[HN Gopher] A life of splendid uselessness is a life well lived ___________________________________________________________________ A life of splendid uselessness is a life well lived Author : indigodaddy Score : 101 points Date : 2023-04-11 14:43 UTC (2 days ago) (HTM) web link (psyche.co) (TXT) w3m dump (psyche.co) | jiriknesl wrote: | Thomas Alva Edison, Nikola Tesla, Albert Einstein, Wolfgang | Mozart and Leonardo da Vinci would disagree. | | Live well lived is a life where you aren't ever completely happy | and always strive for more. It's a life where your skills are | subjected to resistance, and you constantly face obstacles. This | makes your life an adventure. | | Everyone's life should be an adventure. | another_story wrote: | How is the end result different if you're happy and curious and | motivated? Needing to have some level of unhappiness and | constant striving against resistance seems unnecessary. Kids, | when discovering the world, aren't unhappy. | tqi wrote: | I'm a bit confused by this article. On the one hand, it seems to | advocate for thinking beyond "instrumentality" and being solely | "oriented around the practical principles of utility, | effectiveness and impact". On the other hand the two examples | highlighted are "some of the greatest nature writing ever set to | paper" and "the greatest punk rock bands in history", which seems | pretty squarely oriented around utility, effectiveness and | impact... | | If the point is that doing "useless things" can also lead to | greatness, I would say it's also possible to complete a marathon | by walking on your hands, but it sure as shit easier to just run. | If the point is that "impact" is not the be all/end all, I would | whole heartedly agree but argue that the first step is to | reorient ourselves away from celebrating just the extra ordinary | outcomes. | methehack wrote: | Maybe the idea is that from the first person perspective, | neither pursuit (EDIT) felt like doing anything useful... and | yet... | jjulius wrote: | tl;dr - personal hobbies are good. | grrdotcloud wrote: | Thank you. Hobbies are a wonderful expression of wealth, time | management, and initiative. | | As a parent the time for hobbies has morphed into intentional | activities that help my children and when possible that I also | enjoy. | johnbellone wrote: | > As a parent the time for hobbies has morphed into | intentional activities that help my children and when | possible that I also enjoy. | | Nobody really understands that until they have children of | their own. I sure didn't, but lately I've found a lot of joy | in watching my kid discover virtual reality games. Much more | than I actually enjoy them myself. | spinach wrote: | The author seems to undermine their own point by saying it's only | certain types of uselessness that are good. That uselessness is | actually useful for certain things and thus, are like those | things he mentioned which have a use and end goal. Do useless | things, but only if they are useful. | HEmanZ wrote: | I love the stories here, but this article seems so "duh, of | course" to me that I wonder, is there really a target audience | who doesn't think "splendid useless" (I would use the term | "beautiful") things are a huge part of the life well lived? | | Maybe I don't know enough hustlers? | tracerbulletx wrote: | People are free to agree on what they and their group or culture | generally consider to be a life well lived, but there will never | be an objectively defensible answer, it's ontologically | impossible. | rini17 wrote: | Subjectively defensible answer is enough. But very hard. | hospitalJail wrote: | Yeah, a life of hedonism is not providing value to society. | | Even the epicurean subreddit agreed when this was brought up. | ambientenv wrote: | "is not providing value to society" ... are we talking only | the core values today of profit and growth? | birdyrooster wrote: | What a strange inversion of reasoning. * | | Hedonism is an example of society being so capable of | providing that it has largess. Any society without hedonists | would be cautionary. Hedonists test the limits of what | society has achieved on behalf of the individual and is in my | belief the entire point of society. | | Society should elevate the individual be it hedonism or | otherwise. | | * this is a quote and I am being a bit facetious here, I | agree with other commenters that it's impossible to draw a | line on this balance | AussieWog93 wrote: | You could make the exact same argument about people with | clinical psychopathy, and it would be just as valid. | birdyrooster wrote: | Well said, yes it's very much relative to other humans | around. | fortissimohn wrote: | In order for someone's existence to be acceptable, they | should provide value? Monetary value? Or does human life | intrinsically have value, making this a tautology...? | [deleted] | lisper wrote: | Eh, no. Just because you aren't getting paid doesn't mean that | what you're doing is useless. "Useless" is a word the writer | chose deliberately to be provocative and thus get attention, but | it's wrong. | | To be fair though, "a life doing useful things you aren't getting | paid for" doesn't roll so trippingly off the keyboard. | dazzawazza wrote: | To be fair, many people would describe many of those activities | as "useless". But I think you make a good point. | lisper wrote: | If they call everything that one don't get paid for "useless" | then they are using the wrong word. | | In fact, the examples that the author cites were manifestly | not useless at all even on the criterion that money is the | ultimate measure of utility. In the one case, the work | produced a book which, one presumes, some people bought, and | in the other case, art (music) that people at the very least | went out of their way to listen to, and possibly even paid | for. (I've never been to a punk rock concert, but I presume | that at least some of them had cover charges.) | Apocryphon wrote: | "Not all need be monetized." | seba_dos1 wrote: | In my experience, it's easy to get paid doing useless things | just because someone believes they may turn out useful anyway; | and for some kinds of actually useful things it's pretty hard | to get paid for doing them at all. | JohnFen wrote: | Yes. "Useful" is only loosely correlated with "income- | producing". | rmk wrote: | There is some truth to this. Having children and raising them | is an unquestionably useful activity but most societies, | particularly the industrialized ones such as the US, Japan, and | Korea, do not 'pay' for. Many mothers are paid indirectly by | their husbands (housewives), but there are many single mothers | or fathers who do unpaid work as parents. | | Interestingly, caring for one's parents used to be an unpaid | activity, and still is in non-industrialized countries. But | there has been a successful transition to paid (albeit poorly) | work as far as older parents are concerned, in industrialized | countries such as the US and the UK (I do not think this is a | popular phenomenon in Japan and Korea AFAIK). | readthenotes1 wrote: | Tldr: uselessness is useful when we narrow the definition of | uselessness to be meaningless. | | "But truly splendid uselessness nourishes and elevates us | spiritually, rather than simply providing a rush of mental or | bodily pleasure. The output is always more than the input" | | Not all forms of uselessness are praise-worthy, only those that | are ... useful. | zwieback wrote: | I think it's a life well lived if you have the personality for | it. I know a lot of people agonizing over "making a difference" | or the "meaning of life". At times I feel vaguely guilty for not | feeling those feelings or having those thoughts but then I get | distracted by the next interesting endeavour. | fogzen wrote: | "The biggest success of my entire life was the fact that I | managed to stay entirely unemployed." -- Emil Cioran | | "I do not particularly like the word 'work.' Human beings are the | only animals who have to work, and I think that is the most | ridiculous thing in the world. Other animals make their livings | by living, but people work like crazy, thinking that they have to | in order to stay alive. The bigger the job, the greater the | challenge, the more wonderful they think it is. It would be good | to give up that way of thinking and live an easy, comfortable | life with plenty of free time. I think that the way animals live | in the tropics, stepping outside in the morning and evening to | see if there is something to eat, and taking a long nap in the | afternoon, must be a wonderful life. For human beings, a life of | such simplicity would be possible if one worked to produce | directly his daily necessities. In such a life, work is not work | as people generally think of it, but simply doing what needs to | be done." - Masanobu Fukuoka | senko wrote: | This is not about hedonism or doing nothing. Money quote: | | > Of course, not all useless activity is actually good. [...] But | truly splendid uselessness nourishes and elevates us spiritually, | rather than simply providing a rush of mental or bodily pleasure. | The output is always more than the input: [...] rich and | ennobling activities that, while also being pleasurable, reward | the intellect and the soul. | munnyduddy wrote: | I have a saying: | | > It is useful to appear useless in the eyes of those who intend | to misuse us. | shrimp_emoji wrote: | E.g., the entire web development industry :D | ldd wrote: | I really like your saying. | | For whatever reason this reminded me of something attributed to | Groucho Marx: | | > I don't want to belong to any club that will accept me as a | member | BigCryo wrote: | If there were no such thing as cryonics I would travel to Brazil | and go to the Amazon River and build a raft on it and live aboard | it and fish and pick fruit and stare up in the sky and ponder The | mystery of Life until it all ends.. why bother with this rat race | and children and the worries of life when it's really just | nothing ...has no meaning etc | zdragnar wrote: | You may be interested in reading | https://meltingasphalt.com/a-nihilists-guide-to-meaning/ | timacles wrote: | Meaning is whatever you give it. | | If you truly care about nothing then sure it's all pointless. | But I'm sure you have interests, desires, passions. The meaning | is then how you spend your time relative to those | BigCryo wrote: | Huh? | shrimp_emoji wrote: | For me, because life is really cool and interesting, and I love | the fact that more people than have ever lived so far will | probably live after I'm dead, and I'm happy they'll see and | enjoy things I probably can't imagine. I want those future | people, and the present people who are not me, to do well. I | care about my life, and I'm sad it'll end, but that's just one | drop of tragedy in the ocean of comedy. c: | | I think that emotional investment in others is crucial to | overcoming death anxiety, at least for me (as a hardcore based | fedora atheist). If your outlook is confined to your ego, | everything seems pretty bleak and hopeless since your existence | (which is the only thing you're emotionally invested in) is | doomed to end, probably sorta miserably. | LesZedCB wrote: | when capitalism sublimates everything into commodity form, it's | important to be reminded of the water we fish swim in. | | Fun or Play can be considered useless if not being commoditized | or sold, but of course they are essential. Byung-Chul Han has | some nice books about this. | hospitalJail wrote: | >Fun or Play can be considered useless if not being | commoditized or sold, but of course they are essential. | | No they aren't. | | Stoicism will tell you that happiness can come from virtue. | | We are living in an age that marketing companies push hedonism | because they can sell it. Much harder to sell virtue in a 5 | second youtube ad. | LesZedCB wrote: | virtue is neither Real nor transcendent. | [deleted] | [deleted] | jjk166 wrote: | Most people have happiness as a goal. Doing what you enjoy | accomplishes that goal. Doing things that accomplish your goals | is, by definition, not useless. | | I don't think anyone genuinely holds the belief that economic | productivity should be even the primary, nonetheless exclusive, | goal for a person's life. | nluken wrote: | Plenty of others in this thread have expressed the mistake of | calling these sorts of activities "useless" but I can relate to | the splendidness of self-expression for fun. I've recently | started writing music and might record some songs soon after | years of religious listening. Over that time I heard many amazing | artists across all sorts genres, some with jaw-dropping | virtuosity or unbelievable originality. And yet it took someone | doing really lo-fi DIY recording over some simple songs to get me | off my ass and learn to play. Even though they hadn't reached the | heights of some of the other groups I'd heard, I could hear them | having fun with their music in the recording, and that was enough | to convince me I should give it a try. | kyoob wrote: | Not every day you click a link on HN and see Minutemen in the | header image on the article. Chalking that up as a win and a sign | to go do something splendidly useless with the rest of my day. | zwieback wrote: | Queued up some Minutemen on Spotify. I'd heard of the band but | never really listened before. ___________________________________________________________________ (page generated 2023-04-13 23:00 UTC)