I'm a senior software engineer with decades in the industry, but a few years ago I completely burned out, ended up addicted to alcohol, and lost everything.

And when I say lost everything, I mean everything. I ended up in a homeless shelter.

Climbing out from there to get back into the industry was an insane battle. I finally got control over all of it and back on my feet, but I have a new found respect for just being able to keep a roof over my head and pay bills now.

That's all I want. I use my free time to give back to society now.

I’m 57. I’ve worked as a photographer for 32 years, made a great living and traveled the world. I’ve collaborated with incredible people, and seen (and documented) amazing things.

I live in a beautiful house (I paid it off years ago) in a great city. I have zero debt and have so many options about what I’ll do.

My retirement investments have been done very well (good luck getting me to stop working). I have a wonderful family and an incredible daughter.

I never take any of this for granted. I am so thankful. My siblings, cousins, aunts, etc see me like an alien creature. At 57 I’m the oldest living male in generations of my family.

I was fortunate enough to find a company where I live that wrote their major systems in assembler in the late 1960's; they use UNIX/Linux to glue modern systems to a vertical wall of technical debt. This is an endless amount of fun.

I go only so far into these legacy systems (we even have an emulated VAX running VMS, which I keep at arm's distance). I should be thankful for having an unprivileged VMS account. I don't want to run that system.

One of the many reasons I would never move to the US is that in Europe I don't feel like a minor slip up or bad luck will send me into financial ruin. I'll need surgery on my shoulder soon and hopefully it should be fully covered by my health insurance, no added charges. It's an example that comes up again and again and I'm sure people in your position worry less about it, but it's something I keep seeing play a role with my acquaintances and online

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2021/08/22/upshot/hospit...

Ethics aside, the taxes I've been paying out of my salary since I've been in the industry allows me today to benefit from an incredible financial safety net as I'm attempting to put together my own R&D software company.

Your perspective of US life is just shaped by what they report on in the news/reddit/here/etc. Nobody reports on the people that live boring, comfortable lives.

I personally would not want to live in that system. I am 29, debt free, with a university education from one of the countries top universities where I spend 1.5 years extra for an exchange and having needed hospitalisation multiple times in my life. This experience is something that, statistically, not many US citizens my age have (especially the debt freeness), and I have had enough interactions with exchange students who expressed genuine surprise I had no second thought of going to the hospital to appreciate this carefreeness over the benefits the US system might bring for people like me in the happy path.

But that's personal opinion of course.

While Germany and the other European nations are far from perfect and I like some of the business aspects of the US, coming from money matters more in the US than in Europe, statistically.

https://www.visualcapitalist.com/ranked-the-social-mobility-...

I wanted to reciprocate revealing something along the lines, but apart from ourworldindata.org (which has a numeric approach instead of notional), I can only find the promising JunkChart, https://junkcharts.typepad.com/junk_charts/ , and The Economist's Graphic Detail, https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail?page=1 , blogs.

Edit: the said branch of The Economist seems very promising: the latest article, "Just like modern humans, honeybees avoid each other amid plagues // They segregate behaviours in different parts of their hives to prevent parasites from spreading" as a stub shout heading reads «Social distan-sting». Thank you dear editor!

I think you've got that backwards. Everyone is thankful for money and possessions. A job is just how you happen to get them. Would you be unhappy to be very wealthy, without a job?

> seeing the homelessness crisis in full swing is an ever present reminder of what this economy and this society can do to you if you slip up for even a second and / or have even a minor run of bad luck.

I've known a lot of homeless people. Their circumstances are overwhelmingly caused by drug addition or mental illness. Not that anyone will admit to it.

If you're willing and able to work full-time, you can manage a reasonable living. There are government and private programs to support the disabled, unemployed, keep the impoverished who don't fit those categories from starving, etc. Not to mention charities, and friends/family groups who will help most anyone who doesn't get enough support from those programs, or just had "bad luck". Mental illness and drug addition does a good job of cutting you off from all those sources of support.

I happen to enjoy my job very much. I'd feel useless and bored without it.

You could even do all the parts of your job that you enjoy, while skipping all the unpleasant parts of it.

Absolutely. Working on stuff for my job that I’m passionate about gives me great fulfillment. Being paid for my skills is recognition from society as to the value I provide.

Yes.

> Working in software

is a heluva lot better than stoop labor, what people have done for millennia. Every time I work on the yard I'm reminded again at how hard stoop labor is, and how I'm glad to work sitting in a comfy chair in a warm house with the stereo playing in the background. And I can play on HN when waiting for the test suite to run.

To an extent. Some people are predisposed to addiction and the poor are much less likely to have the knowledge or support required to recognise or battle addiction.

I wager that poor people are far better at recognizing addiction than non-poor. I hired a stoner once, not recognizing it. He robbed the company blind to pay his dealer.

Social workers are always trying to get the homeless addicts into rehab. They generally refuse to. It is their choice, not lack of money. In fact, I suspect that the lack of money is caused by their choice to be addicted. After all, addicts lose interest in their jobs and employers don't want stoners and drunks coming to work.

The majority of addicts are people who have experienced trauma. Often this is childhood trauma, specifically sexual, emotional or physical abuse. Of course it may also have occurred in adulthood. Veterans are one common example but there are millions of other causes.

Shit happens man. You can be an armchair judge but it’s all too easy to go off the rails in this world. Be compassionate! Instead of “you made some bad choices” maybe try thinking, “there but for the grace of god go I”.

It seems to me your language above suffers from a false dichotomy.

One might start with a binary question such as "Do we have free will or not?".

However, a better question is "Under what conditions and to what extent are we conscious of our choices, rational in how we evaluate them, and informed enough to predict how they will play out?"

A fairly useless way to think about when it comes to solving problems in our society.

At the end of the days, people's choices are determined by large number of factors, most of which we are unaware of or currently ill equipped to understand.

It would be like a person having a seizure and people deciding to blame said person for making a choice to be corrupted by a devil.

Assume we know the person's addiction and subsequent dysfunction is from said mental illness. The person doesn't want to be treated, as is often the case. Do you

A: let him carry on as is, resulting in both self-harm alongside other externalities

B: Violate his right to self determination and have him committed to a mental institution.

Nobody chose anything without being dictated by physics, biological, sociological, and cognitive factors.

I.e. I think we overestimate how much of a 'choice' certain outcomes are for most people.

I’ve often contemplated that given that the part of me that has a poor work ethic and refuses to get help has generally won out, I would easily be on the streets if I was born into a family of low socioeconomic status, rather than having lots of savings and living in a nice apartment. Also, I’ve spiraled downwards many times, and I’m lucky that food, isolation, internet are my vices, rather than hard drugs.

In the times I’ve finally “decided” to improve my life, I honestly have no explanation for why I did that, versus continue to spiral downwards.

It's interesting how much these kinds of choices are affected by people around you. E.g. when I had classmates depending on me to finish a part of a project, or a partner needing a good night sleep, I am much less likely to goof off into the wee hours of the night playing video games or such.

Makes me wish I could have recognized this way earlier and set up periodic "check-ins" with a group of friends. I've seen some people accomplish this via "life coaches." Some people have really involved parents. Explains why people with poorer backgrounds may do worse - less of this kind of involvement. Conversely I wonder if church/temple participation helps the other way.

At least when it comes to addiction, there can be no recovery unless there is a conscious choice to do something about it. Nobody can save these people unless they want to be saved.

> How much of a choice is it to be attracted to a given individual?

Don't confuse ones' choices with ones' desires. You have free will, you can indulge in the bad predilections, or not. Your choice.

Nobody said making the better choice is easy.

If I had my druthers, I'd eat nothing but donuts and ice cream all day. But I choose otherwise.

Choices or no choices, or free will, doesn't absolve someone of consequences, responsibility, or reality stemming from actions being undertaken.

In the end, you can say it is a choice, but what is a choice worth, if you don't know anything about preconditions (the knowledge, the impulse control, the education, the emotional point of reference, earlier experiences, etc). Not talking about how drugs affect your ability to choose and execute what you have chosen to do.

  > I know that some people

Addiction is NOT a choice, and it is a form of chemical imbalance that happens in our complex brain that makes the person get into addiction with any substance. It could be said like any other mental health illnesses. AND when the person who got addicted doesn't get enough support and the compassion (likely not from you) to the way where they can be able to stay away from their addiction, there is a possibility that such person could go worse.

Drinking alcohol is a choice, so is sticking the needle in your arm.

> likely not from you

I support programs for treatment for addicts. Successful treatment, however, involves the addicts accepting responsibility. Nobody ever said recovery is easy. It isn't. Compassion is in order to help them recover.

But ultimately it's still up to them to make the choice.

I think the evidence suggests a different understanding:

1. One individual’s willpower varies significantly over time (over a day for example)

2. One individual’s set of options varies in many ways — not limited to education, awareness, culture, economic opportunity, and luck.

3. Many important actions are not consciously decided.

This plays out in many ways.

Many individuals that achieve some kind of success mistakenly over-attribute it to hard work or intelligence —- and downplay the role of culture, opportunity, privilege, and luck.

I don't buy it.

Furthermore, when people take responsibility for their lives, they tend to have much better outcomes. I'm old, and I've observed this play out constantly. Blaming others and circumstance might make one feel better, but it is completely useless.

And lastly, successful treatment for addiction and alcoholism involves the person taking responsibility for the addiction.

I didn't assert that.

That's a big claim to make. Do you have any sources?

"60 Minutes" also ran a segment on the Seattle homeless a couple years ago. They went in looking for people who were down on their luck. They found drug addicts and alcoholics.

I haven’t seen these videos yet, but I’m curious if they went to shelters or streets.

This is a take on the issue by the Seattle Times: https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/homeless/why-are-p...

Drug addiction and alcoholism is the proximate cause of a lot of calamities in peoples' lives.

https://our.news/external/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fhotair.com%2Far...

You wrote "90%" -- a specific figure -- as opposed to writing "most" or "many". Why did you choose this number? Do you have a reference you can share?

"I can't afford this" is a lot more difficult of a circumstance to be in than "boy that was a dumb idea to purchase some pricey, fancy, but nasty cheese on a whim"