Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Ask HN: What was the biggest contributor to your happiness in the past year?

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

321–330 of 545 posts

Re: Ask HN: What was the biggest contributor to your happiness in the past year?

#321

Post by satysin »

break_the_bank wrote: post #249
_l4jh wrote: post #244

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m 36 and followed a similar path “retiring” a few years ago to be a stay at home dad. I missed out on my daughters early years due to being a workaholic and didn’t want to do the same with my son. I failed to realise when I was young I can earn more money but never more time and memories built from a phone video suck. I enjoy spending time doing work on the house and since we moved to [redacted] in 2018 I do a few…

I am far away from being a dad but curious, how do you balance "providing for your kid" and "being there for your kid"?

To follow on to my other comment (didn't want to edit it as this is a separate point)...

My reason for doing what I did is that a good friend and former manager died in his early 50s and I realised that could easily be me in twenty years.

It breaks my heart that he worked so damn hard only to die alone in the middle of the night in his home office with a fucking P&L still open on his screen. His wife and kids found him as they were getting ready for school :(

He gave up so much time with his kids as he always said he was working hard to provide the best for them in the future but you want to know the worst thing? His family are now financially struggling. He had two teenager kids and while his wife worked they lived beyond their means so when he passed their whole world collapsed.

All that time working, all the missed time with his kids and still he left so little. It crushed me if I am honest and I swore I would do whatever I had to do to minimise the chance of it happening to me.

Re: Ask HN: What was the biggest contributor to your happiness in the past year?

#323

Post by rmvt »

DyslexicAtheist wrote: post #248
grishka wrote: post #132

Happiness? What happiness? :'(

"Why be happy when you can be interesting" -- Slavoj Žižek https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U88jj6PSD7w

interesting. as someone who's been feeling extremely unhappy lately, i often wonder if most of us don't actually revel in our own misery to a certain extent.

Re: Ask HN: What was the biggest contributor to your happiness in the past year?

#324

Post by notjustanymike »

d3nj4l wrote: post #65

Working from home. I realised being in an office - especially an open-plan office - was setting off my social anxiety all the time. Working in a place where I could choose to engage with people instead of having it forced upon me made it so much easier to work. I became a lot more productive and started enjoying what I did, even picking up more side projects and learning actively. It's a shame it's coming to an end,…

This year taught me how much commuting stressed me out. Never again.

Re: Ask HN: What was the biggest contributor to your happiness in the past year?

#325

Post by lykr0n »

csixty4 wrote: post #264

Transitioning my gender. Living my truth. Coming out to everyone in my life and being forced to confront the shame that held me back for decades. It took a lot of reflection and was cause for a lot of growth. But now I'm not only mentally happier, I'm taking better care of my body because it finally feels like it's my own.

My co-worker/friend did the exact same thing. I had to double check you were not her.

It feels like the Pandemic has left a lot of people worse off, but there are also a lot who are a lot better off now. Kinda weird?

Re: Ask HN: What was the biggest contributor to your happiness in the past year?

#326

Post by spacechild1 »

jhrozek wrote: post #53
xyzelement wrote: post #46

Having a kid born in the middle of the pandemic and work from home situation is amazing. In no other time would a working western father spend so much time with his young child. Reconnecting more and more with religion (Judaism in my case.) To say it plainly, religion represents millennia of people asking deep questions and struggling through answers, which is more honest than the alternative. Though the above senten…

I’ll become a working western father soon and my paternity leave will be ~6 months regardless of pandemic. So I don’t buy the “no other time” argument.

By "western" he probably meant "US based". In many European countries, the (paid) paternity leave can be split between both parents, and some countries even offer additional financial benefits for taking this option. As an anecdotal data point: all of my friends, who have children, chose to split paternity leave.

Re: Ask HN: What was the biggest contributor to your happiness in the past year?

#327

Post by btzo »

Accept that I didn't need a regular job like everyone else.

I abandoned my fear of being an entrepreneur and embraced the idea.

I lowered my cost of living, valued my skills, and started freelancing to pay the bills while I try to build something.

My best decision so far. Ironically today I work a lot more, but the realization of doing something with my time aligned with my dreams makes all the difference.

Re: Ask HN: What was the biggest contributor to your happiness in the past year?

#328

Post by giantg2 »

piptastic wrote: post #308
giantg2 wrote: post #269

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In my experience, you have to make sacrifices. Everything in life is a trade-off in one eaybor another. I gave up my nice car and doing track days. Many of my time consuming hobbies that involved going somewhere have been greatly reduced or eliminated. I tried replacing them with smaller hobbies at home while I can watch the kid - like small batch beer brewing or learning bass guitar. Career-wise I have accepted that…

Hmm I can maybe understand why you think you’ll be a mid level dev without putting in hours.. you didn’t mention your location so not sure. But why in the world can’t you afford to change jobs? Plenty of places need mid level devs and it doesn’t cost anything to change jobs.. in fact they usually pay you more.

The company I'm at requires longer hours for promotions (unofficially of course). I worked as a tech lead and the a senior dev a few years ago. They wouldn't promote me unless I worked at least an extra hour per day.

That system ended up being outsourced and I had to get a new position at the same company. The tech was obscure (FileNet) and thevonky other position I could get was in equally obscure tech (Neoxam). There I became the ASC for the system across 6 teams and two departments - a role typically reserved for senior devs and above. Then they cut the budget in half and did some stuff that I didnt agree with and wouldn't want to be responsible for the security of. So now I'm on a team with modern tech (AWS). It still feels like extra hours are required and they also expect me to be an expert in multiple stacks/systems simultaneously, which is tough. I also feel like, what's the point? The company keeps breaking their own policies and my expertise is just throwaway in their eyes.

Once I become an expert in AWS (which will take a long time the way the work is structured) then I can maybe switch companies. It's still a risk since I have a family to support and I'm responsible for basically all the bills.

Re: Ask HN: What was the biggest contributor to your happiness in the past year?

#329

Post by pothrow »

Quitting porn.

At age 45, having been addicted since first finding I could download over 1200 baud dialup on my parents phone line and watching Cinemax late night through the static, it has just been a thing in my life almost daily and honestly I'd given up on caring whether it was a bad thing or not.

I'd felt guilty about it sometimes, and sure, tried to quit on a number of occasions, but always ended up back within a week or two.

Finally one day early last year I just decided to quit, and for whatever reason, that time it worked. And even though day to day I don't think it's made any objective change in my life, every time I think about it, I'm so happy to be done with it.

Re: Ask HN: What was the biggest contributor to your happiness in the past year?

#330

Post by dorfsmay »

Nbox9 wrote: post #263
meken wrote: post #223

Getting a nice car. I’m prone to depression if I stay in the house too long. Having a nice car means when I roll out of bed in the morning, I’m able to head straight to a nice, comfortable, private, warm space and start listening to meaningful podcasts, audiobooks, get breakfast, head to the gym, and get a consistent good start on the day. I’m not sure if I can go back to city living at this point if it means giving…

In contrast I hate driving cars. I feel like it’s my least favorite tool. I have a nice car, I’ve driven even nicer cars in different styles and hated them all. Driving requires so much of my attention I feel like it’s invasive. In addition I feel like I have to sit relatively still and use my muscles in very particular way. It’s a trap for my mind in body, and an experience I don’t find pleasant. I am an American an…

All of this + the fact that they are a huge financial burden (depreciation, insurance, repairs, fuel), AND probably the most dangerous activity you do on a regular basis.

We have one, we use it, I have even enjoyed the few road trips, but I absolutely hate them.

Post reply on HN