1. Anthony Trollope – I didn’t get this one. 2. Evelyn Waugh – Correct! 3. Henry James – Correct! 4. Graham Greene – I missed this, was thinking of the wrong tone. 5. W. Shakespeare (i) – Correct! 6. Samuel Richardson – Correct! 7. David Foster Wallace – I guessed Gaddis, but this makes perfect sense. Partial credit. 8. Marcel Proust – Correct! 9. Mrs. Gaskell – Correct! 10. Ian McEwan – Partial credit; I guessed Atonement after Henry James. 11. E. M. Forster – Correct! 12. Cormac McCarthy – Correct! 13. P. G. Wodehouse – Correct! 14. Alan Bennett – I guessed Chekhov/Osborne, so I missed this. 15. Jane Austen – Correct! 16. Dan Brown – Correct! 17. Agatha Christie – Correct! 18. Zadie Smith – Missed this one. 19. W. Shakespeare (ii) – Correct! 20. Iris Murdoch – Correct! 21. Ernest Hemingway – Correct! 22. John Banville – Correct! 23. Harold Pinter – Correct! 24. F. Scott Fitzgerald – Correct! 25. Tennessee Williams – Correct! 26. Oscar Wilde – Correct! 27. D. H. Lawrence – Correct! 28. Thomas Hardy – Correct! 29. Virginia Woolf – Missed this one, was thinking of Galsworthy. 30. Tom Stoppard – Correct!

Final score: 25/30 with a couple of partial credits. Not bad!

You can prove this to yourself.

Tomorrow, when you go to work, check in at regular intervals and ask yourself, “What’s wrong with what’s happening?”

Usually, the answer will be something like “It’s pointless,” “It’s tedious,” “I’d rather be doing X than Y,” or “I’m tired.” Short of your work causing you physical harm, it doesn’t matter what the answer is.

Look into why you answered that with as much detachment as possible. Ask yourself questions like, “Is the thing I’m doing inherently unpleasant? Is it hated by everyone who does it? Is it possible that if I dropped the contextual story around what I’m doing, it’s actually about the same as doing anything else?”

You will find that the misery comes from comparing what you’re doing to some ideal that is just that—an imaginary idea that does not actually exist. It’s pretend. Stop comparing reality to pretend things. Take what you’re doing for what it is. Your mind is not going to love doing this because it thrives on resistance to what is. That’s fine; just recognize that and keep investigating what’s happening.

Keep doing this until you realize that you’re creating your own hell and that you can also escape it with just a few creative adjustments to the story you’re telling yourself.

Moving places or changing jobs won’t fix it. Working less or more won’t fix it. Having a more meaningful job won’t fix it. Having no job won’t fix it.

This is not complacency—change can and will happen, but it’s not going to happen until you’re content with what you’re doing now. Good change comes as a result of accepting what’s real now. Good change doesn’t come from escaping what you’re doing now for some pretend ideal.

https://www.audubon.org/news/these-mighty-shorebirds-keep-br...

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28213498

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

The gist of it seems to be that "YouTube must no longer be a tool of fascist recruitment and oppression. Anything less is to countenance deadly violence..."

I've got 16,399 thoughts in mine and add more just about every day. Anything I think I may want to know later goes there. More ephemeral notes go in Apple Notes (I used Evernote for a long time but became annoyed with their business model and haven't missed it). Everything else goes in The Brain.

Search great, the ability to link notes as parent/children/siblings is extremely powerful once you get the hang of it.

It's not free, but it is, in my opinion, easily worth the cost.

I can't remember a time when I've had Dropbox open and not found it at the top of the CPU tab of Activity Monitor. This may be because I have a couple symlinks (not many, just some dotfiles) or because I have a large number of files (nothing ridiculous, ~100k photos backed up) but the fact is, it's been long enough for Dropbox to have figured this out and fixed it.

It's bad enough to where I now leave Dropbox off all the time, then only turn it on when I need to sync something. With iCloud sync I don't even think about it, which is the way it should be.

I opened Dropbox before starting this comment to see the new UI and even after giving it enough time to catch up, it' still using between 48 and 127% CPU. It makes even Outlook feel breezy.

https://github.com/rhysd/NyaoVim

For me, a better approach has been to consciously force myself to do things I don't feel like doing. I push through low energy, distractions, or boredom and just get it done.

You might expect this to lead to sub-optimal performance or suffering through unenjoyable tasks. Sometimes it does, but in my experience, a more common result is the good feeling of having pushed through a barrier and found a second, or third wind.