Earlier quoted context omitted.
I recognize that this is largely a tech forum, but I find it interesting that you choose being a founder or CEO of Google as your benchmarks as opposed to walking on the moon, curing cancer, or something else. Not a critique, just an observation.
Having spent time in biology, being CEO of Google is a way more realistic goal than curing cancer. As far as the moon, I grew up on Star Trek and the idea of spending my life in space and seeing new things was absolutely what I wanted. But once I found that Earth contained a lot of utterly fascinating people, being able to meet them mattered more to me than spending a shitload of time getting as far away from them as…
I thought I’d have accomplished a lot more today and also before I was 35 (2020)
401–410 of 464 posts
Re: I thought I’d have accomplished a lot more today and also before I was 35 (2020)
#402Source: https://quotepark.com/quotes/1336674-charles-bukowski-we-are...
Re: I thought I’d have accomplished a lot more today and also before I was 35 (2020)
#403Earlier quoted context omitted.
I can't disagree more with this. Absolutely do not bring a living person into this world in a coin flip over whether or not it might mean something to your own fulfilment. I am a parent, and absolutely love it and find it extremely rewarding, but it's a ton of work and sacrifice. If both me and my wife were not going into it deliberately with the expectation of what it would entail, it would probably end up bad for e…
Thank you for writing this. There’s an insidious motivation that you have kids for what they can give you (“solve my meaning problem!”) vs what you can offer them. If you gamble on kids giving you meaning and they don’t, now what?
Re: I thought I’d have accomplished a lot more today and also before I was 35 (2020)
#404Earlier quoted context omitted.
No kids, huh?
If that’s how a person without kids feels, isn’t having kids just creating another person who has to have kids to find meaning in their life (and on and on and on)? With the certainty of climate change, it feels like adoption is the only moral/ethical way to do this.
OK, so the meaning of our lives is to perpetuate the species. Not too bad; if it's good enough for (the other) animals, why not for us too?
Ya want anything beyond that, it would logically have to be to make mankind of the future a better species than right now. Which of course you do by making your kids better persons than you are. So then you're back to them again.
Re: I thought I’d have accomplished a lot more today and also before I was 35 (2020)
#405Earlier quoted context omitted.
Man, I feel like I skipped those Middle Years and went straight to living my life one meme at a time after college.
Reality does surprise me now and then by reifying a meme I laughed at a few years ago. Usually the physical manifestation is less funny than the original meme though. I think it was all related to the 2016 US election which is when those 4chan chaos magicians joined forces to elect ‘orange Pepe bad’ to troll normies.
Re: I thought I’d have accomplished a lot more today and also before I was 35 (2020)
#406Here is why: so you can be 41, 441, 1041 and still have millions years ahead.
Once 41 years old no longer means you wasted your youth away, you will be able to concentrate on one thing per day and don't feel tragic if this thing fails.
Re: I thought I’d have accomplished a lot more today and also before I was 35 (2020)
#407This is always a tough subject for me because everyone seems to have at least an idea of what they want to achieve. When I was younger I had these silly dreams of moving to another country, getting married, becoming a programmer to make games, have my own company and get rich (haha). I did become a programmer and got married, but never left the country or became rich. Now on my 30s I know how limited my options are.…
> I could try to focus on my hobbies, but you realize very quickly that to get good at anything, you need hundreds/thousands of hours. The point of hobbies is not "getting good at them". It's enjoying them for their own sake. Otherwise they turn into ... work. > I'm just a blip in the universe and when I'm gone it will be unchanged, the same as if I had never existed. Yes. The Universe doesn't expect or have any spec…
Put like this, it is actually mind blowing and betraying the belief of my whole life.
To me, hobbies are activities that you enjoy so much you eventually get good at. My definition of talent is the ability to persistently and consistently improve yourself in a field. This definition includes the ability to efficiently obtain positive dopamine feedback to continue training and effectively curb burnout.
I really wished I can say I am talented, both in my works and my hobbies. But maybe, just maybe. Getting good is not really important after all.
(And about work: Maybe getting good at work and advancing career is also not the point? What is work anyway? Contributing to society in exchange of being let alive? Lol)
Re: I thought I’d have accomplished a lot more today and also before I was 35 (2020)
#408This is always a tough subject for me because everyone seems to have at least an idea of what they want to achieve. When I was younger I had these silly dreams of moving to another country, getting married, becoming a programmer to make games, have my own company and get rich (haha). I did become a programmer and got married, but never left the country or became rich. Now on my 30s I know how limited my options are.…
I was reading Vaclav Smil's latest book and he does all these calculations about how much energy we have available to us now compared to 200 years ago. And how much less physical labor we have to do to put food on the table and how many more material goods we have available to us now - in my grandparents' day, about 80 years ago, they had maybe one pair of pants sewn together, one shirt that was washed once every two weeks, shoes had holes in them, of course.
Their job was picking tomatoes. Were they living a worse life than the one I had the opportunity to experience? Certainly yes, from a material point of view. From the point of view of internal feelings, the individual variability in life satisfaction within a cohort is greater than the variability in average life satisfaction between cohorts of different generations. They lived their lives, comparing themselves to people living in the same neighborhood, certainly not to people living in generations yet to come.
In the immortal words of Lorenzo de Medici: "Whoever wants to be happy, let him be so! Because of tomorrow there is no certainty". And sometimes, let me add, there is no certainty of this afternoon either.
Let's say you live in the modern Western world, which is more familiar to me. Modern life has endless opportunities for fun, which includes, for some, finding that meaning of life that is so hard to grasp. You can dump your partner, in case you get tired of them, and people would understand - a hundred years ago, such alleged selfishness would have been tolerated at best. Maybe it is the answer, how many I have seen spending decades of the one and only life they will ever have with significant others they barely tolerate, when not hate. You have access to an unlimited number of learning opportunities. We know that agency is supremely important for life satisfaction. You can learn to draw, write, do martial arts, sing, write a screenplay, cook delicious seafood. Assuming you have some disposable income, you can take a flight to some places that until a few decades ago had no sign of civilization. Can you imagine? You can be hypnotized, take some psychedelics, eat and drink as much as you want. Find something new in you and outside of you.
What is the point of it all, you may ask. I can only answer that I haven't become rich or world famous, I don't have world-class skills, but in the fifth decade of my life, I'm having a great time living an exciting life - because I do things that excite me -, which includes some overall minor contribution to society (I don't fool myself thinking I am giving a larger than negligible contribution to society), and which I enjoy sharing with others, but only if they have the right attitude. And for me, that's the point of it all.
Re: I thought I’d have accomplished a lot more today and also before I was 35 (2020)
#409Earlier quoted context omitted.
> And now what? If you haven't already, I highly suggest making a child if you can. It seems to snap all of this into focus - it did for me anyway. I mean I still have a ton of existential dread and still often wonder what the point is but I do find purpose in providing for my family and trying to raise a human that can do good - maybe better than me and the author of that NYer piece :D.
It's sad that this comment got downvoted. There's hundreds of millions of years of evolution that codifies "you should have children" into our genes, and it's not hard to see that this has something to do with how middle age can feel meaningless if you don't. Just because it's difficult and/or not fashionable to have kids these days, doesn't mean those biological imperatives aren't still there, subtly affecting your…
Re: I thought I’d have accomplished a lot more today and also before I was 35 (2020)
#410People often ask me: why am I always preaching life extension and immortality research? Here is why: so you can be 41, 441, 1041 and still have millions years ahead. Once 41 years old no longer means you wasted your youth away, you will be able to concentrate on one thing per day and don't feel tragic if this thing fails.