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Ask HN: How to optimize your career for happiness?

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Re: Ask HN: How to optimize your career for happiness?

#51
post #26

Get a gym membership and go every day. If you have trouble going routinely sign up for classes or a personal trainer so you feel more obligated to go on a regular basis.

Heh, that sounds like a nightmare for me personally. If going to an artificial place to get tired every day works for you, that's great, but this is not generally good advice. If it's purely about physical fitness (I'm really not quite sure what your goal with this method is, perhaps you could edit to clarify), going into nature to cycle or jog is much better due to the nature-happiness correlation (e.g. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/001391651245190... but there are many sources for this).

Re: Ask HN: How to optimize your career for happiness?

#52

I have given advice just for this case here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25509941 So far it is working out pretty well for me. To be quite honest, you don't have to have passion for your job to perform well enough in accord with your salary and incentives. I'd say even more, overworking oneself is a "grave sin" against your future. One's time and intelligence are better spent optimizing one's family size (in…

That's pretty good advice except for the part about kids. This planet is screwed and it's not kind to introduce any new humans to the horrors we face.

I do think that anti-natalist sentiment is very much overblown in the United States, while in the EU we don't see this position being claimed in public a lot. If by "screwed" you mean anthropogenic climate change, then by now it's pretty obvious that it will be mitigated via some form of geoengineering (see, for example recent guardian's popularizing take on it: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2021/sep/30/geoengineering... )

To anyone who can look at the fertility curves and population pyramids, it should be pretty obvious that the real problem of the coming decades is demographic shift, and corresponding growth of dependency ratio. Compared to climate change, our authorities don't really propose a good solution for this crisis, except vague wording about more automation and more immigration (from the countries which, by they way, live through the same falling fertility curves).

If this reasoning still doesn't convice you, consider how hellish your own personal life is going be without grandchildren to take care of you. Western nursery homes staffed by min-wage workers speaking another language are not the place I'd wish for anyone to live in, but it's a de-facto place where grandparents of middle-class families are left to experience their final years.

In any case, I urge the readers to open the mentioned curves and statistical data and do the math to come to their own conclusion.

Re: Ask HN: How to optimize your career for happiness?

#53
Sadly it's an unhealthy profession. Spending 8 hours a day sitting on a chair with your neck fixed in the same position watching a screen harms your body a lot, even if you try to keep a good posture and do stretches from time to time. If you add stress to it, which tenses your muscles unconsciously, it just gets worse.

I don't have any good advice other than try to reduce that time as much as possible. Your body will feel better and hopefully your mind too.

Re: Ask HN: How to optimize your career for happiness?

#54
post #7

I simply don't work much anymore. Below 10h a week on average. I haven't set an alarm for years anymore and sleep 9h a night That made me quite happy.

That sounds like the advice is basically to be rich and go into semi-retirement. Not sure how generally applicable that is.

Re: Ask HN: How to optimize your career for happiness?

#55

The special thing I’ve done is mostly being willing to sit with hard questions like “who am I” and “what do I really want out of life and a job?”, sometimes for years at a time (low-key). The answer is always the same, and will probably always the same: I am motivated by mastery and autonomy. Thus I put lots of time into finding work that is interesting and has a lot to dig into. I routinely annoy the institutions I…

I feel like this advice focuses on execution (“I know that mastery and autonomy make me happy, $this is how I achieved that”). It’s much harder to actually understand what makes you happy, and when your mind is deceiving you: you may not fully appreciate what you have to give up to achieve a certain goal. Would you be able to elaborate how you realized that mastery and autonomy were the things that make you happy?

Mastery was a recurring theme. My happiest times in life were always marked by intense learning, and intense learning usually accompanies things that get labeled hard. Now, you don't do hard things because other people say they're hard; you do them because they're interesting to you and they push back when you dig in, causing you to need to bear down. In the process of that, then you start clawing back to beginners mind, and getting closer to be able to let this new thing reshape you in some small way. I love that feeling, it is like discovering a new conceptual world. Of course, it only makes sense if you're intrinsically interested in said thing, and willing to let it change you.

Stuff like virtual machines, interpreters, systems programming languages, Haskell, etc is all stuff I just wanted to know how it worked at one point, and I'd get sucked into more and more cool things to learn. I'm not a professional at all of those things (Haskell is a lifetime of learning) but I still enjoy them quite a bit, and have gotten a chance to use all of those professionally. Over time, they become competencies that are increasingly rare, so this has positive effects for future career choices.

Re: autonomy, I've always inferred this from my general attitude toward hierarchy, personality type, and watching myself across years and companies fail to be motivated at _all_ by the usual things that people seem to be motivated by. I feign interest in them and accrue enough of them to be reasonably autonomous, but I'm not going to be working weekends for months on end to beat other people at changing a word on my job title.

That's the type of thing that flows directly from knowing who I am. I don't need an upgraded title to hope to know who I am. I'm happy to receive it if it is given to me, but if it isn't; that's fine.

Re: Ask HN: How to optimize your career for happiness?

#56
Forget about chasing high salaries. It's just not worth it. As long as you're earning enough to comfortably support yourself and those that depend on you, that's enough. Health and happiness come first.

Don't tolerate bullshit from anyone, especially yourself. Set high standards and meet them; the satisfaction of a job well done is a reward in itself. Take pride in what you do and approach your work as a vocation, not a job.

If you find yourself in a toxic environment, leave. After seeing my father suffer from the stress of one in my formative years, I made it a policy from the start of my career to avoid large corporate environments at all costs. Maybe some of the are good, but I don't want to take the risk.

Become an expert in something. Make a substantial original contribution to knowledge in your field that advances the state of the art. This is actually an explicit requirement if you want to get a PhD, which I've found to be a valuable way of opening up fulfilling career opportunities that would otherwise not be available to me. Caveat: The process of getting there won't necessarily be a pleasant one, and some parts of academia can be just as toxic as corporate environments. I was pretty lucky in my experience with this.

Move to a country with a low cost of living, while working remotely for a company in the west. Your income will go a lot further, and you can use that to either support a more comfortable lifestyle or work only part time while still being able to support yourself.

Do something you're passionate about. I know this one is a cliche and lots of people will tell you it's unrealistic, but they're wrong.

Stay away from circumstances that cause you to descend into cynicism. It's very easy to become negative and give up hope when you're in a toxic environment, and if you find yourself in one than you need to escape. There are good companies out there run by people who have a clue and are genuinely nice to work with. Don't settle until you've found one.

Most people usually suggest making your children a priority, and not let your career get in the way of a healthy family life. Generally speaking they're correct. However if you don't already have kids, be aware that when the time comes you might suddenly discover that for medical reasons you are not going to be able to have them. If this happens to you, and you suddenly realise that all you have left is your career, you better be damn sure you've prepared in advance for this so you've got something to fall back on. It softens the blow, a bit.

Find good people to work with. This is probably the single most important thing, from my experience. A good manager and good colleagues are worth their weight in gold. Treat them with respect and loyalty, and they'll do the same for you.

Strive to leave a legacy. We all have a short time on this planet, and there's a lot to be said for leaving the place a little better off than the state you found it in.

Re: Ask HN: How to optimize your career for happiness?

#57
post #51
post #26

Get a gym membership and go every day. If you have trouble going routinely sign up for classes or a personal trainer so you feel more obligated to go on a regular basis.

Heh, that sounds like a nightmare for me personally. If going to an artificial place to get tired every day works for you, that's great, but this is not generally good advice. If it's purely about physical fitness (I'm really not quite sure what your goal with this method is, perhaps you could edit to clarify), going into nature to cycle or jog is much better due to the nature-happiness correlation (e.g. https://jour…

I wouldn't deny benefits of exercise, due to too much research pointing out to it being really beneficial. For example, this one is one of the latest: https://www.fightaging.org/archives/2021/12/plasma-transfusi...

My take on this is, one has to find an exercise form that is (un)pleasant enough to engage in long-term. For me it's biking and mostly bodyweight exercise in my improvised home gym.

It's really worth it every time I do it, and I do it just 2-3 times a week.

Re: Ask HN: How to optimize your career for happiness?

#58
post #51
post #26

Get a gym membership and go every day. If you have trouble going routinely sign up for classes or a personal trainer so you feel more obligated to go on a regular basis.

Heh, that sounds like a nightmare for me personally. If going to an artificial place to get tired every day works for you, that's great, but this is not generally good advice. If it's purely about physical fitness (I'm really not quite sure what your goal with this method is, perhaps you could edit to clarify), going into nature to cycle or jog is much better due to the nature-happiness correlation (e.g. https://jour…

> If going to an artificial place to get tired every day works for you

So, the office?

If it doesn't work for you, fine, but the gym is a great place to go. Stop discouraging people because you don't like it or having a single goal (physical fitness) is bad.

Re: Ask HN: How to optimize your career for happiness?

#59

Use your career/job to support your life, then get a life. Become an artist, author, clown, or build some awesome technical system because you want it to exist. GPL it. Don't ask for anything, especially not happiness, from your "career". I put it in quotes because it's conceptually bankrupt. https://www.roystonguest.com/blog/why-happiness-is-not-a-des...

And for those who are able, getting married and having children will tend to bring even more fulfillment than becoming a clown.

Re: Ask HN: How to optimize your career for happiness?

#60
In 2019 I closed my company, middle size web-dev shop.

I used the pandemic situation to reevaluate and rearrange my life. Turns out that I want to do product design and development. And all the experience as a business owner, product manager, etc, is coming handy when crafting new products.

I have survived several burnouts in those years of pushing myself harder. Learned my lessons.

Balance is the key. Physical and mental health are most important things, everything else comes secondary.

After my first burnout, I created a simple priority checklist, which I apply every year.

It is simple:

1. Health.

2. Fulfillment / Meaning.

3. Experience.

4. Monetary reward.

5. Career development.

If something in this list changes priorities, I stop, take a vacation and reevaluate.

You cannot be happy if you are not healthy.

You cannot be healthy if you don’t have enough sleep and proper nutrition.

You cannot have enough sleep if your nervous system is on overload.

You cannot work meaningfully if you don’t “play" regularly.

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