Gonna go out on a limb here and say I can’t take this article too seriously. It is chalk full of false dichotomies:
The very premise of this article rests on the idea that human beings live solely by our need to balance between two sides of a spectrum.
“An author working on a book, or a freelancer working on a project, or an entrepreneur working on a business, does not spend their time in a perpetual state of flow, but rather experiences little moments of flow, while mostly vacillating between anxiety and boredom.”
Why couldn’t a freelancer experience moments outside this spectrum? Why does the author frame our life’s experience as bound to this particularly solitary scale? What about the spectrum of awareness of self and surroundings? What about the spectrum of communicability with others, a social spectrum?
The author treats the subject, a human being, as alone, with mention of social interaction as being merely a product of our conformism, which too, rests on a premise based upon a false dichotomy:
“The widespread existential vacuum of the 20th century, the feeling of boredom, was brought on by both biological and cultural evolution: biological in that man is the only creature whose behaviour is not guided by instinct alone, and cultural in that during the 20th century many traditions that constrained behavior collapsed, organized religion being the major one. For most, the vacuum is filled by one of two strategies, both of which seek to avoid the sensation of existential terror: conformism (doing what everyone around them is doing), or totalitarianism (seeking someone out to tell them what to do). The clueless seek out both the totalitarianism imposed upon them by the sociopaths, and the conformism imposed upon them by the rest of the clueless class, as ways to relieve the pressure of the existential vacuum.
”
The author sees two camps: the rulers and the ruled. The author has no conception of anything resembling cooperation. Like humans couldn’t POSSIBLY be social creatures capable of communal efforts.
I’m not sure what else to say. While I support the message that one needs balance between boredom and anxiety, I can’t help but find the article imposing a blind view on the subject.
Many Ribbonfarm posts shouldn’t be read like LW posts; the point is not to evaluate a bunch of claims for their truth value, it’s more to read some poetry and see what thoughts, feelings, felt senses etc. it causes in you.
Gonna go out on a limb here and say I can’t take this article too seriously. It is chalk full of false dichotomies:
The very premise of this article rests on the idea that human beings live solely by our need to balance between two sides of a spectrum.
Why couldn’t a freelancer experience moments outside this spectrum? Why does the author frame our life’s experience as bound to this particularly solitary scale? What about the spectrum of awareness of self and surroundings? What about the spectrum of communicability with others, a social spectrum?
The author treats the subject, a human being, as alone, with mention of social interaction as being merely a product of our conformism, which too, rests on a premise based upon a false dichotomy:
The author sees two camps: the rulers and the ruled. The author has no conception of anything resembling cooperation. Like humans couldn’t POSSIBLY be social creatures capable of communal efforts.
I’m not sure what else to say. While I support the message that one needs balance between boredom and anxiety, I can’t help but find the article imposing a blind view on the subject.
Many Ribbonfarm posts shouldn’t be read like LW posts; the point is not to evaluate a bunch of claims for their truth value, it’s more to read some poetry and see what thoughts, feelings, felt senses etc. it causes in you.
Why cache different approaches to analyzing an article to different articles? What do you expect to gain from such a heuristic?