> How can [the idea that in the past that the average person did not expect to be happy] even be proposed? Maybe I just read way too into this. Is it a joke?

First off, the author continued:

> Life could be a struggle for survival with hard work and adversity at every corner. Marriages were arranged by parents and if, after 20 years, the couple hated each other, there was no option to divorce.

While I guess that particular life experience is not necessarily incompatible with happiness (“I love my life as a sustenance farmer!”) it was definitely, by modern standards, very hard, and not at all what most people strive for in their retirement.

The author is making a lot of assumptions about fundamental matters of philosophy and human psychology.

For instance, before we escape the first phrase in the section you quoted the author assumed that hard work and adversity run contradictory to happiness—or even actively oppose it.

I left the Gordon Lightfoot reference for a reason: the pleading of people for more material resources as the only road to their personal salvation from misery is there in psalm as a "rich man's spiritual".

"If I only had more X I could find my happiness/peace/salvation". In this article Mr Greenspun appears to begin to make a departure from that notion, but seems to keep tripping over strongly-held beliefs justifying a lust for financial rewards. That's not an easy thing to get away from.

Hell, there are tomes upon tomes about that very struggle—confusing the idea that you may as well enjoy the material to your capacity (he references Camus in that manner) with the material enjoyment being a prerequisite for your happiness.

It is unavoidable for the kind of article the author is writing. He is trying to give the perspective of a person who has 'been there'. This I imagine is very interesting to read for people who want to 'be there' or going to. For them, an article that doesn't deal too deeply into philosophy may be more appealing. This is possible only if the author makes a lot of assumptions. And of course, if you don't agree with those assumptions, you'll just move on.

I didn't introduce the philosophical notions myself. The author makes plentiful use of them, but inaccurately.

That's worse than not using them.

It's like pasting

    rm -rf /

in an article about Fun Bash Commands. People who know enough won't be harmed, and either find it funny or moronic. But those who don't know enough can be injured.

You can read all the philosophy in the world. It doesn't automatically turn into actionable realities. Also, any philosophy is subjective, you are a human, you said something, I am a human, I beg to differ and so on and on....

Absolutely you can read it to death and still glean nothing from it. I don't know how many times I've had to reread, and I usually continue to do so. And to that end it takes more than just reading it, but if one wants to ask some profound questions about the world around oneself now that one doesn't have someone breathing down one's neck then one should probably start where others left off. It'll save a little time.

The point where you took a wrong turn was assuming that philosophy is all based on hearsay. There's been a lot of effort to ground pretty fundamental ideas to what we understand about reality, to the extent that we understand it. It's worth working to grasp some of that. It helps. If you like quantizations and mathematical/logical formality that exists as well, but mind that you'll probably want to do a lot of comparative reading.

To put this in programmer's terms: why would you re-implement libc when you haven't even looked at the existing source code or surrounding arguments? That would look like a fool's errand: not because the effort isn't worthwhile, but because you could save yourself a lot of time and use the lessons of the past to inform your next efforts rather than blindly making all of the same mistakes or rediscovering what was already known (to our best efforts). Worse, you might end up wandering around ranting about how someone should implement a core supportive library for a common systems language without ever looking to find out if there is one in the first place.

The counter argument is that "philosophers" could be dead wrong. Imagine the range of different philosophies that existed in various times and places. Popular interpretations of philosophical texts could be wrong (referring to your suggestion of reading an encyclopedia). You might not even understand the "right" question in the first place.

My personal experience is that giving the problem space a bit of thought and coming to preliminary conclusions before comparing with what mainstream thought has to say makes the whole ordeal more fun and possibly lets you learn the finer nuances and different perspectives more.

PS: the analogy with libc is quite interesting after thinking about it for a bit actually. If you just want to use a C library, you don't reimplement it. But if you want to learn about C or libc specifically, re-implementing libc from the specs is probably the best way to do it.

I think I would recommend reading about some of those philosophies you consider "dead wrong" and how they came to be.

Once you start to understand how they were formed in the first place, I think you would be less ready to deride them.

In fact, I'll bet you it entices you because you'll end up catching yourself saying "hey, I thought of that".

But what you'll find is that that one notion you may have figured out on your own is itself a nuance of a larger system of understandings. That you'll find a lot more work has been done than you realized to understand and prove each of those notions to the best of our collective knowledge.

Then you'll understand why grabbing a single notion and anchoring to it like the author is doing is so fundamentally flawed that it's not a positive exercise.

To use the "rich man's spiritual" reference again: the "rich man" of the poem is basing his salvation on the idea that he has to have enough of whatever new thing he decides is between him and heaven/salvation/happiness before he can ever attain it.

The "rich man" put that barrier there, himself. He created the frame for his experience and bound himself to it by creating it in the first place. In the poem, the central character is making the declaration that he needs more to defend his existing material accumulations, so it's not exactly a 1:1. But that kind of self-imposed framework based on nothing grounded can be self-limiting. It can make it hard to understand real fundamentals.

I totally understand how philosophies, whether wrong or not, came to be: some random person with an interesting idea wrote it down, taught it to others, and others liked it enough to keep sharing it or further adapt/adopt it.

Through this process, things that have withstood the test of time are probably worth a look, but then with time comes a loss of context and relevance.

I mean, I wasn't even saying most/all/many philosophies are dead wrong. It's all about the signal to noise ratio after you've read more than a couple books. You'd be a fool to blindly believe in the process of how ancient wisdom is passed down mostly by a long standing popularity contest. Worse, even good ideas come with "addons" and extra baggage that needs to be thrown out, because ancient elders knew that common people wouldn't understand the core ideas and thus attached "click baity" stuff to ensure the ideas keep passed down over generations.

> In fact, I'll bet you it entices you because you'll end up catching yourself saying "hey, I thought of that".

Sure, this happens often. I consider this independent validation of my own ideas. Without this independent "verification" process, you're almost taking what you read on faith. (yes, the explanations or justifications they give are often not the real ones...)

I think we are talking about two different things. If you are talking about logic, formalism and objectively verifiable things, sure, I totally agree with you. But I am talking about principles that should govern life. Unless you pivot to a Higher moral Authority, I am just taking things to their logical end and saying morality is arbitrary and no amount of philosophy will change that.

We might be.

But we also might not be. However we might be getting into dangerously personal territory there since we're approaching remarks on belief systems and people get pretty touchy about that kind of thing.

I'm curious how think that taking things to their logical end means morality is arbitrary.

My understanding puts everything onto a pretty firm plane that leads me to understand that anything I do to others I'm doing to myself. That's enough to guide my actions accordingly.