To decrease ignorance, greed, and hatred in the world (inlcluding myself).
Ask HN: What is your “mission” in work and life?
81–90 of 102 posts
Re: Ask HN: What is your “mission” in work and life?
#82I don't really have a mission statement. Maybe I should, I don't know. But there are a few things that strongly interest me and long have. They probably look diverse and scattered to other people, but not to me. Yet, I don't know how to readily sum it up in a nutshell.
Perhaps it could be summed up as a desire to inject health and stability into the existing system by focusing on some humanocentric first principles. To me, that stability needs to be rooted in flexibility, not rigidity. I think most people see stability and rigidity as going together and that's part of the problem.
The world is in a state of flux. We have 7 billion people and unprecedented globalization and unprecedented tech. The tendency here is to run roughshod over people. The result is scary destabilization that has even millionaires acting as preppers because they fear the world coming apart at the seams and see no real means to stop it.
Jobs are moving to big cities and/or being replaced with gig work. Towns and rural areas are experiencing duress due to the lack of earning opportunities. Big cities are experiencing duress because they aren't affordable. Housing prices have spun crazily out of control. There is a huge lack of affordable housing nationwide in the US.
People have become prisoners of and slaves to the system. We seem to have forgotten that business should serve people, not the other way around.
I am interested in promulgating mostly market based solutions to some of the social ills of our era. I think that framing business as an evil force and charity (such as UBI) as the only hope of an antidote is part of the problem.
Business can be designed to serve basic human needs while turning a profit. It doesn't have to be pursued on a model of making a few people filthy rich while bleeding the masses or screwing them over. You have to make a conscious decision to design it in a healthy, sustainable fashion. It doesn't just happen. But it can happen.
Re: Ask HN: What is your “mission” in work and life?
#83For me: work, life, family, everything is built on these foundations (albeit imperfectly): Q. 1. What is the chief end of man? A. Man’s chief end is to glorify God, and to enjoy him forever. http://www.reformed.org/documents/WSC.html He has told you, O man, what is good; and what does the Lord require of you but to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God? (Micah 6:8 ESV)
I would also add to this that if there does exist an eternal existence after one's death [1], then it is infinitely rational to spend this comparatively short life finding out what the nature of that eternity is and how best to prepare for it.
[1] Which incidentally, I don't think is possible to conclusively prove nor disprove. Like most things in life, you look at the evidence and make your decision.
Re: Ask HN: What is your “mission” in work and life?
#84My work mission is purely to do a decent job so that I can make my life mission come true. Which is to raise decent kids that are aware that this life is not just the start and end of everything but a journey of their soul.
Re: Ask HN: What is your “mission” in work and life?
#85My 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…
Great mission!
Re: Ask HN: What is your “mission” in work and life?
#86Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
It can be interpreted either way "Bringing the demise of irrational practices such as religion"
Re: Ask HN: What is your “mission” in work and life?
#87Re: Ask HN: What is your “mission” in work and life?
#88Software is a mess. There are too many programming languages, libraries, frameworks, websites, apps, devices, etc. We're still far from what was imagined 50 years ago. We still use text files. Most people still can't program. That's a problem. My mission is to clean up this mess. It could take a lot of different shapes, but the high-level pitch is to build one application/interface/language/platform/system that will…
That's my mission too
Re: Ask HN: What is your “mission” in work and life?
#89Become 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 makes you see the world "as it is" and because of it, you don't need to teach anybody anything, since it's already "as it is" and "as it should be". So, maybe it's just enough to be aware of it.
Re: Ask HN: What is your “mission” in work and life?
#90Earlier quoted context omitted.
>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 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: