Lifestyle design from first principles
taylor.town
taylor.town
I don’t understand this statement. The rest of the article is an exercise in philosophy.
I perceive it to be behavior that does not elevate the human being beyond that of a lesser animal.
This is just hedonism.
Their philosophy isn’t to understand truth or beauty either. It’s just to “use heuristics” to do what other successful people do.
I don’t like Western hedonistic philosophy like this that piggybacks off of old world philosophies and picks and chooses behaviors and practices without understanding. I associate it with Western humanism which I find equally dangerous because the two are philosophical siblings from the same immoral thinking.
This is dangerous philosophy.
Edit: I’ve edited this post because I found my initial post to be overly negative.
That's obviously ridiculous. Correspondingly it's very easy to poke holes in the arguments here. Let's just take the first premise, that we should (a) prevent immediate suffering, and (b) prevent future suffering. What about the very important case where I accept some suffering in the short term to reduce suffering in the long term? No indication here of where that makes sense and where it doesn't. What about a prisoner's dilemma where I may be able to prevent a lot of suffering, but only if someone else (who I have limited information about) makes the same decision I do?
These questions (What do we do about time? What do we do about society?) are just two examples of the hard questions where all the work gets done. The post doesn't explore them. In fact it seems to assume as a premise that hard questions don't really exist. If this is hedonism, the stuffy philosophers maligned by the poster have produced better arguments for hedonism than this one.
(All that said I don't think we should go too hard on the poster - at least they are trying, which is more than most people do!)
> What about the very important case where I accept some suffering in the short term to reduce suffering in the long term?
Great point.
Any recommendations on how to think about expected value when minimizing suffering?
Also, I think pain and suffering are very different, and I completely failed to communicate that in the essay.
> These questions (What do we do about time? What do we do about society?) are just two examples of the hard questions where all the work gets done. The post doesn't explore them. In fact it seems to assume as a premise that hard questions don't really exist.
I purposefully avoided hard questions in this post. I'm much more interested in systems that reliably lead to good questions and good-enough answers.
But I should've addressed more about how to think outside of yourself. Lately, I've been reconsidering my beliefs around "changing the world" and trying to focus more on my family and community. Still searching for the right balance
> (All that said I don't think we should go too hard on the poster - at least they are trying, which is more than most people do!)
Thanks :)
But based on this comments section, it looks like I should've tried a little harder haha
I don't think it's about "minimizing suffering". There is things to suffer for, and there are things which you shouldn.t
I like to prefix my questions with "When should"
Therefore:
> When should I suffer?
and
> When should I not suffer?
I built a platform where I record questions I ask myself
Here is for the keyword "suffering"
But I think your point still stands. There are plenty of reasons to purposefully subject yourself to pain (e.g. exercise).
I'm not sure about suffering. Suffering is an unavoidable side-effect of love and other delights of life, but it doesn't seem like something to ever be sought after. I'll need to think on that some more.
Also, your "when should" trick is clever! Good strategy for keeping things concrete.
It's not a side-effect. It's an intrinsic part.
This is expressed in ancient philosophy like Taoism and embedded in its symbol , but since you poo poo philosophy, give a listen to some old pop music: The Rose by Amanda McBroom and sung by Bette Midler, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zxSTzSEiZ2c
There's no such thing, less so in the extremely simplified form that you attempted. If your goal was to create some content to attract customers (which I suspect) then it's OK I guess. If it's to explore ideas about life... Every idea you wrote can be turned 180 degrees and be just as valid.
"prevent yourself from immediate suffering" - what about when it's productive in that it generates a valuable life lesson at a moderate cost?
"prevent yourself from future suffering" - at what cost? Paying now for futures is a risk that involves chance. There's plenty of occasions when it does not make sense to invest for an uncertain future.
"maximize attention" - Downsides: burnout, narrow focus, etc.
> Their philosophy isn’t to understand truth or beauty either. It’s just to “use heuristics” to do what other successful people do.
I've found that studying others is a reliable way to discover truth and beauty. I also think investigating yourself produces good results. But maybe I'm overthinking haha
> picks and chooses behaviors and practices without understanding
I'm really really interested in how to pick behaviors and practices! Do you have any recommendations?
I perceive that your philosophical framework is an attempt to find minimal ethical strategies to define a well-lived life unto itself for oneself.
You focus on suffering and pleasure as hedons do, and even your questioning now feels like a Monte Carlo iteration of furthering this goal.
You don’t define concepts of good or bad, righteous or evil, outside of what harms the self without concern for others.
You seek to imitate instead of search for ground truth but you use first principle concepts from your own lived experience which doubtlessly derives from concepts you no longer remember the origin of but are stemmed in Western civilization thought.
Yet instead of deriving your first principles from morals, you derive them from pleasure.
You are thusly immoral.
Are you capable of moral behavior? Surely. And I’m sure in the day-to-day no one would think twice about interactions with you as a person.
But as one explores worldly terrain and maps the hills and valleys of the earth, subsequent and progressive meaningful interactions with immoral people yield the voids of the heart.
But you can't look in somebody's head, to see the whole context of their behaviour. There is multiple official cognitive flaws related to this. Humans are very bad at reading others minds and good at hiding their intentions. Think about a typical suicidal person who appears happy and smiling but then... well, you hear the bad news.
But you single out "Western" humanism and perhaps that explains it. I already believe Western culture is deeply selfist and that selfism is fundamentally immoral -- Morality is all about transcending selfishness.
Do you mind elaborating on your issues with Western Humanism? I've never heard anyone critique it from a non-biblical angle, so I'm curious to hear what the gripes are.
As far as I’m concerned it’s a formal definition for those without adherence to any moral value system. You don’t need a biblical argument for that, it just is what it is.
You can call people whatever you want, it doesn’t mean they identify with such a group.
I find it to be the same as associating people who treat women with equality with feminism. Could you prescribe such a label? Sure I guess. But feminism is larger than that concept.
I’m not saying it is a misnomer. I am saying that it can be one for the same reason.
And so if you operate by assumption that one has no value system, they’re immoral.
I’m not trying to dice words here. Humans intuitively know what certain qualities of goodness and badness are. That doesn’t mean they actually live them, though.
That’s what’s dangerous. The subtlety of knowing that people know what goodness and badness are, seeing that they can in some or even most situations live accordingly, but not actually internalizing such philosophy to explicitly live it out, other than doing so my mimicry, requirement, or obligation.
I also find it a little funny that you assume Humanists are only living out their philosophy "by mimicry, requirement, or obligation," as that's often how I've seen humanists describe religious moralism. I appreciate you sharing your perspective!
They are deontological brothers. There's nothing more to glean from there.
To me this is the critical distinction. Pain (loss of loved ones, physical pain, health issues, losing a job etc) is a part of life. If you love, you ultimately lose. This is what life is, this is what love is. It's gunna hurt at times. This cannot be changed and cannot be controlled. This is the Buddhist "first arrow".
But. What you ~do~ with that pain - how you respond to a crisis, how you think of yourself as victim or otherwise, how much you ruminate on the self: "damn, this shit always happens to me / why am I always ill / I'm poorer than that guy over there and it's eating me up" - all of this ~can~ be changed. This is suffering. We're all so bound up in the self that the ego very often controls our response to pain. Suffering blooms. This is the "second arrow".
Like anything else, it takes practice to get better at this. But you can get better at it. I know I have. I'm still - like most humans - often bound by instinctual reactions. I'm still triggered by anger and fear and uncertainty at regular periods. But with mindfulness and attention training it becomes easier to be content, easier to "put a gap between stimulus and response", easier to just notice the ego flaring up, see those moments of regret or jealousy or greed.
Attention truly is at the centre of this. Noticing from as dispassionate a position as possible that you are reacting in a particular way will only come when you pay attention to your inner dialogue. That's another reason why attention being eaten by gadgets / notifications / etc is so nasty.
Beautifully written! I completely agree.
> Like anything else, it takes practice to get better at this. But you can get better at it. I know I have.
Can you share more details? What are some practices you found particularly helpful?
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mindfulness-based_stress_reduc...
I have gained a great deal of value from the stoic/Buddhist traditions around acceptance of a certain amount of suffering, but 'learn to appreciate your suffering' is just plain silly in most cases. If masochism is your thing, fair enough, but don't act like it's what everyone should do.
The author didn't even indicate you should do everything to avoid suffering, but you're going after the idea like a ghost has been haunting you with it. I would normally assume you meant 'appreciate' as one might appreciate an avalanche - from the farthest possible vantage point - but you took that right to the "any of this 'x' bullshit" level right form the hop, just because the author made a reasonable assumption. (which was not that we should "do everything to stop suffering"). Nearly every human and other living creature seems to act in accordance with the author's assumption, so it's probably not a bad thing to assume.
Suffering is bad - arguably as bad can be. If I must live with it, I'll appreciate how polished the turd is, but if I don't have to live with that turd, why would I?
Something about the suffering you experience ultra-running rewired my brain, actually. I came to think that we try too hard (in the first world) to make ourselves overly comfortable. And, in fact, some amount of suffering and struggle motivates and promotes the human brain. Good innovations, culture, food, etc tend to come from these places.
I think the article means suffering in a first couple Maslo’s Hierarchy kind of way, i.e. food, sleep, disease, etc. This is hard to argue with, especially when kids are dying of easily preventable problems in some parts of the world. This is clearly not what I mean. We can and should do everything to solve that suffering.
But, by contrast: having to walk two miles every day to get somewhere because you can’t afford a car is probably a good suffering with lots of fabulously creative solutions.
It feels to me like we sometimes confuse inconvenience for suffering and then try to “solve it” because “suffering is bad”.
Or grifting.
An example I see on socmedia regularly: some mogul worth 20 to 100 million, or more, lecturing the rest of us on the value of suffering. It’s ridiculous. Does that guy suffer? No.
So I prefer not to encourage this and say honestly, as a near working class person who struggles mightily to save & earn - I don’t appreciate suffering and I especially don’t like to hear it from people materially insulated from suffering. End of story.
Your assessment of suffering being unappreciable is borderline ludicrous. I can appreciate someone else who works hard. Do they have to earn 20 million to get my appreciation? Absolutely not. I can appreciate my own hard work when I get off my couch and run a few miles. I could have stayed on the couch and taken it easy. Do I have to break my back for a noble cause for it to be suffering? Absolutely not.
If life was just a happy stroll for 100 years straight, that would actually be miserable.
It's kind of ridiculous to assume that merely having lots of money removes all suffering.
I mean, it sounds to me like someone worth 100 million has quite a lot of attachment, which I am told is the basis of suffering according to some guy under a tree.
We choose to suffer for things we deem worth suffering for even if they don't bring us "joy". In an extreme example of this, we might even choose to jump in front of a car if it means saving a child.
I think a lot of things in this philosophical vein are a symptom of disconnection from society. I truly believe that if you are socially enmeshed with others around you and deeply care about their well being (friends, family, maybe even a partner and/or pets and/or children), or have other things in the world that you deeply care about, (e.g. nature, art, etc.), it would seem odd to try and deduce life from first principles, since these "worldly attachments" are an immediate and obvious source of meaning, value, and direction.
Regarding section 3 - what even is "true happiness", anyway? I'd say (without evidence) that among those who are financially secure, the happiest people are probably those who are content and don't spend all their time wondering about how happy they are; the more you think about this topic the more you'll focus how you can be happier and just end up dissatisfied as a result. A mindset of optimizing for happiness will accidentally make you unhappy.
With all that said, I do like the author's section about trying to align yourself with reality as much as possible.
Fantastic point.
How do you escape the trap? How do you make yourself happier without worrying about happiness?
It seems like a meditation discipline could be helpful for addressing this. How else would you tackle it?
I think part of the answer is in the quotation you quote: "the happiest people are probably those who are content and don't spend all their time wondering about how happy they are.".
My experience agrees with that! For instance, less than 30 minutes ago I went take my kid to the kindergarten and on my way back saw an house for sale, and my automatic response was something like "why do others have money and I can't get a higher paying job". Fortunately, I was paying attention to my thoughts, caught that one on time, and reminded myself that I do already own a house, it's almost payed, and I do have a good (enough) life.
> It seems like a meditation discipline could be helpful for addressing this. How else would you tackle it?
What I try to do is to catch those kind of thoughts before they make serious damage, and realistically remind myself of the path that I chose and what I have now as consequence.
I wouldn't say that I can do it successfully every time, as I've been lately fighting these exact thoughts that I should earn more money (because of small kid, family, inflation, etc.), and I enter a spiral of reading HN for posts about people switching from academia to industry (my current dilema), and lose sleep, and get tired. But after some time (used to be months, now weeks), I try to calm down, realize that yes I'm bored but I do have enough free time, earn above average (for the country, not for the industry), and an interesting opportunity may appear eventually.
So, I'm not a perfect example of success, but I do try my best to remind myself to be content with what I have achieved so far. It's a balance, and it's hard to strike. And being content (some of the times) doesn't mean that I've reached "nirvana".
Don't know if what I wrote makes sense (still tired), but hope it helps.. :/
In my limited experience you do so by aiming for content. You'll stumble on happy every now and then without trying to.
Content can be a continuous state, Happy cannot.
I have a slight tendency towards gloominess and light depression and for me the most powerful tool has been to change how I answer "how are you doing", both when other people ask and when I ask myself. Instead of trying to figure out if I'm happy, I just look if anything bad has happened yet. Usually the answer is no, so I can answer "doing good so far" pretty much always. Doing this has improved my mood incredibly. That's the same sort of happy-vs-content thing I'm talking about.
It's like going to sleep. If you try to will yourself to sleep it will invariably fail. Instead you have to make the conditions right and sleep will mostly happen by itself. Similarly you shouldn't try to be happy. You should try to not be unhappy -- by removing things that make you unhappy, or by learning to live with them without it affecting your mood too much -- and the rest will follow.
In practice, I'd say the feeling of "contentedness" is less of a feeling of "coolness" or "relaxation", and more like a very "normal" feeling (like how you already feel 90% of the day) where your head is either kind of empty or running full of random things. It's mostly about the absence of negative spirals of thinking.
As far as the changes I made, the specific steps I took were along a framework of addressing habits. I think that fleeting thoughts of comparing to others are kind of like an addictive habit like smoking. First a thought like "others are doing better / are happier than me / I should be doing xyz to be happier" comes, either for no reason or from some environmental trigger, and then you dwell on the thought which is what causes the unhappiness.
One possible step is removing triggers - I think these triggers tend to be social, so if you're surrounded by people who constantly brag or make verbal comparisons to others, spend less time with them if you're able to, and spend more time with others that you enjoy the company of. Also, as bad as it sounds, it's also useful to spend less time around friends who are unhappy / have bad mental health and spend more time around happy people (or pets), I think mindsets of optimism and contentedness can rub off when they're "normal" (i.e., if everyone around you thinks in that way).
In my case, I started spending a lot less time with a particular depressed friend (it felt like a shitty move at the time, but after improving my situation I was able to come back and spend time with them again in a more resilient mindset where their thought patterns don't rub off on me), talking way less with my parents who were comparing me to others a lot (ditto about feeling like a shitty move at the time but being able to come back), began having way less depressing / "deep" / "philosophical" conversations with friends, and spent more time with friends and acquaintances (+ my cat) who seem social and who don't talk about themselves/others too much.
Along this vein, my litmus test for whether I consider a friendship to be positive for me was, "if this person ends up more successful than me, would I be happy or jealous?". If I'd feel happy, then it's because I deeply care about them, the same way I would be happy and excited if my sister or parents struck it rich. If I feel even slightly jealous, then it's because I don't genuinely care about them in the same way, instead I'm using them as an index for how successful I want to be, and any friendship resulting from that will be full of social comparisons and won't be enjoyable for me. Also, cutting social media feeds (but still staying on messaging apps like Messenger, Instagram DM, WhatsApp, etc.) was also a really good move, basically it eliminated the downside of social comparison while keeping the upside of social connection.
The second step is removing "dwelling" on these fleeting thoughts like "am I happy?" "are others happier?" etc. A band-aid solution is to dismiss such thoughts when you recognize them by acknowledging that your circumstances are pretty good and that it's a bit vain to obsess over your personal happiness levels when things are already pretty decent. I used the statement "stop being so vain" to dismiss these thoughts for a while which seemed to work pretty well. Eventually I didn't have to use this bandaid because I just unlearned the habit of dwelling.
With that said, this is just my approach and what worked for me, everyone has different circumstances etc., but I'm sure some of it could translate to others' circumstances. Hope this helps!
> What traits do wealthy people have in common? > What traits do poor people have in common?
There seems to be a subtle but profound supposition that being rich or poor is just a matter of "heuristics." Reminds me of the countless self-help books written, YouTube videos made, and Instagram posts, on habits of rich people. I don't think that is going to take you anywhere.
Oof, great point. I didn't mean to imply that.
I'm a huge fan of simple systems, but simple systems aren't always easy systems.
I also don't think heuristics will work 100% of the time. Heck, I'm not even sure if they'll work 65% of the time. But where else do you start, if not for copying others?
Not really. Just look up Indian spirituality. These guys had food and water for a very long time so they spent a bunch of time studying life and the mind.
If you want to get into spirituality look at the East. If you want to get into scientific thinking and categorization, look at the West.
It is that simple.
Start with yoga as a whole. Not just the poses which is a tiny part of yoga sold to us here in the west.
Any resources for exploring "yoga as a whole"? Could be interesting
Modern philosophy is impractical. The Greek/Roman philosophy is great, for example. It should be a huge shame for "humanity" to drop this approach in favor of highly sophisticated word-juggling in three tomes.
> Premise 1: suffering is bad
As someone already mentioned in the post, there is the difference between negative feeling we feel and the process of suffering it triggers. One of the biggest flaws of the common human culture is the failure to recognise it. You may feel the coldness of water, but not to be cold. You can feel pain but not suffer. Or, more generally, you can see a failure indicator on your control panel, but not to become the failure. Without taking this difference into an account, the rest of this hedonism makes no sense :-)
On the other side, philosophers usually focus on abstract things: think/behave like this and your life will be good. Forgetting that whatever smart philosopher you are, you probably will not be able to function normally under extreme hunger or chronic pain.
My life completely changed for the better since when I let this point go. For real. This prevented me to do things like gardening or working hard - those are rewarding. Also I am sure my company would be the same calm waters and zero profits haha.
This is terrible advice. Risk-aversion is life-aversion.
A better formulation would be "maximize your expected value from experiences"
I would almost counter and say that maximizing your ev from experiences just seems like a terrible way to micromanage your life. How do you put ev on mountain biking for a few hours, or having a movie night with a loved one? Are you going to sit down with a spreadsheet and figure it out...or are you maybe just going to go out and do the thing and enjoy it?
You need to think different and to use your body as a petridish is the fastest way to understanding the world.
You're going to die anyway.
The real hard part is getting people to accept your discoveries. Most problems need to be presented as solutions and by that time it's often too late.
There are no absolute "first principles". What you choose as first principles reflects who you are.
If I were to guess, I'd say this was written by someone who's young and has never been in love (truly in love, as opposed to narcissistic love). Has never been a parent and loved a child. Has a sadly ignorant understanding of poverty, wealth and social injustice, or simply doesn't care enough to learn (narcissism), and thus is not at all moved by a desire to better the world, but only better themselves (and will smother any stirrings of conscience by convincing themselves the best way to better the world is to better themselves as much as possible).
Or, if it was written by someone who's older or been a parent, narcissism prevented them from ever growing beyond themselves because they could never see beyond themselves.
I wrote this article because I'm a new parent trying to see beyond myself :)
What beliefs should I impart on my daughter? Why do I justify those beliefs?
I guess that's the goal of this essay, and this was the best I could do with the challenge. I agree that it's not my best work haha
> relationships, love, honor, sacrifice, or any values other than hedonism
I don't really consider myself a hedonist, but I guess that's where my axioms/premises led me.
But I'm extremely curious what basic premises others people accept as ground truth, and where it leads them.
Remember her early years are more formative than her later years. The foundation of her personality traits will be set in the first five years, and the subfloor in the next 5. Those will fixed for the rest of her life. She only remodel the things built on top, but she can't ever change those early layers. At best she can put lots of corrective/counteracting layers on top.
Focus on love, understanding, kindness, being present, listening, honesty, fairness -- and readily admit to her when you've made a mistake or are wrong. Don't demand that she apologize. Instead, apologize to her when you fuck up. Model the behavior.
I don't even know if you want advice from me or even if you'll see this. Feel free to email me if I am being helpful.
We spend a lot of time together right now, playing and laughing throughout the day. It's good to know that our time together helps even at this age :)
In the meantime, I'll continue to work on my compassion and sincerity. Thank you again
Also, assuming you aren't a single parent, don't forget to be good to and honest with your partner. Don't let your devotion to you daughter cause you to neglect your partner. This is important for all three of you.
I wish you all the best.