1. I am getting older and not doing anything remotely impactful.
2. People half my age know all the programming I know. I don't bring anything special to the table.
3. Is this what life is all about?
Now, I don't say the problem is with the world. Something could be wrong with me. But damned if I know.
I have nothing to do with this thread, but felt like answering anyway...
1. Very few people leave a legacy. The people that do often didn't do it deliberately or intentionally.
2. They don't. There might be a few people half your age that know as much about programming as you do, but the majority don't. In any case, you are the worst person to judge what special thing you bring to the table. Go and ask one of these young people that you fear / respect / admire / think are knowledgeable and ask them to tell you what value you bring. The answer will surprise you.
3. A lot of people have pondered the meaning of life. Opinions differ on whether we've made any progress on that question. It's OK to go on a journey of "spiritual discovery" at 37; it doesn't require heading overseas to a monastery.
Thanks for your reply. I would love to take a break and explore the spiritual side of me, but it would need too much of rearranging my life and it may not be worth it. As such I am scared of drastic change, this would just add to the anxiety. Anything I can do with my current flow of life?
I feel compelled to answer here, mostly because I've been and to a degree still are where you are.
It's extremely common to gradually move into a state of mind where you denigrate yourself – and the effort you've put forth in life. You need to ensure your own happiness, and no one in here, or anywhere else, can tell you how to do that. Mindfulness is a great tool, because it allows you to become more certain of yourself. To discover what it is that you feel and where it is you need to go.
That being said, here's what works for me: Acknowledging that creation is hard, but that I love creating and helping people around me. That family is important and love even more so. I also remind myself to do something new every day that somehow moves the boundary of what it means to be me.
Added note: A book that also helped me realise my own tendency to create barriers around myself was "The Flinch" by Julien Smith. It's awesome and I highly recommend giving it a read – and practice some of what it champions. I suspect you will gain a lot from it, but then again: Only you can know that.
Check out The Power Of Now audiobook. As soon as you realize you are not living in the present moment, all of a sudden you are living in the present moment. It’s hard while coding. But stepping back even if you have to set a timer every few minutes to fully feel your body could help. Also, getting and staying in the flow state is very similar. That’s a worthy goal to start with. Hope that helps.
Not all impact needs to be at-scale. Perhaps you can make a difference outside of work, and/or at a local or individual level? While the systems crowd that congregates on HN may discount this kind of "last mile" effort, it can be deeply fulfilling (we are social animals after all) and have life-altering positive effects on recipients.
I don't know if that speaks to your situation at all. Either way, I wish you (individually) self-understanding and happiness. ^__^
What has helped me is talking in person to someone who is close. Realized that sometimes I just need to vent my inner confusion and at other times I need them to shake me because I am living too much in my head.
Over time, I realized that this situation occurs because there's something that I must/need to do but I am procrastinating. That surfaces as anxiety and my mind ends up "translating" it into a spiritual discussion - all in my head - with questions like "is this life", "is this all"?
There's nothing wrong with you - I'm guessing you just had, like most of us, a fantasy about shaking up the world somehow. Time to give up on the fantasy and engage with your actual real life instead
Good god this is awful advice. There are plenty of people that have made their only great contributions to humanity in advanced age (not that late 30s is even remotely advanced). If you gave up on dreams, fine; but don't go on encouraging others to do the same just because you lack the drive and became complacent with giving up.
Moreover, there are so many things that need doing that are plenty impactful and just require discipline to do it frequently; that you never bothered to think of other ways to make an impact shouldn't mean you should dissuade others from finding out new ways to make an impact.
Lastly, there is precisely zero evidence that you get another shot at life so it's grossly irresponsible to push people into thinking that their dreams and their real life should be readjusted into some bullshit dichotomy of fantasy vs real life.
(I have heard people in their early 20s giving this same advice; Good god could you imagine the world if people stopped following their dreams so early in life)
(I was a C/D student in STEM subjects by the end of high school. I can't imagine what my life would be like if I didn't kick it into overdrive, thereby managing to get involved with some of the most prolific scientists on this planet and getting my name on a few papers; actually I can imagine, I would have blown my brains out because my life was incredibly miserable up until then)
I'm surprised at the vehemence of your reaction, and don't really know where to begin responding, so I'll just pick out this sentence:
"Good god could you imagine the world if people stopped following their dreams so early in life"
I imagine it would be indistinguishable from the way it is now. I don't see that the world is built on "great contributions to humanity", just the slow layering of knowledge upon knowledge.
I'm glad you made yourself happier by applying yourself more diligently to your studies when you were in school, but "try harder" is not a helpful response to the parent comment. Almost none of us make any impact beyond our immediate social circle, and even if you do that impact will very quickly become indistinguishable from noise. You don't need to accept that, but it's true, and if you do accept it your life will be better
“Until a man is twenty-five, he still thinks, every so often, that under the right circumstances he could be the baddest motherfucker in the world.”
If you are in your mid 40s you are not going to become great at something new to you (painting, quantum physics, chess, programming, etc etc). It is nice to dream of that, but it does not happen.
You might become decent and contribute to society in your new skill but that's different.
Who are those people who have made a single great contribution at an advanced age (let's say past 50)?
The few that I can think of (like that obscure mathematician who didn't get tenure and did his research alone) labored in their calling starting in their 20s at the latest.
The one exception could be business success which indeed is possible even at a very late age(Colonel Sanders etc)
>The one exception could be business success which indeed is possible even at a very late age
Business success and greatly contributing to the society in the way that most people dream of aren't mutually exclusive. You might not be the kind of person with a PhD who made a scientific breakthrough and finally developed a great self-driving car, but if you created a business that managed to achieve that same thing, I see no reason why it wouldn't count.
> There's nothing wrong with you - I'm guessing you just had, like most of us, a fantasy about shaking up the world somehow.
That's a very interesting statement. Almost all people I know here in Poland, including myself, dream of having a life devoid of external pain, obligations, limitations etc., so that you can do whatever they choose to do. Rarely if ever anyone mentions anything about wanting to have a greater impact.
Maybe that's the next step of rich consumer society that US is at and that Poland hasn't reached yet - one in which people are aware that living (surviving in relative comfort) is easy, so they need to raise the bar for themselves somehow or they'll get depressed over the lack of challenges.
Or maybe it's just a cultural difference? American society is very much a culture of doers, while Polish is not. There are societies even richer than American, for example the Quatari, where people seem just content to mostly do not do anything particularly ambitious and just hang out.
Ah, that's different then. However, even among "us", I think there's a pretty big split among those who want to have an impact (which sometimes goes hand in hand with wanting to "be the kind of person who is impactful", i.e. being ego driven) and those who just want to learn and do things for its own sake. The Jobses and the Wozes if you will.
I had the naive, wide-eyed, ideal belief in my younger years. There are still sometimes spurts of excitement to change the world. But I have grounded myself and accepted that I may never have a bigger impact than my immediate surroundings. I gave up on the fantasy years back.
"...demanding excellence in all that we do ...steals from us one of life’s greatest rewards — the simple pleasure of doing something you merely, but truly, enjoy"
1. I am getting older and not doing anything remotely impactful. 2. People half my age know all the programming I know. I don't bring anything special to the table. 3. Is this what life is all about?
Now, I don't say the problem is with the world. Something could be wrong with me. But damned if I know.