Comment by rubitxxx15
1 year ago
It’s a great speech, but I’ve listened to this “chase your dream” thing for decades. I took career and personality tests but nothing in them fit. I don’t fit. I’ve gotten seriously jaded and live with crippling mental health problems and constant stress because I feel like I failed to find my people and now I just hide from my people.
So, as an older adult, I think maybe we need to be teaching more responsibility to kids today rather than this Disney fantasy. If people just focus on trying to do the best they can, that’s good enough. And spend that extra time improving your home, volunteering, and working on your finances like people did in the mid-to-late 20th century.
I generally agree but strictly speaking I don't think this was yet another canned "chase-your-dream" speech. She went out of her way to elucidate who this was for, and it's ambitious people that are aimlessly coasting.
When you're young, particularly in tech, taking some swings (like with a startup) and not succeeding isn't a long-term detriment. It's a good experience that can help you land other jobs in the worst case.
Which is to say, not all dream-chasing is created equal. If you want to play music, then you need to do a cost-benefit analysis: you will probably not sustain yourself very long, will probably want a dayjob and/or an out at some point, and this is an opportunity cost vs early career traction. If one's ambition only begins and ends with that, then it won't matter so much if what you end up with is "just a job" with lower income potential. All depends on what you're ok with.
The common anecdote is trying to make the big leagues. But consider another: some elite athletes train for years ahead of the Olympics, and then it's all over and they never do it again (most often). Are they screwed? Well it arguably demonstrates discipline and grit and might look impressive on a resume. The lives of ex-Olympians go on. By the same token, someone who never makes the NBA or whatever can get a scholarship ride anyway (which compared to the cost of lifelong training, might be a small victory).
Sometimes optimizing for the early career/education ladder-jumping isn't the "correct" move. But I think it's important that young people understand what's probably at stake
I came here to leave a comment related to this. This article has great advice, if you're normal enough that enough of "your people" exist to be able to find them and do something together.
But if you've spent your whole life being told by the whole world--even people you thought were really interesting and wanted to get to know--that you're "just too fucking weird," it lands more like, "Oh. More advice for other people."
Similarly, if you're a person who likes all kinds of things--but only for 6 weeks to 6 months and then becomes utterly bored of them--there is no stable group of "your people." There's just "these people, for now, I guess," and you hold them lightly because you know in a matter of months, when you don't share the passion for the one thing they're stably obsessed with, you won't have enough in common anymore for them to tolerate you.
I'm almost 40. I'm really at a decision point where I have to decide if I want to keep working on my underlying trauma wounds, in hopes that if I just work hard enough, I'll eventually break into the "fun kind of odd" category instead of "too fucking weird," and blend in enough to have "people," or whether I want to own that this is just how I am, and there's nothing to be done about it, so I should really do what I can to appreciate the fleeting tolerance of "people who don't know me very well yet" while it lasts, but invest most of my energy in trying to figure out if there's any way to be both happy and lonely.
It sounds like you need some friends in the maker space or something similar where tinkering in something temporary is normal. I'd say you're among friends in the HN space where tinkerers are more common!
Keep working on your trauma. Don't however think that your healing is a requirement to have friends, love, etc. We are all broken and hurt. We are broken together.
I've tried a couple times, but the interest in making physical things cycles through just like any other interest. Then it gets replaced by something like neurobiology or anthropology and I don't want to make things for awhile.
It seems like I really enjoy the beginnings of things, like if we run Pareto ratios twice, I like the 4% of the learning that gets me 64% of the understanding. And then it's enough and I'm done. It's enough to ask questions of the interesting people without sounding like a total n00b.
In the time it would take to master one thing, I become "barely proficient" in 25, but it's hard to build anything meaningful, including human connections, operating like that.
I know healing isn't a requirement to deserve the friendship of others. But if I keep operating like this because of it, it's definitely an impediment to building those friendships.
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> Similarly, if you're a person who likes all kinds of things--but only for 6 weeks to 6 months and then becomes utterly bored of them--there is no stable group of "your people." There's just "these people, for now, I guess," and you hold them lightly because you know in a matter of months, when you don't share the passion for the one thing they're stably obsessed with, you won't have enough in common anymore for them to tolerate you.
My lord this cuts deep. Bonus points if you approach your interests in a way that nobody else seems to, leaving you feeling even more disconnected and alone when you're around people who share them.
I've been wrestling with this since (dropping out of) high school, I'm in my early 20s now. I lean towards embracing my idiosyncrasies and letting go of attachment towards getting the kind of social fulfillment I want. Ask me on a different day, though, and the siren's call of having a 'people' is too strong to pass up.
I like to think that learning to just be authentic to myself leads to both in the long run - if I can find a way to be okay with being alone, I'll be in a better place to reach out when the time comes. Still working on the first part of that hypothesis though.
Would you be interested in chatting more about this sometime? Shoot me an email, sheyaway at outlook.
Hey, just FYI, I did shoot you an email. Just mentioning in case it didn't come through.
Sounds familiar. Have you looked into ADHD and Autism yet?
Yeah, but the other symptoms don't line up. Screenings I've had have been negative.
It seems more likely that I have complex trauma from gestation, birth, infancy, and early childhood that really threw a monkeywrench into my neurological development. What we're trying to figure out now is whether I have enough neuroplasticity left at this stage for it to be recoverable, or if I'm just going to be like this forever. I'm definitely not neurologically typical, but I'm also not neurodivergent in a well-established category.
It does seem like there comes a point, though, where it's worth throwing in the towel on attempting to get "better" and just learning to make the most of what is.
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Passion is just a buzzword. I much rather prefer Cal Newport's notions on work and success: https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/so-good-they-cant-ignore-yo...