I recognize that I have been pretty fortunate in life, but I've never been "overnight success, will never actually need to work again" fortunate. I struggle to sympathize with "I got everything I ever wanted, and now I'm depressed". That framing for the article does not exactly have me chomping at the bit to play his newest game.
Framing this in terms of The Beginner's Guide, I think it's more like:
"I just completed a project into which I poured not just all of my time and energy, but also all of my self-worth. It was a massive success. Now I have nowhere to place my self-worth. Doing this again would be both (1) unlikely to succeed, and (2) extremely toxic, just as doing it the first time kind of was. So how do I get out of this mindset without completely destroying myself?"
Amusingly, his response to that question was to make a game about it.
Few people get rewards on that scale (and thus the chance to exit, or at least the time to think about it), but many develop similar relationships to their work (or art). An exploration of the problems in that dynamic (as in The Beginner's Guide) is therefore relevant to a lot of people.
To add to that -- one part that stuck out to me was when he said he "...[feels] like a guy who had gotten rich making jokes about video games, trying to deceive real writers into thinking that I’m a real writer." The article implies present tense, as if perhaps Wreden still feels this way.
If your dream is to make a great game, and you achieve that, sort of -- it's great to everyone except you -- I think it makes sense to feel more alienated and unsure of yourself than ever, or if your game had not been received as well.
I think depending on what you've built your identity around, suddenly being free of having to strive for anything can be pretty daunting. "Having everything we need, indefinitely" is certainly not something we were prepared for by evolution, and the questions that arise when you are at that point and still need to structure your life around something don't really have easy answers, I believe.
So it might actually be a pretty good sign that you struggle to sympathize with this, because the alternative might be that you understand it all too well.
I can't imagine how anyone could even achieve such state. There will always be that skill I do not yet have, that book I haven't read yet, that hobby I haven't tried yet, that place I haven't yet traveled to, etc. etc.
Maybe if I get to have an active life of 300 years, I could maybe imagine starting to get closer to "having everything I need".
Of course, there is always something to do. But once you have reached the point where 'participation in anything is voluntary' and you don't have the necessity of work to show you the value of leisure time, I guess you need to come up with new reasons that make existence worthwhile purely for the sake of existing itself.
(Which is not to say that you weren't facing the same existential questions before, but 'the grind' is a very good way to keep yourself occupied and not ponder these things too closely, I suppose.)
And there definitely are good reasons that make existence worthwhile for its own sake, like using your freedom for discovery and mastery as you said, but unfortunately depression has the nasty side-effect of robbing you of the joy you could find in those causes, and the energy to pursue them.
> I can't imagine how anyone could even achieve such state. There will always be that skill I do not yet have, that book I haven't read yet, that hobby I haven't tried yet, that place I haven't yet traveled to, etc. etc.
I can imagine it. After sidehustling and grinding hard for ~10 years, I realized one day that my savings make more in annual interest than my sidehustle brings in revenue. Not profit, revenue.
After a bit of math I realized that if I just do nothing unusual – go to work, keep my savings rate – I’ll have the option to retire in 3 to 4 years.
The big thing I was pouring my heart, soul, and mind into for so long suddenly feels small and meaningless. Like what is even the point? The sidehustle became more of a hobby. It’s enjoyable but the drive isn’t quite there. The things that used to feel like a big deal make me yawn.
So I try to work on bigger more impactful things. But these take longer and so there’s less of that regular dopamine hit of overcoming challenges. And even if ultimately they don’t succeed, oh well not too big a deal. So they just feel less of a pressing issue.
The ultimate feeling is one of aimless ambition. I want to do and achieve, but wherefore all the effort when chilling brings almost the same result?
> The ultimate feeling is one of aimless ambition. I want to do and achieve, but wherefore all the effort when chilling brings almost the same result?
Surely you have more you want to do and achieve than just that one side hustle? Have you never wanted to write a novel? Learn a musical instrument? A language? How to speedrun your favorite video game? Contribute to open source? Plant a vegetable garden?
There is so, so much to do, and instead I spend all my time working to keep a roof over my head.
Purely selfish pursuits lose their allure when you have the ability to just do them (once the initial rush of being able to do them runs out).
At least they did for me.
Yes there is lots to do! And I’m working on it all.
But it doesn’t hit the same as when success felt like life or death. My actual needs are met. The rest is gravy.
It helps that my dayjob feels like the most effective vehicle for big ambitions. This was a specific thing I optimized for when looking. It doesn’t feel like a necessity or distraction, it’s the thing I want to be doing.
Depression is not about the world. It's about your own internal state - the way your own brain is wired up. To a first approximation, "I am depressed" is a statement about a particular neuron not getting stimulated, which is only related to how your life is going in indirect ways that - like all proxies - leak a lot.
If tomorrow the greatest dream of AI was achieved, and we had a perfect benevolent AI that would shepherd humanity to comfort and safety forever, that would be just about the best outcome imaginable in material terms. But I think I'd be unhappy with it, because I derive a lot of my personal sense of worth from what I do - from what I build and for what I contribute to other people. I don't know what I would do in a world where that was no longer needed. I'm great at being helpful! I suck at being fun.
Is that healthy? Probably not. (It's actually something I'm working through at the moment, that I increasingly understand as a consequence of both personal and societal-level abuse.) But we're not all healthy creatures. We live our lives as the people we are in each moment, including the ways in which we're dumb and flawed and insecure.
> I derive a lot of my personal sense of worth from what I do - from what I build and for what I contribute to other people. I don't know what I would do in a world where that was no longer needed. Is that healthy? Probably not. (It's actually something I'm working through at the moment, that I increasingly understand as a consequence of both personal and societal-level abuse.)
Since you are wondering about the healthiness of that emotion, try to read C.S. Lewis "The Four Loves": the Need love/Gift love opposition may have answers for you.
> If tomorrow the greatest dream of AI was achieved, and we had a perfect benevolent AI that would shepherd humanity to comfort and safety forever, that would be just about the best outcome imaginable in material terms. But I think I'd be unhappy with it, because I derive a lot of my personal sense of worth from what I do - from what I build and for what I contribute to other people.
But surely the Shepherd would be aware of your soul's needs as well, and could pretend that your help is required somewhere in the system.
But surely the Shepherd would be aware of your soul's needs as well, and could pretend that your help is required somewhere in the system.
I think most people wouldn’t be fooled by this. People intuitively understand when their work is superfluous. They see that even if they slack off nothing blows up, no alarm bells sound, no production lines grind to a halt, no one dies.
Perhaps so! I thought about writing a story of an AI like that - something that cures diseases and prevents war and gives you all the tools to be smarter and healthier and more virtuous, but otherwise says "nope, humanity, you gotta figure this out yourself if you want the reward". It'd be an interesting sci-fi setting.
It happens a lot in creative fields. I personally get depressive after putting an album out, and I know I'm not alone in that based on discussions with other musicians. Something about being in the mode of making something for so long, and then it's just... done. When you're deeply involved in something, it changes your personality.
The lack of sympathy is understandable, though I do think becoming depressed after a huge success is probably very common. You've spent so much of your waking life for years working towards a goal and then you attain it, and maybe that success no longer needs your hard work, so there's a massive vacuum in your life. Obviously there's more to life than business success and it'll take time to find your purpose again, but that come down, I think, is natural.
It reminds me of the article about one of the co-founders of RxBar and how he was finding it hard to search for meaning after they sold their company for hundreds of millions. It was posted here years ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21138106
I think it's really more of the "like a guy who had gotten rich making jokes about video games, trying to deceive real writers into thinking that I’m a real writer." feeling he mentions in the article than just being successful. I can't say what actually was going on in his head, but I can imagine making what you see as a joke and then having it get huge, you receive massive praise for it, and people demand more and more of it and consider you to be "the guy who made that funny joke back in 2011 and should tell it again but better" would relate to his issues. The newest rerelease of it really felt like he wanted to move on for good.
As a person in tech, I have met many millionaires and a few billionaires, and it is really true that huge wealth does not in, and of itself, bring happiness. They're basically still stuck with their old problems, but now also surrounded by sycophants and leaches.
No amount of fame or success will alter who you truly are inside. If anything, laying your happiness at the foot of external validation from others in the form of critical success or fame is a poisoned apple.
There are plenty of examples of wildly successful people unable to manage their own demons -- see Kurt Cobain or Anthony Bourdain.
If you take a look at someone like Markus "Notch" Persson, he was on a roll of being incredibly famous and at the head of one of the best-liked games in the world.
It was too much pressure at the top, though, and he sold the project to Microsoft and became a billionaire; but what that actually meant is that Microsoft took it over entirely, and he was nothing. He didn't even get the position of "esteemed creative inventor who now only occasionally provides creative direction instead of being responsible for every last thing", that some people get when they sell their projects to faceless behemoths.
He had a further fall from grace in that the public didn't like his stated values on social media, and Microsoft took the opportunity to completely erase him from Minecraft - removed all mention of his name, and he's not invited to anything.
So now he sits alone in his mansion and cries himself to sleep, because while "never work again" money is nice to have, he'd rather have the kudos and recognition of being the creator of a much-loved game. And that's the one thing he can't have any more.
It is interesting to contrast Notch's arc with Zach Barth's, if you are familiar with the Infiniminer[1] connection. The latter has continued to make small idiosyncratic games with a small team and following his own interests.
There's another part of his story, where he did try make new games post-Minecraft and never got very far, and eventually gave up on making anything on a larger scale again. Scrolls had a lot of issues in development. 0x10c had some interesting ideas, but there was no way it would ever be "the next Minecraft".
> So now he sits alone in his mansion and cries himself to sleep, because while "never work again" money is nice to have, he'd rather have the kudos and recognition of being the creator of a much-loved game. And that's the one thing he can't have any more.
I mean, do we actually know that? I haven't heard anything about Notch in years and years, but I just assumed it was because he was hanging out with his friends and family and enjoying his wealth. It's certainly what I'd do in his shoes, but maybe he's said he doesn't enjoy how things out and I was unaware.
That's sound advice, but to give a comparison: Roman Polanski didn't just post divisive tweets, he drugged and raped a 13 year old girl and has been a fugitive from justice for more than 40 years now. Surely that's worse? And yet, people still keep funding his film making, and his name is on all the films. Why is a rapist given full credit for his creative works, while an idiot with a twitter account stripped of his credit?
It would seem odd, that if he did sign that away, that he nonetheless appeared in the credits of Minecraft, until he caused social media fury, and then Microsoft removed him from the credits.
It does seem crazy to me, given he lived in Sweden, where copyright transfers only economic rights, not moral rights (such as the right to be identified as the creator of a work), but allows the author to waive their moral rights, that he would waive his moral rights.
In any case, he seems pretty miserable, regardless of his twitter outbursts.
It’s not remotely odd, his behaviour online made his name a liability to the Minecraft brand and Microsoft made steps to distance him from it.
For most game developers, getting a credit on a game is not a creative badge of honour, it is sometimes the only hard proof that they worked on a title. It’s part of their portfolio and often essential for their future career and earning potential. This is why they fight so hard for a credit that is essentially free for a company to give.
Everybody knows Notch made Minecraft. He no longer depends on the credit for his future earnings. He chose to give it up.
