
Ask HN: Do you feel like you're missing out? - paulpauper
It seems like with all this amazing stuff going on in the world (surging web 2.0 valuations, people becoming instantly rich &amp; famous in tech, booming stocks &amp; home prices, new discoveries in physics, twitter debates, viral content and insta-fame) does it ever feel like you&#x27;re missing out, like there is a big party going and you&#x27;re watching from the sidelines.
======
JDDunn9
I've been there. It took me a while to figure out that the media manufactures
stories to get eyeballs. Do some digging and you'll find a different story.
Once you know the translation key, it is much less envious.

\- Overnight success => Decade of work

\- Owner is worth an estimated $100 million => Owner is saving for a couch
(Kevin Rose said this after his cover story in a magazine)

\- Innovative idea => Ripped off a competitor and had better marketing

\- Hard work and sacrifice => Lied/cheated/stole to get where they are

~~~
Red_Tarsius
> _Hard work and sacrifice = > Lied/cheated/stole to get where they are_

I wouldn't be so cynic. I think real life is simply not good news material.

 _" Tonight, the groundbreaking story of the developer who worked for 3 years
on banking software, 4 years on insurance databases and a staggering 2 years
on android apps! He's now ready to start his own company... or is he? Sitting
on a chair and typing code has never been so exciting!"_

~~~
JDDunn9
Certainly some people do succeed through hard work alone, but corruption
absolutely plays a large part at the top end of the spectrum. Youtube was
mostly pirated content before they were bought, Zuckerburg stole the idea for
FB and cheated his partner, Uber guys have done every dirty trick in the
book...

------
fsloth
Dude, do you realize there are areas on earth where inhouse toilet and running
potable water are luxuries?

Besides,studies have shown that a) Financial income above a specific fairly
low and professionally attainable threshold does not bring any more happiness
(70k a year or so) b) most happiness peoples experience per achievements are
due to achieved intrinsic goals (art, science, learning to play the piano,
whatever, becoming ceo if that is what gets ones socks rolling)

If this sort of "I'm missing out" thing is on the forefront of your mind I
would call it non-beneficial mental noise. Quit twitter, find a hobby - or get
seriously interested on some practical problem that is approachable by you and
most of all - is intrinsically interesting to you!

Lots of stuff works using principles and systems that are old - some tens of
years, some root back a thousands of years.

The function of media is to grab your attention using hooks that are
subliminally, compulsively interesting. Ignore that second by second crap and
dig in to the root causes of problems. Most things are pretty well researched
already and you can get pretty far by developing a learning path of your own.

And if you don't want to - that's ok too! It's your life - live it the best
way you can.

What is common with most of these Elon Musks and what ever you got - they
lived their life and what they achieved was due to a unique combination of all
the genetics and life circumstances that brought them where they went. You
can't replicate those circumstances, but what you can do and should do, is
live your life.

~~~
rifung
I dont think that 70k threshold is actually necessarily true. At least
according
to:[https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&ei=bMxgVaux...](https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&ei=bMxgVauxMMXooASev4D4CQ&url=http://scholar.harvard.edu/files/danielgilbert/files/if-
money-doesnt-make-you-
happy.nov-12-20101.pdf&ved=0CB0QFjAA&usg=AFQjCNE1-_vxt3q9uzPPn7JCHo8_JJQcDg&sig2=uQJjVCrbRBxJBRUjfLy3GA)

~~~
fsloth
Ok, I oversimplified and am not a specialist anyway :) basically, as I as a
layman to current psychological research understand it, 70k gets you to a
point where most common financial stressors of an everyday western life can be
dealt with withou too much difficulty. Above that should bring you to a place
where you have more financial freedom to explore your intrinsic motivations
and desires. One can travel and hire personal guides and trainers, etc. Sure,
if one absolutely needs to do helicopter bungee jumping above the amazon
rainforest to fullfill ones dearest intrinsic drives then yeah, 70k might not
cut it :). Otoh if marathon running suffices then that has near zero cost.

------
erbdex
“Life will break you. Nobody can protect you from that, and living alone won't
either, for solitude will also break you with its yearning. You have to love.
You have to feel. It is the reason you are here on earth. You are here to risk
your heart. You are here to be swallowed up. And when it happens that you are
broken, or betrayed, or left, or hurt, or death brushes near, let yourself sit
by an apple tree and listen to the apples falling all around you in heaps,
wasting their sweetness. Tell yourself you tasted as many as you could.”

― Louise Erdrich, The Painted Drum LP

------
jerf
A couple of days ago my seven year old asked how internet videos are made.
This morning, to answer him, we made a 57-frame stop-motion movie of two Lego
minifigures building a wall, only to have it blown up by a Bob-omb three times
taller then them. No, I'm not missing out.

...

Oh, you mean all that _sturm und drang_ about entrepeneurship? Meh. This is a
wonderful time to be alive. Make sure you enjoy it. Doesn't have to be family,
there's a lot of other options. There's more ways to succeed in life than
selling a unicorn.

(After years of reading this site... I have more or less a 9-to-5 job at a
matured now-public startup, and few regrets. Oh, there's a few things I might
have done differently, but if HN has taught me anything, it's that I'm _not_
an entrepeneur. That's fine. So's what you're doing. It's OK.)

~~~
jeffwass
On the stop-motion video with your kid - that's totally awesome!!

I'd love to do something like that with my daughter. What software did you use
to put it together?

~~~
jerf
Plain ol' FFMPEG can take images and turn them into videos. I did have to buy
a tripod, but, I've wanted one several times now in the past couple of years
so this finally tipped me over.

(Amusingly, if you haven't bought one in a while, they all come with
"smartphone adapators" now, at least at the consumer level. 21st century ho!)

I used this command line:

    
    
        ~/bin/ffmpeg -r 3 -start_number $X -i %03d.jpg -vcodec mpeg4 \
            -qscale:v 3 -s 1920x1080 ${MOVIE}.mp4
    

"-r 3": 3 frames per second. "-start_number $X -i %03d.jpg": Use JPEGS named
like "123.jpg". Nominally the %03d.jpg is supposed to be a printf-style
template, but I had trouble with anything but straight numbers like that
(possibly my camera's naming convention confused it). I used emacs' wdired
mode to bulk rename the files. "-start_number $X" is helpful so you can just
grab photos off the camera's photo list without having to renumber them. "-s
1920x1080" tones down the resolution since the vast bulk of cameras take way-
more-than-HD resolution, and I didn't bother with trying to fiddle with
setting it down in the camera, because 32GB SD mini cards are cheap now.

I'll say this to anyone thinking of trying it out: Once I had a little stubby
tripod I could put on the kitchen table, it was really quite a fantastically
easy project. Stop-motion is, of course, an _incredibly_ labor intensive style
of animation... for _professional_ results. For 3 fps, grabbing some
children's toys that were probably just on the floor, and moving just one or
two things per frame, you can be taking a shot every 10 seconds or so, quite
easily. My kids were 7 & 4 and, quite frankly, probably both below average on
their patience (for various reasons), and we actually made 4 videos today.
It's had a much better bang/buck for the kids than I expected.

And it's yet another place where Legos _really_ shine, by the way.

~~~
jeffwass
Thanks for the detailed response!

------
laundrysheet
To be yourself in a world that is constantly trying to make you something else
is the greatest accomplishment.

~~~
paulbaumgart
This is great. Is it a quote from somewhere?

~~~
laundrysheet
It's a quote by Ralph Waldo Emerson :)

------
undertow
No. Not really. Not even slightly.

I really don't enjoy the thought of being famous, and especially not the
ephemeral famous-on-the-internet variety. I especially hate the end results of
how twitter gets used, and turn a blind eye to nearly everything that happens
on that website. It's something of an abomination watching silly people cram
their already dumbed-down thoughts into something even dumber than its natural
incarnation.

Web 2.0 is really more of a 2004 idea (as with viral content which is even
older) but I understand what you're driving at. Especially since some of the
technology involved isn't all that new either, which points to the fact that
the purchases are more often a form of conflict resolution between competing
companies, than genuine success. Large companies purchasing smaller companies
before they can become threatening.

There might be much physics-related publicity, but not too many drastic shifts
in our understanding of the world that surrounds us. We still don't have any
moon bases or martian colonies, and so maybe certain special bosons are the
the seat of mass, enslaving us all to gravity, but until that discovery
actually pays off, big deal.

Stocks are imaginary financial instruments, and publicly traded stocks are
even more imaginary. Some people have a lot of imagination, I suppose. From
what my friends tell me, owning a home is worse than owning a car. When your
car breaks down, you have to walk home. But when your home breaks down, you're
either cold, or wet, or both, and there's no place to sleep. At least, when
you rent, there's someone else to blame.

------
supster
99% of the stuff mentioned doesn't last. Why not read a book instead of
surfing twitter or viral content. Why not buy a diversified portfolio instead
of speculating on stocks and real estate. Why not build a lasting lifestyle
business rather than an over diluted non sensical on demand startup. Just my 2
cents, your milage and views may vary. Btw, physics discoveries are super cool
:D

------
Red_Tarsius
Absolutely yes. It's difficult to focus on your own career when everyone else
is on the spotlight. It's been one year since I started grokking the
entrepreneur culture: I've never felt more empowered; I've never felt more
miserable.

On top of that, the average Joe can't appreciate long-term efforts and is
quick to dismiss you as a loser. We worship the _overnight successes_ and
underappreciate everything else.

Magicians want you to believe in mind-reading. Media want you to believe
you're missing out. Both of them know that keeping the boring secrets
preserves the mystery and wonder. George Carlin said it best: _" It's all
bullshit folks, and it's bad for ya!"_

------
krschultz
There's no one becoming _instantly_ rich & famous in anything. Behind every
overnight success is years of grinding it out getting better at whatever it is
that you do. I don't care if you are talking about startups or rap music. It
only ever looks like an overnight success because the 5 or 8 years of grinding
it out before aren't exciting to talk about. Even people that make it rich
quickly on 1 particular startup probably had a bunch of things going before
they ever did that 1 startup.

What does that mean for you?

Are you growing every day? You can work hard without growing. Growing is
learning, pushing yourself, meeting new people, exposing yourself to new
things. If you are doing that on a continuous basis, you will find your way
into the "party".

------
vezzy-fnord
Well, personally I don't consider "Twitter debates", "viral content" or what I
think is implied with "insta-fame" to be all that amazing or noteworthy at
all. Those are all ephemera by definition that may or may not end up obscure
historical footnotes one day.

Other things you described amount to the business cycle. There's a lot of
interesting to stuff to be learned studying economics and finance, but the
particular results and spotlights of a given boom-bust aren't necessarily all
that notable. Do you recall the aftermath of the depression from 1920-1921 in
the United States? Likely not, and it barely registers in the public
consciousness regardless.

Finally, only one actually amazing thing - new discoveries in physics. Too bad
you don't see all the behind-the-scenes academic debate, infighting, spurious
results, grunt work that underpins the eventual eureka moment. And don't
forget just how many "eureka moments" aren't really that at all, but inflated
expectations from poor scientific reporting. How many people do you think
realize that "statistical significance" is pretty mundane in comparison to our
everyday understanding of "significance"?

------
peterkelly
The things you listed are mostly crap and don't matter.

Find the niche you're really interested in, and intensely follow and get
involved with that. It's much more fulfilling than being kept up-to-date with
the latest "someone made this controversial remark on twitter" scandal or the
IPO of some startup you've never heard of until now.

There's just too much stuff in the world, and you can't know and follow
everything in detail. I read a pretty wide variety of news, out of interest,
but I have my core areas in which I work which are the real things I'm
passionate about.

(also: "Web 2.0" isn't a thing)

------
jetskindo
There is one thing you have to remember: this is not a competition.

You don't have to play the game. Do things at your pace. A lot of things you
read about the successes is not entirely true. It is very common for the media
to exaggerate the sexy parts. Every start up story is a revolutionary until
you see them throw in the towel a few month later.

Do things at your own pace, as long as you do something.

------
weaksauce
What you are seeing is a different form of the facebook highlight reel. There
was a study that correlated Facebook use with higher rates of depression or
something along those lines. The rationale for this was that you are comparing
the 100% of your day to day activities with the cream of the crop activities
that your friends were posting about(and possibly fabricating)

Not every day is a highlight reel.

------
gumby
In the late 70s, as a teen ager, I was disappointed that I was just a little
too young to have participated in the computing boom. I got to program big
iron, but all the cool stuff had already been done: early computer vision
algorithms, hard drives, semiconductors, the "ultimate" papers (i.e. scheme),
the ARPAnet, bitmapped display etc. I loved programming but wondered if really
there was anything exciting ahead or if it would now be just more of the same.

My model was of how physics had had an astounding boom from about the
1880s-1940s (roughly Maxwell->semiconductor), and then it just got hard for a
small number of people to make big changes.

Of course that was foolish: computing is still roughly where mechanical
engineering was in the late 1800s: lots of lore, much disastrous failure, but
a marvelous cambrian explosion of experimentation and development of theory.

------
ChuckMcM
I don't feel like I'm missing out, but I do often lament the lack of time[1].
It is an interesting observation though of feeling on the outside of an
amazing time. Do you feel like you are not able to 'join' the party? And if so
what is holding you back?

[1] Spending it reading HN not withstanding :-)

~~~
tonyarkles
Not the OP, but for me it's a conscious decision not to join the party, and
it's totally related to your [1].

I run a small consulting company doing primarily hardware and embedded
software. I've got a lab set up in my basement with almost all of the gear
that I need to do that successfully (spectrum analyzer, oscilloscope, and
logic analyzer being the big 3 that I use pretty often). I do well enough at
it that I don't really worry about money; I won't be retiring at 35, but I'm
doing well enough that I don't think much about my chequing account balance.

There's the occasional crunch time, but for the most part I work hard for
clients a few hours a day and spend the rest of the day learning &
experimenting[1], reading, taking the dogs for a walk, doing yard work, etc.
When I'm working on the software part of the work, we've got a family cabin a
few hours away that has excellent 4G coverage. My partner and I will pack up
the dogs and head down there for a few days in the middle of the week if it
looks like it's going to be nice weather. She too has a job where working
remote is often an option, so we'll get up, make some bacon & eggs with
pancakes, take the dogs for a walk around "town", and then come back and do a
few hours of work from maybe 11-3.

When I was working full-time+ in startup land, I definitely felt time poor.
Sure, I sometimes miss being at the party, but I feel way less stressed now
and happier with my life.

[1] The learning & experimenting often involves noodling with a new piece of
software or hardware. It's often still screen time, but it's at my own pace
and on my own terms. And over and over, it's turned out to be relevant to
potential consulting gigs with a 1-3 month turnaround. Learn some new piece of
tech, talk about it to friends, and tada! there's someone who's willing to pay
me to use whatever weird niche thing I picked up to solve a problem for them.

------
jmartinpetersen
Every day. But then I look at my children, remember the work I've done that
I'm most proud of and stuff like that and I shrug it off.

Sure, I would love to be more socially engaged in my surroundings, but
whenever I'm in doubt about my life I reevaluate my priorities and usually
discover that I'm pretty happy where I'm at. It's my life and I get to define
the optimum, and so far viral content, insta-fame and richness hasn't gotten
close to the top.

Caveat: I'm not famous, haven't founded a start-up or famous for my twitter
debates. But it works for me.

~~~
brador
"And now that you don't have to be perfect, you can be good" \- Anonymous

~~~
brynb
(John Steinbeck, East of Eden, right?)

------
nzealand
I found myself getting into the same old dull routine, purely out of habit.

So I wrote a 5 year plan.

It forced me to think through what I wanted to accomplish in the next five
years, and what made me happy.

Every five years or so, I revisit it.

Having goals in mind helps.

------
bisdas
I personally feel that jumping on the bandwagon will only crash and burn you
unless you genuinely believe that you have an idea or believe in a cause that
would make real difference to the world.

It may seem like everything has already been done but remember that back in
1898, Charles Holland Duell, who was appointed as the United States
Commissioner of Patents famously said "Everything that can be invented has
been invented."

Start from the grassroot level. Start by looking around you, think of how we
can contribute to education and make better citizens of tomorrow by empowering
our children with technology, be able to assist farmers with advanced data
analysis that would enable them maximise their cultivation, predictive
analytics in policing and bring down cost of law enforcement, there are plenty
of ideas that are worth billions of dollars. There is no point in being
another Uber of some on demand service valued at a billion pound. Be another
google, another apple, microsoft or IBM. The foundation of all these companies
were built on creating a legacy, to revolutionise the way we think and
percieve life and to make a difference in our existence.

Have a short term goal of 2 years to find what you want to do and chase it
with singe-minded determination. You are not late. Good Luck!

------
jacquesm
Imagine tons of winning lottery players getting together in one spot. It would
look like the only way to get ahead is to win the lottery if you're looking
from the outside in.

Mix in a few thousand lottery winner wannabes and the analogy is complete.

My advice: just ignore it, survivor bias is a thing that is very hard to
quantify without having all the numbers and for every lottery winner there are
large numbers of also-rans that did not make it.

The media magnifying this effect certainly does not help.

------
timr
Whenever I start to feel this way, it's a good time to read some David Foster
Wallace:

 _" In the day-to-day trenches of adult life, there is actually no such thing
as atheism. There is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships. The
only choice we get is what to worship. And an outstanding reason for choosing
some sort of God or spiritual-type thing to worship — be it J.C. or Allah, be
it Yahweh or the Wiccan mother-goddess or the Four Noble Truths or some
infrangible set of ethical principles — is that pretty much anything else you
worship will eat you alive. If you worship money and things — if they are
where you tap real meaning in life — then you will never have enough. Never
feel you have enough. It's the truth. Worship your own body and beauty and
sexual allure and you will always feel ugly, and when time and age start
showing, you will die a million deaths before they finally plant you. On one
level, we all know this stuff already — it's been codified as myths, proverbs,
clichés, bromides, epigrams, parables: the skeleton of every great story. The
trick is keeping the truth up-front in daily consciousness. Worship power —
you will feel weak and afraid, and you will need ever more power over others
to keep the fear at bay. Worship your intellect, being seen as smart — you
will end up feeling stupid, a fraud, always on the verge of being found out.
And so on.

Look, the insidious thing about these forms of worship is not that they're
evil or sinful; it is that they are unconscious. They are default-settings.
They're the kind of worship you just gradually slip into, day after day,
getting more and more selective about what you see and how you measure value
without ever being fully aware that that's what you're doing. And the world
will not discourage you from operating on your default-settings, because the
world of men and money and power hums along quite nicely on the fuel of fear
and contempt and frustration and craving and the worship of self. Our own
present culture has harnessed these forces in ways that have yielded
extraordinary wealth and comfort and personal freedom. The freedom to be lords
of our own tiny skull-sized kingdoms, alone at the center of all creation.
This kind of freedom has much to recommend it. But of course there are all
different kinds of freedom, and the kind that is most precious you will not
hear much talked about in the great outside world of winning and achieving and
displaying. The really important kind of freedom involves attention, and
awareness, and discipline, and effort, and being able truly to care about
other people and to sacrifice for them, over and over, in myriad petty little
unsexy ways, every day. That is real freedom. The alternative is
unconsciousness, the default-setting, the “rat race” — the constant gnawing
sense of having had and lost some infinite thing."_

~~~
GoodOldNe
Ten years old as of yesterday. Rewards re-reading for sure.

------
eli_gottlieb
Uhhh... why would I feel like I'm missing out on an overinflated asset bubble
driven by cheap money in the hands of people who live in bubbles?

------
sporkenfang
You define what is important for yourself.

OP, it sounds like you're choosing to accept other people's versions of
reality instead of focusing on what you can do (and add) by sticking to your
own values and doing the best you can at what you choose to do.

Nothing that the media reports on will ``matter" in 10 minutes, anyway.
Conversely, your family, kids, dog, open source project, whatever, will still
be around.

------
toomuchtodo
Not at all! Realize that your have a finite amount of time, each day, each
week, your entire life. You _are_ going to miss out on some things, and that's
okay! Ensure you're prioritizing the things in you're life that are important
to you, and be realistic about what's important, and where you want to spend
your time and energy.

------
jongdubois
I think that a lot of people are missing out. I also feel like a lot of
genuinely exciting projects get drowned out by the noise created by well-
funded mediocre projects.

There is a problem in society now whereby successful (sometimes well-
deserving) people are helping their friends too much. I have seen really poor
quality projects (with 0 growth) keep receiving funding year after year
because the CEO was friends with the investor.

The marketing noise created by these mediocre projects prevents a lot of
quality projects from reaching the awareness of consumers.

I often wish that all newly minted tech millionaires would just keep their
money to themselves and go on a perpetual holiday to the Bahamas instead of
using their money to pollute the market with poor quality projects/companies.

Funding isn't necessarily evil though, funding the wrong project is (even
though it is unintentional).

------
andrea_sdl
The missing out sindrome is normal. It's part of growing, and I believe
everyone will sooner or later experience in some areas of life.

But this shouldn't fake reality. Dig deeper into the stories of the many rich
people and you'll discover passion, devotion, late night work, single men and
women, solitude, failure.

Many "overnight" success were planned with lots of work. Don't be fooled. :)

Responding to your question: Yes, I feel like I am missing out a lot. Living
in italy I feel like I'm many steps behind the internet world. I'm trying to
improve, but there's this voice in my head that keeps telling me that all of
this is not important, that our human goal is not competition, is helping the
world with our work. Every day that passes reinforce this thought, and I hope
one day it will also shut down my fear of missing out forever.

------
shade23
Yes I feel that a lot of times.But what I am trying to make myself understand:
-What you said,there are a _lot_ of of amazing stuff going.The mind prefers
vacillating compared to singular focus.So if you are trying to get into any
one of them,where do I jump into? -The more you get intimidated by all that
good stuff going on the more chances that you are going to not focus on a
singular thing which could (just maybe) be the place where you become one of
those famous ones. -Internet fame is as volatile as it could get.Take Flappy
Bird for example. Dong Nguyen was one of those insta-fames .That lasted for a
week?

Back to the age old cliche(or atleast a form of it that i remember). ~Do not
chase success.Chase your goal and success(fame,debates and all those) will
follow .

I know how lame it sounds.But ask any of those people sitting up there.It
works.

------
SuperPaintMan
I used to, then I happened upon Dual Cores - Unplug. Just hit me like a ton of
bricks. You are missing out, just define what's important to you.

[http://open.spotify.com/track/6KUlm8u1OrdZyFf8m74QhR](http://open.spotify.com/track/6KUlm8u1OrdZyFf8m74QhR)

------
Delmania
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fear_of_missing_out](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fear_of_missing_out)

A few random thoughts: \- A story is in the news strictly because it's out of
the ordinary. \- Related to number one, it's best not to compare your life to
to the news. Essentially, you're comparing the day to day with the highlights
of someone else's life. You don't have the full picture. \- One of the best
things to do is something Tim Ferris recommended, avoid all news for a week,
and focus on your life. \- Always remember there is another side to the story.
\- In the end, you are the judge of how fulfilling your life is.

------
japhyr
A little bit. But then I notice that almost everyone announcing anything
interesting has been working hard at that project for years.

So I put my head down and get back to work, so that I too may make an
interesting announcement in the not-too-distant future.

------
pmikesell
Well, why are you missing out? There's plenty of opportunity for these things
in Silicon Valley, San Francisco, Seattle, etc. Is this a question about how
to pick the right company, or where to live, or what kind of work to focus on?

------
psgibbs
Yes – every day. By most metrics, my startup is going great, but it's taken
years of all-nighters, working weekends, and skipped vacations. I love what
I'm doing, but I'm also cognizant of all the friends, relationships, family-
time, and other experiences I'm not investing my time in as much as I should.

Whether things work out or not, I'll always wonder what the counterfactual
was, all the unknown-unknowns I chose to miss out on.

Regardless of what you read, what you feel like you're missing out on, know
everything comes with a sacrifice. My only advice would be to think carefully
about what you choose to invest your time in.

------
_sentient
Keep in mind that the noise ratio is high, particularly in strong bull
markets. Not all that glitters is gold.

If you no longer want to watch from the sidelines, you can follow this simple
formula:

1). Build something great. 2). Tell people about it.

Also, read less tech press.

------
mattikl
I used to feel like that when I was younger. Now many years later I haven't
accomplished the goals I set years back, but I feel happy. I spend my days
working on interesting problems and feel I'm learning so much all the time.

I'd say the key is concentrating on what you're doing that makes you happy. If
coding is your passion and you're coding 50 hours a week now, you'd probably
do the same if you were rich and famous. Or maybe you wouldn't have so much
time for coding with everything else coming your way.

------
cdubose
I feel like I'm missing out from just the regular life that most people on HN
seem to have. I work as a baker at a food chain, I make less than $20,000 a
year, and I don't have a college degree. Hell, I don't even have a smartphone
because I still can't afford one. And yet, here I am trying to stay in the
know as I self-study to maybe become a programmer one day. But I certainly
feel like I'm looking from the outside in, not really a part of the world that
is embodied in this site.

------
bsg75
> people becoming instantly rich & famous in tech

Outliers, like lottery winners and "beating the house" Vegas. It happens, but
very infrequently.

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tmaly
Its all about hustle. I have a friend raking in millions a month now. He
started with nothing, took no vacation for 5 years, but now he is enjoying the
fruits of his labor. I have been on the sidelines for too long, missed out on
the dotcom and the web 2.0 I am working on something now. I think trying to
start something is still better odds than winning the powerball lottery.

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DanBC
I'm socially isolated so I miss a bit of that interaction with other people
stuff.

But, other than that, no, I don't feel like I'm missing out. I made some
decidedly sub-optimal choices when I was younger and they continue to have an
impact.

I tend to focus a lot on making my child's life better - more fun, more safe
(without over-coddling protection), more exciting, more supported, etc etc.

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Jimmy
Oh, I thought this was going to be a "do you feel like you're missing out on
life?" post.

No, I don't feel like I'm missing out on what you're talking about. But
there's probably a party in your neighborhood a few houses down that you _are_
missing out on.

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akhilcacharya
Short answer - yes.

I'm not entirely convinced that there is anything to miss out on, but if there
was, I'm certain that I'm missing it.

I attribute this to geography - I live 2,842 miles from the Valley and don't
go to a feeder school for the Valley - the cultural gap is too great.

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mattdlondon
For every person that "makes it", there are probably a million or two who do
not.

Find your passion, do the best you can, learn, improve your skills and you
might get lucky one day or just live a good life. Money is nice but its not
everything.

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bikeshack
What if OP genuinely is missing out on something? I have followed this
discussion, and a vast many people are equating 'Fear of Missing Out' with a
'Freedom of Missing Out'. The argument that the internet has made spatial
disadvantage obsolete because (apparently) we can now call anybody, any-time,
from anywhere is a myth. The thoughts of cold calling influential people in
Silicon Valley to discuss a new coding project frankly terrifies me. I would
much rather afford to bump into them casually and spark up a conversation the
natural way. i.e: Over coffee, or by way of bumping into them randomly on the
street. So many great things start that way, and I dare suggest the Googles
and the Amazons were born naturally like that as they are insiders clubs.

There are many countries where the Internet is disagreeable and molasses slow
compared to Silicon Valley, and also a vast many people who can not even
afford a keyboard to type on, never mind having several Herman Miller chairs
in the office with exposed brick walls with fixies hanging on them. I know a
few friends who are making their office like that just to replicate Silicon
Valley, but that is like wearing an olympic medal for a few minutes just to
see what it is like winning the race, but without having to run it. Maybe OP
wants that, if not for the part where spatial disadvantage disallows it, or
for the part where simply not having access to capital disallows it. Fair
enough, research suggests we are not in another bubble, but those studies did
not factor in how cheap it is to start things now, and how much leverage we
have. Product Hunt is a perfect example of how far we have come in terms of
leverage. It is basically free now to 'start something' or commit to a cause.

I think OP is referring to the amount of shoestring businesses / bootstrappers
that are sprouting from the woodwork because of pure opportunism and nothing
else. Perhaps they do believe in their idea and are causing parties to happen.
Perhaps they are stuck in a hype machine. The internet is, after all, the
perfect hype machine. Social media (especially Twitter) has allowed ideas to
become a dime a dozen but with no real traction behind them. Ideas are allowed
to sprout but quickly become ephemera. Ideas usually stick around much longer
when they are on Apache servers however; but that doesn't qualify those ideas
any further - it just appears that way, and seems like the webmaster is on to
something because money was thrown at the idea, but the webmaster is not
following up on the idea. You still see sites that were setup 10 years ago
that are only online because they are monetized by Adsense. It seems
'Founders' have become the new 1998 webmasters.

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kippster
No

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msie
Yes

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gaius
_people becoming instantly rich & famous in tech_

Those guys are lottery winners, seriously. Now I am not saying they didn't
work their asses off too, but for every one of them there are 100 or 1000 or
10000 people who were just as smart and worked just as hard and their
companies went up in a puff of smoke anyway. Wishing you were them is
pointless because they are not them either.

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guard-of-terra
I miss out more about people relocating to live in Thailand, finding some
source of income to support them, than about valuations and business success.

Physics is in crisis, the world becomes angrier and less capable, I don't see
bright future ahead anyway.

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michaelochurch
I felt that way during the first tech bubble. I was 17 in 2000, and it seemed
like Exciting Things were happening far away, and here I was as a senior in
high school in the middle of Pennsylvania.

Now that I'm older, I don't feel that way, because I know how the sausage is
made and what the territory looks like. The people becoming "instantly rich
and famous" are either (a) rich kids whose parents are laundering the family
connections and wealth through VC or acqui-hire, or (b) deserving hard-working
people whose "overnight" success took 10 years (we're just noticing them now,
so it seems "instant", but there was a decade or more of hard work and
sacrifice behind it) or (c) statistical outliers who can be likened to lottery
winners.

I've looked into the soul of Silicon Valley and there is no there there. Don't
get me wrong: there are individual companies and people doing great work and
advancing the state of humanity, but the intersection between Real Technology
and the celebrity personalities that dominate Silicon Valley is almost the
empty set.

Most of the easy money is going to investors, upper management, and talentless
celebrity hacks. People doing real work have a shot at some of the hard money,
but it's not guaranteed that there will be any reward. (That's why it's called
"hard money".)

As for "a big party going", well... there are a few things to keep in mind.
From the ground, you might see "a cloud" as a concrete thing, but inside that
cloud is just fog, and from the point of view of a water droplet there is just
a semi-formless mist of other droplets. Things look different from outside
than inside. Most people "in the party" are miserable about not being part of
a more exclusive inner party. There's a certain fractal self-similarity to
material striving that keeps at a constant level of misery (if they're
inclined that way) no matter how far they rise.

Most likely, you were never invited to "the party" and you'll never get in,
because it will have dissipated by the time you'd be eligible. The $5M/person
acqui-hires (which, by the way, deliver 3 orders of magnitude less than that
figure to the rank-and-file engineers actually building the shit) are favors
to the well-connected parents of the founders, and the people making new
discoveries in physics (or, in truth, doing just about anything that actually
matters) are just as far away from the party crowd as you are.

If you're trying to get into the "startup scene" in 2015, my advice is, don't.
Climbing the ladder this late is pointless because if you're not already most
of the way up it, it'll dissipate before you've ascended. Focus on gaining
lasting knowledge. Take the hard CS courses that pre-startup kids avoid
because the workload interferes with "investor networking" events (that won't
be fruitful, if you're doing real work, anyway). I'm not saying that you
should dismiss CS or technology or programming or hard work (on the contrary,
I'd say the opposite) but I think that you have no chance of getting into
_this_ bubble world (and who knows when the next one will rise? I can't
predict that) if you're coming into it this late.

What you're seeing is like Vegas at night. From 20 miles out, it's a glamorous
and almost magical city in the desert, brilliant and alluring at all hours.
Then you get there and it's seedy and pushy and unpleasant. Then morning
comes, the whole world goes to sleep, and now you're alone in this hot, sun-
ravaged ghost town.

What you envy is not real. At least, not for people like you and me. Making
things is real, but you don't need to be in "the scene" to do that.

