A life of splendid uselessness is a life well lived | Hacker News Reader

A life of splendid uselessness is a life well lived

psyche.co

180 pointsindigodaddy89 comments

"The biggest success of my entire life was the fact that I managed to stay entirely unemployed." — Emil Cioran

“I do not particularly like the word 'work.' Human beings are the only animals who have to work, and I think that is the most ridiculous thing in the world. Other animals make their livings by living, but people work like crazy, thinking that they have to in order to stay alive. The bigger the job, the greater the challenge, the more wonderful they think it is. It would be good to give up that way of thinking and live an easy, comfortable life with plenty of free time. I think that the way animals live in the tropics, stepping outside in the morning and evening to see if there is something to eat, and taking a long nap in the afternoon, must be a wonderful life. For human beings, a life of such simplicity would be possible if one worked to produce directly his daily necessities. In such a life, work is not work as people generally think of it, but simply doing what needs to be done.” – Masanobu Fukuoka

A few from Nietzsche:

"Even now one is ashamed of resting, and prolonged reflection almost gives people a bad conscience One thinks with a watch in one’s hand, even as one eats one’s midday meal while reading the latest news of the stock market; one lives as if one always “might miss out on something.” “Rather do anything than nothing”: this principle, too, is merely a string to throttle all culture and good taste"

"How frugal our educated—and uneducated—people have become regarding “joy”! How they are becoming increasingly suspicious of all joy! More and more, work enlists all good conscience on its side; the desire for joy already calls itself a “need to recuperate” and is beginning to be ashamed of itself."

"Soon we may well reach the point where people can no longer give in to the desire for a vita contemplativa (that is, taking a walk with ideas and friends) without self-contempt and a bad conscience."

It's been a while since I read Nietzsche, and every time I see or hear a quote of his, I get reminded of how much wisdom he could pack in so few words.

>Human beings are the only animals who have to work

Have you watched any prey animal for any length of time? Birds, squirrels, antelopes they all spend a majority of their time looking around for predators. Sounds like work to me.

That's necessary. Coding an Ai powered juicer or screwdriver isn't, It's fun, maybe even challenging, but only exists to fulfill a niche and keeps driving pointless innovation to further increase imaginary numbers and 'value'. I don't consider tending to my garden for hours 'work', but a day job I would.

This is not about hedonism or doing nothing. Money quote:

> Of course, not all useless activity is actually good. [...] But truly splendid uselessness nourishes and elevates us spiritually, rather than simply providing a rush of mental or bodily pleasure. The output is always more than the input: [...] rich and ennobling activities that, while also being pleasurable, reward the intellect and the soul.

I laughed out so hard on your comment. I am sorry it is not because I am laughing at you in any way, but rather how the article when full circle around itself. When it said your quote above and this quote further down:

"The worth of anything – an idea, an activity, an artwork, a relationship with another person – is determined pragmatically: things are good to the extent that they are instrumental, with instrumentality usually defined as the capacity to produce money or things.".

We are trying to explain the purpose(!) of somethings that are not instrumental/useful through the lense of how it became that they are useful sometimes. While the examples of the book writer and that punk bands solitary "useless" activity are great they are immediately followed with the example how they produced something out of it.

It's so full circle that it is ridiculously funny. Our culture is soo usefulness driven that you can barely ever put down those lenses even forcefully.

So… learn Lisp? (Not a joke.)

Pretty much

Get a hobby, basically.

doesn't sound useless.

Plenty of others in this thread have expressed the mistake of calling these sorts of activities "useless" but I can relate to the splendidness of self-expression for fun. I've recently started writing music and might record some songs soon after years of religious listening. Over that time I heard many amazing artists across all sorts genres, some with jaw-dropping virtuosity or unbelievable originality. And yet it took someone doing really lo-fi DIY recording over some simple songs to get me off my ass and learn to play. Even though they hadn't reached the heights of some of the other groups I'd heard, I could hear them having fun with their music in the recording, and that was enough to convince me I should give it a try.

I have a saying:

> It is useful to appear useless in the eyes of those who intend to misuse us.

This is like Zhuangzi's tree:

https://ctext.org/zhuangzi/tree-on-the-mountain

On the other hand, you could also end up like the goose who could not cackle, and so was eaten. Thus things are not always straightforward.

I really like your saying.

For whatever reason this reminded me of something attributed to Groucho Marx:

> I don’t want to belong to any club that will accept me as a member

E.g., the entire web development industry :D

People are free to agree on what they and their group or culture generally consider to be a life well lived, but there will never be an objectively defensible answer, it's ontologically impossible.

I think you could reasonably boil it down to “fulfilling.” Just about every other motivation has “fulfilling” At its heart, in one respect or another.

Subjectively defensible answer is enough. But very hard.

It’s also ontologically impossible to proclaim ‘there will never be an objectively defensible answer’ as truth.

Yeah, a life of hedonism is not providing value to society.

Even the epicurean subreddit agreed when this was brought up.

That could only be true if each of our desires made true were not of value to society. And I think its obvious lots of people derive pleasure in things that create value, from helping others to producing nice thing to throwing a great party.

Hell even the stereotypical hedonistic lifestyle provides value. From that friend who gets you out of the house to do something, the life and soul of the party who makes everyones night brighter, your friend the uber-optimist who encourages you when your down.

"is not providing value to society" ... are we talking only the core values today of profit and growth?

It's like pornography... you can't properly set boundaries on what defines it, but "you know it when you see it"

Nothing about gp’s comment is particularly capitalist. It actually reminded me of The old communist slogan: “He who doesn’t work, doesn’t eat”.

> The old communist slogan

Lenin have repeated that after Paul... and John Smith

2 Thessalonians 3:10

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/He_who_does_not_work,_neither_...

The other communist slogan is “He who does work, probably doesn’t eat too”.

Why does the definition of a “life well lived” have to include value to society?

In order for someone's existence to be acceptable, they should provide value? Monetary value? Or does human life intrinsically have value, making this a tautology...?

I really wonder what this means in terms of how the homeless or the elderly are treated.

What a strange inversion of reasoning. *

Hedonism is an example of society being so capable of providing that it has largess. Any society without hedonists would be cautionary. Hedonists test the limits of what society has achieved on behalf of the individual and is in my belief the entire point of society.

Society should elevate the individual be it hedonism or otherwise.

* this is a quote and I am being a bit facetious here, I agree with other commenters that it’s impossible to draw a line on this balance

You could make the exact same argument about people with clinical psychopathy, and it would be just as valid.

Well said, yes it’s very much relative to other humans around.

That largess is very much not equally distributed.

Indulgence doesn’t necessarily have to mean abuse.

Where does "providing value to society" come into it? Why?

A life of hedonism is unlikely to provide maximum value to society but it could be net positive.

Someone aiming for maximum pleasure and minimum risk could spend much of their time as yet another cog in capitalistic society, but an ambitious hedonist is likely to aim for more. Someone like Hew Hefner might seem like a poor role model, but he did make something millions of people wanted while living a life of extreme excess. Given different talents that could be anything from becoming a rock star to curing cancer.

What about unique patterns of wealth redistribution across the economies they participate in? Surely this is a value to society.

Not true. It is only that way because people have only considered a single kind of hypothetical human (probably of themselves). But solving this merely requires us to integrate all of these solution into 1 by mapping the personality -> solution. Trivially, every person requiring a unique solution is an objective answer.

Not every day you click a link on HN and see Minutemen in the header image on the article. Chalking that up as a win and a sign to go do something splendidly useless with the rest of my day.

Queued up some Minutemen on Spotify. I'd heard of the band but never really listened before.

Same, and the first song that came up is the quintessential anthem for "the song you play before doing something stupid." (Jackass theme)

I hadn't really listened to them until I read 'Our Band Could Be Your Life', Azerrad, one of the books mentioned in the article. Now I'm a fan.

I think it's a life well lived if you have the personality for it. I know a lot of people agonizing over "making a difference" or the "meaning of life". At times I feel vaguely guilty for not feeling those feelings or having those thoughts but then I get distracted by the next interesting endeavour.

Most people have happiness as a goal. Doing what you enjoy accomplishes that goal. Doing things that accomplish your goals is, by definition, not useless.

I don't think anyone genuinely holds the belief that economic productivity should be even the primary, nonetheless exclusive, goal for a person's life.

> Most people have happiness as a goal

From where I sit either this is true and most people are terrible at achieving their goals or it’s not really most people’s’ goal.

If you’re posting here you’re likely around a lot of people who have longer time preference and have chosen to temporarily sacrifice short-term happiness in an effort to maximize their lifetime happiness.

The key is knowing when to stop. A lot of people don’t.

Philosophers since forever have wondered about this :)

> Most people have happiness as a goal

Indeed. And I would argue that if you're not, on the whole, living a happy life then something is broken and needs to be fixed.

> I don't think anyone genuinely holds the belief [...]

Oh, lots of people hold this belief, at least in the US. I think it's reductionist in the extreme (if you aren't a productive drone, you have no value as a person), but it's not all that rare.

My response is "if that's the sort of life that makes you happy, who am I to argue?"

> Oh, lots of people hold this belief, at least in the US. I think it's reductionist in the extreme (if you aren't a productive drone, you have no value as a person), but it's not all that rare.

We even made a religion out of it. This is the teleology of American evangelical Protestantism.

I think we'll remember 21st century as the age of overoptimisation and hustle culture, only to realise all the YouTubers were selling us a dream of forcing being and doing our best. We lost track of doing something because we are intrinsically interested in it. And that process of working on something useless for ourselves in the end has an effect of being useful to others and worst case -> time well-spent since we enjoyed it anyways.

A lot of people seem to have the attitude that if you're not employed _right now_ then you're not contributing to society and therefore are an oxygen thief.

It's completely ridiculous. Some people, say nurses or sanitation workers, do indeed provide value every day. But there are tons of people who work all day and barely achieve anything. There are people who work all day and actively reduce the quality of life of others. There are people who work one day, invent something crazy, and could basically just retire there and then and still would have been more useful than the average person.

I reckon as long as you can pay your bills and you're not acting antisocially, do whatever you want. Generally I tend to respect a person far more who puts their energy into their family, their hobbies, their sports etc. than one who is completely obsessed with work.

One of the most "uselessness" useful activity I have experienced is simply watching nature i.e. shape of trees, design of leaves and colour of flowers, behaviour of non-human animals both adult and kids, and birds. It gives the same feeling as in Yoga meditation. Yoga meditation is also a form of useful "uselessness".

If there were no such thing as cryonics I would travel to Brazil and go to the Amazon River and build a raft on it and live aboard it and fish and pick fruit and stare up in the sky and ponder The mystery of Life until it all ends.. why bother with this rat race and children and the worries of life when it's really just nothing ...has no meaning etc

For me, because life is really cool and interesting, and I love the fact that more people than have ever lived so far will probably live after I'm dead, and I'm happy they'll see and enjoy things I probably can't imagine. I want those future people, and the present people who are not me, to do well. I care about my life, and I'm sad it'll end, but that's just one drop of tragedy in the ocean of comedy. c:

I think that emotional investment in others is crucial to overcoming death anxiety, at least for me (as a hardcore based fedora atheist). If your outlook is confined to your ego, everything seems pretty bleak and hopeless since your existence (which is the only thing you're emotionally invested in) is doomed to end, probably sorta miserably.

Meaning is whatever you give it.

If you truly care about nothing then sure it's all pointless. But I'm sure you have interests, desires, passions. The meaning is then how you spend your time relative to those

Huh?

> has no meaning

You should not put a book down half way and say it has no meaning. You haven't finished the book. We don't make unreasonable demands from authors or their books but when it gets to God (the author) and Life (the book) we make unreasonable demands.

You have to finish reading the book.

I don’t believe any god has anything to do with anything. It’s all increasing entropy, chaos, and randomness as far as I’m concerned.

You may be interested in reading https://meltingasphalt.com/a-nihilists-guide-to-meaning/

I love the stories here, but this article seems so “duh, of course” to me that I wonder, is there really a target audience who doesn’t think “splendid useless” (I would use the term “beautiful”) things are a huge part of the life well lived?

Maybe I don’t know enough hustlers?

When I read this, I also though "duh". Yet, consuming articles like this from time to time is useful to remind you of "splendid uselessness" because, as the article suggests, the world around us is orthogonal to this. So your day-to-day is not aligned to this, and the default is to view everything through an economic productivity lens.

Yes they exist but they confirmation bis their own hobbies as “useful” even though they too have hobbies!

Usefulness as a concept assumes that you can make a connection between an activity and a desired outcome. But for many things someone giving a lifetime to something odd might result in something useful down the line. A million people with an odd hobby might create an insight that saves the planet! It is you just don’t know in advance which useless activity would help.

Eh, no. Just because you aren't getting paid doesn't mean that what you're doing is useless. "Useless" is a word the writer chose deliberately to be provocative and thus get attention, but it's wrong.

To be fair though, "a life doing useful things you aren't getting paid for" doesn't roll so trippingly off the keyboard.

In my experience, it's easy to get paid doing useless things just because someone believes they may turn out useful anyway; and for some kinds of actually useful things it's pretty hard to get paid for doing them at all.

Yes. "Useful" is only loosely correlated with "income-producing".

To be fair, many people would describe many of those activities as "useless". But I think you make a good point.

If they call everything that one don't get paid for "useless" then they are using the wrong word.

In fact, the examples that the author cites were manifestly not useless at all even on the criterion that money is the ultimate measure of utility. In the one case, the work produced a book which, one presumes, some people bought, and in the other case, art (music) that people at the very least went out of their way to listen to, and possibly even paid for. (I've never been to a punk rock concert, but I presume that at least some of them had cover charges.)

There is some truth to this. Having children and raising them is an unquestionably useful activity but most societies, particularly the industrialized ones such as the US, Japan, and Korea, do not 'pay' for. Many mothers are paid indirectly by their husbands (housewives), but there are many single mothers or fathers who do unpaid work as parents.

Interestingly, caring for one's parents used to be an unpaid activity, and still is in non-industrialized countries. But there has been a successful transition to paid (albeit poorly) work as far as older parents are concerned, in industrialized countries such as the US and the UK (I do not think this is a popular phenomenon in Japan and Korea AFAIK).

"Not all need be monetized."

Tldr: uselessness is useful when we narrow the definition of uselessness to be meaningless.

"But truly splendid uselessness nourishes and elevates us spiritually, rather than simply providing a rush of mental or bodily pleasure. The output is always more than the input"

Not all forms of uselessness are praise-worthy, only those that are ... useful.

[in response to multiple comments + my own peeves about the things this kind of discussion brings up]:

We, society at large, need to stop thinking in terms of our "use" for somebody else and treating life like a dystopian Communist country, where everyone must have a role and "contribute".

Until we know otherwise, none of us chose to exist. Or had any say in the countless dice that were rolled to determine where and as what we started to exist.

I think society should be more considerate about the fact some people may actually be burdened by existence: Their dice weren't rolled the same as yours. They may just be looking for as little friction as possible and serve their time and get out, or actively searching for things to make existence seem worthwhile.

In any case, it's just not possible for everyone to be "useful", certainly not for all the billions of us, unless you artificially hold back technological progress or invent useless work just for some to pretend to be useful.

I mean if you didn’t cause much human suffering it’s a plus, you don’t need to help humanity advance big time to have a meaningful life.

Thomas Alva Edison, Nikola Tesla, Albert Einstein, Wolfgang Mozart and Leonardo da Vinci would disagree.

Live well lived is a life where you aren't ever completely happy and always strive for more. It's a life where your skills are subjected to resistance, and you constantly face obstacles. This makes your life an adventure.

Everyone's life should be an adventure.

How is the end result different if you're happy and curious and motivated? Needing to have some level of unhappiness and constant striving against resistance seems unnecessary. Kids, when discovering the world, aren't unhappy.

Ambition vs contentment. Everyone has a different opinion, and yours is not more right than others.

The author seems to undermine their own point by saying it's only certain types of uselessness that are good. That uselessness is actually useful for certain things and thus, are like those things he mentioned which have a use and end goal. Do useless things, but only if they are useful.

In essence: “have a hobby”.

I'm a bit confused by this article. On the one hand, it seems to advocate for thinking beyond "instrumentality" and being solely "oriented around the practical principles of utility, effectiveness and impact". On the other hand the two examples highlighted are "some of the greatest nature writing ever set to paper" and "the greatest punk rock bands in history", which seems pretty squarely oriented around utility, effectiveness and impact...

If the point is that doing "useless things" can also lead to greatness, I would say it's also possible to complete a marathon by walking on your hands, but it sure as shit easier to just run. If the point is that "impact" is not the be all/end all, I would whole heartedly agree but argue that the first step is to reorient ourselves away from celebrating just the extra ordinary outcomes.

Maybe the idea is that from the first person perspective, neither pursuit (EDIT) felt like doing anything useful... and yet...

when capitalism sublimates everything into commodity form, it's important to be reminded of the water we fish swim in.

Fun or Play can be considered useless if not being commoditized or sold, but of course they are essential. Byung-Chul Han has some nice books about this.

>Fun or Play can be considered useless if not being commoditized or sold, but of course they are essential.

No they aren't.

Stoicism will tell you that happiness can come from virtue.

We are living in an age that marketing companies push hedonism because they can sell it. Much harder to sell virtue in a 5 second youtube ad.

virtue is neither real nor transcendent.

tl;dr - personal hobbies are good.

Thank you. Hobbies are a wonderful expression of wealth, time management, and initiative.

As a parent the time for hobbies has morphed into intentional activities that help my children and when possible that I also enjoy.

> As a parent the time for hobbies has morphed into intentional activities that help my children and when possible that I also enjoy.

Nobody really understands that until they have children of their own. I sure didn't, but lately I've found a lot of joy in watching my kid discover virtual reality games. Much more than I actually enjoy them myself.

Uh, yuck. Take them outside.

Sometimes it’s raining or dark outside…

Reply on news.ycombinator.com