I found the article anodyne enough, so this is not a knock on it, but something I've noticed as I've gotten older that I find a bit amusing and curious.
What is it that makes people in tech in their late 20s and 30s write about life lessons like an old sage? I don't notice 32 year old farmers or roughnecks doing this.
As a older than this person, I feel like it’s around the time most people have that first large step of retrospectiveness where they see their current self has deviated from their self they thought they were previously. They realize they have autonomy to craft themselves. They realize there are more important aspects to life than their grades/sports/hobby or whatever things they built their identity around for the first 20-25 years. Anyways once you realize it, it’s an interesting topic to write about as you’ve become a completely different person from the one you were maybe 5-10 years prior. Because you’re likely transitioning into adulthood (maturity wise). As this continues in your later thirties and forties, it’s just status quo adulting and not as interesting to write about.
This is good, and I'll add that for the kind of person who grew up sitting in front of a computer and is now working full-time sitting in front of a computer, this is most likely to manifest in recognizing problems with physical health and taking steps to fix it, steps that are tangible and highly achievable for someone in their 20s and 30s.
EDIT: Oh, and farmers do not have this particular problem, lol
My experience is that most people in tech don't write about life lessons. But the ones who do frequently appear on HN because the audience on HN likes this sort of article.
In this particular case, the guy seems to be in his late 30s or 40s (he says "until my late twenties, I could count the number of times I had been to the gym on on hand", and later "fast forward almost to a decade").
But even if he was in his mid 20's... I understand being cautious about taking life lessons from young people, because they've had less chance to learn and correct the false things they might have learned, but the lesson he is sharing here - that your identity determines your actions which in turn will determine large parts of your life outcomes is one that even someone young can understand, and it is a useful one - I'd argue that no matter your age, if you've got a self-image that is blocking you from 'living your best life'/'doing what you want to do'/'being happy', knowing that you can change it, and this will get you closer to your goals, is useful.
The tools have a short lifecycle. So if you've used the tool for a week, that's equivalent relevant lifecycle experience to a farmer using a tractor for 50 years.
/s this is totally a riff on how fast frontend and data science tooling changes
Also, Wendell Berry isn’t exactly just a farmer but grew up one and kept as much as he could while becoming a fine writer who talks about life lessons. More people should read him.
They may be far from having learned all their lessons in life--and hopefully are open to the wisdom of those with many more years in similar shoes--but that doesn't mean that can't have learned valuable lessons in ten, fifteen years of adult life. I know I have plenty of wisdom now that I wish I could have passed to a five-years younger version of myself. I don't think writing, sharing, or publicizing that sort of retrospective is necessarily presumptuous. Sometimes young tech personalities are pompous, but there are also plenty of my own peers (and juniors!) that I'm happy to take lessons from.
You learn extremely valuable lessons even during your traineeship. But it takes many more years to realize if that lesson is truly unique and worth sharing, and if it won’t be turned on its head as you learn more later in life.
I learned very different versions of the same lesson given 20 more years of experience. Sometimes just having my confidence in “old” life lessons shaken was a huge deal, it takes a lot to shake what I thought is bedrock.
If you watch 20 minutes from a 2h movie can you really tell something about the whole movie or just about its beginning?
Do you regularly read the writings of farmers and roughnecks? I didn't get into tech until I was 40 but I definitely was going through some of the same personal growth as the writer when I was about 30 and if I had a blog I probably would have written about it.
Tech people are good at writing, maybe not like an actual writer or journalist, but we definitely write more than farmers. Tech also evolves very fast, so we probably perceive time differently, and think we "have seen a lot" in less time.
Humbly disagree. The majority of tech writing sucks.Or perhaps I should say that it never has a chance to be better because the medium of choice, the blog, is clunky at best and little more than diary entries for the most part (which perhaps makes it harsh to judge them, but then, don't put your diary online). The worst of them are look-at-me/SEO/LinkedIn audition spam. The best are entries that are useful in the moment and then quickly forgotten.
I like some tech writing, but the number of tech authors who I return to for the long view, reflective of industry understanding and life lessons learned, like I might do with writing about any other topic, is extremely small.
Sharing ideas leads to feedback. People in their late 20s and early 30s are only just feeling like they are cementing their identities, so they seek validation.
I think it has to with the audience, or a platform. A young farmer would probably pretend to know a lot and even talk to impress if you put an audience in front of them.
Take it from me, an old sage who has seen some things, people writting life lessons like they are old sages have absolutely no idea. They might strike the correct time twice a day like the broken clock they are, but there are an awful lot of hours in the day that they are wrong.
I draw analogies with junior / medior / senior developers; juniors don't know anything and they know it, mediors know something but think they know everything and want the world to know, seniors know something but know they know nothing.
...if that makes any sense, I'm sure someone else put it more eloquently than that.
Software people reply heavily on systems, patterns and frameworks in planning their work. It leads them to think that all of life is like a coding challenge that just needs the right framework, and as soon as they think they’ve discovered something, they want to share it in the spirit of open source.
I attempted to write a life’s lessons kind of book when I was 17. It took 26 years to finish it. Turns out, it takes a long time to test ideas. I kept asking myself “but how do I know this works.”
exactly. there's just an attitude of hubris in a lot of tech nerds that remains unmoved even when they've "swapped out a whole new operating system" for themselves
The trick to getting results in the gym, and establishing a sustainable practice (which is key in both exercise and diet), is to just go regularly but allow yourself to leave at any point. Say you decide four days a week is your long-term goal. On that first day, if you want, leave after 5m. But return the next day. Keep doing this and eventually, I promise, you'll average the 45m you need four days a week forever.
I do the same thing with books. I have tons I have only partially read. But I also have tons that I pick back up later and absolutely LOVE. I don't know exactly why this happens, but I never feel any dread about reading and so read a lot more than I did when I did not think this way.
Can relate, I go to a Cafe to read almost every morning, even if I'm just reading for 5-10 minutes.
I usually read 1-3 books in parallel because sometimes I'm just not in the mood for non-fiction and I just want to read a quick interview with an interesting person. One of the best features of ebook readers for me is that I can easily switch between books with a few taps, instead of having to bring 3 books.
I've gotten into and out of regular exercise over time. And, i actually did that 5 minute trick in my apartment gym in my 30s. I literally went to the gym i think.... 3 or 4 times consecutively and stayed literally five minutes. Did one pushup. Five minutes in elliptical. etc.
... it totally worked. before long i was staying ten, casually doing more while listening to podcasts. It actually changed my mindset; i was simply over going to the gym to try and push myself or grow muscle. Instead i focused purely on exercise as a way to decompress and be healthy. No more "must go faster / heavier / harder" goals. Only do whatever feels right that day, maybe just weights, just bike, etc. Goal is get to a basic level of elevated heart rate and feeling good, and do it regularly. never feel bad. Amos "off days" where i show up and don't even get my heart rate up.
And it's held up remarkably over time (8 years). I'm not winning any physique or fitness awards, but in general i'm good shape and more importantly feel good physically by default, and in general feel more balanced than in ny early 30s, despite being busier than ever.
Putting too much pressure on oneself to do too much, especially in the beginning before the body has had time to adapt to the pressures of training, is a recipe for burnout.
On the other hand, a slow start, "just keeping showing up, do a little, give yourself plenty of time and space to rest" mentality, in the long run, leads to better performance.
I had a similar experience as a teen, where somehow I had never considered a sport or the gym because “that was not what people like me did, I was the nerdy one”.
I didn’t really ever think that explicitly, or say it aloud, it was just an obvious implication on my mind.
Turns out the only thing separating me from someone who is good at sports, or being buff, was doing it frequently and not half assed. Applies to most of life when it clicks.
Btw, if anyone’s reading this and feeling motivated:
>It began slowly, but I began. Knee press-ups to start, later adding assisted pull-ups.
>If anyone was watching, it would have looked stupid. A grown man barely able to push himself off the floor. But I showed up and put in my reps, day by day, week by week, in the privacy of my bedroom.
That works, but if you haven’t done any work before you’re better off joining a gym. Precisely the advantage is regulating weight more discreetly, and equipment helps for that.
My wife had a similar experience. Being the last child, she was just never pushed to do any activities in school, and had really never participated in any physical activities. When we got married, I set a goal to run a marathon, and she thought that was the funniest joke she'd ever heard. Funny story, turns out she was a natural at running, and handily beat me a few years later in our first half marathon, even though I played sports since I was a kid.
I don’t know about “normal”, but I’d argue it’s pervasive.
We seem to associate certain behaviours and patterns with categories of identity, and changing those behaviours in yourself implies an acceptance of that “other” identity.
I remember this distinctly about 20 years ago when I thought about not eating meat anymore. Choosing not to eat meat was easy, but “becoming a vegetarian” felt alien, and took some mental effort. I didn’t see myself as “one of those” people.
I suspect it has a lot to do with how important group identity is to us, as social primates, and how we tend to package one behaviour with a bunch of others. It’s like doing pushups will suddenly make you a “jock” (and maybe the irony is that, to a certain degree it will, as these thing tend to turn into slippery slopes).
The irony is that, at least in my social circles, the stereotype of the "software developer who does rock-climbing" is really a thing.
To the point where, because part of my identity is being a hipster who is not like everyone else, I tend to avoid rock-climbing unless it's with friends, and when people ask me what sports I do I tell them I do Olympic Weightlifting, because it's actually somewhat original, even if, in practice 90% of the people at my Oly lifting club are either sports coaches or engineers :P
Yes. It's commonly called "peer pressure". People do things to fit in with the group that they feel they belong with, and avoid things that they feel will alienate themselves from "their group"
I don't think it's normal per se, but it's understandable; a lot of US media from the 80's and 90's portrayed people in distinct stereotypes, nerds, jocks and cheerleaders, but the jocks were assholes and the nerds came out on top in the end.
That kind of thing - stereotypes and reinforcing that this stereotype is your strength - will stick with a lot of people for a long time, at least until they become a bit more worldly and realise it's not actually like that.
But that's just my theory / take, it's probably full of assumptions.
> if you haven’t done any work before you’re better off joining a gym
I also find it really helpful to do classes where the instructor helps you understand the right form. Lifting heavy things can lead to injury if you do it wrong.
> Like all childish thinking, it contained some truth. Physical fitness is less important than spiritual, emotional, and mental fitness.
One kind of growth I love to see is when someone becomes less confident in their opinions over time. A lot of people “grow up” by just being super confident and stubborn about new ideas.
Apparently the author is still of the mind that physical fitness takes a back seat to the other types of fitness. Anyone who has suffered from an extensive debilitating injury or illness quickly learns that it drags you down spiritually, emotionally, and mentally. Even minor injuries or illnesses, when sustained over time, can have a profound effect on your mental health. For that reason, I would argue that physical fitness is more foundational (and therefore more important) than mental well being.
I think that the wax and wane of confidence is a natural (and healthy) cycle to preserve.
You start knowing nothing, and have no confidence, then learn stuff and your confidence builds, then you capitalize on that (learning x confidence) by doing productive things, then you hit barriers that create confusion and break down your confidence, at which point you realize you knew nothing and start learning like a beginner again.
Unhealthy confidence does not have this pattern, whether it's low or high. Even "medium" confidence, IMO, signals some kind of rut that one is stuck in, which tends to stifle creativity.
This is very encouraging! As I said in another comment, lack of confidence in opinions due to realizing the limits of knowledge feels debilitating. Glad to hear maybe it’s just the start of learning like a beginner again!
This is a good comment explains why discussions so often are so painful.
I quite often get explained to me the things I already know, in long monologues. Even things that I have created, only having people explain them to me years later, but using terms somewhat incorrectly etc.
And then I'm probably also doing that to other people.
As with all things it seems, this has a failure mode too, at least for the person growing up. I’ve become so un-confident in my opinions on most things that I basically don’t have any. For current event type things I just realized that everything is endlessly complex and finding authoritative, balanced and trustworthy sources is too time consuming to be practical. In work I am just constantly aware of the limits of my own knowledge that it manifests as imposter syndrome, low self esteem and procrastination. I often envy the folks that are confident in their opinions.
That stuck out to me as well, physical fitness is super important for so many reasons, one being it is one of the best tools to help improve your mental health.
I think part of really growing up is first recognizing how little you know, humility, and second still acting despite knowing you don’t have all the pieces of the puzzle, bravery (without bravado)
In 1948 Ashby wired four control units together and made a device he called the "Homeostat." What made it special is that it was "ultrastable" - if you changed the dynamics of the system, or plugged it into a completely new system then after a period of adaption it would relearn how to keep its outputs between tolerances.
Ashby gave the example of an autopilot - if you flipped the yoke controls so that up was down and down was up, a traditional autopilot would go into a positive feedback loop and crash, but the Homeostat would adapt to the new dynamics.
He postulated that this was a model for some systems in the brain and perhaps all learning (he wrote an entire book about it) and there's some evidence he was right. If you put goggles on someone that flips their vision upsidedown, they adjust after a few days... and have to readjust again when you take them off! (This was a real experiment.) YouTuber SmarterEveryDay found he could learn to ride a "backwards bike," but it destroyed his ability to ride a normal bike. You may have experienced this first hand if you've ever played a video game where the controls were flipped temporarily: it's disorienting, sure, but you quickly adjust.
Because of these phenomena, I think Ashby was right about the Homeostat being a useful model of the brain. It explains why so many apparently contradictory diets "work" - simply making a major changes resets the homeostat in your brain where it may settle into a better calibrated equilibrium eventually.
It implies a simple strategy: are you happy? If yes, we're done. If no, change something, and return to the question. (I've seen this as a flowchart online somewhere but can't find it now.)
Motor controls are interesting like that; it's (to my layperson's understanding) a subsystem of your brain close to the brain stem / spine that allows your brain to skip conscious processing for (fine) motor controls. And it can be trained. It's what allows us to learn to play an instrument.
Take drums, put an amateur behind it and it's all over the place, but learning it is (simply?) a matter of slowing down until you can think about every strike, repeating, then slowly speeding up. The movements become almost automatic.
I'm sure something similar happens in 'higher' brain functions, but it takes longer; a common saying is that it takes 6 weeks of conscious effort to form a new habit.
I was thinking about this from another thread (the Helix one).
Initially, learning Helix broke my ability to use Vim, but now I flit back and forth between Helix and IdeaVim without thinking about it.
Similarly, I switched to a split keyboard at my desk with lots of customizations, and it initially broke my ability to use my laptop keyboard, where there was a several minute adjustment period every time I switched, but now I can jump back and forth without making more typos or typing slower.
Both followed the same curve for me: learning the new thing disrupts the old thing, but if you do both enough, your brain/body seems to distill the shared core of both just fine.
I've generally found quite a lot of success at abandoning goals / "destinations" for most things, and focusing on the "journey": don't aim to "be fit" or reach a specific weight. aim to "do one more thing" to make progress along a direction.
every step in that direction is success, every bit is something you weren't doing before and is something to be happy about. it doesn't have to be big at all - have you done one push-up today? do one. it doesn't matter if the answer was yes or no, adding one is one more than before and is achieving what you want, and it eventually adds up.
the nice part about this kind of mindset is that there's no end when you stop, and no failure when you miss a day. there's just a new ever-changing normal, always leaning where you want it.
That's why I don't really get the gym. What is enjoyable in a gym? All activities you do there feel so useless and mindless. Running on a threadmill, lifting weights to put them back down, etc... For the journey/destination analogy, the destination is all that matters here, and you are taking the highway, because it is efficient.
There are may other activities that will get you fit and are what I think are way less boring. Sometimes, it is a literal journey, as in hiking. But also team sports, combat sports, climbing, actual gymnastics, etc... Here, you actually concentrate on the activity itself rather than on the end goal.
The gym, once you get into it, can be incredibly addicting. I'm not as consistent as I should be, but there have been times I've spent 3 hours at a time. I go through similar cycles with running as well. There's just an incredible high to these activities.
Yup, and to change only one thing at a time; for loads of people it's January 1st and they're like "Today is day one of my new life!". I avoid the gym in january, it's usually busy and it eases off until a month before the summer vacation.
But the trick is to start small. One day I started to reduce the sugar (and milk) in my coffee, then I had none, started going to the gym, started losing weight, went to see a personal trainer, etc. But also the other way around, one day I bought myself some craft beer (La Chouffe, my beloved) and a while later I was over a hundred kilos, lol.
> I've generally found quite a lot of success at abandoning goals / "destinations" for most things, and focusing on the "journey"
One of the habits books I've read ("Atomic Habits", I believe) has this piece of advice: When working on a habit focus not on what you hope to achieve, but who you want to become. This feels a lot like your reflection.
This is great - Really love the approach of getting halfway - if I'm really tired and need to go to the gym or do a side project, I always give myself half the time I expect.
Want to go to the gym for an hour but feel too lazy? Half an hour and i'll leave. 99% of the time I end up sticking out as i've reached halfway, might as well reach halfway again.
It helps shift the mental load.
Although being the person that does the thing is something that I find a bit of a struggle with living in the UK. In general, I feel like there ends up being a bit of a pull down mentalility - "why are you spending time doing X side project", "why do you care about Y".
It's a mentality that's easy to fall into culturally, and i've really had to put effort to shift that and build up motivation. I've found getting past the cultural aspects, I end up finding so many people who feel the same way.
Not sure what your gym program and goals are, but 30 mins at a time can already achieve a lot if you go enough times per week. I usually just lift, and after 30 mins I'm out of energy so that any subsequent lifts would be weak and technically poor anyway.
Yeah mostly lift - but i've recently started doing cardio more seriously and it does become daunting sometimes to commit to 90 minute endurance session etc - but I often remind myself it's the difference between something and nothing.
> Although being the person that does the thing is something that I find a bit of a struggle with living in the UK. In general, I feel like there ends up being a bit of a pull down mentalility - "why are you spending time doing X side project", "why do you care about Y".
That's strange. If you're in a large enough city to have lots of other people you can potentially befriend, I would recommend trying to find open-minded groups of people - in Lyon, for example, people who are into electronic music or AcroYoga tend to be quite open-minded, so if you make friends with people in those communities, your long, heartfelt lecture on the relative merits of various UNIX-based operating systems, while it still might not be met with a standing ovation, will at least be listened to, in a "cool story friend, I may not share your passion for this subject but it's nice to know that you care about it" kinda way :)
Oh yeah - i'm definitely getting into a better spot now with befriending more open groups of people, it's just mostly an overall pattern I've noticed in the culture generally.
It's a difficult thing to describe and i'm sure it happens everywhere, but I find there's a lot less passion outside of someone's immediate scope.
Some years ago I bought a little pamphlet with a few mental exercises by Rudolf Steiner, known for the Waldorf school system.
One of them was about building a habit. You find a small meaningless thing to do, it must have no purpose at all, and then you do it once every day for as long as it takes to become a habit, probably a month or two. E.g. you could fill a glass with water and throw it out.
I did the exercise (I would kneel for a few seconds when taking a bath) for a couple of months, and I think it worked for me. I've recently used the same tactic to build a useful habit.
Now building a new habit is not necessarily the same as changing an old habit.
I also found out that kneeling changed my perspective. I could think about a situation with some level of tension, kneel, and then my perspective on the same situation would be more humble and appreciative. YMMV.
The purpose is to focus on the process of building the habit by exercise of will. Having the habit be something that is useless makes the daily repetition an expression of pure will, rather than e.g. a sense of obligation or desire for a certain outcome.
Taking out the emotion. Since the genesis of this discussion was "lifting weights", why uselessly lift weights instead of doing useful work like moving sacks of grain from point A to point B?
"If habit is a muscle that can be developed...", then being detached from the simple, useless habit being formed is good practice for being able to apply it to a productive or important situation.
I can see why; doing something useless requires conscious thought / effort. Doing something you want to do / achieve / change is, controversially, difficult because you think you can rely on just you "wanting it", that is, innate motivation. But that's usually not the case, especially not if it's something that causes discomfort at first (like going to the gym) or if it means giving up or cutting back on something pleasurable (mmm, donuts).
But intentionally doing something that you don't do normally, something you don't want to do, something that doesn't give you any kind of dopamine feedback can help you practice forming habits, practice self-discipline, etc. It's an interesting experiment.
My guess is that you get practice in habit-building that can be applied to useful habits. Sort of like having students do exercises that have solutions in the back of the textbook. It's not the solution that's needed, it's the practice.
There are paradoxes and chicken-and-the-egg problems throughout the article:
> For me, something shifted in my late twenties. Growing up I guess you could call it. I don’t remember the exact straw that broke the camel’s back, but a desire for change grew.
> If you identity as a failure, incapable of achievement, unfit, unlovable, destined to play a bit-part role in your own story, then by heck no matter how much willpower you put in to push that boulder up the hill, it will return to its place.
> You have to actually want it.
How do you actually want to change? That part remains largely a mystery, and appears to be the all-important ingredient everything pretty much flows from.
At the end of the day, nobody knows why they want certain things - they just do. There is a lot of magic to that part. Where does "motivation" come from?
I go back and forth on this, but I pretty much settle on that motivation is the all-important ingredient which no one actually knows much about and all the rest is just backward-rationalizing to make ourselves feel good and feel that we have more agency than we really do.
Except it's a bit deeper I think; the author realised at one point they were confirming to a stereotype, maybe even thinking they were playing by the rules and doing what was expected of them by ??? society or something, but then realised they have free will, they can do whatever they want in the privacy of their own home and the cops can't stop them, and they were in bad physical shape.
They realised they were holding themselves back and stopped.
Beliefs do not exist, like the words we use. What we have are neat, retrofitted explanations that foot the bill. Sportscasting about those actions that never used words to get there, they just seem to.
Pretty fascinating the retro marriage of words and tech gets us here, to a kind of Gutenberg stage of restriction.
Words and narratives are low-bandwidth compression for meaning. It's simple. How did we get stuck here? We were lazy Pleistocene kids, and lazy Pleistocene kids we remain.
Think hard now, the words are being used to extinct us. How did we get stuck here? Math? Status? Money? a combination of all these.
Look at the status drive that pretends we have beliefs in this post. Read it carefully. Do we have beliefs, or do we simply have actions (neural syntax)?
Debate me, don't just downvote me, that's proving my point.
Because someone submitted it, it showed up in new or the home page, it didn't need prior approval because there is no editorial board, at least 69 people upvoted it, and it hasn't been removed yet by a moderator if it does break any submission rules.
Because that's how news aggregators like HN and Reddit work.
I found the article anodyne enough, so this is not a knock on it, but something I've noticed as I've gotten older that I find a bit amusing and curious.
What is it that makes people in tech in their late 20s and 30s write about life lessons like an old sage? I don't notice 32 year old farmers or roughnecks doing this.
As a older than this person, I feel like it’s around the time most people have that first large step of retrospectiveness where they see their current self has deviated from their self they thought they were previously. They realize they have autonomy to craft themselves. They realize there are more important aspects to life than their grades/sports/hobby or whatever things they built their identity around for the first 20-25 years. Anyways once you realize it, it’s an interesting topic to write about as you’ve become a completely different person from the one you were maybe 5-10 years prior. Because you’re likely transitioning into adulthood (maturity wise). As this continues in your later thirties and forties, it’s just status quo adulting and not as interesting to write about.
This is good, and I'll add that for the kind of person who grew up sitting in front of a computer and is now working full-time sitting in front of a computer, this is most likely to manifest in recognizing problems with physical health and taking steps to fix it, steps that are tangible and highly achievable for someone in their 20s and 30s.
EDIT: Oh, and farmers do not have this particular problem, lol
My experience is that most people in tech don't write about life lessons. But the ones who do frequently appear on HN because the audience on HN likes this sort of article.
I think their point is not that people in their mid 20's are WRITING LIFE LESSONS, but more that PEOPLE IN THEIR MID 20'S are writing life lessons.
In this particular case, the guy seems to be in his late 30s or 40s (he says "until my late twenties, I could count the number of times I had been to the gym on on hand", and later "fast forward almost to a decade").
But even if he was in his mid 20's... I understand being cautious about taking life lessons from young people, because they've had less chance to learn and correct the false things they might have learned, but the lesson he is sharing here - that your identity determines your actions which in turn will determine large parts of your life outcomes is one that even someone young can understand, and it is a useful one - I'd argue that no matter your age, if you've got a self-image that is blocking you from 'living your best life'/'doing what you want to do'/'being happy', knowing that you can change it, and this will get you closer to your goals, is useful.
The tools have a short lifecycle. So if you've used the tool for a week, that's equivalent relevant lifecycle experience to a farmer using a tractor for 50 years.
/s this is totally a riff on how fast frontend and data science tooling changes
Maybe the old farmers and rednecks don't have blogs which you can read online. They might well tell their friends and family!
Being very online, probably.
Also, it’s writing code for a social product.
Also, Wendell Berry isn’t exactly just a farmer but grew up one and kept as much as he could while becoming a fine writer who talks about life lessons. More people should read him.
They may be far from having learned all their lessons in life--and hopefully are open to the wisdom of those with many more years in similar shoes--but that doesn't mean that can't have learned valuable lessons in ten, fifteen years of adult life. I know I have plenty of wisdom now that I wish I could have passed to a five-years younger version of myself. I don't think writing, sharing, or publicizing that sort of retrospective is necessarily presumptuous. Sometimes young tech personalities are pompous, but there are also plenty of my own peers (and juniors!) that I'm happy to take lessons from.
You learn extremely valuable lessons even during your traineeship. But it takes many more years to realize if that lesson is truly unique and worth sharing, and if it won’t be turned on its head as you learn more later in life.
I learned very different versions of the same lesson given 20 more years of experience. Sometimes just having my confidence in “old” life lessons shaken was a huge deal, it takes a lot to shake what I thought is bedrock.
If you watch 20 minutes from a 2h movie can you really tell something about the whole movie or just about its beginning?
Do you regularly read the writings of farmers and roughnecks? I didn't get into tech until I was 40 but I definitely was going through some of the same personal growth as the writer when I was about 30 and if I had a blog I probably would have written about it.
> Do you regularly read the writings of farmers and roughnecks?
If you count Facebook posts from high school friends, yeah. I grew up in a very rural environment.
Tech people are good at writing, maybe not like an actual writer or journalist, but we definitely write more than farmers. Tech also evolves very fast, so we probably perceive time differently, and think we "have seen a lot" in less time.
"Good at generating vacuous platitudes that sound profound to dumb people" is not the same thing as "good at writing."
Most tech people are only good at trite linkedin type writing and larping as pg.
Humbly disagree. The majority of tech writing sucks.Or perhaps I should say that it never has a chance to be better because the medium of choice, the blog, is clunky at best and little more than diary entries for the most part (which perhaps makes it harsh to judge them, but then, don't put your diary online). The worst of them are look-at-me/SEO/LinkedIn audition spam. The best are entries that are useful in the moment and then quickly forgotten.
I like some tech writing, but the number of tech authors who I return to for the long view, reflective of industry understanding and life lessons learned, like I might do with writing about any other topic, is extremely small.
Netscape was only released 30 years ago.
Someone in their early 30s could’ve been a developer for half the existence of the browser platform.
I think it's a social media thing that's not limited to tech. There are tons of tiktok videos where some 18 year old explains the world with passion.
Maybe you’re just exposed to tech blogs and not the farmer/roughneck equivalent?
Sharing ideas leads to feedback. People in their late 20s and early 30s are only just feeling like they are cementing their identities, so they seek validation.
I think it has to with the audience, or a platform. A young farmer would probably pretend to know a lot and even talk to impress if you put an audience in front of them.
> write about life lessons like an old sage
Take it from me, an old sage who has seen some things, people writting life lessons like they are old sages have absolutely no idea. They might strike the correct time twice a day like the broken clock they are, but there are an awful lot of hours in the day that they are wrong.
I draw analogies with junior / medior / senior developers; juniors don't know anything and they know it, mediors know something but think they know everything and want the world to know, seniors know something but know they know nothing.
...if that makes any sense, I'm sure someone else put it more eloquently than that.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_stages_of_competence
Dunning-Kruger?
Software people reply heavily on systems, patterns and frameworks in planning their work. It leads them to think that all of life is like a coding challenge that just needs the right framework, and as soon as they think they’ve discovered something, they want to share it in the spirit of open source.
That’s the charitable read anyway.
I attempted to write a life’s lessons kind of book when I was 17. It took 26 years to finish it. Turns out, it takes a long time to test ideas. I kept asking myself “but how do I know this works.”
The quintessential American author Oprah Winfrey didn't write her first book untill she was 42.
exactly. there's just an attitude of hubris in a lot of tech nerds that remains unmoved even when they've "swapped out a whole new operating system" for themselves
The trick to getting results in the gym, and establishing a sustainable practice (which is key in both exercise and diet), is to just go regularly but allow yourself to leave at any point. Say you decide four days a week is your long-term goal. On that first day, if you want, leave after 5m. But return the next day. Keep doing this and eventually, I promise, you'll average the 45m you need four days a week forever.
I do the same thing with books. I have tons I have only partially read. But I also have tons that I pick back up later and absolutely LOVE. I don't know exactly why this happens, but I never feel any dread about reading and so read a lot more than I did when I did not think this way.
> I do the same thing with books.
Can relate, I go to a Cafe to read almost every morning, even if I'm just reading for 5-10 minutes.
I usually read 1-3 books in parallel because sometimes I'm just not in the mood for non-fiction and I just want to read a quick interview with an interesting person. One of the best features of ebook readers for me is that I can easily switch between books with a few taps, instead of having to bring 3 books.
I've gotten into and out of regular exercise over time. And, i actually did that 5 minute trick in my apartment gym in my 30s. I literally went to the gym i think.... 3 or 4 times consecutively and stayed literally five minutes. Did one pushup. Five minutes in elliptical. etc.
... it totally worked. before long i was staying ten, casually doing more while listening to podcasts. It actually changed my mindset; i was simply over going to the gym to try and push myself or grow muscle. Instead i focused purely on exercise as a way to decompress and be healthy. No more "must go faster / heavier / harder" goals. Only do whatever feels right that day, maybe just weights, just bike, etc. Goal is get to a basic level of elevated heart rate and feeling good, and do it regularly. never feel bad. Amos "off days" where i show up and don't even get my heart rate up.
And it's held up remarkably over time (8 years). I'm not winning any physique or fitness awards, but in general i'm good shape and more importantly feel good physically by default, and in general feel more balanced than in ny early 30s, despite being busier than ever.
I second this "just show up" mentality.
Putting too much pressure on oneself to do too much, especially in the beginning before the body has had time to adapt to the pressures of training, is a recipe for burnout.
On the other hand, a slow start, "just keeping showing up, do a little, give yourself plenty of time and space to rest" mentality, in the long run, leads to better performance.
Slow and steady wins the race.
I had a similar experience as a teen, where somehow I had never considered a sport or the gym because “that was not what people like me did, I was the nerdy one”.
I didn’t really ever think that explicitly, or say it aloud, it was just an obvious implication on my mind.
Turns out the only thing separating me from someone who is good at sports, or being buff, was doing it frequently and not half assed. Applies to most of life when it clicks.
Btw, if anyone’s reading this and feeling motivated:
>It began slowly, but I began. Knee press-ups to start, later adding assisted pull-ups.
>If anyone was watching, it would have looked stupid. A grown man barely able to push himself off the floor. But I showed up and put in my reps, day by day, week by week, in the privacy of my bedroom.
That works, but if you haven’t done any work before you’re better off joining a gym. Precisely the advantage is regulating weight more discreetly, and equipment helps for that.
My wife had a similar experience. Being the last child, she was just never pushed to do any activities in school, and had really never participated in any physical activities. When we got married, I set a goal to run a marathon, and she thought that was the funniest joke she'd ever heard. Funny story, turns out she was a natural at running, and handily beat me a few years later in our first half marathon, even though I played sports since I was a kid.
"that was not what people like me do"
Is this kind of thinking normal? Kinda like looking into the world and going like "i must be like that specific thing over there"?
I don’t know about “normal”, but I’d argue it’s pervasive.
We seem to associate certain behaviours and patterns with categories of identity, and changing those behaviours in yourself implies an acceptance of that “other” identity.
I remember this distinctly about 20 years ago when I thought about not eating meat anymore. Choosing not to eat meat was easy, but “becoming a vegetarian” felt alien, and took some mental effort. I didn’t see myself as “one of those” people.
I suspect it has a lot to do with how important group identity is to us, as social primates, and how we tend to package one behaviour with a bunch of others. It’s like doing pushups will suddenly make you a “jock” (and maybe the irony is that, to a certain degree it will, as these thing tend to turn into slippery slopes).
The irony is that, at least in my social circles, the stereotype of the "software developer who does rock-climbing" is really a thing.
To the point where, because part of my identity is being a hipster who is not like everyone else, I tend to avoid rock-climbing unless it's with friends, and when people ask me what sports I do I tell them I do Olympic Weightlifting, because it's actually somewhat original, even if, in practice 90% of the people at my Oly lifting club are either sports coaches or engineers :P
Yes. It's commonly called "peer pressure". People do things to fit in with the group that they feel they belong with, and avoid things that they feel will alienate themselves from "their group"
I don't think it's normal per se, but it's understandable; a lot of US media from the 80's and 90's portrayed people in distinct stereotypes, nerds, jocks and cheerleaders, but the jocks were assholes and the nerds came out on top in the end.
That kind of thing - stereotypes and reinforcing that this stereotype is your strength - will stick with a lot of people for a long time, at least until they become a bit more worldly and realise it's not actually like that.
But that's just my theory / take, it's probably full of assumptions.
> if you haven’t done any work before you’re better off joining a gym
I also find it really helpful to do classes where the instructor helps you understand the right form. Lifting heavy things can lead to injury if you do it wrong.
> Like all childish thinking, it contained some truth. Physical fitness is less important than spiritual, emotional, and mental fitness.
One kind of growth I love to see is when someone becomes less confident in their opinions over time. A lot of people “grow up” by just being super confident and stubborn about new ideas.
Apparently the author is still of the mind that physical fitness takes a back seat to the other types of fitness. Anyone who has suffered from an extensive debilitating injury or illness quickly learns that it drags you down spiritually, emotionally, and mentally. Even minor injuries or illnesses, when sustained over time, can have a profound effect on your mental health. For that reason, I would argue that physical fitness is more foundational (and therefore more important) than mental well being.
I think that the wax and wane of confidence is a natural (and healthy) cycle to preserve.
You start knowing nothing, and have no confidence, then learn stuff and your confidence builds, then you capitalize on that (learning x confidence) by doing productive things, then you hit barriers that create confusion and break down your confidence, at which point you realize you knew nothing and start learning like a beginner again.
Unhealthy confidence does not have this pattern, whether it's low or high. Even "medium" confidence, IMO, signals some kind of rut that one is stuck in, which tends to stifle creativity.
This is very encouraging! As I said in another comment, lack of confidence in opinions due to realizing the limits of knowledge feels debilitating. Glad to hear maybe it’s just the start of learning like a beginner again!
This is a good comment explains why discussions so often are so painful.
I quite often get explained to me the things I already know, in long monologues. Even things that I have created, only having people explain them to me years later, but using terms somewhat incorrectly etc.
And then I'm probably also doing that to other people.
As with all things it seems, this has a failure mode too, at least for the person growing up. I’ve become so un-confident in my opinions on most things that I basically don’t have any. For current event type things I just realized that everything is endlessly complex and finding authoritative, balanced and trustworthy sources is too time consuming to be practical. In work I am just constantly aware of the limits of my own knowledge that it manifests as imposter syndrome, low self esteem and procrastination. I often envy the folks that are confident in their opinions.
That stuck out to me as well, physical fitness is super important for so many reasons, one being it is one of the best tools to help improve your mental health.
I think part of really growing up is first recognizing how little you know, humility, and second still acting despite knowing you don’t have all the pieces of the puzzle, bravery (without bravado)
More people need Socrates.
In 1948 Ashby wired four control units together and made a device he called the "Homeostat." What made it special is that it was "ultrastable" - if you changed the dynamics of the system, or plugged it into a completely new system then after a period of adaption it would relearn how to keep its outputs between tolerances.
Ashby gave the example of an autopilot - if you flipped the yoke controls so that up was down and down was up, a traditional autopilot would go into a positive feedback loop and crash, but the Homeostat would adapt to the new dynamics.
He postulated that this was a model for some systems in the brain and perhaps all learning (he wrote an entire book about it) and there's some evidence he was right. If you put goggles on someone that flips their vision upsidedown, they adjust after a few days... and have to readjust again when you take them off! (This was a real experiment.) YouTuber SmarterEveryDay found he could learn to ride a "backwards bike," but it destroyed his ability to ride a normal bike. You may have experienced this first hand if you've ever played a video game where the controls were flipped temporarily: it's disorienting, sure, but you quickly adjust.
Because of these phenomena, I think Ashby was right about the Homeostat being a useful model of the brain. It explains why so many apparently contradictory diets "work" - simply making a major changes resets the homeostat in your brain where it may settle into a better calibrated equilibrium eventually.
It implies a simple strategy: are you happy? If yes, we're done. If no, change something, and return to the question. (I've seen this as a flowchart online somewhere but can't find it now.)
Motor controls are interesting like that; it's (to my layperson's understanding) a subsystem of your brain close to the brain stem / spine that allows your brain to skip conscious processing for (fine) motor controls. And it can be trained. It's what allows us to learn to play an instrument.
Take drums, put an amateur behind it and it's all over the place, but learning it is (simply?) a matter of slowing down until you can think about every strike, repeating, then slowly speeding up. The movements become almost automatic.
I'm sure something similar happens in 'higher' brain functions, but it takes longer; a common saying is that it takes 6 weeks of conscious effort to form a new habit.
Yea I learned Dvorak but now I can’t type on qwerty
I was thinking about this from another thread (the Helix one).
Initially, learning Helix broke my ability to use Vim, but now I flit back and forth between Helix and IdeaVim without thinking about it.
Similarly, I switched to a split keyboard at my desk with lots of customizations, and it initially broke my ability to use my laptop keyboard, where there was a several minute adjustment period every time I switched, but now I can jump back and forth without making more typos or typing slower.
Both followed the same curve for me: learning the new thing disrupts the old thing, but if you do both enough, your brain/body seems to distill the shared core of both just fine.
I've generally found quite a lot of success at abandoning goals / "destinations" for most things, and focusing on the "journey": don't aim to "be fit" or reach a specific weight. aim to "do one more thing" to make progress along a direction.
every step in that direction is success, every bit is something you weren't doing before and is something to be happy about. it doesn't have to be big at all - have you done one push-up today? do one. it doesn't matter if the answer was yes or no, adding one is one more than before and is achieving what you want, and it eventually adds up.
the nice part about this kind of mindset is that there's no end when you stop, and no failure when you miss a day. there's just a new ever-changing normal, always leaning where you want it.
That's why I don't really get the gym. What is enjoyable in a gym? All activities you do there feel so useless and mindless. Running on a threadmill, lifting weights to put them back down, etc... For the journey/destination analogy, the destination is all that matters here, and you are taking the highway, because it is efficient.
There are may other activities that will get you fit and are what I think are way less boring. Sometimes, it is a literal journey, as in hiking. But also team sports, combat sports, climbing, actual gymnastics, etc... Here, you actually concentrate on the activity itself rather than on the end goal.
The gym, once you get into it, can be incredibly addicting. I'm not as consistent as I should be, but there have been times I've spent 3 hours at a time. I go through similar cycles with running as well. There's just an incredible high to these activities.
Mindlessness is a positive thing here. You don't have to think, just follow the moves, hit your goals and the numbers will naturally go up over time.
Yup, and to change only one thing at a time; for loads of people it's January 1st and they're like "Today is day one of my new life!". I avoid the gym in january, it's usually busy and it eases off until a month before the summer vacation.
But the trick is to start small. One day I started to reduce the sugar (and milk) in my coffee, then I had none, started going to the gym, started losing weight, went to see a personal trainer, etc. But also the other way around, one day I bought myself some craft beer (La Chouffe, my beloved) and a while later I was over a hundred kilos, lol.
> I've generally found quite a lot of success at abandoning goals / "destinations" for most things, and focusing on the "journey"
One of the habits books I've read ("Atomic Habits", I believe) has this piece of advice: When working on a habit focus not on what you hope to achieve, but who you want to become. This feels a lot like your reflection.
This is great - Really love the approach of getting halfway - if I'm really tired and need to go to the gym or do a side project, I always give myself half the time I expect.
Want to go to the gym for an hour but feel too lazy? Half an hour and i'll leave. 99% of the time I end up sticking out as i've reached halfway, might as well reach halfway again.
It helps shift the mental load.
Although being the person that does the thing is something that I find a bit of a struggle with living in the UK. In general, I feel like there ends up being a bit of a pull down mentalility - "why are you spending time doing X side project", "why do you care about Y".
It's a mentality that's easy to fall into culturally, and i've really had to put effort to shift that and build up motivation. I've found getting past the cultural aspects, I end up finding so many people who feel the same way.
Not sure what your gym program and goals are, but 30 mins at a time can already achieve a lot if you go enough times per week. I usually just lift, and after 30 mins I'm out of energy so that any subsequent lifts would be weak and technically poor anyway.
Yeah mostly lift - but i've recently started doing cardio more seriously and it does become daunting sometimes to commit to 90 minute endurance session etc - but I often remind myself it's the difference between something and nothing.
> Although being the person that does the thing is something that I find a bit of a struggle with living in the UK. In general, I feel like there ends up being a bit of a pull down mentalility - "why are you spending time doing X side project", "why do you care about Y".
That's strange. If you're in a large enough city to have lots of other people you can potentially befriend, I would recommend trying to find open-minded groups of people - in Lyon, for example, people who are into electronic music or AcroYoga tend to be quite open-minded, so if you make friends with people in those communities, your long, heartfelt lecture on the relative merits of various UNIX-based operating systems, while it still might not be met with a standing ovation, will at least be listened to, in a "cool story friend, I may not share your passion for this subject but it's nice to know that you care about it" kinda way :)
Oh yeah - i'm definitely getting into a better spot now with befriending more open groups of people, it's just mostly an overall pattern I've noticed in the culture generally.
It's a difficult thing to describe and i'm sure it happens everywhere, but I find there's a lot less passion outside of someone's immediate scope.
Some years ago I bought a little pamphlet with a few mental exercises by Rudolf Steiner, known for the Waldorf school system.
One of them was about building a habit. You find a small meaningless thing to do, it must have no purpose at all, and then you do it once every day for as long as it takes to become a habit, probably a month or two. E.g. you could fill a glass with water and throw it out.
I did the exercise (I would kneel for a few seconds when taking a bath) for a couple of months, and I think it worked for me. I've recently used the same tactic to build a useful habit.
Now building a new habit is not necessarily the same as changing an old habit.
I also found out that kneeling changed my perspective. I could think about a situation with some level of tension, kneel, and then my perspective on the same situation would be more humble and appreciative. YMMV.
What's the benefit of building a useless habit instead of a useful one?
The purpose is to focus on the process of building the habit by exercise of will. Having the habit be something that is useless makes the daily repetition an expression of pure will, rather than e.g. a sense of obligation or desire for a certain outcome.
Taking out the emotion. Since the genesis of this discussion was "lifting weights", why uselessly lift weights instead of doing useful work like moving sacks of grain from point A to point B?
"If habit is a muscle that can be developed...", then being detached from the simple, useless habit being formed is good practice for being able to apply it to a productive or important situation.
I can see why; doing something useless requires conscious thought / effort. Doing something you want to do / achieve / change is, controversially, difficult because you think you can rely on just you "wanting it", that is, innate motivation. But that's usually not the case, especially not if it's something that causes discomfort at first (like going to the gym) or if it means giving up or cutting back on something pleasurable (mmm, donuts).
But intentionally doing something that you don't do normally, something you don't want to do, something that doesn't give you any kind of dopamine feedback can help you practice forming habits, practice self-discipline, etc. It's an interesting experiment.
My guess is that you get practice in habit-building that can be applied to useful habits. Sort of like having students do exercises that have solutions in the back of the textbook. It's not the solution that's needed, it's the practice.
Meditational focus.
There are paradoxes and chicken-and-the-egg problems throughout the article:
> For me, something shifted in my late twenties. Growing up I guess you could call it. I don’t remember the exact straw that broke the camel’s back, but a desire for change grew.
> If you identity as a failure, incapable of achievement, unfit, unlovable, destined to play a bit-part role in your own story, then by heck no matter how much willpower you put in to push that boulder up the hill, it will return to its place.
> You have to actually want it.
How do you actually want to change? That part remains largely a mystery, and appears to be the all-important ingredient everything pretty much flows from.
At the end of the day, nobody knows why they want certain things - they just do. There is a lot of magic to that part. Where does "motivation" come from?
I go back and forth on this, but I pretty much settle on that motivation is the all-important ingredient which no one actually knows much about and all the rest is just backward-rationalizing to make ourselves feel good and feel that we have more agency than we really do.
You can summarise the whole post by the meme video of Shia LaBeouf with his "Do it!" talk.
DON'T LET YOUR DREAMS BE DREAMS!
Except it's a bit deeper I think; the author realised at one point they were confirming to a stereotype, maybe even thinking they were playing by the rules and doing what was expected of them by ??? society or something, but then realised they have free will, they can do whatever they want in the privacy of their own home and the cops can't stop them, and they were in bad physical shape.
They realised they were holding themselves back and stopped.
Beliefs do not exist, like the words we use. What we have are neat, retrofitted explanations that foot the bill. Sportscasting about those actions that never used words to get there, they just seem to.
Pretty fascinating the retro marriage of words and tech gets us here, to a kind of Gutenberg stage of restriction.
Words and narratives are low-bandwidth compression for meaning. It's simple. How did we get stuck here? We were lazy Pleistocene kids, and lazy Pleistocene kids we remain.
Think hard now, the words are being used to extinct us. How did we get stuck here? Math? Status? Money? a combination of all these.
Look at the status drive that pretends we have beliefs in this post. Read it carefully. Do we have beliefs, or do we simply have actions (neural syntax)?
Debate me, don't just downvote me, that's proving my point.
Time to rethink all communication.
With love and respect, why is this on HackerNews?
Because someone submitted it, it showed up in new or the home page, it didn't need prior approval because there is no editorial board, at least 69 people upvoted it, and it hasn't been removed yet by a moderator if it does break any submission rules.
Because that's how news aggregators like HN and Reddit work.