If You’re So Successful, Why Are You Still Working 70 Hours a Week?
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Hate to be the one to tell you this, but there is no guarantee on what the future may bring, money can't fix everything, and true security is a lie. Live your life in the here and now, before you regret wasting it.
The link is mostly about what happens when there is too little currency. Someone deciding to work 40 hours a week instead of 70 would, if anything, reduce the amount of currency in circulation because more wealthy people tend to have larger savings and a person working 70 hours a week is probably making more money than if they were working 40.
Me, I go for functionality. The catch there is, if I've acquired plenty of functionality for something I consider desirable but then I don't DO that thing, does it still exist?
Properties are the exception, being both functional and an investment.
It's a very popular lie.
Now tell me about how crypto is money :)
You have unexpected huge medical expenses. You are no longer able to work. You're fired and can't find a job. Tech salaries collapse. Your town in burned down/destroyed in a hurricane/etc.
etc etc etc
You do need to diversify to something more than a number at a single institution, but in general, I'd say that it's the other way around - when everything is fine in society, then life is okay even if you're a bit lacking, but when things become hard and not everyone is going to make it, then the have-nots will suffer even more due to lack of options caused by lack of resources. For a crude example, think about the difference between 1930s European Jews who could or could not afford to travel overseas (which was a much more serious expense than now) when things started to become threatening.
These days, it takes a lot of assets to be confident you won't be homeless in old age assuming no major surprises or threats from society and the environment changing.
I would say most younger people don't earn enough or have enough assets to reach that level of basic confidence. After all, if you've rented all your life so far due to inability to buy a place to live, you probably know, in the back of your mind, that when you retire, you can't see any way to pay the rent unless something changes between now and then.
No need for any catastrophic surprises. That's foreseeable.
Ironically, as climate change effects become more and more prominent, going with a RV route is looking more like the best possible option for the future, cause you can just pick up and leave when bad weather comes.
what's the plan when fuel shortages start happening and your RV can't be kept rolling?
Also, with a bigger battery comes higher limits on how fast you can charge. If you have a 300kWh battery you should be able to charge it at 300kW all day long.
That said, it doesn't really exist since there is no market for it at the moment. RV sales aren't exactly high, so the niche for EV RVs is even smaller. Plus there's no real infrastructure out for it now.
I suspect once EV Semis become more mainstream we'll see that trickle down to RV users. They can charge at the same place a semi would charge at.
Also, there will undoubtably be hybrid options where you can have a multi fuel generator charging your batteries.
https://www.ford.com/trucks/f150/f150-lightning/2022/#towing...
It is not unreasonable to work under the assumption that temporary petrol shortages become a annual or semi-annual event in a future where the gulf coast is hammered with ever more frequent and powerful hurricanes.
This is an area where small, distributed solar panel arrays and batteries (like on your house) can be much more robust. It's a lot harder to destroy thousands of small solar power systems than it is to take out a pipeline feeding an entire city.
But realistically, hybrid powertrains, or even simple multi-fuel generator charging will make this a non issue.
Provided you're lucky enough to run out of gas in a location that your RV won't be a nuisance. And if you're in hurricane territory, an RV is not functionally equivalent to a house.
That's fine when young and healthy, but when you're older, have several recurring doctor appointments and some mild impairments, a home is a lot better.
Not saying it can't be done, after all there are nomad populations with elderly people who live on the road. But they usually have a support system that travels along, too.
Uh, that is quite a pessimistic take from someone debating on HN, which is a forum of IT-related professionals. Maybe your level of required confidence is too high.
Vast majority of old people in the developed world do not end up homeless and IT professionals are even better off than an average Western employee. So "assuming no major surprises or threats..." and assuming you are not at risk of becoming alcoholic or drug dependent, you do not really need to fear homelessness.
By "a lot of assets" I mostly mean "a house", but a decent size pension would count instead. Both are out of reach for many people now.
I agree that most old people in the developed world don't end up homeless.
On the other hand, there's a growing economic housing crisis affecting a lot of people in almost every developed country. Mostly affecting (current) younger people, and most (current) older people are almost oblivious to it. It's working its way up the age range. This is new.
You cannot assume what worked will always work, when there are factors that appear to be changing across generations.
Many people are paying >50% of their income in rent, and rents are still rising in most places faster than incomes. Most renters cannot find a way to get on the house buying ladder. If things carry on as they are, many people currently young will retire while renting. If you're paying 50% income on rent now, what are you going to do at pension time, as pensions are typically 1/3 or less of the income prior to retirement. You'll have to carry on working, but that gets harder with age, faster for some people than others.
I agree with you most will probably not end up homeless, but the point is, for that to work out, something will have to change.
I personally know an IT person who reached retirement age and is dependent on state benefits to pay their ongoing rent, and found those state benefits enough for almost zero properties in the area they lived for decades prior, making it hard to find a place from which to continue looking after their own older parents. They struggle, and have to work on the side.
And another, skilled and knowledgable software engineer, currently paid well, who for a period last year was unable to pay for rent or food due to running out of money and access to credit. They needed help from local volunteers just to eat. How can that happen, you may think? This is HN, where not everyone is working for a company. Like many HN readers who are entrepreneurial (it's notionally a startup forum), they were a business bootstrapper, and it's easy for that to become financially precarious when things don't go so well. Add a badly timed pandemic into the mix, government support for everyone except small business owners, and a time where jobs were not proving easy to get, and you have a recipe where homelessness really was realistic for a skilled IT person and, unfortunately, their family. I'm sure they're not the only one around here who's had to seriously face it last year.
My own pension is projected to be less than my current rent, which is already low for the area, so I think it's rational to be thinking about that.
I work almost just as much as I used to before but my life gets easier and better the more money I make. It's incredible to me the difference money makes. Compound interest is real and determining when it's enough is about determining the rate of growth in absolute terms relative to the cost of living you'd be happy with.
Being Canadian, I have access to public health, but if I get sick with even minor things, it'll take up my whole day. Now, if I get sick, I'll just pay the ~$200 fee to see a private doctor for 15 minutes, get what I need and get out.
Dental is not covered by public health, so there were at times I delayed treatment because I couldn't afford it.
I used to live in Vancouver where people will tell you they have good public transport but it's a lie. It's really only if you live along the skytrain corridors because the busses are always late and it's always raining. So if you don't have a car, you're wet, cold, late, and miserable. Now I just pay for Uber. Better yet, I just live downtown and I can walk wherever.
Going to the grocery store when I was poor was also difficult. Thinking about what I can afford means spending time comparing prices or even stores, and compromising on the meals I wanted to make. Now I just throw everything I want into the cart and I don't even look at the price tag.
Being poor sucks and there are countless more examples.
Are they?
What constitutes a satisfying life is an incredibly gray area, and for me, as I get older, I keep having to re-calibrate myself and realize life is short, even more so if you don’t know how to use it.
That's an awful way to look at life. Work already occupies your most productive working hours, why wouldn't you try to make it the most interesting and fulfilling activity in your life?
Unfortunately
> why wouldn't you try to make it the most interesting and fulfilling activity in your life?
I can’t. I’d do it if I could, but everything the appears fulfilling seems to end up being a scam or not obtainable or not worth obtaining for the pittance it would pay.
To the question though, with “can’t” being used loosely:
- Anything that I lack the correct aptitude/intelligence to work on. There are a number of options in this category. Things that while I could probably do in theory, I’d be unable to keep up with the competition in a professional market.
- Anything with limited options for employment. Sure I’d love to be a ~~Haskell~~ ~~Adga~~ Idris developer or researcher in some crazy field with absolutely zero immediate monetization strategy, but there just aren’t many jobs to apply to. Even if I did anything right I’d still be likely to fail.
the most interesting job gets grinded down by process, by toxic co-workers, bully bosses, unrealistic expecatations and pressures, dealing with shitty "customers" (be them internal employees or external to the company).
my wife, my kid, hiking, camping, hitting the beach, listening to music, going to a concert, watching a movie, reading a book, gardening, yard/house projects, having my cat sit on my lap ..are all infinitely more rewarding than any piece of shit job could ever be.
I wish my work could enrich my employer more.
They can only deploy the smallest fraction.
I'm getting better at a faster rate than they are.
the bureaucratic bullshit, the HR bullshit, the "team building" exercises - i don't care if it's bowling or drinking alcohol, asshole managers, toxic co-workers, at-work politics in all it's wonderful forms.
i say this for large companies that pay well but treat you more like a number, for the small places that expect everything from you but treat you like family (at times), the startups, the regional companies, the tech companies, the non-tech companies, the customer facing roles, the backend roles.
it's all life sucking and life draining and there's no such thing, on a long enough time line (this is variable to people) that keeps it fulfilling. even changing it up all the time once oyu approach burn out.. .has it's breaking point where even that doesn't do shit for you.
work is a thing you do so you can live when you're done.
work sucks.
best job i ever had was working a kitchen of a BBQ restaurant. 2nd best was building walls and door frames for new houses as a teen. everything else i've ever done, blows and I'm 40.
That I'm now able to what I do and earn what I earn, to me, is like a miracle and I enjoy every minute of it.
Or as my dad put it: better to work with your head than your hands, isn't it son?
What % of software engineers could competently perform a janitorial job, preferences aside? What % of janitors could competently perform a software engineering job?
I'm tired of this bullshit rhetoric that SEs are somehow smarter than everyone else. I know some absolutely fucktarded people working for some pretty big companies in some pretty big roles. One is a doctor I wouldn't trust with my cat.
Your job does not speak to your intelligence.
Janitors can be smart too. Maybe this is all because movies like Good Will Hunting aren't made anymore.
SEs are paid well and so have an overinflated self-value. Again, now that this is crashing with WFH. We have code chop shops in India, yet we still try and pretend coding is some modern-day magic language.
ninja edit- hit reply b4 finished
2nd edit- reminded me of this [1] infamous That Mitchell and Webb Look sketch =)
I do agree that learning how to code is not that hard given that you have certain skills already. But said skills are rare. This might explain why programmers think it is easy to learn programming but we don’t see an influx of skilled developers despite boot camps and online courses available for free.
Maybe changing something at an elementary school level would fix the problem. I have no idea how to do it but I know for sure that we need to teach people a certain way of thinking and this is a prerequisite to being a successful programmer. As soon as you have that way of thinking learning Python or Java is a piece of cake. And I absolutely sure that anyone can learn it, we are simply super bad at teaching the right skills to people.
Some (read- rich) schools are teaching programming early, but I agree 100% if we had all public schools teach it early it would remove much of the mysticism.
Anyways sorry if I come across as heated on this issue, just some of the best people I've ever met made the least and had the most menial of jobs.
edit to add- my mother (a horrible, evil person), was head of Sandia Labs IT(weapons defense contractors for the govt), she had a masters in accounting and knew nothing about computers and servers. This woman- who was on call 24/7 and still had beepers in 2010 as they are more reliable than cellphones, couldn't use a desktop computer and had Win98 as her OS when the rest of the world was on Win 7. I don't understand this world.
Where supply is much larger than demand -- that is, where many people can easily replace the person doing the job and perform similar work -- wages are low. When not many people can do a demanded job, wages are high.
Note that I am not making any moral claims about this fact being good or bad; just pointing out that it is indeed an objective fact.
This dynamic notably holds true even in non-capitalist economic systems, such as in Communist countries where the rate of pay is legally fixed at the same level for all jobs: people simply barter out of band with non-monetary forms of value transfer (блат) instead, to compensate for the inability to use money to find the supply/demand intersection.
It's simply the flavor of the decade, just like last bubble it was website/graphics design. Bubble is bursting IMO.
For the most part, I haven't regretted it, though I was correct that I wouldn't do as much programming in my free time if I did it as a job.
It hasn't really mattered, though. The programming I do during my day job is always towards a purpose and usually has a clear goal. I generally find the programming itself quite rewarding, even if I'm often frustrated with the things around it.
Now that I'm older, I realize I could also have picked a lot of other jobs and learned them relatively quickly, but I still think I made the right decision. Those other things are now my hobbies.
Guess what followed after that: Odd jobs. Yes, they pay the bills but they don't build career progression. You cannot sell yourself to someone to hire you for your 1 year experience in 8 different things. This is why considering the money alone isn't enough. And yes, you also need to be educated on personal finance because if you were born in a poor family chances are you'll be spending the money as soon as you touch them.
It heavily depends on what those things are. If you have one year of legitimate experience in cyber security right now, you've got a job almost anytime you want it. The same goes for many in-demand programming languages at present. That level of experience will not initially net you a very high paying tech job, however compared to the median it'll be a good paying job and you can work your way up from there.
Even amassing 7 figures by your late 20s/30s (very difficult to do reliably, also implies no debt, no adverse life events, etc.), is not remotely enough to make a "comfortable" living for the next ~5 decades of your life.
So, significantly less than what would be needed to hit $250K of pre-tax money ($6M or so), but rather a paid-off house (taxes and insurance only), no further college or retirement savings, tax-optimized withdrawals, and buying health insurance as the major effects. I’m guessing that it’s less than half of $6M (in today’s money) and probably under $2M to hit a 90th percentile spendable money figure.
If you're not "comfortable" spending every single penny you make while your nest egg grows, you have a spending problem.
I read that to mean "retire at 40". If you retire at 40, your $1M isn't going to grow to $4M at 50.
That’s why my advice to young people is always to do what you have to in order to establish working credentials, then move somewhere cheap, buy a house and work remotely as much as you can. You’ll get it paid off in no time and that level of freedom cannot be overstated. Then you can start really saving.
On the downside, you’ll probably be living somewhere small and uncool and that may not be enough incentive to leave the bright lights of the city.
This seems like social life suicide. I'm in my 30s, single, and omitted dating much in my 20s (because -- surprise surprise -- I was working way too much). I can't really move to the middle of nowhere where the dating pool is non-existent.
Even if one overspends a little extra in those initial years paying a mortgage on a nicer place, much of that will be recouped upon sale, since places in cool areas tend to appreciate quit quickly and mortgages are highly leveraged.
How are you employing it?
[personal details removed]
"Where to get private health insurance?" Google it? I think pretty much every state has a BlueCross insurance company you can call up to ask. You'll probably spend between $500 and $1000/month, per person in your family, depending on state and age.
I despise employer-provided insurance - we have an entire culture of people who feel extra-dependent on 'employers' and who don't seem to know how to find out basic information.
You have a more than comfortable nest egg. Go pursue your passion before it's too late.
The GP was talking solely about dividends, but most funds will re-balance and distribute long-term capital gains to you if you wish. If, in 2020, you held $1.5MM in a mix of those funds and instead of reinvesting dividends, long-term, & short-term capital gains, and instead redirected them to your bank account. You'd have something like $80k distributed and your market value would have increased to like 1.7-1.8MM.
Not that 2020 was a typical year or anything. But the past 8 or so years have told a similar story.
Or you can date where you are, and then move somewhere cheap together
This is a dubious claim, but I don't want to get into it, because I've debated this on HN ad nauseum.
> Or you can date where you are, and then move somewhere cheap together
What attractive, educated, socially-active woman in her 20s will want to move to the middle of nowhere once you get together or marry? I want to be around friends, family, alumni, and I'd wager so would she.
If you are STUPID, you insist on living in hell-holes like California (LA or SF areas) and you lock yourself into foolish costs you can easily avoid. FOMO is an excellent and primary way to make you last statement a 100% certainty.
Most people, I observe who burn out, do because of other reasons - work politics, poor health and ultimately not feeling in control of their lives. Not everyone is built to work like that, but some are. And they can sustain it for long periods of time.
I’m a big proponent of not regularly giving employers extra time, but I urge everyone to make the most of the remaining 168-40 hours a week - that means minimizing idle leisure too.
For many jobs being available to do work has value, but a doctor on call that’s sleeping in the hospital isn’t actually working. As such it’s a perfectly reasonable to separate working from bing available to do work.
A lot of the "so successful" have a TON of help. At the home front things are covered - stay at home wife, cleaners etc. You come home, home cooked meal, wife happy to hang out go on a walk do whatever, kids taken care of.
You go to work, you have the parking spot, the assistant with a schedule. Strong managers.
Again, these are the "so successful" folks.
The 70 hours of work is mostly meetings, strategy, bouncing ideas off people you got to hire to work with. It's not terrible
Ie, Elon Musk is probably working long hours. If my goal was to NOT work long hours that would be a bad company to work for.
It's quite likely that the billionaires putting in long hours are doing so in tasks that are diverse and decisive enough to not be soul crushing - while outsourcing those soul crushing tasks to their subordinates... in fact if that isn't the case then they're executiving wrong.
Finally, being a found who benefits directly from every penny your company earns differs significantly from working plebs that might just be randomly fired tomorrow and will never see any benefit from the company doing slightly better. The motivation is there for Musk in a way it isn't for those who surround him.
That also feels outdated. I don't know many people who are happy to sit at home, prepare meals for their absent spouse, and then smile and be happy to do whatever that spouse wants to do when they get home. That feels like an image from the 50s, not 2021.
At least anecdotally most of the millennial couples with a traditional stay at home set up I know transitioned to that after their first kid without expecting to
The reason your friends transition to a traditional dynamic once they have a kid is because they lived the lie as long as they could so they could fit in with modern societal norms, and then once they were faced with the reality of raising a child, they quickly realized the error of group think. The worst part is that people feel pressured to shift to a traditional dynamic quietly because there’s so much shame around the decision, as if deciding to devote yourself to your family is less noble than working for a soulless corporation.
Also why do you think that it's entirely about gender equality when the younger generations have grown up in an era where wages have stagnated and few families can get by on a single income?
I have a lot more sympathy for the view that traditional gender roles have wisdom as I've had kids of my own, but it really seems like you are over-indexing on it which is especially offensive coming from a man who has historically benefited from the set up.
Believe it or not, even 50s housewives did not sit idly, staring at the clock.
Granted it's not for everyone. But I can see why it would be appealing.
If you're making mid six figures it's ultimately much cheaper than a spouse.
Pretty sure that divorce rate isn't the reason why the misogynist community MGTOW exists.
The divorce rate isn't 2.7 per 1000 marriages, which is what I assumed before clicking on the source, it's 2.7 per 1000 people in the population.
The marriage rate is 6.1 per 1,000 total population, divide one by the other and you find the proportion of marriages that end in divorce: 44%.
You mean working for your employer 70 hours a week, right?
As for me, I make it a point to give my employers what they’re paying for, but nothing extra. I spend a lot of extra time each week performing “work” for myself. Whether it be home improvement or side projects.
Most people don't enjoy spending 70 hours a week working for their employer.
It's just not true for ALL. And yes, that minority are those who:
* have higher IQ or higher motivation/grit/work ethic or both
* have a marketable set of skills - both hard and soft
* do not fall into simplistic life memes that induce FOMO - they make their own success rather than rely on others to define what success must be and how it must be done
If "working" to an executive means attending parties, trade shows, and numerous business events, that 70 hours could be a lot of fun, and totally worth it. I can think of a few roles I'd like in the future that would have me working that much and I'd be all-in for it. There are hard parts, certainly, but as you described, you have control over it.
However, if you are sitting at a desk laboring in front of a screen for 70 hours every week because your boss (who works as described in the previous paragraph) thinks that's what defines work ethic, then you're going to get burned out and alienated from your friends and family because all of your emotional energy is being sapped out of you by your employer. You don't have control. Your job isn't exciting and dynamic. There is a limited amount of it that you can tolerate before it starts to harm you.
If the ultra-high-earning executive types enjoy their life-encompassing careers, let them have it. If I have the opportunity at a career like that I might take it myself.
But if you're laboring to meet an end (and yes, most software engineers should be thought of as laborers), you need work/life balance otherwise you're just being exploited by people who don't care if they bring you misery in the process of delivering a product.
Besides, if all you know and do is your career, then you're a pretty boring fellow. Human beings don't just eat and shit. They do other things as well. Culture needs leisure[0]. The world of "total work" is not a good one. And generally, it is a sign of latent nihilism. If you cannot put work to the side and take care of the other important stuff you're neglecting, then you are probably using work as something to avoid uncomfortable realizations. Work becomes an opiate. You're no longer thinking in terms of what is objectively good, but what you find subjectively pleasing. The two need not be at odds, but they can be when you subordinate the truth to your desires instead of subordinating your desires to the truth.
It's not so black-and-white, however.
First it's based on a much older book that is essentially talking about "master-slave/master-serf" luxury and leisure of elites - 100% bullshit elitism.
Second, the reality is that civilization can not operate without a fair if not majority of jobs being shit jobs. As long as they are well-paying enough and voluntary, there's nothing wrong with that. And that cost could be being away from your family. As long as family is being provided for, I see no problems with that.
And the main reason being that simply having parents being "present" does NOT assure happy or good childhoods to your children or good relations with your spouse. There are plenty of counter examples.
If you have a family, 70 hours per week becomes threatening to the well-being of that family unit. Are there exceptions? I'm sure. That's all they are though, rare exceptions. A bunch of that time should rationally be spent exploring life with the kids and spouse, partaking in new shared experiences together, which is what bonds people together for the long-term.
I don't mind working eight hours per day, seven days per week. Up to ten hours if I really need to get something done. I won't do that for anybody else other than myself though, for my own projects/businesses; I won't do it under any circumstances for some middle management moron clown boss or company I don't own. My bills are around a thousand dollars per month right now, I can meet that working part-time for $15 / hr at a convenience store if I feel like it, or doing low volume contract tech work on the side. I've been working six or seven days per week for 20+ years straight at this point and I have rarely suffered burnout, because I've spent that time working on what I wanted to, doing what I wanted to, when I wanted to, with no boss. If I want to sleep all day, I sleep all day; if I want to work all day, I work all day; if I want to sleep during the day and work all night, I do that. That's not normal, and it can't be replicated by the majority of people. I also don't have a family; if I did, I'd have a different schedule because my priorities would be different, working 7*10 would be a serious disservice to that family, it would be unfair.
What matters is not hours but choice: can one choose to use her time at her own will? If she can, then I don't see any issue at all.
>Why not use “they” instead?
It's been 30 years since I've studied formal writing in earnest, but "they," is, or at least was, grammatically incorrect in that sentence, unless you are referring to more than one person. English doesn't have a proper gender neutral singular pronoun. People have bastardized "they" to fit that role though because they don't know the gender, or because changing social and cultural pressures.
> can one choose to use her time at her own will?
changing to:
can one choose to use they time at they own will?
is nothing like English. You could of course use "their", but that has a kind of distancing effect.
It is neither a bastardization, nor grammatically incorrect, to use they as a singular gender-neutral pronoun.
0. https://www.academicwritingsuccess.com/the-astonishing-histo...
PS: I enjoyed the use of the old style footnote. We were just getting out of that notation into inline references when I was taught.
that using “they” as singular was not at all unheard of. It is quite plausible that the sources I am remembering were somewhat over-representing how common it was (they certainly would have motivation to do so, in relation to the changing social pressures that you mentioned), but my impression is still that for a long while, it was not especially unusual for people to use it without meaning to make (and without being perceived to be making) any kind of statement about gender/sex, though it may have been (idk) the clear consensus that it was “technically incorrect usage”.
Furthermore, my impression (I could be wrong) is that while using a singular “they” to refer to a person whose sex/gender was unknown, was not that strange, it would have been fairly odd for someone to use singular “they” in the case where the speaker does know the sex/gender of the person in question, and that this is something which has changed substantially more of late due to changing social pressures etc. (compared to the use when the gender/sex is unknown).
I should note that I have not looked into this closely, and any parts which I have I could have forgotten, and therefore these are only the impressions I have, which could be wrong, and should be taken with a grain of salt.
It is incorrect, as is “her” both times used in the preceding sentence, but not because of number of the referent (a sibling comment addresses “they” and its long-established singular use, but that's not actually relevant here.) Rather, “her” is incorrect because the possessive pronoun that corresponds to the “one” used in the earlier clause of the same sentence and with which “her” shares a referent is “one’s”, not “her”. And “she” is incorrect because it has, again, the same referent as the subject pronoun “one” in the preceding sentence, and therefore should use the same subject pronoun.
> English doesn't have a proper gender neutral singular pronoun.
Leaving aside whether it does for a known, specific referent, it absolutely does for an generic referent, and it was even properly used in one of four places the same generic referent was referred to using a pronoun in the last two sentences of the post: “one (subject)/one (object)/one’s (possessive)”.
e.g. "If people can, then I don't see any issue at all" as opposed to "If a person can, than I don't see any issue at all." There's nothing wrong with either.
The singular they is probably preferable, but can start to feel ‘clinical’ if it’s the only pronoun you ever see for an entire textbook.
https://workingwithmckinsey.blogspot.com/2013/03/McKinsey-pi...
Another example would be "if you've saved up a lot of money, why don't you spend more?" Well because I saved it by not spending too much.
And in this case, "success" is working long hours, because of what these workers believe. Success is the appearance of working hard, and having put the effort in.
The article doesn't really address income/spending, though. Are they making excellent money because of working so hard? What do they do with it? If they spend most of it, they have to keep earning to sustain their lifestyle.
Of course, some people spend little, work hard, earn a lot, and perhaps never reach "enough", where they can work less, spend a bit more, and actually enjoy the fruit of their labor.
If I were successful then I definitely wouldn't be _working_. Yet here I am working many hours and others claim I am successful.
They define it differently (just as "others" define your "working many hours" as successful.)
What I love doing doesn't pay nearly as much as what I don't love doing.
This seems abstract and businessy, but understanding what people mean when they use the term "leverage," in its myriad forms is a very useful concept to master.
There’s a reason why the strongest bounds are formed under pressure.
Pity that you can’t get that high and peace at the same time.
Classic Punk song from Vulgaires Machins (Québec band), translates to: "I do coke, to work more, to make more money, to do more coke, to work more, to make more money..."
And so far, I have remained upwardly mobile, and more importantly, happy with the work that I do and satisfied with the amount of time I am afforded for friends, family, and hobbies.
Everyone searching for a job should be asking their employers hard questions. Job offers aren't worth it if you're being exploited.
Maybe the work is the point.
And even when folks like their jobs, there are practical limits. Some jobs are stressful and lower work hours minimize mistakes. Would you rather have emergency room employees in their 35th or 65th hour on the clock that week?
Maybe work isn't the point, especially considering the unpaid work most of us do (and someone working 70 hours a week is surely expecting others to do, paid or not).
If it is the point for you, that's great, but it's certainly not the point for me. Don't incorrectly assume most people share your purpose or values.
Because I like it.
But, then, you probably wouldn't think of me as "successful." I'm not on anyone's payroll, and I won't be zipping around in any private jets, in the foreseeable future.
I would not agree with that assessment (I feel very successful), but it's not worth arguing about.
Hi Ho, Hi Ho, It's off to work I go...
Honest questions.
That... seems unfair.
Always take time to see the bigger picture.
Our need for labor should not be allowing us to harm the wellbeing of their laborers.
You are clearly in a very privileged position, but it's not a position I can disagree with, only one that needs to be universal.
I imagine for HN as a demographic I’m only averagely successful, but it’s quite a skewed demographic.
I had worked about that much for a while (40-50 at IT job + 16-20 at Lowes), and I still wasn't successful.
And all they do is seeking social relevance, and by doing so they are inadvertedly diluting your own social relevance.
There is not a mechanism which allows you to stop working and freeze your social relevance in place as some sort of videogame checkpoint type manner.
You stop working and your relevance is eroded away...hell you could keep the amount of work constant or even increase it and your relevance would be eroded away if you are in a sector or a country which is not performing well.
The biggest lie that those at the top of the social pyramid have ever managed to pass onto the rest of us is that "it ain't a zero sum game"
Well, matter of fact it is.
I also think you may be overestimating the amount of effort it takes to sort of tread water if necessary. I suspect it's more of a logarithmic decay function in terms of social relevance. I've come to think that the hardest part of staying socially relevant isn't the amount of effort it takes to stay on top, but to actually recognize when it's important to spend effort on some new trend, and when it's important to ignore other trends. I think for this it's even more important to take a step back and take time out to reflect rather than actively trying to work insane hours.
Is going golfing and having dinner with clients considered “work”? How about attending fundraisers, concert events, etc. where you have the opportunity to dramatically alter the course of your business with the right connection?
And in order to do that you need to put in the work to study the trends and understand if they are the future or a simple fad.
The only way to do that is to put in the work, studying papers, reading a lot etc.
That is still work, because sure as hell it ain't leisure
No they don’t. Most of this earth is seeking food and clean water and substance. You’re lucky enough to have that and seek your social relevance
You are underestimating the intelligence of people in 3rd world countries.
They might be fighting violently to procure themselves those things, but in their mind there is always the thought of reaching a point when their social status is so high that they won't have to fight violently, but other people in the village would bring food and water to them as a sign of respect.
That's basically the sole reason for becoming a shaman or a sorcer
yes everything in this capitalism dominated world is owned by somebody so even for food to survive, you have to engage in economic activity
yes if you work on problems that nobody needs solved, nobody's gonna solve any of your problems
there is no biggest lie, those at "the top" are simply enjoying the benefits of nature's bountifulness, inheritance, corruption, inability of common people to organise and negotiate for a better life, etc
it's a zero sum game only by design - that common people play partly out of ignorance and partly out of necessity
You are underestimating the intelligence of people in 3rd world countries.
They might be fighting violently to procure themselves those things, but in their mind there is always the thought of reaching a point when their social status is so high that they won't have to fight violently, but other people in the village would bring food and water to them as a sign of respect.
That's basically the sole reason for becoming a shaman or a sorcer
This is called retirement
I know I've worked jobs and internships which required only couple of hours a day - and I was miserable. Working >70 hours a week on my own startup has felt more rewarding than any previous job :)