“Live as if you were living already for the second time and as if you had acted the first time as wrongly as you are about to act now!”
— Man's Search for Meaning by Viktor E. Frankl
What If You Could Do It All Over?
51–60 of 460 posts
Re: What If You Could Do It All Over?
#52“Live as if you were living already for the second time and as if you had acted the first time as wrongly as you are about to act now!” — Man's Search for Meaning by Viktor E. Frankl
Great book
Re: What If You Could Do It All Over?
#53I recommend the book "Dark Matter" by Blake Crouch for a fun techno-thriller take on the idea of "alternative lives". Great read!
Agreed!
Re: What If You Could Do It All Over?
#54Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's the lowest of the white collar jobs.
I think it may be on the lower end for a number of reasons which lead back to the low barrier to entry - there’s no need to pay your dues with a decade of schooling, in hundreds of thousands in tuition, and to professional associations, state boards of licensure, or both. However, there are crappy doctors and architects - just like there are famous software engineers. Prestige - outside the ingroup - is a function of…
It’s fundamentally disrespected by people at a core level. I’ll prove my point with the one question they always ask us versus any other profession, ‘what is it that you actually do at the company?’.
I swear, I’d never think to ask this of anyone, doctors, lawyers, teachers, nurses, cops, literally, I can’t think of one profession that gets asked this, I’ll try again, pilots, chemists, diplomats, translators, artists, mechanics, it’s endless.
What is it that you actually do?
How about fuck you, I’m not answering that anymore.
It tickles people the wrong way that you took software development into every possible industry you can imagine and not only started offering tech solutions, but business solutions too.
Incoming projection - I see it as the most passive aggressive low ball attack on one’s profession. It’s karma too, because we do the same to sales/product/people management elements within our industry. I know why I’ve done it, and it’s mostly insecurity, ‘oh those people aren’t smart, will soon be gone’.
^ Now imagine the whole of society looking at you like that.
Re: What If You Could Do It All Over?
#55Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yeah but you'll take home way more dates at those parties.
On the one hand it opens the door to (bluntly) "better" people, but equally will you have much in common?
Thanks to our extreme gender partitioning of hobbies and professions, there's little hope of that anyway. ; p
Re: What If You Could Do It All Over?
#56This 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,…
On the same topic, one of my favorite Moth stories is Alternate Ithaca Tom: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=70CCXXz0qzo
Re: What If You Could Do It All Over?
#57Earlier quoted context omitted.
Talking about your job at parties is way down the list of reasons social status matters. It's a fair point that people shouldn't make all their decisions with status in mind, but it is also wrong to belittle it as a consideration.
What are some of the other reasons? Suppose you could make $500k/year either by being a cardiologist or by cleaning out septic tanks. What advantages does the $500k from cardiology get you that the $500k from cleaning septic tanks does not? (Aside from impressing people at parties)
Higher status friends, marrying into a "better family" and so on. Your family (especially more distant) will respect you more.
Also, I think a major elephant in the room: some people just feel better about themselves and sleep better, knowing that they are a big dog and can feel justified in looking down on others.
Re: What If You Could Do It All Over?
#58Earlier quoted context omitted.
You could try being a grad student in New Orleans. The James Earl Jones quote from Conan is apt here (my point being they will be thankful for what they have). If it makes them feel better I have to teach the 99% of their high school they are talking about and they all seem pretty one track minded.
Conan O'Brien or Conan the barbarian?
Re: What If You Could Do It All Over?
#59Earlier quoted context omitted.
Don't get a job based on how impressive it sounds when you tell people about it at parties. You will spend far more time doing the job than you will talking about it at parties.
Talking about your job at parties is way down the list of reasons social status matters. It's a fair point that people shouldn't make all their decisions with status in mind, but it is also wrong to belittle it as a consideration.
It would be more educational to share a few of those things that actually matter. Why exactly does social status matter?
Re: What If You Could Do It All Over?
#60> It’s likely, Miller thinks, that capitalism, “with its isolation of individuals and its accelerating generation of choices and chances,” has increased the number of our unlived lives. “The elevation of choice as an absolute good, the experience of chance as a strange affront, the increasing number of exciting, stultifying decisions we must make, the review of the past to improve future outcomes”—all these “feed the people we’re not.” Advertisers sell us things by getting us to imagine better versions of ourselves, even though there’s only one life to live: it’s “yolo + fomo,” a friend tells Miller, summing up the situation nicely. The nature of work deepens the problem. “Unlike the agricultural and industrial societies that preceded it,” Miller writes, our “professional society” is “made up of specialized careers, ladders of achievement.” You make your choice, forgoing others: year by year, you “clamber up into your future,” thinking back on the ladders unclimbed.
Freedom is a weird thing. Most would say that more personal freedom is a good thing, at least for themselves. Yet so many behave in exactly the opposite way. I'm reminded of Paul Graham's recent essay How to Think for Yourself, and this passage about ideologies:
> The independent-minded thus have a horror of ideologies, which require one to accept a whole collection of beliefs at once, and to treat them as articles of faith. To an independent-minded person that would seem revolting, just as it would seem to someone fastidious about food to take a bite of a submarine sandwich filled with a large variety of ingredients of indeterminate age and provenance.
http://paulgraham.com/think.html
Nobody forces an ideology on someone, and yet the number of people who gleefully latch onto ideologies seems to be exploding.
Could there be a connection between greater freedom and greater desire to restrict that freedom - not from the outside, but from within?