I’ll go first…after 10 years of speculating in the market (read: gambling in high risk assets) I realized I shouldn’t ever touch a brokerage account in my lifetime. A monkey would have made better choices than I did. Greed has altered the course of life many times over. I am at an age where I may recover from my actions over the decades, but it has taken its toll. I am frugal and have a good head on me, but having such impulsivity in financial instruments was not how I envisioned my adulthood. Its a bitter pill to swallow, since money is livelihood of my family, but I need to “invest” all I have into relationships, meaningful moments, and fulfilling hobbies.
that ending a relationship that isn’t working is also my responsibility, instead of postponing it, thinking “this time things will be alright” or “if i break up, everyone will think wrong of me” and letting dissatisfaction grow inside me, turning myself into an *sshole.
i’ve recently had to accept that my neurodivergence makes managers, supervisors, etc. uneasy about me despite my stellar track record and the sole reason why i was able to maintain continuous employment was because of my high demand skill set; which means that employment will become increasingly difficult as i continue to age.
At least your quirks allowed you to create a track record that was seen as stellar by others.
My own Voltron of ADD and Asperger’s allows me to do impressive things. But without any significant ability to monetize those traits or for it to be visibly profitable to someone else, it’s been a much more impactful hell on my employability.
I’ve come to hate how capitalism only “works well” for the masses who stumble and fumble through life, but who can easily conform to the required soul-sucking shape of profitability for someone else. People are more than just how much profit can be squeezed from them, and can provide back to civilization a lot more than what the current capitalistic structures parasitize out of them.
There are other economic structures that are much more humane and planet-friendly, but as a civilization we have been indoctrinated into seeing those frameworks as being “irredeemably evil” simply because prior “implementations” used them as a veneer of legitimacy over despotic authoritarian regimes.
I qualify as an aspie too and I would likely be in the same boat were it not for my software development skills.
LOL 😂 I am also a software developer. 30 years in almost every sector of IT short of 3D animation and games development.
And no, AI hallucinates too gratuitously for me, and just pisses the hell outta me. It’s worse than a gaggle of juniors in terms of all the extra work it generates.
Lol people like you will be useless in a few years. Its a tool, use it like one.
This field is so incredibly lousy w people like us that it makes me marvel at the ones w the kind of job security that I crave because it means that their hyper focus not only aligns w the company’s profit line but they’ve also managed to have a tenure that steered clear of enough clueless neurotypicals to keep them from getting fired or on the chopping block for a layoff.
Greed has altered the course of life many times over.
I continually fight this myself. I made a fair amount of profit in crypto, but I 100 percent realize that it’s just blind luck. I like the idea of it and I love the news about it, so it’s very difficult for me to not to go 100 percent in every time I see a trend!
So far, I’ve resisted the urge to go to crazy with it, but ugh, it’s tough . And I lie to my gf and tell her that I just follow, but don’t invest. So I’m pretty much the kind of asshole that I grew up despising. lol
I’ve never invested more than I can afford to lose, and cash out the minute I make a little profit. But I can see how addicting it is and how easily some people could fall off the cliff.
A lot of crypto isn’t blind luck any more than the stock market is. I’ve made smart, strategic, well researched crypto investments over 13 years and it’s been quite successful. Bitcoin, Ethereum, Solana, Sui…
If you keep up with the engineering and filter all the noise, it’s historically been really smart investment / store of value.
That said if you’re just following influencers and aren’t an engineer or have a keen eye for finding truly knowledgable people - yeah it’s risky af!!
Yeah, well I have been lucky, but I always cash out early. But it’s hard for me not to just be all in all the time! I do love watching the stands and the news about it though.
Nothing wrong with holding long term something you believe will be a more secure store of value over your local currency. People have always held gold and other precious metals to hedge against government fiat inflation.
Truth! Lemmy is very anti-crypto, but it has a lot of advantages in socialist and anarchist circles. Sometimes Lemmy just hates anything that is popular, because they think it means “rich.”
Even tho the average Lemmy poster makes more than the average Americans wage.
Im never going to get everything right. Allowing myself this allowed me to get some of the more important things right.
I have an unhealthy relationship with food. Oddly, the thing that really finally made it click was playing the Sims, and I noticed my Sim would get up & grab a snack from the fridge every single time they were bored.
That I wasted over a decade trying to figure out what was wrong with me on my own before I finally got professional help.
After taking calculus for the third time and still not getting it, I realized I might not be that smart. There is a reason the bell curve places a majority in the middle.
That just meaning well or having good intentions, are not enough. You need to actually show up and make time for the things, and people, you value.
Thinking of a great friend who had the courage to break up with me, and tell me straight up it’s because I was a bad friend to them.
Great post!
Alcohol isn’t everyone’s friend, I was an alcoholic at 18, and refused to acknowlege that fact and kept denying it in the face of all the evidence. When I finally asked for help and quit drinking at 45, I realised how much of a mess I’d made of my life. Thankfully I’ve been sober since (going on 7 years now). Addiction is not a joke people.
Good for you, brother! Stay strong. I’ve stayed drug-free/alcohol free my entire life, but only because I’ve watched loved ones go thru addiction, so I realize how tough it is. The fact that you got out of it after so long, is a major accomplishment. Good on ya, mate.
Addiction is not a joke people.
This is why I hate to see how casual Lemmy is about drugs and alcohol. Some actually brag about posing while high or drunk–and then get a shitton of upvotes for it. They don’t realize how quick it happens. and how addiction doesn’t care who you are. It can happen to anyone.
Thank you brother 🙏
Same, although I’m shy about the alcoholic label. But the fact is I was sadder and less motivated, even when I managed to drink “moderately,” and I feel better in every conceivable way since I stopped. I feel like I can trust myself to handle things straight-on now.
Honestly I understand what you mean, for me it was the opposite, my family and close friends had been telling me about my abuse for decades. So when I finally admitted I owned the word Alcoholic. I’m a happily recovering one. Good on you for managing!
Pardon my language, though I heard this in an interview with Jimmy Carr, and it rather highlights this for me quite well:
I’m paraphrasing, though it was something like “if you’ve seen five cunts before noon, you’re the cunt”.My sapphic brain wasn’t tuned to understand that quote properly at first. Instead of seeing an insult, I thought, “Wow, that sounds like a busy, but amazing, morning.”
This connect deserves a ⭐, just because 😊
The biggest pill was that I am not intelligent. I was just studious and invested enough time to pass exams. People not doing what they should do is not them being stupid but me not grasping the full picture.
The second biggest pill that I am still swallowing is that I am not a good person. I try to behave in a good way, but it’s manipulative and not authentic. People don’t like goodness if it doesn’t come from the heart.
People don’t like goodness if it doesn’t come from the heart.
I’m curious if you mean in an abstract way, of if you’ve done nice-seeming things for people only for them to call you out on whatever ulterior motives.
Cool that you’re way at the end of the willing-to-face-facts bell curve, though.
The biggest pill was that I am not intelligent.
The fact that you’re even saying this implies that you’re more intelligent than so many people.
Knowing the limits of your own understanding is a big part of intelligence imo
Top shelf introspection here.
Re being a good person I wouldn’t sweat your mirror neurons over it too much. I suspect that if most people did the kind of self-analysis you’ve done, they would find similar, ulterior drives.
Anyway, so while I’ve long since shelved the fantasy of “true altruism” I have noticed that I’m more likely to behave nicely if I can set myself up for success by doing things like eating enough, working out, avoiding running late, etc. In a very real way I am a nicer person when I’m, for example, not running late.
I do this because behaving nicely is important to my self image, and leads to a more pleasant feeling life.
It’s something.
You sound like a very interesting person if I may say so (: Love me some folks who were brave enough to have faced these gigantic pillbottles.
Don’t they?? I’m instantly charmed.
Since no one on here will ever know me…
It’s accepting that I have autism and that having autism is ok. My mom used “autistic” as an insult against me, the first time I remember was from age 5 as an attempt to control behavior she saw as undesirable. Running circles outside until I wore the grass out and flapping my hands about was something I needed to feel ashamed about according to her. And so I hid that and everything else she criticized so hard that I couldn’t accept that the reason I struggled so hard with a lot of things in my life wasn’t because I was just some innate failure but because I had an unaddressed condition that was she not only refused to help with but actively made worse.
To this day I still cannot do things like make eye contact, or tolerate being touched. But I’ve learned to not only accept myself for who I am, but accept that little boy who never understood why his own mother never seemed to be able to love him.
💔
I have to force myself to make eye contact when talking. I usually look away when talking, it helps me think. Some people think you aren’t being sincere but oh well.
That not only am I not a good person, it’s mostly impossible for a person to be truly good. Even knowing what good is, in its entirety, is nigh impossible. The best that can be done isn’t necessarily within my energy and/or skill.
There are wrongs that cannot meaningfully be righted.
Doing a little good some of the time is the most I can ever aspire to.
I feel you. The more you know, the less you can do any good. You can try and try and try all around and all you achieved by doing your best in doing good is discovering more bad and feel like you’ve failed altogether. I try to stick to the thought of that it’s only MY best I can do, I’m not almighty and everywhere. And maybe I just have set my standards/morals too high.
Autism enters the chat
That’s Jesus’ “why do you call me good? Only the Father is good”. You can never be perfect nor infallible, of course, but maybe you’ll be good enough and God will approve of you and that’s all we can work towards. No need to use this understanding to give yourself moral allowances though: let your mistakes be mistakes and not plans for immorality.
Woah, did Jesus actually say that (AFAWK)? Because I knew a Christian Scientist who said the whole religion’s view of Jesus was that he wasn’t a god, he was “a perfect man”. That quote sounds like he was literally disclaiming this.
Of course! Mark 10:18. One must remember Jesus was a miraculous prophet of God (not dissimilar to Moses, but his birth was more “special”, more akin that of Isaac), a monotheist that constantly referenced “the law and the prophets” (several callbacks to Solomon in particular whom I also hold in high regard, primarily because of Ecclesiastes) and how he wasn’t here to break the law but to enforce it… he wasn’t followed because he wasn’t a “Jew” and it was a new and revolutionary religion he had established, he was followed because he WAS one and remembered/knew what it meant to be one in earnest. What Rome/Paulian tradition did afterwards with the image of Jesus, the creation of a entirely separate dogma in which ‘God’ is actually a pantheon and also partly FLESH AND BONE/anthropomorphic (following their pagan/polytheistic traditions, and because if not the empire might be reticent to accept such drastic changes), is something else.
There’s no “perfect” man, not even the prophets can be with all their God-given information and their great character, as no man is omniscient nor fully in control of themselves. And Jesus goes even harder, saying he’s not even “good”, because such a strict category only belongs to God. We can only be “good enough”, and that’s for God to decide.
While it may sound similar it’s meaningfully different. Jesus’ statement asserts that good is an attritibute that can be had by some being, just not you or me. I am asserting that good is not something anyone can be. There’s no deity involved here.
The definition of what is “good” changes depending on the person, the situation, etc. It is like defining what is “perfect”.
So what happens when two people in the same or similar situation define the same action, one defines it as good, the other as evil? It’s pretty easy to construct a situation where each person feels morally justified in killing the other.
That doesn’t seem like a very useful morality.
I didn’t say it was a moral system, I never even used the word, it is human psychology and philosophy. Even in your example I could say “This was was to liberate X” then someone else says “That war killed so many civilians!”. Someone fires a bunch of people to save the rest from losing their jobs, the fired people say it was bad, the others it was good. Same event, two views. You can have “Hot summers are perfect”, the next person hates them.
It’s easy to do when we’re all surrounded constantly by the paradox of money meaning nothing at all, but also the only material thing that dictates the action and activity of everything past and future
Biggest Pill I’ve had to swallow is that no matter much I love programming and will continue my computer hobbies for life. I will never make a profession out of it. I’m slowly coping with the fact that all my work will ultimately influence very nearly nothing at all…
I had the opposite, I hated coding and never wanted to do it as a job… But here I am, 9-5 coding. 😅
I did realise at some point that it was actually Java that I hated, not programming. I do, however now work with Kotlin.
I love programming and will continue my computer hobbies for life. I will never make a profession out of it
Why do you say that? Is it by choice or do you not see how you could make it a career?
I’m slowly coping with the fact that all my work will ultimately influence very nearly nothing at all…
What kind of impact were you hoping for? I mean lots of jobs have little “influence” - I would actually say almost all jobs. But that doesn’t mean we are not all part of collective progress.
Could certainly be argued as a choice ultimately. I didn’t quite finish my BS in CS, I’m entering my 30s with a wife that depends on me not leaving my decent and steady warehouse mgmt job atm. I’ve tried a couple of times–last time I was building a great portfolio maintaining a hobbyist arch distro, but I just never got past the interview stages. My network is too small, and the job market seems to be a dumpster fire with no upturn in sight.
I know these are excuses and ultimately it is a choice that I shouldn’t give up on my dreams the way I am, but I wanted to answer your question as honestly as possible for some reason. As far as impact, it’s basically been a lifelong dream of mine to just make software that helps improve the quality of life of as many sentient beings as I possibly can. I know it’s immature and overly idealist, but I can’t shake it
I don’t think it’s immature - I wish more people had that kind of motivation.
But you say you’re entering your 30s. I’d just like to remind you how long time you actually still have. I studied computer science myself and I had multiple friends at the university in their 40s. People do switch up their careers if they want it enough. It is possible.
These are the comments that do me in. Time to repolish the resume and my most practical projects. I can’t believe I’m getting serious about this again, but I do believe in my drive, determination, and earnest passion to be the change I want to see in the software world. I know it’s pointless, and I will almost certainly fail quite miserably, but I also know I have to go down swinging or my soul will rot from the regrets. I just have to fail better–I have to do it despite the pointlessness.
There is nothing pointless about following your passions - in fact I’d say that is the only point of life. It’s the opposite of pointless.
Maybe you need to reframe it as not failure, but progress. See how you get better and closer, not how you didn’t reach the goal. It’s about the journey.
I feel you. I think about how intangible code is and how quickly that will fade from existence… It’s heavy, to say the least. And yet the challenge ever calls me to solve a problem with ones and zeroes.
I built a business with my code, and it helps save/improve hundreds of thousands of lives around the world. I don’t want to doxx myself so won’t give any further info.
Just because it’s intangible, your code can still potentially have a huge amount of value.
I agree. The impact can be real, and that’s the case for my coding job too, maybe to a lesser extent than yours. A lot of days I think I have my dream job. But still, digital data isn’t like a Roman ruin or something. It will be gone in 1000 years. Just wild to think about, and sometimes I feel like that fact matters.
On the other hand I have found a lot of people who turn the hobby they love into a business and it ruins the joy they found in their hobby.
That is certainly a bright side of the matter isn’t it. Maybe keeping the joy alive is more critical than the bread?
I’m not here to influence things. I was in the thick of it for a bit, but I’m here now.
I love coding. I get to do it for money. It allows me a nice little apartment in a nice environment and with my wife chipping in her half we’re a little insulated from financial strife. A little.
That’s it. I code, I eat food and live with a beautiful girl who seems to care for me, and we occasionally get to go see family or a strange new place. I’m flying as close to the sun as I dare.
Find peace in your existence and enjoy what you’re doing, whether programming is the bread or it’s the butter. It’s all a means to an end of doing something you love for what little time we have here.
You can do everything right that people taught you. But you only start living when you make mistakes, fuck up, and find the places where you belong, and a picture perfect life doesn’t bring you happiness; it’s rather shallow and lonely.
That paired with the realization that my mental disabilities will make me lonely for the rest of my life and there’s only so much I can do about it without having breakdowns.
“It is possible to commit no mistakes and still lose. That is not weakness, that is life.”
- Jean-Luc Picard
