Comment by going_ham | Hacker News Reader

Comment by going_ham | Hacker News Reader

Nobody writes it, but it's okay to have average job, with average life and average family as long as you can enjoy your life! Why burden yourself with idea of success and setting expectations. At this point I am sure life doesn't give anything unless you look for it. And even if you seek, there is no guarantee. So I think it's waste of energy.

My experience so far.

I am really glad that I learned how stability is necessary in life.

I have been led into this "work and be successful" bias my reading PG's essay, story about motivated dropouts, Outlier's etc. I thought putting hours was enough to be successful! But nah, nothing is possible without some play of luck. Luck feels like multiplier.

Therefore, now that old perspective has changed, I am able to see completely new perspective. Instead of startup I look for long term careers. Instead of chasing money, I chase my own curiosity with optimism. I accepted that I amount to nobody!!

The beauty of this approach is I can let go of "I must do something important" mentality and explore anything which may sound super dumb and useless to society. For example, the other day I was looking into Gameboy architecture, one day GDB. That day I learnt you can record and replay programs in GDB! They don't teach this at college.

The hindsight is I get to enjoy the life! To me enjoying my life is being successful ;)

It's exactly this, i've been thinking about this a lot lately.

I mean who is 'anybody' anyway. People talk about legacy, but I think it's just ego. They don't want to accept they will be one day gone and nobody cares, so they want to build something they think will extend there life beyond that.

But does it really matter anyway? Even the most successful of the successful, does it really matter? What about the person with the statue in the city centre? Does anyone really care? It might be a good looking statue but people generally don't care about that person, they didn't know them etc and this is all that they have become. That person is long gone and knows nothing of there 'legacy'

In the scale of the universe, you and Steve Jobs are of no real difference.

It reminds me of the starfish story, there was a young boy on the beach throwing washed up starfish back into the water, an older man approaches the boy and says 'look at all the starfish on the beach, you won't be able to make any difference, what is the point?' the young boy looks back at the man, throws the next one back and says 'Made all the difference to that one?'

In the scale of the whole universe who cares about you? In the scale of the earth who cares about you? In the scale of your country who cares about you? In the scale of your city who cares about you? In your street, who cares about you? But to the people you directly know and interact with? Who cares about the universe.

Your world is your own. Being 'average' is not really average. You can count and matter extremely by being 'average' to the people around you, rather than trying to be successful and effect things further outside of that, indeed really the only people you will truly matter to are those people, everyone else would just get an illusion of you anyway.

Despite all the messed up things about the world, perhaps of greatest comfort is the things that can make us truly happy are open to most, it's just the things that we think will that have lower availability.

Yes, it's all relative. But what if your sisters and brothers all have successful companies, and you have just an average paying job?

That depends. Do I like my work that has average pay? Do I have a significant other who cares for me, and a loving family? Is the reason that I have an average paying job, because I maintain a range of open-source software projects that are widely used?

From another angle, am I only in an average paying job because I worked hard, and things just didn't work out, and did they abuse their employees and break the law to make money?

I'm not very competitive. I don't give a toss about what my parents or siblings think of how successful I am about my career. Career-wise, I only really care that I know I put in my best effort week-to-week. I don't compare myself to others based on results; I've lost incredible opportunities genuinely due to bad luck, and stumbled into amazing opportunities based on chance.

I had a conversation with my colleague recently on this. We quickly got lost in this complex topic, but what we managed to recognize was that a large part of "success" phenomenon (here, locally) is just a replacement for a social stability and respect. Atomized society loses big chunks of what makes people happy and sure about their position. And having this is much better than e.g. owning an expensive car. But when everyone around gets constantly gaslighted by success and the role of Money, including relatives or potential friends/spouses, it's hard to row against this current. We live in a pretty unstable environment and it requires much more than just a stable money to insure yourself from taking part in this nonsense, sort of a paradoxical feedback loop. I wish I were that guy who has his average successless life planned ahead, but I'm not assigned this privilege.

Yeah, it turns out we live in a society after all.

I fought like a mad man, because I had to try to become rich in shithole country that was busy imploding and erecting discrimination laws against my class of people... so it was not easy, but success already can be quite hard without a bit of luck... I made it... it was insane... yes it is very satisfying to have financial freedom... but oh boy the price I paid, I dunno if I can recommend it. I was the kind of guy who would crawl through broken glass (like Elon said) to get to success. I used to look. down on people who didn't persue their goals or didn't have grand goals... I do not anymore because I know it's not cowardice it could be entirely sensible. The price of. success can be very high. Sometimes too. high. Especially if you value other things that money does not buy. Still, money buys freedom and options. Which for. a creatively driven person who does not fit in well with the world, this is a VERY valuable thing.

I envy the people who can endure the drudgery and boredom of most jobs, and can therefore have stable longterm careers.

You make it sound as if chasing ideas is the hard part, but for some people the opposite is the hard part.

I envy the people who can endure the drudgery and boredom of most jobs, and can therefore have stable longterm careers.

I've had a stable, long term, stress free, career working at large 'boring' companies doing high level research projects with very smart people in areas I find fascinating, and that I'm still excited to get to work on. 'Boring' and 'stable' companies still have very cool problems they need to solve.

I didn't say big companies only have boring jobs, nor that all jobs are boring.

“I'm sick of not having the courage to be an absolute nobody.” - J.D. Salinger

> average job, with average life and average family

having those is also luck and lots of survivor bias

Check out the underachievers manifesto. A short book that's right in line with what you're thinking in this post.

Thanks, I learned something (record and replay programs in GDB! )

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