I appreciate the spirit of this essay, but I think it overstates the idea that intellectual pursuits are an escape from modern dissatisfaction. I've spent most of my life driven by curiosity, forming my identity around being someone who seeks knowledge. But over time I’ve come to see how that, too, can become a kind of consumerism—chasing ideas for the dopamine hit of a new insight, then feeling the letdown and scrambling for the next one.
The essay frames an intellectually rich life as a kind of antidote to consumer culture, but for me it often mirrors the same patterns: FOMO, compulsiveness, neglect of relationships, a deep anxiety that I’ll never learn enough. The awareness that I’ll only ever scratch the surface of all there is to know has become a source of existential stress, not peace.
This isn’t to say intellectual life isn’t meaningful—but it's not a cure-all. It can be just as prone to distortion as anything else if pursued as a form of escape.
One of the most profoundly simple and true aspects of philosophy that I’ve learned is that without putting it into practice, it’s worthless. It can even be harmful. Although it’s so simple, it’s also one of the most difficult components of philosophy. For me, at least.
I realize more every year how I’ve failed to put what I’ve learned and thought about into practice. It’s dangerously easy to sandbox your intellectual life within your brain, where your ability to reason and navigate your inner world seems deceptively good at times. And that’s an important skill too, of course. But humans are innately social creatures and these skills are next to useless if they don’t also work effectively and reliably around other people, where you don’t control the environment, you don’t control the topic or direction or tone or whatever it might be.
If that obsession with learning the next thing manifests as an ostensibly rich inner world, you will inevitably find yourself in the void generated by antisocial tendencies. Your ideas, skills, emotions, temper, courage, and all the rest won’t have been built upon, tested, broken down, rebuilt, and refined by other human beings. You can only really be a shell of what a human is meant to be. The ultimate test, I guess, is integrating your philosophy with the world. It’s a lot harder than doing it in your sandbox.
I think many of us fool ourselves into thinking we’re doing the work of practicing philosophy in isolation, but it’s actually a distraction from the much more difficult task of practicing it with other people. People who make us angry, sad, distracted, worse than we want to believe we are. Being alone to let yourself impulsively dig deeper and deeper into intellectual or philosophical pursuits can easily be a convenient distraction from the thing we claim to be doing all along.
There’s a sort of irony in the fear or worry that you’ll never learn enough, too. You’ll certainly never get there without deep, intimate, interconnected life with other people. I really believe it. And for a lot of us, that’s incredibly scary too. To let the fear of not knowing enough keep you from truly living is a hell of a thing.
It's a great essay, and I came away with a similar thought.
They mention Erdos and applaud his intensity, transparently mentioning that he was an addict to antidepressants and amphetamines, and without the substance abuse he wasn't able to get any mathematical work done.
To me this is the antithetical to being intellectually rich. More like enslaved to our own intellectualism.
I want to have the freedom to think about the things that I want to think about. Being forced instead to reason through problems, not of my choosing, on behalf of someone else... well that's life for most!
I appreciate this perspective as it matches mine and I think comes from experience. I imagine myself sitting on my peak and seeing millions, maybe billions, of other peaks and the desire to traverse them propels me forward. However, as soon as I'm a quarter of the way up one, I start to think, what am I missing on the other peaks? That's the FOMO. Then I spend the next five years of my life partially breaching a thousand ideas and never experiencing satisfaction.
One's who are really learning aren't calling it out - look at kids learning to bike, new parents, early artists, new dancers, new swimmers, sports folks, researchers, journalists.
And there's pseudo learning, characterized by distinct effort to call the learning out. Reading 200 books a year, twitter, podcasts, hacker news. All cargo cult symbolism and consumerism.
Within real learning too, there's learning for a purpose and another just for the heck of it. Learning investments vs learning to run a marathon.
Learning sales is way different than learning piano, One where you learn mostly by doing, another by observing the delta between what is said and what actually happens.
Every form of learning is uncomfortable in its own way.
No one is really validating me for learning new things. I think the value of learning has more to do with whether you can leverage your learning in a socially positive way. It's hard to know whether learning about a particular topic will create opportunities to help anyone. I'm pretty sure no one but me will get anything from my recent interest in astrophysics beyond a little entertainment value. I consider it hedonic learning, but less so than stuff like pop culture trivia.
For my part, one of the most striking things which I recall from my youth was reading Dumas' _The Count of Monte Cristo_ and the Abbé Faria contending that everything a gentleman needed to make his way in life was contained in less than 100 books --- which he had memorized the content of, and could impart to the young Edmond Dantes.
A naïve younger me tried to brute force this by reading one non-fiction book from each major section of the Dewey Decimal system catalog, but was stymied by the paucity of a high school library in a county in the second smallest tax base in the state....
Since then, I've actually been trying to put that list together (and lightly updating it for availability from Project Gutenberg/Librivox).
I am about a quarter of the way through Modern Library’s top 100 and it has been a worthwhile journey. It is “just” literary fiction but it is among the best humanity has produced. I have learned so much about the human condition, my ability to articulate ideas has improved tremendously, and I feel like my mind has been “freed from the tyranny of the present” (to quote Cicero).
Anyone who puts "Ulysses" at the top of a best books list is suffering from expertitis. Ulysses has a massive user experience problem. It's hard. Dense, convoluted, absurd. If your friend asks you for a good book, you don't recommend it. The only time you do is when your college English major, or advanced highschooler, who is bored with the tropes of even very good novels wants to stretch themselves. Then you hand them this book.
I've read more than half of those, and every time I see that list, I really wish that almost every book would be paired w/ one which enhances/comments on either the book or that same theme.
e.g., _Kim_ by Rudyard Kipling should be paired w/ Robert Heinlein's _Citizen of the Galaxy_, or _The Grapes of Wrath_, which was cribbed from Sanora Babb's notes w/o permission should be paired w/ her _Whose Names Are Unknown_:
That's a dreadful list in my opinion. Absurdly Anglocentric (esp. Americo-centric). I'm not saying they're bad books but a really far cry from "among the best humanity has produced". Not a single south-american novel? Not a single romance language book as a matter of fact? I highly recommend you diversify your reading choices.
would have loved to see some non native English speaking authors on the list. (instead of listing some authors twice - as great as they are). There were 2 Russians that stood out but no Camus, Feuchtwanger, Remarque, Musil, Borges, ...
I don't think this is a very good list that should call itself top 100. Maybe anglophone top 100, but even then I'd question some of the choices. I completely ignores a ton of more important works in non-English languages.
This list is kind of strange. Firstly, it is very "anglo-saxon" oriented. It is a mixture of "Big Literature", interesting for someone who is literature student, like ULYSSES (which is at the same time a great novel and a boring as hell novel) with true gems, like Orwell or Joseph Conrad-Korzeniowski with additions like Robert Graves writing, which has mostly entertainment value equal to average pseudo-documentaries from Netflix and pop stuff like Vonnegut' books (which are, at least, not boring).
Still, a lot of interesting stuff, Orwell, unfortunately, never gets old, pity
Ray Bradbury was omitted, as Fahrenheit 451 is getting more and more up-to-date.
And I say that as a Modern Literature major who has read a lot on that list. FAULKNER IS A TERRIBLE WRITER! And while James Joyce and some of the others are good writers, they don't deserve multiple entries in the top 100.
It's clear this list is really "5 librarians personal favorites."
"Be careful… about this reading you refer to, this reading of many different authors and books of every description. You should be extending your stay among writers whose genius is unquestionable, deriving constant nourishment from them if you wish to gain anything from your reading that will find a lasting place in your mind."
- Seneca, Letters
I was surprised to learn that the temptation to read too many things was also a problem 2,000 years ago. This inspired me to work on a short list of books that I know deeply.
Sucks that the vast majority of those books were lost forever. Early Christianity was a scourge in that regard, how much culture we lost forever because of those zealots.
St John's College is known for their Great Books curriculum - the foundation of their four year program - where students read the primary text of western civilization.
It's always held a soft spot in my heart as my own experience was mostly reading derivative descriptions and the rare times when I was able to read a primary text during my coursework were always my happiest memories.
Trying to learn Newtonian Mechanics from Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica is kinda dumb though.
I certainly noticed that it was ineffective in discussing implications with the students. I found Boyle's observations far more effective in teaching science.
A co-worker mentioned this school when his son selected it for a visit, and I quite envy the young man the chance to attend --- I believe I got everything from their reading list --- if I missed something, let me know.
I actually did your Dewey Decimal project: https://www.dahosek.com/category/dewey-decimal-project/ I read one book out of each “decade” of the Dewey catalog from my local library (which is reasonably well stocked). It was a bit less than the predicted 100 books since there are some gaps in both the system and the collection of my library, but it was an interesting way to discover things I didn’t know I didn’t know.
The most important books are things like first aid and CPR. Or better yet a class because hands on experience beat books learning.
I love the Gingery books and they are great foundations for a hobby. However even in a end of civilization scenario we only need a small minority who knows that content who can teach the rest - that is at best, but quite likely there won't be enough industrial base to produce the aluminum needed and so you are stuck with useless knowledge. Even your 19th century homesteading tends to assume far more industrial base to make some annoyingly hard things.
Most so called practical skills are either not practical in modern civilization (there is far too much population for us all the be hunter/gathers even if we want to); or they are only practical in context of current times. I've seen how to wire your house for electric lights books from the 1920s - most of the things shown wouldn't pass code today. My house was built in 1970, and there are a lot of things that still work but there is good reason we don't allow that anymore.
Trying to focus on intellectual things --- practical skills invites the list becoming an extension of my various interests (note the extant shelves on archery and woodworking) and their various intersections, e.g.,
“The Good Life” by Helen and Scott Nearing has an excellent bibliography/citations section.
How to build stone houses, compost and farm organically, etc. A good primer on homesteading. Contains references to things like 19th century homestead manuals
Based on your interest in Tacitus and Thucydides, I might recommend the The Histories of Polybius. [1] It is absolutely mind-blowing to me that he actually witnessed the events he writes about, and how analogous it is to modern-day geopolitics.
By the way, thank you for providing your list of books - I picked up a few future reads from it.
I'll assume you've run into Mortimer J. Adler's Great Works of the Western World and are familiar with the selection. For those not in the know, the 60 volume set was done by a somewhat sparse group that included many people like Isaac Asimov and William F. Buckley Jr. (what a spread there).
The thing that always made GWWW a killer collection was Adler's syntopicon to the 58 other volumes.
The term 'syntopicon' was coined for this effort and is essentially a way of indexing information. Like how a dictionary uses words to sort the data, and an encyclopedia uses a subject, a syntopicon uses a topic. Think 'jurisprudence of judges' and not 'African elephants'.
I've always thought that more book collections should include a syntopicon to them. With the modern AI revolution, I'd suppose that it's a lot easier to do so now, but it's still a lot of work and effort to edit the 'link table' for these things. More enjoyable though and great for giving the collector a really good grasp on the books.
Try putting in your list of books and then ask your AI of choice the help put together a syntopicon for it. Here's a (poor) example:
Interesting, I have a facsimile version of the first edition of _Roget's Thesaurus_ which orders concepts numerically, and I always wished for a reference list to match.
Agree modern indexing is great for researching terminology, and wish it could be more easily extended to concepts, but not sure modern Large Language Models with their compression/hallucinations/outright-errors are workable yet.
> reading one non-fiction book from each major section of the Dewey Decimal system catalog
This actually sounds really fun. Not so much in an optimized way, but more like just going to the library and picking a decimal heading and then just selecting a cool-looking book in that heading and reading it, then repeat.
Tried to do it again in college, but using the LoC headings, but ran out of time and graduated before running out of college/headings.
To this day, when going to the library, I try to keep this in mind when looking over the new books, and if there is one on a major/notable subject I can't recall having read a book on, grab it.
The Reading Guide at the bottom of the page is the best way to get into them, I think. It's a daily ~15/20 minute selection. Be aware, it's the book's page number that is referenced, not the .pdf's page number.
I only read great literature, classics, history books my whole life. This year (Aged 48) I decided to pepper in a "fluff" book or two. I forced myself to read something I normally wouldn't. I read "The Situation" (Jersey Shore) and Mathew Perry (Friends) "auto" biographies. I actually had some profound insights about depression and substance abuse from those two. Of course, I don't recommend you read either, but if you never read "airport fiction" or "pop biographies" it might prove interesting.
Judging from the French movie (with Pierre Niney) I saw last year (which was awesome btw) , and my vague recollection of the book, there's lots of physical skills involved. It's not just an intellectual pursuit, but more like applied science in getting vengeance. Really fun read.
Big chunk of social media is self improvement. Stumbled across this guy yesterday and actually gives pretty solid advice.
One of my personal favorites, but a very difficult read: _Summa Technologiae_ by Stanislaw Lem. It's so difficult I haven't actually finished it. It's remarkably dense.
Some books I would put on this list: Knowledge and Decisions by Thomas Sowell, Le Rouge et le Noir by Stendhal, Up From Slavery by Booker T. Washington, 1984 by George Orwell.
Dumas himself had a personal library of about 6,000 books at its peak. If you don't already have them on your list, historians have mentioned several books that were known to have strongly influenced him:
Walter Scott's historical novels, particularly "Ivanhoe" and "Waverley," which inspired Dumas' approach to historical fiction
James Fenimore Cooper's frontier adventures, which influenced his action narratives
Lord Byron's romantic poetry and persona, which shaped Dumas' conception of the romantic hero
Schiller's play "The Conspiracy of Fiesco at Genoa," which Dumas translated and adapted early in his career
Shakespeare's dramatic works
Memoirs of historical figures, particularly those from the 17th and 18th centuries, including Courtilz de Sandras' "Mémoires de M. d'Artagnan," which became the foundation for "The Three Musketeers"
Plutarch's "Lives," which informed his understanding of classical historical figures
Works by Abbé Prévost and other French novelists of the 18th century
I love this idea, and the lost is full of gems, but I see a couple of issues. If you actually intend you or anyone else to read these and stay sane I'd remove the mathematical tables (there is value in reading these, but only for a very rare soul), the Bible (lots of really dry stuff about begetting and knowing), the complete works of Shakespeare (hard to understand without careful study, way too long to cafefully study).
> the Bible (lots of really dry stuff about begetting and knowing)
I'd suggest replacing the Bible with just the Gospels (Matthew, Mark, Luke[0], and John). Removing it entirely seems like a mistake since you'd lose a lot of the literary and moral underpinnings of Western culture, but having to read the bible in its entirely sounds exhausting. I did it (reading all four gospels) recently and can attest even outside of the religious aspects the retelling of the same tragic story in four different was is a fascinating literary experience.
[0] Technically we should through Acts in there too since Luke-Acts are essentially one book, but it's not a gospel so I left it out. Plus quite frankly while I did read it I found it way more boring than the others; turns out that Jesus fellow is a way more interesting main character than Paul :)
"Reappraisals" and "When the Facts Change" should be on top of everyone's reading list. Few indeed are those who can write prose as crisp, succinct and erudite as he did.
My mom grew up in Bangladesh with a classic British education (augmented with Russian works that were popular in the country given the socialist alignment). She speaks English with a heavy accent despite living here for almost 40 years, but will randomly reference great works in conversation. The other day she worked a reference to a greek tragedy into a dig at Pakistanis. I’ve come around to the idea that this isn’t merely a class flex, but rather these works have distilled observations about the human condition as well as building blocks of the society we live in even where we don’t recognize the provenance.
Exactly correct. In reading some highly regarded works two things occurred to me, first that the author had captured into words some fundamental aspect of the human condition. Second was that it's easier to think about something presented as a story than it is when it is presented as an alternative to how you currently think.
If you tell someone there position on some topic is wrong, they will argue with you. If you tell someone a story where the character takes the same position they have and then through experience and personal growth comes to understand how it is wrong. They can come away realizing that they might have it wrong. Great trick when it works.
> In August 2018, in the last month of my three-month sabbatical, I arrived at the Hamta village in Himachal Pradesh. I rented a one-room cottage, and my caretakers were Dolma Aunty and Kalzang Uncle, a couple well into their 70’s.
I got to this part and realized: I've read this article before in some form.
It's a really common trope to head out to some remote area of Asia and admire how happy people are. There's often a spiritual component to it. I will write the guy a bit of a pass, because he himself is (I think) Indian.
But westerners have been doing stuff like this for ages and prattling on about it - it's kind of a cornerstone of Orientalism. This was actually a plot point in the recent White Lotus season. People rarely go to Appalachia to have these experiences, but you certainly can find people living simple happy lives there. (At least, if they do, nobody publishes those articles - it doesn't fit our preconceived notions of who gets to be enlightened, which is to say it has to be some place far away and people very different than your average Americans)
Not to say there's no value in this article (there is), and it was a fun read at that.
> But westerners have been doing stuff like this for ages and prattling on about it - it's kind of a cornerstone of Orientalism. This was actually a plot point in the recent White Lotus season. People rarely go to Appalachia to have these experiences, but you certainly can find people living simple happy lives there.
I think you're moralizing over a pretty bland bit of psychology: people need to be shaken from their frame of reference to see different parts of the world. Even if they exist next door. For many Americans, Appalachia will be too close to home to force off the blinders.
I've flown all over the US for work, and in every location found the same exact city. It's hard to take away someone's footing when they feel at home. OTOH, the preconditions that gave me many life broadening experiences within 100 miles of a single US city are not available to everyone.
Assigning someone internal character traits so that their external practice of respectful travel can still be judged is cruel.
Agreed. I think beyond tourist voyeurism, there is something really maturing(?) about being inserted into a completely different culture where people seem to be content. I grew up in rural Wisconsin and even the micro-change of moving away for college in a place like St. Louis had very important implications for my worldview.
> I've flown all over the US for work, and in every location found the same exact city.
I think you can find the exact same city if you like but I also have found much more. Simply LA and NY are very different places, as are different communities in those cities.
As someone from the US who's traveled all over the country for fun, I can assure you there are loads of delightfully unique places and rich communities that think and act quite differently from each other.
But yes I could see how work travel only could make them feel like carbon copies - both from the mindset you'd be in and from the types of places you might only go for work.
Rather reminds me of Pratchetts character Lu-Tze, who having seen so many travel to the monasteries to achieve enlightenment decides to travel to Ankh Morpork and learns many ancient wisdoms ('Is it not written "Oo, you are so sharp you'll cut yourself one of these days."?')
Hamta isn't even really rural. It's a bunch of homestays just outside of Manali, and is similar to Pahalgam.
My family is from rural HP/JK/Ladakh, and a homestay like Hamta is not representative of rural HP/JK/LA/UK.
> They’re enamoured by the simple and rustic living of the villages and think of them as noble savages
I think it goes both ways. They either over-idealize it, or overly berate it.
I feel it's also state dependent to a certain extent, with some states better at rural administrative capacity (eg. Kerala, HP, PB, JK) than others (eg. KA, TG, GJ).
Something I've noticed is states that don't have a primary city tend to have slightly better rural administrative capacity, as it at least incentivizes small town or T3/4 economies to develop instead of being invested in a single mega city.
Dr. Ambedkar is somebody more people in the United States should know about. I was a briefly involved with the Triratna Buddhist Community and read some of Sangharakshita's writing, and he discusses Ambedkar. Real interesting stuff.
I think that as tropey as such a practice is, there's a fundamental valid reason to do trips of this sort. You want to meet people as culturally remote and distant from you as you think exist, that you are still theoretically comfortable with. Then you want to be assured or refuted directly through your direct senses on things that you think are fundamental to the human condition. From such an experience you gain confidence on what you think is important to life and living.
A simpler explanation is that Americans have succumbed to consumerism to such an extent that the absence of it feels enlightened.
Of course the reality is just that the US has become the axis of evil, and perhaps always was, it just had the best PR.
I think you're doing yourself a disservice by belitting Asian cultures and what insights they may have, that are apparently incomprehensible as more than a trope to Americans.
> Of course the reality is just that the US has become the axis of evil, and perhaps always was, it just had the best PR.
Sigh.
Yes, the Soviet Union really was the worker's paradise with free, prosperous, happy people!
Can we get away from the sophomoric idea the USA was ALWAYS the ONLY source of badness in the world, just because right now it's the most powerful nation in the world and also a complete mess?
America is the best because citizens can do basically whatever they want all the time. The latest complaints are people took it too far (rampant drug use, camping on sidewalks, and shitting everywhere in San Francisco, etc.).
But if you want to buy a rural cabin on a beautiful mountain, it’s available, and cheap. You don’t need to go to Asia to live like a hermit.
I agree that this is a common trope but the rest of your comment reads like, "Hey westerners, go find your own rural people and stop appropriating mine".
Also completing your logic loop, this guy is apparently stealing intellectual ideas from (mediocre) westerners.
If you go to another place and someone lets you stay with them, they are probably in a good place in life. You are selecting yourself to meet with happier people.
You won’t be making as many friends with unhappy people.
Well, maybe there's something to it. I think it's great when East meets West. East should keep meeting West over and over and over. Maybe one day East will know West and vice versa.
For what it's worth, I had something of a similar experience, but it was in a plywood shack on a desert island off the coast of California.
The America's have the 'noble savage' trope to find enlightenment with. It became so blatantly co-opting anothers' religion that many Native American tribes still refuse to teach non-tribal members there spiritual practices.
Just because you can prove mathematically that most link chains "end" at "philosophy" doesn't mean that's the end you should end up at. I spend at least 2 nights a week just reading links through wikipedia as I'm falling asleep, and I almost inevitably end up at languages and cultures or historical events that I knew little about. Philosophy isn't an end, and it's pretty meaningless without some stone cold knowledge about the world. Or you could say it comes as a result of knowledge, not before it.
philosophy helps to "compress" more knowledge about the world into "less" knowledge by shifting quantity of data into difficulty from advanced conceptual abstractions
Nothing ends at philosophy. They reach there, but they can reach lots of different places. Without scrolling on philosophy I can see more than 50 other links from that page that are thus reachable from anywhere by at most one more step.
Pick a random thing and see if it is reachable from anywhere. A lot of them are. I suspect most are, but I don't know how to run this study (other than a brute force algorithm that will use more compute than I would want to dedicate)
I think you’d be interested in Tolstoy’s view of “Philosophy”, which he expresses in “Confession / What I Believe”.
Basically that the reason why philosophy is cold and meaningless is because it tries to separate itself from the source of meaning, which is intrinsically subjective and physical and spiritual.
Philosophy’s logical conclusions are relativism and nihilism (or at least they were in Tolstoy’s time? I’m not a philosopher), because they try to understand the world with a pretext that denies its vitality.
Common folk / common sense frown on these forms of philosophy, because they miss the point in a sense; they don’t actually tell you how to live in a moral way. Tolstoy thought intellectuals grossly underrated the perspective of folk wisdom in that way. We’ve made some progress in that department, since his time, but it’s still largely true today.
> Philosophy’s logical conclusions are relativism and nihilism
Some philosophers, notably Jacobi [1], have argued this (he is credited with popularizing the term nihilism). He was arguing against enlightenment thinkers, especially Spinoza and Kant (and the rest of German Idealism). But one philosopher's conjecture isn't equal in any sense to some unequivocal stance of "Philosophy". It is worth noting, that he was arguing for "Faith" instead of speculative reason, so maybe not what you would think.
So your point is true in a very limited sense. Some philosophers have argued against some particular philosophies by suggesting that the particular philosophy they are criticizing is likely to lead to relativism and nihilism.
I tried this for awhile, but was dissatisfied. I found myself a constant consumer of intellectual material instead of being an engaged participant. Once I realized that, I set course to become more of a producer of useful things. That's led me to woodworking, to running a consultancy, to producing AI/ML for nonprofits, and to writing academic works. All in all, I enjoy life substantially.
Years ago I realized that if I bluntly categorize the things I do with my free time into buckets of "productive" and "consumptive" it's the productive things that make me feel pretty great.
I think this is a common viewpoint, because no one wants to say "yeah, being a consumer makes me feel pretty great" publicly. But arguably most people fall into that camp. Even someone who lives an intellectually rich life.
It’s also not exclusive. Different phases of life yield different productivity levels.
My very brief stint into woodworking and machining gave me a lifetime of looking at random objects from really close. Seeing how things are manufactured makes you look at every man-made object differently. It gives you a rare appreciation for craftsmanship and clever engineering. There are whole museum sections that have suddenly opened up to me.
I credit a few YouTube channels for creating the spark: The Engineer Guy, This Old Tony, AvE, Pask Makes, Xyla Foxlin to name a few.
I find consumer vs producer to be very interesting and useful distinction. Sometimes very enlightening and somewhat scary when applied to personal time spending.
I agree. Knowledge-seeking can become a defense or excuse not to take action. I think it can be enriching, particularly when young, but there's a balance in everything.
I've been trying to create/produce more but I'm stuck in the consumption mindset. I can't think of what to create. How did you decide what useful things to produce?
In my youth, I read many books, and I still have many unread ones on the shelf. But, eventually, realized that, you only understand what you can create (to paraphrase feynman), and also that, what it means to be curious is to start from a burning problem or itch which differs for each one of us based on something deeper in our psyche.
Productive activities put us often into uncomfortable mental places which spurs growth of some kind - the discomfort is difficult to embrace however, which is why we resist it. In contrast, the consumptive activity comes out of a comfortable mental place and is embraced easily.
So, a question I ask myself is: what problems am i passionate about, and what am i doing (productively) about them. If I dont feel any passion, then perhaps, something is amiss (I am not communicating with my soul so-to-speak), and if I am not doing anything about them, then I need to get my ass moving and embrace the discomfort.
Do you need something? Make it - it doesn't matter what. Quality doesn't even matter, if the shoes you make turn out well you wear them, if not well go to the store and buy some. If you decide you like making shoes then make some more. If you decide it isn't fun then find something else (and come back again if you later change your mind).
See someone else make something, try to do it yourself. Sometimes you get something nice, sometimes you have fun and then throw away the worthless object.
There are a few danger signs to watch out for. Don't get caught up in learning how - you can spend the rest of your life watching "how to make a guitar" videos and never build anything. You can spend a lot of money on tools, or think you cannot do something for lack of tools - for the first one figure out how to use minimal tools (not zero!) so you don't get invested in a hobby you turn out not to enjoy - the big bucks should be only after you are sure the hobby and the tool is for you. You can start with a project too complex - start with small projects you can get done - take on the complex ones only after you are sure this hobby is for you.
Question for you: does creating mean building something? Do you count playing music as creating? What about art? What about dancing? There is no right answer to these questions except whatever you decide.
1. Find interesting people or projects that are interesting (discovery)
2. Identify the things I don't know how to do yet, or where I don't have enough information (information consumption with plan as output)
3. Execute on the plan (creation and delivery)
4. Evaluate on the outcomes -- modified ikigai is the framework I use: (1) does the world need it? (2) what is the world willing to pay for it? (3) did I enjoy it? (4) could I be good at it
Consumption is addictive - even or all the more so when we feel we are consuming worthwhile stuff (see the various major reading projects here). A useful first step is awareness of the time spent on the various time sinks: we have limited time and sinking all that available time in one thing kills that. So then, diversification away from the worst bits. Even if temporarily that means still consuming.
A second step is understanding the taste vs skill gap: unless what you produce is related to your job or training, when you start creating things your skill is poor (and your equipment probably not adapted) and it's hard to be satisfied with the quality of what you are creating. You can create something related to your job skills, or you can recognize that skill gap is a normal thing and persevere. Some classes though are excellent at carrying someone a long way in a short time.
There are a lot of things, but one warning I can give is try to avoid perfectionism.
Cook some novel dish, or maybe just significantly modify your regular one with some spices. Write a blog post. Sit and think about some library you wanted to write, but didn't have time. Even writing a draft with API is a pretty good example of producing.
You can fix things by yourself. E.g. service your bike, maybe reorganize your workspace, stuff like that.
Just start small and think about things which bother you and what you can do about it.
Here are some suggestions: Writing, music creation, woodworking, drawing, painting, photography, podcasting, gardening, cooking, DIY home projects, chess, sports
Not sure about the intellectual part of it, but how to live a rich life? Surely not by secretly cherishing a feeling of superiority and sophistication because these sentiments will cut you out of a lot of insights and encounters that make your life rich. True, life is a farce in a lot of ways, but who cares? Accept it where you can't change it and find your own islands of happiness. These may be intellectual if you like, but don't expect the people around you to follow the same (high) standards, that will only make you unhappy.
Good insight about how feelings of 'superiority' or 'sophistication' can suck the joy out of life. I fell into this trap myself, and it took a long time to get out of it.
That said, there are times when a certain type of appreciation of 'sophistication' is warranted - you just shouldn't use it to believe you are therefore above other people, or beyond the simple pleasures of life.
This is interminable and appears to be a disaster of mixed self-help metaphors and embarrassingly naive writing -- a TED-talk blog post, though TED talks mercifully have a length limit.
I personally found this very tedious to read and hard to follow. The author veered into weird unrelated tangents and came across of too self indulgent at times. I would rather read Seneca or Cicero instead of this.
This is a little meandering so just to focus on one part:
Philosophy can be valuable, but applying the ideas meaningfully requires discernment. I’m thinking particularly about the popularity of “Meditations”, for example.
Take Plato, for example: He and his also-famous mentor believed knowledge was a form of recollection from past lives, an idea illustrated with an unconvincing geometry lesson in Phaedo (EDIT: It’s Meno).
Sure, it’s worth stepping back to reassess what’s going to increase your “PC” to borrow from seven habits. That could involve leaving behind surface-level achievement in favor of deeper reflection, as the referenced article suggests.
But let’s not overly-romanticize ancient thinkers: Plato and Aristotle held fundamentally different views on knowledge. Even they couldn’t agree; there’s no need to treat any one of them as infallible.
Philosophy is just one of the liberal arts. This idea has declined in popularity in recent years but I still think there's a lot to be said for possessing a liberal arts education. If you have a good one your understanding of the world around you gets broader and deeper. You recognize why things are the way they are. In the long term you may spot opportunities you wouldn't have otherwise, or be able to solve problems that would have seemed intractable. Maybe most importantly you end up developing a sophisticated moral framework that's grounded in history and all the things that eventually led up to you existing and living the life you live.
You don't have to major in a liberal art or even go to college to get one, you can just read books. You also don't have to learn it all in your early 20s. You can just incorporate the great works into what you read throughout your adult life. It's very easy to find lists and recommendations online for what you should read if you want a broad-based liberal education. The general idea is simply to be informed about and understand the foundational concepts in philosophy, economics, political science, psychology, history, sociology, law, and so on. There is no need to go deep in any one them, unless you find it interesting and wish to do so. Someone who reads one or two foundational works in each of these subjects will have a wildly better understanding of the world than someone who doesn't. To me this is what living an intellectually rich life is and it's very rewarding. If nothing else, due to my liberal arts education I will never be bored in retirement, there are thousands of books that I would find it interesting to read.
I don’t have a problem with having a good understanding of classics (liberal arts is a category that far encompasses more than just classical education, though).
I do have a problem with blindly assuming Plato/other ancient philosophers were some sort of omniscient super-intelligence we should blindly follow, which I do see happen with some regularity in my own life.
Plato et al might’ve been the start of our modern understanding of ethics, but the concept of a moral life or epistemology certainly didn’t stop with him!
> Philosophy is just one of the liberal arts. This idea has declined in popularity in recent years but I still think there's a lot to be said for possessing a liberal arts education. If you have a good one your understanding of the world around you gets broader and deeper.
Look no further than all the AI debates on HN: from the perspective of someone with a couple of college classes on philosophy (not even a minor), it’s looks like a bunch of five years olds debating particle physics. Complete ignorance of what the academic precedent is, retreading ideas that philosophers have moved on from hundreds of years ago.
>If you have a good one your understanding of the world around you gets broader and deeper.
The problem is, is it _unique_ to liberal arts? That is what must be true to give it some purpose. If you can just read a bunch of books or study something else with additional positive benefits why do liberal arts?
I am a liberal arts and computer science degree holder. I don't think liberal arts is _worthless_. I do think its a terrible value proposition and that the positive side effects can be achieved while studying something far more marketable. Computer science has made me a much stronger general problem solver and a better critical thinker than liberal arts did. These are the primary skills touted by the liberal arts.
> Philosophy can be valuable, but applying the ideas meaningfully requires discernment. I’m thinking particularly about the popularity of “Meditations”, for example.
From one translation of Meditations (I forget which), and from memory, so I may have it slightly wrong:
"You can live your life in a calm flow of happiness, if you learn to think the right way, and to act the right way".
The act the right way is the hard part. The frame-of-mind stuff that lots of people focus on is necessary, but not sufficient. On its own it can be of some help, but it can also lead to traps like going too easy on one's own deficiencies of action. The thinking bits that get most of the attention, at least in stoicism, are largely reactive—the acting is proactive, as is the thinking to support it (which gets less attention in popular takes on Stoicism, and is harder).
Meditations is particularly interesting because it’s clearly just Marcus Aurelius’s diary that was doubtfully ever meant to see the light of day.
He spends a fair amount of it repeating mantras to himself over and over again, or even arguing with himself in stream-of-consciousness.
It’s Marcus Aurelius giving himself a written pep talk. He struggles to uphold those stoicism ideals his whole life, failing constantly ant it, and Meditations is an artifact of it.
>But let’s not overly-romanticize ancient thinkers: Plato and Aristotle held fundamentally different views on knowledge.
1) everyone agrees “overly” Romanticizing is wrong. By definition of “overly”.
2) why should having a fundamentally different view on knowledge disqualify something from being romanticized? Isnt romanticizing precisely for things that are different?
3) i think its a mischaracterization to say Plato thought “ knowledge was a form of recollection from past lives.” He was not talking about “past lives” but the “soul” (which I think wed both agree is a loaded term). He said the soul knew it before the person was born. This goes to his theory on the forma which I think is a better way to characterize his thoughts on knowledge. In general terms id say he believes truth exists in a timeless, non-empirical realm (the Forms). With the physical reality being an imperfect imitation. Which people have some mediated access to.
I like How To Think Like a Roman Emperor's analysis of Meditations but maybe it falls into pop self-help/psychology, it discusses the history around the text and how modern psychology has similarities with some of the techniques and aphorisms.
> Take Plato, for example: He and his also-famous mentor believed knowledge was a form of recollection from past lives, an idea illustrated with an unconvincing geometry lesson in Phaedo (EDIT: It’s Meno).
I find the line of thought in "Meno" extremly impressiv. Let me try to reformulate it in modern terms.
The literary form of a dialogue emphasizes that the thoughts of the participants should not be considered as doctrines, but the whole as an investigation of a problem domain.
The dialogue starts with a distinction between empirical knowledge ("The way to Larisa") and mathematical knowledge. Empirical knowledge is something that I cannot know from introspection. In contrast, the nature of mathematical knowledge comes from inside the mind. This is demonstrated by an uneducated, but smart child (a slave boy). The child is guided to discover a mathematical insight by questions alone. At first the boy does not know the right answer to an initial question. Then Socartes starts again with a simple question the boy is able to answer. Then a sequence of other questions follows each building on the previous answers. Socrates only questions, the boy only answers. Finally the boy arrives at the correct answer of the initial question whose answer he did not know at the start.
This scene should demonstrate the essence of mathematical proof. First we do not know the answer of a mathematical problem. Step-by-step we clarify our understanding, until we arrive at an answer. At this stage we know whether the particular mathematical statement is true or false. We expanded our understanding by only just thinking. In one way it is new knowledge (we now know something we did not, when we looked for a proof), in another way the knowledge was always there, just hidden in our mind.
At this point Socrates hits a limit where he runs out of questions to invistigate this further. This is when he starts to tell a story (the greek word for story is "myth"). Such stories are just tools to further investigate a problem when purely theoretical thoughts come to an end. In the dialogue it is also accompanied by a lot of joking, and "let me speculate" and "don't take it too serious" sort of remarks. So he reminds his fellows about some old stories (that he adapts and decorates a little to match the problem) about reincarnation where one looses the memory of one's past life but has occasionally some sort of flashbacks. This is more or less the whole point of the story: Perhaps we should think of mathematical knowledge as analogous to memory, but in a in a transcendent way.
Our modern doctrins are not very much off: Our ability of mathematical thinking is something that is inherent to us, more specifically to our brains. The blueprint (a sort of memory?) for our brains are in our genes. This way we are a sort of reincarnation of our parents, but in a state were we have to undergo all the mathematical training again.
What Plato lacks is a theory of evolutionary epistemology. But this is a really new development.
Readit News
The essay frames an intellectually rich life as a kind of antidote to consumer culture, but for me it often mirrors the same patterns: FOMO, compulsiveness, neglect of relationships, a deep anxiety that I’ll never learn enough. The awareness that I’ll only ever scratch the surface of all there is to know has become a source of existential stress, not peace.
This isn’t to say intellectual life isn’t meaningful—but it's not a cure-all. It can be just as prone to distortion as anything else if pursued as a form of escape.
I realize more every year how I’ve failed to put what I’ve learned and thought about into practice. It’s dangerously easy to sandbox your intellectual life within your brain, where your ability to reason and navigate your inner world seems deceptively good at times. And that’s an important skill too, of course. But humans are innately social creatures and these skills are next to useless if they don’t also work effectively and reliably around other people, where you don’t control the environment, you don’t control the topic or direction or tone or whatever it might be.
If that obsession with learning the next thing manifests as an ostensibly rich inner world, you will inevitably find yourself in the void generated by antisocial tendencies. Your ideas, skills, emotions, temper, courage, and all the rest won’t have been built upon, tested, broken down, rebuilt, and refined by other human beings. You can only really be a shell of what a human is meant to be. The ultimate test, I guess, is integrating your philosophy with the world. It’s a lot harder than doing it in your sandbox.
I think many of us fool ourselves into thinking we’re doing the work of practicing philosophy in isolation, but it’s actually a distraction from the much more difficult task of practicing it with other people. People who make us angry, sad, distracted, worse than we want to believe we are. Being alone to let yourself impulsively dig deeper and deeper into intellectual or philosophical pursuits can easily be a convenient distraction from the thing we claim to be doing all along.
There’s a sort of irony in the fear or worry that you’ll never learn enough, too. You’ll certainly never get there without deep, intimate, interconnected life with other people. I really believe it. And for a lot of us, that’s incredibly scary too. To let the fear of not knowing enough keep you from truly living is a hell of a thing.
To me this is the antithetical to being intellectually rich. More like enslaved to our own intellectualism.
I want to have the freedom to think about the things that I want to think about. Being forced instead to reason through problems, not of my choosing, on behalf of someone else... well that's life for most!
I asked her what she thought some of the negative traits of Americans are, and here’s the first thing she said:
“You bounce around too much. From thing to thing to thing.”
One's who are really learning aren't calling it out - look at kids learning to bike, new parents, early artists, new dancers, new swimmers, sports folks, researchers, journalists.
And there's pseudo learning, characterized by distinct effort to call the learning out. Reading 200 books a year, twitter, podcasts, hacker news. All cargo cult symbolism and consumerism.
Within real learning too, there's learning for a purpose and another just for the heck of it. Learning investments vs learning to run a marathon.
Learning sales is way different than learning piano, One where you learn mostly by doing, another by observing the delta between what is said and what actually happens.
Every form of learning is uncomfortable in its own way.
Just take care you don't get it from the external validation of you being that "always learning guy".
It must come from within
A naïve younger me tried to brute force this by reading one non-fiction book from each major section of the Dewey Decimal system catalog, but was stymied by the paucity of a high school library in a county in the second smallest tax base in the state....
Since then, I've actually been trying to put that list together (and lightly updating it for availability from Project Gutenberg/Librivox).
https://www.goodreads.com/review/list/21394355-william-adams...
Suggestions and comments and recommendations welcome.
https://sites.prh.com/modern-library-top-100
e.g., _Kim_ by Rudyard Kipling should be paired w/ Robert Heinlein's _Citizen of the Galaxy_, or _The Grapes of Wrath_, which was cribbed from Sanora Babb's notes w/o permission should be paired w/ her _Whose Names Are Unknown_:
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1197158.Whose_Names_Are_...
Still, a lot of interesting stuff, Orwell, unfortunately, never gets old, pity Ray Bradbury was omitted, as Fahrenheit 451 is getting more and more up-to-date.
Out of the list, I read 8 books so far, but all of them in Czech.
And I say that as a Modern Literature major who has read a lot on that list. FAULKNER IS A TERRIBLE WRITER! And while James Joyce and some of the others are good writers, they don't deserve multiple entries in the top 100.
It's clear this list is really "5 librarians personal favorites."
- Seneca, Letters
I was surprised to learn that the temptation to read too many things was also a problem 2,000 years ago. This inspired me to work on a short list of books that I know deeply.
It's always held a soft spot in my heart as my own experience was mostly reading derivative descriptions and the rare times when I was able to read a primary text during my coursework were always my happiest memories.
1. https://www.sjc.edu/academic-programs/undergraduate/great-bo...
I certainly noticed that it was ineffective in discussing implications with the students. I found Boyle's observations far more effective in teaching science.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophi%C3%A6_Naturalis_Pri...
What would be more interesting, IMHO, books that Cyrus Smith from The Mysterious Island had memorized.
Just from what I saw on HN, I remember Gingery books on metal workshop from scratch, and some homesteading manual from late 19th century.
I love the Gingery books and they are great foundations for a hobby. However even in a end of civilization scenario we only need a small minority who knows that content who can teach the rest - that is at best, but quite likely there won't be enough industrial base to produce the aluminum needed and so you are stuck with useless knowledge. Even your 19th century homesteading tends to assume far more industrial base to make some annoyingly hard things.
Most so called practical skills are either not practical in modern civilization (there is far too much population for us all the be hunter/gathers even if we want to); or they are only practical in context of current times. I've seen how to wire your house for electric lights books from the 1920s - most of the things shown wouldn't pass code today. My house was built in 1970, and there are a lot of things that still work but there is good reason we don't allow that anymore.
https://www.lumberjocks.com/showcase/archery-case-ascham-of-...
Edit: did add a first aid book, as well as the 7 volume edition of "The Gingery Books".
How to build stone houses, compost and farm organically, etc. A good primer on homesteading. Contains references to things like 19th century homestead manuals
By the way, thank you for providing your list of books - I picked up a few future reads from it.
1. https://www.gutenberg.org/files/44125/44125-h/44125-h.htm
My pleasure!
The thing that always made GWWW a killer collection was Adler's syntopicon to the 58 other volumes.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Syntopicon
The term 'syntopicon' was coined for this effort and is essentially a way of indexing information. Like how a dictionary uses words to sort the data, and an encyclopedia uses a subject, a syntopicon uses a topic. Think 'jurisprudence of judges' and not 'African elephants'.
I've always thought that more book collections should include a syntopicon to them. With the modern AI revolution, I'd suppose that it's a lot easier to do so now, but it's still a lot of work and effort to edit the 'link table' for these things. More enjoyable though and great for giving the collector a really good grasp on the books.
Try putting in your list of books and then ask your AI of choice the help put together a syntopicon for it. Here's a (poor) example:
https://chatgpt.com/share/6815ad20-9d54-800a-853e-2517d64a15...
Agree modern indexing is great for researching terminology, and wish it could be more easily extended to concepts, but not sure modern Large Language Models with their compression/hallucinations/outright-errors are workable yet.
This actually sounds really fun. Not so much in an optimized way, but more like just going to the library and picking a decimal heading and then just selecting a cool-looking book in that heading and reading it, then repeat.
Tried to do it again in college, but using the LoC headings, but ran out of time and graduated before running out of college/headings.
To this day, when going to the library, I try to keep this in mind when looking over the new books, and if there is one on a major/notable subject I can't recall having read a book on, grab it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harvard_Classics
https://www.myharvardclassics.com/categories/20120212
The Reading Guide at the bottom of the page is the best way to get into them, I think. It's a daily ~15/20 minute selection. Be aware, it's the book's page number that is referenced, not the .pdf's page number.
Doesn't always play out but it adds to the spice of life when you can draw insight from places you never expected to.
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2024/books/best-books-21...
https://www.nypl.org/voices/print-publications/books-of-the-...
Also, if you haven't read _The Black Count: Glory, Revolution, Betrayal, and the Real Count of Monte Cristo_ by Tom Reiss I'd strongly recommend that:
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/13330922-the-black-count
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BYsr2jkf_3A
Added:
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/803453.The_Sword_and_the...
(which I have a copy of and re-read when I was considering taking up fencing, but my wife demurred)
Walter Scott's historical novels, particularly "Ivanhoe" and "Waverley," which inspired Dumas' approach to historical fiction
James Fenimore Cooper's frontier adventures, which influenced his action narratives
Lord Byron's romantic poetry and persona, which shaped Dumas' conception of the romantic hero
Schiller's play "The Conspiracy of Fiesco at Genoa," which Dumas translated and adapted early in his career
Shakespeare's dramatic works
Memoirs of historical figures, particularly those from the 17th and 18th centuries, including Courtilz de Sandras' "Mémoires de M. d'Artagnan," which became the foundation for "The Three Musketeers"
Plutarch's "Lives," which informed his understanding of classical historical figures
Works by Abbé Prévost and other French novelists of the 18th century
The Bible and classical mythology
I'd suggest replacing the Bible with just the Gospels (Matthew, Mark, Luke[0], and John). Removing it entirely seems like a mistake since you'd lose a lot of the literary and moral underpinnings of Western culture, but having to read the bible in its entirely sounds exhausting. I did it (reading all four gospels) recently and can attest even outside of the religious aspects the retelling of the same tragic story in four different was is a fascinating literary experience.
[0] Technically we should through Acts in there too since Luke-Acts are essentially one book, but it's not a gospel so I left it out. Plus quite frankly while I did read it I found it way more boring than the others; turns out that Jesus fellow is a way more interesting main character than Paul :)
"Reappraisals" and "When the Facts Change" should be on top of everyone's reading list. Few indeed are those who can write prose as crisp, succinct and erudite as he did.
If you tell someone there position on some topic is wrong, they will argue with you. If you tell someone a story where the character takes the same position they have and then through experience and personal growth comes to understand how it is wrong. They can come away realizing that they might have it wrong. Great trick when it works.
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I got to this part and realized: I've read this article before in some form.
It's a really common trope to head out to some remote area of Asia and admire how happy people are. There's often a spiritual component to it. I will write the guy a bit of a pass, because he himself is (I think) Indian.
But westerners have been doing stuff like this for ages and prattling on about it - it's kind of a cornerstone of Orientalism. This was actually a plot point in the recent White Lotus season. People rarely go to Appalachia to have these experiences, but you certainly can find people living simple happy lives there. (At least, if they do, nobody publishes those articles - it doesn't fit our preconceived notions of who gets to be enlightened, which is to say it has to be some place far away and people very different than your average Americans)
Not to say there's no value in this article (there is), and it was a fun read at that.
I think you're moralizing over a pretty bland bit of psychology: people need to be shaken from their frame of reference to see different parts of the world. Even if they exist next door. For many Americans, Appalachia will be too close to home to force off the blinders.
I've flown all over the US for work, and in every location found the same exact city. It's hard to take away someone's footing when they feel at home. OTOH, the preconditions that gave me many life broadening experiences within 100 miles of a single US city are not available to everyone.
Assigning someone internal character traits so that their external practice of respectful travel can still be judged is cruel.
I think you can find the exact same city if you like but I also have found much more. Simply LA and NY are very different places, as are different communities in those cities.
But yes I could see how work travel only could make them feel like carbon copies - both from the mindset you'd be in and from the types of places you might only go for work.
I grew up in rural India and I always recommend people to read Dr. Ambedkar’s rights on this subject.
My family is from rural HP/JK/Ladakh, and a homestay like Hamta is not representative of rural HP/JK/LA/UK.
> They’re enamoured by the simple and rustic living of the villages and think of them as noble savages
I think it goes both ways. They either over-idealize it, or overly berate it.
I feel it's also state dependent to a certain extent, with some states better at rural administrative capacity (eg. Kerala, HP, PB, JK) than others (eg. KA, TG, GJ).
Something I've noticed is states that don't have a primary city tend to have slightly better rural administrative capacity, as it at least incentivizes small town or T3/4 economies to develop instead of being invested in a single mega city.
Of course the reality is just that the US has become the axis of evil, and perhaps always was, it just had the best PR.
I think you're doing yourself a disservice by belitting Asian cultures and what insights they may have, that are apparently incomprehensible as more than a trope to Americans.
Sigh.
Yes, the Soviet Union really was the worker's paradise with free, prosperous, happy people!
Can we get away from the sophomoric idea the USA was ALWAYS the ONLY source of badness in the world, just because right now it's the most powerful nation in the world and also a complete mess?
But if you want to buy a rural cabin on a beautiful mountain, it’s available, and cheap. You don’t need to go to Asia to live like a hermit.
Also completing your logic loop, this guy is apparently stealing intellectual ideas from (mediocre) westerners.
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If you go to another place and someone lets you stay with them, they are probably in a good place in life. You are selecting yourself to meet with happier people.
You won’t be making as many friends with unhappy people.
For what it's worth, I had something of a similar experience, but it was in a plywood shack on a desert island off the coast of California.
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philosophy helps to "compress" more knowledge about the world into "less" knowledge by shifting quantity of data into difficulty from advanced conceptual abstractions
Thank you.
Pick a random thing and see if it is reachable from anywhere. A lot of them are. I suspect most are, but I don't know how to run this study (other than a brute force algorithm that will use more compute than I would want to dedicate)
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Basically that the reason why philosophy is cold and meaningless is because it tries to separate itself from the source of meaning, which is intrinsically subjective and physical and spiritual.
Philosophy’s logical conclusions are relativism and nihilism (or at least they were in Tolstoy’s time? I’m not a philosopher), because they try to understand the world with a pretext that denies its vitality.
Common folk / common sense frown on these forms of philosophy, because they miss the point in a sense; they don’t actually tell you how to live in a moral way. Tolstoy thought intellectuals grossly underrated the perspective of folk wisdom in that way. We’ve made some progress in that department, since his time, but it’s still largely true today.
Some philosophers, notably Jacobi [1], have argued this (he is credited with popularizing the term nihilism). He was arguing against enlightenment thinkers, especially Spinoza and Kant (and the rest of German Idealism). But one philosopher's conjecture isn't equal in any sense to some unequivocal stance of "Philosophy". It is worth noting, that he was arguing for "Faith" instead of speculative reason, so maybe not what you would think.
So your point is true in a very limited sense. Some philosophers have argued against some particular philosophies by suggesting that the particular philosophy they are criticizing is likely to lead to relativism and nihilism.
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friedrich_Heinrich_Jacobi
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It’s also not exclusive. Different phases of life yield different productivity levels.
I credit a few YouTube channels for creating the spark: The Engineer Guy, This Old Tony, AvE, Pask Makes, Xyla Foxlin to name a few.
- Cooking a novel dish, then eating it
- Setting up a music server, then listening to music with it
- (With friends) Making a pen-and-paper game, then playing it
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Productive activities put us often into uncomfortable mental places which spurs growth of some kind - the discomfort is difficult to embrace however, which is why we resist it. In contrast, the consumptive activity comes out of a comfortable mental place and is embraced easily.
So, a question I ask myself is: what problems am i passionate about, and what am i doing (productively) about them. If I dont feel any passion, then perhaps, something is amiss (I am not communicating with my soul so-to-speak), and if I am not doing anything about them, then I need to get my ass moving and embrace the discomfort.
See someone else make something, try to do it yourself. Sometimes you get something nice, sometimes you have fun and then throw away the worthless object.
There are a few danger signs to watch out for. Don't get caught up in learning how - you can spend the rest of your life watching "how to make a guitar" videos and never build anything. You can spend a lot of money on tools, or think you cannot do something for lack of tools - for the first one figure out how to use minimal tools (not zero!) so you don't get invested in a hobby you turn out not to enjoy - the big bucks should be only after you are sure the hobby and the tool is for you. You can start with a project too complex - start with small projects you can get done - take on the complex ones only after you are sure this hobby is for you.
Question for you: does creating mean building something? Do you count playing music as creating? What about art? What about dancing? There is no right answer to these questions except whatever you decide.
Based on an area of interest I:
1. Find interesting people or projects that are interesting (discovery)
2. Identify the things I don't know how to do yet, or where I don't have enough information (information consumption with plan as output)
3. Execute on the plan (creation and delivery)
4. Evaluate on the outcomes -- modified ikigai is the framework I use: (1) does the world need it? (2) what is the world willing to pay for it? (3) did I enjoy it? (4) could I be good at it
A second step is understanding the taste vs skill gap: unless what you produce is related to your job or training, when you start creating things your skill is poor (and your equipment probably not adapted) and it's hard to be satisfied with the quality of what you are creating. You can create something related to your job skills, or you can recognize that skill gap is a normal thing and persevere. Some classes though are excellent at carrying someone a long way in a short time.
Cook some novel dish, or maybe just significantly modify your regular one with some spices. Write a blog post. Sit and think about some library you wanted to write, but didn't have time. Even writing a draft with API is a pretty good example of producing.
You can fix things by yourself. E.g. service your bike, maybe reorganize your workspace, stuff like that.
Just start small and think about things which bother you and what you can do about it.
What you like to consume.
That said, there are times when a certain type of appreciation of 'sophistication' is warranted - you just shouldn't use it to believe you are therefore above other people, or beyond the simple pleasures of life.
Conciseness is really undervalued. Long and meandering is okay for a personal journal or diary, but if you're sharing it with the world, be concise.
Philosophy can be valuable, but applying the ideas meaningfully requires discernment. I’m thinking particularly about the popularity of “Meditations”, for example.
Take Plato, for example: He and his also-famous mentor believed knowledge was a form of recollection from past lives, an idea illustrated with an unconvincing geometry lesson in Phaedo (EDIT: It’s Meno).
Sure, it’s worth stepping back to reassess what’s going to increase your “PC” to borrow from seven habits. That could involve leaving behind surface-level achievement in favor of deeper reflection, as the referenced article suggests.
But let’s not overly-romanticize ancient thinkers: Plato and Aristotle held fundamentally different views on knowledge. Even they couldn’t agree; there’s no need to treat any one of them as infallible.
You don't have to major in a liberal art or even go to college to get one, you can just read books. You also don't have to learn it all in your early 20s. You can just incorporate the great works into what you read throughout your adult life. It's very easy to find lists and recommendations online for what you should read if you want a broad-based liberal education. The general idea is simply to be informed about and understand the foundational concepts in philosophy, economics, political science, psychology, history, sociology, law, and so on. There is no need to go deep in any one them, unless you find it interesting and wish to do so. Someone who reads one or two foundational works in each of these subjects will have a wildly better understanding of the world than someone who doesn't. To me this is what living an intellectually rich life is and it's very rewarding. If nothing else, due to my liberal arts education I will never be bored in retirement, there are thousands of books that I would find it interesting to read.
I do have a problem with blindly assuming Plato/other ancient philosophers were some sort of omniscient super-intelligence we should blindly follow, which I do see happen with some regularity in my own life.
Plato et al might’ve been the start of our modern understanding of ethics, but the concept of a moral life or epistemology certainly didn’t stop with him!
Look no further than all the AI debates on HN: from the perspective of someone with a couple of college classes on philosophy (not even a minor), it’s looks like a bunch of five years olds debating particle physics. Complete ignorance of what the academic precedent is, retreading ideas that philosophers have moved on from hundreds of years ago.
The problem is, is it _unique_ to liberal arts? That is what must be true to give it some purpose. If you can just read a bunch of books or study something else with additional positive benefits why do liberal arts?
I am a liberal arts and computer science degree holder. I don't think liberal arts is _worthless_. I do think its a terrible value proposition and that the positive side effects can be achieved while studying something far more marketable. Computer science has made me a much stronger general problem solver and a better critical thinker than liberal arts did. These are the primary skills touted by the liberal arts.
From one translation of Meditations (I forget which), and from memory, so I may have it slightly wrong:
"You can live your life in a calm flow of happiness, if you learn to think the right way, and to act the right way".
The act the right way is the hard part. The frame-of-mind stuff that lots of people focus on is necessary, but not sufficient. On its own it can be of some help, but it can also lead to traps like going too easy on one's own deficiencies of action. The thinking bits that get most of the attention, at least in stoicism, are largely reactive—the acting is proactive, as is the thinking to support it (which gets less attention in popular takes on Stoicism, and is harder).
He spends a fair amount of it repeating mantras to himself over and over again, or even arguing with himself in stream-of-consciousness.
It’s Marcus Aurelius giving himself a written pep talk. He struggles to uphold those stoicism ideals his whole life, failing constantly ant it, and Meditations is an artifact of it.
1) everyone agrees “overly” Romanticizing is wrong. By definition of “overly”.
2) why should having a fundamentally different view on knowledge disqualify something from being romanticized? Isnt romanticizing precisely for things that are different?
3) i think its a mischaracterization to say Plato thought “ knowledge was a form of recollection from past lives.” He was not talking about “past lives” but the “soul” (which I think wed both agree is a loaded term). He said the soul knew it before the person was born. This goes to his theory on the forma which I think is a better way to characterize his thoughts on knowledge. In general terms id say he believes truth exists in a timeless, non-empirical realm (the Forms). With the physical reality being an imperfect imitation. Which people have some mediated access to.
I mean, apparently not - this author alone takes Plato’s cave allegory at face value without spending even a moment to criticize it.
> I think it’s a mischaracterization…
It is not. Read Meno. Socrates thought this, and has a very painful example of trying to prove it. Plato thought the exact same.
Philosophy isn't a set of ideas or texts. It's a practice.
I find the line of thought in "Meno" extremly impressiv. Let me try to reformulate it in modern terms.
The literary form of a dialogue emphasizes that the thoughts of the participants should not be considered as doctrines, but the whole as an investigation of a problem domain.
The dialogue starts with a distinction between empirical knowledge ("The way to Larisa") and mathematical knowledge. Empirical knowledge is something that I cannot know from introspection. In contrast, the nature of mathematical knowledge comes from inside the mind. This is demonstrated by an uneducated, but smart child (a slave boy). The child is guided to discover a mathematical insight by questions alone. At first the boy does not know the right answer to an initial question. Then Socartes starts again with a simple question the boy is able to answer. Then a sequence of other questions follows each building on the previous answers. Socrates only questions, the boy only answers. Finally the boy arrives at the correct answer of the initial question whose answer he did not know at the start.
This scene should demonstrate the essence of mathematical proof. First we do not know the answer of a mathematical problem. Step-by-step we clarify our understanding, until we arrive at an answer. At this stage we know whether the particular mathematical statement is true or false. We expanded our understanding by only just thinking. In one way it is new knowledge (we now know something we did not, when we looked for a proof), in another way the knowledge was always there, just hidden in our mind.
At this point Socrates hits a limit where he runs out of questions to invistigate this further. This is when he starts to tell a story (the greek word for story is "myth"). Such stories are just tools to further investigate a problem when purely theoretical thoughts come to an end. In the dialogue it is also accompanied by a lot of joking, and "let me speculate" and "don't take it too serious" sort of remarks. So he reminds his fellows about some old stories (that he adapts and decorates a little to match the problem) about reincarnation where one looses the memory of one's past life but has occasionally some sort of flashbacks. This is more or less the whole point of the story: Perhaps we should think of mathematical knowledge as analogous to memory, but in a in a transcendent way.
Our modern doctrins are not very much off: Our ability of mathematical thinking is something that is inherent to us, more specifically to our brains. The blueprint (a sort of memory?) for our brains are in our genes. This way we are a sort of reincarnation of our parents, but in a state were we have to undergo all the mathematical training again.
What Plato lacks is a theory of evolutionary epistemology. But this is a really new development.