71–80 of 126 posts
What’s the pathological obsession with needing to be a unique snowflake? Nail that stands out should get hammered in, that’s a bad nail.
Because the alternative is death. Want to become non-unique? Let your body decompose back into the surrounding environment.
> Your life’s goal should be to become the most improbable person you can be. Your life's goal should not be dictated by Substack philosophers. > Here is what you gain with your most improbable life: > The authentic you. Your particular mix of talents, native abilities, personal inclinations, genetic limits, life experiences, and ambitious desires points to a mixture that is distinctly unique – if it is allowed to bl…
The next level of realization is that every path you've been following your entire life has been laid out by someone else, or chosen due to the value system imparted by someone else, so there's not really an authentic "you" in the way that people like to believe.
Not really, no.
The actual realization is that other people in the past walked paths of which segments yours will share. A lot of stuff is just repetition upon repetition.
The way you phrase it however makes it sound like it's actually predetermined and that there is nothing new to discover, which couldn't be further from the truth, but probably helps as a coping mechanism for existing within the corporate world.
> Your life’s goal should be to become the most improbable person you can be. Your life's goal should not be dictated by Substack philosophers. > Here is what you gain with your most improbable life: > The authentic you. Your particular mix of talents, native abilities, personal inclinations, genetic limits, life experiences, and ambitious desires points to a mixture that is distinctly unique – if it is allowed to bl…
Ironically enough I found the avant garde effort of many modernist artists, architects and such very samey. Like the only way someone could receive any recognition is not by doing something well but only by doing something new. The newness would be forced sometimes for the sake of it and then countless thousands of people would try to do that something new in a similar way and recognising and being able to explain those things would kind of an ingroup thing..
At various points when I did some art schooling and later encoutered professors from the arts who should have been lecturing mostly about UI design and whatnot but clearly didn't want to be doing that type of stuff ended up just giving us some more art schooling.....it too felt like very forced dogma.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Dictate? What an inhospitable straw man/false dichotomy. The first sentence of the article is "Your life’s goal should be to become the most improbable person you can be." It is literally telling you what you should do.
The "should" in a statement like that is not a command. Or expected to be interpreted as a demand. The essay makes a case for one way to look at things. Stating it as an absolute makes it easier to describe. It would be cumbersome and unreadable if it was a form treatise. This is extremely common. As far as agreement, there are many ways to see the world. Few are right, none are complete, but many are useful. Being a…
Personally, if the author's intention was what you suggest, I would argue this kind of writing is "lazy" for lack of a better word. Words have specific meanings, and they matter. The most simple (and I would argue proper) understanding of "your life’s goal should be to become the most improbable person you can be" is the plain text reading: the author is offering very specific advice which he follows with an argument for why it is good advice. In other words, he really means your life’s goal should be to become the most improbable person you can be as he stated.
> Being able to hold many viewpoints, without needing them to be right or wrong, or even consistent, is the beginning of efficiently acquired and scalable wisdom.
One can obviously consider multiple viewpoints and choose whether to embrace them or not. But in my opinion, wisdom comes from first-hand experience accumulated over a lifetime. It is not something that is "efficiently acquired", nor is it inherently "scalable."
Knowledge, on the other hand, can be efficiently acquired and scaled. But it is not always easily applied.
What’s the pathological obsession with needing to be a unique snowflake? Nail that stands out should get hammered in, that’s a bad nail.
This is BTW not how the heat death would look like. There would still be fluctuations that would, given infinite time, produce almost anything by chance at some point.
This is what the Boltzmann brain is all about: If the universe goes down that path, it is much more likely that what we experience is just a hallucination of a "brain" that spun into existence by chance, rather than all of this being a "real" universe. It's the precursor of the simulation question.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The "should" in a statement like that is not a command. Or expected to be interpreted as a demand. The essay makes a case for one way to look at things. Stating it as an absolute makes it easier to describe. It would be cumbersome and unreadable if it was a form treatise. This is extremely common. As far as agreement, there are many ways to see the world. Few are right, none are complete, but many are useful. Being a…
> The "should" in a statement like that is not a command. Or expected to be interpreted as a demand. Personally, if the author's intention was what you suggest, I would argue this kind of writing is "lazy" for lack of a better word. Words have specific meanings, and they matter. The most simple (and I would argue proper) understanding of "your life’s goal should be to become the most improbable person you can be" is…
Wisdom often has unexpectedly wide application, and so is more multiplicative than it is simply additive.
Reality is never contradictory, but it is complex. The seeming contradictions in models are because models capture different subsets of reality, not because they are wrong.
Yes, we get wisdom from direct experience.
But also, many of us acquire even more from reading, conversing, observing. Life gives us one line of direct experience, but tens of thousands of insightful people sharing theirs.
Seeing the sense in other peoples viewpoints, adds value. Getting caught up in wording styles that other's don't have any trouble with, is not what I would call a skill. And seeing coercion, where someone put some effort into communicating and interesting idea, is not shedding light on anything.
Which might sound nihilistic / defeating.
It is not. In fact, it is great.
Imagine the pressure if there was actually a predefined path and you deviated from it. You would have disappointed the whole Cosmos!
Go an live the life that you can according to your desires and circumstances. You will not always succeed. Learn from your mistakes, move forward. Because one day, it will end. And the Universe will still not care.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Society strongly rewards predictability. If I try to minimize predictability of my actions I will very quickly be hit by a car and die. Similar outcomes should be expected in most other areas of life. Stop predictably paying your bills and delivering value… Individualism in the west pretends to value uniqueness, but in practice it values belonging to sollte specific subgroup of consumers and avoiding solidarity with…
"If there is anything the nonconformist hates worse than a conformist, it’s another nonconformist who doesn’t conform to the prevailing standard of nonconformity." - Bill Vaughan