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Comment by bekman | Hacker News Reader

Good question, my career is very important to me. It gives me an identity. I just can’t sit at home all day. I’m gonna die with boredom.

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I don't think I'll ever quite understand this mentality that "not having a job"=="sitting at home all day". Do people not have hobbies of any kind? They really only find meaning in pursuit of money?

OP was clear that it is not about money, wasn’t s/he?

In this case, the job appears to be the hobby. Just because you get paid for something doesn't exclude it from being a hobby.

A job isn't solely about pursuit of money. Presumably, you are doing work that adds value for someone and/or society.

It's also a form of security should the online income suddenly dry up. It can also be a source of healthy social connections.

I was a homemaker for a lot of years. I did a lot of life enhancing stuff for me and other people. Trying to translate that into an adequate income post divorce has been enormously painful.

Some people successfully turn hobbies into careers. Others can't pull that off.

If someone's life works, changing some piece of it could cause it to come apart rapidly. Why risk that?

> Presumably, you are doing work that adds value for someone and/or society.

You can do that without being paid for it, and then you can control your own schedule completely.

> It's also a form of security should the online income suddenly dry up.

That's fair, but chances are if you managed to build something that generates enough passive income to live off of then you probably won't have much difficulty finding a job if you needed to.

> It can also be a source of healthy social connections.

I personally thing relying on work for social interaction is a terrible idea.

> If someone's life works, changing some piece of it could cause it to come apart rapidly. Why risk that?

Fair enough, but all I'm saying is I don't really understand how it works for them. To me, my job is just how I put food on the table, and my pursuit of money is purely so that one day I can do that without having to sell my time to someone else.

To me, my job is just how I put food on the table

Different people relate to work differently. Some people have some of their best relationships through their work.

Your experience isn't invalid, but it also doesn't invalidate how other people experience life.

I replied because I started out as a homemaker, then I got divorced after about two decades. I got to have an extreme experience of doing useful things for reasons other than money, and when I got divorced it was financially and socially devastating.

My so-called friends didn't stick around. All the life enhancing, useful work I had done was not readily translated into paid work.

I've spent recent years figuring out how to have a healthy relationship to paid work. It's overall been a better experience for me than the years I did useful things for others without being paid for it.

I actually have a decent track record of being able to put my volunteer work on a resume to help me get a job and I had a corporate job for a while. But it was an entry level job that didn't pay enough and corporate life wasn't really a good fit for me.

I mean, wherever you go, there you are. I'm no less guilty of tunnel vision (so to speak) than you are. I'm just looking at the world through a different tunnel.

But I desperately want to have enough paid work and to relate to the world through that lens. I don't feel valued for the things I've done and I've literally lived in dire poverty for years, including several years of homelessness. No, people don't really care and I feel I've been badly burned for doing good things for other people and not getting compensated for it.

All those people that I did wonderful things for who got serious careers out of it have not helped me create a real career with sufficient income. It hasn't opened doors for me in terms of being taken seriously and adequately compensated.

It's been enormously frustrating, baffling and enraging. It's proven to be a stubbornly intractable problem.

I never want to be 100% financially dependent on just one thing again.

The guy in this discussion making $6000 a month for two or three hours of work each week may have no ability to replicate that success if this stops working. Lots of businesses have been harmed by the rise of ad blockers, losing as much as 80% of their income over night.

One slam dunk success doesn't guarantee you can readily create another. For many people, that kind of success is short-term and will never happen again.

It's why the NFL requires financial education for their players. They are all college educated, but they are also very young and most NFL careers are short-lived. For many of them, the two or three years they play pro football will be the most money they will make in their life.

If they spend it like they think this is their starting salary and it only gets better from here, then they basically party their asses off for a few short years followed by an injury, the sudden end of their career and no means whatsoever to make anywhere near that much ever again. If they didn't save and invest, it's gone and never coming back.

That's an all too common story for a rather wide variety of wildly successful experiences. That kind of extreme success is frequently described as luck because it's so hard to replicate.

I read that more in jest to be honest.

I know people who work within their industry (health care) in a specific place that tends to be low paying. They could very easily switch (because people have tried recruiting them to do so because they worked with them previously and they know they're good) to a higher paying job with a lighter workload without moving but servicing a different group. But part of the appeal of the job is that they are working in support of this specific class of patients.

Dunno, I could see aspects other than money being a driver in someone sticking with something when a better opportunity or situation seems to be present with little effort.

Not everyone has a hobby or passion and that's totally fine.

I am quite boring to most people.

In some parts of the world, if you meet people and they ask what do you do, and you say, "I do X, I work for Y" they nod and understand. If you say, "I run my business" you are met with serious suspicion, as a possible scam artist. It can impact you real life social network, dating etc. Not only that, online businesses are not guaranteed for life, things changes fast. But career is. You can say I have been a teacher, IT admin, programmer or XYZ for 20 years. Doesn't matter if you changed job once or 30 times.

Unless you have enough money to comfortably retire, or at least, the social network that can catch you if you meet catastrophe, allowing your skills to erode or even allowing the perception that they have via not having a day job is probably a bad idea.

Not necessarily pursuit of money. Work. The world is built on work. If we stop working we go back to living in wilderness - literally and figuratively. Hobbies are fun, but they aren’t work. Work provides a different kind of satisfaction.

Maybe it provides satisfaction for you. My most satisfying projects have always been the ones I was passionate enough about to do at home on my own or with a small group of like-minded people. I'd have done a lot more if I weren't balancing it with the necessary evil of a paying job.

Plenty of hobbies are as useful as 'work'. Cooking, carpentry, fixing an old car. Not all hobbies are focused on consumption, many are about creation.

I think the better term for it is "occupation", just one that you happen to get paid for doing.

Some people thrive in structure. Taking away their job wouldn't be freeing. It would remove a big foundation their life is built on. Not everyone want to self-motivate and build their own structure because there already exists large structures you can just find your place in.

So it's not about not having a hobby. It's about having a place and purpose in life.

Other way to put it: he likes his job, so he hasnt thought too much about doing something else with his time. If he would quit, he probably wouldnt be sitting at home all day but would end up doing something - however he hasnt thought much about it since he is content with the current situation, therefore "sitting at home all day" is just easy way to put it.

I dont think there is nothing wrong in staying at a job if you like it, even if you dont need it financially.

From a different perspective, the site sounds great but it's not something to be be guaranteed to be around forever. I understand steady employment, both from a security standpoint and from not having a gap in employment history.

It takes a very wise man to realize something that sounds like the obvious answer won't make you happy.

I'm gonna have to disagree that "sit at home all day" is the obvious answer. In fact, that's quite obviously not the answer.

It's also a good cover story that makes it easier to downplay your wealth.

It's also an effective means to make sure you don't spend all your time spending your income and thereby end up broke.

You don't have to work for someone else and be an employee your whole life, it's not the only way. There are other choices available to you.

You can also be your own boss too and have other people working for you, or at least help you out occasionally on a part-time basis.

You can easily rent an office in a shared space if you don't want to work from home and go there a couple of times a week.

Also, you don't have to focus only on your current project if it's not your thing.

You can start something else that you would like to create while living off the income generated by your current project.

But I get it, the social expectation is that you have an office job, its what almost everyone does.

But think about this: someone at your company at a given moment had to quit their job to create the company you work on, right? Otherwise, your current day job would simply not exist.

All those things require certain skills and whatnot though. If someone has a good thing going and doesn't want to plunge into the abyss, I'd say good on them. The abyss is full of pitfalls and ways to lose life savings and go into major debt when the lucrative side gig can no longer pay for the vision. Employment is at least guaranteed no debt, especially while the lucrative side gig is going. Correspondingly, when they have this good thing going, they're not being a drag on society. Their employer is still finding value in them too. To those who want to take the plunge and risk it all, that's cool too. On HN, even honourable. But it doesn't have to be the only way.

There is not much financial risk involved in his case, and it looks like he already has the skills needed. He already makes over 10 times his salary. In one year of employment, he spared the equivalent salary of 10 years.

I think people exaggerate the dive into the abyss thing and risking it all. If you have some savings, you can try to launch a business and if it doesn't work you can always go back to work for someone else.

At a given point, someone is going to give you another job as a sysadmin again. He can even work remotely and easily make more than $400 a month.

If you are not hiring other people and purchasing equipment, starting a Saas business as a sole founder has minimal financial risk involved compared to almost all other types of businesses, it's really not that risky.

I think what holds a lot of people back is the fact that they come from an employee background probably at the family level, and they see the world through the eyes of an employee.

They don't even remotely consider the several options that they actually have available.

Perhaps he genuinely enjoys his job? Why should he have to launch another business? He already started one and it's very successful! Let the man enjoy his freedom and have a regular job if he so pleases!

That is highly unlikely, such a mundane job as a sysadmin compared to having your own online business.

If he liked it that much, then probably he wouldn't have started a whole side project that must have consumed evenings and weekends for years.

If he would have found professional fulfillment in his job, he would not likely have started a side project in the first place.

As he mentions in his own reply, he stays because he feels that his job defines him as a person, and he would lose his social identity if he left.

This is a surprisingly lucid reply, he can do whatever he wants and I wish him the best, but it's clear to me that he has other much better options available.

Your reply seems rooted in the fairly widespread assumption that having your own online business that makes solid "mrr" is some kind of supreme achievement and you should relish in it solely.

Some people have higher-dimensional desires and interests in life.

I have a simpler explanation, what likely happens is that most people don't even try to do it (even though they could do so like the case here) because it's different than the social norm, which says that you should be an employee working for someone else.

I'm saying that there are other dignified ways to live that are different, you don't absolutely have to be an employee at all costs.

Independent work, running a small business, those are other alternatives to live that are equally valid.

Your comments and parent's interpretation of your comments aren't necessarily in conflict with each other.

Not sure what you mean, mind being more specific?

Not true for everyone. I genuinely love being a sysadmin, or more accurately business recovery specialist. Rebuilding systems after a disaster with no documentation is genuine fun for me. Otherwise I'd have gone insane. However, I have other projects that I work on.

I understand his position completely.

What you're forgetting is that running an online business all day is isolating. Going to work with colleagues, all working towards a common goal, gives a sense of community. When you are not dependent on the money from your job, it also gives you a certain amount of leverage people normally don't have.

Then on top of this, for this gentleman to see a big change in his/her lifestyle, considering they are already earning $6K/month, any new business would need to make substantially more than that. Is making another $6K/month going to seriously change his/her life? Probably not. Maybe it affords a bit of a nicer house, staying at 5 star hotels VS. 4 star hotels.

The reality is to see a major difference in lifestyle from a new business, it would need to make $20-30K a month, or more.

There is not a lot of sense of community in most companies these days, its often each person for itself.

Especially in IT, people stay for a couple of years and then leave or get laid off, there is no employment for life anymore.

You can run the business from a shared workspace, it's not an issue. And even hire a couple of people to help you out since the salaries there are relatively affordable, and build your own community then.

You don't have to go to an office working for someone else, that is optional. Nothing wrong with it, it's just not the only choice.

I don't agree with your generalization. When you keep in touch with people you used to work with then some relationships usually expand beyond companies and employment duration. In the future they can become your business partners, employers, referees, spouse or just friends.

Sure, but you can also build relationships while owning a business, via conferences, shared workspaces, or what not.

You're a smart man. I wish I had done that.

Personally I would say the opposite. You should define yourself by outside interests rather than by what other people pay you to do.

Given the difference between income streams, and the fact that still go to their day job, I would wager their job is an interest to them.

if i didn't define myself by what allows me to make a living, then i would hate my work. now i am not defining myself only by paid work. but it is part of my identity. if it wasn't i wouldn't be able to do it.

But if you get paid to do what you personally value, isn't that the ultimate win?

This might sound harsh, but if the best thing in life is IT administration for some company then you haven’t looked very far.

But hey, who knows, maybe they work for a charity or something?

At a personal level, I'm not a fan of this generalization that being an IT admin (or any other boring job) is inherently inferior than, I don't know, skateboarding or playing the guitar for a living.

Different people like different things.

That's true, but the way people do things they enjoy when it's a job is very different from how they do them when it's a hobby.

I write code for a living, and I write code for fun. I would never choose to write the code I write for a living if I weren't getting paid to, and it's unlikely I'll ever get paid for the code I write for fun.

Yeah, the question is IT administration for what. I do a lot of stuff in my job that I don't enjoy for its own sake, but I enjoy it because I feel alignment with the purpose the organization is serving.

The problem with that is that, outside of our personal lives, most of our meaningful activities and contributions in society are organized as jobs at companies (or various government bodies). In my country even more so than in the US, as there's almost no volunteering here. It's just hard to feel like you're living a meaningful life without a job, or running a company yourself.

If you get a long enough break from work your hidden inner voices will start talking. You will discover that your identity isn't tied to your work-for-money activities.

IMO (I can't be sure of course) you simply never got off the hamster wheel for long enough to give your inner voices a chance to speak.

I believe the smart part is he knows what he wants... and that's hard, btw.

Have you considered starting your own business out of an office? That’s more than enough money to support yourself and do what you want.

Business is not for all, believe me I have tried :) but I’m studying for my master’s degree.

Very mature thoughts. Sounds like some good life experiences behind them. Kudos on your clarity.

That's really smart. I hope I would've thought of that 5 years ago.

I think it's great that you know what you want to do and like. The income from your website is probably very mentally freeing, because you could do a lot of different things with your life but you can choose not to.

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