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This is from 2006, five years ago. Aaron Swartz's latest posts have been about decentralizing DNS, and his Twitter viewer. I'm going to guess that political wr
by neilk 16y ago
This is from 2006, five years ago. Aaron Swartz's latest posts have been about decentralizing DNS, and his Twitter viewer.
I'm going to guess that political writing hasn't totally worked out either. I think it was plain from this piece that he thought writing was important, but it wasn't something that he was passionate about. If you're going to make a career of writing, you have to be unable to NOT write.
Anyway, when Aaron wrote that, he was 20, and now he's 25. At this point in his life he should be allowed to try and abandon different philosophies without censure. Actually, maybe we all should be. ;)
On the overall point, I think picking what you do based on "importance" is a fallacy. We don't often see it in comp-sci, but this happens all the time to graduates of law school or med school who have tremendous discipline but little self-knowledge. Almost a decade later they find they hate practicing law or that sick people just make them depressed.
Importance is good. But you also have to pick the thing you're suited for and that gives you some pleasure. Otherwise you will get burned out. I can't help feeling that this also had something to do with Aaron burning out on programming; instead of seeking things that he just likes, he's been drawn into doing "important" things, and judging his own work that way. I wonder if, given his history, it is hard to escape the feeling that he has to work at some world-class scale or do mega-important things. It must be hard to just try something with beginner's mind again.
- robg 16y agoI've been developing a theory for my life called "Decades". Do something for ten years then move on by turning the last decade into a hobby and the new one into a profession. It helps to realize that 5-10 years is the right amount of time for the vaunted 10 to 20,000 hours (50 weeks x 20-40 hours/week x 5-10 years). It helps me set expectations too when deciding what to work on: Is this something I would give five years of my life towards? If I enjoyed it enough would I give ten years or more? That was the best outcome of graduate school for me. I worked for four years to get in and another four years to complete the degree. By the end of my post-doc (another two years) I had an appreciation of difficult problems with unknown boundaries. I also had an understanding of how my life would turn out if I exclusively followed that path. I worry today that the focus on rapid iteration leaves aside the challenge of selecting important problems that can truly sustain us long-term. Projects are hard. Sticking with projects is even harder. For me, that has been a whole new lesson in my thirties as I try to develop technologies even as I learned that lesson during my twenties. I hope my forties can start out to be just as confusing as I slowly get a sense of the challenges around me. If not, I'm afraid I'll stagnate and die from the inside out.
- salemh 16y agohttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Individuation http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Individuation Jungian theory of personality, career, social divergences at ~10 year marks, "mid-life" crisis'.
- aaronsw 16y agoThe political writing is going into a book, so I don't post it to the blog. That just leaves occasional side projects like the DNS stuff.
- neilk 16y agoI owe you an apology. One, for psychoanalyzing you based on little evidence, and two, for suggesting you've disengaged from politics. (I've been looking at your blog and Twitter feed and other such things.) I'm still not sure where you fall on the technologist / writer spectrum. But it seems to me that the world needs good hybrids more than it needs one or the other.