Comment by ang_cire
11 hours ago
> A writer needs readers. An entrepreneur needs customers. An athlete needs competition. A lover needs someone free to reject him. Any worthy pursuit needs a mat.
Nah. I judge myself by how I progressed from yesterday, not by whether what I am or what I built is useful to others.
Is keeping a diary pointless if you're not planning to make it a memoir?
Is staying healthy pointless if you aren't using that health to compete with others?
It's hilarious to me that the author calls the cave "grinding", when to my eyes the "grindset" guys are the ones always trying to very visibly compete with others about wealth/status/women.
I've never heard of some guy trying to build the best Rimworld colony (in what is probably a very cave-like setting, no less) try to portray it as grinding.
Despite my other comment in this thread I strongly agree with this! I have "stupid" schemes and do "useless" side projects purely for their own sake and for my own enjoyment, and I am very happy with them. Those things are expressed freely, and never came from a cave.
But I think this article is for people who may not be introspective and self-aware enough to know the difference between private, self-satisfied enjoyment and private, self-inflicted suffering. Some people fool themselves into thinking they do something for the joy of it, and remain unsatisfied, because they harbor higher hopes they never admit to themselves.
For Rimworld: some people like making hyperoptimized minmax colonies for their own satisfaction (haven't played it myself, but I do play Factorio so I get it). But you can imagine that some people who _think_ they play for fun, but also really want the validation of posting their killbox on Reddit and having people acknowledge how good it is, and if they don't get that then they retreat to their cave and work on an even "better" colony, and maybe this one will be the one that people will praise [0, maybe? looked for an example]. And so they get wrapped up in a whole meta-argument about their playstyle and how they choose to enjoy the game and can't just simply... enjoy it?
[0] https://www.reddit.com/r/RimWorld/comments/1v0nwg4/alright_y...
Thank you! The author makes one large assumption about why people do what they do. If I'm doing something for the fun of it, I don't think I need anyone else to see my results in order for me to get exactly what I wanted out of it.
I think the warning in the article is a little more subtle.
The author isn’t placing a moral judgement on certain goals or whether the result of reaching that goal has a large enough audience.
They are warning against doing things that work against achieving our goals in ways that are hard for us to notice by ourselves.
I think they needn't be so subtle in that case.
If the take away is supposed to be only other people can set meaningful metrics for you, then their wrestling history had nothing to do with said lesson, because the author offers no evidence that an external metric-setter would have made them more successful.
Ironically, the author deciding on their own that an external mentor/ reviewer is what they needed to succeed (without evidence proving the difference), is the exact same thing as them deciding that they needed technique or conditioning.
What activities are you engaging in where you can make progress with no interaction with other people?
Speaking for myself: working out, reading, composing music, and journaling.
I'm a grindset man.
I never advertise my grind details.
The mat is the objective (or at least distinct from your own personal judgement) measure of your goal. If your goal is important to you, an objective measure of your progress towards it is more valuable than your own flawed and biased opinion.
The mat for the diary might be the times you consulted back to it for useful introspection and came out better for it, the mat for your health goal could be your blood test from the doctor, etc.
The point is that the mat doesn't care what you think of yourself. I would ask you: when you judged your progress from yesterday, was it with a mat - a brutally objective test - or was it with something less honest?
Whatever your goals are, if you really, truly care about them, and you understand what your true objective is, you'll value the mat. The mat is not about what other people think, it is about undeniably simple and real feedback on your objective.
I get the intention, but this is still ultimately turning it into a sort of, "only progress towards a fixed goal matters, and progress requires metrics, ergo only things that require metrics matter" view of life.
Sometimes the process is the objective. Put another way, some goals are only achieved by not reaching a terminus.
But that aside, there's an even more important point:
> I would ask you: when you judged your progress from yesterday, was it with a mat - a brutally objective test
There is no such thing.
Even in the author's example of wrestling, their conclusion is incorrect (or at least, not supported by the data they have). Their circuit could have been far above the national average in participant skill, so losing there and concluding "I'm not skilled" is an assessment based on where they subjectively drew their line of comparison.
And given that they never actually gained their supposed "heart" they believe they needed, how do they even know that would have changed anything? They could have fixed their attitude and still always lost!
Anyone who works in IT knows that metrics and measures are anything but objective truth.
So, one thing I do that might be directly relevant to this analogy is to lift weights. My goal when I started was to get stronger. I measure that by whether I can lift more weight today than I did yesterday. The barbell doesn't lie.
Sometimes I can, sometimes I can't. Sometimes I even regress a bit. But over time, I have gotten stronger.
Some people at my gym urge me to "compete" but I can't see a reason to do this. I am achieving what I set out to do, by objective measures. Why is what someone else can do in comparison at all relevant? I am stronger than some people. Maybe stronger than most people my age. But there are always going to be people stronger than me. It doesn't bother me, because my goal and motivation was never about that.
For you the barbell itself is the mat.
As best I can tell, the stoics argued against exactly this. The parable of archer[1] is the best summation of this philosophy - that one’s ultimate aim is to do all in one’s power to shoot straight rather than hit the target.
1. https://www.thelatinlibrary.com/cicero/fin3.shtml
My side projects all take forever and meander indefinitely. Completing them means they're over. I do them to do them. I pretty much never make anything useful.
Agree. A good reminder that people project their thoughts as fact in the writing, and our brains accept it faster than coming to our own conclusion.