I thought I would have accomplished a lot more today and also before I was 35

https://www.newyorker.com/humor/daily-shouts/i-thought-i-would-have-accomplished-a-lot-more-today-and-also-by-the-time-i-was-thirty-five

by fergie • 6 years ago

1383 642 6 years ago

newyorker.com

altitudinous3• 6 years ago

A writer is having a mid-life crisis?

TehShrike• 6 years ago

I chuckled

umvi• 6 years ago

Paradoxically, when I had all the time in the world I frittered it away on video games and the internet.

Now that I have multiple kids and my time is extremely constrained, I am very efficient with my time usage. I listen to audiobooks while doing the dishes. I plan in my mind exactly which programming tasks I want to accomplish as soon as the kids are in bed so that I can do them quickly and still have time to spend with my wife.

ed25519FUUU• 6 years ago

A mentor once told me “if you want something done quickly, give it to a busy person”

_alex_• 6 years ago

Wow. That is a great line.

andi9994• 6 years ago

Thats Parkinson's law phrased very nicely.

benc6662• 6 years ago

reminds me of another one:

nothing is impossible for the man who doesn't have to do it himself.

For me it just pushes the point that every situation is a negotiation.

hinkley• 6 years ago

If you have twenty minutes now, and don’t know when you’ll get another twenty minutes, why not do it now?

When you have hours and hours available for the rest of the week, why fret about it? You have so many other opportunities ahead.

DoreenMichele10• 6 years ago

Alternately: When you have a wife and kids and job you like, a lot of your most important needs are well met -- if you can keep juggling everything.

Someone with hours and hours to do nothing likely isn't getting laid, isn't making much money, isn't intellectually gratified, etc. So you play games to occupy yourself to keep from going bonkers.

renjimen4• 6 years ago

I’m very nostalgic about the countless hours I frittered away on video games and the internet as an adolescent. Part of me thinks it made me the person I am today, who I am proud of. I recently joined a Counter Strike team with work and had some of the most fun times I can think of recently. I compare that with the time I put aside to learn 3D modelling, which was fun in its own way but required more self motivation and the satisfaction took a lot more time to achieve. It made me question what society accepts as a valid way to spend spare time, as well as the purpose of how we spend our spare time.

core-questions2• 6 years ago

It made me question what society accepts as a valid way to spend spare time

Well, to be brutally honest with you, it's one thing for you to be proud of yourself for playing video games, but why would anyone else see that as something pride-worthy?

Typically, one takes justifiable pride for accomplishments that stand up to external scrutiny. That usually comes in the form of the accomplishment having an element of sacrifice, of pain and difficulty, of opportunity costs paid, and of a result that stands on its own as something not everyone can do. I am proud of some of my adventures; proud of some of my work; proud of some of the artistic things I have created. None of them are extremely amazing in the grand scheme of things, and I don't let any of it get to my head, but they do give me stories to tell at the bar that aren't dismissed with a wave of the hand as being frittered-away time.

Video games, on the other hand, are not exactly grand sacrificial effort. I can't imagine telling someone I was proud of myself for spending a few hours killing orcs on a screen while eating processed snack food alone in my underwear.

as well as the purpose of how we spend our spare time.

It's only "spare" if you've really satisfied yourself in your best judgement of what you could otherwise be doing.

I like to put Slack and Laziness on a continuum. Laziness is putting things off, avoiding important tasks, pawning them off on others, rationalizing why you shouldn't bother, finding easier ways out even if the end result isn't as good, cutting corners. From the article:

I was supposed to renew my car registration today. I haven’t opened the Web site.

That's classic laziness. Sure, the consequences can be dealt with later, a day or two without driving won't be the end of the world, but it also took about as much effort to write this self-effacing article as it would have to just renew the insurance and move on.

Slack, on the opposite side of the spectrum (and before the word was co-opted by a program that ironically takes up all possible Slack), is free time that you carve out of the world with your actions. Slack is arranging things so that you have time to relax, time to "surf down the luck plane" that you have created for yourself, so that you can allow things to proceed knowing that at the end of the slope, you're not actually in a worse off position than when you started. Slack is paid vacation time, where laziness is unemployment. Slack is a glass of wine at the end of the day, laziness is beer for breakfast. Slack is sitting in the hot tub after you work out, laziness is sitting in the bathtub after you eat a microwaved dinner. Slack is posting on HN on a cloudy Saturday morning while the kids (with breakfast in their tummies) watch a bit of TV, laziness is posting on HN when you're supposed to be writing a program at 3:00 on a Thursday afternoon.

Video games are something you can do in your slack time, or they're something you can do because you're lazy. That's the difference between a healthy hobby and a damaging addiction.

belly_joe• 6 years ago

I feel this deeply. I was extremely lazy in high school and college and then got my act together gradually throughout my 20s to the point where I feel like I no longer waste much time. I've experienced some success and accomplished goals as a result, but when I look back on my life, I remember those hours wasted playing video games most fondly.

There's a motivational saying that when you die you get to meet the person you could have become, and that's your individual heaven/hell. I've got a nagging fear that maybe if I learn to speak French or sell a business or whatever, raise a family, grow old and die, I'll come face to face with the guy who played 10,000 hours of Civ.

arkanciscan• 6 years ago

I'll think about you while I'm playing video games today

pours some Monster energy drink on the floor

yibg2• 6 years ago

Me too. I remember my countless hours playing (arguably wasted) diablo 2 very fondly. I still recall a lot of the detailed stats of specific characters I had built. Also helps I had sunk the hours playing with my partner at the time, so it was also a bit of a bonding moment. Didn’t help my grades any though.

core-questions2• 6 years ago

This describes me very well. What the hell was I doing with all that time during my 20s? I wasn't out hiking up a storm, I wasn't making a lot of music, I wasn't out drinking with friends at every chance. I was inside doing nothing, shitposting online, watching trash TV that I can barely remember the plots of now. Work was productive, but when I went home, I left it at work... Relationship was stable, but I didn't max out every minute of it when I could...

Now, as soon as the kids are in bed, virtually every scrap of time is used for something productive. Except, obviously, for lazy Saturday mornings posting on HN ;-)

late2part• 6 years ago

I read this somewhere, I tried to find the source, and I'm sad I can't properly attribute it:

When you are young, you trade time for money.

When you are middle aged, you trade money for convenience.

When you are old, you trade money for time.

ip262• 6 years ago

Similar boat. I flip-flop between efficient time usage, and squandering my free time, because I'm so fried I just want to do nothing.

thinkharderdev• 6 years ago

I've had a similar experience. There is something about scarcity of time that breeds discipline. Whenever I go through a period of life where I have to spend a huge amount of time on some particular task project I always think "man, when this is over I'm going to be able to use all this time to do X,Y,Z. It's gonna be great!" And then the project ends and I essentially waste all of my newly found free time. I end up accomplishing less, even on my side projects somehow.

yibg2• 6 years ago

Yea there seems to be some thing of a positive feedback loop that one can get into. I’ve experienced this multiple times too. When I had a boring and easy job I had all sorts of aspirations of doing a side business or learning some new stuff etc. I ended up doing none of that and mostly playing games instead. When I had a busy (but interesting) job I ended up doing side projects, socializing a lot more and generally being more productive outside of work. Something like momentum from one activity carrying through to others.

samsquire• 6 years ago

Get out there and write your ideas down. It's never too late to start. Edit. You have good ideas if you cultivate that skill of having ideas.

Someday you'll find an idea you like that hasn't been done before and you'll kill it.

At least that's what I tell myself :-)

cmukka• 6 years ago

It seems really bad that I relate to parts of this even though I am still not 25. I mean things are good with me, I am grateful for everything I have. But once in a while I just feel really empty and that I could be doing way more that I am doing right now rather than lazing around. We are a weird generation for sure ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

jermeh• 6 years ago

I definitely am in the same boat as you. My day to day life is great - good job, financially stable, good relationship, even play in a couple bands (when there's not a pandemic inhibiting us from peforming).

But there constantly feels like something is missing. Most days I have 4-6 hours of time that is spent doing near nothing. In the back of my mind is always "I should be doing x project" or "I should be practicing y skill" and then I end up feeling guilty just for relaxing.

I always go back and forth between "It's totally okay to be lazy. You have a life that affords it." and "If you want to be truly great at something, you need to work for it." The challenging part seems to be finding the healthy medium between the two, which is about where the author feels too, I think.

jpxw• 6 years ago

You need to relax. Don’t burn out

yowlingcat• 6 years ago

I know that this is a genre of American millennial/Gen X mid-life crisis clickbait, but it reminds me a lot of journal entries I wrote when I was not very invested in the present moment. I'd either look forward into the future or backwards into the past. But eventually I got tired of doing that, of measuring accomplishments, of basically robbing myself of the joy of experiencing life. Some of this can be attributed to time and life experience. Some of it maybe can be attributed to me not handling American cities so well.

The most important change started when I began to travel. Just spending a bit of time in Europe showed this neurotic American with overachiever tendencies so much about how to relax and live a little. It was a complete shock to the system, and in a very good way. It forced me to address -- at that moment -- how would I live life and enjoy it if I didn't have my career and "accomplishments" and lived in a society where most people derive fulfillment outside of that? I began to realize that my life was full of many proverbial Michelin-star rated meals that I was wolfing down like a burger -- that's no way to go about things!

Being back stateside, I guess I appreciate that even more because I once again recognize how very much abnormal that is in much of the country. I have to catch myself because it's so easy to slip back into keeping up with Jones who live inside my head.

seveibar• 6 years ago

This essay expresses the futility of ambition against distraction as well as the unproductive cycle of comparing yourself to others as a means of understanding your potential. I have certainly felt this way, and I imagine many do.

I take comfort in the idea that the world (and our lives) are constantly rocked by random circumstance and opportunity, and while there is a lot one can do to maximize our realized potential, we can't be completely responsible for our fulfillment.

throw_this_one2• 6 years ago

You’re saying that comparison steals us of the natural energy of curiosity and “just doing it”?

CarelessExpert2• 6 years ago

Succinctly put! I can't count the number of times I've considered starting a project or something and thought "Nah, those guys did it better, I'll never be that good, what's the point..."

Or: why we spend too much time focused on goals and accomplishments instead of effort, perseverance, and the joy of the journey.

voidhorse• 6 years ago

Funny piece. It can be so easy to waste time when we have the internet. I think the most dangerous distractions are the ones that feel productive but don’t actually work toward your goals. For example, browsing hacker news. Such an activity is useful every now and then, but at least for myself I often scroll around only to realize later that it was a massive waste of time I could’ve spent working on something I care about. I think the brain justifies it since hey, at least I’m “learning” something (not really).

Even something like an addictive videogame is designed to make you feel productive by giving you levels to progress through etc—fundamentally I think we all have a desire to produce, it’s just easy to spend time putting that energy into the wrong forms of productive activity, since these are usually easier and less isolating than actually producing crafts or products.

bjo590• 6 years ago

I find browsing hackernews to be one of the more beneficial activities I can do for 5-20 minutes as a break between more mentally taxing activities. Meditation, going for a walk, getting a snack or a drink, and a quick chat with a friend are other activities I consider both beneficial and short duration.

etrautmann• 6 years ago

Yep, I rarely think of HN reading time as wasted afterwards.

lifeisstillgood• 6 years ago

I like to think that gamification will help my kids get "addicted" to useful things like maths homework or exercise.

I worry it is just teaching them to get gamified...

But the idea is nice - banks that enforce aging and budgets, shops that put fresh produce at the checkouts and never sell chocolate bars...

emteycz3• 6 years ago

I would advise you to fight any addiction your kids might have, especially gaming/other internet points addictions. Gamification is a fix that people addicted to dopamine rushes need, but children shouldn't require it. Instead I would work on framing work in a positive way.

pjfin1234• 6 years ago

The gamification of Duolingo is something that has really worked for me (as an adult). It has all the parts of an addictive mobile game that keep you coming back: a streak that notifies you if you're in danger of losing it (this is the one that really works for me), social rankings, fun graphics, in game currency. I have a 410 day Spanish streak as of this morning!

I took French in middle/high school with the standard lecture/hw school structure and was a lot less successful than I've been with Duolingo. Duolingo alone probably isn't enough to really learn a language but combined with other resources it provides a great structure to keep you committed and provides a great foundation to build from.

sirspacey3• 6 years ago

Agree! “Gamification” is just the most informed, popular form of experience design.

If we approached every challenge with “how do we design experience that builds on and supplements user motivation?” We’d leap forward as a species.

corbins• 6 years ago

Beware of gamification. There is a great talk[1] discussing intrinsic versus extrinsic motivation as it applies to video games, with the key insight being that extrinsic rewards decrease intrinsic motivation. The speaker references a lot of research that seems worth digging into too.

[1] https://www.gdcvault.com/play/1012290/Achievements-Considere...

threatofrain• 6 years ago

I think the most dangerous distractions are the ones that feel productive but don’t actually work toward your goals. For example, browsing hacker news.

This is why I question curiosity as the prescribed value from HN leadership. In its place one could've easily said learning or mastery.

gas9S9zw3P9c• 6 years ago

I think the most dangerous distractions are the ones that feel productive but don’t actually work toward your goals. For example, browsing hacker news.

Time to set up my emacs config to manage my life and stop wasting time.

arsome• 6 years ago

I mean org-mode is pretty amazing for that kind of thing...

juanuys• 6 years ago

Yes, and time for me to finally start my webcomic, but first I need to build myself a webcomic framework...

voisin• 6 years ago

I often scroll around only to realize later that it was a massive waste of time I could’ve spent working on something I care about.

Increasing the signal to noise ratio would help reduce time spent scrolling. A “filter” by keyword feature would be massively helpful.

Viliam1234• 6 years ago

When you increase the signal to noise ratio, it makes it even harder to stop reading. For all practical purposes, the internet is infinite; no matter how high you set your standards, gradually you will find enough sources to fill all your free time.

During the last few years, I switched from reading low quality content to reading high quality content. I am better informed about various things. But the problem of spending too much time reading remains unchanged.

simonsarris• 6 years ago

Even among people trying to be productive you sometimes see vortexes of distraction, for instance around note-taking. I like note taking (apps and paper) but I think there is such thing as an over-reliance on them. They promote collecting over being. Perhaps also they stop people from completing their own ideas. One becomes Penelope, weaving the burial shroud of a thought forever.

Note taking can be pernicious because it feels like doing something but it also gives an excuse to not put forth your own thoughts until you have all the pieces. Then they become so large they are unweildy. The more notes, the less supple.

TeMPOraL15• 6 years ago

It's ironic because the same tools can be used to empower your thinking[0]. Instead of collecting notes, note taking utilities can be used as a sort of L2 cache when you're trying to think something through. E.g. most of my problem solving involves repeated sessions with a text file, in which I dump my stream of thought and refine it. Sometimes it means literally talking with myself via a text file, sometimes it's constructing an artifact (like a prioritized list of things to do). Same tool, slightly different approach.

[0] - Or damage your brain. The fact that I can't think things through unless I'm writing thoughts down or drawing diagrams may be a sign of improved quality of thoughts, or a sign of me no longer being able to think without a crutch.

comprev2• 6 years ago

HN, Facebook, Reddit, Messenger, YouTube, news websites and dozens of other sites are on a block list from 0900-1800 M-F via a super useful plugin for Firefox (on mobile now and I can't remember it!)

foxdev• 6 years ago

Leechblock?

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/leechblock-ng...

moneywoes• 6 years ago

Does the term action faking describe it?

type02• 6 years ago

what sort of gamification is there on HN, upvotes not much else? Maybe it's plausible to strike a deal with oneself not to look at upvotes or downvotes, I think that would make comments more sincere. It would be great to have a setting not to display upvotes and down-votes on your own comments but to still be able to respond on threads tab

Generally I'm glad that HN has minimal gamification, at least compared to the worst offenders reddit, fb, twitter etc.

alexfromapex• 6 years ago

Watching sports and memorizing athletes’ stats is another waste of time a lot of people partake in. Here’s to hoping people are more productive during this hiatus.

papito4• 6 years ago

People are now terrified of putting down a screen and being left alone with their own thoughts for more than 30 seconds. It's horrifying what's bouncing around up in that dome, and having to process it.

But this is exactly what we did before. We got bored, we were wasting time, we were experimenting, and that's how great ideas came around.

tayo422• 6 years ago

Idk if it's just terrified, but I think we're addicted. This probably sounds ridiculous but I recently blocked some apps and sites on my phone and actually felt a little off for a day, like my sleep was weird. I think there was a slight withdrawal from the constant bombardment of stuff. It is helping kill my Facebook habit. I don't even really like the site, I just check it impulsively. It's weird.

Reddit is another one, the infinite scroll I think is addictive. Trying to kill that habit. But there is useful information on there so it's hard to disable it completely.

Dylan168072• 6 years ago

I have enough ideas.

ethbro6• 6 years ago

I can't lay hands on a link, but there was an article about the psychological phenomenon of time passing too quickly. It was a measurable state you could detect a brain as either being in or not in.

One of the most reliable ways to reset internal time perception? Experiencing nature.

I try and take more walks now.

sirspacey3• 6 years ago

I’m an avid screentime user. I never run out of new ideas.

Often my surfing feeds my ideas. My latest creation is derived from downloading Reddit to my brain on the regular.

Boredom is a great stimulus. It’s not a pre-requisite.

rikroots• 6 years ago

There was a good thread on HN a couple of weeks back concerning the benefits of idleness: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24128366

dkersten2• 6 years ago

But this is exactly what we did before. We got bored, we were wasting time, we were experimenting, and that's how great ideas came around.

Yep! I firmly believe that boredom is not just healthy, but a necessary part of life. Your mind needs downtime and your creativity and imagination need mind-numbing boredom.

nkohari• 6 years ago

Meditation is also a great way to force yourself to be alone with your thoughts. However, speaking from experience, that can lead to some uncomfortable truths -- so it's good to be prepared.

cel1ne• 6 years ago

Very well put.

fxtentacle2• 6 years ago

I see a strong network effect here.

Once all of your friends are hooked on their phone, it becomes very lonely to be the only one that doesn't stare at a screen. But what people naturally yearn for is not to get bored alone, but to get bored as a group. So the "quality of bored-ness" goes down as screen usage expands.

Thorentis• 6 years ago

"All of humanity's problems stem from man's inability to sit quietly in a room alone.” - Blaise Pascal, 1654 AD.

This is not a new problem, we are just experiencing a hyper version of it. Social media, the world's knowledge at your finger tips, is distraction on steroids.

shaklee33• 6 years ago

I have the complete opposite feeling. As long as you filter yourself fairly well on which topics you read, HN can be immensely useful. You can learn about new things that can help you a lot in your career, that you otherwise may have missed.

blobbers• 6 years ago

But usually you missed them for a reason. They just aren’t directly relevant to you.

... but I made a technical decision because of an idea on hacker news.

You should have researched that decision outside of hacker news. Less aggregate time spent.

georgeecollins• 6 years ago

Yeah, I read about a fintech api recently due to hn. It can be useful.

Osiris• 6 years ago

I don't think we should think in terms like that. We don't always have to be working toward a goal. There's nothing won't with reading, taking a nap, it sound other unproductive activities. Also, not everyone has big lofty goals of self accomplishment. For some, constant goal seeking can be both stressful and emotionally difficult when goals aren't met.

We should be careful to paint with such a broad brush.

imtringued• 6 years ago

The worst mistake a lot of people make is put stuff on a backlog aka procrastination. If what you want to do is worth doing then do it today.

l0ner• 6 years ago

On the other hand, why do so many highly skilled people push themselves so hard? I do not have any stats, it's just an observation looking at all the people in my environment, and then some public exponents.

I've grown up in a family where there was always enough, yet not much in excess. Most grown up people I knew in my childhood would probably complain that they would want more, yet they mostly just did their job, had enough and enjoyed their family life. That is also true for some of the people I later met at university and then in business, but I get the impression that quite a lot of them, even though they have much better jobs than the people from my childhood, invest a lot of their free time trying to pursue their goal. And it is extremely rare that I see someone actually reaching it. It is far more often that their life becomes a lot more miserable, think divorce or similar.

Now don't ge me wrong, I think pursuing ones goals can be extremely valuable. But for a lot of people, pursuing a goal and trying to be productive with it while at the same time being married, raising kids, earning money, staying healthy and doing chores is most likely not going to lead anywhere good. So why is it so hard for smart people to accept that fact, and enjoy one or two hours of lazyness every day? Why do people take Elon Musk as an example, if even he himself decribes his life as not too nice?

wincent• 6 years ago

I think the most dangerous distractions are the ones that feel productive but don’t actually work toward your goals. For example, browsing hacker news.

Browsing HN has never felt productive to me. At times useful, entertaining, informative, thought-provoking, and at others less so, when it can seem annoying, repetitive, pointless and so on. But never "productive".

jedberg• 6 years ago

It can be so easy to waste time when we have the internet.

I'm just really glad I did college when the only thing distracting on the internet was Slashdot and you could only access it with a computer attached to an ethernet cable.

I'm almost certain I would not have made it past Freshman year if I had a smartphone.

ip262• 6 years ago

I realized recently after many years puttering around online that I frequently couldn't name anything I had just read over the last four hours.

I haven't taken full control of myself back yet, but that thought was a strong wake-up call to me.

vocram3• 6 years ago

Exactly. This happens to me so often. I put my phone back and then ask myself: “what did I just read / watched?” Most of the time I don’t remember.

Apocryphon2• 6 years ago

What have you been doing to fight against it?

nicbou2• 6 years ago

I have the opposite experience. I can recall discussions I've read months or years ago. In aggregate, it added a bit of depth to my perception of the world. They gave me a lot more vocabulary to process the world around me, as do good books.

agumonkey• 6 years ago

Life recently told the meaning of 'know-how' and real life has no competitor.

I spent countless hours fiddling with git tutorials, the best branching, workflow.. Nothing was even close to when I had to actual work with it on a tight rope.

Curiosity intellect is mostly dead baggage in ones head, knowing how to apply ideas as tools, to actually do something, and even have it in mind when you work so that you know you wrote enough, commit will be long, or merge will be ugly. It all balances out on itself and you actually feel light and capable.

unix_fan• 6 years ago

Reddit was a huge time waste for me. I'd spend entire mornings and nearly all night browsing the site and arguing with other users. I wish I could get all of it back.

powersnail• 6 years ago

I don't know if internet is really the culprit to how easy it is to waste time. We have long created enough distraction to fill a entire lifespan.

Before I've encountered any digital computing device, I used to just play Sudoku during class. Or read novels; I had a textbook that carved, inside which hid a small novel. Or, just day-dream and think about stuff.

On the other hand, I enjoyed Sudoku and novels. I don't consider them to be a complete waste of time. In retrospect, they made my childhood better.

zuhayeer• 6 years ago

Its funny because its hard to gauge – the things you think are the most productive feed strongly into your confirmation bias, so maybe they aren't really that productive after all. But that's fine.

In general though, I prefer the idea of going "all in" in whatever I'm doing. If I'm going to play video games, I'm making sure I have a damn good time doing it. If I'm going to put in work, I'm gonna make sure it gets done. Distractions will do you in in both cases. Ruin your fun time and mess up your productivity.

kokey• 6 years ago

I worked for a big multinational bank and was reasonably comfortable but sometimes not very busy and most of the usual online distractions was blocked except for hacker news. I spent so much time reading hacker news that it was probably a big influence in me deciding to quit my job to join a bootstrapped startup as a CTO. Also probably the biggest mistake of my life. In the aftermath I ended up working as a contractor in a remote office for a tech company to recover my finances. During that time I used to spend my afternoon coffee break reading a newsletter from Matt Levine and I think that's probably one of the primary influences that made me end up working in finance again.

MichaelBosworth• 6 years ago

Why was the CTO move a mistake? The biggest mistake of your life, at that.

nudpiedo• 6 years ago

I completely agree with you. Some other distractions are the many intelectual hobbies overpraised out there, two of them which I know very closely: learning languages and reading lots of books (novels).

These activities by itself don’t yell any value by themselves and still free like a super productive to the extent of feeling incredibly productive. One should not forget that intelectual hobbies are in fact still hobbies.

WD-423• 6 years ago

Well you got published in the New Yorker, so there’s that.

altitudinous3• 6 years ago

I'm in my 50's and I read less now, it's because writers are now younger than me and they tell stories I've already lived. I suspect all older folk might feel the same? Writing is for the young? Being published is for the young?

borroka• 6 years ago

That's the time when you switch to reading dead authors, who are blessed by the wisdom given to those with us no more.

everybodyknows• 6 years ago

Authors your age are still writing. Highly recommended:

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2020/08/24/cicadia

neonate• 6 years ago

That story is about teenagers, which kind of reinforces the GP's point. It's good though!

Insanity2• 6 years ago

This highly depends on the genre of what you read of course. I suppose you haven't lived a "space opera" no matter what your age is. :-)

dmreedy• 6 years ago

I've been thinking a lot lately about a line from the movie Master and Commander, a euology (though perhaps not much 'eu' about it) for a dead character.

"The simple truth is, not all of us become the men we once hoped we might be"

Spoken by a character who very much has. I don't really have much comment beyond that.

joelbluminator3• 6 years ago

Well yeah, good movie. The simple truth is almost all of us short fall of what we wanted to be in some ways.

exabrial• 6 years ago

This hits me in the feels. 36.

picodguyo• 6 years ago

Funny and all too familiar, especially during Covid. For a 700+ page take on this theme, check out The Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann. If you finish it, you'll at least feel like you accomplished something worthwhile.

TaupeRanger• 6 years ago

From Taleb's "Antifragile":

"Abundance is harder for us to handle than scarcity.If tired after an intercontinental flight, go to the gym for some exertion instead of resting. Also, it is a well known trick that if you need something urgently done, give the task to the busiest (or second busiest) person in the office. Most humans manage to squander their free time, as free time makes them dysfunctional, lazy, and unmotivated - the busier they get, the more active they are at other tasks."

CarelessExpert2• 6 years ago

the busier they get, the more active they are at other tasks.

Wow does that ever ring true for me right now...

Over the last couple of months I've had some major work items at about 80% complete but just couldn't find the motivation to push them over the line. I'd have free time but I'd always waste it.

A couple weeks ago, an exec came to me and a couple of colleagues and asked us for a major assignment to be complete in two weeks. At first I balked but after thinking it through I saw an obvious path and bore down.

The work was fast and furious and with the deadline looming I put in late nights and used all my free time to get the work done.

It was incredibly satisfying!

But a weird thing happened: I suddenly got motivated to finish those other assignments and knocked off a number of them in short order.

Somehow I've gotten back into the mental headspace of just knocking tasks off my to-do list and I find the momentum keeps me going. I always knew that about myself--my productivity has always been very spikey--but this experience was truly eye opening.

nonbirithm• 6 years ago

the busier they get, the more active they are at other tasks.

Not at all my experience. I hate not feeling unproductive and so spend almost 100% of my free time programming open source projects. But I seem to be unable to care about anything else, and there are long periods of time where I cabnot bring myself to do anything else besides keep working on these projects until 2 in the morning - so-called hyperfocus. As a result I keep feeling exhausted when it comes to anything besides working on said projects, and the first thing I do when not thinking of anything is to gravitate back to them at the expense of everything else. The most trivial things like cleaning my room or even eating a proper lunch become an unbearable slog if I'm in the middle of something important, and sometimes I just skip over them entirely.

I believe this is making me a shallow person because I have no understanding of literally anything else, and is also keeping me in this bubble where there's so much more to life which would be fulfilling that I will never see, but at the same time I just can't bring myself to care about much else that isn't a productive activity. I can't have it both ways, even though I constantly say I should be doing things that aren't productive like playing video games or watching television, and then shoot them down immediately because I feel like I'm not creating anything. I will tell myself that those are the kind of things that humanity usually squanders its free time on, and that I'm not about to fall into that trap.

In the example, if someone gave me that paper to fill out while I was busy and I don't care about filling out the paper, I wouldn't fill out the paper. Not unless my paycheck and continued survival depend on it.

It does not feel like I chose my hobbies, it feels like they chose me.

TeMPOraL15• 6 years ago

the busier they get, the more active they are at other tasks

In my experience, there's a limit to that. If being busy doing tasks gives you regular rewards (and I mean daily, not a monthly paycheck), and you trust yourself to keep the rhythm, then it seems to work. But if you lose the momentum, get swamped in tasks you hate with no clear way out - that's a fast track to complete burnout. Been there, done that, and I like to feel I've finally recovered after many years, but sometimes I'm not so sure.

paulbaumgart2• 6 years ago

If tired after an intercontinental flight, go to the gym for some exertion instead of resting.

Personally, I think I’d rather take a 20 minute nap and then go to the gym.

sneak• 6 years ago

“I tell you, we are here on Earth to fart around, and don't let anybody tell you different.” —Kurt Vonnegut

chesneyc• 6 years ago

I recently read an article on HN where someone mentioned that they saw a guy sitting on a bicycle just talking to a friend, he then lost his footing and hit his head on the ground and died.The commenter then wrote "We're just farts in the wind". Now I understand the reference!

johnwheeler• 6 years ago

One key to a good life is low expectations. Most of the people I know who are unhappy thought they were going to be more than they are now, and some of them carried the naive arrogance around with them all their lives until reality smacked them upside the head.

spzb• 6 years ago

I don't know you but apparently you know me.

thevirtuoso1973• 6 years ago

There is a difference between arrogance and dissatisfaction. I will attribute _most_ of my successes to the latter and all of my failures to the former.

TeeWEE2• 6 years ago

This is key. I would recommend anyone to go to a poorer area in the world and meet the locals... they value things you take for granted so much more.

It made me value things I take for granted much more... like running water... or streets that don't stink like trash... family... I took them for granted.

ISO-morphism• 6 years ago

I really like Happiness = Reality - Expectations.

Advocating for low expectations is usually criticized as laziness when targeted at oneself or pessimism when targeted at others. But I think that criticism happens when we conflate expectations and aspirations, when we set our target as our baseline.

On that note, exercising gratitude (counting your blessings) is a wonderful tool for teasing apart expectations and aspirations. Acknowledging that something you have is good enough to make you happy implicitly informs you that expectations have already been exceeded even if you aspire for more.

math_denial• 6 years ago

But how do you develop this kind of mindset?

vp8989• 6 years ago

The malaise of the over-educated median person who has not yet come to terms with what they really are.

gonzo41• 6 years ago

Don't worry, history is littered with NPC's, maybe you don't know it but you could be one of them.

Also this person daily schedule reads like someone with mild depression.

zrm• 6 years ago

We recently had a big wind storm. Trees down everywhere, power went out. Fine, whatever, start the generator and it's back to being Tuesday.

Wasn't just the power, also Comcast. Fine, whatever, tether to my phone. Wait, no service. Cell tower was out too.

Had no internet at all for four days. I think I got more done in that time with a flashlight and pen and paper than I do in a typical month.

burlesona• 6 years ago

This is so true. I have a difficult love/hate relationship with technology, and the internet in particular. Life is so much more social and in some ways enjoyable when the power is out. And yet I wouldn’t have my career or so much of my life without the internet.

It’s difficult for me to imagine what it was like for people who grew up and worked their whole career without it, but I imagine that a much larger percentage of their working relationships and friendships were (by necessity) face to face, and by comparison richer and deeper than the mostly online connections I’ve grown up with.

cercatrova• 6 years ago

What kinds of stuff did you accomplish? I do most work on the computer, with the internet, so just wondering what I could do if I had neither that was still productive for that type of work, like for example programming.

andi9994• 6 years ago

To me as an armchair psychologist, this sounds more like that the author should get a check for ADHD with depression as a co-morbitity.

andi9994• 6 years ago

Honestly, while the essay sounds ironic and funny, if it is not all made up, it is far from healthy.

afarrell• 6 years ago

Easier said than done. The most important prerequisites to getting successful treatment for ADHD are the abilities to:

- Stay focused while shopping for a psychiatrist for a problem that fills you with a sense of despair.

- Make appointments and consistently attend them.

- Clearly and persuasively explain to your loved ones how important it is to you for them to fill in a description of their memories of your childhood symptoms... and hope you weren't inattentive subtype. Spending hours reading history books isn't memorably annoying to parents like hyperactivity.

- Keep an organised record of the impacts of medication as you go through titration.

- Deal effectively with the administrative complexity of either health insurance or a new country's healthcare system. (See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aKUdadCsuRE)

andi9994• 6 years ago

I agree it is easier said than one. First microstop would be trying to get a professional diagnosis.

martin_balsam• 6 years ago

The daily shout is the humor section of the New Yorker. I wouldn’t take it too seriously

arsahraei• 6 years ago

What a punch line! I couldn't stop laughing when I got to "I literally just turned forty-two while I was thinking this"

adityamehta1990• 6 years ago

It felt like I read a mini version of Brave New World.

mrwnmonm• 6 years ago

three waffles? no way

throwaway0a5e2• 6 years ago

If he's using one of those mini waffle makers three sounds like a reasonable meal.

pmoriarty• 6 years ago

A lot of people would give absolutely anything to be 35 again.

DoreenMichele10• 6 years ago

And some of us would rather gnaw our left arm off than be 35 again.

werber• 6 years ago

I feel like I read a roughly equal amount of words now, but i jump between a million things and rarely finish a book, the great American novel never flowed out of me either and i still haven’t become fluent in French meh

tmsh• 6 years ago

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24120275 has helped me a lot with procrastination already (the video and discussion and the original blogpost)

kylewins• 6 years ago

damn this one hits Hard!!!

DelightOne2• 6 years ago

https://github.com/golang/go/blob/dev.go2go/src/cmd/go2go/te...

A general question. Is there a reason to add those arguments instead of just using them directly inside the goroutine and so passing the arguments implicitly?

jamespwilliams• 6 years ago

I think you posted this comment on the wrong post, but anyway:

In this case, no, and it's actually slightly inefficient to pass those variables as arguments, because a copy of the argument has to be made. This copying matters more if the argument is a big struct or another large value.

However often it is useful to use arguments, for example when calling a goroutine in a loop. For example:

    for i := 0; i < 10; i++ {
        go func() {
            fmt.Println(i)
        }()
    }

    for i := 0; i < 10; i++ {
        go func(i int) {
            fmt.Println(i)
        }(i)
    }

have different behaviours, because the first receives the (changing) `i` variable itself, whereas the second receives a copy of `i` at each iteration. The second behaviour is often the behaviour we actually want.

Something like

    for i := 0; i < 10; i++ {
        i := i
        go func() {
            fmt.Println(i)
        }()
    }

also works as expected.

DelightOne2• 6 years ago

Ah I didnt realize I had the wrong post open, it was supposed to be on the Go Generics examples post. Thank you that makes sense!

komali22• 6 years ago

Man, hits home. 2020 is a bad year for 29, feel like the last of my twenties was stolen from me.

I have so many things I wanna do, always wanted to do. Some of it I got done! Like becoming an engineer, creating a decent career for myself, riding a motorcycle. Take a step back and look at my life and it's pretty much golden, I could coast for the remainder of it and live better than 99% of humankind throughout the ages.

But it's not enough of course, cause I'm human and it never is. I want to start a business. I want to read every philosophy book ever. I want to solve consciousness. I want to be fluent in chinese, japanese, french, spanish, know enough vietnamese to fuck with people when I'm there. I want to be a god tier engineer, one of those strings-together-unix-tools-on-a-whim types that turns around and shits out an android app after, I want to be able to do high level math, I want to understand and contribute to physics, I want to invent AI, I want to be good at chess, I want to be a decent music producer.

Jesus, look at that list. That's probably 25% of the things I really truly want for myself. Unrealistic? Probably. But am I living up to my potential right now? No. Absolutely not. If there's anything I've learned there's always another level. Our ability to make the previously uncomfortable and impossible, comfortable, has so far to me seemed limitless.

But how do I do those things? Making trello boards and tracking progress like my life is an agile project? Looking in the mirror and doing affirmations? Meditating? Yearly goal setting? For me the biggest obstacle is the day to day. Time slips away just like dude says in the article. Looking at memes, trolling Nazis on Twitter with said memes, dicking around on news.ycombinator and justifying it by saying to myself that sometimes I learn some cool stuff here.

Is it always going to be a battle against the distractions? Always little tricks like uninstalling the Twitter app, logging out of it in my browser? Having a habit tracking app? Is reaching my potential going to take a series of millions of bandaids? That seems wrong but I don't know what else to do.

abhayb• 6 years ago

Hey komali2, why'd you have to go and describe me this sharply on a Saturday morning? Is it that I accidentally crowded you out at the Four Barrel pour-over bar and now you want your revenge?

I've heard it said about running: it doesn't get easier, you just get better. I'm beginning to think that that is true of life in general. My greatest source of dis-ease (rather than literal disease) is the feeling that I'm not living up to my potential. Been with me since at least third standard/grade.

While I've never been to Stockholm (heard Noma's a good local joint), I'm at the place where I'm more afraid of getting too comfortable than I am of never being at ease. I'm trying (and usually failing) to think of things one bandaid at a time rather that the whole million at once. Setting my goals real low: to suck less rather than to be good/great. Help's a lot that there's one or two things that I legitimately feel I'm damn good at.

I'm curious, especially on the topic of stringing-together-unix-tools-on-a-whim, have you found any little tricks that apply to that area specifically rather than to the general concept of productivity?

komali22• 6 years ago

Hah it's good to suffer with company.

Re unixy engineering stuff, I'm still a young engineer, the only thing I can think of is that I learn the most when I shoehorn it in during work, if I have time. So recently there was a fat data modification task, turn a bunch of CSV stuff into arrays and escaped strings etc, and rather than try to figure out how to have sheets do it which probably would have been easier and faster, I used it as an opportunity to upskill my vim knowledge. Picked up a couple new commands. That's only when I don't have a crazy deadline looming though sadly.

_ah• 6 years ago

The biggest thing for you to realize is that you can absolutely do any of those things. But you can probably only do one or two of them. Spreading your efforts around is going to get you mediocre everything, which may be okay, but if you want to be truly excellent you need to focus and concentrate on what's important. Life is about prioritization. Somehow the message that "you can be anything you want" has gotten turned into "you can be everything you want" and that's just not realistic.

jonnycomputer2• 6 years ago

This is amusing. But I wonder when it was that using curse like "fuck" became acceptable in publications like The New Yorker. I feel like it must have been in the last 10 years. Maybe fewer, like the last 4 or 5. I still don't approve. Of course if they are used just like any other words, then their taboo shine diminishes, and then the difference doesn't mean anything. Language is like that. But there has been a shift.

altitudinous3• 6 years ago

Yes, I do agree, use of the word feels lazy, poor form. There are trendy stand up comedians and trendy authors who base their entire brand on the use of the word. It is a desperate fall back position.

plaidfuji• 6 years ago

Great style and obviously relatable. At the risk of taking it too seriously, though, this piece reveals an all-too-common self-centered approach to goal-setting: "I wanted to found and sell a successful business by the time I was 35". "I wanted to have given a TED talk." These are just personal outcomes that are the by-products of doing something for society. The older I get, the more obvious it becomes that the founders and the TED-talkers of the world are the people whose goals were set in terms of how they specifically wanted to help others - "I wanted to bring better healthcare to Senegal", "I wanted to improve urban transportation". It was just happenstance that founding a business was the only way to get there, or conducting academic research was the first necessary step to solve the problem. Careers and jobs are just tools to affect real societal change; speaking engagements and awards are a symptom of having done something for the world. You can't start with these things as goals and work backwards - I mean, you can, but it requires an almost sociopathic drive for fame and recognition, and is far more likely to result in burnout.

jonnycomputer2• 6 years ago

Is there a special word for the kind of procrastination you do by watching or reading productivity-porn?

geocrasher• 6 years ago

Procrasturbation

ak392• 6 years ago

Great word

firefoxd• 6 years ago

I recommend: On the shortness of life, by Seneca. I thought time management was a new problem because of the internet, hustle mentality, motivational porn, bill-gates comparison and whatnot. Here is a book written in the BC era for those struggling with just that.

You can aim to be the best at something, but you can settle at being good enough with the result.

k__4• 6 years ago

I'm 35.

When I look at the people I follow on social media, I feel bad, because they're much nore successful than me, often even much younger too.

When I look at the people I meet in my daily life, I'm doing quite okay.

I haven't set an alarm for work in years, can buy what I want without too much consideration, mostly work when I feel like it, and the work I do is often interesting.

vmception2• 6 years ago

And what kind of success do you think those younger people on social media have? Can you give an example of what you look at? Is that success something you want?

k__4• 6 years ago

Don't know really.

They got thousands of followers, people actually engage with them, their opinions are valued, etc.

neilalexander• 6 years ago

The "success" that you see on social media is probably exaggerated at any rate.

chrisjarvis2• 6 years ago

No offense but why are you on social media at all lol.

I haven't set an alarm for work in years, can buy what I want without too much consideration, mostly work when I feel like it, and the work I do is often interesting.

You are doing better than 99% of people who have ever lived!

k__4• 6 years ago

I'm a professional blogger.

syndacks3• 6 years ago

Hey there -- I had my come to Jesus moment (aka gtfo) with Social Media when I realized that people I didn't even know and care about were evoking feelings of shame, guilt, and/or anger within me.

And then I left.

Read your comment. You're fine! You're more than fine! To thine oneself be true.

k__4• 6 years ago

Thank you.

IAmGraydon• 6 years ago

There’s a difference between what you think you want and what you really want. I think people generally work toward what they really want. If you aren’t progressing toward your goals because you’re busy doing other things, you really want those other things more.

PragmaticPulp5• 6 years ago

I've been mentoring CS college students and new grad SWEs for a while. It's shocking to see how many of them perpetually feel like they're overwhelmed and short on time, yet they can't account for where they've actually spent their time. It's not uncommon for new grad SWEs to complain that an 8-hour work day is somehow consuming 100% of their weekday hours, leaving them without any time to do anything else. On further investigation, they're just being pulled into Reddit, Facebook, Twitter, TV, and video games for far more time than they realize. It's almost like those activities are subtracting 6+ hours out of their day without them realizing it.

Nobody likes to be told that they're wasting their free time, but I've had mild success encouraging people to use basic time tracking utilities like the Screen Time feature in iOS. It's eye-opening to watch people estimate their daily screen time around 30 minutes and then be shocked when their reports come back at 2-3 hours or more.

Of course, some amount of leisure activity is necessary throughout the day. It's important to not shame people for spending time on things they enjoy (Hacker News, video games, Reddit, Twitter), but it is important that they can be honest with themselves about how much time they're spending on those activities.

Measuring time spent in leisure activities is the only real way to start closing the feedback loop. Structured procrastination (Spending 5 timed minutes out of every 30 minutes on leisure activities, aka Pomodoro technique) is a good way to start getting a handle on this.

aledalgrande• 6 years ago

It is not just spending time on those sites/apps, it's the pressure society puts on them to get to the next step on the ladder. Perfect houses on Instagram. 24yo making 300K on Blind. 18yo on Youtube making 1M+. Even if you don't want to compare yourself to others, comparisons are everywhere. That adds cognitive load to the slow grind of getting started on a new job, and now 8 hours feel like 12, and at the same time the productivity trends tell them they "have not done enough today".

rwnspace2• 6 years ago

I think this effect is tough for anyone tuned to care what others think, and it tends to be rougher the younger you are.

There's a significant lack of guidance in WEIRD societies about how to be a person, and this is topped off by the limited maturation rituals: learning to drive, first full-time job, graduating and buying a house come to mind - but we've somehow come to a consensus that putting a giant paywall in front of them and creating dependencies between them is fine.

Putting it like that, it's no wonder that so many young people are staying home, whittling their time away on scraps of "advice" on how to get on in life.

I've come to pity people who plug such "productivity" advice online, because I feel like they must be suppressing (or missing) an idea of the Good Life: a notion of using one's actions, or speech, to contribute to the common good.

I'm hopeful newer generations in the West will have the nous to reject false idols like "productivity" or extreme wealth, but I think it's on us to expose the painful lessons learned as we're transitioning into a cyborg society.

ethbro6• 6 years ago

I think a few things aren't hammered into young people enough today.

1) Any action is greater than no action. It doesn't matter how much you suck at something. Do it. Congrats, you've beaten everyone who never started.

2) Finish things. No matter how ugly it is. Even if you have to half-kill yourself to drag it that last inch over the line. Congrats, you've beaten everyone who never finished.

3) Your worst effort is probably better than average. Stop obsessing about the 1% best. That's not who you're competing against. You're competing against the pool of real people a company / project could afford to hire, who are available to hire.

4) Everyone starts off terrible at everything. No movie covers the 10,000 hours someone is learning: that's why training montages are a cliché.

5) Forgive yourself. It's okay not to be spectacular every minute of every day. Consistency of effort is more valuable than cyclical manic-depression. The key to becoming better starts with accepting and being happy with where you're starting from.

BeetleB5• 6 years ago

Even if you don't want to compare yourself to others, comparisons are everywhere.

Where you live and your social circle dictate the comparisons that are made. These are not universal - moving to another part of the country will result in fairly different standards. Some of my friends (now acquaintances?) liked to spend a lot of money at expensive restaurants, hotels, etc. It's my choice whether to spend time with them (I don't spend much). Folks who need to change their wardrobe every so many months? Not in my circle.

Life is great if you set your own standards. It's liberating. Also, I've learned that the guy who makes $1M+ on Youtube is also living a very different life - one I don't want to have. Yes, I'd love the money, but not the sacrifices.

I don't get paid as much as most SV types - but whenever I audit my life, I realize that's the only thing "missing". Almost everything in my life is the way I wanted it to be (by design). I know what I value, and I both consciously and unconsciously achieved it. More money would be awesome, but do I want to sacrifice what I have? I doubt it.

barcadad2• 6 years ago

Totally agree. FYI, a finalist in NPR's recent podcast competition had a nice take on this exact problem: https://soundcloud.com/alex-morgan-658034862/why-instagram-i...

asw12az• 6 years ago

While some of what you are writing is probably true, a work day (especially pre-COVID), really takes up a lot more than 8hrs. If you live in a city and want to live somewhere affordable, you're often looking at 1hr+ of commute each way. You have to get up a little early to prep for the day. Some jobs don't count a lunch break towards your 8hr day, or expect you to stay later, so you end up working more like 9hrs. If you factor in ~30-60mins chores that you do after work such as cooking/cleaning its easy to take up ~10-12hrs doing _work type_ stuff.

So, if you're getting a full 8hrs sleep, how much time does that leave you on an avg work night to do things that _you_ want to do? Like 4hrs? And do you really want to spend all those 4hrs being productive? People need to relax and unwind at some point. If you follow the pomodoro technique and use 5min for leisure every 30 mins, you end up with only ~40mins of "leisure" in that type of day.

What if you want to do things like spend an hour working out at the gym / looking after physical health? What if you are single and want to spend some time dating? It quickly drains away at any time you would have to spend on your own personal projects, interests, hobbies.

WD-423• 6 years ago

Not to mention the 8 hour work day (9-5) are your prime waking hours. It takes a lot of discipline to be productive outside of them.

andreilys• 6 years ago

“ If you live in a city and want to live somewhere affordable, you're often looking at 1hr+ of commute each way”

Here’s a suggestion: don’t live an hour away from work?

With more companies going permanent remote, I find the whole concept of commuting for 2 hours round trip a day unimaginable. Especially for those of us working in Tech that don’t need a physical presence to deliver results.

PragmaticPulp5• 6 years ago

If you live in a city and want to live somewhere affordable, you're often looking at 1hr+ of commute each way. You have to get up a little early to prep for the day. Some jobs don't count a lunch break towards your 8hr day, or expect you to stay later, so you end up working more like 9hrs. If you factor in ~30-60mins chores that you do after work such as cooking/cleaning its easy to take up ~10-12hrs doing _work type_ stuff.

I thought the same thing, until I focused on tightening up my schedule and making active choices to minimize wasted time.

If you want to live somewhere that requires 2 hours (!!) of commuting each day, take long lunch breaks away from the office, have relaxed mornings with hours between alarm going off and leaving the house, that's fine.

However, you have to recognize where you're making personal choices. You don't have to choose a job and house combination that requires an hour long commute each way. You don't have to leave the office for lunch every day. You don't have to have leisurely mornings. It's perfectly fine if you choose to do those things, but you're not being completely honest with yourself if you start portraying those personal choices as completely out of your control.

And do you really want to spend all those 4hrs being productive?

It's not about being productive all day every day. You can spend those 4 hours watching TV if you want, or you can spend those 4 hours going to dinner with friends, or going to the gym. It's your choice.

If you follow the pomodoro technique and use 5min for leisure every 30 mins, you end up with only ~40mins of "leisure" in that type of day.

The Pomodoro technique is for work time. You shouldn't be Pomodoring you personal time after work.

What if you want to do things like spend an hour working out at the gym / looking after physical health?

Make a priority and make it happen.

If you spend 1 hour at the gym 3 times per week, that's less than 3% of your waking hours. Surely you can find 3% slack in your schedule somewhere?

It quickly drains away at any time you would have to spend on your own personal projects, interests, hobbies.

The idea of "side projects" has become a major problem for many new grads growing up the internet era. For some reason, many of them feel obligated to be working on side projects when they're not working. They basically end up with two jobs, a day job and tending to their side projects, and then they wonder where all of their time has gone.

The solution is simple: Don't do side projects if you would prefer to spend your time on something else.

It's all about making active choices in how you spend your time. Once you go down the spiral of assuming everything is an obligation in your life, your schedule starts to feel out of your control. Start being honest about the choices you're making and what you want to do with your time and it becomes much easier to take control again.

BeetleB5• 6 years ago

If you live in a city and want to live somewhere affordable, you're often looking at 1hr+ of commute each way.

Reading your comment and others beneath you, I sense many of you have a weird idea of what a city is.

What you describe is true only for a minority of cities. I live in a city with above median housing prices. I live a 10 minute drive from my work. My house is not expensive - in fact, the expensive neighborhoods are farther away.

Initially you may not have much of a choice on where you work, but if you go through your whole career not having that choice, you probably need to work on your career a bit. For everyone I know, they decided to make that compromise (don't want to leave awesome city, etc). For them, not having enough time in the day definitely is a choice.

I agree with the rest of your accounting, but will note that there are weekends. As for gym, I just figured out exercises I can do at home with minimal equipment. It's a lot more flexible (and takes less time) than going to a gym.

heavenlyblue• 6 years ago

then be shocked when their reports come back at 2-3 hours or more.

That’s because I listen to a lot of Spotify.

barcadad2• 6 years ago

The high school girl he interviews in that podcast was at 8 hours of screen time, led by TikTok, Insta, WhatsApp, YouTube, Snap, etc.

goatherders2• 6 years ago

100% agree. One of the first things I do when taking over a decent size sales team is install tracking software on their machines. Not because i care that they are on facebook or CNN but so i can SHOW them they are not nearly as productive as they think.

My personal theory backed only by my own professional history is that most people are only working about 3 or 4 hours a day, tops. Certain tasks like writing code or authoring content cannot be time hacked; it takes the time it takes. But I joke that I never worked LESS than I did once I became a VP and had very little tactical work to do. Most of the workday in many fields and sectors actually doesn't take all that long.

dgellow• 6 years ago

What is this time tracking software?

dplgk• 6 years ago

Seconded. Now that I've installed auto time tracking on my computer, my estimate is that people do 2-3 of solid work a day. The rest of time is eating, reading news, reading/writing email, social media etc. It takes serious effort to put in 8 billable hours.

balfirevic3• 6 years ago

It's not uncommon for new grad SWEs to complain that an 8-hour work day is somehow consuming 100% of their weekday hours.

I don't know man, I've been struggling with this myself. Obviously it's not literally true, but the problem is that after you account for 8 hours of sleep, 8 hours of work and chores/eating/hygiene/cooking/commute, every thing you want to do starts seriously cutting into the time that's left.

Need an hour more sleep than average? Wanna do some kind of workout on regular basis? Go out with friends, on a date, see a movie? Have a serious hobby that takes 2-3 hours 2-3 times a week? If you put it on spreadsheet it will fit but it's just seriously exhausting (yeah, better hope you actually have pretty high energy levels, that also varies from person to person). There is not much slack there.

triyambakam2• 6 years ago

I was there not very long ago, and sometimes I still feel that way. But the change I made is to be strict without being restrictive, discipline with a sense of freedom. The biggest habit that has helped me is to just choose 2-3 most important things to do in the day and try to get them done as early in the day as possible. It feels so great to accomplish, and it's challenging but not unreasonable. Choose one goal and I feel like a failure and if I don't do it. Choose ten and I won't even do one. But a few good goals is the perfect balance, if I miss one but get the others I feel good. (This habit I learned from Zen to Done which also has nine othrt useful habits to slowly adopt over time)

PragmaticPulp5• 6 years ago

I hear you, but I'll tell you what I tell my mentees:

Most of it distills down to being honest about your priorities. If you value relaxed mornings, relaxed evenings, and never feeling rushed before or after work, then there's nothing wrong with that. You're not obligated to go out with friends or allocate hours to hobbies during the weekday.

The problem comes when people say they value one thing, but when decision time arrives they do something else. If you have a hobby that requires 2-3 hours per week, then you make time a few nights per week to do it. If you want to go out with friends, then you make time to go out with friends.

Going to the gym is perhaps the easiest example. If you really value going to the gym, finding one hour three times per week is only about 3% of your waking hours. Find a gym located between your house and your office and travel time falls out of the equation.

Personally, I freed up an enormous amount of time by tightening up my schedule. Learning how to get out of bed, get dressed, eat breakfast, and get out the door in under 30 minutes was a game changer for me, and it wasn't even that difficult. Likewise, learning how to consolidate my chores and meal prep into small windows of time was an enormous improvement.

If you sleep 8 hours per night, you have 112 waking hours per week. If you spend 40 hours working and have a 30-minute commute each way (5 hours commuting per week), that leaves 67 hours of your own time. Even if you allocate half of that to chores and meal prep, you're still left with 34 hours, or basically an entire work week of personal time. Realistically, you're not going to spend 33 hours on chores, though.

It's all about priorities. If you don't want to real rushed or pressured during your off time, you don't have to, but you can't have it all.

ibeckermayer2• 6 years ago

That’s just how life is my dude. You can’t have all the things, all the time.

https://www.cnbc.com/2019/08/17/what-billionaire-ray-dalio-t...

grugagag3• 6 years ago

Thanks for reminding me to turn on screen time on my phone. I am indeed wasting a lot of time on my phone reading things that don't get me much value while procrastinating on real work or things that I consciously want to spend my time on. This problem is a lot more prevalent on my phone than on my laptop. I catch myself browsing HN without any intent and without any goal, mostly reading comments and skimming on articles. It's a complete waste of time and I'm not really getting anything from it. I wish I could come once a week and get a synthesis of what's been happening over here. There are a lot of things that I absolutely don't care about at all and filtering on categories would help me skip those. I noticed that the top 30 or 60 items on HN move rather slowly and one visit a day is enough to not feel that you're missing out. I feel that I need outside help to regulate these behaviors.

joelbluminator3• 6 years ago

How about every few days just actively search for HN topics that interest you? That's what I try to do. https://hn.algolia.com/

jventura3• 6 years ago

I was on a similar situation until last month or so. I read this book called The Shallows by Nicholas Carr which references a lot of research that consuming lots of internet modifies your neural paths and makes you more distractable and harder to do deeper thinking (such as reading books, etc). I’ve since removed hn from my browser favorites and get a curated list of articles each friday from [1]. I just came here today to skim some articles as i’ve worked all day in a house project and my body hurts so I have no energy for other things.

This house project, some other mini-projects that i’ve done and the 2/3 books I read since last month is something i can now do because now I avoid HN (and the whole internet) by default..

[1] https://hackernewsletter.com/

thelazyoxymoron• 6 years ago

I was in a similar boat until recently. One thing that has worked brilliantly for me is to use any service that gives you a notification/curates your feed for the top posts on HN. I personally use Pushbullet for this. Since I was already using it in my phone as well as my laptop and desktop (it's a pretty handy tool to share stuffs quickly between devices), I set up the Hacker News 500 channel which sends me notification for the top items on HN. I usually get 2-3 posts throughout the day, which is more than sufficient for me.

I encourage you to look into it: https://www.pushbullet.com/

necheffa• 6 years ago

Let's not kid ourselves here, an 8 hour work day takes up a ton of time when you factor in cooking, cleaning, and attending to other chores. Maybe you even have to take care of another small human too.

It is incredibly disingenuous to think all you need is a little time management and all will be right in the world.

Sometimes it takes a couple hours after a full days work just to recharge and focus deeply on a task again.

Lets not forget about the physical and psychological impact of shorter days in the winter time too.

Sincerely, a hardened in the trenches 10 year vet.

Shivetya• 6 years ago

time is pretty much like money in that way, learn to manage one and you will manage the other. what you found works equally well with income as with time if you are not careful all the little numbers add up very quickly.

tester756• 6 years ago

It's not uncommon for new grad SWEs to complain that an 8-hour work day is somehow consuming 100% of their weekday hours

I've been complaining like that when I've been spending around 3h on commute per day

Remote is life changer

On the other hand I've been commuting by public transport, so I had a lot of time to read books :P

yelloweyes• 6 years ago

Nobody likes to be told that they're wasting their free time,

Wasting free time, a.k.a living? Capitalist propaganda is so godamn effective. People now believe that every minute you spend not working is wasted time.

Dear lord.

Toutouxc• 6 years ago

That's not what the original sentence says at all.

Every minute spent not working is free time, that's pretty much true no matter how much work you do.

And you can use that free time to actually live, i.e. have deep, meaningful experiences, or waste it by consuming cheap, addictive and mostly fake content on the social network du jour.

sg47• 6 years ago

I started mentoring new grads after covid hit, trying to help them find jobs. The more I talked to them, the more I felt that I should have talked to them before they started their undergrad or Masters. Most of them had wasted away 4-6 years of their life and were struggling to find jobs in an already competitive field. They took the wrong courses, did not work on communication or networking and in general, seemed to have made bad decisions. Especially the ones that came from India to do their Masters (I did so myself a long time back) but had no one to guide them on what courses to take and how to go about job search, internships, etc.

underwater3• 6 years ago

A 9 to 5 job might only be taking 50% of their waking time, but it could be consuming close to 100% of their mental capacity for the day.

There seems to be a an expectation that everyone should have a side hustle or has a creative outlet outside of work so they can get ahead or explore their true passions. But employment is structured in a way that your employer gets first dibs on your time and energy.

lrem• 6 years ago

This so much.

I'm a senior SRE in Google. I've got myself a NAS to back up my photos. Guess how many weeks it has been before I got the first terabyte of stuff onto it... Wrong, I'm still procrastinating on it :(

TrackerFF• 6 years ago

Tbh, I'd hate to be a motivated CS-student today.

You're just bombarded with the stuff that you should know - well, according to internet forums, at least.

On top of your basic CS curriculum, you should also be "crushing it" in:

- Full-stack development - Research-level Machine Learning - Heavy side projects like creating your own crypto currency, algorithmic trading platform, or whatever.

All while burning through the tens to hundreds of leetcode problems.

And of course, if you're a frequent visitor of certain forums or blogging platforms, you will find some user that's doing all of the above. Flashy website, writing research papers on the latest ML/Deep Learning models, writing interactive and insightful tutorials on leetcode problems, all while keeping a 4.0 throughout their CS-studies and climbing up the career-ladder and getting better internships every year.

I think that if you're comparing yourself to those types, and trying to keep up with them, you're gonna end up spending a lot of time without getting much done.

Of course, all while visiting the usual suspects of time-thieves (FB, Twitter, HN, Reddit, etc.)

There's this myth being perpetuated on most CS career forums (where 99% of the posters are other CS students) that you need to be some super-human rock star to even be worthy of the most lowly position. It's that, or bust.

kamaal• 6 years ago

>There's this myth being perpetuated on most CS career forums (where 99% of the posters are other CS students) that you need to be some super-human rock star to even be worthy of the most lowly position. It's that, or bust.

This is of course given you are in your prime health, family, and other life situations. Its like CS and programming jobs in general are acting like a filter to promote only the candidates who in their best form at the moment.

My guess is this illusion will shatter around the next recession/depression. When people will realize they had more than work, and bazillion tons of luck going on for them, to be the superstars they thought they were.

The gravy train always stops somewhere.

mistersquid2• 6 years ago

Personally, the unquestioned Ethos of Productivity characteristic of early 21st century Western Society is much more dangerous than the distractions which can sometimes fill unstructured time.

The psychological rigidity and social sacrifices required of always being productive (with little to no unstructured leisure time) actively harms individuals and the societies in which they are embedded, perhaps to the exact extent they increase tangible and intangible forms of wealth.

watwut• 6 years ago

I think it has to do with loneliness so many complain about. When being social is seen as waste of time useless thing, people dont socialize except in work. And that has consequences precisedly when yoi need friend the most or when work is highly competitive.

guenthert• 6 years ago

Or when you find yourself between jobs.

13415• 6 years ago

I have a feeling this is even more damaging for Millenials, because they constantly compare themselves with the rest of the world. In a sense, even leisure has turned into competition.

When I was in my teens a long time ago I did sports and learned classical guitar. If I had seen the acrobatics you see daily on Reddit or the "casual home musicians" on Youtube, I'd probably have given up all my efforts.

Doing a backflip seems like the normal thing any guy should be able to do nowadays.

apacheCamel• 6 years ago

Personally, I feel like I struggle with this a lot. Whether it be reading on here, or seeing it in the news, it is hard to not compare myself to a 20-something year old who just sold his/her company for hundreds of thousands of dollars while I sit around reading the stupid article and playing Dota or starting my millionth side project. It is easy to see that not everyone is going to do something like that, but I think it is really hard to internalize the fact that I am the one not doing that too.

Then I get into this "well, won't be me anyway, so why bother" mood where I accomplish even less with my free time. I have urge to do more, but it is a vicious cycle sometimes.

PragmaticPulp5• 6 years ago

I read this a lot online, but strangely enough I see the opposite in practice. Young people who grew up immersed in social media are primed to recognize the difference between a rising social media star and the norm. It's the older people who associate any degree of notoriety with ultimate success who struggle to understand the difference between a super star and someone with a lot of social media followers.

If I had seen the acrobatics you see daily on Reddit or the "casual home musicians" on Youtube, I'd probably have given up all my efforts.

But you wouldn't give up your efforts if you attended a concert of a famous musician, would you? Seeing a video with a million views on YouTube is a step below being a famous musician to young people.

If anything, seeing people gain small degrees of fame and notoriety without going all the way to the top of their field is even more motivating for young people. Seeing different levels of success drives home the point that success isn't binary, it's a spectrum.

volume• 6 years ago

The idea you are not doing enough, or that you are not enough spans generations, gender, race and class.

PragmaticPulp5• 6 years ago

Viewing this as business productivity versus distractions is a false dichotomy, though.

Life isn't just a series of context switches between being productive at work and wasting time at home. The goal is to be intentional with how you spend your time.

For example, coordinating a social dinner with friends isn't work, but it also isn't a waste of time. Going to the gym isn't typical productivity, but it isn't a waste of time either. Even playing video games to catch of with old friends isn't entirely a waste of time.

However, the modern world is full of traps that will lull people into spending their time in ways that feel enjoyable in the moment, but feel wasteful in retrospect. It's easy to pull out your phone and scroll Twitter for 30 minutes, but it takes more effort to pull out your phone and call and old friend or a grandparent for a check-in. It's easy to drop on the couch and select from an endless series of TV shows on Netflix and Hulu, but it takes a little more effort to go for a walk or go to the gym. Afterward, which of those two activities feels like a better use of your free time?

The psychological rigidity and social sacrifices required of always being productive (with little to no unstructured leisure time)

Is this really a common goal, though? I've been around some extremely productive and successful people in my career, but none of them held any illusions about minimizing leisure time. I've also been in some high pressure and highly competitive environments, but the number of people who adopted an "all work and no play" approach to life was vanishingly small. In fact, the people who are most motivated at work are often most motivated to arrange the after-work get together, or the weekend trip for the group of friends, or to invite people over for home-cooked meals so we can catch up.

TeMPOraL15• 6 years ago

In fact, the people who are most motivated at work are often most motivated to arrange the after-work get together, or the weekend trip for the group of friends, or to invite people over for home-cooked meals so we can catch up.

There seems to be a kind of phenomenon, like being in the zone but much longer (weeks at a time instead of hours), where you have an extreme drive to do everything you have to and want to do, a drive to live. I've only experienced it twice, in what I fondly remember as the most productive weeks in my life. And in those times, I'd juggle ridiculous amount of work with social occasions and wandering around, with no problem and a lot of happiness.

I wish I knew how to reproduce it, because these were also what I remember as the happiest of times. I suspect the people you mention are in this mode constantly. I wish I knew what's their secret. And not because I have a desire to be a workaholic or something - but I'd like to feel again those infinite amounts of energy and sheer will to make things happen.

wott• 6 years ago

I am not sure but I think you misunderstood Mistersquid, in that he associates productivity not only with work but with other things and times in life too. That's why he speaks of unstructured time in contrast. He doesn't make an opposition work vs leisure, he makes an opposition between productivity and un-structuration.

Typically the people about whom you talk in your last paragraph are trying to be productive even in their leisure time.

ur-whale• 6 years ago

https://archive.is/zOvjZ

jgilias2• 6 years ago

This resonates a lot.

One of the greatest realizations I've had is that there really is no other time than the present. The future never is, neither the past, it's only the present. So, if all we have and can interact with time-wise is the present moment, then everything you can actually do can only be done at each particular now.

So, if you want to learn French, or Lisp, or riding a dirt bike, you can only ever actually do it, at some particular now. The trick then is to try and make sure somehow that for each particular now, you always have a clear idea of what it is that you should be doing. Otherwise you risk falling into the procrastination trap that can last as long as ones lifetime, as the article brilliantly demonstrates.

sanmon3186• 6 years ago

You pretty much summarised “the power of now” by Eckhart Tolle.

jgilias2• 6 years ago

Haven't read it. Should I?

fodmap• 6 years ago

'Here' and 'Now' as the characters in 'The Angel In The Clock', a cartoon movie to raise money to fight Cancer.

https://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/the_angel_in_the_clock

TeeWEE2• 6 years ago

I think the trick is not doing things now for a better future... but to enjoy now more. If enjoying now means playing a video game, or walking the dog, or bing watching Netflix.. that's completely fine.

We should LIVE more in the now... not try to make the future you more happy. but the current you.

If that is working hard and learning and trying to become rich, if that makes you happy that's fine too.

What makes me happy is family, friends, seeing the world and building and learning about technology and playing with synthesizers... enjoy the current moment. ;-)

abootstrapper3• 6 years ago

Everyone here is reading this article as a cautionary tale on procrastination. To me it’s about the unrealistic expectations we place on ourselves. Maybe that’s due to our fake meritocratic society, or comparisons made on social media, or our parents expectations.

I thought I’d be a millionaire by now, changing the world for the better, with a Wikipedia page and a yacht. But what I really want now is to put down the measuring stick, and be ok with being me. It’s time to stop beating myself up for not living up to the absurd expectations I set for myself as a child.

Item_Boring• 6 years ago

I think so, too! Sometimes we should re-evaluate our expectations and think about what we really want and why we want it. Furthermore, I think it’s important to realise that others might have other motivations such as money, success, curiosity, altruism and so forth so there really is little need to compare ourselves to them.

Most of us don’t have the energy to be productive all the time. It took a lot of work (ironically) for me to be okay with that and to allow myself to do nothing at times. Procrastination for me was the result of constant pressure which sucked so much energy that I just couldn’t BE productive anymore. Funnily enough when I allowed myself to slack around or fall a bit behind I ended up greatly improving my grades.

In the end for me it’s a tale of starting to live in the moment (as cliche as that might sound) instead of failing to meet one’s own impossible expectations.

madaxe_again• 6 years ago

It could be worse. You could be a millionaire, have sacrificed good years of your life and your health, and realise that happiness was achievable on a shoestring all along.

We’re sold a lie from the get-go, a lovely orange carrot dangling just in front of us. Very occasionally a lucky donkey catches the carrot, because the stick broke or somesuch - but the carrot is made of wood.

This is why we have billionaires. They’re the fools who didn’t know when to quit, chewing on wooden carrot after wooden carrot, insisting they’re delicious. More and more and more and never ever enough - because material wealth is good for satisfying your fundamental needs, but once it’s done that, the marginal utility diminishes rapidly, and you derive limited satisfaction from it.

As you say, be ok with you. Be happy in this moment and that moment, however it comes - being alive is enough - ask any cancer patient.

paulbaumgart2• 6 years ago

The handful of (tech) billionaires I’ve met all seemed to genuinely enjoy the work that made them rich. People have different utility functions (which is a good thing!)

aidenn0• 6 years ago

Writing 500 words before noon is not an unrealistic expectation. Being widely regarded as a genius writer by 35 maybe is. TFA covers both.

abootstrapper3• 6 years ago

Writing 500 words before noon is not an unrealistic expectation.

No doubt. To me it seems that the author is writing about being unable to meet basic goals due to depression from not having met more fanciful goals.

Flantastical• 6 years ago

I think it's both.

Even while being aware of my unrealistic work expectations, I often still find myself being disappointed when I reflect on my day.

Not being productive isn't what makes me disappointed. It's procrastinating in ways that don't even make me happy. It's too easy to be sucked into hours of binging youtube, reddit, wikipedia, or twitter.

I know I'd get way more satisfaction by going on a hike, practicing piano, learning a second language, or calling my family. But the simple distractions are too convenient and addicting.

snazz2• 6 years ago

Yes! It’s exactly this. I’m fine being unproductive, but at least I want to be able to reflect on my day and remember doing fun things (as opposed to dopamine roulette activities like Reddit).

puranjay• 6 years ago

I thought I'd be a millionaire by 30 too.

But I hit 30 last year and found that what I truly wanted to do was make music, write, and spend time with my family.

I don't advocate mediocrity, but everyone doesn't have to be a high achiever. It's okay to live a fulfilling life doing what you like, even if it doesn't make you rich or earn you Wikipedia entries.

oblio2• 6 years ago

That's not mediocrity, that's a happy life...

elwell• 6 years ago

Wikipedia entries

Dang, new life goals...

make music, write, and spend time with my family

But seriously, that sounds about right for me too. Maybe insert 'code' after 'write'.

hodgesrm• 6 years ago

On the other hand some very well-known people felt profound conflict about not achieving their self-imposed goals before actually doing so. There's a famous story about Caesar bursting into tears at the thought of how Alexander the Great had built an empire whereas Caesar himself had done nothing of note by the same age. [1]

It's common to read about other military leaders like Alexander who felt similarly, but perhaps military historians just like these stories. The behavior seems general. I would guess that Elon Musk is pretty frustrated that his rockets don't reach Mars yet.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Julius_Caesar#Early_life_and_c...

abootstrapper3• 6 years ago

Survivorship bias perhaps? I suspect even more people felt profound conflict about not having achieved their goals only to continue to fall short of their aspirations.

klerpi• 6 years ago

I'm usually pretty hard on myself, but I'm glad I'm not that hard.

Basing your life on others achievements seems like a pretty sad life to live.

paganel• 6 years ago

with a Wikipedia page

Two of my personal projects that usually get 2-3 visitors per day have been linked from Wikipedia pages (both history-related), as a 39-year old guy that is good enough for me.

kelnos• 6 years ago

Absolutely agree. In some ways I've done more than I ever expected, and in other ways I feel like I'm behind. But comparing my current self to what I thought back when I was 20 doesn't really matter at all. All that matters is that I'm happy with my life as it is, and that I feel like I have enough influence over things in order to change the things I'm not happy about.

parsley27• 6 years ago

I think the danger is not just unrealistic expectations from a point of view of "I'm just not that much of a genius/producer", but (not necessarily article-related) I think it's important to realize how unusual the story is of the "super successful" and "driven" people we so often compare ourselves to.

Now that I'm older, I realize that where I am is not surprising despite the work I've put in; what would have been far more unexpected would be for everything to have worked out and grown so large that I'd be one of the big successes.

That measuring stick would need to be configured against the mean, assuming it's needed at all (and it likely isn't).

type02• 6 years ago

but I didn’t finish it, just like I didn’t finish my Ph.D. in political science

I hope it's to the best. Humanity needs less ph.Ds in non scientific fields and more Ph.Ds in fields that don't urge the need to call themselves science, you know like real scientific endeavors, chemistry physics and so on

crazygringo• 6 years ago

Hard, hard disagree.

We already have all the resources to feed the world's population and then some, to shelter everyone, to provide health care, to stop global warming, to end poverty. We already have enough technology and then some.

The reality is that it's politics, war and corruption that gets in the way.

Sadly, our understanding of how to get along with each other for our mutual benefit is far behind our scientific understanding.

The most meaningful progress over the next century, I believe, is not going to come from technology. It's going to come from political science, sociology, and related fields like behavioral economics.

How do we fix the polarization that is tearing democracies apart? How do we make international cooperation to mitigate climate change realistic? How do we neutralize the threats from authoritarian regimes?

If you want to help people, then today these are the questions that matter most.

And the debate over whether these are "sciences" or not is just distracting and pointless -- mere semantics. They help us design institutions to improve the human good, which is what is meaningful and matters.

emteycz3• 6 years ago

The hardest question is how do we replace money. How do we split out luxury, leisure, fun etc then? How do we determine what is rentable and what's not? How do we decide who and whether has e.g. the latest gaming computer? How do we decide what is worthwhile usage of natural resources?

superasn• 6 years ago

Funniest thing I read all day. But coincidentally I was reading this book earlier called Chasing dalylight. For those who don't know, it was written by the ex-CEO of KPMG and how he spent his life doing things like taking 36 hour flights from NY to Australia just to get 30 minute facetime with someone (iirc) and he was hoping to retire peacefully with all his money when he was diagnosed with brain cancer and given 5 months to live.

Really interesting book about how we waste away our present for future that we may never get.

ak392• 6 years ago

Another note from the underground. The problem is, like Dostoesvky wrote through the mouth of the Undergound Man, the human requires pain and misery in his daily existence in order to have a default want-to-live or want-to-thrive instinct. The lack of misery will banish us to these endless ruminations of self-hate from our lack of desire to live like the "men of action" (Sanjay, in this case) we obssess about. My kids call it "FWP".

It's a tragedy that can be fixed by tragedy. Often the tragedy is self-inflicted. Just to want to live! on our own terms.

It's a mess.

psim1• 6 years ago

I read this and remembered a plan I had journaled when I was 30 years old. I was working in a stratified IT department that I liked pretty well and had mapped out a plan to be at director level by age 40. I left that organization at age 33, took a short term position and then one I liked even better, putting me in a lead role that could have led to something director-like. Then the company laid off most of my team and I took off. Now I am in an individual contributor position again and have just turned 40. Many times, life works against plans and it's better not to get too attached to them. Other things are accomplished in the meantime that may not look like much but in the bigger scheme, are quite meaningful.

lazyjones• 6 years ago

We are not productive for 2 reasons:

1. our methods of learning are wrong, we learn best by asking others and experimenting, not by reading reference texts or passively attending lectures.

2. we lack the skills and tools to get things done, especially in IT our tools are mostly junk and the skills required to do the job change continually.

If you disagree, tell me why artisans are so productive.

peter303• 6 years ago

The daily lethargy may be low grade covid isolation depression. Most of my regular social contacts ended six months ago. I am not dysfunctional, but less productive. Summer outdoors helped a bit.

jjk166• 6 years ago

Plutarch tells the story of a roman quaestor who, at age 31 came upon a statue of Alexander the Great and wept, for at the same age Alexander had forged an empire while he had accomplished nothing. That quaestor was Julius Caesar.

TeMPOraL15• 6 years ago

I'll print this out and frame it, to read as I listen to https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=taupuK6oND4.

And I'm not being that sarcastic here. In the sense of what Plutarch wrote, Elon Musk does make me sad. I suppose every one of us can find someone who's miles ahead in achieving the same dreams as one has.

intrepidhero• 6 years ago

For me, thinking about what I didn't accomplish today is the first step on a short road to depression. Better questions to ask are: 1. Did I see or hear something beautiful. 2. Did I eat or drink something that nourished my body? 3. Did I have a thought that buoyed my spirits? 4. Did I have a pleasant interaction with a fellow human/animal? 5. Did I help someone?

Journey before destination and all that.

I'm not a great person and I have chosen not to aspire to do great things, though I admire people who do. I aspire to an ordinary life lived in contentment. One where I bring some good into the lives of people around me.

joelbluminator3• 6 years ago

If only more people had this life philosophy...

vwat2• 6 years ago

This has 200 comments while the unveiling of the first working prototype of neuralink got a grand total of 15 upvotes. Hackernews has officially flatlined.

kart23• 6 years ago

huh? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24311152

vwat2• 6 years ago

I’m not sure how this is possible... I posted the link before your linked post was created... and my post was a dupe of the following post which is also older than your linked post...

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24308944

I guess I just somehow missed it?

vcanales• 6 years ago

...said the guy published on the newyorker.

rdtwo2• 6 years ago

The problem I have is that the “free” time wasted on the screen isn’t actually free. It’s typically half committed to some activity that requires my physical but not complete mental presence or is cut into chucks of 5-10 minutes that I can’t transition into a meaningful activity for. I’m not really sure if there is much that can really be done about that.

Axsuul2• 6 years ago

"A healthy man wants a thousand things, a sick man only wants one."

hank_z• 6 years ago

Quite social media, or restrict yourself to check it ONLY once a day. Sticking to this rule hasn't made me a billionaire, but I feel a lot happier.

bstar77• 6 years ago

I was incredibly driven about 7 years ago... I was a founder of a startup and had really lofty aspirations. I told my wife that it was very possible that we would be millionaires by the time we hit 40.

Fast forward to today and that did not happen. The startup is no more, but mainly due to burnout. We made money and did well, but not well enough. I never made my millions, but did have a substantial aqui-hire opportunity that I turned down that would have almost gotten me there.

Once that part of my life played out, I decided to make a 180 turn... I'm not working to exhaustion anymore and take a tortoise approach to my career. I've found that as long as I'm consistent and have my eye on my goals, it doesn't matter how hard I work outside of my day job. I just need to be consistent and take advantage of bursts of motivation.

I've accomplished a surprising amount with this approach. I'm not stressed, I have the best quality of life that I've ever had and work is generally fun. This is what my goal should have been from the beginning.

xxxtentachyon• 6 years ago

As someone who has generally tried to take your current approach and has generally been rewarded for it, yours is a refreshing perspective. There's a persistent voice in the back of my head that questions whether I'm acting out of fear, rationality, or just following a happy stasis. It's always reassuring to see the other side of this.

dfxm12• 6 years ago

I follow this approach, too, and I consider myself successful, but I also have no voice questioning me. Consider for yourself if you'll regret what you're doing (or not doing) today ten years from now...

WrtCdEvrydy4• 6 years ago

Noone posts about how their startup exploded and took 5 years of savings in their prime money earning years.

lol6363636• 6 years ago

For last few years, I have been telling myself to take it slow and do what you are doing now. I got a easy but a boring job. I figured this way I will save all my mental energy for my projects after work.

But this is slowly burning me out. The boredom of not doing any real work for 8 hours is soul killing. I do a lot of busy red tape work but it is not intelluctly stimulating.

So now I will do 180 and quit my job in a few months and go indie solo founder route.

stanislavb• 6 years ago

Good luck. It will be more difficult than expected, just be ready for that. But it will be worth it.

oblio2• 6 years ago

Plan B would be to get a more challenging job for much better pay :-)

underwater3• 6 years ago

I'm interpreting the "tortoise" comment as slow and steady, not apathetic to the day job.

Personally, I put my creative energy into my 9 to 5 job. Instead of using evenings to start side hustles or to "get ahead" on work, I unwind and get adequate rest. This is so I can be alert and switched on during my regular work hours.

I've found stretching myself thin starts to affect me quickly, and I feel like I'm actually operating at 50% on a permanent basis.

johnisgood• 6 years ago

How about being a security guard? There are some cozy, chill, nothing-ever-happens places where you can just sit there at night, maybe do a couple of walks but other than that you could work on your projects! This way you have a steady job that will also be beneficial for pension (adds to work years), and you can work on projects that will pay off later. Do not forget to bring your laptop!

djsumdog2• 6 years ago

I've done this twice:

https://battlepenguin.com/philosophy/perspective/a-tale-of-t...

Once was backpacking for 11 months with only two bags. The second was 5 months in a car. I did learn a lot both times, but I never got fully independent and it may have set me back some.

Still in retrospect, it was a great journey and I'm still glad I made the attempt.

sirspacey3• 6 years ago

I’ve found the same. Thanks for sharing!

sizzle2• 6 years ago

Did you have kids? I feel like that is a hard stop and pushes you beyond burn out with sleep deprivation and all your undivided attention, free time and career notwithstanding.

quickthrower27• 6 years ago

I guess you have babies? It gets easier!

Aeolun9• 6 years ago

The good thing is we can just call it ‘having children’ of something with negative connotations like burnout.

tomcam• 6 years ago

I had multiple kids, two of them severely handicapped. It did not stop me. I am a stay at home dad.

praveen9920• 6 years ago

take advantage of bursts of motivation

I understand this but most of the time I am excited about that new awesome idea that popped into my head. How do you focus on one thing without getting deviated?

smichel17• 6 years ago

I see parallels everywhere else, and that pulls me back. Fundamentally, Snowdrift.coop (start at https://wiki.snowdrift.coop) is about public goods and collective action / coordination problems. When you think enough about the alignment of individual and group incentives, you start seeing how so many societal issues (moloch!) fall into this category. And yes, I'd like to fix all of those, and I get excited about projects that try to do so. But at the end of the day, given my skills, interests, connections, etc, nothing else I could do has the tiniest fraction of the potential to make a difference in the world that Snowdrift.coop does.

grasshopperpurp• 6 years ago

For myself, I have two main creative outlets that take up most of my personal free time, and I alternate between the two depending on how I feel. I find them both rewarding and never regret the time spent on either - even when I don't produce anything of any value. I understand going in that there will be fruitless sessions (in terms of quantifiable output), so I count them as a price to get to the stuff of value, which is subjective anyway.

benhurmarcel• 6 years ago

I have a place to note them down. With time it gets filled, refined and culled. If they’re really great I’ll do it at some point. No need to rush to the fresh idea now.

Aeolun9• 6 years ago

I kind of work on 6 different things from time to time. For some reason awesome new ideas have been coming more slowly lately.

bumby• 6 years ago

Discipline > Motivation

Motivation invariably wanes

ttul• 6 years ago

You are describing my life lol.

jacobwilliamroy• 6 years ago

What were you going to do with a million dollars?

nemo44x• 6 years ago

It’s quite nice. You can live wherever you want, make your home just how you want it, have a variety of investments, and have your other half not have to work and raise the children and take care of a garden, etc. You can leave work as well to be even closer to the ones you love.

It takes a lot of stress out of day to day living and you can really plan a future. All while being able to continue work you enjoy or switch careers into something maybe isn’t as profitable but brings different enjoyment.

war1025• 6 years ago

My personal mantra at work is: One useful thing per day.

If I manage to do one useful thing every day, it adds up to a lot of useful things over time. And that has proven to be enough.

There's a sort of mediocre Johnny Cash song with the chorus "Even I might get to Heaven at a half a mile a day"

That's basically how I try to live my life.

nine_k• 6 years ago

The speed still matters somehow.

Well, take Johnny Cash. Half a mile a day * 30k days gives 15k miles; maybe it's enough to reach heaven, but not enough to e.g. reach the Moon.

So, when choosing to move steadily albeit slowly, you have to manage your expectations, and get used to get by with little.

Investing your time is not unlike investing your money: least risky strategies bring most stable but least spectacular results, while big bets bring both big gains and big losses.

flyinglizard2• 6 years ago

I call it "one thing at a time, all the time".

Not because I want to take it slowly, but because I have a lot on my plate and my natural tendency is to "unflatten time", fast-forwarding in my head all the different plays and things to do. Some of these will only apply in a year, but here I am thinking about them and worrying about them now. Worse still, I sometime make decisions related to these future things and as you all surely know, decisions are paid for with a mental toll.

So I dial back, focus on the immediate thing in front of me and remember that nearly any progress is made of trivial, tiny chunks.

Having an effective system of writing stuff down is key to that approach - your future ideas and various pending tasks need to spill into writing instead of lingering around your head. When you have a good writing system you can trust, then you can free your mind to focus on the now.

sqldba3• 6 years ago

One useful thing per day is too much for me. Some days I can’t do anything. Some weeks are the same. Sometimes a month just goes by.

But in the scale of each year I’m super productive.

bg24• 6 years ago

Mind sharing some more on this? "I'm not working to exhaustion anymore and take a tortoise approach to my career. I've found that as long as I'm consistent and have my eye on my goals, it doesn't matter how hard I work outside of my day job. I just need to be consistent and take advantage of bursts of motivation."

Or, is there any article/post you may have written already?

cactus20932• 6 years ago

I can definitely relate to this. My own journey is, in addition to a couple of stints as a founder that didn't work out, I've worked primarily for other startups as opposed to large companies. After 10 years what I have to show for it is about $35,000 from one moderate sized acquisition of a startup you've definitely heard of but was not especially lucrative for anyone except the founders, some options that I never exercised and are worth 0 today since the company shut down, some other options that I never exercised and lost 3 months after leaving the company that may or may not be worth something eventually but I couldn't afford to exercise/didn't feel strongly enough to make a big bet on, and now finally some options where I have 8 years left on a 10 year exercise window which may actually go somewhere (but could also end up at $0 or something minimal).

I had other peers in my graduating class in college that went to work at places like Google, Microsoft, and Amazon while I went to do a startup with a few friends, then ended up mostly working as an employee for these other startups. I find it interesting to idly muse about what would have happened to someone who'd joined one of those companies in an entry level engineering role in 2010 and stayed there while having a fairly average career trajectory, say getting to a senior engineer level 5 years in and then plateauing, going from a stock grant size of maybe $50k a year when joining to $150k a year at senior level. Doing some rough estimates based on stock prices over the years, if you'd been in that position at any of these companies and never sold any stock you'd have something like $2.5 million (Google), $4 million (Microsoft) or $6 million (Amazon) in stock today. And of course your base salary and cash bonuses over that time would have been higher than your base salary working for startups.

I don't say this to complain, I'm still doing fine overall and there are a lot of people in the world who work very hard for a lot less. But I also don't feel like I've really accomplished much of any significance. It's pretty mind-blowing to realize that the less risky, more tortoise-like approach to a career would have been so vastly more profitable than what I've experienced at what I would say have been a pretty average selection of startups. And it's not like the startups have been so much more fulfilling, you're still pretty much a cog in the machine as an engineer even at a 30 person company.

In conclusion - working at a startup smaller than, say, series D is a fool's game and a very likely path to one day looking back and feeling like you haven't accomplished anything. Either become a founder to try to build something meaningful from nothing, or just work at a FAANG company as a 9-5 and get your fulfillment elsewhere and/or retire young.

boring_twenties3• 6 years ago

It's pretty mind-blowing to realize that the less risky, more tortoise-like approach to a career would have been so vastly more profitable

Isn't this the definition of risk? If it was a foregone conclusion that you'd make more money this way, it wouldn't be risky at all.

klipt2• 6 years ago

never sold any stock
less risky

Never selling stock is pretty risky. Sure in retrospect there's been a huge bull run in tech which made those stocks go up crazily, but most of the people I know in FAANG recommend selling your RSUs and buying index funds like VTI instead to diversify because who knows?

kirso• 6 years ago

Yes, I feel like this over-ambition and risk has put me in a similar position. I still own around 300k worth of stock which is not liquid in one of the start-ups but it has been 8 years now. On the other hand I realize that with my background I would never be able to even get a job at FAANG in a first place so I really cherish the experience I got in one of the startups like opening the offices in different countries, travelling and getting clients (I am in tech sales). However looking back, I partially regret the decision to always strive for the outsized return as an employee you get 1 bet for 4 years of vesting, instead of many bets that VCs have. I recently landed a job in a more boring place and increased my income by around 120%, living the boring tortoise life with more politics, but I realised I stopped worrying about the future and really enjoy spending my free time on staying sane. In the end though, I always say that if I would have stayed in my own country and lived the super boring life, I would regret it in the end and so far it has been an exciting ride.

BjoernKW• 6 years ago

Compounding outcomes.

Someone who consistently gets just a little better every day is more likely to succeed than someone who works insanely hard for just a limited period of time.

The years don't come without the days.

chii5• 6 years ago

just a little better every day is more likely to succeed than someone who works insanely hard for just a limited period of time

but someone who works insanely hard for a long time is going to beat the person who gets just a little bit better each day.

The point is, someone who works insanely hard gets to a certain required level quicker than someone who improves a tiny bit every day for a long time. Think cramming for an exam etc.

ChrisMarshallNY27• 6 years ago

I like that. Thanks for sharing it.

I'm 58. I spent over thirty years, writing and managing software projects that other people generally didn't use well (or mishandled while developing). It was frustrating, but they paid the bills, so there wasn't anything I could do about it.

Since leaving my last job, I started to look at working, and immediately, and with extreme prejudice, slammed into the notorious ageism in tech. It was a real shock, as I had always been treated with a fair degree of respect. That is no longer the case. Respect seems to be a virtue that no one practices, anymore (I'm not talking about "worship." I'm talking about simple, basic, courtesy and respect; like I give to others).

I had saved up a fairly substantial war chest, so I just decided to give up on looking for work, and have been spending my time since then, writing a lot of open-source code[0], and learning the latest stuff in the way I want.

Best decision I ever made. Too bad. I'm pretty good at what I do, I would have worked for a lot less than most (see "war chest," above), and would have been happy to take on riskier work with startups and whatnot.

[0] https://github.com/ChrisMarshallNY (and almost every green square will take you to an open-source repo, where I am the sole author, and you can view the checkins)

WrtCdEvrydy4• 6 years ago

Do you want to work together on a thing?

frankbyte3• 6 years ago

You just became the first GitHub profile I follow. Good luck bro! I’m still just 35 but I know I’ll face the same music in 20 years or less.

frogpelt• 6 years ago

It's not just in tech.

You hear responses from younger generations like "Ok Boomer" to their elders' opinions and it is so cringe-worthy.

I don't think everything my parents taught me was perfect or even always correct but there's an irreplaceable amount of wisdom that comes from being alive twice as long.

chipotle_coyote• 6 years ago

I won't say ageism the main reason I moved from programming to tech writing, but it's certainly been something on my mind. I look younger than my 53 years, but I'm pretty clearly not in my early 30s anymore. But, I haven't experienced any real ageism in this field, at least yet.

seebetter• 6 years ago

Also 58 now is not the same as 58 30 years ago.

The state and change of culture and technology is quite different.

I consider age like time an illusion. There’s biological considerations but I reject all the age cliches and sayings. Defy labels, limitations, distorted reminders — focus on living.

fxtentacle2• 6 years ago

It's not just age-ism about people, the same prejudices are also applied against software.

I'm currently #1 in "clean EPE matched" on the Sintel AI benchmark - by re-implementing a 2006 paper. I'm taking advantage of the additional computing power that we have nowadays by brute-forcing what used to be a gradient-descent solver. It appears that people have re-invented the AI wheel many times, but nobody checked to see what was there before deep learning became fashionable.

I see the same issue everywhere. Companies have a large agile web 4.0 team using obscure frameworks that I had never heard of before. But all the stuff that they built would have been included in a $9 WordPress hosting plan.

headmelted2• 6 years ago

I could offer an alternative perspective on this as I’ve seen it done to a lot of people that haven’t much choice in the matter.

It’s entirely possible you’re not getting offers because they know you don’t need them.

I don’t mean to say they’re wanting to give the offers to less fortunate applicants - it’s just that you’ll be impossible to abuse relative to someone who they know needs the money.

“We need you to work until this is done.” “No.” “Chris, it’s very important and will be reflected on your performance review.” “Ok. Still no.”

At the start of my career (ages ago now) I had an employer find out that my university progression was tied entirely to their performance review of my placement, and immediately start to insist on my working all the hours under the sun with the strong implication that if I didn’t play ball the note would be “unfavourable”.

When you’re young it’s not always clear how little crap you should take from people in more senior positions.

dxy3• 6 years ago

Some ideas (from a guy in his 40s who interviews every 6 to 12 months for high paying short-term project work):

- 25 years at a single company is working against you. Remove all that from your cv and just list the recent stuff you built.

- Most of your cv should be description of the repos with links. Cut out and summarise past experience ruthlessly, like you’re refactoring someone else’s old code.

- Remove the link to your personal git page, use the other one. On first sight it looks weak - it has some html files and a lot of docs. My first reaction was “meh”. It took me many minutes of browsing to figure out the real meat was in the other repo And then my reaction was “wow”. Most hiring manager don’t have time for this. People are not clicking on the green squares they are clicking on the source repos, you have about 30 seconds of their time.

- At this stage you might get bored or unhappy real fast in a job, if you are honest to yourself. Consider selling short term access to deep technical expertise - in your case Mobile Bluetooth on iOS.

bregma• 6 years ago

Funny, I'm also 58. I have also hit the ageism wall (although I'm currently at a place where I'm not the oldest, but then the software is also decades old). My plan is to build a bigger war chest while I can then go back full time to my first love, writing Free software. It's what used to be called "retirement" back when businesses were not run by 20-year-olds who plan to live forever.

cryptica2• 6 years ago

If you consider that almost every job in the tech industry is utterly useless, it makes sense why there is so much ageism.

Tech jobs these days are not about adding value, so your additional experience is worthless... The things that are valuable to companies are youth, optimism, loyalty and self-delusion.

Companies need a big headcount to give themselves leverage over governments and banks. Companies need a young workforce which they can influence and use as bargaining chips to make deals to get access to cheap money from the Fed.

The role of big corporations is to take people in when they're young and distort their worldviews so that they stay passive, childlike, compliant and docile as they get older - They're not going to rebel against the status quo, they're not going to complain about unjust government regulations which drive up the company stock price but at the same time diminish their freedom to leave the company and be independent.

Old people are not good because they can't be indoctrinated as easily and the benefits are much shorter-term since these old people don't have so many years left on this earth. The investment of brainwashing them doesn't yield so much and not for so long.

These big tech corporations are engaging in pure macroeconomics. They don't care about details like projects, clients and customers. In their world, the only things that affect their bottom line are:

- Governments

- Banks

- Investors

- Public opinion

Everything else is a detail which doesn't concern them. Everything that everyone does in those companies is ultimately about pleasing or manipulating these 4 entities in the most superficial way possible.

dennis_jeeves• 6 years ago

Chis, If somebody hires you based on this thread let us (or me) know who the employer is.

Like 'headmelted' pointed out, part of 'agiesm' is that it’s just that you’ll be impossible to abuse relative to someone who they know needs the money.

Programmers, especially the young are insecure douche bags, and I suspect that their insecurity leads to hiring docile individuals who can be coerced.

xab312• 6 years ago

Not sure if this will help, but I'll share my very recent story of how ageism looks from the other (youngish people) side, which contains some pitfalls to avoid.

I'm 32, and the technical lead of a mid-sized research computing / ML team in quasi-academia. I'm the one who tells the boss whether a hire is technically competent, performing up to standard, is meshing well with the team, etc. So I don't make hire/fire decisions myself but have substantial influence on them.

Usually, when we hire people > 30, they are PhDs with a specific specialty, like statistics. But recently we hired a guy from industry in his early 50s to do some programming, web dev, and light ML. He had, obviously a long CV with programming and some practice with ML/statistics, although nothing related to our field. Here are some of the things this guy has done in the ~1 months before and since his hiring:

1. He frequently bullshits in presentations and meetings, pretending to know things he doesn't know.

2. Very shortly after joining, he has recommended we radically rebuild several of our systems in different, "better" ways -- ways which he's familiar with. For example, we have a web app on AWS Ubuntu, and he has repeatedly asked why we can't just run a Windows server.

3. If he doesn't know something, he insists on getting step-by-step tutorials from technical people in the lab, but tutorials in how to do things HIS way. For example, we all use Linux and an SSH client, but he wasted 2 hours of my time asking how to SSH into AWS using PuTTY on Windows, how to copy files using WinSCP, etc, since of course he only uses Windows. He claims he'll learn Linux eventually, but wants to use what he knows "for now", "so that he can more rapidly produce results".

4. The first time I met the guy in person (not immediately due to COVID), he had plopped himself and his laptop down in my desk, without asking, and even readjusted my chair settings, and complained about my office being messy. I'm #2 in seniority...

Any one of these alone would be...annoying, but all together he is almost a caricature of every ageist stereotype in tech. He expects a level of respect he feels is due his experience level, while simultaneously he resists learning anything about the way his new organization does things...presumably because he knows better?

It puts me in an awkward situation because I'm kind of his technical supervisor. If he were a new graduate student, I would tell him to cut out the bullshit, figure things out, and quit wasting my time (and commandeering my desk). Since he is almost twice my age it is too awkward to read him the riot act, though, and I don't really know how to deal with this.

My takeaway is that an older person in a new tech job should really, really avoid displaying arrogance and entitlement. Respect is earned, not given; even if you've spent 30+ years in the field, we whippersnappers don't know how competent you are (or not), until it's demonstrated. I'm not saying you made any of these mistakes, but sometimes it is easy to do some of these things unconsciously. Probably you are perfectly competent, but people like this guy are working against you.

jonathanliu2• 6 years ago

FWIW, based on your comments alone, I can tell that I would've enjoyed working with/for you.

john4534243• 6 years ago

Luckily software world is embracing remote work as a side effect of pandemic. This helps a lot in the fight against ageism.

alwahi• 6 years ago

this, so much this

sukilot• 6 years ago

I told my wife that it was very possible that we would be millionaires by the time we hit 40.

Are you being colloquial?

Being a millionaire by 40 (in 7 years or less) is quite likely for anyone with the talent to launch a startup, by working at a regular big conpany.

Launching a startup lowers those odds by quite a bit (but increases the small chance of being a manymillionaire).

sabas123• 6 years ago

This sounds more like a letter of a depressed person than anybody else. Or maybe we blame procrastination for the causes that gives him this feeling while there is a much deeper issue (on a societal level)

josh2600• 6 years ago

I am constantly amazed at what caused progress in my life. Sometimes it is working to the bone. More often it is knowing when to press and when to let things breathe.

One of the most powerful lessons I’ve internalized in my life is that negotiations are often won in the silence between gambits, not in the offers themselves.

Sometimes letting things take the time they need makes them go faster than trying to rush.

jugg1es• 6 years ago

If I had a day like this guy had, my personal neuroses would look to blame something external for my own malaise. I'd be blaming the 3 waffles (and the accompanying blood sugar spike/crash) as being the source of my lack of ambition. I'd eat a couple eggs the next day to see if that changed any thing.

ldd• 6 years ago

I just wanted to make it to the top of Hacker News. I submitted plenty of my projects, but none hit the mark.

So hopefully once before I turn 35 I have a project that makes it to the top. But if not, eh. I'll be al right.

Just like the dolphins in the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

peterwwillis• 6 years ago

Imagine a takeout pizza restaurant run entirely by one woman. She opens the store in the morning, receives shipments, does food prep, takes orders, makes pizzas, delivers them, closes at night, files paperwork, and cleans up. By the end of the day she only gets a few dozen pizzas to customers. And as she's going to sleep, she tosses and turns, worrying that she didn't get enough done.

Now imagine her sole task for the day was to prep ingredients. How do you think she'd sleep?

pftburger• 6 years ago

I am continually annoyed that I can’t compete with VC Funded startups with 20 to 50 employees in my spare time after work while maintaining a healthy social life.

As ridiculous as that sounds I mean that seriously. I can’t shake the feeling

paulcarroty• 6 years ago

Sometimes thinking a lot is bad, especially when hesitation comes you should kick yourself in the ass and start doing.

ouid• 6 years ago

No matter how much I relate to the content, a New Yorker article about how unsuccessful the author is bound to come off a little... tone deaf?

jt2190• 6 years ago

It’s not an article, it’s satire. (Most of the commenters here seem to have missed the joke.)

didibus• 6 years ago

I think there's a cultural aspect at play.

I come from a place where success is measured more by the amount of experiences you've lived and the fun you've had, then the money you've made or the social status you've achieved.

I like to use New Orleans motto as a way to describe it: Big Easy.

A good life is one that was easy going, lade back, where you've enjoyed the company of others, where you've explored the wonders of the world, and that's that.

It's the opposite mentality of: "What's my purpose?". You're not here to do anything, you're here to enjoy your stay. You're not here to make things, you're here to enjoy what's already there.

The irony is that adopting this mindset and living this way is actually surprisingly hard. Seems the body naturally leans towards anxiety, like we've maintained in our DNA fears from our evolution, constantly looking behind our shoulder, feeling the need to get on with it, be on top of things, etc.

Anyway, I am having the opposite reaction. I feel like getting closer to my 35, I feel like I've done everything. Accomplished all things that mattered, and like there's nothing more to do, now it's just routine and repetition. I've been there done that, seen everything, tried everything, so I don't get that excitement out of "undiscovered territories" anymore. And I'm working to adapt to this, be happy with the mondaine.

adamcharnock• 6 years ago

I'm pleased I'm not the only one! I'm 35 shortly and I feel very content with what I have done so far. Here on out feels like icing on the cake.

I always found the "what's the meaning of life?" question to be a nonsense one. I suspect encountering The Hitchikers Guide To The Galaxy at a young age was part of the reason for that. There is so clearly no reason other than to enjoy it as much as you can. But I thin most of it is likely down to having parents that loved me unconditionally regardless of my achievements (which actually seems to be rare).

Do what makes you happy, let boredom be a motivator.

PS. Related comment of mine from a while back: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23061260

tudorconstantin• 6 years ago

Now, this will probably get me downvoted to oblivion, but the article sounds like the rants of a loser. We all have distractions. We all enjoy wasting time. Hell, I'm writing this after 5-6 beers and my tomorrow will most probably be wasted by hangover.

But man, you definitely got to man up get your shit figured out. You're 42, you definitely didn't hit the lottery until now and the chances don't look good in the future either. You seem pragmatic enough to realize there's got to be another way out there to be successful. Get out, find it, and follow it.

bdowling• 6 years ago

the article sounds like the rants of a loser.

The article is published in the humor section of the New Yorker magazine. It’s clearly a humorous work of fiction written by a writer who was certainly paid for his work. It’s grandiose and delusional, because that’s what makes it funny on multiple levels. We relate to the story because we too suffer from procrastination and dismay at not meeting the fantastic goals we set for ourselves.

juniper_strong2• 6 years ago

I used to read the New Yorker, years ago, I don't know what changed, me or them. Much of what they publish now comes across as self-pity, I don't have time in my life for that.

Same as McSweeney's, I used to read it and I thought it was funny and now I read it and it comes across as self-pity.

Give me decorative gourd season any time, but pieces where people complain about the things they haven't done aren't worth my time.

Something new, please.

yepthatsreality2• 6 years ago

If you haven't read the article, you're hitting on the tongue-and-cheek-ness of it.

juniper_strong2• 6 years ago

I read the article.

Nope.

mjayhn• 6 years ago

That twist was a definite kick in the ass to this 35yo, question is will I wake up tomorrow still acting on it.

hyuuu• 6 years ago

this is an interesting view: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3LopI4YeC4I

how luck plays a role to your success but also how you perceive your success which will change your behavior

vonwoodson• 6 years ago

That moment when your iPhone says “your usage is down 30% to 4 hours a day”

m0zg• 6 years ago

I didn’t finish my Ph.D. in political science

That's a worthwhile accomplishment in itself.

tus88• 6 years ago

Sometimes I think the MSM is deliberately writing articles so they will trend on HN.

Kiro• 6 years ago

I feel the opposite. I'm a complete slacker but had a lot success in life and accomplished so much I never thought was possible. I don't deserve any of this and I feel my biggest asset is my incredible luck.

gstipi3• 6 years ago

I love life. I'm 37.

Being alive in itself is truly remarkable. I've made great friends. I've met people who ended up disappointing me greatly. I've married a smart, beautiful, ambitious woman twelve years ago. We've went through exhilarating ups and soulcrushing downs.

I've worked for a startup, which almost went under several times. I've worked for a corporate thresher which sucked life right out of me.

I've worked on niche projects in my spare time, which so far have amounted to nothing.

I've had panic attacks. I've experienced months of mania and perceived greatness.

Life is a present which keeps on giving. I'm grateful. Accomplishments are a matter of perception, experience in itself is utterly exhilarating to me.

I love life. I'm 37.

vishnumohandas2• 6 years ago

This is the best thing I've read today. Thank you. :)

gstipi3• 6 years ago

Thank you, I would love to read your perspective if you feel like sharing!

oars• 6 years ago

Thank you, I really needed this.

gstipi3• 6 years ago

Thank you, friend, writing this felt very liberating.

syndacks3• 6 years ago

I've experienced months of mania and perceived greatness.

That hit hard amigo! Nicely written post.

chansiky• 6 years ago

This needs more upvotes. Life really should be about what you spend your time doing, not letting it waste away, not living for achievements, nor comparing ourselves to others, others from completely different worlds, but really making the most of the short time we have, whatever it is we are doing - having fun, doing work, taking a break, living life.

vilvadot• 6 years ago

Beautiful

swyx• 6 years ago

I've married a smart, beautiful, ambitious woman twelve years ago. We've went through exhilarating ups and soulcrushing downs.

this is the biggest part of my life that is missing. life is almost not worth living without it.

gjm11• 6 years ago

"It is a sobering thought that by the time Mozart was my age ... he had been dead for three years." -- Tom Lehrer

njacobs5074• 6 years ago

I spent most of my younger years making sure that my family was supported and that my kids could go to university without crushing debt afterwards.

Now I try to make sure that when I’m gone, it won’t create too much work for them to clean up after me.

I try not to be attached to worldly passions. It’s not easy but it feels like the right thing to do.

slipmagic• 6 years ago

I feel like my bullies have grown up to be successful while I ended up being a loser and it turned out that I wasn’t as smart as I thought I was. My hard work didn’t amount to much and the things I sacrificed for it were the things that actually mattered.

greybeard1812• 6 years ago

Angst about what you've accomplished is about the processes in your mind -- not so much about what you've actually accomplished. For that reason, accomplishments alone won't calm it.

In an odd coincidence, I did happen to complete my PhD before 35. I had also learned fluent though non-native French. I had already met a wonderful girl and had had 7 children with her.

None of that stopped me from having the same feeling that life was passing me by. I still have it all the time. It's a feeling. It can be useful. But feelings don't have to be rational.

I wouldn't be surprised if Musk and Bezos both look at their careers so far and feel frustrated and impatient from time to time either. It's just how (at least some) minds work.

dj_mc_merlin• 6 years ago

Angst about what you've accomplished is about the processes in your mind

Yes. All of this insecurity and fear about what one has accomplished is nothing more than processes put into peoples' mind as children about what they should accomplish, should be. What is the point of feeling sad about your life?

More importantly, why do they feel sad about their lives? Is it truly their decision, based on what they truly wanted, or an expectation that society (i.e. just other people) imposed on them? I have always lived with a sense that what I chose to do is meaningful and important for no other reason than I chose to do it. Why does one need more of a reason in life to reach goals than that, as long as you can satisfy your basic needs?

kjgkjhfkjf• 6 years ago

It's funny to see this in The New Yorker, because I was under the impression that The New Yorker was an elite publication where all writers aspired to be published.

Perhaps this is supposed to be the joke, since the article is labeled as humor, but I don't think that being a writer, even in the New Yorker, has the same prestige nowadays that it used to have before media became "democratized", so the joke is actually quite sad.

Realistically, the author probably should have been smart enough to realize that careers in the arts are the domain of the idle rich, and learned how to code.

yters2• 6 years ago

they said in a new yorker article...

caligulatte• 6 years ago

The piece has pathos and is funny and feels universal, but I cannot help but think the truth is somewhat diminished when its author is published by The New Yorker!

quickthrower27• 6 years ago

I didn’t even get into tedx as an audience member

shrimpx• 6 years ago

It’s ridiculous to think that you’ve failed unless you’re the founder of a smash hit company, or a movie star, or a hundred millionaire, or a famous scientist. Those are very very low probability outcomes.

The worst life to live is where you’ve sliced up your day into strict intervals of mantra contemplation, deep work, practicing guitar, working out, eating on a strict diet, etc., basically becoming your own slave, ultimately to no great outcome, because it turns out those “great outcomes” are not a function of this militaristic masochism.

alexmingoia• 6 years ago

Accomplishments should serve self-esteem. I want to be proud of what I did. You really only need one endeavor, and it doesn’t need to make money. It matters not whether your accomplishments are numerous or lucrative, but that your accomplishments make you feel good about yourself.

Where people lose their way is playing games they can’t win, or that they aren’t proud of. A common example is a career doing work you’re not proud of, that you get no respect for. You may “win” but you don’t feel any better. Or you spread yourself too thin preventing any meaningful accomplishment.

When I was a 9-5 software engineer I had low self-esteem. I was making great money, had a good job, but we weren’t creating software I was proud of. Meanwhile, I fell in love with and mastered a sport outside of work. The pride of mastering something I and others cared about and respected made me feel better than I ever did at my job. I realized then I should be chasing accomplishments that I can be proud of. That I should focus on doing less, and only doing what I derive my self-esteem from. I realized I didn’t need a fancy career or lots of money, I needed to do something I was a proud of.

I think a lot of people are doing something they really don’t care about, and justifying it to themselves because it’s lucrative, or a “good” job, or other people tell them to be proud of it but they personally aren’t.

naveen99• 6 years ago

What i did today was more important than what I didn’t do. Make it a tautology !

shannifin• 6 years ago

I can definitely relate to being disappointed with myself after wasting too much time online (YouTube is usually my addiction).

Problem is, even when I am productive, I usually don't feel much better for it. At least I don't feel guilty, but I don't really feel satisfied either. Feeling satisfied at the end of the day just seems to be random.

nsandell123• 6 years ago

This was depressing

yters2• 6 years ago

The range of possible accomplishments is too broad, each requiring a lifetime of focus, and thus cause people to hop from accomplishment to accomplishment.

sidcool• 6 years ago

The wiliest addictions in life are subtle. Tobacco or alcohol at least have the decency to warn with adverse and severe health effects, often dissuading some from the habit.

Internet is the subtle monster. I am not literally comparing internet addiction to the ones mentioned above. I am just saying that quitting internet is as difficult, if not more, than quitting tobacco or alcohol, and mainly because of its termite like nature to hollow out the mind. It's slow but steady, as most cruel things are.

siddharthgoel88• 6 years ago

With me it is not a question of what or why but how.

Conceptually, I know why I should do a task at hand and complete it. I also know the priorities which task is more important and which are less.

The part which pulls me down each time is how to convince my brain at the instant where it is telling me to watch that netflix trailer, mindless scroll fb, etc. instead of the work that was needed to be done. What is the framework/trick/technique that people use to not give at that weak moment?

dmje• 6 years ago

Here's what's astounding to me: scrolling through the responses here on HN shows an almost total focus on money and career. I read the piece and thought about life and personal ambition. That's kinda interesting.

Anyway, fwiw: I'm 47, living by the sea in the most beautiful bit of the UK, and running a successful micro business which works with non profits.

I've deliberately chosen a path over the last decade which is about family, and I say no to any business which would cause high levels of stress, no matter how lucrative. I only work with people I like. I say no to lots of work. I've deliberately taken the choice to not grow staff or move into an office, even though we have the financials and potential to do so.

Why? Because life is about more than work. I've got two teenage kids. I see them for hours every day (not 20 minutes which I read recently is the average US dad daily contact time with his kids). I get to surf with them, to eat with them, to be with my wife, to read, to play piano and do hobbies.

Do I put some money aside? Yes, a bit. Is it enough? Who knows, and who cares. I'll work until I'm 90 if I have to so I can continue to have this quality of life with my family and the environment around me.

I'm incredibly, incredibly lucky - there's no doubt I've had a great path through life so far. But if I'm able to offer advice now it appears I'm an old git (and yes, the speed with which life happens is as per the article, it's terrifying!) - it's this: live your life. Live it and be poor. Take every single chance you can to be with your friends and family. Say yes to work that makes you happy. If it doesn't, find something else. In your 20's you'll want to eat the world. Do it, while you have the energy and appetite, but know that when you get older your tastes are going to change. Slow down, and accept that most of the best things in life aren't work, aren't money, and don't require either to create meaning.

Be in your life.

novaRom• 6 years ago

You are too optimistic for a man in a world ruled by populists and monopolies. And environment around you is changing. You still may enjoy it, will your children have that possibility?

maccard2• 6 years ago

It sounds like they're doing all they can to ensure their kids enjoy it. Sure, the world might be very different in 15 years time, but there's almost nothing they can do about that. Assuming they have enough money to get by, it sounds like he's spending time with them, which is the most likely thing that their kids will miss when the world changes.

syndacks3• 6 years ago

If you're an aspiring writer and get published in The New Yorker, you've accomplished a lot :)

aleksjess• 6 years ago

A funny, yet a bit anxiety-fueling article about how time passes by quickly without us noticing. I feel as if it's more about us setting our goals way too high because of the internet, TV, and others. We see different people achieving so much every day, although we don't notice, that it's a) different people b) it takes them years and years and years c) they are one in a million type of people

known• 6 years ago

"Experience is the name everyone gives to their mistakes" --Oscar

sunstone• 6 years ago

The secret of happiness is low expectations.

todd8• 6 years ago

I'm a bit uncomfortable giving advice. I'm skeptical of the survivor bias that provides people on the cover of Fortune magazine the platform to opine about how to be a success. Nevertheless, I'd like to encourage others no matter their age to find a path in life that make them happy.

At 38, I started what became a very successful company; it ended up being publicly traded. I could just as easily have done the same thing at 48. Think, work hard, and know that you can recover from setbacks, in my opinion they are likely to be numerous.

One of my friends is very successful. He had to drop out of high school because it was too difficult for him, but he worked hard and learned as he worked and now runs his own large successful company. He's a great guy with a great family; from walking though his factory with him it's apparent that he likes and is liked by the people that work for him and with him. I wish I lived in a house as beautiful as his, but I don't begrudge him his success--he's an amazing guy that did it himself.

I sometimes wonder if it was just luck for me. Perhaps, but I didn't have some wonderful mentor or rich parents. I just decided that I would try different approaches until I built a happy life for myself.

ca98am79• 6 years ago

The goal of life is happiness - right? We can all agree on that. So the thing to figure out is how to attain happiness.

What I have found is that the less you judge things, the happier you are. In fact, the only way to be unhappy or to suffer is to judge something as bad. Like in this article - a lot of judging of things that are "bad."

If you eliminate this one thing - judgement - then you are happy. Always. So this is the trick for me - removing judgement from my life. Meditating has been a good practice of it.

I thought I would have accomplished a lot more today and also before I was 35

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