A Simple Survival Guide for your Inner Child | Hacker News Reader

A Simple Survival Guide for your Inner Child

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53 pointsspo0nman16 comments

It's a well-written piece, but seriously: "If you're reading this, you've probably already dismissed the plan. You, the individualist, is determined to make your own way in this world."

No need to pander to tha audience so blatantly to make your point.

I just don't get the article. Would somebody care to explain it?

Rarely do I get exactly what I want by "just being myself." Being socially adept is a learned behavior, often requiring one to modify one's own behavior to fit in. I speak of this anecdotally. Maybe I'm missing the point?

I think you're taking that part about being yourself a bit too literally. It is completely possible to be socially adept (refraining from making dead baby jokes around new mothers, not picking your nose in public, saying "please" and "thank you") and still manage to do things you enjoy at home or as a career. Perhaps catfish farming is your true passion, and people all your life have been giving you weird looks if they were strangers, or trying to push you into a safer occupation like lawyering if they were friends, but your will to raise catfish commercially won. (Po Bronson actually writes about a catfish farmer in his book "What Should I Do With My Life?", I believe.) That's an example of being yourself and still leaving plenty of room to be socially adept.

Though, with that slightly contrived example concluded, there are times when really being yourself and being socially acceptable aren't compatible. (Being a woman a few hundred years ago who liked math, being black in the South a few decades ago, etc). But being socially adept would not have saved you there. I think we're fortunate in that the trajectory seems to be going in the direction that we need make such compromises less and less.

Hey, I'm the dude who wrote the original blog post.

Social adeptness is a learned behaviour, but I've seen too many of my friends either go down fighting or buy into the system and become drones.

And in case, I don't check back ... you can direct your ire to gopalv -at- php.net :)

I had never heard that Camus quote. Thanks.

Quote from the article:

Every act of rebellion expresses a nostalgia for innocence and an appeal to the essence of being. -- Albert Camus

Wasn't going to click on the link, but I'm a sucker for a good quote.

Another blog post that would have been better off as a tweet:

"Follow the path of least resistance and be part of the system or ride your own wave instead."

That loses a lot of the piece's poetry (or masturbatory prose, depending on how view you it). I resent this trend of twitterizing stuff. What's wrong with a bit of drama and posturing and exciting hats, anyway?

Because drama ought to be a part of the structure of a piece. When there's a logic to the drama's being there, then it's fine. When it's just drama added to a very simple idea, then it's excessive and a waste of reading.

Perhaps I'm biased, because I came across this just as I was finishing a large and dramatic post based on a similar idea. I worried a bit in mine trying to figure out just how to place my story in a way that it enforced what I was trying to say. That, to me, is the challenge of writing about something like this. This piece strikes me as much more divided between the point and the drama.

Then again, I'm a pretentious asshat of a writer who uses phases like "structural integrity" when describing writing, so perhaps I'm in the minority here. I'd suggest that perhaps writing good blog is like writing good code, however, in that there ought to be a reason for everything beyond just holding attention. There's a noticeable logic in well-written pieces that I don't feel this holds.

My BS filter goes off when I read that isolated sentence. The context in the OP makes the sentiment novel and useful.

Forget Twitterizing it. Randallize it:

http://xkcd.com/610/

"But in the end, they won't call me a rebel. Because I wasn't ... I was just being myself. "

ego much?

I think you're demonstrating part of one of the exact systems of repression that he's talking about, perhaps without knowing it.

From another one of his posts:

"There's some sort of misplaced humility that is injected into us by our educational system. Or maybe it is some sort social stigma attached to the braggart or overacheiver. "

Having experienced a lot of the misplaced humility injected by the educational system, I've been all too happy (and dramatically better off) the more of it I am able to get rid of.

The picture of society he paints appears to be a standard scifi plot. From Wikipedia Tron article: "Sark then informs everyone that they can either renounce their belief in the Users and join the MCP, or they will be forced to play games that result in their eventual elimination." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tron_(film)#Plot

Awesome.

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