When I saw the title I thought the article would be about the dreadful stress of keeping up with new tech or research.. But it's about spare time reading?
Granted the problem seems similar, but only because the author is in the field of reading (working in books related profession).
I'm not sure how much it can be applied to just hobby reading. Stress of keeping up with tech/research comes from a sense of professional obligations (you'll fall behind to your professional peers) but there's not much of stress if you're in it as a leisure /hobby; it's not inherently competitive activity.
So the conclusion is not that helpful. It's targeted to a very small audience (people that work in a field where reading books and keeping up with the latest books, are important) and is essentially "don't worry about it!"
> Stress of keeping up with tech/research comes from a sense of professional obligations (you'll fall behind to your professional peers)
Okay, I'm literally terrified about not being in the top 1% or top 10% of everything I do. Scared.
I have built my life around me with people that perform at those levels, so everyone from my wife to my best friends may disappear if I'm not performing at those levels. Not to mention, look at nature: The best do what they can and the weak suffer. It is sad, but its reality.
So I work always, every success opens up 2 new problems to deal with.
Back when Bell Labs was a top research institute, some researcher gave an interview. He noted that he was top of his class in high school. Way up there in college. Pretty good in grad school. Then he was hired at Bell Labs, where he was at best average. Man, he just got dumber and dumber as time went on.
He said it with a smile, but still, there's a hard kernel of truth there for many of us: if we work hard to advance, and put ourselves in the company of top people, we no longer stand out. But you know what? Life needn't be a continual competition. Be good at what you do, do it well, and take satisfaction in that. You don't need to continuously compare yourself to everyone else, and ask if you are in the top 10%. Eventually you won't be, if only because your entire group is up there.
...look at nature: The best do what they can and the weak suffer.
Yes, but we aren't surrounded by hyenas in the wilds of Africa. Civilization does bring some benefits. Take some time to smell the roses. Heck, a bit of time for relaxation may even improve your performance.
It seems like you're suggesting that people should return to their hometowns and spend the rest of their lives fishing leisurely. While that might be a good option for some, it may not be the option for many regardless of their financial status.
>Not to mention, look at nature: The best do what they can and the weak suffer. It is sad, but its reality.
There's a lot of helping weak members of the pack done by social animals, don't get fooled by the reductionist understanding of "survival of the fittest" that the American education system seems to teach. I believe part of the success of social animals like humans is the support they can give each other, which doesn't mean there is no survival of the fittest anymore, but that the fitness now refers the whole group rather than individuals.
And there are examples of very early humans with disabilities that would have made their care very resource-intensive for their tribe, and still they often lived long lives. This implies that these early humans helped even the weakest members, when they could just as easily have let these individuals perish to make their own lives easier.
I'm trying to say this in the kindest way, but please seek professional help, your view of reality and your relationships seems neither healthy nor sustainable to me.
It is important that you can sometimes let your guard down and not perform at the highest level imho. After all, you are not a machine, but a real human being with feelings. If you want to perform at that level, this is of course perfectly fine, but it should be because you enjoy it, or the fruits of your labor, not because you feel like you have to.
Absolutely. The notion that fierce competition for survival is the state of all things in nature is reductionist at best, and incredibly harmful when applied to the human social world.
Take some of the more successful species out there: there are countless species of fungi which thrive on a mutually-beneficial relationships with the root systems of plants (check out the Wood Wide Web); or lichen, which are composite organisms arising from algae or bacteria living in fungi.
Competition is undeniably a big part of the natural world, but it's not something that captures a fraction of the complex relationships between and within species.
Appeals to this survival of the fittest nonsense justify all sorts of terrible behaviour -- and I guess in this context, self-flagellation -- but have little a very weak relationship with modern understandings of biology, history and sociology.
> Okay, I'm literally terrified about not being in the top 1% or top 10% of everything I do. Scared.
You're not in the top 1% of posters on this site. How do you deal with that utter failure? Sure, you can make excuses, but face it, you're not in the top 1%, 10%, or even top 90% of this site in points.
These points are, of course, worthless, but holding yourself to an unachievable standard is ridiculous. One might even say it's the top 1% of ridiculousness. And how about things that are contradictory? If you're in the top 1% of people who get 8 hours of sleep every night, you're automatically disqualified from being in the top 1% of people who get 4 hours of less a night. If you're in a top 10% country for Gini inequality, are you also in a top 10% country for happiness?
You're not in the top 10% of wealth already, so you've already failed at that. Just do the best you can and have some self-compassion. By all means, push yourself to do your best, but don't kill yourself over the fact that there's always going to be someone better than you at something.
Unless you have extremely expensive lifestyle, usually being in top 10-20% is enough. And getting to top 10-20% is extremely easy on the timescale of decade or so, basically it boils down to any directed effort. Giant majority of employed people literally don't grow.
On the contrary being in 0.1-1% is not worth it, things like monetary success are usually more down to networking and being in the right place at the right time, top 10% software engineer can earn way more money joining right early stage startup or even tech company at the right time - like NVIDIA lately. While the 0.1% developer might spend his time at failed startup - for example, because his extreme passion might mislead them to believe field like _developer tools_ is the future.
Of course, this is written from a perspective of a person that likes what they do, but not to the point where it's what I want to do for the rest of my life. Pretty much every hour spend lead climbing outside was more fun and fulfilling than any hour spend at work.
> Okay, I'm literally terrified about not being in the top 1% or top 10% of everything I do. Scared.
I don't believe you. No one is in the "top 1%" of everything you do.
I don't say this to shame you, but to make you realize that you're already okay as you are, while not being the best.
There's no way you're in the top 1% of management ability, technical knowledge, coworker relationships, parenting, exercise, finances, et cetera.
On the few axes of life where I know for sure I am better than the next 99 people I meet, I have had to practice that thing so much that I have made more than one logical jump and ability jump that counts as a filter for the next 99. It won't be overnight that I fall out of the 1%.
I suspect the same is true for anyone in any 1% of anything.
>If i'm not in the top 10% my wife and friends are going to leave me.
I hope this is sarcastic because it's comically neurotic. Like you're headed for a huge breakdown.
>look at nature: The best do what they can and the weak suffer. It is sad, but its reality.
Wanna know how I know you spend 0 time in nature?
I think you should start a garden. Get in touch with actual nature. You're going to have a breakdown when you realize you're not in the top 1% of all gardens, but once you start to see perennials refuse to accept they were put in the wrong spot year after year, maybe you'll chill out.
> so everyone from my wife to my best friends may disappear if I'm not performing at those levels
Excuse me, what the flask. You don't have a wife and friends then at all. You've built a non-profit organization, not a family.
> look at nature: The best do what they can and the weak suffer
What kind of nature are you even watching? It's the sickly bottom 1% that's suffering which is an unfortunate reality, not the 90%. You completely inverted that.
Not only that, members of the same intelligent species usually help weaker members of their "packs". And people are supposed to be even better than that.
Agreed — people choose you because you’re shiny, and to the rest of the world it looks like a family, but watch what happens if you try to give up being shiny.
It's so so different where I live (Poland). It's still super common here to pair up in high school or university where you are basically still a bunch of nobodies and stay together through the fire and flames™ unless literal abuse is involved or the very basics of personality don't match.
Material status or ambition is almost never a factor even among couples of top performers I know. We were kind of raised to expect various big changes in life. Career interest changes, economical downturns, wars. You just... cannot rely on such things at all so it doesn't make sense to care much about that.
>You don't have a wife and friends then at all. You've built a non-profit organization, not a family.
:( Yeah I know
>What kind of nature are you even watching
From the highest levels to the lowest levels, power dynamics decide how things are. I will admit that you can intellectual insanity your way to enjoying/handling suffering, I was a Stoic for 3 years. Whatever the case, maybe I've personally experienced more of this power dynamic problem. Its literally traumatic.
If you know for a fact that your wife and friends only like your professional success and not YOU, you need to either work on that or get out of those relationships -- or at least build new, additional ones.
I suspect you are exaggerating things in your head though. How will your wife or friends even know that you are only a 75th percentile coder (or whatever your profession is) and not a 99th percentile one? They don't, and can't, and you need to do whatever work is necessary to understand that their love for you is not actually conditional on working 90 hours a week or staying up to date on "the literature".
> Okay, I'm literally terrified about not being in the top 1% or top 10% of everything I do. Scared.
I'm not a doctor of any kind, so this isn't medical advice but: I've dealt with similar fear (usually I get scared of being in the bottom percentiles of whatever I'm doing rather than not being in the top, but the idea is the same), and IMO this feeling is enough to talk to a psychiatrist or therapist, because it is classic anxiety disorder thinking. If you really feel this way all the time (rather than just occasionally, which is pretty normal IMO -- our society tends to over-pathologize stuff like this) then talk therapy or an SSRI might help. Even if you don't think you are "crazy" or have any kind of disorder at all, talk therapy alone can improve your life dramatically. It has mine.
> From the highest levels to the lowest levels, power dynamics decide how things are.
Even granting this premise, which I don't, the interpretation you are operating under -- all but the 1% or 10% or whatever get get crushed -- is not realistic. Folks live happy, contented lives today in community with others. Many species other than human care for the elderly or their sick and long-term disabled. Keeping with the evolutionary model why would altruism continually evolve into species without utility?
I guess, on a personal note, I hope things improve for you.
> so everyone from my wife to my best friends may disappear if I'm not performing at those levels
fwiw - a lot of go-getters find themselves surprised with the support and love they continue to receive from their spouse and friends when they are going through a rough patch.
It's fairly easy to get into the top 30% of something. Just showing up, paying attention, and putting in a little effort will often put you in the top third.
Getting into the top 10% requires a lot more effort and will likely require you to sacrifice other things so that you can focus on that one thing.
Unless the subject is something obscure where few people have interest; getting into the top 1% often requires complete dedication. Your life revolves around that one thing and you need superior talent.
Competition drives us to be better, but often those who find themselves in that 1% are questioning if it was really worth it. You can be completely happy further down the ladder.
> I have built my life around me with people that perform at those levels, so everyone from my wife to my best friends may disappear if I'm not performing at those levels.
Are you positive that this is what is going to happen?
You have to mental gymnastics your way to happiness, rather than using your intrinsic desires.
You also probably need to take a philosophical "Leap of Faith" at some point to justify your work. The obvious one is Solipsism, you basically must assume that other people have consciousness. Hope you aren't just a brain in the vat, and this worldly experience was all for you.
I reckon you're misunderstanding stoicism if you think of it as mental gymnastics. You're implying it is a practice of self-deceit or indulging in irrationality.
Stoicism is largely about accepting things as they are and letting go of the illusion of control. This, if truly integrated in your outlook, is the opposite of mental gymnastics. Said otherwise, you'd have self-awareness to understand your predicament and cut through it. Believe or not, you and Marcus Aurelius share the fundamental human condition, despite him being what you'd consider a "top performer".
Would you consider Cognitive Behavioral Therapy a practice of mental gymnastics? After all, Aaron Beck was inspired in part by the stoics.
I wish you find peace, don't be too hard on yourself.
> Would you consider Cognitive Behavioral Therapy a practice of mental gymnastics?
I think it absolutely can be. A lot of negative circumstances can generate from outside ourselves and they can have massive negative effects on our mental health. Trying to use CBT to work on anxiety or depression that is caused from compounding external factors is a bit like self gaslighting
Situations like "I got into a car accident so my car is wrecked. I'm in hospital debt. I can't work because I'm still recovering from my injuries. I need a car for work and I cannot afford a new one. I'm struggling to survive and I'm depressed"
There would be limited avenues I think for CBT to effectively help here, because a lot of these problems are external and out of a person's control
If you are constantly afraid of being abandoned if you show the slightest sign of weakness, you may not be as strong as you imagine tbh. Such fears are easily exploited, too. You should really discuss this with your wife and/or friends, chances are that they have similar fears. You might support each other to achieve true strength and the confidence that comes with it.
But if you feel the stress of keeping up with new tech or keeping up with book reading, don't you think it's the same? Just don't worry, everyone has their own pace
I don’t think it’s the same. The author frames it as a social pressure. It actually reads as a personal anxiety that they project on the world in my opinion. They started feeling competitive about books as an 8 year old? I’m not shocked they assume anyone asking them what they’re reading is some test. I can’t imagine walking through the world like this.
Of course there is some of this in software related fields, but for a lot of us the bigger risk is a demonstrable professional one. If you haven’t learned anything new in tech in the last 10 years you could be out of a job. There is a whole ocean of jobs for which you would not qualify.
I've made a point of not bothering to learn new tech environments unless I was interested, and it hasn't made me unable to collaborate. Usually I just learn it on the fly, when I'm asked to do something outside my usual scope at work.
Although I did have a moment of panic when I signed up for a contract work with some OpenGL/C# work. I was hoping to talk them into C++, but I'd used C# before. Turned out to be a TypeScript project using WebGL, neither of which I'd done anything with, so I had a couple of days of panic until I realized that TypeScript was similar enough to C++ that I could get work done while learning.
(Also, if you want to learn new things, doing lots of smallish contracts is a great way to do it. You select the contracts that are doing something new but leverage some of your existing knowledge. These are not hard to find; you'll have a harder time finding something that doesn't require some learning!)
I'd say it is transferable only partially? But still not that helpful.
It is helpful to people that are not aware of the source of the stress (often in the form of feeling overwhelmed) to be able to identify it. The article spend most of the words actually just describing this phenomenon. I think newly-graduated-in-tech-startup me in the past would've felt validated reading it.
But the article falls short on any good remedies for the situation. Like yeah I'd love to be able to just "not worry about it", but the problem is that I (as a researcher needing to keep up) can't just stop worrying about it, but I'd love to find a balance where I can keep the enthusiasm and up to date while not feeling overwhelmed and dreadful while doing it.
It works for the author because ultimately, the author is in a position when they can walk away or explain WHY they don't keep up and get accepted for it. Worst case the author will lose respect or some snobbish friends.
That's not the case for most tech or research people. Not worrying about it might be close to just quitting (or silent quitting) and require a bit more mental change than "to not just worry about it". Even if that's the ultimate goal, the advice is as helpful as telling a homeless man how dreadful it is to not have a home, and then tell him to just buy a house.
> Not worrying about it might be close to just quitting (or silent quitting) and require a bit more mental change than "to not just worry about it". Even if that's the ultimate goal, the advice is as helpful as telling a homeless man how dreadful it is to not have a home, and then tell him to just buy a house.
I understand the sentiment and I know where you're coming from with this.
Still, if you want to be less stressed, the only solution that I have found is to just not stress over things. The moment you deeply believe that only stress will improve your life situation, you have made a decision for it to be so. This is the mechanism by which the stress then proliferates not only in you, but also to others. And you don't even get a guarantee that it's worth it. You may end up with only stress and all the goals you tried to achieve with it falling apart anyway. I don't think it's worth it. One needs to find a balance.
Thank you for your sincere reply.(and understanding)
I'm right now not in that mental state, and in matter of fact in the process of quitting my job (well one reason of it) for the stress of keeping up. So the description in your last paragraph does ring true to my previous mentality, and something I had to work on for the past 4 years to correct.
Still, when I see my newer coworkers in similar situation as I were, I know neither my experience nor your comment will reach them. But I believe your comment & my experience is probably more useful than the original articles (non-existent) advice.
> Still, when I see my newer coworkers in similar situation as I were, I know neither my experience nor your comment will reach them. But I believe your comment & my experience is probably more useful than the original articles (non-existent) advice.
Yes and that's ok. Everyone needs a different amount of suffering to get to a point where change becomes possible.
> I'm not sure how much it can be applied to just hobby reading
When I widen my aperture, what I see is this is a form of "keeping up with the joneses", or teenagers comparing themselves to others on Instagram, or chasing the latest buzzword in technology, etc.
FOMO (fear of missing out) vs JOMO (joy of missing out) is another riff on this age-old idea.
Before I started my first tech job many years ago I was quite stressed. I felt behind constantly and I was worried everyone would be so much better than me so I over compensated by reading every tech book I could get my hands on. I threw myself into them and flat out memorized and experimented with the content until I knew it through and through.
Turns out I had nothing to worry about. In my entire career I've met one guy that was ever "on my level".
I'd say yes-- book reading can help, but the dread of not being enough shouldn't be a part of it. Most tech people don't read. Most tech people don't code before 9AM or after 5PM. Most have never heard of hacker news. You're going to be o.k.
Granted the problem seems similar, but only because the author is in the field of reading (working in books related profession).
I'm not sure how much it can be applied to just hobby reading. Stress of keeping up with tech/research comes from a sense of professional obligations (you'll fall behind to your professional peers) but there's not much of stress if you're in it as a leisure /hobby; it's not inherently competitive activity.
So the conclusion is not that helpful. It's targeted to a very small audience (people that work in a field where reading books and keeping up with the latest books, are important) and is essentially "don't worry about it!"