[Rescis]

While I agree that we (where we is a reader of the NYT or other western individuals) focus on hyper optimizing our life towards a perfect, unachievable goal, I am not at all comfortable with the authors assumption that it is inherently bad to do so, and that we should instead be happy with a life of mediocrity.

Every single time humanity visibly progresses, it is because one person (or many) found a problem with themselves or the state they were living in and attempted to remove the problem in hopes of having themselves or their environment become more 'perfect'. If people today decide to stop progressing towards perfection and just be happy with what they have, then there will still be large swaths of people living in extreme poverty, dying from preventable diseases, and suffering from human rights abuses. I really do believe that it is imperative from a humanitarian perspective that while we still have problems in the world, we strive to do everything we can to fix them—and that not doing so is horribly selfish.

[bitexploder]

Emotions and discontent are programmed in via evolution. The default state of most people is not happiness or sadness. It is discontent. If you are comfortable you aren’t going to keep trying hard. We have vast capacity and have struggled for tens of thousands of years to reach this point. Millions have died in wars for us to have what we have today. To waste that potential and settle into some adtech driven fugue state is unacceptable to me. I will keep learning, and struggling, and growing.

[watwut]

> Millions have died in wars for us to have what we have today.

Some of them fought to prevent us to have what we have today. Many fought for bad causes, many fought essentially for nothing or because things were shit for no gain. There were two sides to every war. Many fought over which autoritarian will controll that village.

There is not reason to struggle unless you really struggle, through learning is good.

[bitexploder]

I am just saying, there has been a ton of conflict and struggle for our species as a whole over its history. A lot of crazy suffering happened to our ancestors to get to this point and I feel driven to work hard, learn, and be better than I was yesterday from that perspective.

[watwut]

And my point is that a lot of that suffering did not happened to get us to thus point, but for entirely different often very wrong reasons. A lot of that suffering and hard work caused and ensured future suffering. Continuing that is not necessary virtue.

Related point is that it matters what one works hard towards and why, not just that one do.

[theoh]

The phrasing you are using:

"Millions have died in wars for us to have what we have today"

is problematic. I think a lot of the replies interpret it as a case of this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post_hoc_ergo_propter_hoc

Even if that's not what you are thinking: sure, people die fighting for particular causes, but people also die fighting to oppose those causes. The history of war doesn't confer any intrinsic moral value on fighting. What about https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Is–ought_problem

"There has been a ton of conflict and struggle for our species"

This is more ambiguous. What does the "for" mean? Could it be replaced with "in"? (i.e. it has just been endured) Or do you mean that the conflict and struggle has all been directed towards the furtherance of the species? (e.g. "it's been a tough two millennia for our species")

This is not simple stuff from a philosophical perspective.

[bitexploder]

I meant it from a broad cosmic perspective. Through the chaos and entropy of the universe and evolution we are on the Internet using fantastically complex devices to beam our thoughts across some unknown distance to exchange some ideas. That chaos and entropy includes all the suffering of those that came before us. There is no moral value to humans fighting and dying in the mud, just a waste of potential. My personal view is every human life is a new spark, a new shot to further ourselves as a species a little bit more and that, inherently, progress is the only sensible option for our species. And, being a human who thinks humans have a shot at being pretty alright in the grand scheme of things, I think that struggle is worth undertaking. I know philosophy is complex and this is not a very nuanced view point I am presenting from that perspective, but I don't think my point requires very much nuance.

[theoh]

You actually made pretty bold claims about discontent being the human condition, I'd say they need proper justification if you want them to be taken as universal truths, not just personal opinions.

[FabHK]

How about this formulation:

a) There has been a lot of progress over the millennia (in many ways, from higher life expectancy to less violence)

b) Many people have sacrificed a lot to bring that progress about

c) We ought to be grateful and c2) struggle on.

I think a), b), and c) are uncontroversial, c2) needs to be argued for.

[bitexploder]

I guess that is fair. I just sit down and think broadly about the last 2000 years of human history. I don't know if I would say we should be grateful. It doesn't come down to gratitude. We are here now as humans as a result of some great cosmic turbulence that involved the suffering of a lot of other humans. So, today, as I sit down, I have the choice, and the opportunity, at least here in America, to decide how I am going to spend my effort. It seems like squandering of a great opportunity to not try to improve the lot of humanity just a tiny, infinitely small fraction, by doing what I can to make the world a little bit better, by making myself better, and by making those around me a little bit better. I respect someone's freedom to not believe that. There is no right or wrong answer here. I just feel a personal, moral, imperative to take the balance of those that came before me and work hard. I would channel Carl Sagan here: http://www.planetary.org/explore/space-topics/earth/pale-blu... and put it into cosmic perspective even.

[Gormisdomai]

Then maybe we should be discontented with our current state of discontent.

[bitexploder]

It's discontent. All the way down. Heh. It is a good point though. There is nothing inherently good or bad about this state of being. It is just the way we are. Maybe we can change it, but it seems like it will happen on a geological time scale so we should learn to live with our basic nature for now.

[Atlantium]

"Millions have died in wars for us to have what we have today."

What we have is going to vary from person to person. I have no thanks to all those people for giving me a life filled with discontent and conflict.

[mantas]

It's privilege to feel discontent and see conflicts. Vast majority of people before us (and some during our lifetime) don't have a chance to feel discontent while they fight for survival nor they're interested about conflicts aside from the conflict that keeps them from surviving.

[chongli]

We can't all be Wesley Crusher. I see stories like the one about the five-year-old in China with the 15-page CV and I'm filled with dismay [1]. As a university student, I bear witness to the unbelievable pressure and stress in my peers (and much of it affects me). There's a palpable sense that school is a life raft and everyone is desperate to climb aboard.

This is no way to live. I don't have any idea how to solve this problem but I would be glad to see a discussion.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18368622

[Rescis]

If reading about Wesley Crusher makes you and I function perceptibly worse, I would argue that doing so is the opposite of striving for perfection. We, as biologically limited beings, have to understand that perfection for robots is different than perfection for people, and that we need to optimize towards being the best possible human we can.

As an aside, I think one of the points of that article was the the parents were inflating a bunch of achievements.

[GavinMcG]

You seem to be equating problem-solving with optimization, or a drive towards improvement with a drive towards perfection.

No doubt the effort to solve problems and improve one's self and circumstances have been powerful forces behind progress. But arguably, a focus on optimization and perfection can be forces that prevent the kind of progress you praise.

[Rescis]

I feel comfortable equating problem solving with optimization, for while we are still living outside of a utopia, any beneficial system that less than perfectly efficient is causing suffering (from an opportunity cost perspective).

Similarly, I feel comfortable treating a drive towards improvement the same I do a drive towards perfection, since without an end goal (perfection), you can't have improvement, since you cannot say if what you're doing is bringing you closer or farther from 'good'.

I do agree with you though that an individual can focus on hyper optimizing their personal life to the point where it is not good from a societal perspective; however, that's is not what I gathered the article was arguing ("Enough of our mania to be the best and the most, he says. It’s time to content ourselves with being average.")

[GavinMcG]

You're right that you need some measure to judge improvement, but you can have a vision of perfection without making it a goal in itself.

Optimiziation may be a subset of problem solving, but surely you'd agree that a problem can be solved even without the situation being brought to optimality?

[TeMPOraL]

Optimization is not just about reaching optimal state - which for all practical problems is impossible, given both the constraints of physical reality and the fuzzy definition of optimum humans can conceptualize. Optimization is a process of determining what the optimum is and moving the system towards that point.

[Retra]

If perfection is not a goal, how is it useful? And why call it perfection? I'd argue that you can have models without making them goals, but a model is not perfection unless it is also your primary goal. Perfection implies an optimal moral evaluation, and moral evaluation is always relative to a goal.

[glangdale]

You appear to conflate the absence of self-optimization with 'mediocrity', which seems ... questionable.

It's easy to find examples of both: some great historical figures had rigorous programs of conscious self-improvement; others became great by immediately engaging with some problem entirely outside themselves and if any self-improvement resulted, it wasn't a primary or conscious goal.

[xkcd-sucks]

And some great historical figures ret-conned their own self-improvement programs and suffering in order to maintain a cult of personality

[paulpauper]

It is not inherently bad, but it should not control your life. You should not beat yourself up for not fulfilling an unrealistic idealization of perfection. Not everyone can be like Tim Ferris. You take 500 people who did what he did many maybe two succeed and the rest are mediocre. Luck, whether it's the birth lottery or being at thr 'right place at the right time' (such as buying Bitcoin in 2009-2015), plays a bigger role than we may want to accept.

[jplayer01]

I think there is some conflict inherent in 1) constantly trying to improve and 2) accepting ourselves for who we are that isn't expressed well in the above article. At what point are you "good" enough to be valued or loved? This is something that's never answered anywhere in our modern culture of self-help and social media, and it is this culture that makes us feel unhappier with ourselves despite any improvements we make.

[x220]

>At what point are you "good" enough to be valued or loved?

That's the wrong question. That depends entirely on who you ask about yourself, and whether you believe their answers. The right question is "when should you feel good about yourself?" and the answer to that is "when you have your life put together and are moving towards meaningful goals and keeping chaos under control".

[jplayer01]

That may be well and good, but who's telling people that? What's society teaching people as they grow up?

[x220]

You should not let others define this for you. You should feel satisfied based on your progress towards your goals, as defined by you.

[jplayer01]

Empty words.

[agumonkey]

It's almost religious in the end. There's no global optimum for life, even at an individual scope. That said, spending too much time trying to optimize makes you myopic, which is clearly a subpar way to live one's existence. A baby is probably near peak life.

[x220]

>There's no global optimum for life, even at an individual scope

That's a big assumption with no evidence to support it. Depending on who you ask, people might say that the global optimum is Jesus, or Buddha, or Superman. People can instinctively think about the people they admire, abstract out the things these admirable people have in common, and strive towards (and worship) that ideal.

[agumonkey]

I shouldn't have used religious, I only had buddhist contemplation in mind.

[mitchbob]

"The reasonable man adapts himself to the world: the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man."

― George Bernard Shaw, Man and Superman

[Retra]

That makes a lot of assumptions about what is reasonable or not.

[TeMPOraL]

In some way it does, but I think a lot of us have an instinctive understanding of the message, being constantly told - first by parents, then by society at large - that attempts to improve things are weird and should be abandoned.

[johnminter]

I think the problem is better framed as focusing on consistently making the best choices we can given information we have and the situation we face. Yes, we make these choices in a community and our choices impact one another. We should seek to help our neighbors as we can, remembering we may need their help some day.

Living this way takes determination, persistence, and hard work. We need to know when to rest and recharge because fatigue makes us ineffective and error-prone. For me, that includes both rest and exercise.

I find it helpful to discuss my plans with those I trust to refine the plans and projects I undertake. It is too easy to be overly ambitious/optimistic and start more projects than I can finish. Good counsel helps us to evaluate what we do and focus on what best supports our long term goals.

We all make mistakes. I find it better to learn from them and try not to repeat them rather than engaging in self-pity or trying to cast myself as a "victim." Sometimes life is just hard and we need to be thankful for and encouraged by the "wins" we get. Living that way is far more pleasant than being constantly negative and critical of ourselves and others.

[ProAm]

> Every single time humanity visibly progresses, it is because one person (or many) found a problem with themselves or the state they were living in and attempted to remove the problem in hopes of having themselves or their environment become more 'perfect'

I'd venture to say more human progress is attributed to warfare than anything else.

[intrasight]

I'd venture to say that you are very wrong to say that. I used to believe that too, but I've changed my opinion about what is "progress".

[jcims]

Isn’t that just a subset of what ProAm described?

[ProAm]

Yes, I could see it that way. Much of warfare seems unnecessary though, rooted in greed.

[vertexFarm]

If you can't be happy with a life of mediocrity, you are simply not going to be happy. The extreme majority of people are mediocre, and that is exactly what defines mediocre. It's a simple statistical guarantee that most are not going to win the lottery of life and be more.

I find the concept of anomie useful: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anomie

We aren't making the world or ourselves better by striving towards intense and unrealistically optimistic goals all the time. Our unbound desire to maximize growth is psychotic, and after all we're very much on track to destroy the biosphere if we keep behaving the way we are. Probably past the point of turning back, in fact.

What's the point of all our progress if we end up making ourselves miserable and eventually eradicating ourselves?

[philwelch]

The extreme majority of people might be "mediocre" if you average out all of their skills, talents, and characteristics, but that's not meaningful. If you are an excellent cobbler and I am an excellent carpenter, then you can make me some excellent shoes and I can make you some excellent cabinetry and we are both better off, even though if we average together both of our skills in both trades, we are both mediocre. The world we live in today is a little more complicated than that, but most people can be at least better than mediocre in at least one small part of life if they work hard at it.

[thwy12321]

"specialization is for insects" -Robert Heinlein

[ksdale]

If I remember correctly, the entirety of that quote is really more about being a well-rounded person than about the best way to make a living. I'm betting Robert Heinlein didn't make his own clothes and shoes, though maybe he could have.

[philwelch]

Yeah, even in a world where everyone can, to complete the quote, “change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly”—there will still be some who are particularly excellent generals, butchers, sailors, architects, poets, accountants, stonemasons, medics, nurses, soldiers, officers, engineers, programmers, and chefs; they will simply also be capable of doing a passable (if perhaps mediocre) job at the other tasks as needed. And frankly, merely being that well rounded by itself takes you beyond mediocrity.

[Rescis]

I feel like you're making two different points:

1: That our goals are unrealistic and therefore lead to less 'good' (in the utilitarian sense)

2: Progress without happiness isn't 'good', since we all will die

To the first point, part of striving for perfection is realizing that we are biological creatures, not robots. To be the perfect version of ourselves is to accept that we cannot stay awake in a lab forever, that we need to eat, sleep, and enjoy ourselves in order to be the most productive version of ourselves. Death camp laborers are noticeably less productive than free laborers.

To the second point, I'd ask "What's the point of happiness if we will all eventually be eradicated, regardless?). Humanity, in our current state, cannot last forever. Whether we die from global warming as you presume, nuclear armageddon as others do, or the heat death of the universe, we will all eventually die so long as we are stuck in this universe, and at the point that we all die and all encoded information is lost, it doesn't matter if we were happy or sad.

I feel like our best and only bet at living past the universe is to be as productive as possible, create as much technical knowledge as possible, and see if we can eventually live past what seems to be certain extinction, and to do that requires striving for perfection.

[vertexFarm]

Number one sounds about right for the most part, but you may be misunderstanding the second point.

I don't think that progress is meaningless because we all die. I don't think it's necessarily a bad or unhappy thing that everything will eventually end. What I'm specifically saying here is that our unrealistic goals are themselves the cause of our extremely likely and credible demise in the near future. We are doing immediate damage, and it is not some hypothetical or philosophical curiosity. It's extremely dire.

It's virtually certain we won't live past the heat death of the universe. I don't think that's a concept even worth humoring. Nuclear armageddon, for what it is worth, was always an exaggerated risk. It would have perhaps ended western civilization, but even at the height of proliferation it was far from being able to knock out our biosphere. Which is somewhat controversial, I think most people still buy into that myth.

Climate change, though, is horrendously close to being the final word on whether all our aspirations were worthwhile or whether human industrialization was the most evil mistake to ever happen in the history of life on Earth. It's very likely that the next few decades to a century will make all the crazy people advocating for mass suicide or Luddism or other extreme measures seem like they were onto something. Nobody likes to even hypothetically consider it, but if we're intellectually honest with ourselves there exists out there a gruesome threshold--a point beyond which it would have been better to trade back every bit of our progress to remain hunter-gatherers without civilization or technology.

To think that the way around this is to be maximally productive or develop ever more powerful technologies isn't at all rational. Those elements of our nature are themselves the sole cause of this crisis in the first place. Climate change isn't some vague possibility; it has already started and caused enormous damage. 60% of all animals since the 1970s are dead. The oceans are acidic wastelands and are rapidly worsening. Almost zero reefs left. We're on the verge of runaway greenhouse gas accumulation, and we're utterly ruined if the methane clathrates go off. Make no mistake--this is a great filter. It's not coming. It is already here.

We block it out in order to survive in the short term. Nobody likes to take all this gloom and doom seriously. It's unproductive. But this is precisely where all our productivity has gotten us. It has all been in error; there's a fundamental flaw in our psychology. Even our mundane daily lives are extraordinary damaging, not only to ourselves but to all life. We owe it to ourselves to admit it if our own existence has proven to be evil. There was once a time we should have admitted that it was an option to stop all this, to turn back--but we won't do that. And it's likely too late anyway.

So yes, it was two different points. Our obsession with self-improvement and growth is personally damaging, but it's also damaging us all as a whole. It has damaged everything in a profound way. Our whole paradigm is likely flawed. We hope that we will figure it out, improve, and overcome--but that very hope might be a driving force in perpetuating our industry which has only pushed us to the verge of extinction.

Sorry for the big depressing tirade. I swear I'm not Ted Kaczynski, I just want to face this issue without deceiving myself or irrationally believing that positivity will fix everything. I know that soldiering on can overcome some problems, but I want to acknowledge that there are circumstances where that will never work. Where our human drive to normalize and persist through adversity are a death sentence instead of an advantage.

[gaahrdner]

The vast majority of our lives will be boring and unexceptional. That is not a bad thing.

[ccwilson10]

This has also led to many later IPOs :)

On a more serious note, I agree most with your point around digging oneself out of complacency and moving towards a better future — if not for you, for someone else.