An American life values money over ease of living though, as rightly pointed out in the article. But it's definitely not something to say to one who will view it unfavourably.
Putting people under constant adversity does not make them do better: Only happens if that adversity teaches them something.
I read a nice explanation on LW. Imagine you need goods X and Y to live well. And imagine that in the ancestral environment, X usually came with Y. So evolution could get away with giving you the drive for X, but no drive for Y (though lack of Y would still make you suffer).
Now switch to modernity, where goods can be obtained more independently. For example, you can get tasty food (X) without some necessary nutrient (Y). So you end up suffering for lack of Y, but your drive is only for X. Moreover, as the market tries to provide X cheaply, it has an incentive to drop Y. I don't know how many such Y's we're missing now, but probably a lot.
Huh, that's interesting. The first example that popped into my mind was hunting. I'd imagine there's a lot to the experience; from tracking & pursuing, to the kill & paying respect to the life spent to sustain oneself, that one misses out on from picking out meat from the grocery store.
Agriculture. We got calories (X) from grain without whatever Y was in other plants and animals. Perhaps that's why the keto diet and others like it are helping so many people with a variety of problems. Regardless of what we eat today, there is little physical effort (another Y) required to obtain it, just a credit card.
There's other variations too. Say you need some X and a lot of Y. But X is rare and Y is plentiful. Evolution leads you to an insatiable drive for X but not for Y. Then, suddenly mankind figures out how to cheaply produce X, e.g. salt and sugar.
Another- suppose food supplies are variable and insecure. The optimal amount of muscle & bone is exactly what you need and no more, and the optimal behavior is to be as active as required and no more. Viola, you get humans, one of few species whose bodies require ongoing training to stay fit & healthy, while paradoxically being quite lazy.
It’s a nice piece on breaking out of the conditioning of society and gratefully embracing our time on earth by living fully and taking risks.
Some nice quotes from wise people:
> But as Alan Watts once reminded us, “This is the real secret of life — to be completely engaged with what you are doing in the here and now. And instead of calling it work, realize it is play.”
> In the words of Henry Miller, “the aim of life is to live, and to live means to be aware, joyously, drunkenly, serenely, divinely aware.”
> “If you’re going to try, go all the way.
There is no other feeling like that.
You will be alone with the gods, and the nights will flame with fire.
DO IT. DO IT. DO IT. All the way
You will ride life straight to perfect laughter.
It’s the only good fight there is.” - Charles Bukowski
I spent the first part of my life pursuing what was interesting and engaging to me for its own sake, not putting much effort into status signaling or a cultural mask. All I got was crushing loneliness and a severe social skills deficit. 0/10 do not recommend.
I spent the first part of my life pursuing an impeccably planned career trajectory, setting myself up with all the markers of status and culture that my peers and family expected, discarding the things I loved because they did not contribute back to that.
All I got was crushing existential depression and a severe social skills deficit. 0/10 do not recommend.
I realize this is a glib comment, please don't take it as an insult, just the tongue-in-cheek response of someone who felt a surprisingly mirrored experience of yours.
In fewer words, I'm not sure anecdata is not going to help in this case, but if someone is feeling "something missing" in their life, some of the avenues of questioning and introspection presented in the article may be useful.
I guess the lesson is that you need to find a middle way which is really hard. There is a lot of clarity in extremes but the middle way is pretty fuzzy. Looking back at my own life I would really love being able to try again. It took me decades to find a path that works for me. Some people have that knowledge when they are young but most people need a lot of time and learning to know what they need. Some people never find out
It seems like the common factor is isolation and loneliness. I don't see why chasing either status or what you love has to necessarily entail isolating yourself from other people and letting social skills deteriorate. Either path could be pursued with others, and indeed would probably be helped by having friends and allies along the way.
The problem is obscure preferences. Maybe 30% of the time there's someone in my world who shares them, and maybe 10% of the time we're friends. Having a community usually requires openness to activities that would not have been my first choice, or my tenth. I never used to make that trade. It's worth it, though.
It seems like the common factor is isolation and loneliness.
Traditionally it was easy to be part of a community, because humans structured society that way, because instinctively that’s important: we are mammals after all. But those traditional communities have all been eroded for various reasons. So people are lonely and desperate and aren’t clear why: after all your parents never had to “do” anything, their community was “just there”.
As someone w silly and weird and boring interests... If the things that interest you are interesting to NO ONE... you might have (subconsciously or otherwise) picked something intentionally to avoid human contact.
Hell, tech is boring to other people. How many of us are just in the position where our sole tech hobby happened to be lucrative on the job market, so now we've just doubled down on our boring antisocial single-dimensionality?
Took me quite a while to cultivate interests outside of tech, and pretty much all of them move me closer to other people where tech did not.
For example, there are definitely apartment parties with more wine than tequilla and more talking than dancing. Even in my age bracket. I’ve been to a few. But these kinds of social circles are inherently more difficult to identify and break into. It’s a hell of a lot easier to find the group headed to a nightclub.
People forget that the harder is to do something the higher the satisfaction when you do it right. Life is a journey not a destination, death is the destination of life.
The modern life is horrible to mental health articles that ignore alcoholism and violence and social problems of the past are always suspect.
Yes, some kids are on psychiatric drugs that should not and we don't have tolerance for kids that don't do well in early academic. But we also don't beat the shit oit of them when they misbehave, so it is not all just bad.
I had troubles understanding the article. The very first point is:
Let Go
Americans are among the most stressed people in the world. Eighty-five percent of workers worldwide....
So, how can you have a comfortable life and have a job that you hate?
I had an incredibly comfortable life working at Google while hating my job. I was making excessive amounts of money, they provided food, job was incredibly relaxed, pretty much there were no worries in life.
On the other hand, I felt like I was going insane because I couldn't stand it. I was working on a web application. I'm a security engineer with a passion for low level code. Web work and the Google code bureaucracy (read: mature software development practices) were so frustratingly dull.
That is how your life can be comfortable while having a job that you hate. I now work part time remotely (not for Google). I go on trips as often as I can. I'm working on work that I'm engaged by. I am making less money, but life is tolerable.
>Carl Jung, one of the most prolific psychotherapists of the 20th century, remarked that about a third of his cases were suffering from “no clinically definable neurosis, but from the senselessness and emptiness of their lives. This can be defined as the general neurosis of our times.”
I don't agree with his methods, but the Unabomber was a brilliant mathematician (and, incidentally, a victim of the MK Ultra experiments) and wrote on this subject in his manifesto. He observed that our modern lives are far removed from the hunting/gathering of our ancestors. We evolved to seek frequent small stimuli - hunting for mushrooms, picking fruit, occasionally chasing down an animal - and the rewards tended to be immediate and tangible. Now most humans spend all day working in one specialization with intangible rewards that come in the form of payment every few weeks. It's much harder for most humans to find natural meaning in these tasks, and they don't typically feel critical to survival because, well, we really are quite comfortable most of the time!
The whole "what doesn't kill you makes you stronger" meme is meaningless. Challenging one self to get pain and pretend you will feel better after is a pointless way to live life.
There is little point in climbing mount Everest. It's good for your health to practice physical activity and to occupy your mind and time. But this constant idea that we have to challenge ourselves, while we can't manage to fight inequality or climate change, shows that we're deluded.
Climate change will be the new equalizer. The right to emit co2 will be the new currency.
Not in the us it doesn’t. The two cap and trade programs in the us do little to stop someone at the individual level from needlessly emitting - there is no economic signal to stop. Even some large emitters aren’t subject to any economic signals in rggi, and California has an odd habit of handing out allowances. In a more perfect world, you would be correct.
Challenging oneself gives people the strength to challenge the world.
I'd rather have people who go to the gym several times a week be the one's responsible for combating climate change than people who pursue meaningless pleasure (drug use, pornography) several times a week.
The book Radical Markets has very innovative ideas in combating inequality using market strategies.
We are deluded if we don’t acknowledge Inequality is one of the biggest challenges facing us that we have to solve.
I guess this a nature fallacy? Civilization is built by humans. I don't see why human behavior could not change how civilization works. Freedom of speech is an important evolution that goes against human nature. I don't see why human instincts of domination would always prevail.
Also welfare already exists in many countries including the US, so it's an accepted thing. It needs to be accepted without shame or arguments that it's a socialist measure.
even if you have very very generous welfare (and I agree that this should exist) - it would not ever fix the inequality of outcome.
I just don't see how those who can perform literally 10x more productively than others will settle for less than an absolute top prize, and with technology being such a great amplifier - winner take all dynamics seems to be so inherent - I am not even sure what can be done?
The issue is that civilizations have also been destroyed by humans.
Its not all humans but a minority of greedy sociopathic humans make it difficult to impossible to do anything meaningful towards societal advancement and tend to ruin any sort of collectively equal society.
I hope I'm wrong but that has been my observations so far at micro to macro levels.
> Challenging one self to get pain and pretend you will feel better after is a pointless way to live life.
I don't think he meant that. He wrote: "This world breaks us all". Life is full of suffering by design. It's not going to be a sugary Hollywood movie - you will suffer. Use this experience to grow.
I feel very much the same way. Working in an office is incredibly dull, society feels incredibly dull.
I romanticise primitive life, and people often rebut that you would die at 30. I would be ok with that though, trading some amount of life expectancy for increased excitement, purpose, and struggle. I do this in some ways through moderately dangerous activities, off roading (moto and Jeep) and snowboarding.
I do not think the incredibly comfortable and coddled bay area corporate life is for me. It is another matter to figure out what is, and what will be sustainable.
The premise that you'd drop dead on your 30th birthday is ... largely false.
Infant and childhood mortality was increadibly higher, though this also may have improved overall fitness through selection pressures. Once adulthood was attained, life expectency was ... at the very least modestly comparable to modern experiences, and long-lived individuals were not uncommon throughout history.
Ironically, the development of cities and trade (and their contingent roles in providing for incubation and transmission of disease) added substantially to mortality.
Even in (the relatively disease-ridden) England and Wales of the mid-19th century, as a 20 year old, you'd be likely to live to about 60, by 30, nearly 65, and at 50, you'd likely ive to see 70.
Beyond disease, other causes were accidents, injuries (infection being a real possibility), famine, war, and violence. Though most of those causes tended to be episodic. See:
Keep in mind that without cities and trade, few infectious diseases could spread much beyond a localised tribe. Kyle Harper's The Fate of Rome makes a strong argument that the plagues and pestilences which afflicted the empire co-evolved with it.
The more comfortable life gets, the more knowledge people will receive. The more time they have, the more they think. If you combine these two, it's inevitable to start asking questions about your own existence. Because there are no logical answers to that, people retreat.
That's why you have so many depressed people. They might not know it though.
To move on, we, as society, will need to grow and change. When there's no need to fight for everyday survival - shelter, warmth, water, food- , we'll be free for the first time in the history of our species. That's when it gets interesting.
Things that helped me the most: cardio, diet. It's hard to escape biology and I don't know who said it (probably hardmaru retweet) but the brain is a motion co-processor so general movement goes a long way towards maintaining a healthy mind. It won't fix all your problems but it costs nothing other than some willpower and a trail you like in your local neighborhood.
This is why I run ultra marathons, often in the mountains in incredibly bad weather. Well I should rephrase this, I run the first 20-40 miles, the rest is a hike, until the last ten of so miles which are a zombie shuffle. The thing is though, I spend hours just on my own (most of the time), with only my own wits to keep me going and entertained. I also get to side up real close to nature at it's rawest.
The answer to feeling disconnected and alienated from the world is not to disconnect further or to embrace the alienation. It's to call your parents and tell them you love them and ask about their week, to message your friends and ask when they're free next week, to learn the name of the cashier you always see at the supermarket, to volunteer to help fix whatever problems you worry about, and in general to build genuine connections with other people.
Investing money in experiences instead of goods is less important than investing time in others instead of isolated activities.
Hello, modern commercial advertising here. No, don't invest in people, invest in yourself, in fact we have the perfect product to sell you to do just that.
It is going to take a major change in modern lifestyles to force advertisers not to sell us lies. It seems every screen is selling is separation.
It is harder to blame others for my failings if I have total freedom and opportunity. This forces me to direct anger towards myself.
With imposed constraints I could at least make myself content with my situation as it is. This is probably why monastic life appeals to certain people.
It is much simpler than this. Humans are social animals, we need upto 1000 close family members. Not friends, not colleagues, not church members - relatives. They should be really close, like you should see them almost every day. If you don't you develop unhealthy relationships with people who really don't care about you much. And this means you are alone in this world and you must be stressed - something is going to happen and nobody is going to help. This is natural reaction to an abnormal situation.
I accept that I cannot fix it for myself, but I am trying to make it easier for my children. Hopefully, they will have enough resources to fix it for their children.
Small villages where everyone is a relative are very common in the recent past. In same places it is still the case.
Modern man has up to 1000 "relatives" for sure. It just happened to be people who don't care about that person or not even aware he or she exists (celebrities for instance)
I heard about Dunbar number from pop-science articles, and it feels right. Isn't Marines companies size based on this number? Must be true then.
> "most prosperous time in history"
That is no longer true, at least not here in the US. the most recent adult generation is now the 2nd or 3rd most prosperous generation and not by such a large margin as everyone thinks. The thinking goes that since GDP per capita is up and productivity is high, that we are much wealthier but it's not true.
Even GDP per capita adjusted for PPP can't adequately measure wealth because it uses the wrong basket of goods. if you have a million dollars and you can afford 1000 iphones but a house costs 5 million, then your not wealthy.
Wealth is being able to afford the basics of life: Shelter, food and water and by extension: transportation (because you need to get to a job), education (because employers now require it, regardless of whether its useful), and medical insurance because you don't want to loose your shelter.
Those 6 things are just as expensive as ever, if not more expensive than ever and the average person is less able to afford them, at least in the coastal cities. Calculate how many hours of work per week it takes to afford shelter. people work longer hours than ever, and nearly 50% of their salary now goes just towards shelter which equates to 20 to 25 hours a week of work just to afford shelter. Was that the case 500 years ago?
Yes we've come a long way from 500 years ago, undoubedly we can afford much more food with much greater variety than ever. we eat like kings, dress like kings. But, still live in shelters we can barely afford.
This is a really tricky position to take. How exactly do you measure the benefit of video chat with your grandkids every week, no matter how far away you live? Ubiquitous access to the internet?
This hit home for me when I watched the movie Brooklyn. A hundred years ago, when you emigrated from Europe to America, you often left elderly family behind. You knew there was a high probability you would never see or speak with these relatives again. Your parting could very well be a final goodbye. Technology has certainly closed that gap in a very positive way.
A hundred and twenty years ago, when you emigrated from Europe to America, you wrote back home and told them that steak was the most popular breakfast in America and that coffee was a luxury good in Europe because America was drinking most of the world's supply.
where do you plug in the laptop to make that video chat, when you have no house to stay in?
All our modern day luxuries are contingent upon access to basic shelter. That shelter is harder to get than it has been for a long time: at least in the coastal cities - where most of the jobs are.
And the richest person in the world 30 years ago couldn't afford a single iPhone because it didn't exist.
Shelter 500 years ago was barely better than a single-room, unheated hut. And you probably didn't even own it. You were a serf beholden to a feudal lord. (And that feudal lord didn't even have air conditioning)
And your food was whatever you could grow. In a good year maybe you made a little more than you needed. In a bad year you starved to death.
Even the bottom 1% in the US today have access to far better healthcare than the richest 1% 150 years ago. Antibiotics didn't even exist.
All 6 of the things you mentioned are far better off for almost anyone living today.
Also maybe wages have stagnanted in the US for this generation, but keep in mind the wealth improvements in the rest of the world have been staggering. Billions of people in India or China have been lifted out of poverty.
Focusing on the plight of college educated, middle class young adults seems pretty bizarre when compared with the far greater suffering of so many.
Sure strive to make things better... But if your worst trouble in life is having to work 20 hours a week to live in a comfortable apartment in the most expensive and exclusive city in the country... I'd say things were going pretty well for you.
And 500 years ago there was a benign and all powerful god insuring justice in the universe and history. Today the richest billionaire can't bring god back. He's gone. But at least you have an iPhone, and a lot of pills.
And 500 years ago there was a benign and all powerful god insuring justice in the universe and history. Today the richest billionaire can't bring god back. He's gone. But at least you have an iPhone, and a lot of pills.
having to live in the "most expensive and exclusive city in the country" is not a plus.
I'd take shelter over Iphone any day of the week.
Most of All 6 of the things I mentioned haven't improved much in the last 50 years (Granted Food & Water are already very very good).
Using the US as an example: Housing, Medical and Education are all far less affordable and accesible today. All rising far faster than inflation.
Even our ability to transport people effectively from home to work and back has not improved much. The cost is just as high as ever. Cars/public transportation aren't able to move any faster than they could in the 70s (safety reasons, etc) and as the housing situation worsens, people's commutes get longer and longer. Thus the time it takes to arrive at ones destination hasn't improved. And it doesn't help that we seem to be moving the homes and works further and further apart (due to the cost of housing).
The improvements we're making these days are increasingly minor. Compare a car from today vs one from 20 years ago. there's not a whole lot of difference in terms of impact to you as a human being. even safety improvements are becoming increasingly incremental as we fight for every last 1000th of a percent of improvement.
> Also maybe wages have stagnanted in the US for this generation, but keep in mind the wealth improvements in the rest of the world have been staggering. Billions of people in India or China have been lifted out of poverty.
So, your premise here seems to be that even though your own life may be going downhill as long as everyone else is doing better you shouldn't bother with exploring the reasons behind or even trying to fix your own backwards slide. Is that correct?
It's about keeping things in perspective. Sure explore the reasons or try to fix the backward slide, but maybe we should have a basic posture of gratitude. I suspect most of us have it pretty good in life.
Also the consequences for policies are not always easy to predict. As an example, making college free seems great for the children of the upper middle class. But what about the majority of people who don't go to college?
Every time I see someone bring up that others have it worse, everyone else has seen huge improvement, etc I've always gotten the impression that they are somehow trying to minimize the issues people are talking about as not being worthy of consideration because of the other. From your reply it seems like I may be missing something because I can't see how anyone's level of gratitude or acknowledgement/lack of acknowledgement re the improving status of others is relevant to the concerns they have regarding their own situation or productive in resolving said concerns. And thus, I usually conclude that the only reason it is brought up is to minimize whatever issue the original poster brings up.
But I'm really curious as to what the underlying reasoning here is. I can sort of understand when it comes down to obvious luxuries, so long as those luxuries are not in fact mandatory for being a productive member of the corresponding society (eg complaining about not being one of the 100 people to have one of those newfangled telephones vs complaining about not having a telephone in an age where having a telephone is the default expectation).
How would having a basic posture of gratitude aid someone in resolving issues they face that deal with what may be seen as luxuries in areas that are improving but which may be necessities in their own area? What relevance does the improvement of others have to resolving or mitigating the backwards slide of another? Is it not better for everyone to be experiencing improvement? Is there some fundamental mechanism that requires some areas backslide in order for others to improve?
I'm genuinely curious - you aren't the first person I have met that makes the assertions you have, and I have experienced the same sense of bafflement every time.
You've made huge miscalculations about human nature, and what we find fulfilling. Trivial conveniences and endless novelty don't make for a better quality of life, it just makes people fat, depressed, insecure and addicted to drugs.
Having a high quality of life has more to do with matters of identity. People will happily suffer through anything if they feel it's meaningful. Mountain climbers and professional athletes live physically punishing, high risk lifestyles, but they aren't miserable, because what they do is meaningful to them. Being at the top of Maslow's heirarchy of needs looks a lot like being at the bottom.
This should come as no surprise, we've been living in small groups of Hunter gatherers since before we were human. It's what we're designed for.
Limiting your analysis to “coastal cities” is where I think you go astray. I grew up in the DC suburbs, in Northern Virginia, in a 3BR, 1,100 square foot house that my parents bought for $175,000 ($350,000 adjusted for inflation). Today, that same house is almost $700,000. My parents couldn’t have afforded to buy it today. But it’s also a totally different kind of town. Back in the early 1990s, the town I grew up in was squarely middle class, devoid of trendy restaurants, high end retail, etc. There was no Northern VA tech scene, no Dulles Technology corridor. It might as well have been suburban Ohio. Outside Georgetown, DC itself was a sleepy commuter city full of chain restaurants that closed at 6 pm. There was no Hermès. The Michelin guide didn’t even review restaurants in the city back then. That’s all changed completely.
So I don’t feel like comparing the price of housing back then and today is fair. You’re buying a completely different product for your money. Today, a similar place to what Northern VA was like back then would be like Crofton, MD (not to far from where I live in Annapolis). You can easily buy a house like the one I grew up in for a price similar to what my parents paid in 1989 (adjusted for inflation obviously).
People can't arbitrarily choose where they want to live. People have to go where the jobs are, otherwise there's no money to pay for the house.
Having more unaffordable overly fancy michelin star restaraunts nearby doesn't reduce the hardship of not being able to afford shelter. And who needs high end retail when you can't even afford a place to live? How many gucci bags does it take to keep you happy when your stuff is out on the street and you have no place to plug-in your 1200$ iphone?
now you might be thinking, we already have shelter and we're not at risk. but the vast majority of people are just a few months away of no paycheck from absolute homelessness. even engineers, often don't have more than a years worth of runway saved up.
A much better piece of writing on this topic is “Industrial Society and its Future,” also known as the Unabomber’s Manifesto. You have to forget who wrote it and also ignore the worst 20% of it to get the most out of it though.
I can't forget who wrote it. I can't forget taking my computer in to get it repaired, and how much pain the repairman was in. A month or two earlier he had picked up a package left by the Unabomber. I can't forget what the Unabomber's ideas led him to do. I've seen the results of his ideas, written in pain on a man's face. I can't forget.
The way I recommend reading it is, there is something in those ideas that you can act on, in a constructive way, in your own life, without hurting anyone.
But where do you draw the line? I'm not going to read Mein Kampf looking for constructive ideas. Why? Because Hitler's position is so destructive that trying to untangle constructive ideas from the destructive seems like a fool's errand. (Also dangerous - I don't want to miss some of the destructiveness and incorporate it into my thinking.)
So the question is, did the Unabomber have good ideas, but follow them to bad conclusions? Or is the destructiveness more pervasive in his writing?
For me, the destructiveness was too vivid and too personal.
I see mention of neither crippling medical debt nor the inevitable societal problems caused by widespread ignoring of the climate emergency. There is little comfortable about seeing the world as it is as an American.
> Depression rates have been steadily rising in the US since the mid-1930s.
Are we accepting that as true? Is not our awareness of depression greater? How was depression among those in a small town reported back then? Was depression even a “thing” in common knowledge then? All the sudden everyone seems to have a gluten problem — a problem that, while real for a select few, is mostly a manufactured fad. Did human biology actually change that much, or are we just getting more messages that make us notice or perceive more? When the media says everything is a nail, we start to buy more hammers.
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[ 3.6 ms ] story [ 172 ms ] threadAn American life values money over ease of living though, as rightly pointed out in the article. But it's definitely not something to say to one who will view it unfavourably.
Putting people under constant adversity does not make them do better: Only happens if that adversity teaches them something.
Now switch to modernity, where goods can be obtained more independently. For example, you can get tasty food (X) without some necessary nutrient (Y). So you end up suffering for lack of Y, but your drive is only for X. Moreover, as the market tries to provide X cheaply, it has an incentive to drop Y. I don't know how many such Y's we're missing now, but probably a lot.
Another- suppose food supplies are variable and insecure. The optimal amount of muscle & bone is exactly what you need and no more, and the optimal behavior is to be as active as required and no more. Viola, you get humans, one of few species whose bodies require ongoing training to stay fit & healthy, while paradoxically being quite lazy.
Some nice quotes from wise people:
> But as Alan Watts once reminded us, “This is the real secret of life — to be completely engaged with what you are doing in the here and now. And instead of calling it work, realize it is play.”
> In the words of Henry Miller, “the aim of life is to live, and to live means to be aware, joyously, drunkenly, serenely, divinely aware.”
> “If you’re going to try, go all the way. There is no other feeling like that. You will be alone with the gods, and the nights will flame with fire. DO IT. DO IT. DO IT. All the way You will ride life straight to perfect laughter. It’s the only good fight there is.” - Charles Bukowski
All I got was crushing existential depression and a severe social skills deficit. 0/10 do not recommend.
I realize this is a glib comment, please don't take it as an insult, just the tongue-in-cheek response of someone who felt a surprisingly mirrored experience of yours.
In fewer words, I'm not sure anecdata is not going to help in this case, but if someone is feeling "something missing" in their life, some of the avenues of questioning and introspection presented in the article may be useful.
Traditionally it was easy to be part of a community, because humans structured society that way, because instinctively that’s important: we are mammals after all. But those traditional communities have all been eroded for various reasons. So people are lonely and desperate and aren’t clear why: after all your parents never had to “do” anything, their community was “just there”.
Took me quite a while to cultivate interests outside of tech, and pretty much all of them move me closer to other people where tech did not.
Yes, some kids are on psychiatric drugs that should not and we don't have tolerance for kids that don't do well in early academic. But we also don't beat the shit oit of them when they misbehave, so it is not all just bad.
https://slatestarcodex.com/2015/01/15/depression-is-not-a-pr...
Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
So, how can you have a comfortable life and have a job that you hate?
On the other hand, I felt like I was going insane because I couldn't stand it. I was working on a web application. I'm a security engineer with a passion for low level code. Web work and the Google code bureaucracy (read: mature software development practices) were so frustratingly dull.
That is how your life can be comfortable while having a job that you hate. I now work part time remotely (not for Google). I go on trips as often as I can. I'm working on work that I'm engaged by. I am making less money, but life is tolerable.
I don't agree with his methods, but the Unabomber was a brilliant mathematician (and, incidentally, a victim of the MK Ultra experiments) and wrote on this subject in his manifesto. He observed that our modern lives are far removed from the hunting/gathering of our ancestors. We evolved to seek frequent small stimuli - hunting for mushrooms, picking fruit, occasionally chasing down an animal - and the rewards tended to be immediate and tangible. Now most humans spend all day working in one specialization with intangible rewards that come in the form of payment every few weeks. It's much harder for most humans to find natural meaning in these tasks, and they don't typically feel critical to survival because, well, we really are quite comfortable most of the time!
Sorry but I don't understand this.
The whole "what doesn't kill you makes you stronger" meme is meaningless. Challenging one self to get pain and pretend you will feel better after is a pointless way to live life.
There is little point in climbing mount Everest. It's good for your health to practice physical activity and to occupy your mind and time. But this constant idea that we have to challenge ourselves, while we can't manage to fight inequality or climate change, shows that we're deluded.
Climate change will be the new equalizer. The right to emit co2 will be the new currency.
Well yes, that's exactly how cap-and-trade and carbon-credits work.
Don't hold your breath.
I'd rather have people who go to the gym several times a week be the one's responsible for combating climate change than people who pursue meaningless pleasure (drug use, pornography) several times a week.
Also welfare already exists in many countries including the US, so it's an accepted thing. It needs to be accepted without shame or arguments that it's a socialist measure.
I just don't see how those who can perform literally 10x more productively than others will settle for less than an absolute top prize, and with technology being such a great amplifier - winner take all dynamics seems to be so inherent - I am not even sure what can be done?
Its not all humans but a minority of greedy sociopathic humans make it difficult to impossible to do anything meaningful towards societal advancement and tend to ruin any sort of collectively equal society.
I hope I'm wrong but that has been my observations so far at micro to macro levels.
I don't think he meant that. He wrote: "This world breaks us all". Life is full of suffering by design. It's not going to be a sugary Hollywood movie - you will suffer. Use this experience to grow.
I romanticise primitive life, and people often rebut that you would die at 30. I would be ok with that though, trading some amount of life expectancy for increased excitement, purpose, and struggle. I do this in some ways through moderately dangerous activities, off roading (moto and Jeep) and snowboarding.
I do not think the incredibly comfortable and coddled bay area corporate life is for me. It is another matter to figure out what is, and what will be sustainable.
Speaking as someone considerably older than that, I bet you change your mind on your 30th birthday.
https://ourworldindata.org/uploads/2013/05/Life-expectancy-b...
Life after 30.
Infant and childhood mortality was increadibly higher, though this also may have improved overall fitness through selection pressures. Once adulthood was attained, life expectency was ... at the very least modestly comparable to modern experiences, and long-lived individuals were not uncommon throughout history. Ironically, the development of cities and trade (and their contingent roles in providing for incubation and transmission of disease) added substantially to mortality.
Even in (the relatively disease-ridden) England and Wales of the mid-19th century, as a 20 year old, you'd be likely to live to about 60, by 30, nearly 65, and at 50, you'd likely ive to see 70.
https://ourworldindata.org/uploads/2013/05/Life-expectancy-b...
Beyond disease, other causes were accidents, injuries (infection being a real possibility), famine, war, and violence. Though most of those causes tended to be episodic. See:
http://www.fraser-courtman.co.uk/list_of_famines_&_pestilenc...
Keep in mind that without cities and trade, few infectious diseases could spread much beyond a localised tribe. Kyle Harper's The Fate of Rome makes a strong argument that the plagues and pestilences which afflicted the empire co-evolved with it.
https://press.princeton.edu/books/hardcover/9780691166834/th...
That's why you have so many depressed people. They might not know it though.
To move on, we, as society, will need to grow and change. When there's no need to fight for everyday survival - shelter, warmth, water, food- , we'll be free for the first time in the history of our species. That's when it gets interesting.
I once went on vacation to a beach resort. I went out to the beach all set to spend time sunning and sitting, like they do in the movies.
That lasted less than 5 minutes.
That is especially true in the era of inaction/regression on climate change.
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/mar/01/out-on-i...
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/18/business/energy-environme... https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/03/climate/japan-coal-fukush...
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-01-13/germany-s...
Investing money in experiences instead of goods is less important than investing time in others instead of isolated activities.
It is going to take a major change in modern lifestyles to force advertisers not to sell us lies. It seems every screen is selling is separation.
With imposed constraints I could at least make myself content with my situation as it is. This is probably why monastic life appeals to certain people.
Modern man has up to 1000 "relatives" for sure. It just happened to be people who don't care about that person or not even aware he or she exists (celebrities for instance)
I heard about Dunbar number from pop-science articles, and it feels right. Isn't Marines companies size based on this number? Must be true then.
Even GDP per capita adjusted for PPP can't adequately measure wealth because it uses the wrong basket of goods. if you have a million dollars and you can afford 1000 iphones but a house costs 5 million, then your not wealthy.
Wealth is being able to afford the basics of life: Shelter, food and water and by extension: transportation (because you need to get to a job), education (because employers now require it, regardless of whether its useful), and medical insurance because you don't want to loose your shelter.
Those 6 things are just as expensive as ever, if not more expensive than ever and the average person is less able to afford them, at least in the coastal cities. Calculate how many hours of work per week it takes to afford shelter. people work longer hours than ever, and nearly 50% of their salary now goes just towards shelter which equates to 20 to 25 hours a week of work just to afford shelter. Was that the case 500 years ago?
Yes we've come a long way from 500 years ago, undoubedly we can afford much more food with much greater variety than ever. we eat like kings, dress like kings. But, still live in shelters we can barely afford.
All our modern day luxuries are contingent upon access to basic shelter. That shelter is harder to get than it has been for a long time: at least in the coastal cities - where most of the jobs are.
Shelter 500 years ago was barely better than a single-room, unheated hut. And you probably didn't even own it. You were a serf beholden to a feudal lord. (And that feudal lord didn't even have air conditioning)
And your food was whatever you could grow. In a good year maybe you made a little more than you needed. In a bad year you starved to death.
Even the bottom 1% in the US today have access to far better healthcare than the richest 1% 150 years ago. Antibiotics didn't even exist.
All 6 of the things you mentioned are far better off for almost anyone living today.
Also maybe wages have stagnanted in the US for this generation, but keep in mind the wealth improvements in the rest of the world have been staggering. Billions of people in India or China have been lifted out of poverty.
Focusing on the plight of college educated, middle class young adults seems pretty bizarre when compared with the far greater suffering of so many.
Sure strive to make things better... But if your worst trouble in life is having to work 20 hours a week to live in a comfortable apartment in the most expensive and exclusive city in the country... I'd say things were going pretty well for you.
I'd take shelter over Iphone any day of the week.
Most of All 6 of the things I mentioned haven't improved much in the last 50 years (Granted Food & Water are already very very good).
Using the US as an example: Housing, Medical and Education are all far less affordable and accesible today. All rising far faster than inflation.
Even our ability to transport people effectively from home to work and back has not improved much. The cost is just as high as ever. Cars/public transportation aren't able to move any faster than they could in the 70s (safety reasons, etc) and as the housing situation worsens, people's commutes get longer and longer. Thus the time it takes to arrive at ones destination hasn't improved. And it doesn't help that we seem to be moving the homes and works further and further apart (due to the cost of housing).
The improvements we're making these days are increasingly minor. Compare a car from today vs one from 20 years ago. there's not a whole lot of difference in terms of impact to you as a human being. even safety improvements are becoming increasingly incremental as we fight for every last 1000th of a percent of improvement.
So, your premise here seems to be that even though your own life may be going downhill as long as everyone else is doing better you shouldn't bother with exploring the reasons behind or even trying to fix your own backwards slide. Is that correct?
Also the consequences for policies are not always easy to predict. As an example, making college free seems great for the children of the upper middle class. But what about the majority of people who don't go to college?
But I'm really curious as to what the underlying reasoning here is. I can sort of understand when it comes down to obvious luxuries, so long as those luxuries are not in fact mandatory for being a productive member of the corresponding society (eg complaining about not being one of the 100 people to have one of those newfangled telephones vs complaining about not having a telephone in an age where having a telephone is the default expectation).
How would having a basic posture of gratitude aid someone in resolving issues they face that deal with what may be seen as luxuries in areas that are improving but which may be necessities in their own area? What relevance does the improvement of others have to resolving or mitigating the backwards slide of another? Is it not better for everyone to be experiencing improvement? Is there some fundamental mechanism that requires some areas backslide in order for others to improve?
I'm genuinely curious - you aren't the first person I have met that makes the assertions you have, and I have experienced the same sense of bafflement every time.
Having a high quality of life has more to do with matters of identity. People will happily suffer through anything if they feel it's meaningful. Mountain climbers and professional athletes live physically punishing, high risk lifestyles, but they aren't miserable, because what they do is meaningful to them. Being at the top of Maslow's heirarchy of needs looks a lot like being at the bottom.
This should come as no surprise, we've been living in small groups of Hunter gatherers since before we were human. It's what we're designed for.
Limiting your analysis to “coastal cities” is where I think you go astray. I grew up in the DC suburbs, in Northern Virginia, in a 3BR, 1,100 square foot house that my parents bought for $175,000 ($350,000 adjusted for inflation). Today, that same house is almost $700,000. My parents couldn’t have afforded to buy it today. But it’s also a totally different kind of town. Back in the early 1990s, the town I grew up in was squarely middle class, devoid of trendy restaurants, high end retail, etc. There was no Northern VA tech scene, no Dulles Technology corridor. It might as well have been suburban Ohio. Outside Georgetown, DC itself was a sleepy commuter city full of chain restaurants that closed at 6 pm. There was no Hermès. The Michelin guide didn’t even review restaurants in the city back then. That’s all changed completely.
So I don’t feel like comparing the price of housing back then and today is fair. You’re buying a completely different product for your money. Today, a similar place to what Northern VA was like back then would be like Crofton, MD (not to far from where I live in Annapolis). You can easily buy a house like the one I grew up in for a price similar to what my parents paid in 1989 (adjusted for inflation obviously).
Having more unaffordable overly fancy michelin star restaraunts nearby doesn't reduce the hardship of not being able to afford shelter. And who needs high end retail when you can't even afford a place to live? How many gucci bags does it take to keep you happy when your stuff is out on the street and you have no place to plug-in your 1200$ iphone?
now you might be thinking, we already have shelter and we're not at risk. but the vast majority of people are just a few months away of no paycheck from absolute homelessness. even engineers, often don't have more than a years worth of runway saved up.
So the question is, did the Unabomber have good ideas, but follow them to bad conclusions? Or is the destructiveness more pervasive in his writing?
For me, the destructiveness was too vivid and too personal.
Hopefully this article got on the front page via one of those upvoting services and you fuckers didn't actually vote for this shit.
Are we accepting that as true? Is not our awareness of depression greater? How was depression among those in a small town reported back then? Was depression even a “thing” in common knowledge then? All the sudden everyone seems to have a gluten problem — a problem that, while real for a select few, is mostly a manufactured fad. Did human biology actually change that much, or are we just getting more messages that make us notice or perceive more? When the media says everything is a nail, we start to buy more hammers.