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Comment by recursive | Hacker News Reader

This but unironically. I don't post on LinkedIn or anything. But sometimes it seems like all the agonizing people sometimes do over whether or not they should follow their plan (fitness, diet, productivity) makes it ten times worse.

It can be possible to decide to do something in advance, and then... just do it. The more times you do it the easier it gets. My wife comments on this sometimes. I guess not everyone has this? Maybe it can be learned? I don't know.

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The list of things I must do is large and growing. Much of it outside my control. Yes, I could sell the house but rent is quite high. Yes, I could divorce the wife but that actually makes for more work. Yes, I could abandon the children but I've grown attached; and that's only legal after finding someone else willing to adopt them and a judge willing to approve it. Yes, I could deny any help with the elderly parents on both sides of the family but that seems extreme and carries a social cost. Yes, I could spend a few decades trying to cure the medical issues I've collected but that leaves little time for anything mentioned earlier.

Then there are the things I'd like to do.

I mean, yes. That's true for everyone. Different people have different life circumstances. It's equally important not to decide to do things that one can't realistically do, for whatever reasons there may be. I'm not sure what your point is.

Don't sell your house if you don't have a realistic place to live lined up. Don't divorce your wife if it's not worth the work.

I'm not saying everyone can or should be grindset hustle bro. Probably no one. I'm just saying that it is sometimes possible to decide what you're going to do in advance. If you already have too many obligations, that could include deciding which ones to fail. That's probably better than trying to do everything and just rolling the dice.

It's surprising how controversial this idea is, but it works for me. I hope you find something that works for you.

Sorry if my point was lost in the rant. IME the younger generations are facing an increasingly large burden of must-do's with less slack for them to make any other choices. Growing housing, healthcare, and societal expectations combined with fewer employment opportunities are leaving little room for them to chart their own course.

Some might say it's offset by all the luxuries so widely available. But I personally find it hard to enjoy minor luxuries when so much of life is swallowed by obligations. And I'm one of the luckiest members of my cohort. Most of my high school friends still live with parents or several roommates, have lower paying careers, and/or have to care for more family with serious medical issues. (Though on the latter I seem to be catching up quickly)

It sounds as if you are filing a complaint, but I'm afraid chargebacks are out of question. You have been scammed and given a non-perfect generation to live in.

I'd argue we shouldn't so quickly throw off the solutions of past generations, like protesting, unions, social safety nets, independent branches of government, and rejecting apathy and religion.

You're hitting on exactly what I meant, though. You're generalizing from "it works for me" in a way that implies it's equally possible for everyone, that everyone's brain has the ability to look at something they decided to do earlier, and then just do it, without sending them through a spiraling decision matrix that factors in all the other things that have reemerged as possibilities since whenever they made the first decision.

It's so cool that your brain has this "decision persistence" feature. And it does seem to be common enough that it's treated as "typical."

It's just not remotely universal. Not all of our brains have this.

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