Comment by yellowbuilding | Hacker News Reader

Comment by yellowbuilding | Hacker News Reader

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Maybe. A friend who I spoke to for the first time in a long time made a pretty good point to me the other day. Neither of us are liberals, btw. Both of us are into so many of the same things. We just have different careers, and we are approximately equally jealous of eachother’s careers.

We talked about what we have been doing while feeling lonely and we each had different stories of why we were not able to spend time around people we wanted to be around. He couldn’t afford to live in the city anymore and had to move to the Midwest where now he makes a wage that will probably never allow him to move back. I, on the other hand, can never leave the city because there are no jobs for me elsewhere and I would not be able to come back. Neither of us are comfortable investing in homes because we both feel unhappy where we are.

Job wise, we both have problems with our companies we work for, but like our coworkers. We feel very distant from what we are doing and recognize that the inability to change careers or better our situations gives us a lack of hope. His situation is slightly different because he is in a higher management position, but neither of us feel we can talk to anybody nearby about these things or we will be outed as not being this imaginary committed perfectly obsessed careerist type.

Basically, everything we have depends on our entire stories, everything we have ever done. We don’t have the privacy to have a multifaceted life without feeling like some fraud. He relates this to our society being so obsessed with individuals instead of letting us just be ourselves, separate from our jobs and our income and wellbeing. We don’t have the option of dreaming because the risk is just too great. We have seen our friends lose everything by taking risks.

Ultimately, I have to agree. We have let this obsession of making our personalities our lives get the best of both. It’s the core idea behind individualism, which we are taught is a great thing and I always believed it. I still do in most cases, but now i feel stuck inside my individual self, lonely like alll the other individuals.

We are so obsessed with ourselves as individuals, we lose sight of ourselves as parts of greater wholes, like families and neighborhoods.

I am not sure I can separate this from politics.

> We don’t have the privacy to have a multifaceted life without feeling like some fraud.

You hint at the answer, that aside from financial obligations nothing stands in the way of finding who you really are but yourself. Once a person finds confidence in expressing their true desires and aspirations, others take notice and start valuing and admiring the person, like in everything else it's a herd/popular mentality where anyone will appreciate it so long as others do but specially so long as the subject does. The road is of course winding tortuous with self-doubt, (more) loneliness as everyone else is just trying to conform and flak from society until the breakthrough years. But being a trendsetter is not much more than finding what are your particular trends for this existence, so to say. Only I can hold myself back emotionally, ultimately. Though yes, maybe attempts fail with nothing to show for it (even though wisdom may be worth more than a big salary as one ages) but I still think it's worth trying, really putting your heart into those attempts. The focus on people being specialists and not generalists (specially in more than one area of knowledge) makes the situation worse for sure.

This suggests that I want more money or consumption, and that’s wrong. Nor do I want popularity. Quite the opposite. Popularity and attention are really the main problem, if anything. Who we are is defined by what we have done more than any time in history. Every day that passes is further locking ourselves into our cages of individuality. How can popularity and followers, like you mention, be our only hope for change when they are also the ties that are trapping us to our current trajectories?

Specialist vs. generalist gets more at the problem I think we were talking about, but even the fact that it is such a debated concept seems off. Something seems wrong on a bigger level. Sometimes you need a specialist and sometimes a generalist, and we are highly adaptable creatures. It is strange this thing leads to so much anxiety. I think people are just worrying tremendously over which one are they to an unhealthy degree, and because they are scared to death of failure. Who can blame them?

I’m sure some love popularity and never want to do anything else with their life, but that is an unrealistic bar we have created for everybody in our society. So I guess that seems like a thing to look at.

Can you give examples of friends losing “everything” when following their dreams? What happened?

Excellent comment BTW.

I don’t think “following dreams” actually describes what I mean. I just mean doing anything except the safest thing to do, or making any sudden moves that requires a new start. Watching friends try to change careers has been cringeworthy. You have to be willing to lose everything. I think that takes all the fun out of life. It makes you feel absolutely trapped. Maybe i do love my life just how it is, but it’s hard to say when I cannot even visualize working toward anything else. I am just so much more fulfilled when working toward something. I don’t really get much out of just trying to save money so that’s I can risk it all at some point down the road. That feels like a trap. My happiest times have always been when I can be relatively confident I will not lose everything and I am in a place to contribute to something with other people. That is what I mean by “dream” and I currently have one of them, but it’s not a dream. It was once, or, it was at least a goal. I think “goal” is what’s I really mean. I want the ability to have goals in life that are not mere consumption, but that do not require overwhelming risk. The goals can be lame or common everyday things, but more real than a hobby and less deadly than risking homelessness.

I can relate to that. However, you have to realise that you literally want to have everything - both the comfort and safety AND a fullfilling life. This conflict within people has probably been going on from the beginning of time (it's greatly depicted in "The Revolutionary Road", a film by Sam Mendes (director of American Beauty)). I think that in the end, unless you're very lucky, you need to give up one or the other to some extent. Personally, I think I'd be more comfortable living my next 30 years as an at least somewhat free pauper, than spending my days in a comfortable, but depressing gilded cage - but that's a choice that everyone needs to make for themselves.

You can have comfort, safety and fullfilling life. There is absolutely no contradition between the three - unless your value system defines fullfiling as lack of safety. Comfortable does not imply depressing. Pointless and empty and without something to do implies depressing.

Maybe one reason for problems with loneliness and what not are these dichotomies - people believe they have to choose between two extremes and expect others to choose between two extremes - not allowing for harmony between multiple needs and wishes.

For example, the parent feels need to pretend to be obsessive careerist type. Had he did not pretended so, his peers would put him into familly men bracket and he woild be taken less seriously and his work life would suffer. He needs both, but had to choose only one, because we collectively don't allow for those compromises.

In the context of this forum, comfort and safety means a cushy tech job. I don't know how many people feel fulfilled in those, but my guess is that the majority isn't (esp. among people with more than a couple years of experience). The dichotomy seems very real to me.

Regarding your example of a father that needs to pretend he's laser-focused on the job - this is what I was talking about. There are people for whose career is a #1 priority, and these people naturally get the prized positions (managerial, or work on interesting projects etc.) in work environments, at the cost of everything else in their lives. Your example,a a father who secretely does not give a shit, still wants to work on these interesting projects, and thus misrepresents himself as someone who gives a shit. He literally wants to get something that, in a just world, he shouldn't get. He is not accepting the dichotomy.

Of course, the flip side is that there's plenty of other frauds who also misrepresent themselves, to the point of anyone who's open about his real priorities sticks out like a sore thumb - at which point you need to pretend just to maintain a mediocre job, and not to get the prized one. The reason for that is, in the grand scheme of things, even those "mediocre" tech jobs still pay six figures for working on a computer in a climate -controlled office. These are dream jobs for 90% of the population, so the competition for them is intense, hence all the theatrics (like for example people begrudgingly doing personal projects on Github in their spare time to fake passion). I imagine there's much more honesty amongst brick layers or truck drivers, as they don't have people coming for their jobs from all angles.

> In the context of this forum, comfort and safety means a cushy tech job. I don't know how many people feel fulfilled in those, but my guess is that the majority isn't (esp. among people with more than a couple years of experience). The dichotomy seems very real to me.

See, that is false dichotomy I see. You can have technically interesting job that is quite safe and with good management. You can have boring tasks with high subjective stress and disorganized management leading to late nights full of boring tasks and later burn out and leave the industry (looking at you, game industry).

> Regarding your example of a father that needs to pretend he's laser-focused on the job - this is what I was talking about.

I meant parent poster, not father. I have no idea whether he has children and the issue did not seemed to be family oriented one.

> There are people for whose career is a #1 priority, and these people naturally get the prized positions (managerial, or work on interesting projects etc.) in work environments, at the cost of everything else in their lives.

You later again do dichotomy between "career number one" and "does not give a shit". That is not how real world people act or feel. Moreover, real world people often move between the two.

Many many people in tech don't see middle management as desirable position. I know people who work on interesting projects and it did not costed them everything else in their lives. They focused on the kind of tech and positions important to them, but not to exclusion of everything and it worked out great for them. I know people who sacrificed everything and were not rewarded at all - sometimes unfairly and sometimes fairly. Their ego and identity being depended on job ended up hurting that job. People who sacrificed everything and ended up resentfulness and burned out by their own fault.

> Of course, the flip side is that there's plenty of other frauds who also misrepresent themselves, to the point of anyone who's open about his real priorities sticks out like a sore thumb - at which point you need to pretend just to maintain a mediocre job, and not to get the prized one.

Interestingly, there are two kind of jobs for you - mediocre and prized. You don't see different positions suitable for different people nor people possibly unhappy in those prized jobs nor people possibly happy in "mediocre jobs". These is no concept of personality type or aptitudes affecting what kind of job you are effective and happy at. There are loosers at mediocre jobs and those who sacrificed everything for prized jobs, regardless of whether they are actually really effective at that position.

Is it about work itself and meaning of work or rather about what jobs are seen as prized by others?

> The reason for that is, in the grand scheme of things, even those "mediocre" tech jobs still pay six figures for working on a computer in a climate -controlled office. These are dream jobs for 90% of the population, so the competition for them is intense, hence all the theatrics.

Is it that companies have hard time to find people or that competition for mediocre job is intense? Because really, many many low paid jobs are working on a computer in a climate controlled office.

> I imagine there's much more honesty amongst brick layers or truck drivers, as they don't have people coming for their jobs from all angles.

Truck drivers struggle. The competition for jobs and pressures and debts are very real, harder then any position in tech.

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