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Comment by dsubburam | Hacker News Reader

Aristotle's conception of eudaimonia, happiness consisting in "activity of the rational soul, conducted in accordance with virtue or excellence"[1] helps here. Lack of such activity perhaps leads to ennui.

Not entirely in the individual's hands, as he goes on to say "Someone who is friendless, childless, powerless, weak, and ugly will simply not be able to find many opportunities for virtuous activity over a long period of time, and what little he can accomplish will not be of great merit. To some extent, then, living well requires good fortune"[2].

Surprised I didn't see this mentioned in the article. An adjacent, perhaps more controversial, formulation of this point: Meaninglessness can be countered by the voluntary adoption of responsibility. (e.g. having children)

[1] https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/aristotle/ [2] https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/aristotle-ethics/

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> "Someone who is friendless, childless, powerless, weak, and ugly will simply not be able to find many opportunities for virtuous activity over a long period of time, ..."

But nowadays you can always become a coder ...

you need mental power, intelligence to become a coder.

Clearly, you haven't met many coders

Those many coders you are referring to don't get existential satisfaction out of programming. Programming is just like any other creative medium in that respect. Anyone can learn to write, and some can even make a career writing professionally, but a lot fewer spend their free time writing for fun. The more lucrative a career in an art can be, the more people there will be who have no interest in it beyond a way of making money.

Programming doesn't require any peculiarly high intelligence; it requires proper education and dedication. Intelligence can substitute for formal education by allowing someone to teach themselves, but it's not a technical requirement. However, access to education is still a type of privilege not everyone has.

> > "Someone who is friendless, childless, powerless, weak, and ugly will simply not be able to find many opportunities for virtuous activity over a long period of time, ..."

Go find the others who are friendless, childless, powerless, weak, and ugly[1]. Among them, you'll find plenty of opportunity for virtuous activity.

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[1] There's far more of such people than the, uh, non-friendless, non-childless, non-powerless, non-weak, and non-ugly think.

Speaking as an ugly person, the problem is the majority(all?) of ugly people dont want their peers.Solitude is preferable.

Speaking as an above average looking person (or so I’m told), I’ve found that here in my 30s, physical attraction has taken a major back seat to the personality factor. Maybe I’m in the minority on this one, but I don’t really think of people as attractive or not any more based on facial features or anything else that we don’t have control over with regard to our bodies. What matters is physical fitness and whether we can have a mutually interesting conversation.

As I get older, I still consider physical attractiveness of the people around me. But what I've noticed is that I 100% make fewer choices based on that physical attractiveness.

In my 20's, I was very likely to make a decision to work with or for someone if they are attractive. In my late 30's now, I am much more likely to only base it on the other person's ability and/or intelligence in a subject area.

In Internet 90% of the people are "above average" in attractiveness. Either you are not that good looking as you think you are or you are very modest scratching the untruthfulness. Very attractive people tend to value MORE not less physical appearance, which it makes senss, due to assortative mating and the worldview they grew up with.

Do you mean attractive people post more photos of themselves on facebook/instagram?

No, I mean good-looking people tend to care a LOT more about their appearance than regular people. Not only their appearance but the appearance of their partners. Being good looking is part of their identity and has shaped their worldview.

Same reason smart people value intelligence a lot, rich people value money, and so on and so forth.

No, I believe vain, insecure people post lots of photos of themselves online. Many of them compensate for their ugliness by clothes, background and makeup. Most beautiful people that are busily secure in their lives don't have the time to post 10 times a day!!!!

This somewhat overstates the case, but it does indeed make a huge difference. For myself (also rather unattractive), I wish someone had sat down with me early on and explained these rather awful facts of life.

It might seem courteous and kinder to pretend that this isn't going on, but living in ignorance has significant costs of its own.

Now that I'm older, I'd definitely advise figuring out where you are on the scale and dating down, not up. If you're with someone significantly more attractive, you're paying in other ways--make sure you know what they are.

Yep, I have been infinitely happier dating down, there is no a comparison. Not so much because it is so nice (it is lame) but because dating up is hell on earth. The other "trick" to date across or up (in physical attractiveness) is to offer other things, like money, (this works beautifully with single parents) but I do not like that route.

I would argue that meaning is whatever you find meaningful (people can find profound meaning in very arbitrary things), but it certainly helps to have some biological tailwinds on your side.

another path to responsibility could be a pet.

Make a kid responsible for a pet might start things off early.

I am also reminded of the old saying:

The key to happiness is someone to love, something to do and something to look forward to.

Eudaimonia at work can be achieved by having trophies and places to focus, at college the professor tries to reach eudaimonia honestly my two cents is that Aristotle can't give us anything for us normal people

> Meaninglessness can be countered by the voluntary adoption of responsibility.

This reminded me of Jordan Peterson

I listened to him on Joe Rogan and he seemed like a pretty down to earth guy. However on the show it seemed like he was treated as a controversial figure.

That's because he says lots of down to earth things except his philosophical warrants for these things are insanely conservative

> However on the show it seemed like he was treated as a controversial figure.

Well, I guess this answers that (and maybe more).

But to give my personal perspective, I’m not sure what Peterson’s motives are. He has stated that he used to have severe clinical depression, which might help contextualize some of his more “grim” lectures/videos. (He and his daughter are able to mitigate their depression by having a carnivore diet. Strange, but it seems to work for them.)

It seems to me that there is a financial motivation, they're for getting attention and monetize that attention. Both JP and his daughter are selling snake oil. Having said that, it's a huge turn-off to try to understand what his ramblings really are about.

This is accurate. Perterson has said, verbatim, more than once:

> "The alternative to valued responsibility, is implulsive low class pleasure"

Which aligns directly with the quote you selected.

Not sure why Aristotle is being cited here, where does he talk about boredom in Nichomachean Ethics? Refresh my memory.

I dunno if you've read it, but The Nichomachean Ethics, which is where eudaimonia is treated, is basically a parenting book for a slave owning upper class. It is not a book about how you, a grown adult, experiencing mental paralysis in a hedonistic consumerist Capitalist society that has orders of magnitude more abundance, can get out of said paralysis. Not. At. All.

Edit: I wanna be really clear. Aristotle has some very useful things to say, particularly in De Anima, which, IMO, is the sole philosophical definition of a soul that is capable of being set in alignment with the concept of evolution, but the Ethics is a really big hype job that has lots of important sounding phrases taken wholly out of context. Aristotle is at his best when he is just a scientist, like in De Anima, or any of his zoological works.

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