Ask HN: When you feel stuck in life

Find ways to serve (as in give service).

Acting for others welfare will buoy you up. And I wouldn't be surprised if it led to more fulfilling work opportunities.

Hey! You are not alone. In cases like this, when you feel you have lost track remember... Lewis Carrol once said "If you don't know where you are going, any road will get you there." So breathe and try new things. Go to the library, watch a movie, visit a museum, join a book club... Just be curious in places you have never been but you are interested in. There is so much in life and things to do that you'll be blown away. Trust me, serendipity will come and you'll remember that you are alive, free and ready to explore and enjoy. I send you lots and lots of love, baby. Everything will be OK. I promise.

In 1668 Francesco Redi disproved the theory that flies spontaneously generated from rotting meat, a theory originally proposed by Aristotle. Since that time, popular science has just shifted that theory farther and farther away from the common era. When carefully and objectively observed, rotting meat does not emit maggots, but since nobody around to observe meat, matter, molecules or atoms billions of years ago... we can just squint at the farthest reaches of the timeline and infer from the fuzziness that life must have spontaneously generated...right? God is very scary and mean when he is misunderstood, we can agree on that. You speak of beauty as an objective(even if relative) truth but deny the concept of objective truths. You have an innate respect for continuation and survival, but deny the order and purpose necessary to create and sustain that framework. I'm sure you'd profess Newton's laws of motion, but you deny them in your lack of theory of existence. I'm not trying to be demeaning, I'm trying to leave no room for anything but a yes or no answer in your mind. If you don't want to break it down to that, then cheers to a good life my friend.

Don't feel lost, as said by Mahatma Gandhi...."Strength does not come from winning, your struggles develop your strengths, when you go through hardships and decide not to surrender, that is strength."

I've been feeling this way since middle school.

I didn't really have any bad subjects in school, so I figured I could do whatever interested me professionally, but nothing really strongly appealed to me other than a paycheck large enough to eat out whenever I wanted. I discovered programming was pretty fun, now I'm a software engineer, and I'm just saving money for.....something. I don't know what.

I've been trying to figure out what I'm moving towards for years. I just don't know where it's going. Marry, have children, buy house, continue office job? I want to really care. I see so much wrong with the world and I don't have any clever ideas on how to fix it.

I don't want to make an app, something that adds a little convenience but doesn't truly make anyone's lives better. I want to fix something that's manifestly broken. I envy Elon Musk above all others, because he's seen terribly important things that were very broken, and had what it took to break all barriers to fixing them. Needless to say I'm not Elon Musk. Most people aren't.

I'd like to fix something social more than technological. I'd like to fix something societal that's broken, like the fact that Congress is literally a joke among Americans, that people feel so detached and isolated from the people creating policy that we don't bother to vote because we don't think it'll change anything.

But I don't know how to fix those things, so I keep working conventional jobs, but I can barely bring myself to do them, because my heart isn't in it, and I feel the years passing.