Comment by matrix_overload | Hacker News Reader

Comment by matrix_overload | Hacker News Reader

matrix_overload

I would argue that people have a very intrinsic need for the "doing" mode (setting goals, spending effort achieving them, slowly observing the progress). If we don't get enough of that, we start inventing goals. If we don't manage to find/invent anything worth spending effort, we get depressed and step out of the game, freeing up resources for those who have goals. Brutal efficiency of nature in action.

If you focus on "being" too much, you still end up subconsciously setting goals, but those goals will be very tribal and emotional: get more people to give you attention or acknowledge your feelings, bash those who express opposing views.

I think, what works the best is reserving the "being" to your friends and close circle (that you can pick according to your preferences), and devoting work time to a 100% professional-driven "doing" mode where you focus on common goals and leave everything else outside the office. Sadly, companies don't want people to have lives outside of work anymore, so they are trying to substitute it for "being" at work, creating division out of the blue, and making the work culture toxic.

Humans have been on this earth for 300 millennia

Most of that time, we were nomadic hunter gathers.

No one really knows what is "intrinsic" to human nature.

We only have records for the most recent 1-2% of our time on this planet. And that 1-2% of "recorded time" is by far one of the most abnormal periods not in human history (300,000 years), but probably one of the most abnormal periods in the history of life on our planet (4,500,000,000 years).

Your perceived "intrinsic" need may be true to our nature, but it's more likely a result of the strange environment we find ourselves in.

If you could talk to 100 people from all of human history, the majority of them would be hunter gatherers. You'd be lucky if you got a single person who even understand the concept of "history".

On the last point I feel obligated to point out that 120 bn people are estimated to have ever lived on the planet, of those a 100 bn lived before 1750, 60 bn before 1 CE, 10 bn before 8000 BCE.

That means that if you took 100 people from human history, 15 of them would have heard of press, 50 of writing, 90 of agriculture. Not so many humans in a state of nature there.

That's a great correction. I was absolutely not taking into account the population sizes at each part of human history.

Are your numbers assuming that everyone in the world knew about each "invention", for example writing, at the same time?

If writing existed in a society at a particular time, I'm not sure how to estimate if or how well an average person (likely without much education unless part of a privileged class) would know about it.

I think the point I'm trying to make is that a random human experience today is very abnormal compared to the average human experience at any time previously in history. So I guess the more accurate way to demonstrate that would be to choose 100 random years from the last 300 millennia, and then grab a random person from each of those years.

> I would argue that people have a very intrinsic need for the "doing" mode (setting goals, spending effort achieving them, slowly observing the progress). If we don't get enough of that, we start inventing goals. If we don't manage to find/invent anything worth spending effort, we get depressed and step out of the game, freeing up resources for those who have goals. Brutal efficiency of nature in action.

I agree. I also think people tend to set goals in very binary fashion (Success/Fail) and it puts people on path to be depressed all the time. You either succeed (and get a temporary high from success) only to set new goals and be depressed about hitting another goal for yourself or fail outright and be depressed about that.

I've experienced that myself (social and professional) and it just sucks...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com