Just like an alcoholic uses booze to avoid the problems they face in the rest of life I use work to avoid problems in real life. I don't do it because I am so hard working, or because I really love what I do, its because when I sit down and can stare at code for a couple hours I don't have to worry about the other things going on in life, my brain gets filled with this little world which I know I can control by issuing magic spells that behave appropriately.
It means I'm not thinking about my sister's descent into alcoholism, I don't have to worry about my bipolar sister in law, I don't have to face the guilt I feel about not spending enough time with my kid.
I'm trying to combat that, I'm trying to not use work as an excuse to avoid situations that cause social anxiety, I'm trying not to shirk my household responsibilities by volunteering for extra work that is urgent. But the problem is that I've built up an expectation of several years of what people can expect from me, now I am trying to balance and I can't because I've got to the point where I have so much responsibility it requires that output, it's hard, and I am trying to keep things in balance, but by God it gets so hard sometimes....
So my holidays are now, just another form of work. I literally cant remember the last time I've had a "holiday" where I just unwound and was decadently lazy for the whole time. I work, I go home and work. I book time off under the guise of holidays but really I work on other work.
I kid and say "this is the way" but really I suspect it might not be healthy.
I have no plans to ever retire.
Another problem that I struggle with, and I'm sure "successful" people do as well, is chronic pain. Sometimes it's just bad luck, or an old injury; or maybe you have sacrificed your health to get more work done (in the short term). Many long-term problems are invisible; you never know who is struggling on the inside.
The thing a lot of these have in common is being in the moment vs. looking forward. Absolutely nothing wrong with looking forward, it's how we all progress and ensure future good times, but you also have to be able to turn it off (which is another item on OP's list). Learning how to shut up those internal voices for a while can be hard, but it's worth the effort.
Most 'wealthy & successful' people I have known screwed people and never learned how to not do that and ended up paranoid about everyone since they don't know who they screwed.
Exploitation is not necessarily bad, as most companies to be profitable, need to exploit something. Companies want profit so they are exploiting the price they charge, or exploiting the workers they pay, or a combination of many little exploits.
Imagine a company could pay its workers more, but they don't. I believe this is an exploitation of the workers. People don't see it as "bad" in minor cases, and this practice is commonly accepted. Consider how much Apple is making and how much it is paying its workers, versus a locally owned restaurant.
Imagine a company could charge less for a product and still survive. This again, is a minor exploitation, and commonly accepted.
When the exploitation gets large enough, workers sometimes revolt.
I'm not being a contrarian, but I think it's interesting how our biases and perspectives shape the way we understand things and situations. I've noticed people (myself included, no don't) trying to spin a situation to make them look or feel like a victim instead of admitting they were simply not as good as the alleged screwer. Not sure if I'm even stating this correctly, but maybe someone can help me elaborate.
These types of quotes tire me (and ones like it, "have you ever seen anyone sad on a Jet ski?"). They ignore the very real human condition of yearning for meaning from existence. Pretending like this can be solved with symbols of status and consumption is misguided.
People who are middle class are more happy than people who are dirt poor. Rich people aren't necessarily any happier than middle class people, but both are, in the aggregate, happier than poor people struggling to survive.
> Then the boy said, roughly: "I'd rather not have been born than be what I am. When I saw the other, my heart stood still. I said to myself: 'See what I should have been now!'" He got up: "See here, I feel that I would do better not to stay here, because I would throw it up to you from morning till night, and I would make your life miserable. I'll never forgive you for that!"
Narcissists are driven by external validation and appearance, yes. So much so that they forget the people most important to their lives are humans too, not tools or ornaments of achievement. When these relationships sour, there’s a lot of self-doubt, not about the achievements, but if the trade offs are really worth it in the end.
To me being successful means being content and leading a happy and rich life. Economic well-being often helps facilitate contentment and happiness through the security it allows, but it is, at best, a piece of the pie. Unfortunately all too many (especially Americans) have been conditioned to believe that life is a game of Monopoly and the goal is to accrue as much material wealth as possible. This leads to the oft-referred to, "mid-life crisis" when people start coming to terms with their mortality and realize they've wasted the best decades of their life pushing pencils and sitting in traffic. Perhaps if we start changing the way we view "success" we can help some poor souls avoid this awful day of reckoning in the future.
- Dedicating one’s life to work is often a form of suicide. « SINCE my life is void and I won’t do anything tonight, why not study this book, apply for an MBA or build a company. At least that will be some challenge. It’s not like I’m losing family time, and it will help me focus on one thing. »
I’ll leave people to decide whether this is good or bad, but if most people’s lives were fulfilling, we wouldn’t see that much technological progress.
I’m not denying a good share of people are into tech or work by passion, I’m just talking about those who work as a mean to avoid depression.
Which then makes you wonder: do we really need that much technological progress?
I love technology, especially when it helps people lead better lives. But if we are just developing it without real purpose and mentally/emotionally enslaving ourselves to do it, then it seems self-defeating.
Spoken like someone who takes all of the technological progress of the last centuries for granted. And I don't intend that as a personal attack. Many, many people think like you do, because they can't even begin to imagine a life without the fruits of progress. As for myself, I'm eternally thankful for that progress, for without it, I wouldn't be alive today (appendicitis), neither would my wife (also appendicitis), and probably neither would my two children (historically, most children died within a few years after birth). I'm also extremely thankful for not having to fear death from starvation (thanks to agricultural progress) or from bacterial infections (thanks to antibiotics).
> But if we are just developing it without real purpose [...]
That "if"-condition is doing a lot of work in your sentence. Kind of like saying "if technological progress wouldn't be bringing all the immense benefits it is bringing, it wouldn't be so great".
Or worse yet: the purpose is mental/emotional enslavement.
But it isn't just the web. Even a modern TV is full of additional bullshit complexity that makes life worse.
So do unsuccessful lives. And moderately successful lives. This is just a characteristic of most lives, unless measures are taken to overcome the tendency to experience life this way.
I always thought that but could never quite put words on it. Thanks that’s a nice way of phrasing it.
This is the one thing that I've struggled with as an engineering leader. Much of this article is spot on, but the hardest thing for myself is simply asking for help. Part of it because I have learned how to learn anything, and I can just spend time doing what I need. However, there is only so much time in the day.
For some reason, I've always felt that asking for help was related to weakness, and it took a long time to realize that leadership is not knowing everything, but knowing how to teach people to play the game and ask good/dumb questions.
“The reasonable man adapts himself to the world: the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.”
― George Bernard Shaw, Man and Superman
I think the most "successful" people are the people I would not hear about. Likely, some mid-level executives, engineers, professionals. They have enough. They don't need to "move up". They're happy. They don't need to tell people about their stories. So we never hear about them.
Well, in that case, we didn't really go extinct. The distinguishing feature of our kind is our rational faculty, allowing for discourse with others to explain our past actions and future intentions, that grows our self-consciousness (self requires an other[1]) and births civil society. Not our genetic makeup. If some insect species develops self-consciousness and civilization, I'd argue that we ought to recognize it as of our kind. Moreso than, say, apes who are closer to "us" genetically.
[1] Hegel. Phenomenology of Spirit, 1807. "self-consciousness achieves its satisfaction only in another self-consciousness… A self-consciousness exists for a self-consciousness. Only so is it in fact self-consciousness, for only in this way does the unity of itself in its otherness becomes explicit for it."
We would still be trying to kill food by throwing rocks if we were wise.
Which is funny, because it would have been those first wise people who took the steps to get here.
Often they never learn you are allowed to back off.
More-so fear of the long-term consequences. You do all that hard work to get to where you want to be and then if you back off, will that work be lost?
I don't believe that people cannot think for themselves, nor have I encountered a single person who believes they are not allowed to back off.
Other extreme: stressed, unsatisfied, unhappy, always working, getting lots done.
Maybe there is a middle way. A more nuanced definition of success.
Why is this shit even on HN? Is everyone here a rich, narcissistic douchebag? I mean we all suspected....
The view may be a bit skewed since he is a coach and will mostly deal with people who have a problem. It is still a good reminder to try to have a balanced life, regardless of where on the ladder you are :)
