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Comment by mathgeek | Hacker News Reader

> The real luxury, for any age, in general, is in not having dependencies and needs.

Fewer. Everyone will always have some dependencies and needs.

Personally, I pity anyone who sees a desire to be loved as a weakness. That’s quite literally a lesson taught as a trope about being a good person vs an evil one.

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Being loved is not a weakness. But a strong requirement to be loved is a weakness because that means you don't have strength to be happy without being loved.

And that perspective presumes that being loved isn’t a fundamental human need.

Eating is not a weakness. But a strong requirement to eat is a weakness because you don't have the strength to be happy without eating.

I would actually argue that eating is a weakness, that every single human (and animals in general) just happen to share.

At some level you are defined by your weaknesses enough that they can't really be called weaknesses.

Definitely, but it would be silly to say not needing to eat is a luxury. Not starving, perhaps.

Isn't that true? Not being able to live without eating is, in fact, a weakness, just a very common one.

Love is extremely common. It is not particularly much of a weakness because there are plenty of people who will love you. Now, finding that person, or those people, depending on exactly what it means, that could be hard. There are also a lot of people who will abuse your need for love, and so you do have to be careful.

This is actually a sad comment. How did you ever come to believe that wanting to feel loved, which is a fundamental desire (if not "need") for the vast majority of human beings, could ever be construed as a weakness resulting from a lack of "strength"?

To steel-man their argument, I think what they are trying to describe is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anxious-preoccupied_attachment vs. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secure_attachment

But your steel-man actually proves my point: people who have insecure attachment commonly develop such an attachment style as a result of their childhood relationships with their caregivers.

It has absolutely nothing to do with being "strong" versus "weak".

Under your steel-man, someone who is anxious-avoidant could appear very independent and therefore "strong" even though they are struggling inside.

How then about monks or priests? I wouldn't clasify them as all of them being sad or having a fundamental need to be loved. Also loved can have different meaning - mostly people think about family and partners. There is also community.

Charitably interpreted, GP is already loved and takes it for granted while arguing about a straw man. Or perhaps GP is specifically talking about someone who has trouble loving themself without a romantic partner.

A rock feels no pain.

And an island never cries.

A rock never feels anything. That's the price, and it's a very steep one.

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