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Comment by nicbou | Hacker News Reader

I have the same feeling as a traveler. There's always a Greater Badass who has been on the same adventures as you, but roughed it out the entire way. There's an 80 year old guy who did it in half the time, and another that did it on one foot. It's hard to look back at an identity-defining motorcycle trip, and realise that it's not that special.

In a way though, it's liberating. One-upping the entire world is so out of reach that you can focus on your own experience. Just go there and have your fun.

If my place in the universe is to be a mediocre artist and a passable rider, so be it.

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I agree with your conclusion here. And a big thing to keep in mind is that you are that guy to a lot of the people you’ll meet. As an expat living in exotic places, I find that I consistently impress people with my story and meet people with more impressive stories than me, often on the same day.

Sage advice.

In comparing ourselves to others -- wealth, beauty, fitness, career, etc -- we tend to look up (and feel unsuccessful) rather than look down (and feel successful).

> In a way though, it's liberating. One-upping the entire world is so out of reach that you can focus on your own experience. Just go there and have your fun.

I haven't gotten my head around that one. If I'm nothing but some random nobody and nothing I do really matters, why should I care about my own experience enough to focus on it? What's the fun in randomly killing time? If that's all it's about, I might as well just zone out and watch netflix, or whatever the easiest way to kill time happens to be.

https://media.tenor.com/R4bqdpchzfoAAAAd/buzz-lightyear-fact...

The blessing and the curse is that you get to choose.

Choose Netflix, choose a hobby, choose a career, choose a family, pick several of the above, and/or choose to try to surmount the mountain and be the best among billions.

There's no meaning of life, but there's the meaning you choose for your life.

As with best practices in goals and games, I suggest placing meaning in the choices where success is defined by what is within your control, not on what is outside of your control.

But why would I want to do a thing like that? I chose not to choose life. I chose somethin’ else. And the reasons? There are no reasons. Who needs reasons when you’ve got the internet?

Life has no meaning. We are all as insignificant as grains of sand on a beach. Uniqueness is a big lie that everyone wants to believe. If you enjoy watching netflix more than doing slightly-less-common experiences, you should probably do so. The point of not just passively consuming content is creating memories that can be enjoyed later as well, particularly when discussing with other people.

The differentiation is that you're the only one having that subjective experience and you're stuck with it, so as far as you're concerned the rest of the world is a construct around you and you might as well make it an experience with which you're at least content.

If we started to have neural linking that mimics exactly the entirety of another person's subjective experience, perhaps we'd prefer being brains in vats experiencing a handful of human TV channels while the "top" whatever live it themselves. But then again at that point why not experience an eagle's flight, a whale's dive, the sense of scale of an ant, the computing of some supercomputer, etc.. and whatever we currently consider to be topping our experiences would also be relative.

In a perfect world, you would find the thing you love most, and do that. If it's watching Netflix, so be it.

I assume if you had perfect freedom (and an unconditional basic income), you wouldn't be watching Netflix, at least not all the time. Passive fun is what people usually do when they are tired. You wouldn't be tired all the time.

The difficult part is having to work to pay your bills, in a world so large that there is nothing unique about your skills. That makes you tired, and then there is just enough energy left for watching Netflix.

There was a time when I have said to myself on multiple occasions that "Honestly, I can do 'this' all my life". This being browsing reddit or HN or watching vines and so on. But life has shaken that belief multiple times. Basically you have seen all the patterns there are to be found in the new content that engages you and you can imagine futher combinations of them in your mind (so they don't tickle you or interest you that much) and you say to yourself, "I am done with consuming internet".

It's all about the bragging rights, everything, every moment you feel is worth remembering: so you can tell others. But that is not a bad thing, we're social animals. We just need to drop the competitive aspect and share joy in others achievements, rather than use them as a mirror for self depreciation.

>There's an 80 year old guy who did it in half the time

Isn't that worse when it comes to travelling? I'd rather experience 7 things in 7 days than 7 things in 2 days.

Some people are speed-runners, and some people are completionists, but most people are just "filthy casuals," and we're fine with that. :)

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