31. Howdy. In your early 20s, you're like a girl in college. It's very easy to get "activity" (for college girls, sex; for young nerds, jobs with minor but imp

31. Howdy. In your early 20s, you're like a girl in college. It's very easy to get "activity" (for college girls, sex; for young nerds, jobs with minor but impressive perks) but it's really hard to find respect. (I stopped being indignant about gender disparities in dating when I realized that, in terms of getting respect, it was equally hard for men and women.) Your late 20s is when you learn that most employers-- and especially the "prestigious" ones-- never much respected you. You may have been right that you had the right idea or were the smartest one in the room (whilst ignored). It didn't matter. You didn't have a chance. That enlightenment can be a bit painful. This "mid-career blues" period seems to be the stretch in which a person has learned a few things about what people really are when there's enough at stake, but before having enough life experience (or, for the apolitical or fortunate who are able to focus on the work more than the politics, domain mastery) to avoid the obvious pitfalls, deal with obnoxious personalities, and still play the game to a win. The 27-40 period seems to be when people learn their hardest lessons-- first firing or layoff, first non-paying client, first lawsuit, first truly unethical employer. (My friend started consulting and is dealing with his first non-paying client.) The problem, in the US, is that we're practically not allowed to talk about what is really going on. The fact that I've been open with some rather vanilla details of my Google experience has made me into some sort of +3-sigma outlier "bad-mouther". We live in this culture where we're supposed to pretend that these negative experiences just don't happen. Everyone pretends to be "crushing it" and getting $150,000 signing bonuses and all that bullshit. The result is that the painful experiences of that mid-career spell become isolating, because people are shamed into silence. And that's a fucking crime.