What happens when your career becomes your whole identity • Hacker News Board

Re: What happens when your career becomes your whole identity

#171

Post by sjg007 » Sun, Dec 29, 2019, 1:58 AM UTC

nugget wrote: post #64

alexpetralia wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To play devil's advocate, what is to come of deliberating on existential meaning at great length? Do you think you'll find an answer, rationally speaking (that is, using the tools of reason and logic)? Notably, Godel's incompleteness theorems suggest these tools may be insufficient. More specifically, if you try to rationally "justify" what you ought to be doing, you will always be able to - legitimately! - impugn it…

Ignorance may be bliss, but only if you can remain ignorant until the absolute end. I see evidence of a paradox whereby the most powerful analytical minds are able to most effectively construct defensive counter arguments to their own inherent existential needs, allowing them to defer these needs until a criticality is reached and existential crisis manifests as a state of limbic terror which is impossible to ignore.…

Today it is pretty well established that it is your thoughts create your emotions. Dabrowski was on the path to discovering this but he missed the latent variable here and was too focused on having an individual having a crisis in order to bring about positive change which is not necessary or required.

Re: What happens when your career becomes your whole identity

#172

Post by [deleted] » Sun, Dec 29, 2019, 2:15 AM UTC

anigbrowl wrote: post #119

cryptica wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For me work is what I enjoy the most about life. I would do it for free - In fact I worked on open source projects for free for almost a decade. Including some successful/popular ones. That said I still feel burned out. I've come to realize that not only did the work I do for free not give me any financial advantage (which I expected), but the people who've hired me over the past few years don't seem to recognize tha…

what I've found over and over again is that managers will give promotions to 35 year olds who spent most of their lives playing video games They must be special be special because they place such a high value on their time, whereas you give yours away for free desire to hire them by being a Shiny Object. Appearances matter, not because they are such a good guide to substance but because of the social fact that so man…

[deleted]

Re: What happens when your career becomes your whole identity

#173

Post by tempsy » Sun, Dec 29, 2019, 2:17 AM UTC

lilcorey10 wrote: post #132

0kl wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is your takeaway? What did you mine from really thinking about the meaning and direction you want to take with your life? *clarification: I mean it earnestly, as I have not done anything that you have.

‘I don't want to be at work making someone else rich. I want to spend those remaining 30 years enjoying myself and bringing happiness to those in my life’ How do you expect to live out those 30 years without working consistently? Do you have means of enough passive income ?

Once you’ve saved a certain threshold of money, say $1M, it becomes relatively easy to make your money work for you at a high level so that you can live off dividends.

Re: What happens when your career becomes your whole identity

#174

Post by manigandham » Sun, Dec 29, 2019, 2:21 AM UTC

grecy wrote: post #128

0kl wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is your takeaway? What did you mine from really thinking about the meaning and direction you want to take with your life? *clarification: I mean it earnestly, as I have not done anything that you have.

My takeaway is that I must make decisions and take action if I am to live the life I want, in a manner that makes me happy. Nobody else will do that for me, and if I live my life on autopilot I will be extraordinarily disappointed when I look back over my life and see that I never took life by the horns and charted my own course. It's on me, and that is equal measures exciting and (some days) terrifying. I lost my Mu…

> "I don't want to be at work making someone else rich"

There's no point in thinking this way and it just creates more stress. Think of work as something you do for yourself. There's no shame in earning a living to then pursue your passions. Don't worry about or compare yourself to others.

Re: What happens when your career becomes your whole identity

#175

Post by thundergolfer » Sun, Dec 29, 2019, 2:27 AM UTC

sandoooo wrote: post #159

Here's a common sentiment amongst those with too much time on their hands: "When I am on my deathbed, I don't want to look back on my life with regret." The deathbed part of your life isn't even that long. Probably a week or something. And probably you'll spend much of it being distracted by morphine and excruciating pain, leaving no room for feeling sad about how shit your life was. Maybe you should just tell future…

That is a good retort, very much reminds me of Parfit’s explorations of our relationship to our future selves.

Re: What happens when your career becomes your whole identity

#176

Post by tartoran » Sun, Dec 29, 2019, 2:34 AM UTC

mmsimanga wrote: post #87

hackworks wrote: post #24

Analogous to “putting all eggs in a single basket”, the risks are very high. You end up becoming hyper sensitive at work, start taking everything personal -well, it is your identity or ego at stake. Leads be becoming very closed, guarded and aggressive. Everyday becomes a fight for survival. I personally went through this phase for a long time. Looking back, some of my managers exploited this by reinforcing. They kne…

I wonder if it is an age thing. Paraphrasing but there is a quote along the lines of the difference between experienced people/managers and inexperienced people is they know which battles to fight. Sadly this is a right of passage, you need to fight the wrong battles first before you realise this. I am in my forties now and so much better at selecting which battles to fight.

You’re absolutely right. Around this age if not a bit earlier people have seen/experienced enough to see things more clearly. I wonder if this is the reason most SV companies prefer fresher meat.

Re: What happens when your career becomes your whole identity

#177

Post by nugget » Sun, Dec 29, 2019, 2:39 AM UTC

sjg007 wrote: post #171

nugget wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ignorance may be bliss, but only if you can remain ignorant until the absolute end. I see evidence of a paradox whereby the most powerful analytical minds are able to most effectively construct defensive counter arguments to their own inherent existential needs, allowing them to defer these needs until a criticality is reached and existential crisis manifests as a state of limbic terror which is impossible to ignore.…

Today it is pretty well established that it is your thoughts create your emotions. Dabrowski was on the path to discovering this but he missed the latent variable here and was too focused on having an individual having a crisis in order to bring about positive change which is not necessary or required.

Certain individuals may not require an existential crisis to achieve the uppermost stage of conscious integration but for others (most) I believe it to be absolutely necessary.

Re: What happens when your career becomes your whole identity

#178

Post by CydeWeys » Sun, Dec 29, 2019, 2:50 AM UTC

manigandham wrote: post #174

grecy wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My takeaway is that I must make decisions and take action if I am to live the life I want, in a manner that makes me happy. Nobody else will do that for me, and if I live my life on autopilot I will be extraordinarily disappointed when I look back over my life and see that I never took life by the horns and charted my own course. It's on me, and that is equal measures exciting and (some days) terrifying. I lost my Mu…

> " I don't want to be at work making someone else rich " There's no point in thinking this way and it just creates more stress. Think of work as something you do for yourself. There's no shame in earning a living to then pursue your passions. Don't worry about or compare yourself to others.

Yup. Making a living for yourself only in such in a way that you purposely don't make a living for anyone else is limiting and self-defeating. And if everyone did that, society would collapse.

It's not like the economy is zero-sum anyway.

Re: What happens when your career becomes your whole identity

#179

Post by johnwheeler » Sun, Dec 29, 2019, 2:53 AM UTC

brookside wrote: post #118

grecy wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> all of which can strengthen the urge to defer existential questions about meaning, purpose, community, and identity until some unspecified future date I've quit my Software Engineering job twice now to spend years of my life doing whatever I want. First time I spent two years driving from Alaska to Argentina [1] and second time I just spent three years driving right around Africa [2]. Both times I had no job, no bo…

You are sure are doing a whole lot of book promotion on here and on reddit! This may come across as harsh, but driving on highways, pan-american or not, doesn't strike me as much of an adventure in the current era.

I didn’t see it as promotion but even if it is, his is a valuable perspective we can get something from and totally relevant to the discussion.

Re: What happens when your career becomes your whole identity

#180

Post by t0astbread » Sun, Dec 29, 2019, 2:59 AM UTC

jblow wrote: post #116

Bad article, in part because of the incomplete title. It should be called "What happens when your career becomes your whole identity, when you don't like your job and think it's a waste of time". If this latter part is not true, there is much less of a problem, but for some reason current mainstream American culture wants to extrapolate all the way to "work should be compartmentalized and minimized". The problem is,…

The point of the article is that you can absolutely love your work today but hate it at some point in the future (even if it's not physically straining). If you invest yourself in a job it can always be damaging.

In that way, telling people to work hard to "build a thriving society" is like telling people to drive over the speed limit because they'll get there faster. It can work but doing it too much can be dangerous.