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Show HN: HeyFromTheFuture – Advice people wish they had at your age

heyfromthefuture.com

131–140 of 174 posts

Re: Show HN: HeyFromTheFuture – Advice people wish they had at your age

#131
For Singularity University I conceived of a similar idea. I called it TimeTraveller.

I am not on my computer but a couple of ideas I had:

1. Match people with similar personalities (measured by the big 5). This idea hypothesizes that similar personalities can help each other.

2. Match people per topic. This idea hypothesizes that experts can help non-experts.

Matching older people with younger people and allowing them to chat regarding their lives can give a time traveller type of effect. Here is someone who's done what you want to do and walked a similar path beforehand already.

Re: Show HN: HeyFromTheFuture – Advice people wish they had at your age

#132
post #73

Interesting concept in this regard - Croatian artist Dalibor Martinis interviewed his future self, asking questions in 1978 and answering in 2010 on national TV. Has english subtitles. https://youtu.be/3SCQiKDxmhk

It's interesting the older one doesn't speak in English.

:) The video from 30+ years ago was recorded in Vancouver, in front of a class of English speaking students. His answers on Croatian national TV were broadcasted to a Croatian audience.

Re: Show HN: HeyFromTheFuture – Advice people wish they had at your age

#133
This is all such a bunch of gormless vapid chicken-soup-for-the-soul bullshit. One gets the sense that none of the people giving advice have ever faced real hardship. when the moment comes that you have to make a real choice, the best advice I can think of is to not listen to all these self satisfied blowhards who have never walked in your shoes and think for yourself.

Re: Show HN: HeyFromTheFuture – Advice people wish they had at your age

#134
post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hey thanks for the feedback - really appreciate it. I struggled with the idea of creating a page for every age. I eventually settled on the idea that people could take the platform anywhere they wanted to, whether it was passing generic advice along, or sending themselves a very specific message at a specific time in their life. That being said, it's kind of cool to see the ages that mean the most to people. I like y…

I really like having a different page for each individual age. This separation distinguishes your site from the countless blog posts that pass on advice "to those in their 20s and 30s" or "to those who are still young". In my eyes, these pieces are often far too general. By this, I mean the following: Thinking back on my life so far, the years 19, 20, and 22 were quite unique with respect to my then-current circumsta…

But what if someone develops a little faster? By the time they're 19, it might be too late!

Re: Show HN: HeyFromTheFuture – Advice people wish they had at your age

#135

This is all such a bunch of gormless vapid chicken-soup-for-the-soul bullshit. One gets the sense that none of the people giving advice have ever faced real hardship. when the moment comes that you have to make a real choice, the best advice I can think of is to not listen to all these self satisfied blowhards who have never walked in your shoes and think for yourself.

Some people make really bad decisions when thinking for themselves, though; I've met a few.

It might be worth trying to find advice from people who have actually faced real hardship rather than trying to wing it all on one's own.

Re: Show HN: HeyFromTheFuture – Advice people wish they had at your age

#136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not. I'm still grieving. I think most people when they realize the extent of climate change, soil depletion, and ocean acidification will have to go through some stage of grief before they can accept the future they thought they had is going to be cut short.

My advice for you would be to think longer about these things, 23 is just the right age to think you have all the right answers and everyone else is wrong.

Its a really important hump to get over. When I got out of my undergrad I felt like I owned the world, but a few years later and I felt like I knew nothing.

It just made me try harder, but I think every kid needs to get over that bridge to become a legitimate adult - to be faced with both success and failure, and realize you are only ever at local maxima, there is always another mountain to climb, and you do it to aspire to see more and further.

Re: Show HN: HeyFromTheFuture – Advice people wish they had at your age

#137
This has great potential! Every now and then I learn something new that I wish somebody would have taught me when I was younger. Simple tricks that make life easier.

Not going to go into things that I think could be improved right now but just leave this as encouragement to develop this further as it can really be useful to the world! Well done on getting the idea shipped!

Re: Show HN: HeyFromTheFuture – Advice people wish they had at your age

#138
post #106

IMO the most valuable sections are always going to be Unfortunately, the hard thing is that when you're It's a paradox.

I'm 18 lol, super confused and trying to gain something from older people. However, they always seem to say the same thing, and it's mostly just common sense, along the lines of stay in school and work harder. I guess I could say the same about my high school years, but I feel like I've heard the advice on this site a thousand times over.

The real worthwhile advice isn’t as easy as one liners and some things are really hard to make people understand without experience.

Re: Show HN: HeyFromTheFuture – Advice people wish they had at your age

#139

It is shocking how much of this advice assumes that the world will be a similar place even a few years from now. There is a constant set of themes, for each of the years I scanned but especially my age which is 23, to travel, invest for the future, and start businesses and I am increasingly skeptical of each. I am just starting out, and I am here because I used to think that my future involved travel and startups, bu…

There are various ways to travel, not all involve dumping tons of jet fuel in the atmosphere. A German I met used to take a yearly trip to Portugal on bicycle. Hitchhiking also lets you get pretty far while wasting minimal extra fuel.

We're hackers, no? Rather than declaring the goal impossible, why not try to find clever alternative solutions?

Re: Show HN: HeyFromTheFuture – Advice people wish they had at your age

#140

It is shocking how much of this advice assumes that the world will be a similar place even a few years from now. There is a constant set of themes, for each of the years I scanned but especially my age which is 23, to travel, invest for the future, and start businesses and I am increasingly skeptical of each. I am just starting out, and I am here because I used to think that my future involved travel and startups, bu…

Part of why you feel so strongly about climate change is that you (us, I guess? I'm only four years older) haven't lived long enough to recognize that, while its a massive challenge to the species, two things:

1. We only ever confront challenge either on the individual or among our peer group. No matter how much you try to collectively call everyone a citizen of the Earth and part of one family your biology prevents you from being empathic to those a few orders of magnitude outside your local self. This means you both cannot wax poetic for the woes of everyone else and you need to recognize 99.99999% of humanity will, optimistically, not give a shit about you.

2. Climate change is the kind of problem with stupidly simple solutions that are just hard to implement and take sacrifice and work to accomplish. In the same way curing many plagues in the era of vaccination was a simple solution - reach herd immunity in a population - with a logistical nightmare to accomplish. People died by the millions in the struggle to make it happens, and millions will die victims of climate change until the broader interests of humanity wake up and force the change necessary to fix the problem, but its not any one persons burden to bear.

We could all be killed tomorrow. by a gamma ray burst from a star in our local cluster going supernova. Or an accidential nuke launch at a dilapidated silo could cause total annihilation of the surface world. Or some alien species an infinite amount of distance from us could execute an experiment that fundamentally alters the constant rules of the universe that redefines what matter is.

We don't know whats coming, we do what we can for ourselves and those around us in our time, and we can't be distracted from what we can do with what we can't do, like alter the minds of billions to suddenly decide to take climate change seriously, or stop violent crime, or end tyranny, or feed everyone. That later is a great example - plenty have wished and prayed for global food security, but it took the efforts of millions of individuals over decades to propagate wells and agricultural practices throughout the third world that have led to recent years being consistent record lows for global thirst, hunger, and extreme poverty. They might have cried about it in their early 20s in the 70s-90s, but they got up and did what they could, and collectively had a major impact on it.

So if you really do care about climate change - and being from HN - there is a huge tech scene around solutions and tools to fight it. Get involved and do something. Don't just complain about it, because that doesn't help anyone.

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