Comment by Xcelerate | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Xcelerate | Hacker News Reader

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> one of the most consequential decisions you can make in life is the city you choose to live in

This seems to have had the reverse effect on me. I always wanted to move to the Bay Area growing up because that’s where the tech industry was. When I finally did, I got distracted by all that California had to offer: nature, good food, an endless supply of places to go and interesting things to see. I moved there for tech but promptly lost interest in tech. I picked up a bunch of fun hobbies totally unrelated to my core motivations in life.

Now that I live somewhere boring again, I spend most of my free time learning about new areas of mathematics and computer science.

I’ve also observed the same paradoxical effect with having children. Prior to kids, I had tons of free time that I essentially wasted. But now that free time is scarce, I wake up at 4 AM to study, practice, or create something before the work day starts.

It’s almost like sub-optimal conditions trigger an instinct to fight against those constraints by producing value. If I actually get what I think I want (living somewhere interesting, having plenty of free time, etc.), it’s like I just lose focus and motivation. Go figure.

You'd find many people (even here on HN) that would argue your time spent among "nature, good food, an endless supply of places to go and interesting things to see" is well worth the lack of focus on your career. Hell, many people hyper focus too much on the latter until they wake up one day wishing they spent more time appreciating the former.

And, it's hard to imagine anyone arguing in good faith that you should give those amenities up and move somewhere boring in order to "spend most of my free time learning about new areas of mathematics and computer science" (not that that's not a noble pursuit in itself).

Harking back to the article, it's more about how you want to see yourself in the future. Do you want to be someone who has an appreciation (and has appreciated) life outside a career, at expense of some potential of said career?

"Hell, many people hyper focus too much on the latter until they wake up one day wishing they spent more time appreciating the former."

And some wake up realising they will still have to die, despite their awesome career and that there is no point in taking their money into their grave and they should have started living at some point. But it might be too late by then.

Like most things in life, it is about the right balance.

> it's hard to imagine anyone arguing in good faith that you should give those amenities up and move somewhere boring

Oh, that's certainly not why I moved haha. We wanted to be closer to family and that was just one of the unfortunate tradeoffs of that decision. The math and CS topics I've been studying are those that I find intrinsically interestingly (e.g., computability theory), but they are unlikely to benefit my career more than tangentially. I didn't really make that clear above.

With "core motivations" I was referring to what I would like to accomplish over a lifetime, which is more about what actually benefits society in some way (and at least so far, that appears to be orthogonal to my career). Personally, I found that moving somewhere less "interesting" helped me to realign with those objectives. Or maybe that's just post-hoc rationalization.

>t’s almost like sub-optimal conditions trigger an instinct to fight against those constraints by producing value.

The beatings will continue until productivity increases!

Very different but this vaguely reminds me of body doubling - the idea that just having another person around you makes you work harder and focus

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