[larkery]

I think there's a case to be made that it is possible to judge whether people's behaviours are helping them to enjoy their lives to the best extent.

It is a very extreme position to say that there is literally nothing which can be generalised about people's experiences, and so one person's heroin main-lining hobby is as good as another's model railway collection so long as they both profess an equal belief in their respective enjoyment.

There must be something more than this that we can say, since we have the distilled thoughts of millennia of some of the most capable humans thinking about these questions (what makes a good life) and lots of case histories of how people's lives have gone.

This is different from judging someone's moral worth or probity or what have you, and I think it is harmful to gloss over the distinction because it creates a kind of skeptical collapse.

This might be what the prior comment means to indicate by getting a life - that we should each individually research this question and not presume we've got a good answer already. If it is what they meant, I agree that their phrasing was unskillful.

[TeMPOraL]

I agree there's a case to be made. There's a strong case to be made. In fact, those of us who heard "get a life" shot at them probably made that case many time. The case is this: someone's hobby of tourism / enjoying cars / writing stories / riding horses / all kinds of sports / engaging in gossips and interpersonal dramas / whatever else mainstream does is at least as valid of a lifestyle as my hobby of geeking out about spaceships and writing code for fun.

This is what many of us had to (usually unsuccessfully) argue to our colleagues (and family members!) during school years, so if a full-blown dismissal of "get a life" phrase is a knee-jerk reaction, it's unfortunately a well trained one.

[lists]

Pleasure and pain equally enable a self-satisfaction one might term 'happiness', like the pleasure of consistently demeaning oneself when one finds oneself frustrated by life because demeaning _others_ is pleasurable.

We are comfortable perceiving other species' limitations, even directly perceiving how their behavior or evolution will be their downfall, but we're not particularly good at analyzing ourselves in this way, and its owing to, rather than in spite of, moral constraints, themselves varying from demographic to demographic, so that ultimately the question becomes "_Which kind_ of human should propagate?" For Aristole, only slave-owners could practice virtue, materially and cognitively (though today, epigenitics would tell us there isn't as much of a distinction here as one would wish, or the recent literature indicating IQ drops the _longer_ one is poor as well; Aristotle ultimately had an idea of this as well, but treated of it separately in On the Soul).