"If you lose everything you own, you generally still have your network and skills"
I get the general call to action that those who have excess resources should leverage that to take big risks, but this really undersells the possible consequences of losing everything you own. No, you don't always keep your network and skills. Sometimes, you lose everything. You lose friends from fallout or you belatedly realize that your network isn't as resilient to you becoming a penniless loser as you thought. Sometimes you go into debt and make enemies. Sometimes you become homeless and then develop a mental illness or a drug addiction. Sometimes you skip the homeless part and just commit suicide [1]. How many people can stomach that kind of outcome?
I do like the general message which I think should be said more often but I feel like people who charge ahead on this call to action should also triple check that they can truly accept the actual risk they might incur. I also think the amount of risk you take has diminishing returns. Making "fatal leaps of faith" doesn't seem to be as necessary or pragmatic as it's presented here.
That isn't to say that the OP was protected regardless. But the mindset that lets you do this is a mindset that comes from a background of abundance. Where you can always get another job if you want one, where you always have friends or parents who will bail you out or give you what you need.
A background where things just always seem to work out.
Another way to look at it (especially for those allergic to the idea that privilege may apply to their own outcome) is that ambition, risk taking, and entrepreneurship are evenly distributed across all socioeconomic classes, or close to it.
It's just that some distinct socioeconomic classes have the capability of failing and retrying very quickly, due to moneyed resources.
Contrast that to the person without assets or access to capital, they save up, take a chance, fail, and now have to wait maybe 10 years or more to get to the same place with jobs. And with time, there is error introduced, divergent paths, life changing events, or simply competing priorities as the years keep going by. Alternatively, everyone else in their similar situation rationally decides not to bother, a good network for them is one that exposes them to basic personal finance gurus on odd forums and youtube, who give them generic advice that works for a broad population.
On the concept of privilege, there is no parade and red carpet that gets rolled out, you just wake up one day and realize that you don't have to apply for jobs to maintain food and shelter, and that your bank account also has enough to make that seed investment or hire developers. So, if you're willing to play your cards, you play them. Enough people are willing to and their successes wind up outnumbering the poorer people that want to play tech entreprenuer.
> So, if you're willing to play your cards, you play them. Enough people are willing to and their successes wind up outnumbering the poorer people that want to play tech entreprenuer.
Writing, literature. The word play is used in reference to the use of play in a previous sentence. I think it's a common colorful writing technique.
there is a distinction between "play your cards" and "so, you want to play tech entreprenuer?" but i guess you are so far up capitals arse, you got tone deaf
The author goes on to talk about how there should be a leisure class (basically an aristocracy) and that should be “people of means”. So it’s not even hidden really, it’s just a cementing of the increasing wealth divide more throughly into the political sphere. Neo-Victorianism or something. The working class, literally called “wage-slaves” seemingly unironically in the article and their betters.
The poor have plenty of government support. You can live the liesure lifestyle if you choose to. I used to work 30 hours a week @$9 per hr and pay for an apartment, vehicle, and all of my expenses. The work (cook) was fun and I had a lot of free time to explore tech.
Right after that I got a job as a mechanic and then was laid off. I spent two years on unemployment. I have actual real memories from living a good life during that time. Developing software, hanging out with friends and family, fishing tributaries (walking for hours through a creek or river), tinkering with cars, and reading everything I could get my hands on about world events.
I barely have any memories from when I was trudging through 50 hours a week in a job. Except for those times where I was at a startup trying to change the world (80 hrs a week). But that was an event where I could see the beginning and the end.
Not sure if this was the intention to say it like that.
For me, the interpretation is that when you have time to pursue your own interests, you discover something that is worth fighting for.
I had 2 months off a job and it was the happiest I have ever been because I spend it on researching and discovering problems that I care about. But it was due to the accessibility to "leisure"
I mean maybe, but hn has a primary tech audience. I bet 70% of us here could quit our job, take some risks,go bankrupt, get a new job, all with only mild consequences.
Yes that's privilege and it doesn't apply to everyone but its not an obscure level of privilege. You don't need to be a multimillionaire to have it.
> If you have the resources to spend some time exploring, if you are on to interesting threads of novelty that few other people have, and if you have the spirit to tighten your belt, throw out your map, and explore off-road, then your real job is to do so.
The essay is calling out people of means directly and telling them to stop wasting their time.
If you have the means, it is your real job to do so.
The entire article is a call to build a leisure class. Not whisky and xbox leisure. Newton and Seneca leisure.
This doesn't smell like privilege, it is privilege. But it is highlighting not only the opportunity of that life, but the duty.
The idea that only the rich are able to take risks - or even think about it - is a bias, and an ugly one at that.
It doesn't match history - the only reason we have many good things is because poor people took major risks - and it's part of the tyranny of low expectations that is seeping deeper every day into the fabric of our culture.
It's a remarkably effective way of keeping the pours in their place in the name of "empathy" and "awareness". It's akin to a humblebrag where that the rich can talk bad about themselves while shoring up their position.
And it's a kind of talk that I as one of those pours have zero patience with.
> It doesn't match history - the only reason we have many good things is because poor people took major risks
Check your history again - most of the people who made scientific discoveries or breakthroughs were people of means, or otherwise didn't have to do "real" (paying) work[1] and could afford to dick-around with experiments all day long for months on end and not starve.
1. In history - i.e. from dawn of time to about 1950-ish, when research universities and corporate/government R&D matured.
Where did I say science? Many modern scientific disciplines are by their nature exclusionary because they require access to specialized equipment and space, so of course that's somewhat of an exception to my generality.
And I say somewhat because historically a surprising number of breakthroughs did not happen in a lab, nor were discovered by professional scientists. I took a course in the history of science and tech and the primary lesson pounded into us was how often breakthroughs were accidents made by amateurs.
And among the names of poor scientists are folks like Tesla and the early Einstein I mentioned earlier. So my point stands, even extending a little bit at least here.
You didn't - I said science since it's a specific subset of "many good things" in history that has a clear written record I'm familiar with. Do you think science should be excluded? If so, which fields did you have in mind? Philosophy? Political theory? Economics?
I would hope it is obvious I am not talking about the period prior to the modern age in which the only people who could read were rich.
Because that says nothing about mindset, which is the claim I was replying to.
To test his mindset theory, we have to go to a period in which raw non-monetary resources - the most basic of which is the ability to read - is distributed among both rich and poor. And then you see - do the pours do anything?
And they do, across the vast majority of fields - including even science, which I edited my reply above to include. I'm shocked indeed that this is even being questioned. I'm coming from a humanities and social science background and so that's my primary frame of reference, but my understanding is that while it is not the rule of course they are widely a not insignificant minority among those who have made significant contributions. And obviously an even larger group if we include not only the poor but also the "non-privileged" which is who the OP to this particular thread was throwing into relief.
Of course everyone can take risks, but the consequences of these risks backfiring, are vastly different based on available monetary resources.
A wealthy person may well sink years and piles of money into a dream. If it doesn't work out, meh, that's life. Back to some well paid job and preparing the next try.
Person in strained financial position doing the same and it backfires: May well take years to get back on ones feet, and may even end up in a homeless shelter.
The person who I responded to said "the mindset that lets you do this is a mindset that comes from a background of abundance" - implying that pours have a mindset which doesn't "let them" take risks.
And it goes without saying that the rich have it easier. That doesn't make it their exclusive province, nor indeed should it. It's not exactly as if the risk-free pour life is exactly paradise anyways. When I fell from working class to vagabond in fact it was a significant step up.
It's not that the ability to take risks is fundamentally different, it's just that if you're rich, the consequences of failure will be easier to deal with, allowing more risk-taking and thus more chances at success.
> the tyranny of low expectations that is seeping deeper every day
Thank you. I agree and in fact I didn't post my initial response because it was too snarky. HN seems to have this idea that people will only take risks if the downside is minimal or a minor career setback. It completely ignores an entire class of people "who have so little that they have nothing to lose."
i agree, though it's not just a bias. it's a lie, meant to keep those who don't have the capital to sit the fuck down and work for their employers like the rest of them.
especcially since time and time again those poor people who do contribute major inventions, without having much capital, have been, one could say, robbed of their invention by people who do have lots of capital.
yeah of course money was exchanged, but not in relation. yeah of course nobody can say how well an invention will lift of, but should be considered in the exchange of goods. that makes it to expensive for the buyer as they cant be sure the risk is worth it when really considering it? then you are an non-Lisper: you know the cost of everything, but the actual value of anything? nah....
money has to go. there is no other way. we need to stop valuating things with money. or rather: at all. Value is a synthetic property, imagined by have's to keep stuff away from have-not's, enforced by the state, who has a lot but is really nobody, since we made it so easy to distribute blame across periods of governance. (not saying we should embrace a kazakh model, just we should be all equal workers)
I don't think this person is considering the single mom who has to work multiple minimum wage jobs just to make ends meet; the people who have never had any opportunity to have any sort of "network" to magically get another job.
When you're in that position, you're constantly exhausted because of how much you're working. You have no savings. You absolutely cannot afford to just "quit" and have things work out.
There is never a suggestion that the single mom working multiple minimum wage jobs to make ends meet is the target.
> If you have the resources to spend some time exploring, if you are on to interesting threads of novelty that few other people have, and if you have the spirit to tighten your belt, throw out your map, and explore off-road, then your real job is to do so.
I "retired" for about ten years. I chose to be poor and just focus on raising my kids and being home with them. I discovered what it is this guy is talking about. I was able to focus on personal projects and learning about the world.
I applied all of that and reentered the corporate world like a beast. It is now ten years later and cannot wait to "retire" again. I miss being able to think about things and live life without the narrowing constraints imposed by wage slavery.
You can't understand how liberating it is until you try it but it takes a lot of faith in yourself.
and friends with money, nobody financially depended on him, probably savings to live not just from unemployment benefits (that would even make networking challenging financially I guess)
Yeah it can come from a background of abundance but does not mean it is not a good attitude to have. I have spent most of my life with an attitude of scarcity and I was jealous of others. It held me back in so many ways and made me unhappy. Now I try to live with positive outlook on the future and try to make things happen with a belief that things will work out some how in the end. Impoverised people could benefit from some of this thinking (balanced with realism) since it could help improve their circumstance.
For those that read the note the blog is gone but I searched HN for the author and found the discussion the day this was posted.
He did end up making it because people called the police.
This isn't to undercut the message of this comment, it is clear from the blog that Dennis was very close to dying because of the financial situation he was in and how hopeless it made him feel. I just had to know what happened after reading the note.
Also skills are highly relative. You could be great in some workplace but in another you'd get confused. And the things you were home with are now disregarded.
I’ve been writing open-source software for a very long time. This was mostly because I earned my pay as a manager. The job paid … not great, but enough to keep the lights on, and to let me save. It also wasn’t particularly demanding, and gave me time for extracurricular coding. I needed to code, to keep my chops up. Even in “nights and weekends,” I was able to get some fairly serious work done.
Then, in 2017, my company dragged all the distributed engineering back home (Japan). I knew it was coming for years, but had no interest in bailing. I had a team of engineers under my command, and would remain until the end.
Then, I found out that no one wanted me. Some folks were quite blunt about it.
After a few months of being insulted and patronized, I decided that, even if I found a job, I would be treated like garbage. I had no interest in that.
Fortunately, I am able to retire early (not that early. I was 55, when I left my job).
I need to work. If no one wants to pay me, I’ll do it for free; which is what I’ve been doing for the last couple of years. I took the first couple of years to learn up on stuff, and re-establish a full-time self-discipline.
These days, I work harder than I ever have in my life. I’m at my desk for at least eleven hours a day, seven days a week. It’s not all “production programming,” but most of it is.
The difference in productivity is astonishing. I often get more done by 8:30 AM (the standard start time for my day job), than I used to get done all day. My GitHub Activity Chart is solid green (and not “gamed,” either).
And I’m really enjoying it. I’m quite aware than many folks would find my life unenjoyable, but I’m weird. I like it.
The last year or so, I’ve been writing a fairly ambitious social media-like application, with some friends, as a 501(c)(3). It’s nearing completion, and is work that I’m proud of. Of course, like every project I’ve ever done, I’d like to rewrite it, using all the stuff I’ve learned, but I won’t do that. I’m pretty used to shipping, so we’ll have something nice.
> These days, I work harder than I ever have in my life. I’m at my desk for at least eleven hours a day, seven days a week.
Is this what makes you happy? A lot of people might criticize this as unhealthy. This statement does not contain a lot of "balance". Where's the exercise? Cooking for yourself? Socializing with others? Spending time with loved ones/family? Working on hobbies?
I too am at my keyboard a lot. A lot a lot. I just don't know if it's a noble "I work hard" or "addiction".
"Addiction" as you call it would only a problem if you think it's a problem. Does it or will it interfere with your ability to do something else that you want more? Do you actually want to spend more time cooking for yourself or spend more time with family etc? IMO no one else can tell you how balanced your life ought to be. "Health" is a means to an end.
that's a terrible definitioin of addiction and health. Alot of people with addictions don't think they have a problem and are unable to see it. It can affect alot of people negatively and yourself.
That just sounds like you're projecting your own values onto others for doing something more than you'd like them to. How they spend & value their time and health is their choice alone, whether it affects the individual negatively is up to their perception, not yours. The miserable drug and alcohol addicts you might be imagining are aware that it's a problem, they may not know how to fix it.
What if they had a chance to experience a life without addiction and then decide whether to live their life with or without addiction. Would they still choose addiction?
People might be happy with their life, but this doesn't mean that they wouldn't be happier with an alternative life. After they try the alternative, they could even think that what they had thought as happiness, turned out, was suffering.
But they don't, as you get older you kind of find the things you fundamentally like and dislike in life and learn to accept them, it's perhaps one of the few perks of getting older, knowing yourself, knowing what makes life enjoyable and what doesn't.
Its only an addiction when you connect your identity to the outcome.
The problem is that when you are building something with just an expectation of contributing to the world or intrinsically, it doesn't hurt when you don't get 1000 active users but you are still working on it because you "want to".
I spend 80% of my free time on side things because I love learning and I am curious about the world and that makes me happy.
Socialising and exercise is the rest 20%...
Think balance is subjective for everyone but you can easily notice it when something just makes you miserable.
For instance when I am learning to code, the bugs and things that I don't understand are so freaking frustrating... but I keep going anyways because its interesting.
We are all writers of our own stories including balance I would say...
Eh. I walk a couple of miles, every day; first thing (I’m up at 5). Tomorrow will be an exception, but I’ll get my exercise, anyway, shoveling snow. I’ll get to sleep in, a bit.
I eat relatively healthy, and have a reasonably rich social life. I don’t drink, smoke, use drugs, or engage in a lot of vices. I’m home all day, and have lots of time with my family (including a couple of cats, who let me know, when it’s time to give them attention). I take frequent breaks, including occasional naps. Even the computer time isn’t just working. I do all kinds of things, even play games. I work in the living room, so I’m pretty connected to the household. In fact, it’s important for me to force myself to get out. COVID has made it all too easy to stay in.
When I go on a problem-solving coding run, I don’t have bandwidth for anything else, and I’m generally exhausted, when I’m done. It may be hours straight, focused on what I’m doing. As our project is maturing towards release, there are quite a few days like that.
But, yeah, I’m pretty obsessive about coding. It’s not “noble,” and I am quite familiar with addiction. There’s definitely an aspect of that, in my approach to my work. But then, I know folks that have surgery, so they can play golf better (because they were just as obsessed as me, but in making money, and it damaged their health).
Doing what I do makes me feel good, and whole. I have friends that are every bit as obsessed with golf, traveling, music concerts, religion, crafts, hiking and climbing, skiing, martial arts, dancing, playing music, surfing, video games, art, photography, guns, hunting, fishing, cars, motorcycles, or boating, as I am, with software development. Most business owners are just as tied up with their work, as am I.
I guess folks think that these are “healthier” pursuits, but I am not so sure. What I do has the added benefit of producing something that helps folks out. I consider it a craft. I’ve been shipping software, my entire adult life. I guess this crowd doesn’t really grok doing something that doesn’t generate money (quite understandable), but it’s never actually been about the money, for me. If I wanted to make money, I would have done so. I’m pretty aware of my capabilities. As it is, I made enough to be where I am, but not so much, that it became its own problem. I could have made other people quite a bit of money, but they were incapable of seeing past my gray hair. I’m actually grateful, in the aggregate, as it forced me to be where I am.
There’s a deep satisfaction to be had, putting a bow on it, and sending it out the door. It was deeply disappointing, to have my work treated badly by others. It paid the bills, but I died a little, inside, every time my work was damaged, misused, or ignored. When I work for myself, I no longer have to suffer that pain. Out of necessity, the scope is smaller, but I’ve always been able to get a surprising amount done. The project I’m doing now, is the type of thing normally done by a fair-sized team. Now that I’ve had a few years on my own, I can’t see myself ever going back to the rat race.
I enjoy helping people out. I have a skill that can empower people to transcend a lot of pain and misery, so I don’t think it’s a bad thing to use it. I’m not looking for brownie points (certainly not money). Most folks have no idea of the extent of my work, and that’s fine with me. Fame and accolades are a young man’s game.
I don’t know if the OP is the author of this article or not, but all I have to say I want to buy into the overall concept/ thesis. But the writing is so erratic and turbulent, it is really hard to follow the author’s train of thought.
It feels like they are trying SO hard to come across as deep and intellectual, that they lost sight of how it comes across to the reader. It’s like they are trying to force as many ‘big’ words into every sentence that it gets distracting. There is no cadence to follow, it just turns into this big word soup, and I was never able to extract the essence of their thesis.
The author is well read in philosophy, and the article (what I read in the first 1/4 or so) is a work of philosophy. I have a minor degree in philosophy. To me it is interesting and at a good pace.
For example the author doesn't descend into shallow made up lingo, they aren't too formal or abstract, the ideas are organized into sections, there's a development of the ideas, there's poetic illustrations interleaved with stories, etc.
I liked some of the themes of taking responsibility and venturing into the unknown.
EDIT: I read the rest. The spiritualizing and financial stuff is a bit clumsy. Mainly from lack of context. Based on this writing alone, the author could be anywhere on the spectrum from absolutely insane to level-headed trying to focus on spirituality qua creative pursuits.
I also spot another lack of context in the audience being considered responsible elite, meanwhile belief in bountiful surplus and the audience needing more materials. I guess he may have a different article regarding "non elites" and the bountiful surplus, or maybe he believes the bountiful surplus is only for the elites.
All in all interesting and kinda lukewarm, if only because possible craziness hides behind ambiguity.
This article left a bad taste in my mouth as well. Just an article full of humblebrag, and giving advice that only work because the writer was lucky enough to have friends/family that accepted him being an unemployed leach.
It probably means you are not the target audience.
I found the flow of ideas make a lot of sense.
Perhaps you don't have the "ambient background" of the mindset of the author. Maybe reading a few other articles (just pick randomly) from Palladium magazine can help you get a grasp of things -- if you are interested.
I honestly just ran out of steam by the halfway point. It felt like every paragraph could have been reduced to a sentence and every section reduced to a paragraph.
I know it's bad form to move so quickly into meta-discussion on here, but I feel a lot of the comments in the thread right now are endemic of a certain closed-mindedness that has, to me, come to define in part the Hacker News zeitgeist, which stands in something of a contrast to the site's supposed founding principle of intellectual curiosity.
There is plenty of prior art in Western (and other traditions of) philosophy in the spirit of this essay. Nietzsche and Bataille talked about work in a similar way. Cioran pretty explicitly embraced failure (or the risk of failure) as virtue, as this work does. This essay seems to be saying something like: take a big risk, quite possibly fail, live your principles even if it means being an "outcast", commit to it, and who cares what other people think, because in doing so you will find your people. The response in here seems to be "look at this guy taking big risks and failing, what an outcast." Of course, that is surely the point.
I have, as I'm sure many on here have, found success in grinding away at boring problems, suppressing any kind of "call of God" or desire to do something larger, so we could build a nest egg and stable future for ourselves with MAGMA money. This essay is sort of a direct assault on the aesthetics of that approach. As for me, I have grown quite tired of it, so this piece does resonate with me.
It is fairly easy to understand the hostile reaction to this.
This guy did exactly what he said and something many, if not most, of the people who comment on HN would have the means to do (take some time off, live frugally on savings, attempt something he had passion for). His success was by no means guaranteed but he had the guts to take the risk and make it work. And as he said if worse comes to worst, he can always go back to his old career/job (which is likely true of everyone here).
Most people are not risk-takers and are mainly status-seekers. They live their lives in ways to reflect this and there is absolutely nothing wrong with that. But there is always the niggling feeling for many (I am one) that while I may be making the "smart" choice the real reason I don't do something like this is that I am afraid. I don't like having that pointed out, and so react with hostility.
This isn't to say the path taken by this author is for everyone (especially those with dependents etc), but for many it grates that it would be something they could easily do if only they had the guts. It is also quite telling to see how many of the biggest successes of Tech did something similar to what this guy is saying (Elon Musk as mentioned, Jeff Bezos quitting his finance job, Mark Zuckerberg dropping out of Harvard, Sergey Brin/Larry Page abandoned their PHDs, etc).
TL;DR: People don't like being told that their "smart" life choices are as much made out of fear of failure and status-seeking as from calibrated decision-making.
P.S. To anyone reading, none of the above is a personal attack on you or your circumstances. Everyone is different, everyone's story is different, everyone's circumstances are different. But this is still a valuable piece imo as there are plenty of us out there who could quite easily do what is mentioned and probably benefit from the experience but don't due to fear or just following a comfortable groove.
There is a lot of goodness in this article. I can see why many people don't enjoy the style, but its essence is inspiring and positive.
You don't need to risk bankruptcy to follow the article's main idea, which is to try to use your available resources to invest in high risk, ambitious projects. Criticizing the article as speaking of "privilege" misses the point entirely - this is starting from the assumption that you are able, through networking, excess savings from previous jobs, family connections, etc, to amass the resources for this kind of investment.
Most people in this "privileged", or well deserved, position DO NOT invest their lives and talent in these big projects. Instead, they increase consumption and get tied to over-insured, materially comfortable lifestyles. And I'm not talking about the ultra rich here, but simply the top 20% in disposable income of the developed world. Tens of millions of people could use the article's ideas to better themselves and the world around them by spending a part of their life invested in high risk, high potential benefit projects.
The author sees their magazine as one such project. Maybe they are right... Who knows? I think the world is a tiny bit of a better place because they are trying to do it.
What about those who can't afford to do this? I don't think the article is for them (yet!), and that's okay. From time to time I see articles here about web development, these don't do anything for me because I'm not a web developer. Not every idea needs to benefit every person.
I agree with everything you are saying. I'd like to share my perspective.
I quit my job for about 2 years, thinking I would never go back to full time. It was extremely liberating but also a somewhat scary experience. The reason for this is I think delusional thinking unfortunately plays a big part in what happens to people who stop working for long periods of time.
There are many, many people in my experience who stop working at some point, have nonwork become a big part of who they are, and never go back. They realize their current mode of work and life are making them miserable, so they throw out work complety instead of finding something more balanced.
I've met probably a dozen people like this and most if not all of them are in a deep state of laziness that is probably also a certain category of depressipn. Its quite sad when they realize they are 50, have no money, no way of making money, and no family because they couldn't afford one.
The author to me seems like a very delusional person. I hope I'm wrong but it just comes off as very naive. Is this magazine going to somehow change the world? How is he going to make money? How long has he not been working? How much savings has he lost in opportunity cost?
There is nothing more liberating than not working and convincing yourself that you don't need to work. For every 1000 people who think they are going to do this about 1 succeeds, and 100 manage to support themselves by living cheaply, contributing nothing to society, and mooching off of their relative, friends, and social safety nets.
I should also say I think taking time off, even long periods of time, is one of the best things that people who can afford to can do. It changed my life. I just wanted to point out there is a dark side to this, that a lot of people fall prey to. I could be reading too much into the article but I thought I'd give my perspective as I've thought a lot about this.
Not working a job simply reveals your inner character. When you work a job, you're an instrument of the will of your bosses. When you don't work a job, you're free to have a will of your own. So what you choose to do reflects completely on you. Sadly due to oppressive hierarchies many people have needed to exist in environments where willfulness is punished. Since all their past experiences acting of their own volition resulted in punishment, many people become afraid to do things, once there's no longer anyone responsible for telling them what to do. That makes it difficult for the person's inner creativity and independent motivation to emerge. There's nothing delusional about that. It's just a sign of how unfairly people in our society have been victimized. If you want to help such people, then rather than telling them to get a job, you may want to consider helping them to conquer their fears.
There are many people who have conquered their fears, and are simply bad at whatever they are trying to do. Either that or they aren't really trying to do anything except enjoy themselves, and they don't care / are oblivious to the fact that their lifestyle is a net drain on society that will eventually land them in a very bad spot.
How do you think about the risk of turning into one of those non-work people but also valuing long periods of not working?
When you initially quit, were you thinking you'd find a new position that you were passionate about and then it didn't materialize, forcing you to go back to your previous life?
When I initially quit, I thought I was going to do something similar to what the author here was trying to do, after taking a couple of years off. I had some fantasy of being an artist. I don't believe the notion that there is a position in tech that I would be passionate enough about that I would really care all that much, but I work remotely for about 5-6 hours a day now and have plenty of time to do the things that I care about.
My perspective now is that there are two ends of the work/life balance spectrum you should avoid. The first is not working at all, or working as little as possible. This would include doing something far below what you are capable of like working at a grocery store just because there is no stress and you can manage to get by on that type of income. Lots of people fall into a lifestyle where they realize they don't want to be materialistic, so they never get a career going, and then they pay serious consequences as they get older and have no money or freedom.
The other end of the spectrum to avoid is materialism. Measuring your self worth in status, or seeking status, especially through money, is a challenging thing to avoid at least in the US. Being close minded and materialistic, in my opinion, is robbing yourself of experiencing life in the way it can be experienced, because it makes it hard to build good relationships or empathize with people. Materialism is a huge huge issue in our society and it is something that too many people who start making lots of money take for granted, and this is ultimately rooted in fear and insecurity.
I think I was pushed down the path of materialism by default. I was an insecure twentysomething who was working hard at something that didn't make me happy, and everyone was telling me how well I was doing and to keep at it. The more I made it a part of me the more unhappy I became until I eventually quit.
When I quit and started hanging out with people who had also quit (or never started) I felt like a weight had been lifted off of me and that I was now living the dream. Eventually I realized how lucky I had been to have the career I had, and backed off of the path I was on by starting to work again, but with a much better sense of balance and perspective.
Definitely not saying that. I would also argue that I am contributing less than a majority of my non tech friends, who all make less than me aside from a couple of doctors.
First you challenged the idea that everyone who earns money contributes to society.
Then you changed your argument to challenge the idea that everyone who earns money is a net positive to society.
Those two things are not the same, and moving the goalposts in this way is intellectually dishonest.
A lobbyist contributes to society insofar as that they spend their money in their local community on food and shelter, and in most cases also pay taxes. Whether or not every earner is a net positive to society was not my argument.
It's really really uncommon to use "contribute to society" in any sense other than "contribute positively/constructively to society". It's clearly a misunderstanding here.
a game that my parents like to play:
never have i ever:
- owned an emerald mine.
- been born to one of the largest landowners in Texas.
- looked on as my child swindled their friends out of a project to get rich quick and kept looking when their business model became a danger to democracy.
i dont think musk, bezos or zuck are good benchmarks for people taking risks.
i imagine them having about as much anxiety about which project next to fund as i have choosing socks. the striped ones that go over the knees but slip a little and have to be tugged upwards every now and then, or the short cute kitty socks that are a bit cold though?
Asserting most people choose the "smart" path as much out of fear of failure as by making a calibrated decision seems more like projection than observation.
The GP wrote, "But there is always the niggling feeling for many (I am one) that while I may be making the "smart" choice the real reason I don't do something like this is that I am afraid."
He or she seems to be projecting rather than observing. That is: it might apply to them, but there's nothing in the GP's comment supporting a more general applicability.
> Most people are not risk-takers and are mainly status-seekers. They live their lives in ways to reflect this and there is absolutely nothing wrong with that. But there is always the niggling feeling for many (I am one) that while I may be making the "smart" choice the real reason I don't do something like this is that I am afraid.
This very much resonates with me. I've built up healthy bit of equity (few hundred thousand), earn double the average wage, and own my own home (mortgaged), I'm still young and have no kids. I really do hold all the cards to take more risks, but I don't. And I very much feel like a status-seeker, not in the social media popularity contest sense, but in the sense that I don't want other people to see me as a failure. That makes the status of a senior job at a big firm, living in an own house in the capital city something to be afraid of losing.
It also resonates with me that trying to iterate on my quality of life, e.g. finding a bigger purpose, passions etc, probably isn't going to happen while working the job that I do. It consumes much of my week and energy, and I find I have little energy or interest to seriously pursue 'big thoughts'. I still enjoy my life quite a bit, but it feels pretty mundane.
So I can very much imagine that quitting my job would be the only realistic path to a different life.
I'm not at all hostile to these ideas, in fact I support them. And I'd gladly read about them in a succinct article. Yet I found the writer to come across as overly intellectual, self aggrandizing, and at times downright weird and full of nonsense.
Here's a direct quote from the article, I'm sure that it speaks to something and to someone, and I'm sure I can find meaning in the analogies and examples, but it's not the type of writing I appreciate:
> Yes, even the bane of Darwin’s faith—the humble ichneumon wasp that lays its maggots inside the living bodies of caterpillars to eat them from the inside and burst out on maturity like some alien xenomorph—is a beautiful creature with a sacred task. Like many parasites, its role in the great chain of being is to test the health and defenses of its caterpillar host population. Its predation weeds out the sickly, preventing the much uglier injustice of collective weakness and disease, and spurring the evolution of stronger and even more beautiful life. Even fearsome Nemesis, born from chaos via night and darkness, is ultimately the hand of God and the minister of justice. Even the supposed exceptions to justice prove its rule.
There's seven references to God, for example. I'm not just interested in this type of writing style or type of magazine. I think that's what most people trip over, not the basic message, nor half of the philosophising surrounding it.
The quote resonated with me so well that I decided to read the article. It is telling that individual failures do not make _risk_ undesirable if it strengthens the community as a whole. OP is not communicating information but emotion which is _much_ harder task with language defined by the common denominator and for me as a reader, he is quite skilled at it.
Your post is interesting but I think you're looking too deeply into it. The pushback in this thread is almost entirely a reaction to the self-assured and self-aggrandizing tone taken by the author. I think on a software startup forum we can all appreciate the tension between the stability of a large consistent salary and the fear/risks associated with striking it out on your own, but the lack of humility and self-awareness in the article just rubs people the wrong way.
The writing is a piece of philosophy discussing topics of such importance as the meaning of life. If you don't want to look deeply into it, it's not written for you. In which case, the lack of... Nevermind. Have a nice day :)
If we're going to talk about polarization, it behooves us to bring up that this isn't a either-or topic: you could take risks and succeed, avoid risks and stagnate, but also take risks and fail as well as avoid risks and succeed.
If we're really going meta, it might also be appropriate to think about our tendency to attribute causation to simple inputs (i.e. either X or Y), when in reality, there may have been a mix of multiple things.
For example, the author attributes the existence of the palladium site to be a result of interest in governance, but wouldn't his background in engineering (instead of, say, rice farming) also logically have something to do with the physical manifestation of a website?
The idea that I think should be questioned is the one about "hacking life" in the sense of going all in on a single thing. In investment, that's called diversification. In nutrition, it's called a balanced diet. But for some reason, in some endeavors, moderation gets shunned (work hours in startups come to mind)
Just doing your well-paid job until a comfy retirement, taking regular vacations throughout the years and overall just having a normal boring happy life also falls under this umbrella.
It's HN comment sections this one that make me really sad.
Like, there's nothing actually wrong with anything the author said or did, but a lot of what I'm reading here is just snark. I can even tell just how little of it many of us actually read, seeing as how he's admitting to privilege yet some know-it-alls still need to point out privilege as if that invalidates the whole thing. You're damned if you do, and you're damned if you don't, which is why the whole issue of privilege is a bullshit waste of time.
Post-PayPal Musk or for instance a big movie star risking every dollar of their life savings in a venture is different than the worker who has saved up their stake over 30 years.
2000’s Musk from his Paypal reputation can easily get a very lucrative job if things go completely to zero. Current day Musk can make six or seven figures just by sending a couple tweets. The movie star with nothing other than their name land a job or six or seven figure deal. They’re never really risking it all.
I dunno. Movie stars are always just a couple of flops away from becoming a has-been. There’s plenty of stories of stars branching out, even financing their own films, to have them crash and burn, and take their careers down with the dud movies.
Musk was notorious for being fired from multiple jobs before he did his own thing. If he lost his wealth suddenly over a few bad bets, I doubt anyone would want to hire him. Why would they? He’s unlikely to listen, to do things their way and they know that. That makes him unemployable.
Nobody risks it all unless they bet their life, everyone can go back making salary doing basic work. For example, if a software engineer risks their life savings on a project and they lose all of that money, they can still go back and make $300k a year just doing basic work, that is hardly "risking their all" either.
Where the hell do you earn 300k per year?
In Europe most certainly it this is not possible.
Also don't forget life style creep and risk of loss of social circles.
This is much easier to achieve at big tech companies in the US than you think. Look at levels.fyi and you'll see many examples of people with only a few years of experience making $300k. I personally know many people making that much three years after graduating from a coding bootcamp, and a few people who make $450k-$550k after only a couple more years than that.
To me this piece talks to people who have at least a years income in their bank account and thus don't have to worry about failing. even dont have to fret much about getting a new job.
worse, they are basically saying that, if you are not one of them (who has a nice thick buffer of money in their account or other assets generating income), shut up, sit down, you dont get to have ideas, get back to work your tickets are late... what? no, sorry, i dont make the rules and i dont have the money to get a ladder long enough to change them.
Of course, the opposite is also true - many of the pro side see this article as the road not travelled, and are lamenting not following a romantic vision of what could have been, without thinking too hard about what it might cost.
> I have, as I'm sure many on here have, found success in grinding away at boring problems, suppressing any kind of "call of God" or desire to do something larger.
What a profound statement. This is the sentiment of a generation of tamed hackers.
If it does, you will be extremely delighted knowing there is a book by Marcus Aurelius called Meditations. The book withstood the test of time. He has written it clearly and explained his reasons in a proper manner. He was a roman ruler and everything is from that perspective. Most of the people here are probably not making enough money to get by the everyday mundanes of life. So things like self-actualization are far away from reach. Therefore, when someone drops in an article like this, saying to quit job, isn't it disrespectful for those trying to get their needs? Sure, if everyone had a comfort cushion, I guess internet would be a better place. But the reality is quite harsh! Therefore, people may say harsh things but they don't mean it. It's just to get by.
The notion that one has to take care of one's "needs" before pursuing anything "higher" is a lie and an excuse. The number of great intellectuals and writers who lived at least a portion of their lives - and often more - in absolute penury is testament to this. Einstein for example nearly died of starvation, yet he kept working.
One could make an argument that it is because of real world difficulties that one is able to do great work. What did Jesus say about the rich man and the kingdom of heaven? The times in my life when I've lived on the edges are the ones that have laid the groundwork for everything worthwhile I've done in my life. Success and comfort too often bring stupor and cowardice, and not worthy ambition.
How will you know which one you are - or which one you could become - if you don't try it?
Although the very idea of "trying it" like one tries on a pair of pants is absurd. Either a people has the moral fortitude to recognize and live that there are things more important than mere survival or it doesn't.
And if it doesn't, ironically we're already fucked.
Worth pointing out that Starbucks and restaurants around Hollywood are staffed by actor-wannabes hoping for a big break in the movie industry, many of whom never end up amounting to anything. On another corner of the spectrum, you get Paris Hilton, who frankly doesn't have to put effort into anything she tries.
Point being, depending on who "you" are and what "it" is, the advice of "why don't you just go for it, everything else be damned" may or may not be callous/tone deaf/etc.
Maybe being a waitress is not the worst thing in the world? Billions of people can only dream of being a waiter/waitress in LA, and the lifestyle that goes with it.
You need to look at things relative to something that makes sense in the context of the conversation. Obviously, it's better to be a barista in LA than a starving kid in a war zone, but the context here is that we're talking about people who want to be famous actors and can't, so they take on minimum wage jobs to survive until eventually bitter disillusionment hits.
These people are victims of today's culture, which glamorizes wealth and fame above all else... Before they realize that they've been duped, they waste many years of their lives.
Startup culture is similar BTW - people who take moonshots to try and become obscenely rich, only to realize (if they're in the tiny minority that succeeds) that having so much wealth is not really making much of a change in their life and they've spent important years of their lives focusing on stuff that's not important (see Notch's wailing on Twitter for an example of that realization).
Einstein is, in fact, a counter example. He was working at the patent office as a 'technical examiner' for seven years, including throughout his 'annus mirabilis' when he released his most famous papers.
Not offended at all. I do see some Meditations showing through here. There is a lot of wisdom to be found in that work, and plenty of parallels to be drawn to the modern world -- Aurelius was, after all, dealing with the Antonine Plague just before dawn in the decline of the Roman Empire.
My biggest issue with Stoicism is that it is, at its best, basically therapy. Most of the advice in Meditations revolves around putting things into various perspectives that make a challenging situation not feel so bad. This can be quite valuable! However I think there's only so much therapy a person can do before they want to start actively changing their situation. I think the essay wants to go beyond Stoicism, to illustrate a radical path one can take to hopefully alter the circumstance of their existence positively.
I have absolutely no qualms with anyone who takes the "boring" path to provide for themselves or their family (to say otherwise would make me a hypocrite). However I think we tend to vastly overestimate what our needs are. The average yearly median in the US in 2019 was $35,977 according to the Census. This is the median, so 50% of the population lives on less than that! Probably most of the people at that wage want to make more (don't we all?) but I think the author is making the case for giving up on the luxury of tech pay in exchange for finding some actual purpose in our lives. I don't think that's disrespectful, it's just another option.
Isn't this one of the most common criticisms of the US: that its median/common income is miserably low? That's why there's so much polemic about a "living wage" and "debt crisis" in US politics. You're assuming that the low median income of <$35k is enough and that's why "provide for themselves and family" is a low bar, but actually a lot of Americans don't think it's enough.
Your assumption about the demographics of HN is counter to everything I've seen. Most of these people do have money. Simply by virtue of being professionals in the US, they are part of the 1%.
If someone was really inclined, $20k USD would pay for a year's rent in a comfortable apartment. $20k for other expenses. A year of grinding is open to a lot of people here I bet. They just don't want to do it.
The fear is too large, the inertia of normie life too great.
> Simply by virtue of being professionals in the US, they are part of the 1%.
most white collar professionals, SWEs included, are not even close to being in the 1%. the 1% income bucket for the whole country starts around $350k, so roughly an L5 at google.
You need to add another $20K for taxes. And potentially another $10K for health insurance, depending on location. At $70K/yr you’re well into the top tercile in the US.
If you only make $40k a year you aren't going to be paying very much in taxes at all. You also want be paying very much for healthcare as it will be subsidized by the ACA.
>If you only make $40k a year you aren't going to be paying very much in taxes at all. You also want be paying very much for healthcare as it will be subsidized by the ACA.
ACA subsidies (at least in NY) are in the form of tax credits. If you don't have any (or not enough to pay taxes on) income, those tax credits are useless.
If you have no (or very low) income, the state will instead put you on Medicaid. Which has mostly terrible healthcare providers.
As such, if you go the "quit my job and go my own way" route, expect to pay USD$600-1000/month (for an individual, families will be much, much more) for decent health insurance or deal with the huge pile of crap that is Medicaid.
If you're young, single and healthy, perhaps that won't matter to you. If you're not, that could be a big problem.
If you're self-employed your FICA rate basically doubles. Depending on your state, that means your tax burden at $40K could be ~$9-12K. Even with a subsidy you're looking at another $2-3K for health insurance. That makes your take-home less than $30K, 25% less than what GP proposed was sufficient income for basic comfort.
Except for severe chronic health issues, healthcare can probably be handled by walk-in clinics for a year. Those are generally $100-$200 per visit. Medication costs can be lowered with services like GoodRX, which I think even has a trial month for even lower costs.
With taxes, wouldn't you be able to defer them? Just track what you owe or whatever. It might be different in other places because in Nevada we only pay sales tax.
This article resonates with me quite a lot especially after two years of repeated lock downs and travel restrictions, I reflected on my purpose more than ever during this period.
I came to realize that the most valuable possession I have is my time, that life is exceedingly short and that we can only really dedicate ourselves to one project at a time.
So, I reduced my hours down as a swdev to a handful of days every few weeks to pay the bills and maintain a humble quality of life and began building my own project relating to electronic music instruments.
The result is that I've become a much better engineer, learning embedded Rust, circuit and PCB design. These are skills I could never have learnt in my siloed web-development job, despite the pay being very reasonable.
But most importantly I am happier, less stressed, feel more connected and confident I'm building a vision for my own future that I can see myself doing into old age.
And I'm happy to announce that my first Eurorack instrument is in its final stages, it may not be an immediate financial success but life isn't about avoiding perceived failures, its about having a great time and pushing your own self-imposed limitations.
At the end of the day everyones path through this world is different, we all come from different backgrounds and we all face different obstacles and challenges, its important to stay true to whatever is true for you. Just don't accept a pay-check because society tells you to.
I’m considering the same and pursuing electronic music instrument projects. I’m very curious to learn more about yours and your background, is there a good way to?
>Yes, even the bane of Darwin’s faith—the humble ichneumon wasp that lays its maggots inside the living bodies of caterpillars to eat them from the inside and burst out on maturity like some alien xenomorph—is a beautiful creature with a sacred task. Like many parasites, its role in the great chain of being is to test the health and defenses of its caterpillar host population. Its predation weeds out the sickly, preventing the much uglier injustice of collective weakness and disease, and spurring the evolution of stronger and even more beautiful life. Even fearsome Nemesis, born from chaos via night and darkness, is ultimately the hand of God and the minister of justice. Even the supposed exceptions to justice prove its rule.
Which sounds like a self-indulgent justification to hurt others for your own gain while still being able to sleep at night.
The best way to fix the problem of evil is to say that the evil has a higher noble purpose and thus is justified. That applies just as much to man as it does to the divine, and has been how the majority of evil acts in the world get justified.
Giving it a fancy name just means it has a fancy name. It doesn't change the content of the idea.
"When wolves were reintroduced to Yellowstone National Park in the United States after being absent nearly 70 years, the most remarkable "trophic cascade" occurred."
As the video explains, unchecked herboviore species has caused a lot of damage to the environment, grazing much of the vegetation. The introduction of wolves radically changed the behavior of the prey species and they start avoiding certain places like valleys where they can easily be trapped. This allowed the vegetation to regenerate and trees started to grow. This resulted in birds moving in. Beavers started to increase, and the dams they built provided habitat for a bunch of other species of animals. And so on and so forth. The regeneration of the vegetation provided stability to the banks of the rivers so they collapsed less often.
I'm not disputing the ecological affects of predation. I'm disputing its use/applicability as a rhetorical device to further an argument about how to live a "good life".
After all, this isn't an essay on ecology. This paragraph wasn't simply added because ecology is cool. It was added to further an argument.
The author lives in a self-centered universe in which the virtues of service and responsibility to others count for nothing. Any goal associated with financial ends is reduced to a blind alley which obfuscates "true" goals but there are many charitable goals which involve exclusive focus on purely financial intermediate goals. Providing for one's family is the most basic of such goals but the author seems to be focused on self-centered goals.
Preaching about the "virtue of poverty" when you are privileged enough to be able to choose it instead of it choosing you is just so middle class. We had enough of that during the industrial revolution.
> This is a key part of what it means to be a responsible elite. You use your privilege and your personal judgment to explore and solve problems that no one else can.
> If you have the resources to spend some time exploring, if you are on to interesting threads of novelty that few other people have, and if you have the spirit to tighten your belt, throw out your map, and explore off-road, then your real job is to do so.
The author is Wolf Tivy, a cofounder of Palladium Magazine. Palladium Magazine is funded by Peter Thiel. The other cofounder of Palladium is Jonah Bennett; he now works at a stealth web3 startup and he says on his website he’s a political moderate. However, he also used to work at Tucker Carlson’s Daily Caller and pal around with white nationalists and neoreactionaries. He resigned from Palladium after those ties and several hateful emails came to light: https://www.splcenter.org/hatewatch/2020/03/04/emails-reveal...
That’s gives context for who should, and what greater purpose they should quit their jobs for.
It’s gussied up a bit in the article but it’s still there in the calls for a leisure class, references to elites, “traditional” relationship values and so on. It’s not a neutral article on the value of following your dreams.
I started to think that the article _might_ have a certain political slant after coming across these phrases:
"problems of governance from beyond the established liberal democratic paradigm" ... " the lone overman" ... "Growth Through Struggle" .. "your cosmic duty and win glory only in the bold attempt" ... "our society has been so stagnant and uncreative ... We chose the path of comfort... In our cowardice, we turned away"
Not to mention the name "Wolf". Evidently, he is a "man of destiny". Oddly his linkedin profile pic has a toddler on his shoulders. I assumed the child was his own - the article does have a passing mention of finding a wife. No doubt he considers it his duty to transmit his elevated genetic legacy to future generation.
Are you really faulting a person because he has a name you don't like? BTW, how about Wolf Blitzer, is he too...?
And of course him having kids makes him some kind of a eugenicist, only those folks have kids and love to put them on their shoulders, nobody else would ever consider something like fatherhood enjoyable and worth celebrating. Sheesh.
So just to be clear - you're likening the author to Adolf Hitler?
If you think someone is a racist or a transphobe or a nazi or whatever flavour of the month punchline you prefer, you should just come out and say it, rather than being so bizarrely vague and smug about it. You think he's a nazi because he used to work with Peter Thiel - just say it!
I can't say what the author is like, as I never heard of them before today. I note what the rhetoric of this piece echoes very strongly, and no doubt deliberately.
I don't think that the "flavour of the month punchline" comment is in any way justified. It is neither.
Since you ask, the phrases that I quoted are white nationalist and or Fascist (Neo- or old-school) thinking and imagery. I won't claim that it's all about one person's speaking style, that is reductive. The philosophy (such as it is) of those movements wasn't found there alone.
So you know it's not OK to call people Nazi on this site, especially on extremely flimsy basis such as "he is financed by Peter Thiel" and "he talks about individual achievement". But you still do it. But since you're being coy about it and only "very very transparently hint" at it, it's completely OK. At least for you it's ok, because in this case the rules clearly do not apply.
I did not call the author that, and the basis for what I did state, is not flimsy, and it's not the basis that you claim - I had no idea about the financed part when I read the piece.
I see that the bad faith attacks that I anticipated have finally arrived. if honkdaddy is still reading, this bad faith counterattack is why it's carefully stated.
You did, just thinly veiled it. But everybody understood what you meant, and you know it. You can talk about "bad faith" all you want, but the matter is simple - you read article you didn't like (which is OK) and instead of engaging it on merits you went right into guilt by association and Nazi comparisons (which is not OK at all), all while perfectly knowing it's not OK to do it, but "carefully stating" your message so you could say "akshually, technically, I did not use that word, so here! Gotcha!" (which is not OK at all again). But everybody knew what you mean, what you intended and what you did.
There was a time when Godwin's law was meant to prevent people calling each other literally Hitler with no justification. Now people just use Godwin's law to call other people literally Hitler with no justification.
Yes "literally Hitler" - which you yourself admitted after some insistent prodding. And yes "no justification" - nothing in the article justified going strait into Nazi accusations.
And I don't think a person who thinks it's ok to skirt the rules every time he wants should talk too much about "bad faith". But of course it all fits into the same "it's OK when I do it" mold, doesn't it?
> which you yourself admitted after some insistent prodding.
Rubbish. After repeated attempts to put words in my mouth, which I did not rise to, you just declare the result anyway and launch into the argument anyway. It's not going to uncover any truth is it, just divert attention.
You've risen to (or rather, descended to) mentioning Godwin's law - which specifically implies Nazi & Hitler comparisons, and "white nationalist and or Fascist". That's plenty enough. I know what you meant, you know what you meant, everybody knows what you meant. Own up to it.
My guess is it reminds of Ayn Rand / Atlas Shrugged, but that’s just based on what I’ve picked up from documentaries (I haven’t read this book or anything else by her).
Yeah I went and checked out the authors Twitter after reading the article and there was a tweet praising Atlas Shrugged very near the top which was amazingly on-brand I thought after reading the article.
Having actually read the book when I was going through an ill-thought out libertarian phase I don't understand how anyone capable of engaging writing themselves can think it's anything other than turgid dross. Feels more like praising it is part of the belief system than anything else.
I wasn't thinking about Ayn Rand (although her presence is no surprise at all). Lets just say that some of the rhetoric must have sounded better in the original German. e.g. "Übermensch" is a much more evocative word than "overman".
> "Übermensch" is a much more evocative word than "overman".
Try "Superman" instead.
I'm not a historian, and I've wondered whether the historical background for the comic (conceived in the early '30s I think?) included some of the racial overtones that were more pervasive at the time. I don't know how influential Darwin and Galton were scientifically at the time, but even if they weren't current in scientific circles (which I kind of doubt), certainly it's hard to ignore that the ideas were "in the water" so to speak.
> and I've wondered whether the historical background for the (Superman) comic included some of the racial overtones that were more pervasive at the time.
These were super interesting, thank you. Do you know if there are any references to them intentionally trying to subvert the Nazi idealism of the Übermensch?
I was waiting for the blood and soil stuff but maybe that’s the next issue. I had thought the dork enlightenment stuff had died a death but apparently not.
Of course the guy who wants to find his own path and share his ideas is literally Hitler. If you ask "how ridiculous ideological bubbles can be", the answer is - this ridiculous.
Oh this is absolutely relevant as I was thinking on how that magazine/author can make a living from it. Now it makes absolute sense: it doesn't have to.
There was a news outlet around in the last few years called the knife of Aristotle which always seemed a little off to me. I did some research into it and found out the senior editor and many of the board were associated with NXIVM.
This didn’t affect affect the veracity of their articles, which I found were well written, but the association of their company with unsavoury people should cause all but the most naive and callow to ask WHAT their agenda is.
Similarly, this article is extremely pompous, faux-Nietzschean and comes directly from a media outlet owned by self proclaimed nationalists who are apparently also quite unsavoury. This should cause you concern and you should ask for what purpose such bare-faced propaganda is being pushed.
Or, to put in plain Canadian English “birds of a shitfeather flock together”
You do know that a lot of culture and science is not actually funded by scientists, actors and musicians themselves? In fact, there are people that advocate such funding is so important that we need to have the state take money from people - even not billionaires, but people earning very average salaries - and direct these money into financing people that are following some or other kind of philosophical dreams? If you are aware of that, I would like to hear how comes you think when the millionaire - after paying all the money allocated for all of the above - still wishes to spend money on financing even more people pursuing philosophical dreams, there's something wrong and shameful in that? Is that because this time politicians did not intervene in the process?
I think so: he used his personal example to say follow your dreams, but he followed his dreams with the backing of Peter Theil. If you were thinking you could start an online magazine too after reading this article it’s a nice reality check.
Why dont we like Peter Theil? A couple of interesting things and people have come out of the Theil fellowship
I don't personally think he went far enough to be an anathema as I would also consider leveraging political standing in any society where there are power vacuums, assuming his foray into courting a conservative administration is why people still dont like him
So many wild things in this, but I was curious about this aspect:
> It also helped that I was unemployed. I had time to court her properly.
Does anyone find this kind of situation helps their relationship health? I've started relationships between jobs and started them with people who weren't working. It's not always long-term poison, but a big part of a relationship is figuring out if your two lives will work well together. I find that's easiest to figure out if neither of you is in a temporary situation that's radically different from your future. Sometimes you get lucky and you survive the transition - but in my experience you'll be on the strongest footing if you don't need to navigate a major transition!
When men talk about courting a woman. It just sounds like they are either hunting an animal or performing a job. Seriously, if she (or he) likes you, then it just clicks. Talk of putting effort into it removes the humanity of the other person and also gives creepy people the perspective that someone "owes" them romance because they put the hours into it.
It never "just clicks". Meaningful relationships take work. In the modern adversarial dating environment, people are very wary of one another. Helping someone get to know you means getting them to let down their defenses. People are defensive and cautious these days for good reason, but often times it means meaningful connections with potential just don't happen out of apprehension.
These days, a lot of people want a readymade partner. All the tough work of becoming should be finished, there should be no personal growth left to do. If he/she doesn't already have everything you expect then time to look somewhere else. This is unhealthy. We have to rediscover how to look past the trinkets and into the human being we say we want something more with.
It's a pretty idea that people just click, that true love happens effortlessly, but it is not true, and it is a perfect fiction that destroys peoples reasonable expectations and destroys their lives in the process. How many people waited for perfection like that until they found themselves alone at 40? The only thing that just clicks is sexual attraction.
If someone believes someone else owes them romance for putting in effort they have no idea how to go about it, perhaps they never will. When you meet someone who you think is special and you decide to do the work of getting to know them and putting yourself out there for them, you do that knowing that they might not reciprocate, you accept failure as a possibility and you choose to take that risk and engage gracefully.
It does "just click". I agree meaningful relationships does take work, but it's much more natural than "quitting your job so you can WORK on courting your future-partner FULL TIME".
And it doesn’t even have to be conscious decisions either. In my case: I was working for two clients as a freelancer but mid projects it clicked with an exchange student who was about to head back to her home country in two weeks. But it really clicked, such that I neglected my ongoing projects in a really unprofessional manner. I didn’t want to, because I really needed the money, however I just slowly stopped working on the projects so I can spend as much time as possible with this exchange student. And when I wasn’t with her, I was losing sleep thinking of her, even writing songs for her - a prototype courting behavior. Needless to say, my unprofessional behavior came back to bite me years later when I was interviewing and the potential employer was checking references including my former clients. Was that all healthy middle ground? I don’t know. I just know that 10 years later, 5 of those married, and now with two children, I don’t really care :). I'm just as happy as one can be.
For me at least that immediate sexual attraction has definitely worked out very well and resulted in long-term relationships. It probably helps that sex first, questions later is more socially acceptable where I’ve lived than it seems to be in the US. My wife and I didn’t even get married until our kids were 5 and 3.
The idea of courting where to put it bluntly you are campaigning to get someone to see you as worthwhile is pretty weird.
Which isn’t to say relationships aren’t hard work but that it’s not front-loaded. At least in my experience.
The other point of view is that parents splitting up is very traumatic on kids, so effort should be spent on trying to avoid that. A promise to stay together (marriage) is one possible way to try to avoid that.
I don't think courting is trying to front-load the effort, but rather to avoid back-loading effort. Raising kids is a lot of work, and to prove that the two of you are willing to put effort into that, you put effort into planning cool dates while courting. Once the kids come along less effort is spent on cool dates, and more effort is spent on the kids.
That’s making an assumption one route does better than the other. How do you know your assumed correlation isn’t backwards? Or that parents staying in an unhappy and abusive marriage isn’t very traumatic on kids?
In all my long term relationships we lived together for a long period of time and only one resulted in children. So I don’t think courting was particularly required to get to know one another or find a stable situation to raise kids.
On top of which the idea that planning cool dates is a good proxy for raising kids or even long term compatibility is utterly hilarious.
And that’s dodging round the implication that the main reason to have a relationship is to have kids which isn’t true at all.
Well to me, its less getting someone to see you as worthwhile and more getting someone to see you for who you are and letting them decide if they like what they see.
I spent some time in my life doing the dating thing, attraction first, and they weren't bad times, but they weren't things I wanted til I die. For me, the only long term relationship that matters is the last one. Doing things the way I've always done them wasn't going to work, and honestly I wasn't particularly looking, I just stumbled into someone that I thought was amazing and decided to do it right. There's sex before marriage, but it didn't start off as a sexual attraction. I didn't want to mess around and see where it goes, I knew where I wanted it to go, and I was upfront about it.
Being deliberate about what you want, and clear and open about wanting more from the start, it is a risk, it is easy to put the wrong message out there, and it is work from the get go. Putting the effort in to show that you really care, that this is really what you want, and that you're not some clingy weirdo trying to wife up the first girl that looks at you is not easy in today's environment.
I like how you perform the status move of saying that these things come to you without conscious effort, that you just are yourself and women are automatically attracted to you. Very subtle.
Nope, I'm not talking about myself. I'm talking about the behavior of some people who thing women "owe" them romance because they perform specific tasks. In this case, it was quitting his job. For many years in the past women have been treated as property, traded off in marriages for family gain. Not just in history but also right now in Afghanistan, women are being sold due to financial calamity.
The writer's action of quitting his job can be seen that he gave up something and therefore deserves her affection. Very subtle.
Not sure where you're getting this from in the article. The author never once implies that he quit his job to court this woman (although elsewhere on the site he says he wanted to take the time to find a wife, still doesn't imply being owed anything) and there's nothing here along the lines of "I sacrificed my job to spend more time on her and she'd better notice."
There are men like that, and women too, and it's bad, but I'm not seeing this from the author of the article at all.
When you meet and it just clicks wouldn't you want to spend time together, plan dates, talk about your future together, send love letters (or texts), give gifts? Wouldn't that be courting? To me it seems courting is just dating with an eye toward marriage, so talking about a potential future together.
Your analogies kind of contradict each other. If someone goes hunting for several days but doesn't get a kill, would that person say they're owed an animal? Hunting isn't a transactional activity. Dating/courting aren't transactional either.
I agree. When you like someone, you make it a priority to spend time with them, be nice to them and all that other stuff. What is weird is when you quit your job to court someone. When you make a joke that there is "prophecy" that you and she will be together. On its face, it's pretentious and a laugh, but there's a subtext that if a man makes the decision he wants a women and he performs certain tasks, she has no agency in the manner.
For some people… many people struggle with establishing romantic relationships, men and women alike. I’ll be first to admit that the phrasing used by the author is dated, however
Met my wife when I was between jobs. I didn't land a job until we had already dated for three months. And then I was making more money than anyone she had ever dated in the past, and ended up having a more stable job situation than they did as well.
Now granted I still had my apartment for that three months, so it probably didn't feel that radically different. I just burned though most of my emergency savings and had to build it back up again after.
This article makes me anxious that I just might not have any interesting ideas to share with the world, that I might be stuck in my own perspective and that others will see right through all the fancy words I come up with to masquerade it.
I think I might not be able to refrain from smiling when being called an intellectual. Only positive outlook: At least I do not think I will ever go as far as calling myself an intellectual in my own essay.
But would you go so far as to call yourself an "elite" like this guy does...
>This is a key part of what it means to be a responsible elite.
The best description I ever heard of an "elite" is "A term used ironically to describe someone so out of touch with reality that they think people are using it to refer to them unironically."
Around the time I signed up for this site, I thought the same as you. 10 years and a couple of successful startups later - perspectives change. I don't know if I'd actually unironically call myself "elite" but we need some name, right?
The fact is there's a large number of very, very capable people out there who probably don't need to work for anyone else again if they don't want to. But they get jobs anyway because that's just the kind of people they are. I know quite a few of these people. This essay is a CTA to them.
Give it a few years and you might find yourself in the exact same boat.
And in case you hadn't realised, this whole site is the poster child for a "privileged elite" deciding the world needed something and just going and making it, and thank the gods he did.
The way I always hear the word used is to describe trust fund babies who have never had a job, or people who walked into a do nothing jobs because of their connections and are completely talentless. It is almost always used ironically, usually by people who have to put up with their incompetence. As I mentioned one of the defining features of this kind of 'elite' is that they are so completely detached from the real world that they don't realize people are making fun of them... amusingly, they also spend endless time trying to tell others how to live, which can be quite hilarious to most people.
Now in your case you clearly are not that kind of person the word is usually used to describe.
Do you think the people you are describing do not realize themselves that they do not need to work? You claim to be part of them, did you need that essay to realize it? You just stated you created a couple of startups during the last 10 years, so you seem to have already quit your job a long time ago.
> You claim to be part of them, did you need that essay to realize it?
I'm not really claiming anything beyond saying that I believe there's quite a few successful people working in jobs they don't really need to be doing and i think the point of this essay is to encourage them to maybe have the confidence to do something on their own.
Satya Nadella might not call himself an elite but he is one. Ditto Scott Alexander or Sarah Jeong or wide, wide swathes of other people, of different kinds, in different ways. People can be secure, honest and self-aware enough to accurately use a word to describe themselves.
Ideas start to flow when you invest time and energy in exploring them, everyone can tap into that creative energy.
Its important not to preemptively judge yourself into believing that you aren't worthy of creating something purely of your own accord. You don't have to be a mastermind inventor and discover something entirely new, you can also be an innovator.
To be fair, the author does not go so far as to call themself an intellectual either. The word is applied to the people they surrounded themselves with, and the project they started, but not to their own person.
That's your opinion. The author apparently has a different one.
I would point out that in Western society there have been groups such as religious orders dedicated to the "virtue of poverty" for at least 8 centuries[0] so this is not exactly a new idea.
I'm sure that back then, the ideas probably elicited at least one similar reaction from someone in the equivalent of your position. But enough other people found those ideas sufficiently inspiring that the group has persisted since 1208. It seems unreasonable to call "cruel" something that has given meaning to so many people.
Yes, just like the lifestyle that the author promotes here. They are not forcing you to quit their job, they are encouraging you to voluntarily make that choice. If the article was titled "Join the Franciscan Monks" and was about the benefits the author perceived from making that choice rather than what they did, the article would similarly mention the "virtues of poverty".
One person choosing, for personal reasons, a situation that another person had forced upon them and dislikes, is not inherently cruel.
Yeah. I grew up working poor my wife grew up go-hungry-poor, we’re close to out of debt and living comfortably with two kids in our 40s. Poverty? No fucking thanks.
I'm conflicted by this article. I'm sympathetic to it, but some things just really push past my BS meter. For example:
>This is related to why man became stunted with the dawn of agriculture. We traded a life limited by the occasional violent struggle over bountiful surplus for a more predictable life limited by grinding labor after barely sufficient nutrition.
Firstly, "man" or humanity did all of their greatest work after the dawn of agriculture. Before agriculture, life wasn't bountiful. It was short and harsh. It's easy to see something good and say "well we became complacent" - well, sure, we became complacent because life got better. There's a certain type of public intellectual in our society who says things that sort of intuitively feel like they should be right, but if you actually stop and think about the explanations, you soon realise they're talking rubbish. I don't even think the conclusion is necessarily wrong, I just think the parallel it is drawing is really bad.
> Before agriculture, life wasn't bountiful. It was short and harsh
We all have a linear view of evolution: nomadism -> agriculture -> villages -> cities => for all the better. And we think life was really not fun before agriculture. Yet, some authors (especially in the recent years, with the progress of archeology) will note that things are maybe not so clear, and that's fascinating. With agriculture, man was (possibly) in a less good physical and spiritual shape (so, life would be harsher and shorter for peasants than for nomads). With agriculture and the concentration of people and animals, diseases spread, they ate a less diversified food, they had to fight periods of scarcity, they had a less diversified life, less rituals, things like that. We also know of tribes of nomads that joined in like summer, accumulated and shared big amounts of food, built monuments, and split again. Just to say maybe it wasn't scarcity all year long. Sources: Graeber, James C. Scott, Wengrow. Happy reading!
+1 "the dawn of everything" by Graeber is a lovely, fun, and inspiring read.
it's because Graeber expands thinking on history. who is to say he's right? it's not about that, it's about realizing how much we think we know about history... that we really can't actually know.
filling in the gaps is something people are great at doing. doesn't make it true though.
Looking at the information surrounding the sources you've cited, it seems like you've literally cited the dissenting voices from the consensus view. It's not a coincidence that Scott literally names his book "Against the grain" and that reviews of his book point to his pre-existing political beliefs as colouring his view on a time in history about which we know relatively little.
It certainly doesn't seem like any of your sources actually describe a well-accepted understanding of the history. In which case it's kind of like, ok well sure we can all cherry pick academics who have quite idiosyncratic views of the topics we pick but it's a little bold to be going "Well actually" to the standard view. If you read the paragraph I pulled that quote out of, it's quite clear that the author of this blog has an extremely rose-tinted view of "mortal intensity" and "novel virtue" and finding life "at it's ... highest". A literal reading of that section is advocating for you to quit your job and to rule over those who keep theirs.
> Just to say maybe it wasn't scarcity all year long.
Society changed very slowly historically speaking, so yes, there may have been long stretches of peace just as there have been even much later in some parts of the world. However if we understand the purpose of the agricultural revolution to be producing more bodies for warfaring/conquest and consequently leading to the creation of bureaucracy and Civilization (as Fukuyama would argue), then the incentive for which would have been driven by a keen awareness of scarcity and a history of violent warfare. It would be no small coincidence however that this take fruit largely in the fertile crescent before expanding out. Agriculture did sprout in the Americas too for instance (and the strife associated with it), but it came later.
I imagine that like everything in nature both extremes and everything in between existed in prehistoric human life. There were probably tribes that had so much bounty for generations life was easy, and others on the constant brink of starvation. Places that were peaceful, places with bloody conflicts..
Also, there have been plenty of violent struggles over agrarian society goods, eg land.
The thing is like all "leap of faith" essays it falls down on faith. If it's a leap of faith why do you need to explain it? The essay boils down to "try a new things and don't worry about the consequences, you'll find a way". Which is a nice thing to think sometimes, but it's also worth your while to take considered bets.
> Before agriculture, life wasn't bountiful. It was short and harsh.
Not saying it's necessarily right or wrong, but Yuval Noah Harari, in his book "Sapiens", has a perspective on the transition of humanity to agriculture that echoes TFA (or vice versa). It struck me, when I read it, as an interesting perspective, as we do tend to see the move to agriculture as strictly positive.
Fossil records strongly suggest that life may have been a lot worse and less bountiful for early agriculturalists than contemporary non-agriculturalists.
Then where did the non-agriculturalists went? They either got killed by the surplus capacity of the agriculturalists, or joined them - both is rooted in the expanded capacity for food creation, and thus, technological creation.
It's quite possible that the worse solution won over the better one - i.e. agrarian societies, while having a lower standard of living, were much better at centralizing power/money and thus funding an army that would slowly stamp out the hunters-gatherers (or the nomadic shepherd societies later on).
One narrative is that the superior logistical capacity of agrarians gave them a military/reproductive/etc. advantage despite an inferior standard of living.
>Firstly, "man" or humanity did all of their greatest work after the dawn of agriculture.
That's partly true. Learning to do agriculture was probably the most consequential thing humans have done -- as it let to the rise of towns and cities -- which have been the sources of innovation for millenia.
>Before agriculture, life wasn't bountiful. It was short and harsh.
Actually, life has generally been "short and harsh" for almost all of human history and pre-history. In fact, it's only in the past ~150 years that average lifespans have been longer than 35 years[0] or so.
The "short and harsh" cliche is a gross generalization. High rates of infant mortality and childhood death skew the lifespan data such that for these that survive childhood the average lifespan is not so starkly different than ours (though there is a wide range depending on time and place).
And the harsh thing also depends. The Kitavans for example are well documented to have lived moderately active lives with much leisure time and plenty of food. One tiny example of course but they are far from the only ones. So it depends.
I've seen that too and agree. However to add some nuance as a somewhat anprim, the appeal to me is the raw simplicity of things and direct connection to so much of life. An analogy might be someone who is excited by writing assembly.
Speaking for myself, I've dreamed of simple labor when work gets frustrating, but I quickly tire and get bored of it when I do have it. In a state of "flow" however, there's no want for farm fantasies. The ideal for myself is a hobbyist means to work with my hands and turn my mind off - such as cooking, gardening.
I think for people like myself, the back-to-nature pursuits are reactionary ideas to stress or bullshit jobs. The appeal is emotional. In truth I have no interest in subsistence lifestyle.
please catch up on the anthro research from the last 40 years to much more recently, your narrative of human progression is way off base and sorely out of date
graeber’s new book, dawn of everything, is a good place to start
>Firstly, "man" or humanity did all of their greatest work after the dawn of agriculture. Before agriculture, life wasn't bountiful. It was short and harsh.
>>> It’s surprising how many more resources you have than you might think, especially when you have a good purpose and you bother to actually call them in.
Ie call up a friend who’s working like a sucker. Or has some extra trust fund bucks.
That's what I was thinking. Obviously I don't know the situation of this guy but from my experience a lot of people who preach this stuff (or minimalism) either have already made a lot of money or have parents who can support them when things don't work out. It's much harder to jump into the unknown if you know nobody will catch you.
I've mostly done this....I get bread/butter from freelance, I have ADHD which gives me some major motivation issues already but depression/anxiety/uncertainty and maybe just burnout have led me to go very slow w/ work. I have one client who I absolutely love cause she's not pushy, she's a developer too, and I'm only a cog in their freelance outsourcing - a good one cause she seems to appreciate my work, but I'm not the only resource so basically I can work as much/little, and in 2021 it's been a rough year financially... I've had a lot of time to basically think about what I want to do....
I've come to the conclusion I want to build OS software for co-ops and repurpose as open core for non-co-ops. Think ERP systems that manage point pools for customers, affiliates, workers, etc that can be traded for voting power, and dividends from profits from a network of syndicated worker-owned co-ops....
Example: You work at a WO-pharmacy, and shop at WO-grocery store... you earn x points per hour worked, and x points per dollar spent (upto 10k/annual to prevent whales), perhaps there's a crypto token aspect too that maybe pays out some living dividend too... after you meet a yearly minimum say 500 hours worked, volunteered, or spent you are a 'member' and get full benefits (think like costco) which might include health insurance (eventual goal), equal share of revenue/gains that aren't earmarked for further growth and salaries--equal by point I mean, so each point is 1 share, and if there's 30k in there, and 30k shares and you own 1k shares you get 1k...but points could be syndicated meaning shared across related orgs through partnerships, or single to that co-op, etc... it depends on what they want to do, people still have autonomy. Essentially it's like more centralized DAO's that are networked and have more rules in place to ensure just ownership of more tokens (cash) doesn't give undue power.
Co-ops can set hierarchy choices like do managers/execs maybe get more points/weights based on tenure, level, or is it all equal across the board?
The ERP should have an easy product/inventory listing/tracking thing with federated marketplace... think shopify but products can be imported from other shopify customers into your store, and it feels a bit more like Amazon or Ebay, and you as the store owner might get an affiliate commission.... eventually we can build an fBA like solution so marketplace members can also charge really cheap shipping...to actually compete w/ amazon...
Mom and pops, restaurants, uber-drivers will all have tie-ins to the syndicates so basically small companies and co-ops all can thrive, and big corps can use some of our tools too (but they'll have to pay a premium)... monetization model will mostly be some sort of processing type fee to make nickles and dimes per transaction to pay our devs to continue expanding and things, or perhaps we get shares or something....
I also want to build an intentional community/eco-village with a glamping camp (that is managed/shared by the residents), with earthbag/container homes that are buried... part of me really wants to make this like a big medevil fortress or keep, and go all prepper/doomsday with plenty of rain catching devices, vertical farming, and solar panels.... but I'm not Elon Musk or a 6 figure earner.
Currently I'm working more on a SaaS starter for laravel, as a footbridge to everything else. Basically taking laravel jetstream, adding multi-tenancy (beyond teams but like orgs, which can have multiple teams, and members can belong to multiple orgs, with multiple polymorphic profiles (Employee, Vendor, Consumer, as general pre-configured types and unlimited scaling on types depending on model)...
Also plenty of easy components and a drag/drop tool to help combine layouts that can automatically make views in laravel so basically it's very low-code, and for us backend guys it's a lot easier to launch side projects if we don't need to worry about ui...
I got off on an ADHD tangent here, but my point is... sometimes its better to sacrifice and find something worth growing that can maybe be a side project or something -- if you can get to ramen mrr especially, than it is to work for someone else, and the more people who leave corporate America the higher wages will be for everyone because that drives up demand and lowers supply, so it's a win/win for my ideologies.
I have had similar thoughts for some time too! Thoughts of building a co-op, and open source software needed to support it.
Coincidentally, I have a resignation email written, and have been sitting on it for several days. I am looking to quit work (for some time) not to work on an ambitious project, but just to see what will become of me when I do so. I started my career as a freelancer, and ADHD gave me tons of trouble. Structure and accountabiliy that a regular day job brought made my life very easier, motivation-for-work wise. Now after 5 years of doing a day job, I want to see what I will do when I don't have that structure around me.
want to team up? I've got a team (mostly laravel devs idling -- i got distracted unironcally w/ the holidays)...
I'm maybe close to finishing a project of my own for once that's basically a beefed up version of laravel/jetstream that essentially makes it multi-tenant, with a better dashboard, and a built in low-code designer (take any existing partial/component and drag and drop and create new ones from it) ...essentially build custom views from existing building blocks -ones we provide, or your own, or 3rd party...
What I've got currently is jetstream with livewire extended to have a dashboard, with a datatable (laravel-powergrid repurposed) component, a bunch of form components (blade-ui repurposed), and daisyui (tailwindcss themes so you can basically easily retheme/recolor the entire interface nicely).
The goal is maybe make an OS version, and then have a marketplace for 3rd party designer components that can be used, maybe a netflix like subscription. $19.99/month and then maybe 70% is split based on consumed resources...i.e. everytime someone downloads your code to integrate in the drag/drop ui/ux creator you'd get a share in the monthly pool...
Once this is done... obviously make MRR from it, but then use it to build an ERP system for co-ops. I've started so many projects and get stuck w/ when I get to the dashboard design phase, if the dashboard design part was super simple, and just almost WYSIWYG I could focus more on the architecture/backend stuff less on ui, and my ADHD wouldn't destroy me before I launch something...that's the idea anyways....
Hey replied to someone else in more detail if you want to team up... I'm mostly a laravel dev, but I like vue, remix, golang, etc.... open to new techs too... it's just what i'm familiar with....
I have to say that the guy raised a huge red flag for me already in the first paragraph:
"I hit the gym, pursued the most interesting and important ideas I could find, and started looking for a wife."
Ho boy, I'm getting some Christian fundamentalist vibes with that sentence formulation. Like, a mix of a holy mission, an objectifying checkbox and a "time to get a wife to generate progeny".
So I continued reading:
"The squirrel has no way of knowing or checking that his instinct to bury the nuts will lead him to new life in the spring; he can only trust that God has given him what he needs."
"When we must we defer to a master who teaches us what to value, let us do that consciously and explicitly and personally. Let us aim to be uplifted thereby as we take responsibility for more and more of the task we are given, until the student surpasses the master to receive their visions directly from God."
"How does that project fit into creating a more glorious future? How is that future pleasing to God, the proper order of things, and your own felt value instincts? "
"God’s Trust Fund
The reason taking responsibility for the question of ends involves a leap of faith is that you actually have no sure-fire way to ensure that your visions are sound and good."
"Even fearsome Nemesis, born from chaos via night and darkness, is ultimately the hand of God and the minister of justice. Even the supposed exceptions to justice prove its rule."
"If your vision is beautiful and sound, it will flourish. Resources will unexpectedly come out of the woodwork to support it. If your vision doesn’t have that virtue, you will be struck down for its lack. That’s life. It is also justice. Where this justice conflicts with our own human desires, perhaps it is we who are wrong, not God."
"So take the leap, and have faith that God’s trust fund will come through with what you need."
Having read the whole article, the ongoing theme is "God" and "faith" and the whole article oozes with the unflinching conviction of a religious fanatic.
The man glorifies struggle and sacrifice for a "higher purpose" and then attributes good outcomes to the will of a divine being. I can't really stand behind that kind of reasoning, and I can't really understand how the HN audience resonates with this article. Maybe it's the hustle success story of an entrepreneur that is appealing to the audience, but the guy is actually sending a very dangerous and misleading message.
“I have to say that the guy raised a huge red flag for me already in the first paragraph: ‘I hit the gym, pursued the most interesting and important ideas I could find, and started looking for a wife.’ “
A healthy body, a healthy mind, and a healthy relationship are not red flags.
The guys at Palladium talk about religion as a social technology. People stuck in the “new atheism” phase will find this hard to follow.
Whether a belief is false or true is often completely irrelevant. Even if the Gods are "imaginary", their impact is most definitely real.
Tried this.
Quit and lived a truly romantic life for 2 years. Most happy time of my life - really.
But my ventures didn't succeed. With no partner or family to fall back on, I did contract development to not piss away savings. Hated the work, ran out of novelties to indulge in my free time, and became severely depressed.
Suggesting that anyone other than himself should do this is naive.
"Do what most people are doing unless you have a really good reason not to." Jordan Peterson (paraphrased)
Yes, I peeled myself out of bed to leetcode and got back into full time. It wasn't fun.
I was pretty confident I could get back in, that was the safety net that let me walk out of a job with nowhere to land.
Honestly didn't imagine I'd use it, and I don't love it. But it beats the alternative right now. My entitlement was through the roof :) I'm more grounded now.
I don’t get the obsession with building an “empire”. Why is that even something people find noble or the actions of a “responsible elite”? Imperialism quite literally has destroyed the lives of millions of people in the service of a privileged few.
If you really wanted to be a responsible elite build public goods, not an empire.
If you have nothing to offer, you build and empire to create importance for yourself. At least the illusion of it. The most wretched shit people I’ve ever worked with are empire builders.
Maybe you do get it. In my opinion, his empire is the very public good itself.
What is building an empire? To gather the resources, make plans, complete projects, gain collaborators, provide services, pass the torch. Defeat problems for public good, defeat temptations to extort exploit and abuse...
I love this article. It feels like an articulation of the past 5 years of my life. Even the introduction to it mirrors what's going on with me the past year.
I certainly have periods of time where I doubt what I'm doing, where I wonder if I have what it takes to see my vision through. Articles like this help me to clear my head and keep going, and they're the primary reason I spend time perusing this site.
Despite sounding a little delusional, the author puts forth some good points. The evolution of our society depends on new ideas and in people who are willing to develop them. As the author points out, some of these ideas succeed, while some fail. The process works in a Darwinian fashion.
As for me, I envy the inspiration and purpose felt by the author. I had the experience of living in leisure for a while, and while it was good, I certainly felt like the money slaves mentioned in the text. No matter how much I read, how much I talked to other people, no inspiration ever struck me - so I decided to keep working at a normal job.
This is a key part of what it means to be a responsible elite. You use your privilege and your personal judgment to explore and solve problems that no one else can.
The claim that structured 9-5 work doesn't bring about innovative breakthroughs needs a citation.
Sure, we all love to think that major innovations are drive by a small team of dedicated renegades.
But reality [citation needed] is that most innovative and breakthroughs comes as a result of gradual improvements stacked on top of each other.
Wind power, Battery prices, Computers, The internet, etc. none of these huge changes were brought about by a small team of thinkers working in their garage.
We tend to only notice breakthroughs when they happen suddenly -- but most of them are gradual, the result of hard work and competition.
Letting the fields go fallow to allow for rejuvenation rings like a very apt allegory to me. Breaking routines, finding out who you are outside of work is actually one of the most luxurious things one can do. It’s a great time for healing. But most can’t afford to do this at their lifestyle level.
There’s lots of cognitive dissonance over what makes our lives rich in the tech world.
However there also a lot in the post which seems to hold high minded eruditism as some peak of existence :) still some good point buried.
I think this is the most cogent take on the essay I've read.
I wonder where the middle ground exists between letting the field go fallow and feeding your family is. If you quit your job and then need to pay an unexpected medical bill— or decide to have kids and realize you have no savings— I wonder if one might rethink the spiritual fulfillment they found in unemployment. But on the other hand, if you spend your entire life grinding at a job to make enough money to protect yourself from emergencies and support a family, you might look up at retirement age and wish you had spent more time with your kids.
It would be nice if we lived in a society where the sabbatical was normalized. That seems like a conceivable middle ground.
Covid has opened a lot of eyes. When mortality is on the line in a job people start to think hey what does this really mean. Hoping the current and upcoming generations will make choices towards a better future.
Prosperity gospel with a technical flavor. The assumption that any worthy cause will by financially self-sustaining as an 'empire' has led to a lot of value driven companies destroying all their good will and noble intentions.
To everyone complaining that this article is elitist, or written from a privileged perspective, that's beside the author's point. He even addresses this critique succinctly:
> This is a key part of what it means to be a responsible elite. You use your privilege and your personal judgment to explore and solve problems that no one else can.
It's clear that this essay is not aimed at the everyman who finds meaning in the routine of life. A small number of individuals will read this and find inspiration in its perspective and ambition, even if they might be slightly off-put by its delusional tone. Often an unshakeable belief in one's own ability to succeed against all odds is enough to push one to go try to build something radically new. Personally I've never experienced that sort of absolute certainty, but I have definitely seen it in action.
My most original and insightful ideas came to me invariably during periods when I was unemployed, spending my time reading and wondering about the nature of the universe. I've never had the courage to pursue them. I'm glad some people do, though.
> If your role in the universe is structured work within order found and built by someone else, those off-road investments are pointless.
nobodies role in the universe is to work for someone else.
can we stop repeating the trigger phrases from our cbt sessions colloquialy known as school?
edit:
PAH! elitist muck!
he basically says: if you got money, just quit your job, through amassing wealth you have been chosen by the spirits of the iluminati and blessed by the rothschilds to quit your job and become the next edison.
you dont have money? ah, tough luck, look at the time, ciao
Such a wonderful read. Think of childhood or teenage years when you spent hours building things for the sheer joy of it, profit motive be damned. More of us could do with sabbaticals to explore projects like this as an adult. Build out in the open, perhaps it will work, maybe it won’t. But you’ll learn a vast amount, have fun along the way, and probably learn what you should be doing instead.
Bookmarked, because I know I’m going to have to re-read this.
Ah yes, the young, childless, mortgageless life of 'quit your job and find yourself'. I appreciate a lot of the ideas the author has, but in these stories there's rarely acknowledgement of the elephant in the room--it's a story mainly for the young and unencumbered, which is a small minority of people.
This article seems elitist to me. Not everyone is in a position to take "active unemployment". People are from different walks of life, it is a lot easier to become a thinker having large nest egg from either high earning position or inheritance than when juggling 2 full time jobs to provide for your children.
This reminds me of my 20yo self watching Fight Club for the first time. If you dont get the movie, you wont get this post, so dont bother arguing in the comments. Even still, the post kinda goes to far on some points, and uses a bit hard language for non native speakers (myself included).
You quit your job and started a blog. Wow. And then you wrote an article on your blog in a hypomanic state describing how you quit your job and started a blog. Amazing.
Such drivel. If you really want to move people to act give them a clear roadmap for a lifestyle that supports years without meaningful income.
Did you have $1M in savings? Did you have rich parents? Did you just live off your SO's income? Did you have financial dependants like children or elderly parents?
I hope I'm wrong but this just reeks of intense privilege being misconstrued as nonconformity.
"When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of calling names. 'That is idiotic; 1 + 1 is 2, not 3' can be shortened to '1 + 1 is 2, not 3."
2. Work at one or more MAAAMs for 10-12 years, while living on $40k/yr
3. Retire, maintain lifestyle
If you somehow run out of money, just pull a Michael Jordan or a Jay-Z
Variations include working 3 years on, 2-3 years off, or working 3-4 months per year. The point is that if you're a programmer and you don't have children, you don't have to work very much.
That sounds great. Unfortunately in America, healthcare costs depend a lot on how well your employer negotiates with an insurer. If you're on your own and you want the same level of coverage, you're gonna have to pay a lot more money. If it wasn't for that, I'd have totally taken a sabbatical since Covid started.
If you're in a state which signed on for post-Obamacare Medicare expansion (or WI, which self-funded BadgerCare), you may be eligible for free health care without a wealth test. In other words, if you cut off your income to rely on savings, you may be able to get good healthcare from the gov't, until such a time as you start making money again.
> Although it is still unclear how many Thiel Fellows were actually successful, "Mr. Thiel says companies started by the fellows have raised $73 million, a record that he says has attracted additional applicants. He says fellows “learned far more than they would have in college.”
Source:
Wakabayashi, D. (June, 2015). College Dropouts Thrive in Tech. The Wall Street Journal@College Dropouts Thrive in Tech
;;
> Notable recipients include the following people (year they were awarded the fellowship is indicated in parentheses):[20]
> Laura Deming (2011) – founder and partner at Longevity Fund
Paul Gu (2011) – co-founder and head of product at Upstart[21]
James Proud (2011) – founder of Hello, which made Sense, a sleep tracking device[22][23]
Dale J. Stephens (2011) – founder of Year On, formerly UnCollege, a gap year program with training in work skills and life skills[24]
Dylan Field (2012) – co-founder and CEO of Figma[25]
Taylor Wilson (2012) – the second youngest person to produce nuclear fusion[26]
Ritesh Agarwal (2013) – founder & CEO of OYO Rooms
Austin Russell (2013) – founder and CEO of Luminar Technologies and the world's youngest self-made billionaire as of 2021[27]
Vitalik Buterin (2014) – co-creator of Ethereum[28]
Simon Tian (2015) – creator of the Neptune Pine, a crowd-funded smartwatch
Cathy Tie (2015) – founder of Ranomics and Partner at Cervin Ventures[29]
Boyan Slat (2016) – founder and CEO of The Ocean Cleanup[30]
Robert Habermeier (2018) – co-creator of Polkadot[31][32]
Erin Smith (2019) – creator of software to detect Parkinson's Disease
This is a very long article, and nowhere in it do I see how this guy supported himself after quitting his engineering job. He talks about a few vague references to situations that may be freelance paid gigs, but no specifics.
I found myself wishing for hip waders to even try to get through part of this self-congratulatory pile of BS.
Reading between the lines told me he quit his job, mooched off of friends and girlfriend/wife, then managed to con people into investing in a magazine. I figure he had a trust fund somewhere, or has the gift of gab and could easily part fools from their cash.
It's also surviviorship bias. He quit his job and it worked out. So what? I can point to my brother-in-law, he's constantly quitting jobs and he's basically broke.
Note: Author is a Tall, White, STEM educated dude living in America. So, his experiences is very specific to his skills, his reach and societal perceptions about him.
It's like getting dating tips from an attractive person or money advise from a trust fund baby
No. We are talking about thresholds. He has advantages that may be applicable to < 5% of the population.
If a person quit their job being a short, brown, woman and found happiness and people willing to help them, it is more likely to be replicated by a broader population.
No, you're inferring about WHO this is. I am saying, literally everyone on this planet has experiences which are specific to their skills, their reach and societal perceptions about them.
That's a double edged sword. I understand that he has advantages but don't you think those advantages would make him feeling even more of a fool if he was to waste them?
On the other hand you should also consider the emotions of uncertainty, fear and confusion that he had to overcome. Everyone everywhere attempting something similar would face similar emotions which are not at all trivial to overcome. The fact that he is in California may be even worse. Think of it this way his friends are travelling to Bora Bora and becoming millionaires as he has to console himself with being ok while he is choosing the road less travelled.
How did he "con people" into investing in a magazine - it is indeed after a couple of years a functional magazine with a variety of diverse contributors. Is every startup founder "conning people" until or unless they become a wild success?
"Transform your perspective thus: rather than seeing the job as carrying out someone else’s will in exchange for money, see it as itself your sacred cosmic duty. What important task do you do for the project you work for? How does that project fit into creating a more glorious future? How is that future pleasing to God, the proper order of things, and your own felt value instincts? Your wage is just a budget given to you to help you carry out this sacred duty; give your whole life to the task at hand, and take responsibility for its whole logic. If something in that entire chain of purpose back to the highest purposes isn’t right, fix it. You own the task and the task owns you."
It is the same style isn’t it. The unintended hilarity is due to the fact that Marcus Aurelius was writing a diary addressed to himself (admonishing himself to do this and that) while this blog post is meant as serious advice for public consumption (you, the reader, should do this and that).
i hate how often stoic ideas get rehashed, even marcus was basically just paraphrasing epictetus, but at least that was okay because epictetus didnt write in very readable english
It's like somebody wanted to write Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, attempting something really deep and profound, and ended up with gibberish.
I guess I could say I skimmed most of it, and zeroed in on a few particularly peculiar paragraphs that made me not want to really pay attention to it. The author was clearly earnestly trying so hard to do something.
Had to double check to make sure it wasn't an Onion article.
He certainly has been having a crisis, and as someone else mentioned here, recently read Meditations by Marcus Aurelius and tried to mimic the writing.
But instead, came across as another stressed, lost mind with their head too buried in social media, thinking they have to be at their absolute highlight of their life at any given moment.
I feel sorry for this wife he "courted", she probably asks him to at least help with the dishes sometimes but is responded with another tyrade of "You don't understand, woman, I need to focus on my God-given task of building my little blog with my intellectual friends"
This is exactly the kind of snarky, deflationary attitude that the article is essentially writing in reaction to. The lack of faith that a "little blog" about good governance in an age entirely absent it could actually lead to something meaningful. Or indeed that a blog itself could be meaningful - that words and ideas might after all have some worth.
>is the lifestyle of someone with 100% confidence in their social safety net
Sorry, but millions of working and middle class people without any "net" have done it in history, I'm sure millions have done it in the US, and millions will continue to do the same thing in the future.
As for "whitest"? Tons of blacks have quit their jobs and safety nets and tried their luck in what was termed "the great migration", while having shit for a safety net. And tons of white, latin, jewish, etc. people have done it post WWII, all the way to today.
I know at least a few people in their 30s and 40s with harldy anything in their name, that quit a shitty (but steady) job and travelled the world on a whim, with almost nothing in their pocket (and no safety nets).
You only need to not have people depending on you (like small children). You don't need a degree, parents, generational wealth, or even money in your bank to do anything.
And it doesn't need to come to some happy rich ending where they made money in their quiting job/travelling/etc. Some just come back and eventually get another job. Some just find a partner or a new country to stay, and that's it.
Comparing a dude who quit their job to court a woman and lift weights while living off of their friends income to the plight of blacks in America or European Jews is quite something.
Ah, hollier-than-thou faux-rage in behalf of others combined with reading comprehension issues, the plight of modern internet. As one who lost a number of jewish relatives in WWII (here in old Europe), I find this in bad taste.
First, I didn't compare anybody specific to anybody (even less so, "a dude who quit their job to court a woman and lift weights"). I answered the general question whether a jump of this kind (quiting your job, on a whim) is doable without being born into riches or having some big safety net. I answered in the abstract, that is, not about this particular person, and whether they lift weights or pluck their eyebrows or whatever. In fact, I didn't refer to the person in TFA at all in my answer. I gave some examples from the Baby Boom era, but also from people I know.
Second, note that I didn't write "in WWII", but "post WWII", that is, in the Baby Boom era. This isn't about Jews escaping from the war in Europe, but about (established, and much older) US Jews (and as mentioned, other ethnicities), changing states, looking for "self-realization", changing dreams, and so on.
Third, note that if I indeed had referred to the historical plight of blacks, as you understood it, it would be even better as an argument: if those people could do it while having few things in their name, with no tangible prospects awaiting them, in bad conditions, with no education, and so on, then a 2022 educated person, with a good work prior skills, with a little saved money, who can always try and get another job, can do it far more easily.
> I know at least a few people in their 30s and 40s with harldy anything in their name, that quit a shitty (but steady) job and travelled the world on a whim, with almost nothing in their pocket (and no safety nets).
Did they preach about it on the internet in the form of an ostentatious, almost comical prose too?
What was in question in the thread (and what my answer about) was whether one needs to be born to riches or with some cushy safety net to do it, not the quality of the prose.
> Tons of blacks have quit their jobs and safety nets and tried their luck in what was termed "the great migration"
You understand that for most of the people in the great migration, "quit their jobs" is shorthand for "escaped from indentured servitude as a sharecropper on the farm where their parents were born as human property", right?
Well, do you also understand that that was the only environment they knew, with their family and community around, and they had way less skills, education, etc. to make it wherever they ended (and many didn't make it) than an average person today.
Compared to that leaving a modern job and - if things don't work - try to find another later is nothing...
You need to be hand-assembling your machine code. You need to stop using code written by anyone else. You need to be punching in raw bytes to bootstrap an interactive forth environment. Writing your own interrupt handlers, task schedulers, and specialized allocators, bit-banging wire protocols as well as using DMA. You need to control your own computer.
You need to be hand-building your CPUs. You need to stop using CPUs built by anyone else. You need to be soldering in circuitry to bootstrap an x86 environment. Making your own control unit, ALU, registers, memory, buses. You need to control your computer.
"When I wasn’t lifting and courting, I was building a network of intellectuals interested in problems of governance from beyond the established liberal democratic paradigm."
What a sentence.
>"I feel like it's a term used by somebody from the Edwardian era who needs a refill on their moustache wax."
I knew someone like this. The running joke was that they were a purveyor of 19th century elixirs, tonics—things of that nature. Then they shaved, and the magic ended.
> interested in problems of governance from beyond the established liberal democratic paradigm
So... communists? Hippies? Not that there's anything wrong with either, I just find that such people are really into work-trade and barter, but they always have cash for alcohol and cigarettes.
Courting appears to be the correct term for what was intended in that he did marry her. It's the pursuit of a serious relationship and it gets used for non romantic situations as well.
Businesses court each other. So do nations. Their ambassadors sometimes court each other, not for a personal fling, but to broker an important deal between nations.
Courting is that process of trying to make a connection that works equally well for both sides. It's a practice we should encourage more of. The outcomes are typically better than quick and dirty deals where neither side bothers to adequately understand the interests and motives of the other.
I think courting is the more accurate term in this case, but it would have been fine if he had said dating and a lot of people would have used that term. I think courting is probably viewed by some as an old fashioned term because we no longer insist on virginity before marriage as a primary means of birth control and disease control, so we have more latitude for establishing romantic relationships without necessarily planning to marry the person.
So these days you aren't necessarily trying to decide if you want to marry. In Edwardian times, that was more likely to be the goal of seeing someone: to try to establish a serious, committed relationship under the bonds of marriage.
Dating seems to be a broad term that can mean anything from casual hookups to courting for purposes of trying to marry. And the fact that it's broad has two positives to it: It gives the couple latitude to sort their own feelings without deciding ahead of time if this is a casual hookup or a serious courtship (or something in between) and, secondarily, it protects their privacy.
It protects their privacy by allowing them to communicate to others that "We are seeing each other romantically" while sidestepping questions like "How serious are you two?" or "What are your intentions?"
It also protects their privacy by declining to indicate if they just had dinner together or if they actually slept together. And it's not anyone's business in many cases, though people tend to be nosy.
Sometimes, a broad umbrella term that is not making such specifics clear is a feature, not a bug, of using it. But I agree that the broader term would have communicated something different in this case and the more specific term is the correct term for what he likely desired to communicate.
They did get married. Now that he is married, he has no need to obfuscate the fact that he wanted a serious relationship.
"found someone I like,"
"met someone special,"
"dating"
There are many things he could have said that are way less cringe. Not to mention that the word "courting" feels like it implies a gendered asymmetry between the two. It's old fashioned to put it mildly.
Hahahaa, gotta grant it to the author, he has the rare talent to induce in me uncontrollable laughs with every single paragraph. The other "author" who comes to my mind now with that exquisite skill is Eliezer Yudkowsky, hell, I would pay some amount of money to watch a conversation between that pair. Not even 20 seasons of South Park would be that hilarious.
Indeed you are correct that I should not have made that post. It drags down the discussion and I would not be interested in reading a site filled with posts like that. I will keep it in check the next time I feel that snappy.
Dang, look at the context. I was simply repeating his self-assessment back at him, and trying to flip it with a positive message that one's circumstances of birth do not define one's potential - unless you let it (mental prison). I feel like you've taken the exact opposite reading from what was intended.
That said, when people don't understand what you're trying to say, the fault lies with you. I'll try to rethink how i can phrase this kind of thing. I was trying to challenge in a positive way but it obviously didn't come across like that.
Putting a provocative spin ("you're trapped in a mental prison and proud of it") on someone's personal description and throwing it back at them is not likely to end well. When you add patronizing putdowns ("calm your jets") and outright slurs ("my poor white trash friend"—yes I know the GP used the slur, but it's very different when you use it), you're way into the territory of personal attack. That's no way to send a positive message.
So this is the male version of the trophy spouse stereotype. Focuses on lifting and courting, has an education just to check off a box, writes pseudointellectual drivel to pass the time.
Just as likely to be replaced by a fresher model in a few years.
Serious question: Palladium’s other cofounder is a white nationalist neoreactionary. Is one degree of separation from white nationalism sufficient distance for HN culture?
It is very hard for me to see such dross posted and discussed seriously, earnestly, when everything I’ve been taught about critical thinking as a hacker is to be skeptical, whether of function return codes, technical documentation, or people writing and/or funding obscure online long-form magazines with strong ties to white nationalism/IDW/alt-right/neoreactionarism. As a DC resident, one year after Jan 6, it’s dismaying to see Palladium on the front page, and discussed so credulously here.
I read the first half but then switched to skimming the rest. It’s long-winded and not particularly well-written. I concur with the basic thesis that there are potentially more important things to life than work (or a particular job, at least), and that one should prioritize how to spend one’s time. Also, I agree that the more one pulls on the thread of one’s natural interests, the more likely one is to be rewarded —- Pasteur’s “fortune favors only the prepared mind.” There’s a. undercurrent of sexism, however naive, that made it hard for me to read.
Thank you for holding up a mirror, dang! Being publicly called out came as a bit of shock and really got me thinking.
The comment above really isn't me. Or rather, it is clearly me (since I posted it), but I don't want it to be.
Where I disagree with you is the implication that undesirable people bring bad behavior with them and pollute this site. I think it's the opposite: something about this site brings out the worst in otherwise reasonable people. Or maybe it's all social media.
In any case, the negative effects clearly outweigh the benefits from participation. This will be the last comment from this account; I'll send a request for deletion. Thank you for accidentally curing my HN addiction! I'll be mindful of the door on my way out :)
I get the general call to action that those who have excess resources should leverage that to take big risks, but this really undersells the possible consequences of losing everything you own. No, you don't always keep your network and skills. Sometimes, you lose everything. You lose friends from fallout or you belatedly realize that your network isn't as resilient to you becoming a penniless loser as you thought. Sometimes you go into debt and make enemies. Sometimes you become homeless and then develop a mental illness or a drug addiction. Sometimes you skip the homeless part and just commit suicide [1]. How many people can stomach that kind of outcome?
I do like the general message which I think should be said more often but I feel like people who charge ahead on this call to action should also triple check that they can truly accept the actual risk they might incur. I also think the amount of risk you take has diminishing returns. Making "fatal leaps of faith" doesn't seem to be as necessary or pragmatic as it's presented here.
[1] (heads up: this is a link to a suicide note) https://archive.fo/QaLIw