20 ms·

Staring into the abyss as a core life skill

368 points by troydavis 4y ago

travis86 4y ago
I am curious about the country mentioned that has instant payments between banks, and thus Wave pulled out. What's the country's name and why aren't more countries like that? What's their secret?
- ZhangSWEFAANG 4y ago
  He won't tell you obviously because he's a selfish person who dosen't want to aid the competition.
- Poc 4y ago
  It's possible with Paylib here in France.
hipjiveguy 4y ago
This is very true, but I think should be summed up as the following Think hard, but love harder. In both, be humble, but in all things challenge yourself and others. Questions things, but don't forget that being kind, loving, and inteligent is a gift to yourself first, and others at the same time.
082349872349872 4y ago
As bk mentions in his footnote, this googlebombs "staring into the abyss". "Courage to tackle the unpleasant" doesn't have the same ring, however.
- alan-crowe 4y ago
  To my ears "Courage to tackle the unpleasant" has the ring of bounds known ahead of time. Chore X will be unpleasant. How unpleasant? Between 4 Ughs and 7 Ughs. Maybe 8 Ughs. So I know why I'm procrastinating, I don't want to tackle a 4 Ugh chore right now. But I can plan. Tomorrow morning I'll be up for tackling a 10 Ugh chore, I can plan to do it then. Sometimes we don't know the upper bound. The article mentions religious doubts, which can escalate to nihilism and despair. One cannot plan for that. No-one says: I'm too tired for nihilism and despair this evening, I'll do it tomorrow morning. Abyss? The examples in the article have a feel of a scarily large upper bound, which we are putting off estimating. But we could estimate it, realize that we are not at the abyss, we are just facing a tough choice, and get on with it.
  - 082349872349872 4y ago
    > Gee, Schopenhauer. What are we going to do tonight? > The same thing we do every night, Kierkegaard. Nihilism and despair.
fedeb95 4y ago
I think you're missing what is perhaps the most well known quote about this topic: If you stare into the abyss, the abyss stares back at you.
- pavlov 4y ago
  It's in the footnote.
  - civopsec 4y ago
    Yes, it is further butchered in a footnote.
- forbiddenlake 4y ago
  That is actually in article in the footnote.
  - shudza 4y ago
    A footnote is nice, but you can't really take a well known phrase and just redefine it according to your needs, while clickbaiting a bunch of people.
    - twelve40 4y ago
      I don't think it was malicious, I think the author was trying to be creative in a clumsy way.
  - civopsec 4y ago
    Actually if the author butchers the phrase then such acknowledgements don’t matter. Actually it makes it worse… I’ve got this sword of Damocles[1] hanging over my head right now; I don’t know whether I should have turkey dinner tonight or homemade pizza. Such swords of worry come up in my head quite often, and I think one should learn to master them. In fact, as the CEO of Douchebags Inc. writes in his book Facing Your Own Damocles— [1] Recites Wikipedia
- 4y ago
samsquire 4y ago
The world is filled with much good, but if you're looking at what is false, not good or rejecting what is good you shall find it hard to notice. If you look for the good and aim toward it then you get more of it. If you aim to look for bad and search for it you shall get more of it. Everyone eventually reaps what they sow. And you can judge a tree by its fruit. Rather than focus on the badness of the bad situation or stare into the abyss. Pick good responses that are independent of bad. In other words, two wrongs don't mean right.
- JadeNB 4y ago
  This post seems almost comically like a collection of self-help slogans, and not far off from blaming people who are in a dark place for getting themselves there. (I also don't understand how "two wrongs don't mean right" connects to the rest of it. Is the idea that one is doing wrong by thinking bad things of wrong that has already been done?) Also, if this is meant as a corrective to the article (as suggested by "Rather than focus on the badness of the bad situation or stare into the abyss. Pick good responses that are independent of bad"), then it seems that it is a response to the title, not the content. The very beginning of the article emphasises that the point is not to dwell on the bad in order to foster despair, but rather to acknowledge the existence of the bad in order to be able to move from it towards a remedy. If you can't even acknowledge that a bad situation exists, then you can't make a good response to it.
  - samsquire 4y ago
    Thank you for your reply. What I was trying to put across was that we get the results what we cause. I always bear the outcome of what I did. Can you think of an escape from the effects of what we do? (I deliberately ignore the other side of this, I'm not talking about effects we did not cause, such as trouble others cause for others) If you pick good, right, proper, meant to be, what should be, what is righteous, what is true, honest, genuine, with integrity actions, then you ought to bear fruit that is caused by that. I think that this produces better outcomes than picking bad, not good, wrong, untrue, false, not honest, not genuine actions/thoughts/speech. In hindsight we can determine what actions were not right, since they didn't produce the right, good results. So if we seek after good, shouldn't we get the effects of good back because we surround ourselves with it? This is separate independent reasoning from when bad things befall people who do all things right. I haven't thought much about that. Do we bear the effects of what other's cause? The two wrongs don't create a right refers to the idea of avoid basing my reasoning on doing something on something bad and calling it good. I should keep my reasoning of my reaction to bad things purely based on goodness and not based on the bad thing itself. I never want to say I did something purely due to a bad thing. I think you could call it motivation. I want to keep good and bad independent and not merge them into one. Can something bad cause something good in other words? Or did the good that it is a reaction to cause itself?
tantalor 4y ago
The multiple views provide too much information! It's impossible to move! Calvin quickly tries to eliminate all but one perspective! https://www.gocomics.com/calvinandhobbes/1990/06/17 https://www.gocomics.com/calvinandhobbes/1990/06/17
- chrisweekly 4y ago
  Ha! Thanks for this gem. Love it.
paulpauper 4y ago
Many of these students ultimately end up going into finance or consulting, not because they were particularly excited about that as a career path but because it’s the easiest high-status next step from their in-retrospect-poorly-chosen major. Unfortunately, those are also career paths that require long hours and where the work is often meaningless. While I’m sure that finance and consulting are the right career choice for some elite college graduates, I’d be surprised if it was the best choice for nearly 50% of them. But the pay is so much more too. This means you can retire sooner and then use the free time to find meaning. It also means you have more money to fund your hobbies and interests, and also just having a nice standard of living is good too, and not having to worry so much about unpaid bills, medical costs, etc. . People who have crappy jobs also work long hours too and find the work meaningless.
- hammock 4y ago
  Are finance and consulting really high status beyond the pay? Why? In theory it seems like they might be, but most of my peers in these fields are pretty uninspiring
  - BlargMcLarg 4y ago
    Can't speak for the US but here, "suit" jobs are generally held to higher regard even if the job no longer requires a suit. Fancy names and a history of good pay definitely help. If anything, IT is the outlier in "well-paid office jobs which garner lots of respect".
    - switchbak 4y ago
      Suit jobs are only highly regarded amongst a subset of the population. I think the more you understand the realities of those jobs, the less appeal they have. There's also certain personality types drawn to those roles which isn't attractive for everyone. I used to look at engineers and think I missed out by not going down that road. Fast forward a few years and it turns out most engineers I talk to see the tech industry as being a much better draw (higher salaries, more jobs, etc).
    - 4y ago
curation 4y ago
Subjectivity is an abyss. The Real is the tension between symbolizer and symbolized as we try and fail to fill reality, which is unfinished. Theories of Everything do not come from science but from philosophy. Plato, Hegel, Lacan, McGowan, Dolar, Zizek, Freud, Fanon.
deleted 4y ago
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vlunkr 4y ago
In general I agree with this, though it seems to be mostly about startup founders pivoting. I do take issue with this suggested exercise: > What bad things are you afraid of happening? Imagine in detail what it would be like if they happened. I know people that do this regularly, I would consider it indicative of an anxiety disorder, not a healthy behavior.
- dnissley 4y ago
  I think it depends on your reaction to those imaginings. I do a decent amount of "staring into the abyss." It's actually a way for me to calm my anxiety. Because once I walk through the worst case scenarios in detail, I can always say: I will make it, I will be fine, I can be happy even in those situations. If I don't explicitly walk through the scenarios in detail, I tend to catastrophize them in a vague way -- "It'll be terrible", "no good", "so unhappy". There's something about doing this detailed walkthrough that requires me to state my previously unstated assumptions that are often very wrong.
deleted 4y ago
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throwaway123989 4y ago
Ben Horowitz in THE HARD THING ABOUT HARD THINGS mentioned similar thing: How to lead even when you don't know where you are going: The fine line between fear and courage
leashless 4y ago
Staring into the abyss of your own death is a core spiritual practice in many of the worlds spiritual traditions. It’s the important part of meditation.
hkon 4y ago
Wow, the abyss was a lot shallower than I had imagined.
Henhound 4y ago
Seem to be a lesswrong entrepreneur take on the question: Should you orient yourself by pursuing what you want or by avoiding what you don't want?
- hinkley 4y ago
  Humans can juggle more than one responsibility. If the thing you don’t want is insidious, you better be doing both.
at_a_remove 4y ago
Hunh. I think some people call this "testing their priors." In Pi (1998), there's a lot of "... restate my assumptions: One ..." as the narrator strives to correct his thought processes. I recollect a short horror story in which a man becomes obsessed with "doing away" with more and more of his life he deems truly unneeded (it may have been named "To the Bone," it has been a few decades). In the harder sciences, whatever is accepted as the "the truth" is only a working model, hopefully to be replaced by something better when experiments point toward some flaw. It involves a lot of the ability to confront the Sunk Cost Fallacy and a bit of whatever it is where you see people unwilling to let go of something which inadvertently traps them. I try to do this, frequently, as a kind of back-tracking when I am stuck, or simply when I suspect it. However, I think it's probably a bit dangerous to get into a habit of it, or to apply it very broadly. The dead and the unborn need nothing, and one is ever in a state of moving from the latter to the former, without a way to take anything with you when the journey is done. Perhaps an addendum to "nothing is true; all is permitted" might be another semicolon and "everything is unnecessary."
- loa_in_ 4y ago
  If the man in the story "did away" with willingness to help others and give to others, then that's a pretty big moral failing on his part. But then he probably "did away" with morality at that point as well. Morality and other people (and finally survival) are what's keeping a real person who might undertake such "doing away" from going... too far.
killjoywashere 4y ago
Has anyone done a survey of founders, age of start, their number of companies until success, age at success, their income, and their familial net worth? Because it's a lot easier to "stare into the abyss" when failure has survivable outcomes.
deleted 4y ago
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ssivark 4y ago
"Staring into the abyss" is only half the challenge; the other half is knowing what (values) you can hold on to while the abyss stares back at you. The latter is what stops people from looking too closely, or asking hard questions -- because they fear that they might not have a strong enough framework in which to answer them. And so they look only as close as they can handle while they slowly work up the strength and the courage. Another kind of person happens to be very comfortable staring into the abyss, interpreting with Procrustean simplifications, and reacting to what they see -- without necessarily the strong values in place to ground them; they are a loose canon, especially if they are a high-agency person biased for action. When the gentle equilibrium has been upset by an unexpected outcome, the high-agency person has the fortitude to iterate the cycle of staring into the abyss (still a loose cannon, if they’re not well grounded). However, the median person might not -- and can end up doing an incredible amount of collateral damage (to their own lives, and the lives of people around them) if they do this with insufficient skills or commitment. I wouldn't be surprised if a fear of the abyss is an evolutionary/cultural survival mechanism to protect them from themselves. Very few people have the nous to carry out the whole iterated process well.
giantg2 4y ago
"Staring into the abyss means thinking reasonably about things that are uncomfortable to contemplate, like arguments against your religious beliefs, or in favor of breaking up with your partner." These might be difficult to discuss. But is there really anything uncomfortable to contemplate?
- crawfordcomeaux 4y ago
  Anything that consciously or subconsciously reminds someone's mind or body of their trauma?
  - giantg2 4y ago
    Hmm, if you count anger, I suppose so.
    - crawfordcomeaux 4y ago
      Anger is for sure a sign of something going unaddressed, as humans can learn to enjoy and accept anything.
      - giantg2 4y ago
        Even if they can, perhaps it's not in their best interest to enjoy being abused.
        crawfordcomeaux 4y ago
        Enjoying something, choosing it, and choosing to do things based on what feels joyful are three different things. Getting to a place where one can find joy in dark torment is absolutely in their best interest. So is learning about universal human needs, so as to be able to make choices based on that, rather than purely emotionally-driven choices.
crawfordcomeaux 4y ago
Here's an abyss to stare into: Humans generally don't have an idea of what their needs are. Challenge: list all of your needs for surviving and thriving from memory and also give a definition of each that's clear and not simply some desire/want or societally created artificial construct (computers and money are not needs). Also, Maslow's hierarchy is too individualistic, so cheating with it automatically loses. And another hint: excess and deprivation of needs is a need in order to learn what the individual body's needs for moderating each need is.
- crawfordcomeaux 4y ago
  This is an important abyss to stare into because a sustainable moneyless society that can effectively meet everyone's needs is almost impossible to conceive of without being aware of all the needs.
jamesgreenleaf 4y ago
This sounds more like "playing devil's advocate" or taking a contrarian view, or questioning one's assumptions or decisions. Whatever you call it, the author is right about it being a useful skill. If you want to talk about "staring into the abyss" though... to me that phrase evokes the casting of all reality into doubt. It means to grapple with the Münchhausen trilemma, or to perceive the limitless and arbitrary space of metaphysics, or to acknowledge the oblivion of meaning that the shadow of death casts over us. Either way, the abyss really is an abyss. I don't know whether it's useful to stare into it.
- kdmccormick 4y ago
  I take what the author describes as "staring into the abyss" as a special case of playing devil's advocate: one where the contrarian view has significant and emotionally difficult consequences, and you're actually letting yourself feel the emotional weight of potentially choosing it instead of just playing with the idea. For example: Imagine you go to an engineering college, and you start feeling like you might not like the idea of an engineering career. You could play devil's advocate by chatting with your engineering-enthralled friends about how fun it'd be to drop out of college and go to culinary school instead, but that's just talk. Staring into the abyss would be actually thinking through the financial, social, and personal implications of that choice, looking into culinary schools, and letting that dread and anxiety and excitement wash over you while you genuinely contemplate making the switch. > If you want to talk about "staring into the abyss" though... to me that phrase evokes the casting of all reality into doubt. In a more literal sense, yeah, I agree, that's what staring into the abyss is. I think here the author uses it as an effective way of saying "question the assumptions of your immediate reality".
  - noduerme 4y ago
    > letting that dread and anxiety and excitement wash over you while you genuinely contemplate making the switch. But life also happens anyways. For me, a lot of what constitutes "staring into the abyss" is accepting that neither the original plan nor my alternate wish worked out as expected - despite the best laid plans - because almost nothing ever does. It's not just considering all the implications of a decision but accepting that things just work out differently than you hoped. [edit] I guess I mean that accepting the inevitability of previous disappointments is as much or more a part of grappling with the abyss as is considering the future.
iskander 4y ago
This feels like a very superficial and somewhat silly redefinition of "staring into the abyss".
roughly 4y ago
I was told once that by the time you're genuinely considering a big change - by the time you're aware there's an abyss - the answer is probably "do it." There are things that are normal fears - "I have a serious medical condition and can't risk being without health insurance," that kind of thing - but "abyss" questions tend to be the sorts of things where you can't really articulate what your concerns are, or they're more about status or perception or just a general risk aversion ("what if I never find a job again?" "do I really want to be a divorcee?" "will my peers think I'm a failure?"), and the reason you're really even considering it is because you're currently miserable. People tend to stay at jobs longer than they should, in relationships longer than they should, and in misery longer than they should.
physicles 4y ago
A bit over 10 years ago I was still an evangelical Christian. I decided to ask myself, "What's the most logical way to live in light of your religious beliefs? Why aren't you living that way?" That line of questioning was scary, but also invigorating. Scary, because it probably meant leaving behind a cushy tech job. Invigorating, because I imagined I'd end up as a missionary somewhere, which is a pretty amazing life if you really believe that Christianity is true. After 18 months of staring into the abyss, I wasn't a Christian anymore. It was the hardest and most important thing I've ever done. Two things made the journey possible: 1. I made it impossible to stop. I'd decided that I wanted to live as consistently as possible with my beliefs, so I couldn't stop until I knew what those beliefs were. The only possible outcomes were a) missionary, or b) non-Christian. 2. I found others who went through the same thing. A few were friends, but most were authors or random people online who wrote about their experience, like lukeprog on lesswrong.com.
- jondeval 4y ago
  What were the reasons that made you embrace that change? Consistency is certainly admirable, but you can consistently embrace incorrect world views.
  - physicles 4y ago
    As I wrote in a sibling comment, my faith always rested on Christianity's historical truth claims. So once I reached the conclusion that they weren't true, there was no way I could continue to embrace Christianity. I had to rethink everything from the ground up.
    - fuzzfactor 4y ago
      >dating the wrong person or praying to the wrong god I must be really screwed since I did both at the same time One more form of staring into the abyss is undertaking restoration of vintage equipment. Not for the faint at heart either.
    - jondeval 4y ago
      What specific truth claim are you skeptical about?
sharadov 4y ago
Honestly I was not sure about tech when I made a choice to get an electrical engg degree, a few years down the road I thought of an MBA, but then went and co-founded a startup while holding a full time job. I could afford it, was still in my early 30s and didn't have kids. Although the startup did not succeed, that experience taught me a lot( I called it my alternative to going to business school). But overall, when I look back, tech was a great choice, I always have had enough time for family and hobbies (my average work week has always been 40 hrs). Maybe because I was fortunate to pivot into Data when it was not a "sexy" field that it has come to be. Some paths are just "luck". But tech beats a lot of fields ( medicine, law) for the compensation against hours worked and flexibility.
andrewfromx 4y ago
"Nature loves courage. Throw yourself into the abyss and discover it's actually a feather bed."
keeptrying 4y ago
Salaries/Trustfunds are the main reason that people lose this skill of staring into the abyss and or never gain it in the first place. You literally can't build this skill without taking your own decisions and bearing the consequences of the same (without your boss shielding you).
stared 4y ago
I like the idea of contemplating uncomfortable ideas, but I hate the phrasing. The abyss is void, nothingness. It is not a challenge; it is not something to be studied or resolved. It has no structure and offers no insight. "Staring in the abyss" is a suitable phrase for existential dread, cosmic despair, and metaphysical visions of hell. So, it is a good phrase for the worst of the worst parts of depression rather than good advice.
- w0hnen 4y ago
  interesting that you describe void as nothingness and then immediately assign a negative value to it. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C5%9A%C5%ABnyat%C4%81 https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C5%9A%C5%ABnyat%C4%81
  - stared 4y ago
    The name can mean a few different concepts. The concept I described is purely negative. If you ever experienced even a glimpse of it, I doubt you would classify it otherwise. For some references, I recommend classification of mystical vision (psychedelic-assisted or not).
    - rytill 4y ago
      > For some references, I recommend classification of mystical vision (psychedelic-assisted or not). Could you clarify what you’re referencing here? I wasn’t able to find something that looked like what you were referencing by searching “classification of mystical vision void”.
      - stared 4y ago
        Search for "cosmic despair" as one of four types of states (along with "cosmic unity", "cosmic struggle" and "rebirth"). "Cosmic despair" captures states that go under various names, including "the dark night of the soul", visions of hell related to absolute desolation (rather than lava and stuff), existential dread, and quite a few other names and concepts in religion, spirituality, and philosophy. And describes a very specific type of bad trips. The concept comes from "Realms of the Human Unconscious: Observations from LSD Research" by Stanisval Grof, the grandfather of the research on psychedelics in therapy. He relates these states to four stages of birth, which he takes literally. My preference is to take it metaphorically, though.
2devnull 4y ago
“And I knew I had to finally update. To actually change what I planned to do, to change what I was doing now, to do something different instead.” Reminds me of the famous Rilke poem: “Otherwise this stone would seem defaced beneath the translucent cascade of the shoulders and would not glisten like a wild beast's fur: would not, from all the borders of itself, burst like a star: for here there is no place that does not see you. You must change your life.” And pivot he did.
Jeff_Brown 4y ago
Sometimes. A lot of people have pretty well-defined values, though, and stay in iffy situations out of uncertainty and loss aversion. Even if the expected value of a radical uprooting and redo is positive, the potencial downside -- alienation? depression? loss of function? -- can be extreme.
Jeff_Brown 4y ago
Journaling without any goal besides understanding myself better, particularly my beliefs, had a similarly transformative effect on me. I stopped feeling angry and entitled to things I didn't have, and I became extremely positive in my social interactions and in my head. For a long time I credited knowledge graph technology for the change, but now I think it was more likely just the practice of committed, written introspection. (The graphs definitely helped me navigate my notes faster and with less redundancy, though, which mattered because there were a lot of them.)
Jeff_Brown 4y ago
Do you know anyone who made the leap and regretted it? I'm not thinking of any, but my memory isn't great. Also I think people don't typically share their self-doubts, even ones that happened years ago, very frankly.
- yawnxyz 4y ago
  I made the leap into a weird industry (biotech) as a designer/engineer, and though I don't "fully regret it" I still see friends/peers build up a lot of wealth that's simply not possible in this space. Yes, life's been more meaningful; we've treated patients and sent them home and that's a great feeling, but always with the question, "at what personal cost?"
TedShiller 4y ago
> thinking reasonably about things that are uncomfortable to contemplate, like arguments against your religious beliefs Good exercise for democrats: acknowledge that the Hunter Biden laptop was not fake, that negative news about the government are being actively, illegally, and covertly suppressed by social media companies. It changes everything.
rektide 4y ago
I love this post. Support for seeing the harder toil of life without necessarily being overcome is, in my view, one of the things I've seen least well done least performed least demonstrated for developing youth. Semi related, been re-reading Ministry for the Future, and we just had a blurb on the Availability Hueristic, the preference for relying on what you know & is familiar. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Availability_heuristic https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Availability_heuristic A main character is trying to face the larger world of issues, to see other things, & not let avoidance take over. This empathy for, willingness to tangle in more tham you know & more than what's familiar often involves looking into the fear-spots, in recognizing bigger scarrier parts of the world. It's a huge skill that, for me, growing up & as an adult, has been such a reliable mark of character & interestingness, was the boundary between a maturing engaged useful person & a scary ineard facing existence that lacks a empathy, a willingness to see beyond themself. Seeing beyond yourself, overcoming the Availability Hueristic, Seeing into the Abyss seem all related & high value, define a higher order humanness that I wish to see spread & grow through humanity, that we need to work on. But which are vastly underdescribed, under emphasized, under-spoken. Glad to have this post.
civopsec 4y ago
Interesting! I wonder what kind of philosophy this author has and their outlook on life is. How could it be good to stare into the abyss? Won’t it drive you mad? This must be an interesting read. > I’m probably not using “stare into the abyss” in the exact same sense Nietzche intended, since I wouldn’t really describe what I’m talking about as “fighting with a monster” or like it has the potential to turn you into a monster. […] as did Elon Musk when he said that > […] Staring into the abyss means thinking reasonably about things that are uncomfortable to contemplate, like arguments against your religious beliefs, or in favor of breaking up with your partner. > […] The first time I learned what really exceptional abyss-staring looks like, it was by watching Drew, the CEO of Wave. Starting a company requires a lot of staring into the abyss, because it involves making lots of serious mistakes (building the wrong thing, hiring the wrong person, etc.) groans
- loa_in_ 4y ago
  Define "being driven mad". It's more work with no guarantee of making you happier. But living without it doesn't guarantee making you happier either. Combing the article for keywords you were subjected to, as I ascertained, too many times isn't the best way too, but it's definitely not the worst as well
  - civopsec 4y ago
    Define missing the point.
sklargh 4y ago
I’m sorry, this is just a well targeted rehash of sunk cost fallacy, which anyone handling money of any substance should understand. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sunk_cost https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sunk_cost
jdelman 4y ago
Although the author focuses on organization building and finding product market fit, it's obvious that this thought technology applies more generally. Does anybody have real-world examples of staring into the abyss in very different fields? Academia, painting, bowling?
deleted 4y ago
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spoonjim 4y ago
The overwrought “startups are so hard” seems so ridiculous to me. Oh no, I have to sit in this Aeron and DoorDash my lunch and try to make money for investors who can afford to lose it. Woe is me.

368 points by troydavis 4y ago

I am curious about the country mentioned that has instant payments between banks, and thus Wave pulled out. What's the country's name and why aren't more countries like that? What's their secret?

ZhangSWEFAANG 4y ago
He won't tell you obviously because he's a selfish person who dosen't want to aid the competition.
Poc 4y ago
It's possible with Paylib here in France.

hipjiveguy 4y ago

This is very true, but I think should be summed up as the following Think hard, but love harder. In both, be humble, but in all things challenge yourself and others. Questions things, but don't forget that being kind, loving, and inteligent is a gift to yourself first, and others at the same time.

082349872349872 4y ago

As bk mentions in his footnote, this googlebombs "staring into the abyss". "Courage to tackle the unpleasant" doesn't have the same ring, however.

alan-crowe 4y ago
To my ears "Courage to tackle the unpleasant" has the ring of bounds known ahead of time. Chore X will be unpleasant. How unpleasant? Between 4 Ughs and 7 Ughs. Maybe 8 Ughs. So I know why I'm procrastinating, I don't want to tackle a 4 Ugh chore right now. But I can plan. Tomorrow morning I'll be up for tackling a 10 Ugh chore, I can plan to do it then. Sometimes we don't know the upper bound. The article mentions religious doubts, which can escalate to nihilism and despair. One cannot plan for that. No-one says: I'm too tired for nihilism and despair this evening, I'll do it tomorrow morning. Abyss? The examples in the article have a feel of a scarily large upper bound, which we are putting off estimating. But we could estimate it, realize that we are not at the abyss, we are just facing a tough choice, and get on with it.
- 082349872349872 4y ago
  > Gee, Schopenhauer. What are we going to do tonight? > The same thing we do every night, Kierkegaard. Nihilism and despair.

fedeb95 4y ago

I think you're missing what is perhaps the most well known quote about this topic: If you stare into the abyss, the abyss stares back at you.

pavlov 4y ago
It's in the footnote.
- civopsec 4y ago
  Yes, it is further butchered in a footnote.
forbiddenlake 4y ago
That is actually in article in the footnote.
- shudza 4y ago
  A footnote is nice, but you can't really take a well known phrase and just redefine it according to your needs, while clickbaiting a bunch of people.
  - twelve40 4y ago
    I don't think it was malicious, I think the author was trying to be creative in a clumsy way.
- civopsec 4y ago
  Actually if the author butchers the phrase then such acknowledgements don’t matter. Actually it makes it worse… I’ve got this sword of Damocles[1] hanging over my head right now; I don’t know whether I should have turkey dinner tonight or homemade pizza. Such swords of worry come up in my head quite often, and I think one should learn to master them. In fact, as the CEO of Douchebags Inc. writes in his book Facing Your Own Damocles— [1] Recites Wikipedia
4y ago

samsquire 4y ago

The world is filled with much good, but if you're looking at what is false, not good or rejecting what is good you shall find it hard to notice. If you look for the good and aim toward it then you get more of it. If you aim to look for bad and search for it you shall get more of it. Everyone eventually reaps what they sow. And you can judge a tree by its fruit. Rather than focus on the badness of the bad situation or stare into the abyss. Pick good responses that are independent of bad. In other words, two wrongs don't mean right.

JadeNB 4y ago
This post seems almost comically like a collection of self-help slogans, and not far off from blaming people who are in a dark place for getting themselves there. (I also don't understand how "two wrongs don't mean right" connects to the rest of it. Is the idea that one is doing wrong by thinking bad things of wrong that has already been done?) Also, if this is meant as a corrective to the article (as suggested by "Rather than focus on the badness of the bad situation or stare into the abyss. Pick good responses that are independent of bad"), then it seems that it is a response to the title, not the content. The very beginning of the article emphasises that the point is not to dwell on the bad in order to foster despair, but rather to acknowledge the existence of the bad in order to be able to move from it towards a remedy. If you can't even acknowledge that a bad situation exists, then you can't make a good response to it.
- samsquire 4y ago
  Thank you for your reply. What I was trying to put across was that we get the results what we cause. I always bear the outcome of what I did. Can you think of an escape from the effects of what we do? (I deliberately ignore the other side of this, I'm not talking about effects we did not cause, such as trouble others cause for others) If you pick good, right, proper, meant to be, what should be, what is righteous, what is true, honest, genuine, with integrity actions, then you ought to bear fruit that is caused by that. I think that this produces better outcomes than picking bad, not good, wrong, untrue, false, not honest, not genuine actions/thoughts/speech. In hindsight we can determine what actions were not right, since they didn't produce the right, good results. So if we seek after good, shouldn't we get the effects of good back because we surround ourselves with it? This is separate independent reasoning from when bad things befall people who do all things right. I haven't thought much about that. Do we bear the effects of what other's cause? The two wrongs don't create a right refers to the idea of avoid basing my reasoning on doing something on something bad and calling it good. I should keep my reasoning of my reaction to bad things purely based on goodness and not based on the bad thing itself. I never want to say I did something purely due to a bad thing. I think you could call it motivation. I want to keep good and bad independent and not merge them into one. Can something bad cause something good in other words? Or did the good that it is a reaction to cause itself?

tantalor 4y ago

The multiple views provide too much information! It's impossible to move! Calvin quickly tries to eliminate all but one perspective! https://www.gocomics.com/calvinandhobbes/1990/06/17 https://www.gocomics.com/calvinandhobbes/1990/06/17

chrisweekly 4y ago
Ha! Thanks for this gem. Love it.

paulpauper 4y ago

Many of these students ultimately end up going into finance or consulting, not because they were particularly excited about that as a career path but because it’s the easiest high-status next step from their in-retrospect-poorly-chosen major. Unfortunately, those are also career paths that require long hours and where the work is often meaningless. While I’m sure that finance and consulting are the right career choice for some elite college graduates, I’d be surprised if it was the best choice for nearly 50% of them. But the pay is so much more too. This means you can retire sooner and then use the free time to find meaning. It also means you have more money to fund your hobbies and interests, and also just having a nice standard of living is good too, and not having to worry so much about unpaid bills, medical costs, etc. . People who have crappy jobs also work long hours too and find the work meaningless.

hammock 4y ago
Are finance and consulting really high status beyond the pay? Why? In theory it seems like they might be, but most of my peers in these fields are pretty uninspiring
- BlargMcLarg 4y ago
  Can't speak for the US but here, "suit" jobs are generally held to higher regard even if the job no longer requires a suit. Fancy names and a history of good pay definitely help. If anything, IT is the outlier in "well-paid office jobs which garner lots of respect".
  - switchbak 4y ago
    Suit jobs are only highly regarded amongst a subset of the population. I think the more you understand the realities of those jobs, the less appeal they have. There's also certain personality types drawn to those roles which isn't attractive for everyone. I used to look at engineers and think I missed out by not going down that road. Fast forward a few years and it turns out most engineers I talk to see the tech industry as being a much better draw (higher salaries, more jobs, etc).
  - 4y ago

curation 4y ago

Subjectivity is an abyss. The Real is the tension between symbolizer and symbolized as we try and fail to fill reality, which is unfinished. Theories of Everything do not come from science but from philosophy. Plato, Hegel, Lacan, McGowan, Dolar, Zizek, Freud, Fanon.

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vlunkr 4y ago

In general I agree with this, though it seems to be mostly about startup founders pivoting. I do take issue with this suggested exercise: > What bad things are you afraid of happening? Imagine in detail what it would be like if they happened. I know people that do this regularly, I would consider it indicative of an anxiety disorder, not a healthy behavior.

dnissley 4y ago
I think it depends on your reaction to those imaginings. I do a decent amount of "staring into the abyss." It's actually a way for me to calm my anxiety. Because once I walk through the worst case scenarios in detail, I can always say: I will make it, I will be fine, I can be happy even in those situations. If I don't explicitly walk through the scenarios in detail, I tend to catastrophize them in a vague way -- "It'll be terrible", "no good", "so unhappy". There's something about doing this detailed walkthrough that requires me to state my previously unstated assumptions that are often very wrong.

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throwaway123989 4y ago

Ben Horowitz in THE HARD THING ABOUT HARD THINGS mentioned similar thing: How to lead even when you don't know where you are going: The fine line between fear and courage

leashless 4y ago

Staring into the abyss of your own death is a core spiritual practice in many of the worlds spiritual traditions. It’s the important part of meditation.

hkon 4y ago

Wow, the abyss was a lot shallower than I had imagined.

Henhound 4y ago

Seem to be a lesswrong entrepreneur take on the question: Should you orient yourself by pursuing what you want or by avoiding what you don't want?

hinkley 4y ago
Humans can juggle more than one responsibility. If the thing you don’t want is insidious, you better be doing both.

at_a_remove 4y ago

Hunh. I think some people call this "testing their priors." In Pi (1998), there's a lot of "... restate my assumptions: One ..." as the narrator strives to correct his thought processes. I recollect a short horror story in which a man becomes obsessed with "doing away" with more and more of his life he deems truly unneeded (it may have been named "To the Bone," it has been a few decades). In the harder sciences, whatever is accepted as the "the truth" is only a working model, hopefully to be replaced by something better when experiments point toward some flaw. It involves a lot of the ability to confront the Sunk Cost Fallacy and a bit of whatever it is where you see people unwilling to let go of something which inadvertently traps them. I try to do this, frequently, as a kind of back-tracking when I am stuck, or simply when I suspect it. However, I think it's probably a bit dangerous to get into a habit of it, or to apply it very broadly. The dead and the unborn need nothing, and one is ever in a state of moving from the latter to the former, without a way to take anything with you when the journey is done. Perhaps an addendum to "nothing is true; all is permitted" might be another semicolon and "everything is unnecessary."

loa_in_ 4y ago
If the man in the story "did away" with willingness to help others and give to others, then that's a pretty big moral failing on his part. But then he probably "did away" with morality at that point as well. Morality and other people (and finally survival) are what's keeping a real person who might undertake such "doing away" from going... too far.

killjoywashere 4y ago

Has anyone done a survey of founders, age of start, their number of companies until success, age at success, their income, and their familial net worth? Because it's a lot easier to "stare into the abyss" when failure has survivable outcomes.

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ssivark 4y ago

"Staring into the abyss" is only half the challenge; the other half is knowing what (values) you can hold on to while the abyss stares back at you. The latter is what stops people from looking too closely, or asking hard questions -- because they fear that they might not have a strong enough framework in which to answer them. And so they look only as close as they can handle while they slowly work up the strength and the courage. Another kind of person happens to be very comfortable staring into the abyss, interpreting with Procrustean simplifications, and reacting to what they see -- without necessarily the strong values in place to ground them; they are a loose canon, especially if they are a high-agency person biased for action. When the gentle equilibrium has been upset by an unexpected outcome, the high-agency person has the fortitude to iterate the cycle of staring into the abyss (still a loose cannon, if they’re not well grounded). However, the median person might not -- and can end up doing an incredible amount of collateral damage (to their own lives, and the lives of people around them) if they do this with insufficient skills or commitment. I wouldn't be surprised if a fear of the abyss is an evolutionary/cultural survival mechanism to protect them from themselves. Very few people have the nous to carry out the whole iterated process well.

giantg2 4y ago

"Staring into the abyss means thinking reasonably about things that are uncomfortable to contemplate, like arguments against your religious beliefs, or in favor of breaking up with your partner." These might be difficult to discuss. But is there really anything uncomfortable to contemplate?

crawfordcomeaux 4y ago
Anything that consciously or subconsciously reminds someone's mind or body of their trauma?
- giantg2 4y ago
  Hmm, if you count anger, I suppose so.
  - crawfordcomeaux 4y ago
    Anger is for sure a sign of something going unaddressed, as humans can learn to enjoy and accept anything.
    - giantg2 4y ago
      Even if they can, perhaps it's not in their best interest to enjoy being abused.
      - crawfordcomeaux 4y ago
        Enjoying something, choosing it, and choosing to do things based on what feels joyful are three different things. Getting to a place where one can find joy in dark torment is absolutely in their best interest. So is learning about universal human needs, so as to be able to make choices based on that, rather than purely emotionally-driven choices.

crawfordcomeaux 4y ago

Here's an abyss to stare into: Humans generally don't have an idea of what their needs are. Challenge: list all of your needs for surviving and thriving from memory and also give a definition of each that's clear and not simply some desire/want or societally created artificial construct (computers and money are not needs). Also, Maslow's hierarchy is too individualistic, so cheating with it automatically loses. And another hint: excess and deprivation of needs is a need in order to learn what the individual body's needs for moderating each need is.

crawfordcomeaux 4y ago
This is an important abyss to stare into because a sustainable moneyless society that can effectively meet everyone's needs is almost impossible to conceive of without being aware of all the needs.

jamesgreenleaf 4y ago

This sounds more like "playing devil's advocate" or taking a contrarian view, or questioning one's assumptions or decisions. Whatever you call it, the author is right about it being a useful skill. If you want to talk about "staring into the abyss" though... to me that phrase evokes the casting of all reality into doubt. It means to grapple with the Münchhausen trilemma, or to perceive the limitless and arbitrary space of metaphysics, or to acknowledge the oblivion of meaning that the shadow of death casts over us. Either way, the abyss really is an abyss. I don't know whether it's useful to stare into it.

kdmccormick 4y ago
I take what the author describes as "staring into the abyss" as a special case of playing devil's advocate: one where the contrarian view has significant and emotionally difficult consequences, and you're actually letting yourself feel the emotional weight of potentially choosing it instead of just playing with the idea. For example: Imagine you go to an engineering college, and you start feeling like you might not like the idea of an engineering career. You could play devil's advocate by chatting with your engineering-enthralled friends about how fun it'd be to drop out of college and go to culinary school instead, but that's just talk. Staring into the abyss would be actually thinking through the financial, social, and personal implications of that choice, looking into culinary schools, and letting that dread and anxiety and excitement wash over you while you genuinely contemplate making the switch. > If you want to talk about "staring into the abyss" though... to me that phrase evokes the casting of all reality into doubt. In a more literal sense, yeah, I agree, that's what staring into the abyss is. I think here the author uses it as an effective way of saying "question the assumptions of your immediate reality".
- noduerme 4y ago
  > letting that dread and anxiety and excitement wash over you while you genuinely contemplate making the switch. But life also happens anyways. For me, a lot of what constitutes "staring into the abyss" is accepting that neither the original plan nor my alternate wish worked out as expected - despite the best laid plans - because almost nothing ever does. It's not just considering all the implications of a decision but accepting that things just work out differently than you hoped. [edit] I guess I mean that accepting the inevitability of previous disappointments is as much or more a part of grappling with the abyss as is considering the future.

iskander 4y ago

This feels like a very superficial and somewhat silly redefinition of "staring into the abyss".

roughly 4y ago

I was told once that by the time you're genuinely considering a big change - by the time you're aware there's an abyss - the answer is probably "do it." There are things that are normal fears - "I have a serious medical condition and can't risk being without health insurance," that kind of thing - but "abyss" questions tend to be the sorts of things where you can't really articulate what your concerns are, or they're more about status or perception or just a general risk aversion ("what if I never find a job again?" "do I really want to be a divorcee?" "will my peers think I'm a failure?"), and the reason you're really even considering it is because you're currently miserable. People tend to stay at jobs longer than they should, in relationships longer than they should, and in misery longer than they should.

physicles 4y ago

A bit over 10 years ago I was still an evangelical Christian. I decided to ask myself, "What's the most logical way to live in light of your religious beliefs? Why aren't you living that way?" That line of questioning was scary, but also invigorating. Scary, because it probably meant leaving behind a cushy tech job. Invigorating, because I imagined I'd end up as a missionary somewhere, which is a pretty amazing life if you really believe that Christianity is true. After 18 months of staring into the abyss, I wasn't a Christian anymore. It was the hardest and most important thing I've ever done. Two things made the journey possible: 1. I made it impossible to stop. I'd decided that I wanted to live as consistently as possible with my beliefs, so I couldn't stop until I knew what those beliefs were. The only possible outcomes were a) missionary, or b) non-Christian. 2. I found others who went through the same thing. A few were friends, but most were authors or random people online who wrote about their experience, like lukeprog on lesswrong.com.

jondeval 4y ago
What were the reasons that made you embrace that change? Consistency is certainly admirable, but you can consistently embrace incorrect world views.
- physicles 4y ago
  As I wrote in a sibling comment, my faith always rested on Christianity's historical truth claims. So once I reached the conclusion that they weren't true, there was no way I could continue to embrace Christianity. I had to rethink everything from the ground up.
  - fuzzfactor 4y ago
    >dating the wrong person or praying to the wrong god I must be really screwed since I did both at the same time One more form of staring into the abyss is undertaking restoration of vintage equipment. Not for the faint at heart either.
  - jondeval 4y ago
    What specific truth claim are you skeptical about?

sharadov 4y ago

Honestly I was not sure about tech when I made a choice to get an electrical engg degree, a few years down the road I thought of an MBA, but then went and co-founded a startup while holding a full time job. I could afford it, was still in my early 30s and didn't have kids. Although the startup did not succeed, that experience taught me a lot( I called it my alternative to going to business school). But overall, when I look back, tech was a great choice, I always have had enough time for family and hobbies (my average work week has always been 40 hrs). Maybe because I was fortunate to pivot into Data when it was not a "sexy" field that it has come to be. Some paths are just "luck". But tech beats a lot of fields ( medicine, law) for the compensation against hours worked and flexibility.

andrewfromx 4y ago

"Nature loves courage. Throw yourself into the abyss and discover it's actually a feather bed."

keeptrying 4y ago

Salaries/Trustfunds are the main reason that people lose this skill of staring into the abyss and or never gain it in the first place. You literally can't build this skill without taking your own decisions and bearing the consequences of the same (without your boss shielding you).

stared 4y ago

I like the idea of contemplating uncomfortable ideas, but I hate the phrasing. The abyss is void, nothingness. It is not a challenge; it is not something to be studied or resolved. It has no structure and offers no insight. "Staring in the abyss" is a suitable phrase for existential dread, cosmic despair, and metaphysical visions of hell. So, it is a good phrase for the worst of the worst parts of depression rather than good advice.

w0hnen 4y ago
interesting that you describe void as nothingness and then immediately assign a negative value to it. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C5%9A%C5%ABnyat%C4%81 https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C5%9A%C5%ABnyat%C4%81
- stared 4y ago
  The name can mean a few different concepts. The concept I described is purely negative. If you ever experienced even a glimpse of it, I doubt you would classify it otherwise. For some references, I recommend classification of mystical vision (psychedelic-assisted or not).
  - rytill 4y ago
    > For some references, I recommend classification of mystical vision (psychedelic-assisted or not). Could you clarify what you’re referencing here? I wasn’t able to find something that looked like what you were referencing by searching “classification of mystical vision void”.
    - stared 4y ago
      Search for "cosmic despair" as one of four types of states (along with "cosmic unity", "cosmic struggle" and "rebirth"). "Cosmic despair" captures states that go under various names, including "the dark night of the soul", visions of hell related to absolute desolation (rather than lava and stuff), existential dread, and quite a few other names and concepts in religion, spirituality, and philosophy. And describes a very specific type of bad trips. The concept comes from "Realms of the Human Unconscious: Observations from LSD Research" by Stanisval Grof, the grandfather of the research on psychedelics in therapy. He relates these states to four stages of birth, which he takes literally. My preference is to take it metaphorically, though.

2devnull 4y ago

“And I knew I had to finally update. To actually change what I planned to do, to change what I was doing now, to do something different instead.” Reminds me of the famous Rilke poem: “Otherwise this stone would seem defaced beneath the translucent cascade of the shoulders and would not glisten like a wild beast's fur: would not, from all the borders of itself, burst like a star: for here there is no place that does not see you. You must change your life.” And pivot he did.

Jeff_Brown 4y ago

Sometimes. A lot of people have pretty well-defined values, though, and stay in iffy situations out of uncertainty and loss aversion. Even if the expected value of a radical uprooting and redo is positive, the potencial downside -- alienation? depression? loss of function? -- can be extreme.

Jeff_Brown 4y ago

Journaling without any goal besides understanding myself better, particularly my beliefs, had a similarly transformative effect on me. I stopped feeling angry and entitled to things I didn't have, and I became extremely positive in my social interactions and in my head. For a long time I credited knowledge graph technology for the change, but now I think it was more likely just the practice of committed, written introspection. (The graphs definitely helped me navigate my notes faster and with less redundancy, though, which mattered because there were a lot of them.)

Jeff_Brown 4y ago

Do you know anyone who made the leap and regretted it? I'm not thinking of any, but my memory isn't great. Also I think people don't typically share their self-doubts, even ones that happened years ago, very frankly.

yawnxyz 4y ago
I made the leap into a weird industry (biotech) as a designer/engineer, and though I don't "fully regret it" I still see friends/peers build up a lot of wealth that's simply not possible in this space. Yes, life's been more meaningful; we've treated patients and sent them home and that's a great feeling, but always with the question, "at what personal cost?"

TedShiller 4y ago

> thinking reasonably about things that are uncomfortable to contemplate, like arguments against your religious beliefs Good exercise for democrats: acknowledge that the Hunter Biden laptop was not fake, that negative news about the government are being actively, illegally, and covertly suppressed by social media companies. It changes everything.

rektide 4y ago

I love this post. Support for seeing the harder toil of life without necessarily being overcome is, in my view, one of the things I've seen least well done least performed least demonstrated for developing youth. Semi related, been re-reading Ministry for the Future, and we just had a blurb on the Availability Hueristic, the preference for relying on what you know & is familiar. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Availability_heuristic https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Availability_heuristic A main character is trying to face the larger world of issues, to see other things, & not let avoidance take over. This empathy for, willingness to tangle in more tham you know & more than what's familiar often involves looking into the fear-spots, in recognizing bigger scarrier parts of the world. It's a huge skill that, for me, growing up & as an adult, has been such a reliable mark of character & interestingness, was the boundary between a maturing engaged useful person & a scary ineard facing existence that lacks a empathy, a willingness to see beyond themself. Seeing beyond yourself, overcoming the Availability Hueristic, Seeing into the Abyss seem all related & high value, define a higher order humanness that I wish to see spread & grow through humanity, that we need to work on. But which are vastly underdescribed, under emphasized, under-spoken. Glad to have this post.

civopsec 4y ago

Interesting! I wonder what kind of philosophy this author has and their outlook on life is. How could it be good to stare into the abyss? Won’t it drive you mad? This must be an interesting read. > I’m probably not using “stare into the abyss” in the exact same sense Nietzche intended, since I wouldn’t really describe what I’m talking about as “fighting with a monster” or like it has the potential to turn you into a monster. […] as did Elon Musk when he said that > […] Staring into the abyss means thinking reasonably about things that are uncomfortable to contemplate, like arguments against your religious beliefs, or in favor of breaking up with your partner. > […] The first time I learned what really exceptional abyss-staring looks like, it was by watching Drew, the CEO of Wave. Starting a company requires a lot of staring into the abyss, because it involves making lots of serious mistakes (building the wrong thing, hiring the wrong person, etc.) groans

loa_in_ 4y ago
Define "being driven mad". It's more work with no guarantee of making you happier. But living without it doesn't guarantee making you happier either. Combing the article for keywords you were subjected to, as I ascertained, too many times isn't the best way too, but it's definitely not the worst as well
- civopsec 4y ago
  Define missing the point.

sklargh 4y ago

I’m sorry, this is just a well targeted rehash of sunk cost fallacy, which anyone handling money of any substance should understand. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sunk_cost https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sunk_cost

jdelman 4y ago

Although the author focuses on organization building and finding product market fit, it's obvious that this thought technology applies more generally. Does anybody have real-world examples of staring into the abyss in very different fields? Academia, painting, bowling?

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spoonjim 4y ago

The overwrought “startups are so hard” seems so ridiculous to me. Oh no, I have to sit in this Aeron and DoorDash my lunch and try to make money for investors who can afford to lose it. Woe is me.