Also, playing guitar. I'm hearing impaired, and my audiologist told my parents I could never be in the band at school, so they never pressed me to take guitar or piano lessons. I wish I had learned piano as a kid, because I love music so, so much (despite my hearing loss). That said, playing guitar is one of my favorite things ever. It's so cathartic. I'm really bad at it, but just playing helps melt away the stress of my life.
Also, when I was in college, I dated this gym rat for awhile. She told me one day, "On days when I don't feel like going to the gym, I tell myself to do it for five minutes. If I do it for five minutes and still am not feeling it, then I give myself permission to leave." Then a few seconds later, she said, "I never leave after five minutes."
I've adopted that outlook for almost everything. I don't want to go for a run? I'll run for five minutes. If I still don't want to run, I can stop. I never stop and always run the whole route. If I'd rather stay home and watch TV than accept an invitation to happy hour with coworkers, I'll do happy hour for five minutes. If I don't like it, I can make up an excuse and leave. I usually wind up staying the whole time. This outlook has gotten me to do dozens of things I'd never do: get certified as a scuba diver, take a trip to Peru, run a half marathon, audition for a play, and so on. It's a game-changer, for me.
That seems like it's missing the point, though. When I don't want to go running, say, it's the actual getting ready and starting to run that I don't like. If I have gone through 95% of the effort to get ready and get into that whole headspace and started doing it, it's really easy to just keep it up.
Ie it's not the "lifting weights" part of the gym that I don't want to do, it's the "getting out of bed" part.
She is my everything, and though as a GF she was that too, marriage is just deeper.
Many of my single/unmarried friends don't have the trust and support that I have. I try to tell them that 'pulling the trigger' is not with a gun aimed at your head, but more of the starter's pistol in a 3-legged-race; it's fun. Yes, we have issues, just like all humans. But as we have both grown and changed, holding each other up is something I can't believe I used to not have.
Many 'millenials' seem to view marriage as a capstone to their pyramid. Get 'a degree', get 'a career', find 'the one', fall 'in love', etc. That's wrong, marriage a cornerstone you build a life together on top of. And yes, I am lucky, I know it, and I love her even more as a result.
Maybe readers can extend this to any committed relationship, but I highly recommend taking the time to find that person and jumping in when you are only 70% certain of the commitment ( about 1 - 1/e, for the math folks). Don't wait, just love.
For us, and for so many of my friends, it was hard to get over whatever big life thing seemed to stand in the way of getting married. "I just want to [finish my PhD, get a promotion, start my next big project, figure my life out 100%] before getting married." My consistent advice to them is don't wait! Your partner should be there to help you in your goals, not to drag you down! It'll be so much easier to finish your thesis, advance in your career, and figure out life when you're doing together in a position of strength.
Also people make the mistake of thinking getting married will change things for the better. It never fixes issues.
However, marriage made our relationship way deeper and stronger compared to just living together. Even though we committed to being life partners before legally marrying.
(I'm talking about marriage here, not having a wedding - sometimes people seem to confuse the two.)
Holy cow, will I ever echo that. I mention it in another comment, but to be clear, marriage is work. Again, it's a cornerstone, not a capstone, you have to build the house now.
(Another piece of advice: In an argument, you are both correct at the same time. This is because you are co-owners and not co-workers)
Marriage, for us, was a big deal. That commitment was heavy at the time. Breaking up with a GF, even one you lived with for years, is not too terrible (depending on local laws) outside of the emotional turmoil. Where we are, divorce is a nightmare of legal issues, time, money, and the emotional turmoil, let alone those with kiddos. Ending a marriage is a lot of hard work in a 'raw' time, and that weighed heavily on us both. I guess we were scared of that 'level' of love.
That said, I am so glad we did it and want to kick my younger self for waiting so long. She helped me through all the weight of marriage, the wedding, and even today we lift each other. Marriage, like all things, takes practice to be good at, and a lot of work. But I wouldn't want anyone else to shoulder the loads with.
For us, this weight has strengthened our backs.
I know it's not for everyone, and that is OK! Y'all do y'allselves! Be happy and love the way you need to love! Be careful on separating 'want' and 'need' though. For myself, I have no idea why I didn't do it sooner, knowing what I know now. I guess I was unsure of the amount of responsibility I could handle. With her by my side, there is no amount of anything I cannot get through.
I liken it to a sports team. You can enjoy wins, but when your team wins or loses, you savor it a lot more.
Marriage is not about having more stuff or winning in life. But you enjoy what you have more, and it absorbs the lows in life.
There's also a saying in entrepreneurship - you need a cofounder to get places because it keeps you emotionally fortified when things get bad. Marriage does that function. Marriage lets you bounce ideas off someone. You can do so with a girlfriend or regular friends, but it's not the same as sharing with someone who is equally invested in your life.
Self acceptance of that was a big change for me.
I kid. I'm in the same boat. People exhaust me. I often tell people who ask me to come do something "I'm peopled out." After a while they get it. My better extraverted friends never stop asking, though, for which I am thankful because I occasionally do like to be social and who better to be social with than an extrovert[0].
[0] They get me and fill in all the awkward silences.
But it can be slightly more complicated. Personally, I want the invites to keep coming, but I also want to reject 75% or more of them (due to having accepted the fact that I'm an introvert). If people invite you out, and you always say "no", then at some point they'll stop inviting you.
It's a bit like the story (Dr Jordan) Peterson tells about rats. If a big one invites a small one to play, the small one will only continuously accept the invitations if the big one lets it win 25% of the time, IIRC. Being social is an iterated game, so you have to say "yes" enough to satisfy the other(s). That is, unless you live in the mountains and want to be by yourself.
I was up late finishing a large programming assignment for class, when inexplicably at 3 am, my code stopped compiling with a super generic error message.
Turns out I had somehow added a random character at the top line, but it took me the next 1-2 hours being dumbfounded, confused, over-tired and frustrated before I found the problem.
It would have been a 60 second fix with a simple diff against the repo version.
After that day, I learned how to use svn and always start every project (no matter how small) inside some type of version control system.
2: Startup. I wanted to start my own business my whole life, and I waited to try until I had enough of a plan, enough personal savings for a runway, and until the kids weren't toddlers anymore. I wish I had done it a lot sooner, before having kids, and with someone else's money.
Yes, those two kinda contradict each other. :) I don't know how I'd resolve it, were I to do it again. Not sure I would do it any different, my takeaway is just that in both cases I waited because of fears that turned out to be only fear.
Side note that kids start spending time away from parents when they become teenagers. That's happening to me now, and I am slowly gaining extra free time. Half the time I still want to spend my free time with the kids. But I'd assume that the younger someone is post-kids, the more energy and options they have for starting new things with that free time. I'm just entering my forties and glad I'm not starting to have kids right now. It might have been a little nicer to start earlier just so we could have hit this point while we were younger.
It's just indescribable to be able to share something new with your child. Taking them to a local park or into the city brings me more joy than traveling the world once did. The joys feel less fleeting.
I still hope to get back to traveling, but I really don't feel like it's been a sacrifice as much as a trade where the thing I got was secretly worth well more than what it cost.
The answer came in many parts:
- We bring the kids with us a lot. Some of the fear was mental friction about the difficulty of hauling kids around. Yeah, it takes a little more work, but as long as I do that work, I bring them along and can still go where I want.
- We sometimes take turns parenting to allow each other some freedom. I can buy time to work on my hacking projects and music tomorrow by watching the kids today. For me, this didn't change that much from my relationship with my wife, where we would make similar choices to invest some time with each other.
- We hire babysitters sometimes. (But movie night did go from a very cheap date before kids to a very expensive night after kids...)
- I take more stock of how much time I waste. For example, watching TV/Netflix is fun, but I can choose to sacrifice that here and there and buy time to do other more meaningful things.
- My motivations changed after having kids, and I have the freedom to spend time with them. Certain kinds of socializing became less important to me, which frees up some time.
- We plan ahead more often. Not a bad thing, what freedom meant in some cases was the freedom to not plan, but if I plan ahead and commit to things, I can still do what I want.
Be careful generalizing - this really depends on your life situations (including income/savings) and preferences.
For example, out of both our sets of parents there is only one (my MIL) that I'd ever want my hypothetical children to be around for any more than maybe an hour visit once a year, and she lives a 4 hour drive away. So there is pretty much zero family support for childrearing for us, which is a big factor in our choice to avoid childbearing.
I feel I have to preemptively defend my choice to keep my hypothetical children from their hypothetical grandparents - they are domestic emotional and physical abusers, substance abusers, mentally ill, reckless and drunk drivers, conflict seekers, emotionally unstable, behave socially inappropriately, don't respect boundaries, and create a toxic environment to be in. I grew up with that shit - I would only subject my worst enemy to it.
To be clear, the question was about personal experience, and I'm only sharing my own experience and not suggesting mine works for anyone else. Clearly your personal experience is very different from mine, and different choices are in order.
FWIW, I was a 12 hour drive from all grandparents when my first was born, and living in San Francisco. We didn't have any grandparent support, and even after moving closer, we haven't had a lot. What we have done is hire babysitters now and then, and also play and travel with our kids a lot. The realization that my fears about freedom before kids was unfounded didn't really depend on having family support.
There's a reason I included income/savings specifically in life situations.
>not feel like you need to defend your choice to anyone, you have all the right in the world to deal with the family that was inflicted on you in any way you see fit and without worrying what other people think.
We live in a very judgemental society when it comes to childbearing, child rearing, and parenthood. Parents always get the benefit of the doubt, pretty much no matter what. Denying access to grandchildren is considered extremely cruel. If I didn't give a good reason then people think negatively of me. That's just the society we live in and what we value as a society. Our culture of valuing parents to martyr themselves plays into it. Even the word you used in the GP shows this - "selfish."
I see why you think so, but I hope you can accept that my use of "selfish" was not a judgement on parenting vs not parenting. I think a lot of the freedoms I want are selfish on their own without respect to my family. I am okay with being selfish, and most of what I do is selfish. My top point was I still get to be mostly selfish, with or without children.
You're absolutely right that there is some collective narrative around parenting, and even if my language was part of that narrative, I would encourage not framing it that way if you're worried about what people think. I don't think of myself as a martyr in any way, but it's a true fact that I do make some personal sacrifices to have kids. I also make personal sacrifices to have a job and to own a house. Each of my choices come with their own consequences. I was overly worried about those personal sacrifices with kids, and I'm saying that they were less burdensome than I anticipated. If anything, my experience supports the idea that society's narrative is over-stated.
Anyway, using fairly extreme language like "martyr" to push back on that subtle built-in prejudice I may or may not have seems designed to escalate feelings and unlikely to result in a cultural shift or to the kind of sensitivity you want. I'm absolutely not trying to hurt your feelings by sharing my experience, and so I hope you can give my language the benefit of the doubt rather than think my motivations are biased against you, intentionally or unintentionally.
Now I only use e-mail on my laptop. I do have it installed on my phone, but it is only used when a real priority comes up.
For example, if I feel lonely because my friends didn't invite me to the party, don't blame them. Loneliness is my feeling, so I should do something about it. i.e. Go out and do something that I like, invite some other friends over, whatever... If I don't take any action, blaming other people for my feelings won't change how I feel.
For buying a house, I latched onto the idea that I needed a 20% down payment so I wouldn't have to pay for mortgage insurance so I was trying to save like crazy. Meanwhile, the property values were going through the roof and I realized that I'd always be chasing that 20%. I sat down and ran some numbers with a mortgage lender and that made everything a lot clearer. I could have bought a place two or three years earlier and been making money on the property value with essentially the same amount of savings. Probably not true in every area though.
Kind of the same thing with grad school. I needed a break from school after undergrad, so I took a few years. Work experience is great, but I hit a career ceiling in terms of being seen as "qualified" for certain opportunities. I should have just gone back and started taking classes much sooner.
With embedded systems, I can still use my EE background to get my hands on hardware and I'm learning enough software skills to deliver much more professional software whenever I need to.
As a EE, I knew how to code but never got a lot of formal software training so learning git, focusing on my modular code, etc. has been really nice.
That said, I might have bought sooner had I realized the mind shift that happens with ownership. Want to do something about storage space? Drop a grand at ikea and put in semi permanent shelving. I would never think about dropping that kind if money on a rental.
One weekend, a friend and I flattened and recycled every box in that garage. I bagged up every messy bit of trash, bought new furniture to help organize my things, and I feel like I can relax again in my own home. It was a problem I never knew was harming me, but since that weekend, I've been happier than I have been for several years.
I organise an event for people who run agencies in London (www.agencysummit.co.uk). I use bots to find relevant people on LinkedIn, and then pay somebody on Fiverr to find their email addresses. Then, I put them into Reply.io and send short two sentence emails asking people if they'd like to check out the event.
It works. Two or three times a day, I get push notifications telling me somebody I've never met has bought a ticket.
Without a cold outreach system like this, there's no way I'd be able to run this business.
https://ico.org.uk/for-organisations/guide-to-pecr/electroni...
Literally everything in this world is easier with partners you can trust. Because of this I do everything with every others now.
* Real Estate - Find people you want to live with and split the cost. Everyone wins.
* Friendships - These are people who can emotionally support you, teach you, mentor you, etc.
* Marriage - For obvious reasons.
---
I'm attempting to "split everything". So far I split rent, my phone bill, all utilities, Netflix, Google Play, etc. People are rightfully concerned about the potential downside to such partnership, but I realize now, more than ever that somehow, paradoxically the more you want partners the better it will work out. The key is that you should try to make it so that all people involved have similar stake. All for one, one for all, so to speak.
TLDR: Life is a multiplayer game. Find your players immediately.
I can't imagine how awful it feels to wear cheap earbud headphones in that noise, yet most passengers do.
And blocking the shithole site Reddit until I didn't have the urge to check it.
I use that free time for reading, coding, cleaning, cooking, and running.
Also if you are obese, you need to fix that sooner rather than later.
Money aside, the biggest opportunity cost of education is time. Looking back on my undergrad, I spent an extra year trying to edge out a BS degree when everyone around me was telling me to take the BA in CS and settle for that. In the moment, I felt that the BA would hinder my job prospects. Now that I've been out for a year and a half, I realize that I kind of wasted a year in terms of time. I probably would have been in the exact same place I am now if I had just decided to graduate with what I had at the time.
And, to add further, I ended up earning a BA anyways. But that's another rant.
There are other costs too like dealing with unnecessary mental stress of job scarcity, arbitrary deadlines, arrogant and self-absorbed people.
But time is very easy to overlook as well.
Curiously enough I took one of them last weekend and tried to digitize it into Evernote, via a photo. But I didn't like the final format, and it felt like a ton of repetitive work to get a single notebook in. So I put this aside.
(I imagine you can probably extend the same reasoning to many things, but for me, it was bin bags.)
> I make $3000 a month committing cybercrime
EDIT: AFAIK a decent threat hunter or RE can earn about 3x that legally in the US.
yes, that is a low amount of money in the US but in a place like greece, you would be doing pretty well. (only know because I visited this past summer) I just cannot fathom how any of that money can be 'taken' and spent with any conscious at all. but I suppose he/she is not alone...
Same goes for cyber-crime. I want to be on the good side of cyber, and I can't do that if I'm a criminal. I also don't want to live my whole life looking over my shoulder over fear of something I did in the past. This happened to malwaretech and they're not even sure he actually committed the crime.
Stopped eating added sugar and refined carbohydrates.
I used to do it when I was younger, but took a break for about 6 years. A year later still trying to catch up from that lost fitness.
I believe that my quality of life would have been significantly better if I had started those habits earlier in my money-earning years.
It’s just a shame that desktop YNAB isn’t developed anymore. I will hold onto YNAB4 until it falls apart.
Why yes that is how you can make me try it out!
But at $20 for a unlimited lifetime license, it seems affordable enough for me to want to try using it with my SO.
I've tried giving copies to friends who live paycheck to paycheck but no one can bite the bullet of manually tracking everything.
- Laptop about to fail (Battery less than 10min, out of disk space)
- Calendar
- Site reliability alerts
Similarly I hide things like menu/tasks bars by default and just toggle them in for the rare cases I need some information from there.
It is just such a pleasant experience to have 100% of the screen be used by stuff relevant to the task at hand and only allow very specific distractions. It is a bit less pleasant at times to make it clear to some coworkers, that just because the company uses a chat system and project management tools with live updates, that not everyone has to respond to anyone immediately.
Physics in particular has been oddly life changing. At some point I think we all look for some purpose or meaning in life. I found it in discovering how little I truly understood about our universe and how bizarre and illogical a universe we truly live in. The mystery and intrigue of our universe leaves me with that child like enthusiasm and interest for discovering ever more.
I mean understanding something relatively simple like time dilation, and its implications, is something that is sufficient to upset one's entire view of the universe. Or even very simple things that we all learn in high school but mostly take for granted such as the beautiful interaction in energy conversion and conservation - and again the implications of such. On that topic the nature of energy itself. Could most people describe energy to a person with no knowledge of physics? And then you can start getting into truly bizarre things which I suppose is an appropriate synonym for quantum mechanics. And this is all just a random sampling of one specific area. Understanding things on a deeper level, and the interaction between all of our physical systems - it just creates a very interesting and exciting universe that I'm happy to simply seek to learn more of. Prior to pursuing physics more seriously, I did not have any clue how little I knew. And it's the sort of subject where the more I learn the more I understand how little I know. Fun stuff!
I have had Feyman's lectures sitting on my bookshelf for well over a year now, and hope it won't always be in my "someday" bucket.
After that I turned to more 'big picture' stuff to try to at least get a survey of the breadth of knowledge. Like you mention the Feynman Lectures are great for this. You can also find them online [1] which may be more convenient. "A Brief History of Time" is also a phenomenal big picture look at cosmology, which is my current primary interest.
Perhaps the best resource of all, and what I'm currently working through, is Leonard Susskind's "The Theoretic Minimum." I first saw this as a book. It's essentially a physics overview intended for those with a solid mathematical background, but without much formal education in physics. The book is excellent, an even better resource for this is the site [2] for it. It has extensive coverage and lectures on all major topics. The only downside is the lack of questions or material to test your understanding.
Ultimately, I think the most important thing is to find something that draws you in. From there everything is easy. Take a weekend sometime and really dig into something that fascinates you. Time dilation in general, the twin paradox, black holes and their funkiness at the event horizon, the two slit experiment in quantum mechanics, etc. These are all things with massive amounts of information available that can really draw you in.
[1] - http://www.feynmanlectures.caltech.edu/ [2] - http://theoreticalminimum.com/courses
I wished I started learning music, especially reading music and music theory when I was a child. Now that I'm old, I realize that neuroplasticity is a bitch to fight against. Thank God I learned another language as a child, and a tonal language at that.
For example: getting a mortgage or paying taxes are relatively complex processes with alot of moving parts: tasks, documents, deadlines, etc.
You make a Kanban and divide it up into tasks and a pipeline and notes for each tasks status.
Trello is what I use but there's other tools as well.
Holy crap it makes your life easier.
Techwise: Moving away from piles of hacked up bash scripts and fully embracing an 'infrastructure as code' mindset (and the associated tools)
Side note: if I had held the Amazon stock I sold to start my second company and focused on retirement the past 15 years I would be (semi) retiring right about now.
Personal financial tracking - budgeting and tracking everything in Mint or YNAB. Going from "I spend about this much total money per month" to "I spend this month in each of these categories" was big as far as having confidence in my finances.
Similarly, setting up a retirement account. You should do this as soon as you're over 18 and have a full-time job, no matter whether your salary is low.
Another was Quitting Facebook. I tried a bunch of times but wasn't successful but I have been Facebook free for a few months now. I might turn it back on just to get a backup of my data for my own data science projects but I would immediately turn it off.
Yet another keeping a paper notebook with a pen with me at all times. Some notes are better written.
EDIT:
It would be nice to look back at a decade of blogging, but I only started like ~3 years ago. It has many, many benefits: Practicing written communication, organizing one's thoughts, build up credibility, learn things in-depth by teaching etc.
Now that I think about it, actually, publishing anything in general. Working out in the open. I often kept side project to myself. I should have just open sourced that (did that for some projects after the fact).
To explain: savings is great and smart. But I never evolved past university frugal living. I recently realised that I was living like a student despite a good salary. So I bought some nice furniture and other things. I didn't realise I was missing out on reduced life friction.
[0] https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/block-site/eiimnmi...
[1] https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/its-time-to-end-t...
Quitting a job. Firing a client. Breaking up with a girl. Talking with recruiters I don't like.
It never gets better. Just cut it when there's enough evidence to support.
Followed by less interest in work/money, more interest in family.
Money still matters, of course, but I'm much more in tune with how much I really need.
You don't know how compounding works, unless you actually have some skin in the game and see it work.