What clicked and made you have a different mindset? How long did it take to start changing and how long was the transformation? Did it last or is it an ongoing back and forth between your old self? I want to know your transformation and success.
Any kind of change, big or small. Anything from weight loss, world view, personality shift, major life change, single change like stopped smoking or drinking soda to starting exercising or going back to school. I want to hear how people’s life were a bit or a lot better through reading and your progress.
TIA 🙏
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Two Vonnegut novels—God Bless you Mr. Rosewater and Player Piano—fundamentally shifted the way I view the world.
The novels primarily discuss the economy, automation, and human wellfare. When I was young I defaulted to a laissez-faire economic mindset, and basically assumed automation and technology would always make our quality of lives improve. I was very much in the Ayn Rand club on economic and moral issues. These books were ultimately what made me reflect and consider the other “spiritual” (in the sense Vonnegut uses the term) aspects of human wellfare. Vonnegut was my introduction to humanist thought, and I owe the vast majority of my personal moral development to the influence of these two books.
Wow, stunning answer. Huge Vonnegut fan too btw.
I hated every particle of Playor Piano when I read it and still do today. Granted my field is automation and I am an engineer.
I am making the world a better place. Freeing humans from degrading filthy boring work. You know what really irked me the most about that novel? The population lived in a freaken utopia and couldn’t say one good thing about it.
I would love to have the lives of those “workers”. Think of what you could do with a life where your job required nothing out of you. Go have 8 kids, learn conversational French, become the world champion at the knife game. They start life on near the top of Maslow’s hierarchy and the author had the gall to heavily handed compare them to chattle slaves. Yeah I am sure people getting sold for sex or getting whipped to harvest cotton all day are really comparable in lifestyle to people who are bored at work.
I spent several years working on manufacturing and logistics automation, and I urge you to reconsider your interpretation of it.
Just from your comment, you totally missed the point of the book. It’s not anti-automation. Your analysis is the exact false binary Vonnegut is interrogating. The book is actually a response to the exact attitude expressed in on your comment.
I’m happy to go into it, but Vonnegut is the master; no one will say it like he does, but you have to be open to it. If you react defensively, you’ll come away thinking he’s just anti technology, and that he must be wrong because technology is good. If you reread it with an open mind, or even reflect upon it again, you might find particularly important insights for the likes of you and me.
Yeah this sounds like religion to me. Believe it is true and you will believe it is true. Also, you didnt address what I wrote, only the argument you think I was making
I don’t fault your interpretation. There is a reason Vonnegut uses the term “spiritual” throughout the book. At least for me, I would describe my understanding of the book to have required a spiritual/moral shift before I could really understand the image being painted.
I also read God Bless You Mr. Rosewater first of the two, so maybe that colored how I interpreted Player Piano. It is a more direct argument that humans need to be cared for, independent of their economic utility.
So when I read Player Piano, it didn’t strike me as an argument against automation (which, being an engineer myself, I am entirely for), but moreso as a warning that freedom from labor doesn’t alone make a perfect life. Especially in the mid-20th century context Vonnegut was writing in, it’s an argument against the “American” style of automation, wherein you displace people from their jobs and discard them entirely. They serve no further purpose to your economy, and since your society is tightly adjoined to the economy, they serve to purpose to society…
So it’s not really a book about automation, if if I said that in my first post. It’s a book about failings of American culture, which happens to be revealed through automation. It’s about the inconsistency of a society where one’s usefulness to others is determined solely by their labor, and where that labor is constantly sought to be devalued and eliminated, and what the end of that process looks like for humans who want to find meaning in their activities.
Wonderfully put. Couldn’t agree more. It looks like you and I took away some very similar things and commented them in parallel.
A. The outcasts of that society weren’t exactly homeless. The utopia Kurt describes is one with the largest welfare state of all time.
B. Maybe people shouldn’t be friends with people who only like them because of what they can do for them at work. I am far from perfect but I don’t think I would divorce my wife if she got laid off.
C. It isn’t the best idea to tie your sense of self worth to one aspect of your life.
As I said they live in a utopia, getting better and better, but still complaining.
Yeah this sounds like religion to me. Believe it is true and you will believe it is true.
Are you saying that reading and interpreting the work of one of the most beloved authors in the English language is “like religion?” If so, you could not be more wrong. Reading, interpreting, and reinterpreting the work of those who came before us is actually the very core of any academic pursuit. It’s the most basic description of what every single academic does with their time.
Also, you didnt address what I wrote, only the argument you think I was making
I did, actually. I could not have addressed it more directly. Let me do it again, but this time greatly expanding it.
I am making the world a better place. Freeing humans from degrading filthy boring work. You know what really irked me the most about that novel? The population lived in a freaken utopia and couldn’t say one good thing about it.
It’s been more than ten years since I read the book, but were Vonnegut a less subtle writer, that could be a literal line of dialog from one of the engineers in the book. I could imagine one of them defensively saying exactly that in an argument with the minister (whose name I forget).
You are frustrated that the engineers, through their ingenuity and hard work, have given the population a utopia, but the population is ungrateful. Your attitude is the same as the upper classes in that world. What you overlook is the world’s inherently violent class structure, which is revealed as the book goes on. The lower classes in the books are relegated to meaningless existences in sad, mass-produced housing, physically segregated from the wealthy in Homestead. They are denied an active participation in society, made obsolete by the upper classes (wealthy engineers, which iirc are implied to keep it in the family), who control every aspect of society. Again, it’s been a very long time since I read this so I’m hazy on the details, but in the book, some in the lower classes are trying to actively organize to challenge this class structure. They are brutally repressed. They are infiltrated by secret police, and when they rise up in protest, are met with state violence.
What you describe as utopia is actually a repressive regime that meets the subsistence needs of its lower classes in exchange for their unquestioning acceptance of the oligarchy’s control of society, which they justify to themselves and to the lower classes as a technocratic utopia (“freeing humans from degrading filthy boring work,” as you say), but which is also perfectly willing to subjugate the lower classes using deadly force if they dare to question the existing power structure.
How you describe the world is exactly how the regime chooses to portray itself, and how the upper classes, consisting of people like you and me, view the lower classes. In fact, viewing the lower classes as ungrateful for the upper classes’ generosity is actually a staple of upper class attitudes throughout much of human history. At the beginning of the book, since we’re only given an engineer’s perspective, this is an understandable reading of the world. If you read the entire book and still finished it thinking that same thing, you completely and utterly missed the point.
You and I make technology for companies, which are mostly owned by rich people. Vonnegut is asking us to interrogate what the implied philosophy behind our work is, even if we do not intend it to be so. We try to make people free from tedious work, but if you simply ask the people who we’re supposedly liberating from work, they hate us. This is not necessarily because they like the drudgery of their work, but because the wealthy people who employ us will simply lay them off, increasing corporate profits, but relegating the now-obsolete workers to the margins of society.
If the people you and I are “freeing … from degrading filthy boring work” are actually further degraded by this so-called freedom, are we really freeing them? Maybe we should question how our society is organized if the people you and I work to “free” actually hate us for it, or as they’d put it, hate us for taking away their jobs.
If you made a utopia you would live in it. All those lower tiered workers choose to do so. No where in the book do you see them storming the Canadian border trying to get out, or setting up their own communes. Because why would they? They are at zero risk of starvation, zero risk of being homeless, zero risk of pathogens from sewage, zero risk of any of the other horrors the bulk of humanity has dealt with in the past. Entertainment alone is so inexpensive that you could use it as housing insulation. Who the fuck wouldn’t want that!?
Hey tomorrow you no longer have to work in a sheet metal factory, you get a nice house in the burbs, you get work that requires zero effort, you get a cool car, all forms of media are cheap as dirt, your wife can stay at home if she chooses, you dont have to cook if you dont want to, your 3 kids go to nice schools in safe areas, and you have enough money to go to a bar every night. Your brain and energy levels are peak so you can engage in any hobby. Oh and the only catch is you can’t literally try to overthrow the government. I know, so oppressive.
You yell about the violence in the system, has their ever been a government that didn’t have that? Go ahead and pick the nicest government you like on earth and ask yourself what would happen to you if you starting burning down buildings and attacking the powers-that-be.
And your comparison about slave owners demanding gratitude is just plain wrong. An abusive parent and a good parent both will say that they are a good one. No one is the villain of their own story. That is why you have to look at facts. And the fact is that those workers had more material wealth and agency compared to chattle slaves.
One thing you got right, they do hate us. I am despised in pretty much every factory I show up at, but it’s fine the feeling is pretty mutual and feelings don’t change facts. These places are a mess of inefficiency, waste, and poor workmanship. I have production horror stories of the union metal shops. A few months ago I came to a metal shop for an upgrade and the machinist had a recliner in the shop. Spent about 6 hours on Faceboot and listening to conservative talk radio. I swept up a bit as I was heading out and he told me that he never cleans because it isn’t his job, then sat in his recliner again.
I think the ending of the book summarized the author pretty well. The luddites had no idea how to replace the society they torched. Kurt didn’t have any solutions, he had complaints, and I can’t do anything with actionable items.
Unsurprisingly, I disagree with your interpretation of the ending. I think your interpretation of the whole book says a lot more about you than it does about Vonnegut or other people; it’s misanthropic, unempathetic, and patrician to the point of infantilizing others. I suspect that our views on what we as humans need to be fulfilled, what true freedom really is, and how we should treat each other are so far apart that there’s no bridging it. I hope you one day you reconsider. Until then, it’s been fun chatting. Good luck out there, friend.
My view is simple enough. I want humanity free from bad things. Kurt’s view is that people should be forced against their will to endure the bad. Which one is treating people like infants?
Me: bad things are bad, I am trying to remove bad things. Enjoy the world where you have everything all of the time. Where you can explore, create, procreate, screw, drink, and the only freedom you lose is one you never had to begin with. The freedom to break stuff.
Kurt: no, you must toil despite it being not required. Work shall set you free. Humans should work a job that they hate because it gives them selfworth.
How did that work out for Cambodia?
Discworld - Hogfather. In particular the speech of death about the little and big lies and how justice and mercy are simple human constructs and that in return we are basically responsible for our own happiness/misery. Since they made a movie, here exactly what I meant: Deaths speech
I was actually going to respond with the Discworld series in general, but Death’s dialogue there puts it in a nutshell. We’re not creatures of reason, but of narrative, fiction. I might not have come to that view if not for reading Terry Pratchett.
Designing freedom, by Stafford Beer
I’d been a software engineer for 15 years. In that time, in all the jobs I’ve had, I’d never once worked on anything that actually made people’s lives better, nor did I ever hear anyone else in tech ever really dive into any sort of meaningful philosophical interrogation of what digital technology is for and how we should use it. I made a few cool websites or whatever, but surely there’s more we can do with code. Digital technology is so obviously useful, yet we use it mostly to surveil everyone to better serve them ads.
Then i found cybernetics, though the work of Beer and others. It’s that ontological grounding that tech is missing. It’s the path we didn’t take, choosing instead to follow the California ideology of startups and venture capital and so on that’s now hegemonic and indistinguishable from the digital technology itself.
Even beers harshest critic is surely forced to admit that he had a hell of a vision, whereas most modern tech is completely rudderless
Definitely picking this one up. Great answer btw.
I’m so glad, especially given your username.
Not a complete list, but maybe an amusing one —
- A Wrinkle in Time
- Emergence
- Revolt in 2100
- Aristoi
- Stranger in a Strange Land
- Illuminatus!
- The Left Hand of Darkness
- The Book of the Law
- The Journal Entries of Kennet R’yal Shardik
- Gödel, Escher, Bach
- That Which Is Seen, and That Which Is Not Seen
- Le Ton beau de Marot
- Slavery’s Constitution
- Negative Math
- Programming in Haskell
- Good and Real
great list. Liber AL vel Legis is pretty wild
Cultboy got hella laid, but ended up a junkie though. As an aging dude I’d rather have Bob H’s end times than Al C’s.
The law is a decent rule to attempt in one’s life.
for sure. orgies interrupt my nap time these days!
Stranger in a Strange Land is so good.
Meanwhile, it’s the only book I actively hate. I feel like it stole a fantastic name with a story that was too “I’m 14 and I am smart”.
I probably would have loved it when I was 14.
Maybe I read it at age 17 and didn’t much care for it.
I thought the martians were genocidal self-righteous assholes who I hoped the earth would nuke. The whole idea of thinking right meant doing things right and magically didn’t sit with me for a second. You can just look around, all these really dumb animals and plants managing just fine. You don’t need to know hydrodynamics to be a fish. And if magical thinking worked no way evolution wouldn’t have exploited the hell out of it.
Still it was kinda cool to see a novel that merged sci-fi, the Gnostic Gospel of Judas, and Joseph Smith in one setting.
If anyone here liked that book go read the Gospel of Judas and have your mind blown.
Illuminatus is the most potent and interesting paradigm-shifting book I’ve ever read. It’s like an epistemological shotgun blast, guerilla ontology indeed. Anything by R. A. Wilson is advisable, but this one really shakes you loose of your preconceptions and opens the door to new perspectives.
Illuminatus! is the political weirdness of the post-JFK-assassination period; extrapolated into a psychedelic occult fantasy; as interpreted by two white male porno writers; who were on some combination of weed, acid, plastic nude martinis, and coke for most of it.
It is very much a product of a specific time period and social situation.
I’ve probably re-read it more than any other book.
Wilson went on to write some good stuff, and some utter bullshit, and he’s very clear on the fact that he’s not telling you which part is the good stuff and which part is the utter bullshit.
I’ve probably re-read it more than any other book.
I definitely have.
Honestly I don’t think he wrote any utter bullshit, as such. Anything that could be described as such, was basically intended as such, with the explicit purpose of making you a specific kind of confused. In that sense, the bullshit itself was deeply profound, in a sense.
Everything is true, and false, and meaningless. I think really grokking that, which requires the intermingling of nonsensical-sounding profundity with profound-sounding nonsense, underlies an elusive sort of dynamic enlightenment.
But what the fuck do I know?
Some people need to hear that everything is a little bit bullshit.
Some people need to hear that some things are a lot more bullshit than others.
RAW was a lot better at the first than the second.
Some people huff their own farts, metaphysically speaking.
The second is a pit stop on the way the the first, which itself is a pit stop to yet higher realizations. Some people need to figure things out for themselves, they just haven’t started asking the right questions yet. RAW excelled at assaulting you with more questions than you were really prepared to answer, and giving you the opportunity to try to figure out what he was really trying to say, without ever really giving you a solid answer. That’s why re-reads are so satisfying: every time you read it, you’ve changed enough to dramatically redefine which parts are bullshit.
If you need to be told which things are more bullshit than others, you’re not quite there yet. But it can still get you there, with enough iterations.
How did you like godel Escher Bach? Have it on my bookshelf, intending to read it eventually after my current stack.
Very, very worth a read or ten.
It’s dated, but it’s still essential in connecting math & CS with art & literature. Hofstadter was in a great place to connect disparate fields that touch on related patterns.
His AI theories seem to have come out mostly as dead ends, but that might still change.
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My story is a little different, but I resonate with that kind of change. After I found out my ex wife was cheating on me, it started the process of taking a lot of blinders off. I feel like I see reality better, but I do feel much more disheartened in trying to date.
I forgot to mention, the life saving divorce, while I wouldn’t say it change my life, was helpful at that time.
The Stranger by Albert Camus had a big impact on me as an adolescent, expressing feelings of absurdism that I previously had no words for. Snow Country by Kawabata Yasunari changed the course of my life by drawing me to Japan.
‘Thich Nhat Hanh - Heart of the Buddah’s Teachings’. I didn’t become a Buddhist, but it gave me some really useful mental tools to be happier.
I had a bit of a fucked up childhood, left home at 15, was really angry & bitter for a while. I was already many years into a general attempt to let go and be happier, I believe the knowledge from that book has made me happier and more resilient.
“Animal Liberation” by Peter Singer, which argues against speciesism and the ethical treatment of animals, as well as “Eating Animals” by Jonathan Foer, which delves into the moral complexities of eating animals and factory farming. Both these books have convinced me to go vegan. I’ve been vegan for a decade now and don’t regret it one bit.
As a side effect, I’ve also become more health conscious, because a strict vegan diet doesn’t provide everything, so I did a lot of research into what I’m eating, what my body needs (and doesn’t need) etc. As a result I feel like my health has improved a lot - my hairloss has mostly stopped, my complexion has improved, also I used to have a skin condition which is now under control, no depression episodes, and I rarely fall sick.
It’s been an ongoing process of learning though. Most recently I’ve found out about Choline, which has a critical role in neurotransmitter function and affects your mood, and thankfully I found that my diet already has enough Choline in it, so it wasn’t a worry or anything. But it’s always interesting knowing what’s in what your eating, things your body needs etc.
This Is Vegan Propaganda: (And Other Lies the Meat Industry Tells You) by Ed Winters. I think it’s tough to read this book and not be vegan before it’s finished, it’s an extremely well considered and compelling book for for anyone who likes having their views challenged.
It changed my life profoundly in both outlook and actions, as it did everybody in my life who I suggested read it.
Unlimited Memory: How to Use Advanced Learning Strategies to Learn Faster, Remember More and be More Productive - By. Kevin Horsley
This single book has affected my life and improved my day to day life. Although not all useful, it has some very useful tactics.
I don’t forget stuff as easily, I can recall better for work, notes are minimal and if I do take notes its one or two word per item. Truly life changing especially while I was a student.
The seven habits of highly effective people. Sounds like a get rich quick book but it’s actually a very profound book about what it means to be authentic to yourself and in your interactions with others. This book completely changed my life.
Thinking fast and slow. This book will give you insights into your own mind that are science based and actually explain so much of what we observe in the behaviour of ourselves and others.
I read The Power of Habit - Why We Do What We Do in Life and Business by Charles Duhigg
Not sure if it changed my life but when you mentioned your book about the seven habits of effective people I thought about this.
I think every once in a while about this habit self manipulation for your own advantage. Quite an interesting read for some though inspiration
Thinking Fast and Slow has a lot of really good info but man does it go on.
You might also like Behave by neuroscientist Robert Sapolsky if you haven’t already read it. It’s another book which explains a lot of why we are the way we are. Very interesting read; lengthy but still compelling.
Whoops, based on that prompt I was expecting the topic to be self help books. I will say The Seven Habits Of Highly Effective Teens (based on the adult version) changed my life when I was 13. “Begin with the end in mind” is such a simple little phrase, but it applies to EVERYTHING in life.
- Should I buy this shirt at the mall? Well, what esthetic do I want my wardrobe to be?
- should I eat this ice cream? Will the satisfaction outweigh the extra exercise I’ll have to do later?
- where should I move to? Does the neighborhood have the activities I imagine myself doing?
Basically, picture yourself at the end of the process and figure out the steps you need to take to get there. Work backwards until you get to the beginning, and that’s where you start. I feel like I have more direction in life because I’m working to be the person I see myself as 5 years in the future.
My kids school has really pushed this. One time I drove my eldest to an activity and when we got there I noticed that we had forgotten our bag that has everything needed for the activity. Sigh. Long drive home and she announces “I should have checked to make sure the bag was in the car, beginning with the end in mind”.
Zen and the art of Motorcycle Maintenance by Robert Persig
I love this book, warts and all. The rereads get harder as I see more flaws in both the text and Persig himself.
Regardless, I can’t deny the huge impact it had on my worldview. It helped me refine and improve the analytical mindset I take to the world around me and made me think routinely and deeply about what I value in my life and why.
I could see myself easily being obsessed with money and status at the point in my life where I am, and I’m grateful, in no short part to this book, that I’m not.
What is good? and what is bad? And who can tell us these things?
Persig does his best with these questions and gives you enough to put you on the same journey even if truly answering these questions is ultimately unachievable
- Toward a Psychology of Being by Abraham Maslow - Made me believe people are fundamentally good.
- The Hardware Hacker: Adventures in Making and Breaking Hardware by Andrew “Bunnie” Huang - Really changed the way I look at the human-made world around me.
- Dune by Frank Herbert - Because since I read Dune, I’ve now read 13 other Dune books and plan to read more.
The Enders Game series had a pretty profound effect on my worldview, and also provided a big lesson on separating art from the artist because holy shit do some of the lessons I took away from that series seem to run totally opposite to Orson Scott Card’s personal views and politics.
It’s hard to say exactly what clicked where and what it changed for me because I read them in about middle school which is kind of when people are really starting to form real opinions of the world anyway.
Major takeaways for me include
A general dislike of war, even when it’s justified you’re going to end up doing absolutely terrible things and in retrospect there often really aren’t good guys.
Politics are in their own way just as terrifying as war.
Respect for life, cultures, and viewpoints different from my own, and willingness to examine the world through those different perspectives. That doesn’t mean I agree with them, or find them acceptable, or worthy of being tolerated, but I do think it’s important to at least try to see why they think the way they do.
A whole lot of awe at the potential of genetic engineering, artificial intelligence, etc. tempered by distrust of my fellow man to use them responsibly.
If you really want to hate him read Treason. It is, well let me put it this way: they are not going to make a movie out of it anytime soon.
On the plus side we get to see him put a 19 year old boy in a dress, have him/her hide who they are, and get flirted with. Which explains a lot about Card’s outspoken homophobic views. Yep nothing to see here. Just a perfectly normal story about a boy in drag written by a 100% straight guy.
