DistressedDrone
DistressedDrone on Hacker News
This seems really, really hard to regulate.
You, like most people, are talking about the future. I'm sure you're about the 1000th person telling this person to turn their life around. But this future is a projection, it's imaginary, whereas the pain is very real in the present moment. So start with the present.
In other words, it's okay to just be you. In fact, the world is only better for it if you can live without guilt. Achievement and ambition are much less real to me.
That said, at some point a failing business will realize the end is coming and cash out as much as possible, accelerating its own end in a calculated profit maximization scheme. Brick and mortar stores might as well self-destruct if they also believe they're going down anyway... It's not like anyone works there for the fun of it.
Please speak to a professional, you are not alone.
In the meantime, here are some of my own "no bullshit mantras" I found comforting in similar times, mostly from Zen Bhuddism :
* You are not supposed to be anywhere. Your only real obligation is to be you, now.
* There is no "better" version of you now. There is no other way to be you now. In fact, there is no other way to be, but to be what you are.
* What you are is beautiful, no matter who you are. I don't mean the Aguilera song, I mean it's literally a miracle that you're here now.
* Everything is as it is. There's no point in feeling guilty for things being the way they are, rather than the way you or someone else would have them. In a world where time only flows one way, every "ought" is an illusion.
If you like these ideas, I highly recommend meditation, such ideas are much easier to contemplate with a calm mind. I hear Alan Watts has good talks about this available on Youtube. Mindfulness meditation has also been associated with improvements in mental health (you can find many studies about this on Google Scholar).
Maybe richer people drink more coffee, and also tend to die less?
Sorry if it's an easy critique but it's hard to believe the substance that basically only raises your heart rate is actually doing anything (good) long term.
On the other hand, pharma as a concept certainly needs to exist to save lives. As a Canadian, pharma is not so bad here, but I believe their existence as a for-profit* entity is contrary to the purpose of universal healthcare, which I think is a common enough sentiment. American pharma, however, actively profits from the inequality inherent to the (rather evil) lack of universal healthcare system. Any positives for society seem strictly incidental, as exemplified by the price of insulin.
That depends entirely on how exactly you do it. And knowing something and being able to prove it are two very different things.
But there are a lot of things I hate and don't have to think about. I don't go around protesting the war because in my country that's not something I have to care about, for example.
But advertisers made me have to care. If I didn't have adblock, I'd be running JS from some unverified third party on every other site. Couldn't they restrict it to pictures? Of course not.
So now I have to care, and I'm not going to cooperate with advertisers, who - before adblock got so mainstream - were content to serve us literal viruses as long as someone paid them.
Remember when more than one millionaire funded Juicero? I remember.
This is a marketing push disguised as an aesthetic change. Mozilla, please stop trying to make Pocket happen, it's not going to happen.
That said, I don't doubt that they do create wealth, I just think any benefits to society are incidental, and that the logical rigor of their ex post facto justification is lacking.
Or rather, it says people who are advantaged (ie lucky) considerably underestimate the contribution of this advantage to their success, and overestimate their own contribution.
On the article itself, the stated idea of status is truly naive if not delusional, and allows them to put anyone who disagrees with their idea into the box of "status game players, to be ignored".
I'm not going to read the entire article, it reads like advice to people who don't need it (upper middle class people). I'm sure it must be comforting to the author, and upper middle class and rich people, but in reality there is no clear path from "poor" to "rich", or else everyone would be taking it.
What I will say is they seem to understand that our economic system is irrational, and to take advantage of it seems rational. But an irrational system is also unfair, and I would rather people not praise this unfairness as "good". The author seems to be paying lip service to the idea of "ethics" while teaching people to abuse the system. And they dare to talk about "virtue signaling".
Policies are made with the idea that someone like you must have somehow "earned" it, and you may believe it yourself, but no one chooses to be poor. You were lucky enough to get a good job, lucky enough to be able to work so much without burning out, lucky to be born smart, or a man, or white. It all adds up and it's all luck. You always made the most optimal choice you thought possible, as anyone would.
Yet the pervasive idea that one can "earn it" and become rich through sheer willpower has the unfortunate implication that those who are "still" poor must somehow deserve it. If some can grit their teeth through their misfortune and achieve upward social mobility, why can't they all? This is of course absurd of the face of it because your gain was someone else's loss, we can't all be "rich" as it is inherently relative. But also because any given poor person generally has the goal if not the priority of becoming less poor. Having grown up poor, no one wants to believe it's a permanent state of affairs.
Generally speaking, everyone works hard and no one wants to be poor. Yet modern capitalism (even our Canadian version) is largely engineered to punish the poor for being so, even though in the end, it's all luck.
Edit: Here's an interesting paper on the topic of misattribution of success: https://advances.sciencemag.org/content/5/7/eaau1156.full
My point still stands though for emulators on PC where I believe software piracy remains popular.
Are people understating the capabilities of young devs or are they all really slow? Another possibility is that what they're learning in those two years are company-specific, in which case being senior wouldn't change much.
This point only serves to validate the article's point though. If you already have an acceptable alternative, negotiating with you is far less likely to be rewarding than negotiating with someone who doesn't have one.