Comment by oneshot908 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by oneshot908 | Hacker News Reader

I relocated out of the bay area in 2016-2017 and it was the happiest year of my adult life. I think Silicon Valley has a zero sum culture and having returned here for personal reasons but otherwise against my best judgment, I cannot wait to GTFO for keeps.

I am really really good (perhaps top 10 or so worldwide) at one thing, and pretty good at a couple other things. If I didn't have that, I think I would feel utterly worthless in 2019. If I extrapolate to most of America, wow, I get why they elected who they elected.

Something has gone very wrong here. And I am stymied as to how to fix it because neither political party, which gets to set the agenda every 4 years, seems to grasp what has gone wrong.

But when I travel abroad, I am happy. I see can-do cultures that have far less than western nations, but are so inspiringly optimistic to do more, that I don't want to come back to America. I want to set down roots and help them knock it out of the park. And I am getting close to doing exactly that. Doing so would shatter my personal life, but I suspect if 2020 continues what we started in 2016, I will follow through on what my inner voice is telling me to do.

> I am really really good (perhaps top 10 or so worldwide) at one thing, and pretty good at a couple other things. If I didn't have that, I think I would feel utterly worthless in 2019.

With the internet, our kind of global culture and the kind of "attention economy" that we have, there is a bit of a culture where if you're not the best at something, and the first to do it, you're irrelevant. The world has changed, and so have we. A lot of the people leading the tech field today were kids in the 1980s and 1990s, just playing with computers for fun. In the pre-internet days, you couldn't just publish code online and immediately get a lot of attention for it. Sure, you'd be proud of yourself if you did something cool, but showing people might involve getting someone to come to your house.

I struggle with this too. When I work on a personal project, I want it to have impact, to be world class if possible. That creates pressure. I sometimes forget to just try and have fun. Over a year ago, I had to abandon my main open source project because it was reaching about 8 regular contributors, and just reviewing pull requests after coming home from work felt like another job on top of my job and I was like... Fuck no, I can't do this, when I come home from work, I actually need to rest and have a life of my own.

I'm not a fan of "who they elected" myself, but I don't really see what politics has to do with any of this

yeah, the solution comes from individuals, not from politicians

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