I know I’ll never be able to take martial arts; I have made peace with that.
I know I will never be an amazing athlete; I have made peace with that as well.
Same with my body composition: I will never be rail-thin, I will never “fit” into most “fun” cars even when I finish my weight loss journey, I will never be the kind of guy who can fit into a Medium of anything clothing-wise. I have made peace with all of this.
But what of my dreams of homeownership? If this apartment is the best I will have, then knowing that at least lets me cherish it properly and redirect those savings toward a more immediate improvement in life.
What of my dreams to find a partner? If I’m going to spend my life single and unwed, then I’d at least like to know so I can make peace with that reality and focus my energy on friendships rather than dating.
Yet if I knew whether something was guaranteed, I would not take the risks to achieve it. I wouldn’t meet new people and learn more about my own flaws or strengths in pursuit of a relationship. I wouldn’t have evolved my tastes in food or drink, diversifying away from sugar-laden American foods in huge portions towards curries, and cocktails, and rice, and stir fry, and gyros, and even - dare I confess - salads.
Perhaps I need to make peace with the fact that some dreams are worth fighting for until the bitter end, never knowing if they’re achievable or not.
The article is a bit off base IMHO. That guy could go snowboarding, he just thinks the warning he got creates a risk that isn't worth it. It sounds to me he hasn't even thought much about risk mitigation, or alternatives, etc. So really he's talking about letting go of a non serious fantasy that he has. 'Dream' is a bit of a wishy washy term... you could call that fantasy a dream, but you could also call things you are really determined to achieve a dream also. As long as something is possible, then its potentially achievable. Sometimes you have to go down paths where things only "might" be possible before really knowing if it is actually achievable. If things are important to you, go down "might be possible" paths unless the pursuit of that is detrimental in other significant ways.
I’m curious why you say you know some of those things will never happen. It’s certainly possible that if you’re extremely tall you probably won’t fit comfortably in some sports cars. And there are some medical conditions that preclude any kind of participation in martial arts.
But barring those, is it possible you don’t know those things but are instead conceding them?
Nope, it’s a definite never for those ones I listed for a combination of the very reasons you specified. Medical reasons and/or basic physics of height.
I could barely get in or out of the original tesla roadster. I had to go out on my hands. Was fun to drive. My feet just didn't make it out the door sills sideways. Same thing for the back of a jeep cherokee in the late 90s.
I'm 6'2" and have size 13 feet. I'm not making my shoulder, hips, or feet smaller without a hammer.
Just a gentle reminder: This point of view is sometimes applicable and valuable, but it is extremely easy to say, and statistically it is almost always an oversimplification.
I read the article and fight with this from a different angle.
My son was diagnosed with cancer at 3, then during chemo it became abundantly clear that he had far more severe autism than we originally thought. Could have been made worse by the chemo and trauma; no real way to know.
Now my wife and I have had to give up all the dreams we had for when I retired from the military. A few good moves means that I actually retired at 40, though more modestly than I planned. But we will forever be taking care of him.
We have to distinguish "our" dreams from, let's say, cultural ones. A lot of what we want, what we perceive as living a full life, having fun and so on comes from culture (and increasingly in the last decades/centuries, with mass media).
Besides that, we can't achieve everything, we could not be everywhere when something interesting happens there, at the very least because a lot of those things happened in the past, or do everything because physical condition, economics, or extra conditions (i.e. being an astronaut).
So you draw lines. This is what I can do, I can go, I can be. You may push boundaries, but in the end it will always be more things outside than inside. And try to be the best on what matters on those boundaries.
> A lot of what we want, what we perceive as living a full life, having fun and so on comes from culture (and increasingly in the last decades/centuries, with mass media).
This is very important. I didn't figure it out until late in life, and wasted a lot of effort and money that could have been better spent.
When you want something ask yourself "why", then ask yourself "why" about your answer as well. Keep doing that until you hit bottom and its usually something like "so other people will think more highly of me."
Whenever you find yourself with "impressing others" as a motivation, ignore it. You'll learn to care less about what others think about you when you realize how seldom they do.
my son recently got into skateboarding which warmed my heart because i use to dream of being a pro-skater at his age. I dug out my old board and have gone to a few skateparks with him. Seeing a vert ramp was like seeing an old friend, i'm doing a lot of core and lower body workouts to see if I can get in a few more runs. There's one trick i've never been able to do and this is my last shot (I'm 50). After this summer, the cards will be on the table and, hopefully, I'll stop thinking about it hah.
I think I will always get more fulfillment from the rush of leaving work a bit early on a Friday afternoon, knowing I have a couple of plans for the weekend but not being too busy, picking up a treat for my wife and I on the way home, when the weather is good (cool and crisp or partly sunny and dry), and the city is alive; I will get more satisfaction from that feeling than any "dream" I could imagine.
> And yet, somehow, the more years go by, the more rarely I watch snowboarding videos.
I'd argue that snowboarding wasn't author's "dream" to begin with. I think it's reductive and unfair to compare your "oh it would be cool to do that" with someone else's actual dream: as in, a passion they pour their life and soul into. Being great at anything takes much more than a passing "it would be neat to be able to do X."
And achieving a dream (say, competing at the Olympics) is a lot less glamorous than a casual tourist might imagine.
I somewhat agree, but I think a person's "passion" is more concrete than their "dream". A dream is not necessarily something being actively progressed.
Athletes, artists, entrepreneurs say "this has been my dream" all the time when achieving something superlative. But you qualified with "necessarily" so I guess technically you're correct, but it would be kinda' weird if someone told me that "X is their dream" and never did anything about it, especially if it's relatively achievable (i.e. not "going to Mars" or something).
Getting decent at snowboarding isn't some crazy goal (and you need to be decent before you're good, or great). I started skiing late in life and I try to go a few times a season to keep up with it. I'm by no means good, but slowly getting better.
Why would it be weird? My grandmother dreamed of being a school teacher, never did it, and talked about it until she died. The closest she ever got was teaching Sunday School for a few months.
It's common to have a dream and do nothing concrete about it. That's part of why we call it a dream. Sometimes it's less about the thing itself and more about the unfulfilled and unrealistic expectation.
About your second point, the site guidelines suggest assuming good faith and responding to the strongest possible version of what someone has written. I would interpret that to mean here that "they had no trouble understanding the post but had reservations about it, which felt important to them".
I will also add that I feel characterizing what they have written as nitpicking feels rude and uncharitable.
Personally I appreciated the parent comment because although I enjoyed the article, it didn't completely sit well with me, and the comment helped to clarify why. There are some activities in my life that I've poured years of blood, sweat, and tears into, and I'm realizing as I get older that my goals and dreams with regard to this category of work will probably never be realized. This feels a bit different to the snowboarding narrative, which for all I know may have been chosen not because the writer hasn't been in a situation like mine, but because it's easier to digest and doesn't require a level of vulnerability that would muddy the light-hearted tone of the post.
In any event, I don't feel your hostility is fair or warranted here
My interpretation of the article was the the author really was really into sbowboarding. But 15 years ago. Where now they talk about it with an amount of distance that it really isn't their dream anymore. Because it can't be.
From the article: "I’ll probably never be a snowboarder at all [...] I’d love to take snowboarding lessons." It doesn't seem like he even snowboarded a day in his life.
One of the best lessons I've learned was that the happiest I've been (so far) was a time when I was dirt poor, while chasing my dream that everyone assured me ends in poverty.
Things have changed, but it takes some of the financial anxiety away when I remember that I would still give up everything to go back to that time.
The trick is to widen the scope of what you means.
If it means, us and we, then we are pulling 1080s. The dreams become what we can achieve. When anyone broke the 2hr marathon, we were happy for us. We did it, we landed on the moon. We ran a 4 minute mile or summited Everest w/o oxygen. Dreams are a dance and we have to figure out how to include ourselves and others dynamically.
Is this mindset why people like watching sports so much? I’ve never understood it, really. You’re not playing, exercising, practicing, getting injured, losing, or winning, nor are you getting paid, so … why care?
I could just be an asshole but if we go to Mars tomorrow, I’ll go “ok that was cool” and then go to the grocery store, cook dinner, go to bed, and go to work tomorrow. It just doesn’t matter. I am not we and neither are you (unless you go to Mars or play in the NFL, then you’re definitely allowed to feel “our” accomplishments).
Edit: I almost feel that this mindset is a bad thing for the world. Think of the average Joe (like me) who isn’t capable of building a smartphone. Yet I can buy one for a few hundred bucks. I shouldn’t feel proud of “our” invention, should I? No, some really smart, hardworking people have worked for decades to bring this to my pocket. I should be inspired to work harder and learn a such craft or skill, not go “man, we’re so smart”, because I didn’t help build it. I just bought it … it’s the Joe Rogan pyramids standup bit.
This is in the context of dreams and celebrating the accomplishment as an achievement in and of itself. I was not advocating that you should celebrate every win as your own. My comment was directed toward the voice in the article.
That term is honestly used way too often on HN for my tastes. But then as well, I wouldn't like to identify with everything humanity has ever done. Especially if I know that I have only a tenuous connection (or no connection at all) to the people who did it.
Having kids really helps with making peace with unlived dreams. You simply are too tired to even think about those dreams. You are lucky if you can get one night of good sleep —- and trust me a good sleep when you have kids is different from a good sleep before that.
Maybe you're there already, but there's a transition that happens when your kids become (quite suddenly and strangely unexpectedly) adolescents.
And then many of us have found ourselves staring at the past 15 years wondering where it all went.
There's a deep meaning to be found in comforting a crying child in the night, changing their diaper, preparing their meals, etc. Can be a total grind, fatiguing, but you're living an immanent moment and caring for the being that depends on you fully.
Being a parent to a teenager or young adult becomes something else entirely, and then all the self-needs you put pause on can come bubbling back in ways that can be difficult to deal with.
When do you think the transition happens? For me (I never had very good relationship with my parents) it started from maybe Junior high school but really picked up around sophomore Senior high school when I got completely confused about life (TBF at 40+ still a bit confused).
Does that "deep meaning" come to you when you look back, or you felt it when it happened? I have to say I didn't find much meaning in all that grinding, guess that's because I'm never good with human-beings, so I'm frustrated by little tornadoes. My son is almost 6 now so there is some meaning to be found when we do things altogether, but frankly we share very few hobbies and such so it's mostly like throwing darts and see which one sticks.
But all in all, I guess I'm just the kind of person who are not good with persons and who are totally fine to be left alone. I don't even know why I get married -- guess it's just something that everyone does so I did it anyway. Hell, I've been confused by myself since high school and have never truly gotten out of that confusion.
> Sitting and thinking for 10 minutes about snowboarding when your knees are blown out is 10 minutes you could have used differently.
10 minutes doesnt sound like much of a loss, even if you do it every day. Maybe it helps you empathize with athletes, or if you get nostalgic/wistful, it helps you explore the range of emotions, which is fine as long as you don't get stuck with them.
Sure, I was being extreme. The danger is getting stuck, like in “Glory Days” by Springsteen, or Brando in “On the Waterfront.” People especially get stuck on their high school years.
As someone that has done snowboarding and skying in Central Europe, the paradise of snowboarders and have been friend of profesionals, you probably don't want to be one of them.
It is one thing to go carving whenever you want, where you want because you have a good job outside it. Another totally different thing is spending all your time training. Most people will hate that.
Everybody wants to be a tennis player when they see one player raising the cup and earning millions. But a professional player spends most of her life doing extremely boring things. And only a very minority get enough money to live from the sport.
I would love to be a star ship captain in a universe with faster than light travel. Or a surgeon. But you know actual life is good and I do enjoy watching DS9 with my young adult son, Benjamin. And reading about all the other cool things. It is better to live an imperfect experience than just wish for an ideal imagined experience. And better to act wrongly than to be right but do nothing.
Also, a lot of people have dreams about a perfect idealized version of something instead of the reality. If they actually got to experience the reality they might find that they no longer hold that dream as they originally knew it.
Reading this somewhere in the Atlantic on a sailboat by myself. Nodding yes. A few days from now I will be at home after an almost 2 year journey of learning what sailboat ownership. I still can’t tell if I like the sailboat life. I’m going decide in the fall of 27 If I really want a sailboat. I had to try it or give up the dream. Maybe I’ll go back to my dream of running a small run manufacturer if facility.
This is so true. A few years ago I was volunteering at a running race that’s very hard to get into and many people have as a life dream. I found it kind of amusing how many people were having pity parties in the latter stages of the race despite having dreamed of getting into it for years, maybe decades.
If (for any reason) we know that dreams cannot be achieved, there is a clear cut. And while it might take time to accept the situation, this realization is Stoic/Zen.
It is way harder if there is a chance, we try, yet fail. When do we keep trying, and how do we do so without losing hope piece by piece? It might be even harder when the dream is not something like "win a gold medal in snowboarding", "build a unicorn startup" or "publish a bestseller". But it is in the line of having kids, or being healthy, or other things that a lot of people take for granted.
I had the same mindset about wanting to be good at a lot of things, working on myself, not "wasting time", but now in my mid thirties I figured that if I really wanted to do something, I'd be actually doing it, and a lot of these goals boil down to "it would be cool if I was good at X", and aren't actually things I care about.
Actually I think poorly imagined dreams is a big problem.
People who have poorly imagined dreams are likely to screw up their working life and their retirement too.
There is more that you can pull off during your working years. As a matter of fact, you SHOULD. instead of sitting in front of the tv this weekend, go somewhere.
And in retirement, there is probably less you can pull off unless you focus and make it your job. You should do vigorous cardio, do strength training, connect with people more, not less. and make a good healthy retirement your job.
This article reminded me of this game called "Before your eyes" that is sort of tackling this same theme of unlived dreams. That game helped me realized that I will definitely not achieve all of my dreams but it also gave me the power to pursue them anyway.
I love that game. It's a 1-2h hour long game that I recommend everyone to play (and it's kinda a unique game that use your blinking as a game mechanic)
> As I always say - do what you will regret NOT doing once you are old.
IMO whether or not this is good for self or society depends a lot on what you value and thus think you will regret. On its own it is neither positive or negative and has to be combined with a lot of self-reflection and an innate sense of goodness to be useful.
Regret minimization is an oft-cited mantra among a lot of the current crop of centibillionaires who, if decency still matters in the future, will be viewed by society as even worse versions of gilded age villains.
And there is no evidence that this strategy helps those people on the personal development side when we remove society's view of them from the picture. You don't have to look at them too deeply to see that getting more than everything they wanted as a younger person never filled the void they have that keeps them wanting ever more regardless of how much damage they have to do in the process.
If you're a normal human being and what you will regret is not spending more time with loved ones and such, then yeah that's a great thing to focus on, I wish I had focused on it more when I was younger. If you're a human Hungry Ghost whose primary regret will be dying without the biggest number next to your name, well, maybe regret minimization isn't quite as helpful.
I can see how my advice could be read the wrong way in this post-shame world.
No, I do NOT mean "be an asshole if you feel like it".
I mean it more in the latter sense - take a vacation, go to Pompey. Say hello to the girl you like and see what happens. It's something you can do now, so later you don't replay it endlessly, wondering what would have been.
Also, no billionaire right in the head will be bemoaning not having more billions while on their deathbed.
Appropos of nothing, snowboarding is so unbelievably fun once you’re past the immediate beginner phase of painfully flip-flopping down a slope, that it’s very reasonable to be a tad angry at not being able to live that dream.
“I saw my life branching out before me like the green fig tree in the story. From the tip of every branch, like a fat purple fig, a wonderful future beckoned and winked. One fig was a husband and a happy home and children, and another fig was a famous poet and another fig was a brilliant professor, and another fig was Ee Gee, the amazing editor, and another fig was Europe and Africa and South America, and another fig was Constantin and Socrates and Attila and a pack of other lovers with queer names and offbeat professions, and another fig was an Olympic lady crew champion, and beyond and above these figs were many more figs I couldn't quite make out. I saw myself sitting in the crotch of this fig tree, starving to death, just because I couldn't make up my mind which of the figs I would choose. I wanted each and every one of them, but choosing one meant losing all the rest, and, as I sat there, unable to decide, the figs began to wrinkle and go black, and, one by one, they plopped to the ground at my feet.”
One of my favorite quotes by Sylvia Plath from the Bell Jar.
this is so true, its hard to make a decision when that actually means you're losing a bunch of other possibilities. so no-decision becomes a decision and then you're left with nothing.
Ime with sports and injuries. Doctors say alot of things, unless they are sports doctors that work with you to get back to sports or athletic them selves, they just give useless generic advice.
I lost a year becasue of doctors just telling me to rest for a constant pain I had.
Author should just go learn to snowboard. There's athletes out there competing with torn acls.
IME sports doctors and physios have incentives aligned with returning to high functionality. I think this causes them to clinically converge on effective treatments. It’s also possible that they have clientele who are willing to put in the work to recover.
Regardless, if you’re optimizing for outcomes this is the way.
> You know what else I’d like to do besides becoming a great snowboarder? I want to learn kung fu. I’d also love to be a lot better at video games, get my Yu-Gi-Oh! hobby back on, and become at least fluent enough for everyday conversation in oh, I don’t know, eight more languages.
I think this sort of underplays the feeling of "lives unlived, paths not taken" that everyone gets hit with. Just flattens the whole thing that had been building up to that point, instead of allowing it to open up further.
There is an analogy to be made between the space of human possibility and the space of possible Turing machines: in an unconstrained machine everything is possible and nothing is probable. If you accept constraints (e.g. the shape of a language) then most things become impossible but some things become probable. That is you gain access to some space and lose access to other space. It's a very fundamental trade-off and it's foolish to worry about it too much, especially considering that there is always some level of zoom where every hero, every winner of every game, is irrelevant.
Indeed the underlying insight that our lives are arbitrarily small and irrelevant, (yes, even the greatest titans of politics, tech, science and art), that drives the tech-elite long-now accelerationist ideal. Every life is characterized by [trade-offs + luck] and none of them have any meaning unless we get through the Great Filter. (Sure, this belief is mostly a post hoc rationalization to just do what you wanted in the first place, but I appreciate the attempt to paper over the naked self-interest.)
Making peace with the lived ones might be harder. Chasing the startup dream ended in bitterness, disappointment and debt. It forever damaged my marriage and my mental health. Be careful what you wish for.
Have you thought about absolutely monster knee braces? And then daily squats. They worked for me. Unfortunately now it’s my neck that’s trying to paralyze me, which would be such a not fun outcome.
You can very likely rehab your knees. Single-leg touchdown squats completely eliminated some serious knee pain I was having with my barbell squats. Also reverse sled drags are a good one. Definitely see a sports/rehab physician or DPT, your family doctor or GP is just going to tell you to "not do that."
Having strong muscles around the joint won't fix a structural problem, but they definitely won't hurt.
When I tore my ACL doing bjj, I was surprised to see that some pro MMA fighters will continue to fight with a torn ACL. They double down on muscles to support the joint and postpone the loss of a year of competition to the reconstruction surgery.
As someone with less than stellar knees who skis a lot, ski/ride powder. It's way easier on the body and more fun too. And maybe skip the big jumps. You can definitely still ride big/steep enough mountains for a big adrenaline rush.
I struggled quite a lot with this. I want to do everything, learn everything thus I ended up mastering nothing.
I've learned to play few instruments in last four years so I can jam with people but I still feel it's not enough.
As I got older I started to value relationships much more and overall became a happier person.
But still the knowledge that I never be a skilled doctor, physicist, exceptional chef, biologist, blacksmith, economist, successful entrepreneur and many more will still somehow hunt me.
It’s the not-knowing that is the most haunting.
I know I’ll never be able to take martial arts; I have made peace with that.
I know I will never be an amazing athlete; I have made peace with that as well.
Same with my body composition: I will never be rail-thin, I will never “fit” into most “fun” cars even when I finish my weight loss journey, I will never be the kind of guy who can fit into a Medium of anything clothing-wise. I have made peace with all of this.
But what of my dreams of homeownership? If this apartment is the best I will have, then knowing that at least lets me cherish it properly and redirect those savings toward a more immediate improvement in life.
What of my dreams to find a partner? If I’m going to spend my life single and unwed, then I’d at least like to know so I can make peace with that reality and focus my energy on friendships rather than dating.
Yet if I knew whether something was guaranteed, I would not take the risks to achieve it. I wouldn’t meet new people and learn more about my own flaws or strengths in pursuit of a relationship. I wouldn’t have evolved my tastes in food or drink, diversifying away from sugar-laden American foods in huge portions towards curries, and cocktails, and rice, and stir fry, and gyros, and even - dare I confess - salads.
Perhaps I need to make peace with the fact that some dreams are worth fighting for until the bitter end, never knowing if they’re achievable or not.
The article is a bit off base IMHO. That guy could go snowboarding, he just thinks the warning he got creates a risk that isn't worth it. It sounds to me he hasn't even thought much about risk mitigation, or alternatives, etc. So really he's talking about letting go of a non serious fantasy that he has. 'Dream' is a bit of a wishy washy term... you could call that fantasy a dream, but you could also call things you are really determined to achieve a dream also. As long as something is possible, then its potentially achievable. Sometimes you have to go down paths where things only "might" be possible before really knowing if it is actually achievable. If things are important to you, go down "might be possible" paths unless the pursuit of that is detrimental in other significant ways.
God, give me grace to accept with serenity
the things that cannot be changed,
courage to change the things
which should be changed,
and the wisdom to distinguish
the one from the other.
- Reinhold Niebuhr's Serenity prayer
I’m curious why you say you know some of those things will never happen. It’s certainly possible that if you’re extremely tall you probably won’t fit comfortably in some sports cars. And there are some medical conditions that preclude any kind of participation in martial arts.
But barring those, is it possible you don’t know those things but are instead conceding them?
Nope, it’s a definite never for those ones I listed for a combination of the very reasons you specified. Medical reasons and/or basic physics of height.
Jeremy Clarkson is a really tall guy.
Jeremy Clarkson in a F1 car https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jOh77dwAr54. There's a reason they had hammond try that.
I could barely get in or out of the original tesla roadster. I had to go out on my hands. Was fun to drive. My feet just didn't make it out the door sills sideways. Same thing for the back of a jeep cherokee in the late 90s.
I'm 6'2" and have size 13 feet. I'm not making my shoulder, hips, or feet smaller without a hammer.
Just a gentle reminder: This point of view is sometimes applicable and valuable, but it is extremely easy to say, and statistically it is almost always an oversimplification.
I read the article and fight with this from a different angle.
My son was diagnosed with cancer at 3, then during chemo it became abundantly clear that he had far more severe autism than we originally thought. Could have been made worse by the chemo and trauma; no real way to know.
Now my wife and I have had to give up all the dreams we had for when I retired from the military. A few good moves means that I actually retired at 40, though more modestly than I planned. But we will forever be taking care of him.
So we struggle with the unlived dreams often.
You will never know what could have been, only know that you were a wonderful parent for stepping up to such a challenge.
I'm in a similar boat. I had a startup, connections, was featured in the right places. I got married, and my wife had complications.
6 weeks in the NICU, wife's health has only gone down hill since. Now I'm running between programs for special need for my twins.
From time to time, I struggle with my dreams, but I'm also pretty good at lying to myself. I still manage to get things done to advance my dreams.
If you want to chat I'd be happy to reach out (I see the email in your profile).
I'm trying my hand at a startup right now, just to see if I can make a go of it.
These kind of articles remind me of an article in Polish I read few years ago: "Millennials are a generation that has fallen into the trap of constant self-development" It helped me to deal with my own unrealistic and unrealized dreams/aspirations/etc. Here's a version in English done by Google Translate https://archive.org/details/millennials-are-a-generation-tha... The original article in Polish: https://weekend.gazeta.pl/weekend/7,177344,30226401,milenial...
We have to distinguish "our" dreams from, let's say, cultural ones. A lot of what we want, what we perceive as living a full life, having fun and so on comes from culture (and increasingly in the last decades/centuries, with mass media).
Besides that, we can't achieve everything, we could not be everywhere when something interesting happens there, at the very least because a lot of those things happened in the past, or do everything because physical condition, economics, or extra conditions (i.e. being an astronaut).
So you draw lines. This is what I can do, I can go, I can be. You may push boundaries, but in the end it will always be more things outside than inside. And try to be the best on what matters on those boundaries.
> A lot of what we want, what we perceive as living a full life, having fun and so on comes from culture (and increasingly in the last decades/centuries, with mass media).
This is very important. I didn't figure it out until late in life, and wasted a lot of effort and money that could have been better spent.
When you want something ask yourself "why", then ask yourself "why" about your answer as well. Keep doing that until you hit bottom and its usually something like "so other people will think more highly of me."
Whenever you find yourself with "impressing others" as a motivation, ignore it. You'll learn to care less about what others think about you when you realize how seldom they do.
And don't forget, that sometimes day dreaming about going to space, might be more fun, than actually going. It's not like you can touch it anyways.
My point is: Remember to enjoy your dreams. And 99% of the time let them be just that: "dreams".
my son recently got into skateboarding which warmed my heart because i use to dream of being a pro-skater at his age. I dug out my old board and have gone to a few skateparks with him. Seeing a vert ramp was like seeing an old friend, i'm doing a lot of core and lower body workouts to see if I can get in a few more runs. There's one trick i've never been able to do and this is my last shot (I'm 50). After this summer, the cards will be on the table and, hopefully, I'll stop thinking about it hah.
I think I will always get more fulfillment from the rush of leaving work a bit early on a Friday afternoon, knowing I have a couple of plans for the weekend but not being too busy, picking up a treat for my wife and I on the way home, when the weather is good (cool and crisp or partly sunny and dry), and the city is alive; I will get more satisfaction from that feeling than any "dream" I could imagine.
> And yet, somehow, the more years go by, the more rarely I watch snowboarding videos.
I'd argue that snowboarding wasn't author's "dream" to begin with. I think it's reductive and unfair to compare your "oh it would be cool to do that" with someone else's actual dream: as in, a passion they pour their life and soul into. Being great at anything takes much more than a passing "it would be neat to be able to do X."
And achieving a dream (say, competing at the Olympics) is a lot less glamorous than a casual tourist might imagine.
I somewhat agree, but I think a person's "passion" is more concrete than their "dream". A dream is not necessarily something being actively progressed.
Athletes, artists, entrepreneurs say "this has been my dream" all the time when achieving something superlative. But you qualified with "necessarily" so I guess technically you're correct, but it would be kinda' weird if someone told me that "X is their dream" and never did anything about it, especially if it's relatively achievable (i.e. not "going to Mars" or something).
Getting decent at snowboarding isn't some crazy goal (and you need to be decent before you're good, or great). I started skiing late in life and I try to go a few times a season to keep up with it. I'm by no means good, but slowly getting better.
Why would it be weird? My grandmother dreamed of being a school teacher, never did it, and talked about it until she died. The closest she ever got was teaching Sunday School for a few months.
It's common to have a dream and do nothing concrete about it. That's part of why we call it a dream. Sometimes it's less about the thing itself and more about the unfulfilled and unrealistic expectation.
OK
Did that get in the way of you actually understanding the meaning of this post?
Do you think that nitpicking terminology when the meaning is clear is actually contributing anything?
About your second point, the site guidelines suggest assuming good faith and responding to the strongest possible version of what someone has written. I would interpret that to mean here that "they had no trouble understanding the post but had reservations about it, which felt important to them".
I will also add that I feel characterizing what they have written as nitpicking feels rude and uncharitable.
Personally I appreciated the parent comment because although I enjoyed the article, it didn't completely sit well with me, and the comment helped to clarify why. There are some activities in my life that I've poured years of blood, sweat, and tears into, and I'm realizing as I get older that my goals and dreams with regard to this category of work will probably never be realized. This feels a bit different to the snowboarding narrative, which for all I know may have been chosen not because the writer hasn't been in a situation like mine, but because it's easier to digest and doesn't require a level of vulnerability that would muddy the light-hearted tone of the post.
In any event, I don't feel your hostility is fair or warranted here
My interpretation of the article was the the author really was really into sbowboarding. But 15 years ago. Where now they talk about it with an amount of distance that it really isn't their dream anymore. Because it can't be.
From the article: "I’ll probably never be a snowboarder at all [...] I’d love to take snowboarding lessons." It doesn't seem like he even snowboarded a day in his life.
One of the best lessons I've learned was that the happiest I've been (so far) was a time when I was dirt poor, while chasing my dream that everyone assured me ends in poverty.
Things have changed, but it takes some of the financial anxiety away when I remember that I would still give up everything to go back to that time.
I find I there is anxiety either direction but have more engaging days when I am chasing something deeply.
The trick is to widen the scope of what you means.
If it means, us and we, then we are pulling 1080s. The dreams become what we can achieve. When anyone broke the 2hr marathon, we were happy for us. We did it, we landed on the moon. We ran a 4 minute mile or summited Everest w/o oxygen. Dreams are a dance and we have to figure out how to include ourselves and others dynamically.
Is this mindset why people like watching sports so much? I’ve never understood it, really. You’re not playing, exercising, practicing, getting injured, losing, or winning, nor are you getting paid, so … why care?
I could just be an asshole but if we go to Mars tomorrow, I’ll go “ok that was cool” and then go to the grocery store, cook dinner, go to bed, and go to work tomorrow. It just doesn’t matter. I am not we and neither are you (unless you go to Mars or play in the NFL, then you’re definitely allowed to feel “our” accomplishments).
Edit: I almost feel that this mindset is a bad thing for the world. Think of the average Joe (like me) who isn’t capable of building a smartphone. Yet I can buy one for a few hundred bucks. I shouldn’t feel proud of “our” invention, should I? No, some really smart, hardworking people have worked for decades to bring this to my pocket. I should be inspired to work harder and learn a such craft or skill, not go “man, we’re so smart”, because I didn’t help build it. I just bought it … it’s the Joe Rogan pyramids standup bit.
This is in the context of dreams and celebrating the accomplishment as an achievement in and of itself. I was not advocating that you should celebrate every win as your own. My comment was directed toward the voice in the article.
I don't know, I'd rather not identify with my country too much if it does things I deeply disapprove of but can't change.
By that logic, all Americans would be Trump.
I believe they meant humanity.
That term is honestly used way too often on HN for my tastes. But then as well, I wouldn't like to identify with everything humanity has ever done. Especially if I know that I have only a tenuous connection (or no connection at all) to the people who did it.
Having kids really helps with making peace with unlived dreams. You simply are too tired to even think about those dreams. You are lucky if you can get one night of good sleep —- and trust me a good sleep when you have kids is different from a good sleep before that.
Maybe you're there already, but there's a transition that happens when your kids become (quite suddenly and strangely unexpectedly) adolescents.
And then many of us have found ourselves staring at the past 15 years wondering where it all went.
There's a deep meaning to be found in comforting a crying child in the night, changing their diaper, preparing their meals, etc. Can be a total grind, fatiguing, but you're living an immanent moment and caring for the being that depends on you fully.
Being a parent to a teenager or young adult becomes something else entirely, and then all the self-needs you put pause on can come bubbling back in ways that can be difficult to deal with.
When do you think the transition happens? For me (I never had very good relationship with my parents) it started from maybe Junior high school but really picked up around sophomore Senior high school when I got completely confused about life (TBF at 40+ still a bit confused).
Does that "deep meaning" come to you when you look back, or you felt it when it happened? I have to say I didn't find much meaning in all that grinding, guess that's because I'm never good with human-beings, so I'm frustrated by little tornadoes. My son is almost 6 now so there is some meaning to be found when we do things altogether, but frankly we share very few hobbies and such so it's mostly like throwing darts and see which one sticks.
But all in all, I guess I'm just the kind of person who are not good with persons and who are totally fine to be left alone. I don't even know why I get married -- guess it's just something that everyone does so I did it anyway. Hell, I've been confused by myself since high school and have never truly gotten out of that confusion.
A life well-lived is really what we should all hope for. What that actually means varies by person.
Sitting and thinking for 10 minutes about snowboarding when your knees are blown out is 10 minutes you could have used differently.
Everyone has regrets but my attitude is: I can’t change the past, but I can change the future.
> Sitting and thinking for 10 minutes about snowboarding when your knees are blown out is 10 minutes you could have used differently.
10 minutes doesnt sound like much of a loss, even if you do it every day. Maybe it helps you empathize with athletes, or if you get nostalgic/wistful, it helps you explore the range of emotions, which is fine as long as you don't get stuck with them.
Sure, I was being extreme. The danger is getting stuck, like in “Glory Days” by Springsteen, or Brando in “On the Waterfront.” People especially get stuck on their high school years.
Thinking of happy memories sounds like a perfectly healthy activity to me, TBH
Sure. I won’t be 16 again and I look back fondly on that too.
IMO it’s a problem if doing that stops you from making new happy memories. Life is for living.
As someone that has done snowboarding and skying in Central Europe, the paradise of snowboarders and have been friend of profesionals, you probably don't want to be one of them.
It is one thing to go carving whenever you want, where you want because you have a good job outside it. Another totally different thing is spending all your time training. Most people will hate that.
Everybody wants to be a tennis player when they see one player raising the cup and earning millions. But a professional player spends most of her life doing extremely boring things. And only a very minority get enough money to live from the sport.
I would love to be a star ship captain in a universe with faster than light travel. Or a surgeon. But you know actual life is good and I do enjoy watching DS9 with my young adult son, Benjamin. And reading about all the other cool things. It is better to live an imperfect experience than just wish for an ideal imagined experience. And better to act wrongly than to be right but do nothing.
Did you name your son after the captain of DS9?
Not OP but my daughter and ex wife haven’t worked out the name I picked for my daughter was from an ST:TNG character. They’d kill me.
Lwaxana is very unusual. How haven't they guessed yet?
Definitely not that one!
Is it Tasha?
not Kes though right?
Kes is not a TNG character. Maybe Deanna?
I'm sure little Jadzia will never figure it out.
Edit: crap, that's DS9...
Also, a lot of people have dreams about a perfect idealized version of something instead of the reality. If they actually got to experience the reality they might find that they no longer hold that dream as they originally knew it.
Reading this somewhere in the Atlantic on a sailboat by myself. Nodding yes. A few days from now I will be at home after an almost 2 year journey of learning what sailboat ownership. I still can’t tell if I like the sailboat life. I’m going decide in the fall of 27 If I really want a sailboat. I had to try it or give up the dream. Maybe I’ll go back to my dream of running a small run manufacturer if facility.
This is so true. A few years ago I was volunteering at a running race that’s very hard to get into and many people have as a life dream. I found it kind of amusing how many people were having pity parties in the latter stages of the race despite having dreamed of getting into it for years, maybe decades.
> Sometimes, dreams can just be dreams.
If (for any reason) we know that dreams cannot be achieved, there is a clear cut. And while it might take time to accept the situation, this realization is Stoic/Zen.
It is way harder if there is a chance, we try, yet fail. When do we keep trying, and how do we do so without losing hope piece by piece? It might be even harder when the dream is not something like "win a gold medal in snowboarding", "build a unicorn startup" or "publish a bestseller". But it is in the line of having kids, or being healthy, or other things that a lot of people take for granted.
I had the same mindset about wanting to be good at a lot of things, working on myself, not "wasting time", but now in my mid thirties I figured that if I really wanted to do something, I'd be actually doing it, and a lot of these goals boil down to "it would be cool if I was good at X", and aren't actually things I care about.
Actually I think poorly imagined dreams is a big problem.
People who have poorly imagined dreams are likely to screw up their working life and their retirement too.
There is more that you can pull off during your working years. As a matter of fact, you SHOULD. instead of sitting in front of the tv this weekend, go somewhere.
And in retirement, there is probably less you can pull off unless you focus and make it your job. You should do vigorous cardio, do strength training, connect with people more, not less. and make a good healthy retirement your job.
This article reminded me of this game called "Before your eyes" that is sort of tackling this same theme of unlived dreams. That game helped me realized that I will definitely not achieve all of my dreams but it also gave me the power to pursue them anyway.
I love that game. It's a 1-2h hour long game that I recommend everyone to play (and it's kinda a unique game that use your blinking as a game mechanic)
> It's kinda a unique game that use your blinking as a game mechanic
SCP: Containment Breach?
As I always say - do what you will regret NOT doing once you are old.
I think my old self will want my younger self to have had done lots of things I don't want to do now.
Future me can suck it. I'll be selfish in the moment.
This is like watching videos of old folks saying: "I wish I took better care of my teeth". Right, cause thats what matters a lot to you now.
The lesson to be learned is that what you want from life changes. You shouldn't prioritize the needs of a future version of you.
>Future me can suck it.
So...You will suck it ?
When you get old you realize that none of it matters. You can't take those experiences with you, just as you cannot take money with you.
If you don't take care of your teeth, it might matter a lot to you very quickly and pain is a good instructor.
> As I always say - do what you will regret NOT doing once you are old.
IMO whether or not this is good for self or society depends a lot on what you value and thus think you will regret. On its own it is neither positive or negative and has to be combined with a lot of self-reflection and an innate sense of goodness to be useful.
Regret minimization is an oft-cited mantra among a lot of the current crop of centibillionaires who, if decency still matters in the future, will be viewed by society as even worse versions of gilded age villains.
And there is no evidence that this strategy helps those people on the personal development side when we remove society's view of them from the picture. You don't have to look at them too deeply to see that getting more than everything they wanted as a younger person never filled the void they have that keeps them wanting ever more regardless of how much damage they have to do in the process.
If you're a normal human being and what you will regret is not spending more time with loved ones and such, then yeah that's a great thing to focus on, I wish I had focused on it more when I was younger. If you're a human Hungry Ghost whose primary regret will be dying without the biggest number next to your name, well, maybe regret minimization isn't quite as helpful.
I can see how my advice could be read the wrong way in this post-shame world.
No, I do NOT mean "be an asshole if you feel like it".
I mean it more in the latter sense - take a vacation, go to Pompey. Say hello to the girl you like and see what happens. It's something you can do now, so later you don't replay it endlessly, wondering what would have been.
Also, no billionaire right in the head will be bemoaning not having more billions while on their deathbed.
Appropos of nothing, snowboarding is so unbelievably fun once you’re past the immediate beginner phase of painfully flip-flopping down a slope, that it’s very reasonable to be a tad angry at not being able to live that dream.
“I saw my life branching out before me like the green fig tree in the story. From the tip of every branch, like a fat purple fig, a wonderful future beckoned and winked. One fig was a husband and a happy home and children, and another fig was a famous poet and another fig was a brilliant professor, and another fig was Ee Gee, the amazing editor, and another fig was Europe and Africa and South America, and another fig was Constantin and Socrates and Attila and a pack of other lovers with queer names and offbeat professions, and another fig was an Olympic lady crew champion, and beyond and above these figs were many more figs I couldn't quite make out. I saw myself sitting in the crotch of this fig tree, starving to death, just because I couldn't make up my mind which of the figs I would choose. I wanted each and every one of them, but choosing one meant losing all the rest, and, as I sat there, unable to decide, the figs began to wrinkle and go black, and, one by one, they plopped to the ground at my feet.”
One of my favorite quotes by Sylvia Plath from the Bell Jar.
Beautiful. Thank you for sharing.
this is so true, its hard to make a decision when that actually means you're losing a bunch of other possibilities. so no-decision becomes a decision and then you're left with nothing.
Ime with sports and injuries. Doctors say alot of things, unless they are sports doctors that work with you to get back to sports or athletic them selves, they just give useless generic advice.
I lost a year becasue of doctors just telling me to rest for a constant pain I had.
Author should just go learn to snowboard. There's athletes out there competing with torn acls.
IME sports doctors and physios have incentives aligned with returning to high functionality. I think this causes them to clinically converge on effective treatments. It’s also possible that they have clientele who are willing to put in the work to recover.
Regardless, if you’re optimizing for outcomes this is the way.
> You know what else I’d like to do besides becoming a great snowboarder? I want to learn kung fu. I’d also love to be a lot better at video games, get my Yu-Gi-Oh! hobby back on, and become at least fluent enough for everyday conversation in oh, I don’t know, eight more languages.
I think this sort of underplays the feeling of "lives unlived, paths not taken" that everyone gets hit with. Just flattens the whole thing that had been building up to that point, instead of allowing it to open up further.
There is an analogy to be made between the space of human possibility and the space of possible Turing machines: in an unconstrained machine everything is possible and nothing is probable. If you accept constraints (e.g. the shape of a language) then most things become impossible but some things become probable. That is you gain access to some space and lose access to other space. It's a very fundamental trade-off and it's foolish to worry about it too much, especially considering that there is always some level of zoom where every hero, every winner of every game, is irrelevant.
Indeed the underlying insight that our lives are arbitrarily small and irrelevant, (yes, even the greatest titans of politics, tech, science and art), that drives the tech-elite long-now accelerationist ideal. Every life is characterized by [trade-offs + luck] and none of them have any meaning unless we get through the Great Filter. (Sure, this belief is mostly a post hoc rationalization to just do what you wanted in the first place, but I appreciate the attempt to paper over the naked self-interest.)
Making peace with the lived ones might be harder. Chasing the startup dream ended in bitterness, disappointment and debt. It forever damaged my marriage and my mental health. Be careful what you wish for.
Have you thought about absolutely monster knee braces? And then daily squats. They worked for me. Unfortunately now it’s my neck that’s trying to paralyze me, which would be such a not fun outcome.
You can very likely rehab your knees. Single-leg touchdown squats completely eliminated some serious knee pain I was having with my barbell squats. Also reverse sled drags are a good one. Definitely see a sports/rehab physician or DPT, your family doctor or GP is just going to tell you to "not do that."
Having strong muscles around the joint won't fix a structural problem, but they definitely won't hurt.
When I tore my ACL doing bjj, I was surprised to see that some pro MMA fighters will continue to fight with a torn ACL. They double down on muscles to support the joint and postpone the loss of a year of competition to the reconstruction surgery.
Never let your memes be dreams nor your dreams be memes.
As someone with less than stellar knees who skis a lot, ski/ride powder. It's way easier on the body and more fun too. And maybe skip the big jumps. You can definitely still ride big/steep enough mountains for a big adrenaline rush.
I struggled quite a lot with this. I want to do everything, learn everything thus I ended up mastering nothing.
I've learned to play few instruments in last four years so I can jam with people but I still feel it's not enough.
As I got older I started to value relationships much more and overall became a happier person.
But still the knowledge that I never be a skilled doctor, physicist, exceptional chef, biologist, blacksmith, economist, successful entrepreneur and many more will still somehow hunt me.
I highly recommend the book Four Thousand Weeks by Oliver Burkeman to help cope with this anxiety