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Comment by jlos | Hacker News Reader

> These people who live a vigorous life to 70, 80, 90 years of age—when I look at what those people “do,” almost all of it is what I classify as play. It’s not meaningful work. They’re riding motorcycles; they’re hiking. Which can all have value—don’t get me wrong. But if it’s the main thing in your life? Ummm, that’s not probably a meaningful life.

I'm never really to sure which to find more shocking about these kind of public intellectuals, their hubris in thinking they can define what makes a life meaningful for someone-- everyone--else or that they are often given positions of actual influence.

Then again, maybe things makes more sense if the people running the world think the only thing giving other peoples lives meaning is work.

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> > These people who live a vigorous life to 70, 80, 90 years of age—when I look at what those people “do,” almost all of it is what I classify as play. It’s not meaningful work. They’re riding motorcycles; they’re hiking. Which can all have value—don’t get me wrong. But if it’s the main thing in your life? Ummm, that’s not probably a meaningful life.

Made me think about a few Frankl's quote

> For the meaning of life differs from man to man, from day to day and from hour to hour. What matters, therefore, is not the meaning of life in general but rather the specific meaning of a person's life at a given moment. To put the question in general terms would be comparable to the question posed to a chess champion, “Tell me, Master, what is the best move in the world?” There simply is no such thing as the best or even a good move apart from a particular situation in a game and the particular personality of one's opponent. The same holds for human existence. One should not search for an abstract meaning of life. Everyone has his own specific vocation or mission in life to carry out a concrete assignment which demands fulfillment. Therein he cannot be replaced, nor can his life be repeated. Thus, everyone's task is as unique as is his specific opportunity to implement it.

The funny thing is that people shitting on other's "meaningless hobbies" are very often in the second category he talks about:

> Moreover, there are various masks and guises under which the existential vacuum appears. Sometimes the frustrated will to meaning is vicariously compensated for by a will to power, including the most primitive form of the will to power, the will to money.

Seems they think that those lives serve no utility for others, thus they are not meaningful. Forgetting that a life is most meaningful for the person whose it is. Would have expected more stringency from an intellectual.

It would be sad if it wasn't infuriating. If they had only influence over their own lives then this would only a sad story. Idiots like John Lee decide the cancerous policy that configures our society. They as well be demons because their entire lives seem to be dedicated to torturing human beings by contorting their lives into an unnatural and subordinate lives as if it's the only thing that gives them pleasure.

I'd like to agree and note that assuming we get to post-scarcity conditioning quality of life on work will be a bad definition.

On the other hand I recall, as a PhD student, David Cox lightly napping in the audience of a conference (he'd have been about 90), only to wake up for the questions and fire off some insights. So there is certainly some merit in the theory of a nexus between 'meaningful work' and living a long and engaged life, at least for some people.

QUALY is not conditioned on work productivity, Ezekiel Emanuel has done a poor job of representing it to the public.

The truth of the matter for most people though is that if they are unable to do meaningful (to them) work this leads to depression.

For the anecdote given by the author, the grandmother could perform meaningful work (counseling) still.

Imo, society needs more of this, and these ideas are not in any way new to philosophy. We live in an age of widespread hedonism and much of the way people live is unhealthy on an individual and societal basis. I fully reject the "be yourself, do what makes you happy" mindset of today because the ideal day for a young person now is sleeping in, eating sugar for breakfast, smoking weed, playing video games and watching porn all day. Most people don't take it to that extreme, but too many people, in my opinion, go in that direction instead of the direction of moral productive work and rearing children that actually advances the human race and improves their life outside of momentary feelings of pleasure.

>> moral productive work and rearing children that actually advances the human race

Do not assume that everyone has the freedom to make such decisions. Moral decisions are ones that you can make regardless of life circumstance. Many people simply cannot afford the traditional lifestyle of getting married and having kids. I don't mean incels, I mean that all over the world there are young people who want to marry and have kids but are locked into economic situations that preclude the ability to take that "moral" path.

This is partially caused by the thinking in the article.

The modern selfish senior would rather live 5 more years in a nursing home with a bad quality of life than give their inheritance to their children. The inheritance is instead given to the state and megacorps.

Many of our parents inherited a home.

I would encourage you to read up on "the success sequence". It's very simple to avoid poverty, but it involves depriving yourself of pleasure. I say this as someone who grew up in poverty and escaped it.

>> It's very simple to avoid poverty

Poverty isn't what I meant. There are people, sometimes rather well off people, who are nevertheless in economic situations that preclude marriage. For instance, some people have elderly or disabled family members which they must take care of. There is huge gap, the entire middle class, between "poverty" and not having enough money to hire 24/7 care. Others have good well-paid jobs, but jobs that mean they are located in places with male/female ratio that makes finding a partner next to impossible (China's "bachelor" villages). Still others are limited by cultural norms that do not accept marriage of persons without traditional full-time employment regardless of wealth (India, Japan). Just look at the difficulties surrounding Japan's princess. The real issue there isn't that her husband is poor, he really isn't, but that he doesn't have a traditional fulltime job.

Delayed childrearing is also sometimes a desire to have intense and high-effort experiences: living in new countries, learning new languages, acquiring skills, climbing mountains, etc. The idea is once you have a committed partner your life is mostly over, and once you have a kid it's completely over, so you'd better have lived fully by then. To be honest, the messaging from my own parents was not too far off of that.

Some friends are theoretically open to committed partners, but only if they can be long-distance for the first few years while completing their adventures around the world. There's a big push against compromising even your travel agenda, let alone your career, to be with someone.

This is a really bizarre comment, to me at least. The central point of travel in your post, particularly, as some sort of universal, valuable goal is an unfamiliar concept to me. Travel, along with what I'm guess most of what you consider as "intense and high-effort experiences" to do before "your life is over" after getting married and having kids I would probably categorize as the self-destructive and ultimately pointless pleasure seeking I'm advocating against. My point is the fact that you and most people consider this "desirable" is not good. If you think you should seek a great deal of pleasure before "ending" your life by becoming a responsible adult, my advice is to get addicted to heroin, as it will offer a far more intense pleasure than travel, or whatever else you mean.

>moral productive work and rearing children

I have a hard time with the idea that there is anything moral or immoral about work or leisure. In 50 years time, it's very unlikely anything 'work' I have done will matter.

Leisure activities are only immoral if they hurt yourself or others. If your activities lead you to become an overweight shut-in in poor health with few friends, sure. You could make the argument they are immoral.

I think you can be a retired dabbler and dilettante and absolutely live a 'good life'. At the end of the day, all that matters is that we live lives true to ourselves and our relationships with others. All of our accomplishments are dust in the wind, and will be forgotten.

My point of moral productive work was to differentiate it from things like financial fraud or telemarketing, which require a great deal of work, but are ultimately unproductive and/or come at the expense of society. My other point about leisure/pleasure seeking is that you are always, no matter what, giving your life to something. If you give your life to leisure/pleasure it is a resource that is wasted that detracts both from your life, and the lives of any person you may have helped with that resource. I reject the notion that self destructive behavior doesn't hurt anyone else. I'd hate to live in a society of bums and drug addicts. We all do better when we all do better. Right now, fully a third of all of my work efforts (read: taxes) are wasted on retired dabblers and dilettantes who do nothing to help the rest of us. Their pleasure comes at the cost of myself, and my children. So long as you pass on your genes and your ideas, your efforts matter on Earth, and potentially our actions matter on a spiritual/supernatural level. The only respite I find in these conversations as that the hedonists will just be dust in the wind.

An obvious missing thought by John Lee here is that people would go for their hedonism at different ages depending on their expected years remaining.

If you told me I will live to 100, quitting at 70 to travel the world sounds ok.

If you told me I’ll die at 50, I will be retiring before that.

By prolonging life from 80 to 90, we also encourage people to retire later. So even if “meaningful” would mean “work” (and oh boy, it doesn’t) it still is important to to prolong life.

You can always trust an intellectual to not consider anything but first order effects I guess.

It's an issue of the human condition, once you reach a point where you're superior to one person, you start thinking you're superior to all.

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