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Comment by reactordev | Hacker News Reader

If you find yourself thinking “this is all for nothing”, you’d be correct. You can’t take any of this crap with you when you pass. You do what makes you happy. What makes you happy? Searching for external validation of a pat on the back for a job well done is not what makes one happy. Take a moment, pause, just be, focus on your happiness and what that means to you. Stop comparing yourself to others. Stop trying to find fulfillment through praise or purpose and instead search inwards and ask yourself “What do I like, dislike, enjoy, and am I doing those things?”. If you are just going through the motions but haven’t searched within then I suggest you take a time out and get to know you again. Remember you. Rediscover you. Or start a new path. Life isn’t a straight line.

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This is a step in the right direction but it is still wrong. Yes, whatever praise or accolades you earn from work will be things you can never take with you when you pass. But the same also goes for whatever enjoyment you get from hobbies, interests or activities. You've just swapped one temporary source of happiness for another. Even if the latter is more meaningful, it is still temporary.

It is easy to suggest focusing on one's happiness but it is more useful and (more difficult) to figure out how to tackle unhappiness instead. The goal is equanimity not happiness (i.e happiness in the conventional hedonic sense). Focus on the cessation of your personal suffering.

> when you pass

Nihilism is not the belief that there is no God and life is ultimately meaningless.

Nihilism is recognizing that there is no God and life is ultimately meaningless, while continuing to sacrifice at a grinding job you hate, continuing to submit to the phony morality of those higher than you in the social hierarchy, conforming to social rituals and customs you privately think are bullshit, continuing to follow the rules of external authorities as if that might pay off in the afterlife.

Nihilism is understanding the truth, but pretending the universe is different than it really is, so you can evade personal responsibility for creating your own meaning.

Nihilism is behaving as if there is a God who gives life meaning, even when you don't actually believe that, instead of assuming responsibility for making your own meaning during the brief time you're alive.

I'm not a nihilist so I don't know whether those characterizations are accurate. It seems you are making some conflations with absurdism and pascal's wager.

Nihilism to me is about accepting the idea that there is no self but without actually having directly experienced that truth. And according to buddhism for instance, there is a way to experience a selfless existence which gives rise to true equanimity.

Without direct experience, nihilism is just another form of faith.

Correct, the one truth is Buddha and its many derivatives. We are one and we are none. That our existence itself is but a thread of wool in a spool of yarn in a fabric of life on a bed of chaos.

“Many people are alive but don’t touch the miracle of being alive” - Thich Nhat Hanh

> Nihilism is behaving as if there is a God who gives life meaning, even when you don't actually believe that, instead of assuming responsibility for making your own meaning during the brief time you're alive.

TIL I am a nihilist.

That sounds more like absurdism > the belief that human beings exist in a purposeless, chaotic universe.

Would be interesting to hear a convincing argument against that.

I think the fact that many people end up finding true, fulfilling purpose; and that miracles and seemingly unimaginable, orchestrated coincidences happen regularly, to our surprise, is well enough of an argument probably.

I found this video to be quite significant to me on the "nihilism" front : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jv79l1b-eoI

Thanks for the video. This is so encouraging.

I'm glad you enjoyed it. I really like that whole channel, there's a lot of great stuff there.

I don't understand why having the opportunity as an individual and species of defying entropy and all the consequences this would bring should be meaningless...

“This is a step in the right direction but it is still wrong”

You are wrong in suggesting I’m wrong. There isn’t any wrong. If you believe what you say, you would understand that and strip “wrong” from your vocabulary. There is only a way. There are many ways. The one I described was mine. The universe does not recognize your black and white thinking.

I mean this doesn’t really mean anything. There is a right view and a wrong view, and of course you can make incremental steps towards right views.

Don’t get so attached to your own opinions, that’s a form of clinging.

> Don’t get so attached to your own opinions, that’s a form of clinging.

Ironically, this is precisely what you're doing.

lol this comment is ironic on many levels, thanks

“There is a right view and a wrong view” there you go again. No, there is your own right way and wrong way. Those ways are not the same as mine per se. Stop trying to conform my world view to yours. I would highly recommend you read “The Heart of the Buddha’s Teachings” by Thich Nhat Hanh.

The terms right view and wrong view are from buddhism. There is a right view as taught by the Buddha found in his teachings. Clinging to right view is better than clinging to wrong view, even if it’s still clinging.

But following your own logic, why the resistance to my comments if my statements are neither right or wrong and is just as valid as yours? I’m not intentionally doing the things you’re accusing me of doing.

At the end of the day, may you understand the causes of your own suffering and find peace.

>The terms right view and wrong view are from buddhism

so again, from one individual or group of individuals' subjective views of right and wrong.

>why the resistance to my comments if my statements are neither right or wrong and is just as valid as yours?

Because you are accusing others of being wrong? If I said your right view is wrong, how would that make you feel? Golden Rule.

I am not the OP, but I disagree here. Happiness that we find in our social life, our friendships, family and relationships is not the same or swap-able with our career. This is something I learned the hard way, being drunk on startup cool-aid in the early life till it wore me down.

Friendships or other things I mentioned: not that everything is smooth, but there is a sense of comfort, pleasure, joy that just does not go away with more time invested. Because I am not looking for returns. Just being around is bliss.

Bumming out of a beach is very underrated. Going to a movie date is underrated. This is where my happiness lies. Then on top I write code now again, not to gain startup throne but because I like learning and typing out my thoughts in code.

The point of disagreement here is probably with regards to our definitions of happiness. What you define as happiness, I see as just forms of temporary satisfaction or pleasure.

In my opinion, I think happiness isn’t the goal since it’s temporary. Instead we should aim for equanimity which arises from the complete cessation of stress and doubt and is much harder to obtain but is longer lasting.

It might be important to take a step back. If you are a practicing Buddhist and read OPs comment, you may be right. Most are not, and they can't be shoved into the deep end of this philosophy.

Having said that, taking small steps is important. I feel OPs point is valid, in the sense that happiness comes from within, not external validation.

I would highly encourage* you to read Siddhartha by Hermann Hesse. I used to look at happiness and love also from a high pedestal point of view. As if I am more intellectual and these are mere temporary illusions. This book changed my point of view. Also, I live in the land of people living in love and harmony with Buddism being a strong presence all around (Nepal, Sikkim, etc.).

I embraced life, love, bonding, friendships, heartbreaks and have never looked back.

A good read. If I had to sum it up, it would be: don't let the search for knowledge/happiness/wisdom get in the way of being able to experience it in the moment.

"It took me a long time and am not finished learning this yet, oh Govinda: that there is nothing to be learned! There is indeed no such thing, so I believe, as what we refer to as ‘learning’. There is, oh my friend, just one knowledge, this is everywhere, this is Atman, this is within me and within you and within every creature. And so I’m starting to believe that this knowledge has no worser enemy than the desire to know it, than learning.”

One addition IMO: If anyone in your life tries to push you to seek their validation and do what they think you should (which is mostly just validating themselves), ignore and avoid them, or at least try to knock them down a peg.

The problem isn't work per se, it's our attitudes toward work and the projects that we choose to work on.

"Do what makes you happy" is a cliche that we all accept, but if you think about it, it's actually a very self-centered and egoistic way of deciding what to do. If we used different heuristics, like do what's best for your family/community/world, it might lead to very different answers than doing what makes you happy. It might even involve quite a bit more of what we call "work". Not work for the purposes of financial gain or social status, but work that improves the world for current and future generations.

That said, it's clear that our culture doesn't optimize for rewarding the kinds of work that actually make the world better. That's something we should try to correct for, rather than abandoning work as a value altogether.

It’s just semantics. Helping others makes me happy.

That might be true in your case. What makes someone else happy might be to engage in rent-seeking behavior to profit as much personally off of other people as possible. Even if maximizing personal happiness works as an ethical norm for some people, that doesn't mean that it's the best advice to give universally.

You also can’t take your happiness with you when you pass. Not disagreeing with your advice, but with the reasoning.

Why would you care what happens after you pass?

Exactly my point.

Pass?

I think you mean “die”.

I am frequently reminded of George Carlin's bit about "soft language" and how it obscures facts of life that we're uncomfortable about:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h67k9eEw9AY

His criticism of soft language about aging and death starts around the 5 minute mark

Dying is a fact now, but will it still be 50/100/1000 years from now on with current exponential technological advancements? Sooner or later it will be solved. Dying sucks on all accounts and there’s nothing positive to say about it, so it makes sense to lighten up that language. I definitely don’t want to be reminded all the time of my mortality, which is especially frustrating as it’s a problem that will be solved one day.

Verging away from the topic, but while it might be possible to imitate someone's consciousness after they've died, perhaps extremely convincingly, something tells me we'll each still find out the hard way, individually, that we've always been mortal.

Physically, immortality is impossible due to the second law of thermodynamics. Everything dies, including solar systems, galaxies, and black holes. A biological body can potentially live orders of magnitude longer than we do now, but even then people will die of accidents and natural disasters. I don't see any reason not to speak plainly about it.

The day we solve death is the day we doom ourselves.

Deathphobia is a real thing that pervades many cultures during the last century, largely driven by disposable income and technology, individualism, rejection of respect for ancestors, and marketing. It leads to a “wretched anxiety” that can for some people become an inescapable pathology. One could argue it is not death itself but the path to death and how we as a society acknowlege it that is problematic. If it is causing depression perhaps consider getting help.

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