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It is not true, you see it because people like to brag. But they prefer to hide their problems, sometimes very deep. The society discourages talking about these

It is not true, you see it because people like to brag. But they prefer to hide their problems, sometimes very deep. The society discourages talking about these things unless you are close friends. Whereas positive aspects are amplified. I give you an example. I have a couple of friends with two kids. They have an amazing FB/Instagram feed. You immediately see a wonderful model family living in a beautiful house, traveling together, enjoying every moment together, all smiling. It seems like they are always having fun in all possible places (it made my other friend who can't have kids a bit depressed). One day I decided to visit their house and was a bit shocked. The kids were basically terrorizing the family. The father was half-alive but trying to smile all the time, sometimes unsuccessfully. The whole house was very cold because they spent too much on it and couldn't afford heating it adequately. But the most depressing was a bad smell from nearby chimneys of their neighbors. Apparently they couldn't do anything about. For me it was a living hell, I couldn't live in such a place for one day.

foobarbaz33 5y ago
I know a couple similar to this. Social media with rich vacations, fancy drinks, posting the new cars they bought. BMW one day. SUV the next. Reality is they have a very low income. With a double mortgage on their house. And blew through an inheritance. Have trouble keeping up with repairs, roof, etc. With an uncertain financial future, they are always in a state of worry.
- giantg2 5y ago
  "With an uncertain financial future, they are always in a state of worry." To be fair, I have a job and I'm cheap. I still have these concerns.
killtimeatwork 5y ago
> But the most depressing was a bad smell from nearby chimneys of their neighbors. Apparently they couldn't do anything about. This is fixable, but requires central air in the house. Just don't ever open your windows in the smog season, and have all air intake go through a set of filters (before it's pumped into the rooms) which take out all particles and smells. Not the cheapest thing to buy and install, but should solve the problem.
codegeek 5y ago
Someone in my family lost over 20K in bitcoin when he sold for lower than what he bought them for during recent ups and downs. So yea, this is nothing but selection bias. Not to mention that outside of HN echo chamber, there are plenty of people who have no idea how to do crypto, index funds, startups and what not. They go to work, get a paycheck, do may be a 401K and live paycheck to paycheck.
- techdragon 5y ago
  I mined more than a few thousand Bitcoin back in the pre-“Bitcoin pizza” days when it was a complete curiosity. Difficulty so low you could chuck a couple dozen desktops at it for a weekend and come back with dozens and dozens of Bitcoin on Monday morning. I basically used it as a benchmark and never even saved a single wallet file, it was worthless junk data at the time since no one was even sure it was going to be worth something. It’s taken years since the first booms past $10k but I’m pretty zen now about the fact I threw away what was basically a hybrid between Schrödinger’s cat and a lottery ticket that one day turned into stuff worth a couple hundred of million dollars. Edit: hope no one thinks I mean this in a “at least you only lost $20k” or “you think that’s bad” sort of way. I definitely have a sympathy for that feeling of loss, and share this story to highlight just how impossible it can be to predicted future value. There are lots of similar stories about startups like Dropbox trying to sell to Apple, or Blockbuster passing on Netflix and the list goes on. The lesson is to be accept the outcome of your past choices as the right one at the time (as long as there’s no real direct negative repercussions, but there’s not normally when it comes to investments) and be happy you got what you did from your choice at the time… be it a lawn ornament, paperweight, some deeper knowledge of Linux clusters, or a few thousand dollars.
  - adamhp 5y ago
    That is a great philosophy to have, and a great description of these hindsight opportunities.
    - techdragon 5y ago
      I’ll admit it does help that it never really caught me by surprise. I would hear about Bitcoin every now and then in the years between my early experiments while at university doing silly things with a stack of OpenMosix enabled Linux live CDs like scripting up a master disk on a CDRW (to modify the script each week) to auto generate a wallet spawn as many processes as there were OpenMosix nodes in the cluster and the spend the weekend wandering around from lab to lab rebooting any spare desktop into another in-memory OpenMosix node, and have the master print a summary of the mined coins to a printer Monday morning then delete everything by rebooting back into the normal operating system early Monday morning before students got in for classes. I had my fun and learned some cool stuff. It’s been the anchor I hold whenever I notice the price of Bitcoin and do the trivial multiplication between the current cost of Bitcoin and what I remember roughly mining all those years ago. But like I said, regular exposure to the ideal does help. It’s much easier to come to terms with “loosing”/not acquiring a thousand dollars or ten thousand or a hundred thousand before it turns into millions of dollars than it is to come to terms with suddenly discovering that something you discarded and never thought about is worth a hundred million.
DigitallyFidget 5y ago
This is an exact example of why I don't waste any moment of my life with social media. It's just loaded with fake trash like that. People trying to show off how they're successful and have an amazing life, but reality is they're barely scraping by, and often miserable. Social media is about as accurate of a representation of life as reality TV is an accurate representation of people.
- nicbou 5y ago
  Even if you're doing fine, it's probably better not to submit your life for review. It incentivises you to turn moments into content, to check in instead of being there. You know your happy. You don't have to prove it.
sizzle 5y ago
What bad smell comes from a chimney like a burning soot smell?

foobarbaz33 5y ago

I know a couple similar to this. Social media with rich vacations, fancy drinks, posting the new cars they bought. BMW one day. SUV the next. Reality is they have a very low income. With a double mortgage on their house. And blew through an inheritance. Have trouble keeping up with repairs, roof, etc. With an uncertain financial future, they are always in a state of worry.

giantg2 5y ago
"With an uncertain financial future, they are always in a state of worry." To be fair, I have a job and I'm cheap. I still have these concerns.

killtimeatwork 5y ago

> But the most depressing was a bad smell from nearby chimneys of their neighbors. Apparently they couldn't do anything about. This is fixable, but requires central air in the house. Just don't ever open your windows in the smog season, and have all air intake go through a set of filters (before it's pumped into the rooms) which take out all particles and smells. Not the cheapest thing to buy and install, but should solve the problem.

codegeek 5y ago

Someone in my family lost over 20K in bitcoin when he sold for lower than what he bought them for during recent ups and downs. So yea, this is nothing but selection bias. Not to mention that outside of HN echo chamber, there are plenty of people who have no idea how to do crypto, index funds, startups and what not. They go to work, get a paycheck, do may be a 401K and live paycheck to paycheck.

techdragon 5y ago
I mined more than a few thousand Bitcoin back in the pre-“Bitcoin pizza” days when it was a complete curiosity. Difficulty so low you could chuck a couple dozen desktops at it for a weekend and come back with dozens and dozens of Bitcoin on Monday morning. I basically used it as a benchmark and never even saved a single wallet file, it was worthless junk data at the time since no one was even sure it was going to be worth something. It’s taken years since the first booms past $10k but I’m pretty zen now about the fact I threw away what was basically a hybrid between Schrödinger’s cat and a lottery ticket that one day turned into stuff worth a couple hundred of million dollars. Edit: hope no one thinks I mean this in a “at least you only lost $20k” or “you think that’s bad” sort of way. I definitely have a sympathy for that feeling of loss, and share this story to highlight just how impossible it can be to predicted future value. There are lots of similar stories about startups like Dropbox trying to sell to Apple, or Blockbuster passing on Netflix and the list goes on. The lesson is to be accept the outcome of your past choices as the right one at the time (as long as there’s no real direct negative repercussions, but there’s not normally when it comes to investments) and be happy you got what you did from your choice at the time… be it a lawn ornament, paperweight, some deeper knowledge of Linux clusters, or a few thousand dollars.
- adamhp 5y ago
  That is a great philosophy to have, and a great description of these hindsight opportunities.
  - techdragon 5y ago
    I’ll admit it does help that it never really caught me by surprise. I would hear about Bitcoin every now and then in the years between my early experiments while at university doing silly things with a stack of OpenMosix enabled Linux live CDs like scripting up a master disk on a CDRW (to modify the script each week) to auto generate a wallet spawn as many processes as there were OpenMosix nodes in the cluster and the spend the weekend wandering around from lab to lab rebooting any spare desktop into another in-memory OpenMosix node, and have the master print a summary of the mined coins to a printer Monday morning then delete everything by rebooting back into the normal operating system early Monday morning before students got in for classes. I had my fun and learned some cool stuff. It’s been the anchor I hold whenever I notice the price of Bitcoin and do the trivial multiplication between the current cost of Bitcoin and what I remember roughly mining all those years ago. But like I said, regular exposure to the ideal does help. It’s much easier to come to terms with “loosing”/not acquiring a thousand dollars or ten thousand or a hundred thousand before it turns into millions of dollars than it is to come to terms with suddenly discovering that something you discarded and never thought about is worth a hundred million.

DigitallyFidget 5y ago

This is an exact example of why I don't waste any moment of my life with social media. It's just loaded with fake trash like that. People trying to show off how they're successful and have an amazing life, but reality is they're barely scraping by, and often miserable. Social media is about as accurate of a representation of life as reality TV is an accurate representation of people.

nicbou 5y ago
Even if you're doing fine, it's probably better not to submit your life for review. It incentivises you to turn moments into content, to check in instead of being there. You know your happy. You don't have to prove it.

sizzle 5y ago

What bad smell comes from a chimney like a burning soot smell?