Isn't life composed almost entirely of this? Cooking, eating, sleeping, using the toilet, taking care of love ones... If every responsibility you have in life is automatically absolutely horrible by nature of being a responsibility, why live?

Secondly, the typical natural pace for the items on your list has peaks and troughs, natural downtime. Many jobs demand full effort for extended periods with not much downtime either on a daily cycle or a longer yearly one. That too we are not very well adapted for, I think.

So you agree that needing to do something doesn't automatically make it unenjoyable then?

> Secondly, the typical natural pace for the items on your list has peaks and troughs, natural downtime. Many jobs demand full effort for extended periods with not much downtime either on a daily cycle or a longer yearly one. That too we are not very well adapted for, I think.

I didn't say all jobs were fun. Most aren't, but not because they need doing. Needing to be done has almost nothing to do with how horrible a job is.

I’m not GP, but I’d say the things we need to do not being enjoyable is a deficiency and problem of the technological system, and not necessarily a solvable one. In a pre-tech world (e.g. 15th century), our needs were directly tied to our happiness due to biological reward circuits.

Ted Kaczynski argues about this point extensively in his books, I recommend esp. Technological Slavery, available free online.

Just because life is bad in absolute terms (?) doesn’t mean that it would not be better without having to work in the modern sense of the word.

Why not? If your argument relies on life being a near uniformly horrible experience, yet you choose to live, aren't you in essence invalidating your own argument?

> Just because life is bad in absolute terms (?) doesn’t mean that it would not be better without having to work in the modern sense of the word.

This isn't a point I tried to make. My point was invalidating the premise that anything that needs doing is automatically bad. That's entirely separate from the idea that more free time might be enjoyable.

So you’re being “Socratic”, to put it politely.

"Work sucks" is great as a relatively common shared experience. It is not, however, a great presumption to carry around as if it's a natural law.

Viable. Thinking that most things in life (that you have to do) sucks is perfectly viable. Plenty of people could be of that opinion.

> "Work sucks" is great as a relatively common shared experience. It is not, however, a great presumption to carry around as if it's a natural law.

The great danger of proposing that something universally sucks is that the chronically happy will get upset. Maybe even unhappy.

I share this opinion. This, again, isn't what I'm arguing against.

I'm arguing against the notion that having to do something means doing it sucks.

Even if I take the most generous possible meaning of the parent be: "If you're being forced to do something, it's because it sucks, otherwise you wouldn't need to be forced."

That's still not true. I had to be forced to exercise, but then I enjoyed exercising. When I was little, I had to be forced to bathe, but once I was in it was hard to get me out because I enjoyed it. I was effectively forced into my current career, but I also enjoy that.

> The great danger of proposing that something universally sucks is that the chronically happy will get upset. Maybe even unhappy.

And the flaw is most often that it does not universally suck. Some people are into getting their testicles stomped on, so be careful throwing around your experiences as a base truth.

No no no. This isn’t what you said.

> > Isn't life composed almost entirely of this? Cooking, eating, sleeping, using the toilet, taking care of love ones... If every responsibility you have in life is automatically absolutely horrible by nature of being a responsibility, why live?

An answer to that could easily be “no reason”. Then where does your argument go? Nowhere.

And could you find a person who has always hated having to take a bath, or their careeer (lol)? Probably.

> And the flaw is most often that it does not universally suck.

Your reply to someone who says that something universally something has the same problem! Yeah, of course things could be all-bad for someone. No kidding. So the “why live” question is useless.

> An answer to that could easily be “no reason”. Then where does your argument go? Nowhere.

Well yeah. Generally, when people's reason for holding a belief or performing and action is "lol idk", that isn't conducive to a continuing discussion. Not because it invalidates anything, but because it's the vocal equivalent of saying nothing at all.

It's fine if you think everything that needs doing is awful by definition. I disagree, and have a counterfactual experience. If that means nothing to you, that's totally fine.

That’s not what I meant. I didn’t explain it properly.

You could easily have no reason to live and yet continue living. I guess I’m gonna be forced to say the s-word: living is something that happens while not living (your question: why live?) takes deliberate action, i.e. suicide. But someone could be terrified of killing themselves.

Thus they have no reason to live, and yet no way to end existence as they know it.

Which is again different from “idk”. They know that they have no reason to live. It’s not a mystery.

If you sit down and do nothing at all for a week you will die, no work required. To continue living takes work. I believe that was my original point. To do anything more than nothing at all requires some reason, be it reptilian drive, fear of death broadly, or otherwise.

In any case, I don't see much value in this line of conversation because it's so far from common reality as to be useless in support of the central claim I disagree with. Most well adjusted people will plainly agree that a lot of necessary things are enjoyable. Some people will say their jobs, which they need to do for money, are enjoyable.

It's really not some crazy deep philosophical idea that necessity equals suffering. We don't need to go ten layers down into some core of human experience to say yes or no. It's just inaccurate, and somewhat hyperbolic, on the face of it.

Now you’re changing the goalpost to “reason”. My god. There’s a reason for everything. But it might still suck. You might try to kill yourself by “doing nothing” (very hard and difficult but okay), and yet (as you say) that survival instinct part of you might kick in and “save yourself”. So does that counter any claims about everything you have to do sucking? Not at all.

Say you get to the point where you are about to starve to death. Then the Survival Instinct kicks in and you get something to eat. Does this prove that, actually, you like living? Not at all! It probably sucked to almost starve to death, it probably sucked to get that sudden fear of dying, and things probably suck now (not close to dying) just like they did before you tried that arduous suicide attempt.

> In any case, I don't see much value in this line of conversation because it's so far from common reality as to be useless in support of the central claim I disagree with. Most well adjusted people will plainly agree that a lot of necessary things are enjoyable. Some people will say their jobs, which they need to do for money, are enjoyable.

I guess suicidal people are famously well-adjusted? Well, some are and yet they didn’t think that life was worth living despite that.

Who cares what “well-adjusted” people think? The only claim that I care about is if it is possible to think that basically everything that you have to do sucks. And it seems like there is.

> It's really not some crazy deep philosophical idea that necessity equals suffering. We don't need to go ten layers down into some core of human experience to say yes or no. It's just inaccurate, and somewhat hyperbolic, on the face of it.

No it is not.

Didn’t Schopenhauer claim that life sucked and that we only lived because of a kind of “will to live”? Maybe our old pal “survival instinct” as well as some others?

If Schopenhauer’s philosophy is so easily refuted, why is he one of the more famous philosophers? Just as a beginner refutation practice.

Come to think of it. Don’t people claim that Schopenhaur was inspired by one of the major world religions?

Oh, if that's the claim then sure. I thought the claim was "everything you have to do sucks", not "it's possible to believe everything you had to do sucks."

Totally agree then. I've met lots of unhappy people that believe that. 100% true.

Life isn’t worth living, if that’s what you are asking. But there could be reasons to, you know, not intentionally die. Maybe you’re a Catholic for example. Or maybe you just have small children.

A friend of mine retired early and spends a lot of time in his workshop building fun things for himself. That is work, but it's not "work" in the way people think of the term.

One project I want to do some time is design and 3D print a model roller coaster, including building a train to travel over it. That's work, but it's not employment.

I used to believe that when I was young, and that's pretty much the argument I made to my dad, who responded that most people would rather stay home, drink beer, have sex, and watch tv.

As I've grown older, I've come over to my dad's side, as I learned that most people don't have a creative bone in their body, have no desire to be productive in any way, and would rather spend their time entertaining themselves and consuming above almost anything else.

At least that's the case in much of the US, which is heading relentlessly towards the world predicted by the movie Idiocracy. Maybe in some other countries it's better.

Plenty of people dream of doing these sinful, consumerist—not manly, Hacker News-productive—things because they are the rewind from work pasttimes; they’re the off-time-from-work things that many people just plain need in order to be able to must the energy for another workday. But the fallacy here is to assume that a reality without work is the same. It clearly isn’t though if these things are used to recuperate from work. What if there was no work to recuperate from? I don’t know if they would do manly HN things like implement yet another JS framework, but they would probably do other things than whatever they do in order to recreate themselves right now.

> most people work stupid jobs because they can't afford there risk of doing what they actually want

Again this projects some kind of strong desire for a specialized low-demand sort of work on the greater population. This is a fantasy.

Work is a vector for people to contribute to society and participate in it, allows them to find validation, to compete (if they so choose). Whether a job is "stupid" is a rationalization that betrays the fact that there is demand for it. At best, it can be unenjoyable, but most people don't "hate" their job. Arguably people have stronger feelings about commute time, which is a greater reflection of faults in city planning.

What a vacuous side-point to make.

But anyway, that is not relevant in the world we have today. Today people are required to work, no other option is given, and if this doesn't satisfy their need of feeling useful, they are just forced to go without and face the desperation that deprivation from a basic need leads to.

Just this revolt of people against pointless job is evidence enough that if people could choose, they would do something different from "work" as we have today. You can argue this is a good thing, but you can't argue it's business as usual.

"Girlboss" ideology seems to work. Like Tom Sawyer whitewashing the fence. But I digress.