I love seeing a Vonnegut writeup on HN. He’s my favorite author and his work had a major influence on me in my 20s. I guess we’ll see what I do when I’m old, whenever that is.
Remember: Kurt Vonnegut Was 47
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Re: Remember: Kurt Vonnegut Was 47
#62Earlier quoted context omitted.
Ya, i think “keep trying” is absolutely the right message! But some people will read the statistic and say “i shouldn’t start yet!” — just trying to argue against that.
I'm not so crazy about "keep trying". I tried at my business for long after it was obvious to everyone that I should have quit. I wasted well over a decade of my life, and I learned no lessons other than "don't". But they won't be writing articles about me. As the poster says, "Winners never quit and quitters never win. But those who don't win and don't quit are idiots." This idiot affirms that advice.
Yeah that's the thing. Nobody writes articles about someone who stops, whether they stop at the right time or not.
What would your advice be?
Re: Remember: Kurt Vonnegut Was 47
#63Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think you need some luck to have picked something early in life to be passionate about that will allow you too be great at something later on. If you were unfortunate enough to be passionate about something physical like a sport or game, not much to look forward to
> If you were unfortunate enough to be passionate about something physical like a sport or game, not much to look forward to Coach Little League. Physical passions can be a lot more fullfiling than otherwise
You still need to be good enough to be someone people want to be coached by. In the niches I'm familiar that's hard.
Re: Remember: Kurt Vonnegut Was 47
#64Except to be a president , for that your prime is 90 - 92
Re: Remember: Kurt Vonnegut Was 47
#65Earlier quoted context omitted.
Agreed. The child prodigy is overvalued in popular perception. It is a subject of fascination precisely because it is uncommon. Most really great work is done by people with plenty of experience; it's just not that interesting when an experienced person does good work.
I don't think child prodigies as commonly known exist in computer programming. A child can learn concertos or even write concertos, but not the comparable version of a concerto in code.
I wasn’t a child prodigy but I wrote a word processor (on a Wang PCS II) that was used for years later by (high) school administration when I was in the tenth grade. By the 11th grade my first after school job was writing commercial software.
Re: Remember: Kurt Vonnegut Was 47
#66> Some traumas resist immediate rendering.
Maybe I'm too early to speak on this, since I haven't reached 47 yet ;) but so far, from having been around for a while and having seen people struggle through life, I'd say: All traumas resist immediate rendering.
Trauma overwhelms you and causes behaviors that are hard to break until you understand them. And getting to that understanding is difficult, because the behavior is mostly there to obscure that which is overwhelming, because, well, if it wasn't then the trauma would overwhelm you.
How many people I've seen who get stuck in cycles that never seem to break. But then again, most of these lives are far from over, so it's premature to add "most never will".
Good piece. There's still time.
Re: Remember: Kurt Vonnegut Was 47
#67As they say, youth is wasted on the young. Reaching my 40s, I feel I am, almost, at the end of the tutorial of life. Sure, if you dedicate yourself to something as soon as your brain is reaching maturity in early adulthood, you might be a master by the time you reach middle age.
But the common trajectory is that youth is not usually spent advancing the arts and sciences, but to learn the circus of society, its rules, its demands, to the point that we have the very real concept of midlife crisis when these individuals, after learning what the hell society wants from them, ask, “is that all? I got my degree, my job, my career, now what?”
Only after answering this question, in your late 30s or 40s, the road to self-realisation opens. I think rather the fact that we don’t see many Vonneguts is that the vast majority of people never make this step, and just continue to dance the monotonous rhythm of work and family, learned in their 20s, to their grave, without ever developing their full potential.
A lot of Carl Jung’s career as a therapist was dedicated to the topic of self-actualisation for middle-aged adults.
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