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I have always dreamed about operating an excavator and learning to do so well. I am not sure if it was a midlife crisis or what but I ended up buying a Chinese 2 ton excavator. I live in the suburbs but when I just want to clear my head I go in the backyard and play around with it. My skills have improved a little but nothing like putting 140 hours on a project good. The one I got was about the same as a U17 but less than half the price.

> “dirt dirt dirt..rock..dirt” and that was wonderful

reminds me of discovering minecraft for the first time a long time ago

Motorcycling gets like that for me, flying down a wide-open highway out in the countryside on a clear day... The bike ceases to be a machine I am operating and becomes an extension of my self, my mind immersed in the experience, full of the shape of the land and the curves of the road and the wind and the light.

See I can totally understand the excavator story. Would love that too.

Picking currants? I dread that every year. Same with the raspberries and the cherries and ... It's a chore, I really don't like it at all. Especially having to make sure there's no little green stem left on the currants. That work drives me nuts. Only thing worse is puzzles.

> completely disconnected for a week on an island in Belize

I used to enjoy 18 hour flights to Asia pre-WiFi for true disconnection, plus time zone difference to US East Coast made the time spent on the ground there feel at least half disconnected

I believe ability to shape our immediate surrounding is deeply placed in our brains.

It’s amazing what 5 minutes spent picking weeds out of my garden does for my mental health.

I do long distance solo road cycling. The riding takes just enough of my cognitive capacity that the rest of my mind wanders lightly, usually not thinking about anything of substance. It feels like meditation to me.

The missing part in a lot of this is the deliberate silence. Sure, I enjoy catching up with podcasts, but it’s hard to fully settle in and hear your own thoughts if there is other audio on the go.

Have much more respect for "yard work" after realizing how therapeutic it is.Hours in the sun doing heavy work after sitting at a desk all week is incredibly relaxing and something i look forward to.

I'm currently on a week-long vacation and it's been so long since I had some proper time off that I forgot how slowly time flows when you're not under pressure.

I used to live in the PNW and picking blackberries, mushrooms, cherry plums & oysters kept me quite busy for most of the year. Where I live now the mushrooms and wild berries are nowhere near as abundant, and I feel quite depressed, I’m also spending a lot less time walking (hiking) than I did before. I should probably move back to the PNW for my health.

I lived in Portland for a while and had blackberries along the side of my street. I asked my neighbors about them and they warned me not to eat them because they are basically watered by street runoff.

> for food to just be out there in the wild for the taking

Wait until you hear about hunting!

Is meditation so rigidly defined? It would seem to me that a certain kind of activity done with a certain kind of mindset could be deeply meditative. Disclaimer: I am not a meditator.

But you can meditate while doing something.

I never know what to respond to people when talking about meditation and they mention something like running/playing guitar/reading/etc is their meditation. I don't want to diminish their experience or sound like a contrarian but also know that

> doing something is not meditation.

so usually those conversations end with a "hm yes that's nice too"

We just got a dishwasher after forty years without and I’m not sure it was a good idea.

I find washing dishes by hand meditative too. I also don't find dishwashers too appealing.

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/