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Comment by look_lookatme | Hacker News Reader

No offense to PG, but I really feel this is a better piece on, maybe not the same idea, but a similar sentiment:

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB122178211966454607.html

Oh, come on, folks. The DFW piece is ignorant whining. Some problems:

1. The great many people who live "unexamined lives" tend to be much happier: conservatives are happier than liberals, people in the Midwest are happier than people on the coasts, etc.

2. The default settings are really, really good. You should be extremely skeptical whenever anybody tries to sell you that everyone is born "wrong" and needs to be "fixed" (circumcision, original sin, chiropractic adjustments for all children, etc.). (Vaccination and water fluoridation are the only exceptions I know of, and those are supported by actual science.)

3. Same with anyone saying, "If you don't do this one thing, your whole life is going to be HORRRRRRIBLE!!!"

4. Standard religions most certainly do eat people alive: the people who desperately obsess about them the way his (mostly imaginary) targets obsess about money, power, etc.

5. The real message of the article is the style, and what it says, sentence after sentence, is: "The older, wiser fish knows that life is crap, crap, crap, crap, crap, crap, crap, crap, crap, crap. And BTW, you know I'm the older, wiser fish, because I'm such a soul-sapping drag. Oh, and BTW, I'm the older, wiser fish, and you're not, and if you can't see that, that only proves what a naïve little twit you are. One day, all you goddamned self-centered little successful optimistic goddamned twits will all be sorry!!!"

> or that the Hummer that just cut me off is maybe being driven by a father whose little child is hurt or sick in the seat next to him, and he's trying to rush to the hospital,

Yes, you can choose what your mind does, but this is simply playing make-believe. No self-respecting mind is going to eat this for more then 10 minutes. Changing your thinking works, but it has to be a bit more subtle (and complicated) then this.

I really liked this: http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/minsky07/minsky07_index.html

Really? Because I've "eaten" it for quite a while, and it's been pretty effective. I tell myself that people being rude or jerks have a reason for what they're doing, and while I show a backbone when things get too harsh, for the most part I give them room to breathe. Result: Far fewer pointless fights, far less negativity.

But you still consider them rude, or jerks - which they are, reason or not. That's not avoiding reality.

Yes, but DFW doesn't say they're not rude/jerks. He says what I said - namely, that there's a reason they're r/j.

I don't think thought is all that uniform across humanity. I don't walk around with a little voice yammering about all of life’s petty annoyances.

Back in school I was diagnosed as exceptionally gifted / learning disabled. So I am probably an extreme outlier, but I don't think of myself as the voice in my head. The voice is stuck with language which is this huge, unwieldy instrument, that's far too slow to be interesting. If feels like there are separate machines that can preplan how to move my body, solve math problems, play a video game, etc. Still composing this sentence feels more like remembering the words that best fit the idea, while scrabbling to find the next word to fill out the logical sequence.

Anyway, the best analogy for who I am might be the entity that decides which ideas are terrible and which ones are reasonable enough to keep. But, I don’t hear other people talking about themselves like this, so I wonder if there is all that much commonality. When there are so many ways solve a programming problem why assume that everyone is wired up the same way. Considering all the crazy people out there and how people can function with significant brain damage, there is probably a wide range of internal landscapes even among normal seeming people.

PS: Consider how many different ways people you know react to alcohol a simple drug and then consider love as a huge cascade of chemical responses. Do you really think all of humanity reacts the same way internally?

Marvin Minsky wrote a couple of books on the subject - the link is the fist chapter to one of them (The Emotion Machine and Society of Mind). They're pretty much what you're saying.

Yeah, that's pretty good.

One of the reasons I gave up blogging is that it caused me to use up topics that deserved more work on little, quickly written blog posts. That's why I wasn't in a hurry to republish this.

God damn ... I remember reading that piece years ago and thinking to myself, "Man, DFW really knows what's up. Deep down, he's really got it together. There's a lot of fucked up shit in this world, and he's looked at it head on, and come to grips with it, and has the bravery and strength to move on."

And then he killed himself. The world is such a strange place.

This is easy to say now, but doesn't the piece come off as a suicide note? "I have been miserable my whole life, and the best solution I've come up with is to browbeat myself with an impossible standard of humility. Ecch."

The man was one of the greatest writers (the greatest? Seriously, if anyone knows a better or comparable writer of non-fiction I'd like to read him or her) of modern times but he also suffered from serious mental illness that overwhelmed him for the years. His death was not rational, as much as his writing sometimes make it seem like it.

Lovely explanation of Zen. Thanks.

that was a really great speech, thank you for linking that.

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