Hate Your Job
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If you save to $2m, then that’s $60,000/year, already you are beating the median American family. This is the point where, for me, I had to make peace with the fact that I wasn’t working like a dog to survive. I was doing it to have more stuff.
If you graduate college at 22 making $200k/year and never get a raise; $1m by 30 should be no sweat.
So now that we’ve disposed of engineers, finance folks, and a few other white collar disciplines, what about everybody else? It seems clear that the big problem facing us on an economic perspective is that most people are economically extremely low value. Somehow, before all people are economically extremely low value, we have to figure out how to get to the Star Trek future. That, I have no idea how to do.
Although, even without diabetes I still would want to have health coverage.
There's some decent insurance options for ~$700/mo. That's still $8400/yr. With $60k/yr income, that might still be doable but I don't think it's realistic on a $30k budget.
Or, at $1M you could have $30,000 per year to subsidize working in some job that provides health insurance but otherwise is something you enjoy. Being willing to work for $30k less than anyone else, for example, would probably give you ways to convince the hiring managers to let you do things your way most of the time.
Citation needed. Just back of the envelope, you're looking at $52K in federal taxes. To get that kind of starting salary you're almost certainly in CA, NY, or another high COL area with state income tax, so let's take another $15K. If you live in a car in the parking lot and eat work-provided meals every day and save every penny, you're at $133K * 8 or just barely over a million.
But rent's not free, nor is it even cheap. Even if you split with roommates the whole time, you're probably looking at $12K a year in rent or more. If you live a life of abject poverty you could perhaps meet those thresholds, but what's the point? Throwing away the best years of your life where you are almost certainly at the peak of your health, attractiveness, and ability to meet other people for the hope of.....subsisting in the future?
I also took a year off once and lived off of savings (and out of two bags and hostels). It wasn't until I lived in Seattle I was making six figures. It took a lot of experience and research and work to build up that level of expertise. It also took being in the right market (the west coast). If I had stayed in my home town, it wouldn't have been possible. (I wrote a post about tech markets for those who are interested: https://battlepenguin.com/tech/tech-culture-shock-from-ameri...)
What you're describing is a tale that may be true for you, but it's the tale of someone who is determined to work at all odds to be at the top. If you want to live and do other things and have real adventures, you're not going to be in the same spot.
Let’s just throw out one company as an example: let’s say you graduate from undergrad today and join Google as a fairly unremarkable new hire. Your average first year total compensation is $187k/year. If you negotiate well that can easily exceed $200k. If you do well in your career, three years later you’ll be an L4 earning an average of $263k/year. There are a number of companies that pay this well. All of FAANG is >$150k/year fresh out of undergrad.
What I am saying is: if you decide early enough that you don’t want to be a wage slave your entire life, and you are talented and a bit lucky, you can wage slave for ten years and call it good, then spend 30-death doing whatever you want. The biggest danger, and one I’m wrestling with now, is that you get addicted to it.
Thanks for providing the interesting article - sounds like you’ve lived a fun and variety-filled life so far. That’s fantastic and I’m a little jealous of you, but you compromised real economic utility by doing so. I think it’s a popular model, lots of people spend their 20s having adventures and making little money. Nothing wrong with that - but if instead you spend your twenties soullessly grinding away, thanks to the time-value of money you can have the rest of your life to have adventures.
There are plenty of entry level jobs for people with bachelors degrees that pay $150k-$200k. You might have to make a lot of sacrifices to get them.
For me, I didn’t graduate making this kind of money but ended up in the can-FIRE bucket anyway due to saving and market performance. But it wasn’t like it wasn’t possible, I was unaware that such jobs existed.
The problem seems to be that humans acclimate, and so spending ten years on an enormous salary puts most people in a place where they don't feel like they can live on the modest salary they'll have if they retire.
If you are hired by Google right out of college, first of all, you are willingly participating in an evil organization. No excuses. But yes, if you are hired by Google right out of college you should have no problem doing FI/RE.
Most of the software industry is writing CRUD apps for banks, insurance companies, and other similar large established corporations. You can still do FI/RE, but cut all the numbers in your examples by half, probably more.
Put another way, this might be more accurately titled, “Have you considered talking yourself into hating your job?” Maybe this is the job of the philosophy lecturer, I don’t know.
[0]: https://philpeople.org/profiles/john-danaher/publication_att...
All I can tell you is that AI is not going to render everyone jobless anytime soon.
EXACTLY. From what I've seen, I don't even think self driving cars are remotely viable for another 10~15 years (honestly we'd probably need general purpose AI first, and if that's even remotely possible, there's no way you're going to get a thinking sentient machine to put in the effort to do something so mundane as driving your damn car).
There are still so many things machines cannot do. They can't pick products of different sizes in an Amazon warehouse. They can't make carbon fibre (most of that stuff is still shaped by hand) .. hell even a lot of space rocket shells are still bent into shape by hand.
Ideally we'd want to see the world move away from goods and more human beings living more sustainably producing content and art for one another. But who am I kidding, we're totally going to run out of resources and/or cover our planet in plastic slurry of sludge and pollution long before then.
Today, most of us are controlled by our need to work to live. "Guaranteed income" would mean the people who control us today lose some of that control. Do you think they will give that up without a fight?
That is, isn't our inflation-adjusted total compensation more than 3x what it was in the mid 1930s?
The average inflation-adjusted salary in 1935 was only in the realm of $10,000 (in 2020 dollars).
So you could work 15 hours per week at that standard of living if your take-home wage was $13/hour.
Of course, there are other obstacles to making this work. You can't, for instance, get housing for as cheap as was possible then due to increased construction standards. But that (and other similar obstacles) are not the result of some cabal of billionaires.
Some costs in the US, medical being the primary example, are more expensive than they should be due to financial and political scheming. But most things are not.
I'm from the state of Arkansas, where housing is quite cheap. When I lived there (until 2014), my total cost of living was around under $800/month (rent+utilities+food). This comes out to $9600/year.
What would your cost of equivalent housing have been in Keynes' day?
To use my hometown as an example, consider this 1948 house that Redfin believes is worth $30K: https://www.redfin.com/AR/North-Little-Rock/707-Gardenia-Ave...
It's 3 miles from the downtown of a half-million person metro area. If you're willing to go up into that $50-100K range, you will find plenty of fine houses in mid-sized cities throughout the Midwest/South.
The apartment I rented was an 1100 square foot, 2 bedroom townhouse a block from the bus stop -- $350/month.
You can't even live where you could in 1930 for the same money you could then. You can't rent for what you could in 1930. You can't go to the doctor. You can't buy a car. You can't send your kids to college. There are more things you just can't do today on 1930-equivalent money. Need I go on?
"Is it not the case that we could work 15 hours per week and maintain the lifestyle that was prevalent during Keynes' day?"
I'm explicitly talking about living as if it were the 1930s. No internet. No cable. No air conditioning. No eating at restaurants multiple times per week. Small house. No college. Maybe no car.
So you say I am equating the cheapest houses today with the median back then, which is absolutely correct. That is exactly what I am trying to say. You can live a median 1930s lifestyle for dirt cheap today.
That house was built in 1948 and is basically the same as most other middle class houses built in that time period.
In 1930, fewer than 1% of people graduated from college. So if you want to live a median 1930s lifestyle, you probably don't have to worry about sending your kids to college. You don't need college to command the $13/hr wage that is necessary to live this lifestyle anyway.
Only 48% of households owned a car in 1930, so if you want a median 1930s lifestyle, that may involve not owning a car. And if you do own a car, a used car from 2005 can be had for $1000 and trounces any middle class 1930s car from that era in every metric.
Tell me how I can go to the doctor.
Tell me how I can continue to live, if I'm a diabetic.
Tell me how I, personally, can live, considering I have asthma, and albuterol wasn't discovered until the 1960s (and is much more expensive now than it was then).
I guess I can save money by not buying a radio, because there's nothing worthwhile on there anymore, anyway.
But the general point still stands that if one wants to live on 15 hours/week, as Keynes' suggested, it's certainly possible to do so (essentially everywhere but major metropolises) if one maintains a 1930s lifestyle.
If that's all you want to claim, then I claim I can live like a hunter gatherer from 19300 BCE in the middle of the woods. Big deal. You haven't shown me anything.
Did you want to even begin to address how I can go to the doctor? Or are we conveniently leaving that out? I don't think you have even begun to touch the "general point."
Of course, you know this, and you know that's what I was saying, so I'm going to assume you're not really debating in good faith (or are seriously misreading what I'm saying).
Edit: I had a peek at your comment history and saw this pattern repeated with other people. I regret getting involved in this thread.
> From 1935 to 1936 the median family income was $1,160. An annual wage of $1,000 or more placed a family in the middle-income range. The middle-income family did not have a surplus of income but did have a fairly comfortable standard of living. [0]
Show me how I can pay a mortgage, eat, go to the doctor (still ignoring this one, I see), have a little entertainment every once in a while, etc.
Actually, I'll make it easier on you. From the very same source:
> Average Family Budget, 1935
> Income Amount, $ > Average annual income $1,348
> Expenses
> Food and alcoholic beverages 472
> Housing, utilities, furnishings, etc. 456
> Clothing 136
> Automobile purchase and maintenance 73
> Medical care 53
> Recreation, reading, tobacco 72
> Taxes 5
> Miscellaneous expenses 5
> Total Expenses $1,272
Let's go ahead and inflate this typical 1935 family budget to today and see how we do. Note, these numbers are per year. It's easy, right?
Let's simplify it a bit and just say it's a household of one, but you only get to live on ~1/3 of a median US individual income, currently around $43K. I'll give you $15K to work with.
Hint: do medical care and housing first.
Sorry, not my fault you regret biting off more than you can chew. You knew you couldn't do what you were claiming from the beginning.
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[0]: https://www.encyclopedia.com/education/news-and-education-ma...
For instance, with regard to medical care, in my very first comment, I clearly stated:
"Some costs in the US, medical being the primary example, are more expensive than they should be due to financial and political scheming."
That said, if your income is < $15K/yr, you qualify for Medicaid. Insulin costs < $500/yr on Medicaid.
I've already shown you in a previous comment how it's possible to live so cheaply in the modern day, because I and millions of other Americans literally have done it.
It's kind of interesting that we have to rely on a social program that didn't exist until 1965 to live like the median 1935 person, though. Hm.
There really isn't much of a 'they' trying to 'control you'. Frankly, mostly, rich people are more conscientious, and just want to 'make money' for the most part.
The most cynical I think we could be would be to say that 'they' - meaning the business community at large - want you mostly to 'consume stuff'.
But the level of irrational cynicism here is a little disturbing, a see a lot of people who might be depressed and could be reaching out for help.
Notes on the creation of the consumer economy in the US towards the start of 1900's [1]
Do you have more control over the dog you feed every day or the wolves that feed themselves?
From my own experience with a borderline cult, the people most vulnerable to cults are ones that have had trauma of some sort. Economic prosperity was kind of all across the board, now that I reflect on it. I do agree that "lack of driving goal" is a big factor.
Not an expert on this topic; I just think it's an interesting tangent: what exactly are the biggest factors that make someone susceptible to joining a cult?
But I go back to the underlying theme of the original Star Trek series with Kirk and Spock. Countless times they were presented with paradise, only to find humans were not quite ready for it. Even in a Federation which had solved resource scarcity, removed money and harvested limitless energy, the desire to explore and seek out new life, and even new dangers and disaster, could not be quenched.
Economic engagement is not, shall we say, as "pure" in outcome as direct civic engagement / volunteering / philanthropy. The question for a post-scarcity society is how to motivate civic engagement, even without the prospect of financial reward.
I think there's a pretty decent argument to be made that most people who are working don't have time for real personal goals. The realities of life often take priority over personal pursuits.
In a world without mandatory work to survive, people would be free to pursue frivolous interests. If everybody who wanted to play guitar could just play guitar all the time, the world would be full of music.
It seems that jobs in general can at best only offer short windows of time where the stars line up for you such that you can honestly say you enjoy working that job. But for one reason or another the window always closes. (Reorgs, you master the work so it gets boring, people come and go etc ...)
If the baseline level of pay in a field is high enough, it seems net detrimental to be highly engaged.
Who is better off? A checked out Engineer who collects 90-100k and is able to cruise at 6/10 levels of happiness under most conditions or a "striver" Senior Engineer who gets 130k but is pretty much always unhappy at work for one reason or another?
This article offers a change in perspective, is that not enough to be worthy of HN?
> This needs to be stopped. The economic progress of the past 200 years has brought many unquestioned benefits. But we should question whether compelling humans to work is essential to the continuation of that progress.
The article doesn't say it clearly, but it seems to be recommending a Universal Basic Income, on a large scale. Or at least enough to allow for students to continue studying without having to work.
A common response I've heard about the above proposal, is some variant of work-valorization. "People these days are just lazy and expect a handout. People should have to earn their keep. Working a job builds character, and is essential to a meaningful life." Presumably the author is responding to such statements.
But it's more than just making the classes available. We also need to change the culture that is still somehow vaguely anti-nerd, anti-geek, anti-studying, even though everyone has smartphones and tablets and laptops open 24 hours per day. That's a harder task.
It seems stupid to toil. Humans should be smart enough to invent an economic system that provides for everyone, leaves none unhoused, and doesn’t force 40+ hour weeks on us. The problem is that someone will always run against the grain of standardization of something like this to exploit someone and profit outside the lines.
Marx may very well have been right that we need a worldwide revolution in order to create this form of government in which workers receive the full value of their labor, and work is done according to what is socially necessary. Purge capitalism, and it all works nicely.
I think the word "invented" has to mean something more than "proposed and refined a theory without any successful real-world applications".
Furthermore, Marxist theory has been tested. I think it managed to turn out worse than capitalism, which is quite an achievement.
There's a difference between general work ethic, and the specific belief that paid commercial work is the only ethical kind. It is self-evident to me that, personally, I should be writing computer programs or drawing for at least some of my time instead of playing video games and posting on HN. It is less self-evident that I should pick only one computer program to work on based on the needs of my boss, and then do it for 40 hours a week between the hours of 9am to 5:30pm with an hour for lunch.
? People in general don't believe that.
Everyone recognizes that there's tons of great work being done that's not commercial, or even commercially-related.
This is not a 'deep insight' of a modern ideal either - people have been very active in their communities since the dawn of time and very well aware of the difference between paid and unpaid work - though admittedly, not always 'fully appreciated'.
"It is less self-evident that I should pick only one computer program to work on based on the needs of my boss, and then do it for 40 hours a week between the hours of 9am to 5:30pm with an hour for lunch. "
??? Again, it should be 'fairly evident' because that you are getting paid, is a measure of the value you are creating for a lot of people.
It's not 'the needs of your boss', it's the 'needs of the client that your boss is communicating to you'. It's your bosses job to intelligently make sense of those needs and to divide up the work responsibly.
Your 'interest work' is probably more like 'art' - it may have some function, but that doesn't mean it's useful to anyone at all. There's nothing wrong with doing something useless, and always some 'good' in doing something speculative that may prove to be worthwhile ... but 'payment' is usually a decent measure that the work being done is valuable for someone else.
When you serve a coffee or clean a toilet in the cafe you're definitely creating some value.
When you work for a company that helps the coffee shop do their accounting ... again, value creation.
1. Universal basic income: in the longer term, this is more or less unavoidable if we don't want total chaos and social unrest; also see below.
2. Bigger objectives: As automation grows in terms of its prevalence and the efficiencies it produces, we need to divert more resources on bigger projects that are focused towards long term goals for humanity like scientific exploration/space/energy/medicine etc BUT instead of relying fully on automation to achieve them, we should have a balance of both human and automated labor to ensure that people who want to stay engaged, have the avenue to do so. If that makes things less than fully-efficient, so be it because i) the gains from automation elsewhere offsets that ii) the aim isn't to increase shareholder value.
This probably produces following groups (and there likely will be overlaps/grey areas):
a. Those who are driven by monetary goals: they can continue to pursue their ambitions in profit driven ventures that relies on automation (though automation itself might eat their jobs so this will be a constantly moving target)
b. Those who are driven by humanitarian goals/recognition etc: this is an area that is underfunded and more investment of effort and resources will both help humanity and bring satisfaction to people in it. These problems are so big that even with more and more automation, we can practically throw the entire humanity behind them and still be short of the goals.
c. Those who are unable/unwilling to participate in either corporate or humanitarian projects: I'm sure there will be a significant lot of people in this group but they should/will still have a reasonable standard of living because of #1. People in groups a. and b. shouldn't complain about them because they can join this group too (though based on human needs, I don't think suddenly everyone will jump to this even if they are able to). Similarly someone who is in this group can get inspired and move to a. or b.
If food cultivation and harvesting are completely automated, who maintains machines when they break or err? If we leave all of that work to the machines do we lose a skill that’s fungible for sustaining life?
Assuming we can completely automate healthcare and AI is responsible for developing new diagnostics and treatments without human oversight. Who acts as a check on these systems and who is responsible for correcting issues when they arise?
If we can automate 90% of manual and low-skip labor, who makes up the remaining population responsible for completing those tasks and how are they incentivized to continue performing those tasks?
I like the idea of utopian automation, but we don’t have completely automated transportation (maybe one of the closest possibilities). This seems to be putting the cart before the horse.
Well, supposing it's all automated, who cares if people perform the tasks or not?
More seriously, however, what's the actual incentive to automate "unskilled" labor? Computers are terrible at tasks we find simple, like folding laundry, and the labor of laundry workers is cheap.
I think the rest of your hypotheticals are really not of much consequence. If we develop AI diagnostic machines, why do you assume there won't be human doctors, if only to act as researchers? When horses were retired from farming, what was the incentive to maintain the combines and harvesters?
Laundry workers may be cheap, but automated laundry workers working 24/7/365 will eventually be cheaper at scale. Amazon is as efficient at exploiting human labor as it's possible to be, but they're absolutely working to put those humans out of work as quickly as possible.
Says the farmhand about to be replaced by coal powered engines?
Since the dawn of the Industrial Revolution, there have been wave after wave of automation - and yet material prosperity has exploded and unemployment is relatively low.
Here are some highlights from UK unemployment rates for the last 150 years. Note 2018 was one of the top years for employment - even after 1.5 centuries of automation of various kinds. [1]
There are no glorious jobs, it's all mostly a grind, our civilization depends on people doing their work well.
Whether it is serving coffee, taking out the trash, or writing code - take pride in doing whatever it is well, and do your part.
Of course - we want to make sure we are not abused, we want to make sure we are not 'taken' - but we have it better than anyone in history, and the opportunities we have now are almost unthinkable to someone just two generations ago.
For the vast, vast majority of people, it's not that bad, in fact, relative to most humans who have ever lived, it'd downright utopian.
Within reason try to do a good job, be conscientious and proud of your work, get along and take care of those around you.
[1] https://www.ons.gov.uk/economy/nationalaccounts/uksectoracco...
If you can't clear the German Abitur related to your studies, you'll have a rough time at university anyway. Some filtering makes sense at the door. Else you end up having to recap high school material at university or have tons of extra auxiliary classes to bring people up to speed, who then have this extra load or need to take longer for that reason. Whether I was president of some fancy society in high school has less bearing on how good a physicist I'll be. We don't value the concept of "well-roundedness" here. It's not the job of the university to evaluate people's "character". It's their job to educate people who are capable of getting through the required material. All else is about the upper middle class wanting to push little Bobby in there who has no actual competence versus someone from a poorer background who is good at math or history or whatever but couldn't afford extracurriculars and didn't have connections.
Believe me, I have. And, my conclusion has been that, so far, every software engineering job I've ever had has been a bullshit job as defined by Graeber. And, if your job is to get people to click on ads, or other socially detrimental (forget unnecessary) things, you, too, have a bullshit job.
I mean, if you are really into this stuff, nobody prevents you from going down this road... If not, then the main concern is this:
Do I like my job? When I wake up, do I think about what I was stuck on last evening and how am I going to tackle this? If you wake up thinking "Oh fuck, I need to work", yeah then that's a bullshit job for sure. But even then, I don't see how more than 1% or 10% of the population could have a job they enjoy. Work needs to be done, most of it is boring, dirty and doesn't earn money.
Until that changes, this is how it will be. No point in crying after it, just think about where you want to position yourself in this system.
Not to mention that this whole discussion brings us back to the question: Who's fault is it that people die? The arms researchers or manufacturers? The army? The people who are mean to us and own resources we want (I mean they could just surrender)?
Are the people building Facebook responsible for the social decline? Or is it the government, not applying proper regulation/laws? Or is it the people using Facebook (nobody is forcing you)? Or are humans just like this and Facebook shows us their true color?
But, I'm afraid you're wrong about the main concern, if only in my particular case. I see it as "if I don't do something someone will pay sufficient money for me to do, eventually, I will find myself in a financial bind due to insufficient savings and suffer for it."
And, I would much rather work a non-bullshit job. It's just that the realities of capitalism make that a nonviable alternative. Thus, if I want such luxuries as a roof over my head and food in my belly, I'm deprived of my voluntary choice of how to allocate my own labor, in addition to having the fruits of said labor mostly taken away from me.
Everyone's at fault, according of course to the degree to which they themselves are able to shape the object, in this case mostly culture and incentives, responsible for the decline.
> Are the people building Facebook responsible for the social decline? Or is it the government, not applying proper regulation/laws? Or is it the people using Facebook (nobody is forcing you)? Or are humans just like this and Facebook shows us their true color?
I repeat, everyone's responsible.
> boring, dirty and doesn't earn money.
Or even
> If you wake up thinking "Oh fuck, I need to work", yeah then that's a bullshit job for sure.
Instead, it refers to employment that is "so completely pointless, unnecessary, or pernicious that even the employee cannot justify its existence". Prototypical example is the layers upon layers of superfluous middle management.
I dreamed of getting back into a University and getting my PhD so I could earn way less, but at least try to get grants for research I wanted to do and have summers to develop the classwork so I could lie to--cough-cough--I mean "tech" students. I got my masters, but PhD programs were much more challenging to get into, and my GRE scores are terrible. With the way Universities have turned so ideological and anti-free thought, I doubt I'll ever actually go back.
I lived in some other countries (did software there too), took a year off to backpack, ran out of money, took more tech jobs ... and now, I feel like I'm okay working tech for the rest of my life. I'll probably be 100% remote from here on out (I have before 2020 at one place) and plan on moving out as far away from the city as I can (and still have decent enough Internet to work).
Sure my life might be wasting away playing video games, blogging or attempting to learn banjo while working for another firm soaking up money ... but I've had adventures. I've literally traveled around the world. I might not hit a lot of my goals .. but man, I've done quite a bit and I'm not even 40 yet.
I'm sad due to the pandemic, but at least I'm not bitter. I know if I was stuck locked up in Chicago with younger me, that kid would not have made it. My old project owner at a job sent me an e-mail about how her Italian roommate had committed suicide during the UK lock downs. Could have been me. It's only luck and timing that it isn't.
What?
In the last 10-15 years so many people have been able to start their own businesses, passion projects and venture into new areas just because of Facebook and Google ads. I have jeweler friends, cloth makers, leatherworkers, people making cakes at home — all of which get their clients on Instagram and other social networks. Also: therapists, astrologists (yes, I'm not a fan, but it's still an occupation), gaming dice makers, photographers, caterers, limo drivers, DJs, hair stylists... And those are just people I personally know that I could remember from the top of my head!
The engineers that "make people click on ads" did it. They enabled more small-scale commerce to compete with the giants, gave a lot of people an opportunity to earn a living doing what they love. Without this "bullshit jobs" all these industries would still have been dominated by centralised gatekeeping institutions that have a budget to advertise in print media, radio, TV and billboards. Now, you can get your first customers with a $10 budget.
If there is such a thing as "making a world a better place", this is it.
There are many jobs that feel like "bullshits jobs" because you don't get to have personal interaction with the person whose life you're improving: you work in a giant system, and the cause-and-effect link between your work and their life is not close. But it doesn't mean that it's not there.
Sorry. Getting people to click on ads is still bullshit. The harm Facebook has done to society, especially over the past 5 years, completely outweighs the fact that someone you know used it to boost their astrology business.
That's a scarecrow: I've never made such claim, it's just something that is easy for you to disprove.
These professions obviously existed before. But now the barrier to reach their audience had become significantly lower, and is not tied to a centralised institutions or companies.
I have to admit, I'm really confused by your question: are you under an impression that these professions either don't exist at all, or exist in one immutable state and cannot be democratised? This is not a binary dichotomy between two state. It's a continuum, and while Google and Facebook didn't create those occupations, they still have done a huge deal to improve them. There's no contradiction here.
Nay, this is the opposite of making the world a better place. Shame on thee, ye supposed best and brightest, ye best minds of my generation, destroyed by madness, who spend your days trying to get 1% more people to click on an ad.
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[0]: Which I actually doubt -- the internet as a whole is what lowers the barriers, not Facebook ads per se.
Can you kindly back this claim up? I already brought forth a comparison between traditional and internet advertisement that you have not disproved. How would you get your customers for your one-person business without internet ads?
> the harm Facebook has created
You keep claiming it, and yet I'm to see any examples of that harm. Internet, including Facebook and Youtube enabled wider political discourse that existed before, all around the globe. If you happen to dislike some of that political discourse, then your problem is with other people's political opinions, not with the medium that they choose to exchange it.
It's like being mad at a printing press because you don't like what's written in the paper.
> the internet as a whole is what lowers the barriers, not Facebook ads per se.
What is the internet if not the websites hosted on it? Facebook IS a part of the internet, so distinction between it and the internet "as a whole" is quite meaningless here. All properties that Facebook and Google have that we are discussing, are logical consequences of the internet. If it would happen to be Altavista and Livejournal, we would still have a pretty similar conversation about the very same software engineers working to optimise CTRs.
As for harms of Facebook, here are 6, from the most cursory google search ever: https://www.forbes.com/sites/alicegwalton/2017/06/30/a-run-d...
Yes, Facebook is a part of the internet, but it's a part we don't need, and a part we should cut out and burn to the ground, just like we don't need fascists and racists and their so called "discourse."
Is the rest of it this bad too?
To the extent that we work, hating it simply brings another source of misery into your life. It then makes you poorer because you can't succeed at a job you hate.
So the advice is basically to increase your misery and decrease your wealth.