By this metric, most of humanity probably feels it worthless, isn't it?

I understand this is HN and people here achieve more than the normal crowd - still, I don't get the obsession over being productive every second, the need to "produce something truly outstanding" etc. Whats wrong with just being happy, taking it easy, spreading happiness around us and just living a simple life? Instead of optimizing every waking second and moving the goal post until the day we die?

This, right here, is the summary of all technology now. Millions of people with millions of (mostly bad) ideas, flooding the world with unprecedented ease and access. Yay convenience...

What I believe the quoted commentor was trying to get at was that some people have goals for happiness that are harder to achieve, but also can't be replaced for something else.

Despite the fact that everyone's parents managed to do it.

Each to their own though.

> By this metric, most of humanity probably feels it worthless, isn't it?

Everyone can produce something outstanding. We often confuse that with the recognition that comes from that something becoming noticed by others.

Do something you love, for the love of doing it. Of course, keep the family happy, fed, and housed, but never forget we are more than work and money and that our worth is not derived from how others see us.

We HN'ers like to do a lot and we often get recognition from that, but really makes us who we are is what we love doing. The rest are side-effects not goals.

The reason why so many are depressed and unhappy no matter what they do.

Citation needed?

You don't have to do anything "globally". We're not pop culture superheroes out to save the world. The obsession with "making a dent"-porn has to stop.

If more people were "very nice on a personal level" we'd already be paradise.

Work, on the other hand, has a defined start and endpoint. Ideally, it produces something enduring and unique.

In ancient times, labor was looked down on as something that slaves did. The lowest in society did the back-breaking, life-sustaining work anonymously, while rich, propertied elites built empires, wrote philosophy, and invented new technologies.

The world has changed since then, but I think there's something useful in that distinction. Capitalism transmutes nearly all work into labor. Almost every profession feels like it's performed solely to "sustain life" whether it's plowing fields or producing software. It's all just a salary. So I'm not surprised when I hear that people feel they have "nothing to show for it": they usually retain no ownership of the things they create and it all seems like one long endless task.

We're primates who by nature are very hierarchy oriented. We judge our lives by how high in the hierarchy we are. And no matter how rich society gets, how good our homes, health, food supply and culture are, we still end up on average in the middle of the pack.

And maybe that's what feels like you have "nothing to show for it".

I suspect the modern media doesn't help, it is full of people appearing to live richer lives than are attainable by the majority.

Perhaps we need to impose some real hardship on ourselves now and then to remind us how good we have it.

The tendency of evolutionary psychology to assert that life is governed by primal instincts established in harsher times isn't politically neutral.

But "people really care about social status" does not rest primarily on that at all. I just threw that in to sound a little Malcolm Gladwell.

PS The tendency to deny evolutionary psychology isn't politically neutral :)

In particular, in white-collar work is something that abstracts you almost completely away from reality. You come in, do whatever arbitrary thing you're asked to, and get money for it, which you can exchange to services of the modern society. Any contribution you may have is separated by a couple layers of abstraction from its real-world result, so there's almost nothing you can point to and say "I made that".

Your comment also reminded me of my own thinking on a slightly different subject - maintenance. Maintenance is essentially synonymous to "labor" here, the repeatable, unending activities needed to support things we want, as opposed to being the things we want. It's something I always believed we should strive to get rid of entirely.

Really? I'd hazard a guess that most of Hacker News could point to the websites and apps they made and say they made that. What else would be on a developer or software engineer's CV?

Same with many other white collar jobs. Designers and media creators/artists can easily point out what they've worked on, as can writers and journalists, or scientists or academics, etc.

You've never worked on a project where you contributed a handful of pieces to a million piece puzzle, of which your contribution is nearly unnoticeable?

And can you say "I made that" when legally, and in the eyes of most, SoftwareCompany Inc "made" it?

Job roles and responsibilities.

> most of Hacker News could point to the websites and apps they made and say they made that.

Maybe I'm particularly bad at it. I list some projects I've made on my site, and I notice that they lean heavily towards my earlier days of programming - they're learning artifacts in various states of completion, and represent a small fraction of code I've written. Ever since joining the job market, I've made things I can't show off because they're internal to the workplace, or internal to internal customers, or simply I've contributed pieces of work all around the stack. Most code I write these days builds either something I don't own, can't present, or is just a small piece of the overall whole.

But it's Capatilisms fault.

In your opinion, was there ever a system where that was not the case? If not, then you can't really say that it's capitalism which transmutes work into labor, no?

Do you think there could be a system where that is not the case (apart from an anarcho-communistic utopia as in the Culture series)?

EDIT: Sort of a follow-up thought: capitalism might actually be the escape mechanism that allows the bulk of activity in a society not to be labor. But the tradeoff is that all work is "transmuted" into labor (or feeling like labor) since everything is priced and a salary becomes the means of subsistence. I'm just spitballing, but I thought it was an interesting enough thought to add.

It is true that new subsistence is better than old subsistence, but its still serfdom with nicer clothes.

The chase, at least for me, is about having time and location freedom while enjoying a middle class living or better. It's not about being a billionaire, it's about being free.

I closed my Facebook account years ago and have never missed it. I'm a lot richer (literally and figuratively) for not having wasted a thousand more hours on it.

The point is, if you think that it’s just so easy and starting a business means you get to reap the benefits of someone else’s hard work, then go for it. Why doesn’t everyone do that?

Of course it's not a sure thing, but a) neither is it with most of the startups that raise a seed round, and b) failure without seed money doesn't mean "aw shucks, it didn't work out, I'll try again in a couple years", it means their personal finances and credit have been decimated and now they can spend the next N years clawing their way back to zero (remember the student loans they still have).

Suppose you own a beat-up old car. Instead of sitting on your butt next summer, you could spend the time restoring your car to pristine condition. In doing so you create wealth. The world is-- and you specifically are-- one pristine old car the richer. And not just in some metaphorical way. If you sell your car, you'll get more for it.

In restoring your old car you have made yourself richer. You haven't made anyone else poorer. So there is obviously not a fixed pie. And in fact, when you look at it this way, you wonder why anyone would think there was.

[0] http://paulgraham.com/wealth.html

It makes me wonder, if we were to go full on Jurassic Park and clone some creature from 100mya, would it be able to thrive in today's environment? Would it have sufficient immunity, and be able to digest meat/plants from the present day? Even the alligators have evolved a bit since then.

Historically, the atmosphere was thicker and had a higher percentage of oxygen. Those dragonflies with two foot wingspans could not survive in the current atmosphere. Insects don't have lungs per se and the current lower atmospheric pressure and lower oxygen levels means you would need to basically give them their own pressure suit.

My general understanding is the same would be true for dinosaurs: Their lung design and large size would mean they would need life support to survive at all.

I've never restored a car to pristine condition but have kept quite a few on the road as daily drivers and they were certainly cheaper than buying a new car every three years or so by a huge margin. My current "clunker" is an '87 Goldwing that should be on the road in perfect driving condition with a few hundred invested in parts once I get around to working on it. Heck, might even get the neighbor to give it new paint since he offered "a good deal" a while back and still be ahead on resale value.

I realize this is missing the point, but this is why one should pick metaphors carefully.

https://m.indiamart.com/yash-car-bazar/

[1]https://www.hindustantimes.com/lucknow/road-accident-deaths-... [2]https://www.forbes.com/sites/ronakdesai/2018/03/07/india-con...

Still remember the paper about the externality of bee farm and apple farm. Obvious issue of apple not paid the bee farm but no such issue - all paid and in fact have contract what kind of bees etc.

A bad economic example is bad example.

What are you trying to say? This sentence is nonsense.

But allegedly it turns out that in at least some cases where you have beekeepers and apple farmers near to one another they do trade with one another -- with e.g. contracts stipulating what sort of bees the beekeepers are going to keep -- and the market does do its thing, and the result is efficient allocation of resources.

Here's a paper by Steven Cheung about bees and apples in the Pacific Northwest. It claims (I haven't checked any of its empirical claims or its theoretical analysis): https://www.jstor.org/stable/724823

The business also takes on risk for paying software developers to develop products which may not be successful.

Selling is adding value. If you make something great and nobody uses it, how is that different than never making it in the first place? It would have no effect on the world and nobody would be better off because it exists.

Software adds value to the users and the users need to find out about it and be convinced to purchase it in order to realize that value. That's the case for any category of product.

Compared to what? And someone might propose an alternative system as if to say "well it's better if we do it this way" and you could argue it both ways that they were exploited under the new system too.

The fundamental problem is you need to eat. No matter what political or economic institutions exist, or if any even exist at all, as long as you are alive you are never absolved from having to eat food. For the vast majority of people this means you have to do some form of work. In the base case it means you are a hunter-gatherer and need to forage. This takes all your time and I'm not sure how enjoyable it is either.

Imagine just how ridiculously magical the notion of financial independence through passive income combined with a market where you can procure all the necessities of life would be to a human being living at the turn of the Neolithic Revolution ~14,000 years ago.

It just blows my mind. And people want to throw around words like "exploited". Woe is me.

Should you be satisfied with being comfortable? If it's important for you to leave a legacy related to your hobbies or career field, then probably not. You have to be content with what you leave behind.

For me, I have reached a place where I would be at peace if I left a headstone that said, "Good father, good husband, kind person".

I'm not going to make meaningful changes in computer science, and I'm ok with that. Whether or not I make contributions to open source software won't give me more peace at the end of my life, so I don't pursue it. Is it ungrateful? Perhaps. But it's honest.

But becoming a father definitely changed my perspective. Just raising my kid has become a worthy life goal in itself.

I see this fearful, regret-filled ethos driving a lot of my peers and the western culture at large and I worry about the mindset it instills in people. I know it's well-intentioned and comes from a perspective of the human potential being the highest form of sovereignty. A wasted life seems like the biggest crime. And comfortable has somehow come to become synonymous with wasted.

I'd argue for the cultivation of meaning as a replacement to this search for "finally good-enough" potential actualization, but that's me.

I've worked blue collar and white collar jobs, and it was the blue collar jobs that made me feel more alive, because I was around dangerous tools, hazards, and actuating my body like it was supposed to be outside exposed to the elements. I went home after and my rest felt deserved and truly regenerative, like my body was drinking it in. The white collar work, though it pays better and offers more comfort and is more cognitively demanding, feels at the same time too breezy, too safe.

It seems like a really stupid argument, that things can be bad because they're too good, affluenza and so on, but there's something to it.

Or are you saying that there is no way to be productive without the stress that is more and more present in our daily lives, in this environment of competition and constant yearning for more, for example?

Edit: deleted a phrase.

Maybe you have a good job, but feel like your career isn't going anywhere, but rather than switching to a different role you stay where you are because you like it there. That's comfort.

Plus a lot of people over think what comfort they need and waste a lot of energy on it. Theres a photo of Steve Jobs from the 80s in an empty apartment with a few possessions, where apparently he is comfortable with living like that. I don't know exactly what the story is with the photo, and it's a bit of an extreme example, but imagine instead of working on building his company, he spent his sparetime assembling IKEA furniture, then buying a TV and VHS recorder, then renting movies from the movie store (and physically taking them back).

Many people would be perfectly happy with a headstone saying "I had a comfortable job, and raised a family I love" or "I had a comfortable job, and made my art in the evenings and weekends".

Most part of what we call civilisation, such as industry, sich as the IT industry is simply not sustainable. To survive the 21 century we have to look at better methods to collaborate.

And of course technology is part of the eqaation. Open Source and similar efforts lead the way towards such better methods. But they cannot exist in vacuum or on a island alone.

So we have to change society but by bit. Let’s go!

*

Of course one may add other may be unnecessary concerns - whether the world we live in are better for our kids than we do. We have enjoyed no world hot conflict for decades. Environment can be used and within our life time ... ba la ba la. Are our kids better ?

Or many things happened in the last several years challenge all our knowledge of society - trump and Brexit and the raise of communist china etc. We live in interesting time.

Just relearn swift (forget quit a bit after my iOS app on app story in 2015).