I’ll go first…after 10 years of speculating in the market (read: gambling in high risk assets) I realized I shouldn’t ever touch a brokerage account in my lifetime. A monkey would have made better choices than I did. Greed has altered the course of life many times over. I am at an age where I may recover from my actions over the decades, but it has taken its toll. I am frugal and have a good head on me, but having such impulsivity in financial instruments was not how I envisioned my adulthood. Its a bitter pill to swallow, since money is livelihood of my family, but I need to “invest” all I have into relationships, meaningful moments, and fulfilling hobbies.
It’s easy to do when we’re all surrounded constantly by the paradox of money meaning nothing at all, but also the only material thing that dictates the action and activity of everything past and future
Biggest Pill I’ve had to swallow is that no matter much I love programming and will continue my computer hobbies for life. I will never make a profession out of it. I’m slowly coping with the fact that all my work will ultimately influence very nearly nothing at all…
On the other hand I have found a lot of people who turn the hobby they love into a business and it ruins the joy they found in their hobby.
I’m not here to influence things. I was in the thick of it for a bit, but I’m here now.
I love coding. I get to do it for money. It allows me a nice little apartment in a nice environment and with my wife chipping in her half we’re a little insulated from financial strife. A little.
That’s it. I code, I eat food and live with a beautiful girl who seems to care for me, and we occasionally get to go see family or a strange new place. I’m flying as close to the sun as I dare.
Find peace in your existence and enjoy what you’re doing, whether programming is the bread or it’s the butter. It’s all a means to an end of doing something you love for what little time we have here.
I feel you. I think about how intangible code is and how quickly that will fade from existence… It’s heavy, to say the least. And yet the challenge ever calls me to solve a problem with ones and zeroes.
I built a business with my code, and it helps save/improve hundreds of thousands of lives around the world. I don’t want to doxx myself so won’t give any further info.
Just because it’s intangible, your code can still potentially have a huge amount of value.
I agree. The impact can be real, and that’s the case for my coding job too, maybe to a lesser extent than yours. A lot of days I think I have my dream job. But still, digital data isn’t like a Roman ruin or something. It will be gone in 1000 years. Just wild to think about, and sometimes I feel like that fact matters.