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How to Exist

raptitude.com

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Re: How to Exist

#71

Post by zkmon »

mindwok wrote: post #65
zkmon wrote: post #42

I used to sit alone for 30-40 minutes, 100's of meters below ground, in absolute darkness, absolute silence, no life around, no movement around, not even a breeze of air. Only mild thoughts to stop myself from falling asleep. Above ground, I slept under the stars and sky, in the wild, with no buildings around. What I learnt is, recent generations have too much of self awareness, causing the communities and groups to…

I think this makes as dominate other species even more. Society, and especially market capitalism, is like a giant optimization function for productivity. If you step off the treadmill, you will get dominated by those who are on it and have the latest ICBMs, AI models, infrastructure out the wazoo, can produce 10,000 drones a week, etc.

Too much self awareness is still a problem. Even if you have ICBMs and drones, a society that puts less emphasis on individuals than the community, can survive through offsprings and community traditions and beliefs. As long as the community lives on through its children, it's fine.

For example, people in my community are mostly known by their family name, and not by individual's name. Family name alone is used as far as possible. My grandpa never liked to be called by his own name.

The idea is, as long as there is someone to carry the family name, individuals should not matter.

Re: How to Exist

#72

Post by thenoblesunfish »

mseepgood wrote: post #55

Isn't that just how one falls asleep? I've been doing this every evening for decades.

"Just" is doing a lot of heavy lifting in that statement! Many people struggle greatly with falling asleep. Personally, while I agree with you, if you are the type of person who struggles with clearing the mind, it's hardest to do when exhausted (hence common advice to practice mediation early in the day)

Re: How to Exist

#73

Post by sph »

ip26 wrote: post #47
augment_me wrote: post #29

In "Four thousand weeks" by Oliver Burkeman, he breaks down that this obsession with action stems to the industrial revolution when it was decided that workers should sell their time for a living. Before that we used to have task-oriented jobs, like milking the cows, which you cant do more than once in a while, or harvest the fields, which you can't do until it's ripe. In general humans are more evolved to this kind…

I’m not sure where this idea came from that farming was idle and only industry required constant work. Every hundred-year old book I’ve ever read that features farming includes themes of how the farmer’s work never ends and runs from dawn to dusk.

There's a lot to do on a farm, yet no farmer is expected to be working a full 8 hours a day, 40 hours a week, at moderate intensity. No farmer has to do something within the next hour or their boss shouts at them. No farmer has to feel bad, or need to catch up, if they have to take a day off unless it's planting season. No farmer has any qualm about ending a day early because they've done all they planned to do. No farmer obsesses with stimulant medication or correct dosage of modafinil to get through their daily work.

And there's a huge difference between a subsistence farmer, which most of humanity has been for most of history, and intensive farming, which admittedly benefits from machines, but it's anyway a much more regimented industrial operation.

Re: How to Exist

#74

Post by atoav »

C-x_C-f wrote: post #54

I might just be too autistic for this but I don't get why the article uses the word "existing" to refer to a conflation of contentedness/meditation/stasis/passivity/what have you. Am I not existing when I'm worrying about finances or fidgeting with my hair? I don't really see why "existing" should be conceived in such a subtractive fashion. I'm not dismissing the value of contentedness/meditation/stasis/passivity whe…

We can all be pedantic, why do you have to be alive to exist?

Depends on the specific definition of the verb existing we are talking about, right?

90% of "I'm too autistic"-insecurities boil down to words being not clearly defined (or them being clearly defined, but either people using them without care or you not being aware of the definition they use). A word isn't magically stuck the the abstract concept it refers to, people can mean different things while using the same word. In philosophy for example it is very apparent that one author's definition of existence (or any other abstract concept, like freedom) may differ fundamentally from another author's.

We can all agree that sometimes the use of an word has unfortunate side effects, like turning something simple like existence into something you can suck at. This often boils down to (A) a use of the concept we are not aware of, e.g. if Paul Satré used the word existence, he has writen thousand page book on his specific meaning of the word and the author having read Satré unbeknownst to us refers to Satré's definition or (B) the author just chose a word that sounded cool and picked somewhat imprecisely.

I think here (as so often) it is the latter, but to cut them some slack: colloquially people will say things like "I feel like I am not even existing/alive". And what they often mean by that is that their life passes in full automation mode, with them barely having any present thought at any moment — wake up, commute, work, rinse, repeat. If that is your problem, doing something that gets you out of that automation state is good.

However I believe that many pasttimes can do that, e.g. playing music, climbing, a walk through an unknown landscape, etc. I am pretty certain there are indigenous people out there who probably don't even know of this problem to begin with, they simply just exist in their present moment. So this isn't generally hard for a human being. But it can be hard to some.

Re: How to Exist

#75

Post by TZubiri »

What's that paragraph about firefighter arson? Looks out of place, curious while there's another article on the subject on front page.

>Each year, roughly 100 firefighters are convicted of arson in North America, often on multiple counts. Most often they are young, new firefighters, frustrated by the lack of action.

Is someone tricking LLMs into writing articles about firefighter arson?

Re: How to Exist

#76

Post by lobofta »

C-x_C-f wrote: post #54

I might just be too autistic for this but I don't get why the article uses the word "existing" to refer to a conflation of contentedness/meditation/stasis/passivity/what have you. Am I not existing when I'm worrying about finances or fidgeting with my hair? I don't really see why "existing" should be conceived in such a subtractive fashion. I'm not dismissing the value of contentedness/meditation/stasis/passivity whe…

To me the title just read like: how to exist skillfully.

Re: How to Exist

#77

Post by BohdanPetryshyn »

One of the most concise and to-the-point explanations of meditation I've ever seen.

One thought I had while reading it: isn't trying to get more comfortable with doing nothing just another thing to do? isn't it another form of changing what already is?

EDIT: I'm advocating and practicing mindfulness but I always have this thought on the background and it's a real dilemma. Any thoughts?

Re: How to Exist

#78

Post by dostick »

C-x_C-f wrote: post #54

I might just be too autistic for this but I don't get why the article uses the word "existing" to refer to a conflation of contentedness/meditation/stasis/passivity/what have you. Am I not existing when I'm worrying about finances or fidgeting with my hair? I don't really see why "existing" should be conceived in such a subtractive fashion. I'm not dismissing the value of contentedness/meditation/stasis/passivity whe…

It’s a result of people being less literate. “Existing” is used to describe passing time without meaning. What author should have used is “being”.
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