Why would you get rid of it? At very least it’s fun.

I have only seen the latter in a quiz from the Association for Computing Machinery but I instantly recognized the need for such an answer, for example when the question contains an embedded assumption.

As an example here, I am not a music person, and there was no way to say “I don’t listen to music” in the music question. As another, I’ve been married for thirty years and have no idea what people do to find mates these days.

I was in one of the bobo parts of Atlanta recently and it struck me that I could find the same slice of hipster urbanism anywhere. So while moving to Atlanta from Philadelphia, say, once meant something significant, it seems to have little meaning now.

I got ‘Comfortable’. I agree, for what it is worth. I like my life. But I can’t help but think the *quiz* really would not agree.

I am a software engineer that changes projects every few months, frequently working for startups, a Catholic convert (I read my way in by study of theology and philosophy, to the bafflement of family, and without knowing any Catholics), fly a plane, ride a motorcycle, smoke a pipe, own horses, and have been asked to give lectures three times in the past year on subjects outside (literature and theology) my profession.

I am “comfortable”, the answer is right, but I still can’t shake the feeling that quiz has a bit of a problem.

Trailblazers blaze trails to somewhere. Strivers strive for something. What do they do when they get there? Or attain what they were striving for?

Life doesn’t stand still for long, and likely soon info they will have to blaze somewhere new, or strive for something else, but I think these categories miss the importance of leisure, rest, reward, and delight in a balanced life: “Delight is necessary for happiness. For it is caused by the appetite being at rest in the good attained.” (Summa I-II, Q4)

I think what Tyler is trying to get from ten different ways is that a rut is not fulfilling, whether that rut is the same work, people, places, or habits, so people should do new things, meet new people, try new foods, go new places.

All of which is good in its way, but also ultimately empty (the new place is not that much different than the old place, the new people than the old people); hence the significant, though probably inadvertent, inversion of means and ends in things like his choice of “striving”.

He would do well, I think, to read Josef Pieper’s monograph the Philosophical Act (in Leisure the Basis of Culture). In the snippet below, I think Tyler would start by agreeing, but because his own view seems to be contracted to production and amusement, his answer, rather than leisure and contemplation, is to work/produce or play *harder* at an ever changing array of new and different things.

Suffice to say that love, religion, philosophy, and art do not fair well under such a view, as all those require a certain stability and tradition (ie, things handed down) to thrive.

The refreshment which we sometimes need for them is something more like what Tolkien referred to as ‘Recovery’ rather than constant change. Something which, in Lewis’ words, ‘restores to them the rich significance that has been hidden by “the veil of familiarity”‘.

But back to Pieper:

“Everyone whose life is completely filled by his work… is a proletarian because his life has shrunk inwardly, and contracted, with the result that he can no longer act significantly outside his work, and perhaps can no longer conceive of such a thing.

“Man steps beyond the chain of ends and means, that binds the world of work, in love, or when he takes a step toward the frontier of existence, deeply moved by some existential experience, for this, too, sends a shock through the world of relationships, whatever the occasion may be–perhaps the close proximity of death. The act of philosophizing, genuine poetry, any aesthetic encounter, in fact, as well as prayer, springs from some shock. And when such a shock is experienced, man senses the non-finality of this world of daily care; he transcends it, takes a step beyond it.

“The philosophical act, the religious act, the aesthetic act, as well as the existential shocks of love and death, or any other way in which man’s relation to the world is convulsed and shaken–all these fundamental ways of acting belong naturally together, by reason of the power which they have in common of enabling a man to break through and transcend the workaday world.”

I think any Californian should not get credit for living a neighborhood where they are a minority. That is everyone in our state at some time in their lives! (Heck if you don’t move this could be true.)