Comment by neilsharma | Hacker News Reader

Comment by neilsharma | Hacker News Reader

1) More high quality news analysis content. Think NASA Earth Observatory, The Information, or the best articles you've ever read, and put them behind a paywall. Consistently making top notch content is hard, but I suspect it can be easier if writers are paid good wages to explore their interests and the news industry decouples itself from advertising. I'd pay for it, and I suspect that over time, enough people would.

2) A personalized learning resource. None of this AI adaptive learning nor passive MOOC lecture watching. Get people who know what I want to know (usually job-related skills) and have them sit down and teach me things 2-3x a month. I want structured, supportive, long-lasting mentorship from people who genuinely want to see me grow.

3) A doctor that proactively cares about my health. I hurt my shoulder, but aside from a 30 min physical therapy appointment once every other month, I'm on my own. My posture sucks despite having a split keyboard, standing desk, and doing exercises to fix weak muscles. I need someone to make me diligent about my own well being, day after day. I want workout buddies. I want someone who will pick up yoga just so I'd have someone to do it with. I can get more health benefits from a concerned friend than a licensed medical professional.

4) Life training. Working in tech makes me feel detached from humanity. I want to be a more loving person (I am one, but the culture distorts things and makes me think about my skills/career/startups/work/money too much and life too little). I want someone to help me take 8 weeks off a year to spend time with family and go on vacations. I want someone to help me be a better parent when I have kids (my parents aren't great role models). I want someone to remind me to appreciate all the things I have in my life.

What products I use, how I store my data, etc are just sweating the small stuff. Health, education, happiness, sense of community, etc -- fix my big, recurring problems that truly matter to me as a human. Go above and beyond to do so and pay way more attention to detail than most software products do today. Relentlessly follow up on everything. Keep it human and personal.

These are probably not the answers you wanted to hear, but these are needs that grow bigger and are usually unaddressed over time.

3, 4, and the emotional support aspect of 2 read like you are pining for matrimony.

haha perhaps matrimony would address some of the issues (I am starting to approach THAT age). I'm just a big picture guy and over the years, I don't think that tech has helped that much in addressing some of the more fundamental life problems. Some exceptions (skype to chat with relatives abroad, facebook/social apps to a small extent, my hospital finally creating a website, youtube fitness tutorials, etc). Tech can totally help solve these problems, but there's a ceiling I hit on all of those categories that require me to continuously exert a high amount of willpower to break.

What I want someone to "build" is the cultural environment to make it easier for me to be proactive about my wants. I want a sense of community with my city. I want friends who make themselves more available (and to be one myself). Maybe these are the things that an idyllic small city supposedly offers that big cities do not? I don't know why people don't really talk about these topics often, but maybe it's just me.

Large cities rather self-consciously (as any NYC comedian will tell you) run on the razor's edge of minimum comfort for the maximum amount of productive people, ruthlessly filtering for those who can withstand the continual mental, physical, and social penalties with vitality to spare.

I don't want to sound preachy, but having felt nearly identically to what you've described in #4, I can tell you that I've found my answer in meditation. It's allowed me to slow down life and realize what's really important. It's hard to get caught up in those ego-driven things now that my sense of self and ego has so inexorably changed.

It has also helped with my posture too.

glad meditation has helped ya -- i think everyone gets different things about it. It helps me slow down and be more present instead of worrying about all those career things. It makes me feel a little more connected to the world. It helps me reflect on who I want to be.

I am working on #2. There has to be some sort of incentive for the mentors for this to be sustainable. As a mentee what can you provide to the mentor? What do you think will make this relationship be sustainable?

This area is interesting to me - both to learn and teach. In the past I've explored proffered solutions and found them too heavy and too slow. I'm interested in helping make something that has low friction and is more peer to peer - ping me if I can help but I'm sadly reticent to take the lead.

I feel like the best mentor/mentee relationships aren't based on incentives, but a friendship/concern for one another. A small handful of senior ex-colleagues who I've worked with genuinely look out for me and my career interests. It takes time from their day and often unrewarded intros to their network. Aside from goodwill (and maybe a referral bonus if it leads to a job), there isn't much incentive for them.

If we treat it as transactional, then certain relationships will never foster. For example, if some high school kid got admission to a university I went to a few years ago and wanted my perspective on how to make the most of his education, I have no discernible incentive whatsoever to answer (assuming he can't pay me). Giving a quick response is either useless or hurtful without taking the time to understand his needs and wants. But that kid could probably benefit tremendously if someone took him under their wing.

I think some people want to feel they have accumulated a lot of skills and experience and simply want an outlet to give back in a manner that feels effective to them.

Maybe universities can tell their alumni network that if people mentor new students, they get access to premium recruitment opportunities on campus? Or cities can give tax rebates to people who take an underprivileged youth under their wing. Employers can promote more externship/shadowing opportunites and give invites to the employees. Or maybe senior positions at companies should have "train junior employees" as one of their top job objectives, and alter promotion criteria to bias towards that.

As I've been told by people who helped me, you don't pay back, you pay forward.

When you're young, you need the help. When you've grown thanks to that you give it forward to the younger ones.

For #4 check out The School of Life: https://www.theschooloflife.com

> doing exercises to fix weak muscles

What kind of exercises? If you're not doing e.g. deadlifts, rows, facepulls, squats, etc., you're likely wasting your time. There's no better way to increase overall stability and muscle tonus than hypertrophy. And there's no better way to drive hypertrophy than progressive overload with weighted movements.

I was physically most at risk after I had put on 50lbs of muscle and was routinely breaking lifting goals:

Too heavy benchpress / lifting under fatigue to promote growth --> high risk of accidents.

Too little stretching and lots of heavy squats /deadlifts made my back very tight and prone to injury.

A workout biased towards a high back:chest ratio didn't offset all the time I spent at a computer, so my shoulders would round forward but now my muscles/tendons are even bulkier and have more friction with my joints

I realized if I'm not strict with correct form, range of motion, rest between sets, proper progressions, stretching, etc, hypertropic workouts are more dangerous than beneficial. And if I am strict with everything, I can recover and get stronger at a much healthier pace even if I never lift more than half the weight I used to (just slow the tempo down). I might not get as muscular as before, but I got no benefits from being bulky.

I have a very similar experience with #3. I feel like so much about care for chronic injuries is super sub-optimal.

Almost reads like a list of reasons to move back to mom's house.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com