I am not ambitious myself, the difference is that I don’t care. I don’t mind if I don’t fit in the LW community, I am here to learn certain things, not to get validation and slaps on the back.
I think many of you are products of American culture and even a certain subset of it. A certain subset, perhaps going back to New England culture, that has this attitude to life that altruism, like giving to charity is something of course everybody does and the only issue is how to do it efficiently, or that ambition means achieving a personal goal of yourself, generally a creative one that changes the world in a positive way. I am a product of a very different culture, where ambition largely means to try to get into the elite that has power, and power is grabbed, not earned, you do not need to deserve it or make up meritocratic stories about how you are a hard worker, rather, the less deserved and earned it is, the more purely crystallized power it is, because it is more clear that you don’t need anyone’s consent to wield it, and altruism sounds unusual, usually people try to do the opposite and make each other lightly suffer (say, by pimping their wealth around, wearing designer labels near people who cannot afford them) in order to prove their power. In other words, I was raised in Mordor.
Since I figured out that this kind of ambition is both unethical and does not even make one happy, I stopped being ambitious that way, and since I was not raised in the American kind of altruistic-optimistic kind of ambition I have not adopted goals like that—frankly, to me, entrepreneurs who make it their life quest to make better mousetraps look slightly ridiculous because I don’t really care that much if others are annoyed by mice or not.
Thus, besides living a common life (office job, family), which obviously takes some amount of ambition, I am content with not being otherwise ambitious and being rather a neutral observer or life.
Maybe this is another personality type, similar to the Sidekick: the Chronicler. See: Astinus of Palanthas.
No, but irrelevant, I have hardly ever been there. Wait, I think I will try to write an article about it (assuming I can post to Discussion), I think it will be interesting. I have only recently realized that things that have always been quite normal to me would come across as pretty evil to the readers of the New York Times, and I think there are some lessons that could be gleaned from this.
I am not ambitious myself, the difference is that I don’t care. I don’t mind if I don’t fit in the LW community, I am here to learn certain things, not to get validation and slaps on the back.
I think many of you are products of American culture and even a certain subset of it. A certain subset, perhaps going back to New England culture, that has this attitude to life that altruism, like giving to charity is something of course everybody does and the only issue is how to do it efficiently, or that ambition means achieving a personal goal of yourself, generally a creative one that changes the world in a positive way. I am a product of a very different culture, where ambition largely means to try to get into the elite that has power, and power is grabbed, not earned, you do not need to deserve it or make up meritocratic stories about how you are a hard worker, rather, the less deserved and earned it is, the more purely crystallized power it is, because it is more clear that you don’t need anyone’s consent to wield it, and altruism sounds unusual, usually people try to do the opposite and make each other lightly suffer (say, by pimping their wealth around, wearing designer labels near people who cannot afford them) in order to prove their power. In other words, I was raised in Mordor.
Since I figured out that this kind of ambition is both unethical and does not even make one happy, I stopped being ambitious that way, and since I was not raised in the American kind of altruistic-optimistic kind of ambition I have not adopted goals like that—frankly, to me, entrepreneurs who make it their life quest to make better mousetraps look slightly ridiculous because I don’t really care that much if others are annoyed by mice or not.
Thus, besides living a common life (office job, family), which obviously takes some amount of ambition, I am content with not being otherwise ambitious and being rather a neutral observer or life.
Maybe this is another personality type, similar to the Sidekick: the Chronicler. See: Astinus of Palanthas.
Are you saying France is Mordor?
No, but irrelevant, I have hardly ever been there. Wait, I think I will try to write an article about it (assuming I can post to Discussion), I think it will be interesting. I have only recently realized that things that have always been quite normal to me would come across as pretty evil to the readers of the New York Times, and I think there are some lessons that could be gleaned from this.
No, but irrelevant, I have hardly ever been there.