The following quote helped me a lot: "The professional knows that the mundane physical act of sitting down and starting to work, sets in motion a mysterious process that produces inspiration.

The amateur waits for inspiration, the professional knows that it will come after he starts.

The professional therefore acts in the face of fear, when the amateur fears a big creative endeavor he waits for the fear to disappear, the professional knows this will never happen and starts anyway."

Basically, what it says is that you'll never feel like doing something that you don't want to do, and that's exactly the reason why you should just start doing and get it over with. That's my opinion

I have observed that most of the times, when I am not motivated to work, it is becasue my sub-concious mind is unable to correctly traverse the behavior tree and find a route from 'the non intuitive task' leading to the 'sexy results' I am after. My concious thinking mind has already done that.

But your sub-conscious brain being able to link the results with the efforts is not a precondition to start working. It only facilitated the process, and does not act as a deciding factor.

What an apt description of how I often feel.

"The War of Art," if anyone needs a source.

Thanks for that. Could you help me with something? I'm reading the foreword of that book right now from Amazon's preview, and it says that it's the 1st of a set of 3 books. I found the 2nd, "Turning Pro", on Amazon, but I can't find the 3rd, "The Higher Realm". Was that book renamed to something else after the foreword was written, or has it still not been published, or what could have happened to it? Do you know anything about that?

EDIT: Hmmm... On checking the foreword again, I see it says that book one is actually "Defining the Enemy". I'm starting to think that these 3 "books" are actually sections of the physical book. I guess the physical book "Turning Pro" of the same author might be completely unrelated to the equally named book two the foreword mentions. That's pretty confusing if true.

I have that book on kindle and just checked the contents. You’re correct. The book is split into three sections called books.

Thanks!

As it happens I was looking at the book the other day and decided not to buy it. Maybe I should take another look.

Oh boy, I enjoyed that. Everytime I sit down to face a nasty problem I get a little sick, but as I start working a flow slowly starts to build, and before I know it the Starbucks I'm at is empty.

I wouldn't consider myself a professional, but I know how to beat my own inner dialogues it seems

I can relate to that.

Sometimes I'm dealing with a problem that is really complicated and I tried to solve several times without success... I can feel the resistance in bed, when having breakfast and before I sit on my chair and fire up vim to go to that very block of code. It also tears me apart to go to work and leave it unsolved.

Resistance drags us down really, really bad. It makes it difficult to go back to working on a problem.

Not a professional here, but boy this is the point where amateurs quit and that's exactly where I feel the urge to quit too... but somehow I just don't. That's where it clicks "I have to find a solution to this somehow!". Maybe it's a bit of ego but I don't drop something I started[1] and when I finally find the solution, it's almost orgasmic. I feel like I'm the biggest man in the world, and that's my drive to keep moving[2].

--

[1] Unless it becomes crucially destructive and is clearly harming people, but I guess you get what I mean.

[2] I don't want to make it over minimalist because there's a lot more to it, but I'm referring to this specific motivation building block (I believe motivation isn't just an isolated urge to accomplish thing, but rather several `blocks` that together compose this `will` to do things).

From chess I learn that being professional about things means absolutely nothing. You just do it and get to the point where instinct wants you to run away in horror. To me, this is where the work starts. The point where the boys stay behind and the men move on. If you want to be better than others (like in chess) you cant just stop where everyone else would stop. That would be silly.

>The professional therefore acts in the face of fear, when the amateur fears a big creative endeavor he waits for the fear to disappear, the professional knows this will never happen and starts anyway."

It sounds like the most fundamental and precise definition of (the reason of) procrastination.

I am in a bind now. I agree with your quote, although I just stated that reducing complex matters to tweet-sized sentences is one of our big generational problems.

Whether or not it was an intentional, what a magnificently oximoron-like answer! I tip my hat to you, sir! :D

It's actually a really important quote for me, I have it saved in my notes and I had it printed on a A3 paper and stuck it to a wall.

If more people lived by it, the world could be a more productive and fluid experience, instead of all team members waiting for the last day before the deadline to actually start working or a project, I'm sure you all know how that feels...

> You need to do a lot of things you do not love before you have the skills, the vision and the attitude to actually do what you love, and accomplish the goals you want to accomplish...

I disagree with this, and I'm curious what long term goals you might have that aren't aligned with whatever it is you're doing now.

How do you suggest a millennial choose a "long term goal they really want to achieve" in the first place? In my experience, goals grow out of a person performing an activity and having a desire to master it, but you appear to be suggesting that a person start with a goal in mind and then work on doing things they aren't motivated to do with the hope that the goal will be worth it in the end. That, to me, sounds like a recipe for depression.

Now, I'm not suggesting one should avoid doing anything difficult. Learning hard things is difficult, after all. The problem, in my experience, is that people are initially curious about something, but then tell themselves they can't do it. That they don't have the brain for it, or whatever it is. They're curious about something and so they make an attempt at it, but they don't do a very good job, and so they say to themselves that they aren't good enough and then they quit. This, to me, is where resilience is necessary. This is where it's necessary to do something even though it's hard. But resilience to do something you don't even want to do in the first place because you've set some arbitrary far-off goal for yourself? That seems like a gamble to me.

You make a fair point, but I think we are looking at the article in different ways.

At any rate, you stated yourself that goals come form performing something and getting the desire to master it.

Would you say that such a desire sprouts in everyone the very first time they try something?

I doubt it. It sounds like "love at first sight" and I believe it is very rare, to say the least.

I am saying that, even to get to the point where you know what you love, you need to "push through" a lot of difficult moment that will make you think you hate that very "thing" that you might -through persevering- find out you love.

Yes, I agree with you on these points.

I think what we both agree on is that "find your passion" is not good advice by itself. The mistake people make is thinking that their "passion" will be something they have a natural aptitude for, and that once they stumble across it, it will feel natural and fun and they'll never find it hard or challenging. Most of the time, it does not work this way.

My reading of the article is that rather than seek out activites that are lucrative we should instead follow the thing that make us curious -- pay attention to the little voice in the back of our minds that says "I wonder if I could make something like that", and then go make that thing. When you do that, in my experience, you find yourself energised by your hobbies rather than depleted. And if you do your work in a place where other people can see, you start to meet people who are curious about the same things you're curious about, and that's a truly wonderful thing.

I also would agree that one should prefer things one is passionate about over things that are lucrative (although IMO most people do not have the luxury to completely disregard the lucrative side of things, and need to factor it in).

I'd like to water that generalization down a bit: Unrealistic expectations and following/giving bad career advice are multigenerational human problems that have likely plagued humanity for millenia. I'd wager this problem began in earnest the moment humans started farming.

Generational division is also nothing new.

Please try to respond to the bad advice, and not provide generational troll bait. I'm not saying this with any authority, I just want to keep the level of discourse on HN from devolving.

Please don't respond to this if you disagree, just give it a down vote so the discussion stays on topic.

> Generational division is also nothing new.

This is a person of generation X talking about a problem of the same generation (i.e. X).

> Please don't respond to this if you disagree, just give it a down vote so the discussion stays on topic.

Down vote trolls, not people you disagree with. Down voting for disagreeing leads to negative experience with the whole discussion platform.

>Down vote trolls, not people you disagree with. Down voting for disagreeing leads to negative experience with the whole discussion platform.

Using downvotes to disagree has always been ok (and encouraged) on HN.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16131314

That's a thread from 12 years ago. HN is obviously a different community now than it was then. One problem on HN is how quickly a discussion item will fade or disappear due to excessive downvotes.

And for example, unlike Reddit, you can't downvote items on the main page, just comments.

I'd be curious to hear an updated discussion on this, but I've seen salient points being downvoted into obscurity simply because it accrued a lot of downvotes, and I'll find myself upvoting posts I disagree with just to keep the post alive.

>That's a thread from 12 years ago. HN is obviously a different community now than it was then.

Yes, pg doesn't make a point of reiterating it every year. Is the community really different? I've been around for some time and I haven't noticed. dang is a mod/admin. Here he is repeating it again a year and a half ago:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17996858

So we have a community manager repeatedly saying "yes, this is intended", and a random user saying it's not. The downvote button on articles is a completely separate issue.

Those are interesting points, but I think despite the official position by dang and pg, most HN users don't downvote points they disagree with as a convention. I think this is due to the fact that a comment's karma score is not shown, which is another thing that differs from Reddit. There's no real reward or feedback for downvoting a post, and you can't know for sure if that post has -2 karma or +27 karma, so you don't really know what difference it makes. I think that's a good feature of HN, by the way.

I do think HN is much bigger now. There's less discussion on philosophy of startups in general. PG himself rarely blogs about it any more. It also seems like political topics get more frequently introduced on the front page. Also there's frequent toxicity and negativity about certain technologies which do warrant intellectual discussion, but get dog piled by naysayers. Maybe that's always been there and it's my imagination but it does seem like some of the "hacker ethos" has faded.

I fully agree with you here, and think pg is utterly wrong in this regard. In the long term, it hurts everyone involved. With enough people downvoting to disagree and upvoting to agree, the community devolves to tribalism and echo chambers, and scarily shifts towards Youtube comment level of discourse.

Upvote or downvote comments, not people.

Upvote comments not because you agree with them, but because you feel they contribute to the topic at hand, for those who read the thread after you did. Especially if they make you stop even just for a few seconds and consider a new point of view, even if you end up discarding that point of view.

Downvote comments not because you disagree, but because they are of low quality (for various reasons) and a waste of time to read, given the topic at hand. Comments you disagree with can often seem that way, and it takes self-control and, shall I say, maturity, to see which is it.

Oh yes, and feel free to downvote this comment if you must, I did hijack the topic somewhat rudely here. :)

Personally, I view the vote controls as a three-way toggle. Low-quality comments get down-voted, unless they're already greyed-out (no point in piling on, unless it's truly toxic). Comments that I disagree with but are otherwise well-written and contribute to the discussion I leave alone. And comments that I agree with and that are well-written I up-vote.

But sometimes I up-vote comments that I mostly disagree with, but that I think make such an excellent point that others still might find them interesting. Or if a comment is greyed-out but I think it still contributes, I'll upvote it to counteract someone else's downvote, even if I don't necessarily agree with the comment.

Ultimately, users can do whatever they want with the up and down arrows.

> Please don't respond to this if you disagree, just give it a down vote so the discussion stays on topic.

So that the forum stays an echo-chamber? That's not why I come to hackernews. On HN (and sometimes, but less on Reddit) I can be sure there will be a respectful conversation of the all the viewpoints. That doesn't take away from the discussion, it adds to it.

I admit I might have generalized a bit, but I was far from trying to bait trolls.

I am a millennial myself (I do not know if the author is, and I do not think it is relevant) and I truly think this kind of attitude is damaging us. It sure has damaged me and and a big portion of people I know.

Besides... I did, as you say, try to respond to the bad advice. "We should focus on how to motivate ourselves to do things that we do not love, but that are necessary".

I am well aware that I might be wrong, and I think HN is a good place to debate different, and interesting, ideas. I also prefer to argument my disagreement in words rather than downvotes, because there is no discussion, otherwise :)

To be precise, the author isn't simply saying "Do what you love", he's saying "Do what you love in your leisure time".

I think that's an important distinction. He's not giving diligent work short shrift, just trying to exclude drudgery from leisure time specifically.

And he's not saying "do what you love" either. The word "love" appears only once in the article, and that is inside a quote. He's saying "do what you can't stop thinking about." That is not the same as "do what you love."

It's maybe hard to know "what you love" but it's easy to know what keeps floating back up in the top of your brain, even if rational you says it might not be the best use of your time.

Then again if "Dance Monkey" won't stop playing in your head... doesn't mean it's great art.

that's a fair point, but I still think the general sentiment is disagreeable.

as many other commenters wrote, if one is just supposed to wait to get inspired, wait to have something to love and be unable to stop thinking about, a wide majority of people will wait forever.

I have a much better time when I try something new, give it everything I got, and try to learn everything I can from it, even when I do not like it. This includes hobbies.

That being said, I wont force myself into doing something I hate. It's just the absolute approach of the article that I have a problem with.

Agreed. I see a lot here and on Reddit, any time something comes up that the person doesn’t want or like, the suggestion is to quit and move on. Work problems? Quit and find another job. Boyfriend problems? Leave and start a new relationship. Landlord troubles? Move out and find another place to live.

My sister in law went to college and started working in the job she wanted at the company she wanted but at a location she didn’t want. She couldn’t get a transfer to the more prestigious location within her first year of working so she said it was a waste of her time and everyone was holding her career back. She’s now stocking shelves at a grocery store at 29 years old.

You gotta shovel a lot of shit before you get to the top, but that stuff isn’t Instagram friendly so it’s not glorified in the media.

You’re just taking the opposite extreme.

Yes, you have to shovel a lot of shit to get to the top. But you also have to dump a lot of people (and jobs, and interests, and homes) to find people and places that really complement you.

Maximum progress is made by people who can both trust their inner voice, AND can grit their teeth. The really hard part is using the former to know when to apply the latter.

The only thing I wish someone had told me is you only get one chance to start those “we were here together from the start” relationships. So before you set off on that big search, really think about whether there is something or someone around you that you might want to know in the end, alpha to omega, and stay in touch with those people or places. Because if you disappear for 10 years, you won’t be able to go back.

> Maximum progress is made by people who can both trust their inner voice, AND can grit their teeth.

Part of this is having an educated inner voice. IME one does best with the intersection of ones passions and demand for those skills.

My younger inner voice craved to make videogames. Until gritting through the process a few years and learning about industry norms re-educated that voice. University also helped me discover some other passions that paid better and had better work-life balance, all with less risk. (Albeit none of the prestige.)

When you start accepting all the shit you don't like in your life,you just end up getting more and more of it.Most things,if you don't like them,are almost impossible to fix without some drastic measures. Having said this, things need to be done in a reasonable way with some sort of planning. If the job is shit because there are 10 assholes working in your department, you can't just remove them to make it better. You can, however make sure there's another job lined up before telling them what you think about them and etc.

I agree with you and I can’t say for sure but I think it’s even worse in the next generation as well. I’ve talked with/tried to mentor more than a few but usually one gets fed up with the other because of this very issue.

I knew a girl who wanted to be an astrophysicist. She could’ve done it too. But she started rock climbing (I was mentoring her), and eventually gave up college so she could be a climbing guide because “it’s what I love.” I tried my best to remind her that she also loves physics and can participate in BOTH if she pursued physics. But now she’s working to be a guide somewhere.

I’m not saying being a guide is a bad thing, but I know more than a handful of people who’ve guided most their life and wish they had just put in the time to get skills to get jobs that pay more and have more longevity. This anecdote is just one example (there are more) of my experience with the next generation that I haven’t quite seen in millennials. However, I’m not the most social of person, and I’m rarely on social media other than here so I could definitely be wrong.

Off-topic, but the following had me thinking:

>"However, I’m not the most social of person, and I’m rarely on social media other than here so I could definitely be wrong."

Do you people of the HN consider HN as a social media?

I personally don't, to me it feels more like an aggregator of knowledge and useful opinions.

The way I read HN is that I first look at the comments, and then based on that decided if I'll read the article.

I understand why social medias exist, but to me they feel useless and quite often they have many serious negative effects. None of which are present here on HN.

> Do you people of the HN consider HN as a social media?

Yes, definitely.

At times when I'm really busy, I'll even occasionally blacklist it to avoid distractions. The feelings HN gives me are very similar to the feelings that Reddit/Facebook would give me. I think that platforms like Reddit have additional downsides that HN has managed to avoid, but HN is a social forum.

Yes, definitely. I kind of see it like a hobby subreddit from 5 years ago or a niche forum from 15 years ago.

It is well-moderated (thanks dang!), it doesn't have the critical mass of users which leads to wider adoption, it has a narrow focus on thought-provoking material, it is pseudonymous, and you don't need to download an app to use it.

But even though I occasionally learn useful things from HN, I still think it fits the definition of "social media": it is a way to waste time when you are otherwise lonely and bored, and it involves interacting with other people.

I don’t. I also don’t consider other anonymous post-comment sites like Reddit to be social media. It’s only social if there are actual connections, relationships, friendships, etc. being formed or perpetuated. That doesn’t happen on here or on Reddit or on other similar anonymous sites. There is a particular sub-reddit for a hobby that I spend a ton of time on. I honestly don’t know if any of the comments I have ever read on there are from people I’ve previously read comments from. I never read usernames and wouldn’t remember them anyway. For all I know, every comment was left by a bot. There is no community, no relationships, no friendships, etc. Just like HN. That’s not social media.

I would call it a forum. You can’t follow people, which I would consider a necessary condition for social media.

That’s a good point.

I do by definition (because I enjoy reading some of the conversations), but it could easily be used just as a news site. So I’m my mind it’s usually in a separate place than other social media. Also, as much as I’ve heard some people critique the quality of conversations on HN, it’s definitely a lot better than most, if not all, other conversation based platforms.

Maybe random forums are better, but I don’t consider those social media really.

Today's HN fills the hole in my heart where BIX, CompuServe, and my own old BBS network used to be.

Maybe a good rule of thumb is to sit down, do an instropection on all the things you love and identify the one that assures the most financial stability and security.

Choose that thing as your job and make the rest your hobbies.

The next generation after millennial - they're like 18 right? That doesn't sound like a generation thing that sounds like a teenager/young adult thing. And I think the hippies in the 60s were way further on the "follow your heart" thing than teenagers now, and a lot of them grew up to be like conservative bankers or whatever.

The number of hippies from the 60s are vanishingly small proportion of the population. There're 100x people spitting on Vietnam protesters than there were protesters.

And there are probably an even smaller number of 18 year olds telling their mentors that they're going to leave behind their dreams of being a physicist to become a rock climber. Those stories stand out and get all the attention, and people really want to find ways to claim following generations are going astray, but the 100x people in gen z going on to study STEM fields and getting well paying jobs get outshadowed as people decide that the random person that wants to be a rock climber is going to define the trend. And hey, it's early days - rock climbing competitions and stuff need a winner too, and while I wouldn't expect every person that makes the call to leave a "Boring" path to become a rock climber or a musician or actor or whatever to succeed, id expect to successful ones to have stories along those lines. People had to be that way to create this generation of daredevils and movie starts, why would the next generation be any different?

Totally! And I wish her all the best and when people ask for a reference I send them to her (because I don’t like spending my time teaching newbies anymore). I just have these anecdotes that could mean nothing but are concerning to me. Now that I think about it, I probably am more concerned about all the people out there who live cookie cutter lives without honest introspection.

maybe climbing was the better career move.

if astrophysics is anything like most of academia, there are a lot of low-paying, unstable short-term positions as everybody scrambles for the few permanent jobs. i'm sure there are a lot of astrophysicists struggling to survive in adjunct/lecturer/lab assistant positions who wish they had just gotten a normal job that pays more rather than pursuing what they love.

That’s a great point, but I’ll let you know that there aren’t many jobs in climbing and the number that actually pay well are very small as well. So maybe both are impractical? But that is a good point.

There are many issues that go into making the stereotypical Millennial psyche. But I think an issue overlooked is the loss of context for your own life in your own community, which in my opinion has been brought on by the internet and media machines, overwork, and with the individualist movement pointing the spotlight squarely on yourself. We have disconnected and disenfranchised a generation from the community, then told them to compare themselves on the global stage of highest achievers, while their local avenues for community support get diluted into commercial ventures and shallow social media connections.

Couple that with the commercializing of pretty much everything that the sun bares down upon, such that nothing around you has much authenticity, which leads you to have bizarre situations like humans who think brands are their friends, and there being no non-commercial spaces to meet new people at. It's no wonder there are so many confused Millennials who don't really get how to fit into society anymore.

I regularly get obsessed with making video games and writing sci fi. I am regularly allowed to pursue these precisely because I work a flexible-schedule job that provides for my family and gives us the freedom to dream and live in peace together. Even if that job does not provide the flash-in-the-pan inspiration and passion all the time, it provides a warm glow that will last.

Focus on things/projects you can’t stop thinking about, not tasks. Tasks are just the steps you take.

Of course you won’t love every task, some might even be downright terrible, but if you can’t stop thinking of the overall goal, then keep going.

But if you find yourself not caring about the end goal, time to reconsider.

This isn't advice so much as one person advertising his own professional status. But this article hits upon a good point:

> To the experts, what looks like hard work from the outside, is play from the inside.

People who are obsessed with "motivation" point to people like Elon Musk who work extreme hours, and recommend others do the same. But they have cause and effect backwards.

You start working insane hours when your own personal talents align with society's rewards, and you are blessed/cursed with ambition that demands to be satisfied.

Elon Musk didn't start off saying, "I'd rather spend time with my family and play video games, but I'm going to start working 80 hours a week to get rich." No, it started with a spark within him. How did it get there? I can't say.

They say talent is rare, but I don't think that's true. I believe what is rare is the intersection of talent and ambition.

I've been on both sides of this -- I've been very ambitious, and I've been not very ambitious in different parts of my life. It's hard to work your butt off when you don't feel particularly ambitious, and it's hard not to when you do.

For my side projects I try to start with things I can't stop thinking about, but with a low bar of daily/weekly effort. It's that low bar that helps with the grind. Especially when the next shiny thing comes along, or other priorities prevent a 'real' effort.

Some days I can put in hours. Though in practice I have too much else going on. So the baby steps help maintain momentum without feeling like I can't finish anything.

It also helps to look back at milestones that were satisfying to me even if no one else noticed. And to remind myself it's OK to walk away if my original goals proved too far out of reach.

I tend to have a similar approach and experience to yours.

My point is that to get me where I am today, so that I can even put a finger on WHAT it is that I love, i had to go through many hours of doing things I did not love.

I definitely think that attitudes like "only do what you love/is automatically motivating" is a huge source of imposter syndrome, depression, and anxiety in me as a grad student

Thank you. I have had the same exact problem with imposter syndrome and innumerable motivation issues with things I felt like I loved (and still love).

The "do what you love" narrative that our generation has been fed, I am not sure how and by whom, caused me to doubt my decisions much more than I think it's healthy, just because "I am not loving this, is this what I should be doing?". This applied to my university career, to my profession, to the jobs I took.

Luckily through lots of work on myself I am able now to look at these feelings with more lucidity and to work through them.

Thanks for sharing.

"Do what you love" at face value doesn't make much sense, but IMO that's the wrong way to look at it. "Doing" is not only the mere act of doing something but also the time you invest towards a goal.

I'm not sure I disagree, but I would like to add a caveat.

> You need to do a lot of things you do not love before you have the skills, the vision and the attitude to actually do what you love, and accomplish the goals you want to accomplish.

It will be very difficult for you to get the skills/attitude/vision you need if you don't have a clear vision of where you're going and why you're getting them -- and if you're struggling with motivation, asking yourself if you really care about the end goal can be valuable.

As an example:

I've been working on the same game for almost 2 years. There's a lot of boring stuff that goes into that, there are a lot of just multi-hour, multi-day coding sessions that are not spent on cool gameplay stuff, they're spent on optimizations and infrastructure, and signing up for conferences and writing blog posts. Stuff I don't really enjoy. I've spent 8 hour weekends just working on this, to the point that I struggled with insomnia at some points. And there's some stuff there that's really not fun.

BUT, every day I get up I'm still excited about the game. Every day I get up I desperately want the game to be completed. So it's not actually all that hard to work on boring, mundane things that will get me to that goal. I know, with 100% certainty, baring some kind of horrible accident I will finish this game -- because even with all of the mundane and difficult work, finishing the game is easier for me mentally than living in a world where I have not finished the game.

On the other hand, there are side projects I've tried to invest a lot of time into and when it got to the boring stuff, I couldn't be motivated to work on it. And I spent a long time trying to figure out what the difference was and why I couldn't pull off the same 8-hour practice sessions before realizing that I did not care enough about the final goals of these projects to put in the work. I am not a very good piano player. I'd like to be, but I don't care enough to put in the time and practice. I'd like to be the type of person who's an excellent piano player, but I don't actually love playing the piano.

If you really, genuinely love something, you will be able to put in the time on the boring stuff. If you do not genuinely love something, putting in the time on the boring stuff will be exponentially harder. So while being able to preserver is important, I also advise people who are trying to do hard things to first find hard things that they really, really care about.

Some motivational problems do come down to perspective, not character. I do believe that some people have problems with maintenance and work. But I also believe that sometimes people who can't preserver are in that state specifically because they have convinced themselves that they love something that they don't actually care about.

If I wasn't working on my current game, I would go insane. Motivation does not factor into it; I just do whatever needs to happen next regardless of whatever it is, regardless of whether or not it's fun, because that's what needs to happen next and I emotionally need the game to be finished eventually. To me, that's what working on something that I love means: caring about something so much that you're willing to do hard or mundane things.

If I'm going to spend 3-5 years on game, maybe even longer, I need to know up-front that I care about it on that level. So one of my tests when I start working on a game is exactly what the article asks: "can I stop thinking about this?" If I can stop thinking about it, then I probably am not going to have the motivation 4 years from now to spend a bunch of consecutive weekends debugging stack traces.

Agreed. The focus on the interior world (feeling) versus the exterior world (results) is one of the reasons recent generations have not innovated

On the other hand, this idea is the fastest way to level up your "tech tree" in one specialization.

A lot of my friends are children or grandchildren of Boomers and have been spending a lot of time lately asking and not answering the question of how they got like this, and so I’ve been trying to answer that for myself. Below is my barely half baked theory as it stands today.

After the War, there were kids everywhere. So, so many kids. They had to open schools. Whole industries about kids exploded into existence. But as one of those kids? There must have been ten other people wanting to be what you wanted to be and half of them were better at it than you could hope to be. That, my theory states, fucked them up badly.

When they had kids, they pressured us into being unique snowflakes, to be exceptional. It was too goddamned much pressure, and that fucked us up. So the next cohort started congratulating their kids for doing absolutely nothing at all. Which fucked them up worst of all.

So, like, we are very sorry, but we were just trying not to pass our neuroses down and ended up giving you different ones. Same as our parents.

This is an interesting take on the sociological change.

I definitely think the pressure was one of the top factors in fucking us up :D

Life is supposed to be simple, people overcomplicate things.