Interesting anecdote, but for the life of me I can't understand what relevance this blogpost could have here on HackerNews
After my dad died, we found the love letters
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Re: After my dad died, we found the love letters
#52Earlier quoted context omitted.
Agreed. I just hope they repair their Shift keys soon.
I don't know the age of the author, but interestingly, Gen-Z doesn't seem to use that key
Baby boomers have used up all the capital letters on Yelp reviews and Facebook rants, unfortunately, and have left none for future generations.
Re: After my dad died, we found the love letters
#53This is a sad story but I don’t like that the onus is entirely on the father to have ended things and lived his best life. He also was under pressure. He also had a family and was trying to juggle things the best way he knew how. It is tragic to live this way but I cannot consider him a villain of any sort.
There's a follow up linked a few times in the thread, and unfortunately he looks to be pretty villanous
Re: After my dad died, we found the love letters
#54> he wasted his entire life, my mom said to me, the evening we found the love letters. his entire life, and mine as well. People need to seriously plan and manage a marriage if they decide to go through with it.
Some people don't really get to "decide" for themselves.
FTA:
> my parents were not a love match. at 27 and 26, they were embarrassingly old by the standards of their small chinese port town. all four of my grandparents exerted enormous pressure to force them together.
Re: After my dad died, we found the love letters
#55A very adept writer.
Agreed. I just hope they repair their Shift keys soon.
I think it's become a bit of a cliche/clique'y thing amongst a certain population. I don't know its origins (tumblr emo crowd??) but I first encountered it in Silicon Valley. The Collison brothers used to love doing it, as did Altman. I feel it projects a kind of stream-of-thought with an aloofness, like "i dont care enough for correct form. language bends to my unique thoughts. read this if you like, i dont care lol".
All-lowercase comes accross as the text equivalent of a hoodie and jeans: comfortable, a bit defensive against being seen as trying too hard, and now so common it barely reads as rebellion.
Re: After my dad died, we found the love letters
#56"He wasted his life", sounds so dramatic, but what does it really mean. It's just an emotion like regret triggered by made up standards. If things were different and in the end they would have said "he lived his best life", what difference would it make except a few different words, differently arranged. Not sure what my point is, but perhaps being too much into Buddhism and similar things made me lose touch with mor…
The waste is that he, and I too, could have lived a happier life had we had the courage and opportunity to come out earlier.
The thing is, that This is speculation (with all respect).
I, on the other hand, do not lack courage to do hard things. But I have learned that it is a strawman - it does not make you happier to quite you job, leave your spouse, go for your passion in a startup, etc.
Luckily I fucked up everything in that fever dream early enough that it did not have substantiel impact on my life.
Re: After my dad died, we found the love letters
#57Interesting anecdote, but for the life of me I can't understand what relevance this blogpost could have here on HackerNews
Quoting the “what to submit” guidelines: If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity.
Re: After my dad died, we found the love letters
#58From reading both posts, there's a few things that come to my mind: - It seems this is how the author is processing her father's passing, and it's not really up to us to make moral calls on the content of the posts. They are thoughts with gaps of missing context against a real life of highs and lows which is not readily condensed into a blog post. - I'm peering into the life of a private person, that feels like a vio…
I agree with all of what you say, and while I thought the author was very good, I think calling him a coward was an unnecessary stroke of vanity and bitterness. For the same reason that no one can ever know what's inside another person's mind, much less a child understand their parents.
Re: After my dad died, we found the love letters
#59I'm a dad too, and I'm in a somewhat similar situation. My son is under five, and it feels like I'm still at the very beginning of his story. I've known I was gay since high school, probably even earlier, but I kept choosing whatever seemed like the easiest path. It felt easier to stay closeted. Easier to date a woman. Easier to move in together, propose, get married, and even have a child than to face my truth.
I love my wife and my son, and I feel loved by them in return, but I'm also painfully aware that the version of me they love is someone I constructed. I lie constantly: about why I don't want sex, about my affairs, about my feelings, about my motivations. No one really knows me, and I don't get to be myself, not even in the relationships where I should feel safest.
I've read The Courage to Be Disliked by Ichiro Kishimi and other similar books, and I'm trying to build the courage to finally do something about all of this. It's incredibly difficult. But I refuse to use my son as an excuse to keep postponing coming out. This blog has pushed me even further in that direction.
They'll be angry (well at least my wife). Their lives will be upended. But at least they'll have the chance to ask questions, to understand. They'll see me taking responsibility for the consequences of my choices, and maybe just maybe, in some way, that clarity will be a relief for all of us.
Re: After my dad died, we found the love letters
#60Did it ever occur to her that he wanted a child with his wife? That he loved his wife - even though not romantically? And still had a happy life as a father of her? The author seems to have many misconceptions about gay people..