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Comment by closeparen | Hacker News Reader

I spent the first part of my life pursuing what was interesting and engaging to me for its own sake, not putting much effort into status signaling or a cultural mask. All I got was crushing loneliness and a severe social skills deficit. 0/10 do not recommend.

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I spent the first part of my life pursuing an impeccably planned career trajectory, setting myself up with all the markers of status and culture that my peers and family expected, discarding the things I loved because they did not contribute back to that.

All I got was crushing existential depression and a severe social skills deficit. 0/10 do not recommend.

I realize this is a glib comment, please don't take it as an insult, just the tongue-in-cheek response of someone who felt a surprisingly mirrored experience of yours.

In fewer words, I'm not sure anecdata is not going to help in this case, but if someone is feeling "something missing" in their life, some of the avenues of questioning and introspection presented in the article may be useful.

I guess the lesson is that you need to find a middle way which is really hard. There is a lot of clarity in extremes but the middle way is pretty fuzzy. Looking back at my own life I would really love being able to try again. It took me decades to find a path that works for me. Some people have that knowledge when they are young but most people need a lot of time and learning to know what they need. Some people never find out

It seems like the common factor is isolation and loneliness. I don't see why chasing either status or what you love has to necessarily entail isolating yourself from other people and letting social skills deteriorate. Either path could be pursued with others, and indeed would probably be helped by having friends and allies along the way.

The problem is obscure preferences. Maybe 30% of the time there's someone in my world who shares them, and maybe 10% of the time we're friends. Having a community usually requires openness to activities that would not have been my first choice, or my tenth. I never used to make that trade. It's worth it, though.

It seems like the common factor is isolation and loneliness.

Traditionally it was easy to be part of a community, because humans structured society that way, because instinctively that’s important: we are mammals after all. But those traditional communities have all been eroded for various reasons. So people are lonely and desperate and aren’t clear why: after all your parents never had to “do” anything, their community was “just there”.

As someone w silly and weird and boring interests... If the things that interest you are interesting to NO ONE... you might have (subconsciously or otherwise) picked something intentionally to avoid human contact.

Hell, tech is boring to other people. How many of us are just in the position where our sole tech hobby happened to be lucrative on the job market, so now we've just doubled down on our boring antisocial single-dimensionality?

Took me quite a while to cultivate interests outside of tech, and pretty much all of them move me closer to other people where tech did not.

For example, there are definitely apartment parties with more wine than tequilla and more talking than dancing. Even in my age bracket. I’ve been to a few. But these kinds of social circles are inherently more difficult to identify and break into. It’s a hell of a lot easier to find the group headed to a nightclub.

When did you know you had to make a change? And how did you give yourself the framework to enact that change?

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