> The world is like a ride in an amusement park. And when you choose to go on it you think it's real because that's how powerful our minds are.
And the ride goes up and down and round and round. It has thrills and chills and it's very brightly colored and it's very loud and it's fun, for a while. Some people have been on the ride for a long time and they begin to question: "Is this real, or is this just a ride?" And other people have remembered, and they come back to us, they say: "Hey, don't worry, don't be afraid, ever, because this is just a ride."
This was an interesting interview. Like a lot of great comedians, Odenkirk has a very grounded and bleak view of the world. I suppose a lot of art, comedy included, is a way of coping with their perspective, for themselves and for the audience.
> But let me give you a very serious warning. Be careful how you ask me to do anything outré, to imitate the man in the pantomime, and to sit on my hat. Because I am a man whose soul has been emptied of all pleasures but folly. And for twopence I'd do it."
> "Do it, then," said Lambert, swinging his stick impatiently. "It would be funnier than the bosh you and Barker talk."
> Quin, standing on the top of the hill, stretched his hand out towards the main avenue of Kensington Gardens.
> "Two hundred yards away," he said, "are all your fashionable acquaintances with nothing on earth to do but to stare at each other and at us. We are standing upon an elevation under the open sky, a peak as it were of fantasy, a Sinai of humour. We are in a great pulpit or platform, lit up with sunlight, and half London can see us. Be careful how you suggest things to me. For there is in me a madness which goes beyond martyrdom, the madness of an utterly idle man.
Once you realize that life has no meaning, except that which we arbitrarily assign, you can only go a few ways with it. Of all the 'ism's you could choose in that moment, absudism is perhaps the least worst.
It's my favorite comedy of all time. It's been going for over 10 years with a lot of little spin offs along the way. For those that want to take the plunge you can watch the first first ten seasons, Oscar specials, Decker, etc. for free on YouTube. Use this playlist to watch everything in chronological order.
The thing is, if you never question anything, just lifing is worth it in itself.
If you do think too much about everything, and you survive this, you will land somewhere and this somewhere will be content.
I'm thinking about happiness and what I want for so long, that I now have crossed my half life point.
You also need to have a certain amount of freedom to even have this problem which makes it weird for others not having this. Oh you are not happy? But you have money?! I would be happy with money, i'm struggling.
Its weird if you sometimes think it would be interesting to struggle.
thanks NYT for the weekly reminder from a boomer, video portrait thing framed just right to pretend he's "youthful", that we have nothing to be angry about truly. such mfing wow. Best paired with an op-ed from same age bracket, baffled why a guy tried to shoot up another political event. nope nothing to see here folks everything fine and dandy. life is a farce lol! that farce looks bad let me stanch it
When you're successful and rich (enough, at least), this is a nice whimsical thing to say. When you're suffering in the trenches, this isn't very helpful.
On the contrary, read the piece. He's not saying it from comfort, he's saying it after a heart attack, after his kids grew up, after the form he loved became a young man's game. The farce isn't a punchline delivered from above; it's what's left when the registers that used to hold you don't anymore. And his answer isn't despair, it's "we've got to keep trying… there's a breeze beneath my wings." That's not whimsy. That's the thing the trenches actually teach you, if you survive them.
i’ve caught myself doing the “it’s this and that — it’s not the other” thing a few times. i dunno if it’s because i’ve seen it so many times because of AI generated comments etc and that’s become a norm in my brain, or if it was actually something i do regularly and ive just never noticed it.
it might be the latter, because i always got the title of this paper https://arxiv.org/abs/1905.02175 backwards. i used to write it adversarial examples are features, not bugs (which is apparently not correct in english language 0_o)
regardless, ive started editing it out when i notice ive done it now.
So very rude. If you prefix it with "the LLM says", I'm fine with it. But taking that hot air and pretending it's yours? It's not just rude, it's dishonest.
I find it rather hopeless that people can "survive the trenches" and tell others" that life is meaningless.
The perspective that affords that life is cruel to some and kind to others, and it's just random and meaningless really doesn't sit well with the people who have to struggle to survive without the chance for joy in life.
If I am just going to suffer endlessly while others enjoy a life of luxury, why not burn the whole thing down? There is a disturbing goal for some people who want equality, and that is universal suffering and misery...
> On the contrary, read the piece. He's not saying it from comfort, he's saying it after a heart attack, after his kids grew up, after the form he loved became a young man's game. The farce isn't a punchline delivered from above; it's what's left when the registers that used to hold you don't anymore.
Sounds like a typical mid-life (identity) crisis?
Contrast this with the life perspective of Stephen Colbert, who lost his father and two brother to a plane crash when he was 10:
> “It was a very healthy reciprocal acceptance of suffering,” he said. “Which does not mean being defeated by suffering. Acceptance is not defeat. Acceptance is just awareness.” He smiled in anticipation of the callback: “ ‘You gotta learn to love the bomb,’ ” he said. “Boy, did I have a bomb when I was 10. That was quite an explosion. And I learned to love it. So that's why. Maybe, I don't know. That might be why you don't see me as someone angry and working out my demons onstage. It's that I love the thing that I most wish had not happened.”
> I asked him if he could help me understand that better, and he described a letter from Tolkien in response to a priest who had questioned whether Tolkien's mythos was sufficiently doctrinaire, since it treated death not as a punishment for the sin of the fall but as a gift. “Tolkien says, in a letter back: ‘What punishments of God are not gifts?’ ” Colbert knocked his knuckles on the table. “ ‘What punishments of God are not gifts?’ ” he said again. His eyes were filled with tears. “So it would be ungrateful not to take everything with gratitude. It doesn't mean you want it. I can hold both of those ideas in my head.”
> He was 35, he said, before he could really feel the truth of that. He was walking down the street, and it “stopped me dead. I went, ‘Oh, I'm grateful. Oh, I feel terrible.’ I felt so guilty to be grateful. But I knew it was true.
His interview with Anderson Cooper, where they go over this (amongst other things), is worth checking out (see ~12m43s):
> Then you have to be grateful for all of it. You can't pick and choose what you're grateful for. So what do you get from loss? You get awareness of other people's loss, which allows you to connect with that other person. Which allows you to love more deeply and understand what it means to be a human being, if it's true that all humans suffer. […] It's about the fullness of your humanity: what's the point of being here and being human if you can't be the most human you can be? I'm not saying 'best', because you can be a bad person but a most human. […]
I'm not sure what you are trying to express here. Is it "rich people shouldn't express their worldview" or "the idea that life is inherently meaningless is incorrect"? A younger me ingested this sentiment as a call to action to create the meaning I wanted in the world.
Did you read the interview? He basically says as much.
>There’s no question that the security that you feel from not being afraid of a health issue or housing is a great comfort and helps you to be more at peace with life. It’s just not as much help as you think it should be.
Strictly speaking, meaninglessness is opposed to farce. You can’t have both utter meaninglessness and farce, because meaning is intrinsic to farce.
Comedy presupposes meaning, because comedy hinges on the absurd, but the absurd is a departure from meaning or a deviation from it. Something is absurd when it fails to be meaningful and fails to satisfy the rational in the broader context of rational meaning.
There is no laughter in the utterly meaningless. There cannot be silliness without an overarching context of seriousness.
Your comment is exactly what successful and rich people say. You can find a lot of joy and acceptance among the poorest of people: the mind is remarkably adaptable, yet it's only those that always strive for more that cannot enjoy life's little moments.
I truly dislike this recent trend of making people feel bad if they have learned to just slow down and be content with life. "It's privilege being able to take a break and smell the roses, I'm too busy for this nonsense" is protestant crab mentality that I find revolting.
Exactly! What a high-profile actor’s life represents to an accountant or a programmer, that accountant’s or programmer’s life similarly represents to a factory worker, and so on.
I've met "too busy for this" people in every line of work, regardless of their pay band. When you get to know people, you will see that pretty much everyone has their own trenches, and slowing down is a matter of priorities, not privilege.
You'll have a hard time finding more suffering than in Wall Street. Meanwhile I haven't found more content, relaxed people than when I visited my distant family in sub-Saharan Africa, taking life as it comes. My point still stands.
> Meanwhile I haven't found more content, relaxed people than when I visited my distant family in sub-Saharan Africa, taking life as it comes. My point still stands.
You seem to be arguing against the point "only happy people can be rich". This isn't what the GP comment said. It said only rich people come out with things like "life is a farce". Which I think is true. Are any of your sub saharan african relatives giving interviews to press pontificating on such things? I assume no.
You know what, no you wont have hard time finding more suffering then in Wall Street. I am not saying they are all happy, but the hell non-Wall Street people suffer as often and a lot.
Only rich people are unhappy and suffering is such a ridiculous point, frankly.
Including in Africa for that matter. In fact, you will find plenty of people there that go to extremes to avoid or minimize suffering ... including making other sub-africans super suffering in the process. That happy take life as it comes sub-Saharan Africa includes Sudan and Congo full of people who are not happy and very active in trying to change thing around them (not necessarily in the positive sense).
> You can find a lot of joy and acceptance among the poorest of people: the mind is remarkably adaptable, yet it's only those that always strive for more that cannot enjoy life's little moments.
See perhaps Viktor Frankl on this:
> Man's Search for Meaning (German: ... trotzdem Ja zum Leben sagen. Ein Psychologe erlebt das Konzentrationslager, lit. '... Say Yes to Life nonetheless: A Psychologist Experiences the Concentration Camp') is a 1946 book by Viktor Frankl chronicling his experiences as a prisoner in Nazi concentration camps during World War II, and describing his psychotherapeutic method, which involved identifying a purpose to each person's life through one of three ways: the completion of tasks, caring for another person, or finding meaning by facing suffering with dignity.
> Frankl observed that among the fellow inmates in the concentration camp, those who survived were able to connect with a purpose in life to feel positive about and who then immersed themselves in imagining that purpose in their own way, such as conversing with an (imagined) loved one. According to Frankl, the way a prisoner imagined the future affected their longevity.
I really enjoyed Better Call Saul and thought it was much much better than Breaking Bad. Walter White was such an irritating character. Saul was a brilliant hustler.
I could see Better Call Saul appealing more to the Hacker News community than Breaking Bad. Kim and Jimmy often give off founder/startup energy (e.g. S2E7)
Yeah, I abandoned Breaking Bad around mid-season 2 because of how boring, slow, and repetitive it had become. Better Call Saul, on the other hand, was constantly clicking for me, from one episode to another. The writing is magnificent. There were a few slow-rollers, of course, but they were nothing compared to drip-feeding in Breaking Bad.
How far through did you get? I think it gets significantly better in season 2, and continues improving thereafter. Basically after they starting bringing in bigger overarching storylines.
I made a few false starts where I couldn’t really get through season 1, but after I persisted it was worth it.
Somehow it fizzled out for me somewhere in season 3. These days I can see myself powering through with some skipping, but I would probably rather rewatch The Wire.
This is the kind of thought that only rich and successful people can have.
If you're working every day in a coal mine so you can feed your children otherwise they will go hungry, then you don't have these kind of thoughts.
Similarly, if you're fighting in a war so your family isn't raped or murdered then you don't have these kind of thoughts either.
Basically, you're lucky if you live in a situation that gives you the leisure and time to sit around and think about life being a farce. Probably he should be sitting around thinking, "boy, i'm so lucky I get to sit in this nice coffeeshop with no reason to work, no threat to my life, just chilling, so I can ponder on what a farce life is"
Edit: Because some people start criticising my comment, here's an addition:
How many people who were living in the 1700s do you think sat around thinking life is a farce?
Ponder on that question. Out of everyone living in the world today, how many people do you think sit around thinking life is a farce, who are those people? Why do you think they are thinking this?
I think it's an important question to ask and think about. It's saying something about our society, way of life, way of seeing the world.
In my opinion, life is for living, being with people, engaging in the world, taking action, connecting with people, and giving back. When you stop living, engaging with the world, and spend too much time alone, you start thinking this way.
I think if Bob Odenkirk lived on a community farm where everyone had to work together to survive he would be far happier and think life is far more meaningful.
> There’s no question that the security that you feel from not being afraid of a health issue or housing is a great comfort and helps you to be more at peace with life. It’s just not as much help as you think it should be.
> How many people who were living in the 1700s do you think sat around thinking life is a farce?
The name for this view of the universe is "absurdism". It was first espoused, as far as I can tell, when the discourse of Qohelet was recorded in the book of Ecclesiastes. So yes, they had it in the 1700's although perhaps not by that name.
> If you're working every day in a coal mine so you can feed your children otherwise they will go hungry, then you don't have these kind of thoughts.
This is almost the opposite of the truth. Those with careers that do not occupy their minds do not sit around with their brains idling and empty all day. They spend much of that time thinking about exactly this sort of thing.
Did you read the article? He struggled for many years before achieving fame, and his main source of purpose was having young children. The HN headline doesn’t give the context that he feels outside of Mr Show and raising children, and after a near death experience, he feels less purpose than ever.
It's shows true ignorance about what happiness is and where it's found. You can probably find more smiles and hope for the future in the Ukrainian trenches than reading comments from Silicon Valley workers making $150k a year.
I mean, do you guys even know Buddhism any more? It was such a hip thing in the 70s over there.
Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage
And then is heard no more. It is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing
Miners had elevated suicide rates and alcoholism rates. And when you read stories of families from such environments, similar thoughts were present. Yes, they did had these kind of thoughts. It is not just perfectly possible to be poor hard worker with family and have depression or missing meaning of life, but entirely common.
Miners may have had elevated suicide rates or alcoholism, but are you telling me they sat around thinking life is a meaningless farce?
Miners suffered from hideous diseases due to breathing in huge amounts of toxic chemicals, so yes, that resulted in elevated risk of suicide and alcoholism.
But were they really sitting around discussing absurdism, nihilism, life being a farce? This sort of thinking is really much more of a modern phenomenon, a privilege of the rich and educated with lots of free time.
Well, I didn't expect I would have to spell it out.
But seriously think about it. Why doesn't your pet dog sit around thinking about what a farce life is?
How many people who were living in the 1700s do you think sat around thinking life is a farce?
Ponder on that question. Out of everyone living in the world today, how many people do you think sit around thinking life is a farce, who are those people? Why do you think they are thinking this?
I think it's an important question to ask and think about. It's saying something about our society, way of life, way of seeing the world.
Your last sentence claims that he should appreciate how lucky he is. But this is a different question from what, at face value, the statement that life is meaningless or absurd is about. The two choices (first being operative in this thread):
1. Life is meaningless: descriptive claim
2. You ought to appreciate life to the best of your ability: normative claim
> I think if Bob Odenkirk lived on a community farm where everyone had to work together to survive he would be far happier and think life is far more meaningful.
Probably a better question would be ask the Amish how happy they are? G-D was conceived to fill this gap in the human experience. The Amish harness it to set limits on desire.
From all the parochial nationalistic close minded bigoted homophobic toxic macho Putin boot licking behavior they exhibit, you'd think they all lived on a community farm.
Bob Odenkirk's publicist would like the gullible public to think that his client is some sort of deeply thoughtful intellectual because he's trying to line up his next gig and having his name in the public zeitgeist will land him a fatter paycheck.