Often, just for fun, I do old NY Times Saturday crossword puzzles from their archives, usually on my phone. Sometimes I can finish them very quickly — my best times are around 10 minutes or so. But other times it can take a lot longer.<\/p>\n
The other day I was wrestling with a particularly difficult one. I was really struggling, and it looked like it was going to take at least half an hour.<\/p>\n
When I finally filled in the last square, I looked at my time, and it read 29:59. In that moment I felt an enormous sense of elation.<\/p>\n
Never mind that it had taken me about three times longer than my best times. I felt enormously happy that I had gotten in just under the wire, beating the half hour mark by a single second.<\/p>\n
If I had finished the puzzle in 11:37, I would not have felt the same pleasurable rush as I felt at 29:59. Logically it made no sense. And yet there it was.<\/p>\n
What is this emotion, this irrational response to beating an arbitrary — and arguably meaningless — marker? Why do we get so excited at such “achievements”?<\/p>\n
Why did I feel such a heady sense of accomplishment? All I had really done was manage to finish a crossword puzzle in half an hour.<\/p>\n
Well, actually, less than half an hour. \ud83d\ude42<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Often, just for fun, I do old NY Times Saturday crossword puzzles from their archives, usually on my phone. Sometimes I can finish them very quickly — my best times are around 10 minutes or so. But other times it can take a lot longer. The other day I was wrestling with a particularly difficult … Continue reading “29:59”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25253"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=25253"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25253\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":25254,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25253\/revisions\/25254"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=25253"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=25253"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=25253"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}