Ask HN: What is something that had the largest positive impact on your life?

I think what matters is having a core, something you accept as absolute truth. Make new assumptions around this truth. What happens when science conflicts with your truth? You abandon the lower truth and follow the higher truth. Abandon lower truths for higher ones, like a bubble sort. Is scientific evidence the highest truth? For many it is, but you should get there by thinking rationally.

This absolute truth is bigger than yourself. It makes everything else seem really tiny by comparison - you could lose a limb, a child, your wealth, your life, and that's fine. It's an incredibly solid shock absorber.

Then what's the meaning of life? It's difficult to define by life itself, but you can look at the absence of life -- death. What does dying mean, what happens after, and what should you do before? If you're about to die, do you travel the world? Do you shoot up bullies? Do you write a book? All of us are about to die, some are well past half our lifespan. Religion answers a lot of these questions.

Then you work on things with the urgency of someone who is about to die and who knows what they need to do.

That compass is important. It doesn't have to be a god, but if you believe in the highest power, why wouldn't you do whatever they say? Some are polytheists with indifferent gods, but they still have an idea of what happens after death. Your compass can be the world, you can be out to save the world. It can be yourself - plenty of people leave their homes in search of themselves. You'll have yourself through all your life. Why not look after yourself? There's a religion for that too.

A few comments here refer to religion, but I think this is a better label.

I've restarted life a few times, moving to foreign countries where I didn't know anyone.

Each time, it isn't as if I landed and just instantly had a group of people I related to and enjoyed spending time with. It usually has taken a year, and it's a tough year when I was thinking "maybe I made a mistake".

It wasn't as if I didn't have "friends", but I didn't feel like the people I was spending time with were "my people". Which was fine.

But then, sometimes, you find a group that you really click with. The nice thing about this is that you really appreciate how rare it is to find your tribe, particularly when you've been spending time with people who aren't yours.

I think this might be along the same line as religion and parenthood. Though parenthood is kinda forcing the world to accept that you're making your own tribe, but maybe we just ignore that.

You can also belong to more than one tribe, which is nice. I have my social tribe, and my work tribe, and I truly feel connected to both of them.

Growing up, I never had a tribe until I moved away from home, and even then, I knew that the friends I had wouldn't be friends for life.

I think most people accept that their family is their tribe, and though I'm still close with a few of my siblings, I probably wouldn't have known what it feels like to be free of a family which isn't your tribe, unless I had moved away (which I did in high school).

LASIK. Crossfit / weightlifting. Learning programming and getting hired early at a unicorn.