It is interesting how many stories in a way involve running or moving away from the lifestyle that ... bought them a new lifestyle.

When something consumes you so rabidly and ferociously for so long, and then is just gone (poof), it leaves you searching. Searching for recovery and meaning.

It's 4 years later, and I'm still searching...

My discovery having gone through something similar: If something made you happy and gave you purpose before, it probably will again. So just do it again.

The second time around, you may discover that finding success, getting rich, etc., wasn't actually the reason you were doing it.

Getting rich was never the reason. I was a solo bootstrapper who rarely got paid for a decade+. If it was about the $ I would've dipped week one of the startup.

My issue is product market fit. I've been building different ideas for the past few years, but traction has eluded me.

Out of curiosity, what have you built? Also, do you enjoy the process of building things?

I love building things - it's my passion in life. I loathe when I build something and it doesn't get traction. I'm all for learning, but I'm truly here for the traction. Here's a list of some things I built in the past few years:

- AI Agent Generator: Created no-code platform for customizable AI agents with a MidJourney & RAG/VectorDB document and crawled website integration.

- AI-Enabled Town: Crawled all of my tourist town's destinations, retail stores and their products and then tied them into a React Shopify sales channel. Built an agent to interact with and it links to products and locations as it chats.

- Job-Matching Browser Extension: Developed Chrome/Firefox extension to analyze job fit and generate multilingual resumes/cover letters in 26 languages.

- Job-Searching Agent: Developed MacOS and Winows Electron app to perform a number of searches on popular job website and stream a list of jobs and a % of how the user matches up, so they can focus their time applying instead of sifting through job descriptions.

Zuckerberg said something along the lines of if he would have sold facebook, he would have gone on to build another facebook Is that how you feel? Ive spent the past 10 years building my company, I dont feel like another venture could compare (for now)

I wouldn't, at least not in its current incarnation. I started mine in 2008, after a 2007 Supreme Court decision. For cpg brands, we built a SaaS for e-commerce dealer base compliance and management.

Ultimately, because competition eventually grew like crazy, I don't think the market timing is worthy of trying to rebuild it at this point. Maybe some analog for AI instead of e-commerce.

Oddly, after looking at your profile, it looks like I've been building the last few years in the same space as you. But product market fit has been elusive.

There is a luxury class at both ends of the economic spectrum, as Veblen observed.

*leisure, I suppose. I'd love to read more on that. Is that from "The Theory of the Leisure Class"?

I don't remember that particular observation being in the book since it's very much about the upper class, but that book is amazing. I used to keep an rss feed of new project gutenberg books and when that popped up I read it just based on the name and was amazed how pertinent it was a hundred years later. I haven't read anything else by him, but that one is absolutely worth it. https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/833

Also since it was written when the vestiages of european feudal system still had some tiny amount of power, some of the observations about lords who owned massive estates but had no money and would refuse to take on any work, considering it "beneath them" while they starved was fascinating. It's both of it's time and timeless

Thank you for correcting. I can no longer edit the parent comment and was sleep deprived while writing it.

But yes!

The trick is to attain leisure while also having the resources to live safely and comfortably.

Is it? I have friends who have very little money. Ok, they live safely, but not comfortably by any stretch. They value their leisure and live a good life.

I'm also friends with people who became very rich. In their own ways, they all continue working hard.

> Ok, they live safely, but not comfortably by any stretch.

> They value their leisure and live a good life.

There's an inherent contradiction here unless you believe you can live a 'good life' (which I would expect to be free from excessive discomfort?) while also living 'not comfortably by any stretch'.

You also have to consider what 'safely' means here. Sure, it means walls and a door so that you don't freeze to death or get eaten by dingoes or (insert local hazard here), but beyond the immediate, it also means having resources to obtain medical aid if required, ensure food supply and other necessities even in the face of unforeseen circumstances, etc.

It's possible to 'live a good life' with no resources while everything goes in your favour but it rapidly gets awful if that changes.

On your second point, I'd imagine that the people who became very rich did so because they're constitutionally unable to just relax and coast.

I don't see the "inherent contradiction". Discomfort, as long as it's chosen and not imposed, is not much of a problem.

Yes, wrt safety it's hazy. Eastern Europe, so it's reasonably safe, and also we don't take safety as seriously as the Westerners. Our medical aid is all right. They have enough money to eat, but you'd be surprised how cheap and basic a diet can be.

> It's possible to 'live a good life' with no resources while everything goes in your favour but it rapidly gets awful if that changes.

Oh. It's possible to suffer even with infinite resources. Things can go horribly wrong. Health problems. Death. Other kinds of trauma.

> On your second point, I'd imagine that the people who became very rich did so because they're constitutionally unable to just relax and coast.

Yes, though some are learning and have improved a lot :)

Haha, I almost never reply on HN. But the Office Space ref made my day <3

my favorite quote in the whole movie

I celebrate the [movie's] entire catalog

Yeah but if you had a million dollars you could do two chicks at the same time.

and if you were a millionaire, I bet you could hook that up. Chicks dig dudes with money.

Steel is real. And comes in colors other than black! :)

Even stainless steel ;)

Did you read Caro's books on Lyndon Johnson yet? If you have not, stop what you are doing and read them, especially the first two. He spends a lot of time talking about Hill Country. I suspect you will find them very interesting having spent so much time there.