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Comment by polpenn | Hacker News Reader

Life, by default, is suffering.

The surprise is not the fact that there is suffering around the world, but how we managed to achieve the level of prolonged peaceful co-existence that we have today.

We should act in such a way that suffering or chaos is reduced---however small such reduction may be.

Suppose you had a choice between watching T.V. and washing the dishes. Watching T.V. means, perhaps, that your spouse will need to do the dishes. You can reduce overall suffering by choosing to do the dishes instead of watching T.V.

Given that the default path of most processes is chaos, we should always act in a way that prevents this.

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Speaking of dishwashing and life lessons. When I was in college (20 years ago) and sharing an apartment with 3 colleagues, the guys were leaving their dishes unwashed in the kitchen sink. Initially I washed my own dishes after finising a meal, only to find out the colleagues happily used my clean dishes then let them dirty in the sink. I realized I'm washing them twice: once when picking them dirty from the sink, washing them so I can eat and secondly after I finished eating. So I optimized: only washed them once like all folks do: before eating.

Lesson: when in Rome, do like the Romans.

And P.S: no, you can't argue with the Romans and make 'em wash their dishes after eating.

no but you can do like the Romans and break all their plates.

I just kept mine in my room

Prosit!

Aww. And I though this was going to be a wonderful story about how you decided that, since you were there, you’d wash everyone’s dishes and before long you became an inspiration to your housemates that in time became a race to out-do each other with increasingly outlandish acts of kindness.

When do we get _that_ story.

That's a cool example. I totally agree with your underlying premise. It's about playing the long game, and working to build a life enriching enough that it's worthwhile in the face of suffering, rather than playing short games that attempt to weasel away from the places suffering might be.

One of the most interesting things to me in the past few years is that this core idea seems to exist in hundreds of different places and forms, and every culture and person has a slightly different set of abstractions for it. But there's an awesome universality to it.

A lot of times the people I know who live by the bible and the people I know who live by stoic principles are building roads to the same place, each thinking they're on a journey that only their path can provide.

This reminds me of a bit in one of Bill Burr's standup shows, where he says that if a woman wants to make her boyfriend/husband happy, she should make him a sandwich, hand him a beer, and then leave him to whatever he was doing before you came in.

I think a lot of people forget about the random act of kindness, and how it can go a long way towards making people much happier. It can be as simple as stopping to let someone cross the road, making your partner a sandwich, tidying the house, or even leaving a nice reply to a tweet.

It is really. The older you get the more you’ll observe or hear about people dying or having serious medical issues. Then there are the people getting raped or kidnapped or beaten up randomly... At this point i’m happy I wasn’t born in the middle of a war, but I’m hopping none of that will happen to me.

The other two marks of existence, emptiness and interconnectedness, are also pretty useful.

I act quite in the opposite way. Too much thinking hurts the pleasure of living in the present. If I wash the dishes and not my spouse is because in the present makes more sense for me to wash it, that's all.

Completely agree, life isn't suffering unless your perspective is that because I or someone else must wash dishes, one of us must suffer.

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