Like, you shouldn’t work yourself ragged, but my guess is for most people, working on something meaningful (or at least difficult) is actually more fun and rewarding compared to the alternative of doing nothing or hedonism or whatever, even if you ultimately fail. (And on the off-chance you succeed, things can be a lot more fun.)
I think one of the potential cruxes here is how many of the necessary things are fun or difficult in the right way. Like, sure, it sounds neat to work at a geothermal startup and solve problems, and that could plausibly be better than playing video games. But, does lobbying for permitting reform sound fun to you?
The secret of video games is that all of the difficulty is, in some deep sense, optional, and so can be selected to be interesting. (“What is drama, but life with the dull bits cut out?”) The thing that enlivens the dull bits of life is the bigger meaning, and it seems to me like the superstructure is what makes the bigger meaning more real and less hallucinatory.
those successes could snowball in lots of different directions pretty quickly, without much meta-level direction.
This seems possible to me, but I think most of the big successes that I’ve seen have looked more like there’s some amount of meta-level direction. Like, I think Elon Musk’s projects make more sense if your frame is “someone is deliberately trying to go to Mars and fill out the prerequisites for getting there”. Lots of historical eras have people doing some sort of meta-level direction like this.
But also we might just remember the meta-level direction that was ‘surfing the wave’ instead of pushing the ocean, and many grand plans have failed.
I think one of the potential cruxes here is how many of the necessary things are fun or difficult in the right way. Like, sure, it sounds neat to work at a geothermal startup and solve problems, and that could plausibly be better than playing video games. But, does lobbying for permitting reform sound fun to you?
The secret of video games is that all of the difficulty is, in some deep sense, optional, and so can be selected to be interesting. (“What is drama, but life with the dull bits cut out?”) The thing that enlivens the dull bits of life is the bigger meaning, and it seems to me like the superstructure is what makes the bigger meaning more real and less hallucinatory.
This seems possible to me, but I think most of the big successes that I’ve seen have looked more like there’s some amount of meta-level direction. Like, I think Elon Musk’s projects make more sense if your frame is “someone is deliberately trying to go to Mars and fill out the prerequisites for getting there”. Lots of historical eras have people doing some sort of meta-level direction like this.
But also we might just remember the meta-level direction that was ‘surfing the wave’ instead of pushing the ocean, and many grand plans have failed.