I have a "free spirit" in my family, a really gifted man who just couldn't settle. He's now in his 60s and does mosaics for people all around the UK.
He doesn't own a house and is constantly staying with friends and family.
He tried working in construction jobs and other things, settling with a family and buying a house.
However after his divorce and other things he is most happy with his campervan conversion and parking it on offroads from motorways.
I asked him once, "Uncle, why can't you stay in once place". To which he replied, "Why do you have to stay in one place with brick walls?".
Another famous Olympian, Eddie the Eagle spent a few years homeless traveling for winter qualifiers for the Olympics.
I'm the "free spirit" in my family. I regularly take months or even years off between jobs, travel a lot, and I've never wanted to own a home. Usually, I'm fortunate to earn enough between travel stints to pay my own way, but I still end up camping out with family for a few months every few years, after relocating from another state or country. If I didn't have family to lean on once in a while, I'd be forced to stick with jobs longer than I can usually stand to. I'm really not that far off from a situation like Twigg's, except that I can tolerate the office work a little better.
same here. I had to run all my life (both literally doing marathons and several ultras every year as well as moving to a new country every 3-5 years ... probably rooted in having to move every 2 years on avg as a child).
I'm very sensitive to people on the edge. Mstly because I feel very much part of this edge. Reading Orwell's "Down and out in Paris and London" made me rethink homelessness. There is a lot of stigma around it and most people I know think this would never happen to them. All it takes is a couple of falls in their life, or events that are hard enough to upset what is a fragile balance. I think anyone (no matter the intelligence) could be sitting in the street without a roof, it has nothing to do with education, friends, or their intelligence, once life has just kicked them hard or long enough.
Where I live right now (a former war zone full of people with PTSD from the Yugoslav war horrors) there are many homeless and even more close to the edge of it. Thankfully we have the dream of a EU membership making everything better for the people here, but which unfortunately does nothing for this places (other than create a massive brain drain that makes the situation even more precarious for those off-grid or those not wanting to be part of the system).
As someone who routinely has family "lean on" me, I can tell you its an incredibly disrespectful and foolish thing to do. Your inability to see how you effect your family is disgraceful. You want to be a fuck off who cant support himself thats your choice, but running back to family whenever things get tough is nothing short of childish and parasitic. get a fucking life
Brings to mind the story about CEO who doesn't have phone, but then uses employees and friends phones when "absolutely necessary". The article was about how cool and freeing it was to live without a phone...
Off topic, but I went without a phone for about 9 months (technically, I had a phone, it just wasn't connected, so it really just acted as a portable wifi device) and it really was quite liberating and freeing knowing that once I left home/the office, I was not contactable. I didn't use other people's phones, I just used the internet (on my home wifi or office wifi) to communicate with people. It did mean I had to plan things ahead of time instead of the usual quick call "hey, I'm at X, where are you" type thing, but hey, we did that before mobile phones too, without problem. The only thing I really did miss was google/apple maps.
Eventually a family member got annoyed though and bought me a new sim. :/
Of course it is not possible, starting with the question of where to lay your head at night without payment. The only thing I come up with is U. S. National Forest or Bureau of Land Management land. Any other options I come up with are quasi-legal at best.
I have nothing against free spirit and eternal roamers, but to me they usually don't really seem serene, unrelated to their living choices. Twiggs especially does not : she seems very anxious, her family wouldn't take her for a while. It screams mental health issues, as it often does in such cases.
The definition of "free spirit" is someone that lives their own life on their own means and accord while staying away from societies norms.
Someone that constantly (or most of the time) depends on other people's work to sustain themselves and to have a place to stay, aren't free spirits, they are just piggybacking on the effort of people that live according to society's norms.
I don't think this story is about a "free spirit". Twigg was a determined athlete who doggedly pursued her passion while she could and became the best in her field. But her success in sports didn't translate over to another career.
According to the article, Twigg has only been homeless for five years, and she is currently 56 years old. Twigg wasn't really a "free spirit"- She held down jobs, had kids, and made a normal life for herself up until her 50's.
So I feel that this story is instead about an older tech worker who has aged out of the workforce. As a 40-something developer who has already experienced age discrimination as well as the realization that many of my skills are becoming outdated, I feel for her. Without a nest-egg, many of us may very well be in her situation in our 50's.
Less of a “free spirit” than a “treatment resistant homeless person.” Social workers know the type. She goes to pains to point out that she’s homeless by choice.
If she's resistant, it seems to be out of a sense of empathy for other people in her situation, rather than mental illness or some other issue:
>“I felt at one time that I couldn’t accept housing because there were all these other people who need it”
>“The point is not so much that I need help, it’s that there are a bunch of people who need help — 12,000 in this area, half a million in the country,” Twigg said. “Help should be provided for everybody, not just a few.”
Classifying empathy as a mental illness captures much of what’s wrong with society. Similarly, being unable or unwilling to toil away at a low paying it desk job may actually show some amount of sanity that the rest of us lack.
I didn’t say she was mentally ill. I said she is treatment resistant and homeless by choice. Talk to a social worker, her type is a lot more common than you think.
It's because her brain won't let her. She suffered from trauma as a child. I bet if you did a brain scan on her, she'd have an overdeveloped amygdala. She's in constant fight, flight or freeze mode. There are examples in the actual article demonstrating this.
According to the article, Twigg has only been homeless for five years
No, the article is a bit confusing on this point. Read through the whole thing, though: Twigg was homeless as a kid, before she was ever a top tier cyclist. Her mother kicked her out of the house, for some reason the article doesn't explain. This most recent stretch of homelessness has only been five years though.
Why are we assuming that it was Twigg’s actions that caused her mother to kick her out? It’s just as likely (if not more) that her mother was crazy and/or abusive, and at the very least it was not a traditional family experience—they were living in a basement, not a house!
I'm feeling for her. Finding the right work is never easy but it seems reconversion after pro-sport can be really tricky, especially for these sports where it's hard to earn enough to make a living. From all the examples I read through the years I got the impression that the least disrupting kind of reconversion in these cases is have the luck to find a way to somehow stay in your sport, trainer, or work in the federation or something like that, but of course easier said than done, you're certainly not alone with this simple idea, and of course I think it's even more difficult when you're a woman.
>and of course I think it's even more difficult when you're a woman. //
Would you mind explaining why? I'd imagine how difficult it is to move to the coaching/administration level was more a function of the particular sport? Are you thinking just about differences in the level of funding?
Not at all. Simple. Always (until now at least) a prejudice against women when positions have limited numbers to fill. And of course, the whole area of sport is biaised against women, for instance, for her sport there is still no real tour de france for women in cyclism, in 2019.
[I'm not at all denying your hypothesis. Just wishing to probe the issue further.]
When women are choosing their coaches do they exhibit the same sort of choices, that you called prejudice? Maybe in general men are better at coaching? Are you assuming it is prejudice, or is that demonstrable?
I wonder if sportsmen perceive that more successful sportsmen make better coaches, so female sportsmen think that males are better because of the monetary bias?
The bias in sport seems to be primarily biological. Your second clause doesn't answer why it's harder for women already at the pinnacle of their sport to move in to "retirement" posts (coach, admin, advocacy): besides prejudice do you have any other hypotheses.
I imagine the travel involved is similar to being an itinerant salesman; if there are self-selective pressures that differ by the sexes then I could see similar proportions to that field.
Again a simple example. Track cycling always been more difficult for athletes to make a living from, even for men. A lot of them either are integrated in traditional pro-teams or shift to road pro-cycling after their accomplishments on track. For instance Bradley Wiggins started on track then later won TdF. So part of my point was saying when there is less opportunity to make something like that (there is no true TdF for women, therefore less money, therefore less opportunities to shift from track) then to me there is an obvious difference between opportunities offered to women than men in track cycling.
If nothing else, there’s a lot less money available and that’s around the level where there are a lot of threshold effects — not “do I buy a big house or a small one?” but “can I pay my rent?”. That makes it harder on the athletes and fewer opportunities to be a coach/trainer, and they all pay less.
Only in the past year has it become mandatory for women at an elite level of cycling to be paid a salary and it's less than beginning male pros who are just starting out. Probably less than a dozen women make over five figures a year. 95% of the advertising money in cycling is generated from the men's Tour de France. The organization that runs the Tour de France and a few other races, these are mostly for men with sometimes a day or two set aside for women's races. All the money gets generated by the men's events, gets poured back into creating men's events. For a different type of story, we could look at women's tennis. The cigarette brand Virginia Slims became the sponsor, the sport was televised, and the women started earning ballpark what the men were at least in prize money back in the 70's. It helped that there were few women at the top of tennis and they organized together.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virginia_Slims_Circuit
There are a few superstars in cycling but the farm system or whatever you want to call it is full of potential riders to replace the current ones so it's too easy to get strike breakers if cyclists tried to do the same thing.
Pair programming and mobbing are tools which may be appropriate for some situations.
Unfortunately when tool use is mandated without applying critical thinking, it often results in a great deal of waste. Mandated collaboration is also very susceptible to abuse as it typically provides an additional layer of obfuscation to shield low performing leechers.
Doesn't have to be pair programming. Just having two employees next to eachother working on different parts of the same project can make it a social workplace. If you aren't into it the other person will probably get the hint and not talk too much.
I guess this is the overtraining hampering growth I've heard about as a kid. Being an olympic level athlete makes a lot of hormones to whack.
I don't mind the "group" aspect so much as long as it's supportive, focusing on the team's goals and giving people space/creative freedom/thinking freedom.
Now, Pair programming as in "sit next to your colleague for hours per day" is just BS
I am a developer now, was a PM, and was a developer before that. Even with actively reaching out to people to talk to, my day to day always felt objectively solitary, and certainly solitary compared to what I experienced as a PM. That was what originally drove me away from engineering, and when I went back I got reminded of that fact.
While programming is to a degree a collaborative effort, the act of sitting down is generally a solitary one (unless you happen to be in the 1% of companies that does pair programming extensively). I feel that she could have a place in programming, but there's the problem of finding the right company culture where collaboration is explicitly a bigger focus that would maybe allow somebody like her to thrive. (That's before even considering issues like a spotty resume and age-ism).
Even so, there's a significant difference between programming or a job in sales or PR or management or etc., anything where your core job is dealing with people.
In-between coding there is more human interaction and the craft of coding itself became more social on an abstract level (code should be more communicative and all).
But I would still say it is far from really social jobs - after school, I worked at a home for elderly people, and everyday left me exhausted. After work as a programmer, my social batteries feel much more charged.
One could make programming an extremely social endeavour though, i.e. by constant pair programming (two of Googles best Software Engineers are doing this).
I also would like to reiterate that her context used to be different before - no judgements. As a competitive pro athlete, you are constant asked and in check with your body and/or emotions. There is also a greater sense of protection/support from the coaches and people involved. Whereas in the professional life, it is usually the opposite, managers are rarely willing to protect employee but extract results at their expense and coworkers couldn’t care less if you have a lower back ache, etc.
It is jungle and can be confusing/sad/demotivating to realize that your best is no longer at their best interest.
Yet, I find myself as developer still fortunate to have somewhat rational managers and the market condition still in our side mostly.
It is for show, real work still gets done by solitary programmers.
Some people may have the capacity for pair programming but I doubt that it is sustainable. The conclusion of the famous Steele/Stallman session is this:
"My first thought afterward was: it was a great experience, very intense, and that I never wanted to do it again in my life."
The only excellent, productive teams I’ve ever worked with wrote software as a team. Not pair programming or mobbing, but a group discussing the plan and codebase constantly in person or over chat, reviewing eachother’s PRs, occasionally meeting to hash out a sticky architecture point.
Yes, they then went to their desks, alone, and coded it all up. And yes, they all had the skills to actually put ideas into code. But to say the real work only gets done in isolation ignores the majority of the amazing collaborative work that makes great software.
Calling XP "working together" is extremely reductive. And pair programming is only a small part of it. When it was introduced as a methodology, it was a pretty radical departure from widely accepted development practices at that time.
She sounds like a great person and I hope things work out for her. It's hard to find the right context for her without painting her in a bad light. Some people are eager to call her (or people like her) lazy, conveniently ignoring the fact that nobody really wants to live this way. Society as it is designed now doesn't know what to do with people like her, so they're either ignored or just given shelters and... That's it? Seems like a societal failing on some level.
Can you point to a solution besides giving them shelter and just sort of tolerating it?
I mean, there’s different mechanisms for shelter — family, public housing, NGOs, etc, and we can talk about how to tweak those knobs as a culture — but I can’t think of what else cultures have done, besides various levels of housing people who just want to float.
My comment implied that I'm not sure what else could be done or what should be done. I do feel it should be talked about. What are the root causes? What do these people actually need? What are they lacking? Who are they in the first place? Why are they where they are?
There was nothing to suggest this woman doesn’t care about being homeless.
This thread is wild, from people calling this woman mentally ill, to lazy, to simply not caring about being homeless. It’s certainly more a reflection on the people making these comments and our society than any reflection on her.
Strong disagree. All those explanations are plausible. Without pathologizing her, this is still true by her own admission: She is treatment resistant and homeless by choice
>She is treatment resistant and homeless by choice
I think it’s significantly more complex. It would appear she became homeless through financial/employment issues but elects to not accept what she sees as special treatment which would secure her housing. It reminds me of John McCain electing to stay a Prisoner of War despite being given the opportunity to be returned because of his status as the son of an admiral. Yet It’s odd to say McCain was a POW by choice, he wanted his presence/story to bring to light the story of all POWs, he wanted to be treated the same, just as this woman clearly wants light shed on all homeless not just special treatment/help/housing because her status.
She suffered from homelessness as a child and yet began college at 14, became a world champion/Olympian, even appears to have returned to school successfully after she stopped competing. I mean come on with an experience like that people are here calling her lazy and mentally ill? No doubt mental health issues will follow any homeless child for life, but the track record is clear the woman isn’t lazy and certainly capable, To return to homelessness in her 50’s is tragic, and I’ll double down and say for society to blame her because she is being offered charity and she refuses to accept on principal and then calling her situation a choice is a double tragedy and again more a reflection on society than her.
Dude she’s treatment resistant. Talk to a social worker. Her story is not as special as you think. She’s a pretty classic case of a treatment resistant homeless person. And yes she is making a choice just like John McCain made a choice to remain a POW. To say “but they made a choice because X altruistic reason!” does not mean they did not make a choice.
The whole idea that somebody could be so lazy as to become homeless, without any other issues, is somewhat absurd. Being homeless is terribly uncomfortable. A truly lazy person would find it unbeatable.
Interesting question. I guess most people think of depression when imagining advanced forms of laziness, but maybe determined laziness can be a form of ascetism too?
It seems natural to me - a reflection of harsh reality on this planet. You work for yourself, or you perish. You see this in all living beings. We're animals just like them, bound by the same harsh rules.
Many anthropologists seem to think that a lot of hunter-gatherer populations had a fairly laid back life in terms of hours worked per week. It seems plausible to me that unnecessarily industrious tribes living in rainforest could overtax their environment, for example.
A lot of people who appear lazy are just paralyzed by other things. If it wasn't for living at home, my son would probably wind up homeless just for a lack of coping skills. And he wouldn't be able to get out of it, because of a lack of coping skills. That's just how he's wired.
From reading the story, it sounds a lot like a mental health issue.
- Started at UW at age 14 while competing.
- Had a programming job, quit to go back to cycling.
- She had a job, disappeared for 4 days, only to return, freak out and quit in fear of being fired.
- Had a support job, got fired, returned to Seattle and didn't even bother applying for another job.
- Won't accept help from people who found out about her state.
“The point is not so much that I need help, it’s that there are a bunch of people who need help — 12,000 in this area, half a million in the country,” Twigg said. “Help should be provided for everybody, not just a few.”
She needs some sort of counselling and help with life skills. Her line of thinking isn't even, "If I sort myself out, then maybe I can help some of the people I know".
society medicalizing it via the lens of psychology is not always helpful. These people need help, but teaching them to be part of the system again (which they rejected or which rejected them) can give them even more the feeling of not being understood. Urban living presses us into a pattern not everyone is cut out for or will find worth living.
but what do I know. kids today are put on Ritalin like it was candy, and everyone has to march in lockstep. If you don't you're lazy, or a bum. To quote Pulp Fiction:
VINCENT: So if you’re quitting the life, what’ll you do?
JULES: That’s what I’ve been sitting here contemplating. First, I’m gonna deliver this case to Marsellus. Then, basically, I’m gonna walk the earth.
VINCENT: What do you mean, walk the earth?
JULES: You know, like Caine in “KUNG FU.” Just walk from town to town, meet people, get in adventures.
VINCENT: How long do you intend to walk the earth?
JULES: Until God puts me where he want me to be.
VINCENT: What if he never does?
JULES: If it takes forever, I’ll wait forever.
VINCENT: So you decided to be a bum?
JULES: I’ll just be Jules, Vincent – no more, no less.
EDIT: ofc medicalizing the problem is what people do because that way they become the problem of a therapist, and we can sleep better because we know that a professional will look after them (it's easier to deal with them by just looking at their disease instead of the human behind the disease - "and anyway how could we possibly help somebody that far gone and who obviously doesn't even want to be helped").
For anyone who doesn't know this yet: German prisons (probably not just in Germany but other places in Europe) are full of homeless people that are there for not paying the tram/bus fare (often intentional in order to survive the colder months of the year).
Also for all the people who wonder how can anyone let themselves go so low and lie in the street with pants full of shit, it helps with not getting raped (it doesn't help though with avoiding being doused with lighter fluid and set on fire unfortunately).
I think it's more an existential crisis that can only be solved through some sort of combination of psychotherapy, drug therapy or self reflection.
Either way it needs to bring about a profound philosophical breakthrough that permanently changes your psychology.
I think a lot of problems we have in society are symptoms of psychological causes. Toffler's Future Shock posits that technology is accelerating this societal pathology. I also think that it's an incredibly difficult problem to overcome because there is no mass market or scalable cure... the antidote is a very personal journey of transformation.
The closest thing I've come across to a mass market cure is the profound experience playing Neir: Automata gives you if you manage to get far enough. Unfortunately, this is a philosophical masterpiece that is only going to be experienced by JRPG fans or truely open minded video game connoisseurs. In other words, it has a lot of preconditions. Still, Neir: Automata gives me hope that there could be a mass market solution to the existential malaise suffered in modern times.
That last bit really got to me too. It seems like a lot of pride and guilt are mixed in with whatever else might be going on. Yes, 12,000 people there, half a million in the country, but someone is trying to help her. So if she would let them, they could then help someone else. And then maybe she could double the effort by helping out others herself.
That all seems so easy sitting here in my air conditioned office and not having experienced anything in her life. I'm sure it's far more complicated than that.
What is definitively a societal failing to you is a personal moral failing to others. I don't think it helps anybody to state these things in absolutes, especially when opinions tend to vary greatly, and I was more interested in provoking discussion about the topic as opposed to making any sort of moral judgment.
Only if we entertain the thought that some people just randomly seems to fail on a personal level, in some areas. That is, of course, a ridiculous notion.
But not half as ridiculous as confusing it with a moral issue.
That surprised me too, but, on second thought, elite athletic training is all about passing limits that apply to everyone else. It's not that weird that some of the unintended consequences are also unheard of in the general population.
You can grow into your early twenties or so. Unlikely to grow after that even if administered extra HGH (human growth hormone). At age 26 it seems very weird!
They make it sound like it was because she was burning fewer calories and had some left over to grow, but I don't think it works that way. My uneducated guess is that it's a posture thing; he spine probably stretched or relaxed in some way after she stopped spending her entire waking life hunched over pedaling.
it might just be coincidence since some kids still have a final push of growth with that age.
But children pushed into extreme sports (or "voluntarily pushing themselves") often fail to grow. You can see this with ballet dancers who start too early or gymnasts starting too early.
I think Grant Hill said he grew a couple of inches in college. People say Kevin Durant is still growing. The guy is tall as some centers in the NBA now.
I suspect you can keep growing a few years past 18. I suspect you can stop growing a few year before 18 as well. I don't think 18 is set in stone but an average age when people reach their adult height. But I think gaining an inch at 26 is rare. But she is an olympic medalist and a rare person.
"Olympic medal winner" is like a golden ticket in the fitness trainer industry. There's a lot of rich people who would be willing to pay over the odds to be trained by her.
She sounds like a person who would have a hard time fooling herself into taking the money. There's little if any good a professional athlete can do for regular person who wants to get/stay fit. She's good at taking health compromises to the extreme in exchange for performance. The exact opposite of what a regular person needs.
The value of the personal trainer for the average person looking to get into slightly better-than-average shape is dispensing advice along pretty well-understood guidelines and helping them overcome their self-discipline issues, which is where speaking with the authority of an Olympian adds value even though the training regimes aren't going to be remotely similar.
Of course, she might want to stay well away from her past career for other reasons, whether it's boredom, self-consciousness, frustration or a strong desire to draw a line under it
(FWIW I know an Olympic medallist who made plenty of money from endorsements and speaking engagements and could probably have had a media career but had absolutely no desire to do that or become a trainer/ambassador after his retirement, choosing to became a builder's apprentice instead, because he liked the idea of building stuff rather than because he needed the money)
I knew a world class track athlete who also left the sport completely. To her it was something that parents and coaches had forced on her so she got out as soon as she could despite all the success.
In general I agree with you but there are plenty of people who will pay big money to be trained by a gold medalist not because it makes sense but just for the title. The gold medalist then has to give the same advice every other trainer would give.
This is very interesting. I've always wondered about how tech jobs require endless preening and showing-off for what are often not exactly jobs that require a lot of intellectual ability.
"You want a job in ML ? Yes, learn these absurd frameworks, publish a few papers in so-and-so conferences. Then we'll let you do some clickrate optimization for our website. "
No wonder, tech in the US has a diversity problem. Not everyone wants to be this way.
Homelessness is the tip of the housing iceberg. Right behind the homeless are those who are a paycheck, or emergency, from losing everything. Behind them are millions of paying out there earnings in high rent, forced to share apartments to live where the job pays. Fronting it all are upper-middle class people, foreign investors, and venture capital, buying up properties to rent out.
The cause is not a lack of "affordable housing", it's a lack of housing, period. What's not affordable are regulations and competing with real estate capital. What's not affordable is spending most of your income on rent, and this is hardly a choice for most people right now.
People will stare, and think, gosh this homeless situation is sad, inhumane, drugs/mental, w/e, but meanwhile, the shortage of housing and the affordability to create more is going to make it worse for everybody, especially those who are stuck in the middle with increasing rents and stagnant wages.
"What's not affordable is spending most of your income on rent, and this is hardly a choice for most people right now."
Not a choice? Don't you enter into a rental agreement via choice? I've never met anyone who's said they were forced to rent some place.
I don't necessarily disagree with the housing shortage, but there's reasons for that. Look at state, local laws and nimby's that pass and influence local zoning restrictions. San Francisco is a perfect example of that process gone awry.
Want affordable rent? Then you can still choose not to live in one of the areas that is anti-housing.
I wish people didn't trivialize the struggle with moving from a metropolitan area, as if leaving everything and everyone close to you is a simple, rational, mathematical decision to save a few hundred a month on rent.
The term "landlord" has to go away. We are not in mid-evil times anymore:
1. It should be made financially speaking prohibitively expensive to be a residential landlord. I.e. buy a house and charge others rent to live in it. Tax it at 100%. Done!
2. Change zoning/building codes to allow modern and more efficient construction, allow people to get easy financing to build more HIGH QUALITY and affordable housing.
3. Change mortgage laws to make it possible for more financially responsible families to build and own homes.
I kind of agree with many others here that it sounds like a mental health issue. But I also think that the story is more complicated than that.
We shouldn't neglect the impact on the brain a professional sports career has. I've seen it many times. The amount of sacrifice and energy put into something like this leads to a very unbalanced lifestyle, which is usually encouraged from all sides (parents, coaches, friends). Most often, the only positive emotion athletes experience is that joy of achieving a goal, and this quickly starts becoming an addiction. Especially in sports where not a lot of money is involved, passion and perseverance play a huge role in personal motivation and these sports usually attract athletes that put everything on hold in their life for their minute in the spotlight.
Unfortunately, only a minor fraction of athletes ends their career by choice. Usually, lack of success or injuries tend to force people to retire with unfinished business. This hits the "addicted" athlete very hard, and in an environment where it is generally not advisable to show weakness, can lead to severe mental health issues quickly.
Speaking from personal experience, life is pretty dull after being forced to retire. I fell into a deep existential crisis, mostly because the thing that was responsible for most of the joy in my life wasn't even remotely fun anymore, even as a simple hobby. The fact that I knew I wasn't on top of my game anymore, and I am not investing 100% of my energy into improving made it a pretty dull experience. On top of that, most of my social environment was still connected to that sport, so I wasn't really able to walk away and focus entirely on something different. And even worse, everything else I tried felt meaningless, I felt like it wasn't worth it if I didn't invest 100% of my energy into something I was passionate about. For me, nothing compares to the joy of pursuing a passion and putting everything I have into it.
Source: myself and plenty of my friends and competitors. And yes, I got some help and things are much better now.
> We shouldn't neglect the impact on the brain a professional sports career has.
I think this is true in the abstract, but in this particular story, there's a lot more going on. She was a homeless teenager when she was discovered as a rider, and the article strongly implies that the only stable life she's ever known is racing.
This isn't a Ryan Leaf-type story, where a talented athlete was pushed too hard by their parents, coaches, and teammates and ended up breaking under the pressure. I think Rebecca's circumstances are way more poignantly tragic.
My heart goes out to her and I hope she gets the stability and peace she seems to be searching for.
You're right, there is a lot more going on. The point I was trying to make is that this happens even for athletes coming from a "healthy" environment, and that the way her story unfolded after her career is not all that surprising to me.
Personally I wish that there was more guidance and help available for retired athletes, but on the other hand I also realize most athletes on this level are too stubborn to get that help anyway..
I wonder could endorphins play their role. Production of endorphins are triggered by pain in the muscles when excercising, and athlete becomes accustomed to it and (as I heard) even addicted to a physical activity. When athlete stops her sports career, physical activity levels suddenly drops, so no more cheap endorphins. At the same time she face a problem of resocialization into "normal" lifestyle. Patterns in her mind know the only way to be happy, to work hard, to excercise and to win. I suppose it can be hard, very hard. Especially a first year after retirement.
But Twigg's case seems more complicated for me than that. Her lifestyle suspiciously in harmony with her mother kicked her out of home when she was just 16.
Yes. I was a competitive athlete for years and filling that void after leaving the sport was very difficult. To be honest I dumped a lot of that energy into my work but I've realized over the last few years that I need something equally satisfying at home that has some type of competitive aspect to it. Otherwise I get very bored very quickly at home and will spent way too many hours in the office.
The problem with dumping extremism into your profession is that it doesn’t work the way sports do. In career, you can’t measure yourself, and it doesn’t even matter because pedigree and politics beat hard work and skill every time.
> pedigree and politics beat hard work and skill every time.
I can't agree with this as a universal truth. Personally I only got noticed and landed a job at NASA because of hard work and skill. I was hired for my current job based on capability also. Places that are capability based have been great to work at. I don't even have a degree which is very unusual in my particular field.
That may be true but I'm not competing with folks that have strong pedigree's and connections every time. Sometimes I'm even the one with connections that help me beat someone else out.
Is the mental health issue the cause of the homelessness, or is the homelessness the cause of the mental health issue?
There have been a number of studies that show that poverty has a very real impact on your mental abilities. It wouldn't surprise me at all if homelessness itself causes mental health problems.
But there are absolutely also athletes who have a hard time functioning outside their sports bubble.
Arguably the most accomplished athlete ever, Michael Phelps, has struggled with these same issues [0]. Today he is more upfront about his suicidal issues and what strategies he uses to help with his mental health. Such issues are incredibly personal, but there does seem to be some correlations with 'Black Swan' people (per the Natalie Portman movie) and later term mental health.
I know that posting suicide hotline numbers seems like the right thing to do, but it's generally not helpful. People who call these numbers run the real risk of being detained against their will for extended periods of time while running up large hospital bills, when they just needed someone to talk to. Then there's the lack of statistical evidence that suicide hotline numbers actually prevent suicides in the long run.
> lack of statistical evidence that suicide hotline numbers actually prevent suicides in the long run.
I'm not sure if you say what you mean; but that's not really their purpose as I understand it? Prevent a suicide today, open the door to treatment tomorrow - vs failing to prevent a suicide today, and there being no option for treatment tomorrow?
> people who call these numbers run the real risk of being detained against their will for extended periods of time while running up large hospital bills
>We shouldn't neglect the impact on the brain a professional sports career has. I've seen it many times. The amount of sacrifice and energy put into something like this leads to a very unbalanced lifestyle, which is usually encouraged from all sides (parents, coaches, friends).
I think you might have the causal relationship backwards, at least for a lot of athletes. Elite sport is a really good way of not dealing with your emotional problems. It's a socially legitimate form of obsession, a path in life that makes eating disorders and self-harm look like the determination to win. You can lead a lifestyle that would be obviously pathological for anyone but an elite athlete and people will applaud you for it. It's an all-consuming kind of avoidance coping that nobody scrutinises too deeply.
When athletes retire, they lose their structure, they lose their support network, but they also lose their excuses. All the problems you used sport to escape from are now front-and-center, and you've got nowhere left to run. It's like sobering up after a 20-year bender.
She won a medal which puts her at the top 1% but most athletes who go to Olympics or international championships don't win any medals but nevertheless have to through the same training and invest the same commitment. If she can't make it, it makes you wonder what happens to the rest who also saw their golden years pass by but without any medals or achievements to show off.
I'm not sure what exactly is a "mediocre office job", but normal jobs require a different set of skills and priorities. Athletics benefit from a very singular focus, it's clear what you need to do and largely how to do it. If you're not good enough, it's generally made very clear pretty fast. There's often a huge network around you and lots of emotional reinforcement.
Normal living and normal jobs are not so. The big difference being that your priorities are scattered and there's no clear item to focus on. Very easy to miss things and make a mistake. Jobs are full off odd negotiations and office politics and proving something is hard. It's not very clear where you are.
This is a really interesting story, but if I were Greenstone's editor I would feel really conflicted about running it.
There's the elephant in the room -- mental health. What did the reporter get on record? "She did not want to discuss mental health but feels it should be treated more seriously in Washington."
Then there's her family. What did the reporter get on record? "Her immediate family in the Seattle area, including her 18-year-old daughter, declined interviews for this story."
So now you have to weave a tale while dancing around the fact that she's likely got mental health issues that she won't talk about, and you've got important people in her life who also don't want to talk.
I'm not saying the story is bad as-is. It's fascinating.
Agreed. Those were the things that I spotted instantly. The first thing when you think of for homeless people is mental health. You don't have to be full-on crazy to have mental health issues that bring you down the wrong path of bad decision-making. The fact the family doesn't want to talk, that she was asked to leave by her parents, that she kept losing her job, these all speak volumes.
It's terrible, but it happens: I've learned anyone can suffer from mental health problems. I have a decades-old friend who was gifted and brilliant. He succumbed to schizophrenia in his 30s, lost his job as a patent lawyer and broke off his engagement to his lovely fiance, and started murmuring about evil. He stopped answering my calls and moved around so much I have no idea where he is now, or if he's even still alive.
Because abstracting one person's story to "mental health" is extremely dehumanizing. In fact, the article does address the topic head on:
> "What (Twigg) has is a great trait," Thompson said. "Unless you get into the workforce."
The truth is that personality traits aren't really considered disorders until they affect your ability to lead a normal life, the chief aspect being to "hold down a job".
So we lauded her when these traits helped her be exceptional in her field, but now that she's used that up and didn't pivot it into some more lasting form of wealth, she's left to the shitty support structure.
Yes, I did acknowledge it was only one metric. There are many people who can't stand their families and/or vice versa, yet if they were characterized as mentally ill it would effectively nullify the term. So this is also subjectively condemning personality traits that are celebrated in other contexts, veiled with impartiality.
And while this is a contributing factor to her actual situation (if she were on better terms with her family, that would be another support structure), that doesn't really have a bearing on what I said in the USian individualist paradigm.
No real signs that I picked up on at the time. I talked with his ex-fiancee when I found out, and she said it manifested itself into a paranoid schizophrenia where he was worried about being listened in on. One time I emailed him and I asked him "how are you doing, enquiring minds want to know?" His response was "Who are these enquiring minds that you are asking on behalf of?" I thought he was joking at the time, but I guess that was a sign.
> He stopped answering my calls and moved around so much I have no idea where he is now, or if he's even still alive.
I'm sorry to hear this; I have a friend in a similar situation.
I met my friend thru work, as a fellow SWE. An absolutely brilliant person. He had his quirks, and freely shared his past interesting experiences that indicated there were some former issues, but overall very likeable and friendly to be around. We hung out, we started doing some interesting robotics projects.
Then things fell apart for him. He lost his girlfriend, he started having automobile accidents, we watched him literally walk into a wall at work. He started to sleep under his desk. He soon decided to quit his job.
I kept in touch with him still; all signs pointed to him being bipolar/schizophrenic - and likely had always been, but his medication either wasn't working, or he wasn't taking it correctly, or something.
One day he came over to my house in an old (but well kept) conversion van; extremely custom. He told me he was going to camp in the van, etc. He told me about hearing voices. He told me that he could "stop time". He ended up giving me a watch. Then after staying with my wife and I overnight, he left the next morning. I haven't seen him since, and that was over 5 years ago.
But the story has a happy - or maybe bittersweet? - ending; and I hope you are able to have such a resolution yourself.
My wife and I still noticed that someone updated my friend's facebook page; it was the only contact we had of his that still worked. Every now and then, I'd post a comment to his page, or send him a message, letting him know I was still out here for him. I didn't hear anything.
Late last year he got in contact with me again. I was so worried that he had died or was homeless or something, somewhere - wherever the van broke down or what - I didn't know. Then out of the blue, there he was again. Sorta. At least a contact.
I let him know both my wife and I were there for him if he needed anything. He said he had got his meds under control, and while the voices still spoke, they said nice things now. So I guess that's an improvement.
At least I know he's still alive, and making some progress, whatever that is.
I hope you're able to reconnect with your friend, too - or at least have some kind of closure, even if it isn't what you wanted to hear. Sometimes that better than not knowing at all.
The elephant in the room isn’t “mental health” - it’s severe developmental trauma. As described in the article:
“Twigg was still a child when she became homeless.
A prodigy in academics and athletics, she started at UW at the age of 14... At this time, she was living in Seattle in a basement with her mother and sister.
Twigg’s sister says their mom kicked Twigg out; Twigg remembers being offered the option to leave and taking it. She was a few months from turning 16.”
I’m sorry, I don’t need to “weave a tale” about anything other than the fact that this person has been subject to abuse since childhood. And yeah, of course her family doesn’t want to talk. Nobody wants to talk about abuse in the family.
If anything is missing, it’s our collective blind spot where we can read a story like this and make it about “mental health”. Until we get better as a society about recognizing clear signs of abuse, we won’t make a dent in these kinds of problems.
The article does detail a history of a head injury that required stitches.
Most homeless people have either medical or mental health issues. The older I get, the more convinced I am that those two things are not so neatly separated.
> “Once you’ve done something that feels like you’re born to do it, it’s hard to find anything that’s that good of a fit,” Twigg says today. “Anything else that feels that way.”
If she has a mental health issue, she should seek care. But if you take the above quote at face value (and likely out of context), then I would give her this advice to start building her life:
"Flipping Burgers in not beneath your dignity" - Charles J. Sykes
An entire generation has been romanticized that if you "do what you love" you'll end up a billionaire. The complete opposite is true. It requires doing thing you dislike, discipline, financial management, and focus on the correct things.
> An entire generation has been romanticized that if you "do what you love" you'll end up a billionaire. The complete opposite is true.
The implication that flipping burgers will make you a billionaire is patently absurd. You should never feel ashamed about your work, but menial work in $current_year actually leads to poverty and hunger because it doesn't pay a living wage. An "entire generation" doesn't have illusions about how the world works. The 2008 recession was more than sufficient to dispel that. They just want food and shelter.
That's a ridiculous exaggeration of my words. Flipping burgers will put a roof over your head, buy you some food, and give you a small amount of savings. From there you move up. Better education, better job, more savings.
You said (paraphrased) "doing what you love will not make you a billionaire. The opposite is true. You should go flip burgers." This can either mean "doing what you love will make you poor. And also you should flip burgers" or "doing things you don't like will make you a billionaire." It's possible I misunderstood what you were saying, but whichever point you were trying to make, it's a patronizing extension of the typical boomer "millennials are entitled" refrain.
> Flipping burgers will put a roof over your head, buy you some food, and give you a small amount of savings.
None of these are true. I'm not sure when the last time you worked an entry level job like this was, but they haven't paid anything close to a living wage in a very long time.
That's still an extreme exaggeration of my words. Your argument is pointless.
> they haven't paid anything close to a living wage in a very long time
That is definitely not true. One can eat a grocery store for a few bucks a week. You can rent a place for $250-$500/mo in the vast majority of cities in the country, excluding the cities where millennials are flocking to; take Topeka, Kansas, or Fayetteville, Arkansas, or any number of small cities scattered across the USA.
Like I said in my initial comment, it's totally possible to pull yourself out of the situation, but one must forgo the flashy lifestyle of living in Seattle and the like.
Only a very small set of people are able to convert a $10/hour job into savings (minimum wage in many places is even less). Presumes you live in a state with subsidized medical care, presumes you have no kids, presumes you have no unexpected expenses like a blown engine or broken axle.
Read Ehrenreich or any of the modern authors on poverty to realize that it's not just a matter of "Well, $10 an hour times 180 hours a month is $1800 and the median rent is $900, ergo everyone is fine!"
Yes, it IS possible, but the goal of society is to make it easier for everyone not just the luckiest and most badass 5%.
As a European, it always baffles me how normal it is in US to be homeless. Seems like it can happen to anyone during their life. A bit of bad luck and you're on the street.
In Europe, there are so many safety nets that nobody should end up homeless. Some still do, but it's really a tiny minority compared to US.
This is also one of the most surprising things I saw, the first time I went to the US: so many homeless people, everywhere. Even in small towns.
Even reading the comments in here sheds very interesting light: People discussing about why is the person homeless: Is it because of mental issues? is it because of laziness? is it because of bad luck?
It doesn't matter! it should not matter. People should not be homeless, and the different safety nets should be agnostic of the reasons (otherwise you are catering only for the mental health issues, and you still have homeless drug addicts, or homeless bad-luck people).
I do not know for certain, but it may be that homeless are easier to see in the USA (I have seen people living in tents/on sidewalk in sleeping bags on/under the onramp to the freeway in San Francisco/San Jose/San Diego which is still shocking), but the stats don't make the USA much worse than the UK/France/Germany/Netherlands from a quick sampling of western European nations. Of course how it's defined and how the stats were gathered are all important, but I've seen UK homelessness/rough sleeping discussed on the front page of the UK edition of The Guardian.
Seattle is a rough place to try to jump into independent living. The entry level to normal housing is pretty high.
I don't think there's a lot of onramps to doing that that don't involve years of training.
Ms. Twigg is a very sad story, and I feel for her. Her story highlights the complexity of US homelessness: not drug addiction, not simple job loss, not simple mental health issues.
Athletes in general have an issue exiting the athletic world, I've noticed. Where do you go when you leave the field and the lights are on for someone else?
Amount of people in sports are much lower than in army, that's why we may not hear their stories, but it remembers me a problem with veterans. The same issue - it's hard for people people to adapt for a new life without extreme load. I really don't know the right answer. Teach them since start life is not only fighting, cycling, trainings ? there're something else external life ? But it's hard when your couch pushes you to your limits& I don't know.
mental health problem or not - it is ABSOLUTELY INSANE that a decorated olympic champion, best in her class at the time, that represented this country and won multiple medals has to now live on the streets.
This is what is wrong with America - we cant even take care of the very best of our own (after they cant help themselves anymore) but are quick to point out at other's people's/countries/nationalities problems.
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[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 197 ms ] threadI have a "free spirit" in my family, a really gifted man who just couldn't settle. He's now in his 60s and does mosaics for people all around the UK.
He doesn't own a house and is constantly staying with friends and family. He tried working in construction jobs and other things, settling with a family and buying a house.
However after his divorce and other things he is most happy with his campervan conversion and parking it on offroads from motorways.
I asked him once, "Uncle, why can't you stay in once place". To which he replied, "Why do you have to stay in one place with brick walls?".
Another famous Olympian, Eddie the Eagle spent a few years homeless traveling for winter qualifiers for the Olympics.
I'm very sensitive to people on the edge. Mstly because I feel very much part of this edge. Reading Orwell's "Down and out in Paris and London" made me rethink homelessness. There is a lot of stigma around it and most people I know think this would never happen to them. All it takes is a couple of falls in their life, or events that are hard enough to upset what is a fragile balance. I think anyone (no matter the intelligence) could be sitting in the street without a roof, it has nothing to do with education, friends, or their intelligence, once life has just kicked them hard or long enough.
Where I live right now (a former war zone full of people with PTSD from the Yugoslav war horrors) there are many homeless and even more close to the edge of it. Thankfully we have the dream of a EU membership making everything better for the people here, but which unfortunately does nothing for this places (other than create a massive brain drain that makes the situation even more precarious for those off-grid or those not wanting to be part of the system).
I wonder if truly free living is possible - looks like someone is always paying some price/ doing unfree things to make it happen.
Eventually a family member got annoyed though and bought me a new sim. :/
But you're right; most everywhere else is either quasi-legal, or require money to access.
Someone that constantly (or most of the time) depends on other people's work to sustain themselves and to have a place to stay, aren't free spirits, they are just piggybacking on the effort of people that live according to society's norms.
According to the article, Twigg has only been homeless for five years, and she is currently 56 years old. Twigg wasn't really a "free spirit"- She held down jobs, had kids, and made a normal life for herself up until her 50's.
So I feel that this story is instead about an older tech worker who has aged out of the workforce. As a 40-something developer who has already experienced age discrimination as well as the realization that many of my skills are becoming outdated, I feel for her. Without a nest-egg, many of us may very well be in her situation in our 50's.
>“I felt at one time that I couldn’t accept housing because there were all these other people who need it”
>“The point is not so much that I need help, it’s that there are a bunch of people who need help — 12,000 in this area, half a million in the country,” Twigg said. “Help should be provided for everybody, not just a few.”
No, the article is a bit confusing on this point. Read through the whole thing, though: Twigg was homeless as a kid, before she was ever a top tier cyclist. Her mother kicked her out of the house, for some reason the article doesn't explain. This most recent stretch of homelessness has only been five years though.
Would you mind explaining why? I'd imagine how difficult it is to move to the coaching/administration level was more a function of the particular sport? Are you thinking just about differences in the level of funding?
Not at all. Simple. Always (until now at least) a prejudice against women when positions have limited numbers to fill. And of course, the whole area of sport is biaised against women, for instance, for her sport there is still no real tour de france for women in cyclism, in 2019.
When women are choosing their coaches do they exhibit the same sort of choices, that you called prejudice? Maybe in general men are better at coaching? Are you assuming it is prejudice, or is that demonstrable?
I wonder if sportsmen perceive that more successful sportsmen make better coaches, so female sportsmen think that males are better because of the monetary bias?
The bias in sport seems to be primarily biological. Your second clause doesn't answer why it's harder for women already at the pinnacle of their sport to move in to "retirement" posts (coach, admin, advocacy): besides prejudice do you have any other hypotheses.
I imagine the travel involved is similar to being an itinerant salesman; if there are self-selective pressures that differ by the sexes then I could see similar proportions to that field.
I would like to know what HN thinks about the 'solitary' nature of programming? Isn't programming more or less a group endeavor now?
It is still more solitary than many other jobs.
On the other hand, I hate that it becomes more and more a group endeavor - I would love if it stayed much more solitary as in former days.
It affects productivity and makes people who prefer to work by themselves unhappy.
Unfortunately when tool use is mandated without applying critical thinking, it often results in a great deal of waste. Mandated collaboration is also very susceptible to abuse as it typically provides an additional layer of obfuscation to shield low performing leechers.
High school group projects dialed up to 11.
I guess this is the overtraining hampering growth I've heard about as a kid. Being an olympic level athlete makes a lot of hormones to whack.
Now, Pair programming as in "sit next to your colleague for hours per day" is just BS
I am a developer now, was a PM, and was a developer before that. Even with actively reaching out to people to talk to, my day to day always felt objectively solitary, and certainly solitary compared to what I experienced as a PM. That was what originally drove me away from engineering, and when I went back I got reminded of that fact.
Even so, there's a significant difference between programming or a job in sales or PR or management or etc., anything where your core job is dealing with people.
But I would still say it is far from really social jobs - after school, I worked at a home for elderly people, and everyday left me exhausted. After work as a programmer, my social batteries feel much more charged.
One could make programming an extremely social endeavour though, i.e. by constant pair programming (two of Googles best Software Engineers are doing this).
It is jungle and can be confusing/sad/demotivating to realize that your best is no longer at their best interest.
Yet, I find myself as developer still fortunate to have somewhat rational managers and the market condition still in our side mostly.
Some people may have the capacity for pair programming but I doubt that it is sustainable. The conclusion of the famous Steele/Stallman session is this:
"My first thought afterward was: it was a great experience, very intense, and that I never wanted to do it again in my life."
Yes, they then went to their desks, alone, and coded it all up. And yes, they all had the skills to actually put ideas into code. But to say the real work only gets done in isolation ignores the majority of the amazing collaborative work that makes great software.
I mean, there’s different mechanisms for shelter — family, public housing, NGOs, etc, and we can talk about how to tweak those knobs as a culture — but I can’t think of what else cultures have done, besides various levels of housing people who just want to float.
This thread is wild, from people calling this woman mentally ill, to lazy, to simply not caring about being homeless. It’s certainly more a reflection on the people making these comments and our society than any reflection on her.
I think it’s significantly more complex. It would appear she became homeless through financial/employment issues but elects to not accept what she sees as special treatment which would secure her housing. It reminds me of John McCain electing to stay a Prisoner of War despite being given the opportunity to be returned because of his status as the son of an admiral. Yet It’s odd to say McCain was a POW by choice, he wanted his presence/story to bring to light the story of all POWs, he wanted to be treated the same, just as this woman clearly wants light shed on all homeless not just special treatment/help/housing because her status.
She suffered from homelessness as a child and yet began college at 14, became a world champion/Olympian, even appears to have returned to school successfully after she stopped competing. I mean come on with an experience like that people are here calling her lazy and mentally ill? No doubt mental health issues will follow any homeless child for life, but the track record is clear the woman isn’t lazy and certainly capable, To return to homelessness in her 50’s is tragic, and I’ll double down and say for society to blame her because she is being offered charity and she refuses to accept on principal and then calling her situation a choice is a double tragedy and again more a reflection on society than her.
She needs some sort of counselling and help with life skills. Her line of thinking isn't even, "If I sort myself out, then maybe I can help some of the people I know".
but what do I know. kids today are put on Ritalin like it was candy, and everyone has to march in lockstep. If you don't you're lazy, or a bum. To quote Pulp Fiction:
VINCENT: So if you’re quitting the life, what’ll you do?
JULES: That’s what I’ve been sitting here contemplating. First, I’m gonna deliver this case to Marsellus. Then, basically, I’m gonna walk the earth.
VINCENT: What do you mean, walk the earth?
JULES: You know, like Caine in “KUNG FU.” Just walk from town to town, meet people, get in adventures.
VINCENT: How long do you intend to walk the earth?
JULES: Until God puts me where he want me to be.
VINCENT: What if he never does?
JULES: If it takes forever, I’ll wait forever.
VINCENT: So you decided to be a bum?
JULES: I’ll just be Jules, Vincent – no more, no less.
EDIT: ofc medicalizing the problem is what people do because that way they become the problem of a therapist, and we can sleep better because we know that a professional will look after them (it's easier to deal with them by just looking at their disease instead of the human behind the disease - "and anyway how could we possibly help somebody that far gone and who obviously doesn't even want to be helped").
For anyone who doesn't know this yet: German prisons (probably not just in Germany but other places in Europe) are full of homeless people that are there for not paying the tram/bus fare (often intentional in order to survive the colder months of the year).
Also for all the people who wonder how can anyone let themselves go so low and lie in the street with pants full of shit, it helps with not getting raped (it doesn't help though with avoiding being doused with lighter fluid and set on fire unfortunately).
Either way it needs to bring about a profound philosophical breakthrough that permanently changes your psychology.
I think a lot of problems we have in society are symptoms of psychological causes. Toffler's Future Shock posits that technology is accelerating this societal pathology. I also think that it's an incredibly difficult problem to overcome because there is no mass market or scalable cure... the antidote is a very personal journey of transformation.
The closest thing I've come across to a mass market cure is the profound experience playing Neir: Automata gives you if you manage to get far enough. Unfortunately, this is a philosophical masterpiece that is only going to be experienced by JRPG fans or truely open minded video game connoisseurs. In other words, it has a lot of preconditions. Still, Neir: Automata gives me hope that there could be a mass market solution to the existential malaise suffered in modern times.
That all seems so easy sitting here in my air conditioned office and not having experienced anything in her life. I'm sure it's far more complicated than that.
But not half as ridiculous as confusing it with a moral issue.
What's that again? I've never heard of anyone growing after the age of 18.
https://www.jpeds.com/article/S0022-3476(00)70094-1/fulltext
But children pushed into extreme sports (or "voluntarily pushing themselves") often fail to grow. You can see this with ballet dancers who start too early or gymnasts starting too early.
I suspect you can keep growing a few years past 18. I suspect you can stop growing a few year before 18 as well. I don't think 18 is set in stone but an average age when people reach their adult height. But I think gaining an inch at 26 is rare. But she is an olympic medalist and a rare person.
Just because you haven't heard of something doesn't mean it doesn't exist.
Of course, she might want to stay well away from her past career for other reasons, whether it's boredom, self-consciousness, frustration or a strong desire to draw a line under it (FWIW I know an Olympic medallist who made plenty of money from endorsements and speaking engagements and could probably have had a media career but had absolutely no desire to do that or become a trainer/ambassador after his retirement, choosing to became a builder's apprentice instead, because he liked the idea of building stuff rather than because he needed the money)
So coaches I bet would only be making $20-30k per year. Barely a living wage these days, unless you live in Montana
"You want a job in ML ? Yes, learn these absurd frameworks, publish a few papers in so-and-so conferences. Then we'll let you do some clickrate optimization for our website. "
No wonder, tech in the US has a diversity problem. Not everyone wants to be this way.
The cause is not a lack of "affordable housing", it's a lack of housing, period. What's not affordable are regulations and competing with real estate capital. What's not affordable is spending most of your income on rent, and this is hardly a choice for most people right now.
People will stare, and think, gosh this homeless situation is sad, inhumane, drugs/mental, w/e, but meanwhile, the shortage of housing and the affordability to create more is going to make it worse for everybody, especially those who are stuck in the middle with increasing rents and stagnant wages.
Not a choice? Don't you enter into a rental agreement via choice? I've never met anyone who's said they were forced to rent some place.
I don't necessarily disagree with the housing shortage, but there's reasons for that. Look at state, local laws and nimby's that pass and influence local zoning restrictions. San Francisco is a perfect example of that process gone awry.
Want affordable rent? Then you can still choose not to live in one of the areas that is anti-housing.
1. It should be made financially speaking prohibitively expensive to be a residential landlord. I.e. buy a house and charge others rent to live in it. Tax it at 100%. Done!
2. Change zoning/building codes to allow modern and more efficient construction, allow people to get easy financing to build more HIGH QUALITY and affordable housing.
3. Change mortgage laws to make it possible for more financially responsible families to build and own homes.
I kind of agree with many others here that it sounds like a mental health issue. But I also think that the story is more complicated than that.
We shouldn't neglect the impact on the brain a professional sports career has. I've seen it many times. The amount of sacrifice and energy put into something like this leads to a very unbalanced lifestyle, which is usually encouraged from all sides (parents, coaches, friends). Most often, the only positive emotion athletes experience is that joy of achieving a goal, and this quickly starts becoming an addiction. Especially in sports where not a lot of money is involved, passion and perseverance play a huge role in personal motivation and these sports usually attract athletes that put everything on hold in their life for their minute in the spotlight.
Unfortunately, only a minor fraction of athletes ends their career by choice. Usually, lack of success or injuries tend to force people to retire with unfinished business. This hits the "addicted" athlete very hard, and in an environment where it is generally not advisable to show weakness, can lead to severe mental health issues quickly.
Speaking from personal experience, life is pretty dull after being forced to retire. I fell into a deep existential crisis, mostly because the thing that was responsible for most of the joy in my life wasn't even remotely fun anymore, even as a simple hobby. The fact that I knew I wasn't on top of my game anymore, and I am not investing 100% of my energy into improving made it a pretty dull experience. On top of that, most of my social environment was still connected to that sport, so I wasn't really able to walk away and focus entirely on something different. And even worse, everything else I tried felt meaningless, I felt like it wasn't worth it if I didn't invest 100% of my energy into something I was passionate about. For me, nothing compares to the joy of pursuing a passion and putting everything I have into it.
Source: myself and plenty of my friends and competitors. And yes, I got some help and things are much better now.
I think this is true in the abstract, but in this particular story, there's a lot more going on. She was a homeless teenager when she was discovered as a rider, and the article strongly implies that the only stable life she's ever known is racing.
This isn't a Ryan Leaf-type story, where a talented athlete was pushed too hard by their parents, coaches, and teammates and ended up breaking under the pressure. I think Rebecca's circumstances are way more poignantly tragic.
My heart goes out to her and I hope she gets the stability and peace she seems to be searching for.
Personally I wish that there was more guidance and help available for retired athletes, but on the other hand I also realize most athletes on this level are too stubborn to get that help anyway..
But Twigg's case seems more complicated for me than that. Her lifestyle suspiciously in harmony with her mother kicked her out of home when she was just 16.
I can't agree with this as a universal truth. Personally I only got noticed and landed a job at NASA because of hard work and skill. I was hired for my current job based on capability also. Places that are capability based have been great to work at. I don't even have a degree which is very unusual in my particular field.
I do agree it is generally true though.
There have been a number of studies that show that poverty has a very real impact on your mental abilities. It wouldn't surprise me at all if homelessness itself causes mental health problems.
But there are absolutely also athletes who have a hard time functioning outside their sports bubble.
Expecting anyone to remain sane for an extended period (or even a short time) under these conditions is absurd.
[0] https://www.menshealth.com/health/a24268441/michael-phelps-d...
If you need someone to talk with please call: 1-800-273-8255.
Alternatively, I'd love to talk with you (the reader of this sentence) as well, Hacker to Hacker.
I'm not sure if you say what you mean; but that's not really their purpose as I understand it? Prevent a suicide today, open the door to treatment tomorrow - vs failing to prevent a suicide today, and there being no option for treatment tomorrow?
There's even a suggestion that suicide helplines might normalise suicide, or make it more real. https://twitter.com/ProfLAppleby/status/1110821429443026946
Source please?
I think you might have the causal relationship backwards, at least for a lot of athletes. Elite sport is a really good way of not dealing with your emotional problems. It's a socially legitimate form of obsession, a path in life that makes eating disorders and self-harm look like the determination to win. You can lead a lifestyle that would be obviously pathological for anyone but an elite athlete and people will applaud you for it. It's an all-consuming kind of avoidance coping that nobody scrutinises too deeply.
When athletes retire, they lose their structure, they lose their support network, but they also lose their excuses. All the problems you used sport to escape from are now front-and-center, and you've got nowhere left to run. It's like sobering up after a 20-year bender.
The positive feelings from winning do not come close to offsetting the negative feelings from not winning, even if it's second place.
I'm not sure what exactly is a "mediocre office job", but normal jobs require a different set of skills and priorities. Athletics benefit from a very singular focus, it's clear what you need to do and largely how to do it. If you're not good enough, it's generally made very clear pretty fast. There's often a huge network around you and lots of emotional reinforcement.
Normal living and normal jobs are not so. The big difference being that your priorities are scattered and there's no clear item to focus on. Very easy to miss things and make a mistake. Jobs are full off odd negotiations and office politics and proving something is hard. It's not very clear where you are.
She must be more experienced than most bootcamp grads. There must be jobs she can do in Seattle.
This is a really interesting story, but if I were Greenstone's editor I would feel really conflicted about running it.
There's the elephant in the room -- mental health. What did the reporter get on record? "She did not want to discuss mental health but feels it should be treated more seriously in Washington."
Then there's her family. What did the reporter get on record? "Her immediate family in the Seattle area, including her 18-year-old daughter, declined interviews for this story."
So now you have to weave a tale while dancing around the fact that she's likely got mental health issues that she won't talk about, and you've got important people in her life who also don't want to talk.
I'm not saying the story is bad as-is. It's fascinating.
But it feels like there's a lot missing.
It's terrible, but it happens: I've learned anyone can suffer from mental health problems. I have a decades-old friend who was gifted and brilliant. He succumbed to schizophrenia in his 30s, lost his job as a patent lawyer and broke off his engagement to his lovely fiance, and started murmuring about evil. He stopped answering my calls and moved around so much I have no idea where he is now, or if he's even still alive.
> "What (Twigg) has is a great trait," Thompson said. "Unless you get into the workforce."
The truth is that personality traits aren't really considered disorders until they affect your ability to lead a normal life, the chief aspect being to "hold down a job".
So we lauded her when these traits helped her be exceptional in her field, but now that she's used that up and didn't pivot it into some more lasting form of wealth, she's left to the shitty support structure.
When your own family can't stand being around you, I would say that qualifies as a serious problem.
And while this is a contributing factor to her actual situation (if she were on better terms with her family, that would be another support structure), that doesn't really have a bearing on what I said in the USian individualist paradigm.
I'm sorry to hear this; I have a friend in a similar situation.
I met my friend thru work, as a fellow SWE. An absolutely brilliant person. He had his quirks, and freely shared his past interesting experiences that indicated there were some former issues, but overall very likeable and friendly to be around. We hung out, we started doing some interesting robotics projects.
Then things fell apart for him. He lost his girlfriend, he started having automobile accidents, we watched him literally walk into a wall at work. He started to sleep under his desk. He soon decided to quit his job.
I kept in touch with him still; all signs pointed to him being bipolar/schizophrenic - and likely had always been, but his medication either wasn't working, or he wasn't taking it correctly, or something.
One day he came over to my house in an old (but well kept) conversion van; extremely custom. He told me he was going to camp in the van, etc. He told me about hearing voices. He told me that he could "stop time". He ended up giving me a watch. Then after staying with my wife and I overnight, he left the next morning. I haven't seen him since, and that was over 5 years ago.
But the story has a happy - or maybe bittersweet? - ending; and I hope you are able to have such a resolution yourself.
My wife and I still noticed that someone updated my friend's facebook page; it was the only contact we had of his that still worked. Every now and then, I'd post a comment to his page, or send him a message, letting him know I was still out here for him. I didn't hear anything.
Late last year he got in contact with me again. I was so worried that he had died or was homeless or something, somewhere - wherever the van broke down or what - I didn't know. Then out of the blue, there he was again. Sorta. At least a contact.
I let him know both my wife and I were there for him if he needed anything. He said he had got his meds under control, and while the voices still spoke, they said nice things now. So I guess that's an improvement.
At least I know he's still alive, and making some progress, whatever that is.
I hope you're able to reconnect with your friend, too - or at least have some kind of closure, even if it isn't what you wanted to hear. Sometimes that better than not knowing at all.
“Twigg was still a child when she became homeless.
A prodigy in academics and athletics, she started at UW at the age of 14... At this time, she was living in Seattle in a basement with her mother and sister.
Twigg’s sister says their mom kicked Twigg out; Twigg remembers being offered the option to leave and taking it. She was a few months from turning 16.”
I’m sorry, I don’t need to “weave a tale” about anything other than the fact that this person has been subject to abuse since childhood. And yeah, of course her family doesn’t want to talk. Nobody wants to talk about abuse in the family.
If anything is missing, it’s our collective blind spot where we can read a story like this and make it about “mental health”. Until we get better as a society about recognizing clear signs of abuse, we won’t make a dent in these kinds of problems.
Most homeless people have either medical or mental health issues. The older I get, the more convinced I am that those two things are not so neatly separated.
If she has a mental health issue, she should seek care. But if you take the above quote at face value (and likely out of context), then I would give her this advice to start building her life:
"Flipping Burgers in not beneath your dignity" - Charles J. Sykes
An entire generation has been romanticized that if you "do what you love" you'll end up a billionaire. The complete opposite is true. It requires doing thing you dislike, discipline, financial management, and focus on the correct things.
The implication that flipping burgers will make you a billionaire is patently absurd. You should never feel ashamed about your work, but menial work in $current_year actually leads to poverty and hunger because it doesn't pay a living wage. An "entire generation" doesn't have illusions about how the world works. The 2008 recession was more than sufficient to dispel that. They just want food and shelter.
> Flipping burgers will put a roof over your head, buy you some food, and give you a small amount of savings.
None of these are true. I'm not sure when the last time you worked an entry level job like this was, but they haven't paid anything close to a living wage in a very long time.
> they haven't paid anything close to a living wage in a very long time
That is definitely not true. One can eat a grocery store for a few bucks a week. You can rent a place for $250-$500/mo in the vast majority of cities in the country, excluding the cities where millennials are flocking to; take Topeka, Kansas, or Fayetteville, Arkansas, or any number of small cities scattered across the USA.
Like I said in my initial comment, it's totally possible to pull yourself out of the situation, but one must forgo the flashy lifestyle of living in Seattle and the like.
Read Ehrenreich or any of the modern authors on poverty to realize that it's not just a matter of "Well, $10 an hour times 180 hours a month is $1800 and the median rent is $900, ergo everyone is fine!"
Yes, it IS possible, but the goal of society is to make it easier for everyone not just the luckiest and most badass 5%.
She's 56, so... which generation is that?
In Europe, there are so many safety nets that nobody should end up homeless. Some still do, but it's really a tiny minority compared to US.
This is also one of the most surprising things I saw, the first time I went to the US: so many homeless people, everywhere. Even in small towns.
It doesn't matter! it should not matter. People should not be homeless, and the different safety nets should be agnostic of the reasons (otherwise you are catering only for the mental health issues, and you still have homeless drug addicts, or homeless bad-luck people).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_homeless_...
I don't think there's a lot of onramps to doing that that don't involve years of training.
Ms. Twigg is a very sad story, and I feel for her. Her story highlights the complexity of US homelessness: not drug addiction, not simple job loss, not simple mental health issues.
Athletes in general have an issue exiting the athletic world, I've noticed. Where do you go when you leave the field and the lights are on for someone else?
I hope Ms. Twigg gets the help she needs.
Amount of people in sports are much lower than in army, that's why we may not hear their stories, but it remembers me a problem with veterans. The same issue - it's hard for people people to adapt for a new life without extreme load. I really don't know the right answer. Teach them since start life is not only fighting, cycling, trainings ? there're something else external life ? But it's hard when your couch pushes you to your limits& I don't know.
This is what is wrong with America - we cant even take care of the very best of our own (after they cant help themselves anymore) but are quick to point out at other's people's/countries/nationalities problems.