Confessions of a lotus-eater
tjcx.me
tjcx.me
The weird thing for me is how trapped I felt by my vest dates before leaving the comfort of a well-funded business. I could afford vacations and clothes I wanted, if I waited long enough and kept getting promoted I could eventually buy an overpriced but lovely home in the Bay Area somewhere but I'd never have enough money to really live free.
Do I regret leaving to start a company and ultimately fail? No. I used to be poor and I got used to being poor again. Leaving the island was awful however: paying for food and healthcare again, an inability to enjoy the myriad distractions of the bay. I might never be able to afford a home of my own but I'm lucky that my wife is an artist and is happy to entertain the struggle as well. I'm actually on company number two but this time with some funding.
It's a hero's journey, like the odyssey or wandering the desert. I somehow have found peace with all this; the debt, the fear, the stress. The journey itself is the reward even if it is a bitter one.
What I'm saying is, if you get the sense you don't want to be a lotus eater in Silicon Valley, say fuck it and pull the plug. You'll grow some scars, it will absolutely suck (even my peers who did YC feel this way), but you'll feel some kind of cosmic satisfaction with your path like Odysseus.
And if you don't gain that peace, you can always get another job :)
I don't personally agree with his version of Ithaca, and certainly not his condescension towards others, but this part at least seemed self-consistent.
What is the purpose of this free food?
It cannot be to feed their starving employees. If that was the case they would just stop catering and pay their employees more. They're certainly not feeding homeless people in their office.
This food is not a necessity, most certainly not the snacks. These are creature comforts, pieces of corporate flair for recruiters to lure recruits. They're lotuses, to help you feel more comfortable in a place that is not innately comfortable.
Starting your own company is hard and you need industry experience first. Here, the work-life balance is good, the pay is good, the culture is good. What more could you ask for? Plus, have you tried the queijo?
- employees stay on site and so they take shorter lunch breaks
- they are likely to eat with other employees and talk shop
- it does help recruit and keep good employees. If the firm you are thinking of moving to doesn't provide lunch, that's one more friction point: new commute, possibly new schedule, now you have to figure out what you will do for lunch after you have grown accustomed to such an easy solution.
Note how that last point seems to resonate closely with the author's point since his Ithaca is apparently about leaving your job and starting a startup... or something? It's not clear what his Ithaca is.
His skipping lunch is an exercise in asceticism that I think he is hoping will serve some higher purpose later. But at the end of the day I think he's just not satisfied where he is and would rather work somewhere else. Other than "moving to San Francisco" he doesn't mention any job changes. So I think that's his problem. And if you're not happy somewhere, free lunch is not going to stop you from leaving.
This is what so many people miss. You need to be internally motivated to reach your Ithaca. Being externally motivated will make you forever unrequited, forever wondering if what you have reached truly is Ithaca.
See: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/51296/ithaka-56d22eef...
"Ithaka gave you the marvelous journey. Without her you wouldn't have set out. She has nothing left to give you now.
And if you find her poor, Ithaka won’t have fooled you. Wise as you will have become, so full of experience, you’ll have understood by then what these Ithakas mean."
By C. P. Cavafy
> If it was raining, obviously, I couldn’t reasonably be expected to ride my bike. Or in the winter months when it’s a bit dark in the mornings, or when it got too cold, or when I was just a bit too tired. Let’s be reasonable here.
I guess it’s satirizing people who carve out tiny pockets of differentiation from others then mentally inflate it into some kind of deep uniqueness.
“I was in the throes of a lotus dream”
The reality is some people actually are just special. I watched an interview with David Foster Wallace and two other authors recently and it was blatantly obvious within a few minutes that he was just better than them. All three were professional published authors but it was clear who was gifted and who wasn't. I don't know if that means the other two were wasting their time, but it is definitely discouraging to watch as a fairly average person.
Are you really (already) at the termination point you dreamed of growing up? Have some coworkers, have some family, die?
I, for one, found this deeply profound. Today I wake from my dream, get back on my ship, and start rowing.
Go then, there are other worlds than these.
https://literarydevices.net/lady-doth-protest-too-much/
Learn how to use the phrase before you use the phrase.
For my part, a lifetime of contemptuous outrage at being part of a privileged class sounds exhausting, unfulfilling, and miserable.
Yeah, it touched a goddamn nerve. Listening to entitled people complain about how easy they have it, and then subsequently making a pithy attempt at virtue-signaling by trying to put themselves on a pedestal for surface-level attempts at austerity - and then projecting those values onto others as if they're flaws of character - has a habit of doing that.
The lotus-eaters spent the rest of their days in happiness where Odysseus saw all of his friends die to return to a rock full of goats.
Also, the examples used were not chosen or described by a sympathetic narrator so the writer comes off as the sanctimonious coworker who's silently judging everyone as being dumber or less-pious than he for daring to enjoy a company offsite. Don't accept a free $350 jacket if you don't want it, but if it's because you're too good for it and that anyone who accepts one is a "lotus-eater", don't be too surprised when that attitude doesn't win you any friends. It's not the (rejected) entitlement that's tone-deaf coming from the author, its the condemnation that we're all sheeple.
It's extremely fair to point out that life at a FAANG is lavish and certainly, there are some that have chosen to stay and enjoy a comfortable life there, rather than push themselves harder (elsewhere or while there). That the phrase "rest and vest" exists says that this practice is quite common. Fight against it (if you want), but this is not the piece I would use to try an poach someone away from Google, trying to convince them to join my start-up.
Perhaps here the author is talking of a different type of "lotus-eater" - one who has become comfortable not taking risks, and live in the comfort of their company perks and just coast along without striving hard. Their day of reckoning may come if they get fired and suddenly find they have lost the knack of living in a world without these perks and strewn with risks.
I think this should be read as a person's own story of what compels them to live as they do, and not as a judgement on other people who choose to make different life choices.
So the modern day lotus eater isn't a 9-5 worker, those are the folks on the ships struggling to help fulfill this one dude's hope while being beaten, tempted and killed - and being entirely ignored in the epilogue as if they never even existed... The modern lotus eater is those that sink into depression and drug abuse, able to survive in society but just eeking by while trying to escape reality - And it is certainly good to avoid falling into it.
And being able to mooch off your friends' apartment and crash on their couch so you don't need to worry about finding a place to live seems pretty lotusee-eater to me, but what do I know.
Experience with a real lotus might, I think, engender a useful readjustment of priors, eh?
Everybody has to find their own path I guess. Also 99.99% of people don't care about improving the world and the world gets by just fine on its own. Or does it (global warming, war, etc.)? Who knows, who cares.
You ever watch that South Park episode where they make fun of Hollywood where all the actors love the smell of their own farts? These days I feel that this is a pretty apt of a criticism of SV and Bay Area culture..
Whose definition of "better" are we required to use? I strongly suspect yours, mine, and the person building front ends for Google AdWords will be different definitions.
Hundreds of thousands of people use the product I helped build at my current workplace and I don't feel a thing. Yet having even a 100 daily users show up at the website I used to run felt exhilarating.
Big D said it: The dreams of youth are the regrets of maturity. (;
Eating the free lunch being offered to you doesn't mean you've taken your eye off of your ultimate goals or mission in life.
It's good to keep your end goals in mind and make sure you aren't deviating from a course that will get you there, but a logical conclusion of taking this blog post literally (which many people are doing, because there's no obvious reason not to do so) is that the author is severely misguided at best.
There is nothing inherently praise worthy about suffering. Preferring comfort does not make one weak.
The author is generalizing their personal values to others.
So maybe becoming a lotus-eater would not have been that bad after all.
"When rats were tested in Skinner boxes where they could stimulate the reward system by pressing a lever, the rats pressed for hours."
I guess the author's definition of lotus-eaters is similar to the rat experiment mentioned above. There is something about the satisficing and infantilizing nature of tech companies that seems engineered to keep employees complacent about work that's just okay but maybe not challenging or rewarding.
The story is a good analogy but the tone of the article is weird and condescending.
In think that's part of the point. And at the end he realizes that maybe he's not any different than the lotus-eaters; or, that the lotus-eaters are more like him than he thinks.
We are all lotus eaters - it is defined to be "the things I think makes others soft or vulnerable". The author's value of austerity comes across to me like Mother Teresa's belief that suffering is noble and brings you closer to god. I don't share that belief, but certainly have my own lotus behaviors.
My take on it. I'm very happy being able to work for in a level headed workplace that doesn't resembles a religious cult. And I am very happy to do a non-joke job, unlike programmers working in cat video site startups with unlimited funds for buffoonery.
Our work is almost anonymous in the West, and most of our clients prefer it be that way. We don't mind, and I actually like it this way.
When I finally closed the door on the West, it was a relief. A red pill as people say nowadays.
The West needs a correction. A culture of unlimited money in Silicon Valley assures that they will never get an incentive to get serious, until they really need it, and then they croak.
You can eat a lot of the parts of the lotus but the pods are a common quick eat.
It's like a bag of individually wrapped candy. Except when you doubly unwrap and eat them the fun stops and you realise it's pretty bland.
But it's something to do to pass the time and probably pretty healthy.
I tried to see if any lotus (many breeds out there) is a narcotic but most people mix it (blue lotus) with opiates and other drugs to actually get high so it seems like mostly a mythical dream.
Well, of course. You need a crew for the ship to reach Ithaca. And you can't have a crew of only captains :)
This proposition that somehow everybody can reach Ithaca, is simply a faith based pyramid scheme. You may end up being the captain or you may end up being in the crew. If you do the numbers I think it's quite clear which one is more probable.
That way lies madness.
Maybe if your search for Ithaca can be detailed by eating a meal, then you're looking for the wrong Ithaca.
As for the content, I enjoyed it. It is, however, highly personal and full of self-satire. I'd urge people to read it less as the author thumbing their nose at us 9-5ers and more of a conscious examination of a narcissistic view they hold deep down that they ultimately know at a higher level is absurd.
To keep searching for Ithaca is to put to much emphasis on your professional life. A great professional life is not a sufficient condition for a happy life, but an acceptable/ok professional life is a neccessary condition.
Author goes on about how pampering yourself with comfort is imprisonment, but also says this? cmon.
That's not introspective. That's shallow and condescending, like the author is doing.
It's absolutely true that large tech companies throw massive amounts of compensation and perks to lull workers into a sense of security. How do you think people go into Facebook day after day while new stories about their abuses come out?
If you're just passively going into work year by year without thinking about whether or not the thing you're striving for actually fulfills you, you are absolutely exhibiting sheep-like behavior. For that matter, if you go off and start a company and throw yourself into it without some introspection, you're also exhibiting sheep-like behavior. In fact, there are posts about this that reach the top of HN every once in a while. There was one just the other week.
If you haven't met many people or yourself been someone who has fallen prey to this in tech, I'd say you're either exceptionally focused/self-aware, or you might be snacking on some lotus in your spare time. Either way, whether or not you're a lotus eater, or simply someone who is content with achieving the goals they've set in front of themselves is something that only you can know.
> If you're just passively going into work year by year without thinking about whether or not the thing you're striving for actually fulfills you, you are absolutely exhibiting sheep-like behavior. For that matter, if you go off and start a company and throw yourself into it without some introspection, you're also exhibiting sheep-like behavior. In fact, there are posts about this that reach the top of HN every once in a while. There was one just the other week. If you haven't met many people or yourself been someone who has fallen prey to this in tech, I'd say you're either exceptionally focused/self-aware, or you might be snacking on some lotus in your spare time. Either way, whether or not you're a lotus eater, or simply someone who is content with achieving the goals they've set in front of themselves is something that only you can know.
the opportunity to be lulled into a false sense of achievement is possible for anyone. keep your own goals in mind and you'll avoid it! I couldn't possibly know about the inner lives of every person in tech, I haven't met and had good conversations with all of them. :)
But perhaps that is what a lotus eater would say.
And while I'm at it r/IUseReddit
Well, yeah, when you act like everyone else is a sheep because they like gasp hot food or dear lord a free sweater, you might come across as a masochistic weirdo. Reminds me a lot of Bottle Rocket or The Comedy.
Expect to get negative feedback and insults from the people who want praise for not trying to achieve anything great.