Ask HN: How do you deal with professional jealousy and getting older?

This is an excellent comment, and I hope more people listen to your advice. I especially agree with the XP restarting at 0. I've wondered if it's possible to get people to learn to start at 0 again and still succeed, or if it's an innate lack of motivation.

I remember feeling same way when I was 26. I remember envy when I saw a guy who was 23, had his company with many employees, successfully built stuff for the archiving radio broadcasts (which I kind of tried to get into with "company" that we've set up with two of my friends).

To add insult to an insult he was good looking, he was surfing and his website displayed in IE chromeless window which before that I wasn't even aware to be possible. And I though of myself as knowing almost all of the tricks.

The way I removed myself from mentally competing with this guy was thinking that this guy probably had a father, rich one probably, probably entrepreneur while I was raised by single working mom and a grandfather who was a tinkerer.

That softened the blow enough to just work out an acceptance of the fact that, at no fault of mine, world is filled with a lot more awesome people than me. It is. If you are one in a million, there are thousands of people like you or better on this globe.

Now I'm 36 and I'm feeling way better now. After years of bummming around as a lone wolf I got hired by corporation few years ago. It turned out to be much more profitable and way easier than freelancing. I pumped up my self esteem and my account by showing me how high rates I can demand for my work and I stopped feeling pressure to strike gold.

Surely everybody would want to be Marcus Persson but people like him are so lucky that you can't compete with that in any capacity. It's as if you'd compare your salary with somebody's lottery win. "This guy made a 10 million dollars in a day and what I got? Few hundreds?"

If I at any point in my life get this combination of luck, opportunity, skill and time to launch me way above everything I could build myself then great. If not ... that's perfectly fine. I'm perfectly satisfied with gradually moving towards places that earn me more and bore me less and in the off time playing with whatever I find interesting without thinking whether it's profitable in any way or not.

On more practical note... Try to pick jobs that pay the most. Try to stay on those jobs only as long as you are surrounded by the people you learn from and you are forced to learn. But avoid long hours.

You'll notice that that your brain will be more awake. Instead of watching TV or reading internet you'll be prototyping new technology in your free time, just because you'll feel like it.

If you start getting bored you'll see yourself to be doing in your free time more and more mindless things. Most mindless is TV so the only way you can go from where you are is up.

As long as you hand over total control of your happiness and mood to other people, complaining about how you feel while under their total control makes no sense because its not your responsibility, you gave it up. The other 11 steps of the 12 step programs are off topic and probably some are wrong anyway, but surely you'll never conqueror your problem until you admit you've handed over control of yourself to something (someone) that doesn't necessarily have your best interests in mind, and unsurprisingly its not going too well, at least for you. So good luck with that step, first.

Also you're not older, you're just a kid with kid moods, which is perfectly appropriate when you're a kid, so... good (edited to emphasize, good as in there's nothing wrong with you, not good you're unhappy). You'll know you're actually old "for real" when your self doubt switches entirely over to "Why did I waste my life on screen time, doing stuff I don't care about to earn extra money I don't need to buy stuff I don't want to impress people I don't know who won't care anyway, when I could have been doing something meaningful like (playing with the kids, watching that eclipse, climbing that mountain, dating that person, taking that class, learning that skill, reading that book, watching that live music event, building that thing...). All I really remember from the youthful age of 26 was the fun of dating my future wife and to my regret wasting too much time on work and business and computers, its the mood switch that's how you can tell I'm old(er), not necessarily the memory loss LOL.

There are also serious educational issues, looking at something like the greek philosophical ideal of balance being the goal and lack of balance inherently being wrong in and of it self, I can assume if you're only freaking out about financial success and fame, then your musical listening and instrument playing is going really well, you're reading some cool lit, and you're up to date with exciting recent developments in philosophy and science, eating great food, exercise is going well, and all that other "well rounded human" stuff. There are Eastern outlooks that say basically the same thing with totally different words. Seeking balance seems an almost inherent part of being human. So you didn't get a good education, even if you got excellent vocational training or on the job training. The only way to make that bad situation worse is to not work on being more well rounded.

Note the common mythological trope of some dude who focuses entirely on one thing, gets really good about it, and ends up having a really shitty life (struck down by lightning by the greek gods for hubris, chained to a boulder while vultures eat his liver for all eternity, wings melt in the sun and drown in the ocean, etc). I think the ancients might be trying to give you some life advice about the inevitable result of deciding to be a little too focused on one aspect of life.

So best of luck, you're very young and have plenty of time to figure it all out. It would be way more tragic if your post claimed you're 62 instead of 26 and you're just starting to figure out life. You'll do fine if you're already that far at this young age.

Take a break, spend some time somewhere nice and quiet– like a faraway beach, and sit for hours and see what comes to your mind. You're bound to be curious about something, interested in something. Day to day life has a way of wearing that down in people– we get so caught up in our obligations and our bills and such that we forget what we're curious about, what we're interested in.

Once you figure out what you're curious about, throw yourself into learning everything you can.

That, and serve others. Volunteer. Ask yourself– what do you wish you had when you were a kid, that you didn't? What do you know now that you wish you knew before? Then seek out people who're struggling with that problem, and help them. It feels good.

> An extreme reading of your comment

Right, there's no need to get all New Age enlightenment-ish about it. I am not even in disagreement with the Richard Hamming quote. All I'm stressing on is that it's title is "YOU and YOUR Research". It's not "YOU and WHAT-YOU-THINK-YOU-SHOULD-RESEARCH-ON Research".

I struggled with the exact same confusion about "it's supposed to be natural" vs. "real life == effort" for many years till I understood : you do what it takes when it's your vision. You put in the outer effort, but there is no inner friction. And this can happen across years of "effort".

For example, if you envision clearly that you want to provide your child with a home, and at the same time decide that you're not going to work 12 hours a day for it, and forego a Google job in preference for a more "boring" employer who pays lower but allows flexibility while still paying enough for the mortgage to be paid, why not? It will still look like dreary effort to the hotshot Stanford grad, but to you, each day, which is part of a designed self-directed life, will be lovely. So what if it involves some amount of will-power to deal with an abusive colleague, etc;? You'll live, because it's within YOUR parameters of tolerance. The same thing could work the other way round : you cannot IMAGINE working for Google, but for someone for whom it's been a lifelong dream puts in the "effort".