Young men are dropping out of the job market to spend their time gaming | Hacker News Reader

Young men are dropping out of the job market to spend their time gaming

1843magazine.com

35 pointsWheelsAtLarge31 comments

Feels like i've seen this article around 3 times. 2 times within a month and has made it to front page every time.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13890782

Creat Filter[1] Hypothesis:

The reason why it's difficult to meet technically advanced aliens in the galaxy is because technology brings direct ways to get meaning and satisfaction that far surpasses anything the real world can offer. Each civilization develops to the point where they can produce technology that can short circuit the evolutionary drive and replace it with something better (It can be 'Enlightement', 'Soma', 'immersive neural lace games and soap opera', or 'permanent intellectual, physical and existential orgasm by brain fungus')

Intelligent agent can't derive meaning from rationality or intelligence using deduction. Self preservation is not more logical than being happy, it's provided by evolution. Those who explore universe have not fallen into this filter.

Civilizations that pass this Great Filter are puritans.

----

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Filter

I would flip the headline around a bit.

It is more like Young men are blocked from job market and forced to spend their time gaming.

Some people then ask me, forced how? They can't do anything else?

Well, I know I can't... I don't own a car, no women want relationship with me (what sane woman would want a jobless carless guy that live with his parents?), I don't have money for any other hobbies... so I help with the business that still profit (I own and can inherit several of them) and play games, there is not much else to do, in fact many days were EXTREMELY boring, if I wasn't being treated I know I would be suicidal by now.

Why 'jobless' though? Helping with a family business is a job

Most families don't have a family business.

Yeah, I meant in his specific case. I understood it as not having a 'proper' job is one of the reasons he sees for not having a relationship, while helping in the family business.

Don't you feel the drive and thrust to create and innovate and contribute to society? You're on here so you can probably code. You probably are lucky enough to have a very deep understanding of your family business (supply chain dynamics etc). Let's say it's a restaurant. I'd be killing to learn every detail inside out, spending hours on the internet trying to figure out how others approach the problem, improve efficiency and possibly create a product specific to the industry.

>spending hours on the internet

That is probably a part of the problem.

I am helping my dad code programs that generate some documents that are mandatory to make business in the country...

But that is basically endless work, because the government here keeps changing the laws constantly.

We also have a gigantic website mostly with static pages that needs lots of SEO (almost all our sales come from people find our webpage on google, and calling us).

Still, right now that company doesn't exactly profit, we are using it mostly hoping the economic crisis will end before we run out of open grass field (because the runway ended for quite some time ago already...)

I really want to find some other business to start and see if I can get some short term profits, but I have no idea what to try, most of my ideas doesn't work because my country laws. (brazil won a couple times the dubious honor of being the hardest country in the world to do business :/ I have random companies in my name that I can't shut down because leaving then running is actually cheaper, even if I have pay taxes for business that doesn't nothing... tax law is so byzantine that we are listed as the country where is most expensive to pay taxes, ignoring the taxes themselves, because of the sheer amount of accounting and legal work needed).

Thanks for your insight... as an aside, I heard in Brazil it is possible to invest at a rate of government risk free rate of 15%... is this true?

Yes.

Sort of... But that is how much the government theoretically pays in interest.

For this reason people don't bother in investing in companies (when I had startups, people would batantly tell us they wouldn't invest because buying government papers was more profitable).

Also getting loans to start a business is insanity, for example my bank charges 13% PER MONTH, CC can reach 450%+ per year.

I have lots of ideas, but no capital, no investors, and I am not crazy enough to get more debt here, so I end not doing any of them.

Can't blame them.

Coding is a game for me too and its fun.

If I had a less fun job, I'd probably play more games.

Brave New World

"Today’s games seem to be displacing careers, friendships and families, and thus stopping young people (particularly men) from starting real, adult lives."

How very American Beauty. It is probably best for economists to avoid the topic of friends and family.

What I see is a relatively untapped workforce segment that connects via a game console, handheld device or VR.

This would not bother me that much except for the way gamers get their minds warped by immersing themselves in their fantasy worlds for hours at a time.

My god, they're almost as bad as books.

I don't know. I've never had an argument with an infantile book.

The link sent me to an article about umami, "the fifth taste", not related to games or men. The main protagonist is a woman called Bonnie Chung who likes a Japanese food called miso.

In many places of the world you get to work your ass off for decades while you see 1/3 of the population sitting on their hands while living of the back of the tax paying worker. I can understand that many get fed up, especially if they didn't get paid a whole lot to begin with.

To each its own? People are free to live the life they want to live. No one is forcing you to work hard.

and then expect good life? shouldn't it like "you reap what you sow"?

If the expectation is that you should be able to live a good life if you work hard then something is very wrong. A huge number of people work incredibly hard, yet still don't get to live a good life. A teacher (or nurse, developer, construction worker, etc) who puts in long hours working a stressful job and still doesn't earn enough to invest in a home, take a vacation, or raise a family. Where is the incentive for people to work hard if that's the case?

You can't tell people that "you reap what you sow" if they're seeing other people sowing a huge amount and actually reaping very little.

To anyone who might reply to suggest this means the reward for not working should be even lower, read The Road to Serfdom by Friedrich von Hayek first. He made a very good case that there's a necessity for decent welfare in modern societies because without it poor people will eventually rise up in a bloody revolution. It's happened many times in the past. Lowering welfare is, by logical extension, an argument in favour of murdering the wealthy.

My personal situation: I do work, but probably not more than a few hours a day, and yet make significantly more than most of my peers. I don't work hard at all (maybe once in a while), yet work smart.

By most metrics my life is pretty good given I live a relatively free life without significant stress and plenty of money (not FU money, but I do alright). It also shows that you don't need to work hard to actually achieve something, and can still live well.

If you don't work, and you're too moral to abuse the system, you can't live a reasonable standard of living. The more menial the job these moral people are forced to accept, the more jobs they have to find.

I wonder how free they feel.

This is just untrue - you can. Obviously not while living on welfare, but if you're smart about it you can not work hard and live well. Source: personal experience.

> not work hard and live well

I think these two phrases will have to be expanded upon - what do you consider "not hard work", and "living well"?

To me, this means:

"Not hard work": a few hours a day at most, but with complete freedom, e.g. take the day off (sort of) whenever you want / have the possibility to go sit in a cafe or meet up with friends, etc. A life without too much professional stress.

"Living well": An (after tax) income of $100 - 150k a year, in a low(er) cost of living area (e.g. not SF or London). Add some for higher CoL cities.

I'll be frank, the only way someone gets to the point where they are making $150,000 a year is by doing a lot of work up front and then getting lucky. You have to get a degree (or the work equivalent), build up experience in the industry, pound the pavement for clients, prove your ability to them again and again. Then you have to hit the niche jackpot where you can work very little for a lot of money (at least until a competitor comes along).

I would paint you as the exception, not the rule. You had the right knowledge, the right skillset, and the right contacts to get you a job 99.9% of the current workforce would kill to have. Not because they are too stupid to do the same things you do, but because they weren't as lucky as you.

I don't work for clients though, I work on my own products. My customers are my clients. I agree with you that it would be much harder to make the same from direct client work, however, there are plenty of people in the world making >$10,000/mo via the internet from a product of some sort.

Where does this happen? Where does 1/3 of the population get full governmental assistance?

Are you including retirees, who paid into the system?

My parents, retirees at 55, didn't pay into the system, as we see it today. My dad got a full pension working a blue collar job, on top of a middle wage salary. He's living off that pension, plus social security.

I can't imagine many people being capable of retiring that way these days; jobs that offer good salaries and pensions hardly exist (mostly in the government), and it's likely social security won't be there for us. I hope I'm wrong on the latter, but it's hard to live on Social Security alone even today.

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