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Comment by rrgok | Hacker News Reader

This may feel a little depressing, but I would like to hear the HN community's thoughts on this. Every time I hear about making progress or creating something beautiful, the first thing that comes to mind is: for how long?

As humans, do we think about how long we are going to chase the ever-moving goal post of progress? Do we have a ballpark idea of it? Or are we moving like a dog chasing its own tail, going in circles, having just the illusion of going somewhere but never reaching anywhere?

It is bad day for me. Software Engineering make me only realize that people are never happy. You implement a nice feature that helps people and what comes out of their mouth: but can we improve on that? Not even thinking about what has been implemented.

Compared to 50 years ago, how much we improved. How comfortable our lives have become. And yet we are still chasing something and running somewhere.

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> for how long?

As long as you have an itch to scratch. Steve Jobs didn’t care about progress or about creating for its own sake. He had ideas about what he wanted to see existing in the world, and worked to make those ideas come true.

You mention implementing nice features. The right thing to do is to implement the features you want to use (and to validate their design by actually using them yourself). Even if no one else likes the features, you like them and thus will have some fulfillment by implementing them. Furthermore, if you find the features useful, there is a good chance that there will be other people like you that also find them useful. So usually that is a good strategy, provided that you are an actual, and sufficiently representative, user of the product.

> Software Engineering make me only realize that people are never happy.

I'm not convinced this is an innate property of humanity, rather I think it is a conditioned behavior to keep us buying things. Pay attention to what marketing tells you, what it really tells you, behind the ostensible message. It is not telling you good things about yourself or your life, and it is bombarding you constantly with these intrusive thoughts.

Even my dog gets tired of eating the same feed all the time or playing with the same toy. It gets excited when I bring new toy and is much more eager to eat when I switch feed to a different type from time to time.

I don’t have a TV so my dog is not watching ads so I expect marketing does not affect it.

Might still be that other dogs it plays with tell stuff “I got a new toy, get your owner to buy you new one too”.

I think it is innate property of living things to need different things/experiences and what not in order to survive/thrive.

I've been thinking about boredom and the need for change for a long time. My hypothesis is that boredom is the baseline of life. From this basis, I feel like whatever we may do we will inevitably come back to boredom: again, the dog chasing his own tail. Wouldn't be better to live with boredom instead of having the illusion of escaping it from it now and then?

So we have opposite baselines. Because for me movement and looking for food or resources is the baseline.

If you are bored and stay in one place you die.

Boredom and being well fed is privilege.

How could it not be innate? One of the most noteworthy properties of humanity is our tendency throughout history to make unparalleled technological progress. Surely something like that requires a dissatisfaction with present conditions.

It seems more probable that marketing, like most things that work well, take advantage of our evolved properties.

Humans have an intrinsic quality that they are never satisfied for very long. There are plenty of examples of it. People think "once I get that job I'll be happy" or "once I get married I'll finally achieve what I want" or "once I buy a house, I'll feel like I'm settled". But that rarely happens. People get used to what they have and want more.

But that's a good thing. It's the reason why we have progress. Thank god someone thought "No, it's not good enough that we cure breast cancer by removing the breast entirely, we can do better". Or "no, it's not good enough that we can grow 1000 lbs of wheat on an acre, we can do better".

It's a blessing (progress) and a curse (dissatisfaction). But you can't have one without the other.

I think you might find some solace in the concept of wabi-sabi. An oversimplification is that it’s an aesthetics of things that are temporary, a guide to appreciating beautiful things that inevitably decay.

Counterpoint: "but can we improve on that?" hopefully keeps you in work, unless you're unfortunate enough to work at a company that hires-and-fires upon completion of the latest version of a niche piece of software.

Well we are chasing it because it is still no where near good enough.

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