Ask HN: What gets you out of bed in the morning? What motivates you? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: What gets you out of bed in the morning? What motivates you?

16 pointspetergibbons6 comments

Hello HN,

I'm not sure how to go about writing this post so I'll try to keep it to the point.

For the past few years I've been struggling with an overwhelming feeling that I have no real purpose in life. I work a comfortable job as a programmer and I have enough money saved that I don't have any immediate financial worries. I have hobbies that come and go and I try to keep myself healthy.

The only reason I get out of bed in the morning is because I don't want to lose my job. The only reason I don't want to lose my job is because I'd be bored otherwise. And it's socially unacceptable to be unemployed because "I don't feel like working any more".

But I don't feel that my job is the problem. My problem is that is that I just don't really know what my goals are in life any more. I don't know what makes me happy and I don't know what motivates me. Some people have a family to provide for, others a burning ambition to make the world a better place. Some people have the desire to become rich beyond their wildest dreams. I no longer have that fire in my belly.

I feel like an empty shell of my former enthusiastic self. I have become cynical and jaded and tired and I desperately need to do something to reignite my fuse.

I could write a lot more, but in an effort to avoid this post being entirely "boo hoo, woe-is-me, first-world problems", I'd like to ask the members of HN:

1. What is your motivation in life? What drives you and gives you the energy to make it through the day?

2. Where did your motivation come from? Was it something you were born with or something you gained through an experience?

Thanks for reading.

I am fresh out of college. I am working, too. My job isn't my life, it should not define who you are, but it really took a long time to realize that.

1. In the evenings and weekends, I make art and games. I eventually want to move to Silicon Valley one day. I want to meet my heroes. That keeps me going through the obstacles and roadblocks.

2. I was really burnt out during college. Should I be a doctor? Psychologist? Investment banker? Engineer? These thoughts would weigh me down so much I actually ended up getting so burnt out (studying so hard towards something I could not even see), that I slowly started to sabotage myself and ended up doing none of that. I graduated, got a regular job, and now I pursue blogging and game-making in my free time. It sounds like a sad story, but I am actually a lot happier than I was before. I still struggle because what I do now is not what I dreamt that I would be doing. I did not study programming extensively in school, but I became really interested in it after being inspired by MineCraft, Paul Graham, stories about all kinds of hackers (good and bad), Steve Jobs, etc. I used to lack motivation, but I became really motivated once I became truly and thoroughly inspired. Look for that inspiration.

Is it a loneliness issue for you? That's something I still struggle with, because the friends I made in college felt like acquaintances to me. I think it is because I was trying to push myself to be something that I was not (I did things that I thought would increase my "employability" and salary potential while sacrificing being true to myself, which was a huge mistake. If I was true to myself, I would have met people with similar interests). So now I am striving to go to places where there are people who share my interests and have the same ideals/values.

If you were to sit down and seriously think, what would you do if you had no obligations whatsoever?

This may be a regional thing, but in Silicon Valley it's not socially unacceptable to be unemployed because "I don't feel like working any more". A good number of $B+ companies seem to start that way (YouTube, WhatsApp, Apple, PayPal), and many more ordinary folks do it with more ordinary results as well.

I have a suspicion that your root problem is that you care too much about what other people think. So what if it is socially unacceptable? You think people are going to treat you like a pariah because you're funemployed? Most people will probably secretly envy you, because they wish they could get up the courage to leave as well.

Ah, the meaning of life. A nice easy one for a Tuesday morning:

  * Find something that you really want to do
  * Arrange your world so that you can do that thing

Now naturally, that first bit is a tough one if you honestly can't think of a single thing that you like doing. Assuming you can though, the rest follows.

Chances are that "something" won't be working for somebody else in a felt cube, so a handy thing to do is to increase your value so that you can bill more per hour spent in that cube and hopefully reduce the number of hours you need to spend there to keep the bills paid (and thus more hours left to spend on "your thing").

As developers, we get an extra trick in that we can so easily work remotely. Once you realize that "remote" doesn't only mean "from my bedroom in the same city as the company", nor "the same hemisphere as the company" nor even "someplace other than the beach", things get nice in a hurry. If your "something I want to be doing" only happens in the mountains, at a particular surf break, or within frisbee-toss of the Eiffel Tower, there's nothing to stop you upping sticks and planting yourself there.

In short, it's your life. You get to arrange it any way you like. The fact that most people arrange their lives in exactly the same way doesn't change that. If your life is currently arranged such that you don't even feel like getting out of bed in the morning, that's something that you can fix.

"Technology tends to separate normal from natural. Our bodies weren't designed to eat the foods that people in rich countries eat, or to get so little exercise. There may be a similar problem with the way we work: a normal job may be as bad for us intellectually as white flour or sugar is for us physically." -- http://www.paulgraham.com/boss.html

I moved to Israel a few years ago because I am a Zionist. For me, I wake up everyday with the goal to improve Israeli society and the Israeli economy.

This might help you: http://www.quora.com/Motivational-1/What-are-some-quick-conc...

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