The Myth of the Second Chance

https://ft.pressreader.com/article/282557318242321

by bookofjoe • 2 years ago

352 426 2 years ago

ft.pressreader.com

gnabgib• 2 years ago

Previously [0] (18 points, 3 days ago, 14 comments)

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40162438

flappyeagle• 2 years ago

It was flagged for some reason?

layer8• 2 years ago

It’s amusing that it got a second chance.

cynicalsecurity• 2 years ago

Partly true only.

xandrius2• 2 years ago

I mean if you're 30 and (taking from the article) married badly, chose sciences instead of humanities or did a misjudgement, you absolutely definitely can fix it up. Even at 40, it just gets harder and people don't always find the supposed effort worth it but you totally can.

lanstin10• 2 years ago

I am in my fifties and taking a masters degree mostly for fun while keeping my software engineering job. I am working a lot harder than I have in a long time, specifically in an intense super hard homework due in 8 hours crank it out way. I do learn a lot of complicated stuff at work, but mostly can optimize for well rested and ready to learn and don't use it till I am confident kind of mode. Kids and work was hard but for different reasons. But when I forget my age and just dig in, I do feel younger. But also I am way more mature and able to talk to professors with less fear and like send that email asking stupid question or let people know ahead if I will have logistic problems etc. Best of both worlds except so much hard work.

xandrius2• 2 years ago

Well done! I've studied with people in their 60s who decided they wanted to expand their knowledge or change domain, very inspiring.

Recently, I also decided to improve my knowledge and went on doing 2 more masters in UX/UI and design, as I felt I was lacking those "softer" skills. I was surrounded by 20 year olds but it didn't matter and by the end I feel this choice was as natural as any other I took before.

I'm not in my 50s yet but I still hope I will do like you did :D

(although I'm quite done with writing papers/theses, so maybe not yet another master :P)

nuancebydefault3• 2 years ago

From my experience, the number of chances you have is not the limiting factor in life. I see people making the same kind of mistakes over and over again. The problem is often the pattern of reaction to externalities. The pattern is then the problem, and it is very hard to break habits.

bckr• 2 years ago

Yes! Many bad decisions—choosing the wrong partner, making bad health choices, or even getting the wrong degree, can be changed in 6-36 months, if the mistake is realized.

But the person who makes the mistake takes too long to see the mistake, and then goes about making the same mistake (or failing to make a different decision) for years after they start to question their decision. There’s the bottleneck.

That’s why I’ve invested a lot of energy into being more flexible, changing my mind readily, and learning from my mistakes very quickly.

harimau777• 2 years ago

At least in relationships that's not the case. Unless you are naturally extroverted or charismatic, if you mess up and haven't figured things out by the time you are in your 30s then you may as well give up. American society just isn't built for finding love outside of school/college.

lanstin10• 2 years ago

In my case it took a few decades to plumb utterly the idea that perfecting myself, or trying extremely hard to do so, would not make a bad relationship good. It was a hard lesson for me but I learned it in every cell of my system. Not that I am against being flexible, but some people need life to really beat that lesson into them.

lanstin10• 2 years ago

Easier to identify and work around your characteristic errors. Go slow into romance, or make sure to lint and test the code, or be wary of saying yes to things you don't really care about, maybe offload some judgment calls to a trusted delegate. Whatever it is, we all have weaknesses and we can learn to work with them better. And realize when they crop up it isn't uniquely shameful to have broken bits.

npilk• 2 years ago

It's important to recognize that life is path-dependent. But as a counter-point, worrying too much about each decision as a potential mistake can lead to the kind of fear-based paralysis described by Sylvia Plath in the Bell Jar:

"I saw my life branching out before me like the green fig tree in the story. From the tip of every branch, like a fat purple fig, a wonderful future beckoned and winked. One fig was a husband and a happy home and children, and another fig was a famous poet and another fig was a brilliant professor, and another fig was Ee Gee, the amazing editor, and another fig was Europe and Africa and South America, and another fig was Constantin and Socrates and Attila and a pack of other lovers with queer names and offbeat professions, and another fig was an Olympic lady crew champion, and beyond and above these figs were many more figs I couldn't quite make out. I saw myself sitting in the crotch of this fig tree, starving to death, just because I couldn't make up my mind which of the figs I would choose. I wanted each and every one of them, but choosing one meant losing all the rest, and, as I sat there, unable to decide, the figs began to wrinkle and go black, and, one by one, they plopped to the ground at my feet."

polishdude20• 2 years ago

I think a meta analysis of this is that the character in your quote should realize they themselves are inside of their own unique fig. The reason the others have withered is because she's chosen a fig. In real life, it seems that what usually happens is people don't realize they are heading for a fig that's not that bad all the while staring at all the others imagining how their life might be. Basically, be more grateful for what you have now.

card_zero2• 2 years ago

"Never try"

— H. Simpson

In all the heartwarming animes I watch it goes like this: the main character has an absurd, unrealistic aspiration with a strong emotional motivation for it. She makes a lot of desperate and ridiculous efforts to get somewhere, and as a sort of karmic reward she gets somewhere else, not exactly what she intended, but a situation with a lot of fun and friendship and purpose develops, and it turns out that this is now what she wants and it serves the original emotional purpose just the same. However, the initial foolish aspiration was crucial or nothing would have happened.

simmerup• 2 years ago

Sylvia Plath ended up committing suicide is good context here

imtringued3• 2 years ago

Liquidity preference is one hell of a drug.

gwd• 2 years ago

Reminds me of the Existential Ad Agency:

https://existentialcomics.com/comic/204

Shinchy• 2 years ago

That's a great analogy, I'm now going to have to read this book.

tacocataco2• 2 years ago

Chop down the tree and build a house with the lumber if there are no more figs.

ChrisMarshallNY• 2 years ago

Well, it depends on what is meant, by "second chance."

If it is a complete reversion to the path that would have been followed, then it likely won't happen.

However, I have been privileged to spend the last 43 years, watching second chances become realities, where the second chance turns into something that far surpasses the original vector.

purpleteam812• 2 years ago

"If it is a complete reversion to the path"

Great catch as chance is an inclusive term. Therefore, when seeking a second chance one should consider what aspect(s) of the path should change to succeed.

jowdones2• 2 years ago

Well, in the "advice-industrial complex" as the OP correctly identifies it, the OP being in the advice business (sort of) himself, has two choices: join the inflationary 'self-help, you can do it' camp and have a hard time getting himself remarked from the crowd, or join the tried and true 'contrarian' camp, yielding much better results for a minority who wants to hear and feel 'different'.

Truth is that there's no one true way. Statistically there will be people who get second chances and people who don't. My guess is that the latter crwod gets even more bitter and depressed hearing all "it will get better, you will overcome the hurdles".

sandspar• 2 years ago

I genuinely think it's neat how all of our impulses have been commoditized. People want to feel "different"? Great, there's ways to make money from that. Money is such a spur for creativity.

mlazos• 2 years ago

Nothing is better than a comeback story and I try to feel as inspired as I can every day because the truth is people have made groundbreaking discoveries in their 50s, started businesses in their 70s and completely overcome much harder obstacles than picking sciences instead of humanities? Like really that’s an example? Career changes are literally one of the easier things in life to do if you’re determined. This article is just too pessimistic for me.

danbruc• 2 years ago

There are of course such people, but they are for a good part the few notable exceptions you hear about. For each of those there are thousands of people that don't manage to pull it off.

lll-o-lll2• 2 years ago

Because the struggle is with yourself. The parent post is correct when they say:

Career changes are literally one of the easier things in life to do if you’re determined

What makes it hard is changing yourself; not externally imposed forces. The article is full of hubris in my opinion. The author looks around at the failed friends in their peer group and goes “there, but for the sake of ‘my own intelligent choices’ go I”. The start and end of their wisdom is “make prudent choices, as you reap what you sow”. Granted, but this never ends - the “second chance” may not exist in the sense of a “do over”, but at any point of life the branches flow out, and better choices can be made.

art-not2• 2 years ago

And then there's millions more that didn't even try

Animats• 2 years ago

Nothing is better than a comeback story

An interesting comment on Trump by Ukraine's army head of intelligence, Kyrylo Budanov: “There have been nine instances in his life when he went to the top, fell to the very bottom of life, and went back again.”

bdjsiqoocwk• 2 years ago

When he won in 2016 i remember thinking. The campaign was so long and so intense and for all of it it seemed clear that he would lose. I remember thinking, this guy in every other respect is a despicable person, but I can't help but be impressed that he just kept going.

brailsafe• 2 years ago

Anything can be relatively easy if you've either already succeeded the first time based on sheer determination and/or you've successfully done other harder things that were at least as abstract as having a successful career. This article is not about the moment you make a decision, because that's as easy as it's set up to be based on all of the previous dice rolls of your life, but about the likelihood that you'll be able to bounce back from rolling snake eyes on what seemed like a sure thing at a time when time itself was cheap.

If determination alone qualified as the criteria for succeeding in a career change, then that means whatever situation you're in already has prepared you perfectly for a marginally different path forward, or the risk involved is relatively trivial. Imo, this article isn't pessimistic enough, but it doesn't mean one can't be inspired by rare anomalies, it's just that you'd be naive to believe an arbitrary person can replicate those results merely by trying hard. It doesn't work for a primary career, and it won't work for a secondary career, there are many more factors involved.

ImHereToVote• 2 years ago

Man, I wish my problems were shaped like that.

gumby2• 2 years ago

In the novels of Ian McEwan, a pattern recurs. The main character makes a mistake — just one — which then hangs over them forever. ... This plot trick is said to be unbecoming of a serious artist.

Hmm, yet Thomas Hardy is (correctly IMHO) is considered a great artist worthy of having novels like The Mayor of Casterbridge included in the canon.

richk449• 2 years ago

What about Jonathon Franzen?

gumby2• 2 years ago

You have to be dead for a while to be part of the canon. Until then you’re a “popular writer” at best.

It’s the opposite of the Nobels in this regard.

julienchastang• 2 years ago

Robert Frost's, often misinterpreted [0], “The Road Not Taken” also comes to mind here.

"In many ways, the poem becomes about how—through retroactive narrative—the poet turns something as irrational as an “impulse” into a triumphant, intentional decision. Decisions are nobler than whims, and this reframing is comforting, too, for the way it suggests that a life unfolds through conscious design. However, as the poem reveals, that design arises out of constructed narratives, not dramatic actions."

[0] https://www.poetryfoundation.org/articles/89511/robert-frost...

Barrin92• 2 years ago

I think this is quite terrible advice because our (Western) culture is already way too biased towards quarter and mid-life crises, ageism and fatalism when there is objectively little reason to panic.

One conversation I had that had extreme influence on me was working with an old software developer from China who had seen the cultural revolution as a kid, had family sent to farm labor, his parents had their company taken from him, he lost his own companies twice during reforms of the 80s and 90s and had his life turned over like half a dozen times in ways that where I grew up nobody had ever experienced once. He had to completely start from scratch when he was in his early 50s.

So when someone aged 28 at work was having a mental breakdown over their wrong phd specialization the guy always just laughed and said, you're younger than 45, you can start over, what's the problem?

The article is right that life is path dependent, in the sense that if you went to war and lost both arms you have a problem, but no, what obscure degree choice you made has not in any serious way taken real agency away. That is just our bizarre and neurotic culture. At least for most people their own perception of their history weighs them down significantly more than what is in reality genuinely the case.

grobgambit• 2 years ago

Totally agree. This article is just terrible.

We love to romanticize the path not taken too. If I look at the mistakes I have made in my life, if I could go back and change them I would still just end up making different mistakes on a different path.

Some of those alternate paths would have been a dead end too, literally. We take the value of the path that was chosen is one that means you are alive to read this on 4/28/24 completely for granted.

card_zero2• 2 years ago

There's Orwell's essay Such, Such Were the Joys, where a horrible ordeal of preparation, in a preparatory school, for a scholarship and a successful future in Edwardian society, is completely nullified by coinciding with the First World War and the nature of society changing.

jncfhnb3• 2 years ago

The problem is people want to enjoy their lives and starting over means forfeiting many years of that life, as well as potentially closing doors they wanted to leverage. People often put their lives on complete hold for a phd. Discovering that was a waste is awful.

pimlottc• 2 years ago

There's merit to this but it's not the advice that most people need. Most of us already worry too much about making mistakes and need to know that course correction, at least to some degree, is almost always possible.

For those who always decisions rashly, this might be useful, but I would expect they are the minority group.

mooreds• 2 years ago

That was a beautiful summation of path dependence.

I remember another comment on HN where someone talked about their 50s and looking through the rear view mirror wistfully.

It's not like you can do nothing when you get older, it's more like you know you can't do everything.

foobar1962• 2 years ago

You reach an age when life becomes a (text) adventure game: you wake up in a field next to a mailbox with a letter in it, and on the ground is a bag with items some of which are useful now, some that may be useful later, and others that are not useful at all.

It may or may not be your beautiful house and your beautiful wife (if I may mix the metaphors a moment) but it's all you have. The challenge is working out what to do with what you have within the limitations of the game, which can involve challenging your idea of what the limitations of the game are...

6gvONxR4sf7o2• 2 years ago

On the job side, this is a scary consequence of specialization. If you can learn a job in a day or a week, you can go where opportunity is. If it requires a degree (or a graduate degree!) then you're so much more stuck.

I've wondered if this is part of the reason for high software salaries. When so many industries needs software, developers can hop from the failing industry to the lucrative one, forcing more efficient competition. Not so for many careers, where the skill set and the industry are tied together.

I'd bet the whole second chance thing gets more brittle as competition and specialization get more important in general, even beyond jobs.

tombert13• 2 years ago

If it requires a degree (or a graduate degree!) then you're so much more stuck.

That's a situation I've been in now for a few years now. I'm somewhat burnt out on software engineering, but the last 13 years of work history, a bachelors in CS, and about half a PhD in theoretical CS, my options on who will hire me are kind of limited.

It seems like my only options are:

1) Start a fresh career with a fresh new degree and accept about 1/3 of my salary that I have now for the next 13 years after that.

2) Take a career in non-degreed labor and probably permanently have about 1/3 of my salary.

3) Try and pivot into the management side of things.

4) Start a business.

5) Just live with it.

Since I don't really want to take a loss salary for 13+ years, I'm extremely risk-averse, and I don't want to become a manager, I'm more or less stuck with option 5.

I like software and computer science, but "software engineering" barely counts as either. I expected to be utilizing a million data structures or figuring out proofs of correctness or designing the next amazing distributed system, but it feels like 2/3+ of software engineering is "add field to JSON" or "write a for loop to convert something to a different shape" or "change color of button" or "change width of page layout and then modify selenium tests", and the only data structures that ever get used are hashmaps and arrays. I spent so much time learning the minutia of CSP and TLA+ and set theory and I feel like I have basically nothing to show for it, and now I can't really even change to a career where I would get to use them.

Not that it's really a thing to complain about; I'm pretty lucky to be in a postion where I make about 3x more than I realistically need, so I'm not really trying to garner sympathy, but it's also a situation that becomes kind of easy to burn out on, and sometimes it depresses me more than it really should.

badpun3• 2 years ago

There are jobs (e.g. database engine development) where knowledge of distributed systems algorithms comes in handy. Most likely not nearly at the level of your theoretical PhD, but also much more stimulating that adding fields to JSON.

robertn702• 2 years ago

The statement "my options on who will hire me are kind of limited" is a bit misleading. Limited compared to whom? Your options are abundant compared to most people.

It sounds like you are waiting on a fantasy position that has both interesting work and pays at least the same as your current position, which you have 13 years of experience in. That's not usually how life works. There are trade-offs.

If you want to do a different type of work that you don't have any professional experience in, you are going to have to take a pay cut. As you mentioned, you're fortunate to be making 3x what you need. It's up to you whether it's worth "only" making 2x what you need in order to do work you find more engaging.

This is not a unique circumstance. People make this trade-off all the time. Maybe talk to some people who did.

antihipocrat• 2 years ago

There's no requirement to put qualifications or experience on the CV that aren't necessary for the role. Hiring managers make a lot of assumptions, and if specialisation is going to limit opportunity then leave it out.

_carbyau_3• 2 years ago

Possible other option: I hope to soon go part-time. IE keep my current job with the pay rate, but change the balance of hours worked. And if it doesn't work how I like, go back to full time.

I like the idea of studying physical design... but we'll see how that pans out.

Izkata• 2 years ago

I like software and computer science, but "software engineering" barely counts as either. I expected to be utilizing a million data structures or figuring out proofs of correctness or designing the next amazing distributed system, but it feels like 2/3+ of software engineering is "add field to JSON" or "write a for loop to convert something to a different shape" or "change color of button" or "change width of page layout and then modify selenium tests", and the only data structures that ever get used are hashmaps and arrays. I spent so much time learning the minutia of CSP and TLA+ and set theory and I feel like I have basically nothing to show for it, and now I can't really even change to a career where I would get to use them.

So, around 6-7 years ago I was on a development team and was getting tired of a bunch of things - the frontend treadmill (react/redux, do it this way, no that way, then a few months later there's a new "right way"), how we kept getting new product owners and the "vision" was lost so we were just reacting to customers (and kept remaking the same pages but differently), and a slightly more personal one (no one liked my idea for one of those pages, then a few months later our designer came up with the exact same thing, no one remembered mine, and the page has been unchanged since). Our company was also drifting heavily into silos during that time, some people were frontend-only, some backend-only, where I like the whole stack and didn't want to limit myself.

So after all that I did something that surprised and confused my manager: Asked to get moved to the maintenance team instead of new development. They were intrigued because apparently that team is where new hires often ended up, and they almost never had someone experienced on it - which surprised me because I figured that job would be harder than new development. So far I've been on this team longer than any others and have yet to get tired of it. I know some of it is how good a manager we have, but the work is also very directly about fixing things. It's much more self-directed, no product owner initiated rewrites on a whim, large projects still happen when something is really bad, but because it's considered legacy there's no treadmill-chasing. And the random fixes can end up anywhere in the stack, so I get to keep using everything I'd learned from linux through the database and server to frontend, instead of sticking to a silo.

So even "5) Just live with it." does have sub-options.

didgetmaster2• 2 years ago

If you are really making 3x what you really need, you should be building wealth at a rapid pace. Once you are financially secure, you can stop doing unfulfilling work just because the pay is good.

I 'retired' early because I don't need to work for anyone anymore. My wife and I saved and invested so we are set financially. I still love to program so I spend my time and energy working on a project that is personally fulfilling to me even though it has yet to bring in meaningful revenues.

BTW: it is a new data management system that is designed to be a distributed system. Have you considered teaming up with someone on a side project?

lnsru• 2 years ago

I guess you’re in USA. Luckily I am in poor Germany with way lower salaries. Which opens me another option 6) go into trades. Becoming certified electrician takes a lot of time or money or both. My university degree with an expensive course was enough. Salary stays the same as long as I am self employed.

Otherwise 5) since 4) does not really work for me. Helped too many brilliant guys as an electrical engineer. Products got traction, but nothing big happened.

lanstin10• 2 years ago

This is your chance to decide what your values in life are. Money or fulfillment. Maybe you can alter the software job somehow to make it more fulfilling to you. An organization with a purpose or mission that you believe in. A role with different type of expectations or work. Maybe writing on the side or starting a family.

pif3• 2 years ago

If you can learn a job in a day or a week, you can go where opportunity is.

And you will find a very crowded place, populated with all the other guys who leant the job yesterday.

I've wondered if this is part of the reason for high software salaries. When so many industries needs software,

You are describing demand and offer: nothing more, nothing less.

6gvONxR4sf7o2• 2 years ago

What I'm describing is friction. In a market where demand changes over time, supply friction affects efficiency. The time scale over which the market reaches equilibrium and that time scale's affect on the people providing supply is what I'm talking about.

RheingoldRiver• 2 years ago

A girl misidentifies a rapist, and in doing so shatters three lives, including her own ( Atonement).

That's not what happens, is it? I thought she falsely accuses her sister's boyfriend/lover as being a rapist for reasons left slightly unclear to the reader (misunderstanding the situation vs wanting to cause attention).

ptk921• 2 years ago

A friend of mine has deep wounds around their experience of making the wrong decisions during formative (college years) they they feel has set them back in life.

Everyone around them sees their story differently: a successful career pivot into a field that they love which compensates them well. They have truly inspired many!

Yet for my friend, the story they tell themselves is that their poor decisions in college will essentially haunt them forever because they don't have the academic pedigree and work experience of their peers.

I have my own relationship with rumination, and appreciate this perspective from Michael Pollan in his book "How to Change Your Mind"

"A lot of depression is a sort of self-punishment, as even Freud understood. We get trapped in these loops of rumination that are very destructive, and the stories that we tell ourselves: you know, that we’re unworthy of love, that we can’t get through the next hour with a cigarette, whatever it is. And these deep, deep grooves of thought are very hard to get out of. They disconnect us from other people, from nature, from an earlier idea of who we are."

My advice for anyone reading this is to listen to the stories that you tell yourself. Ask yourself how you can adjust these stories to have a more empowered understanding of yourself.

brian_cunnie• 2 years ago

My brother's college roommate became an actor instead of a lawyer.

Now fifty-seven, he confided, "I think I made the wrong decision."

BeetleB• 2 years ago

No shortages of lawyers who think the same - way before they hit 50 :-)

lelanthran5• 2 years ago

My brother's college roommate became an actor instead of a lawyer.
Now fifty-seven, he confided, "I think I made the wrong decision."

Don't worry; many lawyers, at age 57, are saying the same thing!

(There are more lawyers of the Saul Goodman size of practice than the LA Law type of practice)

galaxyLogic6• 2 years ago

I believe in the Myth of Second Chance and Third and so on. It is what we tell ourselves to keep going. Nothing wrong with that.

At the time you make a decision it is often impossible to know what its consequences are, so if we had made a different decision things might actually be worse.

Not making a decision in time can also have negative consequences.

bruce511• 2 years ago

Hindsight living, is like hindsight investing (I should have bought Apple stock in 1999) useless.

With hindsight it's easy to cherry-pick missteps. And from those missteps fantasize a hypothetical outcome. And obviously in this alternate universe you only ever come out better.

Yes, there are pivotal moments. I've made big decisions along the way. I've made some mistakes.

But everything good in my life has come from this one path.

I make a choice to celebrate the present, not hanker after a mythical alternative. I choose to be content with the present, and contentment is the source of my happiness.

It's easy to compare my life with others, and find others richer, or more famous, or married, or unmarried. Social media amplifies this.

But it's also easy to compare to others who walked a harder path, and have a harder path in front of them. At this stage of my life its less about climbing one more rung, and more about helping those below me, smoothing their path as much as possible.

No one goes through life perfectly. Hindsight living is not helpful and contentment beats regret every day of the week.

alimw• 2 years ago

Nothing wrong with that.

One thing wrong with it is that the myth leads us to blame ourselves for the failure to recover as well.

techno_tsar• 2 years ago

I agree. If you have two narratives about your life, and both are true, it is literally pointless to hang onto the negative one.

One's self-identity is important. The truth about what one's "narrative in life" is is not a brute property etched into the universe.

We should be pragmatic about what what thoughts we nurture.

usgroup3• 2 years ago

I've many regrets similar in vein to that of your friend. Over time I've decided that it's rather reductionist to think that things connect together so simplistically. The "how my life could have been better if X, ceteris paribus" can be a really painful analysis, but -- in this case favourably -- there is no "ceteris paribus" in real lives.

MadcapJake• 2 years ago

There's a collection of techniques in the mental health field called Cognitive Behavioral Therapy that is about helping people identify and replace these negative stories. If folks are having a hard time applying these ideas themselves alone, look into this therapy as it can be good to have a therapist help you through using the technique.

chrisknyfe• 2 years ago

I think the idea that our lives are a set of branching paths, where once you go down one path you can't go down others, is partly a consequence of how the academic path of many careers is designed to "weed out" promising students from others. This "branching tree of time" illusion is created by the elitist, rejecting attitude of the gatekeepers of our society... and by our sensitivity to taking rejection personally in our young and formative years.

And maybe secretly we all wish things could've worked out with our first love... when in reality our first loves are those we are least likely to be compatible with in the long term.

switch007• 2 years ago

I also find people mostly unable to move beyond their initial judgement. First impressions seriously, seriously matter.

skybrian2• 2 years ago

There's a second "myth" that you could have recognized it was the wrong decision at the time. And that's not always true either.

imtringued3• 2 years ago

Neoclassical economics is not only built around that idea, you also have the ability to predict the behaviour of others accurately.

If you don't have those two things, then it doesn't work.

skybrian2• 2 years ago

It's a somewhat better assumption for repeated, routine transactions.

EdwardDiego• 2 years ago

If I'm still breathing, I can still have another go. At least at things I'm not legally or culturally barred from due to age or diagnoses, e.g., no flying planes for me because ADHD.

But I think it's rare for anyone to end up where they had planned, and even rarer for them to get there the way they had intended.

derbOac2• 2 years ago

I think lots of times this is the essence of agism: that old dogs can't learn new tricks etc. I'm not sure path dependence needs to be as strong as it is, but it often is because society disallows it.

majormajor• 2 years ago

"Many people are miserable and accepting of it" does not disprove that you can, in fact, make career moves after 30, or study the humanities you ignored in undergrad at a later point. Many people are fragile; does that mean that you shouldn't try to be resilient?

You might never get end up with the life you wanted when you were 15, but few people do. Does "getting exactly what you wanted when you were young and then never being challenged/learning/changing" sound like the recipe for a happy life well lived?

Most of us do make decisions that aren't exactly resounding successes. Most of us have regrets. So it's "be unhappy about the regret and dwell on it while staying where you are" or "try to move on and change things to make you pay less attention to it."

jncfhnb3• 2 years ago

You might never get end up with the life you wanted when you were 15, but few people do. Does "getting exactly what you wanted when you were young and then never being challenged/learning/changing" sound like the recipe for a happy life well lived?

Easily yes

lanstin10• 2 years ago

Not for me. I like new things.

JoshGG• 2 years ago

Opinion unencumbered by data.

rukuu001• 2 years ago

Can't believe the question of free will hasn't popped up yet.

jmward01• 2 years ago

A corollary to this may be that those who get many chances are more likely to succeed. This is often the case for people that have a safety net of some sort compared to those that don't when it comes to, for example, starting businesses. Those with a safety net can fail and try again and again and eventually tell the story of how 'gumption and spirit' made them a success while those that didn't have a safety net 'just didn't try hard enough'. I know I have been exceptionally lucky in that I have been given many chances to fail, and taken them! Without those opportunities to fail safely I wouldn't have the success I have now.

zwnow5• 2 years ago

This is a good argument. In Germany, if you take a loan to open up a business, you can pretty much ruin your whole life and financially never recover if it fails once. It's a little different with tech, as you usually don't have as high costs early on, but still. There is an extremely high risk involved that most people simply can't afford.

pier25• 2 years ago

Isn't this the same in most countries?

tristramb• 2 years ago

"In Germany, if you take a loan to open up a business, you can pretty much ruin your whole life"

So instead you ruin other people's lives?

raincole• 2 years ago

What's the alternative tho? If you take a loan, in most countries you're expected to pay it back, no? Do you think people should be able to default without consequence?

hgomersall9• 2 years ago

Does GMbH not afford limited liability for loans?

geraldhh• 2 years ago

please elaborate how germany is different in structuring risk of business failure

FinnKuhn2• 2 years ago

From what I could find it bankruptcy in Germany takes 3 years after a change in 2020, which I find is pretty reasonable and is the same length as in the US...

acron0• 2 years ago

This is critical and often overlooked when it comes to fully appreciating socio-economic factors that influence a person's capacity to "succeed". People with the resources are simply allowed to fail and recover more times than those without.

abtinf• 2 years ago

This has nothing at all to do with the article.

K0balt5• 2 years ago

This was really my takeaway as well.

The finality of decisions is highly situational.

The article doesn’t hold true for me, I have used myriad chances to fail, and have so far lived 3 distinct epochs in my life, each one a life unto itself. I owe this to the simple decision of my father to buy 5 acres of raw land a couple of miles out of town and teach me to use tools.

On the basis of that I have never had to rent, I have had my own shelter (starting with a simple cabin and an outhouse) from the age of 16, and I have never been overly dependent on a job to where I wasn’t willing to walk away.

Having simple shelter made it so I could fuck around and find out until I found something that worked a little, then iterate.

I spent many years of my life intermittently in poverty, getting my food from food banks and buying expired surplus from food thrifts, gardening, etc and relying on social programs for medicine, but I was never at risk of being homeless. Always a place to fall back to.

I have parlayed that into a pretty good life, comfortable, productive, and a small economic engine that provides for several families in the community.

My advice for anyone having children: buy land if you can. Not structures, but land. A few miles out of town is fine, because vehicles and bicycles exist. Teach your kids basic carpentry, electrical, mechanical, and masonry skills. Those are the basis of civilisation.

Move to where you can do this if your local environment is too expensive or restrictive. Move to a new country if needed.

I have done this with my children and because of that, they enjoy the same benefits that I had, and are finding their way having known nothing but self determination as the fundamental principle of their lives.

Debt -Free Land you control without many restrictions, not “real estate” is what makes it possible to live better than most people do while technically being in “poverty” by income. That is what makes it possible to take risks. Risks are what makes it possible to find a working solution.

Of course, if you are born into financial privilege, that’s also a great start, but that wasn’t my case. I often struggled to even pay the (very low) property tax.

Without the freedom and willingness to take risks, and the resilience and willingness to endure hardships, you may have to endure being a servant to someone unless you are very lucky, and luck works better if you can make your own.

This might read like a “pull yourself up by your bootstraps “ rant, but it is not. For most people, they are trapped in a situation designed to keep them in service of some goal not their own. It is very difficult to escape, and impossible without the proper training for self sufficient action and the complete lack of debt (or the willingness to lose anything you owe money on) You also might have to sacrifice your comfort, security, and literally risk your life or health to obtain the foothold from which you can launch a self determined life.

That is a position of extreme privilege, but it is one that can be obtained if you want it bad enough and are willing to roll the dice, and accept the finality of failure if you do not succeed (looping back to the article).

My point is that that kind of privilege is more within reach that most people understand. But you might’ve have to be willing to give up everything at first to use it. Most people are simply not prepared for the hardship and sacrifice that entails.

Land is still cheap all over the world. Unless you live on an island, You can probably get an acre of land for a months wages at a fast food place (in the USA) within a weeks bicycle ride of where you are. But that won’t do you any good unless you know how to turn that into a place to live and work from.

anonylizard• 2 years ago

"Move to where you can do this if your local environment is too expensive or restrictive. Move to a new country if needed."

Sounds like typical American arrogance.

Everything you mentioned about building up a piece of land from zero, is predicated on a stable legal and economic framework, that protects and values private property. And every country that has that framework, tends to have high land prices already. Try this in some non-developed country, and you'll soon see why the world is considered unjust.

langsoul-com• 2 years ago

The article doesn't hold true because of the MASSIVE safety net you've had.

Land, house, zero rent for a long ass time. Your ability to fail and come back is high due to that. And family support.

anthonypasq• 2 years ago

i think the reality is that people want the luxury of modern society even if it means they are chained to it. Its either that, or people are born in the chains and dont even realize they can break them.

Thats certainly how i feel as a white collar office professional in the US.

renegade-otter• 2 years ago

The clown car eventually drives into a gold mine, given enough gas.

baursak• 2 years ago

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15659076

"Entrepreneurship is like one of those carnival games where you throw darts or something.

Middle class kids can afford one throw. Most miss. A few hit the target and get a small prize. A very few hit the center bullseye and get a bigger prize. Rags to riches! The American Dream lives on.

Rich kids can afford many throws. If they want to, they can try over and over and over again until they hit something and feel good about themselves. Some keep going until they hit the center bullseye, then they give speeches or write blog posts about "meritocracy" and the salutary effects of hard work.

Poor kids aren't visiting the carnival. They're the ones working it."

mgh22• 2 years ago

The myth is not in 2nd chances; our ability to adapt and be resilient is hard but doable - ex: 1st time immigrants chasing the American dream.

The myth is in our ability to make "choices" which shifts the narrative to "hard work" rather than luck, perpetuated by survivorship bias and those "who have made it".

Is the typical attribution error.

[1] https://medium.com/@trendguardian/free-will-a-rich-fairy-tal...

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3LopI4YeC4I

linearrust• 2 years ago

The myth is not in 2nd chances; our ability to adapt is sometimes hard but doable - ex: 1st time immigrants searching for the American dream.

Isn't that an example of a 2nd chance? A person fails in his own country and gets another chance (2nd chance) in another country?

eleveriven3• 2 years ago

And you simply can learn from failure

luxuryballs• 2 years ago

…the vast international appeal of football. “It’s the only sport which is usually decided by one goal,” he theorised, “so the pressure on the moment is more intense in football than any other sport.”

Ice hockey has entered the chat!

_carbyau_3• 2 years ago

Meh. Like many things in life it isn't one or the other.

If you want to be an extreme outlier, you likely will need some extreme outlier events to occur - depending on what your desire is. For many of us, we're not able to influence many aspects and outcomes in that extreme.

And so I like someone's quote: Life is what happens while you're planning other things.

aetherson• 2 years ago

For almost all of us, the truth is that life could have been better -- there are mistakes that can not be wholly erased or undone -- but life could also be much worse. And you'll be a lot happier if you don't hyper focus on regretting your mistakes.

bee_rider• 2 years ago

Life probably could have been much better for all of us, but also the life we’re imaging that might be much better benefits greatly from being untarnished by reality.

datascienced2• 2 years ago

#00F grass!

lanstin10• 2 years ago

If you count the mistakes as educational then how can you regret them. They were your mistakes going from where you were to where you are, this one unique and fascinating life.

javajosh• 2 years ago

There are some in the "advice-instrustial complex" that give such advice. The Stoics have a technique where you imagine losing all you have, and this creates a feeling of gratitude for what you do have, and prepares you for losing it (as we all must do, in time). The Buddhists say that "Life is suffering".

But yes, this notion that your life is a one-shot, and you may very well outlive the potential for your life to achieve what you wanted, or thought it might, is not common advice. At times mean-spirited people will say that so-and-so celebrity is "over the hill" or "past their prime", but of course this applies (in a good faith way) to us all at some point. When the barb is targeted at someone who's earned a lot and is no longer earning it is less painful and socially acceptable than when targeted at someone who never knew success at all.

Nature is interesting because She seems to play around with lifetime duration quite a lot. Most life is very short lived; they are one-shots. But it doesn't matter because there are so many. But the few, the long-lived, the lives with so many resources behind them, She plays with these too. And honestly it's not clear that they are so successful. They tend to exist at the top of a food chain and accumulate damage over time, requiring sophisticated repair mechanisms. Such creatures are also more sensitive to environmental issues, accumulating poisons much faster than those before them in the food chain. Humans exist in this sensitive, precarious place in the ecosystem and I think we often outlive our usefulness, as evidenced by pre-industrial poor-houses stocked mostly by the old and infirm.

golergka• 2 years ago

There are beliefs that are true, and there are beliefs that are beneficial. Sometimes they are the same. But in this case, knowing that you cannot turn back and fix things mostly just leads to depression, whereas faith that you can turn around can become a self-fulfilling prophecy. On the other case, knowing as a youngster that wrong choices can screw up your whole life doesn't bring anything new — it's not like people want to make bad choices to begin with!

didgetmaster2• 2 years ago

The myth is that that there is one optimal path through life that will make you happy and that any deviation from it will cause you to lose that happiness. While mistakes might take you down a path that you didn't anticipate and you might regret it for some time; they might also have opened up doors that would never have presented themselves.

We all wish we could go back and fix a mistake or two; but we often don't realize that doing so might unravel many other positive events. Everyone has regrets, but we don't get to see what would have happened if we had made a different decision at every turn.

galaxyLogic6• 2 years ago

Right, rumination is bad serves no useful purpose. It is good to analyze our previous mistakes but we should not lament our previous behavior because we cannot change it anyhow. We can only try to be better next time.

The English folk-rock band Incredible String Band has a great song where they sing "Happy man, the happy man, doing the best he can the best he can".

imtringued3• 2 years ago

Rumination and depression evolved to help humans survive. They aren't useless.

pascalcrysis• 2 years ago

Yeah, I'm wondering what is the actual point of the article, and you're touching on where I'm coming from. It's very retrospective, and gives very little time to forethought. Yet the author establishes that they see peers step into life decisions with relatable distress, or indoctrinated softness, people facing the future, but doesn't explore much beyond that. See, to me, this is grasping for an answer, where next step is "and how many of those people who took the step casually or overtly seriously had that have an equivalent impact on their life?"

And I would even take it as a mistake being done here to claim a stake. Being that, they can only ever source the answer from the same place Senator Armstrong does everything in his life. How CAN you solve the problem of finding your best life, how CAN you say you were more mindful and therefore, got rewarded? How CAN anyone say be more like this?

You can't poll for it, people are very often bad a either introspection or at retrospectives, and more than anything - they don't actually know. They will biasedly speak positively of bad experiences and rash decisions that benefited them and vice-versa. Few will have the maturity to turn and say they were glad to have met toxic person or workplace or that it helped them overall despite taking away 30 years of their life. And that's still their prerogative opinion. Opinions are nice and all, but not the answer we seek. We seek the actual, real impact, that mindfulness has on life paths. The state of mind in the moment. It is unknowable. And often, whoever discredits the notion, is suspiciously also handing out brochures.

I don't see eye to eye with the article. Feels like a sermon by someone who doesn't actually peer much beyond any veil. They're just judging people, on the hardest game there is. I play competitive team based games, but I never play ranked. It's full of awful people with lots to say of others.

draven• 2 years ago

That's exactly my thought reading the piece: it talks about "errors", "mistakes", "irrecoverable damage" where everything could be viewed as "non-optimal choices." And they are judged with the benefit of hindsight, because they could have been the most logical choices with the information available at the time.

Past events can't be changed, and we are not the person who made the decision at the time anymore.

bombdailer• 2 years ago

I look at it as the impossibility of having regret once you understand that every decision you made in the past was the best decision you could have made. Which is to say you were some specific person, with a particular ego and relation to self and to world. Any decision made was being made withing some particular frame of mind - mood, energy, memories, as well as their relevance and salience mappings.

Making a decision while angry? If one has not the capacity to see through anger when making a decision - a lack of mindfulness perhaps, then that decision even when made in anger is the best they could do at that point. If one practices mindfulness and can often deal with anger but fails this time, that is still the best that person could do given who they are when a decision is being made. There is nobody to blame.

Even perceived self-sabotage is still acting within some particular framing. If that person Knew something different about the nature of their being at a perspective and participatory level, they likely would have made different more constructive choices.

Everything emerges exactly as it should due to what is Known and is at any particular time. The nature of self being a lifelong quest to understand, the more we understand about it the better the decision we can make. Probably explains the importance of 'Know thyself' to Socrates. But there is never a wrong choice as you say, only non-optimal. Only that which was made due to you having not been some particular other potential version of you.

Learning makes change possible. Not all learning is good for you. You never know you're learning as you're doing it - for if you're self aware you aren't paying attention as so can't learn, but if you are paying attention you're not aware about "learning". Thus we should pay attention to what is good and trust that we are learning. And trust that we are also learning when we pay attention to what is bad for us.

hoc• 2 years ago

Decision tree vs. Turing machine

Variation in overall size, branch angle/length/node distance influence the resulting number of possible steps, as well a the limited run time and state complexity does. This also lets "fail often, fail early" look like that simple approach for a massive wide step zig zag approach to life; only if assuming no life-relevant costs per step, that is.

Still, a state machine with loops allows for second chances in general, while the underlying environment also changes in parallel. So your outlook for the second try might as well be better.

To describe a backwards directed re-play, a decision tree might be a tempting structure. But just because the "truth" is too complex to describe and not visible to you in its entirety anyway.

Don't get discouraged by these kind of undercomplex views on life. There's still lot of environmental problems/limitations to be solved, to make everybody's run a bit smoother and less dependend on their environment, though, even though, or because, all the runs and the environment are basically the same thing.

metalspoon• 2 years ago

Even the decision to go down a science track at school, when the humanities turn out to be your bag, can mangle a life.

Dear Author, you seem not to know the concept of trying (harder). As you stop trying at the first mistake, of course you didn't get a second chance.

kazinator• 2 years ago

The surprise of middle age, and the terror of it, is how much of a person’s fate can boil down to one misjudgement.

I don't think that's it. The misjudgment is invariably going to be just a sample in a pattern of similar such misjudgments.

walterburns• 2 years ago

Ay, that's the spirit, lad.

To borrow a phrase from the book Switch, "true but useless".

And only technically true. Of course there are no actual second chances. Time only moves forward. But the implication - and it's only implied - that you're doomed to unhappiness in a cage of past life choices is defeatist, pusillanimous bunk.

As John Lennon said, "I just had to let it go". That takes more courage the older you get. But anyone that tells you that it's hopeless because you majored in accounting instead of art should be escorted quickly and quietly away from anyone impressionable, and then kept away from sharp objects for their own safety.

Pull yourself together!

Or, to quote the Terry Gilliam movie Baron Munchausen, "Open the gates!"

tpdly• 2 years ago

There is a retrospective and a prospective reading of this advice. I agree with your take when this advice is applied retrospectively, but I find it downright sobering when thinking about my future. I am in the process of making some big decisions, and perhaps I have been a bit to casual about them.

IggleSniggle• 2 years ago

Perhaps, or perhaps you merely let the entirety of your brain make the decision, and more optimally so for your circumstances, instead of the limited executive function. Maybe. Or maybe that was just the lizard brain. Really hard for the executive brain to discern between the "all of my brain / know it in the gut / good instincts" and the "lizard brain want"

ezekiel68• 2 years ago

This simply cannot be overstated: to be paralyzed into inaction is nonetheless yet another action. The curse of choice is common to us all. To quote my mentor (and the actual fatherly mentor of Tony Robbins) Jim Rohn: "To wish it away is to wish your life away."

FlacoJones• 2 years ago

agreed. not everything that's true is wise.

renewiltord2• 2 years ago

That seems true. You can't repair everything. Perhaps recognizing when you're at an inflection point in the curve is a skill. Some of us just happen upon these. Others recognize them.

Speaking of football, Messi is renowned for not running all the time. He strikes at crucial moments, accelerating out, one touch to move away, a dribble past the next, a fantastic shot. There are others who run more miles than him per game, even in his role.

An interesting parallel. I credit luck with my chances. My wife and I got close after I was nearly killed in a motorcycle accident. I found the job that made my career because a friend sent me the link the day I smashed my knee in a skateboarding accident and couldn't move. I moved to America because a friend was going and urged me to move with him. My wife and I have a genetic condition and embryo sequencing arrives just as we decide to have children. Many second chances after I'd first made another choice.

There's only the world and you. You can only constraint solve within the constraints and there's not much to be done about that. A one-legged man will not run the 100m at the Olympics.

Internet forums are littered with those who claim they are that man and the one who wins gold at 100m is just naturally gifted. But I know many strivers and while some would be considered failures, far fewer are than the ones who do not try at anything since they've got the one leg.

The other man always has an extra leg. The other man always has the sharper eye. The other man always has the more handsome face.

Perhaps this is natural. Cells know when they're failures. Perhaps people do too. Perhaps that is adaptive of species.

The reason why so many failures lead to success is that only those who strive fail. And you must strive to succeed. Those who do not try at all do not fail and do not succeed. That's okay. We form the infrastructure of the species.

tome3• 2 years ago

I love this comment. Do you have a blog or other published writing?

renewiltord2• 2 years ago

Very kind of you. Blog is sadly on another identity. And if I'm being honest, quality is highly variable.

purpleteam812• 2 years ago

Some times the second chance succeeds because you rely on the expertise of someone else rather than your own.

When Durian became available locally, I purchased the smallest fruit available. I used it as part of my smoothie. Yes, it was pungent while at the same time a very light and pleasing fragrant aroma.

I didn't purchase it again as I needed more understanding of flavor melding. However, I enjoyed the puff pastry filled with Durian a few years later while visiting China and only tasted the fragrant aroma.

thread_id• 2 years ago

"If" by Rudyard Kipling

If you can keep your head when all about you Are losing theirs and blaming it on you,

If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you, But make allowance for their doubting too;

If you can wait and not be tired by waiting, Or being lied about, don’t deal in lies,

Or being hated, don’t give way to hating, And yet don’t look too good, nor talk too wise:

If you can dream—and not make dreams your master; If you can think—and not make thoughts your aim;

If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster And treat those two impostors just the same;

If you can bear to hear the truth you’ve spoken Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools,

Or watch the things you gave your life to, broken, And stoop and build ’em up with worn-out tools:

If you can make one heap of all your winnings And risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss,

And lose, and start again at your beginnings And never breathe a word about your loss;

If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew To serve your turn long after they are gone,

And so hold on when there is nothing in you Except the Will which says to them: ‘Hold on!’

If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue, Or walk with Kings—nor lose the common touch,

If neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you, If all men count with you, but none too much;

If you can fill the unforgiving minute With sixty seconds’ worth of distance run,

Yours is the Earth and everything that’s in it, And—which is more—you’ll be a Man, my son!

datascienced2• 2 years ago

You can be all that, and still be good or be evil. Maybe that is the point!

Cacti• 2 years ago

Honestly I don’t get the appeal. It reads like something one would write in the middle of puberty and then throw away when you’re a few years older and embarrassed.

lanstin10• 2 years ago

This viewpoint seems a bit fear based or conservative to me. I wouldn't be shocked if the author wants a high degree of wealth as well. I guess that is a defensible approach but there is another approach of trusting the process, learn from your experience (and the experience of others if you can) and bring a perspective that most experiences have a positive aspect that you can focus on. Why be afraid, you die either way. Life isn't a zero sum game where if you get divorced or don't become a famous person or a really rich person it has no interest. Everyone has interesting experiences and the chance to learn and form connections and help out and find meaning strewn all over. And even the wrong career will give you skills and perspectives that you find yourself drawing on when you get the perfect career. Even if only to deeply appreciate the perfection, that is worth a lot of lifetime savings.

affgrff2• 2 years ago

There is just too much randomness in life and control is an illusion. Of course, it is true that some life choices will close or open doors, but, again, life is messy for everyone. By the way, when did mindfulness fall out of favor with tech people? I have the feeling there is a whole new generation that again has to learn the benefits of contemplative practices from scratch. Anyone here read Search inside yourself etc. ten years ago?

pineaux• 2 years ago

One of the problems of this article is that although many of these things are true, a lot of times you must play the cards you're dealt, cause not playing will be even worse. Its like in poker where you are playing one on one against a player with a substantially bigger stack and the blinds are just eating you up. In such situations, waiting for a better hand is a bad decision in many cases. Then when you lose because you bluffed and lost, you will blame yourself for this mistake, but actually it could just be the best chance you had. 6 more blinds would have destroyed you anyway. You thought you had a good enough hand and played it. You lost, but you still made the best decision. Life is like that. Another example: you are a 37 year oldwoman and you feel your fertility slip away. You take a man and make some children. The man turns out to be an idiot... Your lifes dreams destroyed by an asshole man and your childrens needs. But maybe this was the best you could do... Maybe not taking that choice at that moment would have left you childless and maybe you would have been very sad about that. Regretting not taking the chances. I know quite a few people that waited for the best partner to have children, but never had them. Now old, they feel it is their greatest regret.

vjk800• 2 years ago

This, I think is why all (most) old people are conservative while young people tend to be more liberal (both in politics and in personal life). If you know that a single mistake can ruin everything, you focus on not doing that mistake over anything else. And the only way to do that with limited information of the world is to just keep everything running the same way it's always been running.

I've gone from being a capitalist libertarian to being some sort of a self-defined eco hippie because of this. I realized that the capital fueled "progress" changes things a lot and we can't guarantee that all those changes are good (even if we now think they are, we might later find out they weren't). On the other hand, when you change the ecosystem or the planet, it's changed for good and there's no going back. Therefore it's best not to meddle with shit we don't understand. Stop building new stuff, stop making new roads, stop destroying things to make them "better".

helloplanets• 2 years ago

Even the decision to go down a science track at school, when the humanities turn out to be your bag, can mangle a life.

'Mangling a life' is shooting way over the top.

Is having to deal with going down a school track that didn't turn out to be your bag what you can justify calling a mangled life? Isn't that just what we call life? The issue is that we'll almost always be able to find issues in our decisions in hindsight, if we really look for them. Even a ten million dollar exit can feel like a failure if you were shooting for a hundred.

If we forego using bombastic words for things that they shouldn't be applied to, the hollowness of the premise is revealed, and the illusion crumbles:

Even the decision to go down a science track at school, when the humanities turn out to be your bag, can have a negative effect on your life.

GistNoesis• 2 years ago

Life is hell. There are no second chances, because there weren't even a first chance to begin with. There is no escape because this is hell and there are no escape from hell. Live through it.

Circular logic, endless torments, eternal regrets.

Fixed points of the ethereal planes drawing souls like moths towards burning elevation.

EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK• 2 years ago

BS. There are second, and third, and tenth chances. Besides, you can always adjust your definition of "success", it's in fact pretty flexible :)

p1dda• 2 years ago

Dr. Phil has a great speech about starting new late in life, I highly recommend it.

lelanthran5• 2 years ago

If you have a link, maybe.

I'm a little biased against the Dr Phil type of advice because, from what little I heard from him, it isn't really good advice.

But, I'm open to changing my mind based on a video from a trusted source, like a fellow HN reader :-)

dee_s101• 2 years ago

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0OtnGAenWEs

justanotherjoe• 2 years ago

No. I disagree with the sentiment strongly. I've seen so many of my friends alone turn their life around from bad choices. Truth is, this article is most likely just attribution bias. Life is rich enough to allow for manueverability. And for the record i hate everything that makes life seems a more hostile place. I take it my personal responsibility to have the opposite effect to people.

ogou2• 2 years ago

This kind of pessimism seems to come when people want to justify surrender. Why bother trying another path if there are no second chances, right? Now in middle age, I have found the 100s of small choices we make to be just as important as any of the big ones. Sometimes these are more important. I have seen it in my peers as well. People who choice the same path had different outcomes from all the small choices they made along the way. It's easy to attribute luck or privilege, but perseverance is a crucial factor in most success.

In the other extreme, it makes me think of the generations that have grown up with respawn video games. When you die you just respawn. Those games are ONLY second chances. It's rare that anyone plays any game all the way through on the first life they're given. If you grow up immersed in worlds without consequences it can paralyze your decision making in real life. Not always, but I have seen some people retreat into these kinds of worlds and not want IRL decisions.

pif3• 2 years ago

It's easy to attribute luck or privilege, but perseverance is a crucial factor in most success.

You need luck, or privilege, for your perseverance to bear fruit.

You need both! I'm stunned by how many people cannot grasp this simple concept. Typically, people who have luck tend not to notice it, and attribute everything to their merit. At the opposite, people who didn't get their fair share of luck, tend to ignore the effort part and paint all successful people as lucky slackers.

ogou2• 2 years ago

I disagree with that completely. You are arguing for a surrender of personal power and self-determination. It's a short journey between 'luck' as a concept and fate, magic, religion, or just random occurrence. If that's really your belief, then why try anything? I don't live like that. I have been able to succeed on merit or work and despite negative environments. Many, many others have as well, throughout human history.

2d8a875f-39a2-4• 2 years ago

“Whatever you do, don't congratulate yourself too much, or berate yourself either. Your choices are half chance. So are everybody else's.”

alexcpn• 2 years ago

This sounds so true yet false. For absolutely every successful life there is a trail of failed lives left behind and restarted. And I dont mean like movie star or Nobel prize success; just plain vanilla happy and almost boring life. It is a real cliche, but it is true; never ever give up easily. That means that you may need to admit and give up things that never would have worked out, but hold on to things that may; and to know the difference is impossible; you have to trust in your principles; the right principles may extract a terrible initial cost but lead to great happiness in the end. Amen (And you can get Principles here - https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/34536488-principles )

resource_waste2• 2 years ago

Buddy if I drop my life right now, my 6 kids lose their 200k/yr income.

Some decisions you make are permanent.

I suppose I could reject conventional morality and just bail lol. I'm not sure you really want to promote a society like such.

qgin• 2 years ago

Hacker News is in love with this genre of “everything is so much more serious and terrible than you think” and I’m not sure exactly why.

0dayz• 2 years ago

I would imagine it comes from the programmer culture, in that you have to take everything as if life depends on it.

At least compared to most "manual" labor such as electrician, you can be a lot more chill and only focus on what you have to learn and nothing more if you want.

adamomada3• 2 years ago

Older crowd.

gexla2• 2 years ago

The trouble with this viewpoint lies in the "all hope of the life you wanted" part. To enter into this game is the start of the losing outcome. As the saying goes, the only way not to lose the game, is not to play it at all. If you don't want to lose at football, then don't play football. It's a stupid sport.

What you do instead is simply follow what excites you in the moment as reality unfolds, with no attachment to outcome. The more you're attached to an illusion, the more turmoil you'll experience as the illusion fades. It's saddening that the observer fixates on this fading thing, but doesn't notice that new things are appearing which are even more brilliant.

Pick a direction which seems interesting, and get moving. Know that whatever idea you have as to what will happen is only useful as a rough guide which you'll throw out. It's the plan Mike Tyson into the ring with, and throws it out when he gets punched in the face.

A powerful tool is realizing that you manifest your patterns and that you can change. You do this by being sensitive to how you feel in response to that which happens around you, and then make changes for better feeling and results. I'll call this "reaching alignment." You get into that state, and you're unstoppable.

resource_waste2• 2 years ago

Trying to classify this philosophy:

Taoism with a dash of Existentialism?

Anyway, I find all this stuff turns out to be 'crap' when you are in physical pain or really had something bad (PTSD) happen to you. Maybe when the pain is too high, I decided to stop being a helpless Stoic and started focusing on solving my own pains.

gexla2• 2 years ago

I have no idea. I guess it's tailored to me, but maybe someone else finds it useful. And this IS the way I solve pains. But I don't have physical pain or PTSD.

I find in general, what works for me in pretty much everything gets to be so far out from textbook that I have to invent ways to even describe it.

usgroup3• 2 years ago

In some sense life is obviously path dependent, since everything you've done is at least dependent on what didn't happen to you.

In another sense, there are many paths which lead to similar things, and path dependency can be Markovian, wherein the whole path doesn't matter in the first place, just the last bit.

fab1an• 2 years ago

This article is essentially a damaging self-fulfilling prophecy camouflaging as analysis. The world is full of turnarounds, and stories where "mistakes" turn out to be happy accidents: "maybe so, maybe not."

rayiner4• 2 years ago

But life is path-dependent: each mistake narrows the next round of choices. A big one, or just an early one, can foreclose all hope of the life you wanted.

“The life you wanted” is an odd notion that I think is responsible for a great deal of misery. Throughout human history, people had pretty much only one kind of life. Nearly everyone in a community didn’t same thing to survive so they could reproduce, and then they died. I feel like people would be a lot happier if they accepted that this is the human experience, not wanting and achieving a particular kind of life.

circlefavshape• 2 years ago

Came here to say the same thing. Everyone says "don't compare yourself to others", but comparing your life to an imaginary one you dreamed up in your head generates pointless misery too

chasd00• 2 years ago

Most who write articles like this don't even know the life they want much less a feasible way to get there. All they really know is the life they have is the life they don't want. When you think like that then every decision you ever made is viewed as a mistake because they all led you to where you are.

alexpotato• 2 years ago

I can't find the original of this story but it goes something like this:

- Father was a lawyer

- Aged early 40s: is married, has kids, successful career as a lawyer

- Quits law to go to medical school

- Becomes successful pediatrician

- Loves it

I will always remember the quote from the son (who is telling the story):

"At age 12 I remember thinking: this is a little strange. Now that I'm in my late 30s with kids, I realize how absolutely wild my dad's decision was. Anyway, here is a picture with him and one of his pediatric patients" (cue picture of dad with a big smile on his face holding a baby).

tim333• 2 years ago

I guess once you've sorted the wife, kids and career then trying something else is relatively low risk. He could always have gone back to lawyering if it didn't work out.

I've got a friend a bit like that - husband kids successful law career but quit because she hates being a lawyer. It allowed her to go from poor to wealthy though so served its purpose.

grvdrm• 2 years ago

This is me!

Wife, kids, solid insurance career. But I quit to join a start up in cybersecurity because I was too curious not to give it a shot.

Unfortunately just recently laid off but I don’t look back and regret the decision. And now I can go back to insurance if I want to.

coolThingsFirst2• 2 years ago

Life ends at 24

_zagj• 2 years ago

It won't be a myth if life extension ever pans out.

jcalx• 2 years ago

As a counterpoint, see The Trouble With Optionality [1] as a critique of keeping your options open to forestall a single "decisive mistake":

This emphasis on creating optionality can backfire in surprising ways. Instead of enabling young people to take on risks and make choices, acquiring options becomes habitual. You can never create enough option value—and the longer you spend acquiring options, the harder it is to stop.
The Yale undergraduate goes to work at McKinsey for two years, then comes to Harvard Business School, then graduates and goes to work Goldman Sachs and leaves after several years to work at Blackstone. Optionality abounds!
This individual has merely acquired stamps of approval and has acquired safety net upon safety net. These safety nets don’t end up enabling big risk-taking—individuals just become habitual acquirers of safety nets. The comfort of a high-paying job at a prestigious firm surrounded by smart people is simply too much to give up. When that happens, the dreams that those options were meant to enable slowly recede into the background. For a few, those destinations are in fact their dreams come true—but for every one of those, there are ten entrepreneurs, artists, and restaurateurs that get trapped in those institutions.

[1] https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2017/5/25/desai-commencem...

mattgreenrocks• 2 years ago

Thanks for link, great insights here.

Der_Einzige2• 2 years ago

Oh no, someone who might have become megarich settles for... upper class and we treat this like it's something worth critiquing?

Optionality stuff like what you're describing is rationale and leads to by far the best expected returns on life satisfaction. Less stupid risk taking, more careful decision making would do a lot to make the world better.

rapatel0• 2 years ago

The writer is 42. As someone approching to that age in a few years, these are standard "mid-life crisis" thoughts. I get them when I feel like shit.

Bottomline:

- These thoughts don't serve you

- You have more effective/productive years ahead of you then before

Figure out what you want, and grind at it. The rest is noise.

Speaking of which...

twic• 2 years ago

There is a novel in the form of a Choose Your Own Adventure book called Life's Lottery, by Kim Newman [1]. It follows a character from birth to adulthood, with the reader constantly making decisions which will shape his life. Things can go well, or (very) badly. I'm not sure if the chapters form a tree or a more general DAG, but i do know that the book splits into two completely separate sets of outcomes according to your very first choice, which is, at age, six whether your favourite character in The Man from U.N.C.L.E. is Napoleon Solo or Ilya Kuryakin.

[1] https://safe.menlosecurity.com/https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki...

thebaine• 2 years ago

Is the glass half-full or half-empty? How you answer that question may very well shape how you view the pivotal moments of your youth.

salmonfamine2• 2 years ago

A melancholic and romantic but ultimately useless perspective.

It is impossible to know, with certainty, if any decision is the best one because we only live one life. We can make educated guesses about our "what if's" but we'll never know. And furthermore, you have to accept that the road not taken will also have disadvantages and trade-offs that you could not have anticipated at the time.

There are some decisions that you can be pretty sure are big mistakes. And some of these are irreversible. And we are all running out of time.

But generally speaking, I tend to agree with the Proustian perspective -- the "big moments," generally speaking, are the product of a lot of little moments and decisions. Spouses don't suddenly decide to cheat one day, careers aren't made by one or two wrong moves. Rather, I think we only remember the moments in which all of our little decisions culminate into one event -- precisely because it is memorable.

You have to learn to love your fate. There are so many branching permutations of quantum lives that it's impossible to ever know if you chose the "best" one.

P_I_Staker2• 2 years ago

The point is more about reflecting on things that are false, but we tell ourselves to feel better. We don't like to think of a 17 year old as a finished person, however in other ways we try to make them that way.

The reality is that our expectations are much less realistic and bleaker. We love to talk about second chances and failing your way to success. On the other hand, 80% of us live in a very different world.

If you are on the following track which most of us are: high-school -> professional training -> early career -> senior career -> management -> senior management it's almost the opposite as described and downright bleak if you haven't always been a mega achiever.

Now I should possibly distinguish self-employed business people, entrepreneurs, and certain artists. Honestly even these exempt professions it can be like that, and there's exceptions to traditional professions.

Anyway, for most of us it's all about demonstrating perfect success every step of the way. You may be able to "get away" with certain things, but they can all still seriously hurt you. It doesn't take much before you can be perceived as valueless. Sometimes we talk about this, but we seem cautious about admitting it works this way.

So, contrary to the idea that being a failure is okay, most of the time the process looks more like detecting ANY failure in your past and not letting you in the door. After all there's 20 candidates that didn't get a D in 3rd grade biology.

salmonfamine2• 2 years ago

I've met some people who have that outlook, and almost all of them have come from competitive high schools on the coasts, with successful parents who put a lot of expectations on them to achieve from a young age.

If your goal is to have some perfect career of "Perfect SAT -> Ivy+ -> Consulting/Finance/FAANG -> Senior Management -> C-Suite" then you're doomed to rumination and regret unless you end up falling into the smallest fraction of a fraction of perfectionist achievement, and I highly doubt even the survivors of that funnel are anything close to "happy."

As someone who grew up in a rural oil town and didn't go to high school, making ~200k at my B-tier tech company feels like winning the lottery several times over. Plus, I have time to pursue my actual goals (making art, building genuine relationships, hiking.) Any Ivy+ grad who ended up in my shoes would probably feel like a failure, and yet I'm in the top 1-2 percent of earners in my age group in the country and have never wanted for anything.

Also, just as an aside -- I know someone who has published some very ground-breaking research in genomics, runs their own lab at a young age, PhD from an Ivy+ program etc, and they actually did get a D in intro biology their Freshman year (at a B-tier school nonetheless.)

But they still ultimately out-performed entire cohorts of neurotic strivers because they were much more passionate, obsessive, and creative. Although their competition was very hard-working and ambitious, they ultimately didn't care about the actual research as much as they cared about their own careers. In the end, nothing beats passion and obsession.

lo_zamoyski• 2 years ago

It is obvious that you cannot undo the past.

It is also obvious that time flows in one direction, that you cannot recover time you have spent on one thing over another.

It is likewise obvious, though strangely difficult for people, especially the young, to grasp, that time spent waffling in FOMO-land is time totally wasted grasping in vain at everything, never attaining anything. "Decision" comes from the Latin "decidere", itself from "de" and "caedere", meaning to "cut off" [0]. Yes, to decide is to cut off, to give up options for the sake of the higher good, in order to proceed.

And lastly, it is equally obvious that obsessing over a past that we imagine that could have been is also a complete waste of time. The clock is ticking, time is running out, and instead of focusing on what can be done now, what can be done with the time left, how to make the best of where you are and what is possible and prudent, you blow away whatever time remains all the more.

Now, if one has indeed made mistakes, the last thing one should do is deny that one has. Denial is opposed to integrity and renders a person impotent, stagnant, and numb, with the worm of guilt gnawing at the soul. Admit it, and if necessary, make reparations, do your penance, obtain absolution. Then move on. Life does not stand still for anyone. Salvage from the wreckage what is good, and go foward. No one said you will be able to recover the life you lost, or thought you lost. Actions are not unitary operations. They have no inverse. Life is an append-only log, a directed acyclic graph. Persisting in attachments to what was ostensibly lost blinds you to what you should do next. Move on. Keep tilling the land for the harvest. Dismiss whatever draws you away and weakens your commitment to the objective good.

[0] https://www.etymonline.com/word/decision#etymonline_v_857

ngvrnd• 2 years ago

While I think it is true that mistakes cannot be undone, it's also the case that most mistakes (even fairly bad ones) are not a sentence of doom. There are still choices to be made in the future (if you think there are choices) and you can always take the stoic route which is imo quite useful regardless of the question of free will.

w10-1• 2 years ago

In Shogun, the titular lord chastises his son for still "playing the game of friends and enemies".

What if we just stop telling stories, negative or positive?

Then perhaps less commenting on commenters commenting on authors writing stories?

rfwhyte• 2 years ago

Second chances are yet another of the many, many privileges afforded exclusively to the rich in our society. For the rest of us, one mistake can literally be terminal.

Mistakes cost time and money, neither of which the majority of people have in abundance, and one mistake can set you on a path that is impossible to deviate from.

Choose the wrong career, chose the wrong spouse, have a couple of kids, and suddenly you find yourself stuck in a job, a relationship and a home you literally cannot afford to escape from. 50%+ OF ALL PEOPLE IN THE WESTERN WORLD are one paycheck away from financial insolvency and living on the streets. They literally cannot afford to quit their job to "Retrain" for a new career, as that training costs real money most folks don't have, and unless you're in a special / protected group no one is giving you a dime to pay for school let alone cover your food / housing / medical bills while you "Retrain" for a "Better future." It's a nice pipe dream / political talking-point to say truckers can all become coders, but when those truckers have mortgage payments, groceries, medical bills, kid's clothes / school fees, etc., to pay for, and when there's not even a dime of assistance money available to them, and they have nothing in the way of savings, how the hell are they supposed to be able to afford live for months or years at a time while they learn to code?

Folks can't even leave relationships these day, as moving also COSTS MONEY and the majority of people can't afford to pay for movers, put up first and last months rent, etc., making moving to a new home or a new city, too expensive a proposition to be realistic for the vast majority of low to mid income earners. The real kicker though is in basically any city in the US or Canada, if you're moving out of a rental home, the next place you live will be 50%-100% more expensive! Rents have gone up so fast in so many places that a great many people can literally never leave the place they are living as the market has gone up so fast around them they literally cannot afford to move.

It's all well and good to say people should just move for better opportunities, or just "Retrain" for a new career, but when the cost involved in either of those actions means unless they immediately pay off the person in question would find themselves destitute and homeless after bearing the involved expenses, it just goes to show how callous, self-serving and entitled our societies attitudes towards the poor and less fortunate have become.

tacocataco2• 2 years ago

"It is possible to commit no mistakes and still lose. That is not weakness, that is life." ― Jean-Luc Picard.

mgh22• 2 years ago

The myth is not in second chances or our ability to adapt, this is sometimes extremely hard but doable - ex: 1st time immigrants.

The myth is in our ability to make "choices" which shifts the narrative to "hard work" rather than luck, perpetuated by the elite or those "who have made it".

[1] https://medium.com/@trendguardian/free-will-a-rich-fairy-tal...

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3LopI4YeC4I

diamondfist25• 2 years ago

Life is path-dependent, but it is more about the awareness and acknowledgment of your choices in the forks. Unaware, the path becomes constrained and thus dependent on your previous choices. Once aware, your choices opens up.

piloto_ciego• 2 years ago

Yawn. This sort of thing is baseless whining. I’m reinventing myself and graduate with a Masters in a STEM field I enjoy this weekend after losing my extremely lucrative career to illness.

By all accounts I had every reason to give up and lay down and die, and yet I didn’t. This sort of defeatist mindset is a poison. Will I ever fully recover and make it back to where I was? Maybe, maybe not, but the probability of success is zero if you don’t keep going.

greenhearth• 2 years ago

Started out ok, then disintegrated into a rambling analogy to soccer.

credit_guy• 2 years ago

This argument is so dear to so many people: that guy is not successful because he works hard, it's because he's privileged and can afford to fail, so he can take chances, and second chances and third chances. I'm not privileged, so I'm not successful.

The reality is that the difference between success and failure is in the majority of cases due to consistent small choices with compounding consequences. The decision to stay late at night and finish an assignment, the decision to not drink a lot at that party, to go to a summer school rather than a trip, to not cheat on a girlfriend, etc, etc. Later on in life, when the nerds get to get their "revenge", well, it was due to privilege all along ...

ironmanszombie• 2 years ago

After reading many comments in this thread: I wonder if we could emulate this problem digitally. To have a digital recording of the decision we'd made and can change the pivotal moments and have the program follow through with decisions we could be making...etc.

I don't know, I'm a bit tipsy. But this could be fun.

The Myth of the Second Chance

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