alt Hacker NewsVanity activities
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Is ethical consumption really a vanity activity? For the most part it just means not buying things. I don’t think that a Christian would consider “not sinning” a vanity activity. It’s just how people act about behaviour they consider harmful.
It doesn't have to be one or the other. Both ethical consumption and going vegetarian reduce one's environmental impact, and they're independent of one another. So, while someone "truly" optimizing for environmental impact would better spend their time avoiding meat, someone who enjoys meat can still reduce their environmental impact without becoming miserable. Variables like "income" and "environment" are just parts of the equation for the more important heuristic of happiness.
A lot of the activities on that list are like this. Reading the news has a non-zero impact (hey, I'm on HN, and it definitely helps me keep up to date), and it's "easy" in that it fits into my heuristic for happiness. Same with using a metal straw, and same with picking between credit cards.
In a sense, these activities are "free" in terms of their perceived difficulty, but have a positive, if small, impact. If they're "free", why not do them?
On a related note: I've run businesses for close to 20 years, most of those spent selling to other businesses, and I still fail to understand what the entirety of LinkedIn is for and if there is any of it that wouldn't fall under the author's definition of "Vanity activities".
If anyone has a clue, please enlighten me.
I have this debate with people about news and podcasts sometimes (news was one of the examples in TFA). People say they are doing it to remain informed, and it’s a high-value activity, but I argue it’s mostly entertainment since it rarely affects any decision-making.
This is not a hardline position, but I’m surprised at how vehemently people insist that their news habit has benefits beyond entertainment.
(To be clear, I have nothing against entertainment.)
This reminds me of something slightly different but of "not reinventing the wheel"
It feels like there should be emerging "optimized solutions" to certain problems that are widely accepted, but rather instead it seems like people just keep re-doing things that I thought we would have already "solved" and moved on past
For example, if you simply want to consume the cheapest caffeine source, I thought someone figured out it was powdered caffeine... versus paying maybe like 100x more for a coffee from a "coffee chain store". Now, granted the experience and maybe the same antioxidants or chemical makeup may not be the same in caffeine powder versus coffee, but the point is I feel like a lot of problems aren't "solved for optimization" which would enable us to make progress on some other unoptimized problem in society
I guess this "reinvention of the wheel" feels like a "vanity activity" to me?
Author really should have figured out a better word than "vanity."
> paying $49 per month for productivity software
I wonder what software is this that cost this much.
I enjoyed the article. Many comments here on HN seem to be missing the point.
The author isn't bashing on "hobbies" and is not even bashing on "vanity activities". S/he is merely challenging us to acknowledge them for what they are. Stop kidding yourself.
If you churn credit cards (for example) and are one of the 10% that can make it truly profitable, then good for you. The other 90% are probably kidding themselves. Same for the other examples. The author is encouraging a self-sanity check. Are you in the 10% or the 90%, and wherever you land, are you okay with that? If not, you may want to reevaluate, pick something else, or make peace with it. It's better than kidding yourself.
Interesting thought. However, the author starts with “In business…”, then immediately goes on to shoehorn the idea to people. The logic tracks if your underlying assumption is that the core purpose of a human life is to “be productive” (sic generate profit).
This article digs on atomic habits... honestly that book changed my life. Stopped doing drugs, started eating healthy, started working out. Direct result of that book along with some philosophical reading.
Vanity is contextual. Everything is vanity from some ultimate perspective.
“The number of pageviews on your website and the number of likes on your tweets are fun to look at and sound impressive, but optimizing for them completely misses the point if they don’t lead to something more important (e.g. profit).”
Profit is fun to look at and sounds impressive, but optimizing for it completely misses the point if it doesn't lead to something more important (e.g. human flourishing, or net societal gain)
To call reading the news “vanity” exposes the true vanity of this kind of post. What is the logic of assigning the word “vanity” to my interest to know what’s going on in the world? It’s vanity because I have no important decisions to make about the war in Ukraine, or the perfidy of my government?
It’s not vanity, it’s a desire to understand my world and my place within it.
What IS vanity is imagining that one’s own tastes are the only tastes that matter in the world.
I too have hobbies.
There's something horribly broken about the styling on this site. Attempting to scale the page (Ctrl-+) doesn't change the font size. I have no idea how the page managed that, but whatever mechanism allowed that, browsers should kill it with fire.
Some good points in here, but with respect to networking, the author misses the forest for the trees.
Sure, when you go to networking events, you aren't certain you are going to get a job from the folks you meet.
What you are doing is increasing your luck surface area. Hiring is not an entirely rational process, but if someone doesn't know you exist, they won't hire you (how could they?).
From there, it follows that meeting someone and letting them know you exist increases the chances (however small) that they can and will assist you on your career path. And a networking opportunity, where you meet someone face to face (and can meet them repeatedly) is a far better way to let someone know you exist than sending them your resume.
There are other ways to raise your profile that don't involve networking events and you can argue that they are better, but that's a cost-benefit analysis you should consider.