What finally worked for me is listening to history audio books/lectures.
It takes my mind off of real life things, and since it's just audio there is no light involved. History is perfect because there aren't many conceptual hurdles to understanding the material that would require really intense focus. I start to drift off after 30 minutes to 1.5 hours very consistently. It's also easy to find new listening material since there's practically an infinite amount of it.
As a bonus, I've learned a lot about history this way.
I'm not sure if my original post just wasn't clear enough or something. Retirement is great, my point was about non-retirement money.
Building capital for a business is exactly the kind of medium-term goal I was referring to, where you wouldn't want it getting spoiled by a market crash at the wrong time.
I agree with your point entirely, but my point is that most people don't just sock money away for decades if it isn't specifically retirement money. Usually it is saved for some medium-term goal, which stocks could potentially spoil. Aside from that risk, why even deal with the psychological effect of that uncertainty for a paltry gain?
Personally, if I was dependent on my assets for the income I use to eat, I wouldn't want those assets to be ones that can wildly swing in value.
If I had enough other investments that the stocks were just icing on the cake that wouldn't be an issue, but that kind of goes back to my point of being extremely wealthy and having truly extra money you can park in risky stuff.
Something that's never made sense to me about stocks:
Unless you're extremely wealthy, any money you are able to save (outside of retirement money) is probably money you are going to want to use for something to improve your life in the semi-near future. Buying a house or car (or just a better one) for example.
With that assumption in place, under what circumstances does investing in index funds make any sense whatsoever? The entire market crashes on occasion due to herd mentality, and yet even given that level of risk index funds still take many years to appreciate in value significantly. It seems like an absolutely terrible place to put money that isn't specifically intended for retirement or something like a 529 plan.
I think you got that backwards. React's abstractions are transparent, as in the developer doesn't need to "see" them or be aware of them. Your existing web dev knowledge largely applies.
I have about two years of experience with both Angular 1 and React. What was truly astounding to me was how while Angular required months of continually poring docs and Stack Overflow threads for every new thing I wanted to do, React took all of a week or two to get pretty comfortable with, and after that minor investment of time I was rewarded with dramatically increased development speed.
I will never go back to using a framework with an approach like Angular. Trying to abstract away the browser environment and have developers learn a whole new set of APIs with nearly the same level of complexity is just a fundamentally bad idea.
It takes my mind off of real life things, and since it's just audio there is no light involved. History is perfect because there aren't many conceptual hurdles to understanding the material that would require really intense focus. I start to drift off after 30 minutes to 1.5 hours very consistently. It's also easy to find new listening material since there's practically an infinite amount of it.
As a bonus, I've learned a lot about history this way.