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Ask HN: How can I come to peace with the years I wasted on pointless things?
111–120 of 277 posts
Re: Ask HN: How can I come to peace with the years I wasted on pointless things?
#112Everything you do is ultimately pointless. You feel that becoming a particular type of engineer you aspire to is meaningful, but once you get there you’ll realize you’re still yourself and you didn’t ascend to some higher level of being. Probably the most meaningful thing we can do is through social interactions. Your time in WoW must have incorporated social interactions. Be proud of those experiences - they’re in n…
You feel that becoming a particular type of engineer you aspire to is meaningful, but once you get there you’ll realize you’re still yourself and you didn’t ascend to some higher level of being.
This viewpoint sounds to me like it’s coming from someone who is depressed.
I’ve had a long career with a lot of accomplishments and I wouldn’t trade any of it for anything. Yeah someday the sun will consume the inner planets and we’ll all be gone but I don’t think about that. I’m having an absolute blast with life doing whatever I want to do.
Some of the happiest times I’ve had were a direct result of working my butt off conceiving a goal, coming up with a plan, executing that plan and then enjoying the rewards of that goal.
I don’t envy the generation today. In 1982 when I turned on my first computer it did nothing but say, “READY.” If I wanted to play a game I had to type the BASIC or Assembly source code in from a magazine. That’s literally how I learned to program. Sure I played games but most of my time was productive - literally producing instead of consuming.
If I grew up today, what a difference it would be. Infinite distractions. My life would be totally different. I’ve said this many times - the 20th century was about humanity learning to live in a world with infinite sugar, fat and salt. The 21st century will be about humanity learning to live in a world of infinite information.
Will you consume the mental equivalent of broccoli or Pepsi? In the long run I’ve found it makes a tremendous difference in one’s level of happiness.
Re: Ask HN: How can I come to peace with the years I wasted on pointless things?
#113A few thoughts:
- Do you actually want to do all that engineering, or do you just want to be like Carmack, having done all that engineering? Would you be okay with having been similarly productive as him, but not having the commensurate rewards in return?
- Carmack isn't on a higher plane of existence. He still has to shit, still has to arrange to have dinner every day. As per his own recent admission, he still gets distracted and has to modify his environment to cope with that.
- Much like the protagonist in the Bell Jar, you are focusing only on the alternative time streams that appear to you as better. In reality, there are tons of far worse outcomes that you have successfully avoided, but Western culture encourages us to ignore these entirely.
- Humans are notoriously bad at evaluating their own future emotional states in response to life events.
- Fam, you are 23. All else being equal? I would pick being you over being a legendary and wealthy 50+ year old programmer. No offense to the greybeards reading this passage.
Re: Ask HN: How can I come to peace with the years I wasted on pointless things?
#114I am over 50 now. I started programming when I was about 10 years old and (probably not coincidentally) I made a career out of programming. I am pretty good at coding and I still love it. Yet, when I look back at those teenage years spent in a room behind a computer screen I feel pangs of regret as well. Before I met my first computer and fell madly in love, I used to read, draw, write, collect stuff, play outside a…
"Carmack once said: "being well balanced is overrated". After years of being not so well-balanced, I am not so sure of that."
I think it is all about balancing.
I love coding, but only doing coding? Life would be very empty for me.
There are also beaches, mountains and festivals. Family. And much more.
Re: Ask HN: How can I come to peace with the years I wasted on pointless things?
#115You shouldn't look back, but look forward instead. At 23 you should have most of your life still in front of you. At 57 I'm painfully aware that I don't have all that much time left so I'm trying to make the most of it, there is no reason to wait until you are old to start realizing that your time on this rock is finite. At least you realize it now, some people never do, and I hope that you had some fun.
Julia Child didn't become Julia Child until she was in her 60s. If you're in fairly okay health you still have a few decades to do what it is that you want to do.
Re: Ask HN: How can I come to peace with the years I wasted on pointless things?
#116You're 23. You'd be a massive outlier if you'd spent more of your childhood reverse engineering an OS than playing games, or indeed any time reverse engineering an OS at all, and it wouldn't necessarily lead you to be any more successful than someone who didn't even look at a command prompt until the age of 23
The nice thing about this, too, is that there's no real barrier (besides owning a personal computer) to reverse engineering an OS or learning computer science.
There's no incredibly high fees, there's no licensure to practice, and many of the educational materials are free. The original poster can start today if they'd like, using free resources like the Open Source Society University's curriculum: https://github.com/ossu/computer-science
Re: Ask HN: How can I come to peace with the years I wasted on pointless things?
#117I recently saw a book whose title (in German) was "Life doesn't gave a reverse gear" ... which simply means one cannot go back and change things.
But you are young and have many decades left which you can use to do what you now consider worthwhile.
One last tip: even if you now plan to do better with computers, always try to have a hobby away from computers. Or else you might someday regret that you (again) spent too much time in front of digital devices. Using certain devices outdoors is ok though IMHO, for example at photography (digital cameras) or geocaching (gps).
Re: Ask HN: How can I come to peace with the years I wasted on pointless things?
#118I have something of a counterpoint. I've been coding since I was 5 and I look back and wish I had spent time playing more games; I didn't and I missed out on some defining years which you probably had, and are probably taking for granted. I don't regret that however, instead it's something to learn from, and I now attempt to find a balance between all of them. Don't compare yourself to others, only that if you realiz…
Came here to say something similar and I was actually in a similar situation to OP. Was a 23 year old who felt I had wasted too much of my life already - had watched some sitcoms twice through already and while others had been programming for the last 10 years, I had been playing guitar.
So what did I do? I swore off everything that wasn’t going to be “productive,” sold my guitars, and tried to spend every minute of every day coding or reading. My girlfriend at the time would get mad at my book light cause it bothered her while she was trying to sleep but I had to keep reading “Computer Systems: A Programmer’s Perspective.” Years later we would be breaking up and on the day she was moving out she wanted to talk but I had to go to work cause I was lead on a big feature that I thought would lead to a promotion that never happened.
Flash forward years later, I decide to pick up the guitar again during the pandemic. The only thing I regret now is having ever put it down. I’m frustrated at everything I have to relearn because I knew I could play something before, I’m frustrated at the time I lost not playing. Most importantly though, I’m still frustrated at myself for not letting myself enjoy playing guitar; sometimes I still feel guilty that I’m wasting time similar to how I felt at 23. Wasting time can be a bad feeling, but teaching yourself to abhor wasting time is equally bad and it robs you of the joy from anything that isn’t “productive” or productivity adjacent.
Try not to focus on regret and don’t over analyze things too much trying to identify how you could have made things play out differently. The past is gone - which is a good thing. I had spent some time thinking how my job at the time affected that relationship but the truth of the matter is it probably would have ended anyway. I learned a lot about myself through it, and have a much better grasp on my current relationship and a healthier/more stable work life balance because of it.
The other thing about Carmack or any other famous programmer is it doesn’t matter when they started programming. We all kind of plateau somewhere in terms of skill. Had Carmack been born 15 years earlier and started programming 15 years later he’d probably still be equally successful in some area of software development. He didn’t create Doom solely because he started programming in the womb with the first spill proof keyboard. There’s tons of other people who started programming that early and didn’t get anywhere with it. Don’t compare your journey and success with anyone else’s because there’s likely a lot of other factors in there that would be impossible to account for. Focus on enjoying your time on earth, work hard when you need to and make time for relaxation and joy as much as you can as well.
Re: Ask HN: How can I come to peace with the years I wasted on pointless things?
#119I guess the first thing to note is that in a hundred and fifty years, you'll be dead and unless you're one in a million or maybe ten million, nobody alive will know you existed. So it's not a competition, there's no prize ceremony at the end for the guy who did the most stuff, there's no one way you should be living your life. The second thing is, the past is dead and gone. You can't do anything about it. You can lea…
Most of our waking life is spent dwelling in the past or the future. It’s only through practice that it can be changed. I’ve practiced and can’t say I’m an expert but it helps.
Another way of living in the moment but without needing practice is by doing something that is engrossing, that thing we can “flow”.
Re: Ask HN: How can I come to peace with the years I wasted on pointless things?
#120I was browsing Carmack's twitter feed, and stumbled on some posts in there from his ex-wife of 20 odd years, saying he was an absentee dad and husband. Sort of opened my eyes a bit. He also famously took his work computer on his honeymoon. Yes, Carmack is a programming legend, and I respect him greatly (he is one of my personal coding heroes), but I think what we may see as outsiders doesn't always tell the whole story.
You only have one life to live. Do the things that make you happy. I think society pressures us to do well in career and this can put an enormous mental toll on us. And guess what happens when you get there? Zuckerberg just talked about how waking up each day felt like getting punched in the stomach. Yeah, you're not going to be any happier, as long as you are trying to conform to society/external expectations.
You gotta find what makes you happy. Maybe that's playing WoW 10 hours a day. As long as you can support yourself, maybe that's okay.