A Caltech Nobel laureate celebrates his 100th birthday, then gets back to work
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Re: A Caltech Nobel laureate celebrates his 100th birthday, then gets back to work
#2I’ve been fortunate enough to know a few older people who really loved their work and were excellent at it. All of them had one thing in common: they didn’t want to retire.
Meanwhile all of my peer group is obsessed with FIRE and dream of retiring early. All of us are also involved in pretty meaningless work that has no measurable impact on the world (five lines of code to a million line codebase is hardly world changing).
Re: A Caltech Nobel laureate celebrates his 100th birthday, then gets back to work
#3I feel like one of the secrets to living longer is to have a reason to get up every day, a purpose to fulfill in life. And this guy certainly has one.
Re: A Caltech Nobel laureate celebrates his 100th birthday, then gets back to work
#4Wow, such a winner: Long, healthy life full of accomplishments within a community where he is liked and he likes them back.
I wonder what people like Peter Thiel have to say about it, would he consider Rudy Marcus a "winner", maybe bigger one than himself? I recall something about Thiel looking down on the life choices and motivations of scientists.
Re: A Caltech Nobel laureate celebrates his 100th birthday, then gets back to work
#5I’ve been fortunate enough to know a few older people who really loved their work and were excellent at it. All of them had one thing in common: they didn’t want to retire. Meanwhile all of my peer group is obsessed with FIRE and dream of retiring early. All of us are also involved in pretty meaningless work that has no measurable impact on the world (five lines of code to a million line codebase is hardly world chan…
Is it such a bad thing to dream of a life which values things outside of a workplace? To spend time with friends and family. The older generations cling to positions of power and refuse to make room for the newer generations, so it is upon them to find meaning and purpose through other avenues.
Retiring seems important for allowing younger generations to take their place. But if all you have is your work and you've lived for nothing more then I guess it makes sense to cling onto it until the end.
Re: A Caltech Nobel laureate celebrates his 100th birthday, then gets back to work
#6If today's scientific community were as functional as Rudy Marcus' we'd still be progressing. The key moment of his career was prediction of an inverted trend in an unexplored experimental regime. In today's academia, he would have hopped to a startup rather than struggle for tenure with foreign ideas that don't support anyone else's old stack of fluffy papers.
Re: A Caltech Nobel laureate celebrates his 100th birthday, then gets back to work
#7How is this legal?
Re: A Caltech Nobel laureate celebrates his 100th birthday, then gets back to work
#8How is this legal?
So we should make it illegal to work now?
Re: A Caltech Nobel laureate celebrates his 100th birthday, then gets back to work
#9I feel like one of the secrets to living longer is to have a reason to get up every day, a purpose to fulfill in life. And this guy certainly has one.
I mean it’s not that interesting to write about the 100 year olds who have no purpose and just putter around. Might be skewing your conclusions a bit.
Re: A Caltech Nobel laureate celebrates his 100th birthday, then gets back to work
#10I’ve been fortunate enough to know a few older people who really loved their work and were excellent at it. All of them had one thing in common: they didn’t want to retire. Meanwhile all of my peer group is obsessed with FIRE and dream of retiring early. All of us are also involved in pretty meaningless work that has no measurable impact on the world (five lines of code to a million line codebase is hardly world chan…
Is it such a bad thing to dream of a life which values things outside of a workplace? To spend time with friends and family. The older generations cling to positions of power and refuse to make room for the newer generations, so it is upon them to find meaning and purpose through other avenues. Retiring seems important for allowing younger generations to take their place. But if all you have is your work and you've l…
Its not a value judgement on my peer group for wanting out of the workplace.
Its more of a value judgement on the meaningless of so much of modern work.
All the people I mentioned above are involved in work that’s probably more gratifying than making giant corporations richer. One is a playwright, one is a professor, one is a top pulmonologist in the country.
I don’t know what their day to day entails, but I can’t imagine it being as mind numbing as what I do.