How Bad Are Things? (2015) • Hacker News Board

Re: How Bad Are Things? (2015)

#111

Post by munchbunny » Thu, Jun 27, 2019, 6:15 PM UTC

nradov wrote: post #107

I have literally heard wealthy people complain at length about the difficulty of finding a reliable gardening service for their mansion. Should I listen to their concerns without judging? Or is it reasonable to dismiss their misery? (This is a rhetorical question.)

I'll bite, just to answer the non-rhetorical part of your rhetorical question. There are four interesting aspects of what you wrote.

1. The implied belief that there is a cosmic measuring stick for how good someone has it, but, more importantly, that this measuring stick matters. The judging accomplishes nothing, other than to let the person judging feel internally superior for a moment. The more relevant issue is letting that judgement cloud any rational decisions you need to make later with respect to the people you're judging.

2. If you're making policy decisions, then this cosmic measuring stick of suffering would matter (like taxing gardening services, I guess?), but are you making policy decisions?

3. Do you need something from them, and does that inform how you'll behave towards them regardless of what you actually think of them? Startup founders who didn't come from rich backgrounds experience this all the time around VC's. But it's not really possible to keep the functional motivation and the desire to fit in entirely separate.

4. Are they just complaining because shared lightweight misery makes for fun socialization? People who aren't rich do that too. The content may just be a function of their environment.

Re: How Bad Are Things? (2015)

#112

Post by jack_h » Thu, Jun 27, 2019, 6:15 PM UTC

DoreenMichele wrote: post #100

SolaceQuantum wrote: post #6

In my experience this is very true upon simply becoming the kind of person who is open to listening to others. The vast majority of people you've run into have had huge difficulties in life, or are affected by people close to them who have huge difficulties in their lives. People tell me I'm a wonderful listener due to my lack of judgement on their problems (more than once, people, including my therapist, tell me I'd…

Once, when I was whining about what a "tragedy" my life was, someone told me "Everyone thinks their life is a tragedy." That stuck with me. I consider genuinely listening to merely be good manners . I have had to learn to be more stand-off-ish because this is apparently not some universal standard of good manners. In fact, it's apparently some bizarre aberration that signals "use me" or something. All manner of peopl…

This describes my experiences in life very well. It's lead to a lot of social isolation, mistrust, and heart ache for me.

> All manner of people imagine I am the solution to their problem and I am required to fix their problem, all completely for free while they don't do anything whatsoever for me.

It's also been my experience that if you don't then suddenly you're being selfish, a jerk, etc. It's as if you're being judged by an entirely different metric of social acceptability.

Re: How Bad Are Things? (2015)

#113

Post by monsieur_tigre » Thu, Jun 27, 2019, 6:17 PM UTC

nradov wrote: post #50

apo wrote: post #19

> I work in a wealthy, mostly-white college town consistently ranked one of the best places to live in the country. I wonder to what extent the setting in which the author works selects for people who will feel isolated/regretful and therefore develop the kinds of problems s/he encounters. > The town where I practice psychiatry is mostly white and mostly wealthy. That doesn’t save it. The underlying assumption is tha…

Divorce is less common among affluent couples.

True. But there’s a lot more to the marriage/divorce data. Someone find that study that was posted on reddit not too long ago!

Re: How Bad Are Things? (2015)

#114

Post by gorio » Thu, Jun 27, 2019, 6:25 PM UTC

DisruptiveDave wrote: post #90

bilbo0s wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I gotta agree with HN User "gorio" on this one. Your initial explanation, and your clarification are a bit closer to romanticism, (or perhaps idealism?), than pragmatism. Pragmatism is relating to matters of fact or practical affairs often to the exclusion of intellectual or artistic matters. (That's a dictionary definition.) But yeah, in war for example, you are very much not thinking about taking active steps to ma…

Couldn't reply to your most recent reply so I'm doing it here: > Managing one's mind, or ridding oneself of desire, and especially dealing with reality without bias or judgement, are just not terribly realistic in nature. We should certainly strive to deal with reality without bias or judgement for instance, but, I mean, we obviously don't do that in practice. From that point of view, I get how you're looking at this…

My opinion is largely in line with "bilbo0s". What I would emphasis is that I don't object to your solution as such. It is that if you are having mental problems your mind is by definition already compromised. That you can't self-correct is essentially the problem.

To try and fix that by understanding your mind might not be a bad idea, but it remains a theoretical solution until you can presume some success rate. Going to therapy might give you that if you have the means, social stability and trust to do so. Which might then result in you leaving the pool of people having problems.

But if you don't have the conditions to go to therapy successfully, or don't end up succeeding anyway, that solution also remains theoretical. The further down this rabbit hole we go the harder it gets the solve the problem and the less pragmatic understanding your own mind becomes. Instead pragmatism would be to get people in a position where they can realistically work on implementing that, or another, solution successfully.

In that sense I could agree that your position could be considered idealistic rather than romantic. As my objection isn't that it isn't pragmatic because it couldn't work, but that it isn't pragmatic because it wouldn't work in many situations that would also required other things.

Re: How Bad Are Things? (2015)

#115

Post by DoreenMichele » Thu, Jun 27, 2019, 6:27 PM UTC

jack_h wrote: post #112

DoreenMichele wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Once, when I was whining about what a "tragedy" my life was, someone told me "Everyone thinks their life is a tragedy." That stuck with me. I consider genuinely listening to merely be good manners . I have had to learn to be more stand-off-ish because this is apparently not some universal standard of good manners. In fact, it's apparently some bizarre aberration that signals "use me" or something. All manner of peopl…

This describes my experiences in life very well. It's lead to a lot of social isolation, mistrust, and heart ache for me. > All manner of people imagine I am the solution to their problem and I am required to fix their problem, all completely for free while they don't do anything whatsoever for me. It's also been my experience that if you don't then suddenly you're being selfish, a jerk, etc. It's as if you're being…

Yes.

My two adult sons are the only people who have gotten it through their heads that if they value what I bring to the table, they need to be good to me and give me reason to stick around.

Everyone else seems to have some broken social concept of pecking order where being nice to them means you're their bitch and they are important, you are nothing and you are required to keep catering to them, no matter how badly they treat you. Like how when humans feed certain kinds of animals and now those animals think you owe them tribute forevermore.

Actually, this might explain a whole lot about ugly human history.

Meanwhile, in my life, my sons are the only people still close to me. Everyone else keeps being given their walking papers because, no, I'm not your bitch.

Re: How Bad Are Things? (2015)

#116

Post by BurningFrog » Thu, Jun 27, 2019, 6:29 PM UTC

coldtea wrote: post #93

BurningFrog wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nick Lowe made a song out of this paradox: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b0l3QWUXVho

Which is based on a line from Hamlet with the same reasoning ("I must be cruel only to be kind.").

Thanks for teaching me this after all these decades!

Very kind of you :)

Re: How Bad Are Things? (2015)

#117

Post by SolaceQuantum » Thu, Jun 27, 2019, 6:40 PM UTC

nradov wrote: post #107

I have literally heard wealthy people complain at length about the difficulty of finding a reliable gardening service for their mansion. Should I listen to their concerns without judging? Or is it reasonable to dismiss their misery? (This is a rhetorical question.)

Taking it 100% serious- why would you dismiss that they are literally expressing to you a problem they are experiencing? It's useful to know they have a problem, are willing to pay for someone to make the problem go away, and are wealthy and thus can pay a lot!

Re: How Bad Are Things? (2015)

#118

Post by michaelmrose » Thu, Jun 27, 2019, 6:42 PM UTC

ehvatum wrote: post #81

overthemoon wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're right. I think it's unremarkable to say: People who are not straight and/or white tend to have worse outcomes than people who are straight and/or white. -- and -- Straight white people can have hard, miserable lives. His specific anger is at the notion that members of minority groups suffer THEREFORE members of majority groups do not suffer. But as you said, you can still have it better than people in a minori…

Send these miserable, privileged people to Africa to dig latrines for a year. They'll be a lot happier when they return. Deprivation is a necessary dimension of human experience. I was looking at setting up one-month trips for snowflakes through Canadian muskeg guided by special forces veterans, but it turns out that only the government can legally form a meeting of minds sufficient to conclude a contract where one p…

The fact that somewhere other people have it worse has never been a valid or meaningful response to suffering. It is so facile it works on almost any level of horror.

You could fallaciously say I'm sorry you had your legs eaten by bears but did you hear about joe, joe was eaten alive by ants!

Your anecdote regarding your would be boot camp is probably off topic but allowing people to abrogate basic human rights so you can have a camping trip seems like an atrocious idea.

It would be the worst idea I'd heard this week but I just conversed with a guy planning to deliberately make chlorine gas to go to war with the weeds in his garden.

Re: How Bad Are Things? (2015)

#119

Post by michaelmrose » Thu, Jun 27, 2019, 6:48 PM UTC

QuadrupleA wrote: post #92

There does seem to be a certain "external things are the reason for my misery" thread through all these stories that bugs me, even though it's an interesting and well-written piece. These patients, with the exact same circumstances, could have found some peace by accepting and working within their constraints - the 70-year old woman could accept the situation with the granddaughter and find other outlets for caretaki…

Ideally she would tell the son he can go to rehab or get turned in to the authorities.

Re: How Bad Are Things? (2015)

#120

Post by ehvatum » Thu, Jun 27, 2019, 6:55 PM UTC

michaelmrose wrote: post #118

ehvatum wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Send these miserable, privileged people to Africa to dig latrines for a year. They'll be a lot happier when they return. Deprivation is a necessary dimension of human experience. I was looking at setting up one-month trips for snowflakes through Canadian muskeg guided by special forces veterans, but it turns out that only the government can legally form a meeting of minds sufficient to conclude a contract where one p…

The fact that somewhere other people have it worse has never been a valid or meaningful response to suffering. It is so facile it works on almost any level of horror. You could fallaciously say I'm sorry you had your legs eaten by bears but did you hear about joe, joe was eaten alive by ants! Your anecdote regarding your would be boot camp is probably off topic but allowing people to abrogate basic human rights so yo…

It is not facile to ask if experiencing deprivation is a necessary condition for experiencing happiness. Consider that strength training develops muscles. Does facing genuine adversity develop emotional response such that people become capable of enjoying a world of plenty?