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There's reality, and there's the interpretation of reality. Reality is the location of atoms. It's the hard cold facts that all observers can agree on. The interpretation of reality, on the other hand, is fickle. If I am sad, I can listen to happy music, and I'm happy again.

I try to affect reality, not the interpretation of reality. I write software and sell to customers. This is reality. My software exists, my customer relationships exist, and the software is solving my customers' problems. There's really no good answer on whether my business is mediocre or not, so I try not to think along those lines.

While this this attempt at objectivity seems laudable, I don't think there is such a thing as objective value. All value is subjective and subject to interpretations. If you create a program that prints "Hello World" over and over again in a loop forever, you have made an objectively real piece of software, but it has no value to anyone. I would say that all actions, at a purely objective level, are completely pointless until we apply a value statement to them. For example, if like many people you believe that humans existing in the universe has value, and that we should try to optimize for humans existing as long and/or as prosperously as possible, then creating products that contribute to the survival and prosperity of human beings makes sense. I think it is useful to understand the basic values we are taking for granted whenever we state something has "objective" purpose, because those values don't always hold.

There's no mediocrity there's just this illusion created by the very riches and powerful to make even more money, to create a crazy game to make us feel bad and always keep charging for the carrot.

Uh, no. There are a lot of medicore people (I'm one of them) and a few winners.

Life is a competition. Never, ever forget that! Those who are the strongest, smartest, richest, best-looking, socially-aware and most driven are the ones who will probably succeed. (There's always luck involved.) They will get the best jobs (or not have to work), the best mating opportunities, the best everything.

Every minute of every day you are not spending on improving yourself and your position in this world is wasted time. If you do not struggle, you will not succeed, period.

Now, having given you a motivational speech that a Chinese "tiger mom" would find barely adequate at best... the question is, what does this have to do with happiness and overall life satisfaction?

Well, almost nothing. Success can provide opportunities for happiness, but that actually has to be pursued on its own. And the things you need to do for happiness are often in opposition to the things you need to do for success.

What I really want people to do is to just be aware of the tradeoffs. If you want to coast through life, that's fine, as long as you have a good understanding of the costs and benefits.

But life really is a competition.

>They will get the best jobs (or not have to work), the best mating opportunities, the best everything.

This is very much impossible. Above average? Probably. But then they become satiated with the above average things that they do have, get bored, adopt a new definition of "average", and wish they had the bank president's salary. The bank president wants to be president of Goldman Sachs. The president of Goldman wishes he had a wife like so-and-so's.

Ambition is fine and all, but once you start measuring your life that way there's nothing but a black hole all the way down.

>If you want to coast through life, that's fine, as long as you have a good understanding of the costs and benefits.

Same thing definitely goes with viewing life as a competition.

Same thing definitely goes with viewing life as a competition.

As long as someone else views life as a competition, then it is. As long as there are limited resources, then it is. It doesn't matter what you think.

And if you choose not to compete at the highest levels, that's fine. I know I don't, and I don't look down at those who don't.

Of course competing is part of life. I don't conflate that with it being the existential meaning of my existence. Sneezing is part of life whether you like it or not. Is life just one big sneeze?

Oh young grasshopper! Your analogy is very flawed.

Competition defines your existence. It determines where you live, where you work, and what you eat. It has determined who you are and how you are made, for you are a product of evolution. It is woven deeply into the fabric of your existence, on a daily level as well as on geological timescales. It even determines how you think, according to some theories about how mental processes work.

You don't have to derive your existential meaning from competition, but ignore it completely at your peril.

What is this competition? What are the rules? What if I don't wish to play? When does the competition end? What is the prize when the competition ends and you are the winner?

What is this competition?

It is life itself, it is all around you.

What are the rules?

You choose them yourself, but choose wisely.

What if I don't wish to play?

Leaving the game is easy, people do it all the time. All you have to do is stop.

When does the competition end?

When you give up, or get too unlucky.

What is the prize when the competition ends and you are the winner?

The only prize is your own satisfaction, but no big prize at the end. The daily prize is that you get to keep playing.

> In the end of the day, it's your job to respect everyone limitations, including yours, and never judge the guys next to you as mediocre, or yourself. You may not get in the history books, but a lot of people around you that need you and your "mediocrity" wont ready then anyway.

History books are way overrated. I can name like 3 Roman emperors, one of them is famous for being killed. And those dudes are about on top of the world as you can get.

Not to mention that no reputation ever will last for anything but an instant on a cosmological scale.

I find this viewpoint too narrow. Just because you can name only 3 Roman emperors does not diminish or impair their 'greatness' of the rest.

> Musk for example, is a great entrepreneur but just an average (maybe mediocre?) husband: had two wives, divorced three times from the same, is that even possible?

Modern marriage is hugely risky compared to what it used to be. Someone who marries the same person twice must revel in risk.

How is modern marriage hugely risky compared to what it used to be?

I can only imagine it's because of the high divorce rate (is it increasing?) and the cost of separation, including court fees and dividing up the assets. Divorce doesn't have the same stigma as it did 100 or even 50 years ago.

To me, to add, a pre-nup sounds like a romance killer. I couldn't imagine serving one to someone I intend to spend the rest of my life with since it amounts to plan B (that and I don't think it's possible in the UK).

It is very encouraging to hear people still feel this way.

Prenuptial agreements still have a value within the UK, they are considered intent towards your actions in the event of a divorce and unless there are significant extenuating circumstances leading to the divorce are normally honoured. As long as neither of you are cheating, abusive, performing illegal acts, etc, the prenup usually holds up.

> because of the high divorce rate (is it increasing?)

Falling. http://www.nytimes.com/2014/12/02/upshot/the-divorce-surge-i...

The divorce rate increased for the same reason it isn't now, swaths of social pressures that 'forced' people into getting married young, having kids and raising a family are either going away or simply ignored by more and more people. That these pressures are changing and divorce doesn't have the same stigma are good things.

> a pre-nup sounds like a romance killer

A pre-nup is dealing with the parts of marriage that have nothing to do with romance. If you're going into a marriage thinking it's nothing but romance, wine and roses, you may be in for a rude awakening.

Thanks for that. Very interesting and indeed a good thing.

A marriage has everything to do with romance in terms of the kind of relationship we're talking about: a romantic relationship.

Personally, I haven't made my perspective clear in my original comment. Me and my partner have lived together for some time, we have kids and our own home. I definitely don't expect a bed of roses after marriage. In fact, after the experience, it would be pretty damn foolish to expect that from a day to remember, a legal document, a few things and nice holiday.

Despite that, I still fail to see how I, myself, could serve my partner with a pre-nup after knowing, by this time, she is the person I want to spend the rest of my life with.

My opinion is perhaps related to your first paragraph in that I have 0 pressure to get married and I have hafthe luxury of giving myself the best part of a decade to make that decision. That is why in my case I wouldn't serve a pre-nup - it would pretty much say "hey were getting married after a decade of commitment and realisation we want to spend our lives together but I still don't fully believe we will so best sign this just in case". That doesn't really show commitment to me.

To conclude, I would absolutely get a pre nup if the relationship was quite new but then again I wouldn't get married like that so hastily.

To me, marriage is the highest honour you can bestow on someone. You are in effect both saying "yes I honour this person so damn much, I want us to join families". That's a major thing and it actually kinda hurts to see some people treat marriage in a way that decreases its great significance.

> A marriage has everything to do with romance in terms of the kind of relationship we're talking about: a romantic relationship.

Not legally it doesn't and that is where a pre-nup is involved. A pre-nup is related to all the contract law around the legal institution of marriage. The law doesn't care about how much you love each other. You could marry someone to set explicit inheritance rights, absolutely hate the other person and it is still a legal marriage.

Except that the point of marriage is closer union with someone you intend to spend the rest of your life with. I am talking specifically about this kind of marriage.

I'm not saying people don't marry for reasons other than lifetime union. I'm pretty certain I would have a prenup drawn up in the situations you give as examples. My point is that I would not treat marriage that way because it is an honour that you bestow only on the person you intend to marry.

Perhaps i'm getting confused too. I'm talking about serving what is in effect a contingency plan wrt division of assets in the event of divorce. If that is the case, I still stand by what I say in that if you feel this is necessary, perhaps you need to give it more time instead of jumping into what is the highest honour two people can bestow on each other.

If you want to regard marrying someone as 'bestowing upon them the highest honour you can' you can feel feel free to be that full of yourself. If you want to pretend there is nothing going on but romance, you can pretend that.

Legally there is no marriage until you sign that contract at which point you are in a partnership that is covered by many, many laws because it is a legal construct, pre-nups being just one. If you can not recognize this and you go into a marriage thinking of nothing but romance, you are going into it blind and delusional.

> Except that the point of marriage is closer union with someone you intend to spend the rest of your life with

That's actually a pretty new development. You married to stop wars, you married to care for your house, you married to have kids and have someone care for them, you married to carry of the family business.

Excuse me but was that called for? Honouring somebody is not being full of yourself. Its exactly that: honouring somebody. How is it not your biggest honour? You essentially say you love soneone that much you want to share the rest of your life with someone in the closest way possible. I think you are being just a little bit offensive and a touch unfair.

I'm sorry but what part of being in a committed relationship for the best part of a decade do you not understand? I am well aware what a marriage is legally. If you want to view marriage purely as a legal instrument, that's fine by me. To me, a marriage is, through means of law, making official a commitment I already experience. It would NOT change my day to day whatsoever and is purely a piece of paper that lays out how my long term relationship currently works anyway.

A marriage is a romantic event. It is not purely a romantic event but it is none the less. I place value in that but I also place value in the legal document that comes from it. By law, that document cements the way we have lived our lives for many years. Im not actually sure where I said it wasn't a legal contract?

As I said, I have been in a committed relationship for a long time. We have lived together and had children together. A marriage would not change that at all. Im not sure why that makes me blind or delusional? It certainly doesn't warrant the insult in any case.

That sounds very upper class and feudal in respect too. I am from a working class background and from peasantry before it. I doubt my ancestors would have been able to stop a war or continue a family business by marriage. Regardless I am not going down that rabbit hole only to be insulted.

I think the whole point here is that marriage today has many aspects, and the legal aspect is completely orthogonal to the romantic aspect. One should be aware of both. If you want to bestow great depths of meaning on it, it's ok - a marriage like you describe is indeed a profound moment for the two people involved. If you consider this as the essence of marriage, fine - but the legal layer exists independently. By law and custom, it's attached to the union of two people. It may not define the interpersonal meaning of marriage, but it defines its meaning for the rest of society. It doesn't diminish anything, and there's no point in ignoring it.

My partner and I signed a pre-nup. I'd rate our chances of divorce at like...less than 5%. We've both been through a ton of crap together and we are totally committed to making our relationship last.

The point is, we've both seen couples in our circles go from that to absolutely messy divorces. We simply decided that in the rare chance we don't work out, we'd have laid down the rules of separation while we still loved each other. While it certainly wasn't romantic, it didn't kill the romance.

Working out the pre-nup allowed us to really consider how harmful separation would be for both of us on an emotional level. That led to us trying to make the rules for separation as clear as possible. If anything, it strengthened our relationship.

It helps if neither party is interested in "If he/she/they cheats I get double" sorts of clauses and instead are interested in a clear, fair split regardless of the circumstances.

That is an incredibly interesting perspective - enough to step back and think through my stance.

Perhaps my view of this kind of agreement is tarnished by the stereotypical type (you mention it with "if you cheat then x" or how someone with a lot of wealth would aim to protect that when marrying on short notice).

Thank you!

>is it increasing?

No. It's falling. Except in the age group of 50+.

http://m.huffpost.com/us/entry/6256956

We can't know the divorce rates of the people who get married now, only the people who got married years ago. Since the people who get married now are very different than the people who got married previously we can't assume that divorce rates will follow the same trends. For example, people enter marriage now older and more educated. We know both of those decrease the probability of divorce.