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Comment by noduerme | Hacker News Reader

I don't know any high achievers who don't feel they have to prove themselves, so maybe I'm in the wrong cirles. It absolutely is a recipe for all kinds of long term complexes. But when you do work hard and you are satisfied with yourself, that satisfaction comes from something greater than yourself. Having no goal is worse than having an artificial one... and achieving something to make your dead parents happy is better than achieving nothing at all.

The measure of whether it was done in the proper proportion, I think, is whether you find later in life that it was, on balance, a service to you.

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> when you do work hard and you are satisfied with yourself

Ime if you constantly need to prove yourself then you rarely feel this; when you do, the feeling is ephemeral.

> achieving something to make your dead parents happy is better than achieving nothing at all

This feels circular. It assumes a value judgement about achievement which stems from your upbringing.

We are taught that achievement means value. Circularly, we value ourselves for achievements and we inculcate this in our children.

It is a value judgment. It's one that not everyone shares. It's surprising to me that a majority of people find it to be a controversial.

I think what's actually going on here in this thread is that people think any value judgment must be a bad thing. Right?

I'm not saying that any value judgement is a bad thing. (Although such a statement would be amusingly ironic). I'm saying that you're viewing your upbringing strictly through the lens it handed you.

As far as I can make out, your argument goes like this:

Strict parenting is good because it produces high achievers. I think achievement is good because I was conditioned to think it was good. I was conditioned to think it was good as a result of strict parenting.

Effectively: strict parenting is good because I was strictly parented.

I think achievement is good because it is objectively a good thing for humans to achieve things. The trouble here is that you're claiming that's just my subjective formatting. Do you have a definition of "good" by which achievement is NOT good?

Achievement can be good. But an upbringing which heavily idolises achievement can well be problematic, and probably isn't worth it. And your arguments to the contrary feel epistemically circular. You're using your belief that achievement is good to evaluate whether your upbringing was good, but that belief was itself installed by the upbringing, so it can't logically function as independent confirmation

But to answer your question, yes, there are serious moral frameworks in which achievement (of the sort you mean) is neutral or even undesirable. From a Buddhist or Stoic standpoint, being attached to material achievement is as a source of suffering. For hedonists, achievement is only good insofar as it produces happiness. In care ethics, relationships matter much more than accomplishment. All of which is to say that it's not a self-evident truth that achievement is inherently good.

Achieving something rather than nothing is obviously better, full stop. Bringing dead parents into this is just self help book literature.

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