Hunter S. Thompson on Finding Your Purpose (1958) | Hacker News Reader

Hunter S. Thompson on Finding Your Purpose (1958)

tranquilmonkey.com

525 pointszeeshanm257 comments

I remember reading this in college and coming away with the feeling that what he was proposing was impossible.

I didn't know what my Abilities were and how they relate to the others around me such that I can use them effectively.

Not only that I didn't even know what I desire aside from food and sex.

Luckily I was on a career trajectory and had quite a bit of experience ahead of me so I took solace in the idea that world travel, responsibilities etc... would flesh a lot of those abilities and desires things out for me.

It's been 13 years since, and I still have no idea where my Abilities lie or what I Desire aside from food and sex.

I like his suggestion to read Sartre, though I suggest Camus instead.

Did you not desire to write this comment?

It's more of a neurotic addictive compulsion and ego seeking behavior than something that is desirable as a sense of fulfillment. These neurotic addictive behaviors (checking social sites, compulsively reading random things, chewing tobacco, drinking alcohol, sleeping) dominate most of my non-mandatory, un-allocated time. Everything else is just a yawning void of nothing, including my wife and 3 kids. Not for lack of trying (Open Water SCUBA License, Private Pilots License, Skydiving license, Hit 100 some odd countries traveling, Competitively Cycled/Ran etc...).

I think you might want to step back and ask yourself what you expect life to offer you and if those expectations are too high. Sounds like a great life, and you seem to be letting the beautiful things slip through the cracks, because you're judging them not good enough.

At a certain point you realize that experiences and stuff are equally as meaningless in the end.

In a finite physical universe, nothing has intrinsic meaning. The only meaning anything has, is the meaning that you attribute to that thing. Thus, anything that is meaningful to you, is the most meaningful thing in the universe.

No goal is better than any other, because there is no universally defined "better", everything just "is". Therefore, you are free to say that the goal you have chosen is better than any other, and you would be correct, because just by choosing it, you have changed the balance.

>In a finite physical universe

I am pretty existential too, so I agree with you generally...but I'm not sure what this clause has to do with the rest of what you said.

- finite: Infinity is weird. It's very hard to make arguments that hold when infinite resources are in the picture. Finite also includes the time dimension. If you have infinite time and/or space, intrinsic meaning may be possible, but I really have no idea.

- physical: That there is no other plane of existence to progress towards, heaven or enlightenment or anything else similar to those.

- universe: Whatever it is that we inhabit - multiverse, universe, inside of a black hole, we're not quite sure yet as far as I understand the physics (which isn't very far at all unfortunately. It is fascinating though)

In your second clause i think perhaps you mean materialist[|ic] (or maybe physicalist) not physical. A soul, heaven, or other spiritual entities or spaces, aren't necessarily incompatible with a physical universe.

'tis a fair point, thanks.

I agree in principal, Hence, why I suggested Camus in my original comment.

But what happens when you can't attribute meaning to anything? Do you revert to religion or suicide (Those were the three options for camus)?

Yeah, I know that feeling - it is hard to get past it when it happens and it certainly takes a while for me every time it happens.

This is certainly not a universal cure, but for me the ideas presented in this ted talk have helped: https://www.ted.com/talks/dan_gilbert_asks_why_are_we_happy?...

So, set a goal and work towards that - but, looking at your profile that suggestion seems trite and silly, because you are and have been doing that for some time. Doing difficult things falls into the same category.

My suggestion would be to pick something completely pointless - something that you could easily pay someone to do for you, better than you have time-skill for and then do that.

For example, I'm building a house. Fairly big, not huge, wooden. I have no training in it and it has taken 5 years of evenings and weekends so far. Any reasonable construction team would have finished in 6 months and it would have had better quality of work.

I love it - it makes me happy to look at the small bit that I finished yesterday and somehow it gives me a sense of purpose. Maybe it's just a distraction - something to keep away the existential dread, but so what, because nothing has intrinsic value, this purpose is the best possible purpose for me.

Thanks for the suggestion. I'll look into it!

As an IT person, I am slightly jealous of people who can, at the end of the day, point at a physical thing that they have created.

At the end of my day I often feel that I have just kept the cogs grinding for another day. I do feel that my work is "important", and I'm good at it, and the money surely improves my quality of life, but it'd sure be nice to be outside sometimes in the real world digging a hole or planting a tree or something, not just the endless arranging of remote electrons.

As also an IT person, I agree! :)

Frankly what you describe is exactly why I started building real things as a hobby.

> But what happens when you can't attribute meaning to anything? Do you revert to religion or suicide (Those were the three options for camus)?

Is this not the basis for The Myth of Sisyphus? If I recall correctly, Camus rejects both religion and suicide as ultimately absurd.

No, the universe is absurd. The response to absurdity is giving up (death, credulous belief) or acceptance and defining meaning.

Neither. He reject them both.

When you can't attribute meaning to anything, Camus says, according to some of my self-interpretation, that you have to live while accepting the triviality of it all. Live while acknowledging death is a perfectly valid alternative and nothing is really stopping you committing suicide. But only when you are on that edge are you truly living,

Is this attitude something you are satisfied to stay with, or is it something you are interested in changing? Is your end goal to eventually be something like most people who are able to attribute meaning to experiences and stuff? I am assuming that you did all those things (travelling, family, etc) because you thought you'd get some sense of fulfilment out of them.

It's an honest question. I can imagine that a life without meaning would feel, well... meaningless.

terryf has a fantastic comment, but what end are you talking about, death?

A good way of figuring out what you value is considering if you die tomorrow, why wouldn't you (assuming you aren't suicidal). If you really don't matter either way then why not just do the thing that feels good?

Well that's essentially what I do - with an over current of dread.

I think if I could afford it I would probably be a habitual heroin user. From what I read, it seems to push all of the same biochemical "happiness" and "fulfillment" buttons as all of the other relationship/activity/experience things that people like to do, albeit with some side effects.

Hahaha. Easily said by someone who has never done opiates. Drugs aren't the creme de la creme either. Nothing grand stays grand. Drugs come with tolerance and general malaise.

They do, for a few minutes; the rest of the time, everything becomes even worse. And the experience is never quite like the first times, even by pushing up the doses. At least, that's what the users and ex-users I've known describe. Personally, I wouldn't trade even a life of quiet desperation for that.

Other replies were a little salty, and I can only say from personal experience------- but the awareness that you're out of it takes away some of the sanctuary of being high... especially if you're even moderately comfortable (in life, in mind, etc). Feels like you didn't come by it honest, and ruins it some.

On the other hand, if you're stuck in a shithole with a metric tonne of inner demons, it's pretty much tops.

Contentment, opiates. Happiness... like that innocent 'AHHHHH TOMORROW'S CHRISTMAS!' joy, I'd say MDMA instead

What happens if you have no problem with doing so? I would be perfectly comfortable with committing suicide any which time. I just don't do it because I don't have a reason to do so, but otherwise, meh.

'Realize' is a strong claim, experiences may indeed be meaningless or they may not be. How could anyone ever prove one way or another? But if one could be convinced they were indeed meaningful, it might provide an avenue for happiness.

May I ask is it possible you desire something to desire?

is it possible you desire something to desire?

That's an interesting philosophical ouroboros.

Yes but it's also a practical psychological question. A person can come to a mental state where nothing in life interests them yet they wish there was something they enjoyed.

So, although possibly mundane, there is a point of view where the question "does anything in life have meaning" is less interesting than the question "is everything ok".

This is exactly what I'm talking about. We are just biological organisms evolved over millions of years to simply continue the human race. Why would you expect to find meaning?

Could you elaborate? I'm in a place where stuff does not matter anymore (never did actually) and I try to focus on experiences. Is that path also a mistake?

If nothing matters to you, there are no mistakes.

Dawson had an interesting response. I can't give you an answer. Maybe it will for you, maybe it won't. Beats not trying I suppose.

So, a living cushy enough to not be impressed with anything?

I have no idea, maybe?

I know that I've lived on the other side of it - growing up working poor, basically homeless from ages 9-11 and then gritting through over a decade of eating shit in the military. Seeing combat helps put things in perspective to the immediate now, but that only goes so far as you just realize that there are amazing people that have had lives "cut short" unnecessarily and that there was no real purpose to it.

Thanks for your honesty.

If you would take some time and explain what it is that attracts you in Camus writings, maybe I'll understand you better.

Simply the idea that in the absence of universal meaning, it is the individual that must create meaning. It's along the same idea of what Thompson is writing about.

The downside of this approach is if the firmament for what you created meaning from crumbles or never really materializes, leaving a void.

I really appreciate (and am very fascinated by) your extreme honesty in this thread.

I've read Camus twice. The first time I read The Stranger, I took away meaninglessness, in the sense that existentialism seemed true.

The second time, I nearly threw up (no, I wasn't reading Nausea :-D), but in the sense that I don't think I've ever felt anything was so absolutely evil and wrong, and existentialism false.

I can't explain this in a philosophical way, and it may be a delusional and biased opinion given my life experiences between the two readings, but I think observing intuitions does hint at universal meaning. Intuitions might be intellectual observations of objective truths no different, in principle, from observations of atoms, or reason itself.

Reading this thread, and resonating with much of what you say, may I suggest maybe that it's not the meaning or a meaning, but simply the search for meaning itself (which I realise was the title of Viktor Frankl's book) that might offer some structure.

I don't know if it's our brain wiring, chemistry, experiences, psychological development path dependencies, or what, but I'm pretty convinced that human brains are pattern-seeking systems, and finding and establishing patterns, ordering our universes, is one fundamental drive.

It also turns out that that's what I've been directly and principally focusing on for the past few years, mostly because I can't not.

Several of the activities and compulsions you mentioned above strike me as behaviors which feed the brain's reward systems fairly directly (drugs, alcohol, sex, extreme activities), and your combat and other experiences may also affect that -- not judgement or anything, just mapping for me of "what does the brain seek, how does it work, how is it itself re-shaped by experiences?".

The advantage of taking a shortcut is to get to a destination faster. The advantage of taking the long way around, or exploring a space, is often to get a far stronger sense of the interconnections within that space. I thrive on connections, myself, so that has appeal.

No idea how this strikes you, but offered for consideration.

I've nothing to offer except my own experience. I deconverted from a fundamentalist church and had to rebuild my life because I realized that external factors do not give meaning to it, the origin of something does not give it value, and the end of it all is the same.

I don't have much patience with myself getting into the same thought patterns. Perhaps this lack of patience is the must important skill I acquired.

Try getting good at something you're bad at, like, for example, appreciating your life and the lives of those around you. "Yawning void of nothing" is a pretty hilariously inaccurate description of a family and all the life experiences you describe.

I would experiment with the hypothesis that perceiving value and experiencing it as such are skills you lack but others possess, that may be improved through deliberate practice.

I would experiment with the hypothesis that perceiving value and experiencing it as such are skills you lack but others possess

No experimentation necessary, it's blatantly clear that's the case.

that may be improved through deliberate practice

Perhaps. Or maybe it's just trying to distract yourself from reality through what are commonly accepted "values." Hard to know. I read all those studies about "happiness" coming from great relationships, and family etc...

None of them question why happiness is a virtue - it's as though it's implied that hedonism qua epicureanism is preferential. That's what I can't get past.

One could look at it as a loss or lack of a sense - would incredibly tasty food seem all that worthwhile to someone with no taste buds? Does the fact that people can taste good food mean they will automatically become obese?

Could you please expand on the last paragraph? I think about happiness a lot lately, and it seems like you have some intetesting thoughts.

There is an unending amount that has been written about measuring happens and finding happiness etc... All of it seems to boil down to what I would consider "hedonism with a mortgage." The focus is on "lasting happiness" with relationships and experiences being there paramount, and de-emphasizes material accumulation and intoxication.

Nothing ever asks the question "why be happy anyway?"

Seems like it's as bad of a goal as any, but it's how our biological systems create action.

Teenagers ask banal but seemingly profound questions like this all the time. The answer is "because it feels better than not being happy."

You can really overthink this stuff pretty easily

That answer isn't compete though and assumes too much.

It's a cynical answer under a cloak of "experience." Might as well just say, because god wants us to be happy.

I always defined "being happy" as being satisfied. And being satisfied can be defined as "being the way you want to be". So in that sense I think happiness IS a kind of ultimate goal. I may have stretched the definition of happiness a little, though.

Andrew, you're fine. I'm going to guess that you're American as America is the most happy-obsessed culture in the world in my experience.

Happiness as virtue is not universal, maybe you need some more time abroad. I know you said you visited 100 countries but visiting 100 countries and living in another country for many years is quite a different thing. Or maybe you just need different friends or perhaps a meditation practice, I don't know.

I'll leave you with this 2 minute video from Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek, "Why Be Happy When You Could Be Interesting?": https://youtu.be/U88jj6PSD7w

> as America is the most happy-obsessed culture in the world in my experience.

Yup. I blame their constitution.

That's the Declaration of Independence you're thinking of, I believe.

Right, my bad.

> as America is the most happy-obsessed culture in the world in my experience.

You haven't met a lot of French people :-)

Chesterton wrote about the folly of globe-trotting:

"The globe-trotter lives in a smaller world than the peasant. He is always breathing, an air of locality. London is a place, to be compared to Chicago; Chicago is a place, to be compared to Timbuctoo. But Timbuctoo is not a place, since there, at least, live men who regard it as the universe, and breathe, not an air of locality, but the winds of the world. The man in the saloon steamer has seen all the races of men, and he is thinking of the things that divide men — diet, dress, decorum, rings in the nose as in Africa, or in the ears as in Europe, blue paint among the ancients, or red paint among the modern Britons. The man in the cabbage field has seen nothing at all; but he is thinking of the things that unite men — hunger and babies, and the beauty of women, and the promise or menace of the sky."

- http://www.ccel.org/ccel/chesterton/heretics.iii.html

If you're talking about studies in psychology and why they perceive happiness as such, it's because they're not philosophers. They're merely trying to learn things about something that is actually important, even if not the full picture of what is important. Because that's what their method allows them to do effectively.

> Open Water SCUBA License, Private Pilots License, Skydiving license, Hit 100 some odd countries traveling, Competitively Cycled/Ran etc...

Genuinely curious: why did you pursue those things listed, and did you enjoy them? Or was it to check a ticklist?

Also, I've assumed you've been on a sex binge before? Nothing came out of that?

why did you pursue those things listed, and did you enjoy them? Or was it to check a ticklist?

I thought I would, so I started. Never really did, but kept doing it assuming that if I got better at it then it would become enjoyable. Never happened.

I've assumed you've been on a sex binge before? Nothing came out of that?

Three kids!

But seriously...yes 2005-6 was basically that. But no, those kind of serotonin binges are short lived and tend to be tolerance inducing - meaning you need more to get a bigger enjoyment "bump," at least that's what happened in my case and those are generally more destructive and risky than the benefits.

Do you play any sports?

Personally I find the pursuit of mastery in my chosen sport very meditative, and it also offers the right amount of social contact for me.

If you get along with your opponents or teammates, you can chat with them during the match, otherwise I just concentrate on my game and try to win every single point.

Even when I lose, I always have a list of things I've done well during the match and a list of things that I need to work on. And if you have some metrics by which you can see improvement, there's a sense of satisfaction that comes from seeing that improvement as well.

Can you imagine what it's like to be on the other side of you?

I don't know you, and I wouldn't presume to know anything about you other than what you've revealed in your comments, but what I can say is that you've been handed enough lego blocks to build anything you want to, and it seems like you've set them aside because they're not the specific blocks that you had in mind to build the thing that you envisioned at some point in the past.

No one automatically receives happiness. But you have an obligation to work on yourself, to do better than you seem to be doing, at building a happy self out of the life that you've made. That obligation is a result of choices you've made to build a family. Like it or not, you owe it to your wife and children to do the extra work of finding the meaning and sense of significance that is absolutely there waiting to be uncovered by you, and put to use by you.

All of the extrinsic life experiences you've mentioned in your comments do not entitle you to wait for something to click, to be more than a 'yawning void of nothing'.

If what you're talking about is something that you face no matter how many good, wise, smart moves that you make, then you may need to face the reality that you need treatment for depression or some other issue.

No amount of travel or physical trials that you've put yourself through can supplant the reality that you can build for yourself by simply looking inward. In fact, it seems as though by constantly abstracting the search into various physical or worldly concerns, you've done the opposite.

Happiness and fulfillment are moving targets. Personally, I suspect that I may never get all the way there. But I've spent some time on the road you're describing, and I know it's a dead end road. It's ego, it's self-indulgence, it's blame, it's a withering loneliness that makes you a small island, one that can be described in just a few seconds with cliches, easily traversed by foot, and forgotten or ignored by others.

Whether or not you're clinically depressed, you should probably work on the quality of your relationships. Are there people that you can authentically connect with? If not, find them. They're out there. Are there people with whom your connection leaves you feeling bad or more isolated? Get rid of them. Are there people that you keep trying to connect with but it doesn't happen? Stop trying, and refocus your energy on authentic connections. Are there superficial connections that satisfy some social or validating urge that you have? Figure out whether your relationships with those people can be evolved into authentic, meaningful connections or not, and work on the good ones and discard the bad ones.

It's an absolute tragedy to waste all of the time and beautiful experiences and memories that you could be accumulating with all of the people in your life, for lack of addressing a few relatively simple and totally fixable issues.

This was an awesome response, and piece of writing.

Oh, yea those close to me hate it. Everyone else seems fine cause they only see the professional side, so as far as they know, everything is just A OK Great!

Not only family but I have a high stress business to run and people counting on me! Thanks for taking the time to write that out though.

In reality, all you write is correct generally. This wasn't intended to be a mini-therapy session, but for what it's worth the same message you state: "Happiness comes from inside" has been repeated to me literally as far back as I can remember. It's not practical though.

I've had probably a dozen therapists over the years, found mentors I looked up to, tried to find meaningful relationships with peers, studied what fulfillment is etc...A few years ago I came to the conclusion that searching for "happiness" in all of these things was just not working. And beyond that the fact of the search turning up dry is a compounding problem.

I'm not sure what happened, but as Rodney Dangerfield called it "The Heaviness[1]" is getting bigger.

But I've spent some time on the road you're describing, and I know it's a dead end road.

I'm curious what "road" that is?

waste all of the time and beautiful experiences and memories that you could be accumulating

Is there value in accumulating experiences? I mean I've accumulated a shitload of them, the problem is there isn't anything to do with them. It's like saving Polaroids. Is there a reason to other than looking at them again for a serotonin bump?

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1zdjYmhrA-A

I'm grappling with similar questions, and have been my entire adult life. It feels like an unending existential crisis. I think both your comment and the parent comment (which are both very thoughtful, btw) pose an interesting question: is 'happiness' a meaningful or worthwhile goal? For me, at the current moment, I think not. The notion of happiness seems almost incomprehensible to me, to be honest.

The way you've described your life reminds me of a book I've (partially) read: Mindfulness in Plain English. Even if you think Buddhism and meditation are a bunch of malarkey, the book itself is worth a read. What specifically comes to mind are parts where the author discusses why one should bother with meditation:

...you are human. And just because of the simple fact that you are human, you find yourself heir to an inherent unsatisfactoriness in life which simply will not go away. You can suppress it from your awareness for a time. You can distract yourself for hours on end, but it always comes back--usually when you least expect it. All of a sudden, seemingly out of the blue, you sit up, take stock, and realize your actual situation in life.

There you are, and you suddenly realize that you are spending your whole life just barely getting by. You keep up a good front. You manage to make ends meed somehow and look OK from the outside. But those periods of desperation, those times when you feel everything caving in on you, you keep those to yourself. You are a mess. And you know it. But you hide it beautifully. Meanwhile, way down under all that you just know there has got be some other way to live, some better way to look at the world, some way to touch life more fully...

...you suffer from the same malady that infects every human being. It is a monster in side all of us, and it has many arms: Chronic tension, lack of genuine compassion for others, including the people closest to you, feelings being blocked up, and emotional deadness. Many, many arms. None of us is entirely free from it. We may deny it. We try to suppress it. We build a whole culture around hiding from it, pretending it is not there, and distracting ourselves from it with goals and projects and status. But it never goes away. It is a constant undercurrent in every thought and every perception; a little wordless voice at the back of the head saying, "Not good enough yet"...

Maybe the Buddhists have got it right. Perhaps the more worthwhile goal is cultivating a clear and unbiased perception of reality. Honestly, I have no clue; just putting forward an alternative to consider if you haven't already. If you do figure it out, I'd love to know...

Here's a link to the book btw: http://www.budsas.org/ebud/mfneng/mind0.htm

EDIT: reading firstworldman's sibling comment provoked another thought which may head off a semantic issue. Maybe 'happiness' is neither a meaningful nor meaningless objective; it's simply an ill-defined, subjective concept. So when people talk about 'attaining happiness', its possible what they mean by 'happiness' is objectively different to what other people think it is. From what I understand firstworldman to be saying, he has found 'authenticity of experiences and relationships' to be a worthwhile and attainable goal. Incidentally, this seems to square with Buddhist philosophy, which is largely concerned with attaining 'perception of authentic reality' (i.e. 'enlightenment').

When things are hard, it's often because either a) it's new, or b) because we're trying the 'wrong' way.

When something is hard and you can't manage to get the desired result no matter how hard you try, consider that rather than to keep working 'hard', you just try something different.

I know you haven't (and couldn't, on this forum) encapsulated the breadth of all of the things you've tried to overcome this lack of meaning that you've been experiencing throughout your life. But, and please forgive me if I'm oversimplifying your search, it seems pretty clear that you've been looking in the wrong places. Trying something different doesn't necessarily mean trying a different activity, or finding a new thrill, or a new drug, or anything like that. Put simply, it means try doing something that you wouldn't otherwise do.

When you say that the people around you hate it, that's what I'm getting at when I say, 'Can you imagine what it's like being on the other side of you?' Are you giving the people close to you the access and information they need to help you? Do they know you need their care? Do they know what things they do that give you energy, and what things they do for you that are demotivating and de-energizing? Simply giving them access to 'where you're at' can do a lot to empower them to help you. You can't get through this alone. You need to do everything you can to let them know that you're working on it and that they can help.

When you say that 'everyone else seems fine', that's a symptom of the lack of authentic connections in your life. If you're like most of the people on this forum, it's possible you spend a likely unhealthy amount of time working. That makes it crucially important that you have some professional relationships that can help fuel you to do the best work you can do (for the sake of your own business, your own sanity, and just generally making the world a better place by being easy to work with), and to get through the business of being a human being within the constraints of our economy. I don't know what business you're in, but I would be shocked if you couldn't improve it by being better connected to the people you're working with.

Whatever is stopping you from improving those connections, whether it's introversion, a sense of superiority, or simply being a low-friction provider of a minimal interaction service, just be aware that there are steps that you can take to make those connections stronger. There is not nothing you can do.

The fact that happiness comes from the inside is so easily written off by so many people is a persistent and vexing concern. Think of how much you contain, honestly. Within you is all of the pain and all of the joy of every Russian novel, every bit of the dazzling, puzzling, frustrating and ecstatic complexity of every single film, poem, painting, song, etc, ever made. The degree of difference between you and me and every other human being is infinitesimally small if you zoom out just a little bit. So, if someone else is able to apply that idea that happiness originates from within, so can you. I hate myself for writing things that contrived, but it's true. For what it's worth, you may have to take someone at their word that they were able to build happiness just with what was contained within them. Trust it. It's true. Set aside the practical dilemma of working it out in steps that can be described to fit your life, and understand that it's possible.

You mention having a dozen therapists. That sucks to go through that many therapists and not find 'the one', but please keep searching. It's the same with mentors. The compounding problem of trying to attain happiness and to have massive amounts of real effort turn up little reward is a huge and understandably discouraging one.

Despite the absurd and self-aggrandizing length of this reply, I have no answers and no wisdom that couldn't be more succinctly expressed through common idioms. The only thing I can offer is my own experience, and to vouch for the experience of some people I know that were able to slough off the feeling of torpor and malaise that can set in when hopelessness comes easier than hope.

Your Rodney Dangerfield example is well appreciated. The best comedians give us the pain of the world wrapped in a bow. I have found that in my own life, I get both much happier, and also experience much more sadness and even depression as I open more and deeper connections with other people, and with the world at large. In general, you just feel more. That is one of the beautiful (and obvious) things about connecting with others... you get to feel more.

The 'road' that I mentioned sharing with you was probably a bit presumptuous on my part... the road that I was talking about was basically my own history of trying to obfuscate my needs and feelings with more-than-casual drug and alcohol use, believing that the reason 'things' weren't 'happening' had mostly to do with people/influences/circumstances/other factors outside my control, which led to blame and avoidance and some bad stuff that comes along with those things.

Your example comparing the accumulation of experiences/memories with saving Polaroids is concerning because, sure, collecting Polaroids is a bit boring if they're all the same picture, but ideally they shouldn't be. But anyway the analogy doesn't really work, because the important factor is not that they 'happened', but instead that they accumulate, which leads to deeper connections, new connections, etc.

Sorry in advance for the ridiculous length of this post.

I genuinely believe that people find meaning and contentment in themselves.

That helps me as much as asking me to breathe water, or see infrared though.

Those deep relationships you speak of; when trying to have these kinds of conversations the response is mostly "I don't know what that's like so I really can't help, sorry." Or you say, ok I need your help by being patient, but that only goes so far for so long, and then for their sake you just start faking it or maybe not just faking it but at least not dwelling on it, ask again everything looks just fine.

To extend the comedy analogy, very introspective comedians discuss this frequently. Marc maron, garry Shandling, Bill Murray etc... have all discussed (all with Charlie rose Incidentally) their impossible yearning for self actualized contentment only to not find it. I appreciate you taking the time to write that out.

In any case, good luck. It sounds like you put a lot of work in on this, so I hope you keep doing that.

Charlie Rose interviews with comedians (specifically the types that you're referring to) are one of my favorite things to fall asleep to.

If I may add 2cents: It sounds like you're potentially depressed, or just happen to be a nihilist.

This is not necessarily bad. It can, in fact, be a virtue. With true nihilism, comes true freedom to do anything. Right now happiness is the greatest unifying force in our society. Everyone has to be happy. It's a dictum you listen to from birth to death. Be happy. Acquire things. Do this, do that, give us money, spend spend, make more, spend more. It will make you happy. And you want to be happy because we all told you that happiness must be your ultimate goal in life.

Fuck that. There's no need to be happy. Do whatever you want.

As the great Keanu Reeves once said: "You need to be happy to live, I don't"

There are two forms of nihilism, active and passive.

Passive nihilism can be found in Schopenhauer, Zen, Buddhism, Vedanta, detachment from the self and the fulfillment of idle fantasies [desire]. It is related to a monastic/ascetic lifestyle and can be very hard to deal with or fully espouse when one lives an active life inside modern western society (too many distractions).

Active nihilism is best described by Nietzsche, in his concept of the Ubermensch or the Antichrist. This is a strong individual who creates and projects his own morals, imposing his own Will upon the world whilst living his own life as a work of art. John C. Lilly's concept of metaprogramming and various mystical "systems" can also be seen as forms of this discipline.

>I've had probably a dozen therapists over the years

Writing this as someone who went through SCUBA training (but never took the open water dive) and also went through an intensive private pilot training course (but never went on the check ride), I feel a sort of kinship here.

Have you tried CBT or REBT? (REBT has the word "rational" right in it).

The premise is that our thoughts can sometimes put unreasonable demands and pressure on us which results in nasty emotional consequence. You can give REBT a test drive via a few sample chapters from a reputable author here: http://threeminutetherapy.com/my-book-three-minute-therapy

Another useful book is: How to Refuse to Make Yourself Miserable about Anything: Yes Anything! https://www.amazon.com/Refuse-Yourself-Miserable-about-Anyth...

Then there's meditation. It's not all yoga pants and spiritual mumbo jumbo. I've described a simple method here: https://medium.com/@John_Chacho/engaging-the-senses-to-quiet...

These aren't magic solutions. My brain resists this stuff with ninja-like elusiveness, but when I remember to practice it, it does steady my outlook and behavior.

In short, the various CBT methods combined with meditation can turn the confrontation with the "yawning void of nothing" into a peaceful, sometimes even joyful experience.

I would refrain from using CBT as an acronym. Urban dictionary could explain why.

CEBT from now on it is. Though DBT is worth a mention too and it's not all that different from what's described on Urban Dictionary.

Actually my last therapist starting working through some CBT exercises with me before suggesting we go to a neurofeedback approach. Unfortunately I moved and that provider was unavailable after that so I haven't had time to get back into it. I found CBT to bee mostly the same stuff as everything else in the "self actualization" category.

It's really not about self actualization though. I think your therapist may have been a CEBT/REBT dabbler.

The authors of the REBT books I mentioned are at odds with most everyone other type of therapy. One of the books strongly critiques psycho analysis (searching one's past for psychological wounds) and concepts like AA. For this reason (being at odds with other therapies) the authors recommended therapists that specialize in cognitive behavior therapy alone to get the maximum benefit. Again there are slightly different therapies: CBT, CEBT, REBT, DBT - I don't make a distinction that I probably should.

In essence it's about getting in the habit of talking to your brain, interrupting a thought that can easily become a habitual pattern, and disputing what one thinks by default. It's a search for evidence for the thoughts we believe without question because they come from our own brain.

In a conversational sense it's a bit like separating yourself from your thoughts and telling your brain: "That's an interesting thought. It's ridiculous because there is no evidence to support it and it's self-defeating because all it does is harm my mood - but it's interesting. In all the ocean of thoughts that are available you bring me that? How about you go back to the well and bring me something constructive, positive, or at least funny. I don't have time for nonsense."

What I find useful - and again I've only read books about these techniques - is that they can also be applied to negative people in my life. It works externally just as well as it does internally.

You are simply piercing through what the mystics called the Veil of Isis. Introspection will help you I feel, more than consensus reality or various manufactured illusions and delusions that those close to you cling to in order to distance themselves from the void, but really seek solace in the fact that the path that you are on is well-trodden and others have been there before you.

The fundamental problem is "desire", of any sort, which stems from the Ego. Individuals who, through circumstances or deliberate means, manage to chip away at the Ego, pretty much all go through this "dark night of the soul".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ego_death

Have you read Nietzsche? His concept of the Übermensch is particularly useful I feel.

Also John C. Lilly and his concept of metaprogramming. If all that can be said to exist is the Void, then the first step to finding peace, is to give yourself fully to it. On this, the occultist Aleister Crowley used the concept of Babalon which exacts a heavy price (the blood of the adept, meaning his self-identity).

When that realization sets in and there is no fixed "I" there anymore, everything becomes easier.

One becomes what one imagines...

I'm gonna be "that guy" and ask - have you tried psychedelics? If so, what was the experience like? I have no good advice to offer since clearly everyone else has that covered, but I am genuinely curious about how you're wired.

Thanks for that, very interesting.

Sounds familiar. Maybe a personality disorder, something I am wondering about myself as well.

Oh no, no disorder - just life. There is no external meaning, so whatever you decide is it. If you don't decide on anything it's not a disorder: Maybe there just is no good reason to decide on something. In novels like LOTR or war movies life is made meaningful by letting the environment dictate your choice, i.e. limiting your options severely. The paradox of choice shows itself on more than making it tougher to select the right brand of strawberry jam out of 20... :)

I have chosen to use a little bit of chemistry to view life. You don't have chemical reactions where every single molecule reacts. It's a probabilistic model: You throw them all into the pot, and then chance dictates that the right molecules actually meet, which is a function of how quickly they move around (increases chances of meeting your destiny to combine with others into the product), how many there are, etc.

To nature, we are just like those molecules. Whether we meet conditions where we can combine fruitfully depends - and on A LOT more variables than in a simple chemical reaction. And it gets worse! Because the complexity of our solutions keeps increasing! Which means it gets harder and harder to find the right conditions (which includes the right people) for all to combine. Take Einstein and Newton for example. What is overlooked that without their environment, which includes society and hundreds of people they were in contact with, tens of thousands when also counting indirect connections, was essential. You can throw a protein into a soup and nothing happens, only when the exactly right conditions and exactly the appropriate other molecules are present will something happen.

So I don't worry about it too much. I see myself as part of a big probabilistic thing. I am ready and somewhat searching for "my" right conditions, but that is all I'm actually supposed to do by nature. So if I don't find them I just have a good time before it all ends (in my case that does not mean partying).

Somewhat related, from a cartoonist:

- http://blog.dilbert.com/post/102965026826/goals-are-for-lose...

- http://blog.dilbert.com/post/102964992706/goals-vs-systems

I added the links for the parts about "system vs. goal - why goals are bad" (I don't want to touch that "you have limited willpower" thing with a ten foot pole, or the simplistic nutrition advice that is only an aside anyway). This goes along nicely with what I mean, if you can see it.

    > Goals work great for simple situations. But the world is rarely simple these days.
    > You don’t know what your career will look like in a year. You don’t know what the
    > economy will be doing, or which new technologies will hit the scene. Your personal
    > life is just as unpredictable. The future is a big ball of complexity if you look
    > out far enough. And that means your odds of picking the one best goal for you are
    > slim, and the odds of achieving it are even slimmer, because everything is a moving
    > target.
    > ...

(Read the 1st link, that's just the introduction.)

    > And while you’re at it, stop worrying about whether you have enough passion for
    > success. Passion comes from success; success doesn’t come from passion.

EDIT: I found that Scott Adams has been linked to by others too, this exact same thing, "systems vs. goals".

I meant more in the sense that a lot of personality disorders involve a chronic sense of emptiness and identity disturbances.

See http://outofthefog.website/top-100-trait-blog/2015/11/4/feel...

> So I don't worry about it too much.

That's nice. My fomo is seriously crippling my ability to move forward in life. Feels like I am currently stopped in my tracks out of fear that I would lose options.

If you're competitive and come from a technical background, you might enjoy playing chess?

The thrill-seeking and "yawning void of nothing" are a bit concerning. Have you ever looked at the criteria for Antisocial Personality Disorder?

http://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/antisocial-per...

Please don't try to diagnose people on the Internet.

I agree strongly that trying to diagnose people of the internet is unhelpful behavior. However, from the tone of Andrew's comments on this page, it would seem he is interested in improving the quality of his experience of life by seeking greater self understanding. I take the parent comment as merely the offering of yet another possibly helpful direction of inquiry for Andrew, and not an attempt to diagnose.

In my experience, there is no joy without faith.

In my experience there is.

That's certainly equally valid. But my brief comment was meant to also be a humble suggestion of another place to look - another thing worth trying. It's a viewpoint that definitely seems to be in the minority in this forum, but it's an important one to consider. A couple more ideas worth considering: - Coming to a place of faith starts like everything; it begins with the desire to have faith. - Consider the possibility that reason and faith are not mutually exclusive, but actually complementary (just give that concept a chance before dismissing it - it has a very strong intellectual history)

A faith in what?

One definition of faith found on the internet: "Belief not supported by evidence or reason, but assumption alone."

I have seen many people finding happiness and/or purpose in believing various things not supported by evidence or reason, and have always wondered: how to choose which of these I should believe?

Start small. I am going to refer you to some scripture but I am not asking you to accept it a priori as truth, only to investigate whether there may be any truth in it. Hebrews 11:6 says that he who comes to God "must believe that he is, and that he is a rewarder of them that diligently seek him".

Essentially what I am asking you to believe is the truth of "seek and ye shall find"... that it is possible to find, provided that you seek.

I am not telling you what you will find, how you will find it, what it will look like or sound like, etc., but only that there is something waiting to be found.

Then if you take some steps towards God, you will be rewarded and you will learn a little bit about faith Again I am not going to presume I know exactly what those steps are for you but I will tell you I believe with all my heart that there ARE steps you can take, and even if you take the wrong steps, as long as you are seeking God I believe that he will reward you for your efforts, if only by correcting you from your misguided path.

I hope this has been helpful. God bless.

What a load of codswallop.

I find it insulting to my intelligence to be asked to believe something with no evidence, and when I ask for evidence to be told that I shouldn't be asking.

If god is willing to prevent Evil, but not able, he is not omnipotent. If he is able but not willing, he is malevolent. If he is able and willing, then whence cometh evil? If he is neither able nor willing, why call him god?

You bring up two issues here - the need for evidence, and the problem of pain and suffering. There are of course a lot of resources on both sides of the coin about those issues. I'll just summarize my very limited understanding - my personal approach. My faith is evidence based - but it can't be 100% proven beyond the shadow of a doubt. Since it can't be proven, I'm forced to continue to grow in my understanding, and humbly continue the journey. And I have to make a deliberate choice to believe - based on the evidence I see and experience in my life. Also, since it can't be proven, I can't convince you to accept it - you have to do your own searching - you have to make your choice. I believe that this is by design, and I find it to be beautiful.

The problem of pain and suffering is a lot harder to address in a brief comment. Nothing I can say in a few short lines will be very satisfying, unless you already believe or are wanting to believe. Here are a few thoughts...

Pain and suffering are not good in and of themselves, but good can come from them.

In order to escape all pain and suffering, we would have to surrender our freewill - and then what would be the point to life anyway?

My level of understanding will always be limited. I have to approach this journey with humility. I can know a lot, but I can't know everything. I will work to alleviate pain and suffering where I can, and trust that in end, all the pain and suffering in the world will have brought about a glorious end that will be worth it.

> In order to escape all pain and suffering, we would have to surrender our freewill

Why? I can write a game where you have choice, but no pain or suffering. Is God worse programmer?

> and then what would be the point to life anyway?

There's no "point to life". It's a sandbox game you have ~80 years to experience. Enjoy, while you can, and don't be a dick.

> Why? I can write a game where you have choice, but no pain or suffering. Is God worse programmer?

If our choices were reduced to those which could not cause pain and suffering, life would resemble a game; our choices would lack any consequence. Thankfully, life is much more than a game.

> and don't be a dick

This advice is curious to me. How do you derive this from your beliefs? I can understand you saying "don't be a dick just to be a dick", because that would cause pointless suffering. But if I can advance my own wealth or happiness by being a dick in such a way that I can reasonably avoid retribution, why shouldn't I?

> our choices would lack any consequence

consequences doesn't have to cause suffering. You can live in one country or another - meeting different people, eperiencing different thigs, learning different cultures. How is it less of a consequence than developing a cancer?

The rest of your argument is taking a mataphor literally, and asserting it's less true thanks to the existence of evil. Why? How would the life be worse if there were no diseases and wars?

> How do you derive this from your beliefs?

I'm not special. Other people have their lives too, and by being a dick I decrease their enjoyment of their short lives. I don't have any reasons to value my enjoyement over theirs (or vice versa).

I have counter-question BTW - would you go around murdering people and stealing from them if there was no hell and no police? That's what your argument boils down to - "without a stick and a carrot why bother with morality"?

There are more consequences than just hell and jail - and a faith or belief system purely motivated on hell and/or jail is an immature one.

My argument boils down to Natural Law, and it sounds to me like yours does too. When you say "I don't have any reasons to value my enjoyment over theirs" - I would totally agree, but I still don't understand how you arrive at that without a belief in Natural Law.

An argument that doesn't rely on Natural Law goes something like this: We have evolved into highly social beings, so our internal physiology naturally rewards us for socially constructive behavior, so we choose to not be a dick because being a dick feels bad. It's a purely selfish motivation because that is what is purely rational.

My limited understanding of Natural Law comes from CS Lewis and Thomas Aquinas, but I did a quick search before writing this reply and I see that it has some backing in atheistic thought. Is that where your coming from?

> I still don't understand how you arrive at that without a belief in Natural Law

I don't believe in things that seem unlikely and have no proofs.

The theory that my feelings are more valuable than that of other people seems unlikely (why my out of all people) and I have no evidence supporting it. Therefore I assume it's false and act accordingly.

Why would you need some external law for that train of thought? All you need is logic and probability theory.

I get the impression that religious people actually have no internal moral compass of their own so therefore need a set of external rules in order to not be dickish.

Because of this necessity, they can't understand how other people can have morals without a set of rules, even self-contradictory, ambiguous rules passed down from a supernatural being via the mysterious hallucinations of desert people thousands of years ago.

> I get the impression that religious people actually have no internal moral compass

I'm quite certain that's not true. At least it wasn't true for me when I was religious, and it's not true for most of the religious people I know (and I live in 95% Catholic country, at least in theory).

For one example - I've spoken with many Catolics who thought it's "not fair" that a serial murderer can escape eternal punishment with last minute atonement, but a women that was in a marriage with abusive husband and then met her "other half" - has to sacrifice her love till death because of 1 unintentional mistake in the past.

If people actually believed morality comes from God only - they wouldn't think twice about this. God says so and that's it.

On the other hand it's hard to distinguish external and internal motivation when you have it constantly mixed by the religion, rituals, etc. And people like to find explanations fo why they (and you) need religion - external morality seems to be a popular excuse.

> For one example - I've spoken with many Catolics who thought it's "not fair" that a serial murderer can escape eternal punishment with last minute atonement, but a women that was in a marriage with abusive husband and then met her "other half" - has to sacrifice her love till death because of 1 unintentional mistake in the past.

I find it very difficult to discuss these things without saying things that religious people might find offensive (questioning too much seems to be frowned upon for some reason), but I'll try:

So they think it's "not fair", yet they still identify with a religion where this is announced to be the case.

So are you saying they think it's not fair but still believe unfortunately that's the way it is, or are you saying that they think that it's actually not true and won't happen?

Or are you saying that they have an internal moral compass that says that such eternal damnation is immoral, but set it aside because of the rules of the religion?

I guess the difference is that they think it's "not fair", and I think it's not true, and clearly nothing but a fairy tale manufactured to pressure people to keep going to church out of fear.

If someone is already doomed with eternal damnation, then why not keep doing bad stuff?

I'm being flippant, but actually with the massive loophole of last minute atonement, why not just do bad stuff all the time, until the last minute? Hopefully you will get time to spit out a quick "sorry" at the end. Is this what all the pedophile priests and their co-conspirators are planning to do?

> it's hard to distinguish external and internal motivation when you have it constantly mixed by the religion, rituals, etc.

True. I think the peer pressure when your community identifies with a particular religion is a large factor as well. If there wasn't so much peer pressure and the threat of shunning and excommunication, there would probably be many less outwardly religious people around.

I cringe when I hear sports stars thanking god, as if with all the misery and suffering in the world, god still puts it as a priority to be personally interested in whether a millionaire manages to win a sports event or not.

> So are you saying they think it's not fair but still believe unfortunately that's the way it is

I can't talk for everybody, but often it's "I can't understand this, this makes no sense, but it's written that human won't understand God, so whatever, I just have to follow, not to question.". Also there's one story in the New Testament about this - basically saying that God can be inconsistent and unfair if it's in favour to someone and not against anybody. Everybody else shouldn't complain because they got what was promised.

> If someone is already doomed with eternal damnation, then why not keep doing bad stuff?

She's not doomed, she's just expected to live in abusive marriage till the end. Or at least never start a new marriage.

> I'm being flippant, but actually with the massive loophole of last minute atonement, why not just do bad stuff all the time, until the last minute?

Well, you can die at any moment, it's a huge bet. Also intentionaly exploiting loopholes like this is a "sin against Saint Ghost" if I remember correctly, and it's not forgiveable. On the other hand if you weren't a Catholic in the first place - baptize 1 minute before death and it's all peachy, even if you were Hitler.

> I don't believe in things that seem unlikely and have no proofs.

Neither do I.

So I guess my parting comment is that we all need to do a better job of discussing opposing belief systems with mutual respect. There are good arguments on both sides - and I would suggest that if that statement sounds ridiculous, you've not been sincerely listening to the other side, or you've only heard straw man arguments. It's not black and white - and being closed minded is not something unique to one side or the other.

Let's try to hear both sides out - and develop an understanding of each other's beliefs and non-beliefs rather than dropping into an "us" vs "them" stance. Truth does not need to be defended with anger or violence. There's no need to convince or convert - we just need to be true to our search. Truth is often hard to find, but it's not fragile.

I've resisted providing specific evidence for my beliefs because I can reasonably expect for it to not be well received in this forum. But if anyone is interested in a good example of a balanced and civil debate of Christianity vs. Atheism, based on evidence and reason, this is a pretty good one -- https://youtu.be/fEw8VzzXcjE

I am not posting that in an attempt to convert or convince - I'm certain it will do neither. I'm posting it in attempt to encourage civil discussion, and exchange of ideas and beliefs. Notice in the debate the mutual respect the speakers give to each other.

Close-mindedness and hatred exists in every belief system. Let's try to encourage one another on our respective paths. Let's encourage one another to relentlessly seek truth.

Have I been aggressive? It wasn't my intention. I was Catholic for first 25 years of my life (+-, hard to find the exact turning point), and I was quite hardcore for most of that time (not drinking till 18 because I promised when I was 8 for one example). I've also been at Catholic middle school, and I have lots of good friends I respect intelectually that are Catholic (hard not to - in Poland). So I'd say I know the arguments both ways by now :) I've always had problems with theodicea, though.

In my experience intelectual argument may make it easier to switch position eventually, but what makes people convert is life experiences and ideology influencing their lives adversely. So, the discussions are mostly for entertainment.

> Let's encourage one another to relentlessly seek truth.

Let's.

> My faith is evidence based - but it can't be 100% proven beyond the shadow of a doubt. Since it can't be proven

Actually evidence is proof. You're just writing a bunch of words. All your mysterious and humble, "can't know everything...", "learn for yourself" patronizing garbage that doesn't make sense. blah blah blah.

How exactly do you decide which particular ridiculous idea to believe, when you don't need any proof?

> in end, all the pain and suffering in the world will have brought about a glorious end that will be worth it.

That's also codswallop.

See, I've worked in health, and to me that sounds like exactly what someone who has been in the privileged position to never have witnessed or experienced real suffering would write as a flippant, shallow and superficial expression to discount how much needless suffering there actually is in the world.

When you see young children struck down with horrible diseases that cause constant pain and ruin the lives of their families, for no reason but an unlucky genetic abnormality, I can't consolidate that with your idea of "a glorious end", and it's also impossible for me to not attribute blame to a supposedly omnipotent being that would allow such needless suffering when they presumably have the ability to prevent it.

So take your godly rubbish and go and parrot it to the rest of the congregation in your echo chamber of useless rhetoric, and give up on trying to convert reasonable people.

Hey man, I feel the exact sane way. Though I usually don't care enough to actually get Licenses and stuff, because I don't give enough of a damn to get them.

I've done tons of extremely stupid things just to do them, but I genuinely don't care or really give a shit. They're just "things" that I've done. I've never really understood how people genuinely enjoy things like skiing, hiking, skydiving. Ive done them just fine and meh.

.. exactly - you have done them just fine - but have you tried getting good at any of those activities ? I ski and jump competitively (on the bush league level) and I can honestly say that I did not enjoy either until I devoted a shitload of time and money to get decent .

“Those who restrain desire, do so because theirs is weak enough to be restrained; and the restrainer or reason usurps its place & governs the unwilling. And being restrain'd it by degrees becomes passive till it is only the shadow of desire.”

-- William Blake

This is an interesting concept, and I think that desire has two faces: the first face of desire is desire driven for greed and aversion and delusion, as described in Buddhism. Principally, desire for becoming, desire for non-becoming and desire for sensual enjoyment (i.e enjoyment via our six senses, counting the intellect as a sensor and ideas being the objects we sense with it), as is taught in Buddhism.

The second kind of desire is that which you do not attach to. The outcome of these desires, whether accomplishing what you want or not, does not affect your mind. You don't crave these outcomes, or thirst for them.

In my opinion the distinction between "good" and "bad" desire isn't nearly as important as the distinction between what causes suffering and what alleviates suffering. Sense pleasures cause suffering when we attach to them.

AndrewKemendo's problem lies in the lack of contentedness, not lack of happiness. No matter how many sense pleasures we choose to indulge in, they are all impermanent and unstable, all ending, all unsafe.

    The entirety
    of a mountain of gold,
    of solid bullion:
    even twice that
    wouldn't suffice
    for one person.
        Knowing this,
        live evenly,
        in tune with the contemplative life.

    When you see stress,
    and from where it comes,
    how can you incline to sensual pleasures?
    Knowing acquisition
    to be a bond in the world,
        train for
        its subduing.

    - The Buddha (SN 4.20)

http://www.accesstoinsight.org/tipitaka/sn/sn04/sn04.020.tha...

I think a large part of the problem is that when people talk about finding "happiness" they are actually talking about "winning at life". Which is impossible of course. Every time that you do something that you think will make you happy, and you ask yourself 'is this it?' you allready know the answer, because someone who's satisfied wouldn't ask 'is this it?'. And if you spend years thinking about "finding happiness" I don't think there's anything that will stop you from asking "is this it?". I think you have found happiness when the idea "life is meaningless" seems obvious and irrelevant. If we could get rid of the concept of happiness we probably should. As with a lot of existential problems it is only really a problem if you know about it.

Wonder how much of that can be blamed on consumerist marketing, and its drive to amp our desires.

I think that is a part of it, but also a lot the films we see and books we read have convinced us that we'll recognize happiness when we'll find it.

I think a lot would be your answer. Not strictly new as a concept, kids get raised to hunt happiness. Every stupid action movie that ends with a big party, celebrities whose job it has become to look happy, every ad promoting x because it will make you a happier person...

Kids get raised being told they can buy stuff that'll make them happy, and it's only when you become an adult and get a bunch of real world thrown your way that you get the chance to realize how much crap that is actually worth. And yet the majority of the western population doesn't seem to understand that you can't buy happiness. Sure, it's nice to have central heating and a full fridge, but these would make less fortunate people extremely happy! For a while, until the pipes bust and you need to make the guy come 'round to fix them.

Still, heating and fridging have at least some intrinsic value. They keep you from freezing over during sleep and keep your food from rotting. But everything else, after the initial surge of serotonin or whatever other hormone, just becomes part of the annoyances that keep you going throughout the day. At best, it blends into the furniture, so that you forget you have it and buy it again.

There is something seriously wrong with our lifestyle, but it's not clear to me how it can be fixed peacefully. Or violently. Or at all. Because human nature led to this, and how are we supposed to overcome that?

> You have found happiness when the idea "life is meaningless" seem obvious and irrelevant.

Precisely. To the best of our knowledge, we're just robots. There is no meaning behind the universe, it just kinda, is.

The realization that the only sense you can find in life is the one you create yourself, makes a lot of things clearer. This is also why it should be irrelevant that life is meaningless, since what do you care about the true meaning of life (which probably doesn't even exist) once you found something better, more satisfying, that you can cope with and develop in?

I'm curious as to why, when faced with unpredictable phenomenon, you chose to go with the hypothesis "everything is random" rather than "everything is choice" when you have an experience that appears to be choice, and would probably have a hard time naming a truly random phenomenon.

The parent didn't say "everything is random", nor anything that absolutely requires this viewpoint.

To declare that "everything is choice" strikes me as putting one's beliefs ahead of inquiry.

Indeed, when I say life has no meaning, I don't mean that it is devoid of rules. Quite the contrary is true, since our modern life revolves around mathematics. In that sense, the universe is exquisitely meaningful, it's full of mathematical meaning, but that's not massively useful for us humans trying to figure out how to spend our time.

At the small scale, the world is unpredictable. As the scale grows, for well behaved linear systems the law of large numbers kicks in, and you get predictable, mathematical behavior. For complex nonlinear systems, however, the unpredictability of the small scale can "propagate up" and render the system at the large scale completely unpredictable.

Remember that mathematics is just a model, not the territory. For starters, you have incompleteness; for any formal system you can make true statements that are unprovable. Additionally, two constructs which are central to mathematical analysis, infinity and truth, don't exist.

For hundreds of years epicycles were used to model the orbits of the planets. Now we're elevating grand theories that embed the universe in an 11-dimensional manifold.

"To the best of our knowledge, we're just robots"

Due to Bell's theorem, we know that either there is inherent uncertainty in the universe, or the whole bedrock of science gets called into question. If properly informed by physics, the view that we are robots must follow from the view that the uncertainty in nature is uncontrolled, i.e. purely random according to some distribution. Given that we have a subjective experience of choice, this presents the alternate hypothesis that the uncertainty is the result of choice constrained by preference. These aren't the only two possible hypotheses, but remember that all hidden variable models have been effectively ruled out, so no deterministic hypothesis is permissible. I would of course love to hear any plausible alternatives you could present.

We are back to Ecclesiastes without the tacked on Epilogue but with a touch of Blade Runner.

I have two problems with this realization(not that it makes it any less true).

First, anything truly goes then and we are back to "might is right". Any state/laws some subset of humanity creates is no less right than any other subset of humanity which includes various levels of psychopaths.

First problem is not such a bad one as long as your own morale code more or less coincides with the society in which you reside.

Second problem is more personal. How do you choose what is meaningful given how truly short the life is?

At 40+ I realize that life can end with a whimper at any moment.

Barring some truly Kurzweilian breakthrough 40 more years of enjoyment is most I can hope for.

I truly enjoy the little pleasures of life parenthood, food, drink, chess, biking and so on. At the end of the day, you realize there is no hope of working on that unsolved math problem, that huge programming project, that great novel.

Unfortunately there is so little time and no time for any grand works unless you already showed some promise at early age (ala Thompson).

So far the only solution is somehow to delude yourself that what you are doing is meaningful to you.

You are deluding yourself when you think you actually have a choice. A chaotic dynamical system moving between (or sitting at) attractors doesn't leave much room for Free Will.

That all depends on how you define "choice", surely.

Well this is one delusion I am glad I still have.

I can delude myself that I have Free Will by choosing to take a vacation next week. Then I could flip a coin to decide my destination between Singapore and Bangkok.

Sure it was all deterministic at some level but the illusion was good enough for me.

In my thinking, this has two answers.

1) First, an old parable:

When I was a young man, I wanted to change the world.

I found it was difficult to change the world, so I tried to change my nation. When I found I couldn't change the nation, I began to focus on my town. I couldn't change the town and as an older man, I tried to change my family.

Now, as an old man, I realize the only thing I can change is myself, and suddenly I realize that if long ago I had changed myself, I could have made an impact on my family. My family and I could have made an impact on our town. Their impact could have changed the nation and I could indeed have changed the world.

2) If I've learned one thing, its that without other people, life is largely meaningless, or at least, a very much great deal emptier. As such, I do not think it is a logical gap to say that therefore, a large component of the "meaning" of life, lies in one's interactions with other people.

To an extent, I agree with your first point. Should a big mass of people suddenly 'come into the light' and realize they can do whatever the fuck they want, that could become a problem. No need to look far, capitalism is just the latest implementation of the very old concept of 'rich men exploit poor men'. However, we shouldn't forget that we're quite elaborate little things that can through discussion agree on a common set of rules by which to interact with one's environment. So while there may not be any sense in life, just as an individual can create meaning for himself, so can a larger group of people. Obviously, this gets harder the larger the group, which is why to this day nothing has really worked out. I try to be optimistic.

Your second point comes at an interesting point in time: if general robotization works out on the scale that's being talked about right now, jobs for humans will fall off a very big cliff. Meaning, current education systems, whose sole purpose is to pump out hard-working, quick-spending bureau apes, will become utterly useless. I was lucky enough to go to a very good school, and even there, we never learned to think. We learned more algebra or languages or what-have-you than the vast majority of other schools (which I could confirm in the first week of uni), but nobody ever told us what to do with all that. It's not in the program, because all you're wanted for is keeping the system running. No need to think outside the box, here.

Frankly, I don't see how humanity can not crumble into a fucktillion little pieces if we don't give the coming generations something to do. And I think thinking is something we lack hugely, so that would be a good thing. Now, the ablity to think doesn't pop up in your head one sunny afternoon. It has to be taught, by the parents, by the schools, by society. That means fuck adverts. Fuck legalese. Fuck politicians. Fuck expensive action movies. Fuck all the things that are meant to keep you from thinking.

Really? Because in my world, life is about doing what makes you happy, as long as you aren't negatively impacting others. If you want to write that great novel: do it. If you want to finish that huge programming project: do it.

It may mean sacrificing other things in life to accomplish, but if that's what makes you happy, the sacrifice shouldn't be a big deal. If making that sacrifice is too great, then it isn't what REALLY makes you happy, is it?

Now the "do whatever I want" thing works for a short period of time, but at some point you get to the end of the doing everything you want, and realize if you shit on everyone around you, you still aren't happy. And if you don't come to that realization... well... the rest of society is going to figure out how to deal with you and you probably aren't going to like that. not doing bad is just as much about self-preservation as anything else for those people who don't have a moral compass.

The problem in your 40s is that you acutely realize your limitations, you become risk averse, you choose what you are already good at.

So that great novel it is not going to happen unless you have written a fair share of good short stories in your twenties.

That huge programming project again unless you've mastered your chosen language and the domain space, you are just going to be dissapointed.

There are many things that make me happy, but there are no grand plans left.

Trivial example: I took 6 months of daily Duolingo practice in German to keep up with my daughter. I was making some progress but it was slower than hers. It became apparent that unless I dedicated myself fully to study I would not be able to read Grimm's fairy tales much less Kant.

It is as Stephenson wrote: "Until a man is twenty-five, he still thinks, every so often, that under the right circumstances he could be the baddest motherfucker in the world. If I moved to a martial-arts monastery in China and studied real hard for ten years. if my family was wiped out by Colombian drug dealers and I swore myself to revenge. If I got a fatal disease, had one year to live, devoted it to wiping out street crime. If I just dropped out and devoted my life to being bad."

>Unfortunately there is so little time and no time for any grand works unless you already showed some promise at early age (ala Thompson).

Well, there are several artists that started out of nowhere in their 30s or 40s or even 50+. Especially in novel writing, this has been quite common.

I'd love to hear more about great artists/makers/scientists etc who started in their 30s/40s.

Only one who comes to mind as far as writing goes is Chandler, but he must have done his own share of writing (oil business in 1920/30s must have required some writing)before that.

Joseph Conrad is another interesting case mastering English in his late 20s.

My premise: To be great you have to perspire early with some talent thrown in.

Early means in your teens, early 20s. After that it is near impossible to master the unconscious mastery of the basics of whatever craft you choose.

Again, I'd love to hear more counterexamples of old age mastery of something started in your 30s.

Bukowski published his first novel at 51. He had written a couple of stories and poems before his 30s, but spend most of the next 1.5 decade drunk and not writing.

Burroughs published his first noval at 39. He had just written a few articles until then.

Walt Whitman first published a poetry book at 36.

Toni Morrison wrote her first novel at 39.

Bram Stoker wrote Dracula around 50. He worked as a public servant before, and wrote theatre reviews.

Anthony Burgess (of Clockwork Orange fame) first published at 39.

Raymond Chandler worked as a businessman (in the oil industry IIRC) and started writing novels at 51.

Wallace Stevens, celebrated poet, worked office jobs, and first published at 35, but his best work was done in his 50s. He went on to win the Pulitzer price at 75.

Beatrix Potter wrote her first book at 35.

Jules Verne, who went on to write tons of classics, started at 35.

Ian Flemming worked as a spy in Britain, and only started writing his books (James Bond) when he was 44.

In another genre, Martin Rev released his first album (with Suicide) at 39, Leonard Cohen started as a singer/songwriter at 33, and Vi Subversa (nee Frances Sokolov), started singing and performing as the vocalist of the influential Poison Girls punk band at the tender age of 44, and as a mother of two.

>Early means in your teens, early 20s. After that it is near impossible to master the unconscious mastery of the basics of whatever craft you choose.

That presupposes that you need to. Modern painters don't need to learn to learn to paint like Michalangelo to express themselves (and many don't know), modern musicians don't need to go into classical training or even know the scales (e.g. somebody like DJ Shadow and tons of others).

As for writing, it can be more about sensitivity to details and having an interesting story or viewpoint to express, than mastering some genre rules. One can learn most about writing from having read a lot (which is also what most writers advise young writers to do).

Kind of like how you don't need to study CS and study TAoCP to learn to program and write something useful. There are stories that picked up programming later in life and went on to write succesful apps and open source projects.

Your list is inspirational although I could argue that it is flawed because those late starters actually had early practice.

Jules Verne is one of my favorite childhood writers thus I knew he had an early start.

Wikipedia concurs: By 1847, when Verne was 19, he had taken seriously to writing long works in the style of Victor Hugo, beginning Un prêtre en 1839 and seeing two verse tragedies, Alexandre VI and La Conspiration des poudres (The Gunpowder Plot), to completion.

Same deal with Bukowski, sure he had not written a novel but he knew he was a writer much earlier + plus he devoured the whole library ages 15-24.

Same deal with Fleming: His wartime service and his career as a journalist provided much of the background, detail and depth of the James Bond novels. Emphasis on being a journalist.

Still writing is indeed one of those fields where you can get by with not being fluent in your skill as long as you got a good editor.

Programming is the same thing, you can write a decently sized program without knowing the language and its idioms very well but it is oh so painful.

So yes you can achieve outside success in some craft without being really gifted/skilled but that's not the same thing as achieving proficiency and being in flow. Yeah you can fake being a modern painter but someone like Rothko or Pollack had the early classical training.

My lament is that past the age 40 you can not achieve proficiency in some new craft that you have taken up. There are no neurosurgeons who started at 40.

You have to settle for less, pick your battles very carefully and delude yourself with special prizes.

In my personal experience, I agree, it's a misunderstanding of what happiness is, that causes people to miss the mark when trying to find it. Happiness isn't something you find, it's something you make. The universe is meaningless, it exists, devoid of any reason of its own, and yet, it exists. Your job, when trying to become a happy person, is to find your own meaning, and work at that, until you master it.

Theres no need for meaning...

This way lies hedonism.

In what way? Are you sure, based on what the parent wrote? Perhaps he was not clear about the difference between "finding meaning" and "finding your own meaning", but few people are clear about that. A search for meaning, personal or otherwise, does not necessarily lead to hedonism--to get there you have to throw out all kinds of useful things, and it doesn't really get you very far, and eventually life loses meaning and you go somewhere else.

In short, I don't think telling someone to find their own meaning would necessarily lead to hedonism.

No, he's right. If you abandon the notion that there's anything which possesses an intrinsic or higher meaning, it's almost inevitable you'll end up gratifying your most basic instincts first because they're the strongest. At least until they're sated.

The only thing I don't get is why more people don't do it. People walk around with all sorts of hangups and narratives about why they're denying themselves and they take these to the grave with them. I'd much rather overindulge until I'm bursting at the seams and then having learned where my limit is, dial it back from there. Much fewer regrets in the long run.

But how much do you dial it back?

The problem for me personally is that hedonism, while fun for maybe a couple of hours, inevitably leads to more complications and suffering than happiness over the next day, the next week or the next year.

A more measured, but peaceful life with many smaller (not big enough to be disruptive) happy moments has been my solution and I've mostly been satisfied with that.

This doesn't sound like a problem to me at all - you found your sweet spot and dialed it back to a place that you're happy with, presumably with less regrets about it than if you had never gone a bit too far in the first place.

The answer to the "why" is mostly fear, real or imagined. Why don't most people talk to a another person they find insanely attractive? Why do they not take time to understand a religion or philosophy very different from their own? etc.

I think this issue arises from fundamentally western ideas about what it is that are our most basic human instincts. We have certain instinctual needs, which, I'll agree, would seem to imply a hedonistic lifestyle when considered alone. However, many of these things balance themselves out. As an example, we have an evolutionary need to be healthy, viable mates, but we also have an evolutionary need to consume delicious food. Overindulging one need would inherently cause the other need to not be met. I would also add that the need to express kindness and compassion, and the need for positive social interaction seem to also be instinctual, and do drive us to act in ways that would not necessarily fit with a hedonistic lifestyle.

In Aristotle's view, there was a meaningful distinction between pleasure, which led to hedonism, and happiness, which is fairly abstract and depends on virtuous conduct performed with the right mindset. Edit: if I recall correctly. This is from The Nichomachean Ethics.

What if pain, in the traditional sense, makes you happy. I get pleasure from rebelling my hedonist parents in a way reminiscent of puritans. It has nothing to do with comparison to others - I just like denying myself pleasure (abstaining from alcohol, sugar, caffeine, drugs, sometimes sex, etc.). I get a lot of meaning from it.

Whatever floats your boat. As long as you don't force it upon others, I can't see why there should be any problem. The personal freedom for any individual to live as one finds the most happiness without harming others should be the goal of any fair/just society.

There's all kinds of ideas about the word the Greeks used for this, eudaimonia. The translation has shifted, and they tend to not even call it happiness anymore.

The new translations seem to mean something more like what you note here, rather than what we, westerners would call happiness.

And it's a much better goal in life, isn't it?

I've always liked that last sentence. May I suggest an edit to the second sentence? I've always though, Happiness is something you make. But happiness is something that you don't make directly. Its something that naturally arises, by making life choices, that allow happiness to occur naturally.

I noticed that a lot of people (including myself) condition happiness on something. For example "when I get my degree, I'll be happy" or "if I get in a relationship with this person, I'll be happy" or whatever their desire is. However, such events always lie in the future: You always postpone your happiness and never actualize it. And even when the desires are actually satisfied, they quickly stop being a source of happiness and new desires take their place.

Why not be happy right now? The right way to go about it is that you tell yourself "I am pursuing my goal and I am happy, right now, to do so." It is incredible how this changes the quality of life, plus you can detect problems with yourself and the environment early because if you can't be happy with your present situation at all, it's time to change something.

I think this has to do with a certain short-sightedness concerning achievements, purchases, general life decisions... Is there a particularly good reason why a degree would make you happy? It'll land you a good post at a high-paying company, I'm sure. But what will you do with your money? Or are you the type of person who takes pleasure in big, positive numbers as their account balance?

I often get on peoples' nerves by asking 'why?', until they realize something I've seen coming two hours earlier not because I'm a genius, but simply because I'm used to thinking ahead and exploring the possibilities. I've been doing that long enough (was raised that way) so that it happens automatically and very, very quickly.

I've found that a large percentage of people get annoyed when you ask them, "why?".

I don't mean to be harsh, but this is the only way I can describe it: I think it's because they actually don't have well thought out reasons for lots of the things they do, and they don't want that exposed because it could weaken their already shaky worldview because then they'd be standing on shifting sand, not a stable bedrock of unquestioned ideas.

So they just continue accumulating possessions like the happy people in the movies do, ignoring the mounting evidence that these things haven't made them happy in the past, but just one more possession, maybe that'll be the one before I happily drive off into the sunset with the end credits rolling.

Maybe I'm rambling, but I struggle to understand why some people keep doing the same things and expecting a different outcome, and asking them "why?" rarely seems to elicit a well thought out answer. The answer in the end just seems to come down to, "because that's what I do".

Some people are not introspective. As an introspective person myself, I always attempt to understand why I do what I do, admittedly that can be draining at times and doesn't always come up with meaningful answers, but I'd personally prefer to at least attempt than to wander around in wilful ignorance.

No its not harsh at all. I've had almost the same experience, to the T, with a lot of the people I see around me everyday. I suspect that most of society continues to live this way, content in its ignorance and confused as to why despite doing everything "according to the book" they still end up in rather unsatisfying lives. This is even the more dangerous in some cultures where honor is so important that people lead delusional lives; they act as if everything is perfect in their lives while they are actually very unhappy and yearn for something better.

Being introspective is intellectually challenging and rewarding but can also lead to a lot of frustration and dilemmas. That makes a lot of people uncomfortable. It is required though.

I think happiness is very well possible. But the problem is that, whether you want to blame social pressure, education, advertisement or something else, most people seem to think happiness means satisfaction of all desires and eternal feeling-good. That's not it. It's about finding satisfaction in and with yourself and not let circumstances tip your boat over. With or without kids, office job, park ranger or astronaut, married or celibate (or both), if you manage to derive meaning and satisfaction from the moment you'll be happy. You're probably somewhat right people confuse it with winning at life (my house has to be bigger than the neighbours, my job have shorter hours than my brother's and bring more income than my friend's, any my wife had to be the prettiest in town and our kids the smartest), but i think that just scratches the surface of the misconception. It's really about what happiness is and how to reach/keep being happy, and that the outside world or your possessions have surprisingly little to do with it.

> [W]hen people talk about finding "happiness" they are actually talking about "winning at life". Which is impossible of course.

Winning at life is a process, not an event or a one-off result. It can be anything from really enjoying a hot chocolate while watching a sunrise, to nailing a product demo, to that first (or third) date with your crush.

Winning at life is not something you can be 'done with', except maybe by dwelling on and reliving past wins. But then isn't that a kind of winning, too?

I don't disagree with you that what you discribe sounds like a good way to live. But I meant that talking about 'winning at life' is problematic because it suggests there is a finish line. Which is wrong, because as you say, being happy is a process.

5 years out of college; seem to be coming to a similar conclusion...

"In short, he has not dedicated his life to reaching a pre-defined goal, but he has rather chosen a way of life he KNOWS he will enjoy. The goal is absolutely secondary: it is the functioning toward the goal which is important."

I find this is quite new & profound.

"It's not about the destination it's about the journey" is extremely cliche in my experience, though it may be good advice.

Yes, banality to an embarrassing extreme. That someone would comment "I find this is quite new & profound" gives me a philosopher's wince.

Oh well, maybe said commentor is 10 years old.

A lot of academic philosophy can be boiled down to the same sort of simple conclusions. The difference is you have to wade through hundreds of pages of dense self importance to extract them.

Oh, someone came to a conclusion that you had come to before? How inferior must they be to you.

It may be cliché, but it's still hard to comprehend until you reach a life goal and have to ask yourself, "Wait... Now what?"

It's much easier when there's a milestone -- just pick another one. (Graduated? Graduate again!) Then you run out of milestones and have to ask more difficult questions.

Agreed, I find myself the same way. I end up keep asking myself. Is this really what I want in life? or perhaps there's another avenue or path that I could take that would fare better for me in the long term

The real question is one of assigning value to each goal. The valuation changes as do you.

It is easy to get into a local trap of running for a goal you no longer value. It is also easy to get trapped in switching between goals without progress.

Profound, yes, but also pretty much as old as time. "Don't do something, be someone." "The journey is more important than the destination." Etc. etc. Maybe new to folks who're used to a goal-obsessed environment. Nice to see that more people are opening up to it.

Thompson is not exactly saying that the journey is more important than the destination; he's saying that as we grow and change and experience different things, we become another person, and therefore the destination is irrelevant.

The goal we may have had when we started, doesn't change, but we do, and so it's unlikely that we desire it as much as we did or thought we did.

We can't "make it" because there is indeed no destination. The meaning of life is to grow.

> The meaning of life is to grow.

That's exactly the message on "the journey is more important than the destination".

Dilbert cartoonist Scott Adams has recommended the systems approach vs. a goal-oriented approach. I think he explains it in a more accessible way. Here's his presentation pitching his book: Passion is Overrated and Goals are for Losers http://www.slideshare.net/Scottadams925/goals-are-for-losers...

He also writes about it in "How to fail at everything and still succeed" but probably in less depth since I think it's only a chapter.

"no one HAS to do something he doesn’t want to do for the rest of his life. But then again, if that’s what you wind up doing, by all means convince yourself that you HAD to do it. You’ll have lots of company."

Conformity

Said slightly differently: "If you end up with a boring miserable life because you listened to your mom, your dad, your teacher, your priest, or some guy on television telling you how to do your shit, then you deserve it." - Frank Zappa

I was told to follow Zappas 'advice.'

While we're referencing things from the 70's, including prog rock:

  You can choose a ready guide, 
  in some celestial voice.
  If you choose not to decide, 
  you still have made a choice.
  You can choose from phantom fears, 
  and kindness that can kill.
  I will choose a path that's clear.
  I will choose Free Will.

Zappa preacher saying 'don't follow anyone's advice except mine'?

It's definitely fair to remind people that they have options, but most people want stability, family, to watch the game, enjoy the sunset, and derive little joy from shaking things up and wagging it in other people's faces.

Moreover - most people recognize that life is just as much a responsibility as it is an opportunity.

The 'Rock N Roll' movement was about self actualization, but when everyone fully self-actualizes, there is nobody left to pay the bill for the hotel room that was just trashed.

Life is fairly mundane, it's mostly just work, dealing with people, common things. Even for 'famous and exciting people'.

>Zappa preacher saying 'don't follow anyone's advice except mine'?

No, saying "don't follow anyone's stupid advice", period. "Some guy on television telling you how to do your shit" could be him as well. Besides he didn't tell people what to do (even the above is not instruction, it's a warning) -- except not to fall for tele-evangelists and politicians.

>The 'Rock N Roll' movement was about self actualization, but when everyone fully self-actualizes, there is nobody left to pay the bill for the hotel room that was just trashed.

Zappa, for one, didn't do drugs, and didn't trash out hotel rooms. Moreover, he worked as hard as any founder, constantly practicing, in the road, and in the studio. He was also against BS self-actualization (e.g. anti hippy, anti "underground", anti rawkism).

You may have him conflated with Sid Vicious or something, because his advice is definitely not about BS self-actualization and trashing hotel rooms...

Zappa didn't trash hotel rooms or have outrageous parties, he made art and had a family. The self actualization was making that art into a life that paid the bills and fulfilled the rest of the responsibilities that everyone experiences.

is trashing hotel rooms really a form of self-actualization though? maybe for some, but i think that's more a form of letting out one's rage / frustrations that results from missing the other parts of the pyramid of needs.

to me zappa's message isn't as irresponsible as you make it sound. i think a person can self-actualize and still be responsible and stable. for some, those things may even go hand in hand.

I don't think it's necessary bad to choose a life that's ordinary. In fact he says that if you do then simply convince yourself that you had to. It's your life and you can always readjust your goals to match your circumstances.

There's an old Zen saying that goes:

"Before enlightenment, chop wood, carry water. After enlightenment, chop wood, carry water."

And another which reads:

"Miraculous power, marvelous activity. Drawing water, chopping wood."

Worthless but happy is not a worthy goal.

Verify any approach to life by generalisation: what would happen if everyone followed it?

The Buddhist approach leads to stagnation.

> "The Buddhist approach leads to stagnation."

And that's a problem why?

>Worthless but happy is not a worthy goal.

How should one measure self worth?

>Verify any approach to life by generalisation: what would happen if everyone followed it? The Buddhist approach leads to stagnation.

Who said everyone should follow any given approach? If everyone followed any particular approach to life it would lead to stagnation, extinction.

On the contrary, Buddhism emphasizes change, as opposed to stagnation.

Stagnation in what sense?

You mean: 'Responsibility'.

See those kids you have? No, don't have a choice but to raise them to the best of your ability.

The conformist part is believing that to raise kids to the best of one's ability requires one to do something one doesn’t want to do for the rest of one's life.

From a certain point of view, it is always true. You will never get a second chance to raise any specific child.

ah yes of course, the trick is to guide them until they can discover things for themselves

most of the time it's how to behave / conduct oneself in the presence of other humans, AND instill / 'indoctrinate' life-long love for knowledge

p/s: yeah, it's a LOT trickier that it sounds

I'm away from my well annotated copy* of _The Proud Gentleman_ but this letter has almost certainly come from that collection. It makes more sense in context of his other writings from the time.

Another quote, from the same, which I remember as vividly as (and juxtaposed with) this letter:

"Everybody is looking for someone who can stand up in the wind. It is lonely standing up and crowded lying down. I refuse to be an anchor for other people’s dreams—but then I refuse to anchor mine to anyone else."

* I wish my younger self knew the risk of loaning such a loved and personal book

I can't seem to find that book (The Proud Gentleman) on Google. Any chance you have a link to it?

I'm pretty sure oasisbob refers to "The Proud Highway: Saga of a Desperate Southern Gentleman, 1955-1967 (The Fear and Loathing Letters, Vol. 1)".

OP was likely referring to Thompson's The Proud Highway: Saga of a Desperate Southern Gentleman, 1955-1967 (The Fear and Loathing Letters, Vol. 1) https://www.amazon.com/dp/0345377966 http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/10880.The_Proud_Highway

Coincidentally, yesterday I attended a talk by Bernardo Kastrup on the topic of finding our purpose in life. Kastrup is a philosophical idealist, he explained an alternative to the existentialist view of creating your own story and meaning in a essentially meaningless universe outside of ourselves reasoning in part from recent insights in physics. For example:

* S. Gröblacher, T. Paterek, R. Kaltenbaek, Č. Brukner, M. Żukowski, M. Aspelmeyer, and A. Zeilinger. An experimental test of non-local realism. Nature 446, 871–875 (2007) http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v446/n7138/abs/nature05...

In minute 38 I ask the question if he can describe an example of finding meaning in life. https://youtu.be/D-EeF1quouY?t=2305

In one of his books he says the meaning of life is "about experiencing existence, in all its angles and glory, for the sheer and pure sake of experience itself! We don’t eat a nice meal, make love or travel to beautiful locations just to understand or make sense of something. We do these things because the experiences themselves imbue our lives with a kind of timeless meaning, independent of comprehension." -- Kastrup, Bernardo. More Than Allegory: On Religious Myth, Truth And Belief (p 203). John Hunt Publishing.

Ask yourself the right question in the moment itself, fully aware of your emotions and the things around you, and the answers could rise up automatically - 'the meaning of life' cannot be an armchair intellectual exercise he says. This has been my experience in life as well, it takes practise to get back to the Nexus. As Dr. Soran tells Picard: "They say time is the fire in which we burn. Right now, Captain, my time is running out. We leave so many things unfinished in our lives... I know you understand"

> In one of his books he says the meaning of life is "about experiencing existence, in all its angles and glory, for the sheer and pure sake of experience itself! We don’t eat a nice meal, make love or travel to beautiful locations just to understand or make sense of something. We do these things because the experiences themselves imbue our lives with a kind of timeless meaning, independent of comprehension." -- Kastrup, Bernardo. More Than Allegory: On Religious Myth, Truth And Belief (p 203). John Hunt Publishing.

That's an interesting perspective, but, let me poke at it bit.

If you were to be able to experience all those things you describe but had no one to share them with, would they have meaning? What if you were in a simulation so that it seemed like you were doing all these things with other people, but you knew that you are in a simulation all alone? Would these things still have meaning? Would the experience be worthwhile?

I would suggest that whilst they may still be somewhat worthwhile, without other people to share those experiences with, without a public sphere within which to express your unique and distinct story to the rest of humanity, life becomes significantly less meaningful.

To build meaning, we need both the private experiences you describe and the existence of others who can bear witness to our lives and give it an existence outside of our own minds. Yes, the experiences are valuable but they become exponentially more so when they are part of the story of our lives, communicated to our equals.

> What if you were in a simulation so that it seemed like you were doing all these things with other people, but you knew that you are in a simulation all alone? Would these things still have meaning? Would the experience be worthwhile?

If it is in fact a perfect simulation, and you as the actor in said simulation cannot detect a tear in the fabric of the simulated reality, you will, in due time, repress any prior knowledge of said previous "reality" by integrating it with your reality i.e. rationalizing it as a dream. As there would not be any discernible difference between being real and feeling real, any worthwhile experience would, by definition, be worthwhile.

That is one strong assumption to be tested. Sadly we lack the technology and are in general loathe to run experiments on humans.

Except raising kids, that is.

Hi Snowbat, I don't think Bernardo assumes such a simulation (a kind of solipsism?) or is this thought experiment for the sake of 'what if'? "Make love" as Bernardo says in this sense implies genuine meaningful relationship, even though both persons are dreams within 'the godhead', transcendent or ultimate reality or whatever you call this 'timeless meaning'. If so there's still both illusions of active agents (humans who love), which are meaningfully 'real' in the socalled "mind-at-large". Even if you were all alone, crashed or stranded on this planet or another, you can find unity in relationship with the environment which is 'not you'. I think you could relate to plants and animals with love, admiration, beauty and an intense purpose. Animals can return this love as well. Of course other humans would amplify the meaning significantly as I think the love between men reflects the transcendent better, perhaps mystics disagree and their union with God is above anything else. I have no clue, but I for sure would agree with you. This aspect is - for what I understood of Bernardo Kastrup's views - not undervalued and likely just as much emphasized as you and I do. But it's sure good to point it out, love gets it ultimate expression in human relations. I wonder though what theologians and/or mystics would say about this. Bernardo Kastrup argues theology can (and should if the ideas are true) be re-examined in light of the implications of his thought. I'm not sure if I make sense to you or in general? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n1cHg_S3X3A

Yep, you do make sense (though I would suggest more line breaks :-P ). Also my username is swombat not snowbat...

A great source for this discussion is Hannah Arendt's book "The Human Condition". I find it really heavy and difficult to read but full of incredible insights and powerful ideas about certain features/definitions/perspectives of human life. Highly recommended.

For those not familiar with Hunter S. Thompson and looking to get an understanding of his outsize personality and cult following, I highly recommend watching the 2 movies in which Johnny Depp played his character:

* Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (1998) http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0120669/

* The Rum Diary (2011) http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0376136/

If you are not already a fan of Johnny Depp, these movies should do it.

Yeah, nice movies. But damn, read the books! Adding to those two, I'd definitely read:

* Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail '72 (1973) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fear_and_Loathing_on_the_Campa...

* Hell's Angels: The Strange and Terrible Saga of the Outlaw Motorcycle Gangs (1967) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hell%27s_Angels:_The_Strange_a...

His ability to just push himself into the situations and into what he was writing was outstanding. He saw and he wrote, one of the best writers from U.S.

Agreed on books over the movies. First time I watched F & L I turned it off. Eventually I read the book which is fantastic. I did go back and watch the movie then and liked it more but the book is much, much better. As for The Rum Diary I'd suggest the book first because there are a few major character changes between it and the movie and it was harder to follow the book after seeing the movie. Unlike F & L the movie for Rum Diary is on par with the book in my opinion.

My plan on this week (thanks to this post) is to dig deeper into the Gonzo Papers. Any recommendations where to start?

His collections of letters and journalistic work is way better than his books. He always hated writing books and was much better in short brilliant bursts. He wrote extensively to his friends (some very famous friends like Tom Wolfe and other great writers).

Both the letters and articles were released in 3 book series each. These are my favourite books from each series:

(letters) The Proud Highway: Saga of a Desperate Southern Gentleman, 1955-1967 (The Fear and Loathing Letters, Vol. 1

https://www.amazon.com/Proud-Highway-Desperate-Gentleman-195...

(articles) The Great Shark Hunt: Strange Tales from a Strange Time

https://www.amazon.com/Great-Shark-Hunt-Strange-Tales/dp/074...

> But damn, read the books!

I tried reading it after seeing a lot of recommendations, but gave it up quickly; my sentiments are echoed by this[1] Goodreads reviewer (2nd most 'like'd review there, 1st most liked gives the book 5-stars though):

> I honestly don’t remember the last time I was so bored and annoyed by a book. Barring a massive conspiracy, maybe I just didn’t get this book? This is what I got from the book. Please help me if missed something. We drove more than 100 miles an hour while drunk and high. WAHAHAHA! We ran up a huge bill and fled the hotel without paying it. WAHAHAHA! We picked up a teenage girl and gave her drugs and then left her alone, all scared and paranoid. WAHAHAHA! We nearly strangled the poor cleaning lady. WAHAHAHA!

> [...] This book must have been really cool and hip when it was published in 1971. If anyone writes a book like this these days, the only thing that I have to say is: grow the fuck up.

[1] http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/102994163?book_show_act...

It's about the American dream, not about Hunter doing drugs in the desert (or a bit about that too). It's still not dated and it's very much hitting the target. Read his other work and you'll see that he is very good at picturing the current mood and what's going on around him.

Fear and loathing - my favorite movie, period. I saw it numerous times, and after initial amazement of how deep and wild some people can go with mind-altering substances, there are other thing to marvel on. Acting is beyond flawless - both Johnny and Benicio were born for it (I don't get why Benicio was criticized for his acting - the complex guy is played superbly).

Visual representation is breathtaking, in many ways thanx to Terry Gilliam - for me this is the pinnacle of his career. He managed to get so much spirit of the book and atmosphere of those times into it... Countless little details lying here and there.

Bill Murray's adaptation of Fear and Loathing is terrible in all the magnificent ways Bill Murray movies can be terrible. Highly recommended.

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0081748/

I can't shake the feel that Depp has played Depp in all the movie he was "acting" in.

My favorite passage from this:

"a man who procrastinates in his CHOOSING will inevitably have his choice made for him by circumstance."

So very true.

Frost's The Road Not Taken, originally written as a joke, is an easy frame to view my life, imho

"And indeed, that IS the question: whether to float with the tide, or to swim for a goal. " is just the choice Thompson postulates.

To me, I now believe the overarching purpose of life is to have children. Two distinct groups: those with children and those to help those with children.

Parenting (becoming a parent) puts a humans heartbeat into perspective like nothing else can

And becoming a parent challenges me to figure out how to impart life lessons like these. I think it's best if I help her discover them and choose among them.

I think Andrew's post hijacked this thread - not his fault.

You make a good point, but I would like to make it more broad. The purpose, the secret to life, and to fulfillment, is being of value to others. Children are just the most immediate, appropriate people to be of value to, and it's often in a service capacity.

I think becoming a parent is the most effective way to reset our own egos. I think being self-serving is built-in and there are all sorts of wonderful benefits to that evolutionary mechanism.

To Thompson's point, we are all just floating until we find a purpose. Floating has little value. So, it is worthwhile to adopt a purpose for the value that it provides. When that purpose ceases to provide value it should be abandoned in the most severe way possible. Through this process we have the potential to identify our character and our abilities.

And for those in and around Andrew's comments: ful·fill·ment fo͝olˈfilmənt noun 1. satisfaction or happiness as a result of fully developing one's abilities or character.

> To me, I now believe the overarching purpose of life is to have children. Two distinct groups: those with children and those to help those with children.

I reached the same conclusion myself very early on when it became very obvious that it's the most logical conclusion to reach based on the evidence we currently have about the "meaning of life". From a biological perspective, the meaning of life is to stay alive procreate. It sounds empty and ironically, a bit meaningless, but most of what we do in our lives that we find great joy in are rooted in these two very fundamental goals.

Every time we eat a delicious meal we're keeping ourselves alive. When we have great sex we're fulfilling our procreation desires. Even travel can be traced back to those two base desires because we've evolved to take great pleasure in exploring new worlds and relying on our wits to survive.

Now that I have two children of my own I'm more certain than ever that ultimately, it's what I am here to do. My life only has meaning insofar as my children's lives have meaning, and in that way I am fulfilling a centuries old promise to my ancestors who ultimately gave me life by living meaningful, fulfilled lives themselves.

Raising children is not enough. You should also provide them a future. This generalises to providing everyone a future as best as you can.

If everyone focused on raising their own children properly they wouldn't need to provide a future for everyone else. I'm focusing on my kids.

  Your time is limited, so don't waste it living someone   
  else's life. Don't be trapped by dogma - which is living 
  with the results of other people's thinking. Don't let 
  the noise of others' opinions drown out your own inner 
  voice. And most important, have the courage to follow 
  your heart and intuition. 
    -- Steve Jobs

Just to balance it out: http://www.fastcompany.com/3001441/do-steve-jobs-did-dont-fo... ('Do what Steve Jobs did, not what he said')

My Journey In search of purpose

1. Hated working for others. One day manager refused to grant hike (in salary). Googled for a resignation letter, and mailed him the first one found.

2. Didn't know what to do. Decided to do freelancing. Took up a project that was too big for my mouth (read, implementing an ERP for a small retail chain) . Took away some good 2.5 years of my life, for peanuts. But learned a ton. The project was a failure from client's perspective, but I had my contractual obligations met.

learning - Freelancing is not my cup of tea

3. Started an e commerce company. Was one of the first companies in hyper local space. But had a similar feeling that this is not my cup tea, since it required raising large amount of capital for a poor margin business. Shut it down after 2 years.

Learning- I want to build something organically

4. Finally I stumbled upon a business which I truly love. It is yet to make any money. Have been toiling for the last 2 years. But I enjoyed the journey hell lot. And most importantly I feel I can make this work

5. So I took some 5 years to find that one thing that I really love doing, and that I am reasonably good at. Still the unproven part is whether there is a 'need' for that in the market, to make it economically viable.

6. Was it worth it? It was hell lot of pain. Getting depressed at times. But to me there was no choice. So no regrets. I would have done the same , if I were to go back and do. And hopefully we (me and my co founder) will make it.

Overall learning- You cannot discover yourself without getting lost. And getting lost is painful, at times, very very painful. But some pain are worth it (for some).

Whether to float or to swim is a hard choice. But if you decide to swim, make sure that 'to swim' is the only choice you have. Else you are more likely to 'get' back to 'float'.

When you say "manager refused to grant hike", you mean you wanted a raise, or time off for hiking?

It means a raise. Usually it would mean a rise in price of something you pay for.

I like Hunter's writings but I wouldn't look for coherent philosophical ideas in it. I see his writing as artistic, very entertaining, really unique phraseology, inspirational, stuff that really represents the feel of the 70's in US (at least that is what I am told, I wasn't born yet then).

TL;DR: Finding the correct path to take in life, is the correct path to take. Cleverly self-referential, yet not impossible. Succint.

All true truths are Truism.

> If you’re genuinely satisfied with what you are and what you’re doing, then give those books a wide berth. (Let sleeping dogs lie.)

I find myself doing this. Avoiding books that I think might upset my current reality for no apparent gain. It does make me feel intellectually dishonest, though. As in, I should be able to read anything and handle it rationally.

> I should be able to read anything and handle it rationally

You are not a robot. That belief is intellectually dishonest, and is only there because of ego.

As others have said, don't look for goals look for a lifestyle.

Understanding how best to live your life is a gradual learning process and is not really so complicated.

The school of life video on it is 60 seconds and covers the basics:

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=iUdhJ_S_z3w

"As others have said, don't look for goals look for a lifestyle." is really bad advice.

A lifestyle merely describes and/or quantifies the way one lives.

I'm not sure how you get to this conclusion based on the post or the comments, and I am not sure what value it provides. I think this is the precise mode of conformity Thompson is railing against.

Currently, conformity is the common path, "the floating," Thompson describes. It seems to me the outliers with a purpose and the will to swim to their goals find fulfillment along the way.

"A lifestyle merely describes and/or quantifies the way one lives."

This is correct.

I don't draw the conclusion from the post, I make this statement to directly contradict the post, which I believe is unwise.

A further video that underlines my point:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ERbvKrH-GC4

I was the happiest when not thinking about it. There is a trite and often reapeted lesson there.

"Man is condemned to be free; because once thrown into the world, he is responsible for everything he does…" — Jean Paul Sartre (Existentialist philosopher)

Following your passion[s] may or may not be bad advice but predicting the consequences of doing should be measured. Life has a way of making that self evident.

Is finding goal in life so hard and complicated? Why not settle with "do something that helps survive, expand and evolve human species"? Of course, the deeper question is why we want to do that? But until we figure that out, isn't that a worthy goal to pursue?

> "do something that helps survive, expand and evolve human species"

Sex?

"But beware of looking for goals: look for a way of life".

So says every philosopher that ever lived.

One of the best things I've ever read in my life. Thank you for sharing this.

Such a different voice compared to his later work. It really drives home that HST, though seeming crazy, was fully conscious of what he was doing and intentional in his choices.

I prefer Mike Rowe's opinion on that subject.

http://youtu.be/CVEuPmVAb8o

Ironic that he became an opera singer and a TV host which is just the sort of occupations he was slamming people for pursuing.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mike_Rowe#Early_life

Perhaps in hopes they won't follow his mistakes? Also, in that Wikipedia article, he's quoted to have sang in the opera to meet women.

> "I joined the opera to get my union card and meet girls. I was a saloon singer, so I went down to the Baltimore Opera and learned an aria and auditioned. I figured I'd do one show and quit. But the girls were everywhere and the truth is, the music was really decent."

He's really taking that Shakespeare quote out of context. It's about suicide not striving towards goals.

Which is really the only choice in existentialism. You are the one out of your realm..not the letter.

are you suggesting that the letter is about suicide, because it's definitely not.

The letter is about a lot of things.

Like most Shakespeare, a single interpretation rarely does it justice. I think it ties in with Thompson's idea of either floating with the tide or swimming towards a goal very well. The soliloquy it is taken from is about Hamlet debating whether to avenge his father's murder (swimming) or not (tide), and whether to continue living (swimming), or just accept death (tide).

you have it reversed. The choice is whether to continue being tormented by all life's degradations and pains (floating) or end them yourself by committing suicide (swimming)

Flagged. this site seems to be an agreegator that is intended to generate adsense ad revenue , not original content

For example, the article on the sidebar about the 'dying man' was copied from Reddit and elsewhere

https://www.google.fr/#q=Powerful+Advice+From+a+Dying+Man

We should try to link to original sources, not aggregation sites.

Be happy is having something to look forward to. People always complicated this topic.

They 'complicate' it because your simplified version is inaccurate. If the only good thing in my life is a party I'm looking forward to in 6 months time I can assure you I will be unhappy for the vast majority of those 6 months. If it was as easy as you say we would all be happy and that is far from the case.

There is no purpose.

Edgy!

You will be very calm and happy once you accept it :)

I'd be sceptical of life advice from somebody who committed suicide.

For the record, he did so at the age of 67, facing both failing health and the loss of that which he seemed value most (his ability to write). While you can argue (with no small amount of validity) that his life choices contributed to this decline, his decision to take leave of life seems consistent with his views expressed herein on being true to oneself and one's calling, and he does seem to have fit plenty of life into those 67 years...

This quotation seems pretty apt and in my view makes his suicide seem reasonable and consistent with his views:

"Life should not be a journey to the grave with the intention of arriving safely in a pretty and well preserved body, but rather to skid in broadside in a cloud of smoke, thoroughly used up, totally worn out, and loudly proclaiming “Wow! What a Ride!" - Hunter S. Thompson

"All advice can only be a product of the man who gives it"

That's on a par with, "Buy the ticket, take the ride." I think.

Reminder: this is a man who killed himself

Funny you should bring that up, considering the circumstances in which he did so.

I recommend everyone do some research on his suicide, it's very interesting. Start here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hunter_S._Thompson#Death

Actually brings another perspective to his referencing Hamlet's "To be or not to be" soliloquy, which has been interpreted as a discourse on suicide.

This just reaks peasantry. All creatures desire power and you do all to have more power if some thing gives you more power than other you drop the weaker one for stronger one. Very strighforward and simple. Now peasants create this how to do smallest amou of competition while satisfieng max hedonism retarded bullshit...

someone read too much Nietzsche

Yikes

Was about to repost this but then i saw, "10 foods that most def will give you cancer" that host page gave me cancer.

The source of information is not a valid complaint if the information in nonetheless useful or valid.

I would argue that the source is a valid complaint, but i might have overreacted after reading atleast one more article.

Like this one, http://tranquilmonkey.com/19-super-foods-naturally-cleanse-l...

They actually do write in the article that there is no research done to back up the "superfood detox" and actually seem to provide some good tips instead. But I still cant understand why they go for that style of article headlines.

The facts should stand for themselves without care who expresses them.

I agree to always check who the source is. Be aware of its baises and so on.

Still, in 1945 Raymond L. Libby invented an oral delivery method for penicillin. Had Hitler done this, would that discovery not still have been important or valid?

Is this a better alternative?

https://www.farnamstreetblog.com/2014/05/hunter-s-thompson-t...

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