I have learned the hard way it is only appropriate to describe yourself as old in the company of exclusively younger people.
Ask HN: How do you deal with getting old and feeling lost?
621–630 of 890 posts
Re: Ask HN: How do you deal with getting old and feeling lost?
#622Earlier quoted context omitted.
If you don't have kids you are missing a fundamental understanding of what is driving most people each and every day. You are clueless about most of the world because most people have kids and it profoundly affects them. You can't know this unless you experience it yourself. It's also difficult to understand what you are getting into by having kids. It brings on a profound level of anxiety about their feelings and ul…
> He that hath wife and children hath given hostages to fortune, for they are impediments to great enterprises, either of virtue or mischief.
Unless you're Francis Bacon, or some other world changing figure, this does not apply to you.
Re: Ask HN: How do you deal with getting old and feeling lost?
#623Earlier quoted context omitted.
What does trained to fall properly mean? Are you absolutely sure there is such a thing? I doubt that there is, because the human neck is not strong enough to withstand many kinds of flat falls (just watch FailArmy for a while), and assuming you can prevent a flat fall during an accident is a bad assumption. Assuming you can avoid a head-first fall is a bad assumption, and assuming you’re not going to be struck by a c…
When I was in school, our trainer was ill, so he was replaced by a craft teacher, which was fresh from the army. He was a soviet paratrooper, so he told us that he knows nothing about training, but he sure that we will fall a lot during our life, so he will train us to fall properly. We did about a hundred of jumps and falls and rolls per lesson, up to 2 meter height, in military style for 2,5 months, up to 1000 fall…
FWIW, I had a whole skydiving career before I started biking seriously. Drop & roll is not really a viable head injury prevention plan. You’re prepped for a few kinds of accidents with a backpack and trying to roll if/when there’s time, if you’re really lucky, but you’re leaving a mile wide blind spot to many possible accidents that you don’t have control over. Good luck, I hope you don’t have any of those kind of collisions.
Re: Ask HN: How do you deal with getting old and feeling lost?
#624Earlier quoted context omitted.
Although life starts for a lot of people at 35, I envy those people who are able to start much earlier. These are the people who have their first relationships in high school and college, find their life partner in early twenties, get the right job, a house, kids, keep their friend circle, invest money as early as possible, god damn. They live perfect fuckin lives and it’s all because they bravely jumped in and embra…
> They live perfect fuckin lives Do they though? Everyone has their own demons to contend with and seemingly perfect lives frequently fall apart further down the road due to regrets and pent-up frustrations.
Everyone has demons, even perfect people have perfect little demons. But as a person who has lived a broken life, I guarantee you my demons are far larger and more monstrous than theirs. My demons would eat their demons for protein.
Re: Ask HN: How do you deal with getting old and feeling lost?
#625Earlier quoted context omitted.
Can you add a bit more about how this works?
(wishy-washy, unverifiable emotional pseudo-psychology follows) What I mean is -- you do not need to have a partner and your own kids. There are all sorts of families (macro and micro) out there that can benefit from us. On the micro side: you can allow yourself to be included in your best friend's family, you can allow friends to become close enough that you know they'd be there if you were sick and vice versa. You…
This is a beautiful answer, thank you. It puts into words so much of what I’ve had at the back of my mind for awhile now.
Re: Ask HN: How do you deal with getting old and feeling lost?
#626Earlier quoted context omitted.
What you call luck, I'd call magic. The important thing to understand about magic tricks is they're really not all that magical once you learn how to perform them. People are also willing to overlook a great deal when they believe you're a luckbringer. My manager for instance cared about me on a personal level because I was contributing to his success. When the VP took me away, it weakened him.
How do you do that when your manager always considers you an unreliable risk? I think you're dramatically underestimating how much it matters to be punctual in the vast majority of companies, regardless of whether your code output is reliable.
Then you find a new manager, in a different team maybe, who aligns with your values and respect your strengths. There are many different types of people in any company. It takes 2 to tango, and I'm sure one of these managers will be delighted to find someone just like them!
As for punctuality, there are many people who are punctual but couldn't code their way out of paperback, let alone fight they way out of a soaking wet one :)
Guess who'll be brought in to the rescue when they predictibly fail?
Your perspective matters a lot. It will color your actions. Punctuality or even code reliability ultimately doesn't matter. What matters is if you can bring more money to the company, one way or another. If you are doing sales meetings, it may be punctuality. If you are doing tech work on the core infrastructure, it may be code reliability. Find your own niche, surrounded by people who like you and need the unique strengths you bring to the table.
Re: Ask HN: How do you deal with getting old and feeling lost?
#627Earlier quoted context omitted.
Although life starts for a lot of people at 35, I envy those people who are able to start much earlier. These are the people who have their first relationships in high school and college, find their life partner in early twenties, get the right job, a house, kids, keep their friend circle, invest money as early as possible, god damn. They live perfect fuckin lives and it’s all because they bravely jumped in and embra…
At 28, this describes me exactly. Found my partner in college, bought a nice 4-bedroom house in a nice area close to friends/family. Financially stable with plenty of time to spend on creative hobbies. We both “jumped in” to moderately lucrative careers early and are now in very comfortable positions at companies that more or less contribute to the good. By all appearances a perfect life which truly results in many d…
The reason you feel this way is because you’ve never been on the other side. Imagine reaching mid thirties, no more friends, no partner, no real prospects, and getting older is making it harder to attract quality females. Your only source of somewhat human interaction is writing on the internet. It is a life of quiet desperation. There is only one goal, to accumulate money, watch graphs go up and to the right. Money is the only way to have relevance in this society, the only salvation from becoming invisible in the dating pool. And I know money can’t really make you happy, but it’s the only thing that has truly taken care of me over the years. Would you really trade your life for this? You found someone thing good, hold onto it. It will all be over soon enough one day.
Re: Ask HN: How do you deal with getting old and feeling lost?
#628Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yep this. The average rate of return is 10% so this is someone who can make $50k a year just off this money alone. The real median wage in the USA for workers who worked full time in 2020 was $56k. This person has enough money to nearly replicate the financial success of your average American via a do-nothing secondary income. Your average American retires with only $200k saved up by age 65 as well. $500k is a lot of…
> If you are not dying to have kids then you shouldn't not have kids. There is a lot of toxic advice here about having children to "fix" things. Children should not be born as a way to fix yourself. It is 100% valid to not want children. I say this as a parent. Its a grueling and hard life compared to not having children, and if you have difficulty in life and don't even want kids, do not have them. They will not mag…
My take is that you're still in the easy period because babies are just still, well, babies. As they age into children and go to school, academics, socializing, etc matter and their own existential dread of the universe, etc come into play it gets much much harder. My son and I talk about death a lot because he's shocked by it. I try to explain to him what money means. Also you're building both a loving parental but also a peer relationship -- not a parent to baby one, past ages 4 or 5, with someone with their own interests, strong personality, mental health issues, hangups, habits, etc. This is a relationship that cant fail and you can't ever walk away from. This relationship only ends on your death which will badly hurt your children just like the loss of your own parents hurt you.
Especially not only as their parent guiding them through this universe, but also knowing the economic and political system they are inheriting is terrible, unjust, unequal, racist, and dishonest and how they'll have to come to terms with that just like we did, if we ever did. And finding ways for them to avoid getting crushed by this unjust wheel we called capitalism by doing your best to get them into good schools, tutors, pulling strings on their behalf, guiding their interests, etc.
Re: Ask HN: How do you deal with getting old and feeling lost?
#629Earlier quoted context omitted.
Although life starts for a lot of people at 35, I envy those people who are able to start much earlier. These are the people who have their first relationships in high school and college, find their life partner in early twenties, get the right job, a house, kids, keep their friend circle, invest money as early as possible, god damn. They live perfect fuckin lives and it’s all because they bravely jumped in and embra…
At 28, this describes me exactly. Found my partner in college, bought a nice 4-bedroom house in a nice area close to friends/family. Financially stable with plenty of time to spend on creative hobbies. We both “jumped in” to moderately lucrative careers early and are now in very comfortable positions at companies that more or less contribute to the good. By all appearances a perfect life which truly results in many d…
I think we find happiness in service to a community. It can be religion or family, or it can be mentoring, community service, activism, etc. It could be as basic as visiting a retirement home or walking dogs at a shelter. It's pretty hard to feel empty ennui while seeing the gratitude in someone's eyes. And the world is chock-full of lonely, needy people.
Re: Ask HN: How do you deal with getting old and feeling lost?
#630Wait till you go past 40 and they start calling you "sir" at Starbucks :)
There are two sources of meaning in life: being self-focused and trying to achieve your own goals (like going to Mars) OR being others-focused and trying to achieve something good for them (like parenting kids or helping a group who can't help themselves like curing a disease, fostering animals, etc)
The former tends to start feeling hollow after 30 although some people never lose that kind of drive (and nothing wrong with that)
Living for something beyond yourself is a good way to spend a life and brings much joy you can't get or buy any other way.
The two are very similar in the end, they differ by how you define the success criteria.