Ask HN: I feel so shallow and dumb when I see what other smart people are doing

This is a common thread in many traditions of wisdom. The words change (surrender, accept, be with, open to, observe, witness, feel, welcome, embrace etc.) but the idea is the same: you have to feel difficult emotions fully in order to process them.

Dr. K's Healthy Gamer Twitch stream offered another descriptor I like - digest. Emotions can be digested if you allow yourself to feel them without getting swept away or identified with them.

That which you resist, persists. I could go on, but your comment reminded me that sages and therapists have pointed to the same thing.

    Why are we forsaking that in favor of a "you 
    don't have to try so hard, it's ok to be 
    mediocre" mindset?

One reason many feel is the fact that being "the best" often just means making some crappy corporation richer; when you start to feel that the whole system kind of sucks it gets harder to care about accomplishing things within it.

I grew up wanting to be a game developer, but what would that mean in a practical sense? Working 80 hours a week and at the end of the day I'm just making Microsoft or Activision or somebody richer? Even John Freaking Carmack eventually wound up working for Facebook.

Or going solo, and risking my ability to feed/house myself if things don't work out? Or working 100 hours a week because I'm already working 40-50 at a day job?

Ultimately as we get older those kinds of achievements tend to mean less to us than human connections.

If you hate this kind of thinking and/or feel it's wrong, I'm not here to change your mind. Just mentioning why some feel those kinds of ways.

it seems to me that the biggest problem OP faces is the relationship to themselves. Before you can effectively love others you need to be able to be good company to yourself. Because who will put up with you if you don't even think you're worthy of love.

I stopped counting the number of times they mentioned that they considered themselves stupid. There is so much negative and toxic self critic in this post that my feeling is that this is the biggest most fundamental issue that I would look at tackling.

Once you can sit in a room by yourself and be truly happy with your own company go and be open to relationships - but not before - otherwise you're back to square one but only worse because now you have an additional reason that you will use to justify your self hate. Love yourself first. Out of that love maybe you find somebody maybe not. It doesn't matter. Out of that maybe kids can happen - or not. If you ask your partner (or worse your kids) to fix you eventually it will all come back to you. You gotta do that work in the end by yourself. Anything else is cheating.

What if getting a trophy at IOI is easier than making a kid?

As for me it was...I got silver medal there, but I would have given it away easily for being able to date one of the many hot hostesses on the competition. My life would have been so much easier if I just spend my life in the gym instead of solving math and programming problems.

There's a great scene in Band of Brothers where an officer gives the following advice:

"the only hope you have is to accept the fact that you're already dead. And the sooner you accept that, the sooner you'll be able to function as a soldier's supposed to function. Without mercy, without compassion, without remorse."

I feel the same applies in day-to-day life. The sooner I accept that I am a nobody, the sooner I'll be able to function as someone who has nothing to lose should act: without hesitation, without submissiveness, and without regret. And if I can do those three things consistently, then maybe I will become a somebody.