It’s a crisis of faith, caused by a 10,000 year search for meaning that isn’t there. We had our first surplus as a species when we discovered agriculture and husbandry. The human mind has wandered since. We’ve built systems of belief, technological systems, political systems, every possible system you can imagine. All to deal with the simple fact that our minds feel like they should be doing something, but there isn’t actually anything that needs to be done; surplus.
Since our first surplus all those years ago, we have continued to increase our surplus relentlessly. The problem is the more surplus we have, the more the mind idles, the more we try to invent things for the mind to do.
That is where I see the cult, the cult consists of faithless wanderers who have decided that the only valid use of surplus is to gain more surplus, whether it’s through positive means like improving technology or business, or negative means like slavery and exploitation. It’s a hollow existence. There is a righteous path, it’s using our surplus to embrace the positive aspects of our spirit rather than the negative ones.
nine_k · 1h ago
I think it's deeper. The mind is an optimization tool. It always keeps looking for something better, hence it is always not completely happy with the current state of things. The first noble truth (aka the principle of dukkha) is at least 25 centuries old; it says that sentient existence is inseparable from discontent, and thus from suffering.
This whole search for a better optimum, like other evolutionary mechanisms, results in survival and proliferation, but not necessarily in happiness. Proliferation seems to correlate positively with happiness, but up to a limit, and the limit is all too visible.
On the other hand, reaching the true global optimum does not seem too blissful either: any change would be a change to the worse, so all development, all motion except basically spinning at place would need to stop. This is not very different from death. OTOH the human mind, as it is, would still try to keep on searching, still feel somehow discontent.
(I agree that the reasonable path is to try to limit the suffering of living beings, including but not limited to ourselves. It's the least bad option.)
bckr · 1h ago
I don’t have a lot of surplus. I hope to, I’m working towards it. I have the privilege, talent, and positioning. But I can’t understand how anyone just below me in the hierarchy making ends meet.
jmogly · 1h ago
I think that is one of the most interesting take aways from this line of thought. It is nearly impossible to reconcile the idea that we as a species have unimaginable surplus, but nearly all of us feel we are living precariously on the edge of ruin, or are living in destitute poverty. There is plenty to go around, but because the worst parts of human nature have triumphed the good, we are forced to live in an incredibly inequitable distribution.
Rather than build a system that works for everyone in an altruistic manner, we have a system that funnels surplus to our most sycophantic, manipulative, exploitative, brutal members. It might just be human nature, our worst instincts tend to beat our best instincts.
lurk2 · 1h ago
> caused by a 10,000 year search for meaning that isn’t there. We had our first surplus as a species when we discovered agriculture and husbandry.
Religion predates the emergence of both agriculture and animal husbandry. These belief systems didn’t emerge as a result of surplus.
> There is a righteous path, it’s using our surplus to embrace the positive aspects of our spirit rather than the negative ones.
How do you reconcile this belief with the idea there is no meaning, and that “there isn’t actually anything that needs to be done”?
jmogly · 1h ago
Religion is not my strong suit, but I don’t think religion as we think of it today was really around like that, it might have been but that is not my current understanding. IE There probably weren’t prehistoric monks and rabbis having epistemological debates about the meaning of life or what a good life is. Religion was more likely a way of understanding the natural world, like death, floods, luck, etc. Not an expert again.
On your second point, “there is no meaning”, I’m not sure I exactly prescribe that. I think there is no universal meaning innate to humanity. There are meaningful things, like love, friendship, having your basic physical needs met. And when I say that “there isn’t actually anything that actually needs to be done”, I mean that if you have a surplus of all your needs, say just after harvest, you don’t actually need to do anything. All of your needs are met, you don’t need to go and gather or hunt for food every day. Prior to agriculture, surpluses were not regular.
Addressing the spirit of your second point though, even today there is much to be done. As a group we have and produce more surplus than we could ever use, but the distribution is such that many people live in abject poverty, or precariously close to it.
lurk2 · 27m ago
> Religion was more likely a way of understanding the natural world, like death, floods, luck, etc.
It’s impossible to know because we lack written records from the period, but this largely aligns with the earliest religious writings; they are mythical stories, often a sort of folk physics. The point is that the search for meaning is implicit in being able to ask a question. Animals might try to discover an algorithm of behavior to obtain a reward (e.g. press the button, get a biscuit), but it isn’t clear that they can even ask questions (“Why does pressing the button produce a biscuit?”). The question “Why does it rain?” doesn’t ask anything philosophical, but it does imply “I need to know why it rains.”
We could reduce this all to purely evolutionary terms (“I need to know why it rains to further propagate my genes”), but my hunch is that something deeper is going on.
> I think there is no universal meaning innate to humanity. There are meaningful things, like love, friendship, having your basic physical needs met.
I appreciate from the tone of your post that this probably is not your position, but this line of reasoning is the cause of a lot of strife. If there is no universal meaning (or no means by which we can ascertain it, e.g. in moral skepticism), then we can’t really go on to say that there is an ethical imperative to fight injustice; we can’t even really define anything as injustice.
> All of your needs are met, you don’t need to go and gather or hunt for food every day.
I see what you mean. I had interpreted your comment to be in the vein of certain strains of eastern or postmodern thought which take that claim rather literally; we don’t “have” to do anything, and every choice is just as valid as every other choice. Whereas what it sounds like you are saying is that when our physical needs are met, the mind has time to wander, and this leads to the hedonic treadmill that motivates adventure, conquest, philosophizing, and things like that.
I think there’s some merit to this idea; I suspect being engaged in satisfying pressing physical needs would correlate with lower levels of neuroticism (anxiety, depression, etc.), though this is only a hunch. The reason I took exception to your comment was that it seemed like it was reducing all of those activities to being merely a product of a flawed mentality resulting from material excess, whereas I would contest that and say that human history is in fact a product of something meaningful - not just personally meaningful, but ultimately meaningful.
brokegrammer · 1h ago
Well put. Now that we're trying to replace jobs with AI, just like we replaced jobs with software before, it's becoming less clear what "purpose" actually means.
Once we have the surplus of resources, but no job, I wonder what life would look like.
antithesizer · 1h ago
It's not "faithless wanderers who have decided that the only valid use of surplus is to gain more surplus"
It's "mute compulsion"
simpaticoder · 2h ago
Listening to Cryptonomican 20 years after reading it. It is a curious embodiment of this "cult" but from a deeper, more epistemic place. The way Steaphenson treats the world, the way he describes it, is frenetic, packed with trivia and connections and ADHD deep-dives into related topics...but there is no heart to it. It's an empty, mechanistic view of the world, reducing almost every person a neat little network of abstractions, and then moving on. It is a strange book in that it seems to be a promotion of a narrative viewpoint rather than about the plot or characters. It is certainly the viewpoint of the "modern" tech entrepenuer, circa 1999. Somehow both extremely open minded AND judgemental; utterly unsentimental about anything, including the self; mere acceptence and wariness about indelible human needs. And so on.
Word on the street is that Cryptonomicon was required reading at Thiel's early Palantir. I read it now and it definitely hits differently. To accept that you must dwell in something in order to understand it, and therefore in order to wield power over it with any wisdom, is the antithesis of "The Cult of Doing Business". The hubris is baked in deep at an epistemic level, which is demonstrated to lead to epic moral hazards at an epidemic level.
fullshark · 2h ago
You should read Zero to One if you really want to unlock Thiel's thinking re: business. It's both the best business book I've ever read and the perfect distillation of the core soullessness at the root of the matter. The goal is positive cash flows that can't be successfully attacked by competitors. That's the game, that's all everyone here is working for.
tchock23 · 1h ago
I will never, ever understand the praise for that book.
It can be summarized in one sentence: ‘Get a monopoly if you can.’ Brilliant insight there - thanks captain obvious!
If the author wasn’t famous it wouldn’t have even been published, and certainly wouldn’t have appeared as a ‘best business book.’
fullshark · 1h ago
Well for myself it broke things down clearly in terms of the framework to operate in (zero to one, one to infinity) and what types of products you should even strive to build. I recall not seeing a lot of the ideas put so down so clearly and cleanly before, and as far as I know a lot of the book's framing became conventional wisdom in this industry after publication, or after many took his course at Stanford. So maybe it's nothing new to you because the lessons have been internalized already.
FredPret · 2h ago
But Stephenson describes things in this mechanistic, ADHD way. It’s just his technique - he still paints a picture of people with rich inner lives and strong desires. Maybe the characters’ sentiments (mostly pro-Western tech optimism) don’t resonate with you, but that hardly means they don’t have any.
anon_hn_pltr · 2h ago
It definitely wasn't required reading. I have never met anyone who's read it or even mentioned it.
fullshark · 2h ago
I heard that anecdote but it was at paypal/x, which makes more sense given the book's plot.
djoldman · 3h ago
> Employees, no matter what their job, crave recognition, autonomy, and a personal connection to work, which is why they often contribute more than they’re paid for. Baker’s point is that celebrating workers’ “proactivity” disguises an essentially exploitative relationship.
The story of the modern Western economy is that all the low-hanging fruit has been plucked from the tree of technological and productivity improvements (in the context of the regulatory environment).
Therefore, the proportion of profit and revenue rooted in exploiting human flaws is and will continue to rise.
Examples are:
* Humans engage with drama and negative content (ad supported media)
* Humans overindex on a sense of family/belonging/tribe (employers as family extract more work for less pay)
* Etc
Perhaps the biggest is regulatory capture and exploitation of regulatory loopholes.
narrator · 2h ago
The irony of "higher" standards of living is that meanwhile, African countries, and a few strict islamic ones, have much less of all this and they're the only places reproducing at faster than replacement rate.
moshegramovsky · 2h ago
I have run into many of these types over the years. It's amazing to watch them run up their ladder of manipulative tactics until they realize that they aren't going to get what they want. Then you see who they really are. The whole problem is that being genuine matters.
The best boss I ever had never tried to be charismatic. He was a good listener, he was fair, and he took us seriously.
The Naploean Hill/Dale Carnegie types make my skin crawl.
mlsu · 55m ago
Keep your own house.
I like working, I’m not quite sure what I would do otherwise. It is perfectly acceptable to have genuine relationships with your coworkers, employees, and customers, but “genuine” is the key. What’s bad for you is not work, but lying and trying to pull a fast one on everyone around you.
Work, family, and a little leisure. Those are the three pillars. This hasn’t changed since we grew a brain stem, it comes far before language or farming.
ashoeafoot · 37m ago
Its because buisness escaping control forms a "nature" complete with behemoth out crowding the smaller critters, destroying the ecosystems that fed them, plagues and forrest fires. The state if it exist is a park if its not, its a dark forest. Worshipping this is just nature whorship redecorated.
foobarbecue · 3h ago
This is a book review, right?
I'm confused by this pattern of people reading book reviews and treating them as if they were the book itself, or an original article.
Isn't the purpose to decide whether you want to buy the book?
wslh · 3h ago
If you are interested I always recommend to at least download the "sample" from Amazon Kindle before buying it.
greenie_beans · 2h ago
21st century version is naval's twitter thread about becoming rich and paul graham's blog and tim ferris's 4 hour work week. i call it "microfeudalism", a riff on technofedualism and microcelebrities
ranprieur · 52m ago
This all makes more sense if you go through the article, and every time you see the word "work", substitute "work for money".
rubitxxx · 2h ago
> But it’s even better to treat love itself as the most important work.
While Maslow's hierarchy of needs help us understand motivation, this is the most true.
CrulesAll · 1h ago
Strip him of his tenure, and let's see if love pays the rent.
bgnn · 2h ago
This isn't uniquely American, but obsession with wealth accumulation as an individual is. I don't think this applies to all Americans at all, but it is just mire commonly accepted than other cultures.
ativzzz · 2h ago
Wealth is freedom. One of the core tenets of Americanism is "freedom", in quotes because most of us are far from free, just different from "freedom" in monarchical/feudalistic societies. We are bound to the accumulation of wealth. However, some of us are able to break free. Software engineering for instance is a profession that allows this. It doesn't require the full commitment of your life to attain wealth, like finance or law or medicine for someone who has some intelligence and drive.
yfw · 1h ago
There is no freedom. Everyone lives on earth. Despite all the billionaires building bunkers might think otherwise. Microplastic pollution and global warming will kill everyone.
know-how · 3h ago
Only an academic could write something like this;
"But it’s even better to treat love itself as the most important work."
Your mortgage servicer doesn't accept love as payment.
QuantumGood · 2h ago
The comment below yours mentions suicide. Your brain doesn't accept mortgage servicing as a reason to continue living. So I think the idea is that priorities should flow from fundamentals.
bix6 · 4h ago
Good read. I wish there was a bit more advice than the final sentence offers though.
For me, an American, the work ethic comes from reading Benjamin Franklin's Autobiography after being inspired by a passage found in an American Literature textbook in 10th grade. [0]
edit: Of all the different philosophies a young person can subscribe to, entering in the middle of my life, I'm lucky to have chosen one of the better ones. I remember at the time really wanted to embrace an identity of being American and here is a founding father who helped draft the Declaration of Independence and signed the Constitution who was born and raised with the institution of slavery owning slaves himself and evolving into an outspoken anti-slavery advocate working to abolish the practice. That is what it means to be an American, to grow, change, and become better, just.
Nice.
On the virtue of silence: "in conversation [knowledge is] obtain’d rather by the use of the ears than of the tongue, ..."
dataviz1000 · 1h ago
> My list of virtues contain’d at first but twelve; but a Quaker friend having kindly informed me that I was generally thought proud; that my pride show’d itself frequently in conversation; that I was not content with being in the right when discussing any point, but was overbearing, and rather insolent, of which he convinc’d me by mentioning several instances; I determined endeavouring to cure myself, if I could, of this vice or folly among the rest, and I added Humility to my list, giving an extensive meaning to the word.
> I cannot boast of much success in acquiring the reality of this virtue, but I had a good deal with regard to the appearance of it.
(I alway laugh at this because to be truly humble a person can not boast of being virtuous therefore can't boast of being humble which creates a paradox.)
sseagull · 1h ago
As a high school teacher would say:
“The good Lord gave you two eyes, two ears, but only one mouth”
graemep · 3h ago
I think there are several weakneses in the Protestant work ethic as an explanation.
1. why is it directed at making money rather serving society?
2. Why does it glorify the rich rather than the "lowly workman" mentioned in the intro to your wikipedia link?
3. lots of evidence against it
The first two of these are even less convincing given that background of a religion that condemns the accumulation of wealth ("eye of a needle" etc.) and literally worships a "lowly workman".
As a former Christian coming of age in the early 2000s there was a popular IP called "Left Behind" about the Rapture. I always thought the concept of the anti-christ was ridiculously absurd. That someone could convince Christ's followers to basically believe the opposite of the Gospel. After witnessing the rise of 45/7 and the complete bamboozling of my deeply Christian extended family I no longer consider it ridiculous.
All that to say I'm not sure it really matters what exactly was written in the Bible because clearly a lot of the supposed followers of Christ never read it.
alabastervlog · 2h ago
> All that to say I'm not sure it really matters what exactly was written in the Bible because clearly a lot of the supposed followers of Christ never read it.
It’d be wild if they had. It’s a harder read than lots of books that the median reader struggles to understand, let alone enjoy enough to actually make it through. Most folks lack basically all historical context for the tales in it, and the book itself, so it reads as this unmoored set of confusingly-arranged-and-selected stories that have no hope of really making sense to them without a pile of reference books open alongside (what proportion of people are comfortable with and willing to engage in that style of reading?)
On the other hand, it’s also wild that more haven’t—one would think it’d be way up their list of life priorities. I take it as a sign they’re not really, under the veneer and trappings, convinced about the eternal (!!!) ramifications of the whole deal. “Well sure my eternal soul is on the line and I ‘believe’ I’m holding the literal word of the creator of the universe… but it’s haaaard and boring.” LOL.
graemep · 2h ago
What is an IP?
Also, I think its clear that some of this predates modern American evangelical Christianity, and some lies in secular values.
> That someone could convince Christ's followers to basically believe the opposite of the Gospel.
There are a number of historical examples. Most recently prosperity gospel and Positive Christianity?
> All that to say I'm not sure it really matters what exactly was written in the Bible because clearly a lot of the supposed followers of Christ never read it.
Often the ones who place the most importance on the Bible alone, and the most likely to be literalists! I think that is the root of it, because read as a "book" rather than a collection of documents, that exists in multiple versions, subject to disputes about wording and translation, each document written within a cultural (sometimes even personal) context, you can make it mean whatever you want to.
erikerikson · 41m ago
Intellectual property. Here referencing the body of work starting with books, falling with a TV series and movies. Referring to it as the "IP" abstracts across those forms.
valiant55 · 49m ago
Intellectual Property, I believe it started as a book series but had movies, shows and I'm sure other media as well.
> why is it directed at making money rather serving society
i think this particular phenomenon is rooted in calvinism, particularly in North America, and calvinists hated humanity. It also wouldn't surprise me if the protestants coming over here normally prone to social responsibility (eg some lutherans) were less willing to show up for their community than those in the old world.
foobarbecue · 3h ago
right, a.k.a "European Miracle" . I had classes about this (racist and largely debunked) concept in undergraduate Geography. But the link above is a review of a book that presumably aims to take existing research further.
Hilift · 3h ago
> Weber also argued that the Protestant work ethic influenced the creation of capitalism
An alternative explanation is for the first 140 years of the US, "Protestants" were the "people that did the work". Catholicism was illegal until the states re-wrote their constitutions/laws after the revolution (or ratification of the First Amendment, which ever came first).
Also, there wasn't anything to do but work. If you wanted a house, you cleared land and built it. 50% of early European settlers were indentured servants.
Oh and there wasn't any money or banks. Tobacco was the currency (in Maryland/Virginia). The only business partner was the UK, that managed the colonies as businesses. The entrepreneurial part was the Crown getting shareholders to foot the bill for provisions for the colonies. Shares in Virginia were sold on the London Stock Exchange. Maryland had a sole proprietor that funded the infrastructure build out.
ashoeafoot · 2h ago
Its more protestant/catholic structures create legal structures/institues that then form into a modern state and accidentally support the mechanisms that secularize society and themselves. The main component is driving sexual others into social service contract cults while severing ties to clan/family.
Source:
lurk2 · 1h ago
> The main component is driving sexual others into social service contract cults while severing ties to clan/family.
The implication being homo- and asexuals join the clergy because it obviates the expectation that they will marry? How does this lead to secularization?
Protestantism lacks a clerical tradition (reverends and ministers can still get married, and there are no monasteries to join), so how does your theory apply there?
ashoeafoot · 43m ago
It produces church bureaucracy which becomes state bureaucracy , the judge looks like a priest for a reason.
lurk2 · 23m ago
That’s what I suspected you meant, but it doesn’t address my two other questions. What does this have to do with sexual others? How does it track with the Protestant tradition?
ChrisMarshallNY · 3h ago
I’m surprised that the author thinks devotion to vocation is uniquely American.
The Japanese take their jobs so seriously, that some have committed suicide, upon losing their jobs. Some CEOs have committed suicide, if their business fails, or there’s a big scandal (an idea that I sometimes think could be useful on this side of the pond).
kQq9oHeAz6wLLS · 2h ago
You almost had me agreeing with you, but advocating for someone to kill themselves is way out of line.
geysersam · 2h ago
I didn't interpret what they wrote as encouragement to suicide.
CrulesAll · 1h ago
Author is an arts graduate.
General Patton warned against such historians. It is why he recommended autobiographies rather than biographies. The words of Caesar rather than the words written about Caesar. You also delegate your agency to critique. Patton took the good of Napoleon and savaged the bad. To paraphrase Patton, it's a type of tall poppy syndrome. The historian lacks the skills, talent, and mindset that causes men and women who achieve success in the real world. They resent those who remind them of what they lack.
Because of his tenured position, he wants for nothing while, outside of STEM, contributes very little. He is wholly reliant on the types of men and women he bashes. It's the dilettante who mocks the farmer as he eats the farmer's food. Reminds of the critique of self righteous pacifists during the World Way 2(Godwin violation. Apologies.) "How easy it is to be a pacifist safe and secure behind the security of the American Navy's big guns." How easy it is to mock entrepreneurs, capitalism, and strivers when they permit your standard of living and very existence.
api · 3h ago
What’s wrong with finding meaning in work?
Of course like all things the entrepreneurial ethos gets very silly and begins to incorporate a lot of very silly other ideas (think and grow rich!) when you dive deep into it, but as I’ve gotten older I’ve realized that most movements, philosophies, and ideologies get silly if you go deep.
Thinkers, like people on dates, put their best foot forward first. As you get to know them is when you find out they never wash their underwear.
The alternative, I guess, is finding meaning in things other than work, and that’s okay too. Or you can do both.
throwaway9914 · 2h ago
Specifically, if your work is a typical job, it makes your meaning dependent on a business relationship where one side has a lot more power than the other side. Example: an employer may end or modify the relationship for factors that are unrelated to your goals at any time.
In general, depending on work for one's ultimate meaning is dumb because whether or not you worked "hard enough" is judged by other people, not the entity responsible for putting humans (and therefore you) on the planet in the first place--you're already here so you obviously are supposed to be here, otherwise you wouldn't be. Good work makes you deserve to be among others but it can't make you deserve to exist on the planet.
meesles · 2h ago
I think you can tease this out a bunch of ways.
>where one side has a lot more power than the other side
This is life, in its entirety. Even those who feel like they live a 'free' life should realize they depend on things like national security and access to healthcare, right? So the power dynamic there doesn't make sense to me, unless you're also constantly in fear of all these other systems falling apart. Humans have worked to earn money to live forever. There wouldn't be money to give to workers if there wasn't an imbalance to begin with. Even farmers sustaining their own land have to pay workers to harvest.
> whether or not you worked "hard enough" is judged by other people
This IMO is a personal failure. Others don't determine whether I'm satisfied with my work, I do. I'm proud of my work even if others don't care for it.
> not the entity responsible for putting humans (and therefore you) on the planet in the first place--you're already here so you obviously are supposed to be here, otherwise you wouldn't be
There is no entity responsible, just like there is no reason for 'being here'. Your parents are to thank for raising you, but it could have just as well been other parents or another child! Our lives are a gift we're lucky to experience and we should enjoy it to the fullest on our own terms. If work fulfills you, great. If it doesn't, then do something else.
I really dislike people putting their value systems on others, especially around these kinds of topics. Telling people that what they think is valuable is in fact not is akin to telling people to believe in your faith, or how to raise their kids, etc.
Edit: Also curious why you would create a throwaway for this kind of opinion.
FollowingTheDao · 2h ago
> What’s wrong with finding meaning in work?
Who told you you did not have meaning?
carlosjobim · 3h ago
[flagged]
pas · 3h ago
> There's a fundamental spiritual divide between people. One side hates being alive from the moment they are born, so everything is suffering, especially work. The other side loves life and loves doing things.
[citation needed]
:)
So even if people end up in these very black-and-white groups it's doubtful that they are predetermined. But it's more like it's a spectrum, and some people start from a very good place some from a very hard one. And there are many important and distinct factors affecting one's relationship with work, success, motivation, diligence. Not to mention that luckily people's life (and relationship with work) can get better.
steveBK123 · 3h ago
The problem is that "everything is suffering, especially work" is a mindset at the end of the day. Most of us live in free enough countries where we are not assigned a class/vocation from birth.
If your job is so unrewarding or unfulfilling, try something else! You are not married to a job, you won't be court marshaled for leaving, and you likely won't be rewarded for trying to keep a "job for life" like our parents generation might have been.
Maybe you burned out and simply changing scenery will improve your life. Maybe you are in the wrong type of role and trying something new helps.
Doing nothing certainly won't help!
FredPret · 2h ago
Some suffer from learned helplessness. This turbocharges their resentment towards their boss, their company, and all of capitalism.
Appreciating the magic of living in a thriving economy (true for most of the world for decades now) is partly attitude.
steveBK123 · 1h ago
> Appreciating the magic of living in a thriving economy (true for most of the world for decades now) is partly attitude.
Yes. Louis CK did a bit ~15 years back about someone throwing a tantrum on a plane when the (then brand new tech) WiFi broke down.
Exactly. Each of us is standing on the shoulders of giants - technological, scientific, commercial, political, and many other kinds of contributions.
Life may not be perfect, but we all live downstream from Ugh the Caveman who once held a blunt rock in each hand, decided to whack them together, and bootstrapped the entire human tech tree, all while facing lions, sabre-toothed tigers, mammoths, ice ages, terrible diseases, and hunger.
carlosjobim · 3h ago
It is a spectrum for a while, until people generally fall into one of the poles. And starting in a hard place or an easy place has no influence to this attitude, in my experience.
pirgidb · 2h ago
That's a story you tell yourself about the internal lives of others, but it is not knowledge. You don't actually know what's inside other people's minds. All we ever catch are glimpses of each other.
It's tempting to make sweeping generalizations about others to explain the ways they confound and frustrate us. But it's essential to hew to the truth and accept that life is ambiguous, people are baffling, and simplistic narratives do more to give us comfort and reinforce our biases than they do explain the world around us.
ordinaryradical · 2h ago
I’m not sure this claim has any more validity than his. Calling people unknowable flies in the face of a bunch of modern disciplines. We can see people behave very predictably with Game Theory, for example.
Still, I respect the view that the individual is private unto themselves in a profound way. But I would also say people tend to show you what they believe in how they act. If you pay attention you will begin to notice when someone has put their hopes in power, finances, achievement, or ideology, to give a few popular examples. And it’s not about what people say animates them, or even about what they believe about themselves—it’s how they act.
carlosjobim · 3h ago
You just cited it.
bradly · 3h ago
>I love working (...) it's rewarding and mentally developing
Some work may be these things, but not all work. If your work is consistently both then there is a good chance your work involves some creation that is satisfying you.
I do agree that taking the morality out of our everyday tasks can greatly affect our outlook on life.
carlosjobim · 1h ago
If your work is not mentally developing anymore, it's time to look for the next thing to do. You've already conquered it completely.
steveBK123 · 3h ago
Yeah I think you've sort of touched on something there.
Many of my hardworking friends also have interesting hobbies/interests outside work they pursue and are known for. Arts, literary, cuisine, gardening, sports, charity, whatever. Generally putting more out into the world in other non-work venues.
However practically none of my more "slacker" friends have anything to show for their time outside of work. They define life more in terms of what they are avoiding. Hobbies are more consumptive - watching TV/film, dining out, travel, etc.
Maybe at the end of the day being good at any one thing takes some intellectual ability, commitment and effort.. so once you've applied that in one area you are likely able to do so elsewhere.
steveBK123 · 3h ago
And before I'm accused of moralizing - I'm not.
The older I get the more I look at this bifurcation in terms of - wtf am I going to do in retirement.
You read a lot of early retirement experiences and the people that "retire to something" (a hobby/volunteer work/etc) do much better than those that "retire from something" (can't wait to stop working!).
DanielVZ · 2h ago
I love working but, after two years of not taking vacations – due to several reasons that I should’ve anticipated – oh boy how much I’d like to take a rest. I counting the days until I can take a few weeks off.
brokegrammer · 3h ago
> I love working
What if you needed to work for free?
betterThanTexas · 3h ago
ah, if only the rest of us had the willpower to simply choose to not suffer and to enjoy life instead.
Seriously, who do you talk to that enables such viewpoints? I suspect not many people want to talk to you after their shift.
Work isn't the problem; it's doing bullshit work that's undervalued so that morons who don't work can eat. This has held true at every part of the pay scale. It's just the compensation on the upper end helps you have hope you may find meaningful work that can feed you.
I suspect we all WANT to work. We just need to eat, too.
Trasmatta · 3h ago
Or maybe some people don't get the chance to work on things that are rewarding and mentally developing? Not all work is equal.
Maybe have some gratitude that your work has given that to you, rather than assuming that other people who are drained by their work are somehow spiritually inferior.
carlosjobim · 3h ago
Who should I be grateful to?
These people are drained long before they enter the work force. And no matter what job they have they will be drained by it. You probably saw a good chunk of them in school.
steveBK123 · 3h ago
One of the things that opened up my eyes to how much of life is mindset & purpose was, ironically, dealing with some of the very wealthy in NYC.
Some of the most anxious, unhappy, complaining people I met were the underemployed spouses of the very well off. And this isn't a sexist statement because it was both women and men. And some good percent of them had no kids either. Truly no responsibilities.
The kind of people who I'd bump into at the gym just after sunrise on the way to a long day of work, and they lament to me how their weekly in-home massage got cancelled due to a scheduling conflict, and they just don't know what to do with their day. LOL.
One can be happy or unhappy at any objective income/wealth/stress level. You'd be very surprised.
Trasmatta · 2h ago
Some of the people in this thread have apparently never had a truly shitty job.
Since our first surplus all those years ago, we have continued to increase our surplus relentlessly. The problem is the more surplus we have, the more the mind idles, the more we try to invent things for the mind to do.
That is where I see the cult, the cult consists of faithless wanderers who have decided that the only valid use of surplus is to gain more surplus, whether it’s through positive means like improving technology or business, or negative means like slavery and exploitation. It’s a hollow existence. There is a righteous path, it’s using our surplus to embrace the positive aspects of our spirit rather than the negative ones.
This whole search for a better optimum, like other evolutionary mechanisms, results in survival and proliferation, but not necessarily in happiness. Proliferation seems to correlate positively with happiness, but up to a limit, and the limit is all too visible.
On the other hand, reaching the true global optimum does not seem too blissful either: any change would be a change to the worse, so all development, all motion except basically spinning at place would need to stop. This is not very different from death. OTOH the human mind, as it is, would still try to keep on searching, still feel somehow discontent.
(I agree that the reasonable path is to try to limit the suffering of living beings, including but not limited to ourselves. It's the least bad option.)
Rather than build a system that works for everyone in an altruistic manner, we have a system that funnels surplus to our most sycophantic, manipulative, exploitative, brutal members. It might just be human nature, our worst instincts tend to beat our best instincts.
Religion predates the emergence of both agriculture and animal husbandry. These belief systems didn’t emerge as a result of surplus.
> There is a righteous path, it’s using our surplus to embrace the positive aspects of our spirit rather than the negative ones.
How do you reconcile this belief with the idea there is no meaning, and that “there isn’t actually anything that needs to be done”?
On your second point, “there is no meaning”, I’m not sure I exactly prescribe that. I think there is no universal meaning innate to humanity. There are meaningful things, like love, friendship, having your basic physical needs met. And when I say that “there isn’t actually anything that actually needs to be done”, I mean that if you have a surplus of all your needs, say just after harvest, you don’t actually need to do anything. All of your needs are met, you don’t need to go and gather or hunt for food every day. Prior to agriculture, surpluses were not regular.
Addressing the spirit of your second point though, even today there is much to be done. As a group we have and produce more surplus than we could ever use, but the distribution is such that many people live in abject poverty, or precariously close to it.
It’s impossible to know because we lack written records from the period, but this largely aligns with the earliest religious writings; they are mythical stories, often a sort of folk physics. The point is that the search for meaning is implicit in being able to ask a question. Animals might try to discover an algorithm of behavior to obtain a reward (e.g. press the button, get a biscuit), but it isn’t clear that they can even ask questions (“Why does pressing the button produce a biscuit?”). The question “Why does it rain?” doesn’t ask anything philosophical, but it does imply “I need to know why it rains.”
We could reduce this all to purely evolutionary terms (“I need to know why it rains to further propagate my genes”), but my hunch is that something deeper is going on.
> I think there is no universal meaning innate to humanity. There are meaningful things, like love, friendship, having your basic physical needs met.
I appreciate from the tone of your post that this probably is not your position, but this line of reasoning is the cause of a lot of strife. If there is no universal meaning (or no means by which we can ascertain it, e.g. in moral skepticism), then we can’t really go on to say that there is an ethical imperative to fight injustice; we can’t even really define anything as injustice.
> All of your needs are met, you don’t need to go and gather or hunt for food every day.
I see what you mean. I had interpreted your comment to be in the vein of certain strains of eastern or postmodern thought which take that claim rather literally; we don’t “have” to do anything, and every choice is just as valid as every other choice. Whereas what it sounds like you are saying is that when our physical needs are met, the mind has time to wander, and this leads to the hedonic treadmill that motivates adventure, conquest, philosophizing, and things like that.
I think there’s some merit to this idea; I suspect being engaged in satisfying pressing physical needs would correlate with lower levels of neuroticism (anxiety, depression, etc.), though this is only a hunch. The reason I took exception to your comment was that it seemed like it was reducing all of those activities to being merely a product of a flawed mentality resulting from material excess, whereas I would contest that and say that human history is in fact a product of something meaningful - not just personally meaningful, but ultimately meaningful.
Once we have the surplus of resources, but no job, I wonder what life would look like.
It's "mute compulsion"
Word on the street is that Cryptonomicon was required reading at Thiel's early Palantir. I read it now and it definitely hits differently. To accept that you must dwell in something in order to understand it, and therefore in order to wield power over it with any wisdom, is the antithesis of "The Cult of Doing Business". The hubris is baked in deep at an epistemic level, which is demonstrated to lead to epic moral hazards at an epidemic level.
It can be summarized in one sentence: ‘Get a monopoly if you can.’ Brilliant insight there - thanks captain obvious!
If the author wasn’t famous it wouldn’t have even been published, and certainly wouldn’t have appeared as a ‘best business book.’
The story of the modern Western economy is that all the low-hanging fruit has been plucked from the tree of technological and productivity improvements (in the context of the regulatory environment).
Therefore, the proportion of profit and revenue rooted in exploiting human flaws is and will continue to rise.
Examples are:
* Humans engage with drama and negative content (ad supported media)
* Humans overindex on a sense of family/belonging/tribe (employers as family extract more work for less pay)
* Etc
Perhaps the biggest is regulatory capture and exploitation of regulatory loopholes.
The best boss I ever had never tried to be charismatic. He was a good listener, he was fair, and he took us seriously.
The Naploean Hill/Dale Carnegie types make my skin crawl.
I like working, I’m not quite sure what I would do otherwise. It is perfectly acceptable to have genuine relationships with your coworkers, employees, and customers, but “genuine” is the key. What’s bad for you is not work, but lying and trying to pull a fast one on everyone around you.
Work, family, and a little leisure. Those are the three pillars. This hasn’t changed since we grew a brain stem, it comes far before language or farming.
I'm confused by this pattern of people reading book reviews and treating them as if they were the book itself, or an original article.
Isn't the purpose to decide whether you want to buy the book?
While Maslow's hierarchy of needs help us understand motivation, this is the most true.
"But it’s even better to treat love itself as the most important work."
Your mortgage servicer doesn't accept love as payment.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GLkweSiuG2E
edit: Of all the different philosophies a young person can subscribe to, entering in the middle of my life, I'm lucky to have chosen one of the better ones. I remember at the time really wanted to embrace an identity of being American and here is a founding father who helped draft the Declaration of Independence and signed the Constitution who was born and raised with the institution of slavery owning slaves himself and evolving into an outspoken anti-slavery advocate working to abolish the practice. That is what it means to be an American, to grow, change, and become better, just.
[0] https://fs.blog/the-thirteen-virtues/
> I cannot boast of much success in acquiring the reality of this virtue, but I had a good deal with regard to the appearance of it.
(I alway laugh at this because to be truly humble a person can not boast of being virtuous therefore can't boast of being humble which creates a paradox.)
“The good Lord gave you two eyes, two ears, but only one mouth”
1. why is it directed at making money rather serving society? 2. Why does it glorify the rich rather than the "lowly workman" mentioned in the intro to your wikipedia link? 3. lots of evidence against it
The first two of these are even less convincing given that background of a religion that condemns the accumulation of wealth ("eye of a needle" etc.) and literally worships a "lowly workman".
As for evidence, this section of the wikipedia article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protestant_work_ethic#Criticis...
All that to say I'm not sure it really matters what exactly was written in the Bible because clearly a lot of the supposed followers of Christ never read it.
It’d be wild if they had. It’s a harder read than lots of books that the median reader struggles to understand, let alone enjoy enough to actually make it through. Most folks lack basically all historical context for the tales in it, and the book itself, so it reads as this unmoored set of confusingly-arranged-and-selected stories that have no hope of really making sense to them without a pile of reference books open alongside (what proportion of people are comfortable with and willing to engage in that style of reading?)
On the other hand, it’s also wild that more haven’t—one would think it’d be way up their list of life priorities. I take it as a sign they’re not really, under the veneer and trappings, convinced about the eternal (!!!) ramifications of the whole deal. “Well sure my eternal soul is on the line and I ‘believe’ I’m holding the literal word of the creator of the universe… but it’s haaaard and boring.” LOL.
Also, I think its clear that some of this predates modern American evangelical Christianity, and some lies in secular values.
> That someone could convince Christ's followers to basically believe the opposite of the Gospel.
There are a number of historical examples. Most recently prosperity gospel and Positive Christianity?
> All that to say I'm not sure it really matters what exactly was written in the Bible because clearly a lot of the supposed followers of Christ never read it.
Often the ones who place the most importance on the Bible alone, and the most likely to be literalists! I think that is the root of it, because read as a "book" rather than a collection of documents, that exists in multiple versions, subject to disputes about wording and translation, each document written within a cultural (sometimes even personal) context, you can make it mean whatever you want to.
By the way, I highly recommend all of nonstampcollector's videos! https://youtu.be/7gvv_UM7CYg?si=Yer3KeaJZs7FQ03s
i think this particular phenomenon is rooted in calvinism, particularly in North America, and calvinists hated humanity. It also wouldn't surprise me if the protestants coming over here normally prone to social responsibility (eg some lutherans) were less willing to show up for their community than those in the old world.
An alternative explanation is for the first 140 years of the US, "Protestants" were the "people that did the work". Catholicism was illegal until the states re-wrote their constitutions/laws after the revolution (or ratification of the First Amendment, which ever came first).
Also, there wasn't anything to do but work. If you wanted a house, you cleared land and built it. 50% of early European settlers were indentured servants.
Oh and there wasn't any money or banks. Tobacco was the currency (in Maryland/Virginia). The only business partner was the UK, that managed the colonies as businesses. The entrepreneurial part was the Crown getting shareholders to foot the bill for provisions for the colonies. Shares in Virginia were sold on the London Stock Exchange. Maryland had a sole proprietor that funded the infrastructure build out.
Source:
The implication being homo- and asexuals join the clergy because it obviates the expectation that they will marry? How does this lead to secularization?
Protestantism lacks a clerical tradition (reverends and ministers can still get married, and there are no monasteries to join), so how does your theory apply there?
The Japanese take their jobs so seriously, that some have committed suicide, upon losing their jobs. Some CEOs have committed suicide, if their business fails, or there’s a big scandal (an idea that I sometimes think could be useful on this side of the pond).
Because of his tenured position, he wants for nothing while, outside of STEM, contributes very little. He is wholly reliant on the types of men and women he bashes. It's the dilettante who mocks the farmer as he eats the farmer's food. Reminds of the critique of self righteous pacifists during the World Way 2(Godwin violation. Apologies.) "How easy it is to be a pacifist safe and secure behind the security of the American Navy's big guns." How easy it is to mock entrepreneurs, capitalism, and strivers when they permit your standard of living and very existence.
Of course like all things the entrepreneurial ethos gets very silly and begins to incorporate a lot of very silly other ideas (think and grow rich!) when you dive deep into it, but as I’ve gotten older I’ve realized that most movements, philosophies, and ideologies get silly if you go deep.
Thinkers, like people on dates, put their best foot forward first. As you get to know them is when you find out they never wash their underwear.
The alternative, I guess, is finding meaning in things other than work, and that’s okay too. Or you can do both.
In general, depending on work for one's ultimate meaning is dumb because whether or not you worked "hard enough" is judged by other people, not the entity responsible for putting humans (and therefore you) on the planet in the first place--you're already here so you obviously are supposed to be here, otherwise you wouldn't be. Good work makes you deserve to be among others but it can't make you deserve to exist on the planet.
>where one side has a lot more power than the other side
This is life, in its entirety. Even those who feel like they live a 'free' life should realize they depend on things like national security and access to healthcare, right? So the power dynamic there doesn't make sense to me, unless you're also constantly in fear of all these other systems falling apart. Humans have worked to earn money to live forever. There wouldn't be money to give to workers if there wasn't an imbalance to begin with. Even farmers sustaining their own land have to pay workers to harvest.
> whether or not you worked "hard enough" is judged by other people
This IMO is a personal failure. Others don't determine whether I'm satisfied with my work, I do. I'm proud of my work even if others don't care for it.
> not the entity responsible for putting humans (and therefore you) on the planet in the first place--you're already here so you obviously are supposed to be here, otherwise you wouldn't be
There is no entity responsible, just like there is no reason for 'being here'. Your parents are to thank for raising you, but it could have just as well been other parents or another child! Our lives are a gift we're lucky to experience and we should enjoy it to the fullest on our own terms. If work fulfills you, great. If it doesn't, then do something else.
I really dislike people putting their value systems on others, especially around these kinds of topics. Telling people that what they think is valuable is in fact not is akin to telling people to believe in your faith, or how to raise their kids, etc.
Edit: Also curious why you would create a throwaway for this kind of opinion.
Who told you you did not have meaning?
[citation needed]
:)
So even if people end up in these very black-and-white groups it's doubtful that they are predetermined. But it's more like it's a spectrum, and some people start from a very good place some from a very hard one. And there are many important and distinct factors affecting one's relationship with work, success, motivation, diligence. Not to mention that luckily people's life (and relationship with work) can get better.
If your job is so unrewarding or unfulfilling, try something else! You are not married to a job, you won't be court marshaled for leaving, and you likely won't be rewarded for trying to keep a "job for life" like our parents generation might have been.
Maybe you burned out and simply changing scenery will improve your life. Maybe you are in the wrong type of role and trying something new helps.
Doing nothing certainly won't help!
Appreciating the magic of living in a thriving economy (true for most of the world for decades now) is partly attitude.
Yes. Louis CK did a bit ~15 years back about someone throwing a tantrum on a plane when the (then brand new tech) WiFi broke down.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=me4BZBsHwZs
Life may not be perfect, but we all live downstream from Ugh the Caveman who once held a blunt rock in each hand, decided to whack them together, and bootstrapped the entire human tech tree, all while facing lions, sabre-toothed tigers, mammoths, ice ages, terrible diseases, and hunger.
It's tempting to make sweeping generalizations about others to explain the ways they confound and frustrate us. But it's essential to hew to the truth and accept that life is ambiguous, people are baffling, and simplistic narratives do more to give us comfort and reinforce our biases than they do explain the world around us.
Still, I respect the view that the individual is private unto themselves in a profound way. But I would also say people tend to show you what they believe in how they act. If you pay attention you will begin to notice when someone has put their hopes in power, finances, achievement, or ideology, to give a few popular examples. And it’s not about what people say animates them, or even about what they believe about themselves—it’s how they act.
Some work may be these things, but not all work. If your work is consistently both then there is a good chance your work involves some creation that is satisfying you.
I do agree that taking the morality out of our everyday tasks can greatly affect our outlook on life.
Many of my hardworking friends also have interesting hobbies/interests outside work they pursue and are known for. Arts, literary, cuisine, gardening, sports, charity, whatever. Generally putting more out into the world in other non-work venues.
However practically none of my more "slacker" friends have anything to show for their time outside of work. They define life more in terms of what they are avoiding. Hobbies are more consumptive - watching TV/film, dining out, travel, etc.
Maybe at the end of the day being good at any one thing takes some intellectual ability, commitment and effort.. so once you've applied that in one area you are likely able to do so elsewhere.
The older I get the more I look at this bifurcation in terms of - wtf am I going to do in retirement.
You read a lot of early retirement experiences and the people that "retire to something" (a hobby/volunteer work/etc) do much better than those that "retire from something" (can't wait to stop working!).
What if you needed to work for free?
Seriously, who do you talk to that enables such viewpoints? I suspect not many people want to talk to you after their shift.
Work isn't the problem; it's doing bullshit work that's undervalued so that morons who don't work can eat. This has held true at every part of the pay scale. It's just the compensation on the upper end helps you have hope you may find meaningful work that can feed you.
I suspect we all WANT to work. We just need to eat, too.
Maybe have some gratitude that your work has given that to you, rather than assuming that other people who are drained by their work are somehow spiritually inferior.
These people are drained long before they enter the work force. And no matter what job they have they will be drained by it. You probably saw a good chunk of them in school.
Some of the most anxious, unhappy, complaining people I met were the underemployed spouses of the very well off. And this isn't a sexist statement because it was both women and men. And some good percent of them had no kids either. Truly no responsibilities.
The kind of people who I'd bump into at the gym just after sunrise on the way to a long day of work, and they lament to me how their weekly in-home massage got cancelled due to a scheduling conflict, and they just don't know what to do with their day. LOL.
One can be happy or unhappy at any objective income/wealth/stress level. You'd be very surprised.