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Came to post this. Life gets much better when you stop thinking of your body functions as bugs. They're features. Your body learned that 'working really really

Came to post this. Life gets much better when you stop thinking of your body functions as bugs. They're features. Your body learned that 'working really really hard for this resulted in very little tangible reward' and then probably concluded 'i will not work very hard for long periods of time without seeing reward' Probably the hardest part is understanding that 'i made a number in a database increase' is not actually a reward.

TeMPOraL 4y ago
> Life gets much better when you stop thinking of your body functions as bugs. They're features. Counterpoint: this is like considering various peculiarities of software from 1980s to be features in 2020s. Yes, our bodies are well tuned. To an environment we've lived in until our ancestors, thousands of years ago, boarded a metaphorical rocket ship, and left it flying under constant acceleration. In certain aspects, we're quite far from the environment we evolved in, and evolution has lost the ability to keep pace some time around when it granted us with ability to develop a language more complex than a few grunts.
- tehjoker 4y ago
  tbh i don't think this feature is outdated. it's just your body telling you that doing someone else's bidding intensely and unendingly isn't healthy. it's good to recognize that.
  - TeMPOraL 4y ago
    But this is exactly where our environment differs profoundly from the ancestral one: most of us live in a society closed over resource production. We still need food and other means to survive, but now there are no freely accessible sources of them - we're all gating access to resources for each other. Which means I always have to do someone's bidding if I want to live. I have some choice of whose bidding I'll do, but this means that I'll eventually reach a point where changing the person whose bidding I do is less effective than just doing more for the current one.
    - tehjoker 4y ago
      I am a socialist, so I think that this is your body telling you that you have a political problem that you are sensing individually. It's true this kind of thing can crop up even under the best labor conditions, but much much less frequently. Startup founders do run into it and they own their work product. Still if workers get a significant share of the total value they produce and have good control of their working conditions (and can change projects easily), I suspect this will get a lot better.
- vanjajaja1 4y ago
  fair call, if you're body-primary you'll see the environment as broken and in need of fixing. but if you see the current environment as the source of truth or what you'll need to adapt to survive long term, then yeah you'll need to fix your body. this reminds me of the men in black scene [1] where Will Smith moves the table. you get to decide what kind of person you are https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dijVbM9DpxU&ab_channel=Creepoid1234 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dijVbM9DpxU&ab_channel=Creep...
  - TeMPOraL 4y ago
    I tend to see it as a dance - humans have unique ability to transform the environment to better suit their needs, but sometimes it's still easier to just adapt the body[0]. Both these things are unique to humans anyway[1] - all other life on Earth is "environment-primary", i.e. environment is the source of truth and living things adapt to thrive, except they adapt by breeding imperfectly and dying unevenly. Thus, arguably, neither is more or less "natural" than the other - we're the only ones to have the option to fix things - be it our bodies, our environment, or both. -- [0] - Related concept: "society is fixed, biology is mutable". The flip side of the well-known (if annoyingly overused) adage, "you can't fix social problems with technology" is that if your problem is a social one, you've already lost. Social problems are unsolvable by direct approach; literally anything else is easier than getting people to coordinate at scale, when it means enduring a short-term personal loss for a long-term distributed gain. If you have that kind of problem, pray there's a way to medicate, industrialize, capitalize, code, or CRISPR your way out of it. [1] - Unique at the scale we're talking about. There's a huge gap between us and the next animals best skilled at adapting themselves or the environment.

TeMPOraL 4y ago

> Life gets much better when you stop thinking of your body functions as bugs. They're features. Counterpoint: this is like considering various peculiarities of software from 1980s to be features in 2020s. Yes, our bodies are well tuned. To an environment we've lived in until our ancestors, thousands of years ago, boarded a metaphorical rocket ship, and left it flying under constant acceleration. In certain aspects, we're quite far from the environment we evolved in, and evolution has lost the ability to keep pace some time around when it granted us with ability to develop a language more complex than a few grunts.

tehjoker 4y ago
tbh i don't think this feature is outdated. it's just your body telling you that doing someone else's bidding intensely and unendingly isn't healthy. it's good to recognize that.
- TeMPOraL 4y ago
  But this is exactly where our environment differs profoundly from the ancestral one: most of us live in a society closed over resource production. We still need food and other means to survive, but now there are no freely accessible sources of them - we're all gating access to resources for each other. Which means I always have to do someone's bidding if I want to live. I have some choice of whose bidding I'll do, but this means that I'll eventually reach a point where changing the person whose bidding I do is less effective than just doing more for the current one.
  - tehjoker 4y ago
    I am a socialist, so I think that this is your body telling you that you have a political problem that you are sensing individually. It's true this kind of thing can crop up even under the best labor conditions, but much much less frequently. Startup founders do run into it and they own their work product. Still if workers get a significant share of the total value they produce and have good control of their working conditions (and can change projects easily), I suspect this will get a lot better.
vanjajaja1 4y ago
fair call, if you're body-primary you'll see the environment as broken and in need of fixing. but if you see the current environment as the source of truth or what you'll need to adapt to survive long term, then yeah you'll need to fix your body. this reminds me of the men in black scene [1] where Will Smith moves the table. you get to decide what kind of person you are https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dijVbM9DpxU&ab_channel=Creepoid1234 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dijVbM9DpxU&ab_channel=Creep...
- TeMPOraL 4y ago
  I tend to see it as a dance - humans have unique ability to transform the environment to better suit their needs, but sometimes it's still easier to just adapt the body[0]. Both these things are unique to humans anyway[1] - all other life on Earth is "environment-primary", i.e. environment is the source of truth and living things adapt to thrive, except they adapt by breeding imperfectly and dying unevenly. Thus, arguably, neither is more or less "natural" than the other - we're the only ones to have the option to fix things - be it our bodies, our environment, or both. -- [0] - Related concept: "society is fixed, biology is mutable". The flip side of the well-known (if annoyingly overused) adage, "you can't fix social problems with technology" is that if your problem is a social one, you've already lost. Social problems are unsolvable by direct approach; literally anything else is easier than getting people to coordinate at scale, when it means enduring a short-term personal loss for a long-term distributed gain. If you have that kind of problem, pray there's a way to medicate, industrialize, capitalize, code, or CRISPR your way out of it. [1] - Unique at the scale we're talking about. There's a huge gap between us and the next animals best skilled at adapting themselves or the environment.