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What is The Good Life
Shinto
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So, what is the good life?
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Enough money to own a flying yacht, and an airport for it on a private island.
I think that's one of those unanswerable and completely subjective questions, where we each argue our own version for a few pages and then slowly drift away agreeing to disagree...
Selfish.
Immensely. I'm also materialistic beyond belief.
Doesn't sound very good to me.
Do you just exist to stimulate the pleasure centers in your brain?
Sounds pretty empty and wretched actually.
I find that my pleasure centers are infinitely better stimulated by a more convoluted metaphor, but I'm not afraid to call it what it is, either.
Well, I look at it this way: Everything else(love, etc.), that's kind of a GIVEN. There are but a handful of people whom would not want that.
It's the stuff BEYOND THAT(living deep within a forest and nature, creating immense and amazing technology, having a private island) that's interesting and different for everybody.
So, yes, I'd also want to be with the love of my life and have good health and all that. But who WOULDN'T?
So that pesky social programming is value neutral then. It just happens to be the configuration through which you make your pleasure judgment.
I am easily pleased.
Seriously, doing exactly what you want to do rather than what some external value system says you should want to, that is the best life.
Unfortunately the system is currently rigged to prevent exactly this situation from ever occurring in the majority of people.
Nintendo Network ID: AzraelRose
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So, making myself independent of things that worry me is something I think about daily. I'm really not satisfied how demanding the economy is of people. In some cases, something that would be ideally perfect is just not translatable into an economic product. A good example of this is the RepRap project. How are you going to market something which would eliminate its own scarcity to some extent in an environment totally dependent on the exploitation of scarcity (which the economy is, in my mind)? It is quite similar to the marketability problems around Open Source software.
Open source is easily marketable, just not as an end in itself. OSS as a market is about support, not software. :P
https://medium.com/@alascii
Crushing enemies, seeing them driven before you, and hearing the lamentations of their women.
Being the immortal ruler of the world sucks, take it from me.
I mean, it's all fun and games for the first century or so, but there's only so many ways to hideously torture your enemies and after a while there's only so many enemies too...seriously, a couple of centuries down the line and no-one will care that they're the subject of your iron-fisted rule because half of them won't know different and the other half of them will think it was their idea in the first place....
Nintendo Network ID: AzraelRose
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The best things in life come from other people from caring about them and them caring about you.
That's why you build an intergalactic network of wormhole generators, populate the universe with people, and subjugate them through superior technology.
This. I'd lime it but a mere forum meme doesn't do it justice.
Then you'd just have to start figuring out ways to torture the populace at random.
Assuming you've populated the universe you could just go planet hopping and destroy humanity in the most nightmarish ways you could think of, trying to top yourself each time. Eventually you'll have killed everyone, at which point you could just transplant people from the millions of other worlds you've populated and watch them rebuild and coexist, or not.
Being god sounds like fun, though I would imagine it would get a little lonely.
'Course most of them will never find it, they are all too busy looking.
Which John Cusack movie is this from?
When I achieve those things, I will have lived the good life.
Subjective.
I have no idea if it's in a John Cusack movie, I just pulled it out of my ass because it's the first thing I thought of when reading the phrase the good life. It's what my life is currently like, and I think I'm living the good life right now, despite all the bad things happening. That is my idea of the good life, because it's close to what my life is currently like, and I'm happy and that's what matters.
I do not believe this.
I have a good job but this whole "working for a living" thing has never meshed well with me. I want the freedom to travel around and visit my family and friends whenever I wish. I want the TIME to be able to do those things. If I want to attempt to open up a business, I want to do so with the knowledge that, if it fails, I won't be living in a box.
Before you sic the _J_ on me, I guess, I'll say that the good life is what you have when stability has seeped into so many pores of the day that spontaneity doesn't shatter it. The good life is where if you feel like painting stars and moons and spacefish on your walls, you can, and it won't be the end of the world; the good life is where you can throw out your plans of frozen dinner and splurge at the restaurant of your choice because that's just what you want to do.
EDIT: This isn't to say that there aren't the obvious consequences of doing these actions -- you don't have to be rich so that money is a non-issue, for example -- but the stability exists where budgets have giving room and you have enough of an emotional reservoir to bend instead of breaking when you have to go the few extra miles to compensate for what you did in the feverish bouts of want.
Good life would be wealth, love and power to affect the world(For good or ill, depending on the situation).
Passable life is what I now have. Kinda sucky, stale.