Re:I told the truth in my sister’s obituary, so that others ...
by javajosh on Friday March 25, 2016 @04:03AM
(#11358955)
There is a delusion, though. The world is constantly arising and passing away simultaneously. When you are depressed, all you see is decay (passing away); when you are manic, all you see is growth (arising). Both views are delusional. Although I freely admit that stating that so bluntly to a depressed person is usually a bad idea.
The reason people give bad advice is myopia. Most "normal" people seem to get by with a system of habits that protect them from perceiving constant change over long-ish time-lines. When you deal with the same boundary conditions day after day you much of your life operates like an autonomic function. This is the ideal, for "normal" people: to have stable, risk-free lives for themselves and their families, at least for 20-30 years or so until the kids leave/you retire. And of course by then you have become your habits, and so you live a peaceful, boring life until you die.
Note that there is an important minority of people who are inherently explorers, risk takers, who thrive on uncertainty and difficulty. Such people will even create difficulty in their own lives just to avoid being bored and disappointed in their own "ordinary" life. They challenge authority, challenge conventional wisdom, and more often then not, they suffer for their unique choices because an unstable life is a stressful one. This can create drama, and isolation, which leads to depression.
An excellent life, I believe, lies somewhere in the middle: some sort of stable base from which you range out occasionally in adventure. Indiana Jones is a good (fictional) example: he had a fundamentally stable job as a professor, but he would also travel the world and have adventures. Victor Hugo and HG Wells seemed to delight in telling stories of such "gentlemen adventurers". A more mundane example would be a family man going on a month-long trek through the Amazon or through Africa or something like it every year (perhaps with Doctors without Borders or some-such).
There are stories of programmers doing their thing while traveling the world, living out of a backpack on $20/month. There are also stories of programmers taking big risks in business, and winning! (and losing). But business adventures have everything to do with money and shrewdness, and therefore are rooted indelibly in greed, not curiosity. Of the people I know of, Rich Hickey (who took 2.5 years to do Clojure) and Bret Victor (who, AFAIK, has been talking on philosophical applied computer science purely for the love of it, and without compensation) are examples of curiosity-driven adventure-programmers. Most working programmers, though, are hired to build the applications someone else has conceived. We might stumble on a nice data-structure or algorithm and share it widely; but that's a perk, and not the main goal of their employment, which is also greed driven.
A lot of us I think lead a double life of creating for someone else to pay the bills, and creating for ourselves to scratch that adventurer's itch.
The reason people give bad advice is myopia. Most "normal" people seem to get by with a system of habits that protect them from perceiving constant change over long-ish time-lines. When you deal with the same boundary conditions day after day you much of your life operates like an autonomic function. This is the ideal, for "normal" people: to have stable, risk-free lives for themselves and their families, at least for 20-30 years or so until the kids leave/you retire. And of course by then you have become your habits, and so you live a peaceful, boring life until you die.
Note that there is an important minority of people who are inherently explorers, risk takers, who thrive on uncertainty and difficulty. Such people will even create difficulty in their own lives just to avoid being bored and disappointed in their own "ordinary" life. They challenge authority, challenge conventional wisdom, and more often then not, they suffer for their unique choices because an unstable life is a stressful one. This can create drama, and isolation, which leads to depression.
An excellent life, I believe, lies somewhere in the middle: some sort of stable base from which you range out occasionally in adventure. Indiana Jones is a good (fictional) example: he had a fundamentally stable job as a professor, but he would also travel the world and have adventures. Victor Hugo and HG Wells seemed to delight in telling stories of such "gentlemen adventurers". A more mundane example would be a family man going on a month-long trek through the Amazon or through Africa or something like it every year (perhaps with Doctors without Borders or some-such).
There are stories of programmers doing their thing while traveling the world, living out of a backpack on $20/month. There are also stories of programmers taking big risks in business, and winning! (and losing). But business adventures have everything to do with money and shrewdness, and therefore are rooted indelibly in greed, not curiosity. Of the people I know of, Rich Hickey (who took 2.5 years to do Clojure) and Bret Victor (who, AFAIK, has been talking on philosophical applied computer science purely for the love of it, and without compensation) are examples of curiosity-driven adventure-programmers. Most working programmers, though, are hired to build the applications someone else has conceived. We might stumble on a nice data-structure or algorithm and share it widely; but that's a perk, and not the main goal of their employment, which is also greed driven.
A lot of us I think lead a double life of creating for someone else to pay the bills, and creating for ourselves to scratch that adventurer's itch.