I have often been asked why I don't put photos from my restaurant visits on the blog. My response to that question is that in the end, this blog is about me rambling about my interests. If I put up a lot of food porn with the reviews, it becomes a food blog. If I put up a lot of poker or bridge hands and use the BBO hand viewer, it becomes a poker or bridge blog. This is my blog, an outlet for me to ramble about my many interests.
That all might change for this coming month, however. My mother is visiting and we have an itinerary full of good, often expensive, food. So I expect there to be pictures and the only question is how lazy I will be in terms of updating the blog. There might even be -gasp!- posts and photos about touristy things.
Back to rambling. You know how there's regular porn, and then there's the freaky fetish stuff? This site kind of feels like the freaky fetish version of food porn: http://www.fancyfastfood.com/
I mean, his creations do look quite good, but the whole deconstructing and reconstructing of fast food is really out there.
I still get Harvard Magazine and one of the things I look foward to most is the articles about new and interesting research that's being done. One from this month caught my attention. It basically says that people tend to overestimate future payoffs of work now and leisure later versus leisure now and work later. In short, when the experimenters asked subjects how they felt about having chosen work over leisure or vice versa, there was greater regret over choosing leisure over work recently (more guilt), but greater regret over having chosen work over leisure at some point much further in the past. Another interesting thing in the article was the acknowledgement that there are people who just are at the extreme ends of this. Certain overachievers or hedonists are just incapable of deriving enough pleasure from doing the other type of thing. So when the time comes again to consider postponing pleasure, perhaps we just shouldn't.
2 comments :
Balance seems to be a constant struggle for most people. Maybe one reason for the effect you mention is: in the long run, I know which work paid off and which didn't, and naturally I regret the work that didn't -- why didn't I just have more fun! In the future or recent past, I can't tell which bit of work will be or was the crucial one, so I'm nervous I didn't work enough. All of this could be perfectly rational.
One other possibility is that there's an actual immediate payoff from choosing work (you feel better about yourself) that erodes very quickly as time goes on.
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