&gt;the working poor and now, even many working middle class Americans.The fact is that many of those middle class people are now poor but just don&#x27;t want to accept it.I&#x27;d always define myself as working class because while I have a STEM Masters degree I am entirely dependent upon my salary (which isn&#x27;t that high, we don&#x27;t have US level salaries in tech here in Southern Europe) and I have no other sources of income or wealth (real estate, investments etc.)I think the insistence of many people that they aren&#x27;t &quot;working class&quot; is bad as it prevents them from seeing what is really in their best interests.

Very true. I always feel like that when people’s first recommendation for a problem is to get a lawyer. For a lot of people this is prohibitively expensive.

&gt;One of the many ways it&#x27;s expensive to be poor.These sort of time luxury, magnitude of free&#x2F;disposable income, and free cognitive load (less stress, etc.) aspects are all too frequently overlooked when shunning the working poor and now, even many working middle class Americans.I remember the sort of stress I had first starting out simply keeping up with utility bill payment schedules to avoid late fees. I had the luxury of enough assets and steady income that I quickly setup autopayments on my credit card and never had to think about it again.I had relatives and friends who couldn&#x27;t setup autopayment because they were never sure if they&#x27;d have enough in their account or ability to pay their credit card and had to strategically optimize when and what they&#x27;d pay. The amount of cognative load folks endure juggling many of these artificial constructs makes it difficult for them to pursue and seize opportunity when it arises to get ahead.Arguments could be made as to why some should or should not be in such situations but this is just one example. I often think about how difficult it is to fit certain necessary things in my schedule and then remember I don&#x27;t ride the bus in the work which dramatically reduces my commute time.There are many such aspects people deal with daily and it can be daunting. If you&#x27;re very wealthy, a lot of these problems you can throw relatively marginal money at and the problem is solved while focusing on furthering yourself.

&gt; poor people don’t have to worry about having a car that keeps up with the JonesesNeither do the old-money (or socialized to behave the same) rich. That&#x27;s the behavior of someone who&#x27;s worried about being mistaken for poor.

Sounds like a really tough life watching poor people have all the luck.

Instead your buy a beat up old Camry, which was in poor maintenance condition, and keeps breaking down, so pretty soon you have to to either replace it or repair it, and that&#x27;s not cheap, so you go to the cheapest options available, and because of that, those burn out sooner too, and the cycle continues.Regardless of the hit it would take to your social status, you CAN choose to opt out of a rich neighbourhood or a rich car, if you need a car, you can&#x27;t opt out of that choice. There&#x27;s nowhere to opt out to.

&gt; One of the many ways it&#x27;s expensive to be poor.On the other hand, consider — poor people don’t have to worry about having a car that keeps up with the Joneses, so they can drive around in a beater. If I had a dirty 1999 Camry then my rich neighbours would look askance at me.If you think it’s expensive to be poor, try being rich.

Can personally confirm.A while ago my car died, so I suddenly needed transport right now. I was considering renting a car, but my family loaned me an extra vehicle they had on hand that they keep around for just these emergencies. 
EDIT: No, there is absolutely no public transport out here. People who can&#x27;t drive for whatever reason have a very hard time of it.I would have made a much worse decision if I had to pay for every day I took to make it. Given the luxury of time, I made a much better buying decision for the new-to-me vehicle.One of the many ways it&#x27;s expensive to be poor.

Thanks for finding this, was it linked in the article and I just missed it?Either way, I was wondering if people shocked themselves out of curiosity, but the part after what you quoted says &quot;Note that these results only include participants who had reported that they would pay to avoid being shocked again... But what is striking is that simply being alone with their own thoughts for 15 min was apparently so aversive that it drove many participants to self-administer an electric shock that they had earlier said they would pay to avoid.&quot; They all already knew what it would feel like and they did it anyway.

It&#x27;s too bad studies like this have errors (obvious only in retrospect). I learned as a kid to entertain myself with thoughts and can do so easily for a long time.But I will shock myself at least once just to see how bad the shock is... not because I would be bored.(unless they took this into account and let everyone shock themselves before starting the experiment? That would be smart of them... didn&#x27;t have time to read the study)

The study mentioned is &quot;Just think: The challenges of the disengaged mind&quot; <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;science.sciencemag.org&#x2F;content&#x2F;345&#x2F;6192&#x2F;75" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;science.sciencemag.org&#x2F;content&#x2F;345&#x2F;6192&#x2F;75</a>&gt;Next, participants received our standard instructions to
entertain themselves with their thoughts (in this
case for 15 min). If they wanted, they learned,
they could receive an electric shock again during
the thinking period by pressing a button. We
went to some length to explain that the primary goal was to entertain themselves with
their thoughts and that the decision to receive
a shock was entirely up to them.
Many participants elected to receive negative stimulation over no stimulation—especially
men: 67% of men (12 of 18) gave themselves
at least one shock during the thinking period
[range = 0 to 4 shocks, mean (M) = 1.47, SD =
1.46, not including one outlier who administered 190 shocks to himself], compared to 25%
of women (6 of 24; range = 0 to 9 shocks, M =
1.00, SD = 2.32).You can read the complete study here, <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;wjh-www.harvard.edu&#x2F;~dtg&#x2F;WILSON%20ET%20AL%202014.pdf" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;wjh-www.harvard.edu&#x2F;~dtg&#x2F;WILSON%20ET%20AL%202014.pdf</a>I´m quite intrigued about the outlier who managed to shock himself every 4.7 seconds for 15 minutes straight. Was he trying to go for a record or just plain masochism...

So the article mentions &quot;that one study found people preferred giving themselves electric shocks rather than have nothing to do&quot; which sounded like an interesting study. The link provided was to <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov&#x2F;pubmed&#x2F;20548057" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov&#x2F;pubmed&#x2F;20548057</a> , and after searching I found this <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;faculty.chicagobooth.edu&#x2F;christopher.hsee&#x2F;vita&#x2F;Papers&#x2F;IdlenessAversion.pdf" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;faculty.chicagobooth.edu&#x2F;christopher.hsee&#x2F;vita&#x2F;Paper...</a> which strangely doesn&#x27;t mention electric shocks at all.

What if you realize that distracting yourself from major things is foolish and your thoughts return to the topic every few hours a day?Have you figured anything out? Perhaps this can give you some practice every day:<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;existentialcomics.com&#x2F;comic&#x2F;1" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;existentialcomics.com&#x2F;comic&#x2F;1</a>

&gt; The hare in itself would not screen us from the sight of death and calamitiesThe irony is not lost on me that the man in this anecdote is bringing untimely death to the hare, to distract himself from his own.Death probably feels just like you felt before you were born.Why not celebrate that there is anything to experience at all? It seems so improbable.

Some folks in fact think you should do that quite a bit. For example, this guy wrote quite a well-regarded (in his community) book about it:<a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.documentacatholicaomnia.eu&#x2F;03d&#x2F;1696-1787,_De_Ligorio_Alphonsus,_Preparation_For_Death_Part_1,_EN.pdf" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.documentacatholicaomnia.eu&#x2F;03d&#x2F;1696-1787,_De_Ligo...</a>

How about feeling idle with nothing to do but consider your own mortality? Not many people enjoy that, and Pascal wrote an interesting paper about it:<a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;stmaryvalleybloom.org&#x2F;pascal-diversion.html" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;stmaryvalleybloom.org&#x2F;pascal-diversion.html</a>Personally, my main takeaway can be summarized by this passage:&gt;And those who philosophise on the matter, and who think men unreasonable for spending a whole day in chasing a hare which they would not have bought, scarce know our nature. The hare in itself would not screen us from the sight of death and calamities; but the chase, which turns away our attention from these, does screen us.

That&#x27;s why you don&#x27;t go to isolated places like Maldives (unless you are utterly addicted to diving and surfing) but rather Indonesia... you can spend years travelling around discovering places, culture, people, food etc.Met plenty of people stuck in travelling mode for years, but yeah they don&#x27;t just lie around the beach (most of the time).

Most people would surely agree that neither under- nor over-stimulation is ideal on any kind of long term basis.A 2 week project crunch can be exhilarating, but 6 months? No thanks!Similarly a few weeks of beach vacation can be wonderfully relaxing, but months, years of &quot;doing nothing&quot; will soon become boring.

&gt; The opposite is idleness, which we also do not particularly enjoy and will make ourselves play to avoid [...] It&#x27;s a spectrum. Too busy or too idle for too long and we break.Nope, there&#x27;s a hidden axis you&#x27;re implicitly ignoring. It&#x27;s possible to be active and &quot;in flow&quot; doing something without feeling &quot;busy&quot;. So it&#x27;s not just a 1-dimensional spectrum of whether one is idle or doing things, but also the psyche&#x2F;attitude experienced when doing those things. The corresponding analogue to idleness is &quot;leisure&quot;, where it is possible to enjoy idling or acting without coherent purpose.It takes a particular kind of anemic perspective to ignore the experiential axis, and just consider the axis corresponding to &quot;things done&quot; or &quot;output produced&quot;.For a more detailed exposition on what goes into achieving a &quot;flow&quot; state, I recommend checking out Mihalyi Csikszentmihalyi&#x27;s book titled Flow. For more on &quot;leisure&quot;, I recommend Bertrand Russell&#x27;s essay In praise of idleness.

It is perfectly fine to be idle and bored; lay on grass and watch clouds or just do fishing... 
Not everyone comes from puritan american culture.

You&#x27;re making assumptions that aren&#x27;t necessarily true. For instance, I&#x27;ll avoid play in order to enjoy some idleness. I&#x27;ve figured out why I think; because I don&#x27;t want to lose track of time, then have to go to work. The same reason I can sleep fine before my day off, but not before a work day.I don&#x27;t even think I hate my job that much. I&#x27;m not really even working crazy hours; yet it still seems like there&#x27;s no free time, and I don&#x27;t want the little time available to fly by.

&gt; but no idea what is the opposite calledAcedia

The opposite is idleness, which we also do not particularly enjoy and will make ourselves play to avoid.It&#x27;s a spectrum. Too busy or too idle for too long and we break.
Some people do not perceive this, they&#x27;re either workaholics or aboulics.
Tiredness and boredom are good things evolved to prevent damaging ourselves.If you ignore these you get burnout on one end, but no idea what is the opposite called.

Exactly, best inner-feeling I have is when I know I don&#x27;t have to do anything, literally anything. So I know I can do whatever I want.

Personally, I think there is a big difference between busy and occupied and lazy and idle. I love being productive &#x2F; occupied, yet I hate being busy. And that has nothing to do with stress or pressure, but rather with impact.And yes, being busy resulted in a couple of less than perfect decisions on my behalf. The worst ones just for the sake of doing and deciding something.

I&#x27;m not sure it&#x27;s about enjoyment. At the extremes I suspect it&#x27;s more of a compulsion.

I suspect &#x27;humans&#x27; is an attempt to avoid stereotyping&#x2F;sexism - but some people certainly do if not enjoy actually being busy, enjoy talking about how busy they are and how little time they have.i.e. the enjoyment I think is in projecting a certain image of oneself; not necessarily actually embodying that image.

I guess you are in a good situation. My work often keeps me very busy but almost nothing of it is meaningful or challenging. It’s mainly just a repeat of the same thing.

I have the opposite, feeling busy means I am focused and doing meaningful challenging work

&gt; I have never enjoyed feeling busy.Clearly, you are not manager material.Managers like to flaunt their busyness. It&#x27;s their essence, their halo.

&quot;And humans enjoy feeling busy and productive.&quot;I have never enjoyed feeling busy.

You and me both buddy!I like your style.. and sometimes I ask myself other questions like will it matter to me in 10 hours, 10 days or 10 weeks?The longer into the future it matters to me, the more important it is to get done IMO :)

“What is the impact if I don’t do this?”, is a stricter filter.

&gt; assessing if they were actually important to begin with.I&#x27;ve found answering &quot;Is this important?&quot; very hard. I find it much easier to answer &quot;What is the impact if I do this?&quot;

What framework is your site built in? And what did you use to build the application itself? Thanks.

I could not agree more.
For years I was just doing things for the sake of being busy.. crossing tasks off my todo list on a daily basis.
I felt so accomplished, however, I was not really getting a lot of useful work done!--------------------------What did I do?- I started thinking about the tasks I needed to do, assessing if they were actually important to begin with.- I often found that they were not adding value to my product (DarwinMail[1]) and so I discarded them.- I also quickly completed any task that would take 5 minutes or less to complete.--------------------------What was the result?- About a year on and I have a successful product (well, success in my head is a product which has thousands of users of which at least hundreds love the product and could not live without it).- I feel more successful, more fulfilled and a greater sense of accomplishment.[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.darwinmail.app" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.darwinmail.app</a>

Busyness is the path to the dark side. Busyness leads to tunnelling. Tunnelling leads to bad decisions. Bad decisions lead to suffering.

You don&#x27;t have to rush to have no spare time to think.

Busyness leads to bad decisions