Counterpoint example, I've yet to do grad school but I did take some graduate level classes as technical electives my senior year. While they were the most interesting in the abstract, the professors that taught them also seemed to assume that interest alone will drive you and you therefore need less structure. I found this lack of structure extremely annoying and difficult to mange, expectations were always vague. What's the point of the professor if I have to define everything myself? I ended up saving everything to the last minute as my more structured undergrad classes demanded more immediate milestones, which just produced a ton of stress and some shock when I ended up with a B in Compiler Design when I was hoping to just barely scrape by with a C- or something, given the relative lack of time and effort I'd put into it.
Taught me that I'm just not well tuned for academics or pure research. I'm extrinsically motivated, I need a real-world problem to anchor to, and if that problem requires me to learn Brainfuck then I'll enthusiastically learn Brainfuck, but I would never learn Brainfuck for fun.
To each their own, and I guess it goes to the point of the article even more.
Personally I've always greatly preferred self-guided learning. I never really did great with strict coursework, and instead have done a lot better when I am given more abstract lessons that I play with.
I'm a pretty weird dude, and I have no problem acknowledging that; it's possible that a lot of (most?) people do better with the more structured learning.
Could be I'm the weird one, at least in this community. There's at least one thread on here every day about how some language or platform is better/worse due to some esoteric feature or other and every time I try to read one of those I just can't bring myself to care. Seems like the same tasks can get done in roughly the same amount of time, most of the time. I'm also the only one of my coworkers who uses vi/vim daily, strictly because some variety of vi/vim is on every machine I could ever possibly need to access and I hate having to ask permission to install things just to do my job.
Just offering the perspective from someone for whom grad school (or at least my taste of it) was more difficult in aggregate. I'm glad people like you exist, for all the time you waste navel gazing you occasionally stumble across something incredibly useful that people like me would probably never find. :)
Ha, in the US but I had an issue with my chimney where there a strong smoke smell in the basement and an inexplicable hot spot on the back of my fireplace (no fire had been lit recently, and what creosote there was wasn't ignited). Not knowing what else to do, I called the fire deparment's non-emergency line and explained the situation.
They sent THREE full fire engines with sirens blaring and like 30 guys in full gear to my house, chief came out too. All to smash out the back of the fireplace and dispose of some smoldering embers that had collected behind it.
Seemed like an overreaction, now I'm wondering if they were just bored and decided to use me as a training exercise. Granted I'm also just some goober on the phone, they're under no obligation to assume I've reasonably assessed the situation.
Re the "fire": Turns out the original builders of my chimney skimped on bricks, and left a gap between the back of the fireplace and the exterior wall that shouldn't have been there. We were using the fireplace on the weekends, so some embers that cooled on their way up the chimney and fell back down collected in the gap, and decided to cook off a couple of days later. Weather was getting warmer, so instead of going up the chimney the resulting smoke down-drafted back into the house.
This seems like the kinda event that could very well have been disastrous, where a real fire response was actually warranted. The Oakland Hills firestorm of 1991 was caused by embers from a fire that had been put out the previous day but reignited in hot weather. Killed 25 people, injured 150, and destroyed over 3000 homes. One of the homes destroyed was the creator of SimCity, and so it also spawned the Oakland fire disaster scenario in SimCity 2000, as well as serving as the inspiration for The Sims.
In Oakland? Most of the homes in the region were built in the 1920s-1930s, though some were newer developments that were only about 10-30 years old.
Wooden construction is very common in America because wood is very common and hence cheap. In this particular region there's another reason for its use: it's right on top of a fault line, and wood-frame residential construction performs very well in an earthquake, while brick or unreinforced masonry tends to crumble.
Yeah, his house was located a couple blocks away from where the fire started and burned to the ground. The Sims was inspired by the experience of rebuilding his life.
A building only has two statuses, as far as firefighters are concerned:
- There is no uncontained combustion on the premises
- There is uncontained combustion on the premises
"small uncontained fire" can become "no fire" on its own, it can stay "small fire" for a matter of hours, or it can become "big fire" in under a minute.
They have no way of knowing: and your description, which I presume is perfectly accurate, can't help them decide. For example, during the one minute you took to make the call, the embers could have caught cellulose insulation on fire, traveling up the outside wall, and beginning to melt vinyl siding. By the time they arrived, the building might be approaching structurally unstable, endangering neighbor properties.
So yes. They show up prepared to tear down walls and cut firebreaks and such. Once a house is 'on fire' time must be assumed to be of the essence.
I hope this anecdote is intended to demonstrate the unreasonableness of the average person, rather than the unreasonableness of firefighters.
A fire that can be put out by an extinguisher doesn't stay a fire that can be put out by an extinguisher. The same for suspicious smoldering in a wall.
If you want to deal with a fire in a calm manner yourself, then deal with it yourself, right? When you call the fire department, you've declared that there is a situation bigger than you can handle. It's only reasonable for them to assume it's growing.
> now I'm wondering if they were just bored and decided to use me as a training exercise
If there isn't anything else going on, the opportunity cost of sending more people to your thing is very low and the risk that it wasn't actually a small issue can become much larger.
It might seem like an overreaction when you only think about a possible fire. While their larger concern was probably the possibly imminent CO poisoning!
Traditional fireplaces are VERY bad technology. Over 90% of the energy in the wood goes up the chimney and they ruin air quality in the house and they start so many fires. Even when not in use the chimney lets so much heated or cooled air out.
Strong (and correct) indication of hidden fire--yeah, they're going to roll. And they are going to smash whatever they need to smash to get at the hidden fire.
Just because it didn't go big doesn't mean it didn't have the potential to.
Wow, you seem shockingly blasé about a fire inside the walls of your house!
Just because the fire didn't spread doesn't mean it didn't have the potential to, or either you or the firefighters knew if it did or not without the emergency response.
It’s easier to say that when your parents were right. But there are a lot of parents who pushed their now-graduating children into fields that AI has recently eaten. And before that, parents who pushed their kids into fields they hated and ended up burning out.
That said, I am probably going to do with my kids exactly what your parents did and just hope I’m not wrong about their economic future and passions. But man, it’s a tough strategy call.
If you look at the two extremes: "follow exactly the plan I've laid out for you to the letter" and "be whoever you want to be and do whatever you want to do" in a vacuum both of those come with understandable tradeoffs and risks.
So really the meat of the problem is treading that balance. Though I am of the belief that the mind, just like the body, needs cultivating through training and studying helps cultivate the mind. Also, breadth can really unlock different things in perspective and learning so in that respect I have faith in traditional curriculums - it's hard to predict what and how things will stick for a kid so just let them learn a bit of everything because it's possible something they learn in A might lead to an aha in "unrelated" B.
Probably the one invariant for our kid will be "you must work hard"
Regardless of making big money later or not, I find it horrible to push your kids in a direction simply because of that. They might be better off with less income but liking their job. Or like their job, become very good, and make a lot of money anyway because of that.
But maybe that's because I grew up in a place where you can make a decent living in a wide variety of jobs. Or because almost nobody in my (childhood) vicinity ever had a STEM, or even any white collar job.
That's the issue, seems like the amount of jobs that produce a decent living are fewer and further between. Particularly if you want your own house and a family.
Could be a temporary fluctuation, or it could be that we're mean-reverting to the historical average of an ownership class and an underclass, where only the ownership class has the freedom to pursue their passions with any security. That would be sad, but I'm prepping my family for the latter.
Buying lots of stocks, owning my home, maxing out my Roth 401k and Roth IRA as opposed to funding more short term priorities, with the idea that my retirement account isn't just funding my retirement, but possibly buying my kids houses as well. Would like to start a lifestyle business when the kids are older. Looking after my health so that I have more time out of the hospital. When my kids are old enough I'll teach them the absolute necessity of making money and every way I can think of to do that, that whatever they do when they grow up they have to be willing and able to do the version of it that makes money. If they love dance, they better be prepared to be dance instructors and open a studio or savagely commit to going pro, or be prepared to do something else to pay the bills and keep it as a hobby.
We've been financially fortunate enough to be in the top 25% of US households, and even I'm living the reality where I can't afford what my dad could afford working effectively the same job at the same age. Looking out at the world I see little reason why that trend should reverse, it'll have to get a lot worse first.
If I'm right I have a good shot to keep my family on the better side of this shitty transition, and if I'm wrong then my kids will have even more freedom than average, at the cost of a slightly more humble present. Probably won't step on a plane much over the next 2-3 decades, and that's fine.
The older I get, the more I feel it's better to just chase the money. I mean, everyone needs some amount of money and all the stuff other than the job can be made so much easier with money. Also, high paying jobs tend to be more comfortable in other ways too: nicer offices, more slack allowed, less horrible people.
I've always been smart enough to pick any jobs I want, and, if I'm perfectly honest, I've never liked any of them in the long run. All jobs start feeling like chores after a while. In every job, the stuff surrounding the job (waking up early, commuting, talking with people I might not like, the general office setting, being told what to do, etc.) is awful enough to make even the good bits worthless.
On the flip side, anything can become somewhat interesting when I spend some effort to learn it.
So yeah, I'm not a big fan of "do whatever interests you".
On the flip side, the people that have been the most successful at chasing the money seem to be absolutely horrible people. I'm sure we can all think of a few.
I think some guidance is necessary. It's not nice to spend years in university, and then end up unemployed, or working a job that requires no higher education. That is the reality for many young people today.
I will street my children towards something that is at least employable, assuming AI has not completely obliterated job market by then.
and my mum dissuaded me from computers pretty strongly due to the negative stereotypes at the time, and its hindsight that tells us that I got lucky with my passion.
My mum did emphasise my reading though, and that went well.
There is more to life than earning money, and not all skills need to be in service of that.
Regardless, both of those talents have the potential to open doors and set the stage for opportunity, nor are they mutually exclusive to whatever economic skills might be viable in the future.
If you have rent or a mortgage, there is little more important than paying it. Everything else comes after. Everyone alive in the developed world today grew up in a wondrous period of history where the middle class had many luxuries previously only afforded to those with inherited wealth. There are signs that period is ending.
I'm not against things like learning to play an instrument, but if you're going to major in Music Theory, you better have a solid plan for a career on the other end. It can be a risky plan, but it has to be real with non-zero odds of success. It can't be just because you love playing the violin.
Jake the dog: "Music is powerful man. It speaks to a primal pit in our brains. It makes anyone wanna get up and get their knees goin'. Gotta get 'em pumpin' pumpin' pumpin', boompa boompa boom."
Music Hole: "Jake's right. A good song can really wrap people up in a mood, better than any words alone could."
In what world are you living in that you can't afford an instrument to play? You can get used acoustic guitars practically for free secondhand. You can practice singing for free, youtube has lots of great tutorials.
Any kind of musical ability is a skill that differentiates you from the guy who doesn't have any. It widens your perspective, it allows you to talk about music more deeply (for example theory) with others, it creates joy to your life and you will gain bigger respect for the skills of other musicians.
This all doesn't have anything to do with money and it doesn't have to. Not 100% of your time is needed to make money at all times.
> In what world are you living in that you can't afford an instrument to play? You can get used acoustic guitars practically for free secondhand. You can practice singing for free, youtube has lots of great tutorials.
I’m older than YouTube and my parents didn’t have a lot of money.
Never seen free guitars in any charity shops otherwise I’d have picked one up.
Also singing isn’t playing an instrument. Which was specifically what the OP was discussing and thus specifically what I’m reply about.
> Any kind of musical ability is a skill that differentiates you from the guy who doesn't have any. It widens your perspective, it allows you to talk about music more deeply (for example theory) with others, it creates joy to your life and you will gain bigger respect for the skills of other musicians.
I agree. But that wasn’t the point being discussed.
Also the same can also be said for sports. Or knitting. Or in fact any skill.
I love music, it’s my biggest passion outside of computers. But it seems daft to argue music is uniquely different to any other hobby. For example, my wife actually hates music and it wasn’t my interest in it that she found attractive (ironically to this thread, it was actually my work ethic, because she saw someone stable who wanted kids too).
> This all doesn't have anything to do with money and it doesn't have to. Not 100% of your time is needed to make money at all times.
Unfortunately that’s exactly how some families do have to live.
Not all of us are fortunate enough to have the free time to enjoy a hobby. Some people literally work most of their waking hours just to pay rent and buy food. Life can be really hard for some people.
I beatbox and sometimes I sing. Though to be fair I am just being me. While I do have musical ability, I don't use that to impress people. It's a me thing. It keeps my brain juice flowing.
I’ve got no issues with people wanting to express themselves creatively. The point that was contentious was whether learning to play an instrument (specifically) was a core and essential skill.
I was in my 20s before I learned to play a guitar because my family couldn’t afford one. So I had to prioritise other skills and those skills are what got me a lucrative career which allowed me the luxury of pursuing creative hobbies.
It sucks that’s how life works. But that’s the world we live in.
Nobody has said playing an instrument is a core and essential skill. If this thread was about that, I'd say learning to cook is a priority.
This thread is about what you might teach your children, and predicting what works well in 20 years. There's no future where knowing how to play an instrument isn't a great thing. If you can't afford a guitar, don't get a guitar. There are cheaper instruments. Humans have figured out how to make it work across the ages, regardless of financial status.
You might change careers several times in your life, but being able to play an instrument is always a viable way to enrich one's life.
Actually, it's more basic than that: you're not going to be able to afford having a wife and children if you can hardly pay your own rent.
I wish we were living in a world were people could earn a living and follow their passion but capitalism doesn't allow for that. It's designed for consuming things and increasing profits, not for improving the well being of people.
This line of thinking has baked in the assumption that if something is not brining me money, it's not worth the effort. Obviously life is more than money so I am not sure why you would frame it that way.
They are saying a depressingly large number of people don’t earn enough to cover their essential daily expenses like rent and food despite working extremely long hours. And thus they do not have the same luxuries of time and disposable income that people in our position do.
So to say “everyone has the time to learn an instrument” isn’t technically accurate.
> "Everyone alive in the developed world today grew up in a wondrous period of history where the middle class had many luxuries previously only afforded to those with inherited wealth. There are signs that period is ending."
People have been freaking out about this pending doom for as long as we've walked the earth. Most of it stems from either old age or political hyperventilating (both symptoms of perceived displacement). Humanity's still grinding forward ... faster than ever.
Try telling that to the 20-somethings who already cannot afford to get on the property ladder and are being told AI will replace what few skilled white collar roles were available to them.
Times already have changed. It’s not people freaking out about a theoretical scenario. It’s already happened for those entering the job market today.
Izzat all? Man, kids these day sure have it easy. When I was a kid, we had to worry about getting nuked into glowing cinders in World War III, getting conscripted and blown to bits fighting the Soviet led Warsaw Pact, or not being able to get on the property ladder and being told that the Japanese will replace what few skilled blue and white collar jobs were available.
It’s definitely harder to get on the property ladder now than it has been for decades. This isn’t hyperbole, house prices have grown disproportionately to wages. This has been proven in literally every financial report about property prices. Eg https://mojomortgages.com/mortgage-news/homeownership-50-yea...
And as for the fear of WW3, have you turned on the news recently? That fear is just as real now than it was in the 80s.
I know that HN is quite American-centric, but for rest of the developed world (particularity Europe and East Asia), we're already worried about an impending world war.
If you don't mind being a couple hours drive from anywhere Taylor Swift would play, you can find affordable property, a good community, and amazon prime service. Any town that lacks tech work opportunities will still have solid internet from Starlink to support remote work.
I think becoming proficient in some form of artistic expression is very helpful for achieving self-actualization.
My biggest frustration, currently, is a lack of time and energy to devote to my creative projects. I still give them some time, but between a full-time job, child care, and other day-to-day responsibilities, it is not as much as I would like.
My wildest hope for society in my lifetime is that we will experience dramaticly shorter work weeks. Keynes predicted 15 hour work weeks by 2030 or so. If I could afford a modest life on only 15 hours of labor, and devote other time to family, friends, and art, I would feel so amazing. I'm skeptical of the claims of AI, but a society where a shorter work week is the norm would turn me into its biggest fan.
Anyway, despite my frustration, the time I spend with my creative projects results in my greatest self-satisfaction, after the time I devote to raising my children. And the creative outlets I pursue today are directly related to the artistic skills I developed in my youth (including music). So yeah, it probably won't pay the bills, but there's much more important things in life than bills.
On the one hand yea, but on the other hand, society is trying to create a situation where the biggest necessities are less of a burden. The big 4 IMO are: food, water, air, sleep. I get water out of the tap. It costs a lot less for me to get clean water than it is costing people 500 years ago (on average). At least that's my guess anyway.
People should prepare their kids to be happy adults, not just employed adults.
I recall reading of studies that found that a significant majority of adults who did not learn to play an instrument when they were young wish that they had.
Only a small minority of adults who did learn to play an instrument when young wish that they hadn't.
I was often really frustrated with my parents pushing me to learn at least some basics on the piano. Why do I have to practice, I want to watch Dragonball Z. Practicing is sooooo boring. Ugh.
I'm still not amazing at piano. But having a basic understanding of musical theory, understanding how a lot of these concepts of harmonics and tones and waves are related, have really unlocked a lot of neat things throughout my life. Their push for me to learn an instrument drove me to performing for family events including a couple of weddings, with my involvement in their day still quite a powerful shared memory between us. It led me to learn additional musical instruments, which I enjoyed a lot more than piano. It helped me in other artistic endeavors like theater. It helped me understand music production, something I moonlight in as a volunteer. It gave me instant connections with lots of people who were important people in my life but probably would have forever been passing strangers. It has given me something else to share with my children, as they routinely ask me to play for them and show them how instruments work. A basic understanding of waves and harmonics and what not even helped me understand a lot of more complicated EE topics.
Learning an instrument early in my life was definitely a powerful and deeply impactful thing in my life journey, almost entirely positively outside of many afternoons where I had to catch up on DBZ later.
I didn't have that but I instead did a lot of music production as a teenager, hand dragging midi notes. It turns out, I have perfect pitch. But I learned that at 27 where a musically trained person noticed it. I make melodies all the time in my head.
It was a funny moment where she was like "you have perfect pitch!" "What is perfect pitch?"
I guess it's a shame, I could've been a great musician if I was trained.
In any case, if you want to meet up online, my email is in my profile. You sound fun!
If you can read and have any sort of curiosity (or you help teach curiosity) it’s a pretty solid foundation to learn just about anything.
The music bit is mostly things you’d want to impart on your kids if you care about that sort of thing. (Which I do!) The public versions of it are not great where I am but individually you can do a lot.
Proficiency in reading and writing is clearly useful.
Proficiency in musical instrumemts is not necessarily useful by itself, but it's a path towards mastery of something hard that typically involves a lot of intentional practice. Having been able to master something hard once makes it easier to master other hard things, because you can reuse the learning skills. Music has a little bit of applied fractions and what not, too.
The same thing learning to learn journey happens with learning a second language. But also, learning a second language helps develop skills and understanding of your first language, and helps develop communication skills for situations where there's a limited mutual understandable vocabulary.
Some languages have market value too. Better communication with employers, customers, and suppliers is valuable.
Reading is a life skill. Proficiency in it makes you understand things. Weren't there plenty of news articles this year about how high schoolers didn't have proficient reading capabilities? Maybe teaching your kids how to properly read a text is a good thing.
"Hey, Muse, read me this article". Voila, your kids know how to read. Deciphering marks on paper can be as obsolete as lightning a fire without matches, with the advent of technology.
‘Hey, Claude, make me a painting of a sunset.’ Voila, you know how to make art. ‘Hey, Chat, write me a sonnet.’ Voila, you know how to write poetry. But you don’t really though, don’t you.
Text-to-speech didn’t come into existence with the advent of agentic AI, and yet you will have a hard time getting any job or being part of most communities if you are illiterate. It turns out technology did not make literacy obsolete.
In any case, we already know that putting screens in front of children is harmful, so unless someone advocates harming children, using a modern computing device (touchscreen slate, keyboard and mouse, etc) as a replacement for basic education is highly suspect.
Hey Claude, can you have sex with my wife for me? Voila, your wife now has an actual lover. Having sex with your wife can be as obsolete as real intimacy, with the advent of technology.
Playing an instrument (or rather learning new pieces to play) is super efficient brain training increasing your performance in pretty much everything else that requires you to do thinking.
Not musical, but definitely linguistic. There are many jobs for people to work as translators or to provide customer service in languages other than the dominant one.
Music and linguistics have often been considered amongst the "liberal arts" - none of which are arguably "useful" but all of which are terribly worthwhile.
Lmao. This comment combined with the one above are just a microcosm of the worst HN has to offer.
What sort of socialism was at play when the British forced Ireland into famine during the potato blight? What about the British role in India’s famine? What about the many famines brought about by civil wars and ethnic conflicts in Africa? The Great Depression, famously brought about by socialist policies and definitely not gilded age wealth inequality decadence?
If you’re looking for a common thread, it’s authoritarianism, not socialism.
So we're talking about the complete destruction of the consumer economy.
Hard to see how Google or Facebook keeps their advertising models in that environment. There aren't enough construction workers and data scientists to buy everything.
> If it's any consolation, in the end it will destroy capitalism too.
That is hardly will be of any consolation. AI will probably destroy capitalism, but not because it will replace some useless f.ucks from their useless computer jobs (most of them will perfectly fine find another more useful job, if only way less paid), but because with surveillance and totalitarian control that AI capable of, socialists like Stalin or Hitler will build resilient and durable society where no member will have any way for resisting.
Odd that you mention that, China is afraid of exactly the opposite. Their systems are so centralized for surveillance purposes that an AI seriously breaching their systems could destroy their control.
Of course it is afraid, and because of that AI will be banned for many use cases and severely regulated by the government for other use cases.
That is like one of the first steps to build the ultimate totalitarian regime. In the USSR bolsheviks were grate proponents of civilian weapons right until they have got power. And then civilian weapons were banned.
> There aren't enough construction workers and data scientists to buy everything.
There will be, when two third of the office workers will be replaced by AI.
It is astounding why so many people does not understand how consumer economy works. I think it is more a matter of the copium, because, well, it is generally hard to accept the truth that in five years you will have to haul bricks as a job, and the guy who used to put that bricks on one another and make three times less than you in your tech job now will be your new boss.
And advertising models in that environment? Why should something changed for it?
Honestly I'd report it to the state insurance commission. Did they call out any specific issue with the roof at any point? Some kind of new code they were mandating an upgrade to or anything?
Yeah, I probably should have reported it at the time. They didn’t cite anything specific even after we requested what in the on-roof (not drone) inspection indicated an issue or was missing from the inspection.
Though to be precise, this was over a year ago so I’m not remembering their exact wording. But it likely wasn’t literally “drone footage alone,” but probably something more like “our drone footage and associated analysis” — in any case the effective interpretation being “we don’t care about installation date or your inspection. Replace it or lose coverage.”
Not that it makes it right, but there’s enough providers in my area it was less effort to get new coverage than continue to fight them.
> Why should someone who has an unpatched hole in their roof pay the same rate as someone who maintains their roof?
Because otherwise the insurance companies can just look at your completely maintained roof that will last another 20 years and ask for a full replacement because it is 10 years old. And if you don’t comply they will drop you. (Happened to me)
Well yeah, abuse can happen. But the general principle of some people paying higher premiums than others because they're higher risk isn't a bad one.
If we mandate that insurers keep premiums equal for everyone, get ready for a lot of people to have zero access to insurance as they're deemed too risky to cover.
> But the general principle of some people paying higher premiums than others because they're higher risk isn't a bad one.
So someone with cancer should be charged $20k/month then? I am completely healthy and haven’t used my insurance much in the last 10 years. Why are my premiums so high? And why are 65+ year olds not footing most of the bill? I am not advocating for that but just pointing out that were obviously okay with charging for some risk profiles but not others.
> Why should someone who has an unpatched hole in their roof pay the same rate as someone who maintains their roof?
You're right - I really should be paying less due to the unpatched holes in one section of my roof. I obviously need no coverage on this part of the house, as the damage (both already occurred and ongoing) are not covered causes of loss. If you know a way I can express this to my insurance company to receive a discount, without them going "this is weird, we're actually raising your rates", please let me know.
In your experience, how do people typically respond to crassness? That's how they'll respond to your argument.
To be completely blunt, fuck your bluntness. You clearly don't care about climate change all that much if you aren't willing to even attempt effective messaging. Go do your revolutionary cosplay with some lesser topic
Politeness hasn't worked, and we are accelerating climate change, not slowing it.
You can act as upset as you want, I am more concerned about the impact to the world around us than I am about hurt feelings on a tech discussion forum.
I'm not entirely sure why you are so upset with me, but I assure you, it's not cosplay. My family lives on the west coast, and are going to be significantly impacted by climate change. My family back east lives in rural Manitoba (southern and northern), and their farms have been impacted by poor harvests due to weather and climate issues. My friends and family in northern Manitoba were evacuated due to forest fires last summer, and other friends in the BC interior were as well.
It's not performative concern and it's not revolutionary, it's just exhaustion from watching people deny and tone police discussions about something having real, human impacts. People will starve to death because of crop failures happening today, and its going to get worse :(
If you get into a deep enough "convenience" spiral, you lose the physical energy to engage in things like reading a book.
I was once so depressed that I didn't leave my room except to use the bathroom for months, and in that time I developed lethargy so extreme that I couldn't even play causal FPS video games competently. My brain simply didn't work as well, despite having all the calories it needed.
Taught me that I'm just not well tuned for academics or pure research. I'm extrinsically motivated, I need a real-world problem to anchor to, and if that problem requires me to learn Brainfuck then I'll enthusiastically learn Brainfuck, but I would never learn Brainfuck for fun.
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