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People are looking for meaning in the wrong places - it’s not a huge surprise, it’s something secularism has largely failed at. There are places you can work t
by homefree 1y ago
People are looking for meaning in the wrong places - it’s not a huge surprise, it’s something secularism has largely failed at.
There are places you can work that are more meaningful or where there is a culture of cutting down on bullshit. Elon Musk is famously good at running places that do both.
More people would benefit from getting married and having kids - a lot of (Judeo-Christian) religion’s cultural ideas were good even if its empirical claims are wrong. Religion is in some ways a battle tested cultural technology, throwing it away will have unintended consequences for most people.
Alex Karp touches on some of these ideas indirectly in The Technological Republic which is worth reading anyway for other reasons. A lot of people in the west today grow up without a cultural core and end up aloof believing in nothing, or worse substituting some bullshit political ideology as a poor substitute religion.
- jonstewart 1y agoElon Musk, Alex Karp, and the tradlife, in one post. Please touch some grass. If you’re complaining about secularism and committed to Judeo-Christian religion, how do you reconcile Elon and Karp being the embodiment of everything that Jesus condemns?
- homefree 1y agoI suspect nothing you believe about either of them is remotely true. I didn’t say I was committed to the religions - I said they’re a battle tested adaptive cultural technology we should be careful about throwing away because there will be unintended consequences. They are very effective at helping people live meaningful lives and have community. You can choose to be obstinate and read what I wrote through a political lens with no charity - that’s kind of the political religious substitute I’m talking about.
- jonstewart 1y agoIt’s not so much my belief but plain established fact that they’re both very very rich. What’d Jesus have to say about the rich getting into heaven? Camels, eyes of needles…?
- SAI_Peregrinus 1y agoThe rich have access to industrial-scale blenders & can commission a hydraulic syringe. Pretty sure they can blend the camel into a fine liquid & squeeze it through the eye of a needle. Heaven awaits!
- shinecantbeseen 1y agoI commend your effort in eating the cat turd of trying to provide them a different perspective into life. Their resistance to even considering that you’re not saying something insane + inappropriate is a mark on them, not you. For what it’s worth- I’ve been on a similar journey recently and it’s brought me to similar conclusions. I got there through learning more about Eastern Philosophy and trying to map it to modern Western life.
- homefree 1y agoSomeone (throwtato@protonmail) sent me a death threat from my hacker news email alias over this thread - ridiculous, but not surprising given the left wing extremist violence. The most hostility I've see on HN is from trans leftist activists.
- Earw0rm 1y agoThey're a battle-tested technology but, like fossil fuels or pesticides, come at a price. We should aim to take a balanced, complete and holistic view of what that price has looked like, and looks like today. In general terms it optimises for the middle of various bell-curves, at considerable disbenefit for those towards the edges of the distribution. Essentially if you naturally conform to its proposed life-model, you'll broadly have a fairly good time, and if you don't, you won't. It's OK to recognise the pros and the cons as part of the assessment, in a quest for a more fulfilling and long-term-sustainable model for society and human existence. I'm not sure many have the open-mindedness and maturity to participate, though.
- Muromec 1y ago>More people would benefit from getting married and having kids - a lot of (Judeo-Christian) religion’s cultural ideas were good even if its empirical claims are wrong. That's a good way to find yourself with a job you hate by the way.
- rexpop 1y agoYeah, this guy's Christian cultural ideas include a dependence on misogynistic domestic slavery.
- Muromec 1y agoso the job you hate and a wife that hates you? now that's how you do a boomer humor I guess.
- triceratops 1y agoIf having a partner and kids means mandatory "misogynistic domestic slavery" then every human society is irredeemably evil.
- homefree 1y agoAnyone saying “misogynistic domestic slavery” has bought into a much dumber political religion, maybe without even realizing it.
- homefree 1y agoI don’t know why I spend time on HN anymore - it used to be a place to learn things and interact with interesting people. Now it’s just a crappy subreddit. The interesting people mostly fled to private channels (or X) long ago. With PG’s retarded “Free Palestine” arch, it’s probably best to just leave.
- rexpop 1y agoI worked very hard to interrogate and challenge the foundations of the white-supremacist patriarchal "political religion" (do you not know the word "ideology?") into which I was born. This transition was deliberate, and conscious. I can't imagine how I could have endured all of the social risks and personal discomfort "without even realizing it." But, more to the point: have you never heard of The Feminine Mystique? Have you never heard of The Vindication of the Rights of Women? It's an undeniable fact that female spouses have endured centuries of unpaid labor and domestic violence—including legalized rape. This is a serious issue, and it's not "much dumber" to oppose. Frankly, you have to be pretty stupid to think that we're better off through gendered subjugation.
- rexpop 1y ago[flagged]
- red_rech 1y ago[dead]