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Comment by cnity | Hacker News Reader

Something that strikes me about the tone of both the article and comments here is how hard on ourselves we can be. The folks here are of a particular variety too -- pulled in by grand stories of "achievement". The imperfection and the manner in which we reckon with it can be incredibly beautiful. Indeed it is probably the only thing we have, and the only thing we can really use to truly connect with others. It's all really beautiful if you let it be. On the other side, it can be torturous if you don't.

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To provide a little grounding for the author's writing, most novelists don't publish until their 40s or later. Most young novelists who publish don't publish anything that sells until their 40s, too.

Which isn't to discount the author's point. Their writing is introspective. But our perceptions are not always right, and it screws with our self-perceptions, especially of what success means and looks like. We are drawn to exceptions and anchor our expectations for ourselves within their stories.

The 21 year old founder/CEO is largely a myth too. Not that they don't exist, but they usually aren't very good at their job.

... but by being allowed to be bad at their job at 21, they are more likely to find success later.

This is not just true of CEOs. As a precocious chief sysadmin of a small local ISP at age 19, I was allowed to fully administer things no sane company would allow a 19 year-old to touch: sophisticated ADSL aggregation equipment, BGP-speaking border routers, mission-critical core routers, ATM equipment, and so much more.

Not everything I did with this power was smart. A lot of my understanding of what that stuff is was learned "improvisationally", and major local customers, including the county government, paid the price. But what I did do was very successfully parlay this experience into a big-kid job (and a mega pay rise) in the big city, which then begat more such jobs. I doubt I could have rocketed that high, that quickly, if the small-town ISP weren't willing to let ambitious but inexperienced people like me screw up, in exchange for paying them semi-student wages.

The purpose of a startup is not to supercharge the career of its founders.

It's not usually the purpose.

It is difficult IMO to be a great writer until you are at least somewhere around mid life and have lived quite a bit of life and been in enough situations to pull inspiration from.

Young people are good at developing talents involving physical skills, but rarely do you find young writers who produce any great literature. And of those young people who happen to be amazing writers, their skill only improves as they get older and wiser, they don’t really hit a peak until they have mental decline in old age.

So if you hit 40 and you’re not good at anything in particular in life, you might still find there’s time to be a great writer, the journey has just begun!

I agree with this. One of the reasons I think writing on TV and in movies is so poor these days is because it's a lot of young people whose only experience of the world is their city bubble, and Twitter. They have only ever seen a narrow slice of life, and their writing reflects that. Very much unlike great authors of years gone by, who had gone out and lived a wide swath of life (including hardship and death) before they wrote their great works.

In the "old days", it was poor taste for the young to opine too much about things. You wouldn't publish your magnum opus until later in life.

The point is, of course, that age is a necessary, but insufficient condition for wisdom. I know of philosophers who claimed to only grasp their subject matter in their 50s.

I see your point, but the examples I notice across fields including writing, demonstrate a strong preference towards [relative] youth.

  - Neal Stephenson (My favorite fiction writer) published his first book in his early 30s
  - Hemingway published great works in his early 20s
  - Almost all of the most notable scientific breakthroughs in the 20th century were from individuals in their 20s. Schrodinger was the Old Man at 37!
  - Most famous musicans started releasing their first, and often best, albums in their early 20s-early 30s. When they tour into old age, they're mostly playing their hits of youth.

I think, perhaps, the trend is even more pronounced in scientists than writers. Skews early-20s.

You can find exceptions, but the exceptions are often not that old, and in the anecdotes I think of (Favorite authors, writers, musicians etc), it's hard not to notice the trend of youth. I want to find this trend to be untrue because it can be depressing, but can't. (This is at the core of the article)

It is quite interesting to compare these ages to all the people you know.

There are probably roughly zero 20-somethings that are more interesting than the most boring 50-year old you know.

Is it maybe the case that 20-somethings have nothing to do so they futz around with science and writing and can do that. As they grow older they find better things to do?

I don't think it's reasonable to include (pop) musicians. Pop music fans, who decide what's a hit, skew young, and are influenced partly by how much the star prancing on stage attracts them as an imaginary sexual partner (or role model). Stardom involves a lot of intuition, charisma, and personality, all things a young person might have by accident. There's also a "voice of the [...] generation" trope that's more plausible if you are one of that generation. So yes, many albums are released by youthful stars and gain attention due to their youthful relevance, sex appeal, and physical fitness (non-rusty voices, nimble fingers, jumping about): and if coincidentally also good music, they're likely to overshadow later albums that are only good music but connect with less visceral urgency to their audience. With, as you say, many exceptions (Wilburys).

Possibly you could look at Newton's example. Yes, his best scientific contributions happen when he was young, and they are what he is known for. But in his late 40's he gave that away. Perhaps as you say it got too hard.

Instead he took up a job at the mint. The job had some technical bits to it like designing coins that were harder to counterfeit, but is was mostly a managing people and society job. The coin clippers were literally debasing the currency to near worthlessness. Had they continued they would have been the internal cancer that took down the empire, as the state could no longer afford to pay for the ships and men needed to create and maintain it. Newton almost single handedly turned that around. It's not an exaggeration to say he saved the empire.

You say the older Newton could not do what the younger Newton did, and that's probably true. But it's also true the younger Newton could not have done what the older one did. He needed the experience and understanding of how men and society work that only decades of live could give him. So yes some abilities dim as you age. But other abilities grow stronger.

Fluid intelligence is higher when younger.

Crystallised intelligence increases with age.

Your comparative advantage changes.

A huge part of that has to be that in modern day society we're constantly bombarded with those one-in-a-million stories that are presented as if they're the norm. And don't get me started on things like sports stars with insanely rare genetic gifts who then write books that say "And I knew it would just take hard work to make my dreams would come true" - sure, you worked hard, but so did a bajillion other folks who didn't win the genetic lottery that you've never heard of. And in many places, like the US, it's also widely preached and believed that the US is a meritocracy, and that anyone can achieve greatness if they work hard enough. I don't really want to get into the "meritocracy" debate but I hope everyone can at least acknowledge that luck is a huge component of any exceptional success.

Before global media, for the most part if you were comparing yourself to other people it was largely comparing against your friends, family and community. Sure, there may have been that one outsized success, but it still wasn't presented as the norm - you knew all the other friends and family that just had average lives. And for most of human history where social ranking was explicitly classed based, it's not like if you were a peasant you would think "Darn, if I only worked harder I could be a noble".

If you want to feel "less hard on yourself", I highly recommend disconnecting from digital media. It's hard for our human brains to deal with the constant onslaught of stars/celebrities/moguls/exceptions and understand how rare those examples truly are.

Think about all the hours you've spent doing what we all do on this site which is, ultimately, nothing.

Imagine if you had directed those hours towards learning or training some sort of skill. You would, almost certainly, be in the top percents of humanity by now at that skill.

It's not just about innate inability but about dedicating yourself to something of value. The reality is that the overwhelming majority of people choose not to do that.

But the point I would emphasize is that this is a choice.

It's actually quite the issue as well, because it's so enticing to choose to do nothing. Would Einstein in an era of endless entertainment, banter, porn, and so on have nonetheless chosen to spend his days wandering about pondering the mysteries and paradoxes with the speed of light?

I mean maybe...? But there's a strong argument to be made that we haven't done away with meritocracy but rather made it fabulously enjoyable to do things of no real merit.

While i agree somewhat and i have the exact same sensation about many things in my life (which has led me to adopt a relentless learning attitude for many things), I'll say that some random online conversations are worth it. These talks help me stay up to date on current events, they help me understand the way others around me are thinking about the world, and occasionally they give me deep insights that i may have neve come upon myself. A movie might finally click for you why someone is upset, helping you improve your personal relationships. I'm in a physics PhD right now and there are people who obviously have done nothing but study their entire lives. But they cannot participate in political discussions or really even small talk. And they seem to be having outsized difficulties with things i consider essential like, talking with women in a way that you might one day start a family and have kids, engender trust and friendship in a wide selection so that job networks and political clout might allow you to materially improve circumstances for yourself and those you love.

There is something to be said about solitary (socially and intellectually) activities being bad, but i would not be anywhere near the whole person i am without my online experiences.

It's tough to be wired as an optimizer

I'm really hard on myself even for small things like missing a turn that takes me 5 minutes out of the way. Or making a minor mistake in my morning breakfast routine that I've been optimizing for 3 years. It's just how I'm wired.

For me work stuff bothers me like making a mistake/looking dumb. But also when other people make mistakes I don't judge them that harshly/don't obsess over it as opposed to myself.

I think the antidote is to intentionally avoid routines to optimize. Cultivating an objective of variety helps break out of the mundanity-loop. (caveat: everything in moderation, including moderation)

Thing is, over-optimizing is not optimizing. "No plan survives contact with reality", as it is said. Optimal strategies in games, for instance, include lots of adaptive branches to deal with the suboptimal reality of what actually happens - otherwise the plan is really fragile.

(Having said that, restarting a game over and over in order to force your one perfect linear optimal plan to eventually work out can be lots of fun. But this is not an option in real life.)

While I'm on the cheesy aphorisms, I'll throw in "life is what happens while you're busy making other plans". But that one's too pragmatic, I think. It's not as if we have zero control. Maybe a more accurate statement would be "life is what happens while you're busy making loosely similar plans".

You can think of it as "just how I'm wired" if that helps, but these things are tendencies not absolutes. I've been similarly harsh with myself in the past and now I do that less frequently with lower harshness even though I know it's a natural tendency.

It is possible to lessen the effect of these things if you put effort into it.

OK, now I'm being harsh with myself about how I'm failing to get better at not being harsh with myself.

What if you were to optimize for happiness, resilience, and peace of mind?

Through the first half of 2024 I tried learning to drive, and my instructor drilled this mindset into me through how he spoke and reacted to errors. It’s taken me a long time to untangle that attitude out of my head, where I can think clearly, judging myself on my own standards for acceptable errors, and not the hypothetical standards of voices that don’t care about me. Being unable to do anything without doubting or questioning myself was soul destroying.

People like him are horrid traps for optimisers. They’re pointing out errors, and being so desperate to improve you’re encouraged to keep listening and value them greater instead of tuning their overeagerness out.

There’s an irony that actually getting hung up on minor comments and suggestions is in itself poor optimisation since the error becomes a distraction instead of a learning point.

Good reminder that it's everyone's first time doing this.

I believe in re-incarnation, so I've failed at this thousands of times.

And what have you learned?

accept, let go and surrender.

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