dcolgan

While that is a possible sequence of events, it may have been a different cause/effect relationship. From what I saw losing the Nintendo World Championship wasn't something she was unhappy about and was glad to just be a part of it. Maybe girlfriend left because she couldn't handle the flack they were both receiving. Maybe transitioning is something Narcissa has been trying to suppress for a long time and finally couldn't anymore, and everything together happened.

I guess my point is, you really don't know all of that and you seem to be painting her in the worst possible light, which sort of is what I was talking about in my above comment. I can't say any of us would have been able to handle the same situation any better, same with No Man's Sky.

I definitely feel you, as I also went to Christian school for my whole academic career and decided I didn't believe right at the end.

Some thoughts,

The people who are making a strong effort like you seem to be, but that think they aren't very good still, probably actually are quite good. I'd ask what you feel like you are behind of. There will always be someone ahead and (what we might forget) tons of people behind you.

I look at my own life - I am pretty bad with women as a nearly 30 year old because I was raised in a strange puritanical culture and never learned how to woo effectively, but I also am currently working on starting my business full time which I couldn't have done with a family. I also was never taught evolution in school, but now I've become interested in it and by reading many books on the subject probably know quite a bit more about it than most people even if they did learn about it in school.

Everything is a tradeoff. I wish you the best!

Like all advice, this is good for some people and bad for others. I've heard a whole lot of advice to slow down, make sure you don't burn out, and don't miss life. And for people who are putting tons of pressure on themselves to achieve, this is excellent advice.

For me personally I've had a lot more free time than most people because I've worked part time freelance for the last few years, and I could probably reach my goals faster if I "kick it into gear" a bit. As I think Derek Sivers said, advice often reflects the state of the giver of said advice more than anything.

I had this idea once that I would pay $10 an hour to have a fairly new programmer sit next to me while writing freelance code and be a human sounding board, design helper, and companion since I work by myself from home. Not really pair programming as I'd be mostly running the show, but they'd be following the train of thought and offering suggestions. Could be a good job for a college student.

Funny you should say that - when I first started doing this I tried to get some of my friends to join me. They all fell apart from the lack of structure and went back to their old jobs. And that's not to say it was a moral failing on their part - I don't think everyone is wired to do this sort of thing, maybe even most people.

I'm also not saying that I wasted all of my time or that I did nothing of value - just that it has taken real effort to figure out what I value. I think the existential crises I've come through have been really important for my growth, and I wouldn't have had to think about it had I not had to direct my time myself.

I'd be happy to talk - I'll email you.

I spent most of the last 5 years working about 10 hours a week at $90 a hour on a recurring freelance gig, which was enough to live comfortably in the midwest (my rent is currently $400 a month) and travel around eastern Europe. Not really enough to live in a city or have dependents, but I could probably afford that by just working 20 hours a week at $90 an hour.

I think what I did is very doable for other devs - my business proposal was: give me 10 regular hours a week, and I'll continue adding to your internal company app. Phone call with the client once a week. I automated a whole bunch of their processes using Django and it was a great win-win. They weren't large enough to need or be able to afford a full time dev and I could work part part time.

The extra time allowed me to try a bunch of things. I tried livestreaming on Twitch.tv, being a digital nomad, blogging, making products. I enjoyed not having an alarm clock and going on walks in the park whenever to think. I was able to really put time into working on myself, and my health and mental state are pretty good these days. I've read a lot of books.

I'll admit that I've wasted a lot of time surfing the internet - I think the danger of being fully self-directed is that you have to work hard to use the time well. Nobody is sitting on you to "do what you are supposed to." It has also been kind of isolating, but I'm also an introvert and have social anxiety, and working on relationship building is one of my soon future projects.

That's fair enough, but also why I looked for other people who had similar experiences. I'm definitely not always right, that is true. I am not a doctor, lawyer, or accountant.

A good hypothesis can be used to make predictions. I'm just saying with my foot issues that the heuristic of "subtractive medicine is better than additive medicine" was able to predict that removing padding from my shoes would make my problem go away. And it did. That does not prove anything but it worked here.

I would argue that yes, sugar is natural, but the degree that people tend to eat sugar these days is unnatural. I'd argue that is the root problem. And to respond to the first image of the comic, that nobody lives past 30, some things I've read suggest that was more due to infant mortality skewing the average, deaths from war, and deaths from what today would be preventable diseases. If an ancient person avoided those three things, they lived quite a long time, and didn't get cancer or heart disease.

I have no exact sources for those last few assertions, it's just what I remember reading (I think also in the Antifragile book).

I think some nuance here is needed. My understanding of "natural" primarily comes from an understanding of evolutionary history. If humans have been doing something for millions of years, it is likely to be more "natural" and therefore not cause harm compared to recently invented things. But it is not a black and white thing, but rather a spectrum.

Some examples: Trans fats were invented because they thought saturated fat, which was consumed by humans for a long time, were not healthy, and this new thing was supposed to be better. Then it was found to cause all kinds of problems and are now banned in many places. Here I think it was pretty cut and dry.

An anecdote I've found others corroborate: I used to have foot pain. Some people suggested orthotic insoles, but I also found the barefoot shoe proponents saying that shoes without any padding at all (more "natural") work better. Five years later I never have any foot pain. The Vivobarefoot or Vibram Fivefingers shoes are definitely not something that was around a million years ago, but the principle is the same.

In healthcare, an example in the book is how many people are prescribed statin drugs if their cholesterol is too high, even if there is no other visibly problematic symptoms. Taleb would argue the far better solution is to improve the person's diet, or just wait and see if something happens, than to start taking a drug that isn't.

The author once strained his back lifting weights. The doctor suggested an expensive and invasive surgery. Instead he just rested for a while and the problem went away. On the other hand, my mom recently had neck surgery to replace several vertebrae. She'd been in pain for years and nothing could fix it. So in this case I think Taleb would agree that the risk of a dangerous surgery might be worth it in that case.

An extreme example from the book: in the early 20th century children were given doses of radiation to treat acne. We obviously look at this and scoff, but it is the same idea.

> Why on earth would you conflate the profit motives of healthcare middlemen to imply that the science behind medicine isn't credible?

I'm looking at the profit motives to see where I should be cautious. I feel like this very site is where I've read many articles about how scientific studies had bias because of funding from the companies invested in a certain answer. From what I can see, if you follow the money, you can explain a great deal of the behavior of large institutions.

So I'm not at all advocating ludditeism or against science. Rather I'm against scientism (I think the word he uses in the book) - the belief that science has all the answers and that newer things are inherently better than older things just because they are. They may in fact be better, but not always. Sometimes atheists I meet are just as close-minded as the religious.

In one of my favorite books, Antifragile, Nassim Taleb argues that health is largely subtractive - if you want to be healthy, remove unnatural things from your body (sugar, medicines, sitting too much, etc), and only undergo surgery, go to the hospital, or take medicine in very serious cases where the harm of not doing something outweighs the potential complications. Especially since hearing more about more about how the American health system is not exactly incentivized to always look out for the best interest of the patient, I'm inclined to agree with him.

I'm attempting to start do the whole solopreneur online make your own business passive income thing, and it hit me one day that I was spending a whole lot of money in expensive places to sit in front of my computer and type. So this year I moved back to smalltown Indiana. I have a relatively giant apartment above a storefront in one of these small town main streets. It is mostly quiet and costs a whole $360 a month.

There is a coffee shop with 2 tables and a nice owner to talk to, and a couple of my friends work at the one webdev shop in town. I live two blocks away from a tiny little dance studio where I take dance lessons once a week, and am close enough to a city that I can drive there if I have to. Also the internet here is better than many large cities I've been to.

My relatively small savings from freelance should last me way longer than it would have in Chicago where I was before. I kind of wonder if there is an opportunity here to start little startup colonies in small towns.

Sure, it's no cultural center, but I've been pleasantly surprised at the friendliness of the people I've met here. The towns around this one certainly vary in quality of life, but if you look around you may find some cool places.

The main street may not be able to support a grocery store with Walmart down the street, but it is supporting a custom bike shop, a funeral home, and several local insurance companies. Maybe one way to revitalize these small towns is to bring in tech jobs that can be done from anywhere. It's certainly working for me so far.