Posted by thanedar 12/21/2025
The whole higher purpose narrative is bs to keep sell more books or courses or whatever author is selling. And what's with random yellow highlights and bold formatting on every second sentence?
This idea of optimizing for less suffering is logical. A boring corporate life is by all accounts sensible.
Is it boring on Monday? Yeah. But not knowing where your next meal is coming from isn’t boring and not in a good way.
And then this site’s message is clouded by the amount it’s trying to push a book. It’s hard to feel like any source like this is doing fact-based work when the main goal is to convince you to buy their stuff.
Also if you do want to use "it's not X, it's Y" as a clincher, you better make sure that Y in fact builds on X in some way (which implies that X and Y actually have to be similar enough to be plausibly associated with each other) and Y isn't just some orthogonal concept.
Then I'm not even focused on the content more than I'm scanning through it for signs of AI slop writing so I don't have to waste brainpower consuming that which took no brainpower to produce.
Also unfair perhaps but I think writers in particular, like the author of this post, should be aware enough of the patterns of AI written slop to consciously avoid them nowadays.
It doesn't matter if you used to write like this, the reality is people will question you now if you do.
Safety, convenience, infrastructure, everything around you isn't solely designed to price gouge you and exploit you, and all of that was just a minor benefit. The biggest thing I felt was an immense existential dread lifting from me. It's like the world millennials were promised when we were young actually exists - working on meaningful things with mental space to breath.
There's too much that can possibly be said of this, but up until now I genuinely thought there was only one way left and we were all doomed to fail, trying to pound sand into intractable problems. I somehow have hope in my life again.
Everything else sounds great, or tolerable at worst. Public transportation, a more respectful culture, actual 3rd places, housing that isn't treated as an asset to preserve.
I'll still get back to my Japanese learning once things stabilize. Just in case.
But there's a determined, undeniable sense of "we're going to make the world a better place", and you can physically see and touch it in China. Once you take a big inhale of that air, you realize just how much you missed it and needed it.
The US probably felt a little like that in the immediate post war period. The enthusiasm coming out of a terrible war and a terrible depression and seeing actual changes take place in the scale of weeks before your eyes must have been something else.
But today, most cities seem to have been content with solidifying into amber over the last 50 or so years. No investments into society. The poor are still poor and objectively have worse opportunities given the buying power of the jobs available to them. Development isn't happening on a scale to actually meet the population's needs. Transit and most public good efforts are an afterthought because of no direct business profitability angle. It becomes hard to get excited about medical advances when you understand the realities of our healthcare system and that many who need these medicines or treatments won't ever get them. No enthusiasm for anything. A large population of people against anything changing. Young people and young ideas stonewalled out of positions of power in favor of people who ought to have retired by now maintaining the status quo. Technological advances seemingly solely focused on establishing new ways to rent seek, gouge, police, control thoughts, versus things that are simply beneficial to others. "no brainer" ideas facing pushback. Common sense not being valued. The optimism coming out of the civil rights era dashed away against the realities that hate towards your fellow human is a position that will carry popularity in this country. Profit above all. Control above all. Blatant corruption and cronyism by the ruling elite. Awareness that we haven't taken off the shackles of feudalism.
I'm past the age where I can (or rather should have) kids and I have to say, the past decade or so I'm more and more thinking that people SHOULD have kids to have (more) meaning in their life. Put it another way, I've begun thinking that having children is a nice way to have a default baseline of meaning in your life. I really see that with all my friends, who all have kids.
That's how life on earth worked for 3 billion years. I think that assuming humans are somehow above that is unwise. We're not.
Marriage rates have dropped over 70%.
There are extremely thriving sub-communities in places though. Graft on to those.
Can you explain how you see a causation between religion and marriage success?
I don't have kids but I am at the age where more and more of my friends are having kids, there definitely does seem to be something there. They are exhausted but most definitely have a renewed spark of sorts.
Unfortunately this is difficult to A/B test. So I'd avoid having kids to fix burn out.
Like two people can't be together without being married.
But mostly it's a low effort low with quality comment that adds zero value and implicitly passes judgment on those who are not married and don't have kids.
As if married people with kids are the happiest people in the world lol.
I should have made that part clearer but my comment was solely on the kids part of their statement. I don't think marriage is inherently different from any other long-term partnership when it comes "existentially starving".
> As if married people with kids are the happiest people in the world lol.
That's not what I meant at all. The article is about how burnout is a catchall that hides that at our core we actually struggle for meaning. "When facing the existential vacuum, there's only one way out - up, towards your highest purpose". Children do in a lot of way give meaning to your life, suddenly you have a reason for suffering. It's a hell of a stretch to call that happiness, but it's definitely something.
(Before anyone gets onto me I lived in a single parent household for years.)