I didn't specify, because almost any deliberate purpose is better than the hedonistic pursuit of subjective experience. I'll give some examples:
Living a life of virtue
Discovering or creating something of lasting importance to humanity
Living a life devoted to God
Giving life to your children and descendants
Planting lupines in your neighborhood
In some sense pursuing a life of purpose is just subjective experience. But I don't think this is what people mean when they talk about 'subjective life' as in the essay. One quote that rubbed me the wrong way was
Most directly, we should not waste children’s time. The motivation for making school more rewarding and less stultifying should not primarily be its effect on outcomes later in life, but rather that childhood is itself part of life, a very important part.
This suggests that the feeling of boredom is bad in itself. But that's not right. Boredom is a useful feeling, in the same way that hunger or anger are useful for motivating useful behavior (not starving, and protecting one's place in the social hierarchy, respectively). Boredom is useful to motivate one to learn new things. But these feelings are only useful on average; there are circumstances where indulging one's boredom or hunger or anger would be counterproductive. Treating the feeling as bad or good in itself, and the cessation or increase in the feeling as one's goal, in the extreme means a life of hedonism. It doesn't matter whether one is focused on one's children or oneself; the hedonism is what's mistaken.
I'm not saying anything new here that philosophers haven't been talking about for hundreds of years, but this is bound to be a common objection to the essay.
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Notes -
Define your terms.
I didn't specify, because almost any deliberate purpose is better than the hedonistic pursuit of subjective experience. I'll give some examples:
In some sense pursuing a life of purpose is just subjective experience. But I don't think this is what people mean when they talk about 'subjective life' as in the essay. One quote that rubbed me the wrong way was
This suggests that the feeling of boredom is bad in itself. But that's not right. Boredom is a useful feeling, in the same way that hunger or anger are useful for motivating useful behavior (not starving, and protecting one's place in the social hierarchy, respectively). Boredom is useful to motivate one to learn new things. But these feelings are only useful on average; there are circumstances where indulging one's boredom or hunger or anger would be counterproductive. Treating the feeling as bad or good in itself, and the cessation or increase in the feeling as one's goal, in the extreme means a life of hedonism. It doesn't matter whether one is focused on one's children or oneself; the hedonism is what's mistaken.
I'm not saying anything new here that philosophers haven't been talking about for hundreds of years, but this is bound to be a common objection to the essay.
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