I just applied for a regular job. Because to be honest, it’s gonna be pretty sweet having a fat bank account, even if it’ll take till I’m 50 to have FU money.

My current hypothesis is that the team is all that matters. The work can be the most boring, crud-type work. As long as you’re working with people you like on something vaguely interesting, who cares?

20yo me would be mortified to hear myself say this, but the chances of either of us influencing the world is quite small. I’m happy I threw all of my effort into doing something I wanted, but my honest answer is that you’re not really missing out on much.

Relax and enjoy yourself. Most days, I end up wishing I’d had kids 5 years ago. It was nice to prioritize myself, but you can’t prioritize a family you never focused on building.

(I had no idea I even wanted a family or that it was important to me until about… 29?)

I guess my point is, the “relax and enjoy yourself” mentality isn’t so bad. No one will probably remember us the way they’ll remember pg. But I’ve helped thousands of devs directly, whether in DMs or by contributing code, and I think I only care whether those folks might remember me.

So that’s the area you can really make an impact: on the people around you, in your day to day life.

Maybe I’ll wake up in a few years and realize this is a terrible mistake, but that seems unlikely.

Not a single professional accomplishment is within an order of magnitude of that level of fulfillment. Just help one f*cking person become more than they thought they could be and you’ll die happy—why didn’t they tell us it was this simple?

Possibly the best thing I've ever done in my life, and it was in my late teens. I get satisfaction from my intellectuality and general smarts, but for it really brighten my soul, it has to positively affect other people.

The bottom line is a demanding bitch and no matter how much you give it will ask for ever more. A positive change in a fellow human being is intrinsically, life-affirmingly satisfying; even just a single-serve in a lifetime.

I heard his mum giving out to his older brothers for not watching him. There is a good chance that young boy would have run out of energy and slipped under the surface with no one noticing. It's a nice thought that I may have saved his life and also saved his family from all the grief and guilt that would have caused. I doubt he remembers it - not that it matters.

Maybe just being cynical about it, but if I help out at a soup kitchen I know I'm helping people, when I donate I am just getting a tax credit and boosting a charity's executive bonuses.

Also, overheads like executive bonuses don't _necessarily_ mean that the charity is ineffective [3]

[1] https://www.effectivealtruism.org/

[2] https://www.givewell.org/charities/top-charities

[3] https://www.givingwhatwecan.org/choosing-a-charity/#a-note-a...

Most depression is the second type. So I’m not surprised giving people purpose shows great results. It would have for me, too.

I suspect different people probably did try to tell me versions of that, but it’s very hard to learn deep feelings from hearing other people talk or reading their words as compared to living it yourself. You can read about others’ heartbreak but you learn from your first few breakups. You can read about having kids but nothing prepares you for the deep feelings of parenting.

Maybe being doomed to repeat the learnings others have had is part of the point?

The sensible model seems rather obvious: One has to organize their own show before one is of [much] use to others. Until that time one should give the others the opportunity to help you with that and be grateful. Its not an embarrassment if you plan to do the same.

I think you can cultivate that in a small way though, by taking part in volunteer programs in your community. I know it's a cliche recommendation but if you are feeling like we lack community then it's probably just because of how easy it is to separate yourself from it.

Say what you want about the ills that come with it, but religion has been telling us this since the dawn of time.

Because it has an intangible effect on GDP. Our culture optimises for creating obedient worker drones who will capitulate to authority. Fostering empathy for others and leading children to a life of fulfilment conflicts with establishment incentives.

The older I get, the more the whole "legacy"/impact issue seems overhyped; pg (and everyone alive today) is not going to be remembered for long either; perhaps 2 more generations, and it's a wrap. No one is remembered forever. That thought keeps me rooted firmly in the present and on the immediate impact I can have.

I have never been into poetry, but both versions of Ozymandias (Shelley's[1] and Smith's[2]) deeply resonated with me. I wholly agree with you, your impact, and your legacy, is with the people around you, in the here and now.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ozymandias

2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ozymandias_(Smith)

    I met a traveller from way the hell off
    who said: two gigantic, fucked-up rock legs
    be out there in the middle of goddamn nowhere
    right next to them covered in shit some kinda big face
    looked pretty pissed & upset & whatnot
    all damn covered in words
    “yo ozymandias here, this my shit”
    “better than your shit, get fucked buddy”
    not much else tho, just sand
    shitloads of sand all over the place

We know him in the very abstract, not all much different to how we know the Ozymandias of the poems.

Does that level of being remembered matter?

https://daily.jstor.org/short-history-of-the-condom/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kushim_(Uruk_Period)

I didn't find a mention of him making a mistake in this article, but I think I read somewhere a while ago that the numbers he wrote on the tablets had some error somewhere.

History is a highly aggressive compression algorithm. Entire industries are forgotten, let alone people.

So, yes, the correct answer is, "relax and enjoy yourself."

If you happen to contribute to the world in a way that escapes the compression algorithm - congrats.

You win “Hacker News Comment of the Day” :)

Man. One of the worst jobs I've ever had was working as a paralegal in a law office, but I had two friends there that made it so much fun. We'd send each other emails making fun of the attorneys (obviously a risk but the IT person was a friend), joking around, talking about the future, sending dumb memes and getting hammered after work.

After that, I got my first dev gig working with one of my closest friends, and it was a blast.

Now I'm working for a company doing really cool stuff, but I don't really know the people I work with and it's sort of a cold environment, and I feel like I'm stagnating. I really, really think there's something to what you said. They're not bad people, not by a long shot, and maybe something will develop, but the camaraderie I had at the law office gig was special, and I miss it.

My goals have narrowed: be a good father and husband, serve my community in whatever way I can, write fiction when I can. I think that's good. I also don't hold it against myself that I had loftier, maybe unrealistic, goals when I was younger. People change.

https://joedator.com/cartoons/what-do-you-want-to-be-when-yo...

It's probable most people in the world, the majority being Chinese and Indian, would strongly disagree with what you think it should be. If not, it's the africans and the europeans who would.

I have a huge amount of agency in my life, simply because I can live with little money, enjoy obeying and building stuff in teams, can be useful and accept sacrifice, so I moved across the world to work in investment banks and it's striking how similar yet different people are, and hows silly 20-something are in speaking of changing "the world".

Something I hear a lot around me that I also apply a lot is to "pick your battles". There are things that are pointless to fight over, others you can and must. And you see the frustrated spinning around behind you on detail why you slowly but surely build the bigger picture.

Start by changing your hometown, already a feat :D

I can see mostly disadvantages to having children. Perhaps a nice highlights reel, but the daily grind sounds miserable. Having a cat seems like a much better deal. This sums up my sentiment: https://theoatmeal.com/comics/baby_vs_cat

You seem to have a different opinion, so I wonder if it is just a matter of preference of if your perspective is very different to mine?

I chose to have kids, but one of my best friends chose not to have kids. I sometimes regret it (though never seriously), he deeply regrets it. He had a lot of cool stuff and got to travel the world for many years, which I always wished I could do too. He was always doing fun stuff, even as simple as going on beer runs on the weekend (literally the club he was in would drink beer and go running. They had a blast). In his early 50s his wife was diagnosed with terminal cancer. During that period both he and her went through profound regret. She would pass on nothing, and he would be completely alone when she was gone.

I also firmly believe that there is a level of growth/maturity that you can't reach without going through the crucible of kids. I have never met a person who didn't say that having kids was one of the hardest things they ever did but helped them grow and see life in a different way like nothing else could.

Also don't forget the Michael Scott reason for having kids: they can't say no to being your friend[1]

[1]: https://www.reddit.com/r/DunderMifflin/comments/20u728/i_wan...

Sure, there's low points, but there's also high points every single day.

E.g. I certainly didn't even think of it when I was 16 - I was dreaming of other things. Nothing much changed at 25. In my 30s, I am only considering it because it is part of the 'life script' and 'now or never' kind of situation, not because I can't wait to do it. Was it different for you? In an ideal world, I would maybe do it when I'm retired in my late 50s and 60s. I.e. I would prefer to skip children and go straight to grandchildren.

One thing you become aware of quite quickly when you start seriously looking into kids is that the biological realities are much harsher than society leads you to believe. Having kids when the mum is much over 35 gets really difficult really quickly. Once I realised that, knowing that I did want children eventually, it made the decision to expedite things easier. I decided I'd rather make the leap sooner than regret it.

I don't think it's a very logical decision though - interestingly I think a lot of the people I know with children today were quite impulsive and of-the-moment in their early 20s. The more sensible ones haven't had kids yet - perhaps because it's hard to make a reasoned decision about it.

I mean, were you in your early 20s, grinding leetcode, thinking "can't wait to become a parent"? Or was it more of "I want to have had children when I am 65, so even though I'm not over the moon about it right now it is what it is, I'll just go with it"? Or "all my friends and relatives are doing it, so it never even occurred to me that I had other options"?

In general, I did have an innate plan to reproduce at some point in the future from early on (my 20s), potentially because of social norms (then again, my sister didn't), or maybe because of my ego (I'll be bringing smarter-than-average, decent-physical-specimen humans into the world, even though by the time I had kids, I learned that "reasonable" and "empathetic" are probably more important).

Now if, say, my wife wanted to handle 90% of the work, with me primarily responsible for breadwinning and little else - a 'traditional' family - I could understand making such a big decision on what looks to me as very weak reasoning. Because then it wouldn't even be THAT big a decision to me anymore, as MY life would not be changing all that much.

But assuming a true 50/50 split in responsibilities? And wife feeling the same about all these things as I do? To me, much much stronger reasons are required than what motivated you, as you would be changing your life completely, with no going back, committing for a very long time. Not to mention the HUGE financial commitment (say goodbye to financial independence and therefore being able to do independent research/projects in the future). And that's the best case scenario of healthy, not-too-unreasonable children.

People do a lot of things I consider "romantic": fighting for freedom, fairness, human rights... They only benefit them in the long run, and many not even benefit from them directly. I've done my share as well.

It's the same with kids. You asked about reasons to decide to have them, not about what I am getting out of it (you were very explicit in responses to others about how you didn't care about how they decided on "when", for example).

I fully expected that I will develop relationship with my kids that will overcome everything, and so far I have! Which is why I was willing to dive into the huge time, money and effort investment after the initial reasons! But it was not the reason to have them.

You are perfectly allowed to spend the same effort on building relationship with others, and it might or might not (I have no idea) get you the same satisfaction I get from interacting with my kids.

Thank you for your replies and hope it all goes well for you!

My wife originally wanted to, and like you, I was... reticent. My feelings at the time seem similar to yours here.

All I can say is, having a solid partner -- one that I can absolutely count on, and believe in -- helped me unwind. I was able to set aside my original concerns and think long-term.

Here's where we may differ: I've always loved playing with kids. There's something magical about seeing them learn things, interact with the world for the first time, and to just screw around and enjoy life without the normal adult concerns. After all, when you're a kid, you have endless time and all you want to do is play. Chilling with kids and playing games with them has always appealed to me.

There's also a stigma attached to that, when you're a male. If I was female, lots of people would feel "Oh, that's cute!" but when you're a man, I inevitably felt like I should hide that aspect of myself. After all, everyone knows that it's dangerous or creepy for older men to hang around with kids, right?

It wasn't till my wife's sister had kids of their own that I was able to get over this. Once they got to 2yo or so, it all clicked for me. I remember playing the "colors" game with Eloise -- she was quizzing me about the different crayon colors, and it was so cool to watch her learn about orange. I don't remember exactly what she learned, but it was sort of an "aha" moment of orange being halfway between yellow and red.

From then on, I was sold, and decided I wanted kids of my own. Wiping their butts and being woken up with screams will just be a part of the process for me, and I won't mind at all. (Easy to say that now, I'm sure.) But, for example, you probably feel the same way about cleaning out the litterbox for your kitty; an annoyance, sure, but it's a labor of love.

That labor of love is a strength for me. It's what allowed me to ultimately be fine with abandoning my old (current) way of life and return to "the daily grind," as people might like to call it. My wife and I have been trying to have kids for a couple years, and haven't had success. I always felt like, well, whenever the kids come around, I'll go get a traditional job and be family guy. But then one night, I realized "You know, IVF is hugely expensive. I could go get a job right now, and we'd save up enough to get it done within just a few months."

It wasn't an easy decision, but once I made it, it was easy to follow. I want some kiddos to teach things to, hang out with, and occasionally learn from. My motives are no more complicated than that.

You'll feel differently. If you're young, all I can say is, expect yourself to change over time. The only thing you can count on is that how you feel today probably won't be your feelings forever.

If you're less young, then there's really nothing wrong with not having kids. There's a stigma against that too, which I think is bogus. It's simply a question of what you want out of life.

By the time http://www.paulgraham.com/kids.html came out, I was nodding along with that entire essay. Perhaps it'll help elucidate some of the feelings here. But a simpler way to put it is, "one day something activated in my brain -- some kind of primal instinct -- and from then till now, the desire to have kids has been a source of strength."

I would probably want to 'borrow' some relative kids for 2-3 weeks while they go on holidays, and see how the whole thing works - not just the fun parts - before I would be willing to commit to it. I do not mean you here, but it always surprises me how lightly people - otherwise very careful and responsible - take the most important and consequential decision of their life.

> I do wonder if there is a difference between playing/teaching nieces and nephews that you can hand back any time, and doing it all the time.

I think you're right about this.

Just remember, it's totally fine if you decide you don't want kids. It's usually a bad idea to feel pressured into it.

I'd be curious to hear what you end up choosing. Feel free to shoot me a DM on twitter or email me, even if it's a few years from now. (But only if you'd like to, of course.) Also, if you want to chat more about this sometime, definitely reach out; this topic is quite interesting to me.

Best of luck to you.

You will never have FU money working a regular job.

he came to me later and asked me to expound. i told him "the formula is: spend less than you make and invest the left over. you do that long enough and you'll become wealthy."

i also told him "from what i can tell, it will happen so gradually that you'll barely notice a difference in your lifestyle. you will just realize one day that you are part of the maligned upper-crust but noone around you will know that."

he called me 2 years ago to let me know that he took my observation to heart and he's now in the millionaire club. he also said "the books say i'm a millionaire, but i certainly don't feel like it."

his next million will be much easier to get now and he just turned 40.

Realistically though back when being a millionaire meant 'retire immediately' things were much cheaper. You could get a car for 3-4k. Now a similar car would be 30-40k. You could say 'oh but that car is so much better'. That is true, but this 10x is mostly true across most goods I have found. I think many do not realize what a number inflation did on everyone in the late 70s and very early 80s. So many of these 'sayings' are still around but their numbers off by a factor of 10.

New cars are status symbols or toys. I never understood how people could trade a human's full time salary for a car. People take old cars to work every day for a small fraction of the cost.

American lifestyles have inflated much more than the price of comparable goods. Average home size is way up over time, people prepare less of their own food, people buy fancy big cars with lots of horsepower and unnecessary capability.

I would complain about iphones and big TVs but in reality- the only things relevant to most of our budgets are our insistence to compete for the hottest real estate and new cars

Conspicuous consumption of goods is a interesting argument and probably worth talking about. But my point was scale and inflation.

It's not that simple. If nobody bought new cars, where would the used cars come from? :D

And their prices would go comparatively up.

So basically, they are just like everything else that you can get cheaper (which is, really, everything). Eg. you can get a comparable laptop for 1/2 the price most likely (maybe not with new M1 macs, but in a few years). Or the phone.

Also, counting a home’s net worth in assets does not make sense to me unless you can afford to greatly downsize at anytime and the market is liquid.

$6,000 per year is a significant portion of your take-home income if you're making the median income in the US, but it's possible.

1. Reduce outgoings. It's easier to have FU money if the amount you need to be able to say "FU" is smaller, because you've perfected the art of living on a little less than most. Most people's outgoings grow to meet their incomes: resist that. You don't need to recycle everything you touch and grow your own food to make good headway here.

2. Take your age, halve it. That number is the percentage of your gross income you should be putting away each month into retirement and savings if you haven't started already. Yes, it's hard at the beginning, so have it happen automatically through employer deductions (common in the UK for pensions, not sure about elsewhere), or on payday move a %age automatically into a savings or investment account so you get used to living without it. I still struggle to do this but am getting better.

3. Learn about compound returns a little more. $500 a month at 8% (typical market returns recently), and over 10 years gives you back $92k - a $32k profit on the $60k you put in. Whether that's FU money is dependent on whether your outgoings are $50k/year or $150k/year. Keep going for another 10 years, and you're not far off $300k which isn't bad for the $120k it cost you. Think you can keep going into your fifties and do another decade? $750k off the back of a $180k investment. Is this not FU money yet? You're the problem, not the regular job.

Your chances of having FU money working a regular job are far, far higher than having it any other way. It's just too many people are trying to retire in their 20s and not getting it: that's not a very likely outcome, no matter how hard you work or how smart you are.

I think we have very different ideas of what "FU money" means. FU money is literally enough to be able to do what you want. It's being able to stop asking "Can I afford this?" because you definitely can. It's being able to stop making a choice between two sports cars because you can afford both. It's being able to buy the exact house you want because you can approach the current owner and make an offer they'd be stupid to turn down. FU money is literally the ability to say FU and do something anyway when someone says you can't.

Having enough money to retire a bit earlier if you live a relatively simple life and save a lot is not FU money.

$750k off the back of a $180k investment. Is this not FU money yet?

$750k is barely the down payment on a nice Bay Area family house. Of course it isn't FU money. You're not saying "FU" to anyone if you're also saying "I can't afford the house I want so I'll choose a more reasonable one."

FU money is being able to say fuck you to anyone (including your boss) without consequences derailing your life.

At the very beginning of my career I worked in the lab for 36 hours straight trying to finish a project on a tight deadline. I didn't have any "FU" money at that point obviously. If someone asked me to do that today, there would be no way! I wouldn't quit over it necessarily, but I would still be OK financially if I was fired for saying "your deadline is ridiculous!"

So how much does it cost to travel to Alpha Centauri and back?

There are always things you can't afford, no matter how rich you are. So that's a bad definition.

I always thought FU money was enough money that you can say FU and not do something when someone says you have to. That is, enough money to retire (get fired) on a whim. Of course, even by that definition, 750k isn't FU money unless you're single in a LCOL area (or fairly close to a predictable death, I guess).

My personal criterion for FU money is 3mm. This is fairly achievable, market willing, if you have make six figures.

in the U.S working a regular but relatively high paying job like developer should give you FU money right about the time that you start to experience health problems that will then eat into that FU money leaving you nothing.

There's a reason the song is Birth, School, Work, Death without any FU inside the comma separated list.

You might want to update your models. If interest rates will remain at 0 (or get negative like in Europe), you'd be lucky with 0-1% return.

The part people find unpalatable (and sometimes impossible, depending on circumstances) is the "live on half of it" part (but even if half is impossible, it's still worth investing what you can).

I'm not even making US software money and my budget says I can reach FU money (which, to be clear, means matching my current low-budget lifestyle, which is why it's achievable) in 5 years if no other major expenses come up.

I did decide to prioritize charitable giving because of the reasons elsewhere discussed about service being its own reward, but that only pushed it out to ~11, which is still a couple decades earlier than the typical retirement age.

Plus, when I'm gone, I can pass that income generator on to someone else and free them from the rat race, giving the next generation an even better headstart than I had.

To be honest, even your strategy there sounds tremendously flawed because you're assuming that you'll even want to live that life. What happens if you meet someone, get married, and have a couple of kids after you 'retire'? Suddenly your retirement fund is nowhere near enough. A simple example - how do you pay for your kids to go to college? You think you've got "FU money" so surely you can do something as straightforward as saving your kids from college debt. What if they're brilliant and get places at Stanford? Is your 'live on the interest from half the earnings of 11 years as an engineer' going to cover $500k in 20 years time? Of course not. You'd need to dip in to the capital, and then your whole retirement plan falls apart.

Having FU money, as opposed to just plain simple money, means you will be able to afford all those things and more besides because you are genuinely FU rich. You don't get there by having a normal job, even if it pays a lot and you can invest half your income. That just gets you a nice middle-class retirement, which is lovely, but you won't be rich.

I got zero money from my parents after I turned 17, and the bare minimum before that, and I would have felt inadequate as a young adult if I had taken money from them, which they did not have in any case. Exception exists (e.g. disabilities).

Most people won’t ever be able to do that, no matter how much they save of what they earn.

Also, cost of living is another huge factor here. Housing isn’t always as expensive as it is in the Bay Area, and some countries have good (even sometimes great) free education. Heck, in some, you are paid to attend the top schools.

FU money isn’t about being rich. It’s about being able to keep living the life you want even in the event you were to tell your boss or the world to fuck off.

So… in this… everyone’s goal would be different, and yours is not his?

If my kids wanted to go to a half-million dollars university, I’d just burst out laughing and ask them how they expect to pay for that. If they were to reply that they expected me to, I’d probably laugh them out of the room.

Almost nobody in the whole world can afford to send their children off to a $500k college.

Not even after saving up half of everything they’ve earned across their entire life. I don’t care much about holding myself up to such an unreasonable standard.

Noboxy in the world is entitled to expect anyone else to pony up such an amount of money for them either.

If I can

- put a roof over their head,

- clothes on their backs,

- feed them well every day,

- provide them a good health insurance,

- send them to school

- and afford one or two extra-curricular activities

- as well as one or two vacations, preferably abroad, a year,

I’ll have more and be able to provide them with more than most people ever had, have and expect to be able to in their entire lives.

If I can do so without ever needing to work again, it absolutely is enough for me to tell any employer to go find someone else to do the job and please don’t let the door hit them on their way out.

To me, anything more is an extra nice to have that I don’t owe to anybody.

You appear to have a different point of view. That’s fine. To hold yourself to a different standard. That’s okay too. It’s your life.

You also seem to have a hard time grasping that different people have different needs, and to consider that everybody else should abide by your standards.

This, well… is fine too, I guess.

Just to point out, there are some _really_ good college's in the EU that don't cost $$$. eg:

https://leverageedu.com/blog/free-universities-in-germany/ (random page about it)

Which I totally get, but find hilarious nonetheless.

The recipe is simple. If you spend 50% of what you make, then you only have to work 50% of your life. If you spend 10% of what you make, then you only have to work 10% of your life.

Turn off all sources of marketing and watch your free time and savings swell.

With her salary covering life expenses, my salary will be going straight into the bank. That means I can aim as high as I want; the higher, the quicker we'll hit that $1M mark. I estimate somewhere in the 10 to 15 year range, which also happens to coincide nicely with the (unfortunate) transition toward management as you get older, since that tends to come with yet more pay boost.

$1M isn't a lot. But it's FU money for us, because we have simple tastes. Fooling around with electronics, traveling wherever we want, having a multi-floor house; these things are doable on much less than a mil.

So you're right. I won't be buying a Tesla on a whim. But I won't want to.

We're immensely privileged as software engineers to have this kind of leverage. Most people -- the vast, vast majority of the world -- don't lead such comfortable lives. I intend to exploit that privilege to the fullest, in order to build the best life possible for my kiddos.

Then watch as they screw it all up, ha. But I'm fine with that too.

There are plenty of them out there.

I'm in a point of life that I actually long for easy and laid back CRUD-style jobs where one can do everything easily, quickly, be productive and also work a reasonable amount of hours and can stop thinking about work after signing off.

I recently had to start a new front end using just jquery (customer requirement) and oh boy, I felt so much productive compared to react/angular

Once I realized this it occurred to me that instead of trying to optimize for accomplishment I need to optimize for these relationships. This changes the game.

This also explains an economic paradox. Why does our compensation go up when we switch jobs?

The reason is because each job switch opens us up to new opportunities to build relationships.

Is it a paradox only if you take for true the existence homo or company economicus

That's me 6 years ago. After having invested too much on the type of work/mission and found that this was not it.

From the past 6 years and 2 companies where I tried this hypothesis, I can say that the work _structure_ (chaos, or hyper-bureaucratic, or anywhere in between, going either way) and the work _mission_ do matter a lot too in the end. It's an intricate balance.

The work _structure_ mandates how your team will jell, or dismantle, over time and tasks. The thousands of paper cuts due to the transformations from start to scale to profitable and compliant can really turn mad the unprepared.

The work _mission_ mandates how much/long you will endure the paper cuts.

But yes, the team and the people is still what you should invest on: that's the only area where your loyalty matters, if only because that's only there that you can find reciprocity.

The company, the structure, the mission are just some paper fiction that pay and pass; and there's thousands of them.

Moreover, these days, most of the missions (in IT at least) are even more ludicrous compared to the existential challenge that's ahead of us.

So yes, we better relax, enjoy the people around us in the settings we have, be nice and do what's sensible to do.

It's been tough, but I wouldn't change it. I try to concentrate on helping where I can. I think our mission is to try and make the world just a bit better for at least the people around you. Do good and avoid creating hurt in the process.

On the flip side, if you step outside the bubble of comfort that Western society generally affords people, you'll find that life is "nasty, brutish & short" as Hobbes put it.

We've come a very very long way in a short time towards raising our standard of living and our expectations for what our lives can be - especially for regular folk from humble beginnings who aren't born into huge advantages.

Not to say that we can't improve things further for Western society, but just to say that the script we are generally given is pretty damn good compared to historical averages.

Life here is beautiful, the sense of community is so much stronger than it is in the west and overall I'd say that people are less stressed. On the flip side, many things are harder for sure - wages are low and working hours are long, good healthcare is hard come by for many people.

Short of living in an active conflict zone, of which there are only a few in the world, thankfully, life is not "nasty, brutish, and short". Perhaps, in future, before making such statements about the lives of people from cultures other than your own, you could take a few moments to try and empathize with them instead?

a) to partake in that lifestyle

b) has the tools to reach that lifestyle when starting outside of it

Doesn't matter if you are talking about North Korea or the United States. And yes, you can find abject generational poverty in the United States as well.

The fact you could post your comment puts you in the top 40% of the world (roughly 60% don't have internet access).

If you have internet from a mobile phone, you are roughly in the top 50%.

Are you really looking outside your bubble of comfort?

What you might be doing I think... is making the assumption that technology, 'things' like gadgets or better cars and modern medical health is central to human life. Yes, life would objectively improve if you have those, but if I have to work 60 hours a week doing something I don't really care about, then is that really a good trade-off? I think the answer is not the same as yours for everyone.

Again, the central aspect of this topic is agency. Do people choose to live that way, where they live it? And how many would choose a different lifestyle if given the same opportunities as everybody else?

Yes, you can live a happy life as a nomad without any access to technology. That isn't the topic of this conversation.

I have by now traveled pretty much to all the continents and at this point smartphones and internet are ubiquitous. They are litterly now throwing away working second hand ones in developing nations.

Interesting: internet-access > no-internet-access

Even living in the poor part of the EU is still a lot worse then living in the good part.

>Life here is beautiful

snort

> the sense of community is so much stronger than it is in the west

the community is precisely why I dislike my country. I can't imagine worse torture then being force to live your life with close-minded ignorant people stuck in the past.

Go and be gay or atheist or just strange in your country then tell me how beautiful your life is.

>overall I'd say that people are less stressed. On the flip side, many things are harder for sure - wages are low and working hours are long, good healthcare is hard come by for many people.

As long as you don't care if you starve or die of illness it's all great. So literally the basics of security.

>life is not "nasty, brutish, and short"

sure, it's just relatively nastier, more brutish and objectively shorter in years of life.

>Perhaps, in future, before making such statements about the lives of people from cultures other than your own, you could take a few moments to try and empathize with them instead?

I don't need empathy when I feel it on my own skin.

Pretty weak all in all.

Honestly, it’s so good it’s boring. Not much challenge to life if the only thing you need to do to continue existing is plant your ass in the same chair every day.

The Hobbes quote, however, does not apply. Hobbes was comparing life with/without a sufficiently strong Leviathan ('central government') to provide basic protection of property rights, or at least a semblance of such protection.

But the "long way" to which you refer, the physical comfort of modern life, is the fruit of the industrial revolution, roughly 150 years of history.

Hobbes was much earlier, he probably never saw the IR coming.

Raising a family and religion were important, but I don't think people were very different from our times.

To prove this just look at old folk musical instruments and their development. It is fascinating really.

And the military, and politics, and arts, and friends, and philosophy, and sciences, ...

It's a big fat modern-times bias to imagine that our 19th century ancestors were so simplistic. Just read Zola or Dostoïevski, many characters and/or situations could be transposed nearly intact in modern times.

I have no idea what the majority of people in my community do. We simply never discuss work, there's so much more between family, nature, and the goings on in the world. The complete reverse was true in North America - the first question after "what's your name" was invariably "what do you do".

If you have 150k in the bank you could go to a remote place in the US, take a lowkey job where you work 25 hours a week, and live perfectly fine. No one is stopping you.

The only reason you don't do this is because you like nice things, nice food cooked for you, nice immenities, and want your kids to have material prosperity.

>you have 150k in the bank

>no one is stopping you

>the only reason you don't...

Overall I think your response is not convincing. The problems of materialism are systemic because materialism is baked into the culture and institutions of the US. People are thus motivated to blame the system.

Parent is referencing this joke: https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/avocado-toast

It's like numbers, it exists even if we are ignorant of it.

[1] https://www.investopedia.com/terms/n/normativeeconomics.asp

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Normative_economics

[3] https://corporatefinanceinstitute.com/resources/knowledge/ec...

[4] https://marketbusinessnews.com/financial-glossary/normative-...

[5] https://www.soas.ac.uk/cedep-demos/000_P570_IEEP_K3736-Demo/...

[6] https://www.cairn.info/revue-d-economie-politique-2018-2-pag...

Even the least prescriptive economist is going to be a part of this cycle.

This is why I feel that an individual contribution from my life is not enough. No matter how many fires I put out in people's homes, there's still going to be that fucking arsonist.

Me? I didn't have a chance to "try" things. My room for error was zero. Must get above 90 average. Must get scholarship. MUST find job. MUST be there at 9AM. MUST pay rent.

Now I am saving money to take one year off to work on my own thing, but only because my first future ex-wife works for NYC and I can be on her insurance. Without that safety net, at 40, no way.

So, not everyone can be born a failson like Jared Kushner, but what we CAN have is a safety net to let people take risks.

You can do that as well in many EU countries. Without being rich.

But, interestingly, few people do. And those who do seem to take on less risk than their counterparts in the US.

Where I was born, everyone has money and people are generally modest: do not need ferraris or whatever so they just want a happy relaxed life. And that is very easy to get here. I worked very hard since I was 15 as I wanted (and have) (not ferraris but travel) more, but I was never interested in money or fame that can get someone kidnapped. I believe if I lived in the US, my parents would have sent me to Stanford or something and things might have been different somehow. I will never know: I like not having stress, at all so no regrets.

To be clear, I don’t grieve the lack of Ferraris. But the lack of ambition and related consequences gets to me.

A safety net may lead some people to experiment and play with things, others to slouching off. This even applies outside the public sphere. A stereotype of a bored millionaire's son with no energy to do anything substantial exists for a reason.

I would prefer just taking every 21 year old and saying "here is 15 grand, go do something amazing".

I don't know what the results will be, but a fair number will be worth the risk.

On the other hand, I actually like this idea. It would help people escape abusive situations, and I generally think it's fairly ridiculous how we ask young people to live on so little money while educating themselves. I just don't think it would cause many people to "go do something amazing".

But like you I like the idea ...

Not if you've studied much history. Modern western society is awesome compared to what nearly all of our ancestors lived through. Wanting more is good, but denigrating things that nearly anyone from history would kill for doesn't sound right.

Any sane person would agree with you in the sense that it's definitely better to be alive in 2021 than 1621.

If you you shorten the timespan and only look at cultural changes since, say, the 1970s, though, it seems we've sacrificed a lot of what makes us human (community, interconnectedness, a sense of wonder about the future etc.) at the altar of free market economics and received little of actual value in return (Uber Eats, iPhones, Netflix etc.).

* The omnipresent nature of sweetened food and drink

* Car-dependent culture

* Mass media culture

* Simpsons-style dysfunctional nuclear families

* The whole array of corrupt policies and programs, cults-in-disguise(e.g. "troubled teen" schools), and ideologically driven movements; while we're hardly free of those things, and there are plenty of new or intensified versions of them, I believe there are also more ways to find a sustainable path outside those frameworks these days.

But if you asked me if life was good in 2000, I would be mostly in agreement, because my life seemed pretty good - I was told it was! But then I look back on it and it's like, nooo, actually, there were all these pieces that traumatized me, removed my agency, were bad for my health or made me settle for less. And I believe the same would be true if I had been experiencing life in 1970's.

Like, sure, in 1621 I'd probably have died at a young age. But I am on the hedonic treadmill with respect to life quality too. It doesn't matter to my feelings that now is the best time, if better is still possible.

Re identity politics, I'm trans and it helps me a lot. It feels like an intermediate between misogyny and the abolition of the categorization of gender. Focusing on the rights of one group (trans rights, trans liberation now) feels essential.

Re the presence of ideology, there is no way to not have an ideology. Liberalism and neoliberalism consistently say that they are neutral, but they are also a story about the world and a way to interpret facts, on the exact same scale as Marxism. It's just that because (neo)liberalism places weight on the individual and discounts systemic factors, it can feel neutral if you don't need to think about systemic factors (this is what privelage is).

Not really relevant to your overall critique, but it's just something that stood out to me reading your comment.

It's possible to engage with nihilism and say "I'm just going to survive pragmatically". It's related to the "state of nature" many philosophers will refer to as a pre-societal world. You can't have a society that's wholly nihilistic, but you can exist within society nihilistically in degrees, with the far end of that being the "off-grid live in a cabin in the woods" sort of disengagement. But even without going that far, it's also possible to engage with philosophical concepts and critiques without being ideologically attached to them.

Ideological attachment is what happens when you start converting all life events into phenomena relative to that ideology, and that's the thing that I see being shaken away from a fully normalized state("this is how the world is, there's no discussion to be had") to a vigorous, even violent argumentation(see: all the concepts you listed). And I can pinpoint that the shift happened almost instantly after the world achieved mass connectivity with smartphones, in the 2008-2012 period. Suddenly the US had its Marxists and anarchist voices emerge; trans rights became a major issue; and the "alt-right" took shape as well. We have a lot of visible ideologues in social media culture that will blame everything on the other ideology, where before those positions were buried by the consensus and relegated to subculture.

To me that makes it a "better" world in the sense of agency, because it's easier to examine the different positions. But it's also more fragmented as a society, more prone to bubbles of extremism. If my experience tracks, we're in a transitional state where many old attachments are being discarded while others are being taken up. (Since 2008, I went from being - to retroactively label things - a vagely cishet liberal, to a nonbinary asexual meta-anarchist, all terms I would have struggled with back then.)

My ideas on this mostly derive from Heather Marsh's philosophical writing, so you could say I am attached in that direction(it's equally true that I haven't been able to critique her work, in the sense that I literally just don't want to); her view coincides with that of the meta-anarchists(itself a newly emerging project of philosophical writings) which is why I now also use that as an identity label. I don't see myself as anti-identity, but I do see myself as anti-politics(despite having some occasional political engagement), because I accept Marsh's idea of there being both healthy attachments and unhealthy ones, and kicking my political attachment is like kicking a smoking addiction; I can try to curb it, but it often roars back to life if I look at the news.

Maybe there's an argument to be made for a decline in quality of life since the 1970s, but it isn't going to be on the basis that technological advancements over the last fifty years have been a net negative for society.

A sense of wonder about the future? Interconnectedness? Community? The 70's were some of the most cynical and violent years in recent American history. The Cold War. Vietnam. Watergate. The oil crisis. Activist riots and radical underground groups bombing universities. The National Guard killing students at Kent state. Even the politics of the last four years seems quaint compared to the last few decades.

Would they? Boomers are famous for being luddites, and a growing minority of millennials now would be more than happy to toss their smartphones if it didn't mean being pushed to the outer of all their social groups.

>Streaming media with access to an entire library of movies and television shows is qualitatively better than three analog tv channels and whatever happens to be showing at the movie theater at the time.

I agree, Netflix has a much better range than the old technology, it is more convenient and the picture/audio quality is fantastic. The more interesting question, though, is whether or not frictionless access to near-infinite vaults of that tailored entertainment actually makes your quality of life better.

>The 70's were some of the most cynical and violent years in recent American history.

I never said it wasn't violent (nor did I say American, in fact!). But kids in that era would play together in the streets, and families had closer bonds.

>The more interesting question, though, is whether or not frictionless access to near-infinite vaults of that tailored entertainment actually makes your quality of life better.

That's the thing - "quality of life" is an entirely subjective measure, one which both of us are tailoring to fit a predetermined outcome.

But even if one dismisses the value of access to media to quality of life, the degree to which online services (any service, including streaming media) democratize that access compared to the limitations of physical media and gatekept broadcasts (VCRs didn't even come around until the late 1970s) improved quality of life substantially. That some or much of that media is pure entertainment is less relevant to my argument than the paradigm shift it represents.

I mean, to invoke the trope, you have a device you can fit in your pocket which allows you access to almost the entirety of humanity's cultural and intellectual output, a GPS system, a camera, a radio, a compass, a calculator, it can answer questions, it can order food, it can allow you to communicate with people around the world without long-distance fees. From the point of view of the 1970s, that's literally something out of Star Trek. That seems like an objective improvement to quality of life in the same way that the printing press, internal combustion engine and indoor toilets were.

> But kids in that era would play together in the streets, and families had closer bonds.

Kids don't play in the streets anymore but they still play - my niece and nephew have a huge backyard they play in, and my nephew also makes games for his friends on Roblox. To me, kids today have richer and more fulfilling lives than I did, stuck in my living room watching TV and reading old library books.

Also, I would argue that due to the advancement of progressive ideals allowing certain demographics to exist more openly than society would have allowed in the 1970s, some familial bonds are stronger now than then. Maybe if you're a white Christian conservative male things seem to have gone downhill, but things seem to be looking up for everyone else.

And there would have been social media junkies and helicopter parents using it to make their lives worse, too. I doubt it would have been used significantly differently back then.

>But even if one dismisses the value of access to media to quality of life, the degree to which online services (any service, including streaming media) democratize that access compared to the limitations of physical media and gatekept broadcasts

I wasn't alive for the introduction of VHS, but was for the shift from tape to DVD to torrents to Netflix. The amount of media consumed increased dramatically one physical media died, and even that small amount of exercise and social interaction walking around blockbuster and thanking the guy behind the counter has been squeezed out in the name of efficient distribution.

>That seems like an objective improvement to quality of life in the same way that the printing press, internal combustion engine and indoor toilets were.

And yet I literally threw mine away and don't miss it. It was nothing but a distraction that prevented me from doing things I needed to do.

>my niece and nephew have a huge backyard they play in, and my nephew also makes games for his friends on Roblox

That sounds like my wife's upbringing in South Africa. Hardly an ideal to emulate.

>white Christian conservative male Black families have been disintegrating even faster.

I think this subject is one of the more important ones to the US right now, and is largely ignored because it makes a lot of ideologies look bad. I'd be curious what leads you to your accusation.

Part of the reason I blame the free market is because of the timing, but also because many of the functions that used to be performed by the family and community are now performed by businesses.

Specifically, I think the fact that middle-class people in Western countries no longer rely on friends, family and neighbours to meet (or even augment) our material needs has changed the way that we perceive interpersonal relationships on an individual level.

Because most forms of maintaining personal relationships come with real costs (monetary, stress/expectations, time, lost sleep) but minimal tangible benefits outside of the existence of the relationship itself, our "social mammal mental accounting software" discounts their value.

The net result is that we engage with friends, family and neighbours just enough to keep the relationship alive, but no more. We're lonelier, sadder and less fulfilled.

It's pretty bleak, and I'll admit it's a pretty broad stretch of logic, but I think it's at least partially true based on both my own experiences and the conversations I've had with the people I'm close to.

I could see that being true. Do you mean businesses like Facebook and Twitter with their substitution for socializing?

I fully agree with the rest of your post. If you're interested in the subject, I would suggest reading Robert Putnam's research on Social Capital. Bowling Alone is a good synthesis (but I'd personally pass on his other books, which lean more toward polemics).

Free market economics didn't tell people to spend less time with their families and more time consuming entertainment media. Moreover, the argument that we have culturally regressed since the 70s only makes sense from the perspective of a white male.

It literally did. I've probably seen tens of thousands of advertisements for games consoles, films and Netflix-style streaming services.

>from the perspective of a white male

Many women would disagree with you on the "male" part.

>Many women would disagree with you on the "male" part.

And any woman with a professional job would disagree.

My mother is going to be 70 in a few weeks, she is a highly regarded teacher of English, and in her opinion, a lot of things have gone downhill since the 1970s, and especially since the 1990s, though obviously not all of them. So there is your counterexample.

People are complicated and stereotyping them (any woman with X) is bound to fail.

Rich societies (not just Western ones) seem unable to reproduce themselves - the TFR has gone south of 2 pretty much everywhere, with interesting exceptions (Iceland, Israel). That means that our lifestyle is incompatible with long term survival.

We also have a huge, huge health problem that might directly be caused by abundance of food. Metabolic diseases. Just count all the fat people you meet during a 10 minute walk downtown. Many of them are young and already on their way over the 300 pound mark.

I am not even starting a rant about how algorithms hijack our emotions and manipulate our behavior online.

Humans aren't necessarily built for the world we created. Yes, many things are obviously good: not dying of cholera at the age of 2, for example. But there definitely are things to denigrate in our daily life script. And we must acknowledge these downsides if we ever want to get rid of them.

Only if the rate stays there permanently, which is unlikely. Over the span of a century or two, some population contraction might actually be good for overall survival.

It might be that Taliban-like theocracies inherit the Earth through their much higher fertility, or it might be that authoritarian countries start producing children in artificial wombs, or something completely different. But the current societal model where the old are more numerous than the young is likely to be unsustainable. It is not just raw numbers (population contraction); it is the structure of the population that is extra worrisome.

For myself, I burned out pretty hard on 9-5 work, so I don't take on a full time workload and I don't take on work that requires butt-in-seat engagment, even remotely.

In that way I retain full agency over my time, and great flexibility in when I work. I work when I am feeling the most effective, and I can eliminate all that dead time wasted at traditional jobs, where you are just tabbing mindlessly between screens because you have spent your focus budget for the day.

I am assuming you're a software developer, I'm by no means an expert on contracting, but my two recommendations are: Specialize in a domain, and stay on the technology bandwagon. You can't pin your career on a technology, they go obsolete too fast, but you can specialize in an industry domain.

I specialized in eCommerce, and I've had to use dozens of different technologies, each project brings in a new tech stack and a new set of idioms. I have a friend in motorsport/automotive software, which is an exciting field by the sounds of it. There are dozens of industries that need software but aren't solely software companies, and I think that's where much contract work is.

I am ideologically against the rapid technology swapping our industry loves, I really prefer to dig in deep to a framework or stack, but this is work so I keep my eyes up and forward. Sometimes all you need is to recognize the buzzword, say "Yep I've heard of that", then go home and do some research to make sure you can pull it off before accepting the contract.

Focusing on an industry domain (rather than toolset) seems smart. It’s difficult to be productive in new/unfamiliar knowledge domains and I’m sure buyers understand that.

To answer your question a bit better, I don't see much career growth per se, there's certainly no ladder I am climbing, it just becomes easier and easier to find work over time thanks to prior experience compounding. You get to choose nicer contracts and work with people you like.

There's a lot of potential for personal development though, and you can choose to spend more time on developing recurring revenue and "productifying" your expertise instead of just selling your time hourly.

If you look at what people do in life, very few pick professions or businesses with high agency. Pretty sure that is not just some function of upbringing but risk tolerance and attitudes vary and not everyone wants to be a surgeon, trader, entrepreneur, racing driver, etc.

A lot of high paying professions actually are fairly agency free, e.g. consulting and other professional services - so as far as putting a price on it, agency is not necessarily rewarded much

> One of the leading critics was the philosopher Hubert Dreyfus, who argued that computers, who have no body, no childhood and no cultural practice, could not acquire intelligence at all.

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41599-020-0494-4

That could only work even in theory if you've programmed in all the innate behaviours/desires human children have. And in practice raising superintelligent children who can clone themselves and rewrite their minds is not a thing we know how to do.

We could learn to. Through trial and error.

Even though a too big mistake means creating a psychopathic superinterlligent child who can clone itself, rewrite turns mind and easily hack the few American ICBMs not protected by the wondrous safety of floppy disks.

I was just musing on the previous comment and noting that one of the things we do best is learn how to do things we previously didn’t how to do.

OK in theory. In practice, that's a bigger project, by perhaps a hundred years and a trillion dollars?

But you've got the right approach. A body is a prerequisite in order to get exposure to the same data humans receive.

"Lyin' Eyes"

by Don Henley and Glenn Frey

City girls just seem to find out early

How to open doors with just a smile

A rich old man and she won't have to worry

She'll dress up all in lace and go in style

Late at night a big old house gets lonely

I guess every form of refuge has its price

And it breaks her heart to think her love is only

Given to a man with hands as cold as ice

So she tells him she must go out for the evening

To comfort an old friend who's feelin' down

But he knows where she's goin' as she's leavin'

She is headed for the cheatin' side of town

You can't hide your lyin' eyes

And your smile is a thin disguise

I thought by now you'd realize

There ain't no way to hide your lying eyes

On the other side of town a boy is waiting

With fiery eyes and dreams no one could steal

She drives on through the night anticipating

'Cause he makes her feel the way she used to feel

She rushes to his arms, they fall together

She whispers that it's only for awhile

She swears that soon she'll be comin' back forever

She pulls away and leaves him with a smile

You can't hide your lyin' eyes

And your smile is a thin disguise

I thought by now you'd realize

There ain't no way to hide your lyin' eyes

She gets up and pours herself a strong one

And stares out at the stars up in the sky

Another night, it's gonna be a long one

She draws the shade and hangs her head to cry

She wonders how it ever got this crazy

She thinks about a boy she knew in school

Did she get tired or did she just get lazy?

She's so far gone she feels just like a fool

My, oh my, you sure know how to arrange things

You set it up so well, so carefully

Ain't it funny how your new life didn't change things

You're still the same old girl you used to be

You can't hide your lying eyes

And your smile is a thin disguise

I thought by now you'd realize

There ain't no way to hide your lyin' eyes

There ain't no way to hide your lyin' eyes

Honey, you can't hide your lyin' eyes

[1] https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/On_the_shortness_of_life

Because at the end of the day everything gets old - every act, job, etc. (hedonistic treadmill).

And having complete freedom isn’t a solution. You’re still trapped within your own head 24/7.

Taking time to pursue meditation and other activities that help you be happy no matter what the circumstances of the external world seem like the best choice of activity when younger in order to build agency.