Drinking behind 1 in 10 deaths of working-age adults • Hacker News Board

Re: Drinking behind 1 in 10 deaths of working-age adults

#141

Post by ahi » Sun, Jun 29, 2014, 10:26 PM UTC

noname123 wrote: post #133

2muchcoffeeman wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Of course it will help. If tomorrow I became independently rich, I could quit my job and suddenly the most productive 40hrs of my week are free to work on my own problems whatever they may be. Plus your stress levels will probably drop too.

At a startup interview years ago, the hiring manager told me a story, "Once, there was a fisherman with his single fishing boat toiling and netting and gutting his daily haul at sea; then one day, a Silicon Valley VC came on his boat and made a business proposition, 'I can make you a rich man; I can give you a funding to scale your operation so you can hire 40 people with 40 fishing boats to catch more fishes and mak…

There's a version of that story on the wall of most Jimmy John's franchises.

Re: Drinking behind 1 in 10 deaths of working-age adults

#142

Post by bluehazed » Sun, Jun 29, 2014, 11:40 PM UTC

logicallee wrote: post #52

bluehazed wrote: post #47

I've pretty much resolved myself to slowly drinking myself to death, I'm pretty sure I'd have killed myself due to boredom or stress otherwise. Hopefully maybe getting out of my current field (devops) and going back into school (have a CS degree to finish) will help a bit.

lol @ going to college so you can stop drinking. Only the engineering department... :-)

Oh, it's not to stop drinking, it's more to be less miserable :)

Re: Drinking behind 1 in 10 deaths of working-age adults

#143

Post by mrj » Sun, Jun 29, 2014, 11:56 PM UTC

noname123 wrote: post #127

mrj wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yesh, I recognize some of the thinking in this post, and trust me, you're going about it all wrong. Until you figure yourself out, you're not going to make meaningful relationships or be happy in them. You need to find what defines you, what you are about. Then, you'll need to make your peace with it. Own it. I'm not sure the people you have mentioned feel any better about themselves than you do. Normal people reach…

> You seem to dislike the shallowness you feel around you, so don't be shallow. Nothing you wrote says anything about you, OK, let me try; I really like computers back in the day when you typed in a terminal screen 1:Print "Hello World" or the first HTML page with the CSS or figuring out for the first time how object-oriented programming class inheritance working, or referencing and dereferencing C pointers or Direct…

So, years ago I felt trapped by the success I had built to that point. But I also felt that it was all meaningless and I wanted to something more important. I needed a mission.

I gave up everything to go pursue that goal. (It turned out that I was giving up much less than I had thought.) My new career didn't work out like I had hoped, but I was doing something that I felt was meaningful. I was about something.

I met my wife when I was about something. And she married me even though I was poor. But I was a hell of a lot happier and that was attractive.

I came back to tech but with a whole different outlook. What am I about now? I am a family guy, everything I do is for them. I don't think my adventures are over (sure hope not!) but they make even dealing with daily bullshit at work meaningful.

We are lucky that we can apply our field to other industries. We can choose nearly anything we want to go into. We have enormous privilege. Life is a fucking playground. Want to help cure cancer? I'm sure they need tech guys for something. Believe in libraries or helping poor or veteran's care or internet access for rural areas? It's a choose your own adventure game. Even those billionaires you mentioned didn't set out to make billions. They had a mission, computers in every home, connecting social graphs online, etc.

Finally, I would just say that those people that you feel are so shallow are probably trying to fill the same hole. They're not terrible people, they're just doing what they think will make them happy.

My email is in my profile if you want to chat. Just know that everything ends. Good things and especially bad things. This time you're going through will also end and something new will start.

Re: Drinking behind 1 in 10 deaths of working-age adults

#144

Post by teddyh » Tue, Jul 01, 2014, 2:54 PM UTC

morgante wrote: post #117

teddyh wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are not the same person while drunk. If you think that the person you are while sober is a better person, you have a perfectly valid reason for not drinking. I’ll just leave you with this: http://www.cracked.com/blog/9-youtube-videos-that-prove-anyo... Not so much to prove that you can do it, but more for the change that anyone can see. You could hardly tell that it’s the same person in the first videos as the la…

> You are not the same person while drunk. If you think that the person you are while sober is a better person, you have a perfectly valid reason for not drinking. What if I think the tipsy me is a better person? He's much more outgoing, interesting, and far less socially awkward.

See the second article I referenced – it shows how you might think so even though it might be disastrously wrong.