I've posted this on HN before, and it seems appropriate here as well. I read this every once in awhile, and it never fails to inspire meet to live by what Jeff Bezos calls the "regret minimization framework":
If I were able to live my life anew, In the next I would try to commit more errors. I would not try to be so perfect, I would relax more. I would be more foolish than I've been, In fact, I would take few things seriously. I would be less hygienic. I would run more risks, take more vacations, contemplate more sunsets, climb more mountains, swim more rivers. I would go to more places where I've never been, I would eat more ice cream and fewer beans, I would have more real problems and less imaginary ones.
I was one of those people that lived sensibly and prolifically each minute of his life; Of course I had moments of happiness. If I could go back I would try to have only good moments.
Because if you didn't know, of that is life made: only of moments; Don't lose the now.
I was one of those that never went anywhere without a thermometer, a hot-water bottle, an umbrella, and a parachute; If I could live again, I would travel lighter.
If I could live again, I would begin to walk barefoot from the beginning of spring and I would continue barefoot until autumn ends. I would take more cart rides, contemplate more dawns, and play with more children, If I had another life ahead of me.
But already you see, I am 85, and I know that I am dying.
Edit: Not sure who the author is. I've seen it attributed to Jorge Luis Borges, but am pretty sure that is incorrect.
You might hear from old people wishing they'd done more, you don't hear from young people who died while climbing mountains, swimming rivers, or ...er ... eating ice cream.
Which is to say: how cautious or not to be at any point in time is actually a very complex judgement. Seizing the day and living in the moment are important, but so is planning ahead, thinking about the future, practicing restraint at the right times and knowing when not to eat ice cream.
You also don't hear from the people who died in a car accident after fighting with their spouse on the way to their dead-end job.
You don't hear about the people who stayed at their "secure" job as opposed to joining a more risky venture, only to lose their job the next month.
> how cautious or not to be at any point in time is actually a very complex judgement.
I think people are taking what was said a bit too far. You can do very safe mountain climbs and see some awesome views, and safely swim rivers near shore, You can reasonably live without taking absurd risks.
It is, but it isn't as drastic effect as say the survival bias from war or something. The logic being that under today's circumstances, many people live to grow old without the serious threat of from large scale war, famine and disease. In other words, there is survivor bias, but it is significantly diluted by the fact that almost everybody survives. For survivor bias to be significant, you have to have a lot of people not survive.
This is a common, and dangerous, form of selection bias that we often see when old successful people give their wise advice to 'live life to the fullest'. Sure, it's easy to wax lyrical about taking chances when you already know that you made it to the end of your natural life in reasonable shape and with a nice amount of material wealth.
The people who did live that way and suffered a career-ending injury, or were killed in some dodgy third world country, or simply died a pauper - nobody cares about their advice.
"This is a common, and dangerous, form of selection bias that we often see when old successful people give their wise advice to 'live life to the fullest'."
Sometimes people forget that taking risks doesn't always end well. I took a big financial risk in the 1990s which ended up costing me 15 years of savings and a long period of anxiety and depression. If it had worked out I could now give speeches about the need for taking risks...
I think the key is differentiating between real risks (wingsuits are dangerous!) and fake ones (who cares if strangers give you weird looks because you’re barefoot).
In my case, it was just dancing for a couple hours non-stop at the disco while on mild drugs... It was enough for life-long tinnitus.
On the other hand though, I think it's just biological imperative. Statistically, young men (up to around 25 perhaps) are simply reckless and take stupid risks. They make the best soldiers (less fear for their life), extreme sportsmen etc., but obviously some of them end up dead or disabled.
Not make light of your disability but tinnitus is extremely common and can occur because of regular every day activity. When making risk assessments this one is way down on the list of priorities if it's there at all. For some it's even an occupational hazard that they just have to accept as part of their life, however I doubt most people consider being a musician as one of the more life threatening professions.
Several high-level wingsuit flyers were profiled in a short film called "The New Birdmen". I was struck by the calm rationality most exhibited in their commentary.
But then, many insist on flying extremely close to terrain, and that's where things go sideways. I'm the type who would be perfectly content to never be closer than 10+ meters to terrain, but that's not their mindset. Several pioneers shown in the film suffered deaths, none (apparently) from equipment failure.
Are they really that much more dangerous than parachuting? I know they have more fatalities but wingsuiting is only more dangerous because people take more risks with them and fly close to the ridgeline(typically you only get into wingsuiting if you are an experienced parachute operator). Similar to in rock climbing with typical roped climbing vs. free soloing(sans ropes).
Wingsuits aren't inherently dangerous, but they're only fun if you're flying close to things, and flying close to solid objects in an impromptu aircraft with terrible aerodynamics and highly questionable control scheme is dangerous.
So yes, wingsuits when used in the way that wingsuits are almost always used are inherently dangerous.
> but they're only fun if you're flying close to things
I only rock climb but wouldn't it still be fun to be in the air for a longer time even if you are not close to objects? I think the wingsuit craze of flying near objects has more to do with being bored of the normal parachute experience.
I'd imagine if you want more hang time you'd just open your parachute earlier. I've seen videos of people wingsuiting in clear air and it looks pretty boring.
Well it's about the sensation you get, not how it looks. With a wingsuit you can drift faster so it's already something, but it's true that you fully realize the (horizontal) speed you're flying at only when you're close to others objects.
the general practitioner of wingsuiting is pushing the limits of what can be done safely. watch video after video of them do close calls near the edge of a ridgeline. most(perhaps all?) freesoloists are well below their limit(hell even honnold only freesolos well below his limit).
reminds me of:
"Have you ever sailed across an ocean?
On a sailboat surrounded by sea with no land in sight?
Without even the possibility of sighting land for days to come.
The stand of your helm of your destiny.
I want that.
I want to be in Piazza del campo in Siena.
I want another meal in Prague.
I want another bottle of wine,
and then another.
I want the warmth of a woman in a cool set of sheets,
One more night of love.
I want to stand on summits and smoke cubans and feel the sun on my face for as long as I can.
Walking the wall again , climb the tower, ride the river, stare at the stars.
I want to sit in the garden and read one more good book.
Most of all I want to sleep,
I want to sleep like I slept when I was a boy,
Give me that
Just one time" R. Reddington (The Blacklist)
Isn't "taking more risks" simply survivorship bias? A-priori, you weigh every risk and try to minimize your chances of getting hurt (physically, financially, etc). But in hindsight, realizing that nothing bad happened of course you can wish you had taken more risk.
I wonder how folks who took risks and got seriously hurt feel about this. Do they regret taking those risks, or do they regret not taking enough?
The opposite is also victim bias. The only way to calculate risk for sure without any emotional bias is to get some solid numbers per 'risky thing to do.'
I program side projects during my daily commute. Part of my routine in the morning is figuring out that 25 minute task to program during that metro ride. Fixing a bug, tweaking a feature, coding an algorithm - its always possible to find something small.
That’show I coded and maintain www.csvjson.com for example.
That's fine if: a) you can get a seat; b) your seat affords you enough elbow and leg room to type; c) your ride is smooth enough to type. My current commute includes a 40m - 1h bus ride. I get 'a' every day; I usually get 'b'; 'c' is pretty rare. When I used the train instead 'c' wasn't a problem, 'a' was difficult and 'b' was virtually non-existent.
Something relevant : I like walking. Really like. Google Maps report suggests that I walked 100 mi (160 km) in December of 2017. It takes time and I basically commute from the start point to back the same point. While one can consider this as the time wasting, I am trying to get the most out of it by : not assisting google maps for directions, finding path on my own; listening to NPR podcasts; contemplating poker hands I recently played;
I've been walking ~60km per week for a few years now to/from work and I enjoy it immensely - listening to music, talking on the phone, taking pictures, people watching... oh, and programming in my head ! Can't imagine going back to driving.
I normally end up walking about 200km per month; mostly to and from work. It’s fairly habit-forming; I really feel the need to walk at least a few km every day, these days. I don’t see it as time wasting at all.
Productive use of a gym is often the strength training equipment and specific cardio or other conditioning opportunities, as well as the environment itself.
That is: a gym is a laboratory (workspace) for improving the physical condition and performance of your body.
That's not to say you can't make poor use of a gym (or a laboratory, for that matter). Or that all conditioning must occur at a gym (labs are complemented by fieldwork). But well-used, they're a vital adjunct to a fitness regimen.
That said: if it's possible to get there under your own power (walking, cycling), so much the better.
> Google Maps report suggests that I walked 100 mi (160 km) in December of 2017.
Just to put some numbers on this, walking 4mph (a mile every 15 mins) is unusually quick. Most people will work up a real sweat. A normal pace for many people is 17 minutes per mile.
If you walked 100 miles at 4mph, that comes to 1500 minutes or 25 hours.
25 hours/month walking is a sizable chunk of time. This is fantastic if you consider it time well spent.
I listen to podcasts or audiobooks while commuting, and I figure it's roughly equivalent to sitting on my couch reading. I commute 40-60 minutes daily, so it's pretty easy to get through long works that way.
One of the reasons I love public transportation is that I get a good amount of reading time while commuting. While yes, I'd prefer a shorter commute time, getting a long period where all I can do is read has been great.
I owned a Xybernaut and a bunch of other HMDs throughout the years. Few were practical for reading and walking at the same time. (Interestingly, I've had several solutions that allowed me to do cardio on a machine while watching a movie.... and watching a movie, even a regular 2d movie in an occlusive HMD is, at least for me, super immersive and fun. None of the solutions I've tried were very robust, and they all end up breaking. If someone has a recommendation for something robust-ish that is easy to hook up to the major streaming services, I'm all ears. )
That said, I haven't looked at the current Microsoft solution; I thought it was tethered to a serious PC like the oculus. I own an Oculus and haven't yet setup a rig that lets me use it on a cardio rig.
As an aside, there is a lot of focus on the various two degrees of freedom treadmills look cool, with the 'teflon dish, felt shoes" design looking the most practical, of course, but I haven't even setup one of those yet; I don't know if there is a useful game ecosystem for them yet.
But, yeah, if there was something in the neighborhood of a kilobuck that would let me walk and read with reasonable safety, I would be super interested. I already live in an area/live a lifestyle where the 'dork factor' isn't an issue, which I think is the hardest part of solving this problem.
I'll probably be buying an oculus go (or one of the competing 'all in one' HMD products) for treadmill use, and using them for watching movies on the treadmill (watching movies on a HMD is way better supported than reading on a HMD, but that means being on a machine)
Hi slc! I walked around with a monocular hmd for a while in the first decade (until the cable broke), reading was a problem as the text was going up and down in a sinus wave - not really suitable for following the lines.
I thought about two solutions; using a hmd and overlay the text on a camera feed background with low transparency OR use RSVP for the words to stay in one place, or use both but the latter is simpler to implement.
Cycling with a monocular was not a problem, worked great, and the are now several AR ventures for cycling. These can be used for using android RSVP apps... and you look a bit more normal :-)
https://www.wareable.com/headgear/the-best-smartglasses-goog...
I remember that I was out drinking late with my friend (and now working at google) Orri Erling, he was blind and had a white stick, I held his arm on one side while on the other side I had a monocular on my head and a twiddler in my hand. We got some stares.
What I ended up doing was switching to an audio desktop (Emacspeak) and text-to-speech the articles or books I wanted to read.
I have tried the rowing machine with my GearVR, but putting a monitor in front of it is more comfortable. Even so I could try it with my Oculus or MR for a Bigscreen :-) or 360 view with some rowing video's.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-XCrq6ytQeE
RSVP, you say? I have never heard of this technology. I just did a demo app and it looks really interesting. I'll check it out. (I'm super annoyed when people name things using overlapping namespaces... I have a long rant about ip for iproute, too.)
And you say that it's compatible with the jock monocular displays? This is actually... pretty exciting.
if the display can handle 10 fps (the VR headsets are), there is no issue. That said, I found it easier to navigate, cycle and walk with no visual distraction and switch to high speed audio and leave the occasional map, graph, wikipedia entry or image for the monocular. For example, it was very nice dancing on the beach being my own VJ.
Definitely not roughly equivalent to sitting on your couch reading if you are driving. On the couch, distraction rarely ever endangers someone's life. When driving, if your attention moves from the road for even just a few seconds, that could kill.
As a bicyclist I've felt hyperaware compared against a large fraction of drivers who are clearly distracted. I imagine this is even more apparent to motorcyclists due to the higher speeds. Phones are bad, and audiobooks can clearly be distracting as well.
My suggestion if you have a long driving commute is to reduce the length of the commute, not do anything which endangers other road users. Alternatively you can switch to public transit or carpool and rotate drivers.
It seems that audiobooks are somewhere between a minor hindrance and a minor help in their effect on drivers. It seems that someone who is extremely bored is actually more likely to get into an accident.
> During simple drives, people listening to audiobooks braked faster in response to hazards. Audiobooks also helped reduce speeding, a common driver response to mental underload, the study said.
> The findings, said Trick, are particularly useful for people with long daily commutes on familiar routes or on long stretches such as rural roads.
> During complex drives with various hazards, listening to audiobooks can be an added distraction for people who are poor at multi-tasking, the study found. People able to switch easily between tasks are not negatively affected, it said.
The commute time has grown over the last few decades[1]. I wonder if commuting not on the list because the polled older Americans didn't have to commute as long.
That's a rather modest expansion: five minutes over 35+ years. Not that commute time isn't a drag, but I don't really see this being a significant factor. Particularly if you consider that the mode of commuting, the conditions, and outlier commutes are likely to have far larger impacts. Consider:
Mode: If you're commuting by train or bus point-to-point and the ride takes five minutes longer, you're not going to be much bothered. If you have to transfer or connect between multiple modes along the route, the journey is far more stressful. Similarly, highway driving with radio or audio material (or a phone) is relatively productive time, vs. stop-and-go city traffic.
Conditions: Having space to work (say on a commuter bus or rail) vs. being sardined into a city bus or urban subway makes a difference not captured in time alone.
Outliers: One pattern that likely has emerged are "marathon commuters" -- people with exceptionally long commutes. You'd need to compare the mean and median commute times to see what this trend is. It might well be that most people have the same time, but a small number have much longer commutes.
“Hardly” is a bit strong; other people might have opinions which are different from yours.
For example: I’d hate to be stuck in a train carriage for two hours, packed in with people I don’t know, maybe Underground with no internet, all because my job requires me to be in a certain place at a certain time.
That’s two hours I could have spent sleeping; with a loved one; sleeping with a loved one... you get the idea.
> Hardly a waste of time unless you're driving your own car.
So, like most Americans and thus most of people reading and commenting on HN? Also, while a train commute is way better than a car commute, being home is better than both. I read during my 40 mins subway commute and I would never want to be driving instead but I'd prefer to be reading at home for that time.
> while a train commute is way better than a car commute, being home is better than both
I personally agree, but having taken commuter rail for several months a few years ago, I noticed that quite a few people with longer commutes (~1 hour each way) seemed to really enjoy their (evening) train commute, treating it basically like a social hour at a bar. They frequently had beer. (Never saw anything like this in the morning.)
I didn't know enough people on the train to get into that, but I can see the appeal.
When you have a long commute, even by transit, it tends to crowd out other activities that you might want to partake in. I'm not talking about a 30 minute trip, but rather 2+ hours each way. It's life altering.
As someone in the early 30s that mostly wasted away the last 15 years due to anxiety, internet addiction and procrastion and unability to finish stuff: My only advise to younger ones is to work on your problems early on and focus on a stable income to survive on your own and your education. It's not getting easier and progress on these problems rewards you for years to come. If you are stuck in these loops consider taking a year off to get yourself together. I've always somehow carried on without solving any problems and things only got worse.
About a year ago I finally broke, lost my job, and have since been focused on taking a break and working on my issues.
Thank you for sharing. I sincerely, to the point that I am welling up with tears, hope you can resolve your issues, as I totally understand the feeling. Know that there are others like you and it is possible for things to improve.
Just FYI: I am not totally over my problems, but what really helped me was therapy, medication for dermatological issues that were causing me distress and insecurity, socializing with nice friends and family and completely cutting out toxic family, dramatically cutting back on drugs I was using to cope, and creating (and doing my best to stick to) a daily self-care routine, tracked via a to-do app, that includes good sleep, daily showers and grooming, and walks.
It hasn’t been perfect but it’s made a big difference and for the first time in about seven years I am feeling OK about life.
Most people regret noting living a life true to themselves, most regret working too much missing time with loved ones. Many people regret not having the courage to express their feelings.
This is from the book Top 5 regrets of the dying written by a nurse Bronnie Ware at a nursing home.
I don't believe you don't care about what you think. You must have preferences and thoughts about decisions. Sure you may have a low opinion of your own thoughts, but bouncing these ideas off other people and listening to rebuttals and criticisms of your beliefs/decision-making is useful.
Later you may feel you've become an expert in something - and then it is very important to express what you think, but also to listen to what other people say too.
If we don't do any of this we might as well be machines :)
The ideas in the post as well as the comments are a mixed bag. Case in point, we hear a lot that people say they wish they had lived more in the now, or relaxed more instead of working all the time, or given more time to family.
Well, in my opinion, for every such person there are probably hundreds who actually do that and as a result get nowhere in their careers. Family, especially an SO, to an extent looks up to you based on your success, typically, and more importantly, counts on your (e.g., financial) success. If you lived in the now and didn't succeed career-wise or financially, your SO probably would've left you long time ago, and you wouldn't have a family to begin with.
We don't hear from those people because they're "nobodys". We like to interview successful people, who get there through workaholism more or less, and we ask them what are their regrets and they tell us they wish they hadn't worked so hard. What they're really trying to say is that they could settle for a bit less success. But there's no guarantee they would've had minimum desired success if they didn't work as hard to begin with. Such successful people are simply telling you about their desire for some ideal/fantasy world, that doesn't exist, where they spent more time with family, lived more in the now, and still achieved the minimum desirable level of success ('minimum desirable' according to their own personal/subjective standards, which is probably not less than 80-90% of their actual success, e.g., someone with $400m net worth would think he could settle for $300m and be able to spend more time with family etc, but that's not how it works).
If someone interviewed any of those "nobodys" probably many of them would say they're happy with how their life went. But you, the reader of such regret lessons, have to ask yourself what do you want to do with your life. And based on that, your have to "pick" the regret-lessons that apply to you.
Yeah, I think there's a certain fallacy going on with respect to uncertainty.
It's like studying for exams.
Sometimes in school I studied for 10 hours for exams that turned out to be trivially easy. I barely needed to study at all. I could have gotten more sleep, worked out, practiced some other skill... I would have been a much happier person if I'd spent those hours on something other than school.
But then other times I studied for 10 hours for an exam, and when I saw the questions I was kicking myself for not putting in just another hour or two. The exam covered material just barely beyond what I studied, and my grade would have improved dramatically if I'd only put in a little more effort.
When I put in long hours at my job--which I don't always do--I'm not doing so because I'm mistakenly believing that working is more important than relationships or relaxation; I'm working long hours because I'm unsure about the future and I want to make sure I have some minimum level of security. Sometimes I look back and those hours feel unnecessary, but other times I realize how lucky I was to have put in all that work.
That said, I still think there's a lesson here. We should constantly step back and ask ourselves what we really want to be doing. Sometimes that means working less, and sometimes that means working more. Just because we worked 60 hours last week doesn't mean we need to work 60 hours this week, and by the same token we shouldn't get complacent just because things are going well and there's no immediate need for more effort. Some of my best decisions in life have been when I completely re-evaluated where I was at and decided to do something completely different. Sometimes that meant pursuing a passion, but other times it meant giving up on a passion to do something realistic.
"Family, especially an SO, to an extent looks up to you based on your success, typically, and more importantly, counts on your (e.g., financial) success. If you lived in the now and didn't succeed career-wise or financially, your SO probably would've left you long time ago, and you wouldn't have a family to begin with."
Jeepers, I really disagree with this and I hope it has not been your life experience. We're happy nobodies; we settled for modest jobs with modest incomes, limited hours, and good family time. We both contribute financially and have stability if not super-duper success. And I am certain neither of us "looks up to" the other in any way based on financial or career success.
>> "You might feel dumb asking questions, but you look dumber when you don't get it because you failed to ask."
That depends on having co-workers who also think this is true.
In my experience, this is not guaranteed. Frex, I used to work in that one company as a junior dev, where I was expected to know everything about the internal development processes of the dev team from day 1. Well, I hadn't taken "<that_one_company> 101" in my CS course so I had no idea, e.g. which one was the development server and how to get onto it. Still, when I asked people that information, they reacted as if I had transgressed some invisible barrier and I was taking up their time for no reason.
After a lot of this, I resolved to never ask anyone anything again. I mostly kept to it (one time I was sure someone had done something incredibly stupid that I didn't want to have to take the blame for, so I called them over to fix it themselves- and it turned out I was right). The upshot of this was that I learned a metric shit ton of things on my own, but of course the people who depended on my work being done quickly were constantly breathing dow my neck in rage.
On the bright side, once I felt I had received enough self-training at the expense of that company, I gave myself a promotion by finding another one, where I received some of the most brilliant mentoring I could ever expect, by co-workers who were incredibly relieved that a new hire was interested in learning about some of their legacy software.
But there was no downside of the anecdote you described, so it's really odd that you made that resolve.
While it can be uncomfortable (no downside) or expose that you don't know what you're expected to know (but fixes that quickly), in the majority of cases people are happy to explain their expertise.
The downside was that I spent almost two years in that first company, being treated like an incompetent idiot and developing an ulcer, before I could bail out.
I think the inefficiences you mention were primarily caused by people refusing to answer questions. I mean, it's not like I was just made to feel like a fool because I asked- people actively discouraged me from asking stuff.
I complained about that to my line manager who assured me it was OK to ask, that it was part of more senior devs' job to answer questions etc, but of course nothing changed.
Context matters. I regret time I spent when younger playing alone, but some of my happiest memories involve endless games of Doom II, DN3D, and Quake on the network my friends and I built in our dorms. A bunch of us around each computer, chatting, cheering, jeering, and just plain waiting for a go.
It's easy for each of us to look down our noses at how others spend their leisure time, but there's an important point to be made here: leisure time and wasted time are NOT THE SAME THING. Leisure is actually quite important. Grinding away constantly can lead to burnout, poor health, frayed relationships, etc. The trick is to find balance, to fill each part of your life in the most satisfying way but not to let one part overwhelm the others.
Between paid work, house/family work, exercise, etc. I work as hard as anybody else I know, and I still enjoy a good video game session. I'll be playing Horizon: Zero Dawn in a few minutes. It's a better hobby than sneering at others.
Work doesn't define humanity, but the fruits of work are what enable humans to exist.
Also, work is the only means by which we do things that can benefit others. It's all very good to be concerned with your own experience, but if you want to be helpful to a partner, a family, or a community, you have to work.
This is why work has such meaning. It makes benefits that are not purely selfish. Benefiting other people strikes me as more meaningful than simply attending to one's self, trying to make the days until death more pleasant. This selfishness is what has always troubled me about the popular hedonistic conception of meaning that's taken hold in recent decades.
Meh. Last year I spent ~500 hours playing JRPGs. Enjoyed all of that. It's only a waste of time if it's getting in the way of your ogoals. For me, I had nothing else I wanted to do with that free time.
I spent what seemed like way too much time playing video games from my youth to my early 20s. It seems like those are the days I always want to nostalgically recapture, so perhaps I was having a great time and it was well spent. I can hardly get immersed in anything that deeply these days.
Right up there with reading large amounts of fiction. I mean, one should experience life instead of sitting on a couch or wherever for hours on end, staring at printed words and immersing yourself in some other person's imagination! At the end of it, so many hours every year and you have nothing to show for it.
I think reasonable doses of fiction -- say a couple of books a month -- are useful, so long as you choose your fiction carefully. To me the best fiction is like hanging out with the coolest, smartest, and most articulate person you've never met, and letting them show you things they believe to be important.
This is not a substitute for experiencing things firsthand, but I can certainly point to many novels that shocked me into thinking about stuff differently.
Good fiction reaches you in a strongly empathic way, in a place where you're uniquely receptive to it. This is valuable for teaching things about your own life and the lives of others, which seems valuable.
My biggest waste of time has been procrastination, simply because it's avoidable. The time I spend thinking about doing stuff while staring at a screen is hard to justify in any logical sense.
The time spent commuting, standing in-line, sitting in meetings and so on may be felt like wasted time but they are activities which are, pretty much, difficult to avoid.
10 years ago I was laid back, easy to chill, hard to get work done procrastinator. And now I'm a high strung, hard to relax, always super driven work horse.
And let me tell you I'd go back to being lazy in a heartbeat. I was much less successful and poorer, but happier, calmer, and more interesting.
When I was younger I always did well at everything, winning lots of awards in physics, math, and state level awards in computers. So I was accustomed to doing well without trying. Not trying didn't work as well in college, because I had a 2.3 but that didn't bother me because I considered myself "smart". Assumed that employers would recognized I was "smart" and I'd do really well.
Then my wakeup call was getting fired from my internship, realizing I had a shitty GPA, no idea how to code, and no guarantee I would graduate, or that I wouldn't end up homeless after I did.
So every time I needed to do something and had that feeling of procrastination I'd reach down inside, imagine how much my life would be a failure if I didn't accomplish these tasks and then push. And it worked. I started getting a lot more done, my grades improved dramatically, and at my next internship I was a star.
Then it was 5 years later, I'd done well at every job I had, but I was 25 pounds heavier, had stomach issues, my memory was terrible, I hadn't thought about anything but work in years, and my cortisol levels were abnormally high. I decided that I needed to slow down and I can't.
Success is addicting, and now interwoven with my identity. And I've found that it's very hard to slow down. And when I do I start to get depressed when I don't do as well on projects as I'm accustomed to so I usually end up revving back up again promising myself I'll slow down for the next one.
Not to say procrastinating is always great, but not procrastinating isn't just a bucket of pros without any cons.
That's great if you are actually able to enjoy the time spent procrastinating. But when your procrastinating ends up with me, high strung, hard to relax, hard to get work done procrastinator, then it's not that great.
If you marry, you will regret it; if you do not marry, you will also regret it; if you marry or if you do not marry, you will regret both; whether you marry or you do not marry, you will regret both. Laugh at the world's follies, you will regret it; weep over them, you will also regret it; if you laugh at the world's follies or if you weep over them, you will regret both; whether you laugh at the world's follies or you weep over them, you will regret both. Believe a girl, you will regret it; if you do not believe her, you will also regret it; if you believe a girl or you do not believe her, you will regret both; whether you believe a girl or you do not believe her, you will regret both. If you hang yourself, you will regret it; if you do not hang yourself, you will regret it; if you hang yourself or you do not hang yourself, you will regret both; whether you hang yourself or you do not hang yourself, you will regret both. This, gentlemen, is the sum of all practical wisdom.
My biggest regret is not taking my health seriously when I was younger. It turned out my nagging issues with eating were more serious than I thought, the gravity having been cloaked by the gradual onset of symptoms. By the time I was finally diagnosed with celiac, I had been suffering from debilitating issues that harmed my ability to consistently work for well over a decade. The problems with celiac shaped my life and even personality in negative ways, and I’ve been left with chronic problems related to nerve damage that may never heal.
I'm 29 years old, and the biggest blocker in my recent life has been the regret of wasted time. I left my job in late 2013 to travel and work on my own projects, but the project-making has been very slow and sporadic at best. In aggregate, I feel like I've literally wasted about 4 years of my life — just dumped into the trash — and I don't know how to deal with that fact. (At least people with failed startups have "the journey" to learn from. Not the case when you literally can't get any work done.) Part of me feels that I should go get a real job at this point, but a) I'm pretty sure I'm now behind engineers in my age group by half a decade, and b) it will feel like giving up on my ambitions. These thoughts keeps me up at night.
I wish there was some magic phrase that would convince me it's not too late to catch up. If we have aspirations, how do we stop comparing ourselves to other people?
Different people appreciate different things and to different degrees. What I really enjoy you might very well hate. So it does not make much sense to compare your life (and achievements) to that of others - there is no objective metric to go by!
Next time you stay awake, go get a piece of paper and pen, and think back on your travels and current life. What things have you learned that you enjoy doing (especially things that surprise you)? What things have your learned that you don't enjoy (especially things that are often considered desirable/good)?
From there you might be able to come up with some guidelines for how to chose your path forward.
And you will probably realize that your traveling years has taught you a lot about the most important thing - yourself!
Never ever regret making a decision that you thought would make you happier. The fact that it didn’t work out like you thought is nothing to regret. that’s life. It turns out, with the benefit of hindsight, that maybe staying a traditional career path would have been a better choice — but you only know that because of the journey you’ve taken. There was no other way for you personally to have learned that. Now you’re 4 years older and you know much more about who you are and the type of life to want to live. Lucky for you, you get to make the choice between your ambitions and a traditional career again, this time with more knowledge that will hopefully lead to a better decision.
That said, don’t discount your ambitions — sometimes a poor, unsuccessful life spent in pursuit of something beautiful is more happy than a traditionally successful life in pursuit of nothing at all.
To be honest, I really suck at traveling. It was a great experience to live in so many different cities around Europe, but there weren't many actual activities involved. Mostly looking around, going on long walks, and eating local food. Nothing like those Instagram travelbloggers who travel densely and intensely. Frankly, I barely even talked to anyone.
The years weren't a total loss, since I did release a reasonably complex tablet app (with $10k sales) plus a bunch of smaller, less profitable ones. But it took me 3-4 times as long to develop them as it would have any competent engineer, at least based on the stuff that gets posted to HN.
I still want to keep working on myself and break through to the other side of productivity, but sometimes it feels like I'm just circling the drain. My personality is such that I can lift my head one day and find that entire months have disappeared out from under me.
> In order to let the past go, you must forgive yourself officially. Feel the embarrassment or shame one final time. Really feel it throughout your body. ... Finally, make the decision to forgive yourself and do it. It helps to even say it out loud. From now on, it's OK. You are forgiven.
This is inane. I'm reminded of Mark Wahlberg "forgiving himself" for beating the old Vietnamese man blind.
I know I'll regret work, but right now I don't know a good way out of it...
I just see two paths: working where the money is or trying to get by with things I'm passionate about.
I'm quite fine with my current job, but for it to be more of my passion, it would have to include more art and/or science and preferably not be 40h/week + commute and breaks.
If I were able to live my life anew, In the next I would try to commit more errors. I would not try to be so perfect, I would relax more. I would be more foolish than I've been, In fact, I would take few things seriously. I would be less hygienic. I would run more risks, take more vacations, contemplate more sunsets, climb more mountains, swim more rivers. I would go to more places where I've never been, I would eat more ice cream and fewer beans, I would have more real problems and less imaginary ones.
I was one of those people that lived sensibly and prolifically each minute of his life; Of course I had moments of happiness. If I could go back I would try to have only good moments. Because if you didn't know, of that is life made: only of moments; Don't lose the now. I was one of those that never went anywhere without a thermometer, a hot-water bottle, an umbrella, and a parachute; If I could live again, I would travel lighter.
If I could live again, I would begin to walk barefoot from the beginning of spring and I would continue barefoot until autumn ends. I would take more cart rides, contemplate more dawns, and play with more children, If I had another life ahead of me.
But already you see, I am 85, and I know that I am dying.
Edit: Not sure who the author is. I've seen it attributed to Jorge Luis Borges, but am pretty sure that is incorrect.