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Comment by sneak

People have been trading off sleep deprivation for productivity for all of human history.

It isn’t always about money, and it isn’t always a choice.

It is a personal decision to build or destroy one’s body, and while your advice is maybe sound in general, we should avoid generalizing for other people.

A little bit of sleep deprivation isn’t life threatening (such as being significantly overweight, or smoking, or consistently eating unhealthy foods). We should avoid over-moralizing to others about the engineering tradeoffs they make in their own lives.

Many a family has been enriched by mothers and fathers overworking themselves to build a better life for their children, for example.

> Never sacrifice health for money. Never. Every idea that needs to be worked on more than 50 hours a week is an idea not worth working on.

If I had taken this advice verbatim in my 20s, I wouldn’t be able to frequently be working 20 hour weeks in my 40s. I would argue that speaking in absolutes like this is actually bad advice.

It is frequently a good thing to work yourself to burnout for a year or three if it means you can work at 20% for the following 20 years.

parent sneak 1 year ago

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