[dead]
Ask HN: How do you deal with getting old and feeling lost?
751–760 of 890 posts
Re: Ask HN: How do you deal with getting old and feeling lost?
#752Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I have a hard time to see any relevance in a life without children anymore. In my view, having kids is a great way to take off the existential pressure of life being meaningless, by just having a default "do it for them" answer to every single question or hardship in life. And what then will give your child's life such a straightforward meaning? Well, just have kids of their own I guess, and their kids the same, al…
I've noticed that everyone with kids tends to do two things: one is that they get along with other people who've had kids and they use that to create instant bonds of mutual understanding. And the other is that they take opportunities to convince those without kids to get kids. While I don't take offense, I do feel that there is usually an implication in there that someone without kids is somehow less trustworthy or…
Having kids and being a good parent can be really hard. Parents trying to convince others to have kids might be trying to validate their own choices. We do that all the time for trivial choices like iPhone vs Android, so it's expected that we'll do it even more for irreversible choices like having kids. I wouldn't read too much into it.
Re: Ask HN: How do you deal with getting old and feeling lost?
#753The main thing you're describing is not having a future . You're a bit young for a midlife crisis, but covid has forced it on all of us (I entered mine at 39 and covid just crushed it). And the world has changed a lot; a lot of the future we imagined has really been taken away - that is, it isn't available anymore, not because of something we did wrong, but because the doors have slammed shut. Just for one thing, hav…
Thank you for chiming in; I don't have the energy to compose my own top-level. The OP is nowhere to be seen from my vantage point in achievements, but rather, I'm a stone's throw away from that one submitter last year whose circumstances and outlook were so crushingly bleak and who had absolutely nothing to their name. I'm not going to pretend there isn't an ounce of "oh, poor me" here, but I think seeing it is cruci…
[edit, outside edit window]
To wrap it up a little less mystically/spiritually: people already know who I am.
Re: Ask HN: How do you deal with getting old and feeling lost?
#754This is almost exactly my life, shifted by a decade. The problem is that by 35 you can't get by on novelty anymore because you've seen some version of everything there is to see. The worst thing you can do is pine for the good old days. They aren't coming back. And they weren't that good anyway. Your best times are ahead if you can successfully adjust. What worked for me was putting down roots. I resisted it mightily…
I believe 35 is a tough age. You've effectively achieved Journeyman level. No, seriously, you're past the Apprentice level, and you've completed all the 300-400 level life courses. You're ready to become a Master. Unfortunately, you need to go on a journey to discover your masterwork. That may take a while. For me it took another 10 years. But trust me, you will find it, if you're willing to take a step sideways in your career a few times to try and find the problem that you seek. When you find the problem, you will recognize it for what it is: Your Masterwork ... something only you can solve. Solving it may pay off financially, with fame, or just emotionally, but either way it will pay off spiritually. You will know who you are.
Re: Ask HN: How do you deal with getting old and feeling lost?
#755Earlier quoted context omitted.
The big difference is that settling down gives you things to care about deeply. Your family, the community your kids will grow up in, the experiences and skills you want your kids to grow up with. Absent that, my life was one long drawn-out example of “fear of missing out” and I flitted from thing to thing, place to place. Just make sure you marry above your station, emotionally.
This sounds like incredible advice, if you can it would be wonderful to learn more of your thinking about marrying above your station, emotionally?
It’s sort of a know-it-when-you-see-it thing.
On an early date with my now wife she spent an entire subway ride to Queens telling me about Montessori education methods and how it made her the person she is. I recounted that when I was in first grade I was punished for interrupting the class by having a cardboard box put over by desk, so nobody could see me, and that that made me the person I am.
So two passing tests in one convo: she was impressively interested in things that matter (I was already infatuated with her) and she was not put off by my bullshit.
Re: Ask HN: How do you deal with getting old and feeling lost?
#756[dead]
Re: Ask HN: How do you deal with getting old and feeling lost?
#757Earlier quoted context omitted.
56 and still technical here. Learn, learn, learn. Find the new hotness (at least one that has staying power). For me, kubernetes is the latest 'big hill'. It seems to have legs for years ahead, and plenty of technical details that prevent anyone from completely mastering it.
> Learn, learn, learn. Find the new hotness 58 in a few weeks, and seriously considering going the other way: To jump off the treadmill of new fads and concentrate on / return to basics. "Big Data!" "Data Lake!" Data Vault!" "Apache Spark!" "Kafka!" "Cloud this!" "Cloud that!" "Cloud the other!""Snowflake!" "R!" "Python!" "Pandas!" "This new ETL tool!" "That new ETL process!" "This other new ETL tool!" "That other ne…
Yes, that's a valid path, too.
When I was just starting out (circa 1990) a good friend of mine had a pal that was making his living servicing punch card machines.
They were completely unsupported by IBM at the time, this guy had been an IBM tech and saw the opening. He embraced the old tech, knowing there were people still using it and willing to pay for some form of support.
So I don't disagree with that idea, it's definitely workable.
Re: Ask HN: How do you deal with getting old and feeling lost?
#758Delight.
I enjoy living in the future. It's hilarious to me that my favorite tech - NextStep, Linux, Mac - ate the world. I chuckle when I dream of time-traveling to 1997 - me, to reveal that Apple is the most wealthy company in the world (most days). That huge supercomputers have been built to train multi layer neural networks, just as I tried to explain to humans of 1990 why dot products might be interesting to optimize in hardware.
It does not particularly surprise me that most people use a web browser to do anything on a computer, but it's funny to me that I started front-end JavaScript programming in March 1997.
It's also funny that I managed to avoid getting rich, despite seeing all of this coming.
I have tried to understand microelectronics fabrication tech, but 13 billion transistors on my iPhone CPU is indistinguishable from magic. I could show 1988 me an iPad or tablet-laptop convertible running web apps, and he would be very pleased that the dream design seemed to have been realized.
That's the tech stuff.
I'm delighted by my kids. They do neat stuff. The py are better people than I am, which is about the best I could hope for.
I found out - perhaps the hard way - that living on a very modest budget is far more lucrative and secure than chasing a big payout. That's a choice I made that maybe would not be very satisfying to many HN folks. That's ok.
It's all taken longer, I'm older, and health challenges need improvement. But overall the outcome has been pretty good.
Re: Ask HN: How do you deal with getting old and feeling lost?
#759Earlier quoted context omitted.
As of right now, dividend-paying mortgage REITs pay around 9-10%. The US government will never let its housing market fail, and low interest rates let these trusts borrow inexpensively.
> The US government will never let its housing market fail,... Maybe I'm totally missing your point, but didn't exactly this happen in 2008?
The US government came out and said that it would guarantee Freddie's/Fannie's debt which caused a sharp downtick as the government effectively admitted there was a possibility they could go to zero. Short (on the scale we're looking at) downturns, even if large in % terms, aren't a failure of a market. So, to answer your question, no.
Re: Ask HN: How do you deal with getting old and feeling lost?
#760Mourning the loss of one’s youth is pretty typical. You lose a step. You didn’t do what you hoped you would do. You wasted your time. So forth and so on. Don’t worry. It gets better. This is all part of the process of life. My recommendation is that you read Man’s Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl. “He who has a why to live for can bear almost any how.” I’m 52 here. I was a prolific programmer in my 20s. A go-go ma…
What if you don’t have any “why”? How would you go about finding one?