Circa 2012 my boomer parents had me job hunting in person AND hand-writing the cover letters. It got me two jobs so maybe it wasn’t the worst advice, but i would spend every day driving around and penning half a dozen letters for employers that, a lot of the time, weren’t even hiring.
Anyway, that (12 years ago) was the last job hunt i’ve ever done, it’s been nothing but networking and freelancing ever since
you wont be alone everyone finds a lifelong partner.
Calling that advice is like the opposite of a modern fortune cookie.
Don’t believe anything you read on Wikipedia.
That infuriates me. “Oh but anyone can edit”. Yes, but see for how many seconds your stupid edit will last. It’s the single most rich and accurate encyclopedia humanity has seen, ffs.
Teachers should be using Wikipedia as an opportunity to teach skepticism and following sources. I wouldn’t allow Wikipedia to be used as a cited source, but as a starting point for finding other sources on a topic.
Does anyone still say not to trust Wikipedia? They did so in the beginning and it certainly didn’t have to turn out trustworthy so that was good advice for a few years.
Now we see it’s the most trustworthy encyclopedia, and my kids’ teachers qualify it as “an encyclopedia is not an original source “, which is correct and a valuable distinction. They recommend it as a starting point but don’t allow citing it, as is correct.
Don’t talk to strangers on the internet
My parents separated when I was really young, roughly 5 yrs old. As I grew up and had visitation with my dad he always drilled into me “women just want a man who can provide for them, in the end they all just want money.” Being young and obviously not knowing how crazy my dad was yet, I believed him for a long time.
Turns out when you treat people like they just want you for your money, that’s the only kind of people who will put up with you. Kinda self fulfilling. Found a nice lady now, happily married and caring about each other, not just money.
“If you love something set it free, if it comes back it’s meant to be.” Nearly cost me the best relationship of my life because I was a dumb, impressionable kid that believed in wise sounding words. If you love something, hold on to it. Work for it. Don’t let it go just to “see if it comes back”.
Same could probably be said for just about any seemingly wise sounding sayings.
I think it’s more about control than sending what you love away.
“Set it free” means let your love interest choose to stay or leave on their own, don’t try to keep them caged.
Depending on what you mean, it’s possible that your love you regret letting go of wouldn’t have lasted even if you had held it and fought.
Though if you mean you took that saying and thought it meant you needed to push your love away to see if they returned, then yeah, that’s not a great strategy.
Yeah, the latter is how it was explained to me. Like, literally break up with the person you love to see if they’ll fight for you to take them back. Or push them away and wait a few years to see if they magically reenter your life or something. Crazy, I think some people believe they live in a hallmark movie
I installed a gravitic emitter in my belt that makes it feel like she has to walk uphill to approach me. Let’s see just how much she loves me, and if it’s statistically significant in its difference between how much she loves approaching the cat.
Ah fuck, that’s a rough lesson to learn the hard way. Like so obvious in hindsight, but if you needed to learn it, you needed to learn it before you could see that.
Could have also meant just not working to maintain it. “Let it go” could (foolishly IMO) mean “stop feeding it”.
“When you first move into a house dont make any improvements for at least 6 months.”
I now see that its Terrible advice.
Haha, no.
When you first move in you see all the flaws that the previous owners got used to living with. Fix them while you’re still motivated to.
Don’t make any improvements is a crazy proposition. But I agree with living in the place 6 months before doing anything drastic unless it is obvious. I live in a very old house. It took us a while to see the reasoning behind some of the features in our house. We were tempted to scrap anything that wasn’t typical in new constructions, but that would have been a waste of money.
I was happy saving up for a few months and observing the house to see where my money was best spent.
This is very true on codebases as well. There’s always this instinct to underestimate the value of what’s already been built.
I would argue that, rather than 6 months, you should really wait until after you’ve spent a winter in it. Lots of things that might seem odd during warmer months suddenly make sense when everything is cold, icy, and freezing.
Exactly this! We did not understand how our house operated as a system until we experienced it in both the freezing cold and humid summer. Most modern homes were designed to circulate air efficiently, but with a 250 year old home, things work differently.
For example, the wood burning stove was put in that place for a reason, and although it might complicate the couch/tv placement, the benefits of a properly placed heat source outweigh the feng shui of the room.
Why is it not good advice?
It’s meant to stop you from spending $30k on a kitchen renovation because you hate the way the cabinet doors open, not to fix health and safety issues.
I sold cabinets for a while, and at the time I lived in a little studio apartment, basically paycheck to paycheck.
People would drop $10-50k to have slightly nicer cabinets. It seemed so trivial to me.
But then again, I would spend $20 on pizza or whatever sometimes so I didn’t have to cook. I’m sure to someone starving, that would seem like a ridiculous use of resources.
It’s a strange feeling interacting regularly with people more wealthy than myself.
Very many home improvement tasks cause a bit of mess and having to move furniture around. If you don’t do them initially, it’s way harder to motivate yourself to do it when you’re fully moved in. Flooring/skirting/painting are the typical things you’ll want to do up front.
On the other hand, being able to re-create momentum when it has completely drained away is an excellent life skill to have.
Effectively ALL of what I was told about what makes a satisfying and successful life. I was told the right thing to do is work hard, go to school, get a good stable job, get married, settle down, have kids, buy a house, own several depreciating assets.
Life is about being happy. Nothing else. Do what makes you happy, because that car, vacation, or other piece of consumer shit won’t. Nor will living by scripts somebody else wrote for you.
I had my house paid off at 30 and was traveling 5-6 times a year. High-level in the gaming, lottery and promotions industries. Misery. Now I have a humble life and I paint and craft things and I go dancing. And I’m happy. I could pick up the tools again and make a highly successful Steam game, but I won’t. I already proved my point in my career and creative output, and I don’t want to anymore.
Bro, won in life, now doing sidequests
I gave everything away and now I live a simple life where I volunteer, work at crisis shelters, do recovery mentorship, housing outreach and other things. I am happy and I do not care about the trappings of the material world anymore. I chased the hologram until I caught it and discovered its true nature.
This reminds me of this meme, I saw one time :
I agree, but i also get a chuckle out of getting the meme wrong on purpose: this man held the same job title for 21 years, but something about being Principal Performance Architect sucked so much that he retired within a year and became a goose farmer.
Super curious here.
What game did you make?
I made several hundred games over my 20+ year career. I started making games for the world’s first touchscreen internet-enabled kiosks, the Playdium arcade in Toronto, etc. Moved onto online game development as senior dev for GameLoft.com, made the first online pari-mutuel gaming system, introduced online lottery technology to the world’s “Big 3” lotto companies. Made the first 3D tennis game. Honestly too much to even discuss as I could go on for hundreds of pages. Most people who are older than 30 have played my games and wouldn’t know it.
I’m older than 30.
Probably played one of your games.
One of the things I’ve learned from my favorite psychology professor is that paying attention to my conscience, doing what my gut tells me is the right thing to do, is the most effective treatment for depression I’ve ever found.
I used to be enamored of basically financial success and exploration. Now I most highly value the lack of things nagging at my conscience.
I’m pretty poor, but I’m happy.
I used to make a lot more money making software. During that time, I kept maybe 25% of the promises I made to people professionally. I would very often say “This’ll be done in three weeks” knowing I’d have a better chance of landing this or that contract, also knowing the three weeks was extremely optimistic.
I did that all the time. Very bad character in retrospect. No wonder I was anxious and depressed. Always feeling like some kind of hunted animal. Somehow, I thought of myself as a good person because I lied to myself.
Now I do work where I keep approximately 97% of my promises (I track this). I make less money. Honestly the work I do is easy. But the payoff in terms of my serotonin and dopamine levels is huge. I feel solid. I rarely have trouble getting started with my day.
I’m hoping to take on slightly harder, slightly more meaningful work. But now that I have a taste of being reliable, I never want to go back.
I’m happy for you. :)
“Fully empty your battery before charging it up again, it increases the lifespan of the battery.”
This was true before lithium-ion batteries became the norm. But for lithium-ion batteries, the opposite holds.
Remembering which of my devices are old method charging and which are new method is a pain.
I have several camping lamps from like 20 years ago that I almost threw out because they weren’t holding charge anymore, before I remembered to be fully draining the batteries and recharging them once a month. They work like new now practically.
What’s the opposite of “full empty your battery before charging it again?”
Don’t let it uncharge fully. You ideally want to stay in the 30-70% range as much as possible.
Also, charging it to full is much better than letting it die until it’s empty.
I’ve also heard 40-80%
From time to time you want to let the battery go from 100% to shutting off, so the charging circuit can calibrate the reported capacity
Well that one is still true if somehow you still have Ni-Cd batteries in your life.
You can always find it cheaper on Ebay.
This is actually somewhat true again now that Amazon has gone full monopoly abuse, but for a while Ebay was nothing but 1:1 with Amazon sellers and a serious lack of auctions.
Although you can go much lower with Ali Express and Temu, albeit with risk invovled.
I thought eBay in this context meant second hand? Because here’s the thing: i think second hand means you save a lot of money but you get less choice and less convenience; but platforms are getting good now so both of these factors are mitigated.
Anyway, eBay being 1:1 with Amazon is good enough for me, and i agree that AliExpress in particular is now better than Amazon in terms of price and choice. I don’t even know how risky it really is, they can refun orders right?
Just as casual conversation, what items or categories of goods do you usually deal with? Just wondering, as I myself have noticed “the boat” rocking back and forth between different online buying options for years. I live a pretty minimalist life now (used to be heavy tech) so I don’t buy much anymore and am pretty out of the loop now.
If you’re a quiet dedicated employee your value will be recognized and rewarded.
Yeah, that doesn’t work well anymore. Gotta be a noisy dedicated worker, and be willing to move jobs a few times to start seeing the rewards
Yeah, that doesn’t work well anymore.
It never did.
rewards mostly come from job hopping. Raises at every place I’ve worked arent callibrated to inflation, so your 4% raise that the boss thinks is so great is closer to 0-1%/
I put that into practice and just got promoted last Halloween! Let people know that you’re smart and interested in how your job works.
Working hard will get you far.
This works as long as you apply some level of thought to it. Digging a ditch with a spoon is hard work, it’s unlikely to help you get anywhere.
Depends. For someone else? Maybe not. On yourself? Definitely.
Work hard studying and exercising. Self improvement I’d important, and its not related to job opportunities, but rather mastering the art of living.
~2004. My highschool civics teacher told the class that real estate was always a good investment because it only went up. I didn’t really trust him at the time though.
I mean, if you had money at the time and bought a house in one of the larger cities or their suburbs, you would probably be loaded by now, even though you would regret it for about 5 years after the crash
You have to be loaded to be loaded? Got it.
This “teacher” also would complain about wellfare queens who had children just to claim more benefits, that the best thing that could happen to a country is to be invaded by the US because they’ll rebuild afterwards and that every Union but teacher’s Unions were obsolete today, among other things.
Real estate can be a good investment, even pre 2008 crash. What can be dangerous is over leveraging. A primary residence isn’t really an investment, still worth buying though.
He was just echoing the same sentiment lead to all those house flippers. He was a wealth of conservative BS and that was just one of his thinly veiled prosperity gospel moments.
he was a terrible teacher.
the wealthy have always considered real estate to be a liability that requires constant upkeep. they are money pits.
this is why they truly own nothing but physical assets(gold, paintings,etc) and leverage any liquidity on acquiring assets.
The wealthy are buying up properties either to rent out or if they’re Chinese, to move their wealth to places their government can’t take it from. They absolutely own propriety, but not with the intent to flip.
properties yes, but homes are not investments.
Find what you love, and then figure out how to make money on it.
It worked for me, but not my spouse. Sometimes you just need to find something you’re happy enough doing to make the income.
I always thought that was really dumb. After hearing stories from people then “find a skill in demand that sounds like a fun challenge” is a way better approach. I went for software but mech/civil engineering, carpentry, electrician and architect would all also be great choices.
I love sleeping.
Depends what part of the process you like. Some people like to be very meticulous in their hobbies, and somewhat of a perfectionist. That rarely exists in a professional environment, where everything is based on getting projects out the door, on schedule and on budget.
I actually like banging out projects quickly, so the professional life of my hobby suits me well (woodworking). I love pounding out big mortises with a sledgehammer, planing big boards and watch chips go flying. I hate fiddling with joinery and slowly fitting them for 10 minutes (slowly learning how to do them faster). For other people, joinery is their favorite part.
Yeah, finding a career that is acceptable and pays enough to afford the lifestyle you crave is a balance. Usually that advice comes from people who love doing something that is coincidentally also highly paid.
Also, loving something and being actually good enough at it to make a career out of it are also two different things
My grandpa told me “always call your boss sir, and respond “yes sir”, youll be promoted real quick.”
First day at my first job my boss tells me “by the way you don’t need to call me sir, just Brian”
Its actually insane that the world that boomers lived in was that simple.
Sir Brian of Work
“You need to keep phoning and sending letters to employers, they’ll give you a job eventually”.
Lump that in with the ‘apply in person’ crowd too.
Just walk in with your resume and and ask to see the manager so you can shake their hand…
That advice could also be harmful to your career. Being subservient like that will make sure that your boss will never see you as an equal as e.g. a potential successor
Dutch has a formal and informal 2nd person word (think “you” vs “thou”).
I have an intern who will not stop using the formal version, and it feels super awkward. I keep telling her to stop it, but she said she always uses with older people…
She’s 23, I’m mid 30s. Ouch.
Fun fact about English, “you” was actually the more formal one. But since we don’t use “thou” anymore, and most people know it from old-timey speak and church, we think of it as more formal today.
Well, people in the past talked MUCH more formally than we do.
If I talked to my grandfather in 1400 the way I talk to my husband today, he’d probably disown me.
Fun fact about Dutch: The informal is ‘jou/je’ and de formal is ‘u’, the last one, however, is pronounced like English ‘you’, the former is pronounced like old-time-english thou.
At least she doesn’t help you cross the street. Yet.
“Is your lunch soft enough? Should I cut it up for you? We have a blender back in the kitchen if you want?”
You do those shenanigans in french too.
Super complicated with SO family though uhg.
Do you mean je vs u? Could you tell me more about which would be appopriate in settings like a police control, a shop or a campsite? I’m learning dutch but still trying to grasp those things :)
Welcome to dutch, where there are more exceptions than rules, and the natives just ignore the rules anyway!
In general, “Je” is by far the most common form. Children use “u” with adult strangers, adults are generally only expected to use it with people in authority positions, but that’s becoming more and more rare. It’s still polite to use “u” with strangers, but nobody will be very upset if you don’t, unless you’re addressing a judge, mayor or your boss’s boss.
Some people address their grandparents formally, but most don’t. It’s still considered polite to use it with much older people, like 30+ years older, but hardly will be upset if you don’t.
Quite a few companies require customer-facing jobs always use “u”, to be respectful, but even that is getting less. My city sends me letters with “jij” nowadays.
sounds kind of like je vs vous in french, not quite the same but used in a similar way
Funny thing, we actually call the calling someone jij tutoyeren and calling someone u vousvoyeren. This comes from the French.
Thank you, that’s definitely good to know!
German here, we have the same thing (du vs. sie). Our rules may be slightly different than dutch but probably similar enough.
Police: definitely formal unless the officer is someone you know privately.
Shop: usually formal though some hobby-related shops (think GameStop or board games) might prefer informal.
Campsite: probably informal
As a general rule of thumb: informal is used with first names, formal is used with last names. Think about which name you would use in English and go with that. If in doubt, use the formal version or ask.
I speak both german and dutch, and in my experience germans tend to use ‘sie’ in way more situations than the dutch. In my experience, germans also place more importance on titles (dr. Prof. Ir., etc), and older people can get riled up if you don’t address them with their titles, although it has gotten less.
In the Netherlands, I usually start with ‘u’ if I don’t know the older (60+ y.o., I’m late 20s) person yet, but I do listen if they tell me not to. Also the situation is important. For a job interview with someone clearly older than me, or if it’s a suit-and-tie sort of place, I would go formal. I agree with the above about the police/shop/campsite, altough most shops are also informal in the Netherlands.
Is that why Dutch people often get it wrong when to use “Du” or “Sie” if they’re speaking German? Because from my perspective that happens a lot.
I would assume so
Thanks, I’m a German native speaker myself - I tend to use je vs u in Dutch similar to the German du und Sie, but as the other replies indicate that seems to be a bit too formal in Dutch :)
Unless you are in the military or a sex dungeon, I wouldn’t use “sir” these days. It’s a bit odd in everyday life as culture has changed, haha.
Last time I was in a sex dungeon I called my dom Sir Loin… turned out to be a Miss Steak
This is comedy gold where the heck is the recognition over here, can we get some recognition for this comment up here please!?
They didn’t. Some Boomers are also in the “just Brian” camp.
sir doesn’t sit well with me either for work positions, I say it to be nice sometimes, but not because you’re my boss. and if someone calls me sir, my response is " I’m not your sir, just call me …"
That’s how I see it too. It’s like a whimsical anachronism referencing a more formal era.
just call me …
Maybe?
just call me …
Al?
If you’ll be my bodyguard, I can be your long lost pal!
