[coldtea]

Well, you only live once, so there's that. In the end, if you're not happy with your situation, you might get depressed, alcoholic, legal opiod addicted, on even blow your brains out, and that might be worse for the kids, wife, and mortgage.

[hellisothers]

That’s what he is talking about though, “You only live once” is a selfish (no negative connotation intended) sentiment. If you have a wife, children, debts people are expecting you to repay then to some extent you need to deal with some adversity.

I’m not saying everybody should stick it out in terrible situations but “you only live once” is not the reason you should be flipping the table if you have people depending on you.

[coldtea]

>“You only live once” is a selfish (no negative connotation intended) sentiment

This is backwards though.

Avoiding being selfish is exactly what makes the person turn alcoholic, suicidal, depressed etc. Else they could just say "fu" to their family, debts, responsibilities etc and go start a new life.

It's not like they enjoy being depressed or suicidal or abusing some substance etc and do that for selfish reasons. My point was about how trying not to be selfish and sticking to it that can end up making things worse (including for others).

[projektir]

I'm not so sure. This implies that there's some reliable stability in life to which you're holding on to, so when you take risks, you're discarding this reliable stability.

But I don't think this stability actually exists. Lots of things can turn on you and your family at any moment, and then you are not ready, because you haven't been taking the necessary risks, haven't been taking care of yourself, out of a sense of duty.

I think people generally function best when they optimize for themselves compared to optimizing directly for others, because if you do not optimize for yourself, you rot, and then you cannot help said others anyway. Optimizing for others can be very difficult and inaccurate. Put on your mask before you put on your child's mask.

Optimizing yourself should already take care of unnecessarily rash YOLO decisions since you wouldn't want to be left without any money yourself, either. But holding on to awful positions out of a sense of duty, ehh, that seems to be how people get to a really bad place (i.e., depression, alcoholism, infidelity). And, ultimately, there's not just duty to your specific family, but also to society, and you can't change society when you are always just going with the flow.

It also creates a rather sad picture for said family.

[shrimp_emoji]

Interestingly, confucianism extends this concept of obligation to society at large, in which case you're never flipping the table as a good person.

I wonder if that's a better paradigm than the more individualistic one we have in the West.

[huntertwo]

One thought that comes to mind is that this paradigm makes it easier for bad actors (those who are “selfish”) to get ahead.