Successful people are successful
Daniel Tenner's blog is terrific, but I'd like to voice some opposition (yet again). This post is but another specimen in a long line of articles quite popular here on HN that regard life and "success" as an optimization problem. This genre is the hacker version of self-help books, and like many self-help books it assumes that 1) you have near complete control over your life and the outcome of your endeavors,  and 2) that attempting to optimize all life's variables is worthwhile. I have issues with both of these assumptions.<p>First, much in our lives is governed by pure chance. I can't quantify exactly how much, but it's a lot. It's true that here in the West, we've managed to eliminate many forms of sudden destruction that were quite common in pre-modern life (and are quite common today in less developed countries), and when disaster strikes we have mechanisms for mitigating its effects like insurance and medicine. All this has led the Western man to believe that if he picks his priorities just so and organizes his life just right, he has a good chance of achieving any goal he sets out to achieve. This is, well, to put it simply - not true. Not only is this not true, but believing it is dangerous for two reasons: The first is that if in spite of everything you do not "succeed" you may come to believe this is the result of some personal failing; this may be, but it certainly not necessarily so. The other is that when <i>others</i> do not attain success you may come to believe that this is the result of some personal failing on their part - like laziness, and, again, this ain't necessarily so. Especially in America, where social mobility is so rare compared to other modern countries (though it's better than in underdeveloped nations), many failings are simply due to the environment a child was born into. But even if you're born to the right parents, disaster, and fortune <i>will</i> strike you at random.<p>My problem with the second premise, that we should even aspire to optimize our lives, is more one of a personal preference. One of my favorite books is Fyodor Dostoyevsky's "Notes from Underground". The book's protagonist has this to say:<p>"Now, I am living out my life in my corner, taunting myself with the spiteful and useless consolation that an intelligent man cannot become anything seriously, and it is only the fool who becomes anything."<p>"For man's everyday needs, it would have been quite enough to have the ordinary human consciousness, that is, half or a quarter of the amount which falls to the lot of a cultivated man of our unhappy nineteenth century, especially one who has the fatal ill-luck to inhabit Petersburg, the most theoretical and intentional town on the whole terrestrial globe."<p>He rebels against intentionality. He balks at modern attempts to optimize life. He insists on his right to do things out of sheer spite. He want do do things that go against any common or uncommon sense. He sometimes wants to inflict pain upon himself, to wallow in the ensuing misery, and enjoy it. And though he is far from a man anyone would want to end-up like, he is a free spirit who chooses to be a slave only to his own neuroticism rather than to anyone else's utilitarian logic.