161–170 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 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.
29 and ditto. You know the phrase "30's is the new 20's." There's some truth to it, right?
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For me, (very) modest fortune and essentially zero fame seems to be the ideal situation. Like a paid off house, a nest egg that throws off $10K/month, and only family/friends know who I am.
My goals are about the same, and sometimes I worry whether they're ambitious enough. But they really are. It takes a very particular reference frame to make them "simple" or "modest." $120k is a 90th percentile income! And that's among people working full time for it.
Regarding fame, I think the words of the late 20th Century philosopher David Cassidy summed it up best
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Cassidy
If you are desperate for fame and fortune, try just fortune and see how that works out for you.
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Excellent break down of the concept by Jordan Peterson, professor of psychology at the University of Toronto ( 9:18 ); Jordan Peterson Pick Your Sacrifice https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5--W9mhC4zA
Youtube has been recommending a lot of Jordan Peterson to me lately. I know there are people who hate on him for basically misinterpretations of things he has said regarding transgender issues. But then on top of that, there are right wing people that hate him equally much and think he's basically a nonsense-spouting sycophant. I guess listening to the things he has to say, I think they are on par with the more usefu…
So I err on the side of caution by assuming he isn't worth listening to. He also reeks of certainty, like I'm wrong just for asking what the fuck he's trying to tell me because it's so obvious... to him.
My dad got brain cancer when I was 25. That event accelerated our decision to have kids, and as a result our first daughter was born a few days after I turned 27. 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…
This reminds of the moment when Emil Cioran's mother mentioned how she should have aborted him outright. This led him to the insight that his life was largely an accident contingent on small factors, and that it therefore need not be taken so seriously.
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> You can make changes today that will pay dividends in 10 years, so maybe focus on that instead. Exactly this. No matter what your imagined and real futures turn out to be, the good ones all require effort and investment in the present. You can’t go wrong with making investments in your life now.
The best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago. The second best time is now. - Chinese Proverb
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.
My dad got brain cancer when I was 25. That event accelerated our decision to have kids, and as a result our first daughter was born a few days after I turned 27. 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…
At the risk of sounding vulgar, moving your hips at a slightly different rhythm or conceiving half a second later or any number of completely minute changes to the timeline would also have resulted in a completely different child. This reminds of the moment when Emil Cioran's mother mentioned how she should have aborted him outright. This led him to the insight that his life was largely an accident contingent on smal…
I went to a specialized high school (as a semi-anonymous account don't want to give too much detail), and as such more than a few of my close high school friends went on to be famous in their chosen profession, and a couple starred in some fairly well known movies. I ended up going to a top university, and one of my roommates ended up founding a successful internet company you've all heard of. My first job out of col…