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I thought I would have accomplished a lot more today and also before I was 35

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Re: I thought I would have accomplished a lot more today and also before I was 35

#141

Post by abhayb »

komali2 wrote: post #83

Man, hits home. 2020 is a bad year for 29, feel like the last of my twenties was stolen from me. I have so many things I wanna do, always wanted to do. Some of it I got done! Like becoming an engineer, creating a decent career for myself, riding a motorcycle. Take a step back and look at my life and it's pretty much golden, I could coast for the remainder of it and live better than 99% of humankind throughout the age…

Hey komali2, why'd you have to go and describe me this sharply on a Saturday morning? Is it that I accidentally crowded you out at the Four Barrel pour-over bar and now you want your revenge?

I've heard it said about running: it doesn't get easier, you just get better. I'm beginning to think that that is true of life in general. My greatest source of dis-ease (rather than literal disease) is the feeling that I'm not living up to my potential. Been with me since at least third standard/grade.

While I've never been to Stockholm (heard Noma's a good local joint), I'm at the place where I'm more afraid of getting too comfortable than I am of never being at ease. I'm trying (and usually failing) to think of things one bandaid at a time rather that the whole million at once. Setting my goals real low: to suck less rather than to be good/great. Help's a lot that there's one or two things that I legitimately feel I'm damn good at.

I'm curious, especially on the topic of stringing-together-unix-tools-on-a-whim, have you found any little tricks that apply to that area specifically rather than to the general concept of productivity?

Re: I thought I would have accomplished a lot more today and also before I was 35

#142

Post by BigHatLogan »

apacheCamel wrote: post #132
13415 wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have a feeling this is even more damaging for Millenials, because they constantly compare themselves with the rest of the world. In a sense, even leisure has turned into competition. When I was in my teens a long time ago I did sports and learned classical guitar. If I had seen the acrobatics you see daily on Reddit or the "casual home musicians" on Youtube, I'd probably have given up all my efforts. Doing a backfl…

Personally, I feel like I struggle with this a lot. Whether it be reading on here, or seeing it in the news, it is hard to not compare myself to a 20-something year old who just sold his/her company for hundreds of thousands of dollars while I sit around reading the stupid article and playing Dota or starting my millionth side project. It is easy to see that not everyone is going to do something like that, but I thin…

Wow. Very well said, especially the part about "internalizing the fact that I am the one not doing that too." That resonated with me in a painful, aching way.

I'm turning 30 soon. That is by no means "old", but it also isn't "young." And I also made a minefield of my 20s, to the point where I'm worse off today than I was when I turned 20--a constant series of bad decisions over and over again.

The good thing is I'm trying to recover from all of it now and fix what I can fix, but the bad thing is that I'm seeing my friends and peers leap past me, people who I was competitive with all the way into college. I know it's not helpful to think like this, but I can't help it. We journey on.

Re: I thought I would have accomplished a lot more today and also before I was 35

#143

Post by barcadad »

PragmaticPulp wrote: post #102

I've been mentoring CS college students and new grad SWEs for a while. It's shocking to see how many of them perpetually feel like they're overwhelmed and short on time, yet they can't account for where they've actually spent their time. It's not uncommon for new grad SWEs to complain that an 8-hour work day is somehow consuming 100% of their weekday hours, leaving them without any time to do anything else. On furthe…

Totally agree. FYI, a finalist in NPR's recent podcast competition had a nice take on this exact problem: https://soundcloud.com/alex-morgan-658034862/why-instagram-i...

Re: I thought I would have accomplished a lot more today and also before I was 35

#144

Post by username90 »

core-questions wrote: post #49
renjimen wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m very nostalgic about the countless hours I frittered away on video games and the internet as an adolescent. Part of me thinks it made me the person I am today, who I am proud of. I recently joined a Counter Strike team with work and had some of the most fun times I can think of recently. I compare that with the time I put aside to learn 3D modelling, which was fun in its own way but required more self motivation…

> It made me question what society accepts as a valid way to spend spare time Well, to be brutally honest with you, it's one thing for you to be proud of yourself for playing video games, but why would anyone else see that as something pride-worthy? Typically, one takes justifiable pride for accomplishments that stand up to external scrutiny. That usually comes in the form of the accomplishment having an element of s…

> Well, to be brutally honest with you, it's one thing for you to be proud of yourself for playing video games, but why would anyone else see that as something pride-worthy?

For exactly the same reasons anyone thinks that reading novels is pride-worthy. People who plays some of the more complicated niche games have some respect from me at least.

Similarly getting good at a game requires dedication and work, so people with good ranks in games also has some respect from me.

Re: I thought I would have accomplished a lot more today and also before I was 35

#145

Post by jamespwilliams »

DelightOne wrote: post #81

https://github.com/golang/go/blob/dev.go2go/src/cmd/go2go/te... A general question. Is there a reason to add those arguments instead of just using them directly inside the goroutine and so passing the arguments implicitly?

I think you posted this comment on the wrong post, but anyway:

In this case, no, and it's actually slightly inefficient to pass those variables as arguments, because a copy of the argument has to be made. This copying matters more if the argument is a big struct or another large value.

However often it is useful to use arguments, for example when calling a goroutine in a loop. For example:

    for i := 0; i
vs

    for i := 0; i
have different behaviours, because the first receives the (changing) `i` variable itself, whereas the second receives a copy of `i` at each iteration. The second behaviour is often the behaviour we actually want.

Something like

    for i := 0; i
also works as expected.

Re: I thought I would have accomplished a lot more today and also before I was 35

#146

Post by PragmaticPulp »

13415 wrote: post #126
mistersquid wrote: post #105

Personally, the unquestioned Ethos of Productivity characteristic of early 21st century Western Society is much more dangerous than the distractions which can sometimes fill unstructured time. The psychological rigidity and social sacrifices required of always being productive (with little to no unstructured leisure time) actively harms individuals and the societies in which they are embedded, perhaps to the exact ex…

I have a feeling this is even more damaging for Millenials, because they constantly compare themselves with the rest of the world. In a sense, even leisure has turned into competition. When I was in my teens a long time ago I did sports and learned classical guitar. If I had seen the acrobatics you see daily on Reddit or the "casual home musicians" on Youtube, I'd probably have given up all my efforts. Doing a backfl…

I read this a lot online, but strangely enough I see the opposite in practice. Young people who grew up immersed in social media are primed to recognize the difference between a rising social media star and the norm. It's the older people who associate any degree of notoriety with ultimate success who struggle to understand the difference between a super star and someone with a lot of social media followers.

> If I had seen the acrobatics you see daily on Reddit or the "casual home musicians" on Youtube, I'd probably have given up all my efforts.

But you wouldn't give up your efforts if you attended a concert of a famous musician, would you? Seeing a video with a million views on YouTube is a step below being a famous musician to young people.

If anything, seeing people gain small degrees of fame and notoriety without going all the way to the top of their field is even more motivating for young people. Seeing different levels of success drives home the point that success isn't binary, it's a spectrum.

Re: I thought I would have accomplished a lot more today and also before I was 35

#147

Post by afarrell »

andi999 wrote: post #36

To me as an armchair psychologist, this sounds more like that the author should get a check for ADHD with depression as a co-morbitity.

Easier said than done. The most important prerequisites to getting successful treatment for ADHD are the abilities to:

- Stay focused while shopping for a psychiatrist for a problem that fills you with a sense of despair.

- Make appointments and consistently attend them.

- Clearly and persuasively explain to your loved ones how important it is to you for them to fill in a description of their memories of your childhood symptoms... and hope you weren't inattentive subtype. Spending hours reading history books isn't memorably annoying to parents like hyperactivity.

- Keep an organised record of the impacts of medication as you go through titration.

- Deal effectively with the administrative complexity of either health insurance or a new country's healthcare system. (See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aKUdadCsuRE)

Re: I thought I would have accomplished a lot more today and also before I was 35

#148

Post by hoyd »

apacheCamel wrote: post #132
13415 wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have a feeling this is even more damaging for Millenials, because they constantly compare themselves with the rest of the world. In a sense, even leisure has turned into competition. When I was in my teens a long time ago I did sports and learned classical guitar. If I had seen the acrobatics you see daily on Reddit or the "casual home musicians" on Youtube, I'd probably have given up all my efforts. Doing a backfl…

Personally, I feel like I struggle with this a lot. Whether it be reading on here, or seeing it in the news, it is hard to not compare myself to a 20-something year old who just sold his/her company for hundreds of thousands of dollars while I sit around reading the stupid article and playing Dota or starting my millionth side project. It is easy to see that not everyone is going to do something like that, but I thin…

This made me think back to something I once attended, an eye opening weekend cross cultural course, with the purpose of getting to know the different nationalities I worked with. Why they/we would act/speak/behave as we do. We were a full ball room with multiple nationalities.

One of the speaks was about how different north is from the south, even within a country. Also, a huge difference was between Europe and US. Europe being a very old continent, lots of history and US a fairly new one, just a couple of hundred years old. The speaker said youths in US and Europe had been asked about whether they believed they would become millionaires during their life. About 90% in US had said yes vs. about 9% in Europe. The long statistics in Europe and fact that not so many will succeed had made us more realistic, but this new conquer-spirit that started US a long time ago, was still there.

Re: I thought I would have accomplished a lot more today and also before I was 35

#149

Post by shaklee3 »

voidhorse wrote: post #13

Funny piece. It can be so easy to waste time when we have the internet. I think the most dangerous distractions are the ones that feel productive but don’t actually work toward your goals. For example, browsing hacker news. Such an activity is useful every now and then, but at least for myself I often scroll around only to realize later that it was a massive waste of time I could’ve spent working on something I care…

I have the complete opposite feeling. As long as you filter yourself fairly well on which topics you read, HN can be immensely useful. You can learn about new things that can help you a lot in your career, that you otherwise may have missed.

Re: I thought I would have accomplished a lot more today and also before I was 35

#150

Post by DoreenMichele »

core-questions wrote: post #49
renjimen wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m very nostalgic about the countless hours I frittered away on video games and the internet as an adolescent. Part of me thinks it made me the person I am today, who I am proud of. I recently joined a Counter Strike team with work and had some of the most fun times I can think of recently. I compare that with the time I put aside to learn 3D modelling, which was fun in its own way but required more self motivation…

> It made me question what society accepts as a valid way to spend spare time Well, to be brutally honest with you, it's one thing for you to be proud of yourself for playing video games, but why would anyone else see that as something pride-worthy? Typically, one takes justifiable pride for accomplishments that stand up to external scrutiny. That usually comes in the form of the accomplishment having an element of s…

My sons always said "Video games are our only education" because of the many times I was astonished they knew some obscure historical detail and they had learned it from a video game.

My oldest, who is math challenged, was livid when I finally successfully explained to him what Algebra was and he went "I've been doing that for years while playing video games!!!" He's still mad about it and it's probably at least two decades later.

Well, to be brutally honest with you

I read somewhere that "people who value brutal honesty value brutality more than honesty." As someone fond of the saying "I'm too truthful to be good," I took that to heart.

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