Same situation, I truly empathise because it really does seem to take a lot of purpose out of everything. What I’ve found is that you need to replace money/salary/financial success optimisation (assuming you spent a lot of your life and energy to this point focused on these, much like I did) with something else totally unconnected with being measured in that way. For me, I am focused on proving myself as a guitarist in the local jazz and blues scene. These people have no idea how much money I have and wouldn’t give a shit if they did (I didn’t really change my lifestyle after getting lucky so it’s not obvious). So it’s an area I can be creative, grow, and still feel like I’m doing something. At the same time I’m doing part time consulting, mainly for people I worked with in the past who have started companies, just to scratch the tech itch. So far so good but I can’t say yet if it will stick. Maybe for you it’s art, music, going and getting another unrelated degree, or something along those lines? If you have more money than you know what to do with, fundraising and supporting good causes can be really rewarding. Both in terms of giving back something to your local community, and having really nice social elements to it.
One big piece of advice I have is to try to avoid letting others in your social network know exactly how successful you’ve been. Everyone starts wanting to pitch you their investment idea and it can burn down friendships when their ideas are bad. Being a VC to your friends is a path to sadness for everyone.
>Same situation, I truly empathise because it really does seem to take a lot of purpose out of everything.
Mainly though if all the purpose-giving focus was on just getting money and the related grinding to begin with.
Getting mega-rich didn't take the purpose out of Steve Jobs, for example, which was focused on building stuff with some specific twist (his idea of good design). Or Steve Wozniak for that matter, he found hobbies aplenty. Or take the Rolling Stones. Filthy rich, but did they ever give the impression they got bored? Or Dylan, equally rich, which doesn't even have the extravagant lifestyle of models and exotic vacations and high life the Stones had, but is still content to record, jam, play concerts etc. into his 80s.
If the person has other interests, from programming to mountaineering, and from politics to art, they can still be there with or without money. Like the "guitarist in the local jazz and blues scene" thing.
This is my dream. Having enough money to be able to dedicate to things I like, trying to be good at something without worrying about money, or time, or being tired after work.
Open a bookshop, being a rare book dealer, open a small museum about an author, research on a particular topic and write books...
That would be the ultimate dream, though I am sure I won't ever be near to fulfill it.
After you have the bookstore up and running, you could hire a few people to take care of daily operations. It would still be your bookshop, and you could drop by every now and then and just hang out in the store read some of the books, or you could even whenever you felt like getting more involved on some days tell your staff that they can take the day off if they like and they will still get their pay for the day and you’ll handle the customers and the register. I dunno, this is just how I imagine it could work. I’m not rich, and I don’t own any bookstore or any other kind of shop for that matter so maybe my idea here is off the mark.
It does? What happens if you don’t show up for a month? Or just keep it open once a week? As long as you remember to clear out the fridge every now and then, you should be fine :)
Many people overly focus on what they want to retire FROM - work, but not what they want to retire TO - hobbies/volunteer work/etc.
Basic eating healthier, exercising more and consumption-based things like travel are not going to fill the gap left by a full-time job. One can quickly get bored and/or run out of money with that kind of mindset.
Given enough money, or whenever I do retire .. I'd spend my time making music, photographs, do even more reading, etc. Anything that occupies your time and exercises both your body & mind are important.
God, we use to have a street full of people running unprofitable stores. Some were deep in debt making the dream a reality.
Why not a functional bookshop? You don't need money, you need to work on the plan(s). How do museums work? Where is the crude draft for the book?
I had a chat with a guy once who had a laundry list of things he wanted to accomplish but had convinced himself non of it was possible without money. About 1/3 of the list were things one could just go do right now.I think a hundred life times worth of stuff It was mostly helping people in need. One could definitely not help anyone and convince the self it is because it always costs money????
Some non profit here was selling unwanted books for 1-2 euro. I spend an hour or so typing titles on my phone mostly stuff published long ago and bought a whole stack of 200+ euro books. I haven't looked at them and didn't try to sell any but I'm sure it was money well spend for an hour of fun.
You don't need a machine gun, fight with your bare hands.
Why would you think any of those things are not a lot of tiring work, emotional drain and expensive? I don't understand why you can't do any of these as a hobby now, and need to wait until you're "rich" and won't have any real skin in the game.
Running a bookshop is entirely possible without FU money, but it will be hard work and probably not make you much money. Read Welcome to the Hyunam-dong Bookshop for inspiration :)
I once saw an article about apartments that NYC libraries used to have in the library for caretakers. My skipped a beat and I realized I'd never wanted anything more in the world than to just be able to 'pop down to the stacks' at 10pm to select my next read.
What amazes me is that between audible, kindle, libby, and a few other places, we live in a world where books are that available from the comfort of a cozy recliner. Truly the greatest wonder of the modern age.
As I recall from a similar article, some of those apartments still exist, and are no longer limited to librarians but may still allow access to the library. If living in NYC is an option for you, it's probably worth getting on their announcement list and be ready to move if they have an opening?
> > Having enough money to be able to dedicate to things I like
Money doesn't buy time, whatever you like you'd be better off starting now then at some point in the future when you think you have enough money because you make the fallacious equation "enough money = enough time" but that is wrong because mental and physical acuity diminishes with time so a minute in your 20s is worth more than a minute in your 30s and much more than a minute in your 60s etc...also odds of mental/physical illnesses increase, life gets in the way in modalities that you don't expect yet, inflation, collapse of society...in one word entropy.
That last point is salient. I grew very rich in the last 3 - 4 years and I funded a bunch of my friend's startup ideas. Now I cannot bear myself to reply to their happy new year wishes because how the relationships have soured.
I had a friend who I lent money to his startup during Covid. He promised would be paid back within a year. Multiple hard conversations and it’s 4 years later and not one cent has been paid back to me. We currently don’t speak to each other. He’s delusional with his startup ideas, lives in lala fantasy land. Refuses to get a job and take any responsibility. He has zero track record of success, so it’s somewhat my fault for loaning him money.
Never loan money to friends is like “having money 101.” You can gift it or you can invest it with appropriate caveats given to any external investor, but never lend it.
This is common advice because it turns good relationships bad, that manifests as viewing former friends as shysters
Of course not everyone is like that. The issue is you don’t know who is ex ante, and often people aren’t that way ex ante, but one thing leads to another to a total breakdown in trust and respect.
Even in the case you describe, it’s much better to gift it: “if you want or are able to pay me back some day, go for it, but I don’t expect or need it.”
I think the main issue, is that most people are reluctant to ask a friend for a loan because its considered in poor taste. If they are asking they either have no qalms about asking which is a red flag, or they are super desperate which probably means its unlikely they would have the ability to pay back.
I think this is the best advice. If you are going to fund a friend, give them a grant, no strings attached. They can return the favour if/when they have the means on their terms. Anything else is going to kill your friendship.
It seemed obvious that it was a small gamble for me, a big gamble for my friend, but he was doing all the right things.
VCs don’t waste time with concerns over failed investments.
When you hand over some money, you are accepting the risk.
Including complications, which are likely. Treat the money like a gamble, not the friendship.
I was really glad I did. My friend created a successful business after working toward that with major ups & downs for over ten years.
Then he got cancer, and died a year later. I got no money back. But it was the best investment I ever made. His dream came true and that mattered so much to him. That he pulled it off, and his customers loved him and his business.
Don’t invest in a friend if the investment isn’t about genuinely helping them.
It's never even about forgiving. I am not even angry at them. What happens is there is now suddenly a pedestal. No matter what we do, they know I gave them money. And I know they took it. The relationships don't remain the same anymore. It's weird.
I can see that. I would personally feel really bad if I lost all the money someone gave me. I'd always feel like I owe it back. Only exception would be at the very beginning, if that was a possibility that was acknowledged. However, I've noticed people who start these things are always very optimistic and probably don't seriously talk about this. To the previous poster, the only people who seem to handle this type of thing well are the extremely blunt people who are brutally honest and upfront about everything. There aren't many of them.
Yeah, I wouldn't take money from people I wanted to stay friends with for this reason. It's just a bad idea. Introduce me to your acquaintances, sure, but lets stay friends.
People need work to be happy. That doesn't have to be, say, office work necessarily: it can be making music full time, or volunteering at a hospital, or any number of other things.
But you have to have something keeping you busy that makes you feel like you have a purpose.
Totally agree. But it can be surprisingly hard to find what this is for yourself when you are used to climbing the school / corporate / startup ladder your whole life.
You’re on the right track, but I think it’s a bit deeper than just needing something to work on or stay busy with. I effectively retired a few years ago and have spent the time since engaging in various “work” across the kinds of categories you mention. Yet, all of these efforts have carried a sense of purposelessness—a lingering question of whether any of it truly matters, especially knowing I could stop tomorrow without significantly impacting my wellbeing.
This contrasts sharply with the purpose I felt when I had less money and was struggling to build my business. Back then, everything felt deeply do-or-die meaningful. Now, no amount of exercise, goodwill, or intellectual pursuits compares in terms of providing that same sense of purpose.
I don’t think humans need the pursuit of money itself to be happy, but once the foundational needs in Maslow’s hierarchy are met, the higher levels often feel less urgent—and, paradoxically, less fulfilling. There seems to be diminishing returns from “work” as a source of purpose.
As someone who kind of quasi temporarily retired early a few times this is the biggest problem I see. I learned foreign languages and programming languages out of pure necessity to survive and it was thrilling to succeed and make money with them.
So everyone (at least me) has this fantasy of how much better it would be to learn things on their own schedule for pleasure without undue pressure, but they don’t realize the pressure to survive was what made it feel so meaningful without that they soon fall into dilletantism.
For all his issues I think this is why Musk has gotten so much done, because he ups the ante enough to feel real risk if be fails.
> So everyone (at least me) has this fantasy of how much better it would be to learn things on their own schedule for pleasure without undue pressure, but they don’t realize the pressure to survive was what made it feel so meaningful without that they soon fall into dilletantism.
The trick is to find a place between dilletantism and burnout.
Our species, like all living things, has optimised towards struggling through life to the best of their ability (which was always limited). To "win" within the already apex species of humanity means you are hitting your head on the ceiling of what your body and brain was made for, hard.
This is why I stopped striving for success on that scale and returned to only work a small software job.
> a lingering question of whether any of it truly matters, especially knowing I could stop tomorrow without significantly impacting my wellbeing.
A suggestion for your consideration, or that of anyone in a similar position: give enough of the money away that this stops being true, and find fulfilling paid work (not necessarily in that order). I strongly suspect, from my own experience, that there's an amount of savings that you can keep that is adequate to remove any worry about winding up on the streets (or being stuck with work that actually turns out to suck, etc), without making further earning feel pointless to your own comfort. I think there's an ethical case for doing this even if it made you less happy, but even better if it's win-win.
Children are giver of immense sense of satisfaction that’s totally disconnected to wealth (though being wealthy certainly helps). Just remember - no short cuts.
I'm fairly certain children are a much greater giver of satisfaction without wealth, because when you have money you suddenly feel like you need to provide them all the best, whereas if you have none, you only feel like you need to keep them alive.
Like most things in life the need grows to just beyond the level you can supply. Maybe someone with nothing starts with "keep them alive" but once that's covered you move up the hierarchy.
Children are the best. The highs in life are orders of magnitude higher, and the lows are _so_ much lower. But the baseline is incalculably higher. My children have made me feel so much more fulfilled. And they have also made me better.
love to hear it! In that case, branching out to other peoples' children can bring great satisfaction. For example, volunteering to teach a class at a local high school
Seems weird that you have to advice people that they should hide their success from people they're befriending.
Living a double life like that doesn't seem right to me. It has something to do, perhaps, with the type of people you're surrounding yourself with. If someone can't be friends with you without asking you for money why are you keeping such people around in the first place.
Using discretion or being modest isn't necessarily living a double life. I'm sure there are plenty of things you're not open about; that doesn't necessarily make you fake, does it?
I thought we were talking about friends? Maybe I'm misunderstanding the meaning of the word.
I wouldn't imagine being friends with someone and not trusting them with knowing how successful I am.
I think maybe, and this might be a cultural thing, a lot of people tend to use the word lightly. I simply wouldn't get to a stage of being friends with someone I am not able to trust in such a way that I have to hide how much money I have from them.
My friends can accurately assess my net worth within a factor of +/- 5, but where exactly in that range isn't necessary for them to know. Even my closest friends probably can't reliably put it within +/- a factor of 2 (nor do they need to for any valid purpose).
I think the issue here is that with retirement levels of money existing friendships can become strained.
If your high school friend earns 50k a year and you earn 100 then I mean sure, you have different toys, bigger house, whatever, but you're both existing in the same universe with similar constraints.
If your high school friend earns 50k a year and you suddenly have 60 million like the guy in the post then it's more of a test because your lifestyle can just differ hugely.
Some people can handle it but with others there will be an underlying resentment. There are lots of layers to it. They look for work - you look for suitable employees.
Having said that, in my experience there are only really a few major cut-offs, one between homeless/terminally skint and working, one between working and being able to live off of investment income, _maybe_ one at the sort of bodyguard required super famous level. Inside those it's just sort of like, yeah ok, your car/yacht/jet/whatever is better than mine, cool.
It doesn't have to be super drastic - When I graduated college and got a decent job, most of my social group was making less than a full time minimum wage salary, bouncing around couches, or staying with parents - with no hope of it improving. I felt the resentment a lot, even though it was subtle, and constantly felt obligated to pick up checks if we did anything I wanted to do, because what I could afford to spend on an outing was significantly different. Then that builds resentment over time, etc. People don't like seeing people with more "stuff" than they have at a really deep level. Looking back I am not sure that I could have done much to salvage it, the only friends that survived out of that era were the ones that were able to bring themselves out of their situation as well.
I’ve never shared my specific financial details with any friend, before or after, so perhaps a different definition of what it means to be a friend. I haven’t bought a bunch of expensive crap that would give it away.
It’s not about living a double life. I don’t secretly blow cash on hookers and blow, I just live a pretty modest normal life and don’t talk about the details of my investments or means. Mainly I don’t have to worry about anything really.
> I’m doing part time consulting, mainly for people I worked with in the past who have started companies, just to scratch the tech itch
How do you pick you hourly rate? If a friend of yours of the past came to you and asked you to consult for him, and your friend offered you say $80 USD per hour, would you find it offensively low? For someone who doesn’t have a lot and wants to hire consultants for their small projects, I think offering $80 USD per hour is not bad. But I’m curious to know how that amount feels to a potential consultant if the consultant already had a lot. Or do you prefer taking a percentage of shares in your friend’s company as pay? Or something else?
I am happy to take whatever they offer (including helping for free) depending on where they are at. I don’t need it really and I’m happy to help. But most people at least that I’ve worked with are happy to do what’s fair. I haven’t ended up in a hostile negotiation or anything close to it.
FWIW I’ve done similar for friends who are on a tight budget , consulting for 1/2, 1/3 1/5 “regular” rate. Sometimes with equity but not always.
I’m nowhere near rich, but when I was consulting full time of I had enough hours to hit my “ok” target for the year, it felt right to be flexible with some of the rest of my time …
Take the annual salary you would be paid if you were an employee, add 30% to it for overhead/profit and divide by 48 (working weeks in a year) to get your weekly rate. Divide by 40hrs to get the hourly rate.
Another one is to take your annual salary, divide by 250 (working days in a year) to get your daily rate and increase that by 30%, billing in daily units.
The above formula can and should be tweaked based on the project, client, your needs etc.
The tricky thing about formulas like this is that it is very domain dependent.
What you describe is a reasonable approach for a freelancer who expects to bill most working hours. It falls apart for a lot of consulting scenarios where you bill fewer hours and spend more time generating work. In that case you may be better off setting rates so that e.g. 1000 billed hours will reach your base target salary equivalent...
I did say the formula would need to be tweaked as needed ...
OTOH, this is more or less how clients themselves expect to be billed so if you deviate too much without any logical explanation, they will simply go elsewhere.
If you are already “FIRE” and do it for fun, or you can schedule all 40h per week on billable work this works but I would increase by 50%.
If you need to do marketing to get clients, meet clients, etc to close contracts then I guess you should expect only about 20h per week of billable work as the rest is on you. So you need to at least double the hourly rate.
in this case (given it was reportedly sold for $975m cash), that would mean your friends think you either have $877m or $97m (he reportedly net $60m, which means your most pessimistic friend thinks you have more money than you actually have?)
How many new friends would look up what Loom was, though? This blog post was the first time I heard of it, so seems very unlikely that a random person would really care.
They already know who he is, he was a public figure executive that sold his company, everyone in his social circle would know what Loom was and would read in the news how much it sold for.
One thing you could do is give me 20k no strings attached so I can stop paying for my parents screw ups from when I was 20 :)) that will make me a lot less resentful towards life's stupid dice.
> you need to replace money/salary/financial success optimisation
Kind of ironic, but that kind of sounds like the people who've been saying those things aren't the most important in life might have been right all along?
we'd have to come to am agreement on what constitutes a need for therapy, but accidents/mistakes happen, and people die in countries that aren't America, people commit crimes of all sorts; theft, rape, murder, etc. people have childhoods that are less than perfect. PTSD isn't a uniqely American military problem either, nor is it limited to the military of America. Neither is depression. So chances are the need for therapy is universal. Not that therapy necessarily precludes such actions, but it helps in the aftermath.
Therapy requires there to be therapists, and for them to be recognized as a need, and for their expertise to be valued, and it's only in America, with it's patchwork of healthcare insurance, that therapy, as paid for by patients, could really take hold. Other counties have no such system, that individuals are used to paying $x00/session four times a month out of pocket. But in America, since other healthcare's expensive to access, paying for one out of pocket seems like par for the course.
Most countries then simply don't spend the money on therapy, hence fewer therapists. That's not to say those country are poor, just that they have other priorities.
There's something off about the post that I'm not sure I can pin point, but it's there.
What are these oft referenced insecurities? It's hard to get a read on this without details, but dumping your girlfriend to do random selfish shit (climb mountain, go to Hawaii, etc.) - it's not a surprise he's unfulfilled (though working on doge would be exciting).
This trap of 'working on yourself' that leads to endless mindfulness and narcissism leads you to become aloof. People tend to derive purpose from community, friends, and family. This is what religion used to give people independent of the pseudoscience.
Being financially independent is great, but it doesn't bring fulfillment.
A long way to say spend time with friends, work on a relationship, get married, have kids. People can do what they want, but most people will likely be the most content doing this. If you can find something to work on you're also excited about great, can do that too.
You can only dick around traveling and 'finding yourself' for so long, it gets old and repetitive.
Not the OP, but after a certain
age (mid 30s in my case) traveling just becomes cumbersome, i.e. when you realize that there are no big insights about oneself that can be gained via traveling that can’t also be gotten back at home, surrounded by friends/family and a couple of good books.
This sounds an awful lot like you're generalising from your experiences to other people's.
I'm also in my mid 30s and I still find travelling eye opening in a way that books are not (and I do read a lot, including when I travel). And on my last trip I met a retired couple who spent three weeks traveling in their car and they told me they used to have a boat with which they'd sail around the world.
Well, i beg to differ. And i'm older than that. In my view, we have a very limited time to live, and experiencing the amazing planet we're on in all its variety is one of the best things one can do.
You're just scratching the surface of said amazing planet, you're not experiencing anything of value that you couldn't have experienced back home. There's a real good essay on the emptiness of tourism written by Siegfried Kracauer back in the 1930s, just as mass tourism was beginning to take off, Travel and Dance [1] is called, it is still highly relevant almost 100 years later.
Amen! Travelling is just virtue signalling and social posturing. I've travelled the world, way too much for both business and "pleasure" and there's nothing new, no hidden insights, that I couldn't have gotten at home.
I advice all people I meet to stop travelling, and to spend more time with themselves and explore their inside, instead of being captivated by the outside, like a child by a new shiny toy.
The world would truly be a better place if that ever happened.
> One big piece of advice I have is to try to avoid letting others in your social network know exactly how successful you’ve been.
Having lived through this arc myself, this is excellent advice. While the most enlightened/mature people have no problem just being happy for you, this still leaves a lot people for who a significant disparity in wealth/success becomes a problem. It ends up impacting the nature of your relationship with them in subtle but significant ways and it can be very hard to get past. I've found it's just better to avoid the issue by being as stealth as possible about wealth (while still being honest and true to yourself).
I'm good friends with some very rich people. Everyone knows they have money. They learned how to say no, and how to let go of people who just want to milk them for cash.
Anyone who has "more money than they know what to do with" is a fool. There is an unlimited set of things to do with large resource allocation. Depending on the magnitude of that resource allocation, the set increases exponentially.
It shows a total lack of introspection as well as connections with the people, the Earth, and the universe as a whole.
Go eat some psychedelics and travel inside yourself for a while. Listen to what a tree far in a forest has to say. You'll know what to do with your dragon hoard in no time, I guarantee it.
It's true that there are infinite ways to waste a fortune, but that doesn't mean you're a fool for not having decided how to spend your money. I'd actually argue that it'd be more foolish to go figure out what to spend it on "in no time"
Yes, it is foolish to hoard allocation aimlessly. Anyone who amasses resources without a vision or for the sake of amassing it is a fool.
There is a sacred responsibility implicit in the acquisition of resources. It implicitly says "I know what to do better with these resources than others." To take on that responsibility then do nothing with it, and actually publicize you don't know what to do with it, is disgraceful. As long as there is suffering, there is more work to be done.
Move aside and let people who know what to do take over.
In the past, when people didn't know what to do with resources, the people would very loudly & painfully clawback the misallocated hoards and make better use of them. Recently, a CEO that didn't know what to do with resources & took active part in misusing them returned his misallocation to others.
This kind of misallocation is a universal crime. A life is nothing compared to the magnitude of this crime. Ideas of "ownership" and "it's my money" are irrelevant. The crime stands, and the justice of balance for this crime always comes, one way or another.
Escaping the responsibility of this duty, and the negligence of misusing funds, is easy; sell everything you own and reallocate resources to others who are better able to manage them.
Revolution is the "final" reaction to misallocated funds. It is when a mass of misaligned, foolish resource allocators who collectively lost their way and lack all vision to allocate, hoard most wealth. This misallocation chokes out the society they've hoarded from, like a blood clot, and leads to a death of the society if not addressed.
I would be very scared right now to be part of the group of people who have hoarded resources and mismanaged them, because this planet is on the cusp of a clawback.
Alternatively, if visionary resource allocators are allowed to operate, it brings wealth to everyone. It raises the standards of existence, brings about lasting peace, and makes for a prosperous existence. These visionary allocators are most definitely not in operation in these times, and it shows.
I will dream of a day when this changes. I hope that this change occurs peacefully, and with minimal suffering, even to those who has caused incomprehensible suffering due to their greed.
> As long as there is suffering, there is more work to be done.
A noble sentiment that I think resonates with most people.
> There is a sacred responsibility implicit in the acquisition of resources. It implicitly says "I know what to do better with these resources than others."
No, it doesn't. I may 'acquire resources' and use them (or not) simply because nobody else is around who wants them more. I may spend money on something frivolous (e.g. going to the movies), even while knowing there's a possibility that donating it to some 501c3 (or some other person directly) could end up improving lives significantly more than mine was improved from watching the movie, and there's absolutely nothing wrong with that.
> This kind of misallocation is a universal crime.
We have fundamentally different conceptions of property rights.
You seem to believe that people who come into money have a responsibility of spending it in ways that you think are important. In my mind, unless they're ill-gotten gains, they've already improved people's lives proportionally, and they can spend or not spend the value others have accrued to them as they see fit.
There are economic systems where committees get to decide the most appropriate allocation of resources, independent of the people who "amass" the resources themselves. These systems universally end up with lower levels of societal wellbeing than ones where property rights are respected.
To be very charitable with you:
If someone puts all their funds into stocks or similar (what almost all wealthy do) isn't that them letting others decide how to allocate these resources? So they have done all they could. Or are companies outside of the "sacred responsibility" you claim? who decides which organisations or efforts are "sacred "?
To be less charitable you seem like an arrogant person at best to tell people they should always know and allocate resources aligning with your values. I am almost sure all your efforts for this cause while maybe well meaning will be in vain due to your attitude.
Music has been a huge discovery and joy for me too.
I left the tech world seven years ago after a "career" of five years, not super wealthy but having enough saved/invested that I could live frugally and it would grow slowly on its own. I've been doing a wide variety of things mostly outdoors, but these last three years I've been learning to play the fiddle and it's took over my life in a good way.
It's been a rich seven years and aside from occasional brief moments of doubt, I'm very glad I did what I did. I have had time to focus on:
- health (most awesomely, my eyesight has improved dramatically)
- family and community and relationships
- simply being in the real world (nature)
- learning about and changing my behaviors/habits to be more who I want to be
- passions - particularly trying to protect habitats from being destroyed, which is very rewarding even if they might still get destroyed someday, they've gotten to exist for years longer than they would have.
- each thing that's caught my curiosity: gardening, forest conservation, foraging and cooking, building and carpentry, learning various skills and now most of all, the fiddle.
I won't say it's all been easy. I've wrestled with a lot of questioning of what matters and what to give myself to - because I have the choice and there is no obvious default path anymore. But I always feel my way into an answer - even if it has shifted around over time.
I don't have kids, I want to, and I think about how I'll find someone to do that with. I bet it will happen, I live in a rural area though so I pretty much have to travel to meet someone. Meanwhile, I have a sweet nephew and I get to spend a lot of time actively being his uncle.
The world is far more interesting and wild and beautiful than I think most of us have been led to believe.
Therapy. Wealth and success is one of the most massive crutches there is. It can make it almost impossible to be truly in touch with your insecurities and pain because its simply too easy to hide in your victory. Your toughest challenge now is to, despite your wealth, find a way to contact the pain that drove you to your hunger for success. As the bible said, it's easier for a camel to get through the head of a needle than for a rich man to go to heaven. I interpret that metaphorically.
"eye of the needle" refers to a small gate or passage in ancient city walls, used after the main gates were closed at night. A camel could only pass through this narrow opening if it was unloaded of its baggage and possibly crawled through on its knees.
Not as hard or impossible as it first appears but still harder.
It's not true though (and no evidence that such a gate existed with that name).
It's more likely exaggeration referring to actual camel (the large animal of the area) and the eye of a needle (an example of the smallest hole one would be readily familiar with at the time).
If it was reffering to a named place, the very capable in both Jewish and Greek authors of the New Testament wouldn't have translated it as "τρυπήματος ῥαφίδος" (needle's opening) or "τρυμαλιᾶς ῥαφίδος" (needle's hole), as opposed to something like "narrow gate" or similar that would convey to people unfamiliar with Jerusalem the point.
Oh yeah, I just clicked the link and it's Dan McClellan. Maybe TikTok isn't the best place to cite, but he's highly credible in terms of Biblical scholarship and history.
It's just an unsuitable, attention-zapping, toxic format for sharing information. It would be best to link to an article that can convey the full message. not a 15 second jolt which is what TT is all about.
Tiktok is particularly dangerous. And not because of the oft-repeated Chinese FUD (some of which may be true), but (my opinion here) it's the "crack" version of cocaine, or the "heroin" version of opium. Everything TT does goes straight to our psychological weaknesses.
Matters of religion (as well as philosophy) simply can't be covered in bite-size 2-minute "shorts".
If you prefer, he does a long form podcast called Data Over Dogma that is skeptical and informative. He uses TikTok because there are loads of people on the platform spewing misinformation about the Bible. He's meeting people where they are with empirical information
From what I understand, this is actually highly debated among biblical scholars.
This idea that he meant "it's hard but not impossible" seems to generally be pushed by wealthy religions and "prosperity gospel" types.
Reading everything else Jesus said, I find it more likely that he literally meant the "eye of an actual needle". He did not seem to be a fan of the rich or powerful in any way.
It's not impossible for a rich person to develop spiritually and attain heaven. They just have to give up all their riches. So functionally it is easier for a camel to do this other equivalent nearly-impossible thing.
In a Catholic and the way those verses are interpreted is that it’s not that you have to give up all your money but give up greed, it basically means that you should not worship your wealth but place your highest of high towards God, then and only then you can use your wealth towards the Good as you have no more attachments.
I think Protestant have similar interpretations but I could be wrong as they have many denominations.
To be fair, needles at the time probably weren't as fine as they are these days, so you may still have a gap a millimeter across instead of a fraction of that.
Jesus literally told his followers to give up their worldly possessions, but… sure. He intended to give a free pass to those who came after, that hinged on a quirk of city planning that would not exist until centuries later.
A common myth! No, no gate or passage was ever referred to as "the eye of the needle" in antiquity. [1] That verse is intended to be taken literally. Jesus Christ was quite outspoken on his feelings about the wealthy, but of course, wealthy Christians need a way for him to have meant something figurative when he told them to surrender their worldly riches.
This one was originally used to mock scholars who debated such seemingly obscure minutae at the expense of more pressing issues, the canonical example being theological debate during the fall of Constantinople. But I remember reading somewhere that this debate was actually for a good reason since Constantinople were looking for help from fellow Christians against the Ottomans but needed to convince the potential helpers that their beliefs were closely enough aligned enough to warrant them giving aid. Hoping someone here might know more (and apologies for derailing the thread even further...)
> it's easier for a camel to get through the head of a needle than for a rich man to go to heaven. I interpret that metaphorically.
I agree that there's a parallel between what Jesus meant and your comment—in both cases, wealth is dangerous because it distracts from what's important. To my understanding, Jesus meant that one's heart will be focused on money rather than wanting to follow God. And, like you said, it's really easy to be distracted by material success (money, degrees, fame, etc.). But, none of these things will follow us to the grave. IMO this sort of tunnel vision is really pernicious, because it's so, so easy to fall into.
If you'll allow a personal rant: I recently heard someone say that failure is—somewhat paradoxically—a crucial part of finding happiness, because it loosens our grip on things that are ultimately unimportant. I've been thinking about all this a lot recently myself. Last year I hit a bump in the road w.r.t. my career, due to factors outside of my control. So, for the first time, I was suddenly failing my subconscious goal to climb the ladder of achievement. I started feeling adrift and demotivated, and the obvious solutions (therapy, medication, more regular exercise) didn't help.
It eventually forced me to really sit down and take a hard look at my priorities in life. Speaking concretely, this meant 1) accepting that I might not get what I had wanted out of my career, and because I'm a Christian, 2) focusing instead on how I can serve God every day (love others more, be much more open about my faith, volunteer at church and elsewhere, etc.). That's much easier said than done, of course, but I've just gotta take the baby steps that I can and trust God with the rest.
It's only been a few months since I came to this conclusion, but I feel like it's changed my life. I've become much less stressed, and I feel much more fulfilled. Honestly, it's like I have hope again in my future.
Naïvely I want to say something like "therefore, everyone should try to find whatever brings them this fulfillment." But this might be too weak of a statement, because I really think there's only one true answer to this question.
P.S. As for the verse you quoted (Matthew 19:24), I'd be remiss not to point out what Jesus says a few verses later: "With man this is impossible, but with God all things are possible." :-)
I'm not Christian but I definitely resonate with what you're saying about failure sometimes being a gift, if you can make use of it.
I wish I could be more religious, in a sense, but I just can't get my head around the concept of "serving" or "fearing" god. It's not how I relate to "the divine" at all. Power to you, though.
A rich man won't be attracted to heaven in the first place, for it's a place for people who enjoy giving something to others and rarely think about themselves. Hell, on the other hand, would mesmerize a typical man of ambition for it's a world of selfish might and power.
This is pretty close to ancient eastern christian views on heaven and hell. In that view heaven and hell are the same situation: full exposure to the unattenuated light of god. A righteous & repentant person will experience that as love and mercy, and an unjust person will experience it as fear, shame & torture. But all get the same "treatment" so to speak.
Therapy = Exactly. He thinks he has freedom and agency but he's just being puppeteered by conflicting subconscious forces he doesn't understand and seems to have no insight into. This is a man who's in a self-driving car turning a steering wheel that's connected to nothing.
Sounds like a good time to engage a professional coach or therapist, if you haven't already. Particularly to deep dive on the questions asked at the end of the post. In my experience, I often stalemate these kinds of internal debates on my own, but having a second player in the mix got me out of the gridlock.
I think you should start investing in companies and then possibly get some drive there helping others make it. Sometimes it is nice to give back to the community I think
If you do think that can be given a try then hey.. we (my wife and me, my wife more than me) are looking to build something and could do with some investment to take that risk.
I mean if you're looking for a todo list, travelling to third world countries and tipping just like $5 for normal service and seeing people's eyes light up is fun.
I did this once in a restaurant in a small town in Mexico. I called one of the service people (not even a waiter, this was a casual joint where you order at the counter), slipped them $100, and watched their face light up. it was cool.
Yes, feels like the invisible hand selects people to get rich based on how unfulfillable they are and thus how likely they are to keep working after they get rich.
I understand this serves an inflation control mechanism in our highly unequal system. The wealthy have comparatively so much money that the system cannot afford them to spend like normal people would. It would put too much currency in circulation and cause massive inflation. The system needs the wealthy to keep investing in ventures to create more busy-work, filled with NPCs and insatiable people who will also create more busy-work if they get rich.
The system needs to keep the money circulating in a very tight loop. Its journey from the money printer back to government hands needs to be very short in order to allow the government and corporations to retain the increasing degree of control that they need to maintain the status quo.
This is such an American thing that I find it hard to respond to, because these cultural things feel universal when you're swimming in them.
Wealth doesn't make it difficult to figure out what to do with your life if you never thought wealth is the goal. The problem is that the sole life goal for this person was to get rich, and now that's the endgame, and he doesn't know what to do.
If the goal, instead, was to have fun, to foster a strong social circle, good relationships, to do things for and with them, to have hobbies, to learn new things, to challenge yourself, etc, he'd just think "oh cool, now I can do more of those without having to spend X hours a day working".
It's okay. Keep learning, searching, asking questions, trying to find answers. Some questions are answered by starting a new company. Others are answered by going on a vacation to Hawaii and learning Physics in the jungle. Sometimes both. Sometimes neither. The idle mind is the devil's playground. So, stay busy, stay hungry, and keep searching.
This now is your moment to improve the lives of other people in scalable cost-efficient ways, in improving the human condition. It may not be obvious how, but it will come to you if you try.
And the point exactly is that one can often accomplish more when one has more freedom in a lead capacity, as opposed to being a random worker bee in a larger group. Things don't have to be this way, but they often are.
You've won the competition, and you've found it meaningless. Maybe you could work on helping others do meaningful things with their lives, rather than being forced to grind and grind and grind their lives away.
I don't suggest mere philanthropy, but structural change. (The nature of which I will not attempt to dictate; after all, identifying the problem doesn't mean I know a solution.)
Something I always try to remember that has really served me well, from when I grew up dirt poor to eventually having success, is that life is hard for everyone in different ways and more often when I assume how easy or hard someone has it, I’m wrong.
You ain't wrong, but I think it rather goes like this:
The core problems (health, relationships, love troubles, depression, and so on) can be the same in both poor and rich.
But the poor additional have all kinds of very heavy problems that the rich have solved. Hate your boss/job? They have "fuck you money", they don't need to work. Your kid needs surgery? They can afford many times over what would kill you financially. Trouble making rent? Not a problem for them. And so on. Stuck in a warn torn country? Not a problem for them. Wife wants a divorce and half the fortune? No problemo, you're still rich after giving that away.
Don't the rich also have some unique-to-the-rich problems? Yes, but of the nice-to-have (e.g. "people approach me just because I have money") or "I'm too adjusted to this level of the hedonic treadmill, woe be me" variety.
Even something like rich with an incurable disease (or maybe your spouse/child has one) that’s going to take you out in a few months than poor? Having lived a bit in both worlds I’m not really sure it’s so simple as you’re making it out to be. I’d agree that generally of course it’s better to be rich than poor, I’m just saying every individual person can’t be judged solely on that basis.
>Even something like rich with an incurable disease
The contest is between being rich and poor with "all other things being equal". Anything else doesn't make sense, might as well ask: do you prefer being rich facing the firing squad, or poor having drinks with friends?
So, compared to being poor with an incurable disease? Yes, 100 times over.
>Having lived a bit in both worlds I’m not really sure it’s so simple as you’re making it out to be.
Rather it's so simple a choice that you had to add the "incurable disease" to the rich side to tip the balance.
My point was just that all things aren’t equal when judging individuals - life is hard for people in unexpected ways you may not immediately see from their socioeconomic status. My original comment at the top of this thread was about how treating individuals as individuals has served me well, and was explicitly not to set up a contest between whether it is always better to be rich than poor. So if I failed to do so to your satisfaction, I suppose that’s why.
>My point was just that all things aren’t equal when judging individuals
They're not, but for comparing one should only account for things that are different because of being rich vs poor. Having an incurrable disease is not that, as it can perfectly well happen to both rich and poor (and the rich would get better treatment for it anyway, and it wont cost them their house or savings).
Okay, thanks. What is your takeaway in the end, in contrast to my suggestion about empathising with people individually instead of judging them as part of a group based on their socioeconomic status or other outward indicators?
Idk read ”the monk who sold his ferrari” or something not that i have (read book, or ferrari)
Also youtube.com/watch?v=GmJI6qIqURA&t=15m14s but for millionaire equivalent instead of billionaire
e: advice comes in all shapes and forms. you want me to lie to him? what would buddha do
His attention span won't be enough to stick with physics for longer than 4 weeks.. he should just apply his skills in building companies to hire a couple of people to work on cool stuff that he is excited about. A good approach is to find some smart grad students at a local university who are in electrical engineering probably since you have to know lots of physics to get there and say "hey i have some money, want to build some cool prototypes?" and the best part is you can just ask those grad students how all this physics stuff works and they will happily tell you whatever you want to know.
Wealth only makes it hard to figure out what to do with your life if you believe wealth is a goal.
Wealth is something that removes obstacles to figuring out what to do with your life. If you had "being wealthy" as the goal itself, no wonder you're now feeling aimless. Instead, you should have been living your life, and now you'd think "great, now I can continue doing what I've been doing, except I don't need to worry about money".
Work shouldn't be your life. At most, work should be an interesting thing you do for the challenge, and which you'd do even if you weren't getting paid to.
I very much dislike the trend of calling other people NPCs.
When you feel tempted to see someone else as an NPC, it might be helpful to remember the concept of "sonder":
> the realization that each random passerby is living a life as vivid and complex as your own—populated with their own ambitions, friends, routines, worries and inherited craziness—an epic story that continues invisibly around you like an anthill sprawling deep underground, with elaborate passageways to thousands of other lives that you’ll never know existed, in which you might appear only once, as an extra sipping coffee in the background, as a blur of traffic passing on the highway, as a lighted window at dusk.
I don't see any need. The thread is ok on the whole.
On HN, the onus is on commenters not to react to the bits they find most provocative. There's even a site guideline about that: "Please don't pick the most provocative thing in an article or post to complain about in the thread. Find something interesting to respond to instead." - https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
I am referring to the post itself, not the thread, where the writer seems to be pretty sociopathic in his dismissal of the inner lives of others as NPCs.
I don't think it makes sense to weight that one detail more than the entire rest of the article. It's better to drop the worst outlier, as the guidelines ask, and focus on the rest of the content.
There's another point too: it's easy to misinterpret what someone means by a single token like that. It may have an obvious meaning to you, but it isn't clear what the author had in mind. This isn't nearly enough information to justify an extreme conclusion like "sociopath", and when you jump to such a label, what you're doing is not so different than what you're complaining about in the OP.
Perhaps you should consider exploring the path of religion or spirituality. Faith has a way of providing inner peace and grounding. As humans, we are inherently designed to seek meaning through connection, building a family, and raising children. Watching them grow can bring a profound sense of purpose and fulfillment that no material success can replace. This might be the key to rediscovering what truly matters in life.
> Faith has a way of providing inner peace and grounding.
The fact that people can believe things via “faith” that have no empirical basis in reality scares me. It certainly doesn’t provide any inner peace or grounding to me.
As for faith, why do we all toil when, in godless philosophy, everything we do is fundamentally meaningless? Why do you persist? What is that reason, if not illogical faith in some purpose. Read Camus.
I have no idea what “spiritual” means in this context, so until you can clearly define that, my position is: no, we’re just animals.
> As for faith, why do we all toil when, in godless philosophy, everything we do is fundamentally meaningless? Why do you persist? What is that reason, if not illogical faith in some purpose. Read Camus.
I don’t believe I (or anyone else) have any fundamental purpose for existing. If you have evidence to the contrary, please share.
“it is difficult to imagine how the human mind could function without the conviction that there is something irreducibly real in the world; and it is impossible to imagine how consciousness could appear without conferring a meaning on man's impulses and experiences. Consciousness of a real and meaningful world is intimately connected with the discovery of the sacred. Through experience of the sacred, the human mind has perceived the difference between what reveals itself as being real, powerful, rich, and meaningful and what lacks these qualities, that is, the chaotic and dangerous flux of things, their fortuitous and senseless appearances and disappearances"
Eliade, Mircea. The Quest: History and Meaning in Religion. University of Chicago Press, 1984
Now, while Eliade’s word is not final, I think it touches on your question of what spiritual means in the context of mankind. Being a spiritual animal means being an animal embodied with consciousness, an animal that is aware of its existence in both space AND time.
Eliade is a great read for a number of reasons but the best reason is because he can be read from an atheistic or religious perspective and his passages are no less revelatory. If you want to believe that there is no purpose to existing that is fine, I wouldn’t recommend it, but that is fine. But that doesn’t take away from the fact that consciousness transcends evolutionary necessity and by that nature alone deserves serious and legitimate thought and preservation.
This quotation appears to just replace the word "spiritual" with "sacred," another word that I find to have nebulous meaning. It contains a lot of words, but appears to be saying vanishingly little of substance. Or maybe it's just over my head.
> Being a spiritual animal means being an animal embodied with consciousness, an animal that is aware of its existence in both space AND time.
So, you're defining "spiritual" as "conscious." That's fine, but why not say "conscious"? It's clearer that way.
Under this definition, I agree that we are spiritual (conscious) animals.
But I'm willing to bet that the original poster I responded to used the word "spiritual" in a different sense than you do, which is a problem. When you both sort out what you're actually saying, let me know!
Edit to add one more point:
> But that doesn’t take away from the fact that consciousness transcends evolutionary necessity
I think the phrase "evolutionary necessity" is problematic on its own from a biological perspective, but even if we ignore that, do you have any sources for this claim?
I believe the original quotation used sacred because “spiritual” implies spirit or soul, whereas all ideologies do not align with that specifically. I could be mistaken though.
I don’t think it’s over your head I just think it’s academic literary fluff from Eliade, but at its core it breaks down that developing consciousness meant that we also developed methods to conceptualize something that was more real than reality itself. For example, numbers do not “exist” in reality, but represent reality more accurately than it represents itself most of the time. That’s why they’re so useful.
There are truths that are abstracted out of reality, that is a commonplace in human existence - sacred, spiritual, divine, esoteric, whatever you want to call it, there is an innate connection between humankind and something that is beyond humankind (a sort of meta-reality) and that relationship has aided our development since the dawn of consciousness. Connecting that to any one religion would be a fools errand but it does describe how our very being is tied to something more than just the damned physical world, more than just animalistic instinct. It’s all abstraction.
That is my interpretation anyway.
>So, you’re defining “spiritual” as “conscious.”
Good callout, I wasn’t very specific. I think conscious is the baseline reality, it makes being spiritual a possibility. A prerequisite. Being spiritual would be the willingness to use that consciousness to abstract specifically on the human condition, and voluntarily conclude that we ourselves have a part to play in something that is more real than the reality in front of us.
I can’t speak for the original poster, but I am still developing what I consider to be my spiritual knowledge, and I don’t foresee myself learning all there is to be known any time soon. Still young in that regard.
Edit for your edit on transcending evolutionary necessity:
No sources, but let’s say even if, for example, the theory that consciousness emerged in early hominids as a side effect of a brain that rapidly grew to visually detect snakes[1], even in that scenario consciousness is still the side effect. And that means that a prerequisite to spiritual abstraction would be just an evolutionary side effect.
We still do not understand the evolutionary emergence of consciousness and why it appears to be so rare, so I’m not going to act like I have the answers there. But billions of years passed on earth before a human first questioned their place in the universe, and to me that is self-evidence of a lack of evolutionarily necessity. I understand if that conclusion is not solid enough for most though.
Yeah, all of this gets a big fat [citation needed] from me. I don't even know what a bunch of this stuff means. "Conceptualize something more real than reality itself" is nonsensical on its face, and you go on to describe numbers, which are simply an abstraction we use out of convenience, not anything that is "more real than reality itself" as far as I'm aware.
I don't know what "beyond humankind" means in this context, and I don't know what "our very being tied to something more than the physical world" means.
Again, maybe it's just over my head, but can you clearly explain what you mean by all of these things?
> Being spiritual would be the willingness to use that consciousness to abstract specifically on the human condition, and voluntarily conclude that we ourselves have a part to play in something that is more real than the reality in front of us.
And yeah, I'm definitely not in agreement with us being "spiritual" under this definition, because the premise that it's possible for something to be "more real than the reality in front of us" doesn't make any sense to me.
I’m not sure what you would like in the way of citations. Abstracting on its own operates outside of the physical world, the world of ideas is different than the physical world of events. You can choose to believe these are just electrical signals in the brain, nothing more, and that is the physical world, but my entire tangent here has been that I don’t believe that, and why.
Abstractions, at least ones that survive over long periods of time, like the use of numbers, or like human spirituality, tend to contain within them a large collection of truths. Large collections of truths are what I mean by a greater reality, because they are not reality, they are abstracted ideas that are based on reality, but serve a greater purpose.
Something being more real than the reality in front of us is not a new idea, idealism was introduced by Plato 2,400 years ago suggesting that true reality lies in the world of perfect ideas, otherwise put, a reality more real than the physical world.
Like I said though, all of this is my interpretations of readings and based on my own years of thought and experience.
I'd caution against comparing an actual, useful-in-everyday-life abstraction like numbers, with a vague wishy-washy idea like "human spirituality."
I'm familiar with idealism and I definitely got the sense that you were coming from that perspective. As you might have guessed, I'm a naturalist, and probably also a materialist, because I think naturalism most closely comports with what we understand about how the universe works. While idealism is interesting to read about, I have yet to meet anyone that could provide evidence for the fact that it is actually correct and naturalism is wrong, so that's why I was asking. I'm personally not that interested in philosophical concepts that have no evidence or application in the real world.
I'm also not aware of evidence for any "truths" that are themselves inherent to any abstractions we use as a species. For example, I can write an equation like so:
x + 7 = 10
I can solve for X and find that it is 3, and verify that my answer is correct by checking it against the original equation. I can do all of that using the abstractions we've developed and nothing more. But none of these truths are actually inherent to the abstraction of numbers; I could just have easily put seven apples in front of me, and added apples to another pile until I arrived at a total of 10 to find my answer.
Could you give me an example of an abstraction which contains a truth that does not ultimately derive from the material, as in the example above?
The comparison was risky, I’ll give you that. I think we’ve both already come to the conclusion that neither of us is going to prove much to the other, as you’ve stated our belief systems clash in multiple important ways. I would argue that my idealistic and (more importantly but not yet mentioned) my humanistic views of the world are not wholly incompatible with naturalism, given you are willing to give wide berth to aspects of natural forces like consciousness and what we do with it, which you may not be. On materialism, I don’t think we’ll get anywhere.
And to your apple example, I never implied that numbers do not originate in the material world or are not derived from there, only that their true utility is realized when they have been abstracted over all the other types of fruit, and animals, and crops, etc. What started as piles of apples becomes something like one level of abstraction higher than a pile of apples, it becomes 10. But you have specifically said you have no interest in discussing things of this nature so I’ll stop. But I’m leaving this paragraph because I took the time to write it.
Your request for an abstraction that does not derive from the material is a bit of an impossible task isn’t it? And like I said I never claimed that these abstractions did not originate in the material, just that over time they accumulated related truths to become greater than the material itself.
I know our discussion is most likely over but wanted to apologize for being unclear. I wasn't asking for an abstraction that was divorced from something material; I was asking for an example of an abstraction which has shown something true, where that true thing could not then be verified in the material world, as in my apple example. Basically I'm asking for an example of "they accumulated related truths to become greater than the material itself."
No worries! I’ve only done a bit of thinking on this specifically but I struggle to understand why you are asking for an abstraction that could not be verified in the material world. From my understanding the only value that abstractions have is if they can be effectively verified and acted out in the material world. Otherwise why bother abstracting on them!
The abstraction itself exists outside of the material world, we’ve already beaten that horse, but for an example of ‘accumulating related truths to become greater than the material itself’ I would point to food.
Materially, food serves to nurture and satiate, to be found and eaten. But one level up, when abstracted upon, food becomes information. It becomes where to find the food, when the food appears, how much of the food is around. It provides an advantage to those that think in those terms instead of those that react to the appearance of food and eat it and move on to find some more. Animals over time evolve around food and food availability, they move seasonally to find it, they give birth near it, etc. That is not the same as abstracting information from food—this has spearheaded our evolutionary course from hunting and gathering, to agriculture, to squeezing the life out of our planet in pursuit of absolute control of our surroundings (food).
Yeah, this doesn’t work for me at all. I don’t agree that food has been abstracted away at any level, much less that it somehow turned into where to find food, etc. All of that is just information. Thanks for the discussion though.
The study you cited doesn't appear to have anything to say about the general appearance of consciousness, so I don't think it's really relevant to our discussion here.
> We still do not understand the evolutionary emergence of consciousness and why it appears to be so rare, so I’m not going to act like I have the answers there.
Yes, I agree 100%. But because of this, I don't think you're correct in claiming outright that consciousness transcends evolutionary necessity (this is a positive claim that requires evidence). It's OK to say we don't know!
That example I gave of the emergence of consciousness being a result of a growing brain was just an example and not necessarily what I believe, but it was on based this article from 2016:
Which really just breaks down consciousness potentially being a byproduct of having a drastically higher number of neurological connections than lesser developed animal brains.
So combining the two, the growing brain, caused by an increase in size of the visual cortex to detect snake patterns, increased the number of neurological connections and as a result the brain gradually became consciously aware. That’s just one theory that I used.
And I 100% agree it’s okay to say that we don’t know, we don’t. And I don’t! But that won’t stop me from thinking about it like, a lot.
This is just changing your phrasing to say the same thing. It's still a claim unsupported by evidence.
My contention is that the absolute most we can say about the topic of the evolution of consciousness is "we don't yet know how or why consciousness evolved."
And we’re not in disagreement there, my grounds for originally giving the example was only in the fact that consciousness is a prerequisite for spirituality to occur. I was really only saying that it is unique to humans and allows for abstract thought on the human condition.
I respect your contention but I think we’re going in circles over semantics now.
> consciousness is a prerequisite for spirituality to occur
Using your definition of spirituality, this is a tautology.
I don’t see how we were going in circles; I was simply trying to get you to realize that something that seemed important to our discussion which you claimed as “fact” is about as far from fact as can be. Take care!
> I don’t believe I (or anyone else) have any fundamental purpose for existing. If you have evidence to the contrary, please share.
I didn't say existing, but persisting. This is kind of the basis of the point I was making. Clearly you do believe you have a fundamental purpose for persisting, as do most people - otherwise we would see more people deciding to stop living once they have come to the conclusion they have no fundamental purpose.
As to the point of humans being "just animals", you are correct; we are the only "just animals" that have spiritual religion as an emergent property of our species. Given where you are anchoring the beginnings of this discussion, I feel starting your research on the evolutionary origin of religion would be a good starting point to understanding what I mean when I say homo sapiens are a spiritual species.
Sorry for the confusion on terms, but it doesn't change the substance of what I previously said.
> Clearly you do believe you have a fundamental purpose for persisting
I don't. Also, believing that I have no fundamental purpose for persisting is not the same as me wishing to die.
Edit: after thinking about this a bit more, I realized that maybe we disagree over the meaning of the word "fundamental," so let me clarify: I do have reasons for wanting to continue to live, but those reasons are 1) many, and 2) not static over time. 10 years from now, I will likely have different reasons for wanting to persist. I also dislike the word "purpose," as it can imply some kind of "grand plan" or other woo that I vehemently reject. I apologize if I'm being too bristly at your use of terms, but I would better characterize my thoughts as: I have multiple reasons for wanting to persist, which change over time, are grounded in well being of myself and others around me, and not necessarily inherent to me as a person.
I don't believe any of this rises to "illogical faith in some purpose" as you originally asserted.
> Given where you are anchoring the beginnings of this discussion, I feel starting your research on the evolutionary origin of religion would be a good starting point to understanding what I mean when I say homo sapiens are a spiritual species.
If you claim something (especially something containing a term as fraught with varied meanings as "spiritual"), you should be prepared to explain what you mean, not say "go start some research," which among other things is presumptuous. Based on what you said here, I'll assume that by "spiritual animals" you just meant "animals that have developed religion," and we are in agreement. You can drop the term "spiritual" in that case as it just adds confusion.
So we are animals that have developed religion. So what? It doesn't change my initial point, which is that faith (in the traditional definition of the word) is irrational. People are of course free to believe whatever they want, but when their unsupported beliefs start to affect my life via the legal/educational/judicial/healthcare systems in my country, or when people try to assert that my evidence-based beliefs are somehow faith-based, you better believe I'm going to speak out about it.
I don’t get it… you can do whatever the hell you want now. What’s the problem? Surely you like do _something_?
And if you only want to do something for 4 weeks at a time then do that. Where’s the despair coming from?
Also, this person loves capitalism so much because it worked for them. But then the way they say like it’s the greatest gift ever seems so out of touch.
The problem is too many options and so he is stuck in analisys parallaisys. He could spend all is time trolling my posts to correct my spelling or start a company or ... so many options.
seriously, study after study shows that just giving people money is the most effective form of altruism. just give it away. go to your city's homeless shelter and give money away. write a check for your local school board. keep everything anonymous. give it all away.
Doesn't sound like the author has any idea what issues plague them, based on what I read. Lots of plausible sounding ideas in this thread, if a therapist helps them figure out which ones are accurate, money can (probably) help them make the changes.
Everyone I’ve known to say they know all their issues has been blind to many obvious (externally) problems. I tried several different therapists until I tried psychoanalysis instead and it helped. That said, it’s true that many problems cannot be solved and must instead be grieved.
If you believe that there are "good" mindsets and "bad" mindsets (relative to what you want in life), and that it's possible to change one's mindset, it follows that having guidance can help there.
Maybe you don't believe that a professional therapist can offer that guidance, of course.
It's not a panacea, and the way people talk about it drives me crazy. There are many different modalities, with very different levels of effectiveness for any given person. CBT is awful for me, for example, and it's the most popular modality. I also did ketamine-assisted therapy and it absolutely changed my life.
There are definitely people who won't get anything from it, but the reflexive "therapy is useless" is a weird thing to perform when it's obviously helped a ton of people.
It certainly did for me. Practically the first thing my therapist said to me was exactly what he said to someone else before, since apparently it really helped the first person.
The next session was my last, when I told him I had figured out the issue. I don't even know what he said any more, but I haven't had that particular kind of depression recur for like 6 years now.
Gives no guarantees for your own experience of course, just wanted to give a different perspective.
Work on affordable housing tech. There is a huge need for housing at all levels, and I really believe the lower end could be revolutionized by new materials and techniques, along with novel approaches to land use. You could make a real meaningful contribution and choose to make money or not along the way.
Or whatever you want really. I recently contemplated what I would do if I won the lottery and arrived at that conclusion. Hopefully you arrive at yours.
In SF for example, even after a housing project is approved, it can be challenged at any point for any reason by the community or politicians. Even projects that meet all regulations can be rejected for any reason, usually that vibes are bad. I think over half of SF is some kind of historical district. Way too much is zoned for SFHs in the city limits. etc.
It's little wonder why housing projects are so expensive in cities that have such strong NIMBYs. Like is it so unreasonable to ask for a bunch of 4 story single stair apartment buildings to be allowed to even be legal?
Of course not! Take the top N problems ordered by “impacted due to inefficient tech” and the top N ordered by social benefit. N has to be pretty large before anything interesting starts showing up on both lists.
The problem is that making tech more efficient is rarely anything more than a simple capital problem. So the real question is - where is there social benefit but no money?
1,745 comments
[ 1.7 ms ] story [ 466 ms ] threadOne big piece of advice I have is to try to avoid letting others in your social network know exactly how successful you’ve been. Everyone starts wanting to pitch you their investment idea and it can burn down friendships when their ideas are bad. Being a VC to your friends is a path to sadness for everyone.
Mainly though if all the purpose-giving focus was on just getting money and the related grinding to begin with.
Getting mega-rich didn't take the purpose out of Steve Jobs, for example, which was focused on building stuff with some specific twist (his idea of good design). Or Steve Wozniak for that matter, he found hobbies aplenty. Or take the Rolling Stones. Filthy rich, but did they ever give the impression they got bored? Or Dylan, equally rich, which doesn't even have the extravagant lifestyle of models and exotic vacations and high life the Stones had, but is still content to record, jam, play concerts etc. into his 80s.
If the person has other interests, from programming to mountaineering, and from politics to art, they can still be there with or without money. Like the "guitarist in the local jazz and blues scene" thing.
It often gets described as washed up rather than bored, but yes.
Dylan is a good contrast.
It's not being an "entertainer", as his is not Mick Jagger's song and dance style
Open a bookshop, being a rare book dealer, open a small museum about an author, research on a particular topic and write books...
That would be the ultimate dream, though I am sure I won't ever be near to fulfill it.
At a certain level of wealth, any job you can do can be done by someone else better and cheaper
Many people overly focus on what they want to retire FROM - work, but not what they want to retire TO - hobbies/volunteer work/etc.
Basic eating healthier, exercising more and consumption-based things like travel are not going to fill the gap left by a full-time job. One can quickly get bored and/or run out of money with that kind of mindset.
Given enough money, or whenever I do retire .. I'd spend my time making music, photographs, do even more reading, etc. Anything that occupies your time and exercises both your body & mind are important.
Why not a functional bookshop? You don't need money, you need to work on the plan(s). How do museums work? Where is the crude draft for the book?
I had a chat with a guy once who had a laundry list of things he wanted to accomplish but had convinced himself non of it was possible without money. About 1/3 of the list were things one could just go do right now.I think a hundred life times worth of stuff It was mostly helping people in need. One could definitely not help anyone and convince the self it is because it always costs money????
Some non profit here was selling unwanted books for 1-2 euro. I spend an hour or so typing titles on my phone mostly stuff published long ago and bought a whole stack of 200+ euro books. I haven't looked at them and didn't try to sell any but I'm sure it was money well spend for an hour of fun.
You don't need a machine gun, fight with your bare hands.
It takes a lot of time and it's very hard if you have a full time job.
https://app.thestorygraph.com/books/c9fb361a-30ef-45d5-b777-...
What amazes me is that between audible, kindle, libby, and a few other places, we live in a world where books are that available from the comfort of a cozy recliner. Truly the greatest wonder of the modern age.
Money doesn't buy time, whatever you like you'd be better off starting now then at some point in the future when you think you have enough money because you make the fallacious equation "enough money = enough time" but that is wrong because mental and physical acuity diminishes with time so a minute in your 20s is worth more than a minute in your 30s and much more than a minute in your 60s etc...also odds of mental/physical illnesses increase, life gets in the way in modalities that you don't expect yet, inflation, collapse of society...in one word entropy.
Money cannot beat entropy or slow it down
So you’re Dickey from The Talented Mr. Ripely?
This is common advice because it turns good relationships bad, that manifests as viewing former friends as shysters
I've personally lent money to friends when they needed it, and been paid back once they got stuff sorted out.
Though in my younger days I was far less careful, so lending money did indeed go poorly.
Even in the case you describe, it’s much better to gift it: “if you want or are able to pay me back some day, go for it, but I don’t expect or need it.”
It seemed obvious that it was a small gamble for me, a big gamble for my friend, but he was doing all the right things.
VCs don’t waste time with concerns over failed investments.
When you hand over some money, you are accepting the risk.
Including complications, which are likely. Treat the money like a gamble, not the friendship.
I was really glad I did. My friend created a successful business after working toward that with major ups & downs for over ten years.
Then he got cancer, and died a year later. I got no money back. But it was the best investment I ever made. His dream came true and that mattered so much to him. That he pulled it off, and his customers loved him and his business.
Don’t invest in a friend if the investment isn’t about genuinely helping them.
If you can afford to.
Personally I've found the problematic ones to be those who feel like they're obliged to act deferrentially once money is involved.
The blunt/honest ones that don't change their personality like that still seem ok.
But you have to have something keeping you busy that makes you feel like you have a purpose.
This contrasts sharply with the purpose I felt when I had less money and was struggling to build my business. Back then, everything felt deeply do-or-die meaningful. Now, no amount of exercise, goodwill, or intellectual pursuits compares in terms of providing that same sense of purpose.
I don’t think humans need the pursuit of money itself to be happy, but once the foundational needs in Maslow’s hierarchy are met, the higher levels often feel less urgent—and, paradoxically, less fulfilling. There seems to be diminishing returns from “work” as a source of purpose.
So everyone (at least me) has this fantasy of how much better it would be to learn things on their own schedule for pleasure without undue pressure, but they don’t realize the pressure to survive was what made it feel so meaningful without that they soon fall into dilletantism.
For all his issues I think this is why Musk has gotten so much done, because he ups the ante enough to feel real risk if be fails.
The trick is to find a place between dilletantism and burnout.
This is why I stopped striving for success on that scale and returned to only work a small software job.
A suggestion for your consideration, or that of anyone in a similar position: give enough of the money away that this stops being true, and find fulfilling paid work (not necessarily in that order). I strongly suspect, from my own experience, that there's an amount of savings that you can keep that is adequate to remove any worry about winding up on the streets (or being stuck with work that actually turns out to suck, etc), without making further earning feel pointless to your own comfort. I think there's an ethical case for doing this even if it made you less happy, but even better if it's win-win.
I think it is worse actually.
Living a double life like that doesn't seem right to me. It has something to do, perhaps, with the type of people you're surrounding yourself with. If someone can't be friends with you without asking you for money why are you keeping such people around in the first place.
I wouldn't imagine being friends with someone and not trusting them with knowing how successful I am.
I think maybe, and this might be a cultural thing, a lot of people tend to use the word lightly. I simply wouldn't get to a stage of being friends with someone I am not able to trust in such a way that I have to hide how much money I have from them.
If your high school friend earns 50k a year and you earn 100 then I mean sure, you have different toys, bigger house, whatever, but you're both existing in the same universe with similar constraints.
If your high school friend earns 50k a year and you suddenly have 60 million like the guy in the post then it's more of a test because your lifestyle can just differ hugely.
Some people can handle it but with others there will be an underlying resentment. There are lots of layers to it. They look for work - you look for suitable employees.
Having said that, in my experience there are only really a few major cut-offs, one between homeless/terminally skint and working, one between working and being able to live off of investment income, _maybe_ one at the sort of bodyguard required super famous level. Inside those it's just sort of like, yeah ok, your car/yacht/jet/whatever is better than mine, cool.
How do you pick you hourly rate? If a friend of yours of the past came to you and asked you to consult for him, and your friend offered you say $80 USD per hour, would you find it offensively low? For someone who doesn’t have a lot and wants to hire consultants for their small projects, I think offering $80 USD per hour is not bad. But I’m curious to know how that amount feels to a potential consultant if the consultant already had a lot. Or do you prefer taking a percentage of shares in your friend’s company as pay? Or something else?
I’m nowhere near rich, but when I was consulting full time of I had enough hours to hit my “ok” target for the year, it felt right to be flexible with some of the rest of my time …
A fair formula that i was given years ago is;
Take the annual salary you would be paid if you were an employee, add 30% to it for overhead/profit and divide by 48 (working weeks in a year) to get your weekly rate. Divide by 40hrs to get the hourly rate.
Another one is to take your annual salary, divide by 250 (working days in a year) to get your daily rate and increase that by 30%, billing in daily units.
The above formula can and should be tweaked based on the project, client, your needs etc.
What you describe is a reasonable approach for a freelancer who expects to bill most working hours. It falls apart for a lot of consulting scenarios where you bill fewer hours and spend more time generating work. In that case you may be better off setting rates so that e.g. 1000 billed hours will reach your base target salary equivalent...
OTOH, this is more or less how clients themselves expect to be billed so if you deviate too much without any logical explanation, they will simply go elsewhere.
Again, very much depends on the context. Contract engineering that maps roughly to n FTE is often as you suggest, consulting rarely.
If you need to do marketing to get clients, meet clients, etc to close contracts then I guess you should expect only about 20h per week of billable work as the rest is on you. So you need to at least double the hourly rate.
The time to do that was _before_ writing a blog post titled "I am rich" and submitting it to HN
Funnily enough, the link is to a tweet describing how he wired all his money to his parents.
Kind of ironic, but that kind of sounds like the people who've been saying those things aren't the most important in life might have been right all along?
Heck even for good therapy, you need to have those.
Therapy requires there to be therapists, and for them to be recognized as a need, and for their expertise to be valued, and it's only in America, with it's patchwork of healthcare insurance, that therapy, as paid for by patients, could really take hold. Other counties have no such system, that individuals are used to paying $x00/session four times a month out of pocket. But in America, since other healthcare's expensive to access, paying for one out of pocket seems like par for the course.
Most countries then simply don't spend the money on therapy, hence fewer therapists. That's not to say those country are poor, just that they have other priorities.
What are these oft referenced insecurities? It's hard to get a read on this without details, but dumping your girlfriend to do random selfish shit (climb mountain, go to Hawaii, etc.) - it's not a surprise he's unfulfilled (though working on doge would be exciting).
This trap of 'working on yourself' that leads to endless mindfulness and narcissism leads you to become aloof. People tend to derive purpose from community, friends, and family. This is what religion used to give people independent of the pseudoscience.
Being financially independent is great, but it doesn't bring fulfillment.
A long way to say spend time with friends, work on a relationship, get married, have kids. People can do what they want, but most people will likely be the most content doing this. If you can find something to work on you're also excited about great, can do that too.
You can only dick around traveling and 'finding yourself' for so long, it gets old and repetitive.
I'm also in my mid 30s and I still find travelling eye opening in a way that books are not (and I do read a lot, including when I travel). And on my last trip I met a retired couple who spent three weeks traveling in their car and they told me they used to have a boat with which they'd sail around the world.
[1] English version from a spammy website here: https://www.academia.edu/25240089/Siegfried_Kracauer_Travel_... , Spanish version from a real website here: https://antroposmoderno.com/antro-version-imprimir.php?id_ar...
That's an incredibly arrogant view of the world and doesn't match my experience. But you need time.
In particular when you experience the world by sailboat, you get a glimpse of its true size.
I advice all people I meet to stop travelling, and to spend more time with themselves and explore their inside, instead of being captivated by the outside, like a child by a new shiny toy.
The world would truly be a better place if that ever happened.
Having lived through this arc myself, this is excellent advice. While the most enlightened/mature people have no problem just being happy for you, this still leaves a lot people for who a significant disparity in wealth/success becomes a problem. It ends up impacting the nature of your relationship with them in subtle but significant ways and it can be very hard to get past. I've found it's just better to avoid the issue by being as stealth as possible about wealth (while still being honest and true to yourself).
I'm good friends with some very rich people. Everyone knows they have money. They learned how to say no, and how to let go of people who just want to milk them for cash.
Might seem counterproductive or even "toxic" but it's sure better than the nihlism that the author is expressing.
It shows a total lack of introspection as well as connections with the people, the Earth, and the universe as a whole.
Go eat some psychedelics and travel inside yourself for a while. Listen to what a tree far in a forest has to say. You'll know what to do with your dragon hoard in no time, I guarantee it.
There is a sacred responsibility implicit in the acquisition of resources. It implicitly says "I know what to do better with these resources than others." To take on that responsibility then do nothing with it, and actually publicize you don't know what to do with it, is disgraceful. As long as there is suffering, there is more work to be done.
Move aside and let people who know what to do take over.
In the past, when people didn't know what to do with resources, the people would very loudly & painfully clawback the misallocated hoards and make better use of them. Recently, a CEO that didn't know what to do with resources & took active part in misusing them returned his misallocation to others.
This kind of misallocation is a universal crime. A life is nothing compared to the magnitude of this crime. Ideas of "ownership" and "it's my money" are irrelevant. The crime stands, and the justice of balance for this crime always comes, one way or another.
Escaping the responsibility of this duty, and the negligence of misusing funds, is easy; sell everything you own and reallocate resources to others who are better able to manage them.
Revolution is the "final" reaction to misallocated funds. It is when a mass of misaligned, foolish resource allocators who collectively lost their way and lack all vision to allocate, hoard most wealth. This misallocation chokes out the society they've hoarded from, like a blood clot, and leads to a death of the society if not addressed.
I would be very scared right now to be part of the group of people who have hoarded resources and mismanaged them, because this planet is on the cusp of a clawback.
Alternatively, if visionary resource allocators are allowed to operate, it brings wealth to everyone. It raises the standards of existence, brings about lasting peace, and makes for a prosperous existence. These visionary allocators are most definitely not in operation in these times, and it shows.
I will dream of a day when this changes. I hope that this change occurs peacefully, and with minimal suffering, even to those who has caused incomprehensible suffering due to their greed.
A noble sentiment that I think resonates with most people.
> There is a sacred responsibility implicit in the acquisition of resources. It implicitly says "I know what to do better with these resources than others."
No, it doesn't. I may 'acquire resources' and use them (or not) simply because nobody else is around who wants them more. I may spend money on something frivolous (e.g. going to the movies), even while knowing there's a possibility that donating it to some 501c3 (or some other person directly) could end up improving lives significantly more than mine was improved from watching the movie, and there's absolutely nothing wrong with that.
> This kind of misallocation is a universal crime.
We have fundamentally different conceptions of property rights.
You seem to believe that people who come into money have a responsibility of spending it in ways that you think are important. In my mind, unless they're ill-gotten gains, they've already improved people's lives proportionally, and they can spend or not spend the value others have accrued to them as they see fit.
There are economic systems where committees get to decide the most appropriate allocation of resources, independent of the people who "amass" the resources themselves. These systems universally end up with lower levels of societal wellbeing than ones where property rights are respected.
To be less charitable you seem like an arrogant person at best to tell people they should always know and allocate resources aligning with your values. I am almost sure all your efforts for this cause while maybe well meaning will be in vain due to your attitude.
I left the tech world seven years ago after a "career" of five years, not super wealthy but having enough saved/invested that I could live frugally and it would grow slowly on its own. I've been doing a wide variety of things mostly outdoors, but these last three years I've been learning to play the fiddle and it's took over my life in a good way.
It's been a rich seven years and aside from occasional brief moments of doubt, I'm very glad I did what I did. I have had time to focus on:
- health (most awesomely, my eyesight has improved dramatically)
- family and community and relationships
- simply being in the real world (nature)
- learning about and changing my behaviors/habits to be more who I want to be
- passions - particularly trying to protect habitats from being destroyed, which is very rewarding even if they might still get destroyed someday, they've gotten to exist for years longer than they would have.
- each thing that's caught my curiosity: gardening, forest conservation, foraging and cooking, building and carpentry, learning various skills and now most of all, the fiddle.
I won't say it's all been easy. I've wrestled with a lot of questioning of what matters and what to give myself to - because I have the choice and there is no obvious default path anymore. But I always feel my way into an answer - even if it has shifted around over time.
I don't have kids, I want to, and I think about how I'll find someone to do that with. I bet it will happen, I live in a rural area though so I pretty much have to travel to meet someone. Meanwhile, I have a sweet nephew and I get to spend a lot of time actively being his uncle.
The world is far more interesting and wild and beautiful than I think most of us have been led to believe.
That sounds awesome - tell us more.
Not as hard or impossible as it first appears but still harder.
It's more likely exaggeration referring to actual camel (the large animal of the area) and the eye of a needle (an example of the smallest hole one would be readily familiar with at the time).
If it was reffering to a named place, the very capable in both Jewish and Greek authors of the New Testament wouldn't have translated it as "τρυπήματος ῥαφίδος" (needle's opening) or "τρυμαλιᾶς ῥαφίδος" (needle's hole), as opposed to something like "narrow gate" or similar that would convey to people unfamiliar with Jerusalem the point.
Also it just doesn’t make sense.
Otherwise it’s like complaining about citing “words printed on paper” when citing a book or journal.
What exactly was incorrect about Dans video? (He’s great BTW)
These new information medium was invented for a reason, in particular, the economic efficiency of conveying information.
I would suggest people learn to use them.
Want higher quality content? Then go to TikTok.
The best part is you couldn’t answer what was wrong with Dan’s content.
Matters of religion (as well as philosophy) simply can't be covered in bite-size 2-minute "shorts".
It’s dangerous to argue that you need long-form articles to explain ideas.
There's a lot of discussion on this verse. Apparently, the gate interpretation didn't exist until the 11 century.
It was rethought to be Rope for a while but this blog post discredits that. https://kiwihellenist.blogspot.com/2023/11/camel.html
This idea that he meant "it's hard but not impossible" seems to generally be pushed by wealthy religions and "prosperity gospel" types.
Reading everything else Jesus said, I find it more likely that he literally meant the "eye of an actual needle". He did not seem to be a fan of the rich or powerful in any way.
> Jesus looked at them and said, “With man this is impossible, but with God all things are possible.” (Matthew 19:26, CSB, emphasis mine)
I think Protestant have similar interpretations but I could be wrong as they have many denominations.
Lol, I see you've never heard of the prosperity gospel
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prosperity_theology
"Protestant" is such a broad group of beliefs it's nearly impossible to make any sort of board assertion.
Well, then they aren't rich anymore, and the camel doesn't need to pass through the eye of the needle. Problem solved.
[1]: https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/new-testament-studie...
Arabic word for camel and rope are same in a similar verse.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eye_of_a_needle
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/How_many_angels_can_dance_on...
I agree that there's a parallel between what Jesus meant and your comment—in both cases, wealth is dangerous because it distracts from what's important. To my understanding, Jesus meant that one's heart will be focused on money rather than wanting to follow God. And, like you said, it's really easy to be distracted by material success (money, degrees, fame, etc.). But, none of these things will follow us to the grave. IMO this sort of tunnel vision is really pernicious, because it's so, so easy to fall into.
If you'll allow a personal rant: I recently heard someone say that failure is—somewhat paradoxically—a crucial part of finding happiness, because it loosens our grip on things that are ultimately unimportant. I've been thinking about all this a lot recently myself. Last year I hit a bump in the road w.r.t. my career, due to factors outside of my control. So, for the first time, I was suddenly failing my subconscious goal to climb the ladder of achievement. I started feeling adrift and demotivated, and the obvious solutions (therapy, medication, more regular exercise) didn't help.
It eventually forced me to really sit down and take a hard look at my priorities in life. Speaking concretely, this meant 1) accepting that I might not get what I had wanted out of my career, and because I'm a Christian, 2) focusing instead on how I can serve God every day (love others more, be much more open about my faith, volunteer at church and elsewhere, etc.). That's much easier said than done, of course, but I've just gotta take the baby steps that I can and trust God with the rest.
It's only been a few months since I came to this conclusion, but I feel like it's changed my life. I've become much less stressed, and I feel much more fulfilled. Honestly, it's like I have hope again in my future.
Naïvely I want to say something like "therefore, everyone should try to find whatever brings them this fulfillment." But this might be too weak of a statement, because I really think there's only one true answer to this question.
P.S. As for the verse you quoted (Matthew 19:24), I'd be remiss not to point out what Jesus says a few verses later: "With man this is impossible, but with God all things are possible." :-)
I wish I could be more religious, in a sense, but I just can't get my head around the concept of "serving" or "fearing" god. It's not how I relate to "the divine" at all. Power to you, though.
If you do think that can be given a try then hey.. we (my wife and me, my wife more than me) are looking to build something and could do with some investment to take that risk.
I’ll bet literally every person here in the comments can do that.
It's almost as if you can either have wealth/comfort or purpose/fulfillment, but it's vanishingly rare to have both at the same time.
I understand this serves an inflation control mechanism in our highly unequal system. The wealthy have comparatively so much money that the system cannot afford them to spend like normal people would. It would put too much currency in circulation and cause massive inflation. The system needs the wealthy to keep investing in ventures to create more busy-work, filled with NPCs and insatiable people who will also create more busy-work if they get rich.
The system needs to keep the money circulating in a very tight loop. Its journey from the money printer back to government hands needs to be very short in order to allow the government and corporations to retain the increasing degree of control that they need to maintain the status quo.
Wealth doesn't make it difficult to figure out what to do with your life if you never thought wealth is the goal. The problem is that the sole life goal for this person was to get rich, and now that's the endgame, and he doesn't know what to do.
If the goal, instead, was to have fun, to foster a strong social circle, good relationships, to do things for and with them, to have hobbies, to learn new things, to challenge yourself, etc, he'd just think "oh cool, now I can do more of those without having to spend X hours a day working".
It is actually a thinly veiled sociopath/psychopath/narcissist that has fully bought into hyper-capitalism being the endgame of humanity thing.
I don't suggest mere philanthropy, but structural change. (The nature of which I will not attempt to dictate; after all, identifying the problem doesn't mean I know a solution.)
You can be a rich asshole.
And you can "just get by" but be the most loved grand-father the earth has borne.
https://www.cse.cuhk.edu.hk/~cslui/JOKE/leader.html
The core problems (health, relationships, love troubles, depression, and so on) can be the same in both poor and rich.
But the poor additional have all kinds of very heavy problems that the rich have solved. Hate your boss/job? They have "fuck you money", they don't need to work. Your kid needs surgery? They can afford many times over what would kill you financially. Trouble making rent? Not a problem for them. And so on. Stuck in a warn torn country? Not a problem for them. Wife wants a divorce and half the fortune? No problemo, you're still rich after giving that away.
Don't the rich also have some unique-to-the-rich problems? Yes, but of the nice-to-have (e.g. "people approach me just because I have money") or "I'm too adjusted to this level of the hedonic treadmill, woe be me" variety.
The contest is between being rich and poor with "all other things being equal". Anything else doesn't make sense, might as well ask: do you prefer being rich facing the firing squad, or poor having drinks with friends?
So, compared to being poor with an incurable disease? Yes, 100 times over.
>Having lived a bit in both worlds I’m not really sure it’s so simple as you’re making it out to be.
Rather it's so simple a choice that you had to add the "incurable disease" to the rich side to tip the balance.
They're not, but for comparing one should only account for things that are different because of being rich vs poor. Having an incurrable disease is not that, as it can perfectly well happen to both rich and poor (and the rich would get better treatment for it anyway, and it wont cost them their house or savings).
e: advice comes in all shapes and forms. you want me to lie to him? what would buddha do
Wealth is something that removes obstacles to figuring out what to do with your life. If you had "being wealthy" as the goal itself, no wonder you're now feeling aimless. Instead, you should have been living your life, and now you'd think "great, now I can continue doing what I've been doing, except I don't need to worry about money".
Work shouldn't be your life. At most, work should be an interesting thing you do for the challenge, and which you'd do even if you weren't getting paid to.
I almost wrote young people, but any will do, if they are stuggling and are confused where you have clarity, you can be of immense help.
Maybe getting back with that amazing girlfriend wouldn't be bad idea, but that is beyond :) this post.
https://completionistacademy.com/meet_coach_jake
for real though
I very much dislike the trend of calling other people NPCs.
When you feel tempted to see someone else as an NPC, it might be helpful to remember the concept of "sonder":
> the realization that each random passerby is living a life as vivid and complex as your own—populated with their own ambitions, friends, routines, worries and inherited craziness—an epic story that continues invisibly around you like an anthill sprawling deep underground, with elaborate passageways to thousands of other lives that you’ll never know existed, in which you might appear only once, as an extra sipping coffee in the background, as a blur of traffic passing on the highway, as a lighted window at dusk.
https://www.dictionaryofobscuresorrows.com/post/23536922667/...
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
(for anyone seeing this later, my comment above was originally more of an attack on the author, which is what dang was rightly calling out.)
On HN, the onus is on commenters not to react to the bits they find most provocative. There's even a site guideline about that: "Please don't pick the most provocative thing in an article or post to complain about in the thread. Find something interesting to respond to instead." - https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
That is truly insulting.
There's another point too: it's easy to misinterpret what someone means by a single token like that. It may have an obvious meaning to you, but it isn't clear what the author had in mind. This isn't nearly enough information to justify an extreme conclusion like "sociopath", and when you jump to such a label, what you're doing is not so different than what you're complaining about in the OP.
The fact that people can believe things via “faith” that have no empirical basis in reality scares me. It certainly doesn’t provide any inner peace or grounding to me.
As for faith, why do we all toil when, in godless philosophy, everything we do is fundamentally meaningless? Why do you persist? What is that reason, if not illogical faith in some purpose. Read Camus.
I have no idea what “spiritual” means in this context, so until you can clearly define that, my position is: no, we’re just animals.
> As for faith, why do we all toil when, in godless philosophy, everything we do is fundamentally meaningless? Why do you persist? What is that reason, if not illogical faith in some purpose. Read Camus.
I don’t believe I (or anyone else) have any fundamental purpose for existing. If you have evidence to the contrary, please share.
Eliade, Mircea. The Quest: History and Meaning in Religion. University of Chicago Press, 1984
Now, while Eliade’s word is not final, I think it touches on your question of what spiritual means in the context of mankind. Being a spiritual animal means being an animal embodied with consciousness, an animal that is aware of its existence in both space AND time.
Eliade is a great read for a number of reasons but the best reason is because he can be read from an atheistic or religious perspective and his passages are no less revelatory. If you want to believe that there is no purpose to existing that is fine, I wouldn’t recommend it, but that is fine. But that doesn’t take away from the fact that consciousness transcends evolutionary necessity and by that nature alone deserves serious and legitimate thought and preservation.
> Being a spiritual animal means being an animal embodied with consciousness, an animal that is aware of its existence in both space AND time.
So, you're defining "spiritual" as "conscious." That's fine, but why not say "conscious"? It's clearer that way.
Under this definition, I agree that we are spiritual (conscious) animals.
But I'm willing to bet that the original poster I responded to used the word "spiritual" in a different sense than you do, which is a problem. When you both sort out what you're actually saying, let me know!
Edit to add one more point:
> But that doesn’t take away from the fact that consciousness transcends evolutionary necessity
I think the phrase "evolutionary necessity" is problematic on its own from a biological perspective, but even if we ignore that, do you have any sources for this claim?
I don’t think it’s over your head I just think it’s academic literary fluff from Eliade, but at its core it breaks down that developing consciousness meant that we also developed methods to conceptualize something that was more real than reality itself. For example, numbers do not “exist” in reality, but represent reality more accurately than it represents itself most of the time. That’s why they’re so useful.
There are truths that are abstracted out of reality, that is a commonplace in human existence - sacred, spiritual, divine, esoteric, whatever you want to call it, there is an innate connection between humankind and something that is beyond humankind (a sort of meta-reality) and that relationship has aided our development since the dawn of consciousness. Connecting that to any one religion would be a fools errand but it does describe how our very being is tied to something more than just the damned physical world, more than just animalistic instinct. It’s all abstraction.
That is my interpretation anyway.
>So, you’re defining “spiritual” as “conscious.”
Good callout, I wasn’t very specific. I think conscious is the baseline reality, it makes being spiritual a possibility. A prerequisite. Being spiritual would be the willingness to use that consciousness to abstract specifically on the human condition, and voluntarily conclude that we ourselves have a part to play in something that is more real than the reality in front of us.
I can’t speak for the original poster, but I am still developing what I consider to be my spiritual knowledge, and I don’t foresee myself learning all there is to be known any time soon. Still young in that regard.
Edit for your edit on transcending evolutionary necessity: No sources, but let’s say even if, for example, the theory that consciousness emerged in early hominids as a side effect of a brain that rapidly grew to visually detect snakes[1], even in that scenario consciousness is still the side effect. And that means that a prerequisite to spiritual abstraction would be just an evolutionary side effect.
We still do not understand the evolutionary emergence of consciousness and why it appears to be so rare, so I’m not going to act like I have the answers there. But billions of years passed on earth before a human first questioned their place in the universe, and to me that is self-evidence of a lack of evolutionarily necessity. I understand if that conclusion is not solid enough for most though.
1. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5081170/
I don't know what "beyond humankind" means in this context, and I don't know what "our very being tied to something more than the physical world" means.
Again, maybe it's just over my head, but can you clearly explain what you mean by all of these things?
> Being spiritual would be the willingness to use that consciousness to abstract specifically on the human condition, and voluntarily conclude that we ourselves have a part to play in something that is more real than the reality in front of us.
And yeah, I'm definitely not in agreement with us being "spiritual" under this definition, because the premise that it's possible for something to be "more real than the reality in front of us" doesn't make any sense to me.
Abstractions, at least ones that survive over long periods of time, like the use of numbers, or like human spirituality, tend to contain within them a large collection of truths. Large collections of truths are what I mean by a greater reality, because they are not reality, they are abstracted ideas that are based on reality, but serve a greater purpose.
Something being more real than the reality in front of us is not a new idea, idealism was introduced by Plato 2,400 years ago suggesting that true reality lies in the world of perfect ideas, otherwise put, a reality more real than the physical world.
Like I said though, all of this is my interpretations of readings and based on my own years of thought and experience.
I'm familiar with idealism and I definitely got the sense that you were coming from that perspective. As you might have guessed, I'm a naturalist, and probably also a materialist, because I think naturalism most closely comports with what we understand about how the universe works. While idealism is interesting to read about, I have yet to meet anyone that could provide evidence for the fact that it is actually correct and naturalism is wrong, so that's why I was asking. I'm personally not that interested in philosophical concepts that have no evidence or application in the real world.
I'm also not aware of evidence for any "truths" that are themselves inherent to any abstractions we use as a species. For example, I can write an equation like so:
x + 7 = 10
I can solve for X and find that it is 3, and verify that my answer is correct by checking it against the original equation. I can do all of that using the abstractions we've developed and nothing more. But none of these truths are actually inherent to the abstraction of numbers; I could just have easily put seven apples in front of me, and added apples to another pile until I arrived at a total of 10 to find my answer.
Could you give me an example of an abstraction which contains a truth that does not ultimately derive from the material, as in the example above?
And to your apple example, I never implied that numbers do not originate in the material world or are not derived from there, only that their true utility is realized when they have been abstracted over all the other types of fruit, and animals, and crops, etc. What started as piles of apples becomes something like one level of abstraction higher than a pile of apples, it becomes 10. But you have specifically said you have no interest in discussing things of this nature so I’ll stop. But I’m leaving this paragraph because I took the time to write it.
Your request for an abstraction that does not derive from the material is a bit of an impossible task isn’t it? And like I said I never claimed that these abstractions did not originate in the material, just that over time they accumulated related truths to become greater than the material itself.
The abstraction itself exists outside of the material world, we’ve already beaten that horse, but for an example of ‘accumulating related truths to become greater than the material itself’ I would point to food.
Materially, food serves to nurture and satiate, to be found and eaten. But one level up, when abstracted upon, food becomes information. It becomes where to find the food, when the food appears, how much of the food is around. It provides an advantage to those that think in those terms instead of those that react to the appearance of food and eat it and move on to find some more. Animals over time evolve around food and food availability, they move seasonally to find it, they give birth near it, etc. That is not the same as abstracting information from food—this has spearheaded our evolutionary course from hunting and gathering, to agriculture, to squeezing the life out of our planet in pursuit of absolute control of our surroundings (food).
The study you cited doesn't appear to have anything to say about the general appearance of consciousness, so I don't think it's really relevant to our discussion here.
> We still do not understand the evolutionary emergence of consciousness and why it appears to be so rare, so I’m not going to act like I have the answers there.
Yes, I agree 100%. But because of this, I don't think you're correct in claiming outright that consciousness transcends evolutionary necessity (this is a positive claim that requires evidence). It's OK to say we don't know!
https://arxiv.org/abs/1606.00821
Which really just breaks down consciousness potentially being a byproduct of having a drastically higher number of neurological connections than lesser developed animal brains.
So combining the two, the growing brain, caused by an increase in size of the visual cortex to detect snake patterns, increased the number of neurological connections and as a result the brain gradually became consciously aware. That’s just one theory that I used.
And I 100% agree it’s okay to say that we don’t know, we don’t. And I don’t! But that won’t stop me from thinking about it like, a lot.
Edit: spelling
More accurate to my intent would be “consciousness is untethered by evolutionary necessity” maybe?
My contention is that the absolute most we can say about the topic of the evolution of consciousness is "we don't yet know how or why consciousness evolved."
I respect your contention but I think we’re going in circles over semantics now.
Using your definition of spirituality, this is a tautology.
I don’t see how we were going in circles; I was simply trying to get you to realize that something that seemed important to our discussion which you claimed as “fact” is about as far from fact as can be. Take care!
I didn't say existing, but persisting. This is kind of the basis of the point I was making. Clearly you do believe you have a fundamental purpose for persisting, as do most people - otherwise we would see more people deciding to stop living once they have come to the conclusion they have no fundamental purpose.
As to the point of humans being "just animals", you are correct; we are the only "just animals" that have spiritual religion as an emergent property of our species. Given where you are anchoring the beginnings of this discussion, I feel starting your research on the evolutionary origin of religion would be a good starting point to understanding what I mean when I say homo sapiens are a spiritual species.
> Clearly you do believe you have a fundamental purpose for persisting
I don't. Also, believing that I have no fundamental purpose for persisting is not the same as me wishing to die.
Edit: after thinking about this a bit more, I realized that maybe we disagree over the meaning of the word "fundamental," so let me clarify: I do have reasons for wanting to continue to live, but those reasons are 1) many, and 2) not static over time. 10 years from now, I will likely have different reasons for wanting to persist. I also dislike the word "purpose," as it can imply some kind of "grand plan" or other woo that I vehemently reject. I apologize if I'm being too bristly at your use of terms, but I would better characterize my thoughts as: I have multiple reasons for wanting to persist, which change over time, are grounded in well being of myself and others around me, and not necessarily inherent to me as a person.
I don't believe any of this rises to "illogical faith in some purpose" as you originally asserted.
> Given where you are anchoring the beginnings of this discussion, I feel starting your research on the evolutionary origin of religion would be a good starting point to understanding what I mean when I say homo sapiens are a spiritual species.
If you claim something (especially something containing a term as fraught with varied meanings as "spiritual"), you should be prepared to explain what you mean, not say "go start some research," which among other things is presumptuous. Based on what you said here, I'll assume that by "spiritual animals" you just meant "animals that have developed religion," and we are in agreement. You can drop the term "spiritual" in that case as it just adds confusion.
So we are animals that have developed religion. So what? It doesn't change my initial point, which is that faith (in the traditional definition of the word) is irrational. People are of course free to believe whatever they want, but when their unsupported beliefs start to affect my life via the legal/educational/judicial/healthcare systems in my country, or when people try to assert that my evidence-based beliefs are somehow faith-based, you better believe I'm going to speak out about it.
And if you only want to do something for 4 weeks at a time then do that. Where’s the despair coming from?
Also, this person loves capitalism so much because it worked for them. But then the way they say like it’s the greatest gift ever seems so out of touch.
so i'm guessing the problem isn't really that bad, eh?
Therapy can, at best, help one identify issues and suggest ways to make improvements.
When you know all the issues and can’t make changes, therapy doesn’t do much.
Maybe you don't believe that a professional therapist can offer that guidance, of course.
It's not a panacea, and the way people talk about it drives me crazy. There are many different modalities, with very different levels of effectiveness for any given person. CBT is awful for me, for example, and it's the most popular modality. I also did ketamine-assisted therapy and it absolutely changed my life.
There are definitely people who won't get anything from it, but the reflexive "therapy is useless" is a weird thing to perform when it's obviously helped a ton of people.
[1]: https://morepablo.com/2023/12/therapy-and-wellness.html
The next session was my last, when I told him I had figured out the issue. I don't even know what he said any more, but I haven't had that particular kind of depression recur for like 6 years now.
Gives no guarantees for your own experience of course, just wanted to give a different perspective.
Or whatever you want really. I recently contemplated what I would do if I won the lottery and arrived at that conclusion. Hopefully you arrive at yours.
In SF for example, even after a housing project is approved, it can be challenged at any point for any reason by the community or politicians. Even projects that meet all regulations can be rejected for any reason, usually that vibes are bad. I think over half of SF is some kind of historical district. Way too much is zoned for SFHs in the city limits. etc.
It's little wonder why housing projects are so expensive in cities that have such strong NIMBYs. Like is it so unreasonable to ask for a bunch of 4 story single stair apartment buildings to be allowed to even be legal?
The problem is that making tech more efficient is rarely anything more than a simple capital problem. So the real question is - where is there social benefit but no money?