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The reason the author's viewpoint is compelling is because it is somewhat unique. Your viewpoint is the standard one. Most people share it and that's why most people do exactly what most people do: work their tails off to try and accumulate power and money, often without thinking about why they're doing so and what they are truly working towards.

A few weeks ago I saw a startup founder speak and one of the things he talked about was work/life balance, which for him had been skewed towards work, extraordinarily so, for many years. "I've now realized," he said, "that I need to rebalance things, because the reason I'm working so hard is to be able to enjoy life and spend time with my family."

I laughed to myself, because this is someone who has built a company with $100MM in annual revenues. He could sell today and fulfill his stated ambition immediately. The reality, I suspect, is either that he's still in love with building something (a positive motivation that resonates with me) or is still trying to accumulate even more power and money (a less positive motivation that also, quite honestly, resonates with me too).

Someone like that is someone I understand. Based on your comment, you're also someone I understand. But I have met, and believe I also understand, people who are not wired like us. They truly have no power but do have a great deal of freedom. Either choice is valid, but if you look at someone who is free and insist that they are just as power-hungry as you are, that's sad - because if you can't see the choice they made, then it probably means you haven't made a choice either. And you should! Not making a conscious choice about your priorities is a great way to create a mid-life crisis. ;)

I think you capture the essence fairly well.

Choice is a weird thing, it can be oddly paralyzing. My favorite example is that when I was just starting out, a good computer was very expensive (like $3,000 for a desktop, or probably closer to $7000 in today's dollars), and so when I bought one, I had researched all of the options that might fit in my budget and pruned the list down to the one or two "best" components given what I could spend on them. Flash forward 10 years and between salary growth and the cost of computers plummeting, I found I could walk into Fry's and literally put together any computer I wanted. Even the "monster" configurations that PC Gamer used to have I could buy. It was really hard for me to figure out what to buy then.

"Success" is one of those things that in my experience is always in the future, because to have achieved it for me would mean I was "done" and I'm certainly not done. As a result, as I've gone through life I've become more deliberative about how I spend my remaining time, and trying to remind myself that it is the only resource that must be spent every day, you don't get it back.

> then it probably means you haven't made a choice either.

So true. I remember a colleague once saying "Not to choose, that is also a choice."

Was that colleague Neil Peart?

I agree that the author's perspective is very privileged. The terms powerless and trapped are nearly synonyms. Yet he overvalues freedom and says power is overrated.

I think a more interesting statement might be that wielding power is overrated. It seems like you could have financial and personal freedom without holding power over another individual. This is something I've tried hard to do (and I think been successful at.) Perhaps it's an illusion.

But I think what the author and others are noting is that most people who gain power then feel compelled to use it. Once you start to wield power, it seems necessary to compound it. Because power is a hierarchy with a nearly limitless ceiling. There's always a bigger fish.

I've never felt comfortable wielding power. It comes from many things: I'm skeptical of central planning. I think most evil comes from misplaced certainty. I'm over privileged and I recognize the inescapibility of unconscious bias. It goes so deep that I prefer declarative programming to imperative. I'm not even comfortable dominating my computer.

Maybe it is just a privileged form of guilt only accessible to those who have attained sufficient power for their own comfort. But my choice to abdicate conventional power and refrain from participation in some conventional power structures (corporations, etc.) has confused a lot of friends and family. Regardless of being privileged, it doesn't seem common to actively choose to avoid wielding power.

This reasoning confuses me. Your abdication of power cedes it to whoever's next in line. Maybe you are unsure of your ability to appropriately wield power, but that is only a good reason if you think you'd be worse than the next person in line. My attitude is that power-seekers are likely to be bad power-wielders, so you'd have to be a pretty bad power-wielder to make things better by abdication.

Maybe this is a matter of principles for you?

Great point. I'm not advocating for an anarchist utopia. I think Ursula Leguin's The Dispossessed lays out the problems with that pretty well.

We've probably all participated in organizations with ineffective leadership. I do think it's better to be a clear, decisive and consistent leader than a "cool" boss if you're participating in a power structure.

So it's not even a moral issue. It's just a personal one. I think it's rare for us to really ask if we enjoy holding power over others and whether those people benefit from it. Are there fruits of power (wealth, status) worth it? When does that change?

There is an imbalance of power across all demographics. If I step aside maybe the person who gets is traditionally more powerless. The question of whether I wield it better than them is hard to judge. There's a lot of nuance to when a good leader becomes a bad one. I think it's very difficult to judge our own working of power objectively. And of course power corrupts.

If there is a moral issue, it's just that I think a lot of our systemic power structures are archaic and ineffective at directing human potential. There will always be people craving and consolidating hierarchical power structures. I'd rather engage in organic, decentralized, emergent ones when I do participate.

I would differentiate between power and freedom, as the author does.

Power would be the capacity to affect other people's actions, often arising from having a position of authority over them, but can also occur in the form of influence over them (soft power).

Freedom would refer to having the means to choose our own actions with fewer or weaker external constraints.

The author has achieved some degree of financial freedom, but not much power from what I can see, beyond the limited power that his modest net worth can buy.

Freedom requires power over others. You can't avoid work unless others are providing you food. You can't get shelter unless you can keep others from taking it from you.

The real confusion is living in a society where most power is hidden and records are given meaning.

Freedom requires power over yourself, and a lot of people cede that power. Including Mr $100M up there.

Mind expanding on this? I'm curious as to what you are alluding to.

This guy has a company doing $100M and I bet you his kids wish he was at home more. He talks a good talk about cashing out but he has already done enough. What is he waiting for? Theory: he doesn't know how to stop. Being a captain of industry is tied into his identity and he can't give it up. It has power over him.

One definition of addiction is when you engage in a behavior despite its deleterious effects on other aspects of your life. A lot of things we do to "feel control" are closer to that end of the spectrum than they are to healthy behavior.

People live beyond their means and their boss can make them violate their ethics simply by threatening to fire them. In many, many cases this is a bluff, and someone who's financially stable can tell their boss no, or take a risk on a new job.

And strength is the currency which you can cash out as power or freedom. What you choose is up to you, but you need to be strong to get what you want.

Maybe to avoid the ambiguity we could use the terms "political power" and "personal power."

The article uses the terms power and freedom, and explicitly defines them.

> I would define power as the ability to make other people do what you want; freedom is the ability to do what you want.

I don't think it's cool to take a common and ambiguous term like "power" and claim that it will now only refer to a single, narrow meaning. It's not constructive. Better to qualify the term in a way that everyone in the discussion knows what you are talking about.

Since we're discussing a linked article, it is perfectly reasonable for people to use the terms that have been defined early in the linked article.

The original author clearly has a point to make and providing an explicit definition of the relevant terms helps communicate them. If you want to discuss something else about "power", the comment section of this article is probably the wrong place to do so.

I'd argue those are the same things, just different amounts of it.

Upper class people without the more pernicious forms of classism tend to refer to themselves as “comfortable” rather than upper class. We’ve discussed this “comfortable” phenomenon before and I think the classism is the main differentiator. If this line of Us and Them isn’t important to you then of course you wouldn’t necessarily notice when you’ve crossed it.

I'm not sure this is really disagreeing? It's just quibbling over what "power" means. When we say someone has or seeks power, financial independence is not what we're talking about.

There are a lot of retired folks, and this doesn't feel like power, in the sense that most people don't know or care about your opinion. (Unlike the author, who has his opinion in the New York Times.) When you buy stuff, it just feels like an ordinary transaction.

There is technically a form of power in that, but it's different.

> he can now just move to the countryside and enjoy life. And write when he wants. This is power.

Allow me to exagerate a bit. This is mostly knowledge. Minus the bit of land that you'd need to pay, making a house, growing veggies etc etc is just knowledge. It's just not modern western world education.

> Minus the bit of land that you'd need to pay, making a house

Lol guyz fuck this shit I'm gonna go to the countryside. It's so ez. Brb shitting $100k+ on some land + building a house that's up to code. Brb paying $10k+/yr in property taxes.

A guy on youtube bought a bit of forest for 20000 euros. It had two ruins and a tiny river inside. Enough to live happily with a few solar panels.

Also when you are at that level what is asked of you and your time is much less when you are at a lower level, so the motivation to quit is less than it would be if you were not in that position.

Agreed completely. Most people would sure as hell feel that lack of power if someone they loved was in danger/got sick and they couldn't help them.