On Feb 6, 2018 8:57 AM, "Tomasz Rola" <[email protected]> wrote:
Frankly, the whole thread reads a bit surreal to me, to the point where I wonder if my English... On Mon, Feb 05, 2018 at 06:54:52PM +0100, Dave Long wrote: On some other day, Someone Else wrote: > >"We are human beings, not human doings". This may be very deep and wise and yet I happen to have other opinion on this: those who do not do might as well cease to be and nobody would be able to tell the difference. We are perfectly described by our doings, including acts of thinking and acts of having opinions (thus, a consciousness is defined by some "internal acts", which might also manifest in the outside world). Not that long ago European aristocrats prided themselves on "being" aristocratic, and any useful work was looked down upon. So much so, a frightful disease such as consumption was tied to the literary and poetic aesthetic. Today we have become the opposite. People must work till they die because there's no respect or income in just being retired. Monks and nuns or poet philosophers are a vanishing race because they are considered lazy bums who can't contribute anything of value. We ought to balance the two energies of being and doing because there's wisdom in both. The head and the heart. A podcast app I like very much was perfectly useful and complete 7 versions ago, but it's gone through several design iterations, bloated in size and cpu usage. The cost of compulsively doing. I notice this at workplaces too, where often the only way to get recognition is to launch something new. Compulsively being or doing is bad. Many people are engaged in compulsive doing today because that's how they define themselves. The ruling belief is that a human life is ab initio worthless, and each ought to prove her worth by doing something. This has destroyed a lot of social and family ties, and is the cause of distress and disease. A human life ought to have respect and value in society regardless. People ought not to start out of the gate feeling worthless. Stalin would consign to Siberia those who didn't believe in communism. Today, the banks will have us living under the bridge, if we are lucky, if we don't believe in capitalism. Silicon valley has fallen into the trap of compulsively doing deeper than most others. The useful life of a computer was 6-8 years only a couple of decades ago. Now a two year old smart phone is not new enough.
