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Comment by goodside | Hacker News Reader

Zack, don't take this wrong way, because you seemed pretty chill when we met at the meetup a while back, but this post is not even remotely close to any sort of coherent thought. It's unsubstantiated speculation, bad writing, and worse yet it's linkbait. There's a line between informal flare and lunatic raving, and its drawn somewhere in the vicinity of writing in all caps. This isn't what people come to HN for, and I'm genuinely confused as to how it ended up at #1. Sorry.

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I quite enjoyed it. Maybe it's not HN material but it was a pleasant read and spoke well to people who struggle to figure out what happiness is. Most people at HN would probably agree that enjoyment would come from creating something. I, being newer here, took longer to figure this out. I realize that for a long while I was taking the wrong cues from society on how to draw enjoyment and this article sums up a lot of what my struggle was with and drew the same conclusions.

I also found this article to very relevant to modern life here in America. As a young adult I am questioning things like this everyday and I am going to read flow now.

Can you elaborate on why you think it's not a coherent thought?.

some examples of bad writing?.

and why you think it's lunatic raving ?.

withought these my friend, you are just doing the same you are accusing zack of.

in short, be objective.

I normally post my book summaries on HN because people get value out of them. In this case, I made a comment on HN, I replied, a discussion ensued, I decided that it was too big for a comment and I'd blog about it. Tichy asked me to submit the post to HN when I was done with it and his request got modded to +5. I would love to hear which part of the writing you think was bad because I have also been told that this was one of my most well written posts yet due to the relaxed tone. (In the past, I have also been accused of having the tone of a hyper rigorous basement-dweller, and although you can't please everyone, a proper balance is maybe the better approach.) If you think that too much of the post is speculation, then you will be appeased to know that most of my points are actually backed up in the bibliography of Flow. Certainly my blog post was not meant to be construed as scholarly - just intellectually interesting and hopefully insightful.

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