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Comment by justinator | Hacker News Reader

I don't mean to be rude, but would you mind sharing the type of financial situation you grew up in?

I don't remember wasting that much time as a teenager, since if I wanted something, I needed to get a job and work for it. If there was any chance of my bettering the type of situation I grew up on, I had to make sure my grades were amazing. I had to deal with someone else's serious drug addiction in the family, and try to make sense of it, while committing to myself. I don't know if you were ever physically abused as a child because of the lack of drive?

I'm just saying, you may have had the privilege to waste time on someone else's dime, and everything still worked out alright. Not everyone has that. Some of us, if we're not willing to fight from the get-go, we're going nowhere.

Anwyays, congratulations on your post doctoral fellowship.

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I grew up in a neighborhood of dirt and chicken coops. My parents made less than 12k $ per year as I grew up. My parents never attended college and did not know the first thing about it. My privileges included a stable family that pushed me to succeed where they had not, and an above average IQ.

I got through college with my family on student loans, stipends, and food stamps.And you know what, my kids will have opportunities I never even dreamed of. There is no better feeling.

You decide for yourself what my anecdote is worth.

> my kids will have opportunities I never even dreamed of

On another hand your kids are more spoiled with the wealth they were born into and potentially may have lower drive than you have.

Hard to tell how they would turn out.

> your kids are more spoiled with the wealth they were born into

An afghan (?) proverb I barely remember went something like this: "The king's father grew up in a tent; he worked hard, built his house, and led the people well. The king lived in a house but remembered the tent he was born in; he worked hard, built his palace, and led the people well. The king's children were born in a palace; they have never seen a tent. They are lazy and will not lead the people at all."

Maybe you're thinking of the famous quote from the Saudi ruler in the 60s:

"My grandfather rode a Pony, my father rode a Pony, I drive a Mercedes, my son drives a Land Rover, his son will drive a Land Rover, but his son will ride a camel,"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rashid_bin_Saeed_Al_Maktoum

The English language version is:

    Shirt sleeves to shirt sleeves in three generations.

My dad always used to tell us this. I am so happy you reminded me of this proverb ;)

I dedicate my professional life to chipping away at the "drive" required to lead a decent life, and I suspect most software engineers on this forum do too. Our greatest accomplishments as engineers, scientists, etc. are lowering the cost (measured in time and effort) of the things people need. The really deep ones, like food, energy, and medicine, get all the style points. Transportation counts too IMO, but even advertising and finance contribute to productivity (rather than making things cheaper, they make labor worth more).

Economists like to mention that just a few hundred years ago, an average worker's daily wages were only worth ten minutes of artificial light. Now they are worth more than 20,000 hours. This is progress. This is what we do.

Fuck the romanticization of poverty and hardship. That our children do not need to pour as much sweat as us into (literally) keeping the lights on is greatest joy of our success. That drive, grit, pain tolerance, and other survival-mode traits are no longer necessary or adaptive is the best thing that could be happening.

I suspect I will never be able to fully empathize with people who are sad about this. Different mindsets, I guess. Still, I think it's useful for us to be exposed to the opposing perspectives.

Yes, but.

We aren't romanticizing poverty, I'm an engineer too and I'm directly involved in the 20k hours of light part, probably my contribution is a very tiny fraction of it but my children have grown up with not only no desire to work but no real desire to put their all into anything. It's not universal but it does seem more polarized than it was forty years ago when I was the age they are now (20-s).

Of course this is all anecdata but it is something that bothers such a large number of people that I feel there must be a kernel of truth in it.

I'm not sad they don't have to struggle to stay alive, warm, and well fed (not that I ever had to actually struggle either, merely plan ahead a little more) what saddens me is the lack of desire to create. Of course if we go far enough back you had to be creative just to live at all so perhaps we are seeing not a change but merely the revealing of what was always there.

Whenever I start to think this way, I remind myself that "a large number" of adults have been lamenting the same exact deterioration of the youth for hundreds of years, but somehow we keep building, inventing, and progressing.

To be a parent is to worry :)

And I wanted to add something else because you make some very good points.

When I first went off to college I failed. I did not know why I was there or how to do things. I dropped out and worked various jobs e.g. graveyard shifts at AMPM for two years, pizza delivery for a year, driver for a repoman repossessing cars..let me tell you that there were some pretty dark years then..

But I did succeed after failing

The point is not so much a libertarian fairy tale though. It was only after I met my wife and started a family did the focus of my life come together with a vengence. It was only because I received a lot of support from a supportive wife, a stable dad and mom, a good graduate advisor,and a minimally sufficient social services system. Without these I would not have succeeded coming from where I did..

do you make it a habit to shit on peoples' achievements as foregone conclusions because of their upbringing? do you realize that this is an extremely transparent projection of your own insecurities?

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