Ask HN: What keeps you up at night? What do you worry about? Just generally speaking, what do you worry about the most? Family's safety & health, finances, work, etc.? |
Ask HN: What keeps you up at night? What do you worry about? Just generally speaking, what do you worry about the most? Family's safety & health, finances, work, etc.? |
& I don't know what to do about it!
But why would you say such thing? You had nothing as a child and used that as your strong motive, you have managed to save some money and if God forbid you lose your savings, do you think you won't be able to make them again? I doubt it!
You sound like a strong person, so don't be afraid of anything. Everything and I mean it, everything happens for a reason.
Do you exercise ? Smoke?
2) Dying before having children or proving my worth. Living in poverty.
3) Losing face. I don't want to disappoint my family anymore.
4) The fear of diabetes and other illnesses.
5) The cultural and demographic destruction of Europe.
The other problem I have is anxiety, procrastination, and similar issues.
If you're asking this to fish for product ideas, I would love to see a managed task-master assistant service.
Remember that story of a guy that used to pay someone to sit next to him and hit him whenever he was procrastinating? Something similar could be set up where when your day starts, you connect with your assistant via video chat. They can watch everything happening on your screen.
At the start of the day, they should spend some time asking what you want to get done and break it down into a task list for you and feed you pomodoro-like chunks. An assistant could monitor 4 to 8 people at the same time with the right software (screenshots and list of open window titles).
A paid task-master or accountability-buddy. Maybe $3 or $4 an hour for the service.
It seems like you wouldn't really need to hire someone for this, you can just find an accountability buddy who would benefit from these meetings too.
I try and not think too much about it.
Here's the cool thing, however. You'll never know that you're dead. And, unless you're being executed, you'll never know for sure that you're dying. Or at least, the experience probably won't last for very long.
Outside of the family/health stuff, I'd say my biggest worry is actually getting something meaningful done in my life. Don't get me wrong, I've got a good job with a well-paid salary and benefits, good family life and financially comfortable, I'm happy and grateful for all that as well.
However, I know I'm technically capable of doing or building something interesting, and ideally profitable to a point that it could be a business to support me. But I always seem to be stuck in the somewhat cliche spiral of pointless procrastination, browsing HN under the false pretence of fishing for ideas and inspiration, which is really just fueling the procrastinating.
I'm not sure if my head is just wired differently to others, but I really struggle to find ideas that aren't a blatant copy of others, and the original ones I can tell are flawed by design or the market is so small that it'll never me more than a little bit of Adsense revenue etc. Similarly, I'm envious of others people's focus to actually get something built, shipped and profitable.
I see a therapist regularly, but I've always had this sense of being a broken individual who is always a few steps behind everyone else. It feels hopeless and definitely keeps me up at night.
I feel like I'm living in a reference counting memory management system - once nobody else depends on me then I will be reclaimed as garbage. It's what keeps me fighting to stay connected to everyone I know, but it's so tiring.
I could also lock the key in my mailbox before I go to sleep, then grab it in the morning.
* Unemployed for 2 years
* 35, single due to unemployment
* I feel lucky; no kids to torture with this misery
* Mortgage ~= 209K euros
* Thinking of ways to make a living
* Companies avoid hiring me for some reason and they simply reply back with an "overqualified" email.
* If I was given the opportunity to change profession, what would be the ideal job for me?
* OCD, Highly Sensitive Person (HSP), introvert by nature. Now that's a deadly cocktail!
* Have zero friends to go out, plus living in the mountains with parents (thank you financial recession)
* Bloody vampires (mosquitoes) around the room, they are everywhere!
* Remembering things I did when I was 6 or 7 years old and feel embarrassed now. It happens all the time...Let's start: Do you train ?
I was never given the opportunity to master a language and I have been experimenting with programming since 2003, always at an academic level.
On the other hand, as I say "what you know or think you know, has nothing to do with reality".
When you say train, you mean exercising and such? No, the only thing my body can handle is walking. When I exercise or do any other form of physical activity, I get sick easily and takes me a whole week to recover.
Now about incremental persistent improvement, I do my best to improve myself. To give you an idea, I was surrounded by negative people and decided to cut ties with nearly all of them to save myself from pessimism. I still have a long way to go, but I'm getting there.
I worry about my health. My sleep time is decrease. I have to wake up in the morning and then go to office. When my sleep time is not enough, I wouldn't focus. I lose my valuable time for starting my day, like exercise and meditation. I heard that would be a problem if you don't have enough sleep.
I worry about being 40 or 50 or 60 and having as much money as a man could dream about and yet finding no peace or having no memories. I worry about looking back to when i was 25 and all i can remember is sitting infront of a computer hitting a keyboard with all my strength and watching that time pass away, never to be regained.
In essence, I'm afraid of having to sacrifice what makes me happy for living a comfortable life.
That I even accumulated $40k worth of credit card debt in the first place. This wasn't one of my proudest decisions.
That I'll never be happy with what I have and will always strive for more.
That I'll lose my fiancee/wife in the process.
Why do you think you'll lose your wife ? Any bad habits (gamble, smoke, no exercise) ?
More immediately, saving up for a down payment and house fund ($30k for the down, $10k for the house fund) and an emergency nest ($30k) are what I'm looking at.
The credit card thing was interesting. I used to be pretty vigilant about keeping debt down especially with how high my student loan debt was at the time ($200k, now $48k) But then I discovered credit card churning. I tried to churn cards to collect airline miles, so I signed up for a few of them. I also used to get bonuses ($20k or so) that would pay off whatever debt I amassed in one fell swoop. Those bonuses eventually stopped coming (i left finance), but my spending didn't drop off. I also never did a good job at tracking them. (I do now and have for the last year.) One thing lead to another, and I eventually piled on $40k.
The ironic thing is that I eventually became a travelling consultant and now amass plenty of miles without even trying.
I'm afraid of working so hard that I'll neglect her.
Also, not being able to build a family later if I fail in my next venture. I'm 31 and feel the pressure to build a family somehow.
Why no family after next venture ? A friend of mine started creating a baby at 50.
My country turning into either a theocracy or an autocracy (or maybe both at once). Whether there's any way to stem the tide or get out before it slides any further.
Those are the big ones.
Part of the issue is that I don't know what I'd do next. I'd probably watch our child for a couple of years, and then my best guess is to go get a second undergraduate degree, in comp sci, maybe a combined bachelor's-master's degree. But I don't know.
The problem is that academics is a corrupt mess on the inside, and people on the outside, like legislators, push for solutions that will only exacerbate the problems. Its as if your child had diabetes and certain influential physicians' groups started advocating that the best thing for diabetes is to eat lots of simple carbohydrates.
Yes, you theoretically have a lot of freedom in academics, but there's lots of caveats to that. Nowadays, universities only care about what brings in money, so even if you think something is important to research and you don't need money to do it, if it doesn't bring in grant dollars, it doesn't matter, regardless of citation rates. Social dynamics are about 80% of success as well--fads are rampant, and who is credited with something is wildly unpredictable (just last night, I read that something that is commonly cited in my field, even more so than Watson & Crick's DNA paper, reflects a misattribution of credit, which the author actually is explicit about in that paper. It's as if everyone attributed helix structure to Watson & Crick, but if Watson & Crick explicitly stated in their paper "hey, this isn't our idea, we got it from Smith & Jones" and almost no one remembers Smith & Jones).
I could go on and on.
The worst part about it for me is that I feel trapped. Universities tend to hire younger untenured faculty because it's cheaper, and there's only so many places to go anyway. I miss the geography of home, and feel out of place in my field and society (just hypothetically, imagine being a historian by degree, but who does research on signal processing in an archaeological imaging context--reasonable enough, right? But now solve the problem of how to do PR with the conservative legislators who think the liberal arts are useless and should be gutted). Also, I've specialized so specifically it's hard to figure out how to transition to something else (again, who would hire a historian who specializes in archeaological imaging research?)
I often feel like all I want is to do is live someplace that I like in terms of climate, and is modestly interesting. Most of the time I feel like I'd rather be putting together generic web apps in a place I love than being forced to live someplace that feels alien to me because of some freedom and security that is anything but.
You can go to EU. Easiest country to go to (and best for english!) is NL (i went but I like more working remote in a cheap country). The wages may suck though and you won't be able to save a lot and retire early. Hell, you can go and then return back.
Do you exercise ?
Do you eat healthy food ? Do you get enough sleep ?
Do you know python (or some other lang) ? Can you check projects on upwork (or similiar) and start from the bottom and work your way up (what I did) ?
Can you do a program where you list all your issues and beneath them list several optional things that you think you can do/try to improve them, put them on a todo-task-list and try to work on them everyday (by marking) and doing/checking some stats ? (is there a program for this, kinda want it for myself too)
Where do you live ? Have you tried checking meetup.com or similar sites for activities/events to do (..hard in mountain I guess?) ?
Any drugs ? Like, do you smoke ?
Yes, my doctors told me that my system is such that is vulnerable to excessive exercise and sudden weather changes.
> Do you eat healthy food ?
Yep, Greek food all day and all night.
> Do you get enough sleep ?
Like a good looking princess.
> Do you know python (or some other lang) ?
Yep, I know Python (Django is sexy!), C, C++, PHP, JavaScript - Node.js (ES2015 / ES6), some Perl / Lua, etc etc.
> Can you check projects on upwork (or similiar) and start from the bottom and work your way up (what I did) ?
I have tried remote jobs and could not compete with Chinese, Indians, and Pakistani developers. They offer cheap labor and a rich portfolio, whereas I was not given the slightest chance to compete; so I gave up on that.
> Can you do a program where you list all your issues and beneath them list several optional things that you think you can do/try to improve them, put them on a todo-task-list and try to work on them everyday (by marking) and doing/checking some stats ? (is there a program for this, kinda want it for myself too)
Being an OCD person obliges you to be organized lol, so yeah I have done my TODO list and I have it right in front of me right now to be honest with you. Comparing my past self with the present one, I have improved by orders of magnitude.
> Where do you live ? Have you tried checking meetup.com or similar sites for activities/events to do (..hard in mountain I guess?) ?
In Cyprus. As an introvert, I can't stand being surrounded by people. It exhausts me within minutes and I need to get back home, to get in my room to recharge. Some times I get so exhausted that I need vitamin support to heal; it sucks -_-
> Any drugs ? Like, do you smoke ?
COFFEE! LOTS AND LOTS OF COFFEE!
Can you quit coffee ? I did, and now only use it on special situations.
About quitting coffee, I thought about it and probably I should...some day!