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I agree for the most part. DND isn't perfect, though. When you're bored, your mind naturally searches for things to do, and you'll be tempted to proactively check your lock screen, which unhelpfully informs you about "3 messages received while in Do Not Disturb." Now you really want to know what those messages are.

This is why I tend to keep my phone physically far away from me, and out of sight.

I would love to do this except I'm a magnet for bugs. My bliss only lasts 5 minutes or so.

Is there a right kind of anthill to sit on?

I've never seen it mentioned anywhere in their histories but I always suspected the messaging apps Slack and Discord were references to Church of Subgenius and Discordianism respectively

and Bob with his Billard pipe, now as you brought these up!

My father did not smoke, but many of his colleagues did which some did look 60's bit like Bob. For some odd reason I still kind of remember what tobacco and pipe smell felt in room when I begin to think of it, like now in this occasion.

In general use though slack has an even stronger connotation of e.g. slacking off and not doing anything useful with the time.

Slackers! You're all slackers! [0]

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tEsNiV8e4ko

As a french I like the term "idle", as the state my computer switch to when i'm not asking it anything.

Why do people(you, in this case, but this is a very common fallacy) assume that advocating for one thing(idleness) is implicitly advocating against its opposite(work)? We can do both, just not simultaneously.

I start my day with deliberate idleness. Just coffee and music in my living room, or tea on the balcony.

Productivity needs purpose and direction, and you find those through pausing and looking around you.

This reminds me of our painting teacher randomly forcing the whole class to put their paintbrushes down, take a step back and see if their painting still makes sense. Otherwise you get stuck on details while your perspective is all wrong.

The two states are in no way in opposition to each other. In fact, experiencing deep meditation can improve one's ability to get into that desired productive flow.

Computers, TVs, video games, and smartphones have solved that problem. There are now more things to do alone in a room than ever before.

It didn't help.

I prefer to microdose work.

European societies are the most truly democratic states there have ever been. You have educated populaces making decisions with full information (comparatively more than anywhere else in the world, ever) to choose your leaders. All your policy decisions - generous state pensions and benefits, redistributive taxes, extreme bureaucracy around hiring and firing, stifling operational and capital markets regulations - are chosen by your societies at the ballot box.

look at the massive popular protests when Macron tried to do pension reform. These are completely legitimate choices to make, they're your countries, but i do not think it's your leaders letting you down.

The best way to understand European policy is that at a high level they want to establish a quota system both within Europe and globally.

The problem with creating a quota system is that you have to be able to punish countries who cheat on the quota. Europe doesn't have the capacity to do this except internally. The regulatory superpower idea only really makes sense with the physical power to compel obedience and extract taxes.

In the US we solved these issues like the bankruptcy code with federal law because the federal government is the supreme physical power on the continent that all the states obey for reasons of self-preservation and because they are bribed to obey. US federal transfers to individual states are also much, much larger than the largest EU transfers to member stats and the EU is not a central military or police power either.

This is why the EU member states (and the UK member states as well) should become US territories so that they can benefit from federal law without necessarily destabilizing domestic US politics. They are already dependent on US military power but they do not receive the full benefits of becoming member territories.

Re leadership: none of my smart friends wants to be politician. Maybe that’s the root cause.

> Europe is behind because we do not have good leadership. The decisions taken by leadership, no matter what level you look at - local, company, national, supranational - are rarely in the best interest of Europeans. Our markets - housing, rental, labor, capital, pension - are broken and therefore the population does not find opportunities to express their talent completely and the more motivated migrate. Europeans lack well-paying jobs and pay is low because pay is not transparent.

Sounds like Europe is behind because Europeans are working less and taking more vacations. You just point to poor leadership as the cause.

> We are too invested in tides that lift all boats.

Why is that a problem? Yes, it means less "amazing individuals who own N% of the economy", but it also means that none of my neighbors are starving or can't afford healthcare, definitively a tradeoff I (and most people I'm proud to call friends) are willing to make, even if it makes our own lives a small percentage less comfortable.

I'd say that why I personally prefer the (European) country over other places I've lived in the world, or could live. I don't want to live in a place where people don't help lifting all the boats, but instead are just interested in lifting their own boat, or want to lift a small amount of boats.

Its complacency, at least in Western Europe. Centuries of being the world's leading powers have left an underlying sense of being at the top is just normal and is a position that does not need work to maintain.

Even those who might accept this is no longer true intellectually find it hard to internalise.

> We are too invested in tides that lift all boats.

These boats may contain Tesla, Ramanujam, Röntgen and other talent people with poor circumstances.

Good social security is also investment in potential talent that could contribute to economy.

I'm reminded of the somewhat derogatory term "carebear" from the EVE Online community, for players who focus on PvE and profit, while avoiding PvP.

>I don't believe our problem is idleness. It's instead a pernicious belief in peace. There's no sense of geopolitical competition in society at large.

I disagree entirely. It's because most EU workers(at least in the richer most developed countries) don't get a proportional slice of the fruits of their labor, but only breadcrumbs after taxes. Working harder as an EU employee just means your boss/company gets to be richer and your government gets more of your taxes, while you get nothing more in return, just taking home a few extra bucks at the end of the month, making the juice not worth the squeeze, causing everyone to optimize for doing the bare minimum because why bother.

Especially when the big city CoL rises higher than your salary anyway, what's the point of working harder? You'll be more tired now and still won't be able to buy a nice house, ending up on the same standard of living and housing affordability as someone who optimized his life around extracting the most amount of welfare and benefits from the government while dodging work. So then why wouldn't you do the same?

Same story around entrepreneurship and VC funding or lack thereof. The taxes, risk and responsibilities of being a business owner with employees on your payroll are far higher that in other places on the planet like the US, making it a better deal to just not bother with all that and choose the cushy life of an employee in a old dinosaur company in an ageing and declining industry, rather than the stress of being the employer/innovator.

Geopolitical competition will not fix this because the monetary incentive structure around hard work still remains messed up. You can fix this by changing the tax laws to reward those working harder instead of punishing them with higher taxes and no gains to pay for the lifestyles of those who contribute the least in society.

Simply look at what Poland or Czechia did to become economic powerhouses in a short amount of time, and just do stuff like that. And you'll find out they didn't start off by giving their workers Scandinavian style of income taxes, welfare and benefits, that I can tell you, but more like cutthroat capitalism and the harder you work the more you can earn tax structures.

> We generate a lot of wealth in those 36 hours,

You don't, (Western) Europe is just a rentier-place at this point, living on other people's backs. For example look at Maersk, from the much-beloved and relaxed Denmark, their business would crumble over night if it weren't for the Americans keeping the seas open for them.

Is there a point where enough (per capita) wealth has been created? Where there is enough pie to go around for everyone, and we have no need to create more pies?

I am sure we can all argue about where that point is, but I wonder if we agree that there is such a point? Or do we have to keep increasing our wealth forever?

Junior doctors slave away for senior doctors so that they can one day become senior doctors with 10x the pay and have junior doctors do most of their work. That’s not going to happen for the average white collar worker.

There is also one big thing, Europe even though it tries with the EU, is still a group of countries, not a single country.

It’s a lot easier for a business in one US state to expand to another one, but cross border business expansion in EU is still difficult.

People speak different languages, bureaucracy is different and often in a different language as well etc.

On top of that businesses are a lot more regulated than in the US.

> a stunningly incompetent array of bad leaders

I am honestly curious who you are pointing at (in particular if you exclude British leaders)

Partly because I am actually curious, I don't doubt there are bad leaders.

But partly also because, without any details, this is a very general trope, that I don't really think is very healthy at the moment. Since it is food for right wing extremists (you probably know yourself where some politicians in USA originate from).

While I agree that having a well-balanced life isn't necessarily the cause of Europe "falling behind", I'd like to point out that the US also shares some of those issues:

bad policies: massive tariffs, extreme spend of the military-industrial complex at the cost of education and healthcare, a completely pointless War on Drugs that just increases violence (to be fair, many states have more or less legalized cannabis at this point), war in foreign countries (if all the money spent of Afghanistan had just been distributed back to American taxpayers in the form of either tax cuts of stimulus checks, how might that have affected the economy?)

bad leaders: I think most historians would agree that president Trump is not exactly Mount Rushmore material

bad deployment of capital: at the state level, this would mirror 'bad policies', ie I don't think war the Afghanistan/war on drugs was a net gain for the US taxpayer. On the private side, the boom/bust nature of tech investments - how many were buying Pets.com stock in 1998? How many people bought trendy NFTs in 2019? How many completely unviable businesses get funded today just because "our product has AI"?

so there might be other factors.

I think it’s more that at a certain income, you kind of plateau. You can afford all the little pleasures you want, but you couldn’t meaningfully improve your life without doubling your income. It would not get you a nicer apartment, would not make a house more affordable, and would not give you more time to enjoy travelling.

It seems to me like in Germany, the rock bottom is high but the glass ceiling is low. I am very happy with this, but if you are nearer to the ceiling, it can feel cramped.

Is this actually a problem? We all know the average white collar worker doesn't actually work for 40 hours despite being at the office. The average - everywhere - is more like the equivalent of 20 hours of solid focused work per week day.

Does more white collar work beyond a threshold produce more value, anyway? Sometimes yes but often no.

It’s interesting that the countries with the weakest economies in Europe work the longest hours.

During the financial crises Greeks were getting a lot of criticism from Northern Europeans for being lazy but the reality was they did far more hours.

I'm guessing he means actual time physically working, not the theoretical time in the contract.

It really depends on your bubble but a lot of people have "full time" contracts (meaning 40-ish hours) but real hours vary. You can come later, leave earlier, go do something else in the day, and don't have to report it to anyone. Just make sure you're not missing a meeting and deliver what's needed on time. So in practice you end up working fewer hours on average, as long as you can produce enough on average (which honestly isn't hard in many large organisations, and hard to measure).

It’s all about sex. Being idle typically means being poor. Try being in the dating market when you’re poor. Being bald means being middle aged which is also a big negative in the dating market.

The people who are lauding the virtues of being idle probably have money, and are of the age where they’re past measuring success by body count.

What do you mean by societal hooks?

The ability to be at peace, in my world view, stems first and foremost from the ability to be at peace with yourself. Being able to look in a mental mirror, and accepting the image staring back as yourself, warts and all. It's not exactly liking every last imperfection, rather not feeling guilty for not measuring up in all aspects to the ideals of a society or dreams of your younger self. Accepting that you are not the universal paragon and probably never will be, all the while not giving up on the idea of improving yourself.

Only when one can be locked in a room with oneself for a measure of time and not get in a fight, can we talk about being at peace with society and other external factors.

This is so full of holes I don't even know where to start. But the main one is that you have a false dichotomy in assuming that individual success and "helping everyone do better" are mutually exclusive. For example, see the free market economy of the past 250 years.

We can't read everything, so we need markers of taste to figure out what is and isn't worth engaging with. AI tells are markers of drastically bad taste.

> Address how it makes you feel and the argument being made.

Why are you telling other people what to talk or not to talk about?