Staring into the abyss as a core life skill | Hacker News Reader

Staring into the abyss as a core life skill

benkuhn.net

368 pointstroydavis258 comments

Many of these students ultimately end up going into finance or consulting, not because they were particularly excited about that as a career path but because it’s the easiest high-status next step from their in-retrospect-poorly-chosen major. Unfortunately, those are also career paths that require long hours and where the work is often meaningless. While I’m sure that finance and consulting are the right career choice for some elite college graduates, I’d be surprised if it was the best choice for nearly 50% of them.

But the pay is so much more too. This means you can retire sooner and then use the free time to find meaning. It also means you have more money to fund your hobbies and interests, and also just having a nice standard of living is good too, and not having to worry so much about unpaid bills, medical costs, etc. . People who have crappy jobs also work long hours too and find the work meaningless.

The typical response is being in these jobs changes you so that when you have the money you no longer have any meaning. You have a passion, you put it on hold for 10-20yrs for $$$, you come out the other end having lost your passion

Further, that assumes you make it out the other end. Almost no one saves the money and retires early. Instead they get some money, they get a nicer apartment, nicer car, start eating out at fancier restaurants, shopping at higher end places, buying fashion brands etc...

This is a fair illustration of some failure modes for that choice.

I took the other road: during my 20s and early 30s I spent a lot of time chasing meaning while minimizing expenses and the time I put into jobs and other explicitly career-focused choices (although tech-related stuff turned out to be one of my forms of play & exploration, and I did do the startup thing a time or two). Can't say I outright regret this because I do think I exercised a lot of important personal capacities and gained some insights, but at one point I did look around and realize my place in society was effectively "economically marginalized software developer" and that was a weird and probably not optimal tradeoff from both a practical or meaningful standpoint, especially considering I had still had a lot of open questions and anxieties about meaning.

So, this path has potential failure modes too.

At that point I made a pretty deliberate choice to more or less "sell out." Years later the upsides appear to have outweighed the down, and I find myself with the suspicion that meaning is found/made wherever you meet life thoughtfully and intentionally, and that if I'd chosen finance in my 20s (or more comp-rewarding tech roles) I'd have had opportunities that were different but not without their own affordances for meaning (and probably a higher net worth).

Still, I like my work and hobbies, and I never feel there's a shortage of interesting and engaging things to pay attention to in the world. I could continue like this for decades if I'm lucky enough to; my most substantial worries are staving off/prepping for whatever decline in health we all eventually face, and with it capacity to engage the world robustly. Perhaps I didn't do so badly after all.

Your comment made me think and see the usual "high paid, sell out" - "low paid, high meaning" dichotomy in a different light. I'll ponder it a bit more.

Thank you and Merry Xmas.

Not everything has to have meaning. In fact, nothing has to have meaning for life to be worth living. It is a delusion we tell ourselves that something must have meaning to be worthwhile.

Having said that, I find value in relationships, not jobs or hobbies or things. Meaning? There is no meaning. Things are as they are. And it’s beautiful.

Well, "worthwhile" is not a natural state to crave (animals in nature just are, they're not concerned with "worthwhile" or "finding joy in little pleasures" and so on).

So, if you still want life to be "worthwhile", you might as well ask it to be meaningful, it's pretty much the same thing, and meaningless is just another way of saying "not worth it".

Or inversely, "life having a meaning" or a "purpose" doesn't mean getting at an "ultimate understanding of life" or getting the "real meaning of life". Just means finding something meanigful (that makes life meaningful) to you. Somebody for example might find the meaning of life in travelling and getting to see the world, or find meaning in relationships as you said.

Merely being good at what one does, when that is useful to others, is often a good definition for meaning.

I would define that as “helpful” or “useful to society”, not meaningful.

You don’t feel being useful to society had meaning? I think you might be putting meaning on quite a pedestal.

You can assign meaning to anything. You can assign meaning to a bird passing over your head as you propose to your girlfriend: "it was meant to be."

So sure, there can be meaning in being useful to society. But that's not really my point. My point is that meaning does not need to be a goal. If you hang your life's worth on the meaning you find, I am betting you're going to be disappointed a lot of the time. It doesn't need to be that way. Look beyond meaning for worth and value.

>Look beyond meaning for worth and value.

Then what gave your life "worth" and "value" would be what gave it meaning.

You're pretty much saying the same thing, but with different semantics for meaning.

Meaning doesn't necessarily mean to "some big end goal". People use it for anything that they feel makes their life worth it ("gives it meaning"). So "being of help to others" to "enjoying family life and friendships" or "expressing myself through playing the piano" to "religion" can all be said to imply meaning.

I guess we don't agree on the semantics of meaning. For example, the "meaning of life" is not the same as "value of life" or "worth of life".

As with many words, 'meaning' is multiply overloaded, and whichever concept (or concepts) come to mind is heavily dependent on the established or assumed context.

I would normally feel a sense of ambiguity when somebody wrote of "giving their life meaning" (but less so when spoken, because they might emphasise '_/meanin/_'), but would not feel much about the phrase "the meaning of life", nor "life, the universe, and everything!".

I think you're using a different interpretation of meaning than other people in the thread. It looks like you're using "meaning" in the sense of "that which hints at a deeper design beyond our own", while others use "meaning" in the sense of "that which brings personal fulfillment".

Is not being useful to others worthwhile and valuable?

Indeed, it is!

"Look beyond meaning for worth and value."

Well said.

That doesn’t mean anything.

That kind of work we often call "meaningful work". It's pretty much the same thing.

And it's not just about “helpful” or “useful to society”, it can also be meaningful work if you e.g. can express yourself doing it.

I did the exact same thing. Chased my passion through 30, burnt out, sold out, and am now burnt out on the other side 10 years later. Might sell all my shit and become a carpenter or a framer.

Be aware, burn out is often as much or more about self regulation than it is any specific activity. Being able and willing to say no to mind one’s boundaries being a key skill.

Changing careers can help (the novelty provides rewards), but rarely does whatever underlying thing causing the issue disappear.

I've been thinking about that. The IT industry doesn't lend itself to boundaries very well so I think I'd like a career where work stays at work.

Sure it does - you work 8 hours a day, if you get more tasks to do than time you prioritize and what gets done gets done.

If management want more done they can hire more staff.

Sure you need to find the right company and your yearly compensation might be lower, but your hourly rate will still be around the same and you can have quality of life.

> you work 8 hours a day

Do you really though?

Any problem solving industry is going to have flow over work which is not visible.

Even if you're not physically at work, how many ppl are actually mentally checked out when they leave?

How much work is done in the office and how much is left over for the subconscious to decode for the following day?

It will vary by the types of work you're doing, but being in tech as a whole can be quite mentally draining.

This sounds more like you don't have other fulfilling hobbies to focus on once work finishes for the day, or management is pushing for results so hard that you feel like you need to work off the clock.

The only time I sometimes think of work outside business hours is on bike rides because its otherwise not very mentally stimulating.

It depends on the work. If you're writing a CRUD app then sure, it's easy to check out.

If you're building out new infrastructure, doing a huge refactor or stuck on a tricky problem then anyone that naturally cares about their work will have ideas moving around in their subconscious.

For me personally, I'm building my own software, so my asshole boss likes to push as hard as he can :D

LouisSayers: In another post(now closed) you offered help with regard to Sam Ovens consulting accelerator..." Is there a way to discuss with you?

If this reply is offensive, I apologize.

This is where I'm at. The job is to think. You can't frame a house at home in the shower, but you can think about an LDAP solution to get at switches on the other end of a VPN tunnel etc.

> You can't frame a house at home in the shower

I beg to differ. I only do building as a hobby, but the amount of time I spend thinking about how to build things in the shower is pretty much the same as with my tech job.

Again, it may be more about the person than the job

Mentally check out of work - mentally check into your life and loved ones.

Or eventually get a divorce I guess...

This is the self regulation challenge right here.

I suspect that no job lends itself to boundaries well, and that a healthy willingness to enforce them is going to be necessary regardless.

How did you sell out, and practically how did it turn out?

I'm interested in doing the same thing.

yeah exactly, as a man, you should focus on increasing your status in society, and through those activities that increase status, you ultimately find meaning.

"you put it on hold for 10-20yrs for $$$, you come out the other end having lost your passion"

People change for a lot of reasons. I gave up some hobbies when I had a kid and I'm pretty sure I won't pick them back up when I retire. People's passions change, or they realize certain things are unobtainable. That's just life.

It’s become clear some hobbies are essentially status-seeking among young adults and/or showing off to potential partners. They simply don’t make much sense anymore for someone married with kids.

Sounds like an interesting theory. Can you give some examples of these hobbies?

Motorsports and pushing grades rock climbing, for many people I knew. I am also suspicious of ballet and trivia.

You know you’ve found one when, in a gathering, none of the participants seem to particularly like each other and mostly seem interested in one upping the others.

A more obvious example is drinking a ton of alcohol at parties.

Maybe for some. Mine weren't about that, but I could certainly see some people involved in those same activities could be.

I agree. The original comment is bizarre, and espouses a black and white view of life. As a general rule, no young person realises how much age and circumstances will change their life. It is impossible to foresee. Every year of my life, something arrives out of the blue that was impossible to foresee and changes the direction of my life. And older people seem to forget their own circumstances in youth.

+1 The project outline vs the actual shipped product

> And if you gaze long enough into an abyss, the abyss will gaze back into you.

By the way, I find it confusing that the article states that finance and consulting is the result of poorly chosen majors. That's the kind of thinking you apply to kids who picked Jazz Theory and then realized that La La Land is nearly pure Hollywood fantasy (the ending anyways).

Those business/biz-econ/business admin/econ classrooms are filled with kids who have no delusion about what they're getting themselves into it. They're in it for the money and a shot at being hired by the big shot names on Wall Street. They're either passionate about the money, or they just want a stable life with money.

And the entire undergrad experience of those two fields of study do a pretty swell job of weeding kids out. Business Frats, Clubs, Societies -- the emphasis on networking and internships. Like, the classroom experience might be less rigorous compared to your average pre-med student but make no mistake getting a job on Wall Street requires a lot of work. Just a very different kind of work.

It is also the only high status step outside of medicine and law. Or claiming fame via Hollywood (in which nepotism runs rampant) or Athletics (in which your ability to gain status is almost entirely decided by whether or not you were born a genetic outlier). The first two require a lot more schooling and particular academic talent. The last two are basically moonshots and the road to fame littered with failed attempts.

So finance it is.

> Those business/biz-econ/business admin/econ classrooms are filled with kids who have no delusion about what they're getting themselves into it.

I know Harvard doesn’t have anything so vulgar as business, accounting or finance at undergrad since well bred young men and women leave that to grad school. Similarly for Stanford, Yale and Princeton.

> It also means you have more money to fund your hobbies and interests

Except investment banking and consulting both have notoriously long (100+ hr/wk) work weeks leaving very little time for other interests and hobbies. These careers effectively force you to adopt the career as the core of your personality.

My 2-cents seeing friends and a sibling go through the IB track.

You have 100+ hr/wk for a few years in your 20s, when you're young and can sort of handle it. But by the time you're having a family you work more normal hours and make absolute FU money (e.g my younger brother makes over 10x/yr what I do at only 31 years old). It's not about the salary and hours when you start at 22, its about the salary and hours when you're 32 and 42.

I compare this to my friends who became physicians or accountants, and I think the IB folks have a waaaay better work-to-pay ratio long-term. I'm on the fence about consulting because the pay ceiling seems lower and I don't personally know enough of them.

You have much more flexibility of where to live as a physician. Remote software developer is probably the best pay to quality of life at work ratio, and probably even higher pay outright if you were at a high flying tech company for some portion of the last 15 years.

> You have much more flexibility of where to live as a physician.

Ludicrously false. In the long run, sure. But your youth will be spent in whatever random town the residency match takes you to, and that's after having to go wherever there's a med school that'll take you. The flexibility comes much later and by then you may have settled down accidentally somewhere you randomly got placed.

Also true that one has to give up their 20s and possibly low 30s somewhere they do not want to be, but in general, a doctor can pick up and go anytime after that compared to someone in finance who generally has to stick around the finance hubs.

people dont go to medicine just for $$$. Especially high status medicine like residency in microsurgery and fellowship in neurosurgery.

you go to learn the craft at high status institution (like Mayo Clinic in middle of nowhere Minnesota) and help patients with the most complicated health conditions.

I sincerely hope people dont become doctors just for the money. If you want money - it is much easier to become banker or trader. More money and less time spent in academics

I will tell you from personal experience, a huge percent of doctors do it basically just for the money.

If you come from a lower to lower-middle class family, becoming a doctor might as well be becoming a billionaire. Many doctors don’t find out that other careers earn more money until they are already in or beyond residency.

I was in the process of applying to med school, thinking it was my best chance of joining the upper class in America, when I met an extremely wealthy man thru a friend. He gave me the advice “Doctor career is a trap for the middle class. Do something that scales better, and don’t worry about a guaranteed career path, you’ll figure it out as you go along”. It’s a bit dramatic but I think there was truth in it, and it added to the evidence I need to change my career

Consulting covers a lot of different companies with different requirements. You very much can find one where you work a large but acceptable number of hours outside of the occasional crunch (50-ish is easy to find).

Also no one does 100+h/wk. That’s not even physically possible. Even juniors in IB which is notorious for being gruelling are actually not doing much during the day. The main issue is that work really starts when your partner finishes their day of meetings and things have to be ready for the next morning.

I agree that no one is working 100+ hr/wk but you still have to be in the office that long. I.e. you don’t have time away from the office to partake in hobbies and other interests.

Any management consultant (McKinsey, Bain, BCG, etc) not travelling at least 4 full days and in the office 2 of the other 3 isn’t making enough money to be relevant to this conversation. Again, it is time being sucked away from other aspects of your life, regardless of whether you’re working or not.

> Any management consultant (McKinsey, Bain, BCG, etc) not travelling at least 4 full days and in the office 2 of the other 3 isn’t making enough money to be relevant to this conversation.

That’s ridiculous.

There is a world outside of the top 3 strategy consulting companies where people do make good money. What you just did is akin to limiting IT to Google, Apple and Meta.

Plus even there, assignments don’t always have you travelling for days especially if you work from a capital as your clients are likely to be there too. You don’t work 6 days a week every week and the hours get a lot more reasonable as you climb the ladder.

And I say that while not even thinking it’s a good job. I have been in and out of consulting (yes you can go back) during the past decade and think this stint will be my last. When it’s nice, it can be very nice but when it sucks, it sucks a lot. Also at some point you actually forget if you really do interesting things or just get really good at selling what you do.

> There is a world outside of the top 3 strategy consulting companies where people do make good money.

But no one cares about them. In comparison with MBB they have no cachet or prestige. If you want to make good money there are many options. If you want to tell your fellow Princeton graduates that you did well on the post graduation job hunt you don’t want to say you got hired by Walmart Labs, you want to say you got hired by Google. Deloitte is the Walmart Labs in this analogy, not Google (MBB).

> But no one cares about them. In comparison with MBB they have no cachet or prestige.

That’s 21 years old with delusion speech. The MBB are nice because they pay better and have a great alumni network. Still I can assure you that both the customers and employees of the other companies do care very much about what they actually do.

In the real world, no one gives a damn about the MBB. 99% of the population don’t know they exist and the rest of your promotion is too occupied living its own life to care about what you do. The whole prestige thing is just catnip for insecure graduates which is nice for the MBB recruitment pool that being said.

Struck a nerve, huh? Don’t worry. Like you said in your original comment there’s money to be made in consulting outside MBB and as you just wrote most of the population doesn’t know consulting exists at all, never mind who’s prestigious. But everyone in consulting knows, same as those insecure 21 year olds.

I like how you assume I have never worked for a MBB. Some of us don't smell our own farts, you know.

People view of how things work change drastically between their junior years, i.e. nearly students, and grade above manager where you start selling. I'm highly tempted to answer you: you will understand when you have grown up but that would be a touch condescending, wouldn't it?

As far as I can tell the proportion of those who have any excuse to do so who smell their own farts well exceeds 50%. If you deny yourself that pleasure more power to you. It’s still the case that just as more is written about Harvard every year than about all community colleges combined there’s more written about MBB than about the rest of the strategy consulting industry combined. People love prestige.

If you have inside knowledge might you be able to confirm the dumbest thing I’ve heard about McKinsey, that they have an absolute bar on hiring people with subpar academic credentials? The example I heard was a guy who was being recruited as an MD and when they discovered he’d gotten a third class honours they had to rescind the offer.

To be clear, a tiny fraction of an investment bank works hours like that. Morgan Stanley has about 70,000 employees. I guess about 700 junior investment bankers (M&A, IPO, etc.) are working hours like that. And it only lasts for two years. And no one forces them to do it. People willing sign-up for the career fast track.

In 2022, who is working 100+ hr/wk in consulting? Doing what? The 1990s/2000s are over. Now, they are mostly milking big dumb corporations by building unnecessary, overpriced software systems. Probably magic circle junior lawyers are working much more than consultants they days, and making more money.

Also you wrote: <<These careers effectively force you to adopt the career as the core of your personality.>> Not true. Many people get lucky and are selected for a two year ibanking programme. They work like crazy for two years, learn a decade's worth of banking knowledge, then move on to a different role or career.

True but it still might be better than the alternative of working just enough (~40 hours/week) to still make it hard to spend a lot of time on outside interests while not living very comfortably, financially speaking.

Consulting is also great on the job training in how the real world of commerce and business operate, with the bonus that after a year or two you probably have personal knowledge of how a handful of major corporations operate, including which corporate cultures are healthy/positive and which are not. The types of lessons you never learn in a classroom.

The gap between what consulting companies like students to think they will learn and what they actually learn is very significant.

Ha, that’s true. But at least you get to see how dysfunctional nearly any corporation is pretty quickly.

Are finance and consulting really high status beyond the pay? Why? In theory it seems like they might be, but most of my peers in these fields are pretty uninspiring

We live in a world where high pay = status. Not ideal if you aspire the world to be more Meaningful or Spiritual or what have you, but this is reality.

And when in the United States alone the average salary hovers around $75K/yr, a 24 year old being able to command a near $150K base-salary (excluding bonuses) is in the eyes of many absolutely flying high.

Add to that Finance/Consulting/Professional Services eats/live/travels/dresses in a manner that is high status in our society and the jobs quickly becomes a status symbol and attracts those who are willing to sacrifice some amount of passion for status or material wealth.

It also is a field where it confers that wealth and status without Having to Know Someone or Be A Genetic Outlier In Physical Performance/Appearance.

Lastly, survive long enough and climb the ladder high enough and you start gaining Power. That wealth no longer buys you things but rather connections, access, and influence. Finance sits in close proximity to many powerful people in the world, and thus by proxy also gains status.

SWE/IT offers similar levels of wealth but unfortunately lacks that proximity to power (yet) and as a class of professionals seems to espouse cultural values that go against the ostentatious displays of wealth that the average person associates with high status. At the very least, no one is showing up to morning standups in a custom tailored suit.

Source: my social circle growing up mostly consisted of working class immigrant families. Getting into a T20 University and breaking into Wall Street was the very definition of Making It.

You are onto something with the proximity to power thing. A lot of understanding of the world unlocked for me once I started peeling apart wealth & power, how wealth /= power, and how power is the more important end (vs wealth). For example, if anything, someone with a lot of wealth has likely been selling away a lot of power in order to acquire the wealth.

>It also is a field where it confers that wealth and status without Having to Know Someone

I wouldn't have thought this. What in your view are those fields?

>For example, if anything, someone with a lot of wealth has likely been selling away a lot of power in order to acquire the wealth.

O, to the contrary, my dear friend. Someone with a lot of wealth has gained by exploiting their wealth to gain more power -- which results in them gaining more wealth.

I would say that the correct equation is Riches!=Power. One can have a vast treasury that, incorrectly deployed, does not gain them power.

Hollywood is a prime example of this. Music industry is another. Book publishing is also rife with nepotism but in a non-familial way. Anything media related in general. Even journalism -- Anderson Cooper is a Vanderbilt. Chris Cuomo's father and brother both high ranking politicians.

Some people in finance and consulting think we live in a world where money=status or to be honest the students aspiring to career in finance and consulting tend to think that - people in the trench get pretty jaded. Thankfully this is a microcosm and there is a world beyond that.

Maybe you live in a world where high pay = status, but that’s not my experience. I think you at least sort of agree because you note that SWEs don’t have much proximity to power and are lower status because of it. I could have guessed your source just from your initial assertion. Just because that was your upbringing doesn’t make it an objective truth or a value worth considering.

In what country or culture is "high pay = status" not true? I struggle to think of a single one.

Maybe at the entire country level that’s true but why is it important what people that don’t share your values care about? The people I’m surrounded with care much much more about creativity and the ability to have unique and interesting ideas. Salary is totally irrelevant.

Feudal Europe for one. The highest paid were often the merchants. The highest status were the nobility

The mean salary in the US might be $75k, but the median is ~$35k.

Salary or income? The median is brought down by folks with no job who survive on welfare. Is that included in either figure?

I work for a financial company. The closer you get to the money, the more status you're expected to display. They expect you to have a BMW, Tesla, or similar. They expect you to hire a guy to perform any manual labor. They expect that you have a nice house in a nice area.

If you don't have these things, you're looked down on and people assume you aren't successful/skilled. Just projecting the image is enough to push some people into a promotion.

I think the 'need to impress people' is often used as an excuse to splurge. Maybe it's more expected for salesmen like financial advisors, or small business attorneys that are dealing with retail clients.

I'm a fairly senior investment banker (Managing Director, group head), and I drive a 14 year old Honda. None of my co-workers or clients have ever seen my car or been to my house. I don't wear a watch.

Some of my co-workers will wear bespoke clothes and flashy jewelry, but it's not required, and mid-tier conservative suits and shoes are fine.

I agree. I see two types of finance MDs: Flashy and low key. It sounds like you are more low key. My sense about the flashy ones: Their net worth is surprisingly low because their burn rate is so high. The low key ones are loaded.

What are the options to avoid the status treadmill?

Faking displays seems hard (status markers are chosen for their difficulty to fake, presumably the easy faking is done by everyone, and I guess high cost if busted and competition to catch others out?)

Can you be so competent that you can ignore the status rules? Presumably difficult, because competence is hard to measure, and competitively it is hard to achieve a significantly higher level of competence than others? A status player can have mistakes forgiven, but betting on competence requires you never make a misstep?

Or do you just optimise for a level of acceptable status, and maximise savings?

What happens to those that bug out?

There was a discussion here recently about how high-status people can afford to countersignal. But if regular people do that then they tend to suffer negative social consequences.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33942670

There's a recurrent meme on social media about a similar concept. "What's classy if you're rich but trashy if you're poor": https://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/bvdaci/whats_cla...

"What are the options to avoid the status treadmill?"

Stop caring about what 99.9% of other people think about you. Find a few good friends and a romantic partner. That is all you need.

They are extremely high status among friends and family who do not work in tech or IT, or among recent graduate peers who are struggling to get a white collar career going and stuck in service jobs or other jobs that will never break 100k/yr. For a lot of those folks, just hearing about the types of lunch and travel expenses enjoyed by consultants can imbue the job with high status.

Which gets at the uninspiring bit. Having experienced fancy lunches and travel, it ain’t all it’s made out to be and I doubt that anyone higher status than me whom I would actually aspire to, would give two hoots about it the way the people you describe do

Can't speak for the US but here, "suit" jobs are generally held to higher regard even if the job no longer requires a suit. Fancy names and a history of good pay definitely help.

If anything, IT is the outlier in "well-paid office jobs which garner lots of respect".

Suit jobs are only highly regarded amongst a subset of the population. I think the more you understand the realities of those jobs, the less appeal they have. There's also certain personality types drawn to those roles which isn't attractive for everyone.

I used to look at engineers and think I missed out by not going down that road. Fast forward a few years and it turns out most engineers I talk to see the tech industry as being a much better draw (higher salaries, more jobs, etc).

> IT is the outlier in "well-paid office jobs which garner lots of respect"

That is a relatively modern thing - I thought IT was relatively unrespected even 20 years ago, although I am not in the US, so maybe different there. I suspect the change was occurring about when Zuckerberg became wealthy, maybe late 00’s?

It is fucking bizarre to me seeing “geek” go mainstream (although commercialised geek is definitely different from traditional geek - maybe even incompatibly so?).

I think it was at least 30 years ago. With the dot-com boom and impending Y2K disaster, tech had tons of high-paid jobs, and relatively few people had used computers much if at all. Tech 'wizards' were viewed as mysterious brilliant people who could do magic with a little bit of typing or tinkering.

> But the pay is so much more too. This means you can retire sooner and then use the free time to find meaning.

This spiel about waiting for retirement to "find meaning" is a load of BS. Telling people to sit around and wait for decades on end until their life is 4/5 of the way complete is inhumane. Why wait for decades when someone can just do what they're interested in now?

The fact that some people unironically think this crazy stuff (and don't see how crazy it really is) is just sickening to me

> People who have crappy jobs also work long hours too and find the work meaningless.

This part of your comment isn't getting nearly the attention it deserves.

Hard work and long hours aren't the reward, they are what let you reward yourself- however you find value or meaning.

Some jobs don't require long hours. Some jobs pay more than others. Sometimes, doing a job can be intrinsically fulfilling. Not every job is all or any of those things, and any one of them may mean tradeoffs to the others.

Those are good reasons, I'm not going to deny that but there's something to be said for enjoying life while you're young enough to take full advantage of it. Being poor(ish) when you're young isn't the worst thing in the world, when you have no real responsibilities. Grinding to make money in your thirties and beyond, when those real responsibilities hit always made more sense to me... but I may have done all of it wrong. I don't know.

> Grinding to make money in your thirties and beyond

I sort of think grinding is generally wrong at any age. If you feel like you're grinding, perhaps it's time to take stock and consider what you could be doing differently so that you don't have to keep grinding to both meet your responsibilities and enjoy life. Of course some might find themselves with enough exigencies they have almost no choice but to grind, but I doubt too many people on HN are really in that boat.

Investing time early on can permanently change your trajectory.

My experience has been that "grinding" has very big returns. When you're starting out, putting in 2x more time gets you way more than 2x returns over the same period of time.

Personally I'm happy to "grind" for a few years at the start of my career to set myself up for the rest of my life.

Right, if you're not doing it for the journey, maybe you need to find another destination or a better route or something.

Maybe there's no right answer and everybody meanders through life goals at their own pace, or not at all.

The requirement to make enough money to survive is unignorable. Anything beyond that is just making up goalposts. There's always another goalpost you could strive to reach.

> This means you can retire sooner and then use the free time to find meaning

Ugh. What an illusion. Please don’t put your life on hold to find meaning in your 40/50s

At least in the US in a high paying job you can very easily save 50% and still have more spending money than most people around you. It doesn’t necessarily mean you have to sacrifice anything other than lifestyle creep

Yes, did exactly this.

People who say things like "you're putting your life on hold" have no discipline.

I set out on this path at 17. I'm 36 now. I have a wife, kids, have traveled a lot, lived in better houses than most of my peers, ate out plenty, etc.

Much living was had.

I left salary work at age 34 (FIRE).

What do I do now? Work harder than ever and play the long game, and of course continue to live a rich life.

To anyone considering saving and building wealth starting at an early age: yes, it's worth it. No, you don't have to "pause your life."

You will need discipline.

>People who say things like "you're putting your life on hold" have no discipline.

Imagine trying to extrapolate moral superiority from having had the luck of finding a high paid job.

>I set out on this path at 17. I'm 36 now.

Yes, I too had dreams at 17. I even had an entire notebook with journaling about those dreams. None of them came to life. NONE. I guess I wasn't worthy or disciplined enough like the morally superior: the rich.

How many people live well below their means and retire early though? I imagine most people taking those jobs just ended up living expensive lifestyles and retiring around the same time the rest of us do. Plus even retiring early generally means waiting until you're in your 40s or 50s.

I think plenty of people work hard to hit retirement money, and then make mid-life career switches to jobs with better work-life balance. My wife and I were having lots of trouble starting a family and were preparing to basically retire early. The problem is, it's difficult to fit in socially if you're retired early. I was about to start working in earnest on a career pivot to consulting/gig work that I could do for a few months out of the year and travel with my wife the rest of the year. The main aim of the flexible work was to remain employable and able to ramp back up if something went terribly wrong with our retirement investments and/or our living costs.

Luckily, our 4th pregnancy worked out (unlike the previous 3). Now, we're working to maximize opportunities for our son, but we were preparing to make serious career changes to trade the majority of our income for much more flexibility. Now, the plan is to keep working until our son is through college, but he's less than 2 years old, so there's plenty of time for plans to change.

Had we lost our son, the plan was to live out a 3-4 star lifestyle, traveling the world and working just enough to keep the option open for ramping work back up in an emergency.

So, it's a sample size of one, but I think the type of people who live well enough below their means to retire early also tend to be the the type of people who dial their careers back to idle for a "soft retirement" instead of quitting work cold-turkey.

Expensive lifestyles are expensive because there’s more demand for them. Living a more desirable lifestyle and then retiring at the same time is still better is it not?

"This means you can retire sooner and then use the free time to find meaning."

Why does anyone have to find meaning?

Because the alternative is an existential crisis.

Why is that? Is it that we are conditioned to want a purpose, just as we are conditioned by society to want a bigger house, or a fancy wedding, etc?

I wish I lived in the same society as you where people condition themselves and other to find purpose. On the contrary it seems to me that most people live a completely unexamined life, and don't concern themselves with meaning, purpose, truth, morality or whatever. On the contrary, some people, a small minority, are bugged by these existential questions: nobody conditioned me, the ridiculed me for "thinking too much". Not everything is "social conditioning": some people through a mixture of genetics and experiences are just born this way.

I wish I weren't.

Here's a profound realization. Utility is a function of both variables, time and money. Wholly unemployed people have plenty time but can't afford to spend the money using it how they want. So the situation is valueless. On the opposite extreme, people who spend every waking working have plenty of money but can't afford to spend a second using it how they want. So that situation is also valueless.

Based on nothing more than crudely assuming utility = time*money and then optimizing with simple calculus, you can get very close to deriving a 40 hour work week as the utility maximizing choice.

That's all nice theory on paper, but you sure have no clue about reality of most folks you write about...

Life is too short, and damn too short to make huge mistakes like this, for something so meaningless as just money. I am not saying cash is completely meaningless, we don't live in utopia, but the more you have them less meaning/significance they have.

Any white collar folk who ain't completely useless can earn enough to have a decent life and realize (as quickly as possible) that true meaning in life, and long term happiness are in completely different direction than piles of cash. At one point you start paying heavily with former to get latter.

this is stated rather categorically for a subjective opinion

I’ve tried doing my passion by doing two startups and also going into finance and since hindsight is 20/20 a good reason why I think I should have actually went into finance first and or even going into consulting as a technical person in a large Fortune 500 is that budgeting of projects and planning of software to meet budgets is much clearer to me now and management of time to find a solution would have informed me much better than doing the startups first.

Also I could have started saving money for another startup instead of incurring credit card debt.

I keep hearing that consulting and finance are terrible uninspiring careers, but as a consultant I honestly have no idea what else I could do that would be more inspiring. I would love to know though.

There are no other better choices available, unless one is born into wealth. That's why whoever talks about passion, inspiration, etc, is just talking throgh his/her hat. For 95 percent of the world population, some job is better than not having a job.

If you are happy with your own life, you can CTRL+W on this and all other navel-gazing internet fare.

There are plenty of things which are more interesting than consulting which is why most consultants actually use the career as a stepping stone to go do what their clients were doing.

The pay in consulting is not typically the main draw. Finance and tech are almost always more lucrative. Even within finance, most jobs do not pay particularly high salaries for entry-level positions, if seen through the lens of hourly rates (e.g., investment banking).

> But the pay is so much more too. This means you can retire sooner and then use the free time to find meaning.

What I seem to see more often is just more or more expensive consumption. Bigger house, expensive furnishings, expensive cars, designer clothes, lavish vacations.

Most people eventually figure out that meaning is overrated and comfort is where it's at.

It's the journey, not the destination.

Life before Death

Strength before Weakness

Journey before Destination

>But the pay is so much more too. This means you can retire sooner and then use the free time to find meaning.

The type of person that goes into Finance/Consulting is certainly not the type of person that will want to retire early.

Finance person here. I rarely meet people in finance who want to be working the rest of their lives. Not sure if your comment was sarcastic.

That's my experience in finance, as well. Jim Cramer mentioned that when he interviewed at Goldman, they asked him what he planned to do when he left Goldman. Lots of people hit comfortable retirement money at Goldman in their late 30s to late 40s and pivot to working in the public sector.

I went on a tour in Cambodia through a company that donates a portion of its profits to local schools. The last day of our tour, I had dinner with the guy who started the company, and it turns out that running a business that benefits one of the poorest countries is his soft retirement after leaving his position as an MD in Goldman's London office in his mid 40s.

I left Goldman for a hedge fund, but if I didn't have a kid, I'd be soft retired by now.

This sounds more like "playing devil's advocate" or taking a contrarian view, or questioning one's assumptions or decisions. Whatever you call it, the author is right about it being a useful skill.

If you want to talk about "staring into the abyss" though... to me that phrase evokes the casting of all reality into doubt. It means to grapple with the Münchhausen trilemma, or to perceive the limitless and arbitrary space of metaphysics, or to acknowledge the oblivion of meaning that the shadow of death casts over us. Either way, the abyss really is an abyss. I don't know whether it's useful to stare into it.

I take what the author describes as "staring into the abyss" as a special case of playing devil's advocate: one where the contrarian view has significant and emotionally difficult consequences, and you're actually letting yourself feel the emotional weight of potentially choosing it instead of just playing with the idea.

For example: Imagine you go to an engineering college, and you start feeling like you might not like the idea of an engineering career. You could play devil's advocate by chatting with your engineering-enthralled friends about how fun it'd be to drop out of college and go to culinary school instead, but that's just talk. Staring into the abyss would be actually thinking through the financial, social, and personal implications of that choice, looking into culinary schools, and letting that dread and anxiety and excitement wash over you while you genuinely contemplate making the switch.

> If you want to talk about "staring into the abyss" though... to me that phrase evokes the casting of all reality into doubt.

In a more literal sense, yeah, I agree, that's what staring into the abyss is. I think here the author uses it as an effective way of saying "question the assumptions of your immediate reality".

> letting that dread and anxiety and excitement wash over you while you genuinely contemplate making the switch.

But life also happens anyways. For me, a lot of what constitutes "staring into the abyss" is accepting that neither the original plan nor my alternate wish worked out as expected - despite the best laid plans - because almost nothing ever does. It's not just considering all the implications of a decision but accepting that things just work out differently than you hoped.

[edit] I guess I mean that accepting the inevitability of previous disappointments is as much or more a part of grappling with the abyss as is considering the future.

To me "staring into the abyss" isn't just "accepting things". Its an action. Its something you can spend your time doing. Lots of people don't do it - especially in the modern age of social media where the abyss can be kept away with an infinitely scrolling list of entertaining content.

I live in a highrise building with a beautiful view. I've spent a lot of precious hours just sitting on my couch looking over the city and thinking. Those moments have yielded a bounty of insights. But for all the valuable thoughts on the couch waiting for me, I don't go there very often. There's always something more stimulating that wants my attention. Letting my attention settle on some random thread on HN (coughs) instead of pondering infinity has a deep cost that we rarely account for.

Many folks refuse to accept or do either of these things. If you aren’t that person, then congrats! Well, maybe. It has pros and cons either way.

I can honestly say I’m pretty good at this and feel like its more of a burden to me in my life so far. I no longer know anyone who shares this trait, and most people find even hearing me talk about it uncomfortable.

Perhaps I will get the opportunity to use it someday, but as of now it is really just emotionally taxing to have many uncomfortable thoughts that I have to bottle up.

Look into Dabrowski's Theory of Positive Disintegration.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Positive_disintegration

It helped me.

Thank you.

I think most great writers and a few great barflies share it with you. But it's definitely increasingly difficult to encounter in honest conversation, because the structure of modern life does everything possible to discourage honest conversation about the meaning (or especially the meaninglessness) of life.

It must be an indictment of something that “introspection, long term planning, thorough consideration of the idea of changing career paths away from STEM” can be with a straight face described as “staring into the abyss.”

I mentor an engineer for whom staring into the abyss involved walking away from a decade long culinary career and learning to code.

Changing your life is hard. It challenges your whole identity. What you’re switching from and too is irrelevant.

> casting of all reality into doubt

Throwing one's reality into 'doubt' can cause you to significantly change your behavior, thoughts, ideas, etc. If those are largely negative to begin with and 'casting reality into doubt' (which is certainly one piece, if not the major piece of disassociation) in a safe place can improve and change your behavior for the better, it seems like a great idea to me.

https://psyche.co/ideas/when-reality-slips-through-your-fing...

I second this as a classic example of advocatus diaboli[0] in order to find a hole/weakness/wrongness in one own's initial argument/assumptions.

Taking the Nietzsche quote[1] into the context of his work: "Jenseits von Gut und Böse (Viertes Hauptstück; Sprüche und Zwischenspiele, 146)" [Beyond Good and Evil; Fourth main part; Proverbs and interludes; 146]] your interpretation seems more in line with the book.

The inevitability of birthing/becoming a Monster oneself by fighting a Monster for too long is akin to staring into the abyss long enough until the abyss is staring into you. Melting away of cause and effect, the blurring, the reversing and finally the interchangeability/permeability - in this case - of the line between the object and observer (objectivism).

Nihilism (dissolution of all values, meaningless-ism) as a standpoint devours its subject who in the beginning is looking at the outside world all around - from the inside out in the end.

[0]https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Devil%27s_advocate

[1]http://www.zeno.org/Philosophie/M/Nietzsche,+Friedrich/Jense...

146 Wer mit Ungeheuern kämpft, mag zusehn, daß er nicht dabei zum Ungeheuer wird. Und wenn du lange in einen Abgrund blickst, blickt der Abgrund auch in dich hinein.

I would have been interested in reading such a blogpost yeah, I feel like I got catfished :)

A bit over 10 years ago I was still an evangelical Christian. I decided to ask myself, "What's the most logical way to live in light of your religious beliefs? Why aren't you living that way?"

That line of questioning was scary, but also invigorating. Scary, because it probably meant leaving behind a cushy tech job. Invigorating, because I imagined I'd end up as a missionary somewhere, which is a pretty amazing life if you really believe that Christianity is true.

After 18 months of staring into the abyss, I wasn't a Christian anymore. It was the hardest and most important thing I've ever done.

Two things made the journey possible:

1. I made it impossible to stop. I'd decided that I wanted to live as consistently as possible with my beliefs, so I couldn't stop until I knew what those beliefs were. The only possible outcomes were a) missionary, or b) non-Christian.

2. I found others who went through the same thing. A few were friends, but most were authors or random people online who wrote about their experience, like lukeprog on lesswrong.com.

> The only possible outcomes were a) missionary, or b) non-Christian.

That seems like an unnecessarily tiny set of possibilities, and pretty much guaranteed from the beginning you were going to choose (b), since "non-Christian" allows a huge flexibility of options, while "missionary" is one specific vocation and chosen only by a small subset of Christians. It's sort of like a person saying he will only stay an American if he's going to be a federal judge otherwise he'll emigrate.

Now, Evangelical thought lends itself to the sort of conclusion you came to: it really only values spiritual activities, so there is not any value for daily life in and of itself. I've heard pastors say "the reason why God doesn't take us to heaven immediately when we're saved is so that we can bring others to Christ" and "there is nothing for you in this world [because the Bible says 'the world is evil']". Which I'm coming to regard as functionally heretical, since there is no balance at all, certainly no celebration that the world God made is good and very good, and functionally limits you to careers of evangelist or pastor.

The larger history of Christian thought is more robust, though. Consider Paul: "make it your ambition to lead a quiet life: you should mind your own business and work with your hands" (1 Thess 4:11, emphasis added) Or Tim Keller on work: your work is your gift to the people around you; by extension, your work is bringing God's gift to the people you interact with. ("Gift" here not meaning you don't get paid; there was a great barbecue place where I lived, and it was a gift to me to have fantastic barbecue, but I can assure you that it was not cheap)

For me, the truth of Christianity always rested on its objective historical truth claims, especially the resurrection. And for many years I believed these truth claims had sufficient evidence going for them.

But then I was hoping to find evidence that would convince a rational non-believer, so I looked closer. I found out that Adam and Eve didn't exist, the flood didn't happen, the exodus didn't happen, Daniel was written much later than it claims to be, the slaughter of the innocents in Matthew didn't happen, and the founding miracles of Christianity aren't that different from other religions of that time and place. I started giving the benefit of the doubt to skeptics instead of Christian apologists. It became impossible to make the leap that, despite all these issues, the bodily resurrection of Jesus was nevertheless historical.

I never wanted to lose my faith, but once I saw that its historical truth claims didn't hold up to scrutiny, it just kind of crumbled.

I understand that others have a different standard of proof for these miracles than I do. Plenty of people I've talked to over the years have said that looking for evidence is foolish, but I find that ridiculous: if Christianity doesn't have enough of a foothold in reality that we can find evidence for its unique claims, then why should we think it's true? If I should "just have faith", why is it Christianity that I should just have faith in?

I also understand that there are other ways of being Christian that don't depend on any of the miracles in the Bible being historical. But that never made any sense to me either: if we're dismissing huge swaths of the Bible because "we know better," how is what's left not just the religion we've made up? What would be the point of that?

As a passionate atheist, it was quite interesting to listen to the "no dumb question" podcast - a pretty down to earth priest (Matt Whitman) just chatting casually with a renowned engineer (Destin from "smarter every day").

The questions of faith and christianity often come up, but the most interesting episode for me was the one when Matt was telling about his travels to Jerusalem and how different the American version of christianity felt compared to the one practiced in the holly lands.

It's better to listen to it yourself of course but in brief his idea was that the closer you are to the "source" of christianity the more its old school, filled with pegan beliefs and the need for divine objects, miracles etc - concrete manifestations of the religion itself. And further out its more abstract - like your personal belief and values that don't depend on anything specific.

It was fascinating to me to discover how different and "realistic" christian faith in US can be, as it seems it has distilled the essence of the value system itself, shedding away the pageantry and mysticism and other unnecessary trappings, making it a lot stronger to my mind in the process. By this point I could easily see myself following the commandments and values, while not having a shred of faith in the religion itself, since they are quite nice and consistent system.

It's just a model to interpret and react to the world around us, and as the saying goes - all models are flawed and imprecise, some models are useful.

Thanks, that sounds like an interesting conversation and I'll check it out.

Btw, not sure if you were aware but Destin is a Christian. He's a great guy who does cool stuff.

> By this point I could easily see myself following the commandments and values, while not having a shred of faith in the religion itself, since they are quite nice and consistent system.

If you're looking for a turnkey solution for a community of good people with good values, you could do a lot worse than certain kinds of Christianity. It's definitely been a struggle for me to find a similar community that isn't built around faith, but that's important for me because of my own journey.

Its more about shared passion than shared values, but Social latin dances (salsa/bachata/kizomba) has allowed me to easily connect with so many people in the far corners of the earth.

Since all of you have soo much invested in training for the dance people usually have a lot of respect with one another, and people also come from so many diverse backgrounds its quite interesting to listen to everyone’s stories.

You could end up with carpenters, government security experts, philosophy professors, yoga instructors and regular ol IT guys like me all hanging around at a single table, everyone sharing their opinions in a non judgmental way, quite magical I must admit.

One interesting book I read on this topic was Discovering God by Rodney Stark. The author discusses the development of other early religions and compares Christianity to other current religions. It's one of the most logical books I've read on the topic.

I agree that dismissing large swaths of the Bible makes the whole thing pointless. But what if the Bible, especially the Old Testament, was never the modern-style historical catalog of events that Evangelicals assume it is? The most recent pieces were written two millenia ago, and people had a very different idea of what a history was supposed to do. The Old Testament is even older, and as far as I can tell it is the collection of Israel's understanding of what happened to them, who they think God is, and what they think God wants of them. So the truth claims are about who man is and who God is, not "these are the events exactly as they happened". George Washington didn't cut down the cherry tree, but the point of the story is that he was truthful, which is historically attested to. So is the story wrong? Yes, the events never happened, but no, it is correct about Washington's character.

Gen 1-11 (Adam and Eve, the flood) should be read in the context of the mythology of the other nations. [1] Most creation myths had the gods create man to serve the gods, and they got too noisy, so they wiped them out with a flood, except one of the gods saved one family. In contrast, Yahweh creates people in his image, and it is our disobedience that leads to the flood. Whether or not there was a flood is not really the point--everyone at the time assumed there had to have been a flood, because you find fossils of sea creatures on the tops of mountains. (And perhaps more relevant is that God separated the waters of Chaos to make an orderly creation, and our sin almost resulted in the undoing of creation but for the faithfulness of Noah.)

Ultimately the only historical claim that Christianity really rests on is the resurrection. We know there was a guy named Yeshua from both Josephus and references in the Talmud, and they fit the general picture of the Gospels (keeping in mind that the authors of the Talmud were obviously not favorable to him). Beyond that we don't have much history. I've always found C.S. Lewis' argument persuasive: a first-century Jew would not think to claim that they are God yet Jesus did, and his twelve followers maintain that assertion in the face of death. Nobody could produce a body, even though it would be in the disciples' self-interest to. Either Paul or Luke claims there are 400 people that saw Jesus after the resurrection, with the strong implication of "go talk to them if you don't believe me".

I've also found the argument of a psychologist I met persuasive as I've gotten older: each of us has some minimum standard of behavior which we require of ourselves yet fail to meet, and at some level we are not okay with it and feel guilty. That's rather odd. C.S Lewis' argument about beauty (beauty serves no utilitarian purpose; there's no reason the world need to be beautiful--indeed, American suburbs are not--yet it is beautiful. That's odd.) I think the one of the strongest arguments is that the Bible's description of human nature is pretty accurate.

But generally all we get is a bunch of places where having no God creates problems with the model, and if God does exist, it resolves the problem. Of course, the reverse is true, and so you find the Bible dealing with those (why evil in Job, Psalms, Jeremiah, Habakkuk, for instance). I'm still in the process of resolving these questions myself, but I think the question in this stage is "do I want to follow God/Jesus if he does exist with the character described in the Bible?" God might not exist, in which case I will be heartbroken, not only because I want that God, but also because the only other option is meaningless. The atheism of the twentieth century offers a grim warning of this path: you can see it in art, where a toilet was a poignant piece; you can see it in the destruction wrought by atheistic Communism which destroys beauty and killed more people than WWII; you can see it in our own society right now, with elites finding meaning in activism, which has to be ever more extreme in order to still have something to change. If Christ was resurrected there is beauty, there is redemption of man to God and man to man, there is purpose in life. Some days I'm not sure if the evidence favors God, but fortunately Christianity is based on more than just historical claims from projecting a modern expectation onto an ancient text.

[1] I recommend Understanding Genesis by Nahum Sarna (written from a Jewish perspective). There's a summary at http://geoffprewett.com/BookReviews/UnderstandingGenesis.htm...

I appreciate the time and effort you put into this response. I'm afraid we still don't see eye to eye, but that's ok. My goal isn't to try to influence you, I'm also writing for my own benefit -- in some ways I'm still working through my own worldview.

> The most recent pieces were written two millenia ago, and people had a very different idea of what a history was supposed to do.

Yet there were contemporary Roman historians who had a rather modern idea of what history was supposed to do.

> Gen 1-11 (Adam and Eve, the flood) should be read in the context of the mythology of the other nations.

Yet Paul treats Adam's existence as a key theological fact in Romans 5:11-21. His argument doesn't make sense if Adam didn't really exist. Do we know better than Paul? If so, what else is Paul wrong about?

I much prefer C.S. Lewis's brand of Christianity, but I remember being bothered by the fact that he doesn't seem to take the Bible that seriously, and his arguments from aesthetics never carried much weight for me. His view that an individual is either in harmony with God and is set free, or is in stubborn rebellion against God and in slavery, doesn't mirror reality: atheists aren't rebelling against God any more than a Christian is rebelling against Thor.

> I think the one of the strongest arguments is that the Bible's description of human nature is pretty accurate.

Have you looked at descriptions of human nature in other religions? Buddhism and Taoism in particular seem to have a lock on the ups and downs of being human. Yet what Christian would take that as evidence for their supernatural truth claims?

> The atheism of the twentieth century

But there isn't a single atheism of the twentieth century. Stalin and Sartre were both atheists, but their values couldn't have been more different. This is where words like "humanism" are helpful. I've certainly met plenty of atheists who are wonderful, genuine, fulfilled people.

You make some really fantastic points here.

> His argument doesn't make sense if Adam didn't really exist.

I think you are completely correct. CS Lewis provides and extensive set of thoughts about paradisal man in 'The Problem of Pain'. He does this in a way that incorporates an understanding that man evolved from lower common ancestors while attempting a faithful, albeit not literalistic view of the story of the garden. You may or may not have read those chapters, but either way do you think that a possible reconciliation along these lines can exist?

More concretely Pope Pius XII lays out just such a reconciliation in the encyclical Humane Generis that asserts two points: (1) The theory of evolution should be taken seriously and there is strong evidence that human beings evolved from a common ancestors with the apes and (2) The story of Adam and Eve is a story about a real event, although the language expressing the truth of the event should not be interpreted strictly literally.

If you're still on the thread I would be curious to get your thoughts.

Yeah, I'm similiarly working through my worldview, which at the moment involves exploring a Bible that is true but need not be literally true. One nice resource is http://thetorah.com, which are essays by orthodox (and Orthodox) academic Jews discussing Judaism and biblical interpretation in light of current historical understanding. They are solid academics and faithful Jews, so it is a good example of the synthesis.

> Yet there were contemporary Roman historians who had a rather modern idea of what history was supposed to do.

I'm not sure that is true, although I haven't read any Roman historians. My understanding is that ancient histories were written to fit a theme. I think that Gospels are pretty factual, but in the introduction to Luke the author specifically states his purpose: "that you may know the certainty of the things you were taught" (Luke 1:4). Presumably accurate facts are indispensable to this end, but the point is not "this are the events of Jesus and possibly how socio-political events shaped them" like a modern history of, say, Rome or Venice would be. I think Polybius and Josephus are regarded as fairly accurate, but I think Polybius was trying to figure out why the Romans were successful, and Josephus had an agenda of making Romans (or certain Romans) look good. But I think Tacitus simply made up German-barbarian characteristics without even ever travelling to Germany, since his goal was to comment on Rome's decadence. [1] Although my point was more towards the Old Testament, which was written/edited/collated five hundred years earlier and modern detached analytical objectivity-as-far-as-possible was not their goal.

> [Adam, Romans 5]

Personally, I've never thought Paul's argument made any sense even with a historical Adam... I've never thought that the Catholic argument for original sin, being transmitted through Adam made any sense, either. I thought I've read somewhere that Paul saw Adam as representational, but I have no idea how I'd find that. Certainly Paul is happy to symbolize: in Gal 4:24 he says that we can take Hagar and Sarah symbolically, representing two different convenants. If Gen 1 is of the myth genre, then Adam representing humanity makes sense. It's always been my view that regardless of the existence of Adam, each of us has made the same choice and willfully sinned, so in that sense each of as is Adam, and Gen1-Adam "represents" each of us. (I'm not sure that's an orthodox argument, though) I guess I don't see Paul being wrong about events before recorded history as a problem, though. He's making a point about who Jesus is, not an archaeological assessment, although his archaeology reflects the Jewish consensus of his day.

> C.S. Lewis

I've always thought C.S. Lewis had a high view of the Bible, so I curious where you felt he didn't take it seriously. Was it from _Mere Christianity_ where he more or less says that Gen 1 - 11 is of the myth genre? He was a literature professor, so it seems like he's likely to have a quality opinion.

> atheists aren't rebelling against God any more than a Christian is rebelling against Thor

I think Lewis would disagree with you. Lewis was Anglican, so if NT Wright is representational of (orthodox) Anglican thought, God created a temple on earth (the garden, can't remember why this is a temple) where the image of the deity is humanity. We were to be co-creators and be his partners in finishing creation, but we rebelled. Christ fixed that problem, so the co-creation project is back on track. Atheists, by definition, are not co-creating with God, they are doing their independent thing. Elsewhere I think Lewis sees independence as essentially rebellion; imagine if, say, the southern States decided to ignore the government in Washington. Last time that happened, the government considered it rebellion.

(This gets complicated, though, since I don't think American Christians are on board either. And I expect that some non-Christians are acting more onboard than some Christians. I'm not convinced that simply "praying the prayer" gets you into heaven, but Jesus said we don't have the information to judge someone's salvation, only the fruit that we see. But given that Jesus expects to say to some people doing miracles for him "depart, I never knew you", I think that if there is a Last Judgment, a lot of people are going to be in for a surprise, in both directions. Kind of like the Calormene guy in Lewis' _The Last Battle_)

> Buddhism, Taoism

I have read some about both. A friend gave me a great book _Why you are NOT a Buddhist_, which is really clear. The author had really good insights about American (Western?) culture, too, some of the best I've seen. I think he wrote it to disabuse Americans who consider themselves Buddhist because they slap some meditation into their lives. As I understand Buddhism, it's essentially that life is pain and we can escape into nirvana-nothingness (except nirvana is beyond concepts) by realizing that everything is impermanent and detaching from our desires. (I'm sure this is a gross simplication) I think Buddhism is a rational choice if there is no possibility of our desires being fulfilled. But if Christ has reconciled all things, death is vanquished, earth will be recreated/restored, evil will be banished, I'll take that route if it's viable. Besides, I'm not convinced that we can really get rid of our deep desires; and if they are there because God put them there, we won't be able to.

I'm not really sure what Taoism says, beyond life is ambiguous and you need to flow with the inherent tensions (if that is even right). The book _Taoism_ by Holmes Welch is a brilliant analysis of Lao Zi's work, and goes into several levels of interpretation, which are insightful, and end up concluding that one of Lao Zi's goals was the instruction of a method of mystical experiences. Unfortunately I have completely forgotten all the details. It didn't seem relevant, though.

Obviously Christianity has no monopoly on insight into human nature and how to live. But as far as I can tell, Buddhism is escape-from-the-world, but I'd rather co-create with God. To be fair, American Evangelicals are largely escape-from-the-world as well. Anyway, my original argument was for the truth of Christianity, and I think it offers more truth about human nature than Buddhism. It certainly offers a better future, if it's true.

[1] https://acoup.blog/2020/02/07/collections-the-fremen-mirage-...

It's like the Evangelicals forgot Luther's doctrine of vocation.

https://credomag.com/article/martin-luther-and-the-doctrine-...

Thank you so much for your response. Christianity is so often misrepresented in HN / Reddit that it’s ridiculous how often it’s forced into false dichotomies. Your references in the last paragraph were exactly in line of what I was going to link.

I think though also we should be careful to judge things as heretical. It’s always been a dangerous word, and it’s unlikely that any one person or group of people are capable of fully grasping a religion or even God himself.

That is very interesting; also a shame because it highlights how harmful bad theology within Christianity can be, from the perspective of Christianity. That branch of Protestantism has tended to create unstable churches that occasionally produce a lot of energy, but don't last long and especially don't have good intergenerational relations (hard to accomplish with the most eager to learn running off to the mission field.)

I think you're right, although I'd say bad theology is in the eye of the beholder (unless we're talking about prosperity gospel theology, which is objectively terrible)

I grew up a rather serious Lutheran, then branched out within Protestantism in college. John Piper, Francis Schaeffer, Tim Keller. Tons of Bible studies and podcasts. I found it to be rather intellectually satisfying.

This is all to say that I don't think bad theology was the issue here. My only issue was that I made too many friends who were missionaries (some with Wycliffe) and, inspired by how they were living life, I flew too close to the sun, as it were.

I know all those names. Totally understand, and am sympathetic.

The "confessional" (theologically and vocationally serious) Lutheran church is having a big moment right now, and I think has a good framework for harnessing the strength and eagerness of young men, whether they should move away or take on parenting or local community-creating. But it's very small and asserts itself against the baby boomer/gen x conservatism in the same churches, to a degree. Always some difficulty.

Being on a mission like this, and finding people who are on a similar mission, or having written about their experience, is such a fantastic feeling.

Read my story at https://www.iwriteiam.nl/RTE.html

I think you should give staring into the abyss another try on Christianity. Maybe though get it out of the dichotomy, and also expand your search beyond Evangelicals. I’ve found learning about Jewish history (Jonathan Sacks is a great author, Jewish Rabbi) or Biblical authorship has been really enlightening.

Do it again?

I’m resigned to the fact that no matter what, someone out there will insist that I misrepresented Christianity (as if it were obvious how to correctly interpret the Bible), that I “did it wrong,” that if only I could’ve read books XYZ or tweaked my epistemology then I would’ve reached a different conclusion.

Staring into the abyss involved putting my life on hold, basically doing nothing in my free time but reading and talking with friends and mentors. I read a pile of books from Dawkins and Sagan to NT Wright and Dale Allison. I stopped when, after 18 months, I realized that the next step would basically be to get a degree in New Testament studies.

It’s not an experience I’m eager to repeat, especially since the probability that I’ll reach a different conclusion is vanishingly small.

I abandoned my faith once I was unable to rationally reconcile secular and divine morality, which was a theory I played around with in college and later wrote a paper about.

https://specularrealms.com/godsmorality

What were the reasons that made you embrace that change? Consistency is certainly admirable, but you can consistently embrace incorrect world views.

As I wrote in a sibling comment, my faith always rested on Christianity's historical truth claims. So once I reached the conclusion that they weren't true, there was no way I could continue to embrace Christianity. I had to rethink everything from the ground up.

>dating the wrong person or praying to the wrong god

I must be really screwed since I did both at the same time

One more form of staring into the abyss is undertaking restoration of vintage equipment.

Not for the faint at heart either.

What specific truth claim are you skeptical about?

The multiple views provide too much information! It's impossible to move! Calvin quickly tries to eliminate all but one perspective!

https://www.gocomics.com/calvinandhobbes/1990/06/17

Ha! Thanks for this gem. Love it.

"Staring into the abyss" is only half the challenge; the other half is knowing what (values) you can hold on to while the abyss stares back at you.

The latter is what stops people from looking too closely, or asking hard questions -- because they fear that they might not have a strong enough framework in which to answer them. And so they look only as close as they can handle while they slowly work up the strength and the courage.

Another kind of person happens to be very comfortable staring into the abyss, interpreting with Procrustean simplifications, and reacting to what they see -- without necessarily the strong values in place to ground them; they are a loose canon, especially if they are a high-agency person biased for action.

When the gentle equilibrium has been upset by an unexpected outcome, the high-agency person has the fortitude to iterate the cycle of staring into the abyss (still a loose cannon, if they’re not well grounded).

However, the median person might not -- and can end up doing an incredible amount of collateral damage (to their own lives, and the lives of people around them) if they do this with insufficient skills or commitment. I wouldn't be surprised if a fear of the abyss is an evolutionary/cultural survival mechanism to protect them from themselves.

Very few people have the nous to carry out the whole iterated process well.

The world is filled with much good, but if you're looking at what is false, not good or rejecting what is good you shall find it hard to notice.

If you look for the good and aim toward it then you get more of it.

If you aim to look for bad and search for it you shall get more of it.

Everyone eventually reaps what they sow. And you can judge a tree by its fruit.

Rather than focus on the badness of the bad situation or stare into the abyss. Pick good responses that are independent of bad.

In other words, two wrongs don't mean right.

Nah. I know some real garbage people who seem to be immune to Karma. No bad ever comes their way.

And some wonderful people who seem to attract all the Karma which slid right off the garbage people.

The world is unfair, and the universe doesn't care. Morality is emergent from consciousness; in a time before our big thinky brains had evolved, there was no such thing as bad and good.

Evidence: How many, many animals live and thrive is deeply immoral by human standards. With few exceptions, pick just about any horror movie and I can show you an animal who exhibits those behaviors in its normal life.

> Evidence: How many, many animals live and thrive is deeply immoral by human standards.

The fact that non-human animals live an existence of violent survival does not seem to be prima facie evidence for the nonexistence or incoherence of human morality.

Human beings are rational animals. The term rational here is being used in a specific and technical sense. Non-human animals are subject to the laws of nature in a manner that acts more directly on their passions. Human beings are also subject to the laws of nature, but the forces of nature are mediated by our rationality.

Animal Act: (1) Offspring are hungry (2) brings food to offspring

Human Act: (1) Offspring are hungry (2) Reflects and Decides to provide food (3) brings food to offspring

An act is deemed immoral if it is a misuse of the rational faculty for ends that are not in conformity with the laws of nature.

Human Act (immoral): (1) Offspring are hungry (2) Reflects and Decides not to provide food for selfish reasons (3) offspring go hungry

Animals suffer but they are not moral agents like human beings since there is no mediating rationality that can be misused for ends that are not in conformity with nature's laws. The phrase Nature's Laws is being used broadly to include physical, biological or evolved social laws intertwined with the essential characteristics of the species.

> The fact that non-human animals live an existence of violent survival does not seem to be prima facie evidence for the nonexistence or incoherence of human morality.

You missed the point. Morality is a human invention, much like computers are (albeit philosophical, not physical in nature).

Like computers, it didn't exist before consciousness evolved.

Talking about morality as a universal truth, and there being some invisible scales of justice which will eventually even out is thusly irrational.

Apologies if I'm missing the main point. I certainly agree that consciousness + rational choosing must be a prerequisite for moral acts.

But I wouldn't concede that morality is a human invention like the computer. That would imply that it's accidental and not grounded in anything fundamental to our species or nature's laws.

Do you believe that choosing to feed your kids, or choosing to not kill someone are simply created constructs like the computer or the airplane?

Also, I think these two statements can be true at the same time: (1) The Moral Law is real and exists outside of our subjective experience and historical cultural evolution and (2) concepts like Karma are without evidence.

> Do you believe that choosing to feed your kids, or choosing to not kill someone are simply created constructs like the computer or the airplane?

The actions exist obviously.

My point is that in the absence of consciousness there is no positive or negative value ascribed to them.

Let's take the example of feeding your children, but use the opposite extreme. What you see plenty of in nature is a mother eating her children. Sometimes for no reason at all (Octopus, Guppies, rodents).

Are there certain species that are fundamentally immoral? Maybe so, from our perspective. But without our perspective no value is assigned. It is just another thing animals do without any moral weight.

I don't think the concept is morality is relevant in those extreme cases. It looks like we are more or less saying the same thing.

I am not sure we're saying the same thing. Extreme cases are how we test to see if our worldview holds up. But anyways, Happy Holidays!

While the universe might not care, people can. Will you?

In many situations you have the choice to help or to be the one that choses selfishness. To bridge a divide or not.

I can, and do, and people should. You have missed the point of my post if you're replying like this.

Karma is just confirmation bias

Karma is a psyop perpetuated by people with power to keep that masses passive, because they think the universe will do the job of dealing out justice for them.

Ditto belief in a god that judges and punishes the wicked in the afterlife.

Yes the majority of animals die a violent death. If they manage to survive long enough, they get too old to escape a predator.

> With few exceptions, pick just about any horror movie and I can show you an animal who exhibits those behaviors in its normal life.

But in the end, the animals that thrive end up being the ones that cooperate both within their species and with other species. From humans to symbiotic bacteria and jellyfish...

I agree with karma and deservedness not being aligned but I am pretty sure an animal doing what it is doing is limited by the need to hunt and feed rather than to subjugate and be sadistic?

Clearly you do not own cats.

Are you talking those cute furry four legged sadistic serial killers?

Hot damn I don't. I always thought I'd be a cat person but sounds like I need to revisit my choices!

I have seen California sea lions killing ocean sunfish (mola molas) in a way that appears to be sadistic, or at least just for sport. The sea lions bite the fishes' fins off without eating them, then play with the crippled bodies like living frisbees. After a while the sea lions get bored and let the fish sink to the seafloor where they're eaten alive by crabs.

Nature, red in tooth and claw.

Is that a form of sadism? Perhaps the sea lion is unable to conceive of the suffering of the fish. To the sea lion, the fish is merely an object. Playing with the fish is no different than playing with a rock to the sea lion.

Does that matter for the fish?

No, but that's not the question being discussed.

Sounds very similar to a psychopath incapable of empathy.

Lack of empathy is the norm in nature, not the exception. A species of predator that could empathize with its prey would starve to death.

Yeah, my point was that the GP probably wouldn't view a psychopath as innocent as a sea lion, hence there would seem to be a double standard.

Not for more intelligent animals. Consider the footage of killer whales "playing with their food" from Blue Planet.

This post seems almost comically like a collection of self-help slogans, and not far off from blaming people who are in a dark place for getting themselves there. (I also don't understand how "two wrongs don't mean right" connects to the rest of it. Is the idea that one is doing wrong by thinking bad things of wrong that has already been done?)

Also, if this is meant as a corrective to the article (as suggested by "Rather than focus on the badness of the bad situation or stare into the abyss. Pick good responses that are independent of bad"), then it seems that it is a response to the title, not the content. The very beginning of the article emphasises that the point is not to dwell on the bad in order to foster despair, but rather to acknowledge the existence of the bad in order to be able to move from it towards a remedy. If you can't even acknowledge that a bad situation exists, then you can't make a good response to it.

Thank you for your reply.

What I was trying to put across was that we get the results what we cause. I always bear the outcome of what I did. Can you think of an escape from the effects of what we do? (I deliberately ignore the other side of this, I'm not talking about effects we did not cause, such as trouble others cause for others)

If you pick good, right, proper, meant to be, what should be, what is righteous, what is true, honest, genuine, with integrity actions, then you ought to bear fruit that is caused by that. I think that this produces better outcomes than picking bad, not good, wrong, untrue, false, not honest, not genuine actions/thoughts/speech.

In hindsight we can determine what actions were not right, since they didn't produce the right, good results.

So if we seek after good, shouldn't we get the effects of good back because we surround ourselves with it?

This is separate independent reasoning from when bad things befall people who do all things right. I haven't thought much about that.

Do we bear the effects of what other's cause?

The two wrongs don't create a right refers to the idea of avoid basing my reasoning on doing something on something bad and calling it good. I should keep my reasoning of my reaction to bad things purely based on goodness and not based on the bad thing itself. I never want to say I did something purely due to a bad thing. I think you could call it motivation. I want to keep good and bad independent and not merge them into one. Can something bad cause something good in other words? Or did the good that it is a reaction to cause itself?

>In hindsight we can determine what actions were not right, since they didn't produce the right, good results.

Disagree, to the extent that you need to discount results against available information, processing ability, and alternatives at the time of the decision. Also, not all good or bad decisions have similar outcomes, the world is not just. Personally, I've found more use out of refining my decision process and what goes into it than focusing on results. Not to say results aren't a useful signal, but they're hardly the only or even the most important signal.

I agree with you that the EV of trying to be "good" generally outweighs the other path. However, not getting discouraged by the marketing of "bad with no consequences" is difficult in today's world!

The article argues for not ignoring the parts of reality you’re uncomfortable with. Good or bad is neither here nor there. The point is to not be constrained by having a skewed view of reality or by avoidant behavior.

> Thank you for your reply.

I still disagree with much of what you said, also in your follow-up, but I appreciate your replying so civilly to what was a fairly caustic post on my part. Thank you for exemplifying the best of HN discourse!

“If you look for the light, you can often find it. But if you look for the dark, that is all you will ever see.”

- Iroh

I think the footnote from the article covers your point better?:

  [1] This phrase originates from a quote by Nietzche:
        He who fights with monsters should look to it that he himself does not become a monster. And if you gaze long into an abyss, the abyss also gazes into you.
  I’m probably not using “stare into the abyss” in the exact same sense Nietzche intended, since I wouldn’t really describe what I’m talking about as “fighting with a monster” or like it has the potential to turn you into a monster. [snip]

Quality of fruit is the product of soil and climactic conditions, not the tree itself.

Bill Clinton and Donald Trump are notable examples of people who have not reaped what they sowed.

Hunh. I think some people call this "testing their priors." In Pi (1998), there's a lot of "... restate my assumptions: One ..." as the narrator strives to correct his thought processes. I recollect a short horror story in which a man becomes obsessed with "doing away" with more and more of his life he deems truly unneeded (it may have been named "To the Bone," it has been a few decades). In the harder sciences, whatever is accepted as the "the truth" is only a working model, hopefully to be replaced by something better when experiments point toward some flaw.

It involves a lot of the ability to confront the Sunk Cost Fallacy and a bit of whatever it is where you see people unwilling to let go of something which inadvertently traps them.

I try to do this, frequently, as a kind of back-tracking when I am stuck, or simply when I suspect it. However, I think it's probably a bit dangerous to get into a habit of it, or to apply it very broadly. The dead and the unborn need nothing, and one is ever in a state of moving from the latter to the former, without a way to take anything with you when the journey is done. Perhaps an addendum to "nothing is true; all is permitted" might be another semicolon and "everything is unnecessary."

If the man in the story "did away" with willingness to help others and give to others, then that's a pretty big moral failing on his part. But then he probably "did away" with morality at that point as well. Morality and other people (and finally survival) are what's keeping a real person who might undertake such "doing away" from going... too far.

I was told once that by the time you're genuinely considering a big change - by the time you're aware there's an abyss - the answer is probably "do it." There are things that are normal fears - "I have a serious medical condition and can't risk being without health insurance," that kind of thing - but "abyss" questions tend to be the sorts of things where you can't really articulate what your concerns are, or they're more about status or perception or just a general risk aversion ("what if I never find a job again?" "do I really want to be a divorcee?" "will my peers think I'm a failure?"), and the reason you're really even considering it is because you're currently miserable. People tend to stay at jobs longer than they should, in relationships longer than they should, and in misery longer than they should.

I like the idea of contemplating uncomfortable ideas, but I hate the phrasing.

The abyss is void, nothingness. It is not a challenge; it is not something to be studied or resolved. It has no structure and offers no insight. "Staring in the abyss" is a suitable phrase for existential dread, cosmic despair, and metaphysical visions of hell. So, it is a good phrase for the worst of the worst parts of depression rather than good advice.

I thought it was a well-established figure of speech meaning to consider something terrifying. But I admit that I'm not finding that definition quickly online.

interesting that you describe void as nothingness and then immediately assign a negative value to it.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C5%9A%C5%ABnyat%C4%81

The name can mean a few different concepts.

The concept I described is purely negative. If you ever experienced even a glimpse of it, I doubt you would classify it otherwise. For some references, I recommend classification of mystical vision (psychedelic-assisted or not).

> For some references, I recommend classification of mystical vision (psychedelic-assisted or not).

Could you clarify what you’re referencing here? I wasn’t able to find something that looked like what you were referencing by searching “classification of mystical vision void”.

Search for "cosmic despair" as one of four types of states (along with "cosmic unity", "cosmic struggle" and "rebirth").

"Cosmic despair" captures states that go under various names, including "the dark night of the soul", visions of hell related to absolute desolation (rather than lava and stuff), existential dread, and quite a few other names and concepts in religion, spirituality, and philosophy. And describes a very specific type of bad trips.

The concept comes from "Realms of the Human Unconscious: Observations from LSD Research" by Stanisval Grof, the grandfather of the research on psychedelics in therapy. He relates these states to four stages of birth, which he takes literally. My preference is to take it metaphorically, though.

I’m sorry, this is just a well targeted rehash of sunk cost fallacy, which anyone handling money of any substance should understand. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sunk_cost

Wow, the abyss was a lot shallower than I had imagined.

I love this post. Support for seeing the harder toil of life without necessarily being overcome is, in my view, one of the things I've seen least well done least performed least demonstrated for developing youth.

Semi related, been re-reading Ministry for the Future, and we just had a blurb on the Availability Hueristic, the preference for relying on what you know & is familiar. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Availability_heuristic

A main character is trying to face the larger world of issues, to see other things, & not let avoidance take over. This empathy for, willingness to tangle in more tham you know & more than what's familiar often involves looking into the fear-spots, in recognizing bigger scarrier parts of the world. It's a huge skill that, for me, growing up & as an adult, has been such a reliable mark of character & interestingness, was the boundary between a maturing engaged useful person & a scary ineard facing existence that lacks a empathy, a willingness to see beyond themself. Seeing beyond yourself, overcoming the Availability Hueristic, Seeing into the Abyss seem all related & high value, define a higher order humanness that I wish to see spread & grow through humanity, that we need to work on.

But which are vastly underdescribed, under emphasized, under-spoken. Glad to have this post.

Here's an abyss to stare into:

Humans generally don't have an idea of what their needs are.

Challenge: list all of your needs for surviving and thriving from memory and also give a definition of each that's clear and not simply some desire/want or societally created artificial construct (computers and money are not needs).

Also, Maslow's hierarchy is too individualistic, so cheating with it automatically loses. And another hint: excess and deprivation of needs is a need in order to learn what the individual body's needs for moderating each need is.

This is an important abyss to stare into because a sustainable moneyless society that can effectively meet everyone's needs is almost impossible to conceive of without being aware of all the needs.

Seem to be a lesswrong entrepreneur take on the question: Should you orient yourself by pursuing what you want or by avoiding what you don't want?

Humans can juggle more than one responsibility. If the thing you don’t want is insidious, you better be doing both.

In general I agree with this, though it seems to be mostly about startup founders pivoting.

I do take issue with this suggested exercise:

> What bad things are you afraid of happening? Imagine in detail what it would be like if they happened.

I know people that do this regularly, I would consider it indicative of an anxiety disorder, not a healthy behavior.

I think it depends on your reaction to those imaginings. I do a decent amount of "staring into the abyss." It's actually a way for me to calm my anxiety. Because once I walk through the worst case scenarios in detail, I can always say: I will make it, I will be fine, I can be happy even in those situations. If I don't explicitly walk through the scenarios in detail, I tend to catastrophize them in a vague way -- "It'll be terrible", "no good", "so unhappy". There's something about doing this detailed walkthrough that requires me to state my previously unstated assumptions that are often very wrong.

Honestly I was not sure about tech when I made a choice to get an electrical engg degree, a few years down the road I thought of an MBA, but then went and co-founded a startup while holding a full time job. I could afford it, was still in my early 30s and didn't have kids. Although the startup did not succeed, that experience taught me a lot( I called it my alternative to going to business school). But overall, when I look back, tech was a great choice, I always have had enough time for family and hobbies (my average work week has always been 40 hrs). Maybe because I was fortunate to pivot into Data when it was not a "sexy" field that it has come to be.

Some paths are just "luck". But tech beats a lot of fields ( medicine, law) for the compensation against hours worked and flexibility.

Sometimes. A lot of people have pretty well-defined values, though, and stay in iffy situations out of uncertainty and loss aversion. Even if the expected value of a radical uprooting and redo is positive, the potencial downside -- alienation? depression? loss of function? -- can be extreme.

This feels like a very superficial and somewhat silly redefinition of "staring into the abyss".

Although the author focuses on organization building and finding product market fit, it's obvious that this thought technology applies more generally. Does anybody have real-world examples of staring into the abyss in very different fields? Academia, painting, bowling?

Salaries/Trustfunds are the main reason that people lose this skill of staring into the abyss and or never gain it in the first place.

You literally can't build this skill without taking your own decisions and bearing the consequences of the same (without your boss shielding you).

Subjectivity is an abyss. The Real is the tension between symbolizer and symbolized as we try and fail to fill reality, which is unfinished. Theories of Everything do not come from science but from philosophy. Plato, Hegel, Lacan, McGowan, Dolar, Zizek, Freud, Fanon.

Has anyone done a survey of founders, age of start, their number of companies until success, age at success, their income, and their familial net worth? Because it's a lot easier to "stare into the abyss" when failure has survivable outcomes.

Journaling without any goal besides understanding myself better, particularly my beliefs, had a similarly transformative effect on me. I stopped feeling angry and entitled to things I didn't have, and I became extremely positive in my social interactions and in my head.

For a long time I credited knowledge graph technology for the change, but now I think it was more likely just the practice of committed, written introspection. (The graphs definitely helped me navigate my notes faster and with less redundancy, though, which mattered because there were a lot of them.)

The overwrought “startups are so hard” seems so ridiculous to me. Oh no, I have to sit in this Aeron and DoorDash my lunch and try to make money for investors who can afford to lose it. Woe is me.

This is very true, but I think should be summed up as the following

Think hard, but love harder. In both, be humble, but in all things challenge yourself and others. Questions things, but don't forget that being kind, loving, and inteligent is a gift to yourself first, and others at the same time.

“And I knew I had to finally update. To actually change what I planned to do, to change what I was doing now, to do something different instead.”

Reminds me of the famous Rilke poem:

“Otherwise this stone would seem defaced beneath the translucent cascade of the shoulders and would not glisten like a wild beast's fur:

would not, from all the borders of itself, burst like a star: for here there is no place that does not see you. You must change your life.”

And pivot he did.

"Staring into the abyss means thinking reasonably about things that are uncomfortable to contemplate, like arguments against your religious beliefs, or in favor of breaking up with your partner."

These might be difficult to discuss. But is there really anything uncomfortable to contemplate?

Anything that consciously or subconsciously reminds someone's mind or body of their trauma?

Hmm, if you count anger, I suppose so.

Anger is for sure a sign of something going unaddressed, as humans can learn to enjoy and accept anything.

Even if they can, perhaps it's not in their best interest to enjoy being abused.

Enjoying something, choosing it, and choosing to do things based on what feels joyful are three different things.

Getting to a place where one can find joy in dark torment is absolutely in their best interest. So is learning about universal human needs, so as to be able to make choices based on that, rather than purely emotionally-driven choices.

Do you know anyone who made the leap and regretted it? I'm not thinking of any, but my memory isn't great. Also I think people don't typically share their self-doubts, even ones that happened years ago, very frankly.

I made the leap into a weird industry (biotech) as a designer/engineer, and though I don't "fully regret it" I still see friends/peers build up a lot of wealth that's simply not possible in this space.

Yes, life's been more meaningful; we've treated patients and sent them home and that's a great feeling, but always with the question, "at what personal cost?"

I am curious about the country mentioned that has instant payments between banks, and thus Wave pulled out. What's the country's name and why aren't more countries like that? What's their secret?

He won't tell you obviously because he's a selfish person who dosen't want to aid the competition.

It's possible with Paylib here in France.

Ben Horowitz in THE HARD THING ABOUT HARD THINGS mentioned similar thing:

How to lead even when you don't know where you are going: The fine line between fear and courage

As bk mentions in his footnote, this googlebombs "staring into the abyss".

"Courage to tackle the unpleasant" doesn't have the same ring, however.

To my ears "Courage to tackle the unpleasant" has the ring of bounds known ahead of time. Chore X will be unpleasant. How unpleasant? Between 4 Ughs and 7 Ughs. Maybe 8 Ughs.

So I know why I'm procrastinating, I don't want to tackle a 4 Ugh chore right now. But I can plan. Tomorrow morning I'll be up for tackling a 10 Ugh chore, I can plan to do it then.

Sometimes we don't know the upper bound. The article mentions religious doubts, which can escalate to nihilism and despair. One cannot plan for that. No-one says: I'm too tired for nihilism and despair this evening, I'll do it tomorrow morning.

Abyss? The examples in the article have a feel of a scarily large upper bound, which we are putting off estimating. But we could estimate it, realize that we are not at the abyss, we are just facing a tough choice, and get on with it.

> Gee, Schopenhauer. What are we going to do tonight?

> The same thing we do every night, Kierkegaard. Nihilism and despair.

Staring into the abyss of your own death is a core spiritual practice in many of the worlds spiritual traditions.

It’s the important part of meditation.

"Nature loves courage. Throw yourself into the abyss and discover it's actually a feather bed."

Interesting! I wonder what kind of philosophy this author has and their outlook on life is. How could it be good to stare into the abyss? Won’t it drive you mad? This must be an interesting read.

> I’m probably not using “stare into the abyss” in the exact same sense Nietzche intended, since I wouldn’t really describe what I’m talking about as “fighting with a monster” or like it has the potential to turn you into a monster. […] as did Elon Musk when he said that

> […] Staring into the abyss means thinking reasonably about things that are uncomfortable to contemplate, like arguments against your religious beliefs, or in favor of breaking up with your partner.

> […] The first time I learned what really exceptional abyss-staring looks like, it was by watching Drew, the CEO of Wave. Starting a company requires a lot of staring into the abyss, because it involves making lots of serious mistakes (building the wrong thing, hiring the wrong person, etc.)

groans

Define "being driven mad".

It's more work with no guarantee of making you happier. But living without it doesn't guarantee making you happier either.

Combing the article for keywords you were subjected to, as I ascertained, too many times isn't the best way too, but it's definitely not the worst as well

Define missing the point.

> thinking reasonably about things that are uncomfortable to contemplate, like arguments against your religious beliefs

Good exercise for democrats: acknowledge that the Hunter Biden laptop was not fake, that negative news about the government are being actively, illegally, and covertly suppressed by social media companies.

It changes everything.

I think you're missing what is perhaps the most well known quote about this topic:

If you stare into the abyss, the abyss stares back at you.

That is actually in article in the footnote.

Actually if the author butchers the phrase then such acknowledgements don’t matter. Actually it makes it worse…

I’ve got this sword of Damocles[1] hanging over my head right now; I don’t know whether I should have turkey dinner tonight or homemade pizza. Such swords of worry come up in my head quite often, and I think one should learn to master them. In fact, as the CEO of Douchebags Inc. writes in his book Facing Your Own Damocles—

[1] Recites Wikipedia

A footnote is nice, but you can't really take a well known phrase and just redefine it according to your needs, while clickbaiting a bunch of people.

I don't think it was malicious, I think the author was trying to be creative in a clumsy way.

I know I missed the footnote; still, the quote meaning is sill missing in the article meaning.

It's in the footnote.

Yes, it is further butchered in a footnote.

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