Comment by plutonorm | Hacker News Reader

Comment by plutonorm | Hacker News Reader

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I very nearly looked for the most dead end, brain dead job possible when I was in my mid 20s. The plan was to do something that enabled me to just think, which is my passion really. Thinking and learning and digging out the truth. Sometimes I wonder what my life would have been like if I'd followed through. Would I have been happier, would I have been more productive for society or less? Maybe one of the hundreds of projects I don't have the energy to complete would have been completed and born fruit. In this path of life I feel like a tree that is continually bearing fruit, only to have it fall to the floor and rot unused. If I'm honest I think society would be better to let those with the disposition to dream and build without need for employment. Society as a whole would be better to allow those whose disposition forces them to continually create, to do just that, create. To be called to something is a gift, to be denied your calling creates a wound deep within the soul.

Employment is an abstraction of resource-gathering. Every living being must gather resources to survive. Modern society does not enforce employment; employment is the manifestation of resource-gathering in modern society. Thinking and learning and digging out the truth is an incredibly popular lifestyle aesthetic. It's incumbent upon you to discover how to live that life while providing value to society, and if you cannot, then there exist some truths that others already discovered which are still foreign to your understanding. It's OK to think for your own intrinsic enjoyment, but if you aren't able to match the baseline of other successful thinkers then what is the utility to society of endowing you with what ultimately amounts to unlimited leisure time? Pontification is a perfectly acceptable hobby.

That would be true if there were vast numbers of truly creative people driven by nature to create and then create again. But there aren't. There are the correct number. The distribution of personalities reflects the need for those personalities as discerned by natural selection operating at the level of societies for 100s of thousands of years. There are the correct number of thinkers. The correct number of doers and they should all be supported to perform the functions for which they were designed by nature.

Complex societies haven't existed for hundreds of thousands of years, natural selection has not had the time or the ability to put selective pressure on creativity. This is simply an unfounded sociological theory that justifies you doing exactly what you want to be doing.

So is modern economics - a post hoc justification for greed. The same has been said of modern conservatism: "The modern conservative is engaged in one of man's oldest exercises in moral philosophy; that is, the search for a superior moral justification for selfishness."

Brandon Sanderson did much of his early work while employed as a night security guard. If he hadn't had the time to write those early books, he might never have been paid enough for writing to write full time. That kind of 'growth hack' can make sense in some circumstances.

I can tell you what happens because I moved furniture for 3 years after I graduated college so I could work on my internet business:

Failure.

Utter, complete, soul-crushing, devastating failure. Not just in one thing. I'm talking a 20 year death march finally ending in burnout in 2019 just before the pandemic. My experience has been that the more mindless the work, the more psychologically taxing it is for creative types like pretty much everyone on this site. Opportunity cost becomes all-consuming.

My regret is the opposite of yours. I wish I had gone and worked for a major corporation for a few years and saved up a few hundred grand so I could get out from under obligation and invent the things that I was born to build.

I wish I had lived in a van and avoided expenses and helped with communal projects in a makerspace.

I wish I had worked on any personal project at all of my choosing, instead of letting others dictate which personal projects had merit and coopting my motivation.

My spirit has been so utterly shattered so many times, that I no longer hold strong beliefs or expectations. I've toiled under such a level of negative reinforcement for so many years that I no longer trust my own instincts. I don't believe that the future will necessarily get better, that the past even existed, or that (as the article said) money comes from doing the things we love.

But you know what? I feel alive for the first time since I was maybe 5 years old. Watching the world work through some of the existential crises that I've faced since the 90s has been very healing for me.

I have no great words of wisdom to impart. But I do feel a calling to find peace. In my own life, I've been practicing service to others, who are an aspect of myself under reincarnation and the multiverse (quantum immortality, etc). Which looks like setting boundaries and communicating intentions even if I can't meet them at that time. It means basic kindness to everyone I meet, even finding ways to love them no matter how much I disagree with them. And giving them the dignity to succeed and fail and learn in their own way.

I guess what I'm saying is that I've largely abandoned logic, because I've experienced what it's like to try as hard as I can but have it end in tragedy. Bad things still happen no matter how much we try to prevent them. But good things also happen when we aren't expecting them, through the infinite power of serendipity (one of the forces that created the universe). So I've shifted to magical thinking (faith, hope, love, meditation/prayer, manifestation, etc) and have witnessed how reality has shifted to reflect my inner world (as above, so below). Now I walk in wonder as the world solves nearly every problem I wanted to solve, but without my ego's attachment.

Next steps for me are to keep applying small moves to shift laterally into neighboring realities along this timeline. This is an embrace of the free will that science claims doesn't exist. It's seeking meaning through art and culture as our system of necessity works tirelessly to obliterate it. That's how and why I'm working towards the rejection of economic systems, since they're based on constructs like artificial scarcity and denial that wealth creates poverty for someone else through ignorance of karma. Loosely, that looks like being as vegetarian as possible, while still providing for the nutritional needs of my body when warranted. It looks like acknowledging my inner monologue but recognizing that it's not my consciousness, and heeding my subconscious by being an audience for my dreams. And showing up, even on days when I start from a place of zero energy, which is all too often in these times.

I wouldn't trade the pain I've experienced, since it resulted in my conscious awakening. Being here now is priceless.

If this all sounds like gobbledegook, and maybe it is, then you the reader have the priceless gift of youthful thinking on your side. Run with that and don't get dragged down by rantings from old burnouts like me. Your achievements remind me that anything is possible, even when I'm my own worst critic and limit myself with labels like I just did. Everyone has to find their own way.

Thanks. Your comment resonated with me. I had a similar crash/burn at the same time after a decade of 100hr work weeks hoping to "break out" but it never happened. I don't really know what comes next either or even if I have real wisdom from it, I no longer have any concerns about it though.

For a while when people ask me what I do I told them "I'm a failure." Which got some interestingly hostile responses much of the time, so I've stopped doing it. I think those are just other people on the same path but don't want to admit it yet.

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