If happiness is a person’s goal, they’ll never find it. However, for me, I tend to feel happiest when I’ve got things in balance, which means, I’m contributing/productive I’ve got an active social life and I’m taking care of myself. Happiness is a bi-product of those three working in harmony, for me.

While relationships can contribute to happiness, if a person thinks “oh a relationship will make me happy” there is an increased chance the relationship will tank.

What is productive and contributory varies.

Want some examples of a high contributor w/ a social and romantic life? Aubrey de Grey. Todd Huffman. Rion Snow. Reichart.

You also have to choose a partner well if you want to remain productive.

Yeesh max do you love to jump to conclusions and create these rigid generalizations about very complicated situations. I understand the need to “connect the dots” and see situations in a very simplified, cause-and-effect way but usually when you do this you are just doing it based on mere conjecture that makes sense in your head, when the reality is more complicated. I mean, what makes you think that “nurturing a family” is everyone’s end goal, or even that most people who are actually doing that are happy? Even the notion that everyone gets happiness from a single type of lifestyle is ridiculous. I mean,

“They try to prove, often to the opposite sex, that they are someone worth knowing by showing they are extremely competent in some unrelated discipline like science or technology. It pains me to see people with such a distorted sense of reality. Someone who acts this way surely can’t be happy.”

All this saying “they” and lumping so many people into apparently all thinking the same way is painful to me, but… the point here is: How on earth would you know? You’ve just said above that nearly all innovators innovate because of a desire to prove themselves, often to get girls. I mean, you are seriously implying that people go “I want to be an engineer so I can get laid”, SERIOUSLY? Maybe that was part of the motivation for one person or another but that seems ridiculous to ascribe that as the motivation for innovators in general, which is what you did. I just dont get how can you make such generalizations about such a huge group of people, who are defined by being engrossed in a field that they are interested in, and wave it all off by saying “they” are doing it to impress girls? Maybe some people innovate because innovating is what makes them happy, not “raising a family”? I know you know that there are many exceptions, but your style jumps to these ridiculous concrete conclusions and so you dont sound like you are living in a world of conjecture and philosophy and not the actual real world.

This is not your fault, you are just a high school student, so that’s understandable- and going to a few conferences does not elevate you to a higher level of experience, though they probably do provide interesting information. You havent been to college, or worked in these fields you are talking about. I’m not holding that against you, of course 18 year olds cant have all that experience, but on the same time you cant substitute sitting and blogging and connecting dots you believe exist as a substitute for actual experience of these things. The end result is that you have this habit of make these sweeping generalizations that make sense in your head, but dont really resemble what you are talking about because you dont have actual experience with the things you are talking and thinking about.

And you have a good head max, you really do, but just living inside it all the time isnt going to enlighten you to whats going on outside of it, no matter how smart you are.

Yes, I do need to do a better job of constraining parameters to talk more about a specific issue than generalize to contain more scenarios than I intend. The point I wanted to make was just to explore the nature between innovation, relationships, and happiness.

Good points though. I’ll try and keep these mind. I need to do a better job in covering only the issues I intend to delve into. I haven’t blogged much but practice makes perfect.

Wow, someone whose opinion you respect finally said something Max, but unfortunately you are choosing not to listen.

You don’t have to deflect everything he said, internalizing his comments shouldn’t lead you to negative conclusion. Don’t judge everything, there isn’t a “good” and “bad”, those things are only getting in the way of introspection, which is supposedly something you value.

Max you live a sheltered life. People in this country don’t even know if they’ have a job when they arrive at work in the morning and are being evicted form their houses. Don’t take this the wrong way, but you are spending thousands of dollars of someone’s hard earned money going to conferences and flying around in airplanes. No one expects you to know what life is about, you’ve only had a little taste of it. What about the kid who has to flip burgers after school, or wait tables at ihop before school, where do they fit into your paradigm? Maybe they didn’t have any other option, they might have a higher SAT than you and a higher IQ, but they live in a town where thats the only job they could find. My point is, you’re only concerned with the “people that matter”, just like all those conservative politicians you always complain about.

The most interesting part of your blog is learning about you from these posts. This latest rants exposes some of your insecurities and anxieties. Take a closer look. Although you have ascribed these tendencies to others around you, perhaps it hits a little closer to home. Personally, I think you have exposed some of your subconscious feelings without realizing it.

Finally, although there is no patent on ideas, if there was you’d be the definition of a plagiarizer. You see, although no idea is actually “original” in a sense, it is through conceiving the idea that you gain from it. Just because you can regurgitate from all that pop-literature you read doesn’t mean shit. Those guys writing those books wrote them for themselves, not for you. Max, get out of the house, get your head out of the books, and experience something real. You need to branch out, and I know thats scary for you, but right now you are preaching a bunch of crap that in reality is just your slanted (no value judgement, it is inherent to the process of reading) interpretation of someone else’s writing. I hope you get into a really competitive university, a little humbling I think would open your eyes to a whole world you’re missing out on.

Dont get your panties in a twist, don’t get defensive, maybe I’m being a dick, but that doesn’t mean everything I wrote is bullshit.
Enjoy your weekend!

Well from what I’ve seen, I dont think max regurgitates anything- he internalizes a lot of information and it’s natural and inevitable that he will repeat ideas he likes, but he certainly tries to be introspective about what’s going on around him, and he is a smart kid. Frankly, thats more than a lot of people do.

However, the crux of the issue is that none of that introspection is worth anything without real experience, and thats not something he has yet. Its not something most 18 yr olds have yet, so that’s normal, but I guess my worry from these posts is that they tend to be founded solely on conjecture and assume that they are right because the conjectures make sense to max, when its not backed up by any real experience or substantial knowledge of the subject matter.

Max I think you have a lot of potential to come up with some interesting conclusions, but in order to do so, I think its really important you go out in the world, go to college, do some work, etc. I dont think you can get the experience you need by staying at home and thinking about the world, you need to see it for yourself. I think once you have done so however, you could come up with some really insightful conclusions. But the order there is important

Hello, I can’t understand how to add your blog ( maxmarmer.com ) in my rss reader
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Did you click the orange rss icon in the top right corner of the blog?

maxmarmer.com – now in my rss reader)))
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