Becoming the person who does the thing
fredrivett.com206 points by fredrivett a day ago
206 points by fredrivett a day ago
I found the article anodyne enough, so this is not a knock on it, but something I've noticed as I've gotten older that I find a bit amusing and curious.
What is it that makes people in tech in their late 20s and 30s write about life lessons like an old sage? I don't notice 32 year old farmers or roughnecks doing this.
As a older than this person, I feel like it’s around the time most people have that first large step of retrospectiveness where they see their current self has deviated from their self they thought they were previously. They realize they have autonomy to craft themselves. They realize there are more important aspects to life than their grades/sports/hobby or whatever things they built their identity around for the first 20-25 years. Anyways once you realize it, it’s an interesting topic to write about as you’ve become a completely different person from the one you were maybe 5-10 years prior. Because you’re likely transitioning into adulthood (maturity wise). As this continues in your later thirties and forties, it’s just status quo adulting and not as interesting to write about.
I always half-joke that I gave up on my hopes of being a child prodigy when I turned 30.
That was a major milestone not just for realizing that there was no future "grown up" version of me, but also seeing how much time had passed and how little was left. So I accepted that who I am is who I'm going to be, for the most part, and I might as well make the best of it. That opened up a lot of doors for personal interest that I hadn't even noticed previously.
So predictably I started woodworking.
> realizing that there was no future "grown up" version of me
Should you get older (which is probable), you’ll be amazed at how wrong that is. Development doesn’t stop at 30, it just gets a little slower.
That's very exciting to hear! I'd be delighted to be wrong about that.
Edit: Although, just to clarify, I didn't really mean that I think I won't change as I get older. Moreso that if growing a mustache or getting involved in international diplomacy was going to be in my future, I'd likely have some indication of that by now.
Wrong. I never ran more than 5 times a year until I was 30 and now I have run ultra marathons. It is my spiritual calling and I didn’t know about it until 34. Now I am 44 and probably in the best shape of my life.
I hated manual labor as a kid/young adult, associated it with chores and whatnot, now in my 40s I build homes as a hobby/side gig. I like to be as hands on as possible with it and do about 70% of the work myself on every house. I work a knowledge worker job during the day and need something physical to feel like I’ve accomplished any real which helps my overall fulfillment. Most people think it’s strange, but I do most of the house work between 10pm-3pm. After my job and family duties are complete for the day, I’m somewhat nocturnal and it’s not as hot at night (Texas). I’m usually fine with just the 6 or so hours of sleep but it’s kind of like I have a whole second life at night lol
Its quite amazing, that you have the energy levels for it.
Admittedly, it's because my day job isn't very stressful/taxing at all. I'm in an executive leadership position, so I mostly just have a few meetings a day and make sure my teams are all moving things along/help block and tackle within the organization. There's certain times of they year I know I will be fully consumed by the day job and I just plan the house stuff around it. For example, I've poured a slab foundation before a busy season at work and just didn't come back to the slab for about 6 weeks to start the framing, I'm in no huge hurry.
A somewhat more depressing take: "There comes a time in everyone's life when you look into the mirror and realize that what you see is all that you'll ever be. And you accept that fact - or you kill yourself. Or you stop looking into mirrors." (Babylon 5, quoted from memory, so probably not 100% correct)
As I'm nearing 30, still in the "I can be anything I want" phase, I wonder when this time will arrive. And whether it is true for everyone - maybe some people possess the ability to reinvent themselves no matter their age. But can you even do that without giving up some contentment?
I think you are always in this phase of being able to be anything you want. Even as you are growing up, there are usually more choices than you can see. What experience and age gives you is a broader understanding that that really is the case and then, speaking from personal experience, you start feeling foolish for not realizing this before.
That said, changing things is never without some loss of contentment. Even if status quo is abysmal, we humans seem to prefer it over changing it. It is worth exploring, though, even if it is uncomfortable.
"It is the most shattering experience of a young man's life when one morning he awakes and quite reasonably says to himself: 'I shall never play the Dane.'"
https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2013/mar/29/richard-grif...
That first "or" coordinate was really uncalled for.
Its true though, unless you can find your purpose in life. Gotta be more to life than transient hits of dopamine
This is good, and I'll add that for the kind of person who grew up sitting in front of a computer and is now working full-time sitting in front of a computer, this is most likely to manifest in recognizing problems with physical health and taking steps to fix it, steps that are tangible and highly achievable for someone in their 20s and 30s.
EDIT: Oh, and farmers do not have this particular problem, lol
Precisely this. For all the (woefully young) science about brain development and maturity, it doesn't seem to stop for quite a while, and my late 20's and early 30's have been the most interesting time of reflection and self-appraisement I've had.
It's becoming clear to me that what we call a "mid-life crisis" is probably just Jung's self-actualization, where a person becomes aware they've been wearing a mask to some degree until then. It seems most people find a way to drop it, stop doing what they don't want, and start doing what they do want. Hence the development of grumpiness, divorces, moving far afield, buying sports cars, becoming ascetics, whatever it is that reflects a truer identity than their young selves that satisfied expectations and chased approval.
I've found that the people I know who naturally reject molds and masks while young and pursue what they want early on don't seem to go through this.
> I don't notice 32 year old farmers or roughnecks doing this.
Hang out in a bar with 32 year old farmers or roughnecks as a teenager and you'll hear lots of similar shallow anodyne life wisdom.
> What is it that makes people in tech in their late 20s and 30s write about life lessons like an old sage?
Some of my friends tried going down the influencer path. Some on LinkedIn, one as an Substacker, others on Instagram.
Seeing their influencer content in contrast to their personal lives made it abundantly clear that they were using their influencer side as an outlet for their thoughts. As ideas or epiphanies came to them, they would jump to their influencer accounts and preach their realizations as if it was knowledge they had held for decades.
The optimistic angle is that they were using the outlet as a place for sharpening their thoughts. Thinking in public and putting your thoughts into words forces you to sharpen your ideas and make them more coherent.
The part that never sat well with me was how they were trying to preach it to others and present themselves as the wise, experienced guru sharing this advice to others when really they were just barely figuring it out.
The content can be helpful for others to sharpen their own thoughts or catch up on basic realizations about life, but for others it feels weird to see so much fanfare around basic social and workplace understandings.
> The part that never sat well with me was how they were trying to preach it to others and present themselves as the wise, experienced guru sharing this advice to others when really they were just barely figuring it out.
Honestly, you probably have to bring it like this if you want to generate a following. I guess people like it when someone just hands them a truth in a confident enough way.
I am in my late 40s. I went through my own journey. This is not the first generation to do this. The difference being, they did it in private.
Not post every thought and idea as if they've figured out the meaning of life.
And I disagree, you don't need to share your thoughts for validation. Rather, you need to live them. Most roads taken will appear as mistakes, but they have their own teaching moments.
There is nothing better than lived experience.
My experience is that most people in tech don't write about life lessons. But the ones who do frequently appear on HN because the audience on HN likes this sort of article.
I think their point is not that people in their mid 20's are WRITING LIFE LESSONS, but more that PEOPLE IN THEIR MID 20'S are writing life lessons.
People in their 40s are too busy juggling family life with senior positions at work to write about anything that isn't strictly necessary
In this particular case, the guy seems to be in his late 30s or 40s (he says "until my late twenties, I could count the number of times I had been to the gym on on hand", and later "fast forward almost to a decade").
But even if he was in his mid 20's... I understand being cautious about taking life lessons from young people, because they've had less chance to learn and correct the false things they might have learned, but the lesson he is sharing here - that your identity determines your actions which in turn will determine large parts of your life outcomes is one that even someone young can understand, and it is a useful one - I'd argue that no matter your age, if you've got a self-image that is blocking you from 'living your best life'/'doing what you want to do'/'being happy', knowing that you can change it, and this will get you closer to your goals, is useful.
Why not? Experience and maturity is not very dependent on age. Getting those depends on doing it, not just waiting on time passing by. I'm much older than the article author, but it would be foolish of me to think that I couldn't learn things from 20 year olds – including important and profound teachings and advice.
There's not a lot of 20 year olds who have made a single mistake that rolled back multiple years of work, almost instantly. When that happens to you for the first time, it is very humbling; and may take months or years to understand and learn from what happened. We all have things to learn from others, but proportionally there are very few self help authors under the age of 40.
I would say experience is correlated with age. You need to live to gain experience. Someone in their 20s simply hasn't lived long enough to be giving life lessons.
(Give or take some extraordinary exceptions of people who accumulate a lot of hard-earned experience very early in their lives; but the general rule applies).
You need to do things to gain experience. Doing time is not enough. A 20 year old can in many cases have done and experienced much more already in life than some 40 year olds. The large majority of today's mass population have identical lives that are staked out for them from the cradle to the grave, and it is true that most only gain experience by accidents which accumulate over the years. But many people live real lives already from a young age, and have the experience which that gives.
The implication goes the other way: someone who has done a lot of things and learned many lessons has lived a longer time. Not that people who have lived longer necessarily drew valuable lessons.
It's less likely that a 20 year old has done as many things, faced as many challenges, and drawn as many lessons, as someone who doubles them in age. They simply haven't lived long enough to be able to tell if their lessons validate or generalize well.
Even the perspective of someone who has most of their life ahead vs someone who has a few decades more is wildly different. Someone with most of their lives ahead can course-correct more easily. Someone who hasn't had their mid-life crisis yet, etc, etc -- you get the idea.
What kind of knowledge can you get from old age that you cannot get from experience?
Didn't I address this in my first paragraph?
How can you get enough experience without living long enough to accrue said experience? How can your perspective on things change if not enough time passed for perspective changes?
To get back to your initial claim:
> Experience and maturity is not very dependent on age.
This is what I disagree with. Experience and maturity are very dependent on age. While some people have a lot of experience and maturity early on, this is rare.
Also, some people don't get wiser with age, but that's a different proposition. I'm not claiming old people are necessarily wise.
> Experience and maturity is not very dependent on age.
Mostly only in edge cases.
It is true. Self-help content is HN’s favourite. Though I think moaning is close behind.
I'm decently older than this and I'm all for it.
Age is just one modest, fallible signal for wisdom, to say nothing of occupation. Farmers and roughnecks definitely spout plenty of "life lessons".
They may be far from having learned all their lessons in life--and hopefully are open to the wisdom of those with many more years in similar shoes--but that doesn't mean that can't have learned valuable lessons in ten, fifteen years of adult life. I know I have plenty of wisdom now that I wish I could have passed to a five-years younger version of myself. I don't think writing, sharing, or publicizing that sort of retrospective is necessarily presumptuous. Sometimes young tech personalities are pompous, but there are also plenty of my own peers (and juniors!) that I'm happy to take lessons from.
You learn extremely valuable lessons even during your traineeship. But it takes many more years to realize if that lesson is truly unique and worth sharing, and if it won’t be turned on its head as you learn more later in life.
I learned very different versions of the same lesson given 20 more years of experience. Sometimes just having my confidence in “old” life lessons shaken was a huge deal, it takes a lot to shake what I thought is bedrock.
If you watch 20 minutes from a 2h movie can you really tell something about the whole movie or just about its beginning?
An unkind answer is these are the sort of navel-gazing observations had by most teenagers, and people in tech are just late bloomers.
But an even less kind answer would be that self-help is big business, and to run the scam you have to build an audience.
You should choose to practice kindness and charity if you can at all help it. Accusing a whole class of people of arrested development is incredibly derogatory. There are healthier ways to frame criticism.
Kind of like if /r/im14andthisisdeep met LinkedIn B2B SaaS prose :)
(side note in all seriousness I did enjoy the article)
> What is it that makes people in tech in their late 20s and 30s write about life lessons like an old sage? I don't notice 32 year old farmers or roughnecks doing this.
They have blogs and the means to distribute the links to their blogs via sites like this.
Spend some time at your local pub and you'll hear people of all backgrounds over you their sagacity.
Tech people are good at writing, maybe not like an actual writer or journalist, but we definitely write more than farmers. Tech also evolves very fast, so we probably perceive time differently, and think we "have seen a lot" in less time.
Humbly disagree. The majority of tech writing sucks.Or perhaps I should say that it never has a chance to be better because the medium of choice, the blog, is clunky at best and little more than diary entries for the most part (which perhaps makes it harsh to judge them, but then, don't put your diary online). The worst of them are look-at-me/SEO/LinkedIn audition spam. The best are entries that are useful in the moment and then quickly forgotten.
I like some tech writing, but the number of tech authors who I return to for the long view, reflective of industry understanding and life lessons learned, like I might do with writing about any other topic, is extremely small.
I have never read whatever farmers write, but I am almost certain it is miles better than the average tech writing drivel
I was listening to a book-review podcast that was talking about one of Ernest Cline's books. They were on a section where the 17-year-old protagonist is remarking on how his personality probably reflects his dad's interest in something or other, and one of the hosts laughed and said no 17-year-old does that kind of self-analysis. I immediately said, "Au contraire, maybe you didn't, but plenty of them do." I certainly did.
There may be something about the kind of mind that's drawn to tech that correlates with navel-gazing. We like to know how things work, and that doesn't necessarily only apply to computers and gadgets.
Of course, that only explains why we think about it; not why so many of us write about it like we think other people need to hear it. That probably comes down to being smarter than average and thinking you've got everything figured out by the age of 15, also a common trait of tech people. Fortunately some of us manage to outgrow it and be embarrassed by what know-it-alls we were.
> farmers or roughnecks doing this
Oh, they do it. They just do it in their preferred medium, which is usually in person on the job, not the internet.
There was an article or comment a couple of years back discussing how people are now writing grandiose blog posts like they are describing how and why they broke up Pink Floyd. I wish I could find the original source because I still think about it.
Netscape was only released 30 years ago.
Someone in their early 30s could’ve been a developer for half the existence of the browser platform.
I can't help but think of Don Knuth's The Art of Computer Programming.
Looking at wikipedia, he started it in 1962 (at age 24), and it is still incomplete in 2025 (he is 87)
By the time you're old, it might be too late to start your "wise" framework.
I think it's a social media thing that's not limited to tech. There are tons of tiktok videos where some 18 year old explains the world with passion.
> I don't notice 32 year old farmers or roughnecks doing this.
Do you read the blogs of 32 year old farmers or roughnecks?
In tech there's more to be gained building a personal brand online than in petroleum
Maybe you’re just exposed to tech blogs and not the farmer/roughneck equivalent?
> write about life lessons like an old sage
Take it from me, an old sage who has seen some things, people writting life lessons like they are old sages have absolutely no idea. They might strike the correct time twice a day like the broken clock they are, but there are an awful lot of hours in the day that they are wrong.
True. But it's the same trend in every other field: new born babies lecture soon to die people about life.
Example of such lessons: recently, a well known dating coach who gives lessons that costs around 8000 euros per hour about how a man can become a high value man and attract high value women, called Sadia Khan, proved she is in the position to give lessons about how a woman can be of high value: private calls of her were released recently and it is shown she is a side chick of a married man.
Software people reply heavily on systems, patterns and frameworks in planning their work. It leads them to think that all of life is like a coding challenge that just needs the right framework, and as soon as they think they’ve discovered something, they want to share it in the spirit of open source.
That’s the charitable read anyway.
The quintessential American author Oprah Winfrey didn't write her first book untill she was 42.
Blog posts are branding. A version of them is self help style but there's all kinds. It just sells well.
>I don't notice 32 year old farmers or roughnecks doing this.
Not for nothing, but you might if you spent time on the FarmersAndRoughnecksNews forum instead of here
I suppose it’s true. You don’t notice them doing it. The problem here is that you’ve concluded that the detection instrument functions. That’s bad engineering. Check your equipment.
I draw analogies with junior / medior / senior developers; juniors don't know anything and they know it, mediors know something but think they know everything and want the world to know, seniors know something but know they know nothing.
...if that makes any sense, I'm sure someone else put it more eloquently than that.
The trick to getting results in the gym, and establishing a sustainable practice (which is key in both exercise and diet), is to just go regularly but allow yourself to leave at any point. Say you decide four days a week is your long-term goal. On that first day, if you want, leave after 5m. But return the next day. Keep doing this and eventually, I promise, you'll average the 45m you need four days a week forever.
I do the same thing with books. I have tons I have only partially read. But I also have tons that I pick back up later and absolutely LOVE. I don't know exactly why this happens, but I never feel any dread about reading and so read a lot more than I did when I did not think this way.
> I do the same thing with books.
Can relate, I go to a Cafe to read almost every morning, even if I'm just reading for 5-10 minutes.
I usually read 1-3 books in parallel because sometimes I'm just not in the mood for non-fiction and I just want to read a quick interview with an interesting person. One of the best features of ebook readers for me is that I can easily switch between books with a few taps, instead of having to bring 3 books.
I've gotten into and out of regular exercise over time. And, i actually did that 5 minute trick in my apartment gym in my 30s. I literally went to the gym i think.... 3 or 4 times consecutively and stayed literally five minutes. Did one pushup. Five minutes in elliptical. etc.
... it totally worked. before long i was staying ten, casually doing more while listening to podcasts. It actually changed my mindset; i was simply over going to the gym to try and push myself or grow muscle. Instead i focused purely on exercise as a way to decompress and be healthy. No more "must go faster / heavier / harder" goals. Only do whatever feels right that day, maybe just weights, just bike, etc. Goal is get to a basic level of elevated heart rate and feeling good, and do it regularly. never feel bad. Amos "off days" where i show up and don't even get my heart rate up.
And it's held up remarkably over time (8 years). I'm not winning any physique or fitness awards, but in general i'm good shape and more importantly feel good physically by default, and in general feel more balanced than in ny early 30s, despite being busier than ever.
It's the "secret" that kind of flies in the face of much of the type of grit-your-teeth-motivation type of self-help and advice.
There's nothing broken, nothing wrong with our current selves. In fact, we already have good internal compasses and we should listen to them. Go to the gym or park for a few minutes, stay as little or long as we want. See how we feel. Take it easy if we want. Push harder if we want.
It's this slight tweak in perspective that I think is pretty significant. It's an acceptance of the idea that we are not some kind of deficient ball of mess that requires carrots and whips to even know the right direction to our own wellness or happiness. That we don't actually need external pressures and motivation bearing down on us.
We're allowed to just want things because we do. And we're allowed to not want things because we don't. Feels like getting back to simpler times as a child where we could just act on our own emotions and internal state without such gripping regard for the external (e.g. comparison, external ideals, external validation, etc.).
It's been vital for me lately to engage in this...type of "non-striving" form of exercise too. (I now go to the park almost daily for a good walk.) I started doing it just because I wanted to. There were no plans to keep doing it, no routine or regimen expectations, no goals. Just allowing myself to to engage on my own terms. The most important benefit for me has been just been feeling more ownership over my own self-concept.
It's much simpler, quite freeing, and also resistant to commodification.
I've been doing that lately with cleaning my barn, which is partly disorganized and partly too much junk, both mine and the previous owner's. I'd been telling myself to set aside a day or two to tear into it and get it all done, and it never happened. So lately I go out every day on my lunch break and work at it for 15 minutes.
It's not as efficient as doing it all at once, since it takes a minute to look around and pick something to do next. But I'm making progress, which I wasn't at all before.
On the other hand, starting with 4/week as a goal is terrible. Sure, you might be motivated enough to actually do it for a few months, but the risk of falling off is high.
Much better is to start at 2 or maybe 3 times a week, always leaving you slightly hungry for more. Even if you get sick or hurt at some point, you'll have much more drive to continue if you're not already at the limit of your motivation
This is the way.
I’ve been going to the gym regularly now for over a decade.
I have many days where I don’t want to go because I have no motivation. I tell myself I only have to put on my gym clothes and go through the motions. If I hate it after 10 minutes I can go home. I always end up there for at least 40 minutes this way because by the time you’re at the gym with your shorts on, it’s very much like “well… I’m already here…” It might not be the greatest workout, but consistency of just showing up is the key.
I second this "just show up" mentality.
Putting too much pressure on oneself to do too much, especially in the beginning before the body has had time to adapt to the pressures of training, is a recipe for burnout.
On the other hand, a slow start, "just keeping showing up, do a little, give yourself plenty of time and space to rest" mentality, in the long run, leads to better performance.
Slow and steady wins the race.
Going to the gym has intense diminishing returns but the benefit is that you can get great results with only a tiny commitment. Going from nothing to fifteen minutes twice a week makes a huge difference and is easy to commit to (lifting heavy things and or intense aerobic exercise).
What do you mean by diminishing returns?
15 minutes twice a week gets you a certain amount of results
You will not get twice the results for 30×2 or 15×4.
2 hours three times a week doesn't get you 4 times as much as 30 minutes three times a week
The amount of results you get diminishes significantly for time and effort put in.
Having a cut physique like an action movie hero is nearly a full time job but being basically fit with the health benefits that come along with that is actually a pretty small chore if you do things right.
This super-resonates, especially the bit about our actions being a reflection (and being limited by) how we see ourselves and the world in it, the very basic understanding of reality.
For example - I gained a bunch of pounds since my 3rd kid was born - I am busy at work, I try to help my wife as much as I can, the other kids leave no space to work out, whatever. All very realistic and reasonable. And yet I have a neighbor who just had their 3rd kid, he's got a similar caliber job, and I see him running every day. We both "value" being fit, we both understand the connection between exercise and health, we face a similar "objective" reality and yet this is an example where clearly he somehow understands it and himself in it, differently than I do. So for example - consistent with the article - my neighbor probably sees himself as "someone who exercises" and moves the other things around in his life to make it happen. I see myself as someone "who'd like to exercise" - a weaker level of identity that means I don't reshape my reality to make it happen.
Or here's another example - the average religious Jewish couple living in Brooklyn has an average 6.6 kids. A secular couple living in the same zip code is statistically likely to have just about 0 kids. And while there're indeed a million reasons why having kids is very hard today, the religious couple goes into it knowing "we're future parents" and make it happen, the secular couple goes into it "we see the problems facing us" and doesn't make it happen. Same to my exercise example, your interpretation of reality and your role in it, has outsize impact over what externally might seem like identical objective reality.
I am not sure if I believe in objective reality or not. If I do, then people who succeed (eg my fit neighbor, the religious parents) prove what the actual reality is, or whether we each live in our own subjective realities where X is possible for someone as part and parcel of how they are but not for someone else. And when you reframe your reality fully (what religion calls repentance) then you actually do alter it.
You don’t know your neighbor’s circumstances. Maybe he biologically doesn’t need as much sleep. Or maybe his wife does a lot more child care. Or maybe he is okay with the children watching iPad while he exercises.
(I am the person you are responding to so I can be uncharitable towards myself)
All the things you said are an excuse. All that happens if I believe the excuses is that I will be fatter and fatter, no thanks.
I 100% know that I "could" run every day if I got my shit together, if I was really dying to do it, and if it was part of my identity. The fact that it's not part of my identity is the whole problem.
Say it another way - if my neighbor and I switched families and bodies, he'd still run - in my situation - while I'd still succumb to the excuses - in his situation.
You have a good point, and I do agree.
But at the same time I have been both a person exercising every day and a person not understanding how to find the time for exercise (even after having been the exercising person!). It is remarkable how much our identity can be shaped by contingent circumstances or beliefs.
So how to know if one is someone who needs alot of sleep, or someone who just believes there is no time? I actually don't know.
Identity shapes our commitment. For example, when I was a single guy living in NYC, I'd do sometimes 2 hours of yoga every day because the studio was on my walk home and if I had nothing to do, I'd just go there. So it required relatively little commitment.
So I identified as a "yogi" but it didn't take much sacrifice to do it.
As a suburban dad of 3, working out requires greater commitment than it did before, and I am failing to muster the required level of commitment to overcome that friction sometimes. While my neighbor is more committed because I guess it's part of his identity.
You say committed. I hear sacrifice. What will you sacrifice to do yoga for 2 hours? Most likely the children or wife’s wellbeing.
I used to climb V10. I can’t train like that anymore unless I’m willing to sacrifice something else for it.
Here's the reality. If I REALLY wanted to make 2 hours for exercise a day, I could: 1. Eliminate all digital distraction, which I am sure adds up to more than an hour every day. 2. Specifically, if I turned off my phone in the evening, I could go to bed at least an hour earlier and thus wake up an hour earlier to work out. 3. I could negotiate an arrangement with my wife that creates an hour for me - I haven't even tried. 4. I could look into hiring a babysitter for an hour a day.
Each of those things is "a sacrifice" of something but on a conscious level I am happy to sacrifice digital distraction or the cost of a babysitter for an hour. The fact that I haven't jumped to do this (but my neighbor, perhaps, has) is what I am talking about.
The Jewish couple also has a huge amount of community and family support that the secular couple has been stripped of.
That's 100% true but it goes back to the same point. The religious couple has that support because they and their family made the choices to stay in proximity. The secular couple may in theory want the same thing but in reality made a very different choice. For example they might identify as "cool ppl who of course want to live in NYC" more than "future parents that want to be close to the family.
I had a similar experience as a teen, where somehow I had never considered a sport or the gym because “that was not what people like me did, I was the nerdy one”.
I didn’t really ever think that explicitly, or say it aloud, it was just an obvious implication on my mind.
Turns out the only thing separating me from someone who is good at sports, or being buff, was doing it frequently and not half assed. Applies to most of life when it clicks.
Btw, if anyone’s reading this and feeling motivated:
>It began slowly, but I began. Knee press-ups to start, later adding assisted pull-ups.
>If anyone was watching, it would have looked stupid. A grown man barely able to push himself off the floor. But I showed up and put in my reps, day by day, week by week, in the privacy of my bedroom.
That works, but if you haven’t done any work before you’re better off joining a gym. Precisely the advantage is regulating weight more discreetly, and equipment helps for that.
My wife had a similar experience. Being the last child, she was just never pushed to do any activities in school, and had really never participated in any physical activities. When we got married, I set a goal to run a marathon, and she thought that was the funniest joke she'd ever heard. Funny story, turns out she was a natural at running, and handily beat me a few years later in our first half marathon, even though I played sports since I was a kid.
"that was not what people like me do"
Is this kind of thinking normal? Kinda like looking into the world and going like "i must be like that specific thing over there"?
I don’t know about “normal”, but I’d argue it’s pervasive.
We seem to associate certain behaviours and patterns with categories of identity, and changing those behaviours in yourself implies an acceptance of that “other” identity.
I remember this distinctly about 20 years ago when I thought about not eating meat anymore. Choosing not to eat meat was easy, but “becoming a vegetarian” felt alien, and took some mental effort. I didn’t see myself as “one of those” people.
I suspect it has a lot to do with how important group identity is to us, as social primates, and how we tend to package one behaviour with a bunch of others. It’s like doing pushups will suddenly make you a “jock” (and maybe the irony is that, to a certain degree it will, as these thing tend to turn into slippery slopes).
The irony is that, at least in my social circles, the stereotype of the "software developer who does rock-climbing" is really a thing.
To the point where, because part of my identity is being a hipster who is not like everyone else, I tend to avoid rock-climbing unless it's with friends, and when people ask me what sports I do I tell them I do Olympic Weightlifting, because it's actually somewhat original, even if, in practice 90% of the people at my Oly lifting club are either sports coaches or engineers :P
>Is this kind of thinking normal?
Sure. Haven’t you ever met someone who had a bad teacher and now claim they’re not good with numbers or languages?
We usually get comments like “oh you are smart!” when we succeed immediately at school. This is damaging, because it rewards current state rather than progress - the kid who doesn’t succeed at once assumes it’s not their thing, better to try something else.
The opposite is also true, after thousands of hours learning to draw people will get told “wow you’re so naturally talented!”, which accidentally is a dismissal of their effort.
I’m not saying talent doesn’t exist, but I’d go as far as to say it doesn’t matter much for non-elite settings - yet we seriously undervalue practice in the west.
I don't think it's normal per se, but it's understandable; a lot of US media from the 80's and 90's portrayed people in distinct stereotypes, nerds, jocks and cheerleaders, but the jocks were assholes and the nerds came out on top in the end.
That kind of thing - stereotypes and reinforcing that this stereotype is your strength - will stick with a lot of people for a long time, at least until they become a bit more worldly and realise it's not actually like that.
But that's just my theory / take, it's probably full of assumptions.
We all have a lot of subconscious biases that end up a lot like this but rarely or never voiced. "I'm not the kind of person that goes dancing" "I drink a soda with every meal" "these are the only kinds of clothes that I wear" and you have a built up set of things you do and don't do and without reflection.
Then you can think about it and feel silly "why did I never do this before" or "why do I always do this". It's a good exercise to go looking for your unconscious biases and assumptions about yourself – eliminating these identifying behaviors can really be a benefit.
> if you haven’t done any work before you’re better off joining a gym
I also find it really helpful to do classes where the instructor helps you understand the right form. Lifting heavy things can lead to injury if you do it wrong.
Absolutely, classes were the magic bullet for me. I found a gym that offers small-ish (~15) classes, approachable instructors who emphasize good form, and a location and schedule that fits my lifestyle. Thanks to that, I've been a regular for the past few years now, going to class 3 or 4 times a week after being a lazy slob during the height of COVID.
Classes also reduce the barrier to start because you don't have to think about what your workout will look like, and you'll push yourself just a little harder when you're exercising with others.
> Like all childish thinking, it contained some truth. Physical fitness is less important than spiritual, emotional, and mental fitness.
One kind of growth I love to see is when someone becomes less confident in their opinions over time. A lot of people “grow up” by just being super confident and stubborn about new ideas.
I think that the wax and wane of confidence is a natural (and healthy) cycle to preserve.
You start knowing nothing, and have no confidence, then learn stuff and your confidence builds, then you capitalize on that (learning x confidence) by doing productive things, then you hit barriers that create confusion and break down your confidence, at which point you realize you knew nothing and start learning like a beginner again.
Unhealthy confidence does not have this pattern, whether it's low or high. Even "medium" confidence, IMO, signals some kind of rut that one is stuck in, which tends to stifle creativity.
This is a good comment explains why discussions so often are so painful.
I quite often get explained to me the things I already know, in long monologues. Even things that I have created, only having people explain them to me years later, but using terms somewhat incorrectly etc.
And then I'm probably also doing that to other people.
Apparently the author is still of the mind that physical fitness takes a back seat to the other types of fitness. Anyone who has suffered from an extensive debilitating injury or illness quickly learns that it drags you down spiritually, emotionally, and mentally. Even minor injuries or illnesses, when sustained over time, can have a profound effect on your mental health. For that reason, I would argue that physical fitness is more foundational (and therefore more important) than mental well being.
I was thinking about this on and off this morning. My first thought was that the body is the base foundation for all of those things. None of them matter or can be in meaningfully good shape if the body is in poor condition. Then I started thinking it may just be an interrelationship where they all depend on each other. Then I thought more about what exactly is it that we're trying to evaluate? Is it quality of life? Because that really begins convincing me that there really is no priority list here and they are all deeply dependent on each other. Ever been depressed and tried to exercise? Ever been in terrible health and tried to be happy?
ive experienced this effect on mental health for a day or two after major injury but after a bit i find something else to occupy my attention and effort
in simple terms staying active mentally helps me wait out the recovery. healthy spirit might mean i can accept the injury more quickly and get that day or two down to a few hours
sort of like the article it usually begins by dabbling in some activities i can do with my injury
That stuck out to me as well, physical fitness is super important for so many reasons, one being it is one of the best tools to help improve your mental health.
I think part of really growing up is first recognizing how little you know, humility, and second still acting despite knowing you don’t have all the pieces of the puzzle, bravery (without bravado)
As with all things it seems, this has a failure mode too, at least for the person growing up. I’ve become so un-confident in my opinions on most things that I basically don’t have any. For current event type things I just realized that everything is endlessly complex and finding authoritative, balanced and trustworthy sources is too time consuming to be practical. In work I am just constantly aware of the limits of my own knowledge that it manifests as imposter syndrome, low self esteem and procrastination. I often envy the folks that are confident in their opinions.
I've generally found quite a lot of success at abandoning goals / "destinations" for most things, and focusing on the "journey": don't aim to "be fit" or reach a specific weight. aim to "do one more thing" to make progress along a direction.
every step in that direction is success, every bit is something you weren't doing before and is something to be happy about. it doesn't have to be big at all - have you done one push-up today? do one. it doesn't matter if the answer was yes or no, adding one is one more than before and is achieving what you want, and it eventually adds up.
the nice part about this kind of mindset is that there's no end when you stop, and no failure when you miss a day. there's just a new ever-changing normal, always leaning where you want it.
That's why I don't really get the gym. What is enjoyable in a gym? All activities you do there feel so useless and mindless. Running on a threadmill, lifting weights to put them back down, etc... For the journey/destination analogy, the destination is all that matters here, and you are taking the highway, because it is efficient.
There are may other activities that will get you fit and are what I think are way less boring. Sometimes, it is a literal journey, as in hiking. But also team sports, combat sports, climbing, actual gymnastics, etc... Here, you actually concentrate on the activity itself rather than on the end goal.
The gym, once you get into it, can be incredibly addicting. I'm not as consistent as I should be, but there have been times I've spent 3 hours at a time. I go through similar cycles with running as well. There's just an incredible high to these activities.
It's worth noting that a great deal of the high depends on biology. Some human beings produce high quantities of endorphins under muscular strain. Others don't. Not everyone gets the same high, and some people may not get high at all. It's the same from eating peppers, for example. For those that don't get the high, the gym can feel like a slog.
Idk, to me you sound like you've just never engaged seriously with lifting. It is itself an activity. I have no interest in team sports, combat sports, climbing, gymnastics, etc. I'm much more interested in trying to push my body in a controlled way, in full concert with max effort, with as close to perfect form as I can muster, and use every piece of my will I can to do that. It's an incredibly difficult and multi-faceted thing to master and unbelievably engaging.
Before I started trying to get stronger I thought it was going to be very easy. I'd basically been brainwashed by media to disrespect the entire activity of lifting. When I actually started, I was shocked how hard it was to progress beyond the beginning phases. You learn a ton about your body while doing this, as well as the psychology of effort, which is just as challenging. You also learn a lot about your proprioception, as with any sport. At this point, the only thing that demands a similar amount of attention is riding a motorcycle but really it pales in comparison. If I'm trying to hit the 3rd set of five, the one that really proves if I'm going to progress that day, I can't imagine having a thought. I can't even hear what's happening around me.
Your understanding that you don't concentrate on the activity is not true if you're actually trying. You could fill a bookshelf with 400 page books about just the squat. At any given point you are evaluating a ton of variables and frequently still having to go back to the drawing board to devise new ways to progress which are never the same as the last way. Your body fights you the entire time, preferring to put out as little energy as it can, the exact opposite of what you're trying to do. You learn that actually, you weren't giving it your all before, because you didn't know how, or your subconscious was gaslighting you. But that's ok, because there was literally no way to shortcut to where you are now mentally. It's a mindfuck, and it really changes you and your relationship with yourself.
It does help that it has benefits you don't get from most other activities, and that if done right it is restorative rather than destructive to the body like higher impact hobbies. It also helps that it has an outsized physical effect for a given time commitment compared to other activities. It's also true that a lot of people at the gym are just going through the motions for an end goal. But if your goal is actually to improve, it's a wild ride.
> I've generally found quite a lot of success at abandoning goals / "destinations" for most things, and focusing on the "journey"
One of the habits books I've read ("Atomic Habits", I believe) has this piece of advice: When working on a habit focus not on what you hope to achieve, but who you want to become. This feels a lot like your reflection.
Yup, and to change only one thing at a time; for loads of people it's January 1st and they're like "Today is day one of my new life!". I avoid the gym in january, it's usually busy and it eases off until a month before the summer vacation.
But the trick is to start small. One day I started to reduce the sugar (and milk) in my coffee, then I had none, started going to the gym, started losing weight, went to see a personal trainer, etc. But also the other way around, one day I bought myself some craft beer (La Chouffe, my beloved) and a while later I was over a hundred kilos, lol.
Some years ago I bought a little pamphlet with a few mental exercises by Rudolf Steiner, known for the Waldorf school system.
One of them was about building a habit. You find a small meaningless thing to do, it must have no purpose at all, and then you do it once every day for as long as it takes to become a habit, probably a month or two. E.g. you could fill a glass with water and throw it out.
I did the exercise (I would kneel for a few seconds when taking a bath) for a couple of months, and I think it worked for me. I've recently used the same tactic to build a useful habit.
Now building a new habit is not necessarily the same as changing an old habit.
I also found out that kneeling changed my perspective. I could think about a situation with some level of tension, kneel, and then my perspective on the same situation would be more humble and appreciative. YMMV.
Just FYI: Rudolf Steiner was a pusher of pseudoscientific nonsense. He was anti-vax and his views on race were problematic, to say the least. He was a fervent German nationalist and a critic of Einstein's theory of relativity. I could go on, but you get the idea.
More importantly in a modern context, I know that Waldorf schools seem harmless, but they are religious "Anthroposophy" schools at their core.
What's the benefit of building a useless habit instead of a useful one?
Taking out the emotion. Since the genesis of this discussion was "lifting weights", why uselessly lift weights instead of doing useful work like moving sacks of grain from point A to point B?
"If habit is a muscle that can be developed...", then being detached from the simple, useless habit being formed is good practice for being able to apply it to a productive or important situation.
I can see why; doing something useless requires conscious thought / effort. Doing something you want to do / achieve / change is, controversially, difficult because you think you can rely on just you "wanting it", that is, innate motivation. But that's usually not the case, especially not if it's something that causes discomfort at first (like going to the gym) or if it means giving up or cutting back on something pleasurable (mmm, donuts).
But intentionally doing something that you don't do normally, something you don't want to do, something that doesn't give you any kind of dopamine feedback can help you practice forming habits, practice self-discipline, etc. It's an interesting experiment.
In 1948 Ashby wired four control units together and made a device he called the "Homeostat." What made it special is that it was "ultrastable" - if you changed the dynamics of the system, or plugged it into a completely new system then after a period of adaption it would relearn how to keep its outputs between tolerances.
Ashby gave the example of an autopilot - if you flipped the yoke controls so that up was down and down was up, a traditional autopilot would go into a positive feedback loop and crash, but the Homeostat would adapt to the new dynamics.
He postulated that this was a model for some systems in the brain and perhaps all learning (he wrote an entire book about it) and there's some evidence he was right. If you put goggles on someone that flips their vision upsidedown, they adjust after a few days... and have to readjust again when you take them off! (This was a real experiment.) YouTuber SmarterEveryDay found he could learn to ride a "backwards bike," but it destroyed his ability to ride a normal bike. You may have experienced this first hand if you've ever played a video game where the controls were flipped temporarily: it's disorienting, sure, but you quickly adjust.
Because of these phenomena, I think Ashby was right about the Homeostat being a useful model of the brain. It explains why so many apparently contradictory diets "work" - simply making a major changes resets the homeostat in your brain where it may settle into a better calibrated equilibrium eventually.
It implies a simple strategy: are you happy? If yes, we're done. If no, change something, and return to the question. (I've seen this as a flowchart online somewhere but can't find it now.)
Motor controls are interesting like that; it's (to my layperson's understanding) a subsystem of your brain close to the brain stem / spine that allows your brain to skip conscious processing for (fine) motor controls. And it can be trained. It's what allows us to learn to play an instrument.
Take drums, put an amateur behind it and it's all over the place, but learning it is (simply?) a matter of slowing down until you can think about every strike, repeating, then slowly speeding up. The movements become almost automatic.
I'm sure something similar happens in 'higher' brain functions, but it takes longer; a common saying is that it takes 6 weeks of conscious effort to form a new habit.
Yea I learned Dvorak but now I can’t type on qwerty
I was thinking about this from another thread (the Helix one).
Initially, learning Helix broke my ability to use Vim, but now I flit back and forth between Helix and IdeaVim without thinking about it.
Similarly, I switched to a split keyboard at my desk with lots of customizations, and it initially broke my ability to use my laptop keyboard, where there was a several minute adjustment period every time I switched, but now I can jump back and forth without making more typos or typing slower.
Both followed the same curve for me: learning the new thing disrupts the old thing, but if you do both enough, your brain/body seems to distill the shared core of both just fine.
This is great - Really love the approach of getting halfway - if I'm really tired and need to go to the gym or do a side project, I always give myself half the time I expect.
Want to go to the gym for an hour but feel too lazy? Half an hour and i'll leave. 99% of the time I end up sticking out as i've reached halfway, might as well reach halfway again.
It helps shift the mental load.
Although being the person that does the thing is something that I find a bit of a struggle with living in the UK. In general, I feel like there ends up being a bit of a pull down mentalility - "why are you spending time doing X side project", "why do you care about Y".
It's a mentality that's easy to fall into culturally, and i've really had to put effort to shift that and build up motivation. I've found getting past the cultural aspects, I end up finding so many people who feel the same way.
Not sure what your gym program and goals are, but 30 mins at a time can already achieve a lot if you go enough times per week. I usually just lift, and after 30 mins I'm out of energy so that any subsequent lifts would be weak and technically poor anyway.
Yeah mostly lift - but i've recently started doing cardio more seriously and it does become daunting sometimes to commit to 90 minute endurance session etc - but I often remind myself it's the difference between something and nothing.
> Although being the person that does the thing is something that I find a bit of a struggle with living in the UK. In general, I feel like there ends up being a bit of a pull down mentalility - "why are you spending time doing X side project", "why do you care about Y".
That's strange. If you're in a large enough city to have lots of other people you can potentially befriend, I would recommend trying to find open-minded groups of people - in Lyon, for example, people who are into electronic music or AcroYoga tend to be quite open-minded, so if you make friends with people in those communities, your long, heartfelt lecture on the relative merits of various UNIX-based operating systems, while it still might not be met with a standing ovation, will at least be listened to, in a "cool story friend, I may not share your passion for this subject but it's nice to know that you care about it" kinda way :)
Oh yeah - i'm definitely getting into a better spot now with befriending more open groups of people, it's just mostly an overall pattern I've noticed in the culture generally.
It's a difficult thing to describe and i'm sure it happens everywhere, but I find there's a lot less passion outside of someone's immediate scope.
This resonated with me, something mentioned but not explicitly called out - the author started by working out at home, built the habit and some confidence, and later it morphed into a solid gym habit. But it didn’t start at the gym, and the comment about “it would’ve looked dumb to anyone watching” is crucial I think.
I’ve had a lot of good success with bodyweight workouts at home and I just want to highlight that bit of the author’s story for anyone else who feels like the gym is the only way - it’s not! And if you don’t like the idea of going to the gym for whatever reason, you can in fact exercise at home with very little equipment.
These are pitched as self-reflection and self-control, as if deciding matters most.
But invariably they're prompted if not reinforced by changes in circumstance.
Before the internet replaced actual experience with virtual, many middle-to-upper class westerners took a year after school to travel. Traveling means people don't know you; you discover that you can present yourself however you want, and people will mostly go along. (Something similar is true for meditation, etc.)
So the fixed world becomes more dynamic, and as you return, you work on making a dynamic world that fits you instead of fitting yourself to the world: you apply to that school, chase that partner, etc.
People who commit to work or partners or houses/locations before traveling in this sense are really making it much harder to live.
The scarcity of opportunity makes this much, much worse. People feel they need to keep following their followers or the latest tech trends to stay relevant for opportunities, and they never travel.
Something kind of funny to me about quoting the Fault of Our Stars about love when the original source of that expression is The Sun Also Rises regarding bankruptcy.
“How did you go bankrupt? Two ways. Gradually, then suddenly.”
You can summarise the whole post by the meme video of Shia LaBeouf with his "Do it!" talk.
DON'T LET YOUR DREAMS BE DREAMS!
Except it's a bit deeper I think; the author realised at one point they were confirming to a stereotype, maybe even thinking they were playing by the rules and doing what was expected of them by ??? society or something, but then realised they have free will, they can do whatever they want in the privacy of their own home and the cops can't stop them, and they were in bad physical shape.
They realised they were holding themselves back and stopped.
Love this mentality. I think of it as "getting your reps in" which you've used as a literal example in your essay.
We climb the mountain and the mountain climbs us back.
There are paradoxes and chicken-and-the-egg problems throughout the article:
> For me, something shifted in my late twenties. Growing up I guess you could call it. I don’t remember the exact straw that broke the camel’s back, but a desire for change grew.
> If you identity as a failure, incapable of achievement, unfit, unlovable, destined to play a bit-part role in your own story, then by heck no matter how much willpower you put in to push that boulder up the hill, it will return to its place.
> You have to actually want it.
How do you actually want to change? That part remains largely a mystery, and appears to be the all-important ingredient everything pretty much flows from.
At the end of the day, nobody knows why they want certain things - they just do. There is a lot of magic to that part. Where does "motivation" come from?
I go back and forth on this, but I pretty much settle on that motivation is the all-important ingredient which no one actually knows much about and all the rest is just backward-rationalizing to make ourselves feel good and feel that we have more agency than we really do.
People oscillate between rational and irrational motives. I reckon that motivation springs from either depending on the circumstance and the temperament of the individual. Such is the peculiar and special nature of man.
I think we go out of our way to rationalize decisions that emanate beyond reason because the truth is a lot more stark, and usually we only try to rationalize irrational choices when they backfire and we face criticism for them.
Allahu A’alam.
[dead]
Beliefs do not exist, like the words we use. What we have are neat, retrofitted explanations that foot the bill. Sportscasting about those actions that never used words to get there, they just seem to.
Pretty fascinating the retro marriage of words and tech gets us here, to a kind of Gutenberg stage of restriction.
Words and narratives are low-bandwidth compression for meaning. It's simple. How did we get stuck here? We were lazy Pleistocene kids, and lazy Pleistocene kids we remain.
Think hard now, the words are being used to extinct us. How did we get stuck here? Math? Status? Money? a combination of all these.
Look at the status drive that pretends we have beliefs in this post. Read it carefully. Do we have beliefs, or do we simply have actions (neural syntax)?
Debate me, don't just downvote me, that's proving my point.
Time to rethink all communication.
With love and respect, why is this on HackerNews?
Because someone submitted it, it showed up in new or the home page, it didn't need prior approval because there is no editorial board, at least 69 people upvoted it, and it hasn't been removed yet by a moderator if it does break any submission rules.
Because that's how news aggregators like HN and Reddit work.
It’s about adjusting your habits and personality with intention and workarounds for your normal mode. What’s not hackerish about that?