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Comment by jamesgreenleaf | Hacker News Reader

This sounds more like "playing devil's advocate" or taking a contrarian view, or questioning one's assumptions or decisions. Whatever you call it, the author is right about it being a useful skill.

If you want to talk about "staring into the abyss" though... to me that phrase evokes the casting of all reality into doubt. It means to grapple with the Münchhausen trilemma, or to perceive the limitless and arbitrary space of metaphysics, or to acknowledge the oblivion of meaning that the shadow of death casts over us. Either way, the abyss really is an abyss. I don't know whether it's useful to stare into it.

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I take what the author describes as "staring into the abyss" as a special case of playing devil's advocate: one where the contrarian view has significant and emotionally difficult consequences, and you're actually letting yourself feel the emotional weight of potentially choosing it instead of just playing with the idea.

For example: Imagine you go to an engineering college, and you start feeling like you might not like the idea of an engineering career. You could play devil's advocate by chatting with your engineering-enthralled friends about how fun it'd be to drop out of college and go to culinary school instead, but that's just talk. Staring into the abyss would be actually thinking through the financial, social, and personal implications of that choice, looking into culinary schools, and letting that dread and anxiety and excitement wash over you while you genuinely contemplate making the switch.

> If you want to talk about "staring into the abyss" though... to me that phrase evokes the casting of all reality into doubt.

In a more literal sense, yeah, I agree, that's what staring into the abyss is. I think here the author uses it as an effective way of saying "question the assumptions of your immediate reality".

> letting that dread and anxiety and excitement wash over you while you genuinely contemplate making the switch.

But life also happens anyways. For me, a lot of what constitutes "staring into the abyss" is accepting that neither the original plan nor my alternate wish worked out as expected - despite the best laid plans - because almost nothing ever does. It's not just considering all the implications of a decision but accepting that things just work out differently than you hoped.

[edit] I guess I mean that accepting the inevitability of previous disappointments is as much or more a part of grappling with the abyss as is considering the future.

Many folks refuse to accept or do either of these things. If you aren’t that person, then congrats! Well, maybe. It has pros and cons either way.

I can honestly say I’m pretty good at this and feel like its more of a burden to me in my life so far. I no longer know anyone who shares this trait, and most people find even hearing me talk about it uncomfortable.

Perhaps I will get the opportunity to use it someday, but as of now it is really just emotionally taxing to have many uncomfortable thoughts that I have to bottle up.

Look into Dabrowski's Theory of Positive Disintegration.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Positive_disintegration

It helped me.

Thank you.

I think most great writers and a few great barflies share it with you. But it's definitely increasingly difficult to encounter in honest conversation, because the structure of modern life does everything possible to discourage honest conversation about the meaning (or especially the meaninglessness) of life.

To me "staring into the abyss" isn't just "accepting things". Its an action. Its something you can spend your time doing. Lots of people don't do it - especially in the modern age of social media where the abyss can be kept away with an infinitely scrolling list of entertaining content.

I live in a highrise building with a beautiful view. I've spent a lot of precious hours just sitting on my couch looking over the city and thinking. Those moments have yielded a bounty of insights. But for all the valuable thoughts on the couch waiting for me, I don't go there very often. There's always something more stimulating that wants my attention. Letting my attention settle on some random thread on HN (coughs) instead of pondering infinity has a deep cost that we rarely account for.

It must be an indictment of something that “introspection, long term planning, thorough consideration of the idea of changing career paths away from STEM” can be with a straight face described as “staring into the abyss.”

I mentor an engineer for whom staring into the abyss involved walking away from a decade long culinary career and learning to code.

Changing your life is hard. It challenges your whole identity. What you’re switching from and too is irrelevant.

> casting of all reality into doubt

Throwing one's reality into 'doubt' can cause you to significantly change your behavior, thoughts, ideas, etc. If those are largely negative to begin with and 'casting reality into doubt' (which is certainly one piece, if not the major piece of disassociation) in a safe place can improve and change your behavior for the better, it seems like a great idea to me.

https://psyche.co/ideas/when-reality-slips-through-your-fing...

I second this as a classic example of advocatus diaboli[0] in order to find a hole/weakness/wrongness in one own's initial argument/assumptions.

Taking the Nietzsche quote[1] into the context of his work: "Jenseits von Gut und Böse (Viertes Hauptstück; Sprüche und Zwischenspiele, 146)" [Beyond Good and Evil; Fourth main part; Proverbs and interludes; 146]] your interpretation seems more in line with the book.

The inevitability of birthing/becoming a Monster oneself by fighting a Monster for too long is akin to staring into the abyss long enough until the abyss is staring into you. Melting away of cause and effect, the blurring, the reversing and finally the interchangeability/permeability - in this case - of the line between the object and observer (objectivism).

Nihilism (dissolution of all values, meaningless-ism) as a standpoint devours its subject who in the beginning is looking at the outside world all around - from the inside out in the end.

[0]https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Devil%27s_advocate

[1]http://www.zeno.org/Philosophie/M/Nietzsche,+Friedrich/Jense...

146 Wer mit Ungeheuern kämpft, mag zusehn, daß er nicht dabei zum Ungeheuer wird. Und wenn du lange in einen Abgrund blickst, blickt der Abgrund auch in dich hinein.

I would have been interested in reading such a blogpost yeah, I feel like I got catfished :)

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