Hacker News Reader

"It's a topic I often wonder about: now there is less war than ever, but also more depression and despair, even among those with peaceful, affluent lives."

It's an interesting point of view, but here's some food for thought... perhaps there's plenty of despair because there's more to be concerned about than just war and poverty.

Seriously, there's absolutely tons of things messed up about the world we live in, and it can feel overwhelming, which leads to paralysis... people feel powerless to find a better way as individuals. Feeling separated from communities in their immediate vicinity doesn't help either. At least with war, which is truly messed up too, there's an us vs. them, a clearer sense of purpose. In our current world the answers are less clear.

If you'd prefer I mention something concrete that's messed up, I'd almost not know where to begin. For the sake of simplicity in choosing, this was my most recent discovery... it makes me sad that this exists... http://www.thebigroundtable.com/stories/damage/

Holy shit that one was good. Extremely well written.

Um... wow, that was an amazingly well written piece. Thank you for sharing.

It's a tragedy, a beautifully written tragedy. I found it on this subreddit, perhaps you'll find other engaging stories there... http://www.reddit.com/r/FoodForThought

"that allow us to deprive ourselves of all experiences of true intensity or meaning"

It seems that people have a largely irrational, intense fear of something. Public speaking, heights, spiders - whatever your fear is if you embrace it you can still (safely) find that incredibly intense experience you are talking about. For me it was skydiving. I get sweaty palms even thinking about heights, going up in a plane with an open door was terrifying! Leaving it was incredible. If you're afraid of spiders, pick up a big one, public speaking? Join toastmasters. You don't need war to experience the thrill of death.

We may discover that the act of passionate conquering makes men feel that much more closer to "God". The "Immigrant Song" exemplifies the hellish glory of war, to me personally.

"And now you better stop, and rebuild all of your ruins. For peace and trust can win the day, despite all of your losing" [Know now, our conquered subjects, that we are your virtuous overlords, so let peace be with you hereafter. We will install our heaven here, for you and with you. Now, come with us.]

> [O]ur deepest fear is no longer death of the body, but death of the soul.

Can we be sure that this is something new? In both Western and Eastern culture, you can go back thousands of years and follow the sentiment right through to now, century after century: warriors (and to a great extent, aristocrats) have always put honor (which I will include under matters of "soul") before mere physical life. If anything, life began to make more of a difference only now, when we are actually able to do something about meaningfully preserving it.

Welcome to the human condition. What you see as a problem is really the cornerstone of who we are.

Throughout human history there have always been those who believed in utopias. For a long time those utopias were religious -- people imagined either a humanity living in God's grace or an afterlife in heaven. Then, utopias became about removing injustice; communism is a notable example. Now you see, especially here on HN, people believing in technological utopias, where we don't have to work, a benevolent AI makes the best decisions for us, and extend our life indefinitely or at least spend eternity in a silicon afterlife as non-corporeal rational beings. Whenever I hear someone explaining how to achieve utopia, I ask them to do the following thought experiment: imagine their perfect utopia and all those who live in it and all those born into it, and ask themselves this -- will those people really be happy? A very crude approximation of what people are -- but one that's better than many others -- is this: once they've ensured their survival, people are happy when they get what they want, and what they want is what they cannot get.

The only true human utopia is one where we feel most connected to each other and the world we live in, which sounds simple in principal but harder in practice. All the other utopias are just attempts to replace this longing with something easier to achieve.

Don't just mark me down, respond to the points, if you disagree say why.

Nah, that's not how it's done these days.

It seems downvotes on HN are used as the equivalent of a child sticking their fingers in their ears and yelling "NOT LISTENING!".

Oh, and don't be surprised if you find a bunch of your older, unrelated comments downvoted as well. Apparently it's a form of punishment. Or something.

What points? Your text isn't really enough to pin down what you specifically meant.

>A very crude approximation of what people are -- but one that's better than many others -- is this: once they've ensured their survival, people are happy when they get what they want, and what they want is what they cannot get.

Counterpoints:

* Why should an unsatisifability instilled in us by evolution be reckoned as more ethically valuable than our actual well-being?

* What evidence shows the unsatisfiability is even there? Long-term studies have showed that many people live contented lives for what appear to be understandable psychological reasons.

* Provided it is, why could you not find or produce genuinely engaging challenges that don't boil down to "avoid being murdered by the other monkeys"?

This line of thought loses most of its coherency and thoroughness after managing what starts out sounding like an argument that simply solving one human problem will not immediately bring about utopia and thus does not justify mass violence (motte), but ends up proving much too much by claiming, in the end, that human happiness is categorically impossible and therefore all projects to improve life must inevitably fail (bailey) and result in horrifying mass murder (reductio ad Hitlerum).

(Terminology hints: http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/11/03/all-in-all-another-bric... and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proving_too_much)

I think you've taken my cynical description as some mathematical claim which it isn't.

> Why should an unsatisifability instilled in us by evolution be reckoned as more ethically valuable than our actual well-being?

It shouldn't, but it still means that people might do potentially bad things even if everyone's physical well being is ensured, because contentment trumps ethics. I'm not saying it's right jus that it is.

> What evidence shows the unsatisfiability is even there?

The only specific study that I remember off-the-cuff is the one mentioned here [1] (search for "Mike Norton"), but, of course, I think this "unsatisfiabilty" is what brought us here to begin with. Without it, we'd still all be hunters-gatherers. Some of it probably has to do something with social comparison[2]

EDIT: This is a published study: http://jeffreypfeffer.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/10/DeVoeMo... (overview here: http://www.upworthy.com/why-do-rich-people-seem-to-always-ne...)

> Long-term studies have showed that many people live contented lives for what appear to be understandable psychological reasons.

The problem with that is that much of that contentment appears to stem from the fact that others have less [2],[3]

> Provided it is, why could you not find or produce genuinely engaging challenges

Perhaps. But it is also possible that we have destructive urges that require satisfaction. Freud spends half of his Civilization and its Discontents exploring the "death urge". It isn't science -- far from it -- but it's pretty compelling.

> argument that simply solving one human problem will not immediately bring about utopia ...

I wasn't discussing a specific utopia (even though I personally dream of both a communist utopia and an anarchist utopia), but my thought experiment is meant to doubt that any kind of utopia is possible for a significant period of time. Imagine not how to get there, but what there looks like, and then, think for a while on whether people will really be happy for long in your utopia. That is not to say that we shouldn't strive to build our utopia -- in fact, the impossibility of achieving it is what ensures we'll always have something to do.

> claiming ... that human happiness is categorically impossible

Again, my "approximation" wasn't a well specified law of nature. People are happy with their achievements for a while -- until they're not. In fact, most people are happy some of the time, and some people are happy most the time, but I don't think all people can be happy all -- or even most -- of the time. It's quite possible that people's happiness depends on others' misery. I don't think happiness is impossible; I think utopia is.

[1]: http://www.newrepublic.com/article/120092/billionaires-book-...

[2]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_comparison_theory

[3]: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/02/your-money/02shortcuts.htm...

First thought: oh shut up, you can kvetch about the meaninglessness of your vain, well-designed life after we've abolished poverty and death.

Second thought: the correlation between "not having ever really lived" and nonviolence is a false one. The actual issue is "capitalist realism": the increasing cultural hegemony of indoctrinating people to believe that the well-sterilized path of being someone else's worker bee is desirable in the first place (almost nobody in human history has ever actually desired it), and that it has always been this way (the vast majority of human history happened before Reagan and Thatcher, actually), and that there is no alternative except for primitive and nihilistic violence (then what happened throughout all of human history?).

Third thought: the correlation between our current lifestyles and depression may well be a causal connection for purely physiological reasons that have nothing to do with any purported meaninglessness of a nonviolent life.