A monk’s guide to office life | Hacker News Reader

A monk’s guide to office life

economist.com

177 pointselorant128 comments

Thank you

> We might think we invented WFH, but for the first monks remote working was standard. After all, God, much like 4G, is omnipresent. Yet the Benedictine guide makes clear that this privileged existence is often a struggle. Some early monks wept, constantly. Many said it was a sign of their faith – but, having experienced several lockdowns, some of us might be more tempted to diagnose the depression of enforced isolation and flat days on repeat, time without end.

It seems the author does not know anything about monks, people, WFH and whole lot of other things.

The title is Hell is other people and yet in article it is said that it's better to go to office because experiencing hell through other people is better than personal hell.

WFH is not like being a monk for God's sake. In fact, you can have very active social life and you get to choose people who you spend time with. Unlike in office where you are forced to get along with people you know nothing about.

Can you though? For most of mass, forced WFH experiment social activities were literally forbidden by law. To venture out the house after 8pm meant risking arrest or tear gassing by the government. In America.

Examples of people being tear gassed for being out past curfew?

Mostly people peaceably assembling to protest police violence. Sometimes they were just having a vigil, not even protesting. This was big news all through 2020, so the poster probably reasonably assumed it didn't need citation.

Example: that time Capitol police tear gassed protestors so Trump could go have a photo op with a bible at a church. They weren't even out past curfew, but that was the way the police justified it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donald_Trump_photo_op_at_St._J...

Even people who usually defend the police were taken aback by the relatively tame response by the same police to pro-Trump protestors later on before the January 6th coup attempt.

In California there were lots of people walking around outside after curfew. And you were always allowed to leave your home at any time to exercise. There was often a police presence down at the beach, but they didn't enforce anything. Not even fines.

There’s a lot of video evidence to the contrary on your beach claim.

Personally I was nearly run over by a police suv and tackled off my skateboard at noon by an officer in a major American city for violating park closure.

It depends on the city. In LA people still played pickup basketball and soccer despite whatever the mayor was saying and the police only got serious about the beaches a few times. Surfers never stopped going out naturally.

There was an 8pm curfew with emergency alerts broadcast to everyone’s cellphone. You were only allowed to be out if you were heading home. I was out at the time when the alert was issued, and got gassed along with hundreds of others. There are news articles about this.

Can you share a link. I am sympathetic to the overreach, and would like to find out more.

The cops were only enforcing curfew on protestors and that was only like a few blocks of the city. You could still drive around town fine in elsewhere LA at least during the curfew. Cops don't really pull people over here that often to begin with.

I think here you are mixing up pandemic-related WFH and protest-related curfews from a much shorter period of time in 2020 (under a week, where I was). WFH - what the article is about - and pandemic restrictions were much less aggressively enforced.

Ah you’re correct. There was a separate 11pm curfew that came a few weeks later from the health authorities. But the 8pm curfew was from from law enforcement. Regardless, of whether the curfew is 8pm or 11pm or enforced with rubber bullets or official letterhead, it’s still restrictive.

It seems to me you are taking the piece a bit too literal.

> After all, God, much like 4G, is omnipresent.

That was funny and I'm pretty sure 100% tongue in cheek.

I for one, can't really make anything out of this article. Is it a joke or just a poor attempt at comparing monasticism with corporate life? Or is it both?

It's both! This is the style of all the pieces in Economist's year-end 1843 magazine: thought-provoking, but entertaining and not meant to taken terribly seriously.

It's not poor. It seems a lot of people on HN are dismissing the advice in the story because they have mistaken ideas about what monastic life is like and, for some reason God only knows, conclude that the author doesn't know what she's talking about.

As someone who actually lived as a monastic for a time, I can tell you that a. monastic life is not like what HN wags think it is and b. the article is insightful

I would also note that, etymology of the term and famous examples notwithstanding, the monastic lifestyle is a fraternal one, such as rarely exists anymore: you are living and working within a community of people doing and living the same way as you. "Brother" is even the common title for a monk.

This used to be the most common way to live; a farmer with 10-40 acres finds himself in a community of other farmers, but there aren't many farmers today and industrialization has pushed them far apart.

Aside from the military, most of us just have day jobs, and go home to our separate lives at night.

The Christian monastic life is nothing like living in farming community. The monasteries rules every detail of your life. There are rules about what and when you can do, say, eat, wear, everything. On the extreme end, you have monks who can see other people for like 1 hour a day or did wow of silence. Oh, and they dont get to pick person they will be with during that 1 hour of socialization. The rest of time is in isolation and activities for every minute are prescribed.

And even in more moderate monasteries, you still have whole day prescribed. Who you socialize with is controlled too. You don't get to voice opinion about rules. You don't get to pick up friends you have fun with in the evening.

I agree with everything you said, except your last centence:

"You don't get to pick up friends you have fun with in the evening."

At some point in my youth I visited a monastery on weekends, because I was friends with some seminarians studying there. People knew how to have fun. Perhaps not every day, only on some days of the week, but you certainly could hang out with friends. There was at least one or two people in the group with a car, and there were favorite spots people liked to go to.

I'm sure there are a lot stricter places, but for what it's worth, I know more than one person from this group (class?) that went on to become priests, working at churches today.

Priest and monk are operate under two massively different rule sets. The "you don't get to pick up friends you have fun with in the evening" is something I got from reading rules of various monasteries (both male and female).

First, having friend, as in favorite person you spend more time with and prioritize, was literally against the rules. You are not supposed to do that. Second, evening was not free recreation time. You eat dinner, you pray, you have chores, you study etc.

> something I got from reading rules

You read some books but you want to argue with someone who literally socialized with a monk? How about this: I was a monk. What you're saying is wrong. You do get evenings off at times. Yes, there are some orders that are very strict and isolated, but there are also mendicant and missionary orders.

I know it's tempting to feel we are smart thus we can speak to things of which we have only read, but (and I'm assuming you're in software development because you're here) if a consultant with no actual experience came along and told you how to do your job because "these are best practices", wouldn't you be a bit skeptical?

They say they read some rulebooks that sounded extremely strict, you say there are some monasteries that are extremely strict; you're both agreeing with the language of disagreement.

Except that GP asserted that reading the rulebooks was a substitute for, you know, actually having been there and that people who had were wrong.

I didn’t see where they asserted it was a substitute.

Would be interesting to hear what countries you all are talking about. I mean, what "Catholic" means in Italy, Ireland, Mexico and the Philippines varies to some degree, for instance.

In my case, this was in New York.

This was a Christian monastery, but not Catholic.

I argued with someone who socialized with people in seminars. Those are not monks. Priests are not monks either. There is also difference between monk and brother, nun and sister.

What you are saying is that cloistered somehow don't count. Maybe you was in freest order there is, but the rest of them count too.

You also argue absurdly aggressive and arrogant way for a monk.

You are not the only ex-monk out there and in fact, ex-monks or those who gave that up during formation do talk about these rules.

At the end of the day you choose to be in the monastary and adhere to certain rules. It’s not a prison, and you can leave at any time.

Does not make it the same is farming community tho.

This has been like, a lovely digression, but the actual point I was trying to make was about the sense of living and working in a community.

The office-, factory-, shop-worker leaves their home each day to go to their work, and leaves their work each night to return to their home. They live in two worlds that may overlap but are frequently quite separate.

A farmer lives in one world, the farm. The work on the farm never really ends; you may not be working 16-hour days from birth to death, but it isn't contained with a 9-5 M-F schedule. You also don't really leave your home to go to work. You work with your parents, your children, your siblings, and you are always near them. Your neighbors are also farmers, and if you don't occasionally help each other out, you at least will talk shop with them. Your entire life blends into one big sphere rather than bouncing between two.

A monk in the monastery leads that same sort of singular existence: they are always a monk, and never not a monk. They may have an hour here or there between worship or material labors to do as they will, but they never clock out from being a monk. Meanwhile, while they may have left their birth-family, they are always with their brothers. They worship with their brothers, eat with their brothers, work with their brothers.

Working from home doesn't feel like a unified existence, in the same way; it feels like I leave my family for approximately 8 hours each day, less lunch, and go nowhere. I may be able to work productively enough, but it is a third thing, to me, not like being either an office-worker moving between two worlds or a farmer living in one.

> There are rules about what and when you can do, say, eat, wear, everything.

How long have you been in the workforce and what sort of places have your worked? I have personal experience with employers that had rules on one or more of these.

Also, I lived in a monastery, as a monk, for a while. Don't discount the article. Your whole day is not prescribed, you can socialize outside the community, and there are discussions around rules. You even get some evenings off to go out and about.

I am well into my career- I am not young. I worked ever since I finished college and during summer. I did manual/simple jobs (which I fact included uniform and employer provided housing) shortly and then white collars jobs.

Frankly, you are full of it. Your personal experience with employers don't mean much in forum where almost everyone is employed. There is nothing special about having experience with employers.

Given how you write about being employed, it is safe to say you don't mind twisting situation. You also try to argue by implying insults, which is not convincing. It just seeks emotional response.

> You also try to argue by implying insults

I'm sorry for anything I've written that comes off as insulting. Can you point to anything specific that can help me be sure I avoid doing so again?

For nearly every monastic rule, there's centuries that people have spent coming up with ways to perhaps break the spirit of, but not the letter. For example, St. Benedict says no speaking during meal time? There's a whole sign language specific to christian monks during mealtime.

Lately I’ve suspected that monasteries were just Medieval frat houses. I mean, come on, they spent all their time figuring out how to make better beer.

They make Buckfast!

What about Craggy Island?

That would be an ecumenical matter.

There were two vague time periods to medieval monastic life. By the late middle ages it had transitioned to pretty much as you say (although, every monastery was different). Centuries of donations of land from nobles had meant that they didn't really need to work anymore in order to have an extremely upper class life style. And centuries of 'donations' of second and third born male offspring (who otherwise wouldn't get an inheritance anyway) had eroded the spirit of a lot of the piety rules they operated under since a lot of these kids never really wanted to be monks in the first place.

Traditional farming in Europe and most of the world wasn't even a farmer having their own plot of land. Most farming was collaborative, fields were held in common and individuals owned certain portions of the fields mixed with others. Much of the work of weeding, plowing, etc had to be done as a community. 10-40 acres is also far more than someone would be capable of farming as an individual household before modern technology.

Correct. Most villages had one large field surround a few buildings. The split was split up some standard ways. If the village was on a road, the divisions usually fanned out from the road, making the division map look striped. I’d the village sat on a river, often the divisions would radiate out making the map look like a corner of a pie with many slices.

Add social media in there, too.

The farmers still meet in local diners and bitch about people shooting their cows. True story.

Yeah, Hell is other people does not mean "other people suck". It's more that people perceive you one way, that you then perceive this perception of you resulting in painful dissonance between who you are viewed as, and who you are subjectively. To others you're an external object. To yourself you're the subject. Your inability to escape this dissonance is what the hell here is.

Basically, it would be less confusing if it were phrased 'hell it my perception of other people's perceptions of me'.

As the text you are quoting (!) says, the first monks were solo: stylites on pillars, hermits in caves, etc. Communal monastic living came later, and brought with it the inevitable social tensions you see in any group of people living and working together.

anchorites vs cenobites

It's surprisingly similar. Source: I lived as a Zen Buddhist monk for a time in my life. The article is quite insightful.

"The first thing to note when discussing the business secrets of the Pharaohs is an acknowledgement that their era was so completely different from our own that almost all cultural, political and, particularly, business parallels we draw between the two eras are bound, by their very nature, to be wrong."

- Marko Corrigan, Business Secrets of the Pharaohs

Except that monasticism and monastics still exist today, and they still follow the same Rules that were laid down by the early Church (or other faith) founders. There are still Benedictines, Trappists, Redemptorists, Jesuits, and so forth in Catholicism, as well as extensive communities in Buddhist, Hindu, Jain, and other faiths. Many of them have adapted quite well to modernity.

My original comment was tongue-in-cheek, but I think the underlying sentiment is a reasonable one. Joining a monastery - from an outsiders view - is fundamentally a pursuit of a higher purpose. Joining a corporation is often anything but.

While there will be crossover in human group dynamics, I’m (perhaps naively) viewing corporate life to have a completely incompatible incentive structure coupled with a bent towards generally self-serving employees. Maybe I have an idealistic view of the average monk but I’d be quite sad to learn that the pettiness that pervades many corporations is much the same.

A great many people work simply to survive: I’m not sure the same is true of monks.

I think the biggest problem in modern society is car dependent infrastructure. Cars are the ultimate form of isolation. They isolate us from the intermediate spaces where we interact with other people. Parks, paths, stations, cafes, downtowns, and all the other free public spaces we used to use to meet with other people have been devastated by cars.

I can go a week in my suburban home without ever interacting with anyone. Take away the office and the supermarket and you can go for years without talking to anyone.

Then I get on my bike, or walk somewhere and suddenly I meet more people in 30 minutes than I did in 3 months.

I completely agree, and I rant about this constantly. But in America at least, cars have infected society to such a degree that for the average person imagining life without them is totally impossible--like asking a fish to imagine life without water. "How would we get groceries?" they ask, and the thought of having a small grocery store within walking distance doesn't even occur to them, because walking is something they haven't done for their entire lives.

Building a life of total car dependence in the 1940s-60s is IMHO one of the two great American mistakes of the 20th century, that by destroying local bonds between neighbors and strangers has led to America's current sense of deep, unspecific anxiety and lassitude on a societal level, and on an economic level has set the stage for the destruction of both small town and urban life that we've seen in the past 30 years.

People still live car independently but oftentimes its not by choice. Commuting on the bus in LA I would see a lot of old men and women and immigrants who would come onto the bus with groceries or children in tow. That sort of lifestyle is already possible, but we only see people with no other choice in transportation riding the bus for the most part. If we want to convince people to leave the car behind and walk and take the bus to the grocery store, we have to improve the convenience argument of the bus vs. the car. For instance, my trip to costco is an hour on the bus or 20 minutes by car, due to having to transfer to another bus line and the bus being not very frequent, not to mention stuck in traffic. If the bus ran in its own lane and was a lot more frequent, travel time to costco would drop dramatically and might even beat the car commute if the car lanes are clogged with traffic and the bus is moving at full speed without stopping at red lights.

It's not even a question of implementing expensive infrastructure like boring out a subway line. The bus lines in LA at least already go everywhere, but are so slow. Buy a few more busses, hire a few more operators, increase frequency dramatically to 5 minute headways all day, paint a lane and install a curb, set the lights to flick green when the bus is coming. Just doing that alone on major bus corridors would do so much good for improving quality of life in LA and be a model for cities around the world of how to incentivize transit in an area dominated by car modal share.

The reason for a car dependent lifestyle in the U.S is that people don't want to live around or take public transit with the riffraff. This does not make sense to anyone who lives in Europe. Anyone who lives in a high crime city in the U.S who actually takes public transit knows what I'm talking about.

Whether it's morally right or wrong, that's the reason America is set up the way it is.

The reason for our car dependent lifestyle is that America was specifically and purposefully engineered that way during and after WW2. Pre-war, Americans had a rich urban and small town life much like Europe had and still has to an extent. The only reason we lost it was due to misguided urban planning, encouraged by lobbying from the auto industry.

Who Framed Roger Rabbit essentially narrates this story of the demise of the trolley.

I mean, that's a chicken-and-egg thing. The more people who use public transit, the more resources get devoted to it, and the less it feels "trashy" or like a place for "riffraff".

Conversely, the fewer people who use transit, the more grim it feels for those who do use it.

The existence of public transit does not necessitate crime.

> The reason for a car dependent lifestyle in the U.S is that people don't want to live around or take public transit with the riffraff. This does not make sense to anyone who lives in Europe.

This sort of US vs Europe stuff I read on HN regarding car use just isn’t binary at all: some countries in Europe are very car-dependent, others less so.

Not all of us are like The Netherlands or Denmark, unfortunately.

Imagine if Americans spent the same on public transport as they do on cars and roads.

There would be luxurious trains, buses, etc running everywhere you wanted to go.

And they would all be sparkling clean and gold plated.

except that the small grocery stores have poor selection, expensive prices, and are more inconvenient since you have to spend more time every day to get your things instead of shopping for the month. Some of us work long hours and don't have a wife who can spend the time to do things like that.

Some of us know about both options, and a car is much better. People like cars because they are freedom; you are free to go where you want without relying on public transit schedules or the realization you have maybe a five mile radius of places you can walk to in an hour.

The city I lived in before this had bodegas that had a decent selection, pretty much all the basics, and were not expensive. It was nice to be able to walk a couple blocks if you just needed a few ingredients. I and many others got a lot of the basics - beans, tortillas, potatoes, tomatoes, onions, spices - from there.

I remember the first time I got a car. It was definitely freeing. But mostly because I lived in a car dependent garbage town. Everything was miles apart and criss crossed by death roads where walkers and cyclists had to be on full alert to avoid getting smeared by someone driving on a sidewalk or coming out of a driveway backwards at 30 mph.

I remember the first time I moved somewhere I didn't NEED a car to survive and it was AMAZING. All of a sudden the car went from being a source of freedom to an anchor. I didn't realize how much time, money, and pain went into owning one.

Insurance, registration, fuel, parking, maintenance, stressful driving, terrible commutes, time consuming trips to a grocery store, TRAFFIC, planning meals a week at a time, worrying about where I parked it, designated drivers and getting fatter every day. Cars are just a pain.

If you live in the middle of nowhere a car is the best thing in the world. It expands your access to everything. Living somewhere you don't need a car is is SO MUCH BETTER.

This really hit home for me when my sibling and I realized our aging mom was unfit to be able to drive. 4 accidents in a year meant unreasonable insurance premiums and replacement not to mention she was injured.

Going car-free really hit her independence and for 2 years, she was aching to buy a car and get more mobile. It hurt me to see her like that but I couldn't let her get behind a wheel again despite her constant complaints.

Nowadays she's mostly adjusted using Lyft/Uber to go to the doctor or visit family but walking to see friends and go shopping (walk score for her place is very decent).

The impact to her self-esteem hasn't quite recovered yet. Society in general even for an older individual places a LOT of worth on us being "drivers" - popular media reinforces it (just listen and you'll get tons of car references in pop music and movies).

I wish she could move to somewhere like France where this isn't the case, but that ship sailed quite a few years ago.

Vast widescale poverty might cure this social ailment. Seriously.

Like the monks say, "my poverty is my shield".

I don't think cars are that big of a factor, but rather how pretty much everything that could be automated has been. I live in a small town in southern Europe, and I rarely need to talk to more than four or five people in any normal week, and those conversations are usually pretty short. I can work remotely, buy necessities and pay for them without talking to anybody, do taxes, etc. I sometimes have to talk with the neighbours, plumber or my doctor, but those are pretty rare. Considering how easy it is to do everything I need with almost no interactions, I'm not surprised people are becoming more isolated.

Heck, you don't even see people in the suburbs. People just drive right into their garages.

There is a short story I recall about aliens describing society on Earth and basically they describe a species that rolls on wheels and move on intricate highways. They make noises by honking, and all yield to flashing cars.

If aliens visited USA they would likely conclude that the dominant species were these metal rolling objects moving around on paved roads.

That sounds like the description of Ford Prefect’s arrival on earth in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.

This was the first issue of the Transformers comic series.

I don’t think cars itself is isolating people… I’ve heard passengers used to bring in fresh fruits on long distance trains and have nice chats with passengers adjacent, in mid-20th century. The plot of Fight Club, later in the century, also involves the idea of “single-serve friends” that protagonist make on domestic flights, that you make upon boarding and have good times over drinks, then part ways forever at the gate.

Do people still do that? I bet I’d just be bothering them if I try to. You sit quiet and keep swiping, that’s the norm, especially when you have more strangers around.

I don't think the relationship between car-dependent infrastructure and meeting people holds. I live near the center of the city, and I take public transportation and walk to go to work. In 7 years of subway, I've never had a conversation with a stranger. I don't think I've ever seen someone have one either. I think I had one or two conversations with strangers in 5 years of bus, which is a bit better.

I had more when walking (I'd say one every 6 months), but that's only when I'm not constrained on time, so at the end of work or on free days/the weekend. 95% of the time it's people asking for direction, all of those being something you could check on your phone (I know because that's how I'm able to answer them). I've never met someone that I talked to again this way.

My university had no cars in it, and was wide. It was a great place to be, because cars and the infrastructure designed around them sucks. But outside of the people in my class (basically the equivalent of colleagues), I don't think I met anyone.

On the other hand, car-dependent infrastructure strips the joy from life, in a way that makes life with them way more miserable, even if you don't use them. In my university, I could sit on grass, walk around without making sure I won't be killed by an incoming vehicle, appreciate the silence when most people were in class. Now I have to go through a car-heavy area to go to the office. My choice is either the big street with lots of cars, or the small streets with cars and a piss smell.

At the university, I didn't mind being alone. In a way, a bit like in nature, even if alone you don't feel lonely when there are tree, grass and wide spaces around you. Now that I'm mostly in car-dominated areas, being alone is slightly more unbearable every day.

I was thinking about this the other day, and it really struck me how dehumanizing cars are.

Look at road rage, I have seen some of the kindest people I know get absolutely furious at another person's driving. However, I don't think they would ever get that angry at another person if they were doing something else. They don't see a person; they see a car.

>Parks, paths, stations, cafes, downtowns, and all the other free public spaces we used to use to meet with other people have been devastated by cars.

I don't think you understand how and why people avoid these.

Do you really meet them tho? Or do you just pass people glued to their iPhones?

I live in Texas so it may be a bit of an outlier, but yeah, you do actually meet people. Pet dogs, say hi, chat in the front yard, share a beer, throw a stray ball back to some kids, share gossip. Sometimes you know someone's name, sometimes they are just "that lady who runs every day in the park" or "The Donald Trump guy."

I struggle with isolation at work. It really escalated during the pandemic. I run a small team and we're often isolated from everyone else, except the client in front of us at any moment in time. Most the work is indirect.

Coming back into the office, its a struggle to integrate back into a culture that, for me, appears to no longer exists. I'm trying to reconcile if this is my own doing, or if something else has changed. I look around and many of the faces in the back office are new. There's no love coming from the middle or front office or top brass.

To me, at this point in my life, I don't want to be monk. I want to feel like I belong, I want to feel like a valued member of a community. I've worked in financial technology and back office operations most of my career. I doubt I will find any of that in any back office these days.

This makes me curious. With the flexi-work world we now live, in are the people who want to work in office just fighting an inevitable full remote future?

It sounds from your post like in-office isn’t what it was before. How long until the people hoping it returns to what it was give up and search for alternatives?

I wonder if the kids of the near future pick a job, get a budget for a co-working space, and then work alongside their actual friends, all doing different jobs.

We might find ourselves for a while in that middle ground that doesn’t work great for anybody until the next generation comes along and completely embraces the future.

    "Hell is other people" has always been misunderstood. It has been thought that what I meant by that was that our relations with other people are always poisoned, that they are invariably hellish relations. But what I really mean is something totally different. I mean that if relations with someone else are twisted, vitiated, then that other person can only be hell. Why? Because … when we think about ourselves, when we try to know ourselves … we use the knowledge of us which other people already have. We judge ourselves with the means other people have and have given us for judging ourselves."

~ Jean-Paul Sartre

As you can see, this does not mean other people are the worst and you should hide yourself in a dark, lonely room so that you don't have to put up with them. It's because of how we are unable to escape the watchful gaze of everyone around us, whether you work from home or not.

"By there mere appearance of the Other," says Sartre in Being and Nothingness, "I am put in the position of passing judgment on myself as on an object, for it is as an object that I appear to the Other."

Side note, the Economist is a rag.

I mean isn't that kind of the same thing just a little bit more specific?

It seems to me that he basically clarifies why other people are hellish.

We absorb the critiques and judgements of others into our psyche and use them to forge our own identity.

Which by definition is limiting our own self-actualization and freedom and torturous if that person we're influenced by is dysfunctional.

Then you start to think of this in a modern mass media world where the scale of influence is global and things get even more insane.

So I largely agree, but it's not that "other people are hellish", it's that they are, in fact, hell.

Satre is using the word hell to mean "the afterlife" i.e. we live on in other people's minds and opinions whether we like it or not.

Also people don't have to be dysfunctional for it to be a form of torture, we are trapped in their minds (gaze?) no matter what.

exactly!

> "other people are hellish", it's that they are, in fact, hell.

I think you may have been distracted by the semantics over the ideas. I'm talking about hellish people, not hellish relations. Hell is other people. People who are hellish. How I'm using hellish is correct.

> we live on in other people's minds and opinions whether we like it or not.

I don't think Sartre really cared if we lived on in others minds at all. The issue is that the way in which our own minds were affected by 'the others' gaze.

The hellish part to Sarte is the affect other have on our own psyche.

> Also people don't have to be dysfunctional for it to be a form of torture

According to Sarte's clarification it looks like that was his intention, however, I still agree with you, just the presence of the other can be hell.

From Sartre: "I mean that if relations with someone else are twisted, vitiated, then that other person can only be hell."-Sartre

yea agree, but further:

We absorb our own interpretation of the critiques and judgements of others into our psyche because how can we know other than through our own thoughts and feelings

many inquiries into an "eternal mirror" are possible from there..

Ha yes. That's even crazier. There's another level of interpretation to the message.

A person could interpret being called a nerdy programmer in a complimentary way, or they could interpret it in an insulting way.

That makes one wonder what portion of our interpretations, thoughts, and feelings are internal and what portion are external.

It is a nature vs nurture discussion at that point.

To what extent does he own the quip he coined? I don't find the message he intended very compelling. But the "wrong" interpretation I do agree with. In fact, I think the saying is popular precisely because of the "wrong" interpretation.

Us other people will keep using it however we want thank you. That's hell for ya.

> Side note, the Economist is a rag.

Many years ago, before there was so much news on the Internet, I used to subscribe to The Economist. It was kind of expensive for a magazine: it was about $150 a year if I remember correctly. I used to devour it every week, and considered it to be a highbrow, accurate and unbiased version of the news from a European perspective.

Now, I agree with you that it's just a rag full of drivel. Whenever I read The Economist now, I wonder, "did I change, or did The Economist change?"

Is the reporting bad or just the columns?

The publication epitomizes the interests of those who they think are, "High brow." When I read the Economist, I often feel that they are citing past me to those who have Capital, those who legislate, those who might pull the strings of society.

> Now, I agree with you that it's just a rag full of drivel. Whenever I read The Economist now, I wonder, "did I change, or did The Economist change?"

This mirrors my experience with Hacker News. I ask myself what changed -- me, or Hacker News? I suspect the former.

panta rei - everything flows

The Economist is one of the few places that report international news, and specifically international news separate from 'here is how other nations are affected by US/European policies' which is the only story that tends to pop up in other publications

There are still biases of course. Friends from Asia used to joke that there are two kinds of news - American news and European news.

I'll agree that their headline stories are rarely insightful. They cover issues that have been talked about all over other media with a kind of snotty, holier-than-though attitude.

They had a recent headline on the 'illiberal left' which was the exact same pearl clutching that has appeared in every other media source about the intolerant leftist who shut down any voice that strays from the 'approved' story points.

I'm not even going to give an opinion on whether they are right or wrong, only that it is a tired story at this point. We hash it out once a week here on HN. There is nothing more to say.

> The Economist is one of the few places that report international news, and specifically international news separate from 'here is how other nations are affected by US/European policies' which is the only story that tends to pop up in other publications

Pre-www this was a really valuable thing, but international outlets are on the internet now. If you read it in the Economist, it's because they've got some ideological axe to grind.

This is not the normal Economist, but their lifestyle rag "1843", which does tend towards more trivial cheeky long form articles

That seems like an awfully verbose way of saying "I have social anxiety". Seems Sartre had it pretty bad, hence his intended meaning of the phrase, but most people don't feel that way, so they interpret it a bit differently.

I have no idea what you are talking about The Economist is one the last few vestiges of decent journalism.

> Hell is other people

Slide side-track but the older I get the more I realize that (at least for me) having to deal with other people is a path to "salvation", not "hell."

When I was younger, I found certain types of people and interactions difficult and painful. I was very quick to judge people who caused me this "pain" as bad people, and so I always interpreted the quote that "hell is other people" as a reference to that.

But lately I've come to realize that these negative reactions have much more to do with me than with the people. I react(ed) strongly to certain people and things because of my own emotional baggage, etc. and I've come to value these interactions as pointers to where I need to work on myself.

So I find that having to deal with people actually forces you (or at least, forces me) to confront your own issues, it's a form of therapy although obviously painful in the moment. The alternative is to avoid all these triggers. For example, someone in my family chose to spend much more time with plants than with people in order to avoid all these painful triggers, but as a consequence I see her "spiraling" more and more into her own emotional dark places rather than being forced to stay above water by social interactions - by being forced to confront and work through the issues.

Maybe this is not universal, maybe it only applies to me, but I see that the more work I do on myself, the less I agree with "hell is other people" - which means there was never really a big problem with them, only with me.

Thank you. I think something that a lot of the tech world can take note of.

I was also terrible at confrontation when I was younger because I have affirmation as a love language and confrontation doesn't fit too well with that.

In the same way, I had to discover to deal with my baggage so that confrontation was not awkward if handled objectively. It is possible to critique without criticism and most of all, it is entirely possible that other people might be able to teach me something ;-)

I still find my self looking-down on people who are often less "technical" and who therefore struggle to understand logical things but then I struggle to enjoy myself, to throw caution to the wind sometimes and to do things that I can look back on and say "I'm glad I took that risk".

> I still find my self looking-down on people who are often less "technical" and who therefore struggle to understand logical things but then I struggle to enjoy myself, to throw caution to the wind sometimes and to do things that I can look back on and say "I'm glad I took that risk".

Something I always tell my mentees is that your strength and weakness are the two faces of the same coin. Your logic and rationality very likely enable you to have a great career and a stable life that is devoid of stupid risk that other people ruin their lives with. Logic is a gift. But at the same time, the use of this "tool" is limiting in some other ways, as you have outlined.

On the flip side, someone may be very emotional/impulsive and enjoy the things you are currently "pining" for but at the same time have other parts of their life be a total mess because of it.

The answer is to recognize that what we have, even if it works very well for us, as a tool. Logic is a tool that generally serves you well. But at times, there are places to recognize to put that tool down because it's not appropriate or necessary for the situation at hand.

The analogy is something like this - let's say you're a sharp shooter in the army. You have your career and you make an impact because of your knowledge of how to shoot a gun well. But you don't want to limit your life experiences to situations where using a gun is a solution, nor do you want to use the gun inappropriately. The answer is to say: I love my sharp-shooting skills but here is a situation where I need to put the gun down and just have a coffee with my friend, or whatever.

I am a 20something who is coming to this realization now and wish I knew this earlier.

Dude, many people don't realize this until they're approaching their forties. Including me.

I have always described socializing and being around people as akin to exercise.

You generally don't WANT to do it, but you feel better after you have, and it's absolutely necessary for maintaining your (mental) health.

So whenever I am dreading some social situation I just remember it as a form of exercise, something that I don't want to do but must do.

Quite an interesting point of view on socializing! thanks for sharing.

> I have always described socializing and being around people as akin to exercise.

I am similar to you (I am also the person you're responding to). Case in point - the hardest "subject" in business school for me was the Happy Hour. But I am glad that through that experience, and other experiences like moving away from development towards management and even sales, as well as having a family, has forced me to develop these muscles.

The one thing I want to point out is that our experience of this is not universal. For example, my wife is naturally oriented towards people: her default is to be with her family, friends, helping patients at work, etc. So for her, socializing doesn't feel like exercising - but something like quiet solitude and introspection would. Perhaps this is obvious but your comment could be read that you think our view of socializing is universal and it's not.

i really like that, "a form of exercise". thanks!

> Hell is other people

Well, maybe not other people in general, but certainly colleagus at work...

I feel like you missed the point of the post :)

I'm in the same boat. At the beginning of my adult life, someone would say something that annoyed me and I'd start to dislike them. Now when someone says something that bothers me, I'm more likely to think something like "huh, I wonder why that bothers me so much. What they said wasn't wrong, so what triggered that reaction in me? Did I feel like they were challenging my assertions? Hmm, do I actually have evidence for those assertions? Maybe I should prove them wrong by actually, you know, finding references that support what I was telling them."

It is universal. The process you are going through is called individuation. It happens for everyone according to Carl Jung. He even wrote something along the lines almost over 50 years ago:

> Individuation does not isolate, it connects.

> Everything that irritates us about others can lead us to an understanding of ourselves.

anthropodie, very interesting connection. I have always been superficially interested in Jung but on a brief search, I haven't found exactly the literal connection between what I wrote and the description of individuation.

If you have a bit, could you point me to something that discusses individuation from this angle (versus more general things I quickly found?)

What you are doing is not individuation per se but is one component of it. By identifying immature psychic traits in yourself and how you react to others you are withdrawing your own projections.

That is one way of trying to know your own shadow self. Knowing and integrating shadow is first step to individuation.

Man and his symbols is good introduction to Carl Jung's theories if you would like to know more.

Agree completely. https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/1296222-individuals-aren-t-...

“Individuals aren't naturally paid-up members of the human race, except biologically. They need to be bounced around by the Brownian motion of society, which is a mechanism by which human beings constantly remind one another that they are...well...human beings.”

You often hear the weirdest ideas about people from people who don’t socialize much.

This really sounds like low-key return-to-office propaganda.

> Over the past year many of us have sat at home, confined to the same four walls for much of the day, contemplating the same view, munching the same lunch and wearing the same clothes (at least below waist level).

That really wasn't my experience at all. My city is well interspersed with gardens, parks and trees in general and since the lockdown was lifted I was able to explore the parks near my house by taking walks during lunch break or by going out for lunch with my SO from time to time.

My coworkers and me still meet from time to time, when we all decide to do a gathering in the office.

So yeah, that's low quality bait.

If my experience sounds extta-terrestrial to you the good news is that you can achieve something similar or even better while working remotely (since you're not tied to a certain place, city or area in the same city).

I agree with this, my schedule was always more the same working from an office than at home: 1) same 5 restaurants to reasonably eat at, or packed lunch options that reheat well 2) same work location 3) same limited number of places to take outdoor breaks (assuming there was any at all).

I find my working hours infinitely more varied from home

> Oh, the temptation to swan into the office wearing sweatpants and slippers. Don’t do it! The costumes of the corporate world – the heels, the pressed trousers – may seem antiquated and absurd. They all feel so 2020.

But why? The author just mentions that the monk's robes were surely worse. And that might be, but so what?

From the next two paragraphs:

"Despite that, there is a power to performance dressing and no one knows this better than monastic orders. Many monkish rules on dress would not be out of place in a modern company handbook <clip> ... <clip> One of the first things a new monk did on entering the monastery was to step out of their old clothes at the door and into new robes. The two worlds were separate, and dressing accordingly helped keep them that way."

Ever watch Mr. Rogers' Neighborhood? Remember how he'd change his shoes and sweater in the intro and outro? Transitions like that are part of a healthy routine. WFH I've maintained a morning "get dressed for work" and evening "change out of my work clothes" routine, even though I might just wear shorts and a t-shirt for work. The point is to psychologically frame the different aspects of our lives

I went to the office yesterday. It felt ... nostalgic? Everything is exactly as we left it in March 2020, except for the sign-in system that checks symptoms, the social distancing signs in the lobby, inside the office itself it's like we just left yesterday. Someone is keeping the place clean, for sure, not a bit of dust or anything to indicate how long we've been working remotely.

I almost want to go back. At least occasionally. There are people just outside of my team but in the same department that I may never see again, and they were nice people. I'll admit we had a good work environment and no toxic people, and clearly not everyone is so lucky. But it occurs to me that if I leave the company soon (and I am planning to), there's a bunch of folks I'll probably never see again, without ever having had the opportunity to wish them farewell. At least face-to-face :).

Maybe I'm just a softie. Many people seem to have much colder relationships with their coworkers.

I think there are a LOT of people, including me, who feel the same way. My team was reorg'd last summer, and a number of people from my team were reassigned, including my manager; now a bunch of them have left the company and moved cross-country, and I never got a chance to say goodbye to them in person. It's been a hard time.

> Monks live at work, eat at work, sleep at work, wash at work, weekend at work and holiday at work

good thing for the monks that the average monastery is bigger than the average US downtown flat

And the devil is in the details of how you isolate. Seeing someone once a day for an hour is profoundly different from seeing someone once a week, or (again) from seeing no one for several weeks. Isolating with other people is not like isolating by yourself. One way you may find refreshing; one way may drive you mad. It’s a terrible experiment we’re performing on ourselves.

https://archive.is/Z9e5R

Economist being paid to astroturf on behalf of corporate control freaks and their urban real estate buddies

Cache without paywall https://archive.is/Z9e5R

It is mysterious how paywalled articles find their way to a highlighted position on HN.

Read it. Commented on my own site, here: http://gwenbell.com/#Cl1yKR9Kh0hI0za8VLmSZZaDY6qtObOJhBgg10X...

Thanks for reading and commenting, if you wish.

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