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.
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.
EDIT: Oh, and farmers do not have this particular problem, lol
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Also, it’s writing code for a social product.
Also, Wendell Berry isn’t exactly just a farmer but grew up one and kept as much as he could while becoming a fine writer who talks about life lessons. More people should read him.
If you count Facebook posts from high school friends, yeah. I grew up in a very rural environment.
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?
Age is just one modest, fallible signal for wisdom, to say nothing of occupation. Farmers and roughnecks definitely spout plenty of "life lessons".
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.
(side note in all seriousness I did enjoy the article)
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.
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.
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.
Oh, they do it. They just do it in their preferred medium, which is usually in person on the job, not the internet.
That’s the charitable read anyway.
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.
Someone in their early 30s could’ve been a developer for half the existence of the browser platform.
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.
/s this is totally a riff on how fast frontend and data science tooling changes
Not for nothing, but you might if you spent time on the FarmersAndRoughnecksNews forum instead of here
Do you read the blogs of 32 year old farmers or roughnecks?
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.
...if that makes any sense, I'm sure someone else put it more eloquently than that.
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.
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.
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.
... 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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Is this kind of thinking normal? Kinda like looking into the world and going like "i must be like that specific thing over there"?
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
"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.
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.
More importantly in a modern context, I know that Waldorf schools seem harmless, but they are religious "Anthroposophy" schools at their core.
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.)
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.
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.
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.
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 :)
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.
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.
“How did you go bankrupt? Two ways. Gradually, then suddenly.”
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.
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.
Personally I disagree. as I see it, the harder "something" is to achieve, the less true that statement is. For example, identifying with a particular political ideology requires less material effort to align your behavior than identifying as a genius or olympic athlete
We climb the mountain and the mountain climbs us back.
> 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.
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.
Because that's how news aggregators like HN and Reddit work.
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.
