racktash

Most of the world's problems aren't solvable by everyday people. Better to focus one's attention on oneself, work, family and community, where a difference might be made.

(Obviously it's also great if a person can donate to charity or something of that nature. But obsessively following world events will make you miserable and solve nothing.)

I agree that we often don't hear about the 'kept failing' path of, presumably, the majority of would-be writers.

For me, writing is a very frustrating drive...

I've been writing novellas and short stories fairly seriously for about thirteen years now. About a year ago, when evaluating what I want to do in life, I decided to finish a novel. I've started quite a few over the years, but they always peter out in the drafting phase, so I decided this time to approach the task with a "finish it no matter what, no matter how bad the finished product is" approach.

The trouble is – I still dream of getting published, of becoming a published novelist, despite my rational side knowing: (1) I'm not that good at writing, and (2) even if I were, it's very difficult to succeed (not just financially) as a writer.

This is why I say writing is frustrating. I can't really give it up – not the activity of writing itself, nor my unrealistic dream – and yet I know it's essentially a lost cause.

Thank you for the tips!

I agree regarding the usefulness of unpacking.

I've been trying (with only limited success) to get better at verbalising thoughts/opinions and so on. It sounds like you may have had more luck than me – may I ask what has worked for you?

I'm definitely somebody who likes time to think things over and let my conflicting thoughts resolve themselves.

I think in addition to this, though, I struggle to verbalise many of my thoughts and feelings no matter how long I'm given. I've always struggled with pair programming for this reason – I have a sort of gut instinct about many coding best practices, developed through years of experience, without always being able to efficiently summarise the whys.

I'm drawn by media featuring stuttering. One of my favourite novels, for example, is Black Swan Green by David Mitchell, a book about a 13-year-old boy growing up in 80s Britain and who suffers a stutter. It captures wonderfully the silent struggle, the desperate attempts to conceal a condition.

I'm not a stutterer myself, but expressing myself verbally has always been challenging, so I can empathise with at least some of the difficulties those who stutter face.

Being able to speak fluently and easily is precious.

I'm definitely no textual criticism expert, but I do have a book recommendation.

The Inner Citadel by Hadot is a great analysis of the Meditations. It explains extracts from the Meditations – such as references to certain people in Marcus's life – with facts we know about Marcus from other sources.

For me personally... While it could be an elaborate imitation, it would raise the question why Marcus espouses views that don't necessarily tie with Christian doctrine. Obviously something about the Meditations appealed to Christians of the time, but if they were inventing it whole cloth, they probably wouldn't have included only one reference to Christianity, which is arguably negative. (Book 2, chp3)

Epictetus has a wonderful quote. He is talking about moral / philosophical improvement specifically but I find it more broadly applicable when overly high expectations paralyse me from doing a thing:

"What then? Because I have no natural gifts, shall I on that account give up my discipline? Far be it from me! Epictetus will not be better than Socrates; but if only I am not worse, that suffices me. For I shall not be a Milo, either, and yet I do not neglect my body; nor a Croesus, and yet I do not neglect my property; nor, in a word, is there any other field in which we give up the appropriate discipline merely from despair of attaining the highest."

You definitely aren't alone in feeling like this. For what little it's worth, hang tight and I hope things pick up for you. Life's a bit of a chaotic rollercoaster at times, and these last few years that has been dialled up to 11, but we are stronger than we think we are.

After a while, a lot of software development starts to look the same, at least if you aren't working in cutting edge tech. I still love software, but mostly I only write code for work now. In my spare time, I do other challenging hobbies that are quite divorced from software (like fiction writing). I feel this keeps me balanced and avoids my getting sick of software.

The public political slogans on both sides were dominated by economic arguments.

In the case of the Remain side, this was a concrete, measurable benefit that could be pointed to – a very powerful argument in favour of staying. On the Leave side, I believe the economic arguments/claims made were mostly in reaction to the Remain claims: trying to weaken the Remain side's economic claims with their own rebuttals as it were.

I make NO claims, either way, as to who is "right" about the economic argument – I have my own opinion, already stated, but I am just not clever enough or well read enough to KNOW the answer to such a complex question.

My point in this whole thing is that I don't think the majority of everyday people who voted Leave were motivated by the economic claims. A few, no doubt, were convinced by the "extra money for XXX" claims, but I think the far stronger concern was political sovereignty and independence.

I voted Remain thinking it made economic sense. But I was also pro-Remain because I liked the idea of a closely integrated (politically) Europe. A Europe with a standard set of human rights, a common citizenship and so on. Not everybody shared this vision (clearly), and not because they are simpletons who expected a new golden age on the event of leaving.

I voted Remain in the referendum and my stance on the matter hasn't changed. To me, it always made sense to be part of the EU. I say this up front in case what I say next is read in the wrong light.

I get wary when so many people, or so it seems to me, delight in the economic situation Britain is in, pointing out how duped the sad saps that voted Brexit must now be feeling.

But from the Brexit voters I've talked to, the whole point was always political independence. When Ireland fought to be independent of the UK, to take but one example, pointing out the economic negative effects is to miss the point of seeking independence completely. I know the situation between the UK and EU is different to that of the UK and Ireland of old. My point is that the UK has strong, old political traditions that some felt, rightly or wrongly, were being interfered with by foreign political institutions.

I used to think this way about prose too, but a book called "First You Write a Sentence" by Moran changed my assumption on this one. As Moran points out, the "sound" of writing conveys meaning in itself. A little flourish, so long as it's not distracting, can improve the clarity of a sentence and make it more pleasant to read.

I'm a similar age to the poster. This December, I've been doing a lot of thinking (and writing, in order to try to clarify things a bit) about how I want 2023 and the next few years to go.

I've asked myself these three broad questions:

1. What would my ideal future look like? Where would I like to be, in terms of relationships, career, hobbies and so on.

2. What does the opposite of (1) look like? If I really let things go, if I truly failed at life and screwed everything up, what would my life be like?

3. What 8 goals, challenging but doable, could I complete this year that would get me closer to (1)? These 8 goals must be measurable and be bound by a deadline.

I can't say whether or not this will deliver results, but I have found it quite motivating to ponder all this carefully.

Thankfully there are much more interesting and positive ways to get over the fear of death than drugs: philosophy (existentialism etc.), humanistic psychology, religion (this one didn't work for me, but it seems to work for many people), literature.

I genuinely don't mean this to sound negative, or defeatist – sometimes nuance is difficult to convey in plain text.

I think giving up a dream can sometimes be the best choice, the sensible choice. Some dreams just aren't going to work out (I say this from personal experience), and giving up on them allows you to move on to focus on other things that might work better.

Take care of yourself and I wish you the best for the future.

Hodges's book is excellent – delightfully thorough and detailed.

After finishing it (I read it after watching the movie) I was rather shocked at just how many liberties the film had taken. I'm not against a historical movie tweaking things here and there for the sake of drama, but The Imitation Game totally mischaracterised almost everything about Turing and his work in my opinion. I guess, to the movie's credit, it did make me want to learn more about Turing.

My favourite nonfiction read of the year was a biography of Wittgenstein by Ray Monk called The Duty of Genius. Absolutely enthralling read about a really fascinating person. I find Wittgenstein's own writings almost impenetrable, but I feel I got to know and love the man, and his way of thinking, in this work.

For fiction, I read almost all Chaim Potok's novels this year and he has become my favourite author. If anybody has a deep interest in religion, and how it interacts with the secular world, and how one is to reconcile the two, I heartily recommend Potok.

> Do you mean something like Scotland going there own way?

Yes, exactly this – the four countries of the UK going their own way and the UK ceasing to be.

(It's my personal opinion – people will of course have their own take, and good reasons for having their views – that such a happening would be a devastating event.)

I think the handling of Covid-19 (and there plenty of varied, legitimate criticisms to be made about that) is definitely a UK-specific issue. Not that the mistakes made by the UK weren't also made by other governments, of course.

As for fears for the rest of Europe – I don't doubt that the rest of Europe has problems. My worries are confined to the UK because that's where I live. (To be clear, this isn't me saying I don't care about other countries. But there's only so many problems a person can concern themselves with.) I think the country could very well cease to exist unless we figure a lot of problems out.

The three reasons I listed are the ones that people keep citing. I actually suspect that the UK's problems are longer term and more fundamental. I don't think it's related to either party, either. The Conservative Party of the last few years has not been good for the country, but I'm not convinced Labour will be able to fix our deep, societal problems, either.

I genuinely fear for the UK. It's going to be a very different country in ten years, and I fear it will be a weaker, poorer and more divided one.

I don't know for sure what the main cause of our current problems is, but I know that it's not a single issue. Brexit, Covid-19 and the war with Russia – not one of these issues alone is the cause of our problems.

My hope for the country rests in the fact that it still has wonderful, tough, resourceful people in it, and that it has survived worse catastrophes than this in the past, and come out okay.

Ah, simpler times.

The photos really took me back to the early 90's and 00's, when I was a kid/teenager, happy to spend hours playing the same first-person shooters for hours, on the same maps, over and over again, with my nerdy friends from school. I'd love to go back for a day and relive those times.

If it actually came to that, he could just disable the videos/media feature.

I don't personally like Mr Musk, and I don't approve of how he has handled this takeover, but I wonder if some of those hurrying forth with negative predictions about every Twitter development are just saying what they hope happens. The blind praise is just as bad, of course.

(The 'some' people I am referring to isn't the parent commenter, btw. I'm referring to the news articles and (like the linked content) Twitter posts I see getting posted about this.)

I started making total conversion mods for Half-Life 2 when I was a young teenager – I made the levels, models, wrote the gameplay code and so on. I never really recommend game development to anybody, because it can be quite an exhausting hobby (not to mention career), with a high cost and low reward ratio (note: in my experience!), but it sure taught me a lot about realistic project planning, budgeting the cost of features and so on.

This is probably the only death of a public figure that has really hit me hard. The Queen was a constant all of my life, all of my parents' lives and, indeed, a good deal of my grandparents' lives. The comfort she could bring to many is not to be underestimated in my view. When Covid-19 was kicking off in the UK, and our lives were changing in ways we couldn't predict, I remember being immensely comforted by her speech.

For many, royalty is not a joke. In my view, the role of the Queen as a unifying and stabilising influence in the UK is invaluable. Has she been a perfect human being? Of course not, but her dedication to her duties has been inspiring to many including me.

Obviously this is just my opinion. Apologies if my answer seems vague or waffly – I think our ability to analyse these kinds of things with words is limited.

I think our personality and memories didn't prexist our birth, and they don't exist anymore once we die. However, I think we are something more than our body, memories, personality and mind. The analogy that makes most sense to me is the idea that the universe is a kind of actor, and people are characters it's playing. The universe takes the form of people, with memories and so on, and it will do so again after my body dies. So I don't think there's 'nothing' on either side of life.

Perhaps somebody can better word this if they have similar views. My skills at writing are too limited here.

I went through feeling like this when I was about 27. I felt like I had settled into a comfortable, but monotonous, way of life. Programming, my favourite thing to do then, had become challenging only because of problems created by things like application complexity, framework churn, software development fads etc.

What helped me was taking up new interests and hobbies, ones completely removed from software development, ones with a long history that would take a long time to 'master'. For me this was things like reading, writing and studying ancient philosophy.

I also found developing a kind of 'spirituality' – a word I would have considered dirty in my early twenties – essential to living contentedly in a reality that seems chaotic and meaningless, and accepting things like ageing and dying. For me, the writings and recordings of Alan Watts helped enormously here, but I find different people fill this hole with different things and people.

Where I work, we use it extensively for analysing problems and designing code. It's invaluable for communicating and collaborating on designs.

Merry Christmas! I've thoroughly enjoyed lurking at HN for the last year. Looking forward to another year of interesting articles!