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Life is Short

paulgraham.com

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Re: Life is Short

#421

Post by prawn »

egroat wrote: post #375
jacquesm wrote: post #336

If you can't see past the link to the other essays here please try to isolate this one for a bit, especially if you're young and you don't have kids yet. This essay is rich in realizations that come with age, and in some sense I would have potentially gotten a lot of mileage out of it when I was 20 or so (but then I would probably have lacked the background to fully comprehend it), and even more when I was a young fi…

> when I was 20 or so Ok. "20 or so" describes me. And things aren't going so well. Out of uni, and life feels pretty empty. Family has fallen apart, friends are friends of convenience, work is very intense - perhaps too much - and everything is going into keeping going. The brave face, making sure I eat, making sure I run, cycle, climb. The dreams I had even six months ago, feeling ever more impossible. The lure of…

Travel. It will only get harder to coordinate with a partner and children in the future.

Take leave or negotiate unpaid leave if you have to. Try just a weekend at first.

If you think you can't afford to travel, find travel you can afford. That might be domestic, camping, sleeping in the back of a car on a road trip, going to less-in-demand national parks. See and do something new.

Re: Life is Short

#422

Post by palish »

dang wrote: post #410
palish wrote: post #340

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's worth trying, but it probably won't work. The bitterness in this thread can't be countered with social pressure, and you can't ban people for appearing disingenuous. They believe what they're writing. These comments aren't coming from people in a mindset to observe their own actions from a distance, which is what the Principle of Charity requires. When a commenter is convinced that a topic is very important, and…

> it probably won't work You could as easily have said the same thing about HN at every point in its history, yet for all its weaknesses it has managed to survive as a semi-ok place for online discussion far longer than human nature, statistics, and every internet law would have predicted. That didn't just happen by accident. To stave off inevitable decline has been the main intent behind the design of the site and a…

Check how long I've been here. Not only did I know all of that, but it's the entire reason why I left a reply, and why I've stayed on the site. The goal was to characterize the problem for you in a way that you may not have considered, and I was trying to be thorough about it. (I also tried to come up with some new idea so that it wouldn't read as a complaint, even if it was probably a bad one.)

Making the Principle of Charity part of the guidelines implies that you'll ban people who specifically refuse to follow it. When I said "It probably won't work," I meant "Remember orange usernames, and how badly it fragmented the community? Just be careful." Dealing with these people by trying to apply social pressure might backfire, since they are very vocal and motivated by something other than curiosity.

Re: Life is Short

#423

Post by keerthiko »

> It is possible to slow time somewhat.

pg mentions this, but what he says after is not even the best advice in this same essay for it. The real insight is here:

> The "flow" that imaginative people love so much has a darker cousin that prevents you from pausing to savor life amid the daily slurry of errands and alarms.

The way to slow time down is to break all your routines, and never be in a flow. Have no typical days. Don't have a schedule. Don't have a favorite restaurant, a default outfit, or hang out with the same people more than once or twice before seeking new people. This is nearly impossible for most people to do, because doing these things SUCK. And time is slowest when everything feels like it sucks.

I only know this because this was what my life was for 2 years when I was on the road as a digital nomad. It sucked, but was the most rewarding period of my life as well, because it truly was time slowed down. I learned and experienced such a larger spectrum of things in the same time frame than anyone I knew, including myself from any other time frame.

I don't endorse it as a long-term way to live life, but I highly recommend everyone spend at least a year of their (preferably younger, pre-family) adult life living thus to learn truly how much can be fit in a human life if you frame it right.

Re: Life is Short

#424

Post by [deleted] »

jacquesm wrote: post #396
ThomPete wrote: post #369

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have two kids, I have had two melanomas so far. I understand what it means when people say life is to short. But is life is too short to use your wealth and power to help solve the problem you acknowledge there is? That sounds like a weird idea. Most of PGs essays aren't controversial they are more informative. Why is life too short for that? If anything PG is a thinker and a good one at it. He doesn't get everythi…

> I have two kids, I have had two melanomas so far. Ouch. > I understand what it means when people say life is to short. I'll bet, that's the kind of thing that will make this a background feeling almost continuously. > But is life is too short to use your wealth and power to help solve the problem you acknowledge there is? Well, PG is - in his own way - doing just that. He made quite a few people quite wealthy and h…

[deleted]

Re: Life is Short

#425

Post by giaour »

dang wrote: post #266
invalidOrTaken wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is a hostile interpretation of the essay.

Indeed—so hostile that it can only be deliberate. It's an example of why we will probably add the Principle of Charity to the HN guidelines: http://philosophy.lander.edu/oriental/charity.html . The problem isn't merely the dishonesty of trying to make a person and/or their argument sound much worse than they are. It's the degrading effect it has on the rest of a discussion. Once bystanders see that it's ok to throw c…

I find it odd that a comment urging us to interpret others' words charitably begins by attacking the motives of the author of a comment under discussion. If you were jacobolus, would you find this response charitable?

It's entirely possible to come to a different interpretation of a text without having an ulterior motive.

Re: Life is Short

#426

Post by galfarragem »

egroat wrote: post #375
jacquesm wrote: post #336

If you can't see past the link to the other essays here please try to isolate this one for a bit, especially if you're young and you don't have kids yet. This essay is rich in realizations that come with age, and in some sense I would have potentially gotten a lot of mileage out of it when I was 20 or so (but then I would probably have lacked the background to fully comprehend it), and even more when I was a young fi…

> when I was 20 or so Ok. "20 or so" describes me. And things aren't going so well. Out of uni, and life feels pretty empty. Family has fallen apart, friends are friends of convenience, work is very intense - perhaps too much - and everything is going into keeping going. The brave face, making sure I eat, making sure I run, cycle, climb. The dreams I had even six months ago, feeling ever more impossible. The lure of…

Listen this, it might help: https://sivers.org/ml

Re: Life is Short

#427

Post by rdiddly »

Know what's funny, life is short, and life is too short for a lot of the crap you'll spend your life doing, but you'll do it anyway because... that's life!

Re: Life is Short

#428

Post by erikpukinskis »

jaredklewis wrote: post #139
erikpukinskis wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The best computer software is the kind that reminds people to dance and shows them some steps. Vonnegut, like so many people, imagines computers can only suck the life out of things. I suppose we deserve that reputation, since so many of us write software that does.

I don't think Vonnegut meant "dancing" in a particularly figurative way. I think he means it in the sense of physically moving your body. Computers are great in my book, but I agree with Vonnegut that usage of them tends to result in less physical activity.

I didn't mean it figuratively either!

Re: Life is Short

#429

Post by ldd »

p4wnc6 wrote: post #388
ldd wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

beggars can't be choosers. (Some of us would gladly take any of the above options)

And by buying the lines of bullshit that make you feel this way you are causing the very problem, and it hurts not only you but also your peers.

I understand where you are coming from, but it is not that I am buying 'the lines of bullshit that make [me] feel this way', it just so happens that I need (any) job in the tech field as a recent CS grad, and I have only started searching and I would gladly be employed even under non-ideal conditions.

This, I presume, is the predicament of at least a small portion of people in our industry. Yet, your sentiment and line of thought are interesting, and I fully agree with you. I just hope that you understand that even logical agents can be forced to take non-logical decisions given the state of affairs of the world.

Re: Life is Short

#430

Post by throwawaymaroon »

dang wrote: post #411
jacobolus wrote: post #334

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here’s a more carefully elaborated version of the criticism of Graham’s sloppy thinking and lazy writing from his inequality essay: https://glyph.twistedmatrix.com/2016/01/premises.html Since life is short, that’s it for me for this thread.

You're acting as if the correctness of pg's views is relevant to your misconduct on this site. But the two have nothing to do with each other. It's against the values (and rules) of HN to misrepresent what someone said or personally attack them in order to vent your spleen, regardless of how wrong they are.

Pretty dodgy road you've found yourself on, dang.

Evaluating whether or not a criticism of an essay is unfair is equivalent to evaluating whether that criticism is true. It's pretty easy to take "hostility towards PG's points is forbidden" away from this moderation. It might not be entirely, technically true in every single interpretation, particularly the charitable ones you'll apply to yourself, but it's true enough.

I guess I can't be mad at you for protecting the rich people that pay your check.

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