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Comment by dnautics | Hacker News Reader

the anti-"self-made" rhetoric is eventually going to backfire. There are plenty of people who are only modestly privileged, or even hugely privileged that had to pull through a ton of bullshit or work hundred hour weeks, oftentimes succeeding in spite of what they had to endure, that bristle at the connotation that because they happened to grow up with some amount of privilege, everything they did is unearned.

Even if they were wrong and "they would have made it anyways" devaluing someone's effort like what I see happening these days (and moreover, socially pressured to shut up about it) is not a sustainable strategy for ameliorating social disparity.

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Let's look at this scientifically. Being successful takes 100 units of energy. If one monkey starts with 0 units of energy and another monkey starts with 90 units of energy, how many units must each monkey spend to become "successful?"

Now imagine the monkey who spent 10 units of energy sitting on Ellen's couch telling the world about how hard he pulled on those bootstraps.

Edit: Fixed a typo.

> "scientifically"

I'm sorry. I am actually a former scientist, and I pulled hundred hour workweeks in the lab. You do not know what that word means.

Moreover, you completely missed the point.

The median American has a pretty easy life growing up, they don't have any reasons why they can't succeed yet they almost never do anyway. And there is no reason to believe that the poor Americans would do better than the median Americans if they were given the resources of median Americans.

> they don't have any reasons why they can't succeed yet they almost never do anyway

This seems like a failure of imagination to me.

Having adequate food and shelter is a long way from being able to start a profitable business, and it can even be the case that as society becomes more prosperous it becomes HARDER to start a business. Example: try starting a restaurant with the regulations today vs 1950.

If the monkey with zero gains 5 and the monkey with ninety loses 5, the monkey with zero was more successful.

It's not enough to look at where someone is, you have to look at where someone started. If you are a millionaire and your dad was a billionaire, you are probably one of the biggest losers on the planet.

What if you had super rich parents and you decided to become a school teacher (~$60k/yr in the US)?

Being raised rich taught you that wealth isn't everything, in fact it can be quite toxic and maddening.

So you end up owning a house and some retirement investments after 40 years, but most of all feel proud of the work you've done and the lives you've bettered.

To be called the biggest loser in the world seems like a stretch.

If your goal is to educate people, a billion dollars educates more people than your tireless efforts ever could.

You could instead focus on some sort of personal goal, but if you are actually doing that you won't care how much money someone else has.

Your business mogul father had said the same thing to you. He seemed to believe money was the only thing that mattered.

Luckily you were not that shallow or self-deceived and realized that living a humble life and taking the time to work with your students one-on-one was true value you could provide.

Unlike your father, you will leave this world having given more than you took. You will have truly empowered the children to work for a better world than the one they were born into.

I don't see how A comes to B. How does telling people that they're not as self-made as they think they are some how excaerbate social disparity?

Fwiw, I don't believe in being self-made because everyone's idea of "a ton of bullshit" is different.

I feel like by American standards I'm "self-made". I taught myself how to program as a kid and made a career for myself that pays extremely well (I work at a "FAANG-adjacent" company, equitable pay).

My parents didn't co sign any loans, I didn't even go to college. No connections ever involved in getting a job, no friends of parents for summer jobs or anything. Just mind numbing famounts of hours spent single mindedly working on things from childhood to adulthood. Struggling to teach myself, struggling against everyone telling my I was wasting my time (in their defense, I almost didn't graduate high school over how focused I was on projects that ultimately didn't become anything), sacrificing a lot of what most people experience growing up because I was convinced this was what mattered.

But then you have my parents. My dad grew up with a father who was a non-functioning alcoholic in a 3rd world country. He'd farm for yams to get a few cents to pay for school uniforms. He'd walk a mile out to his friend's house in the middle of the night to be able to read by a lantern because they didn't have one.

My mother's father died and a young age and she had to grow up with relatives who didn't hide their disdain for her. As I've grown older I've realized she downplays how bad her situation was growing up, but in the end she wanted to continue education and they forced her to be a seamstress, so she taught herself to type (in the days of typewriters not computers) and joined the police as a secretary in her country.

Today my dad has a PhD and my mother has her doctorate. Compared to them I might as well have been handed the world in a silver platter for the simple reason, at least I had time. I wasn't struggling to find food, I wasn't cleaning up after my father after he soiled himself in a drunken stupor. My parents might not have agreed with what I was doing, and it might have brought conflict between us, but they didn't hate me.

Of course if you look around you'll find someone who would make their story look like they got a silver platter. After all, at the very least in their poverty they still had peace. They weren't dodging bullets, they weren't in a war-torn country or something.

That's why I have no problem with social pressure telling "modestly privileged, or even hugely privileged" people to shut up about how absolutely terrible the odds were and how they struggled. Everything is relative.

Put a prince who's never lifted a finger to even wash his face in an upper middle class life and he'll cry real tears struggling to figure out how a 9-5 works.

There's nothing wrong with giving him a shoulder to cry on, but there's nothing useful or teachable about his struggle (except maybe driving home the how deep his privilege was...) I'd much rather hear from what it took people with much less to get to where they are. There's often more to learn there.

Telling people who have actually worked hard that they are "privileged" and dismissing their success is also bad.

Look at this block of text that you wrote. It's almost entirely all about yourself. You weren't listening at ALL to what my claim is.

Suppose you're middle class, and you haul ass to get ahead. You're not born into abject poverty or anything, but you really DID need to work hard. And some asshole, who probably hasn't worked nearly as hard as you, comes around and tells you "well, you made it because you're white, male, or tall" or whatever (I, personally am only one of those things). AND you can't complain about the metanarrative, because you'll get cancelled, or whatever.

This is not a "prince who's never lifted a finger". This is someone who had to struggle.

Thanks for the laugh. To miss the point so amazingly, it's beautiful.

Woeeee is you, you struggled sooooooo hard and now some random person tells you that you only made it because X and that will somehow social disparity... because?

What, you're going to be extra mean to people who aren't in your social strata or something now? Like us vs them or something?

I mean, you realize:

Thats... that's me. Literally word for word. Down to "one of those things". Or did you... not realize most of the comment is not about me?

Someone tells me that I only made it because I'm male and I won't even give them the time of day! How often is this happening to you that you're crying about it?!

And if I was forced to reply, it's so easy to say the absolute truth: being male didn't hurt! Like holy shit, I struggled and sacrificed but being male never hurt!

Maybe that's what's really hurting you? The fact that despite struggling, there's some property of your path that was out of your control but made the path easier? Yup that's how it is.

No one is 100% self-made. Being cognizant of that helps you be a better person.

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