Hacker News Reader

Comment by pmoriarty | Hacker News Reader

"I'm responsible for me - my success, my failures... Fulfilment comes from within, not externally."

What's external and what's internal?

Where do your desires come from? Your hopes?

Some people think they are the masters of their mind, that what they feel come from them, but what about the influence of their parents, their friends, the movies they watch, the books they read, advertising, music, social media?

We swim in a cultural ocean where things that seem on the inside might have actually come from the outside.

That's if there's even an actual distinction between inside and outside in the first place.

"Get a win, then get another win."

Is winning the point? What if someone doesn't care about winning?

View on HN

I'm in my 50s and I like to think I've had a reasonable career so far.

However, by far the most fulfilling thing I've done for a long long time is helping out in a foodbank in a nearby town.

So my biggest regret at the moment is actually realising that, at least for me, helping other people actually can be rather more fulfilling than achieving purely personal goals - I wish I'd realised this sooner.

You realised it just in time!

I suspect the urge to feel needed, to be appreciated and the satisfaction from really helping other people is pretty much universal.

But it's discouraged at every turn from the top; and replaced with shiny things, power and competition.

I guess that's one advantage of age - the lure of shiny things has long since worn off for me. And I've been fond of expensive cars, watches, cameras, ski gear etc. as anyone...

Yup. I am a sober alcoholic and the most meaningful experience in my life—by a country mile—is sponsoring another alcoholic young man and watching him transform into a responsible, capable adult.

It's true that sometimes we find something fulfilling late in life. But we should also factor that our mind (and thus perspective) biologically change as we age. So what you find fulfilling now at 50 may not be something you may have enjoyed in your 20's or 30's. I remember as a teenager I used to consider kids below 10 dumb pain-in-the-asses. Today, as an adult, I mostly enjoy interacting with them and find their perspective and curiosity really interesting.

>What's external and what's internal? Where do your desires come from? Your hopes? Some people think they are the masters of their mind, that what they feel come from them, but what about the influence of their parents, their friends, the movies they watch, the books they read, advertising, music, social media?

How about thinking about it with common sense, as opposed to trying to find some perfect rational answer that squares the circle?

There will always be external influences, but we still call most of them "internal" if they gently shaped who we are, as opposed to us chasing after them like junkies and getting overwhelmed by propaganda (ads, unattenable images of success/body/status in the media, unhealthy peer pressure, and so on), or beating us to submission to them (e.g. like parents insisting on instilling their own youthful dreams or desires of becoming X or Y to a kid).

Especially if we mostly care for the trappings (being Elon Musk rich, and having Elon Musk lifestyle), and not the process (making stuff).

'How about thinking about it with common sense'

Common sence is a mythl

Thoughts think themselves, you are an empty vessel and they arrive in your mind by magic, and you have no real idea where they come from. All you do is react to them in one way or the other

Yes, the above approach is exactly what I advocate we should avoid.

"you are an empty vessel and they arrive in your mind by magic"

Whatever: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Analysis_paralysis

This is the core of cognitive behavioral therapy.

Your thoughts don’t come out of nowhere. They are based on your own set of beliefs, usually shaped by experiences.

Change your beliefs and you can change your thoughts.

But you're right! All our truths were invented by someone else(s), down to the language we use to write these replies.

"Get a win, then get another win."

Not OP but I interpret “win” in this context to mean something more like “success” and not strictly about winning or beating someone else.

It’s certainly a turn of phrase that I’ve heard used in that context a fair amount.

My thoughts exactly. I just told people I had a major win this week by getting a buddy of mine who started as an intern at my last job a full-time software engineer position at my current company (big pay jump & next step in his career + he's extremely talented and will be a huge asset for us). If our friend here takes the same approach with their kids, one I think can infer they're including cases like this.

"within" means values which you can hold against those of your immediate local environment; "external" means being driven by your immediate local environment.

As in, if you chase situations in which your local environment is full of applause, then you're only going to be satisfied when you're in those environments. If you chase situations in which you are, eg., finish some project in some area of interest, then you can be satisfied with "resources more your own".

What's external and what's internal?

Fulfillment certainly isn’t external. It’s entirely generated internally.

"What's external and what's internal?"

> 1. Some things are in our control and others not. Things in our control are opinion, pursuit, desire, aversion, and, in a word, whatever are our own actions. Things not in our control are body, property, reputation, command, and, in one word, whatever are not our own actions.

http://classics.mit.edu/Epictetus/epicench.html

Does it matter where our desires and hope come from at the very beginning ? We have thousands of divergent influences pushing us everyday. The ones we choose to go with come from within, they come from you, probably ingrained and influenced by your environment, but the only thing that matters is that you take them as yours.

Regarding "Is winning the point? What if someone doesn't care about winning? ", winning here has a wider meaning than the small 'winning a game' meaning, it means succeed at what you set yourself to.

You're of course free not to set goals to your own life, but doing so has long been found to be one of the best way to find happiness and meaning (it's the conclusion for Candid of Voltaire for example, but there's much more). If you're interested in the matter, I can recommend "Man's search for meaning" from Viktor Frankl

Are people's desires and aversions really something they can control? The thought feels alien to me. It's very difficult for me to even tell what I really want, let alone intentionally channel effort towards achieving any such thing.

The largest obstacles I face when it comes to achieving things is really that the things I want to do and the things I feel motivated to do are very rarely the same. Often I am extremely motivated to do things that I really don't want to be doing; I can spend hours fixated on something irrelevant and afterwards feel exhausted and annoyed because I really would rather have done something else, but my brain disagreed.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com