Flat pony

[altivo]

Good thing it's a short week. On the other hoof, the reason I need it to be a short week is because today had two day's worth of work to do in one day. Somehow the tradeoff doesn't seem worth it. And on top of that, tomorrow is Wednesday

Comments

[schnee]

Hmm, I don't think no video's worth the bother. That said, I'm more interested in accurate labelling, anyway: if somebody says "here's a ten minute video of my cat", I can and will conclude that this video is not going to be any different from every single other such video out there (and that the cat, for that matter, isn't different from every single other cat out there, either), so I can just decide not to watch it, and everything's fine.

It's situations where people just say "OMG this is so cool look at this" that bother me. How am I supposed to tell if it's worth investing my time that way? I usually default to "no, I'm not gonna watch that", or perhaps "I'll watch the first 10/15/20 seconds, and if there's no indication it'll be worthwhile by then, I'll skip it", but while that's probably as good as you can get under these circumstances, it's not ideal.

Yeah, of course the day still has just 24 hours, but I think what people are trying to do, consciously or not, is to maximize what they get out of it: the most bang for the buck, as it were, in terms of entertainment/fun/general benefit. Somebody might say "I could spend an hour cooking a nice meal, or I could spend five minutes microwaving something and 55 minutes playing this game/watching this movie/reading this book", and then conclude that the total benefit or pay-off or whatever you want to call it is larger in the second case: the decrease in quality of your food is more than made up for by the increase in fun, at least in that person's own personal metric.

Of course, it might just as well be that people think this is true even when it really isn't. Generally speaking, reality isn't context-free; for example, you might well be playing a video game and not enjoying it (that much) right now but still do it because you know (or expect, or hope) you'll get to more enjoyable parts again later on. But on the other hand, this is something that can be exploited, too, and it takes some experience to recognize and avoid time sinks.

But apart from that, I think there's nothing wrong with different people having different priorities and enjoying different things, and I don't think it's justified to look down on people who, say, prefer playing video to reading, or who generally have different priorities. It may well be that they lack the insight to realize that their priorities are messed up, but it also may well be that their priorities are genuinely different, something that's neither good nor bad in itself.