Ask HN: Why can't I learn anymore?

Yeah, it's normal. When you do the same damn thing for the tenth time (or more) and you've watched all the previous ones be discarded one way or another, usually without ever doing anywhere near enough good to justify making them in the first place, you start to get the sense that you're basically just one of the pegs up near the top of the Plinko board that is modern business—not even one of the players, or the puck, but a peg—and it fucking sucks. I think some dude named Marx wrote about this a bunch.

Anywho, I've solved this by having fewer opinions about technology and generally giving fewer shits. Doomed project? Yeah, they almost all are, so, fine. Bad tech? Most of it's terrible, that's normal. Some moron having way too big a say in the project and making it worse while creating unnecessary work? Yeah, that's normal.

We must imagine Sisyphus happy. I suppose.

I've kinda thought about starting an agency or trying to launch a product, but between not being able to stand looking at a computer screen after my day job, and my guess that that'd end up sucking just as much, but in different ways, I've not done it yet. Honestly, probably never will. Coming to terms with what I, realistically, won't ever do has helped some, too. Kill any dreams you don't care enough about to work toward today. Just let 'em go.

I looked at it the other day after the discussion thread about JS frameworks, but bounced when I saw ".svelte" files.

I accept (demand, really) TypeScript but I've become allergic to any attempt to add much more on top of JS than that. I can just see the next poor bastard coming along in a short year or two and going "oh god, WTF is a '.svelte' file? What did my piece of shit predecessor fall for?"

I'm looking into Vue today. Possibly I'll settle on something even simpler.

React's certainly out, and thank god the mood is finally shifting enough that I can abandon it without harming my career (much). Slow, janky, and god they've made some weird choices with it in the last few years. It was always a bit heavy, but it felt like it had some degree of elegance to it before that—if only in parts of the API itself, not the implementation.

[EDIT] Oh good lord, '.vue'. Don't any of these just use normal-ass code? Sigh.

I hate engaging in surrogate activities which are only abstractly related to the things I need to survive. Even though I understand it's necessary due to the sophistication of manufacturing and the economies of scale of it all, it's mentally destructive.

The worst part of software development for me is knowing that all of my work will eventually be thrown away or useless soon.

I stopped caring about my work completely. I force myself to continue because only because it pays well for the amount of time I spend on it. I make much less than SV types on here. But it's much more efficient than any alternatives I have identified so far, even though I accomplish nearly nothing essential. My current job only exists because a bureaucrat decided their government needs to invasively monitor my company's financial activity. How useful!

I only care about my family, especially my children, and the time I spend together with them chilling, cooking, playing, and learning.

I can imagine several hypotheses to answer that:

- at school, it's the job of the teacher to force us to repeat until we've learned something. See Anki and other SRS systems.

- as a kid you don't read to learn, you read because it's fun or because you want to try something. See what another commenter said, you learn by practicing, not by reading alone.

- you forget all that you've forget as a child :)

Also, kids like to imagine stories. In the literature about learning, one method used to improve the retention is too create vivid images about what you want to learn, in other words, imagine stories to memorize. Relevant xkcd https://xkcd.com/208/

Kids also rehearse stuff a _lot_ => Anki/SRS

Having said that, I like to learn about learning but I don't consider myself a particularly good learner :)