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Comment by stego-tech | Hacker News Reader

A really good litmus test of individual perspective and maturity, here. Already seeing comments nitpick specific arguments or points, which is itself the trap to shine a light on those individuals more obsessed with arbitrary external measures of their personal definition of success, rather than self-reflecting on said definition and asking whether or not this definition fits who they are or want to be as a person, or their desired achievements and goals in life.

It’s a sonnet of sorts about the curse of intelligence in an increasingly insane world, a reminder that brilliant people can be absolute monsters, and that the only person who can bring you contentment in life is yourself.

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Dunno - I think it's hard for a lot of us who rolled the dice on our interests early on, picked the winning combo of CS + Finance, and then just raced ahead in the career ladder over our peers as software work consumed the world.

Now it's ten years later, those ladders have disappeared, many of us seeing the writing on the wall, and wondering whether we were anything special at all.

(The answer of course is no, but it's a tough pill to swallow)

But isn’t being special rather… lonely?

When you're a rising star, they blend narcissistic personality disorders into your paycheck. The only metric you need in order to feel that societal love, is a good performance review and a bonus.

As a former gifted kid who has had their fair share of struggles around identity, competency, and success, having to redefine each multiple times as the world shifts around me and ladders are either yanked up or burned down just as I arrive to climb them:

It sucks. It sucks ass. It has lead to many a night shouting in rage, anger, depression, and malaise. It continues to incense me as I see reprehensible actions receive phenomenal rewards in the short term for inflicting harm, and ignorance of their consequences of the long-term. It sucks.

You’re not alone, at least, and acknowledging that reality helped me rally around more social causes as I accepted that individual success was more luck than talent or effort, at least at present. It doesn’t really get easier to accept that reality either, even as I work to create a better one that’s built more around objectivity than individuality. Still, I’ve been far calmer, more productive, and even happier as I acknowledge the reality around me instead of reject it out of some notion of “specialness” or exceptionalism.

Acknowledging the reality around you is, in its own way, quite liberating, even if it’s also frustrating and lonely at present.

20 different British Prime ministers went to a single school ( high school I think in US terms ) - Eton.

The way you get into Eton is largely via money and social connections - not excellence ( though it's a good school ).

What's interesting is that 18 of those were before 1964. Then there was a gap of ~50 years, and then we got 2 in quick succession recently.

So social mobility ( and the idea of a meritocracy ) flourished for a bit, but we've gone in reverse recently.

I see the same happening in the US - Jimmy Carter was a peanut farmer, Trump is a billioniare, Hilary ( the almost president ) was the wife of previous president, George W Bush was the son of a previous President.

One of the problems is that many successful people now seem to believe it's all down to them, and therefore the world can be split into the deserving and undeserving.

That's simply not true - life is more complex than that - and sure talent and hardwork matter - and matter a lot - but Jeff Bezos isn't worth ( measured in output ) ~1 million times more than his average employee - there is nothing Amazon has created that wouldn't have happened anyway without Jeff - he didn't invent online shopping or cloud computing - though he did execute very very well.

And let me be clear Jeff is very good at his job and deserves to reap the benefit of that - but ~250 billion in one persons hands isn't proportionate - he's not worth that, and he has spent some of that putting Katy Perry into space - I'd argue not the best use of the worlds resources.

I sort of relate. I suspect the misplaced confidence one can develop from early successes in one's career eventually manifests as a lot of beliefs needing to be unlearned later in life (especially when facing challenges requiring resilience). I think I am a better person for it (and that is the point).

I've watched those ladders disappear at least twice and come back over my life (Dotcom bubble and the Global Financial Crisis). These things are cyclical and for somethings we are at a low point. But in the long run there will always be opportunities for talent to florish.

I think the big mistake is to assume that the landscape remains static during your lifetime. This hasn't really been true for a hundred years now (and possibly a bit more than that), and that rate-of-change is only accelerating.

The observation in this article is part of a more general principle: Happiness isn't a single variable equation. It directly parallels the observation that "money doesn't buy happiness." 210 IQ will never be enough. $20M dollars will never be enough.

This article is interesting to me because I see people falsely equivocating money with happiness all the time, and pretty much never see it with IQ. I didn't realize it was a thing.

Bearing in mind that my lived experience is entirely subjective, and that your mileage may vary accordingly:

I find that when people associate money with happiness, what they fail to observe is that they actually want the presumed stability such money would afford them, at their current lifestyle. Failing to acknowledge and plan around that leads to “lifestyle creep” as income rises, which simply perpetuates the same grievances they currently have around instability or insecurity, just with higher price tags and consequences for failure. I strongly suspect that billionaires engage in wealth and asset hoarding for this very reason: a terror of status, security, and stability collapse.

Once I let go of lifestyle creep and found contentment and gratuity in what I had, I began realizing that stability is shockingly affordable even under modern policies and economics. Releasing yourself from this forced societal obligation to “Keep Up with the Jones’” is a key step towards objectively reflecting on your life as it’s lived, and identifying what’s of genuine import to you. Only by doing that do you find what is actually needed for personal fulfillment, and thus, happiness.

> billionaires engage in wealth and asset hoarding

That's not how money works. Nobody becomes a billionaire by hoarding. Money greater than a surprisingly low amount must be invested. Even the most obvious, boring, and low-risk investments still tend to have good returns. At scale lots of money just becomes a lot more money. There is no ego necessarily involved in this process.

Hoarding not as the act of accumulating such absurd wealth (they do that through exploitation), but hoarding in the sense of refusing to spend down, divest, or otherwise cease further acquisition despite the harms created or perpetuated in doing so.

You cannot look me in the eyes and keep a straight face while saying their megayachts, private jets, palatial estates, private islands, and state capture are completely ego-less. To willfully retain or grow such wealth is to have a gluttonous, insatiable ego.

I wouldn't say those things are completely ego-less, but I will say that they're not necessarily for personal enjoyment alone.

The function of all that is entertaining guests. Of course theirs must be the biggest and best to win people over. You may then ask why they need to win people over, and you will find it only keeps getting more complicated and torturous to maintain than what any individual's ego could possibly and stubbornly want to do.

I'm not saying the wealthiest are heroes or saints or anything like that. In fact, in some cases all of what I just said is totally wrong and it's just a front for massive money laundering. Having a means for large private gatherings is also ideal for other possibly nefarious activities.

I'm simply trying to explain what humanity and depth exists where you don't think it does. It's not really one single "evil" person, or even a group of "evil" people, but a situation caused by many well-intended constraints. That a system naturally becomes corrupt as a mere side effect of its scale and tiny imperfections adding up rather any intentions is probably the most evil thing imaginable.

> 210 IQ will never be enough. $20M dollars will never be enough.

At least, $20M dollars exists, while 210 IQ is mathematically nonsense -- it means "one out of several trillions", which exceeds the human population. You would have to colonize the entire galaxy, and then be the smartest human in that galaxy. If even that is not enough, I am giving up.

Or the distribution could be leptokurtic like almost everything in the real world. Also galaxies are bigger than you think.

You took those trillions literally, it's not meant like that. It's a general observation on how abstract the measuring is.

I always love the articles that end up holding mirrors to some of the commenters. :)

What does that say about you? :)

The charitable answer would be that they admire self reflection and try to engage i it themselves.

yes, i'm pretty sure that's the case, i was just making a meta joke about holding up mirrors

High int, dump stat wis

> arbitrary external measures of their personal definition of success

You say 'external' meausures, but these do manifest as internal identities - all of which collectively form your social identity: https://srid.ca/identity/social

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