Thanks OP! I love your posts. However, I was not convinced by this point: “the default state of the world is that your life lacks Slack.” The post explains why OP’s mindset drives him away from Slack, but it doesn’t really explain why this would be true for most people, and it does not ring true for me. I don’t really have evidence for this, but I would assume that most people have the capacity to have an unproductive day or week, take time off work, or waste money. When you think about how many hours the average person spends each day on TV or aimless interneting, it doesn’t really seem consistent with imagining most people’s lives as full of nonstop stressed productivity.
Yeah, fair point! Since writing this I’ve gotten feedback from a few people who think their lives have too much Slack, so I was clearly over-generalising from my own experience and social context.
Though, one supporting point. I think someone can both spend a bunch of time watching TV etc and lack Slack. I’m imagining an archetype of person who both feels always busy and behind, but also has poor executive function and has a lot of aversions, and motivation and procrastination problems (I can think of several friends in this category). Someone who clearly is not actually optimising their time for productivity, but feels overwhelmed. So they don’t give themselves permission to use Slack, take time off, etc, even though they implicitly use a bunch of it on procrastination.
Thanks OP! I love your posts. However, I was not convinced by this point: “the default state of the world is that your life lacks Slack.” The post explains why OP’s mindset drives him away from Slack, but it doesn’t really explain why this would be true for most people, and it does not ring true for me. I don’t really have evidence for this, but I would assume that most people have the capacity to have an unproductive day or week, take time off work, or waste money. When you think about how many hours the average person spends each day on TV or aimless interneting, it doesn’t really seem consistent with imagining most people’s lives as full of nonstop stressed productivity.
Yeah, fair point! Since writing this I’ve gotten feedback from a few people who think their lives have too much Slack, so I was clearly over-generalising from my own experience and social context.
Though, one supporting point. I think someone can both spend a bunch of time watching TV etc and lack Slack. I’m imagining an archetype of person who both feels always busy and behind, but also has poor executive function and has a lot of aversions, and motivation and procrastination problems (I can think of several friends in this category). Someone who clearly is not actually optimising their time for productivity, but feels overwhelmed. So they don’t give themselves permission to use Slack, take time off, etc, even though they implicitly use a bunch of it on procrastination.