Being basic as a virtue

This seems as good an opportunity as any to bring up another part of the &quot;basic&quot; concept which feels really unhealthy: the idea that &quot;basic&quot; is consuming commodity, mass-market goods, and that high status is distinguishing yourself through sophisticated taste in what you consume.<p>This mindset is problematic for at least a few reasons: - Every choice of consumption becomes an opportunity to over-examine - Devaluing goods because they&#x27;re common lures us into a needless chain of &quot;upgrades&quot; as productivity improves. We can never have a post-scarcity economy if we&#x27;re taught to shun whatever isn&#x27;t scarce. - All of this plays into the framing that we&#x27;re first and foremost workers and consumers.<p>Would we not all be happier and healthier consuming decent but not spectacular mass-produced and inexpensive food, drink, clothing, housing, cars, etc, instead of coveting a rare beer, or looking down our noses at people buying starbucks?

<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;workaway.info" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;workaway.info</a><p>A site that lets you find hosts who will trade room and board in exchange for two to five hours of labor per weekday. Mostly located in beautiful&#x2F;wild locations around the world.<p>I&#x27;m currently doing three months in Europe hopping from place to place using Workaway. For instance, right now I&#x27;m at a hobby farm on top of a mountain in central italy. Super laid back. And gorgeous. Imagine the most picturesque idyllic farm you can... I&#x27;m finding that the rewards in mental health are more than sufficient to justify the astronomical opportunity cost.

Is it common for knowledge workers to fantasize about more labor intensive work from time to time? Because I definitely found myself relating to that sentiment. Usually my mind goes to construction or carpentry in those moments.<p>My favorite part of this is the acknowledgement of the enjoyment to be found embracing the &#x27;degenerate&#x27; as the author calls it. I can strongly relate to needing a good, stupid, socially-unacceptable laugh sometimes.

I got to experience some unexpected culture shock earlier this year taking a vacation to SF from a medium-sized city in the midwest (to probably no surprise to you reading this comment). Having forgot my clothes on the trip I got to tour all of SF for a week in cheap business casual clothing I kept on after work, which was an experience. Lovely city but damn, I had a target on my back looking like a basic tourist so I bought some more appropriate clothing and tried my best to fit in. Got home after the trip made me want to take an extra vacation day just to drink cheap beer, stare at the cows, and listen to sports on the radio.<p>Sorry for the mostly irrelevant story, but what I&#x27;m trying to say is I think this is probably a pretty common thing even outside of white collar big city folk culture.

I loved this part: Being mediocre is turning down the combat difficulty on Red Dead so you can play through the game. It’s a resistance to hyper-optimization; the “courage to be ordinary”.<p>I wholeheartedly agreed with this point as soon as I read it. I adapted this approach while building DarwinMail [1].<p>There have been countless email &amp; Twitter suggestions for DarwinMail. I&#x27;ve always listened and asked questions until I understood what what the users core message was. However, I do not always implement what has been asked.<p>I believe in some &#x27;truths&#x27; when it comes to building your product while following a basic approach;<p>1. Users are the core of any business.<p>2. The feedback you receive from users is the most valuable feedback you will receive on your product as they are the ones actually using your product.<p>3. You do not have to implement everything your users ask for.<p>Even though you may not do everything your users ask for, that does not mean you are not listening.<p>I believe you need to keep your features simple and easy to understand.<p>Being basic reminds me of the saying &#x27;Slow is smooth and smooth is fast&#x27;.<p>To me that is one of the most important truths when it comes to life and business.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.DarwinMail.app" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.DarwinMail.app</a>

“A person who thinks all the time has nothing to think about except thoughts. So he loses touch with Reality, and lives in a world of illusion.” -Alan Watts

Whenever I feel this way (and I do feel this way more than I care to admit), it&#x27;s usually due to mental fatigue from extended periods of mental exertion. I&#x27;ve found that stepping away from high intensity thinking for a few weeks every six months or so helps me reset. A complete &quot;information lobotomy&quot; as the author suggests, may be overcompensation...

This is so personal it&#x27;s beyond reproach, for decency’s sake. On the other hand, it could be overwrought romanticism that speaks to nothing but existential crisis.<p>Who doesn’t want to be a farmer, rising at 3am to be alone with your thoughts and hot coffee, tending the fields that feed a nation, while the sun rises, signalling: this is creation; I’m driving the world! The answer is probably: farmers, who would happily say “fuck right off” to 3am starts day after day sucking dust and hoping you can keep your margins, the equipment doesn’t break, and the weather holds.<p>I think the angst of the writing wants to push through to something more than analyzing the pedestrian, but have the ultimate enlightenment being cool with coming back to embrace the pedestrian. Ish.<p>I’m reminded of a couple story closings:<p>[1] Siddhartha listened. He was now nothing but a listener, completely concentrated on listening, completely empty, he felt, that he had now finished learning to listen. Often before, he had heard all this, these many voices in the river, today it sounded new. Already, he could no longer tell the many voices apart, not the happy ones from the weeping ones, not the ones of children from those of men, they all belonged together, the lamentation of yearning and the laughter of the knowledgeable one, the scream of rage and the moaning of the dying ones, everything was one, everything was intertwined and connected, entangled a thousand times. And everything together, all voices, all goals, all yearning, all suffering, all pleasure, all that was good and evil, all of this together was the world. All of it together was the flow of events, was the music of life. And when Siddhartha was listening attentively to this river, this song of a thousand voices, when he neither listened to the suffering nor the laughter, when he did not tie his soul to any particular voice and submerged his self into it, but when he heard them all, perceived the whole, the oneness, then the great song of the thousand voices consisted of a single word, which was Om: the perfection.<p>[2] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;youtu.be&#x2F;OsDnrFBpsBk" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;youtu.be&#x2F;OsDnrFBpsBk</a><p>—-<p>[1] Siddhartha, Hermann Hesse<p>[2] A River Runs Through It. Robert Redford&#x2F;Norman Maclean

I definitely see this. There&#x27;s a brand of clothing for workers that has become fashionable among trendy young people. I see people walking around with a hammer loop who I doubt have ever used a hammer.

I really liked this piece. I especially enjoyed the thinking&lt;---&gt;tan analogy.<p>&quot;Intellectualism as signal for (possibly (<i>likely</i>!) contagious) unluck&quot; is an unfortunate, but I think real, phenomenon.

If this article resonated with me any more strongly, I&#x27;d shatter like a wine glass.<p>I love living on the West Coast and working in tech, and I fully appreciate the many levels of privilege it affords me. Likewise, I&#x27;ve learned a ton and gained countless hours of recreation from Reddit and the other social aggregators. At the same time, there is something unhealthy and unbalanced about it all.<p>Reddit&#x27;s never-ending stream of upvoted videos is a machine for showing me the best and worst of humanity. That&#x27;s enriching and often hilarious. But those best videos often leave me feeling like I can&#x27;t compete. Why should I practice a little guitar if I&#x27;m never going to be as good as that guy playing &quot;While My Guitar Gently Weeps&quot; on a ukelele? The videos of mishaps aren&#x27;t any better. Anytime a video of someone doing something foolish gets a million views, I get a little more self-conscious.<p>It reminds me of that traumatic transition in middle school when I first became really aware of social pressure and fitting in. Because I wasn&#x27;t used to this signal, the gain was really high and I was constantly paralyzed by self-consciousness. The Internet is that times a million, forever.<p>I used to feel good about my even mediocre accomplishments because I lived in a world where I wasn&#x27;t constantly surrounded by the world&#x27;s best X for all possible X. I&#x27;d like to get back to that state, but it&#x27;s really hard to turn off that level of self awareness. Deliberately <i>choosing</i> to be unaware is not the same as actually <i>being</i> unaware. It&#x27;s another layer on top when the goal is to strip off the inteceding layer. I can&#x27;t go back to before ironic-detachment post-modernism. The best I can hope for is a &quot;New Sincerity&quot; <i>post</i>-post-modernism, which isn&#x27;t the same.<p>The part about degeneracy touches a nerve too. I don&#x27;t know if I&#x27;ve ever tried to articulate this properly, but today&#x27;s progressive liberal culture is possibly the most <i>confining</i> culture I&#x27;ve ever lived in. In many ways it feels like a neo-Victorian society where the expectation to follow the norms is high and the price for the slightest transgression is even higher.<p>The <i>values</i> it adopts are strictly better than Victorian times and many of the places I grew up in the South. Equality for people of all genders, races, ability, orientations, etc. Care for the environment. Intolerance of sexual harrassment or violence of any kind. These are <i>good values.</i><p>But the way progressive culture <i>enforces</i> those values socially is pretty intense. There seems to be little room for human error, personal growth, or misinterpretation. A slip of the tongue can easily summon a career-ending mob on Twitter. (Or, at least, it <i>seems</i> that way.) If I tell a joke, is that a micro-aggression? If I <i>don&#x27;t</i> tell a joke, is my seriousness itself another micro-aggression? While the laws are just, the penalties associated with breaking them are Draconian.<p>Maybe it&#x27;s <i>supposed</i> to feel this way for me now. I&#x27;m straight, male, white, able, and middle class. Perhaps I felt freer in my youth because I was in a position of implicit power where there were fewer consequences if I did or said some dumb shit that hurt someone else. And maybe I have to be more careful now because that power imbalance is being restored.<p>But as someone who has always strived to not be racist, sexist, homophobic, etc., someone who has always had been sensitive to the discomfort of others and tried to not hurt people, it&#x27;s kind of a bummer being in a culture that makes me feel even more cautious than I already naturally did. Meanwhile, there&#x27;s still apparently no shortage of actual fascist, racist, sexual predator asshats out there who clearly couldn&#x27;t care less about liberal culture.<p>It feels like we&#x27;re policing ourselves to the point of madness when we weren&#x27;t the problem in the first place.

To me, saying someone is “basic” is another way of saying they’re living the unexamined life. It’s an epithet that probably doesn’t apply to anyone 100% and probably everyone at least a little bit

It is not the thinking that is the problem, it is the constant need to be productive and for thoughts to have value somehow. There are plenty of people who can think about stuff just for the pleasure of it. I guess living in a hyper competitive place like San Francisco would kill some of that &quot;doing something purely for the joy of it&quot; mentality.

Remember, your capacity for innovation can be optimized, but will always be finite. Apply your capacity to where the cost&#x2F;benefit is optimized.

I mentioned this article to my friend Michael who is currently hosting me at his farm in Umbria, and this was his reply:<p>&quot;Interesting yes, too much of anything dulls the mind, even the best things can jade and wane if overindulged in.<p>One hour outside tying up tomato vines, weeding or watering balances out 10 trading memes on FB or watching YouTube tutorials, reading about myriad things as long as they are well written.<p>We need and crave variety, novelty and balance, while the culture nudges us towards monomania, tunnel thinking and hyper-specialisation, narrow casting in the data stream, all trees, no forest. To zoom back out you need to let go of forward motion (or better, our notion of it) and be willing to stop using our will power for a few moments and see what&#x27;s behind our ego&#x27;s prideful play for perfection or power.<p>Basic thinking is a cool concept.<p>Unwinding complexity, seeking simpler, more elegantly energetic solutions to life&#x27;s challenges, first to survive then to transform quantity into quality.&quot;

It&#x27;s this new fangled meaning of basic. I have to accept it as given, but I sort of find it aggravating, maybe because I think of basic as a synonym of foundational or elementary. In the context of mathematics, calling something basic, foundational, or elementary needn&#x27;t mean simplistic, stupid, or something for young children. People can add and subtract without grasping number theory. But again, just me complaining about you people&#x27;s neologisms, and how basic is that?

I think what we as programmers or more largely knowledge workers miss is doing something which is physical and involves direct contact. Typing away on a computer in a room with dozens of others with the him of white noise is far off from that kind of experience. I like to cook, the experience of touching produce, cutting and cooking is a uniquely human experience. So, yeah get a hobby which allows you to do that. Disconnect and recharge.

I equate “basic” as a label to someone I simply find so in-interesting or dull in their personal persists or interests that I’m uncomfortable being around them. Moreso, I’m acknowledging I’m incompatible with them, to me they are “basic” in that I don’t seem to stretch my thought process around them. To others they might be interesting, but I’m not going to lie to myself or others.

thankfully the shift he points out with tan&#x2F;work&#x2F;leisure is happening and everyone now &quot;works&quot; as influencer on social media being the most basic as possible. By the time the author archives his desired basicnes as a status symbol, basicnes will already be repurpose to mean that you toil all day with basic social media influencing.

Listen to yourselves. Look at what you&#x27;re upvoting. Is this community reaching peak arrogance?<p>It can be rephrased as &quot;We&#x27;re so fucking smart we need to take steps to dumb ourselves down&quot;.<p>I&#x27;m prepared for the downvotes. But come on. Really?

Instead of chasing the latest one-dimensional solution (or anti-solution) to The Good Life, just seek balance. Everyone needs creative space, and everyone needs something in their life that feels truly challenging. But everyone also needs meditative breaks from mental activity, and time spent in nature, and time building relationships, and time doing things that are dumb and fun and useless.<p>This seems to be a common theme in California (at least, SF and LA): take something good - creativity, progress, art - and fetishize it until it becomes a pathology. The problem is not with any of these things - they&#x27;re good; great, even! - the problem is with seeing one single dimension of life as The End-All. That is always going to end up being unhealthy, no matter what it is.

It seems as if this person is just discovering old fashioned American anti-intellectualism (unintentionally ironically presented in an intellectual wrapper).<p>There&#x27;s a reason beyond laziness that many American&#x27;s look down on typical urban, liberal arts thought and discussion, and it&#x27;s close to what this post posits: tribalism and in&#x2F;out group signalling. The difference is that the author sees being &quot;basic&quot; as a signal that one is wealthy enough not to have to work creatively for a living, and the historical practitioners of anti-intellectualism are signalling a disdain for productionless thought.

In before there&#x27;s a picture of a girl with one arm in the air with short pants on butt-facing-camera and a rake in the other arm.

The desire to avoid the &quot;tan back stigma&quot; of having to think to make money has already been satisfied by snooty literature. Snooty thinking is thinking that requires a smart brain but has no economic value. If you want to show that you&#x27;re smart, and you also want to show that you don&#x27;t need to make money, you can produce opinions on 13th century literature or whatever else you like. So, in a sense the author&#x27;s prophecy has already come to pass.