Being able to see ourselves as something beyond our job (our means of survival) is a luxury. If a person can't provide for themselves the rest goes out the window fast.
The only way to ease the anxiety in people isn't with fluff about their 'human worth', but rather to help them envision other tangible and plausible ways in which they can provide for themselves.
The cold reality, in my opinion, is that the things we value about ourselves are generally not that valuable to others. I love my own personality and humanity, my soul if you will, but nobody's paying me for it, and so I have to value it accordingly.
Hell, let me go even darker: there are billions of souls on this planet. They're not a rare thing like say, gold. They're very easily produced, by two people getting it on. That leads to a harsh conclusion: human beings aren't that valuable as individuals. We are in fact very disposable and replaceable.
Those living in the first world have been shielded from that harsh reality for some time, but it's starting to show up on our doorstep and we don't like it, and due to our inexperience with it we haven't learned how to adapt to it.
It scares me too, but I refuse to be in denial about it.
Good god, serious life advice targeted at young men (but applicable to anybody) before the manosphere, incels and culture wars took over. Unimaginable stuff today. What a relic.
This article seems to hinge on a rhetorical flourish whereby the literal meaning of 'you are not your job' is substituted with a criticism of 'you are not what you do'. Well, of course it doesn't make sense and isn't true if you redefine it like that - the original aphorism is instead more literal: your identity should not be conflated with the identity of your employer. The substituted argument leads to some fascinating philosophy, but doesn't deal with the more literal fact that plenty of things you can do for value to the world are still negatives, either net negative for the world or to the individual. Conflating one's identity with an employer is the latter, since the employer and the employee almost always have different requirements for well-being (in the case of a corporation then of course the employer in that sense has no requirement for well-being at all).
> they fall for those jerks because those jerks have other things they can offer.
Ha! That reminds me that I, somewhat unknowingly, in the past have emulated the good parts of a jerk to be more attractive myself.
What are the good parts of a jerk?
They are: adventurous, spontaneous, in the moment, doesn't take everything too seriously, thrill seeking and confident. It made me much more pro-active as I'm a fairly passive person (romantically speaking) normally. Oh and I still was nice too. And I emulated those things because they sounded fun as well, I just never thought of amping it up a bit.
In part, but my intent of being nice didn't change. It stayed the same. Also some women explicitly called me kind and nice, not all of them to be fair. I definitely had some women being like "I normally don't go for nice guys but", but I was the exception :)
> before the manosphere, incels and culture wars took over.
Those are convenient boogeymen that give basically the same advice, just sometimes in very crass and very rude forms.
The advice stood 50 years ago, in 2012, and still stands today. What doesn't seem to stand is that american culture seems to have abandoned holding people accountable and responsible for anything ever.
That article is crating the ground for manosphere, incels and culture wars. It tells the men they have no value and don't really matter as people. Have young men read that article, believe it and you will end up with them joining manosphere, incels and culture wars.
Also, it does in fact matter whether a guy is nice.
I think the article's central point is that being nice is the bare minimum. In fact, probably less than that. If you needed life-saving surgery, it would be great to have a nice surgeon, but you're still going to pick the arrogant surgeon at the top of his field rather than a random nice guy. I will say that I in fact agree that people are innately valuable, but that's more of a philosophical/religious debate here.
I think there might be that aspects, but not really the central point. On the niceness, the article claims that being nice or honest does not matter. And also that they are completely common. Neither are true.
I did not liked the surgery argument either. Of course you should not operate if you do not know how ... but that is issue of overblown ego and arrogance. Not of the niceness. No matter how awesome you are, there will be things you cant do. And framing a guy into as a useless idiot because he is a carpenter rather then surgeon and thus cant operate right there in the street is nonsense. The surgery issue simply wont happen with honest nice guy. That guy will call an ambulance which is certainly better then trying to operate.
Read article again: it literally tell guys that yes, they should be sociopathic and go get some money. That is manosphere in nutshel.
> If you needed life-saving surgery, it would be great to have a nice surgeon, but you're still going to pick the arrogant surgeon at the top of his field
In around about way, the automatic assumption that arrogance = capability did allowed quite a few cranks skate. The manosphere is fully into that point.
The author directly confronts and scolds incels in #4 and also plainly says that it isn't about money there so you clearly have the wrong impression of what the essay is about.
I feel like that article contradicts the meaning of OPs article in almost every way.
The Cracked article comes from a very neoliberal, self-optimization hustle-grind culture: work on yourself so you're worth more for others: an incredibly, if not exclusively, extrinsic motivation. While OPs article seems more focused on your internal presence, your relationships and being with people, not for people. Cracked says to work hard and complain less, produce more so your skillset is more worthy to other people. OPs article says to practice presence and true connection.
The only thing I can find that connects both is that they have a mindset of anti-passivity, but that's all.
Ahh, edit: thought you replied directly to OP, that's why I thought you meant that the Cracked article is similar to OPs article. Sorry!
There's some truth in there about in case of a serious emergency you mostly need competence over empathy. But, to me, it's always love, empathy and connectedness that wins. Why are you commenting on HN? Is it for bringing value in return for money or services or material goods? I don't think so. It is about human connection. In absence, life or death makes not much difference anymore.
Love, empathy, and connectedness are something you have to put in effort (lots of effort in some cases) and skill ( that has to be learned and honed) to express to the recipient in a way that gets through to them.
Your mention of "return for money or services or material goods" shows you didn't get the point of the article; the author plainly explains why it isn't about money in #4.
Well i wrote services as well. But anyways, since you were so kind as to take the effort of pointing me out the pointe, I took the effort of watching half of Baldwin's monologue and read the text below in more detail. Very interesting, it makes me understand better why the article today still is referred to. The douchebags for which some pretty women - knowingly or subconsciously - fall, often have a skill, other than just their slick douchebag appearances and schwung. So just being mister nice guy doesn't cut it. I can't help being a nice guy - - Thanks for giving me food for thought!
Thanks very much for sharing this - despite his declaration of his majority audience, this is excellent, hard-hitting advice for anyone who feels lost in the gap between their achievements and their "potential."
This comment defines value as what people pay for things, then comes to the conclusion that they way to value people must be based on what people will pay for them.
That's not insightful, that's just circular reasoning, and it fails to explain normal human behavior.
Does a child have no value to it's parents because it's "easily produced"[1] and "disposable and replaceable"?
I think it's more trying to say, if an individual cannot support themselves or provide value to others who can support them then those other intangible factors don't matter too much.
In the first world we have a ton of excess value so we can do things like homeless shelters, charity, socialized medicine, etc.
But if we suddenly don't have that excess value to spread around and it becomes either I eat today or you eat today and I'm the one who farmed the wheat and made the bread -- me and my family are going to eat today.
I think that is a more clear framing of what the OP was saying, and if they had written it that way I probably wouldn't have bothered replying. It just had a very fatalistic tone I didn't agree with.
I still disagree though, the relationship between scarcity and generosity is very complex.
And as an aside, homeless shelters and socialized medicine are cheaper than the alternatives in developed nations, so I would argue those are the sign of good governance rather than excess value. Although that depends on your definition of value...
If you're focused on farming and I'm focused on taking the product of your labor I win. Your attention/resources are split between producing and defending yourself/survival. Mine is entirely focused on extraction.
Over time the imbalance compounds. I spend all my effort improving the mechanisms of coercion and extraction. You split yours between survival and production. I get better at taking you get just good enough at surviving to keep producing. The system stabilizes around that balance with you allowed enough to survive, but not enough to escape the cycle.
We have had extra excess because for a little while enough of us didn't think in the hundred thousand year old way you wrote. But the 'modern' tech bro world isn't able to get away from the hundred thousand year old thinking. And generations of progress potentially erode because the systems of power guiding them haven’t evolved beyond ancient incentives with all signs now pointing to new locked in systems of control instead of shared prosperity.
Well, I mean, you can certainly say economic value doesn't capture all of the value. But you can also say that there are metrics of value that do capture everything. Thermodynamic entropy, for example - its steady march to zero is statistically unstoppable. You can't measure a child's economic value without making a lot of assumptions, but you can measure a child's thermodynamic heat production with a few simple experiments. It might sound a little out there, but I've been looking at the maximum entropy production principle and some books on thermodynamics, and there really is a lot that is applicable to calculations about human systems. Viewing humans as dissipative structures designed to maximize entropy production really explains a lot about how the world works. Notably, some questions about our energy usage patterns. AI may not be useful economically yet, but it's excellent at dissipating heat.
In fact entropy is relative to what we define as chaos vs what we define as ordered. When we can't explain the order, we define it as being chaotic, and for convenience we model it statistically in stead of in absolute terms. I learned that few months ago from a HN posted article.
I believe they were trying to push back on the easily word in "easily produced". While, thank god, modern medicine makes birthing dramatically safer than at any time in history, it is still an incredibly taxing process on the human body and still fundamentally dangerous. It is not "easy" per-se.
C’mon now, let’s not be intentionally obtuse to try and sound smart adding “yes, but” to a perfectly solid argument. Children are easily produced, that’s a fact. The process of child bearing is not in question, but rather the availability of willing partners (hell, even unwilling, if we’re getting that dark) and how little effort it generally takes to get the conception process going.
They were making a point that it’s much easier to generate a human being than it is actually generating economically meaningful value. One needs a few minutes of your time and gets you feeling really good at the end of the process, and the other can (and often does) require years of effort, toil and sweat (all of which can catastrophically fail rendering your efforts moot).
Generating a new human is, indeed, comparatively easy.
> One needs a few minutes of your time and gets you feeling really good at the end of the process
Ah yes, and after the intercourse the child spawns, I remember. And then it just leaves and goes somewhere and starts it's own life. No pain, work, food, time or whatever involved. Just having sex and feeling good.
> years of effort, toil and sweat
Would be a shame if that would be needed to produce a human being.
...which is what exactly? My best guess is that you're implying "normal human behavior" is unconditional love and support? That's an idealistic view that doesn't hold true for everyone (even in the first world) as GP pointed out.
I think this idealistic type of mindset, which seems to be a collective agreement to blow smoke up each other's asses, has done a lot more harm than good. You get thrashed between the reality that everything is conditional and the ideal which is that you're unique and special just by existing, with the latter being delusion IMO.
They aren’t valuable to markets, but like I have neighbors who are treasured by the community and genuinely bring joy to everyone. But no, I guess they aren’t economically important. I actually don’t like how every soul has been reduced to an efficiency metric, surprised how much I find forums like this accept that framing.
True as well. I've had similar communal experiences where you get a taste of the old way, the way humans would have operated when we lived in tribes. And on that level I think we are capable of valuing each other as beings - the instinct to look out for each other kicks in.
But this modern society we live in... it's just not structured that way anymore. Most of us live in little silos now: our job and our atomic family.
And we've become so used to depending on it that it looks very unlikely to change until/unless shit hits the fan. Your average person doesn't know how to grow their own food or build their own shelter, and even if they do it's far less convenient than just getting a paycheck and relying on the supermarket.
It's often amazing to me that the whole edifice of it functions as long as it does. Sometimes when I'm in the CBD here in Melbourne, I sit there marveling at the thousands of people I see wandering the streets, all of whom are somehow employed by someone to do something such that they have enough money to keep afloat.
> Your average person doesn't know how to grow their own food
And, you know the sad part? A lot of places don't allow you to even try to learn. For example, my current place that I rent has a yard (it's a nice little trailer home), but I'm not allowed to have a garden. They even chopped down the nice tree that was growing in the yard when I first moved in.
Oh, I can certainly try to grow stuff inside in containers, but that means I gotta get containers (which I can't afford) and I get an increased risk of bugs & dirt being in the house (not a fan thanks).
Not really. Only if you discount all external effects on the environment. There are more productive agriculture systems with more yield per sq* but more manual input, but less side effects. E.g. permaculture.
A $10 plastic container doesn't have nearly enough space for sustenance farming. Neither does a typical city home's garden. And for health reasons they're not going to let you raise animals (there are pretty funky diseases you and your neighbours can get from even just poultry, never mind pigs and cattle)
You can certainly grow various fun things in buckets - tomatos, herbs, etc. But you can't survive on it. Not with a small city garden.
And that's the point - in pre-industrial times, you had to survive off what you could grow, and you had a lot more land, which you used most of to grow your own food, and used most of your own time to grow food, and you were fucked at the first bad harvest (though you would likely have been part of a social contract where your local landowner took a portion of your crops to cover for these eventualities)
In post-industrial times, peasants found they could work in factories and earn much more than they could selling a portion of their crop. Countries stopped being 90% farmers. Normal people could specialise, not just the landed gentry who didn't wonder where their next meal was coming from.
And here we are typing to each other on websites.
It's sad if the city or your landlord won't let you have a garden. Gardens are wonderful things. You should try and grow something. But we're in a discussion context of "people don't even know how to grow their own food any more". Thank goodness for that, because if we did, we'd be spending all day tending to our crops, living in abject poverty, at constant risk of starvation, and we'd have no time for computers. Thank goodness for modern agricultural practise.
The person I replied to wrote about indoor gardening. So sustainability was always out of the question. Besides, you dont have to go back to preindustrial times. My parents had enough "land" to grow food for us. It basically ended around 1985 when they finally realized it was far easier to just buy stuff at the supermarket, because, as you already mentioned, growing your own food is very time consuming. Around that time, almost everyone I know stopped to try to be self-sustaining.
When we lived in tribes, people knew who did what job, and those who were taking more than they were contributing were punished harshly.
Money is merely a mnemonic device serving the same purpose, to mark those who did more good than received.
Average person does not know how to grow food and build shelter not because getting paycheck is convenient but because it is more efficient. If we do not want money, supermarkets etc. we'll be back to 10 mln people that the tribal way of life could sustain.
Being employed to get money is not really different from searching prey or edible roots, what is different now is that billions of people who were supposed to die because they couldn't find what to eat, or couldn't get along with their tribe, stay alive and complain that they did not receive more free stuff from complete strangers.
Ha! I grew up in a rural area, "communal" if you may. And leaving that hellhole of dishonesty and depression was one of the most important moves in my life. I guess it really depends on how you deal with communal life and how much you are able to ignore people who think they have the right to comment your lifestyle/situation. Well, maybe I am too harsh, and this phenomenon isn't obvious to non-disabled people. But the amount of patronisation I usually get in communal situations makes me LOVE my urban life.
You and your neighbors might mutually provide joy for each other, but there is a third party in this exchange: the massive industrial complex that provides the food and shelter you need to live. Unfortunately the industrial complex does not accept joy as a form of payment, so this whole system isn't going to work out.
It does not work as long as you stay strongly intertwined with the capitalist complex, correct. But I'd argue that in basically every region of the world, you have the choice. It may be harder or easier, but you have it.
the capitalist complex is strongly intertwined with reality and power.
You have the choice to stick your head in the sand for a while and try to ignore it, but eventually your sand castle will get bulldozed by a group of people that don't.
Yes, if you try to force a material value on everything, you will get a material value.
I would pay a shit ton to have loving and supporting friends, but this is not how it works. Because loving and supporting friends don't want money in exchange, but your true love and support.
This works for "good" neighborhoods if you replace "good" with "low-crime", as people with a higher income tend to do less crimes, if we count out tax evasion and other anti-society behaviours.
But this is not what it's about. You reap what you sow. You try to increase your value for people to like you and want to be friends with you? This can work, but the price for it is (1) purely extrinsical motivation which more often then not does leave you feel empty and (2) friends who will leave you as soon as your worth decreases, e.g. with age or illness, or if a different person with more value comes around and offers their friendship.
> But no, I guess they aren’t economically important. I actually don’t like how every soul has been reduced to an efficiency metric, surprised how much I find forums like this accept that framing.
Efficiency is the metric of nature. Thinking about human life in any other terms than input and output is objectively a luxury, afforded only to societies with surplus resources. Calling it "framing" feels a little disingenuous.
Okay, so when you, BobbyJo, become too old or unwell to work; other people should just shoot you in the head and take your stuff, right? It would only be efficient. Or does this 'harsh reality" only apply to other people?
Modern society has the luxury of surplus resources at the moment, and we are able to take care of the old and weak, which we indeed choose to do. If/when that ceases to be the case, the harsh reality will apply to everyone, me included, yes.
Another thing humans are arguably good at is making a longer term plan and investment: if we see that old people simply get shot, we won't be investing surplus value into our retirement funds — at least not of the same sort. Perhaps we'll be building fortresses when younger, accumulating wealth to be able to pay soldiers to protect us etc...
Wait, that's exactly what has happened, except it has evolved into a more systemic solution (our taxes and social contributions pay for police, courts; bigger accumulated wealth allows for more options...).
For some rare once-in-a-lifetime friendships, you are not disposable, and if anything were to happen to you, you would be missed. I can count those on one hand.
For most casual acquaintances (that some people incorrectly label as friends), it's certainly true.
On the family's side: only parents, siblings, children, maybe some aunt or grandparent. Second distant cousin you saw 3 times in life?
You may feel this way, but it feels a lot different when you learn that one of your acquaintances has died.
I enjoyed a brief intellectual conversation with a professor at the end of a semester. When I returned the next academic year, I stopped by his office for a quick chat, but his name was no longer on the door. The department administrator told me "Oh, he's no longer with us."
My heart sunk. I didn't know him well, he may not have remembered my name, but I wanted to thank him, and now he was gone. Cut down in his prime? He was just an acquaintance to me, he was not my friend. But I still felt that shock and grief deeply.
I asked the administrator how he'd died, and she quickly clarified: he was still alive! He had just been a guest lecturer visiting for one semester from a Scandinavian university and had now returned home. This has taught me not to delay expressing my gratitude for the acquaintances in my life.
There's a been a few similar instances in my life that have led me take up the personal practice of "Always say hi or wave to friend when the chance comes around, because there may not be a next time". It came about because I tend to see a lot of close friends and looser acquaintances on a day to day basis physically in the world, and there used to be more times than not where I wouldn't bother crossing the street or stopping for a minute to chat. Later I realized this costs me almost nothing, and even for less-close relationships, I'd prefer to have put in the tiny amount of effort to walk up and show them they're worth even that much before they overdosed or moved away or committed suicide. It's not always opportune, but what else is life for?
Granted, in retrospect, there's not really ever a sufficient amount of interaction you could have had, but if I see someone inside a cafe that I'm walking past, it's worth popping in and at least saying hi or waving from outside.
There still is value with the casual acquaintances. Just because a person is replaceable doesn't mean they are not valuable when present. My neighbor who I barely talk to has helped me out when I am in a bind. Even if a new neighbor moves in and replaces him, the original neighbor was valuable and gave me a sense of security, peace, and community while he was present.
I'd rather have my family and 1-2 close friends, and literally no one else, instead of 100 close friends that will vanish as soon as I am not able to bring anything to the table anymore, which will inevitably happen for everyone.
That’s not the point. The point is that the number is small. They are not making a judgment on the value of such relationships but rather that that number is and will always be small that in the grand scheme of things it’s insignificant, it only matters in a person’s immediate sphere.
People on this thread seriously need to stop reacting so emotionally to things. Damn. Grow up people.
The number is small in comparison to the whole humanity, yes, but this is not at all what it's about in this post. Did you read the article?
Instead, it actually is literally about each individual's immediate sphere, which, as you correctly point out, is where it matters. Having 5 true friends in a world with 100 people or in a world with 1 billion people doesn't change anything.
I think modern healthcare really put a focus back on people as individuals. Mortality rates were quite high even from what we see now as trivial illness or injury, and people would have a lot of offspring to account for this in the past.
By the time I reached adult hood I only experienced a handful of deaths of close people, all from old age.
Apart from a few, friends and family who care about you can be counted on one hand as well. When automation replaces our job or diminishes our economic worth many fold, not many friends and family remain unchanged. You parents, your siblings maybe and maybe 1-2 of your closest friends. Others will drift apart because we are in a different lifestyle now. Heck, even without any change, parent/siblings drift apart for many. It is tough then to not correlate our value with our economic value.
> Apart from a few, friends and family who care about you can be counted on one hand as well.
It's not about the quantity but about the quality of friendships and human connection. I couldn't care less about the number of my friends. I do care a lot though about the connection to them.
> The cold reality, in my opinion, is that the things we value about ourselves are generally not that valuable to others. I love my own personality and humanity, my soul if you will, but nobody's paying me for it, and so I have to value it accordingly.
> The cold reality, in my opinion, is that the things we value about ourselves are generally not that valuable to others. I love my own personality and humanity, my soul if you will, but nobody's paying me for it, and so I have to value it accordingly.
A good example of what tribes did better vs civilization: if you can do anything to help the tribe survive (I am a good hunter, you can create good bows), you are a prized member. If you can't do anything, at least we still love you because you are kin.
This is incredibly naive. Hunter gatherer communities, especially those in regions without an abundance of food, are and were extremely selective about who were accepted and who weren't. This starts from infancy where non-desirable babies were simply killed. Estimates vary greatly but perhaps around a third to half of "modern" hunter gatherer tribes practice infanticide. The stated reasoning behind infanticides is often extremely vicious and comes down to "he/she is not a good fit for the tribe", or in other words "nobody likes him/her". This fact alone might be one of the major explanations of the high rate of prehistoric infant mortality.
But if you are even allowed to grow up and become an individual, things might be somewhat better once you are part of the in-group, but that does not factor in the fact that human empathy has an overall tendency to switch off if you're not. Even if you're loved because you're kin, your neighboring tribe might still kill you, or you and your kin might kill them, for entirely petty or cynical reasons. The prehistoric bone record supports this as well, seemingly human-weapon related reasons is the most common cause of death.
You can also examine your own emotions to get some idea of our evolutionary environment. Loneliness hurts, to the point where it has measurable negative health impacts equivalent to smoking a pack of cigarettes each day. Your brain is screaming at you not to be lonely, but why? Well, in our ancestral environment, being excluded from the social group meant death, so most individuals that did not have a profound and visceral fear of that happening got their genes consistently removed from the gene pool. For loneliness to be that big of deal, being excluded must have been an easily available option. If everyone loved and accepted everyone unconditionally, this emotional state would simply not have evolved.
Humans quickly become extremely brutal once the environment necessitates it, up to and including cannibalizing your own kin. Infanticide and murder of both ingroups and outgroups is historically commonplace because it was also commonplace prehistorically. Even modern tribes, that live in relative abundance, are still brutal in many ways to this very day.
But of course, when you look at any group of individuals in a tribe survivorship bias will dictate that it all looks nice and rosy. But you might want to check the skeletons in the cave before you pick that as your conclusion.
Late reply, but in case you'll check I think most of what I said is sourced from sources of varying quality and salience, but at least it's sourced from somewhere. But I just typed it all out quickly without checking anything over, so a lot might be wrong. But it's not entirely pulled out of my ass at least.
Evolutionary history is of course always difficult. I think the loneliness part comes mostly from the kurzgesagt video on loneliness, as well as some other stuff here and there. Rate of infanticide is roughly correct with quick Google. Rest of tribal stuff is from a variety of books and high school social anthropology. I think I actually have the "reasoning for infanticide" part from sex at dawn, of all places.
I'm always scared to run a deep research service to find the counterpoints after I type this kind of stuff out, but feel free to do so for me and dress me down. At least survivorship bias is a classic that's pretty much always worth keeping in mind on any topic.
There are many instances of braces and artificial limbs or that were found or fossilised bones that showed crippled people that grew into old-age, which provides evidence that people cared for 'non-productive' members.
Finding evidence that disable people existed does not provide evidence that they were not able to contribute in some way. It's incredibly ableist to assume they couldn't.
In the context of a pre-industrial society? I doubt it. In a hunter gatherer-society? I doubt it even more. people with certain skills (e.g. tool making, music, cooking maybe..) certainly, but not for a lot of people.
However, decent human beings do not value other human beings purely on the basis of their economic contribution. Someone might be a net cost, but a decent society still looks after them.
You're missing things like making clothing (tanning, sinew, etc) , gathering wood, etc. You can be missing an arm or leg and still contribute to those.
I think we have a skewed perception of ability, now that we’re connected via the internet to the whole rest of humanity.
Nature is ableist in a lot of ways… if you had diabetes in some ancient tribe you’d basically be screwed. But if you had an amputated leg, I dunno. You could still be the best flint knapper in the tribe.
I mean, think of your extended circle of friends and acquaintances, your 100 “closest” friends. In particular, think back on the community grew up in, if you’ve subsequently moved to a tech hub that accumulates rare talent. I bet picking through your hobbies there are a couple potentially useful things that you’d be a top-tier contributor in. Most people are really bad at almost everything they don’t do, after all.
I’m not going to engage in some prehistoric idealism. The past was pretty brutal. But we’d probably all die by getting little infected cuts, not because we were abandoned by our tribes.
Indeed. If one is crippled their 'value' for the tribe doesn't suddenly disappear. A person has their wit, their positive spirit, their wisdom and skills, their empathy, care and understanding for others that is important for the tribe's wellbeing. Etcetera.
It seems like most people in the first world either couldn't do physical tasks or would tell themselves they can't. Things like bow making and hunting (including processing) require specialized knowledge and a lot of physical work. Same goes for farming.
But the real thing that makes the comparison fall apart is that with machines people have less utility and people today "require" more resources- can an individual today do anything meaningful to help the tribe survive? And by meaningful, we necessarily tie it to positive economic impact, which is very hard to achieve at lower paying jobs or jobless when we look at things that get paid for by the tribe such as like healthcare cost.
>A good example of what tribes did better vs civilization: if you can do anything to help the tribe survive (I am a good hunter, you can create good bows), you are a prized member. If you can't do anything, at least we still love you because you are kin.
Indeed it seems that there really are two "modes" for human civilization; one where human beings are scarce and valuable, and one where they are abundant and cheap. The West has spent the last 400+ years in the former mode, as the plague decimated Europe and they spread into the vast new world, where humans were so scarce they had to be forcibly imported via mass enslavement, and wage earners could demand a premium. Now that globalism has brought us all onto the same stage as the Eastern masses, things are starting to feel pretty crowded.
We still do that, though, within our own little tribes inside civilization. Most people still love their grandparents, even though they're old. That just doesn't necessarily extend to all of civilization.
You're right, if you've diminished yourself to a generic "consumer", and haven't interleaved yourself into a fabric of value beyond economic. Relationships are worth a lot and can't really be bought. Do/Will you care for someone? Do/Will they care for you? This can make you far more valuable than your economic outputs, and also worth economic inputs if you ever lack.
"All" is a pretty high bar. I think a huge proportion of the developed world has a lot of choice and is repeatedly choosing stuff/experiences over people. Not sure how we'd find data to resolve that... People living paycheck to paycheck, or not having $400 to cover a bill is not really proof without understanding how they're spending money... As far as I can tell a lot of today's economic woes in the developed world is self inflicted through lifestyle inflation. We live in bigger houses (more sq ft per person), more alone, eat out a lot more, drive cars with far more horsepower, and have a supercomputer in their pocket.
A lot of that is just technological advancement. The baseline has shifted up, you aren't going to save any money by driving a Ford Model T. Quite the opposite in fact, given the maintenance and obscure parts it requires.
Likewise not having a smartphone means you're less able to participate in the economy, and can in fact impair one's social life as most things are coordinated via group chat these days.
If you want to go live like it's 1910, that is an option, but unless you're willing to become Amish you will find it socially isolating and surprisingly expensive. It will not fix your economic woes, it will simply swap them for the economic woes of yesteryear and you'll learn first-hand why we developed things like washing machines.
IMO the real culprit is the financialization of everything over the last 50 years, and lax anti-trust enforcement. Since the 70s, every excuse in the book has been used to not pay workers more. Your house is now an asset! Your company-managed pension is now a self-managed 401k! You can get loans for everything under the sun, endless credit! Why care about the total cost of goods when you can just pay it off in installments? Anything but actually paying the middle class a bigger piece of the pie so they might be able to buy something with actual savings like we're taught to do as kids. Competition to bring down prices? Nope, we're approving every corporate consolidation from now until the end of time and bailing them out with taxpayer money when they fail! They jumped the shark a bit proposing 50 year mortgages to fix the housing crisis.
It's always sold to the public as "freedom", because the public is/was the most gullible entity. Mediocre people love pretending that they're the masters of their own destiny.
The net effect is that there is no adjustment to lifestyle you can make to offset the rising cost of everything without sacrificing your ability to prosper in the first place. If there were, West Virginia would be prospering right now. You can go full Diogenes if you like, that's all romantic until you get sick, and God forbid you have dependents who look to you for food and healthcare and you tell them that you can't provide it because that would require lifestyle inflation.
Yes and we love urban areas. Urban areas like NYC, Boston, SF are extremely expensive, with one bedroom apartments renting for 5K and selling for 1M.
Not everyone wants a 1 hr long commute, and since we took away remote work we're stuffing everyone into expensive cities where people spend the remainder of their 50 percent not taken by taxes on housing (and health too in some cases)
Yes, NIMBY-ism has done hard things to those specific areas. At least as far as we trust chatgpt, but people are still living in more median sq ft per person today than long ago (think 50-100 yrs ago). Of course rent per person will go up if we're renting 50-100% more space than in the past.
Have you ever organized with your community before? No offense but you come across as a libertarian trying to monetize social relationships. It comes across as deeply human. It also declares that people have no agency, it's just a pathetic view point on humanity and our potential.
To think money is the only thing that is of highest value in our incredibly short lives is a mental sickness.
> To think money is the only thing that is of highest value in our incredibly short lives is a mental sickness.
They didn’t say that? Nor was it even implied? What the hell?
All they said was that EVEN free time is a form of wealth that not all enjoy, and free time does often correlate to how well you can express your care for someone. And they are absolutely, without a single shadow of a doubt, correct.
Are you responding to the right post? I never said any of that.
All I said was if you have to work 3 jobs just to pay rent, you probably aren't going to be caring for many people no matter how much you might want to, simply due to limited hours in the day. Never mind people with actual disabilities.
> Being able to see ourselves as something beyond our job (our means of survival) is a luxury. If a person can't provide for themselves the rest goes out the window fast.
It is other way round. The sort of person who sees themselves as their job only are good when they are well off.
That sort of person copes badly with when being poor. Having no self to draw from outside of work and feeling like constant failure in unsatisfying work leads to issues like alcoholism, violence, gambling.
> The cold reality, in my opinion, is that the things we value about ourselves are generally not that valuable to others. I love my own personality and humanity, my soul if you will, but nobody's paying me for it, and so I have to value it accordingly.
This is only true if by "value" you mean monetary value. Your personality and humanity may not be valuable to the person paying you to do your job, it still has value for the people around you.
There is an intractable problem is economics which is how to assign value to a thing. It's probably more of a philosophical debate. One arm of the debate is something called marginal utility. That is, a think is worth a different amount to different people. I value a particular guitar more than my neighbour does. I think it's worth $100. He thinks it's worth $50. Who is right? Authoritarian nations use top-down economic methods to dictate the value. In this case, they would make the guitar worth $1 (so "everyone can afford a guitar now"). Under capitalism, we allow individual to negotiate, and the highest bidder determines the price.
Apologies for the long-winded context, but I think it's important to address your point. You're alluding to some kind of intrinsic, self-evident value, and I would like to challenge you on that. Prove to me that this value exists. Prove to me it can be measured. To pre-empt your reply, I don't think you can. You might value a person in a certain way, but you can't ensure everyone else does. In fact you even accept this in your last sentence. A small group of people known to that individual would value them more than the other 8 billion people on the planet. Which is more or less what the person you replied to was explaining.
>Prove to me that this value exists. Prove to me it can be measured. To pre-empt your reply, I don't think you can.
Why does any of this matter? Do you require a person proves their utility to you before you hold the door open for them? When a child falls and scrapes their knee, do you ask about their grades in school, or parents net worth, before lending them a hand?
My point: human society is deeply interwoven with sentimental behaviors that make zero sense in economic theory. You can try to apply all the models you want to model human compassion and it will get you nil.
But that doesn't mean we should optimize that out of societies. I think it's the most wonderful part of our societies, and if we were to remove it, we'd stop being humans.
If you're going to make the claim that people hold intrinsic value, people are going to challenge you for proof. Holding a door open for someone and asking questions doesn't necessarily indicate value. It could indicate personal interest. Empathy. Projection. Self-interest. The concept of altruism doesn't necessitate the belief that other life holds value at all. Altruism by its definition is giving without the expectation of return.
I think you make a good point re culture and tradition. Humans like many "valueless" activities. Some of these are hardcoded into our psyche through evolution. Some are for sentimental reasons. Some are religious. Some are enforced. Some are situational. Etc. I am not suggesting we eliminate those. I am simply agreeing with the top comment which is that we cannot force people to place any value on them. Some people do not see value in those traditions (or in other people). There is no objective way to prove them wrong.
>If you're going to make the claim that people hold intrinsic value, people are going to challenge you for proof.
But this is assuming we share the same set of axioms?
It sounds like you don't accept humans having intrinsic value as a core axiom. However, I do, and it makes zero sense to me to try and "prove" such a notion.
But isn't it the other way around. The more wealthy you get the more valuable things become and the people around you become less valuable. Superficially it sounds counterintuitive and yet it is what we observe, even if it is a not very flattering observation about human nature.
I realized this first when I travelled Latin America as a young person. It was quite surprising to me never to get asked about my job but often about a family thousands of kilometers away and without any chance for the stranger speaking to me to ever meet any of them.
Only if you see yourself defined by the friends and family that surround you it suddenly makes sense.
> Hell, let me go even darker: there are billions of souls on this planet. They're not a rare thing like say, gold. They're very easily produced, by two people getting it on. That leads to a harsh conclusion: human beings aren't that valuable as individuals.
Not valuable to what or whom?
> We are in fact very disposable and replaceable.
Disposable and replaceable to what or whom?
The Planet doesn’t care whether we exist. But then again the planet would not need to replace us either. So what could this be about?
Only humans want or need automation of human labor. Are there then some special kind of humans that are entitled to (by might or other means) the output of the “disposable humans”?
Seems like people forget that work is not the goal, but economical freedom is. And its all about politics. Humanity reached a production capacity that human work is barely needed to sustain everyone. But there is greed and wars. Also, humans are social creatures, we still need one another for relationships. Hell, removing work will let us enjoy our relationships even more. Also, as long as there are wars, rest assured there are plenty of jobs. War is, sadly, a huge industry
I mean, Jack London was pretty famously a professional hobo, wandering the country looking for a place to stay. He got good at storytelling so that he'd have something to give to the families who took him in and fed him.
Eventually Jack London writes Call of the Wild and becomes stupidly rich.
Was Jack London the famous author, living off of all the money (writing less popular stories, like White Fang) more valuable because of all the money he made? Was Jack London the hobo less valuable because he didn't write the bestseller Call to the Wild yet?
Or maybe, the entire concept of valuing people off a monetary lens is just bullshit.
I agree with every fact you said yet my conclusion is that humans are valuable. Why? Because your frame of reference is the world, mine is the known universe. Humans are so fucking unlikely. Matter that somehow can experience its own (and others) being is so crazy unlikely I feel anything other than valuing it is just wrong.
In German we have a word called "Zweckoptimismus" that would translate to purposeful optimism. It is the optimism of someone who knows the world isn't good, but accepting it as bad would make it even worse, so you operate under a defiant optimism without ignoring the reality of the world.
True. But tbh, you can find ppl making time for themselves or not, in most salary ranges. Extreme poverty is another issue ofc. That’s why we have social welfare, to avoid extreme poverty.
Throughout this diatribe I think you had multiple opportunities to see the value of human life. That you didn't, makes me think you actually don't value your own life and while that's entirely your right. But, to project onto others that they're "in denial" for valuing their own, their families', or complete strangers' lives isn't the radical ultra-rational flex you think it is.
To pick one mere point where you might have chosen to value life otherwise:
> They're not a rare thing like say, gold.
You mean the gold that's a relatively common chemical in the universe? You're comparing the elementary particle formed by astronomical processes to somethings which (even if metaphorically) exists only within organisms so complex we have yet to find signs of similar complexity in the universe.
> there are billions of souls on this planet. They're not a rare thing
> like say, gold. They're very easily produced, by two people getting it
> on. That leads to a harsh conclusion: human beings aren't that valuable
> as individuals. We are in fact very disposable and replaceable.
I appreciate the perspective you're offering here, and I don't entirely disagree, especially from an economic angle. But I do want to offer a counterpoint:
Lumps of gold are largely interchangeable. It's just a mass of gold atoms that we don't differentiate between, so one lump of gold is as good as another. But people are not like that. If you were to painstakingly transform a lump of gold into a beautiful sculpture, it would be worth more than its face value. And if a person transforms from the lump of flesh they are born as into a unique individual, they are worth something more, too. Two gold sculptures would not be interchangeable, to an art aficionado, and two people are not interchangeable in that way, either.
On the gross large scale, yes, we're all lumps of flesh squidging around on the planet; a uniform slimy patina on a tiny ball of dirt. And our various large-scale systems and policies (economic, political, etc) treat people in this way, too, in varying degrees.
But you are living your one and possibly only life (just like everyone else). And you have taken a unique path through that life (just like everyone else), and I'd just encourage you and/or others reading to cherish that, both in yourself and others, even if (or especially if) the systems in which we live don't seem to. It is something that can't be taken from you, because it is intrinsic to you, and that is a value beyond "what someone will pay for."
we are, but that doesn't mean we're not valuable. everything is disposable, everything is replacable.
the idea that an individual human life isn't very valuable and that it's only first-worlders that have trouble understanding that is projection. that is the modern, first world (read capitalist) view of human life. you think you're thinking but you're actually regurgitating the ideology you've received.
Huh? I value myself and my family at infinity. Meaning no-one else or no amount of money can replace them. So no we are in fact extremely non disposable and non replaceable to the people we love.
Isn't this exactly Marx's criticism of capitalism through the theory of alienation? Human relationships get mediated and hidden as relationships between commodities and money.
We know how to come up with better alternatives, but as Marx also pointed out, the capitalists won't sit back and idly watch their world crumble. So putting anything else into practice is effectively impossible.
About the only time all the pieces fell into place to even begin to see anything else was Revolutionary Catalonia. However, the USSR quickly waged war with it to ensure its demise, and within no more than a few years it was no more. The capitalists who seized all the capital in the USSR under the guise of pretending to move away capitalism didn't want the people to realize that the USSR was still under capitalism all the same. That would threaten the capitalists who controlled the capital.
> Being able to see ourselves as something beyond our job (our means of survival) is a luxury.
Being able to see ourselves as something beyond our job is the examined life. It what makes life worth living.
We should be incredibly skeptical of a social system whose default is to have individuals primary identify by the work they do. That necessarily sets people up for continuous identity foreclosure and psychic famine in a self re-enforcing feedback loop.
Frankly it's cringe to primarily identify by profession.
Our society used to have religious beliefs that put special value on human lives / souls / whatever. Now for many people, capitalism and materialism is the only religion, and in this religion humans are reduced to their dollar value. But you should recognize that this is not a neutral choice: you have in fact chosen one of many possible value systems, and others may choose differently.
Much of human behavior is not explained by economic incentives: for example, many elderly people are cared for by their children out of a love or a sense of familial duty.
And exactly none of that is sourced from religion. Nobody is born religious, and when they aren't they behave the same. They might not do the same special genuflections and drink the same special holy tea or whatever, but they're similarly human.
Religion has varied continuously throughout human existence. Its not the foundational requirement here.
While that could be true, it's important to remember that these people probably grew up in a culture that had religion influence for thousands of years. In order to become atheist, one needs to renounce god, therefore have the idea of god, therefore, have some background knowledge of or about religion. That is to say, that these processes a not as simple, as one might think: take soviet union as an example - official atheist state - yet so much on interpersonal level remained based on humane values formed by thousand years of east orthodox chiristianity. And even though measly 70 years are not enough to make a significant dent in human behaviour - it did produced a lot of cynicism and misanthropy before going out the window.
It might be the other way around: religions came to be _because_ humans have values that became the backbone of religions.
The evolution of "gods" is obvious in retrospect as well (a tale of some good deeds passed on through generations gets added to with every retelling and suddenly Joe who gave a child an apple and protected it from a rabid dog was walking around feeding everone and killing dragons that stole everyone's sheep).
I recommend reading literature, philosophical and historical works from more than 2000 years ago.
So exactly was this? I am sure all of the slaveholders to the people who spit on a little black girl for dare trying to get educated in public integrated public school to the 80% of evangelical Christians who support a three times married man who admitted in his own autobiography of being a adulterer consider themselves religious.
As an older Black guy I’ve seen how both corporate America works and religious institutions. I’ve seen much less discrimination in the former than the latter.
Hey you’re welcome to your view. In my view that’s an insanely disgusting devaluation of human life that’s been put into peoples brains by propaganda. Capitalism and materialism sure is great huh.
And Christians founded a nation where Black people were counted as a 3/5th of a person and my still living parents grew up in the segregated south - that was upheld by a Supreme Court made up of people who were religious.
Well here's a thing - I don't think it's capitalism which made me think this way, or even living in the first world. The first world in my experience is big on preaching the dogma that we're all special and valuable (whether it practices what it preaches aside).
Rather my view actually came from observing violence - between humans, but also in nature, and deeper still as a product of reality.
We exist in these fragile bags of flesh and bone. To a hungry lion we'd just be food.
And we behave the same - take for example the eating of meat. I'm a meat eater myself so this isn't anything preachy, but consider this - many animals are quite beautiful beings, possessed of their own personalities (we see it in our pets).
But that instrinsic value they have doesn't stop us from turning them into steaks.
On the one hand I wish you were right - I wish the world were beautiful and our souls along with it, and that I could sing that song.
But it doesn't always look that way. And worse still, I think it all started at the level of nature, not at the level of capitalism. We attribute too much significance to the human race when we lay such woes only at our own feet.
I'd respectfully challenge that your opinion reflects reality. Nihilism [1] is just one philosophy amongst many. It's no more 'the one truth' than any of the others. Many of the other philosophies have evolved in the light of folks living for centuries through harsher reality than most of us are experiencing today. You might consider other philosophies to be delusional (as others consider nihilism to be delusional), but even in that different delusion they provide a framework to relate your love of your own personality and humanity with the same feelings that a lot of other people also feel about themselves and also each other.
>Ultimately, out there, people value you by just 5-6 things and almost never they are your beliefs or personal values.
This is such a rigid world view that is demonstrably wrong. I won't even argue with you because others have already pointed out why this cannot be true elsewhere.
What I will say is that I hope you're doing alright.
> there are billions of souls on this planet. They're not a rare thing like say, gold. They're very easily produced, by two people getting it on.
You've clearly never been through childbirth. Women go through incredible amounts of pain, and good parents make incredible sacrifices for their kids. They're not doing that because they're guaranteed some payoff.
> That leads to a harsh conclusion: human beings aren't that valuable as individuals. We are in fact very disposable and replaceable.
Wait until you get to the part of philosophy that hinges on this being an invention of our own making. Human beings have decided that human beings are disposable. Just like we decided that gold was valuable (and to many, more valuable).
I mean, if you are willing to sell your personality, humanity and your soul, I am sure you will find a lot of bidders. Thats literally why slavery was a thing.
There is a definite economic value to it. What does not is your consioisness that you experience since nobody else can use it.
I'd argue they get paid for their ability as performers and entertainers. It's a craft that often has be developed well beyond their innate personality, and often involves a lot of acting as well.
I agree, but many rich YouTubers are terrible. People get entertained by someone watching a video and comment here and there but stays silent for the most part. No acting here. The majority of the people who get entertained are kids, FWIW.
> You are not your job. You're a person first. Your ability to connect, be present, and make people feel understood is what makes you irreplaceable to the people around you, which is the only market that counts.
True, but losing your job is still a big deal. It often means that you lose your income, your health insurance (in the US at least), many (if not most) of your daily interactions with other people, and your social status.
> My technical skills are being disrupted by machines - that's fine I'll go do other things.
As others have noted, it's great to not actually need the paycheck you are working for.
> Your ability to connect, be present, and make people feel understood is what makes you irreplaceable
They say this to a group of people that often struggles with all of these but still have managed to make a living off of solving technical problems in the past. Don't worry, you can just fall back on your famously great people skills!
Have you ever had an experience where you objectively were doing something technically complex yet someone dismissed it because it wasn't "relevant" in their eyes?
That's a people skills problem, believe it or not. At the very least, it's a philosophical problem.
Something in my comment triggered people to think I'm saying that communication skills aren't important or worth bothering with, so obviously there's room for improvement there.
But that's kind of beside the point isn't it? If you've spent years of your life learning specific skills to offer some benefit to society, and suddenly the society decides they need far fewer people with those skills (and thus don't want to employ you), that just fundamentally has to suck for a lot of people.
Saying "cheer up, you can just compensate with this other skill" is just ignoring that fundamental reality. And I think we've all met people who were diligent and technically competent but "a bit weird", but found a refuge in tech (note: I'm not necessarily talking about "assholes" here). Those people are going to have an even harder time, and that's not because of their "toxic" identification with their job (i.e. source of income and primary form of service to society).
And I hesitate to mention this, but I don't feel I'm in this situation. I just see it happening to people in my industry and worry about the future.
> > My technical skills are being disrupted by machines - that's fine I'll go do other things.
> As others have noted, it's great to not actually need the paycheck you are working for.
Um. Yes. There's a link on "other things". It's to a site for a bike tour. The author seems to be implying they don't really need a job.
I still remember hearing a group of homeless people near the cable car turntable at Powell and Market in SF talking about the days when they used to be printers. That was, for several hundred years, a stable, well-paying job.
> in the US, you can get another one much more quickly than anywhere else in the world
Depending on the economic conditions for the year, it can still take months:
> To illustrate the recent trajectory: one analysis found that in January 2023 it took job seekers 268 days on average to land a job offer, whereas by August 2024 this had improved to 182 days (about 6 months) (How Long Does it Take to Find a Job in 2024?). Another dataset focusing on tech jobseekers showed a similar trend – those in 2024 took about 247 days on average to secure a “good” job, down from 281 days in 2023.
The whole world is hurting pretty bad right now when it comes to tech jobs - America seems to be hurting the least.
I'm not saying the tech job situation in America isn't bad - but the world dances to America's fiddle, and its frustrating hearing Americans complain about how hard their situation is while their boot is firmly planted on my neck
To be specific, it’s tied to good employment. Part-time and low-salary jobs don’t often (usually?) provide it. So trading a good tech jobs for “things to keep busy” loses the insurance. Unless you can afford cobra and that only lasts 18 months. At what tends to be 5x the price.
I completely understand where you are coming from, but try not to hate on American laborers because of this situation, that is no more helpful than Americans blaming immigrants for their job woes.
It is the wealthy capitalist class that has the boot planted on all of our necks.
I do recognize that the outcome is worse for some people than others, but keeping us fighting each other is how they continue to maintain power.
My father in law lost his job 2 years ago, completely unrelated to AI, at the age of 63. He had worked this same job since he was 18 and it was his identity. He'd almost greet people with "Hey I'm CEO, my friends and family call me X".
Being fired from his own company completely destroyed him - and not because he's worried about the financial aspect, he doesn't need to worry about that at this point.
I remember watching him go though this and thinking to myself "Jeeze, I'm glad my identity isn't completely tied up with what I do for work".
With AI knocking on the door I'm surprised how much my identity and perceived self-worth is actually tied to being a "good" developer. But it's more of a slow burner than what my father in law got. So I at least have some time to mentally prepare for my new reality.
Makes you wonder with some of the dinosaurs in office if a big reason why they cling on is that internal mythmaking. Presumably everyone knows they can just up and kick back by some body of water doing whatever they'd like with their time, should they ever want to step down. And yet they don't. They prefer their busy, stressful, life of importance.
Me personally I'm just not wired like that. I work hard only to get to that payoff of being lazy and carefree later. I don't actually like being in this stressful state. It bewilders me frankly that some seemingly are addicted to it. Maybe they literally are, considering flight or flight response is a real measured altering of neurotransmitters.
>My technical skills are being disrupted by machines - that's fine I'll go do other things. [links to long bike trip]
Ok that's cool and all but many of us have bills to pay. Bike trips don't pay the bills. Software people have been economically advantaged up until now that they can go and do stuff like that.
Even software people have bills to pay and mouths to feed. I think people like the article author are either single or have no dependents, and it's a big reason I cannot take many of these posts seriously. Much like the story of Peter Pan, the authors of these posts are college students who never grew up and had to be responsible.
The issue isn't losing my job. Many of us could deal with that by simply finding another similar job in the same (coding) industry. The issue is losing the entire industry.
That thing you spent years becoming good at? Getting paid lots of money for? Oh, we killed it. Start over and pick something else. You probably won't be paid well, if you can even find anything, because you're starting from ground zero and competing with all the other people flooding the job market. Oh, and yes, it'll require massive life adjustment on your part. Good luck!
> You probably won't be paid well, if you can even find anything, because you're starting from ground zero and competing with all the other people flooding the job market.
You won’t be paid well because rent is due next week, but the new job requires you to fund your training.
So you find something else that doesn’t pay well, but gets you something coming in. But in order to pay the rent you need to work 60 hours at this job. Of course, no way they’ll schedule you for 60 hours, so you’ll get an additional lower paying job or two.
Suddenly you don’t have the time nor the money to retrain for a higher paying job. All the money from your two jobs is going to ever ballooning housing and energy costs.
Eventually you surrender, understand your place as a peasant, and sell yourself into debt slavery in hopes in a decade you can start from scratch again.
Within a few years I think UBI or UBS will be required for people to continue living, in which case basic needs (bills) won't be a concern. There's just no way for us to transition fast enough to avoid high unemployment as AI replaces large swaths of jobs. I do worry about the ~10 year transition it will take for societal governments to react.
I think UBI is a pipe dream. I live in the UK and even with our social safety net which is much stronger than the US's, I can't imagine the government ever handing out money adequate to live a middle class life to large chunk of the population.
UBI has problems that far as I know haven't been addressed. Vast numbers of people no longer being occupied doesn't seem like it would lead to a healthy society. And how do you uphold democracy when the government is effectively handing out the paychecks?
Whoever said anything about middle class? Ubi is the poverty level, it could never be anything else.
As for people not being occupied, the theory is that since ubi doesn't stop if you find employment, it would lead to less idleness than the current means-tested social safety nets. In test cases though it seems to depend a lot on culture, Finnish communities saw no difference in employment while Indian rates of business formation tripled.
>Multivariate analysis indicates that economic elites and organized groups representing business interests have substantial independent impacts on U.S. government policy, while average citizens and mass-based interest groups have little or no independent influence.
Can't uphold what isn't there, lol
As for how do we avoid becoming WALL-E blobs... elite opinion seems to suggest the UBI will be just enough to prevent people from going into the streets with pitchforks, but not enough for a dignified life. (Enough to live in ze pod and eat ze proverbial bugs.)
I don't see employment being a very big thing (unless AI creates some kinda fake jobs economy to pacify the humans, which would be a rational thing to do).
The crisis of meaning is going to be worse than the economic crisis, and I think people would literally pay to work rather than question their existence on such a deep level.
Beyond fake jobs and human-only jobs (robot can't replace the cute barista at Starbucks!), I think entrepreneurship will be the only real vehicle. So... basically how it already is today.
Within a few years I think UBI or UBS will be required for people to continue living, in which case basic needs (bills) won't be a concern. There's just no way for us to transition fast enough to avoid high unemployment as AI replaces large swaths of jobs. I do worry about the ~10 year transition it will take for societal governments to react.
This strikes me as wildly optimistic. People aren't going to be able to live on UBI at a level where massive political and social unrest is averted unless it's like $2k per person per month, minimum. And I'm skeptical that the US government is going to start printing $8.5 trillion dollars of UBI in the next decade.
This also seems wildly unrealistic. In a world where we need UBI because automation is destroying most jobs, I'd also expect food to get cheaper. In fact, I think almost everything would get cheaper except real estate, which is actually where I worry you'd see the kind of inflation you're talking about.
UBI just inflates the currency. What will hopefully end up happening is that displaced workers can do jobs which aren't economically viable atm, but are still socially viable: Imagine an army of workers cleaning up the streets (literally) and transforming your town into a clean, well maintained cityscape. Etc etc.
IMO this cannot work unless there is enforcement to do such work. Most people would prefer to take their money and do fuck all in return.
If I was a dictator that wanted to institute UBI, I would do it in exchange for every beneficient getting literally conscripted once in a while to do those shit jobs.
UBI/UBS requires a very solidaric community. But the current situation (in Germany) is not about finding any job but taking a low paid, hard working or even dangerous job (nursing service, shifter, even soldier, public sector).
UBI makes it even harder to find people for that kind of jobs. Not paying any social benefits and increasing the pressure on the unemployed to take these jobs is much more interesting for everyone that is not unemployed. Please don't judge me for writing this. It's the feeling I have, not my view.
A lot, I'd say even most people in Germanys long term unemployment scheme which are not already working part time (Aufstocker) have severe mental and physical health problems. More pressure isn't going to help those people but it's the current Government's shtick.
I'd say UBI would make it easier to find people working in demanding jobs because you could to them part time, so they don't wear you down as much. It's much easier to work as a nurse for 20 hours a week.
Only way UBI works is if the govts increase taxes on all income or any income to almost 90%+...
And then re-distribute to each person accordingly. That ain't happening, no govt will be willing to try that, and rich won't let that happen, they will become slightly rich from very rich. that just ain't happening.
If we are able to fill our storefronts with magnificent AI creations for cents on the dollar, would that be profitable enough for the producers to pay enough tax to cover UBI? Producers would still face pricing pressure to lower margins to eat up all those productivity gains. Every path forward seems very uncertain
Great point! But for how many weeks will you enjoy your UBI before the rulers say "Okay, now that we're paying all of your salaries, it's time for you to do the work we need. Off you go to build the railroad or the giant dam! Here's a pick-axe."
Why would the people with control of things go out of their way to keep the rest of us alive via UBI?
I get your point but what about a step before that - since when is that anyone's goal? From a sociopathic leader perspective, vast populations are only great for armies and tech has surpassed the need for raw manpower at that scale (and the AI you fear would make militaries require even fewer people).
In your AI scenario is it more likely the ruling class gives everyone free living standard or just lets like 40% of the population die? If all the leaders get together this is the ideal outcome for them -- vast power and control without enough civilians to rise up, climate change becomes easy to reverse with vastly lower power and food needs, and reduced threat of global war because nobody has an occupying size army anymore. This is like the new version of "mutually assured destruction" as a strategy for global peace. I can't speak for the world but I can imagine some of the twisted folks currently in power in the US seeing this route as their destiny and simply them doing the best thing for humanity as a whole -- longtermists are in, nazis know a final solution when they see one, and Christians are honored to have the duty of bringing forth the second coming.
Software is just another job in many countries, making pretty normal middle class wages. Job loss will hit us the same as any other middle class worker.
The focus on "what you do" is very US-centric (or possibly North American). When you meet someone then one of the very first things asked is "what do you do" or something to that extent. What your job is.
But it's not like that at all elsewhere in the world. It varies a lot. I myself never ask that question, unless it's for a very specific reason. And _never_ as part of an introduction.
I've known people for decades without knowing what their job is, or I only have a vague idea about their job. It's not important for people here. The person itself is important. There are other things than the job which define the person. I know this sounds very strange for Americans, but, in fact, the strangeness is the other way around.
I'm not sure that I can say "I am not my job" [mostly because I actually very much enjoy what I do there], but I can definitely say "you are not your job". Because I don't even know your job, nor do I much care.
One of the things people in the US like to do is to take some thing that's being negatively talked about and spin that into a thing that only people in the US do, whereas this aspect exists in many cultures, such as in India (speaking from experience) or China (from my understanding of their culture, and some Youtubers producing content around the social dynamics of this).
I have noticed the same thing, but I still think it's an interesting question. It would be strange for me to have a close friend and never have any kind of curiosity about how they spend nearly half of their waking hours. We don't live in severance-world: understanding someone's vocation feels like part of understanding them as a person.
I guess if you live in a community where most people do sort of menial interchangeable jobs then it's probably different, maybe everyone has a job as an unfortunate necessity but would rather think and talk about it as little as possible.
Not surprised because most people in the world only have time to work/commute/sleep. Stuff like hobbies, sabbaticals, vacations, etc are quite rare. I've only seen the contrary when I met Europeans.
Domestic tourism is massive even in countries with terrible work culture like China, so your claim is not particularly strong. Either way, hobbies and holidays are certainly not unique to NA and Europe.
I don't think your initial claim is well supported considering the size of domestic travel and entertainment sectors in most of the world (although I'll admit that the way people allocate non-work activities in many places may not lead to a relaxed life in the way, say, a Swiss person on a sabbatical has). Points 1 and 2 in this recent comment are different ones again, though and not ones I disagree with.
Not so sure about hobbies being a European thing. Take Japan, for example. Japan has a work culture/pressure which is considered pretty extreme (Korea is maybe worse, from what I read). I know people with work hours from early morning to 11pm, and a neighbor who drives out at 5:30am and is back way after dark): There are many more people with active hobbies than in my native Europe. With work taking so much time, people seem to learn to manage their time much better than many (much more than I can, definitely) and they squeeze in various hobbies in a very efficient way. That's one of the reasons I like living there, there's much more to do together with other people.
> But it's not like that at all elsewhere in the world. It varies a lot. I myself never ask that question, unless it's for a very specific reason. And _never_ as part of an introduction.
Can you share some area(s) it's not like that, and what kinds of introductions/opening conversations you do have? I'd like to replicate that into my own social life (in North America) if only to bend the arc ever so slightly.
It's very rare to be asked that question ("what do you do") as part of an introduction in basically all of Europe, or at least it's so rare that I can't recall being asked that. Maybe it has happened, but it's not that common. "Where are you from?" is an obvious one on the other hand, if I'm in a different country. I'm sometimes asked that question in Japan, but never as part of an introduction. That's something which people may ask about at a later stage. If that's related to me being a foreigner or not I'm not sure - I haven't noticed that question in between native Japanese people, but then again my Japanese is not very good.
But I'm not actually that good at getting small talk going (not do I particularly enjoy small talk), so I'm not the best person to ask about introductions. So it basically boils down to exchanging names, and, for me, sometimes about nationality, and then about whatever happens at the place we're meeting up (say, an event of some kind). And from then on we kind of figure out the other person's interests. Starting to talk about the job would be.. very dry. Negative. As if there's nothing to talk about, at all.
Yeah and I think it reflects the sorts of jobs people have. A lot of my buddies have these jobs they themselves think are pretty stupid but hey, they were hiring. They aren't going to identify as some salesperson of payroll software though. Probably literally no one in that industry does. It isn't rocket surgery. It just pays the bills.
Americans have this culture of killing the individual in adulthood I've noticed. It seemingly starts with parenthood. Parents are sold the myth that they ought to have no time for themselves, that they ought to drop all their hobbies and anything that made them them, and turn into this machine that either works or putts around with the baby the whole time. The idea of childcare or babysitter seen as "missing out." This frenetic behavior seems to last until the kid is an adolescent and has to set boundaries on the overbearing parents.
It wasn't always like this. Parents used to have more hobbies. Maybe dad was a bowler. Maybe mom was in a gardening club. Where was the kid? With the village of course: grand parents, baby sitter, playing with other kids in the neighborhood.
50% of your waking hours are spent at work. The person you are revolves around your working hours, the problems you solve the concerns you have, the money you make the persona you display at work.
Saying you are not your work is wishful thinking. Try giving it up and check in on how much of you is still the same.
Maybe you wish to be more than your working self. That’s honorable and desirable. Just declaring it isn’t going to cut it though.
> Saying you are not your work is wishful thinking. Try giving it up and check in on how much of you is still the same.
I retired a few years ago, and I believe and insist that I am very much the same person.
To see a person only as what they do at work seems awfully limiting. Even when I was working, I was also a sailor, musician, woodworker, home brewer, cat person, chess player, leather guy, and a good number of other things. And yes, even after retiring, I am still a computer guy. I even like hobby coding projects more than I did.
Well said. I'm nearing retirement age and planning what I'll do, and yes, setting up my hobby room with computers and whatnot. And, as you, I've also been many other things, including some on your list, and more.
I'd only become more "me" if I stopped working. Work isn't a place I go to self actualize, it's a place I go to earn money to do the things I want to do.
Maybe, maybe not. Directly, I only work about 30h/week, so I actually have 86 hours of free time and 30 hours of work per week.
And, at this point I'm working for my kids, not for me. I could have easily retired years ago if I didn't have kids. I could retire right now but my kids might not inherit much if I did. I lucked into a field that paid me > 10x the median salary in the US, but my kids might not be so lucky.
So, I'm working a little harder and longer than I need to, so that my kids perhaps don't have to. 1 year of working and saving for me might, 25 years from now, mean my kids can retire 10 years earlier than they would. That seems like a worthwhile thing for me to do, even if it means I have a little less "me" time.
Ill take it offline and we can circle back to that thought.
I find corporate culture to be extremely fake and it's tough to deal with. Like you ever do something simple and some one tells you wow that's amazing great job. And you think they can't be seriously right now, this was some low effort basic thing? That annoys me, corporate America demands that behavior though.
I only ever feel like "me" when I'm not at work. I work in retail, and every minute I'm at that job I feel my soul dying just that little bit more. But I go there because I like to not starve, which by the way I've done and lemme tell ya: it ain't fun.
This idea that you are not your job is ridiculous because of the amount of time that you spend at your work. And it’s not just fifty of your waking hours, right? There’s also time spent preparing for, commuting to, and winding down from that work. And also, you know, how much of your work are you doing in the shower? It stains the rest of your life; it soaks into everything.
This concept goes hand in hand with...
(oh, to say nothing of the many years of your life dedicated to developing this vocation through school and training or whatever. So it’s not just hours of the day; it’s years of your life that revolve around developing this vocation. It’s deeply disingenuous to suggest that it’s possible to separate yourself meaningfully from your vocation. Frankly, it’s insulting—to suggest that such separation is possible or even preferable, or to judge people for failing to separate their vocation from their identity when it’s impossible.
It makes me think of some of the impossible requirements placed on women: that they not be too slutty while at the same time not wearing a hijab or being too conservative. They get pressure from both sides, and there’s very little space, if any, that goes unjudged or unremarked upon. Having children too early, too late, or not at all—women will get flack from one corner of society or another. Likewise, workers get flack for overidentifying with their vocation, but it’s really impossible to extricate ourselves from it. For that reason, I find the whole idea offensive.)
...this concept of not making friends at work—or of distinguishing between your “work friends” and your “real friends.”
People tell me, “Your manager is not your friend. Your co-workers are not here to be your friends. You shouldn’t expect loyalty from them.” And okay, I get that. I understand the economic realities; I’ve had co-workers say things like, “Hey, I agree with you on this one, but I have a mortgage. I have kids in college. So I’m not going to speak up. I’m not going to join you in this complaint or in this effort to improve working conditions.”
I understand there are real economic constraints on the friendships, the loyalty, and the relationships that we establish in the office. I’ve also had co-workers who were loyal, empathetic, caring, honest, earnest—decent, good people—and they were groomed for management in a way that basically meant that once a week they’d be taken into a room and grilled about everyone else’s behavior. They were made into unwilling spies, and that has a chilling effect on the depth of friendships you can create.
What’s tragic about that is, as I said at the start, because so much of our lives are dedicated to our vocation, the fact that we cannot establish meaningful, trusting, loyal relationships—that we’re forced to snitch on and betray one another—is a stunning, fundamental, disgusting injustice.
It’s an enormous violation of human liberties and possibilities. It is an utterly debased compromise that we’ve made as a society, one that wrecks us. It is a deeply troubling flaw in our foundation—that the majority of our hours, days, and years are dedicated to an environment where mutual trust and free association are fundamentally compromised.
Well put. It's also eye-opening to watch some exceptionally lucky/gifted individuals exude an unmistakable air of deep contentment that only comes from being "time-rich" i.e. possessing complete command of your time. They get to strictly curate the projects and people around which their livelihood revolves. They can't stop gushing about it. It's like even they cannot believe that they are forming lifelong friendships and having meaningful experiences AT work; b/c everyone had told'em that life exists 'outside of work'.
Of course, that's a ride inaccessible to rest of us plebs, but it's nonetheless insightful to see what that ticket buys.
More like 15% of you work from home for a small company and shut the fuck up about wanting to be a career man. If you're not a homo consumator and play your cards right that's enough to check out of the corporate life before 45
Since the beginning of human history, people have always defined themselves by what they contribute to the group; a hunter, a farmer, a king... Today is no different. We may not be our job, but that is how others see us at first. They are not trying to get to know you; they just want to know where you fit, so they know how to deal with you. Only later, if things get personal, might they become interested in you as a person.
That is not your job, but your role in the group. Being a parent, a child or a spouse, a friend or a running mate, are not jobs. The point of the article is that your identity should not be driven by just one role, that is transactional and will not span your whole life. You need to broaden your target and also understand that you open new roles with each new relationship, plus also you can create new roles into existing relationships.
Well I think it's nothing more than a social norm, and an easy one to avoid at that. People are mostly asking what's your job because that's a standard icebreaker.
Since I (mostly) recovered from burnout, and learnt that I'm actually not my job, I took the habit to never automatically ask people what is their job, at least not for ice breaking.
You can talk about their hobbies, their kids, their tastes ... because those are the real topics that will define if you bond or not anyway. And yes some people sometimes do have an interesting job that is worth talking about but when it happens, you will inevitably talk about it anyway.
Where I live, when meeting ppl they don’t introduce by asking “so what do you do?”, instead the phrasing is somewhat akin to “what do you spent your time on”. Even though they mean “what is your profession”, it allows me to stir the discussion to “what I like” or what kind of subject I enjoy discussing at that time eg philosophy, theatre, books, etc.
I agree to an extent that you mostly worked with people you grown up with on those farms, some of which became lifelong friends. This has been replaced by making friends in high school and then parting ways forever, more or less.
I’ll add that if you see your colleagues as anything else than primarily working for money, you’re a bit delusional unless you know for a fact they could not work for the rest of their lives and be financially fine. Of course there are other reasons to work than money, but the way the system is set up you’re not supposed to care more about them than about cold hard cash.
There’s an old aphorism: “Do what you love, and you’ll never work a day in your life.”
I worked in tech, because I love tech. No other reason, really. I accepted a job, making maybe half of what I could make, elsewhere, because of the personal satisfaction I got from it, and the relationships I made, there.
When I retired, I have continued to develop software, and am currently “leaning into” AI-assisted development.
During that time, I’ve also had plenty of time to be human.
I have found that aphorism does not ring true for me.
“Do what you love for work, and you'll stop loving it" seems more true to me. It always eventually turns into a chore once it is a thing you need to do.
I enjoy writing and designing software systems, and have since my first apple ii use in 2nd grade writing logo programs (the turtle drawing programming language)
I write software in my spare time, for fun, as it scratches a particular itch in my brain, but I also enjoy a lot of other hobbies as well: woodworking, car repair, boating, beekeeping...
Having a 9 to 5 desk job in any field is it's own type of soul crushing, even moreso as of late for myself personally. However, if I need to perform the song and dance to support my family, I'll at least do it to the tune of something I enjoy. With software engineering I can at least "get lost in" the work, so the drudgery can be temporarily forgotten until I can get home to my family and side projects.
On the one hand, I think a lot of the ruinous parts are the extra things it forces beyond the parts you actually love. So the problem there is you are actually doing a bunch of things you don't love, so do "work" some portion of your day.
The other is that many of us do love a bit of oppositional defiance. Doing what is demanded of us by others is definitely not doing what we love in that respect!
IMO, there are more steps. Do what you love for work, someone will exploit you for it, and break your heart.
One of my kids has taken this advice, does art (really good art) for themselves and is pursuing a STEM career instead. The other is pursuing a game dev career, despite every current and former dev in his life warning him off for the last fifteen years. To quote Kissing Jessica Stein, “OY! This child will suffer.”
Back in the day, I was a fairly good artist[0]. I was good enough to get work, and pursue a career, although I don’t know how successful I would have been.
Fortunately, I also really enjoyed tech, and figured that even a mediocre programmer would do better than a top-shelf fantasy artist. Back then (hard to believe, these days), competition was a lot less prevalent, in tech, and was brutal, in art.
I've been doing this full time for about fifteen years, which is a fairly long time (though admittedly not nearly as much as some others here).
I haven't really stopped loving writing and designing software. I still have fun writing code and coming up with clever optimization tricks. The thing that has become draining is the actual act of "having a job".
Obviously I'm grateful to have an income, and I like my coworkers, but the problem with most jobs is that the part I enjoy like ends up being a relatively small part of my day. When I worked for a BigCo there would be weeks at a time where at least half of my day is eaten by meetings and/or emails, and when you do get to work on something technical it's usually not something that's challenging or interesting. A lot of the work ends up being a bugfix or an incremental feature that really doesn't require a lot of thought.
Even startups aren't immune to this. With startups you have the advantage of not being nearly as siloed, but that comes with the double-edged sword of being stuck working on parts of the company or stack that you don't really care about. I deal with fewer meetings but I spend much more time fighting with Kubernetes YAML configurations which I find unbelievably draining, which I might have been able to avoid if I stayed at BigCo.
From 2016-2018, I worked at a MediumCo, where I was able to primarily focus on designing and writing distributed software. I was able to spend a good chunk of time figuring out how to optimize concurrent software, there weren't that many meetings, and I didn't get sick of it at all. I quit that job because I had a romanticized idea of what life at BigCo would be like; if I had the ability to see the future I would have stayed at MediumCo because I didn't like working at BigCo [1].
Anyway, my point is that given my experience, if you can actually work on the things you love, and not just a bunch of ancillary bullshit, I think it's possible you can continue to enjoy it forever. The problem is that most jobs simply aren't like that.
[1] Usual disclaimer; you might be able to dig through my history and figure out who BigCo and MediumCo are in this, and that's obviously fine, but I politely ask that you don't post the proper nouns here.
I've been coding for 30 years. We recently built a silent auction app for the university I work for, and it was as rewarding for me as the first thing I ever programmed. Sometimes the job is a chore. But for me, the challenge of building something new never gets old. Teaching junior devs is also consistently rewarding.
Agreed - once you have to do something for a living in order to survive (and probably under the orders of clueless management and company executives) it becomes "work" that is no longer fun.
Same way that being forced to read for school often kills the desire to read for fun.
It certainly killed a lot of my tinkering outside of work, but that's more a matter of when I'm already doing the thing for most of the day, even though I like it I don't always want to continue doing it for the rest of the day too when I get home.
I'm really glad that I left the rodent rally, but I did not want to leave tech. I just wanted to be in a place, where my work doesn't get fed into a wood-chipper, by terrible managers.
Once they were taken out of the equation, happiness ensued.
I deliberately turn down jobs that pay. Once someone pays me for my work, I'm duty-bound to give them what they pay for; even if that sucks, and I don't like doing bad work.
I don't know if it's so universal. My opinion is rather that most jobs will make your passion become dull.
I knew some airline pilots who loved flying, but didn't feel so much like it after decades.
I got into aerospace engineering because I liked all aspects of it. A couple decades of end-to-end meetings and "TPS reports" later, I'm not as passionate anymore. Some time ago I was excited about solving a practical issue by coding some new tool myself, a year of exchanges with management and IT has made me look forward to move on.
By all measures my company is pretty good in my industry, but the corporate life just has a way of sucking away passion.
This was the same for me. The only things I did not like about tech were not really related to tech but rather bad leadership or the wrong kinds of leadership. Early in my career I worked for one of the worst and literally most criminal managed hosting organizations and it was the best boon for my career making me fearless. I learned how to remove all emotion from my experiences and off-board bad leaders. Everything else for me was being in the right place around the right people at the right time and teaching those around me everything I knew in hopes they would take over those tasks. My biggest satisfaction and what I took the most pride in was helping others with their careers and helping them off-board bad and abusive management.
I am "privileged," but pretty much every other vocation has been in a place where people are getting squeezed by others or tools. Nothing new here, folks.
It's just that now, the bell tolls for tech workers, and they are suddenly getting to understand what other fields have been dealing with, for decades -centuries, in some cases.
I love tech. Reading tech books is something I do on a daily basis. I work on personal side projects, learn new ways of solving things, languages, frameworks, libraries, etc.
But I have to say that as I grow older, I like less and less the tech my boss makes me work on. And that applies to perhaps the majority of potential bosses out there.
> When Bronnie Ware interviewed people at the end of their lives, she asked them about their regrets. The clearest pattern wasn't hard to see. Nobody was lying on their deathbed wishing they'd earned more money or accomplished more.
I'm reminded of the story of the great manga artist Tezuka Osamu, who, as he was dying of stomach cancer in a hospital bed at the end of his life, begged to be given a pencil to let him continue his work. Granted, not everyone is Tezuka. But many people have work they care greatly about accomplishing, even at the end of their lives.
I've been on death's door at least 3 times. Sepsis, heart failure, complications from Pneumonia. Each and every time, I've wished I had made more money and accomplished more. The money for my family after me, and the accomplishments for my own ego to feel like my life contributed to part of humanity. I have had a top 10 concrete goals since I was under 10. I have completed many, but not all.
Culture matters and going against yours is difficult. I think everyone tends to be unable to put themselves in the shoes of someone from another country - it is terribly tempting to use one's own "lense" to see everything.
In America there's pressure to "be a success" and it's not easy to get away from. If you're successful it's a virtue and if you're a "loser" it's because you're lazy or something bad. Bums sleeping on the street don't deserve a place to live even in the richest country in the world because losers need to be punished and winners should not be taxed unfairly.
Where I'm from in Zimbabwe, foreigners including my parents always misunderstood the importance of age - the need to show respect to older people no matter what you think of their utterances. Every 2 seconds I could see other immigrants like myself rubbing Shona people up the wrong way by not understanding where the power lay and what people were proud of.
When I was in Turkey with my wife I realised it was another place where older people held a huge amount of power and the whole country operated differently from Britain - where one only has to be able to get a mortgage to be independent and tell one's parents to go to hell. In Turkey you have to kowtow to your parents and uncles and aunts because you're probably living in a flat that one of them owns until you're quite late in life.
It's not that "success" doesn't matter everywhere but that there are multiple priorities and it's not a pure indication of status. Quite often it's about family or not being of "the other" tribe.
As for thinking you're defined by your job, that is just part of the "pigeon-holing" process by which people try to understand you quickly and sometimes attempt to neutralise a perceived competitor socially. I don't think there's much you can do other than not buy into it yourself and not practise it yourself.
Kind of bizarre how Fight Club was so influential a couple decades ago, but doesn’t seem to have much cultural impact today. This exact theme is one of the most memorable quotes from the movie.
Too counter-cultural and anti-money for today’s young people, I think. Everyone’s trying to make it, not drop out of society.
Fight Club came out almost 30 years ago. Most young people have probably never heard of it.
Also there's no such thing as "counterculture" in a world where culture isn't manufactured and controlled by some central authority. When there was only physical media and a few tv stations, "culture" was a fixed point one could obviously align with or against. Today in the post-internet non cultural milieu, anti-capitalist and anti-work ideals are everywhere but they just don't stand out the way the hippies did back in the day.
That’s a part of it but I don’t think it’s really that external. I think people in general, themselves, are just less interested in the counter cultural ethos. It doesn’t feel to me like anti-consumerist cultural movements are being founded and then co-opted by commerce. Rather they aren’t being founded at all, and if they are, it’s just some lazy online thing with no actual real-world presence.
> I think people in general, themselves, are just less interested in the counter cultural ethos.
Gen Z is less patriotic than any other generation, so the counter-culture of their generation is really just... culture. Everyone kind of just agrees that patriotism is a joke, politics are a joke, taking any of this seriously or contributing to it more than necessary is a joke. Gen Z protests as much as any previous generation. The fact that it's not taken seriously in traditional politics is just another signal for them to opt out.
The issue is not that there's no counter-culture, it's that we've designed a system of governance that can withstand it without budging (or at least pretends like it can). Long term, the system will starve. Good luck finding anyone competent to join the military, engage passionately with their jobs, or contribute to civil service. It's not gonna happen. The american dream is now to be on the winning side of a scam.
It might take some time for something else to arise from the ashes of all this, but the first step is already occurring.
People don't need self-help advise, they need a fair redistribution of increased productivity.
We don't make a big deal of our jobs because we are stupid - it's the society that assigns this or that income to this or that job, and income determines lifestyle or in worst case the survival.
>People don't need self-help advise, they need a fair redistribution of increased productivity.
The increased productivity is pretty much entirely coming from AI researchers and the companies investing in huge amounts of GPUs, and they are the ones receiving most of the windfalls, how's that not fair?
This presumes that the value was created by the authors and not the people who found a way to use the structure in the training set to create intelligence. Like crediting wi-fi router owners with creating Wi-Fi Positioning System instead of the people who realized they could wardrive around to create maps and extract a new kind of value that would never have existed without them. Or Egyptians for deciphering hieroglyphics instead of the Frenchman who realized the Rosetta Stone they were using to hold up a wall could actually be used to do much more.
My thinking here is coming from the paper "From Entropy to Epiplexity"[1] which partly discussed why you can train on synthetic data: it's the structure of the data that enables learning, not just the amount of "information". Authors of images and videos may have worked just as hard as authors of text training sets, but they didn't contribute to AI as much because there just wasn't the same kind of structure to discover there. It's the people who found the usable structure, not the people who accidentally generated it, who created the value.
> This presumes that the value was created by the authors and not the people who found a way to use the structure in the training set to create intelligence.
This presumes it's binary.
> Or Egyptians for deciphering hieroglyphics instead of the Frenchman who realized the Rosetta Stone they were using to hold up a wall could actually be used to do much more.
Yes, I think a lot more than 1 person deserves credit for years of painstaking research.
> It's the people who found the usable structure, not the people who accidentally generated it, who created the value.
You're naively assuming the structure is accidental.
Depends on your ethics I guess? In my view fair distribution is an equitable one, which is also the principle that helps to keep society stable. Not that researchers and business people should not be rewarded for their achievement, but the reward should be moderate and limited in time instead of creating a permanent underclass or whatever the plan is now IMO
A small correction to this, your friends don't really like you due to any desirable attribute you have, its not an exchange process. They like you for your you-ness.
Think about a friend, what is it you like about them? I think you will find that it's not a series of attributes, but a rather unquantifiable them ness - you like the fact they are uniquely them, this is how you are seen as well. You're enough.
Agreed with the title and some of the broad sentiment, but two things stood out.
> I can't delegate my capacity to sit with someone when they're confused or scared or just need to feel known
Plenty of people rely on therapists and/or chat bots to listen to them. Not everybody feels comfortable burdening their friends and family with their problems.
> We possess the means to care for everyone -- yet choose not to
There is a trade-off between social services in a broad sense and the ability to pay for them. The stronger the social safety net, the more people at the margin will choose to work less, earn less, make less of an effort. In turn, the tax base becomes smaller, and thus unable to maintain those same social services.
For example, the vast majority of people choose to retire once they reach the age where they are able to collect enough from their pension that they no longer need to work in order to get by. If we lowered the age of eligibility by a year, most people would retire a year earlier. Just like we see people retiring later in countries that have moved the eligibility to the age of e.g. 67.
With this I am not advocating to increase or decrease the current social safety net in whichever region you, dear reader, are living. I am simply pointing out some of the real-world effects of moving the needle in one direction or another.
Thus, yes, in rich countries we have collectively decided that "caring for everyone" is not the best way forward, because we see that it becomes unsustainable when you go too far. Where exactly we place the needle varies from place to place, obviously. Thinning the social safety net too far also has massive societal and economic consequences.
>For example, the vast majority of people choose to retire once they reach the age where they are able to collect enough from their pension that they no longer need to work in order to get by
Part of the problem is that the current system doesn't provide a great way to taper off, at least not by default. I suspect there would be a lot more people who'd keep working if it was simple to get a comparable job at 30 hours per week 25 weeks out of the year. But for those who are traditionally employed instead of contracting, the choice is often between full time or nothing.
> Thus, yes, in rich countries we have collectively decided that "caring for everyone" is not the best way forward, because we see that it becomes unsustainable when you go too far.
What rich country are you talking about? Most developed countries have elected to have social safety nets, and that includes the US to some extent. "Caring for everyone" in your message looks like some form of utopia where no one would have to work, but that has never been advocated anywhere.
Also what does "we" mean in that context? To me, it looks like you’re passing your opinion as a well-accepted fact.
> "Caring for everyone" in your message looks like some form of utopia where no one would have to work, but that has never been advocated anywhere.
Have you never met an advocate for UBI? How do you interpret OP's "We possess the means to care for everyone -- yet choose not to" in its context?
> Also what does "we" mean in that context
Voters. Voters have collectively decided, in all developed countries, to strike a balance between having a social net that gives people some minimum assurances while maintaining strong incentives to work. This is in opposition to OP's "We possess the means to care for everyone -- yet choose not to". I am trying to explain that there are good reasons why we do that; it is not a moral failure.
UBI is based on the idea that some people will still want/need to work. It is not related to freeing people from work, but to ensure that people's basic needs (housing, food, health) are met even if, for some reason, they are unable to work. Usually, UBI proponents claim the main difference between UBI and the current nets is that it would simplify the administrative control structure.
The intent of UBI (make sure everyone has their basic needs met) isn't different from the current safety nets. And, of course, since shit has to be made in order to be consumed, UBI requires people to keep working.
> Voters. Voters have collectively decided, in all developed countries [...] I am trying to explain that there are good reasons why we do that; it is not a moral failure.
It's not a once for all choice, though. Safety nets in all countries have evolved gradually, and are still evolving. Opposing yesterday's voter choices to today or tomorrow's activist hopes is a misunderstanding of the way democracy works. Every choice voters have made about social nets in the past happened because someone started saying "we have the means to do this, why shouldn't we do it?"
> The tax base shrinks but does company revenue shrink?
Capital is highly mobile globally. As corporate taxation becomes higher in a region, production in that region becomes less competitive globally. Companies, in turn, outsource their production elsewhere.
It is not a simple problem to solve. There are good reasons why the status quo is what it is.
Some people indeed identify too much with their jobs, but for many others getting replaced by A.I means on very practical terms - a huge hit in salary, it means possibly retraining - maybe for years, means stress to the family (mortgage, bills etc) perhaps even stress to the marriage.
I disagree that the people near you only love you or need you for your presence; they also rely on your paycheck. Your daugher may love you for you but she needs that check to the private school, that money for nice clothes and gadgets like her friends all have and paying for that apartment in the nice neighborhood.
As well, your point of view and it would seem the general default assumption in articles like this, is that people have families. We are in an unprecedented time of lonliness, there will be many people who if they lose their job they will have no support. Financial, emotional or logistical.
I know it's hard, but I guess it's a good idea to live below your means in case something happens, and also save considerably to face moments of uncertainty. People with tech salaries can do it. Most of the world (and country, independently of where you live) live with much less.
When you meet someone, you assess them on two dimensions. The first is warmth - do you believe they mean you well? The second is competence - do you believe they're capable?
Well, sometimes.
At other times, the assessment may be based on signalling, tribalism, perception of status, personal connections, career connections, transactional goals, or other criteria.
Some people don't have or can't show warmth. Or they don't have the ability to "crack a joke at the right time" or make small talk. Should that be held against people when making assessments?
> The regrets were about relationships. Not staying in touch with friends. Not expressing what they felt. Working too hard. Not living true to themselves. The people who were dying weren't grieving their lost productivity.
> The people who love you don't love you because you're good at your job. They love you because of something else entirely. Maybe it's your humor. Maybe it's that you actually listen. Maybe it's that you remember things about their lives and ask about them. Maybe it's simply that you show up. You're present.
This feminization of society is concerning.
Sure you don't want to be corporate slave. But a man's native instinct is to achieve great things, push the boundaries, achieve fame.
"Be loved for what you are" is not how it works in the real world. Well not for men at least.
People on this site will sing praises of bellards and torvalds and knuths and bernsteins of the world, long after they're gone. For a man's deeds and heroism are his identity.
That's probably why every ancient Indo-European society fixated on heroism, renown of one's self and progeny.
We might today think of them as violent primitive pastoralists who didn't have the talk therapy like the tiktok teens from US of A.
But they understood something we don't.
You're not your job, surely. But you're your deeds. You're the children you raise. You're the society you create.
> But a man's native instinct is to achieve great things, push the boundaries, achieve fame.
I don't care to spend my time worrying about the manliness of the things I value or strengthening the strictures that narrow the possibilities in my life. Ends that arise out of ego, like fame, are fleeting and not worth pursuing in my book.
I’m sorry you had trouble with this, but I don’t understand the problem. I really don’t.
I am a tester. I’ve been a tester for 39 years. I’ll be a tester until I die, whether or not anyone pays me for it. At some point, you believe I am going to… collapse or something?
I have been burned out. Before I was a tester, I was a video game developer. I didn’t get the vitamins from that for the nourishment of my soul, and I DID collapse. In my experience, burnout has nothing to do with ego investment. It has to do with forcing one’s self to do something that isn’t a fit.
Once I learned about staying within my limits, I ceased having trouble with burnout. It had nothing to do with investing my identity into my chosen work.
BTW, I am a tester. I am also a father, a husband, an American, a philosopher, and a teacher. All these things are in me. As I turn 60, I am also beginning to embrace a new identity: old man.
I agree with this article fully, but there is a problem that most blog posts about identity don't talk about before telling you what do with your own. What is identity actually for? This is the only article I know of that talks about this:
Thanks for sharing. I truly enjoy the author's definition of identity as optimisation to decision-making. It does make a lot of sense, and explains why big identity crises (midlife crisis, for example) can have devastating effects and take a long time to resolve. Questioning your identity is akin to going through an ego death, and many developers that do not want to accept this AI-driven future are going through some very painful feelings with large ramifications to their lives.
I can only recommend people going through these phases to treat it (seriously) like any midlife crisis. You can't sweep it under the carpet. Carl Jung has written a lot about those, start there.
(5 years deep into mine, and the timing of the AI revolution certainly made my quest much more difficult than I would have wished)
There's something more, to me: the confusion between identity and role isn't just psychological, it's social. People ask "what do you do?" and mean "who are you?" It takes either courage or a real crisis to separate those two questions. AI is forcing that crisis at industrial scale. Maybe that's not totally a bad thing.
I am often asked "What do you do?" when I meet someone new. I know they are asking about my job, but I throw off the expectations by saying, "Oh, I like to play video games and watch movies primarily." This is usually followed by, "Sorry, I meant what do you do for a living?" I will then, of course, tell them what they expect to hear; however, even the question "What do you do for a living?" implies that we live to work. I play video games and watch movies for living. I work merely to survive and buy the things that allow me to live my life the way I want.
maybe it implies some amount of "live to work" etymologically, but the word "living" in that context specifically refers to living in the financial sense (the act of living wouldn't really make sense in that sentence)
you live to play video games and watch movies, but you make a living by working
> But warmth. Empathy. The ability to sit with someone in their confusion and make them feel understood. The ability to crack a joke at exactly the right moment and remind someone that they're not alone. The capacity to be fully present with another person, to see them not as a role they're playing but as a whole human being… that cannot be automated away and hopefully never will.
To me, that describes for me a human capability that is often overlooked but is in fact at our core. All the rest is almost futile in comparison.
I also took the route of finding a new hobby (biking, all things bike mechanics, even politics) but of course it's not paying any of my bills. That's the point. While I helped making other people very rich, I never owned shares or got a bonus after an exit.
Let’s say it costs $10K/month/person so $120K/yr/person. Probably a big overestimate but gotta include healthcare and help people with long term stability.
That’s 120,000 x 1,000,000 = 120,000,000,000 or $120 billion USD.
Idk what the Nth order effects would be but yea I think what you’re saying tracks in the numbers
You cannot just throw money at a problem like homelessness in order to fix it. That is such an incredibly reductive viewpoint. It's akin to saying 9 mothers can birth a child in a month - oh look, we solved the population decline crisis! Someone go tell Japan!
Engineers have never been calculators or specification machines. Good engineers have always been builders. Our identity is "I build stuff that works well and improves lives" ...
Architects needn't be diminished by CAD. Teachers needn't be diminished by internet access / computers. Nurses/Doctors needn't be diminished by new detection techniques or medicines.
No matter the era, we should carry the identity that we're not the tools we use, we're more than that.
For all intents and purposes I am my job and I'm tired of people trying to pretend like this isn't true. As a human I am worth exactly what I'm able to earn, not a cent more and I am judged by others first and foremost based on my job title. I am not inherently valuable.
I wish it wasn't like this, but this is the world we've built and all I can do is cope with it as those in power work on replacing me.
That depends a lot on your social circles, no? I’ve met plenty of people who never cared about or knew my job title or salary, and whose job titles and salaries I never cared about or knew.
I've been in circles where I thought it didn't matter and I've had people in my life who I thought didn't care...and then they find out (because good luck hiding the thing you do for 40+ hours a week) and the relationships permanently change.
A rather privileged perspective. Software engineer, tech in general, is a new and unique sort of job. Knowledge workers who can work out of any office, even remotely from home, is a very new thing. Throughout history, even the most educated and able had to locate themselves near the worksite. Doctors need to be near patients, lawyers the courts. Even congressmen used to live in dormitories to stay in DC.
My point: You job does define you because, for the vast majority of people, one's job dictates where and how you live. It is a rarefied elite that can so easily disconnect their work from their outside lives. Tell a farmer about work-life balance when if he sleeps in, animals will suffer. Tell a cop that her doing graveyard shifts wrestling drunk people doesn't dictate the flow of her daily life. Tell a soldier that moving home ever other year doesn't impact his long-term social connections. Normal people have long been defined by their jobs, and it still holds today. Calling out such ties as unenlightened or to be avoided sticks a finger in the eye of the billions for whom their job is their life.
I was prepared for another fluffy post... But this resonated with me 100%
> The people who love you don't love you because you're good at your job. They love you because of something else entirely. Maybe it's your humor. Maybe it's that you actually listen. Maybe it's that you remember things about their lives and ask about them. Maybe it's simply that you show up. You're present. You don't extract a conversation and then disappear.
As I get older (and, I hope, wiser), this matters more and more. Jobs come and go (and how many have gone), money comes and goes (rather too quickly), time comes and goes (progressively faster, if I might add), but what matters more than anything else is the people in your life who stick by you, and who you stick by.
The nattering nabobs of negativism will disagree (and there are plenty in the comments). I dont care.
I agree with the poster.
@jyrio - let's do a bagel + coffee in NYC. I'll be there the last week of April
Yes, it's true one needs to eat, have a roof over one's head, etc. Of course you can even like what you do, make friends at work. But never forget the nature of the relationship. It won't love you back.
> "This bothers a lot of people for a reason (I think) that has nothing to do with the technology. The fear isn't really about losing a job title, it's about losing the story you tell yourself about who you are."
No, it is 100% about the fear of losing a job due to companies replacing skilled people with AI.
I went through this reckoning when a company I worked for underwent layoffs for poor financial performance. Nothing I could have done since I started the job would have made it avoidable. I had the epiphany that I'd tied up my sense of self, and self-worth, with a status that I actually had very little control over.
Not being a software developer. That's actually generally a net negative, socially. It was all about class.
I've been fairly upwardly mobile. That alone gave me a feeling of success that glossed over any other inadequacies. Being comfortably financially also means - or meant - that I had the luxury of ignoring the reality of daily life for most people I met, however much I thought I hadn't lost touch.
Confronting the idea of how I'd feel about my life without it, and how the people in my life would feel about me, and how I feel about people who don't have the same comfort, is an instrumental part of me developing into a better, happier person.
One's job and the rest of one's life are not clearly delineated. Best friends and spouses are often met through work, which is inexplicably linked with one's actual performance on the job. This article treats them as if they are isolated. Also, it's worth noting that one's sense of purpose (as in career) is important to happiness, just as being part of a strong social network in one's personal life is. Balance is key.
Work inevitably has highs and lows. Sometimes you'll fail at something. If you tie your self-worth to your job, then you risk anchoring your self-esteem to external factors you can't control. Learn to value yourself on who you are aside from your work.
> ...the disruption happening in AI feels like existential threat. And it should be. The skill that which you exchanged for money and stability is being replaced, you are being replaced just shuffled around.
The narrative is being built that AI has already won, somewhat AGI, replaced jobs. It's sneaking into blogs and articles which are not even about AI, which makes it even harder to notice.
Many people define themselves based on their job & tbh its what they learn from the Society, I remember steve jobs once said in a video i watched that Everything you see is created by someone who is just a human like you, and many people just don't wanna create their own bcs they are too comfortable being in someone else's creation , I'm not talking about Mother nature, I'm talking about tech and stuff like these jobs , which a human has created, so many people needs to come out this thinking and they can casually define themselves based on their interests and even goals.
I don't tie my self-worth to my job, but I still need the dough and I don't see myself doing anything else, hence why I've been so concerned as of late. I only started working four years ago, and I don't have the luxury to retire and go biking for the rest of my days. What a ridiculously bad article. I don't need Facebook-tier self-help "advice", I need reasons to feel confident in the fact that I'll be able to provide for myself in the future by doing something reasonably enjoyable.
> Whether you do well through an economic transition or not has little to do with the cause (AI, digital technology, industrialization, coal), and more to do with the social and political structures which exist around you (which is a blog post for another day).
I keep hearing "AI will free us to do things we love," and all I can think is, in what world? Because in this one, if you don't have labor worth buying or anyone to buy it, you don't eat.
>I keep hearing "AI will free us to do things we love," and all I can think is, in what world?
You're likely to hear this sentiment from rich and privileged SV entrepreneurs and people who were handed six-figure salaries right out of school, and who have never had a realistic view of how most people live. People who only continue to work to satisfy their intellect and lifestyle.
Great article from a place of privilege, now go tell that to the HR drone, nowadays most likely a LLM powered assistant, that my CV matters enough for a phone call.
You are what utility you deliver to others. I doubt they'll keep feeding, dressing and sheltering you for your ability to connect, be present and whatever.
> The fear isn't really about losing a job title, it's about losing the story you tell yourself about who you are.
No, it's just the fear of loosing your mind because you're broken. It's just about money and survivability. There's no room for ego when you don't even know if you will have food to provide for your kids next month
This all changes when you have a kid. Before I had a kid I was my job and it hurt me when I did have a kid by not prioritizing what was important (my kid - not my JOB). I thought I was important at my place of work but realize nobody cared and I could disappear and things would be fine without me.
Indeed, thinking that people and the way they extract money from the environment is same is ridiculous and i've been teaching my kid from childhood that it's just wrong. We've been conditioned to think that way from the industrial era. I hope now people will finally learn to think different.
I really don't care about my intrinsic value as a person. Without this line of work I couldn't make enough to support my household by myself, which I must now do.
This was obvious to those who value their time over the job given to them and all the office politics, performative meetings and the blame-game that comes with it.
The company has ex Fly.io people:;dissent is flagged. What a surprise. Fly.io will still end like Starfighter, where abusing HN for marketing did not work.
>The capacity to be fully present with another person, to see them not as a role they're playing but as a whole human being… that cannot be automated away and hopefully never will.
I agree but I don't hold such a positive view of the result of this (anymore) as the author do.
(I think?) in the book The End of Burnout, an argument is put forward about how our change in work culture is contributing to burnout. One aspect of it being that with the service economy, part of the value we provide in return for salary is not just our skills but a pleasant "persona". In previous times, our work used to be less socially oriented: farmers farm, craftmans craft, factory workers do line work. Social interaction happened ofc but wasn't as much the core for many professions. With increased automation, the social component got more important. These days it's not even surprising for many craftmans to also work close to customers or other group of people in an organization, increasing the number of interactions you need to manage by order of magnitude. You're also expected to be socially professional, "pleasant" as the article points. You're supposed to act graciously when your customers demand the impossible, or your manager doesn't understand the problem at hand. Leave your emotions, personality, and completely valid thoughts at the company main entrance: here you be a "pleasant professional".
Combined it with another trend: the onus for productivity increase is on the worker and not the employer, as it used to be in the factory floor (productivity increased with improved system, not individual effort). I think this point was from Byumg chul Han, and I can see that with the onus on productivity increase being on the worker, in a "be pleasant" job it will be more and more "sacrifice your true self to be maximum pleasant" and the result will be a horribly burnt out society.
So the authors prediction is rather dystopian. A workplace that focus on pleasantness with a detachment to meritocratic conditions will also inevitably converge to squashing of diverse thought and getting stuck in their heads.
I'm surprised that neither this article nor any of the comments have thus far mentioned the fact that rarely do tombstones, eulogies, and the like mention or emphasize much a person's occupation. Most of the time it's "Here lay {name}, loving {relation}, {relation}, and {relation}. May he eternally do {hobby} in the skies forever."
And here's the crazy part: I'm still not convinced this is the right take! Of course we are our jobs and what we do. It literally shapes who you get to meet on the dating market, favors you can call in, and so forth. How naive it is to think otherwise. The Cracked article that another post linked to is pretty spot-on.
Yes, obviously being a 'person' who can be 'with' people (cf. 'for' people) is simultaneously also a thing. Both are true. But "You are not your job" is just cope, and the tombstones and eulogies fall for it too.
> The harder version is asking yourself: if my job title disappeared tomorrow, would I still be me?
This part, though, misses an important point: status and wealth. And I think it’s especially directed at those.
It can be beautiful to identify yourself with your job if you are a professor or a social worker. The problem is identifying yourself with the social status provided by your job (paycheck and power), not the work itself.
The OP says he is going to "do other things" and clicking the link reveals a bike tour across the coast of California. How quaint. These articles always seem like they are trying to dismiss some fantasy of reader or chide them to have the right perspective and basically boil down to say "Why are you so obsessed with work? Go outside, have fun. You Americans are so serious!" But all of this betrays the fact that is the writer of such articles that appears to be extremely naive. I think it is very clear that these people actually believe in this UBI fantasy world or mathematical mysticism. The "other things" that he would be more likely to be doing would be to be hunting and foraging for food and not hunting with ammunition because that is expensive and he won't have money for that. It's so delusional and sort of pompous at the same time. Just my take.
>But warmth. Empathy. The ability to sit with someone in their confusion and make them feel understood. The ability to crack a joke at exactly the right moment and remind someone that they're not alone. The capacity to be fully present with another person, to see them not as a role they're playing but as a whole human being… that cannot be automated away and hopefully never will.
Yeah it can. People have been using LLMs as therapists and digital friends for a while now. All of the soft skills were the first to get automated.
> My technical skills are being disrupted by machines - that's fine I'll go do other things.
I'm curious whether this is a strawman argument or not. Do software engineers really believe, even subconsciously, that they are their job?
Imagine that tomorrow the government decided to pay $250K per year to each software engineer for life as long as they never worked again. Would there be a lot of anxiety about losing the meaning of existence? Of course not! SEs would be celebrating in the streets.
That means the anxiety about AI destroying jobs is all about economic loss, not psychological meaning.
Nope, not at all. Or maybe I do feel a bit useless against the AI slop and FOMO that gets pushed around. But the field is still gonna need engineers to do the non-slop work, or to fix it when it goes wrong.
(I use AI daily BTW.)
As someone said: AI will take our jobs when the execs are able to state their requirements precisely. We're safe!
I want to thank everyone who hates work, is mentally checked out of their jobs and quiet quitting etc.
It makes it much easier for me to distinguish myself as a hard worker who cares about the business being successful. It also helps me keep my job during layoffs because I can assure you the managers have noticed.
When you are old and have lots of formative experiences that are not work-based, we can shake hands and mutually appreciate each other's motives and respective outcomes.
I am arguably a successful employee in a tech-focused role. I enjoy my job and others seem to feel I'm good at what I do.
That said: I am NOT at all interested in identifying myself in social situations by my job. When someone asks what I do, I respond that I work in tech. I am not interested in giving more details nor talking in-depth about what I do to others I have just met.
Why? Because that's not at all what makes me...me. I am far more interested in what I do outside of work (reading...a lot, listening to music, spending as much time w/my family as possible, traveling, spending time at my lake home, etc). That is what I work to do; enjoy my life.
I realize this is an uncommon opinion, but I find it SO VERY ODD that folks are OBSESSED about their jobs and make it a central point of their existence to those outside of their specific industry. I do NOT care what someone does for their day-to-day; it's unlikely it will have any impact on me or my friendship with them. I want to know what they bring to the table in our current or potential social situation and the fact that they make PowerPoint presentations for whomever to look at, ask a few questions answered in the presentation's appendix, and never think about again doesn't do anything to further any of that.
I’d much rather know and learn about someone’s passion for woodworking, hill walking, flower arranging, whatever they enjoy doing in their free time, rather than having to talk about their (or my!) work.
Yeah! IMHO "What are you into / what do you care about or do for fun?" should replace "What do you do? [ie, what's your profession / where do you work]" as the default ice-breaker. More interesting, less reductive or competitive.
So you are saying that your job does not have any impact on your personality, despite you are there for 8+h a day?
The environment you are in for hours (even if its great, you are forced) does not shapre who you are?
And regarding social interactions: Its no difference for you interacting with people from your mind-liked crowd in opposion to someone who runs a gun-shop-chain? For sure, a constructed example, but Id say there is for sure some difference when acting with the different groups?
> So you are saying that your job does not have any impact on your personality, despite you are there for 8+h a day
(Not OP) It's not a core part of it, no. I'm a person who likes solving problems and has an attention to detail. If I see that something is wrong I have a desire to fix it regardless of it's my responsibility or not. This could be finding an outdated piece of documentation at work or finding a piece of litter on the street.
These traits make me an effective software engineer (up to the senior level, then I have to fight against those parts of my personality and focus on specific high-impact things if I want to succeed at Staff+), but they are a part of who I am totally independent from my career.
Software engineering is a field that I am good at and that pays exceptionally well, but I could be happy utilizing these traits in any number of careers. Were I financially independent, my dream career would probably be something closer to the people who design and build elaborate contraptions for stage shows such as Cirque du Soleil.
I like asking both, but these days a lot of the "what do you do for fun" answers are just consumption hobbies (e.g. I watch X show on Netflix) that people use to switch off after a long day of work. It's easier to think of interesting follow up questions about someone's work than about these kinds of hobbies. Even if (especially if) the work is something completely different from what I'm doing.
As the sister comment said: "Not if they work outside of tech…"
And not even then, in many cases. I know exactly what I do, but having to explain that to anyone, including people in tech, is difficult.
And, you know, it's not interesting to talk about. Talking about that is fine at the job, that's what we do. I have no interest in talking about that when I'm not working. Instead I want to talk about other things. Hobbies, activities, music, books, whatever. Enquring about someone's job will not lead to that at all.
> It also helps me keep my job during layoffs because I can assure you the managers have noticed.
If you believe the managers who interact with you have any say in who gets laid off, then your understanding of how business works isn't nearly as good as you seem to believe it is.
Something tells me you haven't been laid off before. I think the overconfidence you're displaying here will be shattered if that were to happen. I hope it doesn't happen to you, but if it does I hope you remember that you are not your job.
I think it has a lot to do with the size of the organization. If you're at a relatively small company, it's not that hard to identify and retain the top performers.
If you're at a faceless megacorp, that's a different story.
You can be laid off at small companies too. For example, a company may be running out of runway and it's looking increasingly likely the next round of funding will not materialize in time. It needs to control expenses and extend runway an extra 6 months, but everyone's a "top-performer". Who gets laid off? It's likely going to be those adding features (e.g. product folks), not those maintaining the business (accounting, devops). We can get into whether it's a good idea to kick off the death spiral for a company in that way, but my point is that no one is immune to layoffs, not at any scale, except maybe the founders.
> worker who cares about the business being successful
In most cases, this is a sucker mentality that makes you vulnerable to abusive employers. You will stress yourself out making your boss richer. They won't care or make reciprocal gestures. They'd be happy to replace you should you become inconvenient.
It’s not about stressing yourself out; that’s something you can ultimately control (though admittedly, many people are bad at separating the two) but more about _how good you are at putting on a show_ of giving a shit.
There is a non zero chance that the company I work for pivots into some weird crypto niche (low, but we’re already fintech-y). If that happens, I’m out, but no way in hell am I gonna pivot my work personality overnight because of a business decision made by the company’s board and investors.
If I need to put on a happy face for my boss to keep my job, then I’m gonna do it because I can’t afford not to at the moment. That’s not to say there is no line, but being a generally positive person in the workplace is a role I’m fine with playing. It costs me very little personally and opens a lot of doors because let’s face it, nobody likes working with a loathsome human being, even if they’re right.
Am I a sucker? Maybe by your definition, but I don’t feel like one currently.
I've known people who survived multiple rounds of layoffs, not because they were "distinguished", but because they were the cheapest. Meanwhile, their more talented counterparts got the ax for being too expensive. Simple as that.
> It also helps me keep my job during layoffs because I can assure you the managers have noticed.
I can assure you that when they are laying off to cut costs, which is most of the time, what they notice is A) the old/expensive ones who can be let go without any major disruptions and B) the "expendables" such as contractors or those they have a personal dislike of - the latter usually has not much to do with hard work and a lot more to do with perception. Category A is to meet cost targets while category B can also help with number targets.
If you think your hard work alone will save you, I pray that life spares you that rude shock.
It does matter because it's your network that gets you your next job and colleagues remember who was doing a good job and helping meet goals and those who didn't.
I have no faith that this is satire since America is full of people who underestimate the impact of luck and privilege in the course of their life in favor of a view that everything is due to their own personal efforts and the suffering of others is obviously due to their personal defects. These people will relentlessly defend any actions by the owner class without realizing that they themselves are not in that class and never will be. They say things like this a lot.
I mostly agree with the parent post. There certainly are roles where the entire scope of the job is to convert Jira tickets to code and nothing else and nobody will blame you for being a checked out 9-5er in such places but that isn't the audience of HN. Most here are software engineers who get fairly broad latitude to exercise judgment and expertise/education in furtherance of business goals and that's they get the FAANG-sized paycheck and RSUs/stock grants for. And you better believe colleagues in those roles notice who is just doing the minimum and who is helping to achieve goals.
You only care about “business goals” under a certain age, I’d say 35-ish, afterwards, if you hadn’t realized by that point that it’s just a paycheck and nothing more then no mindfulness trickery not any “let’s-experience-things”-consoomerism is going to fill the spiritual void inside of you.
Could be 35-ish of age, like in my case, could be later, could be earlier, but at some point that realization will have to come otherwise you’ll remain an empty corpse throughout the rest of it all.
You care for business goals because that's what you're being paid to do. The "nuh-uh, I'm being paid to code and that's it" are the ones who wonder why their career stalled early.
Nobody's saying you should care about business goals personally; that would indeed be dumb.
We've banned this account for repeatedly breaking the site guidelines and ignoring our requests to stop. You can't do this here, no matter how wrong another comment is or you feel it is.
Meh, I feel the opposite. Even though I come from a culture that values separation of work and free time a lot (France), I still feel like it's copium. The fact is, if you spend most of your valuable brain time on a task, your brain starts to get shaped for such task, therefore I don't see why you can't identify yourself as your job. The stuff the author talks about, empathy, ability to joke etc. is also heavily influenced by your day-to-day activity, your job. Heck, there are even some people who claim they became aphantasic and lost all capacity for dreams and creativity after working too much with computers.
Anyways, I get the point of the post, capitalism sucks and makes most of our existence as worth as cattle, that is, if we don't value the stuff outside work.
> Saying "I am a software engineer" is beginning to feel like saying "I am a calcultor" in 1950 now that digital machines can use electrical circuits to count, add, multiply - it's not long until they'll be able differentiate a non-continuous function... You're beginning to feel less-than-useful.
> This bothers a lot of people for a reason (I think) that has nothing to do with the technology. The fear isn't really about losing a job title, it's about losing the story you tell yourself about who you are.
Get Fing real. Most, most, most people in the world need a job to survive. Some technologists might have stonks and financial independence. Those with stocks or other kinds of passive (parasitic) income are the minority.
I think that goes for most programmers as well.
Okay so we’re going to get to how this just means you’ll need to change jobs. So let’s wait for that.
> I like Susan Fiske's research on how humans judge each other shows something worth sitting with. When you meet someone, you assess them on two dimensions. The first is warmth - do you believe they mean you well? The second is competence - do you believe they're capable?
This is farcical when you consider that people with enough capital can survive on just that, capital. No matter what the research says about “competence”. There are billions of dollars invested in portraying people with money as competent. But if that propaganda is ineffectual it’s not like it matters. The system is arranged such that they won’t be inconvenienced by the judgement of commoners.
> Thus far we have automated away "wasteful" or "unnecessary" jobs. Perhaps the elevator operator was your friend, someone you saw everyday. I'm not certain their purpose was "useless". They're gone nonetheless.
> This is the whole point of the system. [...]
The point of the system is to commoditize everything and concentrate wealth.
Labor is a commodity. Labor created automation. And labor will be discarded once the automation that it created displaces labor.
The automation is then fully in the hands of the so-called competent. Capital.
> Whether you do well through an economic transition or not has little to do with the cause (AI, digital technology, industrialization, coal), and more to do with the social and political structures which exist around you (which is a blog post for another day).
That’s rich. The author already told us the fairytale version of Capitalism, the version where we are supposedly all going to benefit. But now the author pretends to shy away and tell us that it is a blog post for another day?
No—you already took a stance with that statement, even with the premise of this therapeutic distraction since you assume that it is just a matter of changing jobs.
Is it though? When the whole system is made for Capital? And Capital obviously owns the automation? Who managed to buy up so much RAM that it caused a global shortage?
But meh, political structure and all that—trivialities for another day. We’re here to pump up Inevitability discourse with.
> You are not your job. You're a person first. Your ability to connect, be present, and make people feel understood is what makes you irreplaceable to the people around you, which is the only market that counts.
I’ll remember that while in the unemployment line.
Being able to see ourselves as something beyond our job (our means of survival) is a luxury. If a person can't provide for themselves the rest goes out the window fast.
The only way to ease the anxiety in people isn't with fluff about their 'human worth', but rather to help them envision other tangible and plausible ways in which they can provide for themselves.
The cold reality, in my opinion, is that the things we value about ourselves are generally not that valuable to others. I love my own personality and humanity, my soul if you will, but nobody's paying me for it, and so I have to value it accordingly.
Hell, let me go even darker: there are billions of souls on this planet. They're not a rare thing like say, gold. They're very easily produced, by two people getting it on. That leads to a harsh conclusion: human beings aren't that valuable as individuals. We are in fact very disposable and replaceable.
Those living in the first world have been shielded from that harsh reality for some time, but it's starting to show up on our doorstep and we don't like it, and due to our inexperience with it we haven't learned how to adapt to it.
It scares me too, but I refuse to be in denial about it.
Reminds me of a very old essay on Cracked that says something very similar: https://www.cracked.com/blog/6-harsh-truths-that-will-make-y...
Good god, serious life advice targeted at young men (but applicable to anybody) before the manosphere, incels and culture wars took over. Unimaginable stuff today. What a relic.
This article seems to hinge on a rhetorical flourish whereby the literal meaning of 'you are not your job' is substituted with a criticism of 'you are not what you do'. Well, of course it doesn't make sense and isn't true if you redefine it like that - the original aphorism is instead more literal: your identity should not be conflated with the identity of your employer. The substituted argument leads to some fascinating philosophy, but doesn't deal with the more literal fact that plenty of things you can do for value to the world are still negatives, either net negative for the world or to the individual. Conflating one's identity with an employer is the latter, since the employer and the employee almost always have different requirements for well-being (in the case of a corporation then of course the employer in that sense has no requirement for well-being at all).
Well... it was 2012 so makes sense.
> they fall for those jerks because those jerks have other things they can offer.
Ha! That reminds me that I, somewhat unknowingly, in the past have emulated the good parts of a jerk to be more attractive myself.
What are the good parts of a jerk?
They are: adventurous, spontaneous, in the moment, doesn't take everything too seriously, thrill seeking and confident. It made me much more pro-active as I'm a fairly passive person (romantically speaking) normally. Oh and I still was nice too. And I emulated those things because they sounded fun as well, I just never thought of amping it up a bit.
> Oh and I still was nice too.
That is a judgment reserved exclusively to third parties, I’m afraid.
In part, but my intent of being nice didn't change. It stayed the same. Also some women explicitly called me kind and nice, not all of them to be fair. I definitely had some women being like "I normally don't go for nice guys but", but I was the exception :)
Which is why a lot of people are called jerks when in truth they're not actually doing anything wrong.
> before the manosphere, incels and culture wars took over.
Those are convenient boogeymen that give basically the same advice, just sometimes in very crass and very rude forms.
The advice stood 50 years ago, in 2012, and still stands today. What doesn't seem to stand is that american culture seems to have abandoned holding people accountable and responsible for anything ever.
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That article is crating the ground for manosphere, incels and culture wars. It tells the men they have no value and don't really matter as people. Have young men read that article, believe it and you will end up with them joining manosphere, incels and culture wars.
Also, it does in fact matter whether a guy is nice.
I think the article's central point is that being nice is the bare minimum. In fact, probably less than that. If you needed life-saving surgery, it would be great to have a nice surgeon, but you're still going to pick the arrogant surgeon at the top of his field rather than a random nice guy. I will say that I in fact agree that people are innately valuable, but that's more of a philosophical/religious debate here.
I think there might be that aspects, but not really the central point. On the niceness, the article claims that being nice or honest does not matter. And also that they are completely common. Neither are true.
I did not liked the surgery argument either. Of course you should not operate if you do not know how ... but that is issue of overblown ego and arrogance. Not of the niceness. No matter how awesome you are, there will be things you cant do. And framing a guy into as a useless idiot because he is a carpenter rather then surgeon and thus cant operate right there in the street is nonsense. The surgery issue simply wont happen with honest nice guy. That guy will call an ambulance which is certainly better then trying to operate.
Read article again: it literally tell guys that yes, they should be sociopathic and go get some money. That is manosphere in nutshel.
> If you needed life-saving surgery, it would be great to have a nice surgeon, but you're still going to pick the arrogant surgeon at the top of his field
In around about way, the automatic assumption that arrogance = capability did allowed quite a few cranks skate. The manosphere is fully into that point.
It matters to me. Therefore I try to be nice. I know it costs me some opportunities and some “success”. But I sleep well at night.
I think this perspective is false. You have no way of knowing how many more opportunities and success you would cost yourself by being not nice.
The author directly confronts and scolds incels in #4 and also plainly says that it isn't about money there so you clearly have the wrong impression of what the essay is about.
I feel like that article contradicts the meaning of OPs article in almost every way.
The Cracked article comes from a very neoliberal, self-optimization hustle-grind culture: work on yourself so you're worth more for others: an incredibly, if not exclusively, extrinsic motivation. While OPs article seems more focused on your internal presence, your relationships and being with people, not for people. Cracked says to work hard and complain less, produce more so your skillset is more worthy to other people. OPs article says to practice presence and true connection.
The only thing I can find that connects both is that they have a mindset of anti-passivity, but that's all.
Ahh, edit: thought you replied directly to OP, that's why I thought you meant that the Cracked article is similar to OPs article. Sorry!
I read that relic just now for the first time.
There's some truth in there about in case of a serious emergency you mostly need competence over empathy. But, to me, it's always love, empathy and connectedness that wins. Why are you commenting on HN? Is it for bringing value in return for money or services or material goods? I don't think so. It is about human connection. In absence, life or death makes not much difference anymore.
Love, empathy, and connectedness are something you have to put in effort (lots of effort in some cases) and skill ( that has to be learned and honed) to express to the recipient in a way that gets through to them.
Your mention of "return for money or services or material goods" shows you didn't get the point of the article; the author plainly explains why it isn't about money in #4.
Well i wrote services as well. But anyways, since you were so kind as to take the effort of pointing me out the pointe, I took the effort of watching half of Baldwin's monologue and read the text below in more detail. Very interesting, it makes me understand better why the article today still is referred to. The douchebags for which some pretty women - knowingly or subconsciously - fall, often have a skill, other than just their slick douchebag appearances and schwung. So just being mister nice guy doesn't cut it. I can't help being a nice guy - - Thanks for giving me food for thought!
Reading content written by humans and not AI is a breath of fresh air. Thanks for sharing this.
Thanks very much for sharing this - despite his declaration of his majority audience, this is excellent, hard-hitting advice for anyone who feels lost in the gap between their achievements and their "potential."
An old classic. Thanks for reminding me about this article.
Thanks for sharing that article!
This comment defines value as what people pay for things, then comes to the conclusion that they way to value people must be based on what people will pay for them.
That's not insightful, that's just circular reasoning, and it fails to explain normal human behavior.
Does a child have no value to it's parents because it's "easily produced"[1] and "disposable and replaceable"?
[1] I imagine OP has never given birth
I think it's more trying to say, if an individual cannot support themselves or provide value to others who can support them then those other intangible factors don't matter too much.
In the first world we have a ton of excess value so we can do things like homeless shelters, charity, socialized medicine, etc.
But if we suddenly don't have that excess value to spread around and it becomes either I eat today or you eat today and I'm the one who farmed the wheat and made the bread -- me and my family are going to eat today.
We go back to "fair" very fast.
I think that is a more clear framing of what the OP was saying, and if they had written it that way I probably wouldn't have bothered replying. It just had a very fatalistic tone I didn't agree with.
I still disagree though, the relationship between scarcity and generosity is very complex.
And as an aside, homeless shelters and socialized medicine are cheaper than the alternatives in developed nations, so I would argue those are the sign of good governance rather than excess value. Although that depends on your definition of value...
If you're focused on farming and I'm focused on taking the product of your labor I win. Your attention/resources are split between producing and defending yourself/survival. Mine is entirely focused on extraction.
Over time the imbalance compounds. I spend all my effort improving the mechanisms of coercion and extraction. You split yours between survival and production. I get better at taking you get just good enough at surviving to keep producing. The system stabilizes around that balance with you allowed enough to survive, but not enough to escape the cycle.
We have had extra excess because for a little while enough of us didn't think in the hundred thousand year old way you wrote. But the 'modern' tech bro world isn't able to get away from the hundred thousand year old thinking. And generations of progress potentially erode because the systems of power guiding them haven’t evolved beyond ancient incentives with all signs now pointing to new locked in systems of control instead of shared prosperity.
Well, I mean, you can certainly say economic value doesn't capture all of the value. But you can also say that there are metrics of value that do capture everything. Thermodynamic entropy, for example - its steady march to zero is statistically unstoppable. You can't measure a child's economic value without making a lot of assumptions, but you can measure a child's thermodynamic heat production with a few simple experiments. It might sound a little out there, but I've been looking at the maximum entropy production principle and some books on thermodynamics, and there really is a lot that is applicable to calculations about human systems. Viewing humans as dissipative structures designed to maximize entropy production really explains a lot about how the world works. Notably, some questions about our energy usage patterns. AI may not be useful economically yet, but it's excellent at dissipating heat.
In fact entropy is relative to what we define as chaos vs what we define as ordered. When we can't explain the order, we define it as being chaotic, and for convenience we model it statistically in stead of in absolute terms. I learned that few months ago from a HN posted article.
This comment brings me so much joy, it might be the most "hackernews" thing I've ever read.
I don't disagree though. Everything is physics, and physics is applied math
I look at it from the other side. Life, and by extension human civilization,is a local entropy minimization mechanism.
Yeah, exactly! Market value and personal/relational value are completely different axes. Conflating the two is a category error and not insight..
Just going to poke you a little for the statement about not having children ;). It strikes me as a little elitist and I'll tell you why:
You don't need to have had children to have loved people and to have lost people, and to fully understand the depth and weight of those things.
I didn't mean to imply that you hadn't cared, or felt loss. That would definitely be presumptuous.
I was only commenting on the "easily produced" comment. I don't think I've heard someone describe pregnancy and childbirth that way ;)
The "not having children" part of the comment was clearly marked as a footnote attached to the quote about how children are "easily produced".
I believe they were trying to push back on the easily word in "easily produced". While, thank god, modern medicine makes birthing dramatically safer than at any time in history, it is still an incredibly taxing process on the human body and still fundamentally dangerous. It is not "easy" per-se.
C’mon now, let’s not be intentionally obtuse to try and sound smart adding “yes, but” to a perfectly solid argument. Children are easily produced, that’s a fact. The process of child bearing is not in question, but rather the availability of willing partners (hell, even unwilling, if we’re getting that dark) and how little effort it generally takes to get the conception process going.
They were making a point that it’s much easier to generate a human being than it is actually generating economically meaningful value. One needs a few minutes of your time and gets you feeling really good at the end of the process, and the other can (and often does) require years of effort, toil and sweat (all of which can catastrophically fail rendering your efforts moot).
Generating a new human is, indeed, comparatively easy.
> One needs a few minutes of your time and gets you feeling really good at the end of the process
Ah yes, and after the intercourse the child spawns, I remember. And then it just leaves and goes somewhere and starts it's own life. No pain, work, food, time or whatever involved. Just having sex and feeling good.
> years of effort, toil and sweat
Would be a shame if that would be needed to produce a human being.
> and it fails to explain normal human behavior.
...which is what exactly? My best guess is that you're implying "normal human behavior" is unconditional love and support? That's an idealistic view that doesn't hold true for everyone (even in the first world) as GP pointed out.
I think this idealistic type of mindset, which seems to be a collective agreement to blow smoke up each other's asses, has done a lot more harm than good. You get thrashed between the reality that everything is conditional and the ideal which is that you're unique and special just by existing, with the latter being delusion IMO.
My intention was to imply that normal human behavior involves doing things that aren't economically beneficial.
Why play piano at home when you could use that energy to work? Why go to the bar and pay more for a drink than you would at home?
Because of this, equating all human value to monetary value doesn't accurately reflect the world.
They aren’t valuable to markets, but like I have neighbors who are treasured by the community and genuinely bring joy to everyone. But no, I guess they aren’t economically important. I actually don’t like how every soul has been reduced to an efficiency metric, surprised how much I find forums like this accept that framing.
True as well. I've had similar communal experiences where you get a taste of the old way, the way humans would have operated when we lived in tribes. And on that level I think we are capable of valuing each other as beings - the instinct to look out for each other kicks in.
But this modern society we live in... it's just not structured that way anymore. Most of us live in little silos now: our job and our atomic family.
And we've become so used to depending on it that it looks very unlikely to change until/unless shit hits the fan. Your average person doesn't know how to grow their own food or build their own shelter, and even if they do it's far less convenient than just getting a paycheck and relying on the supermarket.
It's often amazing to me that the whole edifice of it functions as long as it does. Sometimes when I'm in the CBD here in Melbourne, I sit there marveling at the thousands of people I see wandering the streets, all of whom are somehow employed by someone to do something such that they have enough money to keep afloat.
> Your average person doesn't know how to grow their own food
And, you know the sad part? A lot of places don't allow you to even try to learn. For example, my current place that I rent has a yard (it's a nice little trailer home), but I'm not allowed to have a garden. They even chopped down the nice tree that was growing in the yard when I first moved in.
Oh, I can certainly try to grow stuff inside in containers, but that means I gotta get containers (which I can't afford) and I get an increased risk of bugs & dirt being in the house (not a fan thanks).
To be fair, growing your own food is incredibly inefficient. Agriculture is one of the places where economies of scale shine very very brightly.
> To be fair, growing your own food is incredibly inefficient
Life is not an optimization problem.
However, had we not tried optimising, Malthus would be right and we'd all be dead.
So let's hear it for optimisation.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Agricultural_Revolutio...
No, but staying alive is, and food is for staying alive.
Not really. Only if you discount all external effects on the environment. There are more productive agriculture systems with more yield per sq* but more manual input, but less side effects. E.g. permaculture.
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You can't afford a $10 plastic container for growing plants? If that is true (which I doubt), I would be willing to drop you a few bucks via PayPal.
A $10 plastic container doesn't have nearly enough space for sustenance farming. Neither does a typical city home's garden. And for health reasons they're not going to let you raise animals (there are pretty funky diseases you and your neighbours can get from even just poultry, never mind pigs and cattle)
You can certainly grow various fun things in buckets - tomatos, herbs, etc. But you can't survive on it. Not with a small city garden.
And that's the point - in pre-industrial times, you had to survive off what you could grow, and you had a lot more land, which you used most of to grow your own food, and used most of your own time to grow food, and you were fucked at the first bad harvest (though you would likely have been part of a social contract where your local landowner took a portion of your crops to cover for these eventualities)
In post-industrial times, peasants found they could work in factories and earn much more than they could selling a portion of their crop. Countries stopped being 90% farmers. Normal people could specialise, not just the landed gentry who didn't wonder where their next meal was coming from.
And here we are typing to each other on websites.
It's sad if the city or your landlord won't let you have a garden. Gardens are wonderful things. You should try and grow something. But we're in a discussion context of "people don't even know how to grow their own food any more". Thank goodness for that, because if we did, we'd be spending all day tending to our crops, living in abject poverty, at constant risk of starvation, and we'd have no time for computers. Thank goodness for modern agricultural practise.
The person I replied to wrote about indoor gardening. So sustainability was always out of the question. Besides, you dont have to go back to preindustrial times. My parents had enough "land" to grow food for us. It basically ended around 1985 when they finally realized it was far easier to just buy stuff at the supermarket, because, as you already mentioned, growing your own food is very time consuming. Around that time, almost everyone I know stopped to try to be self-sustaining.
When we lived in tribes, people knew who did what job, and those who were taking more than they were contributing were punished harshly.
Money is merely a mnemonic device serving the same purpose, to mark those who did more good than received.
Average person does not know how to grow food and build shelter not because getting paycheck is convenient but because it is more efficient. If we do not want money, supermarkets etc. we'll be back to 10 mln people that the tribal way of life could sustain.
Being employed to get money is not really different from searching prey or edible roots, what is different now is that billions of people who were supposed to die because they couldn't find what to eat, or couldn't get along with their tribe, stay alive and complain that they did not receive more free stuff from complete strangers.
Ha! I grew up in a rural area, "communal" if you may. And leaving that hellhole of dishonesty and depression was one of the most important moves in my life. I guess it really depends on how you deal with communal life and how much you are able to ignore people who think they have the right to comment your lifestyle/situation. Well, maybe I am too harsh, and this phenomenon isn't obvious to non-disabled people. But the amount of patronisation I usually get in communal situations makes me LOVE my urban life.
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You and your neighbors might mutually provide joy for each other, but there is a third party in this exchange: the massive industrial complex that provides the food and shelter you need to live. Unfortunately the industrial complex does not accept joy as a form of payment, so this whole system isn't going to work out.
It does not work as long as you stay strongly intertwined with the capitalist complex, correct. But I'd argue that in basically every region of the world, you have the choice. It may be harder or easier, but you have it.
the capitalist complex is strongly intertwined with reality and power.
You have the choice to stick your head in the sand for a while and try to ignore it, but eventually your sand castle will get bulldozed by a group of people that don't.
Doesn't that work its way into property values. People want to live in a good neighborhood and community and are willing to pay more for it.
Yes, if you try to force a material value on everything, you will get a material value.
I would pay a shit ton to have loving and supporting friends, but this is not how it works. Because loving and supporting friends don't want money in exchange, but your true love and support.
This works for "good" neighborhoods if you replace "good" with "low-crime", as people with a higher income tend to do less crimes, if we count out tax evasion and other anti-society behaviours.
But this is not what it's about. You reap what you sow. You try to increase your value for people to like you and want to be friends with you? This can work, but the price for it is (1) purely extrinsical motivation which more often then not does leave you feel empty and (2) friends who will leave you as soon as your worth decreases, e.g. with age or illness, or if a different person with more value comes around and offers their friendship.
>Because loving and supporting friends don't want money in exchange, but your true love and support.
The money would go to the "matchmaker" who would connect people with the right people.
> The money would go to the "matchmaker" who would connect people with the right people.
Making friends = paying a service to find friends for me?
> But no, I guess they aren’t economically important. I actually don’t like how every soul has been reduced to an efficiency metric, surprised how much I find forums like this accept that framing.
Efficiency is the metric of nature. Thinking about human life in any other terms than input and output is objectively a luxury, afforded only to societies with surplus resources. Calling it "framing" feels a little disingenuous.
> Thinking about human life in any other terms than input and output is objectively a luxury, afforded only to societies with surplus resources
Even a little bit of anthropological study shows this is false.
Okay, so when you, BobbyJo, become too old or unwell to work; other people should just shoot you in the head and take your stuff, right? It would only be efficient. Or does this 'harsh reality" only apply to other people?
Modern society has the luxury of surplus resources at the moment, and we are able to take care of the old and weak, which we indeed choose to do. If/when that ceases to be the case, the harsh reality will apply to everyone, me included, yes.
Another thing humans are arguably good at is making a longer term plan and investment: if we see that old people simply get shot, we won't be investing surplus value into our retirement funds — at least not of the same sort. Perhaps we'll be building fortresses when younger, accumulating wealth to be able to pay soldiers to protect us etc...
Wait, that's exactly what has happened, except it has evolved into a more systemic solution (our taxes and social contributions pay for police, courts; bigger accumulated wealth allows for more options...).
It is a luxury we can, as a species, afford!
We actually have the capacity and capability to house, feed, and clothe everyone on the planet, and then some.
The frame can shift because our capabilities have increased.
I mostly agree. We have the capacity at present, but only because we are burning a ton of non renewable energy.
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> We are in fact very disposable and replaceable.
To your friends and family as well? Or just your employer?
You're describing things that may well be true for a lot of employers, but fall apart outside of that context.
For some rare once-in-a-lifetime friendships, you are not disposable, and if anything were to happen to you, you would be missed. I can count those on one hand.
For most casual acquaintances (that some people incorrectly label as friends), it's certainly true.
On the family's side: only parents, siblings, children, maybe some aunt or grandparent. Second distant cousin you saw 3 times in life?
> For most casual acquaintances
You may feel this way, but it feels a lot different when you learn that one of your acquaintances has died.
I enjoyed a brief intellectual conversation with a professor at the end of a semester. When I returned the next academic year, I stopped by his office for a quick chat, but his name was no longer on the door. The department administrator told me "Oh, he's no longer with us."
My heart sunk. I didn't know him well, he may not have remembered my name, but I wanted to thank him, and now he was gone. Cut down in his prime? He was just an acquaintance to me, he was not my friend. But I still felt that shock and grief deeply.
I asked the administrator how he'd died, and she quickly clarified: he was still alive! He had just been a guest lecturer visiting for one semester from a Scandinavian university and had now returned home. This has taught me not to delay expressing my gratitude for the acquaintances in my life.
There's a been a few similar instances in my life that have led me take up the personal practice of "Always say hi or wave to friend when the chance comes around, because there may not be a next time". It came about because I tend to see a lot of close friends and looser acquaintances on a day to day basis physically in the world, and there used to be more times than not where I wouldn't bother crossing the street or stopping for a minute to chat. Later I realized this costs me almost nothing, and even for less-close relationships, I'd prefer to have put in the tiny amount of effort to walk up and show them they're worth even that much before they overdosed or moved away or committed suicide. It's not always opportune, but what else is life for?
Granted, in retrospect, there's not really ever a sufficient amount of interaction you could have had, but if I see someone inside a cafe that I'm walking past, it's worth popping in and at least saying hi or waving from outside.
There still is value with the casual acquaintances. Just because a person is replaceable doesn't mean they are not valuable when present. My neighbor who I barely talk to has helped me out when I am in a bind. Even if a new neighbor moves in and replaces him, the original neighbor was valuable and gave me a sense of security, peace, and community while he was present.
> I can count those on one hand.
What's the problem about that?
I'd rather have my family and 1-2 close friends, and literally no one else, instead of 100 close friends that will vanish as soon as I am not able to bring anything to the table anymore, which will inevitably happen for everyone.
That’s not the point. The point is that the number is small. They are not making a judgment on the value of such relationships but rather that that number is and will always be small that in the grand scheme of things it’s insignificant, it only matters in a person’s immediate sphere.
People on this thread seriously need to stop reacting so emotionally to things. Damn. Grow up people.
The number is small in comparison to the whole humanity, yes, but this is not at all what it's about in this post. Did you read the article?
Instead, it actually is literally about each individual's immediate sphere, which, as you correctly point out, is where it matters. Having 5 true friends in a world with 100 people or in a world with 1 billion people doesn't change anything.
Is that not enough?
It is (and even if it is not, it's just the way it is...).
what I'm arguing is that it's not only the workspace where we all are disposable and replaceable. It happens in friends and family context, too.
What to do with this information... I'm not sure. But usually it's a good first step to see things clearly.
That may be true for a lot of families and friends as well. They may not dispose you outright but they will try to cut you off every chance they get.
But it may not be true for family or of employers… so we are back to square one I suppose.
I think modern healthcare really put a focus back on people as individuals. Mortality rates were quite high even from what we see now as trivial illness or injury, and people would have a lot of offspring to account for this in the past.
By the time I reached adult hood I only experienced a handful of deaths of close people, all from old age.
Apart from a few, friends and family who care about you can be counted on one hand as well. When automation replaces our job or diminishes our economic worth many fold, not many friends and family remain unchanged. You parents, your siblings maybe and maybe 1-2 of your closest friends. Others will drift apart because we are in a different lifestyle now. Heck, even without any change, parent/siblings drift apart for many. It is tough then to not correlate our value with our economic value.
> Apart from a few, friends and family who care about you can be counted on one hand as well.
It's not about the quantity but about the quality of friendships and human connection. I couldn't care less about the number of my friends. I do care a lot though about the connection to them.
> The cold reality, in my opinion, is that the things we value about ourselves are generally not that valuable to others. I love my own personality and humanity, my soul if you will, but nobody's paying me for it, and so I have to value it accordingly.
Maybe this was Diogenes's observation.
> The cold reality, in my opinion, is that the things we value about ourselves are generally not that valuable to others. I love my own personality and humanity, my soul if you will, but nobody's paying me for it, and so I have to value it accordingly.
A good example of what tribes did better vs civilization: if you can do anything to help the tribe survive (I am a good hunter, you can create good bows), you are a prized member. If you can't do anything, at least we still love you because you are kin.
This is incredibly naive. Hunter gatherer communities, especially those in regions without an abundance of food, are and were extremely selective about who were accepted and who weren't. This starts from infancy where non-desirable babies were simply killed. Estimates vary greatly but perhaps around a third to half of "modern" hunter gatherer tribes practice infanticide. The stated reasoning behind infanticides is often extremely vicious and comes down to "he/she is not a good fit for the tribe", or in other words "nobody likes him/her". This fact alone might be one of the major explanations of the high rate of prehistoric infant mortality.
But if you are even allowed to grow up and become an individual, things might be somewhat better once you are part of the in-group, but that does not factor in the fact that human empathy has an overall tendency to switch off if you're not. Even if you're loved because you're kin, your neighboring tribe might still kill you, or you and your kin might kill them, for entirely petty or cynical reasons. The prehistoric bone record supports this as well, seemingly human-weapon related reasons is the most common cause of death.
You can also examine your own emotions to get some idea of our evolutionary environment. Loneliness hurts, to the point where it has measurable negative health impacts equivalent to smoking a pack of cigarettes each day. Your brain is screaming at you not to be lonely, but why? Well, in our ancestral environment, being excluded from the social group meant death, so most individuals that did not have a profound and visceral fear of that happening got their genes consistently removed from the gene pool. For loneliness to be that big of deal, being excluded must have been an easily available option. If everyone loved and accepted everyone unconditionally, this emotional state would simply not have evolved.
Humans quickly become extremely brutal once the environment necessitates it, up to and including cannibalizing your own kin. Infanticide and murder of both ingroups and outgroups is historically commonplace because it was also commonplace prehistorically. Even modern tribes, that live in relative abundance, are still brutal in many ways to this very day.
But of course, when you look at any group of individuals in a tribe survivorship bias will dictate that it all looks nice and rosy. But you might want to check the skeletons in the cave before you pick that as your conclusion.
Don't wake him up from his "Noble Savage" fever-dream.
Yes let's all revel in the sunlight of Enlightenment thinking. That's really going well.
>when you look at any group of individuals in a tribe, survivorship bias will dictate that it all looks nice and rosy
there is a lot of conjecture in your overall post, but I think this is a fair takeaway you put at the end.
Late reply, but in case you'll check I think most of what I said is sourced from sources of varying quality and salience, but at least it's sourced from somewhere. But I just typed it all out quickly without checking anything over, so a lot might be wrong. But it's not entirely pulled out of my ass at least.
Evolutionary history is of course always difficult. I think the loneliness part comes mostly from the kurzgesagt video on loneliness, as well as some other stuff here and there. Rate of infanticide is roughly correct with quick Google. Rest of tribal stuff is from a variety of books and high school social anthropology. I think I actually have the "reasoning for infanticide" part from sex at dawn, of all places.
I'm always scared to run a deep research service to find the counterpoints after I type this kind of stuff out, but feel free to do so for me and dress me down. At least survivorship bias is a classic that's pretty much always worth keeping in mind on any topic.
> [Within tribes, if] you can't do anything, at least we still love you because you are kin.
That's a nice sentiment, but do you have sources for the claim that tribes universally "loved" non-productive members just because they were kin?
There are many instances of braces and artificial limbs or that were found or fossilised bones that showed crippled people that grew into old-age, which provides evidence that people cared for 'non-productive' members.
Finding evidence that disable people existed does not provide evidence that they were not able to contribute in some way. It's incredibly ableist to assume they couldn't.
In the context of a pre-industrial society? I doubt it. In a hunter gatherer-society? I doubt it even more. people with certain skills (e.g. tool making, music, cooking maybe..) certainly, but not for a lot of people.
However, decent human beings do not value other human beings purely on the basis of their economic contribution. Someone might be a net cost, but a decent society still looks after them.
You're missing things like making clothing (tanning, sinew, etc) , gathering wood, etc. You can be missing an arm or leg and still contribute to those.
Assuming that disabled people are worthless when they are not able to contribute to the group is even worse.
I never said that. I'm merely countering the claim that disabled people couldn't contribute.
I say this with all due respect and as someone who is struggling to envision their own ability to meaningfully contribute in the likely future:
Nature is ableist. Humanity rises above it to the extent that we can, but ...
I think we have a skewed perception of ability, now that we’re connected via the internet to the whole rest of humanity.
Nature is ableist in a lot of ways… if you had diabetes in some ancient tribe you’d basically be screwed. But if you had an amputated leg, I dunno. You could still be the best flint knapper in the tribe.
I mean, think of your extended circle of friends and acquaintances, your 100 “closest” friends. In particular, think back on the community grew up in, if you’ve subsequently moved to a tech hub that accumulates rare talent. I bet picking through your hobbies there are a couple potentially useful things that you’d be a top-tier contributor in. Most people are really bad at almost everything they don’t do, after all.
I’m not going to engage in some prehistoric idealism. The past was pretty brutal. But we’d probably all die by getting little infected cuts, not because we were abandoned by our tribes.
The cynic in me wonders if it's because they were family members of the leader so got better health care.
Indeed. If one is crippled their 'value' for the tribe doesn't suddenly disappear. A person has their wit, their positive spirit, their wisdom and skills, their empathy, care and understanding for others that is important for the tribe's wellbeing. Etcetera.
It seems like most people in the first world either couldn't do physical tasks or would tell themselves they can't. Things like bow making and hunting (including processing) require specialized knowledge and a lot of physical work. Same goes for farming.
But the real thing that makes the comparison fall apart is that with machines people have less utility and people today "require" more resources- can an individual today do anything meaningful to help the tribe survive? And by meaningful, we necessarily tie it to positive economic impact, which is very hard to achieve at lower paying jobs or jobless when we look at things that get paid for by the tribe such as like healthcare cost.
>A good example of what tribes did better vs civilization: if you can do anything to help the tribe survive (I am a good hunter, you can create good bows), you are a prized member. If you can't do anything, at least we still love you because you are kin.
Indeed it seems that there really are two "modes" for human civilization; one where human beings are scarce and valuable, and one where they are abundant and cheap. The West has spent the last 400+ years in the former mode, as the plague decimated Europe and they spread into the vast new world, where humans were so scarce they had to be forcibly imported via mass enslavement, and wage earners could demand a premium. Now that globalism has brought us all onto the same stage as the Eastern masses, things are starting to feel pretty crowded.
We still do that, though, within our own little tribes inside civilization. Most people still love their grandparents, even though they're old. That just doesn't necessarily extend to all of civilization.
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You're right, if you've diminished yourself to a generic "consumer", and haven't interleaved yourself into a fabric of value beyond economic. Relationships are worth a lot and can't really be bought. Do/Will you care for someone? Do/Will they care for you? This can make you far more valuable than your economic outputs, and also worth economic inputs if you ever lack.
The ability to care for someone in any material sense requires economic resources. Even having free time is a form of wealth that not all enjoy.
"All" is a pretty high bar. I think a huge proportion of the developed world has a lot of choice and is repeatedly choosing stuff/experiences over people. Not sure how we'd find data to resolve that... People living paycheck to paycheck, or not having $400 to cover a bill is not really proof without understanding how they're spending money... As far as I can tell a lot of today's economic woes in the developed world is self inflicted through lifestyle inflation. We live in bigger houses (more sq ft per person), more alone, eat out a lot more, drive cars with far more horsepower, and have a supercomputer in their pocket.
A lot of that is just technological advancement. The baseline has shifted up, you aren't going to save any money by driving a Ford Model T. Quite the opposite in fact, given the maintenance and obscure parts it requires.
Likewise not having a smartphone means you're less able to participate in the economy, and can in fact impair one's social life as most things are coordinated via group chat these days.
If you want to go live like it's 1910, that is an option, but unless you're willing to become Amish you will find it socially isolating and surprisingly expensive. It will not fix your economic woes, it will simply swap them for the economic woes of yesteryear and you'll learn first-hand why we developed things like washing machines.
IMO the real culprit is the financialization of everything over the last 50 years, and lax anti-trust enforcement. Since the 70s, every excuse in the book has been used to not pay workers more. Your house is now an asset! Your company-managed pension is now a self-managed 401k! You can get loans for everything under the sun, endless credit! Why care about the total cost of goods when you can just pay it off in installments? Anything but actually paying the middle class a bigger piece of the pie so they might be able to buy something with actual savings like we're taught to do as kids. Competition to bring down prices? Nope, we're approving every corporate consolidation from now until the end of time and bailing them out with taxpayer money when they fail! They jumped the shark a bit proposing 50 year mortgages to fix the housing crisis.
It's always sold to the public as "freedom", because the public is/was the most gullible entity. Mediocre people love pretending that they're the masters of their own destiny.
The net effect is that there is no adjustment to lifestyle you can make to offset the rising cost of everything without sacrificing your ability to prosper in the first place. If there were, West Virginia would be prospering right now. You can go full Diogenes if you like, that's all romantic until you get sick, and God forbid you have dependents who look to you for food and healthcare and you tell them that you can't provide it because that would require lifestyle inflation.
Yes and we love urban areas. Urban areas like NYC, Boston, SF are extremely expensive, with one bedroom apartments renting for 5K and selling for 1M.
Not everyone wants a 1 hr long commute, and since we took away remote work we're stuffing everyone into expensive cities where people spend the remainder of their 50 percent not taken by taxes on housing (and health too in some cases)
It's a disaster.
Yes, NIMBY-ism has done hard things to those specific areas. At least as far as we trust chatgpt, but people are still living in more median sq ft per person today than long ago (think 50-100 yrs ago). Of course rent per person will go up if we're renting 50-100% more space than in the past.
Have you ever organized with your community before? No offense but you come across as a libertarian trying to monetize social relationships. It comes across as deeply human. It also declares that people have no agency, it's just a pathetic view point on humanity and our potential.
To think money is the only thing that is of highest value in our incredibly short lives is a mental sickness.
> To think money is the only thing that is of highest value in our incredibly short lives is a mental sickness.
They didn’t say that? Nor was it even implied? What the hell?
All they said was that EVEN free time is a form of wealth that not all enjoy, and free time does often correlate to how well you can express your care for someone. And they are absolutely, without a single shadow of a doubt, correct.
Are you responding to the right post? I never said any of that.
All I said was if you have to work 3 jobs just to pay rent, you probably aren't going to be caring for many people no matter how much you might want to, simply due to limited hours in the day. Never mind people with actual disabilities.
> Being able to see ourselves as something beyond our job (our means of survival) is a luxury. If a person can't provide for themselves the rest goes out the window fast.
It is other way round. The sort of person who sees themselves as their job only are good when they are well off.
That sort of person copes badly with when being poor. Having no self to draw from outside of work and feeling like constant failure in unsatisfying work leads to issues like alcoholism, violence, gambling.
> The cold reality, in my opinion, is that the things we value about ourselves are generally not that valuable to others. I love my own personality and humanity, my soul if you will, but nobody's paying me for it, and so I have to value it accordingly.
This is only true if by "value" you mean monetary value. Your personality and humanity may not be valuable to the person paying you to do your job, it still has value for the people around you.
There is an intractable problem is economics which is how to assign value to a thing. It's probably more of a philosophical debate. One arm of the debate is something called marginal utility. That is, a think is worth a different amount to different people. I value a particular guitar more than my neighbour does. I think it's worth $100. He thinks it's worth $50. Who is right? Authoritarian nations use top-down economic methods to dictate the value. In this case, they would make the guitar worth $1 (so "everyone can afford a guitar now"). Under capitalism, we allow individual to negotiate, and the highest bidder determines the price.
Apologies for the long-winded context, but I think it's important to address your point. You're alluding to some kind of intrinsic, self-evident value, and I would like to challenge you on that. Prove to me that this value exists. Prove to me it can be measured. To pre-empt your reply, I don't think you can. You might value a person in a certain way, but you can't ensure everyone else does. In fact you even accept this in your last sentence. A small group of people known to that individual would value them more than the other 8 billion people on the planet. Which is more or less what the person you replied to was explaining.
>Prove to me that this value exists. Prove to me it can be measured. To pre-empt your reply, I don't think you can.
Why does any of this matter? Do you require a person proves their utility to you before you hold the door open for them? When a child falls and scrapes their knee, do you ask about their grades in school, or parents net worth, before lending them a hand?
My point: human society is deeply interwoven with sentimental behaviors that make zero sense in economic theory. You can try to apply all the models you want to model human compassion and it will get you nil.
But that doesn't mean we should optimize that out of societies. I think it's the most wonderful part of our societies, and if we were to remove it, we'd stop being humans.
> Why does any of this matter?
If you're going to make the claim that people hold intrinsic value, people are going to challenge you for proof. Holding a door open for someone and asking questions doesn't necessarily indicate value. It could indicate personal interest. Empathy. Projection. Self-interest. The concept of altruism doesn't necessitate the belief that other life holds value at all. Altruism by its definition is giving without the expectation of return.
I think you make a good point re culture and tradition. Humans like many "valueless" activities. Some of these are hardcoded into our psyche through evolution. Some are for sentimental reasons. Some are religious. Some are enforced. Some are situational. Etc. I am not suggesting we eliminate those. I am simply agreeing with the top comment which is that we cannot force people to place any value on them. Some people do not see value in those traditions (or in other people). There is no objective way to prove them wrong.
>If you're going to make the claim that people hold intrinsic value, people are going to challenge you for proof.
But this is assuming we share the same set of axioms?
It sounds like you don't accept humans having intrinsic value as a core axiom. However, I do, and it makes zero sense to me to try and "prove" such a notion.
But isn't it the other way around. The more wealthy you get the more valuable things become and the people around you become less valuable. Superficially it sounds counterintuitive and yet it is what we observe, even if it is a not very flattering observation about human nature.
I realized this first when I travelled Latin America as a young person. It was quite surprising to me never to get asked about my job but often about a family thousands of kilometers away and without any chance for the stranger speaking to me to ever meet any of them.
Only if you see yourself defined by the friends and family that surround you it suddenly makes sense.
> Hell, let me go even darker: there are billions of souls on this planet. They're not a rare thing like say, gold. They're very easily produced, by two people getting it on. That leads to a harsh conclusion: human beings aren't that valuable as individuals.
Not valuable to what or whom?
> We are in fact very disposable and replaceable.
Disposable and replaceable to what or whom?
The Planet doesn’t care whether we exist. But then again the planet would not need to replace us either. So what could this be about?
Only humans want or need automation of human labor. Are there then some special kind of humans that are entitled to (by might or other means) the output of the “disposable humans”?
Seems like people forget that work is not the goal, but economical freedom is. And its all about politics. Humanity reached a production capacity that human work is barely needed to sustain everyone. But there is greed and wars. Also, humans are social creatures, we still need one another for relationships. Hell, removing work will let us enjoy our relationships even more. Also, as long as there are wars, rest assured there are plenty of jobs. War is, sadly, a huge industry
> They're very easily produced, by two people getting it on.
Something like 360-380 thousand births every day. We’re insignificant even just compared to the delta.
I mean, Jack London was pretty famously a professional hobo, wandering the country looking for a place to stay. He got good at storytelling so that he'd have something to give to the families who took him in and fed him.
Eventually Jack London writes Call of the Wild and becomes stupidly rich.
Was Jack London the famous author, living off of all the money (writing less popular stories, like White Fang) more valuable because of all the money he made? Was Jack London the hobo less valuable because he didn't write the bestseller Call to the Wild yet?
Or maybe, the entire concept of valuing people off a monetary lens is just bullshit.
Comments like this are what I hope to see whenever I visit. Spurring thought. Challenging the obvious.
I agree with every fact you said yet my conclusion is that humans are valuable. Why? Because your frame of reference is the world, mine is the known universe. Humans are so fucking unlikely. Matter that somehow can experience its own (and others) being is so crazy unlikely I feel anything other than valuing it is just wrong.
In German we have a word called "Zweckoptimismus" that would translate to purposeful optimism. It is the optimism of someone who knows the world isn't good, but accepting it as bad would make it even worse, so you operate under a defiant optimism without ignoring the reality of the world.
True. But tbh, you can find ppl making time for themselves or not, in most salary ranges. Extreme poverty is another issue ofc. That’s why we have social welfare, to avoid extreme poverty.
> I love my own personality and humanity, my soul if you will, but nobody's paying me for it, and so I have to value it accordingly.
Don't let capitalism do this to you. Not everything with value is paid in this system, only things which make the buyer more money.
Throughout this diatribe I think you had multiple opportunities to see the value of human life. That you didn't, makes me think you actually don't value your own life and while that's entirely your right. But, to project onto others that they're "in denial" for valuing their own, their families', or complete strangers' lives isn't the radical ultra-rational flex you think it is.
To pick one mere point where you might have chosen to value life otherwise:
> They're not a rare thing like say, gold.
You mean the gold that's a relatively common chemical in the universe? You're comparing the elementary particle formed by astronomical processes to somethings which (even if metaphorically) exists only within organisms so complex we have yet to find signs of similar complexity in the universe.
What you say is cold, but hardly truth.
I don't presume to be able to know the value of human life. There are too many unknowns and I'm not omniscient.
Perhaps we're immensely valuable - sparks of divinity. Perhaps we're not - mere bags of sentient meat.
I don't know which of those statements is more true. Either/neither/both?
Lumps of gold are largely interchangeable. It's just a mass of gold atoms that we don't differentiate between, so one lump of gold is as good as another. But people are not like that. If you were to painstakingly transform a lump of gold into a beautiful sculpture, it would be worth more than its face value. And if a person transforms from the lump of flesh they are born as into a unique individual, they are worth something more, too. Two gold sculptures would not be interchangeable, to an art aficionado, and two people are not interchangeable in that way, either.
On the gross large scale, yes, we're all lumps of flesh squidging around on the planet; a uniform slimy patina on a tiny ball of dirt. And our various large-scale systems and policies (economic, political, etc) treat people in this way, too, in varying degrees.
But you are living your one and possibly only life (just like everyone else). And you have taken a unique path through that life (just like everyone else), and I'd just encourage you and/or others reading to cherish that, both in yourself and others, even if (or especially if) the systems in which we live don't seem to. It is something that can't be taken from you, because it is intrinsic to you, and that is a value beyond "what someone will pay for."
Just my 2¢
> We are in fact very disposable and replaceable.
we are, but that doesn't mean we're not valuable. everything is disposable, everything is replacable.
the idea that an individual human life isn't very valuable and that it's only first-worlders that have trouble understanding that is projection. that is the modern, first world (read capitalist) view of human life. you think you're thinking but you're actually regurgitating the ideology you've received.
Huh? I value myself and my family at infinity. Meaning no-one else or no amount of money can replace them. So no we are in fact extremely non disposable and non replaceable to the people we love.
it's a very modern idea, too. historically people names were associated with their profession.
for the op, it might not define you but it does define you for others.
Isn't this exactly Marx's criticism of capitalism through the theory of alienation? Human relationships get mediated and hidden as relationships between commodities and money.
Probably a valid criticism. Of course coming up with a better alternative is always where the devil's at.
We know how to come up with better alternatives, but as Marx also pointed out, the capitalists won't sit back and idly watch their world crumble. So putting anything else into practice is effectively impossible.
About the only time all the pieces fell into place to even begin to see anything else was Revolutionary Catalonia. However, the USSR quickly waged war with it to ensure its demise, and within no more than a few years it was no more. The capitalists who seized all the capital in the USSR under the guise of pretending to move away capitalism didn't want the people to realize that the USSR was still under capitalism all the same. That would threaten the capitalists who controlled the capital.
> Being able to see ourselves as something beyond our job (our means of survival) is a luxury.
Being able to see ourselves as something beyond our job is the examined life. It what makes life worth living.
We should be incredibly skeptical of a social system whose default is to have individuals primary identify by the work they do. That necessarily sets people up for continuous identity foreclosure and psychic famine in a self re-enforcing feedback loop.
Frankly it's cringe to primarily identify by profession.
Our society used to have religious beliefs that put special value on human lives / souls / whatever. Now for many people, capitalism and materialism is the only religion, and in this religion humans are reduced to their dollar value. But you should recognize that this is not a neutral choice: you have in fact chosen one of many possible value systems, and others may choose differently.
Much of human behavior is not explained by economic incentives: for example, many elderly people are cared for by their children out of a love or a sense of familial duty.
And exactly none of that is sourced from religion. Nobody is born religious, and when they aren't they behave the same. They might not do the same special genuflections and drink the same special holy tea or whatever, but they're similarly human.
Religion has varied continuously throughout human existence. Its not the foundational requirement here.
Zero to do with religion, I knew quite a lot of atheists / agnostics who were extremely wholesome and caring people.
While that could be true, it's important to remember that these people probably grew up in a culture that had religion influence for thousands of years. In order to become atheist, one needs to renounce god, therefore have the idea of god, therefore, have some background knowledge of or about religion. That is to say, that these processes a not as simple, as one might think: take soviet union as an example - official atheist state - yet so much on interpersonal level remained based on humane values formed by thousand years of east orthodox chiristianity. And even though measly 70 years are not enough to make a significant dent in human behaviour - it did produced a lot of cynicism and misanthropy before going out the window.
It might be the other way around: religions came to be _because_ humans have values that became the backbone of religions.
The evolution of "gods" is obvious in retrospect as well (a tale of some good deeds passed on through generations gets added to with every retelling and suddenly Joe who gave a child an apple and protected it from a rabid dog was walking around feeding everone and killing dragons that stole everyone's sheep).
I recommend reading literature, philosophical and historical works from more than 2000 years ago.
So exactly was this? I am sure all of the slaveholders to the people who spit on a little black girl for dare trying to get educated in public integrated public school to the 80% of evangelical Christians who support a three times married man who admitted in his own autobiography of being a adulterer consider themselves religious.
As an older Black guy I’ve seen how both corporate America works and religious institutions. I’ve seen much less discrimination in the former than the latter.
Hey you’re welcome to your view. In my view that’s an insanely disgusting devaluation of human life that’s been put into peoples brains by propaganda. Capitalism and materialism sure is great huh.
And Christians founded a nation where Black people were counted as a 3/5th of a person and my still living parents grew up in the segregated south - that was upheld by a Supreme Court made up of people who were religious.
Well here's a thing - I don't think it's capitalism which made me think this way, or even living in the first world. The first world in my experience is big on preaching the dogma that we're all special and valuable (whether it practices what it preaches aside).
Rather my view actually came from observing violence - between humans, but also in nature, and deeper still as a product of reality.
We exist in these fragile bags of flesh and bone. To a hungry lion we'd just be food.
And we behave the same - take for example the eating of meat. I'm a meat eater myself so this isn't anything preachy, but consider this - many animals are quite beautiful beings, possessed of their own personalities (we see it in our pets).
But that instrinsic value they have doesn't stop us from turning them into steaks.
On the one hand I wish you were right - I wish the world were beautiful and our souls along with it, and that I could sing that song.
But it doesn't always look that way. And worse still, I think it all started at the level of nature, not at the level of capitalism. We attribute too much significance to the human race when we lay such woes only at our own feet.
You refuse to be in denial about your personal fears?
> We are in fact very disposable and replaceable.
Gerasimov? Is it you?
I'd respectfully challenge that your opinion reflects reality. Nihilism [1] is just one philosophy amongst many. It's no more 'the one truth' than any of the others. Many of the other philosophies have evolved in the light of folks living for centuries through harsher reality than most of us are experiencing today. You might consider other philosophies to be delusional (as others consider nihilism to be delusional), but even in that different delusion they provide a framework to relate your love of your own personality and humanity with the same feelings that a lot of other people also feel about themselves and also each other.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nihilism
Philosophy is the theory and we are discussing the practice here. Be a non-nihilist; belong to any school of thought you like.
Ultimately, out there, people value you by just 5-6 things and almost never they are your beliefs or personal values.
So your respectful challenge seems to be missing the point. Your beliefs are not challenged here. But you cannot change how other people value you.
>Ultimately, out there, people value you by just 5-6 things and almost never they are your beliefs or personal values.
This is such a rigid world view that is demonstrably wrong. I won't even argue with you because others have already pointed out why this cannot be true elsewhere.
What I will say is that I hope you're doing alright.
> there are billions of souls on this planet. They're not a rare thing like say, gold. They're very easily produced, by two people getting it on.
You've clearly never been through childbirth. Women go through incredible amounts of pain, and good parents make incredible sacrifices for their kids. They're not doing that because they're guaranteed some payoff.
> That leads to a harsh conclusion: human beings aren't that valuable as individuals. We are in fact very disposable and replaceable.
Wait until you get to the part of philosophy that hinges on this being an invention of our own making. Human beings have decided that human beings are disposable. Just like we decided that gold was valuable (and to many, more valuable).
I mean, if you are willing to sell your personality, humanity and your soul, I am sure you will find a lot of bidders. Thats literally why slavery was a thing.
There is a definite economic value to it. What does not is your consioisness that you experience since nobody else can use it.
Grotesque.
> I love my own personality and humanity, my soul if you will, but nobody's paying me for it, and so I have to value it accordingly.
yikes
BTW YouTubers get paid for... generally themselves alone. I mean come on, many are getting paid for reacting to other people's videos. Wild.
Many more don’t get paid at all.
I'd argue they get paid for their ability as performers and entertainers. It's a craft that often has be developed well beyond their innate personality, and often involves a lot of acting as well.
I agree, but many rich YouTubers are terrible. People get entertained by someone watching a video and comment here and there but stays silent for the most part. No acting here. The majority of the people who get entertained are kids, FWIW.
and then they said it's socialism that kills the individual identity of people...
Your view is disgusting and the fact that your comment is the top one here shows how broken society is.
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> You are not your job. You're a person first. Your ability to connect, be present, and make people feel understood is what makes you irreplaceable to the people around you, which is the only market that counts.
True, but losing your job is still a big deal. It often means that you lose your income, your health insurance (in the US at least), many (if not most) of your daily interactions with other people, and your social status.
> My technical skills are being disrupted by machines - that's fine I'll go do other things.
As others have noted, it's great to not actually need the paycheck you are working for.
> Your ability to connect, be present, and make people feel understood is what makes you irreplaceable
They say this to a group of people that often struggles with all of these but still have managed to make a living off of solving technical problems in the past. Don't worry, you can just fall back on your famously great people skills!
Have you ever had an experience where you objectively were doing something technically complex yet someone dismissed it because it wasn't "relevant" in their eyes?
That's a people skills problem, believe it or not. At the very least, it's a philosophical problem.
Something in my comment triggered people to think I'm saying that communication skills aren't important or worth bothering with, so obviously there's room for improvement there.
But that's kind of beside the point isn't it? If you've spent years of your life learning specific skills to offer some benefit to society, and suddenly the society decides they need far fewer people with those skills (and thus don't want to employ you), that just fundamentally has to suck for a lot of people.
Saying "cheer up, you can just compensate with this other skill" is just ignoring that fundamental reality. And I think we've all met people who were diligent and technically competent but "a bit weird", but found a refuge in tech (note: I'm not necessarily talking about "assholes" here). Those people are going to have an even harder time, and that's not because of their "toxic" identification with their job (i.e. source of income and primary form of service to society).
And I hesitate to mention this, but I don't feel I'm in this situation. I just see it happening to people in my industry and worry about the future.
The irony in your comment is astounding.
Thanks for your comment. I will try to follow your example in the future.
> > My technical skills are being disrupted by machines - that's fine I'll go do other things.
> As others have noted, it's great to not actually need the paycheck you are working for.
Um. Yes. There's a link on "other things". It's to a site for a bike tour. The author seems to be implying they don't really need a job.
I still remember hearing a group of homeless people near the cable car turntable at Powell and Market in SF talking about the days when they used to be printers. That was, for several hundred years, a stable, well-paying job.
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> in the US, you can get another one much more quickly than anywhere else in the world
Depending on the economic conditions for the year, it can still take months:
> To illustrate the recent trajectory: one analysis found that in January 2023 it took job seekers 268 days on average to land a job offer, whereas by August 2024 this had improved to 182 days (about 6 months) (How Long Does it Take to Find a Job in 2024?). Another dataset focusing on tech jobseekers showed a similar trend – those in 2024 took about 247 days on average to secure a “good” job, down from 281 days in 2023.
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/average-job-search-time-tech-...
The whole world is hurting pretty bad right now when it comes to tech jobs - America seems to be hurting the least.
I'm not saying the tech job situation in America isn't bad - but the world dances to America's fiddle, and its frustrating hearing Americans complain about how hard their situation is while their boot is firmly planted on my neck
> but the world dances to America's fiddle
I think we are finding out that in fact it doesn't.
I have edited it to clarify that (in the US) applied to losing health insurance.
To be specific, it’s tied to good employment. Part-time and low-salary jobs don’t often (usually?) provide it. So trading a good tech jobs for “things to keep busy” loses the insurance. Unless you can afford cobra and that only lasts 18 months. At what tends to be 5x the price.
I completely understand where you are coming from, but try not to hate on American laborers because of this situation, that is no more helpful than Americans blaming immigrants for their job woes.
It is the wealthy capitalist class that has the boot planted on all of our necks.
I do recognize that the outcome is worse for some people than others, but keeping us fighting each other is how they continue to maintain power.
I hate that you can't even talk about this stuff without being called a communist or something
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Parent is resentful of America and their perception of Americans taking for granted how much easier it is to get an American tech job.
There is no rah rah here; literally says in next comment how Americans have their (American's) boots on their (parent's) neck.
My father in law lost his job 2 years ago, completely unrelated to AI, at the age of 63. He had worked this same job since he was 18 and it was his identity. He'd almost greet people with "Hey I'm CEO, my friends and family call me X".
Being fired from his own company completely destroyed him - and not because he's worried about the financial aspect, he doesn't need to worry about that at this point.
I remember watching him go though this and thinking to myself "Jeeze, I'm glad my identity isn't completely tied up with what I do for work".
With AI knocking on the door I'm surprised how much my identity and perceived self-worth is actually tied to being a "good" developer. But it's more of a slow burner than what my father in law got. So I at least have some time to mentally prepare for my new reality.
Makes you wonder with some of the dinosaurs in office if a big reason why they cling on is that internal mythmaking. Presumably everyone knows they can just up and kick back by some body of water doing whatever they'd like with their time, should they ever want to step down. And yet they don't. They prefer their busy, stressful, life of importance.
Me personally I'm just not wired like that. I work hard only to get to that payoff of being lazy and carefree later. I don't actually like being in this stressful state. It bewilders me frankly that some seemingly are addicted to it. Maybe they literally are, considering flight or flight response is a real measured altering of neurotransmitters.
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Strange how yet nobody commented on the irony of having an article titled "You are not your job" starting with:
> I'm Jacob - I run Sancho Studio a software consulting studio - I write about cryptography, craft, and human experience.
Basically opening with who they are as defined by their job.
When in Rome... he's talking to a modern audience that are defined by, and evaluate other people by their job.
>My technical skills are being disrupted by machines - that's fine I'll go do other things. [links to long bike trip]
Ok that's cool and all but many of us have bills to pay. Bike trips don't pay the bills. Software people have been economically advantaged up until now that they can go and do stuff like that.
Even software people have bills to pay and mouths to feed. I think people like the article author are either single or have no dependents, and it's a big reason I cannot take many of these posts seriously. Much like the story of Peter Pan, the authors of these posts are college students who never grew up and had to be responsible.
I agree 100%.
The issue isn't losing my job. Many of us could deal with that by simply finding another similar job in the same (coding) industry. The issue is losing the entire industry.
That thing you spent years becoming good at? Getting paid lots of money for? Oh, we killed it. Start over and pick something else. You probably won't be paid well, if you can even find anything, because you're starting from ground zero and competing with all the other people flooding the job market. Oh, and yes, it'll require massive life adjustment on your part. Good luck!
> You probably won't be paid well, if you can even find anything, because you're starting from ground zero and competing with all the other people flooding the job market.
You won’t be paid well because rent is due next week, but the new job requires you to fund your training.
So you find something else that doesn’t pay well, but gets you something coming in. But in order to pay the rent you need to work 60 hours at this job. Of course, no way they’ll schedule you for 60 hours, so you’ll get an additional lower paying job or two.
Suddenly you don’t have the time nor the money to retrain for a higher paying job. All the money from your two jobs is going to ever ballooning housing and energy costs.
Eventually you surrender, understand your place as a peasant, and sell yourself into debt slavery in hopes in a decade you can start from scratch again.
> Start over and pick something else.
Something else that they want to kill as well, don't forget that bit.
Within a few years I think UBI or UBS will be required for people to continue living, in which case basic needs (bills) won't be a concern. There's just no way for us to transition fast enough to avoid high unemployment as AI replaces large swaths of jobs. I do worry about the ~10 year transition it will take for societal governments to react.
I think UBI is a pipe dream. I live in the UK and even with our social safety net which is much stronger than the US's, I can't imagine the government ever handing out money adequate to live a middle class life to large chunk of the population.
UBI has problems that far as I know haven't been addressed. Vast numbers of people no longer being occupied doesn't seem like it would lead to a healthy society. And how do you uphold democracy when the government is effectively handing out the paychecks?
Whoever said anything about middle class? Ubi is the poverty level, it could never be anything else.
As for people not being occupied, the theory is that since ubi doesn't stop if you find employment, it would lead to less idleness than the current means-tested social safety nets. In test cases though it seems to depend a lot on culture, Finnish communities saw no difference in employment while Indian rates of business formation tripled.
Recently: Ireland rolls out basic income scheme for artists
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46977175
Not quite UK, and not very big, but somewhat promising :)
>How do you uphold democracy
https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/perspectives-on-poli...
>Multivariate analysis indicates that economic elites and organized groups representing business interests have substantial independent impacts on U.S. government policy, while average citizens and mass-based interest groups have little or no independent influence.
Can't uphold what isn't there, lol
As for how do we avoid becoming WALL-E blobs... elite opinion seems to suggest the UBI will be just enough to prevent people from going into the streets with pitchforks, but not enough for a dignified life. (Enough to live in ze pod and eat ze proverbial bugs.)
I don't see employment being a very big thing (unless AI creates some kinda fake jobs economy to pacify the humans, which would be a rational thing to do).
The crisis of meaning is going to be worse than the economic crisis, and I think people would literally pay to work rather than question their existence on such a deep level.
Beyond fake jobs and human-only jobs (robot can't replace the cute barista at Starbucks!), I think entrepreneurship will be the only real vehicle. So... basically how it already is today.
> Not quite UK, and not very big, but somewhat promising :)
Rulers have given stipends to artists and scholars for hundreds of years. There's hardly anything new about it.
Make the art or science that satisfies the duke or the glorious district chairman and you will be on the receiving end of these benefits.
Also, among names who did succeed in pursuing these benefits, there are countless forgotten ones who also tried.
Almost like startups and youtube streamers of today, who would have thought.
Within a few years I think UBI or UBS will be required for people to continue living, in which case basic needs (bills) won't be a concern. There's just no way for us to transition fast enough to avoid high unemployment as AI replaces large swaths of jobs. I do worry about the ~10 year transition it will take for societal governments to react.
This strikes me as wildly optimistic. People aren't going to be able to live on UBI at a level where massive political and social unrest is averted unless it's like $2k per person per month, minimum. And I'm skeptical that the US government is going to start printing $8.5 trillion dollars of UBI in the next decade.
$2k of unconditional income means that the most basic bread at your store will cost $150 a loaf, and a bar of butter $180, $200 if unsalted.
This also seems wildly unrealistic. In a world where we need UBI because automation is destroying most jobs, I'd also expect food to get cheaper. In fact, I think almost everything would get cheaper except real estate, which is actually where I worry you'd see the kind of inflation you're talking about.
UBI just inflates the currency. What will hopefully end up happening is that displaced workers can do jobs which aren't economically viable atm, but are still socially viable: Imagine an army of workers cleaning up the streets (literally) and transforming your town into a clean, well maintained cityscape. Etc etc.
IMO this cannot work unless there is enforcement to do such work. Most people would prefer to take their money and do fuck all in return.
If I was a dictator that wanted to institute UBI, I would do it in exchange for every beneficient getting literally conscripted once in a while to do those shit jobs.
UBI/UBS requires a very solidaric community. But the current situation (in Germany) is not about finding any job but taking a low paid, hard working or even dangerous job (nursing service, shifter, even soldier, public sector).
UBI makes it even harder to find people for that kind of jobs. Not paying any social benefits and increasing the pressure on the unemployed to take these jobs is much more interesting for everyone that is not unemployed. Please don't judge me for writing this. It's the feeling I have, not my view.
A lot, I'd say even most people in Germanys long term unemployment scheme which are not already working part time (Aufstocker) have severe mental and physical health problems. More pressure isn't going to help those people but it's the current Government's shtick.
I'd say UBI would make it easier to find people working in demanding jobs because you could to them part time, so they don't wear you down as much. It's much easier to work as a nurse for 20 hours a week.
> It's much easier to work as a nurse for 20 hours a week.
However, being a nurse is a skilled job that a Joe from street cannot do on a whim, and at the same time it has very shitty pay.
I’d say being a nurse competes in shittiness of the pay/work ratio with another indispensable job, a schoolteacher.
Only way UBI works is if the govts increase taxes on all income or any income to almost 90%+...
And then re-distribute to each person accordingly. That ain't happening, no govt will be willing to try that, and rich won't let that happen, they will become slightly rich from very rich. that just ain't happening.
If we are able to fill our storefronts with magnificent AI creations for cents on the dollar, would that be profitable enough for the producers to pay enough tax to cover UBI? Producers would still face pricing pressure to lower margins to eat up all those productivity gains. Every path forward seems very uncertain
Have you heard about the last century? A few governments did that. You had to stand in line for food and your basic goods.
No they didn't. In the USSR, for example, not working without a valid reason was literally a crime (look up tuneyadstvo).
Great point! But for how many weeks will you enjoy your UBI before the rulers say "Okay, now that we're paying all of your salaries, it's time for you to do the work we need. Off you go to build the railroad or the giant dam! Here's a pick-axe."
Why would the people with control of things go out of their way to keep the rest of us alive via UBI?
I get your point but what about a step before that - since when is that anyone's goal? From a sociopathic leader perspective, vast populations are only great for armies and tech has surpassed the need for raw manpower at that scale (and the AI you fear would make militaries require even fewer people).
In your AI scenario is it more likely the ruling class gives everyone free living standard or just lets like 40% of the population die? If all the leaders get together this is the ideal outcome for them -- vast power and control without enough civilians to rise up, climate change becomes easy to reverse with vastly lower power and food needs, and reduced threat of global war because nobody has an occupying size army anymore. This is like the new version of "mutually assured destruction" as a strategy for global peace. I can't speak for the world but I can imagine some of the twisted folks currently in power in the US seeing this route as their destiny and simply them doing the best thing for humanity as a whole -- longtermists are in, nazis know a final solution when they see one, and Christians are honored to have the duty of bringing forth the second coming.
Software is just another job in many countries, making pretty normal middle class wages. Job loss will hit us the same as any other middle class worker.
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The focus on "what you do" is very US-centric (or possibly North American). When you meet someone then one of the very first things asked is "what do you do" or something to that extent. What your job is. But it's not like that at all elsewhere in the world. It varies a lot. I myself never ask that question, unless it's for a very specific reason. And _never_ as part of an introduction.
I've known people for decades without knowing what their job is, or I only have a vague idea about their job. It's not important for people here. The person itself is important. There are other things than the job which define the person. I know this sounds very strange for Americans, but, in fact, the strangeness is the other way around.
I'm not sure that I can say "I am not my job" [mostly because I actually very much enjoy what I do there], but I can definitely say "you are not your job". Because I don't even know your job, nor do I much care.
One of the things people in the US like to do is to take some thing that's being negatively talked about and spin that into a thing that only people in the US do, whereas this aspect exists in many cultures, such as in India (speaking from experience) or China (from my understanding of their culture, and some Youtubers producing content around the social dynamics of this).
I have noticed the same thing, but I still think it's an interesting question. It would be strange for me to have a close friend and never have any kind of curiosity about how they spend nearly half of their waking hours. We don't live in severance-world: understanding someone's vocation feels like part of understanding them as a person.
I guess if you live in a community where most people do sort of menial interchangeable jobs then it's probably different, maybe everyone has a job as an unfortunate necessity but would rather think and talk about it as little as possible.
Not surprised because most people in the world only have time to work/commute/sleep. Stuff like hobbies, sabbaticals, vacations, etc are quite rare. I've only seen the contrary when I met Europeans.
Domestic tourism is massive even in countries with terrible work culture like China, so your claim is not particularly strong. Either way, hobbies and holidays are certainly not unique to NA and Europe.
1. There are far worse places to work than China :)
2. I was comparing everyone against EU. NA included.
I don't think your initial claim is well supported considering the size of domestic travel and entertainment sectors in most of the world (although I'll admit that the way people allocate non-work activities in many places may not lead to a relaxed life in the way, say, a Swiss person on a sabbatical has). Points 1 and 2 in this recent comment are different ones again, though and not ones I disagree with.
Not so sure about hobbies being a European thing. Take Japan, for example. Japan has a work culture/pressure which is considered pretty extreme (Korea is maybe worse, from what I read). I know people with work hours from early morning to 11pm, and a neighbor who drives out at 5:30am and is back way after dark): There are many more people with active hobbies than in my native Europe. With work taking so much time, people seem to learn to manage their time much better than many (much more than I can, definitely) and they squeeze in various hobbies in a very efficient way. That's one of the reasons I like living there, there's much more to do together with other people.
Nah,
All around the world, even people in the lower income brakets take vacation. Sometimes they travel if they can, sometimes they don't.
Working until you wear off is mostly a US thing.
> But it's not like that at all elsewhere in the world. It varies a lot. I myself never ask that question, unless it's for a very specific reason. And _never_ as part of an introduction.
Can you share some area(s) it's not like that, and what kinds of introductions/opening conversations you do have? I'd like to replicate that into my own social life (in North America) if only to bend the arc ever so slightly.
It's very rare to be asked that question ("what do you do") as part of an introduction in basically all of Europe, or at least it's so rare that I can't recall being asked that. Maybe it has happened, but it's not that common. "Where are you from?" is an obvious one on the other hand, if I'm in a different country. I'm sometimes asked that question in Japan, but never as part of an introduction. That's something which people may ask about at a later stage. If that's related to me being a foreigner or not I'm not sure - I haven't noticed that question in between native Japanese people, but then again my Japanese is not very good.
But I'm not actually that good at getting small talk going (not do I particularly enjoy small talk), so I'm not the best person to ask about introductions. So it basically boils down to exchanging names, and, for me, sometimes about nationality, and then about whatever happens at the place we're meeting up (say, an event of some kind). And from then on we kind of figure out the other person's interests. Starting to talk about the job would be.. very dry. Negative. As if there's nothing to talk about, at all.
This is highly regional within the US. You’ll see a lot more of it amongst NYC professionals than anywhere in the Midwest.
Yeah and I think it reflects the sorts of jobs people have. A lot of my buddies have these jobs they themselves think are pretty stupid but hey, they were hiring. They aren't going to identify as some salesperson of payroll software though. Probably literally no one in that industry does. It isn't rocket surgery. It just pays the bills.
Americans have this culture of killing the individual in adulthood I've noticed. It seemingly starts with parenthood. Parents are sold the myth that they ought to have no time for themselves, that they ought to drop all their hobbies and anything that made them them, and turn into this machine that either works or putts around with the baby the whole time. The idea of childcare or babysitter seen as "missing out." This frenetic behavior seems to last until the kid is an adolescent and has to set boundaries on the overbearing parents.
It wasn't always like this. Parents used to have more hobbies. Maybe dad was a bowler. Maybe mom was in a gardening club. Where was the kid? With the village of course: grand parents, baby sitter, playing with other kids in the neighborhood.
I don't have enough energy and am not skilled enough to write a rude enough hate comment to respond to this, so just imagine I did.
50% of your waking hours are spent at work. The person you are revolves around your working hours, the problems you solve the concerns you have, the money you make the persona you display at work.
Saying you are not your work is wishful thinking. Try giving it up and check in on how much of you is still the same.
Maybe you wish to be more than your working self. That’s honorable and desirable. Just declaring it isn’t going to cut it though.
> Saying you are not your work is wishful thinking. Try giving it up and check in on how much of you is still the same.
I retired a few years ago, and I believe and insist that I am very much the same person.
To see a person only as what they do at work seems awfully limiting. Even when I was working, I was also a sailor, musician, woodworker, home brewer, cat person, chess player, leather guy, and a good number of other things. And yes, even after retiring, I am still a computer guy. I even like hobby coding projects more than I did.
Well said. I'm nearing retirement age and planning what I'll do, and yes, setting up my hobby room with computers and whatnot. And, as you, I've also been many other things, including some on your list, and more.
I'd only become more "me" if I stopped working. Work isn't a place I go to self actualize, it's a place I go to earn money to do the things I want to do.
It's also a place a great number of people have to hide who they are because they have to fit in.
This.
I refrain from making jokes or even smalltalk in my new role because I noticed people don't do that here and keep meetings to the point.
Super sad that the majority of your day for the majority of your life is repressive of your "self.*
Maybe, maybe not. Directly, I only work about 30h/week, so I actually have 86 hours of free time and 30 hours of work per week.
And, at this point I'm working for my kids, not for me. I could have easily retired years ago if I didn't have kids. I could retire right now but my kids might not inherit much if I did. I lucked into a field that paid me > 10x the median salary in the US, but my kids might not be so lucky.
So, I'm working a little harder and longer than I need to, so that my kids perhaps don't have to. 1 year of working and saving for me might, 25 years from now, mean my kids can retire 10 years earlier than they would. That seems like a worthwhile thing for me to do, even if it means I have a little less "me" time.
Ill take it offline and we can circle back to that thought.
I find corporate culture to be extremely fake and it's tough to deal with. Like you ever do something simple and some one tells you wow that's amazing great job. And you think they can't be seriously right now, this was some low effort basic thing? That annoys me, corporate America demands that behavior though.
I only ever feel like "me" when I'm not at work. I work in retail, and every minute I'm at that job I feel my soul dying just that little bit more. But I go there because I like to not starve, which by the way I've done and lemme tell ya: it ain't fun.
Beyond this, you are what you do.
And you are what you do for other people.
Besides providing support and entertainment for our friends and families, the concrete things we do that bring value to society are through our jobs.
Society doesn't run on hanging out or hobbies.
This idea that you are not your job is ridiculous because of the amount of time that you spend at your work. And it’s not just fifty of your waking hours, right? There’s also time spent preparing for, commuting to, and winding down from that work. And also, you know, how much of your work are you doing in the shower? It stains the rest of your life; it soaks into everything.
This concept goes hand in hand with...
(oh, to say nothing of the many years of your life dedicated to developing this vocation through school and training or whatever. So it’s not just hours of the day; it’s years of your life that revolve around developing this vocation. It’s deeply disingenuous to suggest that it’s possible to separate yourself meaningfully from your vocation. Frankly, it’s insulting—to suggest that such separation is possible or even preferable, or to judge people for failing to separate their vocation from their identity when it’s impossible.
It makes me think of some of the impossible requirements placed on women: that they not be too slutty while at the same time not wearing a hijab or being too conservative. They get pressure from both sides, and there’s very little space, if any, that goes unjudged or unremarked upon. Having children too early, too late, or not at all—women will get flack from one corner of society or another. Likewise, workers get flack for overidentifying with their vocation, but it’s really impossible to extricate ourselves from it. For that reason, I find the whole idea offensive.)
...this concept of not making friends at work—or of distinguishing between your “work friends” and your “real friends.”
People tell me, “Your manager is not your friend. Your co-workers are not here to be your friends. You shouldn’t expect loyalty from them.” And okay, I get that. I understand the economic realities; I’ve had co-workers say things like, “Hey, I agree with you on this one, but I have a mortgage. I have kids in college. So I’m not going to speak up. I’m not going to join you in this complaint or in this effort to improve working conditions.”
I understand there are real economic constraints on the friendships, the loyalty, and the relationships that we establish in the office. I’ve also had co-workers who were loyal, empathetic, caring, honest, earnest—decent, good people—and they were groomed for management in a way that basically meant that once a week they’d be taken into a room and grilled about everyone else’s behavior. They were made into unwilling spies, and that has a chilling effect on the depth of friendships you can create. What’s tragic about that is, as I said at the start, because so much of our lives are dedicated to our vocation, the fact that we cannot establish meaningful, trusting, loyal relationships—that we’re forced to snitch on and betray one another—is a stunning, fundamental, disgusting injustice.
It’s an enormous violation of human liberties and possibilities. It is an utterly debased compromise that we’ve made as a society, one that wrecks us. It is a deeply troubling flaw in our foundation—that the majority of our hours, days, and years are dedicated to an environment where mutual trust and free association are fundamentally compromised.
Well put. It's also eye-opening to watch some exceptionally lucky/gifted individuals exude an unmistakable air of deep contentment that only comes from being "time-rich" i.e. possessing complete command of your time. They get to strictly curate the projects and people around which their livelihood revolves. They can't stop gushing about it. It's like even they cannot believe that they are forming lifelong friendships and having meaningful experiences AT work; b/c everyone had told'em that life exists 'outside of work'.
Of course, that's a ride inaccessible to rest of us plebs, but it's nonetheless insightful to see what that ticket buys.
> 60% of your waking hours are spent at work.
More like 15% of you work from home for a small company and shut the fuck up about wanting to be a career man. If you're not a homo consumator and play your cards right that's enough to check out of the corporate life before 45
Since the beginning of human history, people have always defined themselves by what they contribute to the group; a hunter, a farmer, a king... Today is no different. We may not be our job, but that is how others see us at first. They are not trying to get to know you; they just want to know where you fit, so they know how to deal with you. Only later, if things get personal, might they become interested in you as a person.
That is not your job, but your role in the group. Being a parent, a child or a spouse, a friend or a running mate, are not jobs. The point of the article is that your identity should not be driven by just one role, that is transactional and will not span your whole life. You need to broaden your target and also understand that you open new roles with each new relationship, plus also you can create new roles into existing relationships.
> but that is how others see us at first
Well I think it's nothing more than a social norm, and an easy one to avoid at that. People are mostly asking what's your job because that's a standard icebreaker.
Since I (mostly) recovered from burnout, and learnt that I'm actually not my job, I took the habit to never automatically ask people what is their job, at least not for ice breaking.
You can talk about their hobbies, their kids, their tastes ... because those are the real topics that will define if you bond or not anyway. And yes some people sometimes do have an interesting job that is worth talking about but when it happens, you will inevitably talk about it anyway.
> Since the beginning of human history
You have that backwards though! :-)
We'd get to know people in our community, often because they were born in to it, then we'd fit in to productive roles.
The way we do it these days is a recent, post industrial revolution, mode of society.
Nah I think this paradigm already exists when city states form and you no longer live in a village where everyone knows everyone
Where I live, when meeting ppl they don’t introduce by asking “so what do you do?”, instead the phrasing is somewhat akin to “what do you spent your time on”. Even though they mean “what is your profession”, it allows me to stir the discussion to “what I like” or what kind of subject I enjoy discussing at that time eg philosophy, theatre, books, etc.
I agree to an extent that you mostly worked with people you grown up with on those farms, some of which became lifelong friends. This has been replaced by making friends in high school and then parting ways forever, more or less.
I’ll add that if you see your colleagues as anything else than primarily working for money, you’re a bit delusional unless you know for a fact they could not work for the rest of their lives and be financially fine. Of course there are other reasons to work than money, but the way the system is set up you’re not supposed to care more about them than about cold hard cash.
There’s an old aphorism: “Do what you love, and you’ll never work a day in your life.”
I worked in tech, because I love tech. No other reason, really. I accepted a job, making maybe half of what I could make, elsewhere, because of the personal satisfaction I got from it, and the relationships I made, there.
When I retired, I have continued to develop software, and am currently “leaning into” AI-assisted development.
During that time, I’ve also had plenty of time to be human.
I have found that aphorism does not ring true for me.
“Do what you love for work, and you'll stop loving it" seems more true to me. It always eventually turns into a chore once it is a thing you need to do.
I enjoy writing and designing software systems, and have since my first apple ii use in 2nd grade writing logo programs (the turtle drawing programming language)
I write software in my spare time, for fun, as it scratches a particular itch in my brain, but I also enjoy a lot of other hobbies as well: woodworking, car repair, boating, beekeeping...
Having a 9 to 5 desk job in any field is it's own type of soul crushing, even moreso as of late for myself personally. However, if I need to perform the song and dance to support my family, I'll at least do it to the tune of something I enjoy. With software engineering I can at least "get lost in" the work, so the drudgery can be temporarily forgotten until I can get home to my family and side projects.
It's a bit fractal and tautological...
On the one hand, I think a lot of the ruinous parts are the extra things it forces beyond the parts you actually love. So the problem there is you are actually doing a bunch of things you don't love, so do "work" some portion of your day.
The other is that many of us do love a bit of oppositional defiance. Doing what is demanded of us by others is definitely not doing what we love in that respect!
IMO, there are more steps. Do what you love for work, someone will exploit you for it, and break your heart.
One of my kids has taken this advice, does art (really good art) for themselves and is pursuing a STEM career instead. The other is pursuing a game dev career, despite every current and former dev in his life warning him off for the last fifteen years. To quote Kissing Jessica Stein, “OY! This child will suffer.”
Back in the day, I was a fairly good artist[0]. I was good enough to get work, and pursue a career, although I don’t know how successful I would have been.
Fortunately, I also really enjoyed tech, and figured that even a mediocre programmer would do better than a top-shelf fantasy artist. Back then (hard to believe, these days), competition was a lot less prevalent, in tech, and was brutal, in art.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40917886
I've been doing this full time for about fifteen years, which is a fairly long time (though admittedly not nearly as much as some others here).
I haven't really stopped loving writing and designing software. I still have fun writing code and coming up with clever optimization tricks. The thing that has become draining is the actual act of "having a job".
Obviously I'm grateful to have an income, and I like my coworkers, but the problem with most jobs is that the part I enjoy like ends up being a relatively small part of my day. When I worked for a BigCo there would be weeks at a time where at least half of my day is eaten by meetings and/or emails, and when you do get to work on something technical it's usually not something that's challenging or interesting. A lot of the work ends up being a bugfix or an incremental feature that really doesn't require a lot of thought.
Even startups aren't immune to this. With startups you have the advantage of not being nearly as siloed, but that comes with the double-edged sword of being stuck working on parts of the company or stack that you don't really care about. I deal with fewer meetings but I spend much more time fighting with Kubernetes YAML configurations which I find unbelievably draining, which I might have been able to avoid if I stayed at BigCo.
From 2016-2018, I worked at a MediumCo, where I was able to primarily focus on designing and writing distributed software. I was able to spend a good chunk of time figuring out how to optimize concurrent software, there weren't that many meetings, and I didn't get sick of it at all. I quit that job because I had a romanticized idea of what life at BigCo would be like; if I had the ability to see the future I would have stayed at MediumCo because I didn't like working at BigCo [1].
Anyway, my point is that given my experience, if you can actually work on the things you love, and not just a bunch of ancillary bullshit, I think it's possible you can continue to enjoy it forever. The problem is that most jobs simply aren't like that.
[1] Usual disclaimer; you might be able to dig through my history and figure out who BigCo and MediumCo are in this, and that's obviously fine, but I politely ask that you don't post the proper nouns here.
I've been coding for 30 years. We recently built a silent auction app for the university I work for, and it was as rewarding for me as the first thing I ever programmed. Sometimes the job is a chore. But for me, the challenge of building something new never gets old. Teaching junior devs is also consistently rewarding.
Agreed - once you have to do something for a living in order to survive (and probably under the orders of clueless management and company executives) it becomes "work" that is no longer fun.
Same way that being forced to read for school often kills the desire to read for fun.
It certainly killed a lot of my tinkering outside of work, but that's more a matter of when I'm already doing the thing for most of the day, even though I like it I don't always want to continue doing it for the rest of the day too when I get home.
Yes and no.
I'm really glad that I left the rodent rally, but I did not want to leave tech. I just wanted to be in a place, where my work doesn't get fed into a wood-chipper, by terrible managers.
Once they were taken out of the equation, happiness ensued.
I deliberately turn down jobs that pay. Once someone pays me for my work, I'm duty-bound to give them what they pay for; even if that sucks, and I don't like doing bad work.
That's a very privileged thing to say about a career where the tools to replace developers did not exist
Thanks. I needed to be put in my place.
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I don't know if it's so universal. My opinion is rather that most jobs will make your passion become dull.
I knew some airline pilots who loved flying, but didn't feel so much like it after decades.
I got into aerospace engineering because I liked all aspects of it. A couple decades of end-to-end meetings and "TPS reports" later, I'm not as passionate anymore. Some time ago I was excited about solving a practical issue by coding some new tool myself, a year of exchanges with management and IT has made me look forward to move on.
By all measures my company is pretty good in my industry, but the corporate life just has a way of sucking away passion.
This was the same for me. The only things I did not like about tech were not really related to tech but rather bad leadership or the wrong kinds of leadership. Early in my career I worked for one of the worst and literally most criminal managed hosting organizations and it was the best boon for my career making me fearless. I learned how to remove all emotion from my experiences and off-board bad leaders. Everything else for me was being in the right place around the right people at the right time and teaching those around me everything I knew in hopes they would take over those tasks. My biggest satisfaction and what I took the most pride in was helping others with their careers and helping them off-board bad and abusive management.
Exactly.
I am "privileged," but pretty much every other vocation has been in a place where people are getting squeezed by others or tools. Nothing new here, folks.
It's just that now, the bell tolls for tech workers, and they are suddenly getting to understand what other fields have been dealing with, for decades -centuries, in some cases.
I love tech. Reading tech books is something I do on a daily basis. I work on personal side projects, learn new ways of solving things, languages, frameworks, libraries, etc.
But I have to say that as I grow older, I like less and less the tech my boss makes me work on. And that applies to perhaps the majority of potential bosses out there.
"Do what you love, and you’ll never work a day in your life."
It's possible sex workers took this advice too literally...
> When Bronnie Ware interviewed people at the end of their lives, she asked them about their regrets. The clearest pattern wasn't hard to see. Nobody was lying on their deathbed wishing they'd earned more money or accomplished more.
I'm reminded of the story of the great manga artist Tezuka Osamu, who, as he was dying of stomach cancer in a hospital bed at the end of his life, begged to be given a pencil to let him continue his work. Granted, not everyone is Tezuka. But many people have work they care greatly about accomplishing, even at the end of their lives.
I've been on death's door at least 3 times. Sepsis, heart failure, complications from Pneumonia. Each and every time, I've wished I had made more money and accomplished more. The money for my family after me, and the accomplishments for my own ego to feel like my life contributed to part of humanity. I have had a top 10 concrete goals since I was under 10. I have completed many, but not all.
We're currently in the process of designing and building machines that can do everything better, faster and cheaper than humans.
Gradually, we are succeeding.
This leaves us with two options:
a) Decouple the value of human life from economic output
b) Watch as the value of human life rapidly approaches zero
Sadly, it seems to me that history has always chosen b), and I doubt this time it's gonna be different.
Culture matters and going against yours is difficult. I think everyone tends to be unable to put themselves in the shoes of someone from another country - it is terribly tempting to use one's own "lense" to see everything.
In America there's pressure to "be a success" and it's not easy to get away from. If you're successful it's a virtue and if you're a "loser" it's because you're lazy or something bad. Bums sleeping on the street don't deserve a place to live even in the richest country in the world because losers need to be punished and winners should not be taxed unfairly.
Where I'm from in Zimbabwe, foreigners including my parents always misunderstood the importance of age - the need to show respect to older people no matter what you think of their utterances. Every 2 seconds I could see other immigrants like myself rubbing Shona people up the wrong way by not understanding where the power lay and what people were proud of.
When I was in Turkey with my wife I realised it was another place where older people held a huge amount of power and the whole country operated differently from Britain - where one only has to be able to get a mortgage to be independent and tell one's parents to go to hell. In Turkey you have to kowtow to your parents and uncles and aunts because you're probably living in a flat that one of them owns until you're quite late in life.
It's not that "success" doesn't matter everywhere but that there are multiple priorities and it's not a pure indication of status. Quite often it's about family or not being of "the other" tribe.
As for thinking you're defined by your job, that is just part of the "pigeon-holing" process by which people try to understand you quickly and sometimes attempt to neutralise a perceived competitor socially. I don't think there's much you can do other than not buy into it yourself and not practise it yourself.
Kind of bizarre how Fight Club was so influential a couple decades ago, but doesn’t seem to have much cultural impact today. This exact theme is one of the most memorable quotes from the movie.
Too counter-cultural and anti-money for today’s young people, I think. Everyone’s trying to make it, not drop out of society.
Fight Club came out almost 30 years ago. Most young people have probably never heard of it.
Also there's no such thing as "counterculture" in a world where culture isn't manufactured and controlled by some central authority. When there was only physical media and a few tv stations, "culture" was a fixed point one could obviously align with or against. Today in the post-internet non cultural milieu, anti-capitalist and anti-work ideals are everywhere but they just don't stand out the way the hippies did back in the day.
> Also there's no such thing as "counterculture" in a world where culture isn't manufactured and controlled by some central authority
Oh my sweet summer child
Capitalism has done with youth cultures what capitalism does best : dissolved them into irrelevance and monetisation.
A new movement ? What a great opportunity to create and sell cheap merch, turning it into a joke.
When everything in life is about money and profit, we lose our humanity.
Take a look at the "cultural leaders" of kids these days. It is disheartening.
That’s a part of it but I don’t think it’s really that external. I think people in general, themselves, are just less interested in the counter cultural ethos. It doesn’t feel to me like anti-consumerist cultural movements are being founded and then co-opted by commerce. Rather they aren’t being founded at all, and if they are, it’s just some lazy online thing with no actual real-world presence.
> I think people in general, themselves, are just less interested in the counter cultural ethos.
Gen Z is less patriotic than any other generation, so the counter-culture of their generation is really just... culture. Everyone kind of just agrees that patriotism is a joke, politics are a joke, taking any of this seriously or contributing to it more than necessary is a joke. Gen Z protests as much as any previous generation. The fact that it's not taken seriously in traditional politics is just another signal for them to opt out.
The issue is not that there's no counter-culture, it's that we've designed a system of governance that can withstand it without budging (or at least pretends like it can). Long term, the system will starve. Good luck finding anyone competent to join the military, engage passionately with their jobs, or contribute to civil service. It's not gonna happen. The american dream is now to be on the winning side of a scam.
It might take some time for something else to arise from the ashes of all this, but the first step is already occurring.
https://www.theupandup.us/p/genz-sinking-american-pride-patr...
https://www.yahoo.com/news/marine-officer-explains-why-gen-1...
People don't need self-help advise, they need a fair redistribution of increased productivity.
We don't make a big deal of our jobs because we are stupid - it's the society that assigns this or that income to this or that job, and income determines lifestyle or in worst case the survival.
>People don't need self-help advise, they need a fair redistribution of increased productivity.
The increased productivity is pretty much entirely coming from AI researchers and the companies investing in huge amounts of GPUs, and they are the ones receiving most of the windfalls, how's that not fair?
The biggest contribution is still from the training set, whose original authors get 0 because of "fair use" in the copyright.
This presumes that the value was created by the authors and not the people who found a way to use the structure in the training set to create intelligence. Like crediting wi-fi router owners with creating Wi-Fi Positioning System instead of the people who realized they could wardrive around to create maps and extract a new kind of value that would never have existed without them. Or Egyptians for deciphering hieroglyphics instead of the Frenchman who realized the Rosetta Stone they were using to hold up a wall could actually be used to do much more.
My thinking here is coming from the paper "From Entropy to Epiplexity"[1] which partly discussed why you can train on synthetic data: it's the structure of the data that enables learning, not just the amount of "information". Authors of images and videos may have worked just as hard as authors of text training sets, but they didn't contribute to AI as much because there just wasn't the same kind of structure to discover there. It's the people who found the usable structure, not the people who accidentally generated it, who created the value.
1. https://arxiv.org/html/2601.03220v2
> This presumes that the value was created by the authors and not the people who found a way to use the structure in the training set to create intelligence.
This presumes it's binary.
> Or Egyptians for deciphering hieroglyphics instead of the Frenchman who realized the Rosetta Stone they were using to hold up a wall could actually be used to do much more.
Yes, I think a lot more than 1 person deserves credit for years of painstaking research.
> It's the people who found the usable structure, not the people who accidentally generated it, who created the value.
You're naively assuming the structure is accidental.
Depends on your ethics I guess? In my view fair distribution is an equitable one, which is also the principle that helps to keep society stable. Not that researchers and business people should not be rewarded for their achievement, but the reward should be moderate and limited in time instead of creating a permanent underclass or whatever the plan is now IMO
Even if that was true. There’s the training data.
A small correction to this, your friends don't really like you due to any desirable attribute you have, its not an exchange process. They like you for your you-ness.
Think about a friend, what is it you like about them? I think you will find that it's not a series of attributes, but a rather unquantifiable them ness - you like the fact they are uniquely them, this is how you are seen as well. You're enough.
Agreed with the title and some of the broad sentiment, but two things stood out.
> I can't delegate my capacity to sit with someone when they're confused or scared or just need to feel known
Plenty of people rely on therapists and/or chat bots to listen to them. Not everybody feels comfortable burdening their friends and family with their problems.
> We possess the means to care for everyone -- yet choose not to
There is a trade-off between social services in a broad sense and the ability to pay for them. The stronger the social safety net, the more people at the margin will choose to work less, earn less, make less of an effort. In turn, the tax base becomes smaller, and thus unable to maintain those same social services.
For example, the vast majority of people choose to retire once they reach the age where they are able to collect enough from their pension that they no longer need to work in order to get by. If we lowered the age of eligibility by a year, most people would retire a year earlier. Just like we see people retiring later in countries that have moved the eligibility to the age of e.g. 67.
With this I am not advocating to increase or decrease the current social safety net in whichever region you, dear reader, are living. I am simply pointing out some of the real-world effects of moving the needle in one direction or another.
Thus, yes, in rich countries we have collectively decided that "caring for everyone" is not the best way forward, because we see that it becomes unsustainable when you go too far. Where exactly we place the needle varies from place to place, obviously. Thinning the social safety net too far also has massive societal and economic consequences.
>For example, the vast majority of people choose to retire once they reach the age where they are able to collect enough from their pension that they no longer need to work in order to get by
Part of the problem is that the current system doesn't provide a great way to taper off, at least not by default. I suspect there would be a lot more people who'd keep working if it was simple to get a comparable job at 30 hours per week 25 weeks out of the year. But for those who are traditionally employed instead of contracting, the choice is often between full time or nothing.
> Thus, yes, in rich countries we have collectively decided that "caring for everyone" is not the best way forward, because we see that it becomes unsustainable when you go too far.
What rich country are you talking about? Most developed countries have elected to have social safety nets, and that includes the US to some extent. "Caring for everyone" in your message looks like some form of utopia where no one would have to work, but that has never been advocated anywhere.
Also what does "we" mean in that context? To me, it looks like you’re passing your opinion as a well-accepted fact.
> "Caring for everyone" in your message looks like some form of utopia where no one would have to work, but that has never been advocated anywhere.
Have you never met an advocate for UBI? How do you interpret OP's "We possess the means to care for everyone -- yet choose not to" in its context?
> Also what does "we" mean in that context
Voters. Voters have collectively decided, in all developed countries, to strike a balance between having a social net that gives people some minimum assurances while maintaining strong incentives to work. This is in opposition to OP's "We possess the means to care for everyone -- yet choose not to". I am trying to explain that there are good reasons why we do that; it is not a moral failure.
UBI is based on the idea that some people will still want/need to work. It is not related to freeing people from work, but to ensure that people's basic needs (housing, food, health) are met even if, for some reason, they are unable to work. Usually, UBI proponents claim the main difference between UBI and the current nets is that it would simplify the administrative control structure.
The intent of UBI (make sure everyone has their basic needs met) isn't different from the current safety nets. And, of course, since shit has to be made in order to be consumed, UBI requires people to keep working.
> Voters. Voters have collectively decided, in all developed countries [...] I am trying to explain that there are good reasons why we do that; it is not a moral failure.
It's not a once for all choice, though. Safety nets in all countries have evolved gradually, and are still evolving. Opposing yesterday's voter choices to today or tomorrow's activist hopes is a misunderstanding of the way democracy works. Every choice voters have made about social nets in the past happened because someone started saying "we have the means to do this, why shouldn't we do it?"
The tax base shrinks but does company revenue shrink? History so far says no, so perhaps that's where we can look for the tax dollars.
> The tax base shrinks but does company revenue shrink?
Capital is highly mobile globally. As corporate taxation becomes higher in a region, production in that region becomes less competitive globally. Companies, in turn, outsource their production elsewhere.
It is not a simple problem to solve. There are good reasons why the status quo is what it is.
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Some people indeed identify too much with their jobs, but for many others getting replaced by A.I means on very practical terms - a huge hit in salary, it means possibly retraining - maybe for years, means stress to the family (mortgage, bills etc) perhaps even stress to the marriage. I disagree that the people near you only love you or need you for your presence; they also rely on your paycheck. Your daugher may love you for you but she needs that check to the private school, that money for nice clothes and gadgets like her friends all have and paying for that apartment in the nice neighborhood.
As well, your point of view and it would seem the general default assumption in articles like this, is that people have families. We are in an unprecedented time of lonliness, there will be many people who if they lose their job they will have no support. Financial, emotional or logistical.
I know it's hard, but I guess it's a good idea to live below your means in case something happens, and also save considerably to face moments of uncertainty. People with tech salaries can do it. Most of the world (and country, independently of where you live) live with much less.
Nobody needs private school, give me a fucking break.
It's an example, you give me a fucking break.
When you meet someone, you assess them on two dimensions. The first is warmth - do you believe they mean you well? The second is competence - do you believe they're capable?
Well, sometimes.
At other times, the assessment may be based on signalling, tribalism, perception of status, personal connections, career connections, transactional goals, or other criteria.
Some people don't have or can't show warmth. Or they don't have the ability to "crack a joke at the right time" or make small talk. Should that be held against people when making assessments?
>Should that be held against people when making assessments?
It shouldn't but it does.
The people who figure this out early are rare. Most only get there after losing the job or burning out completely. Shame it takes that long
> The regrets were about relationships. Not staying in touch with friends. Not expressing what they felt. Working too hard. Not living true to themselves. The people who were dying weren't grieving their lost productivity.
> The people who love you don't love you because you're good at your job. They love you because of something else entirely. Maybe it's your humor. Maybe it's that you actually listen. Maybe it's that you remember things about their lives and ask about them. Maybe it's simply that you show up. You're present.
This feminization of society is concerning.
Sure you don't want to be corporate slave. But a man's native instinct is to achieve great things, push the boundaries, achieve fame.
"Be loved for what you are" is not how it works in the real world. Well not for men at least.
People on this site will sing praises of bellards and torvalds and knuths and bernsteins of the world, long after they're gone. For a man's deeds and heroism are his identity.
That's probably why every ancient Indo-European society fixated on heroism, renown of one's self and progeny.
We might today think of them as violent primitive pastoralists who didn't have the talk therapy like the tiktok teens from US of A.
But they understood something we don't.
You're not your job, surely. But you're your deeds. You're the children you raise. You're the society you create.
> But a man's native instinct is to achieve great things, push the boundaries, achieve fame.
I don't care to spend my time worrying about the manliness of the things I value or strengthening the strictures that narrow the possibilities in my life. Ends that arise out of ego, like fame, are fleeting and not worth pursuing in my book.
I used to BE a software engineer. Then, I experienced a 3 years long burnout and got professional help. Now I work AS an Engineering Manager.
You are not your job. Do not put your ego in what you do. That’s something I discuss a lot during my 1:1s.
I’m sorry you had trouble with this, but I don’t understand the problem. I really don’t.
I am a tester. I’ve been a tester for 39 years. I’ll be a tester until I die, whether or not anyone pays me for it. At some point, you believe I am going to… collapse or something?
I have been burned out. Before I was a tester, I was a video game developer. I didn’t get the vitamins from that for the nourishment of my soul, and I DID collapse. In my experience, burnout has nothing to do with ego investment. It has to do with forcing one’s self to do something that isn’t a fit.
Once I learned about staying within my limits, I ceased having trouble with burnout. It had nothing to do with investing my identity into my chosen work.
BTW, I am a tester. I am also a father, a husband, an American, a philosopher, and a teacher. All these things are in me. As I turn 60, I am also beginning to embrace a new identity: old man.
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I agree with this article fully, but there is a problem that most blog posts about identity don't talk about before telling you what do with your own. What is identity actually for? This is the only article I know of that talks about this:
https://danielkeogh.com/blog/post/On%20not%20being%20miserab...
Thanks for sharing. I truly enjoy the author's definition of identity as optimisation to decision-making. It does make a lot of sense, and explains why big identity crises (midlife crisis, for example) can have devastating effects and take a long time to resolve. Questioning your identity is akin to going through an ego death, and many developers that do not want to accept this AI-driven future are going through some very painful feelings with large ramifications to their lives.
I can only recommend people going through these phases to treat it (seriously) like any midlife crisis. You can't sweep it under the carpet. Carl Jung has written a lot about those, start there.
(5 years deep into mine, and the timing of the AI revolution certainly made my quest much more difficult than I would have wished)
What a fantastic article. Lately I came to the same conclusions but never could put it in words. Thank you!
There's something more, to me: the confusion between identity and role isn't just psychological, it's social. People ask "what do you do?" and mean "who are you?" It takes either courage or a real crisis to separate those two questions. AI is forcing that crisis at industrial scale. Maybe that's not totally a bad thing.
I am often asked "What do you do?" when I meet someone new. I know they are asking about my job, but I throw off the expectations by saying, "Oh, I like to play video games and watch movies primarily." This is usually followed by, "Sorry, I meant what do you do for a living?" I will then, of course, tell them what they expect to hear; however, even the question "What do you do for a living?" implies that we live to work. I play video games and watch movies for living. I work merely to survive and buy the things that allow me to live my life the way I want.
maybe it implies some amount of "live to work" etymologically, but the word "living" in that context specifically refers to living in the financial sense (the act of living wouldn't really make sense in that sentence)
you live to play video games and watch movies, but you make a living by working
> But warmth. Empathy. The ability to sit with someone in their confusion and make them feel understood. The ability to crack a joke at exactly the right moment and remind someone that they're not alone. The capacity to be fully present with another person, to see them not as a role they're playing but as a whole human being… that cannot be automated away and hopefully never will.
To me, that describes for me a human capability that is often overlooked but is in fact at our core. All the rest is almost futile in comparison.
I also took the route of finding a new hobby (biking, all things bike mechanics, even politics) but of course it's not paying any of my bills. That's the point. While I helped making other people very rich, I never owned shares or got a bonus after an exit.
"X. Employee, 19xx-20xx. Beloved co-worker and technical specialist. Sacrificed health and happiness to deliver value to shareholders."
Well. Nobody remembers me already so I doubt they will even care when a truck hits me on my bike.
Fine essay overall but “We possess the means to care for everyone -- yet choose not to”
I really don’t think this is true
The US could make homelessness a thing of the past with a minuscule fraction of what it is spending on the military. It is very much a choice.
DoD spent $1.43 trillion in FY2026
Around ~1 million homeless in US
Let’s say it costs $10K/month/person so $120K/yr/person. Probably a big overestimate but gotta include healthcare and help people with long term stability.
That’s 120,000 x 1,000,000 = 120,000,000,000 or $120 billion USD.
Idk what the Nth order effects would be but yea I think what you’re saying tracks in the numbers
For an ideal ('spherical cow in a vacuum') type of homeless person, sure.
You cannot just throw money at a problem like homelessness in order to fix it. That is such an incredibly reductive viewpoint. It's akin to saying 9 mothers can birth a child in a month - oh look, we solved the population decline crisis! Someone go tell Japan!
Engineers have never been calculators or specification machines. Good engineers have always been builders. Our identity is "I build stuff that works well and improves lives" ...
Architects needn't be diminished by CAD. Teachers needn't be diminished by internet access / computers. Nurses/Doctors needn't be diminished by new detection techniques or medicines.
No matter the era, we should carry the identity that we're not the tools we use, we're more than that.
For all intents and purposes I am my job and I'm tired of people trying to pretend like this isn't true. As a human I am worth exactly what I'm able to earn, not a cent more and I am judged by others first and foremost based on my job title. I am not inherently valuable.
I wish it wasn't like this, but this is the world we've built and all I can do is cope with it as those in power work on replacing me.
I think you as a person have intrinsic value, and I hope your opinion changes in the future.
That depends a lot on your social circles, no? I’ve met plenty of people who never cared about or knew my job title or salary, and whose job titles and salaries I never cared about or knew.
I've been in circles where I thought it didn't matter and I've had people in my life who I thought didn't care...and then they find out (because good luck hiding the thing you do for 40+ hours a week) and the relationships permanently change.
If life is a game, are you playing it right?
A rather privileged perspective. Software engineer, tech in general, is a new and unique sort of job. Knowledge workers who can work out of any office, even remotely from home, is a very new thing. Throughout history, even the most educated and able had to locate themselves near the worksite. Doctors need to be near patients, lawyers the courts. Even congressmen used to live in dormitories to stay in DC.
My point: You job does define you because, for the vast majority of people, one's job dictates where and how you live. It is a rarefied elite that can so easily disconnect their work from their outside lives. Tell a farmer about work-life balance when if he sleeps in, animals will suffer. Tell a cop that her doing graveyard shifts wrestling drunk people doesn't dictate the flow of her daily life. Tell a soldier that moving home ever other year doesn't impact his long-term social connections. Normal people have long been defined by their jobs, and it still holds today. Calling out such ties as unenlightened or to be avoided sticks a finger in the eye of the billions for whom their job is their life.
I was prepared for another fluffy post... But this resonated with me 100%
> The people who love you don't love you because you're good at your job. They love you because of something else entirely. Maybe it's your humor. Maybe it's that you actually listen. Maybe it's that you remember things about their lives and ask about them. Maybe it's simply that you show up. You're present. You don't extract a conversation and then disappear.
As I get older (and, I hope, wiser), this matters more and more. Jobs come and go (and how many have gone), money comes and goes (rather too quickly), time comes and goes (progressively faster, if I might add), but what matters more than anything else is the people in your life who stick by you, and who you stick by.
The nattering nabobs of negativism will disagree (and there are plenty in the comments). I dont care.
I agree with the poster.
@jyrio - let's do a bagel + coffee in NYC. I'll be there the last week of April
Thanks for the great feedback. There's a link to find some time when you're passing through. Otherwise shoot me an email! Cheers.
"The job will not save you, Jimmy. It won't make you whole, it won't fill [you] up."
https://youtu.be/NR1g30pQi4I?t=106s
Yes, it's true one needs to eat, have a roof over one's head, etc. Of course you can even like what you do, make friends at work. But never forget the nature of the relationship. It won't love you back.
> "This bothers a lot of people for a reason (I think) that has nothing to do with the technology. The fear isn't really about losing a job title, it's about losing the story you tell yourself about who you are."
No, it is 100% about the fear of losing a job due to companies replacing skilled people with AI.
I went through this reckoning when a company I worked for underwent layoffs for poor financial performance. Nothing I could have done since I started the job would have made it avoidable. I had the epiphany that I'd tied up my sense of self, and self-worth, with a status that I actually had very little control over.
Not being a software developer. That's actually generally a net negative, socially. It was all about class.
I've been fairly upwardly mobile. That alone gave me a feeling of success that glossed over any other inadequacies. Being comfortably financially also means - or meant - that I had the luxury of ignoring the reality of daily life for most people I met, however much I thought I hadn't lost touch.
Confronting the idea of how I'd feel about my life without it, and how the people in my life would feel about me, and how I feel about people who don't have the same comfort, is an instrumental part of me developing into a better, happier person.
One's job and the rest of one's life are not clearly delineated. Best friends and spouses are often met through work, which is inexplicably linked with one's actual performance on the job. This article treats them as if they are isolated. Also, it's worth noting that one's sense of purpose (as in career) is important to happiness, just as being part of a strong social network in one's personal life is. Balance is key.
Some retirees struggle with meaning in the absence of work. Most adapt just fine. Work is not the meaning of life for most people.
Work inevitably has highs and lows. Sometimes you'll fail at something. If you tie your self-worth to your job, then you risk anchoring your self-esteem to external factors you can't control. Learn to value yourself on who you are aside from your work.
> ...the disruption happening in AI feels like existential threat. And it should be. The skill that which you exchanged for money and stability is being replaced, you are being replaced just shuffled around.
Illusory Truth Effect - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illusory_truth_effect
The narrative is being built that AI has already won, somewhat AGI, replaced jobs. It's sneaking into blogs and articles which are not even about AI, which makes it even harder to notice.
Many people define themselves based on their job & tbh its what they learn from the Society, I remember steve jobs once said in a video i watched that Everything you see is created by someone who is just a human like you, and many people just don't wanna create their own bcs they are too comfortable being in someone else's creation , I'm not talking about Mother nature, I'm talking about tech and stuff like these jobs , which a human has created, so many people needs to come out this thinking and they can casually define themselves based on their interests and even goals.
I don't tie my self-worth to my job, but I still need the dough and I don't see myself doing anything else, hence why I've been so concerned as of late. I only started working four years ago, and I don't have the luxury to retire and go biking for the rest of my days. What a ridiculously bad article. I don't need Facebook-tier self-help "advice", I need reasons to feel confident in the fact that I'll be able to provide for myself in the future by doing something reasonably enjoyable.
> Whether you do well through an economic transition or not has little to do with the cause (AI, digital technology, industrialization, coal), and more to do with the social and political structures which exist around you (which is a blog post for another day).
I keep hearing "AI will free us to do things we love," and all I can think is, in what world? Because in this one, if you don't have labor worth buying or anyone to buy it, you don't eat.
>I keep hearing "AI will free us to do things we love," and all I can think is, in what world?
You're likely to hear this sentiment from rich and privileged SV entrepreneurs and people who were handed six-figure salaries right out of school, and who have never had a realistic view of how most people live. People who only continue to work to satisfy their intellect and lifestyle.
You don't hear this sentiment from normal people.
Great article from a place of privilege, now go tell that to the HR drone, nowadays most likely a LLM powered assistant, that my CV matters enough for a phone call.
There are no irreplaceable people.
No matter how irreplaceable you are, If you get sick or die, you will be replaced in 1-2 weeks. In 2-3 months, you will be forgotten...
You are what utility you deliver to others. I doubt they'll keep feeding, dressing and sheltering you for your ability to connect, be present and whatever.
> The fear isn't really about losing a job title, it's about losing the story you tell yourself about who you are.
No, it's just the fear of loosing your mind because you're broken. It's just about money and survivability. There's no room for ego when you don't even know if you will have food to provide for your kids next month
This all changes when you have a kid. Before I had a kid I was my job and it hurt me when I did have a kid by not prioritizing what was important (my kid - not my JOB). I thought I was important at my place of work but realize nobody cared and I could disappear and things would be fine without me.
IT people go even further, some people tie themselve to the tool they use, language they program in.
Indeed. It's hard to imagine the size of the carrot needed for me to take a job with C++11.
Indeed, thinking that people and the way they extract money from the environment is same is ridiculous and i've been teaching my kid from childhood that it's just wrong. We've been conditioned to think that way from the industrial era. I hope now people will finally learn to think different.
I really don't care about my intrinsic value as a person. Without this line of work I couldn't make enough to support my household by myself, which I must now do.
I am not my age or gender either in this sense, but I am still going to say 'I am a man' and 'I am x years old', because I am fluent in English.
This was obvious to those who value their time over the job given to them and all the office politics, performative meetings and the blame-game that comes with it.
The company has ex Fly.io people:;dissent is flagged. What a surprise. Fly.io will still end like Starfighter, where abusing HN for marketing did not work.
>The capacity to be fully present with another person, to see them not as a role they're playing but as a whole human being… that cannot be automated away and hopefully never will.
I agree but I don't hold such a positive view of the result of this (anymore) as the author do.
(I think?) in the book The End of Burnout, an argument is put forward about how our change in work culture is contributing to burnout. One aspect of it being that with the service economy, part of the value we provide in return for salary is not just our skills but a pleasant "persona". In previous times, our work used to be less socially oriented: farmers farm, craftmans craft, factory workers do line work. Social interaction happened ofc but wasn't as much the core for many professions. With increased automation, the social component got more important. These days it's not even surprising for many craftmans to also work close to customers or other group of people in an organization, increasing the number of interactions you need to manage by order of magnitude. You're also expected to be socially professional, "pleasant" as the article points. You're supposed to act graciously when your customers demand the impossible, or your manager doesn't understand the problem at hand. Leave your emotions, personality, and completely valid thoughts at the company main entrance: here you be a "pleasant professional".
Combined it with another trend: the onus for productivity increase is on the worker and not the employer, as it used to be in the factory floor (productivity increased with improved system, not individual effort). I think this point was from Byumg chul Han, and I can see that with the onus on productivity increase being on the worker, in a "be pleasant" job it will be more and more "sacrifice your true self to be maximum pleasant" and the result will be a horribly burnt out society.
So the authors prediction is rather dystopian. A workplace that focus on pleasantness with a detachment to meritocratic conditions will also inevitably converge to squashing of diverse thought and getting stuck in their heads.
Firefox doesn't seem to like your website. I get an insecure connection warning.
Error code: SSL_ERROR_RX_RECORD_TOO_LONG
Works on chrome though
I'm surprised that neither this article nor any of the comments have thus far mentioned the fact that rarely do tombstones, eulogies, and the like mention or emphasize much a person's occupation. Most of the time it's "Here lay {name}, loving {relation}, {relation}, and {relation}. May he eternally do {hobby} in the skies forever."
And here's the crazy part: I'm still not convinced this is the right take! Of course we are our jobs and what we do. It literally shapes who you get to meet on the dating market, favors you can call in, and so forth. How naive it is to think otherwise. The Cracked article that another post linked to is pretty spot-on.
Yes, obviously being a 'person' who can be 'with' people (cf. 'for' people) is simultaneously also a thing. Both are true. But "You are not your job" is just cope, and the tombstones and eulogies fall for it too.
Super nice read.
> The harder version is asking yourself: if my job title disappeared tomorrow, would I still be me?
This part, though, misses an important point: status and wealth. And I think it’s especially directed at those.
It can be beautiful to identify yourself with your job if you are a professor or a social worker. The problem is identifying yourself with the social status provided by your job (paycheck and power), not the work itself.
Dobel says work gives us the illusion of meaning
The OP says he is going to "do other things" and clicking the link reveals a bike tour across the coast of California. How quaint. These articles always seem like they are trying to dismiss some fantasy of reader or chide them to have the right perspective and basically boil down to say "Why are you so obsessed with work? Go outside, have fun. You Americans are so serious!" But all of this betrays the fact that is the writer of such articles that appears to be extremely naive. I think it is very clear that these people actually believe in this UBI fantasy world or mathematical mysticism. The "other things" that he would be more likely to be doing would be to be hunting and foraging for food and not hunting with ammunition because that is expensive and he won't have money for that. It's so delusional and sort of pompous at the same time. Just my take.
>But warmth. Empathy. The ability to sit with someone in their confusion and make them feel understood. The ability to crack a joke at exactly the right moment and remind someone that they're not alone. The capacity to be fully present with another person, to see them not as a role they're playing but as a whole human being… that cannot be automated away and hopefully never will.
Yeah it can. People have been using LLMs as therapists and digital friends for a while now. All of the soft skills were the first to get automated.
> My technical skills are being disrupted by machines - that's fine I'll go do other things.
Oh yeah? What exactly?
I'm curious whether this is a strawman argument or not. Do software engineers really believe, even subconsciously, that they are their job?
Imagine that tomorrow the government decided to pay $250K per year to each software engineer for life as long as they never worked again. Would there be a lot of anxiety about losing the meaning of existence? Of course not! SEs would be celebrating in the streets.
That means the anxiety about AI destroying jobs is all about economic loss, not psychological meaning.
> You are not your job
Fully agreed.
>You're beginning to feel less-than-useful.
Nope, not at all. Or maybe I do feel a bit useless against the AI slop and FOMO that gets pushed around. But the field is still gonna need engineers to do the non-slop work, or to fix it when it goes wrong.
(I use AI daily BTW.)
As someone said: AI will take our jobs when the execs are able to state their requirements precisely. We're safe!
I don't think it'll happen, but we only need a fraction of people employed.
Robo Socialism is possible, I'd rather send a robot up to clean a roof , build a house, down a pipe , etc.
Robo taxis will be safer in due time.
Instead as the number of viable jobs continues to shrink we'll blame each other.
I want to thank everyone who hates work, is mentally checked out of their jobs and quiet quitting etc.
It makes it much easier for me to distinguish myself as a hard worker who cares about the business being successful. It also helps me keep my job during layoffs because I can assure you the managers have noticed.
When you are old and have lots of formative experiences that are not work-based, we can shake hands and mutually appreciate each other's motives and respective outcomes.
I am arguably a successful employee in a tech-focused role. I enjoy my job and others seem to feel I'm good at what I do.
That said: I am NOT at all interested in identifying myself in social situations by my job. When someone asks what I do, I respond that I work in tech. I am not interested in giving more details nor talking in-depth about what I do to others I have just met.
Why? Because that's not at all what makes me...me. I am far more interested in what I do outside of work (reading...a lot, listening to music, spending as much time w/my family as possible, traveling, spending time at my lake home, etc). That is what I work to do; enjoy my life.
I realize this is an uncommon opinion, but I find it SO VERY ODD that folks are OBSESSED about their jobs and make it a central point of their existence to those outside of their specific industry. I do NOT care what someone does for their day-to-day; it's unlikely it will have any impact on me or my friendship with them. I want to know what they bring to the table in our current or potential social situation and the fact that they make PowerPoint presentations for whomever to look at, ask a few questions answered in the presentation's appendix, and never think about again doesn't do anything to further any of that.
Well said, thanks
I’d much rather know and learn about someone’s passion for woodworking, hill walking, flower arranging, whatever they enjoy doing in their free time, rather than having to talk about their (or my!) work.
Yeah! IMHO "What are you into / what do you care about or do for fun?" should replace "What do you do? [ie, what's your profession / where do you work]" as the default ice-breaker. More interesting, less reductive or competitive.
So you are saying that your job does not have any impact on your personality, despite you are there for 8+h a day? The environment you are in for hours (even if its great, you are forced) does not shapre who you are?
And regarding social interactions: Its no difference for you interacting with people from your mind-liked crowd in opposion to someone who runs a gun-shop-chain? For sure, a constructed example, but Id say there is for sure some difference when acting with the different groups?
> So you are saying that your job does not have any impact on your personality, despite you are there for 8+h a day
(Not OP) It's not a core part of it, no. I'm a person who likes solving problems and has an attention to detail. If I see that something is wrong I have a desire to fix it regardless of it's my responsibility or not. This could be finding an outdated piece of documentation at work or finding a piece of litter on the street.
These traits make me an effective software engineer (up to the senior level, then I have to fight against those parts of my personality and focus on specific high-impact things if I want to succeed at Staff+), but they are a part of who I am totally independent from my career.
Software engineering is a field that I am good at and that pays exceptionally well, but I could be happy utilizing these traits in any number of careers. Were I financially independent, my dream career would probably be something closer to the people who design and build elaborate contraptions for stage shows such as Cirque du Soleil.
Do you have any friends? Your job is a good topic that allows you to find something in common with another person.
I prefer to ask people what they do for fun when looking for something in common, as opposed to what they do for work.
Some people are recently laid off, and asking what they do for work might sting a bit.
I like asking both, but these days a lot of the "what do you do for fun" answers are just consumption hobbies (e.g. I watch X show on Netflix) that people use to switch off after a long day of work. It's easier to think of interesting follow up questions about someone's work than about these kinds of hobbies. Even if (especially if) the work is something completely different from what I'm doing.
> I prefer to ask people what they do for fun when looking for something in common, as opposed to what they do for work.
Hasn't the question always implied to be about what you do for fun? It has never occurred to me that should answer "I wash the dishes".
Not if they work outside of tech…
As the sister comment said: "Not if they work outside of tech…" And not even then, in many cases. I know exactly what I do, but having to explain that to anyone, including people in tech, is difficult.
And, you know, it's not interesting to talk about. Talking about that is fine at the job, that's what we do. I have no interest in talking about that when I'm not working. Instead I want to talk about other things. Hobbies, activities, music, books, whatever. Enquring about someone's job will not lead to that at all.
It sounds like you have a privileged life, and a hard time getting into the shoes of people who don’t.
Traveling? Lake home? I am glad to go to work just to not listen to my wife how we are so poor and cannot have nice things.
> It also helps me keep my job during layoffs because I can assure you the managers have noticed.
If you believe the managers who interact with you have any say in who gets laid off, then your understanding of how business works isn't nearly as good as you seem to believe it is.
Depends on the size of company. I’ve definitely worked for companies where I know for a fact that my manager had the final say.
If you still have a manager, it's not a bad layoff
Something tells me you haven't been laid off before. I think the overconfidence you're displaying here will be shattered if that were to happen. I hope it doesn't happen to you, but if it does I hope you remember that you are not your job.
I think it has a lot to do with the size of the organization. If you're at a relatively small company, it's not that hard to identify and retain the top performers.
If you're at a faceless megacorp, that's a different story.
You can be laid off at small companies too. For example, a company may be running out of runway and it's looking increasingly likely the next round of funding will not materialize in time. It needs to control expenses and extend runway an extra 6 months, but everyone's a "top-performer". Who gets laid off? It's likely going to be those adding features (e.g. product folks), not those maintaining the business (accounting, devops). We can get into whether it's a good idea to kick off the death spiral for a company in that way, but my point is that no one is immune to layoffs, not at any scale, except maybe the founders.
> everyone's a "top-performer"
Except, that’s very rarely the case IME.
We’re talking about improving, not guaranteeing, your odds long term employment.
40 years of an ego dependent on Russian roulette.
> worker who cares about the business being successful
In most cases, this is a sucker mentality that makes you vulnerable to abusive employers. You will stress yourself out making your boss richer. They won't care or make reciprocal gestures. They'd be happy to replace you should you become inconvenient.
It’s not about stressing yourself out; that’s something you can ultimately control (though admittedly, many people are bad at separating the two) but more about _how good you are at putting on a show_ of giving a shit.
There is a non zero chance that the company I work for pivots into some weird crypto niche (low, but we’re already fintech-y). If that happens, I’m out, but no way in hell am I gonna pivot my work personality overnight because of a business decision made by the company’s board and investors.
If I need to put on a happy face for my boss to keep my job, then I’m gonna do it because I can’t afford not to at the moment. That’s not to say there is no line, but being a generally positive person in the workplace is a role I’m fine with playing. It costs me very little personally and opens a lot of doors because let’s face it, nobody likes working with a loathsome human being, even if they’re right.
Am I a sucker? Maybe by your definition, but I don’t feel like one currently.
> Am I a sucker? Maybe by your definition, but I don’t feel like one currently.
Part of being a sucker is not thinking you're a sucker.
> more about _how good you are at putting on a show_ of giving a shit.
> If I need to put on a happy face for my boss to keep my job,
OK, this is an entirely different thing. This is being dishonest.
I've known people who survived multiple rounds of layoffs, not because they were "distinguished", but because they were the cheapest. Meanwhile, their more talented counterparts got the ax for being too expensive. Simple as that.
> It also helps me keep my job during layoffs because I can assure you the managers have noticed.
I can assure you that when they are laying off to cut costs, which is most of the time, what they notice is A) the old/expensive ones who can be let go without any major disruptions and B) the "expendables" such as contractors or those they have a personal dislike of - the latter usually has not much to do with hard work and a lot more to do with perception. Category A is to meet cost targets while category B can also help with number targets.
If you think your hard work alone will save you, I pray that life spares you that rude shock.
> It also helps me keep my job during layoffs because I can assure you the managers have noticed.
Sounds like you’re young and early in your career.
Wait till you’re part of a layoff where an entire division or arm of the company is axed in a 750 person headcount reduction.
Doesn’t matter how good you are, how many years of service you have or even if the CEO loves you. You’ll be out.
It does matter because it's your network that gets you your next job and colleagues remember who was doing a good job and helping meet goals and those who didn't.
We were talking about keeping a job, not finding a new one.
> It also helps me keep my job during layoffs because I can assure you the managers have noticed.
I got to this bit before realising this is satire
I have no faith that this is satire since America is full of people who underestimate the impact of luck and privilege in the course of their life in favor of a view that everything is due to their own personal efforts and the suffering of others is obviously due to their personal defects. These people will relentlessly defend any actions by the owner class without realizing that they themselves are not in that class and never will be. They say things like this a lot.
This approach makes huge sense when you're a contractor who is aiming to graduate into a staff engineer.
I mostly agree with the parent post. There certainly are roles where the entire scope of the job is to convert Jira tickets to code and nothing else and nobody will blame you for being a checked out 9-5er in such places but that isn't the audience of HN. Most here are software engineers who get fairly broad latitude to exercise judgment and expertise/education in furtherance of business goals and that's they get the FAANG-sized paycheck and RSUs/stock grants for. And you better believe colleagues in those roles notice who is just doing the minimum and who is helping to achieve goals.
You only care about “business goals” under a certain age, I’d say 35-ish, afterwards, if you hadn’t realized by that point that it’s just a paycheck and nothing more then no mindfulness trickery not any “let’s-experience-things”-consoomerism is going to fill the spiritual void inside of you.
Could be 35-ish of age, like in my case, could be later, could be earlier, but at some point that realization will have to come otherwise you’ll remain an empty corpse throughout the rest of it all.
You care for business goals because that's what you're being paid to do. The "nuh-uh, I'm being paid to code and that's it" are the ones who wonder why their career stalled early.
Nobody's saying you should care about business goals personally; that would indeed be dumb.
Yeah that.
I don’t put any effort in now. Still get paid the same. Now have more time for better stuff.
Hate to say it but very appropriate username.
[flagged]
We've banned this account for repeatedly breaking the site guidelines and ignoring our requests to stop. You can't do this here, no matter how wrong another comment is or you feel it is.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Until you get fired…
How has Severance not been mentioned in this Thread. Definite Ricken Vibes.
But unless you’re independently wealthy, you are your income.
This text feels like AI-slop, or at least AI-“improved”. No life in it, lots of (by definition, artificial) cheesiness, the usual, I mean.
Meh, I feel the opposite. Even though I come from a culture that values separation of work and free time a lot (France), I still feel like it's copium. The fact is, if you spend most of your valuable brain time on a task, your brain starts to get shaped for such task, therefore I don't see why you can't identify yourself as your job. The stuff the author talks about, empathy, ability to joke etc. is also heavily influenced by your day-to-day activity, your job. Heck, there are even some people who claim they became aphantasic and lost all capacity for dreams and creativity after working too much with computers.
Anyways, I get the point of the post, capitalism sucks and makes most of our existence as worth as cattle, that is, if we don't value the stuff outside work.
Adapt or die. It has been the law for nature. It serves now.
This advice is not as useful if you have a high ACE score and have been severely conditioned to not trust people.
The tech industry used to be a refuge for analytical people who have severe social anxiety, but now it has been completely overrun by gold rush bros.
eh..just lining up words next to each other here
More therapeutic nonsense for the AI age.[1]
[1] AI Inevitability Soothsaying https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47362178
> Saying "I am a software engineer" is beginning to feel like saying "I am a calcultor" in 1950 now that digital machines can use electrical circuits to count, add, multiply - it's not long until they'll be able differentiate a non-continuous function... You're beginning to feel less-than-useful.
> This bothers a lot of people for a reason (I think) that has nothing to do with the technology. The fear isn't really about losing a job title, it's about losing the story you tell yourself about who you are.
Get Fing real. Most, most, most people in the world need a job to survive. Some technologists might have stonks and financial independence. Those with stocks or other kinds of passive (parasitic) income are the minority.
I think that goes for most programmers as well.
Okay so we’re going to get to how this just means you’ll need to change jobs. So let’s wait for that.
> I like Susan Fiske's research on how humans judge each other shows something worth sitting with. When you meet someone, you assess them on two dimensions. The first is warmth - do you believe they mean you well? The second is competence - do you believe they're capable?
This is farcical when you consider that people with enough capital can survive on just that, capital. No matter what the research says about “competence”. There are billions of dollars invested in portraying people with money as competent. But if that propaganda is ineffectual it’s not like it matters. The system is arranged such that they won’t be inconvenienced by the judgement of commoners.
> Thus far we have automated away "wasteful" or "unnecessary" jobs. Perhaps the elevator operator was your friend, someone you saw everyday. I'm not certain their purpose was "useless". They're gone nonetheless.
> This is the whole point of the system. [...]
The point of the system is to commoditize everything and concentrate wealth.
Labor is a commodity. Labor created automation. And labor will be discarded once the automation that it created displaces labor.
The automation is then fully in the hands of the so-called competent. Capital.
> Whether you do well through an economic transition or not has little to do with the cause (AI, digital technology, industrialization, coal), and more to do with the social and political structures which exist around you (which is a blog post for another day).
That’s rich. The author already told us the fairytale version of Capitalism, the version where we are supposedly all going to benefit. But now the author pretends to shy away and tell us that it is a blog post for another day?
No—you already took a stance with that statement, even with the premise of this therapeutic distraction since you assume that it is just a matter of changing jobs.
Is it though? When the whole system is made for Capital? And Capital obviously owns the automation? Who managed to buy up so much RAM that it caused a global shortage?
But meh, political structure and all that—trivialities for another day. We’re here to pump up Inevitability discourse with.
> You are not your job. You're a person first. Your ability to connect, be present, and make people feel understood is what makes you irreplaceable to the people around you, which is the only market that counts.
I’ll remember that while in the unemployment line.
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