"I just completed a project into which I poured not just all of my time and energy, but also all of my self-worth. It was a massive success. Now I have nowhere to place my self-worth. Doing this again would be both (1) unlikely to succeed, and (2) extremely toxic, just as doing it the first time kind of was. So how do I get out of this mindset without completely destroying myself?"
Amusingly, his response to that question was to make a game about it.
Few people get rewards on that scale (and thus the chance to exit, or at least the time to think about it), but many develop similar relationships to their work (or art). An exploration of the problems in that dynamic (as in The Beginner's Guide) is therefore relevant to a lot of people.
If your dream is to make a great game, and you achieve that, sort of -- it's great to everyone except you -- I think it makes sense to feel more alienated and unsure of yourself than ever, or if your game had not been received as well.
Huh...I'm a bit nihilistic and have never felt a need to put self-worth into something. I just want to relax and play games.
So it might actually be a pretty good sign that you struggle to sympathize with this, because the alternative might be that you understand it all too well.
Maybe if I get to have an active life of 300 years, I could maybe imagine starting to get closer to "having everything I need".
I can imagine it. After sidehustling and grinding hard for ~10 years, I realized one day that my savings make more in annual interest than my sidehustle brings in revenue. Not profit, revenue.
After a bit of math I realized that if I just do nothing unusual – go to work, keep my savings rate – I’ll have the option to retire in 3 to 4 years.
The big thing I was pouring my heart, soul, and mind into for so long suddenly feels small and meaningless. Like what is even the point? The sidehustle became more of a hobby. It’s enjoyable but the drive isn’t quite there. The things that used to feel like a big deal make me yawn.
So I try to work on bigger more impactful things. But these take longer and so there’s less of that regular dopamine hit of overcoming challenges. And even if ultimately they don’t succeed, oh well not too big a deal. So they just feel less of a pressing issue.
The ultimate feeling is one of aimless ambition. I want to do and achieve, but wherefore all the effort when chilling brings almost the same result?
Surely you have more you want to do and achieve than just that one side hustle? Have you never wanted to write a novel? Learn a musical instrument? A language? How to speedrun your favorite video game? Contribute to open source? Plant a vegetable garden?
There is so, so much to do, and instead I spend all my time working to keep a roof over my head.
But it doesn’t hit the same as when success felt like life or death. My actual needs are met. The rest is gravy.
It helps that my dayjob feels like the most effective vehicle for big ambitions. This was a specific thing I optimized for when looking. It doesn’t feel like a necessity or distraction, it’s the thing I want to be doing.
And there definitely are good reasons that make existence worthwhile for its own sake, like using your freedom for discovery and mastery as you said, but unfortunately depression has the nasty side-effect of robbing you of the joy you could find in those causes, and the energy to pursue them.
If tomorrow the greatest dream of AI was achieved, and we had a perfect benevolent AI that would shepherd humanity to comfort and safety forever, that would be just about the best outcome imaginable in material terms. But I think I'd be unhappy with it, because I derive a lot of my personal sense of worth from what I do - from what I build and for what I contribute to other people. I don't know what I would do in a world where that was no longer needed. I'm great at being helpful! I suck at being fun.
Is that healthy? Probably not. (It's actually something I'm working through at the moment, that I increasingly understand as a consequence of both personal and societal-level abuse.) But we're not all healthy creatures. We live our lives as the people we are in each moment, including the ways in which we're dumb and flawed and insecure.
If Calhoun's mouse utopia experiments are anything to go by, such a seemingly idyllic situation would spell out humanity's death in very real terms.
Since you are wondering about the healthiness of that emotion, try to read C.S. Lewis "The Four Loves": the Need love/Gift love opposition may have answers for you.
But surely the Shepherd would be aware of your soul's needs as well, and could pretend that your help is required somewhere in the system.
I think most people wouldn’t be fooled by this. People intuitively understand when their work is superfluous. They see that even if they slack off nothing blows up, no alarm bells sound, no production lines grind to a halt, no one dies.
It reminds me of the article about one of the co-founders of RxBar and how he was finding it hard to search for meaning after they sold their company for hundreds of millions. It was posted here years ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21138106
However "Post Adventure/Mission Depression" is very common.
See e.g. https://worldextrememedicine.com/app/uploads/2022/07/Lukas-H...
As a person in tech, I have met many millionaires and a few billionaires, and it is really true that huge wealth does not in, and of itself, bring happiness. They're basically still stuck with their old problems, but now also surrounded by sycophants and leaches.
No amount of fame or success will alter who you truly are inside. If anything, laying your happiness at the foot of external validation from others in the form of critical success or fame is a poisoned apple.
There are plenty of examples of wildly successful people unable to manage their own demons -- see Kurt Cobain or Anthony Bourdain.
It was too much pressure at the top, though, and he sold the project to Microsoft and became a billionaire; but what that actually meant is that Microsoft took it over entirely, and he was nothing. He didn't even get the position of "esteemed creative inventor who now only occasionally provides creative direction instead of being responsible for every last thing", that some people get when they sell their projects to faceless behemoths.
He had a further fall from grace in that the public didn't like his stated values on social media, and Microsoft took the opportunity to completely erase him from Minecraft - removed all mention of his name, and he's not invited to anything.
So now he sits alone in his mansion and cries himself to sleep, because while "never work again" money is nice to have, he'd rather have the kudos and recognition of being the creator of a much-loved game. And that's the one thing he can't have any more.
I mean, do we actually know that? I haven't heard anything about Notch in years and years, but I just assumed it was because he was hanging out with his friends and family and enjoying his wealth. It's certainly what I'd do in his shoes, but maybe he's said he doesn't enjoy how things out and I was unaware.
(He bought the mansion in 2014: https://www.eurogamer.net/minecraft-creator-notch-just-bough...)
That's a pretty disingenuous take. Here are some examples of his social media:
"If you're against the concept of #HeterosexualPrideDay, you're a complete fucking cunt and deserve to be shot" [0]
He believed in PizzaGate[1][2].
He's tweeted in support of QAnon [3].
There's an easy way to avoid a fall from grace: Don't turn into a right-wing nutjob. Just stay out of politics and social commentary in general.
[0] https://fortune.com/2017/07/02/minecraft-markus-persson-homo...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pizzagate_conspiracy_theory
[2] https://www.dailydot.com/unclick/minecraft-creator-pizzagate...
[3] https://www.newsweek.com/minecraft-notch-controversy-twitter...
It does seem crazy to me, given he lived in Sweden, where copyright transfers only economic rights, not moral rights (such as the right to be identified as the creator of a work), but allows the author to waive their moral rights, that he would waive his moral rights.
In any case, he seems pretty miserable, regardless of his twitter outbursts.
For most game developers, getting a credit on a game is not a creative badge of honour, it is sometimes the only hard proof that they worked on a title. It’s part of their portfolio and often essential for their future career and earning potential. This is why they fight so hard for a credit that is essentially free for a company to give.
Everybody knows Notch made Minecraft. He no longer depends on the credit for his future earnings. He chose to give it up.
[1]: https://www.minecraft.net/en-us/credits (ctrl+f "Markus Persson") [2]: https://minecraft.wiki/w/Java_Edition_19w13a#General_2