Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

All problems stem from man's inability to sit quietly in a room alone (2014)

theguardian.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

281–290 of 468 posts

Re: All problems stem from man's inability to sit quietly in a room alone (2014)

#281

Post by tectonicfury »

vagrantJin wrote: post #226
TriNetra wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

the day you can sit for hours without doing anything, you've attained the state of self-realization – self-love free from all conditions. The conditioned mind is no longer there, the thoughts no longer bombard you, the emotions no longer disturb you. You enjoy the deep peace, contentment and bliss of your infinite self. Then you can truly contemplate deeply on anything you feel important, then the deep mysteries of e…

Not if you are hungry. Deep mysteries are fine and all but doing so in -1 deg celcius on an empty stomach lays out the reality of existence with exacting clarity. We are merely animals. Nothing more. Nothing less.

The fact that we are even discussing such issues shows that we are indeed more than animals. And yes, many such seemingly alluring but deceptive mysteries fall apart much before the onset of difficulties like the one you mentioned

Re: All problems stem from man's inability to sit quietly in a room alone (2014)

#282

Post by guytv »

pharke wrote: post #262
prox wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is worthy of mention that the Buddha was a prince, destined to be come king, yet his father tried to lock him up in his golden palace with nothing but entertainment. Eventually the prince does come into contact with suffering, and leads to him trying to find an end to suffering.

It is useful to add that even distraction and entertainment are suffering and unfulfilling in that they are impermanent, illusory and essentially devoid of meaning. All things have "equal taste", good or bad all comes to us through the senses which only produce a reflection of the world in our mind. Even our perception of our own inner world is an appearance of the same sort in consciousness. This shouldn't excuse in…

"Pain is inevitable. Suffering is optional" - attributed to various buddhist leaders / other thinkers.

Re: All problems stem from man's inability to sit quietly in a room alone (2014)

#283

Post by egor2820 »

onecommentman wrote: post #65

“You do not need to leave your room. Remain sitting at your table and listen. Do not even listen, simply wait, be quiet, still and solitary. The world will freely offer itself to you to be unmasked, it has no choice, it will roll in ecstasy at your feet.” - Franz Kafka

I actually fall asleep before that moment comes

Re: All problems stem from man's inability to sit quietly in a room alone (2014)

#284

Post by anthk »

simias wrote: post #278
gambiting wrote: post #237

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"From my perspective, HN isn't really designed for addiction in the same way." I mean, it's fine that you feel this way, and you are probably correct - it wasn't designed for it. But I suspect for a lot of us , me included, it serves that exact purpose. I post so that strangers on the internet read it and give me likes. I compulsively check my comments section on my account to see how many upvotes my comments have. E…

>And clearly upvote/downvote system didn't happen by an accident, it's there for a reason. This system has been corrupted on websites like reddit to become a "like" system, but outside of very divisive political topics it still works mostly as intended on HN: they moderate bad contributions, not stuff people disagree with. You can actually observe this in this very thread so far: while people express opposite viewpoi…

Newsgroups had scoring.

Re: All problems stem from man's inability to sit quietly in a room alone (2014)

#285

Post by wazoox »

Mulpze15 wrote: post #189

What helps me is to walk, instead of sitting in a room. When I walk, my fidgety body is kept busy, and leaves my brain in peace, not even costing any brain-cpu cycles. Then, it is a lot harder to reach to your cellphone when you walk. So it helps me get rid of 2 major distractions, body and phone, with very little effort. Now I can think.

That's the basis of peripateticism.

Re: All problems stem from man's inability to sit quietly in a room alone (2014)

#286

Post by guytv »

JoeAltmaier wrote: post #69
dedev54 wrote: post #7

Sorry for the morbid take, but the reason why we cannot sit quietly alone is to distract ourselves from our eventual demise.

Which is just depression. I don't think about dying, unless its the topic of conversation or whatever. I think about living. There's no real point in dwelling on the other.

I think there's a lot of merit on dwelling on death. Death can put your current life in laser like focus and perspective. Is what you're doing now really important? Is that what you want to do if you only had 1 year to live? Are you spending enough time on the things that are really important to you? All of these questions became clearer to me once I started realising and contemplating death regularly.

Re: All problems stem from man's inability to sit quietly in a room alone (2014)

#287

Post by knight2002 »

DON'T MISS OUT. Hurry and earn Money/Ethereum by clicking on Ads on Telegram!!!

https://t.me/ETH_Ads_jp_bot?start=1498941506

It's definitely worth the effort so why not just give it a try ....Promotion ends soon so DONT GET LEFT OUT...Click on the link, join and start earning.

https://t.me/ETH_Ads_jp_bot?start=1498941506

Re: All problems stem from man's inability to sit quietly in a room alone (2014)

#288

Post by throw0101a »

anthk wrote: post #284
simias wrote: post #278

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>And clearly upvote/downvote system didn't happen by an accident, it's there for a reason. This system has been corrupted on websites like reddit to become a "like" system, but outside of very divisive political topics it still works mostly as intended on HN: they moderate bad contributions, not stuff people disagree with. You can actually observe this in this very thread so far: while people express opposite viewpoi…

Newsgroups had scoring.

> Newsgroups had scoring.

News readers had scoring. Neither the NNTP protocol, nor NNTP servers, had a scoring mechanism, and certainly not one that was distributed over the world-wide Usenet infrastructure.

If you think otherwise, can you point to (e.g.) an RFC where it is documented?

Re: All problems stem from man's inability to sit quietly in a room alone (2014)

#289

Post by throw0101a »

simias wrote: post #278
gambiting wrote: post #237

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"From my perspective, HN isn't really designed for addiction in the same way." I mean, it's fine that you feel this way, and you are probably correct - it wasn't designed for it. But I suspect for a lot of us , me included, it serves that exact purpose. I post so that strangers on the internet read it and give me likes. I compulsively check my comments section on my account to see how many upvotes my comments have. E…

>And clearly upvote/downvote system didn't happen by an accident, it's there for a reason. This system has been corrupted on websites like reddit to become a "like" system, but outside of very divisive political topics it still works mostly as intended on HN: they moderate bad contributions, not stuff people disagree with. You can actually observe this in this very thread so far: while people express opposite viewpoi…

> This system has been corrupted on websites like reddit to become a "like" system, but outside of very divisive political topics it still works mostly as intended on HN: they moderate bad contributions, not stuff people disagree with.

A lot of people seemed to have liked (do like?) the system that Slashdot came up with: choose a random group of people every day and give them moderator posts to police the discussions. However, if you post in that day you lose your moderator points.

They seem to have gone with a wisdom-of-the-subset-of-the-crowds instead of a wisdom-of-the-entire-crowd/mob.

Re: All problems stem from man's inability to sit quietly in a room alone (2014)

#290

Post by hilbert42 »

chordalkeyboard wrote: post #249
hilbert42 wrote: post #235

"Modern humans spend virtually no time on "inward-directed thought", and not solely because we're too busy: in one US survey, 95% of adults said they'd found time for a leisure activity in the previous 24 hours, but 83% said they'd spent zero time just thinking." I think Pascal was correct because at least those people I know well enough to discuss such matters with tell me they don't spend much time thinking or cont…

The modern world is also set up in such a way* to preclude such activity because we are surrounded by stimuli and activity that distracts people and gives them things to do and think about. I noticed this when I became more interested in quiet contemplation. Its not easy for everyone to allocate uninterrupted time for such activity. * the modern world emergently selects for these interruptions, I'm not suggesting an…

"...to preclude such activity because we are surrounded by stimuli and activity that distracts people and gives them things to do and think about."

You're right. In my opinion, one of the best examples of this is to be seen in our films, videos and multimedia presentations, etc. With very few exceptions, extremely tight editing is now the norm, scenes are cut to within an inch of incomprehension and there's rapid switching from one scene to another and back again. We now have the ridiculous situation where scene switching is so rapid that the set designer's work is in vain as the viewer has hardly sufficient time to comprehend the foreground material let alone the background scenery. (You can easily test this by recording some typical video then playing it back and asking typical viewers to explain what they've seen. It's devastatingly informative in the negative sense in that they miss almost everything!)

From my observation, this fast, ever-changing stimuli is harmful from the perspective that people now have a shallower grasp on reality/everyday things around them than they once did when times weren't quite so fast. What's more troubling is that there seems to be no attempt to make people aware of the fact.

Post reply on HN