Ask HN: I feel so shallow and dumb when I see what other smart people are doing

I wont detail how similar my situation to yours is, but you don't realise how lucky you are for having got to where you have got. Some people never even got their career footing. I know its boring to hear, but it's true.

I became fairly obsessed with "natural talent" and what it was, where it came from, and if everyone exhibited a dimension of it. Success is interesting, fascinating almost. I was more interested in the people than the end results and rewards of the success itself.

After basically browsing the same 4 websites and gaming a lot for about 9-10 years, I suddenly found a video, by Jordan Peterson teaching about personality, IQ and lifetime success likelihood. Initially, I assumed this was some "self help" life coach type person holding their own lecture stacked with sycophants. I was wrong, and this was at a major university.

I continued watching, and found that within an hour, I had several fundamental pondering I had sustained for over a decade answered. I wasn't looking for answers, and all the evidence for the phenomena he had described was readily available online. He was very obviously joining dots in some places, but he clearly noted when he moved into the realms of speculation.

I discovered that he sold tests, and self help suites, but that most of these types of tests were simply standard practice in psychology, and were freely available online. I cant fault a man for being a businessman I guess.

I ran one of these tests, and ruminated on the results so much that it kept me up for multiple days over the next few months.

I discovered that simply from understanding the Big Five personality traits (much more scientifically backed and practically useful than the Myers-Briggs tests I had done at school why I felt a certain way about certain things.

It turns out, some of us were raised with very dysfunctional parents, that shaped our view of the world, our view of others, and our view of how we integrate with others by performing societal duties (work). This helped cement our personality traits from a young age, and past the age of roughly 6 they are very difficult to change, without sudden trauma, or with consistent, motivated work to change them over many years.

Your first weakness, was that you were taught at a fundamental level is that you were taught to fear failure. It is also likely that you were taught that the things you instinctively liked were wrong, and that you should pursue something else.

Because of the artificial nature of civilised society, we make certain trade offs against instinctual behaviour to achieve certain functions. One such example is monogamy - without it, society becomes far more unfair, and far more violent, and less stable. It was considered the lesser of the two evils.

Another one of these trade-offs, is your natural instinct for competition doesn't encapsulate all the factors of your competitive environment, unlike when you just had to look and see how many skulls your fellow caveman had collected. Usually, it's mostly inspired from wallowing in self comparison, accelerated by modern technology. How much help someone else has had, how much fear they live with on a daily basis, or how fundamentally wrong they are and how it's all pure chance that they are there. So the trade off for that, is that you must learn to compete only with yourself. It's a tough balance to strike - the outside world clearly matters to you, otherwise we wouldn't want to be impressive and all-achieving. But you must only provide yourself with targets that have proven honest in their validity. Only competing with your past self qualifies.

Additionally, the power of increment is utterly arresting. Do small things over time and they compound into terrifying pits of wasted life and time, or beautiful mountains of stacked achievement and competence. Finding a meaningful pursuit, is hard. Meaning to you lies exactly where you have one foot in the familiar, and one foot in the unknown. What causes it to happen is still a mystery. But think of it like the page of a book. If you woke up in an unfamiliar room, you would instantly be motivated to discover more. That motivation is natural exploratory behaviour. But you cannot develop interest based on loose jealously. Pursue what you find meaningful, and only you can discover where that meaning is, and you are probably being too lofty. Compete with your past self, and incremental interest pursued at your own pace will soon spiral into a powerful narrative you cannot help but follow, it is your duty to your short existence on this earth in a position of stability and ability (neither of those things are permanent) to attempt to find meaning. Good luck.

Thanks for your thoughts!

A note on the one about entitlement:

Everyone is _entitled_ to have their experience of reality acknowledged (this opens up a can of worms, but bear with me).

Someone who is neurodivergent (like OP) experiences reality differently than someone who is neurotypical. It's subjective, and hand-wavy, I know. But to some greater extent, we have to respect _and accept_ what people tell us about themselves.

I liken it to being a parent, when you see your child worrying about something, or saying something you disagree with. Instead of trying to force your viewpoint on them by telling them how they _should_ feel (have you ever caught yourself doing that? I know I have), why not ask them _why_ they feel like that? You gain understanding, and through understanding discovery, which leads to acceptance and a deepening of empathy for individual experience.

I've personally discovered that what comes across as well intentioned "advice" can often feel a lot like shame. And shame, is the death of joy. It only leads one direction -- downwards. So my "advice" is generally to listen more, to _accept_ more.

Anyways, that's what I was getting at. Hopefully this helps add clarity.

Two things: The first step to happiness is not comparing yourself to others. You will ALWAYS be able to find something in the people around you to envy and you will NEVER be happy.

This second one may not be helpful in your current state of mind, but has always helped me focus on the first point. That is: in the grand scheme of things it really doesn't matter. 50,000 years from now it's likely that NOBODY from our current times will be remembered. The guy who wrote rollercoaster tycoon definitely will not be. Someone as infamous as Hitler is a solid shmaybe and that's only if the human race continues to advance technologically and start settling the universe. If we don't go extinct and we don't make it off this planet, the odds are good we'll have driven ourselves back to the stone ages, at which point nobody will remember or care about any of us. So from that perspective, who cares? Just be kind to others, do things you enjoy, and try to be a productive member of society (whatever that means to you).

> what you mean by welcoming them, or feeling them through. But if I interpret that as “accepting it” ...

I think acceptance is the right idea, yes.

There can be some urge to deny one's own emotions, perhaps push them aside as some sort of inconvenience or character flaw. Some might inwardly shout at themselves "stop whining! you're selfish to wallow like this!" (or any number of variations, both quiet and loud). That tends to just create more misery down the line, IMO. So, "welcoming" was meant as the opposite of that.

And processing emotions takes time, so by "feeling them through" I just meant allowing that process to run its course, rather than trying to inhibit or deny it. I don't think there's any stopping it, you just have to ride the wave.

YMMV of course, I'm no psychologist (:

This gets at the crux of my angst along the OP's line: When I look at people who have dedicated themselves to that thing that they pored so many hours into, what I always wonder is, "How did they make the decision to put so much of their time into that thing." Like, I agree with OP that the Roller Coaster Tycoon one man project is really impressive. But there's no world in which I could possibly care enough about building a roller coaster video game to put that time in. And besides a precious few things that are ludicrously hard to break into - contributing to cancer research, working on nuclear fusion, space travel, etc. - it's hard for me to imagine pouring my soul into things that require so much commitment.