On Fri, Jul 16, 2010 at 3:25 PM, Thaths <[email protected]> wrote: > Before you go down this slippery slope, pause and think about: [...]
The above line applies to many things in life. Hackers[0] call it yak shaving [1], but the concept isn't new - the buddhist Jataka tales talk about it in the story of the hermit's disciple who gets a cat [2]. The underlying philosophical concept is that most people spend their entire lives engaged in yak shaving without pausing to consider why they must marry, have kids, and make a lot of money only to still feel unhappy. Cheeni [0] ESR's jargon file has an entry http://catb.org/jargon/html/Y/yak-shaving.html [1] http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/yak_shaving [2] The story is this very briefly: A Hermit and his disciple live in meditation upon a mountain, and live off alms from the local villagers. Hermit goes away on a pilgrimage, and a rat tears the disciple's only spare garment into shreds, villagers gift him a cat, the cat needs milk so he gets a cow off the villagers, cow needs grass and fodder so he ploughs the neighboring waste land, now he needs a granary to store the harvest, and then builds a farm, now he needs a wife to manage the farm, and then he needs kids to plough the land and so on until the Hermit returns a few years later to find no sign of the monastery.
