Ask HN: What motivates you?

Usually self-preservation. Often, the software projects I work on are things that simplify my life and it just so happens that other people want to use them too.

I enjoy eating, having a home, feeding my children, and playing games. So, I do what I have to do to keep that going. Everything else requires effort for me to even start and once I'm going, even more effort to maintain.

1. I want to do certain things/buy things (travel places, climb mountains. buy/build small plane)

2. need x amount of money/y amount of vacation time

3. target next company

4. requires certain technologies

5. study/practice

6. interview

7. success / Failure (go back to step 5)

Well, the most effective way to do it is just anesthetized annihilation of all humanity.

Probably we should flip the mental script and say that this definition of minimisation of suffering has effective altruism as a local minima, and painless and unconscious death as a global minima, because it eliminates all suffering immediately and thus would be the perfect solution.

Death is considered almost univocally bad, so perhaps this definition of doing good should also take some type of maximization of subjective happiness into account.

Sometimes the thought of doing today's work really well is genuinely exciting to me.

And if not that, I feel a certain sense of "honor", for lack of a better word, in meeting my commitments and doing what I said I'd do.

May I ask how you achieve this day to day, and what your big audacious goal is?

It is rare to see someone able to make this their direct passion and drive.

Related: In my personal experience this is the ultimate macro driver (net positive gains in world emotion - decreasing 'suffering emotion', increasing 'happy emotion') but for micro day to day, it's a huge weight and can be an overwhelming self-burden, so different small scale motivators are needed.

Related: I wish that there was a unanimous (or more widely accepted) structure for mapping emotion to as-objective-as-possible values (acknowledging the vast nuance of emotion, hormones-et-al, subjective experience etc.). Or in other words, subjective experience and (practically fractal) complexity of the problem make it difficult to slap figures on externalities to offset them.