Ask HN: How can I come to peace with the years I wasted on pointless things?
I am going to say many things and many of them may come off as insensitive and even hurtful, but do please read until the end. I focus a lot of my comments around John Carmack and WoW because you mentioned them multiple times and I personally see that as an indication that addressing your angst necessarily requires addressing these influences.<p>1. Your life experience has parallels with mine in terms aspiring to be proficient at my career from a young age: my personal view is that point of view was instilled into me by my parents as part of being a middle class family. It definitely had benefits and continues to do so, but my opinion today is that my parents should have tempered this point of view with concepts like the law of diminishing returns and the power law in an educational setting where graduating&#x2F;selecting into a more competitive school means more work for each additional percentage point improvement.<p>2. WoW captured the imagination and time of an entire generation, and many people feel exactly the way you do. There are many arguments as to why and what can be done about it, but those will not help you immediately at this moment. TL;DR you are not alone.<p>3. You did what you wanted to do at the time, and many people did not and still do not get that chance.<p>4. Hindsight is 20&#x2F;20, but getting to the point where something is in hindsight is not a guarantee. WoW is coming out with a new expansion (Dragonflight) soon as well as relaunching an older expansion (Wrath of the Lich King). However, you&#x27;ve decided that you have other priorities at the moment and you&#x27;ve decided to focus on them. TL;DR you came to a realization, and you decided to move in a different direction.<p>5. I agree that having that early start coding as kid would definitely be an advantage. However, Is that early start to coding a necessary precondition to becoming a good software engineer? Yes, there are more distractions today, but there are also resources available to you today that weren&#x27;t available during his childhood.<p>6. In contrast to 5, suppose that the early childhood start at coding is a necessary precondition to being a good software engineer. Is it the end of the world for you if you cannot be a good software engineer?<p>7. Did John Carmack have mental health problems, serious financial hardships, etc on his path towards becoming who he is today? If he did not, then how likely would it have been for him to become who he is today if he had those problems in his life? TL;DR we do not pick our initial conditions &#x2F; spawn point as easily as it is to pick a character in WoW, and we cannot reroll characters.<p>8. What did spending all those hours WoW leave you with? You likely interacted with other people, played in a party or in raids, and maybe organized raids or assisted in guild management. You might also have used voice chat software to communicate with others. Those are useful skills and you built them without complaint and maybe also while having fun. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.wsj.com&#x2F;articles&#x2F;can-warcraft-game-skills-help-land-a-job-1407885660" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.wsj.com&#x2F;articles&#x2F;can-warcraft-game-skills-help-l...</a> - <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=8174480" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=8174480</a> . Every skill you build invests in your future, and I would argue that the lessons I learned when I was enjoying myself were the ones that stuck the most with the least deliberate effort.<p>9. This question is rhetorical one: what else do you have outside of the time you spent on WoW and social media? It is very easy to compress your life story into a number of milestones and influences because we are used to seeing other people do the same in interviews. I do it all the time. However, this compression is lossy: it throws out many other important influences and events that we should be thankful for.<p>10. Suppose being &quot;the next John Carmack&quot; was your absolute number one goal. Then, you realize 6, but you still have that fixation. What is the next best thing? What about being the giant on whose shoulders the next John Carmack stands on? No, you do not have to have children if you do not want to, but you can be mentor via things like Big Brother&#x2F;Sister&#x2F;Sibling mentorship programs, or informally mentoring and supporting a younger relative. TL;DR Even if you cannot be the one to fell the dragon, you can still be instrumental to helping the one who can.<p>The above list is incomplete given the time I can spend today.<p>I too have failed to be who I wanted to be: however, I am thankful for the role of my faith, my family, my friends, my knowledge, my elixir, and the ittehbittehkittehcommitteh in being who I am today.