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Comment by cpfohl | Hacker News Reader

What a horribly sad way to live your life. People are no addiction, they're a necessary (and awesome) part of life. Regardless of your spiritual bent:

Athiesm - We evolved from social primates into other social primates. You're adding a lot of psychological stress at a fundamental level when you don't live the way you're bred.

Christianity/Judaism - God made us for community. "It is not good for Man to be alone".

Budhhism - Everything is interconnected, including other people.

Sikhism - All mankind is a universal brotherhood.

Shall I continue?

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People differ greatly in their appetite for social interactions vs. solitude.

  I never found the companion that was so companionable as solitude.  We are for
  the most part more lonely when we go abroad among men than when we stay in our
  chambers.

  —Henry David Thoreau

Do you agree with Thoreau? Probably not. But some people do, and there's nothing wrong with that.

I do agree with the first part. I once spent an entire year alone in my apartment, never speaking to anyone and rarely even going outside except to get groceries and go to the family Christmas get-together. It was heaven, but it couldn't last because my money wouldn't last, and so I returned to the job force. My need for money outweighs the draining effect other people have on me.

However, I can't speak to the second part because I don't understand "loneliness", since I've never felt it (at least I don't think I have).

Loneliness can be compared to other withdrawal symptoms. People that are used to and expect a lot of social interaction enter a negative mental state to being without it.

When you don't find the social contact addicting, and do not engage in it much, you never are exposed to the "withdrawal" symptoms.

Thoreau didn't agree with Thoreau. His hermitage was frequently interrupted by visits. Solitude is best when broken occasionally.

I don't think the point of the parent comment contradicts what you are saying.

Arguably those "introverted" folks tend to be the types who long for human beings to understand each other even more than "extroverted" people do.

One of Thoreau's crowning achievements was his work on non violent resistance, which in practice is aimed at precisely the same target as the wishes the parent commenter lists.

As an atheist, I dislike such "spiritual bents" being forced into the concept. In no way does Atheism entail a belief* in evolution. It is merely a lack of belief in any god(s).

Also, your argument implies that every atheist views sex-change operation as necessarily bad, since they're a fundamental modification to "the way you're bred". This is certainly not true.

I find your argument uncompelling.

*Not to be confused with faith.

While the dictionary doesn't define atheism as holding a belief in evolution, I would suspect there is an extremely high correlation between them. It's always the religious fundamentalists that reject evolution because anyone with any kind of scientific mind would accept the mountains of evidence.

If one rejects the spiritual or mythological explanation for things being the way they are, it's hard to come up with another possibility. Evolution or creationism, but I seldom hear of a third theory. There are of course many threads of opinion within the basic umbrella of evolution.

If god didn't plant all those bones to make it look like evolution then who did?

Many atheists I know don't know nearly enough about evolution to have a belief in it. They mostly don't know or care who planted those bones.

The issue is that we have the tendency to consider as atheist only the people who self-identify as such, while there's a lot of atheists who don't know they are one, they just don't have a belief in god(s).

As someone who lives in an increasingly less religious place - where even the majority of self-identified Christians is pro-choice - that describes almost everyone of my age that I know of.

Catholic church has no problem with evolution, only fundamentalists do.

Where did parent say otherwise?

If it wasn't God who created the Universe than who did? It created itself somewhere? That's where any rational mind should stop shouldn't it?

We perceive the things in some way, which doesn't mean it is the right way or the only way.

If it wasn't God who created the Universe than who did?

Define "God".

God is something outside (and can be inside at the same moment) the Universe, meaning that it is something we cannot grasp. If we cannot grasp how God operates then whatever we look at is just an observation of a single event, however long we look at it. So whatever time we perceive within our Universe it may be just a single very short moment to God. Hence evolution isn't really how we interpret it - it can be completely possible that how God creates us we perceive as evolution.

So, let me replace "God" with your definition ("something outside the Universe").

If we cannot grasp how something outside the Universe operated then whatever we look at is just an observation of a single event, however long we look at it. So whatever time we perceive within our Universe it may be just a single very short moment to something outside the Universe. Hence evolution isn't really how we interpret it - it can be completely possible that how something outside the Universe creates us we perceive as evolution.

As you see, they're just completely meaningless statements. They apply just as well to George Carlin's "Big Electron" as to a random fluctuation in an energy field, and anything else we can imagine.

It's not even wrong.

Exactly. It's the same as telling to a blind person about the shades of colours. Only in our case I'm blind too and simply dreaming up that what we touch isn't all there is.

God is something outside (and can be inside at the same moment) the Universe, meaning that it is something we cannot grasp, and who wants me to vote Republican.

There, fixed it.

I'm not sure I follow you. Or rather I follow what you're saying, but don't see how it relates to my comment in any way.

I don't think a rational mind should just stop and give up trying to explain things. I believe in science, which is why I believe in evolution, or rather the evidence for it.

What I'm saying is evolution as we see it is part of a bigger picture, and the Universe can be part of something bigger. You trying to describe the elephant just looking at it's ear.

We were talking specifically about evolution, not the big picture. Taking your analogy, parent wasn't trying to "describe the elephant", just "its ear", so it's perfectly fine to look just at it.

If I start talking about traffic jams in big cities and do so for a long while without giving the whole picture, then everybody will think that's just how big cities operate.

describe the elephant just looking at it's ear.

You might be able to clone one from an ear.

If you come to Mars and you manage to grab one animal's ear without the rest of body, you hope to clone the whole animal?

I didn't know I get to come to Mars as well. Well this is fantastic. I'll certainly give it a go. I take it you are paying for the tickets? I'd like a first class window seat if that's at all possible. Have the lab cleaned up and I'll go find a suitable elephant.

How about, "do what makes you happy?"

It's true that for the great majority of people, going out and having a ton of social relationships correlates with increased happiness. For me, not so much. I'm a very happy and optimistic person, yet I don't go out (here meaning social stuff besides the usual seeing and talking to a few friends, talking with colleagues, etc) more than twice a month. And that's actually a lot for me. This does not mean that I don't enjoy socializing now and then - I do. But I can say from personal experience that it is definitely NOT a necessity for me. I've sometimes done so for several months at a time, and have not noticed any side-effects.

Regardless of your spiritual bent... except for every religion that has solitary monks, or hermits, or walkabouts, etc.

Who are considered holy not because they aren't social, but because they are rejecting something fundamentally human in the name of $diety.

A number of schools of buddhism hold no 'diety', yet still have monks who isolate themselves.

Skim milk is diety.

I read an article by an East Orthodox priest once - evidently the idea was the hermit life was popular for wrestling with the Self and for the pursuit of reflection and personal betterment.

Read to the end and you'll find a more precisely stated version of this in her conclusion.

The problem is that she just sort of smacks into that conclusion. Like it was just getting too depressing, so she tacked on a happy ending sitcom-style.

I think it was intentional. The point of the article is not to hold your hand and guide you out of the forest, but to snap her fingers and make it dissolve.

Perspective is often sudden.

This.

Her conclusion was emotional, not intellectual. I'm fairly confident that was intentional.

>We evolved from social primates into other social primates. You're adding a lot of psychological stress at a fundamental level when you don't live the way you're bred

Hardly. Few people choose to live in caves, and a life of doing so would probably be more stressful than normal, despite that it's what we're bred for. And I'm pretty sure going to a bar or a rock concert was never part of the ancestral environment.

If you tried staying in, found it made you feel much more stressed and so switched to going out that would be one thing, but that's not the experience the author describes at all.

Did you not finish the article? She postulates that perhaps people are an addiction to be wary of but ultimately applauds them as a vital addiction to continue fostering...

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