Becoming the person who does the thing

As a older than this person, I feel like it’s around the time most people have that first large step of retrospectiveness where they see their current self has deviated from their self they thought they were previously. They realize they have autonomy to craft themselves. They realize there are more important aspects to life than their grades/sports/hobby or whatever things they built their identity around for the first 20-25 years. Anyways once you realize it, it’s an interesting topic to write about as you’ve become a completely different person from the one you were maybe 5-10 years prior. Because you’re likely transitioning into adulthood (maturity wise). As this continues in your later thirties and forties, it’s just status quo adulting and not as interesting to write about.

> What is it that makes people in tech in their late 20s and 30s write about life lessons like an old sage?

Some of my friends tried going down the influencer path. Some on LinkedIn, one as an Substacker, others on Instagram.

Seeing their influencer content in contrast to their personal lives made it abundantly clear that they were using their influencer side as an outlet for their thoughts. As ideas or epiphanies came to them, they would jump to their influencer accounts and preach their realizations as if it was knowledge they had held for decades.

The optimistic angle is that they were using the outlet as a place for sharpening their thoughts. Thinking in public and putting your thoughts into words forces you to sharpen your ideas and make them more coherent.

The part that never sat well with me was how they were trying to preach it to others and present themselves as the wise, experienced guru sharing this advice to others when really they were just barely figuring it out.

The content can be helpful for others to sharpen their own thoughts or catch up on basic realizations about life, but for others it feels weird to see so much fanfare around basic social and workplace understandings.

> I don't notice 32 year old farmers or roughnecks doing this.

Hang out in a bar with 32 year old farmers or roughnecks as a teenager and you'll hear lots of similar shallow anodyne life wisdom.

My experience is that most people in tech don't write about life lessons. But the ones who do frequently appear on HN because the audience on HN likes this sort of article.

Maybe the old farmers and rednecks don't have blogs which you can read online. They might well tell their friends and family!

There was an article or comment a couple of years back discussing how people are now writing grandiose blog posts like they are describing how and why they broke up Pink Floyd. I wish I could find the original source because I still think about it.

Being very online, probably.

Also, it’s writing code for a social product.

Also, Wendell Berry isn’t exactly just a farmer but grew up one and kept as much as he could while becoming a fine writer who talks about life lessons. More people should read him.

Do you regularly read the writings of farmers and roughnecks? I didn't get into tech until I was 40 but I definitely was going through some of the same personal growth as the writer when I was about 30 and if I had a blog I probably would have written about it.

They feel the need to prove themselves to others. Not a jab or anything, it is normal.

Tech people are good at writing, maybe not like an actual writer or journalist, but we definitely write more than farmers. Tech also evolves very fast, so we probably perceive time differently, and think we "have seen a lot" in less time.

They may be far from having learned all their lessons in life--and hopefully are open to the wisdom of those with many more years in similar shoes--but that doesn't mean that can't have learned valuable lessons in ten, fifteen years of adult life. I know I have plenty of wisdom now that I wish I could have passed to a five-years younger version of myself. I don't think writing, sharing, or publicizing that sort of retrospective is necessarily presumptuous. Sometimes young tech personalities are pompous, but there are also plenty of my own peers (and juniors!) that I'm happy to take lessons from.

The tools have a short lifecycle. So if you've used the tool for a week, that's equivalent relevant lifecycle experience to a farmer using a tractor for 50 years.

/s this is totally a riff on how fast frontend and data science tooling changes

I suppose it’s true. You don’t notice them doing it. The problem here is that you’ve concluded that the detection instrument functions. That’s bad engineering. Check your equipment.

Netscape was only released 30 years ago.

Someone in their early 30s could’ve been a developer for half the existence of the browser platform.

I think it's a social media thing that's not limited to tech. There are tons of tiktok videos where some 18 year old explains the world with passion.

Sharing ideas leads to feedback. People in their late 20s and early 30s are only just feeling like they are cementing their identities, so they seek validation.

I think it has to with the audience, or a platform. A young farmer would probably pretend to know a lot and even talk to impress if you put an audience in front of them.

Maybe you’re just exposed to tech blogs and not the farmer/roughneck equivalent?

> write about life lessons like an old sage

Take it from me, an old sage who has seen some things, people writting life lessons like they are old sages have absolutely no idea. They might strike the correct time twice a day like the broken clock they are, but there are an awful lot of hours in the day that they are wrong.

The quintessential American author Oprah Winfrey didn't write her first book untill she was 42.

Software people reply heavily on systems, patterns and frameworks in planning their work. It leads them to think that all of life is like a coding challenge that just needs the right framework, and as soon as they think they’ve discovered something, they want to share it in the spirit of open source.

That’s the charitable read anyway.

I attempted to write a life’s lessons kind of book when I was 17. It took 26 years to finish it. Turns out, it takes a long time to test ideas. I kept asking myself “but how do I know this works.”

I draw analogies with junior / medior / senior developers; juniors don't know anything and they know it, mediors know something but think they know everything and want the world to know, seniors know something but know they know nothing.

...if that makes any sense, I'm sure someone else put it more eloquently than that.

exactly. there's just an attitude of hubris in a lot of tech nerds that remains unmoved even when they've "swapped out a whole new operating system" for themselves

I keep the principles of days at the gym rather than time at the gym close to time in the market vs timing the market in my mind

> I do the same thing with books.

Can relate, I go to a Cafe to read almost every morning, even if I'm just reading for 5-10 minutes.

I usually read 1-3 books in parallel because sometimes I'm just not in the mood for non-fiction and I just want to read a quick interview with an interesting person. One of the best features of ebook readers for me is that I can easily switch between books with a few taps, instead of having to bring 3 books.

On the other hand, starting with 4/week as a goal is terrible. Sure, you might be motivated enough to actually do it for a few months, but the risk of falling off is high.

Much better is to start at 2 or maybe 3 times a week, always leaving you slightly hungry for more. Even if you get sick or hurt at some point, you'll have much more drive to continue if you're not already at the limit of your motivation

I've gotten into and out of regular exercise over time. And, i actually did that 5 minute trick in my apartment gym in my 30s. I literally went to the gym i think.... 3 or 4 times consecutively and stayed literally five minutes. Did one pushup. Five minutes in elliptical. etc.

... it totally worked. before long i was staying ten, casually doing more while listening to podcasts. It actually changed my mindset; i was simply over going to the gym to try and push myself or grow muscle. Instead i focused purely on exercise as a way to decompress and be healthy. No more "must go faster / heavier / harder" goals. Only do whatever feels right that day, maybe just weights, just bike, etc. Goal is get to a basic level of elevated heart rate and feeling good, and do it regularly. never feel bad. Amos "off days" where i show up and don't even get my heart rate up.

And it's held up remarkably over time (8 years). I'm not winning any physique or fitness awards, but in general i'm good shape and more importantly feel good physically by default, and in general feel more balanced than in ny early 30s, despite being busier than ever.

I second this "just show up" mentality.

Putting too much pressure on oneself to do too much, especially in the beginning before the body has had time to adapt to the pressures of training, is a recipe for burnout.

On the other hand, a slow start, "just keeping showing up, do a little, give yourself plenty of time and space to rest" mentality, in the long run, leads to better performance.

Slow and steady wins the race.

Going to the gym has intense diminishing returns but the benefit is that you can get great results with only a tiny commitment. Going from nothing to fifteen minutes twice a week makes a huge difference and is easy to commit to (lifting heavy things and or intense aerobic exercise).

My wife had a similar experience. Being the last child, she was just never pushed to do any activities in school, and had really never participated in any physical activities. When we got married, I set a goal to run a marathon, and she thought that was the funniest joke she'd ever heard. Funny story, turns out she was a natural at running, and handily beat me a few years later in our first half marathon, even though I played sports since I was a kid.

"that was not what people like me do"

Is this kind of thinking normal? Kinda like looking into the world and going like "i must be like that specific thing over there"?

> if you haven’t done any work before you’re better off joining a gym

I also find it really helpful to do classes where the instructor helps you understand the right form. Lifting heavy things can lead to injury if you do it wrong.

Apparently the author is still of the mind that physical fitness takes a back seat to the other types of fitness. Anyone who has suffered from an extensive debilitating injury or illness quickly learns that it drags you down spiritually, emotionally, and mentally. Even minor injuries or illnesses, when sustained over time, can have a profound effect on your mental health. For that reason, I would argue that physical fitness is more foundational (and therefore more important) than mental well being.

I think that the wax and wane of confidence is a natural (and healthy) cycle to preserve.

You start knowing nothing, and have no confidence, then learn stuff and your confidence builds, then you capitalize on that (learning x confidence) by doing productive things, then you hit barriers that create confusion and break down your confidence, at which point you realize you knew nothing and start learning like a beginner again.

Unhealthy confidence does not have this pattern, whether it's low or high. Even "medium" confidence, IMO, signals some kind of rut that one is stuck in, which tends to stifle creativity.

As with all things it seems, this has a failure mode too, at least for the person growing up. I’ve become so un-confident in my opinions on most things that I basically don’t have any. For current event type things I just realized that everything is endlessly complex and finding authoritative, balanced and trustworthy sources is too time consuming to be practical. In work I am just constantly aware of the limits of my own knowledge that it manifests as imposter syndrome, low self esteem and procrastination. I often envy the folks that are confident in their opinions.

That stuck out to me as well, physical fitness is super important for so many reasons, one being it is one of the best tools to help improve your mental health.

I think part of really growing up is first recognizing how little you know, humility, and second still acting despite knowing you don’t have all the pieces of the puzzle, bravery (without bravado)

More people need Socrates.

Motor controls are interesting like that; it's (to my layperson's understanding) a subsystem of your brain close to the brain stem / spine that allows your brain to skip conscious processing for (fine) motor controls. And it can be trained. It's what allows us to learn to play an instrument.

Take drums, put an amateur behind it and it's all over the place, but learning it is (simply?) a matter of slowing down until you can think about every strike, repeating, then slowly speeding up. The movements become almost automatic.

I'm sure something similar happens in 'higher' brain functions, but it takes longer; a common saying is that it takes 6 weeks of conscious effort to form a new habit.

Yea I learned Dvorak but now I can’t type on qwerty

That's why I don't really get the gym. What is enjoyable in a gym? All activities you do there feel so useless and mindless. Running on a threadmill, lifting weights to put them back down, etc... For the journey/destination analogy, the destination is all that matters here, and you are taking the highway, because it is efficient.

There are may other activities that will get you fit and are what I think are way less boring. Sometimes, it is a literal journey, as in hiking. But also team sports, combat sports, climbing, actual gymnastics, etc... Here, you actually concentrate on the activity itself rather than on the end goal.

> I've generally found quite a lot of success at abandoning goals / "destinations" for most things, and focusing on the "journey"

One of the habits books I've read ("Atomic Habits", I believe) has this piece of advice: When working on a habit focus not on what you hope to achieve, but who you want to become. This feels a lot like your reflection.

Yup, and to change only one thing at a time; for loads of people it's January 1st and they're like "Today is day one of my new life!". I avoid the gym in january, it's usually busy and it eases off until a month before the summer vacation.

But the trick is to start small. One day I started to reduce the sugar (and milk) in my coffee, then I had none, started going to the gym, started losing weight, went to see a personal trainer, etc. But also the other way around, one day I bought myself some craft beer (La Chouffe, my beloved) and a while later I was over a hundred kilos, lol.

Just FYI: Rudolf Steiner was a pusher of pseudoscientific nonsense. He was anti-vax and his views on race were problematic, to say the least. He was a fervent German nationalist and a critic of Einstein's theory of relativity. I could go on, but you get the idea.

More importantly in a modern context, I know that Waldorf schools seem harmless, but they are religious "Anthroposophy" schools at their core.

What's the benefit of building a useless habit instead of a useful one?

Not sure what your gym program and goals are, but 30 mins at a time can already achieve a lot if you go enough times per week. I usually just lift, and after 30 mins I'm out of energy so that any subsequent lifts would be weak and technically poor anyway.

> Although being the person that does the thing is something that I find a bit of a struggle with living in the UK. In general, I feel like there ends up being a bit of a pull down mentalility - "why are you spending time doing X side project", "why do you care about Y".

That's strange. If you're in a large enough city to have lots of other people you can potentially befriend, I would recommend trying to find open-minded groups of people - in Lyon, for example, people who are into electronic music or AcroYoga tend to be quite open-minded, so if you make friends with people in those communities, your long, heartfelt lecture on the relative merits of various UNIX-based operating systems, while it still might not be met with a standing ovation, will at least be listened to, in a "cool story friend, I may not share your passion for this subject but it's nice to know that you care about it" kinda way :)

People oscillate between rational and irrational motives. I reckon that motivation springs from either depending on the circumstance and the temperament of the individual. Such is the peculiar and special nature of man.

I think we go out of our way to rationalize decisions that emanate beyond reason because the truth is a lot more stark, and usually we only try to rationalize irrational choices when they backfire and we face criticism for them.

Allahu A’alam.

DON'T LET YOUR DREAMS BE DREAMS!

Except it's a bit deeper I think; the author realised at one point they were confirming to a stereotype, maybe even thinking they were playing by the rules and doing what was expected of them by ??? society or something, but then realised they have free will, they can do whatever they want in the privacy of their own home and the cops can't stop them, and they were in bad physical shape.

They realised they were holding themselves back and stopped.

Because someone submitted it, it showed up in new or the home page, it didn't need prior approval because there is no editorial board, at least 69 people upvoted it, and it hasn't been removed yet by a moderator if it does break any submission rules.

Because that's how news aggregators like HN and Reddit work.