"If you want to let music inspire you and enjoy its real beauty, I have few very simple rules: Classical Music and no “skipping”. Then I will trust my appetite."
I do like sitting down and actually focusing on an album, but suggesting only that only classical music is worthy of appreciation is absurd. There is an amazing variety of wonderful modern music in a multitude of genres.
Nothing wrong with either. Sure there are definitely artists I respect more than others, but sometimes it's more fun to just put on some trashy [insert genre here, I wont get specific] and enjoy.
So pieces will be 10-20 minutes as opposed to 3 minutes.
That allows for a different listening experience.
I suggest something different for working: light EDM.
EDM is not designed to be 'actively listened to'. It's designed for your body, not your ears, it's generally 'beat and rhythm founded' instead of 'melody, chord and phrasing founded' - and so you can have it on for much longer and still use your mind for work.
Drum Circles last for hours, you can have a conversation while enjoying it.
So you don't waste great music while working away, you can burn the tedium of mediocre electronica all without looking for the dopamine chorus / mega riff.
OnT: The title says overstimulating but with guidelines like that it feels more like criticism of stimulation from a broad range of bad entertainment. Is digitally distributed classical music a no go now?
Think of digital consumption like any drug or vice. The severity of its effects are different for every person, and so is the solution for each person.
Some alcoholics can do a social drink with friends as long as they don't drink at home alone. Others can't touch it.
For me, there are times when the mere presence of an internet-connected device in my headspace has a weight on me - a small weight, but it's there. I find myself feeling truly disconnected from the digital river /better/ when I put music on the record player and put my phone on silent in another room, dissuaded from touching it, "liking" a song, or responding to an unexpected text.
Watching Rick Beato on YouTube dissect the latest top 10 is exceptionally enlightening. There are some exceptions, but there's quite a lot of interesting things going on, musically, in pretty much every song.
Truth. I picked up playing guitar over the pandemic. While I primarily play bluesy / folky / indie stuff on my own time, I find myself listening to 80s metal for inspiration because it’s honestly super nerdy from a music standpoint. You’ll actually probably learn more applicable technique dissecting an Iron Maiden song than a classical piece.
It was just the same old "I wish I was deep" stoic drivel till here and it's clear this was probably written by a 17 year old.
Not to mention pulling out "A Brave New World" after the first paragraph. This reads like a college freshman essay, including the typos. It's "time and time again" not "times and times again".
My reasoning is it's an entire profession to measure flavour profiles and quantities of food additives, hooks and drops in songs, microtransaction timings in games, et cetera. The science is clear, we simply ought to apply it in reverse.
I'm fairly certain the average neanderthal would feel ill after drinking a 500ml Monster and listening to djent.
> Detractors say that the overall concept of dopamine fasting is unscientific since the chemical plays a vital role in everyday life; literally reducing it would not be good for a person,[10] and removing a particular stimulus like social media would not reduce the levels of dopamine in the body, only the stimulation of it.[10] Ciara McCabe, Associate Professor in Neuroscience at the University of Reading, considers the idea that the brain could be "reset" by avoiding dopamine triggers for a short time to be "nonsense".[9]
> Cameron Sepah, who has promoted the practice of dopamine fasting, agrees that the name is misleading and says that its purpose is not to literally reduce dopamine in the body[9] but rather to reduce the impulsive behaviors that are rewarded by it.[6]
For further thought: Stimulant medication significantly improves excessive impulsivity in those with some types of executive function disorders. ADHD is extremely well studied in this regard.
But by framing it in moralistic language, it comes off as insultingly trite. For conversations like this I find it helpful to bring the focus to your personal experience. Say “this is what I did and how it affected me” and not “you have to do these things to be happy”. The former allows the reader to make an inference and decide for themselves if your experience sounds compelling, the latter is a command with no authority.
No?
The author sounds like such a condescending, self-congratulatory and ill-informed asshole. I don't understand how this is upvoted here at all.
I skimmed the article very quickly since I didn't like the authors writing style. That line at the end struck me though. I'm not against cynicism in general but it is particularly destructive when combined with bitterness and contempt.
That helped me realize why I couldn't get through a paragraph of the essay without wanting to skip forward. This rant isn't coming from a place of love but instead it feels like it is coming from a place of contempt. It seems the author feels they are above others. They are dictating the correct behaviour like a priest to sinners.
As developers this is challenging since so many of our tools require network access. I've had minimal luck with various site blockers since you can always just disable them. So here's my plan:
1) Prepare. Download documentation you will want and invest in dead-tree copies of relevent books.
2) Have 2 desks, one with your computer, and one without. I physically move to the non-computer desk for design work and thinking, then get up and move to the computer desk to program. A comfy chair for more creative thinking is a nice addition to this setup.
3) Make it really hard to turn the internet back on. When I started this I would actually go and put the modem outside in my car to make it annoying enough to turn the internet back on. As I've gotten more comfortable with this practice I find it's enough to just go and turn off the modem, but I've found that simply turning off wifi on the computer is not enough distance.
Sounds extreme, but by seeing how much work I need to do to disconnect has taught me how much of an addict I really am and given the motivation to work on the problem.
Through this process I've gained a new level of respect for Emacs. The built-in documentation browser is amazing, both the tools for browsing and the quality of the documentation. I'm able to figure out everything I need to about Emacs without touching the network.
This also makes me want to put a lock on the refrigerator that can only be unlocked by running a certain distance on a treadmill. LOL. I have to create artificial grit, I don't have an overabundance of the natural kind.
I find I'm quite mentally creative when doing tasks such as cutting the grass, which I don't find tedious, but instead require a sort of process-control mental activity. I actually enjoy cutting the grass for its physical side combined with the opportunity to get a good looking result from a task that takes about an hour. Hoovering doesn't inspire the same mental creativity.
Go to the beach for a couple of days to get a groundbreaking work related idea.
Kinda similar to how I use my gym membership ;)
It's also best done without the pressure of "I must come up with something". Sometimes there really is pressure and I have to spend some time to trick myself to build up momentum.
I like to schedule time to go on a 30 minute walk with my phone in Do Not Disturb mode.
LOL.
That's all I need to see from the author to know to ignore his advice. Logic dictates that if you're looking to suppress excess stimulation, then no music is better than background music. Likewise, if focusing is your goal, then a pair of simple noise cancelling headphones or maybe a nice nature sounds track would be better. Classical music, after all, was created at the whims of an elite ruling class. Big money and its influence on the art form didn't begin with modern music.
"I observe many people, interestingly the majority of it are girls, that seem to never stop messaging with their boyfriend, their friends, their mother,…"
Life advice from a child. What a brave new world, indeed.
Makes me feel like I have no free will.
Super strange honestly
This line couldn't have been written by someone who's opinion I respect or care about. Basically stopped right there.
That's what people used to say a decade after the printing press was invented too.
And the bit about music is ridiculous; elitism based on ignorance. Anyone claiming that only their favorite genre is acceptable to listen to either has a too high opinion of themselves or has been missing out on >99% of available content, perhaps even due to a fear of "overstimulating" their mind.
Some idle time now and then, maybe at a regular walk outside, is definitely helpful not only for creativity. But that doesn't mean the rest of the daily activities are bad. At least for me I'd say both are necessary.
He does have a point when he mentions that music in the Spotify era is produced in industrial quantities, and can be quite generic. I also do agree that playlists engender a tendency to rapidly switch from song to song, compared to listening to a full album. But you can't fix that with classical music. If people wanted to seek it out themselves, they would.
"Modern music is like junk food." There's amazing modern music, and total crap. Labeling the millions of hours of modern music as all bad is at best lazy, and at worst has undertones of racism (the only good music is that produced by dead white guys).
"Let me tell you: regulating your emotions with an external tool is dangerous. You start depending on it. You crave it when you don’t have it. It is called addiction." - again, just insanely lazy generalization. I regulate my emotions with an external tool most days. It's called exercise. It is a very good thing, not an addiction (trust me, I'd love to stop, I really don't enjoy exercise at all).
The bit about photos? I visited my mom's house recently and looked at the photos of my deceased grandparents. According to this guy, that's going to keep me in a slump.
This piece is generally pretty lazy ("I bet that 95% of Millenials start their day by looking at the phone." - first of all, if you're going to criticize a whole generation, at least spell it right, and second of all, why don't you do some kind of research instead of making unsupported assumptions about the behavior of a group of millions of people?) and extremely arrogant.
I award OP no points and may god have mercy on his soul.
On HN idea the idea is to post out of curiosity and intellectual interest. If one article doesn't engage your curiosity, perhaps another will. Annoyances are best left where you encountered them, rather than hauled into the HN threads.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Edit: it unfortunately looks like you've been posting in the flamewar style repeatedly lately. Could you please not do that? It's destructive of everything we're trying for here. You've posted substantive, curious comments in the past, which is great; if you'd stick to that in the future, we'd be grateful.
I understand it is not post of the year, but a bit of reading between the lines needs to be done. What is this person trying to tell us? Rather than rushing to find flaws (and perceived flaws) as quickly as possible.
There is a good post in here about how externalizing negative emotion to the internet is indeed addictive behavior, an emotional crutch. Unfortunately this one ain't it. Not to mention it's hardly breaking new ground with this thesis- pre-cancellation Louis C.K. arrived at the same conclusion much more concisely nearly a decade ago:
Stop trying to see racism everywhere where where there is none, it'll do wonders for your blood pressure.
I know the GP contained a provocation, but that's no reason to single it out, pour fuel on it, and light it on fire. When you do that, you seriously damage this place.
The intended spirit of HN is curiosity (specifically intellectual curiosity), and that implies a completely different way of behaving: overlooking provocations and focusing on something else that's interesting. Please do that instead.
Flamewars, especially on classic flamewar topics, have nothing interesting in them because they're so tediously repetitive, and of course inevitably turn nasty as well (perhaps as a way of making them less boring [1]). So they do multiple kinds of damage here. That's not cool.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
[1] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...
He specifically says classical music is the only acceptable kind, and the vast majority of the history of classical music was devoid of non-white people.
You should read the things you're responding to a little better - it'll do wonders for your comprehension.
Care to elaborate as to your reasoning?
