I've always believed that there are no adults. That is the great secret of life that everyone should learn when they turn 18 or so. There are no adults. All those kids that you knew through your schooldays, are still around and still doing the same kind or vicious things that they did way back when. At least some of them are, the rest move on and realize that since there are no adults to look after things, it's time to roll up your sleeves and get to work, making the world better for kids of all ages from 9 to 99.
When I was a (young) child, "adult" was just a stand-in for "those people who ran the world". Now I realize that we're all big children, and it's really just glue and momentum that keeps the world turning.
"Grown-ups don't look like grown-ups on the inside either. Outside, they're big and thoughtless and they always know what they're doing. Inside, they look just like they always have. Like they did when they were your age. Truth is, there aren't any grown-ups. Not one, in the whole wide world." Neil Gaiman, The Ocean at the End of the Lane
First, I don't agree that "the light" never comes back. It is, however, extremely rare. Usually, it involves a transformation similar to a deep religious experience that occurs over months (i.e. spending 6 months in an ashram). But many yuppies who do that sort of thing still learn nothing, so no guarantees.
Second, creative "light" vs. fear is a false dichotomy.
Game of Thrones quote time:
Bran: Can a man still be brave if he's afraid?
Ned Stark: That is the only time a man can be brave.
What kills creativity is giving in to fear (cowardice) and especially the daily compromises that don't feel cowardly but are. The problem is not the emotion (of fear) itself. We need fear. (If nothing else, I'd imagine that the OP agrees we need to fear mediocrity and creative atrophy.) What we don't need is to feed the senseless fear and status insecurity that modern society seems to encourage.
Archie Gates: You're scared, right?
Conrad Vig: Maybe.
Archie Gates: The way it works is, you do the thing you're scared shitless of,
and you get the courage AFTER you do it, not before you do it.
Conrad Vig: That's a dumbass way to work. It should be the other way around.
Archie Gates: I know. That's the way it works.
There can be a lot of creativity and beauty in banking and law. It's just very specialized that a poet might not see it. The same is true for mathematics. A poet might not think that mathematical formulas are beautiful and even be ignorantly unable to find beauty in formulas and then feel superior when he goes out and finds so much beauty in the sky.
There are plenty of dull poets out there too that are uninspired and passionless.
Agreed. Plenty of lawyers work with their hearts and eschew money. Plenty of research mathematicians are more interested in padding their publication record than in mathematics itself.
> Then there are the others. They have no passion and have deep love for money. The most common example of this is a lawyer or banker. They craft nothing. They care not about who they offer their service to but instead care about how much money they will make. Their light is no where to be found.
The attack on lawyers and bankers was unfair. At their best, they are serving others. Service is as important a virtue as any, and it is one that is learned. Children aren't born servers; they are born takers. Serving others, deferring to others, is a sign of maturity. There are virtues in maturity, just as there are in youth. Service, wisdom, patience. These are just as important as imagination, creativity, craft. All are rays of light, all manifest them according to their particular inclination. The important thing is to shine brightly in whatever path one is on.
> Serving others, deferring to others, is a sign of maturity.
Why?
I feel like "maturity" is such a nebulous thing. Like "professionalism", it seems to function as a proxy for anything that serves the point that the user is trying to make.
Anybody that thinks lawyers aren't helping people has never needed one and probably isn't the best informed person to be getting advice from on how to serve others.
> The most common example of this is a lawyer or banker. They craft nothing. They care not about who they offer their service to but instead care about how much money they will make.
You could say this about almost any profession. There are bankers who want to give people a chance to succeed, and there are inventors and artists driven solely by profit. To say whether or not a person can "contribute to better the condition of humanity" on the basis of their job is very short-sighted. If the only job someone can get is a dull, 9-5 office job, does that suddenly make them an insignificant person incapable of making a difference?
The author argues against the pursuit of wealth on the grounds that the pursuers do not help people.
In fact, being rich is the single best way to help people.
Being rich expands your reach as an individual. It allows you to fund initiatives that revitalize entire communities: building homes, providing medicine, contributing to science, technology, arts and culture. Bill Gates has fundamentally changed more people's lives than a million middle-class volunteers combined.
If your goal is to help people on a large scale and in a concrete, measurable way, getting rich should be one of your first priorities in life.
>In fact, being rich is the single best way to help people.
Having empathy is key. Being rich alone doesn't help anyone.
In the capitalist state that we live in perhaps you are right, but if there wasn't such an economic divide in the world, that may not stick. In order to get rich in the capitalist state you essentially have to displace capital from others, who could be the very people that you end up helping in the end.
Being rich is an arguably necessary but absolutely not sufficient condition for being better able to help people.
But, then again, the fact that we live in a world that has rich people (wealth disparity) is a fundamental part of why so many people need the help those rich people are often better able to provide in the first place. In that light, the solution is, in fact, a consequence of the problem it's supposed to be solving.
> If your goal is to help people on a large scale and in a concrete, measurable way, getting rich should be one of your first priorities in life.
Or... you could also get a job at a non-profit / NGO / etc. Or you could work on trying to improve government programs so that the social safety net is more efficient and more effective.
Getting rich and doing philanthropy is certainly one way to raise money, but there are other ways to improve the world that don't involve immense personal gain as a first step.
Not sure what you're trying to say. Are you saying that for NGOs/governments to be effective, everyone needs to focus on getting personally rich to maximize how much money they can give via donations / taxes?
If you look too far into the light, you may go blind.
Hard work and iteration is what led to the creation you speak of: the Automobile, Electricity, Artificial Light.
Children's creativity is, for the most part, aimless and inconsistent. None of the men you mention were by any stretch of the imagination, childlike, though Edison could have been following "the light."
Also, including Ford in your theory, for example, someone who used thugs to break unions with baseball bats, also does not speak to lightness.
Being childlike is great if you aren't interested in making money and want to spend your life giving your ideas away, but you'll need a lawyer if you want to make and keep the money from work you've done to make your ideas a reality.
Children are great for the wide-eyed sense of wonder.
But there's something more than a little puerile in a society that only values that particular sense of wonder. A five year old might indeed be more valuable than me today but I suspect that come because he's far more easily directed by the candy and the fluffy bunnies.
On my Facebook feed, the cleverest quips generally come from those old and jaundiced enough to have an ample supply of double entendre and know how to use them. You can see lots of playfulness from the less-than-spritely and smooth-skinned then.
I once read that Americans over-estimate children and under-estimate age (and expertise in general). This shows so well.
Can children enjoy food? Music? Play music properly? Pursuit passions? Spending days glued to a book? Of course, make it a series of books. Obviously, I just listed the obvious activities. Can children feel the full depth of betrayal? Full happiness of unexpected return? Full hopelessness in face of impossible? Full excitement when attaining things once thought impossible?
Children are stupid, shallow, short-sighted, undeveloped. They know nothing save the most primitive urges. They do nothing save screaming for help. They are, in short, very young humans who need growth. They are neither angels nor saints, but CHILDREN.
Wake up, please, from your disrespect and overly-spoiling of children.
Children are perfectly capable of all of the things you listed, have you forgotten what it was like to be one? They're certainly naive, less mature, less self-aware, not as bright, and so on, but they're still there. They're still people, just an earlier form of what they'll grow up to be.
I don't like the "my little Timmy is a one-of-a-kind snowflake genius!" trend either, but that idea is easily less harmful than the idea that children are mindless cattle driven purely by their id. If you treat children like animals, using only external motivation to guide them, don't be surprised when they act like them. If you actually talk to kids and try to get at their real interests and motivations, I bet you'd be surprised at what you find.
This just seems like self-righteous, pretentious drivel. I'm only being honest. Who are you to claim what humans do or do not have value? It is very childish to act is lawyers and bankers have no value. This just makes a caricature of the world and those "great men" you cite.
There's very little exposure to fear and uncertainty today , compared to the past. That's why it's possible for adults to be children forever. I doubt that's a full life experience, though.
Granted, the sense of wonder is important. But to declare that experience is worthless is just stupid. All of the examples he cites, great entrepreneurs, engineers, artists, etc. didn't make their contributions when they were 5 years old, they made them as adults (oh, excuse me, obsolete children) after accumulating years of, guess what, experience.
You need both. Wonder with no experience = Axe Cop. Experience with no wonder = Enron, etc.
I'm really wishing there was a down vote option on stories right about now. Passion and a desire for money are not inherent opposites. Bill Gates, Oprah Winfrey, JK Rowling, and Larry Ellison are all great examples of passionate people that achieved great wealth and then were able to help way more people than most of the rest of us can.
This quote from the article is just plain insulting and ignorant, “Then there are the others. They have no passion and have deep love for money. The most common example of this is a lawyer or banker.”
There are a multitude of lawyers that are passionate about many things and offer their services pro bono to support their cause, whatever it may be.
Bankers can advise people to help them prepare for retirement, create budgets, make sure they are not over paying on taxes, grow the economy and create jobs by lending to early stage businesses started by people that don’t already have a silver spoon in their mouth.
At the end of the day people are just people. Some are good, some are bad; I would like to believe more good than bad. Some are passionate, some are not; if they are without passion we can not change them.
37 comments
[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 92.5 ms ] threadWhen I was a (young) child, "adult" was just a stand-in for "those people who ran the world". Now I realize that we're all big children, and it's really just glue and momentum that keeps the world turning.
Second, creative "light" vs. fear is a false dichotomy.
Game of Thrones quote time:
What kills creativity is giving in to fear (cowardice) and especially the daily compromises that don't feel cowardly but are. The problem is not the emotion (of fear) itself. We need fear. (If nothing else, I'd imagine that the OP agrees we need to fear mediocrity and creative atrophy.) What we don't need is to feed the senseless fear and status insecurity that modern society seems to encourage.I felt like this was worth highlighting.
There are plenty of dull poets out there too that are uninspired and passionless.
"Good, he did not have enough imagination to become a mathematician," he responded.
That's what I used to think, but it's wrong.
> Then there are the others. They have no passion and have deep love for money. The most common example of this is a lawyer or banker. They craft nothing. They care not about who they offer their service to but instead care about how much money they will make. Their light is no where to be found.
This part, however, is very much true.
Why?
I feel like "maturity" is such a nebulous thing. Like "professionalism", it seems to function as a proxy for anything that serves the point that the user is trying to make.
Shallow.
You could say this about almost any profession. There are bankers who want to give people a chance to succeed, and there are inventors and artists driven solely by profit. To say whether or not a person can "contribute to better the condition of humanity" on the basis of their job is very short-sighted. If the only job someone can get is a dull, 9-5 office job, does that suddenly make them an insignificant person incapable of making a difference?
In fact, being rich is the single best way to help people.
Being rich expands your reach as an individual. It allows you to fund initiatives that revitalize entire communities: building homes, providing medicine, contributing to science, technology, arts and culture. Bill Gates has fundamentally changed more people's lives than a million middle-class volunteers combined.
If your goal is to help people on a large scale and in a concrete, measurable way, getting rich should be one of your first priorities in life.
Having empathy is key. Being rich alone doesn't help anyone.
In the capitalist state that we live in perhaps you are right, but if there wasn't such an economic divide in the world, that may not stick. In order to get rich in the capitalist state you essentially have to displace capital from others, who could be the very people that you end up helping in the end.
But, then again, the fact that we live in a world that has rich people (wealth disparity) is a fundamental part of why so many people need the help those rich people are often better able to provide in the first place. In that light, the solution is, in fact, a consequence of the problem it's supposed to be solving.
Or... you could also get a job at a non-profit / NGO / etc. Or you could work on trying to improve government programs so that the social safety net is more efficient and more effective.
Getting rich and doing philanthropy is certainly one way to raise money, but there are other ways to improve the world that don't involve immense personal gain as a first step.
Data?
Hard work and iteration is what led to the creation you speak of: the Automobile, Electricity, Artificial Light.
Children's creativity is, for the most part, aimless and inconsistent. None of the men you mention were by any stretch of the imagination, childlike, though Edison could have been following "the light."
Also, including Ford in your theory, for example, someone who used thugs to break unions with baseball bats, also does not speak to lightness.
Being childlike is great if you aren't interested in making money and want to spend your life giving your ideas away, but you'll need a lawyer if you want to make and keep the money from work you've done to make your ideas a reality.
But there's something more than a little puerile in a society that only values that particular sense of wonder. A five year old might indeed be more valuable than me today but I suspect that come because he's far more easily directed by the candy and the fluffy bunnies.
On my Facebook feed, the cleverest quips generally come from those old and jaundiced enough to have an ample supply of double entendre and know how to use them. You can see lots of playfulness from the less-than-spritely and smooth-skinned then.
I once read that Americans over-estimate children and under-estimate age (and expertise in general). This shows so well.
Can children enjoy food? Music? Play music properly? Pursuit passions? Spending days glued to a book? Of course, make it a series of books. Obviously, I just listed the obvious activities. Can children feel the full depth of betrayal? Full happiness of unexpected return? Full hopelessness in face of impossible? Full excitement when attaining things once thought impossible?
Children are stupid, shallow, short-sighted, undeveloped. They know nothing save the most primitive urges. They do nothing save screaming for help. They are, in short, very young humans who need growth. They are neither angels nor saints, but CHILDREN.
Wake up, please, from your disrespect and overly-spoiling of children.
I don't like the "my little Timmy is a one-of-a-kind snowflake genius!" trend either, but that idea is easily less harmful than the idea that children are mindless cattle driven purely by their id. If you treat children like animals, using only external motivation to guide them, don't be surprised when they act like them. If you actually talk to kids and try to get at their real interests and motivations, I bet you'd be surprised at what you find.
A very nice childhood so many of us have had, but certainly not the reality for a large chunk of children who grow up hearing exactly the opposite.
General statements like this point out to me how priviledged many of our childhoods have been.
You need both. Wonder with no experience = Axe Cop. Experience with no wonder = Enron, etc.
This quote from the article is just plain insulting and ignorant, “Then there are the others. They have no passion and have deep love for money. The most common example of this is a lawyer or banker.”
There are a multitude of lawyers that are passionate about many things and offer their services pro bono to support their cause, whatever it may be.
Bankers can advise people to help them prepare for retirement, create budgets, make sure they are not over paying on taxes, grow the economy and create jobs by lending to early stage businesses started by people that don’t already have a silver spoon in their mouth.
At the end of the day people are just people. Some are good, some are bad; I would like to believe more good than bad. Some are passionate, some are not; if they are without passion we can not change them.