There is an extreme where you procrastinate on the real work, yes. But half the things on the list are not procrastination, but preparation. If you skip those you hit the other extreme where you are so focused on doing the thing, you waste your time because you don't know the background or context.
Also an issue of asking the wrong question. When the interviewer asks, "are you happy?", they mean relative to other people. The interviewee probably takes it as relative to their own baseline, even if explicitly told not to.
This seems like exactly the same as "why aren't rich people happier?". It's because unless you are very low on the scale (and in many countries few are), your situation isn't so bad as to obviously make you suffer, so the tendency of people to get used to any non-dire environment kicks in and they judge happiness relative to that reference.
Americans tend to have larger, more casual social circles, probably. Having hosted parties in both the U.S. and Europe, the "flake rate" in Europe is much smaller, but the parties are also smaller, less frequent, and planned further ahead of time.
"Europe"? I can assure you, the party cultures in Spain, Scandinavia, France and Greece are all pairwise so dramatically different that the U.S. are not the counterpole, but just another flavor in the sea of possibilities. The same applies to different cultures within these countries. Across areas, ages, socioeconomic backgrounds, political leanings, hobby groups.
It's astonishing to me how many comments around here are lumping everything together under specific nationalities.
I’m always amused by this. The US has a hugely diverse set of attitudes to things and yet a surprising number of people there then look at a more populated combination of more than 25 countries with varied languages and histories who have fought many wars over history against each other have some singular approach to parties or cycling or anything else.
we have different culutures but Americans also have decades of media exposure to inform them on what an "American party" is. Especially if you grew up in the late 80's/90's where "party" was a literal genere of movie to subscribe to.
Now of course, media doesn't reflect reality. But it can certainly homogenize sentiment.
But that's the whole joke of the article ? I don't think it is intended to be that serious. It is kind of those "weird"/rare crime that newspaper have fun reporting on
if they got extracted from unopened Lego sets (e.g. to "launder" stolen Lego sets through the 2nd hand part market) they didn't even need to "take them off" (at least in the past) they did ship as separate parts.
It's an interesting, off-beat story about toys being stolen by a theft ring, how you managed to turn it into a whine about the "bourgeoisie" I'll never know.
Don't disagree, but let's be clear: the alternative is not (as might be implied) deep, introspective thought-pieces. It's chum for the other color of ignorant closed minds.
how about reporting on Kristy Noem stealing $172M from every American so she can have *two* luxury private jets? Thats....28666 stolen-lego rings worth.
im sure NYT reported on that as well, couched in typical "questions arise...." format which they reserve for those criminals whose crimes are so massive and so completely blatant, they couldn't possibly call them what they are. Those would be facts that their readers wouldn't accept. But a Latino man running a shoplifting ring, they'll nod their heads and dream of more Alligator Alcatrazes for "the illegals".
If you wrote code that is to be maintained by someone else, which I think has to be true 99% of the time, it is "we". You are still operating as a team even if you did the initial work.
Great essay. And it's true about all politics. Power will always rest somewhere. You want it to rest with people who know what they're doing, and who care about other people, and are very uncomfortable about the idea of power for its own sake.
Beautiful. I have certainly noticed that, at work, despite my desire to be efficient, without this sort of thing, it becomes unbearable no matter how interesting the actual work is.
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