A corollary to this may be that those who get many chances are more likely to succeed. This is often the case for people that have a safety net of some sort compared to those that don't when it comes to, for example, starting businesses. Those with a safety net can fail and try again and again and eventually tell the story of how 'gumption and spirit' made them a success while those that didn't have a safety net 'just didn't try hard enough'. I know I have been exceptionally lucky in that I have been given many chances to fail, and taken them! Without those opportunities to fail safely I wouldn't have the success I have now.
This is a good argument. In Germany, if you take a loan to open up a business, you can pretty much ruin your whole life and financially never recover if it fails once.
It's a little different with tech, as you usually don't have as high costs early on, but still. There is an extremely high risk involved that most people simply can't afford.
This is critical and often overlooked when it comes to fully appreciating socio-economic factors that influence a person's capacity to "succeed". People with the resources are simply allowed to fail and recover more times than those without.
The myth is not in 2nd chances; our ability to adapt and be resilient is hard but doable - ex: 1st time immigrants chasing the American dream.
The myth is in our ability to make "choices" which shifts the narrative to "hard work" rather than luck, perpetuated by survivorship bias and those "who have made it".
It's important to recognize that life is path-dependent. But as a counter-point, worrying too much about each decision as a potential mistake can lead to the kind of fear-based paralysis described by Sylvia Plath in the Bell Jar:
"I saw my life branching out before me like the green fig tree in the story. From the tip of every branch, like a fat purple fig, a wonderful future beckoned and winked. One fig was a husband and a happy home and children, and another fig was a famous poet and another fig was a brilliant professor, and another fig was Ee Gee, the amazing editor, and another fig was Europe and Africa and South America, and another fig was Constantin and Socrates and Attila and a pack of other lovers with queer names and offbeat professions, and another fig was an Olympic lady crew champion, and beyond and above these figs were many more figs I couldn't quite make out. I saw myself sitting in the crotch of this fig tree, starving to death, just because I couldn't make up my mind which of the figs I would choose. I wanted each and every one of them, but choosing one meant losing all the rest, and, as I sat there, unable to decide, the figs began to wrinkle and go black, and, one by one, they plopped to the ground at my feet."
I think a meta analysis of this is that the character in your quote should realize they themselves are inside of their own unique fig. The reason the others have withered is because she's chosen a fig. In real life, it seems that what usually happens is people don't realize they are heading for a fig that's not that bad all the while staring at all the others imagining how their life might be. Basically, be more grateful for what you have now.
A friend of mine has deep wounds around their experience of making the wrong decisions during formative (college years) they they feel has set them back in life.
Everyone around them sees their story differently: a successful career pivot into a field that they love which compensates them well. They have truly inspired many!
Yet for my friend, the story they tell themselves is that their poor decisions in college will essentially haunt them forever because they don't have the academic pedigree and work experience of their peers.
I have my own relationship with rumination, and appreciate this perspective from Michael Pollan in his book "How to Change Your Mind"
"A lot of depression is a sort of self-punishment, as even Freud understood. We get trapped in these loops of rumination that are very destructive, and the stories that we tell ourselves: you know, that we’re unworthy of love, that we can’t get through the next hour with a cigarette, whatever it is. And these deep, deep grooves of thought are very hard to get out of. They disconnect us from other people, from nature, from an earlier idea of who we are."
My advice for anyone reading this is to listen to the stories that you tell yourself. Ask yourself how you can adjust these stories to have a more empowered understanding of yourself.
I believe in the Myth of Second Chance and Third and so on. It is what we tell ourselves to keep going. Nothing wrong with that.
At the time you make a decision it is often impossible to know what its consequences are, so if we had made a different decision things might actually be worse.
Not making a decision in time can also have negative consequences.
I've many regrets similar in vein to that of your friend. Over time I've decided that it's rather reductionist to think that things connect together so simplistically. The "how my life could have been better if X, ceteris paribus" can be a really painful analysis, but -- in this case favourably -- there is no "ceteris paribus" in real lives.
There's a collection of techniques in the mental health field called Cognitive Behavioral Therapy that is about helping people identify and replace these negative stories. If folks are having a hard time applying these ideas themselves alone, look into this therapy as it can be good to have a therapist help you through using the technique.
I think the idea that our lives are a set of branching paths, where once you go down one path you can't go down others, is partly a consequence of how the academic path of many careers is designed to "weed out" promising students from others. This "branching tree of time" illusion is created by the elitist, rejecting attitude of the gatekeepers of our society... and by our sensitivity to taking rejection personally in our young and formative years.
And maybe secretly we all wish things could've worked out with our first love... when in reality our first loves are those we are least likely to be compatible with in the long term.
To borrow a phrase from the book Switch, "true but useless".
And only technically true. Of course there are no actual second chances. Time only moves forward. But the implication - and it's only implied - that you're doomed to unhappiness in a cage of past life choices is defeatist, pusillanimous bunk.
As John Lennon said, "I just had to let it go". That takes more courage the older you get. But anyone that tells you that it's hopeless because you majored in accounting instead of art should be escorted quickly and quietly away from anyone impressionable, and then kept away from sharp objects for their own safety.
Pull yourself together!
Or, to quote the Terry Gilliam movie Baron Munchausen, "Open the gates!"
The myth is that that there is one optimal path through life that will make you happy and that any deviation from it will cause you to lose that happiness. While mistakes might take you down a path that you didn't anticipate and you might regret it for some time; they might also have opened up doors that would never have presented themselves.
We all wish we could go back and fix a mistake or two; but we often don't realize that doing so might unravel many other positive events. Everyone has regrets, but we don't get to see what would have happened if we had made a different decision at every turn.
That's exactly my thought reading the piece: it talks about "errors", "mistakes", "irrecoverable damage" where everything could be viewed as "non-optimal choices." And they are judged with the benefit of hindsight, because they could have been the most logical choices with the information available at the time.
Past events can't be changed, and we are not the person who made the decision at the time anymore.
Right, rumination is bad serves no useful purpose. It is good to analyze our previous mistakes but we should not lament our previous behavior because we cannot change it anyhow. We can only try to be better next time.
The English folk-rock band Incredible String Band has a great song where they sing "Happy man, the happy man, doing the best he can the best he can".
Yeah, I'm wondering what is the actual point of the article, and you're touching on where I'm coming from. It's very retrospective, and gives very little time to forethought. Yet the author establishes that they see peers step into life decisions with relatable distress, or indoctrinated softness, people facing the future, but doesn't explore much beyond that. See, to me, this is grasping for an answer, where next step is "and how many of those people who took the step casually or overtly seriously had that have an equivalent impact on their life?"
And I would even take it as a mistake being done here to claim a stake. Being that, they can only ever source the answer from the same place Senator Armstrong does everything in his life. How CAN you solve the problem of finding your best life, how CAN you say you were more mindful and therefore, got rewarded? How CAN anyone say be more like this?
You can't poll for it, people are very often bad a either introspection or at retrospectives, and more than anything - they don't actually know. They will biasedly speak positively of bad experiences and rash decisions that benefited them and vice-versa. Few will have the maturity to turn and say they were glad to have met toxic person or workplace or that it helped them overall despite taking away 30 years of their life. And that's still their prerogative opinion. Opinions are nice and all, but not the answer we seek. We seek the actual, real impact, that mindfulness has on life paths. The state of mind in the moment. It is unknowable. And often, whoever discredits the notion, is suspiciously also handing out brochures.
I don't see eye to eye with the article. Feels like a sermon by someone who doesn't actually peer much beyond any veil. They're just judging people, on the hardest game there is. I play competitive team based games, but I never play ranked. It's full of awful people with lots to say of others.
Nothing is better than a comeback story and I try to feel as inspired as I can every day because the truth is people have made groundbreaking discoveries in their 50s, started businesses in their 70s and completely overcome much harder obstacles than picking sciences instead of humanities? Like really that’s an example? Career changes are literally one of the easier things in life to do if you’re determined. This article is just too pessimistic for me.
Nothing is better than a comeback story and I try to feel as inspired as I can every day because the truth is people have made groundbreaking discoveries in their 50s, started businesses in their 70s and completely overcome much harder obstacles than picking sciences instead of humanities?
There are of course such people, but they are for a good part the few notable exceptions you hear about. For each of those there are thousands of people that don't manage to pull it off.
An interesting comment on Trump by Ukraine's army head of intelligence, Kyrylo Budanov: “There have been nine instances in his life when he went to the top, fell to the very bottom of life, and went back again.”
Anything can be relatively easy if you've either already succeeded the first time based on sheer determination and/or you've successfully done other harder things that were at least as abstract as having a successful career. This article is not about the moment you make a decision, because that's as easy as it's set up to be based on all of the previous dice rolls of your life, but about the likelihood that you'll be able to bounce back from rolling snake eyes on what seemed like a sure thing at a time when time itself was cheap.
If determination alone qualified as the criteria for succeeding in a career change, then that means whatever situation you're in already has prepared you perfectly for a marginally different path forward, or the risk involved is relatively trivial. Imo, this article isn't pessimistic enough, but it doesn't mean one can't be inspired by rare anomalies, it's just that you'd be naive to believe an arbitrary person can replicate those results merely by trying hard. It doesn't work for a primary career, and it won't work for a secondary career, there are many more factors involved.
I think this is quite terrible advice because our (Western) culture is already way too biased towards quarter and mid-life crises, ageism and fatalism when there is objectively little reason to panic.
One conversation I had that had extreme influence on me was working with an old software developer from China who had seen the cultural revolution as a kid, had family sent to farm labor, his parents had their company taken from him, he lost his own companies twice during reforms of the 80s and 90s and had his life turned over like half a dozen times in ways that where I grew up nobody had ever experienced once. He had to completely start from scratch when he was in his early 50s.
So when someone aged 28 at work was having a mental breakdown over their wrong phd specialization the guy always just laughed and said, you're younger than 45, you can start over, what's the problem?
The article is right that life is path dependent, in the sense that if you went to war and lost both arms you have a problem, but no, what obscure degree choice you made has not in any serious way taken real agency away. That is just our bizarre and neurotic culture. At least for most people their own perception of their history weighs them down significantly more than what is in reality genuinely the case.
We love to romanticize the path not taken too. If I look at the mistakes I have made in my life, if I could go back and change them I would still just end up making different mistakes on a different path.
Some of those alternate paths would have been a dead end too, literally. We take the value of the path that was chosen is one that means you are alive to read this on 4/28/24 completely for granted.
There's Orwell's essay Such, Such Were the Joys, where a horrible ordeal of preparation, in a preparatory school, for a scholarship and a successful future in Edwardian society, is completely nullified by coinciding with the First World War and the nature of society changing.
The problem is people want to enjoy their lives and starting over means forfeiting many years of that life, as well as potentially closing doors they wanted to leverage. People often put their lives on complete hold for a phd. Discovering that was a waste is awful.
From my experience, the number of chances you have is not the limiting factor in life. I see people making the same kind of mistakes over and over again. The problem is often the pattern of reaction to externalities. The pattern is then the problem, and it is very hard to break habits.
A melancholic and romantic but ultimately useless perspective.
It is impossible to know, with certainty, if any decision is the best one because we only live one life. We can make educated guesses about our "what if's" but we'll never know.
And furthermore, you have to accept that the road not taken will also have disadvantages and trade-offs that you could not have anticipated at the time.
There are some decisions that you can be pretty sure are big mistakes. And some of these are irreversible. And we are all running out of time.
But generally speaking, I tend to agree with the Proustian perspective -- the "big moments," generally speaking, are the product of a lot of little moments and decisions. Spouses don't suddenly decide to cheat one day, careers aren't made by one or two wrong moves. Rather, I think we only remember the moments in which all of our little decisions culminate into one event -- precisely because it is memorable.
You have to learn to love your fate. There are so many branching permutations of quantum lives that it's impossible to ever know if you chose the "best" one.
Robert Frost's, often misinterpreted [0], “The Road Not Taken” also comes to mind here.
"In many ways, the poem becomes about how—through retroactive narrative—the poet turns something as irrational as an “impulse” into a triumphant, intentional decision. Decisions are nobler than whims, and this reframing is comforting, too, for the way it suggests that a life unfolds through conscious design. However, as the poem reveals, that design arises out of constructed narratives, not dramatic actions."
For almost all of us, the truth is that life could have been better -- there are mistakes that can not be wholly erased or undone -- but life could also be much worse. And you'll be a lot happier if you don't hyper focus on regretting your mistakes.
Life probably could have been much better for all of us, but also the life we’re imaging that might be much better benefits greatly from being untarnished by reality.
If you count the mistakes as educational then how can you regret them. They were your mistakes going from where you were to where you are, this one unique and fascinating life.
On the job side, this is a scary consequence of specialization. If you can learn a job in a day or a week, you can go where opportunity is. If it requires a degree (or a graduate degree!) then you're so much more stuck.
I've wondered if this is part of the reason for high software salaries. When so many industries needs software, developers can hop from the failing industry to the lucrative one, forcing more efficient competition. Not so for many careers, where the skill set and the industry are tied together.
I'd bet the whole second chance thing gets more brittle as competition and specialization get more important in general, even beyond jobs.
As a counterpoint, see The Trouble With Optionality [1] as a critique of keeping your options open to forestall a single "decisive mistake":
> This emphasis on creating optionality can backfire in surprising ways. Instead of enabling young people to take on risks and make choices, acquiring options becomes habitual. You can never create enough option value—and the longer you spend acquiring options, the harder it is to stop.
> The Yale undergraduate goes to work at McKinsey for two years, then comes to Harvard Business School, then graduates and goes to work Goldman Sachs and leaves after several years to work at Blackstone. Optionality abounds!
> This individual has merely acquired stamps of approval and has acquired safety net upon safety net. These safety nets don’t end up enabling big risk-taking—individuals just become habitual acquirers of safety nets. The comfort of a high-paying job at a prestigious firm surrounded by smart people is simply too much to give up. When that happens, the dreams that those options were meant to enable slowly recede into the background. For a few, those destinations are in fact their dreams come true—but for every one of those, there are ten entrepreneurs, artists, and restaurateurs that get trapped in those institutions.
This viewpoint seems a bit fear based or conservative to me. I wouldn't be shocked if the author wants a high degree of wealth as well. I guess that is a defensible approach but there is another approach of trusting the process, learn from your experience (and the experience of others if you can) and bring a perspective that most experiences have a positive aspect that you can focus on. Why be afraid, you die either way. Life isn't a zero sum game where if you get divorced or don't become a famous person or a really rich person it has no interest. Everyone has interesting experiences and the chance to learn and form connections and help out and find meaning strewn all over. And even the wrong career will give you skills and perspectives that you find yourself drawing on when you get the perfect career. Even if only to deeply appreciate the perfection, that is worth a lot of lifetime savings.
The trouble with this viewpoint lies in the "all hope of the life you wanted" part. To enter into this game is the start of the losing outcome. As the saying goes, the only way not to lose the game, is not to play it at all. If you don't want to lose at football, then don't play football. It's a stupid sport.
What you do instead is simply follow what excites you in the moment as reality unfolds, with no attachment to outcome. The more you're attached to an illusion, the more turmoil you'll experience as the illusion fades. It's saddening that the observer fixates on this fading thing, but doesn't notice that new things are appearing which are even more brilliant.
Pick a direction which seems interesting, and get moving. Know that whatever idea you have as to what will happen is only useful as a rough guide which you'll throw out. It's the plan Mike Tyson into the ring with, and throws it out when he gets punched in the face.
A powerful tool is realizing that you manifest your patterns and that you can change. You do this by being sensitive to how you feel in response to that which happens around you, and then make changes for better feeling and results. I'll call this "reaching alignment." You get into that state, and you're unstoppable.
Anyway, I find all this stuff turns out to be 'crap' when you are in physical pain or really had something bad (PTSD) happen to you. Maybe when the pain is too high, I decided to stop being a helpless Stoic and started focusing on solving my own pains.
Well, it depends on what is meant, by "second chance."
If it is a complete reversion to the path that would have been followed, then it likely won't happen.
However, I have been privileged to spend the last 43 years, watching second chances become realities, where the second chance turns into something that far surpasses the original vector.
Great catch as chance is an inclusive term. Therefore, when seeking a second chance one should consider what aspect(s) of the path should change to succeed.
There is a novel in the form of a Choose Your Own Adventure book called Life's Lottery, by Kim Newman [1]. It follows a character from birth to adulthood, with the reader constantly making decisions which will shape his life. Things can go well, or (very) badly. I'm not sure if the chapters form a tree or a more general DAG, but i do know that the book splits into two completely separate sets of outcomes according to your very first choice, which is, at age, six whether your favourite character in The Man from U.N.C.L.E. is Napoleon Solo or Ilya Kuryakin.
> But life is path-dependent: each mistake narrows the next round of choices. A big one, or just an early one, can foreclose all hope of the life you wanted.
“The life you wanted” is an odd notion that I think is responsible for a great deal of misery. Throughout human history, people had pretty much only one kind of life. Nearly everyone in a community didn’t same thing to survive so they could reproduce, and then they died. I feel like people would be a lot happier if they accepted that this is the human experience, not wanting and achieving a particular kind of life.
One of the problems of this article is that although many of these things are true, a lot of times you must play the cards you're dealt, cause not playing will be even worse.
Its like in poker where you are playing one on one against a player with a substantially bigger stack and the blinds are just eating you up. In such situations, waiting for a better hand is a bad decision in many cases. Then when you lose because you bluffed and lost, you will blame yourself for this mistake, but actually it could just be the best chance you had. 6 more blinds would have destroyed you anyway. You thought you had a good enough hand and played it. You lost, but you still made the best decision.
Life is like that.
Another example: you are a 37 year oldwoman and you feel your fertility slip away. You take a man and make some children. The man turns out to be an idiot... Your lifes dreams destroyed by an asshole man and your childrens needs.
But maybe this was the best you could do... Maybe not taking that choice at that moment would have left you childless and maybe you would have been very sad about that. Regretting not taking the chances. I know quite a few people that waited for the best partner to have children, but never had them. Now old, they feel it is their greatest regret.
[+] [-] jmward01|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] zwnow|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] renegade-otter|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] acron0|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] mgh2|1 year ago|reply
The myth is in our ability to make "choices" which shifts the narrative to "hard work" rather than luck, perpetuated by survivorship bias and those "who have made it".
Is the typical attribution error.
[1] https://medium.com/@trendguardian/free-will-a-rich-fairy-tal...
[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3LopI4YeC4I
[+] [-] npilk|1 year ago|reply
"I saw my life branching out before me like the green fig tree in the story. From the tip of every branch, like a fat purple fig, a wonderful future beckoned and winked. One fig was a husband and a happy home and children, and another fig was a famous poet and another fig was a brilliant professor, and another fig was Ee Gee, the amazing editor, and another fig was Europe and Africa and South America, and another fig was Constantin and Socrates and Attila and a pack of other lovers with queer names and offbeat professions, and another fig was an Olympic lady crew champion, and beyond and above these figs were many more figs I couldn't quite make out. I saw myself sitting in the crotch of this fig tree, starving to death, just because I couldn't make up my mind which of the figs I would choose. I wanted each and every one of them, but choosing one meant losing all the rest, and, as I sat there, unable to decide, the figs began to wrinkle and go black, and, one by one, they plopped to the ground at my feet."
[+] [-] polishdude20|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] gwd|1 year ago|reply
https://existentialcomics.com/comic/204
[+] [-] tacocataco|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] Shinchy|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] imtringued|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] asdf6969|1 year ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] ptk921|1 year ago|reply
Everyone around them sees their story differently: a successful career pivot into a field that they love which compensates them well. They have truly inspired many!
Yet for my friend, the story they tell themselves is that their poor decisions in college will essentially haunt them forever because they don't have the academic pedigree and work experience of their peers.
I have my own relationship with rumination, and appreciate this perspective from Michael Pollan in his book "How to Change Your Mind"
"A lot of depression is a sort of self-punishment, as even Freud understood. We get trapped in these loops of rumination that are very destructive, and the stories that we tell ourselves: you know, that we’re unworthy of love, that we can’t get through the next hour with a cigarette, whatever it is. And these deep, deep grooves of thought are very hard to get out of. They disconnect us from other people, from nature, from an earlier idea of who we are."
My advice for anyone reading this is to listen to the stories that you tell yourself. Ask yourself how you can adjust these stories to have a more empowered understanding of yourself.
[+] [-] galaxyLogic|1 year ago|reply
At the time you make a decision it is often impossible to know what its consequences are, so if we had made a different decision things might actually be worse.
Not making a decision in time can also have negative consequences.
[+] [-] techno_tsar|1 year ago|reply
One's self-identity is important. The truth about what one's "narrative in life" is is not a brute property etched into the universe.
We should be pragmatic about what what thoughts we nurture.
[+] [-] brian_cunnie|1 year ago|reply
Now fifty-seven, he confided, "I think I made the wrong decision."
[+] [-] usgroup|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] MadcapJake|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] chrisknyfe|1 year ago|reply
And maybe secretly we all wish things could've worked out with our first love... when in reality our first loves are those we are least likely to be compatible with in the long term.
[+] [-] walterburns|1 year ago|reply
To borrow a phrase from the book Switch, "true but useless".
And only technically true. Of course there are no actual second chances. Time only moves forward. But the implication - and it's only implied - that you're doomed to unhappiness in a cage of past life choices is defeatist, pusillanimous bunk.
As John Lennon said, "I just had to let it go". That takes more courage the older you get. But anyone that tells you that it's hopeless because you majored in accounting instead of art should be escorted quickly and quietly away from anyone impressionable, and then kept away from sharp objects for their own safety.
Pull yourself together!
Or, to quote the Terry Gilliam movie Baron Munchausen, "Open the gates!"
[+] [-] didgetmaster|1 year ago|reply
We all wish we could go back and fix a mistake or two; but we often don't realize that doing so might unravel many other positive events. Everyone has regrets, but we don't get to see what would have happened if we had made a different decision at every turn.
[+] [-] draven|1 year ago|reply
Past events can't be changed, and we are not the person who made the decision at the time anymore.
[+] [-] galaxyLogic|1 year ago|reply
The English folk-rock band Incredible String Band has a great song where they sing "Happy man, the happy man, doing the best he can the best he can".
[+] [-] pascalcrysis|1 year ago|reply
And I would even take it as a mistake being done here to claim a stake. Being that, they can only ever source the answer from the same place Senator Armstrong does everything in his life. How CAN you solve the problem of finding your best life, how CAN you say you were more mindful and therefore, got rewarded? How CAN anyone say be more like this?
You can't poll for it, people are very often bad a either introspection or at retrospectives, and more than anything - they don't actually know. They will biasedly speak positively of bad experiences and rash decisions that benefited them and vice-versa. Few will have the maturity to turn and say they were glad to have met toxic person or workplace or that it helped them overall despite taking away 30 years of their life. And that's still their prerogative opinion. Opinions are nice and all, but not the answer we seek. We seek the actual, real impact, that mindfulness has on life paths. The state of mind in the moment. It is unknowable. And often, whoever discredits the notion, is suspiciously also handing out brochures.
I don't see eye to eye with the article. Feels like a sermon by someone who doesn't actually peer much beyond any veil. They're just judging people, on the hardest game there is. I play competitive team based games, but I never play ranked. It's full of awful people with lots to say of others.
[+] [-] mlazos|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] danbruc|1 year ago|reply
There are of course such people, but they are for a good part the few notable exceptions you hear about. For each of those there are thousands of people that don't manage to pull it off.
[+] [-] Animats|1 year ago|reply
An interesting comment on Trump by Ukraine's army head of intelligence, Kyrylo Budanov: “There have been nine instances in his life when he went to the top, fell to the very bottom of life, and went back again.”
[+] [-] brailsafe|1 year ago|reply
If determination alone qualified as the criteria for succeeding in a career change, then that means whatever situation you're in already has prepared you perfectly for a marginally different path forward, or the risk involved is relatively trivial. Imo, this article isn't pessimistic enough, but it doesn't mean one can't be inspired by rare anomalies, it's just that you'd be naive to believe an arbitrary person can replicate those results merely by trying hard. It doesn't work for a primary career, and it won't work for a secondary career, there are many more factors involved.
[+] [-] ImHereToVote|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] Barrin92|1 year ago|reply
One conversation I had that had extreme influence on me was working with an old software developer from China who had seen the cultural revolution as a kid, had family sent to farm labor, his parents had their company taken from him, he lost his own companies twice during reforms of the 80s and 90s and had his life turned over like half a dozen times in ways that where I grew up nobody had ever experienced once. He had to completely start from scratch when he was in his early 50s.
So when someone aged 28 at work was having a mental breakdown over their wrong phd specialization the guy always just laughed and said, you're younger than 45, you can start over, what's the problem?
The article is right that life is path dependent, in the sense that if you went to war and lost both arms you have a problem, but no, what obscure degree choice you made has not in any serious way taken real agency away. That is just our bizarre and neurotic culture. At least for most people their own perception of their history weighs them down significantly more than what is in reality genuinely the case.
[+] [-] grobgambit|1 year ago|reply
We love to romanticize the path not taken too. If I look at the mistakes I have made in my life, if I could go back and change them I would still just end up making different mistakes on a different path.
Some of those alternate paths would have been a dead end too, literally. We take the value of the path that was chosen is one that means you are alive to read this on 4/28/24 completely for granted.
[+] [-] card_zero|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] jncfhnb|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] nuancebydefault|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] salmonfamine|1 year ago|reply
It is impossible to know, with certainty, if any decision is the best one because we only live one life. We can make educated guesses about our "what if's" but we'll never know. And furthermore, you have to accept that the road not taken will also have disadvantages and trade-offs that you could not have anticipated at the time.
There are some decisions that you can be pretty sure are big mistakes. And some of these are irreversible. And we are all running out of time.
But generally speaking, I tend to agree with the Proustian perspective -- the "big moments," generally speaking, are the product of a lot of little moments and decisions. Spouses don't suddenly decide to cheat one day, careers aren't made by one or two wrong moves. Rather, I think we only remember the moments in which all of our little decisions culminate into one event -- precisely because it is memorable.
You have to learn to love your fate. There are so many branching permutations of quantum lives that it's impossible to ever know if you chose the "best" one.
[+] [-] julienchastang|1 year ago|reply
"In many ways, the poem becomes about how—through retroactive narrative—the poet turns something as irrational as an “impulse” into a triumphant, intentional decision. Decisions are nobler than whims, and this reframing is comforting, too, for the way it suggests that a life unfolds through conscious design. However, as the poem reveals, that design arises out of constructed narratives, not dramatic actions."
[0] https://www.poetryfoundation.org/articles/89511/robert-frost...
[+] [-] aetherson|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] bee_rider|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] lanstin|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] 6gvONxR4sf7o|1 year ago|reply
I've wondered if this is part of the reason for high software salaries. When so many industries needs software, developers can hop from the failing industry to the lucrative one, forcing more efficient competition. Not so for many careers, where the skill set and the industry are tied together.
I'd bet the whole second chance thing gets more brittle as competition and specialization get more important in general, even beyond jobs.
[+] [-] jcalx|1 year ago|reply
> This emphasis on creating optionality can backfire in surprising ways. Instead of enabling young people to take on risks and make choices, acquiring options becomes habitual. You can never create enough option value—and the longer you spend acquiring options, the harder it is to stop.
> The Yale undergraduate goes to work at McKinsey for two years, then comes to Harvard Business School, then graduates and goes to work Goldman Sachs and leaves after several years to work at Blackstone. Optionality abounds!
> This individual has merely acquired stamps of approval and has acquired safety net upon safety net. These safety nets don’t end up enabling big risk-taking—individuals just become habitual acquirers of safety nets. The comfort of a high-paying job at a prestigious firm surrounded by smart people is simply too much to give up. When that happens, the dreams that those options were meant to enable slowly recede into the background. For a few, those destinations are in fact their dreams come true—but for every one of those, there are ten entrepreneurs, artists, and restaurateurs that get trapped in those institutions.
[1] https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2017/5/25/desai-commencem...
[+] [-] lanstin|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] gexla|1 year ago|reply
What you do instead is simply follow what excites you in the moment as reality unfolds, with no attachment to outcome. The more you're attached to an illusion, the more turmoil you'll experience as the illusion fades. It's saddening that the observer fixates on this fading thing, but doesn't notice that new things are appearing which are even more brilliant.
Pick a direction which seems interesting, and get moving. Know that whatever idea you have as to what will happen is only useful as a rough guide which you'll throw out. It's the plan Mike Tyson into the ring with, and throws it out when he gets punched in the face.
A powerful tool is realizing that you manifest your patterns and that you can change. You do this by being sensitive to how you feel in response to that which happens around you, and then make changes for better feeling and results. I'll call this "reaching alignment." You get into that state, and you're unstoppable.
[+] [-] resource_waste|1 year ago|reply
Taoism with a dash of Existentialism?
Anyway, I find all this stuff turns out to be 'crap' when you are in physical pain or really had something bad (PTSD) happen to you. Maybe when the pain is too high, I decided to stop being a helpless Stoic and started focusing on solving my own pains.
[+] [-] rapatel0|1 year ago|reply
Bottomline:
- These thoughts don't serve you
- You have more effective/productive years ahead of you then before
Figure out what you want, and grind at it. The rest is noise.
Speaking of which...
[+] [-] ChrisMarshallNY|1 year ago|reply
If it is a complete reversion to the path that would have been followed, then it likely won't happen.
However, I have been privileged to spend the last 43 years, watching second chances become realities, where the second chance turns into something that far surpasses the original vector.
[+] [-] purpleteam81|1 year ago|reply
Great catch as chance is an inclusive term. Therefore, when seeking a second chance one should consider what aspect(s) of the path should change to succeed.
[+] [-] twic|1 year ago|reply
[1] https://safe.menlosecurity.com/https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki...
[+] [-] rayiner|1 year ago|reply
“The life you wanted” is an odd notion that I think is responsible for a great deal of misery. Throughout human history, people had pretty much only one kind of life. Nearly everyone in a community didn’t same thing to survive so they could reproduce, and then they died. I feel like people would be a lot happier if they accepted that this is the human experience, not wanting and achieving a particular kind of life.
[+] [-] pineaux|1 year ago|reply