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Comment by grasshopperpurp | Hacker News Reader

>328. If for company you find a wise and prudent friend who leads a good life, you should, overcoming all impediments, keep his company joyously and mindfully.

329. If for company you cannot find a wise and prudent friend who leads a good life, then, like a king who leaves behind a conquered kingdom, or like a lone elephant in the elephant forest, you should go your way alone.

330. Better it is to live alone; there is no fellowship with a fool. Live alone and do no evil; be carefree like and elephant in the elephant forest.

https://www.buddhanet.net/e-learning/buddhism/dp23.htm

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My problem is def that I do not have enough alone time. I used to have enough alone time before I had kids.

Between work, wife, kids, friends, family, and various drains on my time, squeezing in some quality alone time has become increasingly difficult.

Therefore, I have had to turn my stoicism onto detaching from my former desire for alone-ness (not the same as loneliness, I know).

If anyone knows how to make more time for being alone when you have young kids, let me know! :) I suspect I will mostly have to look forward to that some time in the future.

> I suspect I will mostly have to look forward to that some time in the future.

You will miss them when they grow up and move away. Ignore your longing for "alone" time now. You're going to get plenty of it.

Oh, I'm with you there. I do not wish for them to grow faster, at all.

One day I realized that for most of my life I had been looking forward to some better future time. I’m trying to appreciate my life in the now instead, since that’s the only time we really have.

As far as finding solitude, I’ve found that a few solo camping trips a year help. They don’t solve the problem and it almost feels hopeless to take a couple weekends out of the year to solve a weekly problem, but it actually helps enough that I wouldn’t want to go without it.

Figure out what you need and trade off with your partner. You get one evening a week off, and she gets a different evening a week off. On your evening off you can go to a cafe or hackerspace to work on something, or sit and read at the library, or go for a drive, or bike ride, or a walk in the park.

Note that depending exactly what it is you need (or think you need), certain lifestyle changes may be able to get you parts of it "for free". For example, I choose year-round bicycle commuting, which is a hardship in the winter, but it does mean that almost no matter what, I get 5hrs/week of time to myself for fresh air, thinking, and physical exercise.

I can't say i've found a solution. But I have improved the situation. I work remote now, cutting out 2-3hrs a day of commute time. Though we had to move states (CA -> TX) to get a larger home so I could have an office.

I would suggest getting into endurance sports. Going for long runs or bike rides is an awesome way to clear mental space and no spouse would argue against your personal fitness.

You're being sarcastic maybe? I would interpret it as really selfish if my partner put his personal fitness as a priority above our family functioning.

No, I'm not being sarcastic, nor did I suggest that he put his personal fitness above his families functioning.

That said, I wouldn't enter a partnership with someone who did not respect my need for an hour or so of exercise 3-5 days a week and of course I would make the same effort to provide them that time as well, if they wanted it. In fact, I would argue that a persons physical fitness(to a certain level, of course) is crucial to a partnership and a healthy family. Full disclosure: my wife and I don't have kids- but these are my values and I'm proud enough of them to hope to bestow them on my kids if we ever have them.

I have a 2yr ol, and me and my spouse have the exact same way of functioning. We haven't quite figured out how to get 3-5 days but 1-3 days of exercise each is what we aim for. Or thinking it's the same: you can't have a happy family if your vitals (sleep, exercise, healthy food) are low. We try to combine 1 exercise (running) with going to a playground all of us and then one runs a round while the other cars for our son.

Oh! 3-5 hours a week. You said "extreme sports" or some such, and I was imagining several hours a day!

Endurance - not extreme. Middle distance running covers sprint type runs up to 3 miles. 5k runs (3.12 miles) take about a half an hour to complete for someone who is averagely slow (no offense to anyone who runs 5ks in 30 minutes). That means a 10k run takes about an hour to run. Cycling takes a bit more time to burn the same amount of calories, an equivalent ride to 10k(6.24 miles) would be about a 20 mile ride and would take the same person about an hour and fifteen minutes to ride. I really think this is a healthy way for someone to buy alone time within a family if you can't tell and I think that it's good for all parties involved.

If you're not attending to your personal fitness then the situation you're in is dysfunctional, regardless of whether or not it's a family, a childless relationship, or single life. So it's not possible to sacrifice personal fitness for family function because that is a core part of it.

If you're taking care of others to the exclusion of yourself, you're going to end up in a downward spiral of resentment. Nothing good will come of that.

If you have somewhere you're comfortable cycling with them, stick them in a bike trailer and pull them around behind you.

My son just zones out for an hour or more when I do this with him. We're together of course, but I also have most of the feeling of freedom and solitude that cycling gives me, and he generally has a great time.

Here's what I do: take a day off from work when I know everyone will be gone. Then, I have the house to myself to listen to music loud, read, whatever.

If you have really young kids, you'll need to wait until they are in school. Then, do the day-off trick.

My favorite task is now doing the grocery shopping by myself. A whole hour of wandering the aisles filling up the trolley in (relative) peace and quiet. One of the highlights of the week and its supposed to be a chore.

Haha, and I take the kids to do it in order to give my partner her hour or so off on a Sunday afternoon.

Comments like this make it seem like it's absolutely miserable to have a family.

Nah. I miss single life while knowing perfectly that my life is better with my partner. I miss getting lost in video games and having a wide circle of low-stakes friendships, while knowing perfectly well they my life is richer and more rewarding now than it was then. I'm exhausted by the little humans in my life but I wouldn't give them up for anything. Such is life.

It is miserable having a young family.

The first two years of having a child have been 70% crap, 20% sleep, 10% rewarding moments.

There are a couple of up-sides:

- The rewarding moments are pretty cool, and there are more all the time.

- You don't appreciate free time until you have none. I no longer procrastinate and overall I think I get more things done than I did with unlimited free time.

lol, reading it again now does look really depressing. I wouldn't want it any other way, just that the house is always full, its like living with roommates all the time except noisier.

It's incredibly rewarding but it's not easy.

Raising the kids is actually the easiest part.

Going into work less productive because you are exhausted and having your boss yell at you for missing deadlines is the hard part.

Struggling with money is the hard part.

Etc.

Our culture is a lot less family friendly than it was 50 years ago.

>Going into work less productive because you are exhausted and having your boss yell at you for missing deadlines is the hard part. Struggling with money is the hard part.

TIL I have it easy...

Can’t have highs without lows.

I have 3 kids, one of them in diapers. I stay up late and work on side projects / watch dumb shows alone after the family goes to sleep. No matter how later I still get up early to get the older kids ready for school. I'm tired all the time but it's worth it to get that alone time.

Sounds like you're killing yourself by shortchanging your sleep.

Reminds me of this good read on bad friends: https://aeon.co/essays/when-a-friendship-turns-sour-more-tha.... It concludes by arguing it’s better to have bad friends than no friends at all. Though I’m not entirely convinced.

I can confidently say I disagree with that conclusion.

As Jim Rohn famously said, you are the average of the five people you spend the most time with. While I don't completely agree because I think think "time" can also be interpreted to include reading-the-works-of, I think those five people (either in-person or remote) exert a lot of influence. They help shape your ideas, and provide boundaries or gateways to your thoughts through their feedback.

> 321. A tamed elephant is led into a crowd, and the king mounts a tamed elephant. Best among men is the subdued one who endures abuse.

Not sure I can agree with this, especially as a man. Essentially saying neuter and emasculate yourself , so the King will ride your ass for the rest of your life and you'll live a content life.

> neuter and emasculate yourself... and you'll live a content life.

A lot of Buddhist advice becomes very strange when taken into a secular context. It feels like there's a sense in the West of Buddhism as "less religious" than other faiths because it's less engaged with a deity, but that's a misleading approach.

It's worth remembering that most Buddhist traditions don't expect enlightenment in one lifetime, and do believe in literal, bodily reincarnation based on your behavior in this life. I can't speak to this specific verse, but "best among men is one who endures abuse" is the sort of sentiment which is very different in a world where the one abused will be reincarnated and seeks an end to that cycle more than they seek present benefit. There are bits worth using in a secular context, but as with most faiths we should also expect some advice that's grossly wrong without its spiritual framework.

(This is also worth remembering when we talk about corporate Buddhist meditation retreats and the like. They seem to assume that if enlightenment is the death of desire and ego, a little Buddhism will be a decrease of greed and selfishness. There are a lot of Buddhist traditions which are very much not about that sort of linear progress.)

Well, not bodily. Transmigration is the term. It means that a human consciousness is said to separate from the person's body once they die (the body stops activities and decomposes); the consciousness is said to be able to remain indepedent by its energy being "installed" onto a certain amount of gas, however strange that sounds at first, and that's what they call a "spirit" or "ghost" in the East. Then when that energy disappears, if the person didn't destroy themselves through some kind of problem they got while being alive the previous time, they are reborn through what is in their "origin", which was composed entirely of what that person has done. They forget all memories from past lives because memories are according to Buddhist teaching said to be stored in the consciousness and once that consciousness deteriorates and disappears, they're are gone. But what the person has done doesn't disappear and it's said that a person can find teachings earned in a past life in their own origin again. That's their explanation for why some people are naturals at some things and others are not. They gain a new body through rebirth but their soul (consciousness) is supposed to stay the same unless they lose themselves and along with it, their ability to be born as a human.

Had a lot of time to read this stuff. It goes pretty deep.

Is that from Tibetan book of the Dead? Never read it, but early Buddhism rejects calling consciousness the “soul” or even supports the concept of a soul.

In fact there is one Sutta in the Pali Canon where one monk went around proclaiming consciousness as “self” or Atman and Gotama was pretty annoyed at him.

No, Tibetan book of the dead is orthogonal to Buddha's teaching. People attempted to mix them but Buddha's teaching was only able to be correctly revealed in each detail by a Buddha due to only him having a high enough level to see things as they are (that's why he called himself a Tathagata), so people can't help but change it by adding their own thoughts and ideas. When we look at cases of a special teacher showing a reaction we must confirm every exact detail in context or we will likely completely miss some critical qualifying detail. Buddha didn't see the concepts which religions of the day promulgated so he didn't teach concepts from them. They were naturally imprecise or wrong in some ways. Each object and each living creature has its own self; for example an apple tree only makes apple fruits, and if it changes what is in itself due to a change in its environment then it's a fact that its own truth changed. People who are not enlightened can't see, so they make things complicated due to thinking and learning others' ideas without knowing the world. That's why someone who could actually see things - the enlightened being - had to come to the human world. No one expected what he told people. Most /wanted/ Atman to be a real thing - perhaps that's why Buddha was shunned while he was alive. Hope that makes some sense for you.

Really depends on interpretation, of which there can be quite a few different ones: Even with a king riding on it, subdued and enduring abuse, it's still the elephant who's best (mightiest) among men exactly because of how it is patiently enduring. Says something about power being independent of social status? How the strong keep enduring to preserve harmony?

If the elephant wanted, it could easily squash the king, regardless of him being a king or not.

Don't forget, the elephants are almost extinct, men are overpopulated and depressed, while kings have flourished and bicker for the riches of the world. While it's a lovely parable, if you extend it out, the truth of it becomes apparent =P

Not with a crushed spirit.

A bird that has lived its life in a cage won't leave. It's really quite sad to see.

Men convince themselves they are free by refusing to ackowledge the walls of their own dungeon.

Scriptures are, of course, open to interpretation, but I think 322 and 323 indicate that the passage is about taming/taking control of your mind/perception and subsequent actions.

You read it wrong.

The tamed elephant isn't a metaphor for a man, it's literally an elephant.

The notion is you should endure the abuse of the elephant, rather than lash out at the king for reprehensible behavior.

The overall notion, regardless of whether it is a realistic one or not, is if we stop giving the gregarious attention they crave, it'll cease to be a valuable endeavor. Don't let the king rule you emotionally, and you'll never be their subject literally.

The alternative is revolt against the king. But violence begets violence. And the kings usually have the best weapons.

It's akin to Anarchisms "Rules without rulers".

Thank you. I guess I interpreted it literally.

I'm no buddhist, but yes, neutering and emasculating yourself and realizing that your status (which you fear would be tarnished by the king riding you) is worthless would, I think, result in contentment. You can either choose to try to hold on tighter to your imagined status, and possibly succeed and live only with constant fear that it might be taken away... or let it go.

> Not sure I can agree with this, especially as a man

I'm not sure I understand the qualifier; do you think you'd be more likely to agree with this if you were a woman?

"find a wise and prudent friend who leads a good life".

By then it is too late. Because you aren't a "friend", you are a protégé at best or an opportunist at worst. You will never relate on a deep level because you missed their struggle, foolish mistakes, and hardships as they journeyed towards a good life and wisdom.

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