What if you could do it all over? (2020)
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Life is hard. Focusing on gratitude helps me be thankful for what I have instead of thinking about what may have been.
Parenting is the ultimate exercise in giving.
There may be more than a comfy little pool to swim in :)
https://www.andrews.edu/services/development/annual/the-joy-...
Because there are lots of fun things you can only do when you are alive.
To abuse your metaphor a bit...
I get the sense that some people see the "nihilist pit" (or somesuch) as a dark scary thing (it is). Maybe they have gotten lost in it a little bit, did not like the experience, got out, and so advise everyone else to avoid it, too.
Other people have spent more time in the pit, whether by choice or the lack of it, gone deep down, and found the bottom. And that can be a wonderful, freeing feeling, to get to the end of that hard journey.
I guess for my own part, at the bottom of my pit, I found that there is something to stand on down there. It was an absolute relief to find, life-affirming, and has helped me ever since.
YMMV of course (: Different people are different.
Also different animals kill each other all the time. It's part of the cycle of life. I don't get why you have such a negative perspective.
Thinking about continuing humanity is a coping strategy and I can assure you it's more effective than HN rationality when my kid is screaming about their cheerios etc
True overcoming of the ego is where it doesn't even bother you if things have meaning or not, since there is no separation between your body and the rest of the world. True overcoming of ego is indistriguishable from true giving-in to ego. Is the ultimate act of letting go.
After this you can choose to raise kids, choose to pursue a career in tech and a hobby in arts. Just because it won't matter you will do it, because now you can choose meaning if you wish. Just because it doesn't matter it does matter. You become the creator.
I can't tell you how you go about your pursuit of freedom, or the pursuit of what it means to live free.
I can tell you what it means to me. I'm free when I can choose everyday to pursue what it means to live free. I'm also free when I choose the limitations in this pursuit, because I don't want the anxiety of the hyperpositive when everything is possible. I'm also free when I consider the other, my kin and when I choose to serve them. I'm also free when I ask for strength to change the things in my life that I can, and for wisdom to accept those things I can't change.
Wish you luck in your journey.
Maybe it's clearer in the form of a question: how are you completely sure you are NOT enlightened if you don't know what it is to be enlightened?
Someone kicks you in the shin, it causes pain. If it triggers a whole internal loop of fear and worry and anger and revenge and trauma and suffering, then you've hit upon your ego which you're unable to let go of. If your internal experience isn't sticky, then before you know it, the pain has dissipated and you're on to whatever the next present moment brings.
That internal loop is what there is to "fix".
Brilliant!
And this is why there is nothing to fix, because it doesn't change anything external. If it doesn't change anything external, if it's only an internal loop, it's the same as the ascetic attitude that Nietzsche describes. You can beat yourself until you're in line with your expectations for your ego, or you change your whole relationship with yourself, more accepting of your flaws and more trusting that you are able to overcome this internal loop eventually, but not today.
Many reasons for that, but most I've seen could be summed up as "women expect men to change in marriage, and men expect women to not change", and it fails all over that statement in relationship over time, when kids and responsibilities come knocking at the door of your free time and energy.
When there's an imminent danger of the human species ending because of a lack of babies, we can talk about the other point.
I’m not Henry VIII, just some rube from Indiana. Our family is nothing special.
…or the human species
Nor is this some post-apocalyptic future where children are scarce.
School districts around me are closing schools because there aren’t enough kids to fill them.
It sounds terrible, but I'm inclined to agree with him the children would be better off if there really were child auctions.
Raising kids mostly feels to me like I have a horrible heroin addiction. Loads of cash and time, reduced access to jobs, increased risk of intrusion by authorities and I struggle to see any personal benefit but lots of personal losses. Nonetheless my brain has tricked me somehow into it, at some basic biological level, and it seems this trickery at least at the population level is a necessary condition of life to the point free will is a total joke to consider as part of the equation.
At an individual maybe there is some selfish choice but at a population level having a kid is about the biological equivalent of taking a shit -- people don't take a shit because they are selfish they do it because it is biologically required and humans simply evolved to match this requirement.
in this sense there's no discussion on why humans chooses kids or heroin, or taking a shit. The answer is "they don't"
so this isn't about kids. you've made up your mind about all reality.
This is false equivalence, taking heroin isn't a biologicals imperative, reproduction is obligatory to life.
My thesis is humans have no real choice at a population level not to reproduce, your fallaciously equate that to a reductionist view on everything else including things not obligatory to life.
The big discussion is why have kids. And your position then is we're wired to, just like taking a dump.
It's not a good argument in my mind because the position voids every decision. There are no decisions. No free will. We can discuss that, i suppose.
edit: saw your update. I don't know I think it tracks. Asking why does someone do something implies a choice, to argue it's not a choice is a different argument. A good one even, but it's different.
>I find discussions of selfishness interesting in the context of a biological imperative.
Why is an interesting discussion, but not identical here. The charge I was responding to was specifically addressing selfishness.
I am totally open to the idea one can act selfishly both under the pretext that there is or isn't free will, which moots any attempt you're making here to shoehorn the argument into that.
i don't think this is reductionist btw. Philosophy tends to make people eye-roll. These are unanswerable questions! Discussion is the fun part.
Selfish non-choice. Ex: The fetus takes nourishment from the mother, even in the case she would rather abort and doesn't consent to the continued hosting of the fetus.
Selfish choice: Ex: I must take a dump, but the place I choose to take a shit is on my bosse's chair because I don't like that his is better than mine.
Non-selfish choice: Fireman is driving home after his shift ended, saves baby from fire.
Non-selfish non-choice: Woman involuntarily starts screaming after witnessing an unrelated car drive into a lake. Passers-by hear the scream and alert emergency services.
It's some kind of weird hubris when people think they've awakened to some grand truth that life is suffering and therefore reproduction is cruel.
Is life full of suffering. Yes.
Is life full of joy. Yes
All are true.
Feel free to not answer if it's a painful thing.
- Kurt Vonnegut
"The meaning of life is just to be alive. It is so plain and so obvious and so simple. And yet, everybody rushes around in a great panic as if it were necessary to achieve something beyond themselves."
~ Alan Watts
If/when we disappear, meaning itself might get erased from the universe. In that sense nothing means anything.
In another sense, if we are the only source of meaning that’s potentially the most rare and precious thing imaginable.
Giving a shit is literally our superpower. So give a shit about something because meaning only exists when we bring it into being. And it only exists as long as we make it exist. Far from being depressing this might be the most uplifting thought possible. Because it makes you fucking matter. As much as you want to matter. (And as little)
(I liked that movie)
It also hides the incapability of many to do what they should to succeed. Most people already know what they should do different to succeed without going back in time but still they do not have the will power to do it and they probably would still not have if they had a time machine.
Having an objective and achieving it. Not an overall expectation of winning in life but saying "I want to go to the gym 5x a week for 1 year" or "I want to be able to run 10km" and achieve it.
But in other ways it's not true. For example, there's no way to be 19 again and be in college, date the person who, looking back was clearly into you. Study the thing you really wanted to study (not what you thought would be best for your career), etc.
I think the fantasy of going back isn't about being unable to change, it's about "getting it right this time"
I suppose a better fantasy would involve going back into a similar but rearranged situation, with all the variables and trends changed to prevent predictions.
If I had my current wisdom but not my current knowledge, there are still some big differences in what I would do. Not on the level of bitcoin as that seems fully on the knowledge side, but things like getting healthy habits started earlier, waste less time on certain entertainment pursuits, and take certain opportunities much more serious even when they didn't align with my expectations.
Sometimes I wonder what I would do different today if I had the wisdom of me from 20 years in the future.
Of course with sports betting, investing etc. most people would decide to get rich to make sure they don't struggle materialistically. But after that?
I think a lot of things would be extremely boring because you already know it's going to work.
It's adjacent to the idea that if you could live forever, nothing would have meaning because you can live in any city for a thousand years, marry anyone for a thousand years and do any hobby, job etc. for a thousand years. And if you can choose any option and have zero opportunity cost for it, then does any option really matter?
A long quote, but one I love:
> “Let's suppose that you were able every night to dream any dream that you wanted to dream. And that you could, for example, have the power within one night to dream 75 years of time. Or any length of time you wanted to have. And you would, naturally as you began on this adventure of dreams, you would fulfill all your wishes. You would have every kind of pleasure you could conceive. And after several nights of 75 years of total pleasure each, you would say "Well, that was pretty great." But now let's have a surprise. Let's have a dream which isn't under control. Where something is gonna happen to me that I don't know what it's going to be. And you would dig that and come out of that and say "Wow, that was a close shave, wasn't it?" And then you would get more and more adventurous, and you would make further and further out gambles as to what you would dream. And finally, you would dream ... where you are now. You would dream the dream of living the life that you are actually living today.”
In a limited way those arguments are all true: solve something and something else changes in its significance. The question of what to do next, "but after that?" can be bewildering. However, there are all kinds of obstacles that we are ready and interested to have removed. Personally I have no interest in the challenge of being routinely bored to tears, or the challenge of being doomed to die. I'm totally ready for my next thousand years of non-urgency.
Given I ultimately ended up in a good place anyway, I don't even regret anything. The only thing you can't come back from is death. As long as none of your bad decisions kill you, I don't see much to fret about.
I always liked the thought experiment of living my life again. However, I'm much more interested in the thought of living in the future. If I could do it again, I'd take the risk of living 1000 years from now. I know this could be a mistake, but I'm an optimist.
People are happy in Africa, Latin America and the poor parts of Asia now, many places people are happier than in the US actually.
Which I think there's a good claim that it's totally and entirely transformed, save for a few things.
Happiness isn’t just being able to avoid sadness, that’s just contentment. It is difficult to explain happiness to someone that hasn’t been truly happy. When I used to do cocaine, those feelings were pure happiness, and I’ve never really felt something to that degree again. I think happiness as we know it is really just a modern concept, one that is enabled by our increasingly leisurely and stimulating life, that has vastly expanded the length and enjoyment of our childhoods. Maybe being happy is a lot like being a child, forever.
Nothing knowing that they could have an easier life also probably played a big role on their happiness. Unhappiness (and depression), I would argue, is probably a modern disease.
We could also end up in millenia-spanning dictatorship of immortal piece of scheize egomaniacs like stalin, hitler, puttin', trump and so on and on. All of them would kill millions to achieve that, in a heartbeat with no remorse.
We could also destroy our ecosystem beyond easy repair and live in postapocalyptic mad-maxesque world (sure it will bounce back in a million years or two, but we would most probably be wiped out along the path). I look out of window on a dense beautiful wild forest in full bloom, doesn't get much better than that.
Nah, these are pretty good times we, most of us at least, have right now. If you are not happy now, chances of being happy some other time are slim.
If I could go way farther back in time and bend my entire family tree's trajectory such that I started out on 3rd base, that would be a different story.
I can play out a similar scenario with quite a few slight variations. But this what if stuff is almost always positive.
It's never what if I never downloaded Unity and taught myself to program.
It's never, what if that eviction was a bit faster.
For most of us reading this our lives are modern miracles. I came from nothing and I've made a comfortable 6 figure salary for a decade.
Be content with where you're at, you will never have everything you want.
Yet if we could, we'd also make new mistakes that we'd then want to rectify by going back.
You monster
I always find it funny when people say: "I'd invent Google" when they could barely pass their first year Calculus class. As if stating the idea is all it took but not the engineering and well ... the actual difficult work.
But everyone can invest. That much is totally doable.
I think alot of people aren't passing calculus and doing hard work, not because they're dumb but there's no clear pay off, it's hard to stay motivated
https://www.amazon.com/Replay-Ken-Grimwood-ebook/dp/B0F9MY5M...
There's a quote I love from The Remains of The Day:
> I can't even say I made my own mistakes. Really - one has to ask oneself - what dignity is there in that?”
I was either born without the gene or raised to not do this for myself but I do, quite often, dwell on the unlived lives of people I knew who were never given the chance to live their lives.
My best friend was murdered at school when he was 16. In the Army there are several guys I considered to be "old men" at the time who I am now decades older than.
Now I'm the old man.
Others have taken their own lives or had it stolen from them by drunk drivers or disease.
But me? I just happily (for the most part) stumble through my own life, knowing the past is immutable.
The utility of "what ifs?" seems very low when looking at the past.
The present is a different story, but the convoluted fantasies people seem to build in their minds about going back and marrying that person or taking that risk seem futile because anything you create in your mind is as real and likely to happen as a myriad other options and knowing how that path would have unfolded is impossible.
"I would have been happier/better off/more X if only I.." No. That is unknowable.
Yeah. Go back in time and invest in a sure bet. You got fabulously wealthy and Very Important but ended up dying in your comfy first class seat sitting next to the cofounder of Akamai on 9/11.
"No with my time machine only good things happen"
The movie Groundhog Day comes to mind.
I have been doing this lately with how maybe I should have went into the military after high school.
Of course, the romanticized version doesn't include losing a limb in Afghanistan.
It just easy to take the good fortune that did happen for granted.
I myself can clearly see that at least some some negative experiences helped me in long run. The key is that they needed to be bad enough to force introspection and change, but not devastating enough to just destroy everything beyond repair.
"Still, I should have liked to see the songs come true about the Entwives. I should have dearly liked to see Fimbrethil again. But there, my friends, songs like trees bear fruit only in their own time their own way: and sometimes they are withered untimely."
The other day we went for ice cream after dinner out and movie. I can't tell you fine people enough how much of an accomplishment that felt to me. It's something so simple it must seem ridiculous. I never wanted big money. The cost is simply too high.
Probably relatedly though, I never really think about how things could have been and yet I am haunted by disatissfaction (despite having a great life) and always looking for how I'll change myself or my situation (work mostly) going forward. Maybe these are two views on the same neurosis.
The next is what the restart age would be... Too young and I might get myself killed by a vengeful father.
If I could go back to somewhere around my 20th birthday, with all I know now. Technology wise, I'd do everything I could to make sure Email was autheticated, zero terminated strings were abolished and get a BitGrid chip made.
Oh... And HTML would definitely be a language for the separate addition layering of hypertext markup, instead of the crap we have now.
I get it, life throws different stuff at all of us. I’ve had more lemons than I ever asked for. But for me, it’s not about living in the what-ifs. It’s more about asking how can I?
Sure, we all think about starting over or going back in time. But for me, those thoughts usually fade when I ask myself: Why not now? Is it really too late?
What helped was letting go of regret.
Just my two cents: drop the what-ifs mindset. If something needs to change, don’t dwell on what could’ve been. Ask yourself: How can I make it happen now?
In 1999—our sophomore year—we hit it big. A company that wired mid-tier office buildings with high-speed Internet hired us to build a collaborative work environment for its customers: Slack, avant la lettre. It was a huge project, entrusted to a few college students through some combination of recklessness and charity. We were terrified that we’d taken on work we couldn’t handle but also felt that we were on track to create something innovative. We blew through deadlines and budgets until the C-suite demanded a demo, which we built. Newly confident, we hired our friends, and used our corporate AmEx to expense a “business dinner” at Nobu. Unlike other kids, who were what—socializing?—I had a business card that said “Creative Director.” After midnight, in our darkened office, I nestled my Aeron chair into my IKEA desk, queued up Nine Inch Nails in Winamp, scrolled code, peeped pixels, and entered the matrix. After my client work was done, I’d write short stories for my creative-writing workshops. Often, I slept on the office futon, waking to plunder the vending machine next to the loading dock, where a homeless man lived with his cart.
I liked this entrepreneurial existence—its ambition, its scrappy, near-future velocity. I thought I might move to San Francisco and work in tech. I saw a path, an opening into life. But, as the dot-com bubble burst, our client’s business was acquired by a firm that was acquired by another firm that didn’t want what we’d made. Our invoices went unpaid. It was senior year—a fork in the road. We closed our business and moved out of the office. A few days before graduation, when I went to pay my tuition bill, a girl on the elevator struck up a conversation, then got off at her floor; on my ride down, she stepped on for a second time, and our conversation continued. We started dating, then went to graduate school in English together. We got married, I became a journalist, and we had a son. I now have a life, a world, a story. I’m me, not him—whoever he might have turned out to be.
Damn, that was a good opener.
I wouldn't date partner #5. That probably says something huge.
No. unless you also change my starting conditions.