I really love reading the wisdom of older people. Society really dismisses everyone over 80, but I find myself having deep interesting connections with a few people much older than myself (38).
Something society always neglects is that everyone goes through the same thoughts time and time again. We all make mistakes and we learn our own way, but when someone's 90, they really have done a lot of it all before. Even if we think everything is different, human's really are very similar. We all have emotions, we all have desires and we are all deep down social creatures. So I would only encourage more people to step out and try to make an honest, deep, friendship with someone a lot older than you. It can really help give you guidance and perspective.
And in addition they got to watch their friends/family/coworkers succeed and fail many times over.
While it can be very tempting to say 'we tried that before and it didn't work' - the key is people who can understand why it didn't work, or who can encourage you to make your own mistakes and be there to guide you back when needed.
Exactly. Wisdom sometimes comes from having the right thing to do already articulated in your head (which itself took some reps to articulate), seeing yourself not follow it, and seeing the consequences.
That is not guaranteed, though. There are many experienced yet unwise people, and sometimes viceversa.
I agree with the sentiment of listening to older people, but age alone is not a good criteria to determine whether they're worth paying attention to. Old people can be as ignorant and unwise as young people, sometimes even more so.
You are of course absolutely right, but its more complex. When I look around me at my family, people there and already gone, one of the issue is communication and whole mental model of reality.
Younger generations live emotionally richer lives. Or maybe thats not the best description, but something along that. I can't talk about deeper emotions even with my parents, the generational gap is absolutely huge. They never talk about theirs, and trying to start the talk ends the talk, they simply are not wired for such introspection. Both proper university educated which is a small miracle given how they and their parents were viewed as potential enemies of communist state.
They lived their whole lives under soviet oppression, never left Europe, don't understand modern world and technologies, they lived their whole lives in single monolithic culture. Critical thinking outward and especially inward is not in their runbook. I live past 20 years away from my home country, travelled the world that changed me (for the better) permanently. i tried psychedelic drugs a bit in the past, also a profound and probably permanent change they never had a chance to go through. I was/still am doing a number of potentially dangerous mountain sports that expose you to fear of death regularly, and one has to overcome that fear and move on, over and over - definitely a personality-changing experience. And so on.
Its hard to find people to talk about ie backpacking travelling to exotic undeveloped remote places even within my peers, who did that. I gathered more life experience living in 3 countries, dating ladies from various cultures, raising my kids in a foreign culture than they ever could. I understand psychology and people way better than them.
The roles reversed some time ago - I am helping them, however I can. As long as they are actually willing to listen, not every topic is like that. I can't talk politics to them, russians did a very good job in subverting public opinions of large portions of population into absolutely illogical self-harming position, and just stating truth leads nowhere.
Interesting perspective but with all of that experience are you not able to communicate with them in their way? This seems a bit like missing the forest for the trees, people are no less thoughtful or complex based on where they've lived or what they've done. The experiences you are learning from came at a cost of the experiences like those of your parents, those experiences shape their communication. There is absolutely a multitude of wisdom only age and their experiences can create but you have to learn to bridge the gap.
This speaks to me. So much of our life circumstances are beyond our control (parents, genetics, geography, society, wider economy, etc.) It's humbling, how much of our success or failure is influenced by pure chance.
On the other hand, many things attributed to chance are actually the aggregate effect of other people's choices. If we make choices based on not just what's best for ourselves but what's best for all of us, we will all suddenly become more "lucky". And vice versa, if we only think about ourselves that luck will diminish.
Couldn't agree more. Many (most?) of our opportunities are afforded by the family, community and society in which we grew up. Of course individual talent and choices make a difference, but it's my feeling that many people wildly underestimate how much their external life circumstances contribute to their success or happiness. In fairness, it goes against our sense of self-efficacy.
I was thinking something very similar as I read the letter and hear people talk about luck in a similar way. I think attributing things to luck, while seemingly humble, can be dismissive and/or simplistic. Yes, we're all lucky to be in our situations -- living in this time, fed, privileged. Though, whether this luck is experienced positively or not is entirely subjective. Also, to ascribe our given situation to luck dismisses the concerted efforts of all living things of this time and past that have guided us to our current situation -- once again, without qualifying it as good or bad. It is almost disabling in it's message. The flip side is that many things happened that were dreamed, planned, intended, and carried out to land us in our situation. This to me feels more empowering, hopeful, appreciative, and also responsible than casting off as merely luck.
I was searching for what to answer people who attribute everything I’ve done to luck. There’s the classic “It’s strange because the more I work the more I’m lucky”, but that’s very condescending. Thank you for offering me a positive alternative. In a sense it makes me owe work to my society.
That's a nice point. A society where everyone makes everything just a little bit better for the next random person will be a society full of nice surprises, rather than nasty ones.
Western Europe (not only) social system is based on such belief. It kept working till a lot of immigrants from pretty bad corrupted countries came in, abusing the system in ways it wasn't planned for.
What are you trying to say with this, that you disagree, or that it's an intelligent perspective afforded to those who are not hopeless? I don't see how anyone can disagree that the aggregate actions of your parents, your locality, your culture, your nation, play the largest role in the cards you are dealt from the beginning.
I think the point is that this only works in the aggregate. Individuals in a group/organization/society can make small positive decisions that improve the likelihood that any individual in that same group will get "lucky".
There's a sort of "freeloader" problem, though, which is that the ones who get "lucky" don't themselves have to be making positive choices. In fact, being a selfish individual in a group of generous ones can be an easy way to get ahead - as long as you can get away with it without being noticed or punished.
I read it as in alignment with the previous definition of luck; meaning that a number of previous conscious decisions have created a world where they could come to this understanding of luck
While strictly true, I wonder what does this sentence generates in the minds of the readers.
I personally would prefer other formulations, because while I agree with the core, I think this idea should just reduce frustration if you don't succeed, while I am afraid it can be used as an excuse for not trying.
Yes, you need luck, but if you never get out of your room/street/neighborhood/city/country, you might have less opportunities for luck than otherwise.
Right. I would say the most apt analogy is from poker.
In Poker, luck plays an integral role in the outcome of any specific game or match, but skill does show up when collected over a large enough sample (that's why they say you can't prove something is due to skill over chance until you've collected a sample of 10,000 - 100,000 played hands of poker - at least if you're playing online).
You could also be a very good poker player and have bad luck on one important occasion (say in the finals of the WSOP), where the outcome hinges purely on luck. Similarly, you could be a subpar player and "luck out" and strike it big purely because of the right sequence of cards at a big event. But generally, most people who succeed at Poker are not there purely based on luck; you can be lucky once or twice, but you're unlikely to make it through a whole Poker career just by being lucky.
I think similarly in life - you have a certain hand you're dealt, and if you play it to the best of your ability (and make opportunities for yourself), you increase your odds of winning the hand / the tournament / life; but ultimately even with your best efforts the outcome could still be decided by luck.
"I'm a greater believer in luck, and I find the harder I work the more I have of it." - Thomas Jefferson
There's lots of similar quotes throughout time, all about what you say in your list line: to be lucky you need to create as many opportunities as possible to get lucky. You can't win at dice if you never roll them.
Precisely. "Luck" shouldn't be equivocated with "chance." We have two words for a reason.
Show up + embrace awkwardness + be kind and courteous and luck will follow.
My son's Scout troop was lucky this year. They just sold more than $60k worth of pop-corn in two weeks. How? Each kid walked up to hundreds of complete strangers at grocery stores and asked politely - albeit awkwardly sometimes. The exponentially lower-success approach is to sit behind a table waiting for people to hand you money.
The result? Almost 40 lucky kids get 11 all-expenses-paid camping trips and a fun summer camp all for just eight hours of walking and talking. Doesn't matter how much money their families make; every kid gets to fully participate.
What a cynical and dismissive take, of no value to anyone.
Are you saying that no one of color in that era made any worthwhile contribution to the world? Or are you saying that every white person of the era should hold themselves to the standard of achievement of Thomas Jefferson since that is the power of the privilege they held?
I can see it being reasonable to assume the ROI of hard work while in shackles to be insufficient. Well, at least hard work that does not involve getting violent against the shacklers.
For example, would slave women have done the hard work of having and raising slave children if they had the agency to not have them?
Would you work hard at doing something that doesn't scale if you know the federal government will simply reduce the purchasing power of your earnings to maintain asset owners' position in society?
Does it make sense to work hard if there is a high likelihood you will never own land, and hence will always have increasing portions of your winnings taken by a rent seeker? Seems like a bad trade.
There is truth in saying working harder does seem to generate more luck, in so far as, if you lay in your room all day and did nothing, you won't be getting any luck.
It's just silly to paint yourself as this hard worker that got back what you put in, whilst ignoring the ills that you put in. I'm sure he did good stuff because of work he personally did, but it's laughable to think he could get to where he did, if he wasn't born into the planter class.
And no, that doesn't mean if you were culturally disadvantaged you couldn't do anything, it's just a lot harder and you had no free will in that. Every opportunity (and decision, really) is just a consequence of where and when you are, and should be taken not as a personal character assessment. I guess you could argue that means Jefferson is morally fine because that's just the kinda life he was born into so how would he know different, or maybe he just lacks some empathy :P
Of course less famous people also had good work ethics we just don’t have their quotes immortalized.
So all you’ve really done is subsumed any discussion of the merits of the idea itself into a hand-wringing fest about privilege that was inevitable from the beginning and could equally apply to any famous quote from history. I really don’t see the value in this kind of hand-wringing.
I think it's not prepared. More like a willingness to be open to possibilities. Preparation assume you know something good is coming and can prepare now to face it. Those kind of events are probably not that life changing. Of course there are exceptions.
But best things in life come from opportunities that you cannot prepare for in advance. Just willingness to accept it.
Perhaps pedantic, but "prepared mind" includes your meaning. Prepared may mean being equipped with a skill that meets the moments, but flexibility, acceptance and optimism are also skills of a prepared mind.
It's why the quote has survived since 1854.
> "dans les champs de l'observation, le hasard ne favorise que les esprits préparés" ("In the field of observation, chance favors only the prepared mind")
I don't think it is pedantic at all. A prepared mind is exactly what is needed to take advantage of opportunity. Prepared mentally denotes a state of mind where you are actively looking for opportunities and that allows you to notice them. It is an attitude, really. Not unlike being a Stoic is an attitude on gratefulness of life and acceptance of death.
I used to think the same (and still have regrets about missed opportunities, ie sleepwalking them). But then I think that I'm probably disregarding some other opportunities that I did take and just forgot about them because "For it falls out That what we have we prize not to the worth ..."
But however you want to spin it, there’s still the underlying luck, that you survived until that moment, that you were able to reach that place and that you were free to venture there are all inputs you didn’t have much or any control over. There’s no shame in it. I’ve achieved a good deal in a half century of life and much of it was via hard work and guile, but I do tend to think of myself as lucky because, even as a middle-class kid back when the US had that, where my starting blocks were placed on the track was far enough ahead of the bulk of the pack that these things became achievable.
I like to call it "Exposing yourself to luck." You can't win lottery if you never play. Play the lottery with the best odds and play it as much as you can.
I think it’s just trying to be exposed to as many opportunities as possible with the best tools you can have. You can’t determine whether or not you can catch a fish, but you can acquire the best fish-catching tools you can get, try to get to the fullest river, and stay out there as long as you can. I think the role of “luck” really hits when you realize how some people are born on the side of the river with a gigantic, well-made net.
You won't always be right but you can be there often enough to matter. goals need to be reasoneble - the luck needed to be a billionair is unlikely, but if you settle for millionair that luck is likely if you invest your money in the right place.
Yeah, and it's kinda depressing how hard it is to get people to accept that. Every community and group seems to operate under the assumption that anyone who's not 'successful' is too lazy or selfish to deserve it, and that those who are winning have to be the smartest, hardest working people around.
The just world fallacy is strong in communities, especially for artistic and creative endeavours like writing, art, music, filmmaking, game design, etc.
Does that mean that effort is worthless? Of course not. Does that mean you should just say "well, I'm not successful, I guess that's just life?". Again no.
But you do need to be humble and accept that in some ways, both your successes and failures were affected by external factors as well as your own efforts. That for how tempting it is to look down at people, that it could just have well have been your life circumstances that didn't work out well, your bets that didn't pay off and your efforts that didn't amount to anything in the end.
Best only to worry about what you can control, no? If there are external and internal factors to your success then you should spend 100% of your time focusing on the internal ones, since these are the only ones where productive gains can be made.
Also, the research is in. Grit is the single biggest predictor of economic success. Anyone who is lacking in economic success can be reasonably assumed to lack grit. Whether you label that “lazy” or not is semantics.
It's wild how much of what we chalk up to merit is really just the invisible scaffolding of luck: being born in the right place, with the right wiring, at the right time...
If things generally worked out very well for you, it feels good to believe you got there because of your virtues, and that those who didn’t got there because of their vices.
While I do agree with your opinion, I think the opposite is also true. It feels good to believe you didn't get there because "The game is rigged", "You have to be born lucky", "The house always wins", etc, etc. This defeatist/powerless way of thinking may in fact make it worse for you. When hope is lost, what's left?
That is what all societies are finding out right now. Before, they could count on women having babies providing a need to hope, but now that children are optional, societies don’t seem to have a replacement mechanism.
There's certainly an element of luck. But every individual, no matter how unlucky their circumstances, has the opportunity to make good or bad choices from that starting point. It is not like people are powerless victims of the unlucky birth they had.
A person born in a war torn country who is killed at a young age doesn't get much opportunity for good or bad choices. That's what I think of regarding bad luck.
>the invisible scaffolding of luck: being born in the right place, with the right wiring, at the right time...
That seems overly dismissive of the contribution of our ancestors, fighting against entropy, who paid it forward to their offspring, creating the civilization we now inherit.
> According to this view, justice demands that variations in how well-off people are should be wholly determined by the responsible choices people make and not by differences in their unchosen circumstances. Luck egalitarianism expresses that it is a bad thing for some people to be worse off than others through no fault of their own.
When I see this line of reasoning, it leads me down the road of determinism instead. Who is to say what determines the quality of choices people make? Does one's upbringing, circumstance, and genetics not determine the quality of one's mind and therefore whether or not they will make good choices in life? I don't understand how we can meaningfully distinguish between "things that happen to you" and "things you do" if the set of "things that happen to you" includes things like being born to specific people in a specific time and place. Surely every decision you make happens in your brain and your brain is shaped by things beyond your control.
Maybe this is an unprovable position, but it does lead me to think that for any individual, making a poor choice isn't really "their" fault in any strong sense.
This is a great question. One of the hardest lessons I've learned is that some people don't know that the choices they're making are going to hurt them.
There are children who are actively taught by the people they should be able to trust that belligerence, lying, and stealing will get them what they need in life. On the other side of the coin, there are children who are taught to assume that everyone else has the up-bringing and or at least the natural intelligence needed to enable good choices every time a moral dilemma is presented. Both - it turns out - are equally short-sighted.
What's worse is that many of us assume that others can easily change their entire worldview on a dime. In the middle of my life, I'm coming to accept that I need more years that will be available to me to fix all the broken parts of my psyche and intellect.
Overall I agree with this comment. A determinist would take this position even further and argue that there is nothing left that we could be in control of - it is causes and effects and maybe some randomness all the way down. Even those things we think are our free choices.
Yes, that’s the ultimate argument against determinism. Either one actually sincerely believe in determinism and trying to convince someone else they are wrong about free-will are just displaying their inability to take their hypothesis to its full conclusion, or they are just trying to dispel their own doubts by bending other people opinions.
The bigger picture is though that taking swings every day also requires a bit of "luck". Some people just don't have the energy, education, mindset, or environment.
It's easy to assume it would be in our control, but if you're just tired all day every day because, say, your hormone balance is off and no one can tell you why, you might statistically accomplish less than others.
> Luck is what happens when preparation meets opportunity
I know that quote is reductive, but I do find it is relevant to my life and what I observe in others. The opportunity part is what we usually call luck. Preparation is another matter, though. Many people just aren't prepared to take advantage of situations which present to them.
I'm lucky. I'm lucky because I didn't ever have to try hard at anything in my life, and I have a good life.
I was born from two parents that cared about me. Luck
In a country where most people have a decent shot at life. Luck
I'm lazy, but I was granted a body that never failed me, and was pushed by people around me to try stuff. Luck
I'm lazy, but my laziness is somehow useful in this computer driven world. Luck
All this luck compounds, and thanks to the activities I was pushed to do, the schools I was pushed to go to, I was lucky to meet great friends, an amazing girlfriend, and have a cushy job, a nice house in a beautiful place. Luck. Luck. Luck. Luck
I have no ambition, I was never prepared for anything, but all I've had was luck.
That's what you call luck, and a lot of people try to convince themselves everything good that happens to them is because they somehow deserve it. Because they were "ambitious" and "prepared", and an "opportunity" struck at the right time, and obviously they seized it, and everyone that didn't just didn't deserve it as much as them.
Obviously some people weren't as lucky as me, and actually had to work hard, and managed to seize an actual opportunity that wasn't gifted to them. But that's not all luck, only a little part is. And those people are quite rare.
Guess the child born into abject poverty in a war-torn country in sub-Saharan Africa who died before their 5th birthday due to malnutrition and disease just didn't properly prepare or have enough ambition then right?
Classic survivorship bias BS.
The privileged always think the people on top got their through their hard work and ambition, and those on the bottom just lacked the strength of character to succeed and give no consideration whatsoever to the structural / systemic conditions created by those on top to ensure they remain there, and no consideration paid to how said conditions disproportionately negatively impact those on the bottom.
Must be nice to sit all the way up there on high and look down on the world with such a smug sense of superiority.
I like the concept of "luck surface area". Sure, I started out with a bunch of luck. But the harder I work, the luckier I get. You have to put yourself into a position to cash in on your luck.
I agree. But there's different ways to respond to it. You can be fatalistic and say well I wasn't born rich or I'm no good at XYZ so why bother. Or you can do well and then say it wasn't luck I work hard every day. To me having had some people I've known a long time die or be debilitated by desease in recent years, I feel very lucky just to be alive and healthy with opportunities in front of me and people I love close to me. A lot of people don't have that and it's not their fault.
I think that in a sense, there is a skill to being lucky. You may have exactly the same opportunities as another person but you may have more capacity to take advantage of those opportunities due to being open minded, adaptable, giving, and curious. I call that lucky.
Between pure "luck" and personal struggle during a lifetime there lies a whole lot of dexterities that psychology, evolution and education cannot decide if they are developed due to luck or struggle. Like intelligence, intuition, talent, self confidence etc. And this fuzzy grey zone is the majority of our basis.
An even more outsized role is played by a virtuous life. It may not make you a billionaire, but if you finish high school, get a full-time job once you finish school, get married before you have children, then you are quite likely to have a good life.
We are doing a disservice to our fellow man by not telling them this truth.
To take one of your examples, high school graduation rates vary from ~25% to ~98% in U.S. school districts. It's not because some districts have a lot more virtuous young people, but because some districts are poor and others are wealthy, among other factors. Even if one of those factors is virtuous parents, kids can't choose their parents.
I'm not denying our moral agency, but it is often constrained by environment. Some people are lucky enough that virtuous choices are easier for them.
People in all western countries can do all of these things without much difficulty. We can go off the theory that you are just as likely to have a successful life if you drop out of school, have children with many women and/or absent fathers, and not get a permanent job — but there is no data to support any of those claims, and we have been running this experiment for decades now with nothing getting better.
No, but a few of those poor kids see the claim change their life instead of following their parents examples and those kids tend to do well. We see this most in immigrants where the parents come with nothing and barely get by but their kids despite going to the same bad schools do well
Adsolutely. I agree that our lives aren't determined by family background, and we can draw on many other resources, both within ourselves and from other people besides family.
If I overstated my point, it's only because I was pushing back against the idea that education, employment, and a traditional family are equally attainable by all, and if someone has failed in any of these areas, it's because they lack virtue compared to other people (many of whom had more advantageous starting points in life, but supposedly that doesn't matter).
Or in simpler terms, "poor people are poor because they're bad and they deserve it". It's a sentiment that's been very useful for the ultra-wealthy class, and detrimental to everyone else, not just the poor.
Education, employment, and traditional family are useful things to work with though. They give a direction to try to get the poor to go. We can ask questions on how we can get their kids to go to school and study. We can ask questions about how we can get them acceptable jobs. We can ask how we can get them into stable family situations. We will fail a lot, but it gives us a proven framework to work towards. Yes there are problems - I'm not advocating live with a spouse who abuses you - but we can ask how we can stop that abuse as well.
Now there are many traditions around the world that works. Most cultures have man+women=family (as opposed to some form of polygamy), and there is reason to suspect this is important even if it isn't "in" to study why. (it isn't clear which non-traditional forms also would be fine and which would be a disaster)
Saying "poor are poor because they deserve it" is an accusation that I hear a lot more than I hear people who believe it. Some do believe it, but most accused of it do not and have better explinations of why they do things that the accusers don't like.
I agree that these are useful frameworks. When I said they're not equally attainable by all, I meant that for people who are better off, these things can sort of just fall in their lap, whereas poor people more often have to struggle for them. I know I'm saying something that is common sense, but I just wanted to make the point that inspiring people to be more virtuous is great, but a lot of people face material and psychological obstacles which make attaining these things "without much difficulty" (quoting the parent commenter) not very realistic. I think we agree there.
Not many people would openly say that poor people deserve to be poor. Those aren't the words that the parent commenter used, and maybe that wasn't even the intention. But this line of thinking can encourage people who feel this way, by giving their feelings a moral justification.
All I mean is, we should be empathetic toward people who have fewer resources than we do, and not be too quick to credit our accomplishments to our virtuous living.
How are then countries which are poorer than the USA ranking higher in education?
I completely reject the notion that wealth is at all a factor in the intelligence or educational success of a child. Wealth is just a correlation. Neither does national educational systems or policies have more than a tiny effect on education success.
What matters for educational success is the genetical and cultural material of the children. If they are born smart, or are brought up in families who value intelligence or brought up in cultures which value intelligence. Even poverty and schooling become small factors if the child has any of these foundations.
I don't entirely disagree, however: it's a far sight easier to live a "virtuous" life if you weren't born into poverty, or with a mental illness, or in a country that is actively at war, etc. These things are all beyond our control, as are so many other things. Luck.
It's obviously always possible to make the best of bad circumstances (and make the worst of good circumstances!) but it's easier to "win" when you're dealt a good hand.
And you can have an enlightened life in any one of those places - for example, the ideas laid out in the piece are abstract, and not environment specific.
All sorts of folks have lived in all sorts of places across time. Trappings and environments have varied. Attributing things to luck in and of itself is an illusion. There is nothing that is lucky or unlucky. You play the hand you are dealt.
Nope. Statistically, having children before you get married is much more likely to result in worse outcomes. Maybe cause and effect is inverted, but maybe the better option is to not run a social experiment in fatherless children as we have been doing for the past couple of decades with absolutely no research to suggest that it can result in positive outcomes and loads of data to show that it's almost definitely can't result in positive outcomes.
Statistics without context can be misleading. It’s reasonable to assume that the cause is the prior situation which lead to it, not the act itself.
Picture two scenarios:
1. A loving unmarried couple, regardless of gender, sexual orientation, or child bearing, lives in an affluent neighbourhood, in a rich country, have steady incomes, and decide to have a child. After ten years they decide “I love you so much. I don’t need a piece of paper to prove that, but let’s get married. It’ll be a great opportunity to connect our friends and family, and it’ll give us some legal and financial protection when one of us dies”.
2. In a poor neighbourhood, a woman who was mistreated all her life marries her high school sweetheart, who turn out to be abusive. He not only beats her, he rapes her regularly. Like too many victims of domestic violence, she’s afraid to move away. Eventually she becomes pregnant and has the child against her will.
Which of those do would produce the better outcome?
Being fatherless isn’t in itself the issue, but everything which came before to reach that point might be. There is a huge difference between not having a father because he abandoned you, or because he died, or because your mother as a single affluent woman with the means to do so decided to do in-vitro fertilisation.
I highly recommend “New Family Values”, by Andrew Solomon, to get a feeling for the different types of families which work. It goes way beyond “one mother, one father, married”.
Proof by analogy is fraud" - Bjarne Stroustrup
Yes; page 692 of TC++PL. A good analogy is an excellent way of illustrating an idea, but far too often such analogies are not accompanied by solid reasoning, data, etc
Analogies are seldom perfect but they are often useful. They help to illustrate a point. The world is not a programming language and most things can’t be ascertained by mathematical proofs.
But all that is irrelevant because what I posted above wasn’t an analogy. It was… A thought experiment? A purposefully exaggerated example? Anyway, not an analogy. Analogies compare two different things via a third thing they have in common, but here I used examples which are directly related to the subject matter. The point was to make it clear, via extreme but realistic examples, that correlation does not imply causation.
I don't think you need to run any experiment. Being married or not is just signing a paper. What matters is if the couple live together and in harmony. You can do so without being married and having children, and it's everyday more common.
That's why I'm saying you have cause and effect in the wrong order: children issues are tied to one or both parents not caring about them, and a symptom of that was having children before marriage, when marriage was "the only way" to a family. Nowadays things are different, and you can totally be a functional family without signing any contract on paper.
If we ignore almost all of human history save for the past 50 years, then yes. If we redefine marriage to not mean what most humans that have ever used the word meant by it, then yes.
But why would we do these things? If you call all relations between two human beings marriage, you gain nothing, you just lose a word.
Marriage is a covenant between two people, a man and a woman, with God, and incidentally, this covenant, not a piece of paper, it's also a precondition for two people to live together and in harmony. It's a commitment by both people to focus not on themselves, but on the family unit and the wellbeing of that family unit.
> You can do so without being married and having children, and it's everyday more common.
Children of married parents still have better outcomes, and the lower income people are, the bigger the advantage of having married parents are.
I'm married to my wife. We lived together happily for more than a decade before we married. We are childless atheists in a neighborhood of other childless, atheist, married couples, some of whom have been together almost as long as my wife and I have been alive.
By your definition, are we all unmarried or living in disharmony?
> By your definition, are we all unmarried or living in disharmony?
If we consider what the word meant up until about 50 years ago, then yes. If we consider the new definition, of "you signed a piece of paper given to you by the government, and gave it back to the government". Then, sure, you are married.
I'm not trying to insult you or denigrate you, but again, if we use the word marriage for all relations between two human beings, then we gain nothing, we just lose a word.
I disagree; we have gained the ability to understand how different sorts want to share their lives with their families and communities.
Do you hold the same position for marriages in other traditions - for example, Shintoism, indigenous belief systems, Hinduism, paganism, etc? Many such religions don't have the same concept of a marriage as a covenant with God, yet have existed for quite some time.
No one is suggesting marriage means "all relations between two human beings". Only that there are many ways to demonstrate and be committed to a person. The legal recognization by a church or government is one version, but not the key ingredient.
> And we don't need to use the word marriage for all of them.
But that's the only word we have for "lifetime-committed couple recognized by some authority". The meanings of words change and evolve. Tough luck.
We could use the secular "civil union" for all marriages performed outside of a church. But that would be unnecessarily clunky and pointless ("I got civil union-ed this weekend, it was great!"). And then of course people married under other religious traditions would object to the use of the word "civil" so you'd have to qualify every other union accordingly - "Jewish union", "Muslim union", "Hindu union", etc. Why?
You're basically arguing against free speech. I don't understand who it's helping. If the distinction is that important to you, just spell it out when talking about your marriage ("I was married in a church"). Leave everyone else alone.
I'm religious, but I don't see it that way. When a man and a woman are faithful to each other and having a family together, then that is it: they are married.
Actions have a value which are seven thousand times more worth than words, so the covenant with God is automatic in that situation even if the people are ignorant and have never heard of God.
>the covenant with God is automatic in that situation even if the people are ignorant and have never heard of God.
Yes. That's the kind of attitude that can build toward peace & harmony, and to live & let live instead of the hate against nonuniformity often shown by the religious extremists. Whether they are Christian or anything else. Hate is hate.
When an unmarried couple is completely faithful to each other until death, regardless of any other family, there's no way the average religious marriage can compare in that regard.
Not even close, zero is still a very small number.
Statistics are pretty accurate here. With the rate of divorce and unfaithfulness so rampant in religious marriage, it's only become more of a gamble over decades and decades of direct observation and interacton.
IIRC some cultures have shunned the idea of gambling since prehistoric times.
Others have it inscribed in scriptures almost as old, but not universally adhered to by the "faithful" just yet.
Can you please stop flaunting your ignorant and limited worldview all over this thread? You've insulted a good 30% of humanity by now and are on track to insult the remainder, it's getting a little hard on the eyes and there are only so many links of yours that I'm prepared to flag.
I thought flaggers always hid in the shadows, but here you are out in the open. Would you please reconsider your actions? You're doing great damage to a very nice message board, and it is to no benefit for yourself.
Flagging is a powerful tool in this small duckpond. Instead of abusing it, you can use HN to learn self restraint, so that when you one day achieve power over other people in real life you have learnt not to abuse it.
>I'm advocating here for the Christian institution of marriage, not for a merge contract with government.
How strong is your commitment to this? If it's unflagging I think a lot of people can understand your disappointment then.
If you are well-acquainted enough with the USA, you are certainly aware that these have been one and the same for like . . . centuries now here.
Not just 50 years, what have you been doing about that the whole time?
Have you had any successful efforts to completely separate church & state yet, and have you even had 50 years to work on that so far?
It would be good to see a concrete sign that your advocacy is sincere.
If there's nothing so far, that is understandable, but most of us do not have 90 full years to figure this out, so no time like the present to get started.
To my knowledge, "marriage" has meant "a man + a woman for a lifetime" in most societies that I am aware of. (In the context of this conversation, I think the lifetime part is what the parent was talking about.) Frequently a man could have multiple marriages, but each was for a lifetime. It might be acceptable to have a mistresses outside the marriage (Rome), but the heirs came from the official wife. I'm told that the pre-Christian Irish renewed (or didn't) their marriages every year. Divorce also existed; I know that both the Romans and the Mosaic Law had divorces. But marriage was usually taken pretty seriously by all societies, especially agricultural ones, regardless of whether they were Christian. The idea that "it's just a piece of paper" seems to me to be fairly rare. Maybe the Romans had that (I think Cicero divorces his old wife for a new young one when he was old), and Jesus criticizes the Pharisees for no-fault divorces, but these seem unusual situations compared to most of history.
Not my downvote but I do usually see things going south in a traditional way more as a consequence of tradition itself of some kind, overcoming the better judgement it would have required to avoid such a fate.
Those are just statistics describing what happens, not why it happens. Why does having children before getting married creates worse outcomes? Can individuals or society do something about the qualitative aspect of it?
Quantifying something doesn't explain it, it just... Quantifies it, deeper inspection is needed to understand what the statistics says.
You are prescribing what needs to be done based on something that is, ultimately, descriptive.
Do we have any data whatsoever that would support the claim that whether you are married before having children has no impact on your life outcome or the life outcomes of your children?
I don't think you understood my comment, I will spell it out: data by itself just quantifies, doesn't qualify. It doesn't qualify why marrying before having children is better, it just states that, for some reason, the outcomes are better.
Now you need to do the qualitative research to understand what are the causes for it, it could be that marriage is a signal for stable relationships, in that case marrying doesn't matter but a stable relationship does (which is quite self-obvious, it's just an example). Marriage could also have tax implications in some countries, which in turn could help the average to better outcomes, so on and so forth.
The data on this is enveloping much more than just "marriage" as a virtue, or any other moral aspect of it, you are using the data to imply that marriage is virtuous and is the cause for better outcomes which doesn't hold by just quantification...
It's blindness by statistics, it's quite common when ascribing data as the sole truth. Data can guide you to investigate other aspects that will qualify why the data shows what it shows.
These things I named correlate to better outcomes, we have nothing that indicates that not doing these things generate similar favourable outcomes … but we should continue to tell people that it's not necessary for them to do these things to have good outcomes as we have not done enough qualitative research to know what almost all of our forefathers have known, and it's best that people experiment more and see if maybe the right combination of unemployment, promiscuity and lack of education could not create equally good outcomes for them.
I have unfortunately not spent enough time at a university to follow this line of reasoning. Must be wild to be able to follow it. I'm of the yokel type that thinks if all data and tradition we have shows something works, then it's probably best to do the thing that works instead of trying things that we have no reason to think would work.
But in line with tradition, the underclasses in the west has always been the favourite laboratory for the cultural elites in the west.
> These things I named correlate to better outcomes, we have nothing that indicates that not doing these things generate similar favourable outcomes
Exactly, they correlate but there's nothing saying that just because traditionally it has correlated it means that getting married is the reason for it.
Traditionally only marriage was accepted as the means to form a family, even up to this day people will be shunned by their families for having kids out of wedlock, even in a loving relationship, don't you think being shunned by grandparents would also cause worse outcomes? Considering that some of these being shunned are also of younger age, less support from family members would mean worse outcomes.
Your data doesn't even discriminate about age groups, it's a blanket statement "marriage leads to better outcomes", leading to the question (which you could find data for): which groups? Are there other parameters/aspects that lead to better outcomes which are correlating with marriage rates? What about marriage exactly is causing better outcomes? It's not marriage itself since a lot of marriages end in divorce or an unhealthy home environment, so what is it?
Those are the insights that data can lead you into. Your take is just to do whatever has been done because it's been working, without even questioning why it might work, and what can be done to lead to better outcomes without requiring marriage.
> but we should continue to tell people that it's not necessary for them to do these things to have good outcomes as we have not done enough qualitative research to know what almost all of our forefathers have known, and it's best that people experiment more and see if maybe the right combination of unemployment, promiscuity and lack of education could not create equally good outcomes for them.
This is just moral grandstanding without substance, the world changes, traditions change (the tradition of marriage used to be about property, changing ownership of a woman from her father to her husband, for example), just blind belief in traditions is, at best, ignorant, and at worst produces this bigoted worldview.
You'd do much better if you believed in traditions while also questioning the "whys" behind it, at least to understand better why some tradition you believe might have created better outcomes, and how those processes can be applied outside of your tradition.
That is, if you are a good person and want everyone else to also have a better life even if living outside of what your view of morality is, and not only living life the way your morality prescribes to because that's, supposedly, the only way.
There are many positively skewed coin flips as well which we don't take because of various biases, fears, habits or our upbringing.
I like a quote from Magnus Carlsen (the chess player): "The correct mindset in chess is somewhere between optimist and delusional". I think it applies to life as well.
I am naturally pessimistic I think I lost a lot of opportunities because of it. Thankfully I also get those periods where I am blindly all-in on something. Some of those made me very good at useless things but some resulted in very good opportunities and then outcomes.
Energetic optimists who avoid very dumb choices do very well in life in my experience.
People who talk about luck a lot usually can't produce a decently long list of things they tried or keep making blunders (smoking, alcohol, associating with destructive and apathetic people).
"Luck" is just a subjective view of statistics. We can't change past events but we can often make choices that will pay off over time. So one can in effect build their own luck by leveraging whatever they start with.
It doesn't guarantee anything, you can still be smart and fucked. But you can _try_ to change things.
There is an idealistic fiction of "meritocracy" that doesn't really exist anywhere to varying degrees. Racism, sexism, poverty, sectarian, citizenship discrimination, lack of influential friends and family, and more biases exist and are very unlikely to ever disappear completely.
The pejorative invention of "meritocracy" is such an own goal. The answer to overcoming these adversities is to stop moaning about it and demonstrate your own merits.
That’s true to an extent, but has severe limitations. Of the five thing your parent comment listed (parents, genetics, geography, society, wider economy), only one (geography) is truly under your control, and even then it can be very hard to change depending on where you start and the other four (and more).
I object to those 5 things. Parents and genetics are one thing, but geography, society, and the wider economy are for everyone to navigate so make your own luck.
If you were born poor in a society which sees part of your genetics as undesirable or outright criminal—none of which were your choice—you’ll find yourself in very dire straits and changing your situation—heck, even knowing a better life is possible—will be extremely difficult.
It is not reasonable to tell a child sold into slavery or forced to be a soldier to “make their own luck”, that “society, and the wider economy are for everyone to navigate”. A person in the eye of storm and another in calm waters cannot navigate the same way.
People who firmly believe they above all “made their own luck” are the ones who had such a large amount of it outside their control they don’t even realise how much of it they had, like a fish unable to perceive the water.
I am not saying that it is easy or that everyone starts with the same opportunities. But you can make your own luck in any case to improve your life or at least to have a better shot at it.
If you believe that you are a victim that nothing you can do will make a diference, and therefore don't even try then you will definitely not improve your situation!
Now if you are born in poverty as an albino in Africa, orphaned at a young age, sold to slavery and then to a witchdoctor for organ trafficking are you fucked? Probably but that does not change the point. [I am pushing your reply ad absurdum to highlight that it is not a counter-argument...]
Crime is basically your way of cheating the probabilities. If everyone is playing by the rules and you don’t, you basically made your odds better. I am not saying this is right. I am just saying this is why people deviate and commit crimes though crimes are also committed for different reasons.
Since he might not be known to most (especially a younger audience), the author is a writer best known for many of the Choose Your Own Adventure books that were hugely successful in the 80s.
"Today, it’s all too easy to see all of the limitations and infelicities of The Cave of Time and its successors: a book of 115 pages that had, as it proudly trumpeted on the cover, 40 possible endings meant that the sum total of any given adventure wasn’t likely to span more than about three choices if you were lucky. But to a lonely, hyper-imaginative eight-year-old, none of that mattered. I was well and truly smitten, not so much by what the book was as by what I wished it to be, by what I was able to turn it into in my mind by the sheer intensity of that wish."
These books were incredibly important to me as an 80s kid. Was a voracious reader in general but absolutely loved these because they had replay value! I remember scouring through these on long family trips in the car to find every possible ending.
The parallels with modern video games are obvious.
The first video game (and one of the first programs) I wrote was a self-styled Choose Your Own Adventure on a C64 with ASCII art and maybe a total of 10 pages.
The only person who acted impressed by it was my grandmother - who had paid for the C64 - but that was enough for me.
In fact, this inspired me to buy such a book for my 9-yo son! They've grown in size, apparently (250-300 pages). Let's see how, in the age of omnipresent screens, he likes it :)
I was pleased that at my local toy store (yes, we still have one, The Time Machine in Manchester, CT) they carry Choose Your Own Adventure books. What’s more, last week we picked up a copy of “The Cave of Time”. So many memories of that book growing up.
>“It’s not so difficult to be a buddha,” says Thich Nhat Hanh. “Just
keep your awakening alive all day long.”
And it’s not too complicated to be a permanent tightrope walker either: just stay calm, still and balanced. While ninjas with ignited swords jump all around you and acid-proof sharks lurks at you from the sour sea waiting your fall.
Sleepwalking, that’s a perfect title for our current Zeitgeist indeed.
Ok, that’s a lot of "witty remark I could make regarding" the text (and avoid doing instead). So, let’s take a bit of these advices in practice. Thank you Edward Packard for sharing with us some final reflections on life after a long one, displaying humility while presenting a vibrantly human figure.
Found it last month, don’t remember how, but I did share it with the rest of my team. Excellent talk, it does have many "eternal" points to rebound on the essay vocabulary.
Buddha would probably say it’s very easy to “be” a Buddha. To become one, on the other hand, is hard in my opinion, takes thousands of hours of practice. Once you’re there however, it is open effortless awareness and not hard to maintain, so they say!
Most practitioners get tiny glimpses of aspects of enlightenment, but to integrate and sustain it all is very rare indeed. I wonder if there even 100 Boddhisatvas in the world
> It follows, I think, that the luckier you’ve been, the more humility and generous spiritedness you need, and the unluckier you’ve been, the more compassion for yourself you need, and unfair as it may seem, the more you need irrepressible resolve.
> "...happiness to become one’s default state of mind."
I have read psychologists saying that "happiness as default state" is a social construct myth of modern times. You cannot be happy all the time, the fact of being unhappy sometimes is what drives you self-reflect and to chase meaning to your life. To feel pleasure you need to feel some pain.
>I have read psychologists saying that "happiness as default state" is a social construct myth of modern times.
Psychologists are what's the actual social construct myth of modern times.
>You cannot be happy all the time
That's not what "happiness as default state" implies though. It's about happiness being the disposition you opt for, as opposed to wallowing in misery and seeing fault in everything as your baseline.
"Default state" precisely conveys that it's not about "all the time". Just what you should strive to start from and return to.
Nope, its still vast majority of situation, not a healthy setup for most people. Is being content with one's life a state of happiness or just state of content?
We are splitting hairs here but since happiness is considered the ultimate goal and state (what's beyond that if its not the end?), I would say aim for being content with your life as a baseline, jump to an actual happiness when stars align and revert back.
Its cool enough place to be and definitely more maintainable long term, and as mentioned a seldom dip to misery is a very valuable correction and reminder to all how fleeting this all is.
They certainly are when they're poorly trained and not held to proper academic standards.
I've had more than one licensed psychologist attempt to proselytize to me. Granted, my location is part of the problem, but it still should never have happened. There are other, less rigorously trained people you can go to for that kind of thing and they're a dime a dozen. It objectively made things worse for me as some of my most major issues directly involve religion(s) pushed upon me as a child.
I would argue that perhaps you have confused happiness with joy, or I have confused happiness with a lack of sadness, or perhaps with satisfaction.
While I find that joy is a fickle and fleeting thing, I feel that I am happy most of the time, satisfied that things are as they must be, or at least close enough that the state of affairs does not poorly reflect on my efforts.
Sadness or grief make their appearance, but need not make life a poverty of happiness.
I think probably many people think that happiness and joy are the same thing, thus robbing themselves of happiness in an eternal pursuit of joy. If joy were constant, it wouldn’t be the joyful treasure that it is.
I tend to think of (a default state of) happiness as being akin to equanimity. Not indifference, but acceptance of life as it is right now because that tends to diffuse your suffering. Contentment would be another appropriate word for this I think.
I wish I had more joy in life especially when I meet people who just seem to exude it so well in their interactions. It seems like they are almost always joyful.
In my understanding, Joy is the emotion of overt happiness. It elicits silly behavior, celebratory vocalisation, laughter, and hugging.
Happiness is the state of satisfied being devoid of feelings of remorse, emotional pain, grief, or anger. It is a state that accepts joy, that provokes appreciation, gratitude, and satisfaction. It is a generally open and creative state, that gravitates toward the positive.
It is possible to maintain a state of happiness amid unfavourable events and conditions if your mind and actions are guided by a moral framework, and even to maintain a sense of happiness through hardships and injustice if you have built the philosophical structure to separate your mind and sense of self from your circumstances.
- big things (e.g. someone dies) you cant avoid being sad
- small everyday things (e.g. someone cuts you off at the intersection) you have a choice to smile and treat it lightly or go all passive aggressive and spiteful.
> You cannot be happy all the time, the fact of being unhappy sometimes is what drives you self-reflect and to chase meaning to your life.
Each time you go through a cycle of honest self-reflection, you grow emotionally stronger. When a similar situation arises again, it will not affect you as deeply as it did the first time. After enough cycles, you may reach a point where your default state remains largely unaffected by such events. This equanimity, that comes with a deep inner calm, allows a naturally happy default state to emerge.
I do agree a balance of pain and pleasure is necessary. But I also believe you can make your default state a gentle fluctuation between the two, rather than wild swings.
In my experience, this is largely a force of habit -- I one day found my default reaction to almost any event was to chastise myself, for example. If you can break this habit and return to a more tranquil medium, I think that's as close to being "always happy" as it's possible to get.
Pleasure is not the same as happy. Probably no one, even the luckiest entity in the universe, can avoid to go through some painful emotion.
But how we handle raw emotions, within interpretation processes, is what makes all the difference.
Actually, an entity that would only go through an indefinitely long flow of pleasant emotions and still end up being depressed and feeling unsatisfied the whole time is perfectly conceivable.
>an entity that would only go through an indefinitely long flow of pleasant emotions and still end up being depressed and feeling unsatisfied the whole time is perfectly conceivable.
There's fundamental lack of emotional depth in our society as I believe you can be happy and displeased or in pain _at the same time_. I can say that I'm never unhappy but I do feel displeasure, anger and pain at times as these aren't opposites and don't cancel each other out in my model of the world.
First let's start off that psychology is not like other fields, as it's often theories/opinions.
That statement is someone's way to describe what they found out to be best for them. Not an axiom for everyone.
And default doesn't mean always, it means that one's general state is happiness. For me, for that statement to make sense, the word "happiness" would be replaced with something like "being glad" (gladness?), as I always feel glad of myself/my life but I see happiness as something more active, like being sad. While I see this gladness as a passive state. But again, that's my personal take.
I think that depends on how you interpret "happiness to become one’s default state of mind."
I think feeling happy is my default. I still get mad, hurt, sad, bored, etc. But when those feelings wear away, I return to a general state of happy contentment.
I would call that more content than happy. Interestingly in languages like Spanish, 'contento' is almost overlapping semantically with the word happy ('feliz') in its day-to-day usage, and I find it a more adequate usage of the concept.
So content is basically the baseline when no needs are impacting your state-of-mind, and happy would be the consequence of a positive event or result.
I fully agree. It gives also a sense of impact in the world that might span over centuries or even longer.
Sometimes I joke about the simple concept that we are all the descendants of a chain of ascendants that manage to successfully reproduce and have children without interruption, through all the evolutionary stages, from homo sapiens to hominids, monkeys, mammals until reaching the first life organisms. And I am not going to be the one stopping that long evolutionary chain ;)
Many people do not want to hear this. Many would point to economic factors as the main problem.
But I think that when people are educated about the risks and responsibilities of parenthood and given the choice of doing so (birth control, abortion, etc.) - the simple fact is that they CHOOSE not have enough kids to meet the replacement rate.
The reason you can see this is because the lowering birth rates aren't limited to one or two countries. It is every industrialized country. Every single one. If the issues were purely economic, those countries with amazing parental leave and better social nets would avoid the problem - but they don't.
I'm not sure what that kind of future for humanity will look like long term. It will be an interesting reckoning in ~100-200 years.
Good observation. Those could very well be the only considerations for some people.
Maybe a good part of this is the risks and responsibilities without a co-operative village to grow families interactively.
What if the lingering problem is one of scale, that has not yet been solved?
Remember this whole thing is from a 90-year old and the smaller the village, the fewer the population of any one age group.
It's really making people think about all kinds of things all over the ball park.
If it's a small enough village you can't end up with a crowd of 1st graders ever, for instance, so age segregation as we know it for any years at a time has no similarity, and across-the-board people of all ages are part of the same group more so. Which means for one thing, if there is a 90-year old among the village, almost every one would be familiar with interacting with them routinely, as they were all growing up no less. An overwhelmingly more abundant number of adults would effectively be taking care of the children from start to finish, compared to how widespread adult influence is not intentionally minimized today, but ends up that way with same-age peers being more influential and naturally less mature.
Counter-intuitively it may even be that humanity, in the body of each family itself, thrives better when there remains satisfying group support for community focus more so than separate individual cocoons, which today are each more like on their own in rapidly changing times.
The villages humans mainly evolved to thrive in are about the opposite of what we have now in the big city.
It's also a good reminder that those of us who are a lot closer to 90 than we are 20 have still got a lot to learn.
So no quitting or you'll never be as wise as this letter shows.
You are basically saying that the purpose of all life forms is to create further life forms, whose purpose then is again the same. In other words, the purpose is eating its own tail. In my mind, this circularity disqualifies it from being a meaningful purpose.
I dunno. I'm on the older end, but nowhere near 90, and I've read a lot of these takes, and heard similar from a lot of older people in my lives. While there are good thoughts, often they come from people who didn't do that in their lives and achieved great things because they weren't chasing peace, but chasing success, status, adventure, and the such.
When I read something like this now, I ask if the person writing it lived that way most of their lives, or lived some other way and now are looking back wishing they had lived another (untested) way. I've heard too many old people tell me things like, "appreciate your family" when they were always gone working and built up an amazing life for their families. When my mother told it to me, I believed it because that's the way she lived.
Survivor bias, is what it comes down to. Beware successful people that tell you platitudes!
You could ignore where it came from and evaluate it on its own merits. I had no idea who Packard was - initially i thought it was Packard of hp fame (lol). And I did not entirely agree with some things in the piece. However, it seemed authentic (not ai generated), was brief, and provoked some reflection which is what I expect from any reading.
100% this. It's so bad in my experience that you should basically never listen to someone successful. While there are going to be exceptions, most of the time they either give you a wishlist as you mention, or completely misunderstand what happened.
> 3) to consider what others may be thinking and feeling
Personally I find myself often considering how other people might feel too much and end up being a people pleaser, so I need to work on that aspect of my social skills
It's really essential that one have (1) down (to be self-constituted) down in order for (3) not to lead to a circle of confusion. If I feel very assured in my own relationship with the universe, that doesn't depend on how anybody else sees me, and my security does not depend on others being happy with me. And when I don't need to make anybody happy, connection and compassion arise naturally from a place of curiosity--there are feelings of abundance and security underlying it rather than confusion or anxiety.
That sounds simple but the self-constitution part takes years of serious searching and work; some things (good therapists, good meditation teachers, good books, consistent practice, etc.) help the journey along, but there is no quick route.
Any particular books you recommend? people keep mentioning _how to win friends and influence people_ and I am not sure if it's just mindless productivity gurus hype
Right now I'm reading As It Is by Tulku Urgyen Rinpoche (if you don't have previous experience with Buddhism I'd recommend starting with something broader like Zen Mind Beginner's Mind, and find yourself a Buddhist meditation group!), and Self-Therapy by Jay Earley. Something else very much written for an intellectually-oriented audience but that gives inklings of a ladder into non-intellectual being, is Unwinding Anxiety by Judson A. Brewer. I liked it at the time, though I found I needed more help practicing the things that that book suggests, which led me deeper into Buddhism and eventually towards Dzogchen.
I wouldn't recommend How to Win Friends and Influence People, it is all about fine-tuning behavior to make a better impression on people, and that doesn't sound like the heart of the issue you described. The heart of that issue _could_ be that one clings to mind-concepts rather than trusting the whole being and feeling a connection with the universe. If so, one must slowly learn to trust the felt experience of life, to know that gut feelings and open-heartedness are just as important as thoughts (moreso in many respects), to trust that one can relax one's whole being and be carried by an infinite love within. It is a gradual progression.
As a lifelong obsequious people pleaser, I have realized that I make it about me by trying to figure out what people want from me, or I'm focused on how I can look better in their eyes. Instead, truly trying to understand how someone is feeling and reflecting that to them has been so much more gratifying for me (and hopefully for my friends and family.)
+1. I say this jokingly, but in a sense being a people-pleaser vs being empathetic is a “skill issue.”
Being focused on how people might think of you is shallow and tastes like narcissism. Even if in your own mind you are “thinking about others” too much you are really only thinking about yourself through their eyes.
Being present in the moment with someone and their feelings involves getting out of your own narrative.
>Once you’ve achieved that — once you are virtuously selfconstituted — you will be self-assured and have reason to be so. You will be emotionally invulnerable to being pushed around.
I don't feel that's true? I am currently in a massive turmoil at work because my line-manager is breaking all ethics rules, with higher leadership caring little. Because I try to follow my values I've spoken up numerous times and all I got for that is a mountain of stress. Turns out I am not emotionally invulnerable.
I'm not sure you've understood the idea. While your values include not breaking certain rules of ethics, your value ALSO clearly extends to being offended by others when they do it. So your value isn't purely "don't break ethical rules", but, "observe ethical rules and react when they are broken, by me and by others". I think what the author (not OP) means is that once you are virtuously selfconstituted, your decision about these and what YOU do about it is not easily swayed or pushed around. In this sense, it shouldn't matter that _others_ are breaking rules... obviously it isn't an ethical rule for them... but that you are clear that you wouldn't do the same. Thus, if your activities at work relate to pursuing goals aimed at by these broken rules, then it is _work_, and you do your work.
Another way of interpreting what you've shared is that what you are stressed about is actually _not quite the value you think you have_, otherwise you would have walked away, self-assuredly, emotionally certain in the rightness of removing yourself. But you haven't. So it isn't a set value. Obviously another value like, "I have to eat" preempts this ethical value being broken at work. I'm not saying this is wrong or not, just trying to help you navigate your stressful environment.
I was thinking along parallel lines. If you have fuck-you money then sure: you just leave when asked to do something imoral. But if you are materially dependent on the job then you have battling imperatives that will stress you.
The first thought that popped into my head here was, "well I have no kids, so yeah if forced to choose between job and morality I'd just bounce and figure it out later". But if I DID have dependents it's harder.
I will say if the choice is between being imoral and _personally_ poor ... I'd like to think I'd rather just be poor.
edit. Then again this is also on us as people to anticipate and prepare for these dilemmas and not let ourselves be trapped in toxic situations. I suck at this and don't do any real forward planning like having a lot of savings or having a backup plan to getting out of a bad job. But that's on me.
> But if you are materially dependent on the job then you have battling imperatives that will stress you
I would like to offer a different perspective for you.
I’ve never been shouted at in my work life. And I also know a few people who complain about being shouted at, at all places of work they’ve had — and it’s difficult for me to empathize with them.
At some point I understood that I never allowed my coworkers or managers to shout at me, and in the rare occasions when their voice was raised, I had made myself very clear, and I quit on the spot had the situation ever happened again. As a result, I’ve always had very pleasant and respectful working conditions, with self-respecting people who I know will quit if abused, so I treat them with respect as well.
On the other hand, people who endure humiliation by imagining contrived moral dilemmas about why it’s good and right for them to continue suffering — suffer for decades wherever they are employed, as they seem to filter out and stick to workplaces where this is acceptable.
Are there really no jobs for your talent where you can be moral, or you’re prepared to endure immorality (and to be faithful employee to such businesses) until you’re old and frail?
If your executives are ignoring your line managers unethical behavior, it is probable they are directing it or at least tacitly approving it. You work for an unethical company.
This is wonderful. I humbly believe discovering and applying a similar set of ideas is what got me through the slump of mid-life crisis and in a much more peaceful place now in all aspects of life.
Reminds me of "Try to be nice to people, avoid eating fat, read a good book every now and then, get some walking in, and try to live together in peace and harmony with people of all creeds and nations" from Monty Python's "The Meaning of Life", just with more quotations.
I'm approaching mid-forties. As a former Buddhist (up to like the age of 13) turned atheist, I find all the points the author shared in this PDF agreeable.
Being self-reliant (being able to find happiness even when alone); being self-aware; being aware of others (including others' feelings, motives, perspectives); focusing on the journey; acknowledging that 'luck' has a non-negligible role in one's life; preparing our minds for inevitable death with calm acceptance; so many things the author's view resounded with in my opinion and experience.
As an older person, I found these agreeable too and well articulated.
I could put the nine bullets into 2 broad buckets.
1) and 6) pertain to being in the ego - but one that is principled, seeking clarity of cognition and be willing to correct self-deception. truth and intellect.
2), 3), 4), 5), 7), 8) and 9) pertain to awareness, being in the here and now, dissolving of the ego, universal consciousness, truth and happiness.
The first bucket posits an ego but one that is principled, and the second bucket seeks to dissolve the ego and attempt to tune into the cosmic energies. yin and yang.
I was hoping for more of the author’s own perspective over those ninety years. Instead, it read more like a stitching project of other people's ideas. In particular the barrage of quote fragments disrupted the flow and made it harder for me to engage with the main point of each section.
It is often the case, that one’s perspective is a personal synthesis of external ideas. The act of quoting great past authors is also a way of recognizing where your influences come from. To describe by association how you think, or aspire to.
These are very difficult topics to properly talk about and correctly express all the nuance in the feeling that you try to convey, and many authors are quoted because they nailed a particular description, evocative of the feeling an author is trying to express and that he feels he can’t do a better job at explaining.
Similarly to how you can narrate a story through a sequence of pictures you can narrate an idea through a sequence of raw concepts, encapsulated in quotes.
From a really quick read, good advice and a great read — though, as he admits in the introduction, luck played its role in how things turned out:
>>> That I’d survived thus far, scathed but in happy circumstances, was thanks neither to grit, determination, nor wise counsel, but mostly luck.
Would things have been different if he’d lived by his own advice earlier? Maybe. But it’s impossible to know. Pushing back a little: don't underestimate luck. It can be deeply unfair, and it can distort our sense of what is deserved or earned.
This is not to say that principles, effort, wisdom don't matter. But so does the randomness of where, when, and under what conditions we live and act.
I thoroughly enjoyed this read, and affirm many of these observations.
I find it incredibly challenging to come to these ideas without having walked a path which consistently challenges someone who strives to succeed through challenge, without a mentor. Ofc this is just my opinion.
Lived-experiences, this is what is important to understand #3-5.
Being able to experience this through practicnng vipassana, after spending a long time being self-centered for a long time, I can speak to the fact that there are a few things to truly come to this level of metaphysical realization
1. A bit of Luck(in finding/stumbling upon these) and psychological safety to try something that can change your mind on abandoning the ego and embracing these values.
2. One cannot be convinced of abandoning the ego(I, me, mine, ours) by merely intellectual explanation of these things(Psychology and Neroscience have yet to be able to explain with evidence why even after experiencing profound things the ego centric view sticks on).
It feels reassuring that none of these surprised me, and I strive towards a lot of these views/learnings already. Hopefully a good sign! Packard's writings help give me a little more clarity too, especially when written in such a thoughtful way. Very cool <3
> The ancient Greek and Roman Stoics believed that it’s wise to
contemplate death well ahead of the event. I suppose their idea was that
it’s desirable to contemplate death’s inevitability so as not to be shocked
when it’s staring you in the face.
That seems like a shallow interpretation. Rather, contemplating death ahead of the event refocuses you on your life at the present and hopefully causes you pause to consider if what you are doing right now is meaningful.
Many prominent Stoics advocated the use of “negative visualizations” for a number of reasons. One argument for using negative visualizations was that by imagining potential misfortunes, one could prevent and avert them. Another argument was that they believed misfortune strikes hardest those who believe life is a bed of roses:
> “But no matter how hard we try to prevent bad things from happening to us, some will happen anyway. Seneca therefore points to a second reason for contemplating the bad things that can happen to us. If we think about these things, we will lessen their impact on us when, despite our efforts at prevention, they happen: “He robs present ills of their power who has perceived their coming beforehand.” Misfortune weighs most heavily, he says, on those who “expect nothing but good fortune.” Epictetus echoes this advice: We should keep in mind that “all things everywhere are perishable.” If we fail to recognize this and instead go around assuming that we will always be able to enjoy the things we value, we will likely find ourselves subject to considerable distress when the things we value are taken from us.”
A third argument put forward by the Stoics is that the use of negative visualizations makes you realize what is truly valuable to you and appreciate it:
> They recommended that we spend time imagining that we have lost the things we value—that our wife has left us, our car was stolen, or we lost our job. Doing this, the Stoics thought, will make us value our wife, our car, and our job more than we otherwise would. This technique—let us refer to it as negative visualization—was employed by the Stoics at least as far back as Chrysippus. It is, I think, the single most valuable technique in the Stoics’ psychological tool kit.
And a fourth argument is the one you highlight, that thinking about death makes us realize how precious life is:
> Why, then, do the Stoics want us to contemplate our own death? Because doing so can dramatically enhance our enjoyment of life.”
(All quotations are from the book “A Guide to the Good Life: The Ancient Art of Stoic Joy – William B. Irvine”, which comes highly recommended.)
The greatest gift my counselor taught me was helping me realize the extent to which I could bullshit myself. I'm not sure I'm necessarily much better at stopping it, but instead now realize that my urge to adapt to a situation can be maladaptive, and my brain will happily retcon a million reasons why it has to be that way rather than chance the ego dying in the face of something unknown.
I enjoyed this piece, including references to the Stoics and Spinoza. It preaches serenity, goodwill, composure, etc.
As someone in their 30s with children, work and a generally busy life, I wonder if anyone can recommend some pieces with more direct application - that is, in this vein, but perhaps an operational / how-to guide. Sometimes, it's hard to translate principles to action.
As someone in their 50s with a kid, work and a busy life, I’ve found the unlovable fact of it is these things resist a How To guide. It’s sort of like the thing about anyone who wants to be a politician shouldn’t be allowed to. If someone is distilling these things into a How To, at best, they grasp the ideas but lack the perspective that their lived experience isn’t anyone else’s, so the context is all lost. The bits and pieces that I’ve come to think which map up with the author’s tend to be found in books that lack a goal or a point.
As an aside, the Internet-driven grindset that everything, even a hobby, should have a point is one to resist with all your might. Think of the times you laughed loudest playing with your kids; I doubt you all were trying to achieve a goal beyond being together having fun.
There's some fairly strange and dated advice in here, like entering a door before a woman being impolite (unless it's a revolving door; those require strength, which women do not have?) or being emasculated by shaking hands while sitting down?
It's unsettling how often we think we’re in control when we’re really just chasing impulses or clinging to stories we’ve told ourselves. The bit about sleepwalking through life resonated... Reminds me of how easy it is to let years slip by on autopilot, especially in high-functioning careers
One of the effects I value most from cannabis is that it makes me "awake and aware" the first 1 or 2 hours.
I haven't been able to sustain that state sober, but it's good to know that I sleepwalk at least.
In my late 20s, I felt disillusioned with this kind of wisdom. Found it too simplistic and not enough to cope with the fact that existence is absurd. I am 32 now, and I can't help think that simplicity is all that there is: curate a happy state of mind, meaningful relationships, active lifestyle, and maybe some audacious goal to keep yourself busy. Thinking that there's some higher state of mind (via spirituality, for eg) is delusion at best.
I feel everything follows the Midwit meme progression [1]: at first you use crude, obvious methods because you don’t know better. Later, complexity is alluring, you drown yourself in optimisations and finding the bestest tools and methods. In the end you come back to the same conclusion: simplicity was the most reliable tool the whole time.
I still have my first edition Cave of Time. I don't think it's a first printing though but still, when they came out it was simply awesome. I got the first 6 books in a pack for my birthday, I shared them later on with my children and they loved them too when they were young.
I bought my son "The Whole Enchilada", the pack of 100+ Edward Packard authored CYOA books. (No RA Montgomery titles)
He liked the Encyclopedia Brown books & Two Minute Mystery books I bought him so I thought he'd like the CYOA books as well since I cherished them as a kid but alas, he never got into them like I did.
I'm hoping he likes Infocom text adventures better when I introduce those to him later.
First time (only time?) a game made me cry, Floyd's death.
13-15 or so, Up way too late, hiding under my blanket to muffle the noise from the folding Stowaway keyboard, playing on a glowing green 160x160 LCD display on a Palm VIIx running a Z machine interpreter.
Apparently the author still gets emails now and then to this day about how Floyd’s death affected players. He used to have a personal site but I can’t find it now. A lot of players have written about this moment.
I think the other one I beat was Bureaucracy, by Douglas Adams. Got somewhat deep in Beyond Zork and HHGTTG, but don’t think I completed them.
I remember my father getting excited when he saw those Infocom compilations on Walmart store shelves.
I’ve also considered introducing those to my son. He’s 5 now. Lately having him play Mario RPG, Zelda, and Final Fantasy to practice reading.
—-
“Perhaps the most amazing thing about the creation of Floyd was how easy it was. The entire code and text for the character, if printed out, would perhaps run to ten pages. What’s amazing is not that I was able to create a computer game character that touched people so deeply, but how infrequently the same thing has been accomplished in the intervening two decades.”
Thank you, Kevin, for sharing this, and thank you for your insights, Edward. As a young man without a father anymore, it's always a pleasure learning about people's life experiences to help me be my best self without years of trial and error
Loved it. I am printing this as a booklet and placing it in my bookshelf. We should all try and listen to more experienced people more often. Even a small story from someones life can be eye opening.
Funnily enough, I first came across Thich Nhat Hanh last week while listening to the new Djo (Joe Keery) album. One of the songs on it is a tribute to him; it's quite pretty: https://open.spotify.com/track/6HqSlNhH83iWRU2nTZkiUj
There's an increasing amount of neuroscience and psychology research that supports all of these conclusions. In short, our brains haven't evolved as quickly as the environment around us, and our nervous system (e.g., amygdala) tends to react agnostically to sensory, environmental, contextual, etc. inputs. If we are not aware of those reactions and don't redirect them toward "good" weights (taking the definition of "good" and "bad" as Packard describes in Lesson #1), then our brain's neural net just reinforces the weights in a "bad" direction.
The point is that if these lessons come off too "woo woo," spiritual, and rooted in philosophy to you, know that the science of the brain (and thus, the mind) supports all of these conclusions, as well. Specifically, the lessons laid out herein are requisite for long-term and sustaining contentment from a scientific perspective, as well.
I am working on software to deliver this knowledge to people along with tools to effectively implement habits that can help them live better (i.e., more content and purpose-driven) lives.
Lastly, if this read sparked something in your mind and you want to read more, I suggest reading "Something to do with Paying Attention" by David Foster Wallace. It's an incredible novella that, as the title may suggest, deals exclusively with Packard's notion "to keep aware and awake."
Wow, I didn't realize at first this is Edward Packard - of the "Choose Your Own Adventure" book series fame. CYOA were the first real series of books that I got into and devoured, probably around age 9 or 10. Great to see that he is still writing.
EP did not say he achieved #1; about #2, "I spent much of my
life in this state, and I know all about it."; "I first considered what seemed to be in my best interest, or, more often, gave no thought to the matter at all." is his take on #3; "my normal slouch" in #4; he makes no claim to have gained an eternal perspective, merely quoting others in #5; that "cloud of uncertainty" gives little confidence in #6; being 90, he had little to say about #7 sadly; the reader has to guess whether he was lucky or not in #8; and finally #9 is likewise devoid of actual personal recounting of what he has.
All in all, I find "advice" and "what I've learned" tomes by *older* people to be unhelpful. When someone has spent much other their life living contrary to the advice they are now dishing out, I question it. I prefer advice from someone currently living life, learning and adjusting and growing
now... not at the end when it doesn't matter.
> I prefer advice from someone currently living life, learning and adjusting and growing now... not at the end when it doesn't matter.
He spent time to think about what he's learned and decided to put it in writing at 94 years old. He seems to still be avid reader at his age. He still thinks about ideas of living a fulfilling life. It seems to me he's still currently living life, learning and adjusting and growing now. There may even be a lesson there to having a long life: It always matters. What do you consider the end?
yes. why do we listen to this guy compared to any other 90 years old person? most people would listen to him because he is monetarily successful or because “he made it”. but as he points out, most of it was luck, so there’s really no point in paying closer attention to him than to any other older person that would like to give away his or her advice. number 4 is literally “I read a meme on fb that said that you should be happy now”. great advice. i was hoping he would say something like “i saw this quote and that triggered an interest in buddhist philosophy or meditation”. instead he ends that advice with “i saw another post on fb that confirmed this idea”
i understand he has no obligation to give any good reason for his advice, he just felt like giving it, and that’s nice of him. i would just suggest younger people not to waste too much time listening to “successful people” (whatever that means) on advice because it’s usually not applicable anymore or at all and is just entertainment with no real value
What I've read in his essay is that he piloted a flight simulator for most of his life, then read a manual and some things other people who wrote about flying and landing. So, yes, as I said, I prefer flying with pilots who have learned to land, are continuing to learn, and are getting better each time, with bigger planes and more people.
That's the curse of wisdom, in your 60s you can tell it's advice that you in your 30s should've taken but probably in your 30s you wouldn't have had the experiences that would make them be seen as good advice at the time.
Wisdom is frustrating since to be able to fully absorb it you need to have lived experiences that cements it, it can't be generally taught.
Nothing earth-shattering but quite true nonetheless (or it may be the reason all this is common knowledge is because it's true).
This made me smile:
> Harvard philosopher Christine Korsgaard
It sounds like a honorific title to outline that this person teaches at Harvard, but it's in fact the opposite. It needs to be said she's from Harvard because most people have never heard of her. "Königsberg teacher Immanuel Kant" would be funny.
If a person in the west is thoughtful enough and lives long enough, they will eventually either discover Buddhism, or accidentally re-invent it. (See: Stoicism, Post-modernism). Usually the thing that's left out is Buddhism's ethical foundation. Happy to see that Edward Packard went straight to the source.
> To guard against self-deception – recognize biases, avoid wishful thinking, and question entrenched beliefs
This is such an immensely important point. Seeing my current reality, bad and good, have been one of the most essential elements in taking the right decisions and steps.
10) Cultivate maximally useful, effective purpose(s) and reason(s) for living soon, but preferably, here and now. People without purpose tend to skew sad, chaotic, self-absorbed, and/or dangerous.
A bit of a contrarian take: the effect of many of the aphorisms and much of the wisdom in this document is to empower bad people and allow bad things to happen unimpeded. All at the expense of the greater good, or at least your own.
He quotes Spinoza: "A man strong in character hates no one, is angry with no one... is indignant with no one, scorns no one..." What I'm reading is that Spinoza never met a Donald Trump, even though I know very well he encountered even worse in his life. I'd need to be not just a buddha, but the capital-B Buddha himself, to find relevance in this advice. If I somehow managed to do so, and if everyone else followed my enlightened example in a Kantian sense, things would really suck.
Sometimes we need to hate. Otherwise we wouldn't have the capacity.
Honesty begins with and includes being honest with yourself. There are a great many people who expend great cognitive dissonance mental gymnastics entrenching themselves into and lashing their identity to a particular group or side of an issue, e.g., climate change denial. The only people they are fooling are fools including themselves.
I really love reading the wisdom of older people. Society really dismisses everyone over 80, but I find myself having deep interesting connections with a few people much older than myself (38).
Something society always neglects is that everyone goes through the same thoughts time and time again. We all make mistakes and we learn our own way, but when someone's 90, they really have done a lot of it all before. Even if we think everything is different, human's really are very similar. We all have emotions, we all have desires and we are all deep down social creatures. So I would only encourage more people to step out and try to make an honest, deep, friendship with someone a lot older than you. It can really help give you guidance and perspective.
> they really have done a lot of it all before
Not even just done it before, but done it multiple times. This is where experience is forged into wisdom.
And in addition they got to watch their friends/family/coworkers succeed and fail many times over.
While it can be very tempting to say 'we tried that before and it didn't work' - the key is people who can understand why it didn't work, or who can encourage you to make your own mistakes and be there to guide you back when needed.
Exactly. Wisdom sometimes comes from having the right thing to do already articulated in your head (which itself took some reps to articulate), seeing yourself not follow it, and seeing the consequences.
> This is where experience is forged into wisdom.
That is not guaranteed, though. There are many experienced yet unwise people, and sometimes viceversa.
I agree with the sentiment of listening to older people, but age alone is not a good criteria to determine whether they're worth paying attention to. Old people can be as ignorant and unwise as young people, sometimes even more so.
You are of course absolutely right, but its more complex. When I look around me at my family, people there and already gone, one of the issue is communication and whole mental model of reality.
Younger generations live emotionally richer lives. Or maybe thats not the best description, but something along that. I can't talk about deeper emotions even with my parents, the generational gap is absolutely huge. They never talk about theirs, and trying to start the talk ends the talk, they simply are not wired for such introspection. Both proper university educated which is a small miracle given how they and their parents were viewed as potential enemies of communist state.
They lived their whole lives under soviet oppression, never left Europe, don't understand modern world and technologies, they lived their whole lives in single monolithic culture. Critical thinking outward and especially inward is not in their runbook. I live past 20 years away from my home country, travelled the world that changed me (for the better) permanently. i tried psychedelic drugs a bit in the past, also a profound and probably permanent change they never had a chance to go through. I was/still am doing a number of potentially dangerous mountain sports that expose you to fear of death regularly, and one has to overcome that fear and move on, over and over - definitely a personality-changing experience. And so on.
Its hard to find people to talk about ie backpacking travelling to exotic undeveloped remote places even within my peers, who did that. I gathered more life experience living in 3 countries, dating ladies from various cultures, raising my kids in a foreign culture than they ever could. I understand psychology and people way better than them.
The roles reversed some time ago - I am helping them, however I can. As long as they are actually willing to listen, not every topic is like that. I can't talk politics to them, russians did a very good job in subverting public opinions of large portions of population into absolutely illogical self-harming position, and just stating truth leads nowhere.
Interesting perspective but with all of that experience are you not able to communicate with them in their way? This seems a bit like missing the forest for the trees, people are no less thoughtful or complex based on where they've lived or what they've done. The experiences you are learning from came at a cost of the experiences like those of your parents, those experiences shape their communication. There is absolutely a multitude of wisdom only age and their experiences can create but you have to learn to bridge the gap.
> what an outsized role is played by luck
This speaks to me. So much of our life circumstances are beyond our control (parents, genetics, geography, society, wider economy, etc.) It's humbling, how much of our success or failure is influenced by pure chance.
On the other hand, many things attributed to chance are actually the aggregate effect of other people's choices. If we make choices based on not just what's best for ourselves but what's best for all of us, we will all suddenly become more "lucky". And vice versa, if we only think about ourselves that luck will diminish.
Couldn't agree more. Many (most?) of our opportunities are afforded by the family, community and society in which we grew up. Of course individual talent and choices make a difference, but it's my feeling that many people wildly underestimate how much their external life circumstances contribute to their success or happiness. In fairness, it goes against our sense of self-efficacy.
I was thinking something very similar as I read the letter and hear people talk about luck in a similar way. I think attributing things to luck, while seemingly humble, can be dismissive and/or simplistic. Yes, we're all lucky to be in our situations -- living in this time, fed, privileged. Though, whether this luck is experienced positively or not is entirely subjective. Also, to ascribe our given situation to luck dismisses the concerted efforts of all living things of this time and past that have guided us to our current situation -- once again, without qualifying it as good or bad. It is almost disabling in it's message. The flip side is that many things happened that were dreamed, planned, intended, and carried out to land us in our situation. This to me feels more empowering, hopeful, appreciative, and also responsible than casting off as merely luck.
I prefer the word opportunity in a lot of those situations.
Sure there's luck in whether or not you get an opportunity but spending the whole day on twitter complaining about _ isn't going to give you any ....
I was searching for what to answer people who attribute everything I’ve done to luck. There’s the classic “It’s strange because the more I work the more I’m lucky”, but that’s very condescending. Thank you for offering me a positive alternative. In a sense it makes me owe work to my society.
I think it's more correct to attribute what you receive to luck, rather than what you give.
On the other hand, if you received nothing in return for your work, would you do it?
Again, this is the filthy accusation that people have scammed their way.
You’ve written one reasoning-in-absurdum, now write the opposite side.
That's a nice point. A society where everyone makes everything just a little bit better for the next random person will be a society full of nice surprises, rather than nasty ones.
So an answer to the prisoner's dilemma would be a shared belief in doing good? Interesting.
Western Europe (not only) social system is based on such belief. It kept working till a lot of immigrants from pretty bad corrupted countries came in, abusing the system in ways it wasn't planned for.
So it works, sometimes, on limited populations.
> not just what's best for ourselves but what's best for all of us
One can paraphrase the Summary of the Law (Luke 10:25-37) as, Seek the truth; face the facts; seek the best for others as for your self.
You're lucky to have that perspective.
What are you trying to say with this, that you disagree, or that it's an intelligent perspective afforded to those who are not hopeless? I don't see how anyone can disagree that the aggregate actions of your parents, your locality, your culture, your nation, play the largest role in the cards you are dealt from the beginning.
> If we make choices based on not just what's best for ourselves but what's best for all of us, we will all suddenly become more "lucky".
I personally know handful of extremely lucky people who spent their entire lives doing the exact opposite of this
I think the point is that this only works in the aggregate. Individuals in a group/organization/society can make small positive decisions that improve the likelihood that any individual in that same group will get "lucky".
There's a sort of "freeloader" problem, though, which is that the ones who get "lucky" don't themselves have to be making positive choices. In fact, being a selfish individual in a group of generous ones can be an easy way to get ahead - as long as you can get away with it without being noticed or punished.
The point is not that individual luck plays no part. It's about what your environment offers you as a baseline, not accounting for individual luck.
I don’t disagree but there is also an immense impact of random, pure luck outside of any environment that plays a huge part in many lives
I read it as in alignment with the previous definition of luck; meaning that a number of previous conscious decisions have created a world where they could come to this understanding of luck
I think it's hard to put into practice, but the veil of ignorance is an interesting philosophy for this
While strictly true, I wonder what does this sentence generates in the minds of the readers.
I personally would prefer other formulations, because while I agree with the core, I think this idea should just reduce frustration if you don't succeed, while I am afraid it can be used as an excuse for not trying.
Yes, you need luck, but if you never get out of your room/street/neighborhood/city/country, you might have less opportunities for luck than otherwise.
Right. I would say the most apt analogy is from poker.
In Poker, luck plays an integral role in the outcome of any specific game or match, but skill does show up when collected over a large enough sample (that's why they say you can't prove something is due to skill over chance until you've collected a sample of 10,000 - 100,000 played hands of poker - at least if you're playing online).
You could also be a very good poker player and have bad luck on one important occasion (say in the finals of the WSOP), where the outcome hinges purely on luck. Similarly, you could be a subpar player and "luck out" and strike it big purely because of the right sequence of cards at a big event. But generally, most people who succeed at Poker are not there purely based on luck; you can be lucky once or twice, but you're unlikely to make it through a whole Poker career just by being lucky.
I think similarly in life - you have a certain hand you're dealt, and if you play it to the best of your ability (and make opportunities for yourself), you increase your odds of winning the hand / the tournament / life; but ultimately even with your best efforts the outcome could still be decided by luck.
"I'm a greater believer in luck, and I find the harder I work the more I have of it." - Thomas Jefferson
There's lots of similar quotes throughout time, all about what you say in your list line: to be lucky you need to create as many opportunities as possible to get lucky. You can't win at dice if you never roll them.
Precisely. "Luck" shouldn't be equivocated with "chance." We have two words for a reason.
Show up + embrace awkwardness + be kind and courteous and luck will follow.
My son's Scout troop was lucky this year. They just sold more than $60k worth of pop-corn in two weeks. How? Each kid walked up to hundreds of complete strangers at grocery stores and asked politely - albeit awkwardly sometimes. The exponentially lower-success approach is to sit behind a table waiting for people to hand you money.
The result? Almost 40 lucky kids get 11 all-expenses-paid camping trips and a fun summer camp all for just eight hours of walking and talking. Doesn't matter how much money their families make; every kid gets to fully participate.
He sure was lucky to be white. Do you think he could have rolled the dice if he was shackled up?
What a cynical and dismissive take, of no value to anyone.
Are you saying that no one of color in that era made any worthwhile contribution to the world? Or are you saying that every white person of the era should hold themselves to the standard of achievement of Thomas Jefferson since that is the power of the privilege they held?
I can see it being reasonable to assume the ROI of hard work while in shackles to be insufficient. Well, at least hard work that does not involve getting violent against the shacklers.
For example, would slave women have done the hard work of having and raising slave children if they had the agency to not have them?
Would you work hard at doing something that doesn't scale if you know the federal government will simply reduce the purchasing power of your earnings to maintain asset owners' position in society?
Does it make sense to work hard if there is a high likelihood you will never own land, and hence will always have increasing portions of your winnings taken by a rent seeker? Seems like a bad trade.
There is truth in saying working harder does seem to generate more luck, in so far as, if you lay in your room all day and did nothing, you won't be getting any luck.
It's just silly to paint yourself as this hard worker that got back what you put in, whilst ignoring the ills that you put in. I'm sure he did good stuff because of work he personally did, but it's laughable to think he could get to where he did, if he wasn't born into the planter class.
And no, that doesn't mean if you were culturally disadvantaged you couldn't do anything, it's just a lot harder and you had no free will in that. Every opportunity (and decision, really) is just a consequence of where and when you are, and should be taken not as a personal character assessment. I guess you could argue that means Jefferson is morally fine because that's just the kinda life he was born into so how would he know different, or maybe he just lacks some empathy :P
Of course less famous people also had good work ethics we just don’t have their quotes immortalized.
So all you’ve really done is subsumed any discussion of the merits of the idea itself into a hand-wringing fest about privilege that was inevitable from the beginning and could equally apply to any famous quote from history. I really don’t see the value in this kind of hand-wringing.
The quickest way to double your money is to fold it in half and return it to your safe
Serendipity favours the prepared mind.
I think it's not prepared. More like a willingness to be open to possibilities. Preparation assume you know something good is coming and can prepare now to face it. Those kind of events are probably not that life changing. Of course there are exceptions.
But best things in life come from opportunities that you cannot prepare for in advance. Just willingness to accept it.
Perhaps pedantic, but "prepared mind" includes your meaning. Prepared may mean being equipped with a skill that meets the moments, but flexibility, acceptance and optimism are also skills of a prepared mind.
It's why the quote has survived since 1854.
> "dans les champs de l'observation, le hasard ne favorise que les esprits préparés" ("In the field of observation, chance favors only the prepared mind")
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Louis_Pasteur
I don't think it is pedantic at all. A prepared mind is exactly what is needed to take advantage of opportunity. Prepared mentally denotes a state of mind where you are actively looking for opportunities and that allows you to notice them. It is an attitude, really. Not unlike being a Stoic is an attitude on gratefulness of life and acceptance of death.
Not recognizing and pursuing opportunities is one of my greatest regrets in life. Going to work like hell to teach my kids different.
I used to think the same (and still have regrets about missed opportunities, ie sleepwalking them). But then I think that I'm probably disregarding some other opportunities that I did take and just forgot about them because "For it falls out That what we have we prize not to the worth ..."
Damn straight.
Often, being at the right place at the right time is more of a matter of predicting the places to be and arriving there in advance of said right time.
But however you want to spin it, there’s still the underlying luck, that you survived until that moment, that you were able to reach that place and that you were free to venture there are all inputs you didn’t have much or any control over. There’s no shame in it. I’ve achieved a good deal in a half century of life and much of it was via hard work and guile, but I do tend to think of myself as lucky because, even as a middle-class kid back when the US had that, where my starting blocks were placed on the track was far enough ahead of the bulk of the pack that these things became achievable.
I like to call it "Exposing yourself to luck." You can't win lottery if you never play. Play the lottery with the best odds and play it as much as you can.
Other than moving to the right location, what are other ways to expose yourself to luck?
I think it’s just trying to be exposed to as many opportunities as possible with the best tools you can have. You can’t determine whether or not you can catch a fish, but you can acquire the best fish-catching tools you can get, try to get to the fullest river, and stay out there as long as you can. I think the role of “luck” really hits when you realize how some people are born on the side of the river with a gigantic, well-made net.
You won't always be right but you can be there often enough to matter. goals need to be reasoneble - the luck needed to be a billionair is unlikely, but if you settle for millionair that luck is likely if you invest your money in the right place.
Here’s a good idea about Luck Surface Area https://www.codusoperandi.com/posts/increasing-your-luck-sur...
Yeah, and it's kinda depressing how hard it is to get people to accept that. Every community and group seems to operate under the assumption that anyone who's not 'successful' is too lazy or selfish to deserve it, and that those who are winning have to be the smartest, hardest working people around.
The just world fallacy is strong in communities, especially for artistic and creative endeavours like writing, art, music, filmmaking, game design, etc.
Does that mean that effort is worthless? Of course not. Does that mean you should just say "well, I'm not successful, I guess that's just life?". Again no.
But you do need to be humble and accept that in some ways, both your successes and failures were affected by external factors as well as your own efforts. That for how tempting it is to look down at people, that it could just have well have been your life circumstances that didn't work out well, your bets that didn't pay off and your efforts that didn't amount to anything in the end.
Best only to worry about what you can control, no? If there are external and internal factors to your success then you should spend 100% of your time focusing on the internal ones, since these are the only ones where productive gains can be made.
Also, the research is in. Grit is the single biggest predictor of economic success. Anyone who is lacking in economic success can be reasonably assumed to lack grit. Whether you label that “lazy” or not is semantics.
Keep in mind that there's forms of success other than economic, that actually do require more grit than that.
It's wild how much of what we chalk up to merit is really just the invisible scaffolding of luck: being born in the right place, with the right wiring, at the right time...
If things generally worked out very well for you, it feels good to believe you got there because of your virtues, and that those who didn’t got there because of their vices.
It’s the narrative of least resistance.
While I do agree with your opinion, I think the opposite is also true. It feels good to believe you didn't get there because "The game is rigged", "You have to be born lucky", "The house always wins", etc, etc. This defeatist/powerless way of thinking may in fact make it worse for you. When hope is lost, what's left?
Sounds like we agree with each other!
>When hope is lost, what's left?
That is what all societies are finding out right now. Before, they could count on women having babies providing a need to hope, but now that children are optional, societies don’t seem to have a replacement mechanism.
There's certainly an element of luck. But every individual, no matter how unlucky their circumstances, has the opportunity to make good or bad choices from that starting point. It is not like people are powerless victims of the unlucky birth they had.
A person born in a war torn country who is killed at a young age doesn't get much opportunity for good or bad choices. That's what I think of regarding bad luck.
>the invisible scaffolding of luck: being born in the right place, with the right wiring, at the right time...
That seems overly dismissive of the contribution of our ancestors, fighting against entropy, who paid it forward to their offspring, creating the civilization we now inherit.
The problem lies in the word "we". I personally don't think this, and neither do most other people who gave this subject some thought.
It's just that silly ideas get to live around for a long time, and simply proving them false has little to no effect.
You probably want to revisit the author’s sixth point. Perhaps the people who don’t agree have given it a lot of thought too?
It seems most likely that we do not have free will, and the implication would be that it's all just luck.
> This speaks to me. So much of our life circumstances are beyond our control (parents, genetics, geography, society, wider economy, etc.)
Philosopher John Rawls made this a key point for this thinking:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luck_egalitarianism
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Rawls#A_Theory_of_Justice
> According to this view, justice demands that variations in how well-off people are should be wholly determined by the responsible choices people make and not by differences in their unchosen circumstances. Luck egalitarianism expresses that it is a bad thing for some people to be worse off than others through no fault of their own.
When I see this line of reasoning, it leads me down the road of determinism instead. Who is to say what determines the quality of choices people make? Does one's upbringing, circumstance, and genetics not determine the quality of one's mind and therefore whether or not they will make good choices in life? I don't understand how we can meaningfully distinguish between "things that happen to you" and "things you do" if the set of "things that happen to you" includes things like being born to specific people in a specific time and place. Surely every decision you make happens in your brain and your brain is shaped by things beyond your control.
Maybe this is an unprovable position, but it does lead me to think that for any individual, making a poor choice isn't really "their" fault in any strong sense.
This is a great question. One of the hardest lessons I've learned is that some people don't know that the choices they're making are going to hurt them.
There are children who are actively taught by the people they should be able to trust that belligerence, lying, and stealing will get them what they need in life. On the other side of the coin, there are children who are taught to assume that everyone else has the up-bringing and or at least the natural intelligence needed to enable good choices every time a moral dilemma is presented. Both - it turns out - are equally short-sighted.
What's worse is that many of us assume that others can easily change their entire worldview on a dime. In the middle of my life, I'm coming to accept that I need more years that will be available to me to fix all the broken parts of my psyche and intellect.
Overall I agree with this comment. A determinist would take this position even further and argue that there is nothing left that we could be in control of - it is causes and effects and maybe some randomness all the way down. Even those things we think are our free choices.
That's the thing about free choice. I don't believe it fundamentally exists, but I can't help behaving as if it does.
Yes, that’s the ultimate argument against determinism. Either one actually sincerely believe in determinism and trying to convince someone else they are wrong about free-will are just displaying their inability to take their hypothesis to its full conclusion, or they are just trying to dispel their own doubts by bending other people opinions.
You can always choose to believe free choice does exist. In fact it's almost mandatory to do so just to get by.
Most people don't get it in their earlier part of life. It's only later that you realize.
Well the other way to look at it is beyond initial conditions luck.
You get to take swings every day and luck plays a role there. So keep moving forwards, flipping the coin in life.
The bigger picture is though that taking swings every day also requires a bit of "luck". Some people just don't have the energy, education, mindset, or environment.
It's easy to assume it would be in our control, but if you're just tired all day every day because, say, your hormone balance is off and no one can tell you why, you might statistically accomplish less than others.
People need to adopt a mindset that no one is coming to save them and have a bias for action.
You can go to the doctor. You can move somewhere with better jobs. You can learn stuff online.
Obviously any of these things are harder or easier for some people, but no matter what level you are at you need to avoid learned helplessness.
> Luck is what happens when preparation meets opportunity
I know that quote is reductive, but I do find it is relevant to my life and what I observe in others. The opportunity part is what we usually call luck. Preparation is another matter, though. Many people just aren't prepared to take advantage of situations which present to them.
Luck is ambition and preparation combined with opportunity.
Lots of people pass or aren't prepared to do what is neccessary when opportunity presents itself. The people who are, are called "lucky"
I'm lucky. I'm lucky because I didn't ever have to try hard at anything in my life, and I have a good life.
I was born from two parents that cared about me. Luck
In a country where most people have a decent shot at life. Luck
I'm lazy, but I was granted a body that never failed me, and was pushed by people around me to try stuff. Luck
I'm lazy, but my laziness is somehow useful in this computer driven world. Luck
All this luck compounds, and thanks to the activities I was pushed to do, the schools I was pushed to go to, I was lucky to meet great friends, an amazing girlfriend, and have a cushy job, a nice house in a beautiful place. Luck. Luck. Luck. Luck
I have no ambition, I was never prepared for anything, but all I've had was luck.
That's what you call luck, and a lot of people try to convince themselves everything good that happens to them is because they somehow deserve it. Because they were "ambitious" and "prepared", and an "opportunity" struck at the right time, and obviously they seized it, and everyone that didn't just didn't deserve it as much as them.
Obviously some people weren't as lucky as me, and actually had to work hard, and managed to seize an actual opportunity that wasn't gifted to them. But that's not all luck, only a little part is. And those people are quite rare.
Guess the child born into abject poverty in a war-torn country in sub-Saharan Africa who died before their 5th birthday due to malnutrition and disease just didn't properly prepare or have enough ambition then right?
Classic survivorship bias BS.
The privileged always think the people on top got their through their hard work and ambition, and those on the bottom just lacked the strength of character to succeed and give no consideration whatsoever to the structural / systemic conditions created by those on top to ensure they remain there, and no consideration paid to how said conditions disproportionately negatively impact those on the bottom.
Must be nice to sit all the way up there on high and look down on the world with such a smug sense of superiority.
I recommend reading https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/50364458-the-tyranny-of-...
I like the concept of "luck surface area". Sure, I started out with a bunch of luck. But the harder I work, the luckier I get. You have to put yourself into a position to cash in on your luck.
There’s a well-known Louis Pasteur quote that I always liked:
“Chance favors the prepared mind”
Also "Luck is what happens when preparation meets opportunity" - Seneca
I agree. But there's different ways to respond to it. You can be fatalistic and say well I wasn't born rich or I'm no good at XYZ so why bother. Or you can do well and then say it wasn't luck I work hard every day. To me having had some people I've known a long time die or be debilitated by desease in recent years, I feel very lucky just to be alive and healthy with opportunities in front of me and people I love close to me. A lot of people don't have that and it's not their fault.
You can still work to increase your luck surface, though.
I think that in a sense, there is a skill to being lucky. You may have exactly the same opportunities as another person but you may have more capacity to take advantage of those opportunities due to being open minded, adaptable, giving, and curious. I call that lucky.
>due to being open minded, adaptable, giving, and curious
And how do you become that? Exactly, by being lucky.
Luckily, these things are all learnable.
Between pure "luck" and personal struggle during a lifetime there lies a whole lot of dexterities that psychology, evolution and education cannot decide if they are developed due to luck or struggle. Like intelligence, intuition, talent, self confidence etc. And this fuzzy grey zone is the majority of our basis.
But, never forget, it’s possible to maneuver yourself into better position for luck to find you.
Yeah. It makes me grateful for all the luck Ive had in my life and despair at the amount of unlucky people who suffer.
An even more outsized role is played by a virtuous life. It may not make you a billionaire, but if you finish high school, get a full-time job once you finish school, get married before you have children, then you are quite likely to have a good life.
We are doing a disservice to our fellow man by not telling them this truth.
To take one of your examples, high school graduation rates vary from ~25% to ~98% in U.S. school districts. It's not because some districts have a lot more virtuous young people, but because some districts are poor and others are wealthy, among other factors. Even if one of those factors is virtuous parents, kids can't choose their parents.
I'm not denying our moral agency, but it is often constrained by environment. Some people are lucky enough that virtuous choices are easier for them.
People in all western countries can do all of these things without much difficulty. We can go off the theory that you are just as likely to have a successful life if you drop out of school, have children with many women and/or absent fathers, and not get a permanent job — but there is no data to support any of those claims, and we have been running this experiment for decades now with nothing getting better.
No, but a few of those poor kids see the claim change their life instead of following their parents examples and those kids tend to do well. We see this most in immigrants where the parents come with nothing and barely get by but their kids despite going to the same bad schools do well
Adsolutely. I agree that our lives aren't determined by family background, and we can draw on many other resources, both within ourselves and from other people besides family.
If I overstated my point, it's only because I was pushing back against the idea that education, employment, and a traditional family are equally attainable by all, and if someone has failed in any of these areas, it's because they lack virtue compared to other people (many of whom had more advantageous starting points in life, but supposedly that doesn't matter).
Or in simpler terms, "poor people are poor because they're bad and they deserve it". It's a sentiment that's been very useful for the ultra-wealthy class, and detrimental to everyone else, not just the poor.
Education, employment, and traditional family are useful things to work with though. They give a direction to try to get the poor to go. We can ask questions on how we can get their kids to go to school and study. We can ask questions about how we can get them acceptable jobs. We can ask how we can get them into stable family situations. We will fail a lot, but it gives us a proven framework to work towards. Yes there are problems - I'm not advocating live with a spouse who abuses you - but we can ask how we can stop that abuse as well.
Now there are many traditions around the world that works. Most cultures have man+women=family (as opposed to some form of polygamy), and there is reason to suspect this is important even if it isn't "in" to study why. (it isn't clear which non-traditional forms also would be fine and which would be a disaster)
Saying "poor are poor because they deserve it" is an accusation that I hear a lot more than I hear people who believe it. Some do believe it, but most accused of it do not and have better explinations of why they do things that the accusers don't like.
I agree that these are useful frameworks. When I said they're not equally attainable by all, I meant that for people who are better off, these things can sort of just fall in their lap, whereas poor people more often have to struggle for them. I know I'm saying something that is common sense, but I just wanted to make the point that inspiring people to be more virtuous is great, but a lot of people face material and psychological obstacles which make attaining these things "without much difficulty" (quoting the parent commenter) not very realistic. I think we agree there.
Not many people would openly say that poor people deserve to be poor. Those aren't the words that the parent commenter used, and maybe that wasn't even the intention. But this line of thinking can encourage people who feel this way, by giving their feelings a moral justification.
All I mean is, we should be empathetic toward people who have fewer resources than we do, and not be too quick to credit our accomplishments to our virtuous living.
How are then countries which are poorer than the USA ranking higher in education?
I completely reject the notion that wealth is at all a factor in the intelligence or educational success of a child. Wealth is just a correlation. Neither does national educational systems or policies have more than a tiny effect on education success.
What matters for educational success is the genetical and cultural material of the children. If they are born smart, or are brought up in families who value intelligence or brought up in cultures which value intelligence. Even poverty and schooling become small factors if the child has any of these foundations.
I don't entirely disagree, however: it's a far sight easier to live a "virtuous" life if you weren't born into poverty, or with a mental illness, or in a country that is actively at war, etc. These things are all beyond our control, as are so many other things. Luck.
It's obviously always possible to make the best of bad circumstances (and make the worst of good circumstances!) but it's easier to "win" when you're dealt a good hand.
Those are some strangely arbitrary not-virtues.
It's a shitty conservative talking point called the 'Success Sequence.'
https://archive.is/9Onj3
Why is this downvoted? The "success sequence" seems to be pretty much word-for-word what the GP comment said.
You’re far more likely to have been born in rural China, India or Africa than in the west.
And you can have an enlightened life in any one of those places - for example, the ideas laid out in the piece are abstract, and not environment specific.
All sorts of folks have lived in all sorts of places across time. Trappings and environments have varied. Attributing things to luck in and of itself is an illusion. There is nothing that is lucky or unlucky. You play the hand you are dealt.
I guess every unemployed druggy is just a roll of the dice away from a successful career and happy family.
> get married before you have children, then you are quite likely to have a good life.
Based on what, exactly? I think you have cause and effect inverted.
Nope. Statistically, having children before you get married is much more likely to result in worse outcomes. Maybe cause and effect is inverted, but maybe the better option is to not run a social experiment in fatherless children as we have been doing for the past couple of decades with absolutely no research to suggest that it can result in positive outcomes and loads of data to show that it's almost definitely can't result in positive outcomes.
Statistics without context can be misleading. It’s reasonable to assume that the cause is the prior situation which lead to it, not the act itself.
Picture two scenarios:
1. A loving unmarried couple, regardless of gender, sexual orientation, or child bearing, lives in an affluent neighbourhood, in a rich country, have steady incomes, and decide to have a child. After ten years they decide “I love you so much. I don’t need a piece of paper to prove that, but let’s get married. It’ll be a great opportunity to connect our friends and family, and it’ll give us some legal and financial protection when one of us dies”.
2. In a poor neighbourhood, a woman who was mistreated all her life marries her high school sweetheart, who turn out to be abusive. He not only beats her, he rapes her regularly. Like too many victims of domestic violence, she’s afraid to move away. Eventually she becomes pregnant and has the child against her will.
Which of those do would produce the better outcome?
Being fatherless isn’t in itself the issue, but everything which came before to reach that point might be. There is a huge difference between not having a father because he abandoned you, or because he died, or because your mother as a single affluent woman with the means to do so decided to do in-vitro fertilisation.
I highly recommend “New Family Values”, by Andrew Solomon, to get a feeling for the different types of families which work. It goes way beyond “one mother, one father, married”.
https://andrewsolomon.com/books/new-family-values-audiobook/
Proof by analogy is fraud" - Bjarne Stroustrup Yes; page 692 of TC++PL. A good analogy is an excellent way of illustrating an idea, but far too often such analogies are not accompanied by solid reasoning, data, etc
You're responding to an example not an analogy.
Analogies are seldom perfect but they are often useful. They help to illustrate a point. The world is not a programming language and most things can’t be ascertained by mathematical proofs.
But all that is irrelevant because what I posted above wasn’t an analogy. It was… A thought experiment? A purposefully exaggerated example? Anyway, not an analogy. Analogies compare two different things via a third thing they have in common, but here I used examples which are directly related to the subject matter. The point was to make it clear, via extreme but realistic examples, that correlation does not imply causation.
An analogy
Statement: Statistically, seatbelts reduce the chances you’ll die in a car accident.
You: But, what if your car crashes into a lake and you get trapped underwater?
Wait, what? An analogy to your not-a-correct-analogy:
Statement: Statistically, richer people die less in a car accident.
You (or GP): get rich and survive car accidents!
I don't think you need to run any experiment. Being married or not is just signing a paper. What matters is if the couple live together and in harmony. You can do so without being married and having children, and it's everyday more common.
That's why I'm saying you have cause and effect in the wrong order: children issues are tied to one or both parents not caring about them, and a symptom of that was having children before marriage, when marriage was "the only way" to a family. Nowadays things are different, and you can totally be a functional family without signing any contract on paper.
> Being married or not is just signing a paper.
If we ignore almost all of human history save for the past 50 years, then yes. If we redefine marriage to not mean what most humans that have ever used the word meant by it, then yes.
But why would we do these things? If you call all relations between two human beings marriage, you gain nothing, you just lose a word.
Marriage is a covenant between two people, a man and a woman, with God, and incidentally, this covenant, not a piece of paper, it's also a precondition for two people to live together and in harmony. It's a commitment by both people to focus not on themselves, but on the family unit and the wellbeing of that family unit.
> You can do so without being married and having children, and it's everyday more common.
Children of married parents still have better outcomes, and the lower income people are, the bigger the advantage of having married parents are.
I'm married to my wife. We lived together happily for more than a decade before we married. We are childless atheists in a neighborhood of other childless, atheist, married couples, some of whom have been together almost as long as my wife and I have been alive.
By your definition, are we all unmarried or living in disharmony?
> By your definition, are we all unmarried or living in disharmony?
If we consider what the word meant up until about 50 years ago, then yes. If we consider the new definition, of "you signed a piece of paper given to you by the government, and gave it back to the government". Then, sure, you are married.
I'm not trying to insult you or denigrate you, but again, if we use the word marriage for all relations between two human beings, then we gain nothing, we just lose a word.
I disagree; we have gained the ability to understand how different sorts want to share their lives with their families and communities.
Do you hold the same position for marriages in other traditions - for example, Shintoism, indigenous belief systems, Hinduism, paganism, etc? Many such religions don't have the same concept of a marriage as a covenant with God, yet have existed for quite some time.
While I agree with you that involving God is not necessary for the definition of a marriage, surely having sex and having children are usually a must.
No one is suggesting marriage means "all relations between two human beings". Only that there are many ways to demonstrate and be committed to a person. The legal recognization by a church or government is one version, but not the key ingredient.
> Only that there are many ways to demonstrate and be committed to a person.
And we don't need to use the word marriage for all of them.
> The legal recognization by a church or government is one version, but not the key ingredient.
The covenant with god has been a key ingredient for centuries.
> And we don't need to use the word marriage for all of them.
But that's the only word we have for "lifetime-committed couple recognized by some authority". The meanings of words change and evolve. Tough luck.
We could use the secular "civil union" for all marriages performed outside of a church. But that would be unnecessarily clunky and pointless ("I got civil union-ed this weekend, it was great!"). And then of course people married under other religious traditions would object to the use of the word "civil" so you'd have to qualify every other union accordingly - "Jewish union", "Muslim union", "Hindu union", etc. Why?
You're basically arguing against free speech. I don't understand who it's helping. If the distinction is that important to you, just spell it out when talking about your marriage ("I was married in a church"). Leave everyone else alone.
> The covenant with god has been a key ingredient for centuries
In some cultures yes, but pair-bonding is a lot older than the idea of god
I'm religious, but I don't see it that way. When a man and a woman are faithful to each other and having a family together, then that is it: they are married.
Actions have a value which are seven thousand times more worth than words, so the covenant with God is automatic in that situation even if the people are ignorant and have never heard of God.
>the covenant with God is automatic in that situation even if the people are ignorant and have never heard of God.
Yes. That's the kind of attitude that can build toward peace & harmony, and to live & let live instead of the hate against nonuniformity often shown by the religious extremists. Whether they are Christian or anything else. Hate is hate.
When an unmarried couple is completely faithful to each other until death, regardless of any other family, there's no way the average religious marriage can compare in that regard.
Not even close, zero is still a very small number.
Statistics are pretty accurate here. With the rate of divorce and unfaithfulness so rampant in religious marriage, it's only become more of a gamble over decades and decades of direct observation and interacton.
IIRC some cultures have shunned the idea of gambling since prehistoric times.
Others have it inscribed in scriptures almost as old, but not universally adhered to by the "faithful" just yet.
And it's been a while . . .
Can you please stop flaunting your ignorant and limited worldview all over this thread? You've insulted a good 30% of humanity by now and are on track to insult the remainder, it's getting a little hard on the eyes and there are only so many links of yours that I'm prepared to flag.
I thought flaggers always hid in the shadows, but here you are out in the open. Would you please reconsider your actions? You're doing great damage to a very nice message board, and it is to no benefit for yourself.
Flagging is a powerful tool in this small duckpond. Instead of abusing it, you can use HN to learn self restraint, so that when you one day achieve power over other people in real life you have learnt not to abuse it.
>I thought flaggers always hid in the shadows,
That's only the wimps that have nothing worthwhile to add.
>I'm advocating here for the Christian institution of marriage, not for a merge contract with government.
How strong is your commitment to this? If it's unflagging I think a lot of people can understand your disappointment then.
If you are well-acquainted enough with the USA, you are certainly aware that these have been one and the same for like . . . centuries now here.
Not just 50 years, what have you been doing about that the whole time?
Have you had any successful efforts to completely separate church & state yet, and have you even had 50 years to work on that so far?
It would be good to see a concrete sign that your advocacy is sincere.
If there's nothing so far, that is understandable, but most of us do not have 90 full years to figure this out, so no time like the present to get started.
Technically it does make you irrelevant to statistics about child rearing outcomes.
Now I really want to know how you find a neighborhood of other childless atheits!
Sheerly by luck! Honestly couldn't believe it nor could I be more grateful. We have a weekly fire night and a neighborhood potluck once a month!
> If we ignore almost all of human history save for the past 50 years
This seems pretty narrow-sighted and Christian-oriented.
To my knowledge, "marriage" has meant "a man + a woman for a lifetime" in most societies that I am aware of. (In the context of this conversation, I think the lifetime part is what the parent was talking about.) Frequently a man could have multiple marriages, but each was for a lifetime. It might be acceptable to have a mistresses outside the marriage (Rome), but the heirs came from the official wife. I'm told that the pre-Christian Irish renewed (or didn't) their marriages every year. Divorce also existed; I know that both the Romans and the Mosaic Law had divorces. But marriage was usually taken pretty seriously by all societies, especially agricultural ones, regardless of whether they were Christian. The idea that "it's just a piece of paper" seems to me to be fairly rare. Maybe the Romans had that (I think Cicero divorces his old wife for a new young one when he was old), and Jesus criticizes the Pharisees for no-fault divorces, but these seem unusual situations compared to most of history.
It's not even Christian, just a very limited subset of bigots that call themselves Christians.
> If we ignore almost all of human history save for the past 50 years, then yes.
50 years ago was 1975.
I'm pretty sure there are examples of formalized marriage about as old as historic records.
Did Kurt Russell and Goldie Hawn ever get married?
I'd think they would be the poster children for the two-week marriages that Hollywood is notorious for, but they aren't.
Even in the most barren wastelands, flowers can grow.
> What matters is if the couple live together and in harmony.
If a couple lives together in harmony and have children together, they are married.
"Nowadays things are different"
but is the modern way better??? or people just don't want to be held accountable if things go south in traditional way????
Not my downvote but I do usually see things going south in a traditional way more as a consequence of tradition itself of some kind, overcoming the better judgement it would have required to avoid such a fate.
but you can apply the same thing to modern way, both are have cons here
Those are just statistics describing what happens, not why it happens. Why does having children before getting married creates worse outcomes? Can individuals or society do something about the qualitative aspect of it?
Quantifying something doesn't explain it, it just... Quantifies it, deeper inspection is needed to understand what the statistics says.
You are prescribing what needs to be done based on something that is, ultimately, descriptive.
Do we have any data whatsoever that would support the claim that whether you are married before having children has no impact on your life outcome or the life outcomes of your children?
I don't think you understood my comment, I will spell it out: data by itself just quantifies, doesn't qualify. It doesn't qualify why marrying before having children is better, it just states that, for some reason, the outcomes are better.
Now you need to do the qualitative research to understand what are the causes for it, it could be that marriage is a signal for stable relationships, in that case marrying doesn't matter but a stable relationship does (which is quite self-obvious, it's just an example). Marriage could also have tax implications in some countries, which in turn could help the average to better outcomes, so on and so forth.
The data on this is enveloping much more than just "marriage" as a virtue, or any other moral aspect of it, you are using the data to imply that marriage is virtuous and is the cause for better outcomes which doesn't hold by just quantification...
It's blindness by statistics, it's quite common when ascribing data as the sole truth. Data can guide you to investigate other aspects that will qualify why the data shows what it shows.
These things I named correlate to better outcomes, we have nothing that indicates that not doing these things generate similar favourable outcomes … but we should continue to tell people that it's not necessary for them to do these things to have good outcomes as we have not done enough qualitative research to know what almost all of our forefathers have known, and it's best that people experiment more and see if maybe the right combination of unemployment, promiscuity and lack of education could not create equally good outcomes for them.
I have unfortunately not spent enough time at a university to follow this line of reasoning. Must be wild to be able to follow it. I'm of the yokel type that thinks if all data and tradition we have shows something works, then it's probably best to do the thing that works instead of trying things that we have no reason to think would work.
But in line with tradition, the underclasses in the west has always been the favourite laboratory for the cultural elites in the west.
> These things I named correlate to better outcomes, we have nothing that indicates that not doing these things generate similar favourable outcomes
Exactly, they correlate but there's nothing saying that just because traditionally it has correlated it means that getting married is the reason for it.
Traditionally only marriage was accepted as the means to form a family, even up to this day people will be shunned by their families for having kids out of wedlock, even in a loving relationship, don't you think being shunned by grandparents would also cause worse outcomes? Considering that some of these being shunned are also of younger age, less support from family members would mean worse outcomes.
Your data doesn't even discriminate about age groups, it's a blanket statement "marriage leads to better outcomes", leading to the question (which you could find data for): which groups? Are there other parameters/aspects that lead to better outcomes which are correlating with marriage rates? What about marriage exactly is causing better outcomes? It's not marriage itself since a lot of marriages end in divorce or an unhealthy home environment, so what is it?
Those are the insights that data can lead you into. Your take is just to do whatever has been done because it's been working, without even questioning why it might work, and what can be done to lead to better outcomes without requiring marriage.
> but we should continue to tell people that it's not necessary for them to do these things to have good outcomes as we have not done enough qualitative research to know what almost all of our forefathers have known, and it's best that people experiment more and see if maybe the right combination of unemployment, promiscuity and lack of education could not create equally good outcomes for them.
This is just moral grandstanding without substance, the world changes, traditions change (the tradition of marriage used to be about property, changing ownership of a woman from her father to her husband, for example), just blind belief in traditions is, at best, ignorant, and at worst produces this bigoted worldview.
You'd do much better if you believed in traditions while also questioning the "whys" behind it, at least to understand better why some tradition you believe might have created better outcomes, and how those processes can be applied outside of your tradition.
That is, if you are a good person and want everyone else to also have a better life even if living outside of what your view of morality is, and not only living life the way your morality prescribes to because that's, supposedly, the only way.
For your definition of virtue I assume?
Skew the Odds
"It is possible to commit no mistakes and still lose. That is not a weakness. That is life."
If life is decided by coin flips, you need to maximize the number of coin flips.
Depends on what happens if you lose the flip. If it's zero, vs a payout if you win, sure, maximize the number of flips.
But take, for example, smoking. You're flipping where the best outcome is zero, and the worst is cancer. Minimize the number of those flips.
There are many positively skewed coin flips as well which we don't take because of various biases, fears, habits or our upbringing. I like a quote from Magnus Carlsen (the chess player): "The correct mindset in chess is somewhere between optimist and delusional". I think it applies to life as well.
I am naturally pessimistic I think I lost a lot of opportunities because of it. Thankfully I also get those periods where I am blindly all-in on something. Some of those made me very good at useless things but some resulted in very good opportunities and then outcomes.
Energetic optimists who avoid very dumb choices do very well in life in my experience. People who talk about luck a lot usually can't produce a decently long list of things they tried or keep making blunders (smoking, alcohol, associating with destructive and apathetic people).
If it is true, there is no point reading what he wrote because it is moslty luck
"Luck" is just a subjective view of statistics. We can't change past events but we can often make choices that will pay off over time. So one can in effect build their own luck by leveraging whatever they start with.
It doesn't guarantee anything, you can still be smart and fucked. But you can _try_ to change things.
There is an idealistic fiction of "meritocracy" that doesn't really exist anywhere to varying degrees. Racism, sexism, poverty, sectarian, citizenship discrimination, lack of influential friends and family, and more biases exist and are very unlikely to ever disappear completely.
The pejorative invention of "meritocracy" is such an own goal. The answer to overcoming these adversities is to stop moaning about it and demonstrate your own merits.
Yes but as the saying goes you also create your own luck with the way you act in order to get around more opportunities and then to seize them.
That’s true to an extent, but has severe limitations. Of the five thing your parent comment listed (parents, genetics, geography, society, wider economy), only one (geography) is truly under your control, and even then it can be very hard to change depending on where you start and the other four (and more).
I object to those 5 things. Parents and genetics are one thing, but geography, society, and the wider economy are for everyone to navigate so make your own luck.
If you were born poor in a society which sees part of your genetics as undesirable or outright criminal—none of which were your choice—you’ll find yourself in very dire straits and changing your situation—heck, even knowing a better life is possible—will be extremely difficult.
It is not reasonable to tell a child sold into slavery or forced to be a soldier to “make their own luck”, that “society, and the wider economy are for everyone to navigate”. A person in the eye of storm and another in calm waters cannot navigate the same way.
People who firmly believe they above all “made their own luck” are the ones who had such a large amount of it outside their control they don’t even realise how much of it they had, like a fish unable to perceive the water.
I am not saying that it is easy or that everyone starts with the same opportunities. But you can make your own luck in any case to improve your life or at least to have a better shot at it.
If you believe that you are a victim that nothing you can do will make a diference, and therefore don't even try then you will definitely not improve your situation!
Now if you are born in poverty as an albino in Africa, orphaned at a young age, sold to slavery and then to a witchdoctor for organ trafficking are you fucked? Probably but that does not change the point. [I am pushing your reply ad absurdum to highlight that it is not a counter-argument...]
And this is also why people resort to crime.
What they said also applies to criminals.
Crime is basically your way of cheating the probabilities. If everyone is playing by the rules and you don’t, you basically made your odds better. I am not saying this is right. I am just saying this is why people deviate and commit crimes though crimes are also committed for different reasons.
Somewhat strange to see the narrative flips again on HN. The pendulum not only swings back in other areas, but this too.
Huh? What 'narrative' is flipping here?
The narrative that you make your own luck vs. not. Duh.
I wonder how well that narrative correlates with the Fed Funds rate.
Since he might not be known to most (especially a younger audience), the author is a writer best known for many of the Choose Your Own Adventure books that were hugely successful in the 80s.
Jimmy Maher wrote about them recently https://www.filfre.net/2025/09/choose-your-own-adventure/
Thanks for sharing. This part resonated :)
"Today, it’s all too easy to see all of the limitations and infelicities of The Cave of Time and its successors: a book of 115 pages that had, as it proudly trumpeted on the cover, 40 possible endings meant that the sum total of any given adventure wasn’t likely to span more than about three choices if you were lucky. But to a lonely, hyper-imaginative eight-year-old, none of that mattered. I was well and truly smitten, not so much by what the book was as by what I wished it to be, by what I was able to turn it into in my mind by the sheer intensity of that wish."
These books were incredibly important to me as an 80s kid. Was a voracious reader in general but absolutely loved these because they had replay value! I remember scouring through these on long family trips in the car to find every possible ending.
The parallels with modern video games are obvious.
The first video game (and one of the first programs) I wrote was a self-styled Choose Your Own Adventure on a C64 with ASCII art and maybe a total of 10 pages.
The only person who acted impressed by it was my grandmother - who had paid for the C64 - but that was enough for me.
Same. I would compulsively graph the options as I went so I could backtrack back decisions.
In fact, this inspired me to buy such a book for my 9-yo son! They've grown in size, apparently (250-300 pages). Let's see how, in the age of omnipresent screens, he likes it :)
Discussed yesterday, for anyone curious:
Choose Your Own Adventure - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45337450 - Sept 2025 (80 comments)
Thank for noting this! I had no idea while I was reading the piece, but I loved those books as a kid. What a delightful connection.
He's also the grandfather of David Cornswet, the actor playing Superman in the latest movie.
nice trivia
I was pleased that at my local toy store (yes, we still have one, The Time Machine in Manchester, CT) they carry Choose Your Own Adventure books. What’s more, last week we picked up a copy of “The Cave of Time”. So many memories of that book growing up.
The original headline actually said that, before it got edited out. :/
>“It’s not so difficult to be a buddha,” says Thich Nhat Hanh. “Just keep your awakening alive all day long.”
And it’s not too complicated to be a permanent tightrope walker either: just stay calm, still and balanced. While ninjas with ignited swords jump all around you and acid-proof sharks lurks at you from the sour sea waiting your fall.
Sleepwalking, that’s a perfect title for our current Zeitgeist indeed.
Ok, that’s a lot of "witty remark I could make regarding" the text (and avoid doing instead). So, let’s take a bit of these advices in practice. Thank you Edward Packard for sharing with us some final reflections on life after a long one, displaying humility while presenting a vibrantly human figure.
I wonder if it's a mistranslation and Hanh means it's not complicated to be a Buddha. Many things in life are very simple, and also very hard.
I'm sure most folks here have seen the talk, but Rich Hickey's Simple Made Easy# is a superb discussion about this in the context of software.
# https://youtu.be/SxdOUGdseq4?si=fbRmd27oY80LZxw6
Found it last month, don’t remember how, but I did share it with the rest of my team. Excellent talk, it does have many "eternal" points to rebound on the essay vocabulary.
I read it as Hanh being sarcastic, making a joke.
Buddha would probably say it’s very easy to “be” a Buddha. To become one, on the other hand, is hard in my opinion, takes thousands of hours of practice. Once you’re there however, it is open effortless awareness and not hard to maintain, so they say!
Most practitioners get tiny glimpses of aspects of enlightenment, but to integrate and sustain it all is very rare indeed. I wonder if there even 100 Boddhisatvas in the world
Well, according to the buddhist lore, to become one, you need not thousands but eons of practice.
Love these. This quote stuck out to me:
> It follows, I think, that the luckier you’ve been, the more humility and generous spiritedness you need, and the unluckier you’ve been, the more compassion for yourself you need, and unfair as it may seem, the more you need irrepressible resolve.
Few among the lucky are humble, few among the unlucky are serene, and irrepressible resolve is often met by irresistible fate.
That’s a money quote and shows you lived.
May we both find ourselves among the few, alongside Edward Packard.
I try everyday to fail again.
Yeah, especially this one really resonates with me as well.
> "...happiness to become one’s default state of mind."
I have read psychologists saying that "happiness as default state" is a social construct myth of modern times. You cannot be happy all the time, the fact of being unhappy sometimes is what drives you self-reflect and to chase meaning to your life. To feel pleasure you need to feel some pain.
>I have read psychologists saying that "happiness as default state" is a social construct myth of modern times.
Psychologists are what's the actual social construct myth of modern times.
>You cannot be happy all the time
That's not what "happiness as default state" implies though. It's about happiness being the disposition you opt for, as opposed to wallowing in misery and seeing fault in everything as your baseline.
"Default state" precisely conveys that it's not about "all the time". Just what you should strive to start from and return to.
Nope, its still vast majority of situation, not a healthy setup for most people. Is being content with one's life a state of happiness or just state of content?
We are splitting hairs here but since happiness is considered the ultimate goal and state (what's beyond that if its not the end?), I would say aim for being content with your life as a baseline, jump to an actual happiness when stars align and revert back.
Its cool enough place to be and definitely more maintainable long term, and as mentioned a seldom dip to misery is a very valuable correction and reminder to all how fleeting this all is.
Psychologists are a myth?
I suspect they mean that psychologists are more a problem than a useful profession.
They certainly are when they're poorly trained and not held to proper academic standards.
I've had more than one licensed psychologist attempt to proselytize to me. Granted, my location is part of the problem, but it still should never have happened. There are other, less rigorously trained people you can go to for that kind of thing and they're a dime a dozen. It objectively made things worse for me as some of my most major issues directly involve religion(s) pushed upon me as a child.
Not their existance, their utility
Do you believe the same thing about psychiatrists? How are we to deal with mental illness?
>How are we to deal with mental illness?
Ineffectively, if the current state-of-the-art is any indication :(
I would argue that perhaps you have confused happiness with joy, or I have confused happiness with a lack of sadness, or perhaps with satisfaction.
While I find that joy is a fickle and fleeting thing, I feel that I am happy most of the time, satisfied that things are as they must be, or at least close enough that the state of affairs does not poorly reflect on my efforts.
Sadness or grief make their appearance, but need not make life a poverty of happiness.
I think probably many people think that happiness and joy are the same thing, thus robbing themselves of happiness in an eternal pursuit of joy. If joy were constant, it wouldn’t be the joyful treasure that it is.
I tend to think of (a default state of) happiness as being akin to equanimity. Not indifference, but acceptance of life as it is right now because that tends to diffuse your suffering. Contentment would be another appropriate word for this I think.
I wish I had more joy in life especially when I meet people who just seem to exude it so well in their interactions. It seems like they are almost always joyful.
You didn't explain how you define joy and happiness, can you elaborate how they are different
In my understanding, Joy is the emotion of overt happiness. It elicits silly behavior, celebratory vocalisation, laughter, and hugging.
Happiness is the state of satisfied being devoid of feelings of remorse, emotional pain, grief, or anger. It is a state that accepts joy, that provokes appreciation, gratitude, and satisfaction. It is a generally open and creative state, that gravitates toward the positive.
It is possible to maintain a state of happiness amid unfavourable events and conditions if your mind and actions are guided by a moral framework, and even to maintain a sense of happiness through hardships and injustice if you have built the philosophical structure to separate your mind and sense of self from your circumstances.
Happiness is being content. You can be a generally happy person.
Joy is more exuberant - but more fleeting. You can't be a person constantly experiencing joy (except maybe as a bipolar during their manic phase)
I think in short:
- big things (e.g. someone dies) you cant avoid being sad
- small everyday things (e.g. someone cuts you off at the intersection) you have a choice to smile and treat it lightly or go all passive aggressive and spiteful.
Sometimes you have to find some middle ground wherever you can get it.
Like why curse a slow driver when you can have a 100% positive attitude?
"You can do it! You can do it! There is a gas pedal. You're almost there, don't give up!"
> You cannot be happy all the time, the fact of being unhappy sometimes is what drives you self-reflect and to chase meaning to your life.
Each time you go through a cycle of honest self-reflection, you grow emotionally stronger. When a similar situation arises again, it will not affect you as deeply as it did the first time. After enough cycles, you may reach a point where your default state remains largely unaffected by such events. This equanimity, that comes with a deep inner calm, allows a naturally happy default state to emerge.
I do agree a balance of pain and pleasure is necessary. But I also believe you can make your default state a gentle fluctuation between the two, rather than wild swings.
In my experience, this is largely a force of habit -- I one day found my default reaction to almost any event was to chastise myself, for example. If you can break this habit and return to a more tranquil medium, I think that's as close to being "always happy" as it's possible to get.
You may think you can change it but what if that came with the package? What if you were born bipolar or depressive?
Pleasure is not the same as happy. Probably no one, even the luckiest entity in the universe, can avoid to go through some painful emotion.
But how we handle raw emotions, within interpretation processes, is what makes all the difference.
Actually, an entity that would only go through an indefinitely long flow of pleasant emotions and still end up being depressed and feeling unsatisfied the whole time is perfectly conceivable.
>an entity that would only go through an indefinitely long flow of pleasant emotions and still end up being depressed and feeling unsatisfied the whole time is perfectly conceivable.
I don't think it's that rare.
Fortunately, the opposite is also true.
Happiness as the default state has nothing to do with being happy all the time. Perhaps you need to refine your understanding of “default”.
There's fundamental lack of emotional depth in our society as I believe you can be happy and displeased or in pain _at the same time_. I can say that I'm never unhappy but I do feel displeasure, anger and pain at times as these aren't opposites and don't cancel each other out in my model of the world.
First let's start off that psychology is not like other fields, as it's often theories/opinions.
That statement is someone's way to describe what they found out to be best for them. Not an axiom for everyone.
And default doesn't mean always, it means that one's general state is happiness. For me, for that statement to make sense, the word "happiness" would be replaced with something like "being glad" (gladness?), as I always feel glad of myself/my life but I see happiness as something more active, like being sad. While I see this gladness as a passive state. But again, that's my personal take.
I think that depends on how you interpret "happiness to become one’s default state of mind."
I think feeling happy is my default. I still get mad, hurt, sad, bored, etc. But when those feelings wear away, I return to a general state of happy contentment.
I strive for my default state to be "content", with fleeting moments of happiness
If happiness were truly a "default" state, it would stop registering as happiness at all
Default state doesn’t mean all the time though?
So much of the time it's only when launching the app.
When tragedy and pain are far more prominent than anything else, it kind of reduces to positive resolve.
If others can not feel joy from that in person, you're doing it wrong.
Never forget what it feels like when fate smiles on you, even when it's almost never.
That's not what they said, they said a default state. You can't always be happy, but you can default to it when you have nothing else going on.
I would call that more content than happy. Interestingly in languages like Spanish, 'contento' is almost overlapping semantically with the word happy ('feliz') in its day-to-day usage, and I find it a more adequate usage of the concept.
So content is basically the baseline when no needs are impacting your state-of-mind, and happy would be the consequence of a positive event or result.
I agree
That passage came across to me as toxic positivity, but I hope that's not the case.
Being real is perhaps healthier and more honest than completely avoiding anything that isn't pure bliss or joy.
It is the simple things that is the hardest. If anything, having children revealed many of the mentioned. To me, having children is enlightenment
I fully agree. It gives also a sense of impact in the world that might span over centuries or even longer.
Sometimes I joke about the simple concept that we are all the descendants of a chain of ascendants that manage to successfully reproduce and have children without interruption, through all the evolutionary stages, from homo sapiens to hominids, monkeys, mammals until reaching the first life organisms. And I am not going to be the one stopping that long evolutionary chain ;)
There's something about raising kids that strips away all the fluff and forces you to confront the core of who you are
Having children is the literal purpose of all life forms. Birth control is the worst thing that humanity has invented.
Birth control is not to not have children but to control when you have children.
Sort of...
Many people do not want to hear this. Many would point to economic factors as the main problem.
But I think that when people are educated about the risks and responsibilities of parenthood and given the choice of doing so (birth control, abortion, etc.) - the simple fact is that they CHOOSE not have enough kids to meet the replacement rate.
The reason you can see this is because the lowering birth rates aren't limited to one or two countries. It is every industrialized country. Every single one. If the issues were purely economic, those countries with amazing parental leave and better social nets would avoid the problem - but they don't.
I'm not sure what that kind of future for humanity will look like long term. It will be an interesting reckoning in ~100-200 years.
Good observation. Those could very well be the only considerations for some people.
Maybe a good part of this is the risks and responsibilities without a co-operative village to grow families interactively.
What if the lingering problem is one of scale, that has not yet been solved?
Remember this whole thing is from a 90-year old and the smaller the village, the fewer the population of any one age group.
It's really making people think about all kinds of things all over the ball park.
If it's a small enough village you can't end up with a crowd of 1st graders ever, for instance, so age segregation as we know it for any years at a time has no similarity, and across-the-board people of all ages are part of the same group more so. Which means for one thing, if there is a 90-year old among the village, almost every one would be familiar with interacting with them routinely, as they were all growing up no less. An overwhelmingly more abundant number of adults would effectively be taking care of the children from start to finish, compared to how widespread adult influence is not intentionally minimized today, but ends up that way with same-age peers being more influential and naturally less mature.
Counter-intuitively it may even be that humanity, in the body of each family itself, thrives better when there remains satisfying group support for community focus more so than separate individual cocoons, which today are each more like on their own in rapidly changing times.
The villages humans mainly evolved to thrive in are about the opposite of what we have now in the big city.
It's also a good reminder that those of us who are a lot closer to 90 than we are 20 have still got a lot to learn.
So no quitting or you'll never be as wise as this letter shows.
You are basically saying that the purpose of all life forms is to create further life forms, whose purpose then is again the same. In other words, the purpose is eating its own tail. In my mind, this circularity disqualifies it from being a meaningful purpose.
I dunno. I'm on the older end, but nowhere near 90, and I've read a lot of these takes, and heard similar from a lot of older people in my lives. While there are good thoughts, often they come from people who didn't do that in their lives and achieved great things because they weren't chasing peace, but chasing success, status, adventure, and the such.
When I read something like this now, I ask if the person writing it lived that way most of their lives, or lived some other way and now are looking back wishing they had lived another (untested) way. I've heard too many old people tell me things like, "appreciate your family" when they were always gone working and built up an amazing life for their families. When my mother told it to me, I believed it because that's the way she lived.
Survivor bias, is what it comes down to. Beware successful people that tell you platitudes!
You could ignore where it came from and evaluate it on its own merits. I had no idea who Packard was - initially i thought it was Packard of hp fame (lol). And I did not entirely agree with some things in the piece. However, it seemed authentic (not ai generated), was brief, and provoked some reflection which is what I expect from any reading.
100% this. It's so bad in my experience that you should basically never listen to someone successful. While there are going to be exceptions, most of the time they either give you a wishlist as you mention, or completely misunderstand what happened.
Just because they mightn't have lived that way doesn't mean they haven't learned, and are trying to pass that lesson onto others.
> 3) to consider what others may be thinking and feeling
Personally I find myself often considering how other people might feel too much and end up being a people pleaser, so I need to work on that aspect of my social skills
It's really essential that one have (1) down (to be self-constituted) down in order for (3) not to lead to a circle of confusion. If I feel very assured in my own relationship with the universe, that doesn't depend on how anybody else sees me, and my security does not depend on others being happy with me. And when I don't need to make anybody happy, connection and compassion arise naturally from a place of curiosity--there are feelings of abundance and security underlying it rather than confusion or anxiety.
That sounds simple but the self-constitution part takes years of serious searching and work; some things (good therapists, good meditation teachers, good books, consistent practice, etc.) help the journey along, but there is no quick route.
Any particular books you recommend? people keep mentioning _how to win friends and influence people_ and I am not sure if it's just mindless productivity gurus hype
Right now I'm reading As It Is by Tulku Urgyen Rinpoche (if you don't have previous experience with Buddhism I'd recommend starting with something broader like Zen Mind Beginner's Mind, and find yourself a Buddhist meditation group!), and Self-Therapy by Jay Earley. Something else very much written for an intellectually-oriented audience but that gives inklings of a ladder into non-intellectual being, is Unwinding Anxiety by Judson A. Brewer. I liked it at the time, though I found I needed more help practicing the things that that book suggests, which led me deeper into Buddhism and eventually towards Dzogchen.
I wouldn't recommend How to Win Friends and Influence People, it is all about fine-tuning behavior to make a better impression on people, and that doesn't sound like the heart of the issue you described. The heart of that issue _could_ be that one clings to mind-concepts rather than trusting the whole being and feeling a connection with the universe. If so, one must slowly learn to trust the felt experience of life, to know that gut feelings and open-heartedness are just as important as thoughts (moreso in many respects), to trust that one can relax one's whole being and be carried by an infinite love within. It is a gradual progression.
As a lifelong obsequious people pleaser, I have realized that I make it about me by trying to figure out what people want from me, or I'm focused on how I can look better in their eyes. Instead, truly trying to understand how someone is feeling and reflecting that to them has been so much more gratifying for me (and hopefully for my friends and family.)
+1. I say this jokingly, but in a sense being a people-pleaser vs being empathetic is a “skill issue.”
Being focused on how people might think of you is shallow and tastes like narcissism. Even if in your own mind you are “thinking about others” too much you are really only thinking about yourself through their eyes.
Being present in the moment with someone and their feelings involves getting out of your own narrative.
HN comments are atom-shredding, trite and exhausting. Isn't it wonderful?
Greetings, fellow Buddha.
>Once you’ve achieved that — once you are virtuously selfconstituted — you will be self-assured and have reason to be so. You will be emotionally invulnerable to being pushed around.
I don't feel that's true? I am currently in a massive turmoil at work because my line-manager is breaking all ethics rules, with higher leadership caring little. Because I try to follow my values I've spoken up numerous times and all I got for that is a mountain of stress. Turns out I am not emotionally invulnerable.
I'm not sure you've understood the idea. While your values include not breaking certain rules of ethics, your value ALSO clearly extends to being offended by others when they do it. So your value isn't purely "don't break ethical rules", but, "observe ethical rules and react when they are broken, by me and by others". I think what the author (not OP) means is that once you are virtuously selfconstituted, your decision about these and what YOU do about it is not easily swayed or pushed around. In this sense, it shouldn't matter that _others_ are breaking rules... obviously it isn't an ethical rule for them... but that you are clear that you wouldn't do the same. Thus, if your activities at work relate to pursuing goals aimed at by these broken rules, then it is _work_, and you do your work.
Another way of interpreting what you've shared is that what you are stressed about is actually _not quite the value you think you have_, otherwise you would have walked away, self-assuredly, emotionally certain in the rightness of removing yourself. But you haven't. So it isn't a set value. Obviously another value like, "I have to eat" preempts this ethical value being broken at work. I'm not saying this is wrong or not, just trying to help you navigate your stressful environment.
I was thinking along parallel lines. If you have fuck-you money then sure: you just leave when asked to do something imoral. But if you are materially dependent on the job then you have battling imperatives that will stress you.
The first thought that popped into my head here was, "well I have no kids, so yeah if forced to choose between job and morality I'd just bounce and figure it out later". But if I DID have dependents it's harder.
I will say if the choice is between being imoral and _personally_ poor ... I'd like to think I'd rather just be poor.
edit. Then again this is also on us as people to anticipate and prepare for these dilemmas and not let ourselves be trapped in toxic situations. I suck at this and don't do any real forward planning like having a lot of savings or having a backup plan to getting out of a bad job. But that's on me.
Hope it works out alright for you!
> But if you are materially dependent on the job then you have battling imperatives that will stress you
I would like to offer a different perspective for you.
I’ve never been shouted at in my work life. And I also know a few people who complain about being shouted at, at all places of work they’ve had — and it’s difficult for me to empathize with them.
At some point I understood that I never allowed my coworkers or managers to shout at me, and in the rare occasions when their voice was raised, I had made myself very clear, and I quit on the spot had the situation ever happened again. As a result, I’ve always had very pleasant and respectful working conditions, with self-respecting people who I know will quit if abused, so I treat them with respect as well.
On the other hand, people who endure humiliation by imagining contrived moral dilemmas about why it’s good and right for them to continue suffering — suffer for decades wherever they are employed, as they seem to filter out and stick to workplaces where this is acceptable.
Are there really no jobs for your talent where you can be moral, or you’re prepared to endure immorality (and to be faithful employee to such businesses) until you’re old and frail?
If your executives are ignoring your line managers unethical behavior, it is probable they are directing it or at least tacitly approving it. You work for an unethical company.
Change jobs.
This is wonderful. I humbly believe discovering and applying a similar set of ideas is what got me through the slump of mid-life crisis and in a much more peaceful place now in all aspects of life.
Well.
Reminds me of "Try to be nice to people, avoid eating fat, read a good book every now and then, get some walking in, and try to live together in peace and harmony with people of all creeds and nations" from Monty Python's "The Meaning of Life", just with more quotations.
And along similar lines, "Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants."
I'm approaching mid-forties. As a former Buddhist (up to like the age of 13) turned atheist, I find all the points the author shared in this PDF agreeable.
Being self-reliant (being able to find happiness even when alone); being self-aware; being aware of others (including others' feelings, motives, perspectives); focusing on the journey; acknowledging that 'luck' has a non-negligible role in one's life; preparing our minds for inevitable death with calm acceptance; so many things the author's view resounded with in my opinion and experience.
As an older person, I found these agreeable too and well articulated.
I could put the nine bullets into 2 broad buckets.
1) and 6) pertain to being in the ego - but one that is principled, seeking clarity of cognition and be willing to correct self-deception. truth and intellect.
2), 3), 4), 5), 7), 8) and 9) pertain to awareness, being in the here and now, dissolving of the ego, universal consciousness, truth and happiness.
The first bucket posits an ego but one that is principled, and the second bucket seeks to dissolve the ego and attempt to tune into the cosmic energies. yin and yang.
I was hoping for more of the author’s own perspective over those ninety years. Instead, it read more like a stitching project of other people's ideas. In particular the barrage of quote fragments disrupted the flow and made it harder for me to engage with the main point of each section.
It is often the case, that one’s perspective is a personal synthesis of external ideas. The act of quoting great past authors is also a way of recognizing where your influences come from. To describe by association how you think, or aspire to.
These are very difficult topics to properly talk about and correctly express all the nuance in the feeling that you try to convey, and many authors are quoted because they nailed a particular description, evocative of the feeling an author is trying to express and that he feels he can’t do a better job at explaining.
Similarly to how you can narrate a story through a sequence of pictures you can narrate an idea through a sequence of raw concepts, encapsulated in quotes.
It turns out all the aliens in Darmok were very old and that's why they spoke in reference and metaphor.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darmok
Meanwhile, I communicate exclusively in Star Trek references.
From a really quick read, good advice and a great read — though, as he admits in the introduction, luck played its role in how things turned out:
>>> That I’d survived thus far, scathed but in happy circumstances, was thanks neither to grit, determination, nor wise counsel, but mostly luck.
Would things have been different if he’d lived by his own advice earlier? Maybe. But it’s impossible to know. Pushing back a little: don't underestimate luck. It can be deeply unfair, and it can distort our sense of what is deserved or earned.
This is not to say that principles, effort, wisdom don't matter. But so does the randomness of where, when, and under what conditions we live and act.
I thoroughly enjoyed this read, and affirm many of these observations.
I find it incredibly challenging to come to these ideas without having walked a path which consistently challenges someone who strives to succeed through challenge, without a mentor. Ofc this is just my opinion.
Lived-experiences, this is what is important to understand #3-5.
Being able to experience this through practicnng vipassana, after spending a long time being self-centered for a long time, I can speak to the fact that there are a few things to truly come to this level of metaphysical realization
1. A bit of Luck(in finding/stumbling upon these) and psychological safety to try something that can change your mind on abandoning the ego and embracing these values.
2. One cannot be convinced of abandoning the ego(I, me, mine, ours) by merely intellectual explanation of these things(Psychology and Neroscience have yet to be able to explain with evidence why even after experiencing profound things the ego centric view sticks on).
It feels reassuring that none of these surprised me, and I strive towards a lot of these views/learnings already. Hopefully a good sign! Packard's writings help give me a little more clarity too, especially when written in such a thoughtful way. Very cool <3
"seek an eternal perspective" is such a beautifully open way to posit that concept.
There's a lot of nihilism in the world, and this is the way beyond it, whatever flavour your salvation happens to come in.
> The ancient Greek and Roman Stoics believed that it’s wise to contemplate death well ahead of the event. I suppose their idea was that it’s desirable to contemplate death’s inevitability so as not to be shocked when it’s staring you in the face.
That seems like a shallow interpretation. Rather, contemplating death ahead of the event refocuses you on your life at the present and hopefully causes you pause to consider if what you are doing right now is meaningful.
Many prominent Stoics advocated the use of “negative visualizations” for a number of reasons. One argument for using negative visualizations was that by imagining potential misfortunes, one could prevent and avert them. Another argument was that they believed misfortune strikes hardest those who believe life is a bed of roses:
> “But no matter how hard we try to prevent bad things from happening to us, some will happen anyway. Seneca therefore points to a second reason for contemplating the bad things that can happen to us. If we think about these things, we will lessen their impact on us when, despite our efforts at prevention, they happen: “He robs present ills of their power who has perceived their coming beforehand.” Misfortune weighs most heavily, he says, on those who “expect nothing but good fortune.” Epictetus echoes this advice: We should keep in mind that “all things everywhere are perishable.” If we fail to recognize this and instead go around assuming that we will always be able to enjoy the things we value, we will likely find ourselves subject to considerable distress when the things we value are taken from us.”
A third argument put forward by the Stoics is that the use of negative visualizations makes you realize what is truly valuable to you and appreciate it:
> They recommended that we spend time imagining that we have lost the things we value—that our wife has left us, our car was stolen, or we lost our job. Doing this, the Stoics thought, will make us value our wife, our car, and our job more than we otherwise would. This technique—let us refer to it as negative visualization—was employed by the Stoics at least as far back as Chrysippus. It is, I think, the single most valuable technique in the Stoics’ psychological tool kit.
And a fourth argument is the one you highlight, that thinking about death makes us realize how precious life is:
> Why, then, do the Stoics want us to contemplate our own death? Because doing so can dramatically enhance our enjoyment of life.”
(All quotations are from the book “A Guide to the Good Life: The Ancient Art of Stoic Joy – William B. Irvine”, which comes highly recommended.)
>Rather...
I think both ideas can be true at the same time.
> to guard against self-deception
The greatest gift my counselor taught me was helping me realize the extent to which I could bullshit myself. I'm not sure I'm necessarily much better at stopping it, but instead now realize that my urge to adapt to a situation can be maladaptive, and my brain will happily retcon a million reasons why it has to be that way rather than chance the ego dying in the face of something unknown.
Wear sunscreen?
and moisturize
I enjoyed this piece, including references to the Stoics and Spinoza. It preaches serenity, goodwill, composure, etc.
As someone in their 30s with children, work and a generally busy life, I wonder if anyone can recommend some pieces with more direct application - that is, in this vein, but perhaps an operational / how-to guide. Sometimes, it's hard to translate principles to action.
As someone in their 50s with a kid, work and a busy life, I’ve found the unlovable fact of it is these things resist a How To guide. It’s sort of like the thing about anyone who wants to be a politician shouldn’t be allowed to. If someone is distilling these things into a How To, at best, they grasp the ideas but lack the perspective that their lived experience isn’t anyone else’s, so the context is all lost. The bits and pieces that I’ve come to think which map up with the author’s tend to be found in books that lack a goal or a point.
As an aside, the Internet-driven grindset that everything, even a hobby, should have a point is one to resist with all your might. Think of the times you laughed loudest playing with your kids; I doubt you all were trying to achieve a goal beyond being together having fun.
https://www.onedayyoullfindyourself.com/
Thanks for sharing this.
There's some fairly strange and dated advice in here, like entering a door before a woman being impolite (unless it's a revolving door; those require strength, which women do not have?) or being emasculated by shaking hands while sitting down?
Nope, those are still valid. Revolving doors can really be quite hard to get started even if you're a strong (and heavy) man.
https://www.onedayyoullfindyourself.com/opening-a-golf-umbre... - Hey! I feel attacked! :D
https://web.mit.edu/jmorzins/www/C-H-speech.html
It's unsettling how often we think we’re in control when we’re really just chasing impulses or clinging to stories we’ve told ourselves. The bit about sleepwalking through life resonated... Reminds me of how easy it is to let years slip by on autopilot, especially in high-functioning careers
One of the effects I value most from cannabis is that it makes me "awake and aware" the first 1 or 2 hours. I haven't been able to sustain that state sober, but it's good to know that I sleepwalk at least.
In my late 20s, I felt disillusioned with this kind of wisdom. Found it too simplistic and not enough to cope with the fact that existence is absurd. I am 32 now, and I can't help think that simplicity is all that there is: curate a happy state of mind, meaningful relationships, active lifestyle, and maybe some audacious goal to keep yourself busy. Thinking that there's some higher state of mind (via spirituality, for eg) is delusion at best.
I feel everything follows the Midwit meme progression [1]: at first you use crude, obvious methods because you don’t know better. Later, complexity is alluring, you drown yourself in optimisations and finding the bestest tools and methods. In the end you come back to the same conclusion: simplicity was the most reliable tool the whole time.
[1]: https://medium.com/@obandoandrew8/bell-curve-meme-avoiding-t...
I still have my first edition Cave of Time. I don't think it's a first printing though but still, when they came out it was simply awesome. I got the first 6 books in a pack for my birthday, I shared them later on with my children and they loved them too when they were young.
I bought my son "The Whole Enchilada", the pack of 100+ Edward Packard authored CYOA books. (No RA Montgomery titles)
He liked the Encyclopedia Brown books & Two Minute Mystery books I bought him so I thought he'd like the CYOA books as well since I cherished them as a kid but alas, he never got into them like I did.
I'm hoping he likes Infocom text adventures better when I introduce those to him later.
First time (only time?) a game made me cry, Floyd's death.
13-15 or so, Up way too late, hiding under my blanket to muffle the noise from the folding Stowaway keyboard, playing on a glowing green 160x160 LCD display on a Palm VIIx running a Z machine interpreter.
Apparently the author still gets emails now and then to this day about how Floyd’s death affected players. He used to have a personal site but I can’t find it now. A lot of players have written about this moment.
I think the other one I beat was Bureaucracy, by Douglas Adams. Got somewhat deep in Beyond Zork and HHGTTG, but don’t think I completed them.
I remember my father getting excited when he saw those Infocom compilations on Walmart store shelves.
I’ve also considered introducing those to my son. He’s 5 now. Lately having him play Mario RPG, Zelda, and Final Fantasy to practice reading.
—-
“Perhaps the most amazing thing about the creation of Floyd was how easy it was. The entire code and text for the character, if printed out, would perhaps run to ten pages. What’s amazing is not that I was able to create a computer game character that touched people so deeply, but how infrequently the same thing has been accomplished in the intervening two decades.”
Steve Meretzky
I used to think I had read that one... but after a days-long argument on the scifi SE, turns out it had been Return to the Cave of Time.
Thank you, Kevin, for sharing this, and thank you for your insights, Edward. As a young man without a father anymore, it's always a pleasure learning about people's life experiences to help me be my best self without years of trial and error
Loved it. I am printing this as a booklet and placing it in my bookshelf. We should all try and listen to more experienced people more often. Even a small story from someones life can be eye opening.
Funnily enough, I first came across Thich Nhat Hanh last week while listening to the new Djo (Joe Keery) album. One of the songs on it is a tribute to him; it's quite pretty: https://open.spotify.com/track/6HqSlNhH83iWRU2nTZkiUj
There's an increasing amount of neuroscience and psychology research that supports all of these conclusions. In short, our brains haven't evolved as quickly as the environment around us, and our nervous system (e.g., amygdala) tends to react agnostically to sensory, environmental, contextual, etc. inputs. If we are not aware of those reactions and don't redirect them toward "good" weights (taking the definition of "good" and "bad" as Packard describes in Lesson #1), then our brain's neural net just reinforces the weights in a "bad" direction.
The point is that if these lessons come off too "woo woo," spiritual, and rooted in philosophy to you, know that the science of the brain (and thus, the mind) supports all of these conclusions, as well. Specifically, the lessons laid out herein are requisite for long-term and sustaining contentment from a scientific perspective, as well.
I am working on software to deliver this knowledge to people along with tools to effectively implement habits that can help them live better (i.e., more content and purpose-driven) lives.
Lastly, if this read sparked something in your mind and you want to read more, I suggest reading "Something to do with Paying Attention" by David Foster Wallace. It's an incredible novella that, as the title may suggest, deals exclusively with Packard's notion "to keep aware and awake."
Nihilism is the devil and we must defeat him.
Wow, I didn't realize at first this is Edward Packard - of the "Choose Your Own Adventure" book series fame. CYOA were the first real series of books that I got into and devoured, probably around age 9 or 10. Great to see that he is still writing.
EP did not say he achieved #1; about #2, "I spent much of my life in this state, and I know all about it."; "I first considered what seemed to be in my best interest, or, more often, gave no thought to the matter at all." is his take on #3; "my normal slouch" in #4; he makes no claim to have gained an eternal perspective, merely quoting others in #5; that "cloud of uncertainty" gives little confidence in #6; being 90, he had little to say about #7 sadly; the reader has to guess whether he was lucky or not in #8; and finally #9 is likewise devoid of actual personal recounting of what he has.
All in all, I find "advice" and "what I've learned" tomes by *older* people to be unhelpful. When someone has spent much other their life living contrary to the advice they are now dishing out, I question it. I prefer advice from someone currently living life, learning and adjusting and growing now... not at the end when it doesn't matter.
> I prefer advice from someone currently living life, learning and adjusting and growing now... not at the end when it doesn't matter.
He spent time to think about what he's learned and decided to put it in writing at 94 years old. He seems to still be avid reader at his age. He still thinks about ideas of living a fulfilling life. It seems to me he's still currently living life, learning and adjusting and growing now. There may even be a lesson there to having a long life: It always matters. What do you consider the end?
At some point, another old man would write a pdf proposing you live a certain way contradicting what they have lived.
These learnings are as helpful as life advice based on the positions of stars.
yes. why do we listen to this guy compared to any other 90 years old person? most people would listen to him because he is monetarily successful or because “he made it”. but as he points out, most of it was luck, so there’s really no point in paying closer attention to him than to any other older person that would like to give away his or her advice. number 4 is literally “I read a meme on fb that said that you should be happy now”. great advice. i was hoping he would say something like “i saw this quote and that triggered an interest in buddhist philosophy or meditation”. instead he ends that advice with “i saw another post on fb that confirmed this idea”
i understand he has no obligation to give any good reason for his advice, he just felt like giving it, and that’s nice of him. i would just suggest younger people not to waste too much time listening to “successful people” (whatever that means) on advice because it’s usually not applicable anymore or at all and is just entertainment with no real value
Do you prefer to fly with pilots who have never landed a plane?
What I've read in his essay is that he piloted a flight simulator for most of his life, then read a manual and some things other people who wrote about flying and landing. So, yes, as I said, I prefer flying with pilots who have learned to land, are continuing to learn, and are getting better each time, with bigger planes and more people.
Luck favors the bold. One acts boldly because one feels lucky.
I love reading wisdom and insights like this.
Are there other similar things out there on the web? Anyone can share?
(Wish there are more posts like this on HN)
a completely different topic & question on this post. how is his blog made? I like the style (simple yet clear and beautiful).
Anyone know what direction i should look at?
<meta name="generator" content="WordPress 6.8.2" />
I don't know how he did it but it looks like it was typed in MS Word and saved as a pdf. Or similar.
I think this is just a PDF hosted on WordPress?
WordPress
I am happy that in my 60 years of life to have achieved most of this, but would have been glad and better off having read it in my early 30s.
Reading something like this earlier might have helped, sure, but sometimes you have to live through the detours to really get the message.
That's the curse of wisdom, in your 60s you can tell it's advice that you in your 30s should've taken but probably in your 30s you wouldn't have had the experiences that would make them be seen as good advice at the time.
Wisdom is frustrating since to be able to fully absorb it you need to have lived experiences that cements it, it can't be generally taught.
Definitely. It would take present-self visiting past-self to make me actually understand, to be sure.
I'm impressed that a 94 year-old has had the mental agility to (seemingly) embrace then reject Facebook.
What a beautiful writing. I can't resist the urge to typeset it: https://typst.app/project/p5Ivi8TSuNmFpkoSfoJ06r
PDF: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1GV-yxI4sBS5gg4belO6hXuFvSFW...
"Error: You do not have sufficient permissions to access this project."
:(
I've attached the pdf if you're curious
That's weird, I can view using incognito :(
Same.
Nothing earth-shattering but quite true nonetheless (or it may be the reason all this is common knowledge is because it's true).
This made me smile:
> Harvard philosopher Christine Korsgaard
It sounds like a honorific title to outline that this person teaches at Harvard, but it's in fact the opposite. It needs to be said she's from Harvard because most people have never heard of her. "Königsberg teacher Immanuel Kant" would be funny.
Well, "der Grosse Chinese Von Konigsberg" was already attached as title to Kant by Nietzsche.
That’s certainly an insight to spend pixels on.
Read the article and Was looking for the why, ofc that was to bold of me.
Beautiful. Thanks!
these took 90 years?
Of all these items I feel like mortality is overrated.
If a person in the west is thoughtful enough and lives long enough, they will eventually either discover Buddhism, or accidentally re-invent it. (See: Stoicism, Post-modernism). Usually the thing that's left out is Buddhism's ethical foundation. Happy to see that Edward Packard went straight to the source.
> To guard against self-deception – recognize biases, avoid wishful thinking, and question entrenched beliefs
This is such an immensely important point. Seeing my current reality, bad and good, have been one of the most essential elements in taking the right decisions and steps.
...and use LaTeX
Thanks for sharing this <3
Why would you use LaTeX when there is Typst?
Done!
Typst: https://typst.app/project/p5Ivi8TSuNmFpkoSfoJ06r PDF: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1GV-yxI4sBS5gg4belO6hXuFvSFW...
Hot take but something I learned over many years - for anyone who wants to hear it:
The easiest way to a happy life is to follow the motto "live and let live".
Live - your life to the fullest. Use your liberty to build your own life. Don't sleepwalk into anything.
Let live - don't hurt or interfere with other's liberties. How others live is none of your business.
10) Cultivate maximally useful, effective purpose(s) and reason(s) for living soon, but preferably, here and now. People without purpose tend to skew sad, chaotic, self-absorbed, and/or dangerous.
And people who think they have a purpose tend to skew all of those things too. Especially dangerous.
A bit of a contrarian take: the effect of many of the aphorisms and much of the wisdom in this document is to empower bad people and allow bad things to happen unimpeded. All at the expense of the greater good, or at least your own.
He quotes Spinoza: "A man strong in character hates no one, is angry with no one... is indignant with no one, scorns no one..." What I'm reading is that Spinoza never met a Donald Trump, even though I know very well he encountered even worse in his life. I'd need to be not just a buddha, but the capital-B Buddha himself, to find relevance in this advice. If I somehow managed to do so, and if everyone else followed my enlightened example in a Kantian sense, things would really suck.
Sometimes we need to hate. Otherwise we wouldn't have the capacity.
> 6) to guard against self-deception
Honesty begins with and includes being honest with yourself. There are a great many people who expend great cognitive dissonance mental gymnastics entrenching themselves into and lashing their identity to a particular group or side of an issue, e.g., climate change denial. The only people they are fooling are fools including themselves.
> what an outsized role is played by luck
There is no luck; there is only free will interacting with destiny in some context.