
Ask HN: From an existential standpoint, what to work on? - danschumann
So, I could look at myself and say, &quot;here&#x27;s what I&#x27;m good at, here&#x27;s what I like to do&quot;, or I could look at the world and say, &quot;here are problems, here is where the world should go&quot;, or some sort of halvesies.<p>What do you guys and gals do?  Somewhere in between?  Effectuate the most change?  Have the most fun?<p>What about crossover?  Does having fun sometimes affect the world?  Is changing the world fun in the end?<p>Do I just get better at dealing with the feeling of never knowing?  Aka, accept suffering, as a buddhist, and assume I&#x27;ll never know the &quot;true&quot; purpose, and just become immune to the feeling of &quot;not knowing&quot;?
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mojomark
Curly : Do you know what the secret of life is?

[holds up one finger]

Curly : This.

Mitch : Your finger?

Curly : One thing. Just one thing. You stick to that and the rest don't mean
shit.

Mitch : But, what is the "one thing?"

Curly : [smiles] That's what _you_ have to find out.

1\.
[https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0101587/characters/nm0001588](https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0101587/characters/nm0001588)

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csilverman
I'd say:

\- Start with the first one, but in the context of the second one.

\- Think about what you care about. "Stuff that makes me mad every day" might
not be a bad way to at least kick-start your thinking. Your first answer to
that will probably be something pretty general like "bigotry" or "ignorance"
or "bad design", so you might have to ask some more questions to narrow it
down: what, of that, affects the people you care about? What makes your life
harder? What, of those things, can you turn into a problem that can be solved
by what you're good at and what you like to do?

Personally I'm coming at this from having figured out, embarrassingly
recently, that the #1 criterion for "should I do X" is "do I actually _want_
to do X". I'm selfish and selectively motivated; I'm not particularly happy
with that assessment, but I know at this point that I can't take on any
project, no matter how worthy, if its success rests primarily on something I
think is boring or don't enjoy doing. If you have more drive/self-discipline,
maybe that is not a limiting criterion for you.

\- Finally: there is something to be said for "never knowing", although I
would look at that less in terms of simply wandering aimlessly, never knowing
where you're going, and more in terms of: trust your inner instincts. It's not
that you don't know where you're going; you just don't know _yet_. Accept that
yes, you might be wandering, but if you're doing stuff you enjoy and think is
interesting, you probably aren't lost.

I have this boss-figure in my head who always judges any experiments by their
potential for deliverables. This person always wants to see results by Monday
and has no interest in anything that isn't immediately, measurably pushing me
forward in my career or my life. I'm learning not to listen to that person.

Because I have an increasingly firm belief that everything I do, no matter how
weird or seemingly impractical, adds up to something. I was working on a blog
of stories a while back, and I never launched it because I told myself people
would think it was dumb, but that project is how I learned Markdown, and
knowing Markdown comes in handy for me a _lot_.

I developed a fixation with programmatically re-using CSS animations instead
of defining new ones—I'm explaining this badly, but it was a legitimate
problem—and while the code I came up with was ultimately impractical and I
never used it, I learned a lot about writing Sass mixins. That stuff, I use
every day.

So I'm at the point where I'm willing to let myself go off and work on things
I want to work on, even if it looks pointless and feels like messing around. I
don't know where I'm going much of the time, but then there are moments when a
bunch of things come together and it's clear to me that I really did, deep
down, have a sense of where I wanted to go; I just needed time to get there.

Anything evaluated on the basis of "results by Monday" may get you from point
to point, but I suspect all of us have some bigger picture waiting to be
discovered—some important thing that only we are capable of doing. You really
have to give yourself space, time, and patience for that to become clear. You
really just need to mess around, follow your weird passions, and see what all
of that adds up to when the dots are connected.

(Obviously, most of us have to have a job that pays the bills—I'm speaking in
terms of how to think about where you're going beyond your basic
responsibilities.)

Sorry this is so long. I hope I didn't come off as preachy or life-coachy
here. I have a lot of thoughts on this topic because it's something I think
about every day. (Despite how optimistic I might have sounded, I'm still
haunted by the prospect that I'm an ADHD-riddled dilettante who's wasting his
life, so your question is something I've been trying to solve for myself for a
long damned while.)

~~~
mojomark
Well if OP isn't going to thank you for the thoughtful response, then I will.
Better than my goofy reference to CitySlickers... but come'on, if you watch
that movie in full and don't learn something about self-worth and maybe shed a
small tear, I question your humanity. It's always comforting to here other
folks wrestling in the swamp. Cheers.

