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Comment by codeshaman | Hacker News Reader

At first I thought 'this is so cool' , but then after thinking about it for a while, I realised that it's no cooler than any of the 200 videos or pictures with 'cool stuff' that I see every day.

I think it's a pretty useless expensive gimmick created out of toxic materials to excite the numb neurons of the bored inhabitants of the digital realm for 2 minutes or so. Then we'll all forget about it and move on to the next thing. I'm already looking for something else :).

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The problem with reductio ad nihilum arguments like this one is that you can make them about absolutely everything and anything in life. It's a slippery slope.

Yes, I am doing that and it's a shitty way to see things, because it makes me sad and angry and everything is gloomy. Probably a phase I'm going through right now - my bullshit-filtering glasses are broken.

I go through this phase after a startup or project that I've been working on is over. Without a project to focus on, I see the world as it is - a sharade of people bullshitting each other and hiding from who they are. I need a new project :).

> I see the world as it is

That is no more as it is than anyone else's way of seeing the world.

You're simply seeing the world through the lens of your own discontent.

You might like to read the transcription of Sartre's lecture "Existentialism is a Humanism." It's available online at https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/sartre/works/exis... . He wrote a lot on how to reconcile living in a world that he believed was devoid of inherent meaning and the sense of despair that this causes most people.

All too often I see children playing on the playground, and I always do my best as an adult to inform the children of their pointless immature meandering. /s

Sometimes we get so caught up in our little computers and programming languages and internet that we forget that there's a much bigger world out there.

Go sailing. Learn how to carve wood. Make out with another human on a beach. Go take pictures in a foreign country. Learn how to play an instrument. Grow some vegetables. Volunteer in your local community. Go to a bookstore/library, pick a completely random fiction book, and force yourself to read it from cover to cover.

It gets better.

The problem isn't that the world is small, it is that it looks pointless.

(I am experiencing a somewhat similar "phase" with codeshaman)

Self fulfilling prophecy. If all you do all day is sit at home and think about how the world is pointless, it'll look pointless. If you engage it (for ideas, see my previous post), it will quickly appear less so.

You gotta eat your vegetables.

To me, it's like a dog chasing its tail (or, rather, I am like one!): In order to engage and find meaning I need to find meaning so I get inspired to engage. Do I just jump out of this cycle of thinking and pretend I find meaning in something so I can escape?

(Damn, I sound so lost! :D)

P.S: Your comment on the Tinder topic a couple of days ago (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10019527) was spot on, you really nailed it. Thanks for sharing all these thoughts.

"Act out being alive, like a play. And after a while, a long while, it will be true." —Steinbeck (East of Eden)

Thank you for your thoughts, they are helping.

You are right again, it's a self fulfilling prophecy - the more you dwell on it, the more pointless the whole thing becomes. But as sebkomianos said, it's like a vicious circle: In order to engage and find meaning I need to find meaning so I get inspired to engage.

The solution is, I guess, to pretend for a while and just do something and then it will start making sense again. I'm doing that, trying to produce sparks to ignite the fire, I'm almost there....

That's certainly an elaborate way of calling it art.

you have never seen good art?

How would good art differ from this?

At first, I thought your comment was interesting. But then, I remembered that we're all going to die.

What a boring philosophy.

You mean it's 'art'?

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