Ah, but time spent is not what we are trying to optimize.
Washing and brushing one's hair does add time to daily tasks, but it is not a lot of time. Not compared to general time spent going to the bathroom, showering, eating. That time as a whole could be greatly reduced. By moving and concentrating vigorously, one can get through the shower in 120 seconds, through breakfast in 45. Hang out with ex-military types and you will see this behavior. (You will also see buzz cuts.) This sort of thing is pointedly not what hackers generally do.
We conserve mental effort. Not because we are lazy, but because we have only so much mental effort to use in a day, and we want to use all of it on very specific tasks. Concentration is currency. Remembering things has a cost. Routine, menial tasks are almost free. In fact, like play, they can have a slight negative cost. They allow the mind to wander. For many of us, shower time is often productive time. But even when it's not, we attempt to get through it, not with a minimum expendeture of time, but with a minimum of mental fuss. Not going fast, not going slow. Just getting through it and thinking about other things.
Hence, daily hair maintainence is not really costly. It's a routine. But remembering to schedule a haircut or assessing whether it's time to get out the razor is one more thing to think about. One more thing to remember.
One cannot attack complex problems without proactively and repeatedly clearing the mind of unnecessary details. Abstract and forget. This is a critical skill. Avoiding periodic hair maintenence is an extension of that. Perhaps a silly one, but an extension nonetheless.
For some, maintaining a hairstyle is a specifically chosen hobby, and that's fine. But for everyone else, forgetting about your long hair is a habit borne of simple good intellectual hygeine.
Just to be clear, the styles we're comparing are buzz vs. long (pony-tailable) hair, right? Because the lengths in between are the real attention-sappers -- scheduled retail hair-cuts and at least some sort of daily styling, which requires (sometimes a lot of) attention.
You make good points. And we've successfully moved from the mundane to the philosophical. But as far as maintaining a clear mind, I can weather a head-buzzing every few weeks without suffering any serious thought-train derailment. I even find it rather meditative. There's something purifying and exhilarating about shaving one's head -- it's like throwing away a lot of useless shit you've been accumulating, or putting one's mental baggage astern. My head feels lighter -- and it is!
Washing and brushing one's hair does add time to daily tasks, but it is not a lot of time. Not compared to general time spent going to the bathroom, showering, eating. That time as a whole could be greatly reduced. By moving and concentrating vigorously, one can get through the shower in 120 seconds, through breakfast in 45. Hang out with ex-military types and you will see this behavior. (You will also see buzz cuts.) This sort of thing is pointedly not what hackers generally do.
We conserve mental effort. Not because we are lazy, but because we have only so much mental effort to use in a day, and we want to use all of it on very specific tasks. Concentration is currency. Remembering things has a cost. Routine, menial tasks are almost free. In fact, like play, they can have a slight negative cost. They allow the mind to wander. For many of us, shower time is often productive time. But even when it's not, we attempt to get through it, not with a minimum expendeture of time, but with a minimum of mental fuss. Not going fast, not going slow. Just getting through it and thinking about other things.
Hence, daily hair maintainence is not really costly. It's a routine. But remembering to schedule a haircut or assessing whether it's time to get out the razor is one more thing to think about. One more thing to remember.
One cannot attack complex problems without proactively and repeatedly clearing the mind of unnecessary details. Abstract and forget. This is a critical skill. Avoiding periodic hair maintenence is an extension of that. Perhaps a silly one, but an extension nonetheless.
For some, maintaining a hairstyle is a specifically chosen hobby, and that's fine. But for everyone else, forgetting about your long hair is a habit borne of simple good intellectual hygeine.