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757 points alihm | 1 comments | | HN request time: 0.215s | source
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fcatalan ◴[] No.44469611[source]
This resonates a lot with me. In fact it's a trait that has made me unhappy for as long as I can remember.

I'm seeing a therapist later this month because in a talk with my GP she saw strong enough hints of ADHD to send me there, and the kind of situations and some feelings talked about in the article came up a lot in the conversation.

I size up my oil paints against the old masters, not the old ladies in the atelier. I paint miniatures way better than average but hang around with Golden Demon winners so I always find myself wanting. Can play beautiful Renaissance pieces on my uke, but infuriatingly not at a professional performance level. Can win many sim races, but not against the top 0.1%, yet I size myself against their telemetry and laptimes. I dabble in Chess but being forever stuck around lowly 1300 ELO makes me feel dumb. My dead side projects cemetery has subdirectories approaching 3 figures. I go out and cycle with my brother but I huff and puff while he tops the Strava segments and wins the regional amateur championship again.

So too many days I just sit and do nothing, or just look for something else to enjoy for a few months until I become an unhappy promising beginner at yet another thing, adding to the overall problem.

replies(3): >>44470551 #>>44471212 #>>44473949 #
1. whatevertrevor ◴[] No.44470551[source]
I don't want to psychoanalyze but it seems your sense of dissatisfaction is a little different from what the author is describing? Your dissatisfaction is from not accomplishing the possibly implausible goal of being the very best at something without being a professional competitor, while the author is describing a case of not even getting started on creative projects out of a fear of them not living up to a made up standard in your mind.

They're both arguably unreasonable standards but one is for the end-product (i.e. a novel/album/software project) as opposed to reaching some apparent level of general skill at your hobby. The latter is full of traps because for subjective hobbies like arts, how does one even evaluate that?