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Comment by saagarjha | Hacker News Reader

This article focuses on a utopia of worldy pleasures, and goes on to explain why such a place would be a pretty boring place to live. But that’s just human nature: we’re never permently satisfied with what we have. The only way that we feel happiness from these things is if we get more of whatever it is, and that’s kind of impossible in a utopia. However, I still think there’s a way to get satisfaction out of a world like this: through learning. Even if we, at some point, discover everything there is to know, I think it’s still possible to find joy, since there people will be born unaware of this knowledge. Perhaps we might even mark a lifetime by the amount of time it takes to learn everything.

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I would say through making. Making things gives life purpose, something to struggle against and triumph over. And you also get to learn. Learning for learning's sake doesn't give you the sense of purpose as learning in order to make something great .

Marx and others who elaborated on his work developed the notion of alienation under capital—the notion that capitalism really screws up the specific sort of pleasure you describe. The idea, if I'm not messing it up too badly, is that a worker under capitalism encounters the stuff they make as something alien to them—and in fact something that shapes and brings the worker into being rather than the other way around. I know I experienced this phenomenon all the time staring at code on a screen when I was working in tech.

> And you also get to learn.

I lumped making under the broad umbrella of “learning”.

What does learning mean outside the context of any problem to be solved?

Games are fun, but games almost always involve something that might be useful. But what is useful if everyone already has everything they need?

> What does learning mean outside the context of any problem to be solved?

What did it mean for Darvin to explore evolution theory? What immediate problem was Einstein solving with the relativity theory?

> The only way that we feel happiness from these things is if we get more of whatever it is

Not sure who you mean by "we". This is certainly not the way I experience happiness. And not most of the people I know.

Do you not feel happy when you get something better than what you currently have?

It's a short lived kind of happiness because you quickly adjust to the new norm. This puts you on a treadmill of having to constantly upgrade, which does make advertisers happy.

There might be other forms of longer lasting happiness that don't require needing to continuously upgrade one's life.

Unless we radically alter the way the human brain works, there's no chance to "learn everything." We already know much more than any individual could learn in a lifetime.

Hey, it’s a utopia; maybe we do figure out a way to do this. I’m already heavily suggesting that we’ve figured out a solution to aging. And even if we don’t have this figured out, this necessarily a problem: we could just get pleasure out of relearning things.

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