Comment by zackmorris | Hacker News Reader

Comment by zackmorris | Hacker News Reader

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I've reached the same conclusion. What we have the past 20 years is phantom technology and phantom wealth. So many tools to distract us and fill our time, but shockingly few tools to liberate us from labor. Only a tiny handful like rooftop solar panels, electric cars and Roombas have decreased our labor measurably.

I'm going through a midlife crisis right now where I'm actively rejecting the decisions I made since 2000. I had a falling out with professional programming last year and am looking into the gig economy. I'm not going to buy new anything if I can possibly avoid it. I'm trying to turn my attention from external expectation to what I felt was my life purpose when I graduated college in 1999.

Which will basically amount to finding a way to earn roughly $1000 per month doing whatever it takes and then using the freed up time to work on inventions. I'm hoping to resurrect my blog and write about progress or my thoughts on tech rather than devolving into my usual diatribes about politics and how the world has generally gone the wrong direction. My acquaintances are concerned about me, and rightfully so, but I just don't care to live someone else's life anymore.

I think you're right though, that when basic needs are met, most people want to work on their calling whether it be art or recreation or simply being human. Which looks a bit like how the aristocracy lived in the Gilded Age over a century ago. There's no reason why we can't have that level of affluence today for every single person by letting machines do the labor, or by taxing profits on that labor and providing cash to all via UBI.

I agree with you in a lot of ways, but keep an eye out on what "basic needs" means. Those are poverty-line wages, which don't give you any provision for becoming sick and little chance to save for retirement. Social Security might still exist by the time you retire, but even if it does, it won't even match that $1,000 per month (in whatever inflation-adjusted terms are available).

If you've spent the last two decades socking away some of that sweet, sweet programmer cash, you may well have enough cushion to live the beach-bum/starving-artist life you're talking about. That's great, and go for it. But a lot of people trying to skate by with the minimum will discover that the minimum isn't quite enough, and then they get caught up in a very bad vicious cycle.

UBI is one plan which would alleviate a lot of that, and I'd be all in favor of trying. Technology means there's so much to go around that not everybody needs to spend a third of their waking life to get the basics. But until then, people should be aware that they have needs outside of basic maintenance that must be taken into account.

It's good to see someone express this. I really hate working and you've enumerated my concerns about stopping.

The conclusion I came to is that I need about $3M to provide a life-long safety net, then I can try just making enough to cover the "basic needs" and not end up homeless if things go wrong.

Do you have any thoughts about taking a year off? I'm considering doing that once my current employment expires, but I'm concerned that if I taste freedom and begin enjoying life, I may not be able to go back to work.

I personally took a sabbatical precisely to rediscover my love for the craft of programming, on which I'd become pretty burned out. Travel was great, and I acquired a lifetime of stories, but I missed home and feeling like I was achieving something -- as well as the earning of money that I knew I was spending at a rapid clip.

That's just me, of course. I have long enjoyed programming, and am incredibly lucky to be good at a lucrative job. You might find that a year of climbing glaciers or weaving tapestries ruins you for the office job. I personally am well aware that if I were to pursue my passion for theater as a means of living, I'd come to hate it. So I dunno if my experience generalizes, but that's my $.02 for what it's worth.

(I can say that I'd heard a figure of $2M rather than $3M, and God I hope so. That burnout thing cost me over a decade of productive earnings.)

I see what you are saying, although I do want to mention that the $1000 per month isn't permanent. I'm doing it more to point out the absurdity of living in a society where it's easier to earn $100,000 per year than $12,000 per year. That's self-evidently outrageous and IMHO unsustainable.

After doing this for a few months, I've reached the conclusion that the status quo structures America this way so that we're all locked into the workaday world rat race to bolster corporate profits. The penalties for working less than 40 hours per week are so severe that it's effectively a dream now, out of reach for most. The opportunity cost of that for American innovation is incalculable. We might as well measure it in years instead of dollars. I've lost 20, has anyone else succeeded as a sole proprietor or made a living from patents?

I've already begun to notice the biases against the working poor interwoven through our society. Overdraft fees are crippling, and groveling to get them reversed is demoralizing (luckily my credit union is more understanding than banks ever were). I've begun measuring everything in time again. Eating at a restaurant costs 1-2 hours of income, rent costs at least 30 hours, veterinary bills are out of the question, medical care is a fantasy, I'm at the mercy of my vehicle holding up. I hardly thought about those things on salary, and I grew detached from the chronic daily misery 100 million Americans face just to survive.

Anyway, I want to document all of this as a roadmap for other entrepreneurs that I never had. Reaching $2000 per month, with half coming from self-employment, is the next milestone. Success for me will look like making between $30k and $50k working 20 hours per week by a year or two from now. I figure the odds of that are 90% against, but by working the gig economy, I might be able to get that to 50/50.

I hear ya. Being poor sucks harder than most HackerNews denizens realize, and I'm frequently aggravated to read "just pull yourself up by your bootstraps" talk from people who don't realize just how much easier life is without a huge number of daily hassles. Being poor is literally very expensive.

Seeing past that realization is incredibly difficult, especially when one isn't motivated to. If you find a way to help make that clearer to people, good on ya.

I also use hours to equalise between between myself and friends on low income.

An important trick I use is to take all fixed living costs out of weekly income. Then divide disposable income left by hours to work out your return on time invested.

For example: one friend gets NZD20 per hour and works 40 hours. She only has $30 left to spend on whatever else she wants after living expenses (carefully budgeted in her case). So 0.75 $/hour is what she actually “earns”.

I use this to help explain to her that we don’t need to put in equal $ when we share activities - instead we put in equal disposable income per working hour.

It also means I don’t feel guilty when a friend who has 5x the disposable income pays more than I do for something we share.

Many of the gains are small & taken for granted. Do you remember what banking was like twenty years ago? These days I might visit a branch five times a year, and everything is auto-pay, e-bill, remote deposit, and p2p payments. Many years I don't have to visit the DMV. I used to call stores to get their hours & check stock, now I can mostly do that online in half the time.

I will agree that around the house, aside from Roomba not much home labor has been saved. Everything has gotten more efficient, but cooking is still cooking, and the washing machine still can't fold. Power tools have become a lot cheaper & better, but in many cases the maintenance overhead is often not worth the labor saved.

I would vouch for the last few decades seeing quality improvements: it's become very easy to purchase obscure goods online, to get frozen gluten-free dinners, find product reviews, learn about foreign countries, and other things where the process isn't always saving hours, but it is in some way putting more guarantees on the experience and hence adding a certain dimension of freedom.

At the same time it's become apparent that fewer hours of labor and more benefits with a pay cut is desirable for many, and we're in a "superstar" economy that discourages such. The oft-heard complaint is that we can't enjoy these technological wonders since we have no time.

> freed up time to work on inventions. I'm hoping to resurrect my blog and write about progress or my thoughts on tech

Beware: are you subconsciously just playing different status games? If you have clocked out to avoid status games (like making-house or making-money or making-job) then substituting other status seeking activities is likely to remain hollow.

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