Comment by fnordpiglet | Hacker News Reader

Comment by fnordpiglet | Hacker News Reader

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Everything you do is ultimately pointless. You feel that becoming a particular type of engineer you aspire to is meaningful, but once you get there you’ll realize you’re still yourself and you didn’t ascend to some higher level of being. Probably the most meaningful thing we can do is through social interactions. Your time in WoW must have incorporated social interactions. Be proud of those experiences - they’re in no way worse than others. Enjoy who you are and where you’ve been, avoid hurting people directly or indirectly, and you’ll be fine. If now you value your work with computers more then pursue that with the same vigor - but realize it’s not more meaningful than playing WoW, because meaning is what you make of it. Our culture will tell you productive activities that create capital and productivity are meaningful, but they only are if you find meaning and purpose in them for yourself without regard to the monetary necessities. I’m certain you felt purpose and meaning in your WoW playing at the time, and maybe you’ve just grown and changed. That’s ok too. Just because you wouldn’t spend your time doing WoW now doesn’t change you were driven to then, and the fact you could have “leap frogged” your current skill doesn’t matter one little bit. It’s not a race.

You feel that becoming a particular type of engineer you aspire to is meaningful, but once you get there you’ll realize you’re still yourself and you didn’t ascend to some higher level of being.

This viewpoint sounds to me like it’s coming from someone who is depressed.

I’ve had a long career with a lot of accomplishments and I wouldn’t trade any of it for anything. Yeah someday the sun will consume the inner planets and we’ll all be gone but I don’t think about that. I’m having an absolute blast with life doing whatever I want to do.

Some of the happiest times I’ve had were a direct result of working my butt off conceiving a goal, coming up with a plan, executing that plan and then enjoying the rewards of that goal.

I don’t envy the generation today. In 1982 when I turned on my first computer it did nothing but say, “READY.” If I wanted to play a game I had to type the BASIC or Assembly source code in from a magazine. That’s literally how I learned to program. Sure I played games but most of my time was productive - literally producing instead of consuming.

If I grew up today, what a difference it would be. Infinite distractions. My life would be totally different. I’ve said this many times - the 20th century was about humanity learning to live in a world with infinite sugar, fat and salt. The 21st century will be about humanity learning to live in a world of infinite information.

Will you consume the mental equivalent of broccoli or Pepsi? In the long run I’ve found it makes a tremendous difference in one’s level of happiness.

Oh I have had a great career and enjoyed it tremendously and still enjoy it. But I’ve had clear goals that were hard to achieve that I feel proud of achieving, but I had some other attachment in the “quest” that I thought would make me more like the folks I respected. It wasn’t until I became one of them that I realized they were never different than me, they had just worked hard like I had. If anything that’s humbling but it also cleared my mind of a lot of motivations that were based on a falsehood I told myself. I hear the same falsehoods in a lot of the engineers who look up to me now and I want to shake them and say “it’s not true.” But I’ve never gotten any of them to actually hear me.

Hard disagree, I am not depressed at all and side with the parent comment's perspective. Everything is pointless. This also doesn't invalidate your enjoyment of your career and other accomplishments. They're good things [for you and those you touched], yet still ultimately pointless, merely tangential randomness to everyone outside of your little bubble.

The Earth is a tiny, insignificant blue dot in the vastness of space which is the Universe. It appears to be rare but there is no evidence it is important or otherwise significant. It's eventual demise (in a very long time) is the likely outcome, just like what we observe with other planetary bodies.

I am not depressed at all and side with the parent comments perspective. Everything is pointless.

Context matters and you seem to have ignored all of it and misunderstood what I was saying. We can agree that everything is ultimately pointless - as I said myself in the comment you’re responding to, one day the sun will engulf the inner planets before becoming a red dwarf.

What I find unsettling though is the context in which “life is pointless” was brought up.

It was essentially, “don’t feel bad about not accomplishing anything because life is pointless and accomplishing anything will not fulfill you anyway.”

Do you agree with that sentiment? I don’t.

Ah, thanks for clarifying 300bps, and I sincerely apologize for misinterpreting and misunderstanding you. It was not intentional.

I agree with you 100%, that is a self-defeating nihilist sentiment.

  > Everything you do is ultimately pointless
  > the most meaningful thing we can do is through social interactions

Clearly you can see the contrast here. I agree that people are far more important than anything else.

I am also among the majority of worldviews on earth who do not consider 'everything is pointless'.

I like the Tibetan take on this: We’re all going to die. Every day we live a little and die a little. We should aspire to live joyfully doing whatever is meaningful to us. And let things die throughout our lives. Holding on to possessions, people and ideas too tightly gets in the way of living.

Living joyfully can mean anything for you. One thing I like is struggling at hard programming problems. The struggle (and eventual success) feels great. The challenge is to accept that however I am - I’ll probably be like this until I die. And at some deep level be ok with that, and live my life enthusiastically anyway.

Do I sometimes spend a week or two playing games and “wasting time”? Yep. Maybe I’ll be like this until I die. The challenge is in accepting that that’s ok.

> We’re all going to die. Every day we live a little and die a little Beautiful perspective there. Thanks for writing this.

The point is that everything is meaningless in the absolute sense but on the personal level, we create our own meaning.

Meaning is mostly self-reflecting. You build meaning by the things you love to do, whether someone is watching or not. If you’re depressed this is the hardest thing to “get” , to give yourself the gift of worthiness and bringing meaning into the world. For yourself, and through that to others.

I don't mean to be depressing, but what is the point of life? Like an ultimate goal or something that you must achieve?

It doesn't seem to be a one, except for the ones that we set for ourselves, which is usually trying to live as better as possible for as long as you can. And this seems fine to me, thinking too much about this can get depressing unless you can be comfortable with the fact that whatever we do in life the end outcome is always death.

Why does there have to be a meaning? Maybe we are just chemical reactions and nearly zero entropy self propagating whorls. Does that change anything at all for you as a thinking, living, feeling being? My point was you find meaning all the time in the things you find meaningful. I suspect that’s all there is, but if you stop and think about it that’s all there needs to be or frankly can be. Any other extrinsic meaning would be at odds with your meaning at the moment.

It's like, what is the point of chess, or any game?

After the life-and-death struggle, we just put the game pieces back in the box, neither having gained nor lost anything in the end - except some joy, sorrow, love and friendship in between.

>And this seems fine to me, thinking too much about this can get depressing unless you can be comfortable with the fact that whatever we do in life the end outcome is always death.

Would you want it any other way?

Point of life: you didn’t choose to be here but since you are, make something out of it. What is the pleasure or the meaning of just wasting it away?

The point is to enjoy every day, instead of trying to do things others consider meaningful. If you like playing games all day, do that.

Whom are you living for?

I don’t think this is wise advice. Something can bring joy for a while but may ultimately bring negative emotions if it becomes too large a part of one’s life. e.g. if it excludes exercise, spending time outdoors, in person human interactions etc. It may also rewrite your dopamine and serotonin reward pathways which can be hard to reverse.

You're reading a lot into what I said, and yes, the things you read into it are not wise, I agree.

I don’t think the point is “everything is pointless”, insomuch as “everything is more pointless seeming than social interactions”.

Social interactions seem to be at least part of the “human motive” for most people I’d guess.

I did mean everything is pointless nakedly. The rest I talked about meaningfulness. There doesn’t have to be a point. Pointless doesn’t mean worthless, but we have a culture that insists everything must have an extrinsic point. There isn’t one IMO. That said, the closest I can identify to a point is to not harm and to know, be known, and enrich others through that.

>Everything you do is ultimately pointless.

You've got a good point there.

In the science laboratory, some people spend all their time doing experiments, and most of the time they don't invent anything.

Occasionally when they do, it is still very unlikely to be deployed since this would cost even more money, most of which in non-allocatable. Most inventions may never be financially viable anyway, as we know.

Once in a while something really worthwhile develops fully in spite of all the odds.

Now if you consider anything that never leaves the lab as pointless, it follows that you're going to need to be comfortable doing lots more pointless stuff, or even stuff that turns out to appear "pointless" in hindsight after you've moved on. Otherwise you're not going to get as much of the good progress you could appreciate most.

So I wouldn't worry.

People probably play the games where they have gotten better familiarity as you go along, and move to deeper levels of performance.

Some games you may even have a kind of unfair advantage, whether it's with the game itself or in comparison to other players or perhaps competitors.

These same strategies & tactics can be applied to the same hardware in the pursuit of things like computer science or software engineering, and the challenges as you move to more accomplished levels may have some similarities.

I started with the first Atari computer model that was more than just a gaming machine. There was a full hardware keyboard and they had the BASIC programming language in the same kind of advanced game cartridge that the compatible games used. It would handle 4 joysticks or trackballs.

It was really cut-and-dried when it came to dividing my time between these cartridges, the BASIC was like having a PC before the "IBM PC" was released, so there were really more levels than all of my games combined.

I felt obligated to do some programming to make the hardware do what I wanted, I had to get reference books for complete documentation and it could sometimes take 14 hours to accomplish moving to a new level too.

It was so straightforward to just put in a game cartridge to play for a bit, then plug in BASIC and go back to programming.

Even before Facebook, I considered "social media" well covered by those other than myself. I may put just as much time into personal interaction anyway, but I have always found live action more rewarding. But I'm old fashioned and it's familiar to be satisfied keeping up with far fewer people than if you push all options to the max.

The time I don't spend on my phone, I could start a million-dollar business.

Everybody's on Facebook anyway, if anything important comes up, I'll find out about it first hand.

Not as astute as the good old Yogi Berra saying: "Nobody goes there any more, it's too crowded!".

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