Showing posts tagged living

I wish I had…

Paul Graham posted about a palliative care nurse, Bronnie Ware, who put together a list of 5 most common regrets dying patients had:

  1. I wish I’d had the courage to live a life true to myself, not the life others expected of me.
  2. I wish I didn’t work so hard.
  3. I wish I’d had the courage to express my feelings.
  4. I wish I had stayed in touch with my friends.
  5. I wish that I had let myself be happier.

Paul points out that these regrets are all errors of omission - errors we make by default, making them very dangerous.

He has taken these and turned them around - from regrets into commands that he sees daily at the top of his todo list:

Don’t ignore your dreams; don’t work too much; say what you think; cultivate friendships; be happy.

What was the greatest invention of the industrial revolution? Hans Rosling makes the case for the washing machine. 

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Faced with a networked future that seems to favor the distracted over the focused, the automatic over the considered, and the contrary over the compassionate, it’s time to press the pause button and ask what all this means to the future of our work, our lives, and even our species.
Douglas Rushkoff in Program or Be Programmed

Indefinite social media hiatus

Why is J Ben Deaton is taking a break? He makes a good case:

Time and attention are scarce resources. You only have 24 hours in the day. And each hour only counts if you have the attention to be present (mentally, emotionally, spiritually, physically) during it.

It’s obvious that the time aspect of social media can be a problem, but that’s not my major issue - I don’t spend much time checking social media websites. It’s the attention angle that haunts me.

For the sake of argument, let’s assume I have 10 “units” of attention every day to invest in hard thinking (reading, solving hard problems, etc). Once I use these up, I start losing the ability to concentrate, feel mentally drained, and need to recoup.

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Our problem is not that we don’t have enough stuff - it’s that we don’t have enough ways for people to work and prove that they deserve this stuff.
Douglas Rushkoff in Are jobs obsolete?
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As an engineer, rather than defining your career with a laundry list of technology, pursue the type of product you’re happiest creating.
Ben Sandofsky in Apps vs The Web

Real value

rianvdm:

I have a feeling that we live too much of our lives through other people’s eyes. It seems as if we’ve changed our definition of what is worthy and real to accommodate an economy based on the currency of sharing. It’s an economy that measures an event’s value by the number of likes and retweets it…

(Reblogged from rianvdm)

Obsession With Recency

rianvdm:

Dmitry Fadeyev:

It’s a good indicator for the value of content: is it tied to recency, or is it still going to be read many years on? How much do you really gain by consuming content the value of which dissapears only a few days later? If it’s diversion you want, find it in activities that build rather than waste. Yes, reading a book requires more effort than an article, and the rewards are not immediate — another indicator of value — but in the end you will improve in some way rather than just kill time.

(Reblogged from rianvdm)

Why the Clean Tech Boom Went Bust

The market conditions changed: natural gas has boomed with exploitation of new fields using fracking. The price of silicon, used to make traditional solar panels dropped, and coupled with low cost Chinese manufacturers has resulted in lower cost panels.

A contrary view was subsequently published: There is no Cleantech Bust, sorry Wired  

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Technology lets us do things faster and more efficiently; why would we use that newfound free time to do more and more of the same old thing?
Happiness Takes (A Little) Magic an excellent essay by Brian Lam