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Find Your People

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Re: Find Your People

#201

Post by 9dev »

martin82 wrote: post #193
joshstrange wrote: post #54

> The first step is to realize that the subway stops here. Up to this point in life, most of you have been rolling on train tracks. Elementary school, middle school, high school, college—it was always clear what the next stop was. In the process you've been trained to believe something that’s not true: that all of life is train tracks. And there are some jobs where you can make it stay like train tracks if you want,…

Modern society tries very hard to lay tracks for everyone all the way to final station: The old folks home. In my opinion, there are TOO MANY tracks. We have plastered the entire map with so many tracks, that experiencing true freedom has become virtually impossible.

Yep. The illusion of Freedom is sold as a product, however, and people make a lot of money with it.

Re: Find Your People

#202

Post by eastbound »

jmtulloss wrote: post #134
pulkitsh1234 wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The first bit is too similar to what a typical college kid would go through in India. My assumption was that this would NOT be the case in the USA. You hear about kids dropping out and starting startups, or people just skipping college to work on what they like, or kids joining trade schools to get into welding. Isn't this the norm in the USA / most of the developed world ?? Your comment confirms the same thing.. you…

The kids that fall into this bucket talk about it a lot (when they’re successful). The vast majority of successful people in America (for some definition of success) did not drop out, and the vast majority of drop outs do not find this type of mainstream success. This is not to say that dropouts without that kind of success aren’t happy. I do believe that America does afford a lot of leeway for people to be happy and…

Dropping out is so “Silicon Valley” that the first episode of Silicon valley starts with a billionaire encouraging youths to drop out, and a kid successfully raising funding from him by touching him to his core: “If I don’t raise funding, I might… go to uni”. It’s a joke on SV.

Re: Find Your People

#203

Post by eastbound »

throwaway1921 wrote: post #165
jamesgill wrote: post #119

It's great advice. Reminds me of Steve Jobs' statement: When you grow up you tend to get told the world is the way it is and you’re life is just to live your life inside the world. Try not to bash into the walls too much. Try to have a nice family, have fun, save a little money. That’s a very limited life. Life can be much broader once you discover one simple fact: Everything around you that you call life was made up…

I find myself in the former position more than ever. Feeling kinda trapped... it's what my parents and their parents did before me. Not sure how to break out? It becomes much harder to take risks once you have an entire family to take care of.

If you don’t succeed enough, most men experience that the wife drops us.

You must take those risks. And if you fail, they will be no-one for you. We try to hide this to teens because it’s a raw deal, but generations before us were sent to war without much thought either.

You must succeed at life above the others, or there will be no family thing. At each generation, 30% of males don’t reproduce at all, and there is no plaque for them, no memorial, people simply won’t talk about you.

Do a startup and do not fail, you do not have a real choice here.

Re: Find Your People

#204

Post by jmtulloss »

eastbound wrote: post #202
jmtulloss wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The kids that fall into this bucket talk about it a lot (when they’re successful). The vast majority of successful people in America (for some definition of success) did not drop out, and the vast majority of drop outs do not find this type of mainstream success. This is not to say that dropouts without that kind of success aren’t happy. I do believe that America does afford a lot of leeway for people to be happy and…

Dropping out is so “Silicon Valley” that the first episode of Silicon valley starts with a billionaire encouraging youths to drop out, and a kid successfully raising funding from him by touching him to his core: “If I don’t raise funding, I might… go to uni”. It’s a joke on SV.

What’s your point?

Peter Thiel and the people that did his fellowship don’t represent the majority of career paths people take in SV, but they do make for good (or too close to home) fodder.

Re: Find Your People

#205

Post by [deleted] »

eastbound wrote: post #203
throwaway1921 wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I find myself in the former position more than ever. Feeling kinda trapped... it's what my parents and their parents did before me. Not sure how to break out? It becomes much harder to take risks once you have an entire family to take care of.

If you don’t succeed enough, most men experience that the wife drops us. You must take those risks. And if you fail, they will be no-one for you. We try to hide this to teens because it’s a raw deal, but generations before us were sent to war without much thought either. You must succeed at life above the others, or there will be no family thing. At each generation, 30% of males don’t reproduce at all, and there is n…

[deleted]

Re: Find Your People

#206

Post by nosianu »

Aurornis wrote: post #187
parpfish wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

grad school is definitely a prestige move. not a 'get rich move', but def a prestige move. prestige is not just money. for med or law school, there are very clear hierarchies about who's better than who and next steps in your career. you get money AND intellectual status. but for other sciences and humanities, it's a flex about pursuing abstract "truth" or "knowledge" of "beauty" or whatever and not caring about fina…

> for other sciences and humanities, it's a flex about pursue abstract "truth" or "knowledge" of "beauty" or whatever. it is very monastic in that people make a show of forgoing traditional measures of status in service of their "calling". These comments are oddly cynical. The people I know who went to grad school did it because they enjoyed the academic world. That's all. There was no flexing or bragging. Those who…

The mental human model that people are only what they consciously think about themselves is just wrong. Of course prestige matters, even if you were to pass a (functioning) lie detector test where you claim otherwise. You are so much more than your conscious thoughts. Your brain uses all information, and that includes the "meta" you know about things.

And...

> The people I know who went to grad school did it because they enjoyed the academic world.

What does that even mean? Where are your thoughts about the why? Why does their brain tell them those are good jobs? You have not even considered it, that sentence is meaningless in the context of your argument if you leave out such important parts. What makes things "attractive", or not, in the first place?

Re: Find Your People

#207

Post by killerstorm »

joshstrange wrote: post #54

> The first step is to realize that the subway stops here. Up to this point in life, most of you have been rolling on train tracks. Elementary school, middle school, high school, college—it was always clear what the next stop was. In the process you've been trained to believe something that’s not true: that all of life is train tracks. And there are some jobs where you can make it stay like train tracks if you want,…

Some of my university classmates just stayed in university after graduation... Even though most of them didn't have much interest in academic research or teaching. It was just the easiest things to do: just imagine tracks going further in the same direction. Inertia is powerful.

Re: Find Your People

#208

Post by somedude895 »

9dev wrote: post #201
martin82 wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Modern society tries very hard to lay tracks for everyone all the way to final station: The old folks home. In my opinion, there are TOO MANY tracks. We have plastered the entire map with so many tracks, that experiencing true freedom has become virtually impossible.

Yep. The illusion of Freedom is sold as a product, however, and people make a lot of money with it.

What do you mean by that?

Re: Find Your People

#209

Post by grey-area »

nosianu wrote: post #206
Aurornis wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> for other sciences and humanities, it's a flex about pursue abstract "truth" or "knowledge" of "beauty" or whatever. it is very monastic in that people make a show of forgoing traditional measures of status in service of their "calling". These comments are oddly cynical. The people I know who went to grad school did it because they enjoyed the academic world. That's all. There was no flexing or bragging. Those who…

The mental human model that people are only what they consciously think about themselves is just wrong. Of course prestige matters, even if you were to pass a (functioning) lie detector test where you claim otherwise. You are so much more than your conscious thoughts. Your brain uses all information, and that includes the "meta" you know about things. And... > The people I know who went to grad school did it because…

For some people external validation is not very important and they genuinely love and enjoy the pursuit of knowledge and have little interest in what others think of them.

Sure everyone requires some degree of external validation and there is a hierarchy in every group but all is not vanity.

Re: Find Your People

#210

Post by dcreater »

joshstrange wrote: post #54

> The first step is to realize that the subway stops here. Up to this point in life, most of you have been rolling on train tracks. Elementary school, middle school, high school, college—it was always clear what the next stop was. In the process you've been trained to believe something that’s not true: that all of life is train tracks. And there are some jobs where you can make it stay like train tracks if you want,…

It's funny that the train tracks continue on for Asian kids in the dorm of grad school or engineering jobs
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