Many of these students ultimately end up going into finance or consulting, not because they were particularly excited about that as a career path but because it’s the easiest high-status next step from their in-retrospect-poorly-chosen major. Unfortunately, those are also career paths that require long hours and where the work is often meaningless. While I’m sure that finance and consulting are the right career choice for some elite college graduates, I’d be surprised if it was the best choice for nearly 50% of them.
But the pay is so much more too. This means you can retire sooner and then use the free time to find meaning. It also means you have more money to fund your hobbies and interests, and also just having a nice standard of living is good too, and not having to worry so much about unpaid bills, medical costs, etc. . People who have crappy jobs also work long hours too and find the work meaningless.
The typical response is being in these jobs changes you so that when you have the money you no longer have any meaning. You have a passion, you put it on hold for 10-20yrs for $$$, you come out the other end having lost your passion
Further, that assumes you make it out the other end. Almost no one saves the money and retires early. Instead they get some money, they get a nicer apartment, nicer car, start eating out at fancier restaurants, shopping at higher end places, buying fashion brands etc...
This is a fair illustration of some failure modes for that choice.
I took the other road: during my 20s and early 30s I spent a lot of time chasing meaning while minimizing expenses and the time I put into jobs and other explicitly career-focused choices (although tech-related stuff turned out to be one of my forms of play & exploration, and I did do the startup thing a time or two). Can't say I outright regret this because I do think I exercised a lot of important personal capacities and gained some insights, but at one point I did look around and realize my place in society was effectively "economically marginalized software developer" and that was a weird and probably not optimal tradeoff from both a practical or meaningful standpoint, especially considering I had still had a lot of open questions and anxieties about meaning.
So, this path has potential failure modes too.
At that point I made a pretty deliberate choice to more or less "sell out." Years later the upsides appear to have outweighed the down, and I find myself with the suspicion that meaning is found/made wherever you meet life thoughtfully and intentionally, and that if I'd chosen finance in my 20s (or more comp-rewarding tech roles) I'd have had opportunities that were different but not without their own affordances for meaning (and probably a higher net worth).
Still, I like my work and hobbies, and I never feel there's a shortage of interesting and engaging things to pay attention to in the world. I could continue like this for decades if I'm lucky enough to; my most substantial worries are staving off/prepping for whatever decline in health we all eventually face, and with it capacity to engage the world robustly. Perhaps I didn't do so badly after all.
"you put it on hold for 10-20yrs for $$$, you come out the other end having lost your passion"
People change for a lot of reasons. I gave up some hobbies when I had a kid and I'm pretty sure I won't pick them back up when I retire. People's passions change, or they realize certain things are unobtainable. That's just life.
By the way, I find it confusing that the article states that finance and consulting is the result of poorly chosen majors. That's the kind of thinking you apply to kids who picked Jazz Theory and then realized that La La Land is nearly pure Hollywood fantasy (the ending anyways).
Those business/biz-econ/business admin/econ classrooms are filled with kids who have no delusion about what they're getting themselves into it. They're in it for the money and a shot at being hired by the big shot names on Wall Street. They're either passionate about the money, or they just want a stable life with money.
And the entire undergrad experience of those two fields of study do a pretty swell job of weeding kids out. Business Frats, Clubs, Societies -- the emphasis on networking and internships. Like, the classroom experience might be less rigorous compared to your average pre-med student but make no mistake getting a job on Wall Street requires a lot of work. Just a very different kind of work.
It is also the only high status step outside of medicine and law. Or claiming fame via Hollywood (in which nepotism runs rampant) or Athletics (in which your ability to gain status is almost entirely decided by whether or not you were born a genetic outlier). The first two require a lot more schooling and particular academic talent. The last two are basically moonshots and the road to fame littered with failed attempts.
> Those business/biz-econ/business admin/econ classrooms are filled with kids who have no delusion about what they're getting themselves into it.
I know Harvard doesn’t have anything so vulgar as business, accounting or finance at undergrad since well bred young men and women leave that to grad school. Similarly for Stanford, Yale and Princeton.
> It also means you have more money to fund your hobbies and interests
Except investment banking and consulting both have notoriously long (100+ hr/wk) work weeks leaving very little time for other interests and hobbies. These careers effectively force you to adopt the career as the core of your personality.
My 2-cents seeing friends and a sibling go through the IB track.
You have 100+ hr/wk for a few years in your 20s, when you're young and can sort of handle it. But by the time you're having a family you work more normal hours and make absolute FU money (e.g my younger brother makes over 10x/yr what I do at only 31 years old). It's not about the salary and hours when you start at 22, its about the salary and hours when you're 32 and 42.
I compare this to my friends who became physicians or accountants, and I think the IB folks have a waaaay better work-to-pay ratio long-term. I'm on the fence about consulting because the pay ceiling seems lower and I don't personally know enough of them.
Consulting covers a lot of different companies with different requirements. You very much can find one where you work a large but acceptable number of hours outside of the occasional crunch (50-ish is easy to find).
Also no one does 100+h/wk. That’s not even physically possible. Even juniors in IB which is notorious for being gruelling are actually not doing much during the day. The main issue is that work really starts when your partner finishes their day of meetings and things have to be ready for the next morning.
To be clear, a tiny fraction of an investment bank works hours like that. Morgan Stanley has about 70,000 employees. I guess about 700 junior investment bankers (M&A, IPO, etc.) are working hours like that. And it only lasts for two years. And no one forces them to do it. People willing sign-up for the career fast track.
In 2022, who is working 100+ hr/wk in consulting? Doing what? The 1990s/2000s are over. Now, they are mostly milking big dumb corporations by building unnecessary, overpriced software systems. Probably magic circle junior lawyers are working much more than consultants they days, and making more money.
Also you wrote: <<These careers effectively force you to adopt the career as the core of your personality.>> Not true. Many people get lucky and are selected for a two year ibanking programme. They work like crazy for two years, learn a decade's worth of banking knowledge, then move on to a different role or career.
True but it still might be better than the alternative of working just enough (~40 hours/week) to still make it hard to spend a lot of time on outside interests while not living very comfortably, financially speaking.
Consulting is also great on the job training in how the real world of commerce and business operate, with the bonus that after a year or two you probably have personal knowledge of how a handful of major corporations operate, including which corporate cultures are healthy/positive and which are not. The types of lessons you never learn in a classroom.
Are finance and consulting really high status beyond the pay? Why? In theory it seems like they might be, but most of my peers in these fields are pretty uninspiring
We live in a world where high pay = status. Not ideal if you aspire the world to be more Meaningful or Spiritual or what have you, but this is reality.
And when in the United States alone the average salary hovers around $75K/yr, a 24 year old being able to command a near $150K base-salary (excluding bonuses) is in the eyes of many absolutely flying high.
Add to that Finance/Consulting/Professional Services eats/live/travels/dresses in a manner that is high status in our society and the jobs quickly becomes a status symbol and attracts those who are willing to sacrifice some amount of passion for status or material wealth.
It also is a field where it confers that wealth and status without Having to Know Someone or Be A Genetic Outlier In Physical Performance/Appearance.
Lastly, survive long enough and climb the ladder high enough and you start gaining Power. That wealth no longer buys you things but rather connections, access, and influence. Finance sits in close proximity to many powerful people in the world, and thus by proxy also gains status.
SWE/IT offers similar levels of wealth but unfortunately lacks that proximity to power (yet) and as a class of professionals seems to espouse cultural values that go against the ostentatious displays of wealth that the average person associates with high status. At the very least, no one is showing up to morning standups in a custom tailored suit.
Source: my social circle growing up mostly consisted of working class immigrant families. Getting into a T20 University and breaking into Wall Street was the very definition of Making It.
I work for a financial company. The closer you get to the money, the more status you're expected to display. They expect you to have a BMW, Tesla, or similar. They expect you to hire a guy to perform any manual labor. They expect that you have a nice house in a nice area.
If you don't have these things, you're looked down on and people assume you aren't successful/skilled. Just projecting the image is enough to push some people into a promotion.
They are extremely high status among friends and family who do not work in tech or IT, or among recent graduate peers who are struggling to get a white collar career going and stuck in service jobs or other jobs that will never break 100k/yr. For a lot of those folks, just hearing about the types of lunch and travel expenses enjoyed by consultants can imbue the job with high status.
Can't speak for the US but here, "suit" jobs are generally held to higher regard even if the job no longer requires a suit. Fancy names and a history of good pay definitely help.
If anything, IT is the outlier in "well-paid office jobs which garner lots of respect".
> But the pay is so much more too. This means you can retire sooner and then use the free time to find meaning.
This spiel about waiting for retirement to "find meaning" is a load of BS. Telling people to sit around and wait for decades on end until their life is 4/5 of the way complete is inhumane. Why wait for decades when someone can just do what they're interested in now?
The fact that some people unironically think this crazy stuff (and don't see how crazy it really is) is just sickening to me
> People who have crappy jobs also work long hours too and find the work meaningless.
This part of your comment isn't getting nearly the attention it deserves.
Hard work and long hours aren't the reward, they are what let you reward yourself- however you find value or meaning.
Some jobs don't require long hours. Some jobs pay more than others. Sometimes, doing a job can be intrinsically fulfilling. Not every job is all or any of those things, and any one of them may mean tradeoffs to the others.
Those are good reasons, I'm not going to deny that but there's something to be said for enjoying life while you're young enough to take full advantage of it. Being poor(ish) when you're young isn't the worst thing in the world, when you have no real responsibilities. Grinding to make money in your thirties and beyond, when those real responsibilities hit always made more sense to me... but I may have done all of it wrong. I don't know.
> Grinding to make money in your thirties and beyond
I sort of think grinding is generally wrong at any age. If you feel like you're grinding, perhaps it's time to take stock and consider what you could be doing differently so that you don't have to keep grinding to both meet your responsibilities and enjoy life. Of course some might find themselves with enough exigencies they have almost no choice but to grind, but I doubt too many people on HN are really in that boat.
Maybe there's no right answer and everybody meanders through life goals at their own pace, or not at all.
The requirement to make enough money to survive is unignorable. Anything beyond that is just making up goalposts. There's always another goalpost you could strive to reach.
At least in the US in a high paying job you can very easily save 50% and still have more spending money than most people around you. It doesn’t necessarily mean you have to sacrifice anything other than lifestyle creep
How many people live well below their means and retire early though? I imagine most people taking those jobs just ended up living expensive lifestyles and retiring around the same time the rest of us do. Plus even retiring early generally means waiting until you're in your 40s or 50s.
I think plenty of people work hard to hit retirement money, and then make mid-life career switches to jobs with better work-life balance. My wife and I were having lots of trouble starting a family and were preparing to basically retire early. The problem is, it's difficult to fit in socially if you're retired early. I was about to start working in earnest on a career pivot to consulting/gig work that I could do for a few months out of the year and travel with my wife the rest of the year. The main aim of the flexible work was to remain employable and able to ramp back up if something went terribly wrong with our retirement investments and/or our living costs.
Luckily, our 4th pregnancy worked out (unlike the previous 3). Now, we're working to maximize opportunities for our son, but we were preparing to make serious career changes to trade the majority of our income for much more flexibility. Now, the plan is to keep working until our son is through college, but he's less than 2 years old, so there's plenty of time for plans to change.
Had we lost our son, the plan was to live out a 3-4 star lifestyle, traveling the world and working just enough to keep the option open for ramping work back up in an emergency.
So, it's a sample size of one, but I think the type of people who live well enough below their means to retire early also tend to be the the type of people who dial their careers back to idle for a "soft retirement" instead of quitting work cold-turkey.
Expensive lifestyles are expensive because there’s more demand for them. Living a more desirable lifestyle and then retiring at the same time is still better is it not?
Here's a profound realization. Utility is a function of both variables, time and money. Wholly unemployed people have plenty time but can't afford to spend the money using it how they want. So the situation is valueless. On the opposite extreme, people who spend every waking working have plenty of money but can't afford to spend a second using it how they want. So that situation is also valueless.
Based on nothing more than crudely assuming utility = time*money and then optimizing with simple calculus, you can get very close to deriving a 40 hour work week as the utility maximizing choice.
That's all nice theory on paper, but you sure have no clue about reality of most folks you write about...
Life is too short, and damn too short to make huge mistakes like this, for something so meaningless as just money. I am not saying cash is completely meaningless, we don't live in utopia, but the more you have them less meaning/significance they have.
Any white collar folk who ain't completely useless can earn enough to have a decent life and realize (as quickly as possible) that true meaning in life, and long term happiness are in completely different direction than piles of cash. At one point you start paying heavily with former to get latter.
I’ve tried doing my passion by doing two startups and also going into finance and since hindsight is 20/20 a good reason why I think I should have actually went into finance first and or even going into consulting as a technical person in a large Fortune 500 is that budgeting of projects and planning of software to meet budgets is much clearer to me now and management of time to find a solution would have informed me much better than doing the startups first.
Also I could have started saving money for another startup instead of incurring credit card debt.
I keep hearing that consulting and finance are terrible uninspiring careers, but as a consultant I honestly have no idea what else I could do that would be more inspiring. I would love to know though.
There are no other better choices available, unless one is born into wealth. That's why whoever talks about passion, inspiration, etc, is just talking throgh his/her hat. For 95 percent of the world population, some job is better than not having a job.
There are plenty of things which are more interesting than consulting which is why most consultants actually use the career as a stepping stone to go do what their clients were doing.
The pay in consulting is not typically the main draw. Finance and tech are almost always more lucrative. Even within finance, most jobs do not pay particularly high salaries for entry-level positions, if seen through the lens of hourly rates (e.g., investment banking).
> But the pay is so much more too. This means you can retire sooner and then use the free time to find meaning.
What I seem to see more often is just more or more expensive consumption. Bigger house, expensive furnishings, expensive cars, designer clothes, lavish vacations.
This sounds more like "playing devil's advocate" or taking a contrarian view, or questioning one's assumptions or decisions. Whatever you call it, the author is right about it being a useful skill.
If you want to talk about "staring into the abyss" though... to me that phrase evokes the casting of all reality into doubt. It means to grapple with the Münchhausen trilemma, or to perceive the limitless and arbitrary space of metaphysics, or to acknowledge the oblivion of meaning that the shadow of death casts over us. Either way, the abyss really is an abyss. I don't know whether it's useful to stare into it.
I take what the author describes as "staring into the abyss" as a special case of playing devil's advocate: one where the contrarian view has significant and emotionally difficult consequences, and you're actually letting yourself feel the emotional weight of potentially choosing it instead of just playing with the idea.
For example: Imagine you go to an engineering college, and you start feeling like you might not like the idea of an engineering career. You could play devil's advocate by chatting with your engineering-enthralled friends about how fun it'd be to drop out of college and go to culinary school instead, but that's just talk. Staring into the abyss
would be actually thinking through the financial, social, and personal implications of that choice, looking into culinary schools, and letting that dread and anxiety and excitement wash over you while you genuinely contemplate making the switch.
> If you want to talk about "staring into the abyss" though... to me that phrase evokes the casting of all reality into doubt.
In a more literal sense, yeah, I agree, that's what staring into the abyss is. I think here the author uses it as an effective way of saying "question the assumptions of your immediate reality".
> letting that dread and anxiety and excitement wash over you while you genuinely contemplate making the switch.
But life also happens anyways. For me, a lot of what constitutes "staring into the abyss" is accepting that neither the original plan nor my alternate wish worked out as expected - despite the best laid plans - because almost nothing ever does. It's not just considering all the implications of a decision but accepting that things just work out differently than you hoped.
[edit] I guess I mean that accepting the inevitability of previous disappointments is as much or more a part of grappling with the abyss as is considering the future.
It must be an indictment of something that “introspection, long term planning, thorough consideration of the idea of changing career paths away from STEM” can be with a straight face described as “staring into the abyss.”
Throwing one's reality into 'doubt' can cause you to significantly change your behavior, thoughts, ideas, etc. If those are largely negative to begin with and 'casting reality into doubt' (which is certainly one piece, if not the major piece of disassociation) in a safe place can improve and change your behavior for the better, it seems like a great idea to me.
I second this as a classic example of advocatus diaboli[0] in order to find a hole/weakness/wrongness in one own's initial argument/assumptions.
Taking the Nietzsche quote[1] into the context of his work: "Jenseits von Gut und Böse (Viertes Hauptstück; Sprüche und Zwischenspiele, 146)" [Beyond Good and Evil; Fourth main part; Proverbs and interludes; 146]] your interpretation seems more in line with the book.
The inevitability of birthing/becoming a Monster oneself by fighting a Monster for too long is akin to staring into the abyss long enough until the abyss is staring into you. Melting away of cause and effect, the blurring, the reversing and finally the interchangeability/permeability - in this case - of the line between the object and observer (objectivism).
Nihilism (dissolution of all values, meaningless-ism) as a standpoint devours its subject who in the beginning is looking at the outside world all around - from the inside out in the end.
146
Wer mit Ungeheuern kämpft, mag zusehn, daß er nicht dabei zum Ungeheuer wird. Und wenn du lange in einen Abgrund blickst, blickt der Abgrund auch in dich hinein.
A bit over 10 years ago I was still an evangelical Christian. I decided to ask myself, "What's the most logical way to live in light of your religious beliefs? Why aren't you living that way?"
That line of questioning was scary, but also invigorating. Scary, because it probably meant leaving behind a cushy tech job. Invigorating, because I imagined I'd end up as a missionary somewhere, which is a pretty amazing life if you really believe that Christianity is true.
After 18 months of staring into the abyss, I wasn't a Christian anymore. It was the hardest and most important thing I've ever done.
Two things made the journey possible:
1. I made it impossible to stop. I'd decided that I wanted to live as consistently as possible with my beliefs, so I couldn't stop until I knew what those beliefs were. The only possible outcomes were a) missionary, or b) non-Christian.
2. I found others who went through the same thing. A few were friends, but most were authors or random people online who wrote about their experience, like lukeprog on lesswrong.com.
> The only possible outcomes were a) missionary, or b) non-Christian.
That seems like an unnecessarily tiny set of possibilities, and pretty much guaranteed from the beginning you were going to choose (b), since "non-Christian" allows a huge flexibility of options, while "missionary" is one specific vocation and chosen only by a small subset of Christians. It's sort of like a person saying he will only stay an American if he's going to be a federal judge otherwise he'll emigrate.
Now, Evangelical thought lends itself to the sort of conclusion you came to: it really only values spiritual activities, so there is not any value for daily life in and of itself. I've heard pastors say "the reason why God doesn't take us to heaven immediately when we're saved is so that we can bring others to Christ" and "there is nothing for you in this world [because the Bible says 'the world is evil']". Which I'm coming to regard as functionally heretical, since there is no balance at all, certainly no celebration that the world God made is good and very good, and functionally limits you to careers of evangelist or pastor.
The larger history of Christian thought is more robust, though. Consider Paul: "make it your ambition to lead a quiet life: you should mind your own business and work with your hands" (1 Thess 4:11, emphasis added) Or Tim Keller on work: your work is your gift to the people around you; by extension, your work is bringing God's gift to the people you interact with. ("Gift" here not meaning you don't get paid; there was a great barbecue place where I lived, and it was a gift to me to have fantastic barbecue, but I can assure you that it was not cheap)
For me, the truth of Christianity always rested on its objective historical truth claims, especially the resurrection. And for many years I believed these truth claims had sufficient evidence going for them.
But then I was hoping to find evidence that would convince a rational non-believer, so I looked closer. I found out that Adam and Eve didn't exist, the flood didn't happen, the exodus didn't happen, Daniel was written much later than it claims to be, the slaughter of the innocents in Matthew didn't happen, and the founding miracles of Christianity aren't that different from other religions of that time and place. I started giving the benefit of the doubt to skeptics instead of Christian apologists. It became impossible to make the leap that, despite all these issues, the bodily resurrection of Jesus was nevertheless historical.
I never wanted to lose my faith, but once I saw that its historical truth claims didn't hold up to scrutiny, it just kind of crumbled.
I understand that others have a different standard of proof for these miracles than I do. Plenty of people I've talked to over the years have said that looking for evidence is foolish, but I find that ridiculous: if Christianity doesn't have enough of a foothold in reality that we can find evidence for its unique claims, then why should we think it's true? If I should "just have faith", why is it Christianity that I should just have faith in?
I also understand that there are other ways of being Christian that don't depend on any of the miracles in the Bible being historical. But that never made any sense to me either: if we're dismissing huge swaths of the Bible because "we know better," how is what's left not just the religion we've made up? What would be the point of that?
Thank you so much for your response. Christianity is so often misrepresented in HN / Reddit that it’s ridiculous how often it’s forced into false dichotomies. Your references in the last paragraph were exactly in line of what I was going to link.
I think though also we should be careful to judge things as heretical. It’s always been a dangerous word, and it’s unlikely that any one person or group of people are capable of fully grasping a religion or even God himself.
That is very interesting; also a shame because it highlights how harmful bad theology within Christianity can be, from the perspective of Christianity. That branch of Protestantism has tended to create unstable churches that occasionally produce a lot of energy, but don't last long and especially don't have good intergenerational relations (hard to accomplish with the most eager to learn running off to the mission field.)
I think you're right, although I'd say bad theology is in the eye of the beholder (unless we're talking about prosperity gospel theology, which is objectively terrible)
I grew up a rather serious Lutheran, then branched out within Protestantism in college. John Piper, Francis Schaeffer, Tim Keller. Tons of Bible studies and podcasts. I found it to be rather intellectually satisfying.
This is all to say that I don't think bad theology was the issue here. My only issue was that I made too many friends who were missionaries (some with Wycliffe) and, inspired by how they were living life, I flew too close to the sun, as it were.
I think you should give staring into the abyss another try on Christianity. Maybe though get it out of the dichotomy, and also expand your search beyond Evangelicals. I’ve found learning about Jewish history (Jonathan Sacks is a great author, Jewish Rabbi) or Biblical authorship has been really enlightening.
I’m resigned to the fact that no matter what, someone out there will insist that I misrepresented Christianity (as if it were obvious how to correctly interpret the Bible), that I “did it wrong,” that if only I could’ve read books XYZ or tweaked my epistemology then I would’ve reached a different conclusion.
Staring into the abyss involved putting my life on hold, basically doing nothing in my free time but reading and talking with friends and mentors. I read a pile of books from Dawkins and Sagan to NT Wright and Dale Allison. I stopped when, after 18 months, I realized that the next step would basically be to get a degree in New Testament studies.
It’s not an experience I’m eager to repeat, especially since the probability that I’ll reach a different conclusion is vanishingly small.
I abandoned my faith once I was unable to rationally reconcile secular and divine morality, which was a theory I played around with in college and later wrote a paper about.
As I wrote in a sibling comment, my faith always rested on Christianity's historical truth claims. So once I reached the conclusion that they weren't true, there was no way I could continue to embrace Christianity. I had to rethink everything from the ground up.
"Staring into the abyss" is only half the challenge; the other half is knowing what (values) you can hold on to while the abyss stares back at you.
The latter is what stops people from looking too closely, or asking hard questions -- because they fear that they might not have a strong enough framework in which to answer them. And so they look only as close as they can handle while they slowly work up the strength and the courage.
Another kind of person happens to be very comfortable staring into the abyss, interpreting with Procrustean simplifications, and reacting to what they see -- without necessarily the strong values in place to ground them; they are a loose canon, especially if they are a high-agency person biased for action.
When the gentle equilibrium has been upset by an unexpected outcome, the high-agency person has the fortitude to iterate the cycle of staring into the abyss (still a loose cannon, if they’re not well grounded).
However, the median person might not -- and can end up doing an incredible amount of collateral damage (to their own lives, and the lives of people around them) if they do this with insufficient skills or commitment. I wouldn't be surprised if a fear of the abyss is an evolutionary/cultural survival mechanism to protect them from themselves.
Very few people have the nous to carry out the whole iterated process well.
Nah. I know some real garbage people who seem to be immune to Karma. No bad ever comes their way.
And some wonderful people who seem to attract all the Karma which slid right off the garbage people.
The world is unfair, and the universe doesn't care. Morality is emergent from consciousness; in a time before our big thinky brains had evolved, there was no such thing as bad and good.
Evidence: How many, many animals live and thrive is deeply immoral by human standards. With few exceptions, pick just about any horror movie and I can show you an animal who exhibits those behaviors in its normal life.
> Evidence: How many, many animals live and thrive is deeply immoral by human standards.
The fact that non-human animals live an existence of violent survival does not seem to be prima facie evidence for the nonexistence or incoherence of human morality.
Human beings are rational animals. The term rational here is being used in a specific and technical sense. Non-human animals are subject to the laws of nature in a manner that acts more directly on their passions. Human beings are also subject to the laws of nature, but the forces of nature are mediated by our rationality.
Animal Act: (1) Offspring are hungry (2) brings food to offspring
Human Act: (1) Offspring are hungry (2) Reflects and Decides to provide food (3) brings food to offspring
An act is deemed immoral if it is a misuse of the rational faculty for ends that are not in conformity with the laws of nature.
Human Act (immoral): (1) Offspring are hungry (2) Reflects and Decides not to provide food for selfish reasons (3) offspring go hungry
Animals suffer but they are not moral agents like human beings since there is no mediating rationality that can be misused for ends that are not in conformity with nature's laws. The phrase Nature's Laws is being used broadly to include physical, biological or evolved social laws intertwined with the essential characteristics of the species.
> With few exceptions, pick just about any horror movie and I can show you an animal who exhibits those behaviors in its normal life.
But in the end, the animals that thrive end up being the ones that cooperate both within their species and with other species. From humans to symbiotic bacteria and jellyfish...
I agree with karma and deservedness not being aligned but I am pretty sure an animal doing what it is doing is limited by the need to hunt and feed rather than to subjugate and be sadistic?
This post seems almost comically like a collection of self-help slogans, and not far off from blaming people who are in a dark place for getting themselves there. (I also don't understand how "two wrongs don't mean right" connects to the rest of it. Is the idea that one is doing wrong by thinking bad things of wrong that has already been done?)
Also, if this is meant as a corrective to the article (as suggested by "Rather than focus on the badness of the bad situation or stare into the abyss. Pick good responses that are independent of bad"), then it seems that it is a response to the title, not the content. The very beginning of the article emphasises that the point is not to dwell on the bad in order to foster despair, but rather to acknowledge the existence of the bad in order to be able to move from it towards a remedy. If you can't even acknowledge that a bad situation exists, then you can't make a good response to it.
What I was trying to put across was that we get the results what we cause. I always bear the outcome of what I did. Can you think of an escape from the effects of what we do? (I deliberately ignore the other side of this, I'm not talking about effects we did not cause, such as trouble others cause for others)
If you pick good, right, proper, meant to be, what should be, what is righteous, what is true, honest, genuine, with integrity actions, then you ought to bear fruit that is caused by that. I think that this produces better outcomes than picking bad, not good, wrong, untrue, false, not honest, not genuine actions/thoughts/speech.
In hindsight we can determine what actions were not right, since they didn't produce the right, good results.
So if we seek after good, shouldn't we get the effects of good back because we surround ourselves with it?
This is separate independent reasoning from when bad things befall people who do all things right. I haven't thought much about that.
Do we bear the effects of what other's cause?
The two wrongs don't create a right refers to the idea of avoid basing my reasoning on doing something on something bad and calling it good. I should keep my reasoning of my reaction to bad things purely based on goodness and not based on the bad thing itself. I never want to say I did something purely due to a bad thing. I think you could call it motivation. I want to keep good and bad independent and not merge them into one. Can something bad cause something good in other words? Or did the good that it is a reaction to cause itself?
I think the footnote from the article covers your point better?:
[1] This phrase originates from a quote by Nietzche:
He who fights with monsters should look to it that he himself does not become a monster. And if you gaze long into an abyss, the abyss also gazes into you.
I’m probably not using “stare into the abyss” in the exact same sense Nietzche intended, since I wouldn’t really describe what I’m talking about as “fighting with a monster” or like it has the potential to turn you into a monster. [snip]
Hunh. I think some people call this "testing their priors." In Pi (1998), there's a lot of "... restate my assumptions: One ..." as the narrator strives to correct his thought processes. I recollect a short horror story in which a man becomes obsessed with "doing away" with more and more of his life he deems truly unneeded (it may have been named "To the Bone," it has been a few decades). In the harder sciences, whatever is accepted as the "the truth" is only a working model, hopefully to be replaced by something better when experiments point toward some flaw.
It involves a lot of the ability to confront the Sunk Cost Fallacy and a bit of whatever it is where you see people unwilling to let go of something which inadvertently traps them.
I try to do this, frequently, as a kind of back-tracking when I am stuck, or simply when I suspect it. However, I think it's probably a bit dangerous to get into a habit of it, or to apply it very broadly. The dead and the unborn need nothing, and one is ever in a state of moving from the latter to the former, without a way to take anything with you when the journey is done. Perhaps an addendum to "nothing is true; all is permitted" might be another semicolon and "everything is unnecessary."
If the man in the story "did away" with willingness to help others and give to others, then that's a pretty big moral failing on his part. But then he probably "did away" with morality at that point as well. Morality and other people (and finally survival) are what's keeping a real person who might undertake such "doing away" from going... too far.
I was told once that by the time you're genuinely considering a big change - by the time you're aware there's an abyss - the answer is probably "do it." There are things that are normal fears - "I have a serious medical condition and can't risk being without health insurance," that kind of thing - but "abyss" questions tend to be the sorts of things where you can't really articulate what your concerns are, or they're more about status or perception or just a general risk aversion ("what if I never find a job again?" "do I really want to be a divorcee?" "will my peers think I'm a failure?"), and the reason you're really even considering it is because you're currently miserable. People tend to stay at jobs longer than they should, in relationships longer than they should, and in misery longer than they should.
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But the pay is so much more too. This means you can retire sooner and then use the free time to find meaning. It also means you have more money to fund your hobbies and interests, and also just having a nice standard of living is good too, and not having to worry so much about unpaid bills, medical costs, etc. . People who have crappy jobs also work long hours too and find the work meaningless.
Further, that assumes you make it out the other end. Almost no one saves the money and retires early. Instead they get some money, they get a nicer apartment, nicer car, start eating out at fancier restaurants, shopping at higher end places, buying fashion brands etc...
I took the other road: during my 20s and early 30s I spent a lot of time chasing meaning while minimizing expenses and the time I put into jobs and other explicitly career-focused choices (although tech-related stuff turned out to be one of my forms of play & exploration, and I did do the startup thing a time or two). Can't say I outright regret this because I do think I exercised a lot of important personal capacities and gained some insights, but at one point I did look around and realize my place in society was effectively "economically marginalized software developer" and that was a weird and probably not optimal tradeoff from both a practical or meaningful standpoint, especially considering I had still had a lot of open questions and anxieties about meaning.
So, this path has potential failure modes too.
At that point I made a pretty deliberate choice to more or less "sell out." Years later the upsides appear to have outweighed the down, and I find myself with the suspicion that meaning is found/made wherever you meet life thoughtfully and intentionally, and that if I'd chosen finance in my 20s (or more comp-rewarding tech roles) I'd have had opportunities that were different but not without their own affordances for meaning (and probably a higher net worth).
Still, I like my work and hobbies, and I never feel there's a shortage of interesting and engaging things to pay attention to in the world. I could continue like this for decades if I'm lucky enough to; my most substantial worries are staving off/prepping for whatever decline in health we all eventually face, and with it capacity to engage the world robustly. Perhaps I didn't do so badly after all.
People change for a lot of reasons. I gave up some hobbies when I had a kid and I'm pretty sure I won't pick them back up when I retire. People's passions change, or they realize certain things are unobtainable. That's just life.
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Those business/biz-econ/business admin/econ classrooms are filled with kids who have no delusion about what they're getting themselves into it. They're in it for the money and a shot at being hired by the big shot names on Wall Street. They're either passionate about the money, or they just want a stable life with money.
And the entire undergrad experience of those two fields of study do a pretty swell job of weeding kids out. Business Frats, Clubs, Societies -- the emphasis on networking and internships. Like, the classroom experience might be less rigorous compared to your average pre-med student but make no mistake getting a job on Wall Street requires a lot of work. Just a very different kind of work.
It is also the only high status step outside of medicine and law. Or claiming fame via Hollywood (in which nepotism runs rampant) or Athletics (in which your ability to gain status is almost entirely decided by whether or not you were born a genetic outlier). The first two require a lot more schooling and particular academic talent. The last two are basically moonshots and the road to fame littered with failed attempts.
So finance it is.
I know Harvard doesn’t have anything so vulgar as business, accounting or finance at undergrad since well bred young men and women leave that to grad school. Similarly for Stanford, Yale and Princeton.
Except investment banking and consulting both have notoriously long (100+ hr/wk) work weeks leaving very little time for other interests and hobbies. These careers effectively force you to adopt the career as the core of your personality.
You have 100+ hr/wk for a few years in your 20s, when you're young and can sort of handle it. But by the time you're having a family you work more normal hours and make absolute FU money (e.g my younger brother makes over 10x/yr what I do at only 31 years old). It's not about the salary and hours when you start at 22, its about the salary and hours when you're 32 and 42.
I compare this to my friends who became physicians or accountants, and I think the IB folks have a waaaay better work-to-pay ratio long-term. I'm on the fence about consulting because the pay ceiling seems lower and I don't personally know enough of them.
Also no one does 100+h/wk. That’s not even physically possible. Even juniors in IB which is notorious for being gruelling are actually not doing much during the day. The main issue is that work really starts when your partner finishes their day of meetings and things have to be ready for the next morning.
In 2022, who is working 100+ hr/wk in consulting? Doing what? The 1990s/2000s are over. Now, they are mostly milking big dumb corporations by building unnecessary, overpriced software systems. Probably magic circle junior lawyers are working much more than consultants they days, and making more money.
Also you wrote: <<These careers effectively force you to adopt the career as the core of your personality.>> Not true. Many people get lucky and are selected for a two year ibanking programme. They work like crazy for two years, learn a decade's worth of banking knowledge, then move on to a different role or career.
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And when in the United States alone the average salary hovers around $75K/yr, a 24 year old being able to command a near $150K base-salary (excluding bonuses) is in the eyes of many absolutely flying high.
Add to that Finance/Consulting/Professional Services eats/live/travels/dresses in a manner that is high status in our society and the jobs quickly becomes a status symbol and attracts those who are willing to sacrifice some amount of passion for status or material wealth.
It also is a field where it confers that wealth and status without Having to Know Someone or Be A Genetic Outlier In Physical Performance/Appearance.
Lastly, survive long enough and climb the ladder high enough and you start gaining Power. That wealth no longer buys you things but rather connections, access, and influence. Finance sits in close proximity to many powerful people in the world, and thus by proxy also gains status.
SWE/IT offers similar levels of wealth but unfortunately lacks that proximity to power (yet) and as a class of professionals seems to espouse cultural values that go against the ostentatious displays of wealth that the average person associates with high status. At the very least, no one is showing up to morning standups in a custom tailored suit.
Source: my social circle growing up mostly consisted of working class immigrant families. Getting into a T20 University and breaking into Wall Street was the very definition of Making It.
If you don't have these things, you're looked down on and people assume you aren't successful/skilled. Just projecting the image is enough to push some people into a promotion.
If anything, IT is the outlier in "well-paid office jobs which garner lots of respect".
This spiel about waiting for retirement to "find meaning" is a load of BS. Telling people to sit around and wait for decades on end until their life is 4/5 of the way complete is inhumane. Why wait for decades when someone can just do what they're interested in now?
The fact that some people unironically think this crazy stuff (and don't see how crazy it really is) is just sickening to me
This part of your comment isn't getting nearly the attention it deserves.
Hard work and long hours aren't the reward, they are what let you reward yourself- however you find value or meaning.
Some jobs don't require long hours. Some jobs pay more than others. Sometimes, doing a job can be intrinsically fulfilling. Not every job is all or any of those things, and any one of them may mean tradeoffs to the others.
I sort of think grinding is generally wrong at any age. If you feel like you're grinding, perhaps it's time to take stock and consider what you could be doing differently so that you don't have to keep grinding to both meet your responsibilities and enjoy life. Of course some might find themselves with enough exigencies they have almost no choice but to grind, but I doubt too many people on HN are really in that boat.
The requirement to make enough money to survive is unignorable. Anything beyond that is just making up goalposts. There's always another goalpost you could strive to reach.
Ugh. What an illusion. Please don’t put your life on hold to find meaning in your 40/50s
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Luckily, our 4th pregnancy worked out (unlike the previous 3). Now, we're working to maximize opportunities for our son, but we were preparing to make serious career changes to trade the majority of our income for much more flexibility. Now, the plan is to keep working until our son is through college, but he's less than 2 years old, so there's plenty of time for plans to change.
Had we lost our son, the plan was to live out a 3-4 star lifestyle, traveling the world and working just enough to keep the option open for ramping work back up in an emergency.
So, it's a sample size of one, but I think the type of people who live well enough below their means to retire early also tend to be the the type of people who dial their careers back to idle for a "soft retirement" instead of quitting work cold-turkey.
Why does anyone have to find meaning?
Based on nothing more than crudely assuming utility = time*money and then optimizing with simple calculus, you can get very close to deriving a 40 hour work week as the utility maximizing choice.
Life is too short, and damn too short to make huge mistakes like this, for something so meaningless as just money. I am not saying cash is completely meaningless, we don't live in utopia, but the more you have them less meaning/significance they have.
Any white collar folk who ain't completely useless can earn enough to have a decent life and realize (as quickly as possible) that true meaning in life, and long term happiness are in completely different direction than piles of cash. At one point you start paying heavily with former to get latter.
Also I could have started saving money for another startup instead of incurring credit card debt.
What I seem to see more often is just more or more expensive consumption. Bigger house, expensive furnishings, expensive cars, designer clothes, lavish vacations.
Strength before Weakness
Journey before Destination
The type of person that goes into Finance/Consulting is certainly not the type of person that will want to retire early.
If you want to talk about "staring into the abyss" though... to me that phrase evokes the casting of all reality into doubt. It means to grapple with the Münchhausen trilemma, or to perceive the limitless and arbitrary space of metaphysics, or to acknowledge the oblivion of meaning that the shadow of death casts over us. Either way, the abyss really is an abyss. I don't know whether it's useful to stare into it.
For example: Imagine you go to an engineering college, and you start feeling like you might not like the idea of an engineering career. You could play devil's advocate by chatting with your engineering-enthralled friends about how fun it'd be to drop out of college and go to culinary school instead, but that's just talk. Staring into the abyss would be actually thinking through the financial, social, and personal implications of that choice, looking into culinary schools, and letting that dread and anxiety and excitement wash over you while you genuinely contemplate making the switch.
> If you want to talk about "staring into the abyss" though... to me that phrase evokes the casting of all reality into doubt.
In a more literal sense, yeah, I agree, that's what staring into the abyss is. I think here the author uses it as an effective way of saying "question the assumptions of your immediate reality".
But life also happens anyways. For me, a lot of what constitutes "staring into the abyss" is accepting that neither the original plan nor my alternate wish worked out as expected - despite the best laid plans - because almost nothing ever does. It's not just considering all the implications of a decision but accepting that things just work out differently than you hoped.
[edit] I guess I mean that accepting the inevitability of previous disappointments is as much or more a part of grappling with the abyss as is considering the future.
Throwing one's reality into 'doubt' can cause you to significantly change your behavior, thoughts, ideas, etc. If those are largely negative to begin with and 'casting reality into doubt' (which is certainly one piece, if not the major piece of disassociation) in a safe place can improve and change your behavior for the better, it seems like a great idea to me.
https://psyche.co/ideas/when-reality-slips-through-your-fing...
Taking the Nietzsche quote[1] into the context of his work: "Jenseits von Gut und Böse (Viertes Hauptstück; Sprüche und Zwischenspiele, 146)" [Beyond Good and Evil; Fourth main part; Proverbs and interludes; 146]] your interpretation seems more in line with the book.
The inevitability of birthing/becoming a Monster oneself by fighting a Monster for too long is akin to staring into the abyss long enough until the abyss is staring into you. Melting away of cause and effect, the blurring, the reversing and finally the interchangeability/permeability - in this case - of the line between the object and observer (objectivism).
Nihilism (dissolution of all values, meaningless-ism) as a standpoint devours its subject who in the beginning is looking at the outside world all around - from the inside out in the end.
[0]https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Devil%27s_advocate
[1]http://www.zeno.org/Philosophie/M/Nietzsche,+Friedrich/Jense...
146 Wer mit Ungeheuern kämpft, mag zusehn, daß er nicht dabei zum Ungeheuer wird. Und wenn du lange in einen Abgrund blickst, blickt der Abgrund auch in dich hinein.
That line of questioning was scary, but also invigorating. Scary, because it probably meant leaving behind a cushy tech job. Invigorating, because I imagined I'd end up as a missionary somewhere, which is a pretty amazing life if you really believe that Christianity is true.
After 18 months of staring into the abyss, I wasn't a Christian anymore. It was the hardest and most important thing I've ever done.
Two things made the journey possible:
1. I made it impossible to stop. I'd decided that I wanted to live as consistently as possible with my beliefs, so I couldn't stop until I knew what those beliefs were. The only possible outcomes were a) missionary, or b) non-Christian.
2. I found others who went through the same thing. A few were friends, but most were authors or random people online who wrote about their experience, like lukeprog on lesswrong.com.
That seems like an unnecessarily tiny set of possibilities, and pretty much guaranteed from the beginning you were going to choose (b), since "non-Christian" allows a huge flexibility of options, while "missionary" is one specific vocation and chosen only by a small subset of Christians. It's sort of like a person saying he will only stay an American if he's going to be a federal judge otherwise he'll emigrate.
Now, Evangelical thought lends itself to the sort of conclusion you came to: it really only values spiritual activities, so there is not any value for daily life in and of itself. I've heard pastors say "the reason why God doesn't take us to heaven immediately when we're saved is so that we can bring others to Christ" and "there is nothing for you in this world [because the Bible says 'the world is evil']". Which I'm coming to regard as functionally heretical, since there is no balance at all, certainly no celebration that the world God made is good and very good, and functionally limits you to careers of evangelist or pastor.
The larger history of Christian thought is more robust, though. Consider Paul: "make it your ambition to lead a quiet life: you should mind your own business and work with your hands" (1 Thess 4:11, emphasis added) Or Tim Keller on work: your work is your gift to the people around you; by extension, your work is bringing God's gift to the people you interact with. ("Gift" here not meaning you don't get paid; there was a great barbecue place where I lived, and it was a gift to me to have fantastic barbecue, but I can assure you that it was not cheap)
But then I was hoping to find evidence that would convince a rational non-believer, so I looked closer. I found out that Adam and Eve didn't exist, the flood didn't happen, the exodus didn't happen, Daniel was written much later than it claims to be, the slaughter of the innocents in Matthew didn't happen, and the founding miracles of Christianity aren't that different from other religions of that time and place. I started giving the benefit of the doubt to skeptics instead of Christian apologists. It became impossible to make the leap that, despite all these issues, the bodily resurrection of Jesus was nevertheless historical.
I never wanted to lose my faith, but once I saw that its historical truth claims didn't hold up to scrutiny, it just kind of crumbled.
I understand that others have a different standard of proof for these miracles than I do. Plenty of people I've talked to over the years have said that looking for evidence is foolish, but I find that ridiculous: if Christianity doesn't have enough of a foothold in reality that we can find evidence for its unique claims, then why should we think it's true? If I should "just have faith", why is it Christianity that I should just have faith in?
I also understand that there are other ways of being Christian that don't depend on any of the miracles in the Bible being historical. But that never made any sense to me either: if we're dismissing huge swaths of the Bible because "we know better," how is what's left not just the religion we've made up? What would be the point of that?
https://credomag.com/article/martin-luther-and-the-doctrine-...
I think though also we should be careful to judge things as heretical. It’s always been a dangerous word, and it’s unlikely that any one person or group of people are capable of fully grasping a religion or even God himself.
I grew up a rather serious Lutheran, then branched out within Protestantism in college. John Piper, Francis Schaeffer, Tim Keller. Tons of Bible studies and podcasts. I found it to be rather intellectually satisfying.
This is all to say that I don't think bad theology was the issue here. My only issue was that I made too many friends who were missionaries (some with Wycliffe) and, inspired by how they were living life, I flew too close to the sun, as it were.
I’m resigned to the fact that no matter what, someone out there will insist that I misrepresented Christianity (as if it were obvious how to correctly interpret the Bible), that I “did it wrong,” that if only I could’ve read books XYZ or tweaked my epistemology then I would’ve reached a different conclusion.
Staring into the abyss involved putting my life on hold, basically doing nothing in my free time but reading and talking with friends and mentors. I read a pile of books from Dawkins and Sagan to NT Wright and Dale Allison. I stopped when, after 18 months, I realized that the next step would basically be to get a degree in New Testament studies.
It’s not an experience I’m eager to repeat, especially since the probability that I’ll reach a different conclusion is vanishingly small.
https://specularrealms.com/godsmorality
https://www.gocomics.com/calvinandhobbes/1990/06/17
The latter is what stops people from looking too closely, or asking hard questions -- because they fear that they might not have a strong enough framework in which to answer them. And so they look only as close as they can handle while they slowly work up the strength and the courage.
Another kind of person happens to be very comfortable staring into the abyss, interpreting with Procrustean simplifications, and reacting to what they see -- without necessarily the strong values in place to ground them; they are a loose canon, especially if they are a high-agency person biased for action.
When the gentle equilibrium has been upset by an unexpected outcome, the high-agency person has the fortitude to iterate the cycle of staring into the abyss (still a loose cannon, if they’re not well grounded).
However, the median person might not -- and can end up doing an incredible amount of collateral damage (to their own lives, and the lives of people around them) if they do this with insufficient skills or commitment. I wouldn't be surprised if a fear of the abyss is an evolutionary/cultural survival mechanism to protect them from themselves.
Very few people have the nous to carry out the whole iterated process well.
If you look for the good and aim toward it then you get more of it.
If you aim to look for bad and search for it you shall get more of it.
Everyone eventually reaps what they sow. And you can judge a tree by its fruit.
Rather than focus on the badness of the bad situation or stare into the abyss. Pick good responses that are independent of bad.
In other words, two wrongs don't mean right.
And some wonderful people who seem to attract all the Karma which slid right off the garbage people.
The world is unfair, and the universe doesn't care. Morality is emergent from consciousness; in a time before our big thinky brains had evolved, there was no such thing as bad and good.
Evidence: How many, many animals live and thrive is deeply immoral by human standards. With few exceptions, pick just about any horror movie and I can show you an animal who exhibits those behaviors in its normal life.
The fact that non-human animals live an existence of violent survival does not seem to be prima facie evidence for the nonexistence or incoherence of human morality.
Human beings are rational animals. The term rational here is being used in a specific and technical sense. Non-human animals are subject to the laws of nature in a manner that acts more directly on their passions. Human beings are also subject to the laws of nature, but the forces of nature are mediated by our rationality.
Animal Act: (1) Offspring are hungry (2) brings food to offspring
Human Act: (1) Offspring are hungry (2) Reflects and Decides to provide food (3) brings food to offspring
An act is deemed immoral if it is a misuse of the rational faculty for ends that are not in conformity with the laws of nature.
Human Act (immoral): (1) Offspring are hungry (2) Reflects and Decides not to provide food for selfish reasons (3) offspring go hungry
Animals suffer but they are not moral agents like human beings since there is no mediating rationality that can be misused for ends that are not in conformity with nature's laws. The phrase Nature's Laws is being used broadly to include physical, biological or evolved social laws intertwined with the essential characteristics of the species.
In many situations you have the choice to help or to be the one that choses selfishness. To bridge a divide or not.
But in the end, the animals that thrive end up being the ones that cooperate both within their species and with other species. From humans to symbiotic bacteria and jellyfish...
Also, if this is meant as a corrective to the article (as suggested by "Rather than focus on the badness of the bad situation or stare into the abyss. Pick good responses that are independent of bad"), then it seems that it is a response to the title, not the content. The very beginning of the article emphasises that the point is not to dwell on the bad in order to foster despair, but rather to acknowledge the existence of the bad in order to be able to move from it towards a remedy. If you can't even acknowledge that a bad situation exists, then you can't make a good response to it.
What I was trying to put across was that we get the results what we cause. I always bear the outcome of what I did. Can you think of an escape from the effects of what we do? (I deliberately ignore the other side of this, I'm not talking about effects we did not cause, such as trouble others cause for others)
If you pick good, right, proper, meant to be, what should be, what is righteous, what is true, honest, genuine, with integrity actions, then you ought to bear fruit that is caused by that. I think that this produces better outcomes than picking bad, not good, wrong, untrue, false, not honest, not genuine actions/thoughts/speech.
In hindsight we can determine what actions were not right, since they didn't produce the right, good results.
So if we seek after good, shouldn't we get the effects of good back because we surround ourselves with it?
This is separate independent reasoning from when bad things befall people who do all things right. I haven't thought much about that.
Do we bear the effects of what other's cause?
The two wrongs don't create a right refers to the idea of avoid basing my reasoning on doing something on something bad and calling it good. I should keep my reasoning of my reaction to bad things purely based on goodness and not based on the bad thing itself. I never want to say I did something purely due to a bad thing. I think you could call it motivation. I want to keep good and bad independent and not merge them into one. Can something bad cause something good in other words? Or did the good that it is a reaction to cause itself?
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- Iroh
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It involves a lot of the ability to confront the Sunk Cost Fallacy and a bit of whatever it is where you see people unwilling to let go of something which inadvertently traps them.
I try to do this, frequently, as a kind of back-tracking when I am stuck, or simply when I suspect it. However, I think it's probably a bit dangerous to get into a habit of it, or to apply it very broadly. The dead and the unborn need nothing, and one is ever in a state of moving from the latter to the former, without a way to take anything with you when the journey is done. Perhaps an addendum to "nothing is true; all is permitted" might be another semicolon and "everything is unnecessary."