What if?

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autisticdragonkin said:
Many people including Buddhists say that it is better to have no desires because they characterize utility in a negative fashion of all unfulfilled desires.
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Buddhists advocate freedom from desire because desire creates attachment, and attachment creates suffering. Even a fulfilled desire would result in attachment and is thus undesirable.
 
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DuskEngine said:
Buddhists advocate freedom from desire because desire creates attachment, and attachment creates suffering. Even a fulfilled desire would result in attachment and is thus undesirable.
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And I interpret that as being essentially the same as characterizing utility in a negative sense. By contrast couldn't one interpret it as being the reverse where just having a desire helps because you are able to pursue it which creates utility even if it goes unfulfilled. I am not entirely sure though whether it is still such an abstract question now, it seems to actually be an empirical one
 
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IceGray said:
Since I was advised to put this here, I have a question: Is it braver to keep on living because you're scared of dying?
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I don't know about whether it is brave but considering that fear of death could be considered a quite rational fear I would say that facing it wouldn't be courage and fearing it wouldn't be cowardice
 
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DuskEngine said:
Buddhists advocate freedom from desire because desire creates attachment, and attachment creates suffering. Even a fulfilled desire would result in attachment and is thus undesirable.
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Basically. They go a little deeper than that however. People mistake Buddhism as some sort of dour, nihilistic, deal that scorns all humanity. In practice many sects of it are extremely worldly. You can never truly silence all desires in your mind, but you can learn to realize that they are illusory in the long term and don't have any sort of physicality or reality to them. Meditation for example, if you've never tried it, isn't silencing all your thoughts like a lot of people assume. That actually is impossible, more or less. The idea is to let them come and go without trying to hold on to any of it. You don't weigh positive or negative, you just take it as it is. When you stop trying to impose an ideal on your own thought process you realize most of it resolves itself rather quickly. That's about as "silent" as your head can ever truly get.

Although paradoxically being attached to the idea of nonattachment is an attachment.

autisticdragonkin said:
Is it better to not desire anything or to have desires that go unfulfilled. Many people including Buddhists say that it is better to have no desires because they characterize utility in a negative fashion of all unfulfilled desires. By contrast I define it in a positive sense where a desire is a good thing because it is an opportunity to get the satisfaction of fulfilling it
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Everybody desires something. Thing is if you wrap your sense of self and happiness up in a product of your own mind (which desires are, they have no real world significance outside of your thought process) than you'll probably never be "fulfilled". You'll achieve it, realize you're still just you, and then jump to the next thing. I suppose it is better to ask yourself what you think will happen to you if you get what you want. Where do you go from there?

Do things that might make you happy, but don't make happiness a totem either, and don't assume life will ever be free of pain
 
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Cave said:
How do we approach gender equality in the workplace? Specifically, the business world. It's a very interesting question to me, and while I don't ponder it often, sometimes I'll find something relevant to it and wonder until I end up with no answer.

Motherhood is the real kicker here. The business world is competitive. Should a woman be forced not to have children in order to not fall behind in her attempts to reach the top? As one ages, it only becomes harder to birth a child. This is the hard part for me.
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I would think it depends on the nature of the business she's in. The company I work at (finance) both parents can take leave for events like child birth and adoption without fear of losing their position or negative reprocussion. I'm sure it's not like this everywhere but that's just what I've noticed. (Also having kids can allow parents to broaden their network on the relatable topic of being a parent).
 
Rogowski said:
What if our knees were on the other side of our legs? What would chairs look like?
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Terrifying. The chairs would look terrifying.

But in all seriousness, are we all two-faced? Like, it seems everyone has a face they show to other people, then a face they show to their loved ones. That's not necessarily a bad thing, but am I looking at that in the wrong light? And besides that, if we're all two-faced, why is that? (Besides social norms & all that shit. Any personal reasons?) Or is that a stupid question?
 
What if...

The internet is forcibly taken down 10 years for now to save society from cancer?

Would we be telling stories to other people's grandchildren (like you'll ever reproduce) of the great flame wars and lolcows? Would it be like talking about dragons and magic today?
 
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FailedNormie said:
What if...

The internet is forcibly taken down 10 years for now to save society from cancer?

Would we be telling stories to other people's grandchildren (like you'll ever reproduce) of the great flame wars and lolcows? Would it be like talking about dragons and magic today?
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Society would just find a different cancer to contract, but that isn't your point.

Most mindsets that set the foundation of those mediums are probably going to fall out of style if society is bent on having less people like us. The minds of this hypothetical future, would they find the same things funny as we do? Even a retelling of the legend of Chris-chan would probably be met with revulsion at the fact that it was basically just a bunch of people mocking some guy they didn't even know until he died (this is totally within a decade's time, let's be real). Tales of dragons and magic can be made to sound epic and inspiring to any mind, regardless of what time and place shaped a person's temperament (unless they happen to live where those things are evil and taboo? I digress).
I suppose you could make a lolcow story sound like it has some kind of hero you can root for to make it appealing, but generally it plays out the same; a bunch of bored kids antagonizing each other. If you take it for what it is, I wouldn't compare something like Youtuber Drama to tales of the fantastic.
Hopefully all that makes sense, although I'm interested in how a world suddenly deprived of internet would turn out.
 
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