alt Hacker NewsI read the post differently – the point of the exercise is not that you need to know the answers to the questions. It's to gauge your emotional reaction to the question itself.
By examining the types of tasks you will be consistently faced with, you can ask yourself, "Do I actually want to do that?"
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and the comment is saying that such emotional reaction might be to complexity and scale itself, rather than the specific individual details
>"Do I actually want to do that?"
There's no reason to believe you can be any more confident about your answer to this then the person in the article is about their hazy idea about what something is like.
If people "unpacked" marriage or childbirth to the extent suggested in the article everyone would be frozen in dread. That's not because they're smart and have just disovered what those things are truly like, it's because they overestimate their current emotional state and underestimate what they can grow into.
In fact the article I think is far removed from how people live. We don't chose professions because of our secret "true" interests, we make decisions based on circumstance, luck, financial security and then we adapt our emotional state. And that's a good thing, the emotional state of a young person isn't a good yardstick for anything.
Exactly. I certainly recognized myself in the story. I wanted to be professor, until I learned what they do.
When you break down anything into its subtasks there's basically nothing that anyone wants to do. Sometimes the ends help justify the means too.