Comment by jimmaswell | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jimmaswell | Hacker News Reader

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I can appreciate that it might be like that for some, but absolutely not for me.

Deeper mathematics is meaningful to me for its beauty and the way it feels like arriving at some fundamental truth, for whatever value that can exist. Similar for deeper physics, it's very appealing to me to try to understand the world on some fundamental level, as much as we're capable. And I find it very satisfying solving a good math problem just on the cusp of my limits.

Then higher up the chain is chemistry, electronics, robotics, software. I love seeing how we can put these things together for practical or just fun purposes, and I love when I put something together and get to see the end result working and doing something fun or useful. Doing the little lab experiments in my physics classes in college, it was really cool seeing the math on paper describe what was going on right in front of me, that I made predictions for. Something more practical to put my skills to use a while ago was the light setup I made with turn signals and some other safety features with an Arduino for my ebike. Admittedly I also enjoy when someone sees what I did and appreciates it but I also do it for myself. Then there's AI which brings up all kinds of philosophical questions.

And on another plane I'm getting into the things that go along with homesteading like plant science and animal husbandry. Home grown food tastes better and it's another thing I just think is cool/fun.

This all comes from some combination of appreciation, awe, fun, practicality, or just finding things cool - not seeking validation or running away from something. But I can still heavily sympathize with wishing I had a hundred lives to live, or got to live a thousand years in some kind of university, so I could fully appreciate all of these things. Right now I'm getting out of a long depressive slump and feeling like I've wasted too much time letting myself go intellectually, and wishing I'd dived even deeper on some of them in the past, but I'm feeling good about the future now.

If you were standing at the entrance of a grand amusement park, would you feel despair that you have to choose which ride to take or excitement at having options? If the park were fantastically more grand, so you have no hope of sampling every amusement, does this somehow change your response? Your emotional valence here is your choice, not something intrinsic to the setting. That is what those cognitive behavioral therapists are trying to help with. But, they have to come up with some actionable instruction to convey it to us. I think you are arguing against the chosen rhetorical device rather than an actual principle.

Whether it is rarefied academic pursuits, music and arts appreciation, friendships, love, delicious food, sex, or ... we have to decline a world of countless possibilities to engage what is in front of us. And even then, we need rest periods in order to fully appreciate those rare few branches we do take. You can't enjoy or pursue anything 24x7. The nature of our experience is inexorably tied to the exclusion of other non-experiences.

In other words, life is a constant stream of decisions and branching points. The underlying angst of "not enough lifetime" is rooted, I think, in grief for these other paths not taken, for the loss of imagined alternatives. This is supported by the delusional idea that we could defer and return to every branch (given enough time). It ignores the ephemeral and limited nature of most opportunities and potential experiences, the necessity of closing one door to open another, and that most doors are never open to us (individually) to begin with.

You wouldn't just need a hundred lives or a thousand years but some kind of combinatoric explosion of a Multiverse You, where you could explore every choice of collapsing decision point. But what does that even mean? I think it's another delusion about identity and the self to think that "you" can experience the different paths. You'd be many someones else. If you could somehow fuse them together into an experience, you've just added some kind of sci-fi "hive mind" to your experience. But wouldn't you wish you could have experienced those things as an individual...?

To get stuck with this frustration is a failure to mourn. A failure to accept a finite life and get on with it. That leaves the grief stuck in the back of the mind. This is where philosophers of mind might tell you about desires as the source of suffering, etc. Where practitioners might propose moderation or the so-called middle path. Where the CBT folks might say you are on the path so you might as well learn to enjoy it, and offer a grab bag of tricks to help achieve that.

This is incredibly well written, how did you learn to write like that? As for the concepts you describe, how did you learn about them?

This is essentially the message of “4000 Weeks” by Oliver Burkeman

thank you for writing this

I think I needed to hear this. Thanks.

I agree that it can be like this.

Acquiring expertise is like climbing a mountain. There are revelations in the process, and it is like reaching a beautiful vista and the joy of seeing things expansively, from a height.

I wish I could have this experience in other domains, and feel the constraint is just the physical and temporal bounds of life.

Still, I recognize it as a fantasy to want these things. It’s just simply not possible.

I also recognize that there is something to the Eastern ideas of awareness and consciousness and that you perhaps you don’t need to labor toward material expertise to experience life with expansive revelation?

Plant science and husbandry builds upon chemistry/biochemistry

While you may not be an expert in all of the fields you can definitely understand the basic rules that govern all of these things and build upon that. Mathematics describes all of it

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