The Purpose of Life Is to Be a Nobody
medium.com
medium.com
This author has some other issues - the "I write to reduce noise" part is nonsense as if you really wanted to reduce the noise, you wouldn't write at all (or talk). And he can't even bother to get his idioms correct (e.g. "modes of dust" should be "motes of dust".)
So ... each of you is in fact special at least in some small way. And you can go out an do some good that at least impacts one person. At least go out today and make a stranger smile - that person might need a bit of cheer.
[0] https://eventsforchange.wordpress.com/2011/06/05/the-starfis...
He does also miss the point (also made in Zen) that while you are nothing, you are also, in fact, everything. Both facts; that you are the center of experience and also one insignificant part of an enormous objective reality are both true at the same time. As Shunryu Suzuki would say "do you understand". To which I say... uhh... I guess?
This may be unfair to the author but I'm picturing him making a living by giving new-age style seminars to those who like the touchy-feely sounding words but don't actually require any meaning.
Even wikipedia's summary is a better explanation than the author's (emphasis mine):
However, Sartre contends our conscious choices (leading to often unconscious actions) run counter to our intellectual freedom. Yet we are bound to the conditioned and physical world—in which some form of action is always required. This leads to failed dreams of completion, as Sartre described them, because inevitably we are unable to bridge the void between the purity and spontaneity of thought and all-too constraining action; between the being and the nothingness that inherently coincide in our self. Sartre's recipe for fulfillment is to escape all quests by completing them. This is accomplished by rigorously forcing order onto nothingness, employing the "spirit (or consciousness of mind) of seriousness" and describing the failure to do so in terms such as "bad faith" and "false consciousness". Though Sartre's conclusion seems to be that being diminishes before nothingness since consciousness is probably based more on spontaneity than on stable seriousness, he contends that any person of a serious nature is obliged to continuous struggle between: a) the conscious desire for peaceful self-fulfillment through physical actions and social roles—as if living within a portrait that one actively paints of oneself. and b) the more pure and raging spontaneity of no thing consciousness, of being instantaneously free to overturn one's roles, pull up stakes, and strike out on new paths.
Ignore the negative words of others, they won't matter in the long run. Don't focus on how to leave a mark on history; the names of both the worst despots and the best humanitarians will be forgotten once day. No matter what scientific advancements are made, you will not live forever (even if biological death is finally conquered, you're still just one bad fall away from death). All that really matters is what you do to maximize your "now", so focus on that.
How sad to convince ourselves not to matter to ourselves by saying look, I don't matter to the universe, so how could I possibly matter? Does anything matter to the universe? If not, it's probably not the best entity to look to to figure out what matters. If the universe does care about something, who says it doesn't care about you, just because it's big and you're small in comparison?
As with so many writings with the themes of minimalism / zen / detachment / spiritual enlightenment / etc, the authors have a childish view of CEOs. Yes, there are lumbering corporations with middle managers climbing to CEO to satisfy "vanity". However, for HN audience, I don't think that's the type of CEO that's interesting to us.
>The sooner we realize that, the sooner we can focus on the things we can change. And there’s a lot we can change.
And sometimes to execute those changes, we have to be the CEO instead of being a cog in a wheel (aka "nobody") in somebody else's company. You sometimes have to be the owner/CEO of 10-person startup to be an agent of change.
Yes we have all experienced losing ourselves in an overwhelming sense of our finitude compared to the unfathomable megacycles of human civilisation and the universe.
But you can't live like this. It cultivates disconnection from the world. Meditation can give you the same benefits without the mumbo jumbo, and you can develop it into a daily practice.
It must be an American thing. In my country (Poland), children are usually not brought up this way, and if someone would try it, it might raise some eyebrows as bad parenting.