Ask HN: How can I come to peace with the years I wasted on pointless things?

You’re 23. Seriously stop thinking like this. You have a lot of time.

I’m 37 and I’ve just started out. I know at this point my career has a low ceiling. But I’ll try my best.

>Everything you do is ultimately pointless.

You've got a good point there.

In the science laboratory, some people spend all their time doing experiments, and most of the time they don't invent anything.

Occasionally when they do, it is still very unlikely to be deployed since this would cost even more money, most of which in non-allocatable. Most inventions may never be financially viable anyway, as we know.

Once in a while something really worthwhile develops fully in spite of all the odds.

Now if you consider anything that never leaves the lab as pointless, it follows that you're going to need to be comfortable doing lots more pointless stuff, or even stuff that turns out to appear "pointless" in hindsight after you've moved on. Otherwise you're not going to get as much of the good progress you could appreciate most.

So I wouldn't worry.

People probably play the games where they have gotten better familiarity as you go along, and move to deeper levels of performance.

Some games you may even have a kind of unfair advantage, whether it's with the game itself or in comparison to other players or perhaps competitors.

These same strategies & tactics can be applied to the same hardware in the pursuit of things like computer science or software engineering, and the challenges as you move to more accomplished levels may have some similarities.

I started with the first Atari computer model that was more than just a gaming machine. There was a full hardware keyboard and they had the BASIC programming language in the same kind of advanced game cartridge that the compatible games used. It would handle 4 joysticks or trackballs.

It was really cut-and-dried when it came to dividing my time between these cartridges, the BASIC was like having a PC before the "IBM PC" was released, so there were really more levels than all of my games combined.

I felt obligated to do some programming to make the hardware do what I wanted, I had to get reference books for complete documentation and it could sometimes take 14 hours to accomplish moving to a new level too.

It was so straightforward to just put in a game cartridge to play for a bit, then plug in BASIC and go back to programming.

Even before Facebook, I considered "social media" well covered by those other than myself. I may put just as much time into personal interaction anyway, but I have always found live action more rewarding. But I'm old fashioned and it's familiar to be satisfied keeping up with far fewer people than if you push all options to the max.

The time I don't spend on my phone, I could start a million-dollar business.

Everybody's on Facebook anyway, if anything important comes up, I'll find out about it first hand.

Not as astute as the good old Yogi Berra saying: "Nobody goes there any more, it's too crowded!".

Reading this post it feels like I’m the one who wrote it… to that end, I am 21 years old and I constantly find myself thinking and feeling regretful that I didn’t spend more of my teenage years pursuing my ambitions (of which there are lot), and building my skill set… instead, just like you, I spent my childhood playing video games in my room, watching YouTube, not doing my school work on top of that, etc… I was more or less a couch potato.

This issue isn’t so black and white also, let’s assume a hypothetical scenario where you did everything you regret not doing now… would you feel content? Or would you feel like you should’ve spent more of that time doing more those “pointless” activities. Nobody knows the answer to those questions, and you probably don’t either… but what’s important to remember is that life has at least taught me that balance is extremely important, not only for your mental health and fitness, but especially to ensuring long term success.

I still struggle with this line of thinking to this day, and I can’t say I’m any closer to a resolution. But here’s what I do know; Self pity is cancerous… it starts out being about one thing, but if you keep obsessing over it then it will slowly but surely consume your life, and you won’t know until it’s already happened… then it becomes an addiction. Don’t be like me, learn to forgive yourself and be reasonable about your expectations.

If I were you (which in way I am haha) I would focus on getting a win under my belt, no matter how small… an easy and highly rewarding technical win is spinning up your own Stable Diffusion instance on a cloud GPU vm or if you have a decent GPU run it locally (decent = 8GB> vRAM), if you don’t know it’s an open source version of DALL-E 2 that was released a few days ago and setting it up is fairly straightforward and it will help you feel that wonder of using new technology, and getting some work done at the same time.—perfect avenue if you’re trying to kickstart yourself into CS.

I am going to say many things and many of them may come off as insensitive and even hurtful, but do please read until the end. I focus a lot of my comments around John Carmack and WoW because you mentioned them multiple times and I personally see that as an indication that addressing your angst necessarily requires addressing these influences.

1. Your life experience has parallels with mine in terms aspiring to be proficient at my career from a young age: my personal view is that point of view was instilled into me by my parents as part of being a middle class family. It definitely had benefits and continues to do so, but my opinion today is that my parents should have tempered this point of view with concepts like the law of diminishing returns and the power law in an educational setting where graduating/selecting into a more competitive school means more work for each additional percentage point improvement.

2. WoW captured the imagination and time of an entire generation, and many people feel exactly the way you do. There are many arguments as to why and what can be done about it, but those will not help you immediately at this moment. TL;DR you are not alone.

3. You did what you wanted to do at the time, and many people did not and still do not get that chance.

4. Hindsight is 20/20, but getting to the point where something is in hindsight is not a guarantee. WoW is coming out with a new expansion (Dragonflight) soon as well as relaunching an older expansion (Wrath of the Lich King). However, you've decided that you have other priorities at the moment and you've decided to focus on them. TL;DR you came to a realization, and you decided to move in a different direction.

5. I agree that having that early start coding as kid would definitely be an advantage. However, Is that early start to coding a necessary precondition to becoming a good software engineer? Yes, there are more distractions today, but there are also resources available to you today that weren't available during his childhood.

6. In contrast to 5, suppose that the early childhood start at coding is a necessary precondition to being a good software engineer. Is it the end of the world for you if you cannot be a good software engineer?

7. Did John Carmack have mental health problems, serious financial hardships, etc on his path towards becoming who he is today? If he did not, then how likely would it have been for him to become who he is today if he had those problems in his life? TL;DR we do not pick our initial conditions / spawn point as easily as it is to pick a character in WoW, and we cannot reroll characters.

8. What did spending all those hours WoW leave you with? You likely interacted with other people, played in a party or in raids, and maybe organized raids or assisted in guild management. You might also have used voice chat software to communicate with others. Those are useful skills and you built them without complaint and maybe also while having fun. https://www.wsj.com/articles/can-warcraft-game-skills-help-l... - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8174480 . Every skill you build invests in your future, and I would argue that the lessons I learned when I was enjoying myself were the ones that stuck the most with the least deliberate effort.

9. This question is rhetorical one: what else do you have outside of the time you spent on WoW and social media? It is very easy to compress your life story into a number of milestones and influences because we are used to seeing other people do the same in interviews. I do it all the time. However, this compression is lossy: it throws out many other important influences and events that we should be thankful for.

10. Suppose being "the next John Carmack" was your absolute number one goal. Then, you realize 6, but you still have that fixation. What is the next best thing? What about being the giant on whose shoulders the next John Carmack stands on? No, you do not have to have children if you do not want to, but you can be mentor via things like Big Brother/Sister/Sibling mentorship programs, or informally mentoring and supporting a younger relative. TL;DR Even if you cannot be the one to fell the dragon, you can still be instrumental to helping the one who can.

The above list is incomplete given the time I can spend today.

I too have failed to be who I wanted to be: however, I am thankful for the role of my faith, my family, my friends, my knowledge, my elixir, and the ittehbittehkittehcommitteh in being who I am today.

I didn't go to the best college (not a bad one either), I wasn't top of my class in high school. I moved to Boston and was surrounded by MIT and Harvard people. I had a complex for years about never being good enough because I wasn't credentialed in that way. I poured hours upon hours in my early career getting better and working late and reading incessantly and writing and rewriting PR's. Working through design tradeoffs over and over. Working on passion projects at work that no one was asking for. And at the end of all that, I was easily playing at or above the level around me. A lot of people stop investing in themselves post college and feel that after they've done the school thing and secured the job they can coast, but I'll tell you that if you deeply invest in yourself in your work years and don't just do what's expected, you will see the growth and change and it will be marked.

You can't reclaim those early years. Have some empathy for your younger self, you may have been avoiding the pain of living. You may still be, get a good therapist. If not just know that those companies worked very hard to create random reward loops that your brain ate like candy and the real world will absolutely not reward you like that.