Some of the change came from finally paying off debts and having well-funded retirement and savings accounts. I can finally afford to not try to make more money, so suddenly the super stressful job with the mind boggling salary just isn't worth the stress. I recognize there's certainly privilege there, and I would hope that someday we're all so lucky as to have solid safety nets.
The rest of the change came from having a broader view of the impacts (and non-impacts) my work has. I don't like being part of the wealth inequality gap in the US. I don't like working for tech companies that use their mission statement to devalue and underpay their workers. I don't like contributing to technologies that are being used in backroom deals to support burgeoning humanitarian crises (whether that's creating racially biased algorithms, selling personal data, or literally building bombs). So much of Silicon Valley is well-intentioned but myopic engineers building tools that greedy business people sell to the highest bidder without regard to their final use case. And speaking up, regardless of the HR propaganda, doesn't work-- they will quickly show you the door and corner you into silence with lawyers and hush money (which, on the flip side, is one way to fully fund retirement and savings accounts).
So I'm in my mid-30s, still young by non-silicon valley standards, working through a bit of an identity crisis to figure out what goals really are worthwhile. But my 20s taught me that selling my soul to someone else's company isn't my goal. And building my own company with VC money isn't my goal. So I'm left with tending my personal relationships, refocusing my career outside of startups (back to nonprofits and academia), spending more time outdoors, and pursuing whatever tangential curiosity piques my interest this week.
I used to think in my early 20s that if I worked really hard and lived that SV grind lifestyle, that I would magically make a lot of money and life would be easy.
In fact, what ended up happening was reality - I lost a loved one midway through my 20s, and it altered my perception of just what is actually important vs. what is noise.
Now I just want to make sure I spend just enough time to keep doing well at work, and use everything else in the tank for the really important things.
Partially it’s a life crisis im going to overcome, but in big extent it’s intellectual maturity.
You just see how silly and worthless most of the goals people fight for.
And most of the meaningful things in life, like family, health etc. are not really goals, but rather a process or part of life itself, part of you who liked to set goals in the first place.
Post-30 I’ve done an about-face and realized that I do want a family. It’s come from a shift in attitude. Whereas before I thought avoiding unpleasant things was a solution, I now realize that doing things correctly is a better one.
I grew up in a very rough area, my teenage years was focused primarily on getting out of there. Had I stayed, I would've likely been caught up in a drug life like the majority of my graduating class.
As I'm just over 30 now, I'm trying to get more specific. I can't keep riding the wave I'm on, expecting things to keep working out.
My career is bound to plateau, and where I'm at now is paying me well but I don't know I can keep up the required pace/concessions (eg: 12+ hour days at random, deadlines)
I believe the term 'golden handcuffs' applies here, it's been a developing concern of mine.
I've made decent pay since my early 20s, but without a plan like... buying a home, I worry it's all likely to be for naught.
All that to say I suppose, aim for goals but be willing to let them flex or outright change. I never could've fathomed where I am now, but I've learned their value.
After burning myself out failing for years to even pick a project, get started, stick with it for more than a few hours, and all the while feeling more and more depressed about that fact, I’ve experienced something called “ego exhaustion”. I gave up, which over time allowed me space to stop being so hard on myself, and start to recover, and I’m finally feeling the beginnings of creative energy coming back again. I know better now, that pushing on that energy won’t help anything, so I’m just focused on nurturing it and seeing where it takes me. For now, that’s happiness. Later, maybe I’ll make something big after all. If not, that’s okay.
This is something I’ve heard happens to a lot of people as they get closer to the middle part of life
I’ve realized external ambitions like money, power, status, fame aren’t useful unless you know WHAT you would do with those that make them worthwhile. What do you enjoy in the moment?
Keeping friends who seem active & engaged with the world has always been a challenge but it's next level hard to do at this point & consumes a lot of effort & mental space. When you're in your 20's everyone has blank canvas potential, is just starting to test how to engage. I'm still not quite 40's but most lives are much more well defined it feels at this age of my life, most lives have much clearer shape. That means there's a lot more basis for finding compatibility, for finding what co-interests and mutual support will carry a friendship or relationship. But also geometrically more basis for finding incompatibility, and dis-interest too.
Unfortunately, most don't get to experience what that's like before they are saddled with money requirements such as kids and mortgages so the constant watching of the bank balance continues but instead of spending money on Slickdeals for the item you most likely don't need, it's spent on things for your kids.
I'm in the fortunate position to not have to constantly watch my bank account but weirdly, it's uncomfortable territory so I invest to make my bank account (cash balance) as low as possible.
I've been told that pretty much anything more than $30M has diminishing happiness returns so my biggest life goal tweak was:
<30 = bring as much happiness to oneself and closest friends and family
>30 = bring as much happiness to " " & company staff (I'm a founder)
My professional goals have become a lot more ambitious. My network has grown and the things I thought were unachievable are being achieved by my friends. Everything feels a lot more within reach.
I have become a lot more forward thinking and can now plan and work towards goals over longer time spans.
I'm thinking about what I have to accomplish in the next 3 years to set myself up even more momentum going into my 40s.
I have become a lot more dedicated to fitness. I can clearly feel the effects of aging. The absolute best case scenario is I live to be an old man. If that's my fate, I want to have the highest quality of life, for as long as possible.
My attitude changed and then realized the place where I live doesn't match who I am any more. Now I'm in a mid-30s crisis and no clue how to move forward.
I realised over those two years that money is not everything, time is. I also decided I was tired of the partying bachelor lifestyle and had two babies, while enjoying some chilling time being an employee in a medium sized company with paternity leave and easy deadlines (which is nothing effort wise compared to starting a business or contracting).
My goal then shifted to build passive income streams, so that I have more time to spend on myself and with the family and on projects directed by me, instead of working for someone else trying to make profits above everything else.
After achieving that and getting the freedom I longed for, I don't really have a major life goal, just a bunch of things I would like to do. At the same time, I don't feel like I would regret not doing these things if I were to die tomorrow.
To sum of my life's story, I'm intelligent (like most on here) but suffered a concussion when I was 12 that made me ridiculously tired until I figured out how to treat it in my mid-twenties, though it still limits me in ways. My life's plan for the past 7 years to work around this was to do photography in the summer and my own coding projects in the winter. I haven't been especially successful at either.
On the coding side I developed a pixel art application for the Wii U which my publisher also ported over to the 3DS. It was definitely worth the time I put in to it, but at most I barely broke 6 figures. I wanted to make a quick sequel for the Switch but Nintendo has denied my request for a devkit without reason three separate times. I also developed some extensions for Photoshop which were not worth the time I put in to them, though I did get a job offer out of the deal which I turned down. I didn't think my programming skills would be up to the task and the timing was poor for me to be able to "catch up."
On the photography side...I'm more successful than most, but I'm nowhere near where I thought I would be at this point. I charge below $3,000 per wedding and only do about 17 a year. I'd love to expand my high school senior side of the business as it's what I enjoy doing the most. I think it's also my best work and by far better than anyone in my area - I think it stands up against some of the best in the country. No matter what I try I can't seem to expand that part of my business, and my biggest competitor in the area seems to do at least 10x the numbers that I do. This is hard to work on because any time I even think about it I spiral mentally downwards.
My immediate goals are to not let my depression over the above affect my pregnant wife too much. I've always dreamed of being an indie game developer and I've started and stopped developing a few games over the past few years because I realized I didn't have the time to work on them or lost the thread and my ambition after doing photography in the summer. I'm now developing a simple game that I'm sure won't sell well, but at this point I just want to make something.
Then, one year, I turned 30 and got married and decided that this kind of inconsistency was driving me crazy. I took a job with far less travel, just a day trip to an office or customer within driving range a few times a quarter, and it’s been a lot better. Covid worked out even better as I wasn’t going anywhere at all.
Unpopular opinion: Salaries are golden handcuffs.
The script is something that appears in all the big life decisions: what a good career, relationships, living well is supposed to "look like". I speak from the Millenial perspective but it's something roughly applicable to all generations - pressure to adopt a certain image. In adolescence the script, in some form, hits everyone really hard and becomes the life goal - and so by age 20, if you've had a stable life up to that point, you are groomed to be what society thinks you should be, and have internalised all those ideas.
At some point between then and 30 the cracks start to appear in the script. You're supposed to do X, but you want to do Y. Doing X will make you a lot of money, but you hate it. You actually like X when you were supposed to hate it. It turns out you don't want to become someone with more power and responsibility, or 2.5 children, or living an outragous Instagram lifestyle. You want a modest goal, like getting better at a hobby. Or maybe you're really good at something and it gets you acclaim, but you don't really grasp why that would be and start to reject it. Being told you're successful is ultimately just a way of playing to the crowd, isn't it? How do you be true to yourself without also dying?
And so, little by little, even if you seemed to have all that potential at 20, you probably get filtered out of the framework. Your life is something else, but how do you reconcile that? Some people mask to an increasing degree and find an addiction to help get them through the day. Others drop out and let themselves live more modestly instead of playing at being world-beating conquerers.
For me personally, seeing my parents age has been on my mind a lot. They definitely wanted me to be "successful" by the script. I was not succeeding at it, I felt miserable, was not earning much, and their involvement became increasingly distant and disengaged, repeating old aphorisms without examining the situation. But I realized, in some definitive sense, that I had broken past that when I checked my crypto holdings one day in spring of 2017 and realized they had suddenly become worth more than I had ever earned by working. I needed a few years to reset after that, but I got to watch my parents continue on basically the same trajectory they had had before, trying to write me back into the script: My mom used to want to have talks about "my future". Now she will sometimes say something about how I should be earning into Medicare. But my actual goals are much more near-term: if I live in a healthy way as best I know now, that seems more viable than hoping that Medicare exists in the future and that it will do something for me.
That's the kind of thing that's on my mind. I find things to study and pursue intensely, because that does seem to keep me focused and alive. The rest is just a means of getting there.