Walking in cities is often doable on 'autopilot' which annoyingly makes room for my overthinking. Walking in the hills is what probably works better for me as the attention needs to be on the pebbles, stones, holes, path forks.

I find the more and the better I can optimize a routine the more gratification it gives me. Mowing the ideal path through the yard, sweeping the kitchen east to west against the far wall so no crumbs escape under the cabinet and no strokes are duplicated.

Same feeling as well a well optimized hot path.

If in the process you realize it still triggers you, maybe lessons from dr. Gabor Maté are useful. He teaches that emotional triggers are valuable teachers because they highlight unresolved past trauma.

I also hated picking berries as a child because it was so boring. Nowadays, with so much stress in my life I wouldn't mind spending a day picking berries as it seems pretty relaxing.

Being able to pick berries is fun and relaxing!

Having to pick berries is not.

I have done both throughout my life. I can assure you very few engineers would prefer to be out in a field in the sun or rain working 16 hour days in harvest season to get the berries in before they rot.

And that goes as much for wild berry picking for sustenance, sustenance farming, homesteading, or commercial farming.

I love my little garden. It’s zen for me to be out there trimming, doing soil amendments, picking fruit, etc. I also worked on my parents 2 acre garden that sustained the household (and later sold at market). I highly prefer my easy white collar job to that.

So yeah, I do deny what he’s saying there. I enjoyed programming for fun way more than gardening for survival. Just like I enjoy gardening for fun way more than engineering for survival. The latter scenario is preferable to the former for the vast majority of people.

> We should all be picking berries all the time

I don't think that he wants to pick berries all the time. Or be without his family all the time (even though he prefers being on his own with the berries).

I envy the guy. I wouldn't want to pick berries all the time. But having a routine source of release and tuning out like that which happens to commune with nature and use one's hands...

I was building workbenches for my students last week. A lot of the time was spent outside breaking down pallets and staging things. It was too hot, but I saw the trees sway, the few puffy clouds move, the lizards dart through my path, the squirrels squabble. The few times the wind suddenly picked up felt like heaven. My body ached in new ways. My fingers got into a rhythm and I watched them do things.

I could easily get a job doing work like that. No! I want to be with my students, and I want to work on my hard cerebral projects. But there is a joy to being in nature and to do things with your hands, and there is a rhythm to doing time consuming work, and when we make time for it, it feels really good in a primal way.

I think a reminder to periodically log out and go engage in some repetitive task and actually find peace and enjoyment in it is probably a good thing for a lot of folks.

He says he finds it more pleasurable, not that we should be doing it all the time. And he definitely doesn't say anything about capitalism. There are lots of things that are pleasurable but we can't do all the time, and there are lots of things we need to do but aren't pleasurable. Both exist.

Every day there’s another lucky 10k.

https://xkcd.com/1053/

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