I am not going to try to change your outlook to be more positive, but you have to admit that it’s somewhat (tragically) amusing that we can find ourselves on a website full of people who are extremely technically capable (and highly intelligent), have access to devices that can connect to billions of others devices instantly, and can profit from said system allowing them to better their lives, yet this same community can only dwell on the negative of their situation instead of the positive.

I think, when you’re very smart, you are just many steps ahead of the average person in pattern recognition. You can literally store more information and pattern match against it, so you’re going to pattern match up the power hierarchy and think about things that have a negative impact on you that you can never directly affect without traversing up the hierarchy. If most people here (not saying you specifically) would instead just focus on “what is the biggest problem in my life that I have complete control over?”, I think they’d find that focusing on the greater powers that be has little practical consequence since they’re just not at the level where they can exert influence over those powers. There is almost certainly a path to local maxima, and from there, a greater and greater maxima.

Some background context:

- I self-taught myself coding at the age of 14 in 2004 with Flash/ActionScript using computers in my school's library. Very few people in my small town were interested in coding at the time so it was unusual.

- Studied Software Eng at university. Graduated early with a Info Tech degree due to high number of job opportunities (I was already working part time).

- I got in early on the web development trend.

- Joined an ed-tech startup. Got some shares. Has been slow steady growth but they haven't exited yet. Not sure I'll ever be able to sell.

- Launched an open source library which got thousands of stars on GitHub.

- Joined a startup backed by big investors including Y Combinator, Greylock Partners, A16z.

- Joined a $4 billion market cap crypto project in 2017 which got into the top 10 crypto projects in the world at the time. I was developer #6; the project started using the open source library I had built. Although the project slid in the rankings due to lack of marketing, it's still worth hundreds of millions and hasn't been hacked in 4 years since it started using my open source library. A lot of weird stuff started happening in my career after joining this project.

- Earned like $50K per year (average) from blockchain forging for about 3 years. I was earning 200% yield on my investment each year for 3 years which I used to fund my own time to work on side projects. Then crypto had a big crash though my principal is about the same as when I had started.

- During that time, I launched 6 different side projects with other people. All still running but none earning any revenue yet. Algorithms don't give them any exposure.

Unfortunately, even with this track record, none of this translated to significant long term income or opportunities. I have fewer opportunities today than I did when I just graduated from university in 2012.

That’s great context. And I’m very sorry. I’m an optimist, but I’m also a realist, and, yeah, the delta between getting close to making it over and over and having that high of an expectation and then nothing coming to much fruition after so much work would make anyone discouraged.

It takes a ton of effort and courage to have hope in a situation like that. Because you will have to believe something is possible that you have no indication of being possible based on prior experience.

Or you will have to change your outlook to not care about massive financial success as much. But that’s not easy either since that requires a world view and possibly a values shift. Very very hard.

And yeah if I were stuck in that spot, I would feel cursed too and like the higher forces are fucked. It’s totally natural. I really hope for the best! I know you will be good in the end, but I’m sure that’s the last thing you really want to hear since it’s invalidating of how you’re feeling.

I appreciate this comment.

There are only two types of advice which I find useful nowadays: "The odds of success are extremely low, you need to keep rolling the dice." or "You need to find people who are willing to help you."

Everything else feels like gaslighting because I already tried so many things and clearly that was enough to sent me on an upward trajectory.

But definitely I do sometimes feel like there is a conspiracy because I know quite a few people who were not competent who succeeded... This seems to rule out the 'low probability' scenario. I feel like, in my case, there is an element of being rejected due to obscure 'human' factors that are beyond my understanding.

personally, the post resonates strongly. focusing on this way of seeing has improved my life tremendously. based on the very little I know of you (your two posts) it sounds possible that the point isn’t landing. you seem to be living near the “control = safety/happiness” realm, where the high order bit of life is controllability.

try reading it again, and notice how little specific advice is given towards how to cultivate the sort of attention he’s pointing at (maybe his most concrete advice is in the form of a painting of an owl). are you convinced that by trying hard enough the future can belong to you, or that life owes you something? you can create an arbitrary amount of suffering for yourself by living that delusion (or the opposite one, that you can’t influence anything).

the notion expressed in the post is really worth trying, and simple, but hard to explain. one idea: the next time you see something you personally find beautiful (a flower, the sky? the fact that the earth supports you effortlessly?) you could investigate whether you did anything to “deserve” that.

Cause eventually you realize that we’re here to plant trees we won’t see fruit.

Honestly I thought you were aiming for the more notable criticism: if you consider yourself a smart person but then say you "don't know how the government works" then you're just too lazy to find out (or uninterested in challenging your pre-conceptions).

It is possible, to an enormous level of detail because none of it is secret, to understand how the apparatus of state works - very little of the whole is actually off-limits.