sun, and The Second Apocalypse, beyond mere literary masochism, compared to LotR? Like them or not, LotR, as elaborate as its mythology is (if you include Silmarillion and some or all of the History of Middle Earth), is not at the same level.
The title, about "default settings" being "too high" makes me want an example from a technical domain, though.
Imagine if Tolkien was writing Fellowship last decade, and the book landed on your hands today. No decades of cult growing, no adaptations or explosive marketing, some word of mouth. Would you think it "much important" before reading it? What makes the importance?
In my opinion it's the prose. It's always the prose. Always gotta be on the lookout for good writers, new and old.
> "I took a speed-reading course and read War and Peace in twenty minutes. It involves Russia."
There is no value in doing it for modern clickbait or AI slop though.
I find that a lot of journalists like to pack their writing with fluff before they even reach the subject of the headline, a lot like recipe blogs sharing their life stories before finally reaching the instructions, as if the recipe is only secondary or tertiary to the background given.
This is why I appreciate articles that include bullet points or a TL;DR right at the beginning to summarize. For anything really long that I'm just not interested in reading fully and only want the main points, I use an LLM with the URL to summarize briefly.
While there's so much value in slowing down as the OP wrote, I feel as if journalists want you to lend the same pace to them for all the time of ours they waste. It's like they forget how much information is available to us and how unimportant it all is.
As always, there are tradeoffs, and you can't walk everywhere or always have these types of mindful experiences. On the other hand, life is short and perhaps paradoxically, slower experiences can yield richer days.
The first time I did this was the breath of the wild zelda game, I got to the point in the tutorial where they teach you to fast travel and said, "no I don't want to" so I spent the whole game slow traveling around, planing my trips enjoying the scenery finding new routes , Just bumming back and forth across the map enjoying the game and all it's corners in small slices each night, it took me a couple months to get complete and it was great.
My current phase of this madness is Valheim with no portals and no map. and wow it is an experience. With no map you get this hyper distorted view of the landscape the other way around, it is still based on what you can navigate easily but stuff like shorelines and terrain features are over represented and forests are these scary black boxes. Fog is very very scary, more than once fog has rolled in and I got so lost that I have had to say "well I guess I am living here now." I am currently having fun trying to figure out how to use the in game tools as surveying instruments to make my own hand drawn maps.
I was playing Wing Commander, Privateer way back when (mid-1990's) and didn't realize that there were ways to travel faster. So I did the obvious: I pretended I was a trader on a long haul route, dug out some books and notebooks, and just did whatever until I arrived at my destination or was attacked by pirates. I loved the passive game play in the moment, but I didn't realize how much until about a decade later. That kinda ruined gaming for me in general since games tend to keep the player busy (even if they aren't action games).
In some respects, I think that slow travel offers a sense of authenticity to the game. Well, I should say to some games. Many games set out goals for players. It's obvious why. If there is nothing to accomplish, there is little sense of accomplishment. Yet goals also ruin things in my mind since there is an urgency to get things done to see what the outcome is. Of course, games also reward following up on that urgency. That's contrary to real life where you may be rewarded or you may have to wait upon the rewards.
Reading the Reddit for the game, filled with people complaining that the portal system is too restrictive and forces them to make upwards of three long boat trips over the course of the game is a bit sad. It’s as though they expect the fun to happen when they finish everything, but the fun all happens while you’re actually playing the game.
Valheim without a map would be a bit too much for me. No way to quickly escape to some safe green pastures sounds too stressful :).
Without fast travel you’d be forced to plan your trips more and bundle all the tasks in an area which would be cool. But it’s probably too much to ask for the general public who will see it as annoying.
The successor game added an in-game compass/radar which detracted from the immersion, made the world feel small and boring.
No to doing books via audiobook because I see the words in my head and it’s massively distracting. Cool if it works for others I guess but like the mechanic excerpt above… not for me.
I used to fly fairly regularly between Germany and Italy. I'd get on a plane in Munich and get off in Florence, going from a very "German" place to a very "Italian" place. A few years ago I started driving the route, and I was surprised just how much gradation there is between the cultures.
As an American, I always thought of "Italians" and "Germans" as very distinct cultures, but then you drive through Südtirol (or Alto Adige, if you're feeling Italian, the northern most province of Italy) and it feels quite Germanic. Then gradually, as you continue south, you hear more Italian, see more Italianate architecture and place names. Similar story for Alsace between France and Germany.
Of course none of this is all that surprising knowing the history of these areas, but it is very interesting to experience in-person.
I'm sure most places and cultures are like this, even when we think of of them as quite distinct. When you only fly between major cities, you lose so much of the wonderful overlap.
Something to break the teleportation is obviously to make breaks and enjoy where you are (a lake not too far on the road, any viewpoint...). Plan in advance, have a tent, be ready to not reach your target in one day and you will enjoy a much better a road trip than a train, a plane or even the highway.
There was a man who was afraid of his shadow and disliked his footprints. So he tried to get away from them. He ran, but the faster he ran, the more numerous his footprints became, and his shadow kept up with him without lagging behind. Thinking he was going too slowly, he ran faster and faster, until he collapsed and died of exhaustion. He did not realize that if he had simply stayed in the shade, his shadow would have disappeared, and if he had sat still, there would have been no footprints.
And another one [0]:
My hut lies in the middle of a dense forest; Every year the green ivy grows longer. No news of the affairs of men, Only the occasional song of a woodcutter. The sun shines and I mend my robe; When the moon comes out I read Buddhist poems. I have nothing to report, my friends. If you want to find the meaning, stop chasing after so many things.
[0] https://firstknownwhenlost.blogspot.com/2011/06/stop-chasing...
and audiobooks with really good narrators? the miles will melt away.
(I like Wil Wheaton)
(don't know about lotr oudiobooks)
(currently part way through we are legion read by ray porter)
The article advocates not rushing. In general, that's a good fit for audiobooks.
> limiting myself to mouth-speed
Audiobooks are mouth-speed.
The article suggests this is the right slow speed, at least for the author.
Maybe you yourself want even slower, but that's not what the article is suggesting.
Having said that yes I do indeed pause if I need to take a moment to think, and I roll back 15 seconds if I want to hear it again. Not a big deal, just part of the experience. -signed ex-hater of audiobooks
Second of all, I took TFA advice and read that article with the slowness and deliberate attention it recommended and found it to be trite and difficult to distinguish from AI slop… but if that’s what brings this person joy, good for them.
Who cares if the GP eats their cookies in one bite and listens to their audiobooks at 2.25x speed? Because one self help guru turned blogger said it’s a bad idea?
[0] https://old.reddit.com/r/tolkienfans/comments/100n0y/maybe_t...
And similar to the point OP made, you get more out of it when you attend more closely. And similarly, most music does not withstand this level of scrutiny.
I have some excellent garage band CDs that probably have two or three copies still in the wild at most. Unfortunately sometimes the 25 year old burned CDs are missing the TOC data, but even the recovery process is satisfying.
(Same with the DVD collections.)
I listen to a lot of music on the side, but Chris Boltendahl of Grave Digger said something that stuck with me. Btw, Grave Digger are not making Heavy Metal inspired by Heavy Metal, they were there making Heavy Metal in the 80s :)
Paraphrasing: With all of the streaming, and easy access to music, music has turned into a fast food. Eaten on the side, but rarely really fully appreciated this day.
And for new albums of bands I follow (or if I want to have a good time), I do exactly that: If the weather permits, get a hammock, a good drink, the good headphones (yes, I have several levels of quality of headphones), and just look at the sun, the trees and the magpies while listening to the music. Improving my own guitar skills has only deepened this appreciation.
> Sitting at a live concert (I am thinking classical) is up there too, because you've given yourself permission to not think of/work on anything else in that time
At least in Metal and to me, concerts are a different beast than the record. The record is usually the best and most perfect take of a song, often with additional effects, better mix. If you want to hear to the best version of a song, it's usually from the record.
Concerts are a party. It's always amusing how different concert cultures are there -- I know of some people who complain that they "can't hear the singer over someone next to them shouting". That's kind of the point of a live celebration of the band at the music in my world.
I noticed similar effects when "locking in" in games or sports. Time gets slower.
So when you slow down, you start to pay more attention. But if you pay more attention, the world itself will slow down. And the music would be slowed
This post resonates strongly with me. I strongly believe the default settings _are_ too high, and it takes conscious effort to slow down while bound to the shackles of modern society, but it's so worth it.