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Comment by tobyjsullivan | Hacker News Reader

This is an appealing sentiment, but I have so many counter-examples it's laughable. Including:

- Senior citizens who are homeless because they were too busy "living life" to hold a job (read: life-long hippy types living on mexican beaches)

- Middle-aged friends who are waking up and realizing they don't have careers, just a string of jobs that paid for the weekend getaways.

- Colleagues (across multiple jobs) who show up with this attitude and, quite clearly, do absolutely nothing on average. Nowadays, I push them out if they land on my team. Don't worry, they usually pick up another gig fairly easy.

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Everyone has their own priorities in life, so people who have “wasted their younger years” might have been happy during that time. From my years of meeting random people, I’ve been more fascinated with people who took a lot of time offs and didn’t grind for the career. Especially people in their 60s/70s with a lot of life experience sounded like they feel more “fulfilled”, than some career chasing SVPs. Even with those, they’d mostly talk about non-work stuff.

Long story short, life is fairly different for everyone, thus min/maxing DPS like you’d do in an RPG probably won’t work. Everyone has retroactive regrets, but we can’t really say whether throwing money on weekend getaways or working on a side project over a weekend is objectively better.

There is a middle ground between being homeless on a beach* and deciding to work 4 hours on a Saturday just to get stuff done.

My point is that the reason I can take this attitude now is that I have spent 25 years getting to the point where I am paid well and I can negotiate my time so that I don't have to work evenings and weekends.

* if I was going to be homeless, living on a Mexican beach sounds like a pretty good option.

> - Colleagues (across multiple jobs) who show up with this attitude and, quite clearly, do absolutely nothing on average. Nowadays, I push them out if they land on my team. Don't worry, they usually pick up another gig fairly easy.

Sounds like it's working out great for them, where's the downside?

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