alt Hacker News(Author of the post)
For energy, it both requires and pays dividends. It's a bit like working out in that sense.
I think my intended takeaway was that you really don't need to have make the thing you're studying take a lot of time, that daily consistency matters more than pouring hours into practice and obsessing about it.
Though in general, I do still think it's the phones and media diet that is the problem with the sense of lacking time.
Few years ago I had a full time job I felt like I had no time. Then I had a part time job, and I still had no time. Now I'm self employed, with nobody to answer to, and I still often feel like I have no time. Like damn, to get more time than I actually already have I'd need to move in next door to a black hole. Though when I unplug, then holy crap do I suddenly end up with a lot of time.
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recently read a post on a moms' forum about her having a hard time getting her kid to practice violin and the skill plateauing.
the breakthrough was a trip to a relative's remote house with no screens / internet. Kid found violin better than other things to do. More Hours led to improvement. That fed on itself and kid spent more time with the violin and improved much faster.
The busier our lifestyle, the more cheap, meaningless pursuits we engage ourselves in, it all chips away at out natural ability to focus on one thing for long term and we're left with a recursive livelock of infinite choices laden with hidden opportunity costs.
how can humans from 1500 with everything stacked against them have better art sense and science insight than humans in 2026 ?
I think what the parent post was saying is that there is a finite amount of useful mental function time in any one day, and once you’ve exhausted this any attempted learning will be pretty inefficient. Also some jobs will have a faster burn rate. Doing a workout is separate as it doesn’t draw on the mental energy pool.
When chatgpt dropped I found time to start making stuff with it. All the brainpower that typically went towards checking my favorite creators or reading HN links went into making my first LLM powered game.
2 months later I was finished and the sleep deprivation hit me like a brick.
Yeah, I have a similar experience when I put the phone down for prolonged periods. Though I need to be mindful to not do the same stuff on the computer i.e. open Hacker News or other attention grabbing websites. For that stuff I find it useful to use any feature I can either in the browser or the desktop environment to separate work from leisure.
Idk if this is universal but as soon as I’m on vacation I start learning new things, reading, and getting creative.
When I work, my brain is fried from work. On the weekends I need a long period of idleness to recover before I can read a chapter of a novel.
An hour of study every day is unrealistic for me right now.
I think it's a useful distinction between learning about something and learning to do something. They have very different paths and methods of satisfaction.
working out in my 40s just makes me tired. used to energize me when i was younger.
I have a feeling you are a young person :)
Overall, I agree, especially the unplugging part. It's just optimizing for time doesn't really apply in my case. I can carve some time in the evening, but if I spent energy at work, I can hardly learn much.
But, some things like doomscrolling and procrastination are both huge energy sinks as well as timesinks. However, targeting them is very hard (again, for me), as it is usually not the root problem but a symptom of anxiety and uncertainty, which I often cannot deal with. If the root of the problem is boredom, it should be much easier to unplug and occupy the brain with something more wholesome.
Another thing is obsessive optimization, "am I studying/practicing the best way possible?". "Is it worth it with so little progress?". I keep falling to such traps. Writing this, I found that I feel that I lack an example of people doing stuff in a suboptimal, slacky, yolo way, deriving fun and still achieving some results in the end.