Be careful how you pay the bills | Hacker News Reader

Be careful how you pay the bills

blog.nateliason.com

175 pointsvitabenes204 comments

> My ideal work life is to write about whatever I want, however I want, and be able to turn that into a comfortable living.

I am always torn when I read something like this. On one hand, I want people to be able to pursue their passions. On the other hand, I know that it is impossible for the world to function if everyone got to only do what they want.

This person wants to be able to earn a living doing whatever they want, but they also want to enjoy the benefits of other people doing things they don’t want to do. They want to be able to travel, but that requires other people to do a lot of labor they probably don’t want to do. The boarding agent, flight attendant, and pilots likely all don’t want to be doing what they are doing while he flies. The person who cleans the plane and loads the luggage aren’t doing what they want to be doing.

This is going to apply for so much of what the author is going to expect from others to support his lifestyle of doing whatever he wants whenever he wants. He wants to write while other people grow his food, provide his infrastructure, the services he requires.

In the end, I don’t think it is a healthy goal for people to expect to not have to do work that they don’t want to do. Sure, it might turn out that you can support yourself doing what you wanted to do anyway (although even then you will probably have to do a lot of stuff that isn’t what you want to do, too), but I don’t think you should expect it or define success in life as being able to do that.

What you say is true and necessary today with the limited deployment of automation in the world.

However, it needn’t be that way forever: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fully_Automated_Luxury_Commu...

I'm rather ambivalent about it all myself, but just in case anybody else is curious I've found Nihislist Communism [1] to be the most coherently argued critique of FALC (and other utopian Marxist ideologies).

[1] https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/monsieur-dupont-nihi...

IMO, I think that pursuing a standard of living for you and your family is a reasonable and honorable goal, even if that means work is a chore. If you can love what you do that's a perk, but even if it's not there, the goal still remains.

Having disposable income means you can pursue leisure opportunity, give charitably, gain security for your loved ones, etc. You don't have to love your job to accomplish your goals.

Easier said than done but save and retire then free to do what you want.

Basically, what is the equilibrium?

There are many social equilibriums, and not all are equally desirable for all; but Everybody writing from their backpacks while traveling is not one of the equilibria states (which does not necessarily mean it's not a suitable goal for an individual, as long as expectations are tempered:)

Agreed. It's why i get frustrated in a lot of the antiwork movements. The core of the antiwork movement is about respect and healthy treatment of course; but as a community they also fraternize (?) with people who think we shouldn't have to work at all; that it's optional and society is just asleep to this simple and obvious "fact". But of course it's bunk.

Until automation "saves humanity"[1] we have to work. We can and should push for healthy balances, respectful treatment of workers, sane retirement ages, etc. But still, work needs to be done, and i find it incredibly frustrating that some people think we can all just stop working.

[1]: Though i'm quite pessimistic that automation will save humanity. I suspect that while it could, it will also cause such turmoil in the beginning that we fail as a species. A nuclear winter of the working class.

At the same time, a lot of us who are “working” are actually doing bullshit nonsense that is created just to keep us busy. Meanwhile a lot of people who do actual work like raising children, taking care of elder parents, or educating themselves are not considered to be “working” because they’re not generating someone else a profit.

What would happen if all the bullshit work ended tomorrow? Would the world come to an end? I don’t think so. But if all the unpaid work out there went undone, yes, society would quickly fall apart.

I don’t follow the “anti work” movement so I won’t pretend to know what they as a group believe. But for me, I believe we can drastically redefine the concept of work and come out ahead.

> At the same time, a lot of us who are “working” are actually doing bullshit nonsense that is created just to keep us busy.

I am not going to argue that some work is more essential than other work, but I disagree that some jobs are created just to keep people busy. Why would anyone hire someone just to make sure they stayed busy? That is simply not happening. The people who control the money aren't worried about keeping people busy, they are worried about making more money.

Now, is there a large part of our economy that only exists because people who have capital will pursue anything in order to grow their capital? Yes, absolutely, but those jobs still exist because someone else will give them money to obtain what the job produces. Companies aren't sitting around thinking, "oh man, too many people in the world aren't busy... let's create some more useless jobs"

I would accept reasoning that on some level specially the large organizations are dysfunctional. And they don't necessarily optimize for costs on all levels. Sometimes it is just higher-ups wanting more resources and people under them. Even if it is not productive or needed... And what of the stuff people doing end up being productive?

And then sometimes I really question is that new version website really needed?

> Why would anyone hire someone just to make sure they stayed busy? That is simply not happening.

I’ll give you an example. My wife worked as an intensive case manager, where the job was ostensibly to help severely ill people manage their lives. Was that her actual job though? No, her actual job was filling out reams of paper work instead of actually helping anyone. That paperwork was sent to the state and the company got paid, with the vast majority of the money going to executives.

What would happen if her job were eliminated? Would the people be worse off? No, the whole point was to not help them and keep the state aid checks coming in. My wife wasn’t using her skills and was depressed and stressed all the time so she’d be better off if that job had never existed. Then there were the 3 layers of middle management coordinating all of the form filling. Their job was wholly redundant, and they didn’t do any meaningful work at all. Did they even need to exist? It’s not clear, but their existence didn’t work toward actually helping any real people. They just helped collect government checks. They were paid well though.

The people who would be harmed the most by that “work” not getting done are the executives.

Ha! I have family members who were the bureaucrats who audited that paperwork your wife sent in. The situation is exactly the same on the government side. Over qualified people doing meaningless paperwork while politically connected upper managers make tons of money joining conference calls from the golf course. It's great at crushing the spirit of anybody who actually wants to accomplish whatever the organization's mission is.

And when the service being provided are also paid for by the government the taxpayers take it on both ends!

Edit: Is my comment unpopular because some people think I'm endorsing the status quo or because some people find this state of affairs inconvenient to their world view?

Lol yeah. The main job of those middle managers seemed to be reviewing reports so they didn’t make it sound like they were driving people anywhere, even though that was half the job. The state side bureaucrats probably did the same thing! So it’s even worse than a useless job, but a useless job done twice!

Ok, I see where the disconnect is. You are talking about work that has no value for ‘real people’, or humanity in general. They aren’t providing a good or service that anyone wants directly.

However, they are clearly providing value to SOMEONE. The person paying your wife gets more value (money) than they pay your wife to do the job. They aren’t trying to keep her busy, they are trying to make money.

You could call this rent seeking, which is a completely fair criticism. It just isn’t the same as ‘make work’ that is simply trying to keep someone busy. They are trying to extract value in a way that is not good for society as a whole.

I would say it is precisely exactly the same in the vast majority of cases. These jobs exist to help some rich fucks extract even more value from society in a way that benefits them personally at the expense of society. They are worse than useless, they are actively making the world worse.

That isn't the same as "employing someone just to keep them busy", though. They are employing them to make more money; it just so happens that the work they are doing doesn't actually provide value to society.

It might seem like a minor distinction, but I think it matters when trying to understand the motivations involved.

Right, I would define something like getting an education to be work, because it’s done with the intention of bettering one’s self to better society; while going around and breaking all the windows in town just to be paid to fix them again is not work, even if some individual ends up getting rich in the process. It’s a net loss for the rest of us.

I guess from a physics pov it all depends how you define the boundary of the system, and I draw it at a society level.

I think you're both right to a degree. Yes, nobody's specifically hiring people just to keep them busy. But there are many instances where people are employed to make some manager (and it could be management at any level) look good, or retain power within the organization or even just for them to retain a management position within the organization long past the time when their position could've been eliminated. This is more likely in larger organizations, but can also happen in mid-size ones as well.

>Why would anyone hire someone just to make sure they stayed busy<

This happens _constantly_. It is a side effect of how the promotion ladder in the management profession typically works at large companies: your likelihood of being promoted to the next grade depends entirely on a small number of metrics one of which is how many people you manage.

I actually have been documenting a very strong example of this for a book I have been thinking about writing about what destroyed a high flyer after the dotcom. After the collapse of the dotcom, one group, which had the CEO's ear as "the project that will save us" had effectively unlimited headcount even while the rest of the company was in cuts-and-freeze mode for 2+ years, and because of the headcount = promotion issue, they hired armies of people that they were barely even interviewing. The project ended up 2-4 years late depending on whether you count the first release as a viable product (it wasn't).

I have seen this behavior in every single large company I have worked for. I'm not going to give more details because it would ID me, but this is very common and I was in a position to witness it with actual data, not just a leaf node engineer telling myself stories about why XXX got a promotion to VP or whatever.

This is accurate. As an engineering manager, one of the primary criteria I'm judged on when interviewing for new roles is the size of the teams I've managed previously. Bigger = better.

This is why over time large companies tend to slide and then fail. Instead of growing and growing until they take over the world.

When I was younger and crasser I noted that most large companies end up infested with tumors that exist to serve the tumor and not the company. Now that I'm older, I observe that truly large companies actually even develop an analog of the hypertumors that whales get where the tumors find it easier to steal from one another than from the rest of the company.

Actually working for large companies has left me with a very bleak outlook on human organizations.

Just think of the human organization that is orders of magnitude larger - the government.

Governments are not orders of magnitude larger than the largest corporations. Walmart employs 2.3 million people. The US federal government employs 2.85 million.

Don't overlook 1.3 million servicemen. Don't overlook state & local government.

Don't overlook all of wal-mart's vendors and service providers then, I guess? Those aren't one organization, but thousands.

> sitting around thinking, "oh man, too many people in the world aren't busy... let's create some more useless jobs"

This is exactly what the Federal Reserve does with its mandate for "full employment". When there aren't "enough" jobs, it loans out of a bunch of new money at low interest rates, for bankers to spend on outlandish bets - like say polluting the environment with electric scooters and hoping they'll turn into a recurring revenue stream.

"Full time employment" in 1950 was 40 hours per household. The definition was never adjusted when women entered the workforce en masse, so it's now 80+. With technological advancement, "full time work" should mean an individual works around 15 hours per week (with that "exempt" loophole closed). Economically, workers should have accumulated surplus and then demanded lower working hours regardless, but the previously described economic feedback loop saw that didn't happen, and instead the gains got siphoned upwards as housing and other economic rent.

That's the macro. At the micro level there are certainly motivations to create useless jobs. For one, the more people you manage/employ the more powerful you are, even if they're spinning idle. Also, adversarial entities can create jobs beneficial to their own self-interest while the overall situation remains nonproductive or even antiproductive (eg healthcare billing).

A good example is legally required "security guards" for every apartment building but not defining the tasks or qualifications for the position. As a result there is an elderly person sitting at a desk in every building lobby, watching TV. The govt doesn't need to support these people as their benefits cost has been offloaded onto apartment owners.

There are books about this![0]

> Why would anyone hire someone just to make sure they stayed busy?

1) flunkies, who serve to make their superiors feel important, e.g., receptionists, administrative assistants, door attendants, store greeters, makers of websites whose sites neglect ease of use and speed for looks;

2) goons, who act to harm or deceive others on behalf of their employer, e.g., lobbyists, corporate lawyers, telemarketers, public relations specialists, community managers;

3) duct tapers, who temporarily fix problems that could be fixed permanently, e.g., programmers repairing bloated code, airline desk staff who calm passengers whose bags do not arrive;

4) box tickers, who create the appearance that something useful is being done when it is not, e.g., survey administrators, in-house magazine journalists, corporate compliance officers, quality service managers;

5) taskmasters, who create extra work for those who do not need it, e.g., middle management, leadership professionals

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullshit_Jobs

The one I object to would be airline desk staff: managing large bodies of people is actually a fairly important job - panic and stampede are real risks and crowd dynamics are non-linear regardless of how smart any one person in that crowd is.

Companies are, internally, command economies. Of course they're full of inefficiency and crazy shit like people hired to do nothing. Competition curbs it somewhat, but economies of scale and various moats and probably some under-the-table collusion and such are very effective at protecting them from what we might consider desirable market effects.

Like with any process there is some waste (bullshit jobs), but the question is, it worth committing the extra resources to eliminate these bullshit jobs or would those resources be better used elsewhere.

Essentially not all waste is actually worth eliminating.

> What would happen if all the bullshit work ended tomorrow? Would the world come to an end?

Honestly, it might. It would take an extraordinary amount of work to correctly identify all the work that's actually bullshit, and there might not be any time left for anything else.

There's work that's bullshit, but no-one realizes it because it's very hard to have an expansive yet detailed view of everything. There's also work that seems like bullshit, but performs an important, non-obvious function [1].

[1] Sort of like Congressional earmarks: they were attacked for a long time as corrupt waste. Now that they're gone, it seems like they might have actually been grease that helped keep polarization in check.

what kind of bullshit work do you mean exactly? Who is wasting their money paying people to do "bullshit work" that doesn't actually need to happen?

Tons and tons of organizations. It's extremely common.

It makes more sense when you consider that companies mostly don't experience market effects internally, but operate much more like the Soviet Union, and that, especially for very large companies, the effects of external competition are rather less than ideally efficient, to put it mildly. Throw in a heaping spoonful of principal-agent problems up and down every organization, the fact that information is very far from perfectly available and distributed to managers, and more than a little good ol' incompetence, and it'd be weird if it wasn't common.

>What would happen if all the bullshit work ended tomorrow?<

It can't. Some of the bullshit work is actually just to provide a bizarro-world downtime where you can't just tell people to take extra vacation because that is unthinkable: "fairness" complaints, worries that idle time makes people more likely to consider their options, and frankly the inconceivability of the idea in and of itself. So what you do is have this kind of idle time work that doesn't actually need to be done but keeps people busy. Think of it as the workplace version of engagement tweaking.

As a concrete example, in the ASIC space, the sub-teams involved routinely finish their part of the current generation, and in some cases the next generation work isn't ready to start yet. One thing startups used to do (and were still doing in my direct observation as recently as 4 years ago) was lay off their ASIC guys as they finished the current generation until they could see whether the chip was getting traction, and then they'd hurry up and hire for the next generation of so.

And so on.

What the companies eventually started doing by ~2000 was creating bullshit background work projects that were clearly, at least to most observers, either senseless (like bumping the generation for a low-volume ASIC where even just the mask costs would never be paid back if the project shipped) or speculative-but-not-productive projects.

The number of people in this subthread who think true bullshit jobs don’t exist because they’re inefficient astonishes me. You’d have to believe that all middle managers were good at allocating effort.

Or senior executives for that matter.

In big companies, cash cows subsidize all manner of boondoggles. That’s why we have a term for cash cows.

Ever have a long term project cancelled, either for a good reason, or just because a new VP showed up and the project didn't have his brand on it? Did that cancelled project make the company money? Companies only do things that make money, right?

Never saw a high level goal in your company that was misguided? A roadmap for getting there that was misguided? Never seen a process (methodology, etc) that wasted a lot of time, but one important person swore by? I could go on.

This is why I roll my eyes when I see people suggest that government is wasteful and should be run like a business. It's like they have never worked a job in their lives.

As someone whose done both they don’t compare. One is bad, one is even worse.

exactly. Reason is, businesses that engage in lots of inefficiencies get outcompeted, and if the inefficiencies/mistakes are egregious they go out of business. Government has the ultimate monopoly, where the only remedy available for most "shareholders" is to vote out the "CEO" and "directors" once every couple of years. In the private market, you can take your business to a competitor if you don't like how one company treats you. Or as a shareholder you can sell your shares in company A and buy company B instead. The only real remedy against government incompetence is to emigrate, and then you find yourself in a new one that also acts like it's the only game in town for it's citizens - because it is.

Maybe this would be true if there were thousands of competing businesses in a market. In this world of oligopolies businesses only have to be slightly more efficient than competitors to survive, and even then they can make up for the bullshit job related inefficiencies with different pricing models.

If you're waiting for elections to make your opinions about governance known you're leaving "money" on the table. And if you think you can do anything on that level with businesses you're fooling yourself, they don't care -- and you probably won't even know about the bullshit jobs they're propping up, anyway. If you don't believe me, why not email the CEO of Proctor and Gamble and see what he or she does?

> You’d have to believe that all middle managers were good at allocating effort.

Is being bad at a job make the job “bullshit”?

It does when you get to do that job indefinitely, and perhaps have a whole career of doing that job in different places. Lots of bad middle managers out there have whole careers being bad middle managers.

Nobody gets to keep waiting tables or cleaning bathrooms if they are bad at it.

Employees can be pretty terrible at their jobs and keep them if they can show up on time and sober. Schedule coverage is more important than almost anything else.

In this case it's the middle manager creating or propping up bullshit jobs to make themselves look more important.

It might. Suppose I was a policeman and my job was to reduce crime in the city. I spend my days cruising, talking to coworkers, doing paperwork, meetings, and sending emails. When there's some emergency near me I show up, but kind of wait in the back while other officers do anything.

I would be bad at my job, and if I kept doing it indefinitely, i.e. if I wasn't quickly fired, then there would be a discrepancy between my nominal job (reducing crime) and what I actually did (nothing).

Not talking about the manager’s job. Talking about their reports.

Unfortunately, the notion of bullshit jobs extends beyond jobs that are simply low value within a company. Whole organizations within a company or entire companies can be considered bullshit.

Many of us on this site are most likely contributors to bullshit. How many of us work on something that is tracking and spying on people with the purpose of selling or using that data to manipulate them later?

I have the same frustration when people conflate libertarian with anarchist.

Yeah the antiwork reddit in particular is kind of.. uncomfortable to read sometimes. I want it to be more about giving workers more of the benefit of their labor but they seem to be just anti doing anything at times.

r/WorkReform is slightly better about this, but sometimes is plagued with the same issues.

Automation saved humanity from spending a large chunk of their lifetimes sowing and reaping. Humanity found other works to do.

Every fall my grandfather and many others would travel to harvest wheat in the Canadian prairies. This was before tractors were a thing or common. Quite a few people were affected when one tractor could cut more hay than a dozen men could.

Pedantic I know (this is HN after all), but I think that would be considered straw not hay.

Looking at https://ilfbpartners.com/farm/farm-facts/hay-vs-straw-whats-...

Straw is inaccurate because said grandfather is doing the harvest, not cleaning up after the harvest

Friend you are wrong. Hay is harvested green. It says straw is the byproduct of harvesting wheat i.e. what your grandfather was doing. You could have wheat hay, but you would have to harvest early. No one is going to do that.

It was wheat as stated.

But my analogy of hay being cut by men vs machinery was just that an example.

For work to matter it has to help people achieve goals. If their goals are unachievable then they will not see a point in work. This is where we are.

> people who think we shouldn't have to work at all; that it's optional and society is just asleep to this simple and obvious "fact".

The evidence is clear if there were not people making $8.56 million dollars per hour, there would be plenty enough money to give everyone enough to do what they want with their lives.

Yes plenty of BS jobs would vanish, and you'd have to pay people more to do "undesirable jobs" like taking the trash, but in developed countries like Australia we already do. I made $120k/year stacking boxes in a factory because it's mindless work that nobody wants to do. Instead they sit at home at get $1280 each month from the government as welfare. And that's fine.

Well... if work was optional, but sufficiently and progressively rewarding, then people would choose to do the jobs that they're currently not choosing to do.

So many jobs not only pay like shit while extracting so much value from that labour, but in most cases you also have no incentive to give even the slightest shit about it. No ability to buy into the company, no autonomy, very little functional leverage over increasing your fixed salary, and in most cases not even remotely knowing how much the conpany is making.

My current company thought it was wierd that I basically just peaced out for a bit when they ran out of money to pay me and at the same time aren't the slightest bit transparent about details regarding potential acquisition. Likewise I learned early on that if you don't literally have either a seat at some table, or a real stake in the company, or any decision power, you might as well stop trying after your work is done with an acceptable level of quality. It ain't worth it.

Lots of companies rn complaining about worker shortages, but they offer crap pay and it's fixed. You either don't get a commission, or you get maybe a gift card as a bonus from time to time. Most don't offer benefits.

Some jobs, would you clean latrines if that was somehow the only job we couldn't figure out how to automate,

We already have self cleaning public toilets. Generally jobs that suck are the easiest types of jobs to automate because novelty is interesting.

> jobs that suck are the easiest types of jobs

So no true. Human manual and emotional labor is incredibly cheap compared to the cost of automating those tasks.

A friend works as a ER surgeon which is extremely physically and emotionally demanding. It’s a really hard job, but it’s also rewarding in a way that the worst jobs just aren’t.

As to manual labor, most of what’s been automated has been manual labor. Not just obvious stuff like dishwashers but heaters and cars save extreme amounts of physical effort.

This is partially what I meant to argue. ER Nurses as well are absolutely crazy sometimes about taking on overtime by choice, because they rake it in AND get some value out of the physical and emotional labour.

Doing furniture moving was easier to do every day than a salaried dev job tbh. It was grueling 10 hr days for shit pay, but you got to talk to clients, and they tipped pretty well, and there was an obvious value created. Also you physically get stronger.

> Generally jobs that suck are the easiest types of jobs to automate because novelty is interesting.

This isn't true even with jobs that only involve computer files.

I present to you the bane of my existence: The Somewhat Structured File. It has just enough structure you can almost process it using an easy-to-understand grammar, but there are enough inconsistencies in the file to preclude any clean solution. Every time you think you have a working parser, your program crashes because of an impossibility in the data, which means you've found another exception to the general rule you'd generated inductively by paging through the file. The file contains many white swans but plenty of black, brown, and purple swans as well, no two precisely alike. The code ends up as ugly as the data, epicycle on epicycle, because there's no pretty way to parse an ugly file.

People say Excel isn't a database, but not even Excel could have created some of the files I've seen. School bus routing has some horrors.

Moving on from my woes, I give you the entire field of nursing. True, 90% of the problems of the nursing field are due to administration and the healthcare systems of the world in general, but the other 90% are caused by patients, patients' families, and the very nature of disease and medicine. Automating nursing is far-horizon Strong General AI stuff, if that.

Nursing is a demanding job but doesn’t suck the way assembling iPhones using the exact same motions hour after hour day after day does. It’s also been automated in several ways, what remains seems really hard to automate because it’s the stuff that hasn’t already been automated.

As to the bane of your existence, that actually sounds fun. You haven’t described it in enough detail to give meaningful recommendations, but your parser should be telling you what’s confusing it rather than crashing. You want to automate the process of automation.

I wonder how much of iPhone assemblage hasn't been automated because workers in east asia doing the work earn so little it's not worth the effort to eliminate them?

It’s not just the cost of labor it’s also time to market for an expensive item etc. If manual assembly is 10x more expensive but it’s the difference between 1% and 0.1% of the sales price then other things can be the driving force.

Getting the next iPhone to market even 1 month sooner is extremely valuable, but they don’t manufacture the same phones for that long.

If cleaning latrines was the only job we couldn't figure out how to automate, we could probably work one week a year cleaning latrines and the rest of the time doing whatever. Which would be fine.

Obviously people have to do jobs and some are unpleasant. I'm not convinced that 40-hour work weeks or longer are necessary for society to function.

If I need to pay bills, I'll do anything as long as I'm capable and well-conpensated. I ain't pretentious. Sometimes it's a little awkward because even basic employers look at me as a liability.

> you might as well stop trying after your work is done with an acceptable level of quality. It ain't worth it.

It's been worth it for me.

How so? It could very well be, but it's a risk assessment. Definitely keep going if there's a tangible and at least pseudo-measurable benefit, maybe skills or true impact, but for a company that just pays a fixed salary, I just see it as a burnout risk. You need to have the resources and autonomy to realize those benefits too, but a lot of people don't even get the choice between a mac or a pc in a dev position depending on where you work. Spend the time outside work doing something else that creates personal value. If that's working on the same thing you did all day anyway, there should be a way to connect that with compensation, and of course I do know that a lot of people have stock and big bonuses, I've just personally never had those

There will be a transition where we hit 10, 20, 30, etc pct unemployment as we become more automated. Will views on work transition or will the people who are automated out of a job suffer?

There won’t be an abrupt instance where half the workforce now can’t work.

I think it will happen once genuine downward mobility becomes a very real fear for upper-middle class kids. As in once 10% unemployment or 30-40% poverty wage employment is the result of each private college class, we'll see giant shifts. Before that, we'll just keep claiming to be a meritocracy, but there will be more and more pressure build up.

That's what I think. A shift on work views can't happen without there being some other way to sustain that percentage of unemployed people, and that requires political action, which probably won't happen until people who've previously been comfortable start feeling the pain.

i suspect you’re correct. this is why i find it so frustrating when people deny that society’s current iteration serves at the whims of a small class of people.

Its a useful negotiation tactic to be friendly with people who dont think work should be a thing. You're going to be compromising by the end of the negotiation, so why not ask for the moon?

Just because something’s not attainable for everyone doesn’t mean you shouldn’t aspire to it yourself. Sure, lots of people will have to do stuff they don’t want to, so what? It’s like aspiring to be the best basketball player of all time. Not only is it unattainable for more than one person, but to achieve it you have to destroy everyone else’s ambitions to do the same.

I don't think it is bad to try to make money doing what you want, but I do think it is unhealthy and antisocial to define success in life as only doing what you want at all times.

To compare it to your basketball analogy, it is fine to pursue becoming the best basketball player of all time, but if you think you have failed if you don't achieve it is not good.

To extend the analogy, OP is saying I want some team to pay me to play basketball, but I will only play on the days I feel like it, independent of the team's schedule. That generally doesn't hold up well. If you want someone to give you money you need to conform to their desires enough to get the money, and that won't be what you want all the time.

This assumes everyone has some higher ambition that they are unable to pursue due to bills. A lot of people grew up in shitty situations so job security and the ability to provide stability for their family gives life enough meaning. Expectations are definitely relative.

I think the point is that if you asked someone with a job such as a janitor or an airline luggage worker if they'd rather get paid to do something that they enjoy doing, the answer would be yes 100% of the time. To go even further, the answer would be yes for everyone with a job except for that small lucky few who actually enjoy what they do.

And of course, this is not realistic, because some people would want to get paid for things that no one would be willing to pay for.

If you asked them what they would rather be doing I doubt many would reply with painter, writer, musician, or other career worthy passions. Obviously if someone’s passion is eating pizza or watching TV or spending time with their kids it would be unrealistic that they turn that into a career. I have many friends who work blue collar jobs and most of them aspire to do the same work but get paid more, work less or work for themselves.

disagree: I've known lots of workers who are actually quite content.

Obviously, everybody wants more money/benefits/etc, respect, pleasant work conditions, etc. But the workers I know have ABSOLUTELY NO INTEREST in jobs like research scientist, politician, stockbroker, lawyer, doctor, programmer, etc because they involve all sorts of skills & tasks they fear, despise or seem wildly unobtainable. Many people are introverted and fear meeting strangers and public speaking. Many people are enjoy the physical world and "it makes my head hurt" to spend hours thinking about abstract stuff, which a lot of these "desk jobs" involve.

I highly recommend the book: How to Tell When You're Tired

source: 30 years working all sorts of jobs, from warehouse and retail jobs to executive and board roles.

> source: 30 years working all sorts of jobs, from warehouse and retail jobs to executive and board roles.

Do you mind answering a few questions? I am kind of in a "should I stay or should I go?" dilemma with my current employment, and I have no idea what I want to do (I know more about what I do NOT want to do).

You've been working almost longer than I have been alive, and I am curious what you think (and others).

1. What job made you the happiest, and Why?

2. Did you happen to find any positive or negative correlation between life satisfaction/happiness and the amount of money you made?

I'm just your average, run of the mill developer. Nothing special about me, and that's okay. It's just a job for me, and I enjoy the work. I have no desire to be some Big N programmer. I could chase dollar signs considering what is out there for us devs, but I am not sure the juice is worth the squeeze when I am already living comfortably.

Sounds blissful :-) not knowing enough, I'd generally say to stay for now but also kickoff a thoughtful "project" to discover what you want to do next: research online, talk with people, take interviews, etc. Who knows, maybe you stay? At least you'll know why. One thing that helped me: creating a spreadsheet, where columns are the concrete choices you have, and rows are reasons to make them. The big win is helping clarify why you chose a direction, and which choices are holistically better than others. The sheet can run for months or years and that's fine.

Think about what you want to optimize. 5-10 years from now, what do you want your life-experience to have been? Are you having fun? Are you learning/growing? Are you building a network? Is it sustainable i.e. if the company reorg'd tomorrow and your whole team laid off, could you get another job?

They say that happiness is most strongly correlated with having a good relationship with your direct manager, and that's been my experience.

For me, there was little correlation with pay - all four quadrants have examples. But money is funny, and has strong correlations to culture: good to understand your understand your relationship with money, both short term and long term. Watch out for sucker deals, both in income, overhead/taxes and lifestyle costs: it's easy to end up with far less money than you think based on the paycheck, especially if there's complex stock or benefits. Also, you're only on this planet once so optimize your time as well: a good paying job that's crazy hours can be a sucker bet if you're not learning/growing enough. A job can pay crap but be intense learning and payoff in the next job.

Watch out for grass-is-greener: I see lots of jobs that sound awesome... from the outside. Also lots of jobs that sound awesome for summer, but not years. Switching is a lot of overhead.

Happy to help if you want, DM me. I learn from hearing other peoples' stories.

HN note: I'm not mentioning extreme options since it sounds like you're blessed with a comfortable position in the upper middle class. Some people have real freedom to radically change their income and/or expenses, which then presents different challenges.

Thank you for the reply, I read the whole thing a few times, and I would like to continue this.

How do I DM you? Is email the most effective way?

> Obviously, everybody wants more money/benefits/etc, respect, pleasant work conditions, etc.

This is non-obvious, to the extent that I don't think it's true. People are more than happy to not optimize work related things.

People want respect and to be treated like humans for the work they are doing. Not being a doctor doesn't mean you should be demeaned

I think everyone has a 'higher' ambition in the sense of "this is what I like to do". Even people in shitty situations have things they would rather be doing than working their job.

I agree that only people born with privilege think that supporting yourself while only doing what you want is a viable option, but that is kinda my point.

Not everyone likes doing things. It's one of the reason depression is so common in people with a lot of free time.

"Idle hands are the Devil's workshop" as the saying goes.

You're describing me with that statement, but there's definitely a "it's not worthwhile doing x aspect to it

I wish this was true. It was once true if everyone I interacted with, but that was self-selection bias. I opened up my bubble and found plenty of people that have absolutely no ambition whatsoever. I don’t know if they never had it, or if it just got drilled out of them due to circumstances, but there it is.

I am fairly confident that many (most) pilots love their job. The others that you listed are probably valid.

Some might be stuck there, but I still agree that it is largely a passion career unlike many others. Not that there is levels where compensation isn't horrific, but even those are working towards career growth.

Judging by their reputation as alcoholics I'd disagree. Actually seems like a quite terrible job. Doing the same thing every day over and over. And after the novelty of flight wears off probably quite boring. I know being a passenger is and outside of take off/landing I'm not sure there's much difference.

My dad loved being a fighter pilot and instructor. He had zero interest in being an airline pilot, however, as it was just "boring holes in the air". I suppose it's like being a race car driver compared to a bus driver.

> but I don’t think you should expect it or define success in life as being able to do that.

Why not? Maximum consumption with minimum amount of work is the very definition of success in every process.

I feel like this framing conflates personal and societal responsibility in an unhealthy way. At the end of the day we all benefit from specialization, that's the entire basis for our modern standard of living. I don't think it's the individual's responsibility to ensure that things are fair at a societal level. Not only would it be impossible given personal preferences and the subjective experience of work, but it can also have negative psychological consequences if one believes that work is not morally valuable if one doesn't dislike it.

Now, if the OA felt entitled to his chosen career path regardless of economic reality then I agree that would be uncool, but I'm not seeing that here. The author is not looking for a handout. He is simply grappling with the tradeoff between optimizing for max remuneration vs the nature of the work itself.

I've co-founded two startups and the biggest surprise/lesson for me was that most people don't want to forge their own path and customize every detail of their life. I had co-founders in each who after leaving our startups went on to 'normal' jobs and are much happier now.

There are without a doubt flight attendants who hate their job, but I'd guess that most of them like their jobs and like the structure and accountability that is provided to them, and not having to figure out every detail themself.

And then there are people like myself who can't stand being told what to work on and how to schedule my day.

> but I'd guess that most of them like their jobs and like the structure and accountability that is provided to them, and not having to figure out every detail themself.

It's also nice not having to worry about when/if your next paycheck will come in, if you can afford your health insurance, get company matches on 401ks, etc.. Freedom is free, after all. While security may be an illusion to some degree, it's a compromise for freedom that many are willing to make (myself included).

I sometimes get urges to go out and sow some wild oats, but I debate if it's worth all the effort in the end.

The structure & scaffolding can also liberate you to focus on getting really good at the things you care about.

I could not possibly disagree with this sort of "everybody has to work" view more; I think it's the primary problem with our current society if you could boil it down to that. Thorstein Veblen said it better than I ever could.

More precisely, I suppose, it's not the factual content that I have a problem with. It's technically true, but it also doesn't need to be said. It's like telling a human to keep breathing. So instead, it serves the purpose of contributing to a society that values "sacrificial work" too much.

So who gets to decide who has to do the necessary work for society to function and who gets to sit around and do nothing except benefit from their work?

Do you have an equitable way to solve this issue?

Or maybe people who don't do strictly necessary work still need to do something. And maybe you consider that "sacrificial", I consider it "contributing"

I do, because it's not actually that big of an issue. The correct answer here is "localism." What would it look like in your town? I don't know, but I don't need to. Just ensure that small groups are able to figure it out for themselves.

The real harm isn't the imaginary laziness you fear here.. It's scaled political power that allows groups to exploit others.

That makes no sense. Most stuff you consume is not produced locally. And even then, why would I want to be a local firefighter or whatever if some other people get to sit on their ass every day?

How is localism supposed to enable things like mobile phones, internet, video games, movies, travel, etc., function? You're suggestion is essentially to go back to the stone age. Additionally, wouldn't localism require more people to do things that they don't enjoy? For example, I'm not a fan of farming and I don't think many of my neighbors are either but fortunately, we're all able to eat pretty much any dish we like because of the food shipped from distant farms every day.

> What would it look like in your town? I don't know, but I don't need to

This sounds a lot like a non-answer. Perhaps I would understand what you're talking about better if you explained how you believe it would work in your town where you do have more context.

> How is localism supposed to enable things like mobile phones, internet, video games, movies, travel, etc., function

Forget all that tech. "Localism" couldn't even produce a single 2B pencil, which is such a trivial thing when we consider the scale of society as it is today.

I was honestly hoping there was going to be a better answer than this handwavy nonsense.

See, all of you disagreeing with me are doing the thing where you're pretending to be top down benevolent dictator (or better yet, playing a game of SimCity.)

I'm not. I am suggesting that if you took the world as it exists today, and strongly turned down the volume on "everybody has to work," the world would improve, and that labor at the end of a pointy stick is not necessary to keep things going, and generally makes things worse.

Yes, the mix of goods and services could perhaps drastically change. E.g. if you love throwing away your 3 year old iPhone for a new one, I'm sorry, you will suffer; you'd probably have to deal with repaired phones with interchangeable parts. I think that's probably a better place.

That may drastically slow down human progress in terms of technology. If one posits that we have a moral obligation to future humans to make sure their lives are ones with lower suffering, and if technology, especially medical technology, will take us there, then your idea essentially says that it is immoral to slow down human progress, because more people will suffer.

That's how I see it anyway. I'm a techno-optimist, given the nature of technology in our species' development.

How are you measuring suffering over time? does keeping somebody alive in extreme pain raise or lower it?

Its quite notable that modern medics has made its fair share of opium addicts. I don't know whether that's a feather in the modern cap or not

I would be very interested in seeing a study that concludes that technology has made us suffer less. Perhaps it makes sense to define suffering? If you would define it as "expecting from the world what it can not give you", I think we don't suffer less than previous generations. We have more, but we also expect more.

If we define less suffering as living 2x longer, with 100x less child mortality and access to education, safety and entertainment that not even kings in previous generations had, then we should thank technology for that.

You can of course go full relativism and say that our society cannot be judged as better or worse than any other, but I think that's disingenuous.

Very fair argument. But I strongly dispute your second assumption, that of "technology taking us there," at least today: Right now, I see absolutely no reason to believe in a strongly correlated association between tech advancement and e.g. medical improvement.

E.g. I'd argue that the biggest medical improvement of my lifetime was in a sense a step backwards, in that it was our collective discovery and consequent reduction in smoking.

You're delusional if you think we would still have phones at all in the setup you are hinting at but not really explaining .

The idea that you can just not work is not realistic.

The "pointy stick" you are talking about is nature, as in we will die without working to survive. You aren't entitled to the labour of others to ensure your survival.

You can either work at survival, eg: growing food to eat, building shelter, making clothes, etc, or you can have others do that while you provide something else.

"Everyone has to breathe to live."

No reasonable person FACTUALLY disputes what you're saying about work; it's so something-like-tautological and obvious that you should all think about why people seem to parrot it over and over.

It's not because human beings are likely to keel over and stop working in the face of nature. It's because it's a longstanding political wedge used by the powerful to get working classes to go against each other.

I never said anything about breathing. I'm talking about access food, shelter, security. These aren't even remotely comparable to breathing, because they rely on the labour of other people to maintain consistent access to. Farms don't get planted without help from neighbors, houses don't get built, towns don't stay safe and clean and happy without a lot of work from a lot of people. Don't even get me started about indoor plumbing, or the internet.

Even if you are willing to go back in time to a simple farm in a small town, you are still taking for granted that you will have people helping you survive. And you still aren't entitled to their labour. They will help you plant your field if you help them plant theirs. The scale of our society has changed, but the transactions haven't.

In any case, you seem dead set on misrepresenting or misunderstanding what I'm saying. If you're not going to address my actual arguments, then kindly get lost. You're wasting my time

What would “turning down the volume on ‘everyone has to work’” entail? Are you talking about changing laws or changing habits?

Also, how can you accuse everyone else of being a benevolent dictator when your suggestion is just as impossible to implement?

? It's literally happening now. "Anti-work" et al. Just more of that. Stronger pro-labor laws. Fight for fridays off as well. That sort of thing.

Where would a small group of people get their electricity or medicines? What if none of the small groups of people wants to develop medicines? This isn't a solution, it's just handwaving things away.

And then he turned to the dark side: "The obvious opportunity at the time was to sell SEO services."

I think of wall street, google and others hiring the brightest minds to assure their revenues...

Meanwhile, if a small fraction of those minds worked on a more efficient toilet, or desalinating water the ROI for society would be significantly higher.

But I guess market forces are at work. and they make it possible for people to be paid for growing food or building infrastructure in accordance with demand.

Toilets are pretty efficient already and we have the airplane kind that use even less water. For California it might make a difference to pipe salt water for toilet use but that wouldn’t make sense around the Great Lakes.

You think that we need people doing stuff they don't want to do in order for the world to function.

Ok. But how much?

For example, somebody needs to clean the sewers. But does anybody need to do that 40 hours a week?

How about 4 hours a week?

I dunno about you but I could do any horrible job if it's only 4 hours a week.

And then I could spend the rest of my time doing my fun job and/or whatever I feel like doing.

That would be pretty close to doing only what I want.

How does that work for you?

I had some friends in college with those ideas too. I always got the feeling that despite their ideas stated that they should apply to everyone, they really just meant them and what they wanted.

> This is going to apply for so much of what the author is going to expect from others to support his lifestyle of doing whatever he wants whenever he wants. He wants to write while other people grow his food, provide his infrastructure, the services he requires.

What? I totally have this today and it's great and not only am I happy, but also all these people who don't want to do things find that I can pay them to do things and then they're happy too. In fact, they're happier that I pay them to do these things than if I didn't pay them to do these things and they had to do other things.

People striving to do what they want is generally a good thing, I think. A lot of innovation and benefit to society results from that.

There’s nothing wrong with people doing what they want to be doing. Even to your “perceived” grand visions like curing cancer or something else society has high value of - those people are usually motivated by doing that particular thing. And those people try until it’s either feasible or not, meaning they can make a living off of it. And they will get better by doing any of those things by failing and then being motivated trying harder and perhaps succeeding. So it seems that the economics will just work itself out. But I wouldn’t have a problem with somebody wanting to do something especially when they actually make an effort to do something. I think all people should have the opportunity to at least try, especially if they do you one of these jobs they don’t want to do to be able to afford the opportunity to try what they want. Respect to those people.

> My ideal work life is to write about whatever I want, however I want, and be able to turn that into a comfortable living.

My ideal work life is to eat snacks while reading HN, for a couple of hours each week (or more/fewer as desired), and to be able to turn that into a comfortable living.

I feel this might be a false dichotomy: there are shittier jobs to be done for society to function, but the don’t have to be done 40–60h a week per person. What if instead you could make a living working Whittier jobs a day or two a week and doing whatever you want the rest of the time? It’s harder to run a marathon sprinting, but it’s doable going slower.

I followed the author's links to the course they got started with, and it's all just very self referential.

Buy this course I'm selling. It will teach you to do the stuff I did to make this thing that I got you to pay me for.

Yes, he's very much in the educational product passive income space.

At the end of the day most "gurus" doing this seem to fall into it and it gets a bit recursive. Ramit Sethi seems like an archetypical influencer here.

I've noticed this too in the indie hackers community. Some people look around and realize they're part of a gold rush and then realize it's more lucrative to sell shovels. The more shovels you sell, the more successful you become, and the more you self-promote your success.

I skimmed. 4-hour workweek some years ago (I downloaded it) and I realized that it was pretty meta. The thing you're reading is the thing he's "teaching" you to do. This whole article smacks of that. "Wow my passive income was just too effective." I'm not crying that he doesn't have time to write. It sounds like if he really had that time dedicated to writing he would churn out more self help block posts or booklets anyway. He doesn't seem to describe any other sort of writing that he does? Just navel gazing, tallying his passive income etc? I kind of wish he had no time at all to write.

This is 99% of the "creator" economy.

Making content for the 99% who haven't become successful content marketers yet.

Super boring in my opinion, and exploitative to some extent.

Most of the blog post just feels like a humblebrag.

Barely made it halfway through. The post was largely an exercise in bragging.

Its a pyramid scheme distilled to the fundamentals.

The secret to becoming rich: "get people to pay you to tell them the secret to becoming rich"

> Buy this course I'm selling. It will teach you to do the stuff I did to make this thing that I got you to pay me for.

That sounds a lot like a pyramid scheme... scratch that, it is a pyramid scheme.

So I got some bad news for you, dude. It sounds like you spent all this time not writing much, if at all. There's only one way to get better at a creative pursuit and that is to keep doing it. That means you're no closer to being good enough at writing to earn a living at it than you were when you started, never mind write anything "great".

On the other hand it also sounds like you spent a lot of time learning to sell shit, and selling your stuff is an important part of making "creative work" worthwhile. The dude who draws "The Oatmeal" is a terrible artist, for instance, but his SEO skills sure have made him a lot of money with his bad drawings. So you might be able to make money selling shitty writing. Nobody will probably ever say "there goes a great writer" when you're about to die, though.

The overall vibe I got from reading that post and a few more by Nate is "I found success, you can to, give me money to find out how."

There are also quite a few posts arguing against typical financial wisdom. Things like "yea, I could have made some decent returns investing my money, but it permitted me to become who I am" and "you don't need a budget", which all just starts linking back to referral links and other things that make Nate money.

The page about not needing a budget and that it eats into your productive time is extremely BS. Dude knows this, but it is something that will prey on financially illiterate people who are looking an excuse 'oh, this rich dude Nate said I didn't need a budget'. It also sucks because he then talks about automating credit card payments, if you don't have a budget and don't track your spending that is a HUGE recipe for disaster.

Even some of this writings about wealth vs money, while thoughtful in how they convey the concepts, fail to account for other concerns. Pointing out that a job only pays you while you work, but something like real estate rental may generate wealth, ignores just how much more complication there is in the later.

Which is my final complaint. I am not seeing the nitty gritty truth of just how much work is being put in in any of his writings. He touches on things briefly, but he doesn't really convey that there is a huge startup burden that is incredibly risky everytime you start something like building wealth.

This guy isn't a writer. He's an entrepreneur.

He wants to be a writer because it has a social aura to it, it's a sexy career. But that doesn't mean he has the true mindset of a writer. At the end of the day he thinks like an entrepreneur.

He's already does what he should be doing.

On a personal note, I went through this multiple times in my 20s. I desperately wanted to be a graphic designer because I love design and thought being a graphic designer would be a really cool career. But I don't think like a graphic designer, I think like a programmer. I don't have that specific kind of creativity. So while I appreciate graphic design, my true talents are in writing code.

Very interesting thought.

As someone who often tries to figure out how I can apply my "programmer's mindset" to other areas of my life : can you give more details on how a graphic designer (would/should) think(s) vs how a programmer does? More specifically : how were you thinking vs how you thought you should have thought?

For graphic design, it's a lot about visual experimentation and presentation. With programming, it's engineering a functional solution. Both solve business problems.

I guess it's the difference between the person who builds bridges and the person who paints bridges.

Thanks. The analogy at the end made it clearer ;)

I think the fear of failure (of something we really care about) leads us to procrastinate and find diversions. I think "In order to do my passion X, I first need to do Y e.g. earn some money" is often just a distraction.

The brain does this to us because if we don't do X we can continue to believe that we'll be successful at it if we do do it. Whereas if we do actually do it, we might fail, which will be hard to take.

If you find yourself thinking in that direction, I think it's always better to just go ahead and do the X if at all possible. You'll fail, you'll learn, etc.

> Whereas if we do actually do it, we might fail, which will be hard to take.

It's hard to take because unless you've already got substantial financial security, you may end up broke, and may no longer have any readily available "for-the-money" job opportunities afterward.

Not OP but I read this as it’s hard for the ego to take.

Even for bets that require little financial investment (i.e. digging deeper into physics) and occupy R&R time - failing can be hard to take.

We like to believe we are the version of ourselves capable of doing anything. If you do nothing - you can die believing you wasted your potential. If you do something and fail to meet your own expectations, you can die knowing there wasn’t any potential there to waste.

This is so true. I think the fantasy that we have the capacity to do amazing things in our lives, but there's some external force stopping us, is a lovely, ego-saving one.

I've always thought, I have some great ideas and if I'm ever able to take some time off, I can build something that will surely be successful. A few months ago, I decided that this is as good a time at any at striking out on my own, so I quit my job to pursue my own projects.

With a few months under my belt, I'm realizing, wow it's not that easy. Doubt starts creeping in: Maybe I don't have what it takes. The fantasy I had is starting to crumble a little bit and I start to wonder, if I give up on this dream, what other fantasy can I fall back on when times are tough and I want to dream of a better future?

This is the big thing for me. I know full well that failure is not only possible but highly likely, and that the price is my financial safety net being expended. The ego hit isn't the problem, it's the resulting inability to pay bills.

Thankfully I like my day job quite a lot so my strategy has been to try to drive down cost of living where reasonable and accumulate more padding than is actually necessary, so when I finally commit to doing my own thing I'll be able to fund multiple attempts, preferably with some downtime between each to prevent burnout. Success is still anything but guaranteed but I figure that my chances are better that way than if I were stressed and in a hurry trying to make things work before my bank account ran dry.

I feel like that’s reasonable, but I’ve never attempted it because I think I would do the same thing with money that I do with time; fritter it away until I get desperate enough to light a fire under my ass.

> I think the fear of failure (of something we really care about) leads us to procrastinate and find diversions.

Absolutely, you see this all the time in creative fields. People want to believe they can be the next (insert their favorite musician/author/artist/etc here), and as long as they don't make a sincere attempt at it, the possibility will continue to exist. If only they had more money, or time! That's the only thing stopping them -- as long as it's not actually attempted, this thinking can't be disproven!

From the blog posts, it seems to me that he is not very keen on writing. I could be wrong. But when you start finding an excuse a day not to do what you theoretically think you should do, maybe the theory is wrong. Maybe he likes the idea of being a writer, but without being a writer.

Also, writing means many things. There are a lot of books, think of business books, that are written because it is the most effective way to provide a certain kind of information to a wide audience. Watching a video seems like a waste of time before, during, and after. Reading a book, most of the time, even if the information in it is ridiculous and of poor quality, does not seem like a waste of time. And there is "writing" like, say, Hemingway, James Salter thought about writing. Are we talking about "writing" the way Salter intended it or about "presenting information in a book"? Does "I like to write" means "I like to provide information" or it means "I like to use the written word specifically to present ideas"?

Rossellini, the famous director, said that he was not just a film director, but an artist and disseminator using whatever medium he thought was the most appropriate in order to show his ideas or his view of the world.

I have almost stopped reading recent books. I find them formulaic, winking at the "mythical" audience and what they want, which most of the time is cheap entertainment. There is an author I liked, Adrian McKinty, who had written a series of books set in Belfast at the time of the Troubles. It was a joy to read them. They were erudite and had a great rhythm. But he found himself forced to become an Uber driver to pay the bills--the books were not selling.

Then, with the support of Don Winslow and Winslow's agent, he was able to break through with a book, The Chain, which was so formulaic, poorly written and full of the adjectives and adverbs that make college-educated people drool, that I found it hard to recognize him as the same author of the series set in the Troubles era. It was very good for him and disappointing for me.

I am now reading novels written between the 1930s and the 1960s, and although each decade has its sins, I sense that most authors were not that much concerned about their audience, were not corrupted by literary agents and book clubs, but wrote what they, and not others, wanted to write.

What books from the 30s-60s would you recommend?

Most of what I read is not in English, which is just my second language.

In English, one author I highly recommend reading is James Salter. He had a parsimonious and precise style that, much to my chagrin, went out of fashion when styles of writing either more exuberant or more depressed became the norm.

His "A Sport and a Pastime" is a masterpiece. And his collection of essays "Don't Save Anything" has much to teach those opportunists of limited experience and little reading who sell online writing courses and the like.

So this author is anxious about not being able to pay the bills. And this hinders him from pursuing his true calling, which is writing.

Well, if I had a side gig that raked in $2000 per month steady then I would be a writer for sure. I would just not try to live in Manhattan. Problem of thought money solved.

The problem is that the author probably likes manhattan for various reasons that you can't just move outside of manhattan, like:

- family nearby

- friends nearby

- as a consequence of the above two: support network is in manhattan

- enjoying the local parks/scene/etc

I grew up in <midwest plains city> and then moved to <rival midwest plains city> for a long while after college, eventually moving back to my home city because that's where all my family was.

It was a hard move in both directions and all things considered, I didn't even move that far. In city B, I missed my family and the stuff there was to do in city A. But after moving back, I now miss a lot of the things we did in B. And I don't even consider myself to be someone to particularly likes leaving my house!

Advice that tells people to "just move" is pretty shortsighted, I think. I really doubt OP moved to manhattan just to be able to be snooty about living in an expensive city, or something, which is honestly how I kind of read these kinds of advice - though it's probably not a very charitable read of your argument, for which I apologize.

Ah so now it's transformed from I want to be a writer to I want to be a writer in Manhattan specifically, and I'm sure there are a lot of other caveats.

Do you want me to tell you about someone who really has a passion for writing. Brandon Sanderson, he loved writing so much that in college he got a job at a desk clerk at a hotel at night just so he could write more. He writes "novellas" on his flights for fun just because he can, during COVID he wrote 4 more novels just for funsies to deal with the anxiety.

A lot of people say they have a passion what they have is an interest. Anyone who has a real honest to God burning passion is going to be doing it regardless of anything else just because they love it.

Alot of people think they have a passion but really they just kind of like the idea doing something that seems easier.

> A lot of people say they have a passion what they have is an interest. Anyone who has a real honest to God burning passion is going to be doing it regardless of anything else just because they love it.

This reminds me of a part of a Ken Robinson talk (maybe it's a TED Talk), where he describes talking to a friend after a musical performance. He tells his friend, "I'd love to be able to do what you do on the stage." And his friends basically tells him, "No, you don't. If you wanted to do what I do, you'd be practicing on your guitar daily. What you want is the praise and benefits of the hard work. You don't actually want to do what I do."

This whole "you aren't a real <x> unless you suffer through <y>" is just as unhealthy for authors as it is for programmers. Just because someone isn't grinding out leetcode on their lunchbreak or novellas on flights doesn't mean they don't have a genuine love and passion for the underlying art. Sanderson is an exceptional author, emphasis on exceptional. Most people would burn out at the pace he sets.

My point wasn't to say your aren't a real writer unless you write like he does it was to illustrate what a real love and burning passion is.

A lot of us here think we would love to but physicists as it is all so interesting but we can't because of our jobs. The greatest physicist since Newton couldn't get a job as a physicist but loved it so much that he spent any spare time he had working on it and thinking about it and obsessing over it.

If you really actually love something you'll find a way to do it, otherwise it's a hobby. Hobbies are good there is nothing wrong with it. But if you really feel a burning desire to do something you'd do it regardless of finances and time because you won't be able to stop yourself from doing it.

Speaking from personal experience, that's not true. I truly loved being an archaeologist, but I also enjoy the creature comforts of bathing, housing, and having access to the basic institutions of society like voting or dating. Pursuing one effectively meant giving up the others, so I returned to my more moderate (and financially rewarding) love of tech.

I agree with you to some extent.

There are exceptions like your examples. There are probably others who do have strong passions where they obsess over their art and still want to move to a place where other artist like themselves are.

That's probably why Paris was the place to be if you were an aspiring impressionist painter in the 19th century. Renoir, Monet, etc probably were passionate about their art. And being in close proximity probably helped each other in positive ways.

You're confusing "would you be pursuing that passion regardless of other factors" with "would/should you sacrifice other aspects of your life if you could still follow that one passion".

It's not about the circumstances under which you're willing to still follow your passion. It's about what sacrifices you're willing to make in your life, regardless of your passion. e.g., you might be willing to go to prison or live in a dumpster and still love writing books so much that you'd continue doing that, but your love for writing books doesn't imply you should be willing to go live in a dumpster. The other factors still matter in your life. They just won't get in the way of you writing, is all.

A lot of people in creative fields thrive off the presence of other creatives around them with whom they can discuss ideas, etc. NYC is hard to beat for that. You're also likely to come across more opportunities to get your work published if you live in one of the centers of the global publishing industry.

People choose to live in NYC for reasons other than narcissism or lifestyle amenities - for many creative fields (especially anything "high culture") it is objectively the best, sometimes the only, place to be if you want to develop your career.

And I'm sorry but if quantity written had any relevance on one's seriousness as an author then Stephen King would be the greatest English-language author of all time.

> And I'm sorry but if quantity written had any relevance on one's seriousness as an author then Stephen King would be the greatest English-language author of all time.

While I would never reach for that kind of superlative, and I definitely don't think it's related to quantity written, I do think Stephen King is an exceptionally good English-language author.

For what it’s worth I agree…he’s underrated, although he seems to be getting more respect these days. But he could have benefited from more editing when he was in his prime.

Edit: Still not the best of all time or even in the top 100. But I’d be hard pressed to name a better American author with his level of mass market appeal.

The author lives in Austin. He used to live in Manhattan.

That's probably one part. But a young, hip, professional like this author (based on his writing, that's what he seems like) probably doesn't want to live in a suburb in Ohio, even though he could be much more comfortable there with his $2000 passive income, which could allow him to follow his dreams of writing.

There is a reason why artists go to places like NY or other HCOL places. There are other people like them. It's probably easier to find inspiration and meet peers at those places.

The most prolific writer of our era lives in Utah and has most of his life.

He wants to be trendy hip and part of the artistic in crowd more than he wants to write.

Utah writer is Brandon Sanderson?

Yeah. You might not like his writing but no one can say he doesn't produce. I think he is up to a novel every year usually with a novella thrown in as well.

But author wants to surround themselves with smart people per another of their postings, obviously this can't be done in low cost of living areas...

I've been inspired by Nat's journey for awhile. I always had the impression that he was doing quite well financially from all the self-help/teaching products, mobile apps, and SEO business he's built.

I stopped following him when he got into crypto though. I don't quite understand the article's point if the money in crypto was "too good". Does that mean something crashed to the point of not being able to live sustainably off of?

I wrote a little bit about this phenomena the article talks about of "distracted from distraction by distraction":

https://jondouglas.dev/distracted-from-distraction-by-distra...

At least crypto helped you figure out that at the end of the day, it's just business.

Long-time writer here. Couple of thoughts.

Yes, conjuring up the right words can be a b*tch, and it's so tempting to step away from the keyboard in favor of something that's simpler or more lucrative. But the magnet that keeps pulling me back -- and making it easier -- is this sense that people out there genuinely need the story or lessons that I'm trying to convey.

Start with: Who's my audience? Then: What's my message? Then: Why do they need this? Get solid about all three of these, and a lot of good things happen. You'll press ahead with flawed but fixable first drafts. You'll come back and do the rewrite necessary to get it better. And when your confidence flags, you'll get revived by connecting with readers, friends, fans, etc. who want and need you to succeed.

Writing may seem like a solo sport. In a lot of ways it is. But the more you can conjure up a community that cares, the stronger you'll be.

Here in my garage, just bought this new Lamborghini here. It’s fun to drive up here in the Hollywood hills.

This feels a little click bait-ish. The problem wasn't covering his bills or writing. The problem was as he got more successful, he didn't optimized for just writing, he optimized for a lifestyle. And when the income didn't sustain that new lifestyle (bigger city, fine dinners, etc etc), he created another "distraction" away from his original goal to cover that. Wants create needs.

I enjoyed the article and could relate to large parts.

Check out Substack. Probably the most straightforward way for writers to make money today and you still own the content.

Ghost.org is also interesting for creating a self hosted version.

I think it's also good to have what you love at the core of what you do, but there may be other parts of the system / funnel that mostly serve to let you work on the thing you love (TikTok's, courses etc).

It's natural to work hard, in order to then spend time doing things you enjoy.

But it's important to understand that to make a living at something, especially something like writing, you need to be good at it, not just enjoy it.

Software development is pretty much testament to the opposite, you can very much make a living being average or even below average.

The passion industries are the ones requiring high amounts of dedication. For good reasons.

The bar for many professions to earn a living (whatever that means exactly) is probably minimal competence--which may be easier for some in some professions than others in other professions.

Then, as you say, "passion industries" probably require some combination of talent/hard work/luck no matter who you are to do more than scrape by--if that.

Minimum competence to earn a living as a basketball player is much higher than minimum competence required to earn a living as a software engineer.

Tournament jobs is the general term. [1] It's also the case that some professions have a rather limited number of slots that offer someone a decent living of which professional sports leagues are a good example. Basically being the 300th best software developer (or engineer or chemist etc.) probably means you can get a pretty good job. Being the 300th best basketball player may mean you're a car salesman or teaching high school gym classes.

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

There are 450 NBA players, so being the 300th best basketball player gives you a chance of playing the NBA or maybe in China.

Team sports go deep. Individual sports quite a lot less. 300th best swimmer or runner likely won't do that well. On other hand 300th best in sport with reasonably sized team means you are either on top level or level just below that. Which usually mean reasonable living.

Yes but the 30,000th best software engineer is making $1 million working at Google.

Seems to me the passion industries either pay less (education, game dev, social or environmental work) due to high supply of candidates, or demand way too much (medicine, lawyers, cutting edge sciences)

I for one would like to see my doctors, nurses and police officers well rested and relaxed.

It's just supply and demand putting its greasy fingers in everything combined with poor unionization from the employee side (of their own accord, often enough).

Nurses could force better circumstances if they collectively accepted to work more sane shifts and make society deal with the problem of too few nurses instead.

Animators could be better if they stopped accepting working 60+ hours to push animation which gets bingewatched for a few cents in a day.

But we collectively accept the circumstances, and so a few years of intense practicing drawing is paid worse than taking a bootcamp on how to write API calls and play planning poker (poorly).

The work of a mediocre software developer is not only not done, it's self sustaining.

Even a below average programmer is better at programming than 99.99% of the population.

I thought this was going to be about the dangers of paying bills online. Clearly not.

I totally get the point of wanting to write things that benefit others, or even society at large. But why aspire to earn your living from writing? That makes less sense to me.

E.g. given the choice, I’d rather get paid for having written software than for writing software.

I have few friends who bit the "the office job is death" thing hook, line, and sinker. Only... it didn't work out for them. They are in shittier careers barely making it work while I took the middle path and and quite comfortable. And my conclusion is: the 9-5 can be hard, but honestly I don't really mind it.

At this point I'm good enough at the career and landed a role I'm a good fit for, it's really more of a 12-4 job for me. Not counting meetings. I'm not... hustling. I'm not being ground down. I'm just gliding.

I have a good 401k. i make great money. I can work from home. I can take a break and read, and go for walks, and go running, and play guitar, and pet my cat, and cook lunch at home and get my dishes done.

I don't really want to travel Asia. Maybe for a week or so. As someone who HAS traveled extensively: Meh! It is tiring! I like my house with my mad-scientist-lab looking office and all of my experiments and guitar pedals and things.

Maybe it is perspective coming from a working class family. My father embalmed bodies and dug graves for a living. Very mediocre money, long hours, and not everyone's favorite job. What I do is easy compared to that.

Interesting insight into the mindset of an internet hustler

Does anything they do contribute to society?

I liked the quote from Turning Pro [0] that was mentioned:

> Sometimes, when we're terrified of embracing our true calling, we'll pursue a shadow calling instead. That shadow career is a metaphor for our real career. Its shape is similar, its contours feel tantalizingly the same. But a shadow career entails no real risk. If we fail at a shadow career, the consequences are meaningless to us

I've unfortunately experienced first hand the tendency to fall back onto paths that are easy, low risk, and comfortable.

[1]: https://www.nateliason.com/notes/turning-pro-stephen-pressfi...

It depends on the person, their stage in life, and many other factors why people do what they do.

I went through something similar. I had to choose between chasing my passion or security. I chose security. Things get real when you get older, your body starts falling apart, you need to provide for family, etc.

Even if you choose to follow your passions, the lure of security will come. The author gives an example of writers needing to write pulp novels, courses, copywriting, or any other boring stuff.

And even if you do end up doing your passions and still live comfortably, is it really worth it? Would your passions become monotonous and cause you to seek other passions?

> I would care a lot though if you told me I never wrote anything great. That’s what I’m most afraid to fail at....

Sounds like he's always taking care of the bills from others but running away from the bills he owes himself. Giving writing a real shot might mean giving up running each day until after there are at least a hundred words on that day's blank page. (36,500 words of first draft each year.) Prime the pump every day.

> My ideal work life is to write about whatever I want, however I want, and be able to turn that into a comfortable living.

It might be possible to find such a lifestyle; in fact, it is much easier than the other goal of the poster, namely to write something truly great. In fact, writing something truly great and writing to get a comfortable living may be contrarian goals.

Hopefully it just didn't make it far enough into the conversation, but your minimum income to survive should have $100-$300 a month in long term savings, so you're not forced to grind in your 70's.

Can you make that Million dollar Idea and be independently wealthy for the rest of your life? Maybe, but hedge your bets.

Nat has a great podcast that he has recently restarted.

https://madeyouthinkpodcast.com/

"Jason needs to stop interrupting Sacks" very funny line.

oh, hey

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