Comment by trevcanhuman | Hacker News Reader

Comment by trevcanhuman | Hacker News Reader

I don't know what to say - yet.

I felt this human's story. Touching indeed. But I feel like this was something that HN wouldn't have liked. This was a nice essay but I'm still unsure how it got to the front page. (( Please comment, why did you upvote ? ))

I honestly expected some kind of connection with the title and the story. But there really wasn't. Okay, yeah they talked about Cobain's death, life but did it actually have anything to do with his dad ?

On another note, I feel the writer. Not having a purpose, that's how I feel right now. One could say that I became slightly HN-popular. Even got several internship offers and I worked for two and a half months. But I barely felt like any of the work I was doing actually served a purpose.

I feel lost, this was a good perspective on life stories. But is this just entertainment or do I get any value from it ? Is this just like Netflix and Prime movies and shows that are so far from my own reality that I'm absorbed into it and I feel like I become a part of it and I aspire to some of their values.

I also like writing, I feel like software engineering programming as a job isn't for me.

edit: spelling.

In the hyper-connected, globalized world of today, the experience that comes from a world of constraints is lost. The world now is radically different from the world 20 years ago, and even more radically different from the one the author writes about. It's difficult to convey the change in the human experience. But the author does a fantastic job. He paints a portrait of a smaller world, a world built around people and relationships. A world where Faxes were the best means of communication, given their constraints. A world where his parents could see the cultural changes associated with Asian-American immigration in real time. A world that was wholly and completely unprepared for the silent revolutions taking place in California at the time. Revolutions we're still struggling to grasp the effects of today. A world where the music industry was not the manufactured beast it is today. A world before 9/11, when it felt like we were in the cusp of huge, positive societal change.

The piece is both a love-letter to those times, and to the author's strongest influences (hence the title of the piece). His father seems incredibly kind, thoughtful, and supportive. It must have been incredibly difficult to reconcile this with the fact that he chose to live separately, alone, thousands of miles away.

As algorithms and AIs start to dominate our entertainment and curation, and as major publications struggle to adapt to this climate, it feels rarer and rarer for a piece to capture the Human Experience. This one did. It felt True. Whether you derive any value from it is up to you. But I assure you the value is there. The best stories are written from experience, and an autobiographical account is as close to the experience as you can be. And this one is fantastically written.

Funny you mention the title, I was also expecting something more along the lines of "My Dad and Charles Barkley" (https://www.wbur.org/onlyagame/2018/12/14/lin-wang-charles-b...). But it was still a really good read.

If you are asking “what is the meaning of life?”, you’re asking the wrong question (not my quote)

I somewhat am. I originally wrote this something to look for something that probably isn't on HN. Yes, it is partly the meaning of life. But as I've struggled thru my mid-teens life crisis I never really consider to be 'out' of it. I still constantly struggle to get meaning out of anything. Even school work, assignments, etc. I think to some degree, thinking is driving me nuts. But I didn't mean to say that I did not derive any value from it (as another comment said near here) but that I really did not understand if this was intellectually interesting. It was a nice story, it did get a good development which I enjoyed but I feel like this is just as entertainment, right?

I know I digressed, I apologize.

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