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It's as old as humanity > Do you suppose that you alone have had this experience? Are you surprised, as if it were a novelty, that after such long travel and s
by lm28469 3y ago
It's as old as humanity
> Do you suppose that you alone have had this experience? Are you surprised, as if it were a novelty, that after such long travel and so many changes of scene you have not been able to shake off the gloom and heaviness of your mind? You need a change of soul rather than a change of climate.
Seneca, 2000 years ago
More people should read the classics, lots of wisdom you can speed run instead of discovering you fucked up the better part of your youth chasing ghosts
- hcks 3y agoAt the same time it’s hard to understand something before you experienced it yourself. Something like a limitation of written communication.
- max68 3y agoIt seems fairly straightforward and real wisdom is learning from others mistakes
- SamoyedFurFluff 3y agoI think this is fairly myopic. Surely you’ve experienced firsthand someone telling you something, you not “getting it” or believing them, only to be like “oh shit this person was totally right” later on? Or maybe you can like, imagine that this is a fairly normal interaction other people have?
- matwood 3y agoIt depends. Nothing teaches better than failure. Of course I don't need to try heroin to know it's bad, but there are many other things that are worth trying and learning from. To tie it to HN, the vast majority of new companies fail. Wisdom would say don't waste time on a new company, yet many of us do just that.
- twh270 3y agoNot necessarily. "Inner wisdom", wisdom about yourself and who you are, usually can only come from your own experiences (both mistakes/failures and successes/victories). You can learn a lot about yourself by "blowing up" your life. (And you don't have to go to the extremes the article describes.)
- tmountain 3y agoIt takes a while to get there… most people need to experience the pain of a few real mistakes of their own before they recognize the value of paying attention to other people’s. The worst is seeing someone making a mistake, warning them, and then they do it anyway.
- m463 3y agoIt seems real wisdom has a prerequisite: actually seeing/witnessing other people's mistakes. It is hard to see other people's real mistakes, both clearly and with all the context. I remember reading about one common parenting mistake: fighting with their spouse quietly away from their kids. Or maybe fighting happens, but resolving does not. The idea is that kids can't learn how their parents fight, discuss and then resolve issues because they don't ever see everything start to finish.
- marcosdumay 3y agoAlso, changing the people around you can solve a surprising large number of problems. It's not so much that people can't understand it, it's that it's wrong enough times for people to think it can apply to them. (Kinda like playing on the lottery; you won't win, but you have plenty of evidence to think you will.)
- moneywoes 3y agoAnything you’d recommend
- lm28469 3y agohttps://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Moral_letters_to_Lucilius https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Moral_letters_to_Lucilius
- Wonnk13 3y agoThanks for replying- I completely agree. Which writing is that quote from and/or any goods tips for where to start with Seneca for someone who didn't study the classics in college?
- lm28469 3y agoYou can start here: https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Moral_letters_to_Lucilius https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Moral_letters_to_Lucilius That specific quote is from letter 28 "On travel as a cure for discontent" Seneca is always a good intro, easy to read and pretty low level, as in scenarios that you would face in your everyday life instead of more metaphysical topics.
- jlpom 3y agoA comic inspired by this: https://moretothat.com/travel-is-no-cure-for-the-mind https://moretothat.com/travel-is-no-cure-for-the-mind https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30235262 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30235262