Solve global warming.
Ask HN: What is your “mission” in work and life?
91–100 of 102 posts
Re: Ask HN: What is your “mission” in work and life?
#92Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 a…
I read your post, and am still trying to wrap my head around the content. The best metaphor I could come up with, given my potentially erroneous understanding of your thesis is thus: The purpose of life is a dance competition, the more novel the performance the better. The beautiful mating dances of exotic jungle birds comes to mind: https://youtu.be/W7QZnwKqopo
It's not really a competition for complexity within life, complexity arises naturally within life as a product of competition. Sometimes more complexity is more fit, and other times the added fragility makes the organism less fit... during the mass extinctions it was primarily the most complex organisms that died.
The purpose of life as a whole is to spread this complexity to all parts of the Universe that can support it, so as to raise the overall complexity of the system.
Another way to think about it is that life lengthens the path that energy needs to flow through in order to reach equilibrium (maximum entropy).
Re: Ask HN: What is your “mission” in work and life?
#93Thank you so much for all the valuable & interesting comments! Much appreciated! :)
Re: Ask HN: What is your “mission” in work and life?
#94I read "So Good They Can't Ignore You" last year and was having the same question: "what is my mission in life and how to get/realize/understand that?" My conclusion was: I don't know and don't have a specific mission. The closest I have to a mission is a set of positive (may probably not conscious) principles in life that I'm sticking to. Examples: - always be improving - learn, learn, learn - work hard - presented…
I really like your principles! :)
IMHO, a mission helps focusing on things which really matter to get where you want to be in a couple of weeks, months, years,... And by that, I do not mean that one gets there faster by having a mission, but rather gets there at all.
Yes, things happen if you wait. But in my experience, not the things you want. Or, if things you want happen just by waiting, it was by coincidence, mostly? I think living by a set of positive principles is really important! I like to complement my principles with a mission, while still staying humble and open minded (i.e. having a clear focus but not blocking new and different insights, thoughts, ideas..). I hope that makes sense.
Any chance you also read "Principles" by Ray Dalio?
Re: Ask HN: What is your “mission” in work and life?
#95I feel that we're alive at a unique moment in human history, when humanity must either "figure out" how to live sustainably on a finite planet or suffer the consequences. It's a daunting but wonderful challenge. I can't imagine living at this time and not being part of this project. For the past (almost) 15 years, contributing in some way to this project has been my "mission". In that time, I've experienced the highs…
I can understand and agree with your point of view! Very noble mission :)
If you need any help, let me know.
Re: Ask HN: What is your “mission” in work and life?
#96My 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.
Maybe you could view in a different way?
There are people who want to promote services which actually help society and humanity using tools you helped to create. Even if it is just one person or company! :)
Re: Ask HN: What is your “mission” in work and life?
#97My 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…
I like it! And I will check out AfterClass. Looks like a great execution of a similar idea I in mind some years ago. Kudos to you and keep it up! :)
Re: Ask HN: What is your “mission” in work and life?
#98First, 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…
I find Yoism to be the missing link here.
Re: Ask HN: What is your “mission” in work and life?
#99Become enlightened, and if it's as good as they say, spend the rest of my life teaching others how to get there too. I know for me, it's what I'm here for. Nothing else is as important to me. I can't wait to teach, but it must be from the perspective of my own personal, direct experience. There are already enough charlatans in the world, I don't intend to become one myself. I don't think there's enough awareness the…
Awesome, I think the world would be a better place if more people sought enlightenment.
Re: Ask HN: What is your “mission” in work and life?
#100Become enlightened, and if it's as good as they say, spend the rest of my life teaching others how to get there too. I know for me, it's what I'm here for. Nothing else is as important to me. I can't wait to teach, but it must be from the perspective of my own personal, direct experience. There are already enough charlatans in the world, I don't intend to become one myself. I don't think there's enough awareness the…
> I can't wait to teach It seems that you don't actually want to become enlightened as much as you just simply want to be helpful to other people and teach them a valuable skill. I personally think that enlightenment and teaching others about it are quite different things that maybe don't have in common as much as one thinks they have. As I see it, you might reach a state of mind you are very content with, and it mak…
I see what you're getting at, but it's not quite how I feel.
For me teaching is predicated on having seen far enough to actually be a useful guide. Having said that there may be things I could teach before then, but I'd have to have experienced something major to convince me I was on the right track and the time was right.
Also, regarding the "just enough to be aware" it probably would be enough, but I wouldn't have been able to have reached my goal without the thousands who've gone before, so it'd be paying back that debt. There's just some part of me that knows it's important for me to do that.