[HN Gopher] Mimetic Traps
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Mimetic Traps
Author : herbertl
Score : 47 points
Date : 2022-08-29 04:34 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.briantimar.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.briantimar.com)
| thenerdhead wrote:
| Your current job/profession/career can be seen as an investment
| to your dreams.
|
| You can find meaning in just about anything if you try hard
| enough.
|
| Getting on twitter is the opposite of avoiding the mimetic trap
| though.
| JasonFruit wrote:
| I agree with a lot of this article, but much of the suggested
| action at the end strikes me as flawed.
|
| > Don't force yourself to do anything you hate. If you get too
| good at this, you won't be able to figure out when to quit.
|
| I'd moderate this a bit. Maybe, "If you are forcing yourself to
| do what you hate, step back and think: is the goal worth the slog
| to me?"
|
| > Be suspicious of roles that compensate you with status or non-
| financial rewards.
|
| This is the worst, to me. Purely financial motivation is one of
| the surest ways to be trapped in a role you hate. Make sure what
| you do offers you personal and social rewards that you value.
|
| > Join Twitter -- there's no better way to reduce tunnel vision.
|
| Twitter is the most awful social-pressure tool ever created.
| Please, I beg of you, do not join Twitter!
| zdragnar wrote:
| >> Be suspicious of roles that compensate you with status or
| non-financial rewards.
|
| > This is the worst, to me. Purely financial motivation is one
| of the surest ways to be trapped in a role you hate. Make sure
| what you do offers you personal and social rewards that you
| value.
|
| Money is fungible for a great many things in life- the risk you
| take working for other things (ideals, status, etc) is that, if
| you become disillusioned, you're left with nothing.
|
| This has happened to friends of mine in social work. They
| believed they could make a difference, went through all the
| hoops, kept up with the continuing education and licensing
| requirements (not covered by the state, obviously) and after
| years completely disillusioned from the bureaucracy and human
| nature.
| [deleted]
| Lacerda69 wrote:
| I agreed with all his points but the Twitter one.
|
| Alternatively I would propose to work a job in a wildly
| different field for a few months, for example waiting tables,
| in a grocery or at a recycling company. Your horizon will be
| exploded by the people you meet and work with.
| munificent wrote:
| I came here to post the same comment about financial
| compensation.
|
| Focusing on money is just another mimetic trap (though one with
| very nice side effects). There are a _lot_ of dudes in our
| demographic hitting their thirties and realizing in despair
| that they are financially comfortable and yet their life feels
| utterly empty and meaningless.
|
| The best metric I know to avoid this trap is that the things I
| spend my time on should scratch at least one of:
|
| 1. Be relaxing, enjoyable, or personally rewarding. It should
| help me recharge and unwind to prepare for the rest of this
| list.
|
| 2. Gain or improve a useful skill that I can then apply to the
| last item on this list.
|
| 3. Benefit other people.
|
| In other words, be healthy so that I can be effective so that I
| can be helpful. When I stay centered on this (without obsessing
| about it), I'm generally happy with how I spend my time.
|
| _> Twitter is the most awful social-pressure tool ever
| created._
|
| Twitter, perhaps to a larger degree than any other social
| network, is whatever you make it into. Yes, if you follow a
| bunch of hustle-culture drones (or people who retweet that),
| your feed will make you miserable. Follow different people and
| you'll get a totally different Twitter. My feed is generally
| nourishing, supportive, and rewarding, though it takes fairly
| frequent gardening to keep it such.
| joshlemer wrote:
| I focus on money now, in early/mid career, so that in the
| future I'll have total freedom to do whatever I want.
| munificent wrote:
| Then the odds are good that you are already falling into
| the mimetic trap I'm describing.
| balfirevic wrote:
| The article describes mimetic trap as "it hurts to leave,
| and there's nowhere to go".
|
| Being able to retire at the middle of the career sounds
| like the opposite of that.
| JasonFruit wrote:
| Will you, or will the urge to make more take over? I
| don't know you, so I can't assume, but I've heard a lot
| more people talk about retiring at 40 than do it when
| they could.
| smlacy wrote:
| Joining/using Twitter is in direct conflict with the first goal
| of "Don't force yourself to do anything you hate"
| dnissley wrote:
| I've found twitter to be a kind of mimetic testing ground where
| you can put your mastery of certain mimetic forces to the test.
| Not sure what the ultimate test is, I think it might be to quit
| completely, but without skipping the test of becoming a user --
| there's a lot to be learned in going through that wringer.
| dkural wrote:
| This also speaks to a certain lack of inspiration/creativity. A
| lot of people who end up in graduate school are great at
| following a prescribed academic path and getting good grades etc.
| but when confronted with the prospect of original research might
| find themselves lacking. A lot of top scientists, like the great
| artists, writers etc. can't help themselves but think about or
| work on their field. Grothendieck disappeared to live in a
| cottage, but still produced thousands of page of handwritten
| notes of highly original mathematics.
| woliveirajr wrote:
| [2019], the twitter list is gone...
| xhevahir wrote:
| Is there any explanation for the frequent Rene Girard references
| on HN besides the influence of Peter Thiel? It's odd. I'm not all
| that familiar with his work but in most circles you're probably
| more likely to see names like Charles Taylor, Alasdair MacIntyre,
| et al.
| boucher wrote:
| There's a good (and short) book about the history of Silicon
| Valley cultural and philosophical influences that I found quite
| interesting:
|
| https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374721237/whattechcallsth...
| mjburgess wrote:
| The book "actionable gamification" talks about different sources
| of "core motivation". The author gives 8 typical sources, of
| which "social reinforcement" iirc, is one. (I found them all
| quite poorly named).
|
| In any case, they provide a lens on building productive and
| rewarding systems. One observation is that these "extrinsic"
| motivators, alone, leave people unhappy (but engaged, until they
| arent).
|
| What we appear to have here is a "social proof addiction trap",
| in the manner in which gambling is a "curiosity addiction trap".
| convolvatron wrote:
| DFHippie wrote:
| The competitiveness and status striving are what drove me out of
| academia. I wanted to be there because I liked playing with
| ideas. It was the people who were driven there by their
| competitive impulse that poisoned it for me. That and the zero-
| sum nature of the game: the overproduction of candidates for a
| fixed number of positions, which forced everyone into the same
| mindset, where you'd be lucky if in the end you landed with a job
| in some place you'd rather not be mostly doing stuff other than
| what you wanted to do in the first place.
| jongjong wrote:
| I think I may have the opposite problem. I have contrarian
| tendencies. I have a strong natural desire to argue against group
| consensus. When I see too many people agreeing about something to
| the point that they're not really thinking anymore, I have to
| take the opposite side. I also generally dislike the kinds of
| people who always jump on the latest social bandwagon and support
| the current thing. I can't stand people who can't think for
| themselves and yet are aggressive when it comes to spreading
| whatever ideas authority figures have managed to implant into
| their minds.
|
| It makes no sense to me why someone would spend so much energy
| and invest so much of their ego into an idea which not only they
| didn't come up with but which they haven't even bothered to
| analyze from first principles.
|
| It disturbs me that people can be at once so malleable to the
| will of authority figures and yet so rigid and stubbornly
| resistant to basic reasoning.
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