31–40 of 75 posts
Every day. But then I look at my children, remember the work I've done that I'm most proud of and stuff like that and I shrug it off. Sure, I would love to be more socially engaged in my surroundings, but whenever I'm in doubt about my life I reevaluate my priorities and usually discover that I'm pretty happy where I'm at. It's my life and I get to define the optimum, and so far viral content, insta-fame and richness…
people becoming instantly rich & famous in tech Those guys are lottery winners, seriously. Now I am not saying they didn't work their asses off too, but for every one of them there are 100 or 1000 or 10000 people who were just as smart and worked just as hard and their companies went up in a puff of smoke anyway. Wishing you were them is pointless because they are not them either.
To be yourself in a world that is constantly trying to make you something else is the greatest accomplishment.
Mix in a few thousand lottery winner wannabes and the analogy is complete.
My advice: just ignore it, survivor bias is a thing that is very hard to quantify without having all the numbers and for every lottery winner there are large numbers of also-rans that did not make it.
The media magnifying this effect certainly does not help.
"In the day-to-day trenches of adult life, there is actually no such thing as atheism. There is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship. And an outstanding reason for choosing some sort of God or spiritual-type thing to worship — be it J.C. or Allah, be it Yahweh or the Wiccan mother-goddess or the Four Noble Truths or some infrangible set of ethical principles — is that pretty much anything else you worship will eat you alive. If you worship money and things — if they are where you tap real meaning in life — then you will never have enough. Never feel you have enough. It's the truth. Worship your own body and beauty and sexual allure and you will always feel ugly, and when time and age start showing, you will die a million deaths before they finally plant you. On one level, we all know this stuff already — it's been codified as myths, proverbs, clichés, bromides, epigrams, parables: the skeleton of every great story. The trick is keeping the truth up-front in daily consciousness. Worship power — you will feel weak and afraid, and you will need ever more power over others to keep the fear at bay. Worship your intellect, being seen as smart — you will end up feeling stupid, a fraud, always on the verge of being found out. And so on.
Look, the insidious thing about these forms of worship is not that they're evil or sinful; it is that they are unconscious. They are default-settings. They're the kind of worship you just gradually slip into, day after day, getting more and more selective about what you see and how you measure value without ever being fully aware that that's what you're doing. And the world will not discourage you from operating on your default-settings, because the world of men and money and power hums along quite nicely on the fuel of fear and contempt and frustration and craving and the worship of self. Our own present culture has harnessed these forces in ways that have yielded extraordinary wealth and comfort and personal freedom. The freedom to be lords of our own tiny skull-sized kingdoms, alone at the center of all creation. This kind of freedom has much to recommend it. But of course there are all different kinds of freedom, and the kind that is most precious you will not hear much talked about in the great outside world of winning and achieving and displaying. The really important kind of freedom involves attention, and awareness, and discipline, and effort, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them, over and over, in myriad petty little unsexy ways, every day. That is real freedom. The alternative is unconsciousness, the default-setting, the “rat race” — the constant gnawing sense of having had and lost some infinite thing."
I've been there. It took me a while to figure out that the media manufactures stories to get eyeballs. Do some digging and you'll find a different story. Once you know the translation key, it is much less envious. - Overnight success => Decade of work - Owner is worth an estimated $100 million => Owner is saving for a couch (Kevin Rose said this after his cover story in a magazine) - Innovative idea => Ripped off a c…
> Hard work and sacrifice => Lied/cheated/stole to get where they are I wouldn't be so cynic. I think real life is simply not good news material. "Tonight, the groundbreaking story of the developer who worked for 3 years on banking software, 4 years on insurance databases and a staggering 2 years on android apps! He's now ready to start his own company... or is he? Sitting on a chair and typing code has never been so…
So yes, i feel like im missing out, but more like not having a chance to miss out.
I'd say the key is concentrating on what you're doing that makes you happy. If coding is your passion and you're coding 50 hours a week now, you'd probably do the same if you were rich and famous. Or maybe you wouldn't have so much time for coding with everything else coming your way.
Besides,studies have shown that a) Financial income above a specific fairly low and professionally attainable threshold does not bring any more happiness (70k a year or so) b) most happiness peoples experience per achievements are due to achieved intrinsic goals (art, science, learning to play the piano, whatever, becoming ceo if that is what gets ones socks rolling)
If this sort of "I'm missing out" thing is on the forefront of your mind I would call it non-beneficial mental noise. Quit twitter, find a hobby - or get seriously interested on some practical problem that is approachable by you and most of all - is intrinsically interesting to you!
Lots of stuff works using principles and systems that are old - some tens of years, some root back a thousands of years.
The function of media is to grab your attention using hooks that are subliminally, compulsively interesting. Ignore that second by second crap and dig in to the root causes of problems. Most things are pretty well researched already and you can get pretty far by developing a learning path of your own.
And if you don't want to - that's ok too! It's your life - live it the best way you can.
What is common with most of these Elon Musks and what ever you got - they lived their life and what they achieved was due to a unique combination of all the genetics and life circumstances that brought them where they went. You can't replicate those circumstances, but what you can do and should do, is live your life.
OP, it sounds like you're choosing to accept other people's versions of reality instead of focusing on what you can do (and add) by sticking to your own values and doing the best you can at what you choose to do.
Nothing that the media reports on will ``matter" in 10 minutes, anyway. Conversely, your family, kids, dog, open source project, whatever, will still be around.