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.
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.
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 ;)
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 hear 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, so I'm speaking in defense of that.
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.
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.
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.
> 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 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.
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.
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 ;)
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 hear 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, so I'm speaking in defense of that.
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'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
Edit: clicked the profile, it's just a troll, lol. Joke's on me.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
>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
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.