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Comment by natecavanaugh | Hacker News Reader

I dunno, I'll play the crank here and say that writings like this really make me question the kinds of life that could be lived with this ideology. People tend to already focus on themselves as the locus of creation, do we really need more of this? I know there are people who claim to live better lives because of views like this, but I've seen how many of them live, which is often in the moment, selfish and a waste of others time.

If the highest intellectual, moral and emotional goal you can achieve is to know yourself, hour can anything be too selfish?

Yet, I hear far more often about what these people think of their lives, and far less about the actual benefit to others.

Maybe my moral compass is tuned differently, but the whole focus on "self" seems to be the most shallow when it comes to a happy life, but it sure is convenient ;P

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I never interpreted her saying focus only on yourself and maximize your own happy. But rather know yourself. To me there is a big differences in understanding who you are vs only doing what you want at any expense.

This is too simple, but knowing I want a piece of cake does not mean I should or will eat one.

She is railing against the types of people that are so goal driven to a point where it becomes an obsession. She seems to think that over doing(which is what that is) stems from a poor understanding of who you are, and/or surpassing your own needs. For instance opening a local store. It's successful, makes enough money, but instead of being happy(your needs are met) you open a chain, take over the state, then the country and so on. Or the empty nester that now has no children to focus on has nothing to do, no skills to do anything, and no idea what they actually like to do. Since their entire world was built around someone else.

Also, never let the worst of a group define that group. If they are the worst they probably aren't following the actual ideology.(clearly this thinking fails with Nazi's or other extremists)

Okay, I can accept that. I do have a knee-jerk reaction to posts along this line, but I can see the difference between pleasing yourself and knowing who you are.

I guess my only criticism remaining is that I think one doesn't and shouldn't preclude the other, so when I see posts like this in isolation, in the current culture, it runs so aligned to the "please yourself" pop culture that it's hard not to see it as part of that. But I agree, knowing who you are is incredibly important. I personally believe that you can't truly know yourself unless you also invest in others so you know them well enough to contrast who you are and are not.

The way I interpret the writing is that if one understands who she is then the act of pleasing herself is meaningless "doing" that would never cross her mind in the first place.

I really don't think there is anything in the writing that promotes/suggests the "please yourself pop culture" you mentioned; in fact, I don't think there is anything in the writing about pleasing oneself at all.

The closest thing that I can imagine is consider that you are on a hike alone and all of a sudden you feel the urge to play a tune. You take out your ocarina and just naturally play a tune. When you are done you simply continue hiking. You didn't play the tune to please yourself and you didn't play the tune to please an audience—you simply played because it felt like the most natural thing to do that moment, and it's good because of that.

> I personally believe that you can't truly know yourself unless you also invest in others so you know them well enough to contrast who you are and are not.

I tend to disagree with this. I personally think that you can't understand yourself through contrast with who others are (not least because you can never understand others better than they understand themselves)—that way you are simply creating an image yourself based on the opinions you have on other people, not because you are just being you because you understand yourself.

The reason I read it that way was because of the whole "knowing yourself is the most important goal in life" aspect, which is a summum bonum type statement, and one I disagree with. I think there are lots of good honorable things in life that are more important than knowing who you are.

> I tend to disagree with this. I personally think that you can't understand yourself through contrast with who others are

I don't mean you should only or even primarily base your self-awareness in relation to the contrast, but that any view of yourself that doesn't at least have an understanding of your needs vs another person's will always be an incomplete one.

I'm with you on this having read biographies of Laura Riding and Robert Graves: selfish and narcissistic barely begin to describe Laura Riding's egomania.

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