<story><title>See Randomness</title><url>http://paulgraham.com/randomness.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>look_lookatme</author><text>No offense to PG, but I really feel this is a better piece on, maybe not the same idea, but a similar sentiment:&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://online.wsj.com/article/SB122178211966454607.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://online.wsj.com/article/SB122178211966454607.html&lt;/a&gt;</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>bkovitz</author><text>Oh, come on, folks. The DFW piece is ignorant whining.  Some problems:&lt;p&gt;1. The great many people who live &quot;unexamined lives&quot; tend to be much happier: conservatives are happier than liberals, people in the Midwest are happier than people on the coasts, etc.&lt;p&gt;2. The default settings are really, really good.  You should be extremely skeptical whenever anybody tries to sell you that everyone is born &quot;wrong&quot; and needs to be &quot;fixed&quot; (circumcision, original sin, chiropractic adjustments for all children, etc.).  (Vaccination and water fluoridation are the only exceptions I know of, and those are supported by actual science.)&lt;p&gt;3. Same with anyone saying, &quot;If you don&apos;t do this one thing, your whole life is going to be HORRRRRRIBLE!!!&quot;&lt;p&gt;4. Standard religions most certainly do eat people alive: the people who desperately obsess about them the way his (mostly imaginary) targets obsess about money, power, etc.&lt;p&gt;5. The real message of the article is the style, and what it says, sentence after sentence, is: &quot;The older, wiser fish knows that life is crap, crap, crap, crap, crap, crap, crap, crap, crap, crap.  And BTW, you know I&apos;m the older, wiser fish, because I&apos;m such a soul-sapping drag.  Oh, and BTW, I&apos;m the older, wiser fish, and you&apos;re not, and if you can&apos;t see that, that only proves what a naïve little twit you are. One day, all you goddamned self-centered little successful optimistic goddamned twits will all be sorry!!!&quot;</text></comment>
<story><title>See Randomness</title><url>http://paulgraham.com/randomness.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>look_lookatme</author><text>No offense to PG, but I really feel this is a better piece on, maybe not the same idea, but a similar sentiment:&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://online.wsj.com/article/SB122178211966454607.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://online.wsj.com/article/SB122178211966454607.html&lt;/a&gt;</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>pg</author><text>Yeah, that&apos;s pretty good.&lt;p&gt;One of the reasons I gave up blogging is that it caused me to use up topics that deserved more work on little, quickly written blog posts.  That&apos;s why I wasn&apos;t in a hurry to republish this.</text></comment>