Ask HN: Have you ever had a changed-your-life moment?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32248016

by 2143 • 4 years ago

101 234 4 years ago

news.ycombinator.com

Something that happened over a small span of time that totally changed the trajectory of your life?

zoover2020• 4 years ago

Applied to FANG for an internship and 5 years later I'm still there.

I'd call it life-changing as I can FIRE around 40 now (current trajectory). Planning to care for my siblings however, so realistically it's more like 45-50.

gernb• 4 years ago

it's surprising to me how many people I know that have been at FAAMG for 15+ yrs and are still there.

avgDev2• 4 years ago

Life style creep or just like the work?

cumshitpiss• 4 years ago

surviving a mass shooting

The conversation surrounding such events and lack of political or social will to change left me jaded with Americana, ultimately I left the country and decided to contribute to a more sane society.

jzellis3• 4 years ago

Me too. I wasn't at the October First shooting in Vegas, but I was not far away and I helped take food and stuff to first responders and hospital staff in the trauma ward after. Watching people call that a "false flag" was contemptible.

jzellis3• 4 years ago

And now I live in England, where a loud report really is a car backfiring. It has its problems, but I'm not likely to get shot or go bankrupt from a hospital bill.

gaws6• 4 years ago

The conversation surrounding such events and lack of political or social will to change left me jaded with Americana

A sad state of affairs in which a country gives more rights to firearms than a woman.

jzellis3• 4 years ago

Many of them. A heart attack followed by open heart surgery on the day the coronavirus was officially declared a pandemic was one of them. Having the parent company of my online music store fail was another.

You can always find these moments in your life, but usually in retrospect.

buro9• 4 years ago

Your question is so broad that I'm not sure that you will yield any satisfying answer.

But yes, many times. The problem is that some of the most profound and lasting changes come from trauma that requires significant content warnings or require a degree of empathy that only other survivors appear able to fully understand or display. As such, these things are hard to talk about on an immutable public forum.

trhr• 4 years ago

Once upon a time my buddy was in the data center swapping drives, so i logged onto all the servers. 8 cabinets and like ~18 or so servers in each.

~$ base64 /dev/urandom

I don't know if that qualifies as 'changing my life' but when he told me he had to plug his ears and run away because it was so loud, it certainly made me want to turn this into a long-term career.

yunohn• 4 years ago

Could you explain further?

5e92cb50239222b2• 4 years ago

Probably CPU cooling getting extremely loud. Server fans are notorious for very high levels of noise unlike what you usually see in personal desktops. (At least I think so, never having actually been in a datacenter due to living in the middle of nowhere.)

mg• 4 years ago

When I was a little kid, I was at a department store and saw a guy doing something with a television. Or so I thought.

Me: What are you doing?

He: I am programming. What's your name?

Me: MG

He: Check this out:

    10 PRINT "MG"
    20 GOTO 10

Me: Woah!

I picked a book from a shelf about "Basic" and started to try figuring out how this worked. And never stopped. Have been looking at these "televisions" more than anything else since then.

scary-size• 4 years ago

[deleted]

karamanolev• 4 years ago

While I appreciate this comment is well-intentioned, can we please not turn HN into Reddit? I strongly prefer ready more pithy content.

300bps• 4 years ago

Same thing for me watching my 5th grade teacher program a Commodore Vic-20. I was instantly hooked.

mindslight• 4 years ago

Scene playing out ca. 2013:

Store Manager: It looks like someone hacked our computer, let's call the police, they'll know what to do.

FBI: Our diligent detective work has uncovered the perp is named MG. We will lock him up for 20 years for a CFAA violation.

Store Manager: Isn't that kind of harsh? I've since called the tech support line who told me to turn it off and back on again, and that seems to have fixed it.

Corporate management: We don't support this prosecution.

Prosecutor: Our job is to work in the public interest. Microsoft has suffered because people might think their operating system isn't secure.

MG: All this stress of being persecuted by a bureaucratic meat grinder is making me awfully depressed ...

... talk about a much different type of life changing event.

dole• 4 years ago

More like 1983. This was me at our local Sears department store, loading up every demo BASIC computer with digital vandalism.

euroderf• 4 years ago

I had a religious experience decades ago. Stone cold sober. I only talk about it with my closest friends, because I don't want to be perceived as another nutter. But it keeps me up when I am feeling down, and holds out the promise of living a life on a proper path. My 0,02€, YMMV.

whoooooo123• 4 years ago

I know I'm not one of your closest friends, but can you elaborate on what your experience was?

shimonabi• 4 years ago

You don't have to be drunk or high to have hallucinations.

jiggywiggy3• 4 years ago

Hallucinations are often not religious experiences. Most often when people feel it's religious it's connected to a deep sense of meaning. This can be accompanied to drugs and or hallucinations but doesn't have to. Often connected to feeling of perception of self dissolving, not having any seperatioe, feeling fully one or dissolving into the "outer" world

5e92cb50239222b2• 4 years ago

Not at all surprised this is getting downvoted. There's a decent book on this theme:

https://www.amazon.com/Hallucinations-Oliver-Sacks/dp/030794...

where the author postulates that a decent portion of society experiences hallucinations at least once in their lifetime without any "helpers" like drugs or sleep deprivation. (I don't remember the exact percentage, read that thing ages ago).

I think this is how religions get started.

TimedToasts• 4 years ago

I had one too!

Lasted less than five seconds but it felt like 'the hand of God' passed through me - that's the best way I can describe it.

William James described a religious experience as having four qualities: - Ineffable: the experience is incapable of being described and must be directly experienced to be understood. - Noetic: the experience is understood to be a state of knowledge through which divine truths can be learned. - Transient: the experience is of limited duration. - Passivity: the subject of the experience is passive, unable to control the arrival and departure of the experience.

...and that tracks 100% with how I experienced mine.

purplerabbit• 4 years ago

Same.

Yes, it was also a hallucination, as other commenters have pointed out. But if you allow yourself to be affected by ideas, or art (i.e., synthetic visual or audio experiences), shouldn't you be open to being affected by a unique positive experience generated by your own specific mental architecture? Almost definitionally, it's possible that such an experience could impart you with something more meaningful than something generated externally.

Also, to other commenters: such an experience is obviously very difficult to communicate about effectively. It was formulated by and for your own brain, and so will be hard to translate effectively to a different architecture.

thih9• 4 years ago

Clothes dryers aren’t that popular in Europe. Getting one a year ago and having access to clean clothes faster and with less effort had a surprisingly big positive impact on me.

878654Tom• 4 years ago

This seems quite anecdotal. For example, around 60% of the Dutch population has one. Belgium is around 70%. The USA/Canada is around 80%.

For me personally, I never bought one. I have a garden and the sun works quite well, it is much cheaper and a very easy environmental way to dry your clothes. (In the USA, clothes dryers are the third most consuming residential electrical energy consumers)

onion2k• 4 years ago

I went to university in 1997 to study Broadcast Engineering with every intention of going into the film industry. Some friends and I decided to make ourselves some webpages after reading about HTML in a magazine, and after a few late nights of not getting things to work I saw my first page load in Mosaic 2.0. I realised anyone in the world could access it. You can't get that feeling of connectedness from anything else. I completely changed my career goals and decided I wanted to build web stuff instead. I'm still doing it 25 years on.

LAC-Tech• 4 years ago

Honestly my whole career has been a series of these.

Growing up no one in my family had a professional job. Most of them didn't even work. So while I knew that in theory I could get a CS degree and have a software career, it wasn't something I really felt in my bones. Even after I got the degree I did not feel confident that one of "us" could get a job like one of "them", especially when you're raised with that working class crab mentality.

Later on, it was getting my first self employed contract. I had dreamed about going solo, but always doubted I could pull off. Then it was getting my invoice paid by a director of an overseas company I had never met. Something I knew was possible but felt like utopian science fiction when I read it on HN.

So as cheesy as it sounds - my career has changed my life forever. The realisation that I didn't have to struggle to make ends meet, and that I was in the drivers seat of my own life.

albrewer• 4 years ago

raised with that working class crab mentality

Man, I thought I was the only one that described it like this, but apparently it's so common it has its own Wikipedia page[0]. The entire fucking region I lived in was too busy acting like crabs in a bucket instead of building something better for everyone.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crab_mentality

CalRobert8• 4 years ago

Also called tall poppy syndrome

kickaha• 4 years ago

Golly, brother. I feel you all the way down to my toes. My parents just openly, declaratively resent my leaving misery behind for a rewarding and financially secure career.

Wanna hear the super effed up part? I COMPLETELY UNDERSTAND their feelings! Like so many other modalities of code-switching I’ve learned, with just a little concentration I can go back and forth: having my kids do better than me is the main objective in life [VWOOP!!] the worst misfortune that can befall a parent.

cies2• 4 years ago

When a kid (10+ years younger) at a rave told me --being a vegetarian at the time-- that I'm not "nice to animals" and not "doing enough" and if I cared to be consistent with my beliefs I should go vegan.

Also: children, DMT, studying Buddhism and a not to be named hard-core socialist music festival near Berlin.

hit8run• 4 years ago

Wow. One can never satisfy these woke little know it alls hah?

rco8786• 4 years ago

Imagine taking time out of your day to post this

virtual_void• 4 years ago

I’d like to draw your attention to the comment guidelines here.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Gravyness• 4 years ago

Wise people appear to never be quite sure about what they say, so they rarely incur huge changes in people life, but dumb people have such a limited map of reality that everything is crystal clear and therefore they are the ones people pay attention to.

A good nutritionists would never say such nonsense but that varies on how we definite "good".

jokethrowaway2• 4 years ago

Anectotal, but after 10 years following a (protein rich, trying to bulk with mediocre results) 99% vegan diet, I started having terrible stomach problems (including all sort of bleeding and explosions).

After 2 years of suffering, doctors told me it was unexplained, most likely due to stress and that I should avoid eating fatty meats as my cholesterol was very high (despite basically not eating food). They wanted to put me on statins.

I did the opposite and switched to a carnivore diet - and my symptoms disappeared in a week.

gaws6• 4 years ago

not to be named hard-core socialist music festival near Berlin.

Why not name it?

cies2• 4 years ago

Keep the rest in the dark. They dont want it to be advertised, it already attracts more people than it can handle.

Try Burning Man, some say it has similar vibes minus the radical socialism.

nickreese• 4 years ago

In college I had a small freelancing business doing email marketing for real estate. I needed to use the photos from one of the real estate firm's websites that I worked with.

On a whim I setup a lunch with the freelance developer of this website.

A little nervous I showed up in a dress shirt and khakis. He showed up in ratty old white t-shirt with pit-stains, disheveled, and completely unwashed.

As we ate the expensive meal I was treating him to, I couldn't help think but the meeting was a waste of effort and money.

As we got up to leave, he mentioned a little website he made about mosquito ringtones that made $100 day and that was why he didn't care about our mutual real estate client. He just wanted to maximize his passive income.

It was that day I learned about affiliate marketing and SEO. As a finance/marketing guy it changed my life 100%. Taught myself WordPress, SEO, PPC, and everything in between.

Funny as I was dead set on becoming a ibanker.

exDM692• 4 years ago

I visited (trespassed) in an underground bomb shelter with accomodations for 11000 (eleven thousand) people. It was mothballed and parts of it were used as storage, but most of what would be needed for housing people there if war or nuclear fallout would hit was there.

Dry toilets with no privacy, toilet paper, some dry rations, mattresses, blankets, air filters, first aid kits etc. For 11k people.

It was two giant vaults, 5.5k per vault.

It changed my views on war and peace. Made me stop playing war games and watching war movies.

I wish peace would return to Europe soon. Right now, there are people who have to endure conditions worse than what I saw not very far from here.

v-erne2• 4 years ago

> Made me stop playing war games and watching war movies.

Thats really interesting reaction - probably totally opposite of mine. I honestly believe that war is one of mankind's stupidest invention and suspect that there are no heroes on any battlefield - only naive, stupid and unlucky ones that mostly use pieces of metal with high kinetic energy to pierce through flesh of others. I would never agree to take active part in it. But despite that I love war movies and war games. War theme allows for very good, emotionally charged (in oposition to kinetically charged irl) and captivating narrative that is hard to create otherwise. But nonetheless this is the only good place for war - fantasy.

postsantum• 4 years ago

War isn't mankind's invention - apes has been waging wars since forever

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gombe_Chimpanzee_War

exDM692• 4 years ago

War games and movies mostly focus on the soldiers. But they are a really small part of the people involved in it.

Being exposed to this faux imagery of war messes with people's perception of war. This is especially true for people from countries that have not experienced war on their own territory in centuries and only see it on TV.

Obligatory mention of the game "This War of Mine" where the protagonists are civilians. I could not bring myself to try it, I would probably lose sleep over it.

Unfortunately, being a male in a conscription country, I do not have the luxury of choosing whether to take part in it or not (well I could choose a prison sentence instead). If our neighbors get belligerent, I will be called to arms. Last time I checked, there is a seat in an armored vehicle with my name on it.

badpun• 4 years ago

honestly believe that war is one of mankind's stupidest invention and suspect that there are no heroes on any battlefield - only naive, stupid and unlucky ones that mostly use pieces of metal with high kinetic energy to pierce through flesh of others.

I strongly disagree with that. There were and are plenty of heoric people who chose to put themselves in harm's way and die if necessary, in order to save other people and prevent the world from becoming a worse place. Sometimes the good and evil in war are not so clear, but there are also plenty of clear-cut situations where it's obvious that the invaders will just rape, torture and kill people until someone stops them.

acomjean• 4 years ago

My Mom was very anti-war. No toy guns in our house. (We could play war games like diplomacy and risk when older). It turns out one of her first memory was fleeing her home being bombed in WWII.

rayxi271828• 4 years ago

My father passing away. Not because of COVID, it happened in 2019.

Somehow it triggered my awareness and focus on taking care of myself better. It made "death" very real for me, to the degree that it had never been up to that point.

I have been able to work out a lot more regularly motivated by "how to live longer and healthier", vs. "I want to have a jacked body to attract women".

sasaf5• 4 years ago

When a university buddy told me: "with VHDL you make the instructions yourself. You can make your own registers!"

He didn't need to tell me anything else. It was 2006. I am still designing chips.

MrDresden• 4 years ago

Feeling no particular drive for having children for most of my adult life, that changed when me and my partner got the very shocking news that she was pregnant last november. We were there to start the process to harvest her eggs, as she was about to undergo aggressive cancer treatment that would leave her unable to conceive children afterwards.

The pregnancy turned out to not be viable, and two weeks later the treatment started.

Seeing that heartbeat changed everything. Nothing seems to matter anymore in comparison to having kids, as a life goal.

jiggywiggy3• 4 years ago

Wait till you get them ;). Sort of joking. I know the feeling, also had that. Getting them is very different from this high, but probably even more worth it. Although you will be more tired and busy then ever before.

bbkane• 4 years ago

I just finished feeding my first baby, and I'm not sure when I'll have time for anything else again.

sakerbos3• 4 years ago

You will never be bored again

k_sze• 4 years ago

I think learning Python changed my life.

Learning Groovy came close, but it wasn’t as popular as Python, and the Java ecosystem was still a drag.

Python actually made programming effortless and enjoyable for me.

em-bee3• 4 years ago

i had a similar experience. when i started to study i did an internship at a friends company where i was programming ATMs and related software with case tools in your typical office environment. i decided then, that i hated working in an office and even though i studied computer science, i'd not work as a fulltime programmer.

until i discovered the pike programming language, and i realized that programming is actually fun, or as you say effortless and enjoyable and i realized that working in an office was not the reason why i didn't like programming but not working on meaningful projects with enjoyable tools.

sailorganymede• 4 years ago

I got dumped by someone who I really thought could be the one. It taught me that the world has its own plans, irrespective of my own wants, and good times end. Sort of snapped me out of autopilot for the first time in my life.

docdeek• 4 years ago

I was traveling around north-west Australia in 2001 and hadn’t seen the news in weeks. I stopped at a cheap hotel in Broome for a couple of days as a treat and to take a warm shower after weeks of camping, switched on the TV, and saw the wall-to-wall coverage of 9/11 that had happened the day before. I didn’t understand what I was seeing and I sure didn’t understand why it had happened. I decided I should try and figure that out.

Four months later I enrolled in an undergraduate international relations program on the other side of the country in an effort to understand why these sorts of things happen. I went on to write my PhD in the field and the study and teaching of international politics became my life for probably the next 15 years.

russelg• 4 years ago

Only possible in Broome, where there really isn't all that much to do

CalRobert8• 4 years ago

In 2012 I bought a book called "Getting Out: Your Guide to Leaving America".

It had a chapter on how to move to (almost) every country in the world. Nothing seemed practical, I didn't have the skills and there was a recession.

But in the end there were some interviews with people who had left, and there was a throwaway line: "I got a working holiday visa for Ireland"

I didn't even know working holiday visas existed! I figured I could move to Ireland for a year and enjoy what I could.

6 months in I wasn't having much luck finding a longer term sponsor, despite applying lots of different places.

Then I was at the pub and heard someone having a laugh about "JSON? I said JASON!" (it was funnier when we were drunk) Had a chat, got an interview, got a job, got a green card, and recently got naturalized.

I think a lot of things in life have been small serendipities like this.

nicolas_t3• 4 years ago

I always mention looking at working holiday visas to any friends who bemoans how hard it is to leave their country. For anyone below 30, it's often a very good pathway to immigrating, getting a job and eventually a more stable visa situation.

I've also seen it combined with student visas, so one year on a student visa to learn the language (that costs more in most countries, although there are some countries with relatively cheap language courses and possibility to work for up to 20 hours a week, example Japan or France) then a working holiday visa and then finding a sponsor.

coldtea4• 4 years ago

In many cases you don't even need a "working holiday visa" to go and live somewhere else.

E.g. if you have a remote job, you can just travel to a third country and work from there. Most countries just require that you get out for a few days per 3 or 6 months (which can be just visiting a nearby country, staying in a hotel, and returning) to renew your plain tourist visa.

tiddles• 4 years ago

I remember reading your post about this a few years ago, when I was first considering moving abroad!

Glad it’s going well for you. I have recently taken the plunge and moved to Estonia :)

CalRobert8• 4 years ago

Wonderful! I hope it's a journey full of small delights and unexpected joys.

hamter• 4 years ago

When it comes to working holiday visas this is one of those times non-Americans[1] actually have _more_ options than Americans.

1: Western non-Americans, more specifically, unfortunately..

CalRobert8• 4 years ago

US citizens can avail of WH visas for Ireland, New Zealand, Australia, and (more restrictive) South Korea and Singapore.

Though some of the new digital nomad visas coming out aren't entirely dissimilar.

atemerev4• 4 years ago

I live in Europe, but I would love to move to America someday; the opportunities to start something there are vastly more visible (European startup culture is nearly a contradiction in terms). Sadly, it becomes increasingly more difficult.

jacquesm5• 4 years ago

You probably want to do that when you are young and healthy.

jacquesm5• 4 years ago

It started with you taking action though. Lots of people wait and hang around for serendipity to find them.

q7xvh97o2pDhNrh• 4 years ago

Ah, just another classic example of how much the details matter when parsing JSON. ;)

Very cool story. It's funny how little decisions can ripple out into huge changes to a life trajectory. I suppose the art of it all is to occasionally make a few good little decisions -- and ride the momentum when you do. Glad yours worked out!

nikivi• 4 years ago

Yes. When I figured out how to do hyper keys with Karabiner.

https://wiki.nikiv.dev/macOS/apps/karabiner

baal80spam• 4 years ago

This is completely irrelevant to the topic at hand but my employer provided me a MBP yesterday. Being a Windows guy all my life, I naturally wanted to remap some keys so I looked for an app to do that. Karabiner-elements was the most recommended so I got it. I was _shocked_ to see how much space this tiny app uses [1]. I bet such an utility for Windows written in terse C/C++ would take no more than 1MB (if that). I truly hate today's "programming" using ton of frameworks built upon ton of other frameworks.

[1] https://i.imgur.com/DSSXY39.jpeg

/rant over

teejmya• 4 years ago

Karabiner Elements is ~19 MB: https://github.com/pqrs-org/Karabiner-Elements/releases

In your screenshot, the value you reference is the size of the entire package repository: https://github.com/Homebrew/homebrew-cask

Your point still stands as these sizes are larger than one would expect. Just food for thought.

jjgreen• 4 years ago

A friend of mine wanted to make some speaker-stands from some thick pieces of wood, in a Z shape. He didn't know what angle to cut it, so asked me (knowing that I had, some years earlier, obtained a maths A-level). The problem reduced to solving a quadratic, but I couldn't remember the formula for the solutions (-b ± something?) so spent 2-3 days trying to reconstruct the proof (this was pre-internet). Eventually I cracked it, and enjoyed the process so much that I applied to study maths at University ... He never did make those bloody speaker-stands.

auspex• 4 years ago

Sing this to chorus of Jingle Bells and you’ll never forget it.

X equals opposite of B + or - square root… b squared minus 4 AC all Over 2 A… yay!

jasonjmcghee• 4 years ago

We learned it to the tune of "pop goes the weasel"

sph• 4 years ago

Learned I have ADHD and getting medicated in the span of 3 months has completely changed my quality of life and my outlook on the future.

The second best thing was during a dark time with work-related burnout of top to take my mental health seriously and talk with a therapist. Made it a serious commitment for a couple years and it's been the best investment in time and money I could ever have made. Learned a lot about myself, my approach to the world, the world's approach to myself and what makes me tick... just by talking it out.

Nothing else in my life has created such long-lasting and radical changes in relatively short time.

boberoni• 4 years ago

This question and these comments are giving me flashbacks to when I first discovered (and became a habitual visitor of) r/AskReddit. Back around 2014.

I don’t read r/AskReddit anymore these days. I replaced it with this site..

confp• 4 years ago

When my dad died, shortly followed by my mum.

It really made me realise the futility of life.

Since then, it's been ten years or so, and I look forward to being dead.

Not for any religious, spiritual purpose, but just to get all this life nonsense out of the way. It will be much easier to not exist any more.

ducharmdev• 4 years ago

This reminds me of a section towards the end of Plato's Apology:

...there is great reason to hope that death is a good, for one of two things: - either death is a state of nothingness and utter unconsciousness, or, as men say, there is a change and migration of the soul from this world to another. Now if you suppose that there is no consciousness, but a sleep like the sleep of him who is undisturbed even by the sight of dreams, death will be an unspeakable gain. For if a person were to select the night in which his sleep was undisturbed even by dreams, and were to compare with this the other days and nights of his life, and then were to tell us how many days and nights he had passed in the course of his life better and more pleasantly than this one, I think that any man, I will not say a private man, but even the great king, will not find many such days or nights, when compared with the others. Now if death is like this, I say that to die is gain; for eternity is then only a single night.

victorclf• 4 years ago

Oh, I hope some of the stories here will motivate you to seek help.

baby• 4 years ago

I feel like there are a few moments that can change your life, at least I think I can resume them as:

* health issue

* read a book

* break up / got into a relationship

* moved abroad

* got a new job

The easiest way is really to read a book. The problem is finding the right book and spending time reading bad books.

oleander733• 4 years ago

(Not trying to score sympathy points) I got diagnosed with metastatic cancer (incurable). Five weeks later (while getting chemo) I quit my job. I was a workaholic software developer. I haven't programmed since. Best decision I ever made and I'm happy and enjoy life (with some limitations).

jpnc• 4 years ago

Genuine question: what keeps you coming back to this site?

oleander733• 4 years ago

I think partially out of habit and every now and then there's something really interesting that reinforces the habit :-)

usgroup2• 4 years ago

What do you do now?

oleander733• 4 years ago

I'm retired. I live in a country where healthcare costs aren't an issue and have enough savings to live on for my projected lifespan.

davehcker• 4 years ago

Quite few I had (assuming OPs question to be broad enough)-

1. Reading Malcolm X's autobiography _The Autobiography of Malcolm X_ in college. It transformed me such that within that one week of reading it, I developed (given my low standards) the strongest sense of orderliness in my life. Additionally, I decided for myself 'to straighten myself up' for this life.

2. Reading Dostoevsky's _Brothers Karamazov_. My 'inner' transformation (at the age of around 20.5) was so immense that it was also apparent from the outside. My transformation was 'not to be surprised by bad/evil' and seeing good in everything.

3. In programming/ computer science/ functional programming/ mathematics (I still don't fully get LISP, Haskell et. al. like other people here) but there are encounters in the field of lambda calculus, computation, cryptography that have left me totally transformed. Too many to elaborate.

paskozdilar4• 4 years ago

I remember a conversation with a dear friend of mine. I was studying CS at the time, he was studying Philosophy.

We went into a discussion over some esoteric topics, and we got stuck on a definition of a word, so I asked him "but how do we know what exactly does [the word] mean?", to which in response he paused, looked me in the eye, and just said:

    It means whatever the hell we agree it means.

That sentence has been with me ever since. For some reason, my whole life before that moment, I've had a feeling that words have some definite meaning that we can somehow learn. Only then did I realize how language actually works - every word is just an agreement between humans.

Ever since I've been spending a lot of time learning how to communicate effectively. I believe that a lot of bad things in the world happen simply because of miscommunication of ideas - more precisely, not being in agreement to what some words mean, while using them in discussions, assuming the other person has exactly the same understanding of the word as we do.

Nowdays, in discussions, when I feel that there's "something wrong" in the air, I tend to ask people "what do you mean by X" and some people get annoyed by it. But the number of times I've defused a conflict that way, by revealing it to be pure misunderstanding, makes it worth it.

hahnchen• 4 years ago

Yeah it’s interesting how much people unknowingly fight over semantics.

Ever since I've been spending a lot of time learning how to communicate effectively

How exactly do you learn this?

parabyl• 4 years ago

For me, simply spending time with a Philosophy graduate in, and having these exact sorts of discussions around language quite frequently has had the effect of encouraging me to constantly question how efficiently I'm communicating (at times, to detriment).

On a more basic level however, logical sentence structure is a good place to start: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logical_form

paskozdilar4• 4 years ago

How exactly do you learn this?

Unfortunately, I don't have a good answer to this. My learning process is somewhat chaotic and random. Reading analytic philosophy and psychology definitely gave me important insights.

However, the method I've found works the best is try to imagine society as a system, and humans as processes in the system. Every human has their own will, and they decide what they will or will not do. Nobody owes anyone anything, so every human protocol relies on the will of the other person to follow the protocol with us. So the most important question for any kind of communication is "how do we get the other person to do what we want?".

This may sound selfish, but is (in my experience) more efficient than trying to read minds or conform to some abstract authority of how we should act, then being mad at other people when they act the way that doesn't fit the abstract authority. Even more, it makes dealing with you easier for other people, which makes other people like you more.

nindalf• 4 years ago

I found the book Nonviolent Communication helped me a lot to improve my style of communication.

It helped reinforce the importance of listening and communicating in a way that the other person knows they’ve been listened to. How to change the framing of what I’m saying so the other person doesn’t feel like they’re being attacked.

Maybe some of this stuff is obvious/natural to some people. But for the rest of us are this book is a good place to start.

coldtea4• 4 years ago

In lots of ways?

Good spelling, grammar, and syntax, for example are basic prerequisites (and many people have margins for improvement).

An expanded and more precise vocabulary is also important. For this you can make an effort of looking up dictionary definitions (especially for any word you're not 100% clear on its meaning), read technical, historical, and philosophical dictionaries (those are special-purpose dictionaries, as opposed to a generic one).

Reading (widely accepted as) good prose and non-fiction also helps pick up ways to structure your own communication.

Reading books on writing (e.g. "On writing well", "The elements of style") will also help.

Learning a second language also makes more evident all kinds of internal language workings and subleties that monolingual people often ignore or take for granted.

And, of course, practice (talking to people, speaking publicly, writing a blog, etc.) makes perfect...

anonAndOn• 4 years ago

How exactly do you learn this?

In some graduate programs, Getting to Yes[0] is the first book of the first semester. But isn't this book about negotiation, you might ask?[1]

[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Getting_to_Yes [1]https://gfycat.com/likableglitteringaldabratortoise-keanu-re...

solarmist3• 4 years ago

I learned the mechanics of this from Conscious Business [1]. The point of view is in business, but you can transfer all of these lessons to personal communication too.

Fighting over semantics is like negotiation or discussions on 'alignment' in business. Ensuring you're talking about the same thing by ensuring you have a common point of understanding and purpose in the discussion.

[1] https://www.embracepossibility.com/blog/conscious-business-h...

thunderbong• 4 years ago

I get this epiphany every time I start driving on a particular side of the road!

jacquesm5• 4 years ago

That tends to be a short-lived kind of epiphany.

roey2009• 4 years ago

There's a discipline of communication called, Nonviolent Communication. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l7TONauJGfc It talks about communication via emotions, vs thoughts. I would suggest taking a look.

paskozdilar4• 4 years ago

This is great. So many ideas that I've had cooking in the background of my mind are crystallized and presented clearly in that video. Thank you for this.

solarmist3• 4 years ago

This becomes apparent when studying another language as well. Words don't map cleanly because, ultimately, definitions are arbitrary and decided by tradition and shared understanding.

I still had problems with this, though, because I took the "assuming the other person has exactly the same understanding of the word as we do" to the other extreme and got pedantic in my conversation, frequently side-tracking to explain every important concept.

Since I read Conscious Business, I've changed to more of what you describe and only detour when we seem to be butting heads on something unexpected.

gonzo412• 4 years ago

I broke my back (shatter a few discs) in the Army and it wrecked my career but it probably saved my life. Recovery was a slow process, but the change was sudden. It took me a while the learn the lessons from the experience. Which can be broadly summed up as " Try and end up spending more time doing things you like, than things you don't".

ramesh314• 4 years ago

Better a broken back than a broken brain. If it's not the TBI or PTSD, the slow descent to alcoholic depression will do it. Never met another OIF/OEF combat vet without one of the three.

gonzo412• 4 years ago

I try not to think about Iraq too much. It was a big experience for me when I was a kid, and frankly it's insane we send 19 year olds off to war.

hobabaObama• 4 years ago

I was WAY behind in my study schedule and would have likely failed.

But in 2001 earthquake stuck and the exams were postponed. That extra time helped me complete my studies and I got more marks. Which helped me get into good college and have a stable career.

A tragedy actually changed my life.

em-bee3• 4 years ago

this just shows how ridiculous our current school system is, forcing everyone to learn at the same pace, and if you can't keep up you fail and don't get a chance to improve when all you really needed was a bit of extra time.

kamaal• 4 years ago

My own health issues, and then Dad's old age illness(heart attack, knee replacement surgeries)- Forced me to quit the code superstar life style, and I prioritised four things as the most important things in my life- Health, Side income, free time and peace of mind.

Nothing else has been more transformative.

cutthegrass22• 4 years ago

I've found that nothing lights a fire under your ass to get yourself into shape quite as much as having kids, especially as I was on the older side when I had mine.

nicolas_t3• 4 years ago

Hmm, sleep deprivation so far has conspired into me and my wife being in the worst shape of our lives... Both of us gained 10 pounds since my son was born :(

cutthegrass22• 4 years ago

find the strength brother!

When my kids are my age, i'll be 80. My father is still going strong so i'm trying to do everything I can to maximise QoL as I age in order to be there for my kids in future.

CalRobert8• 4 years ago

Wow, well done. I was in shape before having kids and I'm kind of a wreck now. I go for convenience foods and struggle to work 30 minutes of HIIT in to my day. Though I suspect if I lived somewhere I could throw them in a bakfiets for errands it would be different....

ActorNightly2• 4 years ago

There is me before my first psychedelic trip, and there me after, and those two are probably not the same person.

I still maintain that everyone of a sound mind should do psychedelics once. There are no real negatives (only meta negatives such as from loss of coordination leading to a fall, all of which are prevented by a trip sitter), and the perspective it gives you, namely being able to experience different emotion towards things including yourself, is invaluable.

erikrothoff• 4 years ago

What in your life or your personality changed? What have been the real effects on your life from this? Did you switch career paths, stopped being depressed, made a big move, stopped feeling ugly, etc? Or is it just that you see certain things differently? I'm really interested in this subject.

ActorNightly2• 4 years ago

The thing is, explaining what I went through is kinda pointless as I have found out from talking to other people, because every experience is extremely personal, so there is a large chance that your experience is going to be different.

The only common theme that seems to be common is basically the ability to experience a whole new range of thoughts in regards to yourself and your life, making you aware of the intrinsic thoughts you have about yourself that you aren't normally aware you are having.

caspii• 4 years ago

March 2020: Finding the body of my mother in the basement. She had died suddenly and unexpectedly that morning. The neighbours were alarmed because they couldn't reach her. I went to investigate. She was 74, so she didn't go too early and had a good death.

I realised that my life will be over relatively soon too. I decided to make it count (in little ways). Quit my job. Became a freelancer. Made a big effort to cut bullshit from my life. To give less fucks about irrelevant stuff. To be happier in simple and sustainable ways.

My favourite quote: "We all have 2 lives, the second begins when we realise we have only 1".

thisisnotanexit• 4 years ago

I like that quote

t-3• 4 years ago

Oh, there are infinitely many moments where the course of my life branched into some different direction, but nothing that really changed me. That's probably why I'm a loser, I never changed in since I was young, just let life wash over me like water.

netsharc• 4 years ago

Makes me think of the movie Everything, Everywhere, All At Once (it also involves parallel universes and life's failures).

A friend said the other day, tomorrow isn't written yet...

orwin• 4 years ago

Yeah, a tv advert for a new CS school.

I was studying to be a youth camp (or similar) director, specialized on culture. I drafted a second year pedagogical project was about computers, and i saw this emission (which might have been a disguised ad) about a new school, where the selection was basically one month of coding non-stop to learn the basics. I crushed the online tests (i did have a mathematic bachelor degree at the time, it helped). I hated the CS class of my uni, but thought it would refresh my mind a little.

The first three days, i learned about the command line, bash scripting and git. I was amazed at what i could do with a few commands (check for every picture on a computer, check the date, then put them in folders depending on the creation year?). The following two days were about syscalls and functions, not that interesting, but the "recursivity" day was the one that blew my mind. I proceeded to rewrite everything with recusivity or backtracking, overcomplicating things (i was really new). I think this is the moment when i told myself "i want to continue working with this".

Now i write API calls and response and write yaml configuration files for kubernetes. How things change.

Markoff• 4 years ago

Plenty, travelling in Southeast Asia, already booked flights to Burna, got visa and just doing two interviews with Chinese companies (one over phone, other over webcam) from guesthouse (actually i found these offers also by luck through talking in travellers forum and some guy mentioned they are looking for people), both quickly responded they are hiring me, so instead Friday flight to Burma from Bangkok switching to flight to Hongkong, taking Shenzhen to Beijing train without seat reservation (24+ hours) and Monday going to sign papers in Beijing.

Plus plenty of life threatening situation where I was lucky, slipped on rock in jungle but hey didn't fell down, slipped with motorbike in mountains doing Mae Hong Son loop, but hey handled it in the end without falling down or across railing, lost in jungle etc. But in general I know my limits and trying to avoid life threatening situations not relying on luck.

koonsolo• 4 years ago

My ex asking a divorce. It taught me some lessons (the hard way):

- Nothing is yours, you only borrow things. Everything is temporary.

- Focus on the things you do have. Your base level should be "nothing", not what you currently have. Be happy with the things you take for granted.

- It really is all about the journey, because there is no destination.

My divorce changed the course of my life so much that the first years it felt like living in a parallell universe.

Anon4AReason• 4 years ago

Yes. The first time I was arrested and prosecuted and ended up with a criminal record.

I went from a security cleared I.T consultant that could (and did) walk in to any server room any where for any client (government, financial etc) with pre-approved security clearance to having to decline contracts and shift some of my existing clients on to other contractors. I didn't serve any time in jail and the crime was minor damage to property but none the less the rule book is clear about these sorts of things so my 'go anywhere' clearance was 'yoinked' (I let the various vetting agencies know rather than wait for them to do their periodic re-checking).

It left me with a few smaller clients and I was upfront with them about it so that they were free to walk if they wanted to. Only one did but the rest were fine about it.

My income went from FAANG++ levels (gosh, FAANG shows my age, its' now MAMMA?) to a few steps above Fiverr gigging levels of income so in the end I closed down my consultancy and drifted in to a different industry (a mixture of QA, tech-support, component level design type role).

All of this happened within the space of 4 months or so.

Under UK Laws, any non-serious crime becomes a 'Spent Conviction' after x number of years as long as you are not convicted of any further criminal acts. These means that although it (my conviction) shows up in an enhanced background check it is effectively wiped off and no longer needs to be declared when purchasing insurance, rental checks etc and doesn't flag up in a standard background check.

In other words - I got back my 'Go Anywhere' card a few years ago and am now semi-retired so I guess All's Well that Ends Well :)

ghoomketu• 4 years ago

Not sure if really life changing but in primary school I saw a senior draw a big circle with two eyes in GW BASIC and all I could think about that day was "woah.. the possibilities."

That silly thing consumed me so much I even had a dream about it that night. That time we had computer labs in which access was pretty limited and the teacher had to authorise students and small kids weren't allowed.

Didn't get to do it in school but from that moment on I bugged my parents so much to buy me a 386 that finally my dad sold his car and got me one on my birthday.

No wonder I'm still doing programming to date. And I still remember that smiley face on that ega screen(?) to this date :)

lioeters• 4 years ago

a 386 that finally my dad sold his car and got me one

That's beautiful. It shows how much your father trusted and believed in you - and it literally changed your life. Much respect.

xem• 4 years ago

I'm just going through it.

I'm 35, Web Dev since 2009, work from home (2 hours away from work) since 2020, and my company just decided that they want everyone back at the office immediately, or quit.

So I quat. And I decided I'll never be an employee ever again. I'm gonna make a living out of my passions: write a book, create video games, adopt pets, photo, video, and if I run out of money I can still do Web Dev as freelance.

Frightening but also exciting!

rsanek• 4 years ago

When I hear employers present these ultimatums, I always wonder what would happen if you didn't quit but also didn't come into work, simply continued doing your job as before from home. My sense is that many employers are bluffing and would not fire, but I've got not data points.

openfuture• 4 years ago

Yea I'm also im the never again employed camp. Trying to build myself a sustainable solution to this problem of eating and sleeping though.

atomkirk• 4 years ago

Two years into marriage I was driving down the freeway and had an epiphany that my wife loved me even though she didnt show it. We went from verge of divorce to strongest marriage I know 10 years and 3 kids later.

Dracophoenix2• 4 years ago

Was that an epiphany or wishful thinking that coincidently bore fruit?

AnimalMuppet3• 4 years ago

People show love in different ways. (There's a book called "The 5 Love Languages"; even if you don't buy the details of the book, the idea is likely correct.)

If your spouse shows love in a different way than the way you expect to receive love, that can be confusing. Figuring this out is a big part of making relationships work.

Glench• 4 years ago

I wrote about one which involved quitting tech and becoming a therapist: http://glench.com/WhyIQuitTechAndBecameATherapist/

The key moment was during an LSD journey, but I did a lot of work before that that set the stage for that experience to happen.

anonymous_goat2• 4 years ago

My wife had a ~6month long affair, after ~15 years together. While we were core renovating our just bought home and despite having three kids. I found out the hard way, not because she confessed it openly. We had no money problems (due to my work), we always talked about everything. Life was somewhat stressful (due to the house renovation in addition to my full job and kids) but fine. I had developed feelings for a friend once, talked about it with my wife, she wanted to stay monogamous. She didn't return that behavior years later with her affair.

In counseling and long talks, we found that I could not have done anything different. She's sorry. And while I often think of leaving her, I won't break up the family for my kids - still seems like the best option, ~2 years later (if I take their mental health into account and am not only considering myself).

It's a cliché, but "knowing" things and "living through" things are very, very different:

* Never give yourself up in a relationship or a job

* Never risk everything you have (I couldn't divorce her even if I wanted, without having to pay exorbitant monthly payments)

* You can do everything right and it still can go wrong

* Just because you give everything doesn't mean others will behave the same towards you

"Knowing" these things is different than "living through" them. The affair broke my mental model of the world as a whole. I thought: no matter how bad it is, I can influence my very tiny happy bubble in a distopian world, and giving everything to the right people (who also give a lot back) will make them honor our common code of behavior.

Now, I trust a lot less. I don't waste time on relationships I don't get as much out as I put in (no matter if acquaintances, friends or business related), I secure myself a lot more (prenup, letters-of-intends, etc.).

I'm still miles away of not being depressed and feeling broken, or being able to concentrate or being creative again (which means I'm still unable to work effectively for more than a few hours a day). And the model of the world I have in my head now does not feel like something I want to live in, but it's still - slowly but steadily - changing for the better. Getting here took an enormous amount of effort: Being unable to work at all for about a year, being physically unable to stand, just breaking down in public or in front of clients, amnesia (there are weeks of my life I simply can't remember, whole vacations during the depression that are just gone). It took psycho-therapy, clinical stays, (re)learning habits and techniques to get me out of bad places...

This is not a call for sympathy, but please do learn from me (I made a throwaway account to keep my anonymity).

TLDR: My point is:

* Take care of yourself and don't trust others unbounded. Ensure the "what ifs" don't cost you too much (e.g. prenup, letters-of-intend, ...).

* Happiness is a choice for the most part. Enjoy life and the moment while you can. Sometimes it's little things, sometimes it's big things. But notice them as much as you can.

* There's different levels of honesty - think good about which one you choose. Honesty leads to vulnerability and some people will misuse it.

* Stay positive and give first in relationships, but always listen cautiously to your gut - if it tells you that you are giving too much and receiving too little, reconsider and react. fast.

* Keep friendships and hobbies you enjoy alive - despite family, job and relationship. Friendships are built on common experiences (not common interests!), and the older you get, the less chances for new common experiences with new people you'll have. Hobbies and things you enjoy are as important. If shit hits the fan hard, friends and having routines to recharge your battery are the things that can save your life and get you out of the hole.

CalRobert8• 4 years ago

For what it's worth, my relationship with both of my parents improved dramatically when they got divorced. I was 10.

anonymous_goat2• 4 years ago

While that is an absolute possibility, the statistics give that outcome a much lesser chance than fucking up the children in one way or another. Nice to hear it went for the better for you! :)

So far, we manage quite well - although my children obviously know something's wrong with me and we talked about my depression symptoms (without telling them the reason), we manage to keep our kids out of our problems.

paulryanrogers4• 4 years ago

Finally admitted to myself and others I no longer believed in the religion of my family. After that it was like a huge weight was lifted and I could more clearly rethink all my conclusions about the world and people.

No more need for magical thinking, confirmation bias, or hoop jumping to justify inconsistent rules made up by centuries of grifters.

p0d4• 4 years ago

I found it difficult when my best friend came to the same conclusion as yourself as we have journeyed together for nearly 40 years. I am still a magical thinker as you put it.

It helped me the day the penny dropped and I realised he had become a Humanist. He has not discovered anything new. He has chosen to believe something different. My views on religion are as robust as your not-views on religion. We all make a choice.

He is a little more subdued about his change of direction these days which means that we argue less. He is less "know it all" about how the world works and I talk less about things that are important to me which are not relevant to him. We will be friends until we die, I am sure.

paulryanrogers4• 4 years ago

Not sure what you're trying to communicate here.

He has not discovered anything new.

Perhaps something new to himself, if not new to all humanity. Those of us raised in relative isolation or with rigid interpretations of the world may find outside views difficult to truly consider objectively.

We all make a choice.

Indeed. And what choice is more profound than the foundations of ones belief systems and world view? For me that was "does it conform to 'divine' truth?", defined mostly by illiterate shepherds and priests whose livelihood depended on convincing people. Now I chose only to believe evidence proving what can be falsified.

bravetraveler2• 4 years ago

Had I not played Counter Strike as a teenager, I very well wouldn't be alive now. At the very least, stuck in my home town with dependency problems like most of my graduating class

It's a very long story, but through that competitive community (and tech) I made a good group of friends and learned a lot.

It lead to me finding a viable career and escaping serious poverty

testmasterflex4• 4 years ago

Haha I also have Counter Strike to thank for starting my first company in game server hosting and pays for my livelihood even until today.

bravetraveler2• 4 years ago

Hah, awesome! Funny enough hosting those servers is what got me into Linux and eventually the career I mentioned.

I can't say I was industrious enough to do the business thing, maybe one day.

jokethrowaway2• 4 years ago

When I was 14-15, a girl started trashtalking some pseudohacker I had in my messenger list. This guy got mad and threatened to hack me. In the end he didn't have much skills so he went to a popular forum and asked people to hack me.

Some of these people reached out to me and I found out.

I taught myself how to code and wrote a small tool to extract passwords from the windows registry and email them to me. I learnt how to bind it to another executable and prepared a payload with a freeware flash game.

I then used it on a common clueless contact to hack hist messenger and then I used the common contact to hack the target.

Eventually we became friends and after a couple of years of running warez communities, writing viruses and hacking PHP websites, I moved to normal programming and entrepreneurship, which eventually turned into a career.

I wonder where I would be if I didn't start coding early, due to that accident.

atonse• 4 years ago

Getting officially evaluated and diagnosed with ADHD two years ago (at age 39).

Not a single moment but gave me a framework, tools, and vocabulary to understand my various issues and come up with treatments/solutions.

When I was 19 until my mid 20s, I was often the youngest guy in many corporate settings, and really shining. That was me getting by on raw talent. But to move further you also have to couple that with executive function. And that’s where I started to peak and not grow more. So I was “stuck” in individual contributor roles, still succeeding on raw talent but that doesn’t scale. This helped me break out of that pretty easily and have a different outlook.

I’m in a totally different place now. (Not to mention, more often the oldest guy in the room!!)

onemoresoop• 4 years ago

Please expand on your trajectory and how it changed when you got diagnosed. I'm not diagnosed but I definitely have some traits and have similarly gotten stuck and pushed through multiple times and reinvented myself in different ways but as I get older the energy to do so becomes hard to summon up.

atemerev4• 4 years ago

I was diagnosed 9 years ago, but still struggling in individual contributor roles. What did you do to break the cycle and start scaling up?

swyx• 4 years ago

did a bootcamp. got into programming and a better life. bootcamps get a lot of flak and deservedly so sometimes, but also dont diminish the power of a bootcamp to change lives for those who happen to be a good fit for them

mehphp• 4 years ago

100%. I personally didn't attend a bootcamp, but I've personally watched people go from low-paying jobs that they hate to making well over 6 figures and really enjoying what they do.

Life changing is an understatement for them.

ramesh314• 4 years ago

In 2007, I joined the US Army infantry at the height of the Iraq war, two months after my 17th birthday. I had grown up brainwashed into the idea of military service being the single best thing a person can do, and wanted nothing more at that point than to get out of my small hometown.

As I was training with my unit for deployment, we were spending days on end practicing combat drills to storm buildings. This was the peak of the insurgency, so our mission was more or less kidnapping persons of interest and sending them off to Abu Ghraib. It was in that moment, practicing room clearing with automatic weapons, that I knew that this wasn't who I was. An entire (short) lifetime of being completely sure about my identity vanished in an instant. I knew that I had more to give to the world than this; being a tool of violent fascism.

I went AWOL shortly after. Spent months hitchhiking across the southwest. Eventually turned myself in and (miraculously) got out with an honorable discharge. But I learned the most important lesson in my life, which is that everything is meaningless once you lose your ethical standing. Nothing is more crucial than safeguarding your humanity.

jacquesm5• 4 years ago

That is real bravery.

throwaway_4ever3• 4 years ago

Thank you for your service.

gaws6• 4 years ago

Eventually turned myself in and (miraculously) got out with an honorable discharge.

How did you swing this?

ramesh314• 4 years ago

How did you swing this?

Mostly luck and timing. I was in a combat unit that was deploying to Iraq in a matter of weeks as part of the troop surge. They didn't have the time or interest in court martialling me for the AWOL charges when I came back. So they busted me down to E-1 private, put me on extra duty, and told me I was still going to deploy.

At that point I knew I had to get out. My first thought was to go for Conscientious Objector status, but that only gets you reassigned to non combat duties. So I spoke with an army doctor about why I went AWOL, and convinced him that it was part of a bipolar manic episode. Bipolar disorder is one of a few preexisting conditions that can qualify you for an honorable discharge, so as soon as the diagnosis was made, I was put on the "do not deploy" list and processed out.

tgflynn• 4 years ago

Not really, but I did have an experience that has probably had a significant effect on how I think about the nature of human experience. I would call it an experience of prolonged yet subjectively instantaneous non-being. I was about 15 years old and was having my first surgery. I remember them putting a mask on my face then counting. The next instant I vomited. But it turned out that happened 5 hours later in the recovery room. The transition from one moment to the next was like flipping a light switch. I've had a number of other surgeries since and I've never had quite the same experience. There seems to have been something special about the circumstances that bypassed the usual period of slow groggy waking up that one typically gets with anesthesia or when waking from sleep.

How has this affected my thinking ? Well for one thing it showed me that non-existence was nothing to be afraid of. I also realized that the experience would have been the same whether it had lasted for 5 hours or for 5 billion years. That is one of several factors that has made me skeptical of the idea that death is followed by an eternity of non-existence, even under the hypothesis that materialism is true. If that is the case then the instant of one's death would be subjectively identical with the end of the universe, and I'm not convinced the universe has an end.

markdjacobsen• 4 years ago

I have been successful by most standards, with a litany of professional and educational achievements, a wonderful wife, three beautiful kids, and a life of exciting new experiences. But age 35 was a crucible year in which I presided over the scorching failure of a startup, struggled mightily in my PhD program, and reluctantly accepted that I no longer believed in the religious faith that had shaped my life. That change eventually cost me my marriage. It felt the universe took a sledgehammer to my life.

That year (7 years ago now) marks a "before" and "after" point in my life. It changed all my priorities. I'm much more relational now, much more focused on the present, and search for and find joy in simple, quiet, beautiful things. I still work hard but am far less attached to professional success. The faith change led me to abandon an identity that tormented me with cognitive dissonance, was rooted in social expectations, and never worked well for me; constructing a new, more authentic identity has not been easy but it has been one of the most rewarding experiences of my life.

In many ways, my journey has been a fairly conventional "midlife passage" (my preferred term over "midlife crisis"). I'm grateful for the experience, and thankful it came early enough that I could renew my life while still relatively young.

I wrote a book about my experience, in case it's helpful to anyone else: https://www.amazon.com/Eating-Glass-Journey-Through-Failure-...

elt• 4 years ago

When my daughter was three years old and diagnosed with cancer (stage 4). To say it was "life changing" would be an understatement. It fundamentally changed who I am in a way I can't really express. It changed me in many positive ways and negative ways. With regards to my life, I can distinctly draw a line between "pre-diagnosis" and "post-diagnosis".

A second life changing event happened a few years after her diagnosis when I read "Meditations" by Marcus Aurelius. I think the book hit me at the right time and place in my life and helped me really process things that I couldn't before.

testmasterflex4• 4 years ago

Sorry to hear that friend. Stay strong.

Balgair• 4 years ago

Kinda having one right now. Would like advice.

My FIL died very recently.

We were close.

It was expected, though quicker somehow. I'm to fill the big shoes.

My first was born ~ 3 months ago.

They're a joy I didn't know I could have and fill a hole in me that I didn't know was there.

I'm so confused right now.

The grief, the joy, so close together.

My life has changed, totally, but it's all just getting through the sleepless nights now.

I need to do more for my family, but I'm just exhausted.

What can I do to set them up for success like my FIL did?

What, in 5 years time, will I regret having not done?

Thanks for any advice.

AnimalMuppet3• 4 years ago

In five years (or maybe 20) you will regret not being with people. You won't so much regret the things you didn't get done; you'll regret the time you didn't spend just playing with them, listening to them.

But that's more for a year from now. Now you're just trying to survive. Sleepless nights are hard.

One thing you should consider: If you can afford it, hire someone to do your housecleaning. You've got bigger things to do with your time.

They're a joy I didn't know I could have and fill a hole in me that I didn't know was there.
I'm so confused right now.

People grieve differently. There's no particular way that you're supposed to feel.

My father died recently. I'm his executor. I think I'm doing OK, but I have been so busy with his affairs that I haven't really had time to feel. That may show up later, and I may be surprised at what I feel then.

Maybe, with the birth, you haven't had time to feel either - or at least, haven't had time to sort out your feelings. That's OK. It will come. Until then, there's nothing wrong with having these mixed feelings.

clintonb• 4 years ago

I graduated a semester late…from MIT. Had I stayed on the planned trajectory I would have graduated on time and worked in a relatively boring job at either Booz, Hewlett-Packard, or Texas Instruments making a pittance. Instead, I came across Vistaprint, which offered 50% more salary, later joined startups, and am now in my current role at Stripe.

I am quite fulfilled by my work, past and present, and my income/wealth are greater than I ever imagined. This is all because I screwed up one semester when I only took two subjects, and had to stay an extra semester. That semester was the best $15K I ever spent!

fairity• 4 years ago

I have a recurring nightmare where this exact thing happens - I’m back at MIT as a second semester senior and realize I don’t have enough credits to graduate. Happy to see this was the start of a wonderful journey for you! Now, if only I could convince my subconscious brain as much…

biagidp• 4 years ago

We were riding go karts as part of a friend's bachelor party. I had a hard time fitting in the kart and mine was noticeably slower than the rest. My nerves were on edge and my heart was palpitating the whole time we were driving. I had always been overweight, but up until then I was able to tell myself that it had never kept me from doing anything I wanted to do. That was the kick in the pants I needed to see how my inattention to my health was limiting me and directly lead to losing over 150 pounds.

silisili• 4 years ago

Congrats. To me, it's one of those weird things that sneaks up on you. Or maybe it doesn't and you just don't care. Then one day you realize 'damn, what happened.'

What's interesting to me is how much better you feel once losing weight. Half of what I assumed were 'just getting older' problems vanished, energy way up, etc. Wish there were VR or a pill or something so that everyone could know/remember what it's like, as motivation.

But in any event, kudos to you - changing the lifestyle and sticking to it isn't easy.

julienreszka• 4 years ago

I was 13 and still trying to figure out life, one day I decided to send an email to someone who I secretly admired from reading his hacking blog. I never contacted strangers on the internet and I used to be very shy. I was lucky to receive an answer from this person that helped me find the courage to start programming and business very early on.

sowbug3• 4 years ago

Three.

1. Saw an ad in 1980 for a Radio Shack TRS-80 for $499. Suddenly understood that computers were more real than the spinning tape reels shown in movies. Started learning BASIC at the local Radio Shack while my mom was grocery shopping next door. Got offered programming jobs at least twice during those sessions (or maybe they were child predators). I've been exchanging code for money for the 40+ years since.

2. Around the same time, age 10 or so, I was in a situation where I should have been killed or badly injured. Instead, a car suddenly appeared and instantly killed the thing that was trying to kill me. The car didn't stop; it kept driving, leaving me alone on a country road with bloody flesh (not mine) sprayed 20 feet around me. Since then, though I'm not religious or very spiritual, I've felt special, as if my life is meant to achieve some purpose on Earth. That memory motivates me when I'm feeling aimless or down.

3. The first time I attended Burning Man. The first time I experienced the kindness of strangers as the rule rather than the exception. That inversion in my default assumptions about other people has made an enormous difference (and undoubtedly has helped shrink the giant chip I have on my own shoulder).

golly_ned• 4 years ago

What was the thing that was trying to kill you?

manthedudeguy• 4 years ago

Kind of cruel of them to leave that part out..

jdpigeon• 4 years ago

seriously

throwaway_4ever3• 4 years ago

Hopefully a bear or mountain lion and not a person...

jareklupinski• 4 years ago

self-doubt

it's a metaphor :P

sowbug3• 4 years ago

A German Shepherd dog. It had been trained to attack, and while I'd never witnessed this myself, supposedly the owner trained it on smaller live creatures. Obviously this was the neighborhood house that we avoided -- the owner was even surlier than the dog -- but it was on the way from my house to the local store, and where I lived there was basically one road, so I didn't always have a choice. That road's speed limit was 50 miles per hour, which also made it dangerous to walk. This will become relevant in a moment.

One day I was walking back from the store, and I froze as I realized the dog's chain-link gate had been left open. The dog was in its yard, eyes locked on me. The road separated it and me. It began charging toward me. I was too afraid to take my eyes off it, let alone start running. It reached the road, still coming straight for me. As it approached the dotted yellow dividing line in the road, I remember hearing the dog's nails hitting the pavement, and sensing that it was changing its stride, as if it were preparing to leap. I remained petrified.

Next thing I knew, the dog was nothing but entrails. A speeding car killed it. I remember seeing the back of the driver's head through the rear windshield. He didn't even look back. He just kept going. A moment before I was sure I'd be killed, but now there was just me, intact but scared, and a still-settling spray of animal parts in front of me.

Sorry for leaving that out on the first post. I was trying to keep each part short.

slotrans• 4 years ago

I quit grad school after the first semester, moved back home, and took an entry-level software job at an internet company. This was early 2005.

Completely different life than I would have had if I'd stayed in academia.

avgDev2• 4 years ago

Oh man there has been many things.

1. I loved someone so much that being scared of losing her really caused issues in our relationship. I later realized I wasn't actually a good boyfriend but a controlling asshole. We dated many years. In the end she cheated on me and that is when I completely cut off communication.

2. Having a child was also life changing. So little time but also so little care for anything but him. Also, if I could stop working I would do it now. It is such an interesting time full of love, frustration and sometimes a bit of anger. Child are great but also extremely difficult.

3. Taking an antibiotic (cipro) and not being able to walk for weeks due to severe pain. On top of that 40+ physicians telling me, it's impossible or all in my head. Then, the warnings were updated multiple times, to include tendon damage, damage to heart, nerve damage. Some of it has improved but still have some annoying nerve issues years later. I am hoping to start my masters in CS and develop software to help patients not have to deal with denying physicians. For example, on average it takes 10 years to diagnose a patient with Ehlers-Danlos syndrome and MANY MANY physicians. Anyone on this forum could do it, provided with simple steps to follow. Something ain't right.

moomoo11• 4 years ago

I’ve had two dejavu moments. Both times I decided to act upon them because it just felt so damn freaky, kinda felt like I should just try it out and see what happens, yolo lol.

Both of these moments happened in new places I was visiting which I would end up moving to and prospering.

Over the weekend I had such a moment again. I guess I’m just gonna yolo and move there.

anoojb• 4 years ago

I was in an isolated exurb working hard labor at a UPS warehouse. I became an active user of an open source project and a regular on an IRC network. Over time I got to know a few of the founders, and got offered a job and relocation to San Francisco.

It feels like it was a quick inflection point, but it ultimately changed my life: am now married to my partner, the company got acquired, we had a baby, and I have some economic security.

We are now working towards building what my ancestors have been struggling for generations to achieve:

- Inner peace - Intentional abundance - Authentic community

gaws6• 4 years ago

God bless IRC

AnimalMuppet3• 4 years ago

I was getting a degree in physics. One day I had this conversation with a guy in a parking lot. I'd never talked to him before; I don't even remember who he was. But he asked me what I wanted to do with a physics degree.

"It would be really cool to discover the unified field theory."

"But what do you do with it?"

"Well, the first thing you do is collect your Nobel Prize."

"Yeah, fine, but what do you do with it?"

I realized that I could make some gigantic breakthrough in theoretical physics, and it wouldn't actually change anything for anyone in any practical way. It would be this great achievement, and be completely useless. It wouldn't help anyone; it wouldn't improve anyone's life.

I didn't go into theoretical physics.

throwaway3780372• 4 years ago

Learning about ayahuasca in 2011, randomly when at a business lunch - the day after breaking up with my girlfriend - and taking it a year later for the first time

Changed my life fundamentally

sakerbos3• 4 years ago

Interested to know how it changed your life?

My wife and I have been watching a show on Netflix called "How to Change your Mind" and have been contemplating trying either LSD, shrooms or ayahuasca (we're not really druggies, we're just really interested in living more connected and meaningful lives and it seems those substances really help in initiating the process).

throwaway3780372• 4 years ago

Just saw this. Yeah it’s hard to describe. I took it a few times a year for about 7 years with a wonderful community in Europe and Brazil. I’m just a very different person now than when I started. Sometimes it was a fundamental shift, other times more gradual.

It sounds like you have a good approach though. I’m also not someone who drinks or takes drugs, and come at it more from the Pollan way of thinking. All the best

CoffeePython2• 4 years ago

A handful:

1. Stumbling upon a r/diy post on reddit of some dude building a kegerator with a raspberry pi. I thought it was cool, impulse bought a raspberry pi, and fell in love with programming. I was working at a gas station as a maintenance tech before. Ended up switching careers into software engineering and greatly increasing my life satisfaction, income, etc

2. Joining twitter. I joined in late 2020, and started sharing about side projects I was building. This led to earning my first $ online, launching a startup, raising money from investors, and getting into Y Combinator. Before sharing online what I was building I was making virtually 0 traction on various different SaaS projects i was building. It really changed my life and career in a tremendous way

throwaway_4ever3• 4 years ago

How did people found out what you were building on Twitter and start following you? 0 -> 20k in a couple years is quite the achievement.

Did building in public force you to work more diligently or was it purely about getting your product to the audience of people that would use it?

CoffeePython2• 4 years ago

I followed people building things on twitter and started interacting with their posts, I posted a lot about programming stuff and just did the whole build in public thing.

I think building in public was great for motivating more progress

ilrwbwrkhv• 4 years ago

LSD

sazz• 4 years ago

One of those Spock moments - it would be impossible to discuss the subject without a common frame of reference...

etherael• 4 years ago

Realising after reading something insightful and simultaneously truly malevolent to the extent that I finally accepted that the two things could coexist without cancelling each other out if you simply adopt a philosophical perspective I found disgusting, something that I'd dedicated the better part of ten years of my life to in the naive belief that it would be adopted and used from the same philosophical principles that drew me to it to begin with was not just naive in an inconsequential, minor way, but in the instance that temporal and economic power writ large might be imbued in parties within that ecosystem who would see fit to use it for things unambiguously evil and abhorrent. The kinds of malevolent sociopaths with whom my childhood had extensively familiarised me with, pursuing much the same ends, just with several orders of magnitude larger budgets and everything that implies.

Had me thinking long and hard about if the appropriate thing to do was throw a complete 180. But after that thinking, I came to the conclusion that people like that already exist and pursue the exact same abhorrent and adversarial outcomes as this discovery led me to understand were not isolated to the realms of states and large amoral multinational corporations, and attacking nebulous means to promote specific ends will just change the means that are used for the promotion of those ends all the same. It is the ends one has to be very careful of, fully cogniscent of the fact that those pursuing the most abhorrent ends rarely come out and actually earnestly mark themselves as the monsters that they are.

sakerbos3• 4 years ago

Read Four Hour Work Week. I love what I do, programming for a reasonably successful startup, but I'm much more excited by the idea of doing my own thing. A really inspiring and actionable book.

zak-wrench3• 4 years ago

Three. First was when i was 19, I took a year off after highschool and went to a new town to study and accumule as much knowledge on physics, until one day when my roommate brought some hump, i took some of it as I was about to watch "the social network" and made me switch from physics to spending the rest of the year learning c++, and eventually getting an engineering degree on systems informations. Second and third was when I came to the realisation that i had to temporarily stop my studies and go back home, because my mental health and psyche was deteriorating, which in turn was affecting my whole life and grades. After a few months I realised that my religion was the source of my misery because i was following it as it was meant to be followed, but the environment(which is "99% religious") wasn't comforming to its values. And the fact that my religion defined my identity, I found myself in an "interesting" position where I had to reshape my identity from scratch.

solarmist3• 4 years ago

I found myself in an "interesting" position where I had to reshape my identity from scratch.

What did you end up doing about it?

zak-wrench3• 4 years ago

I was heavily tied to my religion since I was a child, and I'd reason almost all things in life in contrast to it, especially from a scientific stand-point, to make it look and sound legit to my perspective as much as I could, I was very faithful, but still kept it in moderation.

When it suddenly clicked to me that maybe I was just deluding myself my whole life, and that was a few months after I went to my hometown from the big city I used to live in and study after the implosion I undergone through, I found myself heavily tied to so many ideologies I no longer wanted to be tied to, and I basically had to think of how I'd reconstruct my identity from the ground up. I started dropping my beliefs bits by bits, and re-evaluated my view of a lot of things I used to be against/for. On another hand, I also went into a complete hiatus, confining myself from the environment I was living in. I did cut my ties to everyone I used to know, and got into an escapism whirlpool for a few years while being as minimalistically hedonistic as I can as long as I don't get to affect or hurt anyone by it(I basically went into lazy mode, but I didn't want to put any burden of guilt on myself for that period of time).

Since past year or so, I got out of that escapism loop, started getting social again, but I'm also pretty cautious in term who I want to spend my time with, especially since I did "waste"(I don't regret it) a good amount of it when I was keeping it to myself for that period of time.

The implosion I had did made me rethink so many things in life, and I'm very thankful it did happens nonetheless.

gaws6• 4 years ago

when my roommate brought some hump

What is "hump?"

zak-wrench3• 4 years ago

It was a typo, I meant hemp, which has lower thc.

fragmede• 4 years ago

Catching Covid in March of 2020, before vaccines were available totally changed my trajectory. I suffered permanent damage to my body. I'm disabled now. I'm trying my hardest to manage my acquired disability, but the worst thing out of all of my problems is that when I try and share my lived experience, close friends that disbelieve me really hurt.

mod• 4 years ago

I started college and on the second day, I totaled my car because someone ran a stop sign in front of me.

I had just secured a room to rent because the local college apartments wouldn't approve my dad's credit. I had to get a job immediately, so I really couldn't stay.

I went home, and never did go back.

cosmodisk• 4 years ago

I moved to London and fast forward a couple of years, I'm in this crappy job & full time studying. It was distance learning,so we only had to go to uni once a month. So I'm sitting in a room with 20+ students. The tutor reads some text written by a student and asks what advice would you give them. We were all sitting in a circle. One guy, in front of me says: just give up! I start laughing. He starts laughing.. we both keep amplifying each other. The entire audience look at us as we are crazy. Fast forward a few months and he offered me a job and then another once he left the company. I eventually became a CTO, because someone at some point believed in me.

ramonaisonline• 4 years ago

Six years ago I realized I was transgender after discovering r/asktransgender and understanding that my feelings had a name. Now I have a new name, I actually feel confident and motivated and proud of myself, my relationships with other people are way more open and honest... I feel like my life did a 180 in the best way. After I started transitioning and liking my body I was also able to work through some disordered eating habits and negative self-talk. It was hard, but it feels like a fresh start.

boboche• 4 years ago

When I saw my first (300Baud) modem at my dad's friend, and he had a 1200 so gave me his 300 and some software for my commodore 64 to poke around, this completely changed my life from a bored small kid with way too old and religious parents + boring family activities nowhere near adequate to a fully stimulating learning journey into telecom and BBS.

Then he showed his amiga, I'll never forget my first time ;) That drove me in media and tech for a good part of my life.

schizophrenic• 4 years ago

I was perfectly healthy before 2016 (other than some sleep issues) and then experienced a very traumatic psychotic episode, which was quite life-changing (for the worse, unfortunately)! I ended up in a semi-vegetative state and had to go on disability for 6 months because I couldn't sleep and my mind just wouldn't function (random intrusive thoughts or memory retrieval issues like "blanking" when trying to remember really basic facts, headaches and inability to concentrate, items disappearing from working memory). For a while I thought that I'd lost the ability to program forever, thankfully my situation has improved significantly since then. Even 6 years later, I still experience hallucinations, I still have frequent headaches and strange symptoms:

- random sporadic pain in many parts of my body that wasn't there before

- tardive dyskinesia: involuntary twitching or muscle spasm, "forced" movements

- strange salient events, for example my computer sometimes behaves like it is hacked, devices stop working in ways that defy the laws of physics, or time even sometimes feels like it is flowing faster than it should

- background tinnitus that prevented me from sleeping well for years (although I've gone from being tired all the time to having a decent level of energy over time)

- frequently angry "voices" that occasionally say rude and nasty things (as well as some nice ones that suggest interesting thoughts)

- "entities" that attempt to manipulate or coerce me into working on their causes - change your career, become a doctor, become a politician, become a spy (although some of them are nice and a few of them provide some great ideas).

I was diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia and required to take medication which keeps the worst of the symptoms somewhat under control.

This experience made me much more humble, patient, and sympathetic to those suffering from mental illnesses. I also realized how fragile life is. Even as a very successful software engineer, you are about 2 weeks of no sleep away from turning into a zombie or completely broken person.

It also really changed my outlook on life. I used to be somewhat religious, and still believe that there are higher powers out there, but compared to the Christian perspective of a loving and caring God, some of them are downright cruel and vengeful. Chances are that to them, you're just some minisculine speck in the universe and utterly disposable. Perhaps you're some kind of a tool in a grander scheme. The world doesn't "owe" you anything even if you do everything right, and it will crush you into a pulp if the powers that be feel that is advantageous to their interests or maybe even just on a whim.

Lessons and takeaways: - Make sure you have a strong support network: friends and family are what got me through this mess, I never would have made it through this hell without them. - The world is not fair. Maybe it's some kind of a test, or the karma is extremely delayed. But some people have it really rough, and until you've been there, you might not appreciate what others are going through. - Be kind to others and treat everyone with respect. Perhaps you'll be in their shoes someday. - Don't upset anyone or anything. You never know who you might tick off and how they might retaliate. - Curb your ambition and anger, and learn to live with and accept frustration and things not going your way. The world will knock you down when you least expect it, and it will kick you while you're lying on the ground. I'm a lot less ambitious than I used to be, I'd say that on many days I'm just treading water. If you have 0 expectations, at least it's unlikely that you'll end up disappointed. Often times, your interpretation of an event has a bigger influence on your happiness than the actual outcome of the event itself. - Appreciate what you have, even the very basic things in life. Food. Water. Shelter. Electricity. Sleep. Silence. Time. A functioning mind. A universe where the laws of physics are consistent. Many people take these things for granted, and then one day they're gone and you start to realize how valuable these things are/were. Most of the things listed above don't even cost that much. Perhaps they should be essential human rights. - You are stronger than you think. Even in the darkest times, don't give up, just take it step by step, day by day. It gets better with time (hopefully). Perhaps even the wrath of God is subject to a statue of limitations.

LeonTheremin• 4 years ago

This is called "Electronic Harassment" / "Mind Control" enabled by real-time electromagnetic surveillance and directed energy weaponry.

All clandestine and ongoing since the 80s.

bradlys• 4 years ago

I’ve had too many to count and they all seem insignificant when you see all of them individually. Together is where the picture of my life is drawn and you start to understand.

One that comes back to me a lot (cause I’m divorced) is the first time I fell for a lady due to her personality and not her looks. She wasn’t repulsive but she wasn’t exactly anything to look at either. To be honest - the idea of sex with her wasn’t entirely appealing from a non-emotional component. Anyway - that never went anywhere but it completely reshaped how I looked at women. Before - I genuinely believed I couldn’t find anyone who I’d fall for their personality more than their looks. I’d never met anyone who was that great to be around. I really thought the best I’d ever find was someone who was physically attractive but that I could at least find not miserable to be around. I didn’t think I’d ever find someone who I genuinely wanted to be around all the time and would appreciate from an intellectual and emotional level. It seemed too far fetched based on the many women I’d met before.

Later - I met more women who were more balanced - more physical attraction and decent emotional attraction. I met my wife later and it was mostly the personality attraction again - I grew to appreciate her looks more but compared to some other women I’d been involved with - it wasn’t the same. I’ve learned that selecting a partner on personality also has strong drawbacks.

It’s a struggle considering personality is very secondary in our current dating market. Physicality is everything. Such is the commoditization of our dating lives while living in a capitalistic market.

em-bee3• 4 years ago

I’ve learned that selecting a partner on personality also has strong drawbacks

the drawback was that it didn't feel as fulfilling or something like that because she wasn't as physically attractive?

as someone who prefers to look at personality only, i feel that physical attraction gets in the way. at least that was my experience. when i was younger i actually didn't recognize a few times when a girl was attracted to me because i had my eyes on someone else who wasn't. i regret rejecting them to this day. my life could have taken a completely different direction if i hadn't. (not that it would have been better, just different, since we are talking about life-changing experiences. although i'll never know if it really would have been life-changing)

mettamage• 4 years ago

Deep meditation in a Vipassana retreat. I strive to be that person every day to at least some extent: full equanimity over all my sensations and a strong resolution into all my sensations. I don’t know much about Buddhism but that day I learned that this thing can indeed lead to not suffering. How can you suffer when all experiences you’re having are not judged, not even subconsciously? You can’t. This was so lifechanging that my username is named after it on HN

Playing poker semi-professionally, life has become a tree with chance values ever since, for every action, including writing this comment.

13 years ago, reading online how to seduce people. It’s mostly toxic advice, but not all advice is. Without it I am fairly sure that I would still be a virgin, whereas now I’ve enjoyed several long-term relationships. And before some get triggered, I’ve never tricked anyone in bed, nor did I follow the mainstream advice. My cornerstones in this area are: improvisation, playfulness, meditation/spirituality and coming from a frame of not needing/craving sex but preferring it (meditation/Buddhism teaches the distinction well).

Discovering the internet in general.

Recently: becoming a digital nomad

I can fill this comment with many more things but I’ll stop here.

dhubris• 4 years ago

Finally getting the courage in my mid-thirties to get therapy for the sexual abuse I experienced in my early teens. Wish I'd done it sooner.

In my early fifties now and pretty sure I'd be dead by now if I hadn't.

arkbg12• 4 years ago

01.18.2012 was apocalyptic

Ask HN: Have you ever had a changed-your-life moment?

Related Stories