Reading this thread, I'm starting to think work in general is overly romanticized in our culture. To the point where people sacrifice their relationships, their time, and their happiness in pursuit of a misrepresentation of a career they chose. I think a lot of people feel so committed to their choices and pressured by society that once they realize that their job isn't what they expected, they just white knuckle it to retirement.

And yet it strikes me, a lot of these terrible jobs would be pretty good at a slower pace and for fewer hours. The fact that we're still in such a hurry, with so many labor saving devices and so much material wealth, suggests that the hurrying is built into our culture on a deeper level than technology and economics.

Related: In Portugal, it's now illegal for your boss to call outside work hours.

And here's a job that more people would have, in a better world: Coral Farming to Help Restore Dying Reefs.

Henry Ford was a tinkerer. He revolutionized the factory floor by letting his workers experiment, trying anything they could think of to make production more efficient. There was just one rule, a quirk that seemed crazy but was vital to the company's success: No one could keep a record of the factory experiments that were tried and failed.

Things that failed in the past might succeed now, because "other parts of the system have evolved in a way that allows what was once impossible to now become practical."

The article is about technology and economics, so the examples are stuff like the success of Chewy after the failure of Pets.com. But I'm thinking about other kinds of things, and I don't want to get too specific, but maybe some social experiments that failed in the past could work in the future, because of changes to the underlying culture. Or ambitious lifestyle changes could become possible through different moment-to-moment mental habits.

A couple more links. Deaf Football Team Takes California by Storm. It's paywalled, but this is the key bit:

Many teams try to use hand signals to call in plays, but they are no match for the Cubs, who communicate with a flurry of hand movements between each play. No time is wasted by players running to the sidelines to get an earful from the coaching staff. No huddle is needed.

The coaches also say deaf players have heightened visual senses that make them more alert to movement. And because they are so visual, deaf players have a more acute sense of where their opponents are positioned on the field.

In Beyond the Pleasure Principle, where he introduces the ideas, he tries to make clear that they actually refer to "surprise seeking" and "compulsive repetition" respectively.

Freud uses "death drive" for compulsive repetition because, looking at amoebas, he believed that repetitive, "automatic" movement was what defined "inorganic" (or dead) things, while surprise seeking is a specifically "organic" or "living" behavior.

Related: The First Horror Movie Written Entirely By Bots. If automatic movement can't be surprise seeking, then why is this so funny? It's because the bot is reflecting our own cliches back at us, but getting them slightly wrong, in ways that we wouldn't think of.

The most I've ever been changed by a "game", I think, is acting training. The semester in college where we did Meisner acting games was somewhat destabilizing for a lot of us, because they prime you to spit out the truth, to not hide your emotional reaction to anything, and to pay attention to others' authenticity. Meisner training is something that serves that subworld of acting really well, but can cause social upset because our culture abets white lies, bullshit, and emotional restraint.

Unwashed mendicant writes (lightly edited):

I think the best example of a fictional world that has the potential to inform the physical isn't exactly a fictional world, but a set of practices intended to run that world. I'm thinking of the Old School Renaissance of D&D.

Modern D&D has grown more bloated and waddling as each edition goes on. It takes hours to make a character. There's a big incentive to keep player characters alive, since so much effort goes into making them. Dungeon Masters are expected to carefully craft scenarios that match the abilities of the party. Player abilities are there to support combat. The Adventures are scripted. The Dungeons are linear. The experience feels like walking through a hallway knocking things down.

As a reaction to this we have Old School Renaissance. Rulebooks are generally free or cheap. Play is fast. You roll up a character in seconds. You don't have to read many rules -- you just say what you want to do and if it's reasonable it happens.

Player abilities and magic items are there to support exploration and problem solving. Combat is very deadly, and experience points come from finding treasure, so it's smarter to avoid combat. DMs are encouraged to think on their feet and improvise. The rules encourage emergent play with many random elements that can surprise the DM as much as the player.

I often walk away from an old school D&D session with fresh ideas to bring to my actual life; ideas on how to simplify, to make meaningful choices, to encourage agency and choice in myself and those around me, to be open to opportunity, to think on my feet, and move in a creative flow.

Axes won't chop trees with a series of unfocused blows but must instead be carefully aimed and leveraged, slicing into the same point time and again. Lighting a fire, meanwhile, requires you to knock two bits of flint together over dry grass.

In many cases, you need to consider the angle and speed of your approach. Swing a hammer at the wrong angle when crafting and you can hit nails in the wrong direction or even break materials. Chiseling away at wood needs just the right touch or you might end up making a soup ladle by accident.

Of course, you're not learning from the real world, only from some programmer's guess about the real world. In the worst case, VR will lead your body astray like Facebook leads your mind astray. But in the best case, with increasingly good real world modeling, you could get halfway to a difficult physical skill with a lot less investment.

New subject. My favorite sport is women's soccer, and the NCAA tournament starts today. I like top-tier college soccer better than pro or international, maybe because the substitution rules allow the players to play harder more of the time.

Here's a highlight video of a really fun player, USF's Sydny Nasello.

Penn State's Kerry Abello can do really long flip throws.

And last week my home team's most dangerous player, Alyssa Gray, hit a 35 yard golazo.