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Comment by chrisco255 | Hacker News Reader

Well, as someone who went from bankruptcy and low wage job to low wage job to college to my current tech job, I disagree to some extent. It may not be easy to get out of a low pay career trajectory but it's doable. It takes hard work and effort and a certain amount of social and mental intelligence.

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Ah, so if you don't have a certain amount of social and mental intelligence, then fuck you, right?

You're reply is basically an example of survivorship bias.

I mean, vast majority of people have an adequate level of intelligence to improve their lot in life and most do over the course of their life. My reply is an anecdote, not survivor bias. It's also peppered with observations of people in my own family and friend group. My dad started out as a mobile home factory worker, shifted to firefighting in his 30s then after 15 years of service became a chief and earned a lot more as a result and he's set to retire at 60. That's not bad, my dad doesn't have a college degree or anything like that. He just worked hard and was consistent.

You can take a similar path in retail, manufacturing, construction, or any other number of industries that don't even require degrees.

But you can't just do the minimum and do it poorly and expect to advance. It's not a bad thing that the system works that way. Rewarding hard work, and smart work, is what we want in an economic system.

What if I told you there are people who are smarter than you and who have worked harder than you and will continue doing so, but for all their hard work and social and mental intelligence, these things are not sufficient on their own?

There's such a thing as affordance[1].

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Affordance

You're a qsort implementation who wasn't so unlucky as to be spammed with only pathological inputs. There are heapsorts who will fare worse for no other reason than being matched up with workloads that would've choked you, too.

I usually takes luck too. Sometimes the good kind. But more often, not the bad kind.

Wow, what was the trigger for that, if you don't mind me asking?

Because this is meloncholic. Both the article and the comment are fatalistic. First of all, it frames a 9-5 job as something to hate, which is a loaded opinion in and of itself. Rather than being grateful for having a job in a first world country, author and commenter choose to disdain it. Or frame it as slavery. It's privileged nonsense.

If you have a job, you have something to be grateful for, first if all. Secondly, you always have free agency in a free country. If you don't like it, move on, but don't project your own self loathing or dissatisfaction onto other people. Plenty of people get a lot of satisfaction out of their jobs and provide for their families from 9-5s and don't look at it from this pessimistic angle.

Those patterns of thought are either great if they inspire you to move onto other industries or toxic and bad for you if they cause you to become cynical.

Y'know, we're supposed to try to look at comments on this site in a charitable way since it's hard to convey tone with text.

I was actually disagreeing with the idea that 9-5 jobs need to be soul-sucking, and speaking from the perspective of someone who is able to decide what I work on.

But it's important to understand why some people hate their situations and feel unable to escape them. Poverty traps are real, especially in the United States, and we should be doing more as a society to help people escape them.

Also, I disagree that having a job is inherently something to be grateful for. Having a job is something to be paid for.

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