201–210 of 336 posts
Cynical people don't found unicorn startups, don't win marathons and seldom the Nobel prize. On the other hand, not being cynical increases your chance to achieve such goals by 0.00001%, while your chance to end up a broke hobo, a beat down athlete or a 50 y/o teaching assistant waiting for tenure shoot up exponentially. All in all, cynicism sounds (to a cynic) like a pretty good adaptation strategy to the real world…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> everyone is working for a better world My inner cynic is howling at this statement.
A good friend of mine is a very senior civil servant in Ireland, and he says similar - most politicians are smart people sincerely trying to make the world a better place. I believe him. What's the alternative? Believing that all the world's problems would be fixed if only someone good-hearted would attempt to solve them?
I realize as I grow older that cynicism has crept in. To be fair at least in the business I operate in I have observed that the more cynical the analysis the more clarity is brought to the table when making decisions and laying strategy.
Unfortunately I have observed the same in my private social life, and to be honest it sucks. This is mainly regarding people's real intentions and motivations. I would like for this to be not true, and would not mind for another path and another reality.
I also feel like it wasn't like that before in the past, but it may have been because I found myself under the umbrella of educational institutions and people's motivations were probably biased (positively) as people's goals were mostly somewhat influenced by the institution.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The converse is true, too. It’s absolutely sapping working with folks who’ll just repeat bullshit and call you a cynic for trying to helpfully point out the flaws in their thinking.
There is a very real difference between constructive criticism and simply complaining. In most cases, complaining and shutting people down without suggesting any possible alternative or improvement just makes the situation even less unpleasant for everyone.
[1] that I've met and interacted with, of course there's a sampling bias.
I completely disagree that cynicism is about complaining. Cynicism is, as the author says, about never challenging the status quo because you believe it's an already lost battle. Cynicism can be about complaining, but only if you don't do anything about the situation you complain about. I've always been one to complain about a lot of things. When I was studying CS my friends and classmates were annoyed that I was alw…
The "no complaint challenge" [0] linked from the article gives a pretty good definition of the type of complaining the author talks about:
I defined “complaining” for myself as follows: describing an event or person negatively without indicating next steps to fix the problem.
[0]: https://tim.blog/2007/09/18/real-mind-control-the-21-day-no-...
I tried to read the article and I tried to read the comments here. What are the actual recommendations here? So far I couldn't catch that. I realize as I grow older that cynicism has crept in. To be fair at least in the business I operate in I have observed that the more cynical the analysis the more clarity is brought to the table when making decisions and laying strategy. Unfortunately I have observed the same in m…
"a no-complain challenge [...] The goal is to make it 21 days without having move the wrist."
As in 21 days without complaining.
The inimitable Hans Rosling[1] used to call himself a "possibilist": People often call me an optimist, because I show them the enormous progress they didn't know about. That makes me angry. I'm not an optimist. That makes me sound naive. I'm a very serious “possibilist”. That's something I made up. It means someone who neither hopes without reason, nor fears without reason, someone who constantly resists the overdram…
Thank you!
I tried to read the article and I tried to read the comments here. What are the actual recommendations here? So far I couldn't catch that. I realize as I grow older that cynicism has crept in. To be fair at least in the business I operate in I have observed that the more cynical the analysis the more clarity is brought to the table when making decisions and laying strategy. Unfortunately I have observed the same in m…
I tried to read the article and I tried to read the comments here. What are the actual recommendations here? So far I couldn't catch that. I realize as I grow older that cynicism has crept in. To be fair at least in the business I operate in I have observed that the more cynical the analysis the more clarity is brought to the table when making decisions and laying strategy. Unfortunately I have observed the same in m…
Cynicism directly proportional to aging brain and wisdom. It’s an mechanism to weed out assholes and situations wrapped with assholes in the precious few years you gotta live. Sets in at mid 40s.
Scenario 2: Posit that the above conditioning is unattainable, we have reached "peak humanity" and its all now terminally downhill
Call me naive but I think our main problem is that people have never really been forced to make up their minds "en masse", not just on "local" problems where cynicism, free-riders, aggression, exploitation, abuse (+ name your favorite pathology here) may be "rational", but in our "global" problem.
Universal principles and rights (as those put together by the UN) start becoming the mental and emotional guides to come to grips with the important global constraints. Cynics dismiss those as ludicrous, bureaucratic, vacuities. Think again.
In other words, we can be local cynics (and that might even be a breath of fresh air) but we cannot be global cynics.