Letting go of the Fairytale and Taking Personal Responsibility

Letting go of the Fairytale and Taking Personal Responsibility(businessbackpacker.com)

16 points by Derrek 16 years ago | 6 comments

rauljara 16 years ago |

The author looked for relationships to primarily get her: 1) Money 2) Someone who was perfect in the 'Disney' sense of never causing you any trouble.

She then concludes that relationships are a distraction from life's real goal of making money.

Given those two goals, I can't fault her for deciding that relationships are worthless, because they are only very, very rarely a good way to get your hands on money, and people of Disney level flawlessness just don't exist.

But those are really shitty, really selfish reasons to get into a relationship. If you are exclusively interested in only your own needs, of course your relationships will fail. There's no relating going on. It's only about you, and maybe money.

If you are, on the other hand, interested in being with and getting to know another human being, it is possible to have very fulfilling relationships. I would much rather my life be about that, than about pursuing a 15k per year raise.

gizmo 16 years ago | |

I don't think blogposts like these need all kinds of disclaimers. Of course relationships are about the actual relationship. It doesn't need to be stated explicitely.

What I got from the blogpost is that people shouldn't wait for somebody to bail them out financially. That's sound (but not very insightful) advice.

To reduce that to "being exclusively interested in money" is rubbish.

derefr 16 years ago | | |

Hacker News readers seem to apply the Principle of Charity to insightfulness when reading: we would rather think that someone is making an interesting-but-wrong point than a boring-yet-right one.

joanna 16 years ago | |

Her focus on earning money definitely detracts from the overall call to strive for the life one desires independently and to encourage development of oneself beyond relationships, but I am grateful for her bluntness in addressing these issues.

Derrek 16 years ago |

She makes a lot of good points that relate to anyone on the forum who's wants to start a business/startup. "The real deal is that we need to take ownership of ourselves, and take it up a notch when it comes to personal responsibility."

roc 16 years ago |

I honestly got distracted by the format and gave up before I got too far into the content.

The article is a veritable cornucopia of formatting. Just, wow.