There's not much here. He decided to compete against himself and made a list of self-improvement items? He complained about being directionless yet had some clear choices he could make. Cat? Grad School? Girlfriend?
Sounds like this person needs a role-model and a mentor.
I upvoted this because the atmosphere of constant competition he describes is a relatively new thing (certainly I didn't experience it) and I'm interested to hear if other people of a similar age agree or have thoughts on this.
I think anyone under 30 today who studies or has studied feels immense competition and pressure.
I started undergrad in 2011 and already getting in then you needed very good grades. Reading about the acceptance rates into my program and the grades now required, I feel really sad for current students, and I was already very unhappy during my undergrad...
What he describes to me is competition for the sake of competition, and not having any goals.
I'm also 22 like the author, and I realized a long time ago that I had no interest in competing in things I didn't care about.
I was in the top class at my secondary school (High school for you Americans) and easily got above average marks while doing work 1yr ahead with not much effort. I really didn't see the point in grinding for top marks when they were meaningless, but I put in a little effort because I felt like it's what I should be doing.
At uni, I managed to scrape by for a couple of years doing little work and getting C- to B- marks mostly. Again, doing it because it's what I thought I should be doing and I felt obligated to go to university and get an engineering degree since that's what smart people are supposed to do.
I dropped out when I realized that I had been following the path I was "supposed" to take rather than what I wanted to do.
It sounds like OP finally chose a path instead of just following the one that was laid out for him.
I went to university in the US last century, and don't recall an atmosphere of constant competition at all. At least at that time, townies seemed more competitive than gownies. My memories are mostly of us helping each other to drink from the firehose (of both the course load and of life).
As a fellow 23 year old Indian American who grew up in the tri-state area this hit way too close to home. I like to think I learned a lot of the lessons you’ve eschewed during my time in grad school right now but I caught myself sleuthing on your github and LinkedIn and feeling that familiar sense of envy. Some habits are hard to break I guess.
> but I caught myself sleuthing on your github and LinkedIn and feeling that familiar sense of envy
He works at AWS? Is that considered particularly impressive to be envious over? Sure he went to Hopkins but that's not atypical in the Princeton area.
I'd imagine for most of his peers from high school he's considered a disappointment for working at "only" AWS, they're probably all ML Engineers at FB or Google or Two Sigma, etc.
If you’re pathetic like me I guess. I only work at IBM on a bunch of Salesforce bullshit, so I find working on AI at AWS to be pretty impressive. Trust me I know there’s tiers to this stuff as someone who hasn’t passed interviews at Google and Citadel.
> I'd imagine for most of his peers from high school he's considered a disappointment for working at "only" AWS
I went to school at about the same time at the other high school in town (technically 2 towns, 1 combined school district), my family mostly still lives there. A job across the country in a well known tech company is reasonably top 25% of the class or so. Not standout, but nothing to be embarrassed about, and that's where plenty of us ended up.
Hilariously enough, my class' Valedictorian is now an ML Engineer on Amazon Echo.
I wasn't answering the question of "what will their parents think", I was just pointing out the reaction of our peers because I grew up in the same community. Parental reaction is typically much more about them as people than any other particular factor.
Competitiveness of any kind, with others or with oneself, whether physical or mental, seems to me like a crutch rather than a path to happiness.
If you can only feel good about yourself when you're on the up and up, what happens when you start getting old and can no longer keep up with the young blood?
Have you encountered mimetic theory? It's worth a read if you haven't yet. To boil it down: we measure ourselves by the people around us, and the more homogenous the peer group, the greater the pressure on each individual. We're all busy copying each other without consciously realizing it, but simultaneously we are mortally afraid of anybody thinking we are copying them. Here's a random overview: https://violenceandreligion.com/mimetic-theory/
Mimetic theory sounds like a very middle class (in the pejorative sense, as an ever-anxious externally-measuring person: in german we would say "spear-carrier", in french "tiny urbanite", etc.) approach to life.
Aha yes, in America it's often referred to as "Keeping up with the Joneses"
I'm curious about your phrasing, however. In your view, is a middle class approach to life a life that simply conforms to the predictions of mimetic theory without awareness, or a life informed by its understanding and application?
The former. (again, only in a pejorative context! Compare "épater la bourgeoisie", shetexe da sut inya.)
Note that in this century, the mimetic middle class is much closer to the statistical middle class (the modal hump of the poisson distribution) than to the more historical middle class (those with enough property to weather a few years not working, but not enough for permanent leisure. Go back another century and one has the classes of Jane Austen, who wrote mostly about the upper middle, with a smattering of lower upper characters.)
As to scapegoating: I'm reminded of Solzhenitsyn, who said that it's tempting to try to excise evil and separate it from society, but the attempt is doomed, as the line between good and evil runs not between ideologies or countries or factions or people but through all our hearts...
Sili to deng fo decho da nagut, deng to mebi mowsh shetexa kori milowda, kowmang.
Edit: also, conspiracy theorists may enjoy the double-scapegoating in the Passion, as told in Master and Margarita.
This story is definitely something a lot of young ambitious people face, glad the author found some new areas to grow!
As someone about 10 years older with time to reflect, one thing that stood out is burnout. When you’re younger you can keep going nonstop, but even while young it can hit you every few months like it hit me.
My first thought for Saturdays with nothing to do is to build a casual social network that will compound over time and pay off in spades. Once people hit their 30s and 40s and their network is now in management positions, it can have huge benefits for your career or entrepreneurial endeavors.
So one idea is on your open Saturdays, yes spend half the day working out or swimming, but then take it easy the 2nd half, go spend 6 hours at the local beer garden with friends (or make friends), and build from there.
I had my first quarter life crisis at 18, when I came to grips with the fact that I had accomplished nothing in my life so far, as evidenced by my lack of good college admissions - I graduated only 2nd in my class with just a 1500 SAT, which isn't good enough for top schools.
Unlike OP, however, it was less of an aimless drift and more of an aggressive, angry depression. Had another one at 20, when I realized that not getting into a FB internship would probably set me back permanently from my goals.
Now I'm 24, work at Amazon and widely considered a disappointment to people in OP's social circles. The pain has waned a bit, but the crisis is just constant now, like the roar of an engine on a long airplane flight in coach. Eventually the discomfort of the resting your head on the window and the anger you feel at the people with lie-flat seats paid for by Google and Facebook overpowers the rest.
I mean this with only compassion and a deep sense of empathy - you should consider therapy if you aren’t already going. What you’re describing sounds like Hell, and my first thought is that life doesn’t need to be that way for anyone. You are a source of immense value to the world, and if you don’t agree, it just means you can’t see what others can yet.
second this somehow, don't grind long term like this, life is supposed to be acceptably cool, and even if it's a battle a times, it's better served with a goal that you find worth fighting for so no anger but just drive
I picked up coding at the age of 22 as a hobby and now am a tech lead at a green energy company.
I don't make as much money as my hyper competetive peers. But I feel like the work I do matters a lot more. And I never felt this stress about under performing.
I didn't realize anyone (who cares about company 'status') considered Amazon to be lower-status than Facebook or Google. I mean, hell, it comes after F and before G in FAANG :)
At the very least, Amazon is probably considered to have better ethics than Facebook, if that helps.
There are certain circles or communities where that's the case, unfortunately. I casually browse Blind sometimes and the overwhelming attitude there is that Amazon is the "lesser" FAANG and is where you work if you couldn't cut it at Google/FB/Netflix. There's a lot of negativity about things like "Amazon doesn't provide free lunch? why even work there? Google gives me free lunch and free dinner!"
There's also a huge emphasis in such circles on compensation, and Amazon supposedly has a somewhat lower total compensation for entry level engineers than Google et al. That's a huge deal to status chasers who only measure their self worth in money.
FWIW I do not recommend browsing Blind because it is full of toxic mindsets like that, nor do I agree at all with it... I'm just sharing some context that such communities do exist.
Same at the top schools. I've never heard of someone at a top school be proud of going to Amazon - it's only something they do if they have no other options in my experience.
In my comment I shared some context about how there are such mindsets in certain circles, but I want to make it clear that those circles are unequivocally wrong. You should ignore them, full stop. They don't deserve that space in your mind.
You are 24 and work at amazon (I assume in engineering) and you think others consider you a disappointment? I honestly think you need therapy, you have some major self esteem issues. Part of being an adult is not caring what others think, you need to be happy for yourself.
I took a stroll through the comment history as well. A large proportion of them are lamenting working at google instead of amazon and making less than 150k at 23. There was also this line
> All I see is constant disrespect from society and from places like HackerNews. Where's the sympathy for a state school grad like me struggling to get a top job, or struggling to be taken seriously?
Despite most people responding to your comments by saying its not so bad, you're not a failure, and that you're doing fine.
Really, you're fine (career wise). Get some professional help. This is entirely a matter of perspective. Many people would dream to have what you have.
Please don't hate yourself. Do you think the lie-flat seats bring joy? Do you know the plane's destination? In this example, I'd rather be the guy who skipped the airport and went fishing. If anything, you have a head start on understanding this. The others may feel as you do when they're 30, 40, 50 or older, and feel tremendous heartache for wasted time. There is a ceiling everybody reaches in competition, and the billionaires want you to exhaust yourself finding it while working for them. Don't be afraid to question everything. You're young, and your 20s are more or less designed for brain development and tough lessons. But if you use this time to take a step back, your life could become heaven. I'm glad you reached out.
It is 64 degrees outside and cloudy. The young man energy is raw and overpowering! Air quality 24 with very little wind. Good day for a bike ride or a spell of right inaction.
You've created multiple accounts and posted hundreds of comments about this. I'm sympathetic to whatever pain is underlying that, but that doesn't make it ok to keep posting like this. Single-purpose accounts are not ok on HN, and such repetition is not in keeping with the site mandate.
Readers who encounter any single comment along these lines are naturally going to feel sympathetic, but that can't continue past a certain threshold of repetition. In that sense these conversations are illusory. Bringing it up again and again is not helping you, and it's damaging this site. Commenting so repetitively, even about a topic like personal pain which obviously matters, is functionally in the same category as spamming or trolling.
We banned your previous account that was doing this and asked you to stop. I'm going to ban this one as well and ask you to please not do this again.
I wish you well—I'm sure we all wish you well—in finding a way out of this into more satisfaction and self-kindness.
I had a boss that used to tell me..."in a hundred years who will care?" Do it for you and those you love, not the value they tell you you have, the value you logically know you provide them.
Dude, thank you for writing this. I had the exact same thing when I got my first full time job and I thought it was a unique problem. You made me feel way less crazy. I’m pretty much over it now, and like you, I had to set some new goals / ambitions to find a new “path” now that all my college ambitions had been achieved.
Learning to meditate was also a game changer. I do it every day before work. Also, talking to a therapist helped me realize I had been being way too hard on myself for too long. Learning to take pride in my accomplishments was another critical factor.
I hope a lot of people see your blog post. Thanks again for putting that together!
Part of becoming an adult is learning how to (be able to) do what you want.
It's not an easy transition, from one of having your identity and goals shaped by others (family), and being released into a world where you define your own identity and goals.
Maybe you'll be happy with your achievement graduating from a good college, and use that education to do satisfactory work and earn a satisfactory living, and pursue your passions and hobbies.
Maybe you'll never be satisfied and will continue to work your way up the ladder, and die as a CEO working all day every day at 80.
Neither one is 'wrong', but it's up to you to define what you want and what makes you happy. And not just choosing things that will make you happy, but choosing to be happy with your choices.
You might envy the F/G engineer in a lie-flat bed. You might even be right (I flew business class internationally once, it was amazing). But still, they have a choice -- are they happy with what their striving has gotten them, or are they staying up the whole flight working on the next project to achieve the next promotion that they imagine will bring fleeting happiness, until they choose a new goal, making them again unhappy with the promotion they just achieved?
I have been struggling with this lately. I notice that wanting to be "successful" gives me anxiety. Success is not well defined; it's a subjective term. Instead, I try to be "excellent" - be better at thing X today than I was yesterday.
> Part of becoming an adult is learning how to (be able to) do what you want.
I fear this isn't the case for lots of people these days. They go from being defined by school straight to being defined by their boss.
You need a period of independence. A time to discover who you are and what you want. A time where you aren't just chasing external validation. The earlier the better.
Another part is also realizing that society is a very mild and highly relativistic compromise minefield and not to pay too much attention to how things work.
The challenge I've found is finding the balance between professional ambition and personal hobby/passions. I've recently lost much of my professional ambition and now feel a bit more of the competition aspect. I'm clocking out at 5pm and ignoring after hours requests and anything that would impeded on my personal time. However I know there are so many of my peers who are putting in that extra effort and when it comes to review time they'll be preferred over me.
It seem difficult to find a job where I'm not expected to be 'striving'. Where I can get in a position and just say "i'm good here" and simply maintain my position.
great question - I'm in that position myself. Prior to covid, one of my hobbies really took over and became all I wanted to do. I scaled back my ambitions at work and basically have taken steps to put myself in 'auto-pilot' roles where I can meet/barely exceed expectations while focusing on my hobby. Now I have a ton of flexibility to pursue my passion (at least for now) while still getting great feedback from my leads.
A key part of achieving that was
1) Being honest with myself about what I wanted and the sacrifices it entailed, such as slower promotion or salary growth
2) Showing my employer that I am committed to doing well and performing - but with an expectation that they respect my priorities and accommodate them.
3) Demonstrating that allowing me to prioritize my passions actually makes me better at my job - I am happy, relaxed and focused when I come to work - and that 35 hours a week of happy me is better than 45 hours of cranky, unsatisfied me.
I remember the strange feeling of uncertainty I got shortly after graduating college. Up until then, what I was supposed to do next was always clear. I was building up towards being an adult, and then suddenly there I was.
That shift from planning for the future to realizing that future was now was tricky. It took me a couple of years of aimless drifting to finally come to terms with it, and convince myself that it was time to start actually doing the things I had always planned for doing in the future.
As a first generation Indian, I grew up with the competition and abhorred it as a high-schooler. I keep far from it even now. It is not good to have a uncritical self image. Keep doing the good work, enjoy life. Nobody knows what will happen, so plan for the risks ahead, and keep chaos at bay. That's the best you can do. Rest is gravy. One of the worst things anyone can do is feel bad about things that they shouldn't feel bad over. The time spent doing so is wasted, it belittles your spent effort, and creates a poor self image. And keep away from snobs. It is not worth killing yourself over. If you are born in US, you should be able to pickup friends outside your country circle anyways. Don't fix the wrong bug. Cheers.
I do not believe for a moment that this has anything to do with competition.
I have lived in China and kids there are booked fully. Their parents sacrifice everything for their only child but at the same time they put a very high burden on them booking every space of their lives.
Just letting the kids fool around, experience what interest them, play and make mistakes is inadmissible.
Usually the parents work all day and only grandparents could take care of them, so making them go to some class or another is a way to have their kids busy all day.
Because they have only one child, the child needs to be perfect all the time, and the bet must be risk free.
This creates children than don't really know what they really want, and with zero creativity, incapable of making mistakes or take their own decisions.
Also when they don't have external pressure they just laze, because they lack internal motivation.
This particular person is happy on the work because he is told what to do, I suppose he works at Microsoft. Only when he is free to do whatever he can do he feels uneasy.
Like adult people(over 40) in Russia when Soviet Russia collapsed, they felt uneasy when there was no one taking all the decisions for them.
They just had not the training to deal with freedom.
As a kid, when I finished school, I was free, My friends and I decided what we wanted to do all the time. If I joined a competition, I did not tell my parents.
Over time you make lots of mistakes,exploring new territories, experiences and dangers, but develop autonomy and learn to deal with chaos.
After university I had the opposite problem to this man's, I could not stand people at work telling me what to do, specially when I considered they were taking bad decisions, so I started working on my own.
Education in China works exactly like that.
Buxiban until late night for _all_ kids (like wearing a cap in korea years ago)... 0 over-generalization.
I'm really sick of this "chinese-cultural-relativism free pass" (with a little paimapi拍馬屁 included)
I agree with your points, but would just point out that the upbringing - ennui connection you make isn’t as firm as you imply. I had a very laissez-faire, American upbringing and identify with this blog post. A friend with the opposite upbringing (Indian, IIT, only child) never did - she was immediately freed and happy when hitting the same points that left me listless.
I think this has much more to do with internalization if external reward systems, which is tremendously complex.
I wouldn't go as far as calling racist, but you did make some pretty grand generalizations with seemingly detailed explanation about how "Chinese kids" and society work.
Maybe the people you surround yourself with treat their children like that, but I don't think they, and in turn, your observation can be generalized to all of Chinese.
Same with your generalization with your personal experience, not sure if you're American, but there are plenty Americans(or whichever country you're from) who put a lot of pressure on their children to perform well in what they do, maybe you are just not one of them.
> Maybe the people you surround yourself with treat their children like that, but I don't think they, and in turn, your observation can be generalized to all of Chinese.
I think the experience described is pretty typical for the middle class. The claim that all Chinese lack creativity etc is clearly wrong, but I do think this upbringing is a big downward force on such traits. Many will surpass those challenges and get past their childhood experiences eventually, but some don't. My wife for example had a pretty typical upbringing, studying 24/7 basically. Imagine no weekends off since middle-school, not allowed to read books (except for course literature), studying until 11pm every day since high-school etc. Now, she's a high achiever, but needs the structure, without which she doesn't know what to do with herself. It's been a slow process undoing that damage, including a lot of therapy. Being very involved in the Chinese community, this is much more common than in Europe (don't know about US).
>They just had not the training to deal with freedom.
China is just more open about it, the phenomenon is universal. Nobody, China, West or anywhere else really has something approaching authentic freedom.
Over here we can argue we have freedom, but the freedom we have in our choices is like going to Westworld (relevant Bruno Macaes piece[1] from yesterday). We are encouraged to go backpack to Australia, participate in a protest, and then we are supposed to 'grow up', get a family, and so on. There's no point in that process in which you actually do something that amounts to more than simulating freedom, there's no point where you actually might get hurt.
In that sense if anything a lot of cultures like in China are just more honest, they tell you to sit your ass down and do rote memorization for 10 hours, whereas we get a ping pong table in the office and free smoothies and Disneyland, there's really no difference at the end of the day.
I'm going a bit off-topic compared to other comments, but I had never heard about Seattle Freeze. Is it really harder to make friends and acquaintances in Seattle compared to other cities or States? Any Seattleite to confirm?
Seattleite here. It's a common thing that people who move to Seattle experience and can describe. I've experienced it as well and ended up mostly making friends with people I worked with, who themselves were from out of state.
I don't know if it's a phenomenon that has been really seriously studied, though, but it's well known to people who live here.
The emphasis we put on kids to out perform their peers, get the best grades, get the best scores, go to the best colleges, is unrealistic and creates anxiety ridden adults later on. You can fail. It’s ok. What did you learn? You can skip college for some fields and be totally fine. You can even shun your old existence and live a life of a hermit, that’s cool too.
This isn’t the first time I’ve read something like this from an Indian household (or Asia in general). Yes, your family experienced great pressure to do well in order to prove they belong. But in keeping up with the “Jones’s” you aren’t enjoying it, you aren’t doing things that bring you joy, and you are doing things to conform. We all want to “fit in” but it’s when we let our diversity shine we can truly appreciate each other.
Good read though and I hope you realize it’s not all about performance, even in the workplace. Prioritize your mental health and happiness over your career. You’ll live a happier life.
This story truly resonates with me as I am also first generation. I came to USA on my own, with $700 in my pocket and a partial athletic scholarship (played a D1 team sport). After I finished my undergrad and the sports were gone (in an organized form at least) I also struggled a bit. Unlike you, I made that step and got into grad school. That was probably one of the best decisions I've ever made (even though it didn't feel like at the moment). The main reason I've managed to accomplish everything in my life was primarily because of being involved in sports and being competitive in anything that I do, whether it is sports, academia, work or anything else. I believe that a healthy dose of competitive drive is what makes you a better self as you always strive for improvements. It certainly made me a better athlete and a better student.
Another thing that you mentioned is that you fell off the track a bit and you are never going to be in the shape you were in college. Trust me on this one, you'll hit your prime between 28 and 32 years old. That's when you could potentially be your strongest and fastest. And staying in shape is a lot easier than getting in shape. I was lucky that my grad school allowed me a lot of flexibility and I was still able to play my sport on a semi-professional level even after college. Try to find a group/community of like-minded people who share your passion for running. That will be your "hobby" and will fulfill multiple things that you are missing in life at the moment (e.g. staying in shape and competing).
Having said that, my "quarter life crisis" (or one third life crisis if you will) is kicking-in harder this this time around as I am in my mid 30s and my athleticism is slowly going away. Being in the middle of pandemic is not helping either. I used to be extremely agile, with a 40" vertical jump but this has been on a steady decline due to age and mileage and all the restrictions imposed on sports and gatherings. Still learning how to deal with it.
I think this post boils down to two things: finding meaning in one's life and using external validation to define oneself. I think the shift to "competing with oneself" is an attempt to move away from the external validation to give one meaning.
That said, I think these are issues that are always going to come up in life. I wouldn't necessarily describe it as a quarter-life crisis. The crisis part is the realization that these are real issues one has to reckon with, essentially forever. That's life.
I think with age (being 42 and knowing how much more driven I was in my youth), you do eventually start to realize competing with others or even oneself is not necessarily a great goal. Life is about experiences and living. Sometimes things go your way, sometimes they don't. A lot of it isn't in your control.
Trying to be better than others or yourself a year ago is very hard to sustain. You eventually have to be okay with who you are where you are right now. That doesn't mean you give up on dreams, just that you hold them in their proper context.
That was an interesting read. I enjoy it when folks write about things other than the technical. We're human; first and foremost.
For myself, I won't get into it, but I have spent the last 40 years living a life of rigorous self-honesty, and self-evaluation. I take daily personal inventory, and often immediately admit wrong and move to correct any errors.
I'm not very competitive. In order to compete, one must win, and when one wins, someone else loses. I have found that we can often work together to achieve far more than is possible alone; no matter how talented and energetic we are. I can be on a team that may be competing against another team, but often, there's no need for competition, and I never compete against my team members.
I've also spent that last 40 years helping others, and being of Service. Many of those I help have been the victims of someone else's competitiveness, so it gives me a good baseline to reflect on what "competition" looks like, on the losing end.
My lack of competitiveness has often been read as weakness. People that know me, know that's not a particularly helpful approach, when dealing with me.
I just find that we get a lot more done, when we stop trying to beat each other, and see how we can use our differences and orthogonal viewpoints as a concrete mix.
I totally vibe with this. I've never been super competitive either, I always wondered if it hindered me in some way. Even today we had a breakdown in between teams at work, pointing fingers at each other. I just finally said, ok my fault, and recommended how I could have prevented the issue to begin with. Technically not my responsibility but the competition between the two teams was maddening.
I recommend reading Peter Thiel's writings/speeches on his quarter-life crisis, and how it resolved him to "avoid competition"/tracked career paths. I remember reading his content when I was 27, and it completely changed the course of my life.
For anyone else curious, OP's average pace for his last three runs were 6:53 (8.4 mi), 7:08 (5.4 mi), and 7:22 (6.4 mi). He's clearly living the post and doing well at competing against himself.
I just turned 31 and I feel like my life is just starting.
I'm not the smartest dude, but I try really hard. It took me a few tries to get into grad school after working a series of shitty jobs. Now that've finished my PhD (a mixture of computational fluidics and material dynamics), I've been trying to enter the job market in tech (close to family in the bay area) and it's just not happening (like almost no interviews).
I guess it's just managing expectations. Our local police department is hiring so I might give that a shot. It's a bit of a blow to the ego but that doesn't matter.
The one thing I regret was neglecting my relationships (fiancee left me, didn't keep up with close friends/family, even one that passed away) and hobbies for the sake of work during grad school. That's something I won't compromise again.
I feel pretty much the same. 2 bachelors, 1 one year master, 1 two year master, some work experience.
Most software companies basically never responded back. The ones that did told me that I didn't have enough experience.
12 months later, I finally got a job, at some small startup that has its good and bad points. The first thing I'm noticing: university was felt much harder and I felt I was learning a lot more there.
I feel completely demotivated that most companies (and all big companies) weren't considering me when I applied to them (and probably still aren't). It crushed my motivation and now I am simply performing to expectations. It does mean my work is quite relaxing :)
Example:
At my work, I recently learned a bit more about React hooks. I knew they existed, but never used them and this time I learned a bit on using them.
In my final university course I learned how to perform Meltdown/Spectre, read security papers and even more advanced attacks.
| I feel completely demotivated that most companies (and all big companies) weren't considering me when I applied to them (and probably still aren't). It crushed my motivation
I understand that feeling. I lived a very structured life, gym in morning, breakfast in the office right after, clean diet eg. the lockdown + moving back in parents, removed those structures. When I first started looking I got my DS/A in tip-top shape, and consistently applying but after grinding for months with no interviews and ghosting recruiters I've hit a point where I'm tired. I think I've accepted that I'll need a new career and it's been an ego blow but it's freeing. I feel like I'm 17 again with no idea what the hell I'm going to do, thankfully, I've got my health and no dependents.
I too did just learn about hooks for a little side project. React is interesting, I've never done any frontend so it's different. I've also been playing around with rust as a backend too, that's such a cool language.
I'm a bit of a late bloomer, and had my first "quarter life crisis" at 30. I'd like to think this means I'll live to be 120 :) I remember it was my 30th birthday in 2016 and I was taking an airplane to be at a conference I didn't care about in a city I didn't like. "Is this all?" I asked myself. As it turns out, it wasn't.
I quit that job, worked on a startup for 9 months. It failed. I got another job. Soon I'm going to start working on another startup. I started taking my social and dating life more seriously. Like much more seriously. In my 20s, I'd be lucky to get invited to do stuff every couple of months. My weekends are full of stuff these days. I rarely dated, but over the past few years I've rejected women, I've been rejected by women. I'm still not where I want to be: I'd like to build a successful startup, I'd like to have a solid long-term relationship and family, I want to leave my mark on this world.
But honestly -- as someone that's hyper-competitive -- competition isn't healthy. It makes me an asshole and even though, frankly, I do win a lot, it's not as fulfilling as a night out on a great date. Or chatting with friends about the meaning of life. Or enjoying the best damn crème brûlée you've ever had. Winning comes at a cost. Compartmentalizing competition is probably one of the most important character milestones I've achieved yet.
I had my quarter-life crisis at around the same age, but almost the inverse of what you describe. I spent my 20s coasting through undergrad and coasting through my job (read: not caring much about it). I was primarily focused on friendships, dating, and just generally having a lot of fun. Then I hit my late 20s, and after numerous flings and half-serious relationships, I got into a relationship with someone who totally shifted my perspective. I suddenly became extremely ambitious and focused on my career, and stopped the partying and fun-seeking completely. Now I'm chasing the start-up dream and what I feel like most of my peers were focusing on in their 20s.
Having walked this same path, this blog resonates with me. To others reading, however, I would warn against the particular solution the author suggests.
I can’t help but notice the author’s attempts to find new external benchmarks against which to measure himself. I did the exact same thing, literally down to “what if I ran a marathon?”
It worked well temporarily, but it didnt get at the core issue for me: my listlessness stemmed from a disbelief in the value of the benchmark, not the inability to measure up. 10 miles vs 11 didn’t matter; what matters is doing something i believe is valuable. At the end of the day, running didn’t matter, nor did my job (consulting - lol). I needed to find what did matter to me, so that even if I didn’t stack up, I could still point to something and go - “yea, but that’s still objectively awesome”
For those reading this article and saying “this is me, now” I would encourage you to think less about competition and more about values. At the end of the day, competition is a means, not an end; a Surface-level proximal driver, not a core, distal cause.
The key question is: what do you care about right now? What good do you want to do?
I agree wholeheartedly of doing something that you believe is valuable.
The process of figuring out what's valuable is different from person to person. Some people know from a young age. Others figure it out in college or post-education. My values have been shaped and refined over the course of high school, college, and work. The high level picture may not be clear, but I believe it's beneficial to hone in on what you find valuable and see where it takes you.
Naval Ravikant has a healthy way of thinking about this.
If you are envious or jealous of someone's accomplishments or wealth, you must realize that it's impossible to be in that individual's position without taking onboard all the baggage that comes with it. Sure, Warren Buffet is rich, but would you like to swap with him and be 90 years old? Sure, that engineer is getting promoted faster than you, but do you also want their mental health issues?
It's a pernicious fiction to only imagine swapping a single characteristic (their success) and forgetting or not knowing about all the ways in which you're better off (fitness, friends, family, mental health, age).
"Don't compare your insides with someone else's outsides" is a good maxim, but there's a sort of "just world" assumption in your post that everything balances out.
The world isn't that fair. Some people just have it better.
Competition saddens me. I've always found it boring. Most often it doesn't lead to growth or betterment. I prefer creation and understanding to it.
There is much to explore, plenty of new things to invent, plenty of stories to share.
Our elites have successfully failed. They cornered themselves into zero-sum games where they pocket all the wins. You don't have a choice anymore but to compete or die.
Every creation gets corrupted to bring the level down to tic-tac-toe. Hopefully creators can still see the stars when they die in the gutter.
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[ 6.3 ms ] story [ 130 ms ] threadSounds like this person needs a role-model and a mentor.
I upvoted this because the atmosphere of constant competition he describes is a relatively new thing (certainly I didn't experience it) and I'm interested to hear if other people of a similar age agree or have thoughts on this.
I started undergrad in 2011 and already getting in then you needed very good grades. Reading about the acceptance rates into my program and the grades now required, I feel really sad for current students, and I was already very unhappy during my undergrad...
I'm also 22 like the author, and I realized a long time ago that I had no interest in competing in things I didn't care about.
I was in the top class at my secondary school (High school for you Americans) and easily got above average marks while doing work 1yr ahead with not much effort. I really didn't see the point in grinding for top marks when they were meaningless, but I put in a little effort because I felt like it's what I should be doing.
At uni, I managed to scrape by for a couple of years doing little work and getting C- to B- marks mostly. Again, doing it because it's what I thought I should be doing and I felt obligated to go to university and get an engineering degree since that's what smart people are supposed to do.
I dropped out when I realized that I had been following the path I was "supposed" to take rather than what I wanted to do.
It sounds like OP finally chose a path instead of just following the one that was laid out for him.
Note: I don't live in the US
I'm fairly certain that 6 months with a mentor would have altered my life to unbelievable levels (not difficult since I flirted with rock bottom ;)
He works at AWS? Is that considered particularly impressive to be envious over? Sure he went to Hopkins but that's not atypical in the Princeton area.
I'd imagine for most of his peers from high school he's considered a disappointment for working at "only" AWS, they're probably all ML Engineers at FB or Google or Two Sigma, etc.
I went to school at about the same time at the other high school in town (technically 2 towns, 1 combined school district), my family mostly still lives there. A job across the country in a well known tech company is reasonably top 25% of the class or so. Not standout, but nothing to be embarrassed about, and that's where plenty of us ended up.
What did the top 1% do? What did your valedictorian(s) do?
I wasn't answering the question of "what will their parents think", I was just pointing out the reaction of our peers because I grew up in the same community. Parental reaction is typically much more about them as people than any other particular factor.
If you can only feel good about yourself when you're on the up and up, what happens when you start getting old and can no longer keep up with the young blood?
I'm curious about your phrasing, however. In your view, is a middle class approach to life a life that simply conforms to the predictions of mimetic theory without awareness, or a life informed by its understanding and application?
Note that in this century, the mimetic middle class is much closer to the statistical middle class (the modal hump of the poisson distribution) than to the more historical middle class (those with enough property to weather a few years not working, but not enough for permanent leisure. Go back another century and one has the classes of Jane Austen, who wrote mostly about the upper middle, with a smattering of lower upper characters.)
Sili to deng fo decho da nagut, deng to mebi mowsh shetexa kori milowda, kowmang.
Edit: also, conspiracy theorists may enjoy the double-scapegoating in the Passion, as told in Master and Margarita.
As someone about 10 years older with time to reflect, one thing that stood out is burnout. When you’re younger you can keep going nonstop, but even while young it can hit you every few months like it hit me.
My first thought for Saturdays with nothing to do is to build a casual social network that will compound over time and pay off in spades. Once people hit their 30s and 40s and their network is now in management positions, it can have huge benefits for your career or entrepreneurial endeavors.
So one idea is on your open Saturdays, yes spend half the day working out or swimming, but then take it easy the 2nd half, go spend 6 hours at the local beer garden with friends (or make friends), and build from there.
Unlike OP, however, it was less of an aimless drift and more of an aggressive, angry depression. Had another one at 20, when I realized that not getting into a FB internship would probably set me back permanently from my goals.
Now I'm 24, work at Amazon and widely considered a disappointment to people in OP's social circles. The pain has waned a bit, but the crisis is just constant now, like the roar of an engine on a long airplane flight in coach. Eventually the discomfort of the resting your head on the window and the anger you feel at the people with lie-flat seats paid for by Google and Facebook overpowers the rest.
I don't make as much money as my hyper competetive peers. But I feel like the work I do matters a lot more. And I never felt this stress about under performing.
At the very least, Amazon is probably considered to have better ethics than Facebook, if that helps.
There's also a huge emphasis in such circles on compensation, and Amazon supposedly has a somewhat lower total compensation for entry level engineers than Google et al. That's a huge deal to status chasers who only measure their self worth in money.
FWIW I do not recommend browsing Blind because it is full of toxic mindsets like that, nor do I agree at all with it... I'm just sharing some context that such communities do exist.
If a corporation is not under fire, in all likelihood it is not saintly, but too mediocre to be interesting.
> All I see is constant disrespect from society and from places like HackerNews. Where's the sympathy for a state school grad like me struggling to get a top job, or struggling to be taken seriously?
Despite most people responding to your comments by saying its not so bad, you're not a failure, and that you're doing fine.
Really, you're fine (career wise). Get some professional help. This is entirely a matter of perspective. Many people would dream to have what you have.
Readers who encounter any single comment along these lines are naturally going to feel sympathetic, but that can't continue past a certain threshold of repetition. In that sense these conversations are illusory. Bringing it up again and again is not helping you, and it's damaging this site. Commenting so repetitively, even about a topic like personal pain which obviously matters, is functionally in the same category as spamming or trolling.
We banned your previous account that was doing this and asked you to stop. I'm going to ban this one as well and ask you to please not do this again.
I wish you well—I'm sure we all wish you well—in finding a way out of this into more satisfaction and self-kindness.
Learning to meditate was also a game changer. I do it every day before work. Also, talking to a therapist helped me realize I had been being way too hard on myself for too long. Learning to take pride in my accomplishments was another critical factor.
I hope a lot of people see your blog post. Thanks again for putting that together!
It's not an easy transition, from one of having your identity and goals shaped by others (family), and being released into a world where you define your own identity and goals.
Maybe you'll be happy with your achievement graduating from a good college, and use that education to do satisfactory work and earn a satisfactory living, and pursue your passions and hobbies.
Maybe you'll never be satisfied and will continue to work your way up the ladder, and die as a CEO working all day every day at 80.
Neither one is 'wrong', but it's up to you to define what you want and what makes you happy. And not just choosing things that will make you happy, but choosing to be happy with your choices.
You might envy the F/G engineer in a lie-flat bed. You might even be right (I flew business class internationally once, it was amazing). But still, they have a choice -- are they happy with what their striving has gotten them, or are they staying up the whole flight working on the next project to achieve the next promotion that they imagine will bring fleeting happiness, until they choose a new goal, making them again unhappy with the promotion they just achieved?
I fear this isn't the case for lots of people these days. They go from being defined by school straight to being defined by their boss.
You need a period of independence. A time to discover who you are and what you want. A time where you aren't just chasing external validation. The earlier the better.
And as always, be like Tim, Tim doesn't give a shit. https://personalexcellence.co/files/tim-doesnt-give-a-shit.p...
It seem difficult to find a job where I'm not expected to be 'striving'. Where I can get in a position and just say "i'm good here" and simply maintain my position.
A key part of achieving that was 1) Being honest with myself about what I wanted and the sacrifices it entailed, such as slower promotion or salary growth
2) Showing my employer that I am committed to doing well and performing - but with an expectation that they respect my priorities and accommodate them.
3) Demonstrating that allowing me to prioritize my passions actually makes me better at my job - I am happy, relaxed and focused when I come to work - and that 35 hours a week of happy me is better than 45 hours of cranky, unsatisfied me.
That shift from planning for the future to realizing that future was now was tricky. It took me a couple of years of aimless drifting to finally come to terms with it, and convince myself that it was time to start actually doing the things I had always planned for doing in the future.
I have lived in China and kids there are booked fully. Their parents sacrifice everything for their only child but at the same time they put a very high burden on them booking every space of their lives.
Just letting the kids fool around, experience what interest them, play and make mistakes is inadmissible.
Usually the parents work all day and only grandparents could take care of them, so making them go to some class or another is a way to have their kids busy all day.
Because they have only one child, the child needs to be perfect all the time, and the bet must be risk free.
This creates children than don't really know what they really want, and with zero creativity, incapable of making mistakes or take their own decisions.
Also when they don't have external pressure they just laze, because they lack internal motivation.
This particular person is happy on the work because he is told what to do, I suppose he works at Microsoft. Only when he is free to do whatever he can do he feels uneasy.
Like adult people(over 40) in Russia when Soviet Russia collapsed, they felt uneasy when there was no one taking all the decisions for them.
They just had not the training to deal with freedom.
As a kid, when I finished school, I was free, My friends and I decided what we wanted to do all the time. If I joined a competition, I did not tell my parents.
Over time you make lots of mistakes,exploring new territories, experiences and dangers, but develop autonomy and learn to deal with chaos.
After university I had the opposite problem to this man's, I could not stand people at work telling me what to do, specially when I considered they were taking bad decisions, so I started working on my own.
I think this has much more to do with internalization if external reward systems, which is tremendously complex.
Maybe the people you surround yourself with treat their children like that, but I don't think they, and in turn, your observation can be generalized to all of Chinese.
Same with your generalization with your personal experience, not sure if you're American, but there are plenty Americans(or whichever country you're from) who put a lot of pressure on their children to perform well in what they do, maybe you are just not one of them.
I think the experience described is pretty typical for the middle class. The claim that all Chinese lack creativity etc is clearly wrong, but I do think this upbringing is a big downward force on such traits. Many will surpass those challenges and get past their childhood experiences eventually, but some don't. My wife for example had a pretty typical upbringing, studying 24/7 basically. Imagine no weekends off since middle-school, not allowed to read books (except for course literature), studying until 11pm every day since high-school etc. Now, she's a high achiever, but needs the structure, without which she doesn't know what to do with herself. It's been a slow process undoing that damage, including a lot of therapy. Being very involved in the Chinese community, this is much more common than in Europe (don't know about US).
China is just more open about it, the phenomenon is universal. Nobody, China, West or anywhere else really has something approaching authentic freedom.
Over here we can argue we have freedom, but the freedom we have in our choices is like going to Westworld (relevant Bruno Macaes piece[1] from yesterday). We are encouraged to go backpack to Australia, participate in a protest, and then we are supposed to 'grow up', get a family, and so on. There's no point in that process in which you actually do something that amounts to more than simulating freedom, there's no point where you actually might get hurt.
In that sense if anything a lot of cultures like in China are just more honest, they tell you to sit your ass down and do rote memorization for 10 hours, whereas we get a ping pong table in the office and free smoothies and Disneyland, there's really no difference at the end of the day.
[1]https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/history/articles/what-com...
I don't know if it's a phenomenon that has been really seriously studied, though, but it's well known to people who live here.
This isn’t the first time I’ve read something like this from an Indian household (or Asia in general). Yes, your family experienced great pressure to do well in order to prove they belong. But in keeping up with the “Jones’s” you aren’t enjoying it, you aren’t doing things that bring you joy, and you are doing things to conform. We all want to “fit in” but it’s when we let our diversity shine we can truly appreciate each other.
Good read though and I hope you realize it’s not all about performance, even in the workplace. Prioritize your mental health and happiness over your career. You’ll live a happier life.
Another thing that you mentioned is that you fell off the track a bit and you are never going to be in the shape you were in college. Trust me on this one, you'll hit your prime between 28 and 32 years old. That's when you could potentially be your strongest and fastest. And staying in shape is a lot easier than getting in shape. I was lucky that my grad school allowed me a lot of flexibility and I was still able to play my sport on a semi-professional level even after college. Try to find a group/community of like-minded people who share your passion for running. That will be your "hobby" and will fulfill multiple things that you are missing in life at the moment (e.g. staying in shape and competing).
Having said that, my "quarter life crisis" (or one third life crisis if you will) is kicking-in harder this this time around as I am in my mid 30s and my athleticism is slowly going away. Being in the middle of pandemic is not helping either. I used to be extremely agile, with a 40" vertical jump but this has been on a steady decline due to age and mileage and all the restrictions imposed on sports and gatherings. Still learning how to deal with it.
That said, I think these are issues that are always going to come up in life. I wouldn't necessarily describe it as a quarter-life crisis. The crisis part is the realization that these are real issues one has to reckon with, essentially forever. That's life.
I think with age (being 42 and knowing how much more driven I was in my youth), you do eventually start to realize competing with others or even oneself is not necessarily a great goal. Life is about experiences and living. Sometimes things go your way, sometimes they don't. A lot of it isn't in your control.
Trying to be better than others or yourself a year ago is very hard to sustain. You eventually have to be okay with who you are where you are right now. That doesn't mean you give up on dreams, just that you hold them in their proper context.
For myself, I won't get into it, but I have spent the last 40 years living a life of rigorous self-honesty, and self-evaluation. I take daily personal inventory, and often immediately admit wrong and move to correct any errors.
I'm not very competitive. In order to compete, one must win, and when one wins, someone else loses. I have found that we can often work together to achieve far more than is possible alone; no matter how talented and energetic we are. I can be on a team that may be competing against another team, but often, there's no need for competition, and I never compete against my team members.
I've also spent that last 40 years helping others, and being of Service. Many of those I help have been the victims of someone else's competitiveness, so it gives me a good baseline to reflect on what "competition" looks like, on the losing end.
My lack of competitiveness has often been read as weakness. People that know me, know that's not a particularly helpful approach, when dealing with me.
I just find that we get a lot more done, when we stop trying to beat each other, and see how we can use our differences and orthogonal viewpoints as a concrete mix.
I just turned 31 and I feel like my life is just starting.
I'm not the smartest dude, but I try really hard. It took me a few tries to get into grad school after working a series of shitty jobs. Now that've finished my PhD (a mixture of computational fluidics and material dynamics), I've been trying to enter the job market in tech (close to family in the bay area) and it's just not happening (like almost no interviews).
I guess it's just managing expectations. Our local police department is hiring so I might give that a shot. It's a bit of a blow to the ego but that doesn't matter.
The one thing I regret was neglecting my relationships (fiancee left me, didn't keep up with close friends/family, even one that passed away) and hobbies for the sake of work during grad school. That's something I won't compromise again.
Most software companies basically never responded back. The ones that did told me that I didn't have enough experience.
12 months later, I finally got a job, at some small startup that has its good and bad points. The first thing I'm noticing: university was felt much harder and I felt I was learning a lot more there.
I feel completely demotivated that most companies (and all big companies) weren't considering me when I applied to them (and probably still aren't). It crushed my motivation and now I am simply performing to expectations. It does mean my work is quite relaxing :)
Example:
At my work, I recently learned a bit more about React hooks. I knew they existed, but never used them and this time I learned a bit on using them.
In my final university course I learned how to perform Meltdown/Spectre, read security papers and even more advanced attacks.
I understand that feeling. I lived a very structured life, gym in morning, breakfast in the office right after, clean diet eg. the lockdown + moving back in parents, removed those structures. When I first started looking I got my DS/A in tip-top shape, and consistently applying but after grinding for months with no interviews and ghosting recruiters I've hit a point where I'm tired. I think I've accepted that I'll need a new career and it's been an ego blow but it's freeing. I feel like I'm 17 again with no idea what the hell I'm going to do, thankfully, I've got my health and no dependents.
I too did just learn about hooks for a little side project. React is interesting, I've never done any frontend so it's different. I've also been playing around with rust as a backend too, that's such a cool language.
I quit that job, worked on a startup for 9 months. It failed. I got another job. Soon I'm going to start working on another startup. I started taking my social and dating life more seriously. Like much more seriously. In my 20s, I'd be lucky to get invited to do stuff every couple of months. My weekends are full of stuff these days. I rarely dated, but over the past few years I've rejected women, I've been rejected by women. I'm still not where I want to be: I'd like to build a successful startup, I'd like to have a solid long-term relationship and family, I want to leave my mark on this world.
But honestly -- as someone that's hyper-competitive -- competition isn't healthy. It makes me an asshole and even though, frankly, I do win a lot, it's not as fulfilling as a night out on a great date. Or chatting with friends about the meaning of life. Or enjoying the best damn crème brûlée you've ever had. Winning comes at a cost. Compartmentalizing competition is probably one of the most important character milestones I've achieved yet.
I can’t help but notice the author’s attempts to find new external benchmarks against which to measure himself. I did the exact same thing, literally down to “what if I ran a marathon?”
It worked well temporarily, but it didnt get at the core issue for me: my listlessness stemmed from a disbelief in the value of the benchmark, not the inability to measure up. 10 miles vs 11 didn’t matter; what matters is doing something i believe is valuable. At the end of the day, running didn’t matter, nor did my job (consulting - lol). I needed to find what did matter to me, so that even if I didn’t stack up, I could still point to something and go - “yea, but that’s still objectively awesome”
For those reading this article and saying “this is me, now” I would encourage you to think less about competition and more about values. At the end of the day, competition is a means, not an end; a Surface-level proximal driver, not a core, distal cause.
The key question is: what do you care about right now? What good do you want to do?
The process of figuring out what's valuable is different from person to person. Some people know from a young age. Others figure it out in college or post-education. My values have been shaped and refined over the course of high school, college, and work. The high level picture may not be clear, but I believe it's beneficial to hone in on what you find valuable and see where it takes you.
Accompanying HN thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24330086
If you are envious or jealous of someone's accomplishments or wealth, you must realize that it's impossible to be in that individual's position without taking onboard all the baggage that comes with it. Sure, Warren Buffet is rich, but would you like to swap with him and be 90 years old? Sure, that engineer is getting promoted faster than you, but do you also want their mental health issues?
It's a pernicious fiction to only imagine swapping a single characteristic (their success) and forgetting or not knowing about all the ways in which you're better off (fitness, friends, family, mental health, age).
The world isn't that fair. Some people just have it better.
There is much to explore, plenty of new things to invent, plenty of stories to share.
Our elites have successfully failed. They cornered themselves into zero-sum games where they pocket all the wins. You don't have a choice anymore but to compete or die.
Every creation gets corrupted to bring the level down to tic-tac-toe. Hopefully creators can still see the stars when they die in the gutter.