Live data from Hacker News

Ask HN: At a peak of my dev career, I hate my life

news.ycombinator.com

311–320 of 522 posts

Re: Ask HN: At a peak of my dev career, I hate my life

#311
Hey OP imagine the people you would like to be friends with. Why would they want to be friends with a lonely nerd who judges other people with no selfawareness?

Become the person who can add value to the people you want to be friends with. Without specifics it’s hard to give actionable advice on this.

At general social meetups you’re going to find similarly lonely and lost people with nothing in common. They also very likely have a negative mindset. So skip those and go directly to the events of people you want to be friends with.

Re: Ask HN: At a peak of my dev career, I hate my life

#312
First, get through the coronavirus epidemic. We're barely past the peak of omicron. It's starting to look like that will be over in the US in March.[1] Then more stuff will resume full operation. Clubs, live theater, gyms, martial arts, universities.

Personally, I've had horses for most of my adult life, and I've met many people that way. I know more horse people than technical people.

[1] https://ig.ft.com/coronavirus-chart

Re: Ask HN: At a peak of my dev career, I hate my life

#313

You sound like a person who envisions a life they should have, feels they deserve that life, and are frustrated they don't have it - then judge everyone you wind up interacting with as you try to fix it. My advice: get over yourself, you're your own worst enemy. You might not love the people you meet at those meetups, for instance, but if you auto-reject everyone you meet you'll never wind up meeting people via those…

Please don't cross into personal attack, even if you're intending to help somebody.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Re: Ask HN: At a peak of my dev career, I hate my life

#314
I have different friends who have used different methods:

Two(recently divorced 30yo woman, 35-40 divorced man) got into swing dancing (met her now husband there and they have 2 kids) and folk dancing (met his 20 year relationship gf there). Advantage of dancing is that usually people are very sociable... my folk dancing friend ended up with a huge circle of friends who would go out as a group for restaurants and other cultural events.

Gym: as mentioned by others.

I might recommend learning either piano or guitar, it helped me at least...

Re: Ask HN: At a peak of my dev career, I hate my life

#315

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Further ideas for activities: - activism: go canvas for a politician you like - charity work: lots of people down at the soup kitchen, the local thrift shop, etc

[flagged]

Would you please not do this here?

Re: Ask HN: At a peak of my dev career, I hate my life

#316

I felt similar to you while living in Kentucky and turning 30. It felt like all my friends had moved onto the next phase of their life and I wasn't ready for that. I felt unmotivated and stuck, but also felt guilty because I had an income and a job that I felt I should be happy to have. Moving to NYC completely changed my perspective and my life. Moving also had other impacts: it forced a change of scenery, forced me…

Completely agree regarding dense cities. Just to add to this, I recently moved to NYC from the west coast at the ripe age of 40. I decided to join a co-working space so I could meet new people (I did not know anyone here). It has been surprisingly easy to meet new friends, something I was worried about when thinking about moving. I'm not an extrovert person by any means and still in the span of 4-5 months I've met enough people that I have no problems finding someone I like to hang out with on a regular basis.

Re: Ask HN: At a peak of my dev career, I hate my life

#317

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This truly is terrible advice. The worst thing that could happen would be your life gets wrapped into a religious community. This is why people of seeming average intelligence stay in churches. Everyone is pretending to believe the nonsense because if anyone admits (often even just to themselves) just how stupid it is, poof goes their friends, community, perhaps even their marriage. > I’m not even spiritual and I avo…

I'm an atheist or at best agnostic, but I've met and known many highly intelligent people who are also religious. It's not mutually exclusive.

The real litmus test for high intelligence is if they were not anti-vaxxers and actively sought vaccinations.

Re: Ask HN: At a peak of my dev career, I hate my life

#318
A lot of people are diagnosing depression here. That's fine and all, but this problem is one that seems extremely common for people I know in their 30s and beyond, at least in the United States.

It seems that people hit a certain age and just retreat. First, they move to a city or suburb where they know nobody so they can have a yard, drive to a Dairy Queen, and/or earn $15,0000 more. They enjoy the new lifestyle for 5-7 years—they get a car, they work on their house, maybe they have a kid. Then they look around and ask themselves, "What's the point of all this?" The thing that makes life worth living, which is, by and large, human connection, is just not there. Often all this is precipitated by a couple settling down into a relationship, then ignoring or uncultivating prior relationships and becoming 100% of each other's social lives, or, alternately, the development of workaholic habits combined with moderate addictions to boring things like sleeping pills or TV.

The reality is that maintaining or, even more difficult, creating a social life in your 30s and beyond requires energy, organization, thick skin, and relatively strong social skills. Often people don't have even one of these, let alone all four. And, as people age, and careers peak or stall, it becomes even more obvious that the only thing that really matters in life is human connection. Having kids helps here, but only so much.

A few decades ago, there were thriving cultures of local community that it was almost difficult not to join. People would, by and large, go to church. They were part of civic organizations like the Knights of Colombus, book club, weird utopian or improvement clubs (Bellamy societies), business associations, bowling league, Rotory Club, or INSERT WORKPLACE HERE Over 40s Poker. Local politics was a thing, the bar scene was a thing, dancing was a thing. The average person would be in ~5 of these. Nights where you would stay in would be more uncommon than nights you would go out.

What happened? It's hard to say exactly, and there are lots of books on it (Bowling Alone is a good one). But cable TV and the internet, I think, are big parts of it. It was just not possible before a certain year for the average person to stay in all the time. It was just too boring. TV sucked There were, functionally, no games as we now know them. No porn as we now know it. No social media, no link aggregators, no chat rooms, no dating apps. There were drugs, but they were more social drugs (coke and booze). MJ was pretty bad and niche, people were popping massively fewer sleeping pills and opiates. If you wanted to watch a movie, you left your home. If you wanted stimulation, or your fix of dopamine, probably you left your home.

It was a more dangerous world. People would booze, and fight. There was more serious crime before the 90s, discrimination. People fucked more, and with more people. There were predators. People would also get together and drink, and talk about ideas. There were social movements that were actually kind of new. People would get together and drink, and make music. There were scenes, undergrounds. You had the Harlem Renaissance, the Berlin School. Places were a thing, you would go to another city and the scene would be a different scene and the culture a different culture. There would be a cene around a bar, or a street, or a music store.

What OP is experiencing is the default state in the US in 2022. The inertia is to stay inside, be alone or with your immediate family, and to get your fix there. We've invented technologies of approximation and recapitulation. Social Media approximates human connection. Porn approximates sex. GrubHub approximates going to a restaurant. On social media and 24/7 news, all prior social and artistic movements are recapitulated. We try out the 60s in 2020, we try out the 70s in 2022. We larp as Malcolm X or Ira Glasser or Ronald Reagan. Place is collapsed, Montreal and Berlin get the same internet as San Francisco. There are fewer murders and less STDs and fewer missing children. There are fewer artistic movements, serendipitous connections, long afternoons betting on the races. Tolkein doesn't meet Lewis, Diddian doesn't meet Dunn, Hemingway stays away from the bulls. Unless you make a big effort, you live inside your head, and your head is inside and staring at a screen.

So maybe OP is depressed, but maybe it's not just OP. Maybe this time and place has something to do with it.

Re: Ask HN: At a peak of my dev career, I hate my life

#320
> In case someone has any advice beyond finding a hobby, going to therapy

It looks like you don’t really want to solve the issue, rather just get busy solving it.

Because therapy is the answer, often is the only real answer, way better than any advice you can possibly imagine getting on the internet.

Even though finding a good therapist might take a lot of work itself.

Im speaking from personal experience of running away from similar issues by finding sophisticated ways of procrastination.

Post reply on HN