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Interview with Bob Odenkirk

nytimes.com

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Re: Interview with Bob Odenkirk

#141

Post by pfannkuchen »

ryandrake wrote: post #130
chomp wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, and some people are able to buy nicer seats on the ride with plush seats and air conditioning, and some people have to sit on hard backed plastic that hurts, and some people around you don’t get a seat at all and fall off and die routinely, and the ride keeps moving.

Yea. "Life is an amusement park ride" is a pretty privileged take. If life is like an amusement park ride, there are about 500-1000 people in the world actually riding it, and the remaining 8 billion or so of us are operators, maintenance staff, concession stand workers, and groundskeepers keeping it fun for those 500-1000 riders.

I believe the sentiment is that it’s a ride because it consists of synthetic stimulus, not because it is enjoyable.

Re: Interview with Bob Odenkirk

#142

Post by saberience »

mapontosevenths wrote: post #126
saberience wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Note, I didn't say "no people" thought this way. Just that very, very few people thought this way, which is absolutely accurate. Unless you thought most people in the 1700s were sat around smoking cigarettes in cafes discussing the absurdism of life?

I suspect it to be far less rare than you think. Literally every human at some point in their life asks "What is the purpose of my existence?". They are then faced with some variation on "to be or not to be." It is not the exclusive domain of the idle and the educated, they're just the ones who write about it. It's a universal condition, and effects those without leisure equally. If that weren't true religion would n…

The fact that you're 1) Posting on Hackernews and 2) Read Camus as a teenager, already puts you in a group which is very atypical.

I would say, if you're reading Camus for fun and not a school assignment as a teenager, you're in the 0.01% of people or probably 0.001% of people in the world in terms of priviledge and education. And certainly, in the 1700s this group was much smaller as a percentage of the overall population as free-time was much more rare and books, education were much less common.

In 1750, the majority of France's population were peasants who lived in the fields, they weren't pondering the meaning of philosophical literature at weekends.

Re: Interview with Bob Odenkirk

#143

Post by kjkjadksj »

palmotea wrote: post #125
prngl wrote: post #21

This was an interesting interview. Like a lot of great comedians, Odenkirk has a very grounded and bleak view of the world. I suppose a lot of art, comedy included, is a way of coping with their perspective, for themselves and for the audience.

> Like a lot of great comedians, Odenkirk has a very grounded and bleak view of the world. I suppose a lot of art, comedy included, is a way of coping with their perspective, for themselves and for the audience. IIRC, I've heard it said that comedians are not happy people and usually had pretty difficult childhoods where "being funny" was a coping mechanism.

Some of the famous ones like Carlin seemed like they had some mental patterns that favored the line of work. Famously if he wasn’t performing he was thinking of new material virtually every waking minute. Pathological dedication to the craft.

Re: Interview with Bob Odenkirk

#145

Post by watwut »

saberience wrote: post #94
watwut wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Miners had elevated suicide rates and alcoholism rates. And when you read stories of families from such environments, similar thoughts were present. Yes, they did had these kind of thoughts. It is not just perfectly possible to be poor hard worker with family and have depression or missing meaning of life, but entirely common.

Miners may have had elevated suicide rates or alcoholism, but are you telling me they sat around thinking life is a meaningless farce? Miners suffered from hideous diseases due to breathing in huge amounts of toxic chemicals, so yes, that resulted in elevated risk of suicide and alcoholism. But were they really sitting around discussing absurdism, nihilism, life being a farce? This sort of thinking is really much mor…

> Miners may have had elevated suicide rates or alcoholism, but are you telling me they sat around thinking life is a meaningless farce?

Yes they were talking about it while drinking beer and cheap distillate. What makes you think they could not possibly talk about it?

> This sort of thinking is really much more of a modern phenomenon, a privilege of the rich and educated with lots of free time.

Dude, we have history of nihilistic writings going on far far into the history. Including complains of rich people about poor having those attitudes.

> Miners suffered from hideous diseases due to breathing in huge amounts of toxic chemicals, so yes, that resulted in elevated risk of suicide and alcoholism.

Sure, depending on place and time, the health impact could be extremely serious. But blaming all alcoholism, depressions and suicides on that only would be absurd.

Re: Interview with Bob Odenkirk

#146

Post by [deleted] »

AntiUSAbah wrote: post #19
dang wrote: post #144

[stub for offtopicness] [article authors don't write these headlines, you guys - let alone interview subjects]

The thing is, if you never question anything, just lifing is worth it in itself. If you do think too much about everything, and you survive this, you will land somewhere and this somewhere will be content. I'm thinking about happiness and what I want for so long, that I now have crossed my half life point. You also need to have a certain amount of freedom to even have this problem which makes it weird for others not…

[deleted]

Re: Interview with Bob Odenkirk

#147

Post by reactordev »

standardly wrote: post #139
reactordev wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You’re absolutely right! It’s not just X, it’s Y. /s.

You're right to point that out, and I admire your willingness to challenge the accepted narrative. That writing style not just unique to AI — all humans write like that. That's not annoying — it's refreshing. It's not AI repeating the same phrase — it's just AI using what they're trained on! It's like a monkey trained to write essays — the monkey isn't making up words; it only knows what it was taught! That's not AI…

to be fair, em-dashes were cool which is why AI uses it so heavily which is why they are uncool now. round and round we go... and I loved the in-character response.

Re: Interview with Bob Odenkirk

#148

Post by thrance »

mapontosevenths wrote: post #138
thrance wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What you're describing is "existentialism", and Camus's absurdidm is a reaction to it. The difference is subtle, but important to Camus.

It's been a very long time since I studied it, so you're likely right... but I thought that existentialism was the problem statement (life has no inherent meaning so we bring our own) and that absurdism and nihilism were both responses to it? My understanding has always been that Absurdism says that while the search for meaning is absurd we should search anyhow if we feel like it (our happy friend Sisyphus). Whereas…

My own understanding is: all three of existentialism, nihilism and absurdism are responses to the same question (that of the meaning of life). All three agree on the fact that there is no inherent, "natural" meaning.

Nihilism gives you nothing more. Absurdism claims you must embrace this lack of meaning and thrive in spite of it. Existentialism claims you can create your own.

Camus thought Existentialism was "cheating" and trying to deny the correct conclusion that life is meaningless. Also, he diskliked Sartre a lot.

Re: Interview with Bob Odenkirk

#149

Post by lioeters »

throw0101a wrote: post #63
julienmarie wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On the contrary, read the piece. He's not saying it from comfort, he's saying it after a heart attack, after his kids grew up, after the form he loved became a young man's game. The farce isn't a punchline delivered from above; it's what's left when the registers that used to hold you don't anymore. And his answer isn't despair, it's "we've got to keep trying… there's a breeze beneath my wings." That's not whimsy. Th…

> On the contrary, read the piece. He's not saying it from comfort, he's saying it after a heart attack, after his kids grew up, after the form he loved became a young man's game. The farce isn't a punchline delivered from above; it's what's left when the registers that used to hold you don't anymore. Sounds like a typical mid-life (identity) crisis? Contrast this with the life perspective of Stephen Colbert, who los…

The deeper that sorrow carves into your being, the more joy you can contain.

Is not the cup that holds your wine the very cup that was burned in the potter’s oven?

And is not the lute that soothes your spirit, the very wood that was hollowed with knives?

When you are joyous, look deep into your heart and you shall find it is only that which has given you sorrow that is giving you joy.

When you are sorrowful look again in your heart, and you shall see that in truth you are weeping for that which has been your delight.

-- Kahil Gibran

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