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Duncan Black's avatar

Time for me to get philosophical. I would say that time you "waste" doing something that gives you happiness and fulfillment is pretty far from time wasted. Life is short and can often feel pointless in some sense so if your lucky enough to be comfortable try your best to enjoy it. As someone who is not religious I am not convinced there is much else to be had. For sure don't overindulge in short term hedonic pleasures at the expense of long term fulfillment or the happiness of others. I feel like we all know deep down in aggregate this is far from an optimal life but I think we should distinguish externally or societally "useless" from useless.

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Benjamin L. Russell's avatar

> In general, my delight in a hobby

> is inversely proportional to its

> utility.

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This statement reminds me of what was written on a sheet of paper posted on the door of a professor of the Department of Computer Science of my alma mater, Yale University, back in _circa_ 1994, which essentially read, "The degree of interest of a subject is inversely proportional to its utility value."

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That sentiment substantially accords with my own experience as well. For example, in computer science, mathematics, and analytical philosophy, the most interesting courses seemed to be in such subjects as formal semantics of programming languages (the lambda calculus), recursive function theory, recursion equations (domain theory), philosophical metalogic, and Gödel's incompleteness theorems; these were also some of the subjects with the least degree of industrial application.

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Most of my hobbies are almost completely useless: _haiku_/_tanka_ poetry composition, Bertrand Russell's analytical philosophy, astronomy, quantum physics, and, on the frivolous side, Japanese anime and role-playing gaming titles (in Japanese).

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My current objective is equally impractical: to move either to Tsukuba or to Akihabara, and then commute regularly to the main library of the University of Tsukuba to study such interesting topics as astronomy and physics while also commuting daily to Akihabara to participate in the _otaku_ subculture there.

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