I’ll propose to my girlfriend in the next year or so and I’ll move back home to Ontario. We’ll buy a little house in the country with a sunny office for me and we’ll fill our home with children and chickens and goats.
There are times I feel I took the easy route, opting for IC at big tech over leadership in the startup world, but laying it all out like this makes the choice seem easy. These days I feel very blessed.
It is probably interesting to think about though, since on the surface it probably seems like everything's going well at the moment; materially speaking I have more of what I want than ever and my life seems like it's good on a surface level. But that's all a bit of a rapidly crumbling facade.
I've been in the same motions for six+ years and while things at times are annoying/upsetting/whatever, I feel so completely tired that I embrace the dullness
I think this is called depression, shrugs all around
Me, the poor kid that can now pay his bills, lost sight of what's important. It wasn't work.
.. Then finally this morning my trusty old macbook died :(
Ordinarily a very positive person but feel down for making stupid life choices, entirely my own doing. Kids & building apps for fun pull me out of the funk each evening thankfully.
I know lots of people far worse off - sorry just needed to vent.
[Edit] There's billions of people on the planet, and you only might know yourself, and I only might know myself. So we know about 0% of current people. Not sure how old the earth is, but there's roughly 3 trillion years since the big bang, and so we've experienced about 0% of that. Seems hard to make such a sweeping statement as yours. Maybe you're considering life span, to which I'd reply "tis better to have loved and lost, than never loved at all," which is to say a long life isn't necessarily a good one. And before you bring up averages, averages are poor metrics. 999 + 1 / 2 = 500, and 500 is pretty far from 1.
It's the entitlement of the wealthy.
I walked with my son a few days ago and had coffee.
Yesterday I went for a walk with my daughter and had lunch. In the evening I had dinner with a friend.
Tonight I will walk to the ice-cream parlour with my wife.
Happiness is found in the simple things.
Not all is bad still, sone things are better, but it surely can always get worse, especially at the "base" (global warming, mass extinction, political polarisation/instability)
How do you know genuine optimism is in decline?
What do you mean by common culture here?
Genuine questions.
We don't have agency in that.
> How do you know genuine optimism is in decline?
I don't, this is a statement relative to what it felt like to me ~20 years ago (early web enthusiasm, the internet as a network of many smallish communities, a global, curated library). It's highly subjective.
> What do you mean by common culture here?
By common culture I meant widely shared knowledge, values and narrative (within, perhaps, a certain large enough subgroup/in-group of the general population). With the cambrian explosion of Stuff There Is, this may become increasingly unrealistic until everyone lives in their own world.
Also, I'm pretty worried of information overload and the associated forgetting of good stuff of the past. There needs to be a common thread that links culture together. This is especially strong in mathematics with chains of thought spanning hundreds of years, whereas pop or news culture seems to have acquired goldfish-level memory. Societal knowledge integration capacity is finite. Maybe it'll balance out after some time or maybe it will end in idiocracy.
I'm very thankful for Wikipedia and archive.org...
But, as I said, there's still things to like, even though they move about (e.g. from forums and IRC to Discord). And technology is now in part honest sci-fi, except without the societal sophistication that should come with it (see e.g. SEO/AI/science paper spam, filter bubbles). We can grow this sophistication or we can die trying, I guess.
Fair enough. What difference does it make if "we" or other spiecies (or natural events) have agency in that?
> ... this is a statement relative to what it felt like to me ~20 years ago...
So essentially one of your feeling (happiness) is linked to your other feelings in some sort of a loop, correct?
Which kinda leaves out anything objective out of this equation, for this particular source of unhappiness.
My usage wrt human agency implies will, cognition and self-reflection. Ecological exhaustion is not inevitable like with a cosmic catastrophe, because economic decision makers and consumers will it so.
"Legally" speaking, we can be held responsible.
> So essentially one of your feeling (happiness) is linked to your other feelings in some sort of a loop, correct?
It is linked to the widespread disregard of sanity and self-regulation and more specifically to the ongoing and upcoming damage this causes. We are clinging on to broken systems (food, energy, travel, throwaway electronics, general level of consumption, neoliberal narrative) thinking it can go on forever.
I don't believe in karma, but I do believe in self-correcting systems. And the biosphere is one.
Meanwhile chief capitalists are obsessed with childish or cultish ideas of colonizing Mars (lol), building kitsch cities or conquering the earth with AGI.
That said, I also think there's a timeline in which a suitable AGI really does save us and other life forms from ourselves, but it's a fundamentally non-democratic process and a huge gamble, perhaps the last one we will ever make.
Any specific examples of non personal issues?
but i like to see it as an emphasized version of the inventor of comedy genre https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aristophanes
I try to have a bias towards action.
1. Actively organize events for friends and family.
2. Go out and explore new cities, places, museums.
3. Always make sure that you have an activity coming up in the next few weeks that you are really looking forward to. If you don't have such an activity in the moment, schedule one.
Happiness is a matter of choice more than anything.
No matter how bad your situation is - your life is a bonus given to you from your state of eternal nothing.
Nothing can be less happy than eternal nothing that you came from. Almost by definition. Really think about it.
So enjoy whatever movie you’ve been dealt. Because even it will end some day.
Nothing can be less miserable. What kind of argument is even that? Existing is not categorically better then not existing. Great many people today and in the past would have preferred to not have gone through what they experienced alive at all.
Therapy and antidepressants does not help.
I burned out hard last year, and quit my job without a plan. I am so much happier without all the stress of work.
Eventually I’ll have to go back to work, but I’ll blow up that bridge when I get to it.
Having the kids grown and living their lives, settled in my home life, and still no major health concerns makes it a pretty good time!