The Hurricane Comparison

[einbert]

[ QUOTE ]
By your logic (and I hope I'm not misinterpreting), chaos governs all and we shouldn't be overly happy to win a poker hand or to make a scientific discovery because it's all part of the grand ebb-and-flow...

... but then we shouldn't care about the hurricane victims either for the same reason, right?

[/ QUOTE ]
Just woke up, I apologize for not having time to digest your post thoroughly right now.

I will say this:
I believe there are reasons to be happy, but success is a bad reason to be happy. If someone values himself/gets his happiness/contentment/enjoyment out of success he will be miserable with himself when he fails. There's a problem there.

The second thing is that there is really no reason to feel sorry for yourself. This is a destructive thing that no good can come of. It's also exactly what the OP in the other thread was doing, and why I was so perturbed at him.

[revots33]

I am not a philosophy expert. But common sense tells me that complaining about busting out of a poker tournament while other people have just drowned to death/lost everything they have, is more than a little bit self-centered.

I'm not saying that to put anyone down. I know I've done the same thing myself. I think as human beings we all overstimate the importance of our own problems. Innocent children ARE starving to death in many parts of the world right now. Women are being tortured and gang-raped in the genocide in Darfur. Thousands drowned to death in New Orleans. These are all things worth remembering the next time we want to bitch about our AA hand getting cracked.

Does that mean we no longer have the right to complain about anything? No. But I think it's helpful to step back and realize how lucky most of us really are. Many people on this planet would give anything to have a bad run at poker be their biggest problem.

[Georgia Avenue]

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Does that mean we no longer have the right to complain about anything? No. But I think it's helpful to step back and realize how lucky most of us really are. Many people on this planet would give anything to have a bad run at poker be their biggest problem.

[/ QUOTE ]

Actually this is why we should never complain about anything. I don't mean we shouldn't try to solve problems in our lives, or our games, but complaining never did that.

On the other hand, sometimes we can't help but blow off steam by whining and twirling plush seat-backs and screamin DAAAAA and etc. So in terms of the dt vs einbert debate, I would say that einbert is right in his big picture perspective, but dt is correct to say that reminding people that their small problems are smaller than others is kinda rude, and serves even less purpose than complaining.

SO they're both right. Yaaaay. KITTENS.

[dtbog]

[ QUOTE ]
I am not a philosophy expert. But common sense tells me that complaining about busting out of a poker tournament while other people have just drowned to death/lost everything they have, is more than a little bit self-centered.


[/ QUOTE ]

I agree, it's self-centered; I maintain that everything we do on a daily basis is equally self-centered.

Example:

- buying any luxury item, where luxury is defined as "not essential to life"
- complaining about anything
- dedicating time to anything but curing cancer and solving world hunger

[Triumph36]

People are drowning and losing everything they own every day.

It's a sad situation in New Orleans - it's a sad situation around the world.

It's one thing to be grateful for what you have - it's another thing to use a tragedy to dull your own pain, which is what it sounds like some here are advocating. There's two sides to taking that far-reaching perspective, the one of gratitude and a reveling in your own irrelevance - or the callous "well, i've got it bad, but they've got it worse" - showing no gratitude for anything and selfishly using other people's suffering to prop up one's own mistakes.

I don't know if I'm quite getting across the point I want to.

[Lestat]

How can one oppose your argument? It's 100% correct. However...

Disasters such as these do put things into perspective. I went on an 11k slide last week in poker. I was feeling pretty darn pissed about it. But you know what? I watched and heard some of the stories coming out of NO and I realized there are worse things than losing 11k.

Numerous times I've heard sports coaches, announcers, and players reiterate the same thing after a major calamity about their respective sports. It's only a game they say, and what we do is really insignificant in the scheme of things. Of course, they are right as well.

So while whoever this guy was (I didn't read his post), he was probably out of line to come on a poker forum and say what he did. It's not his place to do so. But in a way, I'll bet we can all agree he's got a point.