My attempts to adopt a similar attitude have basically resulted in an infinite regress of trying to figure what “best” is and why, which wasn’t conducive to actually doing anything. Do you just already know what you want from life, or do you have some method of dealing with goal-uncertainty?
Um, yeah, I was actually suffering from that just now after having written my other long comment in this thread. I know what I want; I have plenty of selfish goals, for there’s always another book that you haven’t read, and there’s always more math that you don’t know, and I have far too many ideas of my own to follow up on, and one particular set of ideas that I thought was particularly important (to me)---and surely I can get a better dayjob, and I have a few friends, and I could be very happy this way for a very long time---
But then I start worrying that I am insufficiently “contributing to society,” or mitigating existential risks, or whatever, and this is a much harder problem of which I am not even capable of thinking clearly about.
My attempts to adopt a similar attitude have basically resulted in an infinite regress of trying to figure what “best” is and why, which wasn’t conducive to actually doing anything. Do you just already know what you want from life, or do you have some method of dealing with goal-uncertainty?
Um, yeah, I was actually suffering from that just now after having written my other long comment in this thread. I know what I want; I have plenty of selfish goals, for there’s always another book that you haven’t read, and there’s always more math that you don’t know, and I have far too many ideas of my own to follow up on, and one particular set of ideas that I thought was particularly important (to me)---and surely I can get a better dayjob, and I have a few friends, and I could be very happy this way for a very long time---
But then I start worrying that I am insufficiently “contributing to society,” or mitigating existential risks, or whatever, and this is a much harder problem of which I am not even capable of thinking clearly about.