Ask HN: Do you lack someone to share your achievements with? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Do you lack someone to share your achievements with?

4 pointssph9 comments

This is my latest effort to combat my own period of extreme loneliness.

Reading through The biology of desire by Marc Lewis, there is a part where he mentions that addicts and other people struggling to improve their condition have a hard time visualising their life as a continuous thread from the better day, the current pain and struggles, and a more wholesome future. Their lives have lost a sense of time and instead it tends to become circular, where days, past and future blur into a fog which is hard to get out of.

I feel loneliness is very similar, and I want to try something different now. I have been working towards a better version of myself, but having no one to share my achievements, my days, or just what latest TV show I have been enjoying is a major obstacle to my progress. I feel I would enjoy having someone I can just share what I have done today, rant about that piece of tech, and share some thoughts. No real rules, no structure, no obligation. Just a place I can say something, and there's someone that answers back. Like those IRC channels we used to idle on with friends back in the day.

This is a real shot in the dark, and quite terrifying, but would anyone be interested in something like that? I was thinking of a Discord channel, or IRC, or a group chat, just to have a place to share some thoughts whenever you feel like it.

I don't know what I'm doing but, what the hell, if you're interested, shoot me an email and we'll set something up.

In principle, yes. I can definitely relate to this:

have a hard time visualising their life as a continuous thread from the better day, the current pain and struggles, and a more wholesome future. Their lives have lost a sense of time and instead it tends to become circular, where days, past and future blur into a fog

In context of the projects I'm working on and the goals I have. My problem is, I have a hard time talking about incremental progress. I can talk to my IRL friends if I have something really meaningful to report, even if most of them won't understand what I'm talking about. But many days my "progress" reduces to "read 40 pages of this book on digital sampling of waveforms that I'm reading, and wrote some sample code to read audio off a microphone and save it as a WAV file." This feels to trivial to even talk to anybody about, even though it may be fairly meaningful to me (where the long-term goal(s) here involve speech recognition, AI, etc.).

Not sure how to deal with that aspect, although talking to a group of people who are more or less strangers may actually be easier at times. Kinda like the way there may be some things you'd find it easier to talk about with a random stranger at a bar, than an IRL friend or family member, or whatever.

Anyway, if somebody stands up a Discord instance or something, I'm game to join in and give it a try.

Share your Discord name and I'll send you a msg there. Looks like there's someone else in this thread that might be interested

Discord name is "sprhodes#9372".

Add me too, my discord name is my nickname here + #0768

I'd definitely be down for a discord server for something like this. I'm in a similar situation. Would be nice just to have some buddies to chill with. Having good company is important.

I don't have a server yet, but there's two people and I that would be interested, so you're more than welcome to join us. Share your Discord name and I'll send you a message. I'm not at my PC rn so I don't remember mine.

Sounds cool - I'll shoot you an e-mail with my discord name.

This sounds like an interesting idea, and I could very likely benefit from such an arrangement, myself.

I'm Dossy#5309 on Discord, let's figure something out together.

Cool, I'll send you a message tomorrow.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com