One possible reason is that they just don't think of it as "a hell which is full of suffering"

It's one thing to acknowledge that there is suffering in the world (that is hard to deny) but it is a sweeping generalization to conclude that life is a hell which is full of suffering. Billions of people are born, live, and die without enduring a lifetime of hellish agony. They might break an arm, or have a heart attack but neither of those things amount to a living nightmare. Even a death from cancer lasts a limited period of time.

they will one day die
cause grief to those they left behind
Life is full of suffering
Leaders are full of greed and aggression an
There are diseases, parasites, germs, blood-sucking insects
animals that bite and kill and eat each other.
Even humans are usually selfish and indifferent to the suffering of others
Every second is a second closer to death

Are you having a bad day, or what?

Some of your statements are true (we will all die) and some of them are just glittering generalities like "Leaders are full of greed and aggression". There are many people who are leaders at various levels of society and even you can probably think of some minor leader who wasn't full of greed and aggression.

Choosing to be "against life" is certainly an option, but it seems like one should come up with something a bit more profound and compelling than tape worms and blood-sucking insects. At the very least one could howl at the meaningless universe, for example.

You are here. Get used to it.

I think this may be what you are looking for.

https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/6202/work-should-be-based-on-quantity-of-boredom-involved/p1

But, we are looking from two different angles. You are talking about ecological disaster, which very well might be inevitable. What about the idea about "progress" to begin with? ... This creates really boring jobs, that create outputs so people can pay for them and use them in their spare time. — schopenhauer1

minutia-mongerers and boredom-braggadocios — schopenhauer1

Whatever turns you off! Whatever makes one wish for the death of the last human... Ecological collapse, progress on a stick, extruded ennui, minutia mongers, boredom braggadocios, or titan of tedium...

If we're doomed anyway (many think we are) we might as well enjoy the show. Throwing in the towel, leaning back against a tree, and just observing might actually have some salvific power. Ceasing to strive, is, after all, the opposite of what has gotten us to our sad state of ourselves being bored to tears by technological production even as we breed our way to a more complex destruction.

this just means more boring — schopenhauer1

More boring is not just... more boring, it became unsustainable at least 4.5 billion people ago. Capitalism is predicated on expansion: expanding extraction and production, expanding markets, expanding volume of business activity, expanding profits, expansion expansion expansion. The regime of constant growth has been in place for quite a long time, now--several centuries--and the climate crisis, plastic in the oceans, too much population, and so forth are all a consequence.

The recognition that the world is unsustainable is profoundly alienating. We are stuck with the world in this unsustainable situation until natural forces intervene (which will be ghastly). It makes everything that is done a pointless nightmarish treadmill.

Were I to be as pessimistic as you, my route would be through contemplation of the unsustainable future. I just don't see a way of our species, and quite a few other species as well, making it through to the other side. "It was good while it lasted" is one response. A less sanguine response is that if it is not good in the future, then it wasn't good in the past either. What looked like great progress was actually a great disaster.

Of course, we don't do things (like who we fall in love with) on the basis of the diminishing law of utility. Sometimes we can apply such reasoning when the decision at hand is not too emotionally freighted. Like, "Is it worth spending another $300 to fix the large and very old refrigerator in the church basement." One can argue that it's throwing good money after bad. Just go ahead and apply the repair cost to the new fridge.

But when one meets someone and is infatuated with them, like as not no calculation took place anywhere that you had a chance of observing it. One might end up in bed with them before rational thought can come into play.

How about this: People would rather be the highest paid person in a group at $50,000 a year. then making $50,000 more ($100,000 a year) and be the lowest paid person in the group.

What's significant about that is that it isn't only the amount of wage that is paid, but the status one has in the distribution of wages in a group. That sort of thing can affect decision making in an unrecognized way. It's a sort of "better to reign in hell than be a servant in heaven".

Yes, neuroscience. Slip of the fingers.

Believing in Fate wouldn't help, as far as I can tell. I was aiming at the idea that there are forces (like the way our brains work) that we do not have control of. What we can do is recognize that urges, wishes, desires... are affecting our thinking (often in non-obvious ways) and that we [or what we think are our consciously deciding minds] are not entirely in charge.

The upshot is to exercise caution and reflect on decisions for awhile (if at all possible) before we put them into action. This is, of course, easier said than done.

Here's a simple example: hunger (low blood sugar) and fatigue can creep up on us without our noticing. Both can affect our thinking and decision making. An event that is viewed as a threat before lunch might well be viewed as irrelevant after lunch--and we won't necessarily be aware that eating lunch altered our mental functioning, slightly.

Maybe study neurology? Westerners don't believe in Fate anymore but a lot of stuff goes on between our ears that we have no knowledge of nor control over that we might as well believe in Fate -- up to a point, anyway.

Oh, yeah... one other thing: A lot of decision making we do is not made consciously, so it is quite often difficult or impossible to know WHY we decided x, y, or z, and sometimes it is difficult to know WHAT our decision actually was.

For example, I’m interested in studying the philosophy of personal decision-making which is a subject matter that very few philosophers study and write about. I don’t think I could find a single good course on this topic in any university. It’s actually even hard to find a lot of helpful material online about this topic. I usually try to focus on studying psychology, personal finance, persuasion skills, value theory, and do research on various important life decisions. Unfortunately, these are just not things they teach you in school. — TheHedoMinimalist

Whether you pursue education within an institution or pursue it outside of the same, it is mostly a practical matter. Do you need a recognized degree? Can you afford college? Will you be admitted? Do you have the personal characteristics required to do well in college (and at the same time, do well outside of college)?

If you do not need what a college offers, and you can get what you want and or need elsewhere, then fine. But I don't know what your situation is; how old you are, how knowledgeable you are, what your history and long-range plans are.

Researchers do study personal decision making, from various angles. Take risk, for example. Whether you are risk averse or risk tolerant will affect the kind of decisions you will make, and to some extent, how you will make them. Risk averse people are likely to be cautious about how they make decisions (gathering safe, reliable information for example) as well as which decisions they make. Risk tolerant people may also gather reliable information, but treat it different than a risk averse person. People are not always consistent from thing to think. An individual may be risk averse about money, but be risk tolerant when it comes to sex.

I think you are probably correct that no single field of research (wherever it is done--on campus or off campus) treats "personal decision making" as its territory. Too bad, because that is where most of us make our worst mistakes.

One of the most important personal decisions is, "What do I want to accomplish in life?" I have sometimes asked college students to think about the next 5, 10, or 15 years. What do I want my life to be like in 10 years? What kind of home will I live in? Do I picture myself being married, partnered, single, with children, no children, how employed? How much money (in today's dollars) do I think I will need to live, and so on. Paint as detailed picture of your planned future as you can, then working backward from the future, "What do I have to do to make that possible?"

my intention was not to say, "Hey, lets compensate people according to a boredom scale" — schopenhauer1

Why the hell not? Look, there is something that can be done about boredom. Assemblng parts doesn't have to be a factory version of Day of the Living Dead or Invasion of the Body Snatchers.

The two really horrible jobs here are the circuit board inspectors and the call center workers. The crew laying pipe and the guy doing something with the recycling bins have jobs that would be interesting to the right person. NOBODY likes inspecting circuit boards and NOBODY likes working in call centers. They do these jobs because it beats begging in the streets and living under a bridge.

I would enjoy using a power shovel to dig holes. What I would not enjoy is getting down in the mud and water on a January day when the temp. was -25F and one had to fix a broken water pipe. Not boring, though. Just horrible.

Not all bad jobs are boring. Many people would rather beg on the street and live under a bridge than drive a mass transit bus (considering what the passengers are like) even though the wages are not that bad. The job (the vehicles condition, the passengers, the regulation, the traffic) SUCKS!!!

Have you ever heard of 'hash numbers'? I once had a temp job adding up hash numbers for Cargill Incorporated, a giant ag. product company. The hash numbers were made up of item numbers, maybe a date, invoice number, tons loaded in the box car, one code for corn, another code for wheat, another for beans, and so on. One went through the shipping form and added up these arbitrary numbers. The total was supposed to agree with a number on another form. If it didn't, it meant that somewhere in the data an error was lurking. We were using 10 key adding machines with a paper tape. I did that 8 hours a day for 3 weeks. I think they decided that I wasn't good enough at this crucial job to keep on paying me. Merciful god, they let me go.

Now that was one meaningless, tedious, dull, fucking boring job! It's probably done by a computer now. As well it should be.

We must find a way to measure this boredom output! — schopenhauer1

Sounds like a colossal bore.

Most work is inevitably tedious, dull, dirty, difficult, and a damned drag. That is why they pay people. Nobody would do any of that crap for free.

Just add up the total hours reported by all the workers in the world. Multiply the total number of hours by .93. That's the boredom output. The remaining 7% of hours might be less than boring because some people like routine, and some people (usually liars, thieves, knaves, and scoundrels) are downright gleeful as they go about their work of ripping everybody off.

So yes, the total boredom output is soooo huge one can hardly grasp it.

Whereas, there are no consequences to refusing to self-educate. People are usually more motivated by loss than by gain. — TheHedoMinimalist

Yes there are costs to refusing to self-educate. Look, all education is self-education. You are the one that has to pay attention in lectures, read the text book, go the library and do research, write the paper, and so forth. The teacher is educating you only in an indirect way.

If you don't somehow educate yourself in something you will be what is known in the field as "stupid".

Quite a few colleges offer students the option of designing their majors. One could, for instance, combine creative writing, physics, chemistry, and art to prepare for a career in science fiction and sci fi film direction. Better educated writers would avoid sci fi errors like "the spider had 6 legs" or "thorax" when they meant human "larynx". Yes I have seen those errors just recently.

My family would disapprove of me getting a philosophy degree due to concerns about debt and few future job prospects — TheHedoMinimalist

That's why you need a community -- not just your family. My family would have been of limited utility as a support group. My parents were in favor of education but were not themselves educated beyond high school (they were born on farms in 1906 and 1907). By the time I got to college they were in their 60s and glad to see the last of their children finally out of the house.

Well, if you are borrowing money, you should be worried about debt and job prospects majoring in philosophy. English lit, sociology, philosophy, biology, etc. are all perfectly fine liberal arts majors as long as you don't tie your job search strictly to your major. A BA in sociology won't qualify you for many jobs in 'sociology'. But the same degree in sociology proves you have certain basic skills and interests that a corporation or government agency might want -- persistence, broad literacy, ability to meet deadlines (papers due next week), interests, and so on. Philosophy does the same thing. So does English lit and biology.

Radical thinkers have proposed an inverse wage scale with the highest pay for necessary and very unattractive jobs like unclogging big sewer pipes (not your kitchen sink); tedious and difficult work (providing personal care for the elderly or paralyzed -- toileting, bathing, feeding, etc); and crushingly boring work, with lower pay going to jobs with intrinsic interest and status rewards like major league sports, surgery, and so on.

I do not foresee a time when we will actually see sanitation workers getting $15,000,000 a year for clearing those underground sewers, and brain surgeons and NFL players getting $20 an hour. But the principle is sound. I was really very well rewarded in therms of satisfaction for the best jobs I have had, and no amount of money was enough for the drag-ass, boring, tedious, pointless jobs I've had.

I'm brain dead — Amity

Let's hope that's an exaggeration.

TheHedoMinimalist is entertaining the recurrent dream of the self-made man. Maybe 1/2 of 1% of the population (too generous an estimate?) are really able to pull off the job of autodidaction. That's 1,500,000 potential self-educated Americans. Does it seem like there are a million and a half Americans grinding away at collegiate level self education?

I wish, but wishes are fishes. slippery and hard to catch by hand.

One hopes that the admissions office is able to decipher the wheat from the chaff. — Hanover

Yes, one would hope. Vaguely interested students had best start at a low cost community college to find out if they can, and want to do college work. If they take a few courses, spend little, and do poorly -- no great loss to anyone.

But sometimes students misapprehend their readiness and ability, dive in and fail. There's nothing wrong with trying and failing, as long as one doesn't draw the wrong conclusions, like "I'm too stupid to do anything." And as long as one wasn't coaxed into borrowing money up front.

Is it perhaps possible to effectively educate yourself online and find a community of educated persons there? — TheHedoMinimalist

The IQ of an average uni student is probably only like one standard deviation above the IQ of the workforce. Instead, you are more likely to meet some pretentious intellectual wannabe in uni who fails to recognize his ignorance. — TheHedoMinimalist

Do you think you won't run into a hoard of pretentious intellectual wannabe's on line? Guess again!

Yes, It is possible to educate one's self (autodidact) but it is quite difficult. One has to have a lot of drive, patience, persistence, and access to a good set of resources -- at least a good library and on-line access. One of the services that college provides is a 4 year guided trip through the process.

In addition to that, it helps enormously if one is part of a community that cares that you are trying to become a learnéd person. If all the people around you do not give a rat's ass what you are doing, then the task is even more difficult. It helps to have ready access to people who are interested in what you are learning.

I took some classics and literature courses through Extension when I was about 35. It was a good experience, but it was not for a degree. It would have been tough at that point in life to start college while working full time. People do it, but they have to have a lot of drive, and be well organized. Plus, it takes longer. Double plus, it's no longer really cheap.

Over the last x number of years, I have known several high school graduates who were exceptionally well educated. They read, they discussed, they inquired, they engaged. They tended to not be well employed (or employed at all) but they had managed to become educated people.

Along with these people, there is another batch of people who went to college and became exceptionally well educated. They read, they discussed, they inquired, they engaged. Some of them were well employed, some not.

The difference between the well educated and the not so well educated is the degree to which they read, discussed, inquired, and engaged.

When you're 40 or 50 the time will seem like nothing, and you'll be glad you did it. — Terrapin Station

Let's see. I finish college at 24 (BA, MA) and then 16 to 26 years later I'll finally be glad I did it. Is this really the right approach?

In conclusion, most philosophers are humourless gits. — Amity

I suspect that many philosophers probably are humorless gits. This is probably associated with their low appreciation of being embodied beings--creatures of flesh and blood with all sorts of drives which which are "in charge" a good share [or all?] of the time. Confidently embodied people understand that their rational facilities are subservient to their emotions--like it or not. (It's emotional drives that sends people to college to study philosophy which foolishly elevates rationality over emotionality.)

To avoid misunderstanding... I'm in favor of people being rational. But we discount and ignore our emotional drives at our peril.

People too wrapped up in their cogitations can't afford to laugh at their ridiculousness.

And the whole, "meeting intelligent people at college" is a joke, unless you get into somewhere like Stanford, MIT, or Cal Tech, where the average IQ is above the norm, in some cases significantly. — Wallows

Oh, come on. It isn't just at Stanford, MIT, or Cal Tech that one will find intelligent people. Sour grapes?

So, he started his own business importing cheap supplements from China, and selling them here in the US, and was making close to 100k a month. Go figure. — Wallows

Well, gee whiz, if he is making close to 100k a month he must really be a wonderful person! And by selling cheap supplements of possibly dubious value. He might have done as well by beginning his importer business right out of high school.

It seems you're searching diligently for a justification to advise others that college is a bad decision, but very rarely is it. You still end up with a better type of job, associate with more intelligent people, make more money, and it will expand your intellectual horizons. Be careful with your loans and what you spend, but it's well worth it. — Hanover

Where college is a bad idea is the situation of people taking out loans to attend college (whatever college), for poorly motivated reasons, and then not finishing. They don't have a diploma, they have new debt, and no greater likelihood of a better life.

College was extremely valuable to me as a means to personal growth (intellectual, interpersonal, social, all that). College helped me get jobs, some of which were great, but it doesn't seem to have enhanced my earning power that much.

What plan in life after high school will pay off the best depends on a lot of factors.

How ambitious one is
How wealthy (or poor), how socially connected (or unconnected) one's parents are
What one's long term objectives are: stay on the farm? play it safe, work for civil service, retire? get rich quick and then get richer?
and so on.

One thing to remember: All colleges are in the business of getting students to buy their services. It never was in colleges' interests to tell students that college may not pay off financially.

Well, first of all, being homosexual doesn't rule out fathering children. For men who are 'exclusively homosexual' -- never have heterosexual partners -- children are out of the question. But many homosexuals are not exclusive. A substantial portion of men who have primarily homosexual relationships also have heterosexual relationships, and father children. This complicates life in ever so many annoying ways, but that's just the way it is.

We don't know exactly what determines sexual orientation. It may be determined by factors present in utero which have the consequence of feminizing the otherwise male brain at just the right moment. The male so affected is altogether male, is quite likely to act like most other males, BUT notably, is more likely to prefer other men for sex. Genes may have such an indirect role to play in sexual orientation that we can not now factor them.

Animals and plants have large genomes and even though we have "mapped the human genome" we by no means know what all of the genes do, or what combination of genes and gene switches is required in any instance. So, inheritance of traits (like homosexuality, permissive attitudes, risk tolerance, etc.) is by no means cut and dried.

Sexual behavior in a population plays itself out as a spectrum ranging from exclusive heterosexuality to exclusive homosexuality. The number of men who are exclusively homosexual is a small percentage of the population -- 2% to 3%. When you see figures of 10% of males being homosexual, we're not counting exclusively gay men.

As someone said, the only unnatural sex act is an impossible sex act. People like sex, and whatever happens to arouse them at the moment can lead to sex. That's why many men who are not homosexual have sex with another man sometimes. At the moment it was an arousing possibility. Same thing for more or less gay men. Sex with a woman may, at the moment, be arousing.

otherwise so many people would not have the same problem of getting excited by porn but not as much by regular sex after the fact. It's like if you take 100 people who have watched porn and all of them believe that having regular sex isn't as exciting as porn. The point is that porn is what caused them to believe that sex is boring. — Maureen

Well... has this experiment been done? I would be very surprised if, in one form or another, it had not been done. There is a ton of research published on pornography and sexual behavior. Have a look. It's perfectly safe to read -- it's not pornographic or sexy.

People do tend to like novelty. Porn can become boring and dull. Sex with the same person doing exactly the same moves time after time can become boring and dull (maybe not in a week or two, but give it 20 or 30 years...)

if it reminds us of something we want to separate ourselves from. — Metaphysician Undercover

Does CK want to separate (somebody, himself, whoever) from the American Revolution? Maybe he feels it was an inadequate revolution? Too bourgeois? Just a bunch of privileged anti-tax whiners? Not a revolution for the slaves? Perhaps his criticism was too timid?

The Guardian reader responses are not tightly moderated, and the result is more amusing moments, as well as more pointless (but not rude, crude) response. The New York Times reader responses are very tightly moderated and the result is a high level of comment, very little humor, and no pointless posts. I think the Guardian gets it a little closer to just right than the NYT, but degustibus non disputandem est.

It's a bit like putting a crucifix on the sneaker. — Coben

Might be helpful for the "Hail Mary pass".

Does it really take that much effort not to pick a symbol like that? One imagines the use of the symbol by political groups shows up in basic research. — fdrake

The original flag of the USA is not a 'symbol like that'. It is a distinguished symbol, abused or not. The cross has been abused at cross-burnings, yet we continue to use crosses without anyone thinking that it's display represents racism (unless it is on your lawn, burning away). Proctor and Gamble dithered over the "Satan worship" smear, but in the end they kept the symbol.

It's too late in the advertising game to complain about using the flag to sell products. It's far, far too common.

there must be something about pornography in general that makes it more exciting than regular sex, although it's anyone's guess as to what that is. — Maureen

Pornography is produced to meet a very wide variety of tastes. Practically, no matter what you are into, somebody is making porn that you will like. Because porn images are often shared and re-shared on social sites, Tumblr, BlogSpot, et al, the selection of images becomes even more specific and refined.

Watching a fairly narrow selection of porn is likely to raise one's expectations. Bodies are buff, organs are large, skin is healthy and tanned, the action that is shown is often "the best of". An ordinary person (one's self and one's mate) are likely to fall short.

In the other direction, unsatisfactory sex may lead individuals to seek pornographic stimulation. People who are unhappy, depressed, ill, and so forth may not feel like having sex, or giving the sexual encounter their full attention. Their partner may seek satisfaction using porn.

Pornography of a sort was produced in the Roman Empire. The invention of printing increase the supply of images. In the late 19th century, photography made possible a more explicit pornography. It takes much more time to draw and paint a sexual episode than to capture it on film. When motion pictures came along, still images were supplemented by short films.

Then sound and color were added (enabling us to hear all sorts of ecstatic moaning that rarely occurs in real life). But it wasn't until the late 1960s when the legal restrictions on producing and distributing pornography were removed that high quality porn became plentifully available at an affordable price. Since then it has gotten better and better. (Sex is sex; sex hasn't gotten better. It's the technical aspects of producing porn that have improved. So, our experience with ubiquitous porn is relatively recent.

As good as porn is, most porn productions are exemplars of third rate movie making. If it wasn't for the sex, NOBODY would watch it. Ever. I avoid porn with a plot. I want to look at just the high points of the show. The hottest parts of the hottest scenes. And stills are perfectly acceptable.

I say it's about the dumbing down of the public discourse. — ssu

How can public discourse, involving billions, be anything other than "dumbed down"?

The elderly among us will remember the "Satanic Panic" of the 1970s-1990s. Satan was to those lunatics what being racist or fascist is to the current crop of lunatics. Proctor and Gamble had somehow gotten away with being a satanic cult for decades, when someone noticed their logo. Paroxysms of paranoia! What is America coming to? Satan's soap?

atlasobscura.

Clearly this is a satanic symbol. 13! stars, a bearded man in the crescent moon... obviously satanic. How could anyone interpret it otherwise? Wicked, wicked, wicked.

Nike's job is to make money any way they can. K is apparently helping them do that. All sounds very American to me. — Baden

Making money any way they can is as French as pate foie gras, as Irish as boiled potatoes, as Ugandan as matoke, and as at home in Thailand as pad Thai. All sounds very economic to me.

That fellow appears to be excessively happy. He should probably be investigated.

So, expressing concern that X symbol has been co-opted by others who are racist is not the same as claiming that if corporation Y uses symbol X, it's a racist gesture, so, unless there's something more to this, it looks like you might be raging against a strawman here, Bitter Crank. — Baden

Sigh. I wasn't claiming that Nike was making a racist gesture. The article states that some people think that the Ross flag is racist, because some people (Nazis, for example) have used the flag in their iconography. I'm pretty sure Nike was making a merely shallow patriotic gesture, having nothing to do with patriotism or racism. It's like the plastic Christmas-design bag at Target or Walmart. The bag design has nothing to do with the Incarnation.

That Christmas-design bags or flags on shoes are shallow uses of common symbols doesn't prevent people from freighting the symbols, and then claiming that Walmart is stealing Christmas or that Nike is promoting racism. What I am objecting to is the anachronistic linking of recent usage of the flag to the original (and dominant) usage of the flag.

People could object to the standard design of the flag (alternating red/white stripes and a rectangular arrangement of state-stars). After all, it flew over the state houses of slave states before 1860, as well as over the state houses of non-slave states. The Declaration of Independence was written by a slave owner and (to some people) a slave raper, Thomas Jefferson. The 'Father of the Country' was also a slave owner.

So national, religious, corporate, university, symbols (among others) get this vague aura around them incorporating all the uses to which they have been put. That's life. Get used to it, Colin Kaepernick, et al.

When The Philosophy Forum organizes a house band it should be called "Raging Against the Strawman"

oops - meant to include the link. Here it is.

"the 13-star model, a design associated with the Revolutionary War, the Philadelphia seamstress Betsy Ross and, for some people, a painful history of oppression and racism." and so on.

An earlier version of the headline did include the word "slavery". It isn't altogether unusual for headlines to be revised, it seems.

The word I was thinking about isn't 'nigger' but rather 'negro' (or, in French 'nègre'). — Pierre-Normand

"The 'N' word" has never represented 'negro' or 'nègre', to the best of my knowledge. And 'nigger' was definitely a term of disparagement and scorn under slavery. We know it was because documents written by slave-holders use the term disparagingly and with scorn. That isn't to say that was the only attitude that slave holders had toward their chattel.

BTW, I wonder if the French use a circumlocution like "le mot 'n'". It seems unlikely.

Further shouldn't we patriots dislike someone putting the flag on a sneaker. It's not illegal, but it is parasitic. — Coben

Correct. Nike and patriotism have no connection. If Nike wanted to prove their patriotic fides, they could start manufacturing their shoes here instead of SE Asia, and pay their American employees a living wage. Nikes aren't expensive because of labor cost. They are expensive because of high profit margins and expensive promotion costs.