It seems to me that you’re looking for an impossible book—the world changes fast enough (and I think it’s been changing faster lately and likely to continue) that there’s no obvious way to know, for example, how much you should specialize.
At the moment, there are a lot of people who “did everything right” (followed standard advice on how to have a secure, prosperous future) and have taken considerable losses.
I’d be OK with a book that gave “all the usual advice” of this sort. I’m not expecting the book to describe an optimal life, just a semi-typical life and the logic that justified the decisions at each stage. Part of the reason that I’m looking for the book is so that I can try to merge this sort of bottom up “actuarial model” that has something like “the base rate for normal lives” with a top down analysis of possible future trends and how they may change people’s lives. Then I can look for places where those ways of thinking about the future seem to sharply diverge (signs of crisis or opportunity), and where they are likely to predict basically the same thing (things I’m more likely to be able to count on).
In the meantime it seems like there is potentially a lot of prosaic stuff of the sort that various old people would like to tell young people about how “not to make the retrospectively obvious mistake I made” with respect to actions at 20, 25, 30, 35, 40, 45, 50, 55 and so on. Each of those ages makes me think of distinct sets of life challenges that I have relatively little personal experience with, but I imagine they could go a bit better if I did a little prep work in advance, guided by grounded data.
Maybe someone has already collated that data into a book for some reason? If so, I want to read it :-)
If you’re willing to start with the raw material, this might be an interesting question to raise at Metafilter—it’s got a lively and varied commenting community.
This indeed might make an interesting ask.metafilter question. That is by far the most useful part of the site. I have a backlog of questions I want to ask them and you can only ask one question per week so I cannot volunteer to ask it.
If you paid the 5$ signup and waited one week and asked your question you will get answers. I have no idea if you would get any good answers, let alone an answer worth 5$ to you, but you would get answers. There is no question in my mind that at least one time in the history of that website more than one person has paid the 5$ signup, waited one week, posted one question, and disappeared off into the aether.
You do not need a book for this. What you need is parents who succeeded in their own lives and a close relationship with them. Since I don’t have that, I wouldn’t mind the book you imagine is out there. It probably needs to have a long chapter on tips for managing resentment of all the people around us who have good relationships with their successful parents and for whom life is like a frolic in the park.
The closest thing I have seen to a book approaching your question is by Joe Dominguez and Vicki Robin Your Money or Your Life.
Thanks! The specific article you sent me to was very close to the reason I was looking for information here. There was a comment over there:
you can’t plan 20 years out because you don’t know what’s going to happen. You can plan around goals, and that might be the most useful thing you can do. Don’t just think about ‘retiring before the age of 50’ or ‘getting married by 28’. Life doesn’t work that way. However, if you DO write out your goals and plans for the next fifty years, leave them somewhere and find them in a few decades...hours of laughter and tears....guaranteed.
My goal in searching for this information is not to plan so much as to try to predict what will happen. What will I probably do? I want to write out the prediction and see how things go. Laugh. Then make a new prediction that will hopefully induce less laughter and more smug self confidence. Lather, rinse, repeat :-P
I tracked down a summary of the core concepts in “Your Money Or Your Life” that you mentioned. It looked like it would be helpful for anyone who is financially drowning because they are flinching around conscientious money management. Its not exactly what I’m looking for right now, however.
I also ran the google search you suggested, looked through the results, and find two more interesting books in the process, like the one’s in the original article they are not exactly what I want, but they are in the ballpark:
I’m not sure which of the many norms you’re referring to.
Unfortunately, I’m an occasional reader at MeFi, and can’t help out with the culture. It might be worth asking about, either at Mefi, or at Ask Metafilter.
In the meantime it seems like there is potentially a lot of prosaic stuff of the sort that various old people would like to tell young people about how “not to make the retrospectively obvious mistake I made” with respect to actions at 20, 25, 30, 35, 40, 45, 50, 55 and so on. Each of those ages makes me think of distinct sets of life challenges that I have relatively little personal experience with, but I imagine they could go a bit better if I did a little prep work in advance, guided by grounded data.
In my experience, when it comes to sincere advice from older folks, it’s extremely difficult to separate the wheat from the chaff. This is both because the world is changing very rapidly these days and because, contrary to the usual saying, most people’s hindsight is very far from 20⁄20. People are often oblivious to how much things have changed since their youth, and unable to distinguish true instances of correct and incorrect planning from random luck.
A huge problem here is that honest reflection about one’s past mistakes, missed opportunities, and suboptimal decisions tends to be very painful and unpleasant, and people consequently prefer to tell themselves (let alone others!) a highly distorted and idealized story of their life and accomplishments. When they’re giving advice, this problem is exacerbated by their additional propensity to signal respectability by telling an idealized story about how things should work in an ideal world, not an honest-to-God cynical story about how they really work. (For which I can’t really blame them, considering how often the latter would sound crude and offensive. Of course, as with most human hypocrisy, this idealization mainly happens at unconscious levels, not as conscious deception.)
Yes, but thoughtful older people exist who probably do have insights of the sort I’m thinking of, and their existence constitutes evidence that the information I’m looking for could be collected by someone. Since the information exists and the world is vast, it would not surprise me if someone, somewhere, collected it up for a book that would help me.
Maybe they wrote it in 1973 instead of 2008, but that would still be helpful I think. Heck, in some ways it might be more helpful if it was really high quality and then I could diff that versus 2010 to see what has changed and what has remained stable. The stable bits would be interesting precisely because of their stability.
The trick is, I’m not sure how to track the information down. I need the right keywords or an author’s name or a good URL and I was hoping LW could help me out on that front :-)
It seems to me that you’re looking for an impossible book—the world changes fast enough (and I think it’s been changing faster lately and likely to continue) that there’s no obvious way to know, for example, how much you should specialize.
At the moment, there are a lot of people who “did everything right” (followed standard advice on how to have a secure, prosperous future) and have taken considerable losses.
What they should have done instead isn’t obvious.
I’d be OK with a book that gave “all the usual advice” of this sort. I’m not expecting the book to describe an optimal life, just a semi-typical life and the logic that justified the decisions at each stage. Part of the reason that I’m looking for the book is so that I can try to merge this sort of bottom up “actuarial model” that has something like “the base rate for normal lives” with a top down analysis of possible future trends and how they may change people’s lives. Then I can look for places where those ways of thinking about the future seem to sharply diverge (signs of crisis or opportunity), and where they are likely to predict basically the same thing (things I’m more likely to be able to count on).
In the meantime it seems like there is potentially a lot of prosaic stuff of the sort that various old people would like to tell young people about how “not to make the retrospectively obvious mistake I made” with respect to actions at 20, 25, 30, 35, 40, 45, 50, 55 and so on. Each of those ages makes me think of distinct sets of life challenges that I have relatively little personal experience with, but I imagine they could go a bit better if I did a little prep work in advance, guided by grounded data.
Maybe someone has already collated that data into a book for some reason? If so, I want to read it :-)
If you’re willing to start with the raw material, this might be an interesting question to raise at Metafilter—it’s got a lively and varied commenting community.
That seems like a good idea, but I’m afraid of spamming them. When I checked, they seem to have norms against what I’d want to do.
If anyone here is a member of Metafilter in good standing who could do an “Ask Metafilter” post on this subject, I would appreciate it :-)
Metafilter user 16609 (joined Oct 5 2002) here.
This indeed might make an interesting ask.metafilter question. That is by far the most useful part of the site. I have a backlog of questions I want to ask them and you can only ask one question per week so I cannot volunteer to ask it.
If you paid the 5$ signup and waited one week and asked your question you will get answers. I have no idea if you would get any good answers, let alone an answer worth 5$ to you, but you would get answers. There is no question in my mind that at least one time in the history of that website more than one person has paid the 5$ signup, waited one week, posted one question, and disappeared off into the aether.
I did the following google search:
lifehacks site:ask.metafilter.com
There were 62 hits. The first two I clicked on were useless, but you might like the third one I clicked on:
http://ask.metafilter.com/69892/Lifeplanning
You do not need a book for this. What you need is parents who succeeded in their own lives and a close relationship with them. Since I don’t have that, I wouldn’t mind the book you imagine is out there. It probably needs to have a long chapter on tips for managing resentment of all the people around us who have good relationships with their successful parents and for whom life is like a frolic in the park.
The closest thing I have seen to a book approaching your question is by Joe Dominguez and Vicki Robin Your Money or Your Life.
Thanks! The specific article you sent me to was very close to the reason I was looking for information here. There was a comment over there:
My goal in searching for this information is not to plan so much as to try to predict what will happen. What will I probably do? I want to write out the prediction and see how things go. Laugh. Then make a new prediction that will hopefully induce less laughter and more smug self confidence. Lather, rinse, repeat :-P
I tracked down a summary of the core concepts in “Your Money Or Your Life” that you mentioned. It looked like it would be helpful for anyone who is financially drowning because they are flinching around conscientious money management. Its not exactly what I’m looking for right now, however.
I also ran the google search you suggested, looked through the results, and find two more interesting books in the process, like the one’s in the original article they are not exactly what I want, but they are in the ballpark:
Lifemaps : A Step-By-Step Method for Simplifying 101 of Life’s Most Overwhelming Projects
Lifescripts: What to Say to Get What You Want in Life’s Toughest Situations
I’m not sure which of the many norms you’re referring to.
Unfortunately, I’m an occasional reader at MeFi, and can’t help out with the culture. It might be worth asking about, either at Mefi, or at Ask Metafilter.
JenniferRM:
In my experience, when it comes to sincere advice from older folks, it’s extremely difficult to separate the wheat from the chaff. This is both because the world is changing very rapidly these days and because, contrary to the usual saying, most people’s hindsight is very far from 20⁄20. People are often oblivious to how much things have changed since their youth, and unable to distinguish true instances of correct and incorrect planning from random luck.
A huge problem here is that honest reflection about one’s past mistakes, missed opportunities, and suboptimal decisions tends to be very painful and unpleasant, and people consequently prefer to tell themselves (let alone others!) a highly distorted and idealized story of their life and accomplishments. When they’re giving advice, this problem is exacerbated by their additional propensity to signal respectability by telling an idealized story about how things should work in an ideal world, not an honest-to-God cynical story about how they really work. (For which I can’t really blame them, considering how often the latter would sound crude and offensive. Of course, as with most human hypocrisy, this idealization mainly happens at unconscious levels, not as conscious deception.)
Yes, but thoughtful older people exist who probably do have insights of the sort I’m thinking of, and their existence constitutes evidence that the information I’m looking for could be collected by someone. Since the information exists and the world is vast, it would not surprise me if someone, somewhere, collected it up for a book that would help me.
Maybe they wrote it in 1973 instead of 2008, but that would still be helpful I think. Heck, in some ways it might be more helpful if it was really high quality and then I could diff that versus 2010 to see what has changed and what has remained stable. The stable bits would be interesting precisely because of their stability.
The trick is, I’m not sure how to track the information down. I need the right keywords or an author’s name or a good URL and I was hoping LW could help me out on that front :-)