I see this all around me. People are fixated on careers, hobbies (FOMO), spread thin by family obligations and errands. The truth is, happiness does not derive from these things. This "busyness" is an invention. Life is simple, and happiness actually derives from having cats.
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Life is simple*
* YMMV. You might need to live in a developed world that assures you won't be left to die, that is not at war, that you can find a way to sustain yourself, and that you're not involved in any accidents that drastically change your otherwise simple life.
I have been in countries at war, like Congo, and life there was the simplest thing you could have.
In fact, all the complexity appears when there is peace. People do not save or study or anything secondary when there is war.
Are you going to study when you don't know where your family is? When your mother or sister or daughter has been raped and you have to protect her for being raped or killed? When they go after you because you abandoned guerrilla (or the army)?
You make a simple mistake(like looking weak, with no friends or too smart) and you die, it was as simple as that. A kid without beard with an automatic gun does not like or respect you? You are dead.
People at war, they need something, they take it(with automatic weapons). Super simple.
In China things were also super simple. When I was there a biker was hit by a car and died. Nobody gave a dam. Cars were circulating as usual around the dead person. It was the most brutal thing I ever saw in my life, including Congo, in Congo people cared more about each other.
It is the developed world that is complex and sophisticated. People work for abstract things like "career", "pensions", "tenure" or even paper money that are promises that don't really exist as real things but really are symbols of trust in the society.
BTW you feel alive living at the moment and I personally miss some part of that, even when I was risking my life.
> You make a simple mistake(like looking weak, with no friends or too smart) and you die, it was as simple as that.
Dying is simple, life living is harder.
> In China things were also super simple. When I was there a biker was hit by a car and died.
What would you need to see to conclude that life in China for local people is as complex as for American living in United States?
I am not even differencing rural part of old school China from rich inhabitant of Beijing.
There's no escaping Maslow's Triangle.
> People at war, they need something, they take it(with automatic weapons). Super simple.
That is not actually true. Most people in war zone are civilians without weapons. The survival depends a lot on navigating power structures and negotiating. And luck. But it is not simple and everyone speculates.
> When your mother or sister or daughter has been raped and you have to protect her for being raped or killed?
How exactly would you protect them? You don't. Cause I had relatives survive war and read memoirs from civilians and it was more that everyone was looking for source of income. If males had to join army or guerilla (or died), then it is women trying to survive and trying to care for those who stayed (children, old, themselves). And that is not simple.
> Are you going to study when you don't know where your family is?
Hardly. But school systems in war countries and occupied countries do somehow move on, as malfunctioning as they are. People leave them to search for income and food. People clinge on activites too.
Mental health issues get worst under those conditions. The conflicts between people escalate while everyone being even more dependent on each other. People live in cramped conditions. And none of that is simple. Living in one household with mentally ill or abusive relative you would normally cut off is opposite of simple.
> When they go after you because you abandoned guerrilla (or the army)?
Majority are civilians.
I’d argue that if you are living in a warzone, life is simple too. Just in a completely different way.
You know what drives me crazy? All these people talking about how great technology is and how it saves all this time. But what good is saved time if nobody uses it? It just turns into more busy work, right? You never hear somebody say, "Well, with the time I’ve saved by using my Word Processor, I’m gonna go to a Zen monastery and hang out.” (Jesse)
The problem with everything that 'saves time' is that it doesn't save time in way a that actually frees up blocks of time, because most things in your day are running to someone else's schedule. Saving 10 minutes here and 20 minutes there only adds up to give you hours to do what you want if you're not waiting for some event to let you begin the next task. If you are waiting for something then saving 10 minutes just gives you 10 minutes more dead space in your day to spend waiting. If I have two meetings and I can manage to get the first one done early the only impact that will have is that I'll have to wait longer until the second one. I guess that's a little more time to spend writing nonsense on HN, but it doesn't feel useful to have saved that time.
Saving time on tasks to give yourself more time to do other things only works if you have complete autonomy over your schedule.
Also applies to the very tired ”work smarter, not harder” saying: it never means working less with the time you gain but actually means ”work smarter so you can work even more”
At some point, you stop working though right? And all that smart work probably earned you enough money to retire early compared to someone working a dead end job.
Thankfully the trend of boasting about "multitasking" has died. A decade or two back everyone seemed to think it was a good idea.
That depends on your career goals and your attitude towards the concept of "buffer time", though.
I am getting "smart" technology fatigue. I want old fashion technology, mechanical, analog. Whiteboard, Pen and Pencil, Dump TV.
Yeah, "smart" is just a marketing buzzword.
It's not an intrinsic property of technology, either. It's just businesses that want to take advantage of you in new and more abusive ways. Don't let them.
I agree on the short timescale, but look at the longer one. like coal mining was horrible during Orwells times, and now it is difficult but much much better due to technology. Or take saturdays. I do not know about your country, but here not having to work (and not having to go to school) on saturday happened in the last 50 years; or in Singapore in the last 15 years.
The funny thing is, that horrible coal mining that technology liberated us from was part and parcel of the Industrial Revolution. Thank you technology, for saving us from the fallout of technology! Good thing this time there's no fallout.
Life is busy work. I mean, we give sense to our life beyond filling the atmosphere with CO2, and yet, on a planetary scale, there is not much more to humanity than that.
Technology allows us to experience things that wouldn't be possible otherwise. And your word processor can indeed save you enough time to do other things you want to do with your life. And if word processors and overstimulation are not your things, you can go to a Zen monastery, technology have your back: food, medicine, construction, transportation,... so you can meditate in peace.
I have known several people who live a simple life. Small house in the middle of nowhere, no phone signal, grow their own crops, etc... But they still have a car, go out to town to buy stuff that come out of large factories, they have a few electric devices powered by solar panels, etc... They take advantage of technology and people love of word processors to live their simple life, and that's fine! That's what technology is for, to allow those who want to disconnect to do so without putting their life at risk, and to give a dopamine rush to those who can't stay still.
As long as workers who trade their labor time for money do not participate in the productivity gains at a rate that sufficiently outpaces wage adjustments to the new productivity, this will continue.
It's why I think more and more as the days go on that the Internet, while being humanity's greatest invention, is turning out to be a net negative. Despite most human-development-related statistics pointing to the fact that humanity/civilization is at its most productive/safest in all of history, the Internet is slowly eroding away what it means to be human.
This is funny because the most unhappy and anxious people I know are cat owners.
I remember talking to a coworker friend of mine who was a cat owner. She said that she didn't understand dogs. They just loved you unconditionally all the time no matter what. So I guess she liked the life with the cat where it was just randomly mean or not interested in her sometimes. Kind of illustrated things to me.
You gotta earn it with a cat.
Dogs are for people that need the reassurance of the unconditional love
Cats are for people who have the kind of levels of self-confidence that makes the unconditional love of a dog both suffocatingly annoying and suspicious.
> So I guess she liked the life with the cat where it was just randomly mean or not interested in her sometimes.
If you think your cat is randomly mean to you, then you really don't understand your cat, you don't correctly read the clues it signalizes to you.
If I'm e.g. petting my cat and don't stop if she starts wagging her tail, which pretty much means she's overexcited, then she will scratch me to make it more clear to me.
To expect that your cat is all the time interested in you also seems honestly quite a bit narcissistic.
This says a lot about their romantic life, too
Think of how unhappy they'd be without cats!
Not true from my experience. All cat owners I know are relaxed go with the flow type of people. Few dog owners I know are as you describe but the rest don’t make the pattern significat to notice. Maybe the anxious people you know attempt to rid their anxiety by soothing themselves with cats and it is not working properly for them. I personally love cats and their presence gives me a relaxed attitude but would never have one in my apparent, the smell is too much to bear. And hair everywhere...
At least they know what's good for them!
I am a cat owner and happy like a clam ;)
This is what your cat wants you to think
I'm allergic to cats.
Pets also add complexity to life, e.g. when you want to go away for any length of time.
They can even give you Toxoplasmosis!
And there's a hypothesis that says toxoplasmosis can manipulate the behavior of their hosts to encourage risk-taking activities, including entrepreneurship, and cat owners are more likely to have an interest on startup companies [0][1]...
Which brings us to Hacker News.
Full Disclosure: I was a cat owner, but I'm on HN for its news and the forum, I'm not particularly interested in startup companies...
[0] Toxoplasmosis has been linked to a higher likelihood of entrepreneurial behavior in people who get infected
https://www.businessinsider.com/parasite-in-cat-poop-linked-...
[1] There's a Really Weird Link Between Cats And Entrepreneurs
https://www.sciencealert.com/toxoplasma-gondii-correlation-e...
You can leave cats alone for a weekend without an supervision, just a bowl of food and some water.
We do up to about 6 or 7 days. I often joke I'm not responsible enough to own a dog, and if I was going to get a dog, I might as well just have kids. The idea of having to find a way to take care of the dog when you want to go out of town is definitely a little anxiety-producing.
My friend did that. His cat ate all the food in a single sitting and was both fat and almost dead from not eating for two days.
Your cat isn't diabetic, I guess.
There is cat food that exists or is being developed that should help somewhat.
[0] https://www.purinainstitute.com/science-of-nutrition/neutral...
[1] https://www.jacionline.org/article/S0091-6749(19)30349-5/ful...
I'm also allergic to cats. I have two of them and live on antihistamines. It's worth it.
My cats are a pain the ass. They provide nothing for the effort and cost put into them.
What effort and cost? They're so cheap and easy to take care of.
Maybe I'm being too generous since I am using dogs as a reference point.
We have 3 cats and just got a puppy. The dog is already much more beloved and worth the higher effort than the cats have ever been. Cats are basically dry goldfish that you can play with and pet a bit. Dogs are part of the family.
Travel becomes a lot harder if you have a cat.
My can't moves the distributed scat and bodies of a dozen mice into a centralized sandbox over the course of its life. Worth it for me.
Happiness has been debunked by the replication crisis.
you misspelled dogs.
And chickens!
> happiness actually derives from having cats
Not if you're part of the massive destruction of wildlife wrought by these biodiversity annihilators masquerading as cute pets.
'As an invasive species[1] and superpredator,[2] they do considerable ecological damage.[2] In Australia, hunting by cats helped to drive at least 20 native mammals to extinction,[3] and continues to threaten at least 124 more.[3] Their introduction has caused the extinction of at least 33 endemic species on islands throughout the world.[2] Feral and domestic cats kill billions of birds in the United States every year, where songbird populations continue to decline.[4]'