Thoughts about the Future

Where do you think you will be at the age of 35? What kind of person do you think you will become?(USER WAS WARNED FOR THIS POST (Rule 4) Always elaborate on your opinions, Write a better OP next time, One line OP with two questions and no additional context? Why is this question being asked? What is your own answer to this question ?)

I think in all likelihood, I will live in a shack in the boonies. I will probably be involved in drug trafficking. I will probably spend most of my time either doing house upkeep(gardening, that kind of thing) or reading. The only career I think is worth pursuing is an academic one, and even then the idea of being a tenure-track professor sounds very stressful and I'd rather live the simple life. If I'm not teaching at a university level I'll probably just work odd jobs for money. I hope I'll be married or otherwise in a long-term relationship, but I realize that most people do not share my goals in life so finding someone who fits into that would be very hard.

I was unemployed, playing in a band on weekends and sleeping with a 22 year old who later left to study to become a veterinarian.

I thought I'd be a successful artist or a musician. Now I'm a programmer / web-developer, making more money than I imagined but it's still not enough. It's funny how life goes. I chased money and security, so I could take care of my family. Now I'm bored out of my skull. Everything seems meaningless. But I've had some very crazy, even violent experiences that change who I am in ways I could never have imagined. It's too difficult to second guess.

I really don't know, especially if I'm assuming I'll still be alive by then. A few years ago, I didn't think I'd be an agnostic (former Christian) without lofty ideals, strong beliefs, or grand goals, living only in a biological or charitable sense, but here I am. I don't think people can generally predict these things accurately. >>13438 I would sincerely like to know if you have any age-earned wisdom to share with us, Lain. Sometimes 35 seems impossibly far away for someone like me. Also, you may as well answer this question: where do you think you'll be at 65? If you're that old, I really will be surprised. Where are you now?

My wish is to have a house innawoods preferably either a stone cabin, a stone "bunker" house, a half-timbered cottage, or a wooden house covered with fire-resistant coating. I want to live where I have plenty of opportunity to hunt and fish as well as to grow apple trees and some vegetables. I had originally wanted to become a husband and father but I now know those goals are impossible as were my hopes of becoming a military officer. Realistically, I will probably end up in some cheap apartment or a mobile home. I will probably have to take pills or unlicensed marijuana to better calm and control my disruptive thoughts and anxieties. Either way, I need to find work fast and I need to improve my skills.

>>13440 > any age-earned wisdom to share with us Every time I go into detail like that, some guy with a STEM degree earning barely above minimum wage tells me what a waste I've made of my life or I get accused of LARPing. But seriously, don't waste your youth on anime and video games. If you get to be a certain age and have spent life in front of a screen, you will probably never be socially fulfilled. Spend your middle and old age watching movies if you must, not your youth. Dating gets easier in your 20s and if you're not attached by a certain age (or not willing to be), at some point it starts getting harder again because everyone is either taken or they've stopped looking, making a pairing seem impossible. > where do you think you'll be at 65? Based on family history and personal lifestyle, I don't know if I'll live that long anyway. > Where are you now? In a rut pretty deep at the moment. So yeah, never take my advice. My life kind of is like kicking dead whales down the beach this year but at least I had some adventures when I still had the emotional energy to enjoy them.

>>13435 I'd love to live in Swiss, in these beautiful house near the mountains, have a lovely wife, daughter and a decent job that doesn't suck my life away, so I can spend the time on hobbies and family. In reality I'm probably gonna stay in this terrible country, in this terrible town, full of terrible people. I'm gonna live in some cheap apartament working almost whole days and getting drunk whenever I can. That is of my depression doesn't win, if it does, then I'm gonna probably hang myself. Life sure does seem good...

>>13470 >dont like my live better an hero Never got this. I've you're really done and ready to die you got nothing to lose. Don't like your place? Sell all the crap and start traveling. You don't even need money if you plan ahead and can handle dealing with people.

OP here. Interesting to see the replies thus far. I had no idea that there were already a fair amount of people here who were past that age; I'm not judging anyone by saying that, partially since I am now 35 myself, but I feel that it should be said in any case because I don't want to run the risk of unintentionally offending anyone. But perhaps I'm overthinking it. When I was younger, I aspired to be an academic researcher of some sort. I also thought that I would eventually find a girl that I loved and get married. None of those things happened; I don't even have a job right now, although I did obtain a Master's degree when I was 26 (in 2010, which is a long time ago by this point). How do I feel about it? There are so many things that come into play as to why I ended up this way, and to be honest I really do not know how to put it to words. I certainly did not end up becoming successful, but the thing is that success is very hard, if not impossible, for most people to come by these days. In order to have any measure of success in this day and age, you either have to have the right connections, or you have to be a minority. Since I did not have any connections and I am a white male, I did not end up becoming anything in life (at least thus far), even though I am quite a bit more intelligent than most of the people who are practically handed opportunities these days. This is what I like to tell myself, at least. The truth of the matter, however, was that I lost steam and motivation to do anything important a very long time ago, at the age of 24, but oddly enough I never quite escaped the foolish, childish illusion that I was meant to be something extraordinary in life, and that I had to be, or else I was no better than the dirt underneath my feet. Perhaps I am meant to be something someday, who knows? But I only have the vaguest idea as to what that is. I usually do not like to talk about my life because by the end of it, it just comes off as whining. I had a lot of things holding me back when I was a lot younger and to be perfectly frank I really just got rid of the last main obstacle in the way of progress (that of my last remaining parent, who was an abusive narcissist that inflicted massive amounts of emotional and mental trauma). I know better than to use drugs to dull the pain, or to cry myself to sleep and drown in beer, or to kill myself, and thank God that I can now feel alive and good in a magical sort of way after several years in a medication-induced stupor, but where do I go from here? The only clue is that we all have our own path in life, and my destiny seems to be entirely separate from everyone else's. That would make sense, given the past trend at least.

>>13472 >Never got this. Well, maybe you will get it one day. Plenty of people do get it. In fact, I'd guess that a significant fraction of lainons see themselves as suicide casualties by the age of 35 (or equivalently older than they are currently). >you got nothing to lose That may be true, but alternative lifestyles are difficult, and suicide can potentially be easy, depending on your mental state (pic related). Once you start seeing death as a legitimate response to life, everything changes. In fact, I'd guess that a significant fraction of lainons see themselves as suicide casualties by the age of 35 (or equivalently older than they are currently). >can handle dealing with people And you don't seem to understand... So-called "trigger warnings" may be politically unpopular on this site, but I've spoilered the image I'm punctuating this post with for fear that it could intensify suicidal ideation in the susceptible. If you're trying to avoid suicidal imagery, don't open it.

>>13473 >Perhaps I am meant to be something someday, who knows? If you're defining "being something" as being better than all of the other somethings, then it's no surprise that you feel this way. From one perspective, you already are something rather incredible, Lain. You're a thinking, feeling system capable of operating both autonomously and socially, and you're so complex that current theoretical frameworks have only begun to understand the sort of thing that you are, not to mention you as a unique individual case. I think it may be better for all of us to think that we are all already in the process of being somethings and then hope to maybe eventually become better somethings, but naturally, without having to force anything or stress over it too much. As an aside, I think that our current awareness of the larger social system has skewed our perceptions of the values of our activities. If we can't rise to the top and do something that has an obvious beneficial effect at the national or global level, we're trash, or so we tend to think. Our usual ways of thinking and feeling, however, are apparently more suited to small communities. Please, Lain, feel satisfaction in that you've posted and contributed to a thread that at least one individual (myself) is enjoying. That can be meaningful if you believe in its meaning, and even if you don't, in this moment, I do. It couldn't have happened without you, so that means that you're a something that has an effect that is meaningful to someone else at least. Let's both participate in the "consensual hallucination" that what we're doing here and now matters, because, from at least one perspective, it does.

>>13435 Either dead or far away from this soykafhole (preferably somewhere in the EU). I am going to take the university enterance examination next year I will most likely gain the right to enroll at my desired university I am hoping to wage slave for one of many foreign companies that ((capitalize)) on lack of regulations and relatively cheap labour. I already know several foreign languages. I have heard about these companies sending skilled engineers to work in Europe I hope to be one of them or at least use my shekels and skills to find a job abroad and if that doesn't work out I will probably just kill myself.

>>13469 Hang in there mate. You sound like a decent guy. I hope things work out for you and you find fulfillment in whatever it is you end up doing.

In a few years i probably end up living as guerrilla/cyberpunk renegade commando. Camp outdoors or squat, guerilla grow food and hack vending machines, get access to the net by hacking wifi for internet. Will probably wage some kind of shadow street propaganda war with other punks and try to strengthen the local counter culture that so far managed to resist the man. Will also dabble into magic and heavy drugs, to see if i can glitch the real world some more and fuarrrk up the system wherever i can and mess with the npcs. Present day, present time hahahahahahaa.

35 is in 9 years. I hope I'll be a doctor. maybe working in rural Australia somewhere. I hope I will have had some more meaningful romantic relationships. Part of me thinks single life would be ok as you're free to move and live anywhere - which is an advantage for being a doctor as it is often a career which requires relocating a lot. However I realise that finding a spouse and falling in love is one of the more meaningful things in life along with developing a good support network of friends. Currently I don't feel like I have a really strong good support network and I'm single so I am wanting to shake up my life a bit, move cities or something. I would like to fall in love again. Maybe after I start uni again. I know you can't plan for these things too much but I don't think it's that likely that I'll fall in love in my current situation while working full time shift work and not socialising a whole lot (and rarely socialising wtih new people).

>>13475 >but alternative lifestyles are difficult Just fear of the unknown, it's really not harder than breathing. I've done it for a year. Sure had some fuarrrkups but in the end it all turned out fine. Fear of failure and attachment to what you have is all that really holds you rooted and if you are ready to die you shouldn't fear failure either. My view is also quite different on the final point. Life is just a game and dead is the fail state. It's a theme park mentality - gotta try seeing all attractions before taking the exit. >And you don't seem to understand... Didn't mean having high charisma. More being willing to engage with people you don't necessary like and endure when it goes wrong and try again which can be tiring but also gets you ahead - social skills require training like everything and that counts double if you want to be able to get along with any stranger you meet. With that said i believe if you can hold down a job you have the requirement to do this.

>>13439 What kind of violent experiences?

I have a few all consuming goals in my life... 1. Become fully involved in the quest for immortality 2. Become Ultra wealthy 3. Create something new I have 12 years to work on these things. All my other life choices are being made in the service of these intentions. Maybe I will be some kind of supervillain by the time I am 35. That would be ok with me.

>>13484 Best answer by far.

>>13472 You also have nothing to lose by going an hero. Making the arbitrary choice of "sell your soykaf and travel or party" shows that you in fact value those over suicide, which means you still have something to lose - your preference to travel and party. I don't blame you for not getting it, it's hard to not count your own values in when thinking - life seems to reward that pretty often. But unless you stop feeling like "doing X before suicide is better than not doing X before suicide" means you don't properly understand "nothing to lose". You likely don't want to understand it either, so best leave it at that. If you find this answer arrogant, you're a lose cause.

>>13473 >but oddly enough I never quite escaped the foolish, childish illusion that I was meant to be something extraordinary in life, and that I had to be, or else I was no better than the dirt underneath my feet The child is not a fool. Perhaps you are, but only if you swallow that illusion. Most importantly, measuring "extraordinary" in "in life" is a recipe for arrogance and disaster. Life is boring and people who seem to do well in it are tiny little things. You can only know great people personally as they don't have any time or reason to seem great, or concern themselves with things that would make a huge populace think of them as great. Some celebrity? Musk? A president? Euler? Some great composer? Dennis Ritchie? Some guy who pulled off some insane soykaf in life that we never heard of? These were all meaningless people lost in the details of this world. I'm not implying there is another world whose details they should have been lost in, but rather that being lost in the details of any specific world is the hallmark of tiny, boring entities. There's also no point in trying to be unusually good, or even the best - these things end with competition. I could say "aim higher" but aiming itself is flawed because there's an end it aims at. Just keep going, and hop out of any circles you're walking in. >>13484 See? This guy could be great, except he's more focused on this world and its aesthetic politics than my mom.

>>13506 I'm not sure that I understand what it is that you're getting at here. What does "not being lost in the details of a world" look like to you? What does greatness look like to you? >Some guy who pulled off some insane soykaf in life that we never heard of? I don't care what you say; Troy Hurtubise was a hero. If only he'd been wearing his firepaste, maybe he'd still be alive...

>>13507 Think about it this way: A person who spends a lot of money in the mall is a great person. That sounds weird, right? Why would people be great for spending money in a mall? Does it matter which shop they spend their money at? No, they just spend money, there's nothing great about that. Now replace spending money at the mall with being visibly great in this world. It doesn't matter which field (shop) you're great at, you're still just being visibly great (spending money). People who are actually great don't have time to do things that have tangible consequences, like advancing science or academia, getting rich, saving lives, organizing or leading humanity, changing minds and influencing people... These are pointless human pastimes, and those who pursue them have little time left for actual, hard to measure greatness.

>>13510 what a very bizarre analogy you used. I thought I understood what you meant but now I don't know if I do. Can you give an example of what would constitute greatness?

>>13503 It's not that you value traveling&party in the moment you make that choice. It's that you don't really know how much you might like it before you do it. I see it the same way as training - laziness keeps many away and i'm skipping out some days too but once you start you always end up glad you did it. So it's a flaw in how motivation works in the moment and knowingly bypassing that hurdle might lead to a better result. The core idea is knowing your own brain is busted and acting on that knowledge to gain a possible better result.

>>13491 Holy noodles, those are my goals

I'll probably die in a mental facility or out in the woods

>>13512 Sure I get it, you do the thing first then later on acquire the reason for doing it. I need to do this all the time as well because my motivation is late or dependent on the results of the activity that is dependent on it. But my point still stands: Even if you end up liking that thing or get motivated or whatever, that was only possible because you still had something to lose. When you have nothing to lose, you won't end up liking or wanting it, ever. That's not because you're clinically depressed and some lazy neurotransmitters and axons don't do their soykaf. It's because, as you said, you know your brain is busted and that bust is the only reason anything ever mattered in the first place. That whatever new reason you find, whatever values and feelings will make you feel that "it was worth after all" are irrelevant. So even if you end up getting lucky and sorted out, in the first five minutes alone with your thoughts you'll realize that this isn't a "better result" because there is no such thing. There never was a comparison and if you had killed yourself back then, you wouldn't have missed a train to the better alternative now; if you had nothing left to lose, then you had no possibilities to lose either. That's why I'm saying that people who end up finding a reason to live had a lot of things to lose in the first place, and were just having a bunch of sad days or whatever. >>13511 I'm not sure if I can, it's pretty rare. But I'd say that, humanity and its values and goals being tiny, irrelevant, and directly or indirectly based on animal instincts, anything that humans generally think of as great is in fact not great at all. If anything, you can see this in how celebrities are valued over more significant people in academia or politics or whatever. But there's no reason to stop there, because academia or politics are also concerned with this boring little world, mostly. Sciences and math being concerned with only some aspects, or a useful and predictive theory of it, be it evolving or a random guess of axioms for deductive falsifying. I really can't think of anyone as "great" if their focus and life work is dedicated to things that many people care about on this planet. By many I mean enough for this person to make it to a newspaper, or be remembered by a community, or whatever. Nah, great people are out of this world.

>>13526 So, if other people appreciate you, then you're not great. Thus, you can't give an example because you would be appreciating them, which would mean that the individual in question would not be great. Is that correct?

>>13527 I need some further thinking to answer that. Let's a grab a specific example. There exists a wizard who is great. Let it not be said why he is great, it's just a given. The people think he is great because he banishes the evil lovecraftian monsters in their villages and towns and whatnot; but that is not why the wizard is great - in fact doing so is the wizard equivalent of stale meme soykafposting that would get him derezzed in circles of greatness. In this case the wizard is appreciated by average humans, which doesn't ruin his greatness; but he is appreciated for the wrong reasons. That appreciation from average humans doesn't rule out the wizard's greatness, but also doesn't in any way support it. If there was a charlatan whose only feat was banishing lovecraftian monsters and the people appreciated him, not only would that not make him great, but also it would show how lowly he is: his supposed "greatness" stands on the wizard equivalent of stale meme soykafposting. The majority of human population will only appreciate you for non-great (or the wrong) reasons, and give no appreciation of your great features/deeds. If most of your identity/work revolves around something people appreciate, you are likely far from being great as there's little of you left that is unappreciated (and thus a likely candidate for a source of greatness). I wonder if it takes great minds to understand great people. That would make greatness an equivalence class, kind of. There probably is a small random chance for non-great entities to appreciate greatness for the right reasons, but I'm not sure.

>>13528 Some more real-life examples could probably help. Note that I won't mention any great person here, but somewhat establish the "direction". >1 Some teenage girl who does cosplay makes a tiktok that happens to have a choreography that subtly catches teens and weebs by the dick, poof she's the new queen of the internet and gains a few hundred thousand followers who rain her in attention. (I guess they never miss huh?) Some guy from Norway spends the better part of his life trying to understand human nature and seeking out people who make art movies to learn from them. At 47 he composes, directs, shoots, edits his own art movie that is the deepest, most well thought out KINO soykaf you've never seen. The second watch gives every scene a new meaning because of the first watch. This new meaning gives some scenes an even newer meaning at the third rewatch, and this goes like 5-6 layers deep. He gets 5k DVDs printed and sends it to people who might care, or just gives them away. Most people don't get it at first and never rewatch, big media doesn't care, maybe 4-5 people write on their blogs but those get deleted when life issues happen, DVDs get eaten by data rot, and there goes the life work of a one in 500mil artist. >2 Another one. Obama and his country doesn't collapse in the 8 years he spends in a well defined role where experts do many things for him, perhaps has some good ideas and is okay at his role. Every american citizen knows his name for the next 30-50 years. A woman is keeping a huge family together in some second world country, while managing to stop two political sides in her small hometown from going at each other's throats. She has some great theory of politics that she is applying, and it works. She definitely would get a Nobel for it if it gained publicity, but she doesn't have the time with all the peace she's keeping. Dies to some cancer at 34, family breaks apart, town devolves into lynching and chaos. In both examples the latter persons' deeds are somewhat closer to greatness. Both examples touch on publicity, but the first one emphasizes that publicity doesn't really help/matter, and that humans give appreciation for the wrongest, mundane human reasons. The second one emphasizes that not having a tangible effect or result (with or without chaos theory) doesn't really affect greatness.

>>13529 >art movie that is the deepest, most well thought out KINO soykaf you've never seen. The second watch gives every scene a new meaning because of the first watch. This new meaning gives some scenes an even newer meaning at the third rewatch, and this goes like 5-6 layers deep. Well, now I want to watch a movie that (probably) doesn't exist. I don't understand how you can say that Euler doesn't count because he's too worldly but your director and the political woman are in the direction of greatness (not necessarily great, I know). Should we just wrap this up by saying that your vague notions about greatness are such that you can think of no one who seems unambiguously great? Would that be an unfair statement?

>>13530 I feel like I could identify maybe a few (but not all) great people if I happened to spend enough time observing them, but I definitely haven't seen any to date. In the case of Euler I'm pretty sure he would have been greater if we had no idea who he is, and most if not all of his results were lost. Or if he burned it and go "hah, I just set back human progress by 50 years lmao".