This is the sort of sentimentality that has no place in modern capitalism.
Why would you need to cook dinner or water a garden (who even has a garden) or even have children in the first place? People have been doing that for thousands of years. If you want to scratch dirt you can move to Kansas and be a dirt farmer. Plenty of time with your kids with that career track.
If you're building a company, you have almost no time to do anything. Building a company is a very difficult task that very few people can successfully execute, and even fewer can successfully execute in the limit. It's just intrinsically hard.
In comparison, cooking dinner or putting the hose on some lettuce or some anemic tomato plants is easy as balls. They pay people pennies an hour to do those things for you. You can just pay them to do them, and do interesting, hard things yourself.
Personally, I think preferring easy things to hard things is a sign of weakness. Doing hard things is fulfilling. Cash is incidental, but it is a very good metric of how hard something is. If you are not making very much money, you aren't doing things that are very hard.
Life is, truly, very short. You can spend it doing hard things and, if you die, know that you were able to go further and faster and better than all the people around you, that you've won, or you can die knowing that you did the same boring things people did since they were barely past apes.
It sounds like you're just a simpler person than most, who can be fulfilled by one thing: [your definition of] success. That may actually be pleasant. But a lot of people are not that simple.
And if you say that farming and parenting are easy, then we know two things about you:
(1) You call the things that you value "hard."
(2) You've never farmed or raised a child.
You also clearly believe in an afterlife ("if you die, [you can] know..."); and you believe in one that looks something like a throne from which you can gaze down on your own and others' accomplishments. These two ideas may well have some truth to them, but neither are guaranteed.
Frankly, it's strange to me that in a society in which we are constantly exposed to the memoirs, memories, junkets, and essays of the roundly accomplished, we still think they are any happier than anyone else. Surely some must be or must have been, but I don't know of any confessors. I have heard plenty admit to dissatisfaction, to put it mildly. I hope you don't run into the same trap that many do.
The only thing I agree with you on is that I, too, am a misanthrope in even some of my best hours. I just don't think any more highly of myself for the fact.
Still, I would be proud to have made a better world for the people I do care about--and would even be happy with this George Eliot line for an epitaph, although the pronouns don't map quite right:
"But the effect of her being on those around her was incalculably diffusive: for the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs."
Life is truly very short, I think everybody's going to agree on that. You can spend your limited time turning it into a competition where you look down on "dirt farmers" for the weakness inherent in them that leads them to make food which allows you to survive, or you can figure that some people aren't worth competing with and find things that make you happy.
Congratulations; you're probably going to go "further and faster and better" than I am. But I've got a job I love, I'm early in my career, I'm married to a woman I'm crazy in love with, and every evening I'm happy to fall asleep, every morning I'm excited to start my day. It's hard for me to see how I could be doing much better than that. Hopefully your categorical victory over me will give you some time to take a break, you sound like you need it.
>Cash is incidental, but it is a very good metric of how hard something is. If you are not making very much money, you aren't doing things that are very hard.
This is the just world fallacy. How much people earn isn't analogous to how hard they work, how important their work is or how challenging. It's a product of supply and demand.
>> Life is, truly, very short. You can spend it doing hard things and, if you die, know that you were able to go further and faster and better than all the people around you, that you've won, or you can die knowing that you did the same boring things people did since they were barely past apes.
Yes, life is truly, very short. And in both cases, when all the people who knew you themselves die, you'll be completely forgotten. So you can spend life being happy or you can spend it being miserable. And when you die, it won't matter either way.
You don't get to say "haha, I won". There is no past tense to death. You're going to die and you're going to cease to be. That's it.
And nobody will thank you for the things you do. Even if--in the exceedingly rare case somewhere did--you won't know it.
And who knows, maybe you're all a figment of my imagination and the universe itself ceases to exist around me when I die. What then about all my achievements? What will I do with my degree and my money and my wife and my car and my house and my whatever when the universe ceases to exist?
NOTHING. That's the point. Nothing.
You think you are so big, but you are so small. You are just as small as the rest of us. And there is nothing you can do about it.
The choice to have kids in the first place is a purely individual choice. For some, it may be incredibly important. For others, I think it's perfectly acceptable to opt out of the whole thing.
Once you've had the kids, however, I'd suggest that most startups (perhaps not absolutely all) are objectively less important than making sure your kids grow up to be decent, empathetic, constructive members of society – for whatever definition of society you choose. It may be tough for your kid to grow up to change everyone's world, but it's really easy to let one grow up to destroy someone's world, and preventing that is the job you took on when you decided to take the step of having a child that may one day interact with mine.
Yeah, it is. And you can't take your money with you. Your startup might be the next Facebook. It also might fail in six weeks time leaving you with nothing.
The fact that you define life success in terms of whether you won against other people guarantees one thing: you will lose. There will always be someone above you that you can stress and obsess over beating. Or, you can decide you want none of it and find success on your own terms.
I echo the other poster that described your mentality as "simple". In other situations I'd consider that a little too insulting to say, but you've already described people who focus on anything other than "hard" things as "weak". Truly complex people get fulfillment from a variety of sources. Cooking, gardening, spending time with a loved one, whatever. Success is not the only metric for most of us.
Hey, I applaud you for your mindset for its purity and clarity. I think it's a bit shortsighted myself, but I've found the world a more complex place than I expected when I was younger (I'm in my 30s), and I think it's important to realize that everyone has different priorities.
I agree with the parent of this comment that it takes a life to learn how to live. If you want to live the life of a founder, live that life. I have found great joy in different aspects of life.
I think some people (you, obviously) are motivated by difficult tasks. Some are motivated by other kinds of difficult tasks (even ones that have been done for 1000s of years, like farming--a very difficult task, trust me!). Some people are motivated by learning, some by activism, etc, etc.
> I've found the world a more complex place than I expected when I was younger (I'm in my 30s),
Amen, I'm 34 and for the first time in my life when exposed to unexpected complexity from life I don't retreat back into a set of circumstances that allow me to control the situation (i.e. throw myself into work and minimise all distractions).
I had a fairly horrible (if not unusual) upbringing so I fear messy complex life situations, I deliberately live a Spartan existence (I don't drink, smoke, do drugs or socialise that much (outside the local developer meet up and odd cycle club event)) but I'm working at it, reducing life to a problem simplified enough to be solved is one coping strategy but as I'm starting to realise there are others, my business partner is a Buddhist and while I'm not in the slightest religious I find much of the foundation interesting particulary acceptance and mindfulness.
24 year old me would have never even stopped to question what he was doing, 10 years can make a hell of a difference.
I agree entirely! I look back at my 20s--I had a ton of fun and a lot of experiences, and (cliche alert) "I wouldn't trade it for the world", but man was I dumb!
"know that you were able to go further and faster and better than all the people around you, that you've won"
What exactly has been won here? There have probably been ultra-driven people for as long as people have been cooking or gardening or "scratching dirt." Being ultra-driven and ambitious is probably as boring and quotidian as any of those other things.
All of us die, it is usually unremarkable, and after a while no one remembers. You're optimizing so that you spend most of your life doing the things that seems most meaningful to you. Those people who are having children and watering gardens are probably doing the same. Each type of person can do that without condescending to the other type of person.
>>Building a company is a very difficult task that very few people can successfully execute, and even fewer can successfully execute in the limit. It's just intrinsically hard.
Please do not act as if 100% of the things you do on a daily basis are "hard" things. You're commenting on HN, so I know you are not 100% tapped on the hard things.
I believe that the author chose to use the example of cooking as a way to do a relaxing (easy) thing that doesn't need a whole lot of brain power.
I think life is actually more about being happy. If that dirt scratcher is happier than the person killing themselves to make some random startup a success, then I think the dirt scratcher has won. You see, when you die you don't "know that you were able to..." You don't know anything, because you are dead. All you have is how you feel right now, because life could end at any moment and you won't know it at all, you'll just be dead and gone and the only thing that will have mattered to you is how you felt while you were alive.
Work smart, not hard. Cash is a metric of how valuable something is to the purchaser, and not how hard it is for the master to perform, but for the purchaser to perform from scratch. Working hard, without balance, is an obsessive-compulsive behavior, so that you needn't define yourself and figure out how to live your life. The parent of your comment is spot on.
This is just such a sad perspective. The trajectory of your life, which will be tragic, is surely obvious to everyone around you except yourself. This is entirely a delusion you have chosen to believe.
Why would you need to cook dinner or water a garden (who even has a garden) or even have children in the first place? People have been doing that for thousands of years. If you want to scratch dirt you can move to Kansas and be a dirt farmer. Plenty of time with your kids with that career track.
If you're building a company, you have almost no time to do anything. Building a company is a very difficult task that very few people can successfully execute, and even fewer can successfully execute in the limit. It's just intrinsically hard.
In comparison, cooking dinner or putting the hose on some lettuce or some anemic tomato plants is easy as balls. They pay people pennies an hour to do those things for you. You can just pay them to do them, and do interesting, hard things yourself.
Personally, I think preferring easy things to hard things is a sign of weakness. Doing hard things is fulfilling. Cash is incidental, but it is a very good metric of how hard something is. If you are not making very much money, you aren't doing things that are very hard.
Life is, truly, very short. You can spend it doing hard things and, if you die, know that you were able to go further and faster and better than all the people around you, that you've won, or you can die knowing that you did the same boring things people did since they were barely past apes.