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Comment by manachar | Hacker News Reader

Reframe this critique:

This should be the point of civilization and society. We should be working to free everyone to be able to go surfing when able.

I dislike that some people get to be "privileged" enough to be able to do so as much as the next guy, but I also dislike when people act like it's wrong to aspire to this.

The problem isn't that this is bad advice; the problem is that our civilization currently prevents this for most people, and instead aims to convince the 99% that they are the essential workers who can't go surfing.

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The point of society shouldn't be that everyone is so hedonistic the highlight in their day is surfing. If you're a mother or a father, if you have a church to go to, if you have relatives, if you're part of a political organization or a community you can't just make your own schedule.

This isn't bad, it means that you're an adult. If everyone lived this Peter Pan lifestyle we wouldn't have anything you'd call a civilization, we'd just have a bunch of grown up kids.

A community consists of interdependent people, it's not just a room full of individuals. Defining freedom in opposition to responsibility is an adolescents idea of freedom. That's a valid perspective in youth, not when it's time to be a person others can rely on.

> we'd just have a bunch of grown up kids.

…and?

We currently have more grown up kids than we do adults. Between the internet, porn, video games, and dude weed lmao, the typical adult is placated and ignorant of their surrounding, existence, potential, and future.

It’s a lot easier to sit there and watch the Colbert Report deliver a sick burn than it is to care and work towards change. Online karma points are the equivalent of gambling reward spikes. It’s all gamified bullshit.

You can go surfing - there are people who live this lifestyle. They move to a beach town, get a beach job, and surf. Similar is the ski bum.

Lo and behold, most people do not want to make the sacrifices necessary to have this life.

Being a grown-up is about making these choices.

Bad advice is driving instructions that say turn left, turn right, climb vertically 2,000 feet. You apparently write 20 "best sellers" by selling driving manuals for flying cars to people who think your book can suddenly make their honda civic fly.

> The problem isn't that this is bad advice; the problem is that our civilization currently prevents this for most people, and instead aims to convince the 99% that they are the essential workers who can't go surfing.

I guess I’ve never formalized my thinking about this, but I believe it’s a sad outlook on humanity if the goal is to partake in pleasure at will. There seem to be much more fulfilling pursuits. Maybe I’m taking this the wrong way.

I guess more broadly the goal should be to free people to be able to spend at least a reasonable portion of their time doing whatever brings them enjoyment. That could either be 'pleasure' or whatever you consider 'much more fulfilling pursuits'.

What you choose to be a fulfilling pursuit is what you should get to do.

For some, that's surfing. For others, that's building a rocket to Mars.

My point is that ideally we build a society where as many people as possible get to choose what they find fulfilling, and pursue it as much as they wish.

The problem we have right now is that opportunity, training, and investment for many things are restricted to the very few.

I agree that an exclusively hedonistic outlook on life is empty, but so too is letting the very few enslave the others to their dreams.

> My point is that ideally we build a society where as many people as possible get to choose what they find fulfilling, and pursue it as much as they wish.

But then what of the work that nobody wishes to pursue, but is required? Like farming for food, generating electricity and water, and many of the modern comforts?

I'm sure everybody wishes to pursue their own passion, regardless of the value of that passion to _someone else_. But this is why it cannot be done today, because there isn't enough wealth and energy and resources to allow for this. The star trek style replicators don't yet exist.

Automate that work as much as possible and richly reward those who pursue it.

One of the oddities of modern work is that the lowest paid jobs are mostly those nobody wants to do.

Sure, we're not at replicator level, but farming of many crops require far fewer people than many imagine.

Personally I find that many things that could be automated are not yet automated because humans are cheaper. Think cashier, waiter/waitress, and so on.

In white collar work land, an amazing number of jobs could be automated, but are not yet because it's cheaper to use humans. These are the people who essentially just move numbers from one computer to another with a small amount of work in between.

The underlying assumption of people who make automation arguments are that those whose job got automated out of existence will somehow be able to consume the profits of those automation (and thus enjoy life, rather than to work).

This is wrong, because the automation costed capital, and the capital owners who invested in the automation are the ones capturing the benefits (mostly).

Horses whose job got automated out of existence by cars don't get to retire lavishly - they got turned into glue. And so will the people, if such an event were to happen.

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