Ask HN: Most interesting things you've learned/discovered in 2020?

Life is hard without goals. Or more that it’s hard to have motivation or purpose without goals. Also I realize that this is a fairly simple topic that may be obvious to others, I’ve just started realizing that this may be the core of some personal issues that I’ve been dealing with for the whole of my life.

For the longest time I’ve felt burned out or depressed and I thought it was from doing too much of my job (swe). Instead I’ve realized that I haven’t had goals pulling me, or motivating me to do the things I do on the daily. Instead I’ve been running from the fear of failure; be that in making it through college, or somehow losing my job. It turns out that fear is an effective, but terrible “motivator”. It also turns out that it’s hard to be happy when you’re running away from something instead of towards something.

This thread first started for me when I saw the hn discussion here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23932795 and then further became more clear to me after some deep discussions with my friend and his showing me this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E7RgtMGL7CA.

The thing is I’ve had goals, but nothing that I could use as a means for helping to pull me through life. Goals like staying fit, or reaching FIRE are good goals, but in themselves it’s hard to derive a sense of meaning.

Making goals for yourself that allow you to tell a story about the things you’re doing can help with motivation; at least I think that’s the trick as I haven’t been doing that. This is the part I’m learning about right now and need to figure out to change the way I’m going through life.

After being locked inside for months and trying to start a few of my own side hustles - I'm now convinced that the barriers to "success" outside of a salary or specific industry (even discounting intelligence and raw "ability") is motivation. Simply motivation. How much you truly want something. Being honest with the answer to that question and asking yourself if you'd be happy with your current answer in three years has fundamentally changed the way I set goals, motivate myself and look at life.

It's why plenty of smart people don't make lots of money, why dumb people at times can strike it big, and an interesting mental fringe to find a way out of the rat race / salary man ladder.

I learned how to make coffee like a barista. I purchased an espresso machine with a milk steamer, and learned how to make rudimentary latte/cappucino art.

My best result so far:

https://www.dropbox.com/s/lob9lfjpqtgxkvj/IMG_1011.jpg?dl=0

That nearing age 60, I am an animal lover. I don’t even have a dog, but I have just purchased a farm and plan to fill it with chickens, goats, pigs, alpacas, and perhaps emu.

Maybe culturing mushrooms at home.

I set up a sort of glovebox/laminar flow hood with a HEPA filter, sterilized nutrified agar/plugs in canning jars, and cloned some shiitake and lions mane. I also made some 4"x4" glass slides for spore prints and inoculated some logs.

There are a lot of interesting fungi out there. Many have interesting and surprising properties. And they're delicious.

I started the year happy in my opinion that "it's ok to be crap at your hobby if you find the process enjoyable". I made some really rubbish things and enjoyed the process.

Then I learned that I feel fine with being rubbish at metalwork, but that I actually want to get better at woodwork. Now I am enjoying the process of failing, learning and improving.

There are dialects of Japanese where the moraic obstruent can occur rather freely, and where grammatical clitics cause complex resyllabification mutations in the stem:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Particles_of_the_Kagoshima_dia...

It's probably not the most interesting thing per sē that I learned in the hole year, but simply what I remembered because I leanred it recently.

This year I dove deeper into the mechanical keyboard hobby. I bought a 3d printer, learned how to tweak the settings to get decent prints, and then I printed some cases. These were used to build a hand-wired dactyl manuform keyboard.

I've also gotten into woodcarving by making figurines of animals.

Making things is fun and relaxing.

Example of similar keyboard: https://github.com/abstracthat/dactyl-manuform

Maybe not so interesting but of practical value: needed something for indoor cardio (as my bpm and pressure were below healthy) and got a Rift2 + BeatSaber. Also dentist said to take it easy on brushing as there was visible scratching--switched from carbon to regular slimsoft brush.

ClickHouse lol, that database blows my fucking mind