[HN Gopher] What if hard work felt easier?
___________________________________________________________________
What if hard work felt easier?
Author : kiyanwang
Score : 63 points
Date : 2025-10-27 09:55 UTC (10 days ago)
(HTM) web link (jeanhsu.substack.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (jeanhsu.substack.com)
| wry_discontent wrote:
| This seems naive to me.
|
| There are plenty of things I work hard on because I like them,
| but there are also lots of things I have to work hard on because
| they need to get done.
|
| I have similar feelings about Ikigai, the overlap of what you
| love, what you are good at, what the world needs, and what you
| can be paid for. Those things don't really overlap for me.
| throwaway13337 wrote:
| Lack of autonomy is the most draining thing.
|
| Not many have the luxury to do what they think makes sense. I've
| been running my own small business for years. It's lonely to not
| have coworkers but work is extremely enjoyable.
|
| The author, too, had autonomy but doesn't seem to make a point of
| that.
|
| The system that we've built is why people aren't enjoying their
| work. The bigger the organization, the less autonomy an
| individual has.
|
| Markets are beautiful things when they work. They allow
| individuals to offer their services to the world in exactly the
| way they find best. Which feels good. And is great for a positive
| sum society.
|
| The amount of people employed in small businesses or self
| employed is shrinking and has been for a while. The rules are too
| complex to start a business. In tech, there is no common protocol
| to speak. You are a surf of the platform you find yourself on.
| They extract the value.
|
| To help people find meaning in their work, we must first force
| open protocols, interoperability, and regulations that are
| gradual by business size.
| hypeatei wrote:
| > In tech, there is no common protocol to speak. You are a surf
| of the platform you find yourself on.
|
| Can you expand on this statement? It's a bit ambiguous and I'm
| not sure what you're referring to exactly. Other than that, I
| agree with your comment.
|
| Even doing independent contracting on the side seems like a
| minefield w.r.t. quarterly tax payments, estimated tax, etc..
| in the US at least. I'm sure I could figure it out but just
| earning income for some side work seems like a liability and a
| big headache.
| jonas21 wrote:
| > _Even doing independent contracting on the side seems like
| a minefield w.r.t. quarterly tax payments, estimated tax,
| etc.. in the US at least. I 'm sure I could figure it out but
| just earning income for some side work seems like a liability
| and a big headache._
|
| It's really not hard -- it takes maybe 15 minutes per year,
| and if you own any stocks outside a 401k, you probably
| already need to make quarterly estimated payments. If it's
| too much trouble, you can just hire an accountant to take
| care of it for you. At any rate, it shouldn't be a
| significant obstacle to contracting.
| stronglikedan wrote:
| > it takes maybe 15 minutes per year
|
| It takes _at least_ four times that _per quarter_ , really.
| And especially if you're small enough to not be able to
| afford an accountant just yet.
| SoftTalker wrote:
| The shortcut I always used was to take my effective tax
| rate from last year's return (i.e. total tax owed / gross
| income), multiply my self-employment income for the past
| quarter by that rate, maybe round it up somewhat, and pay
| that. It usually worked out to be close enough that I
| didn't owe any penalty for underpayment of estimated tax
| and it was much easier than using the IRS suggested
| calculation.
| hypeatei wrote:
| > if you own any stocks outside a 401k, you probably
| already need to make quarterly estimated payments.
|
| That's true, and I do. I guess I'm referring more to the
| accounting side of it. My brokerage reports/tracks all that
| for me and hands me a form later. With contracting work,
| it's all up to you to track and there might be better ways
| than a text file with some dates and amounts but maybe it
| really is that simple. I'm not sure.
| immibis wrote:
| The word they meant is serf: a low class in feudalism. Like a
| slave but with subtle differences that don't really matter.
| Does everything their master says, or is killed. More
| importantly, avoids all the emotional outbursts one would
| trigger by using the word "slave".
| throwaway13337 wrote:
| Yes. Thanks. Serf. Share-cropping on the lord's land.
|
| The lord gives you exactly as much as you need to live but
| can extract the rest.
|
| This isn't good for anyone as, history tells us, people are
| less motivated that way.
| Aurornis wrote:
| > Like a slave but with subtle differences that don't
| really matter.
|
| Anyone using slavery as a metaphor for participating in
| tech platforms is out of touch with what slavery really is.
| Nobody is owning you as person and forcing you to work for
| them without any freedoms because they opened an app store
| or let you make a Facebook book.
|
| Minimizing the brutality of actual slavery by drawing
| comparisons to putting apps in app stores (or other tech
| platform things) is really distasteful
| immibis wrote:
| > More importantly, avoids all the emotional outbursts
| one would trigger by using the word "slave".
|
| Thanks for providing an example.
|
| A serf also did not feel like a slave, being forced to do
| things. A serf felt his lord was being generous by
| letting him use the lord's land, for the low low cost of
| whatever percentage of his crops, plus being required to
| go and fight in battle and sometimes die, when there was
| a battle. Which is oddly analogous to how we feel about
| tech companies. We don't feel like we're being _forced_
| to use e.g. YouTube; we feel Google is being generous by
| letting us use it, for the low low price of endless
| advertisements, having our minds altered by propaganda,
| and randomly getting banned by AI.
| throwaway13337 wrote:
| Monopolies become entrenched because of network effect. Phone
| companies had the same problem until the government stepped
| in.
|
| Web standards are great. And the web is really something
| special. No one owns the web. I can publish my own website
| with a ton of different vendors offering hosting. There's a
| power law distribution of provider success but it's still a
| fair game.
|
| App publishing is owned by two companies. Messaging is
| siloed. Discoverability is pay to play. There is no
| townsquare not owned.
|
| The way to solve these problems is forcing platforms over a
| certain size to open their protocols. So We can make on own
| messaging client that communicates with the gatekeepers. We
| can offer, without the app stores, our software to their
| users in the same way that the gatekeepers allow.
|
| Monopolies kill markets. Allowing a fair market on network
| effect platforms would make the categories competitive.
| Smaller businesses could compete. The margins would lower for
| the gatekeepers. The consumers would benefit from lower
| prices and more innovation.
|
| Most of all, we'd finally be able to reverse the trend of
| cynical software - 'enshitification' - that comes when a
| monopoly understands that they no longer need to compete.
| hypeatei wrote:
| I see what you're getting at now, thanks. I left a comment
| on a thread about iOS recently[0] where Apple is only
| making their things open in jurisdicfions where they're
| forced to which was kinda infuriating/nonsensical to me.
| Governments have obviously caught onto this but Apple is
| still trying to squeeze out as much rent as possible while
| they still can.
|
| 0: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45822302
| Aurornis wrote:
| > Discoverability is pay to play. There is no townsquare
| not owned.
|
| And yet anyone can publish a website, like you said. Anyone
| can create an Instagram or TikTok profile and start selling
| things. Millions of small businesses do this all the time
| and grow on these platforms without "pay to play".
|
| > So We can make on own messaging client that communicates
| with the gatekeepers
|
| What does this have to do with letting people create
| businesses? Who's going to pay you (one way or another) to
| use your messaging client to connect to these open services
| when they can use the official client or anyone else's
| client?
|
| I think idealists imagine a world where tech giants are
| forced to open their platforms for free and they can use
| their own apps to connect to Reddit and YouTube and other
| platforms while avoiding the ads. It's a pipe dream to
| imagine that regulators will come in and force businesses
| to be unprofitable for the good of the public. Platforms
| need to make money to exist. They can either charge
| admission or show ads.
|
| There isn't a third option where they're forced to become a
| public good so that other businesses can freely benefit
| from their infrastructure.
| thewebguyd wrote:
| > The rules are too complex to start a business.
|
| Not to mention the taxes, depending on where you live. When I
| actually went to register my side gig wedding photography
| business it was the most confusing mess I've ever had to slog
| through.
|
| It's not clear, at all, what licenses you need because of the
| nature of the business. There's state, then there's also
| local/city licenses, and it's not clear on if you need one for
| every city you photograph at, or just one for the city you
| reside in (your business address). Some cities require it some
| don't.
|
| Then the taxes here are also just as confusing. Different rates
| depending on the business activity. Session fee revenue is
| taxed differently than digital photo sales revenue, etc. Then
| sometimes the service itself is subject to sales tax, sometimes
| not, depending on how (and where) you deliver the photos
| matters too.
|
| You can't be on the legal up and up without hiring an
| accountant and maybe an attorney to go through the process with
| you, which is definitely not something I wanted to do for a
| side gig.
|
| It should not be this convoluted or difficult to legally open a
| business, especially under a certain amount of revenue per
| year. I'm not making millions here, we're talking less than
| 100k/year in gross revenue.
|
| There's a reason most photographers here just....don't bother
| to register with the dept of revenue. Most don't get caught
| anyway so a lot of times its worth the risk to just..not pay
| the taxes.
|
| None of that bureaucracy should exist for businesses under a
| certain size/under a certain revenue.
| stdbrouw wrote:
| In the US income from a hobby can just be added to your
| personal filing [1] and in Belgium, where I live, there is a
| similar arrangement for "diverse sources of income" [2]. If
| you do start a business, in the European Union you're exempt
| from filing VAT if your yearly revenue is below a certain
| amount [3]. Europe has also been pretty aggressive in getting
| rid of licensing requirements for various occupations and
| trades, certainly a photographer wouldn't need a license
| here.
|
| I think the trouble you faced, resulted from being at the
| edge of these kinds of simple systems that do exist -- big
| enough to need to set up a business, but small enough that
| hiring an accountant or spending time to familiarize yourself
| with the legal requirements was out of proportion to the
| expected revenue. That's unfortunate, of course, but doesn't
| necessarily reflect on the amount of red tape that exists in
| general in a country.
|
| [1] https://www.irs.gov/newsroom/heres-how-to-tell-the-
| differenc...
|
| [2] https://www.vlaanderen.be/economie-en-ondernemen/een-
| eigen-z...
|
| [3] https://europa.eu/youreurope/business/taxation/vat/vat-
| exemp...
| thewebguyd wrote:
| Yeah, federally there's no problem here. It's the state I
| live in that's the problem.
|
| Any revenue over $12,000 and you have to register with the
| Department of Revenue, get a business license, and start
| paying business and occupation tax and sales taxes (if
| applicable). If your business is subject to collect sales
| tax at all, you have to register no matter what your gross
| revenue is. Unfortunately, the state doesn't have any
| exemptions for sales tax like the EU.
|
| For some states in the US it is quite a bit simpler,
| unfortunately for mine it's not and it's like they do
| everything in their power to prevent small businesses.
| cestith wrote:
| All business income should be subject to a tiny share of
| total revenue, maybe with some portion of it being
| deductible like input materials, durable equipment
| purchases, and employee benefits. The first US state to
| truly grasp and embrace this will get flooded with new
| businesses, but it will piss off the legal and CPA firms.
| keybored wrote:
| > Lack of autonomy is the most draining thing. ...
|
| > Markets are beautiful things when they work. They allow
| individuals to offer their services to the world in exactly the
| way they find best. Which feels good. And is great for a
| positive sum society.
|
| Modern markets (capitalism) is the direct cause of the problem
| you describe. And if you think "big organizations" are the
| problem? The modern market system always tends towards larger
| corporations since they outcompete the small businesses.
|
| > To help people find meaning in their work, we must first
| force open protocols, interoperability, and regulations that
| are gradual by business size.
|
| If this is the egalitarian idea of everyone being closer to a
| small business owner instead of many smaller businesses but
| most people still being employees, well that ideal is over a
| century out of date. It's dead-end idealism.
| throwaway13337 wrote:
| Markets tend toward monopoly like democracies tend towards
| dictatorship.
|
| In both cases, we need checks and balances to ensure that
| does not happen.
|
| When it does, that group tends to be weaker for it in the
| long run so evolution takes its course.
|
| Changing a failing system is very hard. I agree. Maybe it's
| not possible. But we need to have some vision of a positive
| future for the negative to not win by default. Cynicism is
| self-fulfilling.
| keybored wrote:
| > Markets tend toward monopoly like democracies tend
| towards dictatorship.
|
| Democracies tend towards dictatorship? Oh right, most
| nominal democracies are liberal democracies. Makes sense
| now.
|
| > Changing a failing system is very hard. I agree. Maybe
| it's not possible. But we need to have some vision of a
| positive future for the negative to not win by default.
| Cynicism is self-fulfilling.
|
| What you need is a better system. Not hopes and prayers.
| 9rx wrote:
| _> Democracies tend towards dictatorship?_
|
| Strictly speaking, no. A dictatorship takes power away
| from the people. A democracy sees the people give the
| power away.
|
| The people don't have to give power away in a democracy,
| technically, but in practice they always do. Democracy is
| hard work and people have bigger fish to fry, like
| keeping food on their table and a roof over their head.
| For most people it is most sensible to allow a "leader"
| to take power away from them.
|
| So casually speaking, there isn't a difference. In both
| cases power isn't in the hands of the people. The reason
| for why the power isn't held differ, but that is
| understood to be immaterial with respect the context of
| discussion.
| giantg2 wrote:
| "Lack of autonomy is the most draining thing."
|
| This. I recently moved from a developer team to a non-dev team.
| I've written more lines of code in the past month than I had in
| the last 6 months on the dev team. No vague requirements to
| deal with. No picky reviews or politics from other devs or TLs.
| Freedom to write moderately high coverage, fairly robust test
| suites (compared to minimal coverage with low value checks).
|
| To be fair, this is green field development, so there is a fair
| amount of easy code and it's not spaghettified yet. However, I
| am also training non-devs on the team to run an maintain the
| repo, so there's that.
| agumonkey wrote:
| it's one key factor, whenever i'm forced to follow something
| unfit for the goal or my brain, i crash
| billy99k wrote:
| "The system that we've built is why people aren't enjoying
| their work. The bigger the organization, the less autonomy an
| individual has."
|
| I think it depends on your position. I've worked for big
| companies, where my department (and I) had it's own autonomy.
| Sure, you had to answer to the hire executives at some point,
| but it wasn't that rigid.
|
| Autonomy is usually earned after years of work, through trust.
| I know lots of people that basically stop working and try to do
| nothing, when they are given full autonomy (Many examples of
| this in the OE subreddit).
|
| I had my own small business for 7 years and am now a
| consultant. I automatically just get work done without being
| asked or watched. Most people don't have this mindset and need
| to be told what to do and monitored.
| Aurornis wrote:
| > The rules are too complex to start a business.
|
| I really don't think this is the reason. It's easier than ever
| to start a business now that there are so many free, accessible
| resources to help you through the process.
|
| There are even services like Stripe Atlas that will walk you
| through incorporating, getting an EIN, and setting up your
| billing: https://stripe.com/atlas
|
| The reason few people start businesses is that it's really hard
| to make a good living. Running your own business is highly
| risky and takes a lot of work. For every success story there
| are countless failure stories that people don't speak of.
|
| Being an employee, especially in tech, can be an
| extraordinarily good deal. It can be frustrating like any job,
| but predictable pay that comes in well above median
| compensation for work that poses very little risk to yourself
| is a luxury. A lot of us have gone back and forth between self-
| employed and being an employee, and you don't really appreciate
| how nice it is to get a regular old job doing a narrow piece of
| work until you've dealt with the stresses of running your own
| business from top to bottom.
|
| > we must first force open protocols, interoperability, and
| regulations that are gradual by business size.
|
| What does this even mean? Very few business types would even
| benefit from "forcing" platforms to have open protocols. If
| regulators came in and forced Facebook or Instagram or even
| Hacker News to open their protocol and allow other businesses
| to interoperate (whatever that means) what makes you think
| individual small businesses would thrive, as opposed to other
| large companies coming in to take advantage of those forced-
| open platforms?
| timenotwasted wrote:
| "It's to help people find work that feels easy for them -- not
| necessarily work they already know how to do, but work that feels
| obvious for them to get done by whatever means possible"
|
| Having worked across the spectrum of big co. and startups this is
| much easier to do from a startup/small co. perspective. The
| larger the company gets the less likely this is going to be the
| case even for the ones that are more amenable to shifting folks
| around regularly. The Venn diagram of fulfilling work and the
| team that you're on gets further spread the larger the company
| you're on and will change rapidly on you.
| languagehacker wrote:
| "What if I farmed everything out to an AI and felt like I
| accomplished something"
| andrewrn wrote:
| Not to be that guy but PG has a great one on this:
| https://paulgraham.com/love.html
|
| And here's another great one about how ease, and not grind,
| arguably led to some of the biggest discoveries ever, like
| General Relativity: https://www.strangeloopcanon.com/p/on-
| thinkers-and-doers
|
| I am currently doing a masters degree at Carnegie Mellon and I
| gotta be honest, this place is so dehumanizing for the exact
| reasons discussed in the link. It's just a grind pit here. And
| its harder to swallow this pill when you realize that university
| campuses are one of the few remaining venues well suited for
| exploring new ideas and having intellectual serendipity. When
| you're in a job, you can't easily just find a biology expert or
| economics expert and chat with them. When students are assaulted
| with work, they lose the ability to take advantage of that unique
| quality of the university environment.
| titanomachy wrote:
| Why do you think it's such a grind? Do you think there's
| somewhere else that wouldn't be?
|
| I've been interested in doing more school as well, but I took a
| class in-person at a top school and it seems like CS students
| at least are so career-focused that there's very little room
| for curiosity or joy. I guess it's a big luxury to be a mid-
| career person doing it mostly out of interest.
| all2 wrote:
| I worked adjacent to many masters and PhDs when I was going
| to school. It was a trope that 'if you aren't mentally ill,
| you aren't working hard enough', as if the expectation was to
| destroy any enjoyment or wonder in your work. Or something.
| andrewrn wrote:
| Ah so its just that way everywhere huh. Very frustrating
| because as the article says, its genuinely less productive
| to engage in the grind. This feels true to me.
| andrewrn wrote:
| I think they've just built a ton of momentum around that kind
| of culture here and its hard to reverse. They just set up
| some new committee to troubleshoot suicides on campus. If I
| tried to compare it to other schools with similar prestige
| (like ivies) I'd be speculating, so I couldn't say if it'd be
| the same elsewhere.
|
| I do hope its different elsewhere because to me grad school
| is something one does if they're not satisfied with their
| career direction, so in that spirit there should be some
| exploration built in. CMU doesn't include this at all, so its
| like paying to work even hard than you would in a normal job.
| I would very much not recommend coming here for a graduate
| program.
|
| This is something you might consider checking out, all the
| work is discretionary by definition, so I assume its more
| joyful and personal: https://www.recurse.com/. Might be hard
| to get in, idk.
| keybored wrote:
| What if work felt easy?
|
| > I felt like I should catch up to stay relevant in the changing
| tech landscape, but that feeling just didn't translate to action.
|
| > Then, a few months ago, I had this silly idea for a Trader
| Joe's snack box builder. It made me smile to think about it
| existing in the world. So I downloaded Cursor, and built and
| shipped a basic version in two hours.
|
| And what if AI was what made it feel easy?
|
| > That tiny spark of joy reminded me how much I love to build. A
| few weeks ago, I got pulled into building a Community Library app
| -- something I'd been noodling on for months as a shared Google
| Sheet. Once I had the idea for a real site, it just made sense to
| build it.
|
| What if all your problems could be solved with AI? Visualize it.
| Find that tiny spark of joy. Magnify it.
| switchbak wrote:
| > What if all your problems could be solved with AI?
|
| Well, that's a big question and I think the answer is "no".
| There's probably not a single person in this world whose entire
| set of problems could be solved with AI. It can be useful in
| some narrow (digital) domains, sure. Is it going to fix your
| grumpy neighbour, your IBS or your Mom with dementia? No.
|
| And in fact, one of my main problems these days is dealing with
| the side effects of other's over-exuberance with AI. And
| shockingly, rubbing more AI on it only makes it worse.
| BrenBarn wrote:
| I mean the missing link here is can you make money with it. There
| are plenty of people out there for whom the "easy" work is
| something like building hyper-detailed models of obscure railway
| bridges, or painting 5,000 pictures of their cat, or tending
| their vegetable garden. But their ability to indulge in that is
| limited because they have to support themselves with some other
| kind of work.
|
| I don't think the hard part is finding something to do that
| fulfills you and feels easy. The hard part is meeting your
| material needs while still having enough time and energy to do
| that stuff that fulfills you and feels easy.
| zkmon wrote:
| When I was child, I observed how peasants worked on their own
| small farms. Get up at around 4:30 am (with rooster call), be at
| farm by 6 am. short break at 10 am, lunch at farm around 2pm,
| back home 6pm, have dinner and back at farm until 9 or 10pm. Any
| travel to other villages would be mostly during all night by
| walk, preferably under moonlight. We usually reach destination by
| 6am.
|
| Basically, work stops only for food breaks and sleep of about 6
| hrs. Ofcourse, this is seasonal, with summers having more free
| time, due to lack of crop work. But summers would have different
| types of work such as spinning fiber for cot threads or ropes,
| mending home roofings, repairing farm tools, carts, fixing
| irrigation systems, having marriages and festivals etc.
| korse wrote:
| Out of curiosity, roughly where are you from?
| zkmon wrote:
| South India
| quirkot wrote:
| I'm not trying to throw shade, but the approach as described is
| very short sighted.
|
| > That tiny spark of joy reminded me how much I love to build
|
| Well, yes. That's the fun part. The hard part is the "bug fixes
| on that community library site you built 8 years ago, has 2k
| loyal users, and will never make you a dime."
|
| This approach, as liberating as it feels, only makes the "who
| fixes the toilets for the utopia" problem harder.
| ngriffiths wrote:
| There's a certain kind of work that's productive and doesn't take
| much "effort," at least not in the sense of that super annoying
| voice in your head that says "I _really_ should focus... I didn
| 't get much done yesterday, gotta make up for it now! Other
| people are working, look at how smart and productive they are! I
| need coffee, just one coffee then I'll have enough energy to do
| this."
|
| Used to happen all the time playing piano in a concert or just an
| intense practice session. I'd notice that I had been incredibly
| focused, _shockingly_ focused, like my brain had decided this
| random sound making activity was its One True Purpose and if it
| didn 't work hard enough it would probably shrivel up and die.
| And thinking back it hadn't felt strenuous, it felt weirdly calm
| in the moment, but I think "ease" is totally the wrong word here.
| It was obvious that I had been working _extremely hard_ , it was
| as intense as it was calming (? somehow?), and after I'd be
| totally exhausted.
|
| I think the article really means "what if hard work didn't feel
| incredibly annoying at the same time?"
|
| On the other hand there's "what if work that feels relaxing isn't
| also nearly useless"? Because there's a great way to make hard
| work feel easy, which is to _just stop worrying, man. Take it one
| step at a time, it 's probably the right step. There's no rush,
| slow down, you'll probably get there at the same time as you
| would by stressing yourself out and stopping for more coffee all
| the time. Here, use this easy framework_...
| TrackerFF wrote:
| I've experienced both hard physical and mental work, both sucks
| but physical sucks worse. But for mental work, it depends on what
| you're working on.
|
| Some mental work you can just put away, and sleep on, like trying
| to solve difficult problems. But when you add in time constraint
| and urgency, that's when things really begin to suck. When I
| worked in the military I sometimes had double shifts (15-16
| hours) where I'd track objects non-stop, doing trying to piece
| together a puzzle, and update reports on the go. You're so
| mentally drained afterwards, that you can't do anything but go
| home and sleep / turn off your brain.
| NickM wrote:
| I think this is a dangerously half-true way of thinking.
|
| Yes, there are times when hard work feels great, and it's
| absolutely worth seeking out this kind of work.
|
| But any serious endeavor is going to have times that are a slog,
| and your ability to stick with it through the bad times will very
| directly dictate your ability to get back to the good times.
| BeetleB wrote:
| > But any serious endeavor is going to have times that are a
| slog
|
| You misspelled "many" :-)
| snozolli wrote:
| The article seems to boil down to, "I found a way to do the part
| I like." Obviously, the really unpleasant work on a product is
| usually down the line. Bugs, technical debt, keeping
| documentation relevant, and integrating new features.
|
| This site used to talk all the time about Minimum Viable
| Products. The focus of startups was to get the MVP out the door
| so that you could see if there's even a market for it before you
| invest in further development, scaling, etc. I'm surprised that I
| haven't seen more posts here specifically about using AI to get
| an MVP out the door, with the awareness that there will be a lot
| of human labor down the line.
| atleastoptimal wrote:
| hard work is 1000x easier when I know that I'm contributing to
| something worthwhile, and more importantly, I have strong
| assurance that my work will make a positive impact. Working at
| something you suspect you're redundant or bad at is demoralizing
| and a recipe for burnout.
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