I get depressed reading HN because a lot of the stories are about people my age who are making a lot more money than me.
I don't care too much about money. For me it's been more difficult to cope with the fact that there are so many people who are far more clever than I am. What's one's purpose if so many people can do it better?
(Before I sound too depressed: I am a happy person, I have come to appreciate that enjoying the craft you do is the most important thing. After family and friends.)
Regardless, I think that there is a large qualitative difference between e.g. Hackernews and Facebook. On Facebook people brag about their fortune (or bad luck), on Hackernews there are many genuinely interesting technical discussions where one can learn a lot.
I have come to appreciate that enjoying the craft you do is the most important thing. After family and friends.
Indeed... This reminds me of a dialogue in Iain Banks' Use of Weapons, between a stranger and a woman from the Culture, a society technologically advanced to the point that machines do everything better than the humans:
“Can’t machines build these faster?” he asked the woman,
looking around the starship shell.
“Why, of course!” she laughed.
“Then why do you do it?”
“It’s fun. You see one of these big mothers sail out
those doors for the first time, heading for deep space, three
hundred people on board, everything working, the Mind quite
happy, and you think; I helped build that. The fact a machine
could have done it faster doesn’t alter the fact that it was
you who actually did it.”
“Hmm,” he said.
(Learn woodwork; metalwork; they will not make you a
carpenter or a blacksmith any more than mastering writing will
make you a clerk.)
“Well, you may ‘hmm’ as you wish,” the woman said,
approaching a translucent hologram of the half-completed ship,
where a few other construction workers were standing, pointing
inside the model and talking. “But have you ever been gliding,
or swum underwater?”
“Yes,” he agreed.
The woman shrugged. “Yet birds fly better than we do,
and fish swim better. Do we stop gliding or swimming because
of this?”
He smiled. “I suppose not.”
“You suppose correctly,” the woman said. “And why?” she
looked at him, grinning. “Because it’s fun.”
I think it's a great answer to the question of why do things,
but it doesn't address the problem of one's purpose...
>I don't care too much about money. For me it's been more difficult to cope with the fact that there are so many people who are far more clever than I am. What's one's purpose if so many people can do it better?
Who said man's purpose is to "do" things?
Life's purpose is to just be here, have fun, be kind to others, and read a good book from time to time. And raise some kids if you want to see humanity continue onwards.
Anything else is like saying that all these people who did just that and didn't cure cancer or sold their startup for 10B are not worthy humans.
> Life's purpose is to just be here, have fun, be kind to others, and read a good book from time to time. And raise some kids if you want to see humanity continue onwards.
Indeed. But personally, I'm aware that we don't have a self-sustaining system that would allow everyone to do just that - hence I find meaning in helping to enable that (and as a corollary, I find work (as in, jobs) that don't serve to further or maintain this goal meaningless and depressing).
I get encouraged reading HN. It's not a zero-sum game, a rising tide lifts all boats and all that. Having so many smart people eg developing cool open source helps me, and vice versa.
Sometimes I wonder, though, what's the purpose of associating oneself with advances in the world? If you knew other people could do it better, would you still want your solution to win? I guess the answer is that we don't know other solutions are definitely better, when everyone is developing theirs, and betteris a relative term.
Perhaps it's more interesting to think in terms of Alan Watts' philosophy of growing and competing. Things just happen and there is no "ceramic theory" of good ideas.
I love hearing mathematicians talk about picking problems. You think hackers have it hard about seeing other peoples accomplishments and feeling powerless? Try being a mathematician and hearing about how Gauss or Euler were better than you at the age of 15! And mathematicians devote their whole [professional] life to solving problems.
One advice I hear often is: if you're not the quickest, just don't try to race anyone else for solving a problem (there are many people you could legitimately call 'genius' working on certain problems!). Work on things you know no one else is working with -- if you fail, it's only because the results aren't very useful (but for most things it's really hard to tell when they'll be useful anyway). I call this "work orthogonalization".
And there's my favorite, and probably most often said: be guided by beauty. If you feel what you're solving is "just right", it most likely will work and will work well.
Common sense stuff, so it has exceptions of course. Engineering for instance has a whole extra layer where we have to deal with physics, resource constraints and follow more closely the needs and demands of our users.
"if you're not the quickest, just don't try to race anyone else for solving a problem"
I have heard that too. I was talking with a noted probabilist, who co-authored a well-regarded book, about some work that Michel Talagrand (a very accomplished mathematician) was starting to publish.
He said, "just have to get out of the way," and when I gave a quizzical look, continued, "That guy is a bulldozer." Basically, you might sweat for a year and end up being a special case of a more general result that Talagrand just proved.
“Do not do what someone else could do as well as you. Do not say, do not write what someone else could say, could write as well as you. Care for nothing in yourself but what you feel exists nowhere else. And, out of yourself create, impatiently or patiently, the most irreplaceable of beings.”
―André Gide
+1 Oooh, yes. Your pithy comment reminded me of this vlog brothers post where he relates his small Midwestern town to Renaissance Venice. I couldn't find the video if I wanted, the search terms are too popular.
Still, same thing, locality is important. I wish it was stressed more often in this increasingly globalized world.
I wouldn't use the word depressed though, I'm not depressed, I'm annoyed.
My issue with something like HN isn't that other people are making money, are smarter or doing cool projects. My issue is that so many people are doing stupid things (in my mind), and making a ton of money from VC funding.
Someone who can create and make a living of product or service that's useful to others is wonderful. If you can't get by without funding and you don't seem to have a viable business plan, that's really infuriating. I don't think it's okay to just burn other people money until a business plan materialises. We wouldn't have Twitter, Facebook and a ton of other companies, I understand that, but I'm also okay with it.
there's plenty of terrible shit going on in this world to be annoyed about. i don't think dot com bros making money off the internet is really anywhere near the top of my list.
I suspect these people your age making a lot more money lead lives similar to what's described in this article. These do not seem like happy lives to me!
If you're actively saving lives, that is more valuable than all the money in the world, and I thank you.
To react to other people's portrayed successfulness with doubting the legitimacy or their honesty and suspecting those people to be actually unhappy is almost as immature as getting depressed by it.
Seeing people with lots of money doesn't depress me, although reading about people struggling with money or health issues can be depressing.
In my case I don't care that person X has more money than I do, since as long as I have enough for basic living money itself isn't something which I care deeply about.
> I get depressed reading HN because a lot of the stories are about people my age who are making a lot more money than me.
I'm certainly not getting depressed from this - but I find this trend fairly annoying as well. There is fairly dominant sub-community on HN who try to communicate as often as possible how extremely smart they are and humblebrag about some start-up or how they declined an offer from Google.
But I think this sub-population is actually minority. The majority of HN readers is just curious about the subjects itself - those contribute the highest value on here in my experience.
Very successful people don't waste all their time on HN/slashdot/FB. If all you're doing is reading about those people on those sites, stop and focus your efforts on something constructive. Reading HN is fake work.
The sad part of this is that in psychological experiments it has been shown that people feel better about themselves if they see other people doing worse than them.
It says something about human nature that perhaps we need to fix, rather than just suppressing the symptoms by avoiding things like facebook.
If you have very little, you've got very little to worry about...
An attractive statement but totally wrong.
If you have very little - if you are poor, you have to worry about renting a roof for yourself, and food to eat, and clean-enough water, and having enough warmth, and healthcare, and then all of those things for each member of your family.
Every second of every day.
So much that you cannot manage anything else.
That contributes towards depression, sure.
Find something you truly love doing? This is usually something that rich people have the capacity and opportunity to do.
Then I tell myself that they probably haven't saved as many lives as I have.
Then I have to tell myself that this doesn't pay the bills, dammit.
HN/slashdot/FB in moderation, kids! Now you know and knowing is half the battle.