I'd like to argue something contrarian in this thread: you could be on the right path. Some facts to keep in mind:

- There are on the order of 20,000 new startups each year; most of the other people in this thread are from this pool.

- Only 2-5 of those 20,000 startups will end up mattering (i.e., will reach a high enough valuation/impact on the world to move a needle).

- Of these 2-5 startups that matter per year, almost none of them were pivots (Twitter is LoudCloud are the only examples I can think of).

- The conventional wisdom is to take an incremental idea and run with it; "ideas don't matter and execution is everything"; run sprints and use the Lean Startup methodology to pull the market out of an idea (or pivot), and reach a local maxima.

- This will only get you the result that 20,000 startups a year typically get: incrementalism, small victories, and/or failure.

- There's also lottery ticket mentality to this conventional style of thinking: you're no different than anyone else, so stop ideating and start doing, and maybe you'll get lucky.

If you've been at it for a year and haven't found anything good enough to give your life to, it could mean you are different than the average HNer. It could mean you have a calling to think bigger than most people do.

Here is some material you may be interested in which bolsters this viewpoint:

- Alan Kay's "The Future Doesn't Have to be Incremental": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gTAghAJcO1o&t=1830s

- Peter Thiel's book Zero to One. Among other things, this book discusses the importance of avoiding competition and commoditized markets (unless you have something 10x better; i.e., Google's Page Rank).

- Listen to interviews with Elon Musk, who claims he started by thinking about HUGE problems that humanity faces and worked backwards. Instead of thinking incrementally, Musk thinks extremely large and seems to plan for years in advance: https://www.tesla.com/blog/secret-tesla-motors-master-plan-j...

At some point, of course, you have to interact with reality, and that could involve interacting with negative people on HN (and especially real customers, etc). When Reid Hoffman started LinkedIn, he talked with dozens of people in his network and more than 2/3 said negative things about his idea. It's part of the process of getting calibrated with reality. But this shouldn't be your starting point; it should be what you do after you find something that actually moves you.

Finally, I want to say that me and a friend were in a similar boat to you and your friends several months ago: we had been reading about technologies and problems for months and had rejected incremental ideas that didn't move us. It looked like we had just fucked around for several months and had nothing to show for it.

We ended up working on a experimental VR Window Manager as an attempt to bring Linux to a new computing platform (i.e., VR): https://github.com/SimulaVR/Simula

Here was our rationale for this idea when we started: https://gist.github.com/georgewsinger/46ea8d6b16fb8bf3249358...

It's very much in the spirit of the advice I just gave you. Lord knows we could be wrong, but one problem we don't have is in doubting whether our project could matter if we pulled it off.

Good luck.