6 ms·

While I agree that we (where we is a reader of the NYT or other western individuals) focus on hyper optimizing our life towards a perfect, unachievable goal, I

by Rescis 8y ago

While I agree that we (where we is a reader of the NYT or other western individuals) focus on hyper optimizing our life towards a perfect, unachievable goal, I am not at all comfortable with the authors assumption that it is inherently bad to do so, and that we should instead be happy with a life of mediocrity. Every single time humanity visibly progresses, it is because one person (or many) found a problem with themselves or the state they were living in and attempted to remove the problem in hopes of having themselves or their environment become more 'perfect'. If people today decide to stop progressing towards perfection and just be happy with what they have, then there will still be large swaths of people living in extreme poverty, dying from preventable diseases, and suffering from human rights abuses. I really do believe that it is imperative from a humanitarian perspective that while we still have problems in the world, we strive to do everything we can to fix them—and that not doing so is horribly selfish.

GavinMcG 8y ago
You seem to be equating problem-solving with optimization, or a drive towards improvement with a drive towards perfection. No doubt the effort to solve problems and improve one's self and circumstances have been powerful forces behind progress. But arguably, a focus on optimization and perfection can be forces that prevent the kind of progress you praise.
- Rescis 8y ago
  I feel comfortable equating problem solving with optimization, for while we are still living outside of a utopia, any beneficial system that less than perfectly efficient is causing suffering (from an opportunity cost perspective). Similarly, I feel comfortable treating a drive towards improvement the same I do a drive towards perfection, since without an end goal (perfection), you can't have improvement, since you cannot say if what you're doing is bringing you closer or farther from 'good'. I do agree with you though that an individual can focus on hyper optimizing their personal life to the point where it is not good from a societal perspective; however, that's is not what I gathered the article was arguing ("Enough of our mania to be the best and the most, he says. It’s time to content ourselves with being average.")
  - GavinMcG 8y ago
    You're right that you need some measure to judge improvement, but you can have a vision of perfection without making it a goal in itself. Optimiziation may be a subset of problem solving, but surely you'd agree that a problem can be solved even without the situation being brought to optimality?
    - TeMPOraL 8y ago
      Optimization is not just about reaching optimal state - which for all practical problems is impossible, given both the constraints of physical reality and the fuzzy definition of optimum humans can conceptualize. Optimization is a process of determining what the optimum is and moving the system towards that point.
    - Retra 8y ago
      If perfection is not a goal, how is it useful? And why call it perfection? I'd argue that you can have models without making them goals, but a model is not perfection unless it is also your primary goal. Perfection implies an optimal moral evaluation, and moral evaluation is always relative to a goal.
bitexploder 8y ago
Emotions and discontent are programmed in via evolution. The default state of most people is not happiness or sadness. It is discontent. If you are comfortable you aren’t going to keep trying hard. We have vast capacity and have struggled for tens of thousands of years to reach this point. Millions have died in wars for us to have what we have today. To waste that potential and settle into some adtech driven fugue state is unacceptable to me. I will keep learning, and struggling, and growing.
- watwut 8y ago
  > Millions have died in wars for us to have what we have today. Some of them fought to prevent us to have what we have today. Many fought for bad causes, many fought essentially for nothing or because things were shit for no gain. There were two sides to every war. Many fought over which autoritarian will controll that village. There is not reason to struggle unless you really struggle, through learning is good.
  - bitexploder 8y ago
    I am just saying, there has been a ton of conflict and struggle for our species as a whole over its history. A lot of crazy suffering happened to our ancestors to get to this point and I feel driven to work hard, learn, and be better than I was yesterday from that perspective.
    - shawn 8y ago
      There's no reason to look down on those who don't share that belief.
    - theoh 8y ago
      The phrasing you are using: "Millions have died in wars for us to have what we have today" is problematic. I think a lot of the replies interpret it as a case of this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post_hoc_ergo_propter_hoc https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post_hoc_ergo_propter_hoc Even if that's not what you are thinking: sure, people die fighting for particular causes, but people also die fighting to oppose those causes. The history of war doesn't confer any intrinsic moral value on fighting. What about https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Is–ought_problem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Is–ought_problem "There has been a ton of conflict and struggle for our species" This is more ambiguous. What does the "for" mean? Could it be replaced with "in"? (i.e. it has just been endured) Or do you mean that the conflict and struggle has all been directed towards the furtherance of the species? (e.g. "it's been a tough two millennia for our species") This is not simple stuff from a philosophical perspective.
chongli 8y ago
We can't all be Wesley Crusher. I see stories like the one about the five-year-old in China with the 15-page CV and I'm filled with dismay [1]. As a university student, I bear witness to the unbelievable pressure and stress in my peers (and much of it affects me). There's a palpable sense that school is a life raft and everyone is desperate to climb aboard. This is no way to live. I don't have any idea how to solve this problem but I would be glad to see a discussion. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18368622 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18368622
- Rescis 8y ago
  If reading about Wesley Crusher makes you and I function perceptibly worse, I would argue that doing so is the opposite of striving for perfection. We, as biologically limited beings, have to understand that perfection for robots is different than perfection for people, and that we need to optimize towards being the best possible human we can. As an aside, I think one of the points of that article was the the parents were inflating a bunch of achievements.
Pica_soO 8y ago
Those outliers, when observed closely usually turn out to be deeply unhappy and depressed people. The self-optimization cult is basically a worshiping of workaholics for their dedication. One is free to be inspired by that, but the only way to archive it is basically a societal accepted way of self-destruction with nothing to show for it but loneliness and misery at the end.
vertexFarm 8y ago
If you can't be happy with a life of mediocrity, you are simply not going to be happy. The extreme majority of people are mediocre, and that is exactly what defines mediocre. It's a simple statistical guarantee that most are not going to win the lottery of life and be more. I find the concept of anomie useful: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anomie https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anomie We aren't making the world or ourselves better by striving towards intense and unrealistically optimistic goals all the time. Our unbound desire to maximize growth is psychotic, and after all we're very much on track to destroy the biosphere if we keep behaving the way we are. Probably past the point of turning back, in fact. What's the point of all our progress if we end up making ourselves miserable and eventually eradicating ourselves?
- Rescis 8y ago
  I feel like you're making two different points: 1: That our goals are unrealistic and therefore lead to less 'good' (in the utilitarian sense) 2: Progress without happiness isn't 'good', since we all will die To the first point, part of striving for perfection is realizing that we are biological creatures, not robots. To be the perfect version of ourselves is to accept that we cannot stay awake in a lab forever, that we need to eat, sleep, and enjoy ourselves in order to be the most productive version of ourselves. Death camp laborers are noticeably less productive than free laborers. To the second point, I'd ask "What's the point of happiness if we will all eventually be eradicated, regardless?). Humanity, in our current state, cannot last forever. Whether we die from global warming as you presume, nuclear armageddon as others do, or the heat death of the universe, we will all eventually die so long as we are stuck in this universe, and at the point that we all die and all encoded information is lost, it doesn't matter if we were happy or sad. I feel like our best and only bet at living past the universe is to be as productive as possible, create as much technical knowledge as possible, and see if we can eventually live past what seems to be certain extinction, and to do that requires striving for perfection.
  - vertexFarm 8y ago
    Number one sounds about right for the most part, but you may be misunderstanding the second point. I don't think that progress is meaningless because we all die. I don't think it's necessarily a bad or unhappy thing that everything will eventually end. What I'm specifically saying here is that our unrealistic goals are themselves the cause of our extremely likely and credible demise in the near future. We are doing immediate damage, and it is not some hypothetical or philosophical curiosity. It's extremely dire. It's virtually certain we won't live past the heat death of the universe. I don't think that's a concept even worth humoring. Nuclear armageddon, for what it is worth, was always an exaggerated risk. It would have perhaps ended western civilization, but even at the height of proliferation it was far from being able to knock out our biosphere. Which is somewhat controversial, I think most people still buy into that myth. Climate change, though, is horrendously close to being the final word on whether all our aspirations were worthwhile or whether human industrialization was the most evil mistake to ever happen in the history of life on Earth. It's very likely that the next few decades to a century will make all the crazy people advocating for mass suicide or Luddism or other extreme measures seem like they were onto something. Nobody likes to even hypothetically consider it, but if we're intellectually honest with ourselves there exists out there a gruesome threshold--a point beyond which it would have been better to trade back every bit of our progress to remain hunter-gatherers without civilization or technology. To think that the way around this is to be maximally productive or develop ever more powerful technologies isn't at all rational. Those elements of our nature are themselves the sole cause of this crisis in the first place. Climate change isn't some vague possibility; it has already started and caused enormous damage. 60% of all animals since the 1970s are dead. The oceans are acidic wastelands and are rapidly worsening. Almost zero reefs left. We're on the verge of runaway greenhouse gas accumulation, and we're utterly ruined if the methane clathrates go off. Make no mistake--this is a great filter. It's not coming. It is already here. We block it out in order to survive in the short term. Nobody likes to take all this gloom and doom seriously. It's unproductive. But this is precisely where all our productivity has gotten us. It has all been in error; there's a fundamental flaw in our psychology. Even our mundane daily lives are extraordinary damaging, not only to ourselves but to all life. We owe it to ourselves to admit it if our own existence has proven to be evil. There was once a time we should have admitted that it was an option to stop all this, to turn back--but we won't do that. And it's likely too late anyway. So yes, it was two different points. Our obsession with self-improvement and growth is personally damaging, but it's also damaging us all as a whole. It has damaged everything in a profound way. Our whole paradigm is likely flawed. We hope that we will figure it out, improve, and overcome--but that very hope might be a driving force in perpetuating our industry which has only pushed us to the verge of extinction. Sorry for the big depressing tirade. I swear I'm not Ted Kaczynski, I just want to face this issue without deceiving myself or irrationally believing that positivity will fix everything. I know that soldiering on can overcome some problems, but I want to acknowledge that there are circumstances where that will never work. Where our human drive to normalize and persist through adversity are a death sentence instead of an advantage.
ProAm 8y ago
> Every single time humanity visibly progresses, it is because one person (or many) found a problem with themselves or the state they were living in and attempted to remove the problem in hopes of having themselves or their environment become more 'perfect' I'd venture to say more human progress is attributed to warfare than anything else.
- jcims 8y ago
  Isn’t that just a subset of what ProAm described?
  - ProAm 8y ago
    Yes, I could see it that way. Much of warfare seems unnecessary though, rooted in greed.
- intrasight 8y ago
  I'd venture to say that you are very wrong to say that. I used to believe that too, but I've changed my opinion about what is "progress".
jplayer01 8y ago
I think there is some conflict inherent in 1) constantly trying to improve and 2) accepting ourselves for who we are that isn't expressed well in the above article. At what point are you "good" enough to be valued or loved? This is something that's never answered anywhere in our modern culture of self-help and social media, and it is this culture that makes us feel unhappier with ourselves despite any improvements we make.
- x220 8y ago
  >At what point are you "good" enough to be valued or loved? That's the wrong question. That depends entirely on who you ask about yourself, and whether you believe their answers. The right question is "when should you feel good about yourself?" and the answer to that is "when you have your life put together and are moving towards meaningful goals and keeping chaos under control".
  - jplayer01 8y ago
    That may be well and good, but who's telling people that? What's society teaching people as they grow up?
    - x220 8y ago
      You should not let others define this for you. You should feel satisfied based on your progress towards your goals, as defined by you.
      - jplayer01 8y ago
        Empty words.
paulpauper 8y ago
It is not inherently bad, but it should not control your life. You should not beat yourself up for not fulfilling an unrealistic idealization of perfection. Not everyone can be like Tim Ferris. You take 500 people who did what he did many maybe two succeed and the rest are mediocre. Luck, whether it's the birth lottery or being at thr 'right place at the right time' (such as buying Bitcoin in 2009-2015), plays a bigger role than we may want to accept.
agumonkey 8y ago
It's almost religious in the end. There's no global optimum for life, even at an individual scope. That said, spending too much time trying to optimize makes you myopic, which is clearly a subpar way to live one's existence. A baby is probably near peak life.
- x220 8y ago
  >There's no global optimum for life, even at an individual scope That's a big assumption with no evidence to support it. Depending on who you ask, people might say that the global optimum is Jesus, or Buddha, or Superman. People can instinctively think about the people they admire, abstract out the things these admirable people have in common, and strive towards (and worship) that ideal.
  - agumonkey 8y ago
    I shouldn't have used religious, I only had buddhist contemplation in mind.
gaahrdner 8y ago
The vast majority of our lives will be boring and unexceptional. That is not a bad thing.
mitchbob 8y ago
"The reasonable man adapts himself to the world: the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man." ― George Bernard Shaw, Man and Superman
- Retra 8y ago
  That makes a lot of assumptions about what is reasonable or not.
  - TeMPOraL 8y ago
    In some way it does, but I think a lot of us have an instinctive understanding of the message, being constantly told - first by parents, then by society at large - that attempts to improve things are weird and should be abandoned.
glangdale 8y ago
You appear to conflate the absence of self-optimization with 'mediocrity', which seems ... questionable. It's easy to find examples of both: some great historical figures had rigorous programs of conscious self-improvement; others became great by immediately engaging with some problem entirely outside themselves and if any self-improvement resulted, it wasn't a primary or conscious goal.
- xkcd-sucks 8y ago
  And some great historical figures ret-conned their own self-improvement programs and suffering in order to maintain a cult of personality
ccwilson10 8y ago
This has also led to many later IPOs :) On a more serious note, I agree most with your point around digging oneself out of complacency and moving towards a better future — if not for you, for someone else.
johnminter 8y ago
I think the problem is better framed as focusing on consistently making the best choices we can given information we have and the situation we face. Yes, we make these choices in a community and our choices impact one another. We should seek to help our neighbors as we can, remembering we may need their help some day. Living this way takes determination, persistence, and hard work. We need to know when to rest and recharge because fatigue makes us ineffective and error-prone. For me, that includes both rest and exercise. I find it helpful to discuss my plans with those I trust to refine the plans and projects I undertake. It is too easy to be overly ambitious/optimistic and start more projects than I can finish. Good counsel helps us to evaluate what we do and focus on what best supports our long term goals. We all make mistakes. I find it better to learn from them and try not to repeat them rather than engaging in self-pity or trying to cast myself as a "victim." Sometimes life is just hard and we need to be thankful for and encouraged by the "wins" we get. Living that way is far more pleasant than being constantly negative and critical of ourselves and others.

by Rescis 8y ago

GavinMcG 8y ago

You seem to be equating problem-solving with optimization, or a drive towards improvement with a drive towards perfection. No doubt the effort to solve problems and improve one's self and circumstances have been powerful forces behind progress. But arguably, a focus on optimization and perfection can be forces that prevent the kind of progress you praise.

Rescis 8y ago
I feel comfortable equating problem solving with optimization, for while we are still living outside of a utopia, any beneficial system that less than perfectly efficient is causing suffering (from an opportunity cost perspective). Similarly, I feel comfortable treating a drive towards improvement the same I do a drive towards perfection, since without an end goal (perfection), you can't have improvement, since you cannot say if what you're doing is bringing you closer or farther from 'good'. I do agree with you though that an individual can focus on hyper optimizing their personal life to the point where it is not good from a societal perspective; however, that's is not what I gathered the article was arguing ("Enough of our mania to be the best and the most, he says. It’s time to content ourselves with being average.")
- GavinMcG 8y ago
  You're right that you need some measure to judge improvement, but you can have a vision of perfection without making it a goal in itself. Optimiziation may be a subset of problem solving, but surely you'd agree that a problem can be solved even without the situation being brought to optimality?
  - TeMPOraL 8y ago
    Optimization is not just about reaching optimal state - which for all practical problems is impossible, given both the constraints of physical reality and the fuzzy definition of optimum humans can conceptualize. Optimization is a process of determining what the optimum is and moving the system towards that point.
  - Retra 8y ago
    If perfection is not a goal, how is it useful? And why call it perfection? I'd argue that you can have models without making them goals, but a model is not perfection unless it is also your primary goal. Perfection implies an optimal moral evaluation, and moral evaluation is always relative to a goal.

bitexploder 8y ago

Emotions and discontent are programmed in via evolution. The default state of most people is not happiness or sadness. It is discontent. If you are comfortable you aren’t going to keep trying hard. We have vast capacity and have struggled for tens of thousands of years to reach this point. Millions have died in wars for us to have what we have today. To waste that potential and settle into some adtech driven fugue state is unacceptable to me. I will keep learning, and struggling, and growing.

watwut 8y ago
> Millions have died in wars for us to have what we have today. Some of them fought to prevent us to have what we have today. Many fought for bad causes, many fought essentially for nothing or because things were shit for no gain. There were two sides to every war. Many fought over which autoritarian will controll that village. There is not reason to struggle unless you really struggle, through learning is good.
- bitexploder 8y ago
  I am just saying, there has been a ton of conflict and struggle for our species as a whole over its history. A lot of crazy suffering happened to our ancestors to get to this point and I feel driven to work hard, learn, and be better than I was yesterday from that perspective.
  - shawn 8y ago
    There's no reason to look down on those who don't share that belief.
  - theoh 8y ago
    The phrasing you are using: "Millions have died in wars for us to have what we have today" is problematic. I think a lot of the replies interpret it as a case of this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post_hoc_ergo_propter_hoc https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post_hoc_ergo_propter_hoc Even if that's not what you are thinking: sure, people die fighting for particular causes, but people also die fighting to oppose those causes. The history of war doesn't confer any intrinsic moral value on fighting. What about https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Is–ought_problem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Is–ought_problem "There has been a ton of conflict and struggle for our species" This is more ambiguous. What does the "for" mean? Could it be replaced with "in"? (i.e. it has just been endured) Or do you mean that the conflict and struggle has all been directed towards the furtherance of the species? (e.g. "it's been a tough two millennia for our species") This is not simple stuff from a philosophical perspective.

chongli 8y ago

We can't all be Wesley Crusher. I see stories like the one about the five-year-old in China with the 15-page CV and I'm filled with dismay [1]. As a university student, I bear witness to the unbelievable pressure and stress in my peers (and much of it affects me). There's a palpable sense that school is a life raft and everyone is desperate to climb aboard. This is no way to live. I don't have any idea how to solve this problem but I would be glad to see a discussion. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18368622 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18368622

Rescis 8y ago
If reading about Wesley Crusher makes you and I function perceptibly worse, I would argue that doing so is the opposite of striving for perfection. We, as biologically limited beings, have to understand that perfection for robots is different than perfection for people, and that we need to optimize towards being the best possible human we can. As an aside, I think one of the points of that article was the the parents were inflating a bunch of achievements.

Pica_soO 8y ago

Those outliers, when observed closely usually turn out to be deeply unhappy and depressed people. The self-optimization cult is basically a worshiping of workaholics for their dedication. One is free to be inspired by that, but the only way to archive it is basically a societal accepted way of self-destruction with nothing to show for it but loneliness and misery at the end.

vertexFarm 8y ago

If you can't be happy with a life of mediocrity, you are simply not going to be happy. The extreme majority of people are mediocre, and that is exactly what defines mediocre. It's a simple statistical guarantee that most are not going to win the lottery of life and be more. I find the concept of anomie useful: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anomie https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anomie We aren't making the world or ourselves better by striving towards intense and unrealistically optimistic goals all the time. Our unbound desire to maximize growth is psychotic, and after all we're very much on track to destroy the biosphere if we keep behaving the way we are. Probably past the point of turning back, in fact. What's the point of all our progress if we end up making ourselves miserable and eventually eradicating ourselves?

Rescis 8y ago
I feel like you're making two different points: 1: That our goals are unrealistic and therefore lead to less 'good' (in the utilitarian sense) 2: Progress without happiness isn't 'good', since we all will die To the first point, part of striving for perfection is realizing that we are biological creatures, not robots. To be the perfect version of ourselves is to accept that we cannot stay awake in a lab forever, that we need to eat, sleep, and enjoy ourselves in order to be the most productive version of ourselves. Death camp laborers are noticeably less productive than free laborers. To the second point, I'd ask "What's the point of happiness if we will all eventually be eradicated, regardless?). Humanity, in our current state, cannot last forever. Whether we die from global warming as you presume, nuclear armageddon as others do, or the heat death of the universe, we will all eventually die so long as we are stuck in this universe, and at the point that we all die and all encoded information is lost, it doesn't matter if we were happy or sad. I feel like our best and only bet at living past the universe is to be as productive as possible, create as much technical knowledge as possible, and see if we can eventually live past what seems to be certain extinction, and to do that requires striving for perfection.
- vertexFarm 8y ago
  Number one sounds about right for the most part, but you may be misunderstanding the second point. I don't think that progress is meaningless because we all die. I don't think it's necessarily a bad or unhappy thing that everything will eventually end. What I'm specifically saying here is that our unrealistic goals are themselves the cause of our extremely likely and credible demise in the near future. We are doing immediate damage, and it is not some hypothetical or philosophical curiosity. It's extremely dire. It's virtually certain we won't live past the heat death of the universe. I don't think that's a concept even worth humoring. Nuclear armageddon, for what it is worth, was always an exaggerated risk. It would have perhaps ended western civilization, but even at the height of proliferation it was far from being able to knock out our biosphere. Which is somewhat controversial, I think most people still buy into that myth. Climate change, though, is horrendously close to being the final word on whether all our aspirations were worthwhile or whether human industrialization was the most evil mistake to ever happen in the history of life on Earth. It's very likely that the next few decades to a century will make all the crazy people advocating for mass suicide or Luddism or other extreme measures seem like they were onto something. Nobody likes to even hypothetically consider it, but if we're intellectually honest with ourselves there exists out there a gruesome threshold--a point beyond which it would have been better to trade back every bit of our progress to remain hunter-gatherers without civilization or technology. To think that the way around this is to be maximally productive or develop ever more powerful technologies isn't at all rational. Those elements of our nature are themselves the sole cause of this crisis in the first place. Climate change isn't some vague possibility; it has already started and caused enormous damage. 60% of all animals since the 1970s are dead. The oceans are acidic wastelands and are rapidly worsening. Almost zero reefs left. We're on the verge of runaway greenhouse gas accumulation, and we're utterly ruined if the methane clathrates go off. Make no mistake--this is a great filter. It's not coming. It is already here. We block it out in order to survive in the short term. Nobody likes to take all this gloom and doom seriously. It's unproductive. But this is precisely where all our productivity has gotten us. It has all been in error; there's a fundamental flaw in our psychology. Even our mundane daily lives are extraordinary damaging, not only to ourselves but to all life. We owe it to ourselves to admit it if our own existence has proven to be evil. There was once a time we should have admitted that it was an option to stop all this, to turn back--but we won't do that. And it's likely too late anyway. So yes, it was two different points. Our obsession with self-improvement and growth is personally damaging, but it's also damaging us all as a whole. It has damaged everything in a profound way. Our whole paradigm is likely flawed. We hope that we will figure it out, improve, and overcome--but that very hope might be a driving force in perpetuating our industry which has only pushed us to the verge of extinction. Sorry for the big depressing tirade. I swear I'm not Ted Kaczynski, I just want to face this issue without deceiving myself or irrationally believing that positivity will fix everything. I know that soldiering on can overcome some problems, but I want to acknowledge that there are circumstances where that will never work. Where our human drive to normalize and persist through adversity are a death sentence instead of an advantage.

ProAm 8y ago

> Every single time humanity visibly progresses, it is because one person (or many) found a problem with themselves or the state they were living in and attempted to remove the problem in hopes of having themselves or their environment become more 'perfect' I'd venture to say more human progress is attributed to warfare than anything else.

jcims 8y ago
Isn’t that just a subset of what ProAm described?
- ProAm 8y ago
  Yes, I could see it that way. Much of warfare seems unnecessary though, rooted in greed.
intrasight 8y ago
I'd venture to say that you are very wrong to say that. I used to believe that too, but I've changed my opinion about what is "progress".

jplayer01 8y ago

I think there is some conflict inherent in 1) constantly trying to improve and 2) accepting ourselves for who we are that isn't expressed well in the above article. At what point are you "good" enough to be valued or loved? This is something that's never answered anywhere in our modern culture of self-help and social media, and it is this culture that makes us feel unhappier with ourselves despite any improvements we make.

x220 8y ago
>At what point are you "good" enough to be valued or loved? That's the wrong question. That depends entirely on who you ask about yourself, and whether you believe their answers. The right question is "when should you feel good about yourself?" and the answer to that is "when you have your life put together and are moving towards meaningful goals and keeping chaos under control".
- jplayer01 8y ago
  That may be well and good, but who's telling people that? What's society teaching people as they grow up?
  - x220 8y ago
    You should not let others define this for you. You should feel satisfied based on your progress towards your goals, as defined by you.
    - jplayer01 8y ago
      Empty words.

paulpauper 8y ago

It is not inherently bad, but it should not control your life. You should not beat yourself up for not fulfilling an unrealistic idealization of perfection. Not everyone can be like Tim Ferris. You take 500 people who did what he did many maybe two succeed and the rest are mediocre. Luck, whether it's the birth lottery or being at thr 'right place at the right time' (such as buying Bitcoin in 2009-2015), plays a bigger role than we may want to accept.

agumonkey 8y ago

It's almost religious in the end. There's no global optimum for life, even at an individual scope. That said, spending too much time trying to optimize makes you myopic, which is clearly a subpar way to live one's existence. A baby is probably near peak life.

x220 8y ago
>There's no global optimum for life, even at an individual scope That's a big assumption with no evidence to support it. Depending on who you ask, people might say that the global optimum is Jesus, or Buddha, or Superman. People can instinctively think about the people they admire, abstract out the things these admirable people have in common, and strive towards (and worship) that ideal.
- agumonkey 8y ago
  I shouldn't have used religious, I only had buddhist contemplation in mind.

gaahrdner 8y ago

The vast majority of our lives will be boring and unexceptional. That is not a bad thing.

mitchbob 8y ago

"The reasonable man adapts himself to the world: the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man." ― George Bernard Shaw, Man and Superman

Retra 8y ago
That makes a lot of assumptions about what is reasonable or not.
- TeMPOraL 8y ago
  In some way it does, but I think a lot of us have an instinctive understanding of the message, being constantly told - first by parents, then by society at large - that attempts to improve things are weird and should be abandoned.

glangdale 8y ago

You appear to conflate the absence of self-optimization with 'mediocrity', which seems ... questionable. It's easy to find examples of both: some great historical figures had rigorous programs of conscious self-improvement; others became great by immediately engaging with some problem entirely outside themselves and if any self-improvement resulted, it wasn't a primary or conscious goal.

xkcd-sucks 8y ago
And some great historical figures ret-conned their own self-improvement programs and suffering in order to maintain a cult of personality

ccwilson10 8y ago

This has also led to many later IPOs :) On a more serious note, I agree most with your point around digging oneself out of complacency and moving towards a better future — if not for you, for someone else.

johnminter 8y ago

I think the problem is better framed as focusing on consistently making the best choices we can given information we have and the situation we face. Yes, we make these choices in a community and our choices impact one another. We should seek to help our neighbors as we can, remembering we may need their help some day. Living this way takes determination, persistence, and hard work. We need to know when to rest and recharge because fatigue makes us ineffective and error-prone. For me, that includes both rest and exercise. I find it helpful to discuss my plans with those I trust to refine the plans and projects I undertake. It is too easy to be overly ambitious/optimistic and start more projects than I can finish. Good counsel helps us to evaluate what we do and focus on what best supports our long term goals. We all make mistakes. I find it better to learn from them and try not to repeat them rather than engaging in self-pity or trying to cast myself as a "victim." Sometimes life is just hard and we need to be thankful for and encouraged by the "wins" we get. Living that way is far more pleasant than being constantly negative and critical of ourselves and others.