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You are what you love

gspanos.tech

21–30 of 139 posts

Re: You are what you love

#21
> If you don’t know what you love, try playing with a couple of things.

I have a theory that what you love is what you can experience bad versions of. If you're picky about something, you don't really like it. Connoisseurs and fanatics aren't picky, they're voracious.

If you can only drink the very best wines, you don't like wine. I can eat very very bad, even stinky Chinese food, because I love all versions of it.

I can tolerate bad books much more than bad movies. I can't stand a bad movie, it makes me upset and impatient: I don't really like movies. People who do, watch everything they can, the good and the bad alike. Etc.

If you truly don't know what you love, see if you can get interested in bad instances of things; if you like something when it's bad, you'll love the good version of it.

Re: You are what you love

#22

I used to be the same. Until I started a family. You suddenly realise how… unimportant coding is when you have people who depend on you and you them. I’m a different developer now than I was back then, but I think better for it.

I've never found the job to be all that important; especially once I saw how quickly my work was discarded for some new, fashionably different way of doing things. Honestly it's scary to imagine that some child's health insurance would depend on me staying on the treadmill of ever-changing tech nonsense. I doubt my ability to keep pace for a couple decades.

Re: You are what you love

#24
You are what you love, but until you don't have a family (specially kids) you don t know what love is, and its definitely not work. So I am what I love, but I'm not my work neither my job. You neither. So don't judge people based by what they demonstrate at work. Most majority of people are there for the money.

Fun fact that I became a much better developer when I started to think like that. I dont slack around. I work 10 hours day, happy and concentrated. I see the results of my work impacting my personal life in a positive way. And the problems that I have at work, are not my problem, but companies problem. I am there to solve them, but after day is over, I just keep them at work.

Re: You are what you love

#25
post #21

> If you don’t know what you love, try playing with a couple of things. I have a theory that what you love is what you can experience bad versions of. If you're picky about something, you don't really like it. Connoisseurs and fanatics aren't picky, they're voracious. If you can only drink the very best wines, you don't like wine. I can eat very very bad, even stinky Chinese food, because I love all versions of it. I…

I would qualify this. If you like movies, you like all sorts of movies. You can enjoy well-done schlock horror as much as experimental Thai drama. But you still have a sense of good and bad, and you don't want to sit through something done badly in terms of what it's trying to achieve. Same with food: if you like Chinese food you maybe like all sorts of tastes, and high-end to low-end, but you don't need to like it when it's bad. Someone who likes all movies or Chinese food that they encounter doesn't actually like that thing - they just don't care enough about it.

Re: You are what you love

#26
post #21

> If you don’t know what you love, try playing with a couple of things. I have a theory that what you love is what you can experience bad versions of. If you're picky about something, you don't really like it. Connoisseurs and fanatics aren't picky, they're voracious. If you can only drink the very best wines, you don't like wine. I can eat very very bad, even stinky Chinese food, because I love all versions of it. I…

Not really. Having taste doesn’t mean you don’t like it. You can really like subsets of things that suit your taste. “You don’t like interior design unless you get lit by prison cell decor”

Re: You are what you love

#27
post #3

>I find it really challenging to talk with people who have completely separated their work from their emotional being. For me, work is part of life and it should be a meaningful one. I like my work too but when I hear things like this it's so hard not to cringe because of how much of a place of privilege this comes from. Most jobs are things no one would want to do if they didn't need to survive, and that's fundament…

Aye, you put your finger on something there. Reminds me of how common it is for menial jobs to be outsourced to immigrants or seasonal labour. Fruit picking in the UK to Eastern Europeans, agricultural work in Israel to Thais, etc. Someone has to empty the bins. I guess like anything emptying bins is a job you can enjoy more or less, depending on your inner attitude to doing it, and your ability to "make the best of…

I worked as a garbage man to pay for the start of my software ventures. It was the best combination thinkable of sitting in a room on a chair behind a computer, being in the software clouds, typing away, and being outside, working out, having fun and getting enough sunlight.

These both completely different things balanced each other out perfectly.

Re: You are what you love

#28

I used to be the same. Until I started a family. You suddenly realise how… unimportant coding is when you have people who depend on you and you them. I’m a different developer now than I was back then, but I think better for it.

How are you better for it?

Id also be interested, I see learning computer skills as a way to eventually make my families life better by creating solutions for things around the house. Have you reoriented your efforts to something similar?

Re: You are what you love

#29

You are what you love, but until you don't have a family (specially kids) you don t know what love is, and its definitely not work. So I am what I love, but I'm not my work neither my job. You neither. So don't judge people based by what they demonstrate at work. Most majority of people are there for the money. Fun fact that I became a much better developer when I started to think like that. I dont slack around. I wo…

Family converts men into money printers.

Re: You are what you love

#30
post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Aye, you put your finger on something there. Reminds me of how common it is for menial jobs to be outsourced to immigrants or seasonal labour. Fruit picking in the UK to Eastern Europeans, agricultural work in Israel to Thais, etc. Someone has to empty the bins. I guess like anything emptying bins is a job you can enjoy more or less, depending on your inner attitude to doing it, and your ability to "make the best of…

Ironically emptying the bins and picking fruits might be more directly meaningful for people then building the new generation ad platform/social media/saas tool.

Picking fruit would have been incredibly meaningful if you had spent the year doing the variety of agricultural activities leading up to it. There’s a reason so many cultures had harvest festivals. But now rather than a whole area getting together to literally pick the fruits of their year-long labour and celebrate we’ve optimised the process by just bringing in some seasonal workers.
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