Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Ask HN: What is your “mission” in work and life?

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

71–80 of 102 posts

Re: Ask HN: What is your “mission” in work and life?

#71

Post by simonebrunozzi »

qubex wrote: post #52
simonebrunozzi wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am Italian (living abroad in Luxembourg, Singapore, United States for the last 10 years). I feel exactly like you. I lost almost any faith in our beloved Mother country to be able to emerge from the mud and be a beacon of hope and culture once again. I also hope that in a few years, once I have satiated my appetite for career and startups and money, I will have the willingness to go back and try to apply what I hav…

You’re lucky, in a sense. I have been standing and fighting in the ’mud’ for a decade because we have a family business to defend and preserve, for the benefit of my family and all those who are employed by it. It’s a totally dispiriting experience.

In a sense, I am. In another (as you probably know), it took a dose of guts to leave Italy (and friends, parents, etc).

But, I fought in the muck for 10 years before deciding it was time to leave.

Well. What to say. I still miss Italy to this day.

Re: Ask HN: What is your “mission” in work and life?

#72

Post by jstimpfle »

CyanLite2 wrote: post #67
wvlia5 wrote: post #59

First, achieving a stable financial situation. Then, the big goal: Making the world better by: - Stopping the mass murder of animals - Bringing the demise of irrational practices such as religion and astrology - Pushing knowledge forward by contributing to science or teaching those who will hopefully do so, and by making the software environment tidier

Not sure how ending religion would be better for the world. There are some religious fanatics, always will be, that will use their religion to bring about hate and violence. However there are billions of people who practice some form of religion that are peaceful people who use their religion to spread love and peace throughout the world. Don't try to throw the baby out with the bath water. Religious freedom is a cor…

Parent didn't say he wants to remove that freedom. Look at it as evangelizing of agnosticism.

Re: Ask HN: What is your “mission” in work and life?

#73

Post by gooseus »

wu-ikkyu wrote: post #64
gooseus wrote: post #37

My mission is to gain knowledge in order to understand the world in a new way, and communicate this such that I can do my part to help help Life succeed in the very long term. I wrote about what I believe the "Purpose of Life" is on my blog, though I haven't publicized it very much yet: https://goose.us/thoughts/the-purpose-of-life/ (TL;DR - the purpose of life is to maximize the area under the complexity curve for o…

>the purpose of life is to maximize the area under the complexity curve for our enclosing system. Can you put this in laymans terms?

That's sort of the work I've been trying to do... if you read through the whole post I give it my current best shot and use graphs and videos that do a good job of setting it up using laymans terms, especially the MinutePhysics series narrated by Sean Carroll.

Basically the idea is that life is a process which maximizes complexity as entropy increases, by its very nature... if you consider the whole universe, there are no structures we have observed that are as complex as the structures we observe in living organisms.

The complexity of the biosphere would dwarf the complexity of the rest of our entire solar system... as in, the information required to describe the entire solar system and how it proceeds from state to state, including the storms or Jupiter and Saturn, would be trivial compared to attempts to model all the life on our planet, including the mental states of each of the 7 billion humans and the interconnected relationships of all the other bacteria, plant, fungi, etc.

This maximization occurs as life seeks to continue replicating and adapts to each other and any environment that it possibly can, even the harshest on our planet. The most advanced organisms on the planet are those which have the most complex nervous systems and thus the most complex behavior, including us (again, the complexity of the human mind most likely dwarfs the complexity of most other organisms... proven simply by being able to occupy states that allow it to understand and communicate the complexity of other organisms).

So, my thesis is that the purpose of life is to maximizes complexity, but not as an absolute, since complexity creates fragility and issues with diminishing returns on energy input. This is why I say that it the purpose is to maximize the area under the complexity curve, rather than simply maximize absolute complexity. See this graph - https://goose.us/media/complexity_entropy_graph_filled-920px...

Not sure if that was a good or not, but I appreciate any feedback on the attempt!

Re: Ask HN: What is your “mission” in work and life?

#75

Post by DoreenMichele »

coconut_crab wrote: post #8

My day job is to write tools for the sales people who will try to persuade their clients into buying ads on Facebook, I just can't see how that helps improve the society or humanity as a whole. Ideally, I should be using my skills and knowledge to help the people in need, but that just won't pay as good as writing CRUD apps, and I have a whole family to feed.

This desire to "help people in need" and seeming guilt over taking care of you and your own "instead" is a thing I don't understand. If you don't support you and your family, then you and your family become people in need while at the same time you have nothing to spare for other unfortunate individuals.

Charity begins at home.

Re: Ask HN: What is your “mission” in work and life?

#76

Post by dwaltrip »

benjohnson wrote: post #20

Cal's book is great - but for me, my gut cynical reaction was to wonder if even a successful 'mission' wasn't a false sand-castle that disappears when I die. Two books make note of this: Ecclesiastes would call a mission mere striving after wind and Becker's Denial of Death that would call mission a an immortality project doomed to irrelevance. As others here have noted - Ecclesiastes would agree that enjoying the im…

> wonder if even a successful 'mission' wasn't a false sand-castle that disappears when I die.

Our lives today are the accumulation of billions of sand-castles built by others before us.

It may be very hard to discern how one's life will ripple out through time in the vast future, but many small ripples undeniably combine together into something much larger.

Re: Ask HN: What is your “mission” in work and life?

#78

Post by dwaltrip »

* Seek deep understanding. What are the most fundamental underlying mechanisms and processes that make up the world around us? Since the beginning of time, what events have transpired to bring us to the current moment?

* Learn how to distill ideas and communicate them effectively -- knowledge and wisdom must be dispersed and made understandable

* Search for the largest available levers that one can use to make a beneficial impact

* Try to live mindfully and humanely

Re: Ask HN: What is your “mission” in work and life?

#79

Post by arsalanb »

wvlia5 wrote: post #50
arsalanb wrote: post #6

My mission is to breakdown barriers and level the playing field by allowing people to leverage the huge amount of knowledge we have available today to understand the world and subsequently tinker with abstraction. I want to help people make the jump from "rookie" to somebody who understands abstraction and can look past it, as smoothly as possible. You'd be surprised what we can do as a species if everybody could und…

How are you planning to do it?

Currently working on something that will be the first step in this direction. In case you're interested, there's a link in my HN bio.

Re: Ask HN: What is your “mission” in work and life?

#80

Post by dwaltrip »

coconut_crab wrote: post #8

My day job is to write tools for the sales people who will try to persuade their clients into buying ads on Facebook, I just can't see how that helps improve the society or humanity as a whole. Ideally, I should be using my skills and knowledge to help the people in need, but that just won't pay as good as writing CRUD apps, and I have a whole family to feed.

Can you find a suitable job in your area that still pays decently well (maybe not quite as good as your current job) but also makes you feel better about your work?

I think that sometimes a sense of contentment and meaning can be worth a lot of money. Assuming that the basics of life are taken care of, of course.

Post reply on HN