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Comment by edw519 | Hacker News Reader

Whether you agree there are 16 desires or not, he said there is not any way to reduce all of these desires to just two types.

Or just one. Now bear with me, but sometimes I wonder if Freud was right. There's only one real desire: to get laid.

  Why are you writing this software?
  Because people need it.

  Why can't they just use something else?
  Because mine's better.

  Why is yours better?
  Because it handles these 27 things no one else has considered.

  Why don't you just share those 27 things with the world?
  Because I want to be the one to do it.

  Why do you want to be the one to do it?
  So that I can earn admiration, recognition, and lots of money.

  Why do you want admiration, recognition, and money?
  So I can get a date.

  Isn't there an easier way to attract women?
  Not for me.

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Now i know this, i can skip all this work and just try to get laid. You saved me a lot of work.

On a serious note, are you saying that all people who are ambitious and motivated to achieve something great in their lives are trying to get laid?

I think some of us have realized (perhaps after the fact) that getting laid is actually overrated. It's the game that's fun, not actually getting laid. Furthermore, this game is really #$@*ing shallow and stupid.

Still others have realized that it's not getting laid that matters, it's the ability to get laid, and to keep it coming. Part of that is having something material, which (though not strictly necessary) is quite useful for getting laid.

Once you realize one or both of these points, you pretty much stop caring about getting laid (i.e. why bother?), and start chasing your dreams again.

This is all probably for the better, in the end, because getting laid (or not) doesn't seem to correlate as well with having meaningful relationships, and frankly, I've seen too many bright friends waste their potential by spending their prime years trying to game members of the opposite sex (emphasis on the plural).

Then one wonders what motivates the following groups of people:

- The happily married. Achievement has nothing to do with sexual satisfaction in a marriage; that is either secure or it isn't. You might as well try to win your mother's love.

- Women. The sexual 'market' looks totally different from a woman's perspective. Do you see a guy you'd like to sleep with? Ask him. He'll probably say yes. If women acheive in order to get laid, they are trying too hard.

- Those who have taken some sort of lifetime vow of celibacy. Clergy, monks, some missionaries.

I think that covers more people than it misses!

Ascribing mean and petty motivations to all action says more about the speaker than it does about humanity. Study closely the great men of history--those who had an abundance of motivation--and such explanations clearly fall flat. You can practically feel the heat of intrinsic motivation, of their pride and conviction and vision.

http://artofmanliness.com/2010/02/26/lessons-in-manliness-fr...

Would a corollary be that good-looking, well built men (and women, too) are less motivated? Or maybe being motivated is what really gets men laid (or, at least, married).

Maybe for the college students and young people, but what about married people? It's not like people suddenly stop doing what they love after doing someone they love.

Sex is only one thing which can bring you to an euphoric state. There are also drugs, and exercising control over your surroundings, etc.

Two words: Poop sock.

MMORPGs have everything to do with being in the zone, nothing to do with sexuality; these two motivations are both exceptionally powerful. I remember an experiment with rats, where an electrode was hooked up directly to the center in the brain that generates the "in the zone" feeling; the rats pushed the lever to fire that electrode continually, until they died of starvation. MMORPGs, computer games in general, Wikipedia, checking e-mail, Hacker News... all operate based on the desire to zone in.

Now, the popularity of well-paid parasitic professions in the contemporary US (law, most prominently, where the marginal value of a new lawyer is negative) reveals that the desire for money is very strong as well; but is the desire for money always the same as the desire for sexual relations? I don't see Dick Cheney living it up like Bill Clinton...

Of course, multiple motivations can be present at once; but I think that good work, at least in computer areas, requires the desire to zone in as one of these motivations.

1. You don't see Dick Cheney living it up like Bill Clinton because he can afford to kill his hookers after he finishes with them, and then kill the people who dispose of the bodies. He's smart enough to avoid publicity.

2. The rewards you are referring to (email, HN, MMORPG) have to do with dopaminergic pathways, dopamine release, and the nucleus accumbens.

You're right, it was the dopamine system I was thinking of -- the phrase had escaped me.

On Cheney: I think it's possible to say when someone's having a sybaritic lifestyle and when they're not; certainly someone who's as eagerly discussed by the media as Cheney now is (while Clinton's allowed to live his rather un-Presidential post-Presidential years in media silence).

This isn't a defense of Cheney, though. I would call him less nightmarish if he had the excuse of wanting money as a means to an end, rather than an end in itself. It seems to be a common vice, this thinking of life as Donkey Kong, and if you die with a high enough score you get to leave your initials on the machine at the end...

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