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While we are at it, can we list some other addictions that we use to cope with life. Me personally, it's gambling, pornography, sulking alone, facebooking acqua

While we are at it, can we list some other addictions that we use to cope with life. Me personally, it's gambling, pornography, sulking alone, facebooking acquaintances to see how they're doing better than me or worse, checking sports score and living vicariously through the lives of professional athletes on and off the field, checking TechCrunch/Hack News and doing the same with tech billionaires, making up lists and goals alone or with other people that will never come to fruition due to excessive wishful thinking and ambition to overcompensate but fun to preoccupy my mind for the time being. Window-shopping online and offline for the perfect couch, jewelry, fragrance or other consumer goods that is marketed to me. Reading self-help books, attending wellness workshops, "social intelligence" workshops to help me with my awkwardness, tech-meetup's to mingle. Wasting money at pubs, lounges and clubs hanging out with friends by shallow association of work, school, social network where nothing of importance is said and egos are stroked and reciprocated. Going home alone. Or accompanying a date back home but feeling alone. Or sleeping int the same bed, wondering how I got here and still feeling alone. But I'm just doing what I'm told to find someone, don't be picky, "you're not getting younger." Forging intimate moments like taking a trip to Montreal in July, go visit a botanical garden or go skydiving like what I'm told by Hallmark and merchants of the USA, I feel nothing but my CC swiped to the max. Keeping an overpriced apartment in downtown like a dumb bird nest-building for the sole purpose of mating and trying to fit in. So I have to keep working and running round and round in the hamster-wheel to pay for my student loans, car loan, credit card debt, insurances, save up for a mortgage so I can take on even a bigger loan to convince someone that I may or may not like to start a family with me, so that we can both be indebted for the kids' college education loans. But still everyday I wake up, and I keep braving it through. Because I'm hoping maybe just maybe, I can be like Mark Zuckerberg or Steve Jobs or Bill Gates. Hit it out of the ball park, that is the American Dream, work hard and if things don't work out, keep working even harder and harder, and one day freedom will come for me. I have to believe and try, after all this is the American way.

grimtrigger 12y ago
You don't have to do most of the things on your list. Own your decisions.
frozenport 12y ago
Your rant is too long to read.
- dang 12y ago
  That's not true. Please don't be mean to a fellow user.
tarequeh 12y ago
Life can be much more than conformist grinding. It's too precious. Learn a new language, learn how to ride a motorbike, travel to Easter Island or the Himalayas. Stop worrying about what others want of you. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wU0PYcCsL6o https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wU0PYcCsL6o
andruby 12y ago
Thank you for sharing the honest evaluation of your life. The only advice I can give you after having lived in the, from my point of view, shallow American tech world: move to Europe. The people in most European countries will be less welcoming at first, but I can tell you, if you stick through you will find them to be more profound. It helps that we don't have an American Dream which focusses on financial prosperity through hard work, but rather a joy of life (joie de vivre) which encourages us to enjoy the beauty of life and nature. Travel to Tuscany or Portugal and see for yourself.
- andyl 12y ago
  "you will find them to be a lot more profound" BS - there's plenty of shallow people in Europe too.
  - andruby 12y ago
    Of course there are shallow people in Europe. I met one last year :)
- gress 12y ago
  You don't have to move to Europe. Just Oakland.
- taway 12y ago
  I was born in Portugal and lived there for most of my life. Virtually everything the OP said could describe some portuguese person just as well. Hell, I could have written it at some point and it would be a surprisingly accurate summary of my life back then. These are symptoms of problems that live in you, that consume you from the inside, they will follow you wherever you go, you can't just run away and escape them all. I don't have any recommendations, but you have my empathy and understanding. I believe you will find your way out, maybe by finding some deeper meaning to your life, maybe by finding your place in the world or maybe by just stop giving a fuck. On the other hand I have a feeling that something is pretty fucked with western society in general. And as the western model of society is pretty much expanding everywhere it is becoming a global problem. I can't quite put by finger on it but maybe it has to do with ever growing expectations, the idea that we can be or do everything, that is all in our hands and only depends on us puts an immense pressure on our shoulders and leads to immense pain. The truth, I think, is that luck plays an huge part in our life, on our successes and on our failures. I am not sure if I made any sense, if I did not, please accept my apologies ;)
TeMPOraL 12y ago
Thanks for sharing. I'm already doing like half of the things from that list, and I'll be probably doing the other half soon. It's good to remind ourselves that you, and me, are not alone in this, and maybe to reflect on those "choices" "we" make and see if we can learn to live more of our own lives, and less of someone elses.
- noname123 12y ago
  No problem, I guess if you're gonna eventually give into vices, I guess there's no point to hold back and just go all in one go and go from there, ; ) I believe you're also right that you're not alone. For me personally, I've found that it isn't that adults who are older than me have eventually gotten their act together but more so that people retreat to their families and smaller intimate social clique and not reveal their inner lives as much, compared to when they were melodramatic teenagers or college kids on Facebook or YouTube vlogs.
dasil003 12y ago
I don't mean to shoot down the one thing that gets you through the day, but if you aren't happy now do you think hitting it out of the ballpark will help? I mean, money is great for the basics, but if you're having problems forming romantic connections I think money would make that problem a lot worse.
- 2muchcoffeeman 12y ago
  Of course it will help. If tomorrow I became independently rich, I could quit my job and suddenly the most productive 40hrs of my week are free to work on my own problems whatever they may be. Plus your stress levels will probably drop too.
  - noname123 12y ago
    At a startup interview years ago, the hiring manager told me a story, "Once, there was a fisherman with his single fishing boat toiling and netting and gutting his daily haul at sea; then one day, a Silicon Valley VC came on his boat and made a business proposition, 'I can make you a rich man; I can give you a funding to scale your operation so you can hire 40 people with 40 fishing boats to catch more fishes and make more money!' The fisherman laughed, the VC trying to push him with the startup enthusiasm immediately said, "think of all of the money you can make and you can then retire, and think of what you'd be able to do afterwards with that freedom! The fisherman said 'Well, I'd retire to some place close to the coast, buy a fishing boat there and go out to the sea and go fishing.'"
    - ahi 12y ago
      There's a version of that story on the wall of most Jimmy John's franchises.
architgupta 12y ago
Things which may help, in no particular order: Play a sport you like, work on a project you enjoy (hack on something small and put it out in the world), make a few good friends and maybe work with them (not easy but worthwhile), remain intellectually honest (write down your thoughts / emotions). Its a cliche to say it, but the gap is creation vs consumption.
mrj 12y ago
Yesh, I recognize some of the thinking in this post, and trust me, you're going about it all wrong. Until you figure yourself out, you're not going to make meaningful relationships or be happy in them. You need to find what defines you, what you are about. Then, you'll need to make your peace with it. Own it. I'm not sure the people you have mentioned feel any better about themselves than you do. Normal people reach a point where they have enough money and they stop and learn to paint or something. It's a particular kind of dysfunction to earn billions. If you are not a downtown type, leave. There are plenty of bored potential partners in other places. Focus on joining organizations that will put you with other people of like interests. Shared experiences drive friendships. Drinking at pubs doesn't count. A group that hikes every weekend, does. Find a group that says important things. You seem to dislike the shallowness you feel around you, so don't be shallow. Nothing you wrote says anything about you, just some vague ideas about success that feel thrust on you by what you've read. If you were really all about success and that junk, I don't think you would feel so miserable about pursuing it. You have freedom, much more than you think.
- noname123 12y ago
  > You seem to dislike the shallowness you feel around you, so don't be shallow. Nothing you wrote says anything about you, OK, let me try; I really like computers back in the day when you typed in a terminal screen 1:Print "Hello World" or the first HTML page with the CSS or figuring out for the first time how object-oriented programming class inheritance working, or referencing and dereferencing C pointers or DirectX buffer-swap or socket multicasting, or reading a really profound novel for English class for that matter or catching a late night movie with sexy scenes and heavy themes that you can't put your finger when you're young but the excitement of lust and wanderlust lingers on ("Eyes Wide Shut"), When real life happened was told by parents directly and peers implicitly to "pursue" passion and "be serious" at the same time lest you be judged, so I got a job feeling independent, hell even making six-figures for the first time, feeling a million bucks but initial euphoria eventually gave away to daily grind, fixing tickets after tickets to the tyranny of "agile," "daily standup," and "JIRA burndown chart/project tracker"; more importantly, I want to learn and dig further and further down into stack, get into Linux kernel, hardware circuit design, cryptography, Bioinformatics not to have some BS on my LinkedIn and collect trinkets, but have that rush of hacking at it, like a shot of cocaine straight into the brain blood-barrier; instead, I'm here cranking out tickets for an A/B test on how to make a button to have a single round bevel or double round bevel and seeing which one will boost 0.01% on the user conversion rate to add a product to a shopping cart or to keep user "as engaged" when I could hardly care less about social media, e-commerce and iOS apps about a product or infographics that I don't need but is shoved to my face; I feel cheated and robbed at the lies that the startup industry pumps out for "meaningful work," more importantly, I sacrificed my love for learning academic-oriented computing for a meaningless momentary compensation and the trendiness of startupdom because I watched some stupid video on Steve Jobs or Peter Thiel on some late lonely night and it filled up my emptiness in college, Socially, was an awkward computer nerd and on the bottom of the sexual and social totem-pole in college. But had a few friends whom I can have late night conversations with, who listened to me, whom understood when I say something in Chinglish (English-Cinese combined) and understand instantly what it's like to grow up Chinese in suburban Maryland and going to a Chinese evangelical christian church in the late 90's, and debating what porn clip we saw on porn sites back then, whether it's sanitary or gay for the guys involved for the porn girl in a blowbang to suck one cock and then go off to suck on another cock and also discuss different movies, The Smashing Pumpkins, "Catcher in the Rye," "On the Road," the alienation and the exhilaration of being on the road or constantly searching and wandering and the explicit sexual yearnings, So in my mid-twenties, got finally frustrated due to hormones and that fear of missing out and that parental pressure to "settle down". So I got an downtown apartment and stocked it up with IKEA furniture like Edward Norton did in "Fight Club," shopped at H&M and Brooks Brothers for "snug-fit" jeans, befriended and went out with a carefully curated group of "young professionals but yet boheme" and eventually went on dates that led to a steady girlfriend. At first I felt like a million bucks, felt like I finally made it with "meaningful such yuppie weekend activities" as rock-climbing, hiking and carousing with friends and SO but eventually gave to the daily grind of the socializations, to the pettiness of who's who in office politics, whose next great startup idea to apply to what accelerator and what band to see in which cool fresh new venue that's just opened in the city but that's just the same as the one that we just sat at discussing it, the decor, names and hair are different but the characters all the same, that obligatory feeling that I don't want to but I should, I want to have a feeling of mastery, follow through with something tangible and tactile with my hands, like building a nice outdoors deck with a nice varnish finish, learn how to take a Eric-Clapton-esque solo with all of the chromatic tones and sixteenth notes at a blues jam, to pull off a cross-over and a spin-move to evade the first and second defender in a rec-league basketball and finish at the hoop. Instead I trivialized my personal goals as unrealistic and impractical and instead gave into the social pressure of "practical nest-building and social networking". Learned only later that all my "friends" in trendy yuppie network were more in love with the idea of themselves being involved in a trendy yuppie network than the other people (especially moi). I don't feel like a man, or specifically a human being with any agency, but was re-assured by everyone else that "[I was]. Because [I] had my own apartment and had a great job, a great social network." I rushed to relationships and friends to fill a void of personal inadequacy but found associating or possessing other people that I liked the idea of did not change me and if anything else made me more insecure and co-dependent on them.
jedmeyers 12y ago
I believe and hope that this is not a description of the authors life but rather a stereotypical generalization of the common problems a lot of people face every day. However to a lot of people from 2nd and 3rd world countries just owning a house with some small amount of land is an American Dream came true.
- noname123 12y ago
  Yes, jedmeyers. Your reply reminded me of what I heard on Jian Ghomeshi's "The Q" radio program about the Chilean miners that their lives were destroyed by the broken promises, fame and greed of talk show's, movie deals after they were rescued to the surface, some of them expressed the desire to go back to the shafted mine when they were happier and a purpose.

grimtrigger 12y ago

You don't have to do most of the things on your list. Own your decisions.

frozenport 12y ago

Your rant is too long to read.

dang 12y ago
That's not true. Please don't be mean to a fellow user.

tarequeh 12y ago

Life can be much more than conformist grinding. It's too precious. Learn a new language, learn how to ride a motorbike, travel to Easter Island or the Himalayas. Stop worrying about what others want of you. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wU0PYcCsL6o https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wU0PYcCsL6o

andruby 12y ago

Thank you for sharing the honest evaluation of your life. The only advice I can give you after having lived in the, from my point of view, shallow American tech world: move to Europe. The people in most European countries will be less welcoming at first, but I can tell you, if you stick through you will find them to be more profound. It helps that we don't have an American Dream which focusses on financial prosperity through hard work, but rather a joy of life (joie de vivre) which encourages us to enjoy the beauty of life and nature. Travel to Tuscany or Portugal and see for yourself.

andyl 12y ago
"you will find them to be a lot more profound" BS - there's plenty of shallow people in Europe too.
- andruby 12y ago
  Of course there are shallow people in Europe. I met one last year :)
gress 12y ago
You don't have to move to Europe. Just Oakland.
taway 12y ago
I was born in Portugal and lived there for most of my life. Virtually everything the OP said could describe some portuguese person just as well. Hell, I could have written it at some point and it would be a surprisingly accurate summary of my life back then. These are symptoms of problems that live in you, that consume you from the inside, they will follow you wherever you go, you can't just run away and escape them all. I don't have any recommendations, but you have my empathy and understanding. I believe you will find your way out, maybe by finding some deeper meaning to your life, maybe by finding your place in the world or maybe by just stop giving a fuck. On the other hand I have a feeling that something is pretty fucked with western society in general. And as the western model of society is pretty much expanding everywhere it is becoming a global problem. I can't quite put by finger on it but maybe it has to do with ever growing expectations, the idea that we can be or do everything, that is all in our hands and only depends on us puts an immense pressure on our shoulders and leads to immense pain. The truth, I think, is that luck plays an huge part in our life, on our successes and on our failures. I am not sure if I made any sense, if I did not, please accept my apologies ;)

TeMPOraL 12y ago

Thanks for sharing. I'm already doing like half of the things from that list, and I'll be probably doing the other half soon. It's good to remind ourselves that you, and me, are not alone in this, and maybe to reflect on those "choices" "we" make and see if we can learn to live more of our own lives, and less of someone elses.

noname123 12y ago
No problem, I guess if you're gonna eventually give into vices, I guess there's no point to hold back and just go all in one go and go from there, ; ) I believe you're also right that you're not alone. For me personally, I've found that it isn't that adults who are older than me have eventually gotten their act together but more so that people retreat to their families and smaller intimate social clique and not reveal their inner lives as much, compared to when they were melodramatic teenagers or college kids on Facebook or YouTube vlogs.

dasil003 12y ago

I don't mean to shoot down the one thing that gets you through the day, but if you aren't happy now do you think hitting it out of the ballpark will help? I mean, money is great for the basics, but if you're having problems forming romantic connections I think money would make that problem a lot worse.

2muchcoffeeman 12y ago
Of course it will help. If tomorrow I became independently rich, I could quit my job and suddenly the most productive 40hrs of my week are free to work on my own problems whatever they may be. Plus your stress levels will probably drop too.
- noname123 12y ago
  At a startup interview years ago, the hiring manager told me a story, "Once, there was a fisherman with his single fishing boat toiling and netting and gutting his daily haul at sea; then one day, a Silicon Valley VC came on his boat and made a business proposition, 'I can make you a rich man; I can give you a funding to scale your operation so you can hire 40 people with 40 fishing boats to catch more fishes and make more money!' The fisherman laughed, the VC trying to push him with the startup enthusiasm immediately said, "think of all of the money you can make and you can then retire, and think of what you'd be able to do afterwards with that freedom! The fisherman said 'Well, I'd retire to some place close to the coast, buy a fishing boat there and go out to the sea and go fishing.'"
  - ahi 12y ago
    There's a version of that story on the wall of most Jimmy John's franchises.

architgupta 12y ago

Things which may help, in no particular order: Play a sport you like, work on a project you enjoy (hack on something small and put it out in the world), make a few good friends and maybe work with them (not easy but worthwhile), remain intellectually honest (write down your thoughts / emotions). Its a cliche to say it, but the gap is creation vs consumption.

mrj 12y ago

Yesh, I recognize some of the thinking in this post, and trust me, you're going about it all wrong. Until you figure yourself out, you're not going to make meaningful relationships or be happy in them. You need to find what defines you, what you are about. Then, you'll need to make your peace with it. Own it. I'm not sure the people you have mentioned feel any better about themselves than you do. Normal people reach a point where they have enough money and they stop and learn to paint or something. It's a particular kind of dysfunction to earn billions. If you are not a downtown type, leave. There are plenty of bored potential partners in other places. Focus on joining organizations that will put you with other people of like interests. Shared experiences drive friendships. Drinking at pubs doesn't count. A group that hikes every weekend, does. Find a group that says important things. You seem to dislike the shallowness you feel around you, so don't be shallow. Nothing you wrote says anything about you, just some vague ideas about success that feel thrust on you by what you've read. If you were really all about success and that junk, I don't think you would feel so miserable about pursuing it. You have freedom, much more than you think.

noname123 12y ago
> You seem to dislike the shallowness you feel around you, so don't be shallow. Nothing you wrote says anything about you, OK, let me try; I really like computers back in the day when you typed in a terminal screen 1:Print "Hello World" or the first HTML page with the CSS or figuring out for the first time how object-oriented programming class inheritance working, or referencing and dereferencing C pointers or DirectX buffer-swap or socket multicasting, or reading a really profound novel for English class for that matter or catching a late night movie with sexy scenes and heavy themes that you can't put your finger when you're young but the excitement of lust and wanderlust lingers on ("Eyes Wide Shut"), When real life happened was told by parents directly and peers implicitly to "pursue" passion and "be serious" at the same time lest you be judged, so I got a job feeling independent, hell even making six-figures for the first time, feeling a million bucks but initial euphoria eventually gave away to daily grind, fixing tickets after tickets to the tyranny of "agile," "daily standup," and "JIRA burndown chart/project tracker"; more importantly, I want to learn and dig further and further down into stack, get into Linux kernel, hardware circuit design, cryptography, Bioinformatics not to have some BS on my LinkedIn and collect trinkets, but have that rush of hacking at it, like a shot of cocaine straight into the brain blood-barrier; instead, I'm here cranking out tickets for an A/B test on how to make a button to have a single round bevel or double round bevel and seeing which one will boost 0.01% on the user conversion rate to add a product to a shopping cart or to keep user "as engaged" when I could hardly care less about social media, e-commerce and iOS apps about a product or infographics that I don't need but is shoved to my face; I feel cheated and robbed at the lies that the startup industry pumps out for "meaningful work," more importantly, I sacrificed my love for learning academic-oriented computing for a meaningless momentary compensation and the trendiness of startupdom because I watched some stupid video on Steve Jobs or Peter Thiel on some late lonely night and it filled up my emptiness in college, Socially, was an awkward computer nerd and on the bottom of the sexual and social totem-pole in college. But had a few friends whom I can have late night conversations with, who listened to me, whom understood when I say something in Chinglish (English-Cinese combined) and understand instantly what it's like to grow up Chinese in suburban Maryland and going to a Chinese evangelical christian church in the late 90's, and debating what porn clip we saw on porn sites back then, whether it's sanitary or gay for the guys involved for the porn girl in a blowbang to suck one cock and then go off to suck on another cock and also discuss different movies, The Smashing Pumpkins, "Catcher in the Rye," "On the Road," the alienation and the exhilaration of being on the road or constantly searching and wandering and the explicit sexual yearnings, So in my mid-twenties, got finally frustrated due to hormones and that fear of missing out and that parental pressure to "settle down". So I got an downtown apartment and stocked it up with IKEA furniture like Edward Norton did in "Fight Club," shopped at H&M and Brooks Brothers for "snug-fit" jeans, befriended and went out with a carefully curated group of "young professionals but yet boheme" and eventually went on dates that led to a steady girlfriend. At first I felt like a million bucks, felt like I finally made it with "meaningful such yuppie weekend activities" as rock-climbing, hiking and carousing with friends and SO but eventually gave to the daily grind of the socializations, to the pettiness of who's who in office politics, whose next great startup idea to apply to what accelerator and what band to see in which cool fresh new venue that's just opened in the city but that's just the same as the one that we just sat at discussing it, the decor, names and hair are different but the characters all the same, that obligatory feeling that I don't want to but I should, I want to have a feeling of mastery, follow through with something tangible and tactile with my hands, like building a nice outdoors deck with a nice varnish finish, learn how to take a Eric-Clapton-esque solo with all of the chromatic tones and sixteenth notes at a blues jam, to pull off a cross-over and a spin-move to evade the first and second defender in a rec-league basketball and finish at the hoop. Instead I trivialized my personal goals as unrealistic and impractical and instead gave into the social pressure of "practical nest-building and social networking". Learned only later that all my "friends" in trendy yuppie network were more in love with the idea of themselves being involved in a trendy yuppie network than the other people (especially moi). I don't feel like a man, or specifically a human being with any agency, but was re-assured by everyone else that "[I was]. Because [I] had my own apartment and had a great job, a great social network." I rushed to relationships and friends to fill a void of personal inadequacy but found associating or possessing other people that I liked the idea of did not change me and if anything else made me more insecure and co-dependent on them.

jedmeyers 12y ago

I believe and hope that this is not a description of the authors life but rather a stereotypical generalization of the common problems a lot of people face every day. However to a lot of people from 2nd and 3rd world countries just owning a house with some small amount of land is an American Dream came true.

noname123 12y ago
Yes, jedmeyers. Your reply reminded me of what I heard on Jian Ghomeshi's "The Q" radio program about the Chilean miners that their lives were destroyed by the broken promises, fame and greed of talk show's, movie deals after they were rescued to the surface, some of them expressed the desire to go back to the shafted mine when they were happier and a purpose.