Gina Trapani! That's a name I haven't heard in a long time and at first couldn't place correctly -- for some reason, my mind went to Groklaw, but Lifehacker was the correct answer. Maybe I'm idolizing my own youth and its associated available free time just a tiny bit and I can't actually believe it's been 20 years, but those felt like good times, Web 2.0 with its focus on communication instead of publishing, with Slashdot up top for tech news, Lifehacker, Engadget and many other sites not yet owned by big corporations feeling fresh and bearing individual flair, making you feel being a part of something. A rare feeling in modern times.
There are still tons of websites (more now than ever) not owned by gigantic corporations. It's not their fault that you and the masses mostly stopped going to them in favor of facebook and twitter and instagram and, of course, apps.
(You're on one right now, naturally.)
I get the same feeling when people say "RSS is dead". I read dozens of websites via RSS and my RSS reader still works fine. Very few blogs I want to read don't support RSS.
This happens with programming languages also. Lots of people cry "Perl is dead" because its market share is decreasing. But its absolute user count is increasing!
It's not a competition for a limited size of pie; the pie is still growing at a frightening pace, along with all its pieces.
Those days brought us to successful blogs/websites to be acquired by bigger corp and then enshittified.
Moreover, what used to be a successful blogger is now a successful YouTuber, no? Because generally speaking, masses prefer to watch and listen to things rather then read.
Actually, it’s making a comeback now somewhat, thanks to the inherent capability to filter and select only wanted content and weed out the noise in this world.
I loved the old LH when she ran it (and a short time after, before it became fully enshittified). Still have a Steelcase Leap chair, which was the usual runner-up to the Herman Miller Aeron in their office chair votes.
Fun fact: Nordic countries use week numbers for all sorts of planning, e.g. vacation period, school events, company planning, statistics reporting, ...
I use GNOME with week numbers shown in[0]! Find it super useful.
I am also a big fan of setting yearly goals. Been doing this for a couple of years now. This has sort of converged into a tradition of having ~12 goals per year.
Each item is something quantifiable and achievable. For example, a goal of mine is 'losing x amount of weight', as opposed to 'becoming fit' - this I won't expand into other domains however, if the context is making a game, it would be 'publishing a game', and not 'publishing a game that sells a million copies', as the latter depends on factors outside of your control, luck, etc.
The way I set up my own goals, they are achievable if I were to focus on these for a quarter alone. They are not big, huge deals. But I don't focus on these for a quarter of course, I have to go to work, and I have a family and loved ones that I enjoy spending time with. Yet it is also an anchor I look at occasionally, and if the list is having too little progress, I get the message that I should work on these for a while. I find it to be a nice balance.
0: gsettings set org.gnome.desktop.calendar show-weekdate true
I'm Norwegian, but never got used to this, and to this day (I turn 50 this year) my mum will try to communicate time with me using week numbers, and I have to tell her to use dates.
Week numbers are very useful for static holiday periods like the kid's school fall vacation and winter vacation. In my area, they are always in week 8 and week 40, and as such it's easier to plan accordingly. And my summer vacation is usually weeks 28-30.
Just make sure to turn on week number in your calendar applications, then it might be more useful to you.
Another fun fact: there are three commonly used ways to define week numbers (see `man strftime`, %U, %V, %W; %V is the one used in at least the Nordics). In some years they coincide so you might not notice that you picked the wrong one until next January.
Yet another fun fact: with %V week numbers, the date 2024-12-30 (December 30, 2024) was 2025-W01-1 (the Monday of week 1, 2025). Thus strftime needs two different ways to specify the year: %G denotes the year that goes with %V week numbers, %Y denotes the year that people usually think of when they ask "what year is it". Unfortunately %G comes before %Y on the strftime man page, so people who scan the page quickly can easily pick %G when they really want %Y. I've seen a few bugs caused by this.
I have also seen the corresponding bug in SQL, using IYYY instead of YYYY. This boggles the mind, but apparently when some people read "ISO 8601 week-numbering year", they only see "ISO 8601 ... year", think "yes, that's the date standard we use" and don't care about the "week-numbering" word in the middle.
I've done a bunch of thinking around how to organize things in dates, etc, and often wondered if I should be using week numbers. Never thought to look up if it's a common practice in any countries.
Not so fun fact: Corporate Germany also uses week numbers and some paper pushers and some project managers have adapted, most nerds (incl. me) will never come to terms with it and have to look it up once a month. Also what do you mean by "all calendars" - the last paper one I owned I bought at an art fair in 2018ish ;)
If you work at a 'real' paper pusher office they have a three month calendars with week numbers hanging at every office wall, gifted from the wholesale and office center!
(You can activate week numbers in Office Outlook as well. Or go to ukenummer.no for simple display)
I know you can get to them - but people just don't have them at hand most of the time, in most places :) (My Android phone doesn't display them by default but I've not looked around)
> The first ~1000 are spent in the the very limited tutorial area.
I think it's kinda strange that you're saying up to age 19 is "the very limited tutorial area", as if it doesn't count. Up to age 3 or 4, before you have stable memory, perhaps I could understand, but I'm well, well into middle age and I think of some of the time between say 10-19 as the most vivid in terms of my memories, friends, direction of my life, etc.
I scarcely recognize the person I was at 19 as the same person as me.
I have almost no recollection of school except for maybe a couple of dozen moments and a handful - no more than 4 or so - acquaintances. They were friends at the time, but we went to different colleges in different towns, we're not close now.
I remember books I read, but they're detached from a timeline. I remember programming - that was the most formative thing I learned, and it was outside school - but I have very little recollection of actual time spent, just that I did a huge amount of learning.
Have you heard of Severely Deficient Autobiographical Memory disorder? For me it's memory as it relates to myself that barely functions, I can remember facts just fine.
That's weird to me. I'm in my mid thirties and I feel the bulk of my memories are in the 13-23 range and everything's been a quick blur since then.
In fact when I started a dream diary for a personal experiment, I'm in highschool in most of them - literally, as the dreams take place in the building.
I find this really interesting. I left school 20 years ago, I've lived a wildly varied life and been all around the world on adventures outside of general tourism, with highs and lows tied to locations I am beyond familiar with, yet far too many of my dreams are in that damn school.
I am slightly older and I don't really remember very much from around when I started work after graduating. It's kind of sad that works consume a lot of my time but I have no memory to show for it.
I went through the lucid dreaming rabbit hole when I was 17, I recently found the diary from back then and was curious to see how different the dreams are now.
I agree with the other poster. You are definitely on the extreme side here. Good for you, really, I would love to have your superpower, but you are not the norm.
Sure, I may be toward the other end of the extreme. It's certainly not eidetic memory, I just have tons of memories from all years of my life >=4. But I do think "basically no memories before 20" is close to the other extreme.
No, what you said sounds extremely extreme. Remembering a lot of stuff since ~4? For me, that feels inconceivable!
Myself, I remember maybe one or two things per year from 4+ onwards if I focus; flashes of images. This gradually ramps up after ~12yo, and I can actually say I remember some events from around 16+ well enough to describe them and place in rich context. Properly detailed memory? That starts for me somewhere after 20. I'm 36.
> I think of some of the time between say 10-19 as the most vivid in terms of my memories, friends, direction of my life, etc.
Me too. I think 12-14 is the most vivid for me... I used to enjoy stuff a lot more fully and completely than I seem to be able to nowadays. I miss that.
That makes sense. Just young enough to be able to fully emerse yourself in activities, while not quite old enough to have real worries. Of course I'm saying that from a position of privilege, but that was a sweet spot for me as well.
Oliver Burkeman wrote a book about this, named "Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals". The main point (at least as I remember it) is that there are way more books to read, links to click, and things to do than you can fit in your lifetime, so it's a delusion that you could ever get to the end of your to-do list.
So much of our life is consumed by work. Seeing your lifespan laid bare like this, there's a perverse instinct to optimize what remains. Have to be more productive, more efficient. But it's a bit like seeing you're bleeding out and deciding to optimize your blood donation schedule, isn't it?
The older I get the more I realize that the most effective and productive things I can do are not at all what seem to be productive or effective on the surface.
One of the most mentally and physically crippling things I’ve ever done was work too hard, for too long. I worked and earned more money than I thought I ever could but… All I truly got out of it was a lesson. To never do it again. I would have earned enough but also enjoyed my life had I just calmed down a bit.
I’m sure you know as well as I do, if not better. It seemed worth noting though.
Yes! It’s slow going. I grow and sell plant tissue cultures. Sometimes I get fairly large orders (hundreds of units), but usually I sell a few or a dozen at a time to hobbyists who are into aquaria, terraria, or they want stock to start cultures on their own more easily. I also grow and sell some other stuff, but that’s the bulk of it.
I got started on some discord channels with other hobbyists, but I’m in the process of creating a store front that’ll hopefully boost revenue a bit. I’ll likely need to learn a bunch of boring stuff like marketing to actually get traffic to it, but we’ll see.
It’s at an awkward stage where I need to devote more time to it in order to allow it to grow more, but I’ve also got a full time job, kids, a wife, etc. But I really enjoy it. I hope to make the leap to doing it full time eventually, but that would be a while off still.
No kidding. It blows my mind how bad e-commerce is. And how expensive it is. I had to accept that no payment processor would ever be ideal, no cost structure would ever make sense, I’d have to relinquish access to my own money to a degree, etc. I thought it would be better by 2025 but it’s the worst part of the business I’ve worked on so far, haha.
In this Lex Fiedman video, they talk about how life is short, and a visualization as a spreadsheet is shown that makes one very concerned:
Pieter Levels: Programming, Viral AI Startups, and Digital Nomad Life | Lex Fridman Podcast #440
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oFtjKbXKqbg
[ironically, the podcast is very long - over 3 hours - speaking of not wasting time, but after initial annoyance I'm glad I watched it all.]
The positive insight that can come out of that is use every week and don't waste it, and and if you can, move your long-term dreams closer to the here and now.
I made a version of that spreadsheet for "the rest of my life" to hand it into my office as a reminder. (Even if I will live until 90, it fits my laptop screen without scrolling...)
Should everyone make it? On one hand it’s awareness, on another- at cause endless anxiety that you now visualised how little it is and still can’t do anything..
This is something one says on their deathbed when they have had a good life.
Maybe some people who have wasted half their life being completely unproductive say “I wish I focused on relationships more” on their deathbed. But many others might say “I wasted my whole life, I wish I got it together.” The thing is, those people don’t write books or give seminars on how to live a good life. They die alone and are quickly forgotten.
> This is something one says on their deathbed when they have had a good life.
I can assure you the reaction at hand is not limited to those you suggest.
I know because I faced my own mortality, if only for a brief moment of time, far earlier than I ever expected and earlier than most would prefer I think. And when I did, this exact realisation hit me like a freight train. I don’t think I’ve ever experienced a more profound, visceral moment.
What also may have helped, is developing quite a deep and close relationship with an individual who would later go on to pass from cystic fibrosis.
Now one of this is to say I may not now have an entirely different reaction when again it comes time for my card to be punched. However I feel like this has been somewhat tested by the SCI that would follow five years later. It's also not to say that what I felt had been a waste vs what is important will be applicable to all of us, in fact I am sure that realistically, it will be deeply different, personal and particular to each of us as individuals.
When I have particularly bad days as a result of my unlucky medical outcomes, I remind myself of what I experienced that night, and how lucky I was ultimately to be able to experience something like that, and then actually have somewhat of a "second chance" at taking a look down the second fork in the road.
TL;DR
I give 100x times less of a shit about a "career/being productive/min-maxing" than I once did. Your mileage may vary.
I was briefly diagnosed with "99.9% sure it's cancer" before it turned out to be benign. Say about 2-3 weeks.
In those few weeks my main regrets were a) not having done many of the things on my bucket list, and b) not having children or not going to be live long enough to see them grow up.
I'm someone with recurring nightmare about career goals and such. However at that time, work only crossed my mind briefly and was easily dismissed.
> I was briefly diagnosed with "99.9% sure it's cancer" before it turned out to be benign. Say about 2-3 weeks.
This is similar to my situation, except I was told, “We’re 99.9% sure it’s not cancer, so relax bro, don’t even worry about it.” Apparently, my age made it incredibly unlikely. “We’d be far more concerned if you were an older gentleman.”
Imagine my surprise when I got called back and they told me the complete opposite.
It worked out in the end as apparently they caught it so early that it had only just turned into cancer. If they had found it even weeks or months earlier, it would not have been cancer yet, just precancerous apparently. This claim seems dubious to me, I mean, how do you tell that? However, I am not a doctor, so what do I know. I do worry sometimes though that perhaps they overstated it and blew up my life over nothing.
I was told to consider myself lucky it was caught when it was as apparently it almost never happens. Again, a claim...that I don't know is accurate, or just something they told me to get me to relax.
You also might think that after something like that, that if something else occurred with my body, people might pay me more heed when I raised it? Well, you would be mistaken. Because I walked right into a goddamn spinal cord injury (incomplete at least, you gotta take the small wins) because they did exactly the same thing again. "Its just stress, probably working too hard, just dont think about it."
Turns out no amount of relaxing is going to walk back severe central canal stenosis resulting in severe cervical myelopathy with significant spinal cord signal change.
That’s the conventional wisdom but I think it’s worth challenging it. Or at least, if by “productivity” you mean “work” (I think there’s an important distinction there).
There is nothing wrong with your work being the focus of your life. Many people derive great pleasure and satisfaction from, and make a positive impact on the world with, their work. Life without relationships would be a hell of loneliness, but life without work would be a hell of boredom and meaninglessness. (I’m aware that much work is drudgery, I refer mainly to the kind of work one can derive joy from, which I suspect many of us on HN have in our lives.)
The question “is it okay to work all the time” is explored rather well here:
>Life without relationships would be a hell of loneliness, but life without work would be a hell of boredom and meaninglessness.
There are plenty of people who don't work such as children, students, carers and retirees. They find meaning in all sorts of activities outside of work.
Most people on their deathbed who would counsel you would counsel you to focus on relationships. The ones who had the insight "people can fuck right off, that's the key to it all" aren't interested in telling us about it.
As I’ve gotten older, I’ve shifted to: learning how to find enjoyment and purpose from whatever situation you find yourself in should be an important priority.
Finding work that is inherently enjoyable and purposeful to you is still great if you can find it. But that’s not always possible, and I’ve been increasingly interested in the ideas in books like “Flow”, which details the ways people in all manner of circumstances find purpose/enjoyment from the work in front of them.
That's completely unrealistic though. If you have a job that allows you to support yourself and doesn't make you want to veer into oncoming traffic daily that's about as good as it gets for the vast majority of people.
There's so many reasons why purpose should be found outside of work.
Like others replying to this comment, I disagree because there is much work that needs to be done which cannot truly provide purpose to most people.
However ... I do believe that any job should provide dignity and "purpose" in the narrower sense of something the person doing it believes needs to be done. Any job done full time (however a culture defines that) should also make a reasonable lower middle class life possible.
I think you mean that there are a lot of jobs that while serving a good purpose, aren’t necessarily enjoyed by many. I’m not sure how much that has to be the case. In any case, we should strive to maximize the jobs that are both sufficiently enjoyable and purposeful.
The problem I see today is that there is a lot of “bullshit” work being done that doesn’t really serve any good purpose, or even makes things worse in the world, and not enough people rejecting that state of affairs.
There's a difference between personal purpose and community purpose. I don't expect a city trash collector to consider their work to be their life's purpose, even if they do experience the work as having some purpose/value to the community.
The BS jobs hypothesis, popularized by David Graeber, is IMO quite flawed. It's a way to look at the world without having to get your mind dirty understanding how stuff actually works. Sometimes that can be a good stepping stone to asking "just why are we doing it this way?". However, the broader observation that Graeber makes (essentially: "everybody, especially the people doing them, know it is bullshit") points instead to the disconnect people experience between the work being done by <their organization> and the actual stuff that they do. No doubt there are some true BS jobs, but I think far less of them than is often supposed. You and/or the person doing them may not see why they are there (and that is a problem), but that doesn't make them BS.
Though, I'd argue it should be 18 years free by their math. They lump a subset of leisure activities into another category as if those are beyond your easy control.
Commuting, working, grooming, etc - sure, you could optimize those, but it's harder to deviate from the norm. But TV/video games? Doesn't seem like the same discussion.
Exactly. I have thought about it for a while, I think I have to get rid of work or family to be substantially happier. Apparently getting rid of family is morally wrong, so the only option is to get rid of work, somehow, anyhow.
I fully understand why people buy lottery tickets. Hope beats probability on every single instance. I, a Master of Statistics graduates, buy them too.
Maybe, or maybe not. Now that I think about it, it's difficult to say. But let's say I would rather get rid of work than family, and I don't want to get rid of both.
BTW changing job is still a lot easier than changing family :)
I guess I'm just not a family person. I don't have too much to complain about my family but I don't (net) gain much. Of course I'm as responsible as your usual parents on the street so I don't want to get rid of my family.
Me too. I’d have more freedom to do certain things I love, but they’d quickly lose their appeal and I’d have no one to share any of it with. My family are literally the only people who give half a shit about me. Life would be quiet and hollow without them.
This is why I have interest in the FIRE movement. Our lives are short and fleeting. If there is even a small chance I can become financially independent before traditional retirement age, I am going to optimize for that.
We spend so much time optimizing for productivity that we sometimes miss the bigger picture: the quality of life itself, not just the quantity of tasks we can check off
My biggest failure has been not getting an extreme income ( 300k TC a year +) before 30.
I had planned to retire by 40 and be done with this work nonsense. Now I'm in my mid 30s and that doesn't seem possible.
However I will say if you have a highly variable income ( one year you make 100$ an hour, the next year you have no work), you should max out your 401k during the good times. Having 30k in retirement funds that you'll get smacked for drawing on is better than nothing.
Too late now. I'm comfortable, but I think the era of 300k TC is done.
Yup. My advice to young people is -- if you can't figure out what to do in life, make more $$. With enough $$ you will have a world of time to ponder what to do.
I also regret that I gave up a FAANG level opportunity because my faily doesn't want me to go to another city. I would hit well over 200K TC by now -- a very comfortable salary in Canada.
Quite the irony that the thread started with reminiscing about life and purpose and needing time and valuing relationships and you guys go into the "need to make more money" spiel.
Here comes a secret: It will never be enough for you. It's not the money that counts. It's the ratio of income versus expenses, if anything. And if you grow one and don't stop the other one from growing in unison, then you have gained nothing.
I know lots of people with 5x the income of me, but their expenses and lifestyle overcompensate, so they are much deeper into the hamster wheel than me.
I could retire any day (late 30s). I currently don't do it cause my work is fun and I like the people, and the more I keep going the higher my expenses could become if needed. But the finances don't keep me in my job. And if anything comes along that looks sustainably more fun I will quit in a heartbeat.
Why is parent's advice ironic? I, like probably most people, would have more time for relationships I value now if I had followed their advice. Your first sentence reads as if their advice was "earn money at the expense of relationships and well-being" and that isn't the case at all.
You can't be certain of that, though. If you had (for example) pursued work and money more ambitiously in your 20s, maybe those relationships you value now would never have formed in the first place. Maybe then-existing relationships would have suffered to the point of estrangement.
I'm lucky: I worked very hard and did decently well in the startup lottery, but I still left myself enough time to forge valuable relationships. I've witnessed people who chase higher and higher salaries but aren't that lucky, and end up using the years of their life where their mind and body are at their peak of their ability for work instead of play, and regret it.
I'm in my 40s now, and see some younger friends and acquaintances doing things like taking multi-month world trips, diving head-first into new hobbies/skills that take hundreds/thousands of hours to get good at, and I wish I'd done things like that in my 20s and 30s. In part because my responsibilities today make it difficult to do now, but also because I just don't want to do some of those things anymore, because they sound kinda exhausting at my age. But I still wish I had those experiences in my past to look back fondly upon.
I guess what I'm saying is that nothing is certain, and we can't reliably look back and say "if I'd done X 15 years ago, today I'd be able to do Y". Life just doesn't work that way. I think we should do what makes us happy whenever we have the ability to. Sure, look hard for and always be open to opportunities to take on work that could make a big change in your financial life. But be careful with those sorts of choices, because there's always opportunity cost.
I want to retire early and make music and games for 40 years after I turn 40.
I don't want to wait until I'm 69 to retire for at most 11 years.
Plus none of us know how much time we actually have. A lot of people plan to retire at 68, die on the job at 67, and your replacement is in your chair next week.
> Plus none of us know how much time we actually have
Precisely because of this, you should be making music and games now. You never know if once you reach the amount of money you desire, death will knock on your door.
If you are already doing it, that's great. But so many people defer the enjoyment and overwork themselves waiting for that future where they hit the number.
That's a good point, I make plenty of music, and every now and then I release a really small game. I can't imagine more than 100 people have played them, but in a strange way that's okay. It was never for other people.
I'd love to check out your games, if you'd be willing to post. I've spent 10 years dabbling in indie game dev when I was young, there's something nostalgic about seeing people's projects. Never published anything myself btw, it always stayed firmly in demo stage haha.
> Here comes a secret: It will never be enough for you. It's not the money that counts. It's the ratio of income versus expenses, if anything. And if you grow one and don't stop the other one from growing in unison, then you have gained nothing.
> I know lots of people with 5x the income of me, but their expenses and lifestyle overcompensate, so they are much deeper into the hamster wheel than me.
That's not a good assumption to make for everyone. There are many people who do grow income without growing expenses (see the whole financial independence movement).
I spend about as much now as I did 7 years ago when I made 4x less.
The issue is that for many FIRE people optimizing everything becomes THE main game.
You retire and then you are constantly thinking "how could I do if XYZ happened?".
It's probably better than having to write your own performance review or grind through a job you don't really enjoy, but it's still not what "live your life" is generally supposed to be.
What would that look like? Do you have kids or a family to support? I'm one of two gainfully employed breadwinners among an extended family of 13 adults and 2 kids (my own).
On the other hand, there are opportunities that are only open to you when you're young. Squandering those opportunities by working so you can be retired at 40 or 50 isn't free.
Meeting people in travel hostels would be one example. Being a young single on a beach abroad is another. Traveling in general is another.
Wandering around Prague with some beers and friends you made 6 hours ago hits different at 26 than it does as a retired 55 year old that waited to live their life.
I live on a beach in Mexico in my 30s and see both ends of the spectrum.
Yup, exactly. I know someone in their early 30s who just quit their job and went abroad to spend a month living on a beach learning how to surf. I'm in my mid-40s and can't fathom doing that. I could do that; have the finances and professional flexibility to support it, but the main thing is I just don't want to. The idea of living on a beach in somewhat uncomfortable conditions just doesn't appeal to me anymore. Some things I'd enjoy or tolerate 15 years ago are things that I just don't want to do today. But at the same time I'm disappointed I don't have experiences like that in my past to look back on fondly.
Don't get me wrong; my current situation is fantastic, and I'm in a much better place than I ever would have expected if you asked 25-year-old me where I'd be in nearly 20 years. But I'm still aware that there were paths I didn't take, paths that would have also made me happy.
I think it really depends on what people want. Some people want meeting others in hostels and that's perfectly fine. But I'd still say for the majority of us getting the FU money early has tremendous advantage.
I earned over 200k base in Canada and it didn’t make that meaningful of a difference. I gave up chasing money and went to work for an NGO I care about, earning slightly more than half as much as before, and… I love it. I wouldn’t trade incomes if it meant trading the work.
I thought the money would help, but with family, something will always suck it up. A trip, furniture, house, extracurricular, etc. I wasn’t getting much closer to any semblance of independent wealth, but I was burning myself out.
I’m glad for anyone who can pull it off, but I haven’t met them personally. I have met people who ground themselves down trying, though. It’s a risky endeavour.
You don’t have to go FAANG to earn over 200k here, either. But people will expect you to work for every cent of it, every working hour… and then some. It’s gruelling.
But would you work for an NGO if you don't have the savings from the 200K job? Maybe it's just me, but I never feel safe without the FU money, especially under this market.
BTW getting 100+K working for an NGO is fantastic! I thought they mostly just pay for meagre money. I only earn some 130K and would definitely love to switch to an NGO job with lower pay.
That’s a great question. If anything I at least have the benefit of knowing what it’s like on the other side, right? Without that I’d very likely still be pushing for more. It’s all I did for 15 years or so. I didn’t even realize I was doing it. It kind of became who I was, always simmering away either up front or on the back burner.
I’ll be candid. I spent a lot of my savings on a home that cost way too much, and burned a lot of it on… Burning out. I was unemployed for some time after a layoff and good god, the timing was awful. It was only months after getting my mortgage. So it goes though. Buying the house did a number on me. I thought it was going to matter. I thought it would finally feel like I did something important. I think it was a net negative, though paradoxically, it was the kick in the pants I needed to start to realize how futile my goals and methods were, so it was good in some ways too.
I get what you mean about not feeling safe without the money. I grew up pretty poor and a lot of my motivations were essentially “never be poor again”. I’m still insecure about this, but much less compelled by it. I think going through a rough stretch of essentially living on lentils and water made me realize that the thing I was afraid of wasn’t actually practical so much as status-driven. In a weird way I actually enjoyed aspects of having to watch every dollar again. Having to be resourceful is engaging and interesting. Making good food with less makes cooking more exciting and rewarding. Solving problems around the house with fewer tools and supplies teaches you so much stuff you’d otherwise miss. I was confronted with the fact that I was previously comforted by money more from an ego rather than a practical or survival perspective.
Well, everyone is different, but that made me feel like a complete moron and I began reconsidering my relationship with work and money.
Which landed me here. Knowing what I know now, and without my savings, I’d totally take the route I’m on now. Without knowing and with the option to earn more? The idea of working this job would fill me with dread. Weird, right?
Hey, it’s pretty cool to hear who went through a similar thing! Had around the same base in Canada, let it go after a couple of years, and trying out something a bit different. Well, with the hopes that it’ll feel good after a little while.
It's sounds vain, but money is probably one of the most important things.
At my (our ?) level it's more a luxury of early retirement, but I had a friend who could never afford to move out. Her parents were pretty bad to her to say the least. She was stuck in a pattern of dating guys, moving in with them, getting kicked out and retreating to her parents.
Unfortunately agreed. Money can't buy happiness, but it sure greases the wheels. Money opens up opportunities and possibilities that you just aren't going to have without it.
And not having money is a great way to suffer at least low-grade anxiety on a regular basis. Or a great way to actually be destitute.
Yeah. Money is something that doesn't necessarily bring you happiness, but lack of which would almost surely bring sorrow. I heard some people can live happily without money, but I don't know any of them.
Reliable 5% yield while keeping the base the same value (rising with inflation)? Possible, but not without risk. And if you want to protect against that risk, i.e. accept that some investments will fail [0], you need a bigger amount, imho. Or accept that you will get less, not 35k per year.
That's a good point. But if I'm realistic with my own mortality I'd be happy if I reached 70.
Assuming I retire at 40, and need to make 700k last 30 years, that's 23k per year with no yield. Even a modest 3% yield slows the burn rate so my money would still outlast me.
Or I'll be 73 writing Python which might not be so bad...
Very cool, thank you so much for sharing! One thing that hit me as a European is that you consider president inaugurations interesting enough to put in there! I mean, its a great point of reference, but still interesting to me. I couldn't tell you from when to when Merkel was chancellor, and I couldn't care less.
For me, I employ presidential terms as memorable 4 year labels, much the same as Olympiads (Beijing 2008, Sydney 2000, Barcelona 1992). It’s got zero to do with (geo) political influence. The Olympiads work as point in time “beats”, while presidential terms are “long tones”. Weird memory functions.
The news in the media (and outside) is so full of this that I might even be better at naming US presidents and their terms in reverse than German chancellors. The two term limit helps, to be fair. We're only on the fourth since I was born, vs 8 (counting non-consecutives) in the US. (Like, of course I can name ours, but not the exact years)
Politicians in the states have more influence and can still do something and effect change.
In Europe we're way past that, they are just bureaucrats spinning wheels, extracting value and doing minor changes (some good, some bad), gradually boiling us alive until they extracted any value from society and we collapse.
In Europe legislative bodies are responsible for moving things along. The executive takes care of filling in the gaps, taking care of current affairs and international diplomacy. This is by design.
I like gradual change. I see things here in France changing (for the better mostly) here and there but yes no dramatic shifts. The US model seems irresponsible by comparison.
What are you talking about, what value did Merkel extract for example?
I think Europe has done more good for the world than bad in the last few decades. On the other hand we're still feeling the effects of US involvement in the middle east.
As for politicians in the states having influence... congress is supposed to make the laws that the president executes. The joke is that the US is now operating in complete opposition of that. The president rules by decree, congress members have no real influence and would get decimated in a re-election campaign if they act out of favor of the president. I'd say politicans in the US have less influence do effect change, not more. In fact non-politicians like Musk/Thiel have more influence than politicians, that's more the case than it has been in many decades.
OP is a homosexual ( pls suggest the correct word here) so i think its of special importance to her. i would bet most ppl won't put "cheeto inaugurated" on their life in weeks.
Yes and no. All Presidents have been more or less hostile to gay people at least when they were inaugurated until weirdly enough Biden.
Clinton signed the “Don’t Ask or Don’t Tell” legislation and Obama was originally in favor of the the protection of marriage act. They both have changed as the winds have changed.
Also she called out that prop 8 banning gay marriage was signed in California.
This is a terrifying reminder of the shortness of our lives. I remember reading a blog by Tim Urban, where he showed that you could put all the weeks in your life on a single piece of A4 paper, and it didn’t feel nice.
What strikes me is the empty spaces where we don't recognize what we did, or didn't do anything memorable.
I made an app to try to address this about a decade ago which I called Bucket52, the idea being that every week you put one memorable thing in it. Trying to do this just for a year was surprisingly difficult.
For me I just want to remember what's gone on in my life better, even if it's sometimes mundane. I've tried short-form daily journaling, but I've only made it around 3 months before I start skipping days and stop doing it altogether.
When it comes to doing something new/memorable, I'd be fine with aspiring for just one thing per month (with the assumption that sometimes/often I'd end up with more than that).
I think the way to make things like this work is to start with a low-ambition target, and then scale up until just before the point where it starts to feel difficult to keep it going. I'm not sure I could keep up a cadence of doing one memorable thing per week. Once a month seems doable, though. But if I were really uncertain, maybe I'd first target once per two months, and then see how much more frequently I could do memorable things before it started feeling like a difficult burden.
Oliver Rackham (the woodland history bloke in the UK) used small notebooks.
Kept one in his pocket. Went everywhere with them.
More of a free-form approach.
I have started and stopped journaling times over the years. When I initially got a smart phone, i started taking photos of mundane everyday things. I’ve now been consistently doing this for many years.
It just takes a few seconds to take out the phone and snap a few photos. I have many short videos and photos of my kids over the years doing them mundane that I treasure with my life.
I've started just keeping a text list of "interesting things that I did / happened to me this year". It's nice to look back on at the end of each year - my primary reaction is "OMG that was this year??"
From this view it's clear how wasteful ontogeny is. All of that physical and psychological development takes too much valuable time and investment. And we haven't even gotten to Gina's retirement years yet. Clearly the future is in using 3D bioprinting to build fully formed adults as if sprung from the brow of Zeus. Skill and memory transfer are a technical problem only as long as we cling to our bias against our artificially intelligent upgrades. Aging is defeated by implanting our old model weights into a new print. So much efficiency is waiting if we dare to free ourselves from convention.
I love this! I was similarly inspired by the Wait But Why article[1] and made a chrome plugin several years ago that shows this for my life every time I open a new Chrome window[2]. It's also a handy countdown for big events like vacations or The Singularity (which starts in 7,259 days) that I want some time to prepare for.
I once did the math to figure out, how much space would be required to track my entire life.
I thought, I would want to know a couple of things: my location and my activity for every second of my life. Since I generally live relative to the surface of the Earth, my location could be stored in a GPS coord. And since the number of activities I engage in are not that big, I could probably store them as indexes into a map and a 32 bit int would probably give me a sufficient number of unique activities. I doubt I would exhaust that index space no matter how many unique activities I engaged in.
The math is pretty simple from there. Number of seconds in your expected lifetime multiplied by the size of data you want to store per second. Also consider how much of that is compressible (like an ideal 8 hours per day of sleep). Pretty sobering when I think about it.
Assuming a 64 bit number for activities (more than enough, I think!), a 9 character geohash[0], another 64 bits for health (HR, BP, weight, etc.), and you've got 25 bytes per second, 2.2M per day, ~789M per year, and, given 75 years life expectancy (roughly UK average), ~60G per lifetime. Probably just fits on a 64GB USB stick / SD card.
It depends on the amount and type of data you want to store and your strategies for compression. Kind of a good exercise which can be done in 5 minutes in a spreadsheet. Most reasonable answers will easily fit on a modern smartphone (or USB stick, SD card, etc.)
I like weeks. Just 52 every year. Leap year agnostic.
I have a notebook for self reflection. Week-based. Since it is not a diary I call it septimary. Unlike a diary, the septimary gives me flexibility and every week I summarize something without mentioning specific dates or days unless this level of detail is really required by the context or significance of what needs to be written down.
It's interesting that she lists presidential inaugurations. I personally use those as milestones because my birthday is January 20th. It's fun to watch video of past inaugurations (since 1972) and think, "Huh, I was such and such age then. I don't remember everyone looking so weird!"
(The bad side, of course, is that I can have some truly depressing birthdays - like my 45th and 53rd.)
Considering it is documenting, in writing, things that happened, it makes sense that they decided to follow how we write things rather than how we build houses.
We built a web app so anyone can make these kind of charts a few years ago, measured in months, not weeks. [0] I like how in this version certain weeks are annotated with historical events.
That was nice to watch. I spent about 25 minutes going through that.
But it was horrifying for me. I realized that I wanted to see if the source code is available but then realized that I really don't remember those details. I remember random things for my childhood but I don't remember the date when I started elementary school. I know that I got my first computer when I was in third grade but don't remember the date. I don't even remember the date I started college and I probably wrote the wrong date couple of times during grad school application. While I started recording something less than a diary to record some of these but this was around covid.
> I don't remember the date when I started elementary school
Ultimately the date is not important. It's a life event that came after an event (being born) and before another event (going to college/getting a job)
Recall isn't that simple. Some memories need to be jogged out with colors, smells, or sounds. You probably remember more than you first think, but it would be an involved activity to access.
A similar exercise is lined paper, one year per line. Your life on a page or two. You can vertical-bracket ranges of time, and have multiple columns (even extending the sheet). One nice aspect, is constraint propagation helps a lot in figuring out when things happened. As the years fill in, you get "well, it has to be after X and before Y, and I've already penciled in that summer and that one, so it must have been this one". For greater-than-year precision you can mark a tick, or a blob, or a month letter, but you don't have to. Each time I've done this with someone, there's been something that surprised them.
I usually don't remember details like that but I practice the ways to get them - e.g. for elementary school you should know how old you were for the year, and then you can check at what date elementary school starts in your area (where I'm from it's always 15th of September) so you can pinpoint it.
In the preface of The Games of a Lifetime by Julian "Jaz" Rignall, life may be experiencing one art piece after another:
---
The passage of my life is simply a gallery wall upon which I hang some of the most extraordinary, groundbreaking, exciting and downright thrilling pieces of video game art of the past half century. And yes, as far as I'm concerned, video games are most certainly art.
Super cool! I just adapted Gina's for myself, except that I represented each week with a tiny square so that a full year can fit on one line. Since every week is the same size, I can visually see the relative time invested in each stage of life vs training vs various jobs.
This reminds of a Radiolab episode about how we perceive the passage of time. The episode starts off talking about someone having a poster showing all of the (average) weeks in a person's life. The episode is about how to make our lives _feel_ longer than they really are. You know how sometimes you are like "damn this day is going by real slow" and sometimes it's the exact opposite. The episode is about why that happens
Doing this kind of thing is so helpful to get perspective on our life. One part is just writing down all the events we can remember. Then we can add to that some kind of schematic based on longer periods of time, both for understanding the phases of life we've already been through and for having an overarching plan for what's (possibly) left. Decades are one way to do it, but I thought it was fun to use custom timespans to map to my own milestones. Once I made my "life calendar", I've tracked it for longer than I did with any prior planning attempts.
I've also been inspired by the Wait But Why post and tried to implement my onw weeks visualization, I noticed that some years between birthdays are 53 weeks.
I guess she solves it by reseting the week start at every birthday (all weeks start on [weekday the of previous September 19]), and just before her birthday there's a block that is just 1 day long (or 2 when it's a leap year). The pedantic would then think "But that means it's not a week per block!". E.g. the WBW post has a very rigid grid.
I'm pretty close to OP's age, so pretty much within what most people would called middle aged (if lucky). Sometimes I do feel like time is sort of running out, not in a dramatic mid life crisis sense, but as a realization that time's going by pretty fast now. Seeing the potential remaining time visualized like this refreshes my perspective on this a bit, and that there's still time to complete some tasks on the life bucket list.
This is fascinating. Idk if it was a good or bad thing. In college I once looked up some insurance chart of life expectancy probabilities. It puts things in perspective that’s for sure.
Is it safe to publish your life in public? Even at a weekly precision? What about privacy & security? Genuinely asking. Could anyone take advantage of it?
I think a lot depends on whether you have very low online profile or if you have a wikipedia page with your date of birth and you've been blogging for 20 years. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gina_Trapani
Compare with Americans' often voiced concern of doxing (I'm not saying it's unfounded) and yet other jurisdictions demand that you put your name and address on your online publications even as a private citizen/solo business.
Yes, someone definitely could. But also, you have to assess who your potential adversaries are. If you're very worried you would have to be very careful and could publish almost nothing online. You need to think about that balance for yourself and your case.
This is perhaps only a little more useful information than what you could get from someones LinkedIn page. However, there you could possibly also get a network of contacts which would be more valuable. If someone would target you and you specifically for something fraudulent, they would probably start by looking for you on LinkedIn.
I would say this website, if not posted here, would probably be less discoverable than the persons LinkedIn profile.
I have something similar in an excel sheet! The horizontal axis is time and the vertical one is different categories like school, relationship, work, ... Then I merge and color cells for the duration of each "event". The thing I like about this is that I can see how different subjects in my life overlapped.
I've been wanting to generate a calendar of weeks similar to this recently. Here is a lualatex file that will generate such a calendar: https://github.com/jasongrout/weekcalendar
Into my heart, an air that kills, from yon far country blows. What are those blue remembered hills? What spires, what farms are those? That is the land of lost content. I see it shining plain. Those happy highways, where I went, and cannot go again.
Woah, look at how sparse our perception of reality is. We really can’t remember a full continuous memory, we constantly make things up to fill in the gaps.
One take away here is to constantly and proactively fill up every single second with a positive memory.
Also, I'd be curious to read about your experience at NTT DATA. I'm biased, but inclined to believe that it might be because you discovered what true corporate horror looks like. Am I wrong?
I recognize it from podcasts. She was a frequent guest on a podcast I used to listen to. Any episode she was on was a good one. If Matt Cutts also appeared, it was doubly good.
A dead man's (or well in this case, a dead woman's) trigger, a cronjob that detects a lack of activity and pushes a "$(date of the beginning of this week): I died."?
I know a lot of folks are intimidated by such a calendar (existential dread and all that), but I personally love the idea. It shows how far you've come, sure, and that there's a finite end for everyone.
But it also shows how much might be left. It's so easy, especially in dark times, to think this is nearing the end, or your best days are behind you. Yet when I look at your calendar here, all I see is a bunch of greys, of weeks not yet lived, events not yet occurred. It's a bit of hope, a bit of optimism. "I've still got time, so let's do this!"
This is an interesting way of reflecting on one's life.
I have calculated my ROL (Rest.Of.Life i.e. before been garbage collected) productive hours (hours dedicated to side projects) in a similar way, and the result panics me.
Assume that I still have 37 years before been garbage collected, and 35 years before cognitive degeneration:
Starting from today:
[Time-frame 1]:
I have 200 days before kid goes to primary school. That's roughly 56 days of weekends and 144 days of workdays. For each weekend day, I'd assume an average of 2.5 hours of productivity towards my side projects (I do have more but some are dedicated to gaming and light reading). For each workday, I'd assume an average of 1 hour (usually it is a burst of 2-3 hours for 2-3 days followed by 0 hours for 3-4 days). So this gives me 562.5 + 1441 = 284 hours.
I think this is a generous estimation because I'm struggling with minor depression from time to time, and TBH I hate my work, so I lose a day if either flares up.
[Time-frame 2]:
Kid is going to spend roughly 6 years in primary school. He is going to get friends and gradually gives me more time if he chooses so. However, I'll probably spend more time checking his assignments, talking to him, and introducing him to some hobbies in hope he can find his passion as early as possible. I read "iWoz" and would like to influence my kid as his father influenced him. The upside is -- I can work on my hobby while educating him by just doing it. Downside of primary years is that he is going to weekend classes and clubs so those will take away my time too.
I'd give myself the same 2 hours every weekend day, and 1.5 hours every working day. Let's take 250 working days and 115 non-working days (weekends + holidays). This gives 2501.5 + 1152 = 605 hours each year, and 3,630 hours for 6 years.
[Time-frame 3]:
Kid is going to spend 5 years in secondary school. Judging from my own experience, he is going to gradually leave his parents alone, rebel against them, and stay much more time with their friends. I don't really know about my employment at the time, but let's assume I'm still working a corporation cog.
I'd give myself 3.5 hours every weekend day, and the same 1.5 hours every working day. This gives 2501.5 + 1153.5 = 777.5 hours per year, and 3880 (rounded down) hours for 5 years.
[Time-frame 4]:
Kid is either going to a college or a technical school. Either way, we will probably rent him a condo close to where he studies. I'll also probably go into consulting if possible, or at least take some long breaks during this time frame. If I want to learn General Relativity, this is probably the last chance. I don't think I'm as lucky as those who still possesses a sharp mind in their 70s, so 10 years between 50s and 60s is my best shot.
I'd give myself 5 hours every weekend day, and maybe 2.5 hours every working day. This gives 2502.5 + 1155 = 1,300 hours per year. But I'd be in my mid-50s so this is probably an overestimate. I'll round it down aggressively to 1,000 hours. I can keep the same schedule for 5 years, so 5,000 hours for 5 years.
[Time-frame 5]:
I'm not sure what my cognitive ability looks like in my 60s. I'll have a lot of time, like, 10 hours every day because I don't want to work after 60. So that gives me 3,650 hours per year, and 36,500 until I'm 70, at which point I believe I wouldn't be able to pursuit serious academic or technical objectives. I know, I know, many people can still do it, but I don't think I can do it. I doubt I can work on side projects more than 5 hours per day, so I need to cut down that number at least half, to 18,000 hours. Probably more TBH.
[Time-frame 6]:
70 till garbage collected. It's going to be mostly volunteering work or looking after grandchildren or travelling with my wife, so 0 hour.
[Conclusion]:
Overall, if my mental health and physical health is good enough, my calculation is that I can put 30,000 hours into my side projects. That is, I have to be very lucky to get this number. No mental issues, no heart issues, kid doesn't cause any issues, wife is healthy, etc. In reality, probably a half or two thirds are more realistic.
Isn't that scary? There is so much to learn, yet so little time.
30000 hours seems like a lot, more than enough time for anything you might want to do. More than that, there might be enough changes in technology and the world that something you learn in the first 100 hours might not matter in the last 100 hours etc. If you start taking all these complexities into account, it might be better to count at a granularity of weeks rather than hours. Or maybe even ignore time, and focus on goals and aims. You can always make more or less time to fit your goals.
I think there's some kind of proper name for the fallacy that things now are how things are always how they're going to be. I mean kudos for thinking and planning about the future, but it's kind of ridiculous to assume that there won't be underlying changes in society that will mess with these arcs tremendously. Upsides and downsides. As much or more than the health issues which you (sensibly) do recognise as uncertainties.
I find it mildly insane that your only measure of productivity appears to be working on some sort of project.
If you're really not trying to do that, maybe restructure this sort of assessment to just be a computation of hours you will be awake. That would at least leave it much more open what a productive hour actually means.
I measure productivity by measuring the effective amount of time spent on things I truly care about. I should probably clarify, but "project" isn't always a coding project. For example I also want to study General Relativity and that's a project for me too.
But I would say that most of the human interactions (small talk with strangers, with colleagues, etc.) doesn't bring meaning to my life, although I'm married and has a kid.
The previous consists of key bullet points, numbered steps, and paragraphs that need restructuring for clarity and format.
1. Technical Achievements
2. Strong Leadership and Process Improvement Initiatives
3. Impactful Outcomes in Product Development and Engineering
4. Cross-Industry Collaboration and Product Roadmaps
5. Continuous Learning and servant leadership demonstrated throughout the organization
The following paragraphs should be formatted as:
- Highlighted technical advancements, aligned with executive goals.
- Emphasized strong process improvement initiatives across multiple departments.
- Discussed significant product launches across diverse industries and their success metrics.
- Focused on a global product development team spanning different regions.
- Shown the organization's commitment to organizational transformation and employee engagement.
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