141–150 of 460 posts
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with your God is a rather major point you just ignored from that line. No offense intended, I simply thought it was quite interesting.
As the twelve step programs tell us, everyone has a god, whether divine or not.
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I think it may be on the lower end for a number of reasons which lead back to the low barrier to entry - there’s no need to pay your dues with a decade of schooling, in hundreds of thousands in tuition, and to professional associations, state boards of licensure, or both. However, there are crappy doctors and architects - just like there are famous software engineers. Prestige - outside the ingroup - is a function of…
It’s fundamentally disrespected by people at a core level. I’ll prove my point with the one question they always ask us versus any other profession, ‘what is it that you actually do at the company?’. I swear, I’d never think to ask this of anyone, doctors, lawyers, teachers, nurses, cops, literally, I can’t think of one profession that gets asked this, I’ll try again, pilots, chemists, diplomats, translators, artists…
Now that I think of it, IT people and mechanics suffer from the exact same stereotype where people don't trust anything they say and assume they're just lording their knowledge over the poor, uninformed user for status/money.
I'm sure the others also suffer from stereotypes.
This reminds me of “The Bell Jar” by Sylvia Plath, which has a quote Aziz Ansari used in his series “Master of None”: > "I saw my life branching out before me like the green fig tree in the story. From the tip of every branch, like a fat purple fig, a wonderful future beckoned and winked. One fig was a husband and a happy home and children, and another fig was a famous poet and another fig was a brilliant professor,…
Fantastic analogy. To go a bit further, what surprised me when trying to choose which branch to take was how narrow each branch is. It’s not enough to pick the “software development” branch, you have to pick a specialty within that. And, it has to be a single specialty. In my particular case, it was hard to accept that I couldn’t be both a successful programming language designer and a successful game developer.
This reminds me of “The Bell Jar” by Sylvia Plath, which has a quote Aziz Ansari used in his series “Master of None”: > "I saw my life branching out before me like the green fig tree in the story. From the tip of every branch, like a fat purple fig, a wonderful future beckoned and winked. One fig was a husband and a happy home and children, and another fig was a famous poet and another fig was a brilliant professor,…
Truth is, one could make those choices and arrive at an outcome leading right back to this very question.
Unable to resolve that, I started to think about the scope of human experiences.
If I were to do it over, I would do it as a very different person. Roll the die, and go, same as happened this time.
Even then, it could be very similar...
It's a popular fantasy. See "Replay" by Ken Grimwood. Or all those endless movies where someone gets to do high school over again, like "Peggy Sue Got Married". Or even "Groundhog Day". "A Christmas Carol". "It's a Wonderful Life". And on and on.
This reminds me of “The Bell Jar” by Sylvia Plath, which has a quote Aziz Ansari used in his series “Master of None”: > "I saw my life branching out before me like the green fig tree in the story. From the tip of every branch, like a fat purple fig, a wonderful future beckoned and winked. One fig was a husband and a happy home and children, and another fig was a famous poet and another fig was a brilliant professor,…
As someone who feels like I've wasted most of my 20s since graduating university (turning 29 in 2021) with a job(s) I don't see any future in, man this hits hard. My lack of risk taking, and an unfortunately timed death in the family in 2016, really are me sitting there watching these figs dry up. Damn.
But we’re 29, not 49 or even 39. There’re still figs on the tree.
The reasoning I came to is that given the probabilities of how children are conceived, if my dad didn't have cancer, our first child would have been someone else than our daughter.
So basically wishing anything different for my dad would be wishing that my daughter didn't exist.
And I guess that made his death easier for me to accept.
Perhaps because I was inculcated fairly early in a competitive environment, it's hard for me to look back and not woulda/coulda/shoulda it. Mainly I'd like to ask some of my successful ex-colleagues and friends (some of whom I'm still in contact with, so wouldn't be too hard I guess) if they have any significant regrets. One on hand they must know how incredibly lucky and fortunate they've been, but of course their lives have their own trials and tribulations. And my life is good, I have close friends and family, quite mundane, though at least a good mundane. But still, I find it hard sometimes to not at least wish for a future reincarnation, one where I have the natural talents or extra drive or whatever that is needed to grab that brass ring.
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As someone who feels like I've wasted most of my 20s since graduating university (turning 29 in 2021) with a job(s) I don't see any future in, man this hits hard. My lack of risk taking, and an unfortunately timed death in the family in 2016, really are me sitting there watching these figs dry up. Damn.
I feel the exact same way, and am the exact same age. But we’re 29, not 49 or even 39. There’re still figs on the tree.