Language is a tricky thing, words are exact and meaning is inexact.

One way to interpret this comment would be to imply the author of the quoted statement, having overwhelming advantages conferred upon them by circumstances out of their control, cannot possibly expect that their so-called "experiential wisdom" would have any applicability whatsoever to the masses for whom those same circumstances were not conferred.

If that was your intent, I do not think it serves you well.

I say that because attributing survival, much less success, to a vague notion of privilege is dismissive of an individual's agency. What is more, as a salve for the jealousy of the success for others, it really doesn't work all that well.

I have met many people who have come from many backgrounds and with their own challenges. In that time, the quality of "success" was strongly correlated with fundamentals, not with where they started.

There is a great saying, "Success makes you stupid, failure makes you smart" which speaks to the value of failing in order to better understand success, and why some succeed and others do not.

In the majority (perhaps all but I really couldn't say that as a definite) the ability to fail, take ownership of the failure and then seek the understanding to not fail again, results in success. In contrast people who fail and then externalize the reason for failure to some aspect of the situation that was out of their control and do not seek out a better way, invariably continue to fail.

Privilege exists, that is painfully obvious to me as a white male who is not habituated into getting nervous when a police officer approaches. Privilege exists in toxic organizations where friends of the boss are evaluated differently than everyone else. And privilege exists when people who conform to behavior, dress, and language norms of a group are treated differently than people who are different.

In spite of that, it has been my experience that complaining about what other people have done more easily than you did, and attributing it to privilege, doesn't actually help. Not that I'm saying you would do that, I am saying that in my life I complained about a lot of things, one was a kid my age who was interviewed by the local news station for building a robot, FROM A KIT HIS PARENTS BOUGHT HIM, as if he was some genius robot builder. Was that privilege? Of course it was, his parents could afford it and mine were trying to make sure we had some money left over at the end of the month to save for those future problems that always took money. But it didn't help me get any better to focus on him having these advantages and me having none. I befriended the owner of the TV repair shop (yeah I'm that old :-)) who would give me broken TVs and radios to take apart and learn from. I built a complete Shortwave receiver out of a couple of otherwise non-working AM/FM radios and some additional tuning components scavenged from TVs and other radios. As a result, when I got into college on a scholarship as a EE candidate I already knew the basics of how electronic circuits worked and to analyze them. The kid with the kit robot may have entered college knowing no more than how to solder according to someone else's directions.

My point is that one should not dismiss the power of one's own agency to make a better future for themselves. And I see complaining about privilege as a crutch to avoid doing the work, just like training wheels on a bike means you don't have to do the work of balancing. It is important to recognize privilege exists but it would be wrong to let it define you.

> "Success makes you stupid, failure makes you smart"

Failure makes you dead, unless you have the means and support to try again.

It's a simple point. If you need your job to pay the rent and the bills, then you can't really work as if you don't need your job (unless you're nuts). The people giving this advice are either unaware of their privilege, or aware of it and simply giving bad advice.

There's no dismissal of agency. Deciding to compromise your principles to keep earning money is just as much an exercise of agency as making the opposite decision.

I agree with that to a point, if you need your job to pay the rent and the bills, and there is no other job you can do, then you are well and truly trapped.

There are people for whom the circumstances of their employment, whether it is strict visa rules or the fact that they are being employed illegally, or some other extenuating circumstance such as disabilities that do not give them the freedom of action that being able to leave one job and move on to another. In this we are completely in agreement. The fallacy here is to extend this circumstance as if it will never change.

It is absolutely true to say this advice does not apply to every living breathing human on the planet. However it does apply to a lot of people in the workforce today.

In many economies, the number of people who lose employment and are always having difficulty finding employment again is relatively small[1]. And I have been grateful that I happen to have opportunities and have supported financially organizations such as Homeboy Industries[2] that work to address that. It is inspiring to meet the people who have taken that step to invest in their own employability and versatility so that they can increase their options and live a life they are proud of. Are their periods in their life where losing a job would be really challenging? Absolutely. Does it have to always be like that? Absolutely not.

So in the general sense, I don't think it is a simple point. I think it is a state of mind. Either you take responsibility for your failures and your successes, or you only take responsibility for success and blame your failures on things outside of your control. I get the whole learned helplessness thing, it's a real problem. But it can be overcome. The motivation for that change has to come from inside a person. I do not believe there is any amount of coaching or cheering or reward/punishment cycles will force it.

[1] The most common situation that I've personally interacted with are ex-felons.

[2] https://homeboyindustries.org/

There is an inherent cost to switching jobs, regardless if one potentially could, that one may not be able to afford.

It’s not just as simple as “finding a new job”. Runway for bills, the time it takes to find the right opportunity, etc, are all definite resources that are required to make the switch - which I’d argue far more people have trouble affording as opposed to your proposed statement that few people have trouble finding new jobs within their space.

Personally, I've never had a job where I didn't feel ethnically compromised in one way or another. If I'd quit all of my jobs to date, I wouldn't be a model of self-actualization. I'd just be unemployed and broke. I wouldn't even be ethically pure, as I'd be failing in my responsibility to people who depend on me financially.

I feel that your point of view makes more sense for someone who finds consumer capitalism and the tech industry ethical on a fundamental level, bar occasional aberrations. Not everyone sees it that way.

I really wanted to make a point only about the ethical issue. I think it's fair to say that most of your comment is fairly generic "pull yourself up by the bootstraps" advice. The efficacy of such advice has already been debated a thousand times over. In the midst of the present economic crisis it strikes me as less helpful and relevant than ever.

Thank you for this clarification, I appreciate understanding where you are coming from.

I'm wondering if the ethical compromises you feel/felt ever inspired you to try something to avoid them.

For example, one of the people I knew at Sun was pretty depressed about the sort of crap that went on in tech companies. Her response was to create a company that she felt aligned with her views of ethics. Took her a long time to get to "Raman profitability" but that work was offset by the benefit of knowing that the place where she worked didn't subscribe to the kinds of ethical compromises that make people uncomfortable.

I agree that this sort of advice is less actionable during a crisis, whether it is a pandemic or the Great Recession. Just like it is never helpful to tell someone in a car crash that if they had been wearing a seat belt they wouldn't currently be on the way to the emergency room. That said, large unlikely stresses to the system, like the pandemic, tend to "light up" areas of risk[1]. It is why in operations at a tech company you will stage mock outages (with real equipment failures) to be able to "see" whether or not your mitigation processes work and where they can be improved.

I still think it is always good advice to learn from adverse circumstances, regardless or origin, to create additional resiliency in your life. That's how I started figuring out what to put in my "go" back in my car[2]. Looking at disasters that hit the Bay Area and asking myself the question, "Okay, when this hits and I'm in my car somewhere, what will I want to have?"

[1] Using the pandemic as an example, the pathetic capacity for the US to manufacture PPE was not widely understood (visible) until the pandemic.

[2] https://github.com/ChuckM/CarEarthquakePrep

Your advice is well meaning, but unsolicited and rather obvious as far as it goes. Lots of people consider quitting their jobs and starting their own companies. Not everyone is in a position to do so, or indeed wants to do so. There's a fine line between offering advice and implicitly judging people for not making the choices that you think they ought to make.

I understand this point of view. From non-profit leaders who core activity is grooming relationships with rich or powerful people. To startup who's sales strategy is to lure one giant customer at a loss free to reel in other companies who purchase based on what others. To poker based companies who uses bots to fake engagement. To government entities who are funded on data points hiring teams of data specialists to crave up the raw data into misleading stats to be presented as fact. The little self funded startup finding creative ways of not paying staff or for services rendered.

I can't think of one business who has pure ideals and has successfully implement them without inventing something new.

"Deciding to compromise your principles to keep earning money is just as much an exercise of agency as making the opposite decision." In real life Its not the same . First is often exercised in denial or exercised by default where as Quitting your job on moral ground is a decision taken in full awareness.

People all across the privilege scale, up to and including people who would never need to work another day in their lives, fail to do the Right thing.

Not really. It has nothing to do with privilege .

While it is dramatic in the current context it is the same excuse half of Germany used in Nuremberg, if you didn't stand up to atrocities in front you are just as guilty no matter whether you gave the order or just "doing your job".

People fight and die based on their moral convictions. At times they are not even fighting for their own lives, families or communities. If soldiers are ready to die half way across the world loose a limb in someone else's war without a second thought, anything less is insignificantly trivial.

If you can die for your principles you can loose a job, go hungry or suffer any other pain too.

It is as simple as what will cause you more pain, going hungry or doing something you don't agree with.

A substantial portion of university graduates do not, in fact, need a job right away. Gap years are common. And with small income you can get by (ramen profitable).

Obviously there’s privilege there. But it’s not top 1% or anything.

I guess if you're talking about a subset of the 31% of graduates who don't have student debt, you might be right. [0] Sure, it's not top 1%, but it's certainly closer to the top 10% who have this luxury, as opposed to, say, the median college graduate.

---

[0]: https://www.cnbc.com/2019/05/20/how-much-the-average-student...

Yup. Even broader than that actually. When I left school to start a business, I had student debt. But the govt also had a low income loan assistance program, where you don’t have to pay till you’re above a certain income.

I had some loan money still in my account, and mostly worked “like I didn’t need a job”. I did a bit of consulting work within my industry, but just enough to get by and avoided it where possible. I think I made about $11,000 in my first year.

And it all worked. I didn’t increase my debt, and the business grew after that.

There’s obviously privilege involved, but I try to push back because people write as if you need some insane level of privilege. I’m guessing 30-50% of college grads could try something like that without too much risk. (If I had had zero traction in the first 6-12 months I would have potentially stopped and gone back to school)

Circumstances vary: I’m in Canada, so that accounted for loan repayment + not worrying about medical expenses. I could also stay on my school secondary health insurance (dental etc) through August of my first year.

> There’s obviously privilege involved, but I try to push back because people write as if you need some insane level of privilege. I’m guessing 30-50% of college grads could try something like that without too much risk.

But, your own story showcases a huge level of privilege that you don't seem to be acknowledging.

I know you said you're Canadian, and that changes things a bit, but let's look at this from the perspective of an American college graduate.

First of all, being an American college graduate puts you already in a rather privileged category. Only about 36% of Americans over 25 have at least a bachelor's degree. [0] Consider, too, that most people with college degrees probably grew up in homes where education was considered important, making this, at least partially, a form of hereditary privilege. [1] And, children of non-college educated parents who do go to school finish at lower rates than those who have a college-educated parent. [ibid]

So, now that you're in roughly the top third of "people with privilege," let's just grant you that 30-50% of those people can afford to take a gap year, during which they will likely need significant parental support (remaining on insurance, probably still living at home, etc.) Leaving aside that simply having parents who can afford to float supporting a young, college graduate for an additional year beyond college itself, this puts you in an even higher tier. If we just multiply the numbers, it looks like you're still talking about, population wide, 10-20% of individuals who could even theoretically think about doing what you did. And, that's if your 30-50% number is correct, which I doubt.

There is also no mention of luck in your story. I'm sure you were the recipient of several lucky breaks that year, some of which may have not come your way if you were not a college-educated individual who could afford to take a gap year.

All of this is without layering on race, or any of the multiple other forms of luck and/or privilege that certainly got you where you are. Example: you were lucky enough to be born in a developed, Western country. If you were born a Dalit in India, you may have never even known that opportunities such as you have had even exist. [2]

My own story, likewise, is riddled with privilege. I was born white and to parents who valued education. I got extremely lucky getting my first tech job. I got even luckier with my second and third tech jobs, to the extent that when I got that third job, I was making 2x as much as my first job, only a couple years earlier, and I'm currently making 3x as much as that first job.

Right now, I could almost "work like I don't need a job," but, go back a couple of years, and that most likely would not have been the case. Go to the grocery store and observe all the people working there, and tell me if they can "work like they don't need a job." Even being able to say "work like you don't need a job" with a straight face to someone implies a certain level of privilege on the part of the speaker.

---

[0]: https://www.census.gov/newsroom/press-releases/2020/educatio...

[1]: https://degree.lamar.edu/articles/undergraduate/parents-educ...

[2]: https://www.pri.org/stories/2019-03-05/even-harvard-pedigree...

Edit: Clarified my income growth.

I think this is a case of, "the rich get richer, the poor get poorer".

Having some privilege snowballs into more opportunities and thus, more privilege.

Sure, but I explicitly restricted my comment to university grads. And I literally said “there’s obviously privilege involved”.

My point is that people often talk like nobody could do businesses or be independent except the top 1%. But it’s actually a fairly broad swath of the educated class. I would guess a majority of the people reading the posts here could work like they don’t need a a job. And yet many also do not.

Lots of non americans read this forum but a lot of this is actually easier outside america as COL is so low. Again, for those in the class I’m talking about.

My point wasn’t “anyone can do this”. Obviously there’s privilege involved. My point was that a larger swath of people can work like this than you’d think.

Also, university grad is not a prereq for, say, trying to start a business. A majority of young americans now live with their parents. This is in some ways a gloomy statistic, but it likely also indicates their living costs are very low in most of those cases. Most people in that circumstance can take 1-2 months to fiddle with an online business idea with no startup costs.

If you tell people “something is impossible, only the rich can try” then a lot of people won’t even attempt something, even if their life circumstances actually permitted them to do so. What frustrates me about discussions on these topics is people assume the level of privilege needed is much higher than it actually is.

https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2020/09/04/a-majority-...

It makes me wonder what kind of safety nets are available to people who can afford to think like this. I wish I was able to do this.

Anyone who lives below their means can do this. Not everyone can do that, but a substantial portion of people reading this comment on hacker news can do that.

If someone earns $50,000, spends $40,000, in four years they will have a year’s salary saved up. With that in the bank you have a fair margin of safety.

Most people don’t need a year to get a job, and can also reduce expenses in such a period. By doing so, you effectively buy freedom.

I’m guessing you wrote this because you are not able to have such a margin of savings. But I’m leaving this comment for the many readers who could do so, but have not arranged their lives such that they have it.

> in four years they will have a year’s salary saved up.

That assumes no unexpected expenditure though? Any medical emergency (and even a lot of non-emergencies) in the US (from what I've seen) would blow those savings quickly. Also car problems, child problems, storm damaging the house/apartment, any number of things can swallow those savings quickly and you're back to square one.

Oh right. I’m Canadian, so I forget how tied to their jobs Americans are.

Though the non medical ones you mention can generally be handled by insurance. That usually is not tied to work. If you have a year’s savings you can generally afford insurance.

Americans aren’t tied to their jobs because of health insurance. Anyone can purchase it on healthcare.gov.

They’re tied to their jobs because healthcare costs so much. It’s unaffordable to pay $400+ per person per month plus up to $8k for out of pocket max which resets every calendar year ($16k for family) without having a job.

The $400 per person is for a young person. It goes up to $1,000 per month as you get into 50s/60s. So if you’re being prudent and factoring in the probability of not having income in your 50s/60s (age discrimination, disability, obviated from automation, outsourced), then you also need to save to plan to pay at least $12k a year in today’s money plus out of pocket maximum.

> so I forget how tied to their jobs Americans are.

That's another thing - aren't most of them in at-will employment? Meaning they can be let go with almost no reason with no notice at any time. That's also going to put a dint in the savings.

Just because some people might have an unexpected expenditure doesn't mean the OP's comment isn't true.

Something can always go wrong, but it doesn't happen to everyone.

You also have to factor in the effect on your future earnings of looking for a job while not having a job. You're bound to get lower offers (unless you can credibly give the impression of someone who's so wealthy that they never need to get a job). So even if you have a year's salary saved up and find another job within months, it could still be a big financial hit in the long term.

Are you assuming $50k take-home pay?

This is fundamentally why I think a UBI is a good policy. It will empower everyone to engage to take risks and engage in entrepreneurialism.

Consider asking the flip side of this question, "I wonder what kind of safety net I could create that would allow me to think like this?"

I can recommend the web site Mr Money Mustache[1] for some ideas along that line.

[1] https://www.mrmoneymustache.com/