Hacker News Reader

Comment by CmonDev | Hacker News Reader

It's a choice between pleasure and accomplishment I guess.

False dichotomy.

Spending time with ones family IS an accomplishment. Climbing a hill IS an accomplishment. Both pleasurable activities, to my mind.

The choice is between which accomplishments give you pleasure, not between accomplishments and pleasure.

This is just being silly. Spending time with your family is not an "accomplishment" in the commonly-understood sense of the word.

If spending time with ones family is part of what it means to be a family, and when time/work pressures make it difficult to do so, I would say "accomplishment" is more than appropriate.

Raising an happy and healthy child is an accomplishment, and both parents need to be involved. Giving happiness to your family is an accomplishment, a much bigger one than "imagining" (because, lets get real, this is just a nice dream) futuristic trains travelling in a vacuum pipeline.

You don't have a family? Ok, spend all your time imagining nice stuff and give press releases about your imaginary stuff, but don't call it job, call it hobby. Are you still calling it a job? Then you shouldn't be spending so much time on it.

I am not an EM fan, but Tesla Motors, SpaceX and PayPal are not imaginary and all more important than a thousand of happy healthy kids.

I meant more like accomplishing something that has not been done successfully before by someone else. Like starting a new kind of business. Climbing a hill on Mars would certainly be an accomplishment. Spending time with a family of first genetically-enhanced children would be an accomplishment as well.

I would argue that raising a happy/healthy/balanced child is an accomplishment. Its been done by many before me, but it is by no means easy.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com