firstworldman

I'm curious to read more on this topic. Where will your writeup appear?

Actually kind of a meta-parody about the idea that no one's actually read IJ.

I think he articulated his thoughts about suicidal depression with incredible lucidity in Infinite Jest. This passage is etched in my memory. It haunts me and in a way I found it a bit of a relief that despite ongoing depression issues, I could not relate:

“The so-called ‘psychotically depressed’ person who tries to kill herself doesn’t do so out of quote ‘hopelessness’ or any abstract conviction that life’s assets and debits do not square. And surely not because death seems suddenly appealing. The person in whom Its invisible agony reaches a certain unendurable level will kill herself the same way a trapped person will eventually jump from the window of a burning high-rise. Make no mistake about people who leap from burning windows. Their terror of falling from a great height is still just as great as it would be for you or me standing speculatively at the same window just checking out the view; i.e. the fear of falling remains a constant. The variable here is the other terror, the fire’s flames: when the flames get close enough, falling to death becomes the slightly less terrible of two terrors. It’s not desiring the fall; it’s terror of the flames. And yet nobody down on the sidewalk, looking up and yelling ‘Don’t!’ and ‘Hang on!’, can understand the jump. Not really. You’d have to have personally been trapped and felt flames to really understand a terror way beyond falling.”

If these are honestly the amounts of time you devote to these things, then you need to make a big change. If you're working 80 hours per week and can't afford to live closer to work, you're working the wrong job. Unless you're a founder (and really, even then it should be temporary), 80 hours is an unreasonable expectation from management. Showering shouldn't take more than 10 minutes. Groceries shouldn't take 4 hours per week to buy. Conversely, you should probably spend more than 7 hours per week eating, and hopefully with other people who you care about. You could easily free up ~40 hours to spend time with your friends and family or developing a hobby. It would be good for your long term health and happiness too.

I think this statement might be among the most profound crystallizations of a certain type of SV mindset that people outside that world find flabbergasting. Marketplaces do not exist without goods to sell. If you were to walk into a record store and mistake the store itself, and not the music, for being the main reason why people visit record stores, and that all of these recording artists are super lucky to be in this awesome store, well... I'd like to meet the person who thinks that, I guess. Maybe.