Would it be different if hackers had the prestige of, say, a celebrity? From what I understand, most super successful people work horribly long hours, but I suspect the feeling of fulfillment is also based on the social prestige of what they do. Computing is so ubiquitous (and also the cause of lots of frustration for some people) that those who drive the field don't get the recognition they deserve. Maybe the whole…
also the prestige thing is a multi-dimensional thing. high-brow vs low-brow and things like that play into this.
A hacker's loneliness
71–74 of 74 posts
Re: A hacker's loneliness
#72Earlier quoted context omitted.
thanx for the advice
Don't be a fool arjungmenon, you have a good prospects for the future. While your peers waste precious time, you are sharpening your skills and working on something you enjoy. While you are young, it is a great time to learn new things and advance. You will become expert in programming, which you know is an exciting field, and then it will be relatively easy to get good paying job, or can start your own company if yo…
Moderation is good, and its good to remember not to take yourself too seriously (you appear to have serious plans for arjungmenon, greyman, stop taking yourself so seriously).
I doubt your days of hard programming were a waste. They are an experience at least, a side of life you are aware of that your peers might not be.
Knee-jerks - bad. Moderation - good. Trying new things - exceptionally good.
Re: A hacker's loneliness
#73Earlier quoted context omitted.
Once a hacker, always a hacker. For anyone who has read J.M. Coetzee knows, he is no F. Scott Fitzgerald, the stereotypical glamorous and superfluous writer; his prose and temperament matches that of a mathematician, rational and precise but nonetheless beautiful in its own right. Without going to the emo's and my personal sob stories, I'll jump right into how I cope with dealing with loneliness and the mainstream so…
Somehow, that line just has a brilliant ring of truth to it: Once a hacker, always a hacker. And it's probably right. You can't go back to a life of normalcy after experiencing the exhilaration of hacking away at something for hours on end and finally getting it. What you can do, though, is apply your mind to the social system - as you said, hack it. A lot of nerds and geeks (the ones I know at least) are unpopular n…
Re: A hacker's loneliness
#74"Is this indifference to the world a consequence of too much intercourse with machines that give the appearance of thinking? How were he to fare if one day he has to quit computers and rejoin a civilized society?... The more he has to do with computing, the more it seems to him like chess: a tight little world defined by made-up rules, one that sucks in boys of a certain susceptible temperament and then turns them ha…
It makes me regret when I recall how much of my life I've lost to programming. I spend most of my mid-teens (15,16,17) writing pointless C programs (interpreters, compilers, etc. for pathetic new languages that probably no one except me will use). While my classmates from high school went out dating girls, watching new movies, etc.; I would be sitting in front of my computer palms on forehead fixing hard to find C po…
It might prove almost impossible to fix. OK I'm talking from about a bit different perspective because for me programming (when I was young) an only occasional hobby and I was rather the "otaku" type of nerd, I spent most of my time with swords & sorcery -style books, games, etc. So it might be different, but:
I tried to fix it at around 17. I wanted a girlfriend. I focused on the superficial parts of it: went to a gym, got some muscles, boughts some designer clothes, went to clubs (alone), got piss drunk and tried to pick up girls. And convinced myself this is how normal, extroverted people do. Of course, with one difference: they don't go to places alone. I did - I didn't have friends and when I had something like friends I didn't like it, to go with them to places, it felt it limits my freedom, it was just so convenient to go alone. So what I did was actually I tried to copy the superficial parts of extrovertedness such as the fancy clothes, without the substance of it (actually making and keeping friends, or generally, enjoying the company of others including things like "chatting", "just dropping in to say hello", and so on). I think I must have been unusual - someone who looks like a typical extra-cool disco gigolo (I think in the States it's called "guido"), but a typical shy introverted guy nevertheless who keeps looking at his shoe and likes to be alone.
Guess what, it didn't work. I tried it for 7 years, until about 25, had very little success, 3-4 relationships each lasting about 3 weeks. That's not too much, I guess.
Now at 30 I became something sort of a philosophy geek, I'm more introverted than ever, because after reading up a lot of philosophy, history, economics etc. I just can't talk with most people at all, simply because they are not interested in anything I would like to talk about, and I am not interested in what they want to talk about (they usually want to talk about other people, which is the least interesting subject to me).
If I could start over, if I was again at 17, with a still fairly open and malleable mind, when I was not yet too deep and detached to be unable to talk with people and make friends, I would take care not to become too knowledgeable, not to read too much, don't go too deep into philosophy etc. and instead of all those superficial approaches to extrovertedness (gym, designer clothes, clubs) I'd probably try to become more sociable, try to learn to chat and to like to chat.
(But you can't start over, of course. By 30 some parts of the mind just get rigider every year and you just keep doing what you did before. Habits, you know. )