My people, my people! We should have a (digital) support group. You've just described me perfectly, even to the point of compulsively investigate people's age. I know that feeling in the back of your head, I often describe my state as :I hate myself every single waking moment, and then some more in my sleep. I think this is not that rare of a problem for our age, and generally, I disagree with the sentiment that optimize your life for happiness will solve it (it's just a different life goal. Nothing wrong with aiming for happiness as a goal, but it's not for me personally)
This is definitely not advice, consider this a commiserating post.
Ten years ago, I started learning to play Go (the board game). At the time, I was obsessed with the game, and I was very sad that I didn't get to know/ learn the game earlier. I wanted to play Go professionally, and I thought that it was too late for me to ever be one of the top players in the world (context: I was 16 at the time, and to play Go professionally, you have to be really good. Most pro started playing when their age is in the single digit). 10 years passed by, and I'm not sure what changed, but that certainly doesn't seem to matter anymore. I still love the game, but now looking back, I don't feel dreadful that I didn't learn the game earlier. This might sound unrelated, but I'm sure that 10 years from now, we will look back and laugh at ourselves if we think this is too late to do X, Y or Z.
There are a saying (paraphrase by me) that goes along the line: when you're 20, you're mostly a product of your family, environment, upbringing, friends etc... but when you're 30, you're a product of yourself. That is to say that in our younger years, in a sense a lot of it comes down to "luck", you might stumble in something you like to do young enough that you get some success, got motivated, didn't waste time on video games (along with the usual notion of "luck" involving one's upbringing and family, obviously). Teenagers and young adults are mostly idiots, to no one fault, and only some of us were fortunate enough to skip that period. The world is choked full of distractions, and while I used to think that I have unlimited will power, I also thought that I was invulnerable, so well ...
Life is long, and one of the things I've realized is that almost no one runs full speed for their whole life. The few that do are probably thousands in a billion. I think it was Bill Gates that commented Jobs to be the rare one who has the fire his whole life. A lot of the people who are massively successful in their youth will slow down (it's stressful to be ambitious, after all). So well, if we want to catch up, I guess we already spent our shares of "relaxing time", and just have to look down and plow through things now. Just think about it as we doing things a bit backward. It's gonna work out fine (I hope!). We can't make up the last 10 years, and likely won't get to the top of the world. But I believe anything under that is still up for grab.
There are also the aspect that at least for me, it (work, ambition, success) is a really personal and emotional thing, and chance are our judgements right now are terrible (emotional == irrational) -- maybe a few years from now we would have realized that the "TV watching time" was us exhausting from work, and that we couldn't actually programming 14 hours a day anyway. Just to point out a seemingly irrational thing in your post, you're 26 now, and hoping that you would have started in earnest at ... 25 is a bit odd, isn't it? One year, while valuable, won't make that much of a difference.
Write your worry down. I don't know why, but as soon as I write things down, it feels like I'm taking it off my head. I guess now there is a reminder of my mistake on paper, and I don't have to constantly remind my self.
Also, booze helps, a bit of drunken state helps me slogging through side projects. Although extreme moderation is advised.
My email is in the profile, if you're looking for someone to commiserate from time to time ;)
> I disagree with the sentiment that optimize your life for happiness will solve it
I agree. I don't know how to say this without sounding completely pretentious, but it's kind of hard to talk about your innermost desires without any ego, so I guess here goes. All my life, in the back of my mind, I have had the ultimate goal of creating things that were better than anything else out there. Art? Games? Software? Music? It didn't — doesn't — really matter, as long as they would persist in history and influence other people. (Software is what I've chosen as my medium for the moment, but I expect it will change throughout my life.) While my day-to-day goals are obviously less lofty, this is the driving force behind my life and my career.
For me, to be happy with limited success and a more laid-back pace would be a kind of personal death.
Thank you for the long post. Some really great advice and observations, and I can relate to a lot of it for sure. "No one runs full speed for their whole life" is a great observation: many of the most prominent creators in the world only produced their best work during a fairly short span of time, and then languished shortly after. Maybe it's OK for that moment to come a little later. It can just be hard when it feels like everyone around you is hitting that peak at a younger age.
In regards to writing your worries down, I'm reminded of a recent This American Life story where they talked to a guy who created a website that would send you e-mails "from" your anxieties throughout the day[1]. Maybe it's worth a shot!
> as long as they would persist in history and influence other people.
This used to be my main motivator– the idea that you can transcend death through legacy– until I learned about the heat death of the Universe. Turns out that nothing actually persists indefinitely. The Universe itself will eventually die out.
Optimizing for legacy at the expense of living well day to day can be a miserable existence.
It's as valid a path as any other, but you'll want to really look in the mirror and say "I choose to struggle and suffer and be frustrated and anxious in pursuit of this legacy (that will eventually fade into nothingness anyway), out of all the other options available to me."
Anyway, it also sounds like you're framing the problem too tightly here– it's not like your only options are great, painful success and limited success. It's possible to work on something you care about AND sleep well at night.
Indeed I think the way to a good life and a good death can and should be broken down into living good days, weeks, months, years.
Also there's the whole thing about how... people don't create great things by TRYING to create great things, they tend to create great things by following their curiosity and then allowing an opportunity to consume them completely.
The best way to achieve greatness, in a paradoxical sense, is to stop worrying about it and focus goddamn hard on a problem you desperately want solved, over everything else.
"It can just be hard when it feels like everyone around you is hitting that peak at a younger age"
Just wanted to mention that that is simply not true. "Everyone around you" will probably not reach any sort of peak in their entire life and I bet for a lot of them, from their point of view, YOU are the one that reached that peak.
It's also curious that you say that "to be happy with limited success and a more laid-back pace would be a kind of personal death". So, even though you'd be happy that would be a personal death?. Think about that for a second and why you phrased it that way.
As for the original post, I was at some point where you are (to the point of panic attacks and worse) and I know it's not a nice place to be, but believe me it gets better, way better!. For me the answer wasn't to just try harder to "make it", it was realizing that all those ideas I had of what I wanted to be, success, etc were just wrong. I would even say now my definition of success is actually the inverse of what it was.
You have clearly stated though that what makes you happy would be to create things that "would persist in history and influence other people".
For some reason you then define something that would make you unhappy as 'happy' "For me, to be happy with limited success and a more laid-back pace would be a kind of personal death."
You mentioned you can't be happy with that, so it doesn't make sense to define that as happiness.
Optimising for happiness is going to be different for each person, and from your post, it seems it you should be optimising for creating things that will persist in history and influence people, because that is what you have mentioned will make you happy.
This is definitely not advice, consider this a commiserating post.
Ten years ago, I started learning to play Go (the board game). At the time, I was obsessed with the game, and I was very sad that I didn't get to know/ learn the game earlier. I wanted to play Go professionally, and I thought that it was too late for me to ever be one of the top players in the world (context: I was 16 at the time, and to play Go professionally, you have to be really good. Most pro started playing when their age is in the single digit). 10 years passed by, and I'm not sure what changed, but that certainly doesn't seem to matter anymore. I still love the game, but now looking back, I don't feel dreadful that I didn't learn the game earlier. This might sound unrelated, but I'm sure that 10 years from now, we will look back and laugh at ourselves if we think this is too late to do X, Y or Z.
There are a saying (paraphrase by me) that goes along the line: when you're 20, you're mostly a product of your family, environment, upbringing, friends etc... but when you're 30, you're a product of yourself. That is to say that in our younger years, in a sense a lot of it comes down to "luck", you might stumble in something you like to do young enough that you get some success, got motivated, didn't waste time on video games (along with the usual notion of "luck" involving one's upbringing and family, obviously). Teenagers and young adults are mostly idiots, to no one fault, and only some of us were fortunate enough to skip that period. The world is choked full of distractions, and while I used to think that I have unlimited will power, I also thought that I was invulnerable, so well ...
Life is long, and one of the things I've realized is that almost no one runs full speed for their whole life. The few that do are probably thousands in a billion. I think it was Bill Gates that commented Jobs to be the rare one who has the fire his whole life. A lot of the people who are massively successful in their youth will slow down (it's stressful to be ambitious, after all). So well, if we want to catch up, I guess we already spent our shares of "relaxing time", and just have to look down and plow through things now. Just think about it as we doing things a bit backward. It's gonna work out fine (I hope!). We can't make up the last 10 years, and likely won't get to the top of the world. But I believe anything under that is still up for grab.
There are also the aspect that at least for me, it (work, ambition, success) is a really personal and emotional thing, and chance are our judgements right now are terrible (emotional == irrational) -- maybe a few years from now we would have realized that the "TV watching time" was us exhausting from work, and that we couldn't actually programming 14 hours a day anyway. Just to point out a seemingly irrational thing in your post, you're 26 now, and hoping that you would have started in earnest at ... 25 is a bit odd, isn't it? One year, while valuable, won't make that much of a difference.
Write your worry down. I don't know why, but as soon as I write things down, it feels like I'm taking it off my head. I guess now there is a reminder of my mistake on paper, and I don't have to constantly remind my self.
Also, booze helps, a bit of drunken state helps me slogging through side projects. Although extreme moderation is advised.
My email is in the profile, if you're looking for someone to commiserate from time to time ;)