When did we forget our dreams? | Hacker News Reader

When did we forget our dreams?

xkcd.com

123 pointsblackswan49 comments

I don't think people ever forget their dreams. They always remember them, but just move in the direction that is expected of them, and never actually implement their dreams. But they don't forget.

Something I recently realised is this - this is it! Where I live, what I am doing, who my friends are - this is my life! This is not a temporary stop while I figure out how to make millions, after which I will actually start living, no, it already started and I'm a part of it.

Waiting may take longer than I expect, so I better enjoy the wait as much as I well can. That's why I'm not giving up my life to create a startup. Rather, I'll enjoy things as they come every day, and dedicate an appropriate amount of time towards realising my dreams. If the dreams never work out, it really is not that bad, because I enjoyed the time right up until then.

You've learned the message of Buddha and Pink Floyd well.

This is why self help books keep selling. Because we keep hearing the same wisdom over and over again, but we just do not _understand_ it. All these simple fortune cookie wisdoms, they mean nothing when you read them casually. But when something big happens to you and you really _understand_ what is meant, then it's like opening a new door and discovering magic behind it.

I finally get it. It may be stupid to everyone else, it may be obvious, but only now do I really really understand what is meant, and only now have I been able to apply what I learnt to make a fair amount of money and be happy while doing it.

Kierkegaard nailed this long ago, when he said that everything is subjective, and that no wisdom can be transferred from one person to another, except through directly living and experiencing it.

(Kierkegaard wanted his gravestone to say 'A person', because after all, who would understand what Kierkegaard was anyway.)

self-help books are generally watered down philosophy. instead of presenting the arguments of different philosophers, the author tells you that this one works and to do it. people don't like choice, so they buy a guide they can follow rather than a text they have to think about.

Self help books sell well because they tell people whose lives are not all right that it is all right, that it's really not their fault and that, if they really want it, they can still fix them.

People want hope. In a time when religious belief looks suspiciously like superstition (which it is) some people crave for tools to deceive themselves that do not involve burning bushes or flying zombies (a thought curiously appropriate today).

yea, it is hard to stop finger gazing and bask in the moonlight.

it is also very hard to give up the belief in the Great Reward (Tao of Pooh fans?)

Regardless of your personal thoughts on religion or music, those two messages resonate with almost everyone.

edit: From Wish you were here:

'We're just two lost souls swimming in a fish bowl, year after year | Running over the same old ground | What have you found? The same old fears.'

I assumed he was referencing 'Time' from Dark Side of the Moon: "And then one day you find ten years have got behind you. No one told you when to run, you missed the starting gun"

Kinda related and a bit more pithy is John Lennon's one from Beautiful Boy: "Life is what happens to you while you're busy making other plans."

more from Lennon:

  Imagine there's no Heaven
  It's easy if you try
  No hell below us
  Above us only sky
  Imagine all the people
  Living for today

  Imagine there's no countries
  It isn't hard to do
  Nothing to kill or die for
  And no religion too
  Imagine all the people
  Living life in peace

  You may say that I'm a dreamer
  But I'm not the only one
  I hope someday you'll join us
  And the world will be as one

  Imagine no possessions
  I wonder if you can
  No need for greed or hunger
  A brotherhood of man
  Imagine all the people
  Sharing all the world

  You may say that I'm a dreamer
  But I'm not the only one
  I hope someday you'll join us
  And the world will live as one

0 points for the greatest song of all time? and it's about dreams! a particular dream.

For some reason the previous lines resonate with me better. Tired of lying in the sunshine staying home to watch the rain. You are young and life is long and there is time to kill today.

Yes, that's the line.

Really interesting comment about realizing that right now is your real life. I also spent years in that mode of "this is just a temporary thing while I get enough money to do what I really want." A couple years ago, I had the same realization: that what I'm doing right now is my real life: the dumb conversation I'm having with my ex-gf, the boring Java code I'm writing at my day job, the hurry-up-and-pay-bills-and-answer-email-and-clean-the-kitchen rush in the morning.

Now I appreciate that stuff better, but I'm also spending most of my time implementing the dreams, and recognizing that the act of implementing--clumsy and distracted and imperfect as it is--is sheer ecstasy. I'm not waiting for the future anymore. I've had only a few tangible results so far, but wow life is way better right now.

Yes, we can all go right to xkcd, or techcrunch or whatever and read them ourselves. Thats not the point of posting them on Hacker News. The point is that the discussion that follows about the ideas in the articles/comics is still radically different on HN than most other places.

Randall has some thoughts that apply very well in a group like this so his comics appear here often and start interesting discussions. The only thing not interesting to me is that every time one is getting started I have to wade through a boundary layer of "lets blacklist xkcd" comments.

Doc my karma if you will, but I think the silent majority has voted with the upmod arrow on the post. I am one of them.

Completely agree, but I'm refraining from upmodding you because it would surely be ironic if this becomes the top comment, instead of some real discussion on pursuing our dreams!

Ha. Definitely. Sometimes karma catches you off guard. I didn't expect to get any upmods for that. It was a bit of a rant really. When I got here, it was just about entirely a discussion about blacklisting xkcd and I thought the comic had brought up something that was really worth talking about.

Of course, as soon as I post this the karma discussion effect will begin and it'll be downvoted back to something reasonable I think. Just don't - me bro... :)

It's not that the routines cause thoughtlessness but that, ideally, the routines free us to think about and do important, creative things by making the daily doldrums automatic.

Sure, sometimes it's good to dive back into reinventing the routines (or taking a road trip and questioning the purpose of the routine), but very few people can get work done that way. And getting work done is a valuable goal.

This is an old comic and normally I'd be annoyed, but this one is an exception: Reflecting on my dreams, even if I've chosen not to pursue some of them, has greatly improved my mood on this particular day.

Do it again tomorrow? :)

the essence of your comment if beautiful.. tomorrow would be great.

Great. My employer saw the last three frames and now I'm fired for what someone else wrote.

Can't think of a better reason to go build your startup :)

Absolutely! Just uploading the latest changes to our "stealth mode" startup site right now :) We'll be in invite-only mode by the end of the weekend, and completely public sometime next month. Stoked!

Thinking about these kinds of things, I feel sad for other people who haven't taken a risk on a dream. Caring about something as passionately as a startup you've build from the ground up is something I imagine many people never get to feel, although maybe having kids is similar (don't have any, so I couldn't say...). But as far as the 9-5 goes, I'd rather care about what I built in that time rather than feel it was wasted on something not worth doing.

Ooh, upload just finished, here I go! :)

That's pretty reliable evidence that it's a crappy company.

I hope the OP was joking :-/

A classic.

And, when hiring, I certainly wouldn't hold a rant like that posted somewhere on the internet against an applicant...

All this talk of following one's dreams is really making me want to finish The Alchemist, which I started last night.

Sorry, but why not go right to the good stuff?

You'll find a great list in Harold Bloom's "Genius: A Mosaic of One Hundred Exemplary Creative Minds".

http://www.amazon.com/dp/0446691291/

this is existentialism in a shiny wrapper.

read the first sentence in the wikipedia article on existentialism before you downmod please.

Wow, you said that word. It's unfashionable.

Existentialism isn't popular as self-help because it's not optimistic. There's no natural law that every truth must be shiny happy. "Existence precedes essence" accurately describes our world, but doesn't motivate. A good antidote against religion and propaganda, though.

When the first bill came due.

I've had this on my wall for months.

Oh, the text in the middle is meant to be read? I read the cartoon only as "you should be more careful sdojdsa fosadf aösdpoifasdö fojahdsfösdaof sddfjjdsjdsjfsd föso fsdöfo sdfsd fuck that shit".

That is bloody brilliant! Love it...

I didn't forget my dreams.

PG: can you please add xkcd hostname to the blacklist? Not because it's bad -- actually it's brilliant, but adds very little to this community in terms of news.

After getting techcrunched, is xkcd the second sign of HN going the reddit way?

It's very simple to continue your eye movement a couple more centimeters so as to skip the xkcd entries. It's also very easy to restrain yourself from upvoting it or clicking through. It's also very easy to not get worked up over it as xkcd entries only make it to the front page every once in a while.

You don't need an article to spark interesting discussion. A comic can do the same, and from what I've seen in this thread, there's some interesting discussion.

The point isn't that we can't overlook them. The point is that the slide from XKCD to lolcats can be subtle.

I don't know, I think most of us can tell the difference between XKCD and lolcats.

Greasemonkey + HN Blacklist = far better HN

http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/25039

"If the AI stops wanting to be friendly, you've already lost."

Something similar is true of social media user groups.

It'd be pretty sweet to allow us to put a list of domains we don't want to see links for in our preferences.

Interesting point, but that's a slippery slope away from a big community and toward a system of silos for those whose preferences closely match your own. I don't think that's what HN's about.

The uncommon position of this site is that it's a diverse community of people with intermixing ideas and persuasions. Neat things happen when they work together (and when they argue). I'd be worried you'd lose a piece of that if HN started allowing users to establish their own filtering preferences, even if based on something as simple as domain blocking.

For the record I did love this post. Was it news? No. But we stretch the definition of "hacker news" to include topical things all the time. Why not permit it here?

I had asked for something similar a while back.

Why not just do it yourself via Greasemonkey?

The bitching about xkcd is getting annoying (as is the constant speculation about "Is this the moment when HN is going to jump the shark?)

What is this whining to Daddy shit?

YC News is full of such a bunch of crybabies -- and that includes a lot of the editors.

I hate it when there's some stupid, dreadfully stupid entry, whose only point of interest is the potential complaints in the comment section, and then finding that such complaints are downmodded so hard.

I don't know if a blacklist is the answer, but this 'toon wasted more of my life than it deserved to.

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