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This article silently assumes that a "meaningful life" means: - making good choices of the projects you work on - making those projects succeed, or at least e

by vog 10y ago

This article silently assumes that a "meaningful life" means: - making good choices of the projects you work on - making those projects succeed, or at least ensure pushing them forward So it reduces this broad topic "meaningful life" to the aspects of personal time management, project management and motivation management. In short, the article appears to be very work-centric (but including paid work as well as volunteer work). Within this work-centric view, the article is great. But given the article's title, I would have expected a broader treatment of the whole topic.

jchrisa 10y ago
If anyone is looking for a work antidote, here is some philosophy http://www.generation-online.org/p/fp_bifo5.htm http://www.generation-online.org/p/fp_bifo5.htm
ourmandave 10y ago
Does it even matter? Ozymandias worked in upper management. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ozymandias https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ozymandias #Eeyore
anigbrowl 10y ago
Not so surprising, since most people enjoy the satisfaction of having their plans work out, achieving goals and so on - and consumerism, the dominant 'philosophy' of western liberalism, is all about the accumulation of satisfying experiences. Of course, this doesn't sound all that great when it's reduced to its bare bones. That's why extremist ideologues often find great political success by promoting a stark message: a life filled with suffering and struggle offers more meaning then one where there's never any danger or anxiety. Hitler told the German people quite frankly that they'd have to go through fire to realize his vision, and that sounded good to enough people that he was able to make good on the promise. Likewise, millions of Slavs were willing to sacrifice themselves against hopeless odds (as it seemed at the time) to repel the Nazi invasion of the USSR. Indeed, once a country goes to war there invariably seems to be a great outpouring of enthusiasm because the inherently pointless quotidian struggles of work, survival, acquisition and consumption are replaced with the much more exciting and arousing struggles for life and death, for which economic competition is only the proxy. I believe there are two basic reasons for this. One, most people don't enjoy thinking for its own sake all that much, but when you're in a survival situation you can dispense with all that tedious mentation and really live in the moment. For people who have lived a qualitatively meaningless life up to that point, this is tremendously liberating. The other reason is that life is never sweeter than when death is close, and danger is highly correlated with sexual arousal for evolutionary reasons - hence the epidemic of rape during wartime. When time horizons are short, prohibited actions are no longer consequential, and the normal moral calculus is abandoned, then expression triumphs over repression. In sum, we're not really cut out for long-term thinking and abstract mentation for its own sake appeals to only a tiny minority. There is great value to living in the moment but most people don't know how to do it, and so their frustration builds up, to the detriment of the social body which must eventually express the excess -much as a boil is tolerable until it becomes a cyst and needs to be lanced. This is the reason that attempts to create a totally safe society are doomed - the safer you make it, the more of a prison it becomes. I'd rather not write an essay about this, but there's a reason that aristocratic societies allowed and created formal rules for dueling.
- mmirate 10y ago
  > we're not really cut out for long-term thinking and abstract mentation for its own sake appeals to only a tiny minority. There is great value to living in the moment but most people don't know how to do it That's the most convincing argument in favor of eugenics that I've ever heard. It's a shame that we can't easily test for affinity for long-term, abstract thinking; nor for ability to live in the moment.
  - qntty 10y ago
    Well that's reassuring since it doesn't appear to be an argument for eugenics at all.
    - mmirate 10y ago
      It is. If I read the great-grandparent correctly, violence is only needed as an outlet because the majority of humans don't have a particular combination of attributes; therefore, one solution to that brand of inevitable violence, is to artificially select for precisely those attributes.
      - festivusr 10y ago
        What is wrong with you?
      - konschubert 10y ago
        You seem to forget that the act of selecting is an act of violence by itself.
        mmirate 10y ago
        Hence my particular turn-of-phrase: "that brand of inevitable violence [described by anigbrowl]". Yes, I probably should have included that bracketed clause. (aside: AFAICT, needing violence to remove violence is as much an inevitability as needing guns to remove guns.)
      - 10y ago
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]

by vog 10y ago

jchrisa 10y ago

If anyone is looking for a work antidote, here is some philosophy http://www.generation-online.org/p/fp_bifo5.htm http://www.generation-online.org/p/fp_bifo5.htm

ourmandave 10y ago

Does it even matter? Ozymandias worked in upper management. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ozymandias https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ozymandias #Eeyore

anigbrowl 10y ago

Not so surprising, since most people enjoy the satisfaction of having their plans work out, achieving goals and so on - and consumerism, the dominant 'philosophy' of western liberalism, is all about the accumulation of satisfying experiences. Of course, this doesn't sound all that great when it's reduced to its bare bones. That's why extremist ideologues often find great political success by promoting a stark message: a life filled with suffering and struggle offers more meaning then one where there's never any danger or anxiety. Hitler told the German people quite frankly that they'd have to go through fire to realize his vision, and that sounded good to enough people that he was able to make good on the promise. Likewise, millions of Slavs were willing to sacrifice themselves against hopeless odds (as it seemed at the time) to repel the Nazi invasion of the USSR. Indeed, once a country goes to war there invariably seems to be a great outpouring of enthusiasm because the inherently pointless quotidian struggles of work, survival, acquisition and consumption are replaced with the much more exciting and arousing struggles for life and death, for which economic competition is only the proxy. I believe there are two basic reasons for this. One, most people don't enjoy thinking for its own sake all that much, but when you're in a survival situation you can dispense with all that tedious mentation and really live in the moment. For people who have lived a qualitatively meaningless life up to that point, this is tremendously liberating. The other reason is that life is never sweeter than when death is close, and danger is highly correlated with sexual arousal for evolutionary reasons - hence the epidemic of rape during wartime. When time horizons are short, prohibited actions are no longer consequential, and the normal moral calculus is abandoned, then expression triumphs over repression. In sum, we're not really cut out for long-term thinking and abstract mentation for its own sake appeals to only a tiny minority. There is great value to living in the moment but most people don't know how to do it, and so their frustration builds up, to the detriment of the social body which must eventually express the excess -much as a boil is tolerable until it becomes a cyst and needs to be lanced. This is the reason that attempts to create a totally safe society are doomed - the safer you make it, the more of a prison it becomes. I'd rather not write an essay about this, but there's a reason that aristocratic societies allowed and created formal rules for dueling.

mmirate 10y ago
> we're not really cut out for long-term thinking and abstract mentation for its own sake appeals to only a tiny minority. There is great value to living in the moment but most people don't know how to do it That's the most convincing argument in favor of eugenics that I've ever heard. It's a shame that we can't easily test for affinity for long-term, abstract thinking; nor for ability to live in the moment.
- qntty 10y ago
  Well that's reassuring since it doesn't appear to be an argument for eugenics at all.
  - mmirate 10y ago
    It is. If I read the great-grandparent correctly, violence is only needed as an outlet because the majority of humans don't have a particular combination of attributes; therefore, one solution to that brand of inevitable violence, is to artificially select for precisely those attributes.
    - festivusr 10y ago
      What is wrong with you?
    - konschubert 10y ago
      You seem to forget that the act of selecting is an act of violence by itself.
      - mmirate 10y ago
        Hence my particular turn-of-phrase: "that brand of inevitable violence [described by anigbrowl]". Yes, I probably should have included that bracketed clause. (aside: AFAICT, needing violence to remove violence is as much an inevitability as needing guns to remove guns.)
    - 10y ago

deleted 10y ago

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