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Life is Short
381–390 of 452 posts
Re: Life is Short
#382Great essay. I've always tried to get out of bullshit with some complex thinking, but at the end of the day, most of it could be avoided faster if preceded by a simple "Is this bullshit?" question.
For example, I just realised I wasted 1 week of my time with meetings with an "investor" I knew was bullshitter, because I didn't want to ask myself this question.
Re: Life is Short
#383If you can't see past the link to the other essays here please try to isolate this one for a bit, especially if you're young and you don't have kids yet. This essay is rich in realizations that come with age, and in some sense I would have potentially gotten a lot of mileage out of it when I was 20 or so (but then I would probably have lacked the background to fully comprehend it), and even more when I was a young fi…
> when I was 20 or so Ok. "20 or so" describes me. And things aren't going so well. Out of uni, and life feels pretty empty. Family has fallen apart, friends are friends of convenience, work is very intense - perhaps too much - and everything is going into keeping going. The brave face, making sure I eat, making sure I run, cycle, climb. The dreams I had even six months ago, feeling ever more impossible. The lure of…
>>But the truth is I do not know how else to spend my time.
I am going to make a bold claim here. I hear this very often among people in the west. I here the same among people in India(I'm from India) who come from families who are rich, well supplied with resources. Perhaps its the saturation that a person reaches a point after a person reaches and experiences a sufficient degree of sufficiency.
>>I have a feeling the problem is me.
It is hard to convince your mind to prepare for a grand struggle, challenge or a mission- when none exists. The west(especially US) is already reached the pinnacle of what a developed nation could look like. Schools are free, Country wide road network is nothing like anywhere, Cities with opportunities all over the place, Infrastructure is simply amazing, you can take water out of any tap in the country and it will be clean, you have social security ... the list is endless.
On top of all this if your family is even from lower middle class, you are generally well provided for.
Your mind doesn't identify with any struggle or even acknowledge that one exists. This can for sure cause 'Why am I here' crisis. Like I said I see this same among a lot of friends in India, especially among people from rich families.
Re: Life is Short
#384Earlier quoted context omitted.
> when I was 20 or so Ok. "20 or so" describes me. And things aren't going so well. Out of uni, and life feels pretty empty. Family has fallen apart, friends are friends of convenience, work is very intense - perhaps too much - and everything is going into keeping going. The brave face, making sure I eat, making sure I run, cycle, climb. The dreams I had even six months ago, feeling ever more impossible. The lure of…
I'm a bit reluctant to post this, because nobody here is going to be able to fix your situation for you, but a few thoughts. As someone pushing 50 this year, if I had your freedom to just do anything, I'd be off in a heartbeat. Off to another part of the country or a different country entirely. Making that 5,000-mile bike-trip or just walking off somewhere with a back-pack and some camping gear. You might say "it's n…
Upvoted. Thanks for saving me from typing a few paragraphs, you hit my sentiment spot on, esp, re: options from 20-40. It sounds like he/she needs to sever a few anchors (job, location) and just do something that reignites some life fire. It damn sure is not going to get easier as time passes. Worse, he/she may become less sensitive to the obviously dysfunctional situation and just live a life of learned helplessness.
Re: Life is Short
#385If you can't see past the link to the other essays here please try to isolate this one for a bit, especially if you're young and you don't have kids yet. This essay is rich in realizations that come with age, and in some sense I would have potentially gotten a lot of mileage out of it when I was 20 or so (but then I would probably have lacked the background to fully comprehend it), and even more when I was a young fi…
> Please do ask yourself that question often, and if the answer is 'no' or 'maybe' then simply don't and save yourself a lot of grief and regret in the long run. Actually, don't "simply don't" because that's not a useful way to go about improving things. Learn how your brain works and what you can do to actively change the way it currently operates. You wouldn't expect a trainer at the gym to simply tell you "get str…
Since you seem to have put some thought into this: how do you change how your brain operates? I feel like my brain could use a restructuring.
Re: Life is Short
#386The vast majority of humans on this planet do not get to choose where they spend their time; surely Paul realizes this. Instead, children making clay bricks and parents sending their children off away to work as maids (or worse) do so because they need to survive first and foremost.
I have four children of my own and I'm sceptical of the proposed idea that somehow life is best spent by maximizing time with them. Don't get me wrong, the best moments in life are with my children. Still, one's contributions during our brief passage in the form we like best (walking and free thinking humans) surely should aim to contribute far more than the self-gratifying (and possibly narcissistic) time spent with one's children.
In short, if you do have the luxury of choosing where you actually spend your time, make sure you're giving far more back to the rest of this race than to yourself.
Re: Life is Short
#387Earlier quoted context omitted.
> when I was 20 or so Ok. "20 or so" describes me. And things aren't going so well. Out of uni, and life feels pretty empty. Family has fallen apart, friends are friends of convenience, work is very intense - perhaps too much - and everything is going into keeping going. The brave face, making sure I eat, making sure I run, cycle, climb. The dreams I had even six months ago, feeling ever more impossible. The lure of…
I'm a bit reluctant to post this, because nobody here is going to be able to fix your situation for you, but a few thoughts. As someone pushing 50 this year, if I had your freedom to just do anything, I'd be off in a heartbeat. Off to another part of the country or a different country entirely. Making that 5,000-mile bike-trip or just walking off somewhere with a back-pack and some camping gear. You might say "it's n…
`I burnt out once after a few years of very intense, very committed work. I wasn't better off at the end of it and nobody says "thank you", not sincerely anyway. And after you leave, the waters close around you and it will be like you were never there.`
Wow that imagery is powerfully sad. Corporate culture and its structural constraints makes monsters of all of us.
Re: Life is Short
#388Some practical ways that readers can implement this advice: 1. Don't work for a start-up, since they don't impart salary-winning experience to you, they don't pay you or provide reasonable benefits, and they also don't allow you the freedom to work on big ideas that they usually promise. The lines used to sell naive engineers on working in start-ups are as paramount to life's-too-short-bullshit as anything can be. 2.…
beggars can't be choosers. (Some of us would gladly take any of the above options)
And by buying the lines of bullshit that make you feel this way you are causing the very problem, and it hurts not only you but also your peers.
Re: Life is Short
#389If you can't see past the link to the other essays here please try to isolate this one for a bit, especially if you're young and you don't have kids yet. This essay is rich in realizations that come with age, and in some sense I would have potentially gotten a lot of mileage out of it when I was 20 or so (but then I would probably have lacked the background to fully comprehend it), and even more when I was a young fi…
> when I was 20 or so Ok. "20 or so" describes me. And things aren't going so well. Out of uni, and life feels pretty empty. Family has fallen apart, friends are friends of convenience, work is very intense - perhaps too much - and everything is going into keeping going. The brave face, making sure I eat, making sure I run, cycle, climb. The dreams I had even six months ago, feeling ever more impossible. The lure of…
You're not trapped, you're as free as can be from where I'm looking at you. When I was your age I quit my very secure job at a bank to go on all kinds of weird adventures, working free-lance, going hungry for weeks, suddenly flush with cash from a payment, got my driving license, started to go on ever longer and ever more unplanned trips. In short, I embraced risk in all kinds of ways and found that - to my surprise - the people that tried to hold me back from doing this were wrong. Tomorrow always took care of itself somehow, as long as you have skills you'll have a place somewhere and some food in your stomach and every time you move to a new viewpoint you become slightly richer (but maybe not in a material sense, but that's fine until that need arrives).
Finally, when I was 27 and my first child arrived that phase ended, then it very much mattered if there was money on the table and life suddenly changed from being relatively free to being quite structured with a very high penalty on any inability to provide. I made a pretty conscious decision to stop following just what interested me but to chase the buck and with the knowledge gained in the preceding years that was quite easy.
Go see the world while the current phase lasts, sooner or later life will really trap you (compared to your situation atm) and then you're on the hook for many years before you will have some of this freedom back again. By then your body will be one that you can't compare to today (and I'm saying that as a reasonably fit person of 50+), your time will be spoken for at some regular interval and so on.
The right time to strike out into the world is now, don't worry overly about how you'll finance any or all of this, a few hundred in savings would be enough to broaden your horizon tremendously and that alone will give you an advantage over those that are rooted to their hometown.
This, by the way is what fuels my 'journeyman' projects that I try to do each year now, they're a link back to my past, basically not a new thing but a continuation. It's been incredibly rewarding to meet all these new people and to help them to achieve their dreams and contribute a little bit to solving their problems even if not a single cent ever changed hands. I very much look forward to doing another round of these this coming summer.
Re: Life is Short
#390Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm a bit reluctant to post this, because nobody here is going to be able to fix your situation for you, but a few thoughts. As someone pushing 50 this year, if I had your freedom to just do anything, I'd be off in a heartbeat. Off to another part of the country or a different country entirely. Making that 5,000-mile bike-trip or just walking off somewhere with a back-pack and some camping gear. You might say "it's n…
`I burnt out once after a few years of very intense, very committed work. I wasn't better off at the end of it and nobody says "thank you", not sincerely anyway. And after you leave, the waters close around you and it will be like you were never there.` Wow that imagery is powerfully sad. Corporate culture and its structural constraints makes monsters of all of us.
> Wow that imagery is powerfully sad
I didn't mean it to be ;) I'm an optimist at heart, honestly, and I'm not sitting here feeling I've wasted my life or anything. But there are some things I wouldn't do again if I had my time again, and working hard for unappreciative, self-centred people is one of them.