It occurred to me while reading your comment that I could respond entirely with excerpts from Minding our way. Here’s a go (it’s just fun, if you also find it useful, great!):
You will spend your entire life pulling people out from underneath machinery, and every time you do so there will be another person right next to them who needs the same kind of help, and it goes on and on forever
This is a grave error, in a world where the work is never finished, where the tasks are neverending.
Rest isn’t something you do when everything else is finished. Everything else doesn’t get finished. Rather, there are lots of activities that you do, some which are more fun than others, and rest is an important one to do in appropriate proportions.
Rest isn’t a reward for good behavior! It’s not something you get to do when all the work is finished! That’s finite task thinking. Rather, rest and health are just two of the unending streams that you move through. [...]
the scope of the problem, at least relative to your contribution, is infinite
This behavior won’t do, for someone living in a dark world. If you’re going to live in a dark world, then it’s very important to learn how to choose the best action available to you without any concern for how good it is in an absolute sense. [...]
You will beg for a day in which you go outside and don’t find another idiot stuck under his fucking car
I surely don’t lack the capacity to feel frustration with fools, but I also have a quiet sense of aesthetics and fairness which does not approve of this frustration. There is a tension there.
I choose to resolve the tension in favor of the people rather than the feelings. [...]
somebody else is going to die, you monster
We aren’t yet gods. We’re still fragile. If you have something urgent to do, then work as hard as you can — but work as hard as you can over a long period of time, not in the moment. [...]
You can look at the bad things in this world, and let cold resolve fill you — and then go on a picnic, and have a very pleasant afternoon. That would be a little weird, but you could do it! [...]
So eventually you either give up, or you put earplugs in your ears and go enjoy some time in the woods, completely unable to hear the people yelling for help.
many people seem to think that there is a privileged “don’t do anything” action, that consists of something like curling up into a ball, staying in bed, and refusing to answer emails. It’s much easier to adopt the “buckle down” demeanor when, instead, curling up in a ball and staying in bed feels like just another action. It’s just another way to respond to the situation, which has some merits and some flaws.
(That’s not to say that it’s bad to curl up in a ball on your bed and ignore the world for a while. Sometimes this is exactly what you need to recover. Sometimes it’s what the monkey is going to do regardless of what you decide. [...])
So see the dark world. See everything intolerable. Let the urge to tolerify it build, but don’t relent. Just live there in the intolerable world, refusing to tolerate it. See whether you feel that growing, burning desire to make the world be different. Let parts of yourself harden. Let your resolve grow. It is here, in the face of the intolerable, that you will be able to tap into intrinsic motivation. [...]
Returning to this very belatedly. I actually agree with most of what you say here, and the points of disagreement are not especially important. However, my point WRT the original analogy is that it doesn’t seem to me to be compatible with these insights. If the general state of the world is equivalent to an emergency in which a man is drowning in a river, then the correct course of action is heroic, immediate intervention. But this, as some of your quotes, is totally unsustainable as a permanent state of mind. The outcome, if we take that seriously, is either crippling scrupulosity or total indifference.
The correct move is just to reject the original equivalence. The state of the world is NOT equivalent to an emergency in which a man is drowning in a river, and intuitions drawn from the prior scenario are NOT applicable to everyday existence.
It occurred to me while reading your comment that I could respond entirely with excerpts from Minding our way. Here’s a go (it’s just fun, if you also find it useful, great!):
This is a grave error, in a world where the work is never finished, where the tasks are neverending.
Rest isn’t something you do when everything else is finished. Everything else doesn’t get finished. Rather, there are lots of activities that you do, some which are more fun than others, and rest is an important one to do in appropriate proportions.
Rest isn’t a reward for good behavior! It’s not something you get to do when all the work is finished! That’s finite task thinking. Rather, rest and health are just two of the unending streams that you move through. [...]
This behavior won’t do, for someone living in a dark world. If you’re going to live in a dark world, then it’s very important to learn how to choose the best action available to you without any concern for how good it is in an absolute sense. [...]
I surely don’t lack the capacity to feel frustration with fools, but I also have a quiet sense of aesthetics and fairness which does not approve of this frustration. There is a tension there.
I choose to resolve the tension in favor of the people rather than the feelings. [...]
We aren’t yet gods. We’re still fragile. If you have something urgent to do, then work as hard as you can — but work as hard as you can over a long period of time, not in the moment. [...]
You can look at the bad things in this world, and let cold resolve fill you — and then go on a picnic, and have a very pleasant afternoon. That would be a little weird, but you could do it! [...]
many people seem to think that there is a privileged “don’t do anything” action, that consists of something like curling up into a ball, staying in bed, and refusing to answer emails. It’s much easier to adopt the “buckle down” demeanor when, instead, curling up in a ball and staying in bed feels like just another action. It’s just another way to respond to the situation, which has some merits and some flaws.
(That’s not to say that it’s bad to curl up in a ball on your bed and ignore the world for a while. Sometimes this is exactly what you need to recover. Sometimes it’s what the monkey is going to do regardless of what you decide. [...])
So see the dark world. See everything intolerable. Let the urge to tolerify it build, but don’t relent. Just live there in the intolerable world, refusing to tolerate it. See whether you feel that growing, burning desire to make the world be different. Let parts of yourself harden. Let your resolve grow. It is here, in the face of the intolerable, that you will be able to tap into intrinsic motivation. [...]
Returning to this very belatedly. I actually agree with most of what you say here, and the points of disagreement are not especially important. However, my point WRT the original analogy is that it doesn’t seem to me to be compatible with these insights. If the general state of the world is equivalent to an emergency in which a man is drowning in a river, then the correct course of action is heroic, immediate intervention. But this, as some of your quotes, is totally unsustainable as a permanent state of mind. The outcome, if we take that seriously, is either crippling scrupulosity or total indifference.
The correct move is just to reject the original equivalence. The state of the world is NOT equivalent to an emergency in which a man is drowning in a river, and intuitions drawn from the prior scenario are NOT applicable to everyday existence.