
Ask HN: How did you decide what problems to solve in your lifetime? - amadk
In other words, how do you decide between what you want to work on and what should be worked on?<p>I&#x27;ve been stuck with trying to figure what to do with the rest of my life. I can&#x27;t decide whether I should be working on what I want to work on (Energy, AI) or whether I should work on what I believe should be worked on (Healthcare).<p>It&#x27;s a short life, so I want to be careful with this decision, to avoid any future regrets. Because I can&#x27;t decide on this, I end up not getting anything done. Time continues to march on, while I&#x27;m still stuck with not knowing what to do.<p>Has anyone had any experience with this before? If yes, then what and how did you make your decision? What was the outcome? Is there a middle ground or silver lining, where you managed to work on both cases?
======
yesenadam
_I want to be careful with this decision, to avoid any future regrets_

Don't forget to consider that you may regret whatever you do - by human
nature, the grass is proverbially always greener on the other side. People who
have kids may wish they hadn't, but if they hadn't, they may have regretted
_that_ \- in both cases thinking they'd made the wrong choice. Socrates and
Kierkegaard, among others, discussed this as a basic feature of life - how
regret seems 'objective', but it's far from it.

"Marry or do not marry, you will regret it either way. ...Laugh at the
stupidities of the world or weep over them, you will regret it either way.
...Trust a girl or do not trust her, you will regret it either way. ...Hang
yourself or do not hang yourself, you will regret it either way. ...This,
gentlemen, is the quintessence of all the wisdom of life." \- Kierkegaard,
_Either /Or_

(The Preface of _Either /Or_ even says about the book's chapters "Read them or
do not read them, you will regret it either way."!)

~~~
throwaway713
> Hang yourself or do not hang yourself, you will regret it either way

How does one regret hanging himself?

~~~
diminoten
By failing to do so successfully, or by being saved before the damage is
irreversible.

~~~
ClashTheBunny
There is no such thing as a successful suicide. Just complete and incomplete.

~~~
diminoten
Seems like a semantic argument to me.

------
MrGLaDOS
These fokes devoted quite some time into thinking about your problem:
[https://80000hours.org/](https://80000hours.org/)

From their homepage: "You have 80,000 hours in your career. Make the right
career choices, and you can help solve the world’s most pressing problems, as
well as have a more rewarding, interesting life. We’re here to give you the
information you need to find that fulfilling, high-impact career. Our advice
is all free, tailored for talented graduates & young professionals, and based
on five years of research alongside academics at Oxford."

The 80000 hours podcast can be long winded but is at times also quite
interesting.

~~~
nnd
My biggest issue with 80,000 hours is that it's a rational, but radically
uninspiring advice in the end. It is a framework for those who buy into "don't
follow your passion advice", and try to maximize their utility function
instead.

~~~
tvanantwerp
A fair criticism. Personally, I've spent enough time around folks who followed
their passion and seen where it got them that I'm 100% on board the utility
function train.

~~~
totololo
Oh how I would LOVE to know more! Can you give examples?

~~~
Aeolun
Join a startup as a soon-to-be father, following your dreams, and have the
thing explode in your face, then finally recover and get a job at a megacorp
(a week before the baby is due)?

Utility for the win! Following your dreams is fun and all, but the risk/reward
ratio is just way out there.

~~~
adambyrtek
Getting a stable job at a big company to be able to support your family after
taking a risk on a startup doesn't sound like a terrible outcome to be honest.

~~~
stefanmichael
Sounds optimal actually, you want to take risk when allowed and stop taking
that risk immediately when your life changes.

------
capocannoniere
Paul Graham wrote an essay on this topic, aimed towards high-school students.
His advice: stay upwind
[http://www.paulgraham.com/hs.html](http://www.paulgraham.com/hs.html)

> Instead of working back from a goal, work forward from promising situations.
> This is what most successful people actually do anyway.

> Suppose you're a college freshman deciding whether to major in math or
> economics. Well, math will give you more options: you can go into almost any
> field from math. If you major in math it will be easy to get into grad
> school in economics, but if you major in economics it will be hard to get
> into grad school in math.

> Flying a glider is a good metaphor here. Because a glider doesn't have an
> engine, you can't fly into the wind without losing a lot of altitude. If you
> let yourself get far downwind of good places to land, your options narrow
> uncomfortably. As a rule you want to stay upwind. So I propose that as a
> replacement for "don't give up on your dreams." Stay upwind.

~~~
hopler
That sounds like "life your life in analysis paralysis, and never decide to
actually do anything"

~~~
pier25
The contrary, actually.

The future is unknown, and we are actually making decisions for our future
self. When you're 18 or 25 you don't even know what interests you will have
when being 35 or 40, at least I didn't know.

What Graham is saying is to make decisions that will allow you more choices in
the future.

------
cproctor
I got some good advice about a decade ago, which I've used for guidance and,
on reflection, has served me well. You're not well-positioned to understand
the core nature of problems, and which are most important, from the outside.
Until you have this clarity, do what you can to become part of the core
community driving the thinking in your field of choice. There's a strong case
for the social importance of many problems in energy and AI, and likely enough
there are problems that would interest you in healthcare. So my answer is to
not worry so much about which field you dive into, and focus more on trying to
get to the center.

As someone who has been orbiting two poles of education and CS for my whole
career, I'd also suggest reflecting on why energy and AI are currently more
attractive to you than healthcare. There doesn't have to be a reason, but
sometimes I feel like the attraction of pure science fields is that they don't
involve the messy human issues that come with social science, like identity
and culture, power and your own positionality.

~~~
casper345
> You're not well-positioned to understand the core nature of problems, and
> which are most important, from the outside

Great point. What startups that are trying to infiltrate "old/traditional"
industries like hospitals or healthcare are realizing. Need to shadow doctors
to see their workflow, not just propose a solution based on your observation
or reading articles about hospital shortcomings.

~~~
crankylinuxuser
Ive also noticed that even though the industry has done things X way for a
long time, sometimes those are done because "well We've always done it that
way". It's cargo culting, and nobody has a good reason why its done.

Being an outside can sometimes mean that you call attention to that, and show
better ways. And with the internet and publications, can be an effective way
to do that.

Most of the times however, there are reasons and you should at least
understand why. But for those cases where "why" isn't defined, poke at
them.... You're likely to find something interesting.

~~~
dragonsky67
Agreed. It is very easy to try to disrutpt a process without understanding the
reasons behind the current process. A lot more difficult to understand the
current process then propose changes that address that processes shortfall.

There is always a reason why things are done a particular way "It's always
been done that way" is shorthand for "I don't know why it's done that way".
Like history, you need to understand the reasons behind a process before you
can effectively change it, otherwise you are doomed to make the same mistakes
and very soon your shiny new process will start to look as cobbled together as
the previous one.

------
adim86
It is great that you are thinking of this and from my experience, it will
continue to come up even after you have solved this one and you become more of
an expert in the path you have chosen.

Something to help with the paralysis is to note that you are in a very
privileged position. Majority of the world is not plagued by this issue
because the problem they have to solve is how to survive. So, in other words,
there is no wrong answer here. Whatever you choose will bring positive value
to the world. Do not get paralyzed on if it is the most value you can provide
because there is no way you can foresee this or measure it.

I will advise that you pick the one that seems to generate the most passion in
you, not in the follow your passion sense, but more of the fact that there
will be HARD times ahead when solving HARD problems and only the love of
finding the solution is gonna take you through it. If you pursue a path for
any other reason (except survival), when the going gets tough you will always
measure if it is worth the trouble. In your case, your heart seems to be in
Energy and AI, while your practical side tells you Healthcare is very
important to the world. I will say go with Energy and AI cause who the hell
knows. Where I live a major problem health centers have is consistent energy
and who knows you may come up with some AI that Diagnoses better than a human
can for a specific disease. My point is I have found that following where my
interests really lie always lead me to where I am supposed to be. You may
start in Energy and AI and somewhere bridge the gap into healthcare or you may
jump in and solve problems you never imagined and be fully self-actualized.
The most important thing out of all of this is that you start.

~~~
Nec29
HN guideline says it's okay to comment just to say "Thanks". So, Thanks for
your comment :)

~~~
adim86
haha glad you liked it

------
jadbox
"Do what you love" is a common phrase, but I've found an opposite technique.
Find the things that bugs you most (that you talk about, focus on, debate
about) and allow yourself to become a solution. I've found that the problems I
tended to be naturally be bothered by ended up making great career choice(s)
for me.

~~~
colordrops
What problems have you made career choices out of if you don't mind me asking?

~~~
jadbox
No problem.

I started my career in CS with zero knowledge of what I really wanted to do
out of college. However back in early 2000s, I was extremely frustrated of how
difficult/buggy online banking portals were for managing my finances, so I
decided to get into Fintech for a couple years. Eventually that led me to
designing a nationally awarded banking portal that was ahead of its time in
relation to its online features.

Then I became a gamer as a young adult, and decided to get into social/mobile
gaming as I couldn't find any games on those platforms that really catered to
a traditional gamer. I ended up building a few real-time action-rpgs and
strategy games that ran within the browser and on mobile.

Then I got really technical in driving better gaming/interactivity in the
browser, because I was hitting so many annoying limitations. So I joined the
Adobe's Flash and open standards team to push these boundaries. We managed to
add 3D gpu rendering to Flash, and while making progress with browser
standards for better native multimedia-related features.

Now for last few years I've started to expand outside software and dive really
into academic political philosophy, and I became really concerned with the
current polarization in the US, and it's total lack of real genuine
communication between people of differencing views. So (plug) I'm creating a
self-funded startup that's a live debate platform called
[https://DinnerTable.Chat](https://DinnerTable.Chat) that hopefully provides a
helpful communication medium for authentically discussing viewpoint
differences (as it is, after all, an emotional journey to change one's mind).
I don't know if this will work, but I've always trusted my intuition of
following the desire to solve things that bug me.

~~~
dogcomplex
Hat's off to you and your career path! Very cool.

~~~
jadbox
Thanks, appreciated!

------
marmaduke
You're asking the wrong questions: you can't know in advance that a
breakthrough in energy won't bring about a disruptive impact on healthcare.
For example, if you were to able to stabilize a biobattery of mitrochondria,
you might incidentally solve a problem related to diabetes (example made up).
In other words, because you can't predict the impact of your effort, you can't
reliably infer where to direct your effort.

By analogy with machine learning, instead of throwing lots of effort at a non-
convex problem, you might instead choose a convex problem instead: e.g. what
daily process allows you to achieve high problem solving output? what
expertise can you acquire and put to use regularly, which is sustainable (no
burnout, pays rent, etc)?

------
irchans
Usually I do not decide what problems to solve. They just come to me and I try
to solve them. I have tried to solve some big problems, but that has never
worked out for me.

The "problems" that I solve, or try to solve, come mostly from the following
sources: academic colleagues asking questions, natural questions that arise
during math seminars, finding the optimal way to reach some goal specified by
one of my bosses, finding ways to fix or understand ad hock methods invented
by my coworkers, natural questions that occur to me while reading astronomy,
math, AI, or economics articles, and lastly, answering mathematical or AI
questions about games just because I love games and game theory.

Sometimes problems or questions will remain in my head for years before being
solved. Many are never solved, but they are fun to think about.

It is very rare that one of my solutions affects more than 100 people.

------
nsomaru
The focus should not be on "what," but on "why." I just got this advice the
other day and it's liberated my thinking. I was (am) stuck in a rut believing
that if I just find something I am passionate about it would alleviate the
sense of purposelessness that pervades. Not so.

Some people can work just for material benefit to themselves and their
families. However, eventually that juice runs out because money is just not
useful beyond a point. Depression is a first world problem, generally. Why is
it that people who are materially better off than most of their peers in the
last century become depressed?

The key, it seems, is to find a goal that is higher than immediate selfish
interests of the individual or family. This might even mean staying in your
current situation but just realigning "why" you are doing it to something
higher. It is very hard to find an unselfish person who is depressed, unsure
about what to do or unhappy in general.

The goal makes all the difference.

~~~
RHSeeger
> Some people can work just for material benefit to themselves and their
> families. However, eventually that juice runs out because money is just not
> useful beyond a point.

Admittedly, material benefit to myself and my family isn't the only reason I
work. However, the argument that "money is just not useful beyond a point"
isn't a strong one in my mind. I'm in my late forties right now and make a
reasonable sum of money. I doubt I will ever get to the point where making
more money won't get me more of what I want. Right now, I need to weight
priorities when it comes to spending money (generator for my house vs
something else). Getting to the point where I don't need to do that (for
important things) would be my "more money isn't useful" point. I doubt I will
ever get there.

~~~
nsomaru
Right, let me clarify. Let's define three realms of experience for the sake of
conversation: (physical/material), (emotional), (intellectual). For simplicity
let's assume that all human experiences may be categorised thus.

Now, what can money buy? Only things on the physical level, that is, _sense
experiences_. Sights, sounds, smells, tastes and touches. That's it. Money
can't buy love or knowledge. Maybe a library, but not knowledge :)

So even in a naive examination money has limited uses which apply at the
physical/material level. It's useful to note that happiness/wellbeing is
largely a state of mind and thus you might find someone who is equally or more
happy than you despite not having the generator. How is this possible?

The point is that as inherent motivation money just isn't good. People who are
incentivised inevitably want greater and greater compensation or they burn
out. In contrast, those fired up by a higher ideal (which, of course, includes
the wellbeing of the family) are motivated by an initiative to work which is
not dependent upon something external.

So, make your money, and install that generator. But don't make the mistake of
thinking your wellbeing/happiness is dependent upon XYZ externally.

~~~
syncmaster913n
"Now, what can money buy? Only things on the physical level, that is, _sense
experiences_. "

This is an oversimplification that detracts from the value of money. Your
assumption that money can only buy sense experiences is incorrect. In reality,
money can have a significant impact on the (emotional) and (intellectual)
realms.

# Example for (emotional):

A couple with two children living together. The couple's emotional bonding is
strained by feeling overwhelmed due to house chores. The strain can be
significantly reduced by spending money on a nanny, ordering food when not in
the mood for cooking, and other forms of domestic help.

# Example for (intellectual)

Working person with a family wants to pursue a second degree as a hobby.
Unfortunately, they can't afford university.

It's true that, beyond a certain point, the returns from having more money
diminish quickly. And I agree that as an inherent motivation it probably
doesn't work for many people - only as a means to an end. But to say that
money can only buy sense experiences is untrue.

~~~
RHSeeger
As the quote goes... Money can't buy happiness. It can, however, buy many
things that can make you happy.

------
tw1010
I'm all for egalitarianism in the public sphere, but in private I still
believe that there's such a thing as natural born talent.

Anyone can probably reach the top 5% in most non-athletic areas given enough
time. But if your goal is to maximize your output having already accepted that
your time on earth is limited, then the wise thing is to probably steer in
directions that have high impact but for you feel disproportionately easy
(compared to the general population).

Thus, I'm a big fan of Peter Theils advice to work on things that satisfy the
property that: "if you weren't working on it, this problem would not get
solved".

~~~
coldtea
> _Anyone can probably reach the top 5% in most non-athletic areas given
> enough time._

At any given time, only the 5% of the population can reach the top 5% in any
area.

If anybody could do it and e.g. just 10% did it, then there would be a new 5%
(the top 50% of that 10%), and the rest 50% wouldn't be in.

> _Thus, I 'm a big fan of Peter Theils advice to work on things that satisfy
> the property that: "if you weren't working on it, this problem would not get
> solved"._

Which is a self-aggrandising way for Theils to say that he helped solve some
problems that wouldn't have been solved otherwise.

Unless you have tons of means to contribute (e.g. billions) to some cause, the
idea starting out as some e.g. college student that "this problem wont be
solved without my help" is 99.9999% BS.

~~~
southerndrift
The ratio between goals and people is not 1:1.

With enough specialization, everybody can become the best in one specific
topic. That's the game most phd students play.

~~~
late2part
That’s reasonable. Also, solved goals entice new goals to be created for
others.

------
boffinism
If it helps, energy really really should be worked on. Do that.

Also, that's not really how regrets work. You will be comparing the path you
took to what you imagine to be the roads not taken. It's very dependent on
your own unique experiences and outlook, and very hard to safeguard against.
Your way of evaluating your life will change over time, so optimising for your
current values gives no guarantees. Best thing to work on is stoicism and self
forgiveness in my opinion.

~~~
sethammons
My philosophy: make the best choice given the information you have at the
time. If you do, you have no cause to regret anything in your life.

Thinking of alternative paths you could have taken might be a fun exercise or
could yeild insights to make better future choices, but if you chose the best
you could, there is no sense in regretting a choice, even when that choice
hurt.

~~~
ianai
Reminding myself of this has helped many times in the past. It’s always easy
to critique in hindsight. It’s thus even more easy to criticize harmfully in
hindsight. Just yesterday I got to regretting how a few dates failed to pan
out...almost 12 years ago!

I think of this concept as similar to the excluded middle in logic. In
hindsight, a decision is apparently either good or bad depending on the
outcome. But it’s impossible to know the outcome with certainty the vast
majority of the time. So a decision needs to be judged in the context of the
information known at the time of decision - which does not include the
information about the decisions outcome.

~~~
ianai
Replying to myself,

The value of a decision before uncovering its value is similar to the value of
a lottery ticket before the draw. Before the drawing a lottery tickets value
is nonzero-the aggregate value of the expected payout. But after the draw the
lottery ticket is worth its realized value. When the pre-lotto expected value
of the ticket meets or exceeds the cost of the lottery ticket the purchase of
the ticket is rational. After the draw, the monetary value of the ticket is
whatever the ticket won or did not win. Most likely the value of the ticket is
0$. That doesn’t make the purchase of the ticket irrational before the draw.

------
yason
It's a short life indeed and narrowing it down to a few specific, namely goals
is a good way to make yours miserable. If in doubt, don't.

Find one thing that you _do_ want to do: something that is silently but
persistently pulling you in. Ideally, something you just couldn't _not do_.

I'm not a religious person but I really like the tone of the "$god works in
mysterious ways". You never know what your choices and path will expand into:
it might be something that's related to all three energy, AI, and healthcare
but you never would've guessed in the start.

You can always out-smart yourself and convince yourself to do the thing that
makes sense but the sensible thing often doesn't mean something that truly
fulfills you.

Because future is extremely hard to know, or even predict, all you can do is
follow your light.

------
danking00
I found this advice from Jean Yang resonated with my experience:

[https://twitter.com/jeanqasaur/status/1074526838901202944](https://twitter.com/jeanqasaur/status/1074526838901202944)

> Been having many conversations with people in their 20s about the paralysis
> that can arise from having too many life choices. My advice: commit to
> something and commit hard. Doesn't matter if you switch later. It's easier
> to prove yourself if you've had to do it once before.

> The quarter-life crisis can go on for quite a while--and you don't want to
> come out having little to show for your self-exploration. You learn just as
> much, if not more, about whether you like something by actually doing it,
> rather than thinking about if you might like it.

and then the somewhat morose conclusion:

> At one point in my mid-twenties, a friend observed that we were nearing the
> end of getting opportunities because of our potential and would soon be
> evaluated on what we've actually done. This was a real turning point in my
> thinking on how much space I should take to find myself.

------
pieterhg
I think you can't really consciously decide what you want to do with your
life. Life happens to you:

"You can't connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking
backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your
future. You have to trust in something – your gut, destiny, life, karma,
whatever." \- Steve Jobs

You can however increase the odds of things coming on your path that you'll be
passionate about:

\- Pursue a wide range of interests, jobs in different industries

\- Fearlessly trying lots of different stuff, for ex. go skydiving, go rock
climbing, go travel if you can, go from the beaten path of life

\- Socialize and stay open and curious to different people, so you hear
different viewpoints and get different interests

~~~
PedroSan
Hear hear. Life happens to you. All you can do is try to make sure you enjoy
the ride. When you are younger you think you can have it all, but that isn't
the case. So many things can disrupt your path, the list is endless. Best
advice is to follow your instincts, not your rationale. Life isn't a choice.
It's some sort of roadtrip. You don't know how or where it will end and what
will happen along the way. You may decide what to do and what to pursue but
you can never steer your emotions. Just try to enjoy the ride.

~~~
Kaveren
This is not the mindset that people who achieve anything have. It's a
defeatist attitude. Many people have, to use the saying, had it all, and many
have fought past roadblocks to get there. People who let life wash over them
never get anywhere.

~~~
gtirloni
You both are right. The secret is to balance both world views according to
your values. It's never a black/white decision.

~~~
cimmanom
Yup. Pick the battles that matter to you and that you have a choice of
winning.

There will always be forces beyond your control that affect your life - be
they natural disasters, other people's decisions (from personal choices like
whether to date you and small-scale professional like whether to hire you; to
which departments to cut in a major layoff; to enormous political/social
upheavals), market forces and scientific breakthroughs that you can't predict,
etc. If you don't roll with the punches on those, all you'll accomplish is to
make yourself angry all the time.

But there are also choices you can make - such as how to spend/invest your
money; what jobs to apply to; whether to start a business, and which one; whom
to try to date or ask to marry you; where to buy or rent a home, etc. that
will have massive, compounding effects on your stress levels and happiness.

------
dragonsky67
Why do you feel the need to work on a "Big Problem"? Do you feel the need to
leave a legacy, or do you really want to make things better by working on
paridgm changing enabling technology?

I think there is a problem with trying to target your attention on world
changing technology, in that it is very rare for the world to be changed in a
big way by direct effort towards change. I think this is related to both the
difficulty in identifying what will really provide benefit and also the
difficulty in actually achieving anything beyond incremental change to mature
technology. Ideas that really make a difference tend to come out of left field
and are almost completely unexpected.

If you are looking for something to do that you will look back from your death
bed and say "I did that", then you need to select something that you can
actually achieve. This will not be the thing that everybody else is working
on, because unless you are truely remarkable your effort will be lost in the
noise of what everybody else is doing. You need to find something that your
both enjoy, and after honest evaluation you have the ability to excel in and
take to the next level.

If you were living in the early 1900's I would suggest working on the field
effect produced when electricity is passed through centain types of silicon.
No one will know your name, but transistors certainly changed the world. How
in 2019 do you identify what will have a similar impact? Simply put, you
can't. All you can do is pick something interesting and work at it. If you try
to solve the big problem you will almost certainly get drowned in the problem,
you need to work on something small that can be leveraged to make the big
thing.

Sorry I ramble.

History is full of people who made big changes to the world. Those who made a
positive contribution seem to mostly have emerged from obsecurity after
spending years labouring at improving something small and succeeding in a
remarkable way.

~~~
selestify
> History is full of people who made big changes to the world. Those who made
> a positive contribution seem to mostly have emerged from obsecurity after
> spending years labouring at improving something small and succeeding in a
> remarkable way.

Very interesting. Can you give a few specific examples of this for me to look
into? How have you come to the conclusion that this is a trend?

~~~
dogcomplex
James Burke's "The Day the Universe Changed" series. A history of inventions,
how one led to another, often in stupid tiny ways brought about by pure luck -
or the right person working on the smallest thing at the right time. Fantastic
series if you're into old british documentaries that you can put on in the
background while tinkering btw.

~~~
NeedMoreTea
Every series he ever did is worth a watch. Connections were of the same mould,
but even more random chains of events of how something ancient led to
something modern.

A digression, but topical today is "After the Warming" from the 80s about
climate change. Quite remarkable if a little optimistic about our chances of
doing something. Lots of 80s VR and CGI, which you have to forgive a little.
Pleasingly free of dumbing down.

Probably some of these on Youtube.

------
jondubois
My approach has been to only engage in activities where I can get a lot of
value out of failure. Personally, I chose to work on Open Source projects
because there are a lot of possible upsides:

\- It gives you an opportunity to learn a lot about a specific field and
become an expert in it.

\- Better job opportunities and career security (being the founder of a
moderately popular OSS project can help you to build your personal brand).

\- You may be able to monetize your project by offering consulting, fremium
model or add-ons; OSS can help you get your foot in the door at a lot of
companies.

\- You can use your own generic open source project as a foundation to create
your own commercial projects. If one such project fails financially, it's no
big deal, you can just refocus your energy on a different commercial project
and still use your OSS work as the foundation so you don't start from scratch.

Also, the cost of participating in OSS are pretty low since it only uses up
your time; you don't need to invest any money for marketing. The other thing
about OSS is that sooner or later, smart people will figure out that your free
solution is superior to commercial alternatives and this will give you an
opportunity to form meaningful professional connections with these kinds of
people. Better to have a small community of highly involved and intelligent
people than a huge community of apathetic people who are only there because of
marketing.

~~~
zanny
I've always struggled with how if I want whats best for my resume rather than
fix a project that has gone unmaintained / slowed down / is popular but just
needs more hands on deck it makes more sense to start from scratch so you can
"put your name on it".

I've made dozens of FOSS contributions over the years but usually its "I want
X fixed / working, I'll spend a week learning the codebase and fixing it".
Sometimes I can find 2-3 of those in sequence on a project, but while I'd love
to hang around in one large codebase (I was active in the Clementine music
player for quite a while) a lot of the larger issues in a project like that
are structural and would take months to develop and would require your
commitment of time in the long term to support and maintain it.

Which I'd be all for, but employers really don't give a crap if you are only
the #8 comitter in a project with 10,000 commits. Even if your ~500 is twice
as much as you would have made developing your own stripped down clone of the
project to call "yours" and get your foot in the door.

Just over the holiday break I was doing some patches for Krita - I'd never
worked in the codebase before so there was a lot of exploratory work involved.
I implemented the feature I wanted and left dozens of questionable design
decisions and undocumented behavior untouched / refactored not because I
wanted to but I realized if I want "resume cred" I can't be doing trench work
like that. I implemented arbitrary button support for action events because
thats something I can bullet point easily. "Refactored the input system to
avoid memory leaks, wasted cycles, and streamlined the ergonomics with C++17
features" doesn't turn heads.

It just feels wasteful to have spent probably ~10 hours just reading ~5,000
lines of C++ to learn an entire subsystem of a program and to just leave it at
that when you can tell there is a lot more room for improvement but its also
much more nuanced. Its why everyone gets feature pull requests and none of the
bugs get fixed because most bugs worth fixing are structural ones that would
take a lot of effort for little "payoff".

------
peteforde
The best advice I can give on this subject is to see your life as a series of
well-executed five-year plans.

First, I am doubtful that we have the capacity to imagine what the world will
be like at the end of your life. If you were asking this question in 1907, you
wouldn't be able to anticipate the disruptive transformation and opportunity
of automobiles. Cory Doctorow always says that good science fiction doesn't
predict the future so much as it anticipates the present. That said, there is
strong anecdotal evidence that the gadgets you see on today's Star Trek will
be real things people aren't impressed by in 50 years. Maybe get working on
food replicators. ;)

The second thing about five-year plans is that five years is a perfect amount
of time for a chapter of your life where you really focus on something that
excites you. I could be learning a skill, building a company, having a child.
(Yes, apparently a child takes longer than five years, but the first five are
the most involved.) The result is that you will be what others describe as an
interesting person with broad, colorful experiences that give you lots to talk
about with your friends and life partners. Incidentally, the #1 complaint of
unhappily married women is that their husbands are too predictable.

Ultimately, nobody ever gets to the end of their life and things, "man... I
wish I had made fewer interesting decisions!"

The likelihood of you being able to decide today what will be the most
productive and exciting use of your entire life is extremely small. The key is
to make sure that the next five years is as interesting as possible. Rinse and
repeat.

------
DenisM
"Follow your heart [rather than your wallet]" is generally a bad advice [1],
but if both tracks are equally well paid you might as well indulge, if only
for long enough to get a feel for it.

Meaningful work is one of the pillars of mental health, don't take that away
form yourself unless you have to trade it for another pillar.

[1] It's a bad advice because it often turns people to soul-sucking cafe
ownership, hand-to-mouth musician careers, and other loveable but hurtful
things. A much better advice is to find an intersection of (things you love)
and (things that pay well enough for it to not be a bother) and (things you
might be good at) and (...).

~~~
colordrops
Owning a cafe is soul sucking?

~~~
DenisM
Yes. I vaguely recall some research indicating it's the most likely venture to
fail. You might be used to this in the startup world, but here there is no
outsized upside, and you're not cultivating a valuable skill.

Business aside, there is also a huge discrepancy between the romantic image of
happily hopping about a cozy little shop and the crushing burden of 18-hour
workdays for near-zero pay, demotivated or thieving employees, obnoxious
customers, flaky suppliers, rising or unexpected costs, your own failure to
plan for this or that, and all that with no hope of things becoming different
in the future. There were profiles in the NYT which I can no longer find, but
here is one I did find just now: [https://www.thrillist.com/eat/nation/why-to-
never-open-a-res...](https://www.thrillist.com/eat/nation/why-to-never-open-a-
restaurant-thrillist-nation)

If you are contemplating this nearly-suicidal move I highly recommend
interrogating an acquaintance who's been that and done that before investing
any further effort.

------
bayindirh
My life is an interesting train of consequences and decisions. The decisions
led to some consequences, and I was able to leverage them to decide the next
step.

My computing life started with Commodore64 when I was ~4, and I loved the text
interface. Then I got a 486DX w/ DOS when I was 7. This led me to decide to
"Learn what computers are all about and learn to program these beautiful
things".

Then Windows95 happened. I didn't like the GUI first interface. This led me to
find Linux. Around the same time, I found demo scene. This made me to
appreciate "the raw power of computers". I decided to write programs which
leverage this raw power.

At the university, I was unable to leverage my Linux knowledge, and I was
getting ready to be a Windows programmer, then my second internship threw me
to one of the best Linux shops in existence in my city. I've learnt low level
Linux programming, and decided Linux is a requirement for me in my career.
Learning Linux and loving low-level and high performance tasks formed my
graduation project, which earned me the best project award. I got a call from
a different department of the company that I've spent my second internship
before I graduated, and I'm working there for 12 years as an HPC system
administrator. As a side academic gig, I write high performance code and
publish papers. What I've learnt from my job is feeding my academic gig, and
my academic gig is feeding my office work. I also got Master's and Ph.D.
during the process.

So, let the coincidences and events happen, then try to leverage them to my
best interests. You also learn during the journey. Nothing is set in stone in
the first day. I wanted to be a pure programmer in my day job, but it's much
more stressful and not always enjoyable. I do what I enjoy (R&D, programming
high performance stuff), and have an interesting and cutting edge job
(building and managing HPC systems with latest hardware), so life is good for
me. Hope everyone reading this have an even better life at the end. :)

------
gottebp
"Where your talents and the needs of the world cross; there lies your
vocation." ~Aristotle

There is debate whether the above is really from Aristotle. The idea behind it
works however, and it works in a way that --at least anecdotally-- is
satisfying. I was lucky enough to encounter it by accident.

In 2005 my grandfather was diagnosed with Parkinson's Disease. His hand often
shook with a slight tremor and it made using his computer nearly impossible. I
built software[0] to stabilize the mouse and give him back control.

I created many things between then and now. Most of them have faded away into
obscurity. The works that really lasted and retained meaning always involved
others. The meaning is not really in the software itself, or the technology,
but in the people tangled up in the journey and in being needed. The
excitement, once in a while, when the talents we have honed over the many
years actually apply -- nothing compares.

[0] [https://www.steadymouse.com](https://www.steadymouse.com)

------
ChuckMcM
Work on the problems you care about and are interested in solving. The
reasoning for that is that when you are both interested in and care about a
problem you will give it all of your attention. When you work on a problem
that you think "should" be worked on but that you don't deeply care about,
then you won't give it all of your attention. That leads to less job
satisfaction and solutions that aren't as good as those that would be come up
with by someone who is really invested.

The meta question is one that is more important, do I work on a problem that
pays me a lot of cash or one that is important. Bill Gates showed you can earn
a lot of cash and _then_ work on important problems, but I don't think the
odds favor that approach.

------
killjoywashere
I always went after the hardest unsolved problem I could find. This has often
ended in pain and heartache but that taught me about some things to look for
in a problem. Some key bits of advice:

1) Prepare like your life depends on it. It does. Your time may not come for
40 years, but if you're not prepared, you'll never know. So study hard. This
is where Paul Graham's "swim upstream as long as possible" comes in.

2) Knowing how to code makes you a code monkey, human materiál, an
interchangeble part. Same with doctors, lawyers, etc. They're essentially
interchangable. If you know something else, (medicine, geology, rockets,
whatever) then knowing how to code makes you a magician. In both realms.

3) Develop a 5,000 year old mind. Understand where you are in the world, and
where the world is, so when your critical opportunities arrive, you will
recognize them and know what to do.

4) Most successes come around age 50. If you're 20, 25, 30, 40, and think
you've seen what there is to see, you probably have.

~~~
selestify
> Most successes come around age 50

What do you mean by this? Don't most of those who make it big do so while
young?

~~~
killjoywashere
I mean _objective, measurable success_

[https://hbr.org/2018/07/research-the-average-age-of-a-
succes...](https://hbr.org/2018/07/research-the-average-age-of-a-successful-
startup-founder-is-45)

[http://mitsloan.mit.edu/ideas-made-to-matter/20-year-old-
ent...](http://mitsloan.mit.edu/ideas-made-to-matter/20-year-old-entrepreneur-
lie)

As supporting evidence, we also know happiness kicks up after your 40s

[https://www.economist.com/christmas-
specials/2010/12/16/the-...](https://www.economist.com/christmas-
specials/2010/12/16/the-u-bend-of-life)

[https://www.google.com/search?q=happiness%20vs%20age](https://www.google.com/search?q=happiness%20vs%20age)

------
davedx
I decided in my mid-30's I wanted to work on energy, so after some career
manoeuvring I found a job working in the IT dept of a renewable energy
company. I was there two years, and would have stayed longer, but the salary
wasn't that competitive and with my large family I ended up returning to
contract work. (Towards the end pretty much all of my salary was going to our
monthly costs, I had nothing left).

I don't regret doing this at all. I feel like I contributed (not for as long
as I'd have liked to), and I learned tons of stuff working there.

I think AI is also pretty interesting as something that "should be worked on",
and the pay is possibly also better than it is in the energy sector.

------
qznc
The answer depends very much on the context. Are you a high school graduate
look for a field to study? A mid-career person looking for a hobby? Someone
considering a career change? A end-career wealthy person looking for a place
to dump money on?

Personally, I believe the most important problems are mostly relationship
problems in other words politics. The solutions there are simple but not easy.
For example, world peace is simple: Everybody just stop killing each other.
However, getting everybody to agree on that is ridiculously hard.

My general thoughts are:

1\. I have a certain set of skills and strengths that I can contribute. I
should use them instead of doing stuff I'm not good at because that should
optimize the global productivity.

2\. I should work on things where return of investment is best. So do not work
on things where a return is unlikely, e.g. intergalactic travel or fixing
email, or where the return is not worth it, e.g. cheaper ice cream or a flappy
bird clone.

3\. Keep track of big problems where the time/opportunity has not come yet.
This is inspired by Hammings talk on research. It also applies to lots of free
software though. For example, if Twitter would shut down tomorrow, then the
Fediverse would be there to catch the fallout. So it is of some importance to
work on open alternatives to popular services. The iPhones success was mostly
waiting for the right time, when mobile Internet, mobile computing, and app-
store market structure all were ready enough.

Unfortunately, in terms of my hobbies I'm still mostly suffering from the
Paradox of Choice. Too many options to make a decision, so I don't do
anything. Let check Hacker News again...

------
escapecharacter
I think it’s more practical to think on a per-decade scale, as trying to plan
for the future 25 or more years ahead makes you less flexible to take
advantage of changes in the moment.

I decided two years ago (33 now) to devote my 30s to creating telepresence,
narrative entertainment with live actors.

I think I want to spend my 40s on hobbyist prosthetics.

50s: I don’t know yet. I hope we’ve made contact with aliens by that point so
that I can devote this decade to building systems that help us collaborate
with them.

I finished a PhD when I was 31, and the most useful piece of advice I got from
my advisor was “do the thesis that only you in the world would be able to do”.
My 30s project is a mix of stuff I have special expertise in, that I get
repeatedly told is weird in unique. So I’m chasing that for a while.

------
anotheryou
I'm doing a bullshit job¹ and would be happy to find _anything_ meaningful
that still pays ok². Other than that I'm trying to reduce work days to work on
side projects.

If I had more choice I'd choose things that interest and fascinate me anyways
_and_ serve some good. This would be (socially beneficial) science and
empowering information tools for the web.

¹ [https://strikemag.org/bullshit-jobs/](https://strikemag.org/bullshit-jobs/)

² Need a product manager for a cool product? Please let me know.

~~~
h0mEDw
I am one of those bullshit jobs deniers. Would you like to explain why your
job is bullshit? Feel free to change details to protect your privacy.

~~~
anotheryou
My employer is a big fin-tec company, the product does not work well, revenue
comes from long contract times where people can't get out again (even worse:
selling dreams that usually burst), if anything we can provide some sort of
e-commerce optimization which either makes people buy more s __* or makes them
buy it at one instead of the other vendor.

~~~
h0mEDw
So, if I understand correctly, the source of bullshit here would be some sort
of soft coercion/engineering of consent? Over something that people don't
need/shouldn't need? I.e. something like working on ad campaigns for
cigarettes?

~~~
anotheryou
there are multiple layers of bullshit:

\- big player fin-tec: it only makes numbers grow for rich people

\- selling dreams: preying on peoples hopes, knowing they probably won't come
true

\- broken product: not selling value

\- long contract times: just shady

\- e-commerce: Coercion in to buying stuff they wouldn't have bough otherwise
or simply funneling the money to _our_ clients instead of others. No benefit
for society either way. It doesn't even have to be cigarettes, could be butter
or anything.

------
imhoguy
> _It 's a short life, so I want to be careful with this decision, to avoid
> any future regrets. Because I can't decide on this, I end up not getting
> anything done. Time continues to march on, while I'm still stuck with not
> knowing what to do._

Your situation reminds me this:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buridan%27s_ass](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buridan%27s_ass)

Start small! Make any move, even not ideal one. Just leave your comfort bubble
and try each idea.

------
ThomPete
I decided a long time ago that I wanted to work on things that there aren't
any design patterns for yet.

Any potential client/startup that comes to me asking for help with their
e-commerce business, unless it's something truly unique, I always say, get a
Shopify/Squarespace account first don't waste time on designing for something
that has so many established design patterns already.

Whereas if someone comes to me for help with robotics, crypto, trading, AI,
complex services in healthcare etc, that's where I want to help.

I have recently further decided to focus on industries with jobs aren't desk
related (i.e. where you don't sit in front of a computer).

These make up 80% of the just that exist out there yet only get around 1% of
the actual investments from ex. Sillicon Vally investors. So our venture
studio is now also focusing on that which is a very interesting space and kind
of allow me to come full-circle with the kind of jobs my parents had (cleaning
lady and plumber).

------
d--b
You’ll never regret choosing something you want to work on. Especially when
what you want to work also makes money like energy or AI.

Also, these fields are not evil or useless like weapon design or hedge funds.
They are actually useful to society, so you feel like contributing to the
general good.

Don’t worry about healthcare, there are thousands of people who work on
healthcare.

And, if I may, if you did work on healthcare, your very own contribution to
solving this problem would most likely be very small. Unless you somehow
become the Elon Musk of healthcare... which you know, may or may not happen.

~~~
harias
Why do you think Hedge Funds are useless or evil?

~~~
j2kun
The only good quality of a hedge fund is promoting "market efficiency." I can
understand how most people don't buy that as an excuse for the havoc they can
wreak.

------
mooreds
I have a lot of sympathy for your position. I have worked in many situations:

* Contractor just in it for the bucks

* Contractor in it for the freedom

* Working with a great team on interesting consulting projects

* Start-up co-founder in a space I really believed in

* Comfortable job that provided for me and mine while working on interesting projects and having autonomy.

I suggest that you pick a direction and go for it (given my extremely limited
understanding of your situation, probably in the energy or ai field--better to
pick something you want to do than something you feel like you should do).
Better to have some movement than to idly tread water.

While every decision had consequences and closes off some options, every
situation has good lessons (and that no place is perfect, at least that I have
found). It's also worth realizing that not many decisions are irrevocable, if
you are willing to make sacrifices.

------
kennu
As a general rule in life, you should enjoy the process, not just the outcome.
The joy is in the journey.

------
JohnStrangeII
1\. Do you have something that gives you the flow effect, when you forget the
time and just keep working because it's so interesting? Try to find a
professional income based on that activity.

2\. If the first thing is too hard - e.g. few novelists can live off their
writings -, don't despair. Keep your passion as a hobby, find a stable source
of income and have fun.

Assuming that you're still somewhat young, here is one additional advice from
someone who has made a mistake in that respect: The older you grow, the more
important financial security will become. You may think you're immune to this
effect, but you're not. You'll want to have a fairly decent, constant stream
of income when you're 40+, no matter what you think about that now.

------
johan_larson
The world is not short of people who want to work in healthcare. Because of
high barriers to entry, professionals in the field are very well paid and
young people are desperate to enter it. Given this vast army of the aspiring,
you can be confident that nothing that really needed doing went undone because
you chose to do something else with your life.

~~~
make3
this is true for applied healthcare, but not so for research in healthcare.
Research jobs in healthcare aren't anywhere close to as prestigious and don't
pay anywhere close to as well, yet we would all benefit very much from top
talent dedicating their lives to them

~~~
johan_larson
Science isn't short of brains. It's short of money. There's an overabundance
of clever and highly trained people chasing too little funding, which is why
you find so many young scientists in their thirties grinding through second
and third postdocs for crap money.

I suspect you could do more good for science by working a lifetime in some
well-paid career and donating a hefty portion of your profit to some science-
funding organization than by trying to do science yourself.

Science needs your money far more than it needs your brains.

------
teekert
I kind of rolled into every job I had (didn't want to work after bachelors,
did a master (old Dutch system), was asked to do PhD, finished it, was
unemployed for 10 months got a nice job (but would have taken anything). But I
wanted out of the lab (I am/was a molecular biologist), my heart is with
computers. So I was not really content, but I got paid ok and had fun mostly.
But then I had a career coach (company provided) who told me: Be very, very
precise about what you like about your current job. And be very active in
maximizing the amount of time you spend on the fun parts, the parts that give
you energy. And so I got more and more into data analysis, slowly, I took 7
years! Now after about 9 years I'm about ready to call myself a
bioinformatician and I love it.

Sure Oncology is nice but I really only like the genomics/bioinformatics part
and to be honest I could probably do this type of work in another field (what
I love is Linux clusters, open source software, not worrying about details but
using other people's algorithms and glue them together to do cool things, that
other people (colleagues) appreciate).

I would not pick something to work towards, I would try to find out what
problems you like to solve and the methods you like to use, and try to do
it/them as much as possible. Then, organically you will end up in the right
place. How exactly? By pulling fun stuff towards you (project manager is ill?
You lead the meeting, give yourself some fun work!)

I am 36 now, I feel I just got into a field I truly love, it combines my
(irrational) love for Linux and computers with my training in Biology and it
is that being in a unique position (with a unique background) that I can do
thing my colleagues appreciate. I think that is also a big part of what fuels
me (colleagues that say: wow that is really nice and you did that so fast!).
It took a lot of time and it also takes some conscious attention but you'll
get there.

My advice: Don't work on what you feel you should work on, think hard on the
kind of stuff that makes you forget time, that gives you energy. Don't have
any? Try other stuff until you find something.

~~~
pies_realis
Coming from exactly the opposite side, could you weigh in on opportunities to
pivot into bioinformatics for a regular software engineer? From what I've seen
most biotech companies don't actually have a lot of software engineering in-
house, and if they want anyone who can code it's usually R/Python data
scientists with PhDs, and I feel like even a senior Python software dev is a
poor fit for their requirements.

I find myself increasingly drawn to biology and medicine over the last few
years, considering going back to university for a second degree in fact, but
the ROI on that doesn't seem great.

------
anujsharmax
> It's a short life, so I want to be careful with this decision, to avoid any
> future regrets. Because I can't decide on this, I end up not getting
> anything done. Time continues to march on, while I'm still stuck with not
> knowing what to do.

I loved most of the advice other people have given you. Follow the advice that
you think is the best, but remember, You are more than the work you do.

You are being too hard on yourself - take care of your mental health as well.
Talk to someone you trust.

Your life goals and priorities will change throughout your life. In the end,
everyone will have some regrets (for different reasons). You just get to
choose your own.

------
badpun
> I've been stuck with trying to figure what to do with the rest of my life. I
> can't decide whether I should be working on what I want to work on (Energy,
> AI) or whether I should work on what I believe should be worked on
> (Healthcare).

1\. How about AI for Healthcare?

2\. I don't believe you can do great work in an area you're not personally
excited about. So, if the thought of spending the next 30 years working in the
healthcare sector is not exciting to you at the moment, then, chances are that
if you were to pick this path, you'd be OK at it at best, and that's not good
enough to make any difference on a larger scale.

~~~
abrichr
I'll second AI for healthcare.

Medicine is the killer app for AI, and yet not nearly enough people are
working on it. I suspect it has something to do with the relative difficulty
in accessing data (although this is changing), and the relatively lower pay
compared to working at Google, Facebook et al. But in my opinion, if you're
the sort of person who's searching for meaning and opportunity, this is the
place to be.

Full disclosure: I work in AI for healthcare.

------
DoreenMichele
My problems picked me. I'm just trying to make my life work.

If I make a difference in this world, it will grow out of solving my problems,
basically.

Re your actual conundrum: If you can do something like create/promote clean
energy, a lot of health issues are rooted in pollution. People who aren't sick
because they aren't breathing polluted air will need less healthcare.

So you can potentially kill two birds with one stone by addressing energy and
then tracking how that positively impacts health outcomes for your own
personal edification.

------
lazyjones
This is a very utilitarian approach, I don't recommend it if you really want a
productive and satisfying life. It took me decades to realize what I'm
actually good at and what not and my values changed often, so a life devoted
to one cause that seemed important at the age of 20 wouldn't do 20 years
later. I would have been a very bad monk...

My projects evolved primarily based on personal interest and needs and they
eventually scaled to between a few 100 and a few million users. All gave me
some amount of satisfaction, but none of them was my ultimate "life project"
or the fulfilment of all desires.

Learn many skills and tricks, try a lot of different things (not only job-
wise), invest more energy in what interests and motivates you most and don't
be afraid to move on.

It's better to regret something you have done than something you haven't done!
;-)

------
ngcc_hk
Be happy. A happy man will help your neighbour. And your fellow people.

You may be good at something but if you are not happy ... I think mao and
hilter could. R said quite good in their deeds and mao is even now has no
problem in killing 30m+ (more than 1 time - Great Leap Forward and cultural
revolution).

Both are not happy men. May be they have sming pic but I have not aware much.

Be happy. Do no harm.

Assume that we are not in Olympic but we are always in the game of life. With
that may I quote the motto, the most important thing in life is not about
winning but about participation and you have tried your best.

Good luck.

------
HeadsUpHigh
Define healthcare. If you want to follow the traditional path of getting a
medicine degree as I did( currently 2nd year in a hospital, the system in my
country is different so I don't know exactly how this translates into USA
terms), I can tell you right now that the day to day life can actually be
really satisfying depending on the choices you make inside. Every specialty(
assuming you even chase one) has a unique way of thinking and many many sub-
specialties inside where you get to wrestle with the current cutting edge
problems. Then of course there is research( poorly paid for the cost) that's
it's own thing. So 1) you are postponing your decision until you have more
data to decide and 2) you still keep yourself open to many possibilities from
more practical specialties like the various surgical ones to more theory-heavy
ones like pathology/ID/hematology or being buried in a lab( microbiology etc)
to a medium in between( cardiology) or even a more humanitarian one(
psychiatry). Each with their own unique feel and algorithms. Ultimately you
will still have to choose between what you like and what's important. I am
lucky that I like something I consider also extremely important( cardiology).
Then you can choose if you want to have a broader view of the subject or
specialize a lot into something and becoming the best on it( extra
specializations e.g. arrythmiology etc). Ultimately whatever one might choose
will always have a very strong feedback loop of improving other peoples' lives
and the value of this can't be overstated. Plus the pay is good.

------
whitepoplar
I think money is the great enabler, assuming you don't spend it. Making a nice
chunk of it early on makes the rest of your life better--you can choose
exactly what you'd like to work on, relationships are statistically better,
and your blood pressure will be at lower levels for the rest of your life.
Freedom is the one thing that money can buy, and the great thing about it is
that it never has to leave your bank account in order to buy it. :-)

------
anonu
When you work on something you love, it isn't work anymore. You'll be more
passionate about the subject and more productive around getting things done...
Not to mention orders of magnitude more creative.

So I think you're asking the right questions but you need to look at it from a
slightly different angle.

I'd also agree with you that life is short... But it's also long. You can
always switch fields, learn new things, reinvent yourself. There are no
rules...

------
maliker
I switched from software generally to software for energy. I had a software
job and my friends were always making fun of me for working for "the man",
i.e. banks and large consumer product companies (Coke, McDonalds, etc.). So I
sat down and looked at all the major industries that seemed to help people and
that I could have an impact in as a software engineer. I figured I'd try
energy first, since climate change was probably the worst thing happening at
the time, and I took a 1 year contract to build an app for utilities. 6 years
later I'm still working on it, training another generation of engineers. So
hey, it worked out.

The nice thing about work skills is that they're frequently portable. So if I
had to go back in time and give advice to old me I'd say: don't worry, just
work in some industries where you think you can do things that are important
to you. And while you do that you'll be building your skillset. For me, it was
my software skillset, but I've also learned some stuff on raising funding,
event planning, budgeting, accounting, hiring. It also doesn't hurt to save
money.

Good luck! Have fun!

------
givan
It's a short life indeed, worrying on what decision to make and postponing
will only make it worse.

Consider the statistics of decision, in general and simplified. In any
abstract decision, there is a 50 percent probability that the correct or
constructive choice will be made. If the correct path is taken, obviously no
problems will exist. If the incorrect selection is made, it will become
evident. When it does, there is a 50 percent probability that the choice can
be reversed and the constructive path substituted in its place.

Therefore, there is only one chance in four, at the most, that an irrevocable
direction may be taken in decision making. All vital decisions in the history
of man have been made on much worse odds than three to one. Some were as high
as one in twenty and came out positively.

To move away from the null point of indecision, take the position that any
action or decision is better than none at all, based upon the odds of three to
one.

More here [https://pastebin.com/1tF3gqre](https://pastebin.com/1tF3gqre)

------
Nursie
Money amd free time.

I won't work on things I fundamentally disagree with but what's important to
me is life outside of work. I try to maximise my income and the availability
of non-work time.

As a contractor this is what I get to do, make a packet and take a few months
off here and there.

People with a drive to achieve in a particular area may be after a different
sort of satisfaction in life I guess.

~~~
mostafab
that's a defeatist attitude. If you had unlimited money, how would you spend
your time? that's how you will find what to work on.

~~~
Nursie
> that's a defeatist attitude.

It really isn't. I have a great life, and I also get to work on some
interesting stuff because I'm good at what I do. I help my clients to deliver,
and get satisfaction from that.

> If you had unlimited money, how would you spend your time?

Travelling and seeing the world with other people, in luxury.

------
gpsx
I usually toss the ideas around in my head for a little while and then I will
write it up and keep it in Google Drive. It may be a page or a few pages, or a
half a page. I create a folder for the idea and then put the document inside
that.

What I do not typically do is go over my old ideas, which might be a good
idea. But I think the act of writing the idea down goes a long way towards
crytallizing it in my memory, for is I ever want to revist it. (Back in
college, I would take notes in class, but never review them.)

Most of the ideas get touched only the one time. Some I come back to and
expand on. And some actually become projects (which is what I call the root
folder where I keep all these, "projects").

If the idea does become a bigger project, I will often have many more ideas
and they will get written up in the same folder.

EDIT - oops, this comment is in the wrong post! This was supposed to go under
the :How do you take notes" post.

------
cossatot
Find a problem that you are interested in and have the capacity to make
progress and enjoy at least most of the grind (and it _will be_ a grind). If
you choose something simply because it's a big problem but not something you
have a natural affinity for, you may not end up making a difference because
you won't be effective. If you're not effective, it'll be really hard to find
someone to pay you to work on it, regardless of the problem.

Given the options that you have stated, progress with energy will produce
progress on a wide variety of other problems because it's a physical and
economic limiting factor for almost all activities. Creating cheaper, cleaner
and/or more available energy will have an impact on human health and well-
being, because it makes society more affluent and able to channel more
resources into healthcare. Making progress on healthcare doesn't itself
produce the same sort of spillover effects into as many other sectors, though
it is undoubtedly beneficial. It also seems that many of the biggest
challenges in healthcare are regulatory or policy-oriented and not necessarily
technical, whereas many fundamental problems in the energy field are technical
in nature.

I, personally, am a geologist and work for a seismic hazard and risk nonprofit
that works with governments, insurance companies and other parties to better
assess and ameliorate earthquake risk. My training is in more fundamental
geologic research (not societally oriented at all) but I have veered towards
earthquake hazards in my career because I find it to be more satisfying, both
in terms of the societal benefit and in terms of my day to day effort and
existence.

Earthquakes aren't anywhere as dangerous as cancer or heart disease or drunk
driving, but I don't think I'd be nearly as good at solving any problems with
those things. I deeply love the earth and think it's beautiful, and this
motivates me to work hard at understanding it better and translating that
understanding into useful information for people who want to make safer
buildings and communities.

------
brentonator
I started with only one goal, and I have come to only two conclusions.

Goal: Learn how to do even that which I can't properly understand at face
value today.

Conclusions: I do not want to work in hardware. I do not want to work in life-
dependent hardware.

Hardware is hard, and I want the freedom to experiment with new software ideas
without having to consider who may die / be injured. You can usually undo
mission critical faults with money but you can't replace a life.

Unfortunately, I don't know how I came to these conclusions other than meeting
with lots of people. I get a bad taste in my mouth when I see people who go
off to location X in the world to help solve Y. I just don't see myself
committing to that location and would prefer to attack things in a way that
can solve them worldwide.

------
gfodor
Having some experience with working on things I thought were "important" and
failing due to lack of passion, my advice is that you should work on
interesting problems to you and find the path within those area to do good.
It's possible to do good and evil, to be greedy or altruistic, to work on
harmful or helpful things, in any domain. Life has a way of presenting the
right doors to you to walk through if you are prepared to see them, but the
way to start is to follow your natural interests and keep your eyes open. Luck
favors the prepared mind.

Along the way the main error to avoid is letting others define your thoughts
and opinions -- if you remain your own person then you will find your own way
to make a dent that nobody else could.

------
brandonjm
I experienced this with my PhD topic decision. My focus generally is VR/AR and
I was considering looking at health care applications or haptic tech. In the
end I decided on haptics because it seemed more interesting however I have
often thought my research could have had more impact had I chosen healthcare.
Since starting, my haptic research has subsequently opened up doors into
possible health applications and research anyway. This was effectively a
middle ground because my research is what I want to do but I can still
contribute to something that feels objectively more important.

So based on this, my suggestion would be to do what you want, and see if you
can find applications in things you think should be worked on.

------
casper345
What I found in my experience is that an idea is great but until you start
working on it, you will not know if you're passionate/interested/capable/ready
for it.

I have a lot of projects/ideas that I am working on or want to work on. I jump
from one project to the next until there is one that really grasps me, then I
try to finish till completion. Most people have shallow understandings of a
lot of things. Only with deep knowledge does innovation or sparks of it come
to being. So with your interest in a lot of subjects (Energy, AI, Healthcare)
try to learn a little of them in the beginning beyond shallow understanding.
MAybe you will find something from that.

------
konschubert
I just feel like we really need to fix climate change, thus energy, if we want
to preserve some semblance of the world that we grew up in.

Regarding personal happiness, consider that _how_ you work is much more
important than _what_ you work on.

------
neltnerb
I think you should work on what you want to (day to day) with an eye towards
solving bigger problems that you believe should be worked on.

So if I believed that healthcare needed to be worked on but that energy and AI
were what I was interested in doing day to day, I'd look at applying AI to
healthcare and who is doing that and I'd look at how energy impacts
healthcare. Maybe there's a NIH group studying power grid reliability or
something.

And then I'd try to find a way to work with many teams to provide that side-
expertise in AI or energy if I was already an expert with those, or I'd try to
find a full time job working on it.

------
FigmentEngine
Energy, AI, Healthcare: none of these are problems. They are all ways to solve
problems, or at best domains that constrain thinking.

Energy is a field/domain, there are problems you can solve here, but they
could tend towards optimization or soln looking for problems

AI is overloaded, but again is more tool than problem. Healthcare the same,
very wide, not often problem fixing.

an interesting observation is find where domains intersect. this allows you to
focus on an area where few have/are venturing. giving you a rich seam to mine,
and ROI on your time.

as always choose your own adventure, who are we to say what is 'right'. good
luck!

------
dpcan
Unhappiness.

I find myself constantly drifting toward entertainment. I made mobile games
for about 4 years, and now I run an escape room business. I guess I'm trying
to get rid of sadness one small bit at a time.

~~~
porphyrogene
I value entertainment immensely but saying that it solves unhappiness is like
saying that prostitution solves loneliness. Unhappiness is a core element of
the human experience. It is not solvable because it is not a problem.

~~~
ovebepari
Totally agree.

------
baccheion
I suppose I decide on a whim or follow inspiration. Among the list of
interests is at least one that's practical/money-making. On the other hand,
the job took up the entirety of my life while I was working many years ago and
was absolutely pointless. In eating up all my time, there wasn't any left to
do anything else. I worked during 2008-2010 and it was so bad there wasn't
even time to go to the grocery store. If such a situation can be avoided, then
you may be able to make it all happen.

------
gregfjohnson
For the last 15 years, I have been working on medical device software. I fully
understand your desire to make the world a better place based on your career
choices. Every day, I am excited to go in to work for that very reason. I have
had the privilege of working on NICU ventilators (think preemies born at 22
weeks), pulse oximetry, ECG devices, infusion pumps, and now ultrasound. It is
fairly common in the medical device world for management to invite patients
and families to visit the engineers who worked on the devices that saved
lives. I particularly remember a perfect, healthy, beautiful 18-month old
little girl and her parents. She had been born severely premature, and was
kept alive for months in a NICU on one of our ventilators. Tears all around
the room! Medical device engineers make the devices that clinicians use, and
consequently have a potentially huge multiplicative impact on people's lives.
My last ventilator product family has an installed base of over 200,000 units
worldwide. I like to think about the transitivity of the situation: you save
or improve one life. That also has a huge impact on that person's immediate
family. Then, consider the secondary and tertiary impacts that emanate out to
extended family, and whole communities. Moreover, medical device software is
extremely challenging and interesting to work on. Tons of new stuff to learn
along multiple different dimensions. It is frequently "close to the metal"
programming, so you need to be in to that sort of thing to enjoy it. (A note
of realism: our real goal is simply to move the probability needle on patient
outcomes. But in fact, that is enough.)

------
WhompingWindows
I'm currently coding R and SQL in healthcare, would love to code in energy as
well at some point. Healthcare is an extremely tricky area, our data is
MASSIVE and very very rich, many hundreds of variables to access taken over
many years of time. It's very challenging though: old tech stack, slow
bureaucracy, tons of paperwork, usually not on the "cutting edge" due to the
myriad security/privacy concerns, people still using SAS up the wazoo.
Contrast that to energy: much less issue of security/privacy, however much
fewer jobs, arguably less complexity and less legacy practices, and less
"humanity" at the core. Energy does have the benefit of saving the planet,
without which all of our health would go to Mad Max situations...so, both are
very very important, good luck choosing :)

I got into it via biological sciences, then epidemiology, then straight
epidemiological data analysis, with a flavor of public policy and program
implementation/effectiveness analysis. I was originally pre-med, but coding is
IMO a lower stress, lower debt-ridden, and still remunerative field which
gives higher rein to analytical talent than medicine, which to me is more
about people skills and healing than raw analysis/technicalities.

------
antpls
Regarding Energy, AI or Healthcare, they are probably interconnected, in my
opinion :

Working in Healthcare will only improve short-term human condition, but it can
be a rewarding feeling.

Working in Energy will improve both Healthcare, AI and other domains, because
those fields require energy to build the machines, the infrastructure, and to
maintain them.

Working in AI will improve everything, including itself. If you apply AI to
research and science, it will potentially help to faster discoverings in all
fields, including energy, genomics, materials, operations, and improving AI
itself.

Now, because that idea of AI is powerful, it breaks current societal schemes
about what should be the purpose of humans and work. If you decide to develop
AI, you will face more ethical, philosophical and political issues than in the
other fields. (for example, "If I develop that piece of AI, X people will lose
their jobs". So you have new interesting problems arising to consider first.
Other example : "If I develop that AI, X times more people could die if
misused", in the military field)

The question is more about : do you want to change the world faster at the
expense of some other people lives conditions, or do you want to also support
the people who had less luck than you, and at what scale.

Ultimately, your human feelings will guide you more in your choices than the
rationality you think you have. I believe there is no bad choice and you
should feel proud of yourself if you acquire a job in any of those 3 fields.
You may even change of field in your lifetime, the most important is to start
somewhere

------
hevi_jos
"Decision" word comes from latin:
[https://www.etymonline.com/word/decide](https://www.etymonline.com/word/decide)
It means cutting off. Decision means choosing something and cutting the rest.

If you try to avoid future regrets(future errors), you are going to
procrastinate in life, because it is impossible to do anything meaningful in
life without making mistakes.

It is impossible to do anything new without making mistakes. Real life is not
Academia, in which you can make strait As always. Unless you play it safe,
which is quite a boring life IMHO.

I would give me permission to fail, and will choose something. If you make a
mistake you could always quit as soon as possible and choose something
different.

What happens is that real master takes commitment. Most people quit too early
to succeed.

Anyway, nobody could life your life but you, you should take responsibility
for it, not trying to delegate on strangers on internet. Take a notebook,
write everything down and learn from your previous mistakes until you are a
master on thyself(the good and the bad).

Once you know about you, read a book like "Principles" Ray Dalio, you will be
able to do something about it, like finding people that complement you.

------
taywall5
We are human BEINGs not human doings...but as makers, we're obsessed with what
we're doing rather than being. To solve this problem for myself (and its one
in my experience that will keep cropping up over and over again), I try to
reframe the question "what should I do with my life" to how do I want to "Be"
\- and then work backwards towards a set of values I won't compromise when
working on anything. I'm constantly pulled between working on more creative
vs. more potentially profitable enterprises. Ultimately, I want to be
creative, a story teller, and I want to be helpful. So my "values" are: 1) I
only work on things bigger than myself (meaning I work with teams, not alone)
2) I tell stories (meaning my work is always geared around a narrative - I'm a
designer / writer / marketer rather than an engineer because of this) 3) I
help people directly (meaning I won't work on projects that don't have an
impact).

In my experience, when I work from those values rather than towards very
specific goals, the flow of life tends to take me in really interesting
directions I wouldn't have found otherwise.

PS> Maybe just work in Healthcare AI?

------
austincheney
> In other words, how do you decide between what you want to work on and what
> should be worked on?

What I want to do is spend more time with my kids, play games, or go on
vacations with my wife. The problems I choose to solve though are real
problems that are barriers to my productivity or broken processes. I invest
time to solve for these problems so that I can free up the time for the things
I want. That is how I know what to work on without regret.

------
cperciva
Comparative advantage. Is health care important? Sure. Are there lots of other
people who can work on it if you don't? I'd imagine so.

You're going to make the biggest contribution if you work in the area where
you're relatively better... and being excited about a field makes a hell of a
difference in terms of your ability to contribute to that field vs. a field
which you think is important but not all that personally interesting.

------
tablethnuser
I feel the same way and can't speak to the success of my strategy, but do have
one.

I've been alternating between working for someone else and then spending my
savings investing in myself.

In both cases my goal is to aquire new skills. When you work for someone else,
make sure you are learning something on their dime and saving money. Then
spend that money on learning something no one will pay you to learn at work.

My interests have been all over the place - game design, programming, writing,
philosophy. Just to name a few I've gained expertise in with my strategy. I
don't view any of these things individually as destinations. I don't consider
myself a programmer, or a designer, or a philosopher. But each one does give
me new skills and perspectives which benefit the others. In the future I will
likely invest my time into a science like biology and maybe even push that
further to neuroscience.

A story that has always resonated with me is the one about some dna sequencing
database (nucleotide blast perhaps?) told by a TA in college. I was taking a
biology requirement but majoring in CS. The TA said the database came about
when some former programmers learned of a search problem biologists had no
solution to. Their programming background meant they already knew how to solve
this other domain's problem. I think a lot of breakthroughs come from this
formula of porting one domain's expertise to another domain's problems.

Hopefully this illustrates how skill acquisition is a good "passing play"
while figuring out what you want to do in life. I still don't know what it is
exactly I want to do, but I will keep learning skills that seem relevant and
clarify the picture as I go.

------
coldtea
> _It 's a short life, so I want to be careful with this decision, to avoid
> any future regrets_

Work on what you enjoy and/or can make you a living.

You are not here to solve some big world problem that you don't particularly
care for (but think you "have to" care).

In fact, why even think that your contribution on that sector (healthcare)
would be that big or required, seeing that you don't even know if you want to
work on that area?

------
turc1656
My recommendation is to be honest about your desires and _value system_ and
see which path lines up best with that. For example, it could be that AI
provides the most potential monetary reward by a large margin if you do it
well. But maybe it's not the most interesting to you based on the options you
have. It could also raise the risk that whatever you create is used to
displace people from their jobs and that might not appeal to you either (even
if it may very well be done by someone else down the road and could be
inevitable). Maybe healthcare provides a more emotionally rewarding experience
but is less profitable in the long run and may or may not have the same level
of scalability as AI. Maybe it's more labor intensive which creates jobs and
requires more day to day oversight, involvement, and less creativity but ends
up being more fulfilling. Perhaps your energy option lies somewhere between
those two. I don't know. But you should honestly evaluate the _long-term_ road
map and impact of your plan to see how you imagine things shaking out in the
end and see which of those visions seems more fulfilling. It's possible going
for whatever is the most profitable is what you want and that's fine. It's
also possible that you may find the impact of one of the options to be more
emotionally fulfilling and might value that much higher than just seeking the
highest income.

Another, simpler version of that recommendation I've seen is the old advice of
trying to imagine what your ideal work day looks like and see what path can
best provide that to you. But I find that advice to be a little superficial in
that it only takes into account what your schedule and tasks may look like,
not what you get out of the job. So it's also something to consider, but along
with everything else.

------
ace_of_spades
I have also been at that point and so have many others. There is even a whole
global movement founded on the question: how can I use my resources to do the
most good? It’s called Effective Altruism (EA) and is gaining some traction,
especially in the Valley.

One EA affiliated organization 80000hours.org focuses on the question on “how
to do the most good with your career?” and seems especially relevant to your
question. There is a lot of insightful material on career choice in general
(e.g., thinks to think about) but also concrete guidance in the form of cause
profiles.

In the end, finding a path that’s right for you is always challenging and you
shouldn’t discount things like motivation and comparative advantage if you are
trying to have an impact. 80000hours.org may provide somewhat personalized
coaching and recommendations if you send them a mail and explain your
situation. But just reading the materials on that site should give you a great
starting point to make informed decisions without the fear of doing the wrong
thing. You can hardly do more than try to get the best evidence and make an
informed decision after all!

------
tomxor
> I can't decide whether I should be working on what I want to work on
> (Energy, AI) or whether I should work on what I believe should be worked on
> (Healthcare).

It's my opinion that picking based on idealisms alone is bad for everyone,
_unless_ you have the luxury of choice! ... what I mean by "luxury of choice"
is: of the things you are both _good_ at and _enjoy_.

If you excel at and enjoy working in both healthcare and energy, then pick the
idealism and be the humanitarian... if you don't enjoy healthcare or are not
good at it, don't bother, you will support humanity as a whole and thus
healthcare indirectly by working on the problems you _can_ efficiently solve,
all while not torturing yourself.

My above assertions are based on the assumption that you already know you are
good at and enjoy one of your choices, if not, you need to explore, otherwise
you are choosing based on an even worse aspect (speculation). i.e kids say
they want to be a fireman or spaceman but unless you are really stubborn you
should choose based on the _processes_ those things involve. End results are
just a single moment in time.

------
runjake
Old guy here.

I don't think you'll find the answers to the questions you're asking. Or, if
you're like me, you will find answers. but they might change with each new
chapter of your life.

At the risk of sound like a broken HN record, I urge you to check out Derek
Sivers' FAQ at [https://sivers.org/faq](https://sivers.org/faq)

I am also finally reading through Cal Newport's immensely popular So Good They
Can't Ignore You which directly addresses and challenges the questions and
assumptions you've asked about.

Sivers has some of his book notes online at:
[https://sivers.org/book/SoGood](https://sivers.org/book/SoGood). Those notes
give a good summary, but I'm getting a ton out of the book, too.

TL;DR: Stop looking for The Answer -- it effectively does not exist. Get busy
with something/anything, make small, iterative adjustments to your
trajectories. Forgive yourself, don't beat yourself up. Don't get stuck in the
tool/methodology churn trap. Pick something and go.

------
javajosh
Try as many things as you can, seriously try them. The things you like go back
for more. School is actually pretty good at doing this, modulo teacher
quality.

Then, in the course of living your life you may find that you've discovered
something new. This is very rare. More often your identity becomes a unique
combination of preferences across a (surprisingly short) list of trade-offs in
your field. Then again, finding something new is as much a burden as a
blessing, so you can reasonably count yourself lucky if you do discover
something AND if you don't.

Remember that as a technologist you have an inherent amplifier to your ideas,
and so it's good you're being careful here. One thing I would recommend is
selecting an "Enough Number", which is the amount of money that would be
enough for you to earn in your lifetime, and you should make a solemn vow to
give away anything above and beyond that, or even better, resign and let
others have a chance to earn wealth.

Good luck! And may you discover a way to help yourself and others in the best
possible way!

------
jwr
What should be worked on is fairly easy to figure out using the inversion
technique. Think about what will happen if we do NOT work on something and
assign highest priorities to tasks that will cause catastrophic results if we
do NOT work on them.

If you do that, you'll quickly find that healthcare largely doesn't matter
right now: you might score a victory fighting malaria, but Earth will be a
scorched desert because of global warming caused by our carbon emissions.

So, I'd say that the most important thing that we could possibly work on right
now is removing carbon from the air, because if we do not, our grandchildren
will have serious problems, and their children might not have a planet to live
on.

But that's not what you really asked, right? You wanted to know whether to
work on Big Problems. And from your description it seems like you have the
same problem all perfectionists do: how do I even get started if the problem
is so Big and Complex that it's likely I'll never even make a dent?

Well, if you ever figure that one out, be sure to let me know.

------
namank
Sounds like you don't have enough data - go spend a year on energy, then in
AI, then in healthcare to learn about them. Then you'll have the data to make
a decision that you can probably be happy with.

Also note that this decision paralysis has already led you to one regret: not
getting anything done. If you still believe you should pursue regret-
minimization, then I suggest start doing _something_ (anything, really) right
away.

And I would be careful about the "should" vs. "want". Thinking about it that
way will just never make you happy because you'll be always wondering about
the path you didn't take. I don't know what the answer is but it's just
something to be aware of.

Personally, I think about "should"s. Only after that do I think about "wants".
Then I start by doing the wants and try to see how it would merge with a
should. Because someone once said, "Start by doing what's necessary; then do
what's possible; and suddenly you are doing the impossible."

------
valgor
I have been in your situation before. You must first understand you goals. Do
you want to help humanity, explore science, become rich, explore only what
interests you, etc.? Do you want to be alone in this journey (like a
mathematician or philosopher could be) or in a research group or new company?

You don't have to be interested in altruism to get important ideas out of the
80000 hours site: [https://80000hours.org/](https://80000hours.org/) In a nut
shell they suggest what you are best at, not what you necessarily what
interests you the most. Global Healthcare is high on their list of important
areas to work in.

For myself, I decided what is important is working on problems I find exciting
which is why I'm going back to school for a Masters in Statistics. I've tried
working on problems or in areas that are important to humanity such as coding
for open source projects and non-profits, but keeping up motivation is
difficult.

------
drited
How developing an AI control system that reduces energy usage in health care?

I'm half serious but all in earnest. Most people specialise. In a world of
specialists, perhaps you can distinguish yourself by knowing a little about
several fields. Health care folks will look at you as the magician who knows
about AI even if you're a dwarf by comparison to other AI folks.

------
shanev
May I ask why you want to work on energy? If it’s because of climate change,
it may surprise you that the #1 thing you can do to reduce total CO2 is to
educate women and girls, and family planning:

[https://www.drawdown.org/solutions](https://www.drawdown.org/solutions)

Update: Yes I know these aren’t the same, but they’re related.

------
staunch
You should contribute to humanity in whatever method or quantity you're able,
and not sweat it too much. That doesn't mean you shouldn't try hard. It just
means you shouldn't get too stressed out about it.

Some people are fortunate enough to make huge contributions, other people make
small contributions, and both are totally fine. You're doing great if you're
contributing positively at all.

We're all humans trying to make the world better. Even the ones that make it
worse aren't to be blamed, they were simply unlucky genetically or
environmentally.

It has always been on the shoulders of the most fortunate to do the most
important work. It's not any different today, except that a growing percentage
of society is so fortunate.

At the end of the day, we're all one human family and it's totally unimportant
who did what to get us to the promise land. All humans can take rightful pride
and ownership over the results of our collective effort.

------
glitchc
Mostly opportunity. I find many problems in computing very interesting across
diverse fields, despite the fact that I have a PhD (which usually implies
close study of a very narrow area). Am an applied researcher: I can’t do pure
theoretical work, but I can understand it in a knowledge domain, look at the
problem and find the appropriate solution given existing knowledge, often
developing new tech in bringing that idea or variant to life. I often borrow
from completely different areas, including biology, which is a gold mine of
elegant and efficient solutions. Phd means I often bring more rigour (better
quantification/rationale/metrics) to the solution that quite frankly wasn’t
possible before.

I know I can’t develop quantum mechanics from scratch and am happy with this
limitation. Would much rather use it to build a quantum drive anyways.

Being happy with your limitations is crucial for personal happiness. And lots
of sleep. It is needed.

------
starpilot
I found a tolerable job with friendly people in a city that I like. My manager
at said tolerable job gives me tasks to complete. In exchange, I get paid
money which I use to live.

~~~
teekert
But don't you feel like there are things out there, things you truly enjoy so
much that you will do them more than others and you will naturally start to
excel at them and someone might even pay you for it? Maybe not now or tomorrow
or next year, but there must be parts of your job that are not only tolerable
but actually nice... would it hurt you to try to get more if the nice and less
of the tolerable, year over year?

~~~
Zelmor
You suggest making my hobby my work. Think about that for a second.

~~~
teekert
I thought about it a lot, It's what I strive for, I'm liking it. It's more
like: I'm suggesting you get paid for doing your hobby.

~~~
csa
I suggest you try to have a frank conversation with any video gamer who makes
their living off of twitch and/or YT not named Ninja or Imaqtpie (and even
maybe these two. These folks love video games, but grow to dislike the game
they play for money.

It’s not as easy as it sounds to turn a hobby into a business and have it
still be fun. The only real time that happens is if the hobby is building
businesses (it happens).

~~~
teekert
Games are made to keep you occupied, to keep you engaged to give you a sense
of accomplishment without any real accomplishment. It's a bit of a hack if you
ask me. What really makes you feel accomplishment? What aspect in those games?
What do you enjoy? I get that a twitch channel has entertainment value and can
be work but in that sense (a source of income). But expecting to be paid for
pure, passive entertainment is pretty unrealistic.

Still, there must be a component of your work that you like. If not, there
must be some work out there that has such an element? I can not believe there
are humans that really only want to sit on a couch with a controller playing a
game. I think the situation is pretty troubling in that case. In that case you
are only consuming, that has never worked. Same goes for eating.

------
DenisM
Also, old medical records are extremely valuable for inferring correlations
between symptoms, diagnoses, treatments, etc. But it's a giant natural
language mess, sometimes hand-written. A huge field for NLP/ML/AI research,
and so I heard it's rather hot right now with major hospitals making major
investments.

------
bjelkeman-again
Initially I decided to work on something that interested me, so I ended up in
IT and gradually worked my way to the point when I could start my own company.

After some time I decided I wanted to work on things that makes a significant
difference to other people (preferably those that have it the hardest) and/or
the environment. It turns out there is a ton of stuff to do that I find give
great meaning to my life.

One of the organisations I helped create is
[https://Akvo.org](https://Akvo.org)

Akvo now has one of the largest databases of water wells and water sources,
covering primarily West Africa but also other regions, with a good data
collection and visualisation system. Additionally we have integrated field
usable water quality sensors with smartphones for faster and cheaper data
collection.

To answer the question: I work on both what I want to work on an what I think
needs to be worked on.

------
milancurcic
I never asked myself this question. I aim to work on what I enjoy and what's
fun. I don't 100% live it -- it's a daily challenge. We all got bills to pay
and it can be tempting to go for something more profitable but less fun. I
don't tend to seek out problems to solve, somehow problems find me. There's
always more of what I'd enjoy doing than what I realistically can with my
time.

I'm not talking about passion (I don't like that word). I mean what do you
consistently catch yourself doing in your spare time? What feels like not
work? What would you work on even if it paid nothing? What do you think about
while falling asleep? I think that what you enjoy and have fun doing is also
what you'd be (conveniently) most useful at. Anything else requires more
effort, willpower, energy, and may not be sustainable or healthy in the long
run.

------
GnarfGnarf
My grandfather got me interested in genealogy. I was haunted by the chain of
humble ancestors that link me back to prehistory. To live in hearts we leave
behind is not to die. I decided to develop a family history app to help others
tell the story of their family. Thirty years later I'm still having a blast.

~~~
Dragonai
This is actually a project I was looking to take on myself! I love preserving
my family's history (photos, stories, memories) and it's very important to me.
I'd like to develop some sort of central collection of everything that my
entire extended family can peruse, and that the future generations of my
family can maintain and update. I'd love to know what you're working on in
that space. Mind sharing? :)

------
aronsemle
It is a short life, so don't spend too much time on this. Whichever you pick
you likely won't be working on it the rest of your life anyway.

Healthcare or energy and AI are both big fields with great potential. I left a
10 year career in manufacturing and am now in healthcare. There is no way I
would have predicted or planned it. I just followed the opportunity.

Just find a niche you're interested in, work hard, be the best and it will
work out.

I don't subscribe to the "follow your passion message". It's easy to get
passionate about something you find success in. And for most of the people
that are uber rich now because they "found their passion", when you really
think about it this is one of the few reasons they can give that is socially
acceptable. Imagine if they said "because I'm smarter than you".

~~~
ams6110
"I was lucky" I think is socially acceptable and also pretty much the main
reason for most people.

------
Temasik
Just wane say most people have no time to think about this (outside western
countries) they just want to survive

~~~
tw1010
Maybe that's a sign that incentive structures are the most important (meta)
problem to work on.

Maybe the most important problem of all is to make it trivially easy for
people to solve the problem of this thread. (And not only easy, but
lucrative.) Once that mechanism is in action, you'd have done 100x more good
for the world than you'd have done choosing to work, say, in the energy sector
instead of AI.

------
enf
"We didn't work on (1) time travel, (2) teleportation, and (3) antigravity.
They are not important problems because we do not have an attack. It's not the
consequence that makes a problem important, it is that you have a reasonable
attack. That is what makes a problem important. When I say that most
scientists don't work on important problems, I mean it in that sense. The
average scientist, so far as I can make out, spends almost all his time
working on problems which he believes will not be important and he also
doesn't believe that they will lead to important problems."
[http://www.cs.virginia.edu/~robins/YouAndYourResearch.html](http://www.cs.virginia.edu/~robins/YouAndYourResearch.html)

------
zengid
> _It 's a short life, so I want to be careful with this decision, to avoid
> any future regrets._

I think you shouldn't worry too much about avoiding regrets. Just try to spend
at least a little bit of time towards your goals every day, and eventually
you'll get to where you want to be. It might be incredibly frustrating for a
while, but if you use that frustration and channel the negative energy into
working towards your goals, it will certainly pay off.

You will always look back and regret something. That is actually a good sign,
because it means that you've learned something from your experiences.

One thing I just re-discovered: keep a journal where you can log your daily
work. You'll realize that you actually accomplish a lot more than you would if
you hadn't kept track of your progress.

Best of luck.

------
ternaryoperator
I believe that service is a function of who you are, rather than what you do.
I have met people in healthcare who are superficial, while one of the deepest
thinkers I know spent his entire working life in insurance. Make your service
how you live your life: loving, real, generous, intelligent--so that whatever
your field of endeavor you will help the people in it and through them the
greater world.

After that, your choices will become clearer and in many ways, the choice of
work will matter less because it will be informed by who you are. Any choice
that interests you and that pays the bills well enough will likely be right
enough.

As Gandhi (I believe) once said (not verbatim): "Is the street sweeper or the
cobbler not noble by the honesty of his work and the kindness of his soul?"

------
beders
I don't think life is about solving problems at all. Since life is short and
there's no second attempt, strive for whatever makes you and your loved ones
happy and doesn't cause harm to others.

If that means working in a software job building the new facebook: more power
to do.

I.e. wrong question IMHO.

------
dfgert
Life is not meant to be controlled based on your understanding of world
because as human being we all suffer from subjectivity and fallacies. Learn to
silence your brain and feel the life around you and in yourself. Listen to it
and your role in this world would become apparent.

~~~
icebraining
How many people do you know who have tried that, and how did that work out for
them?

------
apo
Many of the most important technologies came from side hustles/projects, not
from a deliberate attempt to solve a problem:

\- Twitter sprang from a failed startup idea rendered obsolete by a tech giant

\- Apple grew from two guys making blue boxes for grins and pranks

\- The iPhone grew from Apple's experience in producing an MP3 player

\- Amazon started as an online book store

There are counterexamples, but they seem more rare (the light bulb, and most
of what Edison/Tesla did, for example).

The point is that it's very hard to identify good problems de novo. Instead,
problems tend to come to you if you're actively working on even modestly
relevant projects with an open mind.

So, you might try this: start a frivolous side project. No big commitments, no
major expectations. Then follow it wherever it takes you.

------
laythea
Try not to get too bogged down by not having a plan or a clear idea where to
go. This may seem like an unnatural state for our minds, but chaos is the
default state of nature.

Focus your mentalities on yourself (eg do what you want, not what you think
you should), and when the time comes for you to become aware of your calling,
you will become aware of it, unintentionally. Some never do, and that's OK, as
there is no requirement to.

Those that do, will find the path to success easier than those who
premeditated it, in my opinion.

Do what you love, not what you _think_ you should. This, with a positive
attitude and a dribble of lady luck should get you through.

At least that my plan :)

EDIT: I should add, for me, it hasn't worked out yet, but remember. Positive
attitude!

------
Iv
Energy and AI are totally needed.

AI can fuel research in every domain, including healthcare.

Energy is becoming the dominant cost of more and more things. And the
transition out of oil is, IMO, the most likely to be a civilization-ending
event if we don't do it correctly.

If you love on of these subjects, dive in. Let other well intentioned people
go into the other fields, we are many!

And to answer your question, when I was 14-15 yo I stumbled upon the notion of
post-scarcity and on the question and AI and what I did not know at the time
was called the technological singularity.

I think the creation of human-level AIs will be the most significant invention
since the invention of fire or agriculture so this has absorbed most of my
thoughts and focus in the last 20 years.

------
bookofjoe
On choosing a research problem: "If you're going to go fishing, use a big
hook." Albert Szent-Györgyi, Hungarian biochemist who won the Nobel Prize in
Physiology or Medicine in 1937. He is credited with being the first to isolate
vitamin C.

------
psmyrdek
Think and work on discovering your values. Values work as foundation for any
action or project you’re going to work on. If you were always focused on
things to do instead of this underlying foundation for everything, it can
literally change you.

------
jacknews
Both AI and energy are extremely fashionable, and already being worked by
plenty of smart people. Do you think you can have an impact there?

You could alternatively pick something that is not quite so fashionable. Eg
the food system, which will require very serious attention, and perhaps have
at least as much environmental impact as energy. There seem to be many areas
in need of improvement, including distribution, waste handling,
economics/politics/equality, arresting/reducing land use, innovating more
sustainable tastes, innovating production; synthetic meat, dairy, juices,
pulps, hydro-/aero-ponics, self-contained fish farms, etc.

------
anthonyriggi
You're just in the process of coming to terms with change. The only advice I
can give you about that is this: Recognize that change is not something to be
afraid of. It takes courage and certainty to choose because no one can make a
choice for you. You will be accountable for the path you take. The choice is
yours. Like you said, indecisiveness leaves you getting nothing done because
you know that you have to make a choice. I believe the silver lining you're
talking about is the decision you're most eager to make. Think about it as
long as you have to but the worst thing you can do is to not do anything :)

------
superice
So far I have been trying to eliminate repetitive tasks that can easily be
automated to make jobs more interesting. People using our software are usually
afraid to lose their jobs, but in practice their work just becomes more
exception handling than doing the repetitive tasks, which makes for a more
interesting filling of time during the workday. You would be amazed at how
many jobs there are that not much more than 'input this PDF we receive by
e-mail into this excel sheet' or something like that. That we improve
operational performance at container terminals is a nice side effect of this.

------
aj7
1\. You have to consider earning a living unless you’re wealthy or intend only
to be responsible for yourself. 2\. What you’re actually good at may be much
different than what you’re “interested” in. Interested has quotes because a
lot of people have extensive fantasies. 3\. What you’re actually good at may
be somewhat different than what you think you should be doing. 4\. At some
point, you must have the self-discipline to choose, accepting some limitations
by the necessary decision. 5\. There is no path to happiness. Rather, when you
accomplish something you notice it in passing.

------
baxtr
_...to avoid future regrets_

I’d be a bit careful with this presumption. Why optimize for a point in time
far in the future? Living your life such that you don’t regret it every single
morning seems to be more reasonable

------
kernx16
There is nothing stopping you from doing all 3 independently or combined. Give
your 110% if you decide to pick one to do currently, and maybe in a few years
or a couple decades, transition to another one.

I found that when I stuck trying to decide what to do, I ended up not doing
anything at all. I figured, if I just pick one, that is a start. There is
nothing stopping me from leaving that industry/field and going into a
different one, except myself. To solve problems requires action, go do
something and then you'll figure out that that was not the solution.

------
ineedasername
Given the option, and assuming some equivalence in quality of life by each
choice (none is more likely to require insane hours or burdensome travel
requirements etc.). And given equal talent in each area: I would recommend
choosing the one that most interests you, that inspires the most passion.

You're unlikely to be able to drive yourself as hard and therefore contribute
as much to an area you aren't as in interested in. Nor are you as likely to be
as happy and content in your life if you are working on problems that bore
you, even if their goals are noble.

------
peignoir
A quick tip used by the first VC (George Doriot) was to ask people what would
they do with $1b for example. This is a good way to know your natural north.
If you don’t know that then I guess try to know the people you enjoy / admire.
Also a last good motivation is to read Seneca on the shortness of life :
[https://archive.org/stream/SenecaOnTheShortnessOfLife/Seneca...](https://archive.org/stream/SenecaOnTheShortnessOfLife/Seneca+on+the+Shortness+of+Life_djvu.txt)

------
nestorD
In his "You and Your Research" talk, Hamming focusses on the selection of the
problem you should work on as a researcher. I believe it does apply even if
you are not in academics :
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a1zDuOPkMSw](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a1zDuOPkMSw)

(transcript :
[http://www.cs.virginia.edu/~robins/YouAndYourResearch.html](http://www.cs.virginia.edu/~robins/YouAndYourResearch.html))

------
tcgv
An advice a professor gave me at college a decade ago: Choose what you like,
and like what you've chosen.

I guess whatever path you decide to follow, you'll need resilience to achieve
impressive goals.

------
bullen
I always knew multiplayer was my passion, so I built a platform that would
change multiplayer for the better:

[http://fuse.rupy.se/about.html](http://fuse.rupy.se/about.html)

It took 20 years, 10 years to learn how I wanted to build it and 10 to
actually build it.

IMO healthcare is not a solution to anything, good food and people are much
better doctors.

Energy is not a solution; but the problem of this century, AI is complete
baloney.

I also learned to live like in the 18th century on wood for heat, dug-well for
water and perma-culture for food.

~~~
hartator
Pretty impressive. Are you working on this full time?

~~~
bullen
Thx, well I got many other projects, but this is the priority no 1.

------
FahadUddin92
My first problems were(completed both):

1\. Completing education (getting a degree from a good University) 2\.
Becoming financially independent.

I did both well. I write down a lot of thought daily in notebooks. It helps me
understand what I am thinking most about daily. If its very important and
valuable, I make it a problem I need to solve.

Nowadays I am interested to make my millions from tech. I can't focus because
I still don't understand my deep why for making the millions. Apart from being
able to be financially independent, its not very attractive.

------
Consultant32452
I solved whatever problem was handed to me by the employer that paid the most
while allowing me to live the lifestyle I wanted to live: free time, commute,
etc.

When I was younger I cared more about cool projects, or things that might be
recognizable by non-technical people. This was a mistake. The wisdom I'd like
to pass on is unless you're curing cancer, as you grow older things like your
family will be way more important. So for work, just avoid misery and spend
your clock cycles making family stuff work best.

------
mrdoops
I think my most valuable career choices have come from imagining what
potential sci-fi futures could be. What sort of stories would be told given
some technological problems solved in the coming years? Then I look for the
problems that are interesting and engaging and invest time there. It's
impossible for one person to build some utopian system that solves humanities
problems, but designing and imagining such a system at least provides some
insight as to where those future opportunities will be.

~~~
et2o
Example?

~~~
mrdoops
Take something like Augmented Reality, there's a lot for the imagination to
run with like reduced dependencies on physical location for high-fidelity
communication (less text, more full-body expression). Or we could imagine
dynamic tutorials: pop the hood in your car and see a live overlay of the
parts and ways to replace them.

So we take this imagined future and think about how aspects might be
implemented. What problems and barriers are in the way? If I'm interested in
hardware maybe I could tinker with Lidar sensors and software to model
physical spaces. If I'm interested in machine learning and statistics maybe
focus on object detection. Maybe you're more about design and UI and can focus
on the way people will want to interact with the digital overlay. Maybe you're
into architecture and can spend time thinking about how to design physical
spaces to integrate with the new augmented reality capabilities.

You're not going to solve every problem across those diverse domains, but you
can still imagine the possibilities and find areas of interest that you're
motivated to spend time in. I feel like this is what they mean by being
'upwind' of opportunity - you're not consuming paths set by others (downstream
effects) but what has a likelihood of future value and possibilities.

------
profalseidol
Whatever you decide, please make sure that it's for the benefit of the human
race and not for personal or your investor.

You have the luxury to decide what you wanna do. Not so many can do that. If I
wanna stop working on this shitty profit squeezing airline software, the
police will force me out of my roof and I will have to forage leftover food.

Ofc, I'm not telling you not to enjoy living. Everyone has the right to do so.
But you can do that without stepping over other people.

Take your time reading Confucius or Epicurus. Good luck!

------
sytse
I think it is the intersection of what is worthwhile to solve, what is
solvable, and what I can solve better than others.

For example reducing the risk of artificial general intelligence meets the
first two criteria but Sam Altman and Elon Mush already recruited the best
people in the world to join OpenAI. My contribution would not make a
difference.

Providing opportunity to people willing to migrate is something that is over-
served politically but under-served with for-profit initiatives. I hope to
make a difference there.

------
criminally_sane
I think you may find your answers here :

[https://80000hours.org/](https://80000hours.org/)

Also of interest, and the base for ^

[https://www.effectivealtruism.org/](https://www.effectivealtruism.org/)

More specific to your case :

[https://www.effectivealtruism.org/articles/three-impacts-
of-...](https://www.effectivealtruism.org/articles/three-impacts-of-machine-
intelligence-paul-christiano/)

------
hkmurakami
We work on the things that are at the intersection of what we want to work on,
what we are capable of working on (contributing to), and what the world
(customers) want to have us work on.

It's the same thing with charitable giving. Give to the cause that will
sustain your passion and connection to the cause. Disease in third world
countries may reduce the most suffering in the world, but helping others in
your own first world community is a "good" that should not be discounted.

------
cosenal
And what if I tell you that you can work on _BOTH_ AI and Healthcare at the
same time! (Add mindblown emoji). This is a shameless hiring plug for the
company where I work on, that is, Babylon Health.
[https://www.babylonhealth.com/careers-hub/careers-
hub/vacanc...](https://www.babylonhealth.com/careers-hub/careers-
hub/vacancies) Seriously, feel free to reach out if you are interested.

------
AnimalMuppet
I don't think the question, as stated, is useful. Any problem big enough to be
worth dedicating your life to solving is not likely to be solved by one
person. Even if it is, you are unlikely to be the one to do so.

That doesn't mean that you shouldn't work on such problems. But the question
seems like it's saying "I need to fix one of these in order to not waste my
life", which seems line an unhealthy way of trying to find one's identity.

------
bsenftner
YOU are not going to decide; individuals in positions of screening power are
going to evaluate you in contrast to their immediate needs, your education,
and more importantly "your fit" into their social / professional / political
framework. The only thing you can do is be the best version of you, you can be
and hope the individuals in their screening positions of power are like-
minded. This is the reality of careers.

------
armini
I found that the best way to make long term decisions is to pose the question
to 5 year old me and 55 year old me. \- 5 year olds are full of optimism and
dreams \- 55 year olds are full of wisdom and regrets of a life wasted

When you pose the question to yourself in that manner you’ll find that both
personalities tend to agree with each other and set you in the right direction
for what Ray Dallio terms “regret minimization strategy”

------
RHSeeger
The important thing for me is to work on small problems that flex my
abilities. Solving global problems isn't something that I strive towards.
Figuring out a good way to speed up information retrieval in the context of my
work (internal cache vs external cache vs denormalized tables, etc) is
something that makes me happy. I'm happy doing whatever work lets me work on
those small, difficult problems.

------
ianai
Try them all somehow. I’m not sure what you mean by healthcare, but that field
can be misleading. There’s always a strong demand for nurses, for instance,
partially because being a nurse is different from what people expect nursing
to be like. Many people leave nursing sooner than it took to get into it.

Trying to find The One True Solution is itself a problem. One approach is to
try in ways that failure isn’t tragic.

------
tvanantwerp
Though a long read, you might find this interesting as it attempts to answer
the question "When should I think that I may be able to do something unusually
well?": [https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/pRibkeqBa2AxrpgT6/living-
in-...](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/pRibkeqBa2AxrpgT6/living-in-an-
inadequate-world)

------
jaeh
" they sentenced me to thirty years of boredom, for trying to change the
system from within. " \- leonard cohen, first we take manhattan.

------
dmitripopov
Primary project: what you REALLY want to work on

Side project: what you think makes you a good person (or whatever drives you
NOT to do what you enjoy working on).

------
burnt1ce
It seems like you need to do some good-old soul searching. You need to figure
out what you want out of life and from your career, which is a lot harder than
it sounds. Once you've figured that out, it'll be a lot easier how you should
plan your career. It will probably be a moving target because people tend to
get bored at what they do and need change once in awhile.

------
augbog
For people who feel a little lost I highly recommend reading the book "The
Defining Decade: Why your twenties matter" by Meg Jay.

------
Francute
Basically, before finishing school, I've decided that would be better to make
that choice if I had real experience first. So, I've started working on both.
8 months later I figured that I loved working as a programmer with engineers
and that was my decision. As a plus, one year later I enrolled myself in
university and was easier for me than most of my mates.

------
oscarteg
I have been "struggling" with this myself for a long time. It doesn't affect
my day to day life but I'm still searching what to do with my life. So much I
want to do and so little time.

I saw some mentionings of philosophers. I would love to read what philosophers
said about "regret". Does somebody have a list of books or sources to read
about this subject?

------
buboard
> It's a short life, so I want to be careful with this decision, to avoid any
> future regrets.

Obviously then, the first one to solve is longevity

------
DennisP
Why don't you think energy needs to be worked on?

I wouldn't argue except you said energy is something you _want_ to work on.
Better low-carbon energy is one of the most important needs on the planet
right now. Solar is coming along well but fully decarbonizing needs solutions
that are a long way from production, like much better storage, advanced
nuclear, etc.

------
pinouchon
I chose to work on AI (AGI research / probabilistic programming / deep
learning). Choosing wasn't hard, but getting to work on it was: How do you
make a living if you first need to educate about the topic for a long time?
Answer: you don't, research is about endlessly educating yourself.

If you want more details, ping me at pinouchon at gmail com.

------
jv22222
The answer for me has been “work on what I want to work on” and it has
gradually shifted to be something that helps other people.

So, for me, I think you’re better off starting doing something you want and
seeing where that takes you.

Also, this: [https://sivers.org/hellyeah](https://sivers.org/hellyeah)

------
eranation
Don’t let indecision become your decision, like mine. I’m in my 40s, and while
I’m happy in general, my chances of doing something really aligned with
solving the problems I’m passionate about diminish rapidly. Just pick
something and flow with it. Life will find a way to guide you as long as you
don’t just sit it out.

------
bpm11
Solve what's meaningful for you today.

If something more meaningful arises, you can switch course in the future.

State upfront that you will not hold regrets, for to regret a decision implies
that you had knowledge of how it would turn out when you originally decided.
You do not have any such idea - so there is no room for regrets.

------
bethybees
Can you not find a way to make small circles in each direction you want to be
working... set hours or days working in one Circle then switching...doing the
same in the other Circle... ultimately being able to draw the circles together
eventually or realizing it's time to let go of one....

------
ouid
>it's a short life, so I want be careful to avoid future regrets.

Seems like you mostly regret your life being short.

------
danbo_95
Learning to get best out of wherever you are is what works. Regret and other
feeling are supposed to come, they prove you are a human, but you have to
control them and pick up the best for you by contributing your best and always
being on your toes to get things done.

------
userulluipeste
This is the recurring dilemma of choosing something out of passion (what I
want) or utility (what I should). Passion gives energy, utility gives meaning.
There's a balance between the two. Some are lucky to have both, most end up
with something that has none.

------
siliconc0w
These aren't immutable choices. Go talk to people in those industries. Send
emails, setup lunches/coffees, take online courses, volunteer/itern and try to
get some experience.

You can be equally successful, productive, happy, or miserable no matter the
direction.

------
thinkloop
AI will probably be instrumental in solving healthcare, and abundent clean
energy is one of the most important factors for a population's health, wealth
and prosperity, do what you love. Would have been tougher if you were wanting
to play violin.

------
gh1
In my opinion, the best problem to solve are your own problems - both
emotional and material.

------
paulie_a
You probably won't ever directly solve an important problem. Find a job with
interesting problems you can work on. Work hard collect your paycheck.

If you want to start a company to solve a problem you are now sales person
first. The tech is nearly irrelevant.

------
twodave
To paraphrase scripture, it isn’t so much about what you choose to do as it is
how you choose to go about it. Whatever you find for yourself to do, give it
your very best. Do that, and there’s very little chance you will have regrets
at the end.

------
stewbrew
Healthcare is a rather complicated field if you are not already working in
healthcare. Also, healthcare is highly regulated.

It really depends on what you did before but green renewable energy sounds
interesting to me (who to some extent works in healthcare :-).

------
estsauver
Hey, I struggled with this question too. It can hang up a lot of very smart
people in a challenging way.

A few thoughts:

\- Sector of business and the problems you want to solve can end up being kind
of orthogonal. I knew I wanted to have a big impact on some of the world's
poorest people. I ended up working in agtech which at first had no impact on
the world's poorest folks, it just made a few people very rich actually. I
broke off and started a startup in the space 3 years ago that's now using
agtech to help the world's smallest farmers radically improve their incomes.
It takes time, but I wouldn't get too hung up on the sector to work in, I'd
focus on what's driving you. If you want to work in healthcare to help people
in your community, remember that helping people in your community is the goal
and healthcare is just one possible medium.

\- I really like Peter Thiel's classnotes from the startup class he taught at
Stanford. They really changed my world view on what a successful company/life
would be for me. I know he's become somewhat of a pariah in the tech community
for his Trump support, but this work is pretty apolitical and really
excellent.

------
pwagle
I'm reminded of this talk by Richard Hamming:
[http://www.cs.virginia.edu/~robins/YouAndYourResearch.html](http://www.cs.virginia.edu/~robins/YouAndYourResearch.html)

------
cmax
To the degree that you can pursue both or combine them, do so, do not try to
live your life like [https://www.xkcd.com/761/](https://www.xkcd.com/761/)

To the degree that you have to make decisions under uncertainty, try to
minmax.

To the degree that you can't reconcile what different pieces of you want, or
that other people want of you, or that you want of other people, learn to
negotiate.

To the degree that you are really stuck, the world works a little like
Miegakure, changing the question might free you.

To the degree that those don't free you from uncertainty, reduce the scope of
planning and relax the goals, expand them as you master the environment.

Not making a decision is itself a decision that guarantees failure and
maximizes regret.

Advice can be given, but ultimately, it is a hit or miss that depends on how
you tick.

What I would do is, write an essay about it. You need to formulate your
arguments, and convince yourself, to your own standard. Answer your own
questions, and do any research you might need if you are at a loss of words.

If you reach a question in this same class, apply this comment recursively.

This is the best I can do without attempting to write my own essay.

------
cherrygarcia
In terms of work I’ll look at the overall purpose of the organization. Does it
exist soley to make money? Does it do so at the detriment of others? Or does
it contribute positively somehow towards the improvement of peoples lives?

------
late2part
Richard Hanning has good advice for this:
[http://www.cs.virginia.edu/~robins/YouAndYourResearch.html](http://www.cs.virginia.edu/~robins/YouAndYourResearch.html)

------
atemerev
Why not both? I am a software engineering consultant working in many fields
(mostly in finance, but occasionally in such exotic fields as nuclear security
or epidemic modeling).

The entire notion of a “career” is outdated. It ended back in 1980s.

------
jonasaltman
What a question and one that I think more and more - certainty than any time
before In history will be contemplating and most importantly, acting upon.
I’ve co-written an article on it and will post here soon...

------
z3t4
I wanted to cure cancer and work on new propulsion systems for rockets ... I
am currenty working on skinning a yak ... my advice, dont go at it alone, team
up with others! and if you have the option choose life.

------
nicky0
I usually start by deciding what trousers to put on and take it from there.

------
mysterydip
I think what you want to work on (energy, AI) has the capability of helping or
enhancing the work of others doing what you believe should be worked on
(healthcare). Not a zero-sum game in my opinion.

------
capt_numbnut
I heard this once... "If you don't know where you're going, any road can take
you there". Just start doing something, anything, if it's not the right thing
you'll know.

------
crimsonalucard
Likely you won't work on any of the three. There are decision points in your
career where you are given a limited set of options. The outcome of those
options is largely unpredictable.

------
yellowapple
Do all three: AI-controlled backup power solutions for hospitals. :)

------
amadk
Thank you everyone for all your responses and resources. I wasn't expecting
such an immense response. I read every single comment and I am very grateful
for all the advice.

------
DrNuke
Life ultimately chooses for you: the answer to your question will depend on
your relationships with other people (living or dead) and the facts that
happen because of them.

------
aaronhoffman
I used the price system to determine which problems were collectively the most
valued and therefore tried to solve the problems that paid the most money.

------
RichardHeart
The answer I think is in the question. "Lifetime" If whatever you do gets you
a longer health span, then you can do lots of other things too.

------
rmdoss
I dont think most people choose that (or even have a choice).

Whatever luck you get on your first job or whatever your pays more, becomes
the problems you are solving.

------
ajcodez
Work on what interests you. My grandpa lived and breathed medicine and
researched the intestines for like 60 years. There’s thousands just like him.

------
heurist
I try to find the intersection of my interests. You'd be surprised by the
opportunities that are available when you know what to look for.

------
pmarreck
Just try to be a good actor and make a little money. If you are getting paid
at all to do something you enjoy at all, you’re ahead of the game

------
zachlatta
What am I uniquely positioned to do that, if successful, will have expotential
impact (where impact = quality adjusted life years created)?

------
frereubu
Both energy and healthcare are important. Choose the one you want to work on
because you'll make more of an impact in the long run.

------
benrawk
Have kids. Your main problem then is to feed them, keep them clothed, keep
them relatively happy, and educate them (all surprisingly non-trivial problems
with lots of learning along the way, especially the last two). Pursue career
goals as much as possible, but conditional on having acceptable solutions to
kid problems mentioned. Simplifies things, and provides a good option in case
of failure on work problems (“Work today sucked, but at least I’ve got these
great kids!”). Constraints can be good!

------
booknomads
I am trying to solve the problems in front of me. In the end, if I manage to
save one life I will call it a win. (even if it is my own)

------
devaroop
I've the same thought as yous. I still don't have any solution. Please share
your decision once you've made one.

------
scotty79
You will regret either way so just do what pays best, keep friends and use
money to feel safe and for small cheap pleasures.

------
ada1981
Maybe you can do both.

How about you develop some sort of portable energy system for remote hospitals
that includes an AI diagnostic system.

------
borderless-inc
Identify the intersection of value, skill and enjoyment.

Value = what the world needs.

Skill = what you're good at, or can become good at.

Enjoyment = what you like to do.

------
MarsAscendant
I'm a writer and a designer, so there's not a particular problem I'm solving
along my primary path. It's more of a taking the rock higher up the hill,
closer to the stars. It's satisfying, but there will be no end to storytelling
_or_ design in the foreseeable future.

That said, there are goals. I derive all of them from struggling in the same
fields, so that others struggle less.

I'm currently researching for something I dubbed Common Formatting, where any
text-editing would allow one to introduce styles natively, as opposed to using
extraneous layers of formatting (Rich Text editors in Windows, for example).
The reason? I want to be able to emphasize stuff in my notes without having to
use something as heavy as MS Word.

So far, Unicode-native codepoints for "different type of weight/slant/figure",
combining like emoji do currently, seems to be the best option. Basically, it
implies system-native variable font support.

I'm also in the very early stages of writing about a more resilient and to-
the-point system design, dubbed Natural Systems. People often struggle with
implementing changes on all levels, from personal to national. I'd like to
research that and figure out a better way to do this. It's more of a
Buckminster Fuller type of work, and I don't expect to _solve_ anything, but I
do come up with an incremental upgrade, so is the better.

"Natural" in the name comes from the simple fact that one should use the
traits already present within the system, as opposed to forcing one onto it.
For example, following a diet is a problem for a lot of people. My guess is –
it's because people don't want to _follow a diet_ : they just want to get
slimmer. Trying to adhere to a set of principles foreign to you is akin to
hitting your head against the wall: after some time, you'll go "This is
nonsense, it hurts, to hell with it, I'm going back to not doing that".

Building a _natural system_ means building something that works because its
parts align in motivation and resources. It's one thing to promise yourself
not to eat any more cupcakes. It's another thing to cut out most of the
carbohydrates from the diet because of _this_ research and _that_ study, while
still finding sufficient satisfaction in different kinds of food.

The idea behind a _natural system_ is to allow for achieving the goal with as
little friction as possible. If I can figure out and describe the basic
principles in an approachable form, maybe I can help a few people make better
decisions. (INB4 someone else has already done it, and it didn't go down that
well.)

------
Sophistifunk
What problems to solve? Paying the rent.

------
vagab0nd
Work on curing aging.

Once we solve that problem, we'd have "unlimited" lifetime to work on anything
else.

------
squirrelicus
Your goal should be to find meaning in what you do, not finding something
meaningful to do.

Understand the distinction.

------
mostafab
Work on AI for chemistry. It has applications to both Energy and Healthcare.
Where are you based?

~~~
bias_var
I would like to get more info on this. Can you please post more resources?

------
justinhj
Just do something and things will work themselves out. There are infinite
choices in life.

------
wsaryoo
read this and find ways

[http://book.watnyanaves.net/pdf/viewer.php?bookid=a_constitu...](http://book.watnyanaves.net/pdf/viewer.php?bookid=a_constitution_for_living_thai-
eng.pdf)

------
randcraw
I think you'll want to first choose your principles and set some priorities,
and only then choose your best path.

At age 61, I'm nearing the end of my professional journey. Initially, I chose
jobs that solved "sweet" technical problems, often AI-related or
computationally hard, on behalf of the military or intelligence agencies. In
time, I began to question the value of those missions and left to seek a
legacy involving less "collateral damage".

After a stint in academia (which I eventually felt was too tangential to real
world concerns to make a real difference), I moved into healthcare. After 13
years, I'm still involved in AI (image analysis), but here it's on behalf of
making drugs that treat diseases that are largely incurable: cancer,
alzheimer's and ALS, HIV vaccines, etc.

Yes, the short term economic priorities of large corporations are sometimes
troubling. But my role isn't to maximize profits; it's to enable scientific
breakthroughs that can make lives better and longer. And I can live with that.
Likewise, I think you'll need to decide these things for yourself.

------
pier25
You can't avoid future regrets. Focus on the domains that you care about.

------
bobsil1
Do something that uniquely pulls our species forward by decades, if you can.

------
ai_ia
Sometime during my undergrad in Chemical Engineering, I figured out that I
wasn't really good at that and couldn't imagine the rest of my life as a
chemical engineer. I had some interest in Neuroscience but didn't really know
how to transition to that.

Four years ago, During a chemical engineering research internship at a
Canadian University, I stumbled upon Geoff Hinton's Lecture on deep learning.
I don't remember much about what he said but I was fascinated. I started
looking at more related lectures at
[http://videolectures.net/](http://videolectures.net/). I wasn't understanding
much, but I was making some progress.

After I returned from the internship for another year at college, I focused
entirely on learning whatever on the internet has to offer on Computer Science
and AI / ML. My grades tanked but it frankly didn't matter to me. I would
watch lectures, read books and read papers. After a while, I started
forgetting stuff I had read. I figured I should be writing it down and having
a strictly disciplined approach towards self-learning.

I started writing things down by pausing videos. It was not a good experience
and my handwriting would start getting messier, the longer I wrote. I figured
I should be writing in Latex. Started making notes in Org-Mode which export to
a Tufte Latex Book. IMHO Tufte Latex Book templates are amazing.

I also made a lot of Anki Decks. But I don't think I ever used them more than
once. There was not really a drive to do these things. I mean these were
obviously important to learning something but they weren't really the things I
was interested in.

The more videos I watched, the more I became convinced that the video-based
platform is a bad way of learning online. They provide quick introductions but
for deeper stuff, you need to read books. That's when I realized that there is
a gap in the education platform offering online.

I had some thoughts about what should be the ideal system look like. I made a
small script in python that teaches the user using in somewhat Socratic
method, makes notes for him, generates flashcards from notes and reminds him
of when to revise by calculating the Retention Score using Ebbinghaus
Formula[1]. That was two years ago. I decided to pursue the idea. Quit my job
a year back to concentrate full time. Right now it does a lot more. I will
release soon. And bot's name is Primer. A personal tutor.

I am convinced that a bot which teaches difficult things is what the world
right now. I might be wrong but it is something I can see myself working on
improving the rest of my life.

I think writing all this doesn't really help you, but my point is pretty
simple. Pursue things that you feel require your immediate attention or what
you think you feel like doing right now. It may lead to somewhere else and
which in return will take you somewhere else. But if you pursue enough
randomly seemingly unconnected things, it may result in you finally have an
idea which you would be convinced worth pursuing your life. Just my two cents.

P.S: I know I should be releasing early and getting feedback. I have
consciously chosen to ignore that advice for a while.

[1]:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forgetting_curve](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forgetting_curve)

------
DanielBMarkham
Like most internet commenters, I have horrible advice. Also like most internet
commenters, I am happy to share it with you. (Nobody can give you advice like
this. "What gives my own life meaning?" is a question that you and you alone
are left with. Welcome to existentialism!)

For me, there are four questions:

\- Where are my weaknesses/blind spots? You can't fix all of them, and I'll
never be a good mechanic no matter how much I try, but my feeling is that you
have to work on weak areas _at least enough so that you are not cognitively
crippled by them_. After that you have to have a team to help you avoid
problems.

\- How do I really know what people need? Sure, I could read a Forbes article
about a muppet shortage. It might even move me to give to a charity. I might
then see all of my friends giving to muppet charities and talking about their
plight. But what the hell does that mean, aside from the fact that if I
announce I'm doing something about muppets I get a lot of positive attention?
Which leads me to the next question:

\- Am I in this for others or for myself? The important thing here is that
there are no right or wrong answers. If you never work on yourself you'll be
crap at helping others, so trying to choose "helping others" option is
probably the wrong one, at least long-term. Best stick to yourself for a
while. (Some people do this wonderful cop-out where they say "if I'm building
something the market pays for, I must be both helping others and myself!". I
don't disagree with this, but I think it dodges the question, which is
probably more like "what can I do _on-purpose for the sole benefit of others
that will actually directly help them in a way I can understand?_ )

\- How am I sure I am exposed to enough in life to actually make a good
choice? If you know nothing, run across somebody who needs a piece of bread
and give it to them, you've picked a problem and solved it. If you know
somebody who dumps high-quality food every night and drive a truck from their
spot to a place where hundreds can eat, you've done the same thing -- but it
helps more because you know more. So how are you sure you know enough to not
waste your life giving out pieces of bread to 1500 people when you could have
taken the same amount of energy and fed 1,000,000? That's the crux of the
thing, at least for me.

I spent my early life working on my weaknesses while learning a lot of
technical stuff. Then I switched off to working for the highest rates
possible, traveling all over the world meeting people and solving whatever
problems _they_ had, not worrying about my own. I used the market to help
guide me to people who were in some sort of distress. Then I looked for
patterns and root causes.

As I was doing that, I went back and deepened my education in the liberal
arts: philosophy, rhetoric, writing, understanding and appreciating various
forms of art, and so on.

I am happy where I ended up. I am also content in knowing that I couldn't have
short-circuited it by trying to "jump ahead" and solve world hunger at age 20.
There are probably a bunch of folks out there who could do this. From
observation I have found these people are 1) extremely smart, and 2)
profoundly ignorant. They don't know a lot of stuff and they're happy not
knowing. They just have problem X they are going to solve one way or another.
I was never happy not-knowing, so I had to work it all out on my own.

ADD: Once you decide, of course, there's actually making it happen. That's an
entirely-different question. You could decide the right way to cure cancer.
You could know enough to come up with a cure. But that doesn't mean you can
get anybody to listen or actually make a difference. (grin)

------
pvaldes
> How did you decide what problems to solve in your lifetime?

one at a time

------
garmaine
Work on longevity so you won't have to decide.

------
robnite
Do the thing that is most available to you first

------
JofArnold
For day to day I solved this by working for BigHealth. Their mission to get
the world back to good mental health perfectly aligns with what I feel to be
one of the most important issues facing humanity. From that perspective I’m
sorted. But I’m also currently spending a lot of time thinking about 20-30
years into the future. I don’t have any answers but I’m reading various
sources of ideas from sci fi to Marx to economics to philosophy to psychology.
I’m hoping to get insights about fundamental long term human behaviour by
looking at history and science. Good luck to you :)

------
nastypants
Lulz. It sounds like you don’t have kids. If kids are in your future then do
that before asking this question. They will guide the rest of your life.

~~~
TeMPOraL
Recursively applied to the kids, and their kids, that sounds like a recipe for
no contribution and no solving of problems.

------
heidar
Whatever you do, have fun, joke around.

------
1penny42cents
[https://youtu.be/JdAKO3b8oLc](https://youtu.be/JdAKO3b8oLc)

------
mattlondon
Unfortunately it comes down to money I believe.

You did not say how old you are, how long you think you have left, or if you
are wealthy already.

For me it comes down to a question of what pays the best (or has the realistic
potential to pay the most in the near-to-medium term) for my current or near-
to-medium term skills. I need money to live my life and do things that are
meanginful and important to me and my family. Selfish? perhaps. But I live a
very comfortable & happy life with a very easy but well-paid 9-5 job and can
now donate large sums of money to charities and people who want to do more
useful things in many different fields (i.e. more than a single person could
ever devote their attention to) - to quote Homer Simpson: Money can be
exchanged for goods and services.

 _Money makes the world go around as they say, so IMO it is worth finding the
function that maximises that._

If money is equal between what you want vs what you feel you should, go with
what you _want_ vs what you feel is the most important.

The reason I say that is that what feels most important now (e.g. you mention
healthcare) may not still be important in the middle-term, so you might work
on something you dont like but feel is worthy, only to have that problem
"solved" by someone else at some point in the future, leaving you with a load
of wasted time and regrets about being morally-worthy and "sacrificing" your
career/life on something you did not actually enjoy or want to do but that you
felt someone-really-ought-to-be-doing-this, but then ultimately you and your
work is now effectively redundant because someone else did it
better/cheaper/faster.

E.g. take computer vision. People have been working with LIDAR and things like
depth perception algorithms and all sorts of stuff for years and years and
years (think OpenCV et al) in an effort to make computers "see", then out of
seemingly nowhere deep learning and CNNs come along and now pretty much anyone
with a graphics card can train up a network in a weekend that out-performs
decades of research into "traditional" computer vision techniques. With
healthcare I can only imagine that this is worse - you could spend years
working on a treatment for something, only for a cheaper/better one to come
out from a competitor and make your work worthless, or some breakthrough to
open up a more promising area of research again making your work worthless.

tl;dr - YMMV, I think its ok to be selfish in what you chose to work on. Trust
your gut. If you _want_ to work on Healthcare go for it, but if you _want_ to
work on something else than that is ok too.

------
rdiddly
There's so much to unpack here.

First of all if your experience is anything like mine was, the idea that
you're choosing how to spend "the rest of your life" (and the _pressure_ that
comes with that idea), is the source of the paralysis. Life is both chaotic
and a smorgasbord so I very much doubt that you'll be spending your entire
life at one thing. Oh sure, some people do, but A) some people end up not
being able to (because life is chaotic) and B) some people don't want to (and
they don't have to, because life is a smorgasbord).

I was in group B and I've had from 3 to 5 careers (depending how you look at
it), over the course of 30 years. I'm not saying that's better; but my point
is, the "rest of your life?" Depending whether you're A or B: A) you should be
so lucky, or B) that's a prison sentence. It's not what to do forever; it's
what to do _next_. Humans are great at deciding what to do _next_.

Secondly, for this particular question, making any decision is probably more
important than making the "right" decision. Or you could say it another way:
There are no wrong decisions. We don't choose the right path; the path is
wherever we walk. We make the path by walking. And even better, anything can
lead to anything else. Especially if we're talking about working with
computers, which are used in every field. But more broadly, everything
prepares you for everything else, usually in ways you wouldn't anticipate. If
what you do _next_ puts you in a place that seems wrong, then in what you do
_next_ after that, you can change. But you won't know right from wrong until
you get into it a little bit. I don't believe such things can be planned.
"Theory" takes you only so far.

Third: How did I decide what problems to solve? I have always chosen to solve
my own problems. Which is not as selfish as it sounds; any problem I happen to
share with others, I am solving their problem too. And as it so happens, I
actually have a lot in common with a lot of people, including having the same
problems, so it works out to our mutual benefit. It's important to realize one
is not some sort of weird randomly-generated freak, nor a "special unique
snowflake" as they said in Fight Club (which I quote in my HN profile and
which you should probably go watch or read). These two ideas about oneself are
mirror images of each other, one negative, one positive, but both narcissistic
as hell and ultimately self-defeating. You are like most people. Solve your
own problems and you will solve a lot of people's problems.

Tangent: I learned that as a musician. (Speaking of weird unrelated careers.)
When writing a song, I wrote what I liked, a.k.a. what I thought sounded good,
a.k.a. what I wanted to hear. I wasn't sure how it would be received, but fuck
it, at least I liked it. Well it turned out to be a big boost to my self-
confidence and my trust in my own instincts, when I noticed that the more I
liked something I wrote, the more popular it tended to be. It started to dawn
on me that (as I said above) I have a lot in common with other people, and if
I follow those instincts and make those particular decisions, I am
representing a large cohort of other people who will approve of it. Sure there
are those who won't agree. Let them find someone else to write songs for them
then. Or write their own! (lazy-asses!)

Anyway applying that same idea to engineering and the solving of problems: My
primary interest is in solving my own problems. It's inherently practical,
because if a given problem is not one that I personally have, I won't have any
hedonistic, selfish interest in it, thus I will be lacking that particular
component of human drive, and either my work will suffer, or I will suffer;
likely both. I'll be that much less motivated, and that much more likely to
become discouraged in the face of setbacks, etc. etc. This is inherently a
hedonistic argument - do what feels good. Things that feel good are natural
and easy, and at least for the simpler pleasures, are usually based on having
conferred some evolutionary advantage in the past. Reproduction being the only
one that will trick you into propagating the species at the expense of your
own more-modern interests, so beware of that one! But otherwise: you are drawn
to things that feel good, for a reason. You were made to be the type of
organism for which shit smells bad. Shit smells bad, not because it's shit,
but because humans who liked the smell and taste of shit were quickly removed
from the gene pool through starvation or disease. You should instead follow
your instinct to eat food.

For the same hedonistic reasons, if your decision is, as you frame it, between
that which you want to work on, and that which you should work on, what you
want to work on wins every time. Every time. You can't sustain motivation
based on a "should." All the philandering and molesting priests should
convince you of that. A "want to" will help you surmount challenges and avoid
getting sidetracked. (Unless, like me, you _wanted_ to be sidetracked!) On the
other hand, and speaking of sidetracking, a "want to," will likely change.
That's OK. Don't let that tempt you toward a "should" though. A "should," you
actually have no idea about and neither does anybody. Nobody knows what
"should" happen or "should" be, always remember that. That's my take. But see,
when a "should" is actually a "want to," then a should can be legit. Some
people are motivated by the desire to serve; they live for shoulds. That is
great. But they are still pursuing want-to's.

Ignore A and B from above for the following. A.Dispose(); B.Dispose();

In high school I learned a little bit of A. My dad also did A. (It was his 2nd
or 3rd career so I guess it runs in the family.)

But to be different from Dad, I pursued a degree in B.

But then I suffered a life trauma and ended up not pursuing a career in B.

Instead I did C, and experimented with A. Wasn't ready for A though, so stuck
with C.

At some point I started doing D as a side thing too.

Eventually discovered E, liked it, did it for 7-8 years.

But it wasn't as lucrative as B. One day someone found out I knew B and said,
jeez you could probably double your salary if you did B. I suddenly said hey
yeah money is nice (I had started to give a shit about it by then), so what
about B? Well I went back and revisited B. Made progress, but after 2 years,
found I didn't actually like B all that much after all. At this point it had
been 20 years since my first decision to do B, so yeah no wonder.

Tried C again, and started relying on D for the first time as a moneymaker.
Did all right with it but as soon as an opportunity arrived to do E again, I
went back to E. And realized, jeez I'm too old to enjoy C anymore, and D sucks
as a career (it was better as a hobby). So I was glad to leave both.

Then through the E job, rediscovered a variation of A. Liked A a lot suddenly,
because I was using it to _solve my own problems_ , and solving the same
problems for the people I worked with. That's where I am today.

A is programming. D is music. B, C and E are all different roles in the same
industry, that shall remain nameless so nobody links my real identity with
rdiddly and his more controversial comments on HN.

So arguably because B, C, and E are in the same industry, that might put the
lie to my idea that "everything leads to everything else." But no, I was
simply lazy and looking for cheap ways of (again) solving my own problems (in
that case paying rent). With funding and time I still believe I could've gone
to school for something totally different and transitioned to that, I just
chose to make it easy on myself and transition to something more closely
related. Also it so happened I was interested in that industry (as I was when
I first chose B).

Anyway that's my take, good luck.

------
fsloth
I do what interests me.

------
HeavyStorm
The road not taken.

------
kingkool68
I ask my wife.

------
crawfordcomeaux
I peacefully & mindfully coevolve with all life by collaboratively learning to
sustainably contribute to all life's needs in fluid ways and joyfully
embodying science and art, in love. This is my mission statement.

I want to live. I do not exist in a vacuum and everything is interconnected,
even if simply by way of quantum fields. Therefore, it makes since that I need
to contribute to all life I'm connected to, which includes my environment. I
choose a life of serving life because if I'm not intentionally serving life,
then I'll only be contributing to it on accident and contributing to death the
rest of the time. I prefer a less haphazard approach to life, so I
intentionally choose service.

I came about my life's purpose progressively.

First, I became an info addict when young in response to trauma. A few years
ago, I entered into recovery. I'm one of a handful of self-identified info
addicts in recovery I know of, so I had to start solving the problem of how to
recover from an addiction to something that is ever-present and freely
available. That's how I started working on addiction/codependency recovery,
neuroplastic healing, nonviolent communication, and mindfulness.

In the throes of relapse (which looked like literally spending every waking
hour in front of a screen playing games, watching porn, or researching
addiction-related things), I encountered a research device that can wirelessly
and covertly detect human emotions through walls for multiple people at a time
while they're sitting still or moving.
([http://eqradio.csail.mit.edu](http://eqradio.csail.mit.edu)) This was just
before the 2016 US Presidential election. Reading about the device freaked me
out because it was clear to me that a large portion of the US's population
isn't emotionally responsible and struggles with unidentified codependent
patterns/characteristics, meaning they're all ripe for emotional manipulation.
It occurred to me we don't have a design theory to inform how to create things
that responsibly operates on emotions, preserves meaningful connection, is
anti-addictive, and respects attention. I wanted to continue to create things
(I'm a computer scientist), so I started developing what I call a scientific
theory of mindful design.

During the first month of working on that, I came across research indicating
the brain encodes information in a binary manner
([https://singularityhub.com/2016/12/07/this-one-equation-
may-...](https://singularityhub.com/2016/12/07/this-one-equation-may-be-the-
root-of-intelligence/)). I didn't take it to mean brains operate the way
computers do, but did take it to suggest we may be able to reason about them
in a similar manner. A week later, I watched this video on Fully Abstract
Compilation, which describes the theory behind how to construct a language so
programs in other languages can be automatically translated into the target
language ([https://youtu.be/Hylji4ezQHE](https://youtu.be/Hylji4ezQHE)). This
got me thinking that we could construct a human programming language that's
universally usable if we can understand the brain from a category theoretic
perspective. That's when I found this book & started working on learning
category theory ([https://g.co/kgs/jKELdT](https://g.co/kgs/jKELdT)).

A couple months later, while researching emotions, I found perceptual set
theory (the idea that we construct reality by filtering information through
perceptual sets comprised of beliefs, emotions, intentions, and
behavior/thought patterns). I realized the Buddhist concept of love could be
formulated as a simple perceptual set: the belief of equanimity, emotion of
joy, intention of kindness, and patterns of compassion. I started looking for
more simple perceptual sets, thinking they could be useful ways to embody
concepts. I've so far defined sets for science and art.

Differentiable Neural Computers ([https://deepmind.com/blog/differentiable-
neural-computers/](https://deepmind.com/blog/differentiable-neural-
computers/)) came out around the same time & inspired in me the idea for a
human-oriented self-programmable model. At this point, I realized it'd make
more sense to hypothesize things and test them out on myself, rather than
develop the skills to prove things theoretically.

After months of hacking myself through dramatic personality changes, it
occurred to me that using any accurate model of a human could be used to model
human interaction to some degree. I also realized self-programming, when
applied to multiple people, could lead to intentional cultures designed for
specific purposes. So then I started working on culture design. I also
realized all these practices I'd been developing for myself led me to join a
minority class because I'd hypothesized gender could be intentionally expanded
beyond the limits of binary gender and then started cultivating my
genderfluidity. Ultimately, everything I was doing was founded, in part,
around a system of beliefs (ie. perceptual sets), and it seemed like what I
was doing could pass legal tests to determine if something's a religion. I
figured it'd be even easier to pass the test if all the science was packaged
in an intentionally designed religion, so I began designing Iggnnominism, a
religion of absurdity inspired by rock n roll, modern culture, computer
science, math, psychology, and neuroscience. Then, I began living it as a
monk, though I arguably already had been & it could be said I was simply
discovering the religion & simply putting labels on it.

This was about 1.5 years ago. Now, I live with my partner and our 2 month old.
I continue to work on everything in this post, as we're talking about starting
a school for learning how to learn and to teach people how to cultivate a
loving home/community by setting up the school as a community of homes.

------
nostrademons
This is complicated, and ultimately you're the only one who can make this call
for your life, but here's a few observations that I wasn't thinking of when I
was in high school asking myself this question and have only become apparent
through experience:

1\. Don't forget that there are other people out there! It's possible for a
problem to be important, for many people to be working on it, but for your
honest assessment to be "I'd just get in the way, because I have neither the
talent nor drive to effectively contribute to solving the problem." That's
fine - go work on problems that you _can_ contribute to, and through the
wonders of our market economy, you end up making life easier for the people
who _are_ working on the problem. There's a strong argument for thinking in
_relative_ terms when deciding what problems to work on, i.e. "What can I most
contribute that other people can't?" rather than simply "What can I most
contribute?" or "What most needs doing?"

2\. Young people - particularly young people who are really good at rational &
logical thought - tend to underweight their emotions when deciding what to
work with. You're going to be stuck with them throughout all of the actual
work, so it's very difficult to be effective at problem solving when you don't
actually enjoy the problem solving.

3\. Many really big problems got that way because they're effectively
unsolvable. When I was a teenager, the biggest problem facing earth was
arguably climate change, which is arguably still the biggest problem. In the
15 years between my HS graduation and the Paris Accords, we made negative
progress toward solving this, and then a year after the Paris Accords we
reversed all the progress we'd made. Now, the best science available shows
that it's effectively too late, we're screwed, and we should focus on harm-
mitigation. Everybody knew it was a problem in the 1990s and even the 1980s,
but fixing the problem required cooperation from powerful entities that had
every interest in not fixing the problem, and that sort of cooperation is
basically impossible to achieve. While big ideas like this _sound_ great and
get people fired up, you usually accomplish more by working on small problems
with no opposition and then putting yourself in a position where you can solve
the big problem without the consent of all the people who caused it in the
first place.

4\. Realistically, small problems are much easier to solve than big problems,
and solving a bunch of small problems (like, say, "How can Uber or similar
competitor reduce vehicle miles traveled by 5%/quarter?") is often the key to
solving big problems (like, say, "How do we eliminate carbon emissions?") You
often don't know what small problems are worth solving until you actually
enter a field and look around in detail. So pick an interesting field and get
started - you can always start over if it turns out that the most interesting
problems are boring, but you'll never know in the first place if you don't
pick.

------
cosminscaunasu
>Has anyone had any experience with this before? Yes, I'm having this
experience for a couple of years meaning that I'm asking myself if having a
decent salary shouldn't imply that the next step is not to try to get more
money but to try to be involved in something useful not only for myself but
for everyone. As expected, defining "useful for everyone" is difficult. I
guess there are many many ways that the world could improve but since there is
also the question of our ability to solve some particular difficult issue the
world is facing I think we should choose a domain that we think we are good at
or at least that we think that we could get good at. I think almost every
domain is supposed to address some important need of humanity, it remains to
spot a place in the field where you are really solving that need instead of
working in the wrong direction. I'm sure you can find in a domain you are
familiar with examples of entities that are trying to make profit first of all
and only second to think if overall their impact is positive or not. On the
other hand, even if they seem less, I hope you would be able to spot the ones
who are honest about what they do and they are interested in solving a problem
globally. >If yes, then what and how did you make your decision?
Unfortunately, I'm also stuck, I'm browsing all kind of science news for some
time to try to find the answer and the best thing I came up with is trying to
think about big questions like the one you are asking. I didn't find a way of
producing and selling or giving for free something useful in this domain (I
guess it would be philosophy) anyway I think a problem that should be solved
is how to push more people of asking these kind of questions i.e. to think
critically if their actions are pushing everything in the right direction or
if they should try and do something more useful for them and for others.

To get back to your question, while not being at all an expert in answering
this, I would like to say that is a very good question. To follow the example
of major figures in the history of science a lot of them besides being very
smart people they were very curious and stubborn about some particular field
and they were also lucky to be in the position of connecting the dots. So I
think you can find something that is useful for humanity that is also related
to what you like or would like to do. It will not be obvious for the beginning
but sometimes what start as doing something for fun in the spare time can
evolve into something important. Of course with the appropriate feedback
mechanism of knowing that the end goal is to be useful as a long term project.
Trying to trace back why I became a programmer I can only identify the fact
that I was amazed to hear about a machine that would be able to play multiple
games; then, since I was not so good at games I got bored and tried something
else like playing with the other things a computer could do eventually getting
to program in high school.

I think you are already on the right track, so good luck!

------
handelaar
Well... you sound youngish so let's not write off the possibility that there's
time for both. But here's some thoughts and some experience

a) What thing doesn't exist and you've noticed it hasn't existed for ages? A
lack of the thing being both apparent and long-term is how you can assume that
nobody else is going to do it.

b) What thing that nobody else is going to do can _you_ do? Me, I definitely
can't invent a new kind of battery, but I can apply my ADHD and ASD quirks to
a certain kind of civic tech problem that involves pushing a gigantic and
annoying rock of data up a hill _once_, then spending hardly any time per
project keeping it ticking over.

c) What thing that doesn't exist and which you can do _needs doing_? My field
is regularly jostled around by some kid or other whose "startup" barges in,
makes a pile of noise, never makes a dime, stinks up the water some, then
vanishes without trace. I get the feeling that jumping into things without
adequate consideration for the potential harm is likely not _your_ largest
problem [ :) ] but other people will be reading this page.

The first civic tech thing I did (kildarestreet.com) is a searchable
transcript of everything that happens in the Irish parliament. It didn't exist
when I moved here 14 years ago, it really did need to because the official
version of the same data was -- some would say purposefully -- utterly
unusable, and I'd just moved over from the UK where the original version of
the same app (theyworkforyou.com) was A Thing That People Use A Lot. I was
able to put it together -- perhaps would not have if I'd known I'd be
rewriting all the parsers for a third time ten years later -- with my skill
set, and critically, very obviously nobody else was going to get it done.
There's all my tickboxes for whether this is worth spending time on.

d) I should add here that "is it practically possible to do" factors here
because I got into this whole thing trying to build something else entirely.
Ireland did not have a way for me as a new resident to find out which
electoral district I lived in, and thus who represented me at local and
national level. In the UK writetothem.com from the same people as made the
other stuff tells you this when you enter a postcode on the homepage and
simply choose not to write someone a letter. That's what I tried to do first,
in an itch-scratching manner. But it stalled because there was in 2006 no way
to convert an address to a geo point without spending €72000/yr so eventually,
irritated by that, I moved down the list to the lowest-hanging fruit instead.
So also, don't spend forever trying to do the undoable.

You'll notice none of this mentions how in the fuck you pay your rent. I do
other things and take donations. Some people start companies. Some are grant-
aided. Some are just rich to start with. But this isn't strictly what you
asked :D

------
finfun234
follow your curiosity.

------
dragonfly02
You need to some psychologist!

------
thiago_fm
just do it

------
amelius
What people need most right now is a fair replacement for capitalism, and a
sensible replacement for democracy ...

------
matte_black
Without getting too philosophical, if energy is really what you want to work
on, then the problem of making batteries that are as small and as energy dense
as possible would be worth spending an entire life trying to solve, because a
breakthrough in battery tech would easily have an impact on tons of unrelated
industries and trigger a new technology revolution.

------
Zelmor
I solve my own problems and do not worry about the rest of humanity. You guys
will fetch for yourselves.

------
pjc50
Not clear where you are in your career, but if you're determined to be someone
who makes a key breakthrough, your career path is almost totally determined by
your undergraduate education.

If you were going to be Elon Musk, you wouldn't be asking us for advice.

~~~
theoh
This isn't true for people who approach their undergraduate degree as a kind
of classic liberal arts education or intellectual orientation. Many
professional trainings are offered as graduate degrees, without the
expectation that an applicant's undergrad training will necessarily get
applied. One good example is the Harvard Graduate School of Design, where
people with all kinds of backgrounds train to be architects at the graduate
level.

Whether you think undergraduate degrees should be vocational (whether they
currently are or not) or, in contrast, really just an intellectual taster for
topics that students won't necessarily pursue, it would be a mistake to rule
out significant "course corrections" at graduate level. Even at the level of
PhD admissions, people change fields—especially strong people.

The idea that "genius" is always specialised in a particular academic
category, and always knows in advance exactly where it can contribute, is old-
fashioned. GH Hardy probably believed it about mathematics, and (for example)
the Cambridge math degree probably endorses it implicitly by being so tough.
But this kind of macho thinking excludes the possibility of transdisciplinary
work, and discriminates against people whose talents aren't easily
categorized. It also makes the disciplines which it effects markedly less
diverse.

------
dfansteel
Theorizing that one could time travel within their own lifetime, I led an
elite group of scientists into the desert to develop a top secret project,
known as "Quantum Leap". Pressured to prove my theories or lose funding, I
prematurely stepped into the Project Accelerator and vanished. I awoke to find
myself in the past, suffering from partial amnesia and facing a mirror image
that was not my own. Fortunately, contact with my own time was made through
brainwave transmissions with Al, the Project Observer, who appeared in the
form of a hologram that only I could see and hear. Trapped in the past, I find
myself leaping from life to life, putting things right that once went wrong
and hoping each time that my next leap will be the leap home.

