All you need to do is go to sleep before 12 every single night and wake up at 7am without fail, hit the gym and crank out a few sets of squats, hit the pool and the sauna, read a chapter of that book, and then cook yourself an amazing breakfast, all before 9am.
If you're a real go-getter, though, you'd wake up at 6am and do some vibe coding for an hour on that side hustle.
This but unironically. I don't post on LinkedIn or anything. But sometimes it seems like all the agonizing people sometimes do over whether or not they should follow their plan (fitness, diet, productivity) makes it ten times worse.
It can be possible to decide to do something in advance, and then... just do it. The more times you do it the easier it gets. My wife comments on this sometimes. I guess not everyone has this? Maybe it can be learned? I don't know.
The list of things I must do is large and growing. Much of it outside my control. Yes, I could sell the house but rent is quite high. Yes, I could divorce the wife but that actually makes for more work. Yes, I could abandon the children but I've grown attached; and that's only legal after finding someone else willing to adopt them and a judge willing to approve it. Yes, I could deny any help with the elderly parents on both sides of the family but that seems extreme and carries a social cost. Yes, I could spend a few decades trying to cure the medical issues I've collected but that leaves little time for anything mentioned earlier.
I mean, yes. That's true for everyone. Different people have different life circumstances. It's equally important not to decide to do things that one can't realistically do, for whatever reasons there may be. I'm not sure what your point is.
Don't sell your house if you don't have a realistic place to live lined up. Don't divorce your wife if it's not worth the work.
I'm not saying everyone can or should be grindset hustle bro. Probably no one. I'm just saying that it is sometimes possible to decide what you're going to do in advance. If you already have too many obligations, that could include deciding which ones to fail. That's probably better than trying to do everything and just rolling the dice.
It's surprising how controversial this idea is, but it works for me. I hope you find something that works for you.
Sorry if my point was lost in the rant. IME the younger generations are facing an increasingly large burden of must-do's with less slack for them to make any other choices. Growing housing, healthcare, and societal expectations combined with fewer employment opportunities are leaving little room for them to chart their own course.
Some might say it's offset by all the luxuries so widely available. But I personally find it hard to enjoy minor luxuries when so much of life is swallowed by obligations. And I'm one of the luckiest members of my cohort. Most of my high school friends still live with parents or several roommates, have lower paying careers, and/or have to care for more family with serious medical issues. (Though on the latter I seem to be catching up quickly)
It sounds as if you are filing a complaint, but I'm afraid chargebacks are out of question. You have been scammed and given a non-perfect generation to live in.
I'd argue we shouldn't so quickly throw off the solutions of past generations, like protesting, unions, social safety nets, independent branches of government, and rejecting apathy and religion.
You're hitting on exactly what I meant, though. You're generalizing from "it works for me" in a way that implies it's equally possible for everyone, that everyone's brain has the ability to look at something they decided to do earlier, and then just do it, without sending them through a spiraling decision matrix that factors in all the other things that have reemerged as possibilities since whenever they made the first decision.
It's so cool that your brain has this "decision persistence" feature. And it does seem to be common enough that it's treated as "typical."
It's just not remotely universal. Not all of our brains have this.
People would rather blame external factors and not take responsibility.
It’s actually insulting to people who work hard that some people assume they have it easy somehow, like the “must be nice” comment upstream. Not everyone takes the view that you can’t control what happens to you, it’s pretty easy to see who does.
Your parents determine a lot of your trajectory. If they don't make the same investement in their kids as the average for the socioeconomic, you start with a heavy penalty. You can work hard, but you'll have to work twice as hard as everyone else.
If you friends gets permit, cars, fully financed studies but you get thrown out to work straight out of high school what is the probability you would give to be able to accomplish the same things as your friends in a similar timeline.
Sure you can work hard and you will get somewhere, but is that somewhere anywhere near what could be possible ? I would argue not.
The left often argues about unfair advantage from famillies having money. In my experience it's not the having money part that is important, its the parent willing to invest it in their children.
I know some people who accomplished a lot with poor parents, but they got full support from both gov aids and parents, it generally explains a lot.
Without talking about the genetic lottery, life is unfair and hard work isn't really all that's needed. It can never hurt but at the same time you can work much harder than most and never get as much. Add politics in the mix and anything goes.
Your prior comment makes it sound like you assume it’s generally just about willpower and that external factors aren’t generally an issue. Is that accurate?
No, is generally about discipline and building good habits. Willpower or lack thereof is largely irrelevant. I'm not convinced that willpower is even a real thing.
What do you think discipline is if not willpower? This might explain why we're talking past each other.
I can do the exact same thing a hundred days in a row as long as the circumstances happen to be the same. And I can try to make them as similar as I possibly can. My lights come on at the same time. I eat the same food. My clothes are in the same place.
But the second something happens that I can't control, the night the wind howls all night, or a cough wakes me up, or for some damn reason, I wake up hungrier than normal, it doesn't matter how many times I've done it. None of it is automatic. It's all new now. All of it requires decisions. It's like it was never there. And that's why, frankly, I don't ever get to 100 identical days.
Your brain does something different with whatever you mean by "discipline and good habits" than my brain does. And that's really cool. It sounds awesome to have a brain that does that.
It also sounds way easier and like it's not something you actually deserve any credit for, in the same way that my learning how to speak before I was a year old or read before I was 3 is just "a cool thing about my brain" and not something I deserve credit for.
The difference is that because your cool thing about your brain is common, people who don't have it are considered "less than" by people who do, whereas my cool thing about my brain is uncommon, so people looked at me as "more than" other people. Both are baseless. You and I have no more control over having these advantages in our brains than we do over our height or the color of our eyes.
This doesn't answer the question on any level. There is ALWAYS a choice. Where does the choice go when you remove it? What exists in its stead? How is there ever not a choice?
Dicipline and the ability to build good habits is out of the window for a lot of people due to different illnesses. You come across as trying to sell snake oil to people with a heart attack.
If you try hard enough you can always find a plausible sounding excuse for failure. Discipline and good habits are the most effective way to prevent heart attacks in the first place. While there are a tiny fraction of people with serious mental health conditions or developmental disabilities which prevent them from making progress, that hardly applies to anyone on HN.
I have to leave the house for work at 7am. I get back sometime between 6 and 8pm. When I get back I'm mentally and physically shot. I mean, yes I could get an easier job that pays less I suppose, lose the house etc.
Even better in my opinion and experience, exercise during lunch break, if possible. Being drained after work can feel like too high barrier to get started exercising.
> People would rather blame external factors and not take responsibility.
In my opinion the first step to taking responsibility is acknowledging reality. That reality can includes brains and bodies being different, sometimes extremely so. If someones brain or body is different but they deny it, stick their head in the sand, ignore it, then they are at a disadvantage when they try to take responsibility for something and may fail due to failing to acknowledging reality.
You can actually just choose to lock in.
And you don't need a perfect streak. Waking up early, working out and eating a nutritious breakfast is a perfect morning for probably 90% of people but our society is so broken that being healthy is associated with being either a grifter or a fascist.
Nah, you can do it with kids! I have two that are about to be 4 and 6, here are my weekdays:
- Alarm at 4:30. 5 mins of breathing exercises, 20 mins of meditation.
- Make coffee, have breakfast, out the door to work by ~5:30.
- Get to work's gym by 5:45, cardio for 60 mins.
- In my office by 7:00-7:15.
- 3:30, 25 mins of breathe work and meditation again. Tuesdays and Thursdays, this is 3:15 so I can fit in ~30 mins of strength training.
- Head on out, pick up my youngest from school, home by ~4:15-4:30-ish. Ballpark depending on traffic, actual gym times, etc.
- Cook dinner (kiddos often like to help), eat with family, hang out with and play with my kiddos until 7:00PM.
- Kiddo bath and bed time, wife and I take turns doing this every night. Whether I'm "done" at 7 or 8, it only takes me ~30 mins to shower and prep my shit (clothes, lunch, etc.) for the next day.
- Leaves me with ~1-2 hours each night to hang out, read a book, and enjoy my wife's company before heading to bed at ~9:30.
It's busy, but I don't feel like I'm overstretched and I don't feel like it leaves me missing out on anything.
There’s a few things required to make that work for you.
You fall asleep instantly every night or function on less than 7 hours of sleep long term. You have a 15 minute commute. You don’t seem to need any slack time to deal with any issues that pop up.
4 year old has a meltdown because the 6 year old ate the last fruit snack. One of the kids decides to wake up at 3am. Friends come over for dinner and throw off the routine. Oops forgot to buy an ingredient for dinner, now you have to load up all the kids and go to the store. Ugh piece of plastic is lodged in the garbage disposal better get the flashlight and chopsticks.
And that’s not even mentioning regular household maintenance. Laundry, dishes, cleaning, grocery trips etc…
I’d need at least 2 extra hours in every day to handle all of those unexpected and expected issues. Probably closer to 3.
So I made my original post knowing full well that my situation is my own and YMMV, but to speak to those concerns wrt my schedule/life...
>You fall asleep instantly every night...
Actually, yes! Two points there. First, when I'm out of my routine, not working out, drinking lots of coffee and eating like garbage, I sleep like ass. When I'm in my routine, eating well, and only having a cup of coffee with breakfast, I'm incredibly energized throughout the day and end up suddenly feeling tremendously tired right around 8:45/9:00.
The second part is that my father's side of the family is notorious for falling asleep anywhere, anytime. There's a litany of photos of us passed out on couches in the middle of packed parties.
> Meltdowns
They happen, but they don't really rock the schedule in my experience. Bedtime somehow always ends up being bedtime. Might shift by ~15 or so occasionally, but never in a way that nukes my bedtime or anything.
>One of the kids wakes up at 3am.
This is entirely YMMV, but we sleep trained. For whatever absolutely fucking weird reason, neither kid has ever got themselves out of bed in the morning, they always wake up and wait for us to come get them. Earliest I hear one of them is occasionally 6 on the weekends, usually closer to 7. I feel tremendously lucky here, and recognize how not normal this is.
>Forgot dinner ingredient and load kids up...
Nah. I do my best to buy ingredients on the weekend for the week. Definitely isn't foolproof, but usually we just pivot to a meal I'd planned for another night, or we always have easy to make shit like mac and cheese or grilled cheese and tomato soup lying around to fall back on. Life doesn't need to be perfect and I'm cool with pivoting and not sticking to plans.
>Friends coming over
For our own sanity wrt my wife and I's schedules, we hang with friends on the weekend. Weekends are a lot more freeform for us.
>Household maintenance
Naturally, whoever isn't playing with the kids just falls into keeping the laundry moving and cleaning the kitchen. I'll take the kiddos to the grocery store on Saturday. Dishes happen quickly, we all help there.
I’m not doubting that your schedule works for you, I’m just saying that it’s at the extreme of what is feasible with young kids.
> neither kid has ever got themselves out of bed in the morning
My wife is a pediatrician. This is so incredibly not normal to have 2 kids that absolutely never get up early that you won the lottery. And not the regular jackpot. You won the powerball multi-state $500 million lottery.
> For our own sanity wrt my wife and I's schedules, we hang with friends on the weekend. Weekends are a lot more freeform for us.
I wish I knew what a weekend was. My wife works in the ER, as do many of our friends.
> Naturally, whoever isn't playing with the kids just falls into keeping the laundry moving and cleaning the kitchen.
There’s so much more daily maintenance work for our house than an hour a night for one person.
Just making my kids lunch for the next day takes me 15 minutes. It takes me 20-30 minutes to fold one load of laundry.
And the irregular things I mentioned were just a tiny part of it. The other day my 4 year old got a whole stack of puzzles down and the 2 year old immediately dumped out all the pieces. Took me 2 hours to sort that out. Last week the tankless hot water started randomly cutting out and I spent 2 hours dealing with that.
Yesterday we took 2 of our 3 kids for a well check to their pediatrician. For some reason it took 1.5 hours instead of the 30 minutes we had planned. A few months ago one of my many spoke alarms started randomly going off once a night for a few days until I could track down the problem. 3 months ago my 2 year old tripped on the very bottom stair and had a freak fracture. That took hours of time up front and then reverted to crawling for 9 days. And for 6 weeks he had to wear a boot that I had to remove and reapply multiple times a day.
Our 2 month old blew out her diaper a few days ago and I had to take all the padding off, wash it, then figure out how to put it back on. Big storm recently knocked most of our Christmas wreathes off and I had to deal with that.
My kid was recently “snack leader” for his preschool class, which means for a week I had to make healthy snacks for the whole class.
All of that is just the random stuff that has popped up over the last few months that I can think of.
The original post who mentioned this kind of thing isn’t feasible with kids was correct. 2-2.5 hours of exercise/meditation and a full workday isn’t something that most people with kids can pull off.
Sorry to confuse, it's 9:30 every night. Anything less than 7 and I'm wrecked. 7.5 is ideal, but I also feel great with 7. My non-scientific guess is that I spent so much of my teens and 20s getting less than 6 hours that my body is delighted by 7+ lol.
But yeah, I imagine I'll need more as time continues to pass and I get older.
/shrug
Edit: To say nothing of my mild fear of an inadequate amount of sleep in middle age possibly contributing to dementia, but I digress...
My neurodiverse mind often won't let me sleep that early. It just whirls with problem solving that keeps me up all night if I go to bed in a whirl. Yes I know how to meditate. Imagine spending years at it and finding yourself in a mental state that means you can't clear your mind any more. You can't 'let it go', it just comes straight back in a more aggressive way with flash backs and visions. What would you do now?
Not the person you're replying to but I am confused by your comment. What would you do? You'd try and meditate. If that doesn't work, you distract yourself with something else. The mind whirling keeping you up at night is rarely a productive thing, speaking from experience.
I hope my comment doesn't come off as dismissive but learning to meditate is practicing to "let it go". It isn't a switch. You're teaching your mind not to get "too attached" to anything you consider unwholesome.
No, your tone is fine, and thanks for that. A whirling mind is not often productive but it can make great leaps forward. It can also be paranoid, dangerous and self-destructive.
I was trying to make the point that self- help easy fixes are not always successful. I spent decades actively learning to sleep. It works most of the time. It is good to learn. I use a mindfulness sleep meditation most nights. I also learnt from sleep hygiene that going to bed early is normally a big mistake for me, precluding much of the 'go to bed earlier, get up and exercise' advice.
I have also hit periods in my life where I simply couldn't mediate for weeks on end despite regular practice over a decade. I was mentally ill. No routine or hacks was going to get me to exercise. I needed therapy (EMDR) and rest, and when I got really self-destructive I needed sleep medication (useful only for a very short time). The 'hack' people just made me feel bad about myself for being unable to get a grip.
That is what I want people to see, exercise is only useful if you are well enough to do it. If you are not well enough to shave, then don't beat yourself up for not getting exercise. Put a pin in it, and do it later.
My latest illness was (psycho-somatically) interfering with my cortisol levels, and it made any exercise crippling. I couldn't recover. I didn't get the boost. I beat myself up about not being able, and it made me worse.
Exercise and therapy rather than exercise or therapy might be better advice.
It's a marketing campaign and that's all it is. Zero substance on the website about what they're doing to make sure more people actually eat like this.
But what is this administration actually doing to change American diets? It's going to take a little more than throwing up a marketing landing page with a well produced video and nice photos.
You need to read the news, man. The landing page is just a press release. This is a summary of government mandated institutional changes to how food is selected and distributed.
This will actually change how millions eat. It is good news.
What a brilliant marketing campaign for the Trump administration to look like they're doing something positive.
Yet, I see absolutely nothing on this website to suggest how they are going to change American diets. Do they think these guidelines don't already exist somewhere?
I used an Awair Element after wondering if Co2 buildup was causing my groggieness in the morning and an ever so slight dull headache.
My bedroom was quite small at the time, but I measured the same effect of buildup in a larger bedroom, just the Co2 level took a little longer to reach it's peak.
In the small room it took about 45 mins to climb to about 1400 after I closed the door and went to sleep.
I'm currently trying to install some above-door vents to improve circulation but this is a topic most people don't consider at all, even though studies have shown the effects of classrooms having high Co2 concentrations on exam results and cognition.
> I wouldn’t put too much effort into vents above a door as we’ve seen that CO2 will leak through doors and even floors/ceilings very quickly.
I'd like it to vent out into the hallway and the rest of the apartment though, so not sure what you mean by it leaking through doors? It's obviously not leaking enough, hence the addition of a vent. It's either that or keeping my door open all night which isn't feasible due to noise by other family members waking up etc.
I'd love an easy way to connect to and run an existing GitHub/GitLab repo in a VM and spin it up, and iterate on that and be able to open PRs etc from there.
Not exactly. You can eat that mushroom but you'll have indigestion problems. Squirrels around me love it though. You can also parboil it and you'll be fine, which it is actually quite tasty.
That mushroom (Amanita muscaria) is also related to the death cap (Amanita phalloides). Though the toxins are different in the death cap and will not be converted/removed by parboiling. Worse than that, you won't show symptoms for over a day.
The death cap is white or yellow, looking quite mundane. Especially compared to Muscaria.
There are other bright red mushrooms (especially russulas) which are quite tasty. Russulas also can have many other bright colors. Conversely, many of the deadliest mushrooms where I live are plain and unassuming, at least in the color spectrum I can see.
A “proof” in the formal verification sense is just an exhaustive search through a state space that a model of your system, respects a certain set of constraints you have to explicitly write.
You could still have written the model wrong, you could still have not accounted for something important in your constraints. But at least it will give you a definite answer to “Does this model do what you say it does?”.
Then there are cases when an exhaustive search of the entire state space is not possible and best you can do is a stochastic search within it and hope that “Given a random sampling of all possible inputs, this model has respected the constraints for T amount of time, we can say with 99.99999998% certainty that the model follows the constraints”.
It's quite dystopian. Seeing people in your family, and friends, just mindlessly consume that shit, for hours upon hours - and many of them are completely oblivious to the fact that these reels and shorts are engineered to keep them engaged.
Using ML/Data to keep people hooked on content - I'd be embarrassed to be an engineer at any of these companies actively destroying our society.
TV had the same effect before the internet. It just had to use less effective Nielsen instead of AI/ML. People make this complaint about all new media when it appears, including books even (well, that kids and adults would spend their time reading trashy novels rather than study the Bible), and later serial articles (which were designed to keep readers hooked with literary cliff hangers so they would buy the next issue).
If you're a real go-getter, though, you'd wake up at 6am and do some vibe coding for an hour on that side hustle.
Super simple.
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