The perspective that changed is twofold: first is that a job does provide life (your kid's), and second is that life is LONG. If you don't get rich by 30, you can get rich by 40 and still have a long time to do whatever you think is impactful.
The thing I try to do now is to accept my situation and only think about what I can do to improve it. Play the hand you are dealt and don't think about what could have been. That is an endless loop of despair. It takes time to truly understand how to be grateful for what you have. I wasted all I had, including money, because I was not grateful. Now all I have to do is look at my beautiful baby to be grateful.
Life is indeterminate and at best a blip.
If the thing he is doing is not providing fulfillment, it's probably not the right thing. I'd advise not to wait. Search for what brings growth and contentment. Go for it.
Having a rich life full of new experiences can be done without chasing the dollar.
This is not meant to be hippie talk. What it really is risk management. When you perceive that you are losing you psychologically want to increase risk to make up for it, leading you to make poor bets. It applies in trading (gambling), where I learned it, but happens in life as well.
Someone in his position needs to consider whether quitting is legitimately a better bet rather than letting emotions dictate.
This is going to be a touchy subject as people have children for many different reasons - I'll describe a few significant groups:
- Those who do it to pass on knowledge, teach kids to be inquisitive and enjoy making/learning. This kind of parent themselves love learning, and raising a child is a massive part of their life journey
- Those who figure it's the next logical progression in their life/relationship, who wind up so tired from the combination of work and raising a child/children that yes their existential angst has been effectively banished. Some may find perspective when they finally find the time to reflect. Most are ultimately happy that they had kids
- Those who seemingly have Stockholm syndrome, evangelizing the joys of having kids in one breath and telling their children to shut up in another. The kind who had kids because they're a status symbol, a Rubicon of the aspirational class
The first kind make the best parents. We shouldn't try to sell kids as a solution to life's problems - otherwise we'll just keep making the second and third kinds of parents with each generation.
You're right that there are many different reasons people love their kids. But your overly intellectuallized and snobbish categorization misses the main reasons. Most people aren't on a journey of learning, and probably don't even like learning very much. But even dumb uninquisitive people can derive great joy from raising families. It's the ultimate equalizer.
Indeed, throughout history and still today in at least Asia, much of the Americas, and the U.S., most people get married and have kids because of reason 2. I assure you they make perfectly fine parents and most derive tremendous joy from parenthood.
Yes, but that's more-or-less the same reason you feel anyway about anything.
My first sentence professed that "This is going to be a touchy subject as people have children for many different reasons" - I don't pretend to know why anyone here had kids.
But your overly intellectuallized and snobbish categorization misses the main reasons.
Here's some big ones I missed: working the farm and supporting the parents or for dowry. Entirely valid reasons to have kids depending on circumstance.
My point was that kids shouldn't be sold as a solution to existential problems. My best friend did just that and his relationship with his partner has disintegrated because it wasn't a realistic way of dealing with the issues that he has. He'll make a good dad and partner when he figures out what's burning inside him.
It's a never ending cycle to figure out what this life is about by giving birth to life which then again must solve the same question themselves.
However, do we really understand this existential angst at its root? Or is this simply a never-ending passing of the torch?
I'm not questioning how much joy children can bring to a couple's life but I've been thinking about the non-evolutionary purpose of having children for a while and I'm not sure how to think about it.
Children are a great reminder that understanding existence is irrelevant. Children don't contemplate their own existence, they simply experience and relish that existence. You can't be sure that you have any sort of purpose or destiny, but you can be sure of the ground beneath your feet and the sand between your toes. Children get that intuitively, and for a long time they can't approach life any other way.
When I was a teenager and an early twentysomething, I thought the point in life was something one figured out via philosophy and religion.
When I was 24 or so, I realized I'd understood better at seven than at 15.
Do you buy that humans have love?
However, your ideas about the passing of the big questions to a new generation does strike a chord.
Speaking as a non-parent, the biggest mistake I see parents make is to live through their kids. I get that it's natural, partly because parents want the best for their kids and try to give them all they can, but in my opinion kids need role models more than almost anything else, and if their role models are martyrs is it any wonder that the cycle continues?
It takes wisdom to balance life as a parent with life as an adult, I'm sure it's not always easy, but I hope that if I'm ever a parent I'll remember to try, as it seems healthier for both kids and parents.
I know that sounds pithy, but the reality is most folks don't really hit their adult stride until their late twenties or early thirties. My peers and siblings all shared that same experience. To be honest, I wonder if it's actually bio/neurological.
Coincidentally, that's also about the timeframe when a lot of folks start having kids. So is it really the kids that gave you "perspective and curb existential angst"? Or was it just natural maturation, and the kids happened to be around at the time?
And let's suppose it isn't biological. That it's the kids themselves. I'd contend what you're actually doing is just distracting yourself... it's tough to care about the meaning of life when you're up at 2am changing another diaper. Is that perspective? Or is it just horse blinders?
Yeah, you are working for money, so use that to your advantage. What is it that you really want or want to do? Start putting money aside so you can spend time doing that at a later date. Use your free time and when possible work time to work on skill sets and projects which will make that possible.
You are incredibly lucky, and you've got a great foundation to build off of. Don't discount how valuable that is, and don't waste that opportunity.
But a large part of that emotion is misplaced. You can change how you feel simply by changing your perspective. You can look at a situation like that and feel like you are doing unsatisfying work, or you can also realize the benefits that come from that and turn it into a positive. And based on what they are saying, there's a lot of good that can come out of it. Good that most people don't have any chance at. You've got to feel a little thankful or lucky to even have that opportunity.
I don't disagree with your point, but I don't think selling most of the daylight hours of your youth is great either.
Basic income would pay for basic needs, and let people devote "free time" to more personally-satisfacting-activities: open-source programming, studiyng new interesting fields, etc...
The mere fact that in today's professional career there is little oportunity for a 40-50years to work on a completely-new-unexperienced-field is an clear example. There is a point in time after which a job converts from ilusion-and-motivation into delusion-and-economic-compromise. And that's blocking people from growing and fully apply their capabilities to reach higher achivements
I feel immigration to the US is too restrictive as it is, let alone what it would become if it meant giving everyone a paycheck. You basically have these options:
1. Restrict immigration (perhaps you are OK with this, I am not. I feel immigration is one of the fundamental things that helped this country succeed, and that we should be moving to make it MORE open, not less).
2. Allow immigration but not offer basic income until you are a citizen. Now you have a classist system. If you were born in the US you are part of the citizen caste, that is guaranteed income from taxes (a nobility if you will), if you were born outside the borders you must work for your income here. Sure, eventually you could be "admitted", but it seems weird that an 18 year old would be allowed to do whatever he wants but someone just entering the country with three kids would be forced to work.
3. Offer basic income to everyone that comes in, have no restriction, and default immediately.
If you think Americans are xenophobic now, just wait to see their attitudes if basic income ever passes.
I do think that basic income needs to introduced gradually and needs to be paired with reductions in the minimum wage.
This reduction in the bottom range of wages will make more jobs economically viable (Since they have to produce less value to make a profit beyond the cost of the wages). It makes immigration less attractive to people earning the bottom range of wages without leaving our working poor in the lurch. This combined with the provision of basic income to citizens makes citizens more able to compete for low income jobs since they are being subsidized.
I feel this is a bit too early for basic income. That change will come to pass naturally when society will be able to continue to exist and function normally even if almost nobody will work. That would require some pretty hefty advancements in AI and robotics.
Basically, I don't see struggle-free basic income without the robots doing all the work for us.
>"If you think Americans are xenophobic now, just wait to see their attitudes if basic income ever passes." I unfortunately agree with this.
More realistically, just reason instead what the least you need as an individual is, work to get it from within whatever economy you find yourself in, and then begin the REAL work of life, developing your happiness for and from what you have.
See: Tolstoy's "How Much Land Does A Man Need?"
The word for that is inflation, and so far economists have not seen evidence that a basic income would effect inflation.
developing your happiness for and from what you have.
That's a good goal for microeconomics. But this is about macroeconomics.
Really?
First off, any basic income that is provided is not going to come close to what a 'highly technically skilled' individual makes.
Secondly, if those individuals do find some activity or undertaking valuable enough to trade the relative income for, it probably has unrecognized value. I would bet they these individuals will acquire expertise, develop new knowledge, and create new things that will be highly benificial to society.
This is very similar we what do with grants to scientists conducting general research. Following your logic, we have too many important problems to bother wasting scientists time on anything that isn't an immediate problem.
Thirdly, there is no way that these individuals would be operating 'without any sort of economic integration whatsoever'. They would still be consuming in our society and their non-consumptive actions would still have economic effects.
That said, I don't think we are at the point we can realistically provide a basic income capable of supporting a reasonable standard of living. I do think we can start providing a basic supplementary income and I think that if paired with reductions in the minimum wage, it could be very successful at stimulating economic growth during the next downturn or slow down.
http://www.economist.com/news/finance-and-economics/21651897...
And yet, current government spending is 21% of GDP, and that amounts to $12,000 per man, woman and child. Remember, not everyone will hold on to their $12,000. Many will pay back a portion in taxes, and some will pay all of it back. And children will probably not receive the full amount, their parents instead getting a growing percentage until the child is 18. That's about 25% of the population. People in prison would not receive their basic income while serving their sentence, I'd assume. That's about 1% of the population, although I'd hope a basic income would decrease that.
The Swiss proposal would be $32,400 per person, for 74% of the US population, which would come to 7.7 trillion, or around 46% of the GDP.
Sounds outrageous, yes, but consider the fact that we are continually increasing the amount of wealth we create, while drastically reducing the labor necessary to create it.
GDP will continue to increase and wages will continue to stagnate and fall. And at some point, certain disruptive technologies (such as self-driving cars) will decimate whole industries almost overnight.
What that means is that the basic income amount won't be increasing nearly as quickly as the GDP, which means that balking at a current-day percentage of GDP will make less and less sense.
Especially when you're facing massive discontent and the prospect of a near freeze on consumer spending.
Basic income is a great idea, but something that is actually politically workable and a lot smaller in scope is needed. It is constantly advocated around here with no real evidence that it is workable at scale.
Work is not misery as long as you believe in, and are constantly engaged with, your work. It becomes misery when it doesn't align with your needs and expectations.
The biggest question is, what would you rather do? What would you do with your free time if money wasn't an issue?
If you are happy with your product, then what is it about the work environment? Does simply managing people stress you out? Or, is it the expectation that "I should" enjoy what I do because it is successful?
Where am I to look for jobs where I have agency in the choice of technology and the direction of the product, a group of intelligent and supportive peers, and a product that directly improves the lives of others? These types of jobs seem to be a vanishingly small percentage of those that are available (not even accounting for the further filtering that happens: skill match, inteviewing, salary requirements, etc).
Who would have guessed that the video game industry would push graphics cards to a point where they are now incredibly beneficial to scientific applications? You could say the makers of PC games were just optimizing things for consumers, but there is a direct connection between what they did and the computing power we have for worthwhile applications today.
Who would have guessed, in 1847, that Boole's philosophical papers on logic, would form the foundations of computing a hundred years later? George Boole died without every knowing any of this.
The most impactful changes in people's lives are rarely direct. Seeking "impactful" goals is a trap in my experience. Find something that excites you and if its creative, my money's on that being more useful than you think.
It might not be immediately apparently from our website jobs here definitely satisfy all of your criteria. Let me know if you want to chat.
On balance, life is neutral.
(Father of two very young children.)
Imagine you have two jobs to choose from, both in the same field. One is part-time and pays a low wage, but a wage that is just about high enough to live on. One is full-time and pays a much higher wage, enough that you can spend without worrying about overspending.
How many people have the luxury of choosing between these options? What many people end up with is a situation where they're working full-time just to make ends meet. For these people, both time and security are hard to come by, and the competitive nature of the job market means people get trapped working hard in jobs they don't enjoy because they don't want to lose what little they already have.
Whilst I believe that you're right to point to personal choice and responsibility, it's worth acknowledging that some of the problems are systemic. Why can't we change the way we work together, so that doing what you enjoy isn't so much an act of bravery but is just the norm? What might those changes look like?
As for the article, thought it was great. I'm very much in favour of a communal creativity future, though I'm sure we'd find all sorts of ways to keep ourselves amused. I thought this section was particularly insightful...
'Hunnicutt told me that if a cashier’s work were a video game—grab an item, find the bar code, scan it, slide the item onward, and repeat—critics of video games might call it mindless. But when it’s a job, politicians praise its intrinsic dignity.'
Money is unavoidable, so if you're going to be unhappy about earning it, you're going to have an unhappy life no matter what.
I kind of doubt money is the issue...you might just be looking for inspiration.
Maybe look into the nonprofit world. These are organizations that stand for something, and most are in desperate need of technical talent. You won't make as much money but if you can work for a cause you believe in, you might feel your work is more worthwhile.
Nonprofits tend to not grow very fast, so there might not be a job that's exactly what you want to do. If you can find one or two orgs you like, you can get your foot in the door through volunteering first.
There is also a healthy ecosystem of companies that provide support to nonprofits. Nonprofits often outsource parts of their technology, so another way to get into the nonprofit world is through a digital agency. I would try looking for tech jobs in the DC area--a lot of the companies in DC that support nonprofits will happily hire remote developers, project managers, etc.
I studied computer science and information systems. I also studied business management. These are areas I had a passion in and when I worked as a programmer I felt good enough it because I was passionate about it.
In 2001 I developed a mental illness from too much stress, ended up on disability in 2003. I lost my passion because I was no longer able to work. I became broken as it were. All of the technology changed around me, new programming languages got invented and the old ones I knew ere obsolete.
I got into writing and self-published a short story. I botched some of the grammar so it got some bad reviews. I couldn't afford an editor to fix it.
I've tried writing code on Github, but haven't got noticed by anyone yet. It isn't easy for me to get into a group of people and try to help out. I got into the debates with the Opal CoC, and connected with at least one other person. I am trying to rebuild my career one step at a time.
Work isn't supposed to make you happy, work is there to earn money to afford the things in life that make you happy. You have to invest time and money in other people to form relationships. Sometimes those relationships pay off and you are happy, other times they don't and you are sad. Sometimes you work too many hours and don't have the time to do anything that makes you happy.
There was a video someone showed me of a fish market, where they made the work at the fish market enjoyable. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zxQW5xgX8A8
It uses a new type of management where employees make their own decisions instead of being micromanaged. Where employees are empowered instead of having a tyrant boss. Where employees have fun working and make a game out of throwing fish to each other and singing. It really does make a difference.
They're not hijacking the reward center so much as they've found that people like sex and winning (you could argue they're intertwined or one and the same). They are our primary motivators.
The problem is that what we call "work" these days is so abstract that we never actually complete a task and thus never get that juicy hit of AH, job well done. Nailed it! It's just Well there's more of that shit on its way... There's no winning - it's a race that drags on until you retire or die.
I have an alternate philosophy that doesn't make you quit your job to find yourself. See if it resonates with you.
You can't be too emotionally attached to your job. Jobs have value but they come and go. You change jobs throughout life. Some jobs that used to pay really well are now becoming extinct etc.
Eventually you retire. My dad has been retired for ~15 years. My mum has been retired for ~10 years. (He lectured in music and she taught primary school.) Even if your job is awesome, you can't do it forever. Circumstance forces you out. Life moves on. I've been kinda retired for 1 year.
Most people have different jobs throughout their working life. I've been through a few as have my parents. The grass always looks greener from the other side.
You chase each dream and when/if you get it, you realize you probably had some unrealistic expectations of how great it should have been. Even the jobs that seemed super important at the time turn out to be not that mind blowingly significant over time.
In whatever work you do, you have to detach yourself a bit from the triumphs and tragedies. If it all goes bad, you don't take it personally. If things go really well, you don't get a swelled head about it. That's the nature of true professionalism.
Maybe if you cure cancer or something, you can take the time to do a quiet double fist pump. But then you move on! :)
Essentially, you should perform your work like a machine. Or like breathing. There's no emotions necessary, good or bad. You act how you believe another professional should act without bringing your personality into it. In engineering jobs, people want you to be the engineer. They don't need the other parts of you. Outside of work you can be yourself.
In Australia, we tend to say, "Work to live" rather than "Live to work". It means do your work then enjoy living.
I agree with a lot of what you say, but I can't agree with that. Yes, if dull work was a necessary part of life then there's some sense in just getting through it, but I don't agree that it is. Take away people's need to work and you can free them up to do what they want to do instead.
Your advice is pragmatic, and there is wisdom in what you say about taking the rough with the smooth, but there is a better way of living than being slave to a wage, even if it's only part of the time. Why sell ourselves short when we don't have to?
Is current work really that dull?
I prefer to change the term being "slave to wage" to "I worked for a living". But everyone has different circumstances financially. If you are truly stuck in a miserable position then moving to another job is fine by my philosophy.
The future of "no need to work" for everyone sounds pretty awesome. I hope it happens. I am actually living that way now. After a couple of decades of working and some big redundancy payouts, I have savings to fall back on.
Is current work really that dull?"
I'm sure I could've given it a more generous reading, my apologies. Is current work really that dull? Certainly not for everybody. However, if it's best to switch off your emotional capacity to get through it then yes, perhaps the work is dull.
"The future of "no need to work" for everyone sounds pretty awesome. I hope it happens. I am actually living that way now. After a couple of decades of working and some big redundancy payouts, I have savings to fall back on."
Sounds good. What's the best part of living without paid work for you?
I essentially see myself as an early retiree so I live like a retired person. My parents became a bit of a template.
The 8 or so hours of the day that I had to work are now gone. I just replaced it with more of what I did in my leisure time. My life wasn't bad while I had the job so the only drastic change was to not go to work!
We are still trading our time and lives for money working on things that don't resonate with our values.
When fighting for survival we never questioned whether our actions fit with our values; there were no vegan cavemen. We are fortunate, but struggle with this new understanding.
Maybe it's my particularly uninteresting values but no job resonates that much. Even if it did, you eventually have to retire. Then you are going to really be depressed.
Better to not be so attached to the job and be retired happily. Or in my case get fired happily!
Free money and any job you like does sound good though.
Seems like a bad deal
I was feeling like that a few years ago. I stopped, thought about what was wrong, and took a different path. Now I'm making much less money, I'm not working in things I don't believe in and I interact with people I like. Much better than before.
Then I could not do than anymore. I started finding databases, forms and interfaces unbearable. First I thought I did not like coding anymore. Then I realized it was not coding, but doing it alone, and focusing on things so detached from color, movement, space and sound.
I decided to focus on art and creativity. To teach creative coding, and play with code. Create beautiful interactive things without thinking so much about the performance, about the usability, about the correctness. Basically experimenting and playing as I had done as a kid. Apparently there's some demand for teaching, generative art and design, and helping other creative people with their projects.
But then what? I already designed my minimalist life to be filled with free time (no possessions, no obligations). No mortgage, no loans whatsoever, and getting a vasectomy next month. Literally all the time I have not at work is free time.
This may sound like humblebrag, but because my expenses are so low I can quit working right now. But it's nothing to brag about. Because I'm scared. I'm addicted to a salary and the reason I keep working (I don't like my job - it's repetitive and tedious and stressful) is because I don't want to make less money than I'm currently making.
I don't want kids, I don't want to travel. I don't want to commit to a relationship. What will happen in five years when my passive income comes close to what I make at work? What will I do with myself? I really don't know. I'm learning how to code but lose motivation every two weeks.
It'll be interesting to see what people actually do when there's no work left to do. I don't picture a good outcome, mainly from my perspective of having too much freedom. Yes, there is such a thing.
All the more reason to delay having a vasectomy. Give yourself time to think, there's no rush. Unless you're tired of wearing condoms there's not much to gain here, other than making it some kind of statement of intent.
I hope you will take some time to consider whether the vasectomy is an impulsive decision, but ultimately I know it's none of my business. It's your body, it's up to you.
Best of luck with finding enjoyable ways to spend your free time.
To emphasize: I'm not implying something's wrong with you. In fact, I sought therapy for work-related depression only ~4 years ago, and had the bad luck to find a therapist who told me, just after graduating university, that adult life just is careerism. That wasn't helping! But, again, unhappiness is a part of life, whereas clinical depression is a crippling illness that prevents you from being able to work on your situation or even experience your unhappiness as meaningful.
Go start a microISV-style tiny business a la @patio11 in a field you feel you can make things better
Perhaps happiness relates mostly to social relationships, and spending your most productive hours with colleagues with whom you generally have relatively weak bonds depletes your 'social happiness' reserves.
Or perhaps the kinds of jobs many of us do in modern life, especially those involving computer screens and office buildings, are just not well-suited to us.
Or maybe it's just an inherent human property to be unhappy much of the time, and perhaps some people suffer more from this than others (a happiness 'baseline').
I could go on, of course, but fortunately a lot of research has been conducted on this, and many very wise people throughout the ages have written extensively about this.
One thing that could help is to start researching 'happiness' or what you could call 'the good life', whether through philosophy or religion or psychology, if you haven't done so already. And I don't mean 'google for happiness and click through few articles', but rather really dive in. Treat it as a proper project. Take a particular philosophy/approach that appeals to you, and actually apply it. Properly. At least for a while. A lot of it might be crap, or just not for you, but some of it will resonate. For me, it was Alan Watts (and zen buddhism), Seligman/positive psychology, and just the act of reading 'denser' philosophical stuff in itself that somehow tickled my happy bone (hmm, poor choice of words).
Also consider what you've tried, and most importantly, if you've actually tried these things. It took me until my thirties to realize that I had not, in fact, experimented with different ways/perspectives/philosophies of life in my twenties, but rather I had mostly half-heartedly flirted with all these things from a safe distance, and mostly let things happen to me. And all that generally just confirmed what already was while making me feel like I'd explored.
Or, to make an analogy: if you want to find a partner to be happy with long-term, this usually requires a degree of 'experimentation', as few people are lucky enough to find such a partner right away. Common mistakes in this regard are to 1) keep dating the same essential person, and then wondering why it keeps going wrong, or 2) be too shy to take initiative, and wait for things to 'happen'. I've noticed that 2 often ends up leading to 1, as you tend to attract and feel attracted to the same types of people if you remain the same kind of person.
Basically: break your patterns, and break them properly. Our natural instinct is not to, and cling to safety and the familiar. And if breaking patters becomes a pattern, well, then break that and go do the same thing with full abandon for a while.
If quitting your job seems like too much, and perhaps it is, then start with other stuff. Perhaps that will be enough. But just make sure that you really did try other things, because I think the illusion of doing or having done so is an easy trap to fall into. I personally did quit my job, because it was the only way for me to actually try different stuff, but then I'm perhaps just generally too inclined to get sucked up in what I do for work. You might not need this.
And finally, with my rather biased current perspective: give up on trying altogether. Just let yourself be 'now'. Perhaps read some of Alan Watts' material before you do this, so you have an idea as to why this might be effective.
For me the major breakthroughs and a more consistent sense of happiness came as a direct result of giving up (mostly) on all that finding. I can strongly recommend Alan Watts' 'The Book', as well as 'The Wisdom of Insecurity'. Regardless of whether you agree with him or not, he's an entertaining writer, and the approach he suggests is (relatively) unusual, perhaps especially to many of us HN types (ambitious, stuck in the 'virtual', analytic).
This sentence reminds me of the First-world problems lady meme, nothing to see here boys.
Just because some people have taken advantage of that to get others to work for them doesn't mean work or work ethic in and of itself is bad.
Further, just because something's been "endurable" for thousands of years doesn't necessarily make it good, or invalidate attempts to change it. And "honorable" is all about cultural values.
I've been thinking quite a bit about work recently. I'm just about to turn 29, and by all accounts I'm fairly successful: I graduated college with a worthless liberal arts degree just as the Great Recession was beginning. After an unsuccessful attempt at copywriting for a couple years, I managed to learn programming. A few years after that and I'm the leader of the engineering team at 12-person startup that looks to be pretty successful.
And yet I'm as unhappy now as I've ever been. And it sucks. Why can't I just be happy with what I have? I've got a steady job, I've got a pretty good income. Why do I feel so awful about my own life?
I've suspected for some time now that work itself is the problem. I'm trading in the best years of my life, my focus, my attention, my time, my life for money. That's the nature of this transaction. I'm trading in this short life I get for cash. I feel like a prostitute.
Honestly I'm sitting here with tears in my eyes thinking about it.
And apparently I'm not alone in how I feel about work. From the article: "A 2014 Gallup report of worker satisfaction found that as many as 70 percent of Americans don’t feel engaged by their current job."
I think the truth is that work is an ocean of human misery, unfulfilled dreams and wasted lives. I think a vast majority of us waste our youth, our time, our energy in fields that we don't give a shit about, when in a better society we'd be able to work on the things we do care about.