Life is Short
paulgraham.com
paulgraham.com
One gem in here that has not been high-lit by other commenters in this thread that stands out for me because that's one that I did figure out very early on in life (and this served me very well) is this one:
"As I've written before, one byproduct of technical progress is that things we like tend to become more addictive. Which means we will increasingly have to make a conscious effort to avoid addictions—to stand outside ourselves and ask "is this how I want to be spending my time?""
Please do ask yourself that question often, and if the answer is 'no' or 'maybe' then simply don't and save yourself a lot of grief and regret in the long run.
For people who aren't yet parents, it compares a bit to the way your thinking about money matures when you get your first job. Suddenly a shirt equals two hours of labor instead of some abstract quantity of a theoretically finite resource. This triggers in many of us a quest to figure out income, so we can get the things we want. But even the affluent among us can't just throw more time at all the things they'd want to do.
But is life is too short to use your wealth and power to help solve the problem you acknowledge there is? That sounds like a weird idea. Most of PGs essays aren't controversial they are more informative. Why is life too short for that?
If anything PG is a thinker and a good one at it. He doesn't get everything right (who does) but he is a smart enough thinker to be able to develop his thinking.
You can read his essay in three ways.
1) Life is too short, I don't like writing essays about things that interest me anymore.
2) Life is too short, I just want to kick back and enjoy my family and the money I have.
3) Life is too short.
No matter how you turn it around I fail to see why he would give up writing something that he surely enjoys doing. Especially when you have the power to actually get people to take you serious. (Perhaps thats the problem?)
So why should life be too short for that? Only PG knows. But I think he is proving that either some of the "conspiracy theorists" in this thread are not wrong, or some of his critiques of his last couple of essays are not wrong either.
Ouch.
> I understand what it means when people say life is to short.
I'll bet, that's the kind of thing that will make this a background feeling almost continuously.
> But is life is too short to use your wealth and power to help solve the problem you acknowledge there is?
Well, PG is - in his own way - doing just that. He made quite a few people quite wealthy and he wasn't exactly obliged to do so. After all the first exit he had was one where he could have comfortably lived for the rest of his years without spending a single micro-second on the problems of others.
> That sounds like a weird idea.
It is, and I don't think that idea is actually present in this essay or any of the others. Horses for courses, PG is good at what he does and uses his wealth in the way he thinks best matches his skillset. Contrasted with say Zuckerbergs fairly hollow 'letter to my daughter' I frankly much prefer the PG variety, though of course I already had quite a different opinion about those two individuals before either of them wrote a line.
> Most of PGs essays aren't controversial they are more informative. Why is life too short for that?
He's not saying he won't write more essays. He's saying that he's going to be more in fire-and-forget mode, engaging the audience on his terms rather than feeling that he has to respond to each and every person out there with an axe to grind and an internet connection. I'd say more power to him.
So given that I won't go into the second part of your comment because I think you derailed somewhere right at the beginning making the rest not really relevant.
Hence the 'bullshit' line.
Other than that what other controversial essays have he written? Maybe one other?
Ok. "20 or so" describes me. And things aren't going so well.
Out of uni, and life feels pretty empty. Family has fallen apart, friends are friends of convenience, work is very intense - perhaps too much - and everything is going into keeping going. The brave face, making sure I eat, making sure I run, cycle, climb.
The dreams I had even six months ago, feeling ever more impossible. The lure of things I found rewarding in the past - computer games, novels, reddit, hacker news, debating - proving substanceless, insufficient.
The games and the websites are addictive.
> is this how I want to be spending my time?
No. But the truth is I do not know how else to spend my time.
I feel like I should find another job. Move to a different city or country. But I don't know how to do these things. I do not know if these things will help. I have a feeling the problem is me.
So when I am trapped in an empty bed, in a house of people who 'get on', in a city that is ok. I read the novels, I play the games, and I click the links. I try and forget I am here, living in bullshit.
Remember that wasting time at 20 seems OK, wasting it at 30 will make you nervous, and if you're still doing it at 40, you'll wonder where all the time went. It really happens surprisingly fast - at 29, you feel young, but a short decade later, you'll fret about being "too old" (which is an illusion, but it takes a while to know that). Don't worry that you'll mess up your career or anything else by taking some time to do something adventurous. Pretty much whatever you do, you'll look back and thank yourself for stepping out rather than hunkering down.
BTW, as for "work is very intense" - it probably isn't worth it. I burnt out once after a few years of very intense, very committed work. I wasn't better off at the end of it and nobody says "thank you", not sincerely anyway. And after you leave, the waters close around you and it will be like you were never there. So if you're not enjoying it, maybe it's the kind of bullshit you can do without?
Wow that imagery is powerfully sad. Corporate culture and its structural constraints makes monsters of all of us.
I didn't mean it to be ;) I'm an optimist at heart, honestly, and I'm not sitting here feeling I've wasted my life or anything. But there are some things I wouldn't do again if I had my time again, and working hard for unappreciative, self-centred people is one of them.
That's a bit of a luxury, you don't always have that choice but on the whole I agree with the idea. I'd re-phrase it to don't work for assholes if you can avoid it. I'm fortunate enough now that this is a rare occurrence but even now every now and then a deal goes by that is financially too sweet to let go and I still take them. Last year this happened once, the previous 3 years not at all. So unless you're totally secure in your finances keep that door open a crack.
Good to see you on this side of the line after two heart surgeries.
If I could go back and tell myself something, or if I had kids to advise, this is the essence of it.
Once you've got your basic needs met, anything you do to enrich your character is going to make you a more compelling person. Don't squander your 20s and 30s. Take advantage of opportunities that present themselves, because it's a lot harder to cultivate new opportunities from scratch.
GP, if you can actually afford to pick up and try something new, you really ought to do it. It's so easy nowadays: pick a city and spend two weeks at an Airbnb. If you like it, stay longer, and if not, go back or go somewhere else.
Which dreams? Are the people who have achieved dreams like those that much more capable of you? One of my realizations is just how much less important intelligence is to drive. If you want something, oftentimes the difference is doing the work. Make sure it's a meaningful dream (e.g. not "get rich" which impacts happiness surprisingly little).
"I feel like I should find another job. Move to a different city or country. But I don't know how to do these things."
Are you more or less capable than the millions of people who find new jobs or move? You sound smart and educated. "Don't know how" seems like a pretty soft excuse. Everything has an "undo" button. Get a new job and it sucks? Well, you tried and learned some interesting things about yourself and the world-- go find another one. Move to a different city and find out that you don't love it? Well, you got to explore a cool place that wasn't for you, and maybe you met some interesting people. Move back or move to a new city.
I am going to make a bold claim here. I hear this very often among people in the west. I here the same among people in India(I'm from India) who come from families who are rich, well supplied with resources. Perhaps its the saturation that a person reaches a point after a person reaches and experiences a sufficient degree of sufficiency.
>>I have a feeling the problem is me.
It is hard to convince your mind to prepare for a grand struggle, challenge or a mission- when none exists. The west(especially US) is already reached the pinnacle of what a developed nation could look like. Schools are free, Country wide road network is nothing like anywhere, Cities with opportunities all over the place, Infrastructure is simply amazing, you can take water out of any tap in the country and it will be clean, you have social security ... the list is endless.
On top of all this if your family is even from lower middle class, you are generally well provided for.
Your mind doesn't identify with any struggle or even acknowledge that one exists. This can for sure cause 'Why am I here' crisis. Like I said I see this same among a lot of friends in India, especially among people from rich families.
So the right response is to change your viewpoint to one where the problems you are confronted with match your abilities to solve them, in order to get better at this so that you can solve larger problems later on (and it helps that while you're doing this you also make contact with other people who will in turn become your real-life network).
This can take a while, but that's fine. Living in India or the West would not change much in this respect but for someone that grew up in the West to go to India would likely change their perspective on life and values tremendously, just like the reverse would happen if someone from India moved to the West for a while. They'd come back a different person, and would mature a large amount in a relatively short time.
Finally, when I was 27 and my first child arrived that phase ended, then it very much mattered if there was money on the table and life suddenly changed from being relatively free to being quite structured with a very high penalty on any inability to provide. I made a pretty conscious decision to stop following just what interested me but to chase the buck and with the knowledge gained in the preceding years that was quite easy.
Go see the world while the current phase lasts, sooner or later life will really trap you (compared to your situation atm) and then you're on the hook for many years before you will have some of this freedom back again. By then your body will be one that you can't compare to today (and I'm saying that as a reasonably fit person of 50+), your time will be spoken for at some regular interval and so on.
The right time to strike out into the world is now, don't worry overly about how you'll finance any or all of this, a few hundred in savings would be enough to broaden your horizon tremendously and that alone will give you an advantage over those that are rooted to their hometown.
This, by the way is what fuels my 'journeyman' projects that I try to do each year now, they're a link back to my past, basically not a new thing but a continuation. It's been incredibly rewarding to meet all these new people and to help them to achieve their dreams and contribute a little bit to solving their problems even if not a single cent ever changed hands. I very much look forward to doing another round of these this coming summer.
Take leave or negotiate unpaid leave if you have to. Try just a weekend at first.
If you think you can't afford to travel, find travel you can afford. That might be domestic, camping, sleeping in the back of a car on a road trip, going to less-in-demand national parks. See and do something new.
In many ways this is a solidification of a lot of what I have been thinking
But I can't help but feel like it's all wrong. Work hard for what? So you can amass enough money for when you're too old to work? That whole way of life seems counter to the "life is short" argument. Because of that, I find myself needing to constantly move on, ever searching for something truly fulfilling. Work seemed to fulfill me for 4 years or so, but I feel like I've achieved what I set out to achieve, and now it is hollow.
Actually, don't "simply don't" because that's not a useful way to go about improving things. Learn how your brain works and what you can do to actively change the way it currently operates. You wouldn't expect a trainer at the gym to simply tell you "get stronger" and walk away. You need to learn how muscles work, what types of exercises to perform, how to perform them, and then you need to achieve consistency.
(I can only imagine how much sooner I would have achieved consistent happiness if my school teachers and parents would have refrained from simply demanding I "pay attention!" and instead taught me how.)
Anecdote: Thursday night I was going to the bathroom and dropped my phone in the toilet. Doneso - no amount of rice was saving that thing. Replacement can't get here til Monday. After that understandably frustrating experience my girlfriend made a point to call out that I pretty much didn't flinch over it all. Kinda laughed it off. For context, the learned behaviors I've owned since childhood typically goad me into punching a wall over such incidents.
It's a bit difficult to explain, but putting actual practices into play to alter the way you think/react/act feels to me like "unburdening" yourself. There was a great line in the book 10% Happier (great, easy read, no self-improvement BS) about the author wanting to call it "The Voice In My Head Is An Asshole" that kind of gets to the heart of it all, for me. We don't control ourselves! That's not how every day living is set up. If we could, then we'd never be sad or angry or stressed. It would be that simple; just tell yourself to be happy and you'd be happy. Such a simple concept but not something easily internalized.
The next step was to remove things from my life that cause stress and are not worth the effort because of the BS they involve. Whether that's just life situations or clients it has been very refreshing.
The next step was to kill a lot of tv/movies, and most of my free time internet usage.
Finally, I started steadily filling in the new time gainings with things I really care about and the personal sense of well-being and accomplishment has improved drastically.
So I have no intent of doing anything other than continuing to go down this road, I've gotten in better physical shape, better health, enjoy life more, have learned a new language, visited many new places, my stress level has dropped by at last 200%, its been a very positive journey so far.
It feels like trying to kick smoking. I have a list of stuff I want to do (fix up my motorbikes, finish my 'day van', get back in to DH mountain biking) and a list of stuff I do (video games, drink, NetFlix, Reddit), and I always seep back to the latter one.
Might give it another go soon, life is short after all.
But I didn't try to cut out those distractions and start a workout routine at the same time.
Also I didn't try to start anything else until the last goal had become kind of routine (like brushing your teeth in the morning).
There are still many things on my list to see and do and there's still stress in my life, but I feel with this method of one micro step at a time you slowly chip away in unnoticeable steps until now for me a little over a year later you've made a big noticeable dent.
oh yea, I finally quit smoking too :)
EDIT: most of my goals also had to do with eliminating stress. For instance, my "learning the language" was to just turn on the radio and listen to interesting talk shows in swedish and occasionally look up words, all which was very relaxing for me. My exercise is swimming which is super enjoyable for me and something I always look forward to (even when I didn't have the time to do it). I don't know what it would be like if you do not actually look forward to or enjoy your goals...
I ask because HN is my biggest time sync. It's the thing I grab whenever there is a moment of free time and even when their isn't. I type it into my browser without even thinking about it.
I banned it once with /etc/hosts and that lasted about 3 months or maybe it was 6. I'd still read on my phone but that wouldn't happen except out and about or at bathroom breaks.
Then at some point I turned it back on. When it got bad again I blocked it in /etc/hosts. But, it's available in a VM. I'd hoped that would be enough to discourage me but it's not. Instead my habit now is to launch the VM. It is slightly better than unblocked because I still type it into my main browser and the block keeps me off until I eventually use the VM
I'd guess I spent 2-4 hours a day on it. I woke up a 8:30 today. Other than a shower I've been on HN. It's 10:10
Alasdair MacIntyre in After Virtue talks about the concept of a tradition as forming a narrative backbone for a person's life and actions. Conversation is also crucial, and traditions can be seen as extended conversations. I suggest that Hacker News is a place where such a tradition is constructed and maintained. It gives rise to an "imagined community" [2] of this profession of startup development (which is tied into the tradition of open source hacking in interesting ways, sometimes conflicting).
In that sense browsing HN is not merely a bad habit. Maybe the negative tendency is to become a more passive participant, or just gossiping all day. Ideally the site would feed into a larger pattern of creative action, instead of only providing some click buzz relaxation. So we could think about how to use the conversation to give wind to our sails, so to speak—or just how to be more active in the actual tradition, not just the discussion surrounding it.
That's a big discussion and I've already spent an hour writing this comment, after deleting a long and boring explanation of the MacIntyre book's thesis... So I'll just say that Cal Newport's new book Deep Work was pretty inspiring for me, and it's a quick read.
I think you could formulate a dialectic where deep work and community conversation feed into each other. It's like how books are the deep artifacts that conversations can orient themselves around, and the books themselves are like concentrated results of sometimes decades-long conversations.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/After_Virtue
I think it's time for us to start questioning if we really "Want" to do these things so much (exercise) why we don't do them. Do we just want to have done them (it'd sure be nice if I had a nice bod, I should workout. I should learn 12 languages and 3 instruments too!)? Or do we think we want them? Or is there some perverse reason why our body keeps us from doing what we truly want to do in that moment?
You may lose friends because they may think you don't care enough about them since you don't call them frequently anymore (and emails do not work for everyone).
You are unreachable through the modern messengers because you refuse to waste time on a gazillion of them.
Other people update their friends through Facebook. If you opt for an alternative like email (async and focusing on message) then you may be weird for some.
Being focused is great and indeed makes wonders in productivity. Nevertheless, in most cases around 6 hours of quality mental work is the limit. The rest you have to do a lower mental effort activity. That means either writing boilerplate code, answering emails, meetings, reading hn but possibly not learning a new language or meeting new people.
Stress levels fell because you are in control of your life or so you feel since you have limited external signals. That may not be true but you can't be sure always since you have limited environmental feedback. Nevertheless, being ultra responsive means less control also for me (without getting too philosophical).
All in all, I agree with all the steps listed above. That does mean they are the path to enlightenment for everyone or without drawbacks.
Having mentioned that, I feel that for a similar strategy was net positive. Mostly because context switching has large costs and because our modern world makes money by distracting us (feeds us with us about superficial needs/lifestyle and forcing us to measure our sense of self on metrics based on narrow minded philosophies -- consumerism of info(/)products).
I'm not getting involved in the overall discussion, just wanted to highlight this gem. This is so true.
In a conversation about Netflix's announcement of worldwide availability the other day I put it this way - so much of the economy is based on cultivating and indulging in mindlessness.
If you cultivate mindfulness you see how pointless and wasteful so much of people's activities are.
> The next step was to kill a lot of tv/movies, and most of my free time internet usage.
So I actually figured out that TV was the devil in early high school and stopped watching it almost entirely. There are very particular shows that I will follow and if that show isn't playing, the TV is off.
I also don't watch movies to kill time. I pretty much only watch movies with friends or if it's a movie that I suspect will be thought provoking.
I'm still working on the internet distraction piece. I'd love to hear strategies for wasting less time on the internet.
> Finally, I started steadily filling in the new time gainings with things I really care about
I was very fortunate that I've had this mentality from the start. I pursue what interests me. Whatever that is. Don't care if it's weird, or if I'm the oddball. I just go for it. That has led me to have the most random diverse group of hobbies/skills/life pursuits. I'm a programmer. All-American football player (and national champion). Football coach. Gamer. I'm darn good at drawing/illustration. Pretty good cook as well. I like to sew. Now I'm in med school.
I look back at everything I've accomplished, the skills I've developed, the friends I've made along the way, and the future ahead of me, and I feel like I've had a full 25 years. Like I could die tomorrow and not be too upset about how I spent my time.
I often look at other people's lives and wonder who they would be if they simply went after the things they enjoyed.
Smaller shortcuts, like eating unhealthy to save some time, not showering everyday, shaving, to optimize my working time, was taking a toll on quality of life in the long term. Therefore I said to myself no shortcuts! This drastically increased my quality of life almost instantly as i take my time now to do "normal" things in life without rush. Actually enjoying it.
I also neglected working out and to do things I really like, always thinking I'll get to it once my startups takes off. Since I decided not to work after 6pm, I suddenly have a lot of free time which gave me the possibility to workout without feeling guilty and do other stuff I like.
I think I can further optimize by doing things like you described and will try some of them. Thanks for sharing.
It was hard to stop playing with a bunch of different projects and make myself focus on one single project, but in the end it has been extremely satisfying to finish what I start. I wish my father was still around to see what I've done, but I might never have finished anything without the lesson of his passing.
From 1Q84, Haruki Murakami
“Murakami is like a magician who explains what he’s doing as he performs the trick and still makes you believe he has supernatural powers . . . But while anyone can tell a story that resembles a dream, it's the rare artist, like this one, who can make us feel that we are dreaming it ourselves.” —The New York Times Book Review
The year is 1984 and the city is Tokyo.
A young woman named Aomame follows a taxi driver’s enigmatic suggestion and begins to notice puzzling discrepancies in the world around her. She has entered, she realizes, a parallel existence, which she calls 1Q84 —“Q is for ‘question mark.’ A world that bears a question.” Meanwhile, an aspiring writer named Tengo takes on a suspect ghostwriting project. He becomes so wrapped up with the work and its unusual author that, soon, his previously placid life begins to come unraveled.
As Aomame’s and Tengo’s narratives converge over the course of this single year, we learn of the profound and tangled connections that bind them ever closer: a beautiful, dyslexic teenage girl with a unique vision; a mysterious religious cult that instigated a shoot-out with the metropolitan police; a reclusive, wealthy dowager who runs a shelter for abused women; a hideously ugly private investigator; a mild-mannered yet ruthlessly efficient bodyguard; and a peculiarly insistent television-fee collector.
A love story, a mystery, a fantasy, a novel of self-discovery, a dystopia to rival George Orwell’s—1Q84 is Haruki Murakami’s most ambitious undertaking yet: an instant best seller in his native Japan, and a tremendous feat of imagination from one of our most revered contemporary writers.
[Vonnegut tells his wife he’s going out to buy an envelope] “Oh, she says well, you’re not a poor man. You know, why don’t you go online and buy a hundred envelopes and put them in the closet? And so I pretend not to hear her. And go out to get an envelope because I’m going to have a hell of a good time in the process of buying one envelope. I meet a lot of people. And, see some great looking babes. And a fire engine goes by. And I give them the thumbs up. And, and ask a woman what kind of dog that is. And, and I don’t know. The moral of the story is, is we’re here on Earth to fart around. And, of course, the computers will do us out of that. And, what the computer people don’t realize, or they don’t care, is we’re dancing animals. You know, we love to move around. And, we’re not supposed to dance at all anymore.”
This is in stark contrast with 'I wish I spent more time with person X'.
When you live a simpler life, you have simpler pleasures.
When you live a high-brow life, all of a sudden you grasp at experiences because you're not sure when the next one is going to come around the corner.
Hence missing people, or feeling like you will never get to do X again.
When you enjoy the smell of 100 flowers, the absence of a couple doesn't inspire your mind into a frenzy of 'optimizing away the bs' because you know, when you're a multi-millionaire who doesn't have to work another day in his life, is it really spending time on bs that's the problem?
Maybe it's the bs ideas in the mind and in this essay :)
I love seeing the blue sky and clouds and I love just walking outside even if a bike ride or bus ride would be faster. I also want to not be late for work, and have enough time to finish my errands. I want to have comfort and pay off my student loans and see Europe before I turn 35 (had to move the goal posts, unfortunately). It comes down to balancing things.
Also, chatting with a sales clerk, really, experiencing life is not a "simple pleasure" for some people, me included. If I had all the "important things" but couldn't see a white cloud for the rest of my life, I would consider that a failed life. In the end, we all have what we call "important" and what we call "bullshit", and it does vary from person to person.
"So it is—the life we receive is not short, but we make it so, nor do we have any lack of it, but are wasteful of it. Just as great and princely wealth is scattered in a moment when it comes into the hands of a bad owner, while wealth however limited, if it is entrusted to a good guardian, increases by use, so our life is amply long for him who orders it properly."
...
"But those who forget the past, neglect the present, and fear for the future have a life that is very brief and troubled; when they have reached the end of it, the poor wretches perceive too late that for such a long while they have been busied in doing nothing. "
http://www.forumromanum.org/literature/seneca_younger/brev_e...
Sometimes meandering in the manner of Vonnegut means your mind has chance to work on other things in the background, and as a result of this it gives you inspiration, etc.
Slightly on topic: Something I realised lately is that a lot of the activities I do are nothing but stress relief. So to have time to do things I want to do (studying, etc) I attempt to limit stress as much as possible, and not add more stress to the pile by accosting myself for the occasional daydream, etc.
I am looking forward to twenty years from now when I will have time to read all the Kurt Vonnegut, T. S. Eliot, and Charles Bukowski I missed when I was younger. Fortunately, for now, I need to get some work done.
"A man has not everything to do, but something; and because he cannot do everything, it is not necessary that he should do something wrong." -- from Civil Disobedience by Henry Thoreau
That something I have to do is learning to write shell scripts at the moment.
Vonnegut, like so many people, imagines computers can only suck the life out of things. I suppose we deserve that reputation, since so many of us write software that does.
The computer is a neutral tool that can make good things better and bad things worse. Because still a relatively new invention, and undergoing constant, rapid change in how it affects culture and individual behavior (pocket computers! VR! etc!), we haven't quite figured out how to distinguish the two.
In some cases this means that we unexpectedly find a wonderful application that improves countless lives, and in some cases it means that we discover ways in which the use of a computer can affect us or society negatively.
Personally, I am generally in favor of change, in the broadest sense, even if sometimes it's bad, while paradoxically I myself don't deal well with changes. The thing I love about computers is that they are one of the biggest instruments of change, and yet in my interactions with computers they are wonderfully boring and predictable, in the end.
I have a theory that this is one aspect of computers that draws so many people like me to them. I have access to a vast world of experience, knowledge and people while using a tool that I control, usually from the comforts of my home. And using that same tool, in the same comfortable setting, I can create things that somehow affect (and ideally benefit) many people, through writing, coding, 'drawing', and most importantly the internet.
That said, of course going out into the world is still an activity that is important for happiness, at least for most people. But the fact that I live in a time where I can create, learn, consume, bond, and so on, with this one tool and an internet connection is something I'm very thankful for.
It was something I only realised I could do through shitty things that happened over the last few years but working on it has given me a peace I've been missing a long time - I've found it's way too easy to get caught up in the day to day of keeping up with the field we are in, everything moves so quickly I started to feel like if I got off the bus I'd never be able to catch back up..but the thing is another bus usually turns up (if it's a UK bus it'll be late though..).
Repetition doesn’t create memories. New experiences do. Our perception of time is really driven by our perception of the unfamiliar, vivid and new. Of course, it turns out time slows down the most during life threatening experiences. [1] A safer way to slow down time is to travel. Travel is a new experience that can transport you out of your everyday routine to create memories with the ones you love.
https://medium.com/@bchesky/how-to-time-travel-b604096d5ed0#...
For one, from the essay:
> But different things matter to different people, and most have to learn what matters to them
And for two, Kurt is at odds with himself in that quote though his overall sentiment is correct. He says to "fart around" and then creates a straw-man with computers. What he really means to say (I think) is that life is about experiencing it and appreciating those experiences.
This certainly doesn't run contrary to what PG is saying. In fact, he's saying the same exact thing -- life is short, so find what you love and do it & love it.
But that makes me think on what actually matters. Doesn't everything we do in our free time matter? If it didn't, why would we do it?
And then we do things that don't matter all the time at work, PG used meetings an example. Usually, they don't matter, but we do them... it seems there's a bit of give and take. I suppose we could ignore some of the meetings but too many missed meetings might piss the boss off. Then we lose the income source and makes it really hard to do what matters.
This piece hit me pretty hard. My dad's in the hospital again, one of the many times over the years. I never know when might be the last. I live hundreds of miles away... it sucks.
The life of a human can be wrought with meaningless acts that have been given a lofty value in the human's head. One human says "This is meaningless!" while the other calls it holy. Many take this as a lesson to say that happiness is found by arbitrarily assigning value, but this -- and all idols -- will fail.
The great lesson of this world is to find yourself. This is necessary because the world is a dream; a very complicated but simple illusion. How does one escape illusions? Surely not by fighting with them, but by letting them go. This is why monks train so long to let go of attachment to the world and learn how to disconnect from it. The enlightenment that follows is but recognition of the real world -- what some would call "heaven" or "nirvana".
Different strokes for different folks, but the end-goal will always be the same for this world. The "last judgment" will be when the world has finally been judged truly and we relinquish from it and go back home. It might be many, many years away, but there are some of us whose only purpose is to accelerate the return.
Therefore, knowing that I have a purpose, responsibility, and finite time on this world, the equation for what has meaning to me is "Is my function aligned with my purpose?"
"Life's a journey, not a destination."
Note: I always appreciate an explanation for a downvote. I love to defend the notion that automating tasks can always lead to more productivity/happiness if we assign the freed resources appropriately.
When you realize how short time really is you ruthlessly cut bullshit.
Of course, with all of us being different humans with different experiences and different mindsets, YMMV.
As DHH said in Twist interview: "If you're not working on your best idea right now, you're doing it wrong"
It takes me ~10 minutes to shop online and buy the parts I need to put together my own PC. When I receive it, it takes me an additional 15 minutes to unbox it, and put it all together. Then another 30 installing the OS and all the programs I will need.
That's less than an hour. Given the price difference between a Mac and a PC with the same exact equipment (same CPU, RAM, HD, etc), we're looking at ~$250 USD on the low end and ~$550 USD on the high end. Unless you're making $250 USD (or more) per hour, it's most definitely cheaper time-wise to build your own PC.
15 minutes to unbox probably doesn't include taking out the trash. :)
I'm a power user, so I need a lot of programs and setting them up properly usually takes 4-6 hours if not more. Just finding and installing proper driver for stuff like my Wacom tablet takes 30 minutes or so. Again, if you do this every day, then yes, it could be much faster. But I buy a new computer once in 4-5 years and really cannot bother to automate.
Last two times I got a new computer, it took me 2-3 days before I could work on them at full speed. It sure is worth more than $550. Not calculating the cost of stress if something does not work properly.
I have been using Linux for 7+ years and Mac for just over one year. The difference: Mac is mostly Plug and Play. Linux is often Plug and Pray. Hell, doing something simple like copy/paste on Linux still feels like a game of chance.
I love open-source and freedom, but as I got kids I became more pragmatic. The time is limited and I'd rather spend it on building stuff than figuring out some quirks in the operating system.
No, this isn't true at all. The first time you put together your own computer, sure, maybe, it may take a bit longer. But the next time and the time after that, it becomes quicker and quicker because you already know the basics. It only takes 10 minutes to see what new GPUs or CPUs have come out.
Hell, if you didn't know anything about PCs, it would only take 5 minutes to look up all the parts in the latest Mac and order them off newegg. You could build your own exact copy of the latest mac and the research time would be negligible since you already know what parts you need since they're listed right there on the Mac SPEC sheet. And you'd save yourself hundreds of dollars.
> Last two times I got a new computer, it took me 2-3 days before I could work on them at full speed.
My 64 year old senile-ish father without any background in PCs put together his own PC and had it up and running in less than 4 hours. I don't buy 2 days at all. That's either an exaggeration or an outright lie.
> I'm a power user
A power user that cannot put together his own PC in under 2 days? I'm not sure I buy that. It's like a MLB player not being able to hit a ball that's traveling over 65 MPH. Even the pitchers are well enough versed to get hits occasionally.
Is this assuming that one would be building a PC with only a few years in-between?
It’s been more than 8 years since I built a PC, having assembled three of them in the past. It would definitely take me more than 10 minutes to research hardware because, after being shielded from the hardware complexity after using a Mac for so long, I’d need to research to make sure my previous knowledge of how to build a PC are still applicable.
Sure, it wouldn’t take me 2 days, and if not a lot has changed since I last built one four hours seems doable. But if I was very unsure of myself somewhere in the middle is more realistic and probably a more accurate assumption of how long it would take someone research, order and assemble a PC.
Your 64 year old senile-ish father probably uses one or two applications. I use over 50 different programs.
Also, I don't care about hardware at all. Last thing I remember is that there were Slot 1 and Slot A CPUs. I would need to research stuff before even figuring out which components are compatible. Perhaps it's all user-friendly now, but back in the day I recall always missing some cable or adapter to get stuff to work (like USB-PS2 converters for mouse or VGA-HDMI converters for monitors, etc.).
I care about building software. Hardware stuff is not something I need or want to deal with.
It would be like MLB player going to a baseball bat factory to make his own bat. He just wants a good bat. He doesn't care what wood is it made of, or what material is used for coating. He wants to pay for top-notch bat and concentrate on hitting the balls.
I had an IBM laptop before I had a Mac. At least one major component had to be replaced every single year for the duration of the four years I had it. Keys broke. the screen was shite. Windows crashed constantly. I lost all my files multiple times. After having it for more than a year it ran as if someone had permanently applied the brakes and it was just grinding against them and no amount of service seemed to be able to fix this. I spent weeks searching for the specific charger I needed only for the company to ship the wrong one, then when I had to replace it a second time they no longer manufactured it so I had to buy one second hand. That machine was an utter sinkhole of money and time. I swore off Windows products that day and have not spent a dime on them since. Maybe things have gotten better since XP but I'm not about to risk it.
Now I have a Mac. I have had the same MBP for 6+ years and it has never once required service, it runs perfectly, has never lost data, and has been a charm to work with. Sure, it cost me 2x as much as the IBM but in cumulative costs that is nothing. I could easily see this laptop lasting me another year at least.
I am not saying you are wrong, just providing my experience in which the cost of ownership in money and time has in fact been lower.
I don't need to reinstall the OS or download an uninstaller to remove bloatware. I don't need to install antivirus (yeah, this one isn't required, but the reality is that there is much more malware targeting Windows). I don't need to wait for Windows Update to finish before my computer shuts down or boots up - these are particularly painful. I don't need to worry about programs scaling to a retina/high DPI display. I don't need to spend time reading articles about how Windows 10 is tracking me and how to prevent it. I don't need to worry about my laptop breaking, because if it does, I'm a genius bar appointment away from getting it fixed. If my Samsung laptop breaks, I need to ship the whole thing, likely wasting weeks.
Not everyone experiences these issues, but this is how it feels for me. I made a very gradual transition to OS X - owning PCs, building PCs, using OS X on my PCs for almost a decade, then finally buying a Retina Macbook Pro.
While some of your points are valid for *nix setups as well (in terms of hardware, etc.) you've implicitly made the assumption that the only alternative to OS X is Windows, which strikes me as somewhat off base in a place like HN.
And I think twice before starting new projects. Although, I still sometimes feel like twice is not enough.
Much easier to find more money than more time.
It is sad - and disgusting - to see this degree of arrogance in bluntly categorising those who use (or build) PCs (and not Macs) as indulging in bullshit!
I am happy that you have found a useful computer in Mac. At the same time, though, please realise that hundreds of millions of computer users choose otherwise too. And, please do not conclude that they have time for bullshit just because of that!
This seems perfectly justified and fine to me; I don't get why you're so upset by it.
Because harsh expressions are usually gratuitous. Because blanket assertions are usually wrong. And, because combining both is rude.
(This applies to parts of PG's essay as well!)
For instance, did you really need to say `Whoa whoa slow down' when you began your reply? Did that add value?
This never happened though. The parent simply stated they didn't have time for bullshit then said they purchase Macs so they don't have build PCs. He / she simply stated what they considered important. It was personal, there was no blanket assertions at all and it was in the same tone as the article so what was gratuitous in this context?
> For instance, did you really need to say `Whoa whoa slow down' when you began your reply? Did that add value?
I certainly did due to the outlandishness of what I replied to. It sounded two orders of magnitude harsher and more personal than I would have expected especially on HN.
You took the worst possible interpretation of the original comment and then took it, out of context, as a personal attack. Then you posted a very nasty reply. Then, when you got called on it, you claim rudeness on the other parties.
Think about that. Re-read the entire thread. Because you not only missed the point of the OC, you missed the point of the original essay.
I guess you are both very young; I used to think eating was a waste of time in my 20s. I was dreaming of having a nutrition drip so I didn't have to waste time cooking or eating. But nothing beats cleaning or doing laundry imho.
> I'm pretty sure bullshit is relative.
1. I liked to do an activity before.
2. I don't do that activity any more, nor like it.
3. I am older, so I must be wiser (or else I wasted my time)
4. Therefore the old activity was bullshit all along. All hail my personal development.
On the other hand if you have more free time than money then buying a Mac would probably be not the best decision.
Context is important and I don't think OP was generalizing that every PC user is a fool. It's just not the right thing for him personally since he got kids and would rather spend time with them.
It's possible that sometimes, no matter how smart you are, your experiences have been limited in a way and you're missing a part of something everyone else sees. And if thats the case, it's not something to be afraid of or to shut yourself off from.
Anyway good luck!
I was going to expand this thought but when I thought what some of the responses might be, I thought, "Life is too short!" and left it as is :)
An essay is partly a matter of working out one's thoughts on some matter. But _posting_ an essay advances some point of view with a supporting argument, attacking the beliefs of others (e.g. Sanders was not named by pg, but could have been). That seems to be _arguing_ just as much as the additional step of responding to one's critics.
I suppose what makes the latter wearying is that it's hard to hear attacks on you personally, and tedious to respond to attacks which are loud but bad. But it still seems that we should (and usually do) value those who engage with their high quality critics.
This is not a hostile but a literal interpretation of the essay and is the same viewpoint advanced by Atlas Shrugged.
Close enough. But, like, is anyone really going to argue with this? With scare quotes, sure, OK, I guess there's an example of someone out there churning out widgets from their blood-diamond-financed widget factory, and that's more of a grey area, but without weird factors like this...yes, people ought to be entitled to what they create. There are valid arguments on definitions of that (patents, land use, etc.) but all of those are disputes on how to apply the main principle, not whether it is legitimate.
> He further argued that they're extra entitled to it because even if you eliminated all other sources of inequality, you couldn't stop them from creating more wealth for themselves: "creating wealth, as a source of economic inequality, is different from taking it
This is a straw man. He didn't argue that they're "extra entitled," he simply pre-empted the (reasonable) argument that not all the rich got rich in good ways.
But in any case: your description of his argument does not match the description I responded to:
“we rich people deserve to have 100x more than the poors because we’re pushing humanity forward”
Do you think the above is a hostile interpretation? I did, so I said so.
(Side note: In a similar but less defensible way, Paul Graham’s summary of Joseph Stiglitz’s several books about inequality [to wit: “The most common mistake people make about economic inequality is to treat it as a single phenomenon. The most naive version of which is the one based on the pie fallacy: that the rich get rich by taking money from the poor.”] was such a ridiculous oversimplification that I suspect either (a) Graham didn’t actually read any of Stiglitz’s books, or (b) he has extremely poor reading comprehension, or (c) his argument is not only self-serving but also entirely disingenuous.)
But anyway, you can’t just strip out all the context and pretend Paul Graham is having a purely abstract argument in a vacuum. The context today is that the level of inequality and centralization of political influence in America is at a level unseen since the 1920s, or perhaps since the gilded age. There’s a political discussion going on in the society at large about whether this development is healthy, and if not, what to do about it. Many people are angry, to the point that Paul Graham’s essay itself is full of paranoid fantasies about being “hunted”.
Anyone making an argument in modern America is implicitly talking about what direction we should be going from where we are currently, and what social/political changes we can make to get there. Most readers are going to understand such arguments with that context in mind, and only bad/lazy writers will ignore it.
* * *
Graham grew up in a well off family, went to Ivy League college and grad school, worked for a few years as a programmer for his own well-timed web startup then cashed out for tens of millions while he was a relatively young man and transitioned into venture capital, where he has been very successful. As far as I can tell he has basically never worked in any jobs other than being a student, running his own startup, or venture capital. He apparently surrounds himself with other rich techies and has no regular exposure to people outside a tiny cultural bubble. From what I can remember, his only essays which talk at all about folks less fortunate than himself are about his school experience, in particular what I can remember is whining about how English teachers are idiots and how the jocks mistreated him.
From such a position of privilege and ignorance, Graham hand-waves away all the concerns of the vast majority of people in America (not to mention the world), and spends his time justifying his own wealth and prestige and insisting that he shouldn’t have to contribute any of it back to society, with the bulk of the argument being “startups are good”, without further elaboration or analysis.
As you might imagine, this seems awfully cheesy to folks reading along who don’t happen to be multimillionaires themselves.
Also, please don't put things in quotation marks when they're not a quote, as you did here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10917609. It may seem a minor point, but it's an important one for intellectual honesty.
Dan: I’m sure Paul Graham and this site will both be fine whether or not you you tell his critics to keep their opinions to themselves.
(Side note: literally nobody is going to confuse my idiomatic use of quotation marks to offset a sarcastic summary of an argument which I claim is as old as civilization for a direct quotation from any particular person.)
In the general genre of PG criticism, my comments are treating him with kid gloves. For a more vigorous and amusing analysis of his essays’ analytical rigor, Maciej Cegłowski provides a gem, as expected, still just as relevant ten years later: http://idlewords.com/2005/04/dabblers_and_blowhards.htm
Since life is short, that’s it for me for this thread.
Yes, in the society and economy we are discussing this is a universally accepted principle.
Bob is a farmer. He has the same amount of land as his neighbor, but he works twice as hard, and grows twice the number of crops to sell in a year. He has twice the income. No one would reasonably claim that he's entitled to none of what he produced. Bob's greater productivity than his neighbor is a source of income inequality - he earns twice as much!
There is a mainstream view that society has the right to tax Bob's income, so he does not receive all of what he creates. That's the debate: how much is fair? Maybe it's fair for Bob to have twice the income of his neighbor, or maybe less than twice as much. Unless Bob gets the same as his neighbor, there's income inequality because of differences in productivity.
No farmer is going to singlehandedly earn a million times what his neighbor earns. However, because of technology, this is now possible in some industries. For example, Notch is a game designer, and he singlehandedly makes a game that sells 20 million copies. Notch now has a vast income that far exceeds the typical game designer. Is this bad? What is bad about 20 million people choosing to give Notch their money in exchange for his game? I don't see anything wrong or unjust about this.
PG's essay points out that income inequality is a complex phenomenon, with multiple causes, some that are good (small groups or individuals creating amazingly valuable things) and some that are bad ("kids with no chance of reaching their potential"). PG's essay from my perspective serves to make the point that perhaps not all income equality is bad, and that there deserves to be more thought on the topic of "how much is bad?" or "what causes of income inequality are bad?", instead of treating income inequality as a one-dimensional issue that is intrinsically bad.
From my perspective, PG's point is fair. Income inequality is not intrinsically bad: when people work hard, improve, and become more productive, they earn more, leading to income inequality. This incentive to improve and produce is good, in my opinion. Perhaps what we as a society should be tackling are bad problems like "kids with no chance of reaching their potential", rather than considering income inequality to be a problem ipso facto.
But in the real world we are not born equal and we do not have access to the same size of 'land'. There are differences, sometime vast in family wealth, property, health care, education and access to nearly 'n' number of resources. Bob may be born with the land and have 'n' amount of time and the luxury to think of things like productivity, wealth, interests, life while Tom may struggle his entire life just to survive or maybe work towards getting 1/10 of the land as his entire life goal.
Moving to the real world property taxes are not fixed on income. Income tax is an entirely different tax that Bob and Tom would pay based on their income irrespective of their land holdings. If Bob is more productive he would pay more tax but I am not sure income tax or 'simple productivity' as a concept is useful to understand or explain inequality and disparity in a world where everyone does not have the same piece of land.
This is exactly one of the main problem with the essay. He argues against a position only very very few people really have. But it goes further than that.
PG is right claiming that you can't stop how technology creates inequality. But he is wrong if he believe that this wealth is created purely from risk taking and hard work. Of course those who are wealthy mostly work hard, but so does everyone else.
But the real issue of course is that if we can't stop technology to keep pushing wealth for some into extremes and for others to keep stalling then the wealth created is mostly due to luck and access to the right people and some timing. Not unlike a Powerball ticket but just of being born into the right context.
And so if PG wanted to show he actually understood the issue. Instead of arguing against some straw man he could have spent some time on using his otherwise amazing ability, to think out of the box, to put forward some thoughts on how society could deal with this. Then he would have at least shown some understanding of the people he was talking about.
Instead he basically says. It's going to continue like this, but don't worry it's better than the alternatives and it's going to be good again.
Why would anyone who doesn't stand to benefit from this ever accept such a position?
I just don't see PG's thoughts as well developed here as they are in other areas and no amount of historical context is going to change that.
The problem isn't merely the dishonesty of trying to make a person and/or their argument sound much worse than they are. It's the degrading effect it has on the rest of a discussion. Once bystanders see that it's ok to throw concern for the truth out the window and optimize for indignation, other standards drop as well. I don't know if it's true that sharks go crazy when they smell blood, but that's what this effect reminds me of. It seems to be worse these days, and the Principle of Charity might be a rampart against it.
When a commenter is convinced that a topic is very important, and that it's a moral imperative to change the minds of whoever opposes them, "zealot" is one way to describe this situation. It seems to be the underlying force behind all this bitterness.
Scrolling down in hopes of finding a reasonable comment is a recipe for disappointment. Worse, it adds fuel: Many of these comments are from people fed up with zealotry.
Ideally, the mean-spirited comments would be whisked away to the bottom of the thread, where they belong. But they're not offtopic so they can't be detached.
I've often wished for a way to view a thread without any nesting, i.e. like /newcomments but for one specific thread. That way I could at least come back later without having to scroll past the same tired meanness. It'd be a lot easier to spot the gems posted as replies.
You could as easily have said the same thing about HN at every point in its history, yet for all its weaknesses it has managed to survive as a semi-ok place for online discussion far longer than human nature, statistics, and every internet law would have predicted.
That didn't just happen by accident. To stave off inevitable decline has been the main intent behind the design of the site and all the work on it. So, bad as things sometimes appear and critical as everyone sometimes sounds, it's worth remembering that HN has a track record of finding new things that work—for a while—at slowing decay.
Making the Principle of Charity part of the guidelines implies that you'll ban people who specifically refuse to follow it. When I said "It probably won't work," I meant "Remember orange usernames, and how badly it fragmented the community? Just be careful." Dealing with these people by trying to apply social pressure might backfire, since they are very vocal and motivated by something other than curiosity.
It's entirely possible to come to a different interpretation of a text without having an ulterior motive.
Anyway I read his argument as "please ignore the tailing and focus on other things". This is at least my interpretation and if it's correct I agree. Jealousy never hurt any one. Extreme poverty, on the other hand, is quite detrimental to an individuals life.
I'm not convinced that most of the aforementioned responses weren't motivated by that. So, given that almost anything pg will write/has written will get the same treatment, why would he play their game by bothering to defend himself?
In fact, there is a pureness to insulating yourself from the cacophony of opinions that you get online: someoen will always have an adversarial opinion and life really is too short to try to address any or even some of them.
If I was him, I would let my friends be my guide to when I'm talking out of ass, rather than randos on the internet.
Is that "bubbling"?
It sounds lame, but PG's essay is a stanza in a larger societal conversation, and conversations involve more than one person. To weigh in on one side invites response, especially if you're influential.
Unfortunately, most of the responses never made it much past identifying this confusion between the literal meaning of income inequality and what they meant, by saying we have "too much" income inequality. This is a tautology, and most responses failed to address the important question of "how much is too much?".
Most responses instead then focused on inventing or imagining a lot of things pg didn't say, things they thought he might be implying. pg responds by simplifying his essay, so that there is less stuff to read into it. People still try to read too much into it. pg gives up at responding to things he didn't say, no time for BS.
I think he added to the conversation a good point, that many people are sloppy when they refer to income inequality, and that it is not all bad, and that we need to be more precise when we talk about what the real problems are. However, people mostly ignored that...despite actually agreeing with what he actually said, they wanted to disagree with what they thought he said...
Let's say that Bob is a farmer, and (with the same land) can grow twice as many crops to sell in a year as his neighbor nearby. In this scenario, it seems entirely appropriate to me that Bob has greater income - that is, the income of Bob and his neighbor are unequal.
Let's say that Alice is a video game designer. Alice creates an incredibly popular game called Clash of Clans that has 20 million users and earns $1.5m in revenue per day. Bob the farmer quits his job and creates a video game instead, which only sells 10 copies, since while he's great at farming he's a bad video game designer. Is it surprising or bad that the incomes of Alice and Bob are unequal?
Do you work for a living? Let's say a coworker at your place of employment comes to work and does literally nothing, every day. Does he deserve the same income as you?
No, it is not bad that people earn different amounts when they're differently productive. This incentive toward productivity drives society forward. It would be incredibly demotivating to most of the world if people were not made better off through their own efforts to become more productive, effective, and driven. I doubt anyone would argue that all income inequality is bad - instead, as a peer comment points out, the actual debate is about how much is bad, or for what reasons.
The purpose of PG's essay was to point out that income inequality has multiple components and is a complex phenomenon. He observed that technology amplifies this difference in productivity (consider the example of Alice who can make a video game and sell 20 million copies with recurring revenue; being that much more productive as a video game designer is simply impossible as a farmer.)
This feels like the heart of that particular essay and displays a rather breathtaking misunderstanding of poverty, its causes and its inhabitants. This blames poor people for being poor.
How am I misreading this? I don't feel like I'm cherry-picking, I feel like I'm finding the theme of the text. If that's not it, then what is its theme? Its central idea?
From later in the same essay: "Louis Brandeis said 'We may have democracy, or we may have wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we can't have both.' That sounds plausible. But if I have to choose between ignoring him and ignoring an exponential curve that has been operating for thousands of years, I'll bet on the curve."
Again: this sounds like PG saying "In the choice between fostering political power in people at large and concentrating money in the hands of those who already have it, I'll choose the latter." What's there to misinterpret?
I thought this essay, without context, was very sweet. Life is too short. But read as a non-response to critics of the "Income Inequality" essay it takes on a callous tone.
No it doesn't. A claim that most rich people are driven doesn't imply that most poor people are lazy. The portion you quoted makes this distinction clear: "Variation in productivity is far from the only source of economic inequality, but it is the irreducible core of it, in the sense that you'll have that left when you eliminate all other sources."
If we found a way to give everyone the same opportunities, there'd still be economic inequality. Is inequality what we should attack? It's probably better to attack the undesirable causes directly. The essay made this point clearly.
If it doesn't imply that poor people are lazy, then what does it imply? That the rich and poor are equally driven, and that something other than effort (luck, inherited wealth, etc) makes the rich rich and the poor poor?
This is totally compatible with all poor people being in the second category, and no poor people being lazy (3rd and 4th categories).
(I disagree with his essay, but for different reasons than this.)
It really seems like one can either read PG's essay as a Randian screed or as poorly argued cant. I saw it as the former, but I can understand reading it as the latter.
Not quite. He's saying (in my reading) that even if you legislate away all the other sources of inequality (even to the point of wiping out all assets and giving each citizen an equal amount of cash to start anew), inequality would still arise due to differences in personal productivity / drive.
Seems true to me, although entirely irrelevant to the topic of real world inequality.
It really sounds like he believes this to be the cause of real world inequality, too:
"Most people who get rich tend to be fairly driven. Whatever their other flaws, laziness is usually not one of them. Suppose new policies make it hard to make a fortune in finance. Does it seem plausible that the people who currently go into finance to make their fortunes will continue to do so but be content to work for ordinary salaries? The reason they go into finance is not because they love finance but because they want to get rich. If the only way left to get rich is to start startups, they'll start startups. They'll do well at it too, because determination is the main factor in the success of a startup."
Slow down there. You can't just take the converse of any old statement.
PG is saying: IF ((starting equal) AND (differences in drive)) THEN (ending unequal).
You are saying that PG's statement is equivalent to: IF (now unequal) THEN ((earlier equal) AND (differences in drive)). Which translates to "Poor people are poor only because of laziness."
Furthermore, the quote you provide says: IF (rich now) THEN (probably driven earlier), which crucially says nothing at all about people who are not rich now.
That's as best as I can put it.
This is in the context of a hypothetical universe where "the only way left to get rich is to start startups." In that universe, PG asserts that the driven will do well, thereby creating inequality. Since we know inequality exists, some will have done less well, and "determination is the main factor in the success of a startup."
To go back to what you said earlier, this isn't directly relevant to real world inequality. But the essay posits this hypothetical world as a parabolic justification for economic inequality. The essay acknowledges that "few successful founders grew up desperately poor" but refuses to engage in any discussion of why. It will only examine a simplified universe, which allows the author to make implications about the real world and then hand wave any reactions away when others engage with those implications.
He then weakens his claim even further, as quoted in the parent: "Variation in productivity is far from the only source of economic inequality" such that he admits doing something really productive is not the only source of inequality. So, there is really nothing in there that implies either of things you suggest.
"Most people who get rich tend to be fairly driven. Whatever their other flaws, laziness is usually not one of them. Suppose new policies make it hard to make a fortune in finance. Does it seem plausible that the people who currently go into finance to make their fortunes will continue to do so but be content to work for ordinary salaries? The reason they go into finance is not because they love finance but because they want to get rich. If the only way left to get rich is to start startups, they'll start startups. They'll do well at it too, because determination is the main factor in the success of a startup."
Since the skills necessary to succeed in finance are distinctly different from those necessary to succeed as a startup founder, I assumed that the essay was attributing success to the one attribute it specifically calls out: determination.
It's absolutely true that variation in productivity leads to a variation in income and it's also true technology acts as a lever and is increasing the variation in productivity between people.
At no point did PG say anything like what you claim it "sounds like" he is saying. The essay was an argument to attack rent-seeking, and other bad behaviors, but not the variation in productivity. It also argued that even if all rent-seeking were eliminated, there would still be variations in income because some people are far more productive than the average.
Edit: s/rents/returns/
A an example of rent collecting would be if he used his wealth to lobby for a law requiring all start-ups to have a license which an organization he controlled granted (and charged for).
Angel investing and venture capital are jobs that are also prone to the Peter Principle. What makes them different than many other jobs, especially angel investing, is that the person has promoted themselves to their own level of incompetence. Just because some (maybe many) angel investors are incompetent and don't contribute to wealth creation does not mean that none do.
His essay focused on one particular lever, technology. His original lever was technology. Now he uses other levers, economic capital, social capital and experience to create wealth. Extracting value from economic capital alone is rent seeking. This is what banks do with loans. Providing economic capital with advise on how to most intelligently make the most of the capital goes beyond mere rent seeking and enters the realm of wealth creating activities.
No. Productivity has nothing to do with income. You can be the most productive widget-maker in the factory. That doesn't mean you will make a lot of money.
Income inequality exists and has been growing because those at the top have been reaping the increases in productivity of those at the bottom. In fact that's the entire debate: employee productivity has massively increased since the 70s, but wages have not reflected this.
You are using a non economic definition of productivity, and he is using the economic one. In Economics, productivity is the value of what is produced, not the quantity.
Where you fall on pg's essay is defined by your answer to that question.
I tend to read with a charitable eye, so I don't take the same meaning as yourself. But, he's chosen an expression that allows a lot of interpretation.
The way I read it, I assume we're talking about a cohort, and the point is, on average, the least lazy of the cohort will probably do better.
The least lazy people participating in a ponzi scheme get more money?
Obviously not, so what you're assuming and/or implying is that life is fair, that the rich deserve their success and the poor are lazy, which is exactly the point people are arguing, so you're begging the question.
> This blames poor people for being poor. How am I misreading this?
FWIW, I read it differently. I think Paul is saying that even if we had a world where everyone had a truly equal opportunity, in the sense of having similar (or at least adequate) childhood nutrition, intellectual stimulation, education, etc., there would still be variations in productivity between individuals that would result in different economic outcomes.
The second quote I read simply as saying that Paul doesn't think the tendency for wealth to concentrate can be stopped.
If you want to complain that Paul could have expressed himself better, I won't argue; I agree that was by far his worst written essay. And I suspect he is genuinely pained by the reaction it received. To whatever extent this new piece is specifically a response to that reaction, I think it's more hurt than callous.
That argument is still missing the point. Variations you will always have, but no guarantee that the same people would come out on top, unless you believe that the hardest workers happen to mostly come from well-financed backgrounds and caucasian gene pools. There are many people who work hard all their life and never make it out of the slums. Working hard is not a differentiator, it's what gets you a seat at the table. On the way up everyone works hard. Slackers don't even compete. The difference between those who make it to the top and those who don't is mostly not effort, it is opportunity, and good instincts to leverage that opportunity. In a truly fair world the people who came out on top would be an almost completely different set of people than those who are at the top today.
I feel like the criticism of the essay was not because of its content but its theme. It felt like a defense of the current system, whether taken narrowly as SV or broadly as global capitalism. This struck a nerve because most people in their gut know that the current system is fundamentally unfair and needs to be replaced by something better. It cannot be a good system that made it so that the set of people who own as much wealth as the poorest 3 billion all fit on a yacht, and not even a very big one. People got angry because they thought he was defending the way things are, even if his actual position was more nuanced.
[B]y helping startup founders I've been helping to increase economic inequality. If economic inequality is bad and should be decreased, I shouldn't be helping founders. No one should be.
I think this is ridiculous. Creating new millionaires is not increasing inequality. I don't know anyone who thinks that (not to say that Paul might not have run into a few people who think that way). The problem, as you say, is the profound concentration of wealth into the hands of a few multi-billionaires. I would say also, it's the fact that the middle class in the US is actually shrinking.
The fundamental way that the wealthy can help the middle class, while helping themselves at the same time, is by investing in new businesses that create jobs. This is precisely what YC is doing! This isn't increasing inequality but decreasing it. Not only are they creating jobs directly, they're also doing so indirectly, by teaching people -- even those who don't get into their program -- how to start startups.
Founders don't get rich unless they build a successful business. And again, I don't think anybody minds that they can get rich; after all, a lot of them then either start new businesses or become angel investors themselves. There's nothing wrong with any of this, quite the contrary, and if Paul really does run into people who think there is something wrong with it, this is what he should tell them.
I would go so far as to say that YC and its ilk are among the most creative, hopeful, positive things happening in the US economy today. Though I'm not involved with them directly -- I haven't even worked for a YC company -- I am very glad to have them here in the Valley, and I'm excited to see what they do in the coming years.
Huh? He said all the people at the top are not lazy. "All people at the bottom are lazy" doesn't follow from his statement.
What makes it a dirty rhetorical trick is, of course, that one can then reply to one's critics "ah, but I didn't explicitly say what you read into that".
1) Got rich and weren't driven.
2) Got rich and were driven.
3) Stayed poor and weren't driven.
4) Stayed poor but were driven.
pg statement says he's been exposed with group 2, which he highlighted. You seem to accuse him of implicitly highlighting group 3, and would prefer he implicitly (explicitly?) highlights group 4.
Is that the gist of the argument?
The statements "Most people who get rich tend to be fairly driven." and "Most people who are fairly driven tend to get rich." are not logically equivalent.
There really is severe suffering at the bottom of the economic scale here (SV/peninsula), and in my opinion it is the shared responsibility of those of us who have lots of options to figure out how we can help to relieve some of the suffering. However, I don't thing that needs to be the singular focus of every single discussion of economic inequlity, and I don't think it's productive to pan this essay for not really addressing that.
He did call those who disagree with Zuckerberg's letter envious losers, so how can you read something like the Inequality essay without that colouring it?
https://medium.com/@girlziplocked/paul-graham-is-still-askin...
@sama I think the reason you're surprised is that not being a loser yourself you underestimate the power of envy.
(in response to a tweet saying "It takes a lot for the internet to surprise me, but the general reaction to Zuck's letter did it")
As to the rest of your comment... I think you're reading something which takes an aggressive tone in promoting its argument, and mistaking that for a personal attack. There is quite a strong critique of the "startups create value" idea, beginning with the observation that they don't, really -- VCs confer value and legitimacy upon certain startups, and not on others. Which means that in a startup-based economy, such as the one pg argues for, pg and his friends would wield an enormous amount of power. In a true startup-based economy, VCs would literally be the central planners, signing off on which businesses can and can't be started (I mean, in theory someone in such an economy might privately have access to enough capital to get going without VCs, but the deck would still be heavily stacked against those people, and there aren't exactly a lot of them). And it is entirely fair game to question the motives of someone who has such a strong incentive to favor a true startup-based economy, which of course the essay does.
He suggests that social mobility is highly correlated with non-laziness (whether expressed through hard work, not hard but smart work, natural curiosity, drive to tinker with stuff, or ability to deliver on a project started without letting the inertia set in).
That does not mean that poverty is correlated with laziness.
The only logical conclusion that follows is that laziness is not highly correlated with social mobility, e.g. people who are poor and lazy have not statistically been exposed to much social mobility.
I don't see how he advocated a position that poor people deserve to be poor. He advocated a position where being rich is ok. These are two different things. It also focuses discussion on economics - eliminating mega-wealth should not be made priority, but the focus should be placed on poverty minimization.
It's pretty hard to misinterpret a lot of the things he wrote, though.
Debate isn't always about winning. Sometimes it can just be a back and forth exploration of an interesting subject area. But you have to treat it that way.
Thinking about this long enough makes large-scale democracy very scary because it operates in the same terms on the same media.
I think there was in fact wide disagreement, though.
Also because most of his essays are very good, so this one was uncharacteristic and surprising.
Also, I think the last 2 essays pretty much nailed it. If you found them "laughably wrong", it was likely due to the assumptions you brought with you to reading them, not due to any fallacies in the content itself.
Essayists should expect critiques. His argument was that technology is the creator of inequality and it can't be stopped. That startups (and stock options) capture a lot of that wealth is a side effect. This is the capitalist thesis. It's not quite Randian but it's close enough that it comes across as one dimensional. In his defense he said we should focus on other drivers of inequality. However the counter to the capitalist thesis and the most direct way to address inequality is taxation.
This is the basic political argument that defines society.
Not quite. The argument was that technology is a lever that multiplies the differences in productivity between us, not that it is the creator of it.
>"That startups (and stock options) capture a lot of that wealth is a side effect."
Businesses generally capture this wealth. PG has argued in many essays that start-ups are a great path for the most productive of workers to capture the value of their contributions rather than cede them to existing business areas.
>However the counter to the capitalist thesis the most direct way to address inequality is taxation
But is this really what we want? Do we want to broadly discourage all wealth creation at the same time? Or would it make more sense to focus on the non-productive drivers of inequality, rent-seeking behavior etc?
The essay suggested (quite accurately) that actual taxation rate doesn't change much due to tax avoidance issues. Even now, we have what appears to be a very progressive system on the surface. But due to its complexity and many, many loopholes, those with more income pay a lower rate than average in practice. Simply declaring a top tax rate of 90% wouldn't stop this and hasn't in the past.
How much human ingenuity is equivalent to the United States' railroad network? To the Three Gorges Dam? To the physical infrastructure of the Internet? Human ingenuity allows more effective use of capital, but the sheer fact of ownership of capital can often be more valuable.
Is this a given/has this been proven? I do not believe taxation (alone) discourages wealth creation. Otherwise certain high-tax countries would not be 'creating wealth' today.
To claim that being in the other 50% makes somebody "laughably wrong" or a "bully" is not a fair statement. (To say that there is "wide disagreement" is entirely reasonable, but to be fair one should also point out that there is also wide agreement)
This argument has been going on for centuries, with countless millions of people chipping in, without anybody really winning it. It is quite unlikely that this thread, or indeed this year, will be the place where somebody wins it. I think it is reasonable for PG to acknowledge this and bow out of the argument, and that's how I interpret what he's doing.
Life's too short to argue red vs blue.
Half the population does not agree with the stance given in the essay. This argument has not been made for centuries; it has not been made at all because it is wildly out of sync with reality.
I would agree it's very reasonable to bow out of it because life's too short if you are a millionaire; in that case the argument really doesn't effect you so why bother with it, it's just academic.
Also "bully pulpit" doesn't have anything to do with being a bully.
I would reiterate OP of this thread: I love PG's essays and I hope this one isn't a way of saying he is dissuaded by his readership challenging him on one that didn't quite hit the mark. We read them in the first place because they never cease to provoke thought.
So the fact that once upon a time red meant liberal, but no longer does, does not prove that economic conservatives have reducing economic inequality as a direct goal.
And of course that's false. The Democrats of the 1900s are conservative; the new deal is the most iconic conservative movement we've ever seen yes? And Hoovervilles were created by socialist thought?
Virtually no Republicans have a stated goal or platform of reducing economic inequality. Pretty much every Democrat running for president does. To claim otherwise is also clearly untrue.
I suspect you are mixing up the fact that in American politics, conservatism (which is "red") consists of what Europeans would call liberalism (in fact the New Deal was part of the reason the definitions flipped: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conservative_coalition).
No. The New Deal is the most liberal policy enacted in American history.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Deal
The New Deal produced a political realignment, making the Democratic Party the majority... with its base in liberal ideas, the white South, traditional Democrats, big city machines, and the newly empowered labor unions and ethnic minorities. The Republicans were split, with conservatives opposing the entire New Deal as an enemy of business and growth, and liberals accepting some of it and promising to make it more efficient... By 1936 the term "liberal" typically was used for supporters of the New Deal, and "conservative" for its opponents.
That's because they are, and have been completely fine with inequality. They have done nothing, absolutely nothing which indicates they are concerned with income inequality and propose no solutions. So when you say they do not argue in favor of inequality, you're correct. That's because they completely ignore it. They pretend it doesn't exist.
The New Deal was economically liberal but socially conservative; I'm inclined to say that it _was_ an iconic conservative effort. In particular, it was what gave the country enough social cohesion to win WWII; and it was what made the South lose interest in a second attempt at secession. The Southern Agrarians had spent the 1920s building a new argument for an independent CSA; once the New Deal started up, they mostly switched to supporting the US.
If you want examples of why this isn't a good idea, just read any politics thread on social media, and look for the point at which they inevitably degenerate into "no, that's not what you're saying".
Since it apparently wasn't clear enough from my earlier post: the argument that has been made for centuries is that the other side doesn't exist, is clearly wrong anyway, and nobody could possibly agree with them. The main problem with this argument is that the people who make it seem to have found somebody to argue with.
And you used two paragraphs to state a rhetoric 101 textbook's definition of "straw man" -- that's not what I'm doing.
What did he get wrong, specifically?
The gist of PG's essay was that inequality consists of some bad components ("kids with no chance of reaching their potential") and some good ones (e.g., people producing things of incredible value); that it's a complex phenomenon made up of multiple parts; that inequality is at least partially due to individual differences in drive and productivity; that technology amplifies these differences in productivity.
He is concerned that people do not recognize this, and believes they need to recognize this if they are going to fight the bad drivers of inequality effectively. He is concerned that people oversimplify the issue and assume that inequality is all bad, or intrinsically bad.
This essay strongly feels like rationalizing to oneself an unwillingness to engage with reasoned criticism (of which there was quite a bit). If pg wants to spend time with his kids, good for him, that's certainly going to be more fulfilling than arguing online. But throwing arguments over the fence and then proclaiming the desire to spend time with your kids genuinely does not seem fulfilling.
Oh well, live and learn :)
Since plenty of people reading Paul's essays are more than capable of figuring out the intent rather than taking pot-shots at the form in which that intent was cast I don't think given the choice between playing 'someone's wrong on the internet' and spending time with your kids there should even be a contest. On the other hand, action begets reaction and there isn't an essay that Paul wrote that did not have its share of discussion and picking apart so maybe simply accept that and totally ignore the responses?
Enjoy the time you have while you can, indeed, life is too short and I wished I could spend and had spent much more time with my kids. Before you know it they'll be borrowing your car keys and all those years that feel like they will last forever will have vanished.
Better make them count!
Having lost my parents some time ago and having two kids I can concur with his sentiments fully and can confirm they are spot on.
The incentive to respond to acidic comments and trolls in online discourse is a pervasive feature of the medium - and it seldom creates any value. Thus it's a perfect example of useless bullshit. The discussions are usually ephemeral in nature - quickly forgotten - and not influential. This is not to say there are no influential discussions - but that at the heat of the moment most discussions feel more important than they really are.
It's amazing to watch how many young people get caught up in various online outrage missions. Hours spent browsing Twitter or Reddit to dive incredibly deep into some current news outrage is bull shit wasted time.
Get back to work and try to build something (if that's what you want). Or be with your family (if that's what you want). Or do whatever. But this stuff (including my post right now) is addicting.
I'm glad he pointed out this seemingly small detail. This took me a very long time to understand.
EDIT: It reminds me of another great post by Paul Buccheit. It's so important to have the 'heroes' of startup culture explicitly spell out these values:
> I worry that perhaps I'm communicating the wrong priorities. Investing money, creating new products, and all the other things we do are wonderful games and can be a lot of fun, but it's important to remember that it's all just a game. What's most important is that we are good too each other, and ourselves. If we "win", but have failed to do that, then we have lost. Winning is nothing.
http://paulbuchheit.blogspot.fr/2012/03/eight-years-today.ht...
On the other hand, there's something about the following sidenote that is profoundly human but works quite the opposite of the painful shock implied in my first sentence:
> I chose this example deliberately as a note to self. I get attacked a lot online. People tell the craziest lies about me. And I have so far done a pretty mediocre job of suppressing the natural human inclination to say "Hey, that's not true!"
This is almost universally true. It is incredibly reassuring to know that even the greats struggle with this and antagonists pursue us through all walks of life. I'll admit, I've held back from publishing articles that all of my reviewers liked because I worried about the inevitable negative backlash that comes with standing for anything on the internet. Maybe one day I will publish. If so, this essay helped a great deal in getting me there.
This is tangential to your point, but beware of sour grapes. It's an easy trap to fall into.
It was used against me at one point, someone invented a personal connection to pg that just so happened to hit all of the right nerves. He was trying to get me to quit my job to work for him. Almost worked, save for a stroke of luck (pg mentioning this guy had ~5% of the credentials he claimed). It's unbelievable just how many bullets I've dodged over the years...
Yet, we'd like to think of ourselves as less sensitive, perhaps because we implicitly compare ourselves to the "greats" (if only in belieiving they must have what it takes to achieve what we want to achieve). But, we somehow mythologize that they are above it all, which leads to the mistaken idea that perhaps we don't have what it takes after all.
This was timely for me. A reminder to get my head back in the game, let myself off the hook for feeling the negativity, but to keep pressing forward. Feeling it is not evidence that we are too weak or soft. On the contrary, it means that we care enough about our mission. It should then be worth the inevitable bruises we'll have to take from those who find comfort in the status quo we seek to challenge or who revel in simply demeaning others.
(I'll throw in, with all humility, my philistine take on philosophy: http://www.ribbonfarm.com/2014/09/09/geopolitics-for-individ.... It was inspired partly by Paul Graham's previous http://paulgraham.com/philosophy.html, which IMO is far superior.)
This reminds me of how Karl Popper critiques people's opinions, at times he rejects both the pro/anti side of something, as he did in anti-naturalist history vs naturalist history arguing that both were based on a misunderstanding of the logical content of the thing in question.
In this regard you have misunderstood the logical content of the essay in question, drawing a contrast on two things that are not.
This comment breaks the HN guidelines. Please edit incivility out of your comments when posting here.
Do you honestly believe that it is 'us' who will escalate? Or is it them? Does it look like they're looking for anything else? Look at the egregious response to the essays. Yes, i'm sure we are the ones at fault. I guess i'll stop, but you are wrong in a very plain and ordinary way and I think that request was in poor taste.
With children, the days are long but the years are short.
These days, I find myself trying to find the "work/life balance", which is really just me managing the ebb-and-flow of time between work and family. What I've learned in that process is that while work provides some satisfaction that meets an internal need, it will never ever hug me back.
Take time, hug your kids, leave your work every now and then. The years won't seem so short that way.
---
While Richman has vowed to cease being open-minded to absolute horseshit, acquaintances reflected on his approachability.
"I love Blake," coworker David Martin said. "He's such a good listener. A lot of people are closed-minded and self-absorbed, but Blake always makes an effort to hear where I'm coming from. The world could use more people like him."
---
If Wright brothers (and other flight enthusiasts around that time) had not taken the initiative, academics, pundits, and "experts" had it settled that heavier-than-air flight is impossible.
It had to eventually happen because technology is inevitable, but we might have conquered flight in 1953 instead of 1903.
In the case of anti-aging, such a difference means you either die or barely make it past the last generation to die.
Also, some cancers take time to develop, which would make for fewer diagnoses in childhood.
If you have a different meaningful definition of aging I'd like to know.
I have four children of my own and I'm sceptical of the proposed idea that somehow life is best spent by maximizing time with them. Don't get me wrong, the best moments in life are with my children. Still, one's contributions during our brief passage in the form we like best (walking and free thinking humans) surely should aim to contribute far more than the self-gratifying (and possibly narcissistic) time spent with one's children.
In short, if you do have the luxury of choosing where you actually spend your time, make sure you're giving far more back to the rest of this race than to yourself.
It points at another approach to getting the most out of life: change as much as you can. Maybe once everyone in your family had had a few of those magical Christmases it's time to look for something else fun.
This also has a darker cousin for some parents: since spending time with one's children is always a viable and valuable option, spending time without them becomes difficult. People without children often notice that most of their parental friends disappear. This despite the prior protestations of many that "We'll still do things after we have kids."
Undoubtedly some parents work more efficiently than their childless selves (this is also motivated by a desire to earn money to support the kids). But can they socialize more efficiently too, in particular with people who don't have kids?
Not really.
Contradiction means pointing to possible holes in our assumptions. So online discussions - are a way to test our assumptions and learn.
Online discussions is a playground for training our decision-making skills.
Of course, we should maintain a healthy balance between learning in online discussions, other ways of learning and actual decision-making (work). But that healthy balance should probably include more than zero time in online discussions.
Be careful with equating "unproductive" and bullshit. Society at large only cares about your productivity, and there is always pressure for you to do "productive" thing that advances some imaginary life ladder.
From your POV and benefits, all those productive things might all be bullshit.
Not only are "unproductive" activities like film, video games, socializing/hanging out very enjoyable for me, but the most interesting people I've met do a lot of them. All in moderation.
It reached a point where I would often work in the weekends, forego any vacation, feel guilty about the hours I did 'nothing' (out of sheer necessity), and sometimes even apply a little too much pragmatism to my friendships. I'd ask myself if the interactions were useful or somehow furthered my personal development or career, and forget that, while this is not an unimportant question, the value of a friendship can be the time spent enjoying each other's company.
This important realization came after I had worked a lot, built a relatively stable career with enough clients and a good portfolio, saved up enough money to allow me to not work for at least a year. I had reached my goals, so to speak.
But instead of stopping work and doing things I always put off, or creating things I'd been wanting to create for a long time, I ended up with a (mild) burn-out and a severe existential crisis: now that I had nothing to really worry about, I had no clue what to do with that freedom.
What am I, and what do I enjoy doing, after years of neglecting to explore this?
Currently I'm working on finding more balance, and savoring the little and big things in life. But even now, I need to make sure I have some work because when I stop, my mind just kind of panics from the freedom I have. So I'm taking it one step at a time.
Picking up gaming again has been one of those things I savor again.
At this point in my life, there's nothing new that interests me that hasn't already been done. It's made life pretty boring at this juncture. I've lived out all my dreams and now it's all just like "Okay, now what?"
For closer to home, assuming you don't want to travel the world or you've already done that, I personally don't think I'd ever get tired of just enjoying life. Going to my favorite places, watching the city below from the top of a large hill, alternating favorite restaurants, continuing to spend time with friends, reading new books, and continuing scientific and intellectual pursuits.
If you want to discuss this further feel free to email me at jmorrow977@gmail.com.
All that being said, the best "new thing" I can think of is finding creative ways to serve others using what I know about. My blog is one such way though there are no doubt others as well. Giving to the world is a pretty good way to beat back boredom.
I would include Anger as a subcategory of bullshit. It promotes irrationality and the after effects hamper you. In the renowned book "Emotional Intelligence" the author says that the best thing to do when angry is to focus on controlling it. The more it grows, the harder it is to escape.
I don't understand it when people talk about 'squeezing everything out of life' - As though you could extract real lasting substance/meaning from it. I don't believe it's possible to "Make the most" out of life - It all adds up to 0 in the end.
"Squeezing everything out of life" implies that you're literally taking the juice out of life and storing it somewhere safe/permanent - In reality, it is like squeezing an orange and then putting the juice back inside the orange.
I have known how short life is for a long time but I encounter people on a daily basis, most far older than me who don't seem to realise it or if they do are acting irrationally. When I see them wasting their time on things that are clearly not important it doesn't bother me too much because it is their time to choose what to do with but what does make me angry is if they try to involve me in the 'bullshit' too, to use the term used in the essay. At work this can range from petty disagreements or the colleague that creates busywork. I wonder how many people start startups recognise life is too short compared to those who do not, it would be interesting to find out.
The state of all who are preoccupied is wretched, but the most wretched are those who are toiling not even at their own preoccupations but must regulate their sleep by another’s, their walk by another’s pace, and obey orders in those freest of all things, loving and hating. If such people want to know how short their lives are, let them reflect how small a portion is their own.
That doesn't mean they were wrong when they were kids.
On the one hand, we want to believe the adults because they have perspective and experience. They were those kids. But on the other hand, we should also believe the kids because they are actually living it.
For instance, it is kind of funny to say this or that company is more or less bullshitty, when the whole structure is such that requires the masses to work for some company, else essentially be deprived of the resources required for their subsistence. So, most people will have to earn their subsistence by participating in a scheme that allocates more to someone else's subsistence.
Maybe it's the best we can do, but on that scale, the bullshittiest company of all is only marginally more bullshitty than the least.
But not if you had 8 private jets, or 8 cars, or 8 houses, or even 8 telephones. This is a rather arbitrary statement.
Or did it? I think it reflects the point of view, when we're involved in work, all the details to take care of, we feel overwhelmed, busy, time isn't rushing by at all. But once it's history, the past, all of that is suddenly doesn't exist, it has no reality and it is packaged up in memory as though it was just a brief moment. Kind of like closing a menu what's there is hidden, except we're not reopening it, at least not the same way ever again.
Time is relative, as Einstein said, it goes quickly sitting next to a pretty girl, but a boring lecture drags on forever. The epochs across the lifespan come and go, and I think we judge the duration of experience by its currency because involvement with events in real time gives the sense of time. The meaning of a "long" or "short" time is anchored in such reality.
Anyway I've been thinking for a while that what's important is not how much time we have left to live. After all that's not something we can actually ever know. What matters is what we do with the time we have. I'd surely agree we can't afford to waste it on irrelevancies, pipe-dreams, or bitterness. Far better to do what we can, when we can do it.
pg mentions this, but what he says after is not even the best advice in this same essay for it. The real insight is here:
> The "flow" that imaginative people love so much has a darker cousin that prevents you from pausing to savor life amid the daily slurry of errands and alarms.
The way to slow time down is to break all your routines, and never be in a flow. Have no typical days. Don't have a schedule. Don't have a favorite restaurant, a default outfit, or hang out with the same people more than once or twice before seeking new people. This is nearly impossible for most people to do, because doing these things SUCK. And time is slowest when everything feels like it sucks.
I only know this because this was what my life was for 2 years when I was on the road as a digital nomad. It sucked, but was the most rewarding period of my life as well, because it truly was time slowed down. I learned and experienced such a larger spectrum of things in the same time frame than anyone I knew, including myself from any other time frame.
I don't endorse it as a long-term way to live life, but I highly recommend everyone spend at least a year of their (preferably younger, pre-family) adult life living thus to learn truly how much can be fit in a human life if you frame it right.
The bullshit and cherishable also seem to frequently reverse roles. Many things that seem like noise today, may return to foreground with profound meaning later.
I wonder if perhaps nothing is bullshit or meaningful after all. Experience simply plays this game of light and shadow to keep us entertained.
You can have no crime and still know that which is crime. I understand what you're saying though. The meaningless can become meaningful with chance, the right connection, or by repetition. Some view video games as wasted time, but how many gamers met their significant other or became a programmer in such situations?
Steve Jobs
Great advice. But I sometimes struggle with this as it requires a bit of forecasting (you need to put yourself in the 'future' mindset before deciding if you'll care -- this can be hard).
My heuristic is this. It works about 95 percent of the time.
Ask yourself: What motivated the person who made this?
If the answer is, simply, "anger" "money" "boss made me" "had to hit my quarterly numbers, or some similar reason, you're probably better off skipping it.
You want to look for the answers that are more genuine: "love" "practicing a craft" "desire to build something."
This generally helps me decide if something is worth putting in my brain (or my body). It helps me avoid M&Ms (junk food) and to guilt-free enjoy my mom's homemade cookies over the holidays. It helps me avoid clickbait and spend time reading quality essays.
That part really struck me. I've long thought that the most incessant effect of the student loan phenomenon is that debt indentures you to working a conventional job in a country at a similar level of economic development as the one where you have the debt. You can't just "drop out" and go live somewhere cheap in southeast Asia where it doesn't take much income to live, because your debt payments are not adjusted for standard of living imbalances.
This is probably obvious to everyone, but I think it's worth noting that it is something holding a lot of people back from doing a lot of what is suggested in the article.
> Life is long enough, and it has been given in sufficiently generous measure to allow the accomplishment of the very greatest things if the whole of it is well invested. But when it is squandered in luxury and carelessness, when it is devoted to no good end, forced at last by the ultimate necessity we perceive that it has passed away before we were aware that it was passing. So it is—the life we receive is not short, but we make it so, nor do we have any lack of it, but are wasteful of it. Just as great and princely wealth is scattered in a moment when it comes into the hands of a bad owner, while wealth however limited, if it is entrusted to a good guardian, increases by use, so our life is amply long for him who orders it properly.
Just this past week I helped out a young company whose founders are working toward clinical translation of a method of clearance of senescent cells, one of the very first actual honest-to-goodness narrow focus rejuvenation therapies to emerge from the labs. This is something that works to repair and reverse a form of tissue damage that contributes to near all age-related disease.
This is far from the only approach to human rejuvenation presently under development.
But, you know, life is short, so pay attention or not, up to you.
In way too many cases the "bullshit" exists because too many capable people are ignoring it.
That is unless "bullshit" is defined as all things that don't matter to anyone. In which case why would we assume anyone is focusing on those things anyways?
Make too many bad decisions (or have too much bad luck) and it turns out life is really, really long.
Of course the optimal lifespan will change over time. Today we aren't really facing so many physical survival challenges, but if we extend life longer then we may slow down our speed of innovation.
"Relentlessly prune bullshit, don't wait to do things that matter, and savor the time you have. That's what you do when life is short."
A couple of years back I was working remotely in UK for US clients - so my day started later. Which meant I woke up with the kids, fed them, played with them, walked them to school.
My abiding memories are cuddling a child in an arm each watching early morning TV before starting the day.
We should all be so lucky, except it's not luck - it's consciously as a society designing work around community and family not the other way round
The sooner you realize life is short, the more you will make smart use of your time.
The same goes for faith: the sooner you realize there is no life after death, the more you will make smart use of your time. Your brain runs out of electricity and fluids, and poof you go.
There are also two ways of thinking about what's "smart". For the faithful, the smart thing to do is racking up merit (or studying or whatever) for your future rebirth or heaven etc.
For the materialistic people, the smart thing to do is to enjoy the time you have right now by doing what makes you feel good.
Both groups of people think the other is being silly, foolish or something else.
Worst. Advice. Ever.
If I have one thing to contribute, one iota of value to extract and pass on from my life, this may be it.
P.S. Substitute "extortion" for advice, in many circumstances, for a sense of how it really worked.
If anyone wants to use IoT data, personal search queries, etc., to build a recommendation engine that increases the probability of 'reading the right thing at just the right time in life', I'd sign up for it! For subtle/complex things, this seems like an overly-intimidating task, but to get started on the project, someone querying illness, loss, etc., might benefit profoundly from this. You'd be essentially be creating a 'skewed Google' that returns what the user _needs_ rather than what the user _wants_ at the moment. (That said, don't pursue such a project at the expense of spending time with family... :) It's a tough balance to strike, isn't it?)
In peace, Mike
1. Don't work for a start-up, since they don't impart salary-winning experience to you, they don't pay you or provide reasonable benefits, and they also don't allow you the freedom to work on big ideas that they usually promise. The lines used to sell naive engineers on working in start-ups are as paramount to life's-too-short-bullshit as anything can be.
2. Don't agree to work in Agile/Scrum-like one-size-fits-all software management environments. Almost every single aspect of these systems is bullshit and will waste your time and break down your morale while draining away your productivity in the best years of your life.
3. Don't work in open-plan offices or even offices that merely have cubicles. It's been settled for a long, long time that even in dense urban areas, providing private offices for individual knowledge workers is extremely cost effective for businesses, as productivity, work-place cognitive health, job satisfaction, moral, etc., all go up substantially. Generally the only reasons for open-plan offices are (1) bullshit trendiness in which an organization performs a shallow copy of some other organization, (2) hyperbolic focus on short-term costs, which means you should be thinking that the upper management doesn't know what they are doing and are bullshitting you -- it's similar to seeing a company stop providing free coffee as a money-saving tactic. It's bullshit -- coffee is so cheap and the productivity and good will it brings are so valuable that it's virtually never a reasonable plan to cut it; and (3) environments where upper management get off on surveillance and cognitive manipulation, and so it becomes a company cultural value to cram everyone into big rooms where you function more like a piece of office furniture than as a worker.
Personally I would also add that life's too short for enterprise C++ and Java (the languages themselves are quite fine, but anyone telling you that some legacy system couldn't have been maintained and incrementally brought into a better state by 2016 is, once again, bullshitting you and see you as nothing but a glorified code janitor).
I think if I could give any advice to young developers, it would be that if they want management types to respect them throughout a prosperous career, they have to avoid the bullshit of the items above. If you let a manager or executive bullshit you by duping you into working for a start-up, by getting you to agree you are a child whose own creative thinking about problem solving can't be trusted and so Agile/Scrum cookbook management is needed and you must play your part, or by getting you to agree that your natural inclinations for privacy, clarity of thought, protection of productivity and time, should all be sublimated so you can be a "team player" by wearing headphones that cost more than your employer's 401k matches for the year so you can just barely function 10 feet from a foosball table, you've already lost, and it will take years to undo the damage.
This, I presume, is the predicament of at least a small portion of people in our industry. Yet, your sentiment and line of thought are interesting, and I fully agree with you. I just hope that you understand that even logical agents can be forced to take non-logical decisions given the state of affairs of the world.
Would you take a job that offered you $1/year of wage, or a job that offered literally zero vacation days? No? Well then it means you don't need any job, but rather you are in a hurry to select some job that still meets certain minimum criteria.
You probably at least require that the job pays well enough for you to support yourself, and maybe others too, and that the job offers you access to affordable medical, dental, and life insurance. You probably also expect the job to have some range of regular hours, approximately 40-50 hours working per week, with an expectation that you do not usually need to work overtime or on weekends.
You probably also require that while you're working, you are shielded from dangerous situations (e.g. you're not writing code while dangling from a helicopter, and there's not a hole in the roof over your desk, ...).
This is a lot of stuff that you require. In fact, out of the space of all possible jobs, you're actually looking for jobs that fit into an extremely tiny niche.
These things just happen to be the most common norms around employment in the developed world. We don't have to negotiate as hard for them now, and you know why? Because people in the past negotiated extremely hard for them, and refused to take 'no' for an answer, and led strikes, lock-ins, demonstrations, bargaining agreements, and political diplomacy in order to secure either laws or strong social norms to protect these things.
When those people approached employment, they didn't say, well, I'm a beggar with few options, so I had better subject myself to anti-human treatment and just take whatever I am given.
Instead they said, I am a human being with talent and skill (and if you earned a degree in CS, you have a lot of talent and skill compared to vast sections of the working population). They said because I am a human being, I deserve to be treated with some types of basic respect and dignity and not sold bullshit excuses for anti-human conditions.
And now, the battle for employee-protecting laws or social norms (at least for developers) has shifted to be about protection of workplace privacy and productivity (get rid of Agile/Scrum and get rid of open-plan offices) and the respect to be paid fair wage and compensation for your skills (don't fall prey to start-up bullshit which argues that you ought to view certain sets of experiences or chances as valuable and be willing to trade compensation to get them).
You don't need any job. You need a job that meets your goals. When you're young you might fool yourself into thinking that sitting in an open floor plan or agreeing to be bound by Agile aren't a big part of your goals. Then you realize that managers, executives, investors, and so forth, who put you in the open-plan office and tether you to Agile/Scrum fundamentally see you as commodity labor, perfectly easy to replace, and have stopped caring whatsoever about your career progress from almost the first moment they hired you.
It would require a massive, short-term discount factor on your own personal value to make that worthwhile -- such an incredibly self-deprecating amount of discount that it realistically could only be due to a literal emergency situation -- like you need a paycheck today or you will literally die.
And I'd argue that if you have minimum salary requirements, or some fuzzy idea of regular working hours or minimum vacation requirements, then you're not at all in a situation where you need wage as a literal emergency necessitating you to deeply undervalue yourself. And even if you did, you could simply compromise on the field of labor, and do something besides CS jobs if you had to.
At any rate, I do not agree that simply being young and needing a first job is any excuse at all for being willing to tolerate open-plan offices, Agile/Scrum, or the false promises of start-ups. Just say no to all that shit and you'll ensure the first job you get actually helps you in terms of having an actually prosperous software career.
http://edwards.yale.edu/archive?path=aHR0cDovL2Vkd2FyZHMueWF...
a few examples: "6. Resolved, to live with all my might, while I do live."
"9. Resolved, to think much on all occasions of my own dying, and of the common circumstances which attend death."
"52. I frequently hear persons in old age say how they would live, if they were to live their lives over again: resolved, that I will live just so as I can think I shall wish I had done, supposing I live to old age"
"This", meaning "current".
Add the belief that there is another (form of) life after this one and suddenly the equation changes:
This life is short. But then there's another one coming.
The scientists in us agree - of course there is no evidence of life after this one, despite the messages transmitted to us from our ancestors - in the form of stories, traditions, superstitions, beliefs, religions. Depending on who you ask - we either go to a place were we stay forever (heaven/hell/spirit world) or we come back to life as another being or life form.
But the body dies and rots away !
Technically the body has died many times during it's lifetime - cells die and others are created - or rather - create themselves according to the instructions in the DNA.
The DNA is the one that moves forward through time, all the other pieces of our bodies rot away. But not the whole of it, just 50%. Half the DNA vanishes into void.
But "I" will no longer "exist" !
That's a belief. And also quite vague, because - who/what is this "I" ? Is it my body, is it my brain, is it something which lives inside the body/brain, is it all imaginary ?
Well, think about anyone - someone who's not near you right now - who is he/she ?
Right now, he/she is a thought.
Isn't everyone, dead or alive, just that - a thought ? Isn't "I" a thought then ?
If so, what is life then ? A story ?
Your story.
"Remember that man lives only in the present, in this fleeting instant; all the rest of his life is either past and gone, or not yet revealed. Short, therefore, is man's life, and narrow is the corner of the earth wherein he dwells." - Marcus Aurelius
What will be the best use of your time?
When someone ask for the best flavor of linux, or program, or car; depending on the forum you may get the answer "that depends on you", and you may read a lot of different opinions on why people think their version is the best "for them".
With that comes a small problem: deciding the best use of your time, plan for the rest of your life may be incredibly complex.
An alternative B plan could be planning around: "What I don't want on my life"
-I don't want to be in the middle of traffic because is less time with my family...
-I want to spend less time on the internet to go the gym.../I want to stop being a gym rat to learn something on the internet
"Think of your many years of procrastination; how the gods have repeatedly
granted you further periods of grace, of which you have taken no advantage.
It is time now to realize the nature of the universe to which you belong,
and of that controlling Power whose offspring you are; and to understand
that your time has a limit set to it. Use it, then, to advance your
enlightenment; or it will be gone, and never in your power again."
Marcus Aurelius (Meditations 2:4)While that seem contradictory, it is not. When we are in a hurry we make unneeded mistakes, we don't enjoy the process of what we are doing, and we don't do things that reflect our true selves.
As a 40+ parent, I savor the time with my children, parents and friends and I prune the bullshit in work down to minimum.
The big problem: How do you choose what matters if nothing matters on the grand scale?
Life is so short that at 40+ you realize you will never get to do even 0.1% of your bucket list. So which rock do you push uphill?
In other words at 20-30 you can be adventurous and make mistakes. At 40+ you have promises to keep and miles to go before you sleep.
A similar thought scares the shit of me. I can code for hours on end (in the "flow") toward even perhaps the most trivial ends established by my employer. On the one hand, you could say I'm doing what I love in life. On the other,d darker hand, it seems like I'm squandering so many hours of my life playing this (effective) video game where I code for points (money).
My favorite: "One heuristic for distinguishing stuff that matters is to ask yourself whether you'll care about it in the future. Fake stuff that matters usually has a sharp peak of seeming to matter. That's how it tricks you. The area under the curve is small, but its shape jabs into your consciousness like a pin."
There's a lot written on how to live a great life, but in the end more and more I think, you live great stages in life. At any stage, you optimize for it and with an eye for being prepared for future stages.
http://www.holidays.net/mlk/store/Old-60-s-70-s-Protest-type...
I believe you meant "ensure" not "insure" here:
"Indeed, the law of supply and demand insures that: the more rewarding some kind of work is, the cheaper people will do it."
Thank you.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ars_longa,_vita_brevis#Transla...
As a father of young children, and a cancer survivor, these words resonated more with me than anything I've encountered on hn in a very long time -- maybe ever.
Other people's bullshit has never bothered me.
I regularly just turn my phone off and pick up the pieces when I feel like it.
Maybe that comes from my musician background. I don't know.
Or maybe I'm just the most inefficient person in the world because I don't give a shit about anything. I just do what I think is necessary when I think it's needed.
I think I'm a fairly productive person. I get things done. But I don't worry about it much.
I spend most of my thoughts and energy on my family and my girlfriend, not work.
Okay, that's not fair: I spend quite a lot of time reading books.
Is this a real problem? Or is it a straw man?
Just do the best you can with your time. If you become unhappy with how you spent it you can use that to inform you on future decisions but you can't change the past.
The pain of having missed significant time with someone you care about is severe, but it is also a thing you can't change.
I am not saying pg is wrong, I am pointing out a problem.
Life may be too short to worry about how you are spending your time.
possibly, shortened 'aVoiding Bullshit'.
Life is short, so is history, and the impact we can make is enormous.
For me this is my bullshit filter.
Ecclesiastes 3:11
To see a World in a Grain of Sand
And a Heaven in a Wild Flower,
Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand
And Eternity in an hour.
If you have a new account and want to comment here, you're welcome to email us at hn@ycombinator.com.
If you're stuck in traffic, you could've been reading a book. If you were reading a book, you could've been cleaning your room. If you were cleaning your room, you could've been working on a side project. If you were doing that, you could've been working on a better side project to get rich. But that would be less important than curing cancer, which is less important than curing old age. However, even curing old age pales in significance to the fact that entropy will dissipate all energy in the universe. How are you going to prevent that? And what if there's multi-verses that need to be fixed too somehow. You didn't fix the past either. Maybe you should've worked on a time machine instead of solving entropy problems. And what about all those people in poverty getting malaria because you were working on some b.s. problem?
It never ends. You could go crazy dwelling on this stuff too much.
- Poses the hypothesis that "Life is short"
- Proposes an 'objective' basis for this feeling: some of his most meaningful life events happen 8 or less times
- Transitions that the shortness of life justifies avoiding "bullshit," while acknowledging that's a loaded term.
- Proposes examples of "bullshit," traffic jams, unnecessary meetings, bureaucracy, and arguing online.
- Suggests arguing online is an example of a habit that is addictive, yet bullshit.
- Defines bullshit as things that won't matter to you in the future upon reflection.
- Proposes ways to avoid bullshit
- Proposes a way to savor time
Analysis:
- I'm not sold on the metric of measuring something by how much we value it upon reflection.
- I don't think the premise "Life is short" needs to be established to justify "avoid bullshit."
- The argument is fairly loose in that 99.9% of our lives are bullshit by his definition. Is 99% of sex bullshit?
Interesting piece, smarter than your average bear.
I've never got this sentiment. Life is the longest thing anyone has ever done. Life is long, very long. I think back ten years ago and it seems like an age ago. It was. I'm early 30s and I feel like I've lived a long life; seen a lot and done a lot and had my kicks. That I've maybe got another full 60 years if I play my cards right is amazing to me. It seems like eons.
The only funny thing about time I've noticed is that as you age (and if you read) the past gets closer and closer. When I was a kid finding out people were born in the 1940s was amazing. SO long ago! Now Napoleon's reign seems very relevant and modern to me.
The probability for this essay to pop-up right after PG started a fire with his economic essay is just to small for there to be no connection. Could be, that this essay is in itself bullshit. People lie to themselves to hide truths that are painful but self evident. I think this essay could be such a lie.
Also please note that although I was obviously disagreeing with paul on economic inequality I was not explicitly debating the topic. I was simply pointing out potential bias of a post made by a biased source and the possible validity that this recent essay was in response to the backlash caused by pg's economic article.
Additionally, I spent deliberate effort to craft my post in a way to avoid aggression as much as possible. I specifically stated that jl's statement can be classified as supporting evidence but it's still biased evidence and that it needs to be taken into account.
>I am no fan of pg's worldview but I think there are less conspiratorial and more good-faith ways to attack it
Your OP was a conspiratorial attack. I am just defending your original opinion.