Hacker News Reader

University also taught me that some people are genuinely better than me. I'm a much happier person since I learned to let it be so.

University taught me that I was better than everyone, and then real life taught me that I was just another smart idiot with a lot to learn. The problem is that universities don't really prepare you for living your best life.

3. The successful people you are comparing yourself to are often older than you. Who knows if you'll wind up as successful as them, but I'm pretty sure many of them would trade it all just to be young again.

They'd want to keep their knowledge, which you don't have.

100% agreed with this, with a few more items to add to the list:

3. The people you hear about most are heard about most because they're newsworthy in some way. That tends to mean someone who's extraordinary good at something, or at least has the marketing skill to make it seem that way.

They'll also be the types who'll get a lot of attention on social media, since people are more likely to share extraordinary stories than ordinary ones.

So you get an unrealistic picture, simply because you're seeing all the outliers.

4. People who aren't very good at something tend not to share that, whereas those who do will share it. If you're a fitness buff who can bench press 400 lbs, you're the type of person most likely to post to a fitness subreddit, or Discord server, or on relevant hashtags on Twitter/Facebook/Instagram. The many others who are out of shape? Not so much.

Either way, it all leads to a situation where success/skill is drastically overrepresented online compared to its commonness in the population as a whole.

Isn’t this true for everything? If anything is normal, which is most of the times, it is not worth posting as it is common and won’t generate the buzz. So, only the extremes get posted and make everyone feel either good or bad and not just content. Maybe there needs to be a place where people can just post normal everyday stuff that speaks to everyone and neither provokes good nor bad feelings - just a feeling of content.

Also, it's not a zero-sum game. More extraordinary people out there is actually good for you. It means the world is likely a better place and you can learn from more people.

I remember feeling particularly inadequate when watching Google IO presentations in 2018. All these teams of highly payed engineers presenting the work of a year or more within a few days. Not a healthy thing to compare oneself to.

Maybe it's because of how you grew up, but I've found myself in several different groups/scenarios throughout the years that blew my mind how many people (young people who hadn't worked a day in their lives) had trust funds.

I always thought that was crazy Gossip Girl shit, yet I got into a good university and was in certain clubs and social circles where I met a ton of people with trust funds (1M-30M).

That's when I decided to change the approach to my career. I'm not even a social person, so the number of people I was meeting wasn't astronomical, and I wasn't at an elite university, just a very good one.

I still see it today living in a large city. The number of people who have trust funds or parents willing to give them 200k-1M to put down on a house absolutely astounds me! I know it's a small % of people, but a small % of people is still a ton of people!

Ive never met a single one. I feel completely insulated from the top strata of society that looks down on me because of it - it’s really depressing what going to a state school has done to me.

> There aren't as many uber successful people out there as the internet makes it seem.

I live in a city with two elite universities (guess which one). They're literally all around me.

Getting into either of those is my definition of "uber successful", with many of them being more successful at 17 than I'll ever be in my life!

Weird definition of uber successful. They'll probably have steady employment but their mental health/personal anguish is probably distributed similarly to the rest of the population

I have steady employment too. But I don't have society giving me unlimited external validation. Instead, people think I'm subhuman for where I work and went to school.

> Instead, people think I'm subhuman for where I work and went to school.

My email is in my profile if you want to talk to someone. No one thinks you’re subhuman. People are incalculably more likely to be indifferent to you than to despise you. More people don’t care about you than have any opinion whatsoever about you.

> The internet has made everyone feel inadequate as it's easy to compare yourself to people you see on the internet.

Yes, but at the same time I just look at some of my past collegues. Some people are pretty useless and are kept in often well paying jobs for years. Also Reddit is a good place to find out how dumb a lot of people are, or Facebooks' programming groups if you find Reddit's level too high.

> Lots of people are really good at marketing themselves, which inflates the number of people you think are extraordinary.

Yes, and then those people get all of the promotions, so now even just being good at pretending to be extraordinary is sufficient, which is even more frustrating.

Well, did you train at commercial gyms or powerlifting/weightlifting gyms? What if the lifters just happened to be on high volume blocks, or tapering for a meet whenever you visited?

Yeah this is mostly at commercial gyms and there are a lot more at powerlifting/weightlifting gyms for sure. But even there there aren't as many as you would expect. It's probably more common to bench 300, but never seen anyone do a 405 lbs squat atg even at a powerlifting gym.

never seen anyone do a 405 lbs squat atg even at a powerlifting gym

Well yea, a 4-plate ATG squat is gonna be an honest rep, probably by someone pushing 465+ for a parallel squat.

I always figured you could take most men < 45 and hit 1/2/3/4-plate on OP/Bench/Squat/Dead given 2 years on a dedicated schedule w/ a simple plan like 5/3/1. Most people get in the gym for social-hour instead of hammering it hard (aka "fuck-around-itis")

Squatting atg is just not very common to start with.