[HN Gopher] The most precious resource is agency
___________________________________________________________________
The most precious resource is agency
Author : simonsarris
Score : 619 points
Date : 2021-07-01 00:43 UTC (22 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (simonsarris.substack.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (simonsarris.substack.com)
| throwawaysea wrote:
| This article resonated with me, as someone who felt the fixed
| tracks of school often held me back and wasted my time with busy
| work like random craft projects or homework that didn't further
| my understanding. It's all lost time that I'll never get back,
| that I could have spent in some alternate way. Hell, even just
| spending more time with my parents living our life together would
| have been great. Instead, childhood flies by with much of that
| time taken by force seemingly, or as the article puts it, with a
| lack of agency.
|
| This particular line is something I foresee as a future problem:
|
| > I suspect the downplaying of agency in childhood not only
| creates fewer opportunities for great people, it must also create
| more marginal people
|
| The less agency, and corresponding personal responsibility is
| given out, the more likely it is that we will condition future
| generations to expect things to be provided. After all, they are
| used to diminished choice and lesser agency, and removing those
| training wheels can be intimidating. That's not only a risk, but
| it is also sad, because I think it will have some indirect impact
| on the creativity of future generations and the intangibles of
| life.
|
| This article is focused on childhood and schooling. Maybe those
| are addressable via concepts like school choice (vouchers). But I
| would argue that problems of agency extend to adulthood as well.
| Agency is something that needs to be defended through our
| policies and laws. For example, I foresee future policies that
| are hostile towards car ownership as eroding agency. I see the
| practical need for continuous work history (no gaps in
| employment) as eroding agency. I see the 5-day work week as
| eroding agency. I'm sure other HN folks will have their own set
| of examples and desires for greater agency that are very
| different from mine. I feel like it'll be harder to solve for all
| of it except to err on the side of individual freedoms when
| possible.
| zachkatz wrote:
| Note that discouraging car ownership--and instead encouraging
| cycling with safe infrastructure, like the Netherlands has been
| doing for the last 50 years--actually dramatically increases
| independence for both children and adults:
| https://thecityateyelevel.com/stories/biking-the-streets-to-...
| throwawaysea wrote:
| Thanks for sharing. Some of what that article outlines
| resonates with me, and reflecting on what I see today, it
| does seem odd that there aren't as many children out on
| bicycles. However, I also was able to have the same freedoms
| of being able to bike around as a child (without parental
| supervision) in a car-centric setting. That may be because I
| lived in the suburbs and not some very dense urban center,
| but my point is it doesn't have to be a binary choice.
|
| As an adult, the type of agency I derive from cars is
| slightly different. It's about being able to go where I want
| quickly, without the waiting times of public transit or slow
| speeds of a bicycle. It's about being able to put that faster
| travel time to use, by spending the new free time on other
| activities. For example I can run errands, manage children,
| meet with a friend, and go to the movies all in one day
| thanks to the magic of a personal car. And when I go out of
| town, a car lets me go wherever I want with nearly endless
| freedom only limited by availability of road infrastructure,
| while moving the cargo (and people) I want with me at those
| destinations.
| elevenoh wrote:
| Encourage skateboarding in adolescence & I'd bet you'd see
| even more independence.
| chrisweekly wrote:
| This is an extraordinary, profound and moving essay. I can't
| recall the last time I read something that resonated like this. I
| wish I had something more substantive to add to the discussion,
| but it just boils down to, "Yes. This."
| Russelfuture wrote:
| This is a good and important essay. I was crazy-lucky, being born
| at a time and place when kids could be left alone to build stuff
| and play with real technics when still young. I built hovercraft,
| rockets, ballistic devices, and hacked with vacuum tubes and
| transistors and tesla coils and radios and early computer stuff.
| It was wonderful. Oh, and biotech, too. All before high-school.
| Now in my sixties, but still like a crazy kid with tech. The tech
| helped me learn the complex stuff - the math - but it also taught
| me early I could get help/assistance and better faster results
| working with smart people. Doing - not just reading about it -
| but doing it and testing and trying again, and failing and then
| nailing success - this is so powerful and good. We got airplane
| crazy for a while - and I built no-airfoil Laminar winged models
| which flew fine. There were no video games - we built stuff and
| hacked it and sometimes had accidents... But I learned most of
| what I needed to know in life doing - doing and failing and
| fixing and then getting it to work.. This is the algo for life.
| You will have silly setbacks and make awful boneheaded mistakes -
| but when DOING you learn quick that nothing is final. If you
| didnt get killed, you can try again. I never heard this called
| "agency". But doing - and learning to think, and plan, and then
| act, and then evaluate - this is really key. Many folks who just
| write and talk - they never experience true harsh failure of the
| system. But nature is a really good teacher. She shows clear
| truth - and you can learn just by keeping your eyes and brain
| open - and remain curious and driven to know the why and the how.
| The studio is maybe the kitchen table, or the basement. And maybe
| the library and Google and DuckDuckGo. But build something. Build
| a car. Build a go-cart or a rocket. Build a working computer from
| a bag of parts bought online from Mouser or Digikey. Build a
| working fusion-generator ( you can buy "lecture bottles" of non-
| radioactive deuterium. ) Learn to program, and hack together a
| working version of mplayer from source code, and get it running
| on a Linux box, and listen to streaming Radio Caroline (the
| original pirate-radio in the UK from the beginning of open-source
| hardware). The author here is wise,and makes a very key point. DO
| something - MAKE something - pull together the bits and pieces of
| stuff and knowledge that transform nature and get her working for
| you - instead of you being a slave to her. I remember school was
| pretty awful... It had to be endured. And it interfered with my
| experiments. :) I built a TEA laser in my basement. You need a DC
| power supply, and a bunch of stuff you can buy at Staples -
| plastic sheets, aluminum foil, etc. It was first written up in
| Scientific American in 1974. And I also built software machines
| to hack the markets. To my great surprise, they seem to work. If
| a dullard like me can do it - any sufficiently motivated person
| can. :) Do things and make things. You will learn skills that can
| be used to make the things you want to happen, actually happen.
| Good essay. - Russel F.
| mitchell22 wrote:
| Water is our most precious resource. We drink on average around
| four litres a day, and it is an irreplaceable element of our
| industry and our agriculture. Indeed it is at the very heart of
| our existence.
|
| https://www.jcpenneykiosk.run/
| varjag wrote:
| I suspect if Leonardo da Vinci stayed in school a few more years
| he'd still be alright.
| truenindb wrote:
| poppycock! the most precious resource is zement and wheat. Sheep
| and brick can be had anywhere, and longest road and biggest army
| are both like kick me zigns, yay unto the septenth generatzion.
| you gotta spend all your time trying to figure out how to
| translate numbers from aramaic!
| tines wrote:
| > Who could blame young adults for thinking that work is fake and
| meaningless if we proscribe fake and meaningless work for the
| first two decades of their existence?
|
| "Proscribe" means forbid; not sure this is what the author meant
| here.
| simonsarris wrote:
| Whoops, I meant prescribe.
| [deleted]
| KaoruAoiShiho wrote:
| Culturally people know this already, though I think most people
| call it "ambition" rather than agency.
| [deleted]
| mikewarot wrote:
| I decided to share this article with my teenage child. We had a
| very fruitful discussion, which we will use to make changes to
| improve both of our senses of agency.
|
| This prompted me to realize that Factorio has become a refuge
| from my sense of lack of agency. I love solving little problems
| that won't come back and bite me years later if I get it wrong.
|
| Thanks for posting, and the discussions it prompted, both here
| and at home.
| [deleted]
| bumbada wrote:
| I had that experience when I was a kid(of making things that
| mattered).
|
| I became a cracker when I was a kid and we published how to
| replicate our results on the early Internet. We were the first
| generation that could play with computers because they were ours.
|
| We were much better than 40 years old people(those that protected
| against the cracks) because they were trained in their youth with
| machines that were so expensive they basically could not touch.
| They programmed on paper.
|
| We started our own web company early on. We were much better than
| the competence and it was an easy life and sold the thing at
| great profit. Today in this field people have 100x more skills
| and is rewarded way worse and it is an oligopoly of big
| companies.
|
| Then I traveled the world and worked abroad. I worked in China,
| Japan, Korea, the US. Great opportunities that today are closed.
|
| I used digital cameras before everybody did. Nobody uses them and
| suddenly, boom, everybody uses them.
|
| My family though I was crazy for not doing what everybody else
| does, but turns out everybody started doing what we did first
| with 10 years of delay.
|
| The last thing is working remotely. We have been doing that for a
| long time. It was just common sense. If you spend 2 hours
| commuting and are tired before working the company is wasting
| resources that could be channeled to create real value.
|
| We could get people in our company so easy because they loved
| working on their terms and very few companies could compete with
| that. Those companies were like KODAK trying to do things the way
| they always were and it was great for us.
|
| Now suddenly Covid happens and so many people are realizing they
| could work on their terms too. The mass of the people is
| processing and adapting to what early adopters have discovered
| way earlier.
| legendofbrando wrote:
| For an article focused on the benefits of agency, the author sure
| seems to ignore agency on behalf of parents and people to decide
| how to make space for their kids. Modern education is no more a
| trap for the gifted than it is a vehicle to produce mediocrity.
| Greatness and mediocrity are products of what happens around
| school. The reality is that most folks aren't Da Vinci or Steve
| Jobs. And in the case of those people, they found a way.
|
| If the author preaches agency, stop pretending like you don't
| have the agency to "just" be as the system asks.
| Aeolun wrote:
| If the system doesn't ask, and you do it anyway, I could sort
| of see the agency there.
|
| If the system forces. Not.
| poorjohnmacafee wrote:
| > Do children today have useful childhoods?
|
| Well articulated. I always felt a visceral sense that childhood,
| the school world, and even arguably college for many feels like
| we're being kept in some weird pin sequestered from the real
| world.
|
| As the author shows with early examples, this is not how it's
| ever been in human societies (as a default for everyone) prior to
| the last 100 years.
|
| Could this be thought of as a massive experiment the Western
| first world is undertaking?
| grecy wrote:
| Yes, of course.
|
| School that our western society has created quite recently
| exists for the purpose of keeping children off the labor
| market.
| elevenoh wrote:
| >School that our western society has created quite recently
| exists for the purpose of keeping children off the labor
| market.
|
| There's a whole lot more reasons for our current schooling
| than this as a sole reason IMO.
| hoseja wrote:
| Silly frog, teaching agency to children is for the ruling class!
| The productives are best hammered into small-minded obedience.
| [deleted]
| bedobi wrote:
| This article did a great job of articulating something I've
| always felt strongly about but haven't been able to put into
| words.
|
| I'm sure I'm not the only one who felt like my schooling was
| mostly a giant waste of my time and energy.
|
| I was waaaay ahead in subjects I liked, because those things I
| learned myself out of innate interest. Rather than the system
| accommodating and encouraging being ahead, in those subjects I
| was held back and forced to sit through material I already knew,
| because "in year x we learn this and in year y we learn that".
| Don't get ahead. Zero agency.
|
| In other subjects that didn't interest me, I was forced to sit
| through stuff only to forget everything I "learned" soon after.
|
| It really begs the question, what's the point? And while I'm no
| genius at anything, surely a system like this will kill many,
| many actual geniuses, just like the article says.
| david927 wrote:
| My daughter, three years ago at age 12, felt that she could go
| at a faster pace on her own, so she asked to be home-schooled.
| We were really nervous at first but it's been great and agency
| is the reason.
|
| She still takes math at school but that's usually her only
| class. Otherwise she's doing things. She's gone to Florence
| (with us) to take art classes there. (She wants to be an artist
| or author.) That first year she made a video game (#17 here
| https://news.ycombinator.com/front?day=2018-01-02), and this
| last year she wrote an 80,000 word crime novel. If she can get
| the kind of score on the SAT that she's getting on practice
| tests, she has a good chance of going to one of the schools
| that she wants. (Her early application choice is Yale.)
|
| She's doing things and that gives her meaning to what she's
| learning. It's not just words on a page but something that she
| sees value in knowing. We get a lot of eye-rolls when we say
| she's home-schooled but for her, it's been a game changer. And
| agency is a big part of that.
| sangnoir wrote:
| > It really begs the question, what's the point?
|
| To educate the highest number of children possible, as a
| reasonable cost, to assure a steady supply of capable labor
| year after year.
|
| Sadly, this results in low-salaried teachers, cookie-cutter
| teaching plans, and teacher-to-student ratios that are not
| adequate to cater to the outliers that need attention.
| bjornsing wrote:
| > Sadly, this results in low-salaried teachers, cookie-cutter
| teaching plans, and teacher-to-student ratios that are not
| adequate to cater to the outliers that need attention.
|
| In my view/experience the real outliers need only to not be
| held back (implicitly by culture, or explicitly).
| sangnoir wrote:
| Gentle reminder that there are outliers on both ends of a
| normal curve who are being let down - sometimes, it is the
| the same student at different ages. Catering to the needs
| of both top-/bottom Xth percentile requires additional
| resources, effort, time or money, in a field that is
| already under-resourced.
| bjornsing wrote:
| I'm not too fond of that narrative, partly because I
| don't think it's true (top percentile don't need much
| more than some encouragement / acceptance), and partly
| because "we have to prioritize our resources and it's
| more important to help the bottom percentile" is used as
| an excuse to hold the top percentile back (or used to be,
| in Sweden at least).
| an_opabinia wrote:
| > giant waste of my time and energy
|
| Telling people not to go to school is bad life advice.
|
| > I was [in school and thriving]
|
| I don't, would you go into the time machine and like, not go to
| school, as a young person?
| ItsMonkk wrote:
| I did this.
|
| I realized what the GP said when I was 13. I was either bored
| working on subjects I liked because I knew them or bored
| working on subjects I didn't like and had no interest in. I
| was an angsty teenager who could not handle this, so I
| dropped out.
|
| At 18 I got my GED, after doing no studying, and that got me
| into a local college. After my first year I transferred to a
| less than Ivy League college in my state.
|
| I had no support, and therefore did not use this opportunity
| to do great things, but I still ended up pretty much where I
| would have had I not dropped out. I look back on that time as
| my pre-working early retirement that allowed me to figure out
| what was important to me.
| bedobi wrote:
| > would you go into the time machine and like, not go to
| school, as a young person?
|
| Kind of, yeah. I'm not saying school is 100% useless, but I
| like to think I would have been better off with maybe 80% of
| the curriculum cut out.
|
| I could have put all that time to much better use developing
| knowledge and skills in those things that I had an innate
| interest in, let alone spent more time being active, around
| others, and outside - not sitting down at a desk.
|
| But society disagrees, so there's little choice but to
| conform.
| manmal wrote:
| There are other types of schooling which are more tailored to
| the individual. You won't find them in a public school
| though, with one teacher schooling 25-30 kids. It's just not
| possible to cater to every individual's needs in that
| context.
|
| The only way to get more individual schooling is to have
| well-off parents who send you to a school with smaller
| classes, and ideally with a more relaxed schedule, like
| Montessori (I personally find them a little cult-like, there
| are other approaches too). Or, get born in Finland or Sweden,
| they invest heavily into their public education system, and
| it shows.
| bedobi wrote:
| Haha hate to break your bubble but I am born, raised and
| schooled in Sweden :)
|
| I don't live there anymore though, I left as soon as I
| could, can't stand the place, but that's kind of a side
| note, lol.
|
| Finland and Sweden's schooling systems are very, very
| different.
|
| I wouldn't have enjoyed the Finnish one either, just
| saying.
| gizmondo wrote:
| It must be weird to read all the fetishization of
| Scandinavia here? :)
| bedobi wrote:
| For sure! It gets talked about every now and then, this
| one generated a bunch
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24886659
| jkhdigital wrote:
| Daycare. The point is that school is, first and foremost, a
| daycare. All the talk about education is just marketing.
| benrbray wrote:
| Unfortunately college puts up the same barriers. Much of the
| time I spent in high school learning to code was for nothing,
| because my university wouldn't let me even attempt to test
| out of the first- and second-year courses. In another
| instance they also wouldn't let me count a graduate
| statistics course for a baby-stats elective requirement. "We
| WoULdn'T bE an AccREdiTeD iNStiTutION if wE lEt yOU do THat!"
|
| I ended up majoring in math instead of compsci as a result.
| It ended up being a good choice, because now I have skills in
| both areas. But I was pretty disappointed as an incoming
| freshman, enthusiastic about computer science, that college
| was nothing like what my parents and teachers made it out to
| be.
| daniellarusso wrote:
| I had a similar experience, with my university and AP
| classes.
|
| University would not accept the AP classes, and basically
| two years of college to learn what I had already been
| taught in high-school.
| blacktriangle wrote:
| Wow had the same problem with my CS department. I think
| part of the problem is that there was much more demand for
| slots in the CS department from people who were woefully
| unqualified but looking to make bank.
|
| I transferred over to the maths department who welcomed me
| with open arms, took all my credits, and then beat the
| every living shit out of my brain so much harder than the
| CS department ever would have.
| nonameiguess wrote:
| It's not, though. Kids with stay-at-home parents are still
| required to go to school. Compulsory education is near
| universal at this point, but at least in the American
| tradition, the first publicly-funded, mandatory schools were
| mostly for instilling community values into kids, and this
| was in communities where women weren't even allowed to work
| outside the home. Kids were actually expected to learn
| reading and math at home before they even started school.
|
| History isn't the present, but the reason most laws exist
| today is just inertia, not some principled stand of the
| legislative bodies that might otherwise be able to repeal
| them.
| aarongray wrote:
| Kids can homeschool and cover all the same courses taught
| in school in 1/3 of the time, which leaves a lot of extra
| agency for the things the author talks about - doing
| meaningful work from a young age, exploring the world,
| self-directed learning, etc. etc.
| tvanantwerp wrote:
| Through the confines of scheduling, I once found myself in the
| lowest level of biology and AP biology in the same high school
| semester with the same teacher. At first she was perplexed,
| wondering what the hell was going on. But once she got to know
| me, she realized it was a scheduling thing and that I did not
| really belong in the low-level class. It got to the point where
| I just napped through that low level course and she didn't care
| at all. She was a good teacher.
| [deleted]
| FourthProtocol wrote:
| I disagree. Strongly. The (our) most precious resource is time.
| Our time is finite, and thus constrains agency.
|
| Like money, agency is (to a degree) within our reach. It can come
| and it can go. Time on the other hand, simply runs out. Time can
| be be taken, it can be given, and it can be squandered. It can
| _never_ be returned (overtime today repaid by a vacation tomorrow
| is still time lost today).
|
| If you're salaried you know exactly how much you're selling your
| time for. Real wealth is when ALL your time is yours to do with
| as you please. Agency therefore is simply one means to that end.
| rektide wrote:
| Strongly agree.
|
| It's also why I think the web is unlike almost everything else in
| computing: it's a high agency environment. Applications afford
| you certain options, but the web has historically offered great
| agency to the user. Extensions and user-scripts allow for quite a
| wide range of alterations to be done! I use the DarkReader
| extension for example, which makes almost all sites I visit "dark
| mode". There are ad-blockers, form history control programs, word
| count programs I make use of on a regular basis. Someone a couple
| hours ago was complaining about certain sources on HN and asked
| for them to be banned, and it took me less than 5 minutes to
| scratch together a userscript they could use to filter their
| experience in a way they desired[1]!
|
| Thinking of the computing medium we are given as just a start, a
| launching point, that we inject our agency & prowess into: that
| constructivist, can do mentality is everything to me. It's
| completely unmatched, incomparable to everything else I've seen
| in computing. Having a core medium, and the viewing system
| decoupled from it, ready to help us do better, has made all the
| difference.
|
| There's a lot of not-so-great modern web sites, that make things
| rough. I tried to help someone recently who was asking about
| scripting a React site[2]. Most of the times I can eventually
| wrestle the vdom into shape, to make it do what I want, but here
| the poor user was facing draft.js, a nightmare hell-mode take-
| over of the browsing experience by a large pile of software that
| thinks it can do better. Poor user was never going to win.
| There's all sorts of anti-user potentials to the modern web. I
| disagreed hard with a refusenik reactionary "the web browser I'm
| dreaming of" yesterday, but agreed[3] a) that the user should
| have choice/agency about what they want enabled and b) that
| certain technologies are an existential threat to agency, chiefly
| WebAssembly, which further heightens the impossibly of user-
| agency on the web. I've been quite a jerk to Flutter's CanvasKit
| a number of times, because it turns the web into a giant
| television tube that blasts pixels in our face, destroys the
| hypermedia basis that web engagement has been built around.
| Threats to user agency, to a modifiable web are everywhere, and
| plenty of folks simply tell me I'm full of shit, that I'm
| delusional for thinking the web experience is user programmable.
| They're not so far off the truth, especially in the days of
| virtual-dom & react, but I think that's an industrial convenience
| we've been taking advantage of, and that ultimately we'll see
| pressures to use the medium more respectfully, to use Custom
| Elements & other technologies that return some primacy to the
| DOM, rather than floating off into the virtual forever & treating
| this medium like an end-target to be made to dance as the large
| overgrown industrial toolkit + application so desire. There has
| not been a lot of progress in that direction, and weirdly: that
| gives me hope. It makes me think we are rife for disruption, that
| when good folk start trying to understand how not to do harm in
| their web-application-development, there will be leaps & bounds,
| huge strides. Meanwhile React &c are definitely mature
| technologies at this point, excitement has winnowed away,
| advancement comes in little tiny pinprick bursts. A more hyper-
| textual medium is possible, this ascent of code over medium
| doesn't require a total rewrite: we can make the DOM powerful
| again, make a pro-user, pro-manipulable, pro-rich media
| experience again. JS will be with us, but woven through the
| media, rather than hijacking & parasite-ing off it. I look
| forward to rich internet hypermedia becoming a powerful,
| expressive, user-manipulable system again, as the web once so
| powerfully was for users. This would be such a sign of progress
| and respect: for the web to put the user first again, to make the
| medium something shapeable by user-agency. I believe those days
| come.
|
| Computing was always, to me, so compelling because it enabled the
| limitless virtual, because we could go anywhere, do anything, go
| wherever we might think. But I see few other places in computing
| where the frontiers continue to open, where we ennoble & enable
| the agency within each of us. The web remains one of the rarest
| finest gems of computing, where agency remains vastly possible &
| expanding. So much of the rest of computing feels settling &
| shrinking, receding ever further within the firewall.
|
| [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27693710
|
| [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27510276
|
| [3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27683659
| [deleted]
| ak39 wrote:
| There is no default life script. Everyone is a myth legend. A
| hero. You can't fault an opinion piece like the posted article,
| but there's a chink in this thinking. Such opinions - give agency
| early and it will yield dividends not just for the individual but
| for humanity as a whole appeals to our most primal human
| conundrum: our sense of purpose and our destiny in life. The idea
| of the one individual making geometrically disproportionate
| impact for all humanity is mythologised. And it's an error. The
| flip-side of this myth is the ugly face that if we as a society
| stop producing such myth legends (the original author claims it
| might have stopped after ca 1968) we are failing as humanity, or
| worse that if _you_ do not become that myth-legend you are
| unworthy of respect, or dignity. This is a terrible way to look
| at things. I do agree about the author 's powerful comment that
| kids (adolescents) today are hardly considered useful for any
| form of vocational education outside the cookie-cut education
| systems. But can you orchestrate this paradigm like the CCP did
| in the late 60s/70s forcing urban kids to learn farming as part
| of their education? Or is it a naturally existing societal
| affordance to enable such evolution in kids?
|
| There are many unspoken mythical legends living today, huddled in
| their numbered and anonymous cubicles. There are many unknown
| engineers who've done crucial work within their own boundaries of
| "scripted life" to prevent bridges from collapsing or payroll
| runs to be corrupted (just in time). No one hears about them. No
| one celebrates them. But there are billions of us on this planet
| achieving myth-level brilliance daily just by being responsible
| parents. Or just by being simply kind to fellow humans.
|
| There is no default scripted life.
|
| Edited: added "Or just by being simply kind to fellow humans."
| donkeyd wrote:
| The Netherlands, over the past few years, has had a massive
| increase in companies started by young people. Many related to
| social media, of course, like video production and things like
| that. But there's also a group doing more original stuff, like
| breakfast delivery, or ice cream stands.
|
| Over here it seems like what the author is looking for is on the
| rise.
| rendall wrote:
| I understand this article's point, but I think it's nonsense, to
| be honest. It seems like it's saying something, but, really, it's
| not. It might even be making its readers stupider, sadly.
|
| Walt Disney, Leonardo DaVinci, Steve Jobs, et. al. had gigs at
| 13, so now we draw grand conclusions about how shitty kids have
| it today?
|
| Nah. Doesn't credit.
|
| Even accepting as given the undemonstrated premise of the
| article, that society today has fewer "onramps" for children to
| contribute, what conclusion can be drawn from that?
|
| Do we really have fewer (let us call them) extreme contributors
| today?
|
| Have all extreme contributors had childhood onramps, or are those
| cited in the article cherry-picked examples?
|
| Are all adults who worked as children demonstrably greater
| contributors as adults than those who did not? Or are they about
| equivalent?
|
| We need answers to those questions before asserting anything at
| all about how society is failing its children.
|
| Now, let us turn our attention to the question of childhood today
| versus that of even pre-1970. A child today is by all measures
| safer and healthier than a child of any time in the past: child
| mortality, disease, environmental pollution, heavy-metal poison,
| homicide, abuse, all down globally as well as in the US.
|
| Let us take as given (not demonstrated, but why not, for the sake
| of argument) that somehow the rate of extreme contributors is
| lower now than in the past. Is it really the lack of child labor
| or is there something else causing this (again, so-far imaginary)
| problem? Just concluding "lack of avenues to contribute is the
| problem" could create other problems without addressing the root
| cause.
|
| Definitely, give kids who are eager to take on adult
| responsibilities some, and let them figure out how much they can
| handle. Let them fail safely, or succeed wildly, but let them be
| kids.
|
| That's a great message, but it does not need to be couched in
| terms of some grand societal failure. That part is bullshit.
|
| Furthermore, I suspect that there is no formula to making these
| extreme contributors other than (continue) to make society a
| better, safer, healthier, wealthier context for children to
| contribute, or not, as they will.
|
| What is up with HN promoting articles advocating working 13 year
| olds? Here's another, just as nonsensical:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27675603
| meesterdude wrote:
| > It seems like it's saying something, but, really, it's not
|
| This was the same takeaway I had of your comment. It reads like
| glenn beck.
|
| Purpose & meaning are strong motivators and I agree with the
| author that there is not enough focus on that to help promote
| agency in individuals. There are societal failure(s) to be
| highlighted here, despite your unwillingness to see them.
| rendall wrote:
| > _This was the same takeaway I had of your comment. It reads
| like glenn beck._
|
| Odd, this need that some people have to insult those who
| disagree with them.
| rendall wrote:
| > _Purpose & meaning are strong motivators and I agree with
| the author that there is not enough focus on that to help
| promote agency in individuals. There are societal
| failure(s) to be highlighted here, despite your
| unwillingness to see them._
|
| ... and you edited your response to add this after I
| criticized you.
|
| If you had written this in the first place, maybe left out
| the insults, we could have had a nice conversation.
| ThinkBeat wrote:
| The problem with the article is that it only uses examples of
| extra ordinary people.
|
| Most people are not geniuses, they are average. You are not a
| genius.
|
| Most people who flunk out or drop out of school do not become
| billionaires and neither will you.
|
| Most people who decide to give it their all and become various
| forms of artists will never be famous, noticed no wealty or
| admired (Though on a nano scale you may have people who do)
|
| By a large margin most restaurants / startups fail. You are not
| going to create the next unicorn.
|
| yes this is not 100% accurate because it does happen. Much like
| buying a lotto ticket. People do win.
|
| But you will not. (Almost entirely certain but again some do
| win).
|
| People like Lonardo da Vinci are 1 in a billion. Maybe one in 2
| billion.
|
| People like Jobs and Zuckerberg are a lot more common. There are
| maybe 1000? 10.000? If we say 100.000 that is about 0.0013% of
| the world population. You are not in the 0.0013% (2019 estimate)
|
| (Though you really need take into account the privilege accorded
| people based. on where they live, where they were born, family.
| If you win the lottery and grow up in a wealty educated country,
| you have a HUGE advantage.
|
| Much like buying 1 lottery ticket drastically increases you
| chance of winning.
|
| The point being nearly all people fail to be special. They will
| not be remembered by the grater society after their death. They
| will have made no huge impact on the world. They will never make
| it big.
|
| Thus we should not focus our choices in life my making a few of
| the same choices that are advantageous for 1 in a billion.
|
| We should not set our goals to achieve what they did.
|
| We should focus on having a nice life, a good set of friends,
| enough money to live ok, having interesting hobbies Having a job
| that is ok. A safe and dry place to live. Have some love.
|
| We should expect and respect that we will be average That is not
| a failure. That is what most likely will happen.
|
| So set out to make the most of it.
| fellowniusmonk wrote:
| I started working fulltime at 15 (illegally) to pay for my
| family to have a place to live. I was not able to attend
| college and I technically can't prove I ever graduated HS. I
| literally carried buckets of shit as a kid for my family of 7
| we were so poor. My parents/family had taken the lions share of
| my earned money until they died in my early twenties.
|
| I am now in the 1% of global earnings, and every step has been
| truly awful degradation as I have had 0 negotiating leverage
| and just learned to do what others hate because you get paid
| more for it.
|
| I 100% guarantee that in the age of the internet there are more
| "self made" millionaire teenagers than at any point in history.
| And that puts the lie to the core feeling he puts out (which to
| be fair he does contradict multiple times) that there is less
| opportunity for agency now than previously, as always the sense
| of ones own childhood agency is still dependent on the
| quality/existence of your parents, the personality of the child
| and family/environmental wealth.
|
| This article has a true premise in its title, autonomy and
| agency do matter very much, but the authors inability to grasp
| that starting conditions are the sole determining factor for
| any organisms global boundaries of success/failure are telling
| and they clearly romanticize the stories of extreme outliers
| and disregard data for narrative.
|
| I 100% agree, this individual is romanticizing things he
| doesn't understand and the article has a lot of generally poor
| thinking.
|
| Base rate fallacy gets people every time, the idea that
| opportunities for agency have decreased is absurd.
|
| Also he apparently has a big thing for allowing kids to build
| full on buildings because he brings it up twice... which I
| don't think has ever been generally acceptable.
|
| He should read books like little house on the prairie to get a
| better idea of how poor childhood opportunity has been
| throughout history.
| ctdonath wrote:
| _do what others hate because you get paid more for it._
|
| So very true.
|
| I see top management, up close, spending much of their time
| handling stupid/obnoxious tasks nobody else wants.
|
| I see a friend reap considerable wealth by dealing,
| literally, in garbage.
|
| I see $minwage jobs filled & paid because nobody else wants
| to.
|
| I'd write software for free. It's the absurd deadlines &
| requirements I get paid to deliver on.
|
| I see the "income inequality" issue as a matter of most
| people not willing to do - and those who do get paid well.
| pgustafs wrote:
| I vehemently disagree. Not with your explicit reasoning, but
| with the implicit assumption that there is some 1-dimensional
| metric of specialness or greatness that we're all being
| measured against.
|
| The great thing about life is that it's so multidimensional. If
| you want to be the richest person in the world, of course
| you're setting yourself up for failure. But if you want to be
| the best version of yourself, you can easily be the best
| father-husband-son-coder-blogger-walker-painter to your
| children+wife+colleagues in your city in July 2021.
|
| More than that, you can do things no one else has done. If you
| like research, the frontier is endless and extremely high
| dimensional. Find some niche that you enjoy and crush it. If
| you like helping people, there will never be an end of people
| you can help. You don't have to be average -- you can be in the
| 1% of what you're passionate about, easily, because there are
| so many possible choices of passion.
| Godel_unicode wrote:
| You said you disagree, and then you repeated their point with
| different words.
| truenindb wrote:
| I zement to differ!
| mikewarot wrote:
| >Most people are not geniuses, they are average. You are not a
| genius.
|
| Kids have far more curiosity and insight about things,
| "education" exists to squash those qualities in those outside
| the donor class.
| rdxm wrote:
| I don't even know where to begin. This is the worst kind of
| cynicism that lacks any connection to current science related to
| adolescent brain development.
|
| The best way to describe this is someone cataloged a person
| experience trying to broadly apply this to life. Huge FAIL.
|
| Science tells us that adolescent brains are technically
| sociopathic, so I'm trying to reason about the author's
| contention that agency is developed in this cycle.
|
| Weak sauce all around....
| bsder wrote:
| > After a time all children spot this fakeness, and all honest
| educators note it
|
| Really? Math is useless? English is useless? History is useless?
|
| If an educator can't articulate why you are learning something,
| they are a _BAD_ educator.
|
| Math is useless--until you start trading on Robin Hood and can't
| calculate the financial implications of turning over your stocks
| that fast.
|
| English is useless--until you are standing in front of a judge
| and don't have enough literacy to understand that what got
| written down on the official paperwork isn't what the judge
| ruled.
|
| History is useless--until you have a President fomenting an
| insurrection and you join in because you never studied what
| happens to 99% of all insurrections.
| rektide wrote:
| You have some values stated for these lessons, but I have a
| hard time imagining a teacher finding ways to bridge the gap
| with a student or the class & make seen these somewhat adult
| perspectives.
|
| This last is way off in the weeds, but formenting insurrection
| is often a noble & virtuous thing, change often is direly
| necessary or more worsely overdue. There is a huge amount of
| fumbling & failing that often prevents good execution, that
| ruins follow through, & we see in history so many pendulums of
| society swinging & counter-swinging wildly around one another:
| this is purely my personal opinion, but I for one don't de-rate
| the attempts just because it keeps being really really hard (&
| often woefully mis-done!!). I think the effort to try is
| gloriously humanistic, challenges be damned. No, hungry for the
| challenge, the chance to improve. An agency of last & too often
| necessary resort.
|
| What I would judge might-be insurrectionists on though is their
| cause. It's easy for groups to be riled up, to let one's group
| escalate itself rapidly towards inssurectionist climax, to
| mantle oneselves with cause. Whether you search for some
| objectively worthy (legible) truth or cause is important.
| Having a strong epistemic basis is important.
|
| I liked almost nothing about what has recently happened & I
| think we probably agree a lot about how history isn't/might-
| not-be useless, & that modern times have shown some real
| grade-A fuck ups vis-a-vie that all. But still, it feels
| important to me to not condemn insurrection so widely. As a
| communist, it certainly seems like insurrection remains
| necessary. Outcomes haven't been good but the revolutionary
| spirit dwells in all our hearts, amid the beautiful, high-
| agency/highest-agency better-possible selves we might have had
| in us.
| jkhdigital wrote:
| School != the subjects supposedly taught in school. Anyone can
| learn math, writing and history from any number of sources. The
| author's point, which you clearly missed, is that school often
| attempts to impart these subjects in a manner that is
| completely divorced from where and how they are used in real
| life. The student is a vessel to be passively filled with
| knowledge, rather than a willing participant.
| soheil wrote:
| > Who could blame young adults for thinking that work is fake and
| meaningless if we prescribe fake and meaningless work for the
| first two decades of their existence?
|
| This does not mean schoolwork would have been more meaningful to
| them if they had less meaningless work in their earlier years.
| Most schoolwork is complete crap that is highly irrelevant and
| should never be taught unless there is strong interest on the
| part of the student.
|
| I love math and would explore every avenue available to learn
| more about it, to someone who hates math what's the point of
| teaching them derivates? Forcing people to learn stuff they
| aren't interested in only makes them resent the subject and kills
| any hope of them naturally becoming gravitated to it in the
| future.
| Aeolun wrote:
| I believe there is something to be said for teaching people
| elementary math. But that doesn't include anything at high-
| school level.
|
| Also, statistics and chance. Maybe it'd allow people to
| properly understand why we need to get vaccinated.
| blacktriangle wrote:
| Then teach them biology and statistics, and the issues of
| regulatory capture so they learn why vaccines are causing an
| epidemic.
| dannywarner wrote:
| You can have way more impact as a teen software developer than
| almost any field in history. It is a force multiplier to the sort
| of talent and energy that earlier generations showed by doing
| paper runs.
|
| I reckon open source projects and app/game development are great
| ways for kids to "reach" today. You can have a meaningful impact,
| learn a lot, and possibly set yourself up for live.
|
| This Australian Ben Pasternak developed a hit game as a teenager,
| and at 21 he is being featured in the Wall Street Journal after
| raising $50m for a food-tech startup.
|
| https://www.wsj.com/articles/at-21-this-entrepreneur-has-lau...
|
| But this goes back to Bill Gates and Paul Allen -
| https://www.cnbc.com/2019/07/02/microsoft-co-founders-bill-g...
| musingsole wrote:
| > And while they may not have wanted to work, the work was
| nonetheless something that both they and society felt was useful:
| something purposeful and appreciated.
|
| I have begun fearing we live in a world that actively hides
| useful, meaningful work behind bureaucracies, licensure, advanced
| degrees, and other mechanisms. I believe this happens as a type
| of nepotism...a holding onto a nugget of meaningful
| work/knowledge until someone like you can grab hold of it and
| complete it to your liking.
|
| Why are so many business deals hidden behind golf rounds and
| clinking glasses? Because business/work/utility is power. If I
| rely on you, you have power over me. So I better make sure I
| approve of the who and the how of that power.
|
| It's fear that drives this. And my fear of the world it creates
| is stifling.
| BLKNSLVR wrote:
| I'm not sure this is entirely related to your point, but I've
| recently been thinking that intelligence can be detrimental to
| promotion, in that intelligence produces questions and
| disagreements and non-conformity, which are all traits that
| make the job of Management more difficult.
|
| Making life difficult for Management is unquestionably NOT a
| path towards promotion, and continues the rotating door of
| mediocre management. And mediocre management wants,
| desperately, to hold on to their position because they're
| aware, consciously or otherwise, of their mediocrity.
|
| Having someone who can out-think you as a report is a threat to
| your position. Like you said: fear.
| ayngg wrote:
| I think one of the greatest things that is missing from formal
| education is the encouragement of exploration, and the
| acclimation towards the failure that often accompanies that
| exploration.
|
| Everyone in school is so caught up on checking off the right
| prerequisites in the curriculum for the next set of prerequisites
| all the way up until graduation, that there usually isn't much
| room for any sort of real exploration in the system until
| graduation. However, after graduating, a whole new set of real
| world responsibilities appear that often restricts the ability to
| both explore and fail since they come with real consequences that
| make failing a high school class seem like nothing in comparison.
| For example, it is kind of hard to explore in university when
| that year exploring will cost tens of thousands of dollars, or if
| you are on your own and need to find multiple low skill/ wage
| jobs just to survive.
|
| I was just lucky that my dad had a stem job and had a computer,
| which got me into video games, which got me into hacking them,
| which got me involved in communities full of people way older and
| smarter than I was, which facilitated my growth in a way that
| school never could. Without that first computer, there is a good
| chance that I would have just been railroaded into some soul
| draining corporate job pushing papers.
| lucideer wrote:
| While working for a startup enrolled in a small accelerator
| programme I was involved in a business/pitch type workshop in
| which we were asked to carry out a little game along with some
| participants from other enrolled startups. Each individual had to
| write down what was most important to them in their
| life/career/role/business and then sell that concept/life-
| priority to one other person. At the end of each 2-way pitch, the
| pair agreed to choose one of the two priorities and were then
| tasked with pitching it to two others (who had selected theirs in
| the same way), and so on in tournament fashion.
|
| I immediately wrote down "autonomy"*. I learned nothing at all
| about pitching that day, as no-one I spoke to needed any
| convincing whatsoever: everyone had the same response: _" Oh! I
| never thought of that. That's much more important to me than what
| I wrote down."_
|
| * I know "autonomy" and "agency" are technically a bit different
| from a philosophical perspective but hey.
| eloff wrote:
| I came to this conclusion when I was about 24. I was thinking
| about what I wanted most from life. Success, a girlfriend, a
| car, etc. I settled on autonomy, although I phrased it as
| freedom. Freedom to do or work on what I want.
|
| I work part time now and spend most of my days working on what
| I want. I guess I partly achieved that, by age 36. Getting
| there.
| DVassallo wrote:
| Just walked to say https://twitter.com/simonsarris (the author)
| is probably my favorite Twitter account. Go follow for a peek
| into the life of someone living a blissful existence.
| paulpauper wrote:
| this article was not that good. came across as vague and lacking
| of a point and filled with poor examples. There was nothing
| special about the examples he gives or in any way predictive
| except for Nabokov. it was not uncommon in Carnegie's era to
| leave school early. Same for Walt Disney. it was common back then
| for kids to deliver newspapers, and what does that have to do
| with animation.
| human wrote:
| I agree with you. The article has no substance. We can talk
| about how today's schools don't produce shining stars or bright
| minds, but the path followed by these legends (Carnegie, Da
| Vinci, etc.) were not out of the ordinary and I really don't
| think they formed their character. If anything, I believe these
| people had a bias for action, took risks and were hyper-
| focused. Same recipe works today.
| soheil wrote:
| > The act of creation causes imagination, not the other way
| around.
|
| I think this sentence is almost correct. The act of creation does
| wonders and induces imagination, but that is not the only way to
| achieve imagination. The act of just going deep on a thought and
| abstracting away the frictions of the real world can do wonders.
| Imagination is probably most readily available to a brain that is
| operating at its most abstract level.
| musingsole wrote:
| Minds are pattern repeaters. Creation begets imagination begets
| creation begets...Separating the two or holding one over the
| other is rather pointless.
|
| You can tell a child they can create things. That should be
| enough for them to abstractly reason from there about all the
| possibilities, right? Or is it that you have to teach a child
| to create so that they can imagine what they might create next?
| soheil wrote:
| I don't think minds are mere pattern repeaters. There is
| unlimited complexity if you just follow a simple cellular
| automata [0]. So not sure where the idea that creation is the
| fuel for the fire of imagination comes from.
|
| [0] http://atlas.wolfram.com/01/01/31/
| frequent wrote:
| The developer in me says life and our society are like open
| source software. A gigantic piece of code constantly being
| rewritten and growing exponentially over time. Too much for
| anyone to truly grasp in its completeness as time progresses, but
| also not purely spaghetti code, so you can always break it down
| into smaller components one can eventually understand. Of course,
| like the author argues, you can use this software without ever
| caring or wondering about its inner workings. Or you can try to
| make contributions. However, there are no contribution guidelines
| for life. "Usefulness" depends on everyones' individual
| definition (improve the kernel or code readability) and "capacity
| to act" doesn't age well (I started hacking with jQuery). A
| contribution can be anything that may leave an impression on
| someone - a single person or any amount of people, a good or (for
| sake of completeness) a bad impression, something forgotten after
| an instant or something passed on for generations in some form or
| another - legacy contributions that eventually also get rewritten
| over time. Personally, I don't think the results matter as much
| as trying to make these contributions. After all, not all merge-
| requests make it into production code, but they are all worthy
| efforts of trying to improve small parts of the software of life
| and move our society forward.
| CaptArmchair wrote:
| The article raises some good points, but I also have some strong
| reservations.
|
| Take the examples, for instance. The author puts a lot of stock
| in what Nabokov and Da Vinci did themselves in their youth and
| calls this 'agency'. But at the same time, conveniently or
| inadvertently, the author doesn't expand and look at the broader
| picture in which those individuals lived and how that determined
| their lives.
|
| Nabokov was born to a very wealthy and prominent Russian family
| with ties to Russian high nobility. He had access to a breadth of
| networks, resources and means to develop into the person he
| became. Without disparaging the his talent as a writer, it's
| equally important to acknowledge that his early life wasn't
| burdened by poverty, bad health, illness, instability and so on.
| Nabokov himself even described his childhood as "perfect" and
| "cosmopolitan".
|
| Da Vinci, on the other hand, was born out of wedlock outside
| Florence to a lower class family. The historical record regarding
| his life before his arrival Florence is fragmentary at best. What
| can be deduced is that his early childhood must have been tenuous
| and turbulent, living in different homes with different family
| members (grandparents, uncles, mother). His own parents went on
| to live separate lives as well. We do know that he only received
| very basic education - reading and writing vernacular - as a
| child.
|
| Da Vinci's life was determined by a stroke of chance. At age 14,
| his family moved to Florence and he was lucky enough to end up a
| studio boy at Verrocchio. He became an apprentice at 17 and
| received 7 more years of training. Even so, at the same time,
| it's clear that his family wasn't wealthy and so he might as well
| have ended up in a very different place at the time e.g. working
| as a clerk for a budding bank, notary, or even an industry like a
| tannery.
|
| It should be clear that 'agency' only counts for so much. Neither
| Nabokov or Da Vinci are exceptional as millions of others also
| engage in poetry or drawing in early childhood. External
| circumstances such as birth and chance are just as determining.
| From a historical perspective, the author can be perceived as
| falling into the traps of hindsight bias and survivorship bias in
| that regard.
|
| Even so, the article does make a valid criticsm regarding
| education systems. Transferring knowledge through rote exercising
| and standardized testing serves a purpose. The upshot is that it
| allows for scaling basic education towards millions, which is no
| small feat to accomplish. The downside is that doing so ignores
| the needs, traits, ambitions, strengths and weaknesses of
| individuals.
|
| Modern educations systems were first formed during the 19th
| century Industrial Revolution, and further grew during the 20th
| century when humanity experience profound growth, economical and
| technological advancements. It should be noted that there never
| was a unified vision on education, and the argument in the
| article isn't new by any means.
|
| During the early 20th century, incumbent education was heavily
| criticized by emancipatory movements. Helen Parkhurst, Maria
| Montessori, and John Dewey were influential educational thinkers
| who addressed some of the issues touched upon by the author as
| they laid the groundworks for an educational framework called the
| Dalton Plan.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dalton_Plan
|
| At the same time, Celestin Freinet is another influential
| educational thinker who created the Freinet system, addressing
| the same criticisms, which is widely adopted throughout the
| world:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C%C3%A9lestin_Freinet
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freinet_Modern_School_Movement
|
| Finally, the article betrays a fallacy hidden in it's subtitle:
| The world is a very malleable place. To an extent, the world is
| malleable. But one only controls one's actions, less so the
| outcomes. Human life is complex, unpredictable and capricious.
| The impact of some decisions can sometimes only be gauged several
| decades into the future.
|
| While we consider Da Vinci a succesful individual, a young
| Leonardo would quite likely have been just as anxious about what
| what the long future held in store for him as the next young
| person today. In that regard, it might come across as ironic that
| Vasari has recorded Leonardo lamenting in his deathbed, aged 67,
| that "he had offended against God and men by failing to practice
| his art as he should have done."
|
| In the end, it's not unwarranted to consider the author's
| question "Do children today have useful childhoods?" carrying a
| due amount of presumptuousness as well. While lamenting how
| society tends to shoehorn millions into a corset of conformance
| towards norms and values, it would be quite ironical to fall into
| the same trap and subject younger generations to different, yet
| at the same time equally high, expectations and standards
| maximally living up to purported 'agency' given for the sake of
| 'agency'.
| blacktriangle wrote:
| I think your line about rote excersizing allowing education to
| scale to millions is an often lost point when talking about the
| problems with modern education systems.
|
| The Well-Trained Mind: A Guide to Classical Education at Home
| has an interesting comment on this issue. The author, with a
| Masters in Education and years working in public schools, says
| that she often runs into parents who are worried they are not
| qualified to teach because they do not have formal training in
| big-E Education. Her response is that our Education training
| system, with all of its study of psychology and law, is not
| designed around educating a single child to their maximal
| potential, but about scaling up education so that a single
| teacher can teach a room of 40 children to a socially
| acceptable minimum. From this point of view professional
| educators have no advantage over the individual parent and may
| even bring along irrelevant habits from their formal training.
| CarVac wrote:
| I think I found school tolerable, or even fun, because I was able
| to figure out the proper way to exercise agency within the
| confines of the system.
|
| As an analogy, as a kid when I played with Lego or K'NEX, my
| favorite thing to do was not assemble kits but instead come up
| with my own designs from the parts therein. Working within the
| system, but being a creator rather than a consumer.
|
| At school, I wasn't just trying to learn the material they wanted
| me to know, I was also trying to reverse-engineer the tasks asked
| of me to figure out what the teachers most wanted.
| aidenn0 wrote:
| I exercised my agency by annoying my teachers. That tended to
| lead to me having much lower grades in subjectively graded
| classes. It was a lot of fun, but I cringe sometimes in
| retrospect.
|
| Here's one example:
|
| Slashdot posted a link to a place that would let you search all
| graduate thesis papers at about the same time I was starting an
| English class taught by a grad student instructor.
|
| I looked up the instructor's Master's thesis and found it was
| on <Literature Period X>. While the instructor was passing out
| the syllabus, I said loudly to the person next to me "I hope we
| don't have to read anything from <Literature Period X>." The
| instructor just froze and stared at me mouth agape for about 30
| seconds.
|
| By 4 weeks into that class, the instructor informed me that
| regardless of my performance, I was not going to get a grade
| higher than a D. I did in fact end up with a D.
| inglor_cz wrote:
| LOL. If someone looked up my thesis and did the same to me, I
| would have laughed with sincerity. In the "I crossed that
| killing field so that you don't have to" way.
| bruce343434 wrote:
| Quite the fragile instructor...
| BLKNSLVR wrote:
| Destined for Systems Analysis or Money Laundering.
| dkackman11 wrote:
| Such a promising introduction about the importance of agency, and
| then "blah blah kids these days blah uphill in the snow blah". "A
| reawakening of meaningful work"? Come on. Tell that to the child
| coal miner or factory worker of Carnegie's era.
| Aeolun wrote:
| It's not? Obviously it's not nearly as safe, but coal mining
| sounds a lot more interesting than another geography lesson.
| Factory work? Maybe not so much.
| jkhdigital wrote:
| > It seems that the more you ask of people, and the more you have
| them do, the more they are able to later do on their own.
|
| This is almost so self-evident as to be banal... and yet this
| fundamental observation about humans is roundly ignored and
| outright rejected by most institutions charged with educating our
| children.
|
| This essay feels like it could've come straight from John Holt or
| John Taylor Gatto--highly recommended.
| tester34 wrote:
| School sucks for individuals, but for the whole system there's no
| significantly better solution (at least that I'm aware of),
| sadly.
| christophergs wrote:
| Shades of PG's "Why Nerds are Unpopular" [1]
|
| > "As far as I can tell, the concept of the hormone-crazed
| teenager is coeval with suburbia. I don't think this is a
| coincidence. I think teenagers are driven crazy by the life
| they're made to lead. Teenage apprentices in the Renaissance were
| working dogs. Teenagers now are neurotic lapdogs. Their craziness
| is the craziness of the idle everywhere."
|
| [1] http://www.paulgraham.com/nerds.html
| overgard wrote:
| One of the biggest tragedies isn't just that the childhood is
| wasted, but that many people never learn to have agency once it
| is available. I'm not saying you need to start your own business
| or anything like that, but it seems like most people live their
| lives never questioning the scripts that are given to them.
|
| The basic life script we all seem to have in western society
| seems pretty awful when you think critically about it.
| Essentially we waste all out vitality and youth making other
| people rich, so that one day when we're old and infirm, we can
| finally do the things we like with the short time we have left. I
| think most of us never even think about it because it's too bleak
| of a reality. I feel somewhat fortunate in that the work I do is
| something I would generally enjoy doing even if I wasn't being
| paid for it, but I still have a nagging fear that what I could be
| is much more than what I am yet I lack the proper tools and
| perspectives to become that person (and I don't think that just
| starting my own business, like a lot of people here want to do,
| is really sufficient, it's just a small part of inventing your
| own life script).
| ehnto wrote:
| I have tried both sides of the coin and have settled for
| somewhere in the middle, which for me is contracting.
|
| For myself, I burned out pretty hard on 9-5 work, so I don't
| take on a full time workload and I don't take on work that
| requires butt-in-seat engagment, even remotely.
|
| In that way I retain full agency over my time, and great
| flexibility in when I work. I work when I am feeling the most
| effective, and I can eliminate all that dead time wasted at
| traditional jobs, where you are just tabbing mindlessly between
| screens because you have spent your focus budget for the day.
| bjornsing wrote:
| I'm starting to think this is the direction I want to go in.
| The butts-in-seats culture is strong here in Sweden though
| (strangely upheld by the butts in the seats themselves). So
| I'm a bit worried it will be a "dead end career wise" and not
| sustainable until retirement (I'm 43). Any thoughts on this?
| How do you find work and what makes you think you will
| continue to find work for 10, 15 or 20 years?
| ehnto wrote:
| My thought is that if I can't find work as a contractor
| then I'd have as little chance at finding work at a
| company, so it may be time to retrain anyway.
|
| I am assuming you're a software developer, I'm by no means
| an expert on contracting, but my two recommendations are:
| Specialize in a domain, and stay on the technology
| bandwagon. You can't pin your career on a technology, they
| go obsolete too fast, but you can specialize in an industry
| domain.
|
| I specialized in eCommerce, and I've had to use dozens of
| different technologies, each project brings in a new tech
| stack and a new set of idioms. I have a friend in
| motorsport/automotive software, which is an exciting field
| by the sounds of it. There are dozens of industries that
| need software but aren't solely software companies, and I
| think that's where much contract work is.
|
| I am ideologically against the rapid technology swapping
| our industry loves, I really prefer to dig in deep to a
| framework or stack, but this is work so I keep my eyes up
| and forward. Sometimes all you need is to recognize the
| buzzword, say "Yep I've heard of that", then go home and do
| some research to make sure you can pull it off before
| accepting the contract.
| bjornsing wrote:
| Thanks! Last few years I've been a data science manager,
| and my education is in engineering physics, but I have a
| lot of experience with software (also as a consultant /
| running a small consulting company).
|
| Focusing on an industry domain (rather than toolset)
| seems smart. It's difficult to be productive in
| new/unfamiliar knowledge domains and I'm sure buyers
| understand that.
| ehnto wrote:
| Ah sorry, I just assumed you were a dev trying to get
| into contracting given the context.
|
| To answer your question a bit better, I don't see much
| career growth per se, there's certainly no ladder I am
| climbing, it just becomes easier and easier to find work
| over time thanks to prior experience compounding. You get
| to choose nicer contracts and work with people you like.
|
| There's a lot of potential for personal development
| though, and you can choose to spend more time on
| developing recurring revenue and "productifying" your
| expertise instead of just selling your time hourly.
| qqtt wrote:
| > The basic life script we all seem to have in western society
| seems pretty awful when you think critically about it.
|
| On the flip side, if you step outside the bubble of comfort
| that Western society generally affords people, you'll find that
| life is "nasty, brutish & short" as Hobbes put it.
|
| We've come a very very long way in a short time towards raising
| our standard of living and our expectations for what our lives
| can be - especially for regular folk from humble beginnings who
| aren't born into huge advantages.
|
| Not to say that we can't improve things further for Western
| society, but just to say that the script we are generally given
| is pretty damn good compared to historical averages.
| esperent wrote:
| I live in a non-western low income country. Life is not
| "nasty, brutish and short". Honestly, it makes me pretty
| angry when I hear people from the west espouse this
| sentiment. Have you ever lived in a non-western country, to
| state that with such assurance?
|
| Life here is beautiful, the sense of community is so much
| stronger than it is in the west and overall I'd say that
| people are less stressed. On the flip side, many things are
| harder for sure - wages are low and working hours are long,
| good healthcare is hard come by for many people.
|
| Short of living in an active conflict zone, of which there
| are only a few in the world, thankfully, life is not "nasty,
| brutish, and short". Perhaps, in future, before making such
| statements about the lives of people from cultures other than
| your own, you could take a few moments to try and empathize
| with them instead?
| qqtt wrote:
| "Bubbles of comfort" are not unique to Western countries,
| that is true. Every country on the planet offers a subset
| of their population a great life style, the only variable
| is how much of the country actually gets
|
| a) to partake in that lifestyle
|
| b) has the tools to reach that lifestyle when starting
| outside of it
|
| Doesn't matter if you are talking about North Korea or the
| United States. And yes, you can find abject generational
| poverty in the United States as well.
|
| The fact you could post your comment puts you in the top
| 40% of the world (roughly 60% don't have internet access).
|
| If you have internet from a mobile phone, you are roughly
| in the top 50%.
|
| Are you really looking outside your bubble of comfort?
| hungryforcodes wrote:
| > The fact you could post your comment puts you in the
| top 40% of the world (roughly 60% don't have internet
| access).
|
| I have by now traveled pretty much to all the continents
| and at this point smartphones and internet are
| ubiquitous. They are litterly now throwing away working
| second hand ones in developing nations.
| unishark wrote:
| Doesn't that still put them within the western bubble of
| comfort in a sense though? It isn't much of a defense of
| an alternate way of life if that way of life required
| westerners to work hard in a different (i.e., consumer-
| product-based, highly-skilled, high-stress) way of life
| as a prerequisite.
| hungryforcodes wrote:
| I'm not sure what you are talking about. My original
| point is that the OP is wrong about internet access. Most
| of the world has it by now.
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| > The fact you could post your comment puts you in the
| top 40% of the world (roughly 60% don't have internet
| access).
|
| Interesting: internet-access > no-internet-access
| peterlk wrote:
| I similarly think that you are applying a techno-utopian
| lens to your analysis. My family and I have spent time
| with many people who did not have internet or other
| modern amenities (Mongolia, Mali, Burkina Faso,
| Kazakhstan, and several others), and your statement does
| not hold. It is not _entirely_ untrue, because a
| bacterial infection can kill you, however, the dynamics
| of life are just... different. People are still capable
| of all the emotion and fulfillment that you and I are,
| but life is slower, simpler, and more well-defined, so it
| is often easier to feel happy and fulfilled.
| ryloric wrote:
| I think you missed what the parent poster might be
| saying, it's not about "Bubbles of Comfort". I too live
| in one of those countries like you put it, and while I
| live in the bubble to some extent, I know people who've
| never used internet or a smartphone/computer in their
| entire lives and live a decently happy stress-free life.
| Their lives are not nasty or brutish, they're not leading
| less-fulfilling lives as a result. On the contrary, I
| think most of them are happier, more content and wiser
| than me.
|
| What you might be doing I think... is making the
| assumption that technology, 'things' like gadgets or
| better cars and modern medical health is central to human
| life. Yes, life would objectively improve if you have
| those, but if I have to work 60 hours a week doing
| something I don't really care about, then is that really
| a good trade-off? I think the answer is not the same as
| yours for everyone.
| qqtt wrote:
| If you want to live a nomadic disconnected lifestyle
| (with limited access to "technocratic" things like health
| care and education), you can do that almost anywhere,
| including Western countries.
|
| Again, the central aspect of this topic is agency. Do
| people choose to live that way, where they live it? And
| how many would choose a different lifestyle if given the
| same opportunities as everybody else?
|
| Yes, you can live a happy life as a nomad without any
| access to technology. That isn't the topic of this
| conversation.
| curtainsforus wrote:
| Not without people to do it with. And the people that the
| parent poster is talking about aren't nomads.
| [deleted]
| emptyfile wrote:
| I have no clue where you live, but I live in an eastern
| european country and I fail to see how can life be better
| anywhere outside western democracies.
|
| Even living in the poor part of the EU is still a lot worse
| then living in the good part.
|
| >Life here is beautiful
|
| _snort_
|
| > the sense of community is so much stronger than it is in
| the west
|
| the community is precisely why I dislike my country. I
| can't imagine worse torture then being force to live your
| life with close-minded ignorant people stuck in the past.
|
| Go and be gay or atheist or just strange in your country
| then tell me how beautiful your life is.
|
| >overall I'd say that people are less stressed. On the flip
| side, many things are harder for sure - wages are low and
| working hours are long, good healthcare is hard come by for
| many people.
|
| As long as you don't care if you starve or die of illness
| it's all great. So literally the basics of security.
|
| >life is not "nasty, brutish, and short"
|
| sure, it's just relatively nastier, more brutish and
| objectively shorter in years of life.
|
| >Perhaps, in future, before making such statements about
| the lives of people from cultures other than your own, you
| could take a few moments to try and empathize with them
| instead?
|
| I don't need empathy when I feel it on my own skin.
|
| Pretty weak all in all.
| russelldjimmy wrote:
| I think I get where you are coming from. I too live in a
| non-western third world nation. I relate to the points you
| make. But it isn't obvious to me that the commenter meant
| to belittle life outside western nations. I think this
| wasn't meant to be west vs non-west argument IMHO.
| mellavora wrote:
| I'm positive to your overall sentiment that we should
| remember the physical health and comfort which we have
| achieved.
|
| The Hobbes quote, however, does not apply. Hobbes was
| comparing life with/without a sufficiently strong Leviathan
| ('central government') to provide basic protection of
| property rights, or at least a semblance of such protection.
|
| But the "long way" to which you refer, the physical comfort
| of modern life, is the fruit of the industrial revolution,
| roughly 150 years of history.
|
| Hobbes was much earlier, he probably never saw the IR coming.
| tluyben2 wrote:
| Universal income would be a next step in that.
| Aeolun wrote:
| > just to say that the script we are generally given is
| pretty damn good
|
| Honestly, it's so good it's boring. Not much challenge to
| life if the only thing you need to do to continue existing is
| plant your ass in the same chair every day.
| nine_k wrote:
| Nobody guarantees you that chair.
| Aeolun wrote:
| True, but if you live anywhere in western Europe you have
| to work _really_ hard to fuck up your life forever.
| planet-and-halo wrote:
| I suspect we are all the prisoners of long-dead economists.
| Their ideas of people as atomic resources were useful
| abstractions in some ways (I agree with the point below that
| their work has led to great material prosperity), but they have
| also influenced entire generations of overly bureaucratic and
| inhumane policies. People are treated as "things" to be
| "managed," and as a consequence they develop learned
| helplessness.
| jkhdigital wrote:
| Economics is the new god, the god of materialism. At some
| point in the 20th century we decided that material prosperity
| is really all you need for a happy and healthy society.
| Doesn't seem to be working out so well...
| handmodel wrote:
| I never get what motivates people to blame the system here.
|
| If you have 150k in the bank you could go to a remote place
| in the US, take a lowkey job where you work 25 hours a
| week, and live perfectly fine. No one is stopping you.
|
| The only reason you don't do this is because you like nice
| things, nice food cooked for you, nice immenities, and want
| your kids to have material prosperity.
| Sophistifunk wrote:
| Do you have any idea how few people have $150k in the
| bank?
| xnxn wrote:
| I just cut out avocado toast and now I'm well on my way
| to 150k!
| kaybe wrote:
| How much is an avocado in the US?
| vorpalhex wrote:
| About $0.60 for a small one, up to $1.20 for a large one.
|
| Parent is referencing this joke:
| https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/avocado-toast
| jlongr wrote:
| You're making some very large assumptions about the
| reader's circumstances and motivations:
|
| >you have 150k in the bank
|
| >no one is stopping you
|
| >the only reason you don't...
|
| Overall I think your response is not convincing. The
| problems of materialism are systemic because materialism
| is baked into the culture and institutions of the US.
| People are thus motivated to blame the system.
| paulryanrogers wrote:
| By what measure? (Not sure I disagree just curious)
| BLKNSLVR wrote:
| If I may attempt to answer it: Because it works for
| politicians, and the line of people behind the
| politicians with their left hands offering $X and their
| right hands demanding special treatment worth 100x$X.
| bosie wrote:
| whats the measure here?
| jkhdigital wrote:
| It's a good and fair question, and of course I'm going to
| dodge it because I wasn't prepared to defend my
| statement. Probably should have ended with a rhetorical
| question instead.
| toomanyducks wrote:
| This. It's really easy to view our neoliberal climate as
| wholly dependent on the individual when you're priveralaged
| and already, in some way, succeeding. I did, and then I came
| out as trans, and also as nonbinary. Now, 'the system' is so
| much more important. Old white men's opinions on my existence
| could take away my transition (both medical and social) and
| my life with enough effort, or they could simply deny efforts
| to improve it (as they so often do). And I can't imagine what
| it would be like to deal with this and/or be non-white,
| disabled, or non-rich, for a few examples. In some ways I'm
| lucky to understand both perspectives, but the perspective of
| the unprivelaged matters so much more.
|
| This is why I feel that an individual contribution from my
| life is not enough. No matter how many fires I put out in
| people's homes, there's still going to be that fucking
| arsonist.
| mc32 wrote:
| Economists just try to explain things. They don't make
| economics. The nation and enterprises big small in concert
| make an economic system. But, go back far enough in the past
| before nations and businesses and economics were still in
| play.
|
| It's like numbers, it exists even if we are ignorant of it.
| aaron-santos wrote:
| Normative[1] economics[2] is[3] definitely[4] a[5]
| thing[6].
|
| [1]
| https://www.investopedia.com/terms/n/normativeeconomics.asp
|
| [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Normative_economics
|
| [3] https://corporatefinanceinstitute.com/resources/knowled
| ge/ec...
|
| [4] https://marketbusinessnews.com/financial-
| glossary/normative-...
|
| [5] https://www.soas.ac.uk/cedep-
| demos/000_P570_IEEP_K3736-Demo/...
|
| [6] https://www.cairn.info/revue-d-economie-
| politique-2018-2-pag...
| Aerroon wrote:
| There are economists who try to explain things, but there
| are also economists who really want to influence
| policy/politics. It's hard to separate the two. After all,
| most economists of renown are advocates for some policy
| they think is best.
| vincentmarle wrote:
| Milton Friedman is a good example of an economist who
| actively tried to influence economic policy
| WC3w6pXxgGd wrote:
| Socialist economics don't try to do this?
| ryloric wrote:
| Explain things to what end? So that we can use those
| explanations to make economic decisions which they can
| explain again.
|
| Even the least prescriptive economist is going to be a part
| of this cycle.
| planet-and-halo wrote:
| Ideally that'd be true, but many economists are
| prescriptive and help make policy. (I also don't mean to
| pick on economists especially; many other intellectual
| enclaves have contributed to current management
| philosophies and national policies.)
| jkhdigital wrote:
| For all but the last ~150 years or so of human existence,
| meaning and purpose came almost exclusively from (1) raising a
| family and (2) religion. I think the cruelest tragedy of
| modernity is that we no longer teach our children that life can
| actually be quite rewarding and fulfilling outside of one's
| profession.
| cik wrote:
| To me this is a fascinating byproduct of North American
| life... especially having left. The reality is that that work
| is the least important part of my character - though it pays
| for things.
|
| I have no idea what the majority of people in my community
| do. We simply never discuss work, there's so much more
| between family, nature, and the goings on in the world. The
| complete reverse was true in North America - the first
| question after "what's your name" was invariably "what do you
| do".
| Sander_Marechal wrote:
| I am convinced that (organised) religion has done far more
| harm to the world than good.
| terminalcommand wrote:
| I beg to differ, this is way too simplistic. People pursued
| hobbies such as music, painting, theater, literature etc.
|
| Raising a family and religion were important, but I don't
| think people were very different from our times.
|
| To prove this just look at old folk musical instruments and
| their development. It is fascinating really.
| shakow wrote:
| > came almost exclusively from (1) raising a family and (2)
| religion
|
| And the military, and politics, and arts, and friends, and
| philosophy, and sciences, ...
|
| It's a big fat modern-times bias to imagine that our 19th
| century ancestors were so simplistic. Just read Zola or
| Dostoievski, many characters and/or situations could be
| transposed nearly intact in modern times.
| watwut wrote:
| That is quite literally not true. Ypu need just a brief look
| at history or antiquity to see that.
| sillysaurusx wrote:
| I went and did the other side, living nontraditionally and
| trying to be what I wanted.
|
| I just applied for a regular job. Because to be honest, it's
| gonna be pretty sweet having a fat bank account, even if it'll
| take till I'm 50 to have FU money.
|
| My current hypothesis is that the team is all that matters. The
| work can be the most boring, crud-type work. As long as you're
| working with people you like on something vaguely interesting,
| who cares?
|
| 20yo me would be mortified to hear myself say this, but the
| chances of either of us influencing the world is quite small.
| I'm happy I threw all of my effort into doing something I
| wanted, but my honest answer is that you're not really missing
| out on much.
|
| Relax and enjoy yourself. Most days, I end up wishing I'd had
| kids 5 years ago. It was nice to prioritize myself, but you
| can't prioritize a family you never focused on building.
|
| (I had no idea I even wanted a family or that it was important
| to me until about... 29?)
|
| I guess my point is, the "relax and enjoy yourself" mentality
| isn't so bad. No one will probably remember us the way they'll
| remember pg. But I've helped thousands of devs directly,
| whether in DMs or by contributing code, and I think I only care
| whether those folks might remember me.
|
| So that's the area you can really make an impact: on the people
| around you, in your day to day life.
|
| Maybe I'll wake up in a few years and realize this is a
| terrible mistake, but that seems unlikely.
| sangnoir wrote:
| > No one will probably remember us the way they'll remember
| pg.
|
| The older I get, the more the whole "legacy"/impact issue
| seems overhyped; pg (and everyone alive today) is not going
| to be remembered for long either; perhaps 2 more generations,
| and it's a wrap. No one is remembered forever. That thought
| keeps me rooted firmly in the present and on the immediate
| impact I can have.
|
| I have never been into poetry, but both versions of
| Ozymandias (Shelley's[1] and Smith's[2]) deeply resonated
| with me. I wholly agree with you, your impact, and your
| legacy, is with the people around you, in the here and now.
|
| 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ozymandias
|
| 2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ozymandias_(Smith)
| leoc wrote:
| This is all broadly true, but the fact that 'Ozymandias' is
| frickin' _Ramesses II_ does undermine the message of the
| poems a bit. Or more generously, it adds another level of
| depth to the point that someone 's future fame can't easily
| be predicted by looking at their current fame.
| vidarh wrote:
| But even Ramessess II is not really "remembered" by more
| than a tiny handful of people. Most people who recognize
| the name know nothing about him, and most would never
| come up with the name unprompted. Most knowledge about
| him is lost.
|
| We know him in the very abstract, not all much different
| to how we know the Ozymandias of the poems.
|
| Does that level of being remembered matter?
| leoc wrote:
| To the extent that being remembered after your death
| matters at all, then absolutely, yes. To go back to the
| original point of comparison, _many_ more people know
| Ramesses II now than have ever heard of Paul Graham, and
| this is when pg is still alive and probably near the all-
| time peak of his fame. There 's a relatively small, but
| not that small, number of people who can name some of
| Ramesses II's monuments or other achievements without
| looking them up. And there are many millions of people
| who are vaguely aware that he was one of the GOAT
| Pharaohs, and that was more or less the core objective of
| all the monument-building.
| silurese wrote:
| I mean, who knows what random selection of events will
| cause someone to slip through the crevasse of history
| into the future. Imagine being _the fossil_ that is found
| and paraded as the missing link between our species and
| the one that roams the earth 100,000 years from now, and
| Ramesses II nowhere to be found...
| tomjakubowski wrote:
| Rameses's legacy did enjoy a brief revival in the West as
| a brand of condoms.
|
| https://daily.jstor.org/short-history-of-the-condom/
| Ma8ee wrote:
| I'm just a grain of sand, briefly resting in the dune,
| before the next gush of wind, and I'm gone.
| agentwiggles wrote:
| I've always found this goofy copypasta version of the poem
| to be really funny, because even in the silly voice it
| assumes, it still manages to capture something of the
| essence of the piece. Even as written here, that last line
| has a certain power and resonance: I met
| a traveller from way the hell off who said: two
| gigantic, fucked-up rock legs be out there in the
| middle of goddamn nowhere right next to them
| covered in shit some kinda big face looked pretty
| pissed & upset & whatnot all damn covered in words
| "yo ozymandias here, this my shit" "better than
| your shit, get fucked buddy" not much else tho,
| just sand shitloads of sand all over the place
| tailspin2019 wrote:
| For some reason, I enjoyed this very much
| overthemoon wrote:
| > My current hypothesis is that the team is all that matters.
|
| Man. One of the worst jobs I've ever had was working as a
| paralegal in a law office, but I had two friends there that
| made it so much fun. We'd send each other emails making fun
| of the attorneys (obviously a risk but the IT person was a
| friend), joking around, talking about the future, sending
| dumb memes and getting hammered after work.
|
| After that, I got my first dev gig working with one of my
| closest friends, and it was a blast.
|
| Now I'm working for a company doing really cool stuff, but I
| don't really know the people I work with and it's sort of a
| cold environment, and I feel like I'm stagnating. I really,
| really think there's something to what you said. They're not
| bad people, not by a long shot, and maybe something will
| develop, but the camaraderie I had at the law office gig was
| special, and I miss it.
|
| My goals have narrowed: be a good father and husband, serve
| my community in whatever way I can, write fiction when I can.
| I think that's good. I also don't hold it against myself that
| I had loftier, maybe unrealistic, goals when I was younger.
| People change.
| TecoAndJix wrote:
| This whole thread makes me think of this comic (it's more
| cynical the older you get). "What do you want to be when
| you give up"?
|
| https://joedator.com/cartoons/what-do-you-want-to-be-when-
| yo...
| overthemoon wrote:
| Ha, yeah. My past self would be horrified by what I
| wrote. But he also got into a lot of student debt and
| couldn't talk to girls, so. What the fuck does he know.
| agent008t wrote:
| Just curious - why/how did you decide to have kids at 29?
|
| I can see mostly disadvantages to having children. Perhaps a
| nice highlights reel, but the daily grind sounds miserable.
| Having a cat seems like a much better deal. This sums up my
| sentiment: https://theoatmeal.com/comics/baby_vs_cat
|
| You seem to have a different opinion, so I wonder if it is
| just a matter of preference of if your perspective is very
| different to mine?
| freedomben wrote:
| You don't deserve those downvotes. I think you ask a great
| question!
|
| I chose to have kids, but one of my best friends chose not
| to have kids. I sometimes regret it (though never
| seriously), he deeply regrets it. He had a lot of cool
| stuff and got to travel the world for many years, which I
| always wished I could do too. He was always doing fun
| stuff, even as simple as going on beer runs on the weekend
| (literally the club he was in would drink beer and go
| running. They had a blast). In his early 50s his wife was
| diagnosed with terminal cancer. During that period both he
| and her went through profound regret. She would pass on
| nothing, and he would be completely alone when she was
| gone.
|
| I also firmly believe that there is a level of
| growth/maturity that you can't reach without going through
| the crucible of kids. I have never met a person who didn't
| say that having kids was one of the hardest things they
| ever did but helped them grow and see life in a different
| way like nothing else could.
|
| Also don't forget the Michael Scott reason for having kids:
| they can't say no to being your friend[1]
|
| [1]: https://www.reddit.com/r/DunderMifflin/comments/20u728
| /i_wan...
| leoedin wrote:
| I've got a 14 month year old. The daily grind is
| relentless. But it's not miserable. I've watched a tiny
| helpless creature turn into a curious little person who can
| walk around and play with things, who gives me big smiles
| and hugs when he sees me, who takes real joy in such stupid
| things (current obsession: bike helmets). It's hard to
| quantify why that's a good thing - much like to many of my
| friends the idea of voluntarily spending an evening writing
| software that's different to the stuff I do at work all day
| also seems completely crazy.
|
| Sure, there's low points, but there's also high points
| every single day.
| agent008t wrote:
| But how did you decide that this is what you wanted? It
| is a big, life-changing decision to make. Did you wake up
| one morning and think, 'you know what, having a child
| would really make my life a lot better'? Or had you been
| looking forward to becoming a parent from an early age,
| and were just looking for the right time?
|
| E.g. I certainly didn't even think of it when I was 16 -
| I was dreaming of other things. Nothing much changed at
| 25. In my 30s, I am only considering it because it is
| part of the 'life script' and 'now or never' kind of
| situation, not because I can't wait to do it. Was it
| different for you? In an ideal world, I would maybe do it
| when I'm retired in my late 50s and 60s. I.e. I would
| prefer to skip children and go straight to grandchildren.
| leoedin wrote:
| It's an interesting question - I'm not sure there was
| ever a lightbulb moment. I think I've always thought "I
| will have kids some day" - even as a teenager. How much
| of that is just following the societal norms I don't
| know. I enjoy playing with kids though - maybe that
| contributed to that feeling. I'd say by the time I was 26
| or 27 I was fairly sure I wanted kids soon (helped by
| being in a stable long term relationship). I was 29 when
| my son was born.
|
| One thing you become aware of quite quickly when you
| start seriously looking into kids is that the biological
| realities are much harsher than society leads you to
| believe. Having kids when the mum is much over 35 gets
| really difficult really quickly. Once I realised that,
| knowing that I did want children eventually, it made the
| decision to expedite things easier. I decided I'd rather
| make the leap sooner than regret it.
|
| I don't think it's a very logical decision though -
| interestingly I think a lot of the people I know with
| children today were quite impulsive and of-the-moment in
| their early 20s. The more sensible ones haven't had kids
| yet - perhaps because it's hard to make a reasoned
| decision about it.
| oefnak wrote:
| For me it played a big role that I wanted my kids to have
| grandparents for as long as possible, since I lost mine
| relatively early. Also the other way around, for my
| parents it is nice to have grandchildren now too.
| agent008t wrote:
| Sure, these are valid considerations once you have
| decided to have children. It is the 'how' and 'why' of
| even deciding to have children that I am curious about.
|
| I mean, were you in your early 20s, grinding leetcode,
| thinking "can't wait to become a parent"? Or was it more
| of "I want to have had children when I am 65, so even
| though I'm not over the moon about it right now it is
| what it is, I'll just go with it"? Or "all my friends and
| relatives are doing it, so it never even occurred to me
| that I had other options"?
| sillysaurusx wrote:
| I didn't expect to want to.
|
| My wife originally wanted to, and like you, I was...
| reticent. My feelings at the time seem similar to yours
| here.
|
| All I can say is, having a solid partner -- one that I can
| absolutely count on, and believe in -- helped me unwind. I
| was able to set aside my original concerns and think long-
| term.
|
| Here's where we may differ: I've always loved playing with
| kids. There's something magical about seeing them learn
| things, interact with the world for the first time, and to
| just screw around and enjoy life without the normal adult
| concerns. After all, when you're a kid, you have endless
| time and all you want to do is play. Chilling with kids and
| playing games with them has always appealed to me.
|
| There's also a stigma attached to that, when you're a male.
| If I was female, lots of people would feel "Oh, that's
| cute!" but when you're a man, I inevitably felt like I
| should hide that aspect of myself. After all, everyone
| knows that it's dangerous or creepy for older men to hang
| around with kids, right?
|
| It wasn't till my wife's sister had kids of their own that
| I was able to get over this. Once they got to 2yo or so, it
| all clicked for me. I remember playing the "colors" game
| with Eloise -- she was quizzing me about the different
| crayon colors, and it was so cool to watch her learn about
| orange. I don't remember exactly what she learned, but it
| was sort of an "aha" moment of orange being halfway between
| yellow and red.
|
| From then on, I was sold, and decided I wanted kids of my
| own. Wiping their butts and being woken up with screams
| will just be a part of the process for me, and I won't mind
| at all. (Easy to say that now, I'm sure.) But, for example,
| you probably feel the same way about cleaning out the
| litterbox for your kitty; an annoyance, sure, but it's a
| labor of love.
|
| That labor of love is a strength for me. It's what allowed
| me to ultimately be fine with abandoning my old (current)
| way of life and return to "the daily grind," as people
| might like to call it. My wife and I have been trying to
| have kids for a couple years, and haven't had success. I
| always felt like, well, whenever the kids come around, I'll
| go get a traditional job and be family guy. But then one
| night, I realized "You know, IVF is hugely expensive. I
| could go get a job right now, and we'd save up enough to
| get it done within just a few months."
|
| It wasn't an easy decision, but once I made it, it was easy
| to follow. I want some kiddos to teach things to, hang out
| with, and occasionally learn from. My motives are no more
| complicated than that.
|
| You'll feel differently. If you're young, all I can say is,
| expect yourself to change over time. The only thing you can
| count on is that how you feel today probably won't be your
| feelings forever.
|
| If you're less young, then there's really nothing wrong
| with not having kids. There's a stigma against that too,
| which I think is bogus. It's simply a question of what you
| want out of life.
|
| By the time http://www.paulgraham.com/kids.html came out, I
| was nodding along with that entire essay. Perhaps it'll
| help elucidate some of the feelings here. But a simpler way
| to put it is, "one day something activated in my brain --
| some kind of primal instinct -- and from then till now, the
| desire to have kids has been a source of strength."
| asimjalis wrote:
| I can totally relate to this. The most valuable thing I have
| retained from all of my previous jobs has been the
| relationships many of which are ongoing.
|
| Once I realized this it occurred to me that instead of trying
| to optimize for accomplishment I need to optimize for these
| relationships. This changes the game.
|
| This also explains an economic paradox. Why does our
| compensation go up when we switch jobs?
|
| The reason is because each job switch opens us up to new
| opportunities to build relationships.
| borroka wrote:
| "This also explains an economic paradox. Why does our
| compensation go up when we switch jobs?"
|
| Is it a paradox only if you take for true the existence
| homo or company economicus
| Volrath89 wrote:
| One of the best comments I've read in a long time. The
| importance of a steady paycheck is underrated, especially for
| peace of mind.
|
| I'm in a point of life that I actually long for easy and laid
| back CRUD-style jobs where one can do everything easily,
| quickly, be productive and also work a reasonable amount of
| hours and can stop thinking about work after signing off.
|
| I recently had to start a new front end using just jquery
| (customer requirement) and oh boy, I felt so much productive
| compared to react/angular
| pnutjam wrote:
| I started a family early and clawed my way up the income
| ladder until I mostly make enough to support my 6 kids and
| wife.
|
| It's been tough, but I wouldn't change it. I try to
| concentrate on helping where I can. I think our mission is to
| try and make the world just a bit better for at least the
| people around you. Do good and avoid creating hurt in the
| process.
| onion2k wrote:
| _I just applied for a regular job. Because to be honest, it's
| gonna be pretty sweet having a fat bank account, even if
| it'll take till I'm 50 to have FU money._
|
| You will never have FU money working a regular job.
| sillysaurusx wrote:
| One key difference is that my wife is a badass React
| engineer. She's a more capable dev than I am in many
| respects -- perhaps most of them.
|
| With her salary covering life expenses, my salary will be
| going straight into the bank. That means I can aim as high
| as I want; the higher, the quicker we'll hit that $1M mark.
| I estimate somewhere in the 10 to 15 year range, which also
| happens to coincide nicely with the (unfortunate)
| transition toward management as you get older, since that
| tends to come with yet more pay boost.
|
| $1M isn't a lot. But it's FU money for us, because we have
| simple tastes. Fooling around with electronics, traveling
| wherever we want, having a multi-floor house; these things
| are doable on much less than a mil.
|
| So you're right. I won't be buying a Tesla on a whim. But I
| won't want to.
|
| We're immensely privileged as software engineers to have
| this kind of leverage. Most people -- the vast, vast
| majority of the world -- don't lead such comfortable lives.
| I intend to exploit that privilege to the fullest, in order
| to build the best life possible for my kiddos.
|
| Then watch as they screw it all up, ha. But I'm fine with
| that too.
| indigochill wrote:
| You can, if circumstances allow. Have no debt, make a
| software engineer's salary, and live on half of it. Put the
| rest in mutual funds. Repeat for some number of years and
| your investments' passive income eventually surpasses your
| budget, at which point you're free from the rat race.
|
| The part people find unpalatable (and sometimes impossible,
| depending on circumstances) is the "live on half of it"
| part (but even if half is impossible, it's still worth
| investing what you can).
|
| I'm not even making US software money and my budget says I
| can reach FU money (which, to be clear, means matching my
| current low-budget lifestyle, which is why it's achievable)
| in 5 years if no other major expenses come up.
|
| I did decide to prioritize charitable giving because of the
| reasons elsewhere discussed about service being its own
| reward, but that only pushed it out to ~11, which is still
| a couple decades earlier than the typical retirement age.
|
| Plus, when I'm gone, I can pass that income generator on to
| someone else and free them from the rat race, giving the
| next generation an even better headstart than I had.
| onion2k wrote:
| That's a great goal, but you're confusing simply having
| money with having FU money. They're not the same. The
| "FU" bit is important. It means something.
|
| To be honest, even your strategy there sounds
| tremendously flawed because you're assuming that you'll
| even want to live that life. What happens if you meet
| someone, get married, and have a couple of kids after you
| 'retire'? Suddenly your retirement fund is nowhere near
| enough. A simple example - how do you pay for your kids
| to go to college? You think you've got "FU money" so
| surely you can do something as straightforward as saving
| your kids from college debt. What if they're brilliant
| and get places at Stanford? Is your 'live on the interest
| from half the earnings of 11 years as an engineer' going
| to cover $500k in 20 years time? Of course not. You'd
| need to dip in to the capital, and then your whole
| retirement plan falls apart.
|
| Having FU money, as opposed to just plain simple money,
| means you will be able to afford all those things and
| more besides because you are _genuinely FU rich_. You don
| 't get there by having a normal job, even if it pays a
| lot and you can invest half your income. That just gets
| you a nice middle-class retirement, which is lovely, but
| you won't be _rich_.
| justinclift wrote:
| > how do you pay for your kids to go to college?
|
| Just to point out, there are some _really_ good college's
| in the EU that don't cost $$$. eg:
|
| https://leverageedu.com/blog/free-universities-in-
| germany/ (random page about it)
| ElFitz wrote:
| As a matter of fact, France raised it's tuition fees for
| foreigners, in part because their universities were seen
| as _suspiciously not expensive enough_.
|
| Which I totally get, but find hilarious nonetheless.
| ElFitz wrote:
| > Is your 'live on the interest from half the earnings of
| 11 years as an engineer' going to cover $500k in 20 years
| time?
|
| Most people won't ever be able to do that, no matter how
| much they save of what they earn.
|
| Also, cost of living is another huge factor here. Housing
| isn't always as expensive as it is in the Bay Area, and
| some countries have good (even sometimes great) free
| education. Heck, in some, _you are paid_ to attend the
| top schools.
|
| FU money isn't about being rich. It's about being able to
| keep living the life you want even in the event you were
| to tell your boss or the world to fuck off.
|
| So... in this... everyone's goal would be different, and
| yours is not his?
|
| If my kids wanted to go to a half-million dollars
| university, I'd just burst out laughing and ask them how
| they expect to pay for that. If they were to reply that
| _they_ expected _me_ to, I'd probably laugh them out of
| the room.
| onion2k wrote:
| Well in that case you're saying FU to your children
| instead of the bank that's loaning them college money. If
| you had _actual_ FU money you 'd be able to pay...
| ElFitz wrote:
| FU money isn't about being able to satisfy every whim and
| hold up to anyone else's standard.
|
| Almost nobody in the whole world can afford to send their
| children off to a $500k college.
|
| Not even after saving up half of _everything_ they've
| earned across their _entire_ life. I don't care much
| about holding myself up to such an unreasonable standard.
|
| Noboxy in the world is _entitled_ to expect anyone else
| to pony up such an amount of money for them either.
|
| If I can
|
| - put a roof over their head,
|
| - clothes on their backs,
|
| - feed them well every day,
|
| - provide them a good health insurance,
|
| - send them to school
|
| - and afford one or two extra-curricular activities
|
| - as well as one or two vacations, preferably abroad, a
| year,
|
| I'll have more and be able to provide them with more than
| most people ever had, have and expect to be able to in
| their entire lives.
|
| If I can do so without ever needing to work again, it
| _absolutely_ is enough _for me_ to tell any employer to
| go find someone else to do the job and please don't let
| the door hit them on their way out.
|
| To me, anything more is an extra nice to have that I
| don't _owe_ to anybody.
|
| You appear to have a different point of view. That's
| fine. To hold yourself to a different standard. That's
| okay too. It's your life.
|
| You also seem to have a hard time grasping that different
| people have different needs, and to consider that
| everybody else should abide by your standards.
|
| This, well... is fine too, I guess.
| borroka wrote:
| The obsession of Americans with "how do you pay for your
| kids to go to college?" is truly bizarre to my non-US
| eyes (I am living in the US). They are adults when they
| go to college, there are merit-based scholarships, sports
| scholarships, they can work some, maybe I could loan some
| money. If you cannot afford Harvard or Stanford, don't go
| to either. I did not, I did fine, and I would not
| contribute with my money to those institutions.
|
| I got zero money from my parents after I turned 17, and
| the bare minimum before that, and I would have felt
| inadequate as a young adult if I had taken money from
| them, which they did not have in any case. Exception
| exists (e.g. disabilities).
| xapata wrote:
| Compounding growth does fine.
| kebman wrote:
| Assuming the Fed keeps printing more.
| xapata wrote:
| Yeah, yeah, I'm assuming the US government stays solvent.
| bkirkby wrote:
| 15 years ago a young engineer i worked with overheard me
| say "getting rich is a pretty easy formula if you are
| patient."
|
| he came to me later and asked me to expound. i told him
| "the formula is: spend less than you make and invest the
| left over. you do that long enough and you'll become
| wealthy."
|
| i also told him "from what i can tell, it will happen so
| gradually that you'll barely notice a difference in your
| lifestyle. you will just realize one day that you are part
| of the maligned upper-crust but noone around you will know
| that."
|
| he called me 2 years ago to let me know that he took my
| observation to heart and he's now in the millionaire club.
| he also said "the books say i'm a millionaire, but i
| certainly don't feel like it."
|
| his next million will be much easier to get now and he just
| turned 40.
| sokoloff wrote:
| I'm not a Mustachian by any means, but this post
| resonated pretty strongly with me when it first came out:
| https://www.mrmoneymustache.com/2012/01/13/the-
| shockingly-si...
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| What is the point of this story? This will objectively
| never happen for anyone with a "regular" job, I.e.
| anywhere within 1 standard deviation or less of the
| median income.
|
| Also, counting a home's net worth in assets does not make
| sense to me unless you can afford to greatly downsize at
| anytime and the market is liquid.
| beckingz wrote:
| If you invest $500 per month for 40 years and get 6%
| interest, you'll end up with almost a million dollars.
|
| $6,000 per year is a significant portion of your take-
| home income if you're making the median income in the US,
| but it's possible.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| Having $1M (or even $2M or $3M) 40 years in the future is
| not FU money. Not to mention that if you are unemployable
| anyway due to old age, you do not need to say FU to
| anyone in the first place.
| splitstud wrote:
| There is no set amount you need to make or save. The goal
| is to learn what you don't need. One of the things you
| don't need is to say FU.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| The thread stems from onion2k's claim that a regular job
| will never get you to "FU money".
| freedomben wrote:
| Brian! Long time no see my man. HN is a small world ;-)
| sumtechguy wrote:
| I have followed this and am on track to having a nice sum
| when I decide to retire. I look at that pile. Divide it
| by what I make now per year. That number is the number I
| could coast and not have to 'worry' about money with 0
| change in lifestyle. I then add that to my current age
| and figure out where I should run out when I am old. That
| number is currently not far enough along for my liking. I
| am also doing _ridiculously_ better than many of my peers
| on this. As many do not even understand that many
| companies _give_ you money to put money into a 401k.
|
| Realistically though back when being a millionaire meant
| 'retire immediately' things were much cheaper. You could
| get a car for 3-4k. Now a similar car would be 30-40k.
| You could say 'oh but that car is so much better'. That
| is true, but this 10x is mostly true across most goods I
| have found. I think many do not realize what a number
| inflation did on everyone in the late 70s and very early
| 80s. So many of these 'sayings' are still around but
| their numbers off by a factor of 10.
| jonfw wrote:
| A car that you could buy for a few thousand today is much
| more capable than the cars people bought for a few
| thousand in the past.
|
| New cars are status symbols or toys. I never understood
| how people could trade a human's full time salary for a
| car. People take old cars to work every day for a small
| fraction of the cost.
|
| American lifestyles have inflated much more than the
| price of comparable goods. Average home size is way up
| over time, people prepare less of their own food, people
| buy fancy big cars with lots of horsepower and
| unnecessary capability.
|
| I would complain about iphones and big TVs but in
| reality- the only things relevant to most of our budgets
| are our insistence to compete for the hottest real estate
| and new cars
| sumtechguy wrote:
| I was hesitant to use the car example exactly because of
| this argument. My point was if you wanted a new car you
| paid 3-4k. Now a similar new car would be 30-40k. Oh sure
| it is all around a better car. You can however see the
| same approximate scale in many goods. Such as food and
| big ticket items (like refrigerators, lawn mowers, etc).
| What made cars much better is better manufacturing
| allowed by the use of computers (both in the manufacture
| and in the car). Adding a few dozen controller nodes does
| not add nearly 30k to the value of a car. Most of that is
| inflation. Before the inflation hit in the 70s my parents
| bought a home for about 14k. Last time I looked if they
| wanted to sell it was around 120-140k. I have not looked
| but I would take a guess that a 'used car' price would
| scale depending on model and usage with current used car
| prices and age of the car.
|
| Conspicuous consumption of goods is a interesting
| argument and probably worth talking about. But my point
| was scale and inflation.
| AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote:
| That depends entirely on your salary and your lifestyle. If
| I made some of the numbers that HNers throw around I'd have
| FU money in less than a decade.
| ikiris wrote:
| you can totally have FU money working a regular job if the
| job pays well enough.
|
| There are plenty of them out there.
| PaulRobinson wrote:
| That's just nonsense advice. The entire point of retirement
| savings is that at some point you can stop working. FU
| money is just about timing. You can change that timing.
|
| 1. Reduce outgoings. It's easier to have FU money if the
| amount you need to be able to say "FU" is smaller, because
| you've perfected the art of living on a little less than
| most. Most people's outgoings grow to meet their incomes:
| resist that. You don't need to recycle everything you touch
| and grow your own food to make good headway here.
|
| 2. Take your age, halve it. That number is the percentage
| of your gross income you should be putting away each month
| into retirement and savings if you haven't started already.
| Yes, it's hard at the beginning, so have it happen
| automatically through employer deductions (common in the UK
| for pensions, not sure about elsewhere), or on payday move
| a %age automatically into a savings or investment account
| so you get used to living without it. I still struggle to
| do this but am getting better.
|
| 3. Learn about compound returns a little more. $500 a month
| at 8% (typical market returns recently), and over 10 years
| gives you back $92k - a $32k profit on the $60k you put in.
| Whether that's FU money is dependent on whether your
| outgoings are $50k/year or $150k/year. Keep going for
| another 10 years, and you're not far off $300k which isn't
| bad for the $120k it cost you. Think you can keep going
| into your fifties and do another decade? $750k off the back
| of a $180k investment. Is this not FU money yet? You're the
| problem, not the regular job.
|
| Your chances of having FU money working a regular job are
| far, far higher than having it any other way. It's just too
| many people are trying to retire in their 20s and not
| getting it: that's not a very likely outcome, no matter how
| hard you work or how smart you are.
| bryanrasmussen wrote:
| >Your chances of having FU money working a regular job
| are far, far higher than having it any other way.
|
| in the U.S working a regular but relatively high paying
| job like developer should give you FU money right about
| the time that you start to experience health problems
| that will then eat into that FU money leaving you
| nothing.
|
| There's a reason the song is Birth, School, Work, Death
| without any FU inside the comma separated list.
| csomar wrote:
| > Learn about compound returns a little more. $500 a
| month at 8% (typical market returns recently), and over
| 10 years gives you back $92k - a $32k profit on the $60k
| you put in.
|
| You might want to update your models. If interest rates
| will remain at 0 (or get negative like in Europe), you'd
| be lucky with 0-1% return.
| Godel_unicode wrote:
| There are plenty of asset classes which are quite safe
| and return >5%. Saving money in a "savings" account was
| never a good idea (outside of an emergency fund).
| kcatskcolbdi wrote:
| I'm assuming you mean a real yield and not nominal. Lower
| interest rates should provide even higher nominal yields.
| onion2k wrote:
| _Is this not FU money yet? You 're the problem, not the
| regular job._
|
| I think we have _very_ different ideas of what "FU
| money" means. FU money is literally enough to be able to
| do what you want. It's being able to stop asking "Can I
| afford this?" because you definitely can. It's being able
| to stop making a choice between two sports cars because
| you can afford both. It's being able to buy the exact
| house you want because you can approach the current owner
| and make an offer they'd be stupid to turn down. FU money
| is literally the ability to say FU and do something
| anyway when someone says you can't.
|
| Having enough money to retire a bit earlier if you live a
| relatively simple life and save a lot is not FU money.
|
| _$750k off the back of a $180k investment. Is this not
| FU money yet?_
|
| $750k is barely the down payment on a nice Bay Area
| family house. Of course it isn't FU money. You're not
| saying "FU" to anyone if you're also saying "I can't
| afford the house I want so I'll choose a more reasonable
| one."
| skybrian wrote:
| When I first heard the phrase, it was enough savings to
| quit your job without having another lined up? I guess
| people have different definitions.
| solveit wrote:
| > FU money is literally the ability to say FU and do
| something anyway when someone says you can't.
|
| I always thought FU money was enough money that you can
| say FU and _not_ do something when someone says you have
| to. That is, enough money to retire (get fired) on a
| whim. Of course, even by that definition, 750k isn 't FU
| money unless you're single in a LCOL area (or fairly
| close to a predictable death, I guess).
|
| My personal criterion for FU money is 3mm. This is fairly
| achievable, market willing, if you have make six figures.
| inglor_cz wrote:
| If you are willing to move to another country ... 750k
| would be FU money in Czechia. Even for a family of four.
| varjag wrote:
| That's not the original definition.
|
| FU money is being able to say fuck you to anyone
| (including your boss) without consequences derailing your
| life.
| roland35 wrote:
| I agree with this definition. A lot of factors go into it
| - how much cash you have in your bank account, how easy
| it is for you to pick up a new job, etc. Having "FU"
| money doesn't mean you have to quit your job at the
| slightest transgression, but rather you are not desperate
| for the paycheck and can thus stand up for yourself. This
| in itself is liberating!
|
| At the very beginning of my career I worked in the lab
| for 36 hours straight trying to finish a project on a
| tight deadline. I didn't have any "FU" money at that
| point obviously. If someone asked me to do that today,
| there would be no way! I wouldn't quit over it
| necessarily, but I would still be OK financially if I was
| fired for saying "your deadline is ridiculous!"
| jonfw wrote:
| Of course it isn't FU money if you insist on buying
| outrageously overvalued cars and real estate. There is no
| limit to the amount of money you need to play that game
| to receive increasingly marginal returns. You can be a
| small time billionaire and fool yourself into thinking
| you don't have FU money because you'd have to make
| sacrifices to buy that yacht you've been eyeballing
| gizmondo wrote:
| > FU money is literally the ability to say FU and do
| something anyway when someone says you can't.
|
| So how much does it cost to travel to Alpha Centauri and
| back?
|
| There are always things you can't afford, no matter how
| rich you are. So that's a bad definition.
| SpaghettiX wrote:
| I believe FU money is not about how much you earn, it's
| about how much you save vs. spend. I can afford to stop
| working for more than a year, even though I'm not 25 yet, I
| would gladly say I have FU money. It's because I don't
| spend much.
| borroka wrote:
| That's not FU money, that's enough money not to work for
| one year. At the end of the year, you cannot, in this
| context, say FU to anybody.
| icandoit wrote:
| He can say FU some fraction of his time.
|
| The recipe is simple. If you spend 50% of what you make,
| then you only have to work 50% of your life. If you spend
| 10% of what you make, then you only have to work 10% of
| your life.
|
| Turn off all sources of marketing and watch your free
| time and savings swell.
| borroka wrote:
| I wasn't discussing lifestyles, I was discussing the
| meaning of the term "FU money". Otherwise, I could say
| that with a good 17 seconds flat in the 100 meter dash
| I'm well on my way to the Olympics.
| xwolfi wrote:
| I smiled at "changing the world". It's very funny we think
| about the world as if it needed changing, had the ability to
| change in a lifetime or that it was remotely interested in
| our own opinion of it.
|
| It's probable most people in the world, the majority being
| Chinese and Indian, would strongly disagree with what you
| think it should be. If not, it's the africans and the
| europeans who would.
|
| I have a huge amount of agency in my life, simply because I
| can live with little money, enjoy obeying and building stuff
| in teams, can be useful and accept sacrifice, so I moved
| across the world to work in investment banks and it's
| striking how similar yet different people are, and hows silly
| 20-something are in speaking of changing "the world".
|
| Something I hear a lot around me that I also apply a lot is
| to "pick your battles". There are things that are pointless
| to fight over, others you can and must. And you see the
| frustrated spinning around behind you on detail why you
| slowly but surely build the bigger picture.
|
| Start by changing your hometown, already a feat :D
| Juliate wrote:
| > My current hypothesis is that the team is all that matters.
|
| That's me 6 years ago. After having invested too much on the
| type of work/mission and found that this was not it.
|
| From the past 6 years and 2 companies where I tried this
| hypothesis, I can say that the work _structure_ (chaos, or
| hyper-bureaucratic, or anywhere in between, going either way)
| and the work _mission_ do matter a lot too in the end. It's
| an intricate balance.
|
| The work _structure_ mandates how your team will jell, or
| dismantle, over time and tasks. The thousands of paper cuts
| due to the transformations from start to scale to profitable
| and compliant can really turn mad the unprepared.
|
| The work _mission_ mandates how much/long you will endure the
| paper cuts.
|
| But yes, the team and the people is still what you should
| invest on: that's the only area where your loyalty matters,
| if only because that's only there that you can find
| reciprocity.
|
| The company, the structure, the mission are just some paper
| fiction that pay and pass; and there's thousands of them.
|
| Moreover, these days, most of the missions (in IT at least)
| are even more ludicrous compared to the existential challenge
| that's ahead of us.
|
| So yes, we better relax, enjoy the people around us in the
| settings we have, be nice and do what's sensible to do.
| jkhdigital wrote:
| Amen. I'm a sober alcoholic, and if I died tomorrow I'd be
| content knowing that I did at least one worthwhile thing with
| the time I had: I helped another alcoholic, a 23 year old man
| who tried to kill himself shortly before I met him, get sober
| and start working and move out of his mom's basement and
| stand up straight and look other people in the eyes and then
| go and help a few other people stop drinking.
|
| Not a single professional accomplishment is within an order
| of magnitude of that level of fulfillment. Just help one
| f*cking person become more than they thought they could be
| and you'll die happy--why didn't they tell us it was this
| simple?
| tailspin2019 wrote:
| Amazing. Inspiring. Thanks for writing this.
| castlecrasher2 wrote:
| >why didn't they tell us it was this simple?
|
| Say what you want about the ills that come with it, but
| religion has been telling us this since the dawn of time.
| sokoloff wrote:
| > why didn't they tell us it was this simple?
|
| I suspect different people probably did try to tell me
| versions of that, but it's very hard to learn deep feelings
| from hearing other people talk or reading their words as
| compared to living it yourself. You can read about others'
| heartbreak but you learn from your first few breakups. You
| can read about having kids but nothing prepares you for the
| deep feelings of parenting.
|
| Maybe being doomed to repeat the learnings others have had
| is part of the point?
| BLKNSLVR wrote:
| That brings up an old memory for me: I used to work as a
| lifeguard at a pool for three or four years as I was going
| through uni. Nothing glamorous in that work, it's just very
| loosely managing young males showing off in front of young
| females. Except this one time some kid jumped in the deep
| end and whilst he surfaced, he couldn't reach the top of
| the side of the pool in order to stay at the surface, he
| was clutching at the side with that unmistakeable, wide-
| eyed panic face. I reached down, pulled him out, and he ran
| off to his mum / friends / whatever, I never saw him again.
| Was a three second interaction from seeing it to him being
| back on dry land.
|
| Possibly the best thing I've ever done in my life, and it
| was in my late teens. I get satisfaction from my
| intellectuality and general smarts, but for it really
| brighten my soul, it has to positively affect other people.
|
| The bottom line is a demanding bitch and no matter how much
| you give it will ask for ever more. A positive change in a
| fellow human being is intrinsically, life-affirmingly
| satisfying; even just a single-serve in a lifetime.
| malydok wrote:
| It's an interesting fact that one could save many lives
| by donating to charities and yet wouldn't feel quite the
| same way about it. Clicking "donate" on a screen and
| filling in credit card details isn't as thrilling an
| experience as yours even if it achieves no less.
| Godel_unicode wrote:
| This nicely encapsulates why our society sucks. Helping
| people you can't see doesn't provide the self-
| congratulation dopamine hit, thus people don't do it.
| TimTheTinker wrote:
| That's why charities ought to be small, local operations
| helped chiefly by local volunteers and only secondarily
| by donations.
| bluefirebrand wrote:
| Charities aren't appealing not just because you don't
| feel as connected to outcomes, but because we know many
| of them pay out big paycheques to execs and other
| overhead to the point where barely any of our donations
| are put to good use.
|
| Maybe just being cynical about it, but if I help out at a
| soup kitchen I know I'm helping people, when I donate I
| am just getting a tax credit and boosting a charity's
| executive bonuses.
| linspace wrote:
| I don't think it's about being cynical and more about
| proximity. I'm not as pessimistic about charities. We
| don't get the same good feelings helping people we don't
| know for the same reason we don't care about all the
| people that is suffering right now.
| sunshineforever wrote:
| On this note, my parents have been in contact with a
| African woman for years who they helped via one of those
| child sponsorship programs. Shes an adult now and
| literally yesterday she called and texted my Mom via her
| own funds and everything. It doesn't seem like a petty
| thing after all.
| 0-_-0 wrote:
| I vaguely recall a study where they took suicidal people
| and employed them as lifeguards with great results.
| josephg wrote:
| It makes a lot of sense. There's two types of depression
| (though their names elude me). There's depression where
| there's something wrong with your brain - and despite
| having a great life, your brain makes sad chemicals
| instead of happy ones. And then there's depression where
| you feel sad because your life is missing purpose and
| meaning. Ie, being the person you are with the life you
| have, depression is a healthy response.
|
| Most depression is the second type. So I'm not surprised
| giving people purpose shows great results. It would have
| for me, too.
| [deleted]
| mlengineerio wrote:
| Not saving life but I directly and indirectly help dozen
| of people get into top companies. It's an amazing feeling
| when you see someone success because of you. To some
| extent, I felt like I'm reliving the offer experience
| over and over. In a way, I changed some people life and I
| felt oddly content.
| rpsw wrote:
| I also have a similar memory as a teenager swimming in a
| river. A young boy was on his own, with only his face
| above the water, with said wide-eyed expression. I asked
| him if he needed help, he managed to say yes, and I
| pushed him to the river bank. He ran back to his family.
|
| I heard his mum giving out to his older brothers for not
| watching him. There is a good chance that young boy would
| have run out of energy and slipped under the surface with
| no one noticing. It's a nice thought that I may have
| saved his life and also saved his family from all the
| grief and guilt that would have caused. I doubt he
| remembers it - not that it matters.
| hammock wrote:
| If you like these life-saving type of experiences, I
| encourage adrenaline sports. Whitewater kayaking, big
| mountain skiing, etc. Having done these for years I can
| say there are opportunities every season to save a life
| and to have my own saved by someone else. It is
| exhilarating.
| atatatat wrote:
| Thank you.
| TriNetra wrote:
| When we do a selfless act we experience the joy from our
| soul - that's what we're truly are: an eternal, complete
| drop in the infinite ocean of pure consciousness. Our ego
| (which makes us feel that we're separate from others) binds
| us in layers and layers of conditioning, of labels and
| engages us in selfish acts, which only brings suffering and
| stress. Read about this discourse from Buddha to understand
| what we're missing - The Fruits of the Contemplative Life:
| https://www.dhammatalks.org/suttas/DN/DN02.html
| 6510 wrote:
| The whole society seems designed top down to keep us
| fighting and arguing, live at the expense of others is the
| mantra. It seems it took a lot of engineering to get us
| this far from our natural state of caring. The Chinese seem
| to indoctrinate with a slightly different model where you
| are to believe society comes before the individual.
|
| The sensible model seems rather obvious: One has to
| organize their own show before one is of [much] use to
| others. Until that time one should give the others the
| opportunity to help you with that and be grateful. Its not
| an embarrassment if you plan to do the same.
| ehnto wrote:
| There has been a cost to individualism no doubt. There
| are a few culutures where, generally, the community comes
| first.
|
| I think you can cultivate that in a small way though, by
| taking part in volunteer programs in your community. I
| know it's a cliche recommendation but if you are feeling
| like we lack community then it's probably just because of
| how easy it is to separate yourself from it.
| nradov wrote:
| Elevating society above the individual stifles innovation
| and leads to stagnation.
| FreeSpeech wrote:
| > why didn't they tell us it was this simple?
|
| Because it has an intangible effect on GDP. Our culture
| optimises for creating obedient worker drones who will
| capitulate to authority. Fostering empathy for others and
| leading children to a life of fulfilment conflicts with
| establishment incentives.
| garrickvanburen wrote:
| > No one will probably remember us the way they'll remember
| pg.
|
| History is a highly aggressive compression algorithm. Entire
| industries are forgotten, let alone people.
|
| So, yes, the correct answer is, "relax and enjoy yourself."
|
| If you happen to contribute to the world in a way that
| escapes the compression algorithm - congrats.
| tailspin2019 wrote:
| > History is a highly aggressive compression algorithm.
| Entire industries are forgotten, let alone people.
|
| You win "Hacker News Comment of the Day" :)
| atatatat wrote:
| With the right attitude, the amount of money you have in your
| pocket can be "FU" money.
| christophergs wrote:
| Could you elaborate on what living non-traditionally looked
| like for you? What was your thought process going off script,
| and what made you decide to change course back to a regular
| job?
| gabaix wrote:
| If you haven't read it yet, you might want to read De Brevitate
| Vitae [1] by Seneca. You will find many similarities.
|
| [1] https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/On_the_shortness_of_life
| RandomLensman wrote:
| Exercising agency usually brings a lot of uncertainty and risk
| with it and I think a lot of people don't like that (as in
| owning decisions).
|
| If you look at what people do in life, very few pick
| professions or businesses with high agency. Pretty sure that is
| not just some function of upbringing but risk tolerance and
| attitudes vary and not everyone wants to be a surgeon, trader,
| entrepreneur, racing driver, etc.
|
| A lot of high paying professions actually are fairly agency
| free, e.g. consulting and other professional services - so as
| far as putting a price on it, agency is not necessarily
| rewarded much
| wombatmobile wrote:
| This is the argument Hubert Dreyfuss advances to postulate
| Artificial General Intelligence can never be achieved - because
| computers are not "in the world."
|
| > One of the leading critics was the philosopher Hubert
| Dreyfus, who argued that computers, who have no body, no
| childhood and no cultural practice, could not acquire
| intelligence at all.
|
| https://www.nature.com/articles/s41599-020-0494-4
| Aeolun wrote:
| Just raise them as you would a child? Give them a body,
| upgrade it so they grow every few years. Lets see where we
| end up.
| concordDance wrote:
| > Just raise them as you would a child?
|
| That could only work even in theory if you've programmed in
| all the innate behaviours/desires human children have. And
| in practice raising superintelligent children who can clone
| themselves and rewrite their minds is not a thing we know
| how to do.
| ElFitz wrote:
| > And in practice raising superintelligent children who
| can clone themselves and rewrite their minds is not a
| thing we know how to do.
|
| We could learn to. Through trial and error.
|
| Even though a too big mistake means creating a
| psychopathic superinterlligent child who can clone
| itself, rewrite turns mind and easily hack the few
| American ICBMs not protected by the wondrous safety of
| floppy disks.
| Aeolun wrote:
| Seems a bit crazy to assume we'll jump from 'not close to
| human' to 'superintelligent' without going through
| 'barely adequate'?
| ElFitz wrote:
| Oh, definitely.
|
| I was just musing on the previous comment and noting that
| one of the things we do best is learn how to do things we
| previously didn't how to do.
| curtainsforus wrote:
| That doesn't mean it's impossible to create artificial
| intelligences, though, which was Dreyfus' point.
| wombatmobile wrote:
| > Give them a body
|
| OK in theory. In practice, that's a bigger project, by
| perhaps a hundred years and a trillion dollars?
|
| But you've got the right approach. A body is a prerequisite
| in order to get exposure to the same data humans receive.
|
| "Lyin' Eyes"
|
| by Don Henley and Glenn Frey
|
| City girls just seem to find out early
|
| How to open doors with just a smile
|
| A rich old man and she won't have to worry
|
| She'll dress up all in lace and go in style
|
| Late at night a big old house gets lonely
|
| I guess every form of refuge has its price
|
| And it breaks her heart to think her love is only
|
| Given to a man with hands as cold as ice
|
| So she tells him she must go out for the evening
|
| To comfort an old friend who's feelin' down
|
| But he knows where she's goin' as she's leavin'
|
| She is headed for the cheatin' side of town
|
| You can't hide your lyin' eyes
|
| And your smile is a thin disguise
|
| I thought by now you'd realize
|
| There ain't no way to hide your lying eyes
|
| On the other side of town a boy is waiting
|
| With fiery eyes and dreams no one could steal
|
| She drives on through the night anticipating
|
| 'Cause he makes her feel the way she used to feel
|
| She rushes to his arms, they fall together
|
| She whispers that it's only for awhile
|
| She swears that soon she'll be comin' back forever
|
| She pulls away and leaves him with a smile
|
| You can't hide your lyin' eyes
|
| And your smile is a thin disguise
|
| I thought by now you'd realize
|
| There ain't no way to hide your lyin' eyes
|
| She gets up and pours herself a strong one
|
| And stares out at the stars up in the sky
|
| Another night, it's gonna be a long one
|
| She draws the shade and hangs her head to cry
|
| She wonders how it ever got this crazy
|
| She thinks about a boy she knew in school
|
| Did she get tired or did she just get lazy?
|
| She's so far gone she feels just like a fool
|
| My, oh my, you sure know how to arrange things
|
| You set it up so well, so carefully
|
| Ain't it funny how your new life didn't change things
|
| You're still the same old girl you used to be
|
| You can't hide your lying eyes
|
| And your smile is a thin disguise
|
| I thought by now you'd realize
|
| There ain't no way to hide your lyin' eyes
|
| There ain't no way to hide your lyin' eyes
|
| Honey, you can't hide your lyin' eyes
| eikenberry wrote:
| > The basic life script we all seem to have in western society
| seems pretty awful when you think critically about it.
|
| Not if you've studied much history. Modern western society is
| awesome compared to what nearly all of our ancestors lived
| through. Wanting more is good, but denigrating things that
| nearly anyone from history would kill for doesn't sound right.
| inglor_cz wrote:
| Depends. There is a lot of the bad mixed with the good.
|
| Rich societies (not just Western ones) seem unable to
| reproduce themselves - the TFR has gone south of 2 pretty
| much everywhere, with interesting exceptions (Iceland,
| Israel). That means that our lifestyle is incompatible with
| long term survival.
|
| We also have a huge, _huge_ health problem that might
| directly be caused by abundance of food. Metabolic diseases.
| Just count all the fat people you meet during a 10 minute
| walk downtown. Many of them are young and already on their
| way over the 300 pound mark.
|
| I am not even starting a rant about how algorithms hijack our
| emotions and manipulate our behavior online.
|
| Humans aren't necessarily built for the world we created.
| Yes, many things are obviously good: not dying of cholera at
| the age of 2, for example. But there definitely are things to
| denigrate in our daily life script. And we must acknowledge
| these downsides if we ever want to get rid of them.
| b3morales wrote:
| > the TFR has gone south of 2 pretty much everywhere, with
| interesting exceptions (Iceland, Israel). That means that
| our lifestyle is incompatible with long term survival.
|
| Only if the rate stays there _permanently_ , which is
| unlikely. Over the span of a century or two, some
| population contraction might actually be good for overall
| survival.
| AussieWog93 wrote:
| >Modern western society is awesome compared to what nearly
| all of our ancestors lived through.
|
| Any sane person would agree with you in the sense that it's
| definitely better to be alive in 2021 than 1621.
|
| If you you shorten the timespan and only look at cultural
| changes since, say, the 1970s, though, it seems we've
| sacrificed a lot of what makes us human (community,
| interconnectedness, a sense of wonder about the future etc.)
| at the altar of free market economics and received little of
| actual value in return (Uber Eats, iPhones, Netflix etc.).
| seneca wrote:
| It's self-evident, and the research backs up, that our
| communities have all but died in the time frame you
| specified. However, it's not really clear, and the research
| I've read does not agree, that it is because of free market
| economics, at least not directly.
|
| I think this subject is one of the more important ones to
| the US right now, and is largely ignored because it makes a
| lot of ideologies look bad. I'd be curious what leads you
| to your accusation.
| megameter wrote:
| It's clear to me that it's too easy to be Panglossian about
| our material conditions. Just thinking about the time frame
| I grew up within(1980's-2000's US) there were a lot of
| things that I now see as definitely bad and that have, in
| fact, all started to change in my adult life:
|
| * The omnipresent nature of sweetened food and drink
|
| * Car-dependent culture
|
| * Mass media culture
|
| * Simpsons-style dysfunctional nuclear families
|
| * The whole array of corrupt policies and programs, cults-
| in-disguise(e.g. "troubled teen" schools), and
| ideologically driven movements; while we're hardly free of
| those things, and there are plenty of new or intensified
| versions of them, I believe there are also more ways to
| find a sustainable path outside those frameworks these
| days.
|
| But if you asked me if life was good in 2000, I would be
| mostly in agreement, because _my_ life seemed pretty good -
| I was told it was! But then I look back on it and it 's
| like, nooo, actually, there were all these pieces that
| traumatized me, removed my agency, were bad for my health
| or made me settle for less. And I believe the same would be
| true if I had been experiencing life in 1970's.
|
| Like, sure, in 1621 I'd probably have died at a young age.
| But I am on the hedonic treadmill with respect to life
| quality too. It doesn't matter to my feelings that now is
| the best time, if better is still possible.
| toomanyducks wrote:
| Is it fair to say you're citing identity politics and the
| presence of ideology as a cause of problems in society?
|
| Re identity politics, I'm trans and it helps me a lot. It
| feels like an intermediate between misogyny and the
| abolition of the categorization of gender. Focusing on
| the rights of one group (trans rights, trans liberation
| now) feels essential.
|
| Re the presence of ideology, there is no way to not have
| an ideology. Liberalism and neoliberalism consistently
| say that they are neutral, but they are also a story
| about the world and a way to interpret facts, on the
| exact same scale as Marxism. It's just that because
| (neo)liberalism places weight on the individual and
| discounts systemic factors, it can feel neutral if you
| don't need to think about systemic factors (this is what
| privelage is).
|
| Not really relevant to your overall critique, but it's
| just something that stood out to me reading your comment.
| megameter wrote:
| You're getting at the part that I can expound a bit on :)
|
| It's possible to engage with nihilism and say "I'm just
| going to survive pragmatically". It's related to the
| "state of nature" many philosophers will refer to as a
| pre-societal world. You can't have a _society_ that 's
| wholly nihilistic, but you can exist _within_ society
| nihilistically in degrees, with the far end of that being
| the "off-grid live in a cabin in the woods" sort of
| disengagement. But even without going that far, it's also
| possible to engage with philosophical concepts and
| critiques without being ideologically attached to them.
|
| Ideological attachment is what happens when you start
| converting all life events into phenomena relative to
| that ideology, and that's the thing that I see being
| shaken away from a fully normalized state("this is how
| the world is, there's no discussion to be had") to a
| vigorous, even violent argumentation(see: all the
| concepts you listed). And I can pinpoint that the shift
| happened almost instantly after the world achieved mass
| connectivity with smartphones, in the 2008-2012 period.
| Suddenly the US had its Marxists and anarchist voices
| emerge; trans rights became a major issue; and the "alt-
| right" took shape as well. We have a lot of visible
| ideologues in social media culture that will blame
| everything on the other ideology, where before those
| positions were buried by the consensus and relegated to
| subculture.
|
| To me that makes it a "better" world in the sense of
| agency, because it's easier to examine the different
| positions. But it's also more fragmented as a society,
| more prone to bubbles of extremism. If my experience
| tracks, we're in a transitional state where many old
| attachments are being discarded while others are being
| taken up. (Since 2008, I went from being - to
| retroactively label things - a vagely cishet liberal, to
| a nonbinary asexual meta-anarchist, all terms I would
| have struggled with back then.)
|
| My ideas on this mostly derive from Heather Marsh's
| philosophical writing, so you could say I am attached in
| that direction(it's equally true that I haven't been able
| to critique her work, in the sense that I literally just
| don't want to); her view coincides with that of the meta-
| anarchists(itself a newly emerging project of
| philosophical writings) which is why I now also use that
| as an identity label. I don't see myself as anti-
| identity, but I do see myself as anti-politics(despite
| having some occasional political engagement), because I
| accept Marsh's idea of there being both healthy
| attachments and unhealthy ones, and kicking my political
| attachment is like kicking a smoking addiction; I can try
| to curb it, but it often roars back to life if I look at
| the news.
| toomanyducks wrote:
| that's also really interesting, thanks!
| Aunche wrote:
| >If you you shorten the timespan and only look at cultural
| changes since, say, the 1970s, though, it seems we've
| sacrificed a lot of what makes us human (community,
| interconnectedness, a sense of wonder about the future
| etc.) at the altar of free market economics
|
| Free market economics didn't tell people to spend less time
| with their families and more time consuming entertainment
| media. Moreover, the argument that we have culturally
| regressed since the 70s only makes sense from the
| perspective of a white male.
| AussieWog93 wrote:
| >Free market economics didn't tell people to spend less
| time with their families and more time consuming
| entertainment media.
|
| It literally did. I've probably seen tens of thousands of
| advertisements for games consoles, films and Netflix-
| style streaming services.
|
| >from the perspective of a white male
|
| Many women would disagree with you on the "male" part.
| WC3w6pXxgGd wrote:
| Free market economics is the idea of humans having a
| Right to Property. It isn't a thing, let alone capable of
| "telling" you something.
|
| You're confusing advertising with a philosophical concept
| of freedom.
|
| To think there's an alternative to freedom is
| frightening. Just the 20th century alone is chock full of
| examples of what happens when some people try to strip
| others of this natural Right.
| Aunche wrote:
| Advertisement can only sell something that people want.
| If we swapped all video game advertising with Math
| Olympiad advertising, we both still know which one is
| going to be much more popular. Games with zero marketing
| budgets have no problem selling millions of copies.
|
| >Many women would disagree with you on the "male" part.
|
| And any woman with a professional job would disagree.
| inglor_cz wrote:
| > And any woman with a professional job would disagree.
|
| My mother is going to be 70 in a few weeks, she is a
| highly regarded teacher of English, and in her opinion, a
| lot of things have gone downhill since the 1970s, and
| especially since the 1990s, though obviously not all of
| them. So there is your counterexample.
|
| People are complicated and stereotyping them ( _any woman
| with X_ ) is bound to fail.
| Aunche wrote:
| It goes without saying that there is an exception to
| every rule, and it's a strawman to assume that I believe
| otherwise. By "professional job", I should have qualified
| that I mean careers traditionally dominated by men (e.g.
| business, lawyers, doctors).
| krapp wrote:
| People in the 1970s would have killed for smartphones (or
| any phone not physically tethered to a landline,) the
| advent of personal computers and the web making global
| information, communication, data and commerce available for
| practically nothing, and the convenience of Uber, or just
| e-commerce in general. Streaming media with access to an
| entire library of movies and television shows is
| qualitatively better than three analog tv channels and
| whatever happens to be showing at the movie theater at the
| time.
|
| Maybe there's an argument to be made for a decline in
| quality of life since the 1970s, but it isn't going to be
| on the basis that technological advancements over the last
| fifty years have been a net negative for society.
|
| A sense of wonder about the future? Interconnectedness?
| Community? The 70's were some of the most cynical and
| violent years in recent American history. The Cold War.
| Vietnam. Watergate. The oil crisis. Activist riots and
| radical underground groups bombing universities. The
| National Guard killing students at Kent state. Even the
| politics of the last four years seems quaint compared to
| the last few decades.
| AussieWog93 wrote:
| >People in the 1970s would have killed for smartphones...
|
| Would they? Boomers are famous for being luddites, and a
| growing minority of millennials now would be more than
| happy to toss their smartphones if it didn't mean being
| pushed to the outer of all their social groups.
|
| >Streaming media with access to an entire library of
| movies and television shows is qualitatively better than
| three analog tv channels and whatever happens to be
| showing at the movie theater at the time.
|
| I agree, Netflix has a much better range than the old
| technology, it is more convenient and the picture/audio
| quality is fantastic. The more interesting question,
| though, is whether or not frictionless access to near-
| infinite vaults of that tailored entertainment actually
| makes your _quality of life_ better.
|
| >The 70's were some of the most cynical and violent years
| in recent American history.
|
| I never said it wasn't violent (nor did I say American,
| in fact!). But kids in that era would play together in
| the streets, and families had closer bonds.
| krapp wrote:
| Millennials don't apply to an argument about who would
| have done what in the 70s - every generation has people
| who don't appreciate the value of what they have, and I
| don't think everyone in the 70s was an Archie Bunker
| stereotype. Yes, I'm quite certain there would have been
| plenty of people who would have seen the value of
| cellphones and the internet at the time.
|
| >The more interesting question, though, is whether or not
| frictionless access to near-infinite vaults of that
| tailored entertainment actually makes your quality of
| life better.
|
| That's the thing - "quality of life" is an entirely
| subjective measure, one which both of us are tailoring to
| fit a predetermined outcome.
|
| But even if one dismisses the value of access to media to
| quality of life, the degree to which online services (any
| service, including streaming media) democratize that
| access compared to the limitations of physical media and
| gatekept broadcasts (VCRs didn't even come around until
| the late 1970s) improved quality of life substantially.
| That some or much of that media is pure entertainment is
| less relevant to my argument than the paradigm shift it
| represents.
|
| I mean, to invoke the trope, you have a device you can
| fit in your pocket which allows you access to almost the
| entirety of humanity's cultural and intellectual output,
| a GPS system, a camera, a radio, a compass, a calculator,
| it can answer questions, it can order food, it can allow
| you to communicate with people around the world without
| long-distance fees. From the point of view of the 1970s,
| that's literally something out of Star Trek. That seems
| like an _objective_ improvement to quality of life in the
| same way that the printing press, internal combustion
| engine and indoor toilets were.
|
| > But kids in that era would play together in the
| streets, and families had closer bonds.
|
| Kids don't play in the streets anymore but they still
| play - my niece and nephew have a huge backyard they play
| in, and my nephew also makes games for his friends on
| Roblox. To me, kids today have richer and more fulfilling
| lives than I did, stuck in my living room watching TV and
| reading old library books.
|
| Also, I would argue that due to the advancement of
| progressive ideals allowing certain demographics to exist
| more openly than society would have allowed in the 1970s,
| some familial bonds are stronger now than then. Maybe if
| you're a white Christian conservative male things seem to
| have gone downhill, but things seem to be looking up for
| everyone else.
| papito wrote:
| Because risk. Rich, privileged people can try different things
| with zero risk of becoming destitute. And that's how they
| practically stumble into new opportunities. Adam Neumann was
| making collapsible heels and toddler knee-pads before he
| decided to try the pyramid that is WeWork, which ultimately
| bought him a private jet and multiple houses.
|
| Me? I didn't have a chance to "try" things. My room for error
| was _zero_. Must get above 90 average. Must get scholarship.
| MUST find job. MUST be there at 9AM. MUST pay rent.
|
| Now I am saving money to take one year off to work on my own
| thing, but only because my first future ex-wife works for NYC
| and I can be on her insurance. Without that safety net, at 40,
| no way.
|
| So, not everyone can be born a failson like Jared Kushner, but
| what we CAN have is a safety net to let people take _risks_.
| lifeisstillgood wrote:
| I am not so sure "safety net" cuts it.
|
| I would prefer just taking every 21 year old and saying "here
| is 15 grand, go do something amazing".
|
| I don't know what the results will be, but a fair number will
| be worth the risk.
| gpm wrote:
| 15 grand is enough to live off of... for a year... if
| you're frugal, have no debts, and your amazing thing
| doesn't require any startup expenses. It's not enough to
| make risk aversion meaningfully less important. I suspect
| most 21 year olds would still do the same things as they do
| otherwise, just with a marginally better lifestyle.
|
| On the other hand, I actually like this idea. It would help
| people escape abusive situations, and I generally think
| it's fairly ridiculous how we ask young people to live on
| so little money while educating themselves. I just don't
| think it would cause many people to "go do something
| amazing".
| lifeisstillgood wrote:
| Yeah, my numbers are off by about 20 years :-)
|
| But like you I like the idea ...
| tluyben2 wrote:
| > Because risk. Rich, privileged people can try different
| things with zero risk of becoming destitute
|
| You can do that as well in many EU countries. Without being
| rich.
| papito wrote:
| The world you describe is alien to me.
| tluyben2 wrote:
| Been living there for almost 50 years. Works fine.
| inglor_cz wrote:
| We don't seem to generate much more innovation than our
| overseas cousins, though.
|
| A safety net may lead some people to experiment and play
| with things, others to slouching off. This even applies
| outside the public sphere. A stereotype of a bored
| millionaire's son with no energy to do anything
| substantial exists for a reason.
| bjornsing wrote:
| Sadly I think it also promotes (overt) envy and crab
| mentality. Many people use their safety to pull others
| down rather than try to excel. It pains me to say this,
| and I wish it wasn't so, but it seems to me that people
| only accept meritocracy when there is some kind of
| external threat...
| tluyben2 wrote:
| You have that everywhere, but yeah I think without a
| safetynet more people fight harder. So as you do not have
| the extreme upsides(but also not the extreme downsides) I
| guess we will never have the facebooks or googles here.
| It takes some kind of battle. Or being rich from birth
| and being able to hire people like that. Personally I do
| not enjoy that very much.
| bjornsing wrote:
| > You can do that as well in many EU countries. Without
| being rich.
|
| But, interestingly, few people do. And those who do seem to
| take on less risk than their counterparts in the US.
| tluyben2 wrote:
| I think people take a lot of risks here: a lot of people
| would be dying of starvation if they did not have the
| safetynet. But yes, agreed, people do not seem to want to
| go all out. I think you need some existential panic to
| excel (depending on your definition of excel of course),
| but I am not religious so I do not want existential panic
| or any type of risk really. And I guess most people have
| the same feeling here. Just playing risk yourself is no
| risk as there is the safetynet, but once you start witb
| other people their lives, it becomes different.
|
| Where I was born, everyone has money and people are
| generally modest: do not need ferraris or whatever so
| they just want a happy relaxed life. And that is very
| easy to get here. I worked very hard since I was 15 as I
| wanted (and have) (not ferraris but travel) more, but I
| was never interested in money or fame that can get
| someone kidnapped. I believe if I lived in the US, my
| parents would have sent me to Stanford or something and
| things might have been different somehow. I will never
| know: I like not having stress, at all so no regrets.
| bjornsing wrote:
| Well good for you. You've come to the right place. ;)
|
| To be clear, I don't grieve the lack of Ferraris. But the
| lack of ambition and related consequences gets to me.
| tluyben2 wrote:
| As do it does to me. The ambition here is low but I do
| not know how to fix it without destroying what makes it
| nice here. I do not think anyone does. And playing the
| odds is just much easier here. Almost 0% of making a
| billion but never under a bridge and a quite high %
| chance of having a good life.
| tluyben2 wrote:
| I never did that and will never do that (at almost 50 y/o); I
| was raised with Christianity but no-one could answer my
| questions at a very young age so I have no faith which means I
| have 1 go at this life. So no offices, suits, bosses, jobs,
| meetings or whatever. I had 2 kind of stressful years in my
| life and I am well off; I do whatever I want and is good for my
| family. I think it's a good score. It helps living in the EU; I
| never had to worry about living on the streets which makes some
| decisions easier.
| jraby3 wrote:
| I've thought about this a lot. What it comes down to is that
| the only true agency you have is by strengthening your mind.
| That's really the only solution I could come up with.
|
| Because at the end of the day everything gets old - every act,
| job, etc. (hedonistic treadmill).
|
| And having complete freedom isn't a solution. You're still
| trapped within your own head 24/7.
|
| Taking time to pursue meditation and other activities that help
| you be happy no matter what the circumstances of the external
| world seem like the best choice of activity when younger in
| order to build agency.
| andy_ppp wrote:
| Discipline equals Freedom
| jtwaleson wrote:
| In the summer of '99, when I was 11, my father asked me to
| reverse engineer a proprietary data format because he would be
| needing that a couple of months later. He showed me how I could
| manipulate the data using the proprietary software, and how to
| inspect the changes using a hex editor. It went very slow, and
| I'm sure answering my questions and explaining it cost him more
| time in the end, but I learned so much at a young age and he was
| really happy with the results. Knowing that it was actually
| useful made it all the more interesting for me.
|
| If I recall correctly he gave me 100 guilders (about $50) for a
| couple of days of work. The data format was for HP ChemStation,
| good memories.
| cyberge99 wrote:
| I know of a lot of highly agent children that are creators,
| influencers, eSports winners.
|
| Encouraging their passion and enabling them to succeed at
| whatever it may be, is paramount.
| idolaspecus wrote:
| My first child is due any day now and I've been thinking a lot
| about the central problems presented in this article. But I don't
| know what to do about them. Should I keep my son home with me,
| allocate mornings to academics and afternoons to more practical
| endeavors? Should I teach him to cook? To garden? To build
| cabinets? To train a dog? To do his taxes? Should I send him to
| public school but supplement his learning with what I believe he
| should learn, topics like statistics and probability and finance?
| Should I teach him Latin? JavaScript?
|
| I personally feel like I am capable of providing an "agentic"
| education but I almost certainly won't have the time nor the
| persuasive powers to convince a (hopefully) rebellious 7 year old
| that, say, grammar matters and gardening is dope. Seeking any
| suggestions.
| Ma8ee wrote:
| I've put both my kids in preschool from about the time they
| turned one. I can teach my kids a lot in my own, but what I
| can't give them is plenty of training interacting with other
| kids. They might not be able to read when they are four this
| way, but all those things are trivial in comparison to learn a
| bit later.
| combatentropy wrote:
| You should let your child have lots and lots of freedom to do
| whatever he wants, even if that is often watching television or
| whatever. Ideally you would have a lot of outdoor places for
| him to roam --- whether that be a large amount of land that you
| live on or just a green neighborhood.
|
| This is based on my own experience, because I was allowed to
| manage my free time. When I got out of school, I had a chore or
| two, but the rest of the evening was mine to manage. (I was
| expected to do my homework at some point, though, and make
| decent grades. In fact I made A's and B's.) But the rest of the
| time I watched about 2-3 hours of TV, drew a lot, jumped on the
| trampoline, and in general ran around outside (We lived on five
| acres).
|
| My parents never sent me to summer camp. The summer was mine.
| They never made me take piano lessons or join the boy scouts.
| Nothing.
|
| I graduated magna cum laude, started my own business (which
| failed) then pivoted to a completely different field (web
| programming) and taught myself everything, through books,
| blogs, etc. That was 15 years ago and professionally speaking,
| I lead a very stable life.
|
| When I hear about today's children being shuttled from school
| to one extracurricular activity or another, where they have
| very little unstructured time, I scream on the inside on their
| behalf. I've known a handful of adults who were homeschooled,
| and most of them have turned out very poorly. They basically
| are walking time bombs: quiet and obedient through childhood,
| then they get out of the house and explode.
|
| As my mother wisely said, "Kids need to be kids." (We had a
| very strong religious teaching, however, in my household ---
| firm but not oppressive. I ascribe my own acceptance of that
| teaching as a key reason I did not just squander all that
| freedom on drugs, sex, and rock'n'roll. But most of all, I felt
| very, very loved and accepted as a person, even if I were to
| screw up royally.)
| ativzzz wrote:
| Depends on the person. I spent every minute of free time I
| had playing video games as a kid. I had a lot of free time
| since my parents were very laid back and gave it to me. I
| wish my parents were more strict and forced me to do other
| things, literally anything else.
| theonething wrote:
| > I've known a handful of adults who were homeschooled, and
| most of them have turned out very poorly. They basically are
| walking time bombs: quiet and obedient through childhood,
| then they get out of the house and explode.
|
| I don't doubt your account of a handful of adults, but the
| research seems to point to the opposite conclusion:
|
| > Homeschooled children are taking part in the daily routines
| of their communities. They are certainly not isolated, in
| fact, they associate with-- and feel close to--all sorts of
| people. Homeschooling parents . . . actively encourage their
| children to take advantage of social opportunities outside
| the family. Homeschooled children are acquiring the rules of
| behavior and systems of beliefs and attitudes they need. They
| have good self-esteem and are likely to display fewer
| behavior problems than other children. They may be more
| socially mature and have better leadership skills than other
| children as well. And they appear to be functioning
| effectively as members of adult society. (Medlin, 2000, p.
| 119)
|
| https://www.stetson.edu/artsci/psychology/media/medlin-
| socia...
| fellowniusmonk wrote:
| I know nearly innumerable homeschoolers, they regress to
| the mean like any other group, but they also have far more
| hyper successful outliers.
|
| There are a number of people I know who transcended the
| station of their birth but I know a disproportionate number
| of homeschoolers who did from an early age per capita.
|
| All bets are off if the homeschooler is insularly
| religious. Has a kid at a young age or they became
| "homeschooled" because they were kicked out of every
| regular school for extreme violence or other similar
| behavior.
| IncRnd wrote:
| > but I almost certainly won't have the time nor the persuasive
| powers to convince a (hopefully) rebellious 7 year old that,
| say, grammar matters and gardening is dope. Seeking any
| suggestions.
|
| Mine are grown up and have moved away, but I do have a
| suggestion. It's okay, and may be the best method, to just say,
| "grammar matters and gardening is dope," then stop talking
| while you gauge their reaction or listen to what they say. If
| all you ever do is talk with them, they will listen and talk
| with you.
| jkhdigital wrote:
| > then stop talking
|
| This is so damn true... having a son has taught me that my
| words matter _a lot_ , so choose them wisely and say no more
| than is necessary.
| BLKNSLVR wrote:
| I've always (attempted to) live my life as if my words
| matter to everyone. I dislike speaking for the sake of
| conversation because it tends to lead me to say things I
| don't fully mean or intend.
|
| This came about from possibly taking this old saying too
| seriously:
|
| "90% of what people say is untrue"
|
| My childhood self didn't want to be the sort of person with
| that kind of pointless conversation. Combine that with
| something I picked up more recently:
|
| "People don't remember what you said, people remember how
| you made them feel".
|
| Choose your words carefully. Words are cheap, but their
| effect can be expensive.
| jkhdigital wrote:
| Hits close to home... had these exact thoughts a little over
| seven years ago. At one point I was convinced that sending my
| son to a public school would be child abuse... actually I still
| kinda feel that way, but I've softened my stance a bit.
|
| I read up quite a bit on unschooling, which sounds great on
| paper but is probably only feasible when both parents are
| enthusiastically committed. Sudbury schools are probably the
| closest thing to unschooling without having to do it yourself,
| but there's probably less than 100 such schools in the entire
| world.
|
| One big realization I've had is that children _really_ grow
| when their parents aren't around. Schools may suppress agency,
| but so do parents. There's a reason that all the stories in
| this article are about apprenticeships and first jobs--the
| outside world will always be a much richer source of new and
| unexpected interactions and discoveries than anything inside
| the home. Maybe that's my suggestion: get your kid out of the
| house and around other trustworthy adults as much as possible.
| (I moved across the country to live near family just to make
| this happen)
| dash2 wrote:
| Sounds like the argument made by Lenore Skenazy and
| https://letgrow.org.
| jkhdigital wrote:
| Yeah man, Lenore Skenazy and Peter Gray have done a good
| job picking up right where John Holt and John Taylor Gatto
| left off.
| idolaspecus wrote:
| > One big realization I've had is that children really grow
| when their parents aren't around. Schools may suppress
| agency, but so do parents.
|
| This sounds like a good point, I'm going to try to keep it
| more in mind, thanks.
| brutusborn wrote:
| My limited experience shows that a good way to influence
| children is to lead by example, and build on previous knowledge
| to provide context.
|
| Using gardening as an example, choose a fruit or vegetable your
| child likes, then go with them to a store and buy seeds / trees
| / whatever. Then get them to help you plant it and look after
| it. Children love harvest time, the excitement is palpable.
|
| If you have chickens you can feed them wheat. If your child
| likes bread then you can show the child how to turn wheat into
| bread.
|
| The key is not to force things. Monkey see, monkey do. If my
| nephews see me doing yoga, suddenly they are all trying their
| best to copy me.
|
| For programming, I am not sure. But i think the best way is to
| start with a simple language that can alter something visual,
| so that there is clear cause/effect.
|
| I'd love to hear any other examples people have!
| idolaspecus wrote:
| This is basically how I hope to tackle the problem. I'd like
| to try and fill my own life with more practical endeavors and
| then weave in intentional/intellectual/thoughtful moments
| where we (me and kid) consider whatever slightly more
| abstract principles are in effect at that particular time.
| I'm having a hard time believing this is not much much much
| easier said than done though.
| aarongray wrote:
| I was fortunate enough to have two parents that let me stay at
| home and homeschool until high school, then they sent me off to
| learn from others. They taught me how to do almost all of those
| things in your list as the opportunities presented themselves.
| Did we disagree? Yes. Did I hate gardening a lot of the time?
| Yes. But then my parents would play video games with me after
| we were done which I loved. We learned how to give and take,
| how to do what each other enjoyed, and how to do life together.
| Now that I'm in my thirties, working from home, and have a
| little family of my own, I'm trying to replicate my childhood
| as much as I can. I think you have a great dream, I say go for
| it!
| roland35 wrote:
| Parent here with 2 boys, ages 6 and 2 :). I have some good news
| for you if you're worried about planning! I was wondering the
| same things before they were born, but it turns out that
| children will develop their own interests and are much happier
| digging into what they are interested in. The best thing you
| can do is help support their interests! They will also see what
| you are doing and want to follow along too.
|
| Don't worry too much about planning things out, because the any
| grand parenting plan will go out the window once they baby
| arrives haha
| theandrewbailey wrote:
| "No battle plan survives contact with the enemy."
| swader999 wrote:
| They'll follow you around and do all those things with you if
| you do it. My six year old mows the lawn since he could push
| it. Each kids has a raised bed they tend to each summer. School
| is ok for socialization but a lot has to happen at home in
| terms of this agency thing.
| idolaspecus wrote:
| My intuition tells me this is the crux of the matter: If I
| spend my time in the kitchen and the garden and wrenching and
| cutting and repairing, then my kid will be drawn to like
| activities. I hope I can behave accordingly and I hope you're
| right!
| swader999 wrote:
| Most important is just to play with them. You can't force
| it on them.
| kitd wrote:
| I think the article misses the fact that "childhood" in the past
| was more or less defined as just the stage of your life _until_
| you could do something useful, regardless of age. So as a child
| growing up in that environment, finding something useful to do
| was more or less the basic minimum to be accepted. Schooling was
| just an add-on in comparison.
| camillomiller wrote:
| What about the fact that most people don't want agency? Most
| people are perfectly fine with being told what to do. And
| rightfully so, as their work is not a measure of their personal
| success.
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