Feynman: I am burned out and I'll never accomplish anything (1985) • Hacker News Board

Re: Feynman: I am burned out and I'll never accomplish anything (1985)

#61

Post by mikub » Thu, Jan 11, 2024, 7:27 PM UTC

scrapcode wrote: post #30

tnecniv wrote: post #13

As a researcher, I’ve felt largely the same way lately. It’s been hard for me to even wrap up a project I was so excited about when I started it that I missed sleep because I was that engaged. Unfortunately, I don’t have a cozy tenure position at a major research institution to ride out the burnout until I feel inspired again. I’m just a lowly postdoc. I’ve thought about leaving the research life for a regular job, b…

Man, I feel you. I'm not an academic, but I'm just feeling out of breath and defeated lately. I grew up loving to build software. Reading programming books, keeping up with tech. It's the closest thing to work + passion that I think I've ever felt. Joined the military to get out of my hometown. Worked in whatever field I could remotely relate to while I finished my BS:CS. Moved from non-IT fields into whatever IT-rel…

I think that one of the problems of us humans is that we want to accomplish something, we tell our self storys about our self how we should have become that or done that. But in the end it really doesn't matter, even if you were Albert Einstein, Richard Feynman or Marie Curie, in a few billion years none of all the work any human ever did, everything accomplished, won't matter, no one will be here to remember anymore. I think the best one can do is to look at this world with some sort of an observer mindset and be curious about the things happening in this world, try not to judge the things happening, just think "Oh, that's interesting, I wonder why it is like that.". And of course, always try to be friendly to other living beings, even if there might be no afterlife after the end of the universe and you can't trade in your browniepoints anymore, ther is no excuse for making other peoples life worse than it already is. ;)

Re: Feynman: I am burned out and I'll never accomplish anything (1985)

#62

Post by borroka » Thu, Jan 11, 2024, 7:27 PM UTC

tnecniv wrote: post #13

As a researcher, I’ve felt largely the same way lately. It’s been hard for me to even wrap up a project I was so excited about when I started it that I missed sleep because I was that engaged. Unfortunately, I don’t have a cozy tenure position at a major research institution to ride out the burnout until I feel inspired again. I’m just a lowly postdoc. I’ve thought about leaving the research life for a regular job, b…

> First, there’s not really other jobs I’d rather do.

I suspect there are many jobs you would do, but you have to allow yourself to let go of the dreams, the ambitions, the identity you have built in academia.

A few years ago, almost seven, I decided to leave academia, after a PhD and many years as a post doc, more than 50 journal papers published, awards and recognition in my field. I loved doing research, writing papers and thinking about the new advances I would make.

Why the change of mind and career? First, it seemed that my time as a researcher had passed, and that I was becoming an old postdoc with little appeal to universities and research institutions. Second, I was growing tired of earning little money. Third, it was beginning to look like I was doing similar research to what I was doing 5 years earlier, and I had a feeling that it would be the same research I would be doing 5 years down the road.

I started interviewing for positions in (tech) industry, got a monetary offer 5 times what I was making as a senior postdoc, started a new career, and never looked back. The last part is not entirely true. At times, I look back and regret the last 5 years I spent in academia. I could have had a faster career in tech, earned much more money, and would have met bright and motivated people sooner. The world is full of interesting technical problems that need to be solved.

Re: Feynman: I am burned out and I'll never accomplish anything (1985)

#63

Post by smugglerFlynn » Thu, Jan 11, 2024, 7:27 PM UTC

hathawsh wrote: post #39

smugglerFlynn wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not sure how Nobel prize got on your list. I read it that way: - Things become taxing when they stop being fun - Doing fun things and playing around whatever interests you is the way to make things less taxing - Sometimes things you play with are also useful to others Although I am not sure if it is always possible to match what you are getting paid for to what you consider being fun. Feynman gives no answer for this…

To clarify, the Nobel prize comment is a reference to the last sentence of the passage: "The diagrams and the whole business that I got the Nobel Prize for came from that piddling around with the wobbling plate."

I understand. I just wanted to point out that pattern does not seem to have Nobel/etc reward built into it, neither it is a strategy to achieve something other than having fun and discovering random things that interest you. Everything else is coincidental.

You might easily end up living on the street by applying that strategy.

On the other hand, some of the best results I ever got professionally were coming from that exact state of play that Feynman describes.

Re: Feynman: I am burned out and I'll never accomplish anything (1985)

#64

Post by dexwiz » Thu, Jan 11, 2024, 7:30 PM UTC

tnecniv wrote: post #13

As a researcher, I’ve felt largely the same way lately. It’s been hard for me to even wrap up a project I was so excited about when I started it that I missed sleep because I was that engaged. Unfortunately, I don’t have a cozy tenure position at a major research institution to ride out the burnout until I feel inspired again. I’m just a lowly postdoc. I’ve thought about leaving the research life for a regular job, b…

I think there is a kind of grief associated with growing up that people don’t talk about. When you are young and inspired it seems like life is long and you can do anything, branching paths with unlimited doors. Once you're an adult, your past choices narrow down your future paths, and your sense of age starts to set in. In some way you mourn the paths not taken. This is called mortality, and can be a nasty combo with other depressive factors.

As you get older, you realize some doors not yet stepped through are now closed, and less doors are opened by others for you. Life can start to feel like a hallway with the investable at the end. While less doors are open now, life is still very free. You may now be able to see decades into your past, but you still cannot see into your future. There are many open doors still hidden, they just take a bit more searching. Good news, you are an adult with years of life experience, you can go find them.

Re: Feynman: I am burned out and I'll never accomplish anything (1985)

#65

Post by dang » Thu, Jan 11, 2024, 7:31 PM UTC

Feynman: I am burned out and I'll never accomplish anything (1985) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26931359 - April 2021 (276 comments)

Feynman: I am burned out and I'll never accomplish anything - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10585890 - Nov 2015 (22 comments)

Feynman: I am burned out and I'll never accomplish anything - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3874875 - April 2012 (66 comments)

Re: Feynman: I am burned out and I'll never accomplish anything (1985)

#66

Post by fatherzine » Thu, Jan 11, 2024, 7:31 PM UTC

hathawsh wrote: post #16

While this passage is inspiring, it boils down to: 1. Get good at something 2. Get paid for doing it 3. Get burned out by doing it 4. Return to the fun way of doing it 5. ??? 6. Win a Nobel prize or similar How repeatable is that pattern? Is that one of the patterns we want to teach the next generation? Serious question. I don't know the answer. Feynman is obviously rather exceptional. Should we encourage people to f…

on 4, the fun way of doing it is teaching / helping others doing it. coincidentally, that's the most common path to escape the toxic loop.

Re: Feynman: I am burned out and I'll never accomplish anything (1985)

#67

Post by godelski » Thu, Jan 11, 2024, 7:32 PM UTC

nsagent wrote: post #34

tnecniv wrote: post #13

As a researcher, I’ve felt largely the same way lately. It’s been hard for me to even wrap up a project I was so excited about when I started it that I missed sleep because I was that engaged. Unfortunately, I don’t have a cozy tenure position at a major research institution to ride out the burnout until I feel inspired again. I’m just a lowly postdoc. I’ve thought about leaving the research life for a regular job, b…

I'm in a similar boat. Not a postdoc yet, but will be starting a postdoc in July (assuming I graduate in May, which I'm on track for). I've always been interested in the intersection of AI and interactive storytelling. Worked in the game industry for a while, then came back for a PhD when ML really started taking off. With the current frenzied climate in NLP research, I just feel demotivated. Mainly because I think m…

> Mainly because I think my research outlook is very different from the mainstream, so I feel my work gets undervalued or ignored entirely.

You're not alone.

One of my first papers was in normalizing flows and I focused on a niche area in there (if I said, I'd dox myself. Even this limits the search a lot). Reviewers came back and asked why my images weren't as good as SOTA GANs and just rejected. Half my experiments were on density estimation... The other reviews said I should be applying my methods to GANs instead, but that wasn't even possible because I was explicitly exploiting the distributional properties at each flow step.

My most cited paper is unpublished and the reviews I got back were about why someone would want to train from scratch instead of tuning a large model. Why we cared about such things as small number of parameters or how to quickly train models without overfitting because "bigger models generalize better."

Fwiw, I'd have no issue accepting your work. It looks useful, it advances domain knowledge, and is clearly written. I think a lot of people lose sight that experiments are proxies and that the tools we are working with are more general than the specific applications we demonstrate.

Re: Feynman: I am burned out and I'll never accomplish anything (1985)

#68

Post by makapuf » Thu, Jan 11, 2024, 7:33 PM UTC

JohnFen wrote: post #4

dartos wrote: post #3

What an inspiring passage. I’ve been feeling the exact same way about software lately. It’s just no fun anymore. I should do something pointless like making a wayland compositor for myself or something.

When I struggled hard with burnout, I found that hobbies were an important part of fixing that -- but it was important that the hobbies had little-to-nothing to do with computers (I had computer-related hobbies too, of course, but they didn't seem particularly effective in terms of mitigating burnout).

A good thing is to remind that you have not to finish hobby projets. Dont feel any shame about putting it aside and start something more interesting, do it : it's not work and you do it to let off steam. You may even come back to it later

Re: Feynman: I am burned out and I'll never accomplish anything (1985)

#69

Post by amiga386 » Thu, Jan 11, 2024, 7:33 PM UTC

privacyisntdead wrote: post #29

amiga386 wrote: post #9

I can just imagine this in his voice (e.g. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nYg6jzotiAc ) Feynman is my favourite physicist. Of course you could pick someone else, you could argue about the relative importance of each person's contribution to scientific knowledge, but it was his aimiability, playfulness and curiousity, combined with the fact that he _did_ break new frontiers in quantum physics that make him so inspiri…

A favorite of mine as well. I too was hoping for more of an appearance. I wondered if Feynman’s moment was during the first test scene where there is a spectator/scientist sitting in a car with Teller sitting in a lawn chair in the foreground. Feynman says in one of his books he noticed the car windows should block the UV radiation.

Ah, yes, that is it. So he gets a few more seconds in the movie than I thought :)

[An army man is handing out welders glass to the observers. Feynman is in a car, Teller is next to him in a deckchair rubbing sun cream into his skin]

TELLER [to the army man while rubbing his hands]: On the leg, please

ARMY MAN: Feynman

FEYNMAN: No. The glass [knocks on car windshield] stops the UV

TELLER: And what stops the glass?

Re: Feynman: I am burned out and I'll never accomplish anything (1985)

#70

Post by systems_glitch » Thu, Jan 11, 2024, 7:34 PM UTC

I feel like Bell Labs was the biggest loss of "play at it, see if something important comes out" possible. Never worked there, but a lot of friends did, from the 50s thru the Lucent transition right up to the end.