Comment by ffuxlpff
8 hours ago
The most important thing is not to have a purpose. Machines will always outdo you in optimizing for a goal function.
Don't follow rules and if you really need to, make your own and never tell them to anyone. Keep people guessing and change your mind often. Never ask opinions. They are useless and if you never ask people think you know better.
What you know you think and feel are not what you think and feel but dead remnants of your past thoughts and hunches. You have no personality but an ever evolving process that changes instantly to fill the areas you think are not you or your interest.
> make your own and never tell them to anyone. Keep people guessing and change your mind often. Never ask opinions. They are useless and if you never ask people think you know better.
What an incredibly lonely and antagonist life philosophy.
Not only lonely, this feels downright anxiety-driven.
A secure person who has their shit together knows that some people do in fact have valuable opinions and they won't be afraid to ask in public. And they know that too: two thirds of their HN submissions are questions for advice after all.
So this isn't about actual value of opinions, this is about a certain fright of how you appear to others and strategies to control that.
It's an attempt to escape the control of the system but it's a reactionary approach, which at the end of the day, is just letting the system dictate how your life unfolds in a different way.
To live well and accomplish OP's goal in the modern era you have to understand that the attention economy has won, completely and totally. You can choose to live your life in a proactive manner: motivating force arises internally, through contemplation, meditation, deliberate study, and intention.
Or you can choose to live it reactively: you look at what just popped up in your feed and you write a blog post about it.
We're living more reactively than ever now. It's stifling creativity and individuality, it's creating depression and anxiety. The answer is to unplug and let the motive force for your actions start coming from your internal world again. It's okay to be influenced by the outside but we're more possessed now by derivative slop (see how all brand logos have essentially become the same) than we probably ever have been. It's time to unplug from the hive mind and wait in the resulting stillness for the next step.
You should understand what this is in response to, though. The commenter advocates opacity for the sake of not being treated like a machine. The ideal solution is for people to not treat you like a machine, but things aren’t always ideal.
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I would describe this as giving up on any serious agency, and retreating into a game of time killing tactics oriented around other people's confused reactions.
A way to offload the challenging search for purpose, to a shallow controllable process, consistent with the described disillusionment.
But people are idiosyncratic. Maybe for someone, a life of inscrutable eccentric rebellion against the Gods of practical reality, might actually be deeply meaningful to them - even if they don't admit it.
There are people who are genuinely happy doing the same thing every day. Every day. That is just as strange to me!
You don't seem to realize that you are undermining what you have written by sharing it with us here. That gives me hope for you. Of course, you can counter my objection by leaving it open in retrospect whether the text was meant seriously or not. Mind ninja! Always one step ahead! In any case, you won't be able to live a good life as a living gradient in a game-theoretical hell, denying your own goal orientation but strangely still interacting strategically with the world.
But why? What value does living like this add to your life?
Jesus Christ, was this written by LLM trained on 69 laws of power something or some other psychopath bullshit aimed at angsty coming of age?