Strangely reading about high achievers having had a difficult childhood and how it might have actually "enabled" them to achieve what they did, is soothing in a way. It's nice to think of your own scars as a thing that helps you sometimes instead of only a burden.
I've worked at an ayahuasca retreat center the last few years and have worked with several of what I'd consider very successful people. What I've noticed is that there are a couple types- those who are successful despite their traumas and those who are successful because of their traumas. The people I've seen successful because of their traumas tend to have difficulty making real progress (which sometimes comes off has actually having wonderful experiences...possibly all projections or other forms of dissociation/resistance). I think with them there is a subconscious fear that if they heal, they will lose the drive that made them "successful". It's a tough pill to swallow. (The other camp tends to do really well, continues to be successful with even more appreciation and compassion, despite difficult experiences if they decide to face their traumas).
that's a cool perspective, thanks for sharing. totally makes sense that if you've internalized "bad stuff happens to me", you'd see your successful status as more precarious and not want to change anything, even for the better
It's a delicate balance like the Ballmer Peak. Too much or too little problems in childhood and you don't get the incredible drive of these types.
With my own 'difficult' childhood all I got was, according to Gabor Maté, a hard time focusing on stuff that I actually care about and a whole load of mediocre attempts.
Yeah, there are even experiments with mices on that - too much protection and you have no stress in life but die first from predators, or too little and you are anxious your entire life but alive.
I guess this is one of those that you can only judge in retrospect, although you can never know for sure.
I'm from a family that believed strongly in what some might call "useful child abuse", but that doesn't imply any actual abuse as it would have been defined even 20 years ago, and it isn't without love. Every one of my brothers will admit that our parents loved us deeply, but that our upbringing was extremely stringent and intellectually rigorous, with seemingly unjust punishments for poor grades or for words spoken disrespectfully. Many immigrant children or people from cultures that prioritize education will understand this. But never was it abusive in a physical sense (if you have to get physical, you've failed. You're missing the point of educating the child and doing damage to future generations instead).
I still believe in this, because it produces self-reliant, ultra-high-performing people, and if your goal is e.g. to have your lineage survive and thrive, then that's what you would want. So we're all lawyers, doctors and engineers, and we talk to our children like they're adults and have high expectations of them and are gravely, mortally disappointed if they let us down somehow.
Really, the only thing I'd like from low-pressure and low-performing people with too much time on their hands is for them to leave people like us alone, and go back to maxing out their credit cards, taking drugs, watching reality shows and crashing their cars, without thinking they're capable of judging people they'll never understand. But hey, that's the world we live in, and it's all sour grapes from them, so the main thing is to make sure they never get an upper hand no matter how many ill-behaved children they have.
That's the perspective from this side of that.
I expect to be downvoted for this, but before you click that arrow, remember the good news is that our kids will be smart and self-reliant and yours will be helplessly reduced to voting on social platforms, if they can even read ;)
Empirically, the causality you state there is simply wrong, and clearly so. The psychological abuse you have suffered usually at least leads to anxious attachment, i.e. the inability to form healthy bonds with other people, as well as higher probability of social anxiety, depression and suicidality. You've just fallen victim to survivorship bias here - if you were one of the kids that got broken more severly by their parents, you wouldn't post here.
You don't have to abuse children for them to grow up into functioning and healthy adults. That simply is ideology not rooted in any kind of data.
There is a parenting style called authoritative (not authoritarian! Authoritarian is what you had to suffer through) that is characterized by both clear and unwavering secure attachment (i.e. the kid always knows it is loved and protected, even if it got a bad grade in school or did something stupid) and clear, well-communicated and understandable rules and high, but achievable performance targets.
signed, an educational science phd who never was punished for a bad grade in his entire time in school even once, yet developed the discipline of doing a part time phd while already working and being a parent anyway.
I’ve thought about this a lot in the past, too, because my parents didn’t exactly come from loving homes themselves; their upbringings were defined more by strictness.
I grew up the same way. There was a lot of arguing—it rarely turned physical, but they didn’t take much interest in me, either. I had to sort out many of my own issues on my own. Fortunately, I had grandparents on one side of the family who loved me dearly and made me feel like I belonged. They also always encouraged me and supported my talents.
Now I have children of my own and think about this a lot—especially since my wife’s experience was similar, yet different. We decided to do things better with our kids, and we try to put that into practice every day.
Here’s something that crossed my mind: I’ve certainly achieved a degree of success in life, partly because I had to be very independent from a young age. If I wanted something, I had to take care of it myself—at least in most cases. But I’ve come to the conclusion that while my sons might turn out to be more "normies" or conventional, the psychological toll of that kind of upbringing—the low self-esteem and the lack of pride from one’s own parents—far outweighs those benefits.
Maybe I'm speaking from "survivor bias", but I'm bit offended by your clinically framed attempt to pathologize my upbringing here.
I never said that we weren't loved or that basic affection was withheld.
We were expected to do beyond what we thought was our best, or else we would be disappointments to our parents. Would they still love us? Sure. Kick us out...? Not unless our responses involved gross insubordination. But we were called to explain ourselves as one would in a court of law.
What was at stake, and this is what I think you may misapprehend, was not parental love. It was parental respect.
In order for that to function, you actually have to love them and know that they love you. Otherwise you wouldn't give a shit whether they respected you.
Which is why withdrawing respect at times is not abuse, it's teaching someone how to conduct themselves.
> your clinically framed attempt to pathologize my upbringing here.
Don't bring your dog collars around then
> as one would in a court of law.
such as this loud symptom, if you don't want the shame of it to outlive you. It's what you're looking for in fact. Your highly disagreeable post, followed by the very reasonable replies you wrote to the reactions it caused, is a hint you're still looking for that kind of stimulation. It's a form of self-punishment.
As much as I dislike the poster you're responding to ... I think he has a point in fact. I've been running "social inquiries" on linguists who opened new perspectives in their field. It's always the same pattern of finding in their intellectual constructs the life elements that put them in tension on the affective plane.
That's a lot of inefficiency being displayed by such a high-pressure, high-performance, individual. You could've just written "my childhood fucking sucked and I obviously developed some issues, but I justify it as it being good, since I have achieved some level of success, as defined by the circles I dwell in". Also, wasting time commenting on a social platform? Disappointing.
Edit: clicked the profile, it's just a troll, lol. Joke's on me.
heh. Well, I do comment here when I just finished a project and I'm up late drinking.
My childhood didn't suck at all. That's really a misinterpretation. Here's an example.
When I was 5 years old, my parents took me on the Concorde from New York to London. I remember the trip very well and learning what the Mach sign at the front of the cabin meant. The flight attendants gave me some neat models and stuff that I still have 40 years later.
A member of the British Parliament was sitting in the row behind us. Toward the end of the flight, he spoke to my father and said that he'd been worried about sitting in a row behind a child, but that he'd been listening to our conversation for two hours and had to comment on how much we'd talked about and how well I'd behaved.
Children do live up to your expectations of them, and you can talk to them as adults. None of this makes a childhood suck.
Guy grew up in Russia with no indoor plumbing, forced to drop out of school at 12, has 7 brothers and sisters killed in a genocide, flees conscription at 15, broke on a train to Holland then a boat to Argentina where he speaks no Spanish, ends up in America at 21 and becomes a Spanish translator, works as a cloth cutter and a bartender, buys a farm on a patch of arid desert, sends his kid to college, the first person in the family ever to go to college. Kid becomes a lawyer. Kid has kids and takes his children and his father on the Concorde, where they meet members of the British Parliament.
This man also locates and rescues his brother from a displaced persons camp in Cyprus after WWII. Brother could barely speak. Brother marries woman he met in Auschwitz and has two children who are the next people in their family to go to college. They become doctors.
I grew up with this man. He believed in achievement and a human soul.
The news is this: Dismissiveness, anger and dejection do nothing.
With regard to my grandfather's style of expectations and parenting, it was less than my father's. A young man in my grandfather's village had hung himself after getting bad marks in school. My grandfather was afraid my father would hang himself if he pushed him too hard. He was gentler.
I don’t know if it’s the fault of your parents’ parenting style, but there’s a kind of shortsighted meanness in this comment that has been the source of vast amounts of human suffering throughout history.
I don't think it's going to make a difference over a generation or two. If it did we'd have a society of high achievers and no achievers. Rags to riches and back in X generations. The people doing drugs and falling out with society may themselves be high achievers too Drugs drugs casts a wide net. You'll get older and unwanted and stupid like the rest of us. Then you'll wake up. Hopefully when you do you're not on your own.
I've just been sucked into the same online shitstorm as everyone else, I guess. I'm posting right now directly after reading tonight's clickbait about the woman who got sentenced for child abuse for letting her 5 year old kid walk a few blocks alone in a gated community. Transposing that to all this, it makes me think about what impacted me, my family and my cohort and allowed us to be self-sufficient, and further, the whole commentary demonstrates that such things are perceived by a good chunk of the population as "abuse" when they're really tools you need to give your children which other people would love to deprive you of giving to your children. I am an example of someone who would be nothing without the framework of expectations and responsibilities I was given at an early age (including at times radical freedom that I had to use judiciously or else face extreme disappointment) so I'm speaking in defense of that style of parenting.
But as to why I'm here writing in the middle of the night, it's pretty much on myself and my own addictions. I should be doing something more productive.
It kind of depends on your definition on high-performing people. The definition you seem to be operating by might work for the sort of the lone, cantankerous academic genius, someone who’s work is largely dependent on their ability to focus, study, and have certain output. I imagine a lot of people on HN have this definition of success.
But if your definition of success is remotely related to any form of leadership, then your suggestions are extremely flawed. To be a good leader, you need to manage people, have empathy, sympathy, tact, charisma, and so on.
Adding to that - many things in the real world end up being a mix of both, which means you need both to get to the top. Tom Brady or Michael Jordan don’t become the best in the world by being assholes to their teammates. Significant political / activist figures don’t start movements by belittling people. And so on.
Which means that the attitude you’re displaying here really kind of locks you into the upper middle class overachiever definition of success as a doctor, lawyer, etc. and not into the class of the truly successful.
> I expect to be downvoted for this, but before you click that arrow, remember the good news is that our kids will be smart and self-reliant and yours will be helplessly reduced to voting on social platforms, if they can even read ;)
you sound like a cunt, seriously, and have no idea what this attempt at stepping back tells about you. That makes you transparent, really any shrink would be like "ah yes, of course, that was to be expected". It's the only reason I'm replying back (no downvotes though, those are for spam). We get it you absorbed sadism from your parents. Why don't you tell us about the other side as well, all these moments of astheny when you're not flamboyant but ashy?
I just reserve the right to speak honestly, and I'm also willing to have my mind changed. Lots of hypocritical assholes are magnanimous as a gesture. I'll spend 2 hours telling a homeless guy he's not Jesus and he's ruining his life and try to find him a job. I did that a couple nights ago. But that isn't magnanimity, fuck no. It's some kind of sheer Dostoevskyan desire to see humanity in everyone I meet because the token value of mine is only as good as theirs. That's how I define morality. Magnanimity can go to hell.
I grew up in an environment where I had high expectations placed on me with a father who was mortally disappointed when I failed to meet them, but the reality was that, even when I gave my all, I still couldn't be what my father expected me to be because I had undiagnosed ADHD which has obvious implications for educational performance which was complicated by the fact I had undiagnosed (until a teacher picked up on it when I was 15 and referred me) dyspraxia and was physically incapable of writing fast enough to finish exam papers in time. I was permanently stressed from roughly the age of 7 until I left home at 20 and it did enough damage that I had to be referred from the ordinary mental health service to a specialist at the beginning of the year. Your tone is very similar to that of my father, and I'm sure for many kids this parenting style is productive, but if you think this kind of treatment isn't equally capable of producing generational trauma as physical violence, you're lying to yourself. I hope for their sake that your children never find themselves in a position where they can't meet your expectations.
I'd assume from the rest of your post that you'd all become olympians, astronauts, high ranked politicians, or founders of mega-corps. These are all fairly run-of-the-mill careers your family entered into, and plenty of people (I'd guess close to 100%) enter these roles without the type of abuse you suffered.
Hopefully the mortal disappointment you project onto your kids is a little lighter than that your parents projected onto you.
When I was a teenager I really thought their demands were unfair.
When I was a dropout and a taxi driver in my 20s, I blamed my parents.
When I became a millionaire based on finding something I loved and doing it very well, even though they disapproved and didn't support me in it, I finally was able to thank them for giving me the intellectual tools to do that for myself.
And interestingly, unexpectedly, they finally respected my choices as well.
Life without a struggle is meaningless.
My brothers, worth noting, are far far more interesting and successful than I am... I'm still a dropout loser to them. Megacorps and politics are their games.
Our father had a thing about no television and only books. We had to read 50 pages a night of a book he chose, after school, and report to him what we had read. Every night. No video games either, and computers only if you were writing your own code.
My eldest brother was severely dyslexic. He had a very hard time reading 50 pages a night. He found all kinds of ways to fake it. He makes $20 million a year now, give or take, as a senior law partner, still faking it. Tell me that ain't a good story.
Dude or lady, I was happiest when I was writing stories behind the wheel of a taxi, eating beans and rice every night and sleeping in the back seat... I'd almost be happier to lose everything I own and go back to that, because owning shit is an albatross, and what makes me happy is figuring things out from scratch and doing it on my own terms. The one thing that no one can take away from me is the love of proving myself and making things.
I guess I'm happy. I can't complain. I need more challenges.
I think that's a really awesome honest answer. I find it very cool you're still looking for challenges and setting the terms yourself. I wish you the best life ever possible.
I can certainly understand your motivation. To be honest, while money is helpful from the start, beyond a certain point it no longer improves your life. I currently support my own family with the money I earn. I’m even able to invest money for my boys so they can get a good education. But millions? These days, I prefer time. It's something which get more worthy every year.
> have high expectations of them and are gravely, mortally disappointed if they let us down
That sounds like a recipe for long-term psychological complexes. I know plenty of high-achievers that don't constantly feel like they have to prove themselves. And I wish I didn't have to work so hard to challenge that feeling in myself.
I don't know any high achievers who don't feel they have to prove themselves, so maybe I'm in the wrong cirles. It absolutely is a recipe for all kinds of long term complexes. But when you do work hard and you are satisfied with yourself, that satisfaction comes from something greater than yourself. Having no goal is worse than having an artificial one... and achieving something to make your dead parents happy is better than achieving nothing at all.
The measure of whether it was done in the proper proportion, I think, is whether you find later in life that it was, on balance, a service to you.
I'm not saying that any value judgement is a bad thing. (Although such a statement would be amusingly ironic). I'm saying that you're viewing your upbringing strictly through the lens it handed you.
As far as I can make out, your argument goes like this:
Strict parenting is good because it produces high achievers. I think achievement is good because I was conditioned to think it was good. I was conditioned to think it was good as a result of strict parenting.
Effectively: strict parenting is good because I was strictly parented.
"I was in the top 100 in tennis. Then I asked myself: 'what if I started training like Andy (Roddick). So I did and next thing I know I'm in the top 8 in the world"
- Mardy Fish [0]
"Kobe told me if I made a 1,000 shots every practice then I would be an All Star. So I started doing that and then became an All Star"
When I was a child I trained Athletics. In a training session the older kids pranked us or whatever, they measured our long jump and everyone jumped crazy lenghts. We could not believe it! I jumped one meter over my personal best. But they assured us, it was correct. As a naive and autistic kid I didn't question it, it's now as an adult I think back and analyze (i have good memory) it must have been the case... Anyway two days later there was a meet and I first jumped my ordinary length, but I now believed I could jump longer, I just needed to use more force, so I did, a bit longer, added even more force and speed, until I got the same result as the training session two days prior.
I do remember when hearing about Simón Bolívar's crossing of the Andes (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ju7nJjprbQg) "I wish I had this guy's energy and drive". Some people just seem to be on another level. It kind of would make sense if this was bipolar disorder?
This holds true across so many fields. I believe parts of this is in play in physical space as well. When breaking the World deadlift record. 500kgs seemed impossible until someone broke the barrier. Then suddenly others follow. Sub 10 seconds 100 meter was out of reach at some point. Bolts 9.58 seems almost impossible to beat and maybe that is why it isn't. There are of course barriers to physical performance, but I would agree that the general sentiment on where they are play a larger role in placing them than the actual limitations.
> In 1965, Widlar left Fairchild to work at National Semiconductor. While there, he released his design for the industry’s first high-power voltage regulator, the LM109. This finding came at a time when engineers hotly debated whether it was possible to develop a high-power regulator on a single chip.
> Widlar, established as an engineering genius in 1969, wrote a paper settling the debate, claiming temperature swings and packaging limitations made the device impossible. The industry took his word for it and stopped all efforts to build such a device. However, in 1970, Widlar shocked his contemporaries with the 20-W LM109, the industry’s first high-power voltage regulator. The device included all of the features Widlar had claimed were impossible just one year prior.
>Claude Shannon once told me that as a kid, he remembered being stuck on a jigsaw puzzle. His brother, who was passing by, said to him: “You know: I could tell you something.”
>That’s all his brother said.
>Yet that was enough hint to help Claude solve the puzzle. The great thing about this hint… is that you can always give it to yourself.
When I've been stuck on a problem that I know there's a solution to, sometimes I've been able to get unstuck by imagining myself in the future after having solved the problem looking back and kicking myself for how obvious it was.
Maybe that only works for problems that have solutions so obvious you'd kick yourself for not seeing them, but it does put me in a frame of mind of looking back from the solution and seeing the path out of being stuck.
My other trick is that when I've been working hard to solve a difficult problem, and then at the last moment something horribly discouraging happens and everything falls apart, I realize that there is no God, but if there were, he's a huge asshole and a bully who loves to throw things in your path just before you're about to succeed, to discourage you and make you give up right as you're on the edge of success, sabotoging yourself by snatching defeat from the jaws of victory. Because he loves to laugh at you for being the cause of your own defeat.
Now I recognize that pattern of everything falling apart after it was going so well as a sign that I was just about to succeed, and God's just being a dick, so I refuse to give up, and interpret it as an encouraging sign, just to spite him. Even though he doesn't exist, it really annoys him when I do that.
It may sound crazy, but it's not as crazy as believing in God! Maybe it's not internally consistent, because God can't be an asshole and a bully if he doesn't exist, but it's certainly consistent with how the fictional Bible depicts him, and how the vast majority of his followers and the leaders they elect act in the real world.
I recorded this several days ago: Alan Kay was performing an AV test before giving a talk for Kristen Nygaard's 100-year birthday celebration, and God threw a monkey wrench into the loop, which Alan broke out of with amazing ideas from Claud Shannon that he thinks about every day.
Alan Kay: Shannon Gave Us a Way of Dealing with Noisy Channels
Alan Kay performs an improvisational avant garde layered audio feedback loop about Claude Shannon, live online during Kristen Nygaard's 100-year birthday celebration.
Alan was scheduled to talk about how encountering Simula sparked his early thoughts about objects. During setup, somebody had the live stream playing out loud near an open Zoom mic, so his own voice kept arriving back in his ears about 21 seconds late, over and over.
What he said was not random: "Shannon gave us a way of dealing with noisy channels." And: "I think about that almost every day. I realize what the fuck is going on and it's just so amazing." Shannon's noisy channel coding theorem is the math for exactly the kind of channel that was garbling him as he praised it.
Alan joked it was "being rerouted to Mars and back." At the speed of light, a 21 second round trip is about 3 million km one way -- eight trips to the Moon and back, not even a twentieth of the way to Mars at closest approach.
This is an accidental Zoom performance of Alvin Lucier's "I Am Sitting in a Room" (1969), where Lucier re-recorded his own voice in a room until only the room's resonance remained. Here what remains is the network: delay, compression, dropouts.
Bonus noise: YouTube's auto-transcript bleeps Alan's enthusiasm into [ __ ]. So the full chain is: Alan's voice, Zoom, stream, room, Zoom again times three, my screen recording, YouTube's speech recognizer, a censored transcript.
The fix: "Just turn off the audio at your end on Zoom."
Your view of God is internally consistent. It's exactly why I refuse to believe in God. He can be an asdhole and a bully, but as long as I don't believe in Him, I've maintained my consistency. You could just as easily go the other way on that, but if I did acknowledge God then I'd have to do whatever my religion told me God wanted every day. And I'm not about to do that for some entity that's left the world in this state. However, it would be highly hypocritical to yo acknowledge God and at the same time not to follow some of those rules. As long as I don't acknowledge He exists, the agreement is I'm not a hypocrite and He can be an asshole.
My trick to solving those things, by the way, is to talk to myself out loud until I fall asleep, then have a metaphorical dream that I have to analyze, and then the answer is suddenly clear. I never doubt that I will get to the answer, but it can take days or weeks... you have to trust that your mind will get there.
Strangely reading about high achievers having had a difficult childhood and how it might have actually "enabled" them to achieve what they did, is soothing in a way. It's nice to think of your own scars as a thing that helps you sometimes instead of only a burden.
I've worked at an ayahuasca retreat center the last few years and have worked with several of what I'd consider very successful people. What I've noticed is that there are a couple types- those who are successful despite their traumas and those who are successful because of their traumas. The people I've seen successful because of their traumas tend to have difficulty making real progress (which sometimes comes off has actually having wonderful experiences...possibly all projections or other forms of dissociation/resistance). I think with them there is a subconscious fear that if they heal, they will lose the drive that made them "successful". It's a tough pill to swallow. (The other camp tends to do really well, continues to be successful with even more appreciation and compassion, despite difficult experiences if they decide to face their traumas).
that's a cool perspective, thanks for sharing. totally makes sense that if you've internalized "bad stuff happens to me", you'd see your successful status as more precarious and not want to change anything, even for the better
It's a delicate balance like the Ballmer Peak. Too much or too little problems in childhood and you don't get the incredible drive of these types.
With my own 'difficult' childhood all I got was, according to Gabor Maté, a hard time focusing on stuff that I actually care about and a whole load of mediocre attempts.
Yeah, there are even experiments with mices on that - too much protection and you have no stress in life but die first from predators, or too little and you are anxious your entire life but alive.
I guess this is one of those that you can only judge in retrospect, although you can never know for sure.
I'm from a family that believed strongly in what some might call "useful child abuse", but that doesn't imply any actual abuse as it would have been defined even 20 years ago, and it isn't without love. Every one of my brothers will admit that our parents loved us deeply, but that our upbringing was extremely stringent and intellectually rigorous, with seemingly unjust punishments for poor grades or for words spoken disrespectfully. Many immigrant children or people from cultures that prioritize education will understand this. But never was it abusive in a physical sense (if you have to get physical, you've failed. You're missing the point of educating the child and doing damage to future generations instead).
I still believe in this, because it produces self-reliant, ultra-high-performing people, and if your goal is e.g. to have your lineage survive and thrive, then that's what you would want. So we're all lawyers, doctors and engineers, and we talk to our children like they're adults and have high expectations of them and are gravely, mortally disappointed if they let us down somehow.
Really, the only thing I'd like from low-pressure and low-performing people with too much time on their hands is for them to leave people like us alone, and go back to maxing out their credit cards, taking drugs, watching reality shows and crashing their cars, without thinking they're capable of judging people they'll never understand. But hey, that's the world we live in, and it's all sour grapes from them, so the main thing is to make sure they never get an upper hand no matter how many ill-behaved children they have.
That's the perspective from this side of that.
I expect to be downvoted for this, but before you click that arrow, remember the good news is that our kids will be smart and self-reliant and yours will be helplessly reduced to voting on social platforms, if they can even read ;)
Empirically, the causality you state there is simply wrong, and clearly so. The psychological abuse you have suffered usually at least leads to anxious attachment, i.e. the inability to form healthy bonds with other people, as well as higher probability of social anxiety, depression and suicidality. You've just fallen victim to survivorship bias here - if you were one of the kids that got broken more severly by their parents, you wouldn't post here.
You don't have to abuse children for them to grow up into functioning and healthy adults. That simply is ideology not rooted in any kind of data.
There is a parenting style called authoritative (not authoritarian! Authoritarian is what you had to suffer through) that is characterized by both clear and unwavering secure attachment (i.e. the kid always knows it is loved and protected, even if it got a bad grade in school or did something stupid) and clear, well-communicated and understandable rules and high, but achievable performance targets.
signed, an educational science phd who never was punished for a bad grade in his entire time in school even once, yet developed the discipline of doing a part time phd while already working and being a parent anyway.
I’ve thought about this a lot in the past, too, because my parents didn’t exactly come from loving homes themselves; their upbringings were defined more by strictness.
I grew up the same way. There was a lot of arguing—it rarely turned physical, but they didn’t take much interest in me, either. I had to sort out many of my own issues on my own. Fortunately, I had grandparents on one side of the family who loved me dearly and made me feel like I belonged. They also always encouraged me and supported my talents.
Now I have children of my own and think about this a lot—especially since my wife’s experience was similar, yet different. We decided to do things better with our kids, and we try to put that into practice every day.
Here’s something that crossed my mind: I’ve certainly achieved a degree of success in life, partly because I had to be very independent from a young age. If I wanted something, I had to take care of it myself—at least in most cases. But I’ve come to the conclusion that while my sons might turn out to be more "normies" or conventional, the psychological toll of that kind of upbringing—the low self-esteem and the lack of pride from one’s own parents—far outweighs those benefits.
Maybe I'm speaking from "survivor bias", but I'm bit offended by your clinically framed attempt to pathologize my upbringing here.
I never said that we weren't loved or that basic affection was withheld.
We were expected to do beyond what we thought was our best, or else we would be disappointments to our parents. Would they still love us? Sure. Kick us out...? Not unless our responses involved gross insubordination. But we were called to explain ourselves as one would in a court of law.
What was at stake, and this is what I think you may misapprehend, was not parental love. It was parental respect.
In order for that to function, you actually have to love them and know that they love you. Otherwise you wouldn't give a shit whether they respected you.
Which is why withdrawing respect at times is not abuse, it's teaching someone how to conduct themselves.
> your clinically framed attempt to pathologize my upbringing here.
Don't bring your dog collars around then
> as one would in a court of law.
such as this loud symptom, if you don't want the shame of it to outlive you. It's what you're looking for in fact. Your highly disagreeable post, followed by the very reasonable replies you wrote to the reactions it caused, is a hint you're still looking for that kind of stimulation. It's a form of self-punishment.
As much as I dislike the poster you're responding to ... I think he has a point in fact. I've been running "social inquiries" on linguists who opened new perspectives in their field. It's always the same pattern of finding in their intellectual constructs the life elements that put them in tension on the affective plane.
That's a lot of inefficiency being displayed by such a high-pressure, high-performance, individual. You could've just written "my childhood fucking sucked and I obviously developed some issues, but I justify it as it being good, since I have achieved some level of success, as defined by the circles I dwell in". Also, wasting time commenting on a social platform? Disappointing.
Edit: clicked the profile, it's just a troll, lol. Joke's on me.
heh. Well, I do comment here when I just finished a project and I'm up late drinking.
My childhood didn't suck at all. That's really a misinterpretation. Here's an example.
When I was 5 years old, my parents took me on the Concorde from New York to London. I remember the trip very well and learning what the Mach sign at the front of the cabin meant. The flight attendants gave me some neat models and stuff that I still have 40 years later.
A member of the British Parliament was sitting in the row behind us. Toward the end of the flight, he spoke to my father and said that he'd been worried about sitting in a row behind a child, but that he'd been listening to our conversation for two hours and had to comment on how much we'd talked about and how well I'd behaved.
Children do live up to your expectations of them, and you can talk to them as adults. None of this makes a childhood suck.
children from families flying Concorde grow up to be doctors and lawyers, news at 11
That's not really the news.
Guy grew up in Russia with no indoor plumbing, forced to drop out of school at 12, has 7 brothers and sisters killed in a genocide, flees conscription at 15, broke on a train to Holland then a boat to Argentina where he speaks no Spanish, ends up in America at 21 and becomes a Spanish translator, works as a cloth cutter and a bartender, buys a farm on a patch of arid desert, sends his kid to college, the first person in the family ever to go to college. Kid becomes a lawyer. Kid has kids and takes his children and his father on the Concorde, where they meet members of the British Parliament.
This man also locates and rescues his brother from a displaced persons camp in Cyprus after WWII. Brother could barely speak. Brother marries woman he met in Auschwitz and has two children who are the next people in their family to go to college. They become doctors.
I grew up with this man. He believed in achievement and a human soul.
The news is this: Dismissiveness, anger and dejection do nothing.
With regard to my grandfather's style of expectations and parenting, it was less than my father's. A young man in my grandfather's village had hung himself after getting bad marks in school. My grandfather was afraid my father would hang himself if he pushed him too hard. He was gentler.
sob stories of your gramps life have nothing to do with you
I don’t know if it’s the fault of your parents’ parenting style, but there’s a kind of shortsighted meanness in this comment that has been the source of vast amounts of human suffering throughout history.
I don't think it's going to make a difference over a generation or two. If it did we'd have a society of high achievers and no achievers. Rags to riches and back in X generations. The people doing drugs and falling out with society may themselves be high achievers too Drugs drugs casts a wide net. You'll get older and unwanted and stupid like the rest of us. Then you'll wake up. Hopefully when you do you're not on your own.
So where did it all go wrong, to end up with you posting comments like this?
Ahhh, finally a good question.
I've just been sucked into the same online shitstorm as everyone else, I guess. I'm posting right now directly after reading tonight's clickbait about the woman who got sentenced for child abuse for letting her 5 year old kid walk a few blocks alone in a gated community. Transposing that to all this, it makes me think about what impacted me, my family and my cohort and allowed us to be self-sufficient, and further, the whole commentary demonstrates that such things are perceived by a good chunk of the population as "abuse" when they're really tools you need to give your children which other people would love to deprive you of giving to your children. I am an example of someone who would be nothing without the framework of expectations and responsibilities I was given at an early age (including at times radical freedom that I had to use judiciously or else face extreme disappointment) so I'm speaking in defense of that style of parenting.
But as to why I'm here writing in the middle of the night, it's pretty much on myself and my own addictions. I should be doing something more productive.
It kind of depends on your definition on high-performing people. The definition you seem to be operating by might work for the sort of the lone, cantankerous academic genius, someone who’s work is largely dependent on their ability to focus, study, and have certain output. I imagine a lot of people on HN have this definition of success.
But if your definition of success is remotely related to any form of leadership, then your suggestions are extremely flawed. To be a good leader, you need to manage people, have empathy, sympathy, tact, charisma, and so on.
Adding to that - many things in the real world end up being a mix of both, which means you need both to get to the top. Tom Brady or Michael Jordan don’t become the best in the world by being assholes to their teammates. Significant political / activist figures don’t start movements by belittling people. And so on.
Which means that the attitude you’re displaying here really kind of locks you into the upper middle class overachiever definition of success as a doctor, lawyer, etc. and not into the class of the truly successful.
> I expect to be downvoted for this, but before you click that arrow, remember the good news is that our kids will be smart and self-reliant and yours will be helplessly reduced to voting on social platforms, if they can even read ;)
you sound like a cunt, seriously, and have no idea what this attempt at stepping back tells about you. That makes you transparent, really any shrink would be like "ah yes, of course, that was to be expected". It's the only reason I'm replying back (no downvotes though, those are for spam). We get it you absorbed sadism from your parents. Why don't you tell us about the other side as well, all these moments of astheny when you're not flamboyant but ashy?
Once you've made it this far, the new spectrum everyone is measured on is their magnanimity.
It's okay that you didn't turn out to be that magnanimous, but don't lie to yourself and pretend that you tried as hard as you could
You had more in your humanity tank than you knew you had
It's not that I'm not magnanimous.
I've got lots in the humanity tank.
I just reserve the right to speak honestly, and I'm also willing to have my mind changed. Lots of hypocritical assholes are magnanimous as a gesture. I'll spend 2 hours telling a homeless guy he's not Jesus and he's ruining his life and try to find him a job. I did that a couple nights ago. But that isn't magnanimity, fuck no. It's some kind of sheer Dostoevskyan desire to see humanity in everyone I meet because the token value of mine is only as good as theirs. That's how I define morality. Magnanimity can go to hell.
I grew up in an environment where I had high expectations placed on me with a father who was mortally disappointed when I failed to meet them, but the reality was that, even when I gave my all, I still couldn't be what my father expected me to be because I had undiagnosed ADHD which has obvious implications for educational performance which was complicated by the fact I had undiagnosed (until a teacher picked up on it when I was 15 and referred me) dyspraxia and was physically incapable of writing fast enough to finish exam papers in time. I was permanently stressed from roughly the age of 7 until I left home at 20 and it did enough damage that I had to be referred from the ordinary mental health service to a specialist at the beginning of the year. Your tone is very similar to that of my father, and I'm sure for many kids this parenting style is productive, but if you think this kind of treatment isn't equally capable of producing generational trauma as physical violence, you're lying to yourself. I hope for their sake that your children never find themselves in a position where they can't meet your expectations.
>So we're all lawyers, doctors and engineers,
I'd assume from the rest of your post that you'd all become olympians, astronauts, high ranked politicians, or founders of mega-corps. These are all fairly run-of-the-mill careers your family entered into, and plenty of people (I'd guess close to 100%) enter these roles without the type of abuse you suffered.
Hopefully the mortal disappointment you project onto your kids is a little lighter than that your parents projected onto you.
Why?
When I was a teenager I really thought their demands were unfair.
When I was a dropout and a taxi driver in my 20s, I blamed my parents.
When I became a millionaire based on finding something I loved and doing it very well, even though they disapproved and didn't support me in it, I finally was able to thank them for giving me the intellectual tools to do that for myself.
And interestingly, unexpectedly, they finally respected my choices as well.
Life without a struggle is meaningless.
My brothers, worth noting, are far far more interesting and successful than I am... I'm still a dropout loser to them. Megacorps and politics are their games.
Our father had a thing about no television and only books. We had to read 50 pages a night of a book he chose, after school, and report to him what we had read. Every night. No video games either, and computers only if you were writing your own code.
My eldest brother was severely dyslexic. He had a very hard time reading 50 pages a night. He found all kinds of ways to fake it. He makes $20 million a year now, give or take, as a senior law partner, still faking it. Tell me that ain't a good story.
Money aside, would you consider yourself being happy?
Dude or lady, I was happiest when I was writing stories behind the wheel of a taxi, eating beans and rice every night and sleeping in the back seat... I'd almost be happier to lose everything I own and go back to that, because owning shit is an albatross, and what makes me happy is figuring things out from scratch and doing it on my own terms. The one thing that no one can take away from me is the love of proving myself and making things.
I guess I'm happy. I can't complain. I need more challenges.
I'm a dude, but thank you for not assuming :)
I think that's a really awesome honest answer. I find it very cool you're still looking for challenges and setting the terms yourself. I wish you the best life ever possible.
I can certainly understand your motivation. To be honest, while money is helpful from the start, beyond a certain point it no longer improves your life. I currently support my own family with the money I earn. I’m even able to invest money for my boys so they can get a good education. But millions? These days, I prefer time. It's something which get more worthy every year.
> have high expectations of them and are gravely, mortally disappointed if they let us down
That sounds like a recipe for long-term psychological complexes. I know plenty of high-achievers that don't constantly feel like they have to prove themselves. And I wish I didn't have to work so hard to challenge that feeling in myself.
I don't know any high achievers who don't feel they have to prove themselves, so maybe I'm in the wrong cirles. It absolutely is a recipe for all kinds of long term complexes. But when you do work hard and you are satisfied with yourself, that satisfaction comes from something greater than yourself. Having no goal is worse than having an artificial one... and achieving something to make your dead parents happy is better than achieving nothing at all.
The measure of whether it was done in the proper proportion, I think, is whether you find later in life that it was, on balance, a service to you.
> when you do work hard and you are satisfied with yourself
Ime if you constantly need to prove yourself then you rarely feel this; when you do, the feeling is ephemeral.
> achieving something to make your dead parents happy is better than achieving nothing at all
This feels circular. It assumes a value judgement about achievement which stems from your upbringing.
We are taught that achievement means value. Circularly, we value ourselves for achievements and we inculcate this in our children.
It is a value judgment. It's one that not everyone shares. It's surprising to me that a majority of people find it to be a controversial.
I think what's actually going on here in this thread is that people think any value judgment must be a bad thing. Right?
I'm not saying that any value judgement is a bad thing. (Although such a statement would be amusingly ironic). I'm saying that you're viewing your upbringing strictly through the lens it handed you.
As far as I can make out, your argument goes like this:
Strict parenting is good because it produces high achievers. I think achievement is good because I was conditioned to think it was good. I was conditioned to think it was good as a result of strict parenting.
Effectively: strict parenting is good because I was strictly parented.
You expect to be upvoted for an obvious troll post?
It's Poe's Law in action. We can't tell if you're unhinged enough to post that or you're imitating people who would post that to make fun of them.
> if they can even read ;)
No need, they have videos.
cults always utilize this kind of fanservice for initiation
Two quotes I love about this:
"I was in the top 100 in tennis. Then I asked myself: 'what if I started training like Andy (Roddick). So I did and next thing I know I'm in the top 8 in the world"
- Mardy Fish [0]
"Kobe told me if I made a 1,000 shots every practice then I would be an All Star. So I started doing that and then became an All Star"
- Dwight Howard [1]
0 - https://www.netflix.com/title/81026434
1 - https://www.reddit.com/r/nba/comments/j1hjb5/charania_dwight...
When I was a child I trained Athletics. In a training session the older kids pranked us or whatever, they measured our long jump and everyone jumped crazy lenghts. We could not believe it! I jumped one meter over my personal best. But they assured us, it was correct. As a naive and autistic kid I didn't question it, it's now as an adult I think back and analyze (i have good memory) it must have been the case... Anyway two days later there was a meet and I first jumped my ordinary length, but I now believed I could jump longer, I just needed to use more force, so I did, a bit longer, added even more force and speed, until I got the same result as the training session two days prior.
I do remember when hearing about Simón Bolívar's crossing of the Andes (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ju7nJjprbQg) "I wish I had this guy's energy and drive". Some people just seem to be on another level. It kind of would make sense if this was bipolar disorder?
Mania is a hell of a performance enhancer.
This holds true across so many fields. I believe parts of this is in play in physical space as well. When breaking the World deadlift record. 500kgs seemed impossible until someone broke the barrier. Then suddenly others follow. Sub 10 seconds 100 meter was out of reach at some point. Bolts 9.58 seems almost impossible to beat and maybe that is why it isn't. There are of course barriers to physical performance, but I would agree that the general sentiment on where they are play a larger role in placing them than the actual limitations.
Interesting article to share on the eve of yesterday's debacle about the Navier-Stokes problem.
Maybe another quote to add to the list is about Bob Widlar (from https://www.allaboutcircuits.com/news/bob-widlar-silicon-val...):
> In 1965, Widlar left Fairchild to work at National Semiconductor. While there, he released his design for the industry’s first high-power voltage regulator, the LM109. This finding came at a time when engineers hotly debated whether it was possible to develop a high-power regulator on a single chip.
> Widlar, established as an engineering genius in 1969, wrote a paper settling the debate, claiming temperature swings and packaging limitations made the device impossible. The industry took his word for it and stopped all efforts to build such a device. However, in 1970, Widlar shocked his contemporaries with the 20-W LM109, the industry’s first high-power voltage regulator. The device included all of the features Widlar had claimed were impossible just one year prior.
>Claude Shannon once told me that as a kid, he remembered being stuck on a jigsaw puzzle. His brother, who was passing by, said to him: “You know: I could tell you something.”
>That’s all his brother said.
>Yet that was enough hint to help Claude solve the puzzle. The great thing about this hint… is that you can always give it to yourself.
When I've been stuck on a problem that I know there's a solution to, sometimes I've been able to get unstuck by imagining myself in the future after having solved the problem looking back and kicking myself for how obvious it was.
Maybe that only works for problems that have solutions so obvious you'd kick yourself for not seeing them, but it does put me in a frame of mind of looking back from the solution and seeing the path out of being stuck.
My other trick is that when I've been working hard to solve a difficult problem, and then at the last moment something horribly discouraging happens and everything falls apart, I realize that there is no God, but if there were, he's a huge asshole and a bully who loves to throw things in your path just before you're about to succeed, to discourage you and make you give up right as you're on the edge of success, sabotoging yourself by snatching defeat from the jaws of victory. Because he loves to laugh at you for being the cause of your own defeat.
Now I recognize that pattern of everything falling apart after it was going so well as a sign that I was just about to succeed, and God's just being a dick, so I refuse to give up, and interpret it as an encouraging sign, just to spite him. Even though he doesn't exist, it really annoys him when I do that.
It may sound crazy, but it's not as crazy as believing in God! Maybe it's not internally consistent, because God can't be an asshole and a bully if he doesn't exist, but it's certainly consistent with how the fictional Bible depicts him, and how the vast majority of his followers and the leaders they elect act in the real world.
I recorded this several days ago: Alan Kay was performing an AV test before giving a talk for Kristen Nygaard's 100-year birthday celebration, and God threw a monkey wrench into the loop, which Alan broke out of with amazing ideas from Claud Shannon that he thinks about every day.
Alan Kay: Shannon Gave Us a Way of Dealing with Noisy Channels
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cjntrqhn8pk
Alan Kay performs an improvisational avant garde layered audio feedback loop about Claude Shannon, live online during Kristen Nygaard's 100-year birthday celebration.
Alan was scheduled to talk about how encountering Simula sparked his early thoughts about objects. During setup, somebody had the live stream playing out loud near an open Zoom mic, so his own voice kept arriving back in his ears about 21 seconds late, over and over.
What he said was not random: "Shannon gave us a way of dealing with noisy channels." And: "I think about that almost every day. I realize what the fuck is going on and it's just so amazing." Shannon's noisy channel coding theorem is the math for exactly the kind of channel that was garbling him as he praised it.
Alan joked it was "being rerouted to Mars and back." At the speed of light, a 21 second round trip is about 3 million km one way -- eight trips to the Moon and back, not even a twentieth of the way to Mars at closest approach.
This is an accidental Zoom performance of Alvin Lucier's "I Am Sitting in a Room" (1969), where Lucier re-recorded his own voice in a room until only the room's resonance remained. Here what remains is the network: delay, compression, dropouts.
Bonus noise: YouTube's auto-transcript bleeps Alan's enthusiasm into [ __ ]. So the full chain is: Alan's voice, Zoom, stream, room, Zoom again times three, my screen recording, YouTube's speech recognizer, a censored transcript.
The fix: "Just turn off the audio at your end on Zoom."
I Am Sitting in a Room:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_Am_Sitting_in_a_Room
Alvin Lucier on "I am sitting in a room":
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v9XJWBZBzq4
Your view of God is internally consistent. It's exactly why I refuse to believe in God. He can be an asdhole and a bully, but as long as I don't believe in Him, I've maintained my consistency. You could just as easily go the other way on that, but if I did acknowledge God then I'd have to do whatever my religion told me God wanted every day. And I'm not about to do that for some entity that's left the world in this state. However, it would be highly hypocritical to yo acknowledge God and at the same time not to follow some of those rules. As long as I don't acknowledge He exists, the agreement is I'm not a hypocrite and He can be an asshole.
My trick to solving those things, by the way, is to talk to myself out loud until I fall asleep, then have a metaphorical dream that I have to analyze, and then the answer is suddenly clear. I never doubt that I will get to the answer, but it can take days or weeks... you have to trust that your mind will get there.