Achievement Porn

What? Is someone claiming power over objective definitions of right and wrong? I hope you understand that just because right and wrong are subjective doesn't render the model useless. What if it just so happens that a lot of this marvelous "utility" that you mention comes about through a reasonable consensus on morality, brought about through persuasion?

The interesting thing about both of your examples, is that they themselves are both examples of people "defining what should be meaningful for other people." Female circumcision is a statement by a culture that sex should not be desired by girls. The one-child rule is a statement by a culture that quality of life for its existing members is more important than quantity of life for its hypothetical ones. In either case, individual members of the culture may disagree, but then will be forced to conform to the culture's mores anyway—that is what we find repulsive about those policies.

As long as, on an individual level, people are free to choose their own utility function (as long as that function doesn't stop other people from choosing and partaking in their utility functions), then nothing else really matters on a grand-er scale. To put it another way: "cultural relativism" is wrong, but only because there is theoretically a perfect culture that allows its individuals to have individual relativism of ethics with a minimum of friction between individuals. The best culture is the transparent one people don't define themselves in terms of.

Very interesting. These two articles explain a few things for me:

1. Why I can't ever seem to get into video games (or games in general).

2. Why the hobbies I do enjoy use skills that are difficult to acquire and take a lot of effort to master.

3. Why we have such a hard time motivating our son to practice viola and stick to martial arts. Most of the reward he's heard over the years has come in the form of, "Wow, you're really smart." As a verbally gifted child, he has already acquired an expansive vocabulary that impresses adults. Zero effort for him; big payoff.

4. And, possibly, why our daughter seems to be acquiring skills at a faster clip than the boy does. She seems to have tapped into that other kind of reward, for effort. Makes me wonder if this has anything to do with the remarkably different response people have expressed to her verbal abilities, which is typically criticism.

If you're curious, both of our children play video games, but the boy is a great deal more "into" them than the girl. Where he will use up all of his computer time and beg for more, I've seen her go days without using the computer at all. Video games are a political hot button for parenting; like watching television, the kind of parent you are is open to public scrutiny based on how many hours per day you let your kid engage in the activity, or even at all.

You don't have to be a parent to see the value of achievement in habilitation, but it does help. I've met my share of 30-yr-old gamers who still live in their parents' basements. Personally, I believe that if my kids aren't independent by 20, I'll have failed as a parent. There is a real, deep joy that you get from looking at an object you have formed with your hands or the home you've made with your salary. Even if you just sit in a cubicle. We're wired this way for a reason, right? Otherwise we'd perish.

And it's not a bad idea to consider the concept of types of achievement. The advertising industry surely does. They feed us this tripe and most of us eat it without bothering to sniff it first.

Most "achievements" are ways to mark time until we die, and make us feel better about what we spent our lives doing up to that point. Whether they are artificial or perceived benchmarks or 'real' accomplishments is not as important as what we do after we think we've accomplished something, no matter how big (starting a company) or small (high score on Minesweeper, because there's always something else to 'achieve.' Achievement porn or success - the definition (and the embodiment) is up to you.

"What is the meaning of life?

It's up to you to define it."