I had my first quarter life crisis at 18, when I came to grips with the fact that I had accomplished nothing in my life so far, as evidenced by my lack of good college admissions - I graduated only 2nd in my class with just a 1500 SAT, which isn't good enough for top schools.
Unlike OP, however, it was less of an aimless drift and more of an aggressive, angry depression. Had another one at 20, when I realized that not getting into a FB internship would probably set me back permanently from my goals.
Now I'm 24, work at Amazon and widely considered a disappointment to people in OP's social circles. The pain has waned a bit, but the crisis is just constant now, like the roar of an engine on a long airplane flight in coach. Eventually the discomfort of the resting your head on the window and the anger you feel at the people with lie-flat seats paid for by Google and Facebook overpowers the rest.
You've created multiple accounts and posted hundreds of comments about this. I'm sympathetic to whatever pain is underlying that, but that doesn't make it ok to keep posting like this. Single-purpose accounts are not ok on HN, and such repetition is not in keeping with the site mandate.
Readers who encounter any single comment along these lines are naturally going to feel sympathetic, but that can't continue past a certain threshold of repetition. In that sense these conversations are illusory. Bringing it up again and again is not helping you, and it's damaging this site. Commenting so repetitively, even about a topic like personal pain which obviously matters, is functionally in the same category as spamming or trolling.
We banned your previous account that was doing this and asked you to stop. I'm going to ban this one as well and ask you to please not do this again.
I wish you well—I'm sure we all wish you well—in finding a way out of this into more satisfaction and self-kindness.
I mean this with only compassion and a deep sense of empathy - you should consider therapy if you aren’t already going. What you’re describing sounds like Hell, and my first thought is that life doesn’t need to be that way for anyone. You are a source of immense value to the world, and if you don’t agree, it just means you can’t see what others can yet.
second this somehow, don't grind long term like this, life is supposed to be acceptably cool, and even if it's a battle a times, it's better served with a goal that you find worth fighting for so no anger but just drive
Please don't hate yourself. Do you think the lie-flat seats bring joy? Do you know the plane's destination? In this example, I'd rather be the guy who skipped the airport and went fishing. If anything, you have a head start on understanding this. The others may feel as you do when they're 30, 40, 50 or older, and feel tremendous heartache for wasted time. There is a ceiling everybody reaches in competition, and the billionaires want you to exhaust yourself finding it while working for them. Don't be afraid to question everything. You're young, and your 20s are more or less designed for brain development and tough lessons. But if you use this time to take a step back, your life could become heaven. I'm glad you reached out.
It is 64 degrees outside and cloudy. The young man energy is raw and overpowering! Air quality 24 with very little wind. Good day for a bike ride or a spell of right inaction.
I didn't realize anyone (who cares about company 'status') considered Amazon to be lower-status than Facebook or Google. I mean, hell, it comes after F and before G in FAANG :)
At the very least, Amazon is probably considered to have better ethics than Facebook, if that helps.
There are certain circles or communities where that's the case, unfortunately. I casually browse Blind sometimes and the overwhelming attitude there is that Amazon is the "lesser" FAANG and is where you work if you couldn't cut it at Google/FB/Netflix. There's a lot of negativity about things like "Amazon doesn't provide free lunch? why even work there? Google gives me free lunch and free dinner!"
There's also a huge emphasis in such circles on compensation, and Amazon supposedly has a somewhat lower total compensation for entry level engineers than Google et al. That's a huge deal to status chasers who only measure their self worth in money.
FWIW I do not recommend browsing Blind because it is full of toxic mindsets like that, nor do I agree at all with it... I'm just sharing some context that such communities do exist.
Same at the top schools. I've never heard of someone at a top school be proud of going to Amazon - it's only something they do if they have no other options in my experience.
In my comment I shared some context about how there are such mindsets in certain circles, but I want to make it clear that those circles are unequivocally wrong. You should ignore them, full stop. They don't deserve that space in your mind.
I picked up coding at the age of 22 as a hobby and now am a tech lead at a green energy company.
I don't make as much money as my hyper competetive peers. But I feel like the work I do matters a lot more. And I never felt this stress about under performing.
I had a boss that used to tell me..."in a hundred years who will care?" Do it for you and those you love, not the value they tell you you have, the value you logically know you provide them.
You are 24 and work at amazon (I assume in engineering) and you think others consider you a disappointment? I honestly think you need therapy, you have some major self esteem issues. Part of being an adult is not caring what others think, you need to be happy for yourself.
> but I caught myself sleuthing on your github and LinkedIn and feeling that familiar sense of envy
He works at AWS? Is that considered particularly impressive to be envious over? Sure he went to Hopkins but that's not atypical in the Princeton area.
I'd imagine for most of his peers from high school he's considered a disappointment for working at "only" AWS, they're probably all ML Engineers at FB or Google or Two Sigma, etc.
> I'd imagine for most of his peers from high school he's considered a disappointment for working at "only" AWS
I went to school at about the same time at the other high school in town (technically 2 towns, 1 combined school district), my family mostly still lives there. A job across the country in a well known tech company is reasonably top 25% of the class or so. Not standout, but nothing to be embarrassed about, and that's where plenty of us ended up.
Hilariously enough, my class' Valedictorian is now an ML Engineer on Amazon Echo.
I wasn't answering the question of "what will their parents think", I was just pointing out the reaction of our peers because I grew up in the same community. Parental reaction is typically much more about them as people than any other particular factor.
If you’re pathetic like me I guess. I only work at IBM on a bunch of Salesforce bullshit, so I find working on AI at AWS to be pretty impressive. Trust me I know there’s tiers to this stuff as someone who hasn’t passed interviews at Google and Citadel.
If they have not committed a crime or aided in a crime, I personally don't have an issue with it as if they have not committed a terrorist act they are by definition not a terrorists. Lets move the hypothetical situation a little what if they are not a member but are sympathetic to the grievances that ISIS has (not all of them are unfounded)? Are they guilty of fire-able ill thought at that point? I don't argue that this guys ideas are savory nor those of ISIS my point is there is a lot of ideas that people from all walks of life find unsavory. I am sorry but I just fundamentally disagree with cancel culture, which to me this is a byproduct of. To me the harm is greater than the cure.
Those two examples are fundamentally different and it’s silly to conflate individual action with coercing the app stores to discontinue supporting the app.
It’s hardly authoritarian to disallow certain ideas being funded by the tax payer. We wouldn’t be upset if frenology wasn’t allowed in government agencies.
I think the idea behind the ban is that critical race theory delivers a certain leftist ideology veiled in an intent to address race or gender issues.
Agree with this or not, but this seems where to discussion should take place.
This goes much further than banning funding by the tax payer. It disallows companies that want government contracts from having internal training that goes against the ideology the government has dictated even when that training is entirely unrelated to the contracts the company is bidding for.
> I think the idea behind the ban is that critical race theory delivers a certain leftist ideology
You believe the ban is ideological, and... you aren't horrified? What happens when Harris bans discussion of libertarian ideas in the treasury department?
What do you mean by "discussion"? If "using taxpayer money to host mandatory courses", I think every ideology should be banned from this in government institutions.
However, to ban these in the private companies that want to do business with government agencies is of course too much in my opinion.
Federal employees in the treasury, while being paid, should discuss .. the treasury. Not libertarian ideas, not CRT, or any other controversial theories. They are free to do that on their own time however.
What do you imagine a treasury employee does all day, sits in a locked room and counts coins without any connection to the outside world? These are the people that are directing monetary policies that affect people's lives, well being and equity. Without an opinion on CRT itself, which I don't know much about, I think learning from any side about how those lives are affected, and the history of the country, is exactly what well informed government official should be doing.
It like telling a programmer they should only ever have a terminal and a code editor open, and ban using a browser during office hours.
Unlike OP, however, it was less of an aimless drift and more of an aggressive, angry depression. Had another one at 20, when I realized that not getting into a FB internship would probably set me back permanently from my goals.
Now I'm 24, work at Amazon and widely considered a disappointment to people in OP's social circles. The pain has waned a bit, but the crisis is just constant now, like the roar of an engine on a long airplane flight in coach. Eventually the discomfort of the resting your head on the window and the anger you feel at the people with lie-flat seats paid for by Google and Facebook overpowers the rest.