Dalai Lama: Behind Our Anxiety, the Fear of Being Unneeded

> unlimited free time is better than 40-80 hours a week devoted to keeping yourself employed

I just want to touch on this last point. I read the rest of your responses, but I think your philosophy boils down to this single misconception.

Unlimited free time doesn't make you any happier than employment.

Dissatisfaction is born out of these relative comparisons you're making and not spending your attention on what matters: constant inner growth through learning and challenging yourself in addition to appreciating what you have. Nobody is forcing you to work, but if you want to maintain your lifestyle, you should make the best of it. Plenty of employed people are happy with their jobs.

As a rule, I don't make relative comparisons - I did here because I wanted to highlight a difference that exists between the allegedly worse lifestyles of robber barons in 1916 compared to average people in 2016.

I don't disagree that constant inner growth through learning and challenging myself is important. It's just my learning and challenging has more to do with the relationships I have with my friends, family, and community, and with my hobbies and personal interests (which are economically worthless), and not with learning new Javascript frameworks so I can take time away from doing the above to write web applications.

I make what of it I can - and I do get some mild enjoyment out of many jobs, particularly when I get to work closely with customers to solve their problems - because that's the way the world works in 2016, but I'm not going to lie and say I think it's a great thing. It is hard to imagine being less happy in a life where I could do what I wanted without worrying about whether it paid the bills.

That's focusing too much on one data point, the popular "teen idol" singers of the day. :)

Overall we have far more ability to chose the music that fits you personally. If some people chose Bieber, that's fine. I happen to not chose Bieber, and there's plenty of ways of creating playlists on Spotify / listen to the Pandora stations I like / surf Youtube videos / etc. where I never have to hear a Bieber.

In Frank Sinatra's day, you were limited to live performances, kind of lousy sounding radio transmissions, and kind of lousy sounding 78s. Even modern compressed music sounds better than that and there's plenty of music options in full fidelity.

There's even people picking up the crooner torch these days. Some of them have a pretty decent career doing it (I'm thinking of the Michael Bubles and Harry Connick Jrs of the world). And if you want to listen to Frank, it's easy to very quickly do that too.

For the consumers, today is probably worse only in the fact that many people don't like too much choice (http://www.economist.com/node/17723028).

The part I see arguing with more justification is that it's probably worse for many musicians overall. Music never has been a great path to wealth (unless you are lucky to become a superstar) but my impression is that a lot of the jobs "in the middle" (your local cover bands and recording studios and whatnot) are either suffering from the same wage stagnation affecting other jobs in the middle, or are gone altogether due to technological advances.

It's an interesting source. Tibetan society pre-1940s (most recent Chinese invasion) was incredibly feudal. The Dalai Lama was the top of the feudal society, both monarch and high priest. I've spent a bit of time in Tibet, and the Tibetans dearly love the current Dalai Lama. Now, maybe he's an exception for reasons of being a leader in exile, and a general scholar and nice guy.

But I wonder, in most feudal societies, do the serfs feel needed by their societies and their monarchs?

> OP said "a lot" of the haves, so I get the impression they think it's actually a lot and justifiable to start imposing corrections to the problem on the lot of haves.

That's a hell of a leap of logic. If you want to attempt to make the argument that being born into money gives you no intrinsic advantages in life, that's your argument to make. Access to resources (in the modern world, money) is a HUGE advantage. I'm not jaded, I don't hate the rich nor do I want to forcibly remove their wealth, I recognize that the motive to attain wealth is the single greatest motivator ever applied to people and the primary reason capitalist societies are (by most measures) the most successful.

It's worth noting, however that the much derided and in recent history scaled back Estate Tax was originally intended to prevent the creation of a permanent landed gentry in the United States, or if you've never used that term, a group of wealthy estates that own so much they can effectively live from birth to death on the incomes of their properties. I would argue we have one, albiet not as bad as the one that inspired the law but one nonetheless.

The failing of this counterargument is that I'm not advocating for equal results of all people, I'm advocating for more or less equal opportunity. There are plenty of factors at play that we cannot control; genetics are indeed one, as are number of involved parents, upbringing, what the child is exposed to, etc. but there are at least a few that we can help control and access to capital is one of them.