Ask HN: Who else is working on nothing?

I found in my mid thirties that my perspective on what was important and desirable shifted significantly. Which led me to become disengaged from my desire to build side projects and learn new programming languages. It was a time were ecclesiastes from the Bible resonated a lot. After a while I just found out that I wasn’t interested in nothing but I had to rediscover what was important to me and what I valued spending my time on.

While my current lifestyle doesn’t lineup well with the tech grind and won’t get me attention online I’m much happier living a lifestyle that serves me and family rather than some external validation. Hope that helps and good luck on your journey.

Let me guess, you’re about under 30 and/or without kids, right?

You’re just burnt out. It happens. You’ll be able to recognize it when you go through it a couple times lol

It’s not a big deal but you need to get sleep and exercise and get out of house and away from devices at least once a day for ~3 months.

And then reassess. But you shouldn’t make any decision if you’re depressed and burnt out.

This is a step in the right direction but it is still wrong. Yes, whatever praise or accolades you earn from work will be things you can never take with you when you pass. But the same also goes for whatever enjoyment you get from hobbies, interests or activities. You've just swapped one temporary source of happiness for another. Even if the latter is more meaningful, it is still temporary.

It is easy to suggest focusing on one's happiness but it is more useful and (more difficult) to figure out how to tackle unhappiness instead. The goal is equanimity not happiness (i.e happiness in the conventional hedonic sense). Focus on the cessation of your personal suffering.

Wow, I just wanted to say thanks a lot for posting this. I'm in a very similar boat. I was always very focused and goal-oriented in my younger days - a bit of a workaholic but generally enjoyed working hard. A number of changes since the pandemic have left me feeling very similar to you:

1. Like tons of other people, I re-evaluated my relationship with work during the pandemic. To be honest, it wasn't easy. I think a ton of people (especially Americans) tie up their self-worth with their jobs, and during the pandemic I just felt more disconnected from my job.

2. I think a lot of folks have underestimated the psychological changes that happen from being way more isolated these days. I don't mean "shut-in" isolated, I just mean that working remote most days means the number of people I interact with in person has gone way, way down. I'm all for remote work but I won't deny that I greatly miss a lot of the energy from just being around other people.

3. Finally, I've just become really disillusioned with tech over the course of my career, which makes me very sad. I started my career during the dot com boom, and there was so much optimism about the beneficial societal changes that tech and the Internet would bring. I don't feel like all tech is "evil" these days, but I do feel that the world would be better off if all the big tech companies (Google, Facebook, Apple, Microsoft) just completely stopped building any new tech. Obviously that's not realistic, but it highlights my feeling that I'm not looking forward to any new tech from these companies, because more tech is going to invariably lead to more isolation, more "doom scrolling", more assaults on our attention. I feel like most big tech companies have just become the equivalent of drug dealers, just trying to hijack our brain's evolutionary attention mechanisms to addict us. "Attention is all you need" is right...

Anyway, don't have any advice or anything, just wanted to say I appreciated your post in a "misery loves company" sort-of-way, so thank you.

I can relate a lot to this. Thanks for sharing