Ask HN: Did you have any real life-changing experience people often talk about? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Did you have any real life-changing experience people often talk about?

12 pointsoptbuild13 comments

The experience need not be an external event. It can also be an internal habit change initiated by you upon some realisation that brought in real paradigm shift in your life.

Or simply and external event that made you take big decisions.

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Once i had a short episode similar to clinical death experience people usually describe (seeing yourself from the side, feeling frightening level of joy, white light etc).

Without any drugs or dangerous situations involved. Just lying on the bed. And it was 100 times more intense than the strongest lsd experience i had later.

Around the same time one of my friends experienced the same but it lasted much longer for him.

My shift was mostly just having more respect to religious people and becoming less arrogant about knowing how world works.

I also had this when I was about six years old except I wasn’t in danger at that time. It was a “holy shit” experience. It has happened since. Voluntarily. Last one was at 19, which was involuntary, I thought I will lose my mind. Since then I try to reproduce it by listening to some people who I feel can help and meditating but no luck. Maybe it is not meant to be now.

After some thinking I realized that i don’t really want that experience again, neither do i want any sort of “enlightening” experience.

Just like lsd trips — there’s nothing valuable to it except the experience itself.

Managed the estate of my deceased mother… lots of emotional stuff… therapy is good… yada yada… what I want to share today however is that when selling the half renovated (not in a great state to sell, very hard to get good value for) family home … I went against the lawyer’s advice for at least a couple months when we had an eager buyers. His desire to buy seemed genuine and I never committed on my side until he had his money, but I let him spend several months getting his finances sorted… it easily resulted in me getting more than a hundred thousand dollars extra for the property and to this day has served as a valuable lesson in high value transactions… knowing the buyer can make a huge difference. Yes other people will buy a property, but when you see the sparkle in their eye and they tell you it reminds them of their childhood home, how they want to raise their family in the same kind of place, yeah… as long as you don’t let them manipulate you, patience can be absolutely valuable, I never budged on price and every time they had a setback in financing I made sure they knew I was being advised to move on but I was willing to give them more time, and a chance to sort their stuff out… I’m pretty sure that nearly 10 years later even with a rising property market, I got the best price so far for that property… and considering some people literally said it looked like a shit heap and might be able to fetch a better price bulldozed and sold as vacant land… I’m very very proud of how I handed that sale.

I've always liked this quote from True Detective Season 2.

“Sometimes a thing happens, it splits your life. There’s a before and after. I've got, like, five of them at this point, and this is your first. But if you use it right — the bad thing — you use it right and it makes you better.”

The character is talking to a kid who's dad was murdered.

I think everyone experiences something like this at some point in their life. Life changing doesn't always mean good. The constant is what life was before, and what life is after. People talk about these types of life changing events all of the time.

"Before I got divorced."

"Before my mom died."

But there are some good ones too...

"Before I got my driver's license"

"After I moved out on my own."

A should have died, how am I here event. However six days after the accident still resting up, I slowly began to realise I was losing or had lost some core bits of memory / learning from a couple of important younger years, which made some things impossible like programming at the level I used to be able to do. While that in itself was sad and perhaps expected, more notable to me were the changes relating to some other people in my life, mostly to do with figuring I was a soft target for some of their antics ... I ended up going down the part of researching human behaviour, which brought about a peaceful realisation why various nasty people in my past life were and are they way they are - some people are just destined to be not the greatest people to work with or even be around.

I talked to some random student in a parking lot at the university.

He asked what I wanted to do with a physics degree. I said I wanted to discover the unified field theory. He said, yeah, but what do you do with it? I said, first you collect your Nobel Prize. Yeah, he said, but what do you do with it?

I realized that even if I could do this incredible breakthrough, it wouldn't actually change anything for anybody. It wouldn't heal anyone's cancer. It wouldn't change anyone's life emotionally, psychologically, or spiritually (if you believe there is such a thing). It would be, in all practical ways, completely irrelevant.

I got my BS degree in physics, but I didn't go to grad school. Don't plan on ever doing so.

You could say that about anything though. Even if you do heal someone's cancer or change someone's life, they'll still die in the end anyway.

I'm now in my 40s and have realized lately, it doesn't really matter what you do and you don't need to rationalize it to anyone. If you enjoy it and it doesn't hurt anyone, then do it. It doesn't need to change the world.

I disagree with this idea (not criticizing your decision). When I look at space tech, collider cores or nanoscopic IC factories, it strikes me into shivers how much human thought and will can do. Insane complexity that conquers frontiers of reality. This is my spirituality if you like, wish I had at least a half of average “stats” these people have.

That doesn’t happen with medicine or socio-something.

Quit drinking, quit social media, both massively life changing.

I’m jealous. I don’t drink nor have social media accounts (besides HN).

I began my career outside of the tech industry as an English teacher for IT employees. However, my growing interest in Blockchain and its various applications eventually led me to make the transition into this field.

Despite the challenges that came with this shift, I found the experience to be incredibly rewarding. Today, I'm thrilled to be working in a job that I truly enjoy, thanks to Rather Labs - a company that played a key role in my career development.

If you're interested, feel free to check them out at https://www.ratherlabs.com.

Raised three children.

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