Effectively ALL of what I was told about what makes a satisfying and successful life. I was told the right thing to do is work hard, go to school, get a good stable job, get married, settle down, have kids, buy a house, own several depreciating assets.
Life is about being happy. Nothing else. Do what makes you happy, because that car, vacation, or other piece of consumer shit won't. Nor will living by scripts somebody else wrote for you.
I had my house paid off at 30 and was traveling 5-6 times a year. High-level in the gaming, lottery and promotions industries. Misery. Now I have a humble life and I paint and craft things and I go dancing. And I'm happy. I could pick up the tools again and make a highly successful Steam game, but I won't. I already proved my point in my career and creative output, and I don't want to anymore.
I gave everything away and now I live a simple life where I volunteer, work at crisis shelters, do recovery mentorship, housing outreach and other things. I am happy and I do not care about the trappings of the material world anymore. I chased the hologram until I caught it and discovered its true nature.
I agree, but i also get a chuckle out of getting the meme wrong on purpose: this man held the same job title for 21 years, but something about being Principal Performance Architect sucked so much that he retired within a year and became a goose farmer.
I made several hundred games over my 20+ year career. I started making games for the world's first touchscreen internet-enabled kiosks, the Playdium arcade in Toronto, etc. Moved onto online game development as senior dev for GameLoft.com, made the first online pari-mutuel gaming system, introduced online lottery technology to the world's "Big 3" lotto companies. Made the first 3D tennis game. Honestly too much to even discuss as I could go on for hundreds of pages. Most people who are older than 30 have played my games and wouldn't know it.
It's such a nutty claim for me to make... but I really believe any person on the Web circa 97-2005 and was involved in any kind of Web-based gaming has directly played at least one. Shockwave, Flash, Facebook no difference.
If you played any kind of web- or Internet-enabled, State-run lottery product anywhere in the world between 2010-2015 I would bet my actual life. And since the games I made were all localized for international audiences they were world-wide!
If you've been on a Riverboat Casino in the past 2 decades you've 100% played because I ran the game studio that made the games for a major supplier of riverboat Video Lottery Terminal games.
Holy shit... I never actually stopped and realized how many lives my crappy games touched....