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Comment by howmayiannoyyou | Hacker News Reader

Acceptance.

My survival strategy for mid-life has been to replace the ambition and balls that got me through my 20's and 30's with age appropriate acceptance of the MANY things I cannot control & don't have time to do, with a wisdom to focus on the FEW things that are likely to matter to me when I hit my 70's and beyond.

For example, I can't control the divorce that consumed a ton of time and money in my 40's, but I have prioritized recovering money & family in my late 40's and early 50's. I can't control a medical condition that somewhat limits what I can do from time-to-time, but I can identify alternatives that give me joy during those times.

I'm blessed with parents and grandparents who unwittingly failed to prioritize correctly IMHO. I paid close attention and intend to do it differently.

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Acceptance is basically the one and only key to happiness - it's simple to say and hard to practice. But by practicing it even the most miserably ill and destitute people can be happy. It's also not a particularly new idea, going back at least as far as Buddhism.

It's also why I'm not inclined to agree with things like perceived inequality as being the root of all misery.

This is also a huge theme of the Bible — possibly all religions?

Is it? Acceptance for acceptance's sake, I don't get that from the Bible (or most major religious texts?). The 'accept things' is asterisked with a 'because $deity', which just opens up many more cans of worms.

Did you get "accept things because God" from reading the Bible or from conservative American Christians? In my experience conservative Americans Christians have a tendency to be threatened by questions, I think owing to a fairly shallow understanding of God that boils down to "do this because I said so; you can't, trust Jesus to take away your failure", which while not incorrect is incomplete.

But the Old Testament only has three books of laws (Numbers and Deuteronomy, with a few in Exodus), out of 39. Genesis and Exodus give the origin story of how Israel got to be God's people. Exodus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy give the expectations that go along with being privilege of being the people God chose to glorify his name in the earth. There are blessings for obedience, and punishments for disobedience. The rest of the Old Testament is struggling with those laws, namely that God keeps his promises when Israel obeys, but Israel has a strong pattern of disobeying, and God keeps his promises of punishments, too, ultimately kicking them out of the land he gave them. You have some wisdom literature on what a wise, godly life looks like, where is God when you're suffering. A number of the characters get pretty upset with God at points: Elijah says "I thought this amazing miracle would turn Israel back to You, but they're just trying to kill me, wtf?"; Jeremiah says "God you set me up the bomb: if I prophesy people hate me and if I don't prophesy the word burns inside of me until I do"; Job says "I was punished for being innocent, surely if I could bring my case to God he would judge me innocent". And God responds. Then there are people like David, who realize that God doesn't want the sacrifices that the law demands, God really wants a contrite heart. Likewise, Micah says God doesn't want sacrifices, he wants people to act justly.

The Old Testament clearly showed that Israel (and by extension, the rest of us) are incapable of keeping the law, which the teachers of Israel in the New Testament summarized as basically "love God, love others". The New Testament shows God fulfilling his promise from the prophets to solve the problem of people not obeying the law by changing our hearts. This he does through Jesus dying to pay for our failure to obey, and then giving us God's spirit, to change us into people who think the way he does and value the way he does. In the process, we are freed from all the rules and regulations, so Paul says that the follower of Christ is enabled by God's spirit to keep just one law, which is both simpler and harder: "love God, love others".

All that is to say, I don't think the Bible says "accept things because God said so", except arguably in 3 out of the 66 total books. American Christians (maybe others, too, don't know) say that all the time, but not the Bible.

> Acceptance is basically the one and only key to happiness

is it really happiness if you just "tricked" yourself to it?

If you just changed your goals to something else when you realize you cannot achieve your originally planned goals, is it really "winning"?

And if you give up on your dreams, and accept your current circumstances, is that just called despair rather than acceptance?

What is the point of "winning"? Are you sure that your goals and desire to win are not things that society "tricked" you into believing are worthwhile or important?

How can you tell that you've "tricked" yourself into being happy, rather than just "started" being happy?

Something interesting seems to be happening in society. We set aside religion, a trend that accelerated exponentially starting in the 60s, but had no real ideological or philosophical foundation with which to replace it, so it simply created a vacuum for meaning. In my opinion that vacuum was largely filled by consumerism and hedonism. But of course those alternatives aren't really alternatives, because they give some flighting moments of pleasure, but offer little to nothing in terms of long-term satisfaction.

So we're effectively recreating, from scratch, much of the philosophy developed thousands of years ago. What you're describing is, in its fundamentals, identical to Stoicism. I'd highly recommend Marcus Aurelius' "Meditations." [1] It's a collection of the writings of Aurelius, a Roman Emperor who is oft regarded as one of the greatest leaders of society. Stoicism is most fundamentally about accepting the fact that there are many things one cannot change. The only thing we can change, about many things, is how we let it affect us.

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The most interesting thing about the writings is that they were never intended to be seen by anybody other than himself. So it's effectively a collection of post-it notes from a great philosopher-king to himself pondering his own existence, mortality, meaning, and inability to change things. It's also quite insightful to appreciate that perhaps the most powerful person on Earth at the time struggled with the exact same issues that affect us all.

He wanted to change society for the better, but ultimately even a man in his position was unable to move a mountain no matter how much he tried. His life was filled with external perceived successes and internal failures. He not only failed to ultimately better society, but could not even better his own son. Aurelius is regarded as one of the greatest leaders, his son Commodus - one of the worst.

When Aurelius died, he was deified and praised. After his son Commodus was assassinated at the age of 31, he (Commodus) was declared an enemy of the state, his name stricken from record, and public imagery of him destroyed.

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[1] - https://files.libertyfund.org/files/2133/Aurelius_1464_LFeBk... #That book includes two introductions which provide extensive context and other information which is quite important to understanding a fair amount of what is said. Aurelius' writings themselves begin on PDF page 59, which is page 25 in the book's ordering.

The philosophical movement you're looking for is called MetaModernism, or PostPostModernism.

Its specifically about creating a philosophical framework for how to decide what has meaning in our lives. Its about giving people the tools to decide what should fill that gap.

Stoicism is one option, that already suggests answers to that question.

I would like to challenge the notion of the drop of religion being a recent phenomenon. In fact I would counter its been going on at least several centuries. After all, Nietzsche was saying God is dead in the 19th century.

Even before this, the renaissance was a period filled with a turning away from religion and of reintegration of older classical stories and ideas. Descartes and Newton, though religious, introduced a fully mechanical model of the universe which has been growing in strength ever since.

Even in the meditations Marcus Aurelius carefully considers the idea of the universe consisting of nothing but atoms and their motions

I find this a lazy, western-centric, summary of religion's decline. Nietzsche does not a consensus represent, however deep and insightful his statement. It is this kind of casual dismissal of faith that provides one of the fuels to the populist "God and country" crowd exploited by Trump and his ilk.

I'm not sure why you took this as an attack on religion. I was merely trying to provide counterexamples to the claim that the decline of religion's influence in western culture is not something that started out of nowhere in the 1960s.

I'd ask "Why do you need meaning?". Why not just accept that life is meaningless, and any meaning you bring to it is ultimately of your own construction. Seems a lot simpler than continually searching for meaning or purpose, doomed never to find it because it simply does not exist. All evidence seems to indicate that we're complex meat robots, whose existence is basically inevitable given the right initial conditions. What meaning?

> Why do you need meaning?

Why do we respond to meaning? Why do we seek it out? The difficulty in the search may be part of the answer: we need mountains to climb, both outside and inside ourselves.

Meaning is oxygen, and I'll continue optimizing for it.

If you put a hamster in a cage with a wheel it will, more or less merrily, continue to run along that wheel until it eventually becomes physically unable to and, in the longrun, passes. It's the blessing, and the curse of humanity, to stop and actually consider at some point, why am I doing this?

And these questions aren't just an abstract search for meaning. Getting back to Aurelius, he and his son were given comparable power and wealth to do with as they personally saw fit. And they chose radically different paths. The path one chooses, in most of all things, is going to be a product of your own personal ethos, which in turn is going to be a product of how you view the world.

And thinking about such things can not only provide greater contentedness, but also help direct you in unclear waters. Why do you do what you do, and is it in line with what or whom you want to be?

Right, but how do you know that your stopping and considering isn't just spinning a larger wheel? What are you accomplishing?

I've had this feeling in life that after middle age, it is most satisfying to adopt the mindset of a teacher. No more am I an explorer or barrier breaker. I am now a foundation, a home, a tome of knowledge and wisdom that should be used to help the next generation get a leg up.

Easy to do when you have stability and dignity.

For myself, my first career was wrecked by new technology. Now I am 40 years old in an entry-level SWE position alongside 22 year olds working under people in their late 20s or early 30s. Not only would none of these people accept me as a source of knowledge but they can hardly bare to give me the time of day. I am very proud of my contributions to the team and I don’t hold it against them, but the makings of dignity are taken for granted far too often.

May be dignity is inside and not outside. Does it matter what others feel about us.

What’s wrong with entry level SWE at 40? Working for and with younger people is no shame.

Someone dear to me could have started SWE at 38 but felt as you do and quit. More than 12 years later they would be a veteran at the job but instead today still are looking in from the outside saying 50 is too late, regretting their decision and making excuses just like they said at 38. Wrong then, wrong now.

12 years from now you will probably kick yourself for worrying about what worries you today. I am proud of you for making a change; stick with it! Few industries consider you senior after 3-5 years.

Thank you for your encouragement. You make some good points and it’s really meaningful.

If they won't accept an "old person" sharing their experiences, that's their folly.

I think what you do in your work/job is only one piece of this pie. Surely you have more experience and wisdom to give about other aspects of life that are not SWE? There are loads of people out there who don't need your SWE advice but they may need your other advices.

I learned this full speed into a brick wall via an MS relapse in my last semester of graduate school.

There are always things that you can't control. It's best to adjust your worldview to accommodate that, or if the unexpected does happen, you won't adjust easily. Speaking from experience.

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