Hacker News Reader

I tell you, we are here on Earth to fart around, and don't let anybody tell you different.

— Kurt Vonnegut

A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects.

— Robert A. Heinlein

The key to a happy life is to let go of your status anxiety, get out there, and really start living. There’s an effectively infinite number of things to learn, books to read, places to go, people to meet, landscapes to explore, cuisines to taste, animals to see. There’s just so, so much to experience in life, and so little of it has anything to do with money.

> There’s just so, so much to experience in life, and so little of it has anything to do with money.

You say that, and yet

> places to go

Travel is expensive.

> people to meet

If you live in a small town and want to start meeting people radically different from the people you usually meet, you should probably move to a larger city. Large cities are expensive.

> cuisines to taste

Eating out is expensive.

> things to learn, books to read

These are perhaps the ones that require the fewest resources, and even these require enough of a work-life balance that you're not completely exhausted by the time you finish at your third job. Depending on how your economic circumstances are, a healthy work-life balance might not pay the bills.

Now, for the upper middle class readership that HN is most likely composed of, sure, the costs of all these activities are negligible. But I think it's a stretch to say that a homeless person on the street should "get out there and really start living." To do that, they need enough money to get to a stable situation first, and the sort of money that's trivial for us to come by is not always so trivial for everyone else...

I'm not from the US. But in Europe nothing of this must be expensive. I'm almost 40 and lived almost always in shared flats (ca. 2500€ year). Often we got a very old cheap farmhouse half an hour away from a bigger town, which is still accessible by public transportation. Food I sometimes buy and sometimes we get it from places where they would throw it away. Also planting our own stuff. Sure you have to sometimes eat zucchini for a week, or now pumpkin for several weeks :D but you get creative. While travelling I used internet pages like Couchsurfing & HelpX and many others. Some months I spent less than 50€. I met a lot of amazing people on the way which lead to a lot of very nice opportunities. What I learned this way that it is trivial for me to find a place to sleep everywhere on the world. People are helpful and when you help them, they often give you new opportunities, at least that was almost always the case for me. Overall the most expensive things for me is the yearly health care (ca. 3500€). When I work, normally, for one year, this allows me quite easily live for 3-4 years. Knowing this gives me also quite some peace. The good thing is I met people abroad, which also realized that travelling in a more simple fashion could really be very cheap and gave up their job, started to travel around. So far several Couchsurfing couples visited me back from countries which are not really known to make the average person rich (an the couples I met, by no means were). I don't claim I figured out live, but it is definitely possible to life differently.

Comfortable, fast, safe, travel is expensive. Just traveling itself is relatively cheap, you just need a backpack and shoes.

You really don't understand. You need to be able to take more than a day off without getting evicted/loosing your car or eating oats most days. Go tell people that they don't need a home, their job and it's meager benefits like healthcare, and they should just be more stoic.

I just counted "a sufficiently stable life that it's still there when you return" as part of "safety" and "comfort". If traveling is a priority for you, you can live the life of a wandering monk, with the associated downsides.

Sure, the bills and the mortgage will miraculously pay themselves if we set our minds to it. Joking aside, those quotes resonate with most people I suppose, but the cold hard reality is that wageslavery is a very apt term to describe the current state of things.

The mortgage is definitely part of the status anxiety I mentioned. People need a house because they’re surrounded by peers buying houses. Let go of all that and life opens up for you.

Backpacking through Europe is cheap. Backpacking through Southeast Asia even cheaper. Incredible food awaits and it’s very very cheap.

OK I will let it go, but what will my wife and kids say when they are evicted from the apartment and I'm nowhere to be found because I have no signal in Southeast Asia? Maybe some people buy houses because of peer pressure, but most just like to have a roof over their head when it is cold or rains outside. I know I do.

So it isn’t really about wages, it’s about kids. You chose to start a family and accept the responsibility that comes with that. It’s not forever though. When the kids move out you and your wife could sell the house and hit the road, if you wanted to.

Why wouldn't your wife and kid be backpacking with you? Kids are small, they fit in the overhead compartment.

It would be hard to explain to the school why are they missing classes. With all the appeal of the vagabond lifestyle, I'm not sure that is where their passions lie.

All of this is available and not expensive. Easy? Maybe not.

You don't want to do it? That's your choice.

Depends on how you define expensive. For starters it carries an enormous opportunity cost and associated risks. If you mean living on the street and depending on the generosity of others can be started with close to zero cash, you are absolutely right.

I think that worldly, well-rounded individuals never have to worry about how to make ends meet.

An investment in knowledge pays the best interest.

Does this imply that anyone who struggles to make ends meet is not worldly and well-rounded? If so, how might they become worldly and well-rounded so that they can pay their bills? Is there an online course they can take between shifts of the part-time, minimum-wage jobs they work to keep a roof over their head? And how will the knowledge they can absorb in these less-than-ideal circumstances enable them to compete with far better-prepared people on the job market?

Easy.

They can:

- work their way up the ladder in their current job. (If not possible, look for another job where it is.) - find a job with upward mobility that doesn't take much training and is quick to start. Welding, plumbing etc. And prioritize training for it. Then transition.

When either of these are reached you can rinse and repeat. And hopefully while doing so, learn how business/life works because you are actively working to engage with it to improve yourself.

Worth mentioning that the first quote is directly from Vonnegut in an interview, whereas the second is spoken by a character in one of Heinlein's novels.

I like those quotes!

You do have to climb the ladder far enough to get enough resources be secure and healthy though, and that's becoming increasingly difficult. Memes about millenials never owning a home, being able to afford to have kids, or even being able to retire aren't simply jokes - the way society seems to be is heading means those things might actually come true.

Some things that people want o do require resources, and the number of ways to get those resources is diminishing. We're fortunate in tech to be somewhat shielded from it.

In the case of housing the resource supply is constrained artifically by the cartel formed by local homeowners.

It's definitely true that there aren't enough houses being built to keep up with the way people want to live, and that the houses that are built are the wrong sort of houses. I'm in the process of buying my first at the moment and it's immensely difficult to find something suitable and affordable (UK dev wages outside of London don't compare well with the US...). I'm not sure if that's entirely down to homeowners though, or construction companies only building massively profitable mansions instead of small first-time buyer size homes. There definitely isn't much to choose from where I live unless you have 2 good incomes to spend on it.

I'm also in the UK (Edinburgh - it's not quite SE prices but not far off it), and buying solo would be difficult, but buying with two incomes made things much much simpler. Its likely that sole income buyers are going to be priced out by couples, particular in the "nice" houses where the demand is. From a lenders perspective, a couple on 25k each vs a single earner on 60k, the couple is much less risky, their post-tax income is higher, less of a chance of a full default, living costs are split. They can be slightly more "generous" lending to couples, so it's likely that most of the nice properties fall just above the 2x 25k earner threshold (adjusted for whatever that is locally)

But _why_ are those the houses getting built?

Why can't we demolish every residential structure under 5 stories tall in central London and build flats? Why can't you build in the green belt?

There are some good reasons - the negative externalities of one-off housing in the middle of nowhere are huge (I say, writing from a one-off house in the middle of Ireland), but there are some bad reasons too, like homeowners using "social and affordable" to concern-troll their way in to ensuring nothing actually gets built.

And yeah, dev salaries in the UK are shockingly low compared to the US (and Ireland for that matter, so far as I can tell) but when the supply of housing is constrained higher incomes don't help for long. Making $250k might enable you to buy a $2 million 4 bed 2 bath near decent schools in San Jose, but give it a while and you'll need $350k, then $450k, etc. (or remote work will break the back of the NIMBYs with any luck).

simply put, most of these are first world problems.

People who can't afford to settle down, who are spending significant amounts of their income on rent, and who don't see much reward for their effort tend not to have children. In the long term that leads to an aging population, which can cripple the productivity and growth of entire regions. That can be combatted to an extent through immigration policies, but only if people actually want to move to a region that needs more people.

These are not just first world problems. These are problems that could, potentially, destroy entire economies.

I mean, immigration is never a long-term solution.

Immigrants will soon be facing the same issues (high housing, high education costs, lower wages).

I reckon in about 20-30 years the arbitrage opportunity to immigrate to Western countries will be eliminated, it already is much reduced compared to 30 or 40 years ago. QoL in Western countries will be lower, and higher in the rest of the world.

I often think of a documentary I saw about Somali refugees who came to America in the early 2000s (sadly I can't find it anymore.) They ended up moving back to Africa because they hated life in America. Working two terrible minimum wage jobs just to pay rent and food. They made no friends and had no free time or money.

They were happier living in a UN funded refugee camp spending time with friends and family.

I think the only way Western countries have any chance of reducing the falling QoL is space exploration, but I don't think their is enough energy and motivation.

Indeed -without a strong enforcement mechanism such limitations are ignored by anbody with a pile of studs and a nailgun.

If I buy farmland and build a house in Ireland, I know I'll be forced to demolish it after my neighbours complain (and a long review process). In many places there would be no such enforcement.

> You have more choices available than either climbing the corporate ladder or sitting on the couch watching Netflix

I think you are taking this point too literally. The question is: what proportion of your life are you spending pursuing career goals?

For a bit of background on this, I strongly recommend Skidelsky & Skidelsky (2012) How Much is Enough? [1]

[1] https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/216918/how-much-is-...

There is still the assumption there that the only way to make a living is via a "career" which necessarily entails doing something you don't care about and aren't otherwise interested in to make money. That is not the only option

The challenge comes when you have to compete with the ladder-climbers for a severely constrained stock of housing.

Not to mention that even the utility function of the "millenials dilemma" makes no sense here, it's not even consistent like it has to be. What it represents here?

- More wealth is better? Then 0/10 for chill/work maybe is ok, but it make no sense to have 8/8 for chill/chill. - More fun is better? Then 8/8 is ok, but it makes no sense to have 0/10 for chill/work. - More fun in the near future is better? But it is clearly stated that fun will be unachievable in the game since work will prevail as the dominant position.