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Valid. I dreamed of where I am today. Living it doesn't feel like it was your dream, but remember how bad you wanted it when you were a teanager and appreciate where you are now and how far you have come. Great to reflect.

Gratitude, baby. Our society seems very focused on "more", but it is very good for one's mental health to remember how great what we have now is.

There are studies that show daily practices of gratitude change the brain. If you can, write down three things you are grateful for every night before bed. No matter how bad your day was, it will put you in a better head space.

Now, of course, I don't routinely follow my own advice. But when I did, it had noticeable benefits that have persisted to this day.

You know, I actually started this practice recently (more or less - trying to keep track of what has made me happy and what I'm grateful for at night. I miss nights, but I keep at it), and as I wrote that comment I had a thought. I'm not sure I would have reflected so positively or even realized that I'd accomplished a dream of mine if I hadn't been 'practising gratitude' so to speak. It seems to me like it's an important thing to do and believe in. There's so much to be glad about that I've often missed.

Granted there's plenty to be unhappy about, but that's too easy and not rewarding at all. Anyone can plainly see what's bad. But to find the good, it's sort of a treasure hunt before bed. What was awesome today? As it turns out, plenty. Maybe even more was bad, but the good parts were still good, and that's enough most days.

I've sort of been doing something similar for a few years now where, each day I will document the highlight of my days.

It's been a really interesting experience and it's useful from not just a gratitude/appreciation perspective but also it's turned into an invaluable tool for keeping track of how time passes.

You know, when you can look back over the days and see even just one thing that you did each day, they each become a little more memorable.

It can also be handy sometimes when you have a mystery receipt, and you're trying to work out what you spent $12 on 3 weeks ago, on a random weeknight. "Oh yeah, that's the day I went out for ice-cream after work because I'd had a bad day", or whatever.

I wrote a post about it a while back, if you're interested in hearing more: https://nitemice.com/2018/05/12/daily-highlights/

To your point, this interesting podcast discusses the psychology of how we perceive our success/position/wealth - esp. in relation to others.

https://www.npr.org/2020/09/14/912749547/why-nobody-feels-ri...

Just started listening. Thank you for the recommendation.

No joke. As a teenager I thought of this path as a leap of ill-construed faith (I didn't share the idea with anyone), but didn't really care. I couldn't envision my life even a week in the future, let alone 10 or 15 years. It didn't seem possible that I'd even be alive still. But what the hell, it worked!

I worked 5 years at a company I dreamed about. Then 2 at another one. It was an amazing experience, I learned a lot in the process and met many great people. Problem is, there are no companies or projects left for me to dream about any more. :'(

I know the feeling. I've come to believe that it's a terrible thing to actually meet your goals. Kinda like heroes, I guess.

I've heard people say that rather than focus on goals, focus on systems. Like, one time I set a goal to dead lift 400lbs. I actually did it a couple years later. The stupid thing is I stopped lifting maybe 3 months after that. Lifting 400lbs really meant nothing. Focusing on that goal was pointless. Focusing on the system of getting stronger and healthier would have been far more sensible, because there is no end to it, and there's endless progress to be made. Well, within one's own means - you could lift, swim, climb, whatever. Just enjoy it and push yourself, and you'll probably find more ways to get better at it than you could manage in your lifetime.

I've been realizing recently, maybe late in life - I don't know if this is obvious to other people much earlier - that discreet goals don't make much sense in such changeable, open-ended lives. Why aim to save $10,000 when you could aim to maintain the practice of saving 10% of your income - forever? Every month or quarter or year you can look and say hell yes, I hit that goal! Maybe you want to increase it one year. $10k will run out in no time, but a good habit doesn't. Also, maybe saving sums of money isn't really what we need to focus on... Kind of like lifting some arbitrary weight. Maybe what we really want is health and strength, or financial security and independence to allow us to buy the things we want or need. Maybe rather than travelling to a specific location, we want to live in such a way that we can have the opportunity and means to explore and see interesting places. The discreet goals could be a sub-goal of the system perhaps, but probably shouldn't be the focus.

I've always had these silly discreet goals and terrible habits to support them. I think, moving forward into my later 30s and beyond, I'll try more to focus on systems over discreet, limited results.

> rather than focus on goals, focus on systems

Maybe it's from James Clear?

> You do not rise to the level of your goals. You fall to the level of your systems.

> This is a quote from my new book Atomic Habits and was adapted from one of my favorite sayings by the Greek poet Archilochus: “We don't rise to the level of our expectations, we fall to the level of our training.”

https://twitter.com/jamesclear/status/1047643455722283009

"You fall to the level of your systems"

I really like that! Thanks, I'm going to check this out.

I hear you, I've felt like that at times. Lately I've been thinking I need to make my own dream, so to speak. I want to build something for myself maybe - just enjoy the product of what I've learned and the skills I've developed. I enjoy working with my team and having a job, but I think my next step might be taking a break to just enjoy creating something. I definitely feel that "what's next" question creeping up more often these days.

I think that was the original dream in a way too - to learn enough to be able to create the things I imagined. Maybe I'll work part time at regular work and part time on the 'dream', who knows. Like others have mentioned though, there's often a lot to be grateful for in the moment, dreams aside.

The thing with building something for myself is that it's hard. Sure, I do have a hobby project that will, hopefully, make the world better at some point. But that's a hobby project. It doesn't help with this crippling loneliness the slightest. And then starting your own company is a lot of responsibility. Much more than I'm willing to ever take. Not only do you have to have an idea good enough and that there's market for, you also have to devise a way to make money, preferably without ruining your product both in the long and short term. And delegation. I don't like delegation, but running your own startup demands a lot of it. I'm such a kind of person that it's almost always easier for me to do something myself when I know exactly how it's done rather than to explain someone else what I want.

The software industry is trending towards dumbing everything down and making increasingly user-hostile design decisions. This is the exact opposite of my values. Then there's the purely technical side of things. It's becoming scarily common for software developers to not understand the abstractions they're using and the compromises they're making while choosing those abstractions. This leads to poor-quality, underperforming products. It's become so ingrained into the culture that people legit look at you weird when you tell them that they don't need react and 50 JS libraries to build a website and that using the Android APIs in an app directly is a perfectly okay thing to do.

So, there are diminishing opportunities for creating a startup, and most existing companies' values go against mine. I feel lost at this point. I truly have no clue where to go next and what to look for. Nonprofits maybe?

I stand at the same point, and like others of my generation I'm considering switching job and moving to something completely different.

But if I'm being honest, I have to remind myself that the industry was not any better when I joined. Actually, I initially refused to work in that field for the same reasons that you list, except the epitome of dumb and user hostility at the time was Microsoft and Oracle. What made it possible for me to work in the industry was the raising tide of free software. Contributing to the success of it was interesting and fun and meaningful.

Now this tide have receded. Open source has merged with the industry, it incorporated its culture and helps greatly with the dumbing down and the over production of junk software.

I'm waiting for the next wave to come. I'm not sure where it will come from. My best guess at the moment as the most important, potentially disruptive technology, is functional OS distributions pioneered by NixOS and perfected by GuixSD, that has the potential of becoming the Debian of the future and revolution the way we assemble and distribute software and put an end to that unprincipled era of containers.

Rust is also an interesting piece of tech that has the potential to promote correctness and optimization in a field obsessed with simplicity.

So if one had to look for a job right now I would encourage either evangelization in one of those technologies maybe. That, or to work in a farm and enjoy computers on the side.

"You haven't exhausted all ideas, all ideas have exhausted you."

The latter sounds worse. :o

I identify so much with this comment.

I achieved my dream in my 20s by working for Sun Microsystems. The company behind SunOS (then Solaris), and all the hardware I drooled over while in the university. Where I met luminaries like Diffie and Gosling. Where pure magic like dtrace and zfs were born. Java too. A place where brilliant quirky engineers ruled the world. A company that built the best operating system and awesome hardware, how awesome is that? (Spoiler: extremely awesome). The ride of my life.

Today.. what? Most silicon valley jobs by volume (GOOG+FB) are in advertising. Not interested. Most of the rest are in building yet another phone app or social site. Yawn.

Where are the pure tech companies innovating cutting edge hardcore technology products? I want to dream again.

This, so much this. Except I'm Russian so for me it was VKontakte, the social network used by literally everyone, before it was bought by Mail.ru Group and started being turned into a profit machine, by which time I quit. It used to be a small team, maybe 10 developers, 4 sysadmins, 1 designer, and 1 Pavel Durov. Now it's several hundred people and I can't help but wonder where is so much work coming from to keep all of them busy. It's also engulfed by advertising and most decisions are driven by KPIs, not user needs.

Everything interesting we've had was bought by Mail.ru, Yandex, or Sberbank. Everything runs on ads, which I consider the cancerous tumor of the internet.

Silicon Valley is even more depressing than that. I've been there, and I've seen these offices with rows and rows of desks that go as far as you could see. This didn't feel like a welcoming environment. This also raised that question about what the hell do all these people do.

I want companies that are primarily concerned with making the world better, not making shareholders richer at the cost of everyone's sanity.

Go build something to dream about!

My job is part of my dream, but not all of it. I am currently building the other part, where I have equity in something that is growing everyday.

I hear people talk about how great high school was, or how much they loved college or their 20's. For me, each decade is better than the last as long as I'm still learning, growing, and building.

I'm currently 27. When I was in second grade, I told my parents I wanted to do the exact job I'm doing right now when I grew up. I still have that realization every once and a while.

Same! When I saw the really fat UNIX janitor in Jurassic Park, I knew that was my life's calling.

This really hits close to. home as well. 15 year old me learning programming dreamed of where I am now.

15-year-old me wanted to control an army of robot minions from a moon base.

I mean, I'm not sad with how my life turned out, it's pretty great, but I don't even have one robot minion since the Roomba died.

It's not too late.

Checkout https://screeps.com/. You could control your very own army of minions.

As we age, we find bigger and better dreams to pursue.

What is it so special about the minions? Do they have to be robots? What is it with the Moon? Answer those questions and you will figure out what is your new dream... or reframe the older one

I want minions in the old fashioned slave does my bidding context - cook meals, clean the house, work the fields, and whatever else I happen to dream up. All of that taking whatever abuse I happen to dish out in my frustration about whatever.

I share the modern ethical concerns about owning other humans, so that leaves robots.

In addition to the juvenile power fantasies of being in control and having lots of power, I also wanted to create the crazy things seen in science fiction, for a mix of the purer "I want this thing to exist in the world" and the baser "I'd be so famous if I created this".

Of course, it's a lot easier and cheaper to learn pure programming than to learn programming and how to build robots, which is how I got where I am today.

Granted, it's also gotten a lot easier (now that things like Pi's and Arduino and the associated off-the-shelf robotics sensors, etc exist) and more affordable (as I am a paid programmer and not a penniless yute) to build robots, but doing the really cool stuff is still in the realm of "dozens to thousands of people working collaboratively for years" rather than "one person staying up late and coding while listening to music".

To answer bluGill and saalweachter both.

If you have power fantasies, may I interest you in the practice of martial arts instead? I know I am biased in favor of that, but I will try anyways.

If you want to learn and make others do your bidding, the first step is to learn how to do your own bidding: "cannot command until can do" and all that. It is very satisfying to be able to decide to do something and then just do it. Most people cannot do that. Most people do not realize they devote precious little of their time to do what they want to do, because they keep just running in the hamster wheel until they grow old and die.

I had all sorts of fantastic dreams ... when I was 15.

At this point in my life, I emphatically do not want to be in charge of other people. There's still a little part of me that desires fame and accolades, but it's heartily offset by the part of me that now understands how much I loathe actually being the center of attention.

My dreams as an adult are much more modest and achievable than those of that youthful fantabulist.

Well, mostly. I would still like to build a robot army. But the moon base is probably a bit much.

I don't have a power fantasy, I have a leisure fantasy. I want a nice garden without having to seed it. I was clean dishes and laundry without having to wash and put them away. I want good food on the table even when I don't feel like cooking. I spend a couple hours a week cleaning my house (putting away toys, sweeping...) that I want to spend doing something else. I don't care how it gets done, just that it is done.

My 'minion' dream is to get one of those 32 core Threadrippers and actually be able to wrangle all those cores to do my bidding. (my Rust education is moving at glacial speed...)

I for one dreamed of becoming an astronaut and spending some time on the Moon. I still do.