And I agree that "nothing is really new anymore".
Nihil sub sole novum.
Having your life on autopilot is a choice you make.
I moved to the frontier of technological development and intend to stay here for the foreseeable future. What I think about now is pushing technological boundaries, not fulfilling my personal monetary needs.
If you have family, going around in a converted van/bus is a very fun thing to do with endless possibilities
I used to teach skydiving and watching the student's excitement during the first several jumps always brought back strong memories the initial joy. It was like reliving my first jumps.
I wonder if raising kids - sharing life experiences with a young person - has the effect of reliving the initial experience.
But before you have kids, it is more important to find a committed partner. There is nothing that will wreak havoc more on your life than a broken family. If you ever hear a parent regret having kids, you can bet there was trouble with their partner.
I feel this way about many things in my life that I used to care about that now seem insignificant due to that "big picture" feeling, e.g., all of social media; but if I focus I can enjoy the "little details" when, for example, my SO shares a meme. Also accompanies is that nothing is new, everything is a repost, etc.
It's a weird new sensation for me that I'm still learning to deal with, especially with regards to enjoying previously enjoyable activities. Or do I just drop them and search for better endeavours?
I find this hard to believe. Are you not surprised by traveling? Art? dmt experiences?
Drugs are probably the first thing on the list that get old fast.
Even things I really love, like eating authentic food from different countries, while highly enjoyable, isn't shocking or new the way it was when I first had exposure to different food in general.
It's also interesting and exciting to continue to get better at things I love (programming, hobbies...).
Is there stuff I don't know/haven't experienced? Sure. But it's been a few years since the last time I encountered something truly mind-blowing or perspective-changing. Maybe I'll try mushrooms some day.
It's just a function of the internet really, most things that once upon a time seemed like exotic, alternate paths have been de-mystified. For example, after seeing how kung-fu holds up against MMA and BJJ, I no longer have the perception of kung-fu masters as great, master fighters.
Similarly, turns out the classical Spartans arguably weren't nearly as elite as their common reputation. They were just one of the few Greek factions that bothered to regularly train at all, and that often put them over the top.
The information required to formulate both points with any support is only possible because of the internet, where in previous years a historical lay-person like myself would likely have to spend months in the library in dedicated historical studies to arrive at the same conclusions.
The more I look at the world, the more I think the Taoists got it right. "The Great Path is simple and direct yet people love to take the side-routes"
MMA is a joke.
While travelling does show me stuff I haven't seen, that doesn't mean it significantly alters what I thought about the place I'm visiting. Or the world in the larger sense. Sometimes there's a slight surprise in how I expected things to be vs how they are, but those tend to be degrees of difference rather than requiring a large revision.
Art, it's such a huge field. I try to get a context when I see something, but I haven't spent my time learning a lot about art history. But generally I'm not surprised when I see some work of art.
One thing to think about is whether being able to fit everything nicely is itself a symptom of a problem. Hard to know.
It's one of those things you try because people around you are trying. But basically, I felt nothing from smoking joints or mushrooms. I had one fun experience once in Amsterdam with some hash cookies, but could I live without it? Yeah.
I feel much the same about alcohol. That at least has a common cultural set of expectations, but at the same time, I didn't think it really changed much about what I thought about the world.
It's quite common not to have any effect from the first few times one tries smoking marijuana. Eventually, the body seems to "learn" how to appreciate the high.
As for mushrooms, if you felt nothing from them I wonder if: 1 - your dose was too low, or 2 - the mushrooms you had weren't psychoactive.
Believe me, if you've tried a high dose of a real psychedelic drug, it would be a very intense experience (assuming you remembered it, as some people do have amnesia from too high a dose of psychedelics, possibly because the experience is too intense for their conscious mind to assimilate).
What I meant was the experience did not really add much to how I thought about the world. I didn't have particularly meaningful conversations with anyone during that time. It didn't add perspective, which is kinda what I thought would happen.
It should be kept in mind, however, is that people's sensitivity to various drugs varies. So what might be a weak dose to one person might be a strong dose to another.
Those are the lightweights, largely because they are also manufactured experiences:
- Traveling: Whoa, in that other country, people are speaking a different language, have different customs, and have different values? Who could have known!
- Art: Sure, art can evoke some feelings, but rarely is it earthshattering
- Drugs: Okay, that I don't know - and don't care for
The bigger things are other life events, like change in relationships, change in worklife, moving places, friends and family getting ill or worse. Sure, those will never be easy, but the more you go through them the better you know that "this too shall pass" and how to deal with it.
The article has some interesting points but I believe it lacks a reflection from the eastern point of view and a critique to capitalism as it does for socialism.
Without them the discussion seems incomplete.
Free markets, as I prefer to call it, are different. There's a fair case that a lot of good has come from it, along with not so good things. Thus to present the case from a free markets point of view would require a fair bit more explanation:
- Why is it that you're not more happy being able to choose from 10 varieties of toothpaste than when you just buy the one that is there?
- People who work minimum wage jobs, why are they not happy there was at least that? They's be starving otherwise, right? Why aren't they all grateful?
- What is it about extreme specialization that's so unsatisfying? Even Adam Smith touched on this IIRC.
> I believe you are accidentally describing equanimity
Think I learned a new word today!
Honestly when I read this I was not expecting it to touch politics and how societies organize themselves. My point is not that capitalism is bad for happiness, is that I don't think politics are that relevant in the discussion.
Happiness is almost always defined as the opposite to something else. As a solution for a problem. Socialism and Free markets and many other structures provide slightly different manners to enable those solutions. This is what your average zen monk would perhaps call duality.
But being happy is fundamentally a game where the only winning move is not to play. Equanimity, as acceptance of the present is a much more sustainable approach to use a more common language.
If we want to talk about which system would favour this better, well, I honestly don't know. I feel this is much more deeper matter of education, philosophy and appreciation for life. Freedom of speech is probably better for it but I'm not sure it makes a significant difference and we will not be able to measure it.
Socialism might remove the struggle of life and therefore the meaning of it. Free markets fosters artificial struggles and distractions to life, making meaning artificial. You could then argue that all meaning is ultimately artificial, which I would probably agree, but I don't see how it makes it better.
Ultimately, I don't think the solution is in the society. It must be the individual, only he/she/it transcends. Any transmission of that happens via direct experience, or a lot of books and introspection, not abstract models that you can teach easily. I have no idea how to do this at scale, I suspect it is not possible.
But the closest ideal would probably be to just teach and discuss philosophy across the world for the genuine interest of leading a better life and not to project status.
Once you've come across enough life events, along with perspectives like the one in the article, you tend to feel a degree of autonomy about how you see things. You can focus on the (really) big picture of things, where you're an insignificant short-lived ball of carbon and water, or you can warm yourself on the details of why it is you think little babies are cute.
There's also a sense that nothing is really new anymore. Whatever someone throws at me, I can fit it somewhere in my worldview. Part of that is reading a lot of stuff such as HN, part of it is meeting a lot of people can getting their view.