71–80 of 178 posts
Does this apply to 30 year olds who've been working for a while and feel lost?
do whatever to make money first, use that money to do what you love. 'follow your dream' is too risky for most of us and might be misleading for most young people in my opinion. make a living first, and never forget your dream in the process
My advice: - If you don't come from money, and your personality desires security and safety, don't do risky stuff like wasting your 20's hitchhiking and being a ski bum. You should get skills and a career. I came from lower-middle class and have always had the nagging fear of being destitute. I am so much happier that I worked hard in my 20s (80 hours a week hard) so my 30s and 40s were more comfortable. - Your habit…
> If you start working out 3x a week, you will continue doing this and be physically fit. If you drink alcohol 3x a week, you will continue to do this and become wrinkled and grumpy. What about working out 3x a week and drinking alcohol 3x a week? Potentially that could be a sweet spot for sociability and activity. Compared to doing neither 3x a week, what do you think would be better? Both drinking and exercise mean…
"The context of one’s life defines not just what but how one thinks, and a job tends to dominate the context of one’s life — particularly when that job is considered to be part of a career. Your job will change you."
Absolute and complete pseudoscientific bullshit. Everything in life changes you. Every. Thing. Your job, the old man that works at the fruit stand around the corner from your flat, the air you breathe. No one thing in your life is going to determine who you are, because your rational, conscious, decision-making brain is what chooses your path in life. Not some amorphous organization or position that supposedly has control over your cognitive pathways. You change you.
Go ahead and chase a career. Will your life be any better or worse than if you didn't? There is absolutely no way to know that in advance.
You know how you discover yourself? By living your life. By self-reflection, by seeking knowledge, and also by flipping a coin and walking wherever the coin leads.
"Learn three chords, start a band, and go on tour. Ride a bicycle as far as you can. Go WWOOFing or start a community garden in your neighborhood. Put together a traveling puppet show. Build a drone to engage the emerging drones controlled by domestic police. Do whatever — but make it uncomfortable (like leaving prison!) and make it count."
Or don't. It doesn't matter. You are going to become who you are going to be, no matter what you do or don't do. You don't have to be uncomfortable. Nothing you do has to "count". It can, if you want. But you don't need to live some noble life. Your life doesn't have to have meaning. You don't have to seek new experiences and become some dynamic, interesting renaissance man. It's your life.
Here's my career advice:
If you want a career, keep in mind that a career is basically a marathon, whereupon the end goal of the race is to have a high position, good pay, the respect and reference of your peers, interesting work, personal fulfillment, and a fat retirement account. If that's what you want, then most of your actions should be centered around becoming likeable, knowledgeable, useful, and constantly preparing for the next step on the path. If you do it really well, you can climb very fast, but that might work against you. If you do it poorly, you can end up not very far, without much money, or references, or prospects, when you need them the most. Careers are largely a political consideration.
That said, even with this weird political focus around work, you can still have a personal life that revolves around whatever you want outside of work. You also have a very wide latitude of what kind of work you do, where you do it, who you do it for, what its results are, how long and how hard you do it, etc. There is a very, very wide spectrum of both career, and life, and you don't have to fit into anyone's mold. You can even give birth to your own career niche.
The point of this comment, just like the point of Moxie's post, is to tell you that you have options. You can expand your horizons and do all kinds of things that you aren't aware of yet. But also know that, no matter where you go or what you do, you are still just who you are. Life doesn't get better or worse based on what you do. It's your state of mind that makes life worth living. You are not your job. You are yourself.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I moved countries soon after college with not even a job lined up. From Slovenia straight into SFBA because if you're gonna do something that hard, you might as well go all the way. To anyone asking if they should do the same, I say: Don't do it. Because if you have to ask, the answer is no. The ones who succeed don't ask for permission, they ask for tips about how to get it done. The mind is already made up. Same is…
How did you manage to get a work permit?
No. What the experiment showed is that you can be TEMPORARILY coerced into certain behaviors in abusive environments (especially by authority figures - as was exemplified in the Milgram experiment), but it won't change who you actually are. The SPE is really a study in toxic workplaces and abusive relationships. I really wish people would stop quoting the SPE without researching what actually happened and why (and th…
> These new criticisms include the biased and incomplete collection of data, the extent to which the SPE drew on a prison experiment devised and conducted by students in one of Zimbardo's classes 3 months earlier, the fact that the guards received precise instructions regarding the treatment of the prisoners, the fact that the guards were not told they were subjects, and the fact that participants were almost never completely immersed by the situation. [0]
> Zimbardo and his assistants ordered the guards to become cruel, and, moreover, that guards and prisoners alike knew what Zimbardo was trying to prove and were eager to help. [1]
> In other words, the sadism of the guards and the submissiveness of the prisoners in the experiment didn’t reveal the hidden darkness of the human soul, so much as the willingness of college students to please a professor. [1]
[0]: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/31380664/ [1]: https://www.wired.com/story/beware-the-epiphany-industrial-c...
I spent my twenties riding freight trains across the US and cycling across Europe and Asia, living off of music. I'm not sure I would recommend that to anyone who is looking for career advice - Now I'm trying to build a solid career for myself as a software developer and I have no idea if it is easier with all that behind me or not. While I'm hoping that the soft skills and self knowledge I may have acquired over the…
I think if you're engaged with what you do, you will learn and develop more than if not. OTOH there seems to be a developmental window for some specific skills, e.g. phoneme acquisition 6-12 months; (human) language acquisition < 7 years.
Should be labelled (2013). Would be nice if I didn't have to say that; in so many ways the bloom is off the rose of my (admittedly high paying) corporate job. I even recently reunited with some old friends who chose a more independent career path, and was jealous and nostalgic- they're definitely working far closer to their passions with more freedom than I've felt in a decade. But man, what a decade since 2013. I wo…
Along those lines, one of the things that I still struggle with after 20+ years of working, is squaring this feeling of not working enough/earn enough money to have a comfortable retirement, while at the same time trying to live my life and not just work myself until death (very original, I know). So I've always had this conflict with the saying that goes something like "nobody regrets not working more, while in thei…
Almost everyone regrets not having achieved more.
No. What the experiment showed is that you can be TEMPORARILY coerced into certain behaviors in abusive environments (especially by authority figures - as was exemplified in the Milgram experiment), but it won't change who you actually are. The SPE is really a study in toxic workplaces and abusive relationships. I really wish people would stop quoting the SPE without researching what actually happened and why (and th…
They are clearly very different at 18 years old freshman vs 23 graduate, and most would say it is because of their university experience.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think if you're engaged with what you do, you will learn and develop more than if not. OTOH there seems to be a developmental window for some specific skills, e.g. phoneme acquisition 6-12 months; (human) language acquisition < 7 years.
Alternative biography: "Concerned I would never know my authentic self, I left home at the age of 5 to live in the wilderness. Now, I am struggling to begin my career as a software developer due to my failure to acquire human language - all thanks to your 'career advice', Moxe."