Ok. "20 or so" describes me. And things aren't going so well.
Out of uni, and life feels pretty empty. Family has fallen apart, friends are friends of convenience, work is very intense - perhaps too much - and everything is going into keeping going. The brave face, making sure I eat, making sure I run, cycle, climb.
The dreams I had even six months ago, feeling ever more impossible. The lure of things I found rewarding in the past - computer games, novels, reddit, hacker news, debating - proving substanceless, insufficient.
The games and the websites are addictive.
> is this how I want to be spending my time?
No. But the truth is I do not know how else to spend my time.
I feel like I should find another job. Move to a different city or country. But I don't know how to do these things. I do not know if these things will help. I have a feeling the problem is me.
So when I am trapped in an empty bed, in a house of people who 'get on', in a city that is ok. I read the novels, I play the games, and I click the links. I try and forget I am here, living in bullshit.
Remember that wasting time at 20 seems OK, wasting it at 30 will make you nervous, and if you're still doing it at 40, you'll wonder where all the time went. It really happens surprisingly fast - at 29, you feel young, but a short decade later, you'll fret about being "too old" (which is an illusion, but it takes a while to know that). Don't worry that you'll mess up your career or anything else by taking some time to do something adventurous. Pretty much whatever you do, you'll look back and thank yourself for stepping out rather than hunkering down.
BTW, as for "work is very intense" - it probably isn't worth it. I burnt out once after a few years of very intense, very committed work. I wasn't better off at the end of it and nobody says "thank you", not sincerely anyway. And after you leave, the waters close around you and it will be like you were never there. So if you're not enjoying it, maybe it's the kind of bullshit you can do without?
Wow that imagery is powerfully sad. Corporate culture and its structural constraints makes monsters of all of us.
I didn't mean it to be ;) I'm an optimist at heart, honestly, and I'm not sitting here feeling I've wasted my life or anything. But there are some things I wouldn't do again if I had my time again, and working hard for unappreciative, self-centred people is one of them.
That's a bit of a luxury, you don't always have that choice but on the whole I agree with the idea. I'd re-phrase it to don't work for assholes if you can avoid it. I'm fortunate enough now that this is a rare occurrence but even now every now and then a deal goes by that is financially too sweet to let go and I still take them. Last year this happened once, the previous 3 years not at all. So unless you're totally secure in your finances keep that door open a crack.
Good to see you on this side of the line after two heart surgeries.
If I could go back and tell myself something, or if I had kids to advise, this is the essence of it.
Once you've got your basic needs met, anything you do to enrich your character is going to make you a more compelling person. Don't squander your 20s and 30s. Take advantage of opportunities that present themselves, because it's a lot harder to cultivate new opportunities from scratch.
GP, if you can actually afford to pick up and try something new, you really ought to do it. It's so easy nowadays: pick a city and spend two weeks at an Airbnb. If you like it, stay longer, and if not, go back or go somewhere else.
Finally, when I was 27 and my first child arrived that phase ended, then it very much mattered if there was money on the table and life suddenly changed from being relatively free to being quite structured with a very high penalty on any inability to provide. I made a pretty conscious decision to stop following just what interested me but to chase the buck and with the knowledge gained in the preceding years that was quite easy.
Go see the world while the current phase lasts, sooner or later life will really trap you (compared to your situation atm) and then you're on the hook for many years before you will have some of this freedom back again. By then your body will be one that you can't compare to today (and I'm saying that as a reasonably fit person of 50+), your time will be spoken for at some regular interval and so on.
The right time to strike out into the world is now, don't worry overly about how you'll finance any or all of this, a few hundred in savings would be enough to broaden your horizon tremendously and that alone will give you an advantage over those that are rooted to their hometown.
This, by the way is what fuels my 'journeyman' projects that I try to do each year now, they're a link back to my past, basically not a new thing but a continuation. It's been incredibly rewarding to meet all these new people and to help them to achieve their dreams and contribute a little bit to solving their problems even if not a single cent ever changed hands. I very much look forward to doing another round of these this coming summer.
I am going to make a bold claim here. I hear this very often among people in the west. I here the same among people in India(I'm from India) who come from families who are rich, well supplied with resources. Perhaps its the saturation that a person reaches a point after a person reaches and experiences a sufficient degree of sufficiency.
>>I have a feeling the problem is me.
It is hard to convince your mind to prepare for a grand struggle, challenge or a mission- when none exists. The west(especially US) is already reached the pinnacle of what a developed nation could look like. Schools are free, Country wide road network is nothing like anywhere, Cities with opportunities all over the place, Infrastructure is simply amazing, you can take water out of any tap in the country and it will be clean, you have social security ... the list is endless.
On top of all this if your family is even from lower middle class, you are generally well provided for.
Your mind doesn't identify with any struggle or even acknowledge that one exists. This can for sure cause 'Why am I here' crisis. Like I said I see this same among a lot of friends in India, especially among people from rich families.
So the right response is to change your viewpoint to one where the problems you are confronted with match your abilities to solve them, in order to get better at this so that you can solve larger problems later on (and it helps that while you're doing this you also make contact with other people who will in turn become your real-life network).
This can take a while, but that's fine. Living in India or the West would not change much in this respect but for someone that grew up in the West to go to India would likely change their perspective on life and values tremendously, just like the reverse would happen if someone from India moved to the West for a while. They'd come back a different person, and would mature a large amount in a relatively short time.
Which dreams? Are the people who have achieved dreams like those that much more capable of you? One of my realizations is just how much less important intelligence is to drive. If you want something, oftentimes the difference is doing the work. Make sure it's a meaningful dream (e.g. not "get rich" which impacts happiness surprisingly little).
"I feel like I should find another job. Move to a different city or country. But I don't know how to do these things."
Are you more or less capable than the millions of people who find new jobs or move? You sound smart and educated. "Don't know how" seems like a pretty soft excuse. Everything has an "undo" button. Get a new job and it sucks? Well, you tried and learned some interesting things about yourself and the world-- go find another one. Move to a different city and find out that you don't love it? Well, you got to explore a cool place that wasn't for you, and maybe you met some interesting people. Move back or move to a new city.
But I can't help but feel like it's all wrong. Work hard for what? So you can amass enough money for when you're too old to work? That whole way of life seems counter to the "life is short" argument. Because of that, I find myself needing to constantly move on, ever searching for something truly fulfilling. Work seemed to fulfill me for 4 years or so, but I feel like I've achieved what I set out to achieve, and now it is hollow.
In many ways this is a solidification of a lot of what I have been thinking
Take leave or negotiate unpaid leave if you have to. Try just a weekend at first.
If you think you can't afford to travel, find travel you can afford. That might be domestic, camping, sleeping in the back of a car on a road trip, going to less-in-demand national parks. See and do something new.
For people who aren't yet parents, it compares a bit to the way your thinking about money matures when you get your first job. Suddenly a shirt equals two hours of labor instead of some abstract quantity of a theoretically finite resource. This triggers in many of us a quest to figure out income, so we can get the things we want. But even the affluent among us can't just throw more time at all the things they'd want to do.
But is life is too short to use your wealth and power to help solve the problem you acknowledge there is? That sounds like a weird idea. Most of PGs essays aren't controversial they are more informative. Why is life too short for that?
If anything PG is a thinker and a good one at it. He doesn't get everything right (who does) but he is a smart enough thinker to be able to develop his thinking.
You can read his essay in three ways.
1) Life is too short, I don't like writing essays about things that interest me anymore.
2) Life is too short, I just want to kick back and enjoy my family and the money I have.
3) Life is too short.
No matter how you turn it around I fail to see why he would give up writing something that he surely enjoys doing. Especially when you have the power to actually get people to take you serious. (Perhaps thats the problem?)
So why should life be too short for that? Only PG knows. But I think he is proving that either some of the "conspiracy theorists" in this thread are not wrong, or some of his critiques of his last couple of essays are not wrong either.
Ouch.
> I understand what it means when people say life is to short.
I'll bet, that's the kind of thing that will make this a background feeling almost continuously.
> But is life is too short to use your wealth and power to help solve the problem you acknowledge there is?
Well, PG is - in his own way - doing just that. He made quite a few people quite wealthy and he wasn't exactly obliged to do so. After all the first exit he had was one where he could have comfortably lived for the rest of his years without spending a single micro-second on the problems of others.
> That sounds like a weird idea.
It is, and I don't think that idea is actually present in this essay or any of the others. Horses for courses, PG is good at what he does and uses his wealth in the way he thinks best matches his skillset. Contrasted with say Zuckerbergs fairly hollow 'letter to my daughter' I frankly much prefer the PG variety, though of course I already had quite a different opinion about those two individuals before either of them wrote a line.
> Most of PGs essays aren't controversial they are more informative. Why is life too short for that?
He's not saying he won't write more essays. He's saying that he's going to be more in fire-and-forget mode, engaging the audience on his terms rather than feeling that he has to respond to each and every person out there with an axe to grind and an internet connection. I'd say more power to him.
So given that I won't go into the second part of your comment because I think you derailed somewhere right at the beginning making the rest not really relevant.
Hence the 'bullshit' line.
Other than that what other controversial essays have he written? Maybe one other?
Actually, don't "simply don't" because that's not a useful way to go about improving things. Learn how your brain works and what you can do to actively change the way it currently operates. You wouldn't expect a trainer at the gym to simply tell you "get stronger" and walk away. You need to learn how muscles work, what types of exercises to perform, how to perform them, and then you need to achieve consistency.
(I can only imagine how much sooner I would have achieved consistent happiness if my school teachers and parents would have refrained from simply demanding I "pay attention!" and instead taught me how.)
Anecdote: Thursday night I was going to the bathroom and dropped my phone in the toilet. Doneso - no amount of rice was saving that thing. Replacement can't get here til Monday. After that understandably frustrating experience my girlfriend made a point to call out that I pretty much didn't flinch over it all. Kinda laughed it off. For context, the learned behaviors I've owned since childhood typically goad me into punching a wall over such incidents.
It's a bit difficult to explain, but putting actual practices into play to alter the way you think/react/act feels to me like "unburdening" yourself. There was a great line in the book 10% Happier (great, easy read, no self-improvement BS) about the author wanting to call it "The Voice In My Head Is An Asshole" that kind of gets to the heart of it all, for me. We don't control ourselves! That's not how every day living is set up. If we could, then we'd never be sad or angry or stressed. It would be that simple; just tell yourself to be happy and you'd be happy. Such a simple concept but not something easily internalized.
One gem in here that has not been high-lit by other commenters in this thread that stands out for me because that's one that I did figure out very early on in life (and this served me very well) is this one:
"As I've written before, one byproduct of technical progress is that things we like tend to become more addictive. Which means we will increasingly have to make a conscious effort to avoid addictions—to stand outside ourselves and ask "is this how I want to be spending my time?""
Please do ask yourself that question often, and if the answer is 'no' or 'maybe' then simply don't and save yourself a lot of grief and regret in the long run.