If you don’t solve interesting problems, boring problems will solve you. When a boring problem solves you, you turn into a walking cliche.
Not a bad outcome. The consolation of a cliche existence is that is sustainable.
Conversation
Replying to
If you solve interesting problems, you create boring problems that try to solve other people and make money for you by turning them into cliches. This will make them mad at you, so you will need a nice mansion to stay away from them in.
1
3
33
This is called the “commoditize your complement” strategy by us management consultants.
1
1
21
A boring problem like “where to live” or “how to stay healthy” is a cliche machine
1
18
I feel bad for poor people because genuine poverty seems like a truly hard boring problem. I don’t think I’d be able to solve it. Being born middle class and never really dipping below the line into true poverty is like being born a tachyon already moving faster than light.
2
2
21
It’s genuinely depressing how much of “success culture” rests on formulas for commoditizing fellow humans in some way.
I would like to brood over this over dilemma a fine scotch in the oak-paneled library of my future mansion.
1
5
54
Replying to
There's that James Baldwin line about how "the problem with being poor is that it takes up all your time, and the problem with being rich is that it takes up the time of everyone else"
1
1
5
Replying to
People whose chief motivation is to solve interesting problems are walking cliches. Give them a sufficiently intriguing puzzle and a stable living, and they enslave themselves. This is how conquest works.



