I'm terrified of old people
guzey.com
guzey.com
In Germany, there is a proposal that suggests individuals nearing retirement should work in a social service job for a year, similar to the requirement for young people who wish to avoid military conscription. This idea could potentially bridge the generational gap by reacquainting older individuals with the current societal challenges. However, it appears that the older generations, who previously favored reinstating the draft, are now hesitant to support this notion.
It's important to note that this proposal is currently hypothetical and would only be considered if mandatory military service were to be reintroduced
The idea that now young have it much tougher is simply not a reality in my surroundings, I had 1% of the options my children had and ie path to just freedom was where you risked your actual life. Some young just have little patience and want it all immediately, or otherwise they are failing in life and some form of communism needs to be installed promptly. Cant comprehend that social networks arent showing a reality, just few marketaeble slices of it. But this is largely failure of parents failing to explain to kids how world runs, what to expect and how to get what you want out of it.
I think what's different in this generation is that it's becoming much more visible to everyone, so even if these are the outliers everything is judged accordingly. Also it's kind of making extremes more acceptable slowly because they are always in the attention sphere. Just look at the political spectrum - Trump really changed the game even here in Europe, politicians lost so much shame - stuff that would previously cause you to resign - now they just do some stupid spin, double down and get even more support from the tribe.
I'm mid 30s and I feel things have changed considerably in last 10 years, loss of shame in particular - once you get stuff chewed up by social media as the latest shock fad - everyone gets used to it so fast and it becomes almost normalized (not shocking at least).
People have always wanted a better world, and the young have a very different lens than you to judge that, it's absolutely common to become more conservative when you grow older because you lived through how the world was before, that world is gone and the before of the youth's future is right now, they will strive to make it better just like you might have had in your past.
An old man sitting down and pointing fingers at how the youth is corrupted compared to their golden days is a tale as old as time, you're just playing your part of this endless cycle...
Aristotle ~400 BC:
> “[Young people] are high-minded because they have not yet been humbled by life, nor have they experienced the force of circumstances.
> They think they know everything, and are always quite sure about it.”
Horace ~20-50 BC:
> Our sires' age was worse than our grandsires'. We, their sons, are more worthless than they; so in our turn we shall give the world a progeny yet more corrupt.
> The beardless youth… does not foresee what is useful, squandering his money.
You'll find many, many many many more examples of the same rhetoric across all human writing.
Old man yells at cloud, let the youth carry the fire of bettering societies, you already got comfortable and scared.
This is the first time in modern history where the younger generations are materially worse off than their parents were at the same time on a massive scale—as in, not just in localized areas due to specific circumstances, but in most of the western world.
Older people have much lower "give a darn" so we do still need younger clueless people to show us the way we were when we were young, and that whatever that thingy was-- it was important.
And what about letting people live their lives without constantly micro managing their fate. What happened to freedom?
As long as I pay my taxes, don't infringe on the basic universal sane laws (you know, don't kill, steal etc) leave me the fuck alone.
I don't know for Germany but France, my country, starts to ask too much in exchange for what they're offering. Can't do this, can't do that, pot holes everywhere, prices and taxes skyrocketing, impossible to find a doctor that will receive you the same day and now they want to send us to die in Ukraine?
For the new proposal? It seems only fair that the whole corpus of the population has to cover the burden and not only the young.
just my 2 ct
I admire your optimism. But from the datapoints we have, it is not the direction we're heading.
AI is just the next step of technology development, so it will just increase the rate of change we see for last couple of decades in the same direction.
And while technology is indeed helping people to be more productive, it also allows megacorps to capture the added value. You can see it in different economic benchmarks - that while there was an enormous economic growth in the past decades, there is increasing gap between classes, people outside of tech feel the decrease of their purchasing power and quality of life in general throughout the developed world.
There is a powerful systems forces in play, so it is not political, but rather more like a natural force of progress and especially automation.
If you're young and work in tech, you may notice that you are being disproportionately rewarded for your effort from the rest of the world for building tech.
Cynical takes being de rigeur on HN, I’m not surprised to read this comment here; but it’s sad nonetheless. I suppose in a very narrow economic context of “utility”, you may be right. But it would be a truly impoverished society that marginalized the non-economic contributions of its citizens 60 and over.
I’m just shy of one of those “people in their 60s” and volunteer many hours a week at a music school. I’d like to think that I’ll continue being useful to society in that way and in other ways less formalized.
My hunch is that in some cases boomers have been and will continue decreasing their net contribution to whichever economy they live in, which shouldn't be the most important thing in evaluating the value of someone's existence, except that in this case everyone servicing them is also being squeezed by the tax system, and the same people they're servicing. Could be living in a boomer's basement making less than them but paying 1/2 your check, or in a managed rental that's owned by a reit that's invested in by their pension fund.
I think you're misinformed or showing anti-Ukraine bias. No one would send their military there, but could get sent in aid to another EU/EEA/NATO member.
Anyway, I agree that mandatory drafting should not be reintroduced.
Why not? Why should the burden only fall on the poor and the desperate?
For reference, Finland has universal conscription. The question over here is, why are women excluded?
Firstly, professional armies are recruited from the general population and are on average no better or worse than conscripts.
Secondly, the above comment completely sidesteps the moral aspects. Why should the burden of military service fall predominantly on the poor and the desperate? Why should decision makers be able to only send other people’s children to war?
This isn’t true. The US and UK conscript armies of WW1 and WW2 were significantly healthier and better educated than the general population. Lots of people grew up in wretched poverty and had deficiency diseases or were malnourished or had parasites. Those people were rejected.
It is illegal for the US military to accept recruits with an ASBAB score of ten or below, roughly equivalent to IQ 83. The military is in some sense representative but it is not a random sample.
There is no modern, professionalized army that wants conscripts. None. Conscripts are a liability, and a measure of last resort.
To your second, it’s far from just the downtrodden that fill the ranks of professional armies. In many countries, e.g. France (where I served), the upper classes of society (grande bourgeoisie and nobility) are over-represented in the ranks.
In Romania around 2008 mandatory drafting was removed from the constitution and yet we still have an army. The reason why we have such a small army is in a significant part due to pervasive corruption in all of the state's structures, low salaries and abusive higher ups. We have an interesting documentary about the subject (has english subtitles) about the ridiculous state of the army due to reasons mentioned. https://youtu.be/0_YnxJJcC7M?feature=shared
Because the army is the employer of last resort. It is what you do when you have no other options.
In my country we don't have mandatory military service. The "employer of the last resort" is the unemployment office and welfare, not army. I have never heard of anybody going to the army for any other than duty/ideological reasons, desperation for a job might even disqualify you - they want people who are motivated to join the army, not poor desperate people looking for money.
It’s almost a trope here. I expect that’s why the original commenter said that the military is the employer of last resort. In the US that is often the case for many young people.
The entire culture around the separation of state, its components and citizens is very different here. We really don't want another 40 years of dictatorship - best to stop it right at the beginning.
If we really reach a point where conscription is required, it also means that carrying an uterus is probably irrelevant: it's either kill or be killed.
Hopefully that's never going to be a thing again in as many countries as possible
Liberté, égalité, fraternité: Why do I have the feeling that only égalité is considered.
I did my conscript service in Sweden at a time when only 8000 did. 10 years earlier, 50,000 did. I don’t think it’s a coincidence Sweden has now joined NATO. People are simply clueless about the needs of the Defense.
I have since moved to Switzerland where the military is still fully staffed by each generation. I believe this is a link that should never be broken.
Additionally, I believe countries like France and Germany are too big and should reduce in size, but that’s another discussion.
There was an interesting comment recently that discussed the development of a 'warrior caste' in the US military, which to no-one's surprise largely overlaps with poor people. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40787714
France is not sending people to "die in Ukraine", no matter how many potholes you might find to support your bias.
https://english.elpais.com/international/2024-03-18/nato-per...
for example let's say you know a few people who work for the military and they happen to work at Area 51. sure lots of people know military personnel, but your sample is still pretty special. without a good representative sample we simply have no idea.
Second, Putin’s playbook is to sow discord by introducing a bunch of FUD into the political discourse across the world, something which you are doing here. So the remaining question here is: are you doing so willingly, or are you just prey to the same?
Because this is HN, I always believe it’s the latter. Still, your comment is unsourced, your account is four months old, and all your historical comments are systematically pro Russia and/or peddling common Russian talking points that “get people thinking”. Not a good look, huh?
May we meet on vacation.
You are probably not going to be surprised, but things are not going great.
When did we phase out leaded petrol? (We haven't fully, but you get the idea...) When did people mostly stop smoking carcinogens and heavy metals? When did we start, or stop, using toxic azo dyes for clothing? Or particular fireproofing or plasticizing chemicals that are endocrine poisons? Or the latest plague, which hit a lot of people in the brain?
While any of those things is not predictive enough at individual level due to genetic variance, statistics of big numbers show delayed correlations that heavily imply causation, while high dose studies show obvious toxicity of this kind. And when such chronic damage happened 20-30 years ago there's not that much our medicine can do yet.
We cannot even reactivate a thymus (major gland of the immune system) well yet en masse. Or fix or reliably help livers.
The demographics in the West are heavily skewed towards older generations who had a lot more kids than their kids, who are now having less kids than their parents. The power discrepancy directly follows from that and in my opinion so does the disconnect between the generations.
The "retiree draft" is just an absurd proposal which will do exactly one thing: increase resentment and further disconnect.
Low numbers of young people also make it hard to push out people who still are in power. It's a direct consequence of demographics.
That's where democracy also fails. The shorter you're around, the lower chance people heard about what you've done and who you are, no matter how good or bad you are at something. (Same applies to functionaries often enough.)
EDIT: Of course, now I read the article which pretty much says the same thing.
My suggestion: Let people start part time retirement with 55 and train and consult the next generation that comes after them. Then the loss of knowledge is avoided and when they are 65 just leave them alone in their retirement. They have deserved it well. If someone wants still to work, good for him, but a mandatory social service sounds to me like slave labour and the votes at the next elections will come in. There is a reason why the ultra right are so strong in the east of germany.
this proposal is in your head.
Why are they reluctant? Because you eventually realize as you age that slow societal change is better than fast change. The young demand fast change aka “revolution”. Revolutionary change creates volatile societies and volatile societies don’t create progress that sticks.
When I was in my twenties, I was impatient and demanded immediate change. Now approaching my sixties, I want progress, but know that a slow trickle is better and would rather be patient to get there.
The vast majority of people growing old have not spent their lives learning; while enchanting to look at the 60-70+ year olds that are undoubtedly exceptional (think Warren Buffet or the older COBOL dev you think is cool), the reality is they're in the extreme minority.
The author thinks everyone is like him (or us commenting for that matter) and just think of the possibilities in 30-40 years!
Most people are just not that impressive and I wouldn't falsely assume that by just having spent time on the Earth while it spun around the sun over 60 times they're automatically a pillar of wisdom.
Then, I saw that reaching old age without wisdom and equanimity produces a suffering and ugly person whose last years will do nothing but spread misery all around.
It’s an under appreciated reason to always try to better oneself: to avoid the carnage that will result in old age, should one fail to do so.
"One of the major difficulties Trillian experienced in her relationship with Zaphod was learning to distinguish between him pretending to be stupid just to get people off their guard, pretending to be stupid because he couldn't be bothered to think and wanted someone else to do it for him, pretending to be outrageously stupid to hide the fact that he actually didn’t understand what was going on, and really being genuinely stupid. He was renowned for being amazingly clever and quite clearly was so — but not all the time, which obviously worried him, hence, the act. He preferred people to be puzzled rather than contemptuous."
As a 50-something I'd say the chance to spot patterns one has encountered before is the super-power and getting in a rut is the kryptonite.
Oh and my brain does like to spend time at 2am thinking about embarassing and humiliating mistakes I have made. Those accumulate, so there's something to dwell uncomfortably upon as one (at any age) looks to the future. I guess it gives one an incentive to make fewer...
Unfortunately he is just a racist rich white man who got burnt by his own lies.
Intent is what matters. Quite clearly, the word you mention can be used in a variety of ways for a variety of reasons — not all of them racist.
Conversely, you can be the most awful racist without ever saying an offensive word. And there are plenty of those sorts of people too.
However, as for the specific example you mention: I know Americans tend to feel very strongly about that word and I understand that. But to most other English speakers, whilst it’s a horrible word, its mere usage isn’t itself always considered a terrible crime. In fact, it commonly occurs in literature studied in schools — and yes, the teachers and students will in that case have licence to use (or read aloud, if you like) the word.
If I heard the sentence you give, I would quickly assume the speaker might be racist. But it’s clearly not an assumption that is always valid, because I can equally imagine someone using the word (ill-advisedly, of course) as a joke.
It’s like saying ‘a person walking around with a knife in public must be a violent criminal’. Yes — the likelihood is that they are.
If you think the sentence you gave is racist (a priori), you should consider whatever definition of racism you want to use and work out how it applies to that case.
I get that what I’m saying is an unpopular view, but personally I think we shouldn’t give mere words such power. Their use in a situation that has separate indicators of prejudice is what we should really hope to avoid — going for the word itself is just naive.
I sort of get where you're coming from. You don't want to live in a world where speech can be sanctioned and censored for its own sake,. But I wonder if taking this view to its logical conclusion risks neglecting the fact that words do have power in our society. The "n-word" is offensive because its historical usage was intimately tied to the oppression of black people. As a consequence, black people today feel unsafe and hated if someone from those oppressors' background uses it (perhaps outside of extremely sensitive circumstances).
The question then is whether it's right sanction speech based on it making those people feel unsafe and hated. And in the UK we do; we have hate speech laws. By contrast, the US is relatively laissez-faire in what it allows legally, but - perhaps as a consequence - there are very strong, polarising cultural norms on speech.
Going back to Boris Johnson's speech. In an article criticising Tony Blair's focus on foreign policy, he writes:
> What a relief it must be for Blair to get out of England. It is said that the Queen has come to love the Commonwealth, partly because it supplies her with regular cheering crowds of flag-waving piccaninnies; and one can imagine that Blair, twice victor abroad but enmired at home, is similarly seduced by foreign politeness.
> They say he is shortly off to the Congo. No doubt the AK47s will fall silent, and the pangas will stop their hacking of human flesh, and the tribal warriors will all break out in watermelon smiles to see the big white chief touch down in his big white British taxpayer-funded bird. Like Zeus, back there in the Iliad, he has turned his shining eyes away, far over the lands of the Hippemolgoi, the drinkers of mares' milk. He has forgotten domestic affairs, and here, as it happens, in this modest little country that elected him, hell has broken loose.
The only defense Johnson provided here is that the quotes were "satirical" and "taken out of context". Reading them in context, I'm still perplexed as to why he employed derogatory slurs and invoke racist stereotypes. Perhaps he was saying that both the Queen and Tony Blair have a racist, paternalistic view of the commonwealth? I have definite doubts about this, as it's very unlike BoJo to take potshots at the Queen, and he himself apparently has a fondness for the colonial era (e.g. quoting a pro-imperialist Rudyard Kipling poem in a temple in Myanmar). Even if we grant him the satire defense, simply replacing "picaninnies" with "children" achieves the same effect without invoking crude stereotypes.
It took me a few years of life experience to understand that the latter three typically explain life better than the first two.
I suppose that for every individual there are things that they overtrained early on in life, for which it then takes a lot of time to unlearn them. In that respect, keeping an "open mind" can be helpful, but having it opened a bit too much makes one an annoying person as well.
Now where exactly was I going with this rant?
We've seen a collapse in respectability of politicians, for example. Not because the politicians have changed even slightly, but because we have much better visibility into what they're actually like and how the political sausages are made. Pre-internet I'm not even sure how I'd be supposed to get my hands on things like the Hansard records. Billionaires are under similar pressure, look at the difference in image of Musk vs someone like Gates who was world's wealthiest before the internet got big.
I don't think the fairytales of entropy, randomness and incompetence exist. But I do think there is an excellent reason for that - up until around 2000 almost nobody knew how big a factor those things were. The discourse was gummed up by propaganda which was mainly myths of competence in the halls of power and it wasn't feasible to pick apart the mess because communication was hard.
[Citation needed]
Investigative journalism existed, stuff like "manufacturing consent" was published in the '80s, and I'm pretty sure you could always obtain records of parliament sessions, I know in Italy they were all broadcast on the radio (they still are).
Things are easier to access without intermediation but it's not such a qualitative change, IMO.
Are you joking? The quality of that is nowhere near what we have today. I can't very well ring the radio station up to ask them to broadcast a speech I'm interested in from 3 months ago on my lunch break or stick to a specific candidate's record for an evening peruse. Even if they were willing to the scaling properties of that approach are unworkable.
> Investigative journalism existed
Assange dumped more information in a fortnight than an investigative journalist could cover in a decade. We're talking orders of magnitude improvements here.
If you're not seriously interested in politics I can see how nothing much has changed, but for anyone taking a deep interest the world is completely different now.
Over half of people get information from algorithmically driven and typically anonymous human-curated feeds of stories and opinions, and for a major portion of them, this has displaced journalism entirely -- with the notable exception of anyone claiming to blow the whistle which in itself has been perverting incentives.
Expecting people to read beyond the headlines has always been a tall order, but the practice is currently facing extinction while media quality is in a race to the bottom competing for the same attention.
One could for instance be dedicated to events and anecdotes by or about the dozens of people struck by lightning every month and present a credible-seeming case that lightning strikes are escalating and now an eminent danger to people at large. The reality of this has been happening across the board for even much rarer events in the last few years, in a way that some might say exploits confirmation bias.
Maybe it's a pendulum swing that will return, but at the moment the long term trend is towards a return to oral tradition and a pre-telegraph level of shared common knowledge of current events, recent history, and so on.
Manufacturing consent helps to understand the mechanics of how it works, but it did not really change; it just got quicker.
Some of that, perhaps, though I suspect most people don't care too much — most people don't read beyond the headlines, from what I've heard.
I'm assuming you mean US politicians in particular? Because in the UK, Johnson and Truss were genuinely exceptional in how bad they were. (And I'm currently living in the half of Berlin which used to be DDR, which had a government so bad the country stopped existing independently).
For the USA, I remember mocking GWB when he was your president (I even got quoted on the radio for it); the political Overton window I grew up in doesn't, can't, include either of your main parties, but even so, Trump does seem evil compared to GWB's nice-but-dim Forrest Gump.
> look at the difference in image of Musk vs someone like Gates who was world's wealthiest before the internet got big.
Late 90s, I was a teen, friends were talking about how evil he was, sharing pictures with Gates' face pasted onto WW2 dictator's rallies, etc.
How are you measuring that though? What about the politicians that managed to set the British Empire into terminal decline? In hindsight they must have been a bit below average. It isn't crazy to say that the least competent politicians turn up at the nadir of the UK's international importance, but logically speaking the people who mucked up at the peak were probably making worse decisions.
First, that most of that decline is relative power rather than absolute: the UK is no longer astride the world, but because so many others have gained power to kick my parents and grandparents' generations out of their countries, not (in all cases) because the UK became objectively weaker.
Second, that the politicians who caused the decline were doing a lot of smaller mistakes over a longer period.
Those other politicians probably were indeed as you say below average, but Johnson and Truss weren't just scraping the bottom of the barrel, they were the wood of the barrel itself and the floor underneath it.
I was involved in party politics in the 1980s and I saw how the sausage was made. I can tell you it's not like you see on the web today: there a lot more information available today than there was 30 years ago and it's of orders of magnitude lower quality. Don't confuse more crap with better crap.
Prior to the waves of garbage fed the masses by the internet almost everyone knew how big a factor things were. Now, discourse is gummed up by propaganda which is mainly myths of inhuman incompetence or else extremely competent conspiracy and it's not feasible to pick apart the mess because communication is hard.
Too much information make communications as difficult as too little.
But at the current job, it's everywhere, and I don't know how to properly deal with it. I'm thinking of leaving, despite having an excellent compensation package.
One of the realization for me after a few decades was that people in their 50s~70s don't have crazy tricks nor incredibly secret wisdom.
Many are dumb, many others are clever, some came up to crazy conclusions from their experiences and others opened up a lot to the world and keep learning on to of all their knowledge.
More than anything, while we're optimizing our heuristics years over years, the world keeps changing and what we assumed to be invariants were just slowly moving phenomenons that also see sudden breakdowns from times to times.
I have a theory that most people peak in their 20s and from there on change incredibly slowly.
Maybe you mistook my comment for a statement on society at large? That was not my intention at all. My post is about small software engineering teams, not democracies.
Btw, my team's objective was to strengthen a specific law, beneficial for the general public. Which we did. Just to provide some perspective on your view, which seems to be that executing fast with limited impediment by diverging opinions necessarily causes bad outcomes for society. Sometimes those diverging opinions are themselves harmful, and need to be ignored.
Right now, I am close to age the senior engineer was when I met them and even though I may selectively decide not to involve myself with things that can overstretch me, I am in no way the same as that other person.
The reason I am sharing this tangential story is to highlight my opinion about old age. It does not matter much if you have gained a lot of experience as you grow older, unless you are able to use it effectively.
The ideal engineer is not emotionally involved in their work. They aren't shareholders; they don't reap the benefits of what they do, they don't control the direction of the company. They are there to achieve specific technical goals with professionalism. Bringing emotion or non-technical factors in to the deal is an obstacle to excellence.
The ideal engineer is not emotionally involved in their work.
I am sure there are some unicorn exceptions (like the Spock character from Star Trek) but those who are excellent at their work also put a lot of time and effort into it, if not continuously then they’ve at least paid their dues for a span of decades. However they got there it represents a significant emotional investment involving pride and care or even a kind of love.
One can’t know everything all the time. There are ALWAYS going to be gaps in your own ability especially when you’re doing new and difficult work, and the way to bridge those gaps is to be driven by a desire to overcome them— in other words by CARING enough to keep trying.
The most successful people I can think of personally always care enough to overcome gaps in their ability. It looks like incompetence at first, then it becomes obsession, then it becomes problem solving, and it is ends with mastery, IF they CARE enough.
How do you know, and for better or worse?
Sounds like he might have been acting on wisdom, and at the time you might have perceived him through a lense of naivete, which still holds. I felt similarly in my early twenties in perhaps a similar environment, but now I know all the seniors I'd have resented were decades ahead of me in terms of what they valued and why. Caring about that work was stupid, and I should have just enjoyed my time more.
Their decisions made the life of those around them miserable because they did not care about the consequences of it. Like for example, hiring an intern who had basic programming skills when there was no engineering bandwidth available to support the intern, and then bouncing them around multiple large projects every week, for the sake of showing upper management that they had people "working" on priority tickets. There is more to this story, but it's just more details painting that person in a bad light.
I, most certainly am not such a person.
> Caring about that work was stupid, and I should have just enjoyed my time more.
I agree. It's a work in progress for me to get to that state.
I think there's good points to be made about wisdom and decision making when you're older, but there is definitely still a sharp cognitive decline (which will include wisdom and decision making!) when you're hitting 75+, for most people.
Having these people in positions of power is not a good thing. As advisors sure, but not directly in power with high influence.
There's a good chance this guy will cringe hard once he rereads this post in 10-20 years.
> Which makes me think: I have like 5 years of experience of real life. What kind of tricks under their belts do people in their 50s, 60s, 70s have? What kinds of crazy heuristics and meta-heuristics they’ve got in their minds, hearts, and muscles after decades of poking the world? I have no clue and this is what makes me really worried about them.
So on the whole, older folk aren't struggling to prove themselves; and they pretty much know who they are. Also, they've taken the knocks: they've faced physical injury, the pain of rejection, and often the kinds of illnesses that young people rarely get. They carry the scars and bruises.
Perhaps what scares the author isn't old people as such, but rather the experiences they've had that the author has yet to face.
I think he's extrapolated from him learning a lot in 5 years and assumed that everyone does that and that the curve keeps going.
There are a greater and greater proportion of people that need to be able to get labor from a smaller and smaller proportion of younger people, which basically means a need to make rents go up either via taxes or investments. The investments portion is seen as devaluation of currency.
Although, that is not what the linked article is talking about.
The draft never touched the current generation...
;)
Mind you, not just fear, terror !
Nothing factual presented. Not a unique, stimulating, or even really coherent viewpoint. Just a self-confident stream of consciousness with no real takeaway.
Eye-catching title though
To say more would be ad hom. So I shall stop with a wise aphorism of my grandmother, born at the end of the 19th century:
if you have nothing nice to add, consider saying nothing.
With a dash of humble-brag.
That's a new term to me. I like it!
It's a good word for the vacuous "Windows is rubbish" article that got submitted a couple of times yesterday.
I have several 20+ years long close friendships, but it’s definitely not because I just waited. It’s a ton of time, sacrifice, and even more patience and empathy. People change, and sometimes it’s very difficult to handle to what they become. But at the end, these occasions definitely help you to understand people.
Unfortunately, this cost also a lot of money, because you need to travel a lot. After 15-20 years almost all of these kind of my friends live far away from each other. I had to cross even the Atlantic every 2-3 months because of this for a while.
One for sure, If you just wait, you’ll loose close friendships.
I recommend figuring out if: (1) they are good at doing what they'll be responsible for, (2) they enjoy doing it, and (3) if you can live with each other.
(1) You want to know that they will succeed in whatever you delegate to them. (2) Can they persist over the long term, seeing their tasks to completion and success? (3) Especially with a lower headcount, it's similar to a second marriage, and you might end up spending time with them more than the professed love of your life. Can you overcome conflicts?
> If I’m starting a company today, I’m simply not doing it until I have an incredible operations person on board from day 1.
I'm coming round to the same opinion. A better-than-good ops person can have one of the largest influences on success. If we view success as parts preparedness, execution, and luck, they provided an outsized boost to all 3.
EDIT: Clarified the benefits of the ops person.
I wonder if there is a kind of overfitting that keeps the playing field level for young people. Like you read more books, have more experiences, etc, but in the end you’re less capable than the naive approach.
He mentions having more connections as you get old. I think of Bill Belichick’s final years with the Patriots, and how he never seemed to be able to hire the right guys, stuck on old friends and colleagues. You might overfit to “I once hired a left handed guy on a Tuesday to write the backend, maybe I should do that again…”
That’s quite reductive unless you’re overloading “impress” with “awe”. Because making strong impressions and influencing specific action is the whole point of sales, whether it be convincing your parents about something meaningful as a child. An employer the value you’ll bring. A bank or VC a safe or fantastic long term ROI.
> Which makes me think: I have like 5 years of experience of real life.
My experience is that it takes on average 5-7 years for a person to realize this, so kudos to this guy for ticking this off early.
The outlier on the long side is hard to work with in a team.
As someone pointed out in this thread, the group think that forms in same-age groups can be downright dangerous.
Just keep writing, the ultimate audience is your future self, and you'll appreciate being able to look back on your life.
I’m in my 40s and have a very specific view of what things were like in my teens, or 20s, or even 30s. That view is wrong.
Rose tinted Nostalgia glasses are very real.
Bit of an aggressive false dichotomy for a 40 year old to make
Enjoyed the article, keep writing!
This is an argument for traditionalists. Listen to your 50-year-you, aka your parents, your community seniors, etc.
But reversely, if we tilted more towards listening to the elder-you, would there be enough renewal in society? Enough happiness at 20 years old?
Also, everyone has holes in their knowledge/perspective. Could be the older people in your orbit when younger have thoughts that are too limiting compared to where you end up when making decisions as a 20-year-old.
Long story short most of the people are born in a model, have absorbed that and are unable to move. When the time passes we need to change and the "old" generations are simply from another time, unable to be citizens of the present.
The current state of thing is a previous generation born on high growth after a world war, in a high competitive society, a society with strong emotions but also oppression, younger generations are born in a degrading society with much less vivid emotions but much more cooperation, so it's normal to have inter-generational issues where the old generation fear to loose a competition because they ware grown as running horses, if you stop you are dead, while the younger one do not understand why they are so harsh and focused. Back then to keep people subjugated in a fast growing world the rule was "always do the same, trust the system" (at least in most EU) while today the rule is "always doubt and reason on anything, be ready to change" because we are in a degrading society who need to change to reborn.
Unfortunately while most people are kind and honest, most are also mentally unable to evolve and that's why we derail, the world change, the population strive to avoid the change instead of do their best to direct it.
Another one is like this: There are people who I respect/admire for the things they did, and now they are doing something obviously completely stupid. Were those things they did just random results I got to see, compared to a bunch of other stuff they probably did I did not get to see, thus creating this sort of false image of their intellect (or character, or something like that), or are they actually right in believing in this new thing, and I'm just being oblivious? How come some really smart people do some really dumb stuff (while believing they are doing the right thing)? I believe I'm somewhat smart, but what does that even mean if it doesn't prevent me from doing some really, really dumb stuff.
At some point, my friend told me something like (or at least this is how I understood it) - it is good that you realize that good/smart people do bad/stupid things, and vice versa; the fact that you start from this belief that you might be wrong gives you a greater chance of being less wrong, at least in the long run.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qEJ4hkpQW8E
I don't think it is intentional, but the consequences are certainly quantifiable. Everyone thinks the asymmetry of power structures is unfair... right up until perspectives shift when they take on the same roles...
https://www.amazon.com/Dictators-Handbook-Behavior-Almost-Po...
Have a great day, =3
Experience has decreasing marginal returns. Being 40 doesn't make you 4 times as experienced as an adult as a 25 year old. Being 80 doesn't make you 8 times as experienced.
Being a 25 year old you actually have learned a lot about being an adult, and you shouldn't think that time on its own will increase that. It's more the variety of experience that teaches things than time itself, especially if you repeat things for a long time.
I'm on the plus side of 50 and, from personal experience as well as observing my contemporaries, this is relatively rarely true.
Its quite possible to waste^Wuse years chasing stuff that you only thought you wanted. Its also quite possible to spend years being busy with work or child raising or whatever - and then you find yourself washed ashore on the metaphorical beach of your later life and you have to figure out how to make a shelter and survive there. And this still may not beat any insight into your head.
That old cliche: an old person is just a young person looking at them self and going "huh? what the...?"
> I also suspect that the declining intelligence measurements of old people are mostly attributable to slower-lookup and “shallow” reactions rather than any actual decline in quality of decision-making.
My limited experience and insight from introspection is that you lose raw cognitive power but gain experience. I feel like the latter is more useful for the challenges of middle and later life, but you have to be increasingly mindful of confirmation bias. The challenge is distilling your experiences into wisdom, somehow.
Life is so rich, as Scott Galloway says, but I know next to nothing
Obviously theres a context to this article in Biden's recent debate performance. As a non-USian observing it all, I understand the concern. But I wish people would remember that a national leader is just the head of of a decision-making team. They don't decide everything themselves, they lead the team and set the direction. And they almost never ever have to make decisions alone at the tempo of an adversarial debate. Its possible to imagine scenarios where Biden would have 30 seconds to make a nationally existential decision, but such things only happen in films, not real life.
Wisdom not raw power.
But his opponent is an extremely dangerous individual, so I get the concern.