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Posted by aselimov3 1 day ago

Men who stare at walls(www.alexselimov.com)
688 points | 325 commentspage 8
keyle 1 day ago|
Instead of a wall may I recommend trees, fresh air, and just enjoying it away from anything electrical.

I had a same issue and I found it helped to just step away and blank out in nature.

Also try delaying your first coffee to after the first hour of being awake.

uean 1 day ago|
Thanks for saying this. I live in a small, bleak, brown town just recovering from winter, and even despite this, getting out into nature and staring at the water flow past in the local river gives so much benefit.

Reading this article is a great reminder that we all need to disconnect and ground ourselves again. My brain (and likely most of ours) just can't handle 100% up-time all day and needs that break.

Tangent - I used to go cycling a lot, and required a lot less wall/river-staring then. Of the people I knew who I cycled with, 95% of us were coping with some kind of mental health issue in some way and had found our fix on the bike. I miss it.

neilv 1 day ago||
If you get in the habit of doing this when thinking, it can bomb interviews with interviewers who don't know that's something that some people do.

In-person interview: the majority of people want you to be making frequent eye contact, and are less comfortable when you aren't. Some people also hear folk myths that looking a certain direction is a tell for deception or fabrication. ("Up and to the left means lying; up and to the right means hungry.")

On videoconf interview: if you look away when thinking, people might think you're looking at (or listening to) AI output or a human collaborator, to cheat.

(OTOH, you might be better off finding thoughtful colleagues already familiar with introvert and neurodiverse thinkers, who are aware that many great engineers are also nerds, and who include that within "culture fit".)

tolerance 1 day ago|
Exactly! Bomb the interviews.

I would also push back on the idea that this sort of behavior could be unique to "introvert and neurodiverse thinkers". Must there not be social and/or "neurotypical" people with idiosyncrasies?

neilv 1 day ago||
As the philosopher Depeche Mode put it, "people are people".
croisillon 17 hours ago||
i thought it was called "rawdogging" these days
elAhmo 1 day ago||
Why not a walk? No podcasts or music, just walk.
delis-thumbs-7e 1 day ago||
It’s amazing how people recommend very quickly: ”Go to walk in a forrest amongst green leaves, talk to the squirrels…” instead of practice you can do anywhere anytime that cost nothing.

Like do you understand that everyone is not rich working home next to a nice park or great forrest? Like many, many, many in this world people have to travel 1,5h to work middle of an urban metropolitan area with almost no trees and definitely no fresh air, and their living conditions are no improvement? But this practice or other types of meditation you can do even during your remote, or even in a solitary confinement? And if you get good at this hou can do small few minute/seconds of meditations or “wall staring” during the day?

I am very privileged and there’s deers walking 5min from where I live, but I don’t have the audacity to think everyone in this world are as lucky.

sph 1 day ago||
Is having a park or woods nearby a symbol of wealth? Do you live in the middle of the Sahara desert?
Detrytus 1 day ago||
Well, how about downtown Chicago? Or any big city in the US for that matter?
ToucanLoucan 1 day ago||
Whenever people describe the living conditions of your average person all I can think is what a colossal failure our system is, to imprison so many millions in such an utterly shit existence.

Like yes it's cool to have air conditioning and basically any food anywhere at any time, and many have transportation that can take us across the country at a moment's notice. There are marvels now that our ancestors would die of shock trying to comprehend. That said, it seems still that we've made a remarkably awful place for the vast majority of people to live and work in, more the latter than the former, while a handful of people basically live in a never-ending theme park.

ZeidJ 1 day ago||
This reminds me of an app we made awhile back with the sole purpose of finding 'Boredom'.

TLDR on the app is that you join real time 'boring' livestream rooms with random people.

The app never did really take off, but I still would love some fresh ideas around combatting information overload (outside of the 1000's of screen/content blocking type apps)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47926461

James_K 12 hours ago||
Meditation from first principles.
SplendorP 9 hours ago||
This is just a form of meditation, keeping focus on something deliberately for a long time.
jareklupinski 1 day ago||
a large piece of modern / abstract art works just as well, without it needing to be a blank wall
LZ_Khan 1 day ago|
Much needed advice. Thank you!
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