Ask HN: Have you ever had a changed-your-life moment?
Something that happened over a small span of time that totally changed the trajectory of your life?
Growing up no one in my family had a professional job. Most of them didn't even work. So while I knew that in theory I could get a CS degree and have a software career, it wasn't something I really felt in my bones. Even after I got the degree I did not feel confident that one of "us" could get a job like one of "them", especially when you're raised with that working class crab mentality.
Later on, it was getting my first self employed contract. I had dreamed about going solo, but always doubted I could pull off. Then it was getting my invoice paid by a director of an overseas company I had never met. Something I knew was possible but felt like utopian science fiction when I read it on HN.
So as cheesy as it sounds - my career has changed my life forever. The realisation that I didn't have to struggle to make ends meet, and that I was in the drivers seat of my own life.
Man, I thought I was the only one that described it like this, but apparently it's so common it has its own Wikipedia page[0]. The entire fucking region I lived in was too busy acting like crabs in a bucket instead of building something better for everyone.
Wanna hear the super effed up part? I COMPLETELY UNDERSTAND their feelings! Like so many other modalities of code-switching I’ve learned, with just a little concentration I can go back and forth: having my kids do better than me is the main objective in life [VWOOP!!] the worst misfortune that can befall a parent.
I realised that my life will be over relatively soon too. I decided to make it count (in little ways). Quit my job. Became a freelancer. Made a big effort to cut bullshit from my life. To give less fucks about irrelevant stuff. To be happier in simple and sustainable ways.
My favourite quote: "We all have 2 lives, the second begins when we realise we have only 1".
Dry toilets with no privacy, toilet paper, some dry rations, mattresses, blankets, air filters, first aid kits etc. For 11k people.
It was two giant vaults, 5.5k per vault.
It changed my views on war and peace. Made me stop playing war games and watching war movies.
I wish peace would return to Europe soon. Right now, there are people who have to endure conditions worse than what I saw not very far from here.
Thats really interesting reaction - probably totally opposite of mine. I honestly believe that war is one of mankind's stupidest invention and suspect that there are no heroes on any battlefield - only naive, stupid and unlucky ones that mostly use pieces of metal with high kinetic energy to pierce through flesh of others. I would never agree to take active part in it. But despite that I love war movies and war games. War theme allows for very good, emotionally charged (in oposition to kinetically charged irl) and captivating narrative that is hard to create otherwise. But nonetheless this is the only good place for war - fantasy.
Being exposed to this faux imagery of war messes with people's perception of war. This is especially true for people from countries that have not experienced war on their own territory in centuries and only see it on TV.
Obligatory mention of the game "This War of Mine" where the protagonists are civilians. I could not bring myself to try it, I would probably lose sleep over it.
Unfortunately, being a male in a conscription country, I do not have the luxury of choosing whether to take part in it or not (well I could choose a prison sentence instead). If our neighbors get belligerent, I will be called to arms. Last time I checked, there is a seat in an armored vehicle with my name on it.
That seems true on the surface but I do not really buy it. Otherwise I believe that I would meet more people enamored by serial killer life after "Dexter" aired. But jokes aside I blame patriotism (and tribalism in general) for creation of this war hero myth. I can even give real life example - I'm from Poland and the ruling party is actively promoting so called cursed soldiers (żołnierze wyklęci) as a national symbol of fight with oppressor (former communist regime). And the way thay are doing it creates a very romantic image of what it means to be a soldier.
I strongly disagree with that. There were and are plenty of heoric people who chose to put themselves in harm's way and die if necessary, in order to save other people and prevent the world from becoming a worse place. Sometimes the good and evil in war are not so clear, but there are also plenty of clear-cut situations where it's obvious that the invaders will just rape, torture and kill people until someone stops them.
1. Saw an ad in 1980 for a Radio Shack TRS-80 for $499. Suddenly understood that computers were more real than the spinning tape reels shown in movies. Started learning BASIC at the local Radio Shack while my mom was grocery shopping next door. Got offered programming jobs at least twice during those sessions (or maybe they were child predators). I've been exchanging code for money for the 40+ years since.
2. Around the same time, age 10 or so, I was in a situation where I should have been killed or badly injured. Instead, a car suddenly appeared and instantly killed the thing that was trying to kill me. The car didn't stop; it kept driving, leaving me alone on a country road with bloody flesh (not mine) sprayed 20 feet around me. Since then, though I'm not religious or very spiritual, I've felt special, as if my life is meant to achieve some purpose on Earth. That memory motivates me when I'm feeling aimless or down.
3. The first time I attended Burning Man. The first time I experienced the kindness of strangers as the rule rather than the exception. That inversion in my default assumptions about other people has made an enormous difference (and undoubtedly has helped shrink the giant chip I have on my own shoulder).
it's a metaphor :P
One day I was walking back from the store, and I froze as I realized the dog's chain-link gate had been left open. The dog was in its yard, eyes locked on me. The road separated it and me. It began charging toward me. I was too afraid to take my eyes off it, let alone start running. It reached the road, still coming straight for me. As it approached the dotted yellow dividing line in the road, I remember hearing the dog's nails hitting the pavement, and sensing that it was changing its stride, as if it were preparing to leap. I remained petrified.
Next thing I knew, the dog was nothing but entrails. A speeding car killed it. I remember seeing the back of the driver's head through the rear windshield. He didn't even look back. He just kept going. A moment before I was sure I'd be killed, but now there was just me, intact but scared, and a still-settling spray of animal parts in front of me.
Sorry for leaving that out on the first post. I was trying to keep each part short.
When it first happened and I got over the initial shock, the part that freaked me out the most was the fact that the driver didn't pull over. That lent credence to my interpretation that it was some sort of supernatural intervention -- a guardian angel who appeared and then vanished.
Over the years I've polyfilled a better explanation: the driver saw the scene unfolding and realized he/she could help, but didn't want to be bothered with (literally) cleaning up the mess. Also, assuming they were local, they probably also knew the dog's nasty owner and wisely fled the scene to avoid starting a feud.
Me: What are you doing?
He: I am programming. What's your name?
Me: MG
He: Check this out:
10 PRINT "MG"
20 GOTO 10
I picked a book from a shelf about "Basic" and started to try figuring out how this worked. And never stopped. Have been looking at these "televisions" more than anything else since then.
Store Manager: It looks like someone hacked our computer, let's call the police, they'll know what to do.
FBI: Our diligent detective work has uncovered the perp is named MG. We will lock him up for 20 years for a CFAA violation.
Store Manager: Isn't that kind of harsh? I've since called the tech support line who told me to turn it off and back on again, and that seems to have fixed it.
Corporate management: We don't support this prosecution.
Prosecutor: Our job is to work in the public interest. Microsoft has suffered because people might think their operating system isn't secure.
MG: All this stress of being persecuted by a bureaucratic meat grinder is making me awfully depressed ...
... talk about a much different type of life changing event.
We went into a discussion over some esoteric topics, and we got stuck on a definition of a word, so I asked him "but how do we know what exactly does [the word] mean?", to which in response he paused, looked me in the eye, and just said:
It means whatever the hell we agree it means.
Ever since I've been spending a lot of time learning how to communicate effectively. I believe that a lot of bad things in the world happen simply because of miscommunication of ideas - more precisely, not being in agreement to what some words mean, while using them in discussions, assuming the other person has exactly the same understanding of the word as we do.
Nowdays, in discussions, when I feel that there's "something wrong" in the air, I tend to ask people "what do you mean by X" and some people get annoyed by it. But the number of times I've defused a conflict that way, by revealing it to be pure misunderstanding, makes it worth it.
> Ever since I've been spending a lot of time learning how to communicate effectively
How exactly do you learn this?
On a more basic level however, logical sentence structure is a good place to start: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logical_form
Unfortunately, I don't have a good answer to this. My learning process is somewhat chaotic and random. Reading analytic philosophy and psychology definitely gave me important insights.
However, the method I've found works the best is try to imagine society as a system, and humans as processes in the system. Every human has their own will, and they decide what they will or will not do. Nobody owes anyone anything, so every human protocol relies on the will of the other person to follow the protocol with us. So the most important question for any kind of communication is "how do we get the other person to do what we want?".
This may sound selfish, but is (in my experience) more efficient than trying to read minds or conform to some abstract authority of how we should act, then being mad at other people when they act the way that doesn't fit the abstract authority. Even more, it makes dealing with you easier for other people, which makes other people like you more.
However, we need to know what we mean by "manipulation" here. Manipulation, in colloquial usage, refers to the act of deceiving others, and often causing harm, in order to achieve some selfish desire.
In general, "manipulation" as "human interaction" does not require malice (malice, in my experience, leads to extremely poor manipulation tactics, as humans are not stupid, and will realize what you're doing and retaliate).
E.g. when you're encouraging a friend to call a girl he likes by telling him about all the good things that may come out of it, you're manipulating him - you're telling him things that will affect his feelings in a way that will make him do what you want, i.e. call the girl. In this particular case, this kind of manipulation is actually benevolent.
Human beings can and do influence each others' feelings using words all the time. Most of the time, that influence is subconscious, and often it is harmful. Being aware of how your words and actions influence other people - i.e. knowing how to manipulate people - is a tool, and just like any other tool, it can be used for both good and evil (of course, "good" and "evil" are always subjectively defined, but you can take any measure you want and you will always be able to use manipulation for either).
I don't like using the word "manipulation" because of the above reasons. I prefer the more Wittgenstein-ian term "wordplay", because that's all it is - just playing with words in some contexts that we're familiar with, which we know will make stuff happen.
It helped reinforce the importance of listening and communicating in a way that the other person knows they’ve been listened to. How to change the framing of what I’m saying so the other person doesn’t feel like they’re being attacked.
Maybe some of this stuff is obvious/natural to some people. But for the rest of us are this book is a good place to start.
Good spelling, grammar, and syntax, for example are basic prerequisites (and many people have margins for improvement).
An expanded and more precise vocabulary is also important. For this you can make an effort of looking up dictionary definitions (especially for any word you're not 100% clear on its meaning), read technical, historical, and philosophical dictionaries (those are special-purpose dictionaries, as opposed to a generic one).
Reading (widely accepted as) good prose and non-fiction also helps pick up ways to structure your own communication.
Reading books on writing (e.g. "On writing well", "The elements of style") will also help.
Learning a second language also makes more evident all kinds of internal language workings and subleties that monolingual people often ignore or take for granted.
And, of course, practice (talking to people, speaking publicly, writing a blog, etc.) makes perfect...
In some graduate programs, Getting to Yes[0] is the first book of the first semester. But isn't this book about negotiation, you might ask?[1]
[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Getting_to_Yes [1]https://gfycat.com/likableglitteringaldabratortoise-keanu-re...
Fighting over semantics is like negotiation or discussions on 'alignment' in business. Ensuring you're talking about the same thing by ensuring you have a common point of understanding and purpose in the discussion.
[1] https://www.embracepossibility.com/blog/conscious-business-h...
I still had problems with this, though, because I took the "assuming the other person has exactly the same understanding of the word as we do" to the other extreme and got pedantic in my conversation, frequently side-tracking to explain every important concept.
Since I read Conscious Business, I've changed to more of what you describe and only detour when we seem to be butting heads on something unexpected.
It had a chapter on how to move to (almost) every country in the world. Nothing seemed practical, I didn't have the skills and there was a recession.
But in the end there were some interviews with people who had left, and there was a throwaway line: "I got a working holiday visa for Ireland"
I didn't even know working holiday visas existed! I figured I could move to Ireland for a year and enjoy what I could.
6 months in I wasn't having much luck finding a longer term sponsor, despite applying lots of different places.
Then I was at the pub and heard someone having a laugh about "JSON? I said JASON!" (it was funnier when we were drunk) Had a chat, got an interview, got a job, got a green card, and recently got naturalized.
I think a lot of things in life have been small serendipities like this.
I've also seen it combined with student visas, so one year on a student visa to learn the language (that costs more in most countries, although there are some countries with relatively cheap language courses and possibility to work for up to 20 hours a week, example Japan or France) then a working holiday visa and then finding a sponsor.
E.g. if you have a remote job, you can just travel to a third country and work from there. Most countries just require that you get out for a few days per 3 or 6 months (which can be just visiting a nearby country, staying in a hotel, and returning) to renew your plain tourist visa.
In the end, nothing happened but ymmv. I also know a few people who did the same in HK and eventually got into trouble because of that.
I do think it works well but it's not a long term plan and if you do it, you must plan with potentially being denied entry eventually.
First, absolutely, the latter can happen at some point.
Second, however, I know tons of people that did it just fine with no issue for years.
YMMV
It worked out nicely; as an Irish citizen I still have the right to live and work in both the EU/EEA and the UK, which is handy.
Glad it’s going well for you. I have recently taken the plunge and moved to Estonia :)
1: Western non-Americans, more specifically, unfortunately..
Though some of the new digital nomad visas coming out aren't entirely dissimilar.
Very cool story. It's funny how little decisions can ripple out into huge changes to a life trajectory. I suppose the art of it all is to occasionally make a few good little decisions -- and ride the momentum when you do. Glad yours worked out!
What's interesting to me is how much better you feel once losing weight. Half of what I assumed were 'just getting older' problems vanished, energy way up, etc. Wish there were VR or a pill or something so that everyone could know/remember what it's like, as motivation.
But in any event, kudos to you - changing the lifestyle and sticking to it isn't easy.
That year (7 years ago now) marks a "before" and "after" point in my life. It changed all my priorities. I'm much more relational now, much more focused on the present, and search for and find joy in simple, quiet, beautiful things. I still work hard but am far less attached to professional success. The faith change led me to abandon an identity that tormented me with cognitive dissonance, was rooted in social expectations, and never worked well for me; constructing a new, more authentic identity has not been easy but it has been one of the most rewarding experiences of my life.
In many ways, my journey has been a fairly conventional "midlife passage" (my preferred term over "midlife crisis"). I'm grateful for the experience, and thankful it came early enough that I could renew my life while still relatively young.
I wrote a book about my experience, in case it's helpful to anyone else: https://www.amazon.com/Eating-Glass-Journey-Through-Failure-...
Not a single moment but gave me a framework, tools, and vocabulary to understand my various issues and come up with treatments/solutions.
When I was 19 until my mid 20s, I was often the youngest guy in many corporate settings, and really shining. That was me getting by on raw talent. But to move further you also have to couple that with executive function. And that’s where I started to peak and not grow more. So I was “stuck” in individual contributor roles, still succeeding on raw talent but that doesn’t scale. This helped me break out of that pretty easily and have a different outlook.
I’m in a totally different place now. (Not to mention, more often the oldest guy in the room!!)
https://www.amazon.com/Hallucinations-Oliver-Sacks/dp/030794...
where the author postulates that a decent portion of society experiences hallucinations at least once in their lifetime without any "helpers" like drugs or sleep deprivation. (I don't remember the exact percentage, read that thing ages ago).
I think this is how religions get started.
Not all hallucinations are religious.
And not all religious experiences are hallucinations.
In fact, when we talking about a specific kind of experience, the term hallucination has no meaning.
You're not "seeing things", you're feeling and thinking things. So there's no relevance at all to whether they're "really there".
You could have a religious experience by runinating on something that's actually, 100% there (e.g. an experience with near death from a car accident that makes you appreciate life in a religious way, or even a nice sunset).
What on earth are you reading to get this? The parent is a concise statement of fact:
You don't have to be drunk or high to have hallucinations.
How is that anything like you describe? How is it "tactless" and "disrespectful"? How does it assume anything? Try applying the most charitable view to the comments.
Lasted less than five seconds but it felt like 'the hand of God' passed through me - that's the best way I can describe it.
William James described a religious experience as having four qualities: - Ineffable: the experience is incapable of being described and must be directly experienced to be understood. - Noetic: the experience is understood to be a state of knowledge through which divine truths can be learned. - Transient: the experience is of limited duration. - Passivity: the subject of the experience is passive, unable to control the arrival and departure of the experience.
...and that tracks 100% with how I experienced mine.
Yes, it was also a hallucination, as other commenters have pointed out. But if you allow yourself to be affected by ideas, or art (i.e., synthetic visual or audio experiences), shouldn't you be open to being affected by a unique positive experience generated by your own specific mental architecture? Almost definitionally, it's possible that such an experience could impart you with something more meaningful than something generated externally.
Also, to other commenters: such an experience is obviously very difficult to communicate about effectively. It was formulated by and for your own brain, and so will be hard to translate effectively to a different architecture.
As I was training with my unit for deployment, we were spending days on end practicing combat drills to storm buildings. This was the peak of the insurgency, so our mission was more or less kidnapping persons of interest and sending them off to Abu Ghraib. It was in that moment, practicing room clearing with automatic weapons, that I knew that this wasn't who I was. An entire (short) lifetime of being completely sure about my identity vanished in an instant. I knew that I had more to give to the world than this; being a tool of violent fascism.
I went AWOL shortly after. Spent months hitchhiking across the southwest. Eventually turned myself in and (miraculously) got out with an honorable discharge. But I learned the most important lesson in my life, which is that everything is meaningless once you lose your ethical standing. Nothing is more crucial than safeguarding your humanity.
How did you swing this?
Mostly luck and timing. I was in a combat unit that was deploying to Iraq in a matter of weeks as part of the troop surge. They didn't have the time or interest in court martialling me for the AWOL charges when I came back. So they busted me down to E-1 private, put me on extra duty, and told me I was still going to deploy.
At that point I knew I had to get out. My first thought was to go for Conscientious Objector status, but that only gets you reassigned to non combat duties. So I spoke with an army doctor about why I went AWOL, and convinced him that it was part of a bipolar manic episode. Bipolar disorder is one of a few preexisting conditions that can qualify you for an honorable discharge, so as soon as the diagnosis was made, I was put on the "do not deploy" list and processed out.
And you're still dealing with bipolar disorder?
Yes, although mild. Even though my service triggered and agravated it, I don’t have any claims to disability because it was considered preexisting.
The deal with my discharge was basically “We’ll give you an honorable in exchange for not claiming disability”. I think it was a fair trade.
No more need for magical thinking, confirmation bias, or hoop jumping to justify inconsistent rules made up by centuries of grifters.
It helped me the day the penny dropped and I realised he had become a Humanist. He has not discovered anything new. He has chosen to believe something different. My views on religion are as robust as your not-views on religion. We all make a choice.
He is a little more subdued about his change of direction these days which means that we argue less. He is less "know it all" about how the world works and I talk less about things that are important to me which are not relevant to him. We will be friends until we die, I am sure.
> He has not discovered anything new.
Perhaps something new to himself, if not new to all humanity. Those of us raised in relative isolation or with rigid interpretations of the world may find outside views difficult to truly consider objectively.
> We all make a choice.
Indeed. And what choice is more profound than the foundations of ones belief systems and world view? For me that was "does it conform to 'divine' truth?", defined mostly by illiterate shepherds and priests whose livelihood depended on convincing people. Now I chose only to believe evidence proving what can be falsified.
Faith by definition cannot be based on physical evidence, and isn't falsifiable. Or else why does one need faith to believe? So whether that is reasonable is debatable. I'd argue you appear to be proposing a false equivalence.
Try reading "The God Delusion" or "The Selfish Gene" by Dawkins.
I went from a security cleared I.T consultant that could (and did) walk in to any server room any where for any client (government, financial etc) with pre-approved security clearance to having to decline contracts and shift some of my existing clients on to other contractors. I didn't serve any time in jail and the crime was minor damage to property but none the less the rule book is clear about these sorts of things so my 'go anywhere' clearance was 'yoinked' (I let the various vetting agencies know rather than wait for them to do their periodic re-checking).
It left me with a few smaller clients and I was upfront with them about it so that they were free to walk if they wanted to. Only one did but the rest were fine about it.
My income went from FAANG++ levels (gosh, FAANG shows my age, its' now MAMMA?) to a few steps above Fiverr gigging levels of income so in the end I closed down my consultancy and drifted in to a different industry (a mixture of QA, tech-support, component level design type role).
All of this happened within the space of 4 months or so.
Under UK Laws, any non-serious crime becomes a 'Spent Conviction' after x number of years as long as you are not convicted of any further criminal acts. These means that although it (my conviction) shows up in an enhanced background check it is effectively wiped off and no longer needs to be declared when purchasing insurance, rental checks etc and doesn't flag up in a standard background check.
In other words - I got back my 'Go Anywhere' card a few years ago and am now semi-retired so I guess All's Well that Ends Well :)
X equals opposite of B + or - square root… b squared minus 4 AC all Over 2 A… yay!
Four months later I enrolled in an undergraduate international relations program on the other side of the country in an effort to understand why these sorts of things happen. I went on to write my PhD in the field and the study and teaching of international politics became my life for probably the next 15 years.
- Nothing is yours, you only borrow things. Everything is temporary.
- Focus on the things you do have. Your base level should be "nothing", not what you currently have. Be happy with the things you take for granted.
- It really is all about the journey, because there is no destination.
My divorce changed the course of my life so much that the first years it felt like living in a parallell universe.
A second life changing event happened a few years after her diagnosis when I read "Meditations" by Marcus Aurelius. I think the book hit me at the right time and place in my life and helped me really process things that I couldn't before.
1. I loved someone so much that being scared of losing her really caused issues in our relationship. I later realized I wasn't actually a good boyfriend but a controlling asshole. We dated many years. In the end she cheated on me and that is when I completely cut off communication.
2. Having a child was also life changing. So little time but also so little care for anything but him. Also, if I could stop working I would do it now. It is such an interesting time full of love, frustration and sometimes a bit of anger. Child are great but also extremely difficult.
3. Taking an antibiotic (cipro) and not being able to walk for weeks due to severe pain. On top of that 40+ physicians telling me, it's impossible or all in my head. Then, the warnings were updated multiple times, to include tendon damage, damage to heart, nerve damage. Some of it has improved but still have some annoying nerve issues years later. I am hoping to start my masters in CS and develop software to help patients not have to deal with denying physicians. For example, on average it takes 10 years to diagnose a patient with Ehlers-Danlos syndrome and MANY MANY physicians. Anyone on this forum could do it, provided with simple steps to follow. Something ain't right.
"It would be really cool to discover the unified field theory."
"But what do you do with it?"
"Well, the first thing you do is collect your Nobel Prize."
"Yeah, fine, but what do you do with it?"
I realized that I could make some gigantic breakthrough in theoretical physics, and it wouldn't actually change anything for anyone in any practical way. It would be this great achievement, and be completely useless. It wouldn't help anyone; it wouldn't improve anyone's life.
I didn't go into theoretical physics.
My FIL died very recently.
We were close.
It was expected, though quicker somehow. I'm to fill the big shoes.
My first was born ~ 3 months ago.
They're a joy I didn't know I could have and fill a hole in me that I didn't know was there.
I'm so confused right now.
The grief, the joy, so close together.
My life has changed, totally, but it's all just getting through the sleepless nights now.
I need to do more for my family, but I'm just exhausted.
What can I do to set them up for success like my FIL did?
What, in 5 years time, will I regret having not done?
Thanks for any advice.
But that's more for a year from now. Now you're just trying to survive. Sleepless nights are hard.
One thing you should consider: If you can afford it, hire someone to do your housecleaning. You've got bigger things to do with your time.
> They're a joy I didn't know I could have and fill a hole in me that I didn't know was there.
> I'm so confused right now.
People grieve differently. There's no particular way that you're supposed to feel.
My father died recently. I'm his executor. I think I'm doing OK, but I have been so busy with his affairs that I haven't really had time to feel. That may show up later, and I may be surprised at what I feel then.
Maybe, with the birth, you haven't had time to feel either - or at least, haven't had time to sort out your feelings. That's OK. It will come. Until then, there's nothing wrong with having these mixed feelings.
I am quite fulfilled by my work, past and present, and my income/wealth are greater than I ever imagined. This is all because I screwed up one semester when I only took two subjects, and had to stay an extra semester. That semester was the best $15K I ever spent!
Some of these people reached out to me and I found out.
I taught myself how to code and wrote a small tool to extract passwords from the windows registry and email them to me. I learnt how to bind it to another executable and prepared a payload with a freeware flash game.
I then used it on a common clueless contact to hack hist messenger and then I used the common contact to hack the target.
Eventually we became friends and after a couple of years of running warez communities, writing viruses and hacking PHP websites, I moved to normal programming and entrepreneurship, which eventually turned into a career.
I wonder where I would be if I didn't start coding early, due to that accident.
But yes, many times. The problem is that some of the most profound and lasting changes come from trauma that requires significant content warnings or require a degree of empathy that only other survivors appear able to fully understand or display. As such, these things are hard to talk about on an immutable public forum.
Somehow it triggered my awareness and focus on taking care of myself better. It made "death" very real for me, to the degree that it had never been up to that point.
I have been able to work out a lot more regularly motivated by "how to live longer and healthier", vs. "I want to have a jacked body to attract women".
The pregnancy turned out to not be viable, and two weeks later the treatment started.
Seeing that heartbeat changed everything. Nothing seems to matter anymore in comparison to having kids, as a life goal.
:-)
It's a very long story, but through that competitive community (and tech) I made a good group of friends and learned a lot.
It lead to me finding a viable career and escaping serious poverty
I can't say I was industrious enough to do the business thing, maybe one day.
If your spouse shows love in a different way than the way you expect to receive love, that can be confusing. Figuring this out is a big part of making relationships work.
I still maintain that everyone of a sound mind should do psychedelics once. There are no real negatives (only meta negatives such as from loss of coordination leading to a fall, all of which are prevented by a trip sitter), and the perspective it gives you, namely being able to experience different emotion towards things including yourself, is invaluable.
The only common theme that seems to be common is basically the ability to experience a whole new range of thoughts in regards to yourself and your life, making you aware of the intrinsic thoughts you have about yourself that you aren't normally aware you are having.
I'm 35, Web Dev since 2009, work from home (2 hours away from work) since 2020, and my company just decided that they want everyone back at the office immediately, or quit.
So I quat. And I decided I'll never be an employee ever again. I'm gonna make a living out of my passions: write a book, create video games, adopt pets, photo, video, and if I run out of money I can still do Web Dev as freelance.
Frightening but also exciting!
The second best thing was during a dark time with work-related burnout of top to take my mental health seriously and talk with a therapist. Made it a serious commitment for a couple years and it's been the best investment in time and money I could ever have made. Learned a lot about myself, my approach to the world, the world's approach to myself and what makes me tick... just by talking it out.
Nothing else in my life has created such long-lasting and radical changes in relatively short time.
1. Stumbling upon a r/diy post on reddit of some dude building a kegerator with a raspberry pi. I thought it was cool, impulse bought a raspberry pi, and fell in love with programming. I was working at a gas station as a maintenance tech before. Ended up switching careers into software engineering and greatly increasing my life satisfaction, income, etc
2. Joining twitter. I joined in late 2020, and started sharing about side projects I was building. This led to earning my first $ online, launching a startup, raising money from investors, and getting into Y Combinator. Before sharing online what I was building I was making virtually 0 traction on various different SaaS projects i was building. It really changed my life and career in a tremendous way
Did building in public force you to work more diligently or was it purely about getting your product to the audience of people that would use it?
I think building in public was great for motivating more progress
That silly thing consumed me so much I even had a dream about it that night. That time we had computer labs in which access was pretty limited and the teacher had to authorise students and small kids weren't allowed.
Didn't get to do it in school but from that moment on I bugged my parents so much to buy me a 386 that finally my dad sold his car and got me one on my birthday.
No wonder I'm still doing programming to date. And I still remember that smiley face on that ega screen(?) to this date :)
That's beautiful. It shows how much your father trusted and believed in you - and it literally changed your life. Much respect.
I'd call it life-changing as I can FIRE around 40 now (current trajectory). Planning to care for my siblings however, so realistically it's more like 45-50.
* health issue
* read a book
* break up / got into a relationship
* moved abroad
* got a new job
The easiest way is really to read a book. The problem is finding the right book and spending time reading bad books.
Nothing else has been more transformative.
How has this affected my thinking ? Well for one thing it showed me that non-existence was nothing to be afraid of. I also realized that the experience would have been the same whether it had lasted for 5 hours or for 5 billion years. That is one of several factors that has made me skeptical of the idea that death is followed by an eternity of non-existence, even under the hypothesis that materialism is true. If that is the case then the instant of one's death would be subjectively identical with the end of the universe, and I'm not convinced the universe has an end.
It really made me realise the futility of life.
Since then, it's been ten years or so, and I look forward to being dead.
Not for any religious, spiritual purpose, but just to get all this life nonsense out of the way. It will be much easier to not exist any more.
> ...there is great reason to hope that death is a good, for one of two things: - either death is a state of nothingness and utter unconsciousness, or, as men say, there is a change and migration of the soul from this world to another. Now if you suppose that there is no consciousness, but a sleep like the sleep of him who is undisturbed even by the sight of dreams, death will be an unspeakable gain. For if a person were to select the night in which his sleep was undisturbed even by dreams, and were to compare with this the other days and nights of his life, and then were to tell us how many days and nights he had passed in the course of his life better and more pleasantly than this one, I think that any man, I will not say a private man, but even the great king, will not find many such days or nights, when compared with the others. Now if death is like this, I say that to die is gain; for eternity is then only a single night.
But in 2001 earthquake stuck and the exams were postponed. That extra time helped me complete my studies and I got more marks. Which helped me get into good college and have a stable career.
A tragedy actually changed my life.
He didn't need to tell me anything else. It was 2006. I am still designing chips.
On a whim I setup a lunch with the freelance developer of this website.
A little nervous I showed up in a dress shirt and khakis. He showed up in ratty old white t-shirt with pit-stains, disheveled, and completely unwashed.
As we ate the expensive meal I was treating him to, I couldn't help think but the meeting was a waste of effort and money.
As we got up to leave, he mentioned a little website he made about mosquito ringtones that made $100 day and that was why he didn't care about our mutual real estate client. He just wanted to maximize his passive income.
It was that day I learned about affiliate marketing and SEO. As a finance/marketing guy it changed my life 100%. Taught myself WordPress, SEO, PPC, and everything in between.
Funny as I was dead set on becoming a ibanker.
It feels like it was a quick inflection point, but it ultimately changed my life: am now married to my partner, the company got acquired, we had a baby, and I have some economic security.
We are now working towards building what my ancestors have been struggling for generations to achieve:
- Inner peace - Intentional abundance - Authentic community
Changed my life fundamentally
My wife and I have been watching a show on Netflix called "How to Change your Mind" and have been contemplating trying either LSD, shrooms or ayahuasca (we're not really druggies, we're just really interested in living more connected and meaningful lives and it seems those substances really help in initiating the process).
It sounds like you have a good approach though. I’m also not someone who drinks or takes drugs, and come at it more from the Pollan way of thinking. All the best
Playing poker semi-professionally, life has become a tree with chance values ever since, for every action, including writing this comment.
13 years ago, reading online how to seduce people. It’s mostly toxic advice, but not all advice is. Without it I am fairly sure that I would still be a virgin, whereas now I’ve enjoyed several long-term relationships. And before some get triggered, I’ve never tricked anyone in bed, nor did I follow the mainstream advice. My cornerstones in this area are: improvisation, playfulness, meditation/spirituality and coming from a frame of not needing/craving sex but preferring it (meditation/Buddhism teaches the distinction well).
Discovering the internet in general.
Recently: becoming a digital nomad
I can fill this comment with many more things but I’ll stop here.
I was studying to be a youth camp (or similar) director, specialized on culture. I drafted a second year pedagogical project was about computers, and i saw this emission (which might have been a disguised ad) about a new school, where the selection was basically one month of coding non-stop to learn the basics. I crushed the online tests (i did have a mathematic bachelor degree at the time, it helped). I hated the CS class of my uni, but thought it would refresh my mind a little.
The first three days, i learned about the command line, bash scripting and git. I was amazed at what i could do with a few commands (check for every picture on a computer, check the date, then put them in folders depending on the creation year?). The following two days were about syscalls and functions, not that interesting, but the "recursivity" day was the one that blew my mind. I proceeded to rewrite everything with recusivity or backtracking, overcomplicating things (i was really new). I think this is the moment when i told myself "i want to continue working with this".
Now i write API calls and response and write yaml configuration files for kubernetes. How things change.
What did you end up doing about it?
When it suddenly clicked to me that maybe I was just deluding myself my whole life, and that was a few months after I went to my hometown from the big city I used to live in and study after the implosion I undergone through, I found myself heavily tied to so many ideologies I no longer wanted to be tied to, and I basically had to think of how I'd reconstruct my identity from the ground up. I started dropping my beliefs bits by bits, and re-evaluated my view of a lot of things I used to be against/for. On another hand, I also went into a complete hiatus, confining myself from the environment I was living in. I did cut my ties to everyone I used to know, and got into an escapism whirlpool for a few years while being as minimalistically hedonistic as I can as long as I don't get to affect or hurt anyone by it(I basically went into lazy mode, but I didn't want to put any burden of guilt on myself for that period of time).
Since past year or so, I got out of that escapism loop, started getting social again, but I'm also pretty cautious in term who I want to spend my time with, especially since I did "waste"(I don't regret it) a good amount of it when I was keeping it to myself for that period of time.
The implosion I had did made me rethink so many things in life, and I'm very thankful it did happens nonetheless.
What is "hump?"
The key moment was during an LSD journey, but I did a lot of work before that that set the stage for that experience to happen.
~$ base64 /dev/urandom
I don't know if that qualifies as 'changing my life' but when he told me he had to plug his ears and run away because it was so loud, it certainly made me want to turn this into a long-term career.
1. Reading Malcolm X's autobiography _The Autobiography of Malcolm X_ in college. It transformed me such that within that one week of reading it, I developed (given my low standards) the strongest sense of orderliness in my life. Additionally, I decided for myself 'to straighten myself up' for this life.
2. Reading Dostoevsky's _Brothers Karamazov_. My 'inner' transformation (at the age of around 20.5) was so immense that it was also apparent from the outside. My transformation was 'not to be surprised by bad/evil' and seeing good in everything.
3. In programming/ computer science/ functional programming/ mathematics (I still don't fully get LISP, Haskell et. al. like other people here) but there are encounters in the field of lambda calculus, computation, cryptography that have left me totally transformed. Too many to elaborate.
Plus plenty of life threatening situation where I was lucky, slipped on rock in jungle but hey didn't fell down, slipped with motorbike in mountains doing Mae Hong Son loop, but hey handled it in the end without falling down or across railing, lost in jungle etc. But in general I know my limits and trying to avoid life threatening situations not relying on luck.
I had just secured a room to rent because the local college apartments wouldn't approve my dad's credit. I had to get a job immediately, so I really couldn't stay.
I went home, and never did go back.
You can always find these moments in your life, but usually in retrospect.
Life changing is an understatement for them.
Completely different life than I would have had if I'd stayed in academia.
Then he showed his amiga, I'll never forget my first time ;) That drove me in media and tech for a good part of my life.
For me personally, I never bought one. I have a garden and the sun works quite well, it is much cheaper and a very easy environmental way to dry your clothes. (In the USA, clothes dryers are the third most consuming residential electrical energy consumers)
Learning Groovy came close, but it wasn’t as popular as Python, and the Java ecosystem was still a drag.
Python actually made programming effortless and enjoyable for me.
until i discovered the pike programming language, and i realized that programming is actually fun, or as you say effortless and enjoyable and i realized that working in an office was not the reason why i didn't like programming but not working on meaningful projects with enjoyable tools.
When my kids are my age, i'll be 80. My father is still going strong so i'm trying to do everything I can to maximise QoL as I age in order to be there for my kids in future.
Both of these moments happened in new places I was visiting which I would end up moving to and prospering.
Over the weekend I had such a moment again. I guess I’m just gonna yolo and move there.
One that comes back to me a lot (cause I’m divorced) is the first time I fell for a lady due to her personality and not her looks. She wasn’t repulsive but she wasn’t exactly anything to look at either. To be honest - the idea of sex with her wasn’t entirely appealing from a non-emotional component. Anyway - that never went anywhere but it completely reshaped how I looked at women. Before - I genuinely believed I couldn’t find anyone who I’d fall for their personality more than their looks. I’d never met anyone who was that great to be around. I really thought the best I’d ever find was someone who was physically attractive but that I could at least find not miserable to be around. I didn’t think I’d ever find someone who I genuinely wanted to be around all the time and would appreciate from an intellectual and emotional level. It seemed too far fetched based on the many women I’d met before.
Later - I met more women who were more balanced - more physical attraction and decent emotional attraction. I met my wife later and it was mostly the personality attraction again - I grew to appreciate her looks more but compared to some other women I’d been involved with - it wasn’t the same. I’ve learned that selecting a partner on personality also has strong drawbacks.
It’s a struggle considering personality is very secondary in our current dating market. Physicality is everything. Such is the commoditization of our dating lives while living in a capitalistic market.
the drawback was that it didn't feel as fulfilling or something like that because she wasn't as physically attractive?
as someone who prefers to look at personality only, i feel that physical attraction gets in the way. at least that was my experience. when i was younger i actually didn't recognize a few times when a girl was attracted to me because i had my eyes on someone else who wasn't. i regret rejecting them to this day. my life could have taken a completely different direction if i hadn't. (not that it would have been better, just different, since we are talking about life-changing experiences. although i'll never know if it really would have been life-changing)
A friend said the other day, tomorrow isn't written yet...
In my early fifties now and pretty sure I'd be dead by now if I hadn't.
I don’t read r/AskReddit anymore these days. I replaced it with this site..
[1] https://i.imgur.com/DSSXY39.jpeg
/rant over
In your screenshot, the value you reference is the size of the entire package repository: https://github.com/Homebrew/homebrew-cask
Your point still stands as these sizes are larger than one would expect. Just food for thought.
Had me thinking long and hard about if the appropriate thing to do was throw a complete 180. But after that thinking, I came to the conclusion that people like that already exist and pursue the exact same abhorrent and adversarial outcomes as this discovery led me to understand were not isolated to the realms of states and large amoral multinational corporations, and attacking nebulous means to promote specific ends will just change the means that are used for the promotion of those ends all the same. It is the ends one has to be very careful of, fully cogniscent of the fact that those pursuing the most abhorrent ends rarely come out and actually earnestly mark themselves as the monsters that they are.
In counseling and long talks, we found that I could not have done anything different. She's sorry. And while I often think of leaving her, I won't break up the family for my kids - still seems like the best option, ~2 years later (if I take their mental health into account and am not only considering myself).
It's a cliché, but "knowing" things and "living through" things are very, very different:
* Never give yourself up in a relationship or a job
* Never risk everything you have (I couldn't divorce her even if I wanted, without having to pay exorbitant monthly payments)
* You can do everything right and it still can go wrong
* Just because you give everything doesn't mean others will behave the same towards you
"Knowing" these things is different than "living through" them. The affair broke my mental model of the world as a whole. I thought: no matter how bad it is, I can influence my very tiny happy bubble in a distopian world, and giving everything to the right people (who also give a lot back) will make them honor our common code of behavior.
Now, I trust a lot less. I don't waste time on relationships I don't get as much out as I put in (no matter if acquaintances, friends or business related), I secure myself a lot more (prenup, letters-of-intends, etc.).
I'm still miles away of not being depressed and feeling broken, or being able to concentrate or being creative again (which means I'm still unable to work effectively for more than a few hours a day). And the model of the world I have in my head now does not feel like something I want to live in, but it's still - slowly but steadily - changing for the better. Getting here took an enormous amount of effort: Being unable to work at all for about a year, being physically unable to stand, just breaking down in public or in front of clients, amnesia (there are weeks of my life I simply can't remember, whole vacations during the depression that are just gone). It took psycho-therapy, clinical stays, (re)learning habits and techniques to get me out of bad places...
This is not a call for sympathy, but please do learn from me (I made a throwaway account to keep my anonymity).
TLDR: My point is:
* Take care of yourself and don't trust others unbounded. Ensure the "what ifs" don't cost you too much (e.g. prenup, letters-of-intend, ...).
* Happiness is a choice for the most part. Enjoy life and the moment while you can. Sometimes it's little things, sometimes it's big things. But notice them as much as you can.
* There's different levels of honesty - think good about which one you choose. Honesty leads to vulnerability and some people will misuse it.
* Stay positive and give first in relationships, but always listen cautiously to your gut - if it tells you that you are giving too much and receiving too little, reconsider and react. fast.
* Keep friendships and hobbies you enjoy alive - despite family, job and relationship. Friendships are built on common experiences (not common interests!), and the older you get, the less chances for new common experiences with new people you'll have. Hobbies and things you enjoy are as important. If shit hits the fan hard, friends and having routines to recharge your battery are the things that can save your life and get you out of the hole.
So far, we manage quite well - although my children obviously know something's wrong with me and we talked about my depression symptoms (without telling them the reason), we manage to keep our kids out of our problems.
- random sporadic pain in many parts of my body that wasn't there before
- tardive dyskinesia: involuntary twitching or muscle spasm, "forced" movements
- strange salient events, for example my computer sometimes behaves like it is hacked, devices stop working in ways that defy the laws of physics, or time even sometimes feels like it is flowing faster than it should
- background tinnitus that prevented me from sleeping well for years (although I've gone from being tired all the time to having a decent level of energy over time)
- frequently angry "voices" that occasionally say rude and nasty things (as well as some nice ones that suggest interesting thoughts)
- "entities" that attempt to manipulate or coerce me into working on their causes - change your career, become a doctor, become a politician, become a spy (although some of them are nice and a few of them provide some great ideas).
I was diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia and required to take medication which keeps the worst of the symptoms somewhat under control.
This experience made me much more humble, patient, and sympathetic to those suffering from mental illnesses. I also realized how fragile life is. Even as a very successful software engineer, you are about 2 weeks of no sleep away from turning into a zombie or completely broken person.
It also really changed my outlook on life. I used to be somewhat religious, and still believe that there are higher powers out there, but compared to the Christian perspective of a loving and caring God, some of them are downright cruel and vengeful. Chances are that to them, you're just some minisculine speck in the universe and utterly disposable. Perhaps you're some kind of a tool in a grander scheme. The world doesn't "owe" you anything even if you do everything right, and it will crush you into a pulp if the powers that be feel that is advantageous to their interests or maybe even just on a whim.
Lessons and takeaways: - Make sure you have a strong support network: friends and family are what got me through this mess, I never would have made it through this hell without them. - The world is not fair. Maybe it's some kind of a test, or the karma is extremely delayed. But some people have it really rough, and until you've been there, you might not appreciate what others are going through. - Be kind to others and treat everyone with respect. Perhaps you'll be in their shoes someday. - Don't upset anyone or anything. You never know who you might tick off and how they might retaliate. - Curb your ambition and anger, and learn to live with and accept frustration and things not going your way. The world will knock you down when you least expect it, and it will kick you while you're lying on the ground. I'm a lot less ambitious than I used to be, I'd say that on many days I'm just treading water. If you have 0 expectations, at least it's unlikely that you'll end up disappointed. Often times, your interpretation of an event has a bigger influence on your happiness than the actual outcome of the event itself. - Appreciate what you have, even the very basic things in life. Food. Water. Shelter. Electricity. Sleep. Silence. Time. A functioning mind. A universe where the laws of physics are consistent. Many people take these things for granted, and then one day they're gone and you start to realize how valuable these things are/were. Most of the things listed above don't even cost that much. Perhaps they should be essential human rights. - You are stronger than you think. Even in the darkest times, don't give up, just take it step by step, day by day. It gets better with time (hopefully). Perhaps even the wrath of God is subject to a statue of limitations.
All clandestine and ongoing since the 80s.
Also: children, DMT, studying Buddhism and a not to be named hard-core socialist music festival near Berlin.
A good nutritionists would never say such nonsense but that varies on how we definite "good".
After 2 years of suffering, doctors told me it was unexplained, most likely due to stress and that I should avoid eating fatty meats as my cholesterol was very high (despite basically not eating food). They wanted to put me on statins.
I did the opposite and switched to a carnivore diet - and my symptoms disappeared in a week.
Why not name it?
Try Burning Man, some say it has similar vibes minus the radical socialism.
The conversation surrounding such events and lack of political or social will to change left me jaded with Americana, ultimately I left the country and decided to contribute to a more sane society.
A sad state of affairs in which a country gives more rights to firearms than a woman.