Living at home with your parents seems to me like an example of a way to scale back a lifestyle to save money and work on your dream project even without a large financial safety net, i.e., the privilege the author cites. You could replace that example with: sharing an apartment with several friends, cooking cheap meals at home, foregoing a TV, using an old bike instead of a car, etc. I would be surprised if at least one of those options isn't available to the laptop-owning, English-speaking, tech-minded individuals who frequent this site. It doesn't seem very relevant to this discussion to nitpick the example given by the parent.

Omfg give it a rest already.

Yes, some people are more privileged than others. But if you're going to hang out on an internet forum full of professional programmers only to lament how privileged everyone is youre going to have a bad time.

In the context of this forum and this discussion, nothing about what the parent said screams privilege.

Living with your parents after college is privilege now? Where the hell does this circus end?

If you look down the chain far enough, we are all privileged and none of us should be allowed a modicum of joy or happiness because we should all be steeped in guilt.

Yes, living with your parents is (somewhat) privilege. Yes, most of us reading HN are privileged, often in more than one way. No, the alternatives are not forgetting our privilege or giving up joy and happiness, the alternatives are being self absorbed and unaware or trying not to.

geeze you're touchy. rush limbaugh got you too worked up today? All he is saying is that not everyone can go home and live with their parents when they fail. Not sure where guilt plays into this other than in your own mind/narrative.

But why point it out? It's one of the least "privilegy" privilege I could imagine. Living with parents is the default, something "privileged" people try to escape. It's more economically sensible, so in this way poor people are more "privileged" by being more likely to live with their parents. Yes, you could point out various groups like people who've lost their parents, or people with abusive parents, etc. but at this point one has to realize that for every possible attribute X you could carve out a social subgroup that doesn't have X, and call X-havers privileged. It's meaningless.

Think about it this way, many people graduate college with 50k+ in debt, they can't just graduate and live with their parents to "try out ideas". They need to get jobs and pay off loans. They may have kids or wives to support and they can't just take time off for their career growth. Furthermore, a lot of their parents can't afford to house them. Only a select few white suburban kids can safely go live with daddy and have food and everything provided for them while they code up their node.js app for a year. And if that doesn't work out their daddy can get them a job through his connections.

Now obviously living with parents while holding a full time job is sensible.

edit: Another way is to think about this. Who can take the risk to take a few years off to pursue something? The rich white person with connections, no debt, and food/shelter provided for them? Or the poor person with massive debt, poor parents, and a small shared apartment?

That's a fair point, though it is pretty US-specific. In the rest of the world, people don't end college with massive debt. IT industry seems to be a big equalizer there - you don't need massive capital to start something, and with the current job situation, the little effort it takes to learn to code (compared to alternatives) can let you jump up the social ladder pretty quickly.

By Jove he's got it! No wait, those last two words suggest it's not quite sunk in.

I enjoyed the journey of this post, where we went from not even being able to imagine something worse than living with your parents, to realising, what if I didn't have parents? What if they kicked me out? What if... a hundred different scenarios that real people have to deal with in their lives.

It was like watching personal growth happen right in front of my eyes. But looks like it didn't quite stick

> It was like watching personal growth happen right in front of my eyes. But looks like it didn't quite stick

Hey, at least I got a close brush with it. :).

Seriously though, my point is that you can make arbitrary thing into a "privilege" by selecting a subgroup of society that doesn't have that thing. You could also turn the table around and say that the not-havers are "privileged" by growing up not having to depend on having that thing. So what's the point of even bringing it up in this context? It's not like not being able to move in with your parents makes you ill-equipped to start a business. Let's reserve talking about "privilege" for big things that block off some desired ways of life on a large scale.

So, I'm not an expert in "privilege", but I generally approach it like usability. You know how the person who built a tool simply doesn't get why it's hard for other users, who have no context or history with it, to use the tool. It's a basic flaw in human psychology.

Teaching is similar, the person who knows everything about X struggles to explain X to people who know nothing about X, even though in theory they should be the best person possible. The shared context is just not present.

Your first line, where even after being prompted, you simply couldn't imagine something worse than living with your parents is a great example of this. Put yourself, just for a moment, in the shoes of the orphan, or the kid whose parents disowned them for being gay/trans/athiest/addicted, or the kid whose loving parents simply don't have space for them in their small apartment or would be breaking social housing rules by allowing them to stay.

From their perspective, you're being a bit of an asshole, but you weren't even trying to be an asshole. You just couldn't imagine that people like them existed, probably because you, your friends, your family, your neighbours don't fit that description.

The concept of privilege exists, not to make you feel guilty about this, but to make you aware of your unconcious biases. And to stop you accidentally being a asshole by e.g. deciding that everyone should use their real names online, which solves your spam problem, and causes issues for people with abusive exes, or secret lives they need to hide from their family or community. It's about acknowledging that people have different experiences in life for all sorts of reasons and you can't assume what is "normal" for you is all there is.

Getting back to usability, apparently there is video somewhere of a programmer watching people use his application through a two-way mirror. So enraged is he, by them "using it wrong" that he ends up throwing a chair at the mirror. I'm not sure why people get so upset by having their worldview disrupted in this way, but it seems to be a thing.

Thanks for elaborating. I generally agree with the point of view you wrote in this comment, with few caveats:

> From their perspective, you're being a bit of an asshole, but you weren't even trying to be an asshole. You just couldn't imagine that people like them existed, probably because you, your friends, your family, your neighbours don't fit that description.

While I probably can't consciously put the right amount of weight to them and their situation - due to e.g. availability heuristic, like you described - I am at least theoretically aware of their existence and can emphasize in a limited way. My comments in this subthread weren't about denying their existence or their problems; they were against countering an idea with an example of people who can't apply it. I assume it's implicitly understood that tmpanon1234act's comment won't be applicable to everyone - but it will be for many, including most of the audience here.

> The concept of privilege exists, not to make you feel guilty about this, but to make you aware of your unconcious biases.

That's what it says on the box. It's not how it is used in on-line discussion. "Privilege" is most often brought up as a way to make people feel guilty and derail the discussion. I admit that I've become allergic to this word and can overreact even to legitimate usage of it, but that's due to the guilt-tripping it's most often used to induce.

> And to stop you accidentally being a asshole by e.g. deciding that everyone should use their real names online, which solves your spam problem, and causes issues for people with abusive exes, or secret lives they need to hide from their family or community. It's about acknowledging that people have different experiences in life for all sorts of reasons and you can't assume what is "normal" for you is all there is.

I agree this is a worthy goal (and something I try to be mindful of all the time - I actually thank HN for exposing me to so many various point of views that I can tell I've become much more conscious person because of it). But again, pointing out "privilege" is probably not the best way to achieve it now - that particular word has been overused for a different purpose.

To the points about usability:

> You know how the person who built a tool simply doesn't get why it's hard for other users, who have no context or history with it, to use the tool. It's a basic flaw in human psychology.

> Teaching is similar, the person who knows everything about X struggles to explain X to people who know nothing about X, even though in theory they should be the best person possible. The shared context is just not present.

Yeah, I learned to know it as the concept of "degrees of separation" and I think recognizing this is a crucial skill for teachers and tool builders. It's very much learnable - you recursively go down the ladder of abstraction until you reach your audience, and then build up from there. A lot of people don't do (or don't even care about) this, but those that do become again the best person for X - experts in X become the best teachers of X, and programmers become the best people to build digital tools for users.

> I'm not sure why people get so upset by having their worldview disrupted in this way, but it seems to be a thing.

I agree. Known psychological phenomenon that one has to be wary of all the time :). I know I sometimes get angry when I'm proven wrong, but I think I've learned to deal with it - the reward of being closer to the truth and understanding is worth it.

> "Privilege" is most often brought up as a way to make people feel guilty and derail the discussion. I admit that I've become allergic to this word and can overreact even to legitimate usage of it, but that's due to the guilt-tripping it's most often used to induce.

I've seen this claim a lot. What I find strange is that I'm a fairly "right-on" kind of guy, and hang out on some fairly "right-on" bits of the internet, yet I don't really see the word mentioned in any context that much. Yet apparently, lots of (mostly) young men with somewhat less progressive outlooks seem to be getting much higher exposure to this phrase than I am, and in a very particular kind of usage.

A few times I've tried to get to the bottom of this strange anomaly, and it seems there's popular online communities where people search the internet to locate examples of "political correctness gone mad" (or to save time they simply manufacture them) which they then submit to enrage their fellow community members with how the world is going downhill. Everyone's got to have a hobby, and many of them seem strange to outsiders, but the people who indulge in this seem to have lost perspective due to this self-selected overexposure.

Maybe there's other explanations, I'm older, maybe all the young kids hang out together online and berate each other for having privilege over snapchat or something and I just miss out on it, but the number of times the above explanation comes up is odd enough to me, without inventing even more odd explanations.

there are subreddits where people scour the depths of tumblr and feminist blogs to find crazy posts guilting people about privilege. They then pretend this is the mainstream or common view.