What a curious thing it is to be a strange loop, to contemplate your own existence, or, in this case, to contemplate non-existence of yourself and other things? This, I know, Hydrogen nuclei in the sun fusing to make Helium don't give two shits about their existence, neither do bacteria, or fawns, or ceiling fans, or cement blocks.
The ideal is always a strange thing too. Mathematics works completely fine for most things, but the moment you start imagining "complete logical systems", "ideal programs" that halt when any program input to them halt, you find that your ideal can't exist. Yet, the Hydrogens still fuse, bacteria continue to multiple, fawns prance, ceiling fans spin, cement blocks, not sure what they do in verb form, but they remain heavy I guess...
I recently retook Myers-Briggs and it places me at an extreme intuitive person. MB has scientific issues, but forgetting that, that makes me more susceptible to big, abstracting thinking like this than polar opposite "sensing" people, more concrete thinkers are. However, I've had to learn as a physicist that at the end of the day, things do exist, move around, interact whether I care to ponder them or not, and that I have to sometimes cull my dreaming or ideals and what could be and to look around at what actually exists and think about that too.
"How do I know that enjoying life is not a delusion? How do I know that in hating death we are not like people who got lost in early childhood and do not know the way home? Lady Li was the child of a border guard in Ai. When first captured by the state of Jin, she wept so much her clothes were soaked. But after she entered the palace, shared the king's bed, and dined on the finest meats, she regretted her tears. How do I know that the dead do not regret their previous longing for life? One who dreams of drinking wine may in the morning weep; one who dreams weeping may in the morning go out to hunt. During our dreams we do not know we are dreaming. We may even dream of interpreting a dream. Only on waking do we know it was a dream. Only after the great awakening will we realize that this is the great dream. And yet fools think they are awake, presuming to know that they are rulers or herdsmen. How dense! You and Confucius are both dreaming, and I who say you are a dream am also a dream. Such is my tale. It will probably be called preposterous, but after ten thousand generations there may be a great sage who will be able to explain it, a trivial interval equivalent to the passage from morning to night."
First of all the article is very good. It's packed with very insightful gems. I recommend it.
Second of all, have you stumbled upon an increasing number of articles on this theme lateley?
Well that's because it's autumn. It is that season when nature starts its decaying cycle, and we as part of it, can't escape this process either.
About a week ago my mind simply stopped. I was working on something but it didn't matter. I woke up in this sort of a limbo state and I'm still in it. I feel like doing nothing, it seems that nothing really matters. I just sit and stare blankly for minutes. It feels like a part of me is not here anymore. I know it'll come back, it happened before, roughly in the same period. So I just sit, and I suppose this is a good thing. It's nature's way to remind ourself not to take everything too serious, and detach a bit, you know, breathe the air, smell the flowers, enjoy without worrying...
"About a week ago my mind simply stopped. I was working on something but it didn't matter. I woke up in this sort of a limbo state and I'm still in it. I feel like doing nothing, it seems that nothing really matters."
That's... very concerning. I know you may feel like nothing matters right now, but the things you do (and do not do) during this time will affect you dramatically in the future when things start mattering to you again. For the sake of your future self, I hope you're still sticking to your usual routines.
I get similar from time to time. It's not as alarming as it sounds, but for some reason I just suddenly will lose all motivation, lose all will to improve, a kind of feeling that you just want to "exist" rather than do anything important (which is such a polar opposite from how i normally treat life).
I think it's some manifestation of burn out for me, but if I take the cue and take it easy for a few weeks, the creativity and will to improve always comes back.
Thanks for the advise, but don't worry, I didn't completely lost it. I just see it as a rebalancing period after maybe pushing myself too much. However, it's not really burnout and it's not really depression, it's just another part of me that simply wants to enjoy more the things that are around and stop worrying so much about the future.. Life goes on in cycles and this is just a pondering period after a more active one..
That's a really interesting phenomenon. It sounds like your subconscious mind decides that, after a lot of activity, now is the time for meditating and your conscious mind just has to go along with it. Best wishes to you.
> "ideal programs" that halt when any program input to them halt
Nit, but this can certainly exist. "Accept program as input, run input program" is one such program.
You can always (eventually) halt and say "this halted" for any program that halts. The hard part is distinguishing "this will never halt" from "this has not halted yet", and that will always be impossible for some inputs.
Unless there is some way to distinguish "things out of your sight that you don't ponder about cease to exist for brief times" from "things out of your sight continue to exist", I find the latter phrasing easier to reason about.
I don't think George Berkeley would have attributed that to /the brain/.
If one is considering whether there are objects independent of the objects being perceived, I would think that doubting whether the brain is what facilitates(?) our perception would also be questioned.
This is a variation on Apophatic theology [0], the belief that the Devine can only be understood by what it is not. A great example of it can be found in Ch 4 & 5 of "The Mystical Theology" by Dionysius the Areopagite, circa 500CE. [1].
In Western thought, these ideas are closely tied to Plato's Theory of Forms [2].
If procrastination is anxiety towards the imperfection of creation, maybe the best way around it is to adopt the idea that all creation are iterative steps towards perfection- even failed steps.
> If procrastination is anxiety towards the imperfection of creation
I'm sure there are many underlying causes of procrastination, but this is mine. I have worked around it by simply doing something to get from A->B knowing it is okay to go back and clean up the path. Abstract work is really the perfect job for me because it is so easy to go back and change things.
I still struggle with some procrastination on physical things like fixing my deck or remodeling the bathroom (I say some because both of those did get done this summer), but I just remind myself that even then I can always rip it up and do it again.
Thanks. I was disappointed the article ended with so much about procrastination though. I hoped for something like conceptual art that does not even have to be executed.
> Since Ben-Shahar had come so far in the competitive world of squash and also in his academic career, he was able to glimpse what others call “perfection.” In the process, however, he realized that this goal was an illusion.
> “I have not reached perfection,” he admits, “as it’s unattainable.”
> What is attainable, he discovered, was the power to reframe experiences based on what he calls “optimal” outcomes. “Perfect is ideal, something that cannot be improved,” he suggests. “Optimal is the best possible [outcome] given the constraints of reality.”
> Ben-Shahar concedes that optimization is not always easy to achieve, either. He claims it can only be achieved by “learning to fail [and] by accepting painful emotions.” On the other hand, this new perspective ultimately leads to greater reward because it emphasizes the acceptance of all that is positive in one’s life.
> “It is about putting ourselves on the line, trying, falling down, and getting up again,” Ben-Shahar explains. By “getting up,” Ben-Shahar says that we end up higher than when we began, at least in terms of our own perspective.
> While optimization may be more attractive and attainable than perfection, Ben-Shahar cautions that its achievement involves challenge and potential pain. “It’s important to keep in mind that the change cannot happen perfectly,” he says. “There are inevitably ups and downs.”
> Optimizationalists focus more on the ups and do not get as distracted or discouraged by unavoidable “failures.” Ben-Shahar has been able to formulate this idea in a way that works for modern Zen masters like fellow professor Jon Kabat-Zinn (whom Ben-Shahar quotes liberally in his book) and college freshmen alike. No wonder, then, that Ben-Shahar’s lectures regularly set attendance records and have encouraged even the perfection-seeking students of the Ivy League to reconsider their lives and how they evaluate them.
He's basically talking about the human equivalent of focusing on your engine's efficiency relative to Carnot efficiency instead of focusing on its absolute efficiency.
No one needs this advice. We already worship ideas. Especially on HN, which is full of perfectionistic, idealistic founders or one-day founders who will probably spend the first year or years of their start-up lovingly gazing at their technical vision, while their "perfect" idea and "perfect" product mysteriously don't resonate with any customers.
I get it, though. In my teens and 20s, procrastination was the closest thing I had to meditation or serenity. This is the case when you are very, very anxious all the time, and your head is full of "I should do this," "I should do that" -- tyrannical dictates that won't go away, but at least you can ignore them for periods of time and try to nurture your authentic self a bit. However, I would not praise this situation for being more dramatic (more glorious!) than true calm.
My anxiety has slowly lessened as I've gotten older. I'm now 32 and married with kids. I attribute it to getting out on my own, growing up, and letting things go.
Get out: For most of us, there was something toxic about our home or school environment. It might be obvious, or it might be something you have to dig out. You may still be in a toxic environment, where people undermine your sense of who you are and discourage real growth. (In fact, most school and work environments have this quality, but it makes a big difference how you take it and what you're doing with the rest of your hours.) For me, I had to get some serious distance from my parents and get out of grad school. Get out, and you'll begin to heal, which is a process that takes years.
Grow up: Take ownership of your body, your living space, your time, and so on. Clean your apartment. Go to the gym. Get a real job. Enjoy hard, meaningful work. Have real responsibilities. A lot of people seem to want to avoid growing up. Have friends and hobbies. Stop coasting on the advantages that launched you into the world (money, grades, connections, accomplishments, etc.).
Letting things go: Every once in a while, you'll be relieved to find you just don't care about something anymore. This is a known side effect of getting older and could be biological. You don't care as much what people think of you. You don't care about some old grudge or embarrassment you've been clinging on to. You don't care what you thought your life would be. You just live for now.
I think procrastination is something we've be taught to believe is bad, where as I'm with Naht Hanh on this one: we don't need any reason to sit, we can just sit because we enjoy sitting. We don't need to be avoiding anything, or trying to achieve anything.
We don't need to always be achieving something or working toward something, or putting something off. That thing we think we should be doing? Well, if you leave it till the last minute it will only take a minute to do.
Yeah sure, hand in the assignment on time, fix the leaking roof, but it doesn't all have to be done right now.
Because if you're done in the first minute, you might feel inclined spend the next ten chasing perfection. If you're done in the last minute, you spent the next ten doing something else.
As a procrastinator – and a perfectionist – I enjoyed reading that article. However, I lack the imagination to properly contemplate things in their idealised pre-actualised state – so I can’t justify my procrastination on philosophical grounds.
As is the custom on Hacker News, I thought I’d comment on the design of the page. This is the first article I’ve read from the mobile version of the New York Times website – and I love it. Firstly, it works really well with my 9 year old laptop (running Lubuntu with Firefox and NoScript). It’s so elegant in its simplicity and lack of clutter. The typography is beautiful and refined (with proper em-dashes and typographic quotes). The width of the column of text is ideal for reading. The links are underlined blue. Jakob Nielsen would approve.
I'm not proficient in Philosophy but I think that we just select to draw the line at some point and accept that perceived things are such and such. AFAIK there is no way to even logically assert that other people exist (solipsism if i recall right) but it would make no sense to go that way at least according to our biological substratum. It makes sense to just assume that such dead-end philosophic avenues are not the way to go. As long as none of them proves itself more correct than the more 'realistic/pragmatic' alternatives we can go about just fine.
It is only in extended moments of rage and sadness that I've considered the non-existence of the universe an attractive state - and then been angry at such megalomania. Perhaps its because I'm Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic[0] that I've never been sympathetic to ideas of nirvana, but only considered idleness/rest/meditation/sleep as a means to some end. To embrace it beyond that seems suicidal and mentally ill.
you're saying the procrastinator makes an analytical choice to lose their drivers liscence because they didn't choose to pay their accumulated parking tickets?
This line of thinking presumes far too much rationality in this process.
Ever since the last rock band I played in, the thing I enjoy most now is dreaming up various stunt bands with funny names. "Wouldn't it be fun to build a band around [this or that name or concept]." But I'll never actually do them, because I know in very concrete and experiential terms how much hassle is involved in putting a band together, rehearsing it, keeping it together etc. and how it always seems to take some unpredicted course, sometimes for the better but usually for the worse. Whereas my ideas in my head just stay how they are. Never realized I was a Gnostic whose thinking has respected philosophical underpinnings. I just thought I was a lazy perfectionist.
So, bands like Donnie K'Bob and the Shawarmy Gyroes, Fat Man and the Little Boys, Messmaker, Paper Jam and Proper Fucking English will just have to live in my mind. Sorry to disappoint all you thronging millions out there. That doesn't stop someone else from coming along and ruining those ideas of course, but I'M not gonna be the one!
>Cioran is certainly one. For Cioran, who died in 1995, there was something incomparably worse than death — “the catastrophe of birth
If I find anything "incomparably worse than death" is the constant whining of Cioran -- the original inventor of "first world's problems" so to speak, who had critical admiration and a cushy life on top.
I'm all for pessimism and even people contemplating the meaningless of life, nihilism, suicide, etc. But Cioran was such a bore at that...
The ideal is always a strange thing too. Mathematics works completely fine for most things, but the moment you start imagining "complete logical systems", "ideal programs" that halt when any program input to them halt, you find that your ideal can't exist. Yet, the Hydrogens still fuse, bacteria continue to multiple, fawns prance, ceiling fans spin, cement blocks, not sure what they do in verb form, but they remain heavy I guess...
I recently retook Myers-Briggs and it places me at an extreme intuitive person. MB has scientific issues, but forgetting that, that makes me more susceptible to big, abstracting thinking like this than polar opposite "sensing" people, more concrete thinkers are. However, I've had to learn as a physicist that at the end of the day, things do exist, move around, interact whether I care to ponder them or not, and that I have to sometimes cull my dreaming or ideals and what could be and to look around at what actually exists and think about that too.