Hacker News Reader

Comment by debacle | Hacker News Reader

Most people, in my experience, not only do not think logically but actively eschew thinking logically, making long term plans, goal setting, etc.

I don't know if it's an intelligence thing. I don't think it is. I have met not so smart people that are incredibly goal oriented and very smart people who piss it all away.

I'm at a point in my career/life where I often find myself giving advice to people who aren't interested in it. I've learned to limit the extent of the advice I give until people show that they know how to take advice. There are also likely strategies for giving advice depending on who you are talking to. I find that, especially for my spouse, direct advice is useless (...and that's when the fight started) but winding parables and directed self-learning are incredibly impactful.

View on HN

I generally do ignore advice, unless i ask for one, like when i have a problem or when i feel helpless. I just leave people alone and expect the same from them. Everyone is on their own journey, i do not know about theirs and they do not know about mine. Mostly people give under-complex advice, that do not take my situation into account. It always feels out-of-touch. But that is just me.

Advice we learn from we only hear once, advice that doesn't help us you hear over and over so it is easier to remember. So likely you just don't remember all the advice that helped you as you only needed to hear it once.

  > winding parables and directed self-learning are incredibly impactful.

For those of us with a spouse for whom direct advice is useless, please go on.

Ha. I have a very conversational thought process. Often times, giving my wife direct advice would give her anxiety or make her feel like I was giving her directions, rather than direction. "Maybe you should..." would be heard as "I want you to..."

I've found that providing access to unopinionated information ("Here's a study related to that thing you are worried about"), bringing attention/space to the problem (without creating stress), or encouraging her to speak with friends who have had similar issues who I know will give her good advice will help her come to her own conclusions, at which point she will come to me and discuss her findings and the direction she wants to go in.

No offence to your wife, but I find it incredibly exhausting to speak to people like this.

I agree that unsolicited advice is not good. But one should make exceptions for advice from spouses, who's vowed to be by your side, and who has your general best interests at heart - no matter how direct the advice is.

This seems more like a "it's not what you say, it's how you say it" kind of scenario, which is pointless sugarcoating (especially when you have a problem to solve, so you should be willing to listen to advice or take direct instructions if you yourself don't know how to solve it).

If you want I can give you her contact info and you can spend your next 25 years trying to change her. I've capitulated.

This statement seems highly abstract - what sort of goals and long term plans should people have?

It makes a lot of sense, to me. The internet is full of "How do I lose weight", take "Ask Reddit", it's at least once a month that there's a "People who lost weight, how did you do it?" Come on! You know how they did it, they adjusted their eating habits and started exercising.

That just not the answer people want, they want to hear stuff like: "I eat half a lemon every two days" or "I stuffed a peeled potato up my butt to absorb nutrients slowly through the day".

Some advice is ignored because people don't like the answer, right as it may be.

Homeownership (or a more city-oriented construct), civic impact, career growth, retirement, family planning, marriage, growing a business, investment, becoming a grantee, doing 10 pullups, you name it.

I suppose for me, it's finding some sort of meaning in life - it's been rather elusive, and makes it hard to care about any of those; though I can do ten pullups.

For me, goals and meaning are less an innate property, but things that are built over time as the result of positive feedback from direction and momentum. I didn't start with them, but as I try things, my identity changes to hold a goal more deeply.

An analogy is a rock at the top of the mountain. It doesn't have much direction but maybe vague sense that it could be nice to go somewhere and do something. If it moves around a little, it starts to be pulled in a direction, ever so slightly. The Further it goes, the characteristics of the rock change, pulling it more, and repeating the process.

Some combination of the above list should at least give an approximation of meaning. Or keep you busy enough you don't notice its absence.

Somehow the nihilism always creeps in - the older I get the less I seem to be able to believe in anything, as the evidence accumulates that no one else does either. I suppose I'm one of those smart people who the OP suggested has pissed it all away, but I never really got what it was I was supposed to be doing.

I never quite understood nihilism as a problem. Why doesn't it mean that someone has a blank check to impose their own subjective meaning on life?

It doesn't feel like a blank check. You still gotta get up and go to work every day to pay the bills and then do whatever chores you can muster up the will and time to take care of.

I was thinking about meaning. My understanding is that nihilism is more about a lack of higher purpose, opposed to a lack of action.

I agree that work and chores are tough if you don't have a reason to be doing them. Similarly, will and motivation also require a goal, so that would be a challenge without one.

> Why doesn't it mean that someone has a blank check to impose their own subjective meaning on life?

I never understood Existentialism as a serious proposal.

I’m one of those people because this comment gives me the heebie-jeebies.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com