haha, I found this funny and accurate. It captures what I feel is common among the toxic responses that make it past moderation/downvotes. HN has an acceptable way to say "#$!@ your ideas" and "I'm smarter" using intellectual or polite sounding words, but it's still the same thing. I might even prefer the more crass approach that gets filtered out. At least those are honest and not passive aggressive.
I've been grinding karma in this game for nearly a decade, my stats are the same, and I'm still stuck with this default skin and no good loot. Rate up is a lie!
Even though nobody is quite sure how it works, it's possible to reverse the epigenetics of a cell back to its original differentiated state and even back to stem cell form not entirely unlike rolling back git commits.
You say that your intelligence was “given” to you, like a gift. But then you turn around and say the parts of you that made choices that didn’t result in the life you compare yourself to… those parts you say are 100% your fault. You’re saying your positive qualities are from the outside, but your negative qualities are all you. You’re not being fair to yourself.
We make choices, yes. You can choose to take job A instead of job B. But you can’t choose to be the kind of person who chooses job A instead of job B. Or if you can, you can’t choose to be the kind person who chooses to be the kind of person who chooses job A. At some level, there is something that you don’t choose. It just is. It’s not “choices all the way down”.
This powerful feeling inside you right now is a gift, as awful as it feels. You can, if you want, channel it into the energy you’ll need to confront the things that held you back. Change takes incredible amounts of energy and this feeling combusting inside you might be enough to nudge you in a different direction. Or if you want, you can sublimate that energy and apply it to something like helping bright kids growing up in tough circumstances. You may not be the elite 10x graybeard you imagined, but you probably know better than anyone how to help kids who are growing up like you did. Or you may take that energy and channel it into something totally different.
The way you get past the regret is to use this fire for something. But please, please do not take this fire and turn it on yourself like a blowtorch. Don’t use it to beat yourself and make yourself more timid and more afraid and more hobbled by your past.
Primarily I was disillusioned with my college education, but that feeling spread to encompass many areas of my life. Everything seemed arbitrary and pointless -- and reading the first few chapters it really was comforting to hear someone else from a completely different time saying the same things. It was like -- I'm not alone here. Many people seemed to feel this way with Bojack Horseman as well... Though I find Ecclesiastes much more satisfying at the end.
In fact, knowingly or not, many people are echoing the same sentiments here: everything is the same, nothing is new, history repeats itself -- things are bent, and there's no straightening it.
But where the rubber meets the road is this: all the suggestions people told me didn't seem to be of any help. "Just do a hobby, exercise, or travel!" is a hollow suggestion when you think everything is meaningless, "a chasing after the wind."
The author talks about the futility of work, wisdom, pleasure, relationships, even gardening! But then he even talks about miscarriage of justice, and government corruption. "Why do bad things happen to good people?" It's like he's tugging on this weed on human existence, and the more he pulls, the deeper the roots of the problem go.
I'll leave with just two verses that stick out to me:
Better to spend your time at funerals than at parties. After all, everyone dies— so the living should take this to heart. Sorrow is better than laughter, for sadness has a refining influence on us. A wise person thinks a lot about death, while a fool thinks only about having a good time.
Ecclesiastes 7:2-4 NLT
Especially as a young man, that impacted me. Much of life seems to be an effort to avoid suffering -- to the extent that suicide is seen as a viable option. But I look at Joni Eareckson Tada, and the impact her life has had on so many people, in spite of her terrible suffering.
But the jewel on top is the final chapter. It's a direct rebuttal to nihilism and absurdism. There is a meaning and purpose in life to be found in your creator. This feeling of meaninglessness was hole that only Jesus could fill. Once he was there, I found the meaningless imbued with meaning and purpose.
This is my Twitter handle as well, feel free to reach out if you'd like to chat!
What I mean is -- you do not need to have a partner and your own kids. There are all sorts of families (macro and micro) out there that can benefit from us.
On the micro side: you can allow yourself to be included in your best friend's family, you can allow friends to become close enough that you know they'd be there if you were sick and vice versa. You can think about lonely older people who you feel kinship for and be brave enough to offer them support. You can sometimes convert former romantic relationships into trusted friendships, and you can widen your romantic ideals to include joining a single-parent family that already exists.
One step up: you can treat your wider friendship circle like a family, believe in them like you would your family.
On the macro side of things: you can join a community and allow yourself to be absorbed into it as someone of significance; you can help people find their people. Introduce people to other people; be the reason other people have people.
All of these things require a kind of bravery that deserts most of us at some time, and obviously a kind of comfort with other people that not all of us find easy at all, but really any step you make to try to build a "family" is better than no step.
When you're young you don't need it and you forget to look for it, because new experiences outweigh family ties. When you're old you need it and it is harder to find.
When you're 35... this is the time to enjoy the thrill of being brave and seeking real connections with a mature mind, and allow yourself to think of it as building family and significance into your life.
I managed some of this -- a real social life, real connections -- for a long time from the age of 33[0], and then the pandemic has undone a lot of that; people have scattered. And if all of the above sounds preachy and patronising it is because it's really all I think about again -- how do I get that back, at the age I am now?
For those reacting to the inclusion of "lonely" in the description: lonely isn't a dirty word. I worked at Meetup for over a decade and one thing I learned there was that loneliness is a normal experience when you start anything new in life.
You can be "lonely in a context" without being existentially lonely (though that's a very normal human experience also). Loneliness just means that at the present time, you don't know enough people who you can relate to in a certain context. You may have a million friends, but if you want to start a new career, you may be lonely in that context and feel the need to know more people in that industry. If you are newly diagnosed with a disease, you may be lonely in that context, not knowing anyone else who has been through the symptoms you're experiencing, even if you are surrounded by supportive family. And if you're a new dad or mom, you may have your spouse, you may have your kids, but you can absolutely feel the need to connect with other people who have experienced what you're experiencing.
Loneliness is just your emotions telling you that you could benefit from the presence of people who have travelled and are traveling the same road. It isn't a failing. It's fuel to reach out and connect.
Loneliness may not be a dirty word indeed, but there is a huge stigma associated with it for men, and the result is sobering: it's called the "silent killer of men":
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/fear-intimacy/202111...
"Loneliness in men is correlated with cardiovascular disease and stroke; 80 percent of successful suicides are men, and one of the leading contributing factors is loneliness (Murphy, et al., 2017)."
The thing that myself and others found so disagreeable is that your copy sounded… maybe “whiny” is the right word?
It reminded me of the “buddy dad” that cares more about his kids thinking of him as a “best friend”, than being a father. Those are very different things.
Maybe your copy is right for your audience, depending on your goals, but it stuck a strong negative chord for me.
Email in profile, by the way. Happy to iterate and provide direct feedback, as fathers do need good resources.
Those same studies about it then go on to find being in a relationship and having a family are some of the most effective ways to fight loneliness. SO it is kind of weird to include "lonely" in the call to action.
Very well said. I feel as you age and add parent to your CV, you experience all of these things at one point or another in a life well lived. It's all about how you tackle them and for many people building community around their item is a very healthy coping mechanism.
HN is a very advanced level in this game, with high standards for gameplay, but it's very much a part of the game nonetheless.