"What if Money Was No Object" - https://youtu.be/C_sbcSRMsOc

If you're looking for something longer and more in-depth, the late David Foster Wallace's talk on a similar subject is incredibly sincere and motivating:

"This Is Water" - http://youtu.be/dexIA_OfLzg

But what if I lived without that expectation? Maybe I would be happier? Maybe take better care of myself, my communities, my surroundings, the things I currently have instead of pining for the things I want? I don't know. Maybe not. Maybe live more in the present instead of fretting about the distant future and things I have no control over? Maybe not.

There are an awful lot of people on the Earth who live without the resources I have and, I could argue, are happier than me, have less overall stress, have more leisure time, are in better physical shape, and so on. And I'm not trying to romanticize it. I also understand that many people in that condition are miserable.

But overall life satisfaction is relative, isn't it, and largely a state of mind?

Again, the myth of the extremely happy have-nots. This is coming up regularly on HN, and it's based largely on ignorance. People who have much less than you are not more happy. Access to resources, energy, improves quality of life in every way, and increases relative happiness as well. If that were not the case, then nobody in the lesser developed world would want to have a car, to eat more stuff, to have more money to spend and send their kids to school. But actually, they do, because they strive for more stuff that will make them more happy.

It's probably got to do with publicity given to those who voluntarily give up wealth and chose the path of poverty.

Poverty affects humans at a very basic level; their cognition is impaired, their day-to-day life to a very minute detail is controlled by lack of money. And some of the things that we take for granted (for instance potable water) is struggle for them. Those with money can't even imagine what it is like to be poor, day in day out and for years on end with very little hope in sight.

I was not aware of all these until I read a terrific book, "The Poor Economics". It was really an eye opener for me and because of which I'm more empathetic towards poor today instead of just saying they are happier or blaming them for their poverty.

One reason I think this theme resonates here is that software people are location independent in a way few other industries are. If you can work from anywhere being somewhere where your core living expenses are $200 makes sense. Siver's questions becomes real - what then ?

1. Place zombie on treadmill surrounded by a cage. 2. Hook treadmill up to generator. 3. Read a book in front of zombie. 4. Electricity!

So forgetting all the messy business of day-to-day life, just running around with pointy weapons and fighting zombies seems appealing.

Guns, ammo, food, water etc. will become valuable commodities. Natural bartering will lead to money again.

It's probably not realistic to see a humanities degree as a meal ticket, but it can be an excellent foundation for the "real world". Getting the degree teaches you to research and to learn. Those are marketable skills you can apply to many jobs. Unless you want a career in academia, in many cases the humanities degrees aren't likely going to lead you to a job in your field of study, but they will prepare you. You just need to figure out where to apply your skills.

I never really cared about languages before programming, but after learning it, then logic, semantics, ontology I think about other human languages a lot. I'm curious about your point of view coming from the opposite direction.

For my second year of University, I studied in Germany (rather than Canada0, which made things really hard for me. To translate my Latin texts I translated from Latin to English and then worked out how to translate the English to German.

I had a really great professor who taught us not only how to break down words to find their meanings, but he also made no bones about the fact that the key to translating is knowing when to make a good guess.

Once you can get by with Greek and Latin, you can pick up a lot of other bits of languages fairly easily. Sometimes it's by knowing root words. Sometimes it's because you've gotten good at guessing.

A lot of those skills apply directly to reading someone else's code and trying to make sense of it. I find that if you can learn to decipher a foreign, natural language, you may just do alright with languages that machines understand.

Hopefully our posts encourage him to weigh in.

With the economy in the state that it is, it's a lot harder to beat the odds. Just getting an interview with a not-directly-applicable major seems to be flat out impossible.

After many years of watching people dear to me struggle, I'm starting to feel bad telling them that they just need to market themselves better, find a way to bypass the recruitment process and think outside the box. I've come to realize that they really got the raw end of the deal, and instead of any sympathy, they get told that they just need to try harder.

Having said that, the team lead at my $work has an M.A. in Music Composition. Having the coding skills will get you the job, but there's nothing to say that a Humanities degree can't prepare you for getting the skills.

It was basically when Eastern spirituality first wove its way into the American consciousness.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vivekananda_at_the_Parliament_o...

ps: it's a bit looking at the finger pointing to the moon but anyway. pps: thanks for the links

Also, check out the upcoming book 'The Obstacle is the Way' by Ryan Holiday - http://www.amazon.com/The-Obstacle-Is-Way-Timeless/dp/159184...

However, he does a good job of giving a basic introduction and framing for Stoic concepts. I think it's easier to digest the Romans (particularly the concise and acerbic style of Epictetus) if you are somewhat familiar with the subject. I got much, much more from Epictetus than I did from Irvine, but he is, I think, a valuable on-ramp.

I'm also not sure what the big deal is with Marcus Aurelius. Compared with The Enchiridion and even Seneca's letters, it's haphazard and dull. I'll give it another shot once I'm done with all of Seneca's letters.

Personally, I would start with Irvine, then the George Long translation of The Enchiridion (it's more poetic than the Carter translation, IMO). I'm about half way through Seneca's Letters, and while enjoyable, he takes a long time to cover the same insights as Epictetus.

(aside: on my 3rd or 4th reading of The Enchiridion, I wrote brief notes on each part, which you can find at http://thiscodinglife.com/dissecting-epictetus/intro)

I had the same initial reaction with Marcus, but honestly it might be because I didn't have the right translation (pick Gregory Hays's!!) and not enough background on the man. I would highly recommend watching this short series that mentions both Epictetus and Marcus: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nLD09Qa3kMk I truly think you'll see the Meditations in a different way after watching this. Also, Pierre Hadot has a very good (but scholarly) analysis on it in The Inner Citadel.

And for Epictetus, I always introduce him with the story of the Vietnam prisoner of war James Stockdale who in a way relied on stoic principles to endure the tortures he was inflicted. He wrote and lectured about the lessons there, Google him around.

I'm not a big fan of Guide to the Good Life either -- mostly because I think it takes a very profound (and by no means simple or obvious) set of ideas and reduces it to a kind of intellectual fad diet.

For something weightier, you might look at the works of Pierre Hadot (Philosophy as a Way of Life and What is Ancient Philosophy?), both of which contain excellent discussions of stoicism.

Growing up, my family never had much, and I always had to make due with simple activities. Luckily enough I got immersed in the Internet at a young age, because I was able to inherit outdated computers, but never had the fancy toys or gadgets or games that my friends did. I had to find ways to entertain myself with very little, and since then my interests have always revolved around a very small subset of simple, low-fidelity activities. Drawing (materials are universal), weightlifting (free-weights only), programming (self explanatory).. Things that I know could never really be taken from me.

As I'm preparing to graduate college, I've told friends and family that I never want to own a car, or a house. I haven't owned a bed in two years. The only major purchases I want are a decent laptop, which I consider a necessity for a software developer, and books. I want the tools I need to live and grow my skills and intellect.

In that sense, I probably take the modern translation of stoicism too far. But then again, I'm easily fulfilled.

We're not in ancient Rome anymore.

I don't see any reason for modern humans to be stoic. It seems like a great way to stagnate. When you can't change your environment, it makes sense to change your mind to accept your environment. When you can, self-modification is harmful. It lets you accept things you could change if you worked to to change them.

Stoicism seems to be at odds with a personal drive towards self-improvement. It doesn't seem relevant to modern environments where this improvement is possible.

Yes, Stoicism teaches you that you don't have (at least ultimate) control over the world. But it does emphasize that you have control over yourself. You internalize your goals: Instead of "winning the tennis championship" it's "be the best player I can possibly be despite circumstance".

There are some things you really cannot change. We can change more than we used to, but not everything. Stoicism helps.

And we also change things we don't need to change. We chase after things that bring us no happiness. By allowing you to be happy with what you have, stoicism lets you seek those things that truly matter.

For instance, I work with Enterprise Software but not with cars. Perhaps being Stoic towards my material possessions( such as liking my Honda and stop looking at the Maserati I don't need) while still driving towards improvements in the areas that matter, such as my relationships (family, friends, strangers) and career (software, etc)?

We don't have the resources to keep all modern humans in the manner to which those in developed countries have become accustomed.

Since 'improvement' is so often a subjective quality the stoics may perhaps suggest you rebase what you consider to be self improvement.

What if one could find a way of being happy regardless of 'self improvement' drives?

If happiness is the objective and you can be happy without changing your environment, even if changing the environment is trivial, what's the difference?

My mind keeps coming up with generalizations all the time. For example, "the more space you have for your family, the less valuable time together you spend". Needless, useless generalizations like this about just about everything. So I've formed a mental habit of just pausing and asking "really?" .. and soon these just go poof.

In other words, I automatically question the validity of any concept I construct. This way, I'm free to stick to one temporarily and have no qualms about abandoning concepts that aren't valid for me.

The nice thing about Derek's post is that he's just posing the question and leaving it to the reader to ruminate on what answer would mean to them. The skill to pick up here is to ask these kinds of questions ... like all the time.

I think "changing the things you can" (as Niebuhr once put it) is precisely the second half of the stoic idea. In fact, not changing things that by rights should be changed runs contrary to virtue, which the stoics held as the chief -- and indeed, the only -- true good.

This book was my first introduction to stoicism. I loved the book and idea behind stoicism. I meant to find more but had forgotten about it. Thanks for the book suggestion.

1) honest love for oneself; a belief that bettering oneself is not a completely selfish goal, but actually helps everyone and everything else in your life that you care about (insofar as you interact with them)

2) an honest belief that energy spent on self-improvement is effective; if I try to change myself in this way or that and am unsuccessful, it makes the next attempt much harder to get started.

just my two cents.

You could make a plausible argument that self-improvement allows one to accomplish more for others, and use this to connect self-improvement with moral obligations to the community. And you could simply have a deeply ingrained desire for self-improvement (Maslow's Hierarchy seems to suggest that this is a fundamental human need). However, I think it's good to acknowledge that this idea -- that we should improve ourselves -- is not prima facie necessary; it's simply another human desire.

Many people often feel that something's wrong with life or something is missing. A little voice in their heads comes up and says "maybe if I had X that'd fix it", or "maybe if I was Y I'd be happy". In fact, I'm coming to realise (as all the books I've read over the years have been saying) that it's the thinking that is the whole problem. In fact it's not a case of just intellectually accepting this idea that's important. We can go deeper.

Where does the voice come from? What is this thing called "I" that is blindly followed? It would appear it is just another thought. The mind is just a stream of thoughts and "I" is just another one. It has no substance, no reality.

It seems that the only thing that does exist is the present, so just ignore the past and future. The more you are able to ignore the voice in your head (and it's much easier when you see it has no reality) the more you start to tingle, literally. You (well I don't know about you, but I) feel amazing. Satisfied and replete.

So to conclude, what I was getting at was that maintaining the belief that you need to "improve" somehow, or be "better" just adds more fuel to the fire and keeps the mind spinning, distracting us from the present and ever experiencing that fulfilling feeling.

An important note: the clinical definition of Attention-Deficit Disorder is exactly "being unable to feel motivated, except under conditions of stress/fear/pain."

A common self-medicating strategy for people unaware they have ADD, is to invite unhappiness and stress in order to derive motivation from it. If the only thing that can get you to start working on a project is the feeling of a looming deadline, you may want to get yourself checked.

Neurotransmitter imbalances (e.g. clinical depression, AD[H]D, anxiety disorders, etc.) are not diseases. This doesn't mean that people who have them are okay; it just means that thinking of them in terms of what you normally associate with the label 'disease' will lead your thoughts astray.

Instead, neurotransmitter imbalances are genetic impairments. Like, say, nearsightedness.

As with nearsightedness, neurotransmitter imbalances are just annoying natural features of some people's bodies. As with nearsightedness, it kind of sucks to be those people, but they don't generally know what they're missing, because they've always been that way.

But, as with nearsightedness, prosthetics have been invented that "even the playing field" between those with and without the impairment. And, as with nearsightedness, it's readily apparent to those who use the prosthetic that they were impaired, because they now have access to experiences that they may have heard unimpaired people speaking of, but never previously got to experience for themselves.

(And, as with nearsightedness, this has caused the genetic defects responsible for the impairment to spread rapidly through the population; because the impairment is no longer a disadvantage, there's no longer any evolutionary pressure to protect the genetic code responsible from mutating.)

Try imagining telling someone with nearsightedness that they should just learn to cope with everything being fuzzy, instead of getting glasses. Imagine condemning the boom in contact-lens sales as "overmedication." It seems ridiculous, right?

ADHD is fuzzily defined and overdiagnosed. People can be different from one another. "Curing" someone from being active and unfocused has uncomfortable implications.

> And, as with nearsightedness, it's readily apparent to those who use the prosthetic that they were impaired, because they now have access to experiences that they may have heard unimpaired people speaking of, but never previously got to experience for themselves.

The human body requires its internal chemicals to be maintained within certain ranges for various features to function. Each of these features is relevant to what would be called "the human experience"--things that are built into the generalized human utility-function to want, as terminal values.

When you have a neurotransmitter imbalance to a degree that it becomes an impairment, it is so because it disables some of these features, and therefore bars one's access to these terminal values.

In AD(H)D, the feature that gets impaired is the "sense of intrinsic motivation" generated by the dopamine system. The terminal values one loses access to are the feelings of striving, accomplishment, or pride in one's work; and, in more extreme cases, the feeling to hope that one will be able to improve one's lot in life by one's own hand. (When you know you can't motivate yourself to get a job, being jobless is a lot more depressing.)

When you apply the appropriate prosthetic to the impairment--combined dopamine agonist/reuptake inhibitors, in this case--you gain access to this feature, and through it, the terminal values you were barred from.

As with putting on glasses, if you have the impairment (everything is blurry), then it is very, very obvious that when everything comes into focus, that this is the way things were "meant" to be--not from some moral imperative, but just because the rest of your body was built to rely on this feature that was previously broken.

With glasses, this means you suddenly stop bumping into things, and don't find yourself moving closer to people to see them. With normalized dopamine levels, this means you suddenly feel able to make yourself accomplish things you've always wanted to accomplish.

If your dopamine is set to the correct range for your body, this doesn't "make you into a robot" or any of the things people talk about with various neuroaffective drugs. Inasmuch as that was ever true in clinical settings, it was from failure to identify the neurotransmitter which is in imbalance (i.e. treating a norepinephrine production deficiency with dopamine agonists).

---

And now, a rant:

Inasmuch as AD(H)D treatment is made out to be a problem in pop-culture, though, it does indeed come from "overdiagnosis"--if you give a drug to boost a neurotransmitter into a reference range to someone who is not impaired, you will of course boost that neurotransmitter out of the reference range it was already in. People who can see fine already will find glasses quite harmful to their vision.

"Overdiagnosis" is a very strong word for what happens with AD(H)D, though. Population studies have been done, with random samples of adults brought in off the street given strict evaluations to test for AD(H)D--and as much as 3% of the population has scored far into the "impaired" range. (This is, coincidentally-enough, about the same percentage we see for all the other neurotransmitter-reference-range problems, e.g. clinical depression, giving merit to the genetic-drift hypothesis.) This number is far higher than the number of people actually diagnosed with AD(H)D. The stigma behind "overdiagnosis" has lead to underdiagnosis.

The real problem, of course, is parents wanting to treat their children for neurotransmitter imbalances at all. Children do not have stable neurotransmitter reference ranges. Their brains produce random spurts of neurotransmitters at random times, just like their bodies produce random spurts of growth in random body parts. (This is why children have such vivid nightmares and fantasies: random spurts of serotonin will induce visual and auditory hallucinations, much as are found during an LSD trip; coupled with random spurts of adrenaline, these hallucinations can be quite stressful. It is also why they may not "feel tired" after being awake for many hours: due to random spurts of acetylcholine, their bodies can be effectively self-caffeinating. You can surmise how this applies to each other neurotransmitter as well.)

AD(H)D is not a "childhood disease", any more than nearsightedness is. Both impairments tend to first reveal themselves, oddly-enough, when one is first asked in childhood to sit and stare at a blackboard--but this doesn't imply that the problem goes away when the blackboard does. In fact, it usually gets worse--but there is no longer a set of parents being sent report cards to indicate a problem which they might get it into their heads to "fix."

So, when I say "get checked for AD(H)D," I'm intending that advice for adults. Children might certainly have AD(H)D already--if you have a neurotransmitter imbalance, it's almost always present from a very young age--but the rampage of random neurotransmitter releases during development will moot any sort of prosthetic, just like (no, not glasses this time!) a bone- or skull-plate to fix a break would be inadvisable for a child: their bones haven't finished growing or forming, and the plate would soon harm instead of help.

Having said that, school systems must be designed around the fact that children will have various neurochemical imbalances--whether temporarily due to growth, or permanently, due to genetic problems--and around the fact that it is improper to expect the child to be treated for these before their neurology stabilizes. Grade-school must be an environment where a child is given the resources to succeed despite neurochemical imbalances. This calls for a radical restructuring, much moreso than the "radical" ideas one sees proffered on education around HN.

Diagnosing this chemical imbalances has got to be quite hard, if each person has a different profile. Furthermore, most people aren't even tested for it.

It's not an easy problem to solve, and parental pressure for drugs that calm an extrovert kid certainly don't help.

Sounds very much like Taoist teachings as well. Desire, in its many forms, never results in happiness.

I made a conscious decision to work from home and comfortable places because I realized that commuting two hours a day was destroying my health. Very few projects would be worth that sacrifice to me (although I realize that many are out there).

I made a choice to eat mindfully and properly in every meal unless I have something else of extreme urgency. I find very few things are worth interrupting a meal. There's at least one hour of every day you can enjoy tremendously, and many people lose complete sight of that.

I am not disagreeing with your premise, but the truth is that most people's desires, in my opinion, seem to be highly misplaced, given that not many people out there are actually working towards a goal so noble that it's worth the rest of the sacrifices in their lives. Having shorter vacations, less time for relaxation and pursuing hobbies is worth it if you're engaged on projects that give tremendous satisfaction and make a difference.

But would this not require, in some sense, the desire for contentment? I suppose this is just a semantic issue; somehow our usage of "desire" excludes this case (perhaps because it is so fundamental).

Contentment, on the other hand, is something more like "the lack of any particular goal currently requiring you to think, plan, or expend energy."

Basically, they're at odds: when you have a desire, you are by definition discontented.

Incidentally, if you're moved to get broad outlines of philosophical things, the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy and the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy tend to be better resources:

http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/stoicism/

http://www.iep.utm.edu/stoicism/