dbrunton

Came here (and used Fastmail for password recovery) to say just this. I actually forget what it’s like to sell advertising on my correspondence!

If you want to be a successful bank robber, probably. Pirate, yeah, probably that too. If you want to be a successful hit man, smuggler, or drug dealer, you're going to have to bend some rules.

I think if you tell a different sort of story about what you're doing, that it's something worthwhile, and that success involves being a person that people can rely on... well, I don't think being unethical will help you much.

I suppose if you have enough power, people won't give a damn about your ethics. But I think if you can get to the middle without hurting a lot of people, you're going to be identified as one of the people the rest of the middle would like to have at the top.

"Making friends" is more technical than "learning math." But more importantly, having friends helps more with technical problems than, say, knowing some technology that doesn't apply here. Same for resiliency.

This was an off-the-cuff response, but it's a genuine one, particularly with skills "for the next ten years." I've hired a lot of developers over two decades, and some of them have done good work for me for a long, long time.

Learn to be resilient.

Pick up an artistic or handcraft technique.

Make friends.

Comedy, music, drama, or something other performing art.

Know your means, live within them.

Try increasing your attention on what's important to you, instead of decreasing your attention on what isn't.

You can be asked for your attention, explicitly or implicitly, any time, for the dumbest stuff. Most of us have never learned to ignore it. And ignoring it is the only way to survive being constantly asked, because saying "no, stop bothering me" is pretty much just another way of saying "yes, you may take my attention right now."

It might help you to stop having a phone. I did this for a few years, and it was modestly helpful, and surprisingly easy to do. But in the end, there were some things I did need to pay attention to, and some I didn't, including on the phone. My partner, my kids, my family- they all really did need my attention.

Hacker News? Not so much.

Figure out what's important, pay attention to that. Might be that the feeling your having is precipitated more by the lack of connection that is really meeting your needs.

Yeah! Kierkegaard!

I agree with your point, even though I wouldn't call it a middle ground. I think, "make as much money as you can without being evil" is, maybe a middle ground. I think, "make money while doing a particular, real good in the world" is not- it's a thing that actually happens in the world we live in.

Maybe the news example is a little of a red herring (both an example and a counter-example in one).

You can do it! Have a mission.

Imagine a kid dribbling a basketball along the baseline, while staring intently out-of-bounds. "What are you doing, kid?" "Making sure I don't go over the line!" Coach tells the kid to focus instead on moving toward the goal.

It's definitely possible to do well while doing good, but in order for that to happen, you really need to focus on what the good is, not on not-evil. It may require a suspension of your belief that the two are in tension; Kierkegaard might call this a "teleological suspension of the ethical."

I think a great example of this is news organizations (there is also a warning there, I suppose). The focus isn't "maximize shareholder value while hopefully not forgetting about news" (well, again, a warning). The focus is "truth at all costs" and the profit is a thing that inevitably happens by running it as a business.

Do something completely different, and start immediately. Maybe it's working in a coffee shop, maybe it's laboring on a farm, maybe it's teaching a pottery class or bagging groceries. But it's something that provides some amount of income, and it provides you a needed break from development.

I promise you'll think more clearly about it once you've done this. Don't plan your next step after this second one (the first being, y'know, quitting). After step two, step three will come to you.

Find someone to help.

Preferably, this will be someone at work. Either someone in your job who's as stuck as you are, someone in the next layer up who needs a boost, or someone in the next tier down who needs a hand. It will be your next big challenge, to recognize that someone else needs help, to determine what kind of help that is, and to offer what you can.

Your only measure of success is whether that person succeeds.

The three benefits to taking this approach are:

  1) it's easier to objectively measure whether what you're doing is working
  2) you get to practice helping yourself, on someone else!
  3) it will help you stop being an asshole, which is probably something you're doing

Good luck!

I'm not a Stoic, but I like your question. Would you mind too much if I slightly re-worded it? "...retained a positive outlook while projecting no intrinsic meaning onto the universe..."

I was raised with the idea that belief (specifically, The Belief That Jesus Died To Take Away My Sins) is the source of a positive outlook. I think this kind of a warm snuggle (if you can accept a violent and prolonged execution as such) from The Universe is lovely. But it has not been my experience that it has been particularly conducive to my own well-being.

To take this back to your question, rebuking the concept of god is not tied to my well-being either. For me, a positive outlook is largely distinct from cosmology. And a nice side effect of thoughts arranged in this way is that god, the universe, a higher power are un-fundamental. My philosophical approach can constantly grown and change, and that helps me act in a way that is kind and brave.

If you agreed to my rewording of your question up above, then my answer is "yes". YMMV.

Or into the pockets of the owners of the robots who develop, maintain, and power these robots.

Five good reads (okay, one that I've read and four that I now definitely will), and the beautiful prose I have come to love over twenty years of reading this particular author.

Tell that to someone on the no fly list.

HAHAHAHA, touche! Thanks for the perspective ;)

Huh, for some reason, I can't see the comment I submitted with the post. Sorry if this shows up twice...

My little brother (I'm so proud!) wrote a blog post about faster TCP slow starts. He was sad nobody was reading it, so I redditized the headline (you know, f-word, hyperbole, baseless accusations, etc.) and submitted it to Reddit, where it actually turned into an interesting conversation about the actual topic of the post. Seriously. On Reddit.

Wonders never cease.

I wrote a long-format response to this essay on Jottit: http://lies.jottit.com. It's kind of too long to make as a comment, hence this pointer.