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Comment by rainboOow9 | Hacker News Reader

Do we have some tangible numbers on the long term situation of those "quitting tech" people? Like, ok, they open a wind-surfing school, but then what? Does that work, are they more fulfilled and able to work the next 10+ years in that situation without burning out? Or do they go back to tech after a while because grass is always greener, and a job is a job and there are not as much fulfilling jobs as we would like to be.

Looking around me, I do know a fair amount of people quitting tech. To become a sport or management coach, a sound designer, a bar owner, a writer, etc. But a lot of those people seem to struggle even more now than they were when being in tech.

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> But a lot of those people seem to struggle even more now than they were when being in tech.

Beware of bias when attributing value to someone else's struggles. "happiness" and "fulfillment" are innate personal perceptions. And they are the aggregate not just of one's job, but of one's circumstances in life on the whole.

For one person, the struggle associated with being a writer might be totally worth it. For someone else, it could be entirely the wrong road to follow. Thing is, the only person who needs to figure out what path in life is the right way would be... that person. That's what personal responsibility, freedom, agency, independence,... is all about.

In a way, the big trap in this debate is ending up shoehorning people into different boxes. Just because someone graduated with a tech degree doesn't mean they can't do something else in life. Even when that pursuit is, arguably, harder then just sitting in a chair and struggling with - say - Homebrew, trying to install a different versions of Node.

Usually, when the money runs out, they return with their tails between their legs, often in shittier jobs that they'd have had if they'd stuck with it.

You're right about the grass being greener. The tech industry is an absolute plague, but most other industries are just as bad.

In the long term, and for most of us, the only way to escape this garbage system is to blow it up.

But is the system really responsible for all of this? I mean, if we go back to a more "natural" state, with simpler jobs and with more direct impacts, are we actually happier? Is cutting woods all day long more fulfilling that a tech job? Or being a mason and putting block on top of each other for other people that you do not know about?

Or is it just that in tech, we have the luxury to think about all of that, and to potentially take several years without working much thanks to our high salary?

As like many others here, I started writing code in my late teens. And experienced my first bout of burn out sometime in my mid 20s. I was sick of making all these 2D, non-real things and wanted to make real world products that I could hold in my hand. So I did. Then I learnt that the pay was often shit, the work was really difficult and the physical toil it took on my body was not something I could take for long. So I went back to writing code in a comfy, climate controlled office with all the snacks I can eat. And spend my weekends instead doing amateur carpentry. That's so much more fulfilling on all levels.

It's almost certainly true that the closer you got to the ancestral environment, the more fulfilling people's lives would be. That's hunter-gatherer society, not serf farming. In the grand scheme of things, brick laying and lumber are still pretty modern. The hypothesis is that, in the ancestral environment, your instincts would actually be working in your favor, so good things would actually feel good, and bad things would feel bad.

Of course, the logistics of undoing the neolithic revolution are mind-boggling. You're supposed to learn to be a hunter-gatherer over a lifetime, not to be thrust into it in the middle of your adult life. If some leader-type tried to abandon complex society right away, it would probably go about as well as the Cultural Revolution went. Lots of people accidentally picking the wrong mushrooms and killing themselves, because their parents never taught them how to tell them apart.

> the only way to escape this garbage system is to blow it up.

How so? Countries with blown-up systems typically become more shitty, not less.

There’s no country that has blown things up and given power to the people. So there’s no precedent to look at.

There’s no such thing as “giving power to the people.” This is grossly naive in both basic economics and society. There is only giving power to different people and under different terms.

> > the only way to escape this garbage system is to blow it up.

> How so? Countries with blown-up systems typically become more shitty, not less.

1775 [1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Revolutionary_War

(I'm not saying anything one way or t'other, just pointing out a little history)

> Usually, when the money runs out, they return with their tails between their legs, often in shittier jobs that they'd have had if they'd stuck with it.

People are trying to figure out their lives or how they want to live. There is nothing wrong in coming back to what they had quit. Making fun of other people's life choices is very immature in my opinion.

I read the previous comment as a figure of speech, not making fun of anyone.

It's a writing style (mannerism?) but not necessarily ill-intentioned.

The last line shows their intention is good faith and on the side of the common people. There’s no proper way to interpret their comment as a bad faith making fun of people.

The comment happens to be against the status quo and for the every day person and that has a higher chance as being seen as something that is unusual and more negative than it actually is.

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