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Comment by misterman0 | Hacker News Reader

>> The Churn is losing a day debugging because a transitive dependency changed a function signature. The Churn is spending a week just to get a project you wrote a year ago to even run. The Churn is rewriting your front-end because a shiny new thing came around.

If you think the churn is that then you're lucky. To me, the churn is working for the man. Everything I ever do is for the man.

If I could ever reach a point where I could say, fuck you, the man, well, that‘d be the day, wouldn't it? That'd be The End Of The Churn that The Man invented.

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There are many many organizations and Institutes that aren't the man. You don't have to work for a soulless corporation. You can do work that helps the greater good of humanity.

The company I work for certainly does overall good, and treats its employees well, but it's still a larger for-profit company, and the work I do isn't exactly my choice. I figure working for anyone other than myself will always have this air of being for "the man".

It seems like you independently came to the conclusion of Naval's thesis.

https://twitter.com/naval/status/1002103497725173760?lang=en

Maybe you are looking for sovereignty, where you do things not because you "have" to but because you "choose" to.

The idea your touching upon might be bigger than just your "day job" but how you spend your time and what decides that.

The thing is, you always end up working for the man since they own part of your income.

Under the current version of American Corporatism, no, you cannot work for a company that isn't soulless. A Corporation is legally required to work only to increase the value of a share, nothing more.

Maybe you can work for a non-profit if you're lucky, but how many are there out there that pay market rate?

>A Corporation is legally required to work only to increase the value of a share, nothing more.

That's just the excuse the CEO's mouth pieces trot out when the company is doing stuff that is shitty and sociopathic. You'll notice the CEO has no problem getting the company to do things that enriches himself at the expense of the shareholders.

> A Corporation is legally required to work only to increase the value of a share, nothing more.

No. That's a misconception. Corporate directors are required to act in the interests of the shareholders, but they have a lot of discretion in determining what those interests are and how they are to be served.

Here's a reference from a decent law school: https://www.lawschool.cornell.edu/academics/clarke_business_...

That reference cites the Hobby Lobby case where they got to opt out of providing insurance for contraception and a Facebook video of an expert explaining how the current corporate system produces sociopathic entities (corporations). I don't believe either fundamentally debunks the idea that the agents of corporations are required to attempt to increase the value of a share.

I agree that there's still a lot of lee-way in that, like giving an employee a bonus might hurt shareholders directly in the short-term but you can claim it increases productivity and so is a good decision. You still have to justify all decisions in terms of value to the shareholders though. If you (as CEO) decide to just stop all work and spend every day at Disneyland until the coffers are empty you can be sure you'll lose that suit. And when every single decision has to be viewed through that lens, you aren't able to directly do real good for the world, just indirectly.

> You can do work that helps the greater good of humanity

There are many groups that say they do this work, but very few that actually do. Then you have to move yourself internally until you are actually doing work that is the greater good.

What is the greater good to begin with? The flexibility of human understanding and the breadth of types of companies with "good intentions" available means that the search for such a mythical group is something that can take a lifetime and still not yield any fruit.

I'd say the common connotations of the word 'churn' better fit the patterns in the parent 'Advice...' article. What you're describing deserves another name, something more like 'grind' or 'yoke' or 'rat-race'.

> If I could ever reach a point where I could say, fuck you, the man, well, that‘d be the day, wouldn't it? That'd be The End Of The Churn that The Man invented.

You probably already could if you wanted to. Ten years ago I quit my software engineering job and spent 2 years driving from Alaska to Argentina. Recently I quit again and spent 3 years driving around Africa.

When you spend less money, you have a lot more time than you think, and you don't have to work for the man.

I think this is a good place to point out that the "churn" could be a variety of things and really depends on the person "churning". The advice is still sound though, make steps in your life to not deal with the churn. The first step is identifying it, maybe next is how to overcome it. Not always an easy thing to do but I do believe everyone has that one thing holding them back.

The words churn and churning have now lost all of their meaning due to the fact they've been used too much man, you‘ve overused them, c'mon!

But I do think pessimism is the correct state of mind, given how far the tentacles of the man have reached and how little we do to resist his influence.

Who or what is the man? Only a Morpheus can tell you such a thing. I'm not him.

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