Ask HN: What kind of life do you dream about?

- Geographical autonomy: living in places for 2-3 months (usually when tourist visa expires). Thailand, Japan, Indonesia, Italy, Portugal and moving around every quarter. Stay longer if the country allows and it feel incredible there. (I'll never have enough of burrata).

- Working part-time: I still love the sense of community within healthy environments and common goal. I think its an invaluable experience when 10-15 smart people come around and try to achieve a shared goal. The energy is addictive. Unfortunately this has been taken into the extreme and exploited by many companies but I had this experience once, going from 0-1 with a bunch of great people, becoming profitable and never looking back again.

- Tinkering the other half of the time: creative exploration is something that I believe everyone should do. In my case I want to be spending my free time on activities such as learning to code, writing, designing, non-profit activities, volunteering, teaching etc.

- Be close to physical activities: whether its an ocean with surfing waves or a snowy slope for snowboarding and skiing, these environments enable to do other things aside of going to the gym. For instance in Singapore it's common to play basketball/tennis with friends so enables to do more fun physical exercise in groups. Germany has the same with football.

- Be part of a good community: whether its physical exercise, mens health, indiepreneurs or just a supportive network of people all tackling similar issues in life and at the same stage.

- Have one proper home and one summer escape location: if I would every own a home, that would be an emotional purchase and always something to come back to.

- Be close to my folks or at least have an option that doesn't take 16 hours: I live on the other part of the world and after 3 years of covid it made me kind of sick to think that I spent 7 days out of 1000 with my family.

These will obviously change, I noticed that we constantly re-invent ourselves every 6-10 years given that one path closes and another starts based on our interests and curiosities.

I guess thats it, funny when always thinking about it - the above seems quite realistic without the need of a $1B exit outcome. I guess humble beginnings kind of ground the expectations and if it sounds unambitious, it would be amazing enough for me. Different person, different story I guess...

Something worries me though. I've seen before a pattern that happens, when people have big ideas and see a lot of connections between different things, leading to personal breakthroughs in things like physics/math, where it's then hard to find an an expert to look at your ideas. Your post reminds me of that a little.

I can say that for other people in the past, the point where it went wrong is that the devil is in the details, and by connecting many fascinating things together without knowing the math, you can find beauty in things without having the hard fundamental to confirm whether it's real or an illusion.

>I feel like I'm most likely falling into a self bias trap

My instinct is that, in the kindest way possible, this should be a big concern. To be honest I'm someone who likes reading criticism (because I'm far from perfect), so I realize this might come across as criticism, but I mean it positively and constructively.

I think I also share a lot of the fascination that you talk about for things like quantum mechanichs, cryptograhy, complex and deep topics. (I'm also bilingual, another coincidence!) But the more I learn in these deep areas, the more I understand how deep the subject the really is, and how easy it is to think you understand the broad picture of something, without really understand the details (and all the subtlety really is in the details!).

>Bottom line is I need to nail down specifics to focus on and produce project results

I would look at it this way. There's a lot of people in this world, we might pass eight billion today. That's important, because we can look at the kind of patterns people have tried in the past, and we can see where they ended up.

Crucially, it's impossible to know whether a big idea works without diving deep (otherwise everyone would have done it already, and it wouldn't _be_ a big idea). But it _is_ possible to see the more general pattern of people attempting to see connections between many different things, that are hard to precisely articulate.

There's a very dangerous trap in chasing interconnections of fields with a surface understanding (as opposed to deep details-level understanding), because you can spend a lot of years faster than you'd think and wake up at the end with little to show for it. With the feeling that you have found something but without anything very concrete.

If you have something specific and detailed that you have questions about, I'm good at diving into details in a couple of the fields you've listed (though I'm not an expert, and I'm not always entirely immune to overconfidence either.. caveat emptor).

HOWEVER and this is important: I think you could likely avoid a lot of hardships by trying for a while to stick closer to boring ideas than breakthrough ideas, with the goal of growing enough experience to be able to see the flaw in other people's breakthrough ideas. If you can't see the mistakes other people are making, you can't see the mistakes you are (potentially) making, and this is how people fall into the trap.

Cryptographers have an important lesson & rule: anyone can invent cryptography that they can't themselves break. In cryptography, in quantum-adjacent fields, in high-energy physics, a lot of people come with breakthrough ideas and it is fascinating to see why they went wrong (if they didn't go wrong, we would be using their ideas!). This is genuinely a pattern that happens a lot, and that you really want to pay attention to. I cannot underscore how important it is to not fall into the same trap. You don't want to be a quantum 'crank', or a cryptography 'crank'. People have spent many years feeling misunderstood, and their ideas were never recognized in the end. Some have grown old with nothing. You should really want to understand why, so that it doesn't happen to you.

Take care, and stay suspicious of bias. Everyone has them. The easiest lie to sell if from a person to themselves.