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Comment by homefree | Hacker News Reader

People are looking for meaning in the wrong places - it’s not a huge surprise, it’s something secularism has largely failed at.

There are places you can work that are more meaningful or where there is a culture of cutting down on bullshit. Elon Musk is famously good at running places that do both.

More people would benefit from getting married and having kids - a lot of (Judeo-Christian) religion’s cultural ideas were good even if its empirical claims are wrong. Religion is in some ways a battle tested cultural technology, throwing it away will have unintended consequences for most people.

Alex Karp touches on some of these ideas indirectly in The Technological Republic which is worth reading anyway for other reasons. A lot of people in the west today grow up without a cultural core and end up aloof believing in nothing, or worse substituting some bullshit political ideology as a poor substitute religion.

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>More people would benefit from getting married and having kids - a lot of (Judeo-Christian) religion’s cultural ideas were good even if its empirical claims are wrong.

That's a good way to find yourself with a job you hate by the way.

Yeah, this guy's Christian cultural ideas include a dependence on misogynistic domestic slavery.

If having a partner and kids means mandatory "misogynistic domestic slavery" then every human society is irredeemably evil.

Anyone saying “misogynistic domestic slavery” has bought into a much dumber political religion, maybe without even realizing it.

I don’t know why I spend time on HN anymore - it used to be a place to learn things and interact with interesting people. Now it’s just a crappy subreddit. The interesting people mostly fled to private channels (or X) long ago.

With PG’s retarded “Free Palestine” arch, it’s probably best to just leave.

I worked very hard to interrogate and challenge the foundations of the white-supremacist patriarchal "political religion" (do you not know the word "ideology?") into which I was born.

This transition was deliberate, and conscious. I can't imagine how I could have endured all of the social risks and personal discomfort "without even realizing it."

But, more to the point: have you never heard of The Feminine Mystique? Have you never heard of The Vindication of the Rights of Women? It's an undeniable fact that female spouses have endured centuries of unpaid labor and domestic violence—including legalized rape.

This is a serious issue, and it's not "much dumber" to oppose. Frankly, you have to be pretty stupid to think that we're better off through gendered subjugation.

I agree that women have gotten a raw deal for much of history and continue to do in many parts of the world but

> female spouses have endured centuries of unpaid labor

Until fairly recently, due to the realities of childbirth and breastfeeding, women had to shoulder that burden. Unpaid is wrong - women received the fruits of their spouse's labor in return for their own work at home. Underpaid labor is more accurate, since women often couldn't inherit or own their spouse's property.

> women received the fruits of their spouse's labor

With extreme conditions no legal employer could impose, often including rape and certainly bodily mutilation—to say nothing of tight purse strings.

so the job you hate and a wife that hates you? now that's how you do a boomer humor I guess.

This guy’s entire post is about riding a sad Caltrain to some Palo Alto job and being disappointed his memorization of obscure computer trivia or generic software job didn’t provide meaning in his life.

My point is that marriage and kids provide a deep sense of purpose and fulfillment and a certain kind of narrowing clarity and that ideas of what leads to a fulfilling life are well established in old cultural communities for a reason. He’d no longer be looking for the meaning in obscure trivia - which was never the correct place to find it anyway.

The other bit is a lot of jobs are bullshit (probably most) with enormous amounts of waste building stuff that doesn’t matter. You can fix that by working at Tesla, spacex, etc.

Elon Musk, Alex Karp, and the tradlife, in one post. Please touch some grass.

If you’re complaining about secularism and committed to Judeo-Christian religion, how do you reconcile Elon and Karp being the embodiment of everything that Jesus condemns?

I suspect nothing you believe about either of them is remotely true.

I didn’t say I was committed to the religions - I said they’re a battle tested adaptive cultural technology we should be careful about throwing away because there will be unintended consequences. They are very effective at helping people live meaningful lives and have community.

You can choose to be obstinate and read what I wrote through a political lens with no charity - that’s kind of the political religious substitute I’m talking about.

It’s not so much my belief but plain established fact that they’re both very very rich. What’d Jesus have to say about the rich getting into heaven? Camels, eyes of needles…?

The rich have access to industrial-scale blenders & can commission a hydraulic syringe. Pretty sure they can blend the camel into a fine liquid & squeeze it through the eye of a needle. Heaven awaits!

I commend your effort in eating the cat turd of trying to provide them a different perspective into life. Their resistance to even considering that you’re not saying something insane + inappropriate is a mark on them, not you.

For what it’s worth- I’ve been on a similar journey recently and it’s brought me to similar conclusions. I got there through learning more about Eastern Philosophy and trying to map it to modern Western life.

Someone (throwtato@protonmail) sent me a death threat from my hacker news email alias over this thread - ridiculous, but not surprising given the left wing extremist violence. The most hostility I've see on HN is from trans leftist activists.

They're a battle-tested technology but, like fossil fuels or pesticides, come at a price.

We should aim to take a balanced, complete and holistic view of what that price has looked like, and looks like today.

In general terms it optimises for the middle of various bell-curves, at considerable disbenefit for those towards the edges of the distribution. Essentially if you naturally conform to its proposed life-model, you'll broadly have a fairly good time, and if you don't, you won't.

It's OK to recognise the pros and the cons as part of the assessment, in a quest for a more fulfilling and long-term-sustainable model for society and human existence. I'm not sure many have the open-mindedness and maturity to participate, though.

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