141–150 of 357 posts
This is the first time I've heard of an ACE score; I had to look up what it stood for: https://www.christineortollcharity.org/post/adverse-childhoo... I suspect I'm not the only one here in this boat.
Since presumably ‘former gifted children’ were in the 99th percentile, and above, during the relevant period.
I want to work on things I love working on, but 40 hours a week. I want to sleep 8 hours a day, cook 80% of my meals, and spend time in nature exercising. I also want to take 4-6 weeks of vacation a year and learn about other people and cultures. The whole "it doesn't feel like work" thing that every single silicon valley founder who works 100 hours/week parade around is fucking annoying. It's annoying because I used to be egged on to be that person, and I almost died. Stop virtue signalling. (a) You will die early (b) You an ass to your family and you aren't even there for them while you're still alive
Dropped out, went to gamedev, in general spent a lot of 20s in random search. Found a startup at 22 and got funding, it was first failure out of many. Moved countries, married, divorced, went to therapy, moved countries again and again. Played in a band, played as a DJ, tried a lot of things. Sold all of my mined Bitcoin in 2012.
Now I'm a senior developer, and for the last few years I've been working for american startups remotely outside of the US. It pays fairly well, I love my work and colleagues, and I genuinely think that my work is meaningful and improves other people's lives, even if in a small way.
But at the same time, I'm a semi-forced immigrant (can't really call myself a refugee) with questionable legal status, no significant savings, and questionable career prospects. I don't have legal right to work in the US, which is the only job market that matters. I work as contractor for now, but I'm very anxious about availability of US job market for remote-remote developers such as myself, and about what happens to my career as I get into 40s and 50s. I don't feel safe either, and I despite the fact that I'm comfortable, I feel that I could have achieved more.
I beat myself up about a lot of things. I imagine that if I just kept studying math and CS, I would have won a lot of programming competitions, get really good at fundamental CS, got into Google 10-12 years ago (while it was still the place to be at), probably quickly moved to the US, worked on fundamental hard problems, and in general had a much better career than I have now. I'm still a great programmer and have a better job and compensation than about 90% developers of the world (give or take), of course. Or I could have gone into ML. I toyed with different genetic algorithms back around 2010, and with neural networks too — even before AlexNet. I got very serious about ML around 2014, did the first Coursera course, and if I kept at it, I once again could only imagine where it would have got me in these 10 years.
It is very seducing to look at other people's achievements and think that you could have done the same, if only you made the right choices. But then I think about all of the experiences I had instead. I've met so many people and explored so many different things that life has to offer. I've learned A LOT of things that previous "nerd" would have thought impossible. I learned confidence in confrontation, public speaking and romance, and very lucky in the latter. I've learned a lot about business, art, music, journalism, history and a million of other fields. I've grown as a person, I found people that I like and trust. After years of therapy, I had to admit a lot of baggage that I had to take care of — and did it. And I don't think that these people that I envy had to deal with baggage like that.
It's hard to accept things that you're not, and things that you will never become, and it's easy to take for granted the things you have. I'm an anxious person. I always think of the worst and find a way to feel guilty about every failure, possible or imaginary. But now that I know and accept these flaws in my own thinking, every day I make a conscious effort to correct my attitude the other way. And day after day, it slowly gets better.
ACE 4. I generally feel like adult life is very difficult for me, but I'm a fully functional adult. I'm in my 40s, married with young children. I suffer from depression, but I've come to terms with the fact that I'll be living with it forever. I'm totally functional otherwise. I have a career in software, a mortgage and I'm in good physical shape. I've spent a bit of time lately thinking about how childhood trauma ma…
It feels like so many people hit the first stumbling block and throw up their hands stating they don’t know how to do it. That’s where things finally get interesting for me. It doesn’t work. How can I make it work? What have I tried and what other people have solved a similar problem? 95% of the time I just find what someone before me did, copy it and move on. Why is that so difficult for many of my peers? A good portion of my career could be summed up as copying and pasting things I’ve found on Google. It objectively works. Why are others struggling?
I’ll never be a Carmack or an Asahi or any other super hacker that frequently drops incredible work in novel areas that extremely few other individuals could ever deliver. But I can follow their work. Learn from them. Apply their solutions to problems in other domains and iterate on it. But this all feels easy and natural to me so I have trouble understanding why my peers struggle with it so much.
I went through a period in my 20s when I was very interested in talking about it and doing therapy and getting diagnoses. Did the whole circuit of the books and techniques and medications that usually get talked about. Now I’m not interested in talking about it and don’t ID as having any condition.
I’m quite happy and satisfied with my life as a whole. There are many other ways to fill the day. Probably once a week or so I’ll wake up, and as the fog of unconsciousness clears enough for me to remember what and where and how I am, it makes me smile.
I started writing a reply about my childhood. But then I realized I would be sharing more than I'm comfortable sharing in public, I don't even feel comfortable creating a throwaway account to discuss this stuff.
This is the first time I've heard of an ACE score; I had to look up what it stood for: https://www.christineortollcharity.org/post/adverse-childhoo... I suspect I'm not the only one here in this boat.
My first time hearing of it too, am ACE 10. In my mid 40s and have been having an increasing desiring for no particular reason to unpack some baggage. I think I’ve done ok in life generally, much better than the course my childhood put me on, but I think I’ve suppressed a lot of stuff and ultimately is starting to wear me down. Most notably, I just feel like a fraud a lot of times. My peers talk about how they did st…
ACE 6 for me.
40s is when it caught up with me, and of course kids exacerbated it for me too there was a lot of people and places I never wanted to see again, in fact when I met my wife I told her I was an orphan!
As I got older I started feeling genuinely alien to my coworkers, they are so happy and their parents loving and their upbringings wholesome. I just feel absolutely stunted by comparison, half-developed, half-grown. Weed helped me process a lot of my feelings and anger I guess, that's good enough for me but as Rambo says: "I’ve not changed. I just try to keep a lid on it".
The thing I purposely try to avoid when starting a new job is talking about my upbringing and background too early. I didn’t tell people at my current job my youngest daughter is in a wheelchair until about three months in. I let people form their judgments from how effective I am at work, then reveal more about my personal life. That first impression is so important. If people think you’re damaged goods from the get go you’ll get their pity, which is not what you want. You want their respect. Pity in a workplace means career death.
I’ve started riding my bike regularly which seems to have a very similar effect to taking Adderall. I use super bright lights in my home office during the winter. Home cooked meals improve my overall mood by leaps and bounds.