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Comment by pw0ncakes | Hacker News Reader

A life is mediocre or not based on the conditions and constraints within which someone lives.

Someone who has to put off a vacation for 5 months because he only has 2 weeks' vacation each year, instead of going when he wants to, has a mediocre life. Someone who moves out of the city into a boring suburb because he can't afford a place in the city where he can raise kids is living a mediocre life.

It's not about money per se. There are people making $500,000 per year who live mediocre, depressing, subordinate lives. And there are people making a small fraction of that who have great lives. It's about having the resources and access to live life on your own terms rather than someone else's.

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I live in the suburbs. It's quite nice actually.

I work pretty much whatever hours I want and can walk to most things I use on a daily or weekly basis: groceries (including fresh meats and veggies from the local farmers), eat out at restaurants from fast food to 3-star (two in my neighborhood actually), get dry cleaning done if I need to, take care of shipping stuff, take in a movie, see a doctor, dentist, chiropractor or orthodontist. I can also walk to a pretty nice neighborhood park only the folks in my development can use without crossing any major roads. It's about 40 acres, with a water fall, a pond, two tennis courts, exercise equipment, playgrounds for kids, jogging trail and miscellaneous other sundry -- mostly covered in trees and greenery. We have three swimming pools in my neighborhood, one where no kids are allowed. Twice a month we have a farmer's market in the parking lot of the bank I walk to in 5 minutes. On the 4th of July my neighborhood puts on a private fireworks show.

Every home in my neighborhood has fiber optic internet, phone and television. We had it before FiOS was even a term.

I'm 5 minutes from a reservoir and nature preserve. On any given night I can spend maybe 5-10 minutes of travel time to see live music, take in a play, see a concert or get on a 45 mile long dedicated bike trail. 10-15 minutes from my house I can buy pretty much anything a person can buy, from a Porsche to discount socks, can play golf at at least 6 golf courses, have a world class indoor swimming facility inside of a nature preserve and park, and my eating venues and choices expand by a magnitude of 10 including everything from budget priced French Cuisine to Korean bar food. I have half a dozen ethnic groceries within 20 minutes travel time from my house, two world class performance venues, a college campus (soon to be two more), ample jobs and industry in everything from hi-tech to agriculture (I live in Wine Country). I'm close enough to a major international airport that If I travel someplace, I can call my wife when I land to come pick me up at the airport, and she'll be there by the time I collect my baggage.

And in 3 years or so I'll have a mass transit stop 5 minutes from my house.

My house is not terribly big, but I and several family members can live there very comfortably and rarely bump elbows, and I spend less than 25% of my income to live there (I'm not rich by any stretch of the term). In the warm months I, get home from work and walk to the grocery and buy and grill lamb, fresh salmon, steaks, asparagus, mushrooms, onions, garlic and other such great things, and eat out on my property every day with a bottle of wine (I'm partial to Chilean Cabs) I brought back from the same grocery. I usually finish up dinner by finishing the wine with some imported cheeses or fresh fruit from the last farmer's market and a cigar.

If I want to enjoy pure nature, it's literally 10 minutes away, and if I want to enjoy an urban environment, I'm 30-40 minutes from the local city center. However, I find myself not going much into the city because there's really not much draw outside of the occasional comedy show or museum. I literally have everything I could ever need at my finger tips, plus I pay less for the privilege than living in the city, and I have 10x the room.

I get 3 weeks vacation per year, I usually split it into two trips. In the last two years I've vacationed literally around the world 3 times. But the rest of the time, I don't really have to take a vacation, because the environment I live in is literally better than any resort I've ever been to except I have to mix my own drinks.

Maybe you call that having a mediocre life. Perhaps, but maybe I'm just satisfied with mediocrity then?

That sounds like an incredibly nice suburb. Most aren't that good. There is nothing walkable from my parent's house. Though they do have FiOS and I can't get it in the city.

We picked the area because of the large numbers of nice amenities very close by. There are about 5000 homes here all with the same kinds of walk-ability. A very nicely designed area. There are areas just a few miles away that weren't designed quite as well.

I'm very glad to be seeing the recent movement in design that calls for walking friendly areas. But with a good understanding that people need to park somewhere as well.

which city are you in?

I live in the Northern Virginia area. Which is Washington D.C. metro.

Sounds like Ashburn. ;)

You're missing the point of the parent post. Someone who's moving from the cities to the suburbs for money reasons, even though he wants to live in the city, is living a mediocre life. Someone who lives in the suburbs because they want to and it makes them happy is living the dream. The post may be poorly worded, but it shouldn't be interpreted as "suburbs are boring" but rather "someone who finds suburbs boring but is forced to lived there."

You're right. I was being a bit pedantic about it.

I want a Ferrari and a 300 ft luxury yacht, a private helicopter and jet, eat 4-star meals 3 times daily and a closet full of custom made Italian suits and a private trip to the ISS on board a Russian rocket followed by time in any one of a dozen top-end apartments in major cities around the world. I want those things so bad I can feel it in my bones but because of financial reasons I own a practical family car, take a cruise every so often, fly coach most of the time, eat 4-star only 2-3 times a year and I shop at an outlet mall for my clothes which I keep in my boring suburban closet and when I travel I get a reasonably priced hotel with clean sheets and free breakfast in the lobby.

Am I living a mediocre life because my ambitions have outpaced my bank account?

Not really.

Are those fun things to shoot for as long-term, fantasy filled life goals?

Sure thing. I think that lots of successful people are successful because of a general dissatisfaction with the status quo. Their life is great, but can't it be just a tad better? And I think that's fine as a motivational tool.

But just because I'm not followed around by my own personal string quartet to provide atmosphere while I'm eating lunch doesn't mean playing the same music on my laptop somehow makes my life just oh so not worth it all.

I disagree with the basic sentiment that, "I didn't get everything I wanted, whenever I wanted it, all the time, so I'm living a mediocre life." That's a bunch of nonsense. By this definition, nobody lives beyond a mediocre life. Not the Sultan of Oman, Bill Gates, Warren Buffet or Kim Jong Il.

I think a better definition is this "are you on the path to the things you want? if not, you live a mediocre life." For example, I really want to eat 4-star meals 3 times daily. To do that takes lots and lots of money. I don't eat that way now, but as I move up in the world, I make more money and can thus eat 4-star meals with a higher frequency. I'm pretty satisfied with this. Next year, I plan to eat more 4-star meals than this year. And the year after, likewise.

Now supposing, all I could do is eat at Taco Bell every day (I've been there). I am not on that path. I can't even taste the sauce of a good bœuf bourguignon. I'm living a mediocre life. This motivates me, how do I get my bœuf bourguignon? How can afford to eat at Chez Francois and taste that succulent dish? I would save, but I barely make enough money as is. I know! I'll make more money! How do I do that? And on and on and on....

Eventually, I get on the path and my life is fulfilled. But I may have had to do things that I didn't necessarily want to do. Like work full-time, or take fewer vacation days, or commute an hour each way. Tough, that's life, that's not mediocrity.

As others have pointed out here, you will be the best judge of what a good life is.

The article was referring to your "increased capacity to contribute to the world."

That may not be your interest or you may be doing it a whole different way. Again, you will be the best judge of "how much" to contribute.

But if every smart person was contributing enough, we wouldn't be in a mess like we are today.

Something to think about.

But if every smart person was contributing enough, we wouldn't be in a mess like we are today.

That has more to do with a mass of powerful but useless people that has collected at society's top than with an epidemic of lazy smart people.

May be true. That is all the more reason really smart (and not lazy) people to move to the top and displace the powerful and useless people. Don't you think that would be an answer?

Okay, so, I live in San Francisco, but in an unfashionable neighborhood. Please tell me if I'm living a mediocre life or not.

Perhaps I have misunderstood you, but you're basically saying that if there's some constraint at all on my life, it's mediocre. Seriously, fuck that. There's always someone with more freedom. This is hardly more enlightened than keeping-up-with-the-neighbors.

What it's really about is accepting constraints with grace. And a big part of that is knowing yourself well enough that you can make the right choices.

It's more complicated than that, obviously. If the constraints exist because they provide some absolute value, then they're not so bad. For example, neither of us can fly by our own power, but that's a constraint associated with being human instead of another animal, which has some obvious benefits.

Everything worth doing imposes constraints-- working, raising a family. The question is whether those are constraints that add value for you or for someone else. For example, if you choose only to take 2 weeks of vacation per year because you're very interested in seeing the results of a project you're working on, the constraint is paid off by the benefit. If you can't take serious vacation because your company won't allow it, but you could easily do so otherwise with no serious compromise to your work, it's a constraint that is of no benefit to you-- only to someone else.

Please refer me to an employer that will let me take paid vacation whenever I want, and however much I want. I will send you my resume today.

See the first Google result for a casual [search](http://www.google.com/search?q=take+paid+vacation+whenever+I...) of your phrase.

http://www.glassdoor.com/Reviews/Netflix-Reviews-E11891.htm

I never said that it has to be paid vacation.

My point is this: how many companies, when offering $100k for 50 worked weeks (e.g. 2 weeks' paid vacation), would allow someone to take $90k and have 7 weeks' vacation, or $80k and 12? Very few.

Not too many would work on that kind of system. But you'd be surprised what you can negotiate for when taking a job. 6 weeks of vacation is not entirely unheard of, even in the U.S., even for U.S. companies.

But it doesn't scale quite like that. Ideally, your presence in the company is creating value for the company. And I don't mean in some kind of intrinsic sense. I mean in real dollars.

A person making $100k for a company better be making the company at least that much money - they should be making at least 1.5x their salary for the company to stay in business and the company is probably betting they are worth 2x their salary. It's not just your salary or salary + benefits, but the loss the company will realize by you not being there in terms of lost sales (which is what it all ends up as in general, it's what everybody in the company is working towards, even the janitorial staff). So negotiating a $10k pay cut for 5 more weeks of vacation looses the company $10-30k off the bottom line.

Vacation is there because it costs the company more to not give you vacation (burn-out, sloppy work, quitting, smaller employment pool, etc.) than to give it to you. So they strike a balance and say "2 weeks will keep our employees minimally happy without costing us too much money in the end".

If you don't like that, there are plenty of part-time jobs you can apply for -- some even pay pretty well. I'd wager most companies would be thrilled to hire most of their employees P/T because then they don't have to provide benefits and they don't have to worry about keeping their people occupied for every hour they charge. No work? Go home.

If I had to define a mediocre life I'd define it as a life where there are things you want to achieve but you aren't trying to achieve them because you're afraid of failure. It's more of an internal mental state than anything.

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