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.
LLMs write like that because people write like that. That they used the rhetorical device three times in a row in a single paragraph makes me think it’s less likely to be LLM and just how that person writes.
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.
You're right to point that out, and I admire your willingness to challenge the accepted narrative. That writing style not just unique to AI — all humans write like that. That's not annoying — it's refreshing. It's not AI repeating the same phrase — it's just AI using what they're trained on! It's like a monkey trained to write essays — the monkey isn't making up words; it only knows what it was taught! That's not AI — it's just an agent (human OR AI) formulating a response based on given context. That's not exhausting — it's informative!
Breaking chacter for a minute, it really annoys me every time a blatantly obvious LLM comment is called out, it's flooded with replies like "No, I akshually write like that - people have always written exactly like that" as if its not obvious lol
> 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 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...
Who are you even talking about? Bob didn't say life is meaningless. If you want the perspective of someone who survived the "trenches" and kept a meaningful perspective on life then I recommend the book "Man's search for meaning" by Viktor Frankl.
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.
I'm not against rich people outright, but I am against the ones who try to pay people as little as possible sharing their views. And especially the views that contradict (working hard) how they got their wealth (not working hard) in the first place.
I agree. I'm quite sure even Bob would agree. He never even used the words "farce" or "meaning(less)". He just agreed to "life is a farce" in a context that mostly reflected on his work as a comedian. Also the entire interview reads quite performative. This whole emotions-are-just-molecules, life-is-just-a-game etc perspectives fall flat as soon as the doctor tells the armchair-nihilist he has cancer ... suddenly life feels like something more important than a game and the feelings are no longer just molecules.
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.
I’ll disagree with Odenkirk there. Not having to try to decide if you think one of your kids should be taken to the ER at the expense of the other kid for what is probably not an emergency infection, but maybe there’s a chance it could spread and cause real damage so antibiotics now would help, but then the other kid won’t be able to do xyz due to not having a spare $2,000 is a pretty shitty experience.
Security of housing and healthcare is an enormous boost in life. I avoided playing sports when I was a kid because my dad told me a broken arm would set the family back (there were no out of pocket maximums back then).
The government paid if you were dirt poor and had no prospects, or employer or government paid if you were a white collar/union or government employee, but for immigrants invested into their 24/7 small business, they had assets that could be seized but very little cash flow to be able to pay unexpected bills.
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.
> Are any of your sub saharan african relatives giving interviews to press pontificating on such things? I assume no.
No, but the first thing they say to a Westerner like me is "what are you fretting about? You white people are always stressed and busy. Just take a breath. The world isn't going anywhere."
It takes a lot of energy and effort to be rich and to chase money; these are not the people that say "life is a farce".
Your comment is borne from the idea that money does create happiness, so only rich people can enjoy life and have a laugh about it. This is not a universal maxim, just a cultural artefact of the protestant ethos that finds in maximum expression in the American capitalist society. In the rest of the world, it's the complete opposite.
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.
