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What If You Could Do It All Over?

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Re: What If You Could Do It All Over?

#221

Post by SamPatt »

MaximumYComb wrote: post #194
dorchadas wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As someone who feels like I've wasted most of my 20s since graduating university (turning 29 in 2021) with a job(s) I don't see any future in, man this hits hard. My lack of risk taking, and an unfortunately timed death in the family in 2016, really are me sitting there watching these figs dry up. Damn.

I wasted my 20's and got diagnosed with cancer at 30. It changed my perspective quite a bit and so far my 30's have been the best time of my life.

Nice job making adversity work for you. Hard to do.

Re: What If You Could Do It All Over?

#222

Post by bmc7505 »

acwan93 wrote: post #8

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,…

This reminds me of a speculative fiction story by Ted Chiang called "Anxiety is the Dizziness of Freedom" which imagines an expendable device that gives users the ability to contact alternate versions of themselves in other branches, and explores the moral and psychological consequences of learning about those outcomes: https://onezero.medium.com/anxiety-is-the-dizziness-of-freed...

Re: What If You Could Do It All Over?

#223

Post by baby »

Buttons840 wrote: post #220
acwan93 wrote: post #8

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,…

Reminds me of the game of Go. Infinite possibilities in the beginning, but as the game progresses the end state of the board becomes clearer and clearer. Also, you can't have it all, sometimes you try to control the whole board and end up losing a lot of what you could have had.

And yet mistakes in late game can end up costing you the whole game.

Re: What If You Could Do It All Over?

#224

Post by baby »

Buttons840 wrote: post #220
acwan93 wrote: post #8

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,…

Reminds me of the game of Go. Infinite possibilities in the beginning, but as the game progresses the end state of the board becomes clearer and clearer. Also, you can't have it all, sometimes you try to control the whole board and end up losing a lot of what you could have had.

And yet stupid mistakes in late game can end up costing you the whole game.

Re: What If You Could Do It All Over?

#225

Post by akhilcacharya »

person_of_color wrote: post #157
akhilcacharya wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

lol, which FAANG is this? I have friends that joined Goldman at the same time as I started working, and I make more and work less.

If you think everyone at FAANG makes 500k at mid-senior SWE (i.e Associate) level, you're smoking something.

~$500k is what some Amazon L6's and most L7's make. Don't think you can hit that in most Finance positions until VP level, unless you're in Quant finance in hedge funds but then the SWEs make that much too.

Re: What If You Could Do It All Over?

#226

Post by andi999 »

drpgq wrote: post #29
pdog wrote: post #5

“Someone once told me the definition of Hell: The last day you have on earth, the person you became will meet the person you could have become .”

Sartre's definition of Hell was other people.

Which means he had a pretty good opinion about himself?

Re: What If You Could Do It All Over?

#227

Post by victorronin »

This is a fascinating subject. It looks like many people are commenting about alternative realities and that exploring them is a fool's game (BTW. I concur with that).

The thing which bothers me is upbeat comments about living here and now and planting the seeds for future changes. It feels like current problems (and desire to wish them away via woulda/counda/shoulda) didn't happen entirely randomly. These problems are a result of systematic behavior/decision making.

As an example, it's too easy to say to yourself, "I will start doing sport tomorrow". However, you wake up tomorrow and notice that your day is so busy that you don't have time to do sport until 9pm and by that time you are exhausted and can't do sport. And you repeat the cycle saying, "maybe tomorrow". You start teasing your day apart and find that to squeeze in sport won't require you just to add it, but also to kick something out. And that all the things you have the energy for in the day, you implicitly regarded as more important than sport. And as a result, you are stuck in the loop wishing to do something better but being limited by your other priorities.

And frankly, this bothers me way more. The immutability of the past is normal. Being so set in your ways that you can't change the future - this is what scares the shit out of me.

Re: What If You Could Do It All Over?

#229

Post by antupis »

anderspitman wrote: post #187
pansa2 wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> I couldn’t be both a successful programming language designer and a successful game developer Why not? Jonathan Blow seems to be making a pretty good run at it.

Yeah going very deep on specific field for 5-10 years and then hopping next thing is pretty doable.
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