Travelled: found it mostly extremely lonely to travel alone. Got sick of seeing the same things (this place's contemporary art museum, that place's famous church). Of course I saw some amazing things but I now think I agree with some happiness researcher who claims travel is best in short < 1 week bursts every few months.
Worked on personal projects. I do get some feeling of accomplishment but mostly I just feel lonely and isolated. At good jobs I had the camaraderie of close co-workers who became close friends and we really collaborated. I tried hanging out at cafes and coffee shops and that's better than staying home but not all that less isolating. The random people that show up are not people I talk to or become close to.
I don't feel "free" at all. I'm sure it's partly in my mind. I might also be age differences. I'm older and need to think about retirement I realize I can't just make any random decision because there isn't time to correct. I tell myself I don't feel free because I don't have enough money to never work again. I do have to do something that earns significant income (enough to retire in 10-12 years). If I did have enough to retire maybe I'd still not feel free like not having enough to do X where X is whatever (fund that project, whatever...) though maybe I'd feel free to do things and never worry about income (volunteer for various things?). Now I don't volunteer because that's not going to help me earn money to retire. I'm not sure I'd volunteer or not.
I'm pretty much completely lost at this point. No idea what I want to do anymore. I waste my days reading HN and browsing the net and working on personal projects that have no future prospects and answering questions on SO. I go to a meet up or 2 a week and that's about it.
I’m not a doctor, but just as a friend, I think you should really try to think of dealing with that existential sadness as a priority - not as an annoyance. Spending real time and energy towards improving your mental health could have real impact on every other aspect of your life.
If you don't make accidental friends and events on your travels, they'll become a chore. Learned it the hard way. I travelled, was fun, then learned to avoid the accidents only for traveling to become lonely.
How it works?
- Try hostels (there are hostels where you can get your own room).
- Starbucks and approach anything (same gender, other gender, different gender, animal?)
- Go to random events
- Avoid online tools (like tinder and such). They are a waste of time. Most of the woman expect that you are there for a quickie and have their guards up. Most people turn their guards off when the interaction is "natural".
- Avoid approaching in touristy areas. They are usually for groups, couples, family, etc... leads nowhere.
edit: also don't decline to talk to people you are otherwise not interested in. Most of my interesting interactions started this way. Talk to this, invite me to party, go out together, find new friends, etc...
You won't remember the monuments but you'll remember discussions and human-based interactions.
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/learning-play-guitar-jay-paul...
Got a link to that?
Breaking free from the golden handcuffs (or in my case, aluminum handcuffs), you start to realize that high income and lots of stuff really doesn't matter as much as experiences. And then you might even consider doing work that doesn't leverage your brain and career experience. That's actually freeing, because it means you're allowed to go do a manual labor job for a week if you want to. You stop comparing effective hourly rates (which usually suck you back into a corporate or consulting world).
I envy the people who are born into entrepreneurial families. They may or may not go to college, but they usually do not start with the idea of "I go learn X in school so I can get a high paying job doing X". Instead, they seem more likely to seize opportunities with an expectation of success rather than a pessimistic view of cost/benefit. They will surely have more thin times, but they also have much greater chance of both hitting it big (selling a company) as well as actually filling their years with interesting experiences.
Breaking free from the gold rush (or in my case, app rush), you start to realize that huge exits and lots of users really doesn't matter as much as comfort and stability. And then you might even consider doing work that doesn't give you equity or has potential for huge payoffs. That's actually freeing, because it means you're allowed to do your job, then go home and relax. You stop thinking about how much work you could get done if you weren’t relaxing (which usually sucks you back to a computer to chip away at a never ending todo list).
I envy the people who are simply happy in serving others. They may or may not become super wealthy or travel as much, but they usually do not start with the idea of “the only work worth doing is for a company I own”. Instead, they seem more likely to take jobs with an expectation of being useful rather than an egotistical view of time/benefit. They will surely have more boring times, but they also have much greater chance of both being happy (living a normal life) as well as actually filling their years with meaningful accomplishments.
Imagine having a conversation in person where someone parrots back your phrases changing a few nouns. Would you do that?
It is also such a derivative style of commenting, I've seen it many times on HN and I wish people would not recycle it any further.
When I see people talking about entrepreneurship on HN or quitting their X job to do Y project, I feel no different than it being the "minimalist lifestyle" of tech. All this talk about how it's freeing you of all these things that tie you down and what not but it's only "freeing" because you're rich AF.
This article read like: "I'm a rich dude who worked at Big X and went to an Ivy League university. Fuck being paid hundreds of thousands of dollars a year. I live in one of the most expensive and desirable cities in the world. I'm gonna do whatever I want with my ridiculously large savings and I hope to make even more money with whatever I come up with! I'll probably go back to another FAANG if this doesn't pan out in a year and say I did some seriously cool stuff on my resume. I'll get an even bigger package. Wooooo!"
Ugh.
While we praise companies for effectively pivoting after building a product that didn't seem right, we should also recognize that we too can pivot if we feel dissatisfied spending time in an office or if we feel a desire to join a team taking on a hard problem.
I quit my job 6 months ago. Gave myself 6 months to see if I would descend into complacent procrastination, and if so - I'd find another job. Having no job, but enough saving to rely on, has been a blessing. I've learned so many things from creative writing to deep learning, wrote a lot of personal essays, biked for 500miles, and did some side projects. Having one unsuccessful attempt at a startup convinced me that this is a much preferable route to getting back to salaried employment. The learning is a lot more, and there is a higher potential for payoff.
It sounds like we had similar experiences. I agree that the biggest benefit has been the freedom to explore my interests. At Google, I always wanted to get deeper into machine learning, but I felt pressure to lean into my strengths so that I could deliver something and get promoted rather than slow down and learn something new.
Now that I'm on my own, I do still feel pressure to release something, but it's also a lot easier for me to control the pace and devote more time to learning because I'm on my own roadmap.
Additionally, did you feel that you had the freedom to learn and apply ML?
My biggest fear though, is that when I do look for work again, people will say: "That's great that you took that time to learn, I can see that you learned a lot of valuable skills, we want you to be part of our team! -- here's some poorly thought out features we want you to hack into our shitty CRUD app".
Also, is it only me that have such a boring life? or normal people don't have that issue to have too many emails/notifications to respond to? How many people contact you, seriously?
But I have a mini-rant about all those blog-posts with subjects such as "Why I decided to quit Google", or "Why I'm leaving for a startup after being a boss at Facebook for X years".
Those blog post usually always reiterate that the "Smartest people in the world" work at those companies and that it is the "Best job in the world". Sometimes a little bit less arrogance and namedropping would be a good thing.
If anything he is extremely good at getting some buzz around things he is working on and deriving value from having worked at Google.
One of the smarter ones out there.
Was that too many questions?
>Have you still been working with Sia?
Not really anymore. It's hard to walk away because I have so much fun experimenting with Sia, but I don't think I can really make a living doing anything with Sia. My Sia blog had a dedicated, enthusiastic following, but the niche is so small that the following was like 50 people.
>What are your thoughts on Filecoin or other alternatives?
I haven't looked too deeply into Filecoin. I read their whitepaper, but I feel like it's hard to really grasp before I have software I can actually run. They still haven't published any code, just some whitepapers.
Filecoin has so much money and so many employees that it's plausible that they're working on something in secret that's going to blow everyone else away once it's released. But it's also possible that they've got nothing and they're going to release a $250M dud.
I think Storj is a trainwreck with almost zero chance of coming out of the decentralized storage game on top. They're not even really a decentralized storage project. They're an open source project that tells people they're decentralized to cash in on the trend towards decentralization.
>You're one of the few people with any understanding of this, what are the barriers preventing adoption and even lower prices?
The biggest barrier right now is how difficult it is for customers to store data on Sia.
I can sign up for AWS/GCP/Azure and have data in their clouds in ~15 minutes. With Sia, there are SO many steps just to start uploading data and the process is not documented well. Not only that, there are huge waits between steps. So it's like start Sia, wait 36 hours for the blockchain to sync, create a wallet, wait an hour for the wallet to initialize, unlock the wallet, wait 10 mins for wallet to unlock, and on and on.
Even after Sia is totally initialized and ready for use, it's still much harder than anything else to use. They don't yet support backup and recovery, so you're stuck uploading an additional copy of all your data to another cloud provider anyway. And then even in the remaining scenarios, there are no client libraries for using Sia, so you have to write a ton of boilerplate code to wrap HTTP calls to their API.
>Have you read or contributed to the source code?
I've read a lot of Sia's source code. I'm the #9 top contributor to their core codebase. Relative to other cryptocurrency projects, their code is good, but that's kind of a low bar. I think their code has been degrading over time. Their functions are getting much longer, more complicated, and depend on increasingly complex lock synchronization behavior. Their builds are broken about 50% of the time just due to flaky tests.
>Was that too many questions?
I'm ready for more!
Google had really high comp and I don't spend very much money outside of the fact that I live in Manhattan, so I have about 2-3 years of runway from that stockpile of savings.
My health insurance is $470 for a basic high deductible plan.
if you have non-poverty-level income, you can buy a policy for about $300-500 a month through most state exchanges
if you have poverty-level income (no stock dividends, no capital gains, havent worked w2 job in years), then you can qualify for Medicaid
another option is to open a 1-2 employee LLC or LLP and buy small group health insurance. typically these plans are about $5-7k a year and have somewhat reasonable deductibles and somewhat reasonable out of pocket maxes. at the very least, a $100,000 appendix surgery will only cost you $7,000 max, and then you are covered for all other medical expenses for the rest of the year
But big-ups to using a Surface!
It's actually a coincidence because I asked my cartoonist to draw a non-Apple laptop, though I didn't specifically say Surface. But she drew a Surface, and that is indeed what I use.
