Enjoying Life: A mini-tutorial
"Thou shalt never complain."
Yes, your life is unique, and you must be happy to be human to have a great perception of the world. Imagine you were a dog constantly kicked by its owner or a snail that couldn't move faster than your grandfather or a fish who wouldn't ever notice anything outside its river.
Yet people are often not satisfied with their lives. I quote from a scener's website: "I've begun writing a serious diary ... but my life is so extremely boring right now I have nothing to say except that it sucks. Everything about it sucks. You suck." Why is this so?
High expectations from your life
When you're young, you're treated by your parents as a little god, and everybody around you assures you that you'll become the ruler of the world. You are very ambitious and you struggle to make your dreams come true, and then something fails and you're frustrated.
That's the one extreme. The other: You're lazy and just let yourself go. Maybe you'll enjoy this for a while, but one day you'll realize your life is not fulfilled and you're bored.
These are two extremes, and neither of them is optimal. Steer the middle course. Enjoy your life and relax but don't forget that it's up to your creativity, fantasy and commitment to create something new.
Our world is very complex
In the past people had to do a lot of chores regularly: washing clothes, for example. On an average it took a full days to wash the clothes of a small family manually - for this and other reasons, women stayed at home. Smart people struggled to find ways to get rid of such boring tasks - washing machines were invented. The same applied for all walks of life: Automatization has extended everybody's sparetime.
But what are people doing in their thus extended sparetime? It's a small minority like us people in the computer scene that really tries to master the new technologies in order to use the opportunities they give us to create something innovative. The mainstream either belongs to the "consumer" majority or to the "critics" faction, which is not so small, either! The critics regard themselves as a kind of elite because they resist against the temptations of the modern world and think that they are the only ones who also see the disadvantages of the latest developments. But if you always see the dark sides of everything, you will always remain unhappy, no matter how often you swear to be longing for changing the world to the better. Many of the people who like to call themselves critics have become that over-critical that they have lost the ability to see the positive side of the development.
And, in fact, I believe that a not too small faction of the radical critics doesn't even understand our world well enough to see them. It's like this: Approaching things with a pre-defined opinion will block your view of the richness of good possibilities they over.
Approach new things with open-mindedness, don't be shy to ask questions about anything you feel not to know enough yet, and then carefully examine pros and cons - but not compulsively carefully, be just as careful as you think the matter requires it!
Perfectionism
I've already mentioned this, the fact that a lot of us certainly have high aspirations, but let's still name a related matter: perfectionism. The need to be top at everything. Have you read Norbert Wiener's biography and reproached yourself for still having been at high school as a 14-year-old, while Wiener had long been at university at that age? Are you reproaching yourself for not having composed as fine music as Mozart when he was 6? And for not having written Latin poems as the great mathematician George Boole as a 12-year-old boy?
Then you're reading the right paragraph. Stop this tendency of trying to do as well as anybody else, develop your own personality. If you're a demomaker: See, none of these people has ever made a demo. This will be the special remark that will appear in your biography: "As a teenager he already programmed computer demos of a level that was usually only attained by computer science graduates." Nobody will write in your biography that you failed to repeat what somebody else had achieved decades or centuries ago - and repeating something already achieved long ago wouldn't interest anyone that much, anyway!
It shouldn't be the aim of your life to get the Nobel Prize, either. This isn't just a matter of great scientific discoveries, it's especially a matter of luck. You must get your name and your work known, you must get nominated by someone, and the Swedish Academy of Science must approve of you (and who knows for what reasons they might decide not to choose you but someone else?). It's better to strive for contributing to scientific progress - it's up to someone else to praise you for that.
Enjoy life, I'm doing that, too!
Ah, BTW... sorry if your grandfather is some kind of old sportsman. I just couldn't think of a better example to compare the velocity of a snail with. But is this essential? No, it isn't!