Comment by apatters | Hacker News Reader

Comment by apatters | Hacker News Reader

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This was a great read but I found the end of the speech to be a letdown. He does a good job of introducing his core idea:

> The really significant education ... isn’t really about the capacity to think, but rather about the choice of what to think about.

But then at the end of the speech he seems to undermine it by telling us what we should think about, namely that we should be highly empathetic and self-sacrificing:

> The really important kind of freedom involves attention and awareness and discipline and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them over and over in myriad petty, unsexy ways every day.

Wait, why should we be living a life of perpetual self sacrifice? He hasn't built the case for this. But he says it's the real freedom. So which is really his core point: the freedom to choose your perspective, or the virtue of self-sacrifice?

Imho he makes a good argument in favor of choosing a non-default (if you adhere exclusively to self-interest, you'll be miserable because everyone's your enemy).

But he doesn't defend the latter proposition (commitment to self-sacrifice), and if we accept it as dogma it will conflict with the first. I guess an example of when self-sacrifice goes too far is Stockholm Syndrome, where a victim empathizes with their abuser and accepts the abuse.

Beyond this conflict I wonder whether the question of how to live should be viewed as a binary like he seems to have presented it (live for yourself, or live for others). It is a complex and open-ended question. Reducing it to a one or the other choice fails to represent that complexity.

Also I know this question commits an ad hominem fallacy, but it's hard not to ask it: should we be listening to a guy who committed suicide about how to live well?

I think he does explain his reason for this way of life / "worship" as he calls it.

"There is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship. And the compelling reason for maybe choosing some sort of god or spiritual-type thing to worship--be it JC or Allah, be it YHWH or the Wiccan Mother Goddess, or the Four Noble Truths, or some inviolable set of ethical principles--is that pretty much anything else you worship will eat you alive"

There’s no argument about a commitment to self sacrifice.

By focusing on things around you and the world as a greater whole, you’ll naturally be more empathetic, help people more, etc. If your only obsession day after day is improving yourself or improving your “thoughts” via education to get yourself out of the grind, then you’ll be less happy. “This job will make me happy. This profession. This commitment to an idea.” But doing those things only incurs a further grind.

The only thing to do is accept that “this is water” and attempt to reason about the implications from there. I think empathy and caring are natural consequences of that type of displacement from individual satisfaction or understanding and a desire to better understand the world naturally leads to more empathy.

If your goal is to understand your world rather than “conquer” it ideologically, you’ll naturally be kinder and more empathetic to your neighbor.

A writer would attempt to better understand the world and communicate it to the people they love. Repeatedly failing (in your own eyes) to properly communicate is incredibly disheartening, so I wouldn’t say the absolute goal here is your own satisfaction.

> I think empathy and caring are natural consequences of that type of displacement from individual satisfaction or understanding and a desire to better understand the world naturally leads to more empathy.

Makes sense, it's impossible to feel empathy for someone who you're not aware of. To use one of Wallace's examples if you don't consider the circumstances of the "fat, dead-eyed screaming lady" (or don't even notice she's there) you won't have any empathy for her. So in effect mindfulness increases your net empathy (which starts at more or less zero in infancy, I think in developmental psychology they say babies start developing self awareness at around 2, and awareness of others at around 3).

bruh it's a commencement speech

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