that is my view also. I think our path is erratic and a matter of chance, sort of like the first rain drops running down a dry window pane.
As for me personally? I agree with LA Times columnist Jack Smith who wrote that the purpose of life is to stay alive so you can find out what happens next.
I’m in total agreement, and in fact I think this seems quite obvious. Consider an average day like today. What’s going to make you happy today? A cheeseburger? At best, a cheeseburger will give you a short-term physical sensation as the bits of burger hit your taste buds. After that, it’s over. The cheeseburger provides no sense of fulfillment, no serenity, no deep level of satisfaction. And the same is true for any food or any other physical pleasure. Hence it’s hardly surprising that our technological advances haven’t increased the average human happiness.
You may like cheeseburgers, but during the course of a day they’re not going to occupy a very large portion of your thoughts. You don’t spend the bulk of your mental energy thinking about food, or clothing, cars, gadgets, investments, or any of that. You spend your time thinking about things that other human beings said and did. For example, a week from now, you won’t even remember what you ate today or wore today. But you may very well remember something said or written by somebody else. (Maybe even this post.)
Ask yourself, what is happiness? Almost everybody would agree that there’s a level of happiness above ordinary, everyday pleasures. The difference between fulfillment and malaise runs deeper than between pleasure and displeasure.
If all you have to look forward to in a day is a cheeseburger then you probably need to make some changes in your life. I look forward to cooking a good meal, doing things with my friends, spending time with my hobbies, learning stuff, etc. These things all require free time, extra money, & technological advancements that have only been increasingly available quite recently in historical perspective.
Happiness is not necessarily fulfillment. It’s going to be something different to everyone. You’re going to have to define happiness better if you want to discuss it like this.
Isn’t the idea of the free enterprise economic theory that each individual pursuing private interests provides the best method we have of bringing the greatest average benefits to all?
Now those benefits might be pretty scarce for some but that’s the best we can do, and the average is brought up by those who have a huge surplus of benefits.
If only it were more than an idea. I’m in favor of free enterprise. Do you think that’s what The US of A has going?
To have employees we need employers. There’s nothing wrong with innovative enterprising people being rewarded for their efforts. It also seems reasonable to want the average citizen to have their basic needs met. We decide as a society how best to do that. What’s wrong with setting a higher standard for what the “best we can do” is?
Because we care about these things and the things that come from them?
Even if that were all anyone cared about, which is clearly false, hamburgers and sex don’t just like, appear costlessly out of nowhere. Maxing out your sex and burger consumption requires all sorts of other efforts too.
Living good, meaningful lives. Learning things. Accomplishing goals.
Because we care.
Do they?
I don’t doubt that’s what they believe, and phrased that way it certainly seems like an admirable goal. But how come you aren’t asking your “why are they bothering” question to them as well? You seem to act all confused as to why humans care about stuff on one hand, and then when it comes to motivations and goals of Christians, you act like they require no similar explanation. Why the double standard?
No one, not even a God, can offer anything that isn’t “ultimately” arbitrary in terms of value.
I think virtually everyone posting in this thread would have to admit that out of all the human lives ever lived, their lives are EASILY within the top 1% and so are those of virtually everyone we know.
What Chowder said.
Really, we have screwed this ecosystem up so badly I don’t think there’s any hope. Sooner or later, the shit is going to hit the fan in a way that makes all those disaster movies seem optimistic. Fortunately, I will be dead by then, most likely. And, my decision not to have children seems smarter every day.
Given that, back to the OP. Not everybody is sweating. A lot of people just go through life, never thinking of any bigger picture. Some are wasting opportunities and some are just trying to survive. Those that are sweating it do so because of their personalities, upbringing, or some personal experience. There is no collective “we.”
There’s no system or method (or magic for that matter) to this existence. People do their own thing. Babies are born because somebody had sex. Things happen. Sometimes by chance and sometimes because somebody did something. As a result, sometimes life can get better or worse for some people. And so on.
Until that fan thing, anyway.
Even the most hysterical expectations of global warming will be that it will gradually destroy coastline infrastructure, not that it will destroy the planet or eve life on earth (in fact, many places stand to benefit). The reason GW is bad is precisely because we’ve built a lot of our our civilization on the assumption of existing coastlines.
And I don’t think any of that is likely to happen, even if humans fail utterly to reign in CO2 production. Chances are, human technology will solve the problem long before it reaches devastating levels.
I guess we will have to agree to disagree, Apos. Just as an aside, I am an environmental scientist, but I have no cites for you or anything. This is my own opinion, but nobody can convince me that we are not destroying this planet. I didn’t say anything about global warming, but it may not be that anyway. Could be nuclear war, infectious disease, almost anything. Oh, the possiblilities are many… it will probably be zombies, though (see infectious disease).
i am not a great fan of unrestricted, laissez faire free enterprise economics as a way to fill people’s needs or make them happier. I merely was responding to your statement:
And yes, there is nothing wrong with setting a higher standard for the “best we can do.” Now all that is needed is to figure out what are reasonable standards and processes to meet them.
I think that ought to keep us busy until Haunted’s fan thing.
ISTM that other thread got hopelessly sidetracked largely because the OP barely participated and did little to steer the discussion. I predict more of the same here.
Don’t underestimate nature’s ability to recover- if there are still a few ecosystems left when humans exterminate themselves, things will come back eventually.
I’m sure I’m not the only surprised by this. Hanging out with friends requires extra money? Learning demands free time? Nobody cooked good food prior to the development of modern technology?
On a more serious note, I don’t agree at all with the idea that happiness is something different to everyone. Thinking about research in psychology, particularly that of Abraham Maslow, I’ve seen plenty of evidence that there’s a definite set of goals that human beings pursue to reach happiness.
Well, yes. If you’re scrabbling for survival spending every waking moment trying to get what you and your family need to survive, you won’t have much of a social life or free time to have one in.
We survived ice ages, we survived the Black Plague, we survived World War II. We can survive a few pesticides. Our survival’s not the issue. All the nuclear bombs in existence today won’t wipe out the few dreary survivors in the belly of Africa or Australia. There will always be a few people left.
The question of happiness always leads to a clear conclusion: There is no way for a person to consistently feel happy.
Look at it differentially. Our bodies can’t feel our position in space, nor our velocity. All we can feel is acceleration. In the same way, we can’t feel happy based on how much we objectively have, and we can’t feel happy based on our success relative to others’. All we can feel is when we grow in prosperity (a new job, a cheeseburger, winning the lottery) or in misery (a termination, illness, losing a game). So the only useful goal is to be constantly growing in prosperity. The struggle for freedom (political freedom, societal freedom, freedom from illness and hunger and pain, freedom from want) is all we have. As they say, it’s not the destination, it’s the journey.
Of course. You can’t hang out if you have to work 24/7 just to survive. How do you not get that learning demands free time? Maybe cooking good food doesn’t require technology, but it makes it much easier, and I can cook much better food because of it.
Yeah, but some people like the pursuit itself, some people like one goal above all other, some people have much different goals, and some people are happy not pursuing anything. The goals themselves change depending on culture, age, income, etc.
I did not address this in my last post and I don’t think I can edit my post, but I think that suggesting that human technology will solve the problem of global warming (or any similar problem) is like saying that our natural resources are infinite. It’s just not true. Or, it’s just so… unlikely. We discussed something like this - *The Seven Myths of Something or Other * - in college.
Popular belief in myths like “Science Will Save Us,” is one of our biggest problems, in my opinion.
Who is going to create this technology? The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers? That should work out well.
Trust me, I’m a scientist.
If the question is about where an individual goes after death my answer would be that I don’t see any reason for assuming that we go anywhere.
If the question is where is society as a whole is going I don’t see how the question can be answered. Futurists have been working to predict future trends for a long time without much success. Did any futurist predict the personal computer? Xerox had the small, personal computer field to itself and abandonded it as having no future.
The number of possibilites for the future direction is so vast and what seems to be an minor event can cause a dramatic shift in society. I think our future is subject to the “butterfly effect” and prdictions as to its direction would need to be so general as to be without usefulness.
the qualifier there was , “at the expense of others”