Make a habit of spotting things in your life that you can say you are grateful for. A lot of good things in life are taken for granted and you only realize you had them when you lose them. It takes some practice and effort to start noticing these, but when you do, it enhances your enjoyment of the present moment.
To me, it's his position that makes those words seem more credible. Once you hit the peak and have everything one could dream of you lose your illusions and realize that the craving still goes on and it's much more wise to just count your blessings. If you would hear those words coming from some poor pleb you would doubt that "They just don't know what they're talking about, how could they know? They're poor and don't have anything. Of course money and status and power is the answer?"
Also, I'm not sure if it was intended as advice to anyone other than himself. I was under the impression that Meditations was his private reflections towards the end of his life, not intended for publication.
Well, you could just escape the situation and switch jobs but there are so many poor leaders out there that this same problem is probably going to manifest itself in your life again in some form, sooner or later. I would say it's more useful to learn to navigate such a situation. I would refer to Jocko Willink's advice on this as he's the real expert in leadership. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hp4hvVZFnfg
When I hit my own rock bottom a couple of years ago I stumbled upon Jordan Peterson's lectures about meaning and the bible. It helped my rational mind understand and accept that the rational mind isn't the be-all and end-all and there is something transcendent outside of it. Whatever that is, you can aim at getting better at "dancing" with it and the better the dance the greater the sense of meaning. YMMV but it worked for me.
(the lectures were "2017 Maps of Meaning" and "The Psychological Significance of the Biblical Stories")
I've found that for me the only way to get rid of this kind of addiction is to make it impossible to engage. Any "softer" approaches will eventually fail.
I had a bad habit of checking all kinds of unimportant stuff in bed just before going to sleep but then I got rid of the smartphone and bought a dumb phone. I don't really long for that habit anymore because it's simply not possible to engage in. The withdrawal feels harsh at first but you can just soldier through it and eventually it gets easier.
I don't know the answer to your question, but I think this[0] video might help to visualize the mind-boggling scale of the world (in the video you can substitute dollars with human beings). And it's only one billion visualized so in order to go through the entire human population you would have to watch it 7.9 times which would take something over 10 hours.
As the dollar meter keeps running relentlessly you can imagine yourself being one split of a second somewhere there, and then you can imagine the sea of people working hard at compilers, optimizers, math etc. blasting you all at once with their brilliant observations. It's only natural to get overwhelmed if you expose yourself to the aggregate of the most brilliant and productive humans, because as rare as they might be, the human population is so staggeringly big that there are LOTS of them. You might not be doing so bad compared to the rest of the humanity though ;)
I find it peculiar that disregarding the context (hacker news) and just focusing strictly on the content of your message I wouldn't be able to figure out which side you're supposed to be on. I could as well be reading this in one of 'their' forums, where one of your loved ones had posted this exact same message, word for word, to ask advice from their group on how to deal with a loved one affected by fake news (== you).
Unfortunately, I don't have any solutions. This seems like a viciously hard problem. I saw a VICE clip[0] about some survivors of covid-19 in an ICU, and even after going through a near-death experience firsthand they were still hesitant about taking the vaccine. This suggests to me that this issue originates somewhere too deep in the lizard brain to just be reasoned with using the real facts.
I agree with what you said, it may be me who is affected... And yeah it is a very hard problem. I think the underlying problem is determine / finding the truth.
It's hard to say anything without knowing your situation in detail, but to me you sound more like you're just deeply lost rather than your life is messed up beyond repair. If you really focus and put your heart, soul and effort into something you can make astounding progress in just a few years, so mid-thirties does not sound too old in that regard.
You seem to have a felt sense of wasting your life by continuing to live it like this. That would imply that on some level you know that there's something you could and should be doing instead that you would be satisfied with, and your emotional systems are trying to signal to you that you're not doing that now. I would suggest you work on these crude signals and try to articulate the vision that's embedded in them into words to bring it into a form more comprehensible to yourself.
Here's a few questions: what would a properly lived life look like? What would you need? What could you do in your (lowly, confusing) situation to help yourself if you decided to do things properly, and humbly started to grab the opportunities that are presented to you right now, no matter how small and beneath you they might appear to you?
Really good heaphones. It's been years since I bought them and I'm still amazed almost daily just how good music can sound.
I'll admit that the cost upfront was not exactly cheap, but if you divide the price by the useful lifespan (my previous headphones lasted for 8 years) it becomes a no-brainer.
Sony WH-1000XM2, M3 and (I assume) M4 are some of the best and most comfortable headphones I've ever owned. My current M3s are going on 3 years old and plan on getting M4s when it kicks the bucket.
The only pair I've loved more were Sony MDR-XB500. I would kill for them to come back and especially in wireless.
I am not an audio snob but these sound great and most importantly, are extremely comfortable for long periods.
Studio mainstay of the last 30+ years. Comfy as hell. Accurate enough, if flattering. <$100. I have a 20 year old pair that got a few new sets of earpads but sound as good as day one.
