Comment by dasyatidprime | Hacker News Reader

Comment by dasyatidprime | Hacker News Reader

Okay, sure, but: many physical attributes, social perceptions, and pervasive mental habits probably do become increasingly solidified, even if fatalism about it is counterproductive. Sure, there's plenty of late bloomers, but how many of them do you get from a broken late starting point, and how many do you get from people who worked slowly and methodically and did the right slow things earlier on, taking care of their minds, bodies, social connections, growing their resources, gaining experiences, broadening and/or fine-tuning their abilities, and so on? Do fit/rich/popular/etc. 35-year-olds regularly get there from a truly broken (including internally!) state at 31, or is it more that they actually took all the advice about regular exercise/investing/graciousness/etc. back when they were 25, kept taking it, and maybe despaired in the moment about it not seeming to work while actually stacking up tons of invisible long-term bonuses?

I'm trying to come off about a decade of poor habits myself, due to a number of factors which are undoubtedly my responsibility but which it's not clear whether I could have realistically avoided. I've had some minor successes but have never really stabilized so far, including in all the little things like the above. I don't usually see this case handled clearly in the “it's okay to be a late bloomer!” inspiration crowd. (More personally, it doesn't help that the things I most want to do in life probably require being exceptional in specific ways that I'm not sure I can predict in advance and not just “successful” in a generic sort of way, and beyond a certain limited extent, I don't consider the wanting-what-I-have approach to be a viable one (except insofar as having that attitude on the face of things may make it more likely to reach my original desires anyway).)

I'm trying to convince myself to try anyway and it's hellishly difficult.

> I'm trying to convince myself to try anyway

What else are you going to do?

You are where you are right now, and you can either put in the effort to make your life better or you can give up now.

The time's going to pass anyway, you might as well make the most of it.

If that worked enough of the time, articles like the OP wouldn't get written much. Emotionally speaking, giving up is actually a pretty sticky idea! The potential for putting a pile of effort in, finding it wasn't really enough, and being confronted afterward with all the things you did wrong with no chance to correct them now is paralyzing; it's “safer” in a way to not try, never know, and only experience the one, easily-dampened gnawing failure of having wandered off the path, rather than having a hundred different failures confirmed through hard work and inadequacy. I think a lot of people experience this in at least some areas of life, and it's a big source of deciding to lowball, or of blaming the environment (which isn't always factually false, but I'm referring to the emotional interpretation) or making various rationalizations surrounding “talent” or whatnot.

So cognitively I know that's a common problem with an obvious answer, but it doesn't mean I can just skip to the end without convincing the rest of me.

That was brutally real.

Our short attention spans keep giving us new chances, though. If you decide to give up, you can't just do it once (okay, you can, but please don't)-- you have to keep deciding to give up every day. Eventually you realize you're going to need to give up on giving up, at least some of the time.

However, I know what you mean quite fully. I've given up on everything from academic hopes, to artistic dreams, to multiple types of fantasies I was taught were real as a child, to career possibilities and more. Learning to rest in the knowledge that someone out there is already doing whatever cool stuff I could've done, better than I could've done it - and training myself to be mildly comforted by this - has brought me no small amount of peace.

Sentient existence is weird and hard. Giving up is an important life skill.

Thus “know when to hold 'em, know when to fold 'em”.

Which still isn't good to use as an excuse for fatalism, of course. “Knowing when” may be superficially similar to giving up out of raw emotional weakness, but it's not the same underneath at all.

Success isn't the best possible outcome vs worst possible outcome scenario you're describing. I made a decision at 30 to improve my life and three years later I'm reaping benefits.

Consider an obese man looking at a fitness model and saying "I want to look like that". He might never reach it but if he loses weight and becomes fitter and healthier then his effort paid off. He might think he failed but he's landed in a better position. I often remind myself that when I'm doing something I don't want to that I'm paying it forward to a future version of me.

At a very low point of my life, I read a book that had an idea that tickled me out of it.

In the first few pages the protagonist decides to end their own life. He is absolutely committed to ending it. Once the decision was made he realized that there is no longer any significant consequences to anything. So he will do whatever he wants until he eventually kills himself. In the end the adventure he went on helped him realize that there is something to life and he backed off.

Giving up can be freeing. It is a declaration of emotional bankruptcy.

Could I ask the title of that book?

Lights Out In Wonderland

Hi You sound naturally ambitious but scared of failure because of the perfectionism. This might seem very off-topic but "helping others" seems to have a strange but good effect on this psychological debuff. I am not going to try and explain it, probably something along the lines of realising there are people who are even worse combined with the natural social programming to feel good when you help the group. That combo seems to help overcome fear. Build something because you care about the people who will benefit from it and it will bring them joy. Also consider that maybe the other guy doing it better than you prices it out of the reach of people who need it? Your unique contribution to society is still sorely needed by many, many people.

The society will not like your attitude; expect to experience continuous peer pressure. Nearly everyone is hard-coded with the unconditional "never give up", "hope dies last" and so on. The common arguments "might as well make the best out of it", together with the anti-suicidal "if you are going to die, sell everything and give your life another chance", I find annoying. All attempts require efforts. Sometimes you know in advance that a reward will not justify an effort, sometimes it's a giant gamble of many years and you decide not to take the risk. I don't want to put an unbearable burden onto myself only to end up regretting it in the end, where I will know that I inflicted the pain of all efforts and the pain of the final defeat with my own hands. When you know that you could've idled while being sufficiently content and happy with your "unsuccessful" level, but you succumbed to momentary inebriation of inspiration and drove yourself into a trap where you are not happy with your prospects, but you don't want to give up because you already invested much efforts. Because of their inexhaustible fountain of optimism people tend to ignore that efforts are unpleasant, and one cannot sign oneself up to a giant contract of work just because muh "might as well make the best out of it".

> The society will not like your attitude; expect to experience continuous peer pressure. Nearly everyone is hard-coded with the unconditional "never give up", "hope dies last" and so on.

This is only true in US and perhaps a handful of other countries. In most of the world, society tells you to NOT follow your dreams, as they know from experience that this will usually end badly for both you and those close to you. I.e. even if you want to be a painter, your family in India or Eastern Europe will work very hard at convincing you to become a doctor, an engineer or something else "safe". They do it for your own sake (only minority of art students make it and are satisfied with their careers) and also for their own - it's no fun supporting a grown-up son/daughter that is a financially struggling and possibly depressed.

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