"Life is suffering". Better to accept it. There is joy in life but what you are present for even without training your mind is suffering. It's way easier to recognize and remember than joy.

What do you mean by "natural or within range of possibility"?

One is consistent by doing, not by feeling (of course feelings have their own place in life). I don't enjoy going to the gym per se. I let go of that and go. I don't go because I feel happy and motivated before exercise. First, I went because people for thousands of years have saying so, and biologically it makes sense. Then, because I know how I feel in the short and long term after the exercise.

I do different sports for enjoyment and different for keeping in shape of course. I love hiking but going to a gym is more sustainable as a regular way of keeping in shape in all seasons and weather.

You might have heard it from other places but meditation. It's literally training you to be present with your thoughts and knowing what exactly is happening in your mind at the moment (and letting it go).

Once you start meditating regularly you can observe that you got tangled up in thoughts quite early on and pull yourself back.

As many practitioners say it helps to create space between impulse and action.

Do you have some sources to recommend or have you learned it all from your own experience?

It can be great for party setting but I recommend doing it in the safe environment with family, friends at home or in nature. The feeling of deeper connection with people or nature you already have connection with is revealing. I felt love I knew in even more direct and pure way.

Why it always need to be only about productivity and not what is better for people? I get that company need to make money but surly productivity is not dropping 50% and company makes significantly less

If one company were to hire all the slackers and the other all the busy beavers, one will be more likely to succeed vs the other.

Unless being a slacker becomes a protected class companies will hire the productive people, given a choice.

How do you objectively measure productivity? Same question for "better for people".

The former can be somewhat measured by in-effective methods such as lines of code produced, revenue per emp in division, and other measures. The latter via surveys.

A company's direct objective it to turn a profit. Their indirect objective is might be to do that via retaining productive workers, or they may take a churn approach. Is it surprising they'd put more effort and weight on the former (prod) than the latter (better for people)?

What math function allows you to strike the correct balance between the 2 measures. For some employees you might make them maximally satisfied by paying them a lot to do nothing. For others they might want little to no money for socially rewarding work. It's not going to be the same for every person.

So in your mind what's the right optimization function for this equation?

ask yourself that question and answer it.

just what in the hell are you thinking?

Finally, now it's easy to read code on a phone

What does it explain?

The problem is simple means diffrent thing in a small codebase than in a big one. A bunch of if statements in a code that is small enough to understand everything is ok but when it become big it's hard to understand flow of data.

I do favor simple code but some complexity/abstracion is needed to make it easier to understand

But picking the right abstractions that aren't leaky in any of the aspects you really care about is critical, hard to measure (leakiness isn't obvious, nor what kind of aspects you care about), hard to get right, and hard to maintain (because your abstraction may need to evolve, which is extra tricky).

Obviously, getting that right makes subsequent developments much, much easier, but it's hardly a simple route to success.

I see tech debt and simplicity as a mixture between 'tyranny of small decisions' and each individual coders 'cleanliness' level.

Each individual coder has a code cleanliness level, similar to how every friend's Mom growing up would always remark "Sorry the house is a mess", when it was spotless. If your used to 9/10 and it's a 7, that looks like a wreck. If you are used to 5 and it's a 7, that looks great. I urge other coders to increase their cleanliness level, and to look for others with high cleanliness for guidance. If you are coding next to people that 5 looks good to them, no matter how much they try to pay down technical debt, they never will.

I think tyranny is ultimately showing us that the tooling that we currently have is making is much trickier than should be to evolve those abstractions. Partially this is because of bad abstractions that caused bad tooling and bad tooling that caused bad abstractions. Because it's so difficult, we don't do it. We take the small decision and work slightly harder in a slightly buggier environment to get the new thing done. But of course now the problem is bigger which means its even less likely for us to ever actually pay down that debt.

> “I’m sorry I wrote you such a long letter. I didn’t have time to write you a short one.” – Blaise Pascal