Comment by shas3 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by shas3 | Hacker News Reader

This is such a great autobiographical account that manages to do two incredible things at once. It chronicles the discovery of a very interesting historical possibility. While doing so, it also explores the interplay between the personal and professional lives of a very accomplished researcher.

I love the theme of how discovery and research are the source of both melancholy and ecstasy. Gopnik herself seems to have found fulfillment and an escape from other troubles in the exciting new questions she encountered about Hume's influences. The other side of the same coin is Hume's depression during the period when he found himself incapable of making significant progress on his thesis.

> "When you’re young, you want things: work, love, children. When you reach middle age, you want to want things. When you’re depressed, you no longer want anything. Desire, hope, the future itself—all seem to vanish, as they had for me. But now I at least wanted to know whether Hume could have heard about Desideri. It was a sign that my future might return."

The other theme of interest to the tech community is the interplay of personal and professional lives. If you consider the two aspects of one's life, personal relationships and professional fulfillment, each provides a hedge against possible problems with the other. Interesting explorations in one's work can help pull one from other problems in life.

There is a significant time-varying component of probabilistic luck in whether one's life and work will be fulfilling, but I think it makes sense to constantly strive to bias these probabilities towards outcomes that involve working on exciting projects and building meaningful personal relationships.

I think this article is a strong descriptive companion to Zach Weinersmith's popular comic about 'eleven lifetimes' http://www.smbc-comics.com/?id=2722

> "When you’re young, you want things: work, love, children. When you reach middle age, you want to want things. When you’re depressed, you no longer want anything.

It's funny that you quoted this line because I think it reveals a particular ignorance that the author has, namely a misunderstanding of depression due to her particular experience with it. A more truthful version, in my view, would be the following:

When you’re not depressed, you want things: work, love, children. When you have mild depression, you want to want things. When you’re deeply depressed, you no longer want anything.

Age really doesn't have anything to do with it.

So you are only 'normal' when you want things? That is a really strange world view.

seems like you've confused yourself with a literal interpretation

I think this is meant in the context of having goals for oneself, some drive about something(s) to make you want to get out of bed ... not simply consuming products you don't need

I didn't interpret that in the sense of material items. If work and love are things then experiences in general are things.

In that abstract sense wanting things isn't materialistic. Even if you want to live in a cabin on Walden Pond, you still want a "thing".

Things here are broader than the physical. Not for all people who are depressed, but a general absence of desire is common. It includes desire for physical things that you may have once liked or collected. Lack of desire for social things like friends or lovers or perhaps any contact with other people. Even the desire to be alive, which for most people is just a given, can be absent. I, for example, was not actually suicidal, I just had no desire to exist, but also no desire to put forth the effort to end my existence.

Desire is the root of human suffering. This is a widely held belief to put it mildly.

Which is pretty ironic, considering that the people who completely lack desires tend to be those suferring major depression much more than those who have achieved an enlightened serenity.

As someone who has grappled with fairly severe depression, it's not that you have no desires. Your body does a decent job of making sure you maintain your body by giving you plenty.

I would merely say you have no rational desires. As a human your are functional, but as a rational human you've hit a wall.

I can't definitively say I've been depressed, but is it fair to say that you still have desires and want things, but it feels like there are insurmountable barriers between you and desires/things?

Yea, I think that's fair. I think it's also pretty subjective, so it wouldn't surprise me for people to experience it differently. But whatever is wrong or blocking one or one's desires (or whatever) is in one's brain, if not one's control.

More precisely, desire is seen as the root of human suffering by, most commonly, Buddhists.

Isn't it interesting that she was seeking out Buddhism?

The other philosophy that thought about this, but on a more intellectual level, was Stoicism, which was very popular in the Roman empire.

Thanks, good observation.

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