Right but the usually accepted answer is not: I just give them bullshit to do or otherwise plan on having time to do their work if/when they don't do it sufficiently. That's the right answer. We just don't like it because it condemns people. We really need basic income so we can start being more ruthless about this. Honestly I think it could save some of these people from a downward spiral of bullshitting. They're just scared and we all know they have good reason to be so we give them a pass.
"How about just do/like whatever you like, and don't try to make everyone think you're a special snowflake"
So... be a non-conformist? A non-conformist maintains a notion of themselves as such not because they're trying to be a special snow-flake. They need a concept with which to analyze their problems. It's actually really hard to just do what you like and get away with it. Like you said, "the majority of people in the world frankly don't give a shit." No one out there is trying to figure out how to reward you for something they don't understand. Even if it's insanely valuable. There will always be rewards for simply adapting yourself to an existing concept. Anyone not doing that pays a significant penalty for which the conformist world is entirely ignorant. They won't care and they won't help you deal with it. Hence, non-conformists converge-on but don't necessarily conform-to this stereotype. The one in the corner complaining about the conformists.
That was super interesting. Thank you for posting it. The DVD/Streaming split was an especially interesting period for Netflix. I didn't know the back story behind it. For anyone curious, it's at the end.
That's the internet for you. Ask a question and nobody answers, state the wrong answer and you get the right answer instantly. It's not my fault, I'm a victim of an oppressive system!
I've come to exactly that conclusion about my family. I love them but frankly their concern for me translates into very little benefit for anyone. Also their criticisms were largely born of themselves and served primarily to limit me.
I have never had an actual _conversation_ with my own mother (single parent home) who is now in her 70s. Every attempt at a discussion has always ended up without her actually trying to listen and heaping on (berating) criticism that is either coming from her own shortcomings/fears (and she's a very fearful person) or she'll interrupt me and heap on criticism based on what she thinks I'm going to say. At least that's how it's been since I was too big for her to continue to beat me.
There hasn't been a shred of concern for my own interests and goals and in my 30s I don't expect that to change from her. She's been trying to break up my older brother's marriage for near 20 years (after successfully driving his previous partner away and a few of mine). She wasn't invited to my brother's wedding and if I ever meet someone that I care about again, she will not get to meet them. Ever.
If I were more cynical, I would say that every time our goals aren't lock-step with her goals for us, she makes a concerted effort for us to fail, but I imagine that she really thinks she has the best of intentions. She is just crazy.
So sure, love your family, but that doesn't mean your family is good for you. If your family isn't good for you, limit their ability to do damage in your life. If you can't do that, cut them off.
Good call, this is an excelent community with some hearthbreaking stories. There is also a whole network of subreddits on the topic, some very active (lower right sidebar).
I consider myself to be a nihilist and suspect you may misunderstand it. The full scope of nihilism subsumes the smug and misanthropic blackhole that people seem to relate to it. It's just, as you put it, another robot executing a program. The fundamental belief is in fact that you have agency over this mechanism. You get to choose what to believe. You alone are responsible for your semantic relationship to reality. You can toil in the adaptation of harmony between your desires and an apparently meaningless world. You can get a pre-optimized strategy from your local minister. It's just an expression of a new degree of freedom. It's more of a meta-philosophy than a philosophy. It's intended to describe a lack of meaning and not to prescribe it.
Nihilism often goes unidentified. Anyone who has ever changed beliefs has acted momentarily as a nihilist. A person who is open-minded is a partial nihilist. A complete nihilist being someone who has developed a core belief that none of their other beliefs are certainly true. They simply recognize each as subjectively and temporarily optimal. Notably this evaluation changes, for every existing belief, every time you change any single belief. At it's extreme nihilism can be anxiety inducing. There's always that sneaking suspicion that your core belief is no longer subjectively or temporarily optimal. That and no way to test your suspicion but to maintain your core belief. You can get sort've stuck in an anti-dogmatic loop frantically evaluating philosophies. This doesn't have to be your experience of nihilism. You can simply adapt beliefs to manage this problem.
You can choose to believe that there is meaning in life or that your relationship with it necessarily generalizes to all other human beings. It's just sort've annoying.
You can't "choose to believe" that there is meaning in life for the same reason that I can't "choose to believe" that God exists, or that the moon is made of cheese, or that Saturn has 28 moons, or that the world is 8.7 billion years old (I just made that number up).
If you "choose to believe" something, it's just a fantasy. If you "choose to believe" something, you don't really believe it. To really believe something, you have to have enough evidence to be certain about it.
Fortunately, pleasure is inherently valuable (this is given by biology), and moreover, our brains supply us with pleasure (in the form of brain chemistry). So now we have a basic value that we can erect other values around. Of course only if they are valid. I can value preserving my life (for instance), art, my loved ones, and so on, but I can't value something arbitrarily.
(The exact psychological mechanism of genuinely enjoying and thus valuing art and loved ones, and such things, is not straighforward, but it's there. Seeing how preserving one's own life is a value is more straightforward. I am a total egoist, by the way, because you can't out of that with the framework I am describing.)
Well, that's the equivalent of putting your fingers in your ears and saying "lallalalaa I can't hear you!"
edit: In other words: you should not just choose to "believe" one thing or another. You should look at reality and decide what the evidence favors.
Otherwise, you don't really know, and you know that you don't really know, and you are flying blind in life, and thereby engendering in yourself a sense of helplesness and anxiety (no coincidence that one of Sartre's works was called Nausea...).
I believe your notion of "belief" is false. Empirically in fact. As evidenced here. I would suggest that you ask yourself if your current idea of "belief" is actually serving you. If you did that you might see why you're failing to persuade me to adapt that belief.
Sure there is. A person of enough collective benefit becomes valuable enough to the surrounding world that they can be ignorant of their own selfish needs. They will simply be satisfied. You needn't be sacrificial about it. That wouldn't be altruistic. It's just a strategy that can become sort of a fetish. I wouldn't call it a fantasy. It's just got some blind spots that promote a pleasant state of mind. If you're not aware of your own envy for such a state you might not notice yourself contriving reasons for it's absurdity or invalidity. It's really more of an ignorance. While the unexamined life may not be worth living, life cannot be comprehensively examined. You will always be ignorant. To be so affronted by your own ignorance that you only conceptualize it to immediately and compulsively destroy it is a gross limitation. You have the opportunity to accept more ignorance in yourself such that you can then optimize it.
I can't really follow this. For one thing, I don't know what "person of enough collective benefit" means (seems like you are missing a proposition or something).
For another thing, it's not true that people are doomed to ignorance, and it seems like your argument probably rests on that assumption.
I don't see for a second why you'd say people are doomed to ignorance. We use sense perception to perceive stuff, and we develop a coherent picture of the world (so we learn to reconcile optical illusions, for instance). And for all intents and purposes, that is reality, and it's objective.
Maybe there's some other reality underneath that, but then, maybe there are pink unicorns dancing on Alpha Centauri; it's totally arbitrary, and thus irrelevant.
Why: "While the unexamined life may not be worth living, life cannot be comprehensively examined." I have chosen to believe that I am more finite than life. Further I believe that I can only examine a subset of each passing moment. I currently believe that the invention of seamless Virtual Reality is inevitable. Also that with it we will actually create a whole new modality of ignorance. I also believe, as Nietzsche did, that society will increasingly trend towards nihilism.
