How many software developers actually get a chance to “add to the world's treasures“? Building yet another CRUD web app doesn't meet the definition in my book. I'm not saying it's not possible, but you have to be rather lucky.
Yep, this whole thread is one big apples-to-oranges comparison. An average software engineer is lower status than a lawyer at a top law-firm with fierce competition for every position. Well, duh. Why don't we compare a senior FAANG engineer/manager to an average legal clerk or such then.
Sounds deep, you probably mean things like love and faith and kindness.
But it's misleading. Friendships and relationships aren't "free" in terms of effort and achievement. They take the same kind of work/luck/genetics/network combination as getting an interesting and fulfilling job does.
Sure, even the hobo on the street can have faith in Jesus and mental peace for free if you mean that sort of thing, but most things people want are scarce or at least aren't available by default, without either effort or connections.
Hah. Nope. A career where you can make money and move up over time is not low status. Try being a blue collar member of the working poor, or someone deep in debt from a useless degree working a dead end service job. Software is a very cushy job compared with what more than half this country has.
I think it may be on the lower end for a number of reasons which lead back to the low barrier to entry - there’s no need to pay your dues with a decade of schooling, in hundreds of thousands in tuition, and to professional associations, state boards of licensure, or both.
However, there are crappy doctors and architects - just like there are famous software engineers. Prestige - outside the ingroup - is a function of the accessibility, value, and quality of your work. Like the Taiwanese folks who built a mask availability tracker...
It’s fundamentally disrespected by people at a core level. I’ll prove my point with the one question they always ask us versus any other profession, ‘what is it that you actually do at the company?’.
I swear, I’d never think to ask this of anyone, doctors, lawyers, teachers, nurses, cops, literally, I can’t think of one profession that gets asked this, I’ll try again, pilots, chemists, diplomats, translators, artists, mechanics, it’s endless.
What is it that you actually do?
How about fuck you, I’m not answering that anymore.
It tickles people the wrong way that you took software development into every possible industry you can imagine and not only started offering tech solutions, but business solutions too.
Incoming projection - I see it as the most passive aggressive low ball attack on one’s profession. It’s karma too, because we do the same to sales/product/people management elements within our industry. I know why I’ve done it, and it’s mostly insecurity, ‘oh those people aren’t smart, will soon be gone’.
^ Now imagine the whole of society looking at you like that.
I don't think I've ever been asked that by anyone other than my grandparents. Anyone under retirement age and reasonably well-educated knows what software development is or at least doesn't ask because they think it would make them look stupid not to know.
Have you considered applying Hanlon's Razor to the question?
In my experience, most people (i.e. sans pathologies) ask this question because they are ignorant and curious.
They are trying to integrate the unknown (you and your craft) into the known, not trying to challenge your ego.
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A story that might be illustrative.
A close relative of mine came to his current country from another country, but is a citizen of his new country. At social gatherings over the years, a not-uncommon question, asked by immigrants and born-citizens alike, was "Where are you from?"
There was no quicker way to become his mortal enemy, and to ruin a party!
He thought people were trying to parade his otherness, with the intent of making him feel out of place, not welcome, lesser-than, etc.
From another perspective, each question was an opportunity to educate people on his heritage, and an objectively-fascinating component of his identity (that of "The Immigrant").
I think it’s what afflicted my relative, too, for what it’s worth. When you’re stung by people, it’s hard to see the value in continuing to remain open.
Regarding the accrual of knowledge and its hardening effects on the soul:
> with much wisdom comes much sorrow; the more knowledge, the more grief.
> The wise have eyes in their heads, while the fool walks in the darkness; but the same fate overtakes them both.
These quotes come from Ecclesiastes, which does not contain a much of a resolution.
> A person can do nothing better than to eat and drink and find satisfaction in their own toil.
Tao Te Ching makes a similar recommendation: empty hearts and fill bellies. In short, worry less of ideas, and more of literal substances that bind us together (food, drink, and toil).
People think digital artists just press buttons lazily and the computer does all the work. And everyone knows all mechanics will take advantage of your ignorance. And of course, why hire a photographer, all they do is press a button, and why won't they give me all the originals so I can run them through filters and ruin their reputation by crediting them with it on Facebook...
Now that I think of it, IT people and mechanics suffer from the exact same stereotype where people don't trust anything they say and assume they're just lording their knowledge over the poor, uninformed user for status/money.
Any company where that is asked is a terrible software company and you should leave. They also almost certainly make shit software, and staying there is bad for your education and career.
What's your line for "white collar"? There are lots of office desk jobs involving computers that are lower paid and lower status. Testers, help desk, data entry, administrative helpers etc.
It is true though that its easier to climb the ladder via social/soft/people skills and selling/positioning yourself well and knowing who to associate with etc. compared to working real hard on technical stuff. If you want to impress general people, tell them about people related achievements, like how you led a big group to success, or how you resolved conflicts, big names you've worked with and know etc. Social capital is indeed more valuable in general and so managers and "soft" professionals like lawyers can seem higher status. But its more about the focus on people vs things. Rule of thumb: if you can be objectively wrong or make an objective mistake, you're on the lower end of status. If situations are more wishy washy and rhetoric can save you, you are higher up.
Even though formulating it bluntly is frowned upon: as a software engineer you dominate (rule over) computers and equipment (similar to blue collar work), but to get respect from non techies you need to dominate people. No way around it. That's why managers like to have many reports, even if they are useless and hurt the bottom line.
I've done those things, and so has my husband. Not sure either of us would go back, but software has some uniquely frustrating aspects and tends to attract a certain type of oblivious, entitled asshole. You get real tired of fiddling with tiny complicated things for hours on end while some puffed up middle management bro breaths down your neck. I've thought more than once about going back to serving drinks at the bars, but I guess I have higher aspirations now. Sort of a blessing and a curse.
Don't get a job based on how impressive it sounds when you tell people about it at parties. You will spend far more time doing the job than you will talking about it at parties.
I don't think that's as shallow as you make it sound. I'd rather have respect for being a successful adult who exercises a skill to create value, for doing something difficult and being good at it, than for my taste in music or something.
Those things are independent of status, though. You can be a successful plumber who exercises your skill to create value, but status-conscious types would still consider you low-status.
Taking the “more dates” comment with justification at face value and assuming it to be true, the additional dates are primarily attracted to your job, as stated.
It is reasonable to infer that these additional dates are actually interested in dating your job, and your essential self and body are just along for the ride. Your job goes, you go.
The problem is you will forget this at some point and start thinking a particular date actually cares about you personally.
Do yourself a favor to save your future self some pain. Take your CV, in paper form, roll it up into a cylinder, and dip it into latex. You should have a latex wand of about 8 inches in length. Wrap it with a few hundred dollar bills, gift this to your date and run away as fast as your feet will take you. You’re welcome...you’ve just saved yourself 10s to 100s of thousands of dollars and many hours of misery.
Details may vary depending on gender, economic status and the local currency.
I would wager that less than 10% of first dates are based on the "essential self" rather than some superficial quality. You don't get to know peoples' essential selves that quickly.
Talking about your job at parties is way down the list of reasons social status matters. It's a fair point that people shouldn't make all their decisions with status in mind, but it is also wrong to belittle it as a consideration.
What are some of the other reasons? Suppose you could make $500k/year either by being a cardiologist or by cleaning out septic tanks. What advantages does the $500k from cardiology get you that the $500k from cleaning septic tanks does not? (Aside from impressing people at parties)
Higher status friends, marrying into a "better family" and so on. Your family (especially more distant) will respect you more.
Also, I think a major elephant in the room: some people just feel better about themselves and sleep better, knowing that they are a big dog and can feel justified in looking down on others.
There is a great quote from A defense lawyer in the HBO show “The Undoing”:
“You know, I should say up front that, in my experience, doctors tend to be assholes. The reason they tend to be assholes is because they get to be. They're doctors.”
Also, there will always be higher status people around you. If you're a successful doctor, and move around in fancy doctor circles, you will know more accomplished doctors, directors of famous hospitals or whatever. You can always be bitter from envy if you're blinded by the status game. The struggle never ends, there's no "arriving". Software dev salaries (in the US) let you live way beyond material needs and allows tremendous luxuries (relative to other times and places).
It's a self inflicted mental suffering that people bring on themselves. Instead of enjoying that high wealth they fume about why they aren't as impressive as fancy lawyers, ceos, politicians and doctors...
This. How did you help people around you? Did you use your network to enhance theirs? Did you lift as you climbed? Is your institution or organization (if you are working for one) the better for having you?
You could try being a grad student in New Orleans. The James Earl Jones quote from Conan is apt here (my point being they will be thankful for what they have).
If it makes them feel better I have to teach the 99% of their high school they are talking about and they all seem pretty one track minded.
Upvoted though I disagree with you. I'm sure there is a wide variance of outcomes in software, but I think if you work at it, you can make a fulfilling career out of software. Don't give up, as it is possible your current job just isn't a right fit for you.
Counter anecdote: I know law and finance and business folks who wished they studied more computers.
In my experience that's because they think our work is easier and that we do less of it than they do, for more pay. But that actually goes to the parent's point; lazy entitled and overpaid is part of the low status perception.
Are you Indian by any chance? I'm curious because - at least from Indian people I've seen and met - it (social status) seems to be hugely more important than what I see around me locally.
I do think about my literal social status (i.e. friends, sex, etc.) but I don't think thought along those lines has ever really influenced my decision making - beyond a vague desire to outdo people born better than me.
Haha do 500 hours of leetcode and go work for FAANG. It's a totally different level of social status than regular engineers and the only qualifications needed is leetcode mediums in 20 mins
~$500k is what some Amazon L6's and most L7's make. Don't think you can hit that in most Finance positions until VP level, unless you're in Quant finance in hedge funds but then the SWEs make that much too.
Goldman banking associates do not make 500k lmao. you are smoking something
500 at Goldman is like VP with some tenure, which would be similar to E6 at Facebook
Hell Goldman sales and trading managing directors make 750-900k a year, which is what a good E7 at Facebook makes, both usually reached by age 33-35 by high achievers.
I work at a FAANG and the people that I work with aren't terribly different social status from the ones I worked with during my first internship, they're just ~20 years younger.
Yeah legit no one of importance cares. If you’re in good shape, look good, and have enough disposable income to do fun stuff when you want (any software engineer does)... anybody will find you interesting enough.
I'd recommend talking with your friends, and asking them if they find their work fulfilling. If it falls short of their expectations, ask which dimensions contribute the most to the diff.
This might give you some perspective on what life would be like in another vertical. It probably isn't as rosy as you imagine, but you might have done this already.
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I would recommend to younger people, that they shouldn't make their career choice through the lens of prestige, because time has demonstrated that social standing is flimsy and unpredictable.
A profession's relative prestige varies regionally, temporally, socioeconomically, and in the eye of the beholder. These are mutable dimensions for the duration of a normal career.
It's kind of like the old advice: if you're interested in marrying someone for life, don't marry based on one dimension alone (looks, money, health, personality, family). Any of these can invert completely.
In finance terms, it's like betting your financial portfoilo on the 40-year performance of a single ETF: not outright stupid because some people will be successful, but it's not super wise.
If this doesn't help you feel better, maybe you should consider changing careers? As a SWE, you have enough intellectual capital, time and domain-specific education is the only thing standing in your way.
What are some higher status jobs where I can use my above average ability to work with computers and sheer tenacity to compensate for my woefully underdeveloped social skills?
Software engineers in the USA get paid well enough on average that you can live a modest life, save up serious capital, and then bootstrap your own company or side hustle. That will get you more status.
Whenever I get annoyed by the relentlessly banal life lessons of Goggins, I remind myself that his audience is mostly made up of troubled teenagers who took their latest shower 3 weeks ago and middle-age professionals of some sorts who cannot close their trousers anymore because of additional calories brought on by family life.
I actually think Goggins's ideas are the opposite of banal. The concept of "limbic resistance", as brought up by Andrew Huberman when talking about Goggins, is really fascinating [0].
The concept that doing things that you hate doing is "exercising of the muscle of willpower" is very revealing. It's something I've tried to do adopt, and it's been a very powerful motivator in getting me to work out and reduce procrastination. As banal as it may sound — like the father in Calvin and Hobbes saying "it builds character" — it's also a great way of framing it.
And I assure you I'm neither a
> "troubled teenager who took my latest shower 3 weeks ago"
or a
> "middle-age professional of some sort who cannot close his trousers anymore because of additional calories brought on by family life".
Your comment doesn't paint you as a very positive person. Of course, it's fine if you'd like to be that way, but my question is: why? What good does writing a comment like this do you (or me, or anyone reading it)? To me, these sorts of despondent and cynical comments seem to come from the very types of people you think listen to Goggins.
I hate to contradict you, but I am being told I am quite a positive person who's helped many people on their journey to become more accomplished people. I did and I am doing quite well academically, professionally, and athletically. And I became accomplished by doing the exact opposite of what the Goggings, that other lunatic of Jocko Willink, Tim Kennedy and the Army, Navy Seals "influencers" recommend (I hope you are understand they are no different from the tik-tok dancers in terms of their ultimate motivation: money, spotlight, followers). In particular, I became accomplished by enjoying what I was doing, not f-this, f-that, let's run for 30 miles with the hips close to the ground (Goggings) shouting nonsense at our (poor) partner who is filming from the car. How can you listen to that guy if not for the occasional laugh at the lunacy?
Why someone who is not a troubled teenager (and all these influencers were troubled teens) or a middle-age disappointed man (the message is always for men, where are the women?) should wake up at 4:30 am to do squats, bjj, or running? There is no reason whatsoever if you are not in one of those buckets. It is counter-productive, it is silly, it is kicking oneself in the genitals to tell their troubled internal voice: see, I can hurt myself, I can take it, I am strong. What an insecure, troubled way of approaching life!
Why someone should give up on things and actions that have been pleasurable since the dawn of times for all, say, normal people? I am thinking, and these are all hated by the military influencers, about a glass of wine, an escapade, a sudden decision that is not joining the Navy Seals, a night out with friends that ends at 4 am (not staying up late shooting other people, a favorite of Goggins and Willink. Yes, to give them a better future, I know. I have always found funny that men join the military at 17 because they, as they never forget to repeat, want a better world, which is always also what the US want, a terrific coincidence).
"The concept that doing things that you hate doing is "exercising of the muscle of willpower" is very revealing. It's something I've tried to do adopt, and it's been a very powerful motivator in getting me to work out and reduce procrastination." - That's terrible (long-term, short-term anything can work) advice, outside the tails (like people who hate showers, kids who hate calculations, middle-age men and women who hate small portions). Why not working toward enjoying the run, the squats, the learning? Why not "following" people who have a sense of lightness around them, who are "fun" to be around while being accomplished, instead of these soldier-philosophers who seem always pissed and look incapable of not putting a life lesson even in the broccoli they had for dinner?
Let me give you an example: I don't like exercising in the morning, it often gives me an headache, I tend to go hard and it tires me out more than I like during the day, I prefer to workout after 5 pm (like many other people). Now, tell me: why should I do "something I hate to exercise my willpower", instead of— listen to this insight—exercising after 5 pm?
"What good does writing a comment like this do you (or me, or anyone reading it)?" - There is no big vision behind my comment; but since I have seen one too many people buying into this "hard-man for hard times" trope, I would like them to read my cynical comment and say to themselves: they (i.e., me) are right, I am not a troubled teenager that the Army can straighten up, I am not a disappointed man who needs to be radicalized by these early-risers lunatics, I am better than that.
If I ever meet a better or greater version of myself, I expect to get (figuratively) smacked upside the head and told exactly what to do with what little I have left of life.
In every case I can think of, it's better to know. Even when it doesn't seem like it.
That doesn't sound so bad actually. Once you have one foot out the door, who cares? If somebody told me that I once lived another life that I can't remember as some alien species, and I didn't accomplish any of the things that members of those species value, it wouldn't bother me.
I feel like this is a huge exaggeration of "hell" or a demeaning of the concept. For example, if you asked me if I'd rather meet my best possible self, or have my arm broken with a bat, it would be a no-brainer. I'm actually pretty curious to meet my best possible self and would probably pay some amount of money to do so, whereas I'd very much prefer to never have my arm broken again. And being hit with a bat is one of the most banal forms of suffering you could imagine.
I get that it is trying to say something abstract, like, you could be a lot better than what you are, but it just sounds so incredibly ignorant of how horrible things could be that it irritates me.
It is a sentence that makes no sense whatsoever, but it feels slightly profound and gives a sense of smugness when liked. Similar to the Heinlein's quote about specialization being for insects, which for some reason attracts nerds like catnip attracts cats.
This reminds me of “The Bell Jar” by Sylvia Plath, which has a quote Aziz Ansari used in his series “Master of None”:
> "I saw my life branching out before me like the green fig tree in the story. From the tip of every branch, like a fat purple fig, a wonderful future beckoned and winked. One fig was a husband and a happy home and children, and another fig was a famous poet and another fig was a brilliant professor, and another fig was Ee Gee, the amazing editor, and another fig was Europe and Africa and South America, and another fig was Constantin and Socrates and Attila and a pack of other lovers with queer names and offbeat professions, and another fig was an Olympic lady crew champion, and beyond and above these figs were many more figs I couldn't quite make out. I saw myself sitting in the crotch of this fig tree, starving to death, just because I couldn't make up my mind which of the figs I would choose. I wanted each and every one of them, but choosing one meant losing all the rest, and, as I sat there, unable to decide, the figs began to wrinkle and go black, and, one by one, they plopped to the ground at my feet."
The dude is really hard to understand. He says a lot of stuff that just seems like vague unactionable self-help advice.
So I err on the side of caution by assuming he isn't worth listening to. He also reeks of certainty, like I'm wrong just for asking what the fuck he's trying to tell me because it's so obvious... to him.
The clip that OP linked to is a 9 minute segment of a semester long, graduate level psychology class. It shouldn't be surprising that it is hard to follow without some additional context.
He often uses false dichotomies to advocate his views, for example, the left is against freedom and liberty, you have to decide if you are for the Gulag Archipelago society or a capitalistic society etc; as if they were the only two possible options.
I can possibly sift through YouTube to get to the videos where he claims these things, but it will not be the most palatable of chores.
Having just gone through and looked up a bunch of articles criticizing Jordan Peterson (Most of them seem to be written by Matt McManus, so I guess he's trying to make some sort of name for himself by association), it seems to me that basically the people who like Peterson like him for his life advice and the people that don't like him don't like him because of his political and philosophical views.
I guess it seems completely unremarkable that someone would have useful things to say in one regard while having less useful things to say in another.
Also I guess I view him in the context of a university professor who wrote a book and has some lectures online, not in the context of the mega-celebrity he became. I think being catapulted to fame like that is bound to mess up pretty well everyone and probably also muddy their message quite a bit.
I mean, at its core none of the things Peterson has to say are really all that revolutionary, they are pretty basic life advice. "Take responsibility for your life", etc.
Obviously there is an unmet need for that basic life advice because people (particularly young men) ate it up.
One article complained about him relaying a story of getting a kid to eat. My only conclusion is the person that was complaining doesn't have kids, because his story was extremely relatable, and I'd guess basically universal among parents.
Anyway, yes if you try putting Jordan Peterson up on a pedestal, he'll probably fall off it. If you view him as someone that maybe could give some good advice while you'd otherwise just be killing time anyway, I guess I think he holds up to that metric pretty well.
I agree with what you are saying, but there is a huge gap between a pedestal and the advocacy of evidently false and polarizing dichotomies -- Gulag or conservative capitalism, pick one; terrorists attack us because they hate our freedom etc, etc.
Given the yard stick / metric you are measuring him with there would be teeming millions who would qualify -- anyone who is capable of a half decent parenting. In the kind of life advice he offers, Peterson feels quite unremarkable.
I live in the US and not that interested in US politics, so no dog in the fight -- just an fly on the wall observation.
> I guess it seems completely unremarkable that someone would have useful things to say in one regard while having less useful things to say in another.
No, he has a long established pattern of attracting a crowd by talking about basic self-help and then sneak in politically charged ideas like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cultural_Marxism_conspiracy_th... , "people are lobsters", and plenty of sexism.
> I view him in the context of a university professor who wrote a book and has some lectures online, not in the context of the mega-celebrity he became.
You can't pick and choose the context: a person is responsible for they say in public.
Besides, even as a university professor a person is responsible for speaking honestly.
> being catapulted to fame ... muddy their message quite a bit.
No, he was playing the same tricks since the beginning. There are a lot of old videos on youtube.
I don't expect everyone to love Jordan Peterson, but how badly he is maligned by so many people really disappoints me. His maps of meaning lectures on youtube were hugely inspiring (and entertaining), and part of the reason I married my girlfriend and had our daughter. I attended one of his conversation/debates with Sam Harris in Vancouver and that was a lot of fun as well.
Also the same guy who bashes established disorders like ADHD publicly and the whole field of psychiatry(calling them engineers) saying the disorder has deep psychological roots, while himself taking anti-depressants to treat his depression isn't someone worth listening to for anything substantial. This dude thinks a disorder like ADHD is just bad conscientiousness that can be fixed by reading his 12 step book.
Perhaps for some the placebo effect is enough, and Peterson becomes their savior with devotees.
I don't know, I've listened to some of his stuff and what doesn't come across as simplistic platitudes has baked in assumptions that seem unnecessary, like defining truth to be an evolutionarily useful principle.
That he inspires people doesn't surprise me, the religion of my youth did the same and was more hokum than Peterson's mythological substrate mappings.
That book contains some the finest writing ever done in the English language. Her ability to capture emotions and present them in detail-perfect images is breathtaking.
It reminds me a lot of "The Guy I Almost Was" (Patrick Sean Farley) http://www.electricsheepcomix.com/almostguy/ . It's an old (from the early 2000s) comic about trying to get into the tech scene in the 90s. Alternate life paths are explicitly explored.
Fantastic analogy. To go a bit further, what surprised me when trying to choose which branch to take was how narrow each branch is. It’s not enough to pick the “software development” branch, you have to pick a specialty within that.
And, it has to be a single specialty. In my particular case, it was hard to accept that I couldn’t be both a successful programming language designer and a successful game developer.
Should you really dig in and focus on mobile, web, server, game, firmware? If so, should you focus on one language?
I don't so much question paths in my life as I feel very lucky to have ended up where I am. I do question on a daily basis, whether I should stop learning and adopting new technologies, and focus on ONE domain for the rest of my life.
It seems I am destined to be a jack of all trades, master of none, if I let life continue to unfold as it has over the last 10 years, bumping around as needed from my employers to new or different domains.
There's probably an analogy here in cost of task switching. Switch too much and one finds themselves with too many tasks and too little time. Switch too little and the doings or learnings may become monotonous. As with most things good, it takes skill to play it well.
Maybe, but you could be a successful programming language designer and a hobbyist game developer. Depends how you define success. Making money at games is something very few do, but many have fun just for the creative outlet.
As someone who feels like I've wasted most of my 20s since graduating university (turning 29 in 2021) with a job(s) I don't see any future in, man this hits hard. My lack of risk taking, and an unfortunately timed death in the family in 2016, really are me sitting there watching these figs dry up. Damn.
I've never really understood what this means. Did people in their 20s have their life pretty well together in the past? or does it mean when you're in your 30s is the best time to start partying and throwing caution to the wind? Is your 30s when you first leave home and get a higher education? It's really a really confusing turn of phrase to me. I must be missing context
Most people would be married with families by their late 20s. Now many enter into a sort of second childhood and settle down in their 30s or beyond. Hell, I still have some acquaintances from school who are slowly transitioning into the creepy old guy hitting on 24 year olds.
I've always taken it to be about your peak - when life is at its best. In your 20s, you're generally in good health, maintain a good social network from school or college, active social life, etc. I'm in my early 40s and feel like I have it more together now than in the past: fewer but better friendships, more interesting conversations, more means to do what I want in terms of travel or entertainment.
In my parents' generation, there was a lot of pressure to have children before 30. There was a widespread belief that giving birth after 30 risked the health of the mother and the child. As medicine advanced and neonatal care greatly improved, that deadline was pushed back and women started to seriously entertain the idea of careers before having children.
There are other cultural and societal factors at play, but the greater longevity and better medical care have opened up the time period for the expectations that previous generations had for their 20s.
This is interesting because I'm 25 and sometimes worry that I'm going to miss out on the opportunity to start a solid family. It feels so difficult to find anyone my age who wants more than just a fling, and women in their 30s don't even bother with someone my age or they already have kids. From what you're saying, maybe I'm not going to miss out, I'm just thinking about it too soon.
Don’t sweat it too much. I feel like my life got a lot more stable in my 30s. I moved countries, met my now wife, bought a house together, had two kids and finally married. Even personally and career wise it’s been a period of stability and growth.
I also don’t think you’re thinking about things too soon. We’re all slightly different. Also don’t make decisions for other people by writing them off. Just because they present one way doesn’t make that the sum total of who they are. You’ll need to have relationships in order to meet someone to have kids with.
It’s also not just about giving birth, but a woman’s body is probably far better at recovery after birth in their 20s than 30s.
Not to mention the energy to keep up with little ones, and if you ever want the option of more than 2 kids. And of course if you’re 30+ when you have kids, and your kids are 30+ when they have kids, you are pushing 65 to 70+ which makes playing with the grandkids not as much fun and you’re soon to be less of an asset in terms of help and possibly a liability for your kids due to declining health.
On the other hand, you may have increased your chances at having a higher paying career, but I suspect, for many, the extra savings don’t quite make up for the trade offs.
Also a good point, trade offs all around to consider!
I had mine in 30 to 35 range, but if I could go back in time and had found my spouse, I think I would have opted to have them in 25 to 30 range. However, no one in my social circles has kids in their 20s and barely anyone is married by 30 so we also may have been socially isolated if we had chosen to do that.
But I try to think back to what I did in my 25 to 30 range that I thought was worth delaying starting a family and I can’t come up with anything, other than being a little bit further ahead in the rat race. But all the other rats are thinking the same thing, so who is really benefiting?
So it would seem the trend is very much to settle and stabilize in your 30's. I do hope we figure out even better and safer ways to allow women to give birth a little later, if they so choose.
It also seems useful to become a parent with that extra decade of life experience. And if we incentivize exercise in the later years, it could offset the "feeling tired at 70" thing? My fiancé's grandpa runs marathons and honestly has more energy than I do!
Most of what we do in our 20s doesn’t seem that important after the fact (unless you’re an Olympic athlete or otherwise very lucky) but I think it’s an important part of growing up and feeling secure — in yourself, your career, and your relationship. All three types of security are very important to being a good parent.
You can't have kids when you are in your 20s if you are a man who cannot find a woman willing to date you who also wants to have kids while you are in your 20s.
The bottleneck is the same as it is for any issue regarding children.
I certainly hope so. But man, it's a sinking feeling when so many others seem to have it figured out at an even younger age. And knowing that the clock is ticking to actually go get those figs.
If the purpose of life is the journey to get there, not the destination, how could anyone younger than you have figured it out? Life is the one thing where people will never catch up and pass you.
Fair, but I feel the journey is stopped/halted by the crippling student loan debt that will just get worse if I try to change via more education (which is likely, as I want to change countries and it's the easiest way). Really, that might be the worst part of it all, the student loan burden.
46 year old here. Wave I remember feeling like I'd wasted so much time and was irreversibly behind in my twenties. Like, it was all decided. There are so so many figs left. Many many chances ahead of you!
That said, time is ticking and while it isn't too late, now is the best time to start!
> It is never too late, but do not let that be an excuse to delay any decision.
Beautiful, this is the explanation I was looking for because whenever I'd hear that "it's never too late," I just felt like that enabled procrastination, but your explanation solidified that life is not long, but rather it is short indeed. It's true that it's not too late for many of your future opportunities, but eventually, time will run out.
Yeah, when I was younger I remember feeling like I kept abandoning all my ideas. Years pass, and you realize that the ideas are still there, and it's more like you're rotating between them. Which is kind of a nice way to be. Work on one for a while, set it down, go to the next one, etc.
I suppose the feeling itself came from comparing myself to others (which is natural), and it was having some success in some field relative to others that gave me the feeling like I could succeed, I wasn't behind everyone in everything, forever. I guess for the mental health aspect of this, it's probably good to pick something you are good at, better than others, and actively appreciate it. It's not good to feel completely behind in all things. Good luck! :)
I am just a year younger and also had an unfortunate family death at the end of 2016. I have a lot of the same feelings. My current resolve is to quit my job around the time the pandemic ends, and start taking more risks with how I choose to spend my life. I am lucky to have enough savings at this point to do so. Maybe I'll figure things out a bit better before I hit the big 30. I hope you can find a path that works for you too.
Yeah, the pandemic is the only reason I'm still in my job currently. I had an option to go do a masters, but I was talking to a recruiter in that country and they mentioned how badly the market had dropped, so I decided to postpone it once again due to wanting stability in a pandemic. Hopefully it'll work out this next year.
I executed a major career pivot at age 32 and now that I'm approaching 40, I'm so glad I did. It was hard but worth it. You have plenty of time, as long as you can put aside the feelings that you've waited too long and start looking for a path from your current life to the life you want. Those feelings will only hold you back. Now is a good time to pick a fig and start eating it. :)
It's never too late. I was drowning in debt a few years ago, in a bad career, and I was older than 40 [actual age undisclosed]. I don't have a solid retirement, but I'm now doing well and have some peace in my life.
My one life advice: Don't search for greatness, search for peace.
The initial diagnosis was crap. Add in some surgery and the diagnosis improved dramatically, different type. As far as a cancer diagnosis goes I got off really well in the end.
It was the initial stage where I felt I had a death sentence that shifted my outlook on life. When you think you're going to die you re-evaluate some things. I looked at my life, thought about what I'd regret, and made 5 year plans to get things on track. I'm now in the habit of setting plans for 5 years to ensure I don't regret the life I do have.
Studied physics with the intent to go to grad school. Realized after graduating I didn't want to do it because of the perverse incentives in academia (I'd still love to do research and get a PhD eventually if I can fund it myself and not be reliant on academia). Worked as a substitute teacher for a year, then in a mortgage bank for a year. Left that to accept a Fulbright grant, which I eventually had to decline because of the death in the family at the worst possible timing.
Since then I've been a teacher. Looking at pivoting into finance in Ireland/Europe (with a masters in Quantitative Finance) next year; was planning on doing it this year but, y'know, corona kinda destroyed finance jobs over there and I'd need a work visa (thankfully it's a high need field so it's a bit easier)...
Reminds me of "Buridan's ass" named after a 14th century French philosopher who described a donkey dying of starvation while standing between two perfectly good stacks of hay, because it couldn't decide which to eat.
I am not sure why, but the quote triggered a memory of 8bit theater in my head:
"Life is funny. You start out with limitless potential, but time is always shaving away the possibilities. Every choice you make is the choice not to do a thousand other things. What's important, when all is said and done, is that you made a difference. Your choices, and everything undone, have to mean something. Otherwise, what is the point?"
We branch out, but we ultimately keep heading towards the very same outcome.
For a counterpoint, we can look to the Stoics who want us to focus on the present rather than dwell on the past:
"For although in regard of that which is already past there may be some inequality, yet that time which is now present and in being, is equal unto all men. And that being it which we part with whensoever we die, it doth manifestly appear, that it can be but a moment of time, that we then part with. For as for that which is either past or to come, a man cannot be said properly to part with it. For how should a man part with that which he hath not? ... that life which any the longest liver, or the shortest liver parts with, is for length and duration the very same, for that only which is present, is that, which either of them can lose, as being that only which they have; for that which he hath not, no man can truly be said to lose.
"XorNot" is a title inhabited by many different people over time: the person that held that title this time last year is not you, and the "XorNot" of today will give way tomorrow to yet another person. Each can only be properly considered in the context of the situations they inherited and those left for their successors.
Another, more modern translation, from the Oxford world classics edition by Robin Hard:
14. Even if you were to live for three thousand years or ten times as long, you should still remember this, that no one loses any life other than the one that he is living, nor does he live any life other than the one that he loses, so the shortest life and the longest amount to the same. For the present is equal for all, and what is passing must be equal also, so what can be lost is shown to be nothing more than a moment; and no one could lose either the past or the future, for how could he be deprived of what he does not possess? So always bear in mind these two points: firstly that all things are alike in nature from all eternity and recur in cycles, and it therefore makes no difference whether one sees the same spectacle for a hundred years or two hundred or for time everlasting; and secondly that the longest-lived and the earliest to die suffer an equal loss; for it is solely of the present moment that each will be deprived, if it is really the case that this is all he has and a person cannot lose what he does not have.
“Meaning” is just a construct in your head. What we perceive as “meaningful” is shaped by our biological and cultural evolution, a byproduct if you will. “Meaningfulness” is not something that exists out there, outside of our minds. When we see meaning, that’s a perspective we project on things, or a relation we have with things. It’s not a property of the things by themselves. We do crave meaning, and thus we have to come up with meaning for ourselves. Maybe it helps to realize that meaning is just something we create in our minds.
While Diogenes was relaxing in the morning sunlight, Alexander, thrilled to meet the famous philosopher, asked if there was any favour he might do for him. Diogenes replied, "Yes, stand out of my sunlight." Alexander then declared, "If I were not Alexander, then I should wish to be Diogenes." "If I were not Diogenes, I would still wish to be Diogenes," Diogenes replied.
Reminds me of the game of Go. Infinite possibilities in the beginning, but as the game progresses the end state of the board becomes clearer and clearer. Also, you can't have it all, sometimes you try to control the whole board and end up losing a lot of what you could have had.
This reminds me of a speculative fiction story by Ted Chiang called "Anxiety is the Dizziness of Freedom" which imagines an expendable device that gives users the ability to contact alternate versions of themselves in other branches, and explores the moral and psychological consequences of learning about those outcomes: https://onezero.medium.com/anxiety-is-the-dizziness-of-freed...
Forgive my nerding. This week I've been playing dark souls. I couldn't commit to a plan this time around and so now I'm part mage, part rogue, part knight, and I can't use any of the good weapons and I have like five weapons all partly upgraded. My figs all rotted and my character is just so mediocre.
It's definitely easier to commit to one path. I've played bloodborne and DS3 twice and dark souls remastered once. I completed all my playthroughs with a quality melee build. Despite these 5 playthroughs, my understanding of the game is quite narrow. I have no idea what playing as a sorcerer, pyromancer etc would be like, so at least you get that.
Reminds me of the famed Jacques Brel song 'La chanson de Jacky' - He sings through many possible exotic futures for himself, but what he really wants to do is return to his childhood where he can be "Beau, beau, beau et con à la fois" ("Beautiful, beautiful, beautiful and stupid at the same time")
What I don't like about this quote is that it pretends you just have to choose between all these attractive and worthwhile goals and that the choosing is the difficult part.
In reality though you may opt for a career, leave the family but fail. Or you may put your career on a lower pitch only to have your wife and you decide it won't really work out. In reality, it's more like you start to climb for a fat purple fig only to find it rotten, or just edible. At least in some of the cases, and it won't be your fault and your success depends on how you deal with the said fig. Maybe you can still climb to another?
Depends on your perspective, obviously. But personally I'd say we're much more a victim of circumstance than the other way around, and all success or failure is only very partially dependent on the choices we made.
We aren't nearly as in control of our lives as we like to think, and we often construct stories and arcs to explain our paths. Actually, most of what has happened to us, whether we've been successful or not, is down to chance, starting with the family and location you were born into.
A large part of life is just luck. Think of all the chance events that had a big impact on your life. For me for example, almost all my success hinges on me randomly seeing a certain poster in a hallway in 2008.
Pretty much my entire social circle hinges on one of my sister's friends wanting to go see Iron Maiden in 2014, she asked me to go along with her, because she didn't want to go by herself.
I happened to reconnect with a childhood friend in that crowd of 15,000+ and that got the ball rolling.
Analysis paralysis and the paradox of choice (the idea not the book) have been known about since Aesop, though I agree that in the real world we must also make do without even knowing which paths even lead to good outcomes.
Yes I agree, but maybe the quote means it in the sense that these were potential outcomes, which became impossible at some point. I agree it is arrogant to assume all these futures are within their grasp.
>What I don't like about this quote is that it pretends you just have to choose between all these attractive and worthwhile goals and that the choosing is the difficult part.
For sure, however it is better to have tried and experienced than not have. I have tried and failed at picking many of those figs, and it is worth it, the good and bad. Don't stand there, give yourself a time, and then chose freely.
for sure, depending what is important to each person. Success is a subjective. Maybe some live for exploration, and some for execution... It really just comes down to fulling what make sense for oneself. ;-)
The quote makes more sense if you take a look at the life of its author, Sylvia Plath. [1]
She struggled with mental health issues and depression most of her life. She excelled academically and she was driven to write, but at the same time, she struggled with her own self. Her life is marked by several suicide attempts.
She married the poet Ted Hughes and moved around frequently during their short marriage. While she was ambitious, a deep sense of anxiety kept her from exploring and expressing her own identity through her writing.
Most of her poetry was written during a short burst of creativity, over the course of a few months, in late 1962. She died of suicide in 1963. Her famous novel, The Bell Jar, was published a month before her death. Major themes in this novel include "socially acceptable identity" and mental health. [2]
Your criticism is a certainly correct, but would have been removed to the author of the quote. As Plath received treatment and openly discussed her mental health issues, undoubtedly she was told this many times over.
> She married the poet Ted Hughes and moved around frequently during their short marriage.
My understanding is that Ted Hughes' contribution to Plath's mental health went beyond "mov[ing] around frequently during their short marriage" [1].
> In 2017, previously unpublished letters written by Plath between 18 February 1960 and 4 February 1963 accuse Hughes of physically abusing her months before she miscarried their second child in 1961.
Hughes also began an affair with another woman, Assia Wevill, in 1962 and (apparently) had a kid with her in 1965. Plath knew about the former and committed suicide in 1963. Wevill also killed herself as well as her child with Hughes in 1969 after, you guessed it, "Hughes began affairs with Brenda Hedden, a married acquaintance who frequented their home, and Carol Orchard, a nurse 20 years his junior, whom he would later marry in 1970" [2].
It might be too reductive to say Hughes just drove two women to suicide, but it seems like we can be confident that he had, uh, extensive personal failings?
My intention was to provide terse framing for the posted quote, rather then muse at length about the author's life, let alone that of her erstwhile husband, in their own regard.
You might try picking some of the figs that are at ground level and see how they taste, if good, generalize to the whole tree and decide if it’s worth the climb.
You might find someone climbing the tree and ask them if they could tell you how they taste up top.
Sitting in the crotch of the tree lamenting your situation is a fig too. We all bite into a sour one every now and again.
I think this is something the author knew, but this is not an uncommon and painful thought many people have. It's exactly the falsity of this that makes it more painful. Of course life is far more complex than just picking, but this is a perfect example of that painful fantasy.
No, you can't. I'm in my mid 50s. I can't go back and change my decision (non-decision decision) to not have a family. I wanted one. The choices I made or the chances that came by depending on how you look at it got me where I am today. Mid 50s. I'm not going to birth kids. I'm also not likely to be able to change my career to anything that requires 10-15 years of study before I can get a good position in that career. Going forward I also need to choose things that payout so that I can afford to pay for my life once people won't keep giving me work.
I agree with you, that is why I said, maybe you can still reach for another. Maybe not. If things turn out differently than you though, happiness is still about how you deal with the fig you got, either on purpose or not.
It’s worth thinking about how we measure how “good” a life is and if that is superficial and too much influenced by fashion. For example the cliche is go travelling or get rich starting a business. “I raised kids” doesn’t have the same boastworthyness in a lot of circles, but arguably it’s more interesting. Or maybe not. What’s the life well lived metric?
I recently became acquainted with the teachings of Epicurus. He advocated living a simple life of simple pleasures surrounded by friends. It's almost a truism that seeking fame and fortune is a route to unhappiness. Not necessarily because these are bad things, but because the desires that drive these choices seem to be insatiable.
For me, (very) modest fortune and essentially zero fame seems to be the ideal situation. Like a paid off house, a nest egg that throws off $10K/month, and only family/friends know who I am.
My goals are about the same, and sometimes I worry whether they're ambitious enough. But they really are. It takes a very particular reference frame to make them "simple" or "modest." $120k is a 90th percentile income! And that's among people working full time for it.
I mean that's just straight-up asking for the purpose of life: You can't possibly give a rational logical answer. It's (quite beautifully in my opinion) one of those questions that everybody can only answer for themselves.
Raising kids is the "default" choice. More than 50% of people do it. Getting rich or traveling for your life are much rarer, hence more interesting
Edit: ah yes downvotes. Think about it this way. You meet someone with 6 fingers on each hand, kinda interesting right? Minutes later you meet someone with 5 fingers, also interesting?
Having kids? Probably not. Raising them? Probably yes. Same with fingers: having them is more interesting if they can do something novel with them (say, play an instrument). But this being HN, I know plenty of people that travel a lot (no idea if that’s typical).
The nice thing about a culture that exalts “I raised kids and they turned out well” as a “life well lived metric” is that its broadly accessible. You can be born below average in intelligence and creativity and still be a good dad or mom, participate in local civic organizations, etc.
That life isn’t for everyone, and it doesn’t work out for everyone. But it’s also worth considering the average person. The average person isn’t going to be professionally successful, or travel the world, or do anything significant. But they can raise kids who probably love them and come to thanksgiving, etc. I think our modern ways of thinking are leaving the typical person behind.
I know of a few cases where this has happened. In one case the parents were abusive, so this is on them. The other case was great parents and an immature youth. With time that youth will mature and come around when he recognizes the goodness in his parents. In the end, it’s success if you raise your kids with love.
I grew up Christian, and among Christian young people a common question was "What's God's plan for my life?"
In that context, I came across Micah 6:8 which spells it out about as plainly as you'll find anywhere:
"He has told you, O man, what is good; and what does the Lord require of you but to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God?"
That seems like a standard that everyone can get behind. It gives you a standard by which to measure how well you're living, but your options remain open to do whatever you want as long as you do it justly, kindly, and humbly.
The idea is that everyone has unifying motivations, often in a higher power, where they derive their personal sense of morality from. Whether religion, family, tradition, survival, knowledge, the invisible hand of the market, a love of humanity or life for its own sake, sheer pleasure, whatever.
The point is that regardless of the original intent of the Judeo-Christian text, it seems an admirable enough message that can be recontextualized easily enough to fit those of different ethical and theological viewpoints on this forum. No hair-splitting or holy wars necessary.
The allusion to Alcoholics Anonymous is that the “acknowledging a higher power” step, while commonly assumed as pushing crypto-Christianity, can be reinterpreted by each individual participant as their own unifying motivator.
The paradox of twelve steps is that you are supposed to consider yourself at powerless and submit to your higher power yet at the same time every failing is only down to you and resets all progress.
I make no claims about the program as a whole, I was just dropping a reference to another situation where people ascribe religiosity to a reference to god or higher power that could easily be secularized, if preferred, for the sake of personal development.
In my mental model it's implied, since people are the image of God and so being humble towards them is being humble towards God (and I'm not sure there's a context where humility exists independently of other people).
Humility is also useful when alone. I think X is true but let me double check can easily save your life irrespective of a belief in god or the presence of other people. Using a checklist before flying for example is an important recognition of your imperfection. Measure twice cut once is again the same idea.
Yes, something along this line occurred to me after posting, but I'd agree with you. Integrity is also arguably a case where humility can come into play even when people don't notice.
Thanks for your comment. I have enjoyed reading through these comments but I can't consider my own 'what could have been' without considering that which is outside of my self, namely God. My own beliefs do not see this life as the end. Therefore my present actions are shaped by my future hopes. I hope some day to be rewarded by God for my actions today. This seems more important to me than thinking about how my past actions may have made me more successful today. Many of the great moments in history were defined by men and woman giving up their lives for what they hoped for in the future. Not what they hoped would have happened in the past.
The Christian POV is basically, "it doesn't matter how bad your life is because it will be great in the after life". In other words the good parts are ahead, period.
But if you don't believe then there is no guaranteed good parts ahead and the line above has no meaning.
Life is like a long mountain trail in a great migration. There are criss-crossing paths everywhere, and you have to decide which to take. The goal is to climb until you reach the summit. There'll always be valleys and hills, so you won't always be going up. But each step you take forward, and each foot higher in elevation, is your life getting better. If you can say that most of the time you were moving forward and higher, to me that's a well-lived life.
Could you have taken a shorter path and gotten there faster? Sure! But the longer you're on the path, the more time you have to smell the flowers, listen to the birds sing, see the trees swaying in the wind. Maybe you're content to stay exactly where you are. But I think most of us should keep climbing, because there's always new trails to see. Who cares how we get there as long as we keep going up.
I wish I was happy. And I think some hard-to-treat mental illness is preventing my day-to-day happiness.
When I feel envious of others, it's not only that they're rich and they travel a lot. They also have friends. They might even have a family they care about. They have hobbies and they have _something_ to do. A lot of them say they have problems with mental health, but you can't film a year-long depressive episode and upload it to YouTube, so I have to take their word for it. And in truth I don't. The world seems clean-split between people who have everything and people who have it even harder than me, and I always just feel alone in this middle ground, where I have all the material elements to be healthy and happy but I can't put them together.
I have many things other people want, but I never find myself sitting back and saying "I'm glad I have this." I always want things I can't have, and it hurts a lot.
> The world seems clean-split between people who have everything and people who have it even harder than me, and I always just feel alone in this middle ground, where I have all the material elements to be healthy and happy but I can't put them together.
You're not as alone as you think, because this just resonated like I can't even explain.
I feel like i've been in your shoes, in a past life. I've come to believe that happiness is like the horizon, or the sunset. It's a fuzzy concept, which disappears if you go too close to it.
The horizon is not a place, and the sunset is not a moment. They are aggregate phenomena. You can't set them as targets, because they don't exist physically. You can observe them as composite entities, emerging in the right context.
Such is happiness. You can't set it as an objective, because it doesn't exist. And chasing it directly will only cause you suffering. Instead, try to set smaller goals, and let it emerge on its own.
Take care of your physical health. Take care of your relationships. Allocate time, not much, but regularly, for activities that you like (hobbies). Widen your intellectual horizons, e.g. by reading or listening to diverse people. Get better at what you do professionally. Try to find some form of meditation that works for you.
Occasionally, try writing long, thoughtful comments on forums :)
Try to do these without looking too far into it; just trust the process. And at some point, you'll have the revelation "man, it's been quite some time since i felt unhappy!"
> I have all the material elements to be healthy and happy but I can't put them together.
I often have this same thought. I tend to try and phrase it as "I'm learning to put them together". I don't believe that we can't.
> I have many things other people want, but I never find myself sitting back and saying "I'm glad I have this." I always want things I can't have, and it hurts a lot.
There is one quick choice you have the power to make here which might help, which is to choose to be grateful about the things you do have.
And it's not mutually exclusive. I'm not saying you'll immediately stop striving for more. But while engaging in that striving (which is hard to stop!), you can choose, also, to notice and be thankful for the small things you do already have.
Recognise throughout the day the small things that could make you feel grateful if you let them. Just acknowledge those things briefly and try to build a small habit around that way of thinking.
> The world seems clean-split between people who have everything and people who have it even harder than me, and I always just feel alone in this middle ground, where I have all the material elements to be healthy
You're not alone, there's plenty of people who prioritized career over all else and 10-15 years ended up with plenty of money but otherwise no life.
You can make changes today that will pay dividends in 10 years, so maybe focus on that instead.
I was widowed pretty young (as widowers go), so I have done my share of playing the what-if game with the past. Ultimately it is not a productive exercise, and I try not to do it. If I catch myself dwelling in unlived lives, I try to refocus on the one still in front of me.
It's tempting to lay in bed after a bad life event, thinking about turning back the clock, but that never ever leads to anything productive or positive.
Best case scenario is you can't fall asleep until 4AM and screw up your sleep schedule for a week. Worst case is you start exhibiting learned helplessness and go into depression for a year or several.
I always try to refocus and think about what I can do for the people who were there for me during bad times, and how I can learn from my misfortune. (Sometimes, there's nothing to learn and it's just a bad stroke of luck. Even then - it's not going to help playing the what-if game)
Ultimately we are the people we are both because of good and bad things that happened to us.
> You can make changes today that will pay dividends in 10 years, so maybe focus on that instead.
Exactly this. No matter what your imagined and real futures turn out to be, the good ones all require effort and investment in the present. You can’t go wrong with making investments in your life now.
Technically I think the second best time would be 20 years ago less one Planck time. Which is to say, now would be the 11,700,454,120,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000th best time. :)
I tell any young adult who will listen the mistakes I made. It's nice when they stop by with stories and whiskey the days before Christmas and see them come up strong, happy, and on a solid path towards success. It's only through the stories of our mistakes that we can escape the clutches of time.
I agree, partially, I'm adamant about the fact that it's even more important to talk about successes, than failures.
"Vicarious learning from the experiences of others saves making errors yourself, but I regard the study of successes as being basically more important than the studyof failures. As I will several times say, there are so many ways of being wrong and so few of being right, studying successes is more efficient, and furthermore when your turn comes you will know how to succeed rather than how to fail!"
I've gotten a lot more out of studying failures. Especially other people's failures. People who are honest with themselves can warn you around the mistakes they made, but people who succeed rarely have much luck identifying which selection of choices got them there.
I think the reason is that success is usually cumulative: each little win builds on the last until it's obvious you're going in the right direction. Those wins often depend on random or temporary things you have little control over. For example: CED was the perfect format for the decade RCA started developing it in, but it took until VHS redefined the market to finish it.[0]
Meanwhile one mistake can send everything tumbling down. Study enough mistakes and you might know enough of what to avoid to stay afloat long enough to find the right chain of wins.
In principle, I agree with the fact that studying failures teaches one more, whether more is better when it comes to learning stands to be discussed, however.
What I mean by this is that, although you may profit from your parents sharing a plethora of don't-dos such as avoiding drugs, staying away from toxic relationships, not dwelling on your insecurities, et cetera, having regular abstract conversations about how "thinking deeply about my predicament, my objectives and how to reach them despite the former" might be much more useful to you.
In short, the first approach teaches you, potentially, numerous, isolated lessons about specific circumstances you will likely never face. Yes, you certainly learned more things, but whether those things will be useful to you, particularly, is unclear and only time can tell.
If you and your parents, however, have a thorough discussion about what allowed them to lead a happy life, as in the second scenario, both pushing and pulling, trying to discover what it really was and looking to find consensus regarding attitudes, processes, ideas, roadblocks, etc, you might learn a framework what will be useful forever, regardless of the concrete circumstances you are faced with.
Nevertheless, this comment of yours is spot on:
> people who succeed rarely have much luck identifying which selection of choices got them there.
Therefore, I really emphasize that not only the mentor should share the reasons and methods behind their success, the listener must be able to understand why and whether they were as useful as the mentor portrays them.
Maybe. Trying to emulate other people's success always ended in failure for me whether in life or opinionated coding frameworks. Americas Test Kitchen approach to recipes when they first explain all the ways they failed is infinitely more valuable to me than just the one successful recipe.
I did give a considerable amount of time to thinking about the what-if scenarios one day and when I looked down those other paths of what might have been I realized I would have to give up something I had come to love to pursue those.
Who I am may not be the best but I made these choices. I can't travel to past to berate that version of me. If I'm dissatisfied it's up to me to change that for future me.
Any alternative choices I could have made in my youth would have prevented me from having the children I have now, so there’s no significant decision I would ever like to change.
I don't have a kid, but I tell my nieces/nephews that while they are young to search for and practice something that interests them. Could be painting, coding, dancing, chess, languages, music, karate... anything that they enjoy doing that involves being an active participant in the process. Because by the time they are in their late teens / early 20s, they'll have thousands of hours of practice under their belt and opportunities available to them by dint of that mastery.
I don't regret my childhood largely because it's immutable, but when I reflect upon it I would've preferred to have spent a lot less time playing video games.
Early teens is a time when kids should focus on social activities, not be obsessed by some individualistic activity... because the most important skill they can develop at this age is their social skill. I would trade my best technical skills for better social skills (which I didn't manage to develop at this crucial age) as I can see from experience now that that's what brings you what really matters in life: good friends, success in romantic relationships, even success at work where I observe that most people who get "promoted" are the people who others like, not necessarily the best technically.
> Could be painting, coding, dancing, chess, languages, music, karate...
> Early teens is a time when kids should focus on social activities, not be obsessed by some individualistic activity
I don't think GP is suggesting they spend their time exclusively on these activities. But it seems like good advice that kids to spend some time on such endeavours!
Besides, many of these activities could involve (or lead to) socialising with other kids in the process, towards a common goal. Which is an amazing way to develop social skills too.
It's a popular fantasy. See "Replay" by Ken Grimwood. Or all those endless movies where someone gets to do high school over again, like "Peggy Sue Got Married". Or even "Groundhog Day". "A Christmas Carol". "It's a Wonderful Life". And on and on.
Palm Springs came out on Hulu this year and continues in that mold.
I do think certain scenarios like Replay or Groundhog Day accord additional advantages because the relived lives stack up, and one’s knowledge, even mastery, accumulate.
> It’s likely, Miller thinks, that capitalism, “with its isolation of individuals and its accelerating generation of choices and chances,” has increased the number of our unlived lives. “The elevation of choice as an absolute good, the experience of chance as a strange affront, the increasing number of exciting, stultifying decisions we must make, the review of the past to improve future outcomes”—all these “feed the people we’re not.” Advertisers sell us things by getting us to imagine better versions of ourselves, even though there’s only one life to live: it’s “yolo + fomo,” a friend tells Miller, summing up the situation nicely. The nature of work deepens the problem. “Unlike the agricultural and industrial societies that preceded it,” Miller writes, our “professional society” is “made up of specialized careers, ladders of achievement.” You make your choice, forgoing others: year by year, you “clamber up into your future,” thinking back on the ladders unclimbed.
Freedom is a weird thing. Most would say that more personal freedom is a good thing, at least for themselves. Yet so many behave in exactly the opposite way. I'm reminded of Paul Graham's recent essay How to Think for Yourself, and this passage about ideologies:
> The independent-minded thus have a horror of ideologies, which require one to accept a whole collection of beliefs at once, and to treat them as articles of faith. To an independent-minded person that would seem revolting, just as it would seem to someone fastidious about food to take a bite of a submarine sandwich filled with a large variety of ingredients of indeterminate age and provenance.
I used to think like this, but then I saw the Star Trek TNG episode Tapestry [1] where the premise is much like this question. Picard accepts Q's offer to relive his life, and it turns out that even the negative things in Picard's life help to shape the good qualities he has.
I consider my life to be much the similar: even the negative things or the things I wish would change have helped shape qualities that I would not give away.
I think about that episode a lot in perspective of my life. I actually lived my life like Picard reliving his life. What really hit home was when he was transported back to the present and was questioned Troi and Riker about getting into command. They pretty much laughed at him. To me that really opened my eyes about who I am as a person. I liked being wise even young that it almost has created a retroactive effect my future prospects simply because of it. I've often been told "are you an old man?" by many adults when I was younger and in hindsight now I understand why. However I find it very stupid that human culture (or just western values) find that as a negative. For some reason were supposed to waste our youth and engage in risky behaviors. I just never saw it that way.
Whilst I enjoyed that episode, it was fictional. Did Picard really need to be stabbed in the heart, just to learn his lesson? (And, his 'unremarkable career' seemed to be a bigger criticism of Starfleet/the Federation than we normally see - what's wrong with an ordinary life?)
I would be happy to remove the trauma that I experienced in my past. I'd take the risk of being a different person - with different good qualities.
This is Q we're talking about. He's not the kind of character who would sit down with Picard over a cup of tea and talk him through why changing his past would change who he is. Humbling Picard by showing him the folly of his wish to change the past, while he lay on his deathbed, by making him choose to get stabbed through the heart is definitely more his style.
Also, I don't believe they portrayed Picard's "unremarkable" career negatively, except in Picard's own view (and Q's I guess).
I always like to do new and different things. It is the main reason I migrated several times and changed job many times. Currently I am doing my own startup. Sometimes I wonder what life would be if I live a simple boring life? Will I be more successful? or end up like Captain Picard in his alternate universe?
> Unfortunately, the ways of men are such that we cannot truly be ourselves. How strange, that the very thing which makes us human, makes us so anti-human, and yet… In that case, is our anti-human-ness not also the most human thing possible? Never did I think it would pay to make such bad decisions, and never did I think that, had I made better decisions, I might have been worse off. Perhaps the very things that put me here are the challenges God has set out for me to face, and that means that I am right where I should be, and I always have been all along!
> So what is there to do? Should I adopt a strategy of total non-action, of being a passive observer to my thoughts and my bodily emotions and my neuroses? Should I somehow elevate myself to a point beyond my own mind, where I am exposed to fewer neuroses?
> No… I am in a checkmate, a cosmic checkmate. And the only thing to do is to do what I can as best I can, and hope the rest of my life may continue unfazed.
What an amazing way to make yourself sick. Remunerating is an absolutely horrible habit.
Don't assume anyone else has a perfect life. My last partner was divorced, but put up a nice front for family and friends up until she seperated.
As far as I'm concerned until the day I die I don't have a second to waste on things I can't change anyway.
>As far as I'm concerned until the day I die I don't have a second to waste on things I can't change anyway.
This is the real ticket to happiness imo. Once you realize there are just an enumerable amount of things you cannot directly change and start thinking "Why am I so angry about this?" you eventually learn to be happy.
Much of my life hasn't played out how I expected. I had dreams like many people in high school and none of them came true. Instead of finishing college I joined the military after the stock market collapse in 2008/9. Impressions were left on me throughout my early life that I only came to know as an adult. My family got sick, I ruined the relationship that I'd worked for, and at times I alienated people close to me out of my own sense of self-defense. I pushed myself to the brink repeatedly. My twenties were filled with stress, frustration, confusion, and at times anger. These things taught me acceptance and forgiveness of both myself and others. Looking back, I would not trade them for an easier or more prestigious life.
When I came back from Afghanistan I had to scratch, claw, and climb a ladder without a degree thanks in much part to people who saw in me what I could only hoped to have seen in myself. I looked around me when I arrived and I saw Ivy League and top school graduates with multi-million dollar homes, Teslas, and their own literal fig trees in their back yards that complained about everything in life. I've now had the opportunity to live in multiple cultures with varying degrees of prosperity. These things taught me to know my value but to have perspective on what I'm really asking for.
Here I am considering selling all my belongings, buying a truck and an RV to go embrace the new open road that is remote work. Life isn't about looking back. It isn't even about getting what you want. It's about navigating the road in front of you and making the best of the opportunities in front of you and for everyone around you. All that to say, I've embraced the idea that whatever lies ahead is where I'm supposed to be and I needn't look at what my neighbors value or what they have because I don't care. This life is mine to live.
I've had a very strangely similar path, however I still haven't given up on my teenage dreams: call me delusional! I like to think the military gave me the will strength to push until I get some (imperfect) version of what I want, and not let setbacks paint my forward outlook too much.
I'd agree with your conclusion and encourage you to sell everything and go have fun.
I haven't given up, I'm still here, still working in software. I'm just doing it my way now, with some new priorities, I suppose. The military is a complex subject for me and my friends. There are good things I can say and there are awful things I can say. Regardless, I will always be proud of what I did and accomplished in that time. It makes me proud you've made something of post-service life though, veterans will always hold a special place in my mind.
This isn't as uncommon a path as you might believe. I was enlisted in the USAF from 2005-2010, spent months and months Iraq and Afghanistan etc. I have a $500k house with a literal fig tree in my backyard now. I don't assume people in my position or better had an easier time just because they went to college. One of my best friends is a Physics PhD from an Ivy League and he's a complete wreck so, it doesn't necessarily guarantee anything in particular lol
I have a hard time believing that a computer scientist or engineer from a top school will not have an easier time gaining admittance into software engineering than someone not. Anyone not will always have a proverbial hill to climb. I would agree that continued success has diminishing returns from a degree. This is often the argument for designing interviews that reflect real world work.
That said, my point was really that if you can afford a house with a fig tree in Silicon Valley then in some way your stars aligned and to see people unhappy over frivolous things was an enlightening experience that taught me something. My stars didn't align, until they did, and I had to learn to appreciate that. It doesn't mean those people didn't need to overcome adversity or have a story worth listening to or admiring.
> This isn't as uncommon a path as you might believe. I was enlisted in the USAF from 2005-2010, spent months and months Iraq and Afghanistan etc.
I'd be interested in knowing the statistics on veterans in Silicon Valley and tech in general. I've met some, but I wouldn't call it common. I might agree that it's somewhere between common and uncommon, but who knows? If these statistics are collected they are not published or widely disseminated. When I usually meet veterans they're not enlisted, they're officers. The most public activity I've seen is a group at Google that has 2,000 members, I do not know how many of those work in engineering roles.
> I have a hard time believing that a computer scientist or engineer from a top school will not have an easier time gaining admittance into software engineering than someone not.
I think you both may be right. I would imagine that the formal education makes it a bit easier to "get your foot in the door" in the first place, when you're competing "on paper" with others. But once you are in the industry, performance and track record counts for a lot more.
In other words the degree probably does make it easier. But it might be only 20% easier and perhaps not 80-90% as some might assume.
Depends on your chosen specialisation too of course. I managed to pick a career in just the right area of software development where I could get away with having had a pitiful amount of education :-)
It also depends what you're going for. It's true, if you want a career in the most prestigious silicon valley firms, they were interviewing recent CS grads at high prestige schools.
But outside of that world, I was honestly surprised how little it mattered that I didn't have a CS degree. In a lot of ways, if I saw how friends in other fields were progressing and what it took for them to get there, it was objectively easier to be an uncredentialed developer.
The broader point about stars aligning is absolutely correct.
Sorry I'm in Austin, not Silicon Valley. There are a lot of enlisted veterans here in IT, but theres just a lot of veterans here in general so it might be exceptional ;P
Ah, yes. I restarted my career in Dallas as opposed to Austin, so I can definitely believe that. Maybe once I'm done touring the US that's where I'll go. Thanks for your perspective!
>I’d be interested in knowing the statistics on veterans in Silicon Valley and tech in general.
I’ve met quite few while living in the Bay Area. I moved to Austin a few years ago and there are even more of us here. You and I have made some similar choices in life though. I enlisted in 09 and got into tech after returning from Afghanistan as well.
Obviously if you think digital nomad live is for you then go for it. For me I want friends and companionship. My experience is that's not what nomads get. Friends requires you to be near by and spend time when them else they drift way. Sure you can keep in touch online but you won't really be a part of their life nor them a part of yours if you're not there to share your life with them. The same goes for a long term companion unless by some luck of the draw you manage to find someone that can join your open ride lifestyle. Some people don't need that. I do which I learned the hard way.
Depends too. If you’ve moved around a bunch already then your friends are probably scattered around and you don’t get to see them much. If you’re RVing around maybe you’ll see them more
I always consider my life is strange. Born in a 3rd world country in a broken home, families fight like in drama, many divorces and remarriage. I went where whoever my current father at that time went, moving from city to city, school to school. Then I find myself in the US, from odd jobs such as dry clean, laundry, sushi, deli, to church admin, to now working as SWE in one of big US tech company in NYC. Married a wife from another country as well. Me and my wife are different culturally, language, faith, and socio-economic background. One day I woke up in a remote village where her grandparents cultivate rice, in a traditional home and where the bathtub is still traditional, hearing the sound of cicadas and see the morning sun, and I thought to myself "how did I end up here?"
It's strange, I left my home country and now wherever I go I see people that speaks different language than me, buildings that I'm not familiar with. My community where I am active with is also different than me. It is a strange feeling. I hate airports because whenever I am in airports I always have a mixed feeling. The feeling of leaving my current place to visit another home in another place.
Now my heart is in three different countries (or cities, to be precise). Every vacation season I have to decide which country to visit and to which family. Life is short. I saw my brother's baby, and then on the next vacation that baby already knew how to walk. My parents and grandparents are getting older. My kids and my brother's kids will speak different languages, grow up differently, and so does my wife's kids with her sisters'. I have a dream of uniting them in one place during vacation and see how those kids react to one another even though they can't communicate in one language, I think that'd be a hilarious sight but very wholesome. I hope there will be faster way to travel invented within our lifetime, maybe Concorde again?
I guess this is the life of immigrants. We are immigrants, this is our way of life. I often asked myself what would happen if I stayed in my home country? I'd marry my current girlfriend at that time, maybe help my family's business, or do something else. I don't know.
For anyone curious: I was born and grew up in Jakarta (Indonesia), and my wife grew up in Tokyo (Japan), and now I work in NYC. Life is surely strange. I feel very insignificant every time I think about this and I realize, there are millions, and billions of people in this planet with stories as unique or more unique than me. The world is is a strange place.
One day, maybe we will retire in Japan, or in Indonesia. Who knows. It's too far in the future. What I do now is cherish every moment I have, knowing the future will be different.
> I feel very insignificant every time I think about this and I realize, there are millions, and billions of people in this planet with stories as unique or more unique than me.
And less unique.
From my house, I can drive to my hometown, visit my family, and drive back in one day. I left the USA once, except for that I never spent a continuous week outside of the state where I was born.
A lot of people online say that travel makes you a better person. But it's expensive, so I have to just hope I'm not missing too much.
I'd say its not the travel itself, because travel by itself is pretty shallow. I'd say the experience of living with other people who are especially socio-economically or racially different than you, that changes things.
>> A lot of people online say that travel makes you a better person.
Probably every experience you have can make you a better person, it doesn't need to be travel.
I used to travel a ton for work and fun (there was a year where I hit 6 continents in a 10-month window) but spending the last 9 months in a one-bedroom apartment with my wife and our newborn is no less mind opening.
In fact, like everything, travel gets old. At some point you know that you "got it" - you can be dropped in a random point on the earth and make something out of it - and yet you may not know how to be at one place for a long time (I am learning that now.)
Also, it makes things less special. In a way I am jealous of people who are dreaming of going to Paris and then experience it for the first time.
You do you - save your money, invest in relationships around you, learn things on line, be a good child and parent. If that's "all" you have to show against someone who has been everywhere but doesn't have what you have, you're ahead.
I have a similar life, though without the part of a broken home at childhood (parents fought but not out of ordinary I think). It's really hard not being able to visit family often, at most once a year (if you're lucky and if there's no pandemics stopping you!).
The hardest part for me is that my wife doesn't like my family, so she refuses to visit them... as half the family lives in one country and half in another, and we're in yet another country, it's almost impossible for us to unite the whole family. My parents never met hers... and I only met my brother's youngest child when she was already 5. Last time I went to visit my parents I went alone... and again last time I went to visit my brother (who lives on the other side of the planet from my parents - I live almost in the middle). Sometimes I wish I hadn't started the wave of moving to some other country (which my sister, then my brother followed years later)... as they moved to the country I'd been in, I had already moved again to another country because of my wife. Now I am finally planning to have kids (quite late but still time) I wonder how we're going to manage without any family nearby... and how my parents will feel when we never come to visit... that's if I convince the wife to get a kid, we're running out of time quickly and she doesn't seem at all bothered by it.
I'm in a position I must make a decision: perhaps go back to my country and get a new wife there (even though I would hate to go through a divorce) close to at least some of my family... or just let the time pass by and wait for the inevitable, letting old age arrive and die without a family on a strange country. How can I know what to do?! Leaving this great country where I am will probably be the biggest mistake I will ever make (I have a good job, great house and extreme social security here - none of which I would have in my own country), but staying here will likely lead to a meaningless, though comfortable life. What would you do?
Wow, what a question. This is exactly the kind of situation that can branch out to completely different lives.
There's an interesting contrast: the risk-taking choice into the unknown, or the comfortable but boring choice to stay.
If you choose to take the easy path, when you're old you might look back and ask, "Did I make the right choice? What kind of different life would I have had?" Or, if things go well, you might be a satisfied person.
If you choose to go into the unknown, there is a chance that things will not work out better. Maybe you'll have a more difficult life of struggle. Then you might wish that you had stayed in the comfortable but boring life you had.
> good job, great house and extreme social security here - none of which I would have in my own country
That's what you'd be risking for an unknown future..
I imagine people would recommend that you take the risk, take a chance to create a completely different life that's more interesting. But, I also imagine that those same people would choose for themselves the comfortable path. From your story, I think you'll regret it later in life if you don't take the chance.
I think if I were you I'd try to think about the future. I am lucky that my wife's family really welcome me even though my family background, not only that we are foreigners, but also not quite a good background to have. Due to my family's side financial situation, both families from Indonesia and Japan never met each other physically, only through skype, maybe one or two times and we are in our 3rd year of the marriage. Pretty much I went to get married on my own, in Japan, without any side of my family coming. We just spent a nice dinner.
Maybe your wife isn't ready yet to see your family. My wife, being raised in a clean 1st world country, still is not used to the living condition when we visit Indonesia. It is understandable, so most likely we will retire in Japan instead of Indonesia one day.
As immigrants we already accepted our way of life. We will grow older, and our kids too, without being able to grow together with their contemporaries within the family circle.
I understand what you say about staying here you might end up having a meaningless life. Trust me, I thought about it a lot too. Hence that's why I set some things straight with my wife. Who knows what will happen in the future, but I said we gonna work here for a while, maybe until kids go to college, and we gonna go back to Japan. We decide that we aren't taking any long and expensive mortgage, but if possible, only 10 year mortgage. 10 years is a short time. Once we finish that mortgage, we can do whatever we want, and see where to go next.
Again, it is too far to think of the future, but my current plan gives me and my wife hope and goal to aim to. We'll enjoy the journey while we are here.
Keep CGK, Insert SIN, replace NRT with TPE, JFK with YYZ, then add CGK again after that. That is my life :-) Nice to meet you, Chris. We are in similar journey. Maybe I will add another destination after this, see how life goes.
Brabel, I moved back to home country and brought my wife. That can also be a solution for you.
Wow, a fellow traveler on this many road. Greetings!
Ahh, one day I will. Today I still can't afford it. My family's side, parent, grandparent, etc messed up a lot financially and lost everything. I can't afford to go back right now or even move to Japan, my current salary is a reserve for in case anything goes wrong with them.
That’s the life of an immigrant. You lose the concept of “home”. You can try to build one for the next generation but for you it’s most likely gone forever. It’s very strange because I don’t feel at home in my new country but I’ve also been gone for so long that my old country feels just as alien.
Yeah I guess this is the life we have now. It is really strange. Now I understand why mankind want to achieve immortality. Life is too short, and distance is too far. There's no greater value in life than living in the moment with people you treasure.
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[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 318 ms ] threadEDIT: I guess it was suspicious that 99% of my high school circle picked law or finance or business courses instead.
Better jobs are competed for strongly. Good stuff is never free and never available by default.
The pretty good stuff is often in short supply.
But it's misleading. Friendships and relationships aren't "free" in terms of effort and achievement. They take the same kind of work/luck/genetics/network combination as getting an interesting and fulfilling job does.
Sure, even the hobo on the street can have faith in Jesus and mental peace for free if you mean that sort of thing, but most things people want are scarce or at least aren't available by default, without either effort or connections.
Depends on where you work too. Sounds like you may need a new job.
However, there are crappy doctors and architects - just like there are famous software engineers. Prestige - outside the ingroup - is a function of the accessibility, value, and quality of your work. Like the Taiwanese folks who built a mask availability tracker...
I swear, I’d never think to ask this of anyone, doctors, lawyers, teachers, nurses, cops, literally, I can’t think of one profession that gets asked this, I’ll try again, pilots, chemists, diplomats, translators, artists, mechanics, it’s endless.
What is it that you actually do?
How about fuck you, I’m not answering that anymore.
It tickles people the wrong way that you took software development into every possible industry you can imagine and not only started offering tech solutions, but business solutions too.
Incoming projection - I see it as the most passive aggressive low ball attack on one’s profession. It’s karma too, because we do the same to sales/product/people management elements within our industry. I know why I’ve done it, and it’s mostly insecurity, ‘oh those people aren’t smart, will soon be gone’.
^ Now imagine the whole of society looking at you like that.
In my experience, most people (i.e. sans pathologies) ask this question because they are ignorant and curious.
They are trying to integrate the unknown (you and your craft) into the known, not trying to challenge your ego.
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A story that might be illustrative.
A close relative of mine came to his current country from another country, but is a citizen of his new country. At social gatherings over the years, a not-uncommon question, asked by immigrants and born-citizens alike, was "Where are you from?"
There was no quicker way to become his mortal enemy, and to ruin a party!
He thought people were trying to parade his otherness, with the intent of making him feel out of place, not welcome, lesser-than, etc.
From another perspective, each question was an opportunity to educate people on his heritage, and an objectively-fascinating component of his identity (that of "The Immigrant").
I think it’s what afflicted my relative, too, for what it’s worth. When you’re stung by people, it’s hard to see the value in continuing to remain open.
Regarding the accrual of knowledge and its hardening effects on the soul:
> with much wisdom comes much sorrow; the more knowledge, the more grief.
> The wise have eyes in their heads, while the fool walks in the darkness; but the same fate overtakes them both.
These quotes come from Ecclesiastes, which does not contain a much of a resolution.
> A person can do nothing better than to eat and drink and find satisfaction in their own toil.
Tao Te Ching makes a similar recommendation: empty hearts and fill bellies. In short, worry less of ideas, and more of literal substances that bind us together (food, drink, and toil).
Now that I think of it, IT people and mechanics suffer from the exact same stereotype where people don't trust anything they say and assume they're just lording their knowledge over the poor, uninformed user for status/money.
I'm sure the others also suffer from stereotypes.
It is true though that its easier to climb the ladder via social/soft/people skills and selling/positioning yourself well and knowing who to associate with etc. compared to working real hard on technical stuff. If you want to impress general people, tell them about people related achievements, like how you led a big group to success, or how you resolved conflicts, big names you've worked with and know etc. Social capital is indeed more valuable in general and so managers and "soft" professionals like lawyers can seem higher status. But its more about the focus on people vs things. Rule of thumb: if you can be objectively wrong or make an objective mistake, you're on the lower end of status. If situations are more wishy washy and rhetoric can save you, you are higher up.
Even though formulating it bluntly is frowned upon: as a software engineer you dominate (rule over) computers and equipment (similar to blue collar work), but to get respect from non techies you need to dominate people. No way around it. That's why managers like to have many reports, even if they are useless and hurt the bottom line.
It is reasonable to infer that these additional dates are actually interested in dating your job, and your essential self and body are just along for the ride. Your job goes, you go.
The problem is you will forget this at some point and start thinking a particular date actually cares about you personally.
Do yourself a favor to save your future self some pain. Take your CV, in paper form, roll it up into a cylinder, and dip it into latex. You should have a latex wand of about 8 inches in length. Wrap it with a few hundred dollar bills, gift this to your date and run away as fast as your feet will take you. You’re welcome...you’ve just saved yourself 10s to 100s of thousands of dollars and many hours of misery.
Details may vary depending on gender, economic status and the local currency.
Also, I think a major elephant in the room: some people just feel better about themselves and sleep better, knowing that they are a big dog and can feel justified in looking down on others.
“You know, I should say up front that, in my experience, doctors tend to be assholes. The reason they tend to be assholes is because they get to be. They're doctors.”
It's a self inflicted mental suffering that people bring on themselves. Instead of enjoying that high wealth they fume about why they aren't as impressive as fancy lawyers, ceos, politicians and doctors...
We're arguing about status here, so when you're satisfied with the money but not with the status.
If it makes them feel better I have to teach the 99% of their high school they are talking about and they all seem pretty one track minded.
Counter anecdote: I know law and finance and business folks who wished they studied more computers.
I find this take really interesting, because my (and my peers') experience so far has been very different.
I do think about my literal social status (i.e. friends, sex, etc.) but I don't think thought along those lines has ever really influenced my decision making - beyond a vague desire to outdo people born better than me.
500 at Goldman is like VP with some tenure, which would be similar to E6 at Facebook
Hell Goldman sales and trading managing directors make 750-900k a year, which is what a good E7 at Facebook makes, both usually reached by age 33-35 by high achievers.
I work at a FAANG and the people that I work with aren't terribly different social status from the ones I worked with during my first internship, they're just ~20 years younger.
If you actually think lawyer is a high status job then youre watching too many movies.
Half my friends are doing service jobs or gig work.
I can invest in my best friends studio , planing on seeing another friend in Asia next year, can take multiple international vacations per year.
I have no credit card debt.
All from wanting to learn a bit of Unity once upon a time. You can't compare yourself to the top 5% of income earners while ignoring the bottom 95%
I'd recommend talking with your friends, and asking them if they find their work fulfilling. If it falls short of their expectations, ask which dimensions contribute the most to the diff.
This might give you some perspective on what life would be like in another vertical. It probably isn't as rosy as you imagine, but you might have done this already.
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I would recommend to younger people, that they shouldn't make their career choice through the lens of prestige, because time has demonstrated that social standing is flimsy and unpredictable.
A profession's relative prestige varies regionally, temporally, socioeconomically, and in the eye of the beholder. These are mutable dimensions for the duration of a normal career.
It's kind of like the old advice: if you're interested in marrying someone for life, don't marry based on one dimension alone (looks, money, health, personality, family). Any of these can invert completely.
In finance terms, it's like betting your financial portfoilo on the 40-year performance of a single ETF: not outright stupid because some people will be successful, but it's not super wise.
If this doesn't help you feel better, maybe you should consider changing careers? As a SWE, you have enough intellectual capital, time and domain-specific education is the only thing standing in your way.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3fx1mGhTXdg
The concept that doing things that you hate doing is "exercising of the muscle of willpower" is very revealing. It's something I've tried to do adopt, and it's been a very powerful motivator in getting me to work out and reduce procrastination. As banal as it may sound — like the father in Calvin and Hobbes saying "it builds character" — it's also a great way of framing it.
And I assure you I'm neither a
> "troubled teenager who took my latest shower 3 weeks ago"
or a
> "middle-age professional of some sort who cannot close his trousers anymore because of additional calories brought on by family life".
Your comment doesn't paint you as a very positive person. Of course, it's fine if you'd like to be that way, but my question is: why? What good does writing a comment like this do you (or me, or anyone reading it)? To me, these sorts of despondent and cynical comments seem to come from the very types of people you think listen to Goggins.
[0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ujz29rQvDvA
Why someone who is not a troubled teenager (and all these influencers were troubled teens) or a middle-age disappointed man (the message is always for men, where are the women?) should wake up at 4:30 am to do squats, bjj, or running? There is no reason whatsoever if you are not in one of those buckets. It is counter-productive, it is silly, it is kicking oneself in the genitals to tell their troubled internal voice: see, I can hurt myself, I can take it, I am strong. What an insecure, troubled way of approaching life!
Why someone should give up on things and actions that have been pleasurable since the dawn of times for all, say, normal people? I am thinking, and these are all hated by the military influencers, about a glass of wine, an escapade, a sudden decision that is not joining the Navy Seals, a night out with friends that ends at 4 am (not staying up late shooting other people, a favorite of Goggins and Willink. Yes, to give them a better future, I know. I have always found funny that men join the military at 17 because they, as they never forget to repeat, want a better world, which is always also what the US want, a terrific coincidence).
"The concept that doing things that you hate doing is "exercising of the muscle of willpower" is very revealing. It's something I've tried to do adopt, and it's been a very powerful motivator in getting me to work out and reduce procrastination." - That's terrible (long-term, short-term anything can work) advice, outside the tails (like people who hate showers, kids who hate calculations, middle-age men and women who hate small portions). Why not working toward enjoying the run, the squats, the learning? Why not "following" people who have a sense of lightness around them, who are "fun" to be around while being accomplished, instead of these soldier-philosophers who seem always pissed and look incapable of not putting a life lesson even in the broccoli they had for dinner? Let me give you an example: I don't like exercising in the morning, it often gives me an headache, I tend to go hard and it tires me out more than I like during the day, I prefer to workout after 5 pm (like many other people). Now, tell me: why should I do "something I hate to exercise my willpower", instead of— listen to this insight—exercising after 5 pm?
"What good does writing a comment like this do you (or me, or anyone reading it)?" - There is no big vision behind my comment; but since I have seen one too many people buying into this "hard-man for hard times" trope, I would like them to read my cynical comment and say to themselves: they (i.e., me) are right, I am not a troubled teenager that the Army can straighten up, I am not a disappointed man who needs to be radicalized by these early-risers lunatics, I am better than that.
In every case I can think of, it's better to know. Even when it doesn't seem like it.
Does that mean the definition of Heaven is when the person you ended up becoming meets the person you could have wound up being?
I get that it is trying to say something abstract, like, you could be a lot better than what you are, but it just sounds so incredibly ignorant of how horrible things could be that it irritates me.
> "I saw my life branching out before me like the green fig tree in the story. From the tip of every branch, like a fat purple fig, a wonderful future beckoned and winked. One fig was a husband and a happy home and children, and another fig was a famous poet and another fig was a brilliant professor, and another fig was Ee Gee, the amazing editor, and another fig was Europe and Africa and South America, and another fig was Constantin and Socrates and Attila and a pack of other lovers with queer names and offbeat professions, and another fig was an Olympic lady crew champion, and beyond and above these figs were many more figs I couldn't quite make out. I saw myself sitting in the crotch of this fig tree, starving to death, just because I couldn't make up my mind which of the figs I would choose. I wanted each and every one of them, but choosing one meant losing all the rest, and, as I sat there, unable to decide, the figs began to wrinkle and go black, and, one by one, they plopped to the ground at my feet."
Jordan Peterson Pick Your Sacrifice https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5--W9mhC4zA
I know there are people who hate on him for basically misinterpretations of things he has said regarding transgender issues.
But then on top of that, there are right wing people that hate him equally much and think he's basically a nonsense-spouting sycophant.
I guess listening to the things he has to say, I think they are on par with the more useful things I ever heard from a professor at university.
Anyway, he seems to be someone people love to hate.
So I err on the side of caution by assuming he isn't worth listening to. He also reeks of certainty, like I'm wrong just for asking what the fuck he's trying to tell me because it's so obvious... to him.
I can possibly sift through YouTube to get to the videos where he claims these things, but it will not be the most palatable of chores.
I guess it seems completely unremarkable that someone would have useful things to say in one regard while having less useful things to say in another.
Also I guess I view him in the context of a university professor who wrote a book and has some lectures online, not in the context of the mega-celebrity he became. I think being catapulted to fame like that is bound to mess up pretty well everyone and probably also muddy their message quite a bit.
I mean, at its core none of the things Peterson has to say are really all that revolutionary, they are pretty basic life advice. "Take responsibility for your life", etc.
Obviously there is an unmet need for that basic life advice because people (particularly young men) ate it up.
One article complained about him relaying a story of getting a kid to eat. My only conclusion is the person that was complaining doesn't have kids, because his story was extremely relatable, and I'd guess basically universal among parents.
Anyway, yes if you try putting Jordan Peterson up on a pedestal, he'll probably fall off it. If you view him as someone that maybe could give some good advice while you'd otherwise just be killing time anyway, I guess I think he holds up to that metric pretty well.
Given the yard stick / metric you are measuring him with there would be teeming millions who would qualify -- anyone who is capable of a half decent parenting. In the kind of life advice he offers, Peterson feels quite unremarkable.
I live in the US and not that interested in US politics, so no dog in the fight -- just an fly on the wall observation.
No, he has a long established pattern of attracting a crowd by talking about basic self-help and then sneak in politically charged ideas like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cultural_Marxism_conspiracy_th... , "people are lobsters", and plenty of sexism.
> I view him in the context of a university professor who wrote a book and has some lectures online, not in the context of the mega-celebrity he became.
You can't pick and choose the context: a person is responsible for they say in public.
Besides, even as a university professor a person is responsible for speaking honestly.
> being catapulted to fame ... muddy their message quite a bit.
No, he was playing the same tricks since the beginning. There are a lot of old videos on youtube.
Do you seriously think the Lobster guy that almost died in a backwater Russian clinic needs an introduction ?
Also why are people still linking to his material ? Another unstable person giving out advice to others, quite the trend.
I don't know, I've listened to some of his stuff and what doesn't come across as simplistic platitudes has baked in assumptions that seem unnecessary, like defining truth to be an evolutionarily useful principle.
That he inspires people doesn't surprise me, the religion of my youth did the same and was more hokum than Peterson's mythological substrate mappings.
But it's still a good idea to clean your room.
He's good at manipulating the crowds - the amount of downvotes that you are getting say a lot.
And, it has to be a single specialty. In my particular case, it was hard to accept that I couldn’t be both a successful programming language designer and a successful game developer.
Should you really dig in and focus on mobile, web, server, game, firmware? If so, should you focus on one language?
I don't so much question paths in my life as I feel very lucky to have ended up where I am. I do question on a daily basis, whether I should stop learning and adopting new technologies, and focus on ONE domain for the rest of my life.
It seems I am destined to be a jack of all trades, master of none, if I let life continue to unfold as it has over the last 10 years, bumping around as needed from my employers to new or different domains.
Why not? Jonathan Blow seems to be making a pretty good run at it.
See also this webcomic:
https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/2012-09-02
But we’re 29, not 49 or even 39. There’re still figs on the tree.
There are other cultural and societal factors at play, but the greater longevity and better medical care have opened up the time period for the expectations that previous generations had for their 20s.
I also don’t think you’re thinking about things too soon. We’re all slightly different. Also don’t make decisions for other people by writing them off. Just because they present one way doesn’t make that the sum total of who they are. You’ll need to have relationships in order to meet someone to have kids with.
There may be future interventions that correct for that, but generally, quality of ova starts declining after 30 and much more so after 35.
Not to mention the energy to keep up with little ones, and if you ever want the option of more than 2 kids. And of course if you’re 30+ when you have kids, and your kids are 30+ when they have kids, you are pushing 65 to 70+ which makes playing with the grandkids not as much fun and you’re soon to be less of an asset in terms of help and possibly a liability for your kids due to declining health.
On the other hand, you may have increased your chances at having a higher paying career, but I suspect, for many, the extra savings don’t quite make up for the trade offs.
I had mine in 30 to 35 range, but if I could go back in time and had found my spouse, I think I would have opted to have them in 25 to 30 range. However, no one in my social circles has kids in their 20s and barely anyone is married by 30 so we also may have been socially isolated if we had chosen to do that.
But I try to think back to what I did in my 25 to 30 range that I thought was worth delaying starting a family and I can’t come up with anything, other than being a little bit further ahead in the rat race. But all the other rats are thinking the same thing, so who is really benefiting?
It also seems useful to become a parent with that extra decade of life experience. And if we incentivize exercise in the later years, it could offset the "feeling tired at 70" thing? My fiancé's grandpa runs marathons and honestly has more energy than I do!
The bottleneck is the same as it is for any issue regarding children.
The prospective mother must be willing.
They might think they do, but life never unfolds itself according to our plans.
Never compare to others. You don't know what they're going through, or what they're going to go through.
It took me until my mid 30s to realize just how impossible the idea of "having life figured out" really is.
That said, time is ticking and while it isn't too late, now is the best time to start!
42 here, already two major career changes. And I am glad I made both changes.
Beautiful, this is the explanation I was looking for because whenever I'd hear that "it's never too late," I just felt like that enabled procrastination, but your explanation solidified that life is not long, but rather it is short indeed. It's true that it's not too late for many of your future opportunities, but eventually, time will run out.
To be honest I've felt like this since I was 18 and it never went away. What made you realize this wasn't the case?
And I hope you find that path too.
My one life advice: Don't search for greatness, search for peace.
It was the initial stage where I felt I had a death sentence that shifted my outlook on life. When you think you're going to die you re-evaluate some things. I looked at my life, thought about what I'd regret, and made 5 year plans to get things on track. I'm now in the habit of setting plans for 5 years to ensure I don't regret the life I do have.
Since then I've been a teacher. Looking at pivoting into finance in Ireland/Europe (with a masters in Quantitative Finance) next year; was planning on doing it this year but, y'know, corona kinda destroyed finance jobs over there and I'd need a work visa (thankfully it's a high need field so it's a bit easier)...
"Life is funny. You start out with limitless potential, but time is always shaving away the possibilities. Every choice you make is the choice not to do a thousand other things. What's important, when all is said and done, is that you made a difference. Your choices, and everything undone, have to mean something. Otherwise, what is the point?"
We branch out, but we ultimately keep heading towards the very same outcome.
The best I've got these days is that I suspect none of it means anything. But I hope I'm wrong.
"For although in regard of that which is already past there may be some inequality, yet that time which is now present and in being, is equal unto all men. And that being it which we part with whensoever we die, it doth manifestly appear, that it can be but a moment of time, that we then part with. For as for that which is either past or to come, a man cannot be said properly to part with it. For how should a man part with that which he hath not? ... that life which any the longest liver, or the shortest liver parts with, is for length and duration the very same, for that only which is present, is that, which either of them can lose, as being that only which they have; for that which he hath not, no man can truly be said to lose.
-- Marcus Aurelius, http://gutenberg.org/files/2680/2680-h/2680-h.htm#link2H_4_0...
"XorNot" is a title inhabited by many different people over time: the person that held that title this time last year is not you, and the "XorNot" of today will give way tomorrow to yet another person. Each can only be properly considered in the context of the situations they inherited and those left for their successors.
14. Even if you were to live for three thousand years or ten times as long, you should still remember this, that no one loses any life other than the one that he is living, nor does he live any life other than the one that he loses, so the shortest life and the longest amount to the same. For the present is equal for all, and what is passing must be equal also, so what can be lost is shown to be nothing more than a moment; and no one could lose either the past or the future, for how could he be deprived of what he does not possess? So always bear in mind these two points: firstly that all things are alike in nature from all eternity and recur in cycles, and it therefore makes no difference whether one sees the same spectacle for a hundred years or two hundred or for time everlasting; and secondly that the longest-lived and the earliest to die suffer an equal loss; for it is solely of the present moment that each will be deprived, if it is really the case that this is all he has and a person cannot lose what he does not have.
https://global.oup.com/academic/product/meditations-97801995...
In reality though you may opt for a career, leave the family but fail. Or you may put your career on a lower pitch only to have your wife and you decide it won't really work out. In reality, it's more like you start to climb for a fat purple fig only to find it rotten, or just edible. At least in some of the cases, and it won't be your fault and your success depends on how you deal with the said fig. Maybe you can still climb to another?
I happened to reconnect with a childhood friend in that crowd of 15,000+ and that got the ball rolling.
• https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Analysis_paralysis
• https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Paradox_of_Choice
For sure, however it is better to have tried and experienced than not have. I have tried and failed at picking many of those figs, and it is worth it, the good and bad. Don't stand there, give yourself a time, and then chose freely.
She struggled with mental health issues and depression most of her life. She excelled academically and she was driven to write, but at the same time, she struggled with her own self. Her life is marked by several suicide attempts.
She married the poet Ted Hughes and moved around frequently during their short marriage. While she was ambitious, a deep sense of anxiety kept her from exploring and expressing her own identity through her writing.
Most of her poetry was written during a short burst of creativity, over the course of a few months, in late 1962. She died of suicide in 1963. Her famous novel, The Bell Jar, was published a month before her death. Major themes in this novel include "socially acceptable identity" and mental health. [2]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sylvia_Plath [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Bell_Jar
Your criticism is a certainly correct, but would have been removed to the author of the quote. As Plath received treatment and openly discussed her mental health issues, undoubtedly she was told this many times over.
My understanding is that Ted Hughes' contribution to Plath's mental health went beyond "mov[ing] around frequently during their short marriage" [1].
> In 2017, previously unpublished letters written by Plath between 18 February 1960 and 4 February 1963 accuse Hughes of physically abusing her months before she miscarried their second child in 1961.
Hughes also began an affair with another woman, Assia Wevill, in 1962 and (apparently) had a kid with her in 1965. Plath knew about the former and committed suicide in 1963. Wevill also killed herself as well as her child with Hughes in 1969 after, you guessed it, "Hughes began affairs with Brenda Hedden, a married acquaintance who frequented their home, and Carol Orchard, a nurse 20 years his junior, whom he would later marry in 1970" [2].
It might be too reductive to say Hughes just drove two women to suicide, but it seems like we can be confident that he had, uh, extensive personal failings?
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ted_Hughes#Death_of_Sylvia_Pla...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assia_Wevill#Ted_Hughes
You might find someone climbing the tree and ask them if they could tell you how they taste up top.
Sitting in the crotch of the tree lamenting your situation is a fig too. We all bite into a sour one every now and again.
Regarding fame, I think the words of the late 20th Century philosopher David Cassidy summed it up best
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Cassidy
If you are desperate for fame and fortune, try just fortune and see how that works out for you.
Edit: ah yes downvotes. Think about it this way. You meet someone with 6 fingers on each hand, kinda interesting right? Minutes later you meet someone with 5 fingers, also interesting?
I grew up Christian, and among Christian young people a common question was "What's God's plan for my life?"
In that context, I came across Micah 6:8 which spells it out about as plainly as you'll find anywhere:
"He has told you, O man, what is good; and what does the Lord require of you but to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God?"
That seems like a standard that everyone can get behind. It gives you a standard by which to measure how well you're living, but your options remain open to do whatever you want as long as you do it justly, kindly, and humbly.
The point is that regardless of the original intent of the Judeo-Christian text, it seems an admirable enough message that can be recontextualized easily enough to fit those of different ethical and theological viewpoints on this forum. No hair-splitting or holy wars necessary.
The allusion to Alcoholics Anonymous is that the “acknowledging a higher power” step, while commonly assumed as pushing crypto-Christianity, can be reinterpreted by each individual participant as their own unifying motivator.
Humility is also useful when alone. I think X is true but let me double check can easily save your life irrespective of a belief in god or the presence of other people. Using a checklist before flying for example is an important recognition of your imperfection. Measure twice cut once is again the same idea.
The Christian POV is basically, "it doesn't matter how bad your life is because it will be great in the after life". In other words the good parts are ahead, period.
But if you don't believe then there is no guaranteed good parts ahead and the line above has no meaning.
Theologians, especially non American, drastically believe that the American Church has perverted heaven and evolution.
Life is like a long mountain trail in a great migration. There are criss-crossing paths everywhere, and you have to decide which to take. The goal is to climb until you reach the summit. There'll always be valleys and hills, so you won't always be going up. But each step you take forward, and each foot higher in elevation, is your life getting better. If you can say that most of the time you were moving forward and higher, to me that's a well-lived life.
Could you have taken a shorter path and gotten there faster? Sure! But the longer you're on the path, the more time you have to smell the flowers, listen to the birds sing, see the trees swaying in the wind. Maybe you're content to stay exactly where you are. But I think most of us should keep climbing, because there's always new trails to see. Who cares how we get there as long as we keep going up.
I wish I was happy. And I think some hard-to-treat mental illness is preventing my day-to-day happiness.
When I feel envious of others, it's not only that they're rich and they travel a lot. They also have friends. They might even have a family they care about. They have hobbies and they have _something_ to do. A lot of them say they have problems with mental health, but you can't film a year-long depressive episode and upload it to YouTube, so I have to take their word for it. And in truth I don't. The world seems clean-split between people who have everything and people who have it even harder than me, and I always just feel alone in this middle ground, where I have all the material elements to be healthy and happy but I can't put them together.
I have many things other people want, but I never find myself sitting back and saying "I'm glad I have this." I always want things I can't have, and it hurts a lot.
You're not as alone as you think, because this just resonated like I can't even explain.
IMHO, this is a mistake, if not _the_ mistake.
I feel like i've been in your shoes, in a past life. I've come to believe that happiness is like the horizon, or the sunset. It's a fuzzy concept, which disappears if you go too close to it.
The horizon is not a place, and the sunset is not a moment. They are aggregate phenomena. You can't set them as targets, because they don't exist physically. You can observe them as composite entities, emerging in the right context.
Such is happiness. You can't set it as an objective, because it doesn't exist. And chasing it directly will only cause you suffering. Instead, try to set smaller goals, and let it emerge on its own.
Take care of your physical health. Take care of your relationships. Allocate time, not much, but regularly, for activities that you like (hobbies). Widen your intellectual horizons, e.g. by reading or listening to diverse people. Get better at what you do professionally. Try to find some form of meditation that works for you. Occasionally, try writing long, thoughtful comments on forums :)
Try to do these without looking too far into it; just trust the process. And at some point, you'll have the revelation "man, it's been quite some time since i felt unhappy!"
I often have this same thought. I tend to try and phrase it as "I'm learning to put them together". I don't believe that we can't.
> I have many things other people want, but I never find myself sitting back and saying "I'm glad I have this." I always want things I can't have, and it hurts a lot.
There is one quick choice you have the power to make here which might help, which is to choose to be grateful about the things you do have.
And it's not mutually exclusive. I'm not saying you'll immediately stop striving for more. But while engaging in that striving (which is hard to stop!), you can choose, also, to notice and be thankful for the small things you do already have.
Recognise throughout the day the small things that could make you feel grateful if you let them. Just acknowledge those things briefly and try to build a small habit around that way of thinking.
For more on this, Google "gratitude journal".
You're not alone, there's plenty of people who prioritized career over all else and 10-15 years ended up with plenty of money but otherwise no life.
Wait twenty years and it will be the only thing...
But it doesn’t make you happier: https://youtu.be/2EiV4-ClcIs?t=2180
I wouldn't. I used to think I could, now I don't want to.
Where would I like to be? Don't know that either. I'm happy with not knowing.
You can make changes today that will pay dividends in 10 years, so maybe focus on that instead.
I was widowed pretty young (as widowers go), so I have done my share of playing the what-if game with the past. Ultimately it is not a productive exercise, and I try not to do it. If I catch myself dwelling in unlived lives, I try to refocus on the one still in front of me.
It's tempting to lay in bed after a bad life event, thinking about turning back the clock, but that never ever leads to anything productive or positive.
Best case scenario is you can't fall asleep until 4AM and screw up your sleep schedule for a week. Worst case is you start exhibiting learned helplessness and go into depression for a year or several.
I always try to refocus and think about what I can do for the people who were there for me during bad times, and how I can learn from my misfortune. (Sometimes, there's nothing to learn and it's just a bad stroke of luck. Even then - it's not going to help playing the what-if game)
Ultimately we are the people we are both because of good and bad things that happened to us.
Exactly this. No matter what your imagined and real futures turn out to be, the good ones all require effort and investment in the present. You can’t go wrong with making investments in your life now.
"Vicarious learning from the experiences of others saves making errors yourself, but I regard the study of successes as being basically more important than the studyof failures. As I will several times say, there are so many ways of being wrong and so few of being right, studying successes is more efficient, and furthermore when your turn comes you will know how to succeed rather than how to fail!"
~ The art of doing science and engineering
I think the reason is that success is usually cumulative: each little win builds on the last until it's obvious you're going in the right direction. Those wins often depend on random or temporary things you have little control over. For example: CED was the perfect format for the decade RCA started developing it in, but it took until VHS redefined the market to finish it.[0]
Meanwhile one mistake can send everything tumbling down. Study enough mistakes and you might know enough of what to avoid to stay afloat long enough to find the right chain of wins.
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PnpX8d8zRIA
In principle, I agree with the fact that studying failures teaches one more, whether more is better when it comes to learning stands to be discussed, however.
What I mean by this is that, although you may profit from your parents sharing a plethora of don't-dos such as avoiding drugs, staying away from toxic relationships, not dwelling on your insecurities, et cetera, having regular abstract conversations about how "thinking deeply about my predicament, my objectives and how to reach them despite the former" might be much more useful to you.
In short, the first approach teaches you, potentially, numerous, isolated lessons about specific circumstances you will likely never face. Yes, you certainly learned more things, but whether those things will be useful to you, particularly, is unclear and only time can tell.
If you and your parents, however, have a thorough discussion about what allowed them to lead a happy life, as in the second scenario, both pushing and pulling, trying to discover what it really was and looking to find consensus regarding attitudes, processes, ideas, roadblocks, etc, you might learn a framework what will be useful forever, regardless of the concrete circumstances you are faced with.
Nevertheless, this comment of yours is spot on:
> people who succeed rarely have much luck identifying which selection of choices got them there.
Therefore, I really emphasize that not only the mentor should share the reasons and methods behind their success, the listener must be able to understand why and whether they were as useful as the mentor portrays them.
I did give a considerable amount of time to thinking about the what-if scenarios one day and when I looked down those other paths of what might have been I realized I would have to give up something I had come to love to pursue those.
Who I am may not be the best but I made these choices. I can't travel to past to berate that version of me. If I'm dissatisfied it's up to me to change that for future me.
I don't regret my childhood largely because it's immutable, but when I reflect upon it I would've preferred to have spent a lot less time playing video games.
> Early teens is a time when kids should focus on social activities, not be obsessed by some individualistic activity
I don't think GP is suggesting they spend their time exclusively on these activities. But it seems like good advice that kids to spend some time on such endeavours!
Besides, many of these activities could involve (or lead to) socialising with other kids in the process, towards a common goal. Which is an amazing way to develop social skills too.
I do think certain scenarios like Replay or Groundhog Day accord additional advantages because the relived lives stack up, and one’s knowledge, even mastery, accumulate.
— Man's Search for Meaning by Viktor E. Frankl
Freedom is a weird thing. Most would say that more personal freedom is a good thing, at least for themselves. Yet so many behave in exactly the opposite way. I'm reminded of Paul Graham's recent essay How to Think for Yourself, and this passage about ideologies:
> The independent-minded thus have a horror of ideologies, which require one to accept a whole collection of beliefs at once, and to treat them as articles of faith. To an independent-minded person that would seem revolting, just as it would seem to someone fastidious about food to take a bite of a submarine sandwich filled with a large variety of ingredients of indeterminate age and provenance.
http://paulgraham.com/think.html
Nobody forces an ideology on someone, and yet the number of people who gleefully latch onto ideologies seems to be exploding.
Could there be a connection between greater freedom and greater desire to restrict that freedom - not from the outside, but from within?
A relevant folktale: http://www.pitt.edu/~dash/japan.html#stonecutter
I consider my life to be much the similar: even the negative things or the things I wish would change have helped shape qualities that I would not give away.
[1]: https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Tapestry_(episode)
It does not mean that you live right, but people’s opinions are often reflections of their own insecurities.
I would be happy to remove the trauma that I experienced in my past. I'd take the risk of being a different person - with different good qualities.
Also, I don't believe they portrayed Picard's "unremarkable" career negatively, except in Picard's own view (and Q's I guess).
> So what is there to do? Should I adopt a strategy of total non-action, of being a passive observer to my thoughts and my bodily emotions and my neuroses? Should I somehow elevate myself to a point beyond my own mind, where I am exposed to fewer neuroses?
> No… I am in a checkmate, a cosmic checkmate. And the only thing to do is to do what I can as best I can, and hope the rest of my life may continue unfazed.
[0]: https://bedaring.org/post/free-writing/2020-12-21/
What an amazing way to make yourself sick. Remunerating is an absolutely horrible habit. Don't assume anyone else has a perfect life. My last partner was divorced, but put up a nice front for family and friends up until she seperated.
As far as I'm concerned until the day I die I don't have a second to waste on things I can't change anyway.
This is the real ticket to happiness imo. Once you realize there are just an enumerable amount of things you cannot directly change and start thinking "Why am I so angry about this?" you eventually learn to be happy.
When I came back from Afghanistan I had to scratch, claw, and climb a ladder without a degree thanks in much part to people who saw in me what I could only hoped to have seen in myself. I looked around me when I arrived and I saw Ivy League and top school graduates with multi-million dollar homes, Teslas, and their own literal fig trees in their back yards that complained about everything in life. I've now had the opportunity to live in multiple cultures with varying degrees of prosperity. These things taught me to know my value but to have perspective on what I'm really asking for.
Here I am considering selling all my belongings, buying a truck and an RV to go embrace the new open road that is remote work. Life isn't about looking back. It isn't even about getting what you want. It's about navigating the road in front of you and making the best of the opportunities in front of you and for everyone around you. All that to say, I've embraced the idea that whatever lies ahead is where I'm supposed to be and I needn't look at what my neighbors value or what they have because I don't care. This life is mine to live.
I'd agree with your conclusion and encourage you to sell everything and go have fun.
That said, my point was really that if you can afford a house with a fig tree in Silicon Valley then in some way your stars aligned and to see people unhappy over frivolous things was an enlightening experience that taught me something. My stars didn't align, until they did, and I had to learn to appreciate that. It doesn't mean those people didn't need to overcome adversity or have a story worth listening to or admiring.
> This isn't as uncommon a path as you might believe. I was enlisted in the USAF from 2005-2010, spent months and months Iraq and Afghanistan etc.
I'd be interested in knowing the statistics on veterans in Silicon Valley and tech in general. I've met some, but I wouldn't call it common. I might agree that it's somewhere between common and uncommon, but who knows? If these statistics are collected they are not published or widely disseminated. When I usually meet veterans they're not enlisted, they're officers. The most public activity I've seen is a group at Google that has 2,000 members, I do not know how many of those work in engineering roles.
That said, I'm happy to fanboy one of my favorite authors and Silicon Valley veterans: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nathaniel_Fick
I think you both may be right. I would imagine that the formal education makes it a bit easier to "get your foot in the door" in the first place, when you're competing "on paper" with others. But once you are in the industry, performance and track record counts for a lot more.
In other words the degree probably does make it easier. But it might be only 20% easier and perhaps not 80-90% as some might assume.
Depends on your chosen specialisation too of course. I managed to pick a career in just the right area of software development where I could get away with having had a pitiful amount of education :-)
But outside of that world, I was honestly surprised how little it mattered that I didn't have a CS degree. In a lot of ways, if I saw how friends in other fields were progressing and what it took for them to get there, it was objectively easier to be an uncredentialed developer.
The broader point about stars aligning is absolutely correct.
I’ve met quite few while living in the Bay Area. I moved to Austin a few years ago and there are even more of us here. You and I have made some similar choices in life though. I enlisted in 09 and got into tech after returning from Afghanistan as well.
> My twenties were filled with stress, frustration, confusion, and at times anger.
Similar for me, but like you, I'm a different (I think better) person as a result, so it's difficult to wish I'd had an easier time.
> ...climb a ladder without a degree thanks in much part to people who saw in me what I could only hoped to have seen in myself.
I will be forever grateful to the people I had in my life that did this for me too. I've been exceptionally lucky in this respect.
> Here I am considering selling all my belongings, buying a truck and an RV to go embrace the new open road that is remote work.
This sounds awesome. Good luck!!
It's strange, I left my home country and now wherever I go I see people that speaks different language than me, buildings that I'm not familiar with. My community where I am active with is also different than me. It is a strange feeling. I hate airports because whenever I am in airports I always have a mixed feeling. The feeling of leaving my current place to visit another home in another place.
Now my heart is in three different countries (or cities, to be precise). Every vacation season I have to decide which country to visit and to which family. Life is short. I saw my brother's baby, and then on the next vacation that baby already knew how to walk. My parents and grandparents are getting older. My kids and my brother's kids will speak different languages, grow up differently, and so does my wife's kids with her sisters'. I have a dream of uniting them in one place during vacation and see how those kids react to one another even though they can't communicate in one language, I think that'd be a hilarious sight but very wholesome. I hope there will be faster way to travel invented within our lifetime, maybe Concorde again?
I guess this is the life of immigrants. We are immigrants, this is our way of life. I often asked myself what would happen if I stayed in my home country? I'd marry my current girlfriend at that time, maybe help my family's business, or do something else. I don't know.
For anyone curious: I was born and grew up in Jakarta (Indonesia), and my wife grew up in Tokyo (Japan), and now I work in NYC. Life is surely strange. I feel very insignificant every time I think about this and I realize, there are millions, and billions of people in this planet with stories as unique or more unique than me. The world is is a strange place.
One day, maybe we will retire in Japan, or in Indonesia. Who knows. It's too far in the future. What I do now is cherish every moment I have, knowing the future will be different.
And less unique.
From my house, I can drive to my hometown, visit my family, and drive back in one day. I left the USA once, except for that I never spent a continuous week outside of the state where I was born.
A lot of people online say that travel makes you a better person. But it's expensive, so I have to just hope I'm not missing too much.
Probably every experience you have can make you a better person, it doesn't need to be travel.
I used to travel a ton for work and fun (there was a year where I hit 6 continents in a 10-month window) but spending the last 9 months in a one-bedroom apartment with my wife and our newborn is no less mind opening.
In fact, like everything, travel gets old. At some point you know that you "got it" - you can be dropped in a random point on the earth and make something out of it - and yet you may not know how to be at one place for a long time (I am learning that now.)
Also, it makes things less special. In a way I am jealous of people who are dreaming of going to Paris and then experience it for the first time.
You do you - save your money, invest in relationships around you, learn things on line, be a good child and parent. If that's "all" you have to show against someone who has been everywhere but doesn't have what you have, you're ahead.
The hardest part for me is that my wife doesn't like my family, so she refuses to visit them... as half the family lives in one country and half in another, and we're in yet another country, it's almost impossible for us to unite the whole family. My parents never met hers... and I only met my brother's youngest child when she was already 5. Last time I went to visit my parents I went alone... and again last time I went to visit my brother (who lives on the other side of the planet from my parents - I live almost in the middle). Sometimes I wish I hadn't started the wave of moving to some other country (which my sister, then my brother followed years later)... as they moved to the country I'd been in, I had already moved again to another country because of my wife. Now I am finally planning to have kids (quite late but still time) I wonder how we're going to manage without any family nearby... and how my parents will feel when we never come to visit... that's if I convince the wife to get a kid, we're running out of time quickly and she doesn't seem at all bothered by it.
I'm in a position I must make a decision: perhaps go back to my country and get a new wife there (even though I would hate to go through a divorce) close to at least some of my family... or just let the time pass by and wait for the inevitable, letting old age arrive and die without a family on a strange country. How can I know what to do?! Leaving this great country where I am will probably be the biggest mistake I will ever make (I have a good job, great house and extreme social security here - none of which I would have in my own country), but staying here will likely lead to a meaningless, though comfortable life. What would you do?
There's an interesting contrast: the risk-taking choice into the unknown, or the comfortable but boring choice to stay.
If you choose to take the easy path, when you're old you might look back and ask, "Did I make the right choice? What kind of different life would I have had?" Or, if things go well, you might be a satisfied person.
If you choose to go into the unknown, there is a chance that things will not work out better. Maybe you'll have a more difficult life of struggle. Then you might wish that you had stayed in the comfortable but boring life you had.
> good job, great house and extreme social security here - none of which I would have in my own country
That's what you'd be risking for an unknown future..
I imagine people would recommend that you take the risk, take a chance to create a completely different life that's more interesting. But, I also imagine that those same people would choose for themselves the comfortable path. From your story, I think you'll regret it later in life if you don't take the chance.
Maybe your wife isn't ready yet to see your family. My wife, being raised in a clean 1st world country, still is not used to the living condition when we visit Indonesia. It is understandable, so most likely we will retire in Japan instead of Indonesia one day.
As immigrants we already accepted our way of life. We will grow older, and our kids too, without being able to grow together with their contemporaries within the family circle.
I understand what you say about staying here you might end up having a meaningless life. Trust me, I thought about it a lot too. Hence that's why I set some things straight with my wife. Who knows what will happen in the future, but I said we gonna work here for a while, maybe until kids go to college, and we gonna go back to Japan. We decide that we aren't taking any long and expensive mortgage, but if possible, only 10 year mortgage. 10 years is a short time. Once we finish that mortgage, we can do whatever we want, and see where to go next.
Again, it is too far to think of the future, but my current plan gives me and my wife hope and goal to aim to. We'll enjoy the journey while we are here.
Brabel, I moved back to home country and brought my wife. That can also be a solution for you.
Ahh, one day I will. Today I still can't afford it. My family's side, parent, grandparent, etc messed up a lot financially and lost everything. I can't afford to go back right now or even move to Japan, my current salary is a reserve for in case anything goes wrong with them.