Sure, when you go to networking events, you aren't certain you are going to get a job from the folks you meet.
What you are doing is increasing your luck surface area. Hiring is not an entirely rational process, but if someone doesn't know you exist, they won't hire you (how could they?).
From there, it follows that meeting someone and letting them know you exist increases the chances (however small) that they can and will assist you on your career path. And a networking opportunity, where you meet someone face to face (and can meet them repeatedly) is a far better way to let someone know you exist than sending them your resume.
There are other ways to raise your profile that don't involve networking events and you can argue that they are better, but that's a cost-benefit analysis you should consider.
A lot of the activities on that list are like this. Reading the news has a non-zero impact (hey, I'm on HN, and it definitely helps me keep up to date), and it's "easy" in that it fits into my heuristic for happiness. Same with using a metal straw, and same with picking between credit cards.
In a sense, these activities are "free" in terms of their perceived difficulty, but have a positive, if small, impact. If they're "free", why not do them?
If anyone has a clue, please enlighten me.
This is not a hardline position, but I’m surprised at how vehemently people insist that their news habit has benefits beyond entertainment.
(To be clear, I have nothing against entertainment.)
It’s not vanity, it’s a desire to understand my world and my place within it.
What IS vanity is imagining that one’s own tastes are the only tastes that matter in the world.
It feels like there should be emerging "optimized solutions" to certain problems that are widely accepted, but rather instead it seems like people just keep re-doing things that I thought we would have already "solved" and moved on past
For example, if you simply want to consume the cheapest caffeine source, I thought someone figured out it was powdered caffeine... versus paying maybe like 100x more for a coffee from a "coffee chain store". Now, granted the experience and maybe the same antioxidants or chemical makeup may not be the same in caffeine powder versus coffee, but the point is I feel like a lot of problems aren't "solved for optimization" which would enable us to make progress on some other unoptimized problem in society
I guess this "reinvention of the wheel" feels like a "vanity activity" to me?
The author isn't bashing on "hobbies" and is not even bashing on "vanity activities". S/he is merely challenging us to acknowledge them for what they are. Stop kidding yourself.
If you churn credit cards (for example) and are one of the 10% that can make it truly profitable, then good for you. The other 90% are probably kidding themselves. Same for the other examples. The author is encouraging a self-sanity check. Are you in the 10% or the 90%, and wherever you land, are you okay with that? If not, you may want to reevaluate, pick something else, or make peace with it. It's better than kidding yourself.
I wonder what software is this that cost this much.
Profit is fun to look at and sounds impressive, but optimizing for it completely misses the point if it doesn't lead to something more important (e.g. human flourishing, or net societal gain)