Most people reading this will never feel extreme hunger and have all their material needs met forever, but they will probably also go through things that to them, feel like miserable failures.
You might even be forced to leave your cushy jobs and take an annual salary that is what 50 African laborers make in year. And it will possibly take years, maybe well over a decade, to live down how bad you feel about yourself.
Whether you're scrambling around the forest looking for berries and killing things to eat with pointy sticks or working an office job living in a suburb – I don't really think your emotional experience really changes all that much.
I think your misery and delight are driven by the best and worst things in your life and it doesn't really matter all that much what your circumstances are. When things get better you find new things to be miserable about, when things get worse you stop caring about the little things and your misery is driven by the new worst thing.
I don't see standard of living really driving all that much happiness. Maybe some, but much less than I think most people expect.
Happiness is definitely a hockey-stick shaped curve, going from 1M to 10M is not going to make you happier, but someone who is making $100k is going to be far far happier than someone making $20k. The difference between scrabbling to pay your bills and keep the heat on, vs actually having some savings and free money for recreation, is absolutely massive.
To be fair, making $20k was almost always a choice in those cases.
And in fact it isn’t specifically a choice. Sure you can make choices that, over a long term, will boost your income but it’s rarely a choice.
I guess if you're willing to sacrifice some things it could work. You're definitely not raising a family of 3-4 in a nicer neighborhood with that amount.
I don't think there is one correct answer to the question of how much money you have to have to live, because it's mostly about your biggest expense, imo. Everything else you can economize on to an extreme if you have to, if you're healthy and sane and frugal.
Once you start talking about a "nice" neighborhood, you're talking about a competitive zero-sum game where the costs can increase without limit.
That is assuming your status is above subsistence level in your society.
Having an income of 20k/year in US puts you at like 16th percentile.
We're all pretty bad at knowing what will make us happy in advance.
With kids, the cheaper areas have generally worse schools, parks, etc.
The neighborhood they were living in was generally fairly average, everything considered. But only one of them had one kid (also single parent though).
Not in a large city. But I’m fairly sure in that case the main downgrade would be the neighborhood.
A lot of people are happy in college and they're almost all living on less than $24k a year despite working over 40h a week (although schoolwork is a lot more engaging than industry IMHO).
I can say I was very happy with minimal income in my university years, but would not be anymore as my friends are out of the campus and getting forward with their lives.
This is what causes people in the West who earn $35k and $350k alike to feel 'poor' despite the fact that even the former income is already in the global 99th percentile.
On average people making $80k are happier than those making $20k, to a greater degree than when comparing $10M to $1M.
- Viktor Frankl, Man's Search for Meaning
I think there are a few key things that drive happiness. Secure food and shelter. Short commute. Nature. Being able to walk away from toxic jobs and relationships.
Treating animals fairly lead to happier animals.
Transform your puppy in an spoiled human baby clothed in expensive ribbons or giving vegan food to your cat will not make it happier necessarily (not to mention the neutering clause in the small letter of the contract). Our definitions of better can difer from theirs.
Just today
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/juul-ceo-kevin-burns-tells-non-...
They are dumb fucks for trusting him.
Zuck isn't a terrible person for saying that dumb fucks are dumb fucks. He's a terrible person for building a platform exploiting dumb fucks. He's a terrible person for everything except this particular conversation. Not the other way around.
Problem is in this particular case it seems highly relevant today as well.
The point was that Mark Z had the same attitude about the people who shared their data with FB, and the history is replete with FB abusing that trust in myriad ways. Is Mark Z still a teenager? And furthermore, that other CEO guy reformed. Does that mean the story is pointless?
Here is the real point. Both this CEO and young Mark Z were right. They were selling crap and people were buying it. People really did simply share their info and back then Zuck was a little taken aback. The point is that we all collectively as a society buy De Beers and we have collectively begun thinking it’s totally cool to trust some third party with all our private data just so they can connect us. So this is actually a critique of society and how we do exactly the things that they said were pretty dumb - and we really enjoy doing them!
We have no idea what his real thinking/motivation was behind that comment, but a combination of adolescent bravado and incredulity that this stupid little app he'd hacked together was working so well would suffice, at least as well as casting him as a 19-year-old moustache-twirling super-villain-in-the-making would.
This is the one-and-only such quote of his from that period that gets invoked. If that's the most scandalous piece of dirt anyone could dig up on him from his entire early life, he's not doing too badly.
I sure as hell wouldn't fare so well.
Pedantic doesn’t mean anything relevant to this conversation.
OK, I understand that for a lot of people, it's really important to fixate on this "gotcha" instance, to take the view that the worst possible conceivable motive just has to be the only plausible one, even though there is no possibility of undertaking the kind of forensic or judicial examination that would be required to properly determine such a thing.
But seriously, regardless of what it may or may not reveal about Zuckerberg, fixating on it is just not a healthy or productive way to look at the world.
I invite you to explore the psychology concept of the shadow [1], and consider that when we fixate on other people's flaws and transgressions like this, there's very likely plenty wrong that we're not seeing in ourselves, but that we could greatly benefit from paying attention to.
That's is why I call out this trope whenever I see it on HN. Not because it upsets me that people are saying mean things about Mark Zuckerberg. It's that in focusing on other people's supposed sins, they're likely avoiding looking at what they could pay attention to in themselves, and thus embrace big opportunities for their own personal growth.
Say what you like about Zuckerberg and Facebook's current/recent conduct. There's plenty there, and there are plenty of valid and important discussions to be had about the role of Facebook etc in the modern world.
But this 15-year-old comment trivialises these present-day issues, and is also just super-boring.
By the way, the Oxford dictionary and Wikipedia both define "teenager" as any age ending in "teen", so nobody is wrong to use it in that way. You can apply a different interpretation, but it would only be for rhetorical purposes, not to correct any errant assertions of fact.
The shadow is not applicable, and just a red herring, not relevant to whether a 19 year old is an adult. I am not even getting into whether his comment indicates a willingness to log into their email without permission. Why excuse this? If you heard an 19 year old joke about walking into someone’s house would you think they were too young and shouldn’t know better?
As far as the Oxford dictionary, I’ll stick with the general legal definition, as it is more relevant a social measure of whether he should have know better based on generally acceptable measures of conduct at that age, and is fairly held responsible.
This 15 year old comment doesn’t trivialize anything, it serves as an anchor over a 15 year period where the underlying intent is established and the intervening conduct makes more sense and is much worse. It’s impossible to argue that disclosure is inadvertent when this intent was present at the very beginning. He was literally selling peoples information for social credibility with a friend. You may think it’s boring, but I am just as pissed as the first day I heard it and have been off of Facebook for the last 10 years as a result. I hope everyone hears this comment over and over, maybe then it would sink in.
- Instead of saying "He wasn’t a teenager" and continuing to double down on this, you could have made the discussion a whole lot more productive by just saying "he was old enough to know better". That's a reasonable position that people can have a productive discussion about. As far as I can find, "teenager" has no official legal definition that's separate from the dictionary definition (as distinct from "major" or "age of responsibility" which are legal terms). Using legal conventions is unhelpful. People under 18 (and thoroughly "teenage" by your description) can be legally culpable for murder, yet people in the U.S. are considered too immature to buy alcohol before age 21. Everyone knows maturity and sound judgement is a spectrum and numerical age is only one factor in it.
- I understand that for the people for whom this matter is significant, it stems from the view that Facebook is a wholly malevolent influence on society, and is responsible for much of what is wrong in the modern world, including recent election outcomes and other major world events, and that Zuckerberg is primarily responsible for most of it. I don't share that position, about Facebook/Zuckerberg, or indeed about anything/anyone, really. I regard Facebook and Zuckerberg's persona as having emerged out of their surrounding culture, and like pretty much all people and companies, have done some good things and some bad things. Where they've done good they should be commended and where they've done wrong they should be condemned and motivated/compelled to reform. I think people should generally be given a pass for stupid things they said/did 15 years ago, as most people change significantly in that time, even if they were already grown adults, but even more so if they were young. And I think that the propensity to cast Facebook as a primary cause of the world's ills, including but not limited to unfavourable election outcomes, is another example of avoiding confronting our own failings (i.e., our "shadow"), and missing opportunities for learning and growth. And I think this mindset is particularly counterproductive for those of us in the startup world, where it's impossible to do anything important and impactful without risking getting things wrong at least some of the time.
I understand that the ideas in that last point are unpalatable for some people, and that's OK. My own take on such matters comes after a solid number of years exploring these ideas through particular self-development practices I've chosen to undertake, but I understand and respect that everyone has their own background to their worldview, and people are entitled to see it differently.
Thanks for the discussion.
This is a stupid meme that always gets posted.
“After losing everything, he toiled in misery for years — but he eventually made an improbable comeback. In 1997, he took out a £155k (US$203k) loan on his house, built up a health club business, and sold it for £3.9m (US$5.1m). He then used the profits to start an online jewelry company. (The Ratners Group rebranded as Signet in 1993; today, it is the largest diamond retailer in the world.)”