Science MemesYou know the old saying, ‘Get a job doing the thing you love, and you’ll never work a day in your life!’?
That’s really bad advice. Get a job doing something you like, but not your passion. If you burn out on your passion, you’ve lost the thing that brings you joy.
People always ask why I don't turn my hobby into a job, and this is the response I give. If the thing I do to unwind from my job becomes my job, what will I do to unwind from my job?
Ah, we've solved this in America. You go to your second, minimum wage, job. There your skills will not be valued and your work conditions will much worse
This will leave you exhausted and make you yearn for your normal job again
The real advice is to realize that every job has components that are not fun.
There are professional athletes who still love to play their sport, and intend to retire into coaching, but hate dealing with marketing and promos and media availability. Lots hate the travel. Some don't like some of their teammates or coaches.
I know doctors who hate dealing with the paperwork, and programmers who hate dealing with documentation or testing, and lawyers who hate tracking their timesheets. But each of these are part of the job. The question is whether the entire bundled package deal is a pretty good job or not for yourself.
The question is whether the entire bundled package deal is a pretty good job or not for yourself.
That's a great way of putting it. Unfortunately, the drudgery of each job is rarely explained or even acknowledged to young people entering the workforce. That's how we end up with burnt out people in their 20s and 30s.
One of the good things about IT in giant organisations is teams often get big enough to let programmers specialise into the job they enjoy. In my team one programmer does all the auto unit testing, the other two do more of the programming
In my job, I haven't found other analysts who want to do all the admin
This also happens when people who love to cook at home get convinced to open a restaurant. There's a reason why restaurants have cooks/chefs and managers that do the admin stuff, and loads of other delegation. Cooking food and giving it to people you know for free when they're at your home is not the same as asking a world full of Karens to pay for your take on Mac n Cheese
Yeah, this is 100 percent true. It doesn't even have to be what you do for a living. I used to really enjoy cooking, but once I got a family and had to cook meals every day, whether I felt like it or not, it became a chore. As chores go, it was still better than most, but it stopped being something I looked forward to.
test
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ITALICIZED PIG HELL YEAH
FUCK YEAH I FUCKING LOVE SCIENCE
lol TIL
🐈️🔥🔥🔥
I'm very sorry to hear that. I've loved biology since I was a child, and my graduation in biology only fueled that love even further.
What it did not fix however was the absolute dread of seeing the natural world a hair strand away from collapse. You'd think some professor would offer you calming words or a path to the future, but guess what, even the top experts are just as panicked as we are.
My dread got way worse after going to college for biology because every class tells you how fucked things are and can point to the science that proves it.
The worst is when family or friends try to tell you “Things won’t be that bad.” No, if anything it’s going to be worse, because we’re doing fuck all to turn things around.
Voting for abusers to run our leadership governments. Fucking retarded population
I used to love computers... still do, but good god do I hate tech companies and all this shit it's spawned. My last remaining line of defense mentally is that at work we have shifted to a mostly Windows environment, and my interests lie with the Unix side of things.
I've lucky enough to be able to fund my study while I'm in middle age.
I took up my degree course because I enjoyed computing and the theory behind it. I enjoy it for the most part, it's engaging and intriguing. I'm getting some personal and academic development out of it even though it's got fuck all to do with my "real" career.
I can see people stressed off their tits with it though - people who have a career pinned on success with the degree; people who went to uni because they felt it was just the next natural step; and people who did it because they were told to.
I feel genuinely gutted for them that a topic that brings so much learning and satisfaction can bring another so much stress and anxiety.
Shame.
Yeah, you're right, I'm an it scmuck in cyber now but it doesn't mean I failed at computers, I don't want a more stressful job, I don't want to program for a living, I just enjoy learning computer science.
As for uni yeah now it's just extra years of high school, up to an MSc is mandatory if you want to succeed, and by succeed I mean have a job, and even then your chances are very slim.
Mine is being able to self host services that have been enshittified by the tech companies. I tried to watch Fallout on Prime legitimately but their servers couldn't handle the volume. I had it on my Jellyfin server in the time it would have taken the episode to fully buffer.
Haha, god bless, that's the spirit!
all numbers are imaginary
It's more complex than that
Don't be irrational
Yeah, let's be real.
I love 3D art, and I want to make games eventually. I remember using my cracked copy of 3D Studio MAX to experiment and try things "just to see real quick!" when I was supposed to be doing more boring homework like report writing.
I even kept my obsession after a community college semester with the most joy-killing professor on the subject you could ever meet.
I dropped out of college because of life and found Blender, and kept learning as much as I could because I thought it was my ticket to a real job that didn't involve "How may I help you?" every single day. It was going to be my way out.
Well, just a year or so ago I FINALLY got paid to do a freelance character sculpt. And...It took way longer than I hoped, I hammered on it like every single day, and I haven't touched Blender since wrapping that project.
I really want to get back to modeling, but it made me realize I definitely don't want to be an "industry" 3D artist making stuff to someone else's exacting specifications for money. I still would love to sell a game on Steam or something some day.
...But I put a lot of skill points into these skills already, following what I love...so I'm kinda lost. Business and work is a realm that just makes me nauseous and anxious to think about as the water keeps rising, so to speak.
So I guess I'm saying: don't make the thing you love your lifeline to surviving capitalist society, because unless that thing is "making money", doing it for money or clientelle chokes the joy out of most human endeavors.
So I guess I’m saying: don’t make the thing you love your lifeline to surviving capitalist society, because unless that thing is “making money”, doing it for money or clientelle chokes the joy out of most human endeavors.
This is a really good quote, thanks.
Man, I feel that deeply. Working in tech has destroyed any joy I got from technology. After several years I got burnt out so badly that I had to take a couple years off
Now here I am, only a couple months back into working and every moment I spend actually doing the work is torture. I used to love it, now I'd be happy to never use technology in a productive way for the rest of my life
Yeah, too real. It’s that many people are currently forced to turn their hobbies into their second job to make ends meet
My favourite subjects in school and university were the humanities, but I landed in IT systems analysis which turned out to be fun for me, especially now I'm good at it, but I'm pretty trapped there by ok pay and a very generous retirement plan (we called it golden handcuffs back when there were many of us with access to it — since the early 2000s it got less generous.
I feel like I could run a brewpub in my retirement, I wouldn't need it to survive as I'd be on a good pension indexed to the CPI*, and it would work as a one man operation
(Consumer price index, the cost of living)
I really loved reading until i started middle school. And by the time i graduated i no longer found any enjoyment in reading.
I've tried so hard to enjoy it again as an adult because there's not that academic pressure, but now i even feel apathetic about reading stories I am interested in.
I used to want to write
I used to want to make games for people to play and enjoy
Now I just want to get by and i hate myself for it
Audiobooks helped me get back into reading. It’s a different medium, but I’m still getting the story.
And now I can enjoy a good story and fold laundry or do other chores at the same time.
I like audio books, but i have really bad retention when listening to them. I will just zone out and miss everything. :c
It's not your fault. Don't hate yourself and don't give yourself pressure. Relax and maybe it will happen, or maybe it won't. Either way, don't push yourself.
I really loved reading until i started middle school. And by the time i graduated i no longer found any enjoyment in reading.
An education system that takes away the enjoyment of reading from people is rotten.
That sounds a bit like burnout, to be honest. I stopped reading for a few years, too, and didn't even know why, I was just not "in the mood" or at least I thought so. I have picked it up again this year and ultimately realized that my job was stressing me out. I was constantly worried about problems at work, but for reading, you need a calm mind.
Quitting my job and going to another company this year was one of the best decisions ever. Since then I have found time for hobbies (and losing weight) again. I also read on a WiFi-less eBook reader and put my phone into another room, so I cannot get distracted.
I'm gonna be real, idk if there's a way for me to feel ok about life while I'm stuck working 40hrs+ a week.
And I can't find a way to live while working less than that. I'm trying so hard to find another option.
Chat, is this ℝ?
OP has a ℂ now.
I am a first year student in electronics engineering.
I loved watching fun youtube videos on math (ex. 3blue1brown) but was not fond of high school math, due to the lack of proofs and deeper understanding.
Nowadays the stuff I used to watch for fun turned into my job and I couldn't be happier. Finally getting to do real science feels good.
Unlike high school math, I loved high school physics but that one was mostly due to my way of learning. Which is with lots of visualisations in my head and lots of calculus to prove the formulas they made us memorize.
These days, even though my books give me the proof right away, I sometimes don't look at the proof because I miss the magic of fiddling with calculus for hours to find it myself.
I love computers but I felt like my love would diminish if I picked CS as a major. Mostly due to the monotonous nature of the job environment. But i am pretty sure my love for electronics is undying and unlike computing I have heaps to learn about electronics so I picked it.
Is electronics engineering different from electrical engineering?
Electrical engineering includes large-scale power systems, where electronics engineering is mostly small scale instrumentation, computers, etc
Electrical engineering is designing stuff an electrician might work on, something that's part of the grid, electronic engineers work on stuff with chips in them. Most of the stuff Big Clive shows was designed by an electronic engineer
I work in what a lot of people would call a calling. I'm extremely happy coding, writing and doing research. I got a PHD and even that didn't kill the joy I get doing it. I work in a big fortune 500 company doing it and that didn't kill my joy either.
My biggest piece of advice for people afraid to get jobs within their interests is: take care of yourself. You've got to find other interests and stabilize yourself when you're drained. There's a lot exhaustion overlapping with joy suck here that has nothing to do with no longer enjoying your interest.
Sometimes you're drained from the job - because it's a job. Or grad school.
Or the skill / interest is genuinely hard and not as playful as before because you got to a really difficult part, like super advanced mathematics. That's true with a lot of skills. You go far enough, and it's genuinely difficult to learn, understand, and grow. And then it's up to you if you can still find your passion in it or not.
Skill issue. Learning to love an academic discipline beyond the flashy YouTube video level and into the depths of actually doing it every day involves, among other things, a lot of work, such as when you reconceptualize what it's all about and where the beauty lies.
"I fucking love science" and loving science are different games.
I mean, I'm an expert in three fields. I only love the music one. The other two (subfields of economics and tax) can suck my dick and ovaries
I love fucking science
I went to grad school for speech language pathology, so I've read plenty of academic articles. I always thought they were incredibly depressing. So ever since grad school, I have imagined scientists as people who are constantly overworked, underpaid, and depressed
So ever since grad school, I have imagined scientists as people who are constantly overworked, underpaid, and depressed
Uh..... but you're not that far off. Maybe not depressed if they really love their work, but some really hate writing up findings and looking for grants because it's the admin part of the job that no one likes. It's like every episode of Ologies where it's a research scientist, she asks what the things they like least about their job is, and it's always always always hustling for money and writing endless grant applications.
Calling academia "evil incarnate" for that is a bit much.
Yeah, they didn't even mention peer reviews!
no its really not
Grad school really took a heavy toll on my mental health, but it didn't take my love of the field. Diving into the literature on plant development was... Like, I would go for a walk outside and look at all the foliage and it was like I could see the code of the matrix. Auxin flowing along the edges, pooling to form leaves and lobes and then diving down into the interior to form vascular connections. CUC expressing in the primordia then hollowing out to define the boundaries. PINs relocalizing to reenforce the auxin flow. Ad/abaxial gene cohorts defining the leaf polarity and thereby orientation. It was like some wonderful second sight that showed me worlds that had once been hidden to me. It was this almost transcendental experience and I've never forgotten it even as I've moved on other fields.
I've never had quite the same experience since, but I still have found that, to me, learning what's behind the mystery often makes it more magical, not less
For me it was physics. Was interested in it as a teen, studied it for a degree, and though I did well in it -- I just could not look at it as this fun thing. It would even make me angry to read physics posts on reddit where people shared their enthusiasm for certain concepts.
Then I kept reading reddit, had my mind repeatedly blown by things that I thought I understood but clearly didn't because I was just doing rote memorization to pass exams, and I began to enjoy it again. Now I love it, but it really is amazing what being forced to learn something for little-to-no encouragement other than an exam mark can do to sap your enthusiasm for something
I discovered at a young-ish age that the adage of "do something you love and you'll never work a day in your life" is absolute, unabashed bullshit.
As someone who loves science.
I am so glad i decided to pursue video game development as higher education rather then a scientific field.
Granted the illusions in games are gone, every game is now a dull collection of mechanics and The gap between what modern games are snd how i know they could be is depressingly vast.
But at least i can still enjoy hour long deep dives into quantum mechanics and golden ratio. Definitely a good tradeoff.
For me studying for my master's was the more fun part than studying for my bachelor's. The bachelor's studies included a lot of obligatory subjects that were less interesting to me, or choices that didn't include any fun options.
In the master's studies we were free to specialize much more. There was lots of work, but it was interesting. Like building a small OS. Or reading the newest networking papers and discussing their merit. Or implementing congestion control for ourselves, and playing around with ideas on how to maximise its efficiency.
Now I'm a network engineer at an ISP and things are much more practice focused and I had to learn a ton that wasn't taught at uni, or was taught to electrical engineers instead of me, to get into things, but it's still fun and interesting.
I don't know what the difference is, or how to get my outcome instead of the 4channers, but I just wanted to share an opposite anecdote.
My favourite thing has always been English language, so I was disappointed you didn't think of an "apposite opposite anecdote" (though your experience was both apposite and opposite)
My phone thinks apposite isn't a real word. Silly phone.
Ha sorry :-D That would have been really good. I think my vocabulary is pretty okay for an ESL speaker, but that one I hadn't heard of, unfortunately.
I used to like math too
when were were counting lil squares on the paper and when were awarded a piece of candy or one of those smelly erasers
but then they were like "hey why don't you just solve this simple problem? its about identifying perpendicular lines on a graph to find an angle measure in a right triangle. but were not gonna tell you what the number is. hell, were not even gonna give you a graph. or a pencil. or a paper. you're gonna have to make your own paper and pencil. and here's a essay for some fucking reason, cause this is math and you need to write a fucking 31 page ESSAY about TRIANGLES!!!!!!!!!!"
that was math for me :)
Academia killed my love of reading. I can't even read for pleasure anymore
That's what high school did to me. I had a nasty reading disability (still do) but these days I just reread shit when it doesn't sink in. And if I still don't get it, I just keep rereading it until it finally does. Simple, right? Well high school me spent god knows how long obsessing over how to fix my reading problems, even though the solution was pretty simple
So true. As a kid a was in a booklovers' mail club where I'd get a couple books appropriate for my age and I loved it. I always was working through something up through high school and college.
But grad school required reading hundreds of pages of research for class every week and I was just exhausted from it. I think I only made it through the Harry Potter books throughout my PhD. I go through periods where I'll get through a couple books, and there's a few writers I follow, but I haven't gotten back to loving reading the way I used to.
yeah, having to read and pretend to understand a hundred or so pages of legal briefs every day was... not good. i wasn't even in laws school.
Uh... I did learn about imaginary numbers in high school. It was part of the ranking test to get into uni, even.
There's a difference between imaginary numbers and all numbers are imaginary.
BIANAM (but I am not a mathematician)
Work is work
Not really.
I hated work most of my life, and then got some good career guidance from a book called "Discover What You Are Best At."
I found a job that used my talents in a way that kept me interested.
You don't have to work on passion projects like art or research to be content.
Just find something where you feel engaged.
I managed to find very interesting jobs couple of times. After a year or two management changes, projects change, co-workers change. Many things make work "fun" and you usually don't control any of it. My last company in couple of years went from nice place to work to corporate shithole with low morale. Hard to stay interested in a place like that.
Yup this is me right now. I work with an amazing team and was really liking my job for the past three years. Then 2 months ago we got a new Associate Director who immediately set herself to bullying, denigrating, and tearing apart everything and everyone. I'm currently waiting to see which comes first; I get fired or I quit.
She's probably trying to pad her resume for her next job.
I was very lucky. The job I liked was in civil service. Relatively low amount of bull from management.
The trouble is that most managers and other higherups are already planning their next job move the day they get hired. They don't care about the people who are working there.
It's still work somedays.
Yes, but there's a big difference between 'man, the job sucked today' and 'my god, I hate this job, nothing good ever happens.'
Your last two sentences defeat what came before..
Work is work. It's not passion projects, it's work. You don't have to love it
You don’t have to work on passion projects like art or research to be content.
Just find something where you feel engaged.
Are you talking about these two sentences above?
Because it sounds like we agree.
I am not sure I understand your point.
I have never looked at math and saw this beauty people describe. Math to me is as beautiful as an angle grinder, it's a useful tool that hates you and plots your demise.
IMO math is fun when you choose to study it.
Also, if you want some classical "beauty" results, look into complex numbers and complex analysis. E.g., Mandelbrot sets are absolutely gorgeous.
But personally, I'm more partial to stuff like Borwein integrals, i.e. when you make "weird stuff" happen with "not very weird" ingredients.
Basically, the above pattern "works" for exactly the first seven iterations, but then it "breaks" for some reason on the eighth!
Borwein is incredibly interesting. Thank you for sharing
See that seems like the kind of thing Matt Parker would make a video about, "Someone noticed a weird pattern in some numbers." Like how 2 pi or the fibonacci sequence keep turning up in nature, and I just can't muster up much more than a "...huh" about it. I mean I understand margesimpsonpotato.jpg but if you want me to do calculus you're gonna have to bring me more than "I just think they're neat."
Fair lol. IMO you kinda gotta be fucked in the head to like calculus. But I am fucked in the head, so it works for me 🤷
Personally, calculus is really where I fell in love with math. I had 0% interest in math at all until I took calculus. And also, I'm in one of the few positions where I actually use calculus all the time (PhD student in electrical engineering).
But also, I do music production as a hobby. And music production is, under the hood, real-time math. For example, audio equalizers are basically just doing real-time integration for you. You can absolutely do music production without calculus, in fact 99.9% of people do, but it's been so helpful for my creativity to actually understand at that level what filters (and other things) do. So to me, at least in my autistic brain, math, calculus in particular, is part of everything I do, even my hobbies and free time and dreams and everything.
Oh, and computers can do calculus now, even with symbols. If you install its symbolic toolbox, GNU Octave will do it for free on a potato. So even if you don't want to slog through the algebra, it's super easy to just fuck around with calculus and a computer.
Just in to say, I know exactly what you mean, and I love the subject, to the point I did a PhD in pure maths. The whole "golden ratio" in nature, and a lot of other adjacent stuff, leaves me indifferent at best, and really irritates me at worst. It's often cheapo mathy wank to feel clever when you talk to your friends. There is nothing wrong in being interested in it, but I'd hope someone into maths would eventually go beyond that.
I also am not a fan of several very useful branches of maths, like calculus, but it's a tool you need to have. Some people love it though, and I scratch my head at it as much as you do, if not more probably, because I have had to use it so much.
There are probably as many reasons to find maths beautiful (or ugly) as there are people, but for me it boiled down to the fact that:
- with relatively few assumptions, we can logically and iteratively build an abstract machinery that is consistent (well, with caveats...);
- a lot of these abstract theories provide good enough frameworks for other sciences to base theories on and be successful at explaining the world with these (I could talk about the fifth axiom of Euclid, non-euclidian geometries, and how we eventually arrive to something that is a formal setting for the theory of relativity for hours, it's fascinating);
- it provided me with abstract objects that I could reason about, explore in different ways, and with different points of view, until something clicked and I got to understand the objects better;
- some proofs, even of quite complex theorems, have such a simple and elegant initial idea (when others can feel quite forced), that it is hard not to marvel at how things fall neatly into place (sometimes...).
So to me maths provided a setting in which things worked and made sense, and you could essentially just enjoy an endless supply of puzzles in that setting, whose solutions you could formally prove.
Unlike a lot of maths nerds, I don't necessarily think that that's totally limited to maths though. I think most people do their abstract thinking and puzzle solving on whatever it is that they find beautiful. Or I hope they do, it's a wonderful feeling. The formal aspect of proofs though (and I don't necessarily mean computations), that's the unique thing that can set it apart.
????
They tought us about imaginary numbers in A levels (16-17) here, do they not even teach them in undergrad in the US??? I struggle to believe that.
OP isn't referencing "the imaginary numbers" as in the set of numbers that are multiples of the square root of -1. They're referencing the fact that in grad school, you're told "forget everything you've been taught about math up to now. We're going to start with a couple of basic assumptions, and extrapolate all of Cartesian Algebra (the math taught in preschool through undergrad) from those assumptions. Now, let's see what other algebras we can create by changing those assumptions."
The only two "numbers" that need to exist to derive all of Cartesian Algebra are zero (additive identity) and one (multiplicative identity). All other numbers are just convenient identifiers that can be extrapolated rather than assumed, hence the overly simplified "all numbers are imaginary".
This is similar to other STEM subjects, like how in Physics you're taught Newtonian physics, then you're taught why Newtonian physics is just a tiny subset of relativistic physics, and then in grad school you are taught everything you know is just a tiny subset of quantum mechanics. What's taught in undergrad is "good enough" for your average person to do really complex things in typical day to day life, but for someone dedicating their academic career to the subject, they need to learn the dirty, overly complex details to have a true understanding of the subject.
They're just memeing
They taught you that “all numbers are imaginary” in A levels?
I worked in the MMO industry and played a lot of them, including ones I didn't want to (and some that never saw the light of day or folded almost immediately). The last one I kept playing was Rift: Planes of Telara and, when they did an overhaul of stuff, I couldn't be bothered to learn all the new stuff and just quit. That was probably 15ish years ago at this point. It also kinda ruined a lot of gaming for me for years. I do play games again now, and I do sometimes feel the itch for an MMO, but I haven't played one again.
Only numbers that are imaginary are those that do not correlate to real world quantities
