Ask HN: Which books have made you introspect?
Hi all,
Nearly an year ago, I faced a life-shattering crisis that completely wrecked my world view. Since then I have rebuilt up from scratch, and I have found that a lot of the things that I used to believe were false. Books such as Man's Search for Meaning have been very pivotal in that regard. What books could you recommend for the same?
388 comments
[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 234 ms ] threadFear - Thich Nhat Hanh
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Fear-Essential-Wisdom-Getting-Throu...
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0040JHNQG/
Also, I am working on a page on A Philosophy of Loneliness (https://www.popmatters.com/a-philosophy-of-loneliness-by-lar...) and finally I would suggest "Trust the Process" (https://www.shambhala.com/trust-the-process-1598.html)
All these somehow helped me in dealing with personal issues and/or provide some adjustment to my views.
Finally, maybe this one might help, too https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/89200.Pragmatics_of_Huma... (I read it in Italian and many years ago, the current edition is probably updated).
For me personally however I think Dostoyevsky's Crime and Punishment more or less informed my world-view from a very young age and continues to do so.
I picked up Crime and Punishment a few years ago, but had to put it down, due to both foreseeable and unforeseeable circumstances. How would you introduce it if you were to recommend it to someone?
https://antilogicalism.files.wordpress.com/2017/07/wisdom-of...
Watch some of his youtube videos as well - they gave me strength to endure through some tough times.
https://www.amazon.com/Zen-Mind-Beginners-Informal-Meditatio...
https://terebess.hu/english/AlanWatts-On%20The%20Taboo%20Aga...
In the 20th anniversary edition I have, the author spends the full preface admitting as much by explaining that people who've reviewed the book don't seem to understand its message:
“Needless to say, this widespread confusion has been quite frustrating to me over the years, since I felt sure I had spelled out my aims over and over in the text itself. Clearly, however, I didn't do it sufficiently often, or sufficiently clearly.”
He then attempts to outline the principle thesis:
“…GEB is a very personal attempt to say how it is that animate beings can come out of inanimate matter.”
“Very personal” is right — the book reads like a fever dream of tangential scribbled notes compiled into an ~800 page tome, only loosely coupled to the notion of how animate things come to be.
It is still interesting and brilliant and challenging and worth skimming if not reading in its entirety, but do not expect it to be instantly enlightening or full of take-aways.
The great thing about GEB is that Hofstadter basically assumes no prior knowledge from the beginning of the book - he just asks that you pay close attention and exercise your analytical mind. You'll then soon start to notice the patterns, jokes and puzzles in the writing, and how they all relate very closely to the ideas presented in the book.
Note: the book isn't necessarily out to prove anything, and if you're looking for a massive 'aha!' moment towards the end of the book, you'll probably be disappointed. It's just an incredible journey down the recursive rabbit-hole that ties together mathematics, formal logic, linguistics, biology, computer science and loads more all through the extremely deliberate use of language throughout.
It still blows my mind, but requires a good amount of concentration, re-reading and note-taking - which seems fair enough as I can't even imagine how long it took Hofstadter to write!
I only mention this because it hurts to see people waste weeks of their lives trying to appreciate something under duress (be it literature, music, art) or under the belief that the fault is with them rather than simply accepting their lack of any natural affinity for the thing they are studying.
Sometimes it is worth working to appreciate things that are alien to you to stretch the mind, but other times it's perfectly fine to accept that a cultural artefact just might not be for you; that there is nothing wrong with the way you have been consuming it. It frees you to move on and find something new.
Personally I found it very informative and interesting - though not ‘enlightening’. I did stop reading it for a while and found it difficult to pick up the thread again though.
This book gave me the courage to take responsibility in my life and start working towards things which are important for myself. As the author once said, you don't get not to pay a price, you only get what price to pay.
It actually gave me the courage to leave Berlin and go back to my country(Romania) which even though is more poor and low in quality of public services, my friends and family are there and they are a priority for me right now.
It also thought me to make small changes in my every day life even though is something as small as cleaning my room. And these small changes give me enough confidence to pursue bigger ones like quitting smoking for good.
Peterson also gave a presentation about his book for those who are interested https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-5RCmu-HuTg
He's dedicated his life in trying to explain why the atrocities of the 20th century happened and how they can be prevented. I believe he sees our rejection of religion as part of the problem but he understands that the way religion has been presented in modern times (last few centuries) is completely alienating given the rise of science. So he uses science to attempt to give a new meaning to the Judeo-Christian underpinnings of western society. I'd say the biggest precursors to his work are Darwin and Carl Jung.
Looking at what he published it seems he dedicated most of his life to researching the effects of alcoholism.
Also would you mind expanding on how he uses science to give new meaning to the Judeo-Christian underpinnings of Western society?
The first lecture should give you a good idea, but if you're looking for discussion, I'd be willing to have it but we'd be here for hours. We'd have to get into philosophy and define terms like "science", "God", "society", etc. We'd then have to explore psychology and models of consciousness, like Jungian archetypes and Freud's subconscious. We could also cover biology and how some substances trigger spiritual experiences that have positive life-changing effects. All the while, we could relate these discussions to the stories of the Bible or chapters of the Tao Te Ching and why they are both at the very least profound and contagious.
I don't think you have to fully understand or agree with him. In large, I don't. Your paragraph, though, is a gross deliberate misunderstanding of his view. :(
Again, I don't necessarily agree. In large, I think he is familiar with a different nihilism than I am. I grant, however, that he probably knows the topics better than I. I certainly plan to dive deeper on it. In large because I disagree.
I might be wrong but it doesn't sound like you've really read his material beyond 12 Rules for Life. It doesn't necessitate believing in something that does not exist but it will at least leave you with a deep respect for your subconscious and for the collective subconscious. That's enough to understand the value of religious stories. Once you're there, belief in God is your own business... it's not even clear if he believes in God and I'd say it's barely relevant.
You might try reading the book Sapiens by Noah Yuval Harari. Among other things, it shows how intersubjective realities such as human rights, religion, and money make civilization work, whether or not the objects of those stories 'exist'.
In his view, the value of the Bible is not as a pre-scientific historical account of the world. Instead, it's a survival guide for generations of people (who had no concept of science anyway) told in story form.
When I look at his religious metaphors in that light, they seem relevant and meaningful in the context of his 12 Rules.
I think we stand to learn quite a bit from reading the Christian bible, but I didn't walk away feeling like anyone should emulate the behavior on display.
I think he would be delighted if he got more people to go to the sources. I could, of course, be wrong.
I did enjoy his reading of his book. And I will admit that I found some of the ideas more compelling than I would have thought seeing them on paper. In particular, the religious overtones are somewhat offputting to me, on paper. Will see how I feel about them after a few day's reflection.
To the point of this post, however. If he his being pushed as a savior of some sort, I agree that is misguided. However, based on their merits, many of the arguments were compelling and I'm interested to see where they can be taken.
So, to that end, I'm not sure what the criticism "he's just cashing in" has to do offer here. What, exactly, are you accusing him of? Successfully presenting his arguments? Is that really such a bad thing?
Oddly, he just seems like an author, to me. If he is a figurehead, I missed that there was a movement. Is there more subtext to this? I assumed he just had a good seller. Oddly, many people can and do lay claim to that honor. It neither diminishes nor distinguishes it.
I have not reformulated my understanding of the rules. Definitely plan to.
Regardless, I second all you put here. Good luck on your decisions!
IMO The next closest thing - in terms of creating introspection - is a psychedelic / psychotropic experience with accompanying ego-death [1].
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ego_death
I am interested to know, how often when you face a situation, you stop and think, oh I read this and that in a book, I should act this way instead of my natural intuition to do the other way.
Given the limited experience with life I have and the fact that I haven't read any of the self-help books, I am willing to change my perspective regarding this. Will give a shot to '12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos.'
[0] => "It’s Okay to “Forget” What You Read" https://medium.com/the-polymath-project/its-okay-to-forget-w...
This of course won't work.
But reading a book, finding a usefull tool in it, and practicing it until it become a part of your skills is possible.
The way to change behavior is to actually change something and consistently practice that change.
It requires a great deal of commitment. Progress is generally slow. Set backs happen.
But if you actually change something and make it a diligent practice eventually it will be part of who you are.
There are a huge amount of people that read/share/talk about feel good life change quotes/books/etc that are doing nothing more than playing psychological tricks on themselves while avoiding the hard discouragingly long process that is required to make actual changes.
I wouldn't classify 12 Rules of life as a typical 'self-help' book because Peterson is not a self-proclaimed self-help guru without any substance.
If you check his career section on Wikipedia you'll find out that "Peterson's areas of study and research are in the fields of psychopharmacology, abnormal, neuro, clinical, personality, social, industrial and organizational, religious, ideological, political, and creativity psychology. Peterson has authored or co-authored more than a hundred academic papers. Peterson has over 20 years of clinical practice, seeing 20 people a week, but in 2017, he decided to put the practice on hold because of new projects."
And he doesn't try to sell you the idea that life is beautiful and amazing, he actually agrees that life is tragic and brutal.
> I always have a feeling that you just cannot sum up all the things to be "happy" or "content" or whatever in one book
I agree to that. You cannot sum up all the things which make you happy or more content, but you can follow principles which increase the probability of success in what you want to do, such as "be a bit better tomorrow in some minor way"[1]
> I am interested to know, how often when you face a situation, you stop and think, oh I read this and that in a book, I should act this way instead of my natural intuition to do the other way.
Not every time, but more often than before reading that book. For example, I've read Feeling Good: The new mood therapy(another great book with a self-helpish title) and after reading that book I really started to put in practice some exercises in that book which by now they became almost automatic. For so much time I was a victim of cognitive distortions and now I finally found a way to beat them. And not only me. [3]
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cz2tYGt0_As
[2] https://www.amazon.com/Feeling-Good-New-Mood-Therapy/dp/0380...
[3] https://blog.ncase.me/nicky-reads-feeling-good/
1. the whole nature is based on preying on the weak, and that's mandatory for survival; right now some animal "kid" is being eaten alive by some predator without "empathy" of any kind
2. at this very moment some person that might be relatable to you in some special way (like a perfect fit for a friend or partner) is having a really bad day, like dying-bad
3. the amount of sophistication in cheating each other might be one of the main factors in developing many forms of language, behavior or even science
4. health statistics aren't about others; they are all about me and you, we all are going to end up in one category or the other; often we have no say in it as our destruction is already programmed inside us
5. whatever you worked on hard all your life can be gone from one moment to another; earthquake, volcanic eruption, storm or even divorce can strike any time
6. even if you dedicate your life to something amazing, become rich, respected, adored or die a heroic death before you turn a villain, at best you will be a short, quite pointless remark in the history notes; however most likely you will be as important as a dust speck
7. excitement of novelty wears off quickly if you become a hedonist; going ascetic to lowest lows so that you can reach highest highs again will become pointless at some point as well and nothing will move you anymore
8. even if you believe in afterlife, vast majority of religions will tell you that almost everyone ends up in some sort of hell or won't make it to the "next stage of game"
We choose to be unhappy. By fixating on our wants, our worries, our anxieties, or desires, by refusing to be happy unless everything is exactly what and how we want, we don't let our body and our mind be. I think it's only when we let go of our destructive thoughts, when we let go of what has been and what will be, and just live in the present, in the moment, that we can experience a real state of happiness.
It sounds esoteric and counter-intuitive, I know. But just consider the thought. I personally find this to be more and more true the older I get.
Assuming you won the birth lottery (no terminal illness, overall healthy, work in tech given you're on HN), then you are in the top echelon of society and success.
There are many things to be happy about e.g. volunteering to give back, settling down with a significant other, starting a family (or not), traveling the world, cooking, fixing cars, shooting guns, etc. While you partake in these activities (hobbies?) you can get lost in them and for brief moment, nothing else in the world matters i.e. your list. This gives you something to look forward to and a routine away from existential ideation.
Humans are social creatures and we've evolved this way. Generally speaking the majority of us derive happiness from the ones we care about in this weird thing we call life. Thanks for sharing the list!
In my view, searching for happiness is a bit pointless in a world where everything is temporary and brutal in many ways. But there are things which you know you can avoid to not make your life a living hell(Peterson's words) such as doing excessive drugs and alcohol. As Charlie Munger used to say once is much easier to try to not be stupid than trying to be smart. I totally agree with that. After avoiding things which will make you miserable for sure, it all comes down to probability: it's still probable that life will f*ck you up in a grand way no matter how many good things you did. Just hope for the best and be very grateful if you're life is not a living hell now. Meaning is very important. Life itself is meaningless but we get to decide what it will mean in the end. When I decided to leave a good career to move back to a poor country because I wanted to be close to my family I gave a meaning to my life, which is "family is important to me and I will prioritize it no matter what".
Lastly, Peterson book is not about searching for happiness, is just a readme manual about dealing with chaos. Some ideas are not necessarily mind blowing, one can find good tips in stoicism, buddhism or whatever religion or philosophy. But his book can be a start.
IMO any book can be categorized as "self-help" - most business books I read, psychology books, biographies, etc, I read to enjoy, and the best ones (the ones I tend to enjoy the most and remember) are those that I'm changed by (ie. improved) in some way.
People get too caught up in labeling things instead of trying it out and seeing it works for you. You can read (for example) a celebrity gossip magazine and finish with great personal insights - the probability is just low - but if you do, awesome! Same goes with "self-help" books.
I also think it's highly dependent on timing. A book one year may have no meaning to you in one moment but be life changing in a future moment. It's the difference between reading things applicable to your situation now vs future need - the former approach is generally much better.
- It sorely needed an editor. Echoing other's sentiments, it could have been < 1/3 of its length. The writing style was rambling, overly emphatic, and arguments were often not coherent.
- It used a gratuitous amount of Bible quotes, which
I got suckered into to buying the book because the author is a compelling public speaker. I enjoy his lectures.In retrospect, though, part of what makes him a compelling public speaker are his highly emotional arguments, which don't seem to be founded on great reasoning, and therefore make for a bad book, since we have more time to be critical about arguments when reading.
https://www.amazon.com/Meditations-Thrift-Editions-Marcus-Au...
https://www.amazon.com/Senecas-Letters-Stoic-Thrift-Editions...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stoicism
No, it's not. Stoicism has much more depth and the Stoics would not agree with Peterson on many things. Stoicism also doesn't need to be updated.
Adam Sandler has earned people more money from movies than almost anyone. That doesn't mean Anthony Hopkins needed an update.
I originally thought his critique of postmodernism/continental philosophy and stuff was interesting, reminiscent of chomsky
His thesis on alcoholism is interesting, clearly he's atleast a decent psychologist. Reminds me of my aunt, psychologist at U. of Missouri, really interested in carl jung and religion.
IQ testing and personality tests always seemed broken to me. What is IQ measuring? Personality tests seem like arbitary categories. All of this is based on frequentist statistics (factor analysis), wonder if there's a bayesian perspective but I have no idea what i'm talking about honestly, especially compared to Peterson.
I can't stand his economic views, they're similar to Joe Rogan's "classical liberal"/market fundamentalist views. I like Kevin Carson's word: vulgar libertarianism:
"Vulgar libertarian apologists for capitalism use the term 'free market' in an equivocal sense: they seem to have trouble remembering, from one moment to the next, whether they’re defending actually existing capitalism or free market principles. So we get [a] standard boilerplate article… arguing that the rich can’t get rich at the expense of the poor, because 'that’s not how the free market works'— implicitly assuming that this is a free market. When prodded, they’ll grudgingly admit that the present system is not a free market, and that it includes a lot of state intervention on behalf of the rich. But as soon as they think they can get away with it, they go right back to defending the wealth of existing corporations on the basis of 'free market principles.'"
1. Do you regularly apply some of these rules in your life?
2. What arguments were not logical in your view?
"Jordan Peterson's popularity is the sign of a deeply impoverished political and intellectual landscape"
[1] https://www.currentaffairs.org/2018/03/the-intellectual-we-d...
You can figure out for yourself, watch this debate and tell me if Peterson is the type of person described in the article.
https://youtu.be/FmH7JUeVQb8
I promise I'll read your full article beyond the first paragraph :)
Things are busy at work today, but I'll check it out when I have some time. If you could point me to a shorter clip within the almost 2 hours video, I will be more likely to look at it.
Quite fascinating discussion, like watching a match of intellectual boxing :)
> Jordan Peterson appears very profound and has convinced many people to take him seriously. Yet he has almost nothing of value to say.
The irony of this is that the author himself has nothing of real value to say. (See, I said it so it must be true)
But then I realized much of what he is saying is true - and it personally hits my ego in such a way that the reaction is pretty much revulsion/dismissal.
Can it be written more concisely? Probably. But he is an academic afterall...
FWIW: If you enjoy his lecture style / cadence - try his Audiobook version. I would likely have a tough time with reading his book - but the audiobook format delivers like his youtube lectures, which IMO are very well done.
Peterson's thesis is something like the following: that the early biblical stories constitute a kind of dominant eigenvector of human cognition and experience, what you get when you iteratively retell a story over a hundred generations.
To dismiss this as anecdotes or fiction is very much to miss the point of what Peterson is trying to do.
I am certainly pro-Bible, but in the terms you're putting it here it doesn't seem especially compelling.
So like every self help book ever?
No wonder people are getting insights out of the book. It is practically impossible not to!
Mostly the bits about how our society is mostly built on collective fictions.
2. Siddhartha, by Herman Hesse
I remember being very moved reading this, but I can't quite remember why.
Looks like it's time to re-read it.
I couldn't follow him in all his conclusions, namely the hunter gatherer worship, that things were in a sense better for them.
But it's probably in the top 3 books I've ever read, best in the last 5 years.
I think it's the unfolding of someone who sought knowledge and enlightenment throughout his life and the feeling of impotence he felt when sharing knowledge that can only be transmitted/obtained through life experiences.
You have to live life in order to be enlighted. He always "knew it" in reality, but he didn't have the life experience to really know it.
Elders knowledge won't do it - you can't live/experience life through others experiences/knowledge.
After some age, I think we tend to relate to this because we recall people trying to pass knowledge to us and it never clicked until we lived such events. After that, everything gets a new dimension.
It has really changed the way I see life and face adversity.
It is very short and easy to read, despite being quite old, and contains actual down to earth wisdom about life
It somehow goes quite well with the teachings of Frankl, if you replace "God" by meaning.
> With regard to whatever objects either delight the mind or contribute to use or are tenderly beloved, remind yourself of what nature they are, beginning with the merest trifles: if you have a favorite cup, that it is but a cup of which you are fond of—for thus, if it is broken, you can bear it; if you embrace your child or your wife, that you embrace a mortal—and thus, if either of them dies, you can bear it.
Some of the advice is sublime, like this. (And some isn't, but it's a book worth reading.)
Marcus Aurelius's Meditations reads like the daily thoughts of someone attempting to live according to Epictetus's handbook. (Obviously, they're both Stoic works, but they make a better pairing than that alone would make you expect.)
Alzheimer's victims know what they lost, until rather late in the disease. It's part of what makes it a hell.
Act Four, A physicist with dementia details the process of understanding an analog clock.
So, I did this Myer Brigg online test at 16personalities.com
I red the description of my personality and it was like reading in my head.
I bought the longer version and it really helped me better understand myself.
Hope it can help you too.
ENTP
I, too, took a lot of personality tests 4-5 years ago. Briefly got a bit obsessed with them, particularly MBTI (Meyers-Briggs). The problem with these tests is that they play on the archetypes that we would like to be. Also, the minutia of being a living person can not be captured by a system with so few inputs.
Anyhow, I still think it was very helpful, because it got me started on a track. Exploring intuition vs. sensing, thinking vs. feeling got me thinking about who I was, and how I respond to things. I wouldn't have been as rigorous was it not for the fact that I constantly thought about what my 4-letter combination was. I've probably thought I was 8 of them during my studies. Always an intuitive, though.
What I think is particularly bad with these tests are the way they highlight the personality's shortcomings or dificulties. They are portrayed as the opposites to the good parts of the personality, that you already resonate with. Since you resonate so much with the good parts, you can sort of logically repulse the shortcomings as "that's just the way I am", and then sort of brush it off. At least I found it to be the case.
Anyhow, I recommend the MBTI still, since it is what got me started on this track, and I've never been the same after spending the past 5 years introspecting.
For example, I’m a solid, hardcore ENTJ at work but a sensitive-flower INFP at home — it’s hard to get much more diametrically opposed than that.
IMO the “intuitive/sensing” dimension is the only one that is close to “innate” since it just describes how you make inferences and decisions. The rest change based on context.
It’s almost better to look at the “16 personalities” as the different mindsets people can come from. MB tests are useful, but take them with a grain of salt. It’s not some innate thing that you can’t change.
While the wikipedia page of MBT succeeds in hiding the critique to the end it's luckily there [1]. 'Psychometric specialist Robert Hogan wrote: "Most personality psychologists regard the MBTI as little more than an elaborate Chinese fortune cookie"'
Katherine Briggs and Isabel Meyers (a mother and daughter) should be considered as literary authors at most rather than psychologists [2][3]. Katherine apparently had a lot of ideas about personalities in general and she wrote them down. But it's not like she did massive field work or performed anything that could be recognized as credible research.
Luckily some enterprising consultants recognized her work was easy to sell. The rest is marketing...
People find comfort in lot of things. I don't mind people turning to charlatans like horoscope readers if they know what they are getting into.
MBT is entertaining fiction that is marketed by profiteering consultants as an actual psychometric tool. Fiction can be valuable in understanding the world but it is not a scientific instrument. The fact that it is marketed as such makes it very distasteful.
The only well respected psychometric model that has not failed in one way or another that I'm aware of is the five-factor model [0].
The main problem with MBT is when people think they can use it in some structured manner. The marketing around is so solid it succeeds in fooling some people into actually employing MBT consultants. People in actual workplaces have suggested forming teams based on a balancing made through MBT analyzes.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Five_personality_traits
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Myers%E2%80%93Briggs_Type_Indi...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Katharine_Cook_Briggs
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isabel_Briggs_Myers
But that's not really enough to have a media empire and series of books, so the book is larded with all kinds of ridiculous claims, including risible Biblical exegesis, an attribution of various historical atrocities live Kristallnacht to a failure to like In the Now, an extended discourse about how living In the Now can make menstruation a rapturous experience rather than a painful one, and obviously bogus claims about how living In the Now will actually cause the molecules of your body to spread out and make your body less dense.
I think these things, when moving beyond basic limbic system hacking like deep breathing, are highly personal, so YMMV.
I agree it has the tepid undertones you imply, but did not devalue the book since the one tool it provided me with has served me so well.
The point with these therapeutic visualizations is to try how they work, personally, as an actual tool to solve a concrete dilemma. As such it does not matter how useless they sound in written form. Human mind has these psychlogical switches that just seem to work in specific situations. For example of a pathological "switch", the gambler is lured by an unpredictable sequence of loss and reward. Which to most people sound extremely silly, until they try it out themselves, and are totally hooked. Therapeutic switches can seem to have equal power to deal with ones emotions and pain.
For me, visualizing my pain as a separate entity that fed from my suffering allowed me to conceptualize my internal pain in a way in which I could observe and deal with it better.
It's like how some yogis speak of energy flows and whatnot - which is completely inconsequential hogwash and do not matter just as long as the movement and breathing techniques do their very physical work on the human body.
The problem with presenting functional techniques as deeply linked with an esoteric philosophy, a religious movement or (in Tolle's case) a guru is that the technique is often used as a token hook just to lure the person to follow the movement or philosophy.
In 2001 I came down with a heart condition. I was 42, had two young kids, a good job, and basically did not know what to do. Spent a lot of nights up at 2 am. I read through the Aubrey-Maturin series https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aubrey%E2%80%93Maturin_series. On their face, they form an adventure series of historical novels (they fit into a category that Great Britian has, naval fiction). But it seemed to me then and still seems to me now that they are literature, an extended meditation on what it means to be a man.
In any event, they fitted my circumstances. I learned a great deal. They helped me. (I advise starting with the second one, Post Captain.)
But I don't think a person would get much sense of the books from the movie, just as a person would not get all that much sense of an Austen from a hollywood version. (BTW, that's why I suggest the second book in the series for a first try. It is much more like the rest of the series than the first book, in my opinion.)