Don't waste life | Hacker News Reader

Don't waste life

danielflopes.com

40 pointsmunchor41 comments

If your working time is spent doing something you don't really enjoy that sucks, obviously. It'd be great if we could all spend our lives doing creative, enjoyable things. Realistically though, if your work facilitates a happy life outside of your job then it could still be well be worth it - my parents have led full, happy lives (or so they tell me) raising their kids, doing their hobbies, seeing their friends, and yet they worked jobs that weren't that they both claim weren't much fun, and I'm certain that neither of them look back with any regrets.

The expectation that you can carve out a lifestyle where everything is worthwhile is unrealistic, and while a few outliers might actually achieve it, most people aren't going manage to get anything like that. Don't tell people that they're wasting their life because they fail to pass a ludicrously high bar. A life spent doing fulfilling things is not a waste even if it also includes lots of things that suck.

tl;dr Grow up, take responsibility for yourself, and make sure that on balance, after you're dead, you've done more good stuff than bad, even if your job falls in to the 'bad' category.

(This was posted earlier and then deleted for some reason. This is just a repost of my comment from the first time.)

>The expectation that you can carve out a lifestyle where everything is worthwhile is unrealistic, and while a few outliers might actually achieve it, most people aren't going manage to get anything like that.

I've managed it, but it's taken a lot of hard work. I finally have enough money from side projects and clients to quit my job and go full time. I have a few friends who are also looking for work and to quit their jobs, so when I quit, I'm going to join my developers office (they have an office for free in a building their parents own). My few friends are going to live with my in my apartment and we're going full steam. Right now I work between 90 - max 110 hours a week. If I'm not @ work, I'm managing clients and juggling multiple projects, while doing UI for all of them.

I almost have a sweet professional portfolio online, and the moment I do, I'm quitting.

It's taken a lot of time and sacrifice but it's worth it and definitely doable. Also, being 20 years old, no debt, no GF, no obligations makes this infinitely easier.

> It's taken a lot of time and sacrifice but it's worth it and definitely doable. Also, being 20 years old, no debt, no GF, no obligations makes this infinitely easier.

Definitely. Its much more difficult when you're 30, have a mortgage, a wife, possibly kids, etc.

Conversely for me, it's easier with the wife, kids and mortgage: these responsibilities forced me to "grow up" and shocked me out of my protracted childhood.

http://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2014/03/heres-some-bet...

All true ideas, none particularly helpful. No one reads this and thinks: "Wait, I can be happier if I work on something I'm passionate about and get paid for it?! I had no idea!"

The problem is that its really hard to 1) identify what passions you have, 2) filter those by which you want to pursue for the rest of your life and 3) figure out a way to make money on that passion. Most people I know my age (mid 20's) are happy to "waste life" and make money for a couple years while they answer those decisions.

I think a lot of people our age are just happy to have a job in the first place. Young people are flocking to big cities (especially the Bay area, NYNY and DC) just to get anything. I feel really lucky to have the nice "real" job I have now, and given a lot of what's going on right now I don't think it's realistic or responsible to expect that even your job will be balls to the wall awesome. I mean... presumably they're paying you for a reason, right?

Of course, I agree with the sentiment as you do. Just pointing out that there are difficulties in trying to make this happen in addition to the three problems you mentioned.

Right, I think it's worth it to take a job that pays you, and you can use that money to develop your passions.

Another issue is balancing great passion with higher cost. For example, I quit a previous job (that I had some passion about) for my current job, which is ... ok ... but pays twice as much.

As a result, I'm able to fly more, which is something I'm very passionate about.

Sometimes hobbies that we're very passionate about can also be very expensive. There's ways to reduce cost, but in the end, sometimes the best way to have more opportunities to enjoy that passion is to take more "non-passionate" hours that generate the funds.

I'm not saying my choice was right or will always be right. I still struggle with it. I guess the point is, optimizing for happiness is not as simple as it appears, especially for someone who is not independently wealthy.

I saved 15 minutes by not reading this blog post :)

Me too. Somehow today HN reads really a bit self-help'y...

You should have not read it more slowly and saved yourself an hour.

I did not read it so slowly I now have 6 extra hours! Thanks, guy!

Why do you come into threads and make comments like this? Genuinely curious. Do you have something against the author or..?

Because some people are of the opinion that there is entirely too much of this fluff on HN, myself included.

Some day I'm going to go into a pub, strike up a conversation with a stranger, and when they inevitably ask me what I do, I'll say, "Why, thank you for asking! I write about optimising our lives for happiness, integrity, and success."

And then I'll hope that they murder me.

Is there anything wrong in principle with writing about optimising our lives for happiness, integrity, and success?

Just that the posts are seldom insightful or helpful in any meaningful way. And, they are frequently ultra-redundant.

I mean, truly, who here (or on the planet) hasn't thought it would be ideal to earn a living by pursuing a passion?

And, how many forms of this exact article have we seen?

That's fair.

So, author in question is still in school (as I recall from his old about page). Moreover, this is the second time an article from this guy has shown up on HN.

It's a fluff piece, it's reiterating cliched refrains, it provides no analysis, and honestly the writing isn't compelling enough on its own to be here.

when i clicked on the link the page came up blank and i thought it was a brilliant critique on reading blogs. I hit reload to make sure and was disappointed to find a "do what you love" article, uncritical and un-self-aware of all the problems with that line of thinking. Rather than reprint them, here's the best exploration of "do what you love" i've read recently: https://www.jacobinmag.com/2014/01/in-the-name-of-love/

Wow, your link should have been the article instead! That was one of the better reads I've had in a while. Thank you for posting it.

'I tell you, we are here on Earth to fart around, and don't let anybody tell you different.' - Kurt Vonnegut

Want to be happy? Please subscribe to my newsletter.

It's like every kid has this epiphany, "Aha! There are only so many hours in the day. If only I could make my work enjoyable, life would be so much better. I must share this insight with the world!"

Welcome to the club of people that includes anyone who has ever had a job or simply thought for more than 15 minutes about the eventual need to support one's self.

Before you put on your snark hats, note that the author explicitly claims that he is working on "advice for people in their 20s". Actually, I bet the audience this would resonate with is even narrower.

Hoping to read articles about how to cope with finding career fulfillment in "sanitation engineering" or "making-ends-meet".

A favorite quote by Mormon church leader David McKay: "...no other success can compensate for failure in the home."

Yeah, do what you love and love what you do. And when you really do it, work stops being just job, it's life as well. And there's no separation between you at home and you at work. Simple yet, very important idea. You can't get tired of work if you really love it.

Unfortunately, virtually all work includes some stuff to do which you don't happen to love that much. So there will be always a factor which will tire you of your work to a certain degree, and always a separation between work and home. This is only natural.

If you want to avoid the not-so-fun parts of your work, that means you've got to find somebody else to do it for you.

It's unlikely they will do it for free; so you either have to find the dime or the time.

"And when you really do it, work stops being just job, it's life as well. And there's no separation between you at home and you at work."

That is the single most terrifying sentence I've read in some time now. No thank you.

What if I have many passions and I can't decide?

I like programming but I really love breakdance, videogames, traveling, cooking and others.

Right now I'm working as a software engineering because in my country is a little hard to live working on the others things I like.

That does it mean I'm wasting my life?

If everyone followed this guy's advice, I feel like we would all be pumping our own shit and serving our own food when we go out for dinner. I guess we would be more well rounded individuals huh?

I like the idea of the article. However, I don't think you understand free will or the idea of choice. Not everyone gets to have this perfect little say in what they want to do.

Free will doesn't exist anyways. Your brain is deterministic like a biological calculator.

I'm not so sure...

http://thebaffler.com/past/whats_the_point_if_we_cant_have_f...

Brains and calculators are both made out of molecules and their operations are caused by physical interactions of matter and energy. Just like any machine.

People keep saying stuff like this, but I wonder about the molecular structure of sentience.

Flagged. Can we please keep this kind of non-technical fluff and non-newsworthy fluff off the front page?

Failing that, can we at least hold ourselves to a higher standard of fluff?

You can only do one thing at a time. 1000 other things are being neglected. So this means your time is wasted anyways.

That hardly follows..

Doing one meaningful thing is still insignificant compared to the Groundhog Day scenario of repeating each day over and over and doing 1000 things.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com