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Comment by NoraCodes | Hacker News Reader

It's hard not to interpret this as a kind of "youth is wasted on the young" sentiment - that children shouldn't be allowed to do things they enjoy if those things are seen as wasteful, but that retirees should. I'd submit that society might be better off if we only required people to work to a degree reasonable for their mental and physical health, and didn't frame our entire lives around "getting somewhere" so we could finally be left alone. That might mean profits stop growing quite as quickly, but I think that's a fair trade for people actually being happier.

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I think the same thing. The concept of retiring early has never made sense to me - but I enjoy writing software, and building things, and learning things, etc. Financial independence does make sense to me, but only in-so-much that I want to be able to generally provide for my family, and have enough slight cushion to be able to take drastic creative risks and not have to starve to do so.

I don't mind if I'm working when I'm 70/80 (as long as I'm physically capable to) - I do mind if I'm slogging 60hr weeks, doing things I'm not interested in, at those ages however.

I'm "retired," but that's mostly because I ran into a bunch of the types of folks that have been adding to the comments on this story, and gave up on looking for work.

I won't go, where I'm not wanted.

Best damn thing that ever happened to me. I "retired" at 55, and have been more productive, in the last five years, than I probably was, in the previous 20. It's amazing what happens when you don't have clueless, jargon-addled middle managers, interfering with the projects, and destroying work productivity.

The coroner is gonna need to rub "YTЯƎWϘ" off my cheek.

There is a huge difference between "working because you need money" and "working because you want money/something to do/achieve a higher calling", to the point that it's not really fair to compare the two. The latter is better for society as whole, in my opinion.

And the tragic thing is that we could probably achieve a society where that second mode of work is available to everyone, with enough capital investment. Many jobs that people work out of necessity could be automated completely, with today's technology (forget any bleeding-edge AI stuff, I'm talking Robotics 101). Jobs that remain could be made immeasurably less unpleasant. It would just take a restucturing of society around minimizing human suffering, rather than maximizing the wealth that can be accrued by a ruling class.

> It's hard not to interpret this as a kind of "youth is wasted on the young" sentiment - that children shouldn't be allowed to do things they enjoy if those things are seen as wasteful, but that retirees should.

This seems like a motivated conclusion. Children and retirees are not the same. Children are flexible and lack life experience. Small events leave large imprints on children. Older folks tend to get less flexible with age and have lots of life experience, so an understanding of what they do and do not enjoy. While there's definitely similarities (we're all human after all), I don't see this conclusion following at all.

That doesn't mean that retirees should simply passively consume low-complexity content or anything. More that older folk will generally understand themselves, their habits, and importantly their weaknesses better than children. Many "retirees" spend their days doing their best work unencumbered by the self-doubt and expectations they had of themselves when they were young.

> Children are flexible and lack life experience. Small events leave large imprints on children.

> Older folks tend to get less flexible with age and have lots of life experience, so an understanding of what they do and do not enjoy

I believe Children are an opressed group, just like ethnic minorities were at a time. In my life I have personally witnessed dozens of children who were forced into careers and lifepaths based of false pre-conseptions that were formed by older people 40 years ago. The world has moved on, the older people responsible have declined in both mental facoulties and income, and the young people are stuck eith life choice that were made for them, their lives bent out of shape.

The media constantly treat young peolle with derision, mockery and disrespect. No political party represent interest of young people under 25. Their life opportunitues, social mobility and the chance to own a home are all declining. The age of lawmakers is climbing every year.

The disenfranchisement of young people in the west will be our downfall

> I believe Children are an opressed group, just like ethnic minorities were at a time.

That's very strong language but I can generally get behind the idea that children need some work on their rights in the West given the changes of the last 50-80 years in society. This is orthogonal to the above point that retirees are not children. Children are not retirees and their rights will reflect this truth. The rights and expectations of children will have to reflect what it means to be a child and likewise with retirees.

> In my life I have personally witnessed dozens of children who were forced into careers and lifepaths based of false pre-conseptions that were formed by older people 40 years ago. The world has moved on, the older people responsible have declined in both mental facoulties and income, and the young people are stuck eith life choice that were made for them, their lives bent out of shape.

This is heavily, heavily steeped in your own anecdata. I haven't witnessed children under any such parental force, but I've heard other people talk about this. They all had shared upper-middle class suburban upbringings with parents who were trying to force them into elite schools and elite careers. This personality is replete in American tech companies. If this is the background with which you bring this up, remember that this is hardly universal.

I grew up in an immigrant ghetto. Kids were left to do whatever they wanted as early as was feasible. The kids I knew roamed the streets, got into gangs, drugs, and all forms of unfulfilling sex. There were few jobs in the community and the kids had no direction. If anything the kids I witnessed suffered because their parents gave them no help; no parents to talk to the kids about hard conversations, nobody to help find jobs or careers, nobody to even teach the kids about how to modulate their own emotions, often saddled with the debt their parents placed on them through gambling or other poor decisions. The anecdata of my life would cause me to be impassioned about very different set of dangers for children. I saw more lives ruined through minor marijuana possession than through pushy parents.

> The media constantly treat young peolle with derision, mockery and disrespect. No political party represent interest of young people under 25. Their life opportunitues, social mobility and the chance to own a home are all declining. The age of lawmakers is climbing every year.

I haven't seen "derision, mockery, and disrespect". Political parties don't represent the interests of young people because they don't vote. It's pretty simple. Getting young people to vote is the hard part. The aging cohort of lawmakers is a separate, and yes deeply troubling, issue.

> The disenfranchisement of young people in the west will be our downfall

Wait until you realize what it's like to be young in Asia.

I think in both cases, children need to feel psychologically safe confiding mistakes in parents, and neither neglected (emotionally and educationally) and unsupported, nor receive conditional love and be punished when they fail to earn achievements to their parents' satisfaction.

I agree. Supporting children in society and government is hard. I just don't think getting riled up over one's anecdata is a good way to do it.

People can already choose to work less for mental and physical health reasons. Just move to a low cost area and do the bare minimum work to obtain necessities.

But people who want a nice large house, luxury cars, new electronics, and fancy vacations are going to have to work harder in ways that might not be optimal for health. Most middle class people seem to be voluntarily willing to make that trade, and you're not going to convince them otherwise.

For society as a whole, growing profits represent an overall increase in living standards (although the benefits are unevenly distributed). If we were to collectively decide that current living standards are sufficient and stop trying to grow then we might have easy, pleasant lives for a couple generations but would eventually be overrun by more growth-oriented foreign societies. Life is a competitive sport and we ignore that reality at our peril. There are more important things than happiness.

I honestly can't tell if this is serious or satire.

100% serious

What are the things more important than happiness?

Building things of lasting value. Raising children. Leaving the world a better place than you found it.

You can get really happy by taking opioids, if you consider happiness to be of primary importance. But happiness alone is empty and not something that we should consider important by itself.

If you don't derive happiness from lasting value, why build it?

If you don't derive happiness from raising children, why have them?

These things aren't intrinsically valuable. You may derive happiness from them, and that's perfectly fine. Or you may derive happiness from rigidly following some moral code, and that's fine also. But there's no "we" when it comes to what one considers most important by itself.

Better yet, why not snuff people when they get to 30?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logan%27s_Run_(film)

"Seen as wasteful" is doing a lot of heavy lifting here. Spending 6+ hours a day watching TV is seen as wasteful, heroin addiction is seen as wasteful, becoming a musician is seen as wasteful, dropping out of a law degree to start a company is seen as wasteful. The first two are different from the last two, though.

I think watching 6+ hours of TV a day isn't just seen as wasteful, it's seen as actively harmful, and therefore as falling under the moral and legal duty of care adults have to protect children. In contrast, a mentally sound retiree is an adult. Adults are allowed to hurt themselves.

Is 6hrs a day of reading wasteful and harmful? That's how doctors and lawyers and engineers are made.

Reading requires active engagement in a way that makes it inherently healthier than TV (though perhaps not than games).

For me, yeah. I probably spent about that long reading on most school days as a kid, including hiding books in my pencil case, walking the dog while reading, riding a bike while reading, reading on the bus, reading during recess and lunch, reading in front of the TV, reading on the toilet, reading when I was meant to be asleep, and reading during family dinners.

I absolutely should have stopped reading so much during family dinners, during classes I struggled in, when I was meant to be asleep, and during recess and lunch.

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